by Various
‘I’ll hurt you back,’ said Vivyen. ‘You’ll cut me with that knife, I know that, but not before my nails scratch out that last eye of yours.’
The man considered her words, then grinned.
‘I expect you would,’ he said.
Vivyen wanted to let all the air in her lungs out in one explosive breath. Relief turned to horror when she saw the man wasn’t admitting defeat, he was just going to take someone else. He took three powerful strides and grabbed Challis’s scrawny arm, wrenching her from the huddled group of children.
‘No!’ screamed Uriah. ‘Don’t!’
The boy threw himself at the man. Uriah was big for his age, but was still just a child against a full-grown man. The knife bit flesh and Uriah fell with a howl of pain.
Blood squirted from his shoulder and the children screamed at the sight.
‘You don’t want to go? Fine, I’ll take this one instead,’ said the man.
He dragged Challis from the room and slammed the door behind him, leaving the six remaining children to their misery. Vesper fell to the floor, weeping and shrieking at the loss of her twin. Oskar and Lalique knelt with Uriah, their faces wet with tears. Ivalee stood silent and uncomprehending.
Vivyen felt as though the man’s knife had stabbed her in the gut. She looked at Vesper’s curled, sobbing form and guilt settled upon her like a lead weight.
She looked down the book, but the words were meaningless.
They had no comfort to offer her, not now.
‘Please, Alivia,’ sobbed Vivyen. ‘Please help us.’
Alivia’s feet dangled a metre off the deck. The Space Marine gripped her neck in one fist, the wrist of her gun hand in the other. He could break both in an instant.
‘That hurt,’ he said, bleeding from the side of his skull where her bullet had creased him.
‘It was meant to kill you,’ gasped Alivia.
‘You’re fast, I’ll grant you that, but Yasu’s the only mortal I’d credit with a chance of seeing my blood. Even Loken didn’t get a shot.’
‘Who?’
‘Another son of Cthonia.’
‘Another traitor.’
Severian sighed as though disappointed.
‘In another life, I’d already have killed you and been half a kilometre away,’ he said. ‘But I fight on the side of the angels now, and behaviour that was as natural to me as breathing is… frowned upon.’
Severian fractionally tightened his grip. ‘So tell me, who are you? Who are you really?’
Alivia’s eyes bulged at the pressure.
‘Alivia,’ she said between snatched gasps. ‘Alivia Sureka, I’m looking for my daughter.’
She felt his disbelief, as palpable as cold or pain. Just as she felt truth and fresh purpose in his bones, their fit still new and chafing against old instincts.
Severian leaned in, his bearded, tattooed face millimetres from hers, and sniffed her like an animal. He shook his head and his cold eyes flicked down to her flat belly.
‘You’re no mother,’ he said. ‘That womb is as barren as Cthonia’s surface.’
Alivia blinked in surprise, now seeing what lay beyond the savagery his murder-gang tattoos suggested: an agile mind, predator’s patience and a hardwired hunter’s instinct. Alloyed to a psychic presence entirely unlike the blunt, sledgehammer minds possessed by some among the Legions.
‘My adopted daughter,’ she said, resisting the urge to give her words a psychic push. The inside of Severian’s mind was a steel trap of jagged edges, just waiting to snap shut.
‘That’s better,’ said Severian.
She eased the serpenta’s hammer down and relaxed her grip, letting the gun hang by the trigger guard from her forefinger.
‘Good girl,’ said Severian, lowering her to the deck and plucking the weapon from her hand.
‘I want that back,’ said Alivia, massaging her bruised neck.
‘So you can shoot me again?’
‘I’m not going to shoot you, Severian,’ she said.
‘You’re damn right you’re not.’
‘I won’t shoot you because you’re going to help me.’
Severian laughed.
‘Something tells me you’re not the kind of person who normally needs help.’
‘True, but I want you to help me now.’
‘Why?’
‘Because we both answer to the same master.’
Severian’s eyes narrowed and she sensed his frank reappraisal. His instincts were telling him there was more to her than met the eye. That she was dangerous. He’d thought she was simply fast, but now he knew better. He didn’t know what she was – how could he? – but he was curious.
And for someone like Severian, that was enough.
‘So we’re going to find your daughter?’ he said.
Alivia nodded.
‘How do you know she isn’t just lost?’
‘Because he told me,’ said Alivia. ‘He took her last night and I don’t think she was his first. And unless I find where these monsters are hiding, more children will be taken.’
She knelt over the corpse and spat in its face. ‘He’d have led me right to them if you hadn’t killed him.’
Severian shrugged and took a knee beside her. He turned the dead man’s head in his hand. The slack features were no longer curled in a rictus grin of mockery. Blood still dribbled over his purple lips.
‘What is it?’ said Alivia. ‘Some form of chronic hypoxia?’
‘Maybe, but I doubt it,’ said Severian, bending over the man, as though about to give him the kiss of life. Alivia grimaced as the tip of his tongue flicked over the dead man’s lips. The legionary swirled the taste around his mouth before spitting the tainted saliva onto the wall. It smoked as it slid down the steel panel.
‘What is it?’ asked Alivia. ‘A narcotic?’
‘Yes, and a powerful one too. A blend of some kind of ergot and distilled serpent venom,’ said Severian.
‘Will that help you track where he came from?’
‘It might,’ said Severian. ‘There’s a quicker way, but you won’t like it.’
‘If it helps find Vivyen, then I’ll like it.’
‘Fair enough, but I warn you it’s not pretty.’
Severian’s fist stabbed downwards, fingers extended like a blade. He struck the side of the dead man’s head, splitting the bone with precise force. Severian spread his fingers, levering open the vault of the skull and exposing the pink-grey ooze within. He tossed away the hair-covered bone and dug his fingertips into the wet, pliable meat of the brain.
Alivia knew what was coming; a barbaric custom from millennia ago, resurrected by science and made to work as ancient warriors believed it worked. That had always been His gift, grafting fresh purpose to martial customs and bending them to his will.
She forced herself not to look away as Severian scooped out a handful of jelly-like brain matter. He sniffed it and baulked at the smell and texture.
‘What?’ he said, seeing her surprise. ‘It’s something we can do, but do you really think we enjoy it? The things we see, they never go away. Ever.’
‘Please,’ said Alivia. ‘If there was any other way…’
Severian sighed and closed his eyes, pushing the brain meat into his mouth. He chewed for an entire minute before finally swallowing it.
His eyes snapped open, but they were glassy and unfocused, like an opiate-fiend or false prophet in a fugue state. His mouth hung slack and Alivia felt her gorge rise at the sight of bloody morsels stuck in his teeth.
‘Severian?’
He doubled over and puked onto the deck. Alivia covered her mouth and nose at the ammoniac reek as Severian spat and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
‘Did you see where they are?’ she asked.
Severian nodded and gripped his golden-hilted gladius. Alivia saw its ivory pommel was worked with a cobalt-blue company number enclosed by a wreath. A blade of the XIII Legion.
‘I saw them.’
A lump formed in Alivia’s throat. ‘Is Vivyen alive?’
‘Yes.’
Relief flooded her, swiftly followed by more anguish at the terseness of Severian’s reply.
‘Are they hurting her? Is is bad?’
‘It’s worse than you know,’ said Severian. ‘It’s the warp.’
Until the revelation of the White Naga, Shargali-Shi had always viewed suffering as something to be visited upon others. He had shunned pain, taking ever more exotic compounds to dull his senses to its fiery balm.
The Serpent Gods’ revelations had changed him in ways too numerous to believe, but chief among them was a craving for ever more extreme sensation. No debasement could be too degrading, no pain too sublime, and no violation so grossly beyond the mores of civilisation for him to forego. He had transcended all limitations of mortal flesh, blending the Sacristans technology with the flesh-alchemy of serpents.
Secretly wise, serpents held the keys to immortality.
What other species could shed its skin and yet live?
Their venoms were sacred fluids, opening the mind to realms of perception only madmen knew, every toxic droplet imparting knowledge wrung from each brush with death’s kingdom.
His beloved Lyx had known that.
Her treacheries had crippled her first husband, a man whose hate-filled blood wrought venoms of terrifying lethality and beauty. Her lusts had brought him her last husband, a host of battle Knights and the resources of an entire planet.
But Lyx was dead and the Warmaster now claimed Molech as his prize. He had cursed Horus Lupercal until Molech’s Enlightenment plunged into the empyrean and the designs of the Serpent Gods became clear.
Shargali-Shi was to be their prophet of doom, the blade carrying venomous seed to Terra and poisoning the well at the Imperium’s heart.
Hot and humid as a rainforest, moisture filled the arched chamber in which he had established his Serpent House. It dripped from the reticulated girders overhead and glistened on corroded pillars. It sweated from the hundreds of writhing bodies laid before him, their limbs intertwined.
Watching over the debauched flesh-revels were half a dozen Thallaxii: armoured cybernetics with featureless, brushed-steel heads enclosing agonised scraps of excised nervous systems. Once bound to House Devine, they now served the will of the Serpent Gods, and emerald corposant played across the fangs of their lightning guns. If he listened hard enough, he could hear the lunatic screaming of the Thallaxii within their armoured prisons.
Shargali-Shi hung suspended above all, his skeletal limbs splayed like an ancient crucified god. His flesh was the hue of mouldered vellum, clinging to wasted limbs and bones reduced to viscous sludge. Borne aloft like a grotesque marionette, he hung upon wires attached to clattering pulleys and barbed hooks that stretched his pallid skin taut in tattered flaps. A translucent womb-sac extruded from his bloated abdomen, its contents twitching with undulant life.
His face was an ovoid dome with distended jaws and crooked teeth that drooled venom. Blinded by milky cataracts, his prodigious mind saw all and sustained him when every law of nature sought to claim his tormented flesh.
He knew agony with every hissing breath, but he accepted the pain, transformed it into an act of devotion to the powers that dwelled in the night. The White Naga had taught him how to use that pain, to turn it inwards and reach beyond the veil to the realm where the Serpent Gods dwelled.
Smuggled aboard the warship in the last days of the battle for Molech by men of influence in thrall to his cult, Shargali-Shi had drawn ever closer to his gods. As the vessel ploughed the furrows of the immaterial ocean, he heard their hissing secrets in every sigh of submission, every scream of bliss, every blood-choked death rattle.
An auspicious time was approaching. The movement in the taut womb-sac grew frantic as the life within sensed the imminence of its birth.
‘Yes, my child,’ hissed Shargali-Shi. ‘The Chosen Six will be yours, and the White Naga will claim their envenomed flesh. It shall sculpt their forms anew that they might bear the radiance of its divine form.’
Severian led them deeper into the nightmare, into the bowels of the warship, as he followed splintered memories plucked from a dead man’s skull. An inexact map, they took many wrong turns, and doubled back frequently. Alivia tried not to let her frustration show, knowing what it had cost him to eat the flesh of a corrupted soul.
Below the waterline was a place to be feared, even on a ship as illustrious as Molech’s Enlightenment.
Here, scum sank to the bottom.
Scav-tech gangs of bilge rats shadowed their every step, but their fear of Severian kept even the most desperate from attacking.
For that alone Alivia was glad of his presence.
Deeper and deeper they went, silently crossing decks where the broken servitors prowled, mindlessly enacting ritualised functions they could no longer perform. They bypassed sealed vaults where lethal radiation was slowly wearing away protective wards. They covered their ears as they traversed abandoned machine-temples where corrupt code burbled heresies of Old Night.
Alivia kept hold of the Ferlach serpenta, her finger curled around the trigger and the safety off.
‘Did Theresia Ferlach really make that gun?’ asked Severian.
‘She did,’ said Alivia, deciding to intercept what she knew was coming. ‘And yes, that was a hundred and eighty-seven years ago.’
Severian took this in his stride. ‘So that makes you over two hundred years old.’
‘It does,’ replied Alivia.
‘But I’m guessing that’s not even close to the truth.’
‘It’s not, but do you really want to know?’
‘No, keep your secrets,’ said Severian. ‘The galaxy’s more interesting that way.’
Despite the strangeness of the situation, Alivia felt herself warming to Severian.
‘So how does one of the Warmaster’s sons end up, what was it you said, on the side of the angels? And in unmarked armour?’
Severian didn’t answer, and Alivia thought he wasn’t going to until he said, ‘There was an Ecclesiarch of Old Earth who once said “treason is just a matter of dates”.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘When the Luna Wolves needed to decide something, it was customary for us to draw lots,’ said Severian. ‘For command of a speartip, the composition of an honour guard and suchlike. When it came time for Horus Lupercal to send a warrior to join the Crusader Host, it was my name that was drawn.’
‘You didn’t want to go?’
‘What do you think?’ said Severian. ‘To leave the Crusade? To sit out the greatest war-making the human race has ever waged in some gilded palace on Terra? Of course I didn’t want to go, but what choice did I have? My primarch had given me an order, I had to obey.’
Alivia felt a creeping dread settle upon her as the relevance of the long-dead Ecclesiarch’s quote became clear.
‘Tell me,’ said Severian. ‘Have you ever seen Horus Lupercal?’
Alivia nodded stiffly. ‘I met him once,’ she said, a shuddering breath escaping her at the memory.
The Warmaster’s cursed blades shearing her spine and shattering her ribs. Her blood flowing out onto the black gate. His last words to her…
You shouldn’t put your faith in saints…
‘Then you’ll know that it’s next to impossible to refuse him,’ continued Severian. ‘Little Horus Aximand once said the only way he ever remembered what he was about to say was to look at Lupercal’s feet. Catch his eye, and your mind would go utterly blank.’
Severian paused before continuing, as though weighing the cost of where
the path of his life had taken him.
‘I wasn’t there when my brothers of the Sixteenth turned, but I’d always thought that if I had been…’
‘What?’ asked Alivia, when he didn’t go on. ‘That you’d still be with them?’
‘No, that I maybe I could have stopped it,’ said Severian. ‘Then I look at Loken and think it’s probably just as well I wasn’t.’
Severian grunted, a sound that was part anguish, part amusement at the cosmic joke the universe had played upon him.
‘You ask how I came to be on the side of the angels. Luck.’
‘That’s not true, Severian,’ said Alivia with insight that came not from her abilities, but from the pain in Severian’s words. ‘And you know it. You came to Molech to stop the Warmaster, didn’t you?’
‘I never set foot on Molech,’ replied Severian.
‘Then why are you here?’
The Luna Wolf shook his head. ‘Like I said, the galaxy is a more interesting place with a few secrets left to it.’
They huddled in the corner of the meat locker farthest from the door, six frightened children clinging to the last shreds of courage Vivyen’s story had given them.
Vivyen thought Uriah was still alive, but she didn’t know for sure. She’d seen his eyelids flutter not long ago, though she had heard dead people sometimes twitched and burped after they’d died, so maybe that didn’t mean very much.
Oskar and Lalique had tied some cloth around the boy’s shoulder. It was soaked with blood and his skin was white, like a ghost.
‘Why are they doing this?’ said Ivalee for the hundredth time. ‘What did we do wrong?’
‘Nothing,’ said Lalique. ‘We didn’t do anything.’
‘Then why are they hurting us? We must have done something.’
Lalique had no answer for the youngster and Vivyen hated these men who’d taken them more than ever. Even if they somehow managed to escape this cell, the damage had already been done. Ivalee’s innocence had been stripped away and replaced with a twisted sense that she was to blame for what was happening.
‘This isn’t your fault,’ said Vivyen, trying to copy the same tone Alivia used whenever she really wanted to make herself clear. ‘It’s not any of our faults. Mama told me that some people are broken inside, and that makes them like doing bad things. It’s like a sickness or something. When bad people do hurtful things to us, it’s them we need to blame. Even if they didn’t start out bad, what they’re doing to us is wrong, so I want you to remember that none of this is our fault.’