THE VAMPIRE GENEVIEVE
An omnibus by Kim Newman

THE WICKED AND THE DAMNED
A portmanteau novel by Josh Reynolds, Phil Kelly and David Annandale

MALEDICTIONS
An anthology by various authors

INVOCATIONS
An anthology by various authors

ANATHEMAS
An anthology by various authors

THE HARROWED PATHS
An anthology by various authors

THE HOUSE OF NIGHT AND CHAIN
A novel by David Annandale

CASTLE OF BLOOD
A novel by C L Werner

DARK HARVEST
A novel by Josh Reynolds

THE OUBLIETTE
A novel by J C Stearns

SEPULTURUM
A novel by Nick Kyme

THE REVERIE
A novel by Peter Fehervari

THE DEACON OF WOUNDS
A novel by David Annandale

PERDITION’S FLAME
An audio drama by Alec Worley

THE WAY OUT
An audio drama by Rachel Harrison

Contents

Cover

Backlist

Title Page

Warhammer Horror

Skull Throne

The Child Foretold

Tithemarked

Imperator Gladio

The Terminus

Nightbleed

A Moment of Cruelty

The Reaper’s Gift

The Way of All Flesh

Elloth IX

The Cache

The Bloody Kiss

About the Authors

An Extract from ‘Maledictions’

A Black Library Imprint

eBook license

A dark bell tolls in the abyss.

It echoes across cold and unforgiving worlds, mourning the fate of humanity. Terror has been unleashed, and every foul creature of the night haunts the shadows. There is naught but evil here. Alien monstrosities drift in tomblike vessels. Watching. Waiting. Ravenous. Baleful magicks whisper in gloom-shrouded forests, spectres scuttle across disquiet minds. From the depths of the void to the blood-soaked earth, diabolic horrors stalk the endless night to feast upon unworthy souls.

Abandon hope. Do not trust to faith. Sacrifices burn on pyres of madness, rotting corpses stir in unquiet graves. Daemonic abominations leer with rictus grins and stare into the eyes of the accursed. And the Ruinous Gods, with indifference, look on.

This is a time of reckoning, where every mortal soul is at the mercy of the things that lurk in the dark. This is the night eternal, the province of monsters and daemons. This is Warhammer Horror. None shall escape damnation.

And so, the bell tolls on.

Skull Throne

Jake Ozga

I walk barefoot beneath the silent, predatory sky. I step carefully among brittle indigo flowers and leave no trace of my passing. I watch – unblinking – the line of trees as they tremble and fade away. The sky sighs and the flowers blur in the wind, their petals becoming indistinct smears of colour.

Time passes; it flows around me like a river. I settle back into its currents and drift. I close my eyes and when I open them again I am elsewhere. Day has turned to night and in the weak light of the moon the grass is blue and ethereal. I crouch among it and become invisible. I whisper to myself, ‘To live peacefully, we must live unseen.’ I whisper it over and over like a prayer. My mother taught me this when I was a little girl, when I was still a thing of flesh and blood. There is no sound in this Realm of Death, the place I once called home. There are no birds, no insects, just the barest breath of the wind. I listen. Any moment now. Here they come.

Dark shapes separate from the deep blue shadows of the treeline and walk into the field, down where the grass is shorter. I am as still as a mouse and if I breathe it is not so anyone would notice. There is a new sound, the sound of something scraping. It does not belong here, it is so vulgar in this place. Three men walk under the light of a burning timber, most likely taken from a homestead nearby; they make no secret of their presence. The first of the three drags along a girl by her hair. A second is lost in the shadows at the edge of the field, a darker shade. Moonlight picks out the edges of his form; it reflects on sharp corners and cutting angles. The third pulls behind him a great axe with hooks and barbs that furrow the earth as he walks.

I watch as they make the girl kneel in the gently swaying grass. She is like a bird, so skinny and delicate. Her bare arms and legs are almost translucent in the light of the waning moon. Her face is hidden by long, lank black hair. She doesn’t cry out; she knows better. I bite my lip and draw a bead of blood – a test to see if I am dreaming. They pull her head back and I see her face. Her wide, dark eyes seek out my hiding place, and just for a heartbeat her gaze meets mine. I see that she is me and I am her. I am her and I am there in the field, and they hold me by the hair as I kneel and I am scared but not for myself and then the axe swings just once and my head comes away from my body, which topples lifelessly, like a broken doll, to lie discarded in the grass.

I gasp, and the three men turn to look towards where I lie hidden, but they do not see me. The second man takes my head and ties it to his belt. I watch them do it. I watch them do it over and over and over. She is me and I am her. I lie down and curl into a ball. The scraping sound is changing and getting louder. From here, I know, things only get worse. I close my eyes.

Behind my eyelids the edifice looms from the pulsing, rusty haze. It is cyclopean, limitless, the colour of dried blood. There is a thunderous noise that I feel in the base of my skull, that I hear in the bone behind my eyes. It sounds like a boulder dragged across gravel or broken glass but repeated ten thousand times. I squeeze my eyes tight but the shape of the monolith is revealed to me: a monumental throne, built from skulls in numbers beyond my ability to comprehend. They grind against each other like teeth under the weight of the throne’s occupant, a form I cannot make out, lost in the haze. And in dark heavens at the limits of my perception, a burning eye holds me in silent regard.

We are no strangers to death, we who live in his realm. I am no stranger to death; it has always surrounded me. But this is not a vision of death, this is…

Violence. Always the same visions of violence. Even now, when I’m awake, I see the throne. I see the cutting edge of a jagged blade across a fragile, delicate neck. I see a burning, hate-filled eye. I see these things with my eyes open or closed. I see them interwoven with the mundanity of my hidden existence: they are there as I gather my herbs, as I walk under the blanched and sallow sun, as I whisper through the floorboards to the bodies down in the darkness, as I watch from the shattered windows of my ruined home in the realm of silent ghosts, and as I sleep alone under cold and lifeless stars.

Days and nights pass without distinction. Their edges blur as if viewed through a raindrop, remembered only as a dream upon waking – real in one moment and nothing but fragments in the next. I too am blurred. I am a figure without definition, a form without edges. This numbed existence – this fugue, this dream – I float through it like a ghost. Live unseen, but how do you live a life without hope? In truth I do not live, but I exist still, I remain. A heavy blade scrapes a furrow through freshly tilled soil and the skulls grind together under a crushing weight. I remain in incoherence. I linger in madness. I do not know how long it has been this way and I wonder if it will ever end. I am missing a part of my soul.

I open my eyes. Daylight. I am in the charred remains of my crumbling home. I am standing at my favourite broken window that looks down onto a field where nothing grows and no animals graze. The glass panes are long since gone, but there is no wind in this place to speak of and I no longer feel the cold. I am rarely hungry and eat sparingly; instead I make tea in a heavy iron cauldron that hangs from a chain over a modest firepit that I do not remember replenishing. The fire burns white, the pale smoke drifts away towards the stars through the ruin of the roof. The water takes time to boil. I add more of the herb than last time: a pinch of mhurghast root adds a bitter taste but too much can cause paralysis or even death. Brewed to the correct strength the tea removes my dreams, replaces them with this confusion of non-existence, though every day it takes more and more to grant me peace, and every day the dreams return like an invasive weed with roots grown deep inside my head. The herb is found everywhere in this quiet corner of Shyish and I have harvested enough to kill myself a hundred times over.

I do not know if I will kill myself. It is not that I want to be alive, it is that I am unable to decide. It is too much to decide a thing like that; I need guidance. I used to have help, but I have lost a part of my soul and so I am as a ship adrift, alternately becalmed or borne on indiscriminate tides. Decide to die, decide to live.

I see three shapes emerge from the shadows at the edge of the field. I quickly drink the tea and feel its effects immediately. The figures blur into nothing. The world loses its hard edges. I deliquesce, I slip away.

Wait. Wait. I wade back towards the shore from some impossible, dreamless depth. Something has disturbed me from my sleep; some primal instinct sets my heart fluttering as if a predator’s shadow has fallen upon me. I lie awake on my cot and listen. There is something… Far away I hear a man’s voice, raised in rough song. It echoes across this silent, dead land. This is new. My dreams have never sung before.

I walk to the broken window. I move carefully, barefoot on the fragile, fire-blackened floorboards that creak and splinter at my passing, tiptoeing so as not to disturb the bodies as they rest beneath me. I do not know if it is morning or evening. There is pale light as the sun swims weakly across a liquid sky that is always the same ashen grey, faintly diffused with smudged silver stars. The fields are smothered in a funeral shroud of mist and I see nothing and no one, but still I hear the song. It is a chant, vulgar and brutal; it does not belong in this place. I stand in the doorway and watch the shadows as they coalesce and pool together, and from the mist there comes a man.

There comes a man: tall, swaggering, alone. He sings his barbaric song with words I do not understand. He wears the piecemeal red armour of the invaders, so deep in colour that it first appears black. ‘To live peacefully,’ I whisper. ‘To live peacefully…’ My voice trails away. This is something new. I try to think what I should do. I should hide, I should remain unseen, but instead I sit in the doorway and watch as he turns to walk towards the house. I should fetch my mother’s spear, but it is too much to contemplate and instead I close my eyes, and when I open them he is approaching me. He is a new vision. So things do change after all – a part of me is relieved. I bite my lip and taste the metallic tang of blood, but I do not wake up. ‘Open your eyes,’ I say to myself. ‘Open your eyes.’ But they are open. I should run, but instead I sit and I think: it would be the easiest thing in the world to die now.

He does not stop his song as he takes a handful of my hair and drags me back into the charred bones of my house. With his free hand he beats the heavy iron armour on his chest, a percussive crash to accompany his chanting. I watch the stars as they blink out in the heavens. I watch the tea as it boils in the heavy iron pot on the last embers of the fire. Am I to be forever a spectator at my own death? Decide to fight, decide to die – even in these final moments it is too hard to consider.

He throws me ahead of him and I fall awkwardly beside my bed, scraping my bare knees. He draws the sword he wears across his back: an ugly pockmarked blade with a single, well-notched edge. He removes his helmet and I see he is a young man, not much older than me. He has stopped singing. His jaw is ruined from some old injury that has healed badly, and the wound is only partially disguised by a tangled black beard. He says something in a tongue I struggle to understand – the guttural, snarling accent of the invaders is so different from my own – but I know what he intends: I see myself on my knees. This has happened before, different but the same. Time repeats itself. Existence is a loop of chain, the links pass endlessly through my hands. He means to take my head, over and over again. The thought stirs something in me, an unfamiliar anger. Just the tiniest drip, drip, drip of this new feeling into a pool at the bottom of a deep, dark well. Maybe I can use it.

And then he steps towards me; he steps on brittle boards damaged by the fire. He does not tread lightly, as one should, as one must. I hear cracking. I see it coming, I almost smile. And so of course, the floorboards break, and he falls into the darkness, into the darkness with the corpses.

I touch my neck cautiously, but I am intact. I cock my head and listen, waiting for the grinding that heralds the vision of the skull throne, but it does not come. This is something new. The man is hurt – a bone broken in the fall perhaps. There is cursing and moaning: ugly words and sounds that have no place here and which make me want to retreat somewhere hidden and silent. But instead I sit at the edge of the hole, legs dangling into the darkness below, and watch him. He is struggling to get his arm free of some splintered wood that has him pinned in place. His leg is bent the wrong way.

‘Please be quiet,’ I whisper. But he does not hear me and he continues his awful noise. I consider the situation for a while, then I stand and stoke the fire that has cooled in the firepit. I add new bundles of kindling, taken from the thickets near the house, and then cuttings of the grey wood that I keep in a basket near the door, and I wait for the fire to catch and get hot and the water in the cauldron to boil, and then I push the whole thing over so that the cauldron falls and spills down into the hole. There is more screaming – louder now – and then finally there is silence. I watch the last of the water trickle over the broken floor for a moment. Drip, drip, drip. Then I go back to my cot and fall asleep.

Later, as I lie in my bed, I talk to him. I ask him what happened to his jaw, but he does not reply. I lie and watch the stars and imagine him injured in a duel with some brutish rival. I try to remember the song that he sang but when I attempt to whistle it, it does not sound right at all. It has been some time since I checked on him – some days perhaps – it is so easy to lose track. In the hole the moaning sometimes resumes but not for so long that I need to boil any more water. I leave the cauldron where it lies, I do not numb myself with tea. I feel different. I am feeling more and more different all the time.

One night I hear him talking. His voice is small now. I lie in bed, wide-eyed in the darkness, and I listen.

‘I do not want to die here. I do not want to die like this.’ He slurs his words. I have to concentrate to understand him.

‘We came here before. A year ago or more. We killed you,’ he says. ‘We killed you, my brothers and I.’

‘Yes,’ I whisper.

‘What are you? Are you a ghost? A spirit? We have met such things in this strange land.’

‘Am I a ghost,’ I whisper. ‘Am I a spirit.’

‘We killed you – we cut off your head!’

‘You cut off my head,’ I whisper. ‘You cut off my head and I want it back.’

The next day I make a decision. I rise from my bed and I retrieve my mother’s spear and I step down into the cellar, barefoot among the debris and the bodies. He is still trapped by a beam of splintered wood that tears into the meat and muscle of his arm when he tries to move. His leg is twisted. He has stripped off most of his armour until he is naked and his skin is pink and cross-hatched with raw and bloody fingernail marks where he has scratched at his blisters. His face is pale and his tangled beard is foul with vomit. He snarls at me and so I push the broad bronze point of the spear into the sole of his bare foot and he screams. ‘We killed you, we killed you,’ he groans. The bodies in the darkness watch us in silence and I try not to think about them. ‘You will tell me where you have taken my head,’ I say, and twist the spear. And so, in time, he tells me.

Later, we are sat quietly together. He says that he doesn’t want to die this way but I am not listening, my thoughts are elsewhere. His breathing becomes strange and uneven and eventually he goes still. I contemplate the information that he has shared and finally I decide what to do; I decide all on my own. ‘I know,’ I say to the bodies in the darkness, ‘I am feeling different. I am sorry that I have to leave you.’

I pack a few things from around my home and I carry my mother’s spear. I take a bag with some little provisions and my herbs, although I have not drunk any of the tea in some time. In the grey of the evening of that same day I set out to walk towards the setting sun, in the direction from which the man came some few days past.

I pass from the lands where my mother chose to hide into the land that once belonged to my father and his people. I walk through fields I knew as a child and then yet others that I have never seen before. All is still, all is dead. As it should be. At the edge of a copse of skeletal, ash-white trees I walk into a cloud of mist, until I come to a beach of colourless sand that stretches away into the distance. Each step I take along the beach is swallowed by the mist that spills out from a vast lake or sea, and it is only by following the edge of the water that I do not become disoriented. Behind me my footprints are erased by the milk-white water as it laps soundlessly at the shore. Ahead of me, my path is not yet written.

I walk along the shore until I reach the stone marker that I am looking for: an upright column of obsidian, almost twice as tall as me. I trace the razor-sharp edges of the stone with my fingers. Etched on the glassy surface is an eight-pointed star and another shape – a crude skull perhaps, repeated over and over. This object too does not belong here; I know somehow that it was once not of this realm, that it was carried here by the invaders.

I turn and step into the tepid water, the light of Azyr at my back and the spectre of the waning moon ahead of me. The shallow sea vanishes towards an invisible horizon, where it merges in silence with the mist. The water is thick and opaque and the air is redolent with the smell of brine. I taste salt on my lips. After a short while I am up to my knees in the milky water and it seems to get no deeper, the coast now long lost somewhere in the mist behind me, and all around is beautiful, bloodless serenity. I stop and I think that I could fade away here, that I could forget about the edges of myself and dissolve into this nothingness. I close my eyes. And then I hear the drip of the blood from the head I carry by its tangled beard, the drip of blood into the lifeless water, and I am reminded of why I am here and what I now seek. In the distance, muffled by the mist, I hear the familiar sound of bone grinding on bone, and I wade through the water towards it.

They are camped in the skeleton of some great sea creature. The bones of a giant ribcage rise from the water, black and ragged. A fire illuminates an area of land at the heart of the creature’s remains, the light diffused by the mist. Around it I see figures moving. I lower myself into the water until only my eyes would be visible if they were to look in my direction. I remain unseen. It is too shallow to swim but I pull myself along on the seabed, my hands sinking through the spongy silt to find purchase on the rock beneath.

I observe the scene for a while, drawing slowly closer to the camp. The water around the island is full of froth and movement, and I realise that it is surrounded by a frenzy of fish of some sort. No, not fish but eels. They gather at the island of bones, thrashing in the water, writhing and knotting around each other like coils of oiled rope as they fight to feed. They tear scraps from the carcass of the great sea creature, ripping black meat away from the bones and bringing it back into the froth. As I watch, I see an eel uncoil from the swarm to snatch something from the shore in its jaws: a severed human arm. There are many more body parts that lie discarded near a great iron cooking pot in the camp. Even as I observe, one of the men walks to the pile of body parts, takes part of a carcass upon a curved butcher’s hook and hefts the torso up and into the cooking pot.

Is this where they brought me when they took my head? I wonder. Is this where they would have tossed my body? My skinny little arms and skinny little legs and my poor little stump of a neck where my head should be?

Wait. I think. Wait, how could it be me? I am here. I am alive. I am more alive than I have been for some time.

Something moves in the water alongside me. A huge black eel glides past – clouds of white sand billow as it twists its body to turn and face me, almost as long as I am tall. It darts forward in the water; small, sharp teeth sink into the meat of my arm, drawing blood, and I drop the head that I have been carrying. And then the eel retreats, slipping away from me, back to join the others. I follow it, joining the writhing mass. I am surrounded by life and it is invigorating. The eels nip at me but they don’t persist and I let them have their fun. My blood tastes too bitter for them, I expect, full of poisonous mhurghast root. They coil around me, I am welcome among them, I am one of them. I smile. I make a decision. Decisions are coming easily to me now.

I slip out of the water, I crawl on my belly among the carcasses. I am coated with white silt and streaming with watery blood from dozens of tiny bites. I still have my mother’s spear and the pack containing the mhurghast root, enough to kill me a hundred times over. The men in the camp are fighting among themselves: violent games and duels. I think of the man in the cellar of my house, how his jaw was ruined. I think of his violent life and I think, well, my life has not been without violence. I had thought to offer it as a trade, but it doesn’t matter now. I throw the poisonous herbs into the cooking pot. Three handfuls. It floats for a moment in the scum on the surface of the stinking, rust-coloured stew, then sinks. I lie among the body parts.

The men grunt and brawl late into the night, their voices muffled by the mist; they pause only to eat their cannibal feast. I close my eyes. Bone grinds on bone as the skull throne looms but I remain unseen here among the dead. ‘To live peacefully,’ I whisper. I feel something warm inside my chest; it is a new and fragile and alien thing, and I realise after a while that it is an ember that could in time become something good, and I nurture it within me as I lie among the bodies, warmed by the glow of the cooking fire as it slowly burns down to ash. In time, the warriors sleep. I am so tired now. I fade away. In the morning I am the only one to wake.

The new day brings with it a change of atmosphere and I almost do not recognise where I am. A cloud of choking sand has gathered to suffocate this evil place. The red light of the throbbing, heatless sun turns the air to deep rust. I walk through the haze, among the black bones of the camp. I tread carefully, barefoot among the men that lie here and there, and I leave no trace. Some of them are alive; their chests rise and fall, their eyes are open, but they cannot move and so they watch me as I pass. Most are dead. I tiptoe so as not to disturb the bodies. I hum the song that the bearded man once sang as he dragged me by my hair. I can’t get it to sound quite the same – it is confused somehow, distorted. To my ears, my variation sounds better.

In the heart of the camp, one of the invaders sits slouched in a chair crudely formed from black, glassy stone. A great axe – covered in cruel hooks and barbs – lies at his feet. His eyes follow my movements, his pupils pinprick vortexes in the bloodshot whites of his eyeballs. His fingers twitch; the muscles in his neck are bunched, the cords so prominent they look like they might snap. His jaw works slowly from side to side, like cattle chewing cud. My father once had cattle, back when I was little more than a babe. He is trying to talk. I wait patiently.

‘What vision is this?’ His speech is slurred. ‘What strange vision? Are you a daemon? Come to me, born in blood. Your kind are welcome here.’

I look down at myself. The white mud that coats me is dry and cracked and stained with blood.

I laugh and the sound startles me – it is so loud!

‘Am I a daemon? No, no. I am just a girl.’

There is silence for a while. His fingers continue to contract and stretch as he wills his body back to life, fighting against the paralysis. His eyes are so full of hatred and rage; it must be wonderful to feel so intensely, to conjure such emotions out of nothing. Around us the red haze closes in until we are the only two beings in existence; all else is obscured by a miasma of sand the colour of dried blood.

‘Just a girl,’ he rasps. ‘What are you doing here, girl? Do you come to die?’

I think on this; it is not an easy question to answer.

‘Don’t you recognise me?’ I ask. ‘You took my skull. You cut off my head with your ugly axe. I am here to take it back.’

Even as I say it I know the words are not true; they are confused, and out of shape, like the half-remembered melody.

No. I sigh. No, this is not right.

I sit cross-legged in the sand, my head in my hands.

Not my skull, I correct myself. My sister. My twin.

We were born on the same day, moments apart. Our mother said we shared a single soul. Only moments older, but how much she must have learned in those few fleeting heartbeats before I joined her. How wise she was. How I looked up to her. At times it was as if we shared a single body, that we looked on the world with a single set of eyes.

‘You cut off her head,’ I say. ‘And I could only watch.’

I hear the grinding of bone on bone; it echoes around this place. I feel it in the nape of my neck and behind my eyes. I can taste violence in the air. Violence poisoned this hidden corner of the realm when I was just a child. Violence bled into our lives from some other place, carried by invaders. My father did not survive it. My mother kept us hidden for a time. But my sister… my sister was my guide when I could not have survived on my own, when I struggled to understand and to make decisions. She was the guiding force and I merely a passenger. She was so brave to carry this burden and I… I was such a weight around her neck, and worse: a liability. Because I could taste this violence in the air – even as a child, I could taste it. And because I did not hate the taste.

He starts to speak again but I am not listening. I stand slowly and take the axe and drag it behind me to the first of the bodies, the first of the men that litter the camp. The axe is so heavy I struggle to lift it above my head and when I let it drop it is with weight enough to cut bone. It is hard work; one cut is not enough. Some of the men are not yet dead, but it is all they can do to watch me as I approach. Their eyes are full of hatred and something that might be fear. Would my sister have stayed my hand? I wonder. My sister was full of kindness and compassion but I have never truly understood those things.

It takes me most of the day but I gather their heads. The heads of all that came here, invaders in the realm of the dead. I have to pause frequently to rest. It is hard work but it must be done. I take their heads and bring them to the centre of the camp.

‘You make of these an offering,’ the seated man growls. ‘This is as it should be.’

His voice is no longer slurred. He has watched me as I have worked, his head turning to follow my movements even as I cut the heads from the men that he commands.

‘An offering,’ I say. ‘I offer these in exchange for my sister’s skull.’

‘You should be on your knees…’ His voice is so full of hatred and contempt. There are flecks of bloody saliva at the edges of his mouth. He begins to stand. ‘I will consider your request if you beg.’

‘It is not meant for you,’ I say. Before he can rise I push the tip of my mother’s spear into the soft flesh between his ribs and I laugh at his shock as the blade pierces his heart. He does not stop hating even as he dies, as he first slumps forward on his seat then topples to the blood-soaked sand. The grinding of skulls consumes me, overwhelms me.

‘God of violence,’ I call out. I have to shout to make myself heard above the crushing waves of terrible noise. ‘God of violence, I offer these to you. Your men, your Champion. All in your name.’

High above, in dark heavens, the blood-red sun is now a burning eye that holds me in hateful regard. I do not shy from its attention. And I know that this is still not enough.

‘God of violence! I have so little left that I can offer you.’

I push the hilt of my mother’s spear deep into the fine white sand until it hits bedrock. I angle it towards my own throat. It is still so sharp. The tip draws a bead of blood and I know that I am not dreaming. Decisions come so easily to me now. My parents would be so proud of what I have become.

‘Goodbye, mother! Goodbye, father! I’m sorry I troubled you… and I’m sorry I didn’t visit you, down there in the dark. My sister, my soul, I will see you soon.’

I am crying. It is a rare and beautiful gift to feel such emotion.

‘All I ask is that we may gaze upon each other!’

And the dark heavens shrug in acquiescence.

I hold the shaft of the spear tight in trembling hands. And I push myself forward with all my strength and I push and I push and I pu–

There is a noise like that I feel in the base of my skull, that I hear in the bone behind my eyes. It sounds like a boulder dragged across gravel or broken glass, repeated ten thousand times. The skulls of the skull throne grind against each other, unceasing, forever.

And we are together again.

The Child Foretold

Nicholas Kaufmann

Kavel Trake knelt between the rows of nafar plants and sighed when he saw the thick, blood-red vine that ran through the soil and had wrapped itself in a tight chokehold around the stems. Damn, he thought. It was just as he’d worried after seeing the limp, discoloured leaves on his crops.

‘Looks like the warrior weed finally found our little farm, Rahmiel,’ he said.

He looked up at Rahmiel, who stood silently in the middle of the field, his blind, metallic eyes staring past Kavel at the horizon. Kavel had built Rahmiel from spare bits of metal, wood and straw to keep away the packs of scavenging voraks that tried to eat his crops at night. He couldn’t remember exactly when he’d started talking to the scarecrow, or even when he’d given it a name, but he’d been doing it for long enough now that it didn’t seem strange any more. Besides, who else was there to talk to? Rahmiel was his only companion. There was no one else on the farm, which meant there was also no one to judge him for talking to a scarecrow like he’d lost his mind.

Although maybe he had. He suspected ten years of solitude and heavy drinking could do that to a man.

Kavel had known it was only a matter of time before the warrior weed infected his crops, but that didn’t temper his anger. The damned weed shouldn’t have been on Ballard’s Run in the first place. It was an invasive species whose spores had hitched a ride to this world on a supply ship, immediately found a foothold, and spread all over the planet, causing untold damage as it strangled crops and sucked the nutrients out of the ground for itself. The biologis had surely classified it using their own obscure terminology, but the farmers on Ballard’s Run called it warrior weed because when you tried to pull it up, it clung to the soil so tightly that it felt like the blasted thing was fighting back.

Kavel grabbed a handful of the weed and pulled with all his might. It took several minutes and all his strength to yank it free. Unfortunately, it took a chunk of nafar plant with it. He sighed and tossed the clump of vegetable matter aside. One down, but how many more to go? The warrior weed had likely spread over his entire farm already. It was that fast, and that voracious. Eventually, it would take over his fields and kill everything else. The only way to get rid of it would be to burn his fields and plant new crops, but he couldn’t afford to do that. His nafar harvests barely kept him in credits as it was.

A loud roar in the sky drew his attention as an enormous armed freighter took off from the space port to the west. He watched it push its way into the twilight sky on huge thrusters, its hold packed with food for the hungry bellies of a hundred Imperial worlds, and then disappear among the first stars that were beginning to show. Kavel had never been off-world, but he had no regrets about that. He’d heard stories about what was out there. Things a lot worse than warrior weed.

He stood, wobbling for a moment as he tried to find his balance, and then fell flat on his face in the dirt. After so many years, he thought he would be used to the cylindrical metal peg that had replaced his right leg below the knee, but he’d never quite got the hang of it. The stupid thing had tripped him up more times than he could count. It was yet another reason he supposed he should be thankful he lived alone – there was no one around to see him fall. No one but Rahmiel, anyway, and Rahmiel never said a word about it. The medicae who’d attached the prosthesis had assured him that living without his right leg was preferable to dying from gangrene, but sometimes Kavel wasn’t so sure.

He struggled to get up, but with nothing to hold onto and no one to help him he fell again. The fact that he had finished a whole bottle of amasec last night wasn’t helping, he conceded. He pushed hard against the ground, and this time he managed to get up. To the warp with this day, he thought, and staggered back to the small farmhouse he reluctantly called home.

Ballard’s Run was a small agri-world on the outer rim of known space. Populated by approximately ten thousand farmers and produce workers, it was a major source of food production for the sector, generating everything from nafar to ploin fruit to grox meat. Kavel had never taken to farming the way the rest of his family had, so when he came of age he decided to pursue the only other job available to people on Ballard’s Run – he joined the militia. It wasn’t a hard job, mostly training and drills and helping out the farmers during natural disasters. But then, ten years ago, Ballard’s Run had the bad luck to find itself in the way of an ork migration. The orks outnumbered the militia twenty to one, and over the weeks of relentless fighting that followed, thousands of soldiers and civilians were killed. With the planet’s food production halted by the war and dozens of worlds in the sector at risk of starvation as a result, the Imperial Guard forces finally arrived and beat back the orks. But by then, Kavel had already lost his entire family – his parents, cousins, aunts and uncles, and most devastatingly, his younger brother, who’d also been his closest friend. A single soul in two bodies, their parents had called them. The two of them had talked about everything, shared everything, and now all Kavel had to remember his brother Rahmiel by was an effigy he’d named after him.

As if that weren’t enough, the war, like an insatiable beast, had taken even more from him, costing him his right leg below the knee. Without the credits to afford an advanced augmetic, he’d been forced to settle for a crude, metal prosthesis. It allowed him to walk again, but he was unable to continue in the militia. But on Ballard’s Run you were either a farmer or a soldier, so when they discharged him they gave him a few acres of isolated farmland. They called it compensation, but the truth was he didn’t have a choice.

He’d spent every day since then on the farm, alone, tending his nafar crops, bringing his harvests to the nearby processing plant, and waiting, impatiently, to die.

Sitting up in bed and cursing the warrior weed that had invaded his fields, Kavel reached for the fresh amasec bottle on the bedside table and, as he did every night, poured himself a big glass. He drank it in one, wincing as the high-proof alcohol burned its way down his oesophagus. It didn’t matter that he was still hungover from last night’s binge. He repeated the process until he had enough liquor in him to drift off into a dreamless sleep, secretly hoping he wouldn’t wake up again.

But he did, much to his disappointment. When he opened his eyes, it was still dark. A sound from outside had woken him. He heard it again – the rustle of leaves, as though something were moving through the rows of nafar plants. The voraks, he thought. They were back to eat his crops.

‘Damn it, Rahmiel,’ he muttered as he got out of bed. What was the point of the damned thing if it didn’t keep the voraks away?

The room tilted and dipped, and his vision swam. The alcohol was still in his system. As soon as the room stabilised, he pulled on some trousers, went to the chest that sat in the back of the room, and opened it. Inside was his shotgun. He pumped one of its eight loaded rounds into the chamber, and threw open the front door. He lifted the shotgun and scanned his fields, but he didn’t see the voraks’ barbed spines moving among the plants. He waited a moment to be certain there were no animals in his fields, then closed the door. He leaned the shotgun against the doorframe and went back to bed.

His eyes were only closed for a few minutes before a loud banging on his front door forced them open again. He shook his head. He was hearing things. No one came to his farm. No one ever came. But then he heard more banging, frantic and insistent. He got out of bed and picked up the shotgun. Holding it in one hand, ready to use it if he had to, he carefully opened the door.

The young woman who stood there looked to be about twenty years old. She clutched a cloth bundle in her arms. Her face was bruised, scraped and crusted with dried blood. Fresh blood dripped from her nose and the corner of her mouth. She stared at him, and then her eyes rolled back in her head and she collapsed. Kavel dropped the shotgun and caught her before she hit the floor, which tipped him perilously forward on his prosthesis. He shifted his weight to his good leg in time to stop himself from falling, then pulled her inside and sat her up against the wall. Her breath was shallow and ragged, but at least she was still breathing. That was a good sign. Her blood-streaked hands held the cloth bundle tightly to her chest. He reached for it, but the bundle moved suddenly and he yanked his hand back. Something was alive in there!

The young woman’s eyes fluttered open. He could see the fatigue in them, the dimming light. He knew that look well. He’d seen it in the eyes of many during the war. He’d seen it in the eyes of his own brother. She was close to death.

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

‘My name…’ She coughed, and a trickle of blood dripped from the corner of her mouth. ‘My name is Gwynedes Lucolis. Please, you have to help.’

‘Let me get something to treat your wounds.’

‘There’s no time.’ She wiped the blood from her lips with the back of one hand. ‘You… you have to keep her safe.’

‘Keep who safe?’

Gwynedes held the cloth bundle out towards him. ‘The baby. Oshi. Her mother was my sister–’ She winced, her body stiffening in pain. ‘Please, help her.’

‘A baby?’ Kavel stared at the bundle, sobering up fast. ‘Wait, what happened?’

‘Villagers… killed her mother,’ Gwynedes said. She winced again, gritting her teeth against the pain. He could tell she didn’t have much time left. ‘Now they’re… after the baby. I tried to keep her safe. Now you have to. There’s… no one else.’

He stared at the bundle. It was wrapped so tightly he couldn’t see anything of the baby inside, but beneath the cloth a shape squirmed.

‘Take her,’ Gwynedes said again, her voice just a whisper. ‘Help her. Please.’

Her eyelids drooped. Her arms started to go limp. Kavel snatched the bundle from her before she dropped it, then watched in horror as she slumped over onto her side, dead.

He looked at the bundle in his hands, felt body heat through the cloth and something moving inside. A baby. Oshi, Gwynedes had called her. She’d begged him to keep Oshi safe, but why? Why had villagers killed the baby’s mother? Why were they after the baby too?

There was only one explanation he could think of, but it was almost too horrific to contemplate – the baby was a mutant. When the villagers came to kill her, the mother had tried to save her child’s life and died in the process.

Slowly, nervously, he began to unwrap the cloth from around the infant, bracing himself for whatever grotesque mutations he would find. But when he uncovered her head and freed her tiny hands to reach up and touch his weathered face, she didn’t look any different from a normal human child. It was only when he looked closer that he spotted it – a small series of bumpy ridges along her forehead. They were barely noticeable. Was this all it took for the villagers to become bloodthirsty butchers, so eager to murder a mutant they killed anyone who stood in their way? Were these the same people he’d fought the orks to protect? The same people he’d lost his leg for? The thought sickened him, and for once he was glad he lived apart from the rest of them.

Kavel inspected the wounds on Gwynedes’ body to try to get an idea of what had happened to her, but all he could tell was that she’d been stabbed half a dozen times. It was a testament to her strength and dedication that she’d survived as long as she had.

In the light of the double moons, he buried Gwynedes in a patch of open ground beside a grove of twisted, knotted snarltrees, and fashioned a marker for her grave from their thin, interwoven branches. Holding Oshi in one arm, he struggled to remember the prayer for the dead he’d been taught as a child. He hadn’t known Gwynedes in life, but it didn’t seem right not to say something. She’d been brave and strong and had protected the baby for as long as she could. She deserved that much. But in the end all he could remember were the last two lines of the prayer, so that was what he said:

‘May the light of the Emperor guide you and protect you from further harm. For the Eternal Emperor is the fire at the heart of all things, and comfort is only His to give.’

After digging the grave, he was exhausted. He had a few more hours before the sun came up, so Kavel decided to go back to bed and get what rest he could. He pulled the covers over his legs and, by habit, reached for the amasec bottle on the bedside table. But Oshi cooed at him from the other side of the bed, where he’d put her on top of her bundle, and he stopped to turn and look at her. Her big eyes blinked at him under the tiny ridges on her forehead. She smiled toothlessly, and then giggled when he patted her belly, and for the first time in years Kavel fell asleep without drinking a drop.

Oshi woke him with hungry cries several hours later, when the sun was already high. Kavel stumbled out of bed to find her something to eat, but he didn’t know what to give her. There was a bottle of siltberry juice in the cold storage unit, made from berries that grew in the sediment of Ballard’s Run’s rivers. They looked disgusting, like shrivelled, shrunken heads, but they tasted sweet and were rich in nutrients and vitamins. Would that stop the baby from crying? He put some on the tips of his fingers and let her drink it that way. The siltberry juice quieted her, thankfully. When Kavel caught his reflection in a mirror on the wall, he was surprised to see that he was smiling. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d smiled.

She fell asleep again in his arms, and he gently placed her back on the bed. His smile faded. What was he doing? What did he know about raising a child? He was a farmer. An ex-soldier. A cripple and a drunk. He’d never taken care of a baby. He didn’t know the first thing about it. Who was he kidding? He had a farm to operate and Oshi would only get in the way.

And what about Gwynedes? He didn’t actually know her, did he? How could he be sure she was telling the truth? For all he knew, she might have stolen Oshi from the baby’s rightful mother. But even if she was telling the truth, wasn’t he putting himself in danger by harbouring a mutant?

He couldn’t keep her. He would be a fool to try. Tomorrow he would bring Oshi back to the village, he decided, and let them do with her as they saw fit. Maybe the villagers would take pity on her or maybe they would kill her, but whichever way it went, at least he wouldn’t be responsible.

Today, however, he still had work to do. The warrior weed wasn’t going to pull itself, and he needed to salvage as much nafar as he could before his crops withered and died. Not wanting to leave Oshi in the house alone, he fashioned a wheeled cart from some wood he’d piled behind the farmhouse and lined it with soft blankets so he could take her out into the fields with him.

Oshi watched him intently as he struggled to pull up weed after weed, each one more stubborn than the last. When he took a break to rest, he picked up a fallen nafar leaf and tickled her chin with it. She giggled, so he did it again, enjoying the high, easy sound of her laughter. Finally, he let the leaf fall to the ground and got back to work. But a breeze must have caught the leaf, because it lifted off the ground and fluttered through the air into Oshi’s hand. She poked her own chin with it and laughed again. Kavel chuckled, shook his head, and thought nothing of it.

That night, he put Oshi down on her side of the bed and crawled into his own. The baby smiled at him and cooed, and the heaviness in Kavel’s chest – a heaviness he’d got so used to he couldn’t remember life without it – seemed to lighten. As much as it surprised him to admit it, he’d enjoyed having her with him today. He hadn’t felt lonely, and when he’d taken breaks to feed her more siltberry juice and some of his own nutrient paste, he’d felt a sense of purpose he hadn’t felt in a long time – not since he’d been with the militia, tasked with protecting his people.

He decided there was no rush to take her back to the village. He yawned and lay back on his pillow. Maybe tomorrow he would build a crib for her.

A moment later he was asleep, only vaguely aware that for the second night in a row he hadn’t wanted to drink himself into oblivion.

Kavel woke in the middle of the night, certain he’d heard someone call his name. He blinked and looked over at Oshi. The baby was sound asleep. He was on the verge of dismissing it as a dream when he heard the voice again.

‘Kavel Trake!’

It was coming from outside. He wiped the sleep from his eyes, got out of bed, and pulled on yesterday’s dirty clothes. He looked out the window by the front door, and in the dark he saw five figures standing outside his house.

‘Who’s there?’ he called.

The clouds parted in the night sky, revealing both moons and bringing light to the darkness. Now that he could see their faces, he recognised the five men outside. They were villagers he’d known all his life, people he’d seen at the supply store or the processing plant. In the centre stood a man Kavel knew right away as Algeros Stormhand, a soldier he’d fought beside when the orks came. Algeros was older now, just as Kavel was, but he was still big and heavily muscled.

‘Algeros, it’s been a long time,’ he called through the window. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘We’ve come for the child, Kavel,’ Algeros said. ‘Don’t make this any harder than it has to be.’

Kavel frowned. It hadn’t taken them long to follow Gwynedes’ trail to his farm. He’d been foolish to hope for more time.

‘She’s barely a mutant, Algeros,’ he said. ‘There’s no need for this. Just leave.’

Algeros ignored him. ‘Don’t make the same mistake the child’s mother did. Don’t try to stand in our way. She’s all we want, Kavel. Give her to us, and we’ll go. No more blood needs to be shed.’

He looked back at Oshi sleeping on the bed. It would be easy enough to hand her over. He’d only had her for a day, and she wasn’t even his child. But he couldn’t, because he knew what would happen if he did. Algeros and the others would kill her, probably right here, right in front of him. Just the thought of it made him angry, made him want to fight.

‘No deal,’ Kavel called. ‘Now get off my farm before I call the captain of the militia!’

‘You’ve been out here too long, Kavel. You’re out of touch,’ Algeros smiled wolfishly. ‘I am the captain of the militia.’

Then he nodded to the others, and together the five men started towards the house.

Kavel looked desperately around him for something he could use to keep them back. His eyes found the amasec bottle on the bedside table. He grabbed it and unscrewed the top, then picked up an old rag from the floor and quickly stuffed it into the mouth of the bottle. He struck a match and set it to the rag. He ran to the door, yanked it open, and threw the burning bottle at the approaching men. It broke on the ground and the fire spread outwards with a roar, catching three of the men and a row of Kavel’s nafar plants. The three men went up in flames, but to Kavel’s horror they didn’t scream or flail or even stop walking. All five of them continued marching towards the farmhouse until finally the three burning men collapsed to the ground, dead. Algeros and the one remaining villager didn’t look frightened or concerned. They didn’t so much as blink.

Kavel slammed the door and locked it, but he knew that wouldn’t hold off the two remaining men for long. He ran to the chest at the back of the house, passing Oshi, who by some miracle was still sleeping soundly on the bed. Unfortunately, that was about to change. With a loud bang, the door shook in its frame as the men put their shoulders into it. Kavel threw open the chest and pulled out his shotgun. There was more banging against the door. Part of the doorframe splintered, and then the door burst open. Awakened by the noise, Oshi began to mewl and squeal.

The two men stormed inside. Algeros dashed for Oshi while the other villager ran at Kavel. Remembering he’d already pumped a round into the chamber last night when he thought voraks were eating his crops, Kavel didn’t waste a moment before firing off a shot. It struck the villager in the arm, shredding his skin to a pulpy mess, but the man didn’t cry out. He didn’t even flinch. Kavel pumped another round into the chamber, but the man was upon him before he could pull the trigger.

The man spun and hit Kavel in the face with his elbow, knocking him backwards. Kavel tripped over his metal prosthesis and fell on his back. The man loomed over him. Kavel swung the shotgun up and pulled the trigger. The blast hit the villager in the chest, punching a red hole through his torso and blowing him across the room. He didn’t get back up.

Kavel saw Algeros moving towards the door, carrying Oshi. He got up and started after him, but his haste made him clumsy. He tripped over his prosthesis again and fell to the floor. By the time he got back up and hurried outside, he didn’t see Algeros anywhere. He scanned the edge of his fields, shielding his eyes from the fire as a section of his crops and the three dead bodies burned. He listened for Oshi’s cries, but for some reason the baby had decided now was the perfect time to be quiet. Something heavy struck him in the back of his good leg, and the next thing he knew he was on his belly with a mouthful of dirt. Algeros came around from behind him, cradling Oshi in one arm, and kicked the shotgun away from him.

‘You should have handed over the child when you had a chance,’ he said. ‘I was seriously considering letting you live, for old times’ sake.’

‘Mighty nice of you,’ Kavel said.

Algeros shook his head. ‘Being a farmer all these years has made you soft and weak.’

‘Give her back to me.’ He struggled to stand, but the metal prosthesis swung out from under him and he fell into the dirt again.

‘Or what?’ Algeros asked. ‘Look at you. You’re pathetic.’

‘Or I’ll take her back.’ This time, Kavel managed to stand.

‘I see.’ Algeros put Oshi down on the ground. ‘If you insist on going to your grave tonight, Kavel, so be it.’

Kavel started towards him, ready to beat Algeros to a pulp with his bare hands if he had to, but Algeros was ready for him. Before Kavel had a chance to take a swing, Algeros bent and rammed his shoulder into Kavel’s gut. Kavel fell back with the wind knocked out of him. Before he could catch his breath, Algeros spun and kicked him square in the chest. The blow sent him tumbling across the ground to land sprawled out near a pile of farming tools.

Kavel fought to control his breathing. The pain in his side was sharp and intense. He wondered if he’d broken any ribs. Before he could get up, Algeros appeared in front of him, silhouetted by the fire. He straddled Kavel and put his hands around his throat. Kavel batted at him with his fists, but it was no use. Algeros squeezed harder, gritting his teeth, choking him.

Kavel reached into the pile of tools, desperate to find anything he could use as a weapon. His fingers closed around the handle of something he couldn’t see, but which he hoped would be good enough. He hefted it, saw it was a trowel, and with the last of his strength drove its flat, pointed blade into the side of Algeros’ head. The trowel pierced deep into his skull, and Algeros fell to the ground.

Kavel rolled over onto his uninjured side, coughing and sucking in air until he was strong enough to stand. He ran over to Oshi and picked her up. He looked her over for any injuries, then breathed a sigh of relief when he saw she was unharmed.

She started to wail as he carried her back inside.

Kavel gathered everything he needed from the farmhouse: his shotgun, which he reloaded back up to eight rounds using the last of his shells; a change of clothes; the few credits he had squirrelled away to buy amasec; and as many tubes of nutrient paste as he could fit in his bag. More people would come soon. If Algeros Stormhand really was the captain of the militia, there was no way his disappearance would go unnoticed. More would follow, searching for Algeros and his men, and most likely looking to finish what they’d started.

His only chance was to run. Take Oshi and leave the farm before they came. But run where? His mind worked through the options quickly. To the north and south of him were rivers too wide to cross without a boat. If he went east, he would be entering the heart of the village, but if the captain himself had come for Oshi it meant nobody there could be trusted. To the west was the space port. That was his best bet. If he could pay someone for passage on their freighter, he and Oshi could get lost among the stars where no one would find them. But it was a risky plan. There was no way to know if anyone he approached at the space port could be trusted not to try to kill Oshi. On top of that, he’d never gone off-world, and his head swam with the stories he’d heard of the horrors that waited out there, things that made even the orks seem tame by comparison. But to stay on the farm was too great a risk. He had to take the chance.

Oshi hadn’t stopped crying since he’d brought her inside. Kavel took his bag and shotgun in one hand and Oshi with the other, and ran outside to where his truck was parked. Its hold was empty; he’d brought his last harvest of nafar leaves to the processing plant a couple of days ago. This was a good thing: with an empty hold the truck would move faster. He tossed his bag and shotgun into the cab, then placed Oshi in the passenger seat. He tried to get her to stop crying, but nothing seemed to work. After what she’d been through, he couldn’t blame her. He only hoped she would cry herself to sleep soon. He settled into the driver’s seat and hit the ignition switch. Nothing happened. He hit it again, and a third time, but the engine remained silent.

‘Throne,’ he cursed. He hopped out of the cab and opened the engine covering. Inside was a mess of cut wires and smashed gears. Kavel cursed himself. Before they’d come to the farmhouse, Algeros and his men had made sure to disable his only vehicle. He should have known.

He would have to walk. It meant being exposed and vulnerable. It meant trusting he could keep his balance on his metal prosthesis for an extended period of time while travelling over rough terrain. But what other choice did he have?

He took Oshi out of the cab. She squirmed and fought him, trying to break out of his grasp, but he kept a tight grip on her. What was wrong with her? He’d never seen her like this before. There was no way he could carry her and the bag, so he stuffed a tube of nutrient paste in one pocket, his credits in the other, and took the shotgun. He started walking west towards the space port as quickly and carefully as he could. The last thing he needed now was to trip over his damned peg leg. Without the truck he couldn’t take the road, but that was just as well. It was easier to hide in the fields and forests.

When he reached the edge of his farm, he turned to look back. The fire was growing. The amasec that had acted as an accelerant had burned off, and all that remained of the three villagers who’d caught fire were smouldering bones, but the flames were spreading through his crops, devouring them. Soon everything would be gone – the nafar, the warrior weed, maybe even the farmhouse. Not that he cared. He wasn’t planning on coming back. He’d grown to hate this place over the past ten years. He wasn’t going to miss it. It had been as much a prison as a farm, and his only regret was that he didn’t have time to watch it burn.

He felt a pang of regret about leaving Rahmiel behind to burn with the crops, but that was all. He ducked into the woods. He travelled slowly, making sure to find his footing on the uneven forest floor so he didn’t fall, and cradling Oshi close to his chest. She wailed and screamed, tears and mucus wetting her face. Kavel gritted his teeth. If she didn’t shut up, she would lead the others right to them. But nothing calmed her – not humming to her, not rocking her, not changing the way he held her. She was like a blaring siren in the night, a noisy homing beacon, and all he could do was pray no one heard.

There was only one building between his farm and the spaceport, and that was the processing plant – a massive industrial structure that covered two hundred thousand square feet. When he came out of the woods, the ferrocrete and plasteel facility towered over him. Small lumens illuminated the perimeter of the plant like tiny stars.

They were waiting for him on the grounds of the plant, silhouetted in the lights, a group much bigger than the one that had come to his farmhouse. Kavel stopped in his tracks, his heart jackhammering against his ribs. They stood as still as statues, but he knew if he turned and ran he wouldn’t make it far. There were just too many of them. He counted more than thirty men and women in the crowd before he gave up.

A cloaked man stepped forward, his features hidden in the darkness of a hood. Kavel assumed this was their leader. ‘Give us the child.’

Kavel put Oshi down on the ground at his feet, then pumped a shell into the chamber of his shotgun. ‘Come and get her. I killed the last bunch who tried. I’ll kill you, too.’

But he only had eight rounds in the shotgun, and there were more than eight of them. A lot more. If he fought, it was doubtful he would win or even survive. But at least he would die a soldier. At least he would die serving a noble purpose, protecting an innocent child from those who would do her harm, rather than wasting away on some damned farm from boredom and loneliness.

The villagers started towards him. Kavel levelled his shotgun and fired off a round, hitting one man in the chest. The man fell, but the others kept coming, so focused on Kavel that they trampled right over their fallen comrade’s body. He shot into the crowd again and again. Some fell and were stepped over, while others just kept coming, as if the pain didn’t matter. It was as though the whole village had gone insane and wouldn’t rest until they’d murdered Oshi.

There was only a single round left in the shotgun. As the villagers closed the distance between them, Kavel found he had a clear shot at their leader. Maybe he was the one responsible for all this; maybe if he took the leader down the others would stop. He aimed the shotgun at the hooded man, praying he wouldn’t miss. His finger tightened on the trigger, but suddenly the weapon flew out of his hands, wrenched from his grasp by an unseen force. It spun through the air to land thirty feet away, well out of reach. Kavel stared after it in wide-eyed confusion and terror. What in the warp…?

The villagers poured over him in a swarm. He tried to fight back, swinging his fists wildly, but he was overpowered quickly. A crush of bodies brought him to the ground. He watched helplessly as an elderly woman picked up Oshi and carried the baby to the hooded man.

‘No!’ Kavel cried. ‘Leave her alone!’

The villagers lifted him off the ground and dragged him forward. They threw him down in front of the hooded man, who cradled Oshi in the crook of one arm.

‘Don’t hurt her,’ Kavel begged. ‘She’s just a child.’

‘I have no intention of hurting her,’ he said. With his free hand, he pushed back his hood, revealing a bald, bulbous head with ridges on his forehead that matched Oshi’s, although his were much more pronounced. His eyes were big and piercing, and his skin had a slight purplish tint to it. ‘My name is Drameon, and I’ve come for what’s rightfully mine. What’s rightfully ours.’

Kavel looked up at him in confusion. ‘Yours?’

Drameon smiled. Kavel found it a chilling sight. ‘A child belongs with her father, don’t you think?’

One of the villagers hit Kavel on the back of the head, and everything went black.

When Kavel came to, he was being carried by villagers through a dark tunnel lit by torches along both walls. From somewhere above them, he heard a familiar, muffled sound – the low thrum of a machine-automated harvester. He was underground, somewhere below the vast farmland of Ballard’s Run. How long had he been unconscious? How far had they carried him?

The back of his head flared with a sharp pain where he’d been struck. Why go through all the trouble of knocking him out and bringing him here? Why not just kill him? Drameon already had what he wanted. He had Oshi.

Drameon walked alongside him with Oshi in his arms. The baby looked content, sucking on her fingers and smiling her toothless, drooling smile at the villagers.

The tunnel opened onto a huge, subterranean cavern lit with more torches. In the flickering torchlight Kavel saw hundreds of figures scattered throughout the vast space; some gathered on rocky ledges while others watched from the side or clung to the massive stalagmites that rose from the ground like teeth. More shapes moved in the shadows, avoiding the torchlight altogether.

Kavel bit back a cry of terror. The occupants of the cavern weren’t human. Some were creatures the likes of which he’d never seen before – hideous, deformed beings with bulbous, inhuman heads and three or four arms sprouting from their crouched bodies. Some looked closer to human, hybrid abominations like Drameon that were less hunched and had human-like facial features, although a few of them still sported an extra arm, or hands in the shape of claws.

There were humans among them as well, more people Kavel recognised. Was the whole blasted village here? He looked up and saw a group of women standing on a ledge, their eyes glazed over, their pregnant bellies swollen.

‘You sick bastard!’ Kavel yelled, turning to Drameon. ‘What have you done to them?’

‘A family that does not grow will die,’ Drameon said. ‘There must always be new generations.’

A family? Kavel looked at the bizarre creatures again. This was Drameon’s family?

The villagers set him down. He tried to push through them and run back the way they’d come, but he was easily overpowered. They shoved him against a tall stalagmite and tied his hands together in front of him. Something hissed in his ear. He turned his head and saw one of the three-armed creatures staring at him with sinister, glaring eyes.

‘Long ago, one of my ancestors served the Imperium,’ Drameon said. ‘During that time, he had the great honour of encountering Grandsire Mordephus on a distant world. Grandsire bestowed upon him his sacred kiss, consecrating him with his exalted genetic code. When he returned home, he and his wife had children, and those children had children, and so on. Each generation inherited an echo of that sacred kiss, until finally… Oshi. The child foretold. The one we’ve been waiting for. She will be our prophet, her word will be law, a living extension of Grandsire Mordephus’ will. She is the culmination of a plan that spanned generations, the result of a union between our kind and a very special one of yours.’ He tickled the baby under her chin. Oshi laughed and smiled. ‘Now that we finally have her back, she will usher in a new age.’

The three-armed creature inched closer, hissing its hot breath across Kavel’s neck. He cringed as it opened its wide mouth. Its long, wriggling tongue lolled out like a snake from its den.

‘I don’t believe you,’ Kavel said. ‘Oshi’s not like you. She’s not like these things.’

‘Grandsire’s genetic code blesses her just as it blesses the rest of us,’ Drameon said. ‘Soon this whole planet will be blessed with it, and the broodmind will sweep across Ballard’s Run.’

The creature that had been inching closer to him backed away, and behind it Kavel saw again the hundreds of creatures, hybrids and villagers; the women who were carrying more of these monstrosities in their wombs. He found himself thinking of the warrior weed, the way it had come to Ballard’s Run from another world, found a foothold, and begun to spread. These creatures were no different. His village was already infested, but what about the rest of the planet? How far had they spread?

He shook his head. ‘We’ll fight you. We’ve fought worse than you before and won.’

‘How can you fight what is inevitable?’ Drameon said with a grin that chilled Kavel to the bone. ‘We really ought to thank you for keeping Oshi safe until she found her way back to us. You did us a great service, Kavel. We would like to return the favour. Come, it’s time for you to meet Grandsire Mordephus. He has great plans for you.’

The villagers grabbed him and pulled him forward. The creatures in the cavern hissed and cheered in rapturous exaltation. Kavel nearly stumbled on his metal prosthesis several times, but the sheer size of the crowd kept him upright. They pulled him through a huge, rough-hewn archway in the cavern wall.

Beyond was another large cavern, although this one was decorated like a shrine. Heavy cloth banners hung on the stone walls, adorned with strange, unrecognisable symbols. Fires burned in huge bronze braziers. At the far end of the cavern was an enormous dais, upon which squatted a giant, nightmarish statue. The villagers brought Kavel in front of it and threw him prostrate upon the ground. They knelt in reverence around him, bowing their heads before the monstrous statue. Kavel looked up at it. Its horrific features bore no resemblance to humanity whatsoever. Nor did its body, with four long-clawed arms, two squat legs and a spiny ridge down its hunched back.

Then the statue turned its head towards him.

Kavel scrambled away from it in terror and ran back towards the archway, but he tripped over his prosthesis and fell to the floor, banging his chin against the hard, compacted dirt. He rolled onto his back and tried to stand, but discovered he couldn’t move. It felt like an invisible weight was pressing him down into the ground.

Drameon loomed over him, still holding Oshi. ‘She doesn’t want you to leave. She wants you to join us.’

‘No,’ Kavel groaned. ‘It’s not her doing this. It’s you, or that creature up there!’

Drameon shook his head. ‘Poor Kavel, too closed-minded to see what’s right in front of his face.’

Oshi squealed, and a long shred of nafar leaf peeled itself off the bottom of Kavel’s boot. It floated through the air up to Kavel’s face, then rubbed itself against his chin in a clumsy imitation of the way he’d tickled her chin on the farm with a similar leaf. Oshi laughed as the leaf dropped to the ground, but Kavel went cold.

Gods above, it was her! She was exactly what Drameon said she was – a psyker. He thought back to the way the shotgun had torn itself out of his hands before he could kill Drameon. That had been Oshi’s doing. She’d wanted Drameon to live, because he was her father. Because she’d wanted him to bring her home.

‘No,’ he said again, but he knew it was true.

Oshi refused to let him get up. She wouldn’t even let him move as the hulking monstrosity leapt off the dais, its heavy footfalls shaking the ground beneath him. It took another thudding step, its great size allowing it to cross the space between them in a single stride. It loomed over him. Kavel stared up at it, desperate to run, to crawl, to get away any way he could, but he couldn’t move an inch. Its long tongue snaked out of its mouth, slithering towards his face. He saw a strange, pronged hole at the tip of its tongue, and he struggled again, trying to force himself to move, but it was no use. Oshi held him fast.

‘Receive Grandsire’s kiss and be sanctified,’ Drameon said. ‘There’s nothing to fear. It is the kiss of life in a galaxy teeming with death. It is the kiss of peace in an age of endless war. It is the kiss of painless belonging in an existence that knows only suffering and misery.’

The creature’s tongue lowered towards Kavel’s mouth. He turned his head, shutting his jaw tight, but a force much stronger than him turned his head back and prised his mouth open. As the creature’s tongue slid into his mouth, he heard Oshi squeal with delight. The tongue tasted like old, slimy leather, and Kavel gagged in disgust. But it kept moving, forcing its way into Kavel’s throat and down his gullet. He felt it slide like a worm into his stomach and deposit something there, something as cold and sharp as a shard of glass.

When the creature pulled its tongue out of him, retracting it into its toothy maw, Oshi finally released him. Kavel rolled over onto his hands and knees, and vomited.

‘Tell me, Kavel, what has the Imperium of Man ever done for you?’ Drameon asked.

Kavel heaved and spat, but he could still feel it inside him.

‘You sacrificed your leg for them, and they don’t even know your name,’ Drameon said. ‘You toiled in the fields for them, and all they did was take your bounty for themselves.’

It spread through him like a fever, growing stronger by the second.

‘You owe them nothing, Kavel. Not your loyalty, and certainly not your life.’

Kavel shook his head, trying to clear away the encroaching clouds that threatened to smother his thoughts.

‘There is another way,’ Drameon said. ‘Our way.’

Kavel rose from the ground, the pain and confusion gone. Where a gigantic, hideous monstrosity had stood before, he saw only a benevolent and godly figure beaming down at him. He looked around himself at Drameon and the villagers and the waves of creatures flowing into the shrine, and his heart lifted. After all these years, he wasn’t alone any more. He thought he’d lost the last of his family to the orks, but he had a new family now, one that was much bigger than any he’d known before. And with his new family came a new purpose, one that was much more worthwhile and fulfilling than being a nafar farmer.

Because now he understood why he’d been kept alive, why Oshi wanted him to join them. He was her protector. He’d already been her protector, proving to her that he could keep her safe from anyone who meant her harm, and now he could continue to do that for her.

His new family gathered around him, welcoming him. Drameon handed Oshi to him, and he held her, the child Grandsire Mordephus and the rest of the broodcoven had waited so long for. She was beautiful, and one day she would be the leader of their congregation, speaking on behalf of their grandsire. But until then, Kavel would protect her – he would protect all their children, until they grew big enough to fulfil their destiny of domination.

On this world and every other.

Tithemarked

Steven Sheil

Petras tugged at the sleeves of his tunic, pulling them down to cover his hands so they wouldn’t show, at the same time using his feet against the stone floor to push his body tight into the corner where the wheat sacks were piled. He was shivering with the cold of the night, and with fear, and had to clamp his jaw shut tight to stop his teeth from rattling. His heart jumped as he heard the sounds of his brothers entering the grain store – the loud thwack of the door as it was slammed back against the wall.

‘You see him?’ That was Grandon, the eldest, their father’s favourite.

‘No. But he could be hiding, the little wretch.’ Bron, the second son, the strongest, the one Petras was most scared of. He still carried the bruises of when Bron had held him over the old trough, dipping him head first into the foetid water, only letting him go when they had heard the calls from the gates of the village, the urgent, terrified announcements that They had arrived.

Had that been only yesterday? It seemed longer ago, another lifetime almost. Everything had changed in the moment that his father had come to him and told him of the sacrifice he must make for the tithe. Since then there had just been running and hiding and the petrified fluttering of his heart.

His tunic matched the colour and texture of the grain sacks, giving him some camouflage against discovery, but he was finding it hard to hold his breath for so long in amongst the dust and draught of the store. He could hear Bron’s heavy footsteps on the stone floor, could sense that he was circling the piles of grain sacks, could almost feel his gaze upon him. Petras closed his eyes, held his breath, tried to shrink himself even smaller than his already tiny body. He was the youngest, the runt of the family, not blessed with the sturdiness of his brothers, or the age-wrought hardiness of his father. To Bron and Grandon he was little more than a dog to be kicked around for fun. But perhaps now, his smallness would be his saving, would protect him from the hands and from the knife.

It was not to be.

‘Ah!’ shouted Bron, as he pulled away the sack closest to Petras and reached in a thick hand to grasp the boy’s bony shoulder. ‘Thought you could hide from us, did you?’

Bron dragged Petras out of the corner and threw him down on the stone floor. Petras looked up, searching for an escape route, but Grandon barred the way to the door.

‘Please,’ said Petras, his eyes darting from one boy to the other, ‘please don’t make me.’

Grandon stepped forward and grabbed Petras’ wrist, yanked him to his feet. With his other hand, he bunched Petras’ tunic and pulled him close.

‘It’s for the good of us all,’ he said.

The mud path from the grain store was frosted into hard peaks which scraped against Petras’ legs as his brothers dragged him away. One of Bron’s thick hands covered his mouth to stop him from yelling, and over the top of his callused thumb Petras could see the torches that marked the entrance to the village and the dark shadow that stood waiting between them, the curve of its bare skull backlit by the torchlight, the long sword in its fleshless hand. In front of that dark shadow sat another – a heavy oaken chest filled near to the brim with fresh white bones. At the sight, Petras struggled even more, but his brothers’ grip was firm. There was to be no escaping what was coming.

Their father was waiting for them as they entered the house. The table had been cleared and the heavy cleaver which his father used for meat was lying next to the stone he used to sharpen it. When he saw his father, Petras writhed wildly, pleaded with his eyes. His father shook his head.

‘Nothing else for it,’ he said. ‘The tithe must be completed, to the very last bone. What else would you have me do? The graveyard has been emptied, the dying have been sacrificed and still we are short. Should the master of the village not be prepared to do what he must for the sake of his people?’

Grandon and Bron dragged Petras forward and threw him down face first across the table. Bron grabbed his left arm and pulled back the tunic sleeve almost to the shoulder. Grandon pulled his hand to lay flat, resting his weight against the wrist. Petras’ father picked up the cleaver. Petras twisted his neck to look up at him. Tears were in his eyes.

‘Please, father, please!’

A curl of contempt came to his father’s lips. ‘Have some strength, like your brothers. We each must play our part. You want the whole village to be slaughtered for the want of a handful of bones?’

He put his hand against Petras’ forearm, then lowered the blade of the cleaver to the point just above Petras’ elbow, marking the spot. Petras felt the sharpness of the metal against his skin and a panic went through him. He tried to move, but the weight of his brothers held him tight to the table. His father lifted up the cleaver, raised it high…

And brought it down to sever his son’s flesh with all the force he could muster.

Petras jerked awake, instinctively reached to protect his left arm, and instead felt the scar-marked stump, the same stump which he’d felt there every day of these last twelve years since his father had used his limb to complete the Ossiarch Bonereaper’s tithe. The sky above him was turning a dirty pink with the dawn, the same pink that had lingered on the bones after his father had scraped them clean of flesh and sinew. He remembered huddling there on his bed, feeling the dull ache of the cauterised wound, still somehow feeling the hand he no longer had, phantom fingers twitching as he watched his father at the table with the flensing blade. He shivered at the memory and pulled his blanket tight around him.

The campsite fire was burning low, but he was too far from it in any case to properly feel its warmth. Even amongst the other vagabonds who comprised this makeshift camp in the woods he was an outsider. It wasn’t just the fact of his missing limb that made him a pariah – there were many others, survivors of war and battle who had experienced similar losses – but the nature of how it came about. ‘Tithemarked’ they called him, as though the violence that had been perpetrated upon him had forever linked him to those that had demanded it. Fear of the Ossiarch legions was palpable all through Shyish, but especially so in these parts, which were long overdue the return of the tithe masters. Petras and his missing arm were not only a reminder of what could befall them, but also, in their eyes, a potential harbinger of their arrival, as though his bone – now moulded with the others from the tithe, into the body of an Ossiarch warrior – would be led eventually back to its source.

And so they kept a wary eye on him, forbade him to share of their food and demanded that he stay ever a stone’s throw away from the rest of them, while still allowing him to share their camp. This was done only out of superstition that any attempt they made to harm or repel him might bring the Ossiarch hordes down upon them.

Petras slept a while longer, until the dim morning sunlight, split into raking beams by the trees around him, lit the camp. Then he gathered up his blanket and the knapsack he used as a pillow, chewed on the last stale crust of bread that he’d saved and set out for the path. The other vagabonds murmured amongst themselves as he left. The last of them – a big, bearded man who reminded Petras of his brothers – hawked a globule of spit into his throat as he passed, and Petras felt it land against his shoulder. He didn’t stop, didn’t turn back, just walked on. It was no worse treatment than he was used to.

He walked for an hour before he saw another human. The path here was potholed and rock-strewn, treacherous for any wagon or carriage. But at the point where it widened and joined another, wider track, he found a merchant sat eating his lunch on a rock, his horse and cart beside him. Petras approached, keeping his missing arm out of sight, letting the loose folds of the cloak hide its absence.

‘Sir?’ he said as he approached. The man – older, heavier, with a dark beard flecked with grey – looked up at him with suspicion, the knife he held to cut the apple in his hand tightening in his grip. Petras held out a hand in greeting, kept his shoulders hunched as though to show he was no threat.

‘What is it?’ said the man. ‘If it’s food you want, there is none. I’ve got enough for meself and no more.’

‘No, sir, I’m not here to beg. I just wanted to ask you if I was on the right path for Mortenwood.’

The hand holding the knife relaxed a little. The grey-bearded man nodded. ‘Mortenwood? Aye. Take this path.’ He gestured along the opposite way to where his carriage was pointed. ‘You’ll be there by nightfall. You got business there, boy?’

Petras shifted a little uncomfortably. He was afraid to tell the man the truth, but he was an uncommonly bad liar. ‘I’m looking for a man named Hestane, he’s a smith, he–’

‘I know what he does,’ said the man, cutting in. ‘You got need of him?’

Petras again hesitated, afraid to reveal his purpose. The bearded man laughed.

‘Don’t be afraid, boy. Here.’ He reached down and lifted the leg of his trousers. ‘See?’

The man’s foot was clad in a heavy leather boot, but the leg stretching out from its neck was not one of flesh and blood. Instead, it was crafted in a series of curved strands of iron, interwoven like the tendrils of a living vine. Petras could see the earth through the gaps in between them. At the knee, the metal parts met a curved ring which was clamped to the kneecap.

‘Taken in a bone tithe ten winters ago,’ said the man. He looked up at Petras. ‘You’re tithemarked too, ain’t you? Can’t hide it, not from a Shyish man like me. Hangs around you like a stench.’ He rapped his knuckles against his metal leg. ‘Hestane made this for me. Now all I got to worry about is rust.’ He laughed heartily, then pointed at where Petras’ cloak covered his missing arm. ‘That what you lost?’

Petras nodded. He pulled back the cloak to show the stump just above where the elbow should have been. The old man peered at it, nodded.

‘Aye, I’ve seen worse. Could be he could do something for you.’

Petras’ heart jumped at the words. He hadn’t dared let himself dream that it might be possible. But here in front of him was proof that something could be done, that he could be made, if not whole again, then something like it; that he could be granted something that approximated what had been taken from him.

‘That’s good to hear. Thank you, sir,’ said Petras.

The man had pulled down his trouser leg and was getting to his feet. He walked with a slight limp, the heaviness of his metal leg obviously impeding his gait, but without knowing the truth Petras would just have taken him for a little lame. The man headed for the front of his carriage, then turned back to Petras.

‘Tell me something, boy. You got money?’

‘Yes,’ said Petras, ‘a little.’

The old man laughed. He planted his metal foot on the step and hefted himself up onto the seat at the front of the carriage. He picked up the reins and prepared to set off. Before he went, he turned back to Petras.

‘A little won’t get you much from Hestane,’ he said. He flicked the reins, urged his horse on. As the wheels began to turn, Petras could hear his voice over his shoulder. ‘Won’t get you much at all.’

It was nearing dusk when Petras entered the gates of Mortenwood, and it was in the rapidly growing dark that he made his way through the streets to find the smith’s workshop. At last he heard the thump and thwack of hammer against hot metal and saw the orange glow spilling out from a doorway which told him that he’d found his destination.

It had been years since he had first heard of the smith who could create bones from molten iron and shape them into replacement limbs. And now here he was, on the threshold. A part of him knew that a metal arm would change nothing about him, would not make up for his loss, would never be the same as having his own bones back again. But to walk with two arms by his side, to know that he was no longer a pariah, to have at least the base appearance of a human – something that others took for granted – that would be enough to change his fortunes in this world. That much he knew.

Ever since his arm had been taken from him to make up weight in the Bonereaper’s tithe, Petras’ life had been nothing but pain. First the physical ache of the wound itself, the uneven, grizzled stump where his father’s cleaver had been inexpertly wielded and the bloody flesh sealed by the press of a fire-iron: tender to the touch for many months afterwards, as though the nerves themselves were being constantly plucked by unseen fingers. Then the way he had been treated by his father and brothers. He had always been the least of them, the weakest, sickly and frail, only fit for the lowest of duties. But after the sacrifice, he had become even less than that somehow. His father – whether out of shame or disgust – could barely look at him, and with their mother lost in the birth that had produced him he was left to the tender mercies of Grandon and Bron, who now saw him as something less than human. When he ran away from home a few years later, leaving the village by hiding under the sacks of a visiting merchant, it was as much to escape the daily beatings as it was in hope of seeking the prospect of another, better life.

But there was no better life, at least none that he could find. His early years away from home were spent as a beggar, relying on the pity of others to save himself from starving. As he got older he taught himself to pick pockets, but it was no easy task with only one hand and his lack of finesse led to many beatings, and being chased out of countless towns and villages. Since then he had been a vagabond, moving across the land, taking work where he could find it, with no purpose but to survive another day. That was until he heard of the smith and his skills. Since then, Petras had gained a purpose and had dedicated himself to the task of finding the man who could fashion him a new arm, while saving every coin he had earned or found or stolen.

Now though, with the old man’s words in his ears – a little isn’t enough – he feared that his efforts might have been in vain, that all his hard work had been for nothing. The fear that always lived in his heart, planted there by his brothers and father, nurtured there by the world – that he would never, could never amount to anything – was growing once more.

No, he told himself, not this time.

And so he took a step across the smith’s threshold.

The room was lit by a deep orange glow which came from a large forge that sat at its centre. To one side stood a table, along the edge of which were gripped various intricate and elaborate clamps and tools, the likes of which Petras had never seen before. And at the table’s end, his hands clasping a poker whose burning red tip now pressed together two strands of metal in an ornate web-like piece of metalwork, stood a man.

He was short, even shorter than Petras himself, but his shoulders were the broadest that Petras had ever seen, his arms thick from shoulder to wrist, tapering to two hands which were surprisingly small and delicate. He had a short beard cropped close to his chin: it was a ruddy, almost rust colour, the same as the hair that ringed his head, leaving a large circle of bald scalp at its centre. When he looked up, as he did now, Petras could see two eyes of deepest amethyst.

‘Eh,’ he said, looking Petras up and down, ‘what wind blows you in?’

Petras felt his courage wilt under the man’s intense gaze.

‘I…’ he stammered, ‘I wanted…’

‘I know what you want,’ said the man. He put down his tools, stepped round the edge of the bench, wiped his hand on a leather cloth and nodded at Petras’ left arm. ‘Let’s see it, then.’

Petras didn’t know how Hestane had divined his problem, whether through the hang of his cloak or the balance of his posture, but whatever had revealed his affliction it was of no matter now – all that mattered was that he was here, with the master smith, and that the solution to his woes was at hand.

Petras pulled back the cloak and lifted his sleeve to show Hestane the scarred stump of his left arm. Hestane peered closely at the stump, and with a light, delicate touch used his small hands to tilt Petras’ arm this way and that, examining it closely. At one point, he used a sharp nail on his forefinger to touch a tender, reddened spot on the edge of the scarring. Petras flinched.

‘You’ll need to keep an eye on that. I’m no doctor,’ said Hestane, ‘but I’ve seen a bad case of Dead Man’s Meat grow from spots like that. I’ll wager you don’t want to lose any more of this?’ He waggled the stump up and down. Petras shook his head. ‘Keep it clean, let the air get to it once in a while. Best thing for it.’

He let go of the stump and walked away, back to the bench where his work lay. Petras could see now what the metalsmith had been forging and a jolt of excitement went through him. Hestane lifted up the piece and turned it in his hands.

The piece was a metal arm, full from fingers to shoulder, jointed at the elbow. As with the iron leg of the merchant that Petras had met earlier, the pieces were entwined like vines, giving the sense of motion and life to the static shape. As Petras watched, Hestane used his own hand to curve the jointed metal fingers into a perfect fist. He looked up, saw Petras watching and gave a snort of derision.

‘Put your eyes back in their holes,’ he said, laying the arm carefully back onto the bench, ‘this isn’t for the likes of you. This’ – he tapped the metal wrist with his knuckle, sending out a perfectly toned ringing note around the room – ‘is for a great nobleman and warrior of the Freeguilds who lost his arm fighting against the Ossiarch hordes.’

Petras gave an involuntary shiver at the mention of the name, and looked away to disguise his reaction.

‘And he’s paying a pretty penny, too. This is craftsman’s work, don’t come cheap. So…’ He leaned forward on the bench. ‘Let’s see the colour of your money.’

Petras reached into his cloak and pulled out the small bag which he had sequestered there. He handed it over to Hestane. The older man opened the bag and spilled out the coins into his palm. He nodded, put the coins back into the bag, then reached down to the bench and picked something up.

‘Here,’ he said, holding it out. ‘That’s what that lot’ll get you.’

Between his fingers sat the metal tip of a finger, roughly made, little more than a sharpened inch of iron.

‘Please,’ said Petras, ‘I’ve come so far. I’ve waited so long…’

But Hestane was already turning away, going back to his work as though Petras had completely faded from his vision, like smoke from his forge drifting into the night.

‘I’ll work for you,’ said Petras. ‘I can fetch and carry…’

‘Already have apprentices for that,’ said Hestane without looking up.

‘Then I can cook and clean. Empty your latrines. I’ll do anything,’ said Petras.

Hestane stopped, looked at him. ‘You want an arm that bad, do you?’

‘Yes,’ said Petras. He’d never wanted anything more.

Hestane held his gaze for a moment, then nodded at the fine-wrought arm on his bench. ‘Can’t promise you one of these, but you work for me, do whatever I say, no complaint, and I’ll see what I can do.’

A surge of relief went through Petras. ‘Thank you, sir, thank you!’

Hestane smiled, and there was a curl of contempt to his lip, as though Petras’ gratitude had somehow lessened him.

‘Enough of that,’ he said. ‘Thanks gets paid in deeds, not words. So…’ He nodded to the broom in the corner. ‘You’d better get to work.’

For a week, for a month and for a year, Petras’ gratitude held. He did whatever Hestane asked, whether it be cooking and bringing him his supper every day, or washing and scrubbing his clothes, thick with smoke and tar and ashes, or sweeping out the hot embers from the forge when it was needed, feeling the heat scald his cheeks and smelling the hairs on his hand burning with their touch. The apprentices who worked with Hestane, who maintained his tools and prepared the metal for his touch, treated Petras little better than his brothers had. To them, his tithe-taint rendered him barely even human, made him little more than a dog, to be shouted at and kicked and kept in his place. And like a dog, he was given just a bed of straw in the corner of the workshop, where he slept every night after cleaning the room from top to bottom.

Petras put up with every indignity, every push and shove from the apprentices’ hands, every time they tripped him on the way back from the latrine, sending him sprawling into the effluent which he would then have to clean up alone. He put up with it all because he knew that he was working towards the time when Hestane would give him what he most desired – the arm that would make him whole again.

In the odd moments between toiling at his menial tasks, Petras would watch Hestane as he worked at his craft. The blacksmith’s favourite tool was a heavy, dark hammer, blunt and flat on one side, and sharpened to a point like an axe on the other. When he pulled a piece of glowing metal from the forge and placed it on his anvil, he would use the hammer to flatten and curl the piece into whatever shape he needed, and then, by deftly twisting the handle mid-air as he lifted it, would cut the piece with the razor-sharp axe blade. For Petras it was like watching magic happen, the glowing hot metal formed by Hestane’s blows and cuts into one of the vine-like strands which would then become part of an arm or a leg – an iron sinew or an iron muscle. At night Petras dreamed of Hestane forging a limb for him, hammering, cutting, shaping and moulding, and finally presenting him with his prize.

And one year after he arrived at Hestane’s door, one year after he made the bargain, Petras again spoke to the smith and asked him when his arm – his simple metal arm – might be ready.

Hestane laughed. ‘You think you’ve earned it, do you?’

Petras nodded. ‘Yes.’

Hestane laughed again, and as he laughed, he moved over to the bench where he was working and picked something up and held it out to Petras. ‘This is what you’ve earned so far, lad.’

Petras saw what he held. A single metal finger.

Resentment boiled in his gut. ‘I’ve worked hard,’ he said. ‘Haven’t I?’

‘You’ve done a fair job, I’ll give you that,’ said Hestane. ‘But you’ve had food and lodging from me and that don’t come free. We each have to pay our way.’

‘But–’

Hestane slammed his hand down on the bench. Petras flinched. ‘I’ll hear no buts, boy. You want your arm, you keep working. That’s the deal.’

And with that he turned his back on Petras and busied himself with stirring the embers in the forge.

Over the next weeks and months the seed of resentment that had been planted in Petras began to grow and fester and maturate. He saw the years stretching out ahead of him, years of him working like a slave, years of being kicked and trodden on and treated like an animal. He’d grown used to such treatment, had come to expect it. But now, with the prize of the metal arm dangled in front of him, he felt for the first time the injustice of it all. He kept his head down, carried out his chores, didn’t complain when the apprentices pushed him down, didn’t shout back or get angry. Instead, he nurtured and fed the red-raw feeling inside of him.

One night, when he lay on the straw at the rear of the workshop, Petras was woken by voices. One he knew belonged to Hestane, but the other was new. A man’s voice, thin and reedy, with a kind of sing-song whine to it. Quietly, Petras moved through the dark shadows of the workshop towards the sound.

Peering through the shelves where Hestane kept his tools, Petras could see the smith beside his forge, talking to another man. The other was tall and thin, and hunched his back as he spoke to Hestane, as though seeking to shrink himself to his level. He held in his hands a sack, which he held open at the top, and moved from side to side in front of Hestane’s eyes, like a merchant showing off his wares. Hestane’s hand pulled something from the sack, held it up. It was an armoured chestpiece, bent and pummelled but still intact.

‘It’s a good piece, solid, hard-wearing,’ said the man.

A scavenger, thought Petras. He’d met many of them before on the road, had bartered once or twice with them to sell pieces that he’d picked up on the trail. Hestane looked the chestpiece over with a cautious eye. He rapped his knuckle against the metal and held it up to his ear to hear the low tone it made. He shook his head, dropped the piece of armour back into the sack.

‘Unsound,’ he said. ‘No good to me. What else do you have?’

The scavenger gave a sigh and closed the sack. ‘You’ve seen all I have,’ he said. Then he looked down at another, smaller sack behind him. ‘Unless… this might be of interest.’ He picked up the smaller sack and opened it, reached a hand in to pull something out. ‘Found at the battle near Skullshale River. A rare find. A rare find indeed.’

At the sight of what he held, Petras felt his stomach lurch and a pulse run through his blood, as though pricked by a sword.

Hestane’s brow creased. ‘Is that…’

‘The arm of an Ossiarch Bonereaper,’ said the scavenger, ‘forged by Mortisan craftsmen from the bones of the dead, clad in nadirite armour, now–’

‘Get it out of here!’ Hestane roared, pushing the scavenger in the chest. The scavenger tripped, half-fell over his sack. Hestane grabbed the sack and threw it at him, aiming a kick at his backside as he scrambled for the door.

‘It’s but a dead piece,’ said the scavenger. ‘Can’t bring no harm.’

‘Then take it with you,’ said Hestane, ‘and hope it doesn’t bring the Ossiarch hordes to your door.’

As the scavenger gathered together his sacks, Petras caught another glimpse of the white of the Bonereaper’s arm and a thought sprung to his mind as though conjured there. The thought that perhaps in that bag, merged within the structure of the Bonereaper’s arm, lay his own bones. That perhaps fate had brought back to him what he had thought forever lost.

Hestane pulled shut the big wooden doors of the workshop and skulked away, back towards the stairway that led up to his living quarters above. Petras could hear the scavenger just outside the door as he gathered up his pieces and began to leave.

Some instinct, some compulsion took hold of Petras and he made his way to the doors and quietly opened them. He could see the shadow of the scavenger, making his way towards the gates of the town. Petras, stepping quietly so as not to be heard, followed him.

The scavenger walked deep into the woods which lay on the outskirts of the town, and Petras had to be careful not to be heard as he followed the man through webs of branches and clusters of thorn bushes. Eventually the man entered a small clearing, at the centre of which stood a large overhanging tree, its twisted branches nearly touching the forest floor. The scavenger had to creep almost on his belly to reach the thick trunk, where he had made his camp, safe from the prying eyes of any passing brigands.

Petras moved slowly and silently so as not to alert the scavenger to his presence, and peered through the crisscrossing branches. He watched as the scavenger took a deep glug from a bottle of mead, then pulled a horsehair blanket over himself and settled down to sleep. In the minutes that it took until he heard the scavenger’s deep snores, Petras could feel the cold of the night penetrating his bones, but though he longed to move, he kept still, kept his presence unnoticed. Then he left the cover of the bushes where he had been crouching and fell to his belly to crawl beneath the overhanging branches. Across the grass towards where the scavenger slept.

In the dim light of the moon which threaded through the branches, Petras could see the sack containing the chestpiece rejected by Hestane, but not the second, smaller one that the scavenger had carried. For a moment he worried that the man was using it as a pillow, but then he saw it, sat in the darkness close to the trunk. Stepping past the sleeping scavenger, careful not to wake him, Petras picked up the smaller sack and looked inside.

The Bonereaper’s arm lay curled at the bottom of the bag, a strange, unnatural thing. The long, clean fingers of its hand sat curled at the end of a thick forearm which ended in a jagged break, like a saw’s blade. From afar, one could mistake it for a mortal arm stripped of all flesh, but up close the workmanship of the Ossiarch craftsmen was clear. The white bones had been sculpted to forge something new, something instantly unnerving, the sight of which sent a sickening lurch through Petras’ stomach. At the same time, a vivid memory also swept through him.

His father dropping the newly cleaned bone into the chest that stood at the entrance to the village and retreating in fear… The Ossiarch revenant who stood guard over the chest turning the black eye sockets of its fleshless skull onto the contents, assessing its weight, then reaching its hand down to slam the chest closed, stealing Petras’ arm forever from him–

He drew in a loud breath. The scavenger stirred beneath his bedding and Petras quickly closed the sack and stood, statue-still in the darkness beneath the tree. He waited until the scavenger’s thick snores came again, then he moved away, carrying the bag with him, clasping the heavy load tight against his heart.

Hestane’s workshop was dark and silent when Petras returned. He lit a small lamp and carried it over to the straw bed, where he laid the Bonereaper’s arm. It was a left arm, the same as he had lost, and Petras wondered again if his own bone lay somewhere merged within, such was his instinctive desire to possess it. Ossiarch magic remade souls as well as body parts, so it was told, and perhaps some part of Petras, buried deep in his marrow, had been stolen and used by their necromantic craftsmen. Perhaps it was calling out to him now, somehow.

Or perhaps, thought Petras, my mind has become addled and is playing tricks on me.

Petras wrapped the arm in the blanket that he used as a pillow, and buried it beneath the straw. He didn’t know why he had stolen it, what good it would ever do him, but something about possessing it made him feel more complete than he had done in years.

Over the next few days Petras worked hard and worked quietly. He spoke no more to Hestane, save to acknowledge each order he was given, and even the bullying of the apprentices provoked no more in him than a resigned shrug. And each night, when he was alone, he would unwrap the arm and look at it. The perfect shape of the bones, the glinting metal of the armour that was seemingly bound to them, the curve of the hand which seemed too long for the grip of a weapon. Fear and disgust mixed with desire and envy in him as he turned the arm in his hand and felt its weight. In form it far eclipsed even those that Hestane had made for his wealthy clients, being both more and less human than anything crafted from metal.

Petras found that the Bonereaper’s arm came ever more frequently to his waking thoughts, almost as though it were calling out to him from its hiding place beneath the straw. And in the darkness, as he dozed, Petras could even vouch that he heard the arm moving inside its blanket, bony fingers scraping and tapping against the stone floor, like the steady ticking of a clock as it moves towards midnight.

One night, a week after he stole it, Petras took the bone arm from its hiding place, knelt down on the straw and moved it so that it lay in a straight line, palm up. As he ran his finger along the sculpted bone, a sudden urge went through him – a hunger to feel it against his flesh. He untied the twine that kept his loose left sleeve tied, and pushed up the fabric so that it exposed his scarred stump. The fingers of the bone arm were curved towards the palm, all except the long forefinger, which curved up and pointed its tip towards him as though beckoning. Petras felt almost in a trance as he picked up the bone arm and placed its jagged edge against his stump of flesh. It felt to him as though invisible forces were guiding his movements, drawing together bone and stump, as though completing some unnatural ritual.

At the moment the bone met his scar tissue, a surge of images swept through Petras’ mind, scouring away all that had been there before – memories more vivid than any he had known, none of them his.

The splitting open of terrified faces with the swipe of his sword, showing the pink flesh within; the crush of a skull beneath his foot, brain matter clinging to his boot tread; his bone arm wrist-deep in the guts of a man, pushing forward, ever deeper, towards the heart.

At the same time came a cacophony of voices – the souls of those merged to create a single animus, now screaming in torment, inconsolably insane, railing against their impermeable bonds.

In the next moment all conscious thought was obliterated as a needle of pain spiked through him, penetrating from his stump through to every single nerve ending in his body, annihilating any other sensation. Petras threw his head back and let out a shriek of agony, stripping his throat red raw. As the cry died in his mouth, Petras slumped forward onto the straw bed and clenched his fist to beat against the floorboards beneath. It took seconds for him to hear the echo of that sound from his other side, and realise that now there were two hands beating.

He turned his eyes to the left and saw the bone arm, now somehow grafted to his own body, its jagged edge pushed into his flesh, the entwined bones snaking up and embedding themselves into his skin, merging into his stump. As he watched, the bone fist unclenched and spread its fingers wide, as though trying on a glove. He could feel the movement, but it was not him who commanded it. The animus within the bone – fractured, tortured, half-unmade – was guiding its actions, its voices screaming inside his skull.

In amongst the cacophony of thoughts there came a desperate one of his own. Cut it off. Get rid of it. The arm would never be part of him, but he could sense that if he didn’t act now, he would become part of it.

‘Who’s there? Is that you, boy?’ Hestane’s voice, coming from the stairway, boomed out across the room, his footsteps coming at the same time as he entered the workshop. ‘Well? What’s all this noise?’

Petras’ head turned towards the sound. He was holding his jaw clamped tight, trying to swallow down all the pain and fear that was inside of him, trying to suppress all the alien images and impulses which threatened to consume him from within. As he saw Hestane approach, he felt himself get to his feet and turn to face the older man – almost as though he were a puppet being pulled up by unseen hands.

He looked down at his left arm, and saw where the Ossiarch bones now wedded themselves to him, like a leech to a wound.

‘Boy?’ said Hestane, growing closer. ‘What ails you?’

As the smith stepped forward, Petras’ eyes seemed to run over every part of Hestane’s body at once and see not only the clothes and muscles, but somehow everything beneath. His gaze fell on Hestane’s upper body – the thick shoulders and arms. Good bones, said a voice inside of him.

The bone arm reached out towards the tool rack beside Petras.

Hestane saw the movement, saw the arm and felt the fear of what it meant. ‘What have you done, boy?’ he said, his voice little more than a whisper.

Petras wanted to hand him the axe, to beg him to wield it quickly and true, to cut the bone arm from him, even if it meant losing all that remained of his own limb. But the words wouldn’t come and even as he fought to speak them, he could feel the bone arm’s grip tightening on the axe’s handle.

Now is the time, said the voice inside Petras. Act now or be forever joined. But the voice was small and quiet now, lost in the screeching of the others. Petras took hold of the tool and raised it high above his head.

‘Don’t!’ cried Hestane. He raised a hand in protection, only to see the arm severed at the wrist by the sharp edge of the hammer-axe, swinging down with all its weight. Before he had time to react, to even feel the pain of the amputation, before even the blood had begun to pulse from the cleanly cut wound, the handle of the tool was spun by Petras’ bone hand and swung upwards from below, its blunt end connecting with Hestane’s chin, shattering his jaw. Hestane fell to the ground, tried to cry out, but his mouth was now a mess of mush and bone fragments, his lower teeth embedded in the roof of his mouth, his tongue just a set of flailing ribbons attached to a pulsing muscle.

Petras stood over the squirming, bloody body of the smith and felt the bone arm turn the tool’s handle in its grip, offering again the sharpened blade. The severed stump of Hestane’s arm pulsed blood onto the flagstones beneath. There was a clean cut at the wrist, which Petras now stepped on with his boot, holding it in place, ready to make another cut. Petras felt as though he were watching the whole thing from the bottom of a deep well, or as though he were a passenger in a carriage which was being driven hard to its destination, but with no control over the reins.

He lifted the axe high and swung it down, meeting the stone floor with a clang as it severed Hestane’s arm at the shoulder.

When the apprentices arrived shortly after dawn, the doors to the workshop stood open and a trail of bloody footprints led out from the stone floor to be swallowed by the mud outside. The room within was spread with blood and flesh and hair and muscle – the remnants of Hestane’s body. A small pile of half-flensed bones sat atop a pile of meat and sinew as though discarded, but of the larger bones – the arms, the shoulders – there was no sign.

It was close to dusk and a dank, heavy fog was creeping out from the forest that surrounded the village, enveloping the standing torches which marked its boundaries, sending them flickering and jumping, creating shapes and shadows in the mist.

Bron cupped his hands to his mouth and blew on his fingers to warm them, then pulled on his gloves once more and stamped the ground to waken his feet. Patrol duties on a night like this were an unpleasant part of his role as village watchman, but he knew that though the cold would soon enter and settle into his bones, it would be nothing that couldn’t be banished by a good spell in front of a warm fire. He closed his eyes and tried to picture the fireplace at home, the high mantel built years ago by his father, the crackling logs stacked high and burning red. He could almost feel the warmth against his skin. Then a noise woke him from his reverie, a sound like a heavy footfall on the forest floor, and Bron opened his eyes.

At first there was nothing, just the trunks of the trees and their low spreading branches, cloaked in the thick fog. Then, coming between the trees, moving steadily, slowly, something swinging in its hand, came the figure of a man.

Or was it a man? As it came close, Bron felt the dread he’d felt a number of times before, the cold fear that accompanied the arrival of the reapers. It can’t be time for another tithe, thought Bron. It had been only a handful of years since the last, and the village had not enough dead to fulfil their demands, nor even enough old and dying prepared to be sacrificed. The figure moved closer, and Bron could see the whiteness of bone that marked its limbs and his mind began to race. Should he run now, warn Grandon?

Then the figure lurched out of the fog and Bron realised that what stood before him was no Bonereaper, but a sick mockery of one. Apart from the left arm, clad in armour and grasping a bloodstained blacksmith’s hammer, the bones that covered the upper part of the torso were hanging with strands of flayed skin and chunks of wet flesh, and were pinned to the body beneath by what looked like metal rivets, inserted directly into the skin, leaving suppurating wounds at each point where they penetrated.

But it was the face that sat above the flesh-dripping shoulders that horrified Bron most, for it was one that he recognised.

‘Brother,’ said Bron, his throat turned dry and cracked, ‘is that you?’

Petras looked Bron up and down. His eyes – clouded and rheumy but still somehow penetrating – fell on his brother’s legs. Thick and heavy, solid and strong. Good bones, said the voice inside him.

Petras swung the hammer.

Grandon’s wife and children ran when the door burst open and Petras lurched in, wet with Bron’s blood and dragging a sack of his bones, but Grandon held his ground. He grabbed the wood-axe from beside the fire and held it clasped in both hands, feet shifting in the earth, ready to face the attack.

‘What kind of creature…’ he began, but even as his eyes moved from the bloody leg bones, freshly skinned and shorn of meat, skewered to the flesh beneath, up the red-drenched torso to the face, he realised that he would never know what had made the thing that stood before him, the thing that was once his brother. He would either die by its hand in the next few minutes, or drive it back into the night from which it came.

Grandon swung the axe with all his strength, cutting down towards the bone arm which held the hammer. But his blow was met by Petras’ hammer moving upwards with an inhuman strength of purpose. Grandon was spun backwards with the force of the contact, tripping and spilling across a chair to land on his back on the floor. As he turned to look up, he saw the hammer spin in Petras’ hand, the blunt edge become sharp, and then the whole thing come down to split him in two from crown to hip.

Grandon’s chest fell with the last breath from his lungs and Petras could see the movement in the newly exposed breastbone and ribs. They’ll make a fine body, said the voices inside him, the ones that weren’t screaming. Petras lowered himself to his knees astride his brother’s body and began to work.

‘I’m back, father,’ said Petras. But his voice was little more than a whisper now, drowned out by the other sounds that crowded him. He felt like he was growing smaller, ever smaller, and even the eyes he looked through were a great distance away. He could see earth and his hands digging, the bone hand scooping out great globules of soil and throwing it behind him in the moonlight. Then came the scrape of his bone fingers against wood, and the tearing of the rotten timbers away to reveal the face of his father. The old man’s lips seemed to be moving, trying to speak, but as Petras peered closer he could see that it was just the maggots writhing as they ate the soft, rotting flesh. A few fell onto his father’s teeth and then into the blackness of the decomposing throat beyond.

The skin had been eaten away around the eyes and Petras could see the sickly white bone of the skull beneath. Petras’ bone hand reached for the axe that lay beside him on the graveyard grass. As he raised the blade, a voice from long ago came back to him. His father’s voice.

We all must play our part.

‘You too, father,’ said Petras. ‘You too.’

The cracked and fractured pathway of bones which led to the Ossiarch fortress gave a little under Petras’ bloodstained foot. Each step he took was filled with pain, but that pain had become a kind of ecstasy for him now, so long had he lived with it. His gait was slow and heavy, each movement accompanied by the scraping of bone against bone. Grandon’s breastbone was embedded in his own now, Bron’s legs wedded to his legs. Around them, riveted to each other were the bones of others – people from his village who had found him as he left his father’s grave, vagabonds he’d met along the road, the arms of Hestane. His head was heavy too and his eyes, dry and bloodshot from lack of sleep – for how was sleep possible with the cacophony ever in his head? – looked out through dark sockets at the path he walked. He could see the gates of the fortress in front of him, could see movement in front of them.

A pair of Bonereapers marching out to meet him, their bone feet cricking and cracking against the bone path beneath.

He watched them through the cracked and broken mask that once had been his father’s skull, now pinned by rivets to his cheekbones and jaw. He could no longer speak, could not tell them that his tithe was, at last, complete. All he could do was stand and wait for their approach.

As they fell upon him with hands and weapons, making little distinction between the bones that were pinned to his flesh and those that lay beneath his skin, harvesting all with the same cold precision, Petras saw once again visions of battlefields and hoped that some part of him would move on to some other, greater destiny.

But they had no use for anything beyond his bones. As the Bonereapers carried away their haul, they left his wet flesh to rot into the earth. His weak soul, of no worth to them, they left to the winds.

Imperator Gladio

Richard Strachan

The night had been cold, and the smell of the salt marshes was still dormant as the twin suns rose, one casting a pale corona to wreathe the first with fire. In the distance came the sound of a desultory cannonade from the Basilisk batteries, and from the other side of the motor pool the battered tank platoons were turning over their engines, preparing the retreat. Captain Becherovka stowed the data-slate in the thigh pocket of his fatigues as he cut through churned and oily mud. Dread was coiled deep in his stomach. It was an old friend now, much missed when it wasn’t there.

He held out a trembling hand and gripped it with the other. Then, as he skirted a line of Chimeras, out of the mist it loomed, monolithic, the salt marshes fanning away behind it. Like an outcrop of rock, he thought, or stacked basalt slabs cooling on a volcanic plain. The camouflage paint had flecked away to reveal the brooding black metal underneath. He held his breath as he approached it, reverent, afraid.

Imperator Gladio… It was as if he were approaching a temple, a primitive homage to some appalling, vengeful god.

The main gun stretched out like a brandished sword, the squat muzzle of the Demolisher cannon beneath it glazed with afterburn. The Baneblade bristled with secondary weapons: lascannons, heavy bolters, heavy flamers, heavy stubbers. Nothing about it was light, or geared for anything other than total destruction. It was the most powerful weapon available to the Zentrale 77th Armoured Dragoons, but as Becherovka came near he felt only the wild stirrings of that dread in his stomach, the sense of fate lying heavily against him.

The Gladio… There wasn’t a super-heavy crewman in the regiment who didn’t fear that name.

‘We need to be certain that you’re up to the job,’ Colonel Radetzky had said to him the night before.

‘What he means,’ the lord commissar had drawled, ‘is will you break? The nightmares, the trauma – can we rely on you, captain?’

The command tent had been musty and close, the light stark from the lumen-globe that stuttered above the map table. Much revised, the map showed a front on the verge of collapse – troops’ positions overrun by suicidal cultist assaults, counter-attacking armoured spearheads shattered against impregnable defences. The Archenemy was rolling up the advance everywhere. The whole campaign was on the brink.

‘Yes,’ he’d said, with as much certainty as he could muster.

‘A recon team found it four days ago,’ Radetzky said. ‘It was recovered last night, refitted, rearmed. It’s in good working order, as far as we can tell. Throne knows we need every advantage we can get.’

‘The mission schematics will be cast to your slate,’ the commissar informed him. ‘Relieve, reinforce, resist. No retreat.’

‘I know the drill,’ Becherovka said, and inside he thought, Suicide mission. And the Gladio of all things. Well, it was going to come at some point. It may as well be now, when all else seems lost. A strange recklessness gripped him, and he said, ‘The Gladio. A cursed tank, for a cursed man.’

Six times the Baneblade had been dispatched in the campaign to pacify the Valgaast front. Each time it had returned with new rumours and legends accruing to it, like barnacles to a ship’s hull. Some said the first honoured lieutenant to lead it into combat had died in the command chair from an unexplained seizure; it was only when the mission was complete that the rest of the crew realised he had been dead for hours, even though he’d been speaking to them over the vox the whole time… Supposedly a reactor leak had killed the crew with rad-poisoning on its third mission, and there was a rumour that during one expedition the Gladio’s machine-spirit had turned on a supporting Leman Russ platoon and wiped them out, the gunners powerless to stop it. It was a cursed tank indeed.

‘Superstitious nonsense,’ Radetzky told him. ‘We’ve had men shot for less. The only curse is our dearth of reliable parts for repairs.’

‘Be careful, captain,’ the commissar hissed. ‘You tread on dangerous ground here.’

Becherovka strapped on his helmet and saluted. ‘Hadn’t you heard, lord commissar? I’m an expert in dangerous ground.’

He was aware of the figure he must cut as he approached the crew – diminished, faded, about a stone underweight and with a nervous tic in his eye. Lieutenant Kovar, the second-in-command and primary gunner, looked up and nodded. Stijn, the driver, her face permanently marked by the black frames of her goggles, gave a lazy salute. ‘Come to join us then, captain?’ she said. ‘The voyage of the damned…’

They all felt it, this accursed place, clawing at their minds – the endless wilds of marshland and dead mists and desolate fog. They tried to hide it with a soldier’s gallows humour, but they hated this front as much as he did.

They were a scratch team, about four short of what the Baneblade demanded. They lounged just outside its shadow, some playing knucklebones, others chaining lho-sticks and arguing the finer points of bootleg amasec stills. Kovar and Stijn he knew already; the engineer, Palivo, came recommended. The others were unknown to him, but the data-slate had given him their names: Zaj and Musil, wiry twins who would man the sponsons; Jezek, built like an ogryn and pulling double duty to load and fire the Demolisher. Becherovka himself would man the autocannon and the heavy stubber. It was a mess – it was worse than a mess – but it was what they had.

And every one of them would know him by reputation: Captain Halidar Becherovka, who’d spent four days at the bottom of the salt marshes breathing a pocket of stale air while his Stormsword’s crew drowned in the mud around him.

Under his breath he muttered the first words of the Dragoons’ battle prayer. ‘Facta non verba… Deeds, not words…’ Only deeds would kill his fear. And then he said, ‘Mount up!’

Sitting with their blank grins in the ossuary niche by the wall of honour were the seventy-three skulls of the men and women who had crewed Imperator Gladio before them – at least, the ones they’d been able to find. Becherovka touched his hand to the oldest skulls, the bone blackened with age, silty with a crust of engine exhaust. He primed the terminal by the command seat and scanned the uploaded schematics. The multi-fuel engines were brewing hard, the reactor cooking up a full-throated growl that rattled his teeth. Jezek, already shirtless, his muscled chest as thick as a flak jacket, was sweating as he settled himself by the munitions sconce on the lower gunnery deck. Zaj and Musil checked in from the sponsons; repairs had been hurried, and what was normally automated would require crewed input. Palivo confirmed the power plant was turning over smoothly, or as well as could be expected.

‘We have no tech-priest?’ he voxed. ‘No adept either?’ The network crackled, and his words were framed by a weird glissando. Becherovka squeezed the bud deeper into his ear, boosting the vox-suite on the command terminal. He glanced down the gangway from the gunnery deck to the engine room. Palivo raised a hand.

‘No,’ he confirmed. ‘Something went wrong, a neural burn-out when he tried to interface last night. The machine-spirit is truculent in this one.’

‘So they say… Well, we’ll make do,’ Palivo replied, uneasily. ‘It’s bad luck all the same.’

‘There’s no such thing as luck.’ Yes there is. ‘This is a venerable machine we have the privilege to command, but let’s not pretend it doesn’t have its… its issues.’

Stijn cheerily chipped in from the driver’s cell. ‘How many times has it been recovered now?’

‘Six,’ Becherovka said. ‘This is the seventh mission this deployment.’

‘My lucky number!’ she whooped as she gunned the engines. Then they all felt it; the implacable advance of the Gladio lurching forward. ‘At least we’ll get to find out what really happened to the other guys!’

‘That’s enough,’ Becherovka said. He measured the shake out of his voice. ‘Look, I don’t know any of you well, and some of you I don’t know at all. But we all have a job to do and I know we can do it. Trust in your guns, soldiers, and fear the Emperor’s grace. Facta non verba.’

He looked through the viewing cupolas and saw the mist curl across clean air, the cobalt sky surrendering to the cloud.

Not water, not mud, he prayed. Give me fire and thunder, but please, Emperor, don’t let me die like that again.

They moved for an hour, grinding steadily over the rough ground on the edge of the salt marshes until they came to the first ridges of the Switchbacks. Skirting them wide on the east flank, they entered the low foothills where light from the twin suns dazzled in the golden grass, making the hidden meadows seem like great reflective plates of melted sand. Bars of mist rolled down from the Switchbacks’ higher peaks and settled in the troughs and valleys. Every few minutes the crew checked in, reporting sensor readings or cogitation data from the auto-scribes in the rear hull. Becherovka moved from the main deck to the observation cupola in the turret, where he could sit in the secondary command chair. That feeling of enclosure, of being buried deep inside the tank, had been more than he could bear. At least here, with the primary hatch just above his head, it felt as if escape was only a moment away. The marshland beyond the Switchbacks was a brooding morass, chill and drear.

He tracked ghost signs on the augur screens, but they sputtered out into nothing when he switched to thermals. Although they were heading straight for it, the front seemed very far away.

‘Cold,’ Stijn voxed after a while. ‘Anyone else notice it? Feels like we dropped ten degrees here.’

Below, Jezek rummaged in his locker and pulled out his shirt. ‘Damn cold,’ he said.

‘Palivo, you hearing this?’ Becherovka said. ‘Is there something wrong with the heating system?’ The vox sputtered and crackled. ‘Can any of you hear me? This Throne-damned thing…’ he muttered.

There was a piercing shriek over the network and all of them wrenched the looped vox-buds from their ears with a curse. Becherovka dropped his as if it were burning.

Jezek’s ear was bleeding, and Palivo shouted something unintelligible from the rear hull compartment. Becherovka climbed the short steps from the turret onto the gunnery deck and looked through the gangway. The engineer stood there, top half framed in the hatchway, gesticulating over the Baneblade’s titanic roar. The adamantium tracks squealed and groaned as they crushed their way over rock and earth alike. Becherovka checked the passive auspex net, but nothing popped on the viewscreen. Just shades, ghosts, fluttered readings that smoothed out to nil. Where was the front? Where were all the things that by rights should be trying to kill them?

‘Jezek, how’s the ear?’ he bellowed down. Whether deafened by the vox-burn or by the engine’s unholy racket, the big man by the loading rack didn’t notice. Becherovka crouched to tap him on the shoulder and switched to combat-sign. Load the rack, his fingers said. Jezek nodded. Through the hatchway he waved to catch Palivo’s attention and signed for half-speed. Palivo nodded, but before he could do anything the engines cut out, and Imperator Gladio lurched to a halt.

‘Palivo?’ he said. ‘Talk to me, what’s wrong?’

‘I don’t know, sir, it’s not responding, it’s… They just died on me.’

After the apocalyptic roar of the super-heavy’s motors, the sudden silence was absolute, unnerving; cathedral-quiet. Becherovka looked back up to meet Kovar’s eyes and the gunner was mute. Jezek had frozen, crouched down by the munitions sconce.

It was creeping closer, pressing itself to the back of his neck, squeezing his stomach tight. Panic, paralysis. What do I do? he thought. The words flashed in a looped relay through his mind, faster and faster. The water was lapping at his mouth, pooling over his frantic eyes. Water, and mud, and the grasping hands of dead friends. What do I do what do I do what do I–

‘What do I do? Sir?’

Stijn, calling from the driver’s compartment. Her voice came muffled through the aperture. ‘Controls are dead here, captain. What do I do?’

Becherovka’s attention snapped back. ‘Jezek,’ he said. ‘Load the cannon.’ He tried to keep the tremble from his voice, but it made no difference, because right then the big man screamed and the sound flashed like a blade through the silence. He looked down to see the loader on his back, scrambling away from the munitions sconce, desperately trying to kick the door closed.

‘There’s something in there!’ Jezek shouted. ‘Some thing, it– Throne, it looked at me!’ He retched.

Becherovka felt adrenaline stab through his system. Kovar’s face was a mask and his hands were white-knuckled on the cannon’s guiding rail.

‘Captain?’ Palivo shouted through the hatchway. ‘What the hell’s going on in there?’

‘I don’t know, it’s… Jezek, come back to me. What did you see? What’s in there?’

Becherovka drew his laspistol. His hand was shaking again.

The door to the munitions sconce creaked back slowly on its hinge. Jezek flinched away from it. Six feet of tanker, biceps practically as big as Becherovka’s chest, and he looked like he was going to cry. Dropping down another level, Becherovka approached the locker and slowly pushed the door aside with the barrel of his pistol.

‘You see it?’ Jezek whimpered. ‘What is it?’

Becherovka lowered his gun, wiped the beaded sweat from his forehead. All he could see were the rows of shells for the Baneblade cannon, each tipped with the colour of its function. Red for high-explosive, green for armour-piercing.

‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing there.’

‘I swear, captain, I swear – and then it, it…’

No one said anything. Jezek couldn’t meet his eye – and yet, something had scared him, scared him bad. Becherovka glanced through at the ossuary niche, the stacked skulls brittle with age. What had they seen, in their time?

The silence inside the tank was almost unbearable. Some crewmen, lifers signed up for full service, lost their minds when they weren’t on active duty. They needed the deep percussion of combat, of the super-heavy crushing the land beneath its tracks, to feel even halfway whole. Becherovka wasn’t one of them. That was his secret – although 77th born and bred, he hated tanks. He hated the farmyard stink of soldiers locked in a small space for too long. He hated the feel of the walls closing in on him, the bleeding green light of low-sodium bulbs, the sour taste of recycled air. He hated it, he always had. And the walls were getting closer.

Three hundred tons. Three hundred tons of Stormsword with a great rent in its side from the plasma cannon, lurching off the track and falling into the treacherous ground, belching air as it plummeted downwards, sucking in half the salt marshes; water pouring like a tide over Hjobo and Danniver – their screams choked off, their eyes like black holes, the water lashing against his chest and forcing him like a cork in a bottle to the turret’s jammed hatch… Emperor save me, Emperor protect me!

‘Captain?’ the lieutenant said with quiet alarm.

‘Kovar?’

‘…What’s that noise?’

It started low, a creeping scurry over the side of the tank. There was a soft tap on the top hatch, and then the sense of something pressing against it.

A muffled giggle, a patter of feet, silence.

Becherovka had bitten his lip. He tasted blood. He still had the laspistol in his hand. Jezek looked at it uneasily, and then Becherovka realised he was pointing the gun straight at him. He lowered it slowly.

It started again from the rear compartment, and even on the command deck they could hear it: the faint scrabbling against the outside power vents, whispered voices – through three feet of steel. He watched Palivo follow the sound with his eyes, tracing it from the ceiling of the engine deck to the corner of the exhaust housing. The engineer looked at him, eyes wide, frozen.

‘Stijn?’ Becherovka hissed. ‘Stijn!’

‘Yes, captain?’

Her voice was thick with fear.

‘Close the driver’s hatch,’ he said. ‘Seal us in.’

They were watching him; Kovar and Jezek, Palivo along the walkway. This was command, he thought. Make a decision, even if it’s the wrong one.

He climbed back up to the secondary command chair and checked the cupolas, cycling through thermal, ultraviolet, infrared, bare sight. The glass showed nothing. The land around them was pale with mistfall, bleak with drifting fume. There was no sound of gunfire, no artillery or cannon shot, no massed lasguns. The Archenemy was silent. There was nothing. They were dead in the water.

The outside of the tank looked deserted. The rustling, scurrying, tapping noise had stopped. Maybe whatever it was had given up? It couldn’t crack this nut. It had moved on to easier… what? Targets? Prey?

The silence rang in his ears. Silence had a presence of its own, he thought. It pushed at a man, challenged him, frayed his nerves. Becherovka gave one last look and dropped back down to the main deck. The engines, the power plant – that was the key. Get that up and running again and the choices became clearer. Press on, or go back.

‘Palivo,’ he shouted through the hatchway, ‘we need to vent the plant or reroute the power, or whatever it is you grease monkeys do best. We–’

It stared at him from the other end of the gangway, and its mouth cracked into a grin. It looked like Palivo. It stood there like Palivo, and it had Palivo’s face, but the eyes… They were black as the void, as black as deep, deep water.

Becherovka snapped up the laspistol and emptied the power pack. The hiss-crack of blue beams ionising the foetid air was loud as thunder. His vision was seared with it, but when he blinked his eyes clear, the hatchway was empty. There was a stench of ozone, and lying greasily atop it was the warm stink of cooked meat.

Jezek and Kovar had both thrown themselves to the plate when the shooting started, and he could hear Stijn shouting from the driver’s compartment. Zaj and Musil were battering at the sponson hatches. Becherovka just stood there with his pistol extended, the barrel frosted with afterburn. Through the hatchway, along the short corridor to the engine deck, he could see a spark of flame from a wide shot that had hit the exhaust housing.

‘Fire!’ he screamed, and as one the crew reacted.

Every trainee crewman spent as much of his or her time on fire drills as they did on weapons training. A brewed-up tank with a sealed hatch was a crewman’s nightmare, the story he told around the campfire to frighten new recruits. There was nothing more awful, everyone agreed. Everyone except Becherovka. Water. Water is worse than fire.

Becherovka was first through the hatch, holstering his pistol. The thing that had been Palivo steamed and fizzled on the deck, its face a red mess of scorched meat, a steaming black crater where its chest had been. Drops of superheated blood had sprayed in a greasy tar across the chromium deck. Kovar, following the captain through the walkway, recoiled and fell back, spewing across the maintenance valves. Becherovka ignored him, popped the foam extinguisher from its bracket and sprayed the flames. Mixed with dead meat, charred skin and chemicals was the tangy stink of burnt plastek from the wire housings.

Kovar wiped vomit from his mouth and lunged at the captain, trying to wrestle the pistol from Becherovka’s holster. Jezek stooped low and clambered into the engine deck, and Becherovka could hear Zaj and Musil trying to batter their way out of the sponson chambers.

‘You shot him, you shot him!’ Kovar was screaming. ‘What is wrong with you, are you insane?’

‘You didn’t see it! It wasn’t Palivo, it was something else, I swear it. It was in here with us. You didn’t see its eyes!’

The lieutenant had tight hold of the pistol’s handle and Becherovka couldn’t prise his fingers loose. He let go suddenly and Kovar stumbled backwards with the laspistol in an awkward grip. Before he could bring it up to fire Becherovka knocked it from his hand. He snapped out his forearm to lightly cuff Kovar’s throat, and then the soldier was down, spluttering, fighting for breath. Jezek just stood there, dumbfounded. Becherovka scooped up the gun and reloaded.

‘I’m telling you, that wasn’t Palivo,’ he said, evenly. ‘Look at it, Kovar. Look at it!’ He pointed the pistol at the body. Zaj and Musil were still pounding at their hatches, their voices muffled behind the steel.

‘How can you tell?’ Kovar croaked. ‘You look at him! You shot him in cold blood.’

‘And you attacked a senior officer in a combat zone.’ He pointed the pistol at him. ‘That’s a capital offence, lieutenant, a battlefield execution…’

Kovar looked up at him from his knees, fire in his eyes. ‘It’s true what they say about you, captain. You’ve lost your mind. You died down there in the swamp and you never came back.’

The mud and filth, the stagnant water creeping higher and higher, a tideline that reached his chin and spilled into his mouth. He stretched his neck, toes just barely reaching the turret steps, pressing his face into the shrinking pocket of air. Four days, four days in the rancid dark, bobbing below him the dead bodies of his crew…

Becherovka pressed the barrel of the laspistol to Kovar’s forehead. ‘I did come back,’ he whispered. ‘I’m right here.’

They stood like that for what felt like hours: Becherovka with his gun against the lieutenant’s head, Jezek frozen beside him, the thing that had been Palivo still steaming on the plate at their feet.

It grinned. And it looked at me… Throne, what was it? What is going on?

‘Jezek,’ he said.

‘Sir?’

‘Let Zaj and Musil out.’

But it was only then that Becherovka realised they’d stopped hammering. He looked up and saw why – saw the ropes of blood dribbling through the gaps beneath the doors – and before he could say anything the slaved servo-skull above the auto-scribes started snapping its jaw. The sphygmograph pens rattled in their casings. The parchment roll started to unfurl, and the pens were scribbling madly on the paper. Cogitation data, Becherovka thought. The Gladio’s machine-spirit, finally telling us what’s going on.

‘What does it say?’ he said to Jezek. Kovar was still on his knees. ‘Read it, what does it say?’

The loader turned back from the cogitation bench. His face was white. He looked grief-stricken, defeated.

‘It says… It says, “Murder”.’

The servo-skull cackled at them.

The lights across the engine deck flickered and dimmed, and then shut down completely. The scurrying, tapping noise was back, only this time it was in there with them – mere feet away, snuffling and slobbering.

‘Get into the front hull!’ Becherovka ordered. Jezek, moving fast for a big man, dived through the hatch and clambered into the command deck. Becherovka snapped off two shots with the laspistol and then followed him, and in the strobed glare of the beams he thought he saw something unfurling from the darkness; drear and hungry, and infinitely cold. ‘Kovar! Move yourself, it’s almost on you!’

But Kovar was too slow. He rose from his knees and pulled himself up into the hatchway, but then Becherovka looked back to see him hauled bodily out. His eyes went wide, glassy with fright, mouth stretched to frame a scream that never came. The darkness swallowed him, like a stone dropped into deep water.

Deep water, he thought. Deep, deep water, stinking of death…

‘Stijn!’ he cried. ‘Abandon the tank, get out! Save yourself!’

Jezek had scrambled up into the turret and he was weeping as he tried to unscrew the hatch lock. The muscles popped out on his arms and sweat streamed down his face, but it wouldn’t budge.

‘Just let me out, please please please let me out!’ he whimpered.

Through the hatch the blackness unfurled, pouring like ink, dripping down from the gangway – down to the munitions floor, up to the base of the turret steps. Jezek saw it and screamed, beating the steel now as if he could break his way out with his fists alone. The darkness dripped across his feet and he tried to curl up away from it.

An absurd sight, Becherovka thought. Such a big man, curled up like a child on the command chair. He almost laughed. Then he saw the skulls in the ossuary niche, each looking down at him with black eyes, goat’s eyes, the slotted pupils dancing with black light. Becherovka fired his gun until the power pack was dead, until the ripples of darkness had smothered the steps and drawn Jezek down into them, uncomplaining, a look on his face almost like peace.

Underneath the feed tray for the autocannon was a collection receptacle for the spent casings, and in a niche beside it was a narrow aperture that led into the driver’s deck. He scrambled through, barking his shins on the metal.

‘Stijn! I said to get out, for Throne’s–’

Her severed hands were still holding the escape hatch’s handle. Becherovka dropped down into the rest of her.

There is no way out. There is only a pocket of air, shrinking, and growing staler and staler.

He moved back through to the command deck, but the darkness had swallowed it. The red bulbs of the gangway lamps flickered in their cages, strobing the chamber. Becherovka scurried past the shadow’s edge and rolled down into the munitions store, past the sconce and its creaking door, past the sighing breath of whatever was hiding in there, the glistening eye. On the darkness flowed, slopping into the corrugated channels of the chromium plate floor.

Almost, almost, almost…

He cracked down the breech lever on the Demolisher cannon, skipped back as the recoil mechanism cranked to the side and the breech swung open on its reinforced hinge. The great socket mount yawned to admit him. Peering into it, Becherovka could see a ring of sunlight at the other end, bright and clear. He pulled himself in and shinnied up the tube, the barrel’s rifled interior twisting at his fatigues; gritty and constricted, wreathed in the rotten-egg smell of burnt cordite. But it was going to work. It was actually going to work. His arms were squeezed into his side and his shoulders felt like they were both going to dislocate at once, but if he pressed in with his feet and his elbows, he could wriggle up an inch at a time – agonisingly slowly, infinitely painful. But it was going to work.

‘Nearly there,’ he muttered, grinning at the light above him. ‘Please, Emperor, please shine your grace on your faithful servant and let me live.’

The barrel pressed in on him, ever closer, oily and black. He had scraped his forehead against the rifling and blood ran freely down his face. He tried to move his arms, but they were stuck fast. The muscles in his shoulders screamed with the effort of crawling up another inch, another half-inch. Cramps rippled in his calves. His eyes were blinded by blood and sweat. The walls closed in; the hollow chamber squeezed him, jamming into his back, his knees.

He couldn’t breathe. If he held up his head a chain of fire burned down his spine, but if he rested his chin on the barrel his chest was too constricted to draw a breath. He sipped shallow little gasps of air and he knew, as if sitting outside of himself, that he was starting to panic. He wanted to thrash his arms and legs and scream, but he couldn’t move. The black tunnel was squeezing him tighter and tighter and his breath was dying in his lungs. The roar of madness was in his ears. The water was getting higher and higher, and all light was gone. He could feel it lapping at his ankles, like ice, rising up to freeze his legs and grip his chest in its stagnant embrace. And then the water was surging up the barrel, rising, encircling his neck, a brackish ring that crawled higher and higher, feathering against his chin, his mouth, his nose. He was stretched out on the very edge of sanity and he was gulping to reach the disc of air that lay just above his face, and he was in the Stormsword drifting down, the salt marshes swallowing it up like a stone – like a stone dropped into deep water…

Fire and thunder, he thought. He tried to laugh, but his laughter disappeared in a bubble of air.

A recon crew found Imperator Gladio four days later, high in the Switchbacks. The front had rolled on, the enemy advance grinding to a halt in the face of the 77th’s implacable defence. The Baneblade was untouched by enemy fire. It lay dormant in the earth, the great adamantium tracks clogged with mud, the armour plating dusted with fine silt. Its silent cannon pointed towards the distant fighting. There was no sign of the crew. Deserters, some said. Decent men led astray by a bad command. Captain Becherovka had always been a weak link in the chain, ever since that incident with the Stormsword.

It took two Atlas recovery tanks to haul it down off the ridge, and a week of concerted prayer to get it running again. In the motor pool, tech-priests and mechanics ministered to it body and soul, and before long the Dragoons had one of their most powerful assets restored to them. A crew was always difficult to find, but the regimental officers moved quickly to scotch any rumours. The Gladio was a venerable machine, Colonel Radetzky said, much-storied, a veteran of a thousand campaigns! Who wouldn’t want the honour of crewing such a vessel in the Emperor’s name?

Indeed, the lord commissar agreed. There were eighty skulls in the ossuary niche. Just think – one day yours could be there too.

The Terminus

David Annandale

The wind sighed over iron wreckage. It whistled through rusted pipes. Metal creaked against metal, the notes scraping up and down; a desultory song in the wastelands.

The ruins were a hard yet shapeless black mass in the night. Hills of jagged shadow leaned over Vazya Reinhardt as she and her brother made their way towards the abandoned maglev station. There was no moon. The only light came from the glow of the decaying outskirts of Carchera, one of the city’s old satellite industrial sectors. Carchera’s long decline had eroded its edges first, and the manufactories here had closed centuries ago. The land was slowly reclaiming the region. The long siege by the forests had sunk roots between the fallen rockcrete walls. Vazya thought she could hear the waving of ferns and struggling shrubs, a green susurrus beneath the dying groans of metal.

Bakhin risked turning on his torch. Its beam caught the base of a rockcrete staircase, crumbling and stained, a hundred yards ahead. ‘We’re almost there,’ he said.

Vazya sucked on her lower lip. ‘This might be a waste of time.’

The Enforcer stopped walking. ‘What? Did I hear you right?’

‘Just wanted to say it. You know it’s true.’

‘Are you changing your mind?’ Bakhin asked. ‘This was your idea.’

‘I know. And no, I’m not changing my mind.’ But if they did turn away from the shell of Ciego Station, she could live with that decision.

‘I don’t believe this,’ said Bakhin.

‘I said I hadn’t changed my mind.’

‘So, we’re going?’

‘We’re going.’ She made herself walk on.

Coming here had been her idea. She was the one who had urged Bakhin to help her prove the reality of the Valgaast Train. She was the one who had been fascinated by the stories since childhood. She was the one who had lived and breathed the legend all her adult life, the effort to track down its existence her obsession that kept her sane through the monotony of her days as Third Junior Cataloguer, agri-sub-directory secundus, in the city’s Adeptus Administratum halls.

The Valgaast Train. The myths that ran through Carchera were bundles of contradictions, and what was consistent was also vague. The train ran only on moonless nights, stopping only at disused stations. So, no one had ever actually seen it. The train ran through dreams. It travelled in the shared tales of children and bored adults searching for something about Carchera that was extraordinary. The worn city edges had hundreds of miles of abandoned tracks, and dozens of abandoned stations. Of course a phantom coursed through the metal graveyard.

Where did it go? Where did it take its passengers?

To Valgaast.

Where was that?

No one knew. The name did not show up on any of the maps of Ossorian. If there had been such a place on the planet, it was now gone.

Bakhin kept his torch on, aimed low, until they reached the stairs. Through unspoken agreement, he and Vazya kept their presence in the ruins hidden. They were breaking no edict by being here. It was intuition that prompted their actions, the sense that their quarry would not appear if they were visible.

The steps rose above heaped debris, climbing into the dim light of the city. Vazya could see well enough to place her feet, but there was no longer any handrail, so she and Bakhin kept to the centre. Rockcrete crunched quietly beneath their feet. Fragments crumbled away and skittered down into the dark.

‘Does this feel steady to you?’ Vazya asked.

‘No. Do you know another way up?’

‘No,’ she admitted.

Cracks covered the platform like old veins. The song of the wind had a deeper tone here, as if the elevated track was a massive tuning fork, its vibrations going on and on, a somnambulist hum in the night. There were no shelters. The station was a bare surface, a utilitarian construct that had lost all meaning.

Vazya and Bakhin advanced to the edge of the platform. They looked up and down the track. Vazya saw only night. The track curved off into the darkness in both directions. It ran from nowhere to nowhere. The abyss concealed anything Vazya could imagine. Dreams or nightmares could emerge from this black. She half-hoped nothing at all would come.

Half-hoped. More than thirty years of wondering would not be satisfied with absence.

An hour passed. Then another. The wind sang. Tedium took the edge off anxiety.

‘When will it come?’

Bakhin’s mournful tone told Vazya that his words were more an expression of despair than a question. She answered anyway. ‘No one knows. It might have come earlier. It might not come at all. It might not be real.’ Though it is. I know it is. ‘Did you want to give up?’

‘No. We stay until dawn.’

His debts must have been worse than she thought. His need for the train sounded greater than hers. Even a few hours ago, she would not have thought that was possible. ‘Are things really that bad?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ Bakhin said after a long silence.

‘You can’t know that the train leads to wealth, even if it turns out to be real. That’s just a story.’

‘The train itself is a story.’

‘I’m sure it’s more than that.’

‘Then so is the treasure. It has to be.’

‘Throne, what have you done?’

‘Nothing new. Just more of it. Too much. The debts are due now. My creditors are insistent. I think they’re about to make an example of me.’

‘But you’re an Enforcer.’

‘That’s the point.’

‘How would they dare?’

‘That’s what I thought. That was my mistake. They dare,’ Bakhin said, tired, and sounding disgusted with himself. ‘They have political power that I don’t. I need this, Vazya. I need this to be real.’

The wind picked up. It had been an east wind, blowing from their right. Now it came from the left, a strong blast and growing stronger, the air rushing ahead of something massive, as if the night were a tunnel. Then, darkness within darkness took on direction and form. It became a shape, rushing towards the station. Vazya and Bakhin jerked back from the edge of the platform.

The train was huge, bigger than should have been possible on the narrow maglev track. Blasts of steam erupted from the locomotive as it braked suddenly at the platform, yet except for the creaking and rattling of the cars as they leaned back and forth with the train’s motion, it was almost completely silent. There was no headlamp. The train was a mass of iron night that crawled towards them like a predator. In the faint light, Vazya made out ornate metalwork on the locomotive. It bulged and twisted, shaped like the movement of the steam. She had never seen an engine like this. It seemed ancient; an entity emerged from a tomb of a forgotten age.

Though there was no illumination from within the locomotive, a dull red shone inside all but the first of nine passenger cars. The train came to a stop with the middle car in front of Vazya and Bakhin. The doors hissed open directly before them. The rest remained shut.

‘An invitation,’ Vazya whispered. She stared at the train, heart hammering, the reality of the legend too huge, too heavy. She had imagined many things over the years, some sinister, some hopeful, all of them pale, shrunken and vague before the thing itself. She could not move. She could barely think. Awe held her fast.

Bakhin cleared his throat. ‘An invitation,’ he echoed with a hoarse croak. ‘Then we should accept,’ he said, his voice stronger. He stepped over the threshold into the passenger car.

‘Bakhin,’ Vazya said. ‘Wait.’

He turned around, faced her, but stayed in the train. ‘No.’

‘The doors opened for us. For us. The train knew we were here. What if this is a trap?’

‘Then I’m no worse off than I was before. Are you coming with me or not?’

She hesitated. Low ticks and creaks came from the train as it idled. It was waiting for her.

She should go home. She had her proof. She didn’t need to know more.

If I walk away, will I always wonder?

She boarded the train. There was never any real choice.

The doors closed behind her. With a lurch, the train started moving.

‘To Valgaast, then,’ said Vazya.

‘To Valgaast,’ said Bakhin.

The passenger car was a shell. There were no seats, no decor of any kind. There was only the black iron of the hull, and dull, flickering lumen strips. Their red light did little more than create shadows.

There were scratches on the walls, some of them deep, like clawed flesh. Vazya ran her fingers over them, tracing the way they ran into each other. She snatched her hand away before she felt a pattern.

‘What’s that smell?’ Bakhin asked.

Vazya wrinkled her nose. The tang in the air made her think of insects, and age.

The train picked up speed, the car rocking slightly from side to side. Vazya looked out the window. The track was curving away from Carchera, and the lights of the city were fading. They were travelling deeper into night, deeper into the void. The train hit a sharp bend, and the car jerked. Vazya almost fell, and Bakhin reached suddenly for his shock maul. He was not in uniform but had slipped his weapon through his belt. He pulled it out now and looked towards the next car back.

‘What is it?’ Vazya asked.

‘I thought I heard voices.’

They peered through the narrow windows of the connecting doors between the cars. There was no one there. Bakhin slid the doors open, moved into the other car, and prowled forwards, shock maul at the ready. Vazya followed, keeping a few steps back in case he started to swing.

They were halfway down when the far doors opened. Two women and a man entered. When they saw Bakhin, they stopped dead and raised their hands.

‘We aren’t here to fight,’ one of the women said.

‘There will be plenty for all of us,’ said the man.

‘We won’t make trouble,’ said the other woman.

Vazya came up beside Bakhin. She touched his shoulder, and he lowered the maul. ‘Who are you?’ she asked.

‘Darra,’ said one woman. She was older than her two companions. Squat, clean-shaven, she had the hard appearance of a manufactory serf, one who had worked the forges long enough to be tempered by them into a hardened alloy of flesh. ‘This is Krent.’

The man looked like another refugee from the forges, one who hadn’t been there as long. He had been badly burned recently. The left side of his face and his arm were shiny with scar tissue.

‘And Nevi.’ The other woman, who looked about the same age as Krent, was more slightly built than her two friends and wore a soiled valet’s uniform. A servant from one of the noble families of Carchera, Vazya guessed. One who had been dismissed and was scrambling to survive.

Vazya introduced herself and Bakhin, keeping to first names only, like Darra. Bakhin tensed for a moment, but worrying about being identified was a concern that belonged back on the platform. They had entered the world of a legend. Everything, Vazya thought, was different now. For better or worse.

‘How many are you?’ Bakhin asked.

‘Just the three of us,’ said Krent. ‘We had a fourth, but she stayed behind…’ He paused when Nevi shuddered and shook her head sharply.

‘What is it?’ said Vazya.

‘She’s dead.’

‘We aren’t sure,’ said Darra.

‘She is,’ Nevi insisted. ‘I know what I saw.’

‘It was dark,’ said Krent. ‘Too dark to tell.’

‘No. No it wasn’t. Not that dark. She tripped. Somehow, she tripped, and she fell under the train.’

Vazya’s mouth dried. If I had stayed behind, would I have tripped too?

‘Then she tripped,’ said Darra. ‘She should have been more careful. She should have come with us.’

‘To Valgaast,’ Vazya said.

‘That’s right,’ said Krent. ‘And its riches.’

Darra nodded.

‘You all believe that?’ Vazya asked.

‘We do,’ Darra said emphatically.

‘Yes,’ Nevi said, sounding like someone who was rapidly losing her faith. ‘I have to.’

‘She’s alone,’ Darra explained to Vazya. ‘Four children, all ailing, dead husband. She needs this.’

‘And you?’ Vazya asked.

‘I’m tired of being hungry,’ Darra said, fury barely suppressed.

‘What about you?’ Vazya said to Krent.

‘I just… I just want my life to be something better than survival.’ His hope sounded worn out from years of pointless use. ‘Isn’t that why you’re here?’

‘I just want to know the truth,’ said Vazya. She wondered if she should have used the past tense.

‘Have you seen anyone else aboard?’ Bakhin asked the others.

‘The last two cars are full,’ said Krent. ‘There must be twenty or thirty people. They came on in small groups, like us. The train has been circling Carchera.’ He glanced at the window, and the blackness outside. ‘This is the longest we’ve gone without a stop,’ he added.

‘So, we’re going to Valgaast,’ said Bakhin. ‘We’re all agreed, though that tells us nothing. Does anyone know what way we’re heading?’

‘No,’ said Darra. ‘No one does. Too dark to see, and we can’t open any of the windows. We volunteered to go forward to the locomotive. Maybe there’s someone there… who can tell us.’

Vazya noticed Darra’s pause. Maybe there’s someone there… Maybe there’s no one. There was a doubt that Darra feared to express, even to herself.

‘Good,’ Bakhin said. ‘Let’s go.’

He turned and led the way towards the front of the train. The others fell in behind, deferring to his leadership without question. If he wanted the responsibility, he was welcome to it.

The light in the car forward of the one that Vazya and Bakhin had entered was even dimmer. There was only one lumen strip functioning, and it kept flickering off altogether. Vazya peered through the doors at the same time as Bakhin, and she jerked back.

‘What?’ Bakhin asked.

‘Didn’t you see? There was someone there.’

He looked again. ‘No one there now. What did you see?’

‘At the far end. Someone in robes, I think. Their skin was so pale.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘So, they came on board before you,’ said Krent. ‘At one of the earlier stops.’

‘Are any of the others robed?’ Vazya asked him, sceptical.

‘No,’ he admitted, looking uneasy too.

‘Whoever it was, they’re gone now,’ Bakhin said. ‘We’re not accomplishing anything by staying here.’

‘I don’t think we should go on,’ Nevi said.

‘And what would you do instead?’ Darra asked her.

‘I just want to leave.’

Darra snorted. She pointed to the door, and the rushing darkness beyond. ‘Go right ahead. Let me know how that goes.’

‘The rest of you do what you want,’ Bakhin said. ‘I’m going on.’ He shoved the doors aside and entered the next car. Vazya followed close behind. She had committed herself to seeing the truth through to the end when she came on board. There would be no hiding from it, so it was better to be active and seek it out. That was what she told herself. It was a way of keeping the paralysis of growing fear at bay.

They walked slowly down the length of the car. The insectile sourness of the air grew stronger. The lumen strip’s stuttering rhythm of light and darkness made it hard to walk. Vazya’s balance was precarious. When night bloomed before her eyes, it tried to make her pitch forward into it. Halfway to the next doors, she looked back, and caught a glimpse of Nevi, bringing up the rear. She felt a wave of sympathy. She wanted to tell the other woman that she understood, that she wished all of them were off the train.

There were a lot more scratches on the walls here. The marks were converging towards the front of the train. Vazya could see the patterns now. They looked like how the air smelled.

Bakhin reached the end of the car and stopped. He was still looking into the next carriage, the last before the locomotive, and had done nothing to reach for the door handles when Vazya caught up to him. ‘You were right,’ he said softly. He stepped aside so she could see more easily.

Her breath caught. There was no light at all inside the next car, but the flickering lumen strip in theirs cast a penumbral illumination a few yards ahead. The carriage was full of people. They were standing in rows, motionless, silent, all of them robed, their skulls hairless, their flesh maggot white. They were all facing forward, towards the locomotive.

Vazya’s flesh crawled. She was staring at statues. She was staring at corpses. She was staring at neither and worse.

She backed away with Bakhin.

‘What did you see?’ Darra asked, much too loud.

‘Shhhhh,’ Vazya hissed.

Darra pushed past to have a look for herself. Then she, too, moved away from the door, her eyes wide, her steps careful and quiet.

They all retreated two cars back.

‘Who… What do you think they are?’ Krent asked.

‘I don’t want to know,’ said Nevi.

‘I think she’s right,’ Vazya said. Her curiosity was more than sated. She cursed it for ever having existed.

‘Agreed,’ Bakhin said. He was sweating, and his anxiety did nothing for Vazya’s state of mind. ‘All right, then. We don’t want to have anything to do with them, whatever they are. I’m not staying put and waiting for them to take notice.’

‘What choices do we have?’ Darra asked.

‘I think we should head back and join all the others you were with,’ said Vazya. ‘Strength in numbers.’

Bakhin tapped his shock maul. ‘Did anyone else bring a weapon?’

‘No,’ said Darra. ‘Not that I saw.’

‘And we don’t know if those robed corpses are armed. I’m going to assume they are.’

‘They might not be dangerous,’ Nevi said, pleading for someone to agree with her and soothe her fears. No one did.

Bakhin moved to the right-hand window. He gave it an experimental rap. ‘Armourglass,’ he muttered.

‘What are you thinking?’ Vazya asked, unwilling to believe he was going to try something this mad.

‘I’m leaving this train.’

‘How?’

‘Not through the window, at any rate. We can’t smash that.’ Bakhin went to the exit in the middle of the car, Darra following at his heels.

‘You can’t get out at all,’ Vazya said.

‘We won’t if we don’t try.’ Her brother had the fixed look in his eyes that came when he was set on a goal, no matter how ill-advised, and would not listen to reason. He examined the doors. There were handles for opening them manually if they failed to function during a stop. He grabbed the right hand one, and nodded to Darra, who took the other. They pulled, leaning hard to pit all of their strength against the doors.

‘This is madness,’ Vazya said.

They didn’t listen. Nevi and Krent drew closer to them, as if effort were the same as a plan. Vazya didn’t think the doors would open, but then, as Bakhin and Darra strained, they parted a fraction of an inch. Wind came into the car with a high-pitched scream.

‘Pull!’ Bakhin urged.

Bit by bit, the doors opened. Nevi and Krent backed away as the wind roared in with greater strength. Vazya held herself against the hull on the opposite side. The wind buffeted her. It tried to scoop her up in its grip. She pictured herself hurled out into the night, and she stood fast.

Bakhin and Darra straightened. The doors were open all the way. A gale battered the interior of the car. Bakhin kept a firm grip on the handle and leaned his head past the threshold, looking down.

‘You can’t jump,’ Vazya called. ‘We’re at least fifty feet up.’ And if the tracks were passing over a gorge…

‘If there’s water, I’ll take my chances.’ He kept staring down. He made no move to leap.

‘And?’ Vazya asked. ‘Is there water? Can you even tell?’

Bakhin and Darra exchanged a look. Bakhin grimaced. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I can’t see anything at all.’

They pushed the doors closed again, shutting out the gale. Vazya let her body relax enough to breathe. Bakhin wasn’t going to jump, and she wasn’t going to be swept out of the carriage by the wind.

‘What are we going to do?’ Nevi pleaded.

‘There’s nothing we can do,’ Vazya said. ‘We’re here to the end of the line.’ There was no question that the only stop would be the last one. The city was far behind, and with it, she knew in her heart, the hope of any stations.

Bakhin punched the door in frustration.

‘Is she right?’ Nevi asked him, and he nodded.

‘We should go to the rear,’ said Vazya. ‘Join the others.’

‘Strength in numbers is all we have,’ Krent added.

‘Better than nothing,’ Bakhin said, and started down the car, leading the way as if this had been his idea.

When they reached the crowd in the rear carriage, they were greeted by expressions that went from hopeful and back to frightened in moments. Nevi described the robed figures, and fear spread through the carriage like a heavy mist. No one suggested that all would be well, that the treasure of Valgaast was what waited at the terminus. No one believed that story any longer, least of all Bakhin.

‘When we stop,’ he said, ‘when the doors open, we leave as a group, in force. There are enough of us to be hard to control. Don’t be docile.’

‘What if we’re met by weapons?’ someone asked.

‘We’ll deal with that if and when it happens.’

He sounded confident, Vazya thought. Her brother had always been good at projecting assurance and the impression of forward momentum. She saw the illusion clearly enough. His strategy wasn’t the best option available to them. It was the only one. She could have easily suggested the same course of action.

‘The treasure might still be real,’ said Krent.

Bakhin nodded. Even Nevi did.

We all have to know, Vazya thought. All of us.

Hours later, with dawn still distant, the train slowed down, then came to a stop. The doors rattled open. Cold air blew into the car. There was a collective hesitation. Vazya started moving first. She wanted to get off the train. By starting forwards, she jerked Bakhin into action, and he hurried to step out onto the platform just ahead of her. The others followed quickly.

Outside the train, irregularly staggered torches burned on iron columns, illuminating the surroundings with a wavering, shifting glow. Shadows jerked back and forth over a confusion of metal constructs. The platform was in what had once been a large maglev station. A dozen other disused tracks converged here, feeding into the ruins of a conglomeration of manufactories. A fragment of rockcrete wall stood next to one of the torches, and on it was a sign that read BOGARDUS COMPLEX.

‘Not Valgaast,’ Vazya said, looking at the sign. The name faded away into the fog of myth. The Bogardus Complex was a name with a different resonance, one of loss, of the long crumbling of a civilisation. It had been centuries since the manufactories here had shut down. The Bogardus Complex lived on only in Carchera’s fading sense of history. It was a thing that had been, and was no longer, and its memory was flakes of rust.

At the other end of the train, the robed beings had also disembarked. Still they did not face back.

‘They’re ignoring us,’ said Bakhin.

‘Good,’ said Krent. ‘Then we can leave.’

‘And go where?’ Vazya asked. They were hundreds of miles from Carchera. ‘Are you planning to walk back on the track? Can you see in the dark?’

‘They’re leaving,’ Nevi said.

The figures were retreating, heading deeper into the ruins, following the line of torches.

‘We should follow,’ said Bakhin.

‘Are you mad?’ Nevi exclaimed.

‘They haven’t attacked us. We haven’t been captured. There may be something worth finding here after all.’

‘Then we have to see,’ said Darra.

‘Do we?’ Nevi asked.

‘Could you go back, knowing you hadn’t tried everything for your children?’

‘No,’ said Nevi.

‘And if we can’t go back?’ Vazya asked, but she started walking with Bakhin anyway. There was nothing else to do.

Everyone else followed. Vazya even heard some hopeful whispers, people trying to convince themselves that Bakhin was right. They tried to cling to the dream that had brought them to this spot. She tried to feel resigned instead. She was going to find out the truth of the myth whether she wanted to or not.

Beyond the platform, the rubble of the station and the manufactories had been rebuilt, and repurposed. The passengers of the Valgaast Train descended a slope of battered iron and rockcrete, and it led into a vast tunnel. Chimneys and shattered façades leaned against one another to create an angular roof. Torn, twisted metal reached out of the walls like arms. The torches carried on ahead, and the floor kept sloping deeper into the gloom.

From somewhere deep in the structure came the sound of low chanting.

‘Do you hear that?’ Vazya asked Bakhin.

‘Yes. I can’t make out what they’re saying.’

‘It doesn’t sound like any prayer to the Emperor I know.’

‘And? Does that change our options?’

‘No.’ She glanced at the shock maul in Bakhin’s hand and wished for a weapon.

The floor levelled off. Vazya saw now that some of the fissures in the walls of wreckage looked like passages. She guessed this tunnel was a major artery cutting through a web inside the wreckage. She didn’t like where her imagination went, because there was still nothing she could do about it.

The chanting grew louder, and at last the train passengers crossed a huge, angular threshold. They entered a circular chamber at least a hundred feet across. The ceiling must have been fifty feet up. It was shrouded in darkness, barely touched by the torchlight. Sharp angles glinted, and the shadows of a weave of iron made Vazya think again of a web. This was its heart. The centre of the roof was utterly dark. There was nothing there to pick up the light of the torches.

Is that a shaft?

There were hundreds of robed people here, all chanting, all looking upward. They all had the same decayed pallor, but the shapes of some of the skulls disturbed Vazya. She was too far away to see them clearly in the dimness, but there was something inhuman about their silhouettes.

As the passengers arrived, the chanting ceased. Still looking up, the worshippers nearest the entrance drew apart, creating a path that led to the centre of the chamber.

‘No,’ Vazya said.

‘Exactly,’ Bakhin agreed.

They turned around, even though Vazya knew the gesture was an empty one. There was nowhere to go. She knew she was going to die.

The rest of their company turned too, but there, back up the sloping path, were many more of the robed beings. They began walking slowly towards the passengers. There was movement next to the walls, the swift and angular movement of things coming down through the shadows, things that snarled, things whose claws clicked and scratched against the rockcrete and iron.

And from above, from inside the ceiling shaft, came a hissing, echoing roar.

Bakhin raised his shock maul and looked up, ready to fight – until the thing dropped to the floor with rockcrete-shattering impact, and he dropped the maul, his body going slack with terror.

The worshippers chanted again, and the passengers screamed. The creature, both reptilian and insectoid, towered over them on its massive hind legs. Two of its four legs were bony scythes. The other two resembled arms, and at first Vazya thought that was the most horrible thing, the way the utterly inhuman mimicked the human and made it monstrous, with one limb seeming to become a hand wielding a serrated blade, and the other holding a whip of flexible cartilage.

The limbs were not the worst thing, though. She saw the worst thing when she stared, mesmerised by monstrous awe, at the elongated, horned skull, emerging from a shell of chitinous armour. The worst thing was the expression forged by the narrow eyes and the jaws that gaped wide enough to swallow a man. The horror looked down at Vazya. Its gaze was mindless predation, but it was also all-knowing. Something as old as night looked out at her through those eyes. It knew her as she knew an insect.

Her old faith disintegrated before the truth behind myths.

Bakhin’s scream was short and sharp as a scythe pierced his chest and lifted him to the jaws. There were many other screams as the being waded into the passengers and began to feed.

Vazya did not scream. She fell on her knees, her vision filled by the sight of the divine in all its monstrosity. She was still on her knees when one of the clawed beings, an emissary of the god, seized her.

Much later, when she found herself disembarking the train in Carchera once more, she rejoiced in her new faith, and in the knowledge that her own being had been altered, and that she was part of the true divine. Made new, made a prophet, she walked into the city, ready to tell a story of mythical trains and wealth to whoever would listen. There was a legend to spread. There were curious minds to lure.

There was a world to harvest.

Nightbleed

Peter Fehervari

‘Needle-bright, needle-dark,
Will you, won’t you unstitch the light,
And switch out the stars to blackest night.’

– The Needlesong

No, the Grey Woman says – or tries to say – when she enters the white ward. No.

As is so often the way with dreams, her words go unspoken, but not unheard.

Yes, the ward replies in a shimmer of gleaming tiles, drawing the newcomer forward. Yes.

The long room opens out around the woman as she advances, its walls falling back to either side like retreating tides, carrying rows of dark windows and vacant beds beyond her reach. Fresh tiles hatch from their neighbours to sheathe the widening expanse of floor and ceiling, breeding in orderly swathes that mock her confusion. Glancing down, she sees she is wearing a trim white tunic striped with blue. There is a tightness about her head, indicating the peaked cap containing her hair. This is the uniform of a life that slipped away years ago, along with her youth and every spark of hope she once nurtured.

This is where I lost myself, she realises, recognising the ward despite its strangeness. It is an abstraction of the reality she once walked, stripped to the bone then sharpened to a merciless point. Her unease curdles into fear as a lone bed rises smoothly from the floor ahead, like a puzzle piece slotting into place. Unlike the others, it is occupied.

No, the dreamer protests again, urgently this time. Please, no.

Yes, the ward insists, its breath caustic with disinfectants. Yes.

The woman’s legs obey the decree, carrying her onward, caught in the room’s invisible, inevitable currents. She realises her feet are bare and terribly cold – surely too cold for a mere dream? Like poison, the chill spreads up her legs as she nears the bed, numbing her body but leaving her mind raw and receptive to revelation.

There is a girl in the bed, sleeping, her breath coming in ragged, wet gasps. She is scarcely past childhood, yet her face is gaunt and her scalp hairless. Evidently the sickness in her runs deep – probably too deep to expunge, though nobody will ever know for sure, for she will never be given the chance to heal.

The bed’s brass footboard is embossed with the Gothic numeral ‘XVI’. A note is taped to it, bearing its occupant’s details, but the dreamer cannot decipher the handwritten scrawl. Those words are not part of her memories. She neglected to read them when this scene was real, so they elude her now. Nevertheless, she knows this patient’s name as intimately as her own.

Rozalia Temető.

The Grey Woman is not a killer by nature, so killing has left an enduring scar on her soul. She will never forget the girl she murdered.

No, she pleads, raising the hypo-syringe in her left hand. It has been there since she entered the ward, primed to play its part in this tragedy. I won’t… I won’t do it!

Yes, the bed exhales in a waft of budding decay. Yes.

Surrendering, the Grey Woman is rewarded by a rush of sudden, spiteful eagerness. As she leans over the sleeper she notices the serum in her hypo is black. It isn’t a natural darkness, but the stain of absolute nothingness. Of the void…

A moment later another aberration becomes apparent. She isn’t holding the hypo in her hand. The hypo is her hand.

Chel snapped out of the nightmare with a violence that shook her bed’s rickety frame. Her heart was pounding furiously, as though she’d been running hard. Sweat clung to her like a second skin, though the room was cold. Shivering, she peered at her fingers through the gloom, half expecting to find the hypo there. She could still feel it, but her hand was empty.

‘A dream,’ she murmured, closing her eyes. ‘Just a dream.’

And a lie, she added, fearful of speaking the denial aloud, though she didn’t know why. The dream had lied. She had never wanted the girl’s death – and certainly never delighted in it. So why was she afraid to defy the dream’s narrative?

‘I’m not,’ she whispered. But that was also a lie. She was no stranger to nightmares, but they’d stopped mattering years ago. Most washed over her like dirty water, leaving a stain without pain, like all the other detritus that passed for her life. These dreams were different, as sharp as any part of her waking experience. Sharper.

More real.

When had she ever felt anything so vital as the eagerness with which she’d administered the poison? Or as bitter as the shame that welled up inside her during yesterday’s sleep cycle, when she’d revisited her dismissal from the medicae service? A court of faceless obsidian giants had judged her, their verdict infinitely more damning than the condemnation of their flesh-and-blood counterparts. And when had she known anything like the terror of the nightmare before that, where she’d stepped into a lift and plunged into a shrieking abyss? Or the black despair of the first of these torments? That had been the subtlest, yet most unnerving of them all. There she had wandered her city as its lights expired one by one, leaving hungry shadows in their wake.

When had she ever felt so horribly, nakedly alive?

‘Never,’ Chel answered herself. Could that be a coincidence?

No, she decided, thinking of the VLG-01. The liquid in the dream hypo had been the same lustreless black as the tarry sample waiting in her lab. And these dreams had begun four days ago, after she–

Chel shook her head. This wasn’t the time or the place to brood on that choice. Let the worrying wait until she could do something about it. She was no longer a medicae, but the methodology of observation, analysis and treatment endured. It would probably be the last part of her to fade away.

Opening her eyes, she saw pallid light leaking through the window’s blinds, painting the room in a washed-out twilight that consummated its shabbiness. Far below, the muffled rattle-hiss of the auto-trams had become a near-continuous stream as they ferried workers home.

It’s still early, Chel realised. The city’s night cycle was only just kicking in. Her shift wasn’t due to start for hours, but sleep wouldn’t return and the thought of lying here in the gathering darkness was intolerable. Besides, if she left now there was no chance of bumping into Lyle. He rarely turned up before nightfall, but sometimes he was too tired to go drinking after work. She’d been seeing too much of him lately.

Get moving!

With a groan, Chel threw aside her rumpled blanket and rolled into a sitting position, then perched on the bed’s edge, waiting for her spinning head to catch up. She’d been working nights almost four months now, but her body still hadn’t acclimatised. The apartment’s constant chill didn’t help with getting up either, but Lyle was against heating it.

‘We live under a dome, Chel,’ he’d explained in that slow, condescending tone she’d once taken for gravitas. ‘Our city regulates itself like a living body – light, heat and clean air filtered, cycled and recycled to keep things running smoothly, as our fore-founders intended. It’s not our place to interfere with The Balance.’

‘The Balance’ was always capitalised in Lyle’s speech, as much an article of faith as a matter of machinery and science. Chel suspected everyone in the Canopic Congregation felt the same way, from the army of labourers who kept the city’s vast dome patched up, to the tech magi who communed with its ailing spirit. Not that anyone would admit its spirit was ailing – at least not openly. The integrity of the dome was deemed beyond reproach. Voicing doubts bordered on heresy. After all, everyone’s life depended on The Balance.

‘As above, so below,’ Lyle was fond of saying. It was the credo of the Congregation. He always proclaimed it as if he were imparting some profound wisdom, though he’d never explained its meaning. Chel suspected he didn’t know either. He was just a minor functionary in the organisation, but he talked as though he were a full administrator, puffed up with pride and big ideas. She’d found that endearing once.

I thought he was a dreamer. Chel snorted at the notion. They had both been in their twenties when they met. Back then she had been a junior medicae, doing her internship in one of the civic hospitals. Lyle had been admitted with a bowel disorder, which Chel diagnosed as stress-related. The context couldn’t have been less romantic, but they’d found humour in it, which sparked things off. She’d liked his earnest manner and devotion to their city, mistaking servility for idealism. They had married within a year.

But that was all before…

Thrusting the memories aside, Chel rose and padded over to the room’s sanitation cubicle. It was so cold she was tempted to skip showering, but she was sticky with the nightmare’s residue. She needed to wash it away.

I wish I could.

She showered in the dark, unwilling to face the apparition that stared back from the cubicle’s mirror. Though she wasn’t yet forty her skin was ashen and her close-shorn hair peppered with white, as if age had reached a withered hand back from the future to clasp her prematurely. At this rate she’d be an old woman by fifty. Oddly the prospect didn’t much trouble her, just so long as she didn’t have to see it.

‘I won’t,’ Chel promised herself, unsure what the vow meant.

The water was a lukewarm drizzle with a faint chemical odour, but she relished it, delaying the moment when she’d have to step out into the cold again. Nothing better awaited her in the long night ahead.

Gonna be a good night, Skreech decided. Gonna be sharp!

He stepped back from the alley wall to gauge his handiwork. The painted words glowed neon pink in the gloom. It wasn’t a colour he’d have picked, but these days he used whatever he could scavenge. Besides, it didn’t blunt the credo’s edge. Emblazoned in the spikey script he’d perfected over the years, it had power. Bite.

ITZ A LY

Skreech chewed his lower lip, agonising over adding an exclamation mark. He raised his spray can then lowered it again. No, too much. It didn’t need to shout. Not this time. He’d painted the slogan plenty of times over the years, usually with a mark, but this was his best. Maybe pink worked after all.

‘It’s a lie,’ he read in a growl, reaching for the tidal hatred that had washed him onto this path. As always, he only found a trickle of that wave, but it was more lively than usual. He was getting closer. And the Night Below was getting stronger.

Growing! Skreech thought. Spreading right under the Sleepers’ noses.

He grinned at the notion, showing sharpened teeth. Filing them into points had been crazy painful, but the spidery tattoos covering his face had hurt far worse. He’d inked them himself, using a pilfered kit, without a clue how to do it right. The infection that followed had ruined his skin and forced him to hole up for weeks with a fever, but he’d hugged the pain close, knowing it would make him stronger.

‘It’s a lie,’ he repeated, his mantra addressed to the Sleepers. They were the dross who strolled, shambled or staggered through life without smelling its deceit – the blue bloods and worker drones who kept things rolling along, and all the dreggerz and dedhedz who fell between the cracks without fighting back – and worst of all, the priests and enforcers who kept all the rest in line. Kept ’em blind! Some of the lawmen probably smelled their world’s sickness – they waded through too much sin and shit not to – but they didn’t have the guts to taste it, let alone drink deep and run wild with it, as Skreech did.

‘All a lie…’ He placed a hand on the wall. Sometimes he could feel the current of his secret saviour coursing through the city’s bones, breathing fleeting life into metal, stone or glass. That pulse was what woke him up in the first place. He’d been a kid back then, just coming on fourteen, but he’d never questioned the message – never hesitated to serve when it opened his eyes to The Lie.

I served them up, he recalled fondly. Served them sharp!

Taking a fork from the kitchen, he’d crept into his parents’ room one night and stood over the sleeping forms, waiting for a sign. They were rich folks, undertower Alpha-bloods who’d hidden themselves far from the dome and the endless night beyond, never imagining the deeper darkness already inside. No matter. Their son brought it home to them.

‘Woke you up!’ The messenger giggled at the memory. ‘Made you see the night.’

A tremor had run through the boy, more intimate than anything his god had offered before. Electrified, he’d plunged the fork into his father’s left eye, hard enough to pop it, but not enough to pass right through, then spiked the other one before the first strike even registered. The screams had roused his mother as the boy came for her eyes. She’d opened them as he stabbed, which was helpful, but she’d also tried to sit up, which wasn’t, because the prongs had ended up going too far and killing her outright, denying the revelation he’d granted his father. But things had worked out all right ’cos she’d given her son a gift instead. The boy heard his true name in her dying screech. Yes, a screech. It hadn’t sounded like a human shriek at all. It was more like the noise beaked animals made in the vid-casts he’d seen. Birds, they were called. At first that struck him as funny; then he’d realised it was another sign and found his name.

Later, long after he fled the undertowers and took refuge in the slums, he’d pared the name down to its raw form, scraping away the stupid rules his tutor had drummed into him. That was how Kristopher Eugene Bunditz became De Skreech Dat Shreddz De Lyt.

Of course, the city knew him by yet another name…

The wall twitched beneath his palm. It only lasted a moment – a divine heartbeat! – but there was no mistaking its meaning. The slogan had pleased his saviour. Skreech moaned happily. It had been a long time since his devotion was acknowledged. Even his bloodier communions had been met with silence, but he’d never once questioned his faith – never wondered if it might all be in his head. This was proof he was back on his game. It called for something special.

The night’s herald pulled up the collars of his leather trench coat and crept from the alleyway. Bright lights lined the avenue beyond, hanging from arced pylons like offerings, burning to hold back the encroaching hab-blocks. The city’s thralls hurried along the pavements, ignorant of their bondage, but the crowd was already thinning as the evening’s stampede died down. Auto-trams trundled along the tracks at the street’s centre like boxy yellow beasts, human cargo visible through their dirty-glass eyes. It didn’t matter which way the herd rushed. They’d all end up in the same place soon enough.

‘It ain’t real,’ Skreech murmured, allowing himself a flicker of pity for the slaves. ‘None of it.’

He glanced up. High above, the dome might have been a star-studded sky, its sunlights dimmed to bright points for the evening cycle. Skreech hated the cycle. It was another scam to keep the herd docile. Sarastus’ real sun was deep in its dotage, its radiance faded to grey long before humanity claimed the planet. The land between the five great cities was dead, its waters tainted by acid and its air bitter, but it was honest. Skreech had climbed out onto the dome’s skin once to taste it. It was a dangerous pilgrimage, not least because it was strictly forbidden, but it had been worth the risk. It proved his faith.

‘It’s a lie!’ he yelled as a tram sped past. Nobody heard him over the racket, but it felt good to proclaim it out loud. ‘All a lie!’

Someday soon the Night Below would answer the call of the Night Above. Like a titanic obsidian needle, it would rise up to pierce the dome and crack The Lie wide open. The signs were everywhere. The city was ready to break. It just needed a push.

‘Gonna put out your lights, dedhedz!’

Shoving his hands into his pockets, the street prophet joined the throng. As he walked, his eyes flitted over each passing face, hunting for inspiration.

Yes, this was going to be a good night.

The lift was a long time coming. Someone had smashed its indicator panel so Chel waited in ignorance, trusting it was on its way. There were twelve lifts serving her hab-tower, three to each side, but only seven still ran. Her apartment was on the one hundred and thirty-first floor, roughly midway up the block. Walking down a stairwell would take over an hour. Walking back up might as well take a lifetime because she’d never last the journey. Lyle claimed he’d done it once, but that was years ago, before he let himself go. Over the last decade he’d run to fat while she’d wasted to skin and bones, as though one body had leeched the other, though neither benefitted from the transaction.

If the lifts die, we’ll die with them, Chel reflected bleakly, gazing along the corridor to her right. She never walked that way, though it offered a shorter route to her apartment. Something about the passage repelled her. As always, many of its overhead bulbs were out, while the rest blinked erratically, transforming it into a patchwork path of light and shadow. Winged bugs worshipped at the surviving lights, fluttering about the bulbs in faltering circles, confused by the flickering. There was a mournful quality to their devotions, as though they suspected their idols were mocking them. Some of the flyers had defected to the steadier illumination of Chel’s torch. Like many citizens, she carried her own light source, fearful of getting caught in a blackout. They were becoming more frequent, occasionally plunging entire districts into darkness for hours. Lyle, who refused to carry a light, claimed it was nothing to worry about, but–

There was a scraping noise along the shunned corridor.

Chel shone her light into the gloom, her other hand drawing a shok-jak from her pocket. The compact weapon only had a single charge, but she’d been assured it packed a heavy punch. She’d bought it from one of the stimm dealers on her district’s outskirts. Like the seller’s primary wares, it was illegal. Lyle would be scandalised if he found out, which pleased her.

‘Hello?’ Chel called out. Her beam couldn’t penetrate beyond the first few dark patches. ‘Is someone there?’

In theory the tower was safe, sealed behind shutters and coded gates, but strangers still got inside. The upper seven floors, which had been gutted by fire years ago, were overrun with vagrants. The block’s wardens stayed clear of the derelict floors, but they’d cut off power and lift access, sealing their status as a no-go zone. Lyle called the area The Warren – capitalised like The Balance, but the spiritual opposite of his beloved harmony. The disorder overhead symbolised everything he loathed.

‘I’m armed,’ Chel added, raising her jak pointedly. There was no reply. It was probably just a rat or one of the feral cats that hunted them. Both were getting bolder – and bigger – but they usually avoided residents, though they’d been known to attack young children. But it wasn’t vermin that worried her. Not that kind anyway.

The stairs to The Warren had been sealed off many times, but the barriers never held and the wardens eventually gave up repairing them. There’d been talk of starting up a residents’ watch, but nothing united the people of Barka Tower except misery, so it went nowhere. The squatters had been reported to the authorities, but the city’s law enforcers had bigger problems on their hands. It would probably take another fire to purge the infestation.

Infestation? Purge? Chel frowned, ashamed of using such terms. His terms. The intruders might be unsettling, but they were still people, many of them probably only a few bad choices along from her own position, if they’d ever had a choice at all. Since her dismissal from the municipal medicae service Chel had drifted between jobs, never lasting more than a year in one place. The trajectory in respect and pay had been relentlessly downward. That was why she’d stuck with Lyle. The Congregation would look after him if they split, but she’d probably end up in one of the periphery slums.

There’s no way back from that, she thought as her light played over the flaking, graffiti-covered walls. It illuminated declarations of love and hate, devotion and revolution, and more often than not, sheer nonsense, or something that would only make sense to its author. The many-coloured scrawls overlapped each other in a continuous skein, recent avowals smeared over the old, creating layers of desire and delirium. There were pictures too, caught amid the tangle like snared hallucinations. Most were obscene, but two – undoubtedly the work of the same hand – were striking.

You’re new, Chel gauged, certain she hadn’t seen them before. Her gaze lingered on each in turn. They sliced through their rivals in stark black lines, sometimes flowing, sometimes jagged, but always vicious. The nearest depicted a spiralling mandala that bristled with spines and sharp petals, like a malignant flower. A vertical eye nestled at its core, wide open and defiantly insane. The composition was disturbing, though not without beauty, but the other…

Chel shivered as she studied the second picture. Was that meant to be a person? The bipedal figure was about the height of a man, but it wasn’t remotely human. It looked like the thing’s body had been torn apart then strung back together at random, with the pieces connected by taut tendons. Spindly limbs sprouted from its torso, jointed in multiple, sometimes conflicting angles that forced the appendages into zigzagging contortions. The legs tapered into sharp points while the arms bloomed into sheaves of needle-like talons. But the head – if it could be called a head – was the worst part. That swirling ribbon of fanged eyes glared at her, alive with gleeful malice.

Who had painted these things? The prospect of the mind behind such visions wandering the corridors was frightening, yet also exhilarating. There was a mystery here and mysteries had no place in Barka Tower, let alone the limbo of Chel Jarrow’s life.

What do you mean? What are–

There was a chime beside her. The lift doors parted, releasing the pent-up stench of vomit and urine, laced with the tang of some narcotic. It was a foul mixture, but Chel had smelled worse. Sometimes there were more substantial deposits waiting inside. Predictably the lift’s light was out, leaving only faint rings of radiance from the buttons on the control panel. With practised wariness, she scanned the compartment’s floor before stepping inside. The enigma of the pictures would have to wait.

Don’t go away, she prayed to them. It was a peculiar wish, yet she couldn’t deny it.

As she reached for the panel the scraping sound came again, closer and more protracted this time, as though something sharp were being drawn along the wall towards her. Several sharp things. A glassy chittering accompanied the scraping – so delicate it might be subliminal. Chel froze, picturing the shredded man slithering along the wall, navigating its peeling canvas in a ripple of black lines.

The noise stopped just outside.

Waiting for me to choose…

Strangely Chel felt no fear, just an apprehension of disappointment. What if she looked and found only vermin, animal or otherwise? No, it was better not to know. Let the mystery endure. She pressed the button to the lobby.

There was a uniformed man standing on the street corner ahead, watching passers-by. His blue suit was armoured with flak-plates, boosting his already considerable bulk. The winged-sun icon of Carceri Hive shone from his breastplate and helmet. A tinted visor hid most of his face, but his vigilance was obvious.

Enforcer, Skreech thought sourly. He slowed his pace, but kept moving, wary of drawing suspicion. The lawmen were becoming more active on the streets these days, as if they knew something big was coming. There’d never been many of them – maybe a thousand covering the whole city – but even one of the bastards was bad news.

You’re looking for someone, Skreech guessed. Violent crime used to be rare in Carceri, but things were becoming edgier in the final days. There’d always been gangs working the slums, running vice in all its flavours or making trouble just for the hell of it, but nothing like the doomsday cults that had come crawling out of the shadows in recent years. Crazies like the Razers or the Darkscars killed because they liked it, even if they had a creed of sorts. Skreech reckoned they’d heard the call of the Night Below, but didn’t have the soul to listen the way he did. Unfortunately they’d carried their trouble beyond the slums, which upped the heat across the whole city. That made his crusade trickier.

Ain’t me you want, he guessed, eyeing the enforcer ahead. Oh, the authorities knew his work for sure, but they didn’t get its significance. And they sure didn’t know his old name or face either – the one he wore now – or they’d have taken him out long ago. To them his offerings were small fry beside the cults’ mayhem, but the herd knew better, in their blood if not with their heads. The newscasts proved that. Nothing scared them like the kiss of the Needleman!

Skreech realised he was smiling. Guiltily he bit his tongue, drawing blood as penance. This was serious. Maybe the law wasn’t after him specifically, but that enforcer wasn’t going to like the looks of him. The odds were good he’d be stopped and searched, which wouldn’t end well – not with the things he was carrying – but turning round was also risky. The crowd was pretty thin so the lawman might notice and come after him.

Make a move, Skreech urged himself, turning the options over. Both were bad.

As so often happened in a crisis, his saviour threw a miracle his way. This time it showed up as a rushing yellow wall. The tram rolled alongside him, heading away from the enforcer, going fast, but not so fast Skreech didn’t see the gaping doorway coming right up – jammed open, like they sometimes did. There wasn’t time to think things over. Now or never!

Skreech leapt.

A heavy thud cut through the soporific rhythm of the wheels. Startled from her dozing, Chel glanced along the carriage. There was a boy leaning against the wall opposite the faulty door, about ten paces away, his hands pressed against the glass. Clearly he’d jumped aboard and lost his balance. It was a reckless, stupid thing to do.

Idiot, Chel judged. As if hearing her scorn, the newcomer turned and caught her gaze. His sallow face crawled with scars and tattoos, but his eyes were striking, like clear blue pools in a swamp. Black hair hung to his waist in a snarl of dreadlocks, braided with fragments of metal and glass. His leather coat was frayed, its gloss faded and spattered with paint. He didn’t look much past eighteen, but his spirit would be older, coarsened by violence and wounded pride. Chel had seen the type before – both men and women – especially since she’d started working nights. This boy would cut her open without a second thought.

He’s smiling, she realised. It wasn’t the arrogant smirk she’d expect from such a face, but something softer… Filled with wonder. She looked away quickly.

There were six other passengers in the carriage, all Delta-class labourers judging by their drab coveralls – probably cleaners heading for the industrial district. None of them paid any attention to the predator who’d leapt among them. Either they were lost in their dozing or fearful of drawing his interest, as she’d done. If the boy attacked her they’d just sit by and sink deeper into themselves, seeing and hearing nothing.

You’re all dead already, Chel thought, studying their placid faces. But too lazy to see it.

Cautiously she glanced at the newcomer again. The boy had sunk to the floor, back against the wall with his legs drawn up, evidently contemptuous of the seats. His fingers drummed skittishly against his knees, betraying the tension beneath his relaxed posture. He was staring at the blur of buildings through the doorway, but Chel sensed his focus was elsewhere.

On me…

For the second time that night she felt no fear at the prospect of danger. Indeed, she was energised by it. She didn’t trust the smile the boy had offered, but she trusted the desire it concealed – the urge to hit out and hurt. Trusted it because she felt an echo of that same compulsion in herself…

Come then, she urged, her fingers stroking the shok-jak in her pocket. Try me.

But the boy didn’t answer her unspoken challenge. The carriage emptied steadily with each passing station until they were the last on board, but even then the predator didn’t stir. Had she misjudged him? No, she’d never felt more certain of her instincts. Her sharpened dreams had sharpened her in turn. Somewhere beneath that razor-bright clarity her old self chimed a bell of warning. This wasn’t right. It was the VLG-01 talking, twisting her out of kilter. It had to be.

‘I don’t care,’ Chel whispered, stifling the alarm. ‘I like it.’

The tram ground to a halt again, signalling her stop. They were nearly at the line’s terminus, beyond which lay the periphery slums, where civilisation petered out. That’s where her fellow passenger – fellow predator – belonged.

Finally the boy moved, rising smoothly when Chel did. They stepped outside together, exiting by different doors in parallel. As the tram pulled away Chel turned to face him. They were alone on the platform. Surely the moment of danger was imminent. The jak felt alive in her grip, as eager as the syringe she’d used to murder Rozalia Temető.

Not murder, she corrected herself. It was an accident. But suddenly she wasn’t so sure. Hadn’t it felt good? So very–

Chel shook her head, trying to focus on the present. The boy’s face was in profile to her, his gaze locked on the wall ahead, as though it carried an invisible message.

‘What do you want?’ Chel demanded, thrilled by the steel in her voice. ‘Why are you following me?’

He didn’t answer – didn’t even look at her. Scowling, Chel stepped towards him, then caught herself. What was she thinking? This was madness. Her inner alarm was tolling again, louder than before.

This isn’t me!

Skreech exhaled slowly as his quarry’s footsteps receded. For a moment there he thought the woman might push it – maybe even attack him before he was ready. Sometimes the marked ones fought back, but most just froze up and let things play out. None had ever confronted him. That proved he’d chosen well. Sure, the woman was old and dried-up on the outside, but there was a spark inside her – something fierce and bitter looking to break out.

‘I’ll show you the way, sister,’ Skreech promised, pulling a bag from inside his coat. Reverently he withdrew his true face. To call the sacred artefact a mask was unthinkable. No, his mask was the ink-stained meat he currently wore, not the black iron visage in his hands. He’d forged it soon after starting on his path, taking inspiration from the stories that terrified him as a child – the ones that proved to be so much more than just stories…

Behold the Needleman, piercer of light and spinner of night!

The totem stared back at him, its ragged eye slits demanding to be filled. Fulfilled! Skreech was no craftsman, but that didn’t matter. His creation was pure in its ugliness and savage in its honesty. It was a long veil of metal that tapered to a jagged point, with uneven edges that were sharp to the touch, as his scarred fingers attested. The surface was mottled with dried blood and rust, symbolising the twin anathemas of violence and decay, through which revelation could be ripped then rotted away, cycling the seasons of riot and ruin over and over again until the world itself wound down.

Beware the Needleman, bearer of all things dark and spiteful!

Skreech closed his eyes and donned his secret face, binding it to his skull with a leather cord. He shivered as his mind opened up, flooded with impressions that didn’t belong to him, along with an eloquence of thought that was equally exotic. In that moment he became what he wore, anointed by the Night Below.

Hail the Needleman, reaper of lies and weaver of sharp truths!

The myth was as old as the hive itself, though its roots extended much further back, hooked deep into the human psyche, drawing sustenance from that most primal of aversions, the fear of the night. On a world without natural light, where absolute darkness was only a whisper away, that terror had taken ardent form.

Run, hide, weep or fight, it’ll all end the same way, for where there’s one, there’s always more, waiting right inside you and wanting out!

One of his family’s servants had told him the story when he turned nine, sharing it like a dread secret. There were cracks in the great dome that shielded them from the night, riddling it like a spider’s web across an eggshell. They were too fine for the naked eye to see, but if you stared hard enough then closed your eyes suddenly you’d glimpse them, snagged in the torn interval between sight and its absence. Master the trick and you might even see more, though you’d wish you hadn’t, for those black fissures weren’t empty.

Oh no, they were full of needles!

Not the kind of needles that mended things or made you better with a quick jab of pain. No, these were barbs of pure darkness that raged against the light that condemned them to their hairline trenches. But late at night, when the sunlights had dimmed, then the prisoners would come slithering out. Coalescing into seething, spiny shapes, they would crawl across the dome, searching for a way to extinguish the lights for good.

The Needlemen…

The night’s terrors were without number, for they were all figments of the same immaculate fever dream. Sometimes they swarmed in the thousands, like black bugs, each fragment no bigger than a human hand. More rarely, they melded into a vast, thorny blanket that oozed across the canopy as one, but most commonly they took forms that looked manlike, but only if you didn’t look too closely.

Of course, Skreech had looked closely, and often. Once he’d started he couldn’t stop. And, in time, the children of the fissures had looked back and recognised a fellow servant of the Night Below.

Opening its eyes, the Needleman removed the remainder of its vestments from the bag. The gloves were tipped with slender blades, no two the same length. The herald smiled as it slipped them on and flexed its fingers experimentally.

‘Will you, won’t you?’ it asked its blades, anticipating the divine terror they would wring from its sacrifice. There had been no need to shadow the woman. Her jacket carried her company’s logo – a cartoon tin can with goggle eyes and a manic grin, its white-gloved hands raised to offer a double thumbs up. That same absurd figure crowned a building a few blocks from the station, rendered in plastek, its vast form glowing against the skyline.

‘Deceiver of fools,’ the Needleman challenged the false idol. Moving with a jerky grace, it set off in pursuit of its prey.

What was I thinking? Chel asked herself yet again. In the sterile sanctuary of her lab a measure of her composure had returned. Her encounter with the scarred boy felt unreal, like an episode from someone else’s life, yet its flavour lingered – a reckless abandon that was almost euphoric.

I wanted to fight, she admitted. Wanted to break him.

But none of that mattered right now. The anger was just another symptom of her disorder, like the nightmares. She needed to focus on the cause. The vector…

She returned her attention to the sample in her Petri dish. She couldn’t shake the sense that the black gruel was staring right back at her. That was ridiculous, of course. It was only a food additive, like countless others that had passed through her lab for testing and approval. She always approved them. The plant’s manager had made that requirement perfectly clear when she took the job. Quantity over quality! Potton Vitapax supplied the city’s Delta-class labourers with cheap synth-proteins, keeping millions just above the starvation line. That precarious swathe of humanity wasn’t picky about its food, only its absence.

‘We keep ’em topped up so they don’t start chowin’ down on each other.’ Her new boss had winked conspiratorially. ‘Or on us!’

Chel suspected even that crude mission statement wasn’t strictly true. It was rumoured that Potton’s base stock, the euphemistically named ‘Vita Ephemera’, wasn’t entirely synthetic in nature. The grey sludge was delivered via an underground pipeline and funnelled into the plant’s vast network of vats, where it was refined, flavoured, coloured then finally packaged for distribution. There were countless varieties under the company’s brand, but the essence was always the same. Chel sometimes wondered what a molecular analysis of that raw gloop would reveal, but that led to questions about what lay at the other end of the pipeline, which conjured possibilities she didn’t want to dwell upon.

Dismissing the unwanted train of thought, Chel returned her attention to the sample on her desk. VLG-01. The compound’s code name was bland, yet it had piqued her curiosity immediately. The ‘01’ designated it as the first formula from a new supplier, which was unprecedented in her experience. Potton’s additives were always sourced from the same handful of companies, with most products numbering in the high thousands. Who was this ‘VLG’?

The toxicology analysis had come back negative, unusually so in fact. No traces of carcinogens or impurities at all, unlike many of the borderline poisons she’d rubber-stamped for her paymasters. Suspecting an error, she had repeated the tests several times, always with the same results. The compound was clean. And yet she’d held off approving it. Results be damned, she didn’t trust that tarry slime. She’d felt a visceral aversion the moment she saw it, which had intensified with every test it evaded.

‘What are you hiding?’ she murmured. For better or worse, she’d uncovered part of the answer already, though it raised more questions than it settled. The compound had psychoactive properties, though nothing had shown up in the chem-tests. It had taken a more direct approach to unravel that particular secret…

Four nights ago she had administered three undiluted drops with a pipette, directly to her tongue, forgoing the customary infusion wafers or solutions employed by the company’s indentured tasters. It was a flagrant violation of protocol, never mind good sense. Indeed she couldn’t say why she’d done it. Part of it was her antipathy towards the sample – an unwillingness to let the damn thing beat her – but that wasn’t the whole of it. At some level it hadn’t been a decision at all.

I had to try it.

Chel shuddered, remembering the rancid sweetness that had infused her mouth, like the pulp of a rotten fruit. And beneath that, something other – a quality that had no parallel with any natural flavour, yet one she’d recognised in a heartbeat, like a buried memory that was eager to be exhumed.

We… know… you…

She frowned, unable to tell whether the slurred thought had been her own or a reverberation from something outside, slipping through her mind like an intruder. As she floundered, the liquid in the dish moved. Ripples spiralled from its centre, shaping the ooze into concentric ridges that persisted as the liquid flowed through them. Chel held her breath as a complex geometry of spines and petals coagulated before her eyes. It looked like a glistening black orchid.

Or a mandala, she realised, picturing the graffiti she’d seen earlier. This was another manifestation of that arcane form, but rendered in living fluid it captured the reality in a way paint never could.

The reality?

Chel leaned closer, fascinated. The liquid couldn’t actually be moving, though it had moved her to perceive the effect. This had to be another hallucination, but that didn’t make it meaningless. No, there was a message here. She felt sure of it.

As… within…

Once again she was struck by a sense of disconnection, as if the thought weren’t hers.

‘So without,’ she whispered, intuitively completing the verse.

With creeping slowness the mandala flexed within the dish, extending itself into a quivering corona of thorns. Reaching for her… Chel’s hand answered of its own accord, snatching up the container and bringing it to her mouth without recourse to thought. The flavour was exactly as she remembered it.

Distilled darkness.

Potton Vitapax was a sprawling complex of blocky buildings encrusted with pipes and cooling towers. A chain-link fence encircled it, topped with coils of razor wire. The Needleman walked its length patiently, looking for a way inside. It could smell its prey within, ripe for revelation.

Will you, won’t you prick out the lights and bleed the night anew? The ancient rhyme spun through the hunter’s mind as it searched. Whenever the holy fugue awoke it those words were waiting, vibrant with power. Will you, won’t you seek out the sighted and slash their little lies away?

Finally an opportunity presented itself. A burnt-out truck hunkered alongside a stretch of fence, its pallet piled high with ruptured barrels. In a healthy metropolis such a carcass wouldn’t be left to rot on the streets, but Carceri’s industrial quarter was a graveyard of dead machinery. Someday soon such relics would spill out across the entire city, mingling freely with the corpses of its creators.

Will you, won’t you shred the wiles of day and spread the seeds of wild decay?

The Needleman climbed the mound of canisters, picking its way around the runnels of oxidised gunk they’d vomited. The peak was almost level with the top of the fence. Throwing out its arms, the hunter leapt over the barrier and thudded down into the yard beyond, rolling into a crouch as it hit the ground. The impact was bone-jarring, but nothing broke, which was all that mattered. Later there would be pain, but–

Something growled nearby. The Needleman looked up as the growl exploded into a furious barking and a dog hurtled across the yard towards it. The animal’s body was a black-furred slab, bulked out with vat-grown muscles and ridged with augmetic implants. Serrated metal teeth glinted from its muzzle, like the jaws of a trap.

A spike of fear shot through the intruder, puncturing its fugue. Suddenly – horribly – it was mortal again. With a moan of terror, Skreech backed away then wailed as the hound’s jaws snapped shut around his left leg, just above the knee. Swinging its head about, the dog tore through leather and flesh to the bone beneath. Agony drowned out Skreech’s fear, threatening oblivion. He slashed at his attacker wildly, his finger-blades ripping red gouges through its pelt, but it paid no heed. The thing was a damn ward-dog! Its lobotomised brain was wired to ignore pain – maybe even get off on it.

‘Help me!’ Skreech begged the Night Below. ‘Help–’ He kicked out with his other leg and lost his balance. With a yelp he crashed onto his back. The hound was on top of him in an instant, its weight crushing his chest. Hot breath wafted from its jaws, reeking of decay and oil. He kept hacking at its flanks, but couldn’t cut deep enough to do any real damage. Drool spattered his iron veil as the dog snapped at it, trying to reach his throat. Fortunately his mask extended to his breastbone, presenting an impenetrable shield, but if its cord snapped he was done for.

Will you, won’t you tear my bloody throat out? Skreech thought frantically. Yes, you bloody will! He giggled, unable to resist the absurdity of the moment. To die like this, chewed up by a mindless beast, after achieving so much and coming so close to the end of days. It was so damn pointless!

And maybe that was the point…

A blissful serenity suffused him. Letting go, he sank back into the fugue as his severed self arose, eager to be about its business.

‘Will you?’ the Needleman asked the dog softly. With a sigh it flexed its arms and twisted them at the elbows – then again and yet again – contorting them to line up its blades at just the right angle. ‘Won’t you die for me?’

Then it set to work, stabbing and slicing in swift but unhurried strokes, its blades flicking about in perfect synchronicity, instinctively finding and following the fault lines in their subject’s flesh, severing tendons, arteries and circuitry in a symphony of evisceration, delving deeper with every pointed note. The dog whimpered and its eyes glazed over as some vital connection inside was ruptured. Blood and smoke spewed from its jaws; then it shuddered and slumped forward into death.

‘Yes, you will,’ the Needleman purred. Its joints cracking loudly, it realigned its arms and thrust the carcass aside, then rose unsteadily. Organs flopped from its blood-drenched coat. Despite the eloquence of the butchery it had been messy work, unbefitting of the herald’s sublime calling, but that indignity was trivial beside the damage done to its leg. The dog had gnawed deep into the bone. Blood was pumping vigorously from the wound, threatening to bleed the hunter out.

Ignoring the pain, the Needleman cut a strip from the hem of its coat and bound the wound tightly. Without proper attention the leg would likely be lost, but that was irrelevant for now. It was still more or less functional. That would suffice to fulfil this night’s obligation.

Looking up, the herald glared at the smirking totem atop the refinery. The colossal tin-can god appeared to mock it, revelling in the damage its guardian beast had inflicted. They embodied opposing creeds in the secret war for the city’s soul, yet both had arisen from the same primal sickness, albeit from different strains – one seeded by Greed, the other by Fear. No matter how far humanity journeyed from its wellspring, its innate curses would go with it and find fertile soil to fester.

‘You lie to them,’ the Needleman rebuked its rival. ‘I tell only truth.’

Dismissing the crass idol, it limped towards the nearest building. The vastness of the complex would be no obstacle, for the hunter was connected to its ordained prey by an intangible yet unbreakable cord. It simply had to follow the thread.

Chel felt light-headed, yet paradoxically lucid, as though her body had receded, leaving her senses at the fore. The world around her appeared tenuous and transient, as though it were merely one possibility among many, its persistence entirely contingent upon her conviction in it. She understood this was an extension of the state she had been experiencing for days, heightened by the extra dose of the drug she’d swallowed.

I was blind. Now I see.

She was walking the snarl of gantries overlooking Block-D, which housed a sweeping expanse of storage vats. Vita Ephemera swirled languidly in the open-topped containers below, churned by fans to prevent it from congealing. It was all coarse grey gloop, still awaiting processing into the garbage her masters passed off as food. Siphoning pipes protruded from every vat, connected to testing stations above. Part of her job was to conduct regular hygiene checks on the stock. While the company’s nutritional standards were pitiful, actually poisoning its consumers wouldn’t be profitable.

We might kill them, Chel reflected, but we’ll do it slowly.

During the day the refinery would be packed with labourers, which was why the company had her working nights, tucked away while production went on. Other than a couple of watchmen she was alone in the complex. But she didn’t feel alone now. In fact she felt crowded, as though the place were teeming with unseen people.

Not people. Not any more.

Chel halted and gazed down at the grey pools, studying them with an honesty she’d never allowed herself before. This place was haunted, but its shades weren’t true ghosts. They were too diffuse and degraded for that, their spirits dissolved alongside their bodies, blended into an aggregate spectral sludge.

Processed like sewage.

Once she accepted the truth she began to see the dead, swirling through the gloop in tides of distended, melded faces and groping hands. They were hollow-eyed and hopeless, bereft of sense or sanity, yet suffering all the same. It wasn’t just flesh and blood the city recycled and shovelled into its poor.

We’ve turned them into soul-eaters.

Chel realised she was crying, but she didn’t try to stop the tears falling into the grey swirl below. It was already contaminated beyond anything she could offer, tainted though she was. There was no denying her guilt, of course. Ignorance couldn’t acquit her collaboration, especially when it was wilful.

‘I knew,’ she confessed to the dead. ‘I’ve always known.’

Somewhere far away, the fading fantasy of her old self railed against the admission. This wasn’t – couldn’t be – real! It was just another drug-fuelled delusion, like her nightmares. She wasn’t herself – hadn’t been since she’d taken that first, fateful dose. Why else would she have swallowed more of the damned thing?

They were tempting denials, but they were still lies and she was past humouring them. The narcotic wasn’t an engine of delirium, but revelation, and once the taste was acquired there was no going back. The change it engendered in the brain, perhaps even the spirit, was permanent. She grasped that viscerally, with both regret and relief, but above all curiosity. Why would anyone create such a provocative substance, let alone seek to spread it among the city’s forsaken? Why wake them up to the horror of their existence? It was those questions that had led her here. She needed to find the sample’s source container. Perhaps it would offer a clue as to its creators.

‘Who are you?’ she whispered.

‘Doc?’ someone asked behind her. She turned, unsurprised, as though she’d always known the man was there. He was in his late sixties, but his back was straight and his shoulders broad. The face under his cap was like carved mahogany, leavened by bushy white brows and lively eyes.

‘Sergeant,’ Chel answered. She didn’t know the watchman’s name. Everybody just called him The Sergeant, the same way they called her The Doc. It was rumoured he’d been in the military in his younger days. There was a laconic authority about him that supported that, yet he was an affable fellow. They’d shared the occasional mug of caff, even played cards once. Regarding him with her new-found clarity, Chel realised he might even have become a friend of sorts, if she’d been open to such things.

‘You see something down there?’ he asked, his eyes sweeping the refinery floor. ‘Something off?’

‘Nothing that wasn’t there before.’

He frowned. ‘You all right, doc?’

‘I don’t know.’ She was unwilling to lie any more, even for convenience.

‘You got the look tonight,’ he gauged, taking a step closer.

‘The look?’

‘Thousand-yard stare. Like yer seein’ right through things.’

Chel lowered her eyes, unsettled by the observation.

‘Maybe a brew to perk you up?’ he suggested gently.

‘Another time, sergeant.’ Then a thought occurred to her. ‘But there’s something you could help me with.’ She showed him her data-slate. ‘I’m looking for this warehouse.’ The stock manifest had identified where the VLG-01 was stored, but she’d been going round in circles trying to find it.

‘Yeah, I know the place,’ the watchman said, squinting at the slate. ‘Ain’t used much these days.’

‘Can you show me?’

He raised an eyebrow, weighing her up. Though the warehouses weren’t off limits to her, it was an unusual request.

‘Please, sergeant. It’s important.’

He held her gaze a moment longer, then nodded. ‘Okay, good enough for me. This way.’

Getting inside the complex had been easy. The first door the Needleman tried was unlocked and unguarded. The worst of the refinery’s security was probably behind it, but haste had already cost it gravely so the intruder proceeded cautiously. Not that speed was an option any more. Its mauled leg had become a dead weight, trailing behind it as it crept through a maze of vats. Every step sent slivers of pain up its leg, threatening to break its equilibrium, but blood loss was a more pressing concern. The crude tourniquet had staunched the flow somewhat, but without stitches the bleeding wouldn’t stop. Unfortunately, despite its name, that craft was alien to the Needleman. Its vocation was dissolution, not restoration.

This body is failing, it judged, accepting the conclusion without emotion. It was of little consequence. Another herald would take its place – perhaps many others. After all, its kind was legion.

A clatter of footsteps approached from somewhere overhead. The hunter pressed itself against a vat as a pair of figures appeared on the gantry above – a man in a grey uniform and… The Needleman smiled, recognising its prey. There was a new vibrancy about the woman, as though her potential had bloomed since their last encounter. It could hope for no finer offering for its final sacrifice.

‘Will you, won’t you bleed to feed the night?’ it whispered.

The cord between them grew taut as the woman passed by, tugging the hunter after her. Relenting, it shadowed the pair as they crossed the concourse then fell back when they descended a stairway to its level.

‘This is the one,’ the watchman said, grabbing the handle of a heavy door. It creaked in protest when he yanked it open, like nails raking metal. ‘Like I said, ain’t used much.’

‘Why?’ the woman asked.

‘Can’t rightly say.’ He shook his head. ‘Some places… They just don’t work out.’

Lights flickered on in the chamber beyond when they entered. The Needleman took ten long breaths then followed. It wouldn’t be long now…

Her quarry was on the far side of the warehouse, lurking in a shadowed corner. There was no mistaking it. Vast and dark, the barrel loomed over its fellow containers like a cylindrical monolith. Its dark body was girdled with broad iron bands and massive rivets.

Like a cage, Chel thought, approaching the vessel warily. It was almost twice her height, yet that wasn’t what unsettled her. No, it was the age radiating from it – a deep and baleful antiquity that seemed to diminish everything around it.

‘This what yer after?’ her guide asked, speaking quietly, as though afraid of waking the slumbering giant.

‘Yes. Have you seen anything like it before?’ Chel asked, already knowing the answer.

‘No,’ the sergeant whispered. ‘No, I ain’t.’

Chel realised he was hanging back. His stubborn vitality had drained away, yet there was steel in his eyes. This was a man who’d faced down fear before. Why had she never taken the time to learn his story?

‘You can go, sergeant,’ she said, releasing him from whatever vague obligation he felt towards her. This wasn’t his problem.

‘You sure?’ His expression teetered between gratitude and guilt.

‘I am. Thank you.’

‘I’ll be right outside then,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Holler if you need me.’

Chel watched him go then faced the vessel again. There was a brooding expectancy about it, as though it had been waiting for her. How long had it been here? And who’d brought the sample to her lab? It hadn’t appeared with the regular batches. For that matter, the name on the testing requisition form – Vedas – had been unfamiliar, though its authorisation stamp was in order. How was that–

No, such mysteries were inconsequential. The drug had come to her because it wanted to. Wanted her. She felt sure of that.

‘Why?’ she asked, taking the final steps towards the barrel. ‘Why me?’ That was the only question that really mattered. ‘Tell me.’

Up close, she saw the bands girdling the container were engraved with runes, though she couldn’t make them out clearly in the gloom. Hesitantly, then with sudden eagerness, she reached out and ran her fingers over them, trying to identify their forms by touch, though she couldn’t say why. Like so much else recently, the action felt inevitable, as if she were snared by some implacable gravity that rendered volition obsolete. Perhaps that had always been the way of things, but she’d never noticed before. Maybe choice was only ever illusory. She couldn’t decide whether the possibility was repellent or comforting.

There was a scuffling sound somewhere behind her, punctuated by a harsh gargling. Chel tried to turn, but the runes wouldn’t allow it. They crawled beneath her fingertips like worms etched in water, urging her to follow their flow. Follow… Closing her eyes, she circled the barrel, drawn along by the riddle. Follow…

‘What are you?’ she murmured.

‘What are you, Chel Jarrow?’ the enigma asks in answer.

Opening her eyes the Grey Woman sees she is in the infinite ward once again, standing over the sick girl. No… not sick. Rozalia Temető is already dead, her face livid with decay, yet her eyes are open, their faded irises fixed on her.

‘Why?’ the corpse demands in a drowned voice. ‘Why me?’

The Grey Woman stares at her victim, aghast.

‘Tell me.’

‘An accident…’ she confesses. ‘It was an accident.’ She had been so tired that night, drained by a triple shift she should never have accepted, but pride had demanded. She’d misread the bed numbers, mistaking XVI for XIV, and administered a blood thinner to the wrong patient – a girl whose metabolism had reacted violently to the error. ‘It was a terrible mistake.’

‘Then it was for nothing,’ the dead girl croaks.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I don’t want your pity.’

‘No,’ the Grey Woman whispers. ‘But–’

‘Make it mean something.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Believe in it. Embrace it. Choose it.’

‘Choose it?’

‘Make me a sacrifice.’

‘I…’ The Grey Woman hesitates, sensing a final, unforgivable precipice. ‘I can’t change the past,’ she protests.

‘But you can choose your present.’ The revenant leans towards her, its body creaking with rigor mortis. ‘Choose!’

‘Yes,’ Chel breathed, accepting her fate. In that moment her hand found the barrel’s spigot. It protruded from an octagonal panel, almost level with her face. The plate was embossed with the cryptic acronym, along with a phrase in bold Gothic script:

VLG

~ AS WITHIN, SO WITHOUT ~

While her eyes lingered on the words, Chel’s fingers turned the spigot’s tap. Then her mouth found the spout.

As above, so below, she prayed as the dark nectar gushed past her lips.

The Needleman took the watchman as he left the warehouse, slitting his throat with a strike intended to silence and slay in the same instant. The wound was mortal, yet the old man still fought back, scrabbling for his killer’s throat as his life leached away. The fury on his face was exhilarating to behold – so much sweeter than the dog’s mindless rage – but like the beast before him, he was defeated by his foe’s iron visage.

‘So it flows,’ the victor whispered, lowering the watchman’s body gently, wary of alerting its true prey. ‘Until all the world’s bled dry.’

Sighing in anticipation, the Needleman crept into the warehouse. The overhead lights were sparse and feeble, leaving much of the chamber in darkness, but that was no impediment to its purpose. No, it was the leg wound that dismayed it. Spasms wracked the hunter’s muscles and its vision fluttered as it moved, threatening to disintegrate altogether.

‘I am legion,’ the Needleman hissed, steadying itself with the promise of its brethren.

The woman was waiting beside a massive container, her back to the hunter. She turned as it approached, meeting its gaze without surprise or fear. Indeed her long, pale face was entirely devoid of expression. Dark liquid trickled from her lips, staining her chin and the front of her jacket. Woven logos of the tin-can deity grinned from her lapels, revelling in its worshipper’s excess.

‘Will you, won’t you rise to fulfil the Fall?’ the Needleman asked, stalking towards her. This was the customary question it offered the chosen ones, though whatever they wailed or whimpered in response, whether threats, bribes or pleas for mercy, the answer was always the same.

‘Oh yes, you will!’ the herald confirmed, whirling its claws in a slashing salute. Then its step faltered as it noticed something else about its prey.

Her eyes were black.

The Dark Woman regarded the creature before her with detached contempt. It was an inane, unfinished wretch, drenched in blood and banality. She recognised the supernal entity its makeshift claws and mask aspired to, but the mimicry fell far short of the graffiti that had enthralled her earlier that night, let alone the reality. The youth who’d stalked her skulked behind the sham, clinging to his delusions like a drowning man.

‘You are nothing,’ she judged. Picturing his mask’s cord, she tore it free with a twist of her will. ‘Let me make something of you.’

The boy stared at her, terror and envy warring for supremacy on his face. Stripped of his façade he was pitiful – a frail and quailing thug who’d imagined himself so much more. Only the violence in him survived his exposure, too ingrained to scour away.

‘Come then,’ the Dark Woman goaded, knowing he couldn’t resist the challenge. ‘Kill me if you can.’

With a snarl the youth lurched towards her, his claws slashing in dual swipes. To his foe’s heightened senses the attack appeared sluggish, as though he were wading through water, while her domain was air. She darted inside the languid arcs and rammed her shok-jak’s blunt prong between his jaws, shattering his teeth and tearing through the tongue behind. The charge activated when the tip hit the back of his throat, spewing electric current through his skull. His eyes widened as they broiled, then burst wetly. Sparks played about the charred sockets, teasing out black smoke. More leaked from his jaws, which had melted around the prong jutting from them.

‘You were a lie,’ his executioner declared, releasing her weapon. She stepped away as the dead man’s claws completed their passage, gnashing together like teeth. The impact unbalanced the corpse and it toppled over, flat on its back.

‘For the Fall,’ the Dark Woman proclaimed, granting the fool a purpose in death. Her eyes met the vacant gaze of the mask beside him.

Will you, won’t you? it asked.

Deciding she would, the night’s new herald picked it up. It was a crude thing, yet they shared the same creed. They had both sacrificed to hasten the coming darkness. In time she would far outstrip the grubby offerings of its creator, but the mask itself was potent.

This isn’t me, a plaintive voice beseeched her, but it was buried too deep to matter any more, if it ever had. Ignoring the ghost, she glanced at the liquid-filled monolith. The urge to worship at its fount and drink again was strong, but she understood she’d had her fill. Whatever remained was for others to savour. She would approve it as an additive, of course. That would be her final act in this squalid temple-factory, for she wouldn’t be returning. Soon the nectar would find its way to Carceri’s forsaken, too diluted to awaken their flesh as it had awakened hers, but sufficient to open their eyes. Their enlightenment would be one of many unravelling threads in this world’s greater dissolution.

‘Thank you,’ she whispered to the monolith. ‘For the choice.’

Leaving the warehouse, she stopped beside the dead watchman. When the bodies were found questions would be asked, but quickly quashed in the name of productivity. The authorities would never hear of the murders. And in due course the cadavers would return here in another form.

‘I’m sorry,’ the Dark Woman said to the old man. It was her second apology of the night and the last she would ever offer.

Skreech lay in a darkness more complete than anything he’d ever desired, dead yet horribly present, severed from sensation, yet all too aware of the voracious, watchful giant looming over him. Pleading without words, he begged for forgiveness – for another chance to serve – but if his dark god heard him it paid no heed.

The Dark Woman took the stairwell back to her old apartment, striding up the mountain of steps as confidently as her former self would have crossed a room. Occasionally she passed shabby, broken-faced figures, but they slunk away from her, sensing she wouldn’t be easy pickings, which was the only kind they cared for. Reaching her floor, she stopped to peruse the hallowed graffiti that had signposted her path. The mandala was still there, testifying to the sanctity of this place, but the figure was gone, its message served and its territory relinquished to a new custodian.

‘We are legion,’ the Dark Woman acknowledged. Later she would ascend further and claim the tower’s derelict heights as her eyrie, along with the abandoned souls who congregated there, taking some as worshippers, others as sacrifices, for they were ripe for either role. But first she must accept the sacrament that would seal her allegiance to the night.

The supplicant donned her predecessor’s mask then walked the corridor she had always shunned, shivering as its shadows caressed her. Soft but insistent, they teased her flesh and bones into finer, sharper forms with every step she took, eliciting pleasure and pain in equal measure.

Will we, won’t we… the mask murmured, sharing its wearer’s epiphany.

The Dark Woman gasped as her fingers lengthened then split, budding crooked blades that chittered when she flexed them. Her elbows splintered in sudden sympathy, then multiplied and knitted into new configurations that would defy mortal eyes. A few steps later her knees followed, twisting into manifold opposing arcs, yet she kept her balance, instinctively adapting to the changes. When her torso shattered she screamed from the soul, then moaned as the fragments realigned and spun thorny tendons to bind themselves anew, though the knots were restless, for rigidity offended them.

We are legion!

As she neared the end of the passageway the mask tightened about her face, fusing with the skin and skull beneath. Creaking, it distended further, gouging fresh eyes along its length as its chin passed her riven waist.

We are legion!

The pilgrim’s path ended at its old apartment. It slipped through the cracks in the door and flitted to the bed it had once shared with a fool. The man was there now, his jowls quivering as he snored, lost in the last refuge he would ever know. Even in sleep he reeked of arrogance. His atonement would be lengthy and extravagant, his confessor decided. Its claws clicked in anticipation, drooling shadows over the oblivious penitent.

‘As above, so below,’ the Needleman intoned in a voice that swarmed with barbs. ‘As within, so without.’

Then it set to work and True Night drew a little closer.

A Moment of Cruelty

Phil Kelly

Alabastian Valenth the First awoke to the surging patter of sleet on his bedroom window. He groaned, scratching his hip as his sleep-gummed eyes peeled open. Feeble light diffused through the musky fug that hung in his bedroom. Always so damn gloomy in Shyish. Not like Azyr. Not like the land of his true birthright.

Mhurghast’s sun had always been weak. It was why the mists lingered in the city’s streets so long. They made people-watching out of the Valenth mansion’s attic window, his favourite pastime when drink-ridden and melancholy, a rare indulgence. ‘A kind of morbid voyeurism,’ his best friend Harratio had called it. Perhaps there was some truth in that, for he had developed a habit of idly dwelling on peasants’ tales whilst staring into the mist. Tales of tortured phantoms and leering cannibals, of hungry things that could take human form and beasts that walked as men.

How wonderful it would be to have a proper summer to burn the mists away. Just a few weeks of undiluted Hyshian sunshine to put some colour in his pale skin and banish the dark thoughts. Was that too much to ask?

The young noble raised an arm, bleary-eyed. He turned the limb in the half-light, a master carpenter examining a pearwood carving fresh from the lathe. Still near perfect, even in his late twenties. Still wrinkle-free, blemish-free. Small wonder so many ingénues and princelings had shared his bed sheets of late.

Alabastian cut a dash in the high society of Mhurghast, and used his reputation as an eligible scion to full effect. In fact, in the recent past, he had been described by one of his admirers as magnificent. He smiled at the memory, stretching like a cat, then winced as a beam of afternoon sun crept into the corner of his eye. Admittedly he was not feeling quite so magnificent today, but given that he preferred to sleep alone – and had kicked out many a conquest during the small hours to ensure it – it hardly mattered. A slow, insidious headache was mounting an offensive on his frontal lobe, almost certainly thanks to another late night with Harratio and his viciously strong–

Pater Nagash! His costume meet!

Alabastian sat bolt upright in a tangle of stained silk, stomach lurching with a queasy bulge of vomit that he only just managed to keep down. How could he be so careless? He cast a bitter glance at Mother’s water clock by his bed, the Azyrite relic accusing him as usual with its constant drip, drip, drip. Three hours late. He reached over to turn the clock sideways, but his drink-torpor made him clumsy, and he knocked it into the cupboard instead. The intricate artefact spun away, bouncing hard off the chaise longue before shattering on the floor’s mosaic of bluestone and jet.

‘Damn it all.’

Slowly he felt his rage dwindle and pass into sullen languor and irritation. The floor was always a little too cold for his bare feet, no matter how much wood he had Maltratt burn in the hearth overnight. Now, with shards of broken glass scattered across it, it would be even more obnoxious to cross to the bathroom. And with Mother gone, he would have to get the staff to clean it up all by himself.

With a great, shuddering sigh, Alabastian hauled himself out of the other side of the bed. He stepped around the periphery of the room with exaggerated, careful steps. A shard of Azyrite crystal punctured the meat of his foot nonetheless. He hissed, breathing hard, before finding the splinter. His questing fingers yanked it out to send droplets of blood pattering onto the bluestone. A howl of pain echoed down the corridor.

Moments later the heavy thuds of the house guard shook the stairs.

‘Sire,’ came the voice of his head guard, Maltratt. ‘Are you hurt?’ She had a deep voice, for a woman, but given her wrestler’s build perhaps that was little surprise.

‘It’s just a splinter, damn it. You idle buffoons can go back to your card game.’

‘If you are sure you are well, sir, I will leave you,’ said Maltratt. She bowed stiffly, and made for the stairs. Xarantine, her second-in-command, met his gaze for a moment with a look of barely concealed contempt. ‘Our apologies for disturbing your morning exercise,’ she said, turning to follow her reporting officer back downstairs.

Maltratt was deferential enough, but her second-in-command had never liked him. Since Mother had passed away, the redhead hadn’t been afraid to show it.

‘Xarantine?’

‘What?’ she said, turning back with her eyes hooded.

‘Get Lassiter to prepare me a coach. I’m running late. I depart in fifteen minutes for the costumiers, to the very second.’

‘You gave him the day off, remember? After getting back so late last night.’

‘What? I don’t remember doing that.’

Xarantine raised an eyebrow, her lips pursed.

‘Fine then,’ he said, shaking his head to clear some of the muzzy spider silk of his headache. ‘I’m perfectly capable of walking there. I’m a grown man, after all.’

‘Very good.’ The guardswoman’s expression suggested he was anything but. Alabastian smiled mirthlessly, and slammed the door in her face.

The mist from the River Hisset rose over the Necrai Bridge like a revenant crawling from an open grave. Purple-grey, it curled its long fingers through the column-lined sides to cover the flagstones in a haze of clinging condensation. Beyond it the palace dominated the horizon, the baroque shadow of mansions built around it in the Azyrite style only just visible through the mist.

‘More like cursed Ulgu than Shyish, these days,’ muttered Alabastian. ‘Malerion’s breath everywhere.’ In truth the cool, wet mist was not near as dangerous as its Ulguan equivalent. It was a mere inconvenience rather than a hungering, sentient force. Yet the things it could hide gave him a delicious shiver of fear, the undead foremost amongst them.

Face your terrors, Mother had always said. Perhaps that was why he and Harratio had chosen to dress as long-skulled, blood-slicked gheists for the coming Lunaghast Ball, cushions stuffed under their tattered cloaks to give them the hunchbacked silhouettes of glaivewraiths. Legend had it the hunter-spirits were slow creatures, but that the spearing, piercing blades they held before them were inescapable. Much like Pater Nagash’s revenge. The young nobles had considered it an apt metaphor for their rise to prominence in Mhurghast society. Slow, but inevitable.

As he strode towards his rendezvous at the costumier’s, the mist’s chill grasped Alabastian’s shoulders and pushed its invisible talons into the meat of his chest. He pulled his jade pashmina tighter, tucking its ends into his doublet. Good cloth, he thought, distracting himself by admiring its pattern of interlocking Valenth heraldry. A fine garment with which to impress Harratio, and one with a story behind it, for it had been bought for a pittance from a desperate Azyrite seamstress. Yet against the penetrating cold of the Mhurghast night, it was about as much use as a lacy negligee.

A stooped shadow shuffled from the mist to his left, becoming a yellow-toothed woman with a missing leg. She was about Xarantine’s age, but had more in common with a stooped crone, presumably through the trials of what had obviously been a very hard life. Her smashed-up features were twisted into an eager expression, a brown plague-stain on her forehead as if she had been splashed with blood that she had never bothered to wash off.

‘Sally from the castle,’ she said. ‘Water for a tale?’

‘I think not.’

‘I can spin a fine yarn about the Old War, laddie, if you have a drop of aqua to loosen the tongue.’

‘None for you, wretch,’ said Alabastian. ‘I have better things to spend my money on than hot air.’

‘Sally from the castle!’ she shouted after him, as if he would bother to remember her name. His hand strayed to protect the leather-bound phials of aqua ghyranis at his waist. It was precious stuff. Even a few drips of the sacred water could cure a common ailment, or revive a dying rose with which to impress a paramour. Used as a currency across the realms, it was a mark of status to own even one full globe of the stuff. The Valenth dynasty had once owned three entire vats of it.

Alabastian moved to the other side of the bridge to get away from the deranged woman’s accusing glare, and found another shadow solidifying in the mist to his right. A threadbare blanket was spread out before a skeletally thin craftswoman, trinkets of Shyishan poormetal and crow’s bones tied with plaited hair spread across her cloth in an impressive fan pattern.

By the fact there were no gaps in the design, business had not been brisk.

‘Talisman for the young dasher?’

‘If you are living proof of the luck they bring,’ said Alabastian, ‘then I will firmly decline.’

More beggars and madmen lined the bridge, crooning or hawking their wares. They were almost certainly Reclaimed, those poor and underprivileged natives of Shyish who had somehow survived the reign of Chaos and, since the raising of the new cities, found refuge amongst the new wave of Azyrite settlers. They had a reputation for being unkempt, embittered and usually wounded, in mind if not in body.

Alabastian cursed his own tardiness. If he had woken up before late afternoon, he could have taken the Bridge of Nobles before it shut for the evening. He could even have stopped for a little gossip with Ghuara and the rest of the Black Halberds at Bridge’s End, so as to have something to offer Harratio.

Instead he was running the gauntlet of the poor and the disfigured, the madness of the Old War reflected in the eyes of those who had only just escaped it. He clucked in disapproval whenever a shadow approached him in the mist, and steered away, making for the central span to better avoid the living detritus at the bridge’s edge.

For a moment, the mist parted, and Alabastian’s eyes were drawn to the sparkling amethyst lights of the waterfront. All those high buildings and glass-roofed palaces made for a grand sight, their rain-slick obsidian gleaming with the moisture of the River Hisset.

‘Please,’ came a wheezing, phlegm-thick voice.

Alabastian nearly tripped over a kneeling figure, all but prostrate, on the flagstones.

‘A drop, sire. Please.’

The beggar was clad in a filthy green jerkin, head down as if in genuflection. A ratty, threadbare shawl covered most of his features, one eye staring out from the wrapping where the other was no more than a cataracted lump. The man’s arms were outstretched, lined with the most terrible sores, and his palms were offered up as if to receive a gift. Alabastian nearly choked in disgust as he saw the beggar was missing three of his fingers. The stumps were still wet with half-dissolute flesh, a fluid like off-white gruel dripping from the stubby remnants of his digits.

‘Please,’ hissed the apparition, his voice dry and hoarse. ‘Please. I beg of you. Just a drop.’

‘I think not,’ said Alabastian, staggering in his haste to get away. ‘Better luck in the next life.’

He pressed on, looking back to dispel a horrible, irrational suspicion the leprous beggar was crawling after him. He heard something skitter in the mist, and for a moment imagined the creature shuffling on all fours towards him at unnatural speed. Must have been a bloat-rat, he told himself. Nothing more.

Still the young noble felt a burning need to run home and wash himself, to scrub his skin from head to toe in as hot a bath as he could stand. The idea of meeting with Harratio and playing at costumes had lost all its lustre. He wanted nothing more than to hide in his bedroom and blast that spectre from his mind with some strong Glymmsforge sweetblack. Yet already he had committed one faux pas by being tardy for a dressmaker’s appointment. To miss it altogether would invite social rancour from an influential friend, and that he could not afford.

Alabastian pressed on through the mist, glad beyond words to reach the far end of the bridge. Beyond it lay the cobbled streets that stretched towards the Artisanry District. The Black Halberds kept the riff-raff off the main streets; their wages depended on it. He passed two of the guards at the bridge’s barbican, their upright silhouettes in stark contrast to those of the dregs on the bridge.

‘Evening, sire,’ one of them ventured.

‘It is that,’ he replied. ‘Though not a good one.’

Something of his usual confidence bled into Alabastian’s step once more as he continued on past the guards into the well-paved streets of Jeweller’s Row and made his way for Tzendril’s Costumiers. Perhaps something could be salvaged from the day after all.

‘I tell you, Harratio,’ said Alabastian, adjusting his codpiece with a great show of effort, ‘it’s an absolute shithole when you stray past the Halberds.’

‘How so?’ said his friend, his slender physique revealed once more as he shed the glaivewraith costume’s inner framework and tossed it casually aside. ‘I mean, one hears things, of course, but I haven’t been out of the Quarter for months.’

It was a well-known fact that Harratio d’Asbe rarely ventured out of the city’s Temple, Palace and Artisan districts. The d’Asbes were even richer than the Valenths, which alone had elevated their eldest son to heroic status amongst their peers. Yet on matters outside his clique, he was painfully naïve.

‘You should see the peasants massing on the bridge,’ said Alabastian. ‘Hawkers, thriftsmen, grafters and grifters of all stripes. Stop for even a moment and you’ll walk away with your phials dry and your shoes filthy.’

‘How repugnant.’ The d’Asbe looked down his beak of a nose towards Alabastian as if he himself may have become infected. He turned to the costumier, dismissing him with a wave of his white silk glove.

‘I know. I live in fear of one of them touching my skin. Transmitting lice or something. If that happened I’d see them all burnt alive.’

‘I pity you, dear Basti. Over this side of the water, we talk not of fleas, nor paupers, but of velvet-tongued beauties who shift form the better to entice you.’

Alabastian managed a thin smile. ‘One day, I’ll be over this side of the river with you.’

‘Improving one’s lot is purely a matter of persistence.’

‘That and ruthlessness, perhaps. Not something we Valenths have ever lacked.’

‘You say that, handsome,’ said Harratio, ‘but I know you better than that. You’re too soft for this side of town.’

‘Soft as the steel I’ll see sprout from your back, one day.’

Harratio pretended to look appalled, then shrugged and flicked him a kiss from long, well-manicured fingertips. ‘Just make sure I’m wearing the glaivewraith costume first.’

‘The seamsters have done a fine job, but I still think Pater Nagash might spot you for the callow youth you are.’

‘He knows us all, in the end. There is no escape.’

Alabastian frowned at the odd comment, approaching the velvet-shrouded mirror at the back of the room and idly moving its concealing cloth with an outstretched finger.

‘Leave that, please,’ said Harratio. ‘It’s an heirloom I’m taking over to Aunt Dauntrice. Father won’t trust a courier with it. If he sees so much as a finger-smear upon its glass, I’ll feel his horsewhip.’

‘Still a tyrant, then.’

‘Only when he prises himself from the morgue,’ sniffed Harratio. ‘Anyway. See you at the ball next week. We’re meeting at the Jewel for sundown. Don’t be late this time, or I’ll blacken your reputation even further.’

‘After today, the party can’t come soon enough.’

‘You should take Negatian Bridge on your way back, if you want to avoid all that horridness.’

Sketching a salute with his glass before downing the salty, liquorice-foul sweetblack in a single draught, Alabastian turned to open the doors wide. He took a deep breath of cool air. Free from the cloying scents of the costumiers, he found his spirits were quite restored – and not just because of the fortifying liquor he and Harratio had supped on throughout the fitting session. This was his city, he told himself, ripe for the taking. He would tear through her social strata one after another until all looked up to him. Even Harratio, king of Mhurghast’s trendsetters, would kneel to him one day. It was his birthright; they would be his adoring acolytes, one way or another. He had the beauty for it, and the drive. Woe betide any who tried to stop him.

Chin jutting and chest full, Alabastian strode out into the night without looking back.

When he was sure Alabastian would not return, Harratio headed for the mirror on the drawer-board. Carefully taking the shroud from the mirror, folding it and putting it in his leather satchel, he took out a trio of candles and lit them with an heirloom spark-box. The room filled with the scent of sizzling fat, the porcine tang of burning human tallow wafting from the wicks. Harratio said three ancient words of power, and within the mirror coalesced a reflection.

The image was rippled, making him feel like he was gazing up at it from within a deep black pool. And perhaps he was.

The apparition slowly resolved into something pox-scarred and foul, and then, as the light of recognition lit its one good eye, it bared its rotting teeth in something approximating a smile.

The River Hisset was still sending up its mists as Alabastian ventured towards the Necrai Bridge. He felt a thin gruel of fear creep up his throat at the thought of seeing the beggar again, being forced to witness those horrible, flesh-drizzling finger stubs once more, but he choked it down. Face your terrors, he told himself.

Yet as he grew closer, as the bridge’s statues loomed out of the grey-white nothingness, he found his feet leading him away. There was no rush, no time pressure now that Harratio had been mollified, and the poor etiquette of his being late faded into the province of jest. He would confront his fears tomorrow, perhaps, in the light of day.

Remembering Harratio’s advice, Alabastian walked right past the Necrai Bridge and onwards along the river embankment. He heard the vague, distant clank of rigging against masts, the occasional babble of conversation drifting up from one of the river barges below. The sweetblack had given everything a kind of pleasant numbness, and the chill he had felt on his way over was kept at bay by a feeling of warm-skinned bonhomie. His path seemed to be weaving a little more than he intended it to, but the guardian rail – a wide slab atop sculpted caryatids that were painfully thin in the Athanasian fashion – helped him keep his bearings.

In fact, the journey seemed to be taking longer than it should have. Some of the voices in the fog had become harsh, menacing croaks, sounding barely human with the distortion of the river fog. He had a brief vision of a glaivewraith drifting in towards him, its distended horse-skull grinning behind the tip of a long polearm aimed straight for his heart. Once more he remembered Mother’s words from when he was a boy. It is not wise to mock the servants of Nagash, lest they come for you, and prove how deadly they are.

The sounds were getting louder, out there in the mist. Weird groans, distorted and wordless under the mournful cawing of gulls.

He put some confidence back in his stride, hand resting on his dress-dagger’s hilt as if he knew how to use it. What did the young and vital have to fear of musty old spectres? He was vaguely aware it was the liquor talking; such bottle-born courage was the reason it had been invented by the Glymmsforge alcomysts. But it worked.

Still, when the tall stanchions of the Negatian Bridge came into view, Alabastian felt a sensation of relief blossom within his gut. A left turn here, a left again on the other side, and he would be back on track.

The Negatian Bridge was narrower than the Necrai, and had less statuary, but with far less in the way of footfall it was usually free of mendicants. He increased his pace up the slight incline, hoping–

‘Please…’

There was a dark figure on his left, bowed low as if in supplication to a king.

‘Please, Master Valenth. Just a drop.’

Alabastian’s heart felt like it was going to explode. It was the beggar from the Necrai Bridge, his stubby fingers and filthy palms unmistakeable. Somehow he had got within five feet of him.

Staggering back, Alabastian hawked up an oyster gobbet of sweetblack-stained saliva and spat it towards the leper’s back. It landed full centre with a wet splat.

‘There,’ he said. ‘There’s your precious drop. Now don’t bother me again.’

There was a moment of stillness, numb and sobering. Whatever brief burst of courage had compelled him to spit on the creature evaporated. His fast walk turned into a strange half-run, then into a jog. He passed another figure in the mist, dark and tall, and nodded towards it as if all were well. Yet in his chest, his heart hammered.

The image of that creature skittering after him on all fours swelled up in his mind like blood welling from an arrow wound. He turned back, face taut with fear, but saw nothing.

At the end of the bridge, he forced himself to stop and turn, his dagger sliding from its sheath.

‘Come ahead, then,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll take a few more of those fingers from you. See how keen you are on harassing me then.’

Long seconds stretched by, the blanket of mist dampening his sleeves and hair. Nothing.

Alabastian huffed a cloud of condensing breath, pulled his collar up, and made for home. He felt a mighty need to square things with Xarantine, double the guard, and return to bed with the nightlamp at full blaze.

‘The scion returns,’ said Maltratt. ‘A pleasant evening, I trust?’

‘No,’ said Alabastian, barely meeting her eye as he slammed the coach house door shut. ‘It was not. In fact, it was perfectly awful. Ruined by a beggar who wouldn’t take no for an answer.’

‘Did he assail you?’ asked Xarantine, getting up from the card table to stand by Maltratt’s side.

‘He did not “assail” me, no,’ said Alabastian. ‘He followed me, is all. He lay in wait for me, hoping to beg some aqua, and I didn’t react well. I’m not sure how he got ahead of me, given his condition, but he did. It’s been a trying night.’

‘What do you mean by condition?’ said Xarantine.

‘Fingers missing, dripping skin, some hideous malady by the look of it.’

‘Moss leper, maybe,’ muttered Maltratt. ‘That gate to Ghyran in North Athanasia lets through all manner of freaks. Should be walled up for good.’

‘You want us to get out there?’ said Xarantine. ‘Make sure he gets a nice cold bath in the Hisset?’

‘I would prefer you to run me a nice hot one,’ said Alabastian. ‘I feel the need to scrub myself clean, then retire to fresh sheets and sleep with a guard close at hand.’

‘We can do that.’ Maltratt pointed a thick finger at Nimsk, one of the mansion’s teenage chambermen. ‘Nimsky, boil a few of the big kettles and get the young master his bath started.’

‘Right.’ The boy waved his hand in front of his nose. ‘About time, really.’

Maltratt snorted despite herself and turned back, cocking her head. ‘How was your mate? Bothered about you being so tardy?’

‘He was as perfectly put together as ever, and making me feel like a stablehand by comparison. Speaking of which, why am I still in the hallway? Would you mind not barring my way like some flophouse doorman?’

‘Sorry, young master,’ said Maltratt, stepping aside with her lantern jaw sticking out. ‘Old habits from my days in the Darkjackets. Enter, by all means. We’ll make sure there’s someone in earshot at all times.’

‘Ever so many thanks for doing your job.’ He tried to keep the acid from his tone, but with the comfort of familiar surroundings, old habits were already creeping back in. ‘Now get the bath kettles going. And I want it hot.’

Xarantine let out a measured breath. ‘Right you are,’ she said, ‘Alabastian.’

He lay in a tangle of sheets, unable to sleep. The wind outside the bedroom was insistent, and growing more so by the hour. Occasionally the curtains, custom-made of heavy velvet to keep out the sunlight and fringed with half-rotten lace, shifted or bulged as a draught made it through the oaken frames. The purple-grey mist from the river would have dispersed by now, thinned by the gathering tempest. Likely the Hisset would have been unveiled and robbed of its romantic mystique, exposed with its hunting vermin, bobbing corpses and all.

The streets, too, would be revealed, laid bare and perfect for a spot of voyeurism. He could easily grab a bottle of Mother’s finest Princedom Red from the cellar, climb the stairs to the attic and peer out of the window, watching the people of the city go about their business and taking notes on the activity of those he recognised. Then he remembered he had drunk the cellar dry some weeks ago, and slumped even further into his depressive fug.

The mantel roof of the mansion had such a commanding view over the southern plaza, where the statue of Lord Vandus formed a popular meeting point for lovers and conspirators alike. Yet after the trying events of the evening, and with the cellar dry, he really did not feel like it.

Which is precisely why you must do it, young man. Face it, the better to conquer it.

Mother’s voice, ringing in the back of his mind. Always so domineering. And usually right.

Alabastian lay fitfully in the sheets for a few more minutes, occasionally changing position in petulant bursts of activity and turning the pillow so it was cool against his cheek, but sleep wouldn’t come. When he did manage to doze a little, he saw the greyed-out mists of memory part to reveal that hideous, robe-swathed cripple, skin blotchy with sores and fingers adrip as one evil eye glinted in the half-light.

Sitting up with a heavy sigh, Alabastian pushed his fists into his eyes, and got to his feet. He made for the bedroom door, taking care to avoid the area he had strewn with broken glass earlier that day.

Face it, the better to conquer it.

Along the scuffed carpet he went to the far side of the hallway, where the steep stairs led up to the attic. Gingerly he climbed up, avoiding those floorboards that he knew would creak by planting one foot at the extreme diagonal every other step. No need to risk a ticking off from Maltratt, or worse, another raised eyebrow from Xarantine.

The attic spread before him as he reached the top of the stairs, its dusty confines full of furniture hooded by old sheets. Strewn around the place was a wide variety of the general bric-a-brac his father could never bring himself to give away, stashed up here by the staff after Baron Valenth had left town with his mistress.

Alabastian had once thought the place a treasure trove, a warren full of interesting hiding places for those rare occasions when Mother had deigned to play seek-the-stray with him. Not so much these days, when he saw it for what it was: a graveyard of sorts, the remnants of a dead marriage littered everywhere and sheeted the better to keep them out of sight, and therefore out of mind.

Come out, Bastian, come out and get what’s coming to you…

Slender trails of small footprints and scuffs had once showed the way through the jumble of furniture to his favourite nooks and dens. Now, there was but one path through the dust. It led to his rocking chair, strategically placed in front of the circular window that overlooked the statue of Lord Vandus. Alabastian’s fist closed in a gesture of triumph as he spotted a pewter drinking goblet and half-empty bottle of strong Athanasian that Harratio had given him at one of the costume fittings.

Broad shafts of light filtered through the circular window, the shadow of its frame settling upon the upholstered rocking chair like the crosshairs of a marksman’s arquebus. Alabastian slid into its recesses, the upholstery perfectly accommodating to his posture, and cast his eyes over the square below. Framed by mantled roofs, it was a stage, and he the aristocrat in the high box. The unwitting theatre was lit by Lunaghast, the Moon of Secrets. They said that its soft light could drive you mad, if you stood in it too long, and force you to babble your darkest secrets into the sky.

The tableau below was disappointingly empty. Alabastian picked up the wine goblet from beneath his chair, using the cuff of his sleeve to wipe it clean before filling it with the dregs of the red he retrieved after it. A thin spider-strand found its way into the thick crimson vintage in the process, but he fished it out, and took a swig. Past its best, perhaps, but eminently drinkable. It would fight the sweetblack for the honour of claiming his headache tomorrow, but he was willing to–

There was a figure down there in the square, looking up at him. Bent-backed and filthy with muck, it was craning its neck to peer up. Its face was half shrouded. In places it was wrinkled and sunken, like a rotten apple, whilst in others it was swollen and lumpy. He could make out the black slit of a mouth drooling beneath one glimmering, watery eye, and see its ravaged fingers held up in a gesture of pleading, those awful, dripping stumps gleaming in the moonlight.

‘Get away!’ cried Alabastian, tumbling out of the rocking chair. It whipped back and forth with crazed squeals of old wooden floorboards. His goblet hit the floor, a spill of wine like dark blood splashing across the lengths of oak and white dustsheets. He rushed back to the door, all thoughts of watching midnight lovers driven from his mind.

‘Xarantine! Maltratt!’

Alabastian thundered down the steep attic stairs, tripping down the last three in his haste to get away. He clutched at the dark mahogany banister, spinning around and twisting his ankle as he staggered down the hall. ‘Maltratt! Attend me, damn it!’

‘What is it? What happened?’ The close-cropped scalp of the house guard came into view on the stairs, followed by her broad shoulders. She gained the landing, eyes wide and alert and her hand on the pommel of her short sword. Xarantine came stamping up the stairs in her wake, hurriedly buckling on her breastplate.

‘That thing is outside, by Nagash! It followed me here! I didn’t give it the aqua it wanted, and now it’s coming after me. Get out there and kill it!’

‘We’ll see him off for you, sir,’ said Maltratt. ‘Run him along, sort of thing, send him packing.’

‘You’ll bloody well run him through!’ shrieked Alabastian.

Xarantine was already moving, jumping the last few stairs to the hallway and grabbing a halberd from the rack above the door. She lifted the latch with the butt of the polearm, pushing it wide before slipping out into the misty streets as slick as an eel. Maltratt thumped down the stairs behind her, drawing her short sword and moving out with the gait of some unstoppable bailiff.

Alabastian ventured down the stairs to watch them leave, then locked the door behind them with his heirloom keyslide and ran back to his bedroom. He slammed the door of that, too, pressing his back against it before dragging a chair over and wedging it under the door handle.

After what seemed like a solid hour of waiting he heard the lock slide open in the front door. He said nothing, still feeling tightness in his chest. He couldn’t help imagining the creature pushing its way inside to leave bloody handprints on the hallway plaster as it slunk up the stairs.

Then came the clump of boots. ‘Alabastian?’

Xarantine’s strident tones. He relaxed a little, standing up and straightening his jerkin.

‘Up here.’

There was a sharp rap on his bedroom door, and after a moment of steeling himself, he opened it halfway. Xarantine looked in, seeming stressed out, and for once, a little contrite.

‘Well? Did you kill it?’

‘We couldn’t find it, whatever it was.’

‘What does Mother pay you for? Get back out there!’

‘There’s no sign of anyone that fits your description. We can’t search the whole district. Look, we’ll both stand vigil tonight. Maltratt will take downstairs, I’ll be up here with you. No cards, no distractions.’

‘See that there aren’t. It will be a miracle if I can get any sleep at all without you two yammering away in your cups.’

Xarantine shook her head, her concerned expression replaced by a far more familiar look of exasperation. ‘Just try and rest, you bloody craven. And lay off the liquor awhile.’

‘Rest, she says. I’ll not be getting back to sleep anytime soon. In fact, I think I’ll come downstairs with you. Slum it for a bit. At least until we’re sure I’m safe.’

Alabastian sat huddled under a blanket in the servants’ quarters, stooped over a steaming cup of expensive Verdian tea as he stared out into nothingness. Maltratt and Xarantine kept him company, and every so often told him to get some sleep. Fools. How was he supposed to rest at all, with the vision of that thing foremost in his mind?

So he sat, eyes unfocused and knees pulled up under his chin, waiting for dawn.

He felt his hand stray down to his phial-belt, and considered taking a few drops of aqua ghyranis to keep him alert. It was not something he wanted to do in front of the staff, of course; if he was to indulge then he would be obliged to share by the rules of etiquette, and he was not in the business of giving something for nothing. Instead he dredged up the will to speak.

‘Is there any chance we can get Varda and ven Guillo back, do you think, with enough aqua? Double the manpower for a while?’

‘Not a chance,’ said Maltratt, her expression drooping like that of a longmouth hound. ‘Even if we knew where to find them, they went with the master of the house. They are as loyal to him as we are to you.’

Xarantine rolled her eyes, and put her feet up on the desk.

‘Can’t we call someone to help us? Anyone?’

‘What about your friends? Can you get some of them to stay over for a while until this blows over?’

‘Not likely,’ said Alabastian, blowing out his cheeks. ‘They’ll all be far too preoccupied with preparations for the ball. Even a visit is unlikely, this side of the river.’

‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ said Maltratt. ‘Your mate, what’s he called, Horace or something–’

‘Harratio?’ said Alabastian, suddenly alert.

‘That’s the cove. He was over here the other day. Said his bladder was after him, and that he had no intention of using an alleyway. I know his coachman through Lassiter, he vouched for him.’

Alabastian scoffed. As if a noble needed a coachman to vouch for him.

‘I let him in,’ continued Maltratt. ‘Insisted on using the upstairs bathroom, for some reason. To be honest it looked like he was more interested in having a good snoop around than he was in using the lavatory. Still, he might be interested in staying for a day or two, don’t you think?’

‘You don’t know Harratio at all. He never comes this side of the river. Not since ven Breichart disappeared, anyway. You must be mistaken.’

‘Not the first time he’s done it,’ said Xarantine. ‘I remember something like that a few weeks back, Maltratt, when you were on leave. He’s old Azyr money, right? Tall fellow, with a nose like a butcher’s cleaver?’

Alabastian nearly choked at the blatant disrespect. ‘If the man has a weak bladder that’s his own business. It is not given to the staff to dwell on the shortcomings of their betters. Is this the sort of thing you talk about, down here?’

‘You bloody well brought it up,’ said Xarantine. ‘We’re only trying to help. As usual.’

‘Right,’ said Alabastian. ‘Let us sit in silence, then. That way you might actually pay attention to what’s going on around you.’

‘Fine words, from someone who spends the better part of each day slobbing around in bed.’

Alabastian felt his mood go from sullen to burning rage.

‘Enough! Enough waiting. We get our swords, strap on our breastplates, and we go out there and find this bastard. I know where he lingers. Then when we bump into him, we’ll slide a blade into his heart and whoops, over the bridge’s balustrade he goes, to join who knows how many hundreds of others floating in the Hisset. He’s a beggar, for the love of Sigmar! One of the Reclaimed! No one will miss him. That way we won’t have to worry about upping our vigilance, you addle-brained sots can go back to your cards, and I can get some damned sleep!’

‘Quite the speech,’ said Xarantine.

‘He needs sleep, that much is pretty obvious,’ muttered Maltratt. ‘Murder is not within our purview, young man. Your mother would be appalled.’

‘I have to admit, the boy’s suggestion has some appeal,’ said Xarantine.

‘You serious?’ said Maltratt, her eyes wide. ‘I thought those days were over.’

‘Depends on the circumstances,’ shrugged the redhead. ‘And these, despite our man here being the most irritating waste of space I’ve ever met, are not usual circumstances.’

‘We live in Shyish,’ said Maltratt. ‘If people started killing one another at every night phantom or knocking-gheist there’d be no one left come winter.’

‘Whatever it is that’s stalking Alabastian is staking the place out. That’s different. And if it knows where we live, I’d rather see it put down hard.’

‘It’s a beggar, Kaitlin,’ said Maltratt. ‘A plague victim, or a warrior come out of the Old War in the wilds, before Pater Nagash took back what was owed him. I’m not going out there to stab someone I don’t know, even if the young master is certain of his guilt. My father didn’t bring me up like that.’

Alabastian felt the wind sag out of his sails. When Maltratt set her mind to something, she would not be budged.

‘I’m going back to bed,’ he said, rubbing the heels of his palms into his eyes.

‘I’ll come up with you,’ said Maltratt. ‘Keep a vigil on the upper half of the place.’

‘I think I would prefer Xarantine on the top floor,’ said Alabastian, ‘and you as far away as possible.’ He pulled a sour expression before leaving the servants’ quarters, climbing the stairs to his bedroom with his footsteps as loud as he could make them. He yawned, slamming the door behind him and slumping into bed. His head felt full of broken glass, and his eyes were aching from stress. He burrowed under the silk sheets, feeling like death, and stewed in his own dark imaginings.

It took an hour and a half of sour, petulant thoughts, but eventually he fell asleep.

In the small hours, when the city was almost still, the night pushed tendrils of amethyst and grey across the landscape of Alabastian’s mind. He dreamed of vile, uncanny things, stilt-legged and scalpel-gloved with long masks protruding from their faces in the manner of a mosquito’s proboscis. They twitched and spasmed as they came closer. With the irrefutable logic of dreams, Alabastian knew their intent to operate no matter the cost.

Suddenly he was surrounded by them, laid out on the slab under their staring lenses. It was not the dissection table of a hospice, rather one at the centre of Mhurghast’s great scholar-theatres. Scores of staring, pallid faces looked down upon him, each entirely devoid of life. The lecture was in session, and he was the subject.

‘His thread grows thin,’ said one of them, his voice tinny and distant. ‘We will have to cut deep.’

‘Deep indeed, to find the soul,’ nodded another. ‘If it has not already atrophied to nothing.’

There was a hammering noise from high up in the amphitheatre’s shadowed eaves, rattling and urgent. Several of the strange surgeons looked up.

‘The Visitor is here,’ said the tallest of them.

‘So early,’ mused another.

‘We had best hasten,’ said a third. ‘Or the chance will be gone.’

‘Then bring forth the liquid of life.’

As one, the scalpels cut into Alabastian’s hip, belly and throat, and he began to scream.

‘Sir, are you all right?’

Maltratt had burst through the door like the first warrior through the breach of a lengthy siege. Her teeth were bared and her short sword drawn as she took in every detail of the room. Xarantine came in behind her, eyes scanning the corners of the chamber.

‘A nightmare,’ groaned Alabastian. ‘Just… just a nightmare, I think.’

‘I heard something,’ said Maltratt. ‘You knock something over, perhaps?’ She cast a meaningful glance at the broken Azyrite water clock, its fragments still scattered across the floor where Alabastian had left them the previous morning.

‘I did, yes. Though it was some time ago. What did you hear?’

‘Banging, rattling. Thought it was a storm at first, or at least high wind, but there’s been not so much as a drop of rain and Lassiter said it’s been calm all night.’ She shrugged, the leather of her armour groaning. ‘Probably you thrashing around, if you were in the teeth of a bad dream.’

Alabastian felt his limbs grow heavy and cold. Propping himself up on his hip, he turned to the window and parted curtains of heavy velvet with a long index finger. Moonlight streamed through, or at least Mhurghast’s grudging semblance of it. He winced nonetheless, his head suddenly pounding, then forced himself to look again through hooded eyes until the pane itself sprang into focus.

The large, arched window was smeared with dirt, weird fluids and streaks of blood.

‘Those are fingerprints,’ said Xarantine, leaning in close. ‘Look.’

As Alabastian squinted closer, he saw the unmistakable marks of human fingers left on glass. Not enough for a whole hand, but prints nonetheless.

Even in her paranoia, Mother had never fortified the upper windows with more than a sturdy lock. She had once told him that to shutter them altogether was to consign the topmost floors to perpetual gloom. The outer wall was sheer and well maintained, thirty feet from the forbidding barb-crowned perimeter of the garden, and a razor-sharp, glass-toothed overhang jutted out over six feet above it to see off the rope and grapnel of any truly determined thieves. It was a point of pride of the Valenth dynasty that their city mansion was a castle that had never been breached.

And yet it was plain to see there had been something outside his window, in the small hours of the night.

Something filthy, and hungry to get in.

‘Okay,’ said Maltratt. ‘Okay. First light-hour tomorrow, Xarantine and I go on the hunt.’

So early in the morning, the Necrai Bridge was all but deserted. It was cold, colder than Maltratt had expected. The chill was seeping through her thick furs, and the morning mists were thick and clinging. Wisps trailed from Xarantine’s legs as she trod the cobbles just ahead.

Not for the first time, Maltratt’s thoughts turned to childhood stories of the Illuminating Realm, where the sun always shone and the answers to every problem hung like ripe fruit on a low bough. Right now, she would brave a Realmgate to Hysh without a second thought. Even Aqshy, with its fierce people and burning-hot wastelands, would be preferable to the omnipresent gloom and chill of Shyish.

‘Why do you think the Valenths chose this benighted place as their settler-gains?’

‘Opportunism. Plenty of grave goods here for the taking, if you’ve the steel for it.’

‘If they had, it’s not carried down the generations. I’ll wager he’s hiding under his bed even now.’

‘Almost certainly. Why are we doing this again?’

‘Just so we can tell him we have. We don’t really know what this thing looks like, nor where it makes its lair. Very unlikely to be on a public thoroughfare with nowhere but the mist to hide.’

They walked the length and breadth of the bridge in sullen silence from that point, finding nothing but the occasional black-headed gull startled from its roost. Wherever the beggar-creature was, it was not on the bridge, that much was becoming clear.

As they were heading back towards the mansion, Maltratt heard a muttering in the fog ahead, a sing-song voice from a human throat.

‘Sally… Sally’s the word… Sally, out from the castle…’

Someone shuffled in the morning light ahead, a muddled black shadow. Xarantine marched straight up towards her, halberd held diagonally before her so one downward sweep could decapitate in an instant. Maltratt came in close behind.

‘Sally from the castle… Tell you a fine tale for a drop of aqua, my fine warriors.’

‘Tell us where the fingerless freak who haunts this bridge has gone,’ said Xarantine, ‘and you can have a whole phial.’

The madwoman leered, her yellow teeth on display. ‘Fingerless… She means the Haunter, I reckon. The Visitor. Sally, sally.’

‘Talk in riddles and you’ll get the side of my halberd,’ said Xarantine. Maltratt shot her a look, but she was too intent on her prey to notice. ‘Just tell us where he is, street-scum. I’ll know if you’re lying to me.’

‘Oh, such a fierce one.’

‘She means it,’ said Maltratt, stepping in to add her impressive bulk to Xarantine’s fiery presence. ‘You’ll tell us where he is, or though I hate to say it, it’ll be into the Hisset with you, my girl.’

‘Sally!’ she hissed. ‘Sally out!’

‘Stop saying that,’ said Xarantine, her jaw clenching, ‘or we’ll stop your gabbling for good.’

‘Oh, I’ve faced far worse than you, heaven-child.’ She puckered up her lips, offering a false kiss before her expression turned nasty. ‘Sally from the castle,’ she said slowly, ‘and leave the gates unbarred.’

Something clicked in Maltratt’s mind, a dusty lock opening a door to blackness beyond.

‘Nagash’s blood. Is Lassiter on duty this morning?’

‘Just Nimsk,’ said Xarantine. ‘And you know what he’s like. Still, the place is locked up tighter than a Chamonite’s hoardvault, isn’t it? He’ll be safe enough. He wouldn’t have dispatched us otherwise.’

‘That thing couldn’t get in the window, but it left enough evidence to get us out,’ said Maltratt. ‘To get us to sally from the castle, as it were. Could it already know how to break in, with the window smeared as a ruse?’

The talespinner’s grin flashed in the gloom, defiant madness glimmering in her eyes.

‘She’s cleverer than she seems, this one.’

Maltratt broke into a run back the way they had come, Xarantine close at her heels. The redhead soon overtook her, casting her halberd into a nearby gutter so she could make a proper sprint.

By the next corner, Maltratt ran on alone.

The hairs on Alabastian’s forearms had risen fast when he’d heard a thin creak and a flurry of muffled thumps come from the attic. Fear had driven him out of bed more than anger. More than that, it was the need to have an end to it, and sink into the blissful oblivion of proper sleep.

‘Nimsk!’ he called downstairs. ‘Nimsk, come up here this minute!’

There was no answer. Stupid youth was probably still asleep.

He told himself it was righteous fury that drove him onto the landing and to the base of the attic stairs, the noble indignation of the man of the house who finds another on his land without permission. In his heart, he knew it was injured pride, frustration and a sense that if he cowered so long that someone else went up in his stead, he would never rise to be the man of the house. Not truly.

An idea struck him. Making his way to the craft room at the back of the second floor, he rustled around amongst the dust-covered bric-a-brac of Mother’s artisan supplies. It was nerve-twisting work, having his back to the door. Every moment he half expected the beggar-thing to jump on his back and sink its fingernails into his neck. His hands were shaking by the time he found what he was looking for: a large crystal phial of Aqshian printer’s vitriol, potent enough to etch metal.

Face your terrors, little darling, or live forever in the shade.

With a sigh of leather, Alabastian’s shortblade slid from its sheath. He made his way up to the attic. Only his bullseye lantern and thin shafts of moonlight illuminated his path.

A ray of light gleamed from something wet on the third stair from the top. He stooped, looking closer at the bubble-dotted liquid. Phlegm, by the look of it, spattered on the threadbare carpet strip that was pinned to the centre of the mahogany stairs. It was cloudy and discoloured with black streaks.

Alabastian was suddenly conscious of the sweat on the ribbed leather grip of his heirloom sword. He had a terrible feeling that the tighter he clutched it the more likely his hand would cramp at a critical moment. Teeth clenched hard, he made it up the last few steps, one of which gave a slight creak. The curve-topped door to the attic was closed.

It was never closed.

A bead of sweat tickled the nape of his neck despite the chill. The air smelt somehow danker than he remembered, as if the door to the earthy maze of the cellar below had been left open all night.

He found himself longing for Xarantine, imagining her going up before him with the point of her halberd leading the way. He would have dearly loved to watch either of his armed retainers take down the freakish thing that had stalked him over the last few days, but by the time they got back, it could well be too late. After dispatching them to hunt the creature on the bridge, he either had to investigate the thumping noise himself, or cower under the covers like a craven child with Mother’s voice ringing in his ears.

Are you a man at all, Bastian? Are you truly cut out to live in Shyish, to inherit our dynasty, if you are so petrified of gheists and phantom noises?

His father would have put it more bluntly. Better to hunt than be hunted.

‘Sword out, strike first,’ he said quietly to himself. ‘Jab, then run.’

He pushed open the door, a slight squeal from its hinges making him jump.

The attic was lit by wan light coming through the shattered window over the square, broken glass glinting jagged as he placed his bullseye lantern carefully on the floor. It cast stark shadows across the sheet-covered boxes and statues of his father’s abandoned possessions. More than ever they seemed to him a horde of gheists frozen in time, eyeless faces craning to see who was foolish enough to trespass amongst their unquiet graves.

‘Come out, bastard!’ he shouted. His voice was a throttled yelp a full octave higher than he intended. He cleared his throat. ‘Come out, and get what’s coming to you!’

A hiss, somewhere in the back of the attic. Then silence.

The thing came at him with shocking speed. It was gangling and covered in sores. Alabastian screamed and jerked his arm, the contents of the phial of vitriol glittering in the light as he flung it. The creature grabbed a sheet from a covered mannequin and whirled it in front of itself, catching most of the etching vitriol and dashing it to one side. Droplets sizzled on ancient wood, the sharp scent of acid filling the air over a nauseating stink of rotten meat. Alabastian caught a glimpse of the thing, all sunken eyes and gaping mouth. He broke and ran for the stairs.

His flight down to the landing below was clumsy, feet slamming flat down three steps at a time as his back and neck tingled with the hideous feeling that plague-crusted teeth or fingernails would rip into him at any moment. His sword wobbled before him, more a liability than a weapon. There was no way his panic would let him use it. He saw something coming up from the hall below, his heart leaping into his mouth before he recognised the shock of red hair. Thank Sigmar. It was Xarantine, sword drawn.

‘Kill it!’ he screeched. He barged past the guardswoman’s shoulder, making for his bedroom. It was like running into a wooden post. He was sent spinning in a half-turn, and despite himself, he looked back.

Xarantine lunged at the creature as it scrabbled on all fours down the stairs. It darted left, sickeningly fast. She whipped her blade after it, the edge thunking into its shoulder. It twisted away – no blood, just a spatter of dark, silty fluid – and launched itself into her chest with such force it bowled both of them over.

They went down the stairs in a jumble of limbs. Xarantine’s sword clattered to embed itself point first into the banister as she and the grotesque creature tumbled in a killing embrace. As one they landed heavily onto the mosaic floor in a sudden halo of blood.

Xarantine’s neck was bent. Her tongue lolled. The creature was folded over her, head buried in her neck.

Then the beggar-thing looked straight up at him, one eye white, one black, and clacked its bloodstained teeth.

‘Please…’ it said, grinning. ‘Please…’

It came fast up the stairs on all fours, more like a hound than a man. Gone was the shuffling, bent-backed slowness of the cripple he had seen on the bridge. Here was a predator clad in rags, many of its claws missing but its teeth and eyes shining bright. It rushed towards him, the staccato thumping of its feet setting his mind aflame.

Alabastian staggered away, instinctively backing into his bedroom. His heart was pounding. Defend the door, he thought. Cut anything that comes through.

He looked back. That awful face leered up over the last few stairs, gore dribbling down its chin.

‘Please…’ it hissed. ‘Please. Just a drop…’

He stood en garde, as Mother had taught him. The tip of the blade was steady.

The beast halted, eyeing the sword. Alabastian felt a fierce, killing elation. He stepped backwards to put some more room between them, then felt something pierce his foot. He howled, his off-hand clutching at the knife of Azyrite glass that protruded through the meat of his instep.

In a flurry of black rags the creature was on him. He tried to twist away, but it bore him down. It pulled itself up onto his back as he scrabbled in the scattering of broken glass. Fear took him, and on instinct he sent a sharp elbow back into the thing’s jaw. It connected with a crack. He scrabbled for a shard of the water clock, pain slashing his nerves as his fingers were opened on the sharp, bluish glass. Reversing it, he whipped it back around and stabbed it into the creature’s ribs. He felt it sink in.

Then a dozen needles sank into the back of his neck at the same time, a fiery ring of pain that pulsed so hard it was impossible to think. Black rags, encrusted with filth, draped over his face. A half-hand clasped itself down over his forehead. One of the missing fingers smeared lukewarm, peach-coloured fluids over his eyebrow, the awful substances trickling over his eyelid as he shook his head as violently as he could. Still the pulsing, throbbing agony spread from his neck. He pulled out his knife of glass, catching sight of it out of the corner of his eye before sinking it back into the creature’s ribs.

His vision swam now, distorted and smudged. One of his arms reached forwards for the leg of the bed, hoping for some purchase so he could pull himself away, maybe twist and kick himself free. The weight upon him was too much. He noticed with horror that the flesh of that arm was blotchy and covered with sores, the skin parchment dry and blackened as if by a year-long infection.

The creature reached out a limb of its own to grab his hand and force it back. Rags obscured his vision, looping and catching on his own arms as the thing shuddered and wriggled on his back. It was still latching its teeth into the nape of his neck, and seemed to be getting heavier, or else he was getting weaker. Perhaps both. For a moment he could have sworn he saw one of its limbs, hearty and clean, with all five of its fingers grasping after his own.

The reaching digits closed on his hand, and with a vile, nerve-shredding crack, his own fingers broke and came away in a slurry of rancid blood and deliquescing flesh.

There was a shout from the hallway below, the voice broken and of anguish.

‘Xarantine! No!’

Heavy boots thumped on the stairs, coming fast and with a deadly, solid purpose. ‘Whoever you are, I’ll kill you!’

Maltratt, thank Sigmar. Seconds away from salvation. Retribution, even.

Something gave in Alabastian’s chest, his ribs cracking and his lungs emptying in an awful, shuddering sob. Though his vision was stained red and black by fatigue and the nameless fluids smeared across his eyes, he saw the creature climb off him, looping rags and bandages falling away to drape themselves over his own sore-riddled arms.

The beggar-thing was no more. Standing before him, making its way carefully through the broken glass, was a tall, statuesque youth with unblemished, milk-white skin. He felt his innards clench, smelt the foulness of his own rotting form as it turned to look down over its shoulder at him. The creature smiled, perfect teeth glinting in the half-light. Its features were all too familiar.

‘It’s in here,’ the creature called out. It was a close analogue of his voice, albeit weirdly thin and phlegm-choked. ‘I have the measure of it.’

Alabastian’s eyes widened. He grasped out for the bed leg again, pulling himself hard to shuffle and wriggle underneath it in a cloud of dust and flakes of skin. Spikes of pain pierced him, but in his fear, he barely registered them.

He was halfway under when he felt a hard, solid grip on his ankles. As Maltratt hauled him back out, slivers of broken glass shredded his belly and chest. He tried to speak, to protest, but it came out as an inhuman moan.

The changeling that had taken his form leered down at him. It hawked up a gobbet of phlegm and spat. The wad of saliva spattered on his cheek, a final indignity.

Maltratt’s blade pinned him to the floorboards, and in a final shudder of wretchedness, he died.

‘Take it outside and burn it,’ said Alabastian Valenth the Second.

The Reaper’s Gift

Ray Cluley

Rutger ran through the wet cornfield, staggering between withered stalks, slipping in mud, one arm hooked around his stomach to slow the blood. A weak rain hung in the air like mist. The sky was thick with cloud and all colour had seeped away to something purple-tinged, like a contusion. Rutger held up a hand to protect his face from the crops, barely able to see where he was going in the descending darkness.

He glanced behind, as he’d done countless times over miles he barely remembered, but all he saw was stalks of corn closing behind him in broken rows. Some were bent out of shape, bloodied by his passing; others drooped with the weight of their own rot. Trampled stalks pressed beneath his boots were slow to rise again, and the prints he’d left in the mud were filling with small puddles. He would be easy to track, even in this dying light.

A furrowed row, mud-thick and slick with rain, sent him stumbling and he added a handprint to those of his boots, pushing up from the ground to continue fleeing. He turned with the direction of the crops and followed them for a few moments of easier progress, then turned again for the safety of their cover.

Amongst the corn were tangled low growths of bloodweed. Some of it burst underfoot as he ran, souring the soil with its dark, poisonous sap. Where it was thickest it snatched at his ankles and threatened to trip him. It was said that upon land where battles had been fierce the bloodweed grew, and there was nowhere in Shyish that had not known battle. It thrived where blood had been spilt in vast quantities, keeping the killing fields red and spreading to choke whatever else might grow. It was desperately difficult to farm such land, but evidently there were those who tried. Rutger cursed them for not ploughing deep enough before planting, for not pulling the weed properly, and he turned to find a clearer route through the rows of the cornfield.

Crows burst into sudden flight around him in a flurry of feathers that swallowed him with their darkness. He dropped into a crouch, one arm overhead to fend off the thunder of their wings. Then they were gone, lost to the early evening sky as quickly as they had erupted into being. He heard their cries and for a moment he was back on the battlefield with the screams and shrieks of the dying. With his eyes clenched shut he saw soldiers fall, carved to bloody pieces. Saw them trampled by the hooves of two-legged beasts that growled and howled as they rushed towards their next enemy, each one hefting vicious blades or wickedly tipped spears. One of them swung at him but he found his feet and ran and–

He was back in the cornfield, fleeing from a battle left far behind. The sky deepened with cloud and seemed to press upon him, slowing him, trying to claim him for its own.

‘With Sigmar’s strength,’ Rutger began, but he was panting and could go no further with the prayer. ‘With Sigmar’s strength,’ he tried again, but what god would listen to him anyway? Sigmar’s strength was for those who had their own, and Rutger’s had all but left him. He risked another look at his stomach but in the gloom saw only where his wet wound gaped and bled. He held it closed again, his sodden sleeve a makeshift bandage, and kept running, stumbling, gasping partial prayers to a god he’d left behind with the dying.

‘With Sigmar’s strength… I wield,’ he said. ‘Forging forward, never yield…’

The words came at last, a litany of habit, but he dismissed all but two of them as he ran, reciting, ‘Forging forward… Forging forward…’ A heartbeat rhythm to keep his legs moving, setting a pace that kept him ‘forging forward… Forging forward…’

The Freeguild army was a fierce force of men and women, tough and skilled and keen to fight, but it was difficult to remain disciplined in the face of Chaos. And Rutger had seen that face up close. Seen the matted fur of its blood-drenched muzzle and smelt the foetid stink of its breath as it roared its wrath and hunger. Beasts that walked as men, horned like goats but muscled like bulls or warhorses. Armed with deadly spears and serrated blades of steel and bone, they cut through ranks of soldiers in a ferocious frenzy. Driven by bloodlust, the beasts had hacked and torn, roaring their war cries as if outraged by man’s very existence. Rutger had seen friends fall and scatter and he’d fled, determined to live while others died.

He ducked into and through another line of crops, swatting a path clear and grabbing at things to keep himself upright. The strength in his legs was fading with the light. His breathing came hard and ragged. Blood oozed from his wound despite his attempts to staunch its flow, taking his warmth with it. But still he ran, driven by desperation and fear.

A sudden figure loomed out of the dark, tall and long-limbed. With a startled cry, Rutger tried to halt but fell with the abrupt action, throwing himself backwards as best he could to get away from the weapon he saw descending upon him. He brought his arms up, yelling with the pain it pulled from his open wound, only to find he shielded himself from nothing; the weapon hung suspended above him, its long curving blade refusing to fall.

Rutger cowered from a man o’ straw. Tattered clothing, lumpy with old stuffing, sagged and bulged around the ropes that held it staked. Across its body, fixed in place, a scythe rusted in the rain, and above that leered a sackcloth face, slashed open in a split grin black with mould. Rutger tried to laugh but made only a strangled sound like a sob as he rolled over in his struggle to stand.

A man o’ straw, slumped in a neglected field of corn. That was all. Rutger noted how its insides spilled from a seam around the waist and looked again at his own injury. He held out no hope for help, not around here, but there would be shelter, he thought. An old farmhouse, perhaps a barn. He would rest in whatever ruin he could find.

And, yes! There! Praise Sigmar!

The land sloped and he followed it down, stumbling more than running now towards the leaning shape of an old building little more than a silhouette in the fading light. He almost fell again, this time with relief, as if he could rest right here in sight of it; he was so exhausted. But he forced himself onward, gasping and bleeding and–

‘Forging forward…’

Maudeline cut the last of the stunted vegetables into small, thin pieces – as if that would convince anyone there was enough – and carried them on the chopping board to where a pot heated slowly over the room’s fire.

‘Harren, Leese, mind out of my way.’

The children were sitting close to the fire, playing a quiet game of straw-draw on the low protruding stone of the hearth. They were too old for such games, but they went through the motions of selecting straws from the other’s hand and nodding or tutting at each result. It was a game their father had taught them; perhaps they took some comfort from that. She nudged her way past and with her knife swept the vegetables into the stew. The pieces sank all too quickly. She would need to thicken it up or they’d merely be drinking their dinner tonight.

‘Where’s your brother?’

Harren said nothing, too focused on his turn of the game, but Leese glanced up and said, ‘Chores.’

‘Still?’

The girl shrugged.

Maudeline took the board and knife back to where she’d been preparing dinner. She considered the small sack of flour on the counter. Supplies were scarce. She’d have to try one of the neighbouring farms soon, but each time meant travelling further afield. Not that anyone had anything they were willing to spare.

‘You cheated!’

‘Did not!’

‘Quiet, you two.’

‘But he cheated, Ma. He took more than he should.’

‘And what have I told you about men?’ She had a scowl for her daughter.

‘That they can’t be trusted.’ Leese borrowed some of her mother’s scowl for her brother.

‘I didn’t cheat!’

‘Let me see, then. Open your hand.’

Maudeline closed her eyes against the squabbling and wished again that their father was here. She wished it several times a day, and prayed for it nightly, but if Sigmar heard he did not seem to care. An outlier’s life was a tough one, she knew, but it was all the more difficult on your own.

‘Let me see!’

‘No!’

Maudeline opened her eyes to see Harren throw his handful of straw into the fire and move away, retreating to where he’d rolled a fleece into a seat. He was done playing.

Leese leaned close to the flames to check the burning straws.

‘Leese, get back. Sit down. Harren, wipe some bowls clean for dinner.’

Sometimes Maudeline wished she was the one away at war. How long before she lost Harren to a similar cause? Leese? Even little Poll liked to play soldiers, and he was growing up faster with every day that passed. Of course they’d rather wield swords than scythes; it was far easier to spill blood than till soil. And besides, you had to fight for the land before you could farm it, and there was far more glory to be had facing enemy forces than in defending lines of seed against hungry crows. Nobody sang of a farmer’s toil, or told tales of their back-breaking labour.

A leather skin of wine hung from the kitchen shelf. She was saving it for her husband, but the amount she saved for him grew less each week. If he didn’t come home to them soon, there’d be nothing but gritty well-water to drink.

Maudeline retrieved her shawl from a chair by the fire and wrapped it around herself, tucking her hair into its warmth. ‘Keep stirring that pot, one of you.’

‘Where are you going?’

Oh, Leese, where can I go?

‘To remind Poll that it’s dark, and dinner’s near ready.’

She took the lantern pole from beside the door. They’d long ago run out of oil for the lantern, but she’d melted a candle stub behind the shelter of the glass. She lit this with a taper from the fire.

‘Remember to–’

‘Bar the door, and answer no stranger,’ said Leese. ‘We know, Ma.’

‘Good.’

There wasn’t wind enough to wrench the door from her but it was strong enough to lash her with rain while still inside. What had been little more than a mist hanging in the air a few hours ago was now falling in earnest. To think, she’d prayed for this not so long ago. Now, with the corn rotting in the fields and their gathered grain spoiling, she wished for just one day of sun hot enough to dry their crops.

She pulled the shawl tighter around her face and stepped into the dark, waiting under the porch eaves until she heard the door behind her barred. Only then did she head out into the rain, using the lantern pole as support across the muddy yard.

‘Where are you?’ she muttered, looking for some sign of her son. The feeble candlelight from her lantern cast a pallid glow across the yard, showing her just how desolate their home had become. A water pump, rusting and forlorn, leaned over a stone trough that collected shadows with the rain. From the roof behind her came the croak and creak of the ancient weathervane as it turned in the wind. It had been a gift, pewter beaten into the shape of twin comets by her husband, as if Sigmar would watch over them.

‘He likes the spirit of outliers and frontier families,’ he’d told her, and they had shunned the safety of a city’s rule in favour of whatever freedom could be taken from the land.

‘Where are you?’ she asked again, thinking not only of her son but of his father, too. Wishing he’d come back to her so she could love him and hate him and figure out which was most true.

The beast’s teeth were thick with gore, its breath a reek of flesh and death as it roared its hate at Rutger. It swung its weapon up in a vicious slash, sweeping from the ground and across, but Rutger launched himself back from the blade. Cleaver-like but curved, and already slick with blood, it cut the air where he’d been standing.

He lunged into the space of the weapon’s wake and managed to plunge his own blade into the creature’s hide. He drove it in with both hands, but the beast turned with the momentum of its swing and barged him aside with a muscled shoulder. Rutger fell, pulling his sword free and seeing the wound he’d inflicted would not be enough.

Scrambling back, kicking at the ground, he retreated from the beastman looming over him, but when it raised its weapon he ceased his retreat and threw himself upward, sword held before him with all the force of himself behind the strike. He buried the blade deep into the beast’s stomach and yanked upwards with a roar of his own. A wet heat splashed his legs and rubbery lengths unspooled from the creature’s opened belly. Rutger shoved the beastman back, retrieving his sword from its body as it fell.

He turned for his next enemy and found one more ready than he’d expected, a serrated blade already slashing at him. It drew across his torso and left a hot line of pain, opening the flesh of his abdomen.

He staggered back as much in surprise as from the blow itself and–

He spasmed awake with a cry, twisting from his sleep and flooding himself with pain. He clutched at the rags he’d tied around himself as a crude bandage and felt them soaked through. With a groan, he eased himself into a sitting position and set about unwinding the cloth.

The wooden floor beneath him was damp, the boards warped beneath a carpet of mildewed straw. Rain came in through a hole in the roof and the wind whistled through the gaps in the plank walls. He had only the barest memory of collapsing inside. A barn, maybe a stable, he couldn’t see or remember enough to know, but it was better shelter than anything he’d had for some time. He was cold, and uncomfortable, but he was alive. For now.

He was alarmed by the continued oozing of his wound, but his insides remained insides. There was a foul smell to it all, though. Underneath the blood, some sour stench that did not bode well. He needed a healer, and soon. Hot water, salve, clean bandages.

A creak in the dark, and his wound was forgotten. A floorboard groaning under the weight of someone or something else in the gloom. Rutger grabbed for his sword, forgetting the sheath was empty, then pushed at the floor to slide further back into the shadows of the corner where he’d slept. He looked for something to serve as a weapon but found only panic when he saw he was surrounded, figures looming out from the dark. No armour, no weapons, but they floated a few feet from the floor, peering down with vacant eyes and slack mouths. Rutger cowered from them with another cry like the one he’d woken with, then saw them for what they really were.

More scarecrows, stuffed and sagging, hanging from tool-hooks on the wooden walls.

In front of him, a figure emerged from behind the slumped stump of a hay bale, moving in a low, slow prowl. This was no scarecrow, though.

‘I have bad dreams too, sometimes.’

It was a child. He remained a short distance away, close to the cover of his hay pile and its shadows, squatting as if he might run or lunge. Rutger couldn’t see much of him yet, but he could tell the boy was better armed than he was; the lad held a pitchfork across his knees.

‘You’re in our barn.’

‘I am.’

The boy nodded, satisfied by the confirmation. ‘Are you hurt?’

‘No.’

‘You look hurt.’

Rutger sat a little straighter, trying not to wince at how it pulled his stomach. ‘Just resting. Then I’ll be on my way.’

‘You shouldn’t be here.’

‘No.’

The boy took a step closer and looked him over carefully.

‘You are hurt. You’re bleeding.’

‘It’s nothing.’

‘Will you die?’

A twinge in his wound made Rutger tight-lipped with pain, though his tight breath and sharp wince provided some sort of answer, it seemed; the boy nodded.

‘Ma says we all die, but not everyone really lives.’

‘She sounds very wise.’

‘Are you scared of dying?’

A beastman lunged at Rutger, its face rushing to his with a ferocious bellow. He flinched from a bite that didn’t come because he was in a barn and there were no beasts here. Just this boy, waiting for an answer. I’m terrified, Rutger wanted to say. I’ve seen what’s out there, and how it hungers for us. I’ve looked into the blood-drenched face of Chaos and seen it grin.

Whatever expression accompanied Rutger’s thoughts, it made the boy wary. He raised the pitchfork as if to plunge the tines into Rutger’s chest.

‘Those frighten me, that’s a certainty,’ Rutger said, nodding at the closest man o’ straw. It wore torn trousers much like his own, and straw spilled from holes like open wounds. A drab tunic did a better job of keeping it in, but it sprouted from the stuffed head like hair, a topknot thatch where the sack had been tied. Thick woollen crosses had been sewn for eyes, and a dye-smeared handprint, upside down, gave it a drooling mouth. The whole body drooped like a hanged man. There was even something of a noose where a knot of rope tied the head to the body.

‘Reaper’s gifts,’ the boy said. ‘We made them for the other farms but nobody needs them now.’

‘Reaper’s gifts?’

‘To keep the Reaperman away.’

‘I’m sure they’d scare anything anyway.’

‘Not the Reaperman. He’s a man o’ straw, too.’

The boy had lowered his weapon, such as it was. Even driven by the strength of a child it would hurt plenty, so Rutger was relieved.

When the boy said, ‘If you try to take it I’ll have to use it,’ he realised he’d been staring. The boy feigned a jab. Rutger raised his hand as if to ward off the blow, and as an apology. He saw the boy notice the blood and lowered his hand to press at his improvised bandages.

‘Who’s the Reaperman?’ he asked.

‘You don’t know the Reaperman? Everybody around here knows the Reaperman.’

‘I’m not from around here.’

‘Aren’t you a farmer?’

‘No. I’m a soldier.’

‘My father’s a farmer and he’s a soldier.’

Rutger straightened. ‘Is he here?’

‘He’s away, fighting. Ma said he’s better at farming, but he went anyway.’

‘How long ago?’

The boy shrugged, but it didn’t matter. Rutger could tell from the look of the place that the boy’s father had been gone a while.

‘Can I see?’ the boy asked. He pointed at Rutger’s stomach.

‘No.’

‘I can help you.’

‘It’s too dark.’

The boy put down his weapon and reached behind the drooping hay bale where he’d been hiding. He retrieved a lantern and opened the shutter to reveal the stump of a candle, burning. The inside of the barn was bathed in a weak and flickering light. It struck the hanging strawmen so they seemed to move out of their own shadows.

‘Show me,’ the boy said as he approached, ‘and I’ll tell you about the Reaperman.’

It seemed a fair trade.

Maudeline clutched her shawl tight around her face and peered out into the drizzle, lantern held before her on its staff. She went to the chicken coop where Poll was meant to have gathered whatever eggs their scrawny bird might have managed to squeeze out. If their circumstances didn’t change soon, she would have to put it in the pot for dinner, though she feared that once plucked, all she’d have to show for it would be the poor bird’s bones.

It was scratching at the dirt, so Poll had tossed it something to eat at least. But where was he? After the chicken he was supposed to–

A noise in the dark snatched the rest of her thought away. A gruff breath, she’d thought, like the snort of a horse. And maybe the quick creak of wood as if it pulled against some nearby hitching post. But the farm hadn’t known a horse since… well, a long time. And there was no hitching post. Only the boards of the coop, and the line of fencing around it.

The chicken bhuk-awwed! in alarm and flustered a panicked path, this way and that.

Maudeline did not call out. Anyone out here at this time would not mean them well, and it would be senseless to alert them that she had heard something of their movements. If it were an animal, then she didn’t want it alerted either; their larder desperately needed restocking. She drew the slim blade she always carried in the front of her apron. It was the sharpest and most prized of her kitchen wares, good for the toughest of meat. It would do.

She approached the far side of the coop, keeping distance enough between her and the small pen that anyone hiding there couldn’t lunge at her from its cover, but before she could see there was a quick galloping sound in the mud and then a rustle of corn. Shortly after that, from across the yard, came a short, sharp cry. A quick shriek she recognised.

‘Poll!’

Maudeline ran, dropping the lantern in her haste as she hurried towards the barn.

Behind her, a puddle found its way into the lantern glass and doused the candle’s forgotten flame.

Rutger made shadow shapes on the wall, enjoying the warmth of the candlelight on his hands and pleased with how each shape he made delighted the child. His father had taught him several by the glow of the forge; rabbits, horses, tavern-tale monsters. Rutger repeated as many as he could remember. The dragon had been poor – using both hands had brought some pain – but the boy had shrieked with a delight that surprised and pleased him.

He was making crows from shadows when a woman burst into the barn. Her abrupt entrance forced Rutger into a hasty retreat, despite the pain that came with it. The woman’s eyes were wide, and wet hair clung to her face, but Rutger focused most on the knife she held. It looked sharp.

The woman pointed her weapon with one hand while the other beckoned to her boy. ‘Come on now, Poll.’

‘Ma, this is Rutger, he’s–’

‘To me, now, come on. Your supper is ready.’

‘He’s a soldier like father but not a farmer, and–’

‘Poll!’

The boy flinched but was only quiet for a moment. ‘He can make shapes out of shadows with his hands! Show her the dragon.’

‘You should go to your mother, boy.’

The boy finally did as he was told, and the woman pulled him to stand behind her. ‘Pick up your lantern.’

The shifting light sent the shadows dancing up the walls and for a moment Rutger felt himself swallowed by the dark, taken by scarecrows.

‘He’s hurt, Ma.’

It gave her pause, though she’d surely seen as much for herself already. ‘Looks bad,’ she said.

‘Not many with worse get to talk about it,’ Rutger admitted.

‘You alone?’

‘Yes.’

She stared at him. Eventually she said, ‘You can come inside. There’s not much food to share, but we will.’

‘Praise Sigmar for you.’

‘Praise my boy, he’s the one found you.’ She helped Rutger to stand after watching him struggle for a moment. Blood that had pooled in his lap poured to the floorboards with the sound of a drink spilled. Rutger groaned.

‘I’ll stitch that up before you eat,’ the woman said. ‘No sense feeding you just to see it all fall out again after. Come on.’ She put an arm around him, and he tried to do the same to her as she led him outside, Poll bearing the light before them.

‘Harren, serve supper for your brother and sister,’ Maudeline said, carrying Rutger inside and to the table. ‘Keep mine and our guest’s in the pot for now.’ It was all she gave them as an introduction, though Poll told them, ‘He was in the barn. He’s a soldier.’

‘Sit down,’ Maudeline told Rutger, easing him into a chair she’d turned away from the table.

‘He’s hurt.’

‘Yes, Leese, he’s hurt. Now eat your supper.’

Maudeline knelt beside Rutger, using her body to block any view the children might get of his wound as she peeled away his shirt. The smell beneath was so foul that she was forced to turn her head as she pulled the last of his makeshift bandages away. They stuck to his flesh, crusted to the split in his skin, and he hissed as they came free. Maudeline dropped the sodden rags into a bowl already dark with blood.

‘I’ll need to clean it first. You can hold it, but I’ll need to get in under your hands with a hot cloth before I stitch you back together.’

Rutger clenched his teeth. His breathing came hard and fast through his nose.

‘What did this?’ she asked him.

The memory was instant and jarring, a beast with a savage cry of promised pain as it attacked. Rutger flinched.

‘Was it a sword? An axe?’

‘Something like the two together,’ Rutger said. ‘But as long as a spear.’

The woman – Maudeline – leaned closer, her nose wrinkled against the stench coming from his wound. ‘Well, it’s cut you wide open, but I don’t know how much damage has been done inside. I can’t see.’

She looked up at him. She’d wiped sweat from her brow and a line of his blood was smeared across her forehead. She had a stern face, tough looking, like weathered iron. He’d known women like her in the army. Her youth had worn away with hard work and children, who were likely much the same thing, but whatever hardships she’d endured only made her features more striking.

‘Just stitch it closed for now,’ Rutger said.

‘For now,’ she said. They both knew that for now was probably as long as he was likely to get. But she cleaned the wound as best she could. It was ragged in places, flesh torn where it hadn’t been cut. She pointed it out to Rutger who grunted, remembering the wicked points of the weapon’s serrated edge.

‘Tricky to stitch,’ she said.

‘Then I’ll have an interesting scar.’

His skin, pale as fish belly, was numb to each press of her needle when it came, but the pull of coarse thread through him was like a rough fire. He thought of the scarecrows hanging in the barn, splitting their stitches in the dark.

‘Your son was telling me about the Reaperman,’ Rutger said, keen to distract himself from what she was doing.

Maudeline looked at Poll, who was rushing his supper. ‘Before or after your chores?’

‘After,’ he said between spoonfuls, his full attention on his meal.

‘He mentioned a reaper’s gift.’

‘Reaping gift,’ she said.

Rutger’s expression encouraged her to explain.

‘Around here, harvest can be hard. Not much grows without a lot of work. Did you come down through the crops? You must have. Did you see the weeds?’

Rutger grunted. ‘We call it bloodweed where I’m from.’

‘I’ve heard that. It’s corpse-wort here. Crops rot, my husband calls it. Because it steals the goodness from the soil and strangles what we try to grow. Makes farming tough.’

Rutger believed it. The life he’d known before soldiering was as a farrier’s son, and that had been hard work, the smithing part especially, but given the right amount of heat, metal could be shaped and manipulated far more easily than nature. Their lives out here would be constant hard work.

Rutger hissed and shifted in his chair as Maudeline pulled the thread tight to knot it. She withdrew her small blade from the front pocket of her apron and cut away the excess.

‘There were a dozen or so families out here not that long ago,’ she said, ‘each with their own reasons for living as outliers. When one of us had a bad harvest, the rest contributed so as no one would starve or suffer for the next planting. Called it a reaping gift. If we couldn’t contribute crops, some other gift was given to show they had the charity of our thoughts, if little else.’

‘Like a man o’ straw.’

‘If you were lucky you’d get something useful, yes. Crows can be as much a problem as crops rot out here. But it could as likely be a ragdoll or wooden toy.’

‘Or stitches, and a bowl of hot food.’

She nodded. ‘Here, hold this.’ She pressed a folded piece of clean cloth to the long, jagged crescent of his black-stitched wound.

‘And the Reaperman?’ Rutger asked.

‘The Reaperman comes for you if you don’t give a reaping gift,’ Poll said without looking up from his soup. He was scraping his spoon against the bottom of the bowl as if he might work some of the wood into his meal. ‘He’s like a giant man o’ straw so he can’t die and sometimes he has a stuffed sack for a head and sometimes a huge gord–’

‘And sometimes he has a rusty scythe,’ Harren added, warming to their guest, ‘like the one in our field. Or sometimes he has two bloody sickles for hands and he comes for you if you don’t give what you could to those who needed it.’

‘Or if you’re not grateful when someone else gives you something,’ said the girl, Leese. She gave him a hard stare.

‘Well, I’m grateful,’ he said.

‘Leese, get me something I can use for a fresh bandage.’ Maudeline pointed at a trunk pushed against the wall. The girl left the table to do as she was told. Maudeline helped Rutger turn around to face the bowl Poll had ladled full for him.

Rutger spooned the broth so eagerly that most spilled down his chin, much to Poll’s delighted astonishment. It tasted more like water that vegetables had once been washed in, but he found a few tiny morsels worth chewing and it was hot, as promised. The heat of it was perhaps the most delicious part.

‘This is good,’ he said.

‘It’s not, but you’re welcome to it.’ Maudeline sat with an empty bowl. She leaned over it to say quietly, ‘To hear the Reaperman is to hear death calling for you.’ She glanced at where Rutger held the cloth against himself. ‘You’ll likely hear him soon.’

Rutger paused in his eating. The children were solemn. If the woman was trying to joke with him, she needed practice.

‘Not a ghostly scream coming at you out of the dark,’ Maudeline explained, ‘not some banshee’s shriek or wailing cry of woe. Just the whispered doom of his scythe, like a swathe of cut corn, or the wind whistling through the crops. And then he’s there to take all you have left.’ She eased back into her chair. ‘Leese, what are you doing? Just bring me one of the shirts.’

Leese had a pile of clothes beside her at the trunk. She pulled a shirt from them.

‘Put the rest back as neat as you found them.’

‘Don’t ruin a good shirt on my account,’ Rutger said.

Maudeline waved the comment away.

‘He was a healer, once,’ she said. ‘The Reaperman. Living with his wife where the Harden farm is now. They had a strong ox to pull their plough and come the harvest they always had an abundance of crops which they’d share amongst the other farms. What they lacked was children, and children are what we outliers have for farmhands, but they kept trying and eventually they managed one. Bligh, they called him. He wasn’t a strong worker, but he was keen and helped as much as he could. Certainly more than these three.’

The children protested and she smiled, hushing them. To Rutger she admitted, ‘They make my life easier as much as they make it difficult. Do you have any?’

‘No.’

She nodded once at that, as if the answer satisfied her in some way.

‘Anyway, Bligh died,’ she said.

‘How?’

‘He fell under the plough,’ Maudeline said. ‘Dragged a full length of the field, too. Unable to cry out for being choked with churned earth, turning over and over against the curved blades of the plough arm while his blood spilled into the soil, souring it with his death. That’s what drew the corpse-wort, they say. The bloodweed. Land’s been cursed ever since.’

Leese brought a shirt to her mother and ladled her a bowl of the broth. It seemed to Rutger that the story was finished, but just as he spooned up the last of his own supper, Maudeline spoke again.

‘The wife was ruined with grief. She took sick and fell beyond the healing powers of her husband, succumbing to her suffering. The husband, already hollowed with one loss, slaughtered the ox in a fit of grief-borne rage. His neighbours, they were unable or unwilling to help him after, and though they pitied him, they did little to stop his crops failing and provided nothing from their own harvest. When he, too, grew sick, the Great Necromancer came for him.’

‘Nagash,’ Leese whispered. Maudeline hushed her, but nodded.

‘The Great Necromancer prevented the man’s death, prolonging his grief as punishment for those he’d managed to save when he was a healer, those he’d denied the necromancer over the years. And with eternity, the poor man’s grief manifested into anger. His disgust for those who’d failed to help him and his wife turned to fury until all he had was hate and resentment. It drove him to take up the curved tines of the plough, the sickle, the scythe, whatever he could find, and he took his revenge on all who lacked the compassion he’d once held so dear. Over the years, people learned to make gifts to appease him or keep him at bay. These are the tributes that became reaping gifts, so that other neighbours would not suffer the same fate or fall at the hands of the Reaperman.’

Maudeline pushed her bowl of broth to Rutger. She’d barely touched it and nodded for him to eat. ‘You’ve never heard that story?’

‘Something like it,’ he said, and took the offered bowl. ‘Thank you.’

Maudeline shrugged. ‘There’s a different Reaperman for every farmstead, probably. Stories are a way of reminding ourselves we’re a community, which can be easy to forget out here, divided by fields and fences.’

‘And are there many of you in this community?’ Rutger asked.

‘Not as many as there were.’

‘The Reaperman came for them,’ Poll said.

‘Some of them, maybe,’ Maudeline said. ‘Others went to war. Likely the same war you’re running from.’

Rutger looked away.

‘It’s all right,’ Maudeline said. ‘You’ll find no judgement here. I only wish my husband would do the same.’

The look she gave Rutger made him feel wanted and hated at the same time. That he could have been her husband, but was not.

‘Don’t wish for that,’ Rutger said. ‘They hang deserters.’ It made him remember the man o’ straw hanging in the barn, roped and limp against the wall.

‘Better to risk the rope than get split across the middle. What good could he be to us with his belly open and his guts streaming out?’

Maudeline was turning the shirt that Leese had given her in her hands. For a moment Rutger thought it was his own, somehow washed clean and repaired; it was the same design, same colour, same cloth. Her husband’s, then. But no, if he was away fighting, this was not his uniform.

The realisation came as sudden as pain and when he looked back at Maudeline he knew she’d seen it.

‘You’re not the first soldier to pass through this way,’ she said quietly.

Rutger remembered all of the clothes the girl had taken and returned to the trunk. There had been a pile of them. How many had been uniforms?

‘You can stay in the barn,’ Maudeline said, reducing the shirt in her hands to strips.

To Rutger’s ears, each tear sounded like a scythe cutting through corn.

With his stomach so tightly bound some of the pain had been subdued, but he still leaned on Maudeline and the lantern staff she had given him. The candle stub gave only slight light, but in the almost absolute dark of the yard it was enough to guide them.

‘It’s hard, surviving out here.’

Rutger said nothing.

‘The army visited every homestead, every farm they passed through, rounding up the able-bodied. Including my husband. They said he had to go and I said he had to stay and you can see who won that battle. They took our old mule, too, though it weren’t much good for anything but its manure any more, and all of our chickens save one. If it wasn’t for those three in there, I’d have been pressed into service, too. Still, it taught me an important lesson.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Take what you can from those who have it.’

Rutger grunted. ‘Not all deserters get the rope,’ he said.

‘Not if they come through this way.’

Rutger stopped. He moved away from Maudeline and leaned against a water pump. ‘Why bother sewing me up? Why feed me?’ He was looking at the sword she wore; before leaving the house, she had retrieved it from the trunk – one weapon from a choice of several – and made a show of fastening it around her waist.

Maudeline had no answer for his question. Nothing she was willing to give, anyway.

‘Do I remind you of him?’

She took his arm and pulled him towards the barn. ‘No, you do not.’

‘Then why? If I’m only going to become a pile of clothes and belongings, why waste your food and thread?’

She sighed. ‘The meat’s ruined.’

‘The meat?’

‘It’s festering. Infected. I can’t tell quite what. Perhaps the weapon that ripped you open was poisoned with something. All I know is I wouldn’t trust it for my children.’

Rutger pulled away again, though without the pump to lean on he wasn’t very steady on his feet. ‘Sigmar’s mercy.’ He was grateful his broth had only been vegetable water.

‘I suppose you could call it that.’ She met his look without flinching. ‘You’ve seen the wasted state of the crops. Bloodweed isn’t fit for eating, and the crows are no better. We get eggs from our one scrawny chicken, but so rarely that I’d cook it if it weren’t all beak, bone and feathers.’

Rutger could barely look at her. How many had come this way, only to find themselves meat in her larder?

‘You can sleep safe tonight,’ Maudeline told him, ‘and then be on your way elsewhere tomorrow. Anything I might have taken from you, I’d have taken already.’

Rutger was still looking at the sword. She was right; he was in no fit state to fight her. He hung his head in resignation.

That was when he saw it.

‘Maudeline. Look.’

Warily, she looked to where he pointed and saw the churned mud. The night sky was cloudy, almost lightless, but Rutger lowered the lantern towards the ground to reveal a number of split-hoof prints. They circled the chicken coop. Maudeline began to follow them.

‘I heard something out here earlier,’ she said. ‘An animal.’ She eased the sword she wore from its sheath and held it point forward, ready to lunge.

‘No,’ Rutger said, ‘wait,’ and stepped forward to restrain her.

It came out of the darkness with surprising speed. They saw it only briefly by the weak light of the candle stub, but it was enough to frighten them into a shared gasp. Its face was long like that of a horse, but more like a goat’s in shape and features, with long horns curling back from its head. It snarled at them, teeth jagged and sharp, and raised a hairy fist to show a cleaver-like weapon. Rutger noted the beast’s lack of armour, saw only a strap of leather across the pelt of its own chest and a tattered loincloth at its groin, and then Maudeline was in his way. She slashed her blade across the creature’s chest, stepping in close to avoid its own weapon as she brought hers up again with sudden speed. Rutger saw it sink into the beast’s armpit and then the two of them toppled away into the dark.

For a moment he stood rooted, a statue unable to act. But a guttural cry called him to action and he hurried forward.

The two were writhing on the ground. Rutger saw the cleaver abandoned and kicked it away, yelling at the strain it put on his wound. The beast was clawing at Maudeline, turning her clothes to bloody tatters, but she held her position atop it, forearm pressed to its throat and her other stabbing again and again at whatever part of it she could find with her weapon. Rutger jabbed at the creature’s face with the shaft of the lantern pole but it was knocked away in the fray. In his fumble to keep hold of it he managed to reverse it around and brought it down with both hands, hard, smashing the lantern into the beast’s head just as Maudeline slammed her sword up under its chin, pinning its jaw closed.

The rest was done in darkness. Rutger held back, not wanting to strike Maudeline, but he heard the grunts and breaths of their struggle. It was brief. Once his eyes grew accustomed to the night, he saw Maudeline sit back, still astride the creature, sword dripping in her fist. She was soaked with blood and smeared with mud, little more than a pale face in the darkness, panting and fierce.

Rutger toed the beastman’s shoulder, turning the body slightly to show a crushed quiver of arrows beneath it, a broken bow once slung on its back now held together only by its string.

‘It’s a scout.’

‘How many?’ Maudeline asked. She tried to stand, staggered, and was helped up by Rutger. ‘Are there more?’

‘I don’t know. We should go.’

‘Go where?’

‘Anywhere. A neighbour? And then another neighbour, and so on.’

‘We have none.’

‘None?’

‘Not nearby, anyway.’ She swept her hair back from her face. It stayed in place, slick with blood and mud and rainwater. She looked at Rutger. ‘Not all the clothes in that trunk are uniforms.’

She was daring his judgement; all he could do was look away.

‘This one will be missed,’ he said, gesturing at the fallen beast. ‘Its absence will be its report and a warband will come.’

She pointed her sword at him. ‘They’re looking for you.’

Rutger stepped back. ‘Battle’s moving this way,’ he said. ‘They’re looking for anyone.’

For a moment, brief as a star falling, Rutger saw all the fight and fierceness leave her. The strength abandoned her limbs and the blade hung limp in her hand. ‘They’ll cut right through this place,’ she said.

‘We have to run.’

‘They’ll catch us.’

They would. Unless there was something to hold them here a while.

Rutger looked towards the barn. ‘I have an idea.’

‘Great. What we need is an army.’

Rutger agreed, and he told her some of his plan.

The sun remained hidden for now, but some of its light was leaking into the sky and a brightening amethyst jewelled the ridge of the farm. The rain had stopped and the wet stalks of corn seemed to shine with the morning. Rutger, pausing for breath, held his stomach and looked back at the ruse they’d constructed.

It hadn’t taken long to ready the farm, not with the family helping. Every man o’ straw had been fetched from the barn and new ones had been hastily made using the clothes from the trunk. Using some repurposed fencing, each had been strategically planted around the property, some under Rutger’s guidance and the rest by Rutger himself. He’d needed their help initially – without Harren clambering up to the roof, there was no way Rutger could have positioned the man o’ straw at the chimney, a curve of wagon wheel held like a bow in its handless grip – but once the more difficult jobs had been completed, Rutger had been able to manage the rest alone.

Standing close, in the yard, the full foolishness of the trick was clear, but from this distant field, looking back, Rutger thought the scarecrows would be convincing enough to warrant pause, especially those dressed in uniforms. The purpose was merely to buy some time. A full warband in the heat of battle-lust would simply pour down upon the farm regardless, of course, but a cautious warband or scouting party would linger to plan their approach and attack.

At least, that was what Rutger hoped.

‘This is senseless,’ Maudeline had said. ‘The time we’re spending with this distraction is time wasted. We should be leaving.’

‘At night?’

‘I can find our way in the dark.’

‘I’ve no doubt, but you’d be a fool to try. If a party discovers this place abandoned, they’ll move right on through Mhurghast and find you before the sun has fully risen. They move faster than you.’

‘The Gowers have a horse.’

Rutger looked at her then, considering this news.

‘She’s a tired old mare, but–’

‘If she could be so easily taken, you’d have done so already, if only for food. My guess is that the Gowers have learnt about your visits to other neighbours, or are otherwise too many, too strong, or too wily to be easily plundered.’

He took her silence as agreement.

Poll had been breaking boards into shield shapes. He’d proven a resourceful boy; the stuffed archer on the roof had been his idea. ‘It’s like your shadows,’ he’d said, and put his hands together to mimic a flapping bird.

‘Children’s games,’ Maudeline had muttered.

Leese, picking up on her mother’s mood, had pointed out, ‘They won’t be very convincing if they can’t move.’

‘Then we’ll make them move.’

‘How?’

‘The same way your weathervane works.’

Maudeline had looked up at the roof, though it was too dark to see anything. ‘And if there’s no wind?’

As it turned out, her concern had been warranted. This morning, with the rain clouds dispersed, the dawn was calm. Barely any breeze rustled the corn. But it didn’t matter, not now.

Rutger leaned forward, as much as his wound allowed, and tried to catch his breath. He was already exhausted.

‘We won’t be able to wait for you,’ Maudeline had warned him.

‘I know. It doesn’t matter.’

She’d handed him one of the swords from the trunk. Each of her children had strapped one on as well. Rutger made a few practised swings. The sword was fine, but his movement was not.

‘The only gift I have to give you is time,’ he’d said. To emphasise his point, he moved his arm away from where he cradled his stomach; a dark line had soaked through to the linen of his borrowed shirt. ‘I think I’ll rest here a while.’

Maudeline, practical, had nodded. ‘Soldiers,’ she’d said. ‘Always giving their lives away.’

In that moment, Rutger had felt every bit the hero he’d always wanted to be, but knew he was not.

Now, as he waited a moment for the sun to rise, Rutger remembered the story she’d told at supper. It reminded him of the Harridan Curse, and he wondered if the Reaperman was merely a farmer’s version of the awful Dreadscythe. If he remembered the tale correctly, it was blood and injury that drew the Dreadscythe Harridans, though no longer from any lingering memory of their prior lives as healers but rather as creatures that delighted in causing such suffering. As a boy, he had thought it terrible that a person’s character could be so corrupted, but as he grew into an adult he recognised its truth in the world. Now he thought the worst thing about the story was the idea that some inkling of what they used to be remained inside their new cursed form so that even as they attacked the living, some part of them screamed in powerless torment against what they had become.

Rutger understood that, too, and though a purer part of him rebelled against what he intended to do, he’d long ago learnt that nature was difficult to tame. His mettle had been formed in the forge of war, and there was no changing the shape of it now. Even if he could, these people had taught him something else…

Take what you can from those who have it. Do whatever it takes to survive.

He’d subdued the woman, first.

As a farrier’s boy, he was familiar with how to approach a horse that might kick, just as he knew how to swing a hammer hard and true. As she’d filled a sack with meagre provisions – ‘I could pack all we have and we’d still be travelling light’ – Rutger had retrieved a hatchet from the woodpile and brought the back of it down hard across the back of her skull.

After her, the children had been easy.

He could still just about see where the eldest of the children, Harren, struggled against the ropes binding him to the stake in the farmyard. Arms bound outstretched as if waiting to fight, he pivoted left and right. A distance away, with several scarecrows between them, his sister’s struggles had the same effect, and further away still was Poll. Their movements only served to make the ploy more convincing to whatever might see them from afar.

‘I’m sorry,’ Rutger muttered, though he doubted his own words.

He looked again to where his wound was suppurating unseen beneath his bandages and remembered Maudeline’s opinion of it, that he was poisoned or infected. Perhaps she was right. Perhaps he would not endure the wound for long, but he would try. That was the lesson he had taken from this family’s survival, though it was a lesson Maudeline hadn’t meant to give.

He’d bound her in the house, too weak to position her with the others. He wondered if she was conscious yet and thought it perhaps better if she were not.

They would have died anyway, he told himself, shrugging the sack of stolen supplies into a more comfortable position over his shoulder. Out here, a woman and three children, fleeing from such beasts? They had no chance.

Such was the flimsy argument he made for himself, believing it about as much as he believed his apology for the part he’d play in their demise. But this way, at least they would provide a little more time for Rutger to reach the family with the horse. How he would fare from there, he did not know, but he would forge forward until such a time.

He stood for a moment, bathing in the light of a new dawn, and raised his arms to either side as if he, too, were some man o’ straw standing in a stubbled field, corn stalks whispering at his back. And with his arms open, he welcomed the crows circling the farm. He had startled them once, shaken them from where they pecked at morsels in the field to burst black and panicked into the sky. Now they waited to feed again, eager to peck at what had once been a battlefield, to take what they could from whatever they found there.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said again, meaning it no more than he had the first time. ‘But thank you.’

In the moment before he turned away, he heard the wind rustle through the corn behind him. He heard the quiet, drawn out hush of whispering stalks, and somewhere within that sound was the unmistakable shush of a scythe slicing through crops. A reaping sound.

He felt it come like a dying breath, and it was as if the wind passed through his own body. As if he himself was made of little more than straw.

Beyond the ridge came the drawn-out call of a battle horn, signalling someone’s end.

The Way of
All Flesh

Jude Reid

I killed Konrad Langenbruik exactly one month before I married his sister.

It was raining the night it happened, a cold, relentless drizzle that saturated the air and blurred the distant glow of the city’s manufactoria. In Etterdam there was nothing unusual about rain, but what was unexpected was the presence of my future brother-in-law at my door.

‘What do you want?’ I asked.

He barged inside without an invitation, water dripping from his greatcoat onto the cracked marble floor. ‘That’s hardly a warm welcome, Niklaas.’

‘I was on my way to bed.’

‘What a very abstemious life you do lead.’ He sniffed, his nose wrinkling with distaste. ‘Well. If we’re dispensing with the pleasantries, I’m here to tell you to break off your engagement with my sister.’

He pulled his gloves off one finger at a time and tucked them inside his coat. A square-cut emerald sparkled on his left hand, matching the jewelled hilt of his monoblade. It made the dagger on my belt look like a cooking knife.

‘And what makes you think I’m going to do that?’

He favoured me with a light, mocking laugh. ‘Honestly, Niklaas. Look around you.’ An expansive gesture took in the moth-eaten velvet curtains, the oozing crack in the cupola, the chipped banister that spiralled to the upper floors. Riedveltshof had once been the crowning glory of my family’s ancestral estate. Now it was a crumbling relic that bled a continual river of Thronegelt. ‘I wouldn’t keep grox in a place like this.’

‘I seem to recall Aurelie knew about the state of the house when she agreed to marry me.’ A scowl flickered across his face as I spoke his sister’s name, and I felt a momentary stab of satisfaction. ‘Out of interest, does she know about your little visit?’

‘Credit me with some discretion.’ Konrad’s crisp diction dripped with scorn. ‘The problem is my sister thinks she loves you.’

‘I see. And you know better, do you?’

‘I’m sure her notion of marrying a penniless nobleman seems terribly romantic. And I imagine you think you’ll have spent all her money by the time she gets wise to you.’ Konrad’s lip was curled upwards, his handsome face twisting in a sneer. ‘A very profitable alliance, I grant you that. The wealthiest heiress in Etterdam, the woman whose manufactoria supply servitors to anyone who’s anyone in this city.’ He let out a derisive snort. ‘And a pauper with a name that hasn’t mattered for a hundred years.’

‘I think you should leave,’ I said.

Konrad took a step towards me. I moved back, and he advanced again until we were standing face-to-face, my back pressed against the wall.

‘If you’d allow me to finish.’ His skin smelled of amasec, lho-smoke, expensive cologne. ‘I’ve come into possession of some interesting information. Information that makes you an even less appealing marriage prospect than you already are, Graaf Niklaas van Riedvelt. Except that’s the problem. Rumour has it you might not be the Graaf at all.’

Blood rushed to my face. My father on his deathbed, cursing me for a worthless bastard, the unwanted by-blow of one of my dead mother’s many indiscretions. I ground my teeth against the escape of words I might later regret.

‘I’m sure Aurelie’s friends in the Adeptus Mechanicus could recommend a genetor who could prove your lineage,’ Konrad continued. ‘Assuming you’d be willing to subject yourself to their tests.’

My fingernails bit half-moons into my palms. ‘Get out.’

‘Make things easy on yourself, Nik.’ Konrad shook his head with an air of gentle, rueful kindness. ‘Do as you’re told and you can keep your empty title and your shabby old ruin. But my sister deserves better than you.’ He jabbed his index finger into my breastbone. ‘Understand?’

For a moment I was silent, stunned by the sheer audacity of the man. Then somehow my dagger found its way into my grip, and Konrad was staggering back, his hands gloved in red, clawing at the ragged-edged hole in his throat. He opened his mouth, and a torrent of dark liquid streamed over his chin, staining his expensive collar crimson.

A giddying sense of nausea swept over me, accompanied by the profound desire to have the last ten seconds of my life back. Konrad reached out his hand, the confusion on his face making him look unexpectedly young, then he crumpled to the ground with a long, bubbling wheeze.

Rain dripped through the crack in the cupola. I swallowed down a mouthful of bile.

‘Konrad?’

I stumbled back and sat down heavily on the stairs, unable to tear my eyes from the body. With one blow, Konrad had been transformed from a living creature into an inanimate lump of flesh – and I had been the one to do it.

A leaden weight pressed down on my chest; my head spun, the walls closing in around me. Unbidden, the image of my brother flashed into my mind, resplendent in his officer’s uniform. Had Pieter felt the heaviness of guilt each time he had taken a life on the battlefield, or had repetition rendered the appalling deed unremarkable? It didn’t matter. Pieter had killed with the God-Emperor’s blessing. I was a murderer, and His justice would surely follow.

Blood trickled across the floor, turning the cracks between the marble tiles into narrow crimson canals. I straightened my back and stood. There was a simple, honourable solution to this. I would send for the enforcers, confess my guilt and–

And what? Even if I could convince the provost-marshall that Konrad’s death had been an accident, I would save my neck at the cost of everything else: reputation, marriage and any hope of restoring the family name, a heavy price to pay for a moment’s loss of control.

Yet, was I truly the one to blame? Konrad might not have attacked me physically, but he had come intent on my destruction all the same. I had acted only in self-defence, though no one would believe that. Throwing myself on the provost-marshall’s mercy would serve only to complete Konrad’s work. No, I would have to hide the evidence, and quickly.

No doubt Pieter would have dealt with the body on his floor with the same easy confidence with which he sailed through his entire life, leaving me to stumble and botch at every turn. But the golden boy of the family was dead, butchered with the rest of his regiment in some futile off-world conflict, his body too mutilated to be worth sending home. This time I was the one in desperate trouble.

If I was to escape this situation with my skin intact, I would need a plan.

For the first time I was grateful for the absence of household staff. I had no reason to think Konrad had been lying when he said he had been discreet about his visit. If I could find a way to dispose of the body, tonight’s mistake might not cost me everything after all.

I had no idea where to begin. But I knew someone who might.

As the younger son of the family, tradition dictated that my career would be in the Administratum. The van Riedvelt name had spared me the worst of the tedium, and I had settled into an uneventful post tending the city’s ledgers. The salary was barely enough to live on even without the leeching shadow of Riedveltshof hanging over me, and so when Hanna Ullman had approached me with an offer of additional employment, I had been in no position to refuse.

The ancient vox-unit in the study cracked and fizzed in protest as I lifted the handset and entered her private code, waiting for the click to tell me that the connection had been made. No one spoke, but I could hear the faint sound of breathing on the other end of the line.

‘Ms. Ullman? It’s Niklaas van Riedvelt. I keep your books.’ I had also been the source of some confidential Administratum information that she had put to profitable use, but I still wasn’t sure she would remember my name. If I was honest, I wasn’t sure I wanted her to. Rumour had it that the last man to inconvenience her had been flayed alive and set alight on the deck of a barge.

‘Graaf Niklaas.’ Was that the hint of a smile in Ullman’s voice? ‘To what do I owe the unexpected pleasure of your call? Not a problem with the accounts, I trust?’

‘No, not that.’ I swallowed down the painful lump in my throat. ‘My fiancée’s brother. He attacked me. He’s dead.’

‘Who else knows?’ Her words were crisp, urgent.

‘No one – he came here alone.’

‘And where are you now?’

‘Home. Riedveltshof, but I can–’

‘Lock the door and stay where you are. I’ll send someone to deal with it.’

The hour that followed was the longest I had ever spent in Konrad Langenbruik’s company. I perched on the bottom stair like an uneasy gargoyle, never taking my eyes from the corpse at my feet. When at last the knock came I leapt into the air and half-tripped over the body in my haste to press my ear against the door.

‘Graaf van Riedvelt?’ It was a man’s voice, reassuring and calm. ‘You’ve got a problem. We’re here to help.’

‘Can you–’ I glanced down at the body. ‘Can you go round the back, please?’

‘Tradesman’s entrance, is it?’ A woman this time.

‘Someone might see,’ I hissed through my teeth. Someone might already have seen.

‘If you like,’ the man said.

I opened the back door to a pair dressed in nondescript clothing, nothing like the flamboyant gangers of my imagination. The man nodded to me with a workmanlike air, while the woman bypassed me entirely, following my bloody footprints through the scullery to where the body lay.

‘Bit of a mess,’ the man said pleasantly.

When I failed to reply, he joined his companion at the scene of the crime, examining the remains with the diligence of an enforcer. They stripped Konrad’s body with well-practised ease, wrapped it and transferred it to an unmarked groundcar in the orchard, then wiped away the carnage from the floor until no trace remained.

‘Ms. Ullman said to tell you she’ll be in touch soon,’ the man said, as matter-of-factly as if he had just delivered a carpet.

‘What will you do with him? The body, I mean.’

‘The canal.’ He shrugged. ‘Lower city. The usual.’

The woman held my gaze as she slid Konrad’s signet ring into her breast pocket. I didn’t stop her. Priceless though the jewel was, it was nothing compared to what I owed for tonight’s little escapade.

Light was searing through the bed-curtains when I woke, my mouth dry and my head pounding. I fumbled for my chrono, wondering how long I had slept – then jolted awake as I realised the hammering in my skull was coming from the front door.

Halfway into my clothes I remembered that running would do me no good. I had nowhere to go and no money to get me there in any case. If I resisted arrest, perhaps a few bolt-rounds would save me the humiliation of a trial. More likely I’d be brought down twitching and drooling by a shock baton to face whatever cursory justice the governor thought I deserved. I lumbered to the top of the stairs like a grox resigned to the slaughterhouse.

‘Nik?’ The voice at the door was light and curious, far from the augmented bark of an enforcer. My heart leapt.

‘Coming!’ I rattled down the stairs two at a time into a hallway bathed in warmth and colour. In daylight, the events of the previous night took on an unreal quality, something I might have dreamed in my drug-induced slumber.

Aurelie was standing on the doorstep just as her brother had done the night before, the morning light playing over her dark curls. Where Konrad had been angular and harsh, his elder sister was all soft sweetness, her gentle face creased with concern as she looked up at me. Even through my panic I felt a surge of love for her.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

‘I was going to ask you the same thing.’ She smiled, though her expression lacked conviction. Her hands fluttered over each other like the wings of an unsettled bird. ‘I’ve been knocking for ages. You didn’t answer.’

‘Overslept.’ I rubbed my eyes with the back of my hand and caught a glimpse of my chrono. ‘Shit. I’ll be late for work.’

‘I won’t keep you. Only…’ Aurelie’s teeth worried at her lower lip, scoring indents in her skin. ‘Konrad didn’t come home last night. I know it’s not all that unusual, but I started to worry.’

‘I haven’t seen him,’ I said, the lie jumping too quickly to my lips. A slow, sick dread was rising from the pit of my stomach. I forced a smile onto my face, leaned down and brushed my lips to her cheek. ‘He can’t be far away.’

‘You’re right. He’s probably found somewhere more interesting to spend his time, that’s all,’ Aurelie said, without conviction. ‘He’ll be back before long.’

I imagined the dead man drifting, grey and bloated through the murky waters of the canal, his eyes and lips already gnawed away by rats.

‘I’m sure he will,’ I said, and hated myself for it.

A week passed before the enforcers were willing to take Konrad’s absence seriously. The fear I was being watched was like a noose around my neck, one that might snap tight at any moment. I found an old bottle of kalma, the one that had eased my father’s suffering in his last days, and used it to buy a few hours of sleep each night. Even so my dreams were fitful, restless, haunted things: the judder of knife on bone, crimson smears on a regicide board.

The days were worse.

Aurelie concealed her anxiety with brittle optimism, the shadows under her eyes deepening with each day that passed. The slow death of her hope was painful to watch, and I found myself avoiding her, citing the pressures of work and the last preparations for the wedding. Once we were married, I told myself, things would be better. Both of us would come to terms with Konrad’s disappearance in our own way in time.

And then the letter arrived.

I had heard it fall only moments before, but already a puddle of filthy water was spreading across the floor. It was sealed with the Langenbruik family sigil – an eagle holding a cog in its talons – but there was no name or address.

I snapped the seal. A murky odour rose from the paper as I unfolded it. Ink had bled across the surface as if from a hundred tiny papercuts, but the words were still legible, still appallingly familiar. I had watched them appear a hundred times beneath the autoquill, one to be sent with every wedding invitation, a blank space underneath for the recipient to add their name.

I shall attend the wedding of Graf Niklaas van Riedvelt to Miss Aurelie Langenbruik.

The bottom of the page was smeared with ink, the signature blurred to the point of illegibility, but the shape of the name was unmistakable.

Konrad Langenbruik.

Holding the letter as though it were the rotting corpse of a canal-rat, I took it to the scullery and dropped it into the macerator. I watched the sodden grey fibres shred and clot and vanish, then armed myself with a mop to clean away the puddles of water it had left behind it, desperate to be rid of every trace of its presence.

I told myself there was no need for this irrationality. It was a letter, not Konrad himself on my doorstep. I had sent the invitations weeks ago. Konrad had signed it before he had decided to confront me. No doubt the messenger had been delayed or forgotten the missive, only now realising their error.

I opened the front door and scanned the night for signs of movement. Outside was only the distant sulphurous lights of the city’s manufactoria, glinting through the endless rain, but my eye fell on a smear of silty mud on the doorstep. It might, if I squinted at it from the correct angle, have been the edge of a footprint.

I looked up again. Something moved down by the canal. I told myself it was nothing, my brain trying to make sense of random patterns of light and dark, but the longer I looked, the more solid and human-shaped it became. Fear traced a chill finger down my back. Something was there, and it was watching me.

I slammed the door, fighting to steady the panicked thudding in my chest, torn between the desperate urge to shine a light into the shadows and dread of what I might illuminate. I fumbled my way to a decanter and poured a glass of amasec, the stench of stagnant canal-water lingering on my hands. I gulped it down and I poured another, this time adding a few drops of my dwindling supply of kalma. The tox-wand built into my father’s signet ring – a plain adamantium band, not half as flashy or expensive as Konrad’s – made a chirp of disapproval. I reset its parameters to ignore the drug. Its machine-spirit subsided into resentful silence, and my hands finally stopped shaking.

As the sedative eased its way through my bloodstream, the pieces of the puzzle fell into place with painful clarity. Only three people besides myself knew about the murder – my two helpers, and Hanna Ullman herself. I had been a fool to put my trust in a criminal and not expect her to take full advantage of it. The letter on the doorstep, the shadowy figure in the darkness, even the faint sense of being watched that had haunted me since the night of Konrad’s death must all be part of her plan. Next would come the threat of exposure, though Throne knew there was little to blackmail out of me.

I decided not to wait for her blow to land.

Leaving Riedveltshof by the servants’ entrance, I was careful to avert my eyes from the canal as I followed it towards the Lower City. Violence was never far from the surface in Etterdam, and over the last few days it had boiled over in a spate of execution-style killings in the slums, which only served to add to my unease.

I had visited Ullman’s home once before, while handling a particularly sensitive series of accounts, and had been struck by the contrast between the filth outside the hab-block and the understated elegance of its interior. An office had been prepared for me with an autoquill and enough recaff to lubricate the night’s work, but I suspected that on this occasion her hospitality would not be forthcoming.

The Lower City seemed darker than usual, its streets deserted, every window shuttered against the night. The unmistakable smell of promethium singed my nostrils as I approached Ullman’s hab, and to my astonishment I saw that the building had been gutted by fire. The walls were charred, the windows shattered, the reinforced grilles melted into their frames. When I placed a hand on the wall it was cool to the touch. Whatever flames had burned here were long dead.

A foot-thick bulkhead door that could have stopped a bolter round hung open in the smoke-blackened doorway. Inside, the promethium fumes were stronger still, and nothing was identifiable amongst the ruin of soot and melted plascrete. Fires in the Lower City were commonplace, of course, but this one seemed rather more deliberate.

Scratching echoed from the depths of the building. The crimson eyes of a pit-rat glared at me, then the creature scurried away into the darkness. I hurried out of the alley and headed back to the canalside, an unaccountable prickling at the back of my neck.

None of this made sense. Someone – most likely Ullman herself – had destroyed every trace of her presence here, but if she was trying to blackmail me, then why would she make herself impossible to find? I risked a glance over my shoulder, but the streets were empty, the rain pattering into the canal like the tapping of miniscule feet. By the docks the municipal gallows were a stark outline against the glow of the city, two luckless souls dangling broken-necked from the crossbeam.

The street-lumens grew further apart as I made my way home. The canals that had once transported ore to Etterdam’s manufactoria were now stagnant and filthy, obstructed arteries clinging to the city’s living waterways. Fungal scum covered the surface, so thick you could mistake it for solid ground – except that nothing green grew near Riedveltshof. Centuries of mining had pockmarked the land with empty claims and hollowed-out quarries, and as the ore had dried up, so had the money.

There were footsteps behind me. The prickling sensation returned to the back of my neck, and as I increased my pace so did my pursuer, their feet keeping perfect time with mine. The path between the warehouses and the canal was narrowing, the footsteps close now, still maintaining that maddening synchronicity. The air was thick with the reek of standing water. My hand crept to the hilt of my dagger and I spun, ready to defend myself at the slightest provocation, only to find the path behind me empty.

I took one hesitant step. The sound echoed into the dark. Had I been enough of a fool to flee the ghost of my own footsteps? I turned to walk on, but this time the footsteps anticipated my own, as though they were real and I the echo. I broke into a run, my breath coming quick and high in my chest, but the thin soles of my boots slithered over the rain-slick cobbles – my toe snagged and for a moment I was weightless – and then the path rose up to meet me. I scrabbled to rise, slipped and fell onto my back, freezing rainwater plastering my clothes to my skin – and there it was again, a robed and hooded figure, standing motionless in the darkness where the lumen-light could not quite reach.

‘What do you want?’ My voice was thin, full of childish bravado. I drew my dagger and brandished it at arm’s length in a clumsy threat-display, knowing I was no threat at all.

The watcher moved towards me. It raised its left hand to point at me, and the sleeve of its robe fell back to reveal a familiar emerald gleam.

‘Merciful Emperor,’ I whispered.

Konrad Langenbruik was dead. I knew that as surely as I knew my own name, but someone – something – was on the canalside wearing his ring. An imposter, it had to be, all part of Hanna Ullman’s incomprehensible plan, and yet the lean, broad-shouldered frame and the imperious tilt of the head were unmistakable.

It wasn’t possible, none of this was possible – but there he was.

The nearest lumen-globe exploded, sending white-hot sparks raining down around me. When I opened my eyes I was alone, and all that was left to do was to pick up my sodden carcass and hope my remaining shreds of courage would bear me home.

The days that followed were filled with torment. Every shadow in the rain was a ghost, every noise the footstep of a pursuing spectre. I resigned from the Administratum with immediate effect and immured myself inside Riedveltshof, burning my lumens day and night with no concern for the cost. I cut off contact with everyone but Aurelie. When we spoke, she expressed her worries for my health, while I endlessly reaffirmed my commitment to our marriage. I found myself obscurely pleased that I had replaced Konrad as the primary object of her regard.

When my wedding day finally dawned, it took a sizable dose of kalma to steady my hands long enough for me to dress. I cut a curious figure: corpse-grey, caverns in the hollows of my cheeks, dressed in a doublet and breeches that had been at the height of fashion a generation ago.

I decided to walk to the cathedral early to deprive the local harpies of the pleasure of seeing me arrive on foot, and waited in the narthex through the morning worship. When the sermon was finished, I knelt in contemplation at the altar and listened to the guests filing in, my eyes fixed on the shining aquila, my mind racing.

The wedding had been a beacon of hope in the preceding days, but now it had arrived my muscles were rigid, my mouth bone-dry. I found I was unwilling to look over my shoulder to check which of our invitations had been answered. The Pontifex Urba, resplendent in his gilded crimson cassock, began the ceremony, the High Gothic litanies rolling across me like clouds of sacred incense. The cathedral was incandescent, a thousand jewel-bright colours gleaming through the glassaic windows. My skull ached.

Aurelie joined me at the altar. She was draped in white, her gown encrusted with tiny nacreous shells that caught and refracted the light so that it hung around her like an aurora. A diaphanous veil adorned rather than obscured her features, fine enough that I could see her exquisite profile and the tumbling curls of her hair. I caught her hand and squeezed it. With Aurelie as my wife, there was no terror too awful for me to endure.

The pontifex lifted the chalice, offering it first to Aurelie’s lips and then to mine. The sanctified wine was rich and aromatic, but I thought I could detect a bitterness beneath that reminded me of the stench that had clung to Konrad’s letter.

I shall attend the wedding of Graf Niklaas van Riedvelt to Miss Aurelie Langenbruik.

I lurched to my feet. The chalice clattered to the floor. Wine splashed the altar-cloth, spattering Aurelie’s gown blood-red. The air was thick with resin-smoke, the glassaic-tinted-light smeared across my vision as I blundered down the aisles.

‘Konrad! I know you’re here!’

I spotted him in a cluster of robed figures, his head bowed beneath its heavy mantle. I dashed to his side and tore back the hood, only to reveal a whirring augmetic eye, its human partner blinking indignantly. A Priest of Mars.

‘Where is he? Which one of you is it?’

I tugged back a second hood, and another, the lights blinding, the stench of the canal filling my mouth. A hush fell across the room. Aurelie was at my side, her face flushed, her fingertips clawing my shoulder.

‘Nik. Please. I don’t know what the matter is, but you have to stop.’

A murmur was spreading through the crowd. Every pair of eyes, organic and mechanical, were focused on the spectacle I had made of myself. I straightened my doublet, smoothed down my hair, tried to steady my shaking hands.

‘I’m sorry,’ I murmured. Then, louder, so that the assembled dignitaries could hear: ‘Pontifex, please carry on.’

The Pontifex Urba glanced at Aurelie. I understood the unspoken question as clearly as if it had boomed through his laud-hailer: should I allow this to continue? Aurelie closed her eyes, her lips pressed into a bloodless line. I held my breath.

She nodded, and I gave thanks to the Emperor for her loyalty.

I wish now that she had abandoned me at the altar.

The rest of the ceremony was a mundane affair. Aurelie waited with me while the guests departed, whispering and gossiping to each other. No doubt our names would be on everyone’s lips by morning, mine in scorn and derision, Aurelie’s with gloating pity. As we walked along the canalside in the gathering dusk, my unease could hardly have been lost on my new bride, but no spirit chose to manifest itself – at least, none that I could see.

Our homecoming was far from the romantic occasion I had planned back in the first, heady days of our courtship. Then, I had imagined the threshold garlanded with exotic offworld blooms, candles flickering in their sconces, a trail of petals leading to the bedchamber where we would spend our wedding night. All of my plans had been washed away in the panic and dread of the preceding weeks, and Riedveltshof was the same shabby old relic as ever, lurking in the gloom as we approached. Aurelie was restless, slipping her hand away every time I tried to touch her fingers with mine. The day had taken its toll on her, too.

Something was creaking in the dark, a soft back-and-forth like the laboured breath of a dying man. I wondered what shutter had come unhinged this time, but for the first time I didn’t have to worry about borrowing money for repairs.

‘Welcome home, Graafin van Riedvelt.’

The door swung open at a touch, unexpectedly unlocked. A mechanical failure, nothing more. I waved a hand to trigger the lumen globes. Nothing.

‘Old wiring,’ I offered, and Aurelie gave me a feeble smile in exchange. The air in the hall smelled stale and damp, lit only by the borrowed light that seeped through the dirty glass roof, glinting off something small and metallic on the floor. Aurelie caught it with the edge of her foot. Light flashed off emerald-green facets. A ball of ice formed in the pit of my stomach, my mouth suddenly too dry to speak. Shaking, I shepherded Aurelie to the bottom of the stairs, hoping beyond hope that her gaze would not chance to fall on the signet ring that somehow had found its way here.

‘Are you tired?’ I asked. ‘Go up to bed, I’ll reset the lumens, then bring us up some amasec. We can toast our wedding.’

‘If you like.’ Her voice was soft, almost sad.

I heard rather than saw the thing that moved in the darkness. A soft, whispering scuff that might have had any number of mundane explanations – a pit-rat from the cellar, or a bird that had flown in through the broken shutter and become trapped inside – but I knew it was neither.

‘Did you hear that?’

‘Hear what?’ I could hardly make out Aurelie’s expression, but I thought she was frowning. The noise came again, closer this time. Something was in the house.

‘Go upstairs,’ I told her.

‘Why?’

‘Go upstairs and lock the bedroom door. I need to check – I need you to be safe. Please.’

She hesitated. ‘Nik, there’s something–’

The sound came again, and still she was perched like an idiot on the bottom step. Why wouldn’t she listen? My hand lashed out, catching her across the cheek with a resonant smack.

She swayed, her hand flying to the blossoming red mark on her face, her eyes spilling with hurt – then set her jaw in an expression as close to anger as I had ever seen her wear.

‘If that’s what you want,’ she said.

I kept my eyes on her until she was safely out of sight, already cursing myself. Once again I had allowed the darkness to rob me of my courage. My weakness had made me a fool and a bully. I went to call after her, to apologise, but before I could form the words, something scraped across the floor of the hall.

One of the lumen globes flickered into life. My breath caught in my throat. There it was between me and the door: a gaunt, dripping figure draped in a filthy pauper’s shroud.

A scream tore itself from my throat as the house plunged back into darkness. I bolted for the nearest room – the dining room – slammed the door and struggled to swallow down my panic. There was no way to lock the door, and the massive banqueting table was too heavy for me to move alone. Something metallic scraped down the door, rasping like the talons of a warp-spawned atrocity in a firebrand preacher’s sermon.

‘Please, Konrad.’ The words came quickly, flooding from between my lips on a tide of desperation. Blood pounded in my ears. ‘I’m sorry, I never meant to–’

The door opened. A warm gust of air blew into the room, carrying the thick stench of the canal, forcing its way down my throat like unwelcome fingers.

‘God-Emperor in your mercy, forgive me,’ I whispered. ‘I never meant to kill him.’

I closed my eyes.

A minute passed.

Another.

The air had taken on the dusty emptiness of the tomb, silent except for my own rapid breathing. There was a soft hum, followed by a click, and through my closed eyelids I realised the lumen globes had reignited. With a superhuman effort of will I opened first one eye, and then the other. The room was bathed in golden light, and the spirit was gone.

I lumbered to my feet and staggered into the hall, intimately aware of the reek of sour sweat drying on my skin. The cracked mirror on the wall reflected a wide-eyed beggar of a man – but I was alive. The spectre of Konrad Langenbruik had spared me when it might have dragged me screaming to the warp. Perhaps my remorse had been enough to stay his hand, or my desperate plea to the God-Emperor had found an answer. It didn’t matter which.

I had been granted a second chance, one I had no intention of squandering.

Aurelie had fallen asleep by the time I crept, still shaking, into bed, so it was no surprise to find she had risen before me. I had slept deeply, refreshingly for the first time in a month, and I sprang from bed with the eagerness of a man reborn. The sound of Aurelie’s singing drifted up from the floor below like the lilting melody of a caged bird.

‘Aurelie?’ I called. ‘Last night – I’m so sorry.’

‘Just a moment, Nik!’ Her voice was bright. ‘Wait for me in the dining room, I won’t be long!’

The sun’s warmth was a benediction, the vivid crimson of the glassaic bleeding across the marble floor as I crossed the hall and entered the dining room. The table was set for breakfast, a pot of steaming recaff in the centre. I poured myself a cup, savoured its bitter flavour, and settled into my chair to await my wife’s arrival. A languid warmth spread over me, as if I had finished a hard day’s labour. I let my eyes close, drifting into a pleasant daydream of our shared future – and then the door opened.

I opened my eyes to a darkened room. The air was cold, full of the dank, mouldering smell of the canal. When I tried to rise the strength went out of my legs, and I only barely kept myself from falling to the ground.

Another footstep. Sweat prickled on the back of my neck, dripping down between my shoulder blades, tortuous and slow. Something more than fear was freezing me in place, weighing me down like a warm, numbing anchor. Kalma. It had been in the recaff, while my tox-ring sat in obedient silence on my hand.

‘Is something wrong, Nik?’

Aurelie’s face swam into my vision, but there was an edge to her voice that I didn’t recognise.

‘I wanted our first morning as husband and wife to be special. A shame to spoil the recaff, but I couldn’t risk you running away, not after all the trouble I’ve gone to.’

A figure in dripping robes was forming out of the shadows, one arm raised, the sleeve of its robe falling away to reveal tattered grey flesh and a pointing finger.

‘Behind you–’ I managed.

Aurelie reached out a hand and pulled back the sodden hood.

Konrad’s face was corpse-grey, bloated and waterlogged from his long immersion in the canal. His lips and eye sockets were gnawed to the bone, while the ragged-edged knife-wound in his throat gaped like a second mouth. The fine cheekbones and the high-bridged nose were unmistakably his, but the head sat on the neck at an angle that was uncannily wrong. Panic locked a hand around my chest and squeezed, while a dull roar filled my ears like distant, rushing water. I tried to form words, but my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth.

The apparition took a step towards me, and light glinted on two dull metal plates on either side of the ruined throat. Fat metal cables snaked from the rear of its skull to disappear into the robes while dim red lights flickered into life in the eyeless sockets of its face.

It was a servitor.

Servo-motors creaked and whined as it took another step, its feet slamming into the marble like the thudding of a crypt door. The stench of decay flooded over me, so strong I could taste its sour, cloying sweetness in the back of my throat. I tried to turn away, but Aurelie was too quick for me and forced my gaze back towards the dead man’s face.

‘Look at what you did, Niklaas.’

The servitor towered over me, bulkier than Konrad had ever been in life, a grotesque puppet given the merest semblance of life. Red, glowing orbs bored into mine like the eyes of a hellish abomination. The thing that had stalked me all this time had been no apparition, no shade from beyond the veil, but an all-too-real construct of decaying meat and rusting metal, yet somehow, the truth was worse than all my fevered imaginings. This close, I could see every tear and tatter in Konrad’s mottled skin, each abrasion laying bare the muscle and sinew beneath, ripe and repugnant as rotting fruit.

The awful death-mask filled my vision, devoid of all life or animation, a travesty, a mockery of the living man I had known. And worst of all was the thought that some remnant of his consciousness might still exist, trapped inside that soulless, rotting corpse.

‘No words for your brother-in-law, Niklaas?’ Aurelie’s voice was sharp. Gone was the downturned face, the deferential inward curve of her shoulders. This woman stood straight, her eyes so cold they burned, her once-yielding lips set in a hard line. ‘Never mind. I have them for you.’

She touched a metal stud on the cadaver’s neck, and a hidden vox-caster beneath the shroud crackled into life.

‘God-Emperor in your mercy, forgive me.’ The voice – my voice – was a high, anguished bleat. ‘I never meant to kill him.’

‘By all means ask for the God-Emperor’s forgiveness,’ Aurelie said. ‘But don’t expect mine.’

‘I swear to you, it was an accident.’ My lips felt thick and stupid, enunciating every word a battle. ‘He said he would ruin me, expose my parentage. I love you, Aurelie. The thought of losing you – I had no choice!’

Her open palm slapped into my cheek. ‘I loved you, not your title. If you’d told me, I wouldn’t have cared. And instead of trusting me, you killed my little brother.’ Tears brimmed in her eyes, but she wiped them away before they could fall. ‘You thought I would believe whatever lies you told me.’

I had underestimated her. I saw the determination in the set of her jaw, the steadfast hatred in her gaze. She had never resembled Konrad so clearly before.

‘The enforcers were useless. It took the Mechanicus and me a long time to find him in the canals, but none of us slept until we did. Then it was just a question of finding out who had killed him.’

I tried again to stand, but my legs once again refused to obey.

‘Did you know there are twelve pawnbrokers in the Lower City? I found Konrad’s signet in the third one I tried. It only took a few Thrones for the filthy little woman who owned it to tell me everything she knew. Your friends gave you up so easily, Niklaas, I didn’t even have to show them my needles.’

‘But why–’ I tried to reach out to her, but succeeded only in sending the dregs of my recaff crashing to the floor.

‘Why have the Mechanicus make a servitor out of Konrad’s remains? Why have it stalk you, haunt you, convince you he had risen from the grave to torment you?’ Her mouth twisted, wry and bitter. ‘For your confession, of course. I should be grateful you broke when you did. I almost lost my nerve last night. Poor Konrad. I’ve kept him from his rest long enough.’

The world was filled with the heady scent of recaff, sacred machine oil, and the sweetness of corruption.

‘Konrad was right all along. He knew what you are. Liar. Coward. Murderer.’

Her words hit me beneath the breastbone, driving out what little breath I still had. My eyes blurred with tears I was too weak to blink away.

‘Don’t look so pathetic, Niklaas. I won’t let you die, not yet. I need you alive for your trial. And once you’ve hanged for what you did, they’ll release your body to me to lay to rest in the family crypt.’

My wife leaned close, so close that the heat of her lips burned against my ear, her whispered words dripping with vicious satis-faction.

‘But I can find a better use for you than that.’

Elloth IX

Justin D Hill

In the galley kitchen there was slab stew still in its pot and a row of half-eaten bowls. A month of vacuum had dehydrated the food. Between the pot’s edge and the gelatinous slab was a finger’s width of space. A ladle was embedded in the mass. Alun lifted it and the whole pot came off the stove.

‘Bastards,’ he muttered, as the pot dropped with a clang. ‘Get rid of that,’ he told Toyn.

Toyn turned to Szalin. ‘Get rid of it,’ she said.

Szalin cursed, but obeyed the order. Alun Koru was gang-leader, one of the most experienced on Elloth IX, Toyn his deputy, and Szalin was just a lowly rig-orphan turned void-miner – a typical story in this part of Deadhenge. He was scrubbing the pot by the time Alun had banged his way through the habdeck and reached the barrack-block doors.

Alun punched the access code into the door and the two panels slid sideways. There was a hiss of equalising pressure before an empty metal corridor was revealed, eight berths along one side. Alun stood, a dark, looming figure upon the threshold. The barracks were deserted. The only sound was the hiss of a servitor respirator set in an alcove at the end of the corridor.

Alun stared at the thing with ill-disguised disgust. Only criminals and heretics were condemned to such a fate. Theirs was not even a half-life, their existence nothing more than biological serfdom. All traces of humanity were scrubbed away, and the remaining organs used till they reached their natural death. Meshed cables replaced the servitor’s arms, tubes ran from its eye sockets and thick ducting plugged the sutured mouth. There was the occasional gurgle as paste trickled through its nutrient tube. On its shaved head was an ident code, tattooed over a criminal brand with the mark of the aquila. Alun guessed this had once been a woman, but he couldn’t be sure.

He punched his fist into his meaty palm. It helped him think. He had never known anything like this emptiness. There was no apparent malfunction within the mining facility, no physical damage. Nothing to explain why the previous crew had forsaken its relative safety without a word. That crew had really landed Alun and his gang in the shit. Miners usually stuck together. If there was a problem with this facility, the other gang should have done something to warn them. Left a note, at least.

He cursed as he searched the chambers. There were items of clothing left in the barracks and he felt an inexplicable chill as he picked up a surplus canvas holdall. It smelt musty. Inside were a few well-thumbed prayer books, a half-eaten carb-bar and a notebook filled with personal tallies.

Beyond the barracks was the rest room. A notice board was peeling out of its frame; there were a series of numbers scratched crudely into the beaten metal surface alongside the word ‘Valgaast’, whatever that meant. There was a poster of some obscure agri-world Alun had never heard of, a sprayed Richstar coat of arms that had been suitably defaced, and crude seats made from sacks stuffed with synth-wool fibre. Alun pulled the sacking aside. Stuck down the back was a simple icon of the God-Emperor. It was a cheap print with a golden halo around a seated, stern-faced figure. But something was wrong. The Emperor’s eyes had been scratched out.

‘All good?’ Toyn asked as she followed him inside.

‘Yes,’ Alun said, folding the icon into four and slipping it inside his pocket. ‘Nothing here.’

Defacing the Emperor was the act of a heretic. Perhaps it was a good thing they’d not met the previous crew after all.

On the hangar deck, Moaz, another overseer, supervised the unloading of a pinnace. He was second in size to Alun with the same gang mohawk and bull-neck.

‘All good!’ he shouted to Alun, who gave a brief nod in return.

A pair of lifter Sentinels carried heavy gear from the open cargo bay. There were oxygen tanks, water, medic packs, synthetic protein powders, carb-blocks, nutriment tabs, mineral jabs, shock hammers, grinding gear, shearing blades, spare roof heading props, fyceline plugs, shot drill bits, spare demo cord, conveyor patches. Everything the void-miners were going to need for this six-month posting.

Alun was strangely quiet as he stood at the data-point. His face was uplit by the data-slate’s inner light, his brow tense as he tapped the access keys into the console. There was the usual sting as his retinal display paired with the facility’s logic circuits, and then a sudden stream of data scrolled within his retinal display. Oxygen levels, temperature, void-seals, mundane reports from each of the embedded servitors. It was overwhelming at first, meeting the machine-spirit of the facility. He blinked through the reams of data, processing it all.

Moaz, broad as a door, waded across the chamber and came to stand beside him. ‘What have you found?’

Alun paused. ‘The facility is functioning correctly. But the crew log is blank.’ He tapped at the keys to demonstrate. The miner’s log had been scrubbed. He shook his head, confused. He had worked long enough for the mining companies of Deadhenge to know that only dangerous postings paid as well as this.

The data-block was a simple blockwall. He’d learnt a few tricks in his time and tapped in a bypass code. It came back blank. He tried another. Nothing. Again and again, access was denied. He felt a thread of sweat trickle down his side.

‘First job is to check that this rig has been left in good order. No mining until we have gone through this place. I want every inch of it inspected. Understood?’

Alun took one team, Toyn took the other. The superstructure had to be examined thoroughly. A tiny crack or faulty weld could cause a catastrophic failure of the whole complex. They checked the facility for faults, got the mining rig back on-stream, and as mining started, the mood among the gang began to lift.

As soon as all the necessary inspection chits were in order, his team made their way down through the empty ore-hoppers to the top of the mineshaft. It was a simple room with hygiene-chambers and dressing rooms, bare metal flooring and a pair of chain-link conveyors. They worked in pairs, checking each other’s void suits. Alun was last to twist his helmet into place, lowering it over his mohawk. They checked their vox-links.

‘Ready?’ he queried.

The team shuffled into the conveyor and took their places.

There was a lurch as they began to fall towards the asteroid surface. A second lurch came as the grav-dampeners kicked in and the carriage slowed and finally came to a halt. Szalin cursed as he stepped out onto the surface of the asteroid. They were usually dark, icy, metallic places with pitted and gnarled surfaces. But this was one was polished and smooth, and bone white. The brightness was shocking. The rings that hung from Szalin’s left nostril were silvered in the reflected light.

‘I don’t like this place,’ he snapped.

Alun shook his head. None of them did.

The mine-face was a hundred yards below. Scaffold steps zigzagged down between hydraulic props, ropes of cabling and hydraulic hoses, ore-troughs and conveyors. The borehole had been barricaded against collapse with flakboard sidings. The asteroid’s core glowed with a putrid green corpse-light.

‘I really don’t like this,’ Szalin said.

‘Pull yourself together,’ Alun snapped. ‘We have quotas to hit, and we won’t reach them getting spooked by some strange bloody lights.’

The mine-face appeared to be in good order, which reassured him, though when Alun looked closer he saw that everything was covered in a light skin of powder. It was as pale as talc and billowed up with every step, sticking to everything and everyone. By the time they were finished making their checks, and even with the suction pipes running, they looked like ghosts. It had taken nearly an hour, and they had only an hour of their shift left to actually start work.

‘Positions!’ he called out. His team was an example of how it should be done, Alun noted. He had picked them all well. When they were ready, he signalled to Toyn in the drill cabin. There was a long pause before the machine rumbled to life with a splutter of black promethium fumes, and then, within seconds, Toyn brought the great beast up to full power. The roar filled the chamber.

As she did so, Alun held up his hand for her to stop.

‘Can you hear that?’ he said once the noise had died down.

She shook her head. ‘What?’

‘That tapping sound…?’

He looked about. No one else seemed to hear anything. At last he waved his hand for them to start the drill up again. There was a clunk as the gears were engaged. Slowly, the gnarled steel teeth began to spin.

It was Toyn who found the body. When she voxed Alun, he was sitting in the refectory. He put one thick finger to his earpiece, raising his voice as he always did when talking on the vox.

‘Is it fresh?’ he demanded, remembering the icon of the Emperor.

‘You’d better come and look,’ she said.

He ignored the looks of the others.

‘What’s up?’ Szalin said.

‘Nothing,’ he snapped. Void-miners were a hierarchical lot. Alun had always worked on a need-to-know basis, and he didn’t think Szalin needed to know much more than his job of blasting and boring.

The body was wrapped in canvas sheeting and ship-rope in the manner of a void-burial. It was nailed to the bottom of a hopper with rivets.

‘I was awake,’ Toyn explained, shining her lumen upon it. ‘And I just thought I would have a look around… Seems an odd place to leave a body.’

‘Let’s get it down.’

Toyn took the long gang-knife strapped to her thigh. Four slashes and the body came away. Alun caught its weight as it fell into his arms. It was strangely light.

He set the bundle down onto the floor of the hopper while Toyn brought the lumen over. The face had the air of something desiccated by centuries. The skin was stretched like parchment across it, the flesh dried like jerky to the bone. All the weight was in the canvas sacking. But it was clear that this creature’s last moments had been bloody and violent. Someone had staved in its cranium. A garrotte was wrapped about its neck, but the throat had also been cut, and as a final insult, its eyes were missing. The hollow sockets stared at Alun like black holes. The lips curled back in a last snarl of pain.

‘Why didn’t they just vent them?’ Alun said. It was the simplest form of execution. Void-miners lived a dangerous life stranded on their rigs, far from any help. Their overseers each maintained a brutal law code. There were many punishments – many of which ended in death. But even as he voiced the question, Alun knew this was not one of them. The whole thing had the stench of ritual about it. The corpse had been bound with mouldering parchment strips and across its forehead a symbol had been cut: the holy aquila, now stretched and distorted by time.

Toyn stared down and shuddered. ‘I dunno, but let’s vent it now,’ she said.

Alun checked his retinal display. The nearest airlock was five levels above – a service hatch that had not been opened for nearly five centuries.

‘You lead the way,’ he said, hefting the corpse onto his shoulders.

The airlock opened with a gasp, like a long-held breath. Frigid air washed over them. The void-locks were rimed with hoar frost that sparkled white. The metal flooring was marked with hazard warning stripes, worn away where feet had trampled over it.

Alun dumped the body and backed away. Toyn punched in the access code as Alun stood at the viewport.

‘In the name of the Emperor,’ Toyn said as she locked the inner door, then vented the corpse out into the void.

Alun watched the shrouded body tumble out and drift away into the darkness.

With each shift the ore-hoppers slowly filled, and so far they were well ahead of schedule. Food rations were increased and each shift was given a protein slab and an extra ration of grog. On the third day, once they had eaten, Toyn found Alun standing outside the refectory, his hand pressed to his head in a gesture of bewilderment.

‘You all right?’ Toyn asked.

He looked at her with hollow eyes. ‘Come here,’ he said.

Alun led her to the cold-store. As he unlocked the door and pulled it open, a mist of cool air rolled out. The open shelves were piled with tubs of oil and tins, and a side of grox hanging from a meat hook. But it was the thing on the floor that drew Toyn’s attention. A canvas bundle, wrapped in rope.

‘Another one?’ she asked.

Alun grimaced. He led her forward and Toyn looked down. There it was, the desiccated face with empty, staring eye sockets.

‘It can’t be,’ she said, but the wounds were all the same. The garrotte. The slashed throat. The dry lips pulled back from its broken teeth.

‘It is,’ he said.

‘It’s impossible,’ she said.

Alun looked down and knew that the impossible was lying at his feet, wrapped in canvas and marked with the aquila.

The scream woke Alun. He sat bolt upright in his cot.

‘Toyn?’ he called.

There was no answer. Just a tapping sound. The noise was coming from the lower decks, like something trying to get in.

He slammed the lumen on and grabbed his void suit. His miner’s chest was stowed beneath his cot. It was cheap press-steel with reinforced bands and an inbuilt thumb-ident lock. He fumbled with it, threw it open and scrabbled through his belongings. There was nothing of real value: some old clothes, stacks of credit chits, lucky tokens, a few fading pict-prints of women he’d fallen in and out with along the way. At the bottom was a wrapped bundle, and inside it there was a sawn-off rivet gun, a solid piece favoured by the stimms gangers on Camp Karex.

He checked the feed. It was half full of blunt steel slugs. He shoved it into his waistband. If there was a stowaway upon their craft he would not be going to find them unarmed.

The tapping sound was faint at first, but it grew gradually louder, leading him down flights of metal zigzag stairs towards the generatorium. He paused before its heavy doors, feet on the floor’s hazard stripes, and put his ear to the wall. The air vibrated with the rumble of the plasma reactor and coolants within.

The noise was coming from inside.

Alun pulled off his glove and pressed his thumb onto the ident-pad. There was a pause as it read his print, then, with a hiss of pressure differentials, the void-gate opened.

The generatorium was a dimly lit zone of tangled duct piping, narrow walkways and exposed cabling. There had been a logic once, but decades of on-the-job repairs had turned the standard template construct into a mess of bypasses, sections of dead-cabling and pipes that leaked black unguents. Generations of cabling had been repaired, replaced, left in situ. The confused guts clogged the pathways that led between the heavy steel bulkheads.

From somewhere inside this techno-labyrinth, the tapping sound tolled like a bell.

Alun turned towards it, slipping sideways through tangled hosing. Pneumatic valves hissed about him. For a moment, he was blinded as a coolant pipe valve released above his head, a plume of vapour billowing downwards. The tolling suddenly became insistent, and he started to hurry. A prickle of fear made his skin goosepimple.

He started and fell sideways as something leapt at him. Loops of heavy cabling enveloped him like the folds of a serpent. He battered them away, pulling some astray and letting out blasts of pneumatic liquid.

It was a servitor console, buried in pipework.

The servitor appeared dead. It lay face down in a pool of blood. Alun had started to move away when it jerked upwards. Its nose was a crushed smear. From ruined nostrils, bright gouts of fresh, arterial blood poured, mixed with the mess of days-old gore. It sat bolt upright, and then slammed its face down into the console before it. Blood splattered Alun’s cheeks. The servitor raised its head again, and after a moment’s pause repeated the action in time to the tolling bell. This time, the skin of its cheek split down to the bone.

It slammed its face down a third time.

‘Stop!’ Alun shouted, but there was something almost wilful in the manner of the servitor. He could not hold it back. Again, it slammed down.

Alun crouched in front of the servitor and caught the nutrient tube sewn into what remained of its sutured mouth. It was thick and black, and ribbed like a windpipe. As he yanked the head back to pull away the tube, he had the absurd and fleeting image of a child puckering for a kiss. Blinking the image away, he pulled at the tube, but it would not come out. He put his boot up to the servitor’s chest and pulled again.

The nutrient tube tore free with a rip of flesh. Alun stumbled back as sludge dribbled over him. It was grey and had a stagnant stench. A puddle began to gather on the metal plate flooring. The servitor’s torn mouth hung open. It seemed to stare at Alan for a few seconds, and then slammed its face down again. Nutrient paste mixed in with the next splat of blood.

‘Stop!’ Alun shouted, but of course the mute thing had no understanding.

Alun gripped its skull in both hands. His stimm-bulked muscles drove its head down with such force that he felt the dome of its skull shatter. He did not wait for the servitor to rear its head again but smashed the ruined visage against the floor, once, twice, three times.

The servitor gargled blood with the stitched remains of its tongue. It could have been words of pain or reproach. Alun did not care. His fingers clawed into the servitor’s brain as he rammed it down again and again. At last, with a shout of pure fury, he twisted the head so sharply that it almost came free in his hand. The servitor lolled back, and did not stir.

When Alun got back to the hab-deck his crew were preparing for their shift. They passed each other in the narrow corridor, an air of sleepy yet urgent movement about them. He prayed to the Emperor that no one would stop to talk to him.

In the facilities stood a row of three cubicles. The first door was locked. Alun went to the other end, pushed inside and locked the metal door behind him. There was a simple vacuum latrine, a steel basin and water dispenser. He slammed the water stud and a thin trickle of recyc came out. It stank faintly of urine. He pushed his sleeve up and washed his arms right up to his elbows. The servitor’s blood came away easily in the spray of water, but he had to scrape along his cuticles and under his nails to remove the pulpy chunks of brain. He must have been there five minutes when the klaxon rang, signalling an upcoming shift.

‘Ten minutes,’ an automated voice reported.

Alun splashed water over his face. The polished steel mirror was stained and discoloured, but he saw enough to know that he did not look like a well man. His eyes were veiny and red. As he stood there, staring at himself, his vision blurred and the stains on the mirror seemed to coalesce into a figure. He saw a desiccated face with hollows for eyes.

He started, blinked, and saw that there was nothing there.

Someone pounded on the door. He spun about and opened it.

Toyn looked at him warily. ‘It’s time,’ she said.

Alun was tense. He kept seeing the ruined face of the servitor in his mind, and he was certain that the tapping sound had resumed. But no one else seemed to hear it, and whenever he asked, the others looked at him askance. In the end he stopped talking about it.

‘You all right?’ Toyn asked him as they waited at the bottom of the conveyor at the end of the shift.

‘I’m fine,’ he snapped.

‘You look sick.’

‘It’s nothing,’ Alun said, waving a hand at her. ‘Honest. I just need sleep.’

He left the common room and stumbled back to his cell, bolting the door shut. He checked under the bed. There was nothing there. He stripped off his top and fell onto his cot. A pot of suppressants stood on the console by his bed. He shook two out into his palm and slammed them down his throat.

Mere seconds later, Alun’s eyes flicked open. He was lying on his back as the lumen rattled to life. Above him, nailed to the ceiling of his chamber, was the cadaver. There was a sound like old leather being twisted. The thing moved, struggling against its bonds. He did not dare look up, but lay with his hands pressed to his ears, mouth open in a silent scream.

Toyn hammered on his door. ‘Boss!’

Alun swallowed and tried to blink the image away, hoping he was imagining it.

He got up and opened the door, just a crack.

‘You all right, boss?’ Toyn asked.

‘I just need a rest,’ he told her. His voice was a croak. He would deal with his nightmares alone. ‘You take the team. You know the drill.’

As he shut the door again, that dreadful, leathery creak sounded from above. The cadaver was struggling to get free!

Alun scrabbled for his rivet gun. He waited until he was sure his gang had filed down to the conveyor head, then held up the gun with fumbling hands and fired seven desperate shots into its shrouded body until it stopped moving. The heavy metal slugs reverberated from the ceiling.

Alun cut the thing down. He did not want to touch its dried flesh, but dragged it along the corridor. He had to work quickly before Moaz’s gang made it up to the barracks. He could picture them reaching the top of the mineshaft, stripping off their suits, slewing off the dust and sweat in the sterilant spouts of the hygiene chamber.

Alun reached the doors to the incinerator and flung the body inside. A wave of relief washed over him as the heavy metal doors closed. He sealed the locking mechanism, thumbed the power stud, and a blast of plasma lit the inside with the fire of an unchained sun.

As he waited for the inside to cool, he heard scratching.

The viewport was hidden behind a clasp. He peered through, and to his horror he saw the face of the cadaver staring back at him, its jaw working as if it were laughing. He slammed the plasma stud again. He held it there till he could feel the heat radiating through the massive doors.

At last, he vented the contents out into the void.

When he stumbled back to his cell, his vox began to chime. It was probably Toyn asking for advice. He’d have to go down and help her, he told himself. He sucked in a deep breath and tried to calm down.

The voice was not Toyn. It was Dhann, one of his shot-blasters.

‘Boss?’ he said. ‘There’s been an accident.’

Alun took in the news with a strange sense of detachment. He had to hear Dhann repeat the words for them to feel real.

‘What kind of accident?’ he said.

‘Toyn is dead.’

There was a long pause as Alun processed it. He felt a weight of dread pressing down on him. His hand started to shake. He could hear the creak of leather above his head, but did not dare look up.

It took a while for Alun to realise that it was his turn to speak. He coughed to clear his voice. He had to sound shocked, concerned.

‘What happened?’

Dhann’s voice came back, disjointed and urgent. ‘Hydrogen bubble. Trapped within the ice. A spark from the drill set off a fireball that ripped through the drill rig.’ He went on, describing who had helped quell the fire, who deserved commendation, who was going to be out of action. The details were loaded with recrimination. If you had been here… The implication was clear, but all Alun could really hear was the tap-tapping.

Dhann stopped speaking, and the silence went on. Alun rubbed his eyes and spoke in a voice that barely seemed his own – a rasping, dry voice.

‘Put it in the log,’ Alun croaked.

‘That’s it?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You’re not coming down?’

‘No.’

‘You all right?’ Dhann said.

‘Yes. I’m fine.’ Alun cleared his throat again. He was uncertain… but he had to reach out. ‘Who am I speaking to again?’

‘Dhann,’ the voice said.

He and Dhann had been through some tight spaces together. ‘Can you do something for me?’ Alun said.

The answer came back affirmative.

He put his hand to his head. ‘Close your eyes,’ he said. ‘Are they closed? Good. Now. Tell me. Can you hear anything?’

There was a long pause. ‘No?’ Dhann said. ‘Alun, do you need a medic?’

Alun thought he might weep. He croaked out an answer. ‘No. Just a little more rest.’

There was another long pause.

‘Honest, I just need a little more rest.’

Medic Dunne was a borer with a teardrop tattooed under one eye and an Imperial aquila hanging from one nostril. He had just come from the site of the accident and was still a little shaken. He was savouring a half-burned lho-stick when the alert came. His yellowed fingers smelled of smoke.

Alun’s cell was open. They found him lying in his cot with his hands pressed to his ears. Dunne shone a light into the foreman’s eye, took his pulse, drew blood from his arm and then sedated him.

Alun slept for two days solid. When he woke, Dunne put him through the same tests. When they were done, Moaz appeared by his bedside. It seemed that he’d been waiting just outside the door.

‘How’s the mining going?’ Alun asked.

Moaz nodded. ‘Well,’ he said.

They made small talk for a while. Mining stuff. Ore. Loads. Projected bore depths and angles for the days ahead. It seemed to Alun that Dunne, watching silently in the corner, was testing his sanity.

At last, Moaz said, ‘Listen. When you were sick, you mentioned a knocking sound.’

‘Did I?’

‘Yes. Dhann said something about it.’

‘He did…’ Alun said. He laughed. ‘I must have been trying to scare him. As if he was just a tyro!’

Moaz smiled. ‘Do you still hear it?’

Alun paused and considered. After a moment he shook his head. ‘No. I’m fine. I feel much better. Honest.’

He took in a deep breath. He’d overdone it on the last furlough, he told himself. Too much time spent in the illicit stimm-bars and scrubber-dens. He could do this, he told himself, as if it were a matter of willpower.

On the next day’s shift Alun manned the drill with a fierce intensity – all his being was focused on following the seam down into the asteroid. When Moaz’s gang arrived he briefed the other man, then joined his own crew as they sluiced off the dust and sweat in the hygiene chamber before returning to the hab-deck.

Alun grabbed some food from the mess hall and went back to his cell. Dunne was waiting for him, and Alun lay down as the medic went through his list of checks.

‘Everything appears normal,’ Dunne said, shaking a test tube filled with Alun’s blood. ‘Pressures are all fine. No sign of bad humours.’

‘Good. I’m fine,’ Alun said. ‘Just needed a break.’

As soon as the medic was out of earshot, Alun jumped up from his cot. The miner’s chest beneath the bed scraped as he pulled it open. He had used up most of the rivets. There were only a few shots left. He pulled his void suit back on, stuck the rivet gun into his waistband and grabbed his helmet.

This was it, he told himself. He could not bear that incessant knocking any longer.

The generatorium airlock door hissed closed behind him. Alun paused to let his eyes grow accustomed to the gloom. He did not hear the clunk of mag-locks engaging behind him. All he heard was the knocking. He plunged deeper into the coiled guts of the rig, and at the end of the corridor he saw it – the shroud of canvas had been burned away so that the emaciated cadaver lay naked, scorched and black, its white hair singed at the tails, its torso ending at the waist.

Alun clutched the rivet gun in his sweaty palm.

The creature’s head lifted slowly from the floor, but instead of the mutilated face, it was Toyn who looked up at him. Her eyes bulged from an age-withered visage, her skin hung in slack sacks of wrinkled flesh. Her hair, instead of being cut short, hung in long, frizzled curtains. It was as if she had died ten years before, and the hair had kept growing since.

She reached out a hand as if to beg for help.

‘Who are you?’ he shouted.

Toyn-who-was-not-Toyn still reached for him, imploring him to come forwards.

‘What are you?’ he raged.

She started to crawl towards him, hand over broken hand, dragging her bisected body jerkily along the floor. Blood smeared the corridor behind her. Each hand fell in time with the metallic knock that sounded in his head.

‘Stay there. I’ll come back,’ he shouted.

The sound, which had been so constant, started to speed up, and in time with the noise, Toyn began to accelerate towards him.

‘Wait! I’ll fetch a medic,’ he called.

She looked up, her face a snarl of anger and hatred. The look in those inhuman eyes stabbed him in the gut. His hands shook as he held out the rivet gun.

The first shot hit her in the shoulder. It knocked the prostrate torso back, but it was only a moment’s respite. He fired three more shots, but Toyn kept on crawling towards him. He stumbled backwards and started to run, but she was moving faster than him.

The knocking was now beating so rapidly against his skull it was like the hammer of a pneumatic drill, and he knew that there was no way he could outpace it. He sprinted, slapping the pipes and ducting aside in his terror. He did not know which way he was going, just that he had to get away. Toyn-that-was-not-Toyn was right behind him. He could hear her teeth gnashing together.

He must have taken a wrong turn, because before him was not the exit but a void-lock. He did not care. If he could just reach it, he told himself. He felt the thing’s arms clutching at him and he screamed in terror. Pipes clung to him, entangling him. He threw them off, hurled himself the last few feet and rolled inside the void-lock. Paralysed, he watched as Toyn dragged herself towards him. Everything was in slow motion. There was nothing he could do to stop it. It seemed that she would make it inside with him, but at last the doors slid shut and he was alone, listening to the pounding in his head.

The door’s mag-locks engaged. Alun stood there, feeling the chill of the void through the second set of doors. Mechanically, he began to punch in a code to open the void-gates. A warning lumen flashed. A klaxon sounded. He turned his back on the door he had just come through, and waited for the void to suck him out.

The air about Alun froze to liquid as the void-gates opened. The vacuum pulled the air from his body in a sudden, soundless rush as the gases trapped in his body expanded. His eyes exploded. His tongue grew so big it closed off his airways, but his skin stretched with the pressure within till his void-suit ripped open and he hung in the air like an inflated toy, his viscera vaporising and freezing within seconds.

It took him fifteen seconds to pass out. Ninety seconds later, his bloated balloon of flesh died. Within five minutes, his grotesquely inflated body had frozen solid.

Moaz finished his lho-stick as he left his chamber.

Down below, he could hear the whine of the drill on the asteroid surface droning away as the other gang worked. He had found a strange, old icon on the floor near Alun’s cot. The Emperor, with the eyes scratched out. He had screwed it up and had meant to throw it away, but instead, without thinking, he had slipped it into his pocket.

He strode into the refectory, and as he did he heard a dull tapping deep within the complex. The other miners had retired. Only Dunne was left. The medic held the stub of his lho-stick between pinched thumb and forefinger, and took a last suck before dropping it to the floor and crushing it underfoot.

‘Can you hear that?’ Moaz said.

Dunne slowly exhaled. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘What is it?’

The Cache

James Brogden

Lyse Urretzi was on the verge of opening up a cluster of unexplored chambers in the Spike’s mid-reaches – almost half a mile below the inhabited levels where her clan and their neighbours lived – when the crawlers attacked.

Obviously nowhere below the hab-halls was entirely safe, but even so, for crawlers to venture so far up from the lower reaches was unusual. Who knew what had drawn them? Hunger? Well, every living creature in the Spike was starving to some degree. Something bigger and fouler than themselves moving into their territory? Lyse didn’t like to think about that. All she knew was that one moment she was doing her job – squeezing her scrawny body down through the wreckage that blocked this particular shaft and bolting a vertical zip line to the wall as she went – and the next, a grille to her left was smashed open by something pale that chittered as its claws flailed and snatched.

If she had been wearing clothes she would surely have been snagged and dragged to her death. As it was, garments only hindered the work of a pit-rat like herself, who often had to squeeze through the most claustrophobic of spaces, and so apart from a utility harness, boots and gloves, her biolux tattoos and a generous amount of engine grease covering everything else, there was nothing for the crawler to snag. Even as she yelped, its grip slipped on her slickened flesh.

She fell, and the lightless gape of the shaft swallowed her instead.

A dozen deaths flashed through her mind. Brains splattered on riveted hull plating. Torso impaled on some jagged barb, guts unspooling. Garrotted by tangled wiring. Broken but alive, helpless at the mercy of the crawler’s kin. She dashed the images away and fumbled for the emergency glob-gun.

Then she hit something hard enough to knock the wind out of her. A sloping surface, so that even as she was groping for a handhold the protective grease betrayed her, and she fell and bounced off something else, her skull cracking against the metal hard enough to make bright spots flare. By then she’d got the glob-gun free and fired upward blindly, praying to Saint Geller for salvation. He must have been listening because in the darkness above, the glob hit something and stuck. The strand of goo that attached it to her harness stretched under her weight like jellied sinew. Her invisible anchor point shifted with a grinding squeal of metal, but held, and she bounced and spun like a crude toy, ricocheting from one wall of the shaft to the other. Eventually, her mad penduluming calmed to a slow spin. Her eyes clenched tight as she whispered, ‘Thank you, thank you, oh thank you.’

The blue biolux glow of her tattoos showed the walls of the shaft around her: riveted plating, pipes and conduits, torn wiring. Close by was the narrow oblong of a half-open doorway, and blackness beyond. She looked up. Blackness above, too. Calling for help – or even just to let her crew know that she was alive – was out of the question, since it would only draw more crawlers. As for climbing up without the zip line? Impossible. She looked at the doorway again. There could be anything in that chamber – a hundred ways to die. On the other hand, it could be exactly the kind of thing that she was down here to look for in the first place: fragments of tech from long ago, when the Spike had been something else entirely. Such things were ancient and unfathomable to her, but Brother Putorius could sacrifice them to keep the Geller generators alive for another day. Her clan’s ancient duty. Her duty, as the daughter of Sutomore Urretzi, clanfather. Also, her only chance of finding her way back to the hab-halls was to hope that there were stairs or another shaft, something that she could climb.

Lyse swung herself over to the doorway, caught the jamb and spun herself around to sit on the threshold with her legs dangling over the abyss as she detached the glob strand. Then she took a deep breath, offered up a prayer of thanks to Saint Geller and went inside.

There was a drop to the floor on the other side, of course, but it wasn’t as far as some. She landed, crouched and still, and listened. No echoes of crawlers, just a distant drip and trickle. She was in a cavernous space of huge, angular shadows, the darkness overhead criss-crossed by the dim columns of ducts fallen and jammed at all angles from one side to the other. It was cold, with condensation sheeting the walls. Any water was a precious commodity, and she tasted some of it from a fingertip. It was sulphurous but didn’t burn her tongue, so was probably no more toxic than anywhere else. She swept more from the wall with her palms and licked them.

In such vastness the meagre light emitted by her tattoos was useless for anything more than illuminating her immediate surroundings as she picked her way through a junkyard of wreckage, wincing at every scrape and clatter that she made. Occasionally she passed an opening to left or right, but nothing that smelled like it might lead upwards. And all the while her senses strained for any sign of tech – the fire-spark flicker or whispered hum of powercells doggedly clinging to life despite the utter dereliction of the devices that they had once served, dying alone in darkness and futility. It was a mercy, her work, salvaging these expiring gasps of the machine-spirit and putting them to one final use, to keep the clans safe. It was holy.

What she found deep in that chamber was the exact opposite.

Towards the far end, the wall was shrouded in tall drapes of heavy fabric, in front of which there was a raised, circular platform many yards across. It gleamed with what she assumed to be more condensation, and a tumble of organic shapes was stacked in the middle. She smelled shit and old blood, the miasma of violent death, and was about to turn away because no good could come from whatever this was, but then she caught it – that fire-spark flicker, a tremble of amber right in the middle of the stack.

Her excitement at the promise of tech turned to revulsion when she saw what surrounded it.

Around the platform’s circumference, unlit candles sagged in their own tallow like degenerate monks, some cupped in severed hands, some socketed in skulls, all joined by a perimeter rope of intestines. Lines painted in blood linked them, and where they intersected something had been built out of the remains of those who had given hands, heads and viscera. Whatever abomination it was supposed to be had no place being formed from human parts. It had far too many limbs, for a start. The teeth in its leering mouth were the stumps of a shattered ribcage; its eyes were the loops at the bottom of a pelvis with the wings flaring high above like a crest. In the effigy’s lap was cradled a blood-crusted bowl, and littered around its feet were smaller bones that she didn’t have to look at too closely to know were scored by gnawing.

Cannibalism itself didn’t particularly shock her. The Spike’s dead were routinely given to the corpse-starch vats. It was only in lean times, when there was a blight or a power failure, that a clan might resort to the flesh itself to survive – and even then, it was kept firmly within the family, with Prime Adjutant Galla Domitia using her arbiters to enforce a ban on inter-tribal killing. For the Urretzis there was only ever reverence and gratitude towards those who gave their bodies for the clan’s uttermost need. This, though, revolted her on every level. There was no love here. No respect. This was an abomination, mutilation for its own sake, a glorification of torment in worship of… what? There were rumours of some who gathered in forgotten chambers and raised shrines to the things Outside that hungered to get in – as they surely would if her family failed in their duty to maintain the machines that kept them at bay. There were few absolute heresies in the Spike: as long as nobody endangered the welfare of all, Prime Adjutant Domitia was content to let them do as they liked. Worship of the Outside most definitely was an absolute heresy. Lyse would report it, and delight in watching this atrocity put to the torch, along with those who had committed it.

But not before she helped herself to the glimmering thing that hung around the effigy’s neck.

She tiptoed across the dais, careful to avoid touching any of the body parts. They glistened as she passed, as if shifting to watch her, and she couldn’t shake the impression that nothing here was entirely dead. Up close, the effigy’s stench was like the breath of something rotting alive. The tech was a large and ornate medallion hanging about its throat; she checked for booby traps or alarms, but whoever had built this was obviously arrogant enough in their power to not bother. Her knife made short work of the cord, and the medallion fell into her hands.

It was a lot heavier than it looked – probably gold, but in this light that was a guess – and ridged with concentric dials that were themselves busy with slide-switches and mechanisms whose purpose she couldn’t begin to guess at. All she cared about was that the large central crystal held a dim flicker of amber within its depths, like a welding torch seen far down a shaft. She hoped it was enough for Brother Putorius to keep the machines running – maybe just for a day, maybe only for a few hours.

It would now be a simple matter to follow the tracks of those who came here, ideally back to the hab-halls or at least somewhere close. She stashed the medallion in a pouch and turned to go, and as she did so her biolux caught something metallic woven into the drapes cloaking the wall – some kind of tapestry created from stripped electrical wiring. Maybe there was another chamber behind it, a door, a passage and stairs up. There was a cord running from somewhere high above and anchored to the edge of the platform. She pulled it slowly and the covering drew to one side.

Instead of a door or passage there was some kind of twisted mural, and the shock of seeing it made her reel backwards.

‘Blessed Saint Geller,’ she whispered, aghast.

Daubed in pigments made from human bodily fluids and who knew what else, it was like the twisting roil of fire in a no-grav zone, or a multi-fingered hand of static electricity discharging at a worm’s crawl through a haze of blood-coloured smoke. It was as if the darkness behind her eyelids had spilled free and vomited itself across the wall, seething with half-formed shapes and punctuated by eldritch sigils that squirmed away from direct attention. She uttered a small, terrified whimper as she realised what she was looking at.

It was a picture of the Outside.

The artist who had rendered this could not have seen the Outside directly, as the Spike’s viewports were protected by Saint Geller’s intervention, and so this must have been how it appeared in their mind – in which case surely they must have been irretrievably insane. A deep, throbbing ache grew at the base of her brain, and her vision blurred. The image’s churning grew more agitated as if it could sense her distress, coalescing into the forms of leering faces and clutching claws in her peripheral vision. They wanted her to look at them, because then they could become real – all she had to do was take one step towards the mural, then another, as close as possible so that she could give them her terror to feed on and her imagination to clothe them, and they could slip through the painting and be free…

She tottered on the edge of the platform, nearly losing her balance. It snapped her back to herself and she found that she had moved almost to within touching distance of the mural, her right hand outstretched. She recoiled in disgust, and dropped the draw-cord as if it were a live cable. The curtain fell back, and the Outside was hidden again.

Lyse drew a deep, shuddering breath. How close had she come?

‘Idiot.’ She slapped herself. She needed to leave now before she attracted the attention of anything else.

Sure enough, there was a trail through the debris which led to a small door and then a warren of shafts and chambers leading upwards. She knew she was getting closer to the hab-halls when it started to grow warmer and she heard the rattling of the pipes that carried heat from the Spike’s lower reaches, but this district was unfamiliar, and since she didn’t know whose territory it would take her to, she advanced more cautiously. Most were friends to the Urretzis, but by no means all. The final door wasn’t much more than a hinged panel, probably disguised to look like something innocuous on the other side. The air was thick with a familiar acrid pungency and she could hear the churning of vats, and she finally knew where she was. It was almost enough to make her return to the shrine and its loathsome effigy. This was Jaax territory.

She’d only ever been here once, in the company of her father and Prime Adjutant Domitia to present her betrothal gift to Clanfather Hadzor Jaax. It was a good match; everybody said so. A Jaax-Urretzi child would ally two of the most powerful clans in the Spike, streamlining both food production and the maintenance of the Spike’s defences, and put an end to generations of bloodshed. The prime adjutant had negotiated it for months. The fact that Lyse would rather let herself be eaten alive by crawlers than share a wedding bed with Hadzor Jaax was irrelevant. He was a leering, cadaverous beast of a man whose lifetime proximity to the corpse-starch vats he controlled had afflicted him with a chronic fungal flesh-rot that caused pustulant boils. He’d had two wives already, but one had proved barren and it was rumoured that the other had thrown herself down a shaft in shame after having bred a crawler. The idea that he, or someone in his clan, was worshipping a being of the Outside with human sacrifice and cannibalism didn’t surprise her one bit. From her memory of the vat halls, they were dark and noisy places – easy to sneak through unnoticed unless she was unlucky.

She eased the panel open and slipped inside.

Instantly the noise, smell and cloying humidity all intensified. Like most of the Spike’s larger chambers it was taller than it was wide, but long, and filled with ranks of towering vats that churned the yeast-based gruel which kept most of the Spike’s population fed. Occasionally the discovery of a cache of ancient ration packs would be cause for a feast, but most had been plundered generations ago. Jaax’s vat-workers clambered amongst the pipes and ducts that fed the containers, stirring, hammering, shouting, while servo-skulls floated around them performing their unknowable tasks.

She kept her head low and her biolux dark, and slid through shadow, hoping to find the exit before she was seen. There was plenty of cover for someone small, and she crept behind the machinery along the wide gallery that led to the exit. When a servo-skull suddenly rose up in front of her with its eye sockets gleaming and mechanical mandibles a-quiver, she froze, heart hammering. It regarded her for a moment, but she obviously didn’t fit the criteria of ‘intruder’ because it ignored her and zoomed away on its business. Lyse heaved a sigh of relief and continued creeping.

The shout came like a knife between the shoulder blades – expected, but still a shock. ‘Hey! Who are you?’

Lyse didn’t bother looking at who it was. She just ran.

She twisted and turned randomly as much as possible to confound pursuit until she could find the way out. Only a few passages separated Jaax and Urretzi territories, but home might as well be at the bottom of the Spike if she was caught.

Racing footsteps pounded after her, clattering on metal catwalks above. Whistles, catcalls, whoops and jeers. Someone stepped out from a corner brandishing a wrench, but she slid underneath his wild swing, rolled, and came up running. The medallion in its pouch slapped heavily against her hip, and the fear of letting down her father was almost as bad as that of what the Jaaxes might do to her.

Ironically, it was the tech that got her caught. She was running on instinct and doing what she did best, finding small spaces and squeezing through them – gaps between pipes, underneath conduits, behind tanks – while her pursuers yelled to each other, coordinating, driving her and cutting off her escape. She tried to go feet first through the gap between two metal steps, but she’d forgotten about the extra bulk she was carrying and it got wedged – not tight enough to get her stuck, but it slowed her down, and as she was cursing and tugging herself free, a hand on the other side grabbed her ankle and dragged her out.

‘Gotcha, thieving maggot!’ The owner of the hand grabbed her throat. He was a nondescript vat-rat, scrawny but heavier than her, and his arm was livid to the elbow with burn-scar tissue that made it look half melted.

She made her biolux flare so that he could see her tattoos, the clan-sigils inscribed in her flesh. ‘I am no thief!’ she retorted. ‘I am Lyse Urretzi, first daughter of Clanfather Sutomore Urretzi, and you will unhand me before I have Prime Adjutant Domitia feed you to your own vats!’

It was a risk, giving away her identity, but she had nothing else to fall back on now except her status. Whether it was the threat or just the sudden blaze of light, he blinked, and she took advantage of it by ramming her knee into his crotch, fleeing as he doubled up, retching. Saint Geller must have been looking favourably on her courage because around the next corner she saw the wide gates that opened onto the passage between Jaax and Urretzi territory, and she collapsed sobbing over the threshold of home.

‘I will not hear this!’ shouted her father. ‘I will not waste the prime adjutant’s time with old wives’ tales!’ Brother Putorius looked up briefly from his devotions at the shrine of Saint Geller, frowning at the interruption. The saint’s reliquary was a vast sarcophagus of black iron, decorated with panels depicting Geller victorious in battle over the abominations of the Outside and preaching in glory from the apex of the Spike. Snaking into it from all directions were the hissing pipes and trembling conduits that it was Putorius’ duty to placate with his mumbled prayers and invocations. ‘And even if your story is true, just because you ended up in Jaax territory doesn’t mean that what you found has anything to do with them.’

‘Who else could it be?’ she retorted.

‘Regardless of that,’ he ploughed on, ‘you thought this… this thing’ – he prodded the medallion with disgust – ‘which was part of something blasphemous, would somehow make up for your intrusion?’

It was true. She hadn’t considered it that way. At least she hadn’t told them about the mural and its effect on her. Bad enough that he thought she was an idiot; if he suspected that she had been polluted by the Outside he might very well throw her to the crawlers. The doctrine was implacable, first daughter or not. ‘I thought you’d be pleased,’ was the best she could come up with.

‘What would please me would be for you to stop running around the lower reaches like a child playing hide and seek, and live up to your responsibilities by marrying Hadzor Jaax and bearing him a son!’ he snapped.

She stared at him, horrified. ‘You still think there can be an alliance? When they are worshipping the Outside? Father, they’re spitting in the face of everything we believe! How can you say this?’

‘I can say this, daughter, because we are starving. It’s that simple.’ He wouldn’t face her, and she realised that what she had taken for coldness was the bleak despair of a trapped animal. ‘Now go and clean yourself up. And get rid of this!’ He tossed the medallion back to her.

The evening’s gruel was thin on sustenance, but there was enough awkward silence for a banquet. The last time they’d had fresh protein had been the discovery of a nest of foot-long albino centipedes, and just remembering the smell of their frying made Lyse’s mouth water. When she’d been very small her father had once brought home an oilskin-wrapped package that he had presented to his family with great ceremony. The lettering on it had long since faded and nobody knew what the contents were, and once it had been divided up amongst the family she’d received little more than a dice-sized lump, but even that had been enough to send her bouncing off the walls for the rest of the evening.

The awkward silence was broken by the arrival of a nervous-looking sentry, who announced that Hadzor Jaax was at the gate demanding to speak to the clanfather. He had the prime adjutant with him, accompanied by a squad of arbiters. Lyse’s father shot her a cold glance and rose from the table to accompany the guard. She excused herself and returned to her sleeping alcove – not just because of the day’s shocks, but also because there was a metal grille in the wall above her pallet that carried sound from the surrounding passageways if the airflow was in the right direction.

She pulled the curtain closed and stood on her pallet with her ear pressed to the grille, and found that she could hear the argument that was unfolding.

‘My daughter is no thief!’ her father shouted. Her heart glowed at that. He might be furious with her, but would never side with anyone against her no matter how wrong she was.

‘She was found in the vat hall, where she had no right to be,’ replied Jaax, his voice low and controlled – amused, even. ‘She even identified herself to one of my men, and threatened to have the arbiters called.’ Jaax’s chuckle was thick with the arrogance of power. ‘Be careful what you wish for, wouldn’t you say?’

A woman’s voice – Prime Adjutant Domitia, cold and without inflection: ‘Calm yourself, Sutomore. If she has taken nothing, you should have no fear of her being searched.’

‘This is not fear!’ snapped her father. ‘This is outrage! This accusation is baseless slander! An insult to my family and beneath the dignity of your office.’

‘Have a care how you tell me to do my job,’ Domitia said, her voice steely.

‘My apologies,’ he replied. ‘Nevertheless, prime adjutant…’

There was only one way this could end and Lyse didn’t need to hear any more. Her father would capitulate, their chambers would be searched, the medallion would be found and Jaax would murder her – probably not until she’d bred him a healthy son, but all the same. It would be easy to throw the object down a shaft beyond recovery and feign innocence, but to discard a piece of ancient tech like trash felt worse than wasting food. She needed a place to hide and a way of finding out what the medallion was, and she knew one person who could supply both, assuming that he was still alive and sane enough to not kill her on sight.

Cracius the Eremite. The ancient tech-priest of no hall and no clan.

Some said Cracius was the oldest living soul in the Spike. Some said that he had exiled himself after a failed attempt to overthrow the prime adjutant’s predecessor. Others whispered that he stole and ate children. All Lyse knew was that Brother Putorius considered him to be a dangerous heretic in possession of outlawed knowledge, and right now that was exactly what she needed.

She scooped up some uneaten food into a flask for an offering, gathered the rest of her things and slipped away.

For as long as anyone could remember Cracius had lived in a region called the Cyst, which scavengers like Lyse made long detours to avoid. This was, quite simply, because it was haunted.

It lay half a mile below the hab-halls but not quite as far as the lower reaches, and its effect was felt differently by those foolish enough to get close. It caused dizziness and disorientation, spinning you around and spitting you out in a different location. Sometimes it provoked profound unease, the sense that you were about to plunge into a bottomless shaft or were being followed by unseen things. Worst were the hallucinations: of being asphyxiated by gas, or burned alive, or chased down tunnels boiling with hordes of crawlers. If you bullied your way past all of this by brute willpower, you came to places where the straight up-and-down passages and shafts were blocked by curving bulkheads of strange, leathery material. Anyone with any sense took the hint and kept well away, unless they were a half-mad tech-priest or somebody desperate enough to be looking for him.

She knew she was getting close when the shadows in her peripheral vision began to scamper, and the pressure that had been building in her head started to feel like hydraulic pistons on either side of her skull. She gritted her teeth and forced herself forward, trying not to be distracted by the leering faces that she knew weren’t really there. When a tall, multi-limbed silhouette clambered out of the walls of the passage ahead she nearly blundered into it, convinced that it too was an illusion. Cracius’ form was bulky with robes over a metal carapace that wheezed and creaked, and was hung about with arcane devices and amulets. Without warning, articulated mechanical claws gripped her wrists and she was hauled off her feet to be held, kicking uselessly, in front of a face that glared from within a thick transparent dome.

‘What is it?’ rasped a voice, distorted through amplification. ‘Human,’ it continued, as if the question hadn’t been meant for her. She was turned this way and that, inspected. ‘Three-seven point two kilograms/malnourished… Female/possibly/err percentile one-seven point zero-four. What does it want?’ After a moment he shook her like a doll and repeated, ‘What does it want?’

It seemed she was being addressed after all.

‘Master… Cracius,’ she gasped. It was hard to breathe with her weight hanging off her arms. ‘I have… food.’

‘Food, is it?’ She was hauled closer for a more detailed inspection. Behind his protective visor, Cracius’ face was wizened with age, his eyebrows like white wire brushes, and parts of his bald skull were plated with riveted metal from which tubes drained a brackish-looking fluid. He must have been satisfied with what he saw because he grunted and let go, and she dropped to the floor. ‘Let’s have it then,’ he ordered.

She fumbled for the flask of leftovers. A segmented tentacle emerged from amongst his robes, took the flask, and withdrew. ‘I assume this is payment for some favour you are about to waste my time by requesting,’ he rasped.

‘I have something,’ she replied, and showed him the medallion. ‘Can you tell me what it is?’

He peered at it, and grunted. ‘Possibly. First, though…’ He reached within himself and pulled free a tube. An intravenous needle tipped the end, from which a bead of blue fluid welled. ‘This. It will help with the hallucinations. Shield your meat brain.’

She looked at the needle. No way was she sticking that in any part of her. ‘I’m fine, thanks.’

He shrugged. ‘Come with me,’ he said, and set off down the passage, his heavy footfalls making the floor shudder. She ran to catch up. Grasping hands came out of the floor to grab at her ankles, but they weren’t really there. She focused on the tech-priest’s disappearing back and followed him.

Master Cracius’ cell was so crammed with tech that she wondered how he managed to move around. There were teetering piles of machinery, wires, gears, pistons, valves, data-slates, even a small pyramid of broken servo-skulls, and a hundred other things that she couldn’t begin to identify. In only one place was anything clear: a section of wall that bulged outward slightly and appeared to be made of a different substance to the rest – something dark and pearlescent – the wall of the Cyst. It was covered by a mosaic of data-slates connected by venous cables, their screens scrawling with glyphs busily writing themselves.

The tech-priest took the golden medallion to a device that looked like a giant overturned spider on a lectern, and placed it in the centre. Then he detached one of the cables from deep within his robes and inserted it into the spider’s head, whereupon its legs spasmed and curled themselves over and began to probe at the medallion with surprising delicacy. Meanwhile, ugly slurping sounds came from within Cracius’ carapace as he ingested her leftovers. She tried to ignore how the bulge of wall was growing, because she knew it wasn’t really happening, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away from its distended swell, like a pregnant belly gravid with horrors, or the smaller bulges roaming around as whatever was on the other side seethed to be born…

In an effort to distract herself she asked him, ‘What makes the hallucinations?’

‘Sequence/iteration/else/cogit-failure,’ he muttered. ‘That’s not the question you need answering.’

‘It isn’t?’

‘Null/else/this: you must be aware that this place was once populated more densely than is currently the case. You’ve seen the evidence everywhere.’

Lyse nodded. ‘We find remains sometimes, but not often. Crawlers ate most of them long ago.’

He turned to regard her. ‘Have you never stopped to think what the crawlers actually are?’

‘I don’t understand. They’re just… crawlers. Messed-up meat.’

‘Yes, well, we’ll come back to that later. Anyway, before the Spike became what it is, her name was the Spira Tenebris, and she was a battleship.’

Lyse knew ‘battle’ well enough. ‘What’s a ship?’ she asked.

‘Don’t interrupt. Now, the crew complement of the Tenebris numbered in the hundreds of thousands – virtually a small city…’

‘What’s a–’

Cracius glared at her, and she shut up.

‘A city that had to be provisioned,’ he continued. ‘From stores containing enough to feed a quarter of a million mouths for the few weeks of a campaign.’

Lyse continued listening in the hope that he might say something coherent.

‘Keeping track of those stores was the responsibility of the master sergeant victualler. This,’ he said, indicating the medallion, ‘is the Victualler’s Seal.’ He waited, plainly expecting her to be impressed.

She looked at him. ‘And?’

‘And it contains stock data, location and access codes for all the food caches on board, you ignorant oaf of a girl!’

She sat up straight. ‘Wait – did you say food?’

‘Yes, I did. And mark you, I’m not talking about spit-roasted rat or this corpse-starch slop.’ Her flask fell out from within his robes, empty now, but she didn’t rush to collect it. She didn’t want to think about where it had been. ‘I’m talking about protein bars, vitamin supplements, freeze-dried ration packs, water-purification tabs, cal-gel… things your taste buds couldn’t begin to dream of.’

‘Well, where are they?’

The spider device probed the Seal some more while the tech-priest muttered words which might have been prayers to the Machine-God, or equally curses. Abruptly, the central amber stone burst into life, and a glowing apparition sprang into the air above it. Lyse drew her knife and backed away. ‘It’s a ghost!’

He squinted at her. ‘In a way, yes, it is. This is the Spira Tenebris as she was, in the time of your grandmother’s grandmother.’

The apparition was long and sketched in a network of bright geometric lines, like a picture of a bone scratched in fire, but it wasn’t flat; it rotated slowly, and it wasn’t a smooth bone but wickedly pointed at one end and heavily flared at the other and jutted with angular excrescences along its length.

He was still squinting at her. ‘Do you recognise this?’

‘No. Should I?’

‘Var/aspect/exec,’ he muttered, making further adjustments, and the phantom swivelled from a horizontal to a vertical alignment, the sharp point uppermost. ‘How about now?’

Lyse shrugged. ‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to be looking at.’

He sighed with irritation and pointed to the top, where it curved into something like a fang. ‘This is where the prime adjutant and her arbiters have their quarters. Below that, the hab-halls of the five families. Then down through a mile of wreckage and devastation to the lower reaches where crawlers make their nests and the air is poison and the djinn fires burn eternally.

‘Much data is lost, but either the grav-generators failed or else it happened during the first moments of upheaval when the Tenebris was open to the immaterium. The shafts that you clamber up and down were once halls and galleries, thronging with people and the glorious song of countless machines. Now all is silent,’ he murmured. ‘All is dark. It is the Spike. Our home.’

She stared, wondering at the strange melancholy that had come over him. Then she burst out laughing.

His voice was a low growl. ‘I did not realise I was being amusing.’

‘I’m sorry!’ she sputtered, trying to stifle her giggles. ‘It’s just that what you’re saying…’

‘Yes?’

‘Well it’s nonsense, isn’t it? You’re insane.’

Instead of being insulted, Cracius seemed to consider this seriously. ‘That is entirely possible,’ he admitted. ‘In which case you’re not going to like this.’ The spider probed a third time, and the image filled with fire-spark points, each orbited by a tiny ring of numbers and figures. ‘Each one of these is the location of a cache of provisions. Food, to you. Unless I’m insane,’ he added drily.

‘But…’ she stammered. ‘But there are so many of them!’ Enough food to last a few thousand people for centuries. And it wasn’t just something to fill bellies, it was freedom from the tyranny of scraping a hand-to-mouth existence, freedom from the Jaaxes’ control over the vats, freedom from her obligation to marry a man she loathed.

‘Correction: there were so many of them.’

One by one, the fire-sparks began to die.

‘No…’ she whispered. ‘No!’ They were disappearing. She grasped at the image to stop them, but her fingers just closed on empty air, and they kept dying inexorably. She turned to Master Cracius. ‘What’s happening?’

‘The Seal is updating its records. Your ancestors plundered those caches long ago. But look.’ He pointed, and she turned back. Two fire-sparks remained. One, which was just a plain glowing icon with no halo of orbiting figures, was in the middle of the image, close by a sphere of empty space. ‘That one,’ he said, ‘is this,’ and he indicated the Seal. The second fire-spark was ringed with numbers and was a lot lower down the Spike, almost at the very bottom. ‘That one,’ he said, ‘is a cache that has not been plundered. Yet.’

Its depth explained why it hadn’t been found before. It was in the lower reaches. Crawler territory. Dangerously close to the djinn fires and the kind of place you never went without protective gear, weapons and a full support team – none of which she had.

‘Well that’s–’ she said, and was interrupted by a high-pitched wail coming from a servo-skull that had floated from its perch amongst the stacks of equipment; its eyes were flashing an urgent red.

‘Visitors,’ commented Master Cracius. The skull glided over to him and he connected a cable, communing with the device. ‘Friends of yours,’ he added drily. ‘Jaaxes and a squad of arbiters, headed by the prime adjutant herself, no less. You should be flattered.’

‘Can you hide me?’

He shook his head. ‘Domitia and I have an understanding, but I am of no hall and so my influence is limited. I will not detain you, but that is the most I can offer.’

‘Thanks for nothing.’ She held out her hand. ‘I’ll have my tech back.’ When he hesitated, she waved her knife. ‘Let’s you and I have an understanding too, then – a quarter of whatever I find, or else I see how much damage I can do to your funny little tubes before the arbiters get me.’

He laughed, and it sounded like stones rattling in a bucket. ‘Half. I will input the cache’s coordinates so that the Seal directs you to it.’

‘Done.’

He made his adjustments to the device’s sliding switches, muttering in his arcane machine language, and returned it to her. She saw now that rather than a medallion it was a compass, suspended in a gimbal of rings that allowed it to rotate in three dimensions.

‘It will now point to the cache at all times,’ he said, then added with a dark amusement that she did not like, ‘though it will not guide you through whatever is in the way.’

As the servo-skull’s shrilling grew louder, Lyse fled.

Down, then. Except that if Master Cracius was to be believed, down had once been along. The idea of being able to walk in a straight line for more than a dozen yards without obstacle was simultaneously fascinating and so alien that it threatened to overwhelm Lyse’s imagination, so she pushed it aside and concentrated on finding a way down to the last cache. If she could find it without being killed by crawlers, and then open it, and if there was anything left, there might be something that she could use to barter with Domitia for her freedom. It was a ladder of ‘mights’, any rung of which might slip from under her footing and send her plummeting to her death.

There was only one zip line that travelled so far down, laid years ago by some foolhardy or desperate scavenger who had never returned to tell of what they had found, and she prayed to Saint Geller that it was still there. With only hearsay and tall stories to guide her it was difficult, but her consolation was that her pursuers didn’t even have that, and would be moving much slower than herself. She kept her biolux low, and trusted to her instincts.

Despite telling her imagination to keep its mouth shut, she couldn’t help examining her surroundings as she passed, looking for evidence to support Cracius’ absurd tales. It might explain why nothing seemed designed properly for people: doorways were sometimes so low that you had to crouch to get through, and all over the Spike there were vertical rows of sigils on the walls, but since she couldn’t read she had no way of telling whether or not they were the right way up.

She found it in the end – a wide-mouthed shaft as derelict as any other, with a pair of metal tracks running down one wall. She cocked her head to one side and experimented with seeing that wall as a floor, and the tracks being used to transport something to and fro. It was impossible. The zip line was there, bolted to the wall, and she wondered how far down it went, who had set it there and what they had seen. Had they fallen under the claws of crawlers or looked on the djinn fires with their own eyes, or even reached the very bottom of the Spike itself? Until Cracius had shown her the ghost of the Spira Tenebris she had never thought of the Spike as having a bottom; it had always seemed to just go on, down and down forever. If it had a bottom, then what was on the other side? The Outside? It hurt her head to think this way.

There was a good chance that this was all nothing but his idea of a joke, sending her to certain death on a quest for something that had never existed in the first place. But what choice did she have?

‘Damn you, Cracius,’ she muttered, then clipped onto the line and lowered herself over the edge.

She could feel a faint vibration thrumming up the line, as if it were descending through levels where massive furnaces roared in the darkness. She took it slowly, not trusting the old anchor points to be secure, and paused often to listen, sniff the air, and feel the vibrations in the metal walls. There were no blockages, thank Saint Geller, and no sign of any crawlers. She knew they were there, of course. They were probably watching her right at this moment, and had just decided not to show themselves. Not for the first time she wished she had brought a decent weapon. Her small size and sneakiness were always going to be her best assets, but it would be nice to have something larger than her little utility knife to wield. She made a small detour along a side tunnel off the shaft and found a length of piping that felt comfortingly heftable, shoved it through the back straps of her harness and resumed her descent.

Gradually Lyse became aware of a current of warm air bathing her from below that she didn’t like the feel of at all. It might be coming from the djinn fires, in which case it was poisonous and to be avoided at all costs, so she left the shaft and took to a transverse passage. The Seal only gave her the crudest directional guidance, and so she was constantly forced to backtrack and find ways around blockages, jammed doors and abysses that yawned unexpectedly at her feet. Eventually, however, she reached a place where its compass began oscillating as if confused, and she knew that she must be close. Lyse found herself before a wide, low door much like any other, except that it had a circular depression in the wall above it, just about the same size as the medallion.

It fitted perfectly.

The Seal, locked into place by something powerfully magnetic, pulled itself out of her hand, and she stepped back in alarm. The concentric slide-controls around its central stone moved on their own, clicking into position, and she heard a heavy grinding of unseen gears and pistons as the door opened from the bottom up. A gust of stale air blew around her. The gap was less than two feet when something gave way with a scream of hydraulics and a judder that she felt through her feet, and jammed.

She went dark, folded herself into a corner and waited, heart pounding.

Nothing happened. Nothing lurched out of the gap to snatch at her. Nothing came out of the tunnel, alerted by the noise of the ancient mechanism. She eased herself down on the floor and put one arm through the gap, flexing her fingers wide to activate the biolux tattoos, and peered in. There was some kind of jumbled mound on the other side, gleaming in the meagre illumination.

She slithered under the jammed door, praying that it would not unjam and crash down again, slicing her in half like a worm. But it didn’t. She stood straight in the room on the other side and gasped in amazement.

A mountain of packages sealed in some strange kind of oilskin that shone like polished metal, canisters, tins, bottles and containers of every shape and size lay amidst the wreckage of the shelving from which they’d toppled. Many had spilled or burst, their contents spoiled, but the majority appeared to be intact. She picked up a small bar of something that lay nearby, tore open one corner and sniffed at it. It didn’t really smell of much, certainly not something rotten, so she tried the tiniest of nibbles. The taste was rich, heavy and sweet, and her mouth instantly began to salivate. Before she could stop herself she wolfed the whole thing and three more, squatting on her haunches and scoffing with both hands. Whatever was in them, it surged into her blood like battery acid, burning the fatigue out of her muscles and clearing her head. She was so overwhelmed by the sensory overload that she didn’t notice what had entered the room behind her until it spoke.

Ours now.

She spun, knife in her hand, expecting Hadzor Jaax and his men, backed up by the prime adjutant’s arbiters.

Instead she saw an army of crawlers.

They crowded under the door, pulling themselves into the room on pale limbs. No two were alike – most of the eyes that stared at her were blind and white but others glittered with malevolence. Most had legs but some dragged themselves along the floor and up the walls with wide, sucker-lined hands or hooked claws. She saw faces that had melted into torsos, vertebrae that protruded from the skin in barbed spines, figures that carried their naked organs ahead of themselves like offerings, and others with jaws that hinged wide to reveal multiple rows of teeth and snake-like tongues that lashed and leered. Some were even wearing the ragged remains of clothing. The one that had spoken – which she assumed was the leader either because of its ability to use human speech or because its deformities were the most extreme – was being carried by two of its brethren. Part of its skull was missing, or else had been removed, and in the naked, pulsing brain underneath a milky eyeball rolled at her.

We have waited a very long time for this to be opened, it said, and she was amazed at the perfect clarity of its speech before realising that it had no mouth, and was speaking directly into her mind. Shocked and revolted, she back-pedalled up the pile of ration packs, stumbling as they slithered out from beneath her.

Many wanted to eat you, it continued. But you were thinking so loudly about opening the cache that we thought we’d wait to see if you could do it. And you did, for which we thank you. But now it, and you, are ours.

‘Blessed Saint Geller, protect me,’ she whispered, still backing away awkwardly, and hauled out the iron bar to defend herself.

The crawler’s mocking laugh filled her skull. Oh child, do you have any idea what it is that you are actually praying to?

‘What… what do you mean?’

Then consider this a mercy. We’re putting you out of your ignorance.

At some unheard command they surged towards her.

She clubbed at pale flesh and felt something snap beneath her iron bar before her feet were snatched from underneath her and she fell into the pile. Then a crawler was on top of her, snapping and drooling, while another seized the meaty flesh of her right calf and worried at her like a rat fighting over a scrap. No mercy of a swift fall or a bullet here; they were going to eat her alive while she watched and screamed. The stench of them choked her, and the darkness was raucous with their looping howls.

A burst of gunfire from the hallway crashed over the din and for a moment everything froze. Something uttered a high-pitched, gibbering shriek and there was another rattle of shooting, and the room exploded into frantic motion as the crawlers abandoned their prey and attempted to flee.

Lyse lay, dizzy with shock, listening to the screams of battle. Only arbiters possessed proper firearms, which meant that Prime Adjutant Domitia was close, which meant that Jaax was too, but at this very moment Lyse couldn’t have cared less. This place and everything in it was hers. She had found it by law of salvage, and if her claim wasn’t honoured then Master Cracius would vouch for her, otherwise he wouldn’t get his share.

Then the pain in her savaged leg woke up, and she cried out. In the dim glow of biolux her blood was black; she was glossy with it from knee to toe. The noises of fighting abated as the crawlers fled into their tunnels and Lyse hauled herself to her feet, using the iron bar as a makeshift crutch. When the first arbiter slid under the door, sweeping the chamber with a flashlight on the end of his gun, she put her free hand up in surrender.

‘Don’t shoot!’ she called. ‘I am Lyse Urretzi, first daughter of–’

‘We know,’ said Prime Adjutant Galla Domitia, sliding in after her soldier and standing. ‘And a merry dance you’ve led us, too.’ She was tall and carapaced in body armour, with a shock of close-cropped iron-grey hair and a hatchet face that looked like it had forgotten how to smile a long time ago. Nevertheless, surprise widened her eyes as she looked around the room and saw its riches.

‘Claim!’ Lyse declared. ‘This is mine!’ She took the iron bar in both hands, though it meant having to totter on one leg, and brandished it as if she were prepared to fight all of them.

One corner of Domitia’s mouth quirked and she inclined her head slightly. ‘Your claim will be honoured, have no fear.’ The rest of her squad entered the room one by one, and fell upon the loot with whoops and hollers, but Domitia barked at them to stand down.

‘Thank you, prime adjutant.’ Lyse almost allowed herself to relax, but then Hadzor Jaax squirmed into the room last of all. His armaments were much cruder than the arbiters’ – his gun looked like it had been cobbled together from plumbing and scrap metal, and as likely to take his own hand off as actually hit his target. Lyse ignored him. She could afford to now.

‘Cracius told you where I was going, didn’t he?’

‘Yes,’ said Domitia, ‘but don’t be angry with him. My chasteners didn’t leave him much of a choice, and after all, it saved your life. He also told us about the Seal. Where did you find it?’

It was only Jaax’s flicker of a glance at Domitia that saved her life. In it Lyse saw him weighing up the odds of shooting either the prime adjutant or herself – which one he could best get away with to suppress the discovery of his heresy. Lyse wasn’t conscious of the knowledge, however; it slithered straight down into her animal hindbrain and triggered her fight-or-flight instinct.

His gun shifted, and he shot her.

She fell to one side as something punched her in the shoulder, and she scrambled under the door and into the passageway outside. It was littered with the corpses of crawlers and slippery with their blood, and she skidded and limped through them.

She had to give Jaax his due, he was fast. He tried to slip out after her, and almost made it. She fought every instinct screaming at her to run, and turned back to the door. The prime adjutant was shouting with outrage, and maybe somebody was trying to hold Jaax back, but he was halfway out from underneath, grabbing at her.

‘Little bitch!’ he snarled, and seized her ankle. He was bringing his gun up to bear on her when Lyse plucked the Victualler’s Seal from its lock.

The door slammed down on his torso, crushing his ribcage, and a gout of blood spurted from his mouth. His eyes bulged and his arms spasmed; the gun went off but nowhere near her, and he was still.

Lyse fell amongst the crawler corpses, sobbing.

The prime adjutant’s shouts were faint and distant.

Hadzor Jaax began to move again.

Except that it wasn’t Hadzor Jaax any more.

Its hands gripped the lower edge of the door and began to push upwards, which was impossible because the door must have weighed a ton. But then the hands themselves were swelling, growing talons that left gouges in the metal as if it were paper. Everything about Jaax was growing and thickening, sprouting spines and horns, mutating into something new and terrible – the living nightmare of which the effigy, obscene as it was, had been only a shadow. It made the crawlers that had so nearly killed her look like mere rats in comparison, and she could only gape at it, her mind numbed by disbelief. Transfixed by its eyes, she felt the same kind of sick fascination as when she had looked at the blasphemous mural. It grinned at her, its tongue lolling across teeth as black as rot.

‘Don’t worry, my dear,’ it drooled in Jaax’s voice. ‘You will still be my bride.’ It got to its knees, shouldering the door upwards with immense strength. Behind it, in the room, people were screaming, guns firing, and stray bullets zipped through the gap around her. ‘But first I have business to attend to.’ It ducked back inside, dropping the door behind it, and she heard the gunfire and screaming escalate to frenzied heights, accompanied by wet, rending noises and the laughter of something that gloried in its work.

Released from its gaze, Lyse fled.

This couldn’t last long, she knew. She was sobbing and slipping in her own blood and stumbling every other step, her leg burning with agony, her shoulder adding its fuel to the fire even though that whole arm was numb with pins and needles. She should have collapsed by now, but whatever she had eaten was still burning in her blood. All the same, she had no plan – she couldn’t lead the Outsider upwards to the hab-halls, nor was there much further down to drop; all she could do was slip through the smallest gaps and run from the inevitable for as long as possible.

The Outsider announced its pursuit, calling her name, laughing and jeering. Presumably it had finished with the arbiters. It would do to her clan – all the clans – what it had done to the best-armed of them, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

Lyse’s attention was so consumed by the pursuing horror that she nearly fell headlong into the shaft that opened before her.

She pinwheeled her arms and regained her balance. Light and warmth struck her face from below. There was an angry orange glow far down the shaft, which could only be one thing: the djinn fires. All the stories told that the djinn fires were poison – that their breath would corrupt your flesh and make you a mother to crawlers – but that hardly mattered now since it didn’t seem likely that she was going to live to be a mother to anything. She must be almost at the very bottom of the Spike.

‘Lyse, my love, come to me and we shall be one in Valgaast!’ howled the Outsider, and shrieked with laughter that hurt her ears. It was a lot louder, a lot closer.

It was so tempting to simply throw herself in and have done with it, but that would have meant abandoning her family to the creature without even offering what pitiful defiance she could muster. Instead, she closed her eyes and offered what she feared was her last prayer to Saint Geller. Then she turned, putting her back to the burning abyss, and limped towards the monster’s voice.

‘No!’ she shouted. ‘You come to me!’

It emerged around the corner, bigger than before, so large that it had to stoop. Maybe killing the arbiters had empowered it. She didn’t care. ‘You were a pitiful sack of shit when you were a man and you’re just a bigger sack of shit now!’

The Outsider roared and charged.

Lyse was small – that was partially how she had survived so long in the Spike. Small and quick. She held her ground to the very last second and then flattened herself to the floor as the Outsider swept towards her with its claw-tipped arms bent like scoops to snatch her up.

And missed.

Its speed carried it towards the shaft, feet scrabbling against the smooth metal of the floor, but even as it plunged towards the edge it somehow managed to twist and use its momentum to leap over the gap, where it landed awkwardly on the other side.

The Outsider grinned and opened its slavering mouth but then stopped, staring at something stuck to its chest: a lump of sticky green goo and a wire-tight strand stretching from it to the glob-gun in Lyse’s hand.

‘Little bitch!’ she spat, and pulled as hard as she could.

The creature outweighed her massively, and if she’d given it a moment to regain its balance, it would easily have been able to resist. But she was quick, and like a precariously balanced machine pushed past its tipping point, the Outsider fell howling into the void.

Lyse collapsed at the edge, exhausted and broken, and a bit pissed off. She was going to have to get a new glob-gun now. Then as the fire left her blood she began to laugh – a high, crazed sound indistinguishable from the weeping or howling that echoed through the twisted passageways and empty galleries of the Spike like the shrieks of a lost and demented soul.

She laughed, and laughed, and laughed.

Master Cracius surveyed her critically. ‘Quer/invent.: you are sure that you have everything?’

Lyse, once first daughter to the Urretzi clan but latterly of no hall, checked her gear for the third time, more to reassure him than out of necessity: glob-gun, riveter, line-grabber, mag-pads, the message that was her errand and the gifts that would ease its reception. ‘Everything,’ she said.

‘Quer/loc.: the schematic is clear to you?’

She patted the satchel which held the data-slate and its map of her route. ‘Yes, grandfather.’

He scowled. ‘That is not amusing.’

‘Yes it is.’ She couldn’t claim to know the old tech-priest from the short time that she had been quartered with him, but she could tell when he was responding more or less as a human when his responses weren’t prefaced by some machine language gibberish.

He grunted, which was the closest he got to agreement. He was more predictable than the Urretzis, at least. When she had returned with her clan tattoos warped out of recognition the celebrations had quickly turned to whispers that she had made some kind of pact with the Outside, and she had left before the whispers became accusations of heresy. The shrine and effigy had both disappeared, but she didn’t for one second imagine that its worshippers had too.

We shall be one in Valgaast, the Outsider had said. She had no idea what that meant, but the very shape of the words in her mind was enough to cause nightmares.

Cracius had not so much taken her in as neglected to throw her out when she started sleeping amidst his scrap hoard, and he didn’t seem disturbed by the way she screamed herself awake most nights. In time she had even proved herself to be useful to him, retrieving components from places he was too bulky to go. Now he had given her a message to deliver, and the trust that this implied swelled her heart with a strange feeling that might have been happiness.

‘Go on, then,’ he said, and turned from her to work on one of his incomprehensible devices.

She grinned, and left for the crawler warrens.

The Bloody Kiss

Darius Hinks

She waits for me in the Vladym Forest, where trees root in blood and the hag-kin howl. Where my life found meaning.

‘Marya.’ I whisper her name and it burns my veins, quickening my pulse, making me stumble like a drunk through the streets of Dravko. My need for her is a kind of agony. Too much to bear. But soon, the wait will be over.

The Cuvari patrol the walls, yawning at the endless waves of snow, swaddled in their greatcoats and leaning heavily on spears. They are not facing my way. The sentries are not employed to spy on their fellow villagers; they keep watch for the dead, not the living. Still, one could easily turn and catch sight of me. ‘Raziv,’ they would cry, incredulous. ‘What drags you from your bed at this hour? Go back to your wife. And what is that look in your eyes?’ For there is no way I could conceal my passion. It burns too bright. It would shine from my skin. Like the gheists in the Vladym Forest, I am luminous. My hunger for Marya is so great it is almost a torture. Only the knowledge that I will soon hold her keeps me from madness.

Lights flicker behind a few of the shuttered windows but most people will be asleep by now, or too drunk to care about people creeping past their door. I duck low behind a grain wagon and approach the town gates with caution. The market square is bathed in moonlight and frost glints on the cobblestones.

I pause at the end of a side street, hiding in the shadows beneath a frozen awning. My breath pools around me in the darkness and I can already feel my beard starting to freeze. I try to imagine what Sanja would say if she was here, rather than away at her brother’s wedding feast. She would stare at me with those docile, child-like eyes and then she would start to weep, unable to understand; unable to accept that I could betray her. She believes so completely in me. She thinks I am perfect. Her beloved husband.

Guilt starts to dampen my mood so I think instead of Marya, picturing her tawny hair, remembering how it winds down her long, pale neck. Guilt goes forgotten as I remember the rest of Marya. But, more than her body, it is her soul that I hunger for. There are brothels in Dravko. If it was a simple matter of lust, I could have found easier ways to slake my thirst. But no one in Dravko could give me the things that Marya has. For the first time in my life I feel alive. Truly alive. Since childhood I have felt oddly numb, only pretending to care about the things others care about, wondering all the time why I feel nothing. Life has always seemed remote to me, and unreal. But out there in the trees, surrounded by so much death, I have finally found something to live for.

I take a last glance up at the guards then sprint for the gates. They are locked, of course, but there is a smaller door, to the left of the main gates, and I have the key. Trappers like me come and go as we please. At first I think the lock is too frozen to work, but then the metal clicks and I am free, rushing out of Dravko, racing across the snow like a cloud-thrown shadow.

For most people it would be madness to venture out so late. The town is surrounded by dark, sprawling forests. And even in daylight it is not safe. These are the hunting grounds of the hag-kin – the lupine, blood-hungry damned who have given themselves to the wolf-hag. Some people call them Vyrkos. Some call them Kuzlac. Others name them the Children of the Hag, or even just the hounds, but they are nothing like hounds. My work takes me further into the woods than most and I have glimpsed the hag-kin at close quarters. Some are savage and bestial, deformed by the wolf-hag’s blood kiss, but others are still recognisable as the humans they once were. Those are the ones I fear the most. I was once on the verge of greeting a man when I saw the madness in his eyes and the odd, distended shape of his fang-crowded mouth. My pistol saved my life but I still remember the feel of his hands, clawing at my throat, trying to find purchase.

I follow the course of a frozen stream through bone-white meadows and glittering gullies, ducking snow-laden boughs and keeping to the shadows. But I feel no fear. These lands are not as dangerous for me as they would be for most. My father taught me the secret ways and the old paths, just as his father taught him. These are the routes the Vyrkos never take. The routes they cannot find. Places hidden by the old magic. The wolf-hag has not always ruled these lands. There is an ancient power in these hills. My father believed it is older even than the Great Necromancer himself but he was wise enough never to make that claim in front of any priests. I look for signs no one else would see: a shadow that leans the wrong way, a patch of snow that glistens a different hue, a hawthorn with branches knotted into a rune. By these marks I make an easy passage down the valley and reach the borders of Vladym Forest.

The sight of the trees fills me with euphoria. It was here, under this ancient canopy, that I first met Marya. It was less than a year ago, but my whole life springs from that moment.

I am not a bad man. I had never thought of betraying Sanja. And, in my own way, I do love her. My wife is a simple, timid creature but I would never wish her any harm. And no harm shall come to her. Out here, in the frozen forest, secrets remain unspoken. Marya has never asked if I have a wife and I doubt she ever will. The topic would bore her. She talks to me instead of Jaromir’s poetry. She weeps as she describes the quality of light in Ourada’s paintings. Zeal burns in her eyes as she whispers to me of her travels, describing the great temples and cities of the south. She holds me so tight it hurts as she tells me of lightning-wielding paladins who fall from storms and bring word of a new, greater god: the Heldenhammer. The most exciting thing I ever discuss with Sanja is the flavour of that day’s dried meat. Sanja could not understand half the things Marya says. And she could not conceive of the thrill I feel as I sprint through the night, heart drumming against my ribs, wind filling my eyes with tears.

I skirt the borders of the forest, searching for the right way in. There are countless paths, but most lead into the jaws of the hag-kin. The undead are legion and they have claimed these groves for their own. Some were once people I knew. Life is brutal in Dravko, just as it is in all the other settlements. There is never enough food, never enough warmth, but the real hardship is the endless fear. Settlements are overrun all the time. Sometimes it is the wolf-hag’s hounds, but not always. Zalessk was razed by cannibals who worshipped through the collection of skulls. The stink of burning bodies filled the valleys for weeks as the cannibals celebrated their victory. And a few months before that, Shushkin simply vanished. Our greatest trading partners disappeared overnight, leaving nothing but blue fire – a vast pillar of flames that hovered over the snow, forming a flickering number nine. It was as if the town had simply never existed.

It is fear that makes life so hard – fear of being so helpless. Which is why so many give themselves to the wolf-hag. They take the blood kiss because they crave her power. They know what will become of them. They know they are damning themselves. But there is a kind of power in making a choice even if it is a dreadful one. At least they have decided the manner of their fall. At least they no longer have to wait, terrified, to see what manner of horror will eventually claim them.

It takes me half an hour but I finally spot it – a place where the gap between two trees is brighter than it should be, the moonlight bouncing off a surface that is not there. I dash through the gap, recognising a track I have used since childhood. Under the darkness of the trees the cold sinks through my furs, locking around my bones and causing my jaw to shake. I am still young and strong, not yet thirty, and I can endure anything the elements throw at me, but my hunger for Marya is growing worse. It is a physical pain. I have to hold her. I have to hear her voice. And I have to do it before this torment overwhelms me.

I vault over trunks that have been toppled by the weight of snow and slide across frozen ponds. In one hand I grip my hunting knife, sensible enough to know that even I am not immune to danger. In my other hand I hold the gift I have brought for Marya: a small, leather-bound book, a collection of Jaromir’s poems. It is the most expensive thing I have ever bought. Keeping it secret from Sanja has been hard, but I cannot wait to see Marya’s eyes light up when I hand it to her.

I have not been in the forest very long when I realise something is wrong. The trees always echo to the sound of hag-kin. I heard them the moment I entered the forest – eerie howls that harmonise with the wind, moaning through dead branches and whipping the snow. But, as I struggle through walls of frozen undergrowth, I hear something nearby: a quick, heavy panting that can only be a few feet away. A deer? A bear? Or another hunter, perhaps? It would be odd for someone to be out at such a late hour, but not impossible.

I keep still, holding my breath as I peer through columns of shadow and moonlight. The panting stops. ‘Who’s there?’ I say, trying to sound unafraid. There is no reply. As the silence stretches out, I feel sure that someone is watching me. The animals of the forest would not skulk like this. They either attack or flee. This must be someone from the town. Either that, or one of the Vyrkos. But vampires have never found these paths before. It is not possible. The old ways are hidden.

‘Who is that?’ I demand, sure that it must be a hunter. ‘Velizar,’ I call. ‘Is it you?’ Old Man Velizar is the only hunter I know who regularly comes into the forest at night. Like me, he knows the secret ways through the trees and he has always managed to find food, even when the rest of us are eating boot leather.

There is no reply but, as I stare into the shadows between the trees, I make out a figure, motionless in the dark, watching me in silence.

I grip my knife tighter and turn slowly from the path, trying to see who it is. ‘Speak, damn you.’ I am unable to keep a tremor from my voice. ‘Is it you, Velizar?’

The figure remains silent. I see a pair of eyes, glittering in the moonlight. Then the figure bolts, dashing off through the undergrowth and vanishing from sight.

I stand there for a moment, trying to steady my breathing. If it was one of the hag-kin it may have gone to fetch the rest of its pack. Perhaps it was wary of attacking me alone for some reason. I am a large, powerfully built man, and I am armed. Even a vampire might be wary of my bullets.

There is nothing I can do. I certainly don’t want to leave the path and head into the heart of the forest. The route I have chosen will take me directly to the old redoubt where Marya and I meet. It would be madness to start chasing phantoms when I am so close to her. The howls continue but they seem no nearer than before. I head on but move with more caution, listening out for the sound of breathing.

I travel another half a mile before I reach a frozen stream and tread carefully on the thick plates of ice. The opposite bank is ridged and bumpy where the mud has been frozen into contorted shapes. I haul myself up and then halt, staring in shock.

Everything in the forest is white or grey, draped in ice and snow, but lying ahead of me on the path is a splash of garish colour that jars horribly against its surroundings. Velizar is in here with me. But he is no longer hunting. He has been torn apart, his lower half ripped away leaving only the parts from the waist up. His insides have been scattered across the snow in a bright spiral of crimson. It looks like someone has hurled a meal across the ground. He stares at me as I approach, his eyes blank and his head twisted at a repulsive angle by the savage wounds inflicted on his neck. His throat has been torn away.

‘Hag-kin,’ I whisper, dropping into a crouch and raising my knife, waiting for an attack.

Nothing happens but then, after a few moments, I hear the panting I heard before: the quick, heavy breathing of an animal.

‘Come out!’ I spit, waving my knife. ‘Why are you hiding?’ It is panic rather than courage that makes me yell. The thought that I am being stalked is awful. I do not fear for my life, but that I might not reach Marya. I can face anything but that. ‘Come on!’ I whisper, pacing around the steaming corpse. ‘Face me.’

Then I see the figure again, watching me from the darkness, silent and unmoving, staring directly at me. I lunge and it flees. I catch a glimpse of a purple and yellow sash, then it is gone and I am left floundering in the brambles with no sign of my tormenter.

‘How?’ I say, returning to the path and staring at the pieces of Velizar. For my whole life, these paths have remained hidden. And in my father’s time it was the same. Someone must have led the Vyrkos here. But why would anyone do such a stupid thing? I crouch beside Velizar, looking into his dead eyes. ‘Did you bring them here? Why would you do that?’ Then it occurs to me. ‘Did you come looking for the blood kiss? Did you want to join them?’ Even those who are desperate enough to offer themselves to the wolf-hag cannot be sure of a place in her pack. The Vyrkos are as likely to devour their victims as they are to grant them immortality.

As I stare at Velizar’s quickly cooling corpse, my anger grows. I feel sure this is somehow his fault. What if I fail to reach Marya? What if I die out here and she thinks I chose not to meet her? I cannot bear it. I grip my head, trying to crush the panic. Never in all my life have I felt such torment. How can I endure it? This journey through the woods feels like it is taking an eternity.

I spit on Velizar’s corpse then turn and look around at the trees. If this path has been revealed to the Vyrkos I will have to find another. I climb up one of the trees and look out across the forest. I can recognise my surroundings well enough and I quickly spot a different path, one that should still be hidden, but the vampire could follow my scent. If it is still nearby, which I assume it is, it would be easy for it to follow me. I stare into the gloom, desperate for a solution.

Then, my gaze comes to rest on a dazzling patch of silver. It is a bend of a river called the Milaska that cuts right through the forest. The water is so deep and fast moving that it rarely freezes. If I cross the river, the water would mask my scent. I would just need to find a safe point to climb the opposite bank without being observed. The water will be painfully cold. Perhaps fatally cold. But I can think of no other way to rid myself of the beast that is stalking me. And I cannot bear the thought of leading it to Marya.

I break off from the path and enter the trees, sprinting across ice and crashing through snowdrifts, heedless of the danger, heedless of anything except the need to reach the redoubt before I am taken. All around me, the howling starts to grow louder and more frenzied. They have my scent. They are coming.

I reach a wide, moonlit clearing and whip out my pistol, sure that this is where the vampires will strike. Snow is falling heavily, rolling in the moonlight and making it hard to see clearly. Something moves on the far side of the clearing. I raise my gun.

I am about to fire when I realise I am taking aim at a broken branch that is swaying in the breeze. I laugh, but the sound is shrill and odd, not like my own voice. ‘Are you there?’ I whisper, scanning the clearing for the figure I saw earlier, the one that must have killed Velizar. The howls swell, as if answering me, but there is nothing else, only the branch creaking as it swings back and forth. I step out into the clearing, my rag-swaddled boots crunching through the deep snow.

Nothing happens. I reach the opposite side of the clearing and rush on down the path. The river is now visible up ahead and the water is moving, as I thought it would be. There are huge trees leaning over it, weighed down by snow and creating an enormous tunnel. Once I am under the sagging boughs I will be hidden. I should not have to endure the water for very long before I can climb the other bank.

I gasp as I reach the water and plunge in. The cold is intense. It feels like fire rippling across my legs. I stumble, shocked by the ferocity of the pain, and almost fall into the currents. I reach for one of the overhanging branches to steady myself but the tree groans and cracks. For a horrible moment I think the whole lot will come down, dumping tons of snow on me, but it holds and I wade on, wheezing and shaking my head as the cold eats into me. I do not manage to travel far in the water. I am feeling dizzy and weak. I make for the opposite bank, glance back to see if I have been followed, then climb up back into the trees.

My legs feel like they have been broken. I can hardly walk as I stumble through the undergrowth.

I have only just left the water when I hear movement from behind me. I halt and look back to see a man running towards me. He is dressed in trapper furs and gripping an axe but I can see immediately that he is one of the Vyrkos. His face is contorted, his eyes rolling loosely in their sockets. Strings of drool are hanging from his mouth.

I barely have time to pull out my knife before he slams into me. His attack is clumsy and uncoordinated and we roll back through the bracken. I slam into a trunk and the overhanging tree groans again, shedding snow.

The clatter of metal against metal echoes through the trees as I bring my knife up to parry a sword strike. The vampire grins and leans against me, filling my nostrils with an abattoir stink.

‘Hungry,’ it says, drooling as it presses its face closer.

I bring my knee up into its stomach and, as the vampire doubles over, I step back and kick it in the face, sending it tumbling through the snow.

It leaps back to its feet and rushes at me, swinging the sword again. I sidestep and plant my foot in its back, but it grabs my leg, sending me thudding into a tree trunk.

Pain explodes across the side of my face and I tumble into a snow drift. The sounds of the forest become muffled and distant but I hear feet pounding towards me and know I have to move. I wrench myself free, stagger to my feet and dodge the vampire’s sword as it whistles past my face. The creature is thrown forwards by its own momentum and stumbles back towards the riverbank.

I raise my pistol and take aim at the monster’s head. Then I have a better idea. Bullets rarely stop the Vyrkos but something else might. I fire at the tree that has been groaning since I grabbed one of its branches.

The vampire looks up in shock as a section of the massive tree judders and drops towards the ground. Snow hits with the force of a landslide, crashing into me and sending me staggering backwards.

When the air clears, I see no sign of my attacker. Where it was standing there is now a mountain of snow and broken branches. Still struggling to walk, I limp towards the riverbank. After a few seconds, I hear a sound beneath the pile of snow, a muffled scratching as the vampire struggles to dig its way out.

I turn and do my best to run, making for the path. To my relief, my legs still work and, after a few minutes, my clumsy limp becomes something approaching a jog. I reach the path, entering it through a route the Vyrkos should not be able to find and, as I run on, I hear no signs of pursuit.

Soon after, I spot the redoubt up ahead. It is at the top of the next rise, a ragged silhouette jutting up from the treetops. No one else would dream of trying to reach it. It is far too deep in the forest. Marya was delighted when I taught her the hidden paths. She loved the idea that our secret meetings would take place surrounded by so much danger. I am no fool. Marya is too beautiful and interesting to spend her time with me. It is the risk that has drawn her to me, the excitement of meeting here, surrounded by the howls of the night creatures. But I do not care why she wants me, only that she wants me.

I climb over the first hill and then approach the second, with the redoubt looming over me. I have to battle the urge to scream in delight. There is light leaking from the deep, arrow-slit windows. She is here. I can even recognise the scent of her perfume drifting through the cold air. I whisper her name as I climb the hill, moving as fast as I can go, heading for the doorway.

The redoubt is ancient, built in another age by masons using skills that have since been lost. The building is rounded and hunched by age but it will probably still be standing when Dravko has crumbled to dust. It wears such a thick, knotted skirt of brambles that much of the stonework has been obscured, but there are glimpses of grandeur here and there, peering through the thorns – the faces of glowering kings who ruled in an era when men could take the time to build something that would last.

I dust myself down as I approach the door and wipe some of the ice from my face, trying to look less like a vagabond. I pause at the threshold to take a last look behind me and I am delighted to see no sign of hag-kin. I have made it. My pulse is hammering in my temples. The wait is over. I step into the tower.

Marya stares at me, tears in her eyes, as I stumble into the candlelight. For a moment, I think she is hovering in the air, performing a strange, flamboyant greeting. Her hands are thrown back like a dancer.

But then I see the blood. The floor. The walls. The air. Everything is drenched in blood. Marya’s throat has been torn open. Shock roots me to the spot, until I see the figure who has killed her. A towering, feral vampire, its face rent out of shape by a bestial snout. It is gripping Marya with hands that are horribly elongated and bristling with filthy talons.

The strength goes from my legs and I drop to my knees. Marya is still gasping, blood foaming at her lips, but she is past saving. The monster has torn her apart as brutally as Velizar. Her body is as torn and sodden as her clothes. I raise my pistol, but it is no more than a reflex. I have no interest in fighting. What would I fight for? She is dead.

The vampire feeds on her slowly, delighting in every crunch and snap, savouring each throat-full while keeping its eyes locked on me, revelling in my fear and grief. I fire the pistol but my hand is shaking so badly the shot barely glances the monster. It stumbles slightly, then drops Marya’s corpse and lurches towards me, bloody saliva trailing from its muzzle.

It is only as the Vyrkos grips me that I realise something. The purple and yellow sash it is wearing is familiar. Numb with terror and grief I take it in my hands, staring at the blood-drenched cloth. The vampire pauses, letting me examine the sash, seeming pleased that I have noticed it.

It is Sanja’s, I realise. It is my wife’s sash. But how can it be here, in the forest, worn by this creature? Realisation dawns as I see other scraps of clothing beneath the blood. They are all equally familiar.

‘Sanja?’ I whisper, staring into the monster’s eyes.

The monster’s lips curl back, revealing its teeth in a horrible approximation of a smile.

I try to reconcile memories of my sweet, feeble wife with the nightmare that is crushing my arms in its claws.

‘Forever,’ says Sanja, her voice contorted by triumph and rage. She holds up a small wax doll, threaded with scraps of my hair and dressed to resemble me. ‘You will seek her forever. And always find her like this.’ Then she leans closer, widening her jaws to give me one last kiss.

Pain explodes across my face and, as I take my last breath, I see the truth clearly. The tower is not full of fresh blood, but heaped with dust and crumbling bones. I am not a young man, not strong. I am a frail, stooped old wretch. In a brief moment of clarity, I realise that this has all happened before; it has happened many times before.

She waits for me in the Vladym Forest, where trees root in blood and the hag-kin howl, where my life found meaning. ‘Marya.’ I whisper her name and it burns my veins, quickening my pulse, making me stumble like a drunk through the streets of Dravko. My need for her is a kind of agony. Too much to bear. But soon, the wait will be over.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Jake Ozga is a lifelong Warhammer fan and horror fanatic with a particular interest in exploring the dark corners of the Mortal Realms. He lives in Leamington Spa with his partner and several pets. His first story for Black Library, ‘Supplication’, featured in the Warhammer Horror anthology Invocations, and he has since gone on to write ‘Skull Throne’, ‘Suffer the Vision’ and ‘Into Dark Water’.

Nicholas Kaufmann is the author of numerous works of horror and dark fantasy, including the bestselling horror novel 100 Fathoms Below with Steven L. Kent. He has been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award, the Thriller Award, the Shirley Jackson Award and the Dragon Award, and his short fiction has appeared in Nightmare Magazine, Interzone and various other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Steven Sheil is a writer and film director based in Nottingham, UK. His films include the features Mum & Dad (2008), winner of the Silver Méliès at the Leeds International Film Festival, and Dead Mine (2012). His short fiction has previously appeared in Black Static magazine.

Richard Strachan is a writer and editor who lives with his partner and two children in Edinburgh, UK. Despite his best efforts, both children stubbornly refuse to be interested in tabletop wargaming. His first story for Black Library, ‘The Widow Tide’, appeared in the Warhammer Horror anthology Maledictions, and he has since written ‘Blood of the Flayer’, ‘Tesserae’ and the Warcry Catacombs novel Blood of the Everchosen.

David Annandale is the author of the Warhammer Horror novel The House of Night and Chain and the novella The Faith and the Flesh, which features in the portmanteau The Wicked and the Damned. His work for the Horus Heresy series includes the novels Ruinstorm and The Damnation of Pythos, and the Primarchs novels Roboute Guilliman: Lord of Ultramar and Vulkan: Lord of Drakes. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written Ephrael Stern: The Heretic Saint, Warlord: Fury of the God-Machine, the Yarrick series, and several stories involving the Grey Knights, as well as titles for The Beast Arises and the Space Marine Battles series. For Warhammer Age of Sigmar he has written Neferata: Mortarch of Blood and Neferata: The Dominion of Bones. David lectures at a Canadian university, on subjects ranging from English literature to horror films and video games.

Peter Fehervari is the author of the Warhammer 40,000 novels Requiem Infernal, Cult of the Spiral Dawn and Fire Caste, as well as the novella Fire and Ice from the Shas’o anthology. He has also written many short stories for Black Library, including the T’au-themed ‘Out Caste’ and ‘A Sanctuary of Wyrms’, the latter of which appeared in the anthology Deathwatch: Xenos Hunters. He also wrote ‘Nightfall’, which was in the Heroes of the Space Marines anthology, and ‘The Crown of Thorns’. He lives and works in London.

Phil Kelly is the author of the Warhammer 40,000 novels Farsight: Crisis of Faith and Farsight: Empire of Lies, the Space Marine Conquests novel War of Secrets, the Space Marine Battles novel Blades of Damocles and the novellas Farsight and Blood Oath. For Warhammer he has written the titles Sigmar’s Blood and Dreadfleet. He has also written ‘The Woman in the Walls’ for the Warhammer Horror portmanteau The Wicked and the Damned, and a number of short stories. He works as a background writer for Games Workshop, crafting the worlds of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000. He lives in Nottingham.

Ray Cluley is a British Fantasy Award winning horror writer. His short fiction has been printed and reprinted in various venues and has been translated into French, Chinese, Hungarian, and Russian. He currently lives and works in Wales.

Jude Reid lives in Glasgow with her husband and two daughters, and writes in the narrow gaps between full-time work as a surgeon, wrangling her kids and failing to tire out a border collie. In what little free time she has, she enjoys tabletop roleplaying, ITF Tae Kwon Do and inadvisably climbing big hills.

Justin D Hill is the author of the Warhammer 40,000 novels Cadia Stands, Cadian Honour and Traitor Rock. He has also written the Necromunda novel Terminal Overkill, the Space Marine Battles novel Storm of Damocles, as well as the short stories ‘Last Step Backwards’, ‘Lost Hope’, ‘The Battle of Tyrok Fields’ and many more. His novels have won a number of prizes, as well as being Washington Post and Sunday Times Books of the Year. He lives ten miles uphill from York, where he is indoctrinating his four children in the 40K lore.

James Brogden is a writer of horror and dark fantasy whose work includes the novels Bone Harvest and The Plague Stones, the latter being shortlisted for the British Fantasy Society’s August Derleth Award for Best Horror in 2020. His short stories have appeared in various anthologies and periodicals ranging from The Big Issue to the BFS Award-winning Alchemy Press. A part-time Australian who grew up in Tasmania and the Cumbrian Borders, he has since escaped to suburbia and now lives in the Midlands where he teaches English. When not writing or teaching, he can usually be found up a hill, poking around stone circles and burial mounds.

Darius Hinks is the author of the Warhammer 40,000 novels Blackstone Fortress, Blackstone Fortress: Ascension and the accompanying audio drama The Beast Inside. He also wrote three novels in the Mephiston series: Mephiston: Blood of Sanguinius, Mephiston: Revenant Crusade and Mephiston: City of Light, as well as the Space Marine Battles novella Sanctus. His work for Age of Sigmar includes Dominion, Hammers of Sigmar, Warqueen and the Gotrek Gurnisson novels Ghoulslayer and Gitslayer. For Warhammer, he wrote Warrior Priest, which won the David Gemmel Morningstar Award for best newcomer, as well as the Orion trilogy, Sigvald and several novellas.

An extract from The Widow Tide
by Richard Strachan
Taken from the anthology Maledictions

How did he die, she wondered? How frightened was he when he realised it was over?

She dwelled nightly on his pain, tormenting herself with his imagined agony. Smothered by the waves, perhaps, shouldered from his boat into the boiling waters; she saw him kicking against the current, the weight of his clothes dragging him down, choking and screaming for help though help was miles away. He would have watched with dread as his boat drifted off into the drizzling light, and then he was under, swallowed by the hungry dark, thrashing and scrabbling for air…

But perhaps it had been even worse. Maybe he had met his end in the jaws of some lurking horror of the Hopetide seas – a flensfin scavenging the catch, leaping from the sea as he hauled in his net. She saw its teeth rip the flesh from his neck, the spurt of blood in the water as he plunged his fingers into the gaping wound. The maddened frenzy of feeding things, tearing his body to pieces…

Why not? she thought. The worst was always the most likely.

She thought of this every night. Every night he died in a hundred different ways. Here on a narrow spur of land amongst the gravestones of the village cemetery, she looked down on the roiling water that surged and swayed and kept its secrets close. He was in there still, locked in the chains of the waves.

These were the widow tides, the fishermen said. A man left his boat at harbour in such weather and tried to ignore the old wives’ tales of the daemons in the deep. Out there, all the cold acres of the ocean groaned and muttered for their prey.

‘Katalina!’

In the sallow twilight, a figure moved up the slope from the beach. She huddled into her black sealskin, felt the wind pluck and harry at her.

‘Katalina,’ he shouted again as he came near, ‘I thought it was you.’

‘Radomir,’ she said, and at the same time thought, how does someone get so fat on a diet of fish?

He leaned against a gravestone to gather his breath. Framed against the dying day, broad and unshaven, he looked solid and unflappable. For a moment she felt ashamed of her grief.

‘For Sigmar’s sake, Kat, can’t you see…’ He held his hands out to her.

‘See what?’

‘That this isn’t good for you,’ he said. ‘Haunting the graves like this, spending so much time amongst the dead…’ He touched the fishbone charm around his neck. ‘He’s not coming back, you know that. Borys is dead.’

‘You can’t be sure.’

‘I loved him as much as anyone, really I did. His father was my oldest friend, the boy was like a son to me. But in the end you have to face the truth, no matter how painful it is. Hopetide’s an unforgiving coast.’

She gazed down into the churning sea, picturing her husband, his thick yellow hair, the wicked glint in his eyes. The black waters of Shyish did no favours to anyone. She was under no illusions; her man was surely dead.

‘I know,’ she admitted. ‘But how can his soul find the peace it needs if we don’t have a body to bury?’

‘Kat, it’s–’

‘He should be waiting for me on the Placid Shore, not lost out there afraid and alone. Don’t you see? He’ll come back to me, one way or another. The sea will give him up. And when it does, I’ll be waiting right here for him.’

Radomir gave an exasperated sigh. He turned to the path again.

‘You’re too sensitive for this place. Always dreaming… I remember when we cut your first sealskin, you cried like a baby! I thought Borys would keep your feet on the ground, but the two of you were more wrapped up in each other than anyone I’ve ever met.’ He smiled sadly. ‘I’m headman of the village, Kat, I’ve got to make the effort. People are getting restless. Sympathy’s a shallow well, and I think you’ve drawn as much of it as you’re going to get.’

‘I don’t care about their sympathy. They can think what they like.’

He dismissed her with a wave, but before he disappeared back down the slope he turned and said in a low, uncertain voice: ‘This isn’t the kind of night to be out, Katalina, take it from an old man like me. Don’t stay out much longer, please. It isn’t safe…’

Before she left, she paused to read the names on the gravestones, as she did every night. Aleksander Cuffe, Eryk Olsein, Selton Harred. Some of the names were too worn to read, no more than dimpled suggestions in the stone. She ran her fingers over them, wondering if those names now lived upon the Placid Shore, far across the ocean, where the sea was always gentle and kind. Perhaps the very motion of her fingertips over the forgotten letters brought back a spark of memory inside a distant soul?

When the wind died down she headed back to the village. The low dwellings clustered like barnacles against the shore. The guarding totems on the beach gave a last sad clatter, their poles decorated with bloodshark skulls and carved ivory; apotropaic scrimshaw to keep the daemons at bay. The water shushed and rattled across the stones. She paused awhile amongst the dunes to listen to it, this endless music that underlay all life in the village. Some nights she had lain out here with Borys, serenaded by that sound. Now there was only a long and empty evening ahead of her; the meagre fire in the grate, the pile of stinking nets she still had to repair – for even widows have to earn their keep. Home, she thought. It was a bitter image.

She heard it then: a noise in the dark.

She clutched a fold of her sealskin. Silence, nothing but the sea.

Her fingers fluttered to the bone charm around her wrist. After a sour moment it came again – low and strangled, burbling across the night. Her stomach was a shard of ice.

‘Who’s there?’

A skittering against the stones.

Crabs, she thought, picking through the surf. A seal, maybe, wounded and waiting to die. Something was out there…

A sudden, twisted scream lanced out of the dark, and before Katalina could think what she was doing she had flung herself onto the ground, the breath ragged in her chest. The scream came again, agonised, fainter. It clawed against her skin.

She peered through the dry grass. The sound came now as an awful, huffing wail, like a tortured animal, and it was this thought that finally put steel into her nerves. It took all of her courage, courage she thought she had lost the day they came to tell her Borys’ boat was gone, but slowly she stood and stepped onto the shore. If something was hurt out there, then surely it didn’t deserve to die alone.

The beach lay before her like an empty stage, tenebrous and ill-lit. The totems were columns of shadow, and every now and then she caught a glimpse of light from a breaking wave – and there was something else there too; a pale, blue glow that pulsed and shivered and fell. She stared at its afterglow, almost willing it to return, and when it did – still in that same weak pattern of pulse and fade – she moved cautiously across the beach towards it; towards the low slumped shape that floundered in the tide, white-skinned and wounded, gasping for breath and croaking out a single word:

‘Help.’

‘Eat,’ she said. ‘You must eat.’

She tipped the spoon against its blackened lips. The stew dribbled down its chin. Katalina had to still the fear that the thing was going to bite her when she reached to wipe it away.

It coughed. Spit flicked from its mouth onto the blanket.

She tried to make it drink, holding out a cup of water and supporting its head, her fingers splayed against its clammy, hairless skin. The rank feel of it tightened every muscle in her body.

‘Drink,’ she said. ‘You must drink.’ The thing snarled into the brimming cup.

Sometimes when it looked at her its gaze was delirious and vague. Bubbles formed on its lips, and it emitted a moan that reminded her of the deep-whales’ mournful midnight call when they surfaced out at sea. But then the eyes would snap to her like steel traps, pale blue with bitter black pupils.

‘I want to help you,’ she said. ‘You’re hurt. I’ve done the best I can, but… I’ve never seen anything like you before.’

It groaned and rolled away. Eventually, by the laboured rise and fall of its chest, she thought it must have fallen asleep. In the shivering firelight it looked for a moment like a wizened old man, but when the flames leapt higher it felt instead like an image drawn from an old dream she could barely remember.

Her first thought had been of her husband – ‘Borys!’ she’d gasped – but then the tide had turned it over and she saw the pale, inhuman face, the sunken eyes and pointed ears, that narrow, tapering chin. It was wrapped in nothing but rags and broken scraps of what could have been armour, weird, conch-like whorls of metal that were tarnished with salt. On its chest were savage puncture marks. It had gurgled and retched, reaching for a caged shard of glass submerged in the surf. A jewel of some kind, she thought, the source of that dull blue glow she had seen from the dunes. She plucked it from the water and slipped it into her pocket, and despite the low, disturbing scent that clung to its skin, a smell like burning weeds or rotting fish, Katalina had managed to haul the creature from the water. It took her half an hour to drag it up the beach. A mariner caught in the storm, she thought. Flung by the currents towards our lonely shore. The realms were wider and stranger than anyone could understand, but even as she struggled into the dunes she knew this was no lost mariner. It wasn’t a trader from Aqshy blown off course, or a Ghurish merchant sunk with his cargo. This was something else.

Once inside she had stripped off the rags and armour and cleaned its wounds. The creature’s eyes had flickered as she lowered it to the bed.

She crept from its side now and settled herself into Borys’ old chair by the fire, a blanket drawn across her shoulders. A cold wind threaded through the cottage. She tried to rest, tried to ignore the gagging smell exuded by the thing that was sleeping in her bed. It was a scent, she felt, of brackish tides and dead weeds, of shorelines long abandoned.

‘Kattie! Are you up?’

The widow Agata’s grating tones, the older woman screeching her name from the path.

The melancholic light fell clear through a gap in the curtain. Katalina saw the shape in her bed, heard the moist clicking of its breath. She cast off her blanket and stood for a moment gazing down at the smooth and savage blade of the creature’s face, the frown of pain or sorrow that briefly marred it.

There was a brisk knock at the door. ‘Still abed, girl?’ Agata muttered. ‘Up, up. Shift yourself, the day will near be done at this rate!’ Then, with the widow’s maddening familiarity, a second after that the door began to open. Quickly Katalina drew the hanging around the bed.

Agata was stooped and wrinkled like the strings of bladderwrack the villagers hung above their doors for luck, but she wore her widowhood like a well-tailored frock.

‘What is it?’ Katalina protested. ‘You can’t just burst in like this, it isn’t right!’

‘And what do you think I’m like to see, hmm? With your Borys gone I’m sure there’s nothing to offend my eyes. And right or not,’ the widow said, ‘there’s work to be done.’

‘I’ll have the nets ready by tomorrow.’

‘More than nets,’ Agata grumbled. ‘There’s crab pots that need fixing too. The day’s catch needs sorted for market. Think you’re too good for that?’

‘I’ll help, I promise.’

The old woman trundled about the cottage, picking at the mess on the table, peering into the dirty pot on the hearth.

‘I know your man’s gone,’ she said, not unkindly, ‘but so’s mine, a long time past. We all die, Kattie – Shyishans know this more than most. The village continues. So should you.’

She was about to leave when she noticed the rags bundled on the floor. Quickly, before Katalina could stop her, the widow hooked them up.

‘What’s this? Been out beachcombing have you?’

She held up the strange metal plates to the light, curved and barbed like seashells. There was something in her eyes then, Katalina felt; a lost memory resurfacing from deep places, an old fear finally confirmed. Like a change in the weather, the expression passed away. Agata cast the pieces down with a shudder.

‘Huh. They’ll make good flower baskets for your eaves come spring,’ she said. She squinted at the younger woman. For a moment her face looked drawn and harried. ‘Don’t suppose you saw much else out there?’

‘Like what?’

‘Tracks on the beach, the young lads say. Something dragged itself from the sea last night, maybe. Or dragged itself back.’

Katalina said nothing. The older woman stared at her, but under that piercing gaze she made her face blank. Only the thin material of the hanging separated the old widow from the truth of the rumour.

‘Well,’ she said at last. ‘Open a window, Kat. Get some air in. It reeks in here.’

When the door banged behind the old woman, Katalina fell into her chair. She wiped the sweat from her face and stilled her breathing, and when she could hear Agata back at her drying green she drew the hanging. The thing was staring up at her, its eyes a richer blue, the dark lips parted to show a sliver of silver teeth.

‘You’re safe,’ she said. ‘I won’t let anybody hurt you. I promise.’

She took the dull blue jewel from her pocket and placed it on the pillow by the creature’s head. It said nothing, moved not a muscle, but somehow Katalina was sure it was saying thank you.

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WARHAMMER HORROR

A BLACK LIBRARY IMPRINT

First published in Great Britain in 2021.
This eBook edition published in 2021 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Represented by: Games Workshop Limited – Irish branch,
Unit 3, Lower Liffey Street, Dublin 1, D01 K199, Ireland.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Rachel Williams.

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ISBN: 978-1-80026-656-8

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