Fire Caste

by Peter Fehervari

  The echo of a drowned bell...

  For a moment the snow whirled apart and he caught sight of a tall shadow in a wide-brimmed hat standing in the street ahead. He couldn’t make out its face, but some instinct told him it was looking directly at him.

  ‘Who goes there?’ Cutler hollered over the squall, but the snow had already swept the wraith away. He strained, listening for another chime, looking for the stranger, but both were gone.

  If they were ever there at all...

  ‘What’s up?’ Elias Waite yelled beside him, his voice muffled by the woollen scarf wrapped around his face. Clearly the old captain hadn’t noticed anything untoward. Nor had any other member of the squad for that matter.

  Cutler peered warily at the shuttered windows on either side of the narrow street. They were just dark blurs through the swirling whiteness, but he imagined furtive eyes behind every one of them, watching the intruders with growing malice.

  ‘Ensor?’ Waite urged.

  ‘Quinney,’ Cutler called to the squad’s vox-operator, ‘any word from Muse in Iron yet?’

  ‘Been trying to raise him every couple of minutes, sir,’ the skinny greyback answered. He was hunched miserably under the bulky vox-set strapped to his back. ‘Ain’t got nothing since before sunset. Could be the storm fragging with the comms of course,’ he finished doubtfully.

  Cutler frowned, wondering if Jaxon had run into trouble. He had ordered the cavalryman to meet them at the edge of town, but like most Sentinel riders, ‘Kiljak’ was a cocksure chancer who couldn’t sit still to save his hide. Besides, what did a Sentinel have to fear from a bunch of stir crazy inbreeds?

  ‘It don’t feel right, does it?’ Waite said, sensing Cutler’s mood. ‘You know, I’m thinking maybe we ought to pass on this hand, Ensor.’

  ‘We’ve a killing cold at our backs, old man,’ Cutler said. ‘Even if this town’s dead we can hole up and wait out the storm here.’

  ‘And what if it ain’t dead, just dying?’

  ‘I’m not losing another man to the snow, Elias.’

  Although it might be a cleaner way to die than all the filthy fates waiting for us here...

  Uneasily Cutler waved his squad onwards.

  The prisoner stirred, his body fighting unconsciously against the restraints that bound him as his mind fought against the hooks dragging him inexorably deeper into horror…

  They found Muse in Iron standing forlornly in the town plaza. The walker’s canopy was thrown wide open but there was no sign of Jaxon. Cutler halted the squad at the edge of the square, hanging back in the cover of the street. His instincts were jangling like alarm bells and his muscles were taut with a tension he couldn’t explain.

  Why do I feel like I’m trussed up like a steer in a slaughterhouse?

  ‘I see a light,’ Waite said, tapping his shoulder. Cutler followed his pointing finger to a tall building that loomed over the rest like a hunchbacked giant. It was a crude edifice built from timber and brick, but it had probably pushed the ambition of this stunted town to the limit. The light was seeping through a huge, lopsided window above the portico. Something, probably the glass, had stained the glow into a polychromatic chaos that writhed like a living thing in the white noise of snow.

  ‘Now that has to be the sorriest excuse for a temple I’ve ever seen,’ Waite growled. Cutler saw him touch the aquila pendant hanging from his neck. Warding off evil. In his rough-and-ready way, the captain had always been a true believer.

  But it didn’t save you, Elias…

  An inexplicable pang of sadness hit Cutler as he looked at his old friend. He was suddenly sure that Elias Waite was long dead.

  ‘Why you looking at me like that, Ensor?’ Waite asked, but Cutler had no answer for him.

  That was when someone stepped from the temple. For a moment the newcomer stood silhouetted against the rainbow light, swaying gently as if unsure of its balance, then it began to walk towards them, homing in on their position with unerring accuracy. The squad tensed up around Cutler like a gestalt animal, raising lasguns and bayonets like defensive spines to ward of a predator. Then the stranger emerged from the varicoloured haze and they recognised him.

  ‘Jaxon!’ Cutler called out.

  The tall cavalryman stopped a few metres away. His finely chiselled features looked flat and lifeless without their characteristic smirk, but it was his dead white hair that turned Cutler’s blood to ice. When Jaxon had departed the regiment two days ago his hair had been a deep brown.

  ‘Lieutenant, what happened here?’ Cutler pressed. ‘Why did you abandon your Sentinel?’

  Jaxon looked at him with eyes like painted eggs – false eyes only pretending at life. ‘They gave me a choice sir,’ he said in a flat monotone, every word flowing into the next without texture or inflection. ‘Many choices actually so many there was really no choice at all sir.’

  ‘Who gave you a choice?’ Cutler stepped forward, wanting to shake the man, but instinctively unwilling to touch him. ‘Are you talking about the townsfolk, lieutenant?’

  ‘No the townsfolk are all gone sir.’

  ‘Gone where? Are you saying they’re all dead?’

  ‘No not dead they’re still here just gone sir.’

  ‘You’re not making any sense, man.’

  ‘That’s as it should be if you just look between the lines they’ll show you how it really is sir.’

  ‘Who are they?’ Cutler said, taking another step towards him.

  ‘Oh you’ll see them soon sir they already see you.’ Jaxon’s hand came up holding a bright dagger. ‘They say I have to go now.’

  ‘Easy son, we’re here to help you,’ Waite said steadily.

  ‘There is no help.’ The ghost of a smile haunted Jaxon’s face as he put the dagger to his own throat. ‘And all the choices are lies.’

  ‘Wait!’ Cutler shouted, but it was too late. The cavalryman jerked the dagger convulsively and bright arterial blood sprayed into the blizzard. For a moment he just stood there watching his life drain away, then he looked at Cutler and his lips moved as if he wanted to say something more, but his vocal chords were gone so he just sighed and toppled. His corpse hit the snow with a sonorous clang that reverberated across the square.

  Cutler stared at the corpse in confusion, unable to link that concussion of sound with the sight. Then the boom came again and he glanced up at the temple, suddenly understanding. It was the bell tolling. Calling to the damned…

  And the damned came by the dozen, bursting from shadowed doorways and windows like starved rats. They were the citizens of the blighted town, broken ghouls eager to share their curse. Despite the cold, most were stripped to the waist and their flesh shone blue with the frigid kiss of hypothermia. A few carried antique firearms, but most made do with the makeshift weapons of home and hearth. They laughed and wailed in an ecstasy of misery as they bore down on the greybacks.

  ‘Fire at will!’ Cutler roared without hesitation, but the townsfolk were already on top of the squad, hacking and slashing with wild abandon.

  Cutler rammed his sabre between the tines of a jabbing pitchfork and twisted, tearing the weapon from his attacker’s numbed hands. The peasant glared at him, one eye burning with fury, the other brimming with merriment. His cadaverous face was a bipolar caricature, the left side twisted into a rictus of joy, the right into a snarl of hate. It reminded Cutler of the grotesque carved masks he’d seen back in the Capitol playhouses.

  ‘Stand down!’ Cutler shouted at the disarmed man.

  With a sob of joy the maniac leapt forward and impaled himself on Cutler’s blade, then thrust onwards, rapturously disembowelling himself as he groped for his killer. Horrified, Cutler rammed his autopistol under the man’s jaw and blew away that insane flesh mask. As he struggled to withdraw his sabre an axe came chopping in from the right. Desperately he swung the impaled co
rpse round and caught the blow. The axe man ululated furiously, his distended face rippling like melting wax as he struck again and again, trying to break through Cutler’s meat shield.

  The bell tolls and the world unfolds…

  Cutler caught snatches of his beleaguered squad through the chaos. He heard the boom of Waite’s antique bolt pistol and the throaty roar of Sergeant Hickox’s chainsword revving up. To his right he saw a burly greyback thrashing about with his bayoneted lasrifle, holding back the crazies while another knelt beside him, snapping off wild rounds into the teeming horde. To his left he saw Belknap go down, his face split wide open by a meat cleaver. His killer, a mountainous matron with a bone-white mane, waved her weapon about and howled triumphantly. Cutler put two bullets into her skull and she toppled like a felled tree.

  ‘Give no quarter!’ Cutler bellowed.

  Something tugged at his arm from below, sending his pistol tumbling away. He glanced down and saw a scrawny girl child latched onto his wrist, trying to gnaw through the heavy fabric of his greatcoat. She had the face of a shrivelled crone and her eyes were sewn shut. With a cry of revulsion he pulled his arm away, but the urchin clung on and came with it, her feet kicking the air as he tried to shake her loose. The meat shield pinned to his sabre was coming apart under the axe man’s blows so he let the sword go, sidestepping as the madman toppled forward under his own momentum. With his free hand he wrenched the child loose and threw her through a broken window. Then Waite was at his side, tearing into the horde with explosive bolt-rounds. It bought Cutler a moment to retrieve his sabre.

  ‘Form up around me, Arkan!’ Cutler yelled, beheading the axe man as he clambered to his knees. ‘Fall back in good order!’ Three men had gone down in the first onslaught, but the survivors held their nerve admirably, pulling together into a tight phalanx and covering every approach as they backed away down the street. Hickox cleared their path with his buzzing chainsword while the others kept the horde at bay with pistols and bayonets.

  ‘What’s got into these wretches?’ Waite shouted as he ejected a spent clip, but the revulsion in his voice told Cutler he had already guessed the truth. While civil war had raged across their world, another, more insidious madness had taken root in this forsaken town. The soul taint had come to Providence.

  A cadaverous hag leapt from a window overhead in a shatter of glass. Screeching manically she landed on Trooper Dawson’s back and clung on with her scrawny legs. He thrashed about frantically as she clawed at his face, sending the man beside him skidding to the ground. Seeing an opening, the horde rushed in like wolves, leaping over their dead in a frenzy of blissful bloodlust. A pitchfork nailed the fallen greyback through the back of the neck, pinning him to the snow. Another trooper hurried to fill the gap and caught a barbed pole in the gut. Dropping his weapon he clutched at the spear, his face frozen in shock. A moment later he was gone, tugged from the phalanx by his unseen assailant.

  ‘I’m through ’em!’ Hickox called from the back.

  Cutler glanced round and saw the sergeant standing over a heap of slaughtered degenerates. With visibility down to a few metres there was no telling what lay in the street beyond, but it was their best chance. The defensive phalanx was disintegrating under the sheer weight of the horde and once the crazies got in amongst them it would be over.

  ‘Disengage!’ Cutler bellowed. ‘Withdraw at speed!’

  Run… It was a bitter order to give, but the alternative was suicide and they had to live through this. The cancer they had stumbled upon here must not be allowed to spread.

  ‘Move yourselves!’ Cutler slashed about in a wide arc as the surviving greybacks raced past Hickox. Waite was still at his side, firing two-handed to control the violent bucking of his bolt pistol.

  ‘Just like Yethsemane Falls, eh Ensor!’ Waite growled, knowing full well this was nothing like that honest bloodbath. Fearing it might be something infinitely worse.

  ‘Get clear!’ Sergeant Hickox yelled behind them as he threw a grenade over their heads. Cutler saw it fall among the throng and felt the concussion at his back as he spun and ran, pushing Waite along in front of him. The frag grenade tore through the close-packed townsfolk like a shredding wind, throwing mangled bodies into the air and bowling others from their feet. It didn’t stem the tide for more than a few heartbeats, but it was enough for the battered platoon to vanish into the blizzard.

  As they raced through the streets, Cutler heard the frustrated howls of the cheated ghouls loping after them. Trooper Dawson was just ahead with the hag still clinging to his shoulders like a crazed jockey. He kept flailing at her as he ran, protecting his bleeding face but unable to dislodge her. Cutler caught up with him and swept away her head with a surgical slash of his sabre, but her legs remained locked tight. Abruptly Dawson giggled and threw him a broken look. One of his eyes had been gouged out and the other was wide with madness. Then the big greyback whirled around and ran back the way they had come, ignoring Cutler’s shouts. He made to follow, but Waite pulled him back.

  ‘He’s gone, Ensor!’

  A shutter flew open alongside the squad and a shotgun flared in the darkness beyond. The vox-set on Quinney’s back exploded, sending him sprawling into the snow. Waite put a burst of fire through the window while Cutler stooped to haul the injured man over his shoulders. Then they were running again, storming through the town gates with hell on their heels. A wooden sign flashed past. It was wormy with rot, but the crudely carved words were still legible:

  ‘WELCOME TO TRINITY – Pop. 487’

  Not any more, Cutler thought grimly.

  Not on either count.

  The prisoner awoke to the sound of his own ragged laughter. Blinded by the sudden brightness he felt himself falling again. This time he held on, pushing away oblivion as he struggled with the straps binding him to the high-backed chair. Finally the glare resolved itself into a padded cell and he remembered that he was still…

  …dreaming.

  There was an alien staring at him through a shimmering force barrier. Its face was a wizened wedge of faded blue, unmistakably ancient, but its eyes were bright with fascination.

  ‘Welcome, Colonel Ensor Cutler,’ the xenos said in perfect Gothic. ‘I am Por’o Dal’yth Seishin of the Wintertide Concordance and it is my sincere aspiration that you and I shall walk in friendship.’

  Day 44 – The Coil: Adrift

  Reve is right. We are completely lost.

  Iverson’s Journal

  ‘If you do not know your place in the Tau’va, you do not know yourself. And if you do not know yourself you have no place at all.’

  Winter’s Tide

  Claiborne Roach battered his way through another wall of clinging fronds and burst into the clearing beyond. His breath came in short, ragged gasps now, trying to keep time with his hammering heart. The rain thundered down in an angry barrage, churning the soil into treacherous mulch, but he didn’t dare slow his breakneck pace. His pursuers were too close. He could hear them crashing through the foliage and calling to each other, no more than thirty paces at his back. He’d cut the chase fine, but sometimes a man had to play for all or nothing.

  With a whine of displaced air a tau drone shot by overhead and spun to scope him. He threw the hovering disc a grin as he raced forward, flashing past the coral corpse at the centre of the clearing. The ruin was little more than a broken stub, but it was enough to sterilise almost twenty square metres of jungle. And it was more than enough for his plan.

  He heard a triumphant shout as the first of the Concordance janissaries broke into the clearing and spotted him. Fine beams of markerlight lanced around him as he hurtled towards the trees ahead. Dredging up a last burst of speed he dived for cover, ducking under the lattice of violet fire that swept after him. Rolling to his knees, he tore his carbine free and swung round, but it was already over.

  As the janissaries raced past the
ruin, Roach’s comrades rose from behind the coral and unleashed an enfilade of their own markerlight into their backs. The hunters’ weapons deactivated in a bleeping tide of mock kills, taking them out of the game in quick succession. Their leader swore and threw down his dead carbine as Roach ambled back from the foliage to join his victorious cluster. Mister Fish met him with a grin and they slapped hands like old gang buddies. And truth to tell, the Saathlaa guide was the closest thing Roach had had to a friend in years. The askari had told him his real name once, but ‘Mister Fish’ had already stuck and the native didn’t seem to mind it. Life would be a whole heap easier if more folk just went with the flow like the Fish, Roach reckoned.

  ‘That was well done, Friend Roach,’ Ricardo Alvarez, the leader of their cluster declared. ‘Your skill in the field almost compensates for your doubts about the Tau’va.’

  ‘Doubts keep a man sharp,’ Roach quipped.

  ‘Kauyon,’ someone said behind them, speaking in an inflectionless electronic monotone. They turned and Roach squinted, hunting for their hidden observer. He nodded in satisfaction as he spotted a vaguely humanoid shimmer lurking at the edge of the clearing. The translucent shape looked like it had been sculpted out of thin air by the rain; in other conditions the tau stealth suit would have been almost invisible.

  ‘You honour us, Shas’ui Jhi’kaara,’ Alvarez said with a bow, acknowledging the tau’s compliment. Kauyon, which loosely translated as ‘the Patient Hunter’ was one of the two fundamental philosophies of the tau art of war. It was an approach dedicated to stealth and cunning, stressing the use of a lure to entrap the enemy.

  ‘It was a passable execution of the principle, but you risked much,’ the rain-shadow continued. ‘If your foe had fielded pathfinders the ruse would have failed.’

  ‘They were cocky,’ Roach said. ‘I knew they’d fall for it.’

  The shape flickered then blurred into solidity, revealing a compact black battlesuit with a hefty burst cannon attached to its right arm. To Roach the xenos looked like a bulkier, better armoured Fire Warrior rather than a stealth operative, but as with all things tau its advantage lay with techno-wizardry. Although there was no arguing with the effectiveness of the suit’s integrated distortion field, Roach didn’t regard it as real scout-craft.