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 ACCURSED

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

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Epilogue

About the Author

An Extract from ‘The Accursed’

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.

CHAPTER ONE

The solemn bells of the Cathedral Ignatzio tolled over the Evercity that morning, as I stood in the baroque stone doorway of my attic room and took a last look at my childhood. This lofty chamber had been a refuge from the madness of my home world, but I could not stay here. Not now that I’d been summoned by the responsibility of my birth. I took in a deep breath, telling myself I was ready.

On my shelves were ranks of metal Guardsmen, boxes overflowing with long-discarded playthings, and the few books that had helped shape me: Wain’s Illustrated Lex Imperialis, Thorn’s Book of Martyrs and 101 Devotions for the Young. But there were older companions, too.

I saw the stiff poses of my most treasured toys, lying in the shadows. They had wooden arms, legs and heads, uniforms of embroidered cloth, bodies of fur and flesh. Time and play had ruined most of them. Staring back at me were empty eye sockets and black, glassy optics. Tufts of stuffing peeked through worn torsos. Only one of them moved: Gambol, my clown. He stood out with his red hair, whitened skin, blue diamonds stitched over his eyes, and a broad, red smile tattooed upon his face. He rocked back and forth on his sutured haunches, the bells on his harlequin’s uniform ringing gently as he scratched at the brass flesh-plug behind his ear. His voice was boyish, despite his adult size. ‘Ruddie go?’

‘Ruddie go,’ I said in our childlike pidgin.

He sniffed ostentatiously as a tear rolled down his pockmarked cheek.

‘Who Gambol play with?’ He pulled an exaggerated sad face and started to sob theatrically. ‘Gambol sad.’

I could see that. When I was young, I had thought of him as my closest friend. Now, I was unmoved by these cheap displays of fake emotion. In truth, he was once some criminal or heretic that had been turned into a wealthy kid’s plaything – his legs amputated, his brain hacked into and his neural pathways slaved to a simple spectrum of emotions. Growing up, I had occasionally wondered what crime he had committed to deserve such punishment, and whether something lurked still beneath his neural circuitry. Was there a malevolence in his bloodshot eyes?

Gambol scratched behind his ear again. His fingers came away bloody.

‘Itches,’ he said, but his flesh-plugs had always festered.

‘Gambol must not scratch,’ I told him.

‘Itches,’ he said again, and fresh blood covered his nails in a red glaze. He held them up for me to see.

I didn’t know what he wanted me to do about it.

‘Pain is a sign of life,’ I told him.

I dragged that parting out, but I’ve since learnt that it is kinder to leave people behind without fuss. There’s no point in prolonging torment, or apologising, or asking for forgiveness. It’s better just to rip off the plaster, as they say. Pull the trigger. Put the shot right between the eyeballs – or even better, in the back of the head. A brutal kiss, where skull and spine meet.

But I didn’t know any of that back then, as I stood in the doorway of my refuge, trying to be kind to an old friend.

‘I’ll be back,’ I lied.

Gambol wiped his hand on his quartered livery. Suddenly he was bright and cheery. ‘Back? Gambol wait! When you back?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Today?’

‘No.’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘No.’

He flinched at my tone and opened his mouth in an exaggerated wail, his blue-diamond eyes squeezing another torrent of tears down his face. I should have shot him there and then to put him out of his fake misery. But I was in a hurry, and through the ancient walls of my ancestral home, I could hear the cathedral bells tolling solemnly, reminding me of my duty that morning. It was the hallowday of Saint Helena Richstar, and I had been summoned.

‘Gambol sad!’ he called as I turned my back on him. They were his last ever words to me. I didn’t bother answering, but shut the door, the click of the lock sealing my childhood firmly in the past.

Some say that partings are hard, but the truth was I felt lighter after I left Gambol behind and made my way down the grand staircase, one hand on the ironwood banister to guide my steps in the darkness.

This stairway descended through the heart of the ancient palace that my mother had bought lock, stock, and with all the paraphernalia of a noble household when she had arrived on the planet. The walls were lined with antique portraits of complete strangers: men and women in gilded Militarum uniforms with high shakos and gold braids, like shrines to ancient battles. The unknown faces were severe, their eyes haunted by illustrious careers, fighting and dying for the God-Emperor across the wide Imperium of Mankind. And there were their mementos as well: crossed lances with musty tassels, venerable powerblades, and hunting trophies from across the Gallows Cluster – a mix of heads and fangs and horns and antlers, mouldering pelts exposing white skulls, glassy eyes dulled by veils of ancient cobwebs, and the stink of naphthalene preservatives.

Halfway down I smelt the musky reek of the greenskin head. The monstrous creature had always terrified me with its broken tusks and beaded, blankly staring eyes. The mount bore the name of the Battle of Cinnabar’s Folly and that of the man who had killed the beast: a General Everard Richstar. I had learnt about him in my histories. He’d been a reputable Guardsman until he had fallen in the bloody rout at Oukk.

At the bottom of the stairs was a wide landing with thick carpets and ten-foot doors opening off into various rooms of further pomp and grandeur, home to more historical figures I would never live up to. One set of doors, leading to my mother’s apartment, was ajar. I heard her voice calling my name. ‘Ruddie?’

She sounded as if she had just noticed my approach, but I knew she had been watching me ever since I left my chamber. The whole palace was covered by her surveillance picters. Their crystal eyes had been silently following my progress.

I used to joke that nothing was ever hidden from my mother, but I’ve since learnt that there are two ways of keeping confidences: not telling anyone anything or, if you must, killing them once you do.

Death is a true friend. It keeps all secrets.

My mother’s boudoir had the musty air of a museum, dedicated to my childhood. On the wall hung my old tasselled caps, stiff jackets and embroidered shoes, while a chosen assortment of my toys cluttered the black-lacquered shelves.

Mother had never been a happy woman, but she cherished the past in the misapprehension that she had been happier then. Her discontent was like a weight upon all who knew her, and I looked forward to leaving it all behind as I entered her room.

She was sitting in her high-backed leather throne, facing away from me. The throne swung soundlessly round, revealing its occupant.

‘Mother,’ I said, and bowed.

She wore a black lace dress with a ruff of furs about her neck, and an ornate black headdress lit with fairy lights, dark against her silver hair.

My mother was a curious sight, even for the Evercity. Subdermal implants had turned her eyes to gold, and her skin silver. In the half-light of candle flames, she shimmered, but it was hard to read emotion in her metallic visage. She let out a long breath of smoke and took me in, from boots to head.

From her long ivory pipe came the sweet scent of narcotics. They left me feeling nauseous, but they were one of her only joys. ‘Ruddie,’ she said, exhaling smoke along with my name.

An augmetic monocle covered one eye. In its light I could see the flicker of a pict-image against her skin. The miniature screen went dark as she moved the monocle aside and I looked into her gilded eyes. They gave nothing away as she regarded me.

‘I wanted to look good for father,’ I told her. Over my black bodyglove, I wore a suit of combat armour made by the finest artisans in the Evercity. She beckoned me forward, her silver skin catching the flickering light, and nodded silently.

‘You look like him.’ When she said that, it was not a compliment. Father was an ugly man and I had inherited his craggy looks. ‘Be careful, Ruddie,’ she said. ‘Or you will end up like him in other ways.’

Her words stung me.

Now, of course, I know better. I have known handsome men and beautiful women who were not much served by their good looks, and I have got used to being an ugly man. I’ve learnt to not let other people hurt me. Feelings are like tripwires. A blank conscience is the difference between wakeful and dreamless sleep.

Something in my mother’s lap moved. It was one of her pet simians, squatting amongst the drapes of her skirt, dressed in a hat of velvet and a jacket of silk brocade. About its neck was clasped an electro control-leash, the neuro circuits buried in the scruff of its neck. I think it was called Imp, though I made a point of not keeping track of any of her pets’ names. I had never liked any of them: they had always been rivals to my mother’s affection. When she lifted it up and pressed it to her chest I refused to be baited, but then it reached down and dragged my clockwork Titan, Rhadameor, from the folds in her gown.

The winding mechanism had long since broken, the blue-and-flame paintwork was chipped and worn, the inferno cannon re-welded onto the arm more times than I could remember, but it was dear to me. ‘That’s mine,’ I said.

‘You don’t play with it any more. You’re all grown up.’ The words held an edge of spite.

‘No,’ I said, ‘but it’s still mine.’

A montage flashed through my head of sitting with Gambol and the other playmates my mother had bought – human and augmented. We had filled my bedroom floor with metal Militarum. My bed was the gates of the Imperial Palace on Holy Terra, and Rhadameor had smashed its way through the legions of traitors.

She was trying to hurt me, and I refused to show any emotion.

She saw that her ploy had failed, or maybe, in her narcotic stupor, she felt a pang of guilt. ‘It seems that only yesterday you were just a boy. And now look at you…’

My mother’s eyes blinked and I saw a golden tear make its way down her silver cheek. Beneath all the frippery and glittering façade, she loved me. It was a stifling, choking love, but it was well meant. And she knew that she was losing me.

‘He’s a hard man,’ she warned. ‘He will brook no weakness.’

She spoke from experience, of course. She was the last of my father’s three concubines and had spent most of my childhood lamenting her luck at being brought to this planet, but as she spoke, my eyes must have taken on that glazed, hard exterior because she stopped herself and took a deep breath.

‘I bought this for you,’ she said at last, and took something out of the voluminous folds of her midnight lace skirts. Her silver arm shimmered as she held it out to me.

For once I was lost for words.

The autopistol was priceless, with a carved ivory handle and an exquisitely patterned barrel, acid-etched with entwined vines and the Imperial aquila etched on either side. But it was the Tronsvasse symbol stamped into the barrel that struck me dumb.

It was the mark par excellence, of beauty and craftsmanship, and expense. And, even for my mother, it must have cost a fortune.

‘Mother!’ I breathed. I felt a genuine wave of humility. It was so unfamiliar that it stuck in my throat. I had to cough to clear away the emotion. ‘Thank you,’ I said at last.

‘I asked the Cardinal Archbishop to bless it. And he blessed these as well.’ She handed me a heavy package of hard rounds. ‘They fragment upon impact,’ she told me. I held them up. Each one of the snub-nosed bullets had been hand-ground by artisans into the shape of a flower. ‘Manstoppers,’ she said.

I knew, of course. Xenos-hunters used them to stop the foes of humanity in their tracks. There was an image in one of my books that showed how the shards ripped through the flesh of the target.

I thanked her many times and she nodded stiffly.

‘You had better go. Arcad is waiting for you downstairs.’

‘I don’t need him,’ I said. She started to argue but I was adamant. ‘What will father think if you send one of your lifewards with me?’ My logic was clear. If I was to prove myself his successor, I had to set myself high standards.

She fell silent. The simian nudged her finger to encourage her to scratch again.

‘I will be fine, I promise.’ I patted the Tronsvasse at my side.

Her fingers curled protectively about the creature in her lap. Its blank eyes blinked slowly at me as it clutched my Titan in both hands.

‘Remember,’ she said, ‘you were mine first.’

‘You’re right. I was,’ I said.

The past tense stung her and there was ice in her voice as she answered, ‘Well, go to him then.’

I nodded curtly and stepped forward to embrace her. She did not stand. The smell of narcotics had worked its way into her clothes. She was stiff in my arms. We were silent for a moment, mother and son, till at last I started to pull away. Her fingers clutched my arm, and her hoarse whisper spat into my ear. ‘They will try to kill you,’ she said. ‘You must be ready. And when they come for you, do not hesitate.’

She slapped my cheek to make me remember. The blow smarted and her nails left scratches across my face. I blinked and nodded. I had known this for years. It was burned into my soul. I did not need to be struck again.

‘Go, if you must,’ she said.

I walked to her doorway, took a deep breath, and closed the double doors.

Those were her final words to me. A month later she was dead. But I did not know that then, and if I had, I do not know that I would have done anything differently. Each life runs its own course, and it was the Emperor’s will that hers should end.

CHAPTER TWO

For a week, the people of the Evercity had been preparing for Saint Helena’s hallowday with fasts, prayer strips and displays of self-mortification.

I was a little hazy on what exactly Saint Helena, Celibate Matriarch and Healer of the Sick, had done to earn her beatification. The Gallows Cluster had so many holy folk, it was sometimes hard to keep track of them all. Either she had conquered worlds or purged apostates, or perhaps she was the martyr who had been lashed to an asteroid and fired into the local star.

But these details were the last of my concerns as I slipped out of the rear gate of my home and found myself in a dark, narrow alley. A rain of foul liquids dripped down from leaking pipes high above. The mouldering rockcrete was stained with long, damp streaks of moss and fungi.

The alley led south, dropping sharply down the tiered steps of the Evercity. It quickly left the Palace Quarter behind, and snaked back and forth through the narrow slum dwellings.

A foetid stink hung in the air. In these cramped habitations faith was even stronger, and woven charms and icons hung from every rockcrete eave. Prayer strips were plastered onto every wall, Imperial aquilas had been given a fresh lick of silver paint, and from the murmurs issuing from behind closed doors, the fervent were already up and working their way through their chaplets.

I took a flight of worn marble stairs down another narrow alley that plunged between two fallen marmoreal palazzos, now crumbling and subdivided into blighted tenements. This was the kind of place my mother had warned me of – a narrow and forsaken spot where a man might be gutted, his body dropped in an acid bath, and never seen again. But I was young, and it was a little act of rebellion and fearlessness that morning that I took that road. But even as I checked behind me, just in case, I felt someone following me. I touched the Tronsvasse at my side. Just the feel of it was reassuring, as I spun about and saw a dark shape with a cloth pulled close about their face. I felt a prickle of fear run down my spine, like a droplet of ice water.

My mother’s words rang in my head. I stopped, drew my sidearm and raised it.

‘Halt!’ I ordered. There was a shout of surprise and I saw that it was just an old woman, going out for her morning prayers. She threw up her hands in dismay and retreated back the way she had come, old legs going slowly up the steep stairs.

I felt foolish as I slid my gun back into its holster.

My father was Chief Enforcer of the planet of Potence and I knew that I could shoot with impunity, but an innocent old hag wasn’t worth the ammunition.

A manstopper would rip her apart, I thought, and she was probably harmless. And besides, I was in a hurry to meet my father.

My father was Aebram Howe. He had held the position of Chief Enforcer of Potence for nearly a century, and I was his third son. We were direct descendants of Knoxe Howe, officer of the Adeptus Arbites, who had been brought to the Gallows Cluster six hundred years earlier, by the then dowager Patridzo – a tough woman who knew the limitations of her son and his consorts.

Knoxe Howe was, by all accounts, a bastard. One of his first acts after imposing his authority was to move himself and his captains out of the Patridzo’s sprawling palace complex. ‘Courtly politicking is a canker that has made this world weak,’ he was rumoured to have told his son. ‘Do not let it weaken you.’

The family lore was full of stories about Knoxe Howe. There was so much internecine plotting that he had ended up purging two whole branches of the Richstar family, including that of Everard Richstar, whose palace I had grown up in. But one of his major contributions to the Evercity was the Enforcer Block, a rockcrete cube within a ferrocrete palisade, ringed with curled loops of flaywire and set at the base of the capital.

It was a blunt and brutal riposte to the baroque splendour of the tiered palaces and palazzos. It was there my father lived, and it was the place to which I had been summoned.

As soon as I set foot on the broad approaches to the Enforcer Block, I saw the Tarantula sentry guns swivel towards me. To the slaved minds within I was a potential threat. Their twinned blunt muzzles tracked my progress across the featureless thoroughfare.

As I drew closer, I could make out the servitors that manned each weapon. The skulls were set into the metallic gun housings, their eyes replaced with augmetic targeters. They reminded me unpleasantly of Gambol. He had been prone to spells of anger, and there had been times when I had had to hide under my bed until they had passed. The experience had taught me not to trust my safety to the repurposed brain of a heretic or criminal, and now I felt uncomfortable as the malevolent red targeters fixed upon my forehead.

The heavy gates slid open as I stepped onto the access ramp.

An enforcer stood guard within. He wore everyday battleplate consisting of flak armour and a helmet with mirrored visor, and carried a pump-action riot-gun. I didn’t bother showing him my personal idents and he didn’t ask. Everyone knew who I was. I could be his boss in a year’s time. His boss, or dead, as my mother had reminded me – depending on how dirty my half-brothers fought for our inheritance.

In the courtyard, a row of halftracks with riot-screens and black enforcer heraldry stood ready for deployment. At the far end were the three Repressors Knoxe Howe had brought with him to Potence, six hundred years earlier. They were like living shrines to the Lex Imperialis, with thrice-blessed armour and lovingly oiled storm bolters.

They dwarfed the other transports in size, and with their brutal lines and weight. My father loved them more than anything else in the world – including his own flesh and blood. I told myself that I had learnt not to hold it against them, but to be honest, it wasn’t true. The only consolation was that they would be mine, eventually.

A riot squad were heading out on patrol. Each of them was strapping on their body armour and helmets. I hurried past them down some rockcrete steps, polished smooth by the passage of many black jackboots. Enforcer Captain Bachis, my father’s right hand, met me coming up and said, ‘Your father–’

I nodded as I swept past him. I knew what he was going to say: I was late.

My father’s office was sunk into the bowels of the rockcrete block. I took the steps down to the basement, to where the air underground was cool, and smelt like a mix of damp and disinfectant.

Stretching away from the bottom of the stairwell was a long, brightly lit corridor of holding and interrogation cells. I could hear someone screaming, though the noise was muffled behind heavy doors. The pitiful note of a lost soul pleading for their life. A deviant being cured of their crimes.

The plaintive calls echoed about me as I made my way along the corridor. My father’s office was located halfway down. It had no obvious markings, the presence of another enforcer, assault shotgun held across his chest, the only clue as to its significance. The man nodded me through. I took a moment to catch my breath and then knocked.

‘Come!’ a voice boomed.

The office was a windowless rockcrete chamber. A bare strip-lumen lit the room with a sterile white light. My father sat behind a large pressed-metal desk, absent-mindedly rubbing the fifty-year-old scar that marked where an assassin had almost succeeded in cutting his throat.

It was hard to take your eyes off him. He looked as ugly as the building he occupied, and exuded all the menace of a frag grenade. But that morning, as he flipped through a pile of papers, I saw that his skin was sallow, his breathing was laboured.

The rumours are true, I told myself. His last rejuvenat treatment had not taken well. My father was mortal after all.

At last, he looked up from his desk and sighed. ‘Ah, there you are.’

I had expected so much more, despite all my mother’s warnings, and my palms started to sweat as apprehension rose within me.

‘I am ready for work, sir,’ I said, and made the sign of the aquila.

His eyes flickered over me, from my boots up to my neck, just as my mother’s had done. His look was of ill-disguised contempt. He simply took me all in: gun, uniform, armour – then, without warmth, he said, ‘I see you brought your gun.’

‘Yes, sir. A Tronsvasse.’ I held it out.

‘A parabellum,’ he snorted. ‘And you think you deserve it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘I am a Howe,’ I said.

‘It’s a name,’ he snapped. ‘That’s all. If you want to live up to it, then prove yourself.’

‘I will, sir!’

He grunted and went back to the papers before him, and my cheeks reddened. When he spoke again, it was not to me, but to one of the officers standing waiting against the wall. ‘When is the Patridzo returning?’

‘This afternoon.’

My father rolled his eyes. The Patridzo was the hereditary ruler of Potence, a ‘weak and corrupt product of ten thousand years of dynastic struggles’, as my father liked to say. Now, he said, ‘Everyone is in place?’

‘Yes, sir.’

My father didn’t trust the man’s word, as for the next half an hour he checked the details each in turn. I waited through it all and started to think I had been entirely forgotten as he went on to demand reports on the Banda synth-drug cartels and crime syndicates.

He seemed to suddenly remember me and explained, ‘We have pinpointed one of the Banda safe houses. Time to wipe the vermin out.’

My father and his officers went back and forth, discussing which gang leader they would be up against, and how much force to commit. I listened with growing interest, thinking that this would be my first mission. I would soon be getting my first man, I thought.

I let them talk, even though my legs and back ached. ‘May I help, sir?’ I asked at last.

I saw a spark of amusement in my father’s eye. It was as if he was measuring how long I would wait without attention. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m sending you on a judgement tour.’

‘What’s that?’

‘A chance to get to know the world beyond…’ – my father waved his hand in a dismissive manner – ‘all this.’

I risked a joke. ‘Is there life beyond the Evercity?’

My father did not even smile. He nodded across the room to the row of officers who waited upon him. ‘Meet Enforcer Terrini,’ he said.

I spun round. Terrini was a square man, with broad shoulders, a broad belt and military boots laced up over his ankles. He was grizzled and grey and looked solid, reliable. And he was clearly hand-picked. ‘You’re both leaving in an hour’s time,’ my father said.

I thought of the raid on the Banda hideout. ‘Today?’ I said.

‘Yes. Today,’ my father said. ‘What – were you expecting to be allowed to take part in the hallowday revelries?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s just that… the raid… on the safe house?’

He fixed me with a steely glare. ‘Boy. You start at the bottom, like the rest of us.’ He waved a hand dismissively. ‘Terrini will let you know what you’ll need.’

At that moment there was a knock on the door. Another enforcer put his head around it. ‘Sir. He is ready to confess.’

A man was dragged in. Banda tattoos swirled about his bare arms. The enforcer who’d spoken kicked him. ‘Tell the Chief Enforcer what you told me!’

The man had started to speak when the enforcer punched him full in the face. There was a crunch as his nose broke, and then a torrent of blood started to splatter down onto the floor.

Terrini took my arm and led me towards the doorway. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘It’s time to go.’

The sound of heavy blows followed us outside as Terrini shut the door behind us. We stood alone in the corridor. ‘Enforcer First Class Algar Terrini,’ he said and put his hand out. His grip was like a vice. He nodded towards my sidearm. ‘Nice piece. Know how to use it?’

‘Point and pray,’ I told him.

Terrini laughed and slapped my arm. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I like your style!’

A few minutes later we were striding across an underground hangar. The low rockcrete roof was crossed with steel I-beams and looped pipes and ducting slung under the crossbars. At the far end was a parked halftrack, emblazoned with the Imperial aquila and the Richstar emblem.

Two kitbags were leaning against one of the front wheels. Terrini lifted one in each hand. ‘Everything you’ll need,’ he said as he hefted them up onto a rack on top of the driver’s cabin. He lashed them down, then dropped to the rockcrete.

The cabin was bare and rudimentary, the seats bowed, the leather covers patched and torn. The green paint on the dashboard was chipped and scratched from decades of use. Underneath was dull iron and patches of rust. It smelt of cheap lubricants and stale lho-tar. It was a long way from my father’s Repressors.

Well, this is the bottom, I thought, as Terrini started the engine on the third attempt. A cloud of thick, brown promethium smoke rose behind us as he pumped the pedals to gently wake the machine-spirit.

Once it was fully awake Terrini played with a few buttons and levers, pulled a pair of mirrored glare-shields from his breast pocket, and at last, with a crunch of gears, we lurched forward.

CHAPTER THREE

‘So, what is a judgement tour?’ I asked as Terrini ground the halftrack’s gears and we swung up out of the subterranean hangar into the main courtyard. He did not turn to me, but kept his gaze fixed ahead, his thick knuckles fastened upon each handle of the butterfly steering wheel.

‘The outer settlements… they’re too distant and too small to maintain their own Court of Misdemeanours.’ He tapped an ornate scroll case chained to his waist. ‘Writ of Magisterial Authority,’ he said, and lifted his two forefingers like a pistol and made the sound of firing. ‘Full judicial powers. Settle scores, impose fines and execute.’

He nodded towards a tin chest that lay between us. ‘Open that.’

I did so. I had expected food, water, spare galvanic powercells, but instead there were a pair of leather-bound tomes of law and a selection of chains, cuffs, nail screws, power prods and other bladed implements.

‘Instruments of interrogation,’ Terrini stated.

I remembered the man who had been brought into my father’s office that morning. Terrini appeared to read my mind. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Those who rebel against the Imperium of Man, and the Emperor’s representative – they’ve forfeited their humanity. They’re not much better than beasts.’

I nodded, taking this in as we pulled out of the enforcer compound.

‘You’ve got to understand,’ Terrini went on, ‘this whole planet is just a small tooth on a cog, buried in the guts of the Imperium. We’re just an agri world. As far as the High Lords of Terra are concerned, we’re almost entirely insignificant. Our only function is to deliver our agri tithes on time.’ He raised his fingers into the air to punctuate his words as he drove. ‘If we fail, then millions – billions – will die. But the serfs don’t care. They only care about filling their bellies and screwing their sisters. Forget all the “Emperor loves you” bullshit. It doesn’t work with them. The only way of getting them to focus is to shoot them. Ten. Twenty. Half of them. So, before each tithe fleet arrives we have to make a show of violence. Put the fear of the Emperor in them.’

‘And does it work?’

‘Of course,’ Terrini said. He turned to me and smiled. ‘Power comes through violence, and violence must be seen to be done.’

As the Evercity shrank into the distance, I breathed deep and felt some of life’s pressures fade, like barking hounds that fall behind.

‘First stop is Cardinal Water,’ Terrini said. ‘The bookkeeper there’s a solid man.’

‘Who are the bookkeepers?’

‘They run the farmsteads. They’re called bookkeepers because they keep the tithe books,’ he said, as if it were obvious.

‘And what are they?’

Terrini sighed. ‘They’re the record of what each facility has to deliver for the Imperial tithes.’

‘And if they don’t deliver?’

‘They do.’

‘Always?’

Terrini smirked. ‘If they want to live, they do.’

We were waved through a series of roadblocks and then we were rolling south through serf-camps, warehouses and brutal factorums with barred windows and chimneys pouring out heavy black promethium fumes. Ahead lay Starport – a sprawling ferrocrete plain, with rust-stained circular silos, augur towers and acre upon acre of rusting bonded hangars. Parked on the landing zones were the orbital landers, awaiting agri tithes to ferry into space.

At last, Terrini broke the silence. ‘Know how to roll a lho-stick?’

He pulled a leather pouch from under his body armour and tossed it across the cabin. I sprinkled the shredded leaf, rolled and sealed the paper, and handed the object back.

‘Light it,’ he said.

I took his lighter from the panel before me, lit it in my cupped hand and passed it stub first.

He took a long drag and let a thread of smoke trail out of the corner of his mouth. Then he pursed his lips and blew out a funnel of blue smoke and started to sing tunelessly to himself as the hours stretched on with the miles, which grew increasingly quiet.

As fields took over from factorums, there wasn’t much to see but rank upon rank of twenty-foot-high corn stalks, dry and rustling and approaching harvest.

Life away from the Evercity was all a revelation to me. This was a world of serf-camps, dirt and poverty. There were night soil trucks with human filth slopping from their open lids; labour gangs, strung out in fields or resting in the shade of the corn, each one wearing the locked casket about their neck that bore details of their confinement. The overseers stood apart, ancient laslocks thrown over their shoulders. They looked almost as downtrodden as their serfs, each one a study in poverty and haunting desperation. None of the thralls looked up. There was safety in the crowd. It was dangerous to be singled out. Only a fool brought trouble upon themself.

It struck me how charmed my life had been up to now. I understood that, despite the silks and marble and palace life, only a quirk of fate separated me from the chained agri serfs huddling by the side of the road. And who knew what the future held? When my father died, there would be a scramble for the inheritance. I did not know how I would be tested in the months ahead, but I knew that failure meant death.

And thinking of Gambol, there was worse than death.

‘What are their crimes?’ I asked Terrini as we passed another serf-gang.

‘All sorts. The worst heretics are culled. Suitable ones are turned over to the flesh-wrights. But, for those whose crimes are less serious, they suffer serfdom. Their children inherit their crimes, as do their children’s children, over many generations, until their ancestors’ sins have been expunged.’

I thought of Gambol and wondered what dark crimes had lurked behind his tattooed smile.

After a long silence Terrini said, ‘How long do you think your father’s got left?’

‘What do you mean?’

Terrini laughed, a deep, phlegmy rumble that brought up a gobbet which he spat out of his open window. ‘Don’t play stupid. Everyone can see he’s dying.’ There was a pause. I had no idea what to say. He looked almost bashful for a moment. ‘You do know, don’t you?’

‘Of course,’ I said. I looked out of the window, considering how much I could or should say. I answered his first question. ‘A few years.’

Terrini tossed his lho-stub out through the window. ‘And what’ll happen when he’s gone?’

I didn’t answer. I looked at Terrini, and it struck me that this was what happened in all the stories I had read as a child. The youngster was sent out of town with a guardian instructed to kill them…

Silence returned. Terrini tossed the pouch back to me for another lho-stick. ‘Want one?’ he asked.

‘Sure.’

The lho was rougher than I was used to. It caught in my throat and made me cough, and Terrini laughed. ‘Puts gravel in your throat,’ he said, and rattled out a cough to prove his point.

CHAPTER FOUR

Cardinal Water was a sprawling farmstead six hours south of the Evercity, manned by a hundred agri serfs. The facility consisted of serf barracks, a command block, barns and subterranean plant houses with plex-glass domes.

We arrived as the afternoon was starting to cool, the halftrack coming to a rest in the middle of the rockcrete courtyard. Terrini slammed his door shut and looked about. There was a harvester clearing a broad furrow through a distant field. The rumble of its engine was like a constant, faraway thunder. A haze of dust rose in its wake.

The whole place had an apathetic air – even the ex-Militarum overseers, who had seen our approach, and now appeared, strapping their belts tight about their pot bellies. The bookkeeper was the fattest of the lot. He started sweating as he approached, and talked quickly as he led us around.

Terrini’s standard response was to disapprove of everything he was shown, tutting and shaking his head. It keeps the bookkeepers on their toes, he told me later, but at the end of the inspection he gave the bookkeeper a warning glance. ‘You’d better fulfil your quotas.’

The bookkeeper mopped his brow. ‘Yes, sir. Of course. I promise. We will!’

Terrini said nothing as the bookkeeper showed us into his office. An ornate wooden bureau took up half of one wall. ‘It’s all in there,’ he said.

I saw then that the title ‘bookkeeper’ was no mere honorific. The leather-bound tithe book was as tall as a man, and as thick as a cargo-8 pneumatic tyre. It took three men to carry it out and set it upon its stand. Two of them pulled the front cover open. The vellum pages had a visible weight to them. Each leaf was covered with ruled lines and columns of neat Gothic miniscule. The bookkeeper used a stick to smooth them down until he had found the right one.

‘Here,’ he said, and started to read aloud.

We sat for nearly half a day as Terrini and the bookkeeper ran through each of the entries. The only thing that got us through were little glasses of recaff.

I took my first sip and winced. It was sour and earthy. I looked around to read the others’ expressions but they all seemed to be tolerating it. At last, Terrini took out his seal and wax, dripped enough to affix the seal, and then affirmed the requisite amounts of grain and slab.

‘Done,’ he said.

Afterwards, we shared a meal – a mediocre spread of home-processed slab and some of the fruits of the farmstead, washed down with a passable jug of grog that just about banished the taste of the recaff. At the end of the meal Terrini belched. ‘Any malefactors?’

The bookkeeper nodded. ‘Of course.’

‘Good!’ Terrini slapped me on the back. ‘Now, Rudgard, is your pistol loaded?’

‘Yes.’

‘Time for the fun bit.’

A narrow stage had been erected and the sun was setting as we stood on the narrow boards and looked out over a crowd of serfs, sitting in huddles on the sun-baked earth. There had to be a hundred of them. Men, women, children – all wearing their chains of servitude. Their faces were dirty, pinched and hollow. The stink of unwashed human bodies rose from them.

Scrolls of writ hung from banner poles to either side of the stage, and behind us the Richstar flag rippled limply in the hot air. A vox-horn played the sound of chanting choirs as a servo-skull hummed over the crowd, trailing a banner praising the God-Emperor. In the palace, the servo-skulls I had seen were all finely crafted objects, but this one was a crude job with patches of poorly cured flesh clinging to the bone. It looked like something dragged from a coffin and hastily embalmed. It trailed the scent of disinfectant.

A dread expectation hung over the crowd as one of their own was dragged forward by two of the overseers. He was a skinny man, dressed in rags, bare feet scrabbling to keep up. A hood covered his head. He was blind as they hauled him towards the back of the truck.

Terrini patted my shoulder. ‘He’s yours.’

I had always imagined my first man would be a Banda ganger, shot down in the heat of an armed raid, not a petty criminal, bound and gagged. He read the look on my face.

‘You’ll be fine,’ he said, and slapped my arm. ‘Just point and pray.’

I found myself apprehensive and took a deep breath. The man was a serf and deserving of his punishment, but I wanted to blood my sidearm with a more worthy death. ‘May I use your gun?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘Use yours.’

I started to argue, but he was firm. ‘A serf is a life. Your gun doesn’t care.’

As he was led towards me, I felt anger at the serf for making me have to shoot him with my Tronsvasse. I’m wiser now, of course. Life seldom gives us the lessons we want, and the truth is killing a man in an armed raid is as easy as blinking. The world is a blur. Events are happening too fast all about you and it’s all instinctive. You are living at the edge of your wits, and the threat of death keeps you sharp. You do not think, until afterwards.

Executing criminals takes more steel. It is a good place to start. You are calm, and ready, and there is an audience watching who demand the death. And I remembered Terrini’s words.

Violence must be seen to be done.

There were many other crimes to get through before the shooting. Two serfs were flogged for stealing slab, five others for meeting together in secret. Another man had his tongue cut out for cursing the bookkeeper.

We stood witness to it all. Heard the cracks of the whip, watched the long welts rise and weep blood, heard the lamenting cries of the chastised as his tongue was pulled out for the knife to do its work. And through it all a beaten air hung over the serfs. At last it was time for the execution.

Two overseers lifted the condemned man onto the stage, hands under each armpit, then half carried him to the centre. He struggled against them and they kicked the backs of his knees and forced him to kneel.

I wiped my hands on my trousers, set my feet wide, and took a deep breath.

At Terrini’s instruction they removed the hood. A ball gag forced his mouth open. He blinked in the sudden glare, and singled me out. His eyes were green and lit, like a cat’s, with a spark of malevolence. I returned his gaze with equal venom.

Terrini took a vox-horn. ‘Serf Bann. You are accused of engaging in secret rituals. The God-Emperor is tired of your miserable existence. Your pitiful labour is not worth the food that the Imperium of Mankind wastes upon you. Your sentence will be passed on to your scions for three generations so that they might scour your crimes from the record. But for you, your existence has come to an end. The God-Emperor demands your death, and the beneficent Patridzo has asked us to ensure that this is done.’

The man kneeling before me was a similar age to me – but we were divided by fate to be killer and killed. I felt contempt for him as I waited for the sentencing to be done.

Terrini stepped up behind me and whispered, ‘Arm’s length. Don’t close your eyes like your eldest brother. He winged the bastard and I had to step in and finish them off.’

I nodded, still holding the condemned man’s gaze, stepped into position and wiped the sweat from my palms.

‘Straight into the face,’ Terrini told me, but by then I barely heard his words. This was between me and this stranger kneeling before me. He was a criminal and I was his death.

I stepped forward and raised my straight arm, like a duellist, and spoke in a loud voice. ‘In the name of the Patridzo, Saint Ignatzio Richstar and the God-Emperor of Mankind, I condemn you.’

There was a moment’s pause for the words to fall on the watching crowd, and then I fired.

The pistol kicked in my hand, but I was strong and the shot went true.

It was as if a bomb had gone off. The man’s head exploded. I felt a gritty wet shower and there was a stunned silence as the headless torso bubbled with blood before toppling sideways off the stage into the crowd of serfs.

I wiped my face. The silence persisted a moment longer, and then the serfs started moaning. Even Terrini looked pale. He came over to me, wiping a bloody scrap of scalp from his face. A shard of bone had cut him just under the eye.

‘Throne!’ he said. ‘What did you shoot him with?’

I showed him the round I had used.

‘Manstoppers?’ he said, and laughed. Later he handed me a magazine of standard-issue hard rounds. ‘Next time, use these.’

The next week saw a succession of ledgers, executions and the assessment. Everyone asked about the coming tithe ships. When would they arrive? How much would the God-Emperor demand? How hungry were His armies?

Terrini answered them all with solemn authority as if he had a link through to the God-Emperor Himself. It was a misunderstanding he did nothing to allay. He talked of the enemies that the Imperium faced. How xenos threats hemmed the God-Emperor in on all sides, while darker forces of corruption and heresy undermined us from within. All of them wanted to enslave humanity. They wanted the galaxy for themselves.

The staff of each farmstead listened with weighty respect. Terrini let his warnings sink in. ‘The Patridzo has promised the Emperor that we will deliver our tribute. There cannot be any backsliding. The tithes must be delivered on time and in full. It is only the God-Emperor’s armies that keep our enemies at bay.’

I nodded solemnly by his side, and the overseers looked up at me with trepidation.

Of course, at each farmstead there were condemned serfs.

I shot them all.

‘It should be like wiping your shoes,’ Terrini said one night as he sat back, sipping a glass of amasec and smoking his lho-stick.

My eyes had been following the distant lumens of a lighter, spiralling slowly up as it ferried tithes to the orbital hangars. Terrini went on, and I nodded. That first time had been shocking, but each subsequent instance was a little easier than the last.

I loaded plain old enforcer-issue hard rounds into my magazine. They were as long as the end of my little finger, blunt-nosed, brass cartridges packed with fyceline, weighing heavy in the cupped palm.

The dull steel slugs did the job. Some of the condemned looked me in the eye. Some of them prayed. Some of them begged. I put an end to each of them.

Calm. Collected. Like wiping your shoe when you come off the street.

By the thirtieth I was almost casual. Even Terrini seemed impressed. At the end he slapped my arm in congratulations. ‘You’re a natural,’ he said. ‘Just like your father!’

‘Thank you,’ I said.

The last place on our judgement tour was an agri plant named Reklanbore. It was a well-run little establishment, with strict discipline and browbeaten serfs. We were drinking our morning recaff when a messenger came to the guest-hab where we were staying.

‘Sir,’ he said to Terrini, ‘they’re calling for you at the command block.’

Terrini went off while I finished my recaff and shoved my clothes in the kitbag.

When Terrini came back his face was dark, though his mirrored shades reflected the clear cobalt sky. I handed him a lho-stick and lit it for him. Terrini blew a long, blue plume of smoke into the air. ‘Vox message from the Evercity. One more place to visit.’

I had been looking forward to a return to the Evercity and met this news with irritation.

‘Place called Thorsarbour,’ Terrini said. ‘Bookkeeper’s named Taru. A good man. Ex-Militarum.’

One of the men standing nearby looked uncomfortable. He hesitated before speaking. I caught his eye and he felt compelled to talk. ‘You haven’t heard…?’

‘What?’ Terrini snapped.

‘Bookkeeper Taru’s dead…’

Terrini looked up. ‘Really? He seemed healthy last time I saw him.’ The man pulled a face. Life on Potence was tough. There were all manner of dangers out there. Terrini said, ‘So who’s there now?’

The man wasn’t sure. ‘There’s a new gang.’

Terrini shook his head. We were both looking forward to returning to the Evercity. This was the last thing either of us wanted.

‘What’s this place called again?’ I asked, as we loaded our kitbags up onto the halftrack and made ready to depart.

‘Thorsarbour,’ Terrini said.

‘Never even heard of it. Is it far?’

He nodded. ‘Butt end of nowhere.’

CHAPTER FIVE

Thorsarbour was two days’ drive further south, set in the dusty wastes of the Long Dry. The landscape became more bleak and dusty as we rumbled on. After the first day we stopped in a wayside lodge – just a two-room shack with a pit latrine and water pump, and a pile of dry firewood.

Terrini was an enforcer veteran of many tours such as this, but even he was unimpressed with the crudeness of the housing, and made his discomfort plain. But we set to without unnecessary words, brewed recaff, boiled up our slab, then sat and smoked our lho-sticks as the day darkened. When the sun disappeared we lay back and watched the orbital hangars twinkle in the gathering dark.

I did not sleep well.

Gambol was waiting for me in my dreams. I flinched at his appearance as he swung his sutured torso forward till he was sitting over me, peering down and fretting at the plugs behind his ears.

‘Itches!’ he hissed, and started to get upset. His blue-diamond eyes stretched as he pulled a face. He pinched something out and held it up for me between his bloody nails. It was a hard, white lump of pus. I tried to tell him to stop, but I could not speak and Gambol could not stop scratching. He could not understand that his scratching only made his flesh-plugs worse.

He started to bleed freely and the blood splattered down on my face and I woke with a start – the dream-scent of blood and festering flesh in my nostrils.

It was a short-lived reprieve. Each time I turned over he was there, waiting for me – suffering one of his angry fits and reaching under the bed for me, or reading me to sleep, Thorn’s Book of Martyrs open in his lap.

‘Let me see the picture,’ I told him. It showed a penitent, strapped into a chair, as surgeons bent over them with wires and implants and cavity drills.

‘What’s happening to him?’ my childish dream-self asked. I tugged Gambol’s sleeve as he stared in silence.

‘They are punished!’ he said at last. He pulled a sad clown face. His teeth were yellow against his white skin. I could see the veins in his eyes, and then his left eye began to twitch.

I knew what was coming, and immediately kicked away.

‘Punished,’ he hissed. ‘Deviants must be punished. It itches!’ He pulled at the implants and they came free. Blood trickled down his neck as the dulled light in his eyes changed. Now they were lit with a malevolent intelligence.

In terror I scrambled towards my bed and Gambol dragged himself after me, using his hands to pull himself along. I kicked at him. ‘Get off me!’ I shouted, but he seized my wrists and dragged me towards him. I kicked and thrashed but he pinned me down.

‘Mother!’ I screamed, but he clamped a hand over my mouth. It was hot and sweaty. I wanted to bite him but I was afraid.

‘They are broken,’ he whispered. ‘Tortured. Beaten. Bled. They are made to repent of their sins.’

This dream-Gambol was terrifying. ‘Stop!’ I tried to tell him, but Gambol’s broad, red mouth was curled in a snarl. His breath was foetid, his green eyes spiteful.

‘They are forced to repent!’ he spat again. And then he started to sob. It was a chilling thing to see him cry. ‘They are broken…’

Somehow I had managed to twist a wrist free and had lurched to my feet, scrambling up the shelves of my bookshelf. Toys rained down as I climbed ever higher. The only safe place was where he could not reach me.

In my dream I was awake all night, pressed against the wall, eyes wide to the darkness, ready and fearful. I could hear Gambol swinging his stumped torso along, patrolling under my bed like a hungry wolf.

He tried to lure me down. Made promises. Threats.

‘No!’ my dream-self told him, and I listened to the cathedral bells striking the hours, waiting desperately for the morning, when the servants would come for me.

As dawn silhouetted the spires and buttresses of the Evercity, Gambol knew his time was up. I heard his grunts as he dragged himself up the shelving. I prayed to the Emperor as I saw the red tufts of hair appear over the lip of the top shelf. Gambol’s white face lifted slowly, like a sickly moonrise, his blue-diamond eyes dark in the night.

‘Gambol is sorry,’ he said, pulling himself up level with me. He held himself up with one arm, and reached for me with the other. ‘Come to Gambol!’

I shook my head. In my dream I was just a child, but I would not go to him. Not when he was like this. He reached for me, but I was pressed right against the wall, my legs drawn up to my chin. He caught Rhadameor and swung it at me, but the effort dislodged him and he almost fell.

‘Come here!’ he hissed, grasping at me again. ‘You little bastard!’

Next morning, Terrini and I were up before dawn. I said nothing of the nightmares, and did not ask him about his night’s sleep, but he looked tired as well. We packed up and set off, rumbling south.

A few hours after lunch, the road gave way to a dirt track that plunged straight out into the wastes. ‘I didn’t know there was anything this far out,’ I said.

Terrini had one arm resting on the sill, the other holding his lho-stick. ‘No,’ he replied simply.

After an hour we saw a wall had been built across the wastes before us. It stretched from horizon to horizon, a behemoth of rockcrete, like a dam when the water had been drained away.

Where it met the road, iron gates had half fallen from their hinges, and lay open. There were words on the gates, though I could not read them for the dust and rust. But as we plunged into the dark of the arch, I had a brief impression of a guard chamber, long abandoned.

Terrini drove through at speed. I had expected to see something different on the other side of the wall, but the landscape was the same. Just mile after mile of salty scrubland, flat as a dead man’s heartbeat. And the hours wore on…

I twisted and turned, trying to relieve the boredom and the ache in my backside as Terrini hummed a tune for a while, smoked, hummed some more.

At long, long last, the salt flats gave way to scrubby fields, and then slowly, out of the silvered landscape, rose the dark brown of mile upon mile of irrigated farmland. Pipes ran through broad, square fields of giant corn stalks, near-on thirty feet high; so tall that they rose up like walls on either side, their heads bowing under their own weight.

Here and there, irrigation pipes had failed, and there were long stretches where the plants were stunted and desiccated by the heat. The rustling stalks were thick with webs. There was a ghostly rustle as we drove by, like we were moving through ranks of the dead. Every so often, in the margins of the fields, we saw piles of rusting machinery: a cargo-6 without tyres; an old ploughing rig, grass growing through its iron struts. And sheltering in the shadows were birdlike creatures with leathery wings. Occasionally we would startle one out, and it would flap away in search of a new roost, hanging upside down in the shadows.

The whole landscape had a dismal and depressing air that only deepened as we passed a long line of vast, rusting agri machinery. The machines reminded me of blunt-nosed instruments of war, fitted out with scythes and threshers instead of guns. Rank weeds grew in all the paver cracks, and along the side of each were stretched banners emblazoned with religious texts, and then a row of iron gallows.

There were bodies within the cages of looped iron. The first one was just a tumble of bones, but as we rolled along the line, the later corpses were fresher, the stink stronger. Each bore scraps of prayers and quotes and scripture. Pennant strips claimed that the dead had chosen self-immolation.

The stink of ostentatious and destructive piety hung in the air.

I recalled lies that I had told, times that I had missed my prayers, hallowdays when I had lain in bed and played with Gambol, or lined up my metal soldiers on the floor, and imagined them armies at my command. And I remembered other times as well, when my mother and I had lit a taper against the darkness so that she could read the holy words as we knelt by my bedside.

The last cadaver could not be more than a week or so dead. The corpse’s head had fallen forwards against the bars. The eyes had been pecked out. The nose had been eaten away, and there were maggots falling out of the nostrils. The skin was black and swollen, and a hand reached out through the bars of the cage, its forefinger pointing back the way that we had come. Spilling from the open mouth was a long tongue of parchment with black script that was fire-and-las-bolt kind of stuff.

Death is preferable to madness, the script said.

At last, Thorsarbour’s command block loomed into view. As we swung into the main compound a flock of bantams erupted in a flutter of wings and feathers. There was a thud as we slammed a couple aside, and we left them broken and flightless in our wake.

Terrini brought our truck to a halt. The machine-spirit rattled as it fell back to sleep, and the dust settled. Before us was a shrine to the God-Emperor. It was an open building, with red pillars and a red tile roof. Through the thicket of prayer strips nailed to the eaves, I could see candles burning under a golden skull, which was disfigured by ancient stalactites of melted wax. In front of it was a giant brass censer, heaped with a cone of pale ashes, into which a tall red candle had been thrust. A thread of blue smoke trailed upwards.

I looked about. The walls of dry corn, pressing in on all sides, gave the place a crushing air of desolation.

Terrini kicked his door open. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let’s get this over with.’

The sound of our slamming doors brought startled figures from the shadows of one of the barns. They were nondescript in many ways – some shoeless, others wearing mismatching military surplus boots or home-made sandals, their ill-fitting garments sun-bleached and patched at the elbows and knees. But their stubbled scalps showed some of the most extreme forms of self-mortification that I had ever seen. The shaven skin was blotched and scabbed with long scars – some faded, some so fresh that the wounds were puckered, crusted with gore or dripping blood.

They stared at us in silence.

I’ve since banned such sanguinary forms of Imperial cults, but they were a common enough feature on Potence then. Even as I stood watching, one of the men slashed himself and started to bleed.

‘Who’s the bookkeeper here?’ Terrini demanded.

‘Capo,’ one of the men said.

‘Where is he?’

Another, who had cut his lips right down to the gum lines, pointed along the yard to a rockcrete bunker with sheer walls and dark loopholes. We walked the rest of the way to the command block in silence, save the crunching of the gravel under our feet.

The main gate was ajar. An aquila had been stencilled across it, but the double-headed eagle was scratched and streaked with corrosion. The gateway was plastered on either side with prayer strips. The words had faded in the bright sunlight.

The guilt of the unholy hangs heavy upon their souls, one read.

Madness is purity, said another.

The holy wash their hands with blood.

Through the command block’s gate was a wide rockcrete atrium, around which were set a number of doorways. The air was cool. It smelt dusty. All the doors were closed.

‘Bookkeeper?’ Terrini called, his voice echoing off the grey walls.

There was a long pause before a voice called, ‘Hello?’

Coming out of a doorway to our left was a bull of a man, dressed in mountain infantry boots and a stained white apron tied loosely about his waist. His face was as puffy as a pit fighter’s. His nose was a sideways smear across his cheek and one eye was missing, the socket depressed and hollow.

‘Bookkeeper Capo, at your service,’ he said.

‘Enforcer Terrini,’ my fellow said, ‘and Enforcer Howe.’

He stopped before us. ‘There aren’t more of you?’

‘Just us.’

‘No confessor?’

‘I said it’s just us. What’s the problem here?’ Terrini said.

‘Oh,’ the bookkeeper said, and paused and took a deep breath. ‘Right.’ He gestured to his office. ‘Come inside. We need to talk.’

The bookkeeper’s office was lit by the screen of a deskbound cogitator. Capo pulled a knotted cord and a strip-lumen rattled to life. The room was cluttered. The shelves were stuffed with papers, scrolls and box files, and on the bare wall behind the desk hung a large graph, a few mouldering Munitorum awards, faded with age, and a paper icon of Saint Ignatzio pinned at the corners with four brass tacks. The saint was depicted in his guise of Ignatzio Victorious, with golden armour, a power spear crackling in his hand, and a tumble of extinct xenos species lying in heaps at his feet. But it was the large metal desk that drew my attention.

Next to the cogitator was an overflowing ashtray, and a skull. It reminded me of the pet simians that my mother kept, with an elongated snout set with fangs, like a canine’s, and eye sockets overshadowed by heavy brows. There were strange icons carved into the surface that caught my eye.

I reached out for a closer look.

‘Don’t touch!’ the bookkeeper said. He hurried across and took the simian skull. ‘Please. It was my father’s,’ he said, as he put it on top of one of the shelves. He rowed back from the harshness of his tone. ‘Brought it back from campaign.’

‘He was a military man?’ Terrini said.

‘Supply corps.’

As he spoke, the door swung open and a servo-skull hummed into the room, vestigial spine trailing in the air. We’d seen many poorly made skulls on our tour, but this one looked like the scavenged remains of a murder. Scraps of skin were held in with crude metal sutures and a cog device had been hammered into the forehead, almost like an afterthought.

‘Throne!’ Terrini said, as its anti-grav generators hummed past his shoulder. Its underslung buzz saw, drill and claw hung beneath it like palsied limbs, a sheath of paper clamped in the three-pronged pincers. ‘That’s one ugly creation.’

Capo nodded as he took the file from the servo-skull, and stuffed it into a wooden crate. ‘Yes,’ he said, his single eye crossing to each of us in turn. ‘Listen. I didn’t like to speak too loudly. The truth is we’re packing up.’

Terrini’s voice instantly hardened. ‘What do you mean, “packing up”?’

Capo was sweating, despite the interior cool. ‘Enforcer, I’m not a foolish or ignorant man but there’s something unnatural here…’ He took a deep breath and looked as if he were trying to organise his thoughts. ‘You don’t feel it?’

When we didn’t reply, he puffed out his cheeks. ‘It’s been building for months. Nightmares. Shapes at night. Shadows where no men are.’ He put his hand to his head and wiped away the film of perspiration. ‘The serfs have become unruly. Some of them have gone missing. They all feel it. Their fervour has become… extreme. Then there’s the girl…’ He paused and took another breath, as if he knew that what he was about to say was a little incoherent. ‘I think she’s a witch.’

Terrini laughed and rested his hand to his pistol – nothing too obvious, just a subtle threat. ‘I cannot believe the nonsense that I’m hearing.’

The bookkeeper rubbed at his temple. ‘You should listen to her.’

Terrini cut him off. ‘I don’t want to listen to her. We can take her back to the Evercity. The Ecclesiarchy can judge. But meanwhile, I’m here to make sure you bring in the harvest.’

Capo sat down, and put his head in his hands. ‘Sorry, sir. I’m a little out of my depth, sir, to be honest. I was only ever made a temporary replacement to Taru. I’ve asked for guidance… but the Evercity – they never answer.’

Before Terrini could reply, the bookkeeper set to listing all of his problems. ‘First serfs came down with the sweating sickness, then suppurating boils that left them in agony… We prayed for deliverance, but some of the overseers’ girls started to wake every night in fits. I saw one with my own eyes. She thrashed about, twisted her body into animal shapes. Inhuman sounds came out of her. It was the most chilling thing I’ve seen. And then there were voices, where no man stood. Draughts of wind in empty rooms. The serfs refused to go out to work. We had to go out and guard them even in broad daylight. My team are not experienced. They started to become fearful too. There were rumours. A curse. A heretic. A hungry soul that was looking for a body to take for its own. Suddenly, even with guards I could not get anyone to go out and bring in the harvest. And then he came. He called himself “Unworthy”. He said he was a holy man.

‘At first I was glad. His prayers stopped the sickness and the next time one of the girls went into a trance, he was summoned. He spoke to her in commanding tones, and laid hands on her. “She is possessed by a spirit!” he told us, and he bled himself as he sat in vigil, and when the spirit came again, he was there and he drove the malevolence out.

‘I thought he was a blessing, but he said that whatever was inside her had not gone away. That it was chained to this place – that the only way of keeping it at bay was to mortify yourself. Some of the serfs started believing they’d been possessed. They locked themselves in cages and starved themselves to death. Now, what’s left are all his followers and they all worship together… But it seems this curse – this thing – has started to attack our outposts. We’ve lost three of them.’

‘What in Holy Terra’s name are you talking about, man?’ Terrini said, his temper rising. ‘And what do you mean you’ve lost three outposts? You misplaced them? You put them in a drawer and forgot about them?’

The bookkeeper blushed. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I mean the crew are dead.’ He paused and took in a deep breath as his woes weighed upon him anew. ‘All this time the Patridzo demands my tithes. And yet he does not send me the help I need.’ He sat down, rubbing his head again. ‘We are desperate, enforcer, for a holy man. Someone with the power to drive out the malevolence that haunts us.’

Terrini put up his hand. ‘Stop! You sound like a superstitious thrall. Think. You’re an overseer. You wear the badge of the aquila. We are not superstitious folk. We are the instruments of the God-Emperor. He sits on the Golden Throne on Terra holding the Imperium together, and He relies on the likes of us to serve Him, and to do His will. We cannot let ourselves sink to the level of the superstitious and the ignorant, can we?’

Capo held Terrini’s gaze. At last, the bookkeeper shook his head. ‘No. I’m sorry. You’re right.’ He sighed and Terrini patted his shoulder. His voice was kinder now.

‘I know it can be hard, the Emperor demands much of all of us, but we cannot waver. We must remain strong. You understand that, don’t you?’

Capo nodded.

Terrini paused. ‘He relies on us to provide Him with food. His armies defend us all from xenos and insanity. So we have to get that harvest in.’

Capo’s head snapped up, and he started to try and explain again.

‘Hush!’ Terrini said. ‘Breathe. Tell me again – what’s happened to your outposts?’

‘Farrar’s crew disappeared,’ he said. ‘Raine died of the flux. Talia went out hunting one day and never came back. I couldn’t find anyone who would go out and look for her. And then, just yesterday, I had word from Mamma Jett that there was something hanging about her farmstead… I promised her help – but now the vox has gone quiet.’

I had been sitting, watching this all. I was as mystified as Terrini. ‘Who is Mamma Jett?’ I asked.

‘She’s a freed serf, been working her plot for thirty years. She’s tough as old leather.’

‘And how far is her steading?’

‘An hour.’

‘That’s it?’ I said.

Capo nodded.

I looked to Terrini. ‘Surely we can get there before dark?’

Terrini checked his chronometer. ‘Yes. Capo, come and show us the way.’

Capo paled. ‘Now?’

I slapped his back encouragingly. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Now.’

CHAPTER SIX

As there were three of us, we took one of the compound’s Goliaths. It was a rusting old hulk, with Munitorum insignia barely visible under the caked dust. Capo started the engine on the second attempt. A thick, brown cloud of promethium fumes rose about the truck as he pumped the pedal to warm the engine.

‘Just takes a little encouragement,’ he said, as we started forward.

The road led through the back of the farmstead, along a row of barns, then turned off into a canyon of corn stalks. The Goliath’s iron suspension did nothing to soften the journey. A tracked machine had come along here in the wet season and the road was torn up and rutted, the ruts since baked into hard ridges. The Goliath rattled every bone in our bodies. We felt every bump.

‘So, this Mamma Jett,’ I started, raising my voice over the background din. ‘You say she’s a freed serf?’

‘Yes. Fourth generation. Ancestor convicted of heresy a hundred and thirty years ago. Turned free when that sentence had been served.’

‘And how old is she now?’

Capo puffed out his cheeks. ‘Fifty. Sixty. I couldn’t tell you. I don’t know if she knows herself.’

‘Do many serfs stay on after they’re freed?’

Capo shook his head. ‘Not many of them live long enough to get freed. And those that do, most of them are institutionalised. They wouldn’t know how to live in the real world. So they’re either inducted into the factorum workforce, or the Militarum. Or, like Mamma Jett, they keep on doing what they know.’

We passed through mile after mile of corn stalks before Mamma Jett’s settlement swept into view.

It had been carved out from the fields, a square space with a low hab, open barn, pump station, and a row of subterranean plant house domes, sparkling in the sunlight.

Behind the pump station was a row of tall water storage towers and galvanised irrigation pipes that trekked out into the fields. The nodding head of the pump jack was slowly moving up to a seventy-degree angle, and then descending again, and repeating this action. Otherwise, the place had an ominous stillness.

A straw man stood outside the hab, its wooden pole thrust into the ground. It was clothed in a thin, ragged dress, its arm pointed towards the hab.

The Goliath’s engine wound down and Capo threw his door open and slid out. Terrini did the same from his side. As I landed on the grit, Capo shouted, ‘Mamma Jett?’

I called her name as well. But, apart from the creak of the pump head, there was no answer.

The single-storey hab had a narrow veranda made from scavenged flakboard. The door was just a couple of pieces of rusting sheet metal, screwed onto a simple wooden frame and hung with crude icons.

Capo knocked. ‘Hello?’ he called out.

No one answered. It creaked as he shoved it open. ‘Mamma Jett?’

I followed him inside. The room looked as though a vortex had swept through it. Every piece of furniture was overturned and smashed, and over the whole mess, shreds of clothing had fallen like snow.

‘Holy fucking Throne,’ I muttered as my boots crunched on smashed pots and jars, and shards of glass. The floor was sopping with pickling fluids and slab powder.

‘Mamma Jett?’ we called as we pushed through the rooms. ‘Mamma Jett?’

I pushed through to the back and stopped.

‘What?’ Terrini asked.

‘Looks like the grox have broken free,’ I said.

Grox were a staple livestock across the Imperium. They were vicious reptilians, apex hunters on their home world, with a ferocious temper and a set of jaws that could cut a man in two – but they had the distinction of being able to turn almost anything into meat protein.

The only way we had of keeping them safely was lobotomising them en masse, and housing them in sunken pits.

But it was clear that something had gone wrong here. The galvanic fence had been trampled down, and a half-grown grox was standing in the backyard. I held my breath. It was hunched like a cat, ready to spring, its black reptilian eyes staring straight at us, the end of its sinuous tail flicking menacingly.

For the first time in my life I had the chilling sensation that I was not a human, but simply a prey animal. And then it sprang.

I fired and missed, and as I aimed again Terrini pushed me aside.

He fired one shot after another. The reports echoed back from the fields of corn. It took five rounds. The grox hit the earth ten feet before us, and died with a great heave of breath that inflated the dewlaps along its throat and whistled out through its nostrils.

Terrini slammed his sidearm back into its holster. ‘One down,’ he said, turning to Capo. ‘How many more?’

We found two more grox almost immediately. They were dead, and looked like they’d been eaten by the rest of the herd. I found the fourth. It was as big as a halftrack and was only ten feet away from me, back half turned towards me as I came around the hab.

Its dewlaps flared in warning. It was protecting a human body.

The extremities had gone, but before me was the torso of a woman. The grox stuck its head into the stomach cavity and dragged the body sideways, lifted it from the floor, and shook it.

My mouth went dry as I aimed and fired.

This was very different to shooting criminals in the face. As I fired it seemed that time stopped.

The clap of the report was followed by a moment of silence. Paradoxically, a moment of stillness.

I’ve experienced it many times. It’s as if the whole world turns to look in sudden shock, as if everyone knows that something terrible is about to happen. A shot has been fired and so a life is about to end. Events unfold with the paralysing slowness of a nightmare.

And then the round strikes home and it’s suddenly a shitstorm.

After the first shot, the grox turned its head towards me. It seemed to wait for the slug to strike. The round slammed into flesh, just below the front shoulder. I saw it go in but did not see it come out. Now the beast was angry and alarmed. It moved with sudden speed, charging at me with a thin hiss of fury.

The next shot hit above the shoulder. It kept coming.

I fired twice more. These were manstoppers, I thought, as I pumped three more rounds into it. At last it fell, sideways, vicious claws kicking ineffectually, fanged maw open in a screech of rage as it reached for me with its sinuous neck.

If I close my eyes I can still hear that sound.

When you shoot a man or woman, they fall to the floor and more often than not, they are so traumatised by the shot that they can barely speak. Sometimes they call on another for aid in this moment of mortal torment. The Emperor. Their father, or more often, their mother.

Occasionally they question you. I’ve stood there many a time, reloading to put the last bolt into a skull, and the condemned has stared up at me, and whispered, ‘Why?’ or ‘Who are you?’ or even, ‘How do you sleep at night?’

‘I sleep at night because scum like you are dead,’ I tell them, and put them into the hands of the Emperor.

But more often they are in such pain and shock as they waver on the edge of life that all they can manage is a mewling, wounded sound as they drag themselves into a corner. There is no escape, of course. Even if it is a dark room, all you do is follow the broad smear of blood and find them lying against the wall, curled up about the entry wound, pale and trembling as they bleed out their last.

If you’re feeling merciful you can put them out of their misery. But I don’t see why I have to be forgiving. If you’ve broken the Lex Imperialis, then there is no mercy. Mercy is for the weak.

No, you let them bleed out their last… or put another round into their guts. Let all the filth of their digestive tract out into the wound. It’s the slowest way to die, and the most painful. For some, even that is too good – but I didn’t know any of these things then.

This grox lacked any of the intelligence and understanding of a criminal. All it knew was pain, and in its pain it barely seemed to draw breath as it let out a hiss of fury and anger, still struggling to get to me.

I stood over it and let it scream as I looked into its black, lidded eye. Its teeth were yellow and irregular. Blood was frothing from its snout. Unthinking as the thing might have been, my sense of right and order demanded its punishment.

Not far off lay the torso of Mamma Jett. The head had gone, and the stomach had been ripped open, and the choice organs had been devoured, the legs gnawed up to the knee.

With the half-eaten torso of that woman in mind, I let the creature squeal.

Terrini stumped up next to me and took out his own gun. ‘Shut it up!’ Terrini said, and at last I ended its final scream with a round to the skull.

Capo went into the house to find a winding sheet while Terrini and I hunted the remaining grox down.

We found four more in the back fields, but one was still missing. We went around the hab, and then stalked towards the pump station, watchful.

The iron machinery was well maintained. It had been painted so many times the rivets and joins were all blurred into each other. Its nodding head pumped water from below. There were piles of grox-shit, but no beast I could see.

I found the remains of another of Jett’s workers. There was just a booted foot, and a few scraps of clothing. When we came out, blinking into the faded sunlight, we couldn’t see Capo. I felt a moment’s panic, but the bookkeeper appeared from the hab.

I beckoned him over. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

We’d gathered up all the human remains we could find, and now they bounced around in the back of the Goliath, each wrapped in the stained sheets.

It was quiet as we drove back. I looked out of the window and relived the face-off with the grox, piecing together what might have happened at the farmstead.

I tried to picture it: the galvanic fence failing, someone going out to investigate, stumping down to the grox pit, and then suddenly being confronted with a stray grox, looming in the darkness.

Those inside, hearing the screams, rushing to help and the grox pushing inside, driven wild by the scent of blood. The women and the children must have hidden under beds, or in wardrobes. But once they were inside, there was no stopping the beasts.

The destruction inside the house made sense to me now. Those that had fled had been caught in the open. Those that had cowered inside had been sniffed out by the grox.

The sight of death had made me think about my father. About his failed rejuvenat. Whether he would have been proud of me this day. How long he would live for. What I would miss when he was gone.

The sombre air even seemed to affect Terrini. He smoked his lho-stick in studied silence.

We watched the setting sun stretch the shadows long upon the ground. It was a red ball sitting on the horizon by the time we pulled into the main courtyard. There was a crowd of serfs waiting for us there. One of them had dark stubble and a prominent lower jaw. ‘They are here!’ he shouted and drew a blade along his forehead. There was a second before the blood welled up and started to stream down his face. He slapped the wound to keep it open. Each splat showered himself and those about him with blood.

‘What the Throne are they doing?’ Terrini snapped.

‘They think human blood has sacred properties,’ Capo said.

As we dismounted, one of them started to flick his blood towards us, shouting, ‘Outsiders – you must be purified!’

‘Stop it!’ Terrini snapped.

There was a sudden silence, as one of the penitents – the serfs’ leader, I presumed – pushed his way forward. He was not more than twenty years old, and wore what had once been a white gown, now dirt-stained about the hem and discoloured with old bloodstains. He had more piercings than Saint Fentula of the Bloody Shroud. One eye had been freshly stitched open. Blood leaked from the stretched punctures. The exposed eyeball was laced with angry red capillaries.

‘The Emperor blesses you,’ he said to us. His voice was deep for one so thin, and his prominent Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he spoke. He did not share the serfs’ thick accent, but had the clipped tones of the Evercity’s nobility. I guessed this was the man that Capo had spoken of. The holy man who had led a sanguinary cult among the serfs.

His confidence was striking, even though he was dressed in rags. He said simply, ‘My name is Unworthy. I was cursed with wealth and name and luxury. All these I have disowned. I embrace servitude. I embrace the example of the Emperor, who serves us all. If the faithful toil then I too will toil. I share their burden. And I will not answer to any name that my mother gave me. I have no rank. I have no family, and the only name I answer to is the one that I have given myself.’

Something about Unworthy held Terrini back. It was not just the accent, and the obvious links to the planetary nobility, but I think it was also the steely self-assurance that flowed from him. He was different from most of the holy men I had met, who cared more about their earthly progression than souls like these. In fact, I don’t think I had seen a member of the Ecclesiarchy ever take up the life of a serf. It was more natural for them to adopt the role of overseers.

Unworthy felt me watching him and I held his gaze. It was all I could do to stare him down. He could not blink, and when he tried, a bead of blood appeared at one of the stitches, and started to drip down his cheek.

He addressed Terrini. ‘The Emperor is unhappy with us,’ he said, pointing at the bookkeeper. ‘That is why we must make amends for our sins. Until we have satisfied Him with our purity, the Emperor will surely punish us all.’

The crowd of serfs murmured their assent. It was as loud and confident as any religious congregation voicing their creed. Terrini paused. Mobs are dangerous. Once unleashed they have a wild and berserk fury. Maybe if it had not been me standing at his shoulder he would have been bolder, but I was the Chief Enforcer’s son, and he decided that it was better to defuse the tension.

‘Listen to me, all of you. You belong to the Emperor, and the one thing the Emperor demands from this world is food. Grain. Meat. Provisions for His armies across the Imperium who fight in His name, and defend us all from the unclean and the inhuman…’

He was in full flow when Unworthy interrupted him. ‘You speak false.’

There was silence.

I tightened my grip on my sidearm.

‘There is one thing greater that we provide to the God-Emperor, who sits over all on His Golden Throne!’ Unworthy shouted. ‘It is prayer! It is only through faith and prayer that we nourish the soul of the Emperor. And it is with our blood that we keep Him vital and alive!’ Unworthy swelled before us, as the crowd answered with shouts of affirmation. At Unworthy’s command, one of the serfs stepped forward and put his fist to his head, grimacing as he slowly dragged his clenched hand downwards. It was like striking a well head: gouts of blood poured over his face.

He opened his hand and I saw a pair of razors held within his grip. He grinned as he repeated the gesture. The blood ran in hot rivulets, dripping from his chin, and he flicked it at us both.

He missed me, but a splatter freckled Terrini’s face. ‘You little bastard!’ the enforcer cursed, and he lashed out, throwing the man sideways.

The serf propped himself up on one elbow, spitting blood. Terrini’s boot connected with his ribs and the man lifted a foot off the ground. I heard the crack of breaking bone, but Terrini was not done. Another kick connected fully with the man’s face.

I don’t know what broke – whether it was his cranium or his neck – but there was a sickening crunch and the man lay still as a puddle of blood pillowed his head.

‘We are enforcers in the service of the God-Emperor and the Patridzo of Potence. I carry the Writ of Magisterial Authority.’ Terrini touched the ornate scroll case at his waist. It had a golden skull engraved at one end.

The serfs stared at it with obvious awe. ‘We are the embodiment of the Emperor’s will,’ Terrini shouted. ‘This scroll allows us to execute immediately whosoever refuses to comply with my demands. You speak of faith, but faith has many manifestations. Tithes, however, do not. You should be ashamed of yourselves, scarring the bodies the God-Emperor gave you when you should cherish the strength and heart He has bestowed. You were all blessed with servitude. Your role in this life is to serve, not to judge others. I have killed many times in my life, and I will happily shoot any of you who refuse my commands. Now, go back to your barracks. Tomorrow morning, at dawn, the harvest will begin.’

The death of one of their comrades had stunned the crowd. They had been suitably cowed and there was a rattle of chains as they made their way back to their barracks.

Unworthy, though, refused to leave, even as his congregation left him stranded. He was shaking with fury as he held our gaze.

‘Don’t waste my time,’ Terrini said, ‘or I’ll make you a serf and you can live out the rest of your life in the mines on Blackrock.’

‘Who are you to speak for the Emperor?’ Unworthy demanded.

‘I am Enforcer Terrini, and I will feed you to the grox if you cross me again.’

Two of Capo’s men were sitting just inside the command block, playing dice on a small table in a guardroom.

They started when they saw Terrini but he was already on them. His boot connected with the table and there was an explosion of dice as he grabbed one by the scruff of the neck, and threw him into the other man.

‘Get up!’ he shouted and they scrambled back to their feet, and hastily straightened their clothes as they saluted. Terrini’s anger was frightening. ‘Who the hell runs this place?’ he demanded of them. ‘I’ll tell you who,’ he said. ‘It’s not Unworthy! It’s the fucking Emperor, and until He arrives, it’s me.’ Their eyes fell to the writ of authority he wore at his belt, but it wasn’t that which convinced them. It was his anger, his violence and his steely conviction.

‘Now. Find the rest of the crew and bring them here to me!’

The sky was darkening by the time the overseers were gathered together. Terrini took them in. They looked as if they were serfs themselves. ‘I don’t know what’s happened here before, but I am here now. I bear with me the writ of authority of the Patridzo of Potence and through him, the God-Emperor of Mankind.’

I’ve always found silence the most threatening, but Terrini was the vox-horn kind. He went on and on till the veins stuck out from his neck and spittle was flying from his mouth. He cowed them, intimidated them, and then he made it as if they could redeem themselves through following his commands.

‘I’ve just come from Mamma Jett’s farmstead. Someone turned the galvanic generator off and the grox got out. Killed the lot of them. And one of those beasts is still out there. Which means it’ll be on its way here. It’s had the taste of human meat. The serfs are watched at all times, and you will work in pairs until the harvest is brought in. So no one goes about unarmed. Is that understood?’

They nodded.

Terrini knocked one of them over to make his point. ‘Sloppiness costs lives!’ he told them and they nodded again in stunned silence. At the end he pointed. ‘In the morning I want every corner of this farmstead cleared out and working.’ Then he picked five men out at random. ‘In the back of our Goliath are all that remains of Mamma Jett and her crew. Dig graves and bury them. And unless you’re careful, you’ll be next.’

They each went their way, but one of them stood a little uncertain, not sure if he should approach. Terrini felt the man’s presence too and turned in irritation. ‘Yes?’ he snapped.

The man bobbed in discomfort, and stammered. ‘Sorry, sir,’ he said. ‘I used to know…’ he started.

Terrini looked at him. ‘Yes?’ he said.

‘It’s me, sir. Hamber.’

There was a pause as Terrini looked at him, but the next moment his expression changed. ‘Hamber!’ Terrini said. ‘Throne! What are you doing here?’

‘Well. I came with Taru…’ the other man said. ‘And here I stayed.’

I left Terrini and Hamber talking as I went to supervise the burial. Night had fallen and the overseers had parked a Sentinel powerlifter and used its search-lumen to illuminate a cone of white light.

I sat on a rock, rolled a lho-stick and looked on. We were a hundred yards from the command block, next to a small flakboard chapel. Serfs were not buried here, apparently. Their corpses were fed to the grox, but overseers were, and along one side of the chapel was a ragged line of metal posts, each one marked with a rusting aquila.

Mamma Jett and the others were all being lumped in one grave. The overseers were already working with picks and shovels. The top of the ground was hard, but once they were a couple of feet down, it was soft and sandy. The shovels scraped as the overseers heaped the soil up at the side.

After nearly an hour, they were done and they carried the remains of Mamma Jett and her crew from the back of the Goliath. The winding cloths were stained with old blood. They set each down at the side of the pit and then one went to find somebody who could say some words. Not Unworthy, but an older man, dressed in black robes, who limped around the corner, leaning on a silver stick topped with the symbol of a cog.

The air was warm and the scent of death was already rising from the pit.

He was a sickly-looking man, his complexion made even paler by his garments. He looked as if he had just been woken up as he adjusted the rope belt about his waist. He put out a hand when he met me and spoke in a phlegmy and apologetic voice. ‘I am Enginseer Gad,’ he said.

I told him my name, but he gave no sign of recognition.

‘Well!’ he said, taking a breath. ‘I’d better get them away to the Omnissiah!’

I sucked on my lho-stick. ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ I said.

I sat back as Gad started his work. I paid this ceremony little attention. I was thinking of what would happen when I returned to the Evercity. When my father died. It was going to be messy.

One of the overseers came over and nodded a greeting. He stood, staring at me till I offered him a lho-stick.

‘Sure?’ he said, and I nodded. ‘Thanks!’

Another came over. They shared the lho-stick I had given the first and told me their names. ‘I’m Perin,’ said one with straight dark hair, cut unevenly over his ears.

‘And I’m Tombs… Been here five years,’ the shorter man said, squinting as he inhaled. ‘This is sweet stuff you have.’

Perin nodded as he waited his turn. ‘So you’ve met Unworthy?’ he said.

I nodded. ‘Where did he come from?’

Perin shrugged. ‘Just appeared three months ago. Moved in with the serfs… Cult of the Holy Blood. But he won the serfs over within a few weeks. They scare the shit out of me.’

Once the enginseer was done he came over to scrounge a lho-stick as well. He took it with trembling fingers. As he bent towards me to light it I could see his eyes were bloodshot. ‘This place is killing me,’ he said. ‘Do you feel it?’

I paused and looked about. It did feel a little weird.

He closed his eyes as he took in a long drag. ‘Did you hear about Rlor?’

‘No. Who is he?’

‘He was Taru’s second-in-command. Another Militarum guy. Not bright, but reliable, know what I mean?’

I did. ‘And?’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘he was in the plant house and he slipped. Into the slop tank.’

I didn’t understand the implication of this.

‘The slops give off poisonous gases. If you fall in then you only have a few seconds to get out.’

‘And if you don’t, you pass out?’ He nodded, and I pulled a face. ‘And then you drown…’

‘Next day,’ he said, ‘this figure of a man was found outside, stuffed with straw, just like the ones we put out in the fields. Except no one remembered moving this one. The serfs were terrified. There were lights there at night. Capo closed it down. He said we should leave whatever was in there inside. Otherwise, it might get out. Now, whenever there’s a death, there’s one of these bloody straw men. Just waiting.’

CHAPTER EIGHT

Once Mamma Jett and her team were buried, we shared a simple dinner of boiled roots with a few shreds of cured grox. Everyone turned in early, Capo wishing each a good night as they sloped off into the dark. I took the opportunity to ask about Rlor’s death in the plant houses. Capo’s mouth fell open as he started stammering something in reply.

‘It’s just malfunctioning,’ he said. ‘It’s a jungle in there.’

Terrini’s eyes narrowed. ‘So, we need to get it working,’ he said. ‘What’s it growing?’

‘Algae.’

‘Right. So we need to harvest the algae. Understood?’

Capo nodded. ‘I’ll send someone in in the morning.’

There was a tense air as we finished our meal. Finally, Capo said, ‘Overseer Perin will take you to your hab.’

We grabbed our kitbags from the rack on top of the halftrack’s cabin, and followed Perin as he took us past the chapel and along a line of barns. The track was unpaved, and here and there were stones and potholes from the wet season. The serf block was on our right. It was a low, solid rockcrete building with bars on the glassless windows and a pair of overseers standing duty at the door. They were dressed much like Perin, with lasrifles thrown over their shoulders.

The made the sign of the aquila as we passed, and we did the same.

‘The guest hab is this way,’ Perin stated, turning left along another unpaved track. We passed through a tall wire fence to a little line of prefab terraces set along one side of a gravel path.

The overseer hab compound had clearly been meant to give these colonists of the desert a sense of home and order. There was a broad pavement and cast iron lumens along either side of the road, and about each single-storey hab was a wire-fenced yard. But the desolation made the place feel empty and deserted regardless.

Half the lumens were dark and broken, their glass smashed. The few that remained cast tight circles of light, illuminating little except stones and rank weeds.

Perin pointed to the third in line. ‘That’s mine,’ he said proudly. It was hard to find anything to say. The hovel looked as dingy and dilapidated as the rest, and Perin felt our lack of enthusiasm. ‘The guest hab is further up. We don’t have much use for it. No one comes out here.’

I tried to make conversation. From the way he carried himself, Perin was clearly ex-Militarum, although that spanned a wide range of roles, from local militia to reserves. ‘Did you get to see the Evercity?’ I asked.

‘Once,’ he said, his face reddening. ‘Spent most of my time up on the Gallows Cluster. Astropathic facility there. Never went inside. Scared the shits out of me.’

Conversation dried up. A single hab had been added to the end of the row, but unlike the others, this looked like it had been built with a pair of old Munitorum containers stuck together and fitted out with a flakboard roof.

‘This is it,’ Perin said with forced enthusiasm, as he pushed the wire gate open.

A dirt path led up to the guest hab. A lumen was on outside. Someone had planted a row of greens in the front yard. A pair of sticks held up a tepee of gauze netting.

Leathery avians were fluttering outside the windows. One slapped me in the face as I climbed up the steps. I smacked it down.

‘What are these things?’

‘Imhis,’ Terrini said as he crunched it underfoot. ‘They’re a bloody pest.’

A heavy brass bolt lock was on the door. Perin fumbled for a moment with the key. It took a lot of jiggling before there was an audible ping and the two pieces of the lock came free and tumbled into his hand, the door opening with a creak of weary hinges.

Perin reached in and punched an ignition stud. A light came on. It was a bare lumen, screwed into a black plastek socket in the middle of the hallway’s pressboard ceiling. Hot, stale air greeted us as we followed him inside. The interior of the container had been panelled with cheap flakboard, papered over with a standard aquila design, faded almost to obscurity.

‘I’d have cleaned the rooms out if I’d known you were coming today, but with everything that’s happened…’ Perin said.

Three doorways opened up from the front hall. There was nothing much to see in the rooms to either side, just single cots, blankets and pillows folded at the foot of the bed, and a small, flakboard side table. Perin pushed the door in front of us open. ‘And this is the galley.’

The scent of stagnant water greeted us as we crowded inside the small room.

There was a wooden counter with a cheap pump-prime promethium stove, an aluminium lidded pot, open timber shelves and, at the end, a cupboard. Perin opened it, as if to have something to introduce to us. It too was bare.

‘I’ll make sure we send over some implements,’ he said.

I gave Terrini a look. Neither of us were impressed.

In the corner, a plastek barrel of water was half full. Perin lifted the lid and a cloud of bugs rose into the air. He felt our displeasure. ‘The latrine is outside…’ he started, and pushed open the back door and tried the rear lumen. It didn’t light. ‘I’ll get that fixed as well.’

Disapproval oozed out of Terrini.

‘S-s-sorry, sir.’ Perin’s cheeks flushed. He apologised once more as Terrini followed him to the front door and shut it on him, cutting yet another of his apologies off mid-sentence. ‘I’ll sort it in the morning,’ he called.

‘No,’ Terrini told him. ‘Go out and get us a replace-ment – now.’

‘Alone, sir?’

‘Yes,’ Terrini said. ‘Alone.’

I knew Perin’s mind was travelling to the lone grox, but he clearly thought better of objecting further. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said.

‘And be quick about it!’ Terrini snapped as he turned from the door. ‘Damn idiots,’ he said. He took in a deep breath. Both bedchambers were open. ‘Which do you want?’ he demanded.

I didn’t care.

‘Right. I’ll take this side,’ Terrini said, and grabbed his kitbag.

I took the opposite side. It looked like no guests had slept here for years. Besides the cot there was a cheap metal chair with missing slats. Everything was covered in a thick layer of dust and the room had a hot, stale smell. I pulled the thin cotton mattress aside. The cot was standard issue with a metal frame and bowed cross-hatch leather supports.

Perin came back a few minutes later, panting and red in the face.

‘I’ve brought these.’ He stood on the doorstep and passed me a broad metal pan with some pressed-metal enamelled mugs, and a jerrycan half filled with promethium for the pump stove. He was about to go when he said, ‘You should leave the porch lumen on at night. And close the shutters.’

‘Why?’

‘Stops the imhis getting in.’

I shut the door and joined Terrini in the galley. He was searching through the empty cupboard, and cursing under his breath. He banged the doors closed, but brightened when he saw that I had promethium.

‘I’m dying for a recaff,’ he said. ‘Did that idiot bring any?’

‘No,’ I said. He cursed again. ‘There’s some in the halftrack,’ I offered.

‘There’s that missing grox…’ he said.

‘I’ll be fine,’ I told him.

‘Sure?’

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘Okay. You’ve got more grit than that Perin,’ he said. ‘Just don’t get eaten. What will I tell your father?’

‘I won’t,’ I said, and laughed. ‘What are the chances of me running into the missing grox?’

‘In this place,’ he said, ‘who knows?’

I have purged many dens in my time as an enforcer. I have come face to fang with the mad and the corrupt in the benighted pits and hollows beneath the Evercity. But I don’t think I have ever known a darkness as intense as the nights of Thorsarbour. It wasn’t natural. It pressed in all around, and even though the stars gleamed cold and white above, they cast no light, and only served to intensify the shadows. It was unholy.

As I stood on the doorstep and closed the door behind me I immediately regretted my decision to set out alone without a stablight, but I was young and proud and stupid, as many young men are. The only illumination beyond the guest hab was the single unbroken lumen at the end of the gravel track. It stood out from the gloom, but its glow was hemmed in, and it cast only a thin puddle of yellow light at its feet. Still, it was a beacon for me, and I pushed off, my heartbeat quickening as my feet felt their way along the track.

As the darkness pressed in, my other senses compensated. I heard a distant door slammed, a hound bark, and then the unearthly screech of a far-off grox – the missing one, I thought, and was immediately reassured by the distance, until I remembered that Thorsarbour had its own herd.

I was almost at the lumen when I sensed a shadow at the side of the road, and my heart was in my mouth for a moment.

‘That you, Perin?’ I called, Tronsvasse already in hand.

There was no answer, and as I stared I wasn’t sure I hadn’t imagined it all. ‘Who is that?’

Nothing. No one, I told myself. Just my imagination.

I was still edgy as I reached the main yard. A light was on above the command block’s gateway. It was unnaturally quiet as I made my way to our halftrack.

I had to reholster my gun to climb up the cabin to reach the luggage rack. The ration bag clattered down as I descended the ladder, jumping the last few rungs to the floor.

No grox, I told myself, as I threw the bag over my shoulder and started back to the hab.

I hummed a tune to comfort myself. It was what I had done when a child, alone in the attic apartment, when the shadows seemed to have a life of their own. Gambol had sung it to me when I woke in the middle of the night. In that forsaken place I could see his eyes, the red veins standing out against his white-painted face.

I passed the pale bulk of the serf block, and turned left along the track to our hab, the working lumens guiding me home.

I was ensconced in my memories of Gambol when I saw a woman standing at the edge of the lumen’s pale reach. Her face was ashen and pinched – but what stood out were her eyes. They were black. So black they seemed to suck in the meagre light.

She was ten feet off. I stopped. ‘Who are you?’ I called.

Her fingers clutched the shawl that hooded her face. She did not speak, but took a step closer.

My hand went to my gun.

‘You are one of the enforcers?’ she said.

‘Who are you?’

‘My name is Agafa,’ she said. There was a pause. ‘You shouldn’t be here. The straw man does not like it.’

‘What straw man?’

The girl looked at me. Her eyes were like pits that felt as though they would suck me in. She was about to say something when a voice called, ‘Agafa!’

A moment later I saw the thin light of a hand-held lumen, hurrying towards me. It was carried by a woman. She approached the circle of light and I saw she was middle-aged, with a frizz of greying hair pulled into a rough knot behind her head. ‘Agafa!’ she shouted. ‘Come here!’

‘Wait – you were saying,’ I prompted the girl. ‘What is this straw man?’

Agafa looked to her mother, who took her arm and pulled her away. ‘Sorry, lord enforcer!’ the older woman said, fumbling with her words. ‘It’s just silly talk. We believe in the Emperor, and do our duties. We’re good people.’ She didn’t wait for me to respond but said, ‘Come, Agafa! It’s late to be out.’

When I got back to the hab the door was unlocked. It was ominously quiet. ‘Terrini?’ I called out as I pushed open the other man’s bedchamber door. The room was empty.

‘Terrini?’ I said, walking through into the galley. I searched each room, but Terrini was nowhere. I hurried out to the back porch and shouted his name.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ Terrini cursed as the latrine door banged suddenly open. He pulled his belt buckle tight and strode back towards the hab. ‘Sheesh. Can’t a man even take a shit in peace?’

I felt stupid.

‘Got the recaff?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘Thank the Throne!’

As we waited for the water to boil, I took my turn outside in the latrine while Terrini rolled a pair of lho-sticks.

The latrine was enclosed inside a wooden hut. It was all shadow. The door creaked open. I could sense the drop, and didn’t want to go inside. It had a scent that mixed counterseptic and the usual stale stink. I stopped in the doorway and relieved myself in the direction of the drop.

Afterwards, there was a plastek tub of water, with a ladle hanging off the side. I used it to splash water inside, then let the latrine door bang shut and hurried back to the hab, and locked and bolted the back door.

By the time I got inside, the pot had boiled and Terrini had spooned a thick dollop of recaff paste in the pan. He waited for it to melt and used the lid to strain the solids out.

‘Here,’ he said, passing me the mug, as I lit my lho-stick and then lit his. We sat and sipped it and I told Terrini about the girl, and this mention of the straw man.

Terrini exhaled a long plume of blue smoke. ‘“Straw man?” Who is the straw man?’

‘I don’t know. Her mother called her away before she elaborated,’ I said. ‘But one of the guys at the burial mentioned it, too. And there was that one at Mamma Jett’s. I dunno – just something about it feels off. She felt off.’

Terrini shook his head at me. ‘This is a farmstead. There are straw men everywhere. Don’t let them get to you,’ he said, as he found a pressed-steel plate to use as an ashtray. ‘It’s all the fault of that idiot bookkeeper. He’s too weak, impressionable. Men go native and start mixing with the serfs, and look what happens!’ He read my face. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll shoot some of them tomorrow, that’ll sort them out. Then we can head back home.’

Home, I thought, as I finished my lho-stick and ground the stub into the metal plate. It seemed suddenly so very far away.

That night, I closed the shutters on my chamber, checked the locks, flicked off my lumen and lay awake for a long time, listening to the mutterings of the wasteland.

In my dreams Agafa was standing over my bed. Black eyes, cold skin, that intense stare sucking all the life from the room. I tried to sit up, but she knelt down by the side of the bed and took my hands. ‘Beware the straw man!’ she hissed, and I woke with a start.

The room was empty, the door closed. I could hear Terrini’s snores from across the hallway.

The air felt cold. I pulled the blankets up to my shoulders, took in a deep breath and tried to calm my heartbeat as I tossed and turned for what felt like hours, waking and dozing, then waking once more.

In another dream I was in a cell in the basement of the Evercity Enforcer Block, tied to a chair. There was that distinctive smell of old blood, urine and pervasive damp, and I could hear the screams of deviants echoing outside. The sounds were coming towards me as the interrogator made their way along the line of cells.

I listened to the man in the chamber next to me. His cries started slowly then rose to a pitch of wild pain, before they fell silent. I could hear each scrunch of grit under the interrogator’s heavy boots, the jangle of keys, the heavy latch rising.

When the door opened, in the light of the corridor lumen I saw that the interrogator was my father. I should have felt a wave of relief, but as he padded into the room, I could see that he was not there to set me free. His hands were stained red. There was a knife in his fist, and when he spoke it was through fanged teeth. ‘Son,’ he rasped, ‘do you love me?’

It was not a question my father had ever asked before. It was not something I had ever had to think about. I feared my father, certainly, but love?

But I was no fool. ‘Yes, father!’ I said. ‘Of course.’

He came closer. One side of his face hung down, as if palsied. I saw to my horror that his throat had been cut from ear to ear, and that his front was soaked with blood. It glistened in the light. His breathing was laboured. ‘You want me to live?’

‘Of course, father.’

‘My rejuvenat is failing,’ he said, and gestured towards his neck. ‘They’re trying to kill me. You’re all trying to kill me.’

‘Not me, father.’

He swallowed and nodded as if he accepted my words. ‘You can help me,’ he said, bending towards me and pressing his knife to my cheek. He pressed so hard I felt my skin part, and warm blood started to ooze down my face. He was a master of pain. He always knew how hard to press to get what he wanted.

‘You want to help me?’ he asked.

‘Of course, father.’

He bent down towards me and whispered, ‘I need your liver.’

I paused. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m going to cut it out.’

‘No,’ I said quickly, playing for time.

His eyes were heavy with reproach. ‘You do not love me.’

‘I do, father, but if I give you my liver then I’ll die.’

‘Why do you think you were born?’

Those words jolted me awake. Or was it a sound?

I turned over and thought I heard a gentle tapping on my window. I was out of bed in a moment, edging towards the shutters, and used the barrel of my pistol to open them a crack. I could see nothing, but the tapping continued. I unbolted my chamber and crept to the front door and slowly slid the bolt back. The tapping was clearer now.

‘Hello?’ I called.

I edged outside. The outside lumen cast a weak circle of light on the porch but little further. I went down the steps to investigate and was standing under my window when I saw it.

It was nothing but a cord, flapping in the breeze, nailed to the eaves and slapping against the window pane.

It came away with the first tug. I walked back inside and saw that the end of the cord had been twisted into a noose – and hanging from the end was a straw torso, small enough to fit inside my palm, a scrap of wire thrust through it to make arms and legs. It wore a tattered jacket of faded homespun and had a face of crudely fashioned wood, the mouth just a slit, the eyeholes drilled out.

CHAPTER NINE

It took me a long time to go back to sleep after that, but when I eventually woke it was morning and I could hear Terrini shuffling around in the galley. He was making no effort to be quiet. He went through his routine as normal, sniffing loudly, clattering metallic pots. Soon, the water boiled and I smelt the rich scent of freshly brewed recaff and the smoke of Terrini’s lho-stick.

I pushed myself up. It was still early. Slanting light fell through the shutters. There was the rumble of far-off engines, the sound so low that the air seemed to vibrate. So, the harvest had started, I told myself, as I swung my legs over the edge of my bed and rested my head in my hands. The noose was lying on the floor nearby.

I pulled on my bodyglove, buckled on my armour and helmet, holstered my Tronsvasse.

‘Afternoon,’ Terrini said. ‘Recaff?’ He didn’t wait for an answer, but handed one to me. ‘Here.’

The first sip jolted me awake. I took another sip before holding out the miniature straw man. ‘I found this last night,’ I said. ‘Hung outside my window.’

Terrini picked it up. The eyes were like black holes, sucking in the thin morning light.

‘Was it there before we went to bed?’

‘No idea.’

He looked at the thing in silence for a long time. ‘You think Unworthy is trying to frighten us?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘This doesn’t seem his style.’

We sat in silence, sipping and smoking as we readied ourselves for the day ahead. Terrini’s mood was darkening as he thought about the attempted threat. ‘Ask any healer. They’ll tell you. There’s no point administering medicine unless you’ve diagnosed the illness. Most places, shooting the serfs works, but sometimes the sickness lies within the crew. Sometimes it’s even the bookkeeper. Sometimes the whole place is rotten to the core.

‘I did a tour a few years ago, where the whole place was run by the Banda. They had bought every single man, woman and child, and they were adulterating their loaders with shredded straw, and selling the good stuff off to merchant adventurers through one of the orbital stations in return for obscura. The whole place appeared well run. It was as slick as oil. They acted all friendly at first, and then, when we started sniffing round, they got scared. We brought in support and wiped them out.’

‘Do you think something like that is happening here?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

I thought about that. We were a long way from any support. ‘Should we make contact with the Evercity?’

Terrini paused. ‘I don’t think this lot are competent enough to be running a scam, do you?’

I shook my head.

‘What did that girl say to you again?’

‘“Beware of the straw man”,’ I said.

He laughed as he tapped the ash from the end of his lho-stick. ‘Damn rustics. They’re too remote, that’s all. I think we’ll have to shoot a few of them today, just to get them focused.’

As we finished our recaff there was a knock at the door.

It was Hamber. ‘I just wanted to let you know, sir. The harvesters have been assembled and are ready. The bookkeeper wanted to know if you would like to attend the blessing.’

Terrini looked to me, and I was keen to learn about these farmsteads. Wasn’t this what my trip was all about? I thought. I should take every opportunity to learn.

‘Of course,’ I said, and finished my recaff in a single gulp. ‘Let’s go.’

The harvesters were heavy, tracked engines with turret pilot cabins set before their high chimney stacks and mowing arms folded upon themselves, until they reached the fields. We arrived as Enginseer Gad limped his way along the files of parked vehicles, stopping before each to bless their engines and anoint them with unguents and holy oils. A couple of serfs trailed along behind him, holding his equipment, and chanting simple prayers.

Only once this process was complete were the machine-spirits roused from sleep. Their engines started up with dark puffs of promethium smoke. The rattle of each built to a steady roar, until every vehicle was adding to the thick clouds of fumes.

The crews mounted up and the ancillary serfs clambered back aboard their transports – a motley collection of farm trucks, dirty bikes converted into unsteady three-wheelers, and Goliaths retired from service elsewhere, repaired and modified, presumably by Gad.

Once all of the engines were roaring their faith in the Emperor, Gad blessed the serfs as well. I’d not heard his prayer before, but it covered familiar ground: the sacrifices of the God-Emperor and Omnissiah, the serfs’ own privileged lives – blessed with all manner of machinery and free from heresy and xenos threat – and how, by bringing in the corn, they would provide His armies with victuals and oil the cogs of the Imperium of Man.

When he had finished, one of the crews was still waiting for their overseer to appear.

‘What’s wrong?’ Capo called. ‘Who is taking this lot out?’

‘Dunne,’ Hamber shouted.

‘Where is he?’

All the overseers looked at each other. No one had seen him.

Capo stepped forward. ‘Hamber, you go!’

Hamber grabbed a spare ammo belt from one of the others, and clambered aboard.

‘Right!’ Capo shouted, and waved them off with both hands. ‘For the Emperor!’

His shout was answered and Gad limped quickly out of the way as, one by one, the harvesters rolled out of their barn, the drivers making the sign of the aquila.

‘That’s a fine sight, isn’t it?’ Capo said, as the tracked vehicles headed out towards the fields. A trail of dust settled behind them.

‘It is.’ I nodded. ‘The Emperor is beneficent.’

The enginseer approached. ‘We should thank you both for your help.’

Terrini waved a hand dismissively. He was all bonhomie now that the harvest was underway. ‘We each serve in our own way,’ he said. ‘Each according to his means and talent. Now, what is the problem with Dunne?’

Capo’s one eye looked at Terrini and then at me. ‘I sent him to the plant houses.’

We did not think anything more of it, but by midday Dunne had still not returned, so Capo, Terrini and I went to investigate. It was half an hour’s drive towards a water head and a line of domes marking each plant house.

Dunne’s Goliath was parked outside. We pulled up alongside it. The Goliath was empty and there was no sign of Dunne – only a vox-set, lying on the seat.

I took it out and flipped it on. ‘Dunne?’ I called.

There was a crackle of static.

‘He’s not answering,’ I told the others.

Terrini nodded. ‘Come on. Let’s go inside.’

Algae was one of the staple foodstuffs that Potence supplied to the Munitorum. It was cooked then dried into thin, nutrient-rich sheets that could be added to slab stew. It was brewed up in great vats, and harvested every week. It was clear that this had not been happening here. The venting towers were silent and the plex-glass domes of the plant houses were misted up and smeared with strands of green algae.

We made our way down the steps together. Capo had a bunch of keys at his belt. The lock had been opened. The metal shutters clattered up, seeming too loud in the sudden stillness.

The sight that greeted us was like a jungle. Even in a week, the long tiers of micro-greens had overwhelmed their trays. Hot, foetid air rolled out, bringing with it the damp stink of putrid vegetation. It smelt like a bog.

‘Can we get the lumens on?’ Terrini said.

There was a row of lever switches by the door. I pulled one, but nothing happened. ‘Dunne!’ I shouted, but the wet vegetation seemed to muffle noise.

‘Try the vox again,’ Terrini said.

It crackled with static.

‘Dunne?’ I called again.

The static crackled on. I slapped the handset into my palm. ‘Dunne?’

Nothing.

‘Come on,’ Terrini said as we set off into the swirling, humid air. ‘Let’s have a look.’

‘I’ll stay here,’ Capo said.

‘No,’ Terrini told him. ‘You come with us.’

We split up, each taking a row of the long plant house.

Narrow walkways stretched the whole length of the structure and stacked up on either side were tiers of long micro vats. The algae had grown out of control, far taller than their fibrous stems were designed to support. They had flopped out from their vats, blocking our lines of vision. They had not been harvested for months, and now the only illumination came from the thin spears of light stabbing down through the green gloom.

The thick, rotting vegetation seemed to go on and on. At last we reached the end, and turned down another row. ‘Dunne?’ I called out.

I passed an intersection and something wet slapped against my arm. I presumed it was a piece of vegetation but it stuck to my skin, and as I brushed it off with my hand, it clung to me.

I let out a shout when I saw what it was: a human hand, severed at the wrist.

‘I’ve found a hand!’ I called out, and pushed on and found a web of intestines, looped across the walkway. ‘Dunne?’ I called out, but the jungle seemed to soak up my voice. ‘Dunne?’

Dunne’s body lay face down just beyond the next intersection. A trail of dried blood ran along the floor. Scabs caked the side of his head. The face was already black and bloated. ‘He’s here!’ I shouted, recognising him as one of the men from the meal the night before.

Whatever had cut through the belly had made a hell of a mess. The edges of the wounds were torn and shredded. It was as if a chainsaw had been taken to him, or a savage beast. One wound ran from his navel to halfway up his chest. His sternum had been sawn through to get at his lungs and heart. And his insides had been pulled out. They hung from racks on either side, the surfaces of the kidneys and heart and liver starting to harden in the humid warmth.

Terrini pulled a face.

‘Come on, let’s get him out of here,’ I said.

It was hard pulling the dead weight through the tangle of clinging algae fronds. Terrini and I took a leg each. We got him to the door and let his legs drop, and left him there as we got a breath of the clean, fresh air.

We were both sweating. We looked to Capo to understand what had gone on. He shook his head. ‘I have no answers…’ he said.

Terrini went to look at Dunne’s body. ‘Was he a gambler?’

Capo shook his head. Terrini went through the list of common causes of murder. Affairs of the heart, drunkenness, grievances that others would want to settle.

Capo frowned and ran a hand across his head. ‘No. Nothing more than any other man.’

I turned Dunne over. ‘Here,’ I said to Terrini.

His black hair was matted with blood. Terrini knelt down next to me and pulled the hair aside. There was a neat round hole in the back of his head. Terrini stuck his finger into the wound.

‘Was he shot?’ I asked.

Terrini paused, feeling inside. ‘I don’t feel a round…’ There was a long pause as he gauged the depth. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, and stood and went to the nearest vat to wash his hands. He dried them on the front of his jacket. ‘It might be a pick. Or a bolt gun.’

‘So not the missing grox,’ I said.

‘No,’ Terrini replied.

I thought of the bodies at Mamma Jett’s. They had all been eaten, but Dunne had been mutilated.

‘There was a killer. And the killer is still abroad.’ Terrini turned to Capo. ‘Who else was missing this morning?’

Capo put the heel of his hand to his temple. ‘I can’t think of anyone.’

‘There had to be someone.’

He tapped his head as he thought aloud. ‘The overseers were all there… and Gad.’

‘Was Unworthy there?’

‘No.’

‘And the serfs?’

Capo didn’t know. ‘I couldn’t tell, to be honest.’

‘Well, find out,’ Terrini said.

CHAPTER TEN

When we got back to the command block, Hamber was waiting for us on the steps. He read our faces as we parked the Goliath and slid down from its cabin.

‘Found him?’ he asked.

I nodded. ‘Dead.’

The servo-skull hummed through the doorway on its morning tour of the facilities, palsied limbs hanging hunched underneath it and spine trailing behind.

‘Vox message from the crews on the northern stretch,’ Hamber said. ‘Possible grox sighting.’

We went inside to look at a map. Hamber pointed out the spot where the grox had been seen. It was a long way from Mamma Jett’s.

‘Well,’ Terrini said, ‘shall we go for a hunt?’

He looked at Hamber, not me, and I felt disappointed.

‘I can come,’ I said, but Terrini gave me a look. ‘Stay here and have a look around.’

I started to argue but he put up a finger, and afterwards, when we were standing alone, he said, ‘I’d like to get Hamber by himself. See if he will open up.’

‘Sure,’ I said, but I’d rather have gone hunting.

I watched Hamber and Terrini set off in our halftrack, a pair of long-las rifles leaning out of the passenger side window.

I set off down the path that led towards our hab, but carried on along the long line of barns. The scents of the countryside rose about me: dry earth, old dung piles, mouldering meal-sacks, sprouting grass. I could smell the stink of the grox pits long before I reached them. Grass was growing through piles of rusting machinery, a cargo-6 without tyres, and an old ploughing rig. Somewhere, a distant engine started with a low splutter. I could hear the scrape of metal pots being cleaned, a man clearing his throat and spitting, the scrape of a brush along a rockcrete surface.

A raised flakboard roof covered the grox pits at the end of the barns. I got there as the servo-skull was hovering at the maintenance cabin of the power fencing. Blue voltaic pulses sporadically flared. It hovered there for a moment, data-input plugged into the continuity engines.

The air crackled with energy. I went as close as I dared and peered down. All I saw were needle-sharp teeth, reptilian skin, pulsing dewlaps, and beetle-black eyes staring at me. The stench of ammonia, rotting feed and dung rose up.

‘Greetings,’ a voice said.

I spun about.

A thin, dark-haired man, with the damp stub of a lho-stick in his mouth, was watching me.

‘Better be careful, enforcer.’ He nodded towards the fencing. ‘Galvanic. Only stuns them, but it would fry you.’

‘I guessed.’

He came to stand next to me and looked down as well. ‘I’m Kossu,’ he said. ‘Grox-herd.’

I shook his hand. Grox-herds were Munitorum staff. A separate class of worker from the serfs and overseers. ‘They’re hatchlings. Only a month old. Ugly bastards, aren’t they?’

‘When do they go for slaughter?’

‘Another month, if they’re well fed,’ Kossu said. There was a pause as I took them in.

A squabble broke out amongst the reptiles below. We could hear the hissing as they fought amongst themselves. It was like a ripple through the herd. They picked on a wounded grox, and in a moment it was surrounded by snapping jaws, and desperately trying to fend them off.

It had no chance. The other grox set upon it with merciless hunger. Its dewlaps flared, it bared its fangs, and its long tail lashed about, but its fellow hatchlings were unperturbed. They started to tear chunks off its haunches, and then the largest of them caught its neck in its jaws, and crushed the breath from it.

There was a moment of savage violence as we watched it die with a paralysed gasp of breath. Then came a furious melee as the herd clawed over each other for the fresh meat.

In a minute it was over. There was not even a bone left. Nothing.

‘You don’t worry about them killing each other?’

Kossu laughed. ‘No. I deliver meat by weight, not by the head of grox. If they eat one, the others get bigger.’ He paused. ‘Are you the ones who found Mamma Jett?’

‘Yes.’

He nodded and sniffed again. ‘And I hear you let one go…?’

‘My colleague is hunting it down now.’

‘No need,’ the man said.

‘No?’

‘It’ll come here soon enough. They follow their noses, and everything edible is here. Want to see the daddy?’

I didn’t bother arguing as he led me along to another sunken feed pit a hundred yards further out. It was twice as deep as the other pit and covered with a cage-grid of welded I-beams. The bars were bent and misshapen. There was a strong, musky scent: the stink of an apex predator.

I almost feared to look over the edge.

When I did I took in an involuntary breath. The grox within was curled up, but even gathered in, it was enormous. It was as long as a cargo-6, and had the compressed energy of a coiled spring. Only its head moved. It was a wedge of malevolence, swinging on the end of a long neck. The eyes were small black points in the heavy skull. At the front of its snout were long nostrils that opened independently as it detected the presence of the newcomers. Its forked tongue tasted the air and it slithered towards us.

‘The hatchlings are lobotomised,’ Kossu said. ‘Takes a few seconds. Drill out the left lobe, around the ear. Stops them eating each other. You couldn’t keep them in a herd otherwise. They’d be a pile of bones and one fucking big monster. This one though… We always keep one unblemished, otherwise he won’t fertilise the eggs. Drill out the brain and it takes away the urge, know what I mean?’

I did, but at that moment its sinuous head curled up, vivid red dewlaps flared out to either side as it hissed at us. I didn’t hear what else he told me. I could not take my eyes off it. That grox was the most frightening thing I had ever seen. Even now I cannot think of a living thing that has inspired such terror. It was pure beast.

He tapped my arm. ‘You’re lucky. It’s feeding time!’

He moved to the side of the pen and slowly cranked a metal cogwheel. It was stiff with dried crud. At last the duct opened and a trickle of slop began to accelerate, then to pour steadily. A slurry of human waste and grit filled the waiting trough.

Kossu rejoined me as we watched the thing gulp the filth down with hungry grunts. The beast was totally focused on feeding, and when it was done it started to lick at the slops, then belched, spewed up a little, and ate its own vomit, before slithering to the corner.

‘There was a straw man at Mamma Jett’s,’ I said.

Kossu looked at me and licked his lips. ‘This is a farm,’ he said. ‘The barns are full of straw men…’

‘I’ve heard they turn up when people die.’

‘I don’t know about that.’

‘Who should I talk to?’

Kossu let out a long sigh. ‘Listen, enforcer. I don’t think anyone is going to talk to you.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘If you stay here long enough, you get the feel of Thorsarbour. It’s not normal. Things go wrong. I’ve seen it time and again.’

‘Like what?’

‘Taru. Raine. Talia. Mamma Jett. And it went on before I arrived.’

‘What about Unworthy?’

Kossu took the wet stub of lho-stick from his mouth. ‘He’s like carrion. He’s drawn here by the deaths. I keep myself to myself, and say my prayers every night to the God-Emperor. He protects me.’ He pointed north. ‘Know why they built that wall? It was to keep people out. The ancients understood. We shouldn’t be here.’

I left to make my way back on the outer side of the barns. The fields began a few yards to my left; the corn stalks were twenty feet high, the heads heavy with grain.

On a hunch I walked into one of the barns. There was a pile of round bales, rising up to the roof. The other half of the barn was filled with clutter. There was a beaten sign leant against one of the posts. No trespassing, it read. Violators will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.

I bent under an old shed awning. The entrance had been screened off with a piece of corrugated roofing. The steel had rusted through into sharp edges. I lifted it carefully away and pushed inside. The interior was dark. Through the weatherboard, stripes of light did little to illuminate the space.

I paused, letting my eyes get used to the darkness.

One of the roof rafters had fallen in. A rusting truck took up most of the space. The engine panels had once been painted in Richstar colours, but were now chipped and scratched and rusted through. The tracks had been removed; the track wheels still had thick black grease smeared over their moving parts.

Webs caught my face. I brushed them off and pushed past rolls of wire, old farming implements with broken shafts.

Hanging on a nail in the wall was a woven figure. I picked it off. It was similar to the one I had found nailed above my window. A country charm with a crudely formed jacket that had once been blue. I turned it over in my hand. The eyes had been bored out. I stuffed it into my pocket and moved deeper into the shadows.

A sudden movement made me start.

It was just a colony of imhis hanging from the intersection of the rafters. They squeaked in alarm. I swatted them away as they flapped into my face. There was a stack of boards propped against the wall. Droppings had smeared them all. The first was an old, warped noticeboard. Faded papers were pinned to it with rusted tacks. The notices were filled with the slogans common to this kind of establishment. Nearby was an old sign, words printed on it in block capitals. I pulled it closer; it read: CLEAR THE XENOS, PLOUGH THE LAND, FEED THE GALAXY.

I let it fall back, then looked again.

The title was not Thorsarbour, but ‘Valgaast’.

The name disturbed me. As I stood there, a voice said suddenly, ‘Morning, enforcer.’

I dropped the sign as I spun about.

In the shadows stood Unworthy. He smiled. ‘This is a strange place to find you,’ he said.

Next to him was a straw man in a sun-bleached top, a battered hat thrust down onto its head, propped up against the wall.

‘What are you doing with that?’ I demanded.

He looked at the straw man next to him. ‘This is a farmstead…’ he said. ‘There are hundreds of straw men.’

‘You’re the second person to tell me that.’

He looked at me with a smirk. ‘They are here to scare off vermin.’

‘There was one outside Mamma Jett’s. There was one outside the plant house this morning.’

‘Oh,’ he said, a smile playing about his mouth. ‘What happened at the plant house?’

‘I wonder if you know?’

He shook his head.

‘Where were you this morning?’

‘Why should I tell you?’

‘Where were you?’ I said again.

He paused, sensing the threat in my voice. ‘I was at prayer,’ he said.

‘Anyone with you?’

‘No.’ He looked at the straw man standing next to him and said, ‘Why is everyone so concerned about petty things? It’s a straw man. Nothing more.’

To prove his point he knocked the scarecrow over. It slid sideways, and caught on the fallen rafter.

‘You should not believe every tattletale you hear,’ Unworthy said as he stepped towards me.

He had sliced the end of his tongue right through and, as he licked his lips, I saw that it was forked, like a reptile’s. He came so close I could see the pores of his skin, the surface tension in the droplet of blood under his eye as it filled, then slid a red path down his cheek – but I refused to stand back.

‘Have you seen this sign for a place called Valgaast?’ I said.

‘Yes.’

‘Where’s it from?’

‘Valgaast. Obviously.’ He repeated the name in a lisping hiss.

‘But where is that?’

‘No idea. What’s the matter, enforcer? Does that name disturb you?’

‘No,’ I lied.

His eyes were wide. ‘I love the taste of it. The first time I read that sign aloud, I felt physical pain. Now when I say it, I taste blood. I come here just to read that name. Each night I repeat it as part of my mortifications, and I know that I am doing His will. Though it makes my skin crawl,’ he whispered. Then he said, ‘Do you dream, enforcer?’

I shook my head.

I saw a glint of steel as he lifted his hand to his cheek. The skin indented as he pressed it in. It was clear, even in the half-light. The silver edge pressed against living flesh, and the flesh parted and blood welled up. ‘I dream,’ he said. ‘And I bleed. I always see blood. The God-Emperor is so hungry. We cannot keep Him satisfied. He is consuming us all.’

The whole time he was speaking his blood ran freely. I had seen worse in the confession chambers of the Evercity, but even so there was something unnerving about the look in the man’s eye. He seemed to be enjoying my discomfort. ‘You know why Mamma Jett died?’ he asked.

I shook my head.

Unworthy stepped forward. ‘Because she was a sinner. The God-Emperor sees everything. He is unhappy with us. He disapproves.’

The blood was running so fast it trickled down the side of his palm, all the way to his wrist. He lifted his arm and licked up its length. I could see the broken veins in his cheeks. ‘If you have faith then you need to bleed,’ he said, and reached for me.

I shoved him and he stumbled back over the machinery, and fell heavily, razor still in hand.

‘Touch me again and I will shoot you,’ I told him.

He glared up at me. ‘The Emperor sees all our sins,’ he said.

I nodded. ‘My sins are between the Emperor and me. I’ll talk to Him when that time comes.’

‘You cannot hide from the Golden Throne!’ he called after me, and I left him to his sanguinary ablutions.

I was glad to get back into the daylight. As the serfs were out in the fields I thought I would look inside their barracks. It was a filthy place, the walls smeared with religious texts and hand marks of blood. Each room was littered with old food wrappers and a few pitiful possessions: clothes, footwear, the plastek head of a child’s toy. In the corners were scraps of bedding and filth. There were roaches everywhere – their shiny carapaces darting for cover as I stepped forward.

Behind the serf block was a run of work sheds. In the stillness of the heat, sound travelled, and I could hear voices from inside.

I found the source. There was a small doorway in the side of a large flakboard construction. Through a narrow atrium was a room with a cast iron shredder – a great beast, with a broad funnel for taking corn stalks, the scraps fired out the back. The engine casing was lifted high and propped open, and Perin stood at the side, someone beside him.

‘Enforcer,’ he said by way of greeting.

The other man looked up. It was Hamber. ‘How did the hunt go?’ I asked.

Hamber pulled himself out. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Good.’

‘Did you find it?’

‘We did,’ he said. ‘Terrini bagged it. He was very proud of himself. Cut off the head for a trophy.’

He wiped the sweat from his forehead on the back of his arm.

‘So,’ I started. ‘I met a girl last night.’ I gestured with my hand. ‘This tall. Black hair. Dark eyes. Kind of odd. I’d like to speak with her.’

I could see from his face that he knew who I was talking about straight away.

‘Agafa. She’s the ale-wife’s daughter.’ He looked to Perin. ‘Why don’t you show Enforcer Howe the way.’

Perin led me around the back of the serf block to a low, rockcrete structure. ‘This is the brewhouse,’ he said. He knocked on the flakboard door, before shoving it open.

Inside the air was warm and humid. There were wide cauldrons, brimful of bubbling brown mash. They gave off a sour, malty scent.

A stout woman in a white apron was stirring the far pot with a long wooden paddle. She hadn’t heard us. ‘Murgia!’ Perin shouted. ‘This is Enforcer Howe. He’s looking for your daughter.’

Murgia put the paddle down and came towards us, shoving up her sleeves like a man striding into a fight. It was the middle-aged woman I had seen last night. ‘Greetings, enforcer,’ she said.

‘Where’s your daughter?’ I asked. ‘I want to talk to her.’

She wiped her hands on her apron. ‘She’s a good girl, sir, but she’s never been right up there. Ever since she could talk. She feels things powerfully.’

‘Where is she?’ I said in a tone that told her to shut up.

She nodded and bobbed. ‘Sorry, sir.’ She took in a deep breath. ‘Follow me.’

She led me to a lean-to at the back of the brewhouse. The space inside was dark and smelt foetid – of too much humanity in too small a space. I had thought that darkness had played tricks on me the night before, and made an apparition out of a human face, but I saw that in daylight, Agafa was even more disturbing.

She was pale as a sheet, with black eyes in deep, sunken sockets. It was the eyes that threw me. There was no white at all, just pits of darkness. She had the look of a plague-child. A face malformed by evil. ‘Enforcer Howe,’ the girl said. ‘I know what you are going to ask. You want to know about the straw man…’

I felt sweat on my back, and suddenly my mouth was full of spittle. For a moment I thought I was going to be sick. Quickly, I tried to pull myself together. ‘Agafa. This thing – this straw man… Why do you believe it to be responsible for the stuff that’s going on here?’

‘Do you know the real name of this place?’ she asked.

I paused, tense, fearing what she would say, and her black eyes looked at me slowly and deliberately as she said the same word that had been written upon the sign in the barn. The one that Unworthy had uttered with such relish.

‘I– Stop. Was the straw man responsible for the death of Mamma Jett?’

‘Yes,’ she replied, without hesitation. ‘It will kill all of us.’

‘But why?’ Agafa stared at me for a moment, then shook her head, and said nothing. I tried again. ‘Have you seen it?’

‘Of course!’ she said.

‘What does it want?’

‘It wants us to leave. It does not like us here. This is not a place for humanity.’ She started speaking again, and then her eyes rolled up into her head and she sat there, shaking. ‘Oh!’ she said, hugging herself as she started to rock back and forth. ‘It is coming…’

‘Where?’

She started to shake violently.

‘Where!’ I demanded. She shook her head. ‘I can’t,’ she said. She suddenly jerked upright, then shook her head and put her palms to her temples, as if she wanted to crush her skull. ‘Stop!’ she hissed, her eyes clamped shut. Blood gathered in the seams of her eyelids and started to drip down her face. ‘It’s coming!’ she said again as she squeezed her blood-gummed eyes tighter, pressed her hands against her head anew, and screamed.

Moments later, I heard shouts of alarm from outside and hurried out through the brewhouse.

The first person I saw was Terrini. He had come at a jog. Perin was with him, the overseer looking as pale as a sheet of paper.

‘It’s Hamber,’ Perin said breathlessly. ‘There was an accident. The shredder started up while he was working on it.’

‘How?’

‘I don’t know, sir. It shouldn’t happen. It can’t happen. Not unless someone started it.’

I caught the look in Terrini’s eye. It was sceptical.

Perin led us to the shed door. The scent of promethium fumes hung in the air. He paused before we went in. ‘Sir, I’m a military man, but I’m warning you… It’s a mess.’

‘I’ve seen many things,’ Terrini said. He put his hand out. ‘Perin. Your lumen.’

The overseer unclipped it from his belt and handed it over.

Terrini looked at me. ‘Shall we?’

CHAPTER ELEVEN

It took me a moment before my eyes became accustomed to the sudden gloom, and then Terrini clicked the lumen on. The light it gave off was a fierce blue-white. We stepped towards the chamber containing the shredder. At the doorway I caught the familiar, metallic scent of blood and my skin began to goose-pimple.

The scent of promethium fumes hung in the air. Terrini strode forward and stopped in the middle of the room, panning the lumen about the chamber. It was a storage shed. The walls were hung with all manner of agricultural implements: hoes, scythes, forks, threshers, scourers and a spindle-driven seed drill, and in front of them a recently serviced chisel plough, a topper.

Before us was the shredder. It was just as I had left it, except Hamber was no longer there, just the scent of blood.

Perin had followed us in. He stood in the doorway and said, ‘We found it just like this. Just as you see it.’

Terrini looked about. Liquid was dripping down the far wall. He puffed out his cheeks as he took in the mess. ‘It’s a damned shambles,’ he said.

I thought that was the understatement of the year. This wasn’t a murder, it was an evisceration. Terrini took it all in. At last he touched my arm and pointed upwards. A word had been scratched onto the ceiling. I saw the first letter and knew what it said.

‘Valgaast,’ Terrini sounded, with obvious distaste.

‘It’s an old name for this place,’ I said.

He stepped closer to the far wall. A fine mist of blood hung in the air. The wall was covered in gobbets of gore. Bone, flesh, muscle, all reduced to shreds that had been splattered over every surface.

The overwhelming stench made me gag.

‘So he started it up and accidentally fell in…’ Terrini said.

Perin did not come inside, but stayed in the doorway. ‘That’s impossible. There is a safety catch.’

Terrini turned. ‘Suicide?’

I laughed despite myself. ‘There are easier ways to kill yourself.’ Terrini nodded. Throwing yourself into a shredder seemed a masochistic way to end your life. ‘And I saw him just an hour ago,’ I added. ‘He did not look like a man who was about to meet the Emperor.’

‘Was he unpopular?’ Terrini said to Perin.

‘No more than anyone else.’

‘Wife?’

‘She died.’

‘When?’

‘Six years ago. In childbirth.’

‘And the child?’

‘Died as well.’

Terrini frowned. ‘Did anyone hold a grudge?’

Perin shook his head. ‘You knew him. He was a good man, he kept himself to himself.’

I turned it over in my mind. ‘A shredder. That’s a brutal way to kill a man. Someone was unhappy.’

Perin scratched his head, but he did not come up with a name.

Terrini let his breath whistle out between his teeth as he took in the sight one last time. Here and there I could make out an ear, a finger, what looked like part of an arm.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said to him. ‘I know you two served together.’

‘Someone was frightened of what he might tell me… Who else has seen this?’

‘Only us three,’ Perin said.

Terrini puffed out his cheeks and let out a long, deep breath. ‘Lock it,’ he said at last. He took the key and put it into his pocket. ‘I will speak to Capo. In the meantime, I think it’s best if we keep this to ourselves.’ He paused. ‘Capo is in the fields. When is he due back?’

‘This afternoon.’

Terrini nodded. ‘We need to speak to the Evercity. Is there a vox?’

‘Yes,’ Perin said. He inhaled deeply. ‘I’ll show you.’

The farmstead’s vox-unit was kept in an alcove of its own in the command block.

‘We don’t use it often,’ Perin said apologetically as he unbolted the two doors top and bottom and swung them open.

The vox-alcove was not much bigger than a closet. It was spotless – no dust, no mess, nothing to show common usage. It was as if the unit were kept like an altar. The machine was an ancient beast: there were levers and buttons to engage the motivators, and its brass pipes and ducting took up half the confined space. The front panels were of polished wood, and there was an iron skull and a vox-horn handset set into the fascia.

Just the sight of it quelled the noise in the room. It was as if that skull were the God-Emperor Himself, looking out at us. Perin made the sign of the aquila and stepped forward.

‘I’ve seen it done enough times…’

He moved methodically through the routines rousing the machine-spirit. As he engaged the power stud, the lumens within the skull’s eye sockets lit up. At that moment, one of the overseers who had come back from the fields stumbled in on us.

‘Get him out of here!’ Terrini said.

I shoved the man out of the room as Terrini entered the small alcove.

Perin had more sense than to stay. ‘I’ll go and keep an eye out,’ he said.

I closed the door as Terrini sat down. The skull face was three times larger than a human head. It stared down on Terrini and made it look as though the enforcer were communing with Death itself.

Terrini took a brass headset off a rack to the side and set it upon his head, winding a wood-and-brass handle at the side. I could hear a low whine of galvanic motors. It seemed to take an inordinate amount of time before the note of the humming changed. I felt the atmosphere in the room start to change as the lights of the skull glowed brighter.

The air began to vibrate and the hairs of my arms stood on end. Gears and cogs turned within the device. Terrini suddenly sat up straight and stated his name and rank into the handset. A panel opened, he pressed his hand onto it and a needle pricked his finger. After a long pause the lights of the vox changed hue, and the glowing eyes pulsed and flickered as if there were a sentience within them. I felt the air turn cold.

‘Yes,’ Terrini said, repeating his credentials. ‘Enforcer, first class. At Thorsarbour.’ He clearly knew the man on the other end. I could picture him on the cogitator as he ran investigations. Terrini had a list of names before him. He went through them all, starting with Unworthy. He drummed his fingers absent-mindedly onto the tabletop. He checked on the records of Taru’s death, Taru’s service record.

All of a sudden he said, ‘Are you sure?’

I listened now, but could hear nothing of what was being said to him.

‘Very interesting,’ Terrini said. ‘A manumission, granted by Taru? What was the date of that?’ He frowned as he listened, repeating the information so that I might hear. ‘Right. So Taru granted her manumission, and two months later he dies… That smells, doesn’t it?’

Who? I mouthed silently, but he clearly wanted to keep his little secret, and kept me guessing until the end.

‘Thank you,’ he said at last. ‘Yes, no doubt, we’ll see you back at the Evercity.’ He closed the link down and took a deep breath. ‘Well, the tithe fleet has arrived.’

‘Already?’ I said, though I knew that the warp was an unreliable road.

‘They’ll be docking in a week’s time.’

A week, I thought. That would be enough time to get the harvest in. ‘And what about Hamber?’

Terrini pushed himself up as he wiped the blood from his fingertip. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘It seems that there are unpleasant links between my old friend Taru and Murgia. Come, let’s see what the ale-wife has to say for herself.’

We left the alcove, closing the door behind us.

‘Perin, is there somewhere we can talk to Murgia?’ Terrini asked.

‘There are rooms in the basement.’

‘Show me.’

Perin led us to a food storeroom filled with sacks of grain, and a pair of lock-ups.

‘We use these for drunks,’ the overseer said. There was a narrow-barred skylight and three chairs stacked atop one another, and while there was no cot there was a mattress and a blanket in the corner of the room.

‘Good,’ Terrini said. ‘Go get her.’

Outside, the sun was at its zenith. All the shadows had shrunk back from the intense light, and the glaring heat was oppressive. Murgia was sitting in her brewhouse, fanning herself with the end of her apron as we pushed inside.

She had heard the alarm, and said, ‘Is he dead?’

I didn’t see any point in hiding it. ‘He is. And we’d like to talk to you about that.’

She dropped the corner of her apron. ‘Why?’

‘Terrini will talk to you about that.’

‘I’d better turn this down,’ she said, and went to one of her cauldrons and adjusted it. ‘Can I speak to my daughter?’

‘No,’ I said.

We escorted her out of the brewhouse. She tried to make conversation, but neither of us were forthcoming. We mounted the steps of the command block. Murgia stopped at the door. ‘Inside?’ she said.

I nodded.

She was hesitant, I pushed her through. Once inside the atrium she stopped again.

‘Down the stairs,’ I told her.

She went ahead of us, and halfway down she seemed to panic. She turned around and tried to push past us. She was a strong woman. Perin and I caught her and dragged her down. She fought every inch of the way to the basement. We were sweating by the time we pulled her inside.

Terrini was waiting. He shut the door behind us as we hauled her across the room and thrust her down into the chair.

She knew she was beaten, and sat still.

‘Ale-wife,’ Terrini said. ‘Tell me, why were you sentenced to serfdom?’

She was a confident woman. ‘I did wrong,’ she said. ‘But I have worked hard since. I’m a loyal servant of the Emperor.’

Terrini sniffed as he turned towards her. He pulled a chair over, and put his foot up on it.

‘Are you?’

She nodded.

‘Tell me, why did Taru grant you manumission?’

She shrugged. ‘I worked hard,’ she said. ‘I kept myself clean.’

‘Clean from what?’

She stammered for a moment, looking for an answer, but stopped as Terrini came closer. He bent down, till his head was next to hers, and said, ‘Think of yourself as a patient. Inside you is a cancer that will devour you. Only I can save you. I am the surgeon. I can remove the tumour. But unless you tell me the truth, it will be hard for me. I will have to dig around. You wouldn’t want that. It can get messy. The patient usually dies.’

She flushed at these words, and looked at him and nodded, but she didn’t speak.

He smiled. ‘Listen. This will be easier if you assume that I know the truth. Because I will get it out of you. So first, let’s start again. Why were you sent here? And more importantly, why weren’t you shot?’

‘I was with child,’ she said.

‘Before or after you were taken?’

‘Before,’ she said.

‘And your child is…’

‘Agafa.’

‘She is a strange child.’

‘She’s a good girl.’

‘And whose was she?’

Murgia blushed.

‘Was she Taru’s?’

‘No,’ she said.

‘You’re lying.’

She set her jaw hard.

‘Is that how you won your freedom?’

‘No!’

Terrini paused. ‘I knew Taru. We served together. He saved you from execution, didn’t he?’ Terrini went on. ‘And he died just two months after he freed you. Were you involved?’

‘No, sir! I mourned him. We all did. He was a good man.’

‘Was he?’

There was a long pause. Murgia was clearly holding something back, but Terrini was determined. He set his jaw hard as he stood over her. ‘And now you’re the ale-wife.’

She put her chin out. ‘I serve the Emperor in my own little way.’

‘I have just spoken to the Evercity… You were a bad woman, weren’t you? Seems a stupid thing to do, to put a woman guilty of dealing in narcotics in charge of supplying ale.’

Murgia clammed up.

‘Do you know why Taru was sent here?’

She shook her head but there was a slight colour in her cheeks, an uncertain flicker in her eyes, quickly subdued as she shifted her weight.

Terrini paused, took out the leather pouch from his pocket, slid a paper, carefully filled it with dried leaves, then rolled, licked and tapped down either end.

It was slow, deliberate, supremely confident. He retrieved his lighter, sparked the flint with his thumb, sucked the flame into the lho-stick. He breathed the smoke deep, and leant forward and let it out in a long plume.

‘You don’t know why he was sent here?’

She shook her head.

‘Really?’

She stared at him defiantly. ‘I do not know.’

Terrini took another long drag and then dropped the lho-stick onto the floor and ground the flame out with his boot. ‘You’re lying,’ he said again.

Murgia tried to look impassive, but I saw her pause and lick her lips.

Of course, I had seen this process before – and I have seen it many times since. But this was the first time I watched it all unfold before me: the guilty working out how much to tell the interrogator, wondering whether she could fob him off with a lie.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

Terrini’s hand lashed out. The smack was audible and Murgia fell backwards. She landed heavily on her side. Terrini nodded towards me. I lifted her chair back up and set her facing the enforcer. Her lip was split. A long thread of blood was running down her chin. She licked her lip and her teeth turned red as it mixed with her saliva.

‘Now. Shall we try one more time?’ Terrini said.

Murgia glared at him, but Terrini was into his stride now. This was only going to end one way.

‘The simplest way out of this is to admit everything,’ he told her.

Murgia knew her life was on the line, and with every interaction any hope of salvation was slipping away, and she did not know how to stop it. I willed her to tell Terrini everything. I had seen what happened to criminals who did not speak.

She appealed to me but I gave her nothing.

Terrini had a blade out, and was sharpening it on the stone at his feet. The long, rasping strokes filled the chamber with an ominous sound.

‘We do not want you to feel any unnecessary pain,’ he said. ‘The Emperor does not want that. He just wants your absolute compliance. You understand that, don’t you?’

She glared at him.

‘The Emperor loves you,’ Terrini said. ‘But you have let Him down. I know that you don’t want to fail Him. All that He has suffered on our behalf, and all He wants is for humanity to obey His laws.’

He sounded like Gambol when I was a child and he would look after me. I knew what was coming. I hardened myself against it.

Terrini wiped his hands on his thighs. He examined the blade. ‘I’m going to skin you,’ he told her.

I thought of Saint Casophili in Thorn’s Book of Martyrs. He had been skinned alive. The image in my head was not pleasant, and I did not think skinning Murgia would bring us closer to the truth.

I stepped forward. ‘Enforcer,’ I said. ‘May I?’

He did not appear to be happy, but he did turn her over to me.

I pulled a chair across the room, spun it round, and straddled it. Ever since I was a child, my father had insisted I sit in on the interrogations. He had perfected the manner of unlocking a guilty conscience and would work with bare hands on the criminal. Only a thug used violence. The secret weapon of the interrogator lies within the mind of the criminal. It is their own imagination.

‘Murgia, if you do not tell the truth then Enforcer Terrini will do his worst. It will be slow and it will be painful. And at the end, when you have told him everything, only then will he grant you the Emperor’s Peace. Then your daughter will be orphaned – and let’s face it, your daughter is not normal. Some might even say that she’s a freak – maybe even a heretic. I can help her, if you assist us. If not, after your death, she will be alone.’

‘She’s a good and decent girl.’

‘That may be so, but we live in an uncaring world. Unloved children live short lives.’

‘I love her,’ she protested.

‘But if you do not speak, you will be dead. It’s even possible that the Inquisition would be interested in examining her…’

The word ‘Inquisition’ fell as heavy as a stone.

‘If you speak, then the Emperor will protect her.’

Murgia looked at me, as if assessing whether I was telling the truth.

I was, and my face made that plain. I pressed on. ‘But if not, they will peel her open, like a piece of fruit. And once they have assured themselves that she is not a threat to the God-Emperor, then, to be frank, there will not be much of her left. If she’s lucky, her sanity will go before her life ends. But it is not assured.’

Murgia swallowed. ‘She isn’t a heretic, sir. She just sees things sometimes. Things others cannot, or will not. That is all. It’s this place. It tests us all.’

I nodded. ‘They would destroy her. It’s not a fate I would wish upon my worst enemy.’

‘I’ll speak,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you.’ She took in a deep breath and hung her head and fumbled with her fingers. ‘You’re right, sir. I lived in the Evercity, but I fell into hard times. I made bad friends. They offered me easy credits. I did not know who they were, until it was too late. If I did not do what they wanted they said that they would turn me over to the Enforcers.’

‘Speak plainly,’ I told her.

Murgia took a deep breath. ‘Sir. I did. I dealt in obscura.’

‘And?’

‘I was sent here. Taru helped me.’

‘And why would he do that?’

There was a long pause. ‘Think of what is best for your daughter,’ I told her.

Murgia looked up at me. There were dirty streaks down her cheeks. She sniffed and wiped her nose with the heel of her palm. She looked beaten as she nodded, and said, almost to herself, ‘I swore an oath that… But he’s dead now, so I can say.’ She took another breath. Her head hung down. ‘Taru was an obscura addict. He needed it. The Banda helped both of us. I gave it to him, a little at a time. He couldn’t live without it, so I looked after him. I never gave him too much.’ She was breathless as she came to an end, and gasped as she wiped her cheeks.

‘There!’ she said. ‘I’ve told you. I worked with the Banda. I’m sorry but I did it.’

‘So, you supplied Taru with…?’

‘Obscura,’ she said, and nodded. ‘You heard me. I’m truly sorry, sir. The Emperor knows I am sorry and I have repented many times.’

‘So how did Taru die?’

‘You’ve read the reports,’ she said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I have not.’

‘He had a heart attack,’ Terrini said.

She nodded.

‘Brought on by the filth you were pushing on him?’

‘No, sir. Not me. He always wanted more, but I would not let him.’

‘And Hamber?’

‘I did not kill him.’

‘Murgia,’ I said, ‘think of your daughter.’

‘I am, sir. I am!’

‘See?’ Terrini said. ‘She hasn’t told us the truth. She killed Hamber.’

‘I did not!’

Terrini and I conferred outside. We spoke in low voices that echoed in the stairwell. ‘She’s hiding something,’ Terrini said. ‘I’ll get it out of her.’

‘How?’

‘By any means possible.’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘But I want her to stay alive. I want to take her back to my father.’

He nodded. ‘Of course.’ I thought for a moment that he was about to call me ‘sir’.

When we went back inside, Murgia glared up at Terrini.

‘The simplest way out of this is to admit everything,’ I repeated.

‘I have!’

‘That,’ said Terrini, ‘is simply not true.’ She thrashed her head back and forth as he reached for her. Her breath came in wheezing gasps. I thought he was going to throttle her, but all he wanted was for her to lie still enough.

‘Murgia,’ Terrini said as he struggled. ‘You leave me with no choice. Those who are blind should live in blindness,’ he said gently. He spread his fingers across the sides of her face. He found the right place, his thumbs on either side of her cheeks. ‘Hold still. I do not want this to hurt more than is necessary.’ She started to snarl with pain as he pressed his thumb into her eye socket.

When it was done, Terrini held out the eyeball in his hand. He peered into it, as if taunting her, before ripping it out and flinging it across the room. It skidded across the ground, trailing a tail of pale nerves.

‘One gone,’ he said, and sat back as he looked into the remaining eye. ‘One to go.’

He stretched his hands above his head and rolled his shoulders. I had seen eyeballs squeezed out before. I was not squeamish, but something told me that she had not killed Hamber, and I did not think that Terrini’s blunt violence was going to work. But she had traded in obscura, and this was how we kept the people down. The Emperor was loving but He was not forgiving. She had betrayed Him, and worse, she had annoyed Terrini. There was a strange intimacy between torturer and the tortured. His face, I thought, would be the last thing that she would see as he forced his thumbs into the corners of her remaining eye.

We left her kneeling on the floor, her hands scrabbling around.

‘I know she killed him,’ Terrini said. But he had wanted to make her say it.

We locked the door, and started back up the stairs. ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry about Hamber. He seemed like a good guy and there was history between you. But I don’t think she did this. There is more she knows, definitely, but – maybe it’s to do with this talk of the strawman.’

‘Rudgard, that’s just bumpkin talk.’

‘It’s scaring the shit out of these people. And some of those people are now dead.’

‘That woman is who’s responsible for this. Trust me. There’s something bigger going on here and she knows about it.’

‘Yes, that’s what I’m saying.’

‘Something related to obscura. Not bloody straw men.’

I pursed my lips and stared at the older man for a moment. Finally, I said, ‘I want her back at the Evercity. I want her able to speak to my father.’

Terrini shrugged. ‘I left her tongue.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Don’t thank me,’ he said, then, seeing my seriousness, he sighed. ‘All right. It seems that all is in order… which means that tomorrow we can return to the Evercity.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Excellent.’

As Terrini went to wash his hands, I summoned Perin. ‘Go and fetch Agafa,’ I told him.

He saluted and left, and I went into the bookkeeper’s office. The room was quiet. The simian skull stared down from the top shelf where Capo had put it, and the servo-skull was sitting on its perch. Its eye sockets shone with a dull light as its generators charged, its limbs bunched under its gap-toothed jaw.

The tithe book stood on its stand, the heavy cover closed.

I lifted it open, and went through the records: diligent scribes recording so many tons of grain delivered in time for the tithe fleet… so many tons of grox-meat… so much algae cake.

I inhaled deeply. Something important had happened down there, I thought. Not only had I uncovered a Banda operative who was willing to talk, but on top of that I had given Terrini an instruction and he had obeyed. I felt as though I had passed some unknown test.

Perin returned, and knocked on the door. ‘Yes?’ I called.

‘I couldn’t find Agafa. I looked everywhere.’

‘Let the other overseers know I’m looking for her,’ I told him. ‘I want her bringing in as soon as possible.’

The shadows gradually lengthened as the afternoon wore on. The overseers not out searching for Agafa kept themselves to themselves. I think they napped the afternoon heat off. The air was still and unbearably hot. Sweat trickled down my sides. There were growing stains on my uniform under my armpits and in the small of my back.

Every once in a while, a breath of wind would lift the sound of the harvesters, and carry it to us across the fields. It brought a momentary relief from the heat.

Terrini pulled out his lho and rolled us both a stick. He seemed oddly insouciant as he sat back, pouring what must’ve been his fifth mug of recaff. I wondered if he’d taken umbrage at our slight disagreement. ‘Did I ever tell you about Eviscerator?’ he asked, as he lit the lho-sticks.

‘No,’ I said, taking the one he held out for me.

‘He was one of my first interrogations. Nasty piece of work.’

‘Aren’t they all?’

‘This one was different. Proud. Excited. He confessed immediately. Wanted to tell me all about his little crime. How he had cut up a poor bunch of buggers. How he’d eaten them raw. He wanted to put all that into my head. It seemed to thrill him…’

I didn’t know where this story had come from, or why Terrini felt the need to regale me with it. I squinted out of the window, greased up with lho-tar, the glass splintered in one corner, but there was no sign of Perin or any of the other overseers. Restlessly, I drew on the lho-stick and started to pace.

‘Spent his time in prison carving runes into himself,’ Terrini went on. ‘The wounds wouldn’t heal. They were deep, raw sigils. He was quite mad by the time his execution came. When the medicae arrived ready to harvest his organs, we had to chain him to the bed.’ He took a slow sip of recaff. ‘They didn’t use anything to dull his pain. Why waste medicine on a monster such as him? They cut out his vocal cords, though, so he couldn’t scream. But despite that, he let out a terrible rasping noise. I couldn’t watch. But I could see his hands, and through them, I read his pain. They clenched and struggled as his voiceless mouth made that dreadful sound.’

It was hard listening to his story. I paced up and down the hard, creaking floorboards. I drew hard on my lho-stick as he went on.

‘His liver came first. Then his kidneys. I could hear his strangled moans. They knew how to make him squirm. One kidney, two. Spleen. Stomach. Pancreas. When his lungs came out they were still moving – pink balloons, wheezing as they were cut free and dropped into the medicae’s stasis cask. Each time they cut a blood vessel, it was clamped shut. Some were lost in the bloody mess of flesh, and they had to use tweezers to dig them out. His heart was still beating when they started to remove long sections of skin. And then… they skinned him alive.’

‘Throne!’

‘Harvested him right down to his bones.’

I was no longer interested in my recaff, but Terrini took a long sip of his. ‘When everyone had gone, I stood over the bed. It was like an animal had devoured him. His arms and legs had been cut back to stumps. They had skinned him, removed his eyes…’

I had lost my appetite as well. Terrini seemed oblivious.

‘The Emperor has no mercy. Now, no doubt those organs are being put to good use by some Astra Militarum officer.’

‘No doubt,’ I said. No doubt.

CHAPTER TWELVE

We could hear the dull rumble of the harvesters as they ran long, straight lines across the open fields. They grew gradually louder as they approached the farmstead, and then more distant again. Hours passed in that manner. Perin appeared to tell us there was still no sign of Agafa anywhere. I had no choice but to give up the search for the time being, though I was determined to discover something about this place.

I went to the bookkeeper’s office. There was a pleasant coolness to the air, and I returned to the tithe book and ran through the details, looking for a clue as to when the farmstead had changed its name. The distant noise of the harvesters made the motes of dust vibrate in the air about me. The servo-skull sat, grotesque, upon its stand – red eyes slowly pulsing as it charged. I disliked the thing staring at me.

‘Skull!’ I said to it and its eyes brightened. ‘Find the bookkeeper.’

There was a pause before it disengaged and rose, humming into the air. Its trailing spine slapped my cheek as it passed overhead.

Half an hour later it returned, and hovered in the doorway.

‘Rest,’ I told it.

It hesitated for a moment, anti-grav humming loudly. I had to repeat my instruction before it returned dutifully to its stand. I went back to the accounts but soon heard footsteps outside and Capo appeared, sun hat askew, his red face filmed with dust.

‘Come in,’ I told him. ‘Have you heard about Hamber?’

He shook his head. ‘No, is all well?’

‘No. He had an accident. With the shredder…’

Capo looked pale as I related the details. I studied his response and he seemed genuinely surprised.

‘We believe it was Murgia,’ I said.

‘Murgia? Oh dear. Why would she do that?’

I did not want him discovering what we had heard, just in case the web of crime included him. ‘Who knows what drives souls to kill?’ I said. ‘Thwarted love. A slight. A sudden angry impulse?’

He nodded. My gut told me he was not involved.

‘And how’s the harvest going?’

‘All good!’ he said. ‘All good. We’ve five trucks to send off to Starport.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow, Enforcer Terrini and I are returning to the Evercity.’

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Fine.’

‘You have everything under control?’

‘Of course,’ he said.

As evening fell we could see the lights of the cargo-8s as they set off towards Starport. They went slowly, each one loaded with corn.

‘That’s a great sight,’ Capo said. ‘I didn’t think we would bring in the harvest – thank you for your help.’

‘Thank the Emperor,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘Where’s Terrini?’

‘He went down towards the brewhouse. He wanted to make sure we didn’t miss anything.’

When Terrini returned a short time later, the bookkeeper said, ‘I think we should share a toast.’

He had the air of a man who craves a drink so much that he always feels the need to celebrate something.

‘What are we celebrating?’ Terrini said.

‘The harvest.’

Capo went to the vox-alcove, where he apparently kept a dusty bottle of amasec. He brought it out and wiped away the dust with his forearm, took three cut-crystal glasses from the clutter on the shelves, blew the dust out of them, rinsed them out, and then set them upon the table.

‘Here,’ he said, and filled each glass and handed them out, first to Terrini, then me. ‘To the harvest!’ We drank.

And then, ‘To Hamber’s soul!’ and then, ‘To one less malefactor to trouble the Emperor!’

Each time, we clinked glasses and drained them.

After three shots I felt Terrini’s tension ease. His instincts were to cut Murgia to shreds, though I had stopped that for the moment. But as the work-teams returned in the back of the Goliaths, dusty and thirsty and exhausted, the amasec kicked in, and we all started to relax.

Terrini sniffed as he nursed his glass. ‘I’ve seen some things,’ he said as it was refilled once more. ‘I’ve met some evil bastards, I can tell you.’ He went on like this for a while. Maybe it was because he wanted to restore his sense of pride. He listed gunfights, malefactors. ‘Ever heard of Dread Baeblio?’

Capo nodded. Of course he had. Baeblio had terrorised the lower wards of the Evercity for months.

‘I was the one who executed him,’ Terrini said.

Capo shook his head. ‘No!’

‘It’s true,’ Terrini said. ‘I was Rudgard’s age. I spent the night in the guardroom next to the cell. The bastard didn’t sleep his last night, and he muttered incessantly as he stayed awake.

‘There was a little vision slit with a metal grille. He was an ugly, ugly man – had heavy brows that made him look like an ogryn. He rocked back and forth, kept on muttering. His lips were moving but there were no words I could hear. My super had a look. They turned to me – I was a cocky cadet. “Off you go, Terrini. You’re a big talker. Go and find out what he’s saying.”’

Terrini held his glass out and Capo refilled it, and then went on. ‘They pushed me in and locked the door behind me. I stood with my back against the door. I was terrified. “Hello?” I said. He didn’t react. His hair hung down over his face, like a hood, in thick, black clumps. In places it had been torn out. His scalp was raw flesh. There were heavy iron rings hanging from his lips and cheeks. He just sat there, hunched. And do you know what he did? He turned to me and said, “Terrini. Is that you?”’

It took a moment for Capo to understand the implication. ‘You had never met him before?’

‘Never,’ Terrini said.

Capo frowned. ‘How did he know it was you?’

When Terrini spoke it was in a low whisper. ‘He looked up. His eyeballs had been tattooed red, his lips slashed through, right down to the base of his gums. They made his speech indistinct. I suddenly understood what he’d been saying all this time. He’d been saying my name all along. “Terrini,” he said. He looked me in the eye and said, “I will come back and kill you.”’

My attention wandered. Outside, the sun was setting and the crews were coming back to the farmstead.

From the barrack kitchens came the clatter of cauldrons. Terrini grew increasingly garrulous. Darkness fell as he went on, recounting lurid stories. In the corner of my eyes I thought I saw a shadow cross the window. It was just a flitting image, but then it came again.

I didn’t interrupt Terrini but went to the door. I saw the servo-skull’s stand was empty.

Neither Capo nor Terrini knew where it had gone.

For some reason it disturbed me. I went outside. The horizon was a thin, paling blue and I saw the skull’s lights, as it hummed away across the farmstead. I looked about. Everything seemed well, but something left me feeling uneasy. I puffed out my cheeks and returned inside. The room was a cluttered mess. I felt there was something here that I was missing.

Then Perin brought us a pot of slab and a set of bowls. It was plain, farmstead stuff, and we sat at the table a long time after the meal had finished, kicking back, rolling lho-sticks and pouring more drinks. Terrini had as many tales as there were stars in the sky. Perin tried to match Terrini with his own tales of life in the mountain infantry. There was a competitive air that only got worse as the grog flowed.

I heard a shout and looked around; Terrini was much too relaxed to pay much attention. It came again, louder this time.

Terrini caught the look on my face. ‘I thought I heard something,’ I said.

‘It’s nothing,’ Terrini said.

‘I’ll just go check.’

‘Whatever,’ he said.

It was cool and dark outside, and as I left the command block I paused for a moment to let my eyes become accustomed to the gloom. The shadows were so thick that I could not penetrate them. I closed my eyes to enjoy the breeze. After the heat of the day it was like fresh water. And I was full of amasec. And I felt myself a man.

As I stood there a voice said, ‘Enforcer?’

I spun about. It was Murgia’s daughter. She was standing right behind me, arms wrapped about her ribs.

‘Agafa. Where have you been?’

‘What are you doing with my mother?’

‘We’re taking her to the Evercity.’

‘Enforcer Terrini… He blinded her.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘That was cruel.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I saw it. I saw it before you came. I saw it all. I warned her, but she didn’t believe me.’

The farmstead was quiet. Far off a canid started barking. And then I went cold as I realised that I could see the lumens through the girl. I shook my head. Too much grog, I thought, but I had the strange sensation that I was not speaking to a creature of flesh, but an apparition. She leant towards me. ‘It’s going to kill everyone. You have to stop it.’

She was chewing her lip and twitched nervously as she rubbed her hands together.

‘Listen,’ I said, fed up of the evasion and finally coming to a conclusion, ‘I don’t believe in any of this straw man shit. Someone is behind all this. Who is it?’

She disappeared, and then her voice came from the other side of me. ‘No one,’ she said. ‘I’m not lying to you, I swear on my mother’s life!’

I whirled, but there was nothing there. I turned again. I’d never seen anything like it. The hairs on my arm stood on end. The sudden movements were too much, and I fell drunkenly and it took me a moment to push myself up.

I should have eaten more, I told myself. Amasec on a half-empty stomach was never a good idea.

I swayed as I clambered back up the steps and went indoors.

‘Where have you been?’ Terrini said as I rejoined him.

‘Just checking on the ale-wife.’

‘How is she? Regretting her crimes?’

I nodded, unnerved by the memory of Agafa’s strange presence. I took another sip of my grog, and said nothing.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

As we stumbled back to our hab, Terrini and I shared a lho-stick, and in our drunkenness we talked openly about my father’s succession. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘there are three of you, and you’re not strong enough to beat the others alone. If I were you I’d make an alliance with one of your brothers, kill the third, then turn on the one who helped you. That will only leave yourself.’

I knew that it was inappropriate to discuss this, but I was drunk and I was curious what the enforcers thought about it all. Besides, I had heard my mother’s opinions so many times I wanted a fresh perspective.

‘Who’s the strongest?’ I asked Terrini.

‘Well, no one likes Hingull,’ he said, ‘but Gaktum has a following. He’s been working at the “I’m not Hingull” thing for a while. He’s weak, but some men like that – it means they can use him.’

‘And me? What do the men say of me?’

He paused. ‘No one knows you so well.’

‘Is that a good thing?’

‘It’s not good or bad, but you can use it to your advantage.’ I prompted him to keep speaking. ‘Well, it means you’re an unknown quantity. That’s a good place to be. You can put out what you want them to think.’

‘What does the Patridzo want?’ I asked.

Terrini laughed. ‘He’s unimportant. The dowager, however – she wants a good, honest, strong Chief Enforcer. But she’s about the only one. The nobles want someone who will take their side against their enemies. The people don’t much care as long as they’re left alone. And that’s about it.’

‘What about the enforcers?’

He laughed. ‘They want your father to live.’

I laughed at that as well. ‘So do I.’

We walked on in silence for a while. ‘You make it sound simple,’ I said finally, thinking of having to kill my brothers.

‘It is,’ Terrini said. ‘You know what the Banda say.’

‘No.’

Terrini took a long drag on his lho-stick as we turned up the path to our hab. The end flared with hot embers, and then the smoke came out in one long exhalation. ‘Trust makes way for treachery,’ he said, and winked. ‘Come on, let’s get to bed.’

I did not sleep well that night.

Spirits came to haunt me. My mother. My father, my brothers, and even Gambol, his sutured body hitting the wooden floor with a dull thud. When he caught me, his arms were so strong I could not pull myself away. He hauled himself up, and pinned me down.

‘Come in!’ he called, and in my dream my brothers entered. It was clear that they knew the drunken plan we had hatched up that evening.

Their faces were as white as Gambol’s, with the same blue diamonds surrounding their eyes.

‘Thank you, Gambol,’ Hingull, my eldest brother, said. He had all my father’s menace, heightened by a sadistic streak.

Gambol held me down.

‘Get a stone,’ Hingull said to Gaktum, my middle sibling.

I should have been able to escape him easily, but some ghostly force held me back, and I could see his red tufts drawing closer. Gaktum struggled to lift the stone he had found. He grunted as he straightened, and then hobbled over. ‘Lift it higher!’ Hingull said. ‘Now. Drop it on his head.’

I woke with a start and sat up.

It was morning. I rubbed the sleep from my face. Just dreams, I told myself, and cursed out loud for being concerned.

Terrini was banging away in the galley. I shoved myself up, pulled on my bodyglove and gun belt, and stuffed my clothes into my kitbag, then dumped it by the door. This place was starting to grate on me. I was looking forward to getting back on the road to the Evercity.

We sat and sipped our recaff, our thoughts already turning to the journey. Terrini drained his mug, slapped his hands onto his knees and sniffed. We were talking about the trip. Chief concern was Murgia. ‘We’ll bung her in the back, cuff her to the railing,’ he said, then paused and leant towards the door to spit his morning phlegm out the back. ‘We’ll get some slab from the bookkeeper. Enough for three of us, for five days. She won’t need any more than that.’

He said the last sentence without any drama. It was a fact. Murgia would need her strength for when she was handed over to my father.

The serfs had already been driven out into the fields. As we made our way up the steps of the command block, we could hear the harvesters out in the fields, the growl of their vast engines a vibration in the air.

Capo was in his office, whistling tunelessly to himself. The servo-skull hummed back and forth about his head. It hung in the air, cogitators whirring inside the hollow cavity of its skull, its drill bit spinning.

‘Rest!’ Capo told it, and the servo-skull flew straight towards me, veering off at the last second.

‘Disgusting thing,’ Terrini said as the skull settled for a moment, palsied metal limbs relaxing as the red light went from its eyes. He dragged a chair out, turned it round backwards, then sat down with his arms folded across the back.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘We’re heading back to the Evercity today, and we’re taking Murgia. The tithe ships have arrived early. You will continue to fulfil your duties as interim bookkeeper. You will bring the harvest in, in its entirety. Understand?’

Capo nodded through it all. He puffed out his cheeks. Yes, he could manage for a few more days. Yes, he really needed someone to take over. He was never the kind to lead, he’d always been a follower.

‘I’ll convey your fears to the Chief Enforcer,’ Terrini said. ‘And the Ecclesiarchy. Did that girl ever show up?’

Capo shook his head.

‘Never mind. When she does, send her to the Evercity. Now,’ he said, ‘let’s get that woman.’

He tossed the key across the room. I caught it and went down the stone spiral staircase to the second floor.

The lock came apart in my hands, the chain rattling as it ran through the handles. I pulled the door open. It grated on the gravel underfoot. Murgia was crouched in the far corner, her legs pulled up to her chest.

‘Murgia?’ I called. There was no answer. ‘Up you get.’

I crossed the room. ‘Up!’

She refused to move.

‘Come on.’

I gave her a nudge with my foot, and her body slid down the wall, her head flopping sideways.

It looked like a chainsaw had ripped her throat open. A savage wound had almost cut her head from her body, and as she fell I saw that something had cut her insides open.

‘Terrini!’ I yelled.

He came at a run, his feet pounding on the steps as he stormed in and looked down at Murgia’s corpse. The cut was savage. It went right down to the bone. ‘How the Throne…?’ he started.

We looked about. There was no sign of a break-in. No sign of a fight, either. Nothing.

Terrini knelt down next to her to feel her body. ‘Cold,’ he said. ‘Which means this happened hours ago.’

As he propped her back up, her hair left a smear of blood on his arm. He crouched down again, and checked the back of her head. There was a round hole at the nape of her neck.

We walked about, looking for a hidden door, or trapdoor. There was nothing. The walls were solid, bloodstained, cold.

I felt slow with the effects of last night’s amasec and wanted to work it all through. ‘And we have the only key?’

‘Yes.’

I looked round. All there was, was a narrow, high window. As I looked, something caught my attention. There was a long piece of twine hanging from the sill, and dangling from the end was a figure of twisted wire. I tore it down and held it in my hand.

A straw man.

‘Murdered? Holy Throne…’ Capo said, sitting at his desk, face in his hands. He was beyond words.

At that moment Perin came in with something to report. I put up my hand for him to stop and demanded, ‘What do you want?’

‘Nothing, sir,’ Perin stammered.

‘Then wait outside,’ I told him.

‘But… we found Agafa,’ he said.

‘Finally. Put her in the storeroom,’ I said, then slammed the office door shut.

‘Holy Throne,’ Capo said again. ‘Didn’t I tell you we needed a confessor!’

I slammed my hand down onto the table. ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘This is not a haunting. Someone killed Murgia. Not a ghost. Not a spirit. A man or woman. And we will find them, whoever it is.’

I looked to Terrini. He could see what I was thinking. ‘Let’s get them all in here,’ he said.

We called Perin and the others back inside.

I was calm and cool and hard as marble. ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Murgia was murdered overnight. I want all of you armed at all times, and I want you in pairs. Understand? No one tells the serfs. The harvest goes on and we deliver what is due to the Emperor. Any questions?’

There were none.

We all headed to the armoury. The heavy reinforced doors were dusty with years. There was a rack of auto-rifles inside, a chain threaded through the trigger guards. Terrini pulled the chain clear. I took the rifles out two at a time, and handed them to the men. They were ancient pieces, retired long ago from the Astra Militarum, and then passed down to part-time home-based military units, eventually filtering down to places like this.

Terrini and I spent the morning questioning anyone – serf and overseer – who was not in the fields. They were a motley mixture, like the bookkeeper, largely inept. None of them had seen anything, no one knew anything. I didn’t believe them. They were holding things back.

Unworthy demanded to be questioned by me. His cuts were swollen. The swelling had stretched the skin of his cheek such that it was almost transparent. Under the pink skin I could see pale mounds of infection, with crowns of hard yellow pus. One of them had burst, and blood and pus leaked down his cheek. He seemed delighted by the turn of events. ‘You are men of little faith,’ he said. ‘The Emperor is unhappy with us. He will judge us all.’

When we were done, Terrini went into the alcove and sat at the vox-unit and summoned the spirit back to life. The eyes glowed. The words of the vox-unit were a dull crackle, too far away for me to make out.

‘Yes. Unexplained deaths,’ Terrini said. There was a long pause. ‘Two, while we have been here.’ Another long pause. ‘We thought we had the culprit. A Murgia Crovo, linked to the Banda. Dealing in obscura.’

Another pause. I turned my back on him and drummed my fingers. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I know.’ He cupped the vox handset and said to me, ‘They’re checking.’

At last the conversation came to an end. ‘Nothing,’ he said. He sat for a moment and took in a deep breath before looking at me. His face looked concerned.

‘What?’

‘They warned me that there’s a storm coming in from the Long Dry.’

I didn’t know much about this part of the world, so he had to explain. ‘A desert cyclone. They’re pretty formidable.’

I still didn’t understand, so he spelt it out for me. ‘We can’t leave until it’s passed.’

‘So we’re trapped?’

He nodded.

‘How long have we got?’

‘Two days, probably.’

‘Right,’ I said, aware that we had no choice but to make the best of this. I was thinking about my reputation in the forthcoming battle for the succession. ‘Well. The tithe ships are in-system, so we can make sure we get as much of the harvest in…’

Terrini nodded. ‘Yes. The harvest.’

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

That first day, the storm was just a dark stain on the horizon. It helped focus all the workers at Thorsarbour. Now, it seemed, every hour was precious. We drove the serfs out, and the harvesters ploughed up and down, stripping the fields down to the ground.

I went out to the fields to supervise and watched the gloomy forests of stalks being chewed up by the swirling blades of the threshers. All manner of creatures lived in the corn, and they scuttled for safety as the whirling blades cleared their cover.

The harvesters left bare stubble in their wake, and long trails of corn stalks. Nothing was wasted and once the grain was processed, then the stalks would be taken to the farmstead and shredded as fodder for the grox.

Back at the farmstead we had left Kossu in charge of getting the place storm-worthy. Shutters were screwed in, strips of tape plastered across any exposed glass. Anything loose was lashed down or brought inside.

Unworthy saw the storm as a sign of the Emperor’s displeasure. He was there, at the end of the day, waiting for us when the Goliaths brought the serfs back from the fields. ‘Brothers and sisters!’ he called out as the Goliaths unloaded. ‘Look! That cloud is the Emperor’s anger. He is angry at you all. You must mortify yourselves!’

A few serfs shouted back to him and called out prayers as they came to sprinkle blood onto the steps of the Emperor’s shrine. They were a jostling crowd as they attempted to mortify themselves. They were tired and disorganised, and shoving past each other.

As the crowd seethed, one of the serfs was knocked forward. He tripped on the steps and fell head first into the statue of the Emperor. There was a stunned silence as the wooden edifice slowly toppled sideways.

It wobbled for a moment, and then fell backwards.

The serf pushed himself up, and fumbled to pull the Emperor erect. But it was too late.

Unworthy pointed at him. ‘We are cursed and here is the reason. Thank the Emperor! In His fury the disbeliever reveals himself. Here, brothers and sisters, is the despoiler. Heretic. Traitor!’

I wanted to help the man in danger. I peered over the crowd and saw his face. He worked in the canteen. He was a big, bony man, with ears that stuck out from the sides of his shaven scalp, like handles. His name was Chalice.

His face was a mask of horror. Unworthy pointed him out. ‘Look! He has unmasked himself. See how brazen he is to knock down the Emperor before our eyes! He has such contempt for us.’

The serfs began to shout and hiss. I saw Chalice try to remonstrate. He pushed one man off, and then another before Unworthy pushed himself to the fore.

‘Kneel!’ he demanded. ‘Admit your guilt!’

Chalice disappeared from view, but giving in did not mollify the mob. In a moment the crowd had turned from prayers to accusations. A punch was thrown, then another.

I pulled my pistol and fired in the air. I know that they were serfs, but it was almost as if they were no longer human, as if they had turned into a many-headed beast. For a brief moment, Chalice appeared, shielding himself as best he could. He was a big man, but the blows came in from all directions and he could not fend them all off.

Perin looked to me as if questioning whether we should intervene. There were only four of us, and more than thirty of them. There was no way of stopping this without shooting half of them. But this was about authority. Who was in charge of this farmstead, Unworthy or me?

I strode towards them, shouting to them to stand aside. I fired twice, the rounds whistling over the heads of the crowd. They kept beating Chalice. I knocked one skinny man over, and shoved through the mess of bodies.

Perin was right behind me, covering my back. ‘Back!’ I shouted, pushing forwards.

Chalice half lay on the ground. I stood over him as the serfs surrounded me like barking canids. Their faces were contorted with anger and hatred. ‘This place is cursed!’ one shouted. ‘How can we stay here?’

The serfs were no longer human. They were like the tentacles of a beast of nightmare. ‘It’s not safe!’ one screamed.

‘Cursed!’ another put in.

‘He shamed the Emperor!’ a pockmarked woman lisped, her front teeth missing.

I remained standing over Chalice and fired into the air again. ‘Back!’ I commanded. ‘I will curse you all if you do not get back to your barracks!’

At this moment Terrini arrived with more overseers. He strode forward, knocking the mob back.

‘Back to the barracks!’ he ordered them. ‘Back!’ he shouted again when they hesitated.

The serfs were driven off. Only Unworthy remained. He refused to leave, and glared at me and pointed to Chalice. ‘He is marked for death.’

‘We’re all marked for death.’

Unworthy smiled at my retort. ‘Yes, but he dies today.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘You do. Seize this man,’ I told the overseers.

They hesitated for a moment, but only a moment. Unworthy seemed stunned to be manhandled in such a manner. He started to resist, and spat bloody phlegm at me.

‘Bind and muzzle him,’ I told Perin, and the overseer lashed Unworthy’s hands behind his back. I ordered that Chalice was housed in the command block. We tied Unworthy to the back of the Goliath and dragged him through the farmstead.

Terrini stayed to vox the Evercity. I took Kossu with me.

He was quiet. I made small talk so I didn’t have to listen to Unworthy’s ravings.

We dragged him to the unblemished grox pit, untied him, and pulled him to the edge.

‘You cannot do this,’ he told me in his distinct Evercity tones.

‘You’re wrong,’ I said, and I stepped behind him, put my boot to his back and shoved him forward.

He toppled over the edge, hit the I-bars, and tumbled through. The grox within moved with the speed of a snake. Unworthy didn’t even hit the floor – the creature caught him in the air, and shook him violently back and forth as if he were a rag doll, then put a claw onto his back and tore him in half.

The power of the creature stunned me. I stood to watch Unworthy be devoured, and then swallowed back my fear.

Kossu and I walked back to the Goliath. We climbed up into the cabin. I had never felt so alive, I thought, as I turned to Kossu and said, ‘The Emperor is wise.’

Kossu nodded. ‘And for some of us, He protects.’

Next morning the winds were too strong for the cargo-12s so we piled the corn up in the barns. As the day wore on the barns were filled, one by one, before the heavy doors were shut and sealed and barred against the coming gale. By lunchtime, the horizon was as dark as evening.

The sense of foreboding increased as the wind began to whip up twisting spirals of dust. The serfs became edgy. They kept looking towards the storm, and calling out to the Emperor for His mercy.

When one of the harvesters’ engines became clogged with dust we had to summon Gad, and wait for him to clean the filters. He limped over to me, leaning on his stick.

‘The Omnissiah thinks we should stop,’ he said.

‘The Omnissiah runs on promethium, but the Militarum need food in their bellies, or they will starve. What will you say to the Emperor when all this is flattened?’

I ordered the teams back after lunch, and only the harvesters kept working.

By the time that Terrini and I headed back to Thorsarbour the storm was whipping through the fields of corn and flattening the twenty-foot stalks to the ground.

We were parched and dirty, too tired to speak. We rocked with the movement of the truck as behind us the dust rose, and the air cooled quickly as the sun faded to a dull red coin hanging over the horizon.

We took shelter in the command block. The door was hard to close – I had to put my shoulder to it before drawing the bolt. In the office the servo-skull sat on its charging mount, its eyes glowing a dull red, and I had the odd feeling that I was being watched.

‘Skull. Out,’ I ordered.

Its eyes lit up, spiral lenses adjusting to the light levels. There was a moment’s pause as it processed my command, then lifted with a hum of anti-grav generators. There was a creak of old sinews. I looked up and saw the thing as it drifted towards the door.

I went to the vox-alcove to see if there was any communication from the Evercity, but the parchment mouth was empty. As I stood there, there was a long, low moan of voices on the wind as the storm howled around the building. Terrini was brewing recaff in the guardroom.

I went down to check on Agafa. I had left a guard there. He hadn’t heard me coming, so was leaning against the wall and jumped to attention as I approached. ‘If I catch you slacking on duty again I’ll have you demoted to serf and you can live out the rest of your miserable life eating slab-grit,’ I told him.

‘Yes, sir. Sorry, sir,’ he said, looking pale.

I opened the door. Agafa was sitting across the room, her legs drawn up to her chin. Her hair was pulled down over her face. She was still alive. I closed the door, relieved.

My lips were gummed with dried spittle and dirt as I joined the others to eat cold slab stew. Capo gave us all a glass of amasec, but we were exhausted and soon ran out of conversation, so Terrini and I said our goodnights, and made our way through the darkness to the guest hab.

Sheets of dust obscured it, but as we approached I saw that the storm had ripped the roofing off. Terrini had his head down. ‘The roof has come off!’ I shouted to him.

‘What?’

I repeated myself and pointed. He looked. The rafters were now bare, there was no way we could sleep there. He raised his voice over the storm. ‘Let’s grab our bags and get back to the command block.’

The front door of the hab was swinging wildly. We pushed inside and each went into our rooms.

My clothes had been scattered across the cramped space. I stuffed them into my kitbag and threw in the recaff and pots from the kitchen. Terrini had his own kitbag under his arm.

We used our arms to shield the dust from our eyes as we retraced our steps to the command block. Grit whipped up in sheets. The God-Emperor had fallen over again, His statue covered in a film of dust. His stern face stared out, unblinking, as a tangle of corn stalks tumbled past.

We stumbled up the command block steps as a section of barn roofing flew past us, turning end over end. It took both of us to push inside. We slammed the heavy doors behind us. I held it closed as Terrini threw the bolts home.

There were a couple of old mattresses in the guardroom that the overseers used for their afternoon naps.

We dragged them out and made beds. Terrini blew the dust from the pots, then rinsed them out with fresh water. I pumped the promethium stove. It took me a couple of times to get it lit. The flame burnt yellow and smokily at first, flickering with every gust of air, and I twisted the knobs until it settled with a hiss to a steady blue.

‘Can’t sleep without recaff,’ Terrini said and started to brew up a fresh pot.

I heard something behind me and saw the servo-skull hovering in the atrium. It started to butt against the front door. ‘Rest!’ I shouted to it, but it took no notice.

‘It wants to get out,’ Terrini said.

‘But there’s a storm.’

The skull didn’t seem to care. ‘There’s a storm!’ I told it, but it kept banging against the outside door.

In the end I unbolted the door and let the servo-skull fly out into the night. Terrini gave me a look. ‘I can’t stand that thing,’ I said, and slammed the door closed behind it. ‘Good riddance.’

The wind moaned through the building and each gust made the blue promethium flames lie flat.

I yawned as Terrini measured out the black recaff paste into the pot and then we sat down to watch in an exhausted torpor. Terrini peered in as the water boiled slowly. I could barely keep my eyes open. ‘Nearly there!’ he said and then the pot began to rock.

He flicked off the heat as the door rattled. It sounded like a knock.

‘Think it’s back?’ he said.

I pushed myself up and opened the front door. I stepped out onto the top step, but I could see nothing. I gave it a moment, just in case the servo-skull had returned, then closed the door and fixed the lock.

‘Who was it?’ Terrini said when I came back to the guardroom.

‘No one,’ I said. The knock came again.

I went a second time, and again there was nothing.

When the banging came again, he said, ‘Leave it.’

I slept as Terrini sat up. At about midnight he shook my arm. ‘The storm’s passing,’ he said. ‘I’m going to have a look round. I’ll knock when I’m back.’

I let him out and had a brief impression of the courtyard littered with corn stalks and scraps of flakboard. I locked the door behind me and turned back into the atrium. The servo-skull was hanging in the air behind me, its clawed limb reaching out to me. ‘Throne!’ I cursed. ‘Don’t do that.’

It hung, anti-grav generators letting out a low hum as the underslung drill whirred.

‘Where the hell did you come from?’

It remained at eye level, red lens flaring.

‘I have no need for you,’ I told it. ‘Rest.’

It tried to follow me into the guardroom. ‘No,’ I said again. ‘Rest!’

It hung back as I closed the guardroom door. I finished the dregs of the recaff and yawned. The skull had unnerved me. I slid the chair and jammed it under the door knob, then lay down, exhausted, sliding my sidearm under the kitbag I was using as a pillow.

The guardroom door rattled as if someone was trying to get in. I thought I could hear Agafa shouting my name, and pulled Terrini’s kitbag over my head to block out the sound.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

For the first time at Thorsarbour, I slept without interruption. My sleep that night was as deep as a well and it was morning already when a shout woke me.

I started and sat up. Dawn light was streaming from under the door. The storm had passed and the stillness was palpable.

I yawned as I unbolted the guardroom door. The atrium was quiet and empty. A thick layer of dust had blown in during the night, and the yard outside was littered with vegetation and parts of barns and roofing. Dunes of grit had been sculpted along each of the command block steps. The God-Emperor lay half buried in dirt. His shrine had lost half of its prayer strips – a line of them hung from the barn opposite. The candles had been blown against the halftrack.

‘Terrini!’ I shouted.

There was no answer.

‘Terrini?’ I called again.

The silence was absolute.

I returned to the command block and went into the bookkeeper’s office, in case he had come back in the night, but there was no sign of him. The stove was cold. The remains of last night’s recaff was still in his mug. I started down the stairs. I felt a prickle of fear as I unlocked the door, and pulled it open.

Agafa lay in the corner of the room, where her mother had lain. I called her name, and her head slowly lifted.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘It’s you.’

‘Has Enforcer Terrini been here?’ I asked.

‘No, I–’ I didn’t wait for her to finish, but went and pulled on my body armour before I headed back outside.

Our halftrack stood where we had parked it, its wheels part submerged in blown dirt. One of the lumen-posts had come down opposite the serf block, as had a section of wire fencing. There were pieces of flakboard roofing lying in the middle of the track. My footsteps led me back to our hab. The front door stood open, the rooms open to the morning sky. They were filled with dirt.

I pushed through to the galley. Outside, the storm had stripped the top off our latrine. The door was closed. ‘Terrini?’ I called tentatively.

Nothing.

I poked my head inside. Nothing.

I pushed on, into the yard, and saw a figure standing at the end of the garden.

‘There you are!’ I started, even as I realised my mistake. It was not a man, but a straw edifice set on a piece of metal rebar that had been thrust into the ground. I pushed through the back gate. This straw man wore enforcer-black. Its body was crudely stuffed with blankets, which gave it a lumpy and misshapen look.

I made to knock the thing down, thinking someone was mocking us, but as I stared at it I stopped dead. It was an enforcer jacket, with badges and a name tag sewn into the cloth. My breath caught in my throat.

Terrini, the label read, the letters stitched in white on black.

In that moment the Evercity felt a long, long way away. I spun about, but there was no one there. No clues. No hints. Nothing.

My palms dripped sweat, my throat tightened. My mouth was full of saliva but I couldn’t swallow it. For a brief instant I imagined this was all a joke – that Terrini was watching me, laughing at the terror he had instilled in the Chief Enforcer’s son.

It would be a story that he’d recount many times over, I told myself as I searched for him.

I knew as soon as I saw the body that Terrini was dead. I found him lying in the back garden of one of the deserted habs. I nodded, and walked across, pushed through the wire gate.

He lay face down, his body stripped naked. A dark puddle of blood stained the earth beneath him. It was unmistakably Terrini: short-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, a tattoo of the aquila across his shoulders. It was blurred and distorted with age.

There was a puncture wound at the back of his head. I turned him over and saw that he had been eviscerated. I found his organs in the nearest tree. They hung suspended like fruit from one of the branches. They were starting to dry in the heat, their thin membranes a papery red, marbled with subcutaneous fat.

I stared out over the fields of corn and felt as though the world were unsteady beneath my feet. There were many emotions trapped within me. I didn’t really know what they were, to be honest, but the strongest among them was a deep sense of betrayal.

Something had gone terribly wrong. It was not supposed to happen like this, I thought. This was supposed to be a training trip. I felt anger rise within me. It was hot, raw, volcanic.

I was as angry with Terrini as anyone else. He had underestimated our foe, and he had ended up dead.

‘He’s dead?’ a voice said.

I spun around. It was Perin. His face was pale, his hands trembling. He saw Terrini’s body and looked as shocked as me.

I nodded and tried to show no emotion, but the truth was I didn’t trust myself to speak.

‘What do we do?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

There was a long pause. For a moment, I felt like crying.

‘I’d better tell Capo,’ Perin said, and fool that I was, I let him go.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I say it with hindsight, of course, but I see now that this was one of life’s great tests. I had spent my youth learning stories of Imperial heroes, and while Gambol read, it was the illustrations that taught me most. I would sit on the stumps of his legs as he rocked back and forth, and breathe in the smell of the cheap counterseptics he sprayed on his flesh-plugs.

In all those stories, a single figure stood out amidst the crowds of slavering xenos or heretics, the hero of the tale standing tall amidst the masses of the words. I had always associated myself with those individuals, even as Gambol’s stuttering voice recounted the events that made them famous.

But this was a book of martyrs… The stories always ended in their deaths. It was designed to teach young men and women how to die well.

Some were ripped apart; others were broken on the wheel, or sliced apart with an unholy number of cuts. The graphic pictures had been sobering for a child, even though I did not appreciate the pain that each of these manners of martyrdom could inflict.

But I was clear about one thing. I was much too selfish to be a martyr. I wanted to live long, inherit my father’s position, and look back on all this and recount it.

I felt trepidation until I thought of either of my brothers becoming Chief Enforcer, and I knew that I would fight harder than ever to return to the Evercity.

Perin ran off, and I stood there cursing Terrini for getting himself killed.

It was the sound of shouting that roused me. I had been so confident the day before, giving orders, feeling in control, putting my boot to Unworthy’s backside and shoving him to his death.

Now I saw all this for the joke it was. Life was playing with me, like a cat with a rodent.

I left Terrini’s body lying in the dirt.

I left a lot more there as well. Looking back, I shed the last of my childhood fantasies. Innocence, pity, naivety. This moment of extremis stripped them all from me and I left them behind me like a pile of abandoned garments.

I felt better without them. A quiet, calm sense of release rose through me as I strode towards the command block. It was as if Terrini had been a weight upon my chest.

Perin, it seemed, had come upon the assembling serfs and overseers as they readied themselves for the harvest, and he had given them his news. Panic had done the rest. I tried to assert control. ‘Out to the fields!’ I shouted. ‘The Emperor expects you all to do your duty. The tithe fleet demands the fruits of your labour.’

But it was too late. There was an unhappy silence and then Capo stepped forward. ‘Sir,’ he said. ‘I understand your position, but I do not think that the workers will stay.’

‘What do you mean?’

He ran a hand over his head. ‘This is more serious than any of us can deal with, sir. I’ve ordered an evacuation.’

His words had a physical effect upon me. I tensed up and stared at him with deadly calm. ‘What do you mean, you’ve ordered an evacuation?’

Capo’s mouth opened but I did not let him finish. ‘No one is leaving this place until the harvest is brought in, is that understood?’

The bookkeeper stared at me in shock. He was between two masters now – fear of me and fear of this place – and he wavered, not sure which to give obeisance to.

He started to speak again, but I cut him off. ‘The Emperor expects and we must deliver. That harvest will be brought in before anyone leaves this place. Is that understood?’

Capo’s face darkened, but he nodded and cleared his throat. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said.

I went into the office, and stood for a moment, blood thundering in my head.

I just needed to be alone to think. I should vox the Evercity, I thought. And then I tried to imagine how it would sound – claiming that there was an unholy presence here. They would think that I was either mad, or running scared.

No, I thought and calmed myself. No. I would have to stay and fight. This thing – whatever it was – would have to come for me. And I would be waiting.

But as I stood there I heard a note of adulation in the shouts outside, and it raised my suspicions. I returned to the command block steps and saw the overseers and serfs all throwing sacks of their belongings onto a pile.

I lifted my hands for silence but the crowd were unsettled and frightened, and the news of Terrini’s death had made them edgy.

‘Quiet!’ I called, but the hubbub only rose.

A single gunshot shut them up. I didn’t know what I was going to say, and turned to my name as if it were a talisman that had real power.

‘I am Rudgard Howe,’ I said, ‘son of the Chief Enforcer. My father sent me here to protect you. We are all servants of the Emperor. I will do my job and you must do yours. You must not be dismayed by the death of Enforcer Terrini. You must not be fearful of night shadows or straw men.’ I held up the Tronsvasse. ‘This weapon has been blessed by the Cardinal Archbishop of the Gallows Cluster. The hard rounds are blessed as well. No supernatural force can withstand the power of the God-Emperor.’

As I spoke, a cargo-8 rolled into the yard. A second followed it, and a third. The roar of their engines drowned out my voice.

One of the drivers, a foreman, leapt down, waving his arms in the air, calling the people over.

‘Stop!’ I shouted, but the spell had been broken. The crowd were no longer listening. I lifted my pistol again, and fired, but it was too late. They were all running.

‘Stop!’ I yelled as the gathering turned into a mob. The weak and infirm were knocked aside, those that fell trampled down. The strong clambered aboard the cargo-8s first. Fights broke out, punches flew. People shouted and screamed. I saw Chalice throwing his bag up onto one of the trucks, and felt like I had been betrayed.

They took it in turns to haul each other up. Even Gad clambered aboard. I saw Perin running towards the lead truck and thought that I could appeal to a shared sense of brotherhood, but he was caught up in the panic.

I tried once more to use my authority. ‘Stop!’ I shouted as I advanced. ‘I command you to remain!’

He slowed for a moment, and paused as he put his hand to the cabin door, but shook his head. ‘We cannot stay,’ he said. ‘This place is cursed.’

I fired. The shot hit Perin in the ribs and threw him against the cabin. The second struck his shoulder and there was a puff of blood and cloth. He spun about, took a few steps backwards, reaching forward as if to clutch on to something to remain standing.

He was falling back against the door when I fired the third time. The round hit Perin in the jaw and whipped his head back and to the right. It shattered bone and sprayed blood and teeth and gore and spittle out over my shoulder. He stumbled and fell heavily, like a sack of meat being flung to the ground.

‘Why?’ he managed to mouth as blood bubbled up about his words.

My jaw was set. I gave no answer, but fired again. Three more shots made Perin’s body dance off the floor, but it was just a form of necromancy. There was no real life left within the cadaver. Perin had gone.

The first cargo-8 was already moving off. The driver veered towards me and I fired at him through the windscreen. The glass fractured but the vehicle did not slow. I threw myself sideways, but the truck grazed my side and flung me to the ground. The acrid stink from the engine housing was hot in my nose as I rolled for cover.

I had barely got to my feet again before another truck roared towards me. I dived under the eaves of a barn, old timbers shattering beneath my impact. A moment later I was lost in a haze of dirt and debris as the second cargo-8 accelerated away.

I rose, coughing in the cloud of dust. ‘Stop!’ I shouted at the third truck that swept past me, Chalice among the desperate serfs clinging to the open back.

I knelt and aimed at it. I saw shreds come off the rear wheel, but there was no way of stopping the truck. They were solid polymers, built by a distant forge world to last for generations.

A few seconds later, all three of them were rumbling towards the northward road.

My immediate impulse was to chase after them and to force them back to work.

I leapt into the halftrack, which was still standing before the shrine of the Emperor. I settled into the driver’s seat and pressed the power stud. Nothing happened.

I pressed harder.

Still nothing.

I jumped out and pulled the engine covers up and saw a mess of torn wires. It would take hours to fix the damage, at best. I jumped down and glanced about. Only Perin’s corpse remained. The overseer was lying on his back, his head flung to the side, mouth open, a look of reproach in the dead eyes.

I tipped him over onto his front and looked along the road to the Evercity, and saw the cadavers hanging in their iron cages that lined the road north.

At that moment I heard footsteps, and spun about.

It was Kossu. He saw the dead body and froze, as if he wasn’t sure whether he should stand or run.

‘They fled,’ I said. I felt that I needed to give an explanation. ‘They disobeyed me.’

I could see the calculation in Kossu’s eyes. He was reappraising me, or wondering if he could flee as well. ‘So there’s only two of us left?’

I paused. ‘Three,’ I said. ‘There’s Agafa as well.’

If she’s still alive, I thought.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The first thing I had to do was raise the alarm.

I went straight to the vox-alcove, sat down and cranked it to life. The eyes of the skull glowed in response. I had seen how Terrini did it.

I put the ornate headset on and slid my hands into place. There was a sudden prick of pain on the end of my middle finger, then the reader slid back into the ornate housing.

The vox-link was poor, but at last I relayed my name, location, and the fact that Terrini had been killed.

‘Yes, this is Enforcer Howe,’ I said, with emphasis on my last name.

There was a long pause. ‘Report,’ the man at the other end said. I took a breath, considering.

‘Bookkeeper Capo has abandoned the facility with the overseers and the serfs. Only two staff remain. Kossu, the grox-herd, and a girl named Agafa, suspected of witchcraft.

‘Fugitives are heading north in three cargo-8s. I have secured Thorsarbour. Situation is under control,’ I reported. ‘But I wish to make an urgent request for replacement labour gangs.’

There was another pause. ‘Confirmed,’ and then the vox-link ended with an audible click.

I closed the machine down as the lights in the eye sockets faded to narrow slits, still glowing. I had done my job, I thought. I would remain here until the support arrived.

When the call was done I went down to check on Agafa. She was sitting in the middle of the room, knees drawn up to her chest. ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’ she said.

‘Who?’

I had expected her to say Terrini, but she answered, ‘Perin.’

I nodded. ‘He tried to flee.’

‘They’ve all gone, haven’t they?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s still here.’

‘The straw man?’

She nodded and started to rock back and forth.

‘Tell me what you see…’ I said, but she shook her head and pressed the palms of her hands over her eyes and started to moan.

It was a long day waiting. Part of me wanted to flee, but I knew this was a test that I either passed or failed. There was no running away from it. The Howe family did not breed craven hearts, I told myself to jolly my courage up.

I watched the sun reach its zenith and then begin to slide down towards the horizon, and I knew that when night fell my trials would come. I could not sit still, and so, when Kossu said he had to feed the grox, I went with him.

The only sound in the whole farmstead was the hum of the generators.

Again, I felt we were being watched; felt as though there was a predator just biding its time. Flashing through my mind were images of the mutilated bodies. I saw myself lying like Terrini: dead, discarded and impotent. I relived Unworthy’s end. I thought about Perin.

Life was cheap on Potence. Even mine would not be so sorely missed by many. Only my mother would really care. And Gambol, perhaps. My father had two other sons and one of them would inherit from him – and I would be a no one, I’d vanish from the record. No history would bear my name. I stood near the galvanic fencing thinking on this, as Kossu opened up the sluice gates to feed the hatchlings.

The sun was setting by the time we started back through the farmstead. The serf block was deserted, the barred windows staring out. The sense of desolation was crushing.

As evening fell I could not sit still, and paced up and down. I walked through every inch of the command block. In the bookkeeper’s office, the simian skull stared down from the top shelf where Capo had put it that first night. The servo-skull sat on its perch, eye sockets slowly pulsing as its generators charged. I pulled out drawers, opened cabinets. There were musty files, covered with dust, alongside vellum rolls, ledgers, lists of rotas and punishments for the long dead.

I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but it was better than just waiting.

What I found did not seem to be anything particularly noteworthy. The usual reports of successes and arguments, of slack behaviour and misdemeanours. Drunkenness. Failures to report for corvée labour. Over the years teams were replaced, bookkeepers added at a strangely fast rate. But I couldn’t find any records more than a hundred years old.

‘Kossu?’ I called.

He barely noticed me.

I shook him. ‘How old is this place?’

He shook his head as if to say he had no idea. ‘Hundreds of years,’ he said. ‘Maybe more.’

‘But there’s nothing here in the records.’

I remembered the sign that I had found in the barn that first morning, and sat at the bookkeeper’s desk.

‘Do you know the name “Valgaast”?’

He shivered and shook his head. I went to the main cogitator. The ancient box was as large as a cabinet. A sheath of thick cables ran to the screen on the desk.

I found the power stud. The machine took five minutes to warm up. The green screen flickered slowly as its cathode ray came to life, and I typed in my security access codes. The connection was slow this far out. I thought I could probably drive to the Evercity faster than this thing took.

For a long time the screen remained unchanged. Only the flashing icon showed me that it had not frozen up altogether. I typed in ‘Valgaast’. The screen went blank. For a moment I thought I had lost the whole thing, but slowly the light began to return.

There was one report from the reign of Dowager Ciricao, six hundred years before, which asked for permission to breach the wall and establish a farmstead in the Valgaast region. I could feel my heartbeat quickening. This was the same lady who had summoned my ancestor to the planet. I felt a personal connection to this story, as if it were running full circle, and kept scrolling through reams of data.

There were only a few scraps. The first settlements had died out, blaming lack of water, disease, pestilence, murrain, but each time it seemed a new crew was sent, with fresh serfs. I found a long list of official correspondence. Tithe quotas received. Command crews. A sheath of files recording the movement of stud grox. One falling sick, handlers eaten.

But the records ran out and I got tired.

I stopped and tried a different tack. When I attempted to access Terrini’s service record, a confidential data file opened up. It listed the various stages of his career, the investigations he had worked on, the criminals he had brought to justice.

I was almost surprised to see the names of Dread Baeblio and the Eviscerator.

The Eviscerator: pseudonym for Asterin Lucius, the record ran. Bookkeeper of Thorsarbour, known formerly as Valgaast…

I felt a chill run through me.

There were all kinds of picts of victims and crime scenes, and then there were three interrogators’ picts of Asterin himself: in profile, a frontal image, and then another with his head twisted to the side.

I looked at that face and saw a glowering man, with heavy brows.

Something about him seemed familiar, though I could not trace it. I tapped in the access codes, looking to see what was done with him, and where his body parts had gone after harvesting, but at that moment the lumens flickered, and went out.

The machine clicked, and the glowing screen shrank back to a point of light in the middle that paused for a moment, before going black.

I froze, listening. There was no sound.

The power had failed. The blackness was almost complete. I stumbled round the desk. Agafa started to scream, her voice echoing up from below.

‘Kossu?’ I called. ‘Kossu?’

‘Hello?’ he called. ‘I’m here!’

I found him in the corner of the guardroom. I knelt next to him, blind in the darkness, my hand on his shoulder. His scrawny body was trembling; he was stiff with fear. Agafa’s screams were getting louder.

‘What’s happened?’ I asked.

‘I think the generator has gone out.’

‘How?’

He shook his head.

‘Kossu!’ I said. ‘I need to find the generator.’ He didn’t answer me. ‘You must show me where it is.’

He shook his head. ‘No. I can’t.’

‘Kossu!’ I shook him. ‘We need to get the power back up, just think of the grox.’

‘Oh Throne!’ he said. ‘The grox.’ He took a deep breath. ‘The main generator is down at the grox pit. The reserve is in the shed.’

‘Which one?’

‘The same one as the shredder.’

I fixed the location of the shed in my head. ‘Where is the generator, exactly?’

He explained it all to me.

‘Right,’ I said, standing. I thought about bringing him with me, but he seemed so petrified, I didn’t want him getting in the way. ‘Stay here.’

Kossu clung to me. I had to pull his hands away. ‘Lock the doors behind me,’ I told him. ‘When I return I’ll knock three times.’

As the doors closed and I heard Kossu carry out my instructions to lock them I stood alone on the steps and looked out. The vastness of the night faced me. Far off to the north, lander lights flashed as they slowly spiralled upwards, and above me I could see the twinkle of orbital hangars moving across the sky.

The sight of these only reinforced my sense of isolation. I was truly alone.

I felt my way down the steps. An imhi flapped over my head. It startled me for a moment, but I told myself not to be frightened.

Seeking reassurance, I put my hand to my Tronsvasse. It felt warm to the touch.

I drew the sidearm and slipped my finger onto the trigger.

I’ll be straight. I am not a devout man – but I felt that warmth spread up my arm. In my mind’s eye it was like a yellow sun streaming through my veins, into my shoulder, then across my chest and through my body. I remembered how my mother had said that it had been blessed by the Archbishop Cardinal.

‘The Emperor Protects,’ I told myself. I was descended from a line of men who spent their lives enforcing the Lex Imperialis. Not timid or cruel, but hard, rigorous and fair men.

I felt some comfort as I reached the bottom of the steps, felt my way around the back of the shrine, and then turned right along the line of barns and right again, towards the sheds.

They were patches of deeper shade in the darkness. I counted my way along them, to the one with the shredder. I thought of Hamber and wiped the sweat from my brow.

The generator was located on the opposite side to the shredder. My fingers found the door handles in the gloom. I pushed my way inside and tripped; got up, but stumbled again, knocking a metal bucket over. The noise seemed louder in the stillness.

I cursed, and for the first time I dared to switch on my lumen.

The sudden blue light blinded me for a moment as I panned about the room. The space was cluttered with sacks, pallets and discarded pieces of harvester – some smeared in oil, or rusted. A few had been freshly sharpened, and the whetted blades gleamed out like thin smiles. I kept well away from them as I ducked under the bars.

I had to go slowly. I could smell promethium ahead of me and as I straightened up from under another crossbar, I saw the solid bulk of the generator – there was a large fire-chamber, with pipes running off it, and a galvanised steel chimney thrusting straight up, through the flakboard roof.

I paused, taking it all in. Pipes in and out, the bleeding chamber, a few knobs and levers, and a well-worn ignition stud. It reminded me of the generator in my mother’s cellar. They were all of a fairly standard design. The ignition chamber was cold. I checked the levers and then pressed the stud.

Nothing happened.

After a few more attempts I stood back and looked at it all, then went back to checking the other details. The promethium pipes sounded full. The valves were on. Then I heard the scrape of metal and spun round.

The lumen’s beam was bright where it fell, but the circle of blue-white light plunged the rest of the room into greater darkness.

‘Hello?’ I said.

My voice sounded timid, even to me.

There was no answer. Just an imhi, I told myself.

I felt all the pipes, and found a safety valve located within their tangle.

To reach it I had to slide up and use both hands. I rested the lumen on the casing and slid my sidearm into its holster, feeling vulnerable as I reached right inside the housing.

My hands were sweating as I worked. I could feel my heartbeat accelerate. I was both blind and exposed. My ears strained for any sound that might alert me to danger. The valve was stiff with age. Cold sweat prickled on my neck as I pushed myself deeper into the guts of the machine, and reached up with both hands.

At last the valve grated open and I heard a welcome gurgle of promethium falling through the pipe.

I slid back down, almost expecting to come face to face with some horror, but I was alone. Nothing appeared to have changed.

I pressed the ignition stud and as it clicked there was a welcome rattle as the flame lit, and the generator began to burn. I put my back against the machine, and took a deep breath.

Done, I thought, then I waited almost a minute before the motivators started to turn and the farmstead lumens flickered to life.

When I got back to the command block doors, I knocked three times with the butt of my pistol. The doors opened with the force of my blows.

‘Kossu?’ I called.

There was no sound. I slid inside. In the bookkeeper’s office a light was on, but the room was empty. ‘Kossu?’ I shouted, then again, louder this time, ‘Kossu!’

There was still no answer. Perhaps he had gone to see Agafa, I thought, and started down the rockcrete steps. I was three steps from the top before I felt something wet beneath my feet. It clung to the sole of my shoe. The next footfall, something turned beneath me. The scent of death rose. The steps were slick with blood.

As I turned the corner it seemed as if a giant spider had strung a web out across the stairwell – but the strands of web were pink and bloody, and halfway down the stairs lay Kossu’s body.

He was face down. There was a ragged wound across his back and his guts had been pulled out through the gash. His innards were strung across the embrasures. On the back of his head was a puncture hole, raw and bloody.

At that moment there was a deflating sound as the lights flickered, then failed again. I froze. For a moment the only sound I could hear was my own frightened breath, echoing in the stairwell.

I had left the lumen up in the office. I did not want to go back up there.

‘Agafa!’ I called, as my fingers reached blindly for the end of the corridor. I had to pass the curtain of wet pink intestines; they clung to my face as I pushed through. I was near the bottom. There was no answer.

At last I felt my way to the bottom of the stairwell. I was fumbling for the handle when I heard a voice from within. It was Agafa. ‘Quick!’ she hissed. ‘It’s coming!’

Panic rose within me. I found the handle and put my hand into my pocket, but there was no key there.

I remembered, in a moment of sudden terror, that Kossu had the keys. I started back towards the stairs, fell, and found myself crawling blindly up the steps, through the puddles of blood and entrails. My heart was pounding. My mouth was full of spit. My fingers landed in something wet. I felt around, and realised that I had my hand in Kossu’s open mouth.

‘It’s coming!’ Agafa called again through the door.

My fingers scrabbled along his body. They searched blindly through his pockets. I feared for a moment that I would never find them. I cannot tell you what I put my hands into but it was all wet and warm and sticky. At last I felt my way along his arms, and in one of his hands I detected the round metal ring upon which the keys were slung.

I prised the dead fingers open, pulled the keys from his grasp and stumbled back down the stairs.

A low whine sounded above me. It was so faint as to be like a swooping bird passing across the top of the stairwell. The enclosed space amplified it, and then I heard it coming closer.

In the darkness, I heard the whirr of a drill and in terror I leapt down the stairs. It was a mad, frantic tumble, my feet skidding and slipping on the wet steps. My shoulder slammed into the door. The impact jarred my right wrist and I dropped the key, falling to my knees as I frantically searched for it again, cursing my stupidity.

Blood had pooled on the bottom step. A baleful red glow was descending towards me.

My fingers scrambled for the keyhole. It seemed to take an age before I managed to get the key inside but it could only have been a few seconds.

‘It’s coming!’ Agafa screamed.

The lock turned with a low click. I pushed the door open and fell inside, then slammed the door behind me. Something threw itself at me.

It was Agafa.

She was all nails and arms and wild hair. I battered her off, but I realised that she was not trying to fight me – she was clinging to me, like someone drowning will cling to a rock. ‘Get off!’ I snapped and shoved her, but she was incoherent as she leapt back at me, nails raking at my skin in her terror.

And then, just as suddenly as she had started, she stopped. It was as if she were a dancing puppet and her strings had been cut through with a single swipe of a blade. She collapsed into a heap and clung at my legs. I could feel the terror in her slight frame. She was shaking like a timid canid. And so, I realised, was I.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

It is hard for me to relate what happened that night. Even now, years later, I can feel the laws of sanity start to peel away as I recall it. There is sweat in my palms, saliva in my mouth, bile in the back of my throat. And to be honest, I doubted my sanity, even as it happened to me.

I stood with my back to the cell door and heard the scrape of an unseen hand testing the handle. There was a creak of metal as it began to twist, and I turned and grabbed it to stop it moving.

I felt a wave of relief, but, with horror, I realised that in my haste I had left the key on the other side, and a moment after the handle stopped moving I heard the metal rattle of the key being withdrawn from the latch.

‘It’s here!’ Agafa hissed.

I took in a deep breath. Even a plain Munitorum-issue laspistol can turn an indentured Guardsman into a hero and I had a Tronsvasse parabellum, blessed by the Archbishop Cardinal of the Gallows Cluster.

I was Rudgard Howe. I was not going to hide here like a serf. No, I told myself, with my blessed weapon, I would face down this terror.

Steeling myself, I put my hand to the handle and opened the door a crack.

The stairwell was lit with a menacing red light. I opened it a little further. Two red eyes stared back at me from under looming brows.

It suddenly struck me where I had seen the face of Asterin Lucius before, as I heard the whirr of an underslung drill as it started to spin and then suddenly swung at my face.

Agafa tried to shove the door closed. ‘Stop him!’ she cried. She scrambled at me as I tried to throw her off, and in her madness she made to grab the gun from my hand. I fell backwards as the servo-skull hummed through the opening. The drone of its buzz saw gave me a moment’s warning. I twisted as I fell, just in time. It caught me and it felt as if a razor had been run across my scalp.

My blood was hot as it started to pour down my forehead. I kicked at Agafa as I scrambled to the corner, and put my back against the wall. I could see the skull swing round for another pass. Agafa came at me again. I caught her this time, knocking her sideways as I held my gun up and fired.

Blood was running freely down my neck. The servo-skull’s two red eyes narrowed to fierce dots. I felt as if I were in the sights of a long-las as they focused upon me.

My fingers found one of the blessed manstopper rounds at my belt. I slammed it into the magazine and raised the Tronsvasse again as the red eyes glowed with a fierce and intelligent malevolence.

‘Come on, you bastard!’ I hissed. It flew at me as I aimed the Tronsvasse, and fired.

EPILOGUE

The relief force arrived two days later in a convoy of Tauros all-terrain vehicles. They dismounted and took in the scene before them.

There were scraps of flakboard roofing strewn across the ground, and the farmstead had a deserted air, like something from a warzone. My father’s expression was grim as he strode towards me.

‘Where the hell is Terrini?’ he demanded.

‘Murdered,’ I said.

‘I didn’t believe it. Killing an enforcer is a capital crime. Have you caught the culprit?’

I tensed up as a servo-skull swept out of one of the trucks. It flew towards me, and I reached for my sidearm, before stopping myself.

This was no crude farmstead version: it was a well-artificed device, such as was used within the Evercity.

‘I have destroyed it,’ I said.

He frowned at my words. ‘Destroyed? What do you mean destroyed? Did you kill the killer?’

I took a deep breath. The truth was that Terrini’s killer had been executed years before. Where even to start? ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I did.’

I had faced horror like I’d never known existed at Thorsarbour, and I was a harsher, more serrated version of myself in the aftermath. In the months that followed, my father grew increasingly sick, but he clung to his miserable life for nearly two more years. My brothers were not so fortunate, if that is what to survive really means. One of them was responsible for the murder of my mother. I did not care which. I killed them both and let the Emperor judge between the two. But that is another story.

I had no compunctions about either death. They were better done by my hand. It was private, family business, and if an outsider had killed them, then I would have been duty-bound to take vengeance upon them, as no one interfered with the Howe family – no one except us. Not on Potence, nor indeed anywhere in the Gallows Cluster. A lesson my father had taught me.

Afterwards, I went to see my father. I had just washed Hingull’s blood from my hands. My father took me in and said, knowingly, ‘So, there’s just you left?’

I nodded.

‘Sit down. I’ve got a lot to teach you, and time is short.’

That was it. I took a chair in my father’s office, and he never mentioned it again.

One of the first things he tasked me with was sending a new squad of enforcers to Thorsarbour – but they did not outlast my father. Within weeks, one of the guards went rogue and murdered the rest of the squad. The Ecclesiarchy sent a confessor to purge the place before their replacements were sent, yet still two further squads suffered similar ends: the first to a serf revolt and the next to a freak sickness.

Around that time, my father finally died. One of the first challenges I had as Chief Enforcer was to deal with Thorsarbour – for good. Honestly, I had thought that with the destruction of Asterin Lucius’ skull I had purged the place of its malevolence, but I was wrong. The sickness went deeper than that. It seemed to soak down into the very soil there, or rise up from it. So, I took the only reasonable action and ordered the whole place closed down and sealed off. I set the boundary at the wall and deemed it a capital offence for any soul to step foot inside.

‘Terra Excommunicado,’ I said, as I locked the gates myself, my seal affixed to the parchment hanging from its rails.

Today, Thorsarbour remains deserted. The cardinals of Potence installed anchorites at the gateway, holed up in prayer cells built against the wall to keep subdued whatever evil tries to grow there. They do not last long, but there are always devout youths willing to take up such a posting.

I am not a cowardly man – not now – but I refuse to ever set my eyes on that place again, for I cannot forget its festering silence, its skulking sentience. I fear a seeping of insanity pervades the cracks of this world. Like a tune of madness, playing just on the edge of hearing.

There is a file I have locked away for any who might follow me that explains why I have taken these actions. There is wisdom in the ancients, though it is in the manner of things that over time old wisdoms are forgotten. New generations will start afresh, and are forced to make the same errors.

Burns teach children about fire better than any warning, and some lessons are never forgotten.

But it is best that whatever lies there remains hidden.

As for Agafa, I turned her over to the Ecclesiarchy; took her personally up to the cathedral. It was the hallowday of Saint Arabella and the bells were ringing as we approached the pinnacle of the Evercity and passed through the gatehouse.

Psalms were coming from the house of the Sisters of the Ebon Chalice, and above the cardinal’s palace praise birds were circling, singing of the virtues of Arabella.

We stopped before the cardinal’s palace. It was a sombre building, with gothic windows rising up in tiers above us. The whole place had a dour and serious feel. This was not just a place of worship but of raw power, for the Cardinal Archbishop held sway over the whole of the Gallows Cluster.

There was a moment’s pause as I stood looking up at the building. At last a heavy door opened and three black-robed men came out to meet me, hoods drawn over their shaven heads, their hands thrust into their sleeves, and folded before them.

They stopped ten feet from us and bowed.

The foremost seemed an overly officious cleric. He announced his name and rank, and I forgot both straight away as I looked into his face with its hooked nose and intense blue eyes. ‘Blessings, Chief Enforcer Howe,’ he said.

I made the sign of the aquila and bowed in return. I was never a religious man and felt uneasy standing at the heart of the Ecclesiarchy.

I had driven up in an enforcer halftrack. Agafa was sitting in the back compartment, her face hidden behind a knotted curtain of scraggly black hair.

‘This is her,’ I said.

The ordinand stood next to me. He spoke with authority. ‘Come!’

Agafa did not move. He tugged the leash about her neck and she looked up, and the sight of her sickly, pale face and black eyes even stopped him for a moment. ‘Blessed Throne!’ he said, and made the sign of the aquila.

‘She has strange powers,’ I said, and gave a brief account of what had transpired. Her ability to sense the attacks of that skull.

The ordinand put his hand to my arm. ‘You did right, Chief Enforcer Howe. We will care for her, and if there is a cure for her malady, then we will find it.’

I never heard about her again. I could not tell you what happened to her. As far as I know she disappeared into the pits of the Ecclesiarchy, her life puffed out like the fragile flame of a candle.

I still dream of Thorsarbour.

On dark nights I find myself sitting in the corner of my room with sweat pouring down my face, as an unseen foe hums through the air about my head.

It is the same each time. In my mind, Gambol’s head is a servo-skull. The neural plugs hang severed and my old plaything’s palsied limbs claw their way up my body. ‘Ruddie play?’ he hisses as he reaches my neck, and I feel the draught of air, and hear the whine of an underslung drill as it starts to spin.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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.

An extract from “Skull Throne”
by Jake Ozga
featured in The Accursed

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…

Click here to buy The Accursed.

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 Maxim Kostin.

The Bookkeeper’s Skull © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2021. The Bookkeeper’s Skull, Warhammer Horror, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-80026-620-9

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

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To all the mums and dads who also had to home school last year.

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o 1.1 to store the e-book on any number of electronic devices and/or storage media (including, by way of example only, personal computers, e-book readers, mobile phones, portable hard drives, USB flash drives, CDs or DVDs) which are personally owned by you;

o 1.2 to access the e-book using an appropriate electronic device and/or through any appropriate storage media.

* 2. For the avoidance of doubt, you are ONLY licensed to use the e-book as described in paragraph 1 above. You may NOT use or store the e-book in any other way. If you do, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license.

* 3. Further to the general restriction at paragraph 2, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license in the event that you use or store the e-book (or any part of it) in any way not expressly licensed. This includes (but is by no means limited to) the following circumstances:

o 3.1 you provide the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.2 you make the e-book available on bit-torrent sites, or are otherwise complicit in ‘seeding’ or sharing the e-book with any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.4 you attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.

* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.