by Marc
Pig tells us we’re wading through sap, sap drooled out of the fleshy cycads and root-ferns all around. He snorts again. It’s hard to catch my breath, the air is so humid. The Skinners though… they move so silently. They disturb nothing. They make no ripples, leave no trace. Their damn boots never get stuck in the mud-pools. Their sleeves never catch on thorns. Fronds never whip back as they pass. Bark doesn’t snap as they climb over it. Even cobwebs remain miraculously intact, as if the Skinners were never there.
For coarse brutes, they move with unimaginable care and enviable skill. We Jopall blunder like fools amongst them. I spent four weeks last summer on a covert training course at the Hades Hive Guard Academy. I did well. I thought I was good. How… how in the name of the Emperor who watches us all do you not make a ripple when you wade through water?
We stop once more, and I lean against the bole of a giant ginkgo. Something has laid a clutch of wet, yellow eggs in the fabric of my jacket cuff. The size of rice grains, they glisten. I shudder and make to wipe them off.
A dirty hand grabs mine and stops me. It is the Skinner with the blackened eye sockets.
‘Don’t touch them. Rot-wasp eggs. Be thankful they chose your fancy jacket to lay in and not your ear, or your genitals, or your tear-ducts.’
He scrapes the eggs off me with the blade of a rusty shearknife.
I look at him, bewildered.
‘You wanna wake up with larvae munching out of your nose? Eating out your brain?’
I shake my head. Who would?
He chuckles.
‘What’s your name?’ I ask.
‘Deadhead.’
‘No… your real name.’
‘Er… Rickles.’ he replies, as if he has to think about it. Then he turns away.
‘Don’t you want to know my name?’ I call after him.
He turns back with a shrug. ‘No point remembering the name of a skinbait who’ll be dead by tonight. I’ll never use your name anyway.’
Anger puffs up inside me, dry and fire-hot despite my sweat. ‘I’m Corporal Ondy Scalber of the Jopall Indentured, you scum-sucker! Remember it! Emperor help you that you do ever have to use it!’
He grins, as if my forthright attitude has impressed him.
But he punches me in the mouth anyway.
We press on, the ever-quiet Skinners silently punishing every clumsy stumble of us Jopall. We reach a glade where the vast upper canopy is broken and sunlight streams down bright as lasers. There are flowers here, floating on the frothy, weed-choked water, huge flowers with shocking pink heads. Vast insects too, slow and drowsy, buzzing the air like chainswords and dripping nectar from each hideously limp proboscis. A pallid white serpent with vestigial limbs slides through the murk between my legs. My friend, Trooper Rokar, starts to whimper. He has just discovered that something unseen and submerged has gnawed off the cap of his boot… along with two of his smaller toes.
I was in a scholam with Rokar. I pity him. His injury. His weakness.
The scouts come back, two of them. We never see the third again. They confer with Keyser for a while. Then he tells us, low and mean, there’s a nest nearby and we must fan out.
Rokar is whimpering even more now, and begins to climb up into a tree. The captain tries to call him down. Rokar shakes his head, refusing, terrified.
Keyser gets him out of the tree. He throws a stab-knife and impales my old friend through the sternum. Rokar drops and hits the ooze with a wet slap. His body sinks.
‘He was no use to us anyway. A liability. Worse than a liability.’ Keyser tells the captain.
The captain is speechless with rage and horror. We all are. I don’t know what to think or feel any more.
I am sent on the right hand side of the fan advance, with Deadhead and Pig, and another Skinner called Toaster who hefts a heavy flamer unit. Trooper Hinder of the Jopall is with us.
Pig stops us under the shade of a horsetail and smears foul smelling grease over our skin from a dirty pot. Now we smell as bad as the Skinners, and I notice for the first time that they are caked in the stuff. It isn’t just dirt. It’s deliberate.
‘It’s skin tallow.’ Toaster sneers as he explains while checking the hoses of his sooty flamer. ‘Now you won’t smell of soap and humans.’
Pig has just daubed us with ork grease, blubber fat from their pestilent bodies. My stomach turns over.
We edge onwards. Flinder and I try to be as silent as the Skinners. Our efforts seem laughable. Then Deadhead stops me again, and points down at the gossamer skein my shin was about to break. He traces it back to a clump of flowering moss and gently exhumes a clutch of stikk-bombs, wired to the cord.
Keyser appears.
‘Good work, Deadhead. Good eye.’
‘Wasn’t me who found it, sir. It was Ondy there.’
I look round, delighted to hear my name used.
‘His shin, anyway.’ Deadhead adds, and he and the Skinner boss laugh out loud. Curse their filthy hides.
WE CROUCH IN sap-water for half an hour, not daring to breathe. Bird calls and insect chirrups wing through the air. Some of them are natural, some are disguised signals. I can’t tell them apart.
Deadhead waves us on.
As we cross a deep culvert of mud and slime, I see movement in the far tree-line. I’ve always had a good eye. It’s the one skill I’m still proud of. I make something pustular and green amid the Green.
So I don’t hesitate. I raise my lasrifle, and fire a stuttered burst.
Something big and green and tusked and monstrous slumps out of the foliage, its chest cavity exploded, and drops into the mere.
Then hell breaks loose. There are ‘skins all around us, throwing themselves up out of the ooze, spitting out the hollow reeds they were breathing through. They are lean, malnourished, pale things, with jutting teeth like anthracite and deep-set eyes like diamonds. They howl and whoop. They stink. They wield heavy cleavers, cudgels and crude sidearms.
We’re all firing. Gunfire explodes from the other elements of our formation. The wet air becomes cinder dry with ozone from the laser discharge. Las-rounds pepper through the leaf cover and fill the air with sap-vapour.
Toaster triggers his flamer and wastes the curtain of foliage before us. Swine-shrieks issue from the raging fire, piercingly harsh.
I fire, on full auto now, dropping ‘skins around him. A rusty cleaver takes Flinder’s head off his shoulders in a welter of blood and frayed tissue. I see Captain Lorit lifted right up out of the water on a primitive spear that transfixes his gut. He screams, piteously, flailing his limbs.
I had fixed my bayonet hours before, as per the Skinners’ briefing. Now, with las-rounds expended and no time to change the clip, I stab and gut and slash.
Deadhead is nearby. He has wrested an ork lance from some dead grip, and is splitting skulls and whooping like a ‘skin. Toaster fires again, his belch of flamer vaporising a tide of charging ‘skins so that nothing but their fused skeletons slump in the steaming water, dribbling molten fat.
I impale a charging ‘skin on my rifle-blade. It howls and pulls towards me, dragging the weapon out of my grasp. There is a plate-metal hatchet in its massive paw already wet with human brain tissue.
I pull my autopistol and blow its face apart.
‘Throw! Throw!’ yells Deadhead, tossing me a clutch of stikk-bombs.
We hurl them together into the densest part of the ‘skin press. In the flash-wash, slivers of shrapnel flutter back, stippling the water with a million separate impacts.
The orks turn and melt away, as if they were never there.
We regroup. Five Skinners are dead. I am one of only three Jopall left alive. I slump, hollowed by shock, against a lichen-covered rock with the others of my hive as the Skinners lock down the perimeter and take the spoils.
‘What do you want?’ Pig asks, and I turn.
He is sawing the head off an ork corpse wim a serrated knife.
‘What?’
‘An ear? A
tooth? You earned it.’
My gut tosses in revulsion. ‘Skin ichor is leaking from the sawed incision he is working and forms a stinking slick on the water’s surface.
‘Don’t make a mistake now, Ondy Scalber.’ It is Deadhead. His voice is low.
‘A mistake?’
‘Pig’s offering you a trophy. Can’t remember the last time Pig did that for skinbait. It’s an honour. Don’t refuse it.’
‘A tooth then.’ says I, turning back to see the butchery.
‘Yeah.’ agrees Deadhead. ‘He had a good eye back there. Saw them first.’
Pig nods, snorts, and digs his blade in.
‘A good eye? Then that’s what he’ll get. A good eye for Good Eye!’ Pig and Deadhead laugh.
Pig hands me the trophy. It dangles like a pendant on its long rope of blood-black optic nerve.
I can’t refuse. I take it, tie it to my dog-tags. It thumps against my chest like a rubber ball at every move I make. As soon as Pig is gone, I’ll lose it.
The Skinners build what they call warning shrines. Ork skulls and limbs spiked on posts or nailed to trunks. The idea is the ‘skins will now shun this area because it stinks of murder and defeat. But the Skinners wire up the remnants to grenades anyway, in case the ‘skins decide to recover their dead.
It’s what Keyser calls a win-win situation.
Keyser. I see him across the clearing as the Skinners raise the ork heads on display all around us. He is bent over the eviscerated body of Captain Lorit, who is cruelly still alive. Toaster says Keyser is giving the captain last rites. I see the sudden twist of Keyser’s hand. That wasn’t last rites as we know it.
The nest is close. We move in, forming small groups. I find myself with Pig, Toaster, and two other Skinners called Slipknot and Buck.
In the glade ahead, swathed in vapour, rises a great, ghostly tree. I sense it is not one tree but several that have become wrapped around each other over time. Hundreds of metres tall and thousands of years old, the great, entwined trunks are lifted clear of the water by a vast raft of winding roots. Birds flitter in the upper canopy. Beetles crawl and gnaw on the exposed roots.
We enter the root system, finding a tunnel half-filled with rank water. The roots coil and interlock above our stooped heads, reminding me of the interlocking arch vaults of the glorious Ecclesiarchy chapel back home on Jopall.
Toaster leads the way. We can smell the leaking promethium of his blackened flamer.
Buck shows me how to take a strip of field dressing and soak it in the swamp water to make a breath mask. Already, the pungent smoke of fires deliberately lit by the scouts on the far side of the nest is creeping back to us.
I breathe through wet gauze.
They’re on us a moment later. Toaster scours the tunnel with his flamer, but they’re pouring out of side turnings we didn’t even see. I’m killing them even as I realise these are youngsters, small ork spawn no taller than my waist, weeping and shrieking as they run from the smoke.
Children. That’s what we’d call them.
I don’t care any more. Slipknot and I push down a side-vent, clawing our way through the tangles of black roots, and engage fierce ‘skin youths, who jab at us with short spears and broken blades.
No match for las-fire.
‘This way, Good Eye!’ I hear Slipknot shout.
Then I’m into a larger root cavity, with Buck and Slipknot on my heels. We can still hear the rasp of Toaster’s flamer nearby, and smell the burning promethium.
Feral orks are all around us now, many full-grown and massive. Some have guns. Slipknot is blown apart by a bolt round. His left hand slaps against my shoulder as it is blown clear of his carcass.
I kill the ork with the bolter. Then Buck and I pepper the cavity with random automatic fire. Green blood splats and sprays in the close air.
An ork is right on top of me, howling, raising a blade in a meaty paw bigger then my head. My gun is out. I fumble. It sees the eye bouncing across my chest and it seems to make it pause. I need no further urging. I slam the bayonet up into its jutting chin so the blade-end punches out through the back of its skull. Its huge jaws, spasming shut as it dies, bite the end off my lasgun.
I take up its blade in my right hand, holding my autopistol in my left. With the blade I dash out ‘skin brains. With the pistol I wound and cripple and kill. I am plastered with ‘skin blood now, as feral as the things I slay, murderous, wanton, out of my mind.
Jopall seems a long, long way away. Further than ever before.
And I know now I can’t go back there.
Not now.
Not after this.
Toaster comes in behind us and yells for us to drop. Buck does, and I pull my head down as the flamer wash gusts like a sun’s heat over our heads, incinerating the rest of the chamber.
We’re all laughing as we clamber out of the nest. Golder and Spaff, the remaining Indentured Squadrons, look as me as if I have run mad. I know how I must look to them, singed and filthy and covered in ‘skin blood that is baked like treacle. I don’t care. I don’t care what they think. I don’t care for anything any more.
KEYSER IS FIGHTING the boss. Driven out by the smoke and carrying a ragged stomach wound, the massive ‘skin has found himself cornered in a sap-pool east of the nest. Keyser confronts him. We all group around to watch. No one interferes. We just watch and whoop and chant.
Like orks.
The ‘skin boss is one hundred kilos heavier than Keyser, and massively muscled, with molars like daggers and tusks like bayonets. It wears a turtle-shell breast plate, and carries a hooked bill on one paw and a gutting knife in the other. Its torn belly oozes foul-smelling ichor, making the thing crouch.
Keyser, lank and lean in tattered camo-fatigues and webbing, his skin white with paint, has only a shear-knife. They circle and jab. We stand around the clearing, clapping and cheering, chanting ‘Key-ser! Key-ser!’ like animals. The boss circles in, sidestepping Keyser’s blade and taking a decent cut of meat from Keyser’s left thigh with its bill. In return, Keyser swings and kicks the monster square in its wounded abdomen, throwing it back into the water in a spray of slime.
The boss rises to its feet awkwardly. Keyser is now limping from the ragged slice in the meat of his thigh, a slice that has flapped the skin open to show pink meat and gleaming white bone.
Another swing with the bill, an evasive deflection from Keyser’s knife. How can he go on with a wound that bad, I wonder?
But he does. Keyser splashes through the churning, foamy water and rips his blade along the boss’s forearm, causing it to drop its bill.
Then Keyser swings in counter-clockwise and buries his blade up to the hilt in the boss’s throat.
Gurgling and aspirating mists of blood, the boss falls on its back, surging water across the clearing under its vast bulk. And dies.
We chant Keyser’s name so loud that leaves shake lose and drop from the canopy.
ONLY SCALBER IS dead. He died somewhere and somewhen in the glades of Armegeddon’s vicious jungles.
I only barely remember him now. He was a good sort, I suppose.
What I am become now, only time will tell. I hate it, yet I love it too. It is a way of life and of death that appeals to me in its simplicity. To hunt, to kill, to be a better hunter and better killer than the brutes we stalk. To be Good Eye.
One day, perhaps, I’ll remember Jopall and the life I had there. Perhaps. I may wake screaming in the night, dreaming of it. I may not.
The Green waits for me. There I will do my work, in the Emperor’s name. There I will find my glory.
THE RAVEN’S CLAW
Jonathan Curran
‘MY LORD GOVERNOR, I see shadows ahead. I see ravens wheeling, but beyond the shadows there is only darkness.’ The man was nervous, wary.
‘Are we in danger then, Rosarius? Are all our schemes to come to naught? Look again. Look again!’ his master insisted.
‘My lord, I- I cannot tell… Wait, there is someth
ing, the darkness is clearing… I see fire. No… a star, it is falling in the night… falling from the sky. What does it mean? No, no, wait… it is gone, I can see no more.’
‘Then try harder. We must not fail. Too much is at stake here. You’ve got to protect me until all this is over. This place is full of treachery and I trust no one. If anyone so much as thinks ill of me I want to know about it. We’re taking a massive gamble here, and I want to know that it’s going to pay off. Don’t worry, when it does, I will remember who my loyal servants are. Keep looking – I must know when victory is close.’
Governor Torlin turned on his heels, and stalked over to the windows. He was a short man, but his gait was commanding, almost a swagger. He stood with both hands resting lightly on the sill, looking out over his capital. Far in the distance he could see flashes of light as the defence troops straggled to hold the city’s perimeter. The triple-insulated glass dampened the sounds, but even from this distance, he could see distortions in his vision as the steady crump-cramp of artillery caused the plexi-glass to vibrate. He couldn’t tell whether the explosions were coming closer, but he knew it couldn’t be long before the walls were overrun and the city brought to its knees. He started to stroke the lines of medals on the chest of his gaudy dress uniform, as he always did when he was lost in thought.
Rosarius, a thin, sallow man dressed in dark robes, stared at his back. His milk white eyes, blind since his days at the Adeptus Astra Telepathica, gazed unseeing into the void. He could hear the governor’s breathing, sense his faint odour of tension and fear, feel the intense electrical activity of his brain. He could almost tell what he looked like, so well did he know his aura, but he ignored these false clues to reality, and concentrated instead on the images he could see with his inner eye. Far beyond the window, he could feel the desperation of the Guardsmen holding the walls, feel the determination of the attackers, their mad lust for battle as they threw themselves against the defenders. He sent out fingers of thought, searching for pathways to the future, like tendrils, snaking their way into possibility. He searched for clues to potential outcomes, the easiest way to victory, the conclusion of their plans. He shook his head in frustration – whichever way he looked, all he could see was darkness, and stars falling from the sky.