‘When I am free,’ he spat the words out with strings of saliva, ‘I will kill every single one of you.’
One of his tormentors came closer. He heard it in the purr of armour joints, the soft grinding of machinery muscles.
‘Athrillay, vylas,’ his torturer whispered in a dead language, from a dead world. Yet his captors knew no such tongue.
The prisoner raised his head, staring blindly forward, and repeated the words back.
‘Greetings,’ he said, ‘brother.’
Talos didn’t want to imagine the prisoner’s pain – his own retinal display struggled to dull the atrocious strength of the chamber’s lights, and even behind his faceplate he felt the sting of tears at the aggravating brightness.
He curled his armoured fingers through the captive’s unshaven, greasy hair, and yanked the prisoner’s head back, baring the sweating throat. His words were a Nostraman hiss, pitched low to defeat unwanted ears.
‘I swore to kill you when next we met.’
‘I remember it.‘ Ruven smiled through the pain. ‘Now is your chance, Talos.’
The prophet drew his gladius, pressing the blade’s edge against the prisoner’s cheek. ‘Give me one reason not to peel the skin from your treacherous bones.’
Ruven choked out a laugh. As he shook his head, the sword rubbed against his flesh, slicing a shallow gash.
‘I have no reasons to give you. Spare us both the pretence that I will beg for my life, and just do as you will.’
Talos withdrew the blade. For a moment, he did nothing but watch the drop of blood crawl its wet way down the steel. ‘How did they catch you?’
Ruven swallowed. ‘The Warmaster cast me aside. For my failures at Crythe.’
Talos couldn’t help the crooked grin that took hold. ‘And you fled here?’
‘Of course. Where else? What other havens for our kind have such size and scope? Such potential? The Maelstrom was the only answer that made sense.’ The prisoner’s face twisted into a snarl. ‘I did not know some of my erstwhile brothers had so harmed the Eighth Legion’s reputation with the Corsairs.’
Talos was still watching the blood trickle down. ‘We made few friends last time we were here,’ he said. ‘But that’s not why Huron took you prisoner, is it? These might be your last words, brother. Lies have no place in a valediction.’
Ruven said nothing for a time. Then, in a sibilant whisper: ‘Look at me.’
Talos did so. Streams of bio-data flickered across his visor. ‘You are dehydrated to the point of tissue damage,’ he noted.
The captive grunted. ‘Is that so? You should be an Apothecary.’
‘The truth, Ruven.’
‘The “truth”. Were it only so simple. Huron allowed me to remain at Hell’s Iris if I traded away the secrets I’d spent decades prying from the warp. At first, I conceded. Then there was an... altercation.’ Ruven’s androgynous features split into a dry-gummed smile. ‘Three Corsairs died summoning denizens of the warp many times more powerful than they could bind. Tragic, Talos. So very tragic. Evidently, the dabbling fools were considered promising candidates for Huron’s Librarium.’
The prophet stared at the sorcerer for some time.
‘You are still there, brother,’ Ruven said. ‘I hear you.’
‘I am still here,’ Talos agreed. ‘I am trying to discern the truth from your lies.’
‘I told you the truth. What purpose would lying serve? They have shackled me here for what feels like months, saturating my eyes with light. I cannot see. I cannot move. Abaddon cast me aside, stripping me of my role in his Black Legion. Why would I lie to you?’
‘That is what I intend to find out,’ Talos replied, and rose to his feet. ‘Because I know you, Ruven. The truth is anathema to your tongue.’
‘A traitorous prize, is he not?’ Lord Huron asked. ‘I am almost done with him, for he is no longer worth any amusement, and I believe he holds little information back from my sorcerers now. They have peeled all the lore they need from his mind.’
‘What were his crimes?’ Talos glanced back at the kneeling form of his former brother bathed in the radiant light.
‘He caused the death of three initiates, and refused to share his knowledge. He had to be... encouraged... to do so, by other means.’ The Blood Reaver’s cadaverous features peeled back into a smile. ‘Rendering him helpless was a trial in itself. Collared as he is, he is no threat. He cannot whisper into the warp to call forth his powers. Binding his warpcraft was the very first precaution I took, immediately before blinding him.’
‘Play this carefully,’ Cyrion warned. ‘This is a promise of our fate if we betray the Corsairs.’
‘If?’ Talos voxed back. ‘They have the Echo of Damnation. I’m not leaving without it.’
‘Very well. When we betray them.’
Talos clicked an acknowledgement pulse back over the vox in reply.
‘Let him rot here,’ the prophet said to the Corsair lord. ‘What of his weapons and armour?’
Huron’s split lips curled. ‘I have his wargear. Consider it another gesture of goodwill that I offer it back to you.’
Ruven let out a moan that disintegrated as it left his slack jaws. Chains rattled as he tested his shackles for the first time in weeks.
‘Do not leave me here...’
‘Burn in the warp, traitor,’ Xarl chuckled back.
‘Thank you for the gift,’ Talos said to Huron. ‘It is always gratifying to see betrayers reap what they sow. Kill him if you wish. It matters nothing to us.’
‘Talos,’ Ruven whispered the name once – on the second effort, it became a scream. ‘Talos.’
The prophet turned to the prisoner, his retinal display compensating for the insane glare once again. Ruven was staring at him now. Blood ran down his cheeks in twin tear-trails as the light burned out the sensitive tissue behind his eyes.
‘I thought you said you wouldn’t beg for your life,’ Talos said.
The bulkhead slammed closed before Ruven could reply, sealing him inside the cell with his own screams.
XIII
REGENERATION
Septimus sipped the drink, forcing himself to go through the suddenly difficult ritual of actually swallowing. He considered it a fair bet the beverage was distilled from engine oil.
The bar, such as it was, was one of many on board Hell’s Iris, no different from a hundred others of its filthy kind. Wretched men and women mixed in the gloom, drinking foulness as they laughed and argued and shouted in a dozen different tongues.
‘Oh, Throne,’ Maruc whispered.
Septimus scowled. ‘Don’t say that here if you wish to leave alive.’
The older man gestured to a lithe young woman across the room, moving from table to table. Her hair streamed down her naked back in a flawless fall of silken white, while an exaggerated femininity set her slender hips swinging with every step.
‘Don’t talk to it.’ Septimus shook his head. For a moment, Maruc thought he saw a smile on the other serf’s face.
It? Don’t talk to it?
But she’d seen Maruc’s interest. ‘Friksh sarkarr,’ she purred as she approached, her dress of battered leather scraps whispering against her milky skin. Fingers the white of clean porcelain stroked his unshaven cheek. As if approving of something, she nodded to herself. ‘Vrikaj ghu sneghrah?’ She had a child’s voice: a girl on the edge of maidenhood.
‘I... I don’t...’
She shushed him with her fingertip, resting the pale digit on his dry lips. ‘Vrikaj ghu sneghrah... sijakh...’
‘Septimus...’ Maruc swallowed. Her eyes were wide, the rich green of forests he’d only seen in hololithics. Her fingertip tasted of some unknowable spicy musk.
Septimus cleared his throat. The maiden turned with a ghost’s grace, moistening her lips with a forked tongue.
‘Trijakh mu sekh?’
The slave drew back the edge of his jacket, revealing the holstered pistol at his hip. Slowly, pointedly, he
shook his head, and gestured to another table.
The girl spat onto the floor by his boot, slinking away with her hips swinging.
‘She’s something else...’ Maruc watched her moving away, leering at all the flesh on display.
‘Skin-walker,’ Septimus grimaced at the taste of his drink – he wasn’t swallowing any more of the stuff, but it was grotesque enough even to pretend, when it lapped against his lips. ‘That leather she’s wearing, do you see how it is sewn together?’
‘Yeah.’
‘It isn’t leather.’
Maruc watched the girl as she traced her fingernails gently across the back of a rough-looking man’s neck. ‘I don’t think I can sit here much longer,’ he said. ‘That fat thing across the room has too many eyes. There’s a beautiful girl with a snake’s tongue, walking around wearing human skin. Everyone in here is armed to the teeth, and the sorry bastard under the next table looks like he died two days ago.’
‘Be calm.’ Septimus was watching him closely now. ‘Be at ease. We are safe, as long as we don’t attract attention to ourselves. If you give in to panic, we’ll be dead before the first yell has finished leaving your lips.’
‘I’ll be fine.’ Maruc calmed himself with a slug of his own drink. It spread a pleasant warmth through his gullet. ‘This is good stuff.’
Septimus let his expression speak for him.
‘What?’ Maruc asked.
‘For all we know, this is distilled rodent piss. Try not to drink too much of it.’
‘Fine. Sure.’ He made another subtle scan around the room. One of the other patrons seemed to be too small for his own skeleton: bones at every joint poked out from his flesh, even along the ridges of his spine and the stretched skin of his cheeks. ‘Your lord was right, you know.’
‘In what way?’
‘About escaping when we docked. Being stranded here would be worse than staying on the Covenant. Throne...’
Septimus winced. ‘Stop saying that.’
‘Sorry. Look, have they even told you what the Legion agreed to?’
Septimus returned a shrug. ‘First Claw pledged the Legion to a siege of some kind. They’re calling it Vilamus.’
‘A world? An enemy fleet? A hive city?’
‘I’ve not had the chance to ask.’
Maruc’s gaze drifted back to the beautiful girl. ‘Are there many of those... people?’
Septimus nodded. ‘The flaying of flesh is one of the more common traditions in many cults. Even the Legion does it, remember. Lord Uzas’s ceremonial cloak was once the royal family of some insignificant backwater world the Covenant raided.’
‘You mean the cloak once belonged to them?’
‘No. Was them. It is not leather, either. But the skin-walkers are a common enough cult. Mutants, mostly. Avoid them at all costs.’
‘I thought she wanted to–’
‘She did.’ Septimus’s human eye glanced to the doorway, and he adjusted a silver ring on his finger. ‘But she’d have skinned you afterwards. Come on.’
Maruc followed as Septimus led him to the door. The younger slave reached back to loosen his short ponytail, letting his scruffy hair fall to his chin, half-covering his subtle bionics.
‘Keep your weapon ready,’ he said. ‘You never know when someone will take offence to us.’
‘You still haven’t said why we’re here,’ Maruc whispered.
‘You’re about to find out.’
Octavia sighed – the kind of sigh where she felt she’d lost weight once it left her lips. As she breathed out, she exhaled months of tension, keeping her eyes closed as she tilted her head back.
The warm water rained against her face, tickling her eyelids, running in pleasant trickles along her lips and chin. She had nothing in the way of soap, but even that didn’t dent her enthusiasm. She scrubbed at her body with a rough sponge, almost feeling the grime of neglectful months sloughing from her skin.
With the Covenant docked, taking on fresh water supplies, the refilled tanks took the strain off the depleted recycling processors.
She risked a glance down at her figure, though it took surprising courage to do so. While she was far from the emaciated wraith she’d expected to see, her skin was a pale palette, and the trails of blue veins showed faintly beneath her flesh. Still, she had to confess she felt unhealthier than she looked. Evidently the nutrient-rich gruel that served as shipboard fare was more nourishing than its sandpaper taste suggested.
With her nose wrinkled, she picked a little fluff, the same midnight blue of Legion slave clothing, from her navel. Delightful.
With a quiet laugh, she flicked it away.
‘Mistress? Did you call?’
Octavia looked up with a start, covering herself with her hands. Octavia had at least a shadow of mundane human instinct within her, for she sought to ward her nakedness from a stranger’s eyes. While one hand guarded her bare skin, the other flew to her forehead, palm covering everything beneath her hairline.
But it was there – a flicker of sight – the shadow of something either human or close to it, glimpsed through the turbulent vision offered by her genetic gift. She saw its stained, multi-hued soul as an imprint in the seething torment of the warp all around.
She’d looked at someone, stared right at them even if only for a heartbeat, with her truest eye.
Her attendant, standing at the communal ablution chamber’s edge, made a throaty gagging sound. He reached up to his throat with trembling hands, choking on air he could no longer swallow. Darkness moved across the bandaged face: a wet, spreading darkness, broadcast from the attendant’s black eyes and open mouth. The blood stained the dirty weave in moments, bathing the bandages in stinking red.
He collapsed against the wall behind, wracked by spasms, beating the back of his skull against the steel. Wrapped hands clawed at his head, pulling the bandages away to reveal a starkly human face, albeit one soured purple by asphyxiation. Bloody vomit emerged from the old man’s lips in a reeking torrent, splashing across the chamber’s wet floor.
He lay there, grunting, twitching, bleeding, as the warm water still rained upon her.
She swallowed, her human eyes still staring, as another of her attendants made his hunchbacked way inside. He spared her no glance, limping over to the dying elder, a beaten shotgun in his hands. He placed the sawn-off barrel in the older attendant’s gaping, gushing mouth, and pulled the trigger. The chamber resonated with the gunshot’s echo for several seconds. What remained of the old man – which was very little above the neck – fell still.
‘It wasn’t my fault.’ Octavia breathed the words, caught between shock, anger, and shame.
‘I know,’ said Hound. He turned to his mistress, his blinded eyes fixed upon her. She still felt a strange reluctance to lower her hands. Either of them.
‘I told you all to wait outside.’
‘I know this, also.’ Hound chambered another round with a sharp click-chuck. The spent shell tinkled across the dirty decking, rolling to a smoky rest against a wall. ‘Telemach was in great pain. I entered only to end it. I will leave now, mistress.’
‘I think I’m finished now...’ She turned away from the headless body, and the ruination smearing the metal wall.
But she didn’t leave with Hound. She stayed in the room with the dead body, her hands against the shower wall, head lowered into the jetting water. Her hair, almost long enough to reach her elbows now, was a black velvet drape hanging down.
She’d never killed with her eye before. The only time she’d ever tried had been a failure – at the moment of her capture so many months before, when Talos had dragged her into this new life with his hand around her throat. All the stories she’d heard over the years came flooding back to her in a bittersweet rush: sailors’ legends that Kartan Syne’s crew had whispered when they believed she couldn’t hear them; the warning tales given to every scion of the Navis Nobilite in the years of their extensive tuition; the things she’d never learned fro
m her teachers, but found herself believing after reading them in old family logbooks.
A Navigator cannot kill without consequence. So the stories said.
Blood of my blood, do not let your soul be stained by such a deed. Her father’s words.
And a notation in an ancestral Mervallion journal, more damning than all else: Every murdering glance is a beacon to the Neverborn, a light in their darkness.
She didn’t look over at the body. She didn’t need to – its slumped repose was etched into her memory, scratched upon her senses with grotesque finality.
A tickle in her throat was all the weary warning she needed – a few seconds later, Octavia was on her knees, puking the day’s gruel into the rusty drainage grate. Her tears mixed with the falling water, lost in the downpour, a secret to everyone but herself.
The Corsairs’ apothecarion saw a great deal of business. Many of the surgical tables held victims of the unending honour-duels and violent disagreements aboard Hell’s Iris. Most were human, though plenty of others occupied their own mutational places on the charts of known natural species.
Deltrian moved through the chaos, his hooded features grinning at everything he saw. Talos walked behind him, as did Variel, the two warriors ostensibly acting as escorts. The tech-adept paused briefly to point at another ceiling-mounted auto-surgery unit, its mechandendrites hanging with the unpleasant curl of a dead spider’s legs.
‘We require one of these for stereotactic procedures, with the A, D and F socketed limbs.’
A dull-eyed servitor, wearing a robe similar to Deltrian’s, trailed behind the other three. It drooled an acknowledgement, recording its master’s wishes in an internal database.
Deltrian paused again, picking up a silver instrument. ‘Tyndaller. Seven should suffice. A similar number of these occluders will be necessary.’
The servitor murmured another acknowledgement.
Variel tensed at the reaching hand of a Corsair grasping for his medicae vambrace. His thin features soured into a scowl.
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