by Various
He sprang forwards and chopped his hands out: hard left, hard right. The two soldiers bringing up the rear of the squad toppled, their necks broken cleanly before they had even realised they were under attack.
Severian heard the bark of urgent voices in the vox-beads clipped to their helmets.
He lifted one of the tiny voice units to his mouth. ‘Five dead and counting. Who wants to be number six?’
When Nagasena reaches the bodies, ragged scavengers have already begun to gather. They look at him with hostile eyes, debating whether or not to fight him for possession of the dead.
He already knows they will make the wrong decision.
After all, desperation makes fools of men.
There are five of them, more than enough – they think – to take down one man. Two are armed with factory-stamped stubbers, the third with a custom rig that looks more dangerous to its owner than him. Two men rush him, armed only with lengths of rusted pipe and fear-born courage.
Shoujiki whispers from its sheath and the first dies with his belly sliced open. Nagasena spins on his heel and brings the lethal edge down on the neck of the second. The head flies clear and crashes through a nearby window.
Nagasena is moving before the first body hits the ground. Stubber fire blasts from perforated barrels. The low-grade ammo makes the guns’ recoil too powerful to keep the weapons on target. Two quick cuts open the first gunner from groin to sternum.
Nagasena leaps up and his sword stabs down into the hollow behind the second gunner’s collarbone. It slices effortlessly through the man’s heart and lungs. Nagasena twists the blade free and a crimson geyser arcs over the wall as the man falls to his knees.
The last scavenger backs away, his converted pistol held out in a shaking grip. It is a primitive thing – loud, dangerous and intimidatingly large. Nagasena’s pistol matches it in lethality, but his does not waver.
‘You will miss,’ he says, ‘and then I will kill you.’
He sees the man’s decision in his eyes a fraction of a second before he knows it himself.
Nagasena presses the firing stud on his volkite pistol and a searing beam flashes into existence, linking the tapered barrel and the scavenger’s head.
The man’s skull detonates as his brain cavity is superheated and the blood, oxygen and brain matter expand explosively. His headless corpse drops straight down and his finger tightens on the trigger. The report echoes through the streets of the Petitioners’ City and Nagasena feels the distortion of the air as the shell tears past him to blow a shield-sized crater in the wall behind him.
He holsters his pistol and bends to wipe the blood from Shoujiki on a dead man’s clothes. With the worst of it removed, Nagasena unfolds an oiled cloth and polishes the blade to a mirror finish once again.
He brings the blade up and touches the tip to the end of the scabbard. He pauses for a heartbeat to honour the weapon, before sliding it home in one smooth motion. He hears angry voices behind him. Men who wear the same uniform as the dead Black Sentinels killed by Severian.
A five-man combat squad, the brothers of these dead Sentinels.
A lieutenant reaches down to a fallen warrior and Nagasena opens his mouth to shout a warning, but it is too late. The dead man’s body shifts and the fragmentation grenades wedged between his breastplate and the ground roll clear. Nagasena hurls himself behind a stack of crumbling bricks as they detonate with a hard, echoing bang. Fire rolls out, and in its wake comes a storm of red-hot shrapnel.
It engulfs the street, ricocheting back and forth in a flesh-shredding hurricane. The blast wave lifts the other dead bodies into the air, and grenades hidden beneath them go off in a deafening succession of secondary explosions. Nagasena puts his hands to his ears, pressing himself into a tight ball as the concussive force of the blasts punches the air from his lungs.
Tumbling fragments of hot steel slice his cheek, his arm and his neck. One embeds in Shoujiki’s scabbard, and he plucks the smoking metal from the lacquered wood. At last the ringing echoes of the blast diminish as it travels outwards through the streets.
He sucks in a breath of fyceline-hot air. Blood runs down his face and from his ears. His body feels like it has been worked over by an Arbiter’s shock maul. Nagasena rises unsteadily to his feet, but he can see nothing of the Sentinels. He weaves a path back down the street, seeing dark, wet lumps that were once human beings scattered like butcher’s offal. The smoke obscures the worst of the carnage, but not enough to keep the horror from his face.
One man is still alive.
Incredibly, it is the lieutenant who turned over the first grenade-rigged body.
Nothing is left of him below the waist, and he stares at Nagasena with pleading, disbelieving eyes. His mouth flaps like a landed fish, trying to form words, but failing in the face of such unendurable agony. Nagasena kneels beside the lieutenant and takes his hand.
The lieutenant’s eyes ease shut, as though he is falling asleep and might soon wake.
The man’s hand slips from Nagasena’s, who gives voice to the jisei composed by Master Nagamitsu on the eve of his assassination:
‘Should this body die and die a thousand times over,
White bones turning to dust, with or without trace of a soul,
My steadfast heart is Truth, can it ever fade away?’
Nagasena looks up, feeling someone’s gaze upon him.
Leaning from the high window of an adjacent building is a young girl, strikingly pretty, with skin so dark it puts him in mind of the Salamanders legionary he saw at the Preceptory. Her eyes are wide orbs of pale white, and she wears a crimson flower pinned to her green dress. She sees him looking at her and darts her head back inside.
The instant their eyes meet, Nagasena sees a sure and certain truth.
She has seen the Luna Wolf.
Severian moved at speed through the streets, following the mental map he had compiled in the hours after his escape from the Temple of Woe. The street plan followed no logic and changed with each passing day, but he navigated the spaces between its scrapyard palaces and junk-habs with aplomb.
Like his ability to blend, his innate sense for direction had never yet let him down. He had guided the Outcast Dead through the labyrinthine complexity of the mountain gaol with ease, and they had travelled the Petitioners’ City like natives. Cities opened up to Severian, their roads rising to greet him, their highways and byways like old friends.
Frightened faces poked from openings in scavenged structures above him, some seeing him, most not. Even those who looked right at him did so with perplexed expressions, as though unsure of what exactly they were seeing.
Severian did not question this.
The shadows were lengthening and Severian kept to the walls, moving low and keeping his eyes constantly in motion. The noise of the city was familiar to him, a rustle of bodies, the clatter of pots and the sharpening of knives. Then came the dull echoes of distant grenade blasts, and he shook his head at the foolishness of his pursuers.
Cookfires and smoke scents joined those of sweat and desperation and fear.
And beneath it all, the low-level buzz of the broken earpiece in his helmet.
He’d listened to the skirl and sway of the static during the quieter moments of his solitude, picking out the odd word here and there, like impossibly distant echoes from a bygone age seeking a connection to the present. Nothing of any use, but the interleaving ghost voices made him feel marginally less isolated. He wondered if he would eventually join them, a lone voice lost among the millions of dead in the wars fought to bring unity to a world on the verge of extinction.
A static warble, like a soft wave breaking on a golden beach, washed through the helm and Severian let the vox-fragments surf the edges of his consciousness as he slipped through the evening.
He crested a rocky defile towards the scarp upon which
rested Vadok Singh’s walled enclosure. He skirted the edges of what looked like a small cemetery, the three graves hacked from the rock of the mountain and marked with carved cherubs. Severian saw no names, but from the size of the holes cut into the rock, two of the dead were children.
He looked back through the jumbled silhouettes of the buildings behind him, seeing the arched roof of the Temple of Woe. Despite the wild stories of what had taken place within its walls, the people of the Petitioners’ City still brought their dead to its doors.
No one would dig a grave for Severian, and the thought hardened his heart.
He began to climb.
Nagasena looks for a way into the building, eventually finding a rope-hinged doorway of nailed timbers and sheet metal. He pauses as he enters, letting his eyes adjust to the dim light. Stairs lead to a broken landing, upon which sits an ill-fashioned ladder of metal struts and baling twine. Swiftly he ascends, knowing he does not have much time until mistrust seals the girl’s lips.
The floor above is a crumbling permacrete slab, divided into myriad living spaces by struts of trench shuttering. Huddled bodies crouch in their allocated spaces, gathered around stuttering thermal generators, sleeping or kneeling before opened boxes with carved fronts. Children look at him with open mouths before parents pull them away. They do not know him, but they know he is dangerous.
These people are pinched and wary, curious at the bloodshed beyond their home, but hoping he will pass swiftly. He is an unwelcome visitor in a place he does not belong. The sensation of being a trespasser on Terra saddens him, and he wonders if these people even think of themselves as citizens of the Imperium any more.
He sees the girl in the green dress sitting with her back to the wall, her knees drawn up before her, and he makes his way towards her slowly. She looks twenty, but is probably younger. Poverty and desperation age people.
He keeps his hands in plain sight, palms up. She watches him with eyes that tell him she saw him kill the scavengers.
‘You have nothing to fear from me,’ he says.
‘You promise?’ she asks, and her desire to believe him almost breaks his heart.
Nagasena twists the sash at his waist, holding the lacquered scabbard as though offering it to her. Her eyes widen at the workmanship, and he knows she will never see anything this beautiful again.
‘This sword is Shoujiki,’ says Nagasena. ‘In one of the dead languages, it means honesty. The man who gave it that name bound it to me with a promise to live by that principle. I am not a good man, and I have done many terrible things in my life, but I have never broken that promise.’
She searches his face for deceit, but finds none and the tension in her taut body visibly relaxes.
‘You saw him,’ he says. ‘The Legion warrior.’
Her face crumples at the memory, and Nagasena waits, knowing it would be a mistake to force the words from her. To see a Space Marine is no small thing, and to see one make war is to witness killing fury at its most violent.
‘He is not coming back,’ Nagasena promises her. ‘If that is what you’re afraid of.’
‘You don’t know that,’ she says. ‘I saw him look at me, and he had death in his eyes.’
A single tear runs down her cheek, and Nagasena hates that the treachery of Horus has made this girl afraid of the very warriors wrought to win the galaxy in her name.
‘He will never hurt you,’ he says.
‘How do you know that?’
‘Because I am going to kill him.’
She looks up, and she gives him a crooked grin at the certainty in his voice.
‘My name’s Ekata,’ she says. ‘He went north, towards the cliffs above the Temple of Woe.’
At first Nagasena thinks she must be mistaken. Why would Severian head back to where the hunt began? Then he remembers what Severian wants and it all makes sense.
‘Does that help you?’ asks Ekata.
‘More than you know,’ says Nagasena, wishing he could help her, that he could rebuild her faith in the Imperium. Coming to a decision within himself, he removes a jade cartouche from around his neck. The polished oval stone is etched in gold with the image of a serpentine dragon. He places the cartouche in Ekata’s palm and closes her fingers over it.
‘Do you know the Chitwan path on the southern approaches to the upland work camps?’
‘Yes, at the Primus Gate barracks.’
‘Take the path until you come to a fork marked with a small cairn of black and gold rocks. Walk the path on your right and follow it uphill until you reach a red-roofed villa with the same dragon symbol on the gates. Present yourself to the mistress of the house, a woman named Amita, and tell her that Master Nagamitsu’s pupil wishes you to be treated as a guest until his return. You understand?’
‘Yes,’ says Ekata, her smile making her beautiful.
‘Go now, for night is coming and the Petitioners’ City is no place to be out after dark.’
Ekata stands and unpins the crimson flower from her breast and leans forwards to attach it to Nagasena’s breastplate.
‘For luck,’ she says, embarrassed by the superstition. ‘A rosette.’
Severian had chosen a route up the eastern sides of the projecting bluffs of the cliff face to keep himself clad in shadows. The climb was difficult, the exposed face worn smooth by abrasive winds and the quarryman’s drill. Each handhold was a finger-breadth wide, each toehold a sliver of a projection. More than enough for a Luna Wolf.
The sun arced further into the west, the rich blue deepening to subtle purple and the sounds of the city rising to meet him. As the sun dipped to the horizon, the Palace was bathed in its dying light, painting it the colour of blood. Severian remembered a time before it had assumed so imperious a title and appearance, when it had been no more than a mountain citadel, a bastion for a council of war – a fastness from which the conquest of the galaxy had been planned.
It had been a time for heroes, the beginning of a new epoch. For the first time in uncounted centuries, light was eclipsing dark. The solar system was poised to fall, and the galaxy was opening up to mankind. In a mighty diaspora that echoed humanity’s first great explosion into the stars, the expeditionary fleets of the Legions knifed into the void to reclaim that lost empire.
But Severian would not be part of that noble endeavour.
As the 63rd Expedition breached the heliopause, Severian was returning to Terra with full honours to join the Crusader Host. As part of a new brotherhood, he had stood proudly with his brother legionaries in glory. They had been visible paragons of the new order carving the Imperium into the flesh of the galaxy.
That time was long gone, and Severian found it increasingly difficult to reconcile that memory with his current plight. Stranded and alone, the last survivor of a disparate group of warriors thrown together by circumstance, then chosen by Atharva’s design. He had long ago given up trying to understand why Atharva had only freed the seven of them when there were plainly others who would have been sympathetic to their cause.
What of the representatives of the Night Lords, the Word Bearers and the Iron Warriors?
Might their escape have fared better with a son of Nostramo or an Olympian at their side?
At first Severian didn’t notice the scratching voice emerging from the static, thinking it was simply his imagination. A trick of memory and isolation. But it came again, rising like a whisper in the quiet of a deserted fane. He paused in his ascent and tapped a finger to the side of the helm.
The voice came again, louder and more distinct.
This time there was no question of what it was saying.
‘Severian,’ said the voice.
Shock pinned him to the cliff. He twisted his head left and right, then up and down. He saw nothing to indicate he was being observed, but any hunter this good wouldn’t expose himself to his prey.
‘Who are you?’ he asked, resuming his climb.
‘My name is Yasu Nagasena.’
Severian made the connection. ‘You are the hunter who tracked us to the temple.’
‘Yes, and now I have tracked you here.’
‘How is it you are talking to me?’
‘The helmet you wear belonged to a warrior from an earlier age,’ said Nagasena. ‘I saw how your fellow warriors were clad in the temple and requisitioned a similar communications device from the Palace reliquaries.’
‘Clever,’ admitted Severian.
‘It required no great insight on my part,’ said Nagasena modestly.
‘No one else thought of it.’
‘I am not everyone else.’
‘You won’t be triangulating me with this,’ said Severian, recalling what he knew of Unity tech-levels. ‘These work on open-wavelength broadcasts. Anyone with a receiver tuned to the right frequency could hear this.’
‘I do not need to track you this way. I know where you are going and I have you in my sights right now.’
Severian laughed, the first moment of genuine amusement he had felt in a long time.
‘Then take the shot, hunter.’
Moments later a portion of the cliff face to his left puffed with the impact of a long-las round. Severian blinked away the afterimage and the acrid heat haze of dust.
‘Are you psychic?’ he asked. ‘Has the Imperium decided that yet another class of useful psykers are worth special dispensation?’
Nagasena seemed amused at his outburst. ‘I am not psychic, just a very good tracker. The first axiom of the tracker is to understand what your target wants.’
‘And what do I want?’
‘What death denied Atharva of the Thousand Sons and your fellows. The truth.’
Severian paused in his climb. ‘What truth?’
‘The truth of how the galaxy has changed. You are adrift, Severian. You are told your primarch has betrayed you. Betrayed the Imperium. You want to look your brothers in the eye because you cannot reconcile that truth with what you remember.’