25 For 25

by Various

  But somehow she had known of Vika’s pregnancy before Vika had mentioned it to anyone but Brael.

  ‘Does this mean we’re going to visit the temple again?’ Bron asked. Vika had wanted him blessed by the priests of the Varks, in their temple in the southern city of Mallax. It was called the Iron Town, thanks to the foundries and workshops that fouled the air with their smoke and noise. ‘I’m old enough to remember it, now.’

  ‘We’ll go again one day,’ Brael replied, remembering the clattering iron caravan journey south – ten days and nine nights. ‘When you’re older and I’ve taught you how to run this place.’ He massaged his neck. An ache was beginning to blossom at the back of his head. He recognised it as the start of the throbbing pain that had, on occasion, confined him to a darkened room for the best part of a day.

  Brella had a phrase for it. ‘Wisdom trying to fight its way out,’ she’d say, then fix Brael with a significant look. Brael would smile, kiss the old woman, and offer to refill her glass.

  ‘Headache?’ Vika asked. Brael nodded. ‘I know just the thing to make it go away.’ She paused and smiled. ‘And if that doesn’t work, I’ll just have to send you to bed with a cold cloth over your eyes,’ she added. She took Brael’s arm and turned back to the farmhouse.

  ‘Can I watch the sky a bit longer?’ Bron asked.

  ‘Why not?’ Brael replied, smiling at his wife. ‘They’re only shooting stars, after all.’

  Vika thumped him playfully on the chest.

  ‘Don’t stay out here too long,’ she told Bron. ‘I’ll expect you to be in bed before moonrise.’

  ‘I will,’ Bron replied. ‘You go and look after Dad’s headache.’ There was such a knowing tone in his voice that Brael and Vika stared at each other, both struggling not to laugh, as they walked to the kitchen door.

  Brael didn’t remember falling asleep. He woke to find a shaft of silver light cutting through a gap in the bedroom shutters. The moon must have risen while he slept. Judging by the intensity and angle of the moonlight, it was close to its zenith. Dawn was still some way off.

  Brael couldn’t remember what he had been dreaming, or why it should have woken him. He eased up into a sitting position, careful not to disturb Vika. Blinking and absently rubbing the back of his neck, he looked down at her, still asleep beside him, fair hair fanned out around her head. He felt a familiar tightness in his chest. He had felt that same tightness the first time he laid eyes on her.

  Brael’s father had been still years from the grave when Brael accompanied his elder cousin Ralk on an iron caravan to the annual market at Giant’s Pass, at the foot of the North Hills. The gentle, rising country marked the border between the wide rich grasslands and the ragged hill country that grew wilder and steeper with every day’s travel north. The ancient, smoke-belching engines that travelled the iron roads, all of which had their terminus in Mallax, were of no use in the north country. Here the people moved their flocks from peak to peak in search of pasture and wintered in valleys where the snow would pile as high as the roofs of their stone-walled cabins.

  ‘Northern women are like the bleaters they tend,’ Ralk had warned Brael with a smile. ‘Always ready to wander off and never know when to quieten down.’ Brael laughed; he knew how Ralk’s wife, Jenna, would react if she heard her husband. Women raised among the wide, grassy plains of Brael’s homeland were more than capable of using a sharp tongue or flying kitchen bowl to make their opinions known, and Jenna’s aim was legendary.

  Brael stayed in the north after Ralk returned with the rest of the caravan to the grasslands. He endured the biting winds and unremitting cold of the hilltops and the well-meant ridicule of Vika’s kinfolk; they were sure he’d be dead before Vika deigned to return his attentions. Luckily for his frozen, aching limbs they were wrong.

  Vika’s independent mind and adventurous spirit both attracted and puzzled Brael. Even by the standards of the hill clans, her family were particularly well travelled. Brael was surprised to learn that they had travelled as far south as Mallax, primarily to visit the Temple of the Holy Varks, home of an obscure sect, hardly known beyond the city walls. Brael had considered this no more than a curiosity of her family history until she fell pregnant with Bron. One night, as they lay together, she had told him that after the birth she wanted to take their child south to be blessed at the temple.

  Brael had been unsure. All he had heard of Mallax were travellers’ tales of a smoke-clogged, soot-blackened scab of a place. Once the men of Mallax worked in shafts and galleries beneath the ground, tearing rock from the earth, then transforming it through ancient processes into the knives and ploughshares used by farmers everywhere, and the swords and lances with which the city barons armed their militias.

  But that had been long ago. Men no longer ventured beneath the earth. Instead, the men of Mallax spent their time repairing what their forefathers had made: the tools and the machines, including the engines that pulled the iron caravans. Meanwhile, the stones of their city grew ever blacker from the dirt spewed into the air by the chimneys of the city’s workshops.

  He had been about to forbid the journey when he caught sight of something in her eyes, in the set of her jaw. She would go without him, and take their new babe with her. Some men in his family would have called him a fool, but the moment he realised that, he also remembered why he loved her.

  Six months after Bron’s birth, he arranged for his nephew Rebak to look after the farm while he and his new family travelled south.

  Mallax was everything he had heard it to be and more. The noise was worse than deafening, it was an assault: the hammering of metal on metal; the cries of foremen and workers; the rushing, artificial inhalations and explosive, hissing exhalations of engines like those that pulled the caravans, only much, much bigger. There was a reek of burning metal always in the air and grit crunching between your teeth. When Brael looked skyward, past the forest of smoke stacks that seemed to jostle for space above the tallest of the city’s rooftops, it was as if he were looking through a grey veil, a gauze of smoke and grit and the combined excrescence of too many souls packed too closely together.

  Brael was not a bumpkin. He had visited Vinara, the city-state that claimed administrative control over the region in which his family farmed and to which they paid regular tithes of produce. He had also made one trip to Primax, the greatest of the city-states. Both were large, bustling, curtain-walled cities, home to powerful families and their militias and the temples of deities associated with the seasons and the fertility of crops, beasts and men. They were every bit as crowded as Mallax and probably not much cleaner. But the smells of Vinara and Primax were those that he recognised – animals, crops and dirt – and they didn’t seem to cling to your skin like a thin film of oily fat.

  Vinara belonged to its landscape; its stepped streets mirrored the vine-planted terraces that surrounded it. Primax seemed to share the grandeur of the vast prairies of productive farmland at whose centre it sat. Mallax, by contrast, was a dark, cacophonous imposition on the land.

  During their journey, Vika had explained to Brael the Dogma of the Varks.

  ‘It is a beacon,’ she had told him, shouting over the constant clattering of the caravan’s iron wheels. ‘It is by its invisible light that the gods will find their way back to us.’

  The gods had been born among the stars, Vika explained. They had travelled together in peace and joy until, becoming tired, they had set down on this world and rested here for centuries. During this time, they gave birth to the first true inhabitants of this world, the ancestors of everyone now living on the world they named Agra, which meant ‘farm’ in the star gods’ holy tongue. But, just as paradise seemed complete, they were called away to confront a vast, unknowable danger that threatened to destroy all that was good and pure.

  So that their children should not feel abandoned, the gods gave them the Varks. Some stories claimed that every child of the gods had a Varks of their own, through which the gods spoke, promis
ing their anxious children that one day, when the danger had been defeated, they would return.

  But they didn’t return. The Varks fell silent. Generations passed and the children of the gods changed, forgetting their heritage and the knowledge their parents had given them. The huge, glittering machines with which they once tended the open grasslands and even took to the air like birds fell out of use, then fell apart as the knowledge required to maintain them was lost.

  The last remaining Varks was housed in the temple in Mallax and only in Mallax did people struggle to preserve the knowledge of the gods and to maintain what few examples remained of their wonders. Without their efforts, the iron caravans would have long ago ceased to run and the only means of transport that remained would have been of the four-legged variety.

  Though he said nothing about it, Brael was amazed that his wife could believe such nonsense. While there may once have been machines as miraculous as those in the stories – it was not unusual for unfamiliar objects, battered and rusted by unguessable ages underground, to be unearthed during the digging of a sewer ditch – they had been made by men and abandoned by those same men, probably for very good reasons of their own. As far as Brael was concerned, the land was the land, men were men and beasts were beasts.

  Brael remembered the dark and relative quiet of the Temple of the Holy Varks, separated from the rest of the city by its high precinct wall. There was a low hum that seemed to pervade the space, but it was not unpleasant. Hooded priests moved to and fro, their footsteps scuffing on the flagstoned floor.

  He hadn’t known what to expect, but this wasn’t it. It looked pretty much like every temple he had ever seen.

  ‘Only the priests stand before the Varks,’ Vika had explained. ‘They take our prayers to it and bring its blessings back.’

  One of the priests had noticed them. He padded over to greet them and threw back his cowl.

  Brael opened his eyes with a jolt of surprise. He had dozed, only to jerk awake again when his head lolled forward. The memories of meeting Vika, having Bron and travelling south had raced through his mind in a matter of heartbeats. And, judging by the familiar tightness at the base of his skull, the headache he had gone to bed with was about to pay a return visit.

  Easing himself out of bed he padded from the bedroom to the kitchen, where moonlight shone brightly in through the unshuttered windows. His mouth was dry and gummy, so he decided to wind up a bucket from the well, take a sip and then splash the chill water over the back of his head. He glanced out through the kitchen window. There was something in the yard. A body.

  Bron had not gone to bed as his mother had asked. He had lain on the packed earth and counted the shooting stars, eventually falling asleep where he lay.

  Brael smiled down at his son, then went outside and gathered him gently into his arms. Before turning back to the house, he spared a glance skywards. The light of the moon had all but obliterated the stars he knew to be there and there was no trace of the falling stars that had so entranced his son.

  A sickly yellow blotch blossomed behind his eyes and his stomach lurched. Vika’s ministrations had merely delayed the inevitable. By the time he reached the kitchen door his head was pounding. After slipping Bron into his bed he returned to lay beside his wife, pustules of gaudy colour swimming behind his closed eyelids until morning.

  PART ONE

  From the collation of survivors’ reports and the analysis of the few pieces of documentary evidence thus far unearthed and translated from this planet’s debased form of pre-Heresy Imperial Gothic, the invasion of Samax IV appears to have proceeded exactly as one would have expected. The invaders were technologically superior. The indigenous population were limited in their technology, but enjoyed a vast numerical superiority.

  At first the invaders’ advance was swift, seizing control of the most northerly quarter of the planet’s single continent. Very few reports of the attacks appear to have reached the rest of the population. Transcriptorum Servitors record only one reference to a rumour concerning ‘storms in the north’ and ‘fires among the mountains.’

  Over the next year (approx. 1.25 Terran solar cycles) the invaders moved south. Again their initial gains were swift, but news of their advance travelled quickly through the more populous central regions. Evidence has been found of some disbelief in early reports of the invaders’ progress from the mountains. Gorna Haldek, a diarist and civil functionary in the court of Luydos, self-styled High Baron of Caspera, describes early reports as: ‘the stuff of a child’s nightmares, no more.’ Caspera was shortly to fall beneath the invaders’ advance.

  The few survivors of Caspera’s hastily assembled defence force – little more than the city baron’s standing militia augmented by every able-bodied inhabitant of the region – were forced to retreat and to swell the ranks of the forces being assembled by the as-yet untouched city-states. This process of catastrophic loss followed by the retreat and regrouping of the remaining forces was to continue down the length of the continent.

  These larger forces would succeed in slowing the invaders’ advance, albeit briefly. Some units of the defenders were equipped with ancient slug-throwers (Cross ref. 665/1468-archeotech designations: flintlock; wheel-lock; musket) and the wreckage of primitive artillery pieces has been unearthed along the invaders’ route south. There appear to have been rare instances of the defenders learning to use weapons captured from the invaders. However, the defenders’ main weapon was their numbers and their willingness to fight to the death.

  When this was set against the technological superiority of the invaders, and combined with the invaders’ inhuman predilection for bloodshed, the eventual outcome could never have been in doubt.

  The inhabitants of Samax IV were doomed.

  – Extract: ‘Inquisitorial communiqué 747923486/aleph/Samax IV’ Author: Inquisitor Selene Infantus. M41,793

  Wiping the sweat from his eyes as he ran, Brael wondered for what might have been the ten thousandth time if this was the day he was going to die.

  Ahead of him, Fellick stumbled and almost dropped the long musket he was carrying as the toe of his ragged boot clipped a piece of the debris that littered the streets. Even before the attack, the town – Grellax, Brael remembered someone telling him – had looked like it had been sacked and abandoned.

  Grellax had been a well-established market town, set among a landscape of rolling hills. The farmer that Brael had once been, a year and what felt like a hundred lifetimes ago, couldn’t help but note that the grass on the hills he had marched over to reach Grellax, in column with the rest of the army – an amalgamation of regiments from Primax, Mundax, Caspera and Terrax – was richer than that of his flatter homeland to the north. The animals raised on this feed would have produced rich milk and dense, wholesome meat.

  Grellax had grown prosperous enough to spill beyond its ancient and crumbling walls. Those buildings outside the walls were now ablaze and the walls themselves were shattered, the stone blown to dust by engines of destruction that had no place in this world.

  The buildings of Grellax’s older quarters were built stoutly of stone quarried some way off, their roofs made of red tile, another indication of the wealth that had resided here. Brael and Fellick were running along one of the broad avenues that ran through the centre of the town, in what must have been a district of shops and taverns, an area dedicated to giving the Grellaxians something to do with their money.

  However, since the three ragged armies had rendezvoused outside the town, with the intention of re-provisioning and moving on in a single, combined column, Grellax’s inhabitants had been quick to pile what belongings they could into what transport they could find and attach themselves to the rear of the column. It moved out two days after the last army – Brael’s as it turned out – had arrived.

  Brael had been lucky so far – luckier than any normal man had a right to be, according to some – but he knew it couldn’t last. He and his men were assigned to join the rearguard.
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  As he drew level with Fellick, Brael reached out – with his left hand, the one that had been shorn of its first two fingers in a skirmish during the withdrawal through the Cornos Forest, the dense woodland that marked the border between the baronets of Caspera and Vinara – and slapped the broad-backed Primaxian on the shoulder.

  ‘Keep moving!’ Brael shouted.

  ‘I wasn’t planning on doing anything else!’ Fellick replied without taking his eyes from the street ahead.

  The street was lined with shops no one would patronise again, taverns in which tankards would never again be raised. Their doors hung open, some off their hinges, as if their owners had torn them away in their haste to be gone from their homes. And, given what he had seen in the year since the lights fell from the sky, Brael could understand why.

  A guttural roar came from the end of the street behind them. Automatically, both men accelerated their pace.

  ‘Too soon!’ Fellick hissed through clenched teeth. The market square towards which they were running was still half a street-length away.

  Brael heard a second inhuman shout, followed by a harsh metallic clatter. ‘Cover!’ he shouted as he swerved suddenly to the left, slamming into Fellick and propelling him towards a tavern’s hanging door.

  An appalling cacophony erupted from the end of the street: a coughing roar from the many-headed animal that was devouring the world. As Fellick crashed into the tavern’s main room, Brael knew what was coming next.

  Thunderous impacts chewed a line in the dirt behind the men, throwing up a shower of fragments of the street’s cobbled surface and the hard-packed dirt beneath. In the heartbeat before he crossed the tavern’s threshold, Brael risked a glance along the street.