Red had been here for a long time. Harrow had found a coat for her on the Crimson Hunter and she had it wrapped tightly around her shoulders. Breath steamed in front of her face. Pyre, against all her expectations, was cold.
Titanic fires had once raged across the surface of this world, hurling millions of tonnes of smoke and dust into the atmosphere. The fires were long extinguished now, but the clouds remained, blocking out almost all Pyre's sunlight. That, even more than the gigatonnes of ordnance fired by the Iconoclast fleet, had spelled doom for the planet's ecosystem - there were life-forms on Pyre hardy enough to endure the bombardment, but nothing could survive prolonged lack of sunlight.
It was a well-known scenario. First the plants die off, then the animals. Before long, even the oxygen in the air begins to bind to rock, filtering down from the air until nothing but rust and nitrogen remain. A living, breathing world is reduced to a dead wasteland.
Red stared out over the oily sea towards the invisible horizon. "Nuclear winter, they used to call this," she said. "Back then, nukes were the worst thing anyone had to offer."
She could hear Harrow trudging through the sand towards her, his boots crunching through the grease-layer. "Nukes?"
"Thermonuclear weapons."
"Oh," he said quietly. "Those."
Firecrackers now, thought Red. The weapons wielded against Pyre had made nukes look like kids' toys. No wonder Harrow remained unimpressed.
She stuffed her hands into her pockets. The silence was oppressive; it beat at the ears. It was like a pressure, squeezing her down, making her head ache. The air hung flat and heavy around her, reeking with smoke. There was no wind at all.
Harrow had stopped a few metres behind her. "Holy one," he said, his voice sounding strange and empty in the still air. "Why are we here?"
"I told you," she snapped. "I don't know."
"Then tell me how you feel."
She looked across at him. There was an open, quizzical look on his face. She couldn't help but smile. "You know how I feel."
"I'm sure I don't. Tell me, holy one."
Red gave a sour chuckle. "I feel like I've been hit by a bulk hauler. Like the universe took a sledgehammer, said 'Okay girlie, now it's your turn,' and smashed me into the ground like a tack."
There was a long silence, after which Harrow said: "That's not entirely what I meant."
"I know." Red scuffed a line in the sand with the toe of her boot. The grease-layer cracked away queasily, leaving soggy, dull-looking mush beneath. "Jude, I do my best communicating with my fists and my teeth." She bared her fangs at him for a second. "This isn't easy for me. All I know is, this is the closest I can get to the beginning."
"The beginning? Oh, I see," Harrow nodded. "So if Wodan still existed..."
"Jude?" She stuffed her hands deep into her pockets. "What happened to Earth?"
"Earth?" he frowned. "What do you mean?"
"I looked it up in the database, but there wasn't an entry. Crimson Hunter didn't know what I was talking about."
Harrow spread his hands helplessly. "Earth is... gone, holy one. It hasn't existed for, oh, a thousand years or more. Long before the database was written. Why do you ask?"
Red shook her head, bewildered. "I don't understand. How does a whole planet just go?"
"I don't know. Red, it's ancient history at best. Other than that, fairy tales. People have other things to concern them now."
She gave him a sour look. "You realise I'm quite upset about this. I was born there, Judas!"
His eyebrows went up into his hairline. "You were?"
"What, that's not what they taught you about me in Sunday school?"
"Our scriptures are hazy on your origins, holy one."
"Oh, forget it." She turned her back on him, angrily. "Whole snecking universe had gone insane. Vanishing planets just about fits right in."
She began to walk slowly back up the beach. Ahead of her, shapes were poking from the blackened ground, tipped at random angles, their outlines broken and peeling, their detail washed out by the fog into a succession of flat grey layers.
Sticks and stones, Red thought dully, picking her way across the dead beach towards them. A few sad little scraps of broken masonry and melted plastic that had once been a town.
Debris crunched and snapped beneath her boots as she walked among the broken buildings. "I wonder what it was called," she whispered.
"Hmm?" Harrow was moving parallel to her, not too close. There were few standing walls to get in the way, though. "What was what called?"
"Here. The town."
"Ah. I couldn't say."
She stopped, in front of a truncated curve that had been part of a doorway. "I'm sorry, Jude. I know I'm putting you through a lot. But I had to see this, you know? Really see it." She moved on, though the doorway. "They did this in my name. I tried to run away from that, and look what happened."
"I'm still not sure what you hope to achieve."
"Neither am I. But I'll let you know when it happens."
Three billion human beings had lived on Pyre. Then the Tenebrae came, and three billion had died.
Historians were already calling it the Second Bloodshed, that brief but vicious mutant uprising. Compared to the first great human-mutant war it lasted almost no time at all, but the devastation it wrought, the damage it did to the stability of the Accord, was almost unimaginable.
Pyre had been turned into a shrine-world; a hymn to blood and fire. The human population had been systematically butchered, their bodies fed into vast, sky-blackening furnaces, their bones fused into towering citadels. Over a period of weeks three thousand million men, women and children had been reduced to fuel.
Burned, to prove a point. And all in the name of Saint Scarlet of Durham.
That was what haunted Red, now that she was too weak to hold the thoughts back. This atrocity, and dozens of others like it, had been committed by mutants who held her as their messiah. They had slaughtered entire populations because they thought she'd want them to.
That was what she had become, while she slept the centuries away. A figurehead for a mutant cause so extreme it regarded genocide as a tool of argument.
Her footsteps slowed, and eventually she stopped and stood where she was.
She felt tired, and bitterly cold. The days spent travelling back through Accord space to Pyre had given her some time to recuperate, but she was still weak. Fairly soon, she'd have to start back to the Crimson Hunter, or she'd not make it.
She glanced around. Her aimless wandering had taken her deep into the ruined town. She was standing in the remnants of some kind of building; a roughly circular space in what might have been a courtyard. Objects surrounded her, burned and melted beyond recognition, arranged in concentric rings.
There were other things, too, half-buried in the ash. Little domes and rods of blackened bone.
She crouched, brushing ash away from a tiny skull with her fingertips. These ones hadn't made it to the furnaces, she realised. They must have died in the first assault.
Distantly, she heard Harrow calling her name, skating to a halt at the edge of the circle. "Holy one! I thought I'd lost you." He looked about, breathlessly. "What is this?"
The skull came up in her hands. She cradled it, blowing carbon from its eye-sockets. "It was a school."
"Oh," he said simply. There wasn't really anything else to say.
How old had this child been, she wondered, when the Tenebrae firebombs had rained down? Five? Six? When Red was six she was still in the Milton Keynes ghetto, an outcast even among her own people. Dracula, they called her. Bloodsucker.
A six year-old child, called Bloodsucker in the street.
"Nothing changes, Jude. Being different is still enough to get you killed." She stood up, and let the skull roll out of her hand. It thumped back into the ash. "There's nothing here, is there? Just soot and bones." She sighed. "Sorry."
"For what?"
"Dragging you back to this nightmare
." She sniffed. Something was itching her nose, tickling the back of her throat. "Damn, this smoke gets everywhere."
He nodded. "We should get back to the ship. It'll be dark soon. Well, darker than it is already."
"Aye, cap'n." She began to walk towards an opening in the wall, then paused. She sniffed again. "That's weird."
"What?"
"I smell blood."
Harrow looked shocked. "Are you sure?"
She glared at him incredulously, and pointed at her fangs. "Er, vampire?" Her mouth was beginning to water. "I'm not kidding, Jude. Something's alive here, beside us. And it's bleeding."
The source of the smell was further than she'd thought, a few minutes' walk through the rubble. But the air was still, and Red's capacity for sniffing out blood was very good indeed.
They were at the edge of the ruins, moving up what had been a wide avenue of trees and low walls, before the bombs had shredded it. The main road into town, perhaps, or a ceremonial route. Piles of bricks and twisted lattices of metal spoke of a tall, elegant gateway.
Harrow put a hand up. "Red? Can you hear something?"
She listened hard. After a time, she nodded. "Singing. Someone's singing."
There was a song in the dead air, a slow, murmuring lament. She couldn't make out the words, or even if the song had words at all, but she could hear that it was being sung by many, many people. It was soft and low and impossibly sad.
It was beautiful. It made her throat catch to hear it.
Past the song were other sounds, she could hear them now. The steady beat of drums and the shuffling of many feet. A rhythmic noise, too; an odd, repetitive slapping that she couldn't identify. "Harrow, what is this? Have you ever heard this before?"
He shook his head, and then his eyes widened. "There," he said.
A procession was making its way through the shattered gates.
There must have been a hundred of them. A mix of humans and mutants, it looked like, although it was harder to tell now than in her own time. After all, Harrow was a mutant, a member of the Tenebrae itself, and he looked more human than she did.
The newcomers were clad in strange, angular robes of white leather and silk, their faces draped in cloth, their wrists and ankles trailing long chains of black iron. Their bare feet scuffed up great clouds of ash and filth, until it surrounded them like a captive storm.
Red moved to the side of the road as the hooded figures reached her. If they noticed her, they showed no sign of it, just kept trudging along, beating little drums with the heels of their hands, singing their tragic, wonderful song.
Durham Red shivered. The sight of so many hooded men brought back edges of memory she didn't like at all, although she couldn't remember why.
More robed figures came through the gates. Some were naked from neck to waist, and were whipping their own backs with long, bladed chains. The chains were fixed to heavy wooden handles, gleaming with years of hard use. With the handles gripped tightly in their bloodied fists, the flagellants swung the chains up and over their left shoulders, completely in unison, then down, and back up over the right shoulder. Over and over again, keeping perfect rhythm, blood sprayed into the air with every blow.
Here was the source of the blood scent and the strange sound. "Sneck," Red hissed to herself. "What a waste."
"These are heirophants of the Thanatos sect, holy one," Harrow whispered. "They must be here to say prayers for the dead of Pyre."
Red gnawed her lower lip. "Good call, I guess. But what's with the guys cutting themselves up?"
"Those are transgressors of the Thanatos code, atoning for their sins." His brow creased in thought. "Or they might be newcomers to the sect. I believe they go through a period of taking on the suffering of the dead."
Another lash, another multiple spray of blood. Red winced. "That's gotta hurt."
"There must be some who don't make it. I seem to remember..." He broke off, looking hard at the flagellants. "Sacred rubies," he gasped. "One of them's an Iconoclast!"
"You're kidding!" Red followed Harrow's startled gaze.
He was right. One of the flagellants was covered in charm tattoos. Red hadn't seen them under the blood, but there they were, a criss-cross pattern of lines burned and inked into corpse-white skin; supernatural protection against the bite of a vampire.
The man's face was hooded.
"Jude, it couldn't be him, could it?" Suddenly, Red felt her heart slamming in her chest. After all this time, all this distance.
She ran forward and ripped of the man's hood. "Godolkin, you old..."
A stranger looked back at her and gradually lowered his great head.
"Oops." Red stepped away, letting the hood drop from her hand. "Sorry, honey. Thought you were someone else."
The entire procession had stopped. So had the singing. And the drums and the bladed chains.
Red noticed that, barring the Iconoclast, everyone in the procession was looking right at her.
A man was walking towards her, leaning heavily on a black cane. His robes were the same smoke-stained white as his companions, but he wore no chains and carried no drum. He stopped in front of her, reached up and stripped the hood from his head.
Red inhaled sharply.
Something had been done to the man's face. Hundreds of carefully wrought scars around his eyes and mouth had turned his face into a paradigm of sorrow.
Red found herself taking a step backwards. "Forgive me," she muttered. "Didn't mean to stop the party."
"You are Durham Red," the man said quietly.
Red glanced quickly back to Harrow, but the mutant was looking just as baffled as her. "Um..."
"So the rumours were true," the man breathed. "I didn't believe them myself, but here you are, returned to survey your work."
Emptiness, cold and still, reached up to clutch Durham Red's heart. "Mine?"
"Whose else?" He spread his hands, encompassing everything around them. The cane remained stuck in the ash, and Red could see that the top of it was a chrome skull the size of a golf ball. "Pyre died in the name of the Scarlet Saint. The dead we sing for burned with your name on their lips."
Red looked around her, imploringly. "No, that's not fair. I didn't do this..."
"Then why are you here, Durham Red?"
The question, from the scarred lips of this terrible man, hit her like a brick. Harrow had asked her, more than once after she'd made him land here. She'd asked herself dozens of times. And every time, the same answer.
"I don't know."
The heirophant prodded the ash with the end of his cane, and flipped a blackened skull out into the light. "They know," he said. "But they no longer have breath with which to curse you. That privilege belongs with us now."
He fixed her with a steely glare. "Go back to where you came from, Durham Red. Go home. Your mark has been on this world long enough."
There were four systems thrones on the bridge of the Crimson Hunter: command and navigation faced towards the prow, engineering and tactical to the stern. Red, still bundled in her coat, was strapped into the tactical station when the yacht powered out of orbit. For a few moments she felt acceleration dragging her back towards Pyre, as if the planet was reluctant to let her go. Then the dampers kicked in and Crimson Hunter darted away, leaving the burned world far behind.
Red hadn't said anything for a long time, and Harrow, ever mindful of her needs, hadn't asked her to. Only when Pyre was gone from the scanners did she feel able to speak.
"Was he right?"
"The heirophant?" Harrow shook his head. "Holy one, if I've learned anything these past few months, it's that you and the Saint Scarlet of legend are two very different people indeed. Pyre was caught in a conflict that has lasted for centuries and no one sane could hold you responsible for that."
She gave him a soft smile. "You think?"
"If it hadn't been you, it would have been someone else."
"I'll keep telling myself that." She swung the throne back around to
the tactical board and hit the safety release. The straps unlocked and slid away into recesses. "Sneck, I need a vacation."
Harrow appeared to consider this. "It might be no bad thing. If you don't mind me saying, you are still only just starting to recover from the Glow. A few weeks of rest would do you a power of good."
"Yep. Plus, if those happy-clappers were hearing rumours about me, it's only a matter of time before somebody else does. How much of a price do I have on my head now?"
"At last count, just enough to buy a small continent."
"You know something?" Red stretched, taking care not to put too much stress on her injured back. "Right now I wish I could do just what he said. Go home."
"Was it ever a place you wanted to return to?"
"I didn't think so. But you only realise how much you miss things when you know you can't have them any more." She yawned mightily. Waves of fatigue were coming up from her feet, making her feel slightly giddy. She'd overdone things today, she decided. Too much walking, too much grief. Too much soot in the lungs.
"It's nothing, Jude. Pick a planet you like, I'll be fine. Right now I just need a shower."
She lay on the gel bed, staring up at the curved ceiling and studied its intricate carvings. She had seen this view a lot over the past few days, and was getting to know every square centimetre of those carvings.
It was hard to know what to feel. Earth was no happy centre to her memories, that was certain. All she'd known there was misery and loss, hunger and fear. She'd become a Search and Destroy agent, a licensed bounty hunter, in order to escape the place.
She couldn't blame Harrow for being vague. His reaction would have been the same as hers, had someone wandered up and asked her for directions to Babylon, and how about those gardens, eh? As had been said, it was ancient history. A footnote, at most.
She rolled over, burying her face in the pillows. Harrow had told her about the stories surrounding the disappearance of Earth: that it had been hidden by human forces at the beginning of the Bloodshed, to keep it safe from mutant attack, or that it had been utterly destroyed in a horrific weapons test. Dismantled by killer machines. Stolen by aliens.
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