Fire Caste

by Peter Fehervari

  ‘We must make allowances,’ Ortega continued. ‘I fear these Arkan churls don’t have the wit and wisdom of Verzante Seabloods like you or I, Friend Alvarez.’

  ‘That’s no excuse, Friend Ortega. Just look at his kinsman over there.’ Alvarez indicated another neophyte whose face was buried in a laminated copy of Winter’s Tide. ‘He’s picking up the path real quick. Isn’t that so, Friend?’

  The reader looked up and his disfigured face broke into a gap-toothed grin: ‘For the Greater Good,’ Jakob Dix drawled. ‘Damn straight.’

  ‘It ain’t right,’ Audie Joyce growled over the inter-suit vox. ‘We’ve been watching these xenos-loving heretics near on a month now, but we’re still skulking in the hills like jackals. This ain’t what the God-Emperor forged us for!’

  There was a crackling chorus of assent from the other Zouave knights hidden along the ridge. They were spread out in a loose line overlooking the smog-choked lake far below, keeping watch on the activity around the rebel base. All they could see of the refinery itself was the slow gyration of its beacon light, but their vantage point took in the connecting waterways, revealing a restless flow of ships back and forth between the lake and the rest of the Coil.

  ‘We’ve found the heart of the cancer, brothers!’ Joyce went on fervently. ‘How long must we wait to burn it out?’

  Captain Machen frowned, once again regretting the arrogant greencap’s promotion to the Zouave brotherhood. ‘We’ll wait as long as it takes, boy,’ he said. ‘The colonel will send word when it’s time.’

  ‘No disrespect intended sir, but he’s probably skrabmeat by now,’ Joyce said.

  ‘Ensor Cutler is alive. If he was dead she would know.’

  ‘And you’d trust the word of a Norland witch, captain?’ Machen blanched at the scorn in the youth’s voice. ’emperor’s Blood, she might even be working for the blueskins!’

  Once again the Zouaves lent Joyce their support and Machen gritted his teeth, biting clean through his unlit cigar. The boy had only been among the Steamblood Brotherhood five months, yet the old guard was rallying around him as if he was some kind of hero. Joyce’s meteoric rise had exceeded Machen’s worst fears about opening up the brotherhood to commoners, but there had been no choice.

  During their first weeks on Phaedra the Arkan had been hit hard by the planet’s more insidious taints. Fever and fungal infections had swept through their ranks like wildfire, laying almost everyone low. Thirty-three men had never recovered, including two of Machen’s Zouaves, leaving him with eleven warsuits and just nine nobles to wear them. Forced to recruit from the common greybacks, he had been determined to find the best.

  Unfortunately the very best had proven to be a rookie from Dustsnake squad whose passion for the Imperial creed bordered on stupidity. His comrades had taken to calling Joyce ‘the Preacher’ and most were only half-joking. The youth’s brand of hellfire rhetoric was backed up by true grit, winning him plenty of admirers, while his apparent immunity to Phaedra’s ailments had sealed his status as a rising regimental legend. Machen, who still suffered from a dozen disorders, detested him with the malice of a fading alpha wolf. If the boy hadn’t been so damnably talented he would have weeded him out long ago, but his instinct for the iron was uncanny. Within weeks of his initiation Joyce had been throwing his armour around like a veteran. A month later he’d surpassed the lesser knights. After that it had been too late to expel him.

  ‘The Emperor has blessed our flesh with iron and our hearts with fire,’ Joyce was ranting. ‘I won’t hang my fate on the ravings of a barbarian witch!’

  ‘That’s enough, boy!’ Machen snapped, furious to be defending the woman, who he personally despised. ‘The colonel trusts her and she’s led us true so far. We’ve no cause to doubt her now.’ He could almost taste the friction on the vox-band, but Joyce had just enough sense to shut up. Wrestling down his irritation Machen levelled his voice. ‘We’re the steel backbone of the 19th, not a pack of greencap hotheads fired up by the Gospel. We’ve got our orders and we’ll stand by them. If we throw that away we’re nothing but renegades.’

  ‘He’s back,’ Valance’s voice crackled into his ear over a secure channel. ‘Just got into camp this minute, captain.’

  Machen acknowledged the scout and stalked away, leaving Wade in command. His old wingman was the only Zouave who hadn’t bought into the boy preacher’s mystique – the only one who was still loyal to the old order. Stomping down the other side of the ridge he wondered how things had become so hellfired complicated. How had he ended up backing Ensor bloody Cutler and speaking up for his Norland whore? The Machen of old would have been champing at the bit to turn the tables on them both and make a play for command. In truth he’d have shared the boy’s eagerness to take the battle into the valley. What had changed?

  Ringing in the changes, like a cawing, clawing canticle of crows heralding damnation valley, where dead men come to cast the die…

  Machen snorted at the words that had slithered into his head like leeches. The Seven Hells take Ambrose Templeton and his confounded ramblings! Machen supposed it was guilt that had prompted him to keep the notebook left behind by the vanished captain. They had never been friends – far from it in fact – but there was no denying that Templeton had proved to be an able leader on their first day in this hell, yet Machen had turned his back on him.

  Go away, he’d said when the man had asked for help. And Templeton had. That was why Machen had begun to read his notebook and somehow never stopped. He always got lost somewhere around the halfway mark, where the tale turned slippery, its meaning contorting upon itself and forcing him to go back and reread from the start. Over and over again…

  Am I haunted by a dead man’s unfinished tale?

  The thought made him shudder inside his carapace. Whatever the truth of it, Templeton’s doomed epic had wormed its way into his soul, leaving him riddled with doubt. These days his thoughts kept drifting back to his lost wife and daughters, dragging him down to a horror that rage alone could no longer tame. Once again he swore to burn the treacherous book, knowing full well he never would.

  ‘The risk is too great,’ the witch insisted, her eyes boring into Vendrake like viridian suns. ‘The forces arrayed against us at the Diadem are many and grievous. We cannot squander the Sentinels on this venture of yours.’

  Exasperated, Vendrake threw himself down onto the stool opposite her. Skjoldis saw that his hand shook as he wiped the sweat from his sallow, stubble-smeared face. It was sweltering hot in the cramped cabin, but the Sentinel captain was used to such things.

  What he isn’t used to is being on the wrong side, she reflected. Even if he understands that the wrong side is actually the right side.

  The regiment’s self-imposed exile had been difficult on all of them, but Hardin Vendrake had taken it harder than most. For all his rakish posturing he was an idealist and idealists had further to fall. Certainly the ragged apparition slumped across from her was a far cry from the dashing patrician officer of old. With his unruly hair strangled up in a red bandana he looked more like a feral jungle fighter than a graduate of the Capitol Academy.

  Especially with that indigo stain in his eyes…

  ‘Captain, I have asked you to abstain from the Glory,’ she said. ‘The fungus carries a taint.’

  ‘And I’ve told you the Glory keeps me sharp,’ he shot back with a sickly grin. The tension between them had eased after she saved his life back at the Shell. Sometimes she even felt they were drifting towards a brittle friendship, but he still didn’t trust her.

  And why should he when the Whitecrow and I have kept our secrets so close? We should have told him about Abel long ago. He deserves the truth.

  ‘When did you last sleep?’ Skjoldis asked.

  ‘Look, I’m touched by your concern witch, but that’s not why I came to see you.’ Vendrake leaned forward, glaring right into he
r face. ‘We have to bail this commissar out.’

  ‘If you save him he will almost certainly turn on you,’ Skjoldis said with a sigh. ‘Such men are not renowned for their forbearance, captain.’

  ‘But he’s flying the Seven Stars. And he has the look of an Arkan. I think he wants to talk.’

  ‘Or he plans to trick you.’

  ‘It’s a chance we have to take,’ Vendrake urged. ‘We’ve been playing Cutler’s game almost nine months now, wandering around the Coil like pawns on a regicide board, chasing after a redemption only the two of you seem to understand…’

  ‘And I have promised you that the endgame is in sight.’

  ‘That’s not enough anymore!’ he snarled, showing stained teeth. Drawn by the captain’s anger, Mister Frost loomed out of the shadows behind him. Skjoldis shook her head and her hulking guardian faded away, but Vendrake had caught the movement. Since their exile he had grown almost preternaturally sensitive to the slightest movement at his back, almost as if he were afraid something was creeping up on him. Or galloping up on him, she sensed in a frisson of psychic empathy.

  He still blames himself for the death of his protégé.

  ‘You must calm yourself, captain,’ Skjoldis said with a peculiar sense of déjà vu. Did a streak of madness run through every Arkan officer? Was it her doom to play nursemaid to one tortured patrician after another?

  ‘The men are running out of hope, witch.’

  ‘And you believe that a commissar can give them hope?’

  ‘I believe he can give them legitimacy,’ Vendrake hissed. Seeing her scorn he slumped back and closed his eyes, hovering at the edge of exhaustion.

  She waited.

  ‘Beauregard Van Hal,’ he said in a whisper. ‘You won’t know the name because he keeps himself to himself, but he’s probably my finest rider. Might not have a whole lot going on up there,’ Vendrake tapped his temple, ‘but he’s loyal to a fault and born to the cavalry.’

  ‘I do not follow your meaning.’

  He silenced her with a weary hand. ‘The other day Van Hal asked me why we were fighting the rebels when it was the Imperium who wanted our hides. He was wondering why we didn’t just sign up with the tau like all the other sorry dregs who’ve been screwed over in this mess. You know what I said?’ He opened his eyes and looked at her with a terrible blankness. ‘I didn’t say a damn thing.’

  ‘Vendrake, you need to be patient. The Diadem is what we’ve been searching for. Once the colonel sends word…’

  ‘It’ll be too late,’ he shook his head. ‘No, woman, we need something now. Maybe you’re right and this commissar will prove to be another bloody zealot, but he’s the only shot we have.’

  Still brooding, Machen strode back into camp. Brushing off the sentries’ half-hearted calls for a password he wove through the sprawl of habtents, making for the flotilla of ships moored along the riverbank. They were a miserable sight: most of the stolen gunboats and transports were little more than rust-bitten shells on their last legs. Much like the regiment itself, he mused grimly. There were some three hundred and fifty men gathered here, virtually all that remained of the eight hundred who had left Providence a lifetime ago. These Arkan were survivors, but they were also ghosts…

  Crooked shadows lost on the crow road from Despair to Delirium…

  Angrily Machen shook Templeton out of his skull, struggling to focus on the facts, but tone and texture kept slipping back in, hinting at meanings he didn’t need – or want – to see. Every one of the greybacks was lean to the point of starvation, with bloodshot eyes that either blinked too much or didn’t blink at all…

  Facing oblivion with a twitch or a stare, souls laid bare to the empty one-way mirrors of fate and fortune squandered…

  Most were suffering from multiple afflictions – foot rot or gutrot, mire fever or swamp burn, greyscale rash or splinterskin… The roll call of Phaedra’s petty torments was as endless as the windings of the Coil, but misery was the only constant amongst the troops. Only the proud Burning Eagles of the 1st Company still had the look of a coherent unit. Their bronze raptor helms and para-armour had withstood the rigours of the Mire while the uniforms of the common soldiers had sloughed away, forcing each man to improvise his apparel as best he could. Many had scavenged synthetic fatigues or flak armour from dead janissaries, stubbornly scrubbing away the rebel insignia. A few had gone further and salvaged fragments of tau armour. Although the xenos breastplates were too small for a man, the pauldrons and tessellated greaves were serviceable. Even the helmets could be made to fit with a little work. Cully, the one-eyed rogue from Dustsnake squad, appeared to be on a mission to rebuild himself as a patchwork Fire Warrior. The veteran had a knack for tech and had even got some of the targeting optics in his pilfered helmet working. Many such opportunists had also adopted the lighter, punchier carbines of the janissaries, with Cully sporting a prized rail rifle.

  The more devout men shunned such heretical gear and stuck with their sturdy Providence-pattern lasrifles. Following the example of their askari guides they had woven rough garments from animal skins and vines that made them look wilder than the savages back home. But despite the tangle of xenos and native junk, every man wore scraps of his Arkan heritage: a threadbare jacket here, crimson-striped breeches there… polished rhineskin belts and harnesses… flat-topped kepi caps bearing the ram’s skull icon of the Confederacy, carved from bone as was the regimental custom…

  Pirates! We look like Throne-forsaken pirates, Machen reflected miserably.

  ‘He’s with the witch,’ Valance said, interrupting the captain’s reverie. Machen snorted, irritated that the scout had crept up on him. It was uncanny how such a big man could move so quietly. Nevertheless, the scout was one of the few greybacks he still trusted.

  ‘Stormed into camp in an all-fired hurry,’ Valance continued. ‘Went straight to her. It ain’t seemly, especially with her being the colonel’s lady and all.’

  Machen nodded inside his helmet, recognising the Sentinel standing beside Cutler’s command boat. Vendrake had been gone nearly two days, shadowing the idiot commissar who had followed them into the Coil. He didn’t understand his fellow captain’s obsession with their pursuer and he didn’t much care, but it was intolerable that he’d gone gallivanting off into the jungle when so much was at stake. They had put their differences aside in Cutler’s absence, working together to keep the regiment afloat, but Vendrake’s vices had eaten away his brains. It was time to have things out with the degenerate.

  As Despair sows Delirium so Delirium sows Discord…

  ‘Shut the Hells up you dead bastard!’ Machen snarled. Ignoring Valance’s quizzical look he marched towards the command boat.

  ‘Our plan hangs on a knife edge of synchronicity,’ Skjoldis insisted. ‘What if he calls and your Sentinels are not here, Vendrake?’

  ‘So ask him,’ the captain said. ‘I know you can do it. It’s how you’ve coordinated things since they took him.’

  ‘It is not so simple. He is no psyker. At this distance it is difficult to touch his mind – and painful for him. We have agreed times…’

  ‘Well, that’s too bad because the commissar’s time is running out. The man is sailing right into the bloody Meatlocker,’ Vendrake hissed. ‘Do you have any idea what’s waiting for him there?’

  ‘I–’

  ‘Vendrake!’ Machen bawled from the shore. ‘Vendrake, get your fungus-addled arse off that boat! We need to talk!’

  Skjoldis glanced towards the cabin door, but Vendrake gripped her wrist urgently.

  ‘Ask him!’

  Subject 11 groaned and began to shudder, struggling against the restraints that bound him to the chair. His eyes were screwed tight shut in a face wracked by an agony of concentration. Alarmed by the seizure, Por’o Dal’yth Seishin skimmed backwards on his throne drone. Although a force barrier separated him
from his prisoner, the ambassador had not lived so long without exalting prudence.

  ‘Do it…’ the prisoner hissed. A crimson trickle oozed from his right nostril. ‘Go get him.’ Suddenly his head snapped backwards and he looked directly at O’Seishin, his eyes gleaming with sly malice.

  ‘Trinity remembers!’ he roared in a savage croak. Then he slumped lifelessly in his chair. O’Seishin watched the man uncertainly, but he didn’t stir. Cautiously the ambassador hovered back to the barrier.

  ‘Do you require medical assistance?’ the tau asked. The prisoner’s eyes flicked open and gazed at him through a tangle of white hair. ‘Your meaning eluded me,’ O’Seishin pressed, debating whether to retreat again. ‘Who was it you wished me to get?’

  ‘I was just thinking out loud,’ the exhausted man wheezed, straightening up with an effort. ‘Us humans, we do that sometimes. Especially the crazy ones.’

  ‘Our assessments would indicate that your cognitive faculties are unimpaired,’ O’Seishin said. ‘You do however exhibit symptoms of severe personality disorder, perhaps even latent schizophrenia…’

  ‘Glad to know it,’ the prisoner snorted.

  ‘Indeed, knowing oneself is the first and final step to enlightenment, my friend.’

  ‘I’m no friend to you, blueskin.’

  ‘I concede that this is so, yet I aspire to overcome our differences, Ensor Cutler,’ O’Seishin said.

  ‘You know, you talk real fancy for a xenos pen-pusher, Si.’

  ‘My thanks, it is the calling I was born to.’

  Cutler chuckled, the sound low and mocking.

  ‘You believe I do not understand sarcasm, Ensor Cutler?’ The tau’s nostrils flared in amusement. ‘You are mistaken. I am of the Water Caste and as I have previously stated, communication is my calling.’ O’Seishin paused, then finished more haltingly: ‘You-son-of-a-bitch.’

  This time Cutler’s laugh was genuine.

  ‘But you…’ the tau said, leaning forward on his floating perch. ‘You choose to communicate in the manner of an obtuse barbarian, which you most assuredly are not. Why do you persist in this fabrication?’