But there is no howling. There are no balefire eyes, or yawning jaws. Instead, Wyck hears a voice ringing in his head, dim and distant.
Kin, it rasps.
Something Wyck can’t see tethers him, keeping him from that break in the armourglass. Away from the void.
Away from death.
Emergency measures kick in. Shutters slam down, sealing the void out and allowing the core to repressurise. Wyck falls hard onto the deck and air forces its way back into his lungs. It burns badly. His whole body burns. He can’t move or speak or even blink. The bulkhead door grinds up slowly, and his kinfolk move in. Lydia Zane limps into view and falls to her knees beside him. She is bloodied and burned and looks for all the world like a devil sent to haunt him.
‘I owed you a debt,’ Zane says, as unconsciousness comes to claim him. ‘Consider it paid.’
Twenty-two
What was lost
Andren Fel wakes to the sound of screaming. The noise pulls him up and out of dreams that cling to him, refusing to fade. Dreams of fire, and smoke. Dreams of Severina Raine’s voice, echoing, though he cannot see her for the fire.
I still have stories I owe you.
Fel finds himself in a small, stark room, with whitewashed walls. There is no door, just a plastek curtain that shifts and creases in the recycled air. The room smells of counterseptic, and of blood. Fel hears screaming again, coming from beyond the curtain. He hears shouts in answer too. The snarl of tools and a repeating ping that sounds like auspex returns, or a monitron tracker. Fel gets himself sat up, though it hurts to do it. Every breath burns. His eyes are heavy, and his mind is slow. It takes a moment to understand what he is seeing and hearing. For him to recognise that he is in a medicae ward and to remember why.
Fel looks down then at his right arm.
‘Hells,’ he says, and his voice is hoarse.
The augmetic replacement is made of silvered steel, and it goes almost all the way to his shoulder. His arm aches, though it shouldn’t be able to, and the augmetic fingers twitch of their own accord, like a misfire. It takes Fel three tries to make it stop. The servos inside the augmetic whine and burr. What happened starts to filter back in, then. The explosion. Bleeding a lot. Seeing Raine in the aftermath. She had asked him what happened, and he hadn’t been able to tell her, but Fel remembers now. The cause of the explosion was a contact charge. One that he failed to notice until it was too late. Whoever set the bomb had made a trigger of Lori Ghael’s augmetic lens as a message, and a punishment.
Ghael is dead, because she helped him.
Fel feels all the heavier now. His augmetic hand twitches again, trying to close. He has to find Raine and tell her about Ghael’s death.
Fel pulls the needles feeding him medication from under his skin. That takes three tries, too, because his augmetic hand is clumsy and slow. Blood spatters on the tiled floor and the machines by the side of his cot start to ring urgently. Fel manages to get to his feet, but then the room starts turning around him and the walls run like wet paint, and he finds he can’t see so well. When the orderlies come running and shouting, it sounds as though they are underwater. He can’t fight them when they make him sit back down on the edge of the cot. Fel has to keep looking at his hands until everything stops spinning. That augmetic catches the light a lot. He’ll have to do something about that.
‘What in the hells do you think you’re doing?’
Nuria Lye sounds as though she is underwater too. It does nothing to make her sound less angry, or tired. When Fel is able to look up, he sees that she looks it too. The chief medicae’s grey eyes are bloodshot and hollow. Her lip is split and her scalp is grazed.
She looks as though she’s been fighting.
Unease claws at Fel, then.
‘I missed a fight,’ he says. ‘What was it?’
‘You need to rest,’ Lye says, with a shake of her head. ‘Or you’ll miss a good deal more.’
Fel shakes his head and the room turns again. He has to put his good hand down on the cot-frame. ‘Tell me what I missed,’ he says.
Lye puffs air through her cheeks. ‘High Command sent us after the Laxian shipyards,’ she says. ‘And we took them back, but it cost us.’
It’s not just unease that Fel feels then. It’s dread.
‘How much?’ he asks.
‘Your Duskhounds are still standing, but not everyone was so lucky.’ Lye shakes her head. She blinks a couple of times as if her eyes are stinging. ‘We lost almost forty per cent across the regiment. Karin Sun and damn near all of Gold. Dol and his Fenwalkers. Half the Wyldfolk. Ari too. And Yuri Hale.’
Fel takes a breath, but it doesn’t seem to help. All of those losses still feel like being drowned.
‘Gone to His light,’ he says, softly.
Lye nods. ‘Aye,’ she replies. ‘Evermore.’
Then Lye takes a deep breath and her no-nonsense frown returns. ‘Now, rest, like I said. That arm won’t settle until you do.’
Fel shakes his head. ‘I can’t,’ he says. ‘I need to speak with the commissar about what happened on Laxus Secundus. You have to call for her.’
Lye’s face colours, and she shakes her head.
‘I can’t, captain,’ she says. ‘Raine was killed in the shipyards too.’
Everything goes distant in an instant. Muffled, like the shock after a flash-charge. Fel’s augmetic hand twitches again and this time he doesn’t try to stop it. He just lets it misfire while he tries his best to breathe, remembering Raine’s voice in his dreams.
I still have stories I owe you.
Fel slams his augmetic hand against the rail of the cot and puts a dent in the metal. He wants it to hurt like it did before, but now he can’t feel a damned thing.
‘It will get easier,’ Lye says. ‘Once the injury isn’t so new.’
Fel knows that she means his arm, which is why he doesn’t tell her that she’s wrong and that it won’t get easier, because he should have been there to fight with them, and he wasn’t.
Because he owes Raine more than just stories, and now she is gone.
Twenty-three
For the Bale Stars
Lord-General Militant Alar Serek is in agony. Every step he takes down the marble and gilt hallway that leads to the main audience chamber on board Bale’s Heart sends pain rolling outwards from the old scar that runs from his shoulder to his hip. From the mark he was given. Serek does not allow the pain to show on his face. He does not limp, or falter, and his breathing remains steady, because in this he is practised. He has been hiding the pain for over a decade.
But not for much longer.
Soon, he will have the machines.
Soon, everything will change.
Serek passes by the hanging portraits of those who came before him. The brightest and fiercest sons and daughters of the Bale Stars rendered in cracked and flaking oils. The paintings are cared for, and tended, but even still the name plates have tarnished and their eyes have faded, because no legacies left by the dead can outlast time. Serek stops at the end of the hallway and the last of the portraits. His kastelan stops in the same instant, keeping silent watch as Serek looks at the portrait of the last Lord-General Militant to hold rank before him.
The artist captured Thema Raine well. Her severity, her scars and her keen eyes. Even down to the way she held herself so straight, as if she could never be bowed. Never broken. Long ago, Serek used to think that was what it took to hold dominion over the Bale Stars. Just standing straight, and never breaking. But it is so much more than that.
You must give everything.
The roar of triumphal horns carries from the audience chamber ahead of Serek, and he turns away from Thema Raine, and her keen eyes. He walks up the marble steps towards the audience chamber with that ever-present pain coursing through him. His kastelan follows close, and slow. A pair of at
tendants open the heavy curtains, and Serek steps out onto the dais to another kind of roar, coming from those arrayed before him.
The audience chamber’s gallery hall is arranged like a cathedral, lined with rows and rows of marble pews on either side of a central aisle. None of the pews are in use, because all present are standing. At the sides of the hall stand those who have come to bear witness. Sylar, and a select few of his Kavrone officer cadre. The Paxari Naval delegation, and House Stormfall’s lesser nobles. A number of Serek’s own Lions of Bale. In the gallery rows stand those who are to be honoured.
The remaining members of the Eleventh Antari Rifles are clad in their dress greys with hardly a thought for medals or glories. Instead, they are decorated with cuts and bruises and bandages. They all wear colour bands to mark their companies. Serek sees blue, and grey, but very little in the way of gold. Serek has read the reports, and the lists of the lost. Over half of the regiment’s infantry were killed to claim the Laxian shipyards. It is a good deal of blood to spend, but like so many things it is necessary, for the crusade.
For the Bale Stars.
The other five members of his High Command are already present, and already seated in their own finely made thrones on the curved dais. High-King Araxis and Veris Drake bow their heads as Serek walks past them to where his throne waits. He does not sit; instead Serek draws his sword from the scabbard at his hip, because blades and words go hand in hand. Because both can cut and kill in equal measure. Because that blade always reminds him of who he is, and why he has been chosen to stand above all others, to shape the fate of the Bale Stars, and those who serve them. Serek’s kastelan waits at his back, and two more of his Lions take guard positions on either side of him, their fur-trimmed cloaks stirring in the recycled air. On Serek’s left, Io Karandi. On his right, Mateu Vostal. The pariah’s presence is discomforting, but necessary.
‘On this day, a new legend has been written,’ Serek says. ‘Like all legends, it has been written in blood, by the faithful and the loyal. By those willing to sacrifice everything in the name of something greater.’
He looks out at the Antari. They are scarred and augmented and built strong from fighting. Despite all of that, they still seem transient. Impermanent. Their lives will be short and bloody and then they will be gone. Their names and their deeds will pass into memory, but even that will not last. Those who remember die, and their memories go with them. Death is an equaliser, which is why Serek has given so much to deny it, because he is not equal. He is chosen.
But he will allow them their moment of glory, impermanent as it may be.
‘The Bale Stars see your sacrifice,’ he says. ‘As do I. We see your bravery and your loyalty, and we recognise it.’
He raises his hand and draws it across his chest, following the shape of the old wound given to him by Dektar the Ascended. The wound that put him on the path to change and to the truth. It aches even more fiercely then. A reminder of what he is, and what he needs to be, just like the sword he carries.
‘I confer the Lion’s Honour on every soul that spent their blood at Laxus,’ he says. ‘Both the living, and the dead. On your captains. Your sergeants. Your infantry and on your commissar.’
There is a murmur then in the audience chamber as the doors at the far end open. The victory banners hanging above the central aisle stir and four figures resolve with a scattering of psy-frost. Two are storm troopers, dressed in black carapace and armed with hellpistols. The third is the Antari psyker, frail and wretched. Serek barely pays them heed, because his attention is on the fourth figure. The one dressed in commissariat black, with a peaked cap on her head and her bolt pistol drawn.
‘Lord-General Militant.’
The voice rings out clear. That pitch and inflection. Just like her damned sister. Just like Thema, who Serek once knew and respected. Who he emulated, until he realised that standing straight and remaining unbroken were not enough.
‘I refuse the Lion’s Honour,’ Severina Raine says, as she walks down the central aisle. ‘As do my regiment.’
The chamber erupts with noise as the other members of High Command react to Raine’s words with indignant rage. Serek holds up his hand and they all fall silent.
‘Severina Raine,’ he says, with deliberate calm. ‘I was told that you were dead.’
She stares up at him from the gallery floor, unflinching. If it weren’t for her intent, he could almost be proud of her.
‘A lie, lord-general,’ Raine says. ‘But a necessary one, because I know the truth.’
Serek could order her shot in that moment, but he doesn’t, because he wants to see if she will have the strength to say it.
He wants to see if she truly is Thema Raine’s daughter.
‘And what truth is that?’ he asks.
Raine levels her pistol at him.
‘That you have embraced darkness, and betrayed the Bale Stars Crusade.’
As soon as Raine says the words, the chamber erupts into clamour. Serek’s Lions raise their guns and point them at her. Not just the two on the dais. The guards around the edge of the chamber too. On either side of her, Tyl and Jeth raise their own hellpistols in answer. Shouts and orders echo off the walls of the audience chamber and Raine watches Serek through the iron sights of her pistol as the Lord-General Militant shakes his head.
‘I am so very disappointed in you, Severina Raine,’ Serek says, and the room falls silent again. He sheathes his sword and sits down in that throne of his as if nobody in the chamber has a gun levelled. ‘I gave you every chance, despite the failings of your blood, and now you stand here on a day meant to glory our victories and you dare to level your weapon at me. You dare to accuse me of betraying the Bale Stars Crusade.’
He looks down at her from his throne, his blue eyes glittering like cut crystal.
‘I have given everything in the name of this crusade,’ he says, coldly. ‘Lower your weapons, while you still can.’
Raine knows that, at least, to be the truth. She does not look away from those unnatural eyes of his as she speaks again.
‘Including your soul,’ Raine says, just as coldly.
Serek shakes his head. ‘You share your sister’s failings,’ he says. ‘And you will share her fate.’
He gestures to his Lions. ‘Get her out of my sight.’
As the Lions step down off the dais and onto the gallery floor Raine hears the powercells of Tyl and Jeth’s guns whine. Her finger tightens on the trigger of her pistol.
‘No.’
The Lions freeze at the sound of the voice. A voice Raine knows so very well, one that she wishes she had never doubted.
‘I want to hear it,’ says Lord-Marshal Veris Drake. ‘All of it.’
Serek turns to look at her. ‘Veris,’ he says, warningly. ‘Do not be a fool.’
Drake’s eyes narrow in that approximation of a smile. ‘Alar,’ she says, giving his forename as much deliberate weight as he did hers. ‘If you have committed no sins, then where is the harm? Surely Raine’s words will only damn her further.’
‘Unacceptable,’ says Gulieta Vallah. The fleet commander’s face is a snarl as she draws her sabre. ‘This is dissent. Treason!’
The drawing of Vallah’s sabre shatters decorum like a dropped glass and within seconds High Command is divided between Serek and Drake. Not just High Command, either. Every soul in the chamber. Kaspar Sylar breaks the line and points his gilded, ornate laspistol at Veris Drake.
‘You are a damned disgrace,’ the Kavrone general snarls. ‘This is not about Serek. This is about your ambition.’
Drake laughs. ‘Ambition?’ she says. ‘Kaspar, please. We both know who of the two of us has killed for the sake of ambition.’
The sound Sylar makes in response is practically animal. Raine hears his pistol arm and charge.
‘You dare,’ he roars. ‘You dare to question m
e. To question the Lord-General Militant.’
‘Nobody is above questioning,’ says Lukas Vander.
He draws his own pistol with his uninjured hand and puts it to Sylar’s head.
‘Not for a commissar,’ Vander says. ‘I would hear Raine’s charges.’
The chamber is held at stalemate. Held like a breath. So Raine takes a step forwards into the teeth of the Lions, and towards the throne and the king who made it for himself.
‘Lord-General Militant Alar Serek,’ she says. ‘The charges against you are that of treason and corruption. Of the use of psykers and heretical machines taken from the enemy to prolong your own life and your control over the crusade. Of the abuse of military assets to acquire those machines.’
Raine takes a breath.
‘You are accused of murder. Of complicity in the deaths of hundreds, not least of Surgeon-Major Isabella Luz, who you killed to conceal the greatest of your sins. The willing embrace of corruption.’
She clicks the hololith projector she carries live and holds it up in her hand for all to see. The audio blares from the vox-emitters Tyl and Jeth rigged to their kit.
‘He is different.’ Isabella Luz’s voice echoes in the silence of the chamber. ‘Changed. It is his eyes. They are so blue now. And then there is the matter of the mark.’
Raine sees those blue eyes go wide. Serek begins to move. He opens his mouth to speak.
‘There is a scar that is not a scar,’ Luz says. ‘It is a fate-mark.’
There is a long, aching moment of silence. Of shock and dismay, that rolls through the chamber like an ocean wave.
‘I will not stand for this,’ Serek says. He gets to his feet. ‘Not from you, or any other.’
‘Is it true?’ Drake asks. Her voice is hollow, and full of rage.
Serek snaps around to look at her. ‘Of course not,’ he says.
‘Prove it,’ Drake says.
Serek flinches. He takes a breath, and his hand goes to his chest as if it hurts him.
Honourbound - Rachel Harrison Page 39