His words are superstitious, but Raine can’t disagree with all of it. The Sanctum really does feel cursed.
Tainted.
‘Keep your hearts fierce, and your minds strong,’ Raine says, loudly enough so it carries. ‘This place is meant to make us fear. To make us falter. We will do neither.’
The vox crackles in her ear.
‘Not everyone in here is dead.’
The voice is Wyck’s. It is breathless, but Raine cannot hear gunfire, not over the vox, or on the wind.
‘Sighted?’ Hale asks.
Wyck has that jagged grin on his face. Raine can tell just from the tone of his voice over the vox.
‘Not Sighted,’ he says. ‘Round up those highborn bastards we brought with us, and tell them that we found their missing kin.’
Wyck moves up slow with his gun drawn and pointed, his Wyldfolk at his side. Above them, the shielding flickers. It feels like knives running over his bones and makes him see shadows when he blinks. The shield doesn’t feel like void. It feels like fear, captured and set to work. But before Wyck and his Wyldfolk even get near the shield, there is the more immediate problem.
In front of Wyck, lights are burning. Flares, mostly. They are all scattered around a deep, still pool that’s bigger than some of the minor lakes back in the Vales. The water looks like blood in the red burn of the flare-light. Statues of the God-Emperor watch the water too. The changing light transforms His face, making it wrathful.
Around the pool and between the statues, there are figures kneeling. Must be almost one hundred of them. They are as still as the water. Their blue and white uniforms are recoloured in red by that hissing flare light. Not one of them turns as the Wyldfolk approach them.
‘Sarge,’ Crys whispers. ‘What in the hells is going on here?’
Her voice sounds slow to him. Painfully so. He could swear those stimms he took from Kolat are stronger than what Lye used to give him.
Either that, or what she said was true, and maybe the doses really are killing him.
The way he’s feeling right now, that thought makes Wyck want to laugh. He has to take a breath. Count it out, just like he told Haro.
‘The Kavrone said that their second company were trapped here,’ Wyck mutters. ‘But they don’t look trapped.’
‘They look spellbound,’ Crys whispers, with fear in her voice. ‘Is it the water?’
‘The water’s for cleansing,’ Awd murmurs. ‘Those who came here for healing had to pass through it first.’
Wyck has heard of practices like that. They do something similar on Antar’s coast’s edge. Take the sick and the injured down to the sea and walk them into the water. The salt and the cold is meant to aid them. Not so in the Vales. The black lakes give nothing.
They only take.
He holds up his hand for the others to stop. The left, with the Wyldfolk’s mark on it, so they know he means it.
‘Sarge,’ Crys whispers.
Wyck ignores her and keeps moving. He’s close enough now that he should be able to see the closest of the spellbound soldiers breathing through his rifle’s sights. Should be able to, but can’t. Wyck is close enough now to see that their hands are dark with old blood too.
No good, he thinks.
He’s about to vox back when he hears bootsteps at his back.
‘What is this?’
The spellbound soldier twitches at the sound of the voice. The movement is almost mechanical. Wyck’s nerves fire at the sight of it, and his heart starts to thunder in his ears.
No, he thinks. Definitely no good.
The words come from the Kavrone’s commissar, Vander. The one with the wicked eyes. He strides through the mist past Wyck with Ellervin, that captain of his that barely looks old enough to be tithed. Raine is there too, and Hale. Wyck has never been thankful to see her before, but compared to the Kavrone’s commissar, she’s a known threat.
‘Wait,’ Wyck says to them. ‘Don’t. I think they’re spellbound.’
Raine stops. So does Hale. Vander doesn’t. He doesn’t acknowledge Wyck’s words at all. He draws his pistol and walks right over to the spellbound soldier.
‘On your feet,’ Vander says, loud and clear.
And as one, the spellbound soldiers around the pool get to their feet.
‘Vander,’ Raine says, warningly. She raises her pistol.
The spellbound soldiers turn, with sharp, twitching motions, like wooden dolls puppeted by cord.
Vander snarls. Ellervin murmurs something in his own tongue.
‘Mists alive,’ Wyck says.
Every damned one of the spellbound soldiers is blinded, just like the Sighted dead. From their bloody hands, Wyck can guess how it was done. As one, the spellbound raise their blades. No rifles. Just knives.
‘Stand down,’ Vander calls out. ‘In the name of the God-Emperor.’
There’s a moment like a held breath, where nobody moves and all Wyck can hear is the thunder of his heart, then as one, the spellbound speak with a voice that isn’t theirs. One that sounds like old, dry leaves turning. A witch’s voice.
‘Oh, you poor fools,’ they say. ‘Your God-Emperor is dead.’
Wyck’s finger tightens on the trigger of his lasrifle, but before even he fires with all of his stimm-given speed, there’s a boom from Raine’s pistol and the spellbound soldier closest to Vander spills over onto his back. His head spills open too, and that’s what does it.
It lights the firefight inside the Sanctum of Bones.
The fight quickly becomes a chaotic rush that reminds Raine of how the scholam’s lower levels would flood, back on Gloam. A violent, inescapable rush. The spellbound soldiers might not be armed with rifles, but they refuse to fall until they are forced to. Raine has taken cuts from a dozen blades. Blood runs down her sword-arm and soaks through her tunic at the waist. She grits her teeth and pushes the pain aside.
‘Heart-strikes,’ Raine shouts. ‘Head-shots! Quick, clean kills!’
Raine lets her forward momentum carry into her next upward strike. Evenfall’s powered blade separates the soldier’s head from his body. It doesn’t bleed as it falls. The smell of old death rolls up like fog from the ocean. Raine is already turning and firing her pistol again. Another of the spellbound soldiers falls backwards into the cleansing pool. They don’t thrash or scream. They just drop. Around her, the Antari light the Sanctum with las-fire. Through the melee, she sees Vander’s Kavrone do the same. They have broken into ordered, disciplined pairs, with one soldier covering the other. Despite the fact that they are firing on their own spellbound kin, they do not hesitate. Vander has had to sling that longrifle of his. There’s no room for it in a space like this. Instead he uses his own sword. It is not a duellist’s sabre, but a lightweight double-edged blade, built for closeness and speed. He uses it deftly. Clean cuts and parries, opening the space around him as she has around her. Despite all she might think of him, Raine cannot deny Vander’s skill as a fighter.
One does not last as a regimental commissar on the bleeding edge of the Bale Stars Crusade without knowing how to kill.
Raine’s pistol runs dry and before she can eject the magazine, one of the spellbound soldiers lunges for her. His eye sockets are ragged holes in his face, and his lips are blue and split. Raine backhands him with the weight of the bolt pistol. The blow caves in the soldier’s face and sends him reeling. It should be more than enough to kill, but the spellbound soldier still arches and twists and tries to bury his knife in her chest.
The blade never lands.
A thunderclap of force turns the spellbound soldier soft and broken and he collapses.
‘We must find the one controlling them,’ Raine says. ‘We kill the psyker, and the spell is broken.’
Lydia Zane steps over the mess she has made and tilts her head. She breaks another of the spellbou
nd soldiers with just a curl of her slender hands.
‘We will not find her so easily,’ Zane says. ‘This is the work of Cretia Ommatid. She Who Watches. Who counts herself the Sixth of Nine.’
Raine grits her teeth at the mention of one of the Nine. ‘All the more reason to find her, and kill her,’ she says.
Zane nods her head. Her nose is bleeding slowly down her pale face.
‘I hear Ommatid’s laughter in the way the spellbound move. She thinks this a game. A fleeting amusement.’
And oh, is the amusement fleeting. The rasping voice of Cretia Ommatid echoes from every one of the spellbound soldiers. As are so many things, when you see as I do.
The spellbound soldiers stop fighting as one and collapse.
A new game, I think.
This time, Ommatid’s voice doesn’t come from the spellbound soldiers. It echoes inside Raine’s head, a delighted whisper. Shadows crowd her vision and Raine tastes blood.
Yes, Ommatid hisses. A new game.
One by one, every loyal soul succumbs to Ommatid’s whispers around Lydia Zane. Their thoughts turn dark like ink spilling across cloth, and the Sanctum rings with screams.
It is false,+ pulses Zane, as loudly as she can. +Ommatid shows you lies!+
If they hear her words, they do not heed them. Las-fire lights the Sanctum as the two regiments fight back against the nightmares given to them by Ommatid and fight each other in their blindness.
‘No,’ Zane says. ‘Not like this.’
She protects them from themselves and from each other. Zane engages gun safeties. Ejects powercells. Twists knives out of hands. She deflects las-fire and solid shot with flickers of telekine shielding. Every action is an effort, because Zane feels the pressure too. Ommatid’s whispers pry and pull at the edges of her mind, setting her birds crying and beating their wings, but Lydia Zane is practised in ignoring whispers. She focuses all of her attention on Cretia Ommatid herself.
And on where she is.
Oh, no,+ comes the voice. +I am not ready to come out yet, my sweet. I am busy with my games.+
Zane is forced to one knee by the immensity of Ommatid’s will. Beside her, Calvar Larat would have been no more than a dim, old lumen light. Ommatid is a witch-fire, scorching and bright and hungry.
I am so glad to see you here,+ Ommatid pulses. +My lovely, broken thing.+
Blood bursts from Zane’s nose and runs from her false, silver eyes.
I am not yours,+ Zane replies. +My soul belongs to no one save the Emperor.+
There is a pause that Zane knows to be softly amused. She can almost see the quirk of Ommatid’s smile, though she has never seen the traitor’s face.
Does it now?+ Ommatid teases. +If that is true, then why is it that your kin tried to betray you? To break you. You cannot trust them, because they do not understand you. They will not understand you.+
Zane does not answer. Instead she starts to murmur her centring words in an effort to force Ommatid out. Zane feels her affected sigh as trailing fingers up her spine.
I would treat you so well,+ Ommatid says. +But you are blind in more ways than one. Wilfully so. It will be your end. The manticore will come for you again, for he cannot afford to call it off.+
Zane shudders. A long string of drool runs from her clenched teeth.
The manticore,+ she pulses. +You mean the King of Winter. The one who meant to put me in a casket. The one who sent his soldiers.+
Ommatid’s laugh is discordant music. +The King of Winter,+ she pulses. +How quaint.+
Who is he?+ Zane lashes at her, trying to force the answer.
This time Zane truly does see Ommatid’s smile. It blooms in her head like a resolving pict. From shapes to sharpness. Blackened teeth and bloody lips. Glittering, green gemstone eyes.
Oh, my sweet,+ pulses Cretia Ommatid. +Now that would be telling.+
Ommatid shows you lies!+
Zane’s voice makes Tyl stagger and shake, even though the witch is half a kilometre below in the bottom level of the Sanctum. Tyl sees it do the same to Jeth and to Myre. Their heart rates spike momentarily in her helmet’s display.
‘Teeth of winter,’ Jeth snarls.
But Tyl isn’t looking at him. She is looking at the shield, and the figure approaching from the other side. The world beyond the shield is smeared and blurry, so all Tyl can see is a shadow, painted in monochrome. The singing she could hear before grows louder and becomes more distinct too.
That voice.
She knows that voice.
‘Tyl,’ Jeth says. ‘What is this?’
Tyl takes a couple of steps backwards as the shield flickers and distorts. She keeps her gun up and braced and her finger resting on the trigger. Jeth and Myre do the same beside her as a hole opens in the shield like eyelids moving apart, and the figure steps through. He stops his singing and stands there in silence with snow hitting his carapace plate. He has a hellgun drawn on them too. Red crystal lenses watch them from the painted face of his mask. The painted face that Tyl knows as well as she does the one who wears it. As well as the singing voice. Her heart rate more than spikes this time and her finger comes away from the trigger of her rifle. Saying the name hurts like a twisted knife in the chest.
‘Rol?’
He lowers his rifle, just a fraction. ‘Hey, Cass,’ he says.
Tyl feels like she’s lost her balance as Rol takes a step forwards. There is a deep fissure in his carapace armour that looks as though it was made by a powered blade. Save for that, though, and the strange pendant that looks like a vial on a chain around his neck, Rol looks the same as the last time Tyl saw him, when he had been laughing, like always.
‘Stay where you are,’ Jeth snarls at Rol. He hasn’t lowered his gun a hair. ‘Don’t move.’
Rol gives a little shake of his head. ‘Good to see you too,’ he says.
‘Thing is,’ Jeth says. ‘I’m not sure I am seeing you, because you’re dead.’
‘Clearly not,’ Rol says.
‘What happened?’ Tyl says, breathless. ‘We thought we had lost you.’
‘I was lost, for a while,’ Rol says. He puts his hand to that mark on his carapace plate. ‘The Sighted got the drop on me in the forges. They took me to a dark place with the intent to kill me.’
He laughs, that familiar, soft laugh.
‘Turns out that I’m harder to kill than they think.’
‘How did you get away?’ Jeth asks. He still hasn’t lowered his gun.
‘How do you think?’ Rol says.
‘I’ll tell you what I think. I think that Rol is dead, and that you’re a Sighted trick.’
‘Aye,’ Myre says. ‘You’re a lie.’
Tyl heard what Zane said, but she can’t believe it. Fel told her to trust her eyes and ears, but he also said to trust her heart, and it’s that last one that’s telling her that Rol is as real as she is.
‘I’m not a lie,’ Rol says.
‘Then how did you come through the shield?’ Jeth asks.
‘This pendant is a key,’ Rol says. ‘I took it from some scouts.’
‘Sure,’ Jeth replies.
‘I’m telling you, I’m not a lie,’ Rol says, again.
‘Prove it,’ Tyl replies.
Rol lowers his hellgun and slings it. He holds his hand out, palm down, the way they do when they train. When they take oaths.
‘Tyl,’ Jeth says. ‘Wait.’
Tyl ignores him. She slings her own gun and takes a step towards Rol, then reaches out and puts her hand flat on top of his. Her heart was right. He’s as real as she is.
‘You’re alive,’ she manages to say. ‘But how?’
Rol leans in closer. Save for that new mark, every pit and scuff on his armour is exactly how it should be.
‘Because they changed my fate,’ he says.
Then he moves, faster than she’s ever known him to. Too fast to stop. Rol grabs her by the arm and drives his combat blade between her ribs, then throws her backwards. Tyl lands hard and rolls. All of the air leaves her lungs. The pain makes her half-blind and her heart thunders.
He cut her. Rol who is her kin. As good as a brother to her.
He cut her.
Tyl sees everything happen through lidded eyes as she struggles back to her feet with blood soaking through her fatigues and dribbling all over the floor. Rol moves fast, hitting Jeth so hard that his mask shatters and he falls against the wall of the corridor and goes still. Myre fires on Rol, but he knocks her shot wild and puts her up against the wall by her throat.
‘Rol!’ Tyl screams his name this time.
His mask turns to her.
‘Caiden,’ she says, using his given name in the hope he’ll snap out of it. ‘Stop.’
He keeps looking at her as he twists his hand and breaks Myre’s neck. Tyl feels as if the ground has fallen away. She screams and fires at him as he drops Myre and comes for her. Even half-blind and bleeding, she hits him twice before he closes the gap and knocks her onto her back. Rol’s armour is smoking from where the las-fire has grazed him and glanced from it. He disarms her and throws her gun clear first, then her knife, then he puts his knee on her chest so she can’t get free.
‘Looks as though the captain really did turn his back on you,’ Rol says.
‘You don’t know a thing about it,’ Tyl manages to say. ‘The captain has done no such thing. Not like you.’
Rol laughs, and it sounds like a bad echo of his voice.
‘Sure he did,’ he says. ‘Because he let his heart tell him what to do and not his head. Because he’s compromised by it. That’s what Cretia told me.’
‘Ommatid,’ Tyl says the name like a curse. ‘What did that witch do to you?’
‘She didn’t leave me for dead in the forges, for one thing,’ Rol says. ‘Not like you.’
He reaches up, unhooks his mask and pulls it free to show his face. Pale and freckled, with eyes so light they might as well be silver. Exactly as she remembers it, like his mask.
Honourbound - Rachel Harrison Page 23