‘Can’t be too careful,’ he says, without looking up from the script. ‘There have been security breaches across the front. Behind the lines, if you can believe it.’
‘Is that so?’ Fel asks him, without missing a beat.
The guard nods. He rolls up the script and hands it back. ‘From what I hear everywhere under this sky is dangerous,’ the Kavrone says.
Fel puts the script back in his pocket, and laughs. ‘You’d think it was a warzone,’ he says.
That makes the Kavrone laugh for a second time.
‘I’ll vox up,’ the guard says. ‘She’ll have to come down and verify in person. Security, you understand.’
He puts his fingers to the vox-bead in his ear and passes the message up.
‘Oh, you’ll need to leave that pistol of yours, of course,’ he says, when he’s done.
Fel unhooks the holster for his pistol and hands it over. He expected to have to do it, but it sits poorly with him nonetheless.
‘Security,’ Fel says back to the guard. ‘I understand.’
Ghael doesn’t take long to come down to the gate. Like before, she is wearing fatigues and boots. Today she also has a heavy rain jacket and a patterned scarf wound tight around her neck. Just like before, though, the expression on her face is one of faint amusement.
‘Captain Fel,’ she says, with a tilt of her head. ‘I wasn’t expecting you.’
Fel nods. ‘Things have escalated,’ he says. ‘It’s a poor time to be undermanned.’
Ghael huffs a breath into the cold air and narrows her eyes, with that half-smile of hers still in place. Fel can see the question – of why he’s here, and not on the line – plainly in her face, but she doesn’t ask it. It’s a risk, that moment. Ghael could easily blow the whole thing, but Fel has a feeling she won’t because then she won’t get to ask her question.
‘He’s alright,’ Ghael says to the guard. ‘Verified.’
The guard shrugs his shoulders and buzzes the gate. It unlocks and swings open and Fel goes inside. It closes and locks again behind him. Ghael turns away and back towards the complex. The guns on the nests track them as they walk up the marble steps.
‘Autocannon mounts,’ Fel says. ‘They aren’t messing around.’
Ghael snorts a laugh. ‘It’s not very welcoming, I’ll grant you that. Security has been increased over the last couple of days. More guards. New guards.’
They pass into the complex building proper. The entry hall is a domed structure with a high roof. The floor is marble, and slick with rainwater. Adepts hurry to and fro with sheaves of orders and requisitions. Their voices become an anonymous, echoing muddle of languages. Watching them go are yet more guards, with those same cut-down model lasguns.
‘It’s strange,’ Ghael says, as she leads Fel across the entry hall, ‘just how many of those new guards are Kavrone.’
Those last words come from Ghael in Antari. Her accent is coast’s edge, like Tyl’s. Like Rol’s was. The choice to use their homeworld’s tongue makes Fel realise that just like the last time they spoke, Lori Ghael knows more than those around her.
‘Strange,’ Fel says, in Antari too. ‘That’s one word for it.’
Ghael’s office is a room deep inside the labyrinthine structure of the Departmento complex. It isn’t a small room, but it is made to feel as though it is by all of the records and paperwork stacked on every surface. There are charts pinned to the walls. Troop listings. Requisition orders. Records of the dead, long enough to reach down and bunch where they hit the floor. Fel finds a space in the middle of it all that’s big enough to put his feet in.
Ghael steps over and around her paperwork to her desk. On it is a dust-caked cogitator with a speaker mount. She depresses one of the chunky trigger-keys and the speaker hisses, then music starts. The strum of strings and echoing drums. Fel recognises it immediately as music from home. It puts him right back on the edge of the Northwilds’ black forests.
‘They let me play it because it helps me concentrate,’ Ghael says. ‘Makes me more efficient.’
Ghael cranks a dial and the volume increases, then she rounds her desk and perches on the edge of it with her arms folded. She is tapping her ink-blackened fingers against her arm.
‘You should be in the Sanctum with your hounds,’ she says. ‘But you’re not. I know for damned sure that it’s naught to do with that order script I sent you, so what is it?’
Fel watches her carefully. There’s a tension in her that he’s seen before in others.
Like something hunted.
‘What do you think it is?’ he asks her.
Ghael stops her tapping, but only to pick up a handful of papers from her desk. She riffles through them quickly. More quickly than is natural.
‘I couldn’t forget it,’ she says. ‘What you said that night about the guns. Steadfast-made. What Krall and Brannt said too, about the Strixians. He was wrong, I thought, but I wasn’t sure. I don’t like to be unsure.’
She puts the papers down and leans over to pick up another handful.
‘So I went looking,’ she says. ‘And I found something.’
Fel’s hand drifts to where he’d usually wear his pistol, just by instinct.
‘What?’ he asks her.
‘Krall was right about us sending guns to the Strixian Ninety-Ninth, and I was right about them being dead. And now the Strixians are not the only ones.’
She holds out a crumpled piece of paper. It’s a transcription, and it must have been one she made herself, because it’s in Antari. The script is spiked and cramped.
‘Krall and Brannt,’ Fel says, scanning the page. ‘When did this happen?’
‘A promethium container went up at their new work assignment the day after the fight club,’ Ghael says. ‘After one of the Kavrone landing sites was breached.’
‘One of the landing sites?’ Fel makes it sound like a question.
‘Begging your pardon, captain,’ Ghael says. ‘But don’t give me that shit.’
Fel looks up at her. She is more pale than usual, and back to tapping her fingers. She nods at the paper in his hand.
‘Whatever it is you are hunting, it doesn’t want to be found,’ she says. ‘It’ll kill to stay hidden.’
Fel doesn’t break eye contact with her. The song playing through the speaker is slow and mournful. One for winter.
‘All the more reason to keep hunting,’ he says.
‘Then you’ll be killed too,’ Ghael says, flatly. ‘Or worse, dishonoured.’
He knows that she’s right, just as he knows what his answer is.
‘It would be a small price to pay for the sake of the crusade,’ Fel says. ‘For the regiment.’
For Raine, he thinks.
Ghael’s human eye narrows and the lenses of her augmetic eye spin to mimic it.
‘It wasn’t just those records I pulled,’ she says. ‘I found everything that I could about you, too, Andren Fel.’
That feels like exposure. Like an intrusion. Just like her asking him to tell the Duskhounds’ story to those from outside.
‘I know that you were born in the Northwilds,’ she says. ‘Orphaned at seven years old. That you proved an exceptional candidate during training at the Schola Antari.’
She pauses and clears her throat, as if her words are sticking.
‘I know what they did to you at that place,’ she says. ‘That they tested you over and over again, and found you unwilling to break.’
She doesn’t say how they tested him. She doesn’t have to. Fel remembers it well enough. The submersion tanks and going for days without food or water or sleep. Fighting far beyond first blood. Sometimes with weapons. Sometimes with his bare hands. He remembers the shocks and the lash and the flash of knives. She’s looking at him with a sort of sadness now, as if everyone living isn’t made by one k
ind of pain or another. As if there’s an alternative.
‘I know that your combat record is exemplary,’ Ghael says. ‘No black marks. No punishment orders. You have never turned your back on a fight or on your squad until today. That tells me that whatever it is you are looking for here is beyond important.’
‘So you will give me leave to find it?’ Fel asks her.
Ghael takes a deep breath. ‘No,’ she says. ‘As much as I know I am going to regret it, I’m going to help you.’
‘What about the risk of being killed or dishonoured?’ Fel asks.
Ghael shakes her head. ‘I might not be a soldier, but I still serve. My life belongs to the crusade, to the Emperor, same as yours.’ She pauses. ‘And we are Antari. That means loyalty before the threat of death.’
It’s an old adage. One that Fel is surprised to hear from the mouth of a Munitorum adept.
‘Aye,’ he says. ‘Thank you.’
She waves the words away.
‘So, what is it that you need to find?’ she asks.
‘I need to get into the central archive,’ Fel says. ‘To the alpha-grade records.’
Lori Ghael puffs air out through her cheeks. ‘That’s all?’ she asks, flatly.
‘That’s all.’
She shakes her head, but she is smiling.
‘You know,’ she says, ‘I really thought it’d take a lot longer before I started regretting this.’
The alpha-grade records are kept in the undercroft of the Munitorum complex. It seems appropriate to Fel, given that he’s looking for something deliberately buried.
‘You need high level clearance to get inside,’ Ghael mutters, in Antari.
The two of them are walking through the marble hallways of the complex together towards the heart of it. Ghael smiles and nods at those who pass her, including all of the guards.
‘Clearance I have,’ Fel says. ‘Or codes, anyway.’
She gives him a sideways glance.
‘How in the hells did you get alpha-grade codes?’ she asks, before shaking her head. ‘You know, actually, don’t tell me. It’s best I don’t know.’
‘Surely,’ Fel says.
‘The codes will get you through the door,’ Ghael says. ‘But what were you planning on doing about the guards? They wouldn’t exactly take you for an adept.’
‘Slipping by them if I could,’ he says. ‘Quieting them if I couldn’t.’
Ghael lets out a slow breath. Under the grin, she’s nervous. It’s why she brought a bundle of records and slates with her. Something to hide the shaking of her hands.
‘Quieting them,’ Ghael says. ‘Not killing.’
Fel shakes his head. ‘Not killing. I am a soldier, not a monster.’
She only looks a little bit relieved by that.
‘And why wouldn’t they take me for an adept?’ he asks.
Ghael looks at him flatly. ‘The fatigues, for one thing. Never mind the fact that I have never in my life seen an adept built like you. It would be like painting a wyldwolf’s fur and trying to pass it off as cattle.’
Fel laughs at that. It makes Ghael jump.
‘Didn’t think your kind did that,’ she says. ‘Laugh, I mean. Don’t they take that from you at the scholam?’
‘I told you,’ Fel says. ‘I am a soldier, not a monster.’
Ghael turns into a side corridor, and Fel follows her. It isn’t nearly as grand as the main hallways. The marble cladding stops, exposing the bare stonework. Fel remembers it from the schematic and the landmarks he made, like the high-gain vox cabling that runs overhead. It’s a part of the complex’s nervous system. Security and power. Vox transmissions.
‘Your codes had better work,’ Ghael says. ‘You’ll only get one go at this.’
‘They’ll work,’ he says. ‘I trust the one who gave them to me.’
Ghael glances back at him. ‘Trust,’ she says. ‘There’s more in your tone than just trust.’
Fel knows what she is getting at, as much as he knows he won’t speak of it. It’s another intrusion. One too far.
‘The records,’ he says, instead.
Ghael looks at him and her mouth quirks in a smile, despite the shaking of her hands.
‘There it is,’ she says, and she stops at a heavy door that’s marked with block words in four different language scripts.
It reads AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY.
Lori Ghael puts in a code and pushes the door open. The room beyond is small and cramped. Set with heavy gauge cables and breaker levers. Manual switches and generatorium. Fel ducks inside the room and pushes the door closed.
‘What are you doing with this kind of access?’ he asks her.
Ghael shakes her head. ‘Not my access,’ she says. ‘A friend’s. Saw him put the code in once, and like I told you, I don’t forget.’
‘And where is this friend now?’ Fel asks.
Ghael checks the chrono at her wrist. ‘In the mess,’ she says. ‘For another fifteen minutes.’
‘You’re sure about this?’ Fel asks her. ‘You’re not too far gone to turn back.’
Ghael looks back at him. Her augmetic eye glints in the low light.
‘People are dead,’ she says. ‘And if there is a chance that what I’ve pledged my life to is being poisoned and corrupted, I’m not going to sit by and let it happen.’
She turns back to the breaker levers and cables.
‘Now go,’ she says. ‘And I’ll make you some shadows to hide in.’
There are two ways into the undercroft from the main floor. A stairwell that’s keenly guarded, and an elevator shaft that is equally so.
At least until the power goes out.
There are no exterior windows in the heart of the complex, so when Ghael cuts the power, it goes dark as the witch’s hour. But it’s not just darkness that Ghael makes. Alarms begin to blare from elsewhere in the complex that draw the two guards away from the elevator they are guarding and to the source of the noise, because they think nobody will use it in the dark, without power to the mechanisms. They shout to one another over the alarms as they go and the stablights mounted on their rifles skip over the walls and the tiles of the floor.
And they skip over Fel entirely as he slips by them, hidden by the clamour and the dark.
He makes his way down the hall to the elevator doors without using the stablight he carries. Moving in the near-dark is second nature, even without optics. It’s the way he was trained at the Schola Antari. The masters would cut the lights during fight training, or make them do it under flickering strobes. They’d sit Fel in the isolation cells and have him stare into the shadows until he learned how to read them.
It’s the kind of learning you don’t forget.
Without power, the elevator won’t raise, but he doesn’t need it to. Fel takes the combat blade from his belt and pushes it into the gap of the door to pry it open. Just wide enough to get through. Inside, the chains descend into darkness. Down to the undercroft. He takes hold of one like a rappel line. The doors fall closed again under their own weight, and Fel descends the elevator chains. He goes slow so that he lands quiet on top of the cage, then drops into it, landing softly. The doors at the bottom are closed too. It’s the greatest risk of contact, this moment, but it’s still easier than the stairway would have been.
Fel pries open the lower set of doors the same way as up at the top. The corridor beyond is low-ceilinged and angled further down. It is dark.
And it is completely empty.
As Fel leaves the elevator behind, the emergency lighting flickers on, bathing everything in dim red light. He waits a moment, but the pict-feed lenses mounted into the ceiling stay dark, like dead eyes.
The heavy door at the end of the corridor is keypad locked. Fel inputs the code that Raine gave him, and the door locks release with a hiss. H
e pushes the door just enough to hear what’s inside. The air that comes from within is just about warm, and has none of the damp of the corridor outside. There’s not a sound carried on it, save for the hum and click of cogitators, so he opens the door the rest of the way.
The room beyond is well-lit, clearly on a separate circuit to the rest of the complex. It is huge and circular, like a strategium hall. Tall stacks run floor to ceiling, as thick as trees can get if they are left well alone. Each stack holds rows upon rows of physical records, as well as datacrystals and pict-feed logs. The whole thing looks as though someone tried to build a forest who had never seen a real one. As Fel moves between the datastacks with light casting through the spaces between them, it feels a bit like a forest too. It’s all the knowledge, he thinks. That’s what he was always told. That the forest remembers things. Soaks them up like it does rainwater. This is the same. All of those deeds and lives, all the blood spent, all captured in ink and crystal. Overhead, servo-skulls hum absently and scan the shelves, paying him no mind. They clack their jaws and spool data, then move to the next record.
From up ahead, Fel hears murmuring. He slows and puts his back to one of the stacks, then looks around it for the source of the noise.
An old woman moves away from him down one of the aisles. She is hunched and thin, dressed in heavy robes and supported by an array of multi-jointed augmetic legs. They hiss as she stops.
‘Five years,’ she says, to herself. Her voice is dry and coarse, like turning pages. ‘Five thousand, five hundred souls. Numerical symmetry.’
She makes a gasping, rattling noise. It takes Fel a moment to realise that she is laughing. Then her spider’s legs start moving again. They take her straight up the side of one of the stacks. He crosses the aisle quickly and keeps going towards the centre, towards the alpha-grade records.
The alpha-grade records are all held in one combined cogitator system. A behemoth, set with blinking lights. Cables coil from it like wasted limbs. At the base of the stack is a viewscreen and an input console with heavy plastek keys that are worn and dirtied from use. The word ‘query’ blinks in block capitals on the screen. Fel checks the aisles around him and the stacks above, then types his query.
Honourbound - Rachel Harrison Page 26