by Warhammer
‘I stay too,’ she said without hesitation. Her accent was thick but her intonation of Low Gothic perfect. ‘With her.’
Morgravia swore again, a little louder this time. She gestured to Maela’s handiwork. ‘You made those bindings?’
‘I did.’
‘You were a medic?’
‘I still am.’
An educated woman in thrall to a wretched, solipsistic man. Morgravia smiled ruefully.
‘Fharkoum, he does not like you,’ Maela offered.
‘Feeling’s mutual.’
‘I overhear them talking. They think I do not listen. That I am beneath their notice.’
Morgravia wanted to hurt Fharkoum very, very much.
‘What did they say?’
‘He has a ship and a pilot. He wants to bring it here.’
‘A flyer?’ the Broker interjected, hope rising in her voice.
‘And leave us for dead, I assume,’ said Morgravia grimly.
Maela nodded.
‘Bastard…’ Morgravia’s gaze went to Jana. She slipped the shotgun over her shoulder on its strap and offered it to her. ‘If we’re going after Barak, you’ll need protection.’
Jana took it, and expertly shucked a round into the breech. Years of being the landlady of a downhive dive bar had evidently yielded some useful experience.
‘You cannot mean to go down there,’ said the Broker.
‘That’s precisely what I mean to do,’ said Jana.
Maela raised a hand, urging the others to be quiet. ‘Listen… Can you hear that?’
And in the distance, echoing through the dimly lit confines, they heard shouting and knew they wouldn’t need to go anywhere. The monsters had come to them.
Chapter XXI
Survive or die
Kharata had been less than subtle.
Sparks riddled every scrap of equipment, every device he could lay hands on once he had got what he needed from it. Tiny serpents of electricity ran rampant over wireless units, auditory scrubbers, transmitters and receivers. Static whispered through the air like the half-heard voices of the dead.
Ejecting the empty casing of his flechette pistol, Kharata took a replacement from his belt and left the vox-room behind. He moved quickly, headed to the lifter. He’d need to disable that too. A deft knife-slash through the cable would suffice. Clean. Simple. No sense in complicating matters more than they already were. It was his method. How he had survived so long doing what he did. Keep it simple. Survive or die. No moral ambiguity. No hesitation. He served Fharkoum because the fat merchant paid well, and because it suited his needs. Loyalty could be bought if you had enough coin.
The ship was coming, a way out of this merciless shit they were in.
Kharata’s only regret was not killing that bastard cattle-hand and the inquisitor. He took solace from the fact they would die anyway. The pallid would have them. More grist for mankind’s ever-churning mill.
He reached the lifter, the doors parting to reveal the odious bulk of the merchant. Sweat poured off his ample frame and Kharata had to make a concerted effort not to wrinkle his nose at the stench. He presented a mask of implacability instead.
‘When will it arrive?’ snarled Fharkoum, wiping his mouth with the cuff of a dirty sleeve. Waddling out of the lifter, he clutched Kharata’s shoulder. His laboured breath smelled faintly of lavender and soured milk.
‘Imminently.’
Fharkoum’s lip curled in an ugly, sadistic grin.
‘Then let’s make sure that inquisitor bitch and the other dregs die in this shithole.’
He patted Kharata’s cheek, a master praising his dog but with a savagery in his eyes that promised a beating if it ever failed him.
Resisting the urge to retch at the merchant’s gelid touch, Kharata dealt with the lifter cable and then led them on. The route up to the roof was close, and he fancied he could already hear the sound of faraway engines drawing nearer.
Barak was on his feet, but limping. He looked groggy, half delirious from all the blood he was losing. His shirt was drenched in crimson and he left a dark smear in his wake, his right leg dragging behind him like a dead weight. Drover kept them moving, an arm around his back, Barak’s over the gunslinger’s shoulders. A pistol hung languidly in his grasp, close to falling.
Jana ran, her injuries forgotten in her desire to reach him. Barak smiled, teeth bloody, his features haggard. She embraced him, the pair slipping slowly to the ground, arms enfolding, clenched tightly. She kissed his face, his cuts, his lips. Held him by the chin so she could see him alive, and wept for his hurts.
He breathed, ‘I’m sorry…’
And Jana shook her head, tears cutting tracts in the dried blood.
Drover sagged beside them, leaning on the wall, exhausted with the effort of heaving the hefty ex-proctor halfway through the precinct. He held his autopistol in a loose grip, and wore a bulky musette bag slung over one shoulder. He looked nearly as ragged as Barak.
‘How many?’ asked Morgravia. The itch had returned, insistent and uncomfortable. She tried to quash it through a barricade of clenched teeth.
‘Enough. We barely made it out. Managed to get a door between us but it won’t hold long.’
She gestured to the bag and Drover pulled out a clip of heavy shells, the exact fit for her stub pistol.
‘Everything on your list.’
‘And more besides?’ she asked, partially recovering her composure.
Drover nodded, a searching look in his eyes that Morgravia ignored. ‘In case we ran into trouble,’ he said, looking behind him and then tossing the bag to Maela who caught it by the strap. She had a medi-kit in the other hand with everything she could scavenge from the med-bay. ‘They’re coming, Morgravia,’ said Drover. ‘They’re coming right now.’
A long corridor swept into darkness behind him, but sound travelled easily through the gloom, a chattering, snarling refrain of bestial voices.
They waited in the darkness, a light rain slicking the landing pad and turning it black like tar.
Through the clouds of smog and pollutant, a heavy lamp beam strafed, cutting through the morass. Grainy, dispersed light fell upon the precinct roof, and Kharata winced. He stepped forwards at Fharkoum’s barked request, flagging down the gun-cutter as it hove in to land. Rivulets of rainwater ran in tiny cataracts off its wings. The nose dipped, a giant, gunmetal bird of prey nodding its acquiescence. The backwash of stabiliser jets kicked up squalls of water, little typhoons swirling away from the lander’s descent. It touched down on clawed metal pinions, a rear ramp lowering to admit its passengers.
Fharkoum hurried over to it, grimacing at the wet and the noise. He hoisted the damp skirts of his robes, the hem sodden and stained, revealing fat, pale ankles and blotchy, yellowed-nailed toes.
‘No one follows,’ he snapped back at Kharata, shouting above the drone of cycling engines.
Kharata nodded, but experienced a moment’s hesitation as he watched the fat man struggle up the ramp and into the waiting gloom of the hold.
‘Hurry up,’ snapped Fharkoum, a hand braced against the inner side of the hold, ‘or you share their fate.’
The door to the roof was sturdy. Thick metal, heavy. A tiny slit in its face allowed Kharata to peer through to the corridor inside. He saw them, barrelling and careening in their desperation. And they saw him, his dark eyes through the slit, glittering with unashamed malice. Losing the slave girl was regrettable but he could easily procure another. The rest were nothing to him.
The cattle-hand shouted something, some bawled invective, then he raised a pistol. Kharata ducked back, hissing in pain as the bullet tore along his cheek. It missed by a hair’s breadth, but the hot brass seared his skin and left a mark.
He swore, then slammed a brace against the door so it stayed shut.
‘Surv
ive or die,’ he muttered, grimacing as he touched the burn on his cheek and ran for the gun-cutter.
Drover aimed a kick and the door shuddered but held. He threw his body against it, rebounding off, teeth gritted at his bruised shoulder.
‘Won’t yield…’ he said, rolling back against the wall, a half-glance at what was coming for them.
Morgravia pressed her face against the slit, peering into slanting rain and darkness at a ship soaring away, its engine roar diminishing as its lights faded, consumed by cloud. She turned, and saw hope die in the others’ faces. Her skin felt hot, taut, as if stretched. The itch. It gnawed at her, slowly unpicking the stitches of her sanity.
She focused on the present, on the death that was coming for them. Farther back, lit by jerking bursts of sodium brightness, she saw the pallid.
‘You want to live…’ she said, striding forwards with her pistol arm outstretched, ‘then fight. It’s us or it’s them. Survive or die. This is it.’
She fired and in the rapidly closing distance a body fell. The pallid trampled it, barely hindered, the corpse consumed by a mudslide of bodies. A shotgun blast took another, ripping away a leg and thudding it into the wall to be dashed then crushed by the onset of the horde. Jana racked a shell into the breech and fired again. Morgravia’s pistol boomed. Drover stepped up, autopistols blazing. Then came Barak, one-handed with his pistol; Maela on the second shotgun, not as capable as Jana but so close she could hardly miss. A firing line erupted, a deadly fusillade lighting up the corridor in pellucid white. It tore into the pallid, bursting torsos, shredding limbs. Heads were sundered and blown apart in the storm of shells. Another foe would have balked, fled against the onslaught of violence. The rabid herd knew no such fear, only instinct, only hunger, their minds eroded by the signal.
They reached the defenders, decimated but relentless, and fell upon them without mercy or restraint.
Morgravia lost sight of Barak in the scrum. He fell back, Jana reaching for him with a cry on her lips. She caught snatches of Drover, shouting and stabbing. Maela disappeared, having stepped in front of Barak as the old man collapsed. Stray gunfire rattled then fell silent, subsumed by animalistic voices.
She heard a shriek, like a power coil charging, and felt a flash of heat; saw a beam of perfect blue light, severing and burning. It strafed the corridor, not one beam but several, slowly turning and overlapping, scorching the walls black with their irresistible trajectory. Bright, blinding. The reek of seared flesh filled the narrow space, cloying and choking. Morgravia retched, sinking to her knees. She clutched her Inquisitorial rosette, willing herself to rise.
The light faded, the deafening shriek retreating into obscurity, leaving behind a whining tinnitus.
Smoke threaded the air, thin and dissipating. It hung over bodies dissected, butchered and almost bloodless. Every cut had cauterised, a raft of flash-seared pieces, the stumps of limbs and half-torsos, of necks, precisely severed.
Nothing remained. Pieces of plaster detached from the walls and crumbled inwards. A sodium lamp swayed like a hanged corpse until its tether snapped and it fell too, the crash obscenely loud in the sudden silence.
Only the Broker was left standing, her right arm outstretched. The fingers of her hand had fused, the hot metal of her ruined augmetics steaming and shimmering with heat haze. A fallen hood revealed her for what she was. Pale, with scratches of hair, her skin patchy with the scars of old burns. A faded brand in her flesh. Self-consciously she reached for her cowl and pulled it back over her ravaged scalp.
‘I tried…’ she uttered, her voice hoarse. ‘No one can say I didn’t try.’
Amongst the dead was Maela. She had been spared the severing beam. A dark wound blossomed on the left side of her chest, her sightless eyes staring back at the others from where she lay amongst a tangle of bodies.
Barak sank to his knees by her side. Softly, he closed her eyelids and pushed a stray hair from her face. Jana stood behind him, a hand upon her husband’s shoulder, her face contorted with sorrow. She had saved her, this courtesan; a stranger, and yet one who had risked and given everything. It seemed a poor end for such altruism.
‘Just a girl…’ muttered Barak. ‘Should’ve been me,’ he said, and started to gently weep. ‘Stupid, old, broken-down man. It should’ve been me.’
Jana’s grip tightened and Barak clasped her hand in his, shaking with grief. She wept too, tears for a daughter they never had or ever could.
Morgravia looked on, dulled to their pain. She should say something, remind them that they could not stay here. That they had to leave low-hive. Pity stopped her at the last. Let them have this, at least. They had already lost so much.
In the end, Barak spoke, intruding on her thoughts. ‘Before the precinct fell,’ he said, stiffly getting to his feet, ‘the proctors had been watching a religious cult.’
Morgravia eyed him shrewdly.
‘I found references to it in a watchman’s journal,’ Barak went on. ‘He called them “the Divine”. Mentioned their hideout too, old church at the north edge. I’m thinking they attacked the precinct, maybe even took some prisoners.’
‘What makes you say that?’ asked the inquisitor.
‘On account of the lack of bodies, and that I found this.’ He produced the piece of shattered mask he had recovered.
Drover lit up another cheroot. ‘Once a lawman, always a lawman, I suppose.’
‘The Divine wear masks like this,’ said Barak, ignoring him. ‘These are bad men, inquisitor. Really bad. Burnings, abductions.’
‘And what are you saying, exactly?’ asked Morgravia.
‘I’m saying it’s a lead. Even without your memories, even if this one,’ he jerked his chin at the Broker, ‘doesn’t make good. It’s worth following.’
Morgravia considered it. She had no guarantee even if she reached the Empath, if any of it was real, that it would cure her and that the answers she sought would be buried in her subconscious. At absolute best, it was a hunch.
‘And will you make good?’ she asked of the Broker, who had recovered a little of her poise.
‘You know my terms.’
‘We might all be dead before I can meet them.’
‘Then for all our sakes I hope it does not come to that.’
Morgravia bit back a reply. She didn’t think she could compel the Broker to reveal the Empath’s location or she would have already done so. With little other choice, it had to be this way. Quid pro quo, just as the Broker had said.
‘The gate lies to the north,’ she decided eventually, ‘so does the church if it’s at the north edge.’
Drover took a drag on his tabac and exhaled a long plume of smoke. ‘That’s settled then.’ His eyes fell on the Broker. ‘I assume the Empath lies that way too?’
The Broker didn’t answer, though her face betrayed her ambivalence as she picked her way through the bodies.
The others followed, and left only the dead behind.
Chapter XXII
Swallow the bullet
Kharata saw the gate to uphive ahead, an immense ferrocrete barrier than had more in kind with an ancient fastness than a border wall. Distant figures moved along its battlements too far away to discern any details. They faced a mass of desperate humanity, the crowds before the gate swelling like a living sea. A riot of bodies, made anonymous by its sheer number, hammered at the unyielding metal to be let through, but the monolithic gate stayed firm.
As the gun-cutter came in low under the smog layer, specifics resolved at an accelerated rate.
A thicket of razor wire crowned the walls, which were marginally lower than the gate itself and bridged the relatively narrow causeway between low-hive and uphive. Watchmen in up-armoured proctor garb manned the ramparts, a garrison stationed for the express purpose of keeping people out. Flamer teams stood at the ready, poised before murder slits, prepa
red to douse the region directly in front of the gate should there be an unauthorised breach. Heavy stubbers angled low on their pintle mounts, piled on threat, but didn’t fire.
Not yet.
Kharata counted eight gun nests from where he crouched by the gun-cutter’s side hatch. He watched as a dozen canisters jetted out into the crowds trailing vapour. Tear gas erupted in bulbous mushroom clouds, quickly blanketing the rioters, who recoiled like a single organism. He heard distant screaming and imagined the stampede below.
‘Hail them,’ snarled Fharkoum, peeking at the carnage through a vision slit as he dabbed the sweat from his lips.
Kharata used the hold’s vox to contact the pilot, who did as bidden. The reply from the wall was terse. It mentioned the phrases ‘restricted area’ and ‘turn back immediately’. Two of the gun nests had two-man rocket tubes. One lined up on the gun-cutter’s trajectory.
Fharkoum swore, his fear and arrogance bleeding from his pores in a sickly-smelling sweat.
‘Offer to pay,’ he said, ‘any amount.’
‘These are gate watch, master,’ Kharata offered, still hanging out of the side hatch. His eyes narrowed. Behind the milling crowds, he saw movement, an army on the march. ‘They do not accept bribes.’
‘I don’t fucking care. Do it!’ Fharkoum roared, spittle flying, a hacking cough erupting from his corpulent body.
No, not an army, Kharata realised. A horde. The pallid.
Urgent requests for clarification hissed through bouts of vox static, as the pilot started to get nervous. They were still on course for the gate, and now a second rocket tube had angled towards the gun-cutter.
Kharata barely registered. He watched in morbid fascination as the pallid scurried below like a greasy flood, the tendrils of the horde reaching like talons. Panic rippled through the crowds at the gate as they slowly realised what was upon them. The rear edges, those too afraid to get close or sent reeling by tear gas, disappeared first. Absorbed. Consumed. The hungry tide spilled on and now the crowds fled or fought. Not that it mattered. Two opposing poles met in the middle and were crushed. Confusion took hold, abruptly dissipating as the realisation of what the rear ranks were running from became apparent.