‘Vander!’ she shouts.
This time, he turns to look at her, but his green eyes are dull and distant. He raises his sword drunkenly, as if to strike her.
And for the second time in as many days, Raine curls her fist and punches him. The blow knocks Vander reeling and makes him stop his murmuring. He shakes his head, hard, and lowers his sword.
‘Ommatid did this,’ he snarls. ‘I will kill her.’
‘For once, something we agree on,’ Raine says.
This time, when Vander looks at her, his eyes are clear and furious. ‘You will never lay your hands on me again,’ he says. ‘Is that clear?’
Raine ignores him. She won’t make a promise that she knows she cannot keep.
‘We must rally those left standing and make Ommatid pay for her games,’ Raine says. ‘Look around you. We are moments away from broken.’
Vander does as she says. Sees what she does. That the Antari and the Kavrone are bloodied and in disarray. Some are dead.
‘You are right,’ he says, and it sounds as though it pains him.
The two of them draw their bolt pistols and fire them into the air. The twin booms echo hard and loud into the shadows, reverberating off the Sanctum’s distant walls.
‘Enough!’ Raine yells.
And they turn to look at her. Beside her, Vander raises his sword.
‘The Emperor watches,’ he shouts. ‘Will you be found wanting?’
The answer comes as a rolling ‘no’, from both regiments. Raine sees the Antari helping one another to their feet. Those who can be helped. She sees Hale and Odi and Koy, all bloodied and limping, but living. The Kavrone do the same. With their uniforms tarnished and blood-spattered, they don’t look all that different to the Antari.
‘Courage in His sight,’ Vander shouts. ‘Always!’
Those words. The ones she heard from Lucia, once. More of her sister’s words echo for Raine, then. Words from the dream.
I was wrong.
And Raine denies them, because she thinks that she is the one who was wrong about Lucia all this time, and she is determined to prove it.
‘We will not be broken,’ Raine cries. ‘Not today. Not ever!’
The Antari cheer and they rally and Raine’s own words ring in her ears. More words from the dream.
I will not break.
Daven Wyck comes to with lungs full of water and hands dragging him clear of the lake onto the shore. He thrashes free, coughing and heaving and gasping for air, then rolls to his feet and goes for the one who was dragging him like that. The one who tried to drown him.
‘Dav!’
The voice stops him short before he can bury his knife in the chest of the figure. The figure holding their hands up and trying to get back from him.
Awd’s voice. Awd’s hands, with the Wyldfolk’s mark on his palm.
Wyck lowers the knife. It’s an effort to do it.
‘What?’ he says. ‘What happened?’
‘You wouldn’t stop,’ Awd says. ‘So I put you under to see if it would wake you.’
The realisation happens slowly, like everything else around him. This isn’t the Vales. There’s no black lake. No shore. The floor underfoot is blood-slick tile. The water at his back is the cleansing pool. He’s in the Sanctum of Bones with his kin.
‘It was a damned witch-dream,’ he says.
Awd nods. That’s when Wyck notices the las burns dappling Awd’s flak armour. One or two have gone through. He glances down at his rifle. At the powercell, blinking on red. Empty.
‘I shot you,’ Wyck says.
Awd nods. ‘Not badly,’ he says. ‘Whatever you saw sent you mad. Too mad to land any kill-shots.’
‘Sorry,’ Wyck says.
The word surprises him. It clearly surprises Awd too.
‘I don’t think I’ve heard that word out of your mouth once,’ Awd says. ‘Not in all the time I’ve known you.’
Wyck shrugs like it doesn’t matter. Like he doesn’t care. ‘Don’t get used to it,’ he says. ‘Find the others. We need to regroup and get back in the fight. Find that witch and kill her.’
Awd puts his hand out to stop him before he can pass by. ‘You kept saying something,’ he says. ‘When the dream had you. Something about bodies in the water.’
Wyck goes cold, as if he’s back in that black lake.
‘It was a witch-dream,’ he says. ‘That’s all.’
‘You swear that’s all it is?’ Awd asks.
Of all the Wyldfolk, Wyck has known Awd the longest. Only Crys comes near in terms of time and blood spent. They both owe each other, though Wyck has always been careful to keep the balance in his favour. Awd is the closest thing he’s got left to a friend.
Which is why he won’t tell him the truth of it.
Wyck nods and holds up his hand. The one with the Wyldfolk’s mark on it.
‘I swear,’ he says. ‘On blood spent.’
There’s a flicker in Awd’s eyes. One that Wyck can’t quite recognise.
‘Alright,’ he says.
Then he turns away to go and find the others.
Cassia Tyl holds Rol’s pendant in an outstretched hand, as far from her body as she can. As far from her heart. She can still feel the chill coming from it, though the hallway is already cold with the snow that’s still falling.
‘Are you sure we should use it?’ Jeth asks.
He has had to take off his Duskhounds mask because Rol shattered the eye lenses and split the plasteel when he hit him. Jeth’s dark skin is a patchwork of bruises, and his nose is rebroken, but at least he’s still alive.
Unlike Myre.
‘We don’t have a choice,’ she says to Jeth. ‘We need to get inside the shield and complete the mission.’
Jeth frowns, but he doesn’t argue.
Tyl takes a step forwards. As the vial swings close, the shield starts to shimmer and part and a hole opens in the face of it. The closer Tyl gets the more it peels apart until there’s room for her to step through and let Jeth pass after her. The instant he’s through, she wants to drop the pendant and shatter it under her boot, but she can’t, because they might yet need it. Tyl puts the thing in a pouch at her belt, with Jeth frowning at her all the while.
‘Once the shields are down, we destroy it,’ he says.
Tyl nods, then she glances back to where Myre is slumped against the wall. Rol is lying not far from her. All of that blood has turned thick in the cold.
‘Blow the charges,’ Tyl says.
Jeth hits the command key on the bracer at his wrist and the hallway blooms with light. The roar is dampened by the shield. Chunks of tile and glass and armour are deflected by it with smears of colour. Myre and Rol. Both gone now. Truly gone.
‘That will bring the Sighted running,’ Jeth says. ‘We should move.’
Tyl looks for a second longer as the smoke rolls against the psychic shield, questing and pressing. Through it, she sees fire and blackened iron. Broken glass and debris.
But no remains.
‘Let’s finish this,’ she says, turning away.
‘Commissar.’
Both Raine and Vander turn at the voice. Yuri Hale approaches them through the dead with his command squad in tow. The captain is badly bruised, and his flak armour has been blackened in places by las-fire. Makar Kayd is bleeding from a deep head wound. He is hefting both his vox-set and the company standard. Behind him, Lye and Rath have their rifles slung so that they can carry a limp, shaking figure between them.
Lydia Zane.
When they get close enough, they lower her to the ground. Both of them unconsciously wipe their hands clean on their fatigues. Zane is murmuring and shaking. Her false eyes remain firmly closed.
‘She hasn’t stopped,’ Hale says. ‘Not since the dreams faded.’
&nb
sp; Raine takes a couple of steps towards Zane. She draws her pistol on the psyker. Vander steps up too, though Zane isn’t his to watch or judge. The Antari look on, wary.
‘She is broken,’ Vander says. ‘Dangerous.’
Raine listens to Zane murmur and picks up her slurred words.
‘She is the reason we are no longer dreaming,’ Raine says, lowering her pistol. ‘She is keeping Ommatid out. Drawing her eyes.’
‘I heard her,’ Hale says. ‘I remember it now. In the dream I heard her.’
‘Ommatid shows you lies,’ Lye says, with a nod. ‘That’s what she said.’
Raine remembers it too, though she couldn’t recognise it at the time. Zane’s voice carrying in the roar of the ocean and the tremor in the cold stone at her back.
‘She is still dangerous,’ Vander says.
Raine puts herself between Zane and Vander. She can feel the eyes of the Antari on her. Rare are the occasions that she feels firmly on the same side as her regiment. Rare are the occasions she can feel their want to cheer for her, even over the life of a witch.
‘She is dangerous, you are right,’ Raine says. ‘To our enemies. To Ommatid.’
She holds his eyes.
‘I am the regimental commissar assigned to the Antari Rifles,’ she says. ‘Which means that Lydia Zane is mine to judge. And my choice is to spare her life.’
Vander narrows his eyes. ‘So be it,’ he says. ‘Another decision for which you will answer.’
‘Gladly,’ Raine says.
Tyl knows when they are close to the source of the shield. Not just by the thick, serpent’s coils of cabling that run along the walls and ceiling, or the elevated presence of the Sighted. It’s the sense of unease. The physical sensation like a blade running down her back, catching the knots of her spine. The way the walls seem to bend and bleed. To narrow and close. The way that she keeps catching shadows out of the corners of her eyes.
And then there’s the whispering.
She watches. All is what she watches. She sees. All is what she sees. She knows. All is what she knows.
‘This place,’ Jeth says. ‘We should have burned the lot to the ground.’
He is bloodied and breathing hard, leaning against the wall of the corridor. The two of them have passed through a maze of connecting rooms and corridors to get to the spire’s centre. Tyl has seen antechambers still set up for surgeries, and mortuary pits where the bones of the dead are boiled and cleansed, ready to be made into something new. Those that could not be used have been set into the walls of every corridor and every room, to watch and grin until they turn to dust with age.
‘I’m still considering it,’ Tyl replies.
Jeth smiles. It looks like it hurts.
‘There are mounted guns on the door,’ Tyl says.
She is using her combat blade as a mirror to see around the corner into the next corridor, where the overhead cables lead. Even in the reflection, the shape of the space keeps changing.
‘It is manned and fortified, and there are two scouts moving up too. I don’t think they want us around.’
Jeth snorts. ‘Could say the same for them,’ he says. ‘Pattern?’
‘Eleventh hour,’ she says.
‘Sounds about right,’ Jeth says.
He pushes away from the wall and stands up straight. That looks like it hurts too. Jeth takes a krak charge from his belt. Tyl holds up her hand, open, and waits for the right moment. Then she closes her hand in a snap movement, and the two of them round the corner. Tyl goes in front and puts two las-bolts in each of the scouts. Jeth lands that krak charge at the far end of the corridor, where the mag-component snaps it to the doors behind the Sighted and their mounted guns. Tyl hears the guns spin up and the Sighted shouting in Laxian, then the grenade goes off with a colossal boom. Krak is meant for armour breaking. It’ll go through a Chimera’s hull if you attach it in the right place. It blows the doors inwards and twists the guns into ruin along with their gunners, but the rest of the Sighted have already cleared the barricades and are running in a headlong charge. Tyl sees six. Or maybe it’s eight. The corridor shrinks and wavers around her. Tyl fires on the closest, a woman with blazing green bionic eyes and curved blades in the place of her hands. She disappears when the las-bolt hits her, but not because she’s dead.
It’s because she was never there. Just a trick, like Zane said.
‘Ghosts,’ Tyl shouts, backing up.
Tyl goes side by side with Jeth so that the Sighted can’t split them up. They choose their targets. Some of them bleed. Some of them don’t. One of the Sighted grabs onto Tyl’s arm. He feels real enough, as does his blood when she opens up his throat with her combat blade. Some of it hits the ceiling. As the Sighted sinks to the ground, more take his place. Tyl’s vision fills with rolling black eyes and wide-grin mouths. She fights like a cornered animal. It’s not training anymore. It’s instinct.
Then Tyl thinks of the pendant. It breached the shield.
The psychic shield.
She gets her fingers around the pendant and pulls it free from the pouch at her belt. It is burningly, agonisingly cold. Despair washes over her. The Sighted recoil from it as one, then Tyl drops the vial and breaks it under her boot. There’s an unholy scream that runs fingers along all of her nerves, and then the ghosts vanish, leaving the true Sighted behind.
Two of them.
Tyl puts a las-bolt in one and Jeth breaks the other’s neck with a twist of his hands, then they both stand there a moment, breathing raggedly.
‘Guess that thing did come in useful,’ Jeth says, then spits a clot of blood onto the floor.
Tyl looks to the door, blown open by the charges. The whispers echo loudly from inside as she moves down the corridor towards it. The walls around her expand and contract like lungs. Tyl picks her way over the barricades and the twisted guns and the Sighted dead, and steps through the jagged remains of the doorway into the chamber beyond.
It is a circular space that might have once been an observation chamber for procedures undertaken by the Sanctum’s healers. Cables hang in loops from the ceiling and snake down the stairs to the centre where they trail up and connect to a set of nine metal thrones. Thrones with witches fused into them. Every one of them has been messily blinded. Tyl can’t tell if it was done to them, or if they did it with their own hands.
‘Emperor’s mercy,’ Jeth says, from beside her.
Tyl walks down the stairs towards the thrones. Her breath mists the air and shadows coil around her legs. Dread coils around her heart in turn. The whispers are screams now, issuing from the mouths of every one of those witches. She approaches the closest of them with her rifle up and ready. It is a woman, this one. Thin as springtime ice. Her teeth are blunted, broken stubs from where she has clattered them together as the shield draws her power. There are tear trails painted through the blood on her face from her empty eyes. She is murmuring something different now. Something more urgent.
‘Protect the engines. Protect the engines. Protect the engines.’
Lightning arcs across the witch’s scalp and she raises her empty eyes and looks right at Tyl.
‘Grant their fates,’ the witch screams. ‘Give them death!’
Pressure squeezes behind Tyl’s eyes and bursts light across her vision.
‘Execute,’ she slurs.
And the two of them open fire. They keep firing until the screaming stops and the mist retreats and everything finally falls silent. The pressure eases and Tyl’s vision stops dazzling. She activates her vox-link.
‘Duskhounds checking in,’ Tyl manages to say. ‘Shield is disabled. The way is open.’
Twelve
Alpha-Grade
The building that houses the Departmento Munitorum records on Laxus Secundus is an imposing hulk of marble and leaded glass. Like the city district around it, it has been
remade for war. The windows are shuttered and shielded. The lip of the roof is looped with razor wire. Gun-nests have been built on the stairs that lead up to the doors. The approach is shattered rockcrete and wet mud and a high, barbed fence runs around the perimeter. A security checkpoint built from flakboard and corrugated plasteel stands at the gated entrance. As Fel approaches, one of the guards stationed inside it comes out to meet him. The guard carries a cut-down lasrifle with a wicked bayonet. He is wearing a raincloak with a hood, but the rest of his gear is soaked from standing out in the constant Laxian storm. His hands are painfully red from the cold, and going by the set of his shoulders and the frown on his face, he’s more than a little pissed off about it.
‘Hold there,’ the guard says. ‘This is a secure area.’
His accent is familiar from that night at the landing fields. It’s a giveaway that the man is Kavrone, though he wears no colours or pins. It’s what Fel might have called a coincidence, if he were fool enough to believe in such things.
‘Name,’ the Kavrone says, flatly.
‘Andren Fel. Eleventh Antari Rifles.’
The guard’s frown deepens. ‘Thought your lot were assaulting the city today,’ he says.
Fel could say the same about the Kavrone, but he doesn’t. That won’t do him any favours.
‘Believe me, I wish that I was,’ he says. ‘But instead I’m standing here, in this damned endless rain.’
The guard laughs and there’s a small change in his bearing.
‘I hear you,’ he says. ‘What’s your business?’
‘There’s a requisitions adept named Lori Ghael stationed here,’ Fel says. ‘I need to speak with her.’
It’s only half a lie. There’s that outstanding missive from Ghael and the Departmento about troop allocation for the Duskhounds. The one he has been putting off.
‘You got a script?’ the guard asks.
Fel nods. He takes out the order script and shows it. It’s watermarked with the Departmento seal. The guard takes it in one of his weather-raw hands and reads it over.
Honourbound - Rachel Harrison Page 25