Prisoner 52
Page 30
The eyeless, sucking orifice fastened itself onto his head and began to engulf it. Its inner pincers sank into the flesh there until they met with the bone of his skull and there strove deeper so that he felt their tips scratching across his cranium. He struggled against it with his great strength and with the tendrils of the mouth housed amidst his ribcage and when these failed tried to make use of the words writ upon his skin as proofs of compacts old as time.
But thought of these brought into his mind an endless darkness populated as endlessly with endless things, abject and abominable things that had a place in no mortal mind. Things that drifted through a dead space absent of any ponderable purpose or reason; things that had sat since the beginning in cold deeps inimical to the stuff that had created them and to subsist must subvert. He stared into that void shown to him, the void of an endless hunger and the void of a way of life that tended towards destruction, and in its black depths he could but stare as the thing ate into his skull as it ate then into his mind.
Sejanus looked on and tightened his grip round the reins of the chariot to depress the trigger that electrified them. The winged beasts at their barbed ends yowled into the storm as hounds from the deepest hells and hastened onward to the entwined forms ahead. He raised the spear above his head and resettled his grip and in his passing the conjoined horrors he cast the spear. It sailed its natural course through the winds, straight and true, and as it came nigh the airjets along its haft activated. Its cruel and jagged point, the force of the pressurized gas behind it and that of his arm and the exo-suit, gored through what remained in mutation of Tobias Simm's spinal column. In a shower of bone and pale ichorous flesh the being he had become burst apart and there erupted in its place a great green light.
All who looked upon it saw nothing else and in its glow that was like the sun's there arose a cacophony, a dirge from beyond the most distant and alien stars and men wailed themselves only to drown it out. Then the brilliance dimmed to less than that of the night and as sudden as it had come into being. Sejanus and his chariot coursed through its emerald twilight and as though caught in that small instant for eternity. From afar all could see now the crystalline heart from which it still poured but small now and glowering at the end of the spear that pierced it. Then it exploded.
The light that had shined forth returned a hundredfold and within it rampaged a swirling horde of fiends and brute beasts, as if the detonation had breached some seal beneath the earth against the hells and brought up its fire and deranged attendants. Tezac saw from his far place the figures framed within the brightness, the Maerazian and the chariot and all others caught inside of it, vaporize. Then the abyssal legion that had been conjured was sucked away down into some form which remained still in the light of the blast and that raged about where it stood, flailing and its shape changing all the time. But this too in moments was gone, as with everything else, and the radiance petered out to nothing more than staccato shimmering across the melting glacial plain.
A groan sounded as from the gutter of the earth and the home of things not meant to be found and it shook the skies and the ice beneath their feet. Tezac looked up at the ship and the clouds that were swallowing it back again amidst its mournful cries. The beings that had issued from its inner regions returned to them and the Maerazians harried them as they fled, taking of them a great number.
He began to walk then and the old man with him, to tread over the dead that lay everywhere and to no certain place. He went until they turned to ashes and then he began to run. The crater that had been struck into the ground by the force of the crystal's explosion came no closer ahead and so he began to sprint. The piles and little strands of grey ash and the black pulverized steel of HEVs and crashed chariots wheeled beneath him and he fell to his knees at the edge of the pit and peered down into it. But within he saw only crumbling rock and darkness and rising from it a foul smell that he knew without being able to know reeked like no other stench. He sank back onto his legs and looked about at the confines of the hole punched into the planet‘s surface, at the incinerated remains scattered around it as if more could be found in them that had not been there before.
"Sejanus!" He cried and he did not know why, his voice carried far into the emptiness by gelid and desolate winds, with such suddenness that the old man stopped short of his approach behind him. "Sejanus."
"I can't see his biosigns." Leargam said and came up beside him, panting and casting about as he had done. "Not anywhere."
"The Maerazian's neither, I suppose. Or Tobias."
"None of them." He said. "It's like they weren't even here."
"Well." Tezac said and got to his feet.
"You know, it's funny."
"What?"
"He was so tore up inside." Leargam said. "Everything he did, those things on his service record and the things that got him in here. Then he does this. No one will ever know his name, but I guess that's how these things go. I'm sorry, Tezac."
"Everyone keeps saying that." He said and got to his feet and looked up at the chariots that circled overhead and landed elsewhere, the eyes of their crews all turned on them now. "I must be a real sorry guy."
"What else is anybody supposed to say?" The old man said. "Things happen and you ought to know by now not everyone makes it."
"I know it." Tezac said and wiped away the blood that ran from his nose with the back of his hand. "But maybe if he did, well, maybe that’d mean I could too."
"You could what?" Leargam said. "You know, they filled your head with so much crap it's a wonder you don't have shit for brains."
"Is that what you think?"
"I think you got an idea, maybe when you were real young, and it got buried deep. And when you went outside the Citadel and you found out it didn't exist, not in the way you thought it did, it did something to you. Something so bad you convinced yourself it was your hand you needed that Mute for."
"You don't know what you're talking about, old man."
"I don't?" He said and looked at him. "I was an old, burned out miner a long time before I was an old, burned out Enforcer. You think you're the first person to see the things he loves die in war? Hell, to see the things he loves die at all?"
"I don't know what I think. I don't know what I thought then." Tezac said. "Except that when the war was over, it would be over. Just like he thought. And if we did what we had to do to win, we would have won something more. Something more than this."
"Let me tell you something, kid: it's never over. It doesn't stop just because you wanted it to and if you love something, you've got to fight to protect it. These things, they die when they're left alone and when men stop dying for them. He died protecting it, and you think he died for no good reason. Now I'd tell you he died for what seemed to him the best reason of all. That's the kind of man something like that needs. The kind of man who'll bleed and not ask why he's bleeding; that'll die if he has to, if it means the thing will live. Now you have to decide. Are you that kind of man or aren't you?"
Tezac said nothing, but turned round and stepped past him. He awaited the cadre of Maerazians that approached them and threw away his rifle and told Leargam to do the same, but the old man had not turned around. Instead he took a step nearer the edge of the pit and looked down at the glint he saw in the black meltwater therein, the green glimmer that played across its surface. Those that bore with them staves drew up foremost to meet Tezac and the others circled round the two, levelled their cryptic rifles at them both and stood tall in their obsidian suits truly alien to anything he had seen elsewhere in the universe.
"You," The centermost of the warlocks said, his voice a low rasp that sounded through his helmet's outbound transmitter as though from within some sarcophagal chamber, and pointed at him. "You will come with us."
Tezac held his gaze he was sure, hidden behind the visor of his helmet, and then looked across the glacial plain where it was visible through the gaps in the Maerazians formed up about them and saw the others herding
what inmates remained alive and yet sane into groups destined for the specialised skiffs that now descended from beyond the clouds above. In a moment he knew that he would watch them be fit into the slave cages and he with them.
"There's not much choice, is there?" He said and looked back to the warlocks, but they only stared from behind their dark angular helmets and he watched the tassels atop them billow in the wind. "Come on, Leargam."
"What?" The old man said and looked up from the viridian glow and saw the raiders that now surrounded them. "What's going on, kid?"
"The life of a slave." Tezac said and started forward. "Pray to the Gods it's short."
Gauntleted hands caught him up about the arms and a pair of Maerazians hauled him away to join Tezac, who they kept restrained under threat of immediate destruction, as if he were in truth a giant of old. The warlocks left them to go they knew not where and the raiders took them away to stand at a site of their own choosing and formed up around them again, waiting. Leargam watched the Maerazians that were yet by the crater their master had died to form and he watched how they searched with their eyes within it as he had. Only they got down inside as he had not. Then the roaring of reverse thrusters sounded overhead and he looked away to the dropship that lowered down for them alone and of the pit he saw no more.