by Thorpe, Gav
She spent the rest of the shift managing the armour replacement, and then headed back to the duluz quarters in the great temple-manufactory where the Imperator was housed. The benefits of rank were meagre, but significant to her, and included a small but private chamber.
Ghelsa ducked through the curtain, expecting to see Notasa, but instead there was a lanky, mustachioed man sitting on her low bunk. He was dressed in the coat of an Imperial noble, dark blue and edged with red thread. Bloodshot, dark green eyes regarded Ghelsa from under a ragged fringe of black curls. The telltale sign of anti-ageing modifications glinted just beneath the skin of his neck.
‘Who are you?’ Ghelsa tried to sound casual, but her heart raced, sweat prickling her palm where she held the multi-tool.
‘My name is Estevan Idysd. I once tutored the man you knew as Ossissiru Harkas.’
Ghelsa’s grip tightened even harder.
‘Harkas? Right.’
‘I need you to come and work for me.’
‘Doing what?’
Idysd leaned forward and took a small box out of his coat pocket. It was lacquered black but otherwise unadorned. He held it out and Ghelsa took it with trembling fingers.
She opened the lid. Sitting within on a cushion of purple velvet was a metal ‘I’ with two crossbars.
A sigil of the Inquisition.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gav Thorpe is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Deliverance Lost, Angels of Caliban and Corax, as well as the novella The Lion, which formed part of the New York Times bestselling collection The Primarchs, and several audio dramas including the bestselling Raven’s Flight. He has written many novels for Warhammer 40,000, including Ashes of Prospero, Imperator: Wrath of the Omnissiah, Rise of the Ynnari: Ghost Warrior, Jain Zar: The Storm of Silence and Asurmen: Hand of Asuryan. He also wrote the Path of the Eldar and Legacy of Caliban trilogies, and two volumes in The Beast Arises series. For Warhammer, Gav has penned the End Times novel The Curse of Khaine, the Warhammer Chronicles trilogy, The Sundering, and much more besides. In 2017, Gav was awarded the David Gemmell Legend award for his Age of Sigmar novel Warbeast. He lives and works in Nottingham.
An extract from The Voice of Mars.
I
The augmentician, Janis Gilt, pressed his fingers to Arven Rauth’s throat. He frowned, digging around in search of a non-existent pulse.
The Imperium is a large place after all, and I’m clearly not human, thought Rauth. How long is it since I felt my own heart beat – a year?
As the mortal’s lips shaped ‘twenty’, he withdrew his fingers, flicking them as if to dislodge whatever microbes he might have scraped off under his nails.
Recognising the cue, an indentured aide in a high-necked, tight-sleeved chirurgical gown swiftly presented a towel. He ran it through his fingers, polishing the nails as he looked over Rauth’s corpse-like body once more.
Unblinking, eyes naturally dimmed by a cataract of mucroanid fibres, Rauth stared back.
‘I can certainly certify him dead. Would you like a copy of the documentation, Miss…?’ Janis looked up and over the wire rim of his spectacles, to address the presence that Rauth could feel behind him.
‘Laana Valorrn,’ came the reply. ‘And no.’
The augmentician smiled thinly.
I doubt whether many bring their real names to this shop. Why does he even ask?
Shaking his head, Janis looked down again. He spread his hands along the side rail of the weigh-in gurney and smoothed his expression, obviously trying not to look as though some prickly off-worlder had just dumped the interred remains of Princeps Fabris the First into his clinic. With a finger, he traced one of the flex-rods that ran from Rauth’s reconstructed left shoulder into the neighbouring pectoralis muscle.
Clammy. Cold. No one acts the corpse like an Iron Hand. Rauth resisted the urge to grimace as the augmentician’s inquisitive fingers moved onto his pectoral plate. Another frown spread across the mortal’s face.
‘I can’t find any ribs.’
‘He is not baseline human,’ came Laana’s curt reply.
‘That I see.’ He checked a readout on the side of the trolley that was obscured to Rauth’s eyeline. ‘Two and a half metres tall. Four hundred kilograms. Even accounting for the augments – and fine work, I must say – that is a lot of muscle for two and half metres of man to carry.’ He looked over his spectacles towards Laana again, as if she were a first year medicae scholar with the impertinence to call out a spelling error. He’ll be regretting that soon enough. ‘I don’t normally ask these sorts of questions. I wouldn’t get nearly the business if I did. But I just have to know, what is he?’
‘Nothing like you and I.’
‘One doesn’t need a House-chartered augmentician to tell you that.’
‘One does not need a House-chartered augmentician at all. But I was told you were discreet.’
He sniffed. ‘You were correctly informed.’
The cramped little triage room that served as Janis Gilt’s front-of-shop was already starting to fill with walk-ins, despite the earliness of the evening. Battered bodies sat slumped in chairs, eyes staring, lips going blue, most of them messed by sharp blows to the back of the head, but Rauth could covertly pick out six stabbings, two shootings, one high fall or high-speed impact and even one natural cause with just a cursory look. Some had been brought in by relatives looking to earn a chit from their grief, others by those simply looking to make a chit. They all looked impatient. The heightened Imperial presence in Fort Callivant had seen the value of black market meat rise exponentially.
Locating one of the myriad underground dealers that supplied the Fort Callivant Mechanicus with cadavers had been the easiest part of this mission.
Janis Gilt simply had the distinction of being the unlucky one.
‘I can offer you…’ The augmentician spontaneously removed his spectacles, then quickly reset them and began fiddling with his temples. ‘Twenty-five guilders,’ he declared suddenly, his voice going high as if he were asking a question rather than stating a price. A big man plastered in cult tattoos seated nearby spluttered on a cup of hydrous recyc.
‘Thirty-five,’ said Laana.
‘Agreed!’ Janis snapped, then beamed. He probably would’ve gone to five times that and considered it good business.
‘On one condition.’
The man’s face fell. ‘Go on.’
‘The body contains certain implants. Unique technologies. Things that could be traced back to my employer if a person were so inclined. She insists I witness your procedures and ensure their safe return.’
The augmentician gave the unseen woman a second scrutinising look. Rauth tried to imagine how she would seem to a man like him.
A girl. Nineteen years old. Unhealthily pale. Dark hair, cut to the scalp. She had come dressed in the garb of a serf from some minor House. It would have been a perfect disguise if not for the tough musculature that the Callivantine fashion for short-sleeves exposed. Wire-trace lines of musculoskeletal enhancement accentuated the definition. And there was a tattoo on her bicep. Rauth remembered it well, of course.
A white hand. And the Gothic numeral ‘X’.
Fabris Callivant was a long way from the trade routes and established warzones. Off-worlders were a far from common sight here.
‘I understand perfectly,’ Janis said.
A clap of his hands brought servitor assistance over from its position in waiting. Rauth remained motionless and staring as the gurney swung around and thumped through a set of doors at the back of the shop.
Unlike the grim state of the triage room, which was an extension of the street, Medicae Janis Gilt took pride in his theatre.
Every surface had been swabbed. Every drill bit and scalpel edge glinted as though astringent lighting and daily counterseptic polishes brought out their keenness. The overhead servo-arms and the Militarum-grade diagnostic kit must have been painstakingly acquired, and was almost as good as anything enj
oyed by those with the favour of House Callivant. High-end weaponised augmetics and artificial brains, sub-intelligences coded with crude battle algorithms, lined the shelves in bubbling jars of cyborganic fluids.
The servitor hauled Rauth into position under the spot lamps. Chirurgical arms locked the trolley’s wheels and it departed with the same unthinking thuggishness with which it had arrived. The lights slowly burned their outlines onto Rauth’s retinas.
Yet he still didn’t blink.
‘Now then,’ said Janis. ‘You can begin by telling me exactly where I can locate your employer’s devices, and then you can collect your thirty-five guilders from my–’
‘This room is sound-proofed, isn’t it?’ said Laana.
‘It is. Most people don’t want to hear–’
The door clicked shut as she leant her back against it.
Rauth felt saliva building up in his mouth.
Finally.
II
Blood and bone fragments splattered his face, followed shortly after by the incinerator stench of lyddite, fyceline and vaporised brain matter. Arven Rauth drew it in through his nostrils and opened his mouth for more. Blood sloshed through his bionic heart like degreaser through a promethium can. It ached. As if the muscles and nerves it was attached to were constantly on edge, and never more so than now, waiting for it to beat.
‘You could have just wrung his neck.’ Laana hadn’t reacted to the shot. Blood speckled her disguise, and the stone-cold features of the Medusan cult assassin inside them. ‘Why did you have to shoot him?’
Because I wanted to. Because I like the sound my bolt pistol makes, the way it rings in my ears, the look on his face as the back of his head exploded. Because I– ‘Be quiet and lift him for me.’
With a grunt Rauth slid from the gurney, muscles clenching, the augmetic sinews in his arm whining after the prolonged spell of inaction. He towered over the mortal woman, twitching and bulging. Laana looked up, controlling her fear well.
‘I am not your menial,’ she said. ‘You lift him.’
Rauth imagined spraying the assassin’s brains across the tiled wall. The chirurgeon had a bodyguard, madam inquisitor. There was nothing I could do. ‘Your temple should have indoctrinated you better.’
‘Some of us must work for what we have. We cannot all be elevated by genic sorcery.’
My bolt pistol just went off in her face. It must have offended the Omnissiah in some way. I cannot imagine how.
‘Weakness will find any excuse,’ he supplied instead.
A light nudge sent the assassin stumbling, clattering into an instrument trolley, and Rauth bent down. Taking the dead augmentician by the sopping ruin of his throat, he hauled him up to eye level as though his hefty weight were nothing.
The man’s height was average for an upper House male. His toes dangled around Rauth’s knees. His age was more difficult to judge as Rauth had become accustomed to functionally immortal beings for whom flesh was a distant, abhorrent memory. If he were compelled to guess, then he would have put the augmentician somewhere in the final third of his years. Fatty tissue hung from his gut and from his arms like a poorly measured raiment. Too late to return to the tailor now. The weight caused the flaccid neck muscles under Rauth’s single-handed grip to stretch.
The head was a stringy mess, like something forced through a mincer. Humans. So fragile. And yet, it was something like this that he had been born as, and some residue of it would always tar him.
‘What was that?’ Laana’s voice distracted him from his thoughts.
‘What?’
‘You just licked your lips.’
‘I did not.’
‘I assure you, you did.’
‘Then why ask the question?’
She scowled as though a mongrel had bitten her hand. ‘I told the inquisitor she would have been better sending Khrysaar.’
A sudden growl caught them both by surprise.
‘You won’t speak of my brother,’ said Rauth.
Laana retreated to the door, hand slipping behind the back of her dress to the not-so-secret pocket and the collapsible needle pistol hidden between the shoulder blades. Rauth shook his head as if to knock loose an unwelcome thought and turned back to the corpse. ‘Go. Discourage anyone from entering.’ She drew her hand from between her shoulders and presented the open palm. As if an Iron Hands scout would not have been able to disarm her the instant the intent to draw had entered her eyes.
‘I will give Inquisitor Yazir what she wants,’ he muttered, as Laana backed through the door to the triage room.
He sniffed at the augmentician’s burst head. Despite his lack of a pulse, he could feel his eyes begin to throb. He closed them, lips lowering, lowering, and sank his teeth into the soft, pulpy flesh. His eyelids flickered as the recollections of a life not his passed across them.
Click here to buy The Voice of Mars.
This book is dedicated to Tony Cottrell for being at least partly responsible for the last thirty years of my Titan fanboyism.
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First published in Great Britain in 2018.
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