25 For 25

by Various

  Bas didn’t. He had never asked the Sarge about his leg. He didn’t dare. He knew it caused the old man frequent pain. He had seen that pain scored deep in his face often enough. He knew, too, that the leg made a grinding noise on some days and not on others, though there seemed no particular pattern to it. It didn’t sound anything like the noise Kraevin was making, but that didn’t seem to stop the boys enjoying the joke.

  Kraevin stopped in front of Bas. ‘So, what are you to him, eh? You his new boyfriend?’

  Again, great fits of laughter from all sides.

  ‘I… I’m his grandson,’ Bas stuttered. It suddenly dawned on him that every moment spent talking to this boy was a moment spent digging a deeper hole for himself. He needed an escape… and he got it, for all the good it did.

  A bronze bell rang out and a portly, stern-looking man with thick spectacles and a hooded robe of rough brown canvas appeared at the broad double doors of the main building. He bellowed at them to get inside.

  ‘We’ll talk later, maggot,’ said Kraevin as he turned and led the rest of the boys in.

  Bas barely made it back to the Sarge’s home that evening. He had stopped screaming by then, but the tears continued to stream down his cheeks. His clothes had been cut with knives. His lip was ragged and bloody. One eye was so swollen he couldn’t see out of it, and two of his fingers would no longer flex.

  The Sarge was waiting for him at the rickety dining table in the centre of the room, bandages and salves already laid out.

  ‘How many hits did you land?’ he asked simply.

  Bas couldn’t speak for sobbing.

  ‘I said how many hits,’ the old man snapped.

  ‘None,’ Bas wailed. ‘None, alright? I couldn’t do anything!’

  The old man cursed angrily, then gestured to the empty chair opposite him at the table. ‘Sit down. Let’s see if I can’t patch you up.’

  For half an hour, the Sarge tended his injured grandson. He was not gentle. He didn’t even try to be. Bas cried out in pain a dozen times or more. But, rough as he was, the old man was good with bandages, splints and a needle and thread.

  When he was done, he stood up to put away the medical kit. Looking down at Bas, he said, ‘You’re going back tomorrow. They won’t touch you again until you’re healed.’

  Bas shook his head. ‘I don’t want to go back. Don’t make me go. I’d rather die!’

  The Sarge launched himself forward, getting right in Bas’s face.

  ‘Never say that!’ he hissed. ‘Don’t you ever back down! Don’t you ever let them win! Do you hear me, boy?’

  Bas was frozen in absolute terror, certain the old man was about to rip him apart, such was the vehemence in his voice and on that terrible face.

  His grandfather stood up straight again.

  ‘The hard lessons are the ones that count,’ he said in more subdued tones. ‘You understand? Hard lessons make hard people.’

  He turned and walked to a cupboard on the left to put the kit away.

  ‘When you get sick of being an easy target, you let me know, boy. I mean it.’

  He threw on a heavy groxskin coat and made for the door.

  ‘Rest,’ he said as he opened it. ‘I have to go to work.’

  The door slammed behind him.

  Bas rested, but he could not sleep. His wounds throbbed, but that was not the worst of it.

  Abject fear had settled over him like a wet shroud, clinging to him, smothering him.

  Closing his eyes brought back stark memories of fists and feet pummelling him, of the wicked, joyous laughter that had mocked his cries for mercy.

  No, there would be no sleep for him that night, nor for many others to come.

  Bas found the human slaves already locked in a broad cage of black iron, the bars of which were crudely cast and cruelly barbed. As before, all but one of the slaves – and Bas judged there were over twenty of them – sat or lay like lifeless dolls. There was no talking between them, no sobbing or whimpering. They had no tears left. Bas wondered how long they had endured. As long as he had? Longer?

  He saw the boy standing at the bars, hands clenched tight around them. What was he thinking? Did he always stand like this? Did he ever sleep?

  The interior of the building had once been a grand place, even in the years of the town’s decline. Now, though, each corner of the great lobby was heaped with mountains of ork excrement and rotting bodies. The walls were splattered with warlike icons in the same childishly simple style as the greenskin vehicles and banners. The air in here was foul, almost overpowering, even for Bas. Part of his success in remaining undetected for so long had depended on rubbing dried greenskin faeces onto his skin. At first, he had gagged so much he thought he might die. But after that first time, he had adjusted quickly, and the regrettable practice had masked his human scent well. Had it not, he would have been found and slaughtered long ago. Even so, the miasma of filth and decay in the wide lobby was sickening.

  Much of the marble cladding which had graced the interior walls here had shattered and fallen to the floor, revealing rough brick and, in many places, twisted steel bars, making a descent fast and easy. Bas did a last visual scan to make sure all the greenskins were outside watching the fight, then dropped quickly to the lobby floor. The falls of his bare feet were silent as he moved around the west wall and closed on the black iron cage. None of the human captives saw or heard him until he was almost standing right in front of the boy. Even then, it seemed that they were too exhausted to register his presence. The boy continued staring straight ahead, eyes still intense, unblinking, and Bas felt a moment of panic. Perhaps the boy was brain-addled.

  He took an instant to study him at close range. Like the others, he was skinny to the point of ill health, clearly malnourished, and bore the marks of cuts and bruises that had not healed properly. In the centre of his forehead was a black tattoo about three centimetres across. Bas noted it, but he had never seen its like before. He had no idea what it meant – a single stylised eye set within a triangle. Bas looked down at the boy’s arms and noticed another tattoo on the inside right forearm. It was a bar-code with numbers beneath it. The greenskins had not done this to him. It was far too cleanly rendered for that. Bas couldn’t imagine what these tattoos meant, and right here, right now, he didn’t care.

  He reached out and touched the boy’s left hand where it gripped the bar.

  Human contact must have pierced the veil over the boy’s senses, because he gave a start and his eyes locked with Bas’s for the first time.

  Joy exploded in Bas’s heart. Human contact! A connection! He hadn’t dared hope to experience it ever again, and yet here it was. Damn the bars that stood between them. He might have embraced the boy otherwise for all the joy he felt at that moment.

  He opened his mouth and tried to greet the boy, but the sound that emerged was a dry croak. Had he forgotten how to speak already? With concerted effort, he tried again, shaping his lips to form a word so simple and yet so difficult after his long months alone.

  ‘Hello,’ he grated, then said it again, his second attempt much better.

  The boy blinked in surprise and whipped his hands from the bars. He retreated a step into the cage.

  Bas couldn’t understand this reaction. Had he done something wrong?

  In his head, words formed, and he knew they were not his own. They had a strange quality to them, a sort of accent he did not recognise.

  Who are you?

  Bas shook his head, unsure of what was happening.

  Seeing his confusion, the tattooed boy gingerly returned to the bars.

  Who are you? the voice asked again.

  ‘Is that you?’ Bas returned hoarsely. ‘It that you in my head?’

  The boy opened his mouth and pointed inside. Most of his teeth were gone. Those that remained where little more than sharp, broken stubs. But this was not the reason the boy couldn’t vocalise. Where his tongue should have been, only a dark nub of flesh remained. His t
ongue had been cut from his mouth.

  Sounds of movement came suddenly from either side of the boy. Bas looked to left and right and saw that the other captives had roused at last. Barging each other aside, they surged to the walls of the cage, shoving the tattooed, tongueless boy backwards in order to get closer to Bas.

  Bas stepped away immediately, warily. He didn’t like the look in their eyes. Such desperation. He felt the sudden burden of their hopes and expectations before anyone gave voice to them.

  It was an ugly, shabby, middle-aged woman who did so first. ‘Get us out, child! Free us, quickly!’

  Others echoed her urgently. ‘Open the cage, lad! Save us!’

  Bas looked for the cage door and found it easily enough. It was to his right, locked and chained with links as thick as his wrist.

  A tall, thin man with deeply sunken eyes and cheeks hissed at the others. ‘Shut up, damn you. They’ll hear!’

  When he was ignored, he struck the loudest of the prisoners in the jaw, and Bas saw her sink to the cage floor. Another quickly took her place, stepping on the shoulder and arm of the first in her need to get closer to her potential saviour. Bas shrank further from them all. This was not right. He did not want to be responsible for these people. He just needed the boy.

  Despite the logic in the words of the gaunt man, the others would not be quiet. They thrust their hands out between the bars, tearing their weak, papery skin on the iron barbs. Pools of blood began forming on the tiled floor, filling cracks there. Bas took another step back, searching the crowd in front of him for sign of the tattooed boy, but he had been pushed entirely from view.

  ‘Don’t you leave us, son,’ begged a bald man, his right arm docked at the elbow.

  ‘Emperor curse you if you leave us,’ screeched a filthy woman with only a dark scab where her nose should have been. ‘He will, boy. He’ll curse you if you don’t save us.’

  Had the monsters outside not been making such a din of their own, they would surely have heard this commotion. Bas knew he had to go. He couldn’t stay here. But it was hard to leave the boy. How could he open the cage? He had no way of cutting through that chain. Had he found this boy only to be frustrated by his inability to save him? Was the universe truly so cruel?

  A mighty roar sounded from Salvation Square, so loud it drowned out even the wailing humans. The fight between the warbosses was over. The entertainment had ended. Three Bridges belonged either to the new leader or the old, it didn’t matter to Bas. What mattered was that, any second now, massive green bodies would pour into the building through the shattered oak doors.

  Go, said the tattooed boy’s projected voice. You have to go now.

  Bas still couldn’t see him, but he called out, ‘I’ll come back for you!’

  Don’t, replied the boy. Don’t come back. You cannot help us. Just run.

  Bas scrambled back up the lobby wall like a spider. At the top, crouching on the lip of the great jagged wound in the dome, he paused and turned to look down at the cage one more time. The prisoners were still reaching out towards him despite being twenty metres away. They were still calling to him, howling at him.

  Bas frowned.

  ‘There’s nowhere to run to,’ Bas said quietly, wondering if the boy would pick up his thoughts. ‘I only have you. I have to come back.’

  Jabbering greenskins poured into the building then, laughing and grunting and snorting like wild boar.

  Bas slid from view and made for the nearest of his boltholes to prepare for his return tonight. He didn’t know how he would set the boy free, but something told him he would find a way. It was all that mattered to him now.

  There are two ways to deal with fear, as Bas found out in his first few months in Three Rivers. You can let it corrode you, eat away at your freedom and sanity like a cancer, or you can fight it head on, maybe even overcome it. He didn’t have much choice in the approach he was to take. His grandfather had already decided for him.

  Kraevin and his gang of scum did indeed wait until Bas recovered before they brutalised him again. When it came, it was as vicious as the first time. They kicked him repeatedly, savagely, as he lay curled into a ball on the ground, and Bas thought they might never stop. Maybe they would kill him. Part of him wished they would. At least it would be an end.

  When no more kicks came, it felt like a blessing from the God Emperor Himself. He opened his eyes to see the gang strolling off down the street, the boys laughing and punching each other playfully on the arm. Two local women walked past and looked down at Bas where he bled on the pavement, but they didn’t stop. There was no sign of pity in their eyes. They looked at him in passing as they might notice a dead rat on their path.

  The next passerby did stop, however. Bas didn’t know him. He was a big fat man with skull and sword tattoos on both forearms. ‘Having a bad day, son?’ he asked as he helped Bas to his feet. ‘Let’s get you home, eh? The Sarge will fix you up.’

  Bas hobbled along at the man’s side, doing a fair job of stifling his sobs for once.

  ‘D… do you know the Sarge?’ he stammered.

  The man laughed. ‘You could say that,’ he replied. ‘I employ him.’

  Bas looked up at him.

  ‘I’m Sheriddan,’ said the fat man. ‘I own the public house on Megrum Street. You know, where your grandfather works at night.’

  It turned out that Sheriddan liked to talk. In the twenty-two minutes Bas spent with him that day, he learned more about his grandfather than he had in the weeks since he had come to this accursed place. And what he learned, he could never have guessed.

  According to Sheriddan, the sour old bastard was an Imperial hero.

  As he had promised himself, Bas ate a full can of processed grox meat, knowing he would need the strength and energy it would give him. Sitting in the bolthole closest to Salvation Square, he thought hard about how he would get the boy out of the cage. One of the orks had to be carrying a key. Which one? How would Bas get it?

  He thought, too, about what to do once the cage door was open. The others… he couldn’t look after them. They’d have to fend for themselves. They were adults. They couldn’t expect him to take the burden of their lives onto his shoulders. Such a thing was well beyond his power. It was too much to ask of him. They’d have to make their own way. He would lead the boy out at speed, climbing up to the rooftops before the orks realised what was going on. Together, they could return to this bolthole without drawing attention.

  Bas looked at the few cans of food remaining in the metal box at his feet. There were no labels on them, but he didn’t suppose it mattered. Like himself, the tattooed boy would be glad of whatever food he could get. Together, they would eat well in celebration of their new friendship. Tomorrow, they could search out new supplies as a team.

  With these thoughts buoying his spirit, Bas bedded down and tried to sleep, knowing he would need to be well rested for the dangers of the night ahead.

  Darkness fell fast in Three Rivers, and this night the sky was clear and bright. Overhead, the planet’s three small moons glowed like spotlit pearls. The stars shone in all their glory. Had Bas deigned to look up, he might have noticed some of them moving inexplicably northwards, but he did not. His eyes were fixed on the scene below.

  In the ruined plaza, ork cookfires burned by the dozen, surrounded by massive bodies turned orange by the flames. The majority of the brutes were drinking some kind of stinking, fermented liquid from barrels they had unloaded from their trucks. Others ripped hunks of roasted meat from bodies that turned on their spits. Bas didn’t know what kind of meat the greenskins were cooking, but he could hear the fat pop and sizzle as the baking skin cracked and burned. Others still were barking at each other in their coarse tongue. Fights broke out sporadically, each ending in a fatality as the stronger hacked or bludgeoned the weaker to death.

  Bas’s stomach groaned, demanding he act on the savoury smell that wafted up towards his perch, but he ignored it. He needed all his focus, all
his attention, to recognise the moment he could slip back inside the dome of the administratum building.

  It seemed that a great many hours passed as he hunched there atop the ruins of the old church once more, clinging to the statue that broke up his silhouette. In fact, only two hours had gone by when, with their fill of meat and drink and fighting, most of the orks settled down to sleep. Their communal snoring soon rivalled the noise of their engines from earlier in the day.

  It was time to move.

  With all his concentration centred on avoiding detection, Bas made his way across his plank-bridges and soon reached the gaping crack in the dome. There, pressing himself close to the exposed stone, he peered inside and scanned the hallway below.

  There were fires in here, too, though smaller than the ones outside. Around them slept the biggest of the greenskins, those with the heaviest armour, the largest weapons, the most decoration. There were a few hook-noses, too, sleeping in groups near the fly-covered dung piles. They had not been allowed to bed down near the fires of their giant masters.

  Bas watched and waited and decided that the orks within were as sound asleep as those without. He steeled himself for what had to be done, then stepped out from behind the cover of the dome and began his descent. The stars cast his shadow on the tile floor below, but nothing stirred, nothing noticed.

  With all the stealth he could muster, Bas descended, his toes and fingers seeking and finding the same holds he had used earlier in the day. But while the daytime descent had taken only moments, this one took minutes. There was too much at stake to rush, and nothing to be gained.

  Finally, his bare feet reached the cold tiles and he turned from the wall. He realised that, even had he slipped and made a noise, none of the orks would likely have heard him. Up close, their snoring was preposterously loud. Good. That would work in his favour.

  Bas avoided looking directly at any of the fires. His eyes had adjusted well to the shadows over the last few hours of patient observation. He didn’t want to lose that. He had to be able to see into the dark places, for the cage with the human prisoners was flush against the far wall and the marble staircase next to it cast a black cloak over it.