Fire Caste

by Peter Fehervari

  ‘Is Fish village,’ Vaskó called from the wheelhouse. ‘River runs through it, but there is wall ahead!’

  Iverson joined him and peered through the rain-smeared glass of the cabin. Following the wide beam of the ship’s forward searchlight he saw a dam straddling the river about twenty metres ahead. Although crudely woven from timber and creepers, the thing was at least three metres thick and twice that in height. One of the ship’s scout boats bobbed about in the churning river alongside the dam, crewed by a gang of Letheans. The Corsair leading the party kept watch while his Mariners hacked away at the barrier with machetes and axes. It was a brave, but futile endeavour, especially in the storm.

  ‘Can’t you just punch through it with the main gun?’ Iverson asked, indicating the lascannon at the prow.

  ‘Can,’ Vaskó said, ‘but power cells very low. Only six, maybe seven shots left. Do not want waste, no?’

  ‘Seven shots?’ Iverson was outraged. ‘But we haven’t even fired the bloody thing! Why would the cells be drained?’

  ‘Is Phaedra,’ Vaskó said with a shrug, as if that explained everything. Unfortunately Iverson knew it did.

  ‘We should back up and take another branch,’ a voice said at his shoulder. He turned and saw Reve standing beside him, frowning at the barrier. To his surprise he realised he had almost missed his fourth shadow. ‘This smells like a trap.’

  ‘But this place just stinking Fish nest!’ Vaskó bridled. ‘Is nothing here my Corsairs cannot kill dead, girl.’

  ‘Maybe so, but Cadet Reve is right,’ Iverson said. ‘We can take another path.’ After all, we’re not really going anywhere. ‘Get those men back on board, zabaton.’

  ‘We only need to weaken wall, then we push through it easy!’ Vaskó insisted, unwilling to back down yet again.

  ‘Zabaton…’

  Something whipped out of the storm and shattered the forward searchlight, plunging the men by the barrier into sudden darkness. Down in the prow the Mariners operating the light yelled and scrabbled about for a replacement.

  ‘Bring more lights!’ Vaskó shouted into the ship’s loudhailer.

  A shrill howl ululated through the gale. Out by the barrier a Mariner lit up a torch. Iverson saw him perched atop the dam, frantically chasing shadows with his beam while his comrades fumbled about for their own lights.

  ‘Pull them back,’ Iverson ordered.

  ‘Is just Fish!’ Vaskó said stubbornly.

  A rangy shadow leapt from the gloom and swept the light-bearing Mariner from his perch. As he splashed into the water the night rushed back in like a hungry ghost and the screams began. They were riddled with bestial snarls and strange, warbling cries that made Iverson’s hackles rise. He had hoped never to hear those sounds again.

  ‘Those aren’t Fish,’ Iverson hissed.

  Crimson laser light slashed through the darkness as the stranded Corsair opened up with his hellgun, then a flash of lightning threw the tableau into stark relief, revealing stooped, predatory shapes slinking amongst the Letheans. A heartbeat later it was pitch dark again and the Corsair stopped firing.

  ‘Forward!’ Vaskó shouted to the helmsman. ‘To battle stations, seadogs!’ he yelled into the loudhailer.

  The Mariners reacted with swift discipline, casting aside buckets and unslinging lasguns as they rushed to their posts. The Corsairs stalked among them like armoured gods of war, chanting prayers as they powered up their hellguns. The forward searchlight flared back into life and pinned the dam in bright light, but the work team was gone.

  ‘The engine awakens, my zabaton,’ the helmsman said.

  As the ship chugged forward something slammed down onto the cabin roof. They glanced up as clawed feet scrabbled about for purchase. Vaskó fired without hesitation, his superheated hellbolts punching through the metal ceiling as if it were paper. The unseen boarder yelped and a tangle of bony legs toppled past the window.

  ‘Zabaton, turn this tug around now!’ Iverson ordered.

  And then the predators were everywhere. Propelled by powerful, reverse-jointed legs they bounded from the rooftops of the village and soared over the gunwales. One landed by the wheelhouse steps. It came down on all fours and skittered off balance on the rain-slick metal. Although its sleekly muscled form was canine its rapid, jerky movements suggested an avian metabolism. Its grey flesh was leathery and hairless, but a ruff of sharp quills jutted from the back of its neck.

  ‘Is that a dog?’ Reve breathed from the doorway.

  At the sound of her voice the creature’s head snapped round on a sinuous neck. They caught a glimpse of slanted eyes above a curved, razor blade beak evolved for rending and tearing. The thing hooted – a strange sound somewhere between a bark and a squawk – and pounced straight for the wheelhouse.

  Iverson shouldered Reve aside and thrust out his augmetic arm. The hound’s jaws clamped shut on the metal, but its momentum sent him crashing back into the petrified helmsman and they both went down under its bulk.

  ‘Ördög kutja!’ Vaskó cursed in his native tongue, unslinging his hellgun.

  As the beast’s claws tore at his coat Iverson clenched his trapped hand around its tongue and squeezed. The hound tossed its head about furiously, spattering him with drool as it tried to get at the soft flesh beyond his augmetic. The carrion stench wafting from its maw made him dizzy with nausea, but he held on, tightening his grip. Up close he could see the monster’s flesh was covered in suppurating lesions and tangled fungal nodules. Phaedra had claimed the beast as Her own.

  ‘Kill it!’ Iverson roared at the others.

  Vaskó was at his side first. The zealot jammed his rifle up against the monster’s midriff and opened fire. It squawked in agony and sent him flying with a flailing claw, but the hellgun had virtually torn it in half and its strength was fading fast. A carefully placed shot from Reve punctured an eye. A second tore open its skull and it lay still.

  ‘The Emperor condemns!’ Vaskó bellowed as he raced out into the storm, eager to spill more blood in his god’s name.

  ‘By the Throne, what are they?’ Reve asked as Iverson pulled himself up.

  ‘Kroot hounds,’ the commissar said bleakly. ‘And where there are hounds the handlers won’t be far away. We have to get out of here.’

  Down on the storm-lashed deck Modine stood with his legs splayed wide for balance. His flamer coughed as he gunned it into life. He spun as one of the dog-things leapt for him, its beak slick with gore from a butchered Mariner. He batted it aside with the bulky weapon and sent it crashing against the guardrail in a snapping, snarling tangle. It was on its feet again in an instant, howling with raw malice. Modine howled right back and torched it. The monster’s challenge turned to a squeal and the pyrotrooper cackled, revelling in the mayhem. He was being eaten alive by some kind of mutie mushroom and everyone he’d ever known was probably dead, but by the Hells life could still be good!

  He saw a Corsair crawling along with a hound straddling his back. Its jaws were locked around the man’s head, trying to crack his helmet like an iron egg. Whistling softly, Modine bathed its quills in a delicate wash of flames and it let go with a yowl of pain. As it spun to face him he rammed his flamer between its jaws and cooked its brains. Breathing in the scent of burning flesh, he looked around the deck eagerly, but all the hounds were dead and the fight was done.

  It seemed the Corsairs had enjoyed the tussle as much as he had. They were all chanting some kind of hallelujah to the God-Emperor with big, cheesy grins on their faces. Even the idiot who’d nearly had his head chewed off was singing along. The Corsairs might be Throne junkies, but Modine had to admit they weren’t short of guts. The Mariners had guts too, but mostly they were the wrong kind – red and raw and littered about the deck like off-cuts in a slaughterhouse. Nope, things hadn’t gone down well for the deck monkeys. Without the hellguns and armour of their masters they’d bee
n easy meat for the dogs and Modine guessed more than half were done for. Well, the runts had been just as quick to beat up on him as the heavies so he wasn’t going to shed any tears for them.

  ‘You fight well for mutant scum,’ said the Corsair he had saved.

  ‘That wasn’t no fight,’ Modine drawled. ‘That was just playing around.’

  Mangled Helmet grinned, flashing teeth studded with shiny gemstones.

  Someone wailed in the wind, long and lost and full of pain. Everyone on the deck heard it, but it was the zabaton who spoke: ‘Is Zsolt. The Fish scum have taken him.’ The zealot’s tattooed face was a devil mask of fury. ‘They mock us, brothers!’

  ‘It’s not the Fish who took your man,’ Iverson said from the wheelhouse steps. ‘There’s something far worse out there.’ He indicated the shantytown stretched out along the river. ‘Something we don’t want to tangle with right now.’

  ‘I will not abandon a brother Corsair,’ Vaskó said coldly.

  ‘He’s already dead…’ The cry came again, putting the lie to Iverson’s words. ‘It’s a trap,’ he urged, but the zabaton was already turning away, shouting orders at his surviving comrades.

  ‘Zabaton, the mission comes first!’

  The zealot whirled on Iverson. ‘Then you must shoot me, Holt Iverson,’ he snarled, ‘because this time I will not yield.’

  Seeing his hate-glazed eyes, Iverson didn’t doubt it for a moment.

  ‘But I should go with you, sir,’ Reve insisted. ‘You will need backup out there.’

  ‘That’s Modine’s job,’ Iverson said. They were talking up in the wheelhouse while Vaskó prepped his search party on the deck below. ‘Besides, I’ll need backup right here. Our zabaton insists on taking all the Corsairs with him. Someone needs to watch the fort while we’re gone. If we lose the ship we’re finished.’

  ‘Are you saying you trust me, commissar?’

  ‘Are you saying I shouldn’t, cadet?’

  She gave him a wintry smile and he almost returned it. Their cat-and-mouse game was almost playing itself these days.

  ‘Anyway, if I’m right and there’s a kroot war band waiting for us in that village…’ He gave her a pointed look. ‘Well, let’s just say this would be a very bad time to let me down, cadet.’

  ‘So what’s the deal with you and the ice maiden?’ Modine whispered as they crept amongst the huddle of Saathlaa igloos.

  ‘I don’t believe I take your meaning, greyback,’ Iverson said, his eyes dancing over the huts. They were dilapidated and mangy with rot, their walls puckered like the skin of spoiled fruit. Decay hung over the shantytown like a mantle.

  ‘Aw, come on Holt. You can’t fool an old dog like Klete Modine,’ the pyrotrooper said with a leer. ‘I seen the way you two is always gabbing away together.’

  ‘Are you telling me you’re jealous, Modine?’ Iverson said. ‘I remember what they used to say back home: never trust a Badlander at your back.’

  Modine sniggered. ‘Did you just crack a joke on me, Holt? You know, back in…’ His words trailed off as the missing Corsair cried out again.

  Vaskó called a halt, trying to get a bearing on the sound. It was much closer now, but between the darkness and the storm the settlement was proving a nightmare to navigate. The zabaton was growing increasingly agitated, but to his credit he hadn’t suggested splitting the search party up.

  We’re already too few, Iverson thought, glancing over his comrades. Seven bloody-minded zealots, four terrified seadogs, one degenerate Badlander and a faded commissar. Not exactly the stuff that legends are made of.

  ‘It came from that way,’ Modine said, jabbing a stubby finger to his left.

  Vaskó scowled at him. ‘You think I do not know this?’

  ‘So what’s the hold-up then, boss?’

  ‘There is no path, fool!’

  ‘Sure there is,’ Modine said, obviously enjoying himself. ‘You just got to think creative is all.’ With that he kicked out at a neighbouring igloo. His foot went through the wall as if it were matchwood, shaking the entire structure. Another couple of kicks brought the barrier tumbling down. They saw that the splintered wooden frame was riddled with ropey grey fibres that glistened like maggots in the rain. Iverson was repelled: the igloo was just a husk, sucked dry by the insidious fungus. The entire village was probably infested with the filthy stuff. Suddenly he was glad of the hard rain. In any other conditions the air would be ripe with spores.

  ‘See, us Badlander boys, we like to make our own way in the world,’ Modine said with a grin.

  After that any attempt at stealth seemed irrelevant and the pyrotrooper led the way, whistling cheerily as he bulldozed a path towards the siren cries. While the others stepped over the tainted debris gingerly, he seemed to revel in it. Iverson guessed that infection wasn’t a big worry for Kletus Modine anymore…

  He’s already halfway to being Phaedra’s, even if he doesn’t know it yet. Then again, maybe he knows it perfectly well and this little rampage is a kind of payback.

  They found their quarry in a big roundhouse that was built to a grander scale than the igloos. The place might have been a chieftain’s hall in better days, but those days were long gone. As they crowded inside their torches sliced the shadows into flickering wedges of horror.

  ‘Hellfire…’ Modine breathed, his cockiness draining out of him like lifeblood.

  The lost Corsair was dangling from the ceiling by his feet, swaying gently back and forth. The other missing Letheans were hanging beside him, along with Janosz, the Mariner who had been snatched from the crow’s nest the day before. Janosz was already bloated with decay, but while the others were fresher they were just as dead, including the Corsair. Every one of them had a ragged red tear in his chest where his heart had been ripped out.

  ‘I’d say this jaunt is looking like a really bad idea right about now,’ Modine growled.

  The roundhouse was an ossuary. The floor was littered with the relics of death – cracked skulls, yawning ribcages and an unrecognisable muddle of lesser bones, all heaped together in casual desecration. A fur of grey mould shrouded everything, clinging to the walls and hanging from the ceiling in thick cobwebs. Tendrils of the fungus wove through the chamber like shrivelled snakes, coiling around the bones and insinuating themselves into eye sockets.

  There are enough pieces here to build a hundred skeletons, Iverson estimated grimly. And enough skeletons to repopulate a whole village with the dead...

  There were other bones caught up in the foetid skein: smaller, more delicate and darker of hue. The xenos skulls were devoid of the gaping nostrils and grinning teeth that gave humanity its last laugh in death, but then the tau were an altogether more sober species. Not that sobriety had done them much good here.

  Fragments of tau armour and guns were buried amongst the bones like treasures in a defiled tomb, but the most wondrous relic had been given pride of place. Tethered to a coral totem piercing the heart of the ossuary was a towering suit of alien armour. Trussed up and defaced with primitive scrawls, the Crisis battlesuit had the look of a fallen star god. Under a patina of mould its plates were a mottled crimson and Iverson could still make out its heraldry – a five-flanged sunburst. He didn’t recognise the symbol, but something told him that this dead warrior predated Commander Wintertide’s rule. It was old, perhaps older than the war itself.

  Who were you and what brought you to this doom?

  Whatever the truth, the warrior’s fate had been a grim one. The armour’s breastplate had been cracked wide open, revealing the hero within. His skeleton was still intact, suspended almost tenderly in a cradle of fungal threads. There was something fleshy and infinitely unclean blossoming within his ruptured ribcage.

  Phaedra loathes us all as equals. Human and tau, we’re both just intruders to Her. Nothing but meat to be corrupted and devoured and turned...

/>   Uneasily Iverson wondered what terrible alchemy Phaedra had worked on the kroot who haunted this village. The savage creatures believed they could steal the strength of an enemy by devouring its flesh. It seemed a far-fetched idea, but the kroot bloodline was known to be fluid and unpredictable. By all accounts the kroot hounds were a dead-end branch of the race that had overspecialised in hunting to the detriment of all else. Had their doom resulted from their choice of prey? And if that were true, what would happen to a kroot war band that glutted itself on tainted flesh? The flesh of a degenerate Saathlaa tribe for example…

  Canker Eaters.

  The name sprang into Iverson’s mind with the clarity of a true vision. Suddenly he was sure that his guess about this place was correct: the village had fallen to the kroot and the kroot had in turn fallen to Phaedra.

  And then the monsters had turned on their tau overlords and slaughtered them too.

  ‘Burn it,’ Iverson hissed at Modine. ‘Burn it all.’

  ‘Wait!’ Vaskó said as the pyrotrooper raised his flamer. ‘We cannot leave Zsolt in this tomb!’

  ‘He’s gone, zabaton,’ Iverson said tightly. His head was pounding. ‘And we have to be gone too. This place isn’t a tomb. It’s a larder.’

  They wait for the flesh to putrefy before they feed…

  The butchered Corsair wailed again. Everyone stared at the mutilated corpse. Its mouth was gummed up with clotted blood. Another cry came, soft and mocking this time, drawing their eyes upwards.

  There was a xenos perched precariously at the tip of the totem. The creature was sitting back on its haunches, gripping the coral with clawed feet like a bird of prey. Its leathery skin was hairless, but a cascade of fungal coils sprouted from its throat and shoulders, draping the beast in a fibrous, fleshy cloak. The creature’s limbs rippled with sinewy muscles and Iverson knew it would tower over most men when standing erect. Like the hounds it was evidently a predator, but the eyes shining above its flat beak regarded the intruders with sly amusement. Instinctively Iverson knew it was a leader – a shaper, the kroot called them.