by Various
‘The denizens of the empyrean will learn to respect you.’
‘The White Scars. The Sigillite. Garviel Loken… and now this. The attempts made upon my life by my father’s lackeys are tiresome enough. I will not have the Neverborn acting against me also. I am my own master.’
‘Yes, sire.’
Horus set the knife down, and picked up another. He made a dismissive noise at its quality. ‘I am sorry for the humiliation you had to endure, Mal.’
Maloghurst’s words stuck in his throat. Two more attempts were required before he could voice them. The resplendence of Horus unmanned him.
‘There is no humiliation. Never in serving you.’
‘That is what I expect you to say, Mal, but it does no harm for me to let you know that your service is valued.’
Maloghurst leaned upon his cane and bowed slightly. The pride at his master’s words was almost enough to overcome his sorrow at the distance growing between them.
But not quite.
‘Thank you, sire.’
Horus’s attention drifted from the blade in his hand. ‘Is there something wrong, Mal?’
‘No, my lord. With your permission, I will return to my duties.’
‘You have it, as always.’
Maloghurst turned painfully and departed the stateroom, the rap of his cane on the stone echoing away down the corridor.
A cruel smile played over Xisan’s purple-stained lips as the woman stumbled. She looked up with terrified eyes.
‘Please, my daughter, she–’
Xisan backhanded his fist across her face.
‘You don’t get to speak.’
She spat blood and looked up from the deck with hate.
Xisan laughed. He’d discovered her in a darkened sub-transit of Molech’s Enlightenment, calling the girl’s name and frantic with dread.
Too good an opportunity to ignore.
She’d run to him, eyes wet with tears. Hoping for help.
Xisan had been tasked with finding children, but with the warship overburdened with refugees fleeing the Warmaster’s victory on Molech, finding anyone alone was a gift.
He’d clubbed her to the ground and bound her wrists with baling twine before administering a hypo loaded with soporific venom. Not enough to put her out completely, just enough to render her compliant.
She begged in slurred fragments, not for her own life, but that of her daughter. Perhaps she knew, with the psychic womb-tether of mothers, that he’d been the one who’d taken her.
Her fear energised Xisan. It empowered him.
He remembered the girl. Vivyen, she’d called herself.
The Serpent Gods favoured innocence in those offered unto them, but in such times of tribulation all offers of flesh were welcome.
Shargali-Shi would be pleased to have a mother and daughter to offer the Serpent Gods. Those linked by blood were a greater prize than strangers.
He ignored the woman’s slurred protests as he dragged her through the hidden pathways of the ship. Down into the darkness below the waterline. Down to where Shargali-Shi awaited.
The Ophiolater heard the sibilant voices of the Serpent Gods in his venom-fugues and spread their wisdom among the Vril-yaal. Only a very few of the chosen people had escaped aboard Molech’s Enlightenment, and they used the darkness to rebuild, to renew their faith.
House Devine had fallen on Molech, but enough of the Vril-yaal remained to carry their faith to the stars. Such times of trial were necessary, claimed Shargali-Shi, for only through such testing would true strength emerge.
The woman’s fear increased the deeper they delved into the creaking, lightless bilges of Molech’s Enlightenment. Rusted ductwork gurgled and moaned, exhaling reeking steam and sweating foetid liquids; the bowels of the vessel in all senses of the word.
Some of the Vril-yaal claimed to hear this darkness mutter or that inhuman shadows moved in the silences between breaths. Xisan once thought he’d caught a glimpse of a giant in grey with frost-blue eyes. He never knew if that had been something real or the result of the many ergots he’d ingested.
The woman suddenly stopped, eyes wide, brow furrowed.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Don’t you dare.’
‘You don’t get to speak,’ said Xisan again.
Something slammed into the deck plates behind him. Something with mass and density to buckle sheet metal.
He spun around in time to see a vast shape filling the transit. Faint slivers of light reflected from burnished plate emitting a sub-aural buzz that set his teeth on edge. Xisan smelled caustic lapping powders and oily sweat.
He heard bellows breath like that of hormone-bulked livestock.
‘And you don’t get to live,’ growled the giant.
A glittering blade rammed into Xisan’s gut, punching out through his spine. The giant twisted the sword and hooked out Xisan’s bowels. His intestines followed, splattering the deck like mortuary slops.
He dropped to his knees, aghast at the life-ending quantities of blood leaving him. The woman stood over him, all traces of fear gone. Inexplicably, she now held a gun pointed at his head, a weapon of chromed steel with the inlaid form of a white snake coiled around the barrel.
‘Don’t you die on me, damn you,’ she said, all traces of the slurred pleading tones erased from her voice. Her eyes were clear, honed like razors.
She held his dying body upright, the warm anodized steel of the cannon’s barrel pressed hard into his neck.
‘Where’s Vivyen?’ demanded the woman. ‘Where’s my daughter? Tell me and I’ll end you quickly.’
Xisan grinned through a mouthful of blood.
Alivia Sureka kicked the corpse to the deck and turned her weapon on the armoured Space Marine who’d disembowelled him. She thumbed back the hammer as he took a step forward. He made no sound, surely an impossibility for one of his kind.
‘Why the hell did you have to kill him?’ she said, keeping the sights centred on his bare head. Space Marine or not, one bullet would carve a canyon through his skull.
‘You’re welcome,’ he said.
‘I needed him alive.’
He grinned. ‘You mean you weren’t his helpless prisoner?’
Alivia sighed and waggled the gun barrel. ‘Hardly.’
‘Looked like you were.’
‘That’s what I needed him to think.’
‘And why was that?’
‘He took my daughter,’ said Alivia, her voice almost cracking at the thought of this bottom-feeding predator’s coven holding Vivyen. ‘He was taking me to his lair.’
‘Ah, so you let yourself be captured.’
‘You catch on quick,’ said Alivia as the warrior bent to clean his blade on the dead man’s tunic. A golden-hilted gladius, fashioned for transhuman hands, and yet it seemed a small weapon for one so powerful. Alivia had seen plenty of Space Marines in the course of her existence, but the sheer inhuman scale of them never failed to disgust her.
Of all His creations, she disliked them the most.
This one was bearded with a scalp of close-cropped auburn hair. His worn-leather skin was heavily scarred from recent combat. Dark tattoos of curved blades and blood drops painted his cheeks. Gang markings, serpentine around his eyes and brow. Indistinct in the shadow, but chillingly familiar.
An ash-dulled bolt pistol was mag-locked to his thigh, and strapped to the opposite hip was a serrated combat blade and a grenade harness. Alivia saw three explosive canisters buckled in the loops.
‘That’s an interesting weapon you have,’ he said, rising to his full height and ramming the gladius into a cobalt-blue sheath at his belt.
‘I could say the same thing,’ countered Alivia, sensing the power unwittingly bound to the blade. ‘That’s no ordinary line weapon. It’s shed some potent blood.’
; ‘And that’s no ordinary gun.’
‘It’s a Ferlach serpenta,’ said Alivia.
The Space Marine nodded. ‘Nice.’
‘Crafted by the lady herself to my exact specifications.’
‘Unlikely.’
‘How so?’ asked Alivia.
‘Theresia Ferlach died in the Burning of Carinthia.’
‘And you know that how?’
‘I set the fire that burned her weapon forges.’
Alivia applied fractionally more pressure to the trigger.
‘Who are you?’ she asked. ‘And how does a Space Marine come to be aboard this ship?’
‘I’m Severian,’ he said with a feral grin, the tattooed blades twisting on his gnarled skin. And Alivia finally remembered where she’d seen his gang markings before – the last time she had truly feared for her life.
‘Cthonia…’ she said. ‘You’re a Son of Horus.’
Alivia pulled the trigger.
The room was cold and moisture dripped from the rusty hooks hanging from the ceiling. Moisture and corrosion slathered its walls in blooms of clotted yellow and mould green.
Vivyen had thought her family’s spot beneath the air vent on the starboard radial was unpleasant, but this place was really horrible. She sat against the wall across from the barred door with her knees drawn up tight. Shivering, frightened breath misted on her blue lips.
Including herself, seven bewildered children were being held in the room, ranging from Ivalee and Oskar, who were eleven, to Uriah, who said he was seventeen. Vivyen thought he was probably only fourteen, but he seemed to like being the oldest, so she didn’t argue with him.
A while ago there had been ten of them, but then two women, one with burned out eyes and another with purple-stained lips, came and took them away. Vivyen wondered what they wanted the children for, but they never came back. She could only guess, but all those guesses made her want to close her eyes and cry.
The twins, Challis and Vesper, had been crying and reciting prayers to the God-Emperor since they got here. Uriah paced back and forth, flapping his arms to keep warm. He muttered under his breath, but Vivyen couldn’t hear what he was saying. Something angry probably. Like the missionary he’d been named after, Uriah was always angry.
Vivyen missed her daddy and Miska. She missed Alivia. And even though they weren’t family, she missed Noama and Kjell. They’d kept them alive on the road from Larsa to Lupercalia, and according to Alivia, that made them better than a lot of real families.
When the orbital shuttle left Molech without Alivia, Vivyen had cried herself dry, so when her mother – in all but biology – came back to them it was the happiest she could remember being. Alivia had said things would be okay, and for a time they were.
Until the man with the purple lips had taken Vivyen.
Oskar huddled in close beside her, his eyes twitching beneath their lids. Vivyen held his hand. Oskar was younger than her, which made him practically a baby to her worldly twelve years.
‘He having another nightmare?’ asked Lalique, her head resting on Vivyen’s other shoulder.
‘Yes, I think so,’ said Vivyen.
Lalique’s breath was pleasantly warm on her neck. It was Vivyen’s turn to be in the middle and she hated how glad she was that Oskar was still asleep. As soon as he woke it would be Lalique’s turn to enjoy the meagre warmth between them.
‘I hope he wakes soon,’ said Lalique. ‘I’m cold.’
Vivyen sighed, wishing she had Miska’s talent for putting her own comfort first. ‘Don’t worry, I know how to get up without waking someone who’s asleep.’
‘You can do that?’
‘My sister’s always falling asleep on me,’ explained Vivyen, easing away from Oskar and using her free hand to hold him upright. Lalique slid gratefully into the middle as they swapped places.
‘You’re the best, Vivyen,’ said Lalique with a brittle smile. Her friend, if she could call someone she’d just met in a meat-locker cell a friend, was the daughter of a glass-blower who once crafted fantastical, spun-sugar confections for Molech’s noble houses. She said that several of his creations had pride of place in the House Devine’s towers.
Judging by her clothes, her father had been wealthy, but Vivyen guessed it had been used up to buy them passage on Molech’s Enlightenment. Whatever she’d been before, Lalique was now alone and frightened, just like the rest of them.
‘I wish they’d shut up,’ said Lalique, casting a venomous glance towards the praying twins. ‘I grew out of those kinds of prayers by the time I was seven.’
Vivyen shrugged. ‘I like them,’ she said. ‘They’re about the only comfort any of us has left.’
‘What about that book I saw you looking at?’ said Lalique. ‘If it’s a chapbook, maybe you could read us a story?’
Vivyen felt a stab of protectiveness towards the book tucked inside her dress. Alivia had given it to her and said it was a very special book. It wasn’t new or even valuable, but it was hers. The stories were written in a dead language, but that didn’t matter. Vivyen knew them all off by heart and could recite any one of them at will.
The idea of sharing it seemed dangerous until she realised that she wanted to read a story. Or was it that they wanted to be read? Stories had always helped her feel less scared and if sharing one with the others would make them feel better, then that’s what she’d do.
‘Does anyone want to hear a story?’ she asked.
Uriah glowered at her. ‘Don’t you think we’ve got enough to worry about without hearing your baby stories?’
‘Shut up, Uriah,’ said Lalique. ‘What else have we got to do?’
‘Look for a way out,’ said the boy through bared teeth.
Lalique pointed to the door. ‘There’s the way out. Don’t see you getting through it any time soon, though.’
‘I’d like to hear one,’ said Ivalee with a shy smile.
‘Me too,’ mumbled Oskar, clearly not as asleep as he’d appeared.
‘Fine,’ said Uriah. ‘Tell your bloody story.’
They gathered around her. Lalique was still in the middle and Oskar on the other side of her. Challis and Vesper were in front with Ivalee between them.
Vivyen reached inside her dress and pulled out the book. More crumpled than it had been before, its pages were yellowed and textured with age. She had no idea how old the book was, and Alivia had just winked when she’d asked.
‘What’s the story called?’ asked Challis.
‘Yes, what’s the story?’ echoed her twin.
‘I don’t know,’ said Vivyen, thumbing the pages. ‘I never pick a story, I just look for one that wants to be read.’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Uriah. ‘Stories don’t want to be read. They’re just words on a page.’
‘Of course they want to be read,’ said Vivyen. ‘What’s the point of being a story if no one reads to you?’
Uriah didn’t answer and kept pacing with his arms wrapped across his chest, but Vivyen saw he was waiting for her to start. She scanned the swift-turning pages until the book fell open at a picture of a fat-bellied man in a parade. He had no clothes on and everyone was laughing at him.
‘This is a good one,’ said Vivyen, and she told them all the tale of a foolish emperor, who was convinced by two swindlers that they had fashioned a magical garment, one that only those of keen intellect could see. The hopelessly stupid and unimaginative would be unable to appreciate its – and by association the emperor’s – majesty. Of course all the emperor’s courtiers, not wishing to be thought stupid, claimed their master’s new clothes were magnificent beyond imagining.
And so the emperor paraded before his subjects to show off his new clothes. The people, who by now had heard the swindlers’ claims, also cheered the naked emperor and told him how grand he looked.
All was well until one little boy, courageous enough to speak out, cried that the emperor wasn’t wearing anything at all. And the spell, for such it was, was broken and the crowds howled with laughter as the emperor fled to his castle, red-faced in shame.
Vivyen finished the story, her eyes refocusing as she lifted them from the page. It felt like the words were rearranging themselves on the page. Sometimes they did that.
The faces around her were smiling, stronger now, and Vivyen smiled back at them, pleased she’d given them hope and fresh courage. Even Uriah looked less angry, more defiant.
‘Another!’ said Vesper, clapping her hands.
‘Yes, read one more,’ added Challis.
‘Okay,’ said Vivyen.
‘What’s “okay”?’ asked Lalique.
‘It’s an old word Alivia used to say to me,’ said Vivyen. ‘It sort of means yes, but sometimes it can mean that things aren’t bad either or that they’ll get better.’
Oskar rose to his feet as the door opened, fists gathered at his side. Vivyen’s heart leapt, imagining that Alivia would be standing there with her silver gun with the white snake etched into the metal. Smoke would be curling from it and she’d cock a hip and say something that would tell Vivyen that, yes, things were going to be okay.
But it wasn’t Alivia, it was a man in a long white tunic. Like the women before him, he had been mutilated. His skin was scarred, one eye burned out, and his lips were an unhealthy purple. He carried a dirty knife that dripped with something yellowish.
The children screamed and scrambled into the corner of the room. They whimpered and cried as the man swept his one good eye over them, like a buyer at a meat market. Even Uriah’s anger vanished in the face of naked terror.
‘You,’ he said, pointing at Vivyen. ‘Come now.’
Vivyen shook her head, too frightened to answer.
‘Now.’
‘No,’ said Vivyen, remembering the courage of the little boy in the story she’d just read.
‘I will hurt you,’ he promised, lifting the knife.