Get a grip man. It was just a splinter of debris that hit you. This place has probably been falling down forever. The rebels have fled. There’s nothing alive in this tomb but us. Somehow the thought didn’t reassure him.
His vox crackled, breaking the almost hypnotic drumming of the rain.
‘Vendrake,’ he acknowledged.
The only response was a babble of static. He tried again with the same result. Growing irritated he killed the noise and got moving. The downpour had taken the edge off the heat, turning his cabin cold and clammy. Suddenly he was eager to get back to camp, but the poor visibility restricted him to a cautious crawl. At this rate he wouldn’t be back before dawn.
The vox hissed again. He scowled and snapped it to send: ‘Vendrake here. Who in the Seven bloody Hells is this?’ More static. ‘Quint, is that you? Look, I’m in no mood for games.’
There was a barely audible sigh, like something washed up on a tide of white noise. He leaned towards the vox, frowning in concentration as he strained to filter out the static. It sounded like someone was breathing on the other end, harsh and irregular. As if they’d forgotten how…
‘Who is this?’ he whispered.
‘Belle du Morte signing in.’ The voice was as brittle as dry leaves in the wind, so fragile he might almost have imagined it.
But I didn’t imagine it.
Suddenly Vendrake was racing away at breakneck speed, all thoughts of caution crushed by the need to escape those haunted streets.
‘Belle du Morte’ had been Leonora’s call sign.
As a bobbing trio of will-o’-the-wisps approached through the downpour, Audie Joyce pushed himself deeper into the shadows of the colonnade, holding his breath until the lanterns had faded away. He wasn’t sure why he was hiding from the patrol, but he figured they’d start asking him questions – like what he was doing out here in the rain when he could be huddled up inside a habtent. He didn’t want to answer questions right now. He just wanted to be left alone with the Emperor.
Screwing his eyes shut he carried on talking to Him, praying hard and fast. It was the only way to stop the tears. If he let them fall they’d drown him and he couldn’t let that happen, not when the Emperor was counting on him. Uncle Sergeant Calhoun was gone and Audie’s ma would be mad at him for letting that happen. She’d never understand that the old man was with the Emperor now, fighting dead heretics forever and watching over Audie to make sure he kept sending them his way. That was how things worked: the living and the dead were all part of one big justice grinder, with the Emperor right up there as the Chief Grinder. Audie still wasn’t sure if He was living or dead, but guessed He might be both. The Emperor was complicated like that.
The greencap heard laughter from the habtent nearby and grimaced. How could the Dustsnakes be celebrating when they’d just lost their sergeant? Audie had expected the squad to pray together through the night, but after they’d reached the heathen city the men had started up with the drinking and the cards, acting like nothing bad had happened. Roach had even tried to rope him into it...
‘We’re just paying our respects to the sarge and blowing off steam,’ the half-breed had said. ‘If you don’t roll with the punches they’ll break you in half, boy.’
For a moment Audie had almost believed him, but then the native freak who’d become so pally with Roach had offered him a drink – some kind of filthy local brew that would probably turn him into a ‘shroom. Seeing that moony, fish-eyed face grinning at him from under a decent Arkan cap, Audie had exploded. Snarling like a prairie lizard, he’d shoved the mutie right off his feet and stormed out of the tent.
Listening to their laughter, he decided the Dustsnakes were too stupid to know they were finished. There were only seven of them left and that included Toomy, who was worse than useless. The medics didn’t think the sniper would ever recover from the head injury he’d taken in the boat. It made Audie mad that a brainwreck like that had survived the ambush when Uncle Sergeant Calhoun had died. He’d felt sorry for Toomy once, but now he hated him. Just like he hated all the Dustsnakes – hated them for their easy laughter and dirty jokes and all their little blasphemies. He was pretty sure Saint Gurdy-Jeff would call them heretics. Suddenly he wondered how the saint was doing.
Confessor Yosiv Gurdjief entered the Shell at dawn. The rain had finally subsided, leaving the ruins swathed in a halo of mist that writhed around his chugging gunboat. He had sailed up the great Qalaqexi River and entered the city via its central canal. Standing in the armoured prow of the boat he watched the ruins seep past like titanic, fossilised anemones, rising then falling back into the smog. This was his first visit to the dead city, but he remembered the river well, for he had travelled its treacherous paths long ago.
It was said that a man could cross the entire continent along the Qalaqexi, but Gurdjief doubted many men would complete such a journey, for deeper inland the river frayed into a tangle of tributaries that could lead a traveller in circles forever. They called that labyrinth the Dolorosa Coil. Gurdjief had once entered the Coil and returned, but he often wondered if he had ever truly escaped.
Sailing through the mist-shrouded dawn, his mind drifted back to that delirious voyage. It had been the Letheans’ first year on Phaedra and Admiral Karjalan had requested volunteers to reconnoitre the wilderness behind enemy lines. It was dangerous work, but Gurdjief had been a fresh-faced lieutenant eager to make his mark. Posing as a lone pilgrim in search of enlightenment he had ingratiated himself amongst a tribe of nomads called the Nirrhoda. Even by the standards of Phaedra they had been degenerates, but they had embraced his lies and allowed him to join their wanderings along the Qalaqexi. And in time his cover story had become a perfect truth, for deep in the Coil all thoughts of spying and war had sloughed away like fading dreams until nothing had mattered but his quest for the God-Emperor’s Truth.
Time flowed strangely in that grey-green limbo. He recalled years of soul-grinding despair punctuated by fleeting moments of ecstasy. He had explored lost valleys haunted by colossal, primordial beasts and wandered the sunken ruins of pre-human civilisations that made the Shell seem a modern metropolis. Deep in the coral heart of the planet he had duelled and debated with daemons, never quite knowing whether they were real or delusions and not even sure there was a difference.
Strangest of all, he had once encountered a lone tau warrior wandering the jungle in a hulking battlesuit. Judging by the cracks riddling its tarnished ceramic plates the armour had seen better days, but it was easily capable of annihilating Gurdjief, so he had offered no hostility. Instead he had tried to make sense of the mystery. The suit was painted a mottled crimson, a colour at odds with Wintertide’s stark whites and midnight blacks. Gurdjief had no idea what faction the alien belonged to, but the five-flanged sunburst adorning its breastplate looked like personal heraldry, identifying its wearer as a warrior of distinction.
They had talked like fellow pilgrims, sharing tales and striving to map the impossible geometries of the Coil. The xenos was a soldier like himself, lost in time and place but still true to the mission that had led him into the wilderness. He had been vague about that mission, but so far as Gurdjief could make out he was hunting a band of traitors he called ‘The Canker Eaters’.
‘The savages turned on us and slaughtered my comrades,’ the warrior said. ‘They devoured our flesh.’
‘Yet you survived?’
‘I… Yes… I survived. It must be so,’ but the xenos had seemed uncertain.
When Gurdjief had politely enquired about his caste, already knowing he must be a Fire Warrior, the tau had become confused. Finally he had answered ‘Smoke’. Gurdjief had sensed no lie even though he knew the tau only had five castes and ‘Smoke’ was not one of them. They had parted without incident, neither friends nor foes, which had been a mystery in itself. Afterwards he realised that the enigmatic warrior had offered neither his name nor his rank
.
Decades later, Gurdjief had returned from the Coil and found he’d been away less than a year. He could offer Admiral Karjalan neither maps nor news of the enemy. Instead he bore the seeds of revelation, together with other, stranger seeds that soon took root in the admiral’s own flesh – voracious fungal spores he had carried unwittingly from the heart of the Coil. When Gurdjief’s beloved Natalja also ripened with the blight he had first despaired, then rejoiced at her suffering. And so his creed had gradually taken shape. Mankind was born damned and redemption could only be achieved through divine suffering in the God-Emperor’s name.
‘The renegades, they are watching us,’ said the commissar beside Gurdjief, drawing him back to the present. ‘I have seen them spying from the ruins and scurrying away like rats.’
‘They know they have strayed and must face the Emperor’s judgement,’ the confessor said sadly.
‘The Emperor, He condemns,’ the commissar offered devoutly.
Yes He does, Gurdjief agreed. And today He will condemn this rogue colonel – this Ensor Cutler.
The Arkan commander had spurned the Puissance and cheated its admiral of precious donors, sending poor Vyodor into an apoplexy of rage. That insult had been injury enough, but Cutler’s victory at the Shell had sent ripples of discord all the way up to the Sky Marshall himself. In truth Gurdjief cared nothing for the Marshall’s arcane schemes, but he had threatened Vyodor with removal unless the Arkan were brought to heel. That was something Gurdjief would not tolerate. Nothing must interfere with his master’s sacred pilgrimage of torment.
An example will have to be made of this heretic, Cutler. Something particularly enduring...
As the canal wound into a rubble-strewn plaza a spectral army dissolved out of the mist: Arkan, hundreds of them, lined up along the banks like lost souls waiting for passage out of limbo. Most were haggard, pale-faced ghosts in grey, but a few wore those ridiculous clockwork suits that Vyodor had laughed at. Gurdjief also counted several Sentinel walkers towering over the crowd, tracking his boat with an array of heavy weapons.
‘I do not like the look of these heathens,’ murmured the commissar. ‘Have a care my lord confessor. I have only fifty men with me.’
Gurdjief ignored him. His eyes had fixed upon a tall officer standing in the front ranks. The man’s white mane lent him an ancient yet paradoxically ageless quality, a duality of faded dignity and savage vigour. He could almost taste the hatred pent up inside that apparition. A sane man would have sailed away, but Confessor Yosiv Gurdjief simply smiled, knowing he had found his quarry.
Cutler waited in silence as the robed giant leapt ashore and stalked towards him, smiling like a shark behind a morass of black hair. A skeletal commissar followed, flanked by a squad of soldiers in crimson flak-plate. Though the Letheans were heavily outnumbered and outgunned he saw no trace of fear on their vicious, tattooed faces.
‘That’s the maniac who did for Elias,’ Machen hissed. The armoured Zouave stood behind the colonel, reined in like a thunderstorm in an iron cage. By Providence, Cutler knew how the man felt!
Whitecrow, we walk a narrow path! You must cloak your heart in ice–
Angrily Cutler shoved Skjoldis out of his mind and saw her flinch beside him. He had no patience for the witch woman’s anxieties now, not with Elias’s murderer standing right in front of him.
‘You are Colonel Ensor Cutler.’ It wasn’t a question and the priest didn’t wait for an answer. ‘I am Confessor Yosiv Gurdjief, First Herald of the Emperor’s Justice for the Dolorosa continent. You will come with me.’
‘Where are my men?’ Cutler asked.
Gurdjief looked at him blankly. He obviously had no idea what Cutler was talking about.
‘Elroy Griffin, Grayson Hawtin and Kletus Modine,’ Cutler snapped. ‘Your cog priests took them away. I want them back.’
The confessor was taken aback. This fool had lost almost half his regiment, yet he was concerned about three peasants.
‘They are dead, colonel,’ he lied. Gurdjief expected some kind of outburst, but Cutler said nothing, almost as if he had expected the answer. ‘Regrettably they succumbed to Phaedra’s pestilence,’ Gurdjief continued smoothly. ‘As you have doubtless witnessed, this is a blighted world.’
‘That it is, sir.’
Gurdjief waited, but Cutler said nothing more. Determined to seize control of the encounter, the confessor spread his hands in a gesture of openness.
‘Colonel, your recent actions have caused some… consternation. Nevertheless you have won a great victory here. If you will accompany me back to the Puissance I can assure you a fair penitence.’
‘I see.’
Another long silence. Gurdjief felt his patience fraying and he hardened his voice. ‘Surely your men have suffered enough, colonel.’
‘Elias Waite,’ Cutler said. His eyes looked cold and dead.
‘I don’t follow you…’
Cutler moved like a whirlwind, wrenching his sabre from its scabbard and lunging forward in one fluid motion that tore Gurdjief’s confusion into bright agony. The confessor looked down and saw the blade buried in his abdomen. Fascinated, he watched as his robes blossomed crimson around the wound.
‘For Elias Waite,’ Cutler said, plunging the sabre deeper. ‘And all the others.’
Gurdjief gasped as the blade ripped through his back, bringing him closer to the white-haired renegade until their faces were only inches apart. He saw that the colonel’s eyes were no longer cold and dead. In fact they seemed to be on fire, blazing from the man’s skull like twin suns. Abruptly the confessor wondered if this was another delirium. The pain seemed so real, but perhaps he was still lost in the grey-green eternity of the Coil.
How could I hope She would ever let me go?
The sudden cacophony of battle exploded around him, but it seemed muffled and distant. Unimportant. The world had narrowed to the scope of the terrible, agonising blade that bound him to the monstrous colonel.
‘Is this a dream?’ Gurdjief asked.
The apparition appeared to give it some thought.
‘I guess you’ll know if you ever wake up,’ it replied.
Then Cutler thrust the priest away, ripping his sabre free in a welter of blood. Gurdjief tottered backwards, mouthing wordlessly as he tried to break out of the nightmare before it killed him.
It cannot end here. I have walked the tainted heart of this world and wrestled with daemons and seen the secret clockwork bones of reality.
But perhaps all those raptures had been mere delusions and he himself nothing more than a madman. His feet stumbled on empty air and he toppled over into the canal. As he sank into the fecund embrace of the Qalaqexi, Yosiv Gurdjief wondered if he would indeed wake up.
The skirmish was almost over when Vendrake’s Sentinel raced into the plaza, but the insanity was still burning fiercely. The captain clattered to a halt as he saw the last couple of Lethean soldiers die, blasted from the deck of their gunboat by a barrage of high velocity rounds from Silverstorm. Swarming along the banks of the canal, the greybacks roared and fired a victorious salvo into the air.
With an oath, Vendrake swung open the canopy of his machine and leapt to the ground. His legs almost buckled under him, rebelling after long hours in the cramped cockpit. His hellish journey through the city streets had lasted all night. The web of ruins had seemed to close in around him, every junction leading onto another and another, but never offering a way out. And somewhere in that maze he’d heard another Sentinel behind him, racing at a speed that should have been impossible for something so battered and broken.
Nothing is impossible or inviolable, Vendrake realised as he watched the chaos on the shore. There are no rules and there never were. There is no sense or sanity to any of it. Waite was right. I just didn’t see it until I came here. I wouldn’t see it...
A black-bearded
ruffian crashed into him, howling like a savage. The captain threw him aside and pushed his way through the throng like a man fighting to reach his own execution. All around him, greybacks rushed about, whooping and jeering, some of them spraying dead Letheans with las-fire, scattering and burning the corpses like ragdolls. Vendrake heard himself railing at them, but his own words were lost to him, stifled by the shadows of the past.
It’s like Trinity all over again, Vendrake realised as long-buried memories came flooding back. The sickness in our souls rising up to make monsters of us all…
He saw Cutler and Machen through the riot. They were standing over a broken commissar who was struggling feebly, trying to rise to feet that were no longer there. Cutler was leering down at the man with a bestial grin that turned Vendrake’s blood to ice. Machen was little better; through his open faceplate the Zouave’s jaws were frozen in a rictus of hate, transforming his face into a grinning skull. Only the witch seemed troubled by the madness, fluttering desperately around Cutler while her giant weraldur loomed over her, shielding her from the crowd. Unexpectedly her green eyes locked onto Vendrake’s and she screamed into his mind: You have to stop this!
He was stung by the insult as much as the invasion. Of course he had to stop it! I can’t stop it. There’s no turning back. Forcing down the doubts, he barrelled his way through to the officers.
‘Enough!’ Vendrake yelled, shoving Cutler away from the commissar. ‘By Providence, that’s enough! We’re Arkan, not warp-tainted animals!’
Not like the damned souls of Trinity!
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