• THE VAMPIRE GENEVIEVE •
by Kim Newman
DRACHENFELS
GENEVIEVE UNDEAD
BEASTS IN VELVET
SILVER NAILS

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 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 COLONEL’S MONOGRAPH
A novella by Graham McNeill

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

Dictionary

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Chapter XVI

Chapter XVII

Chapter XVIII

Chapter XIX

Chapter XX

Chapter XXI

Chapter XXII

Chapter XXIII

Chapter XXIV

Chapter XXV

Chapter XXVI

Chapter XXVII

Chapter XXVIII

Chapter XXIX

Chapter XXX

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Anathemas’

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 I

Two bullets

The bloody streak down the wall told Morgravia the man did not have long to live. His mouth trembled, like a priest murmuring a sermon, but nothing intelligible came out. Just the passing of his last breaths. He had said his name was Oshanti and that he knew Morgravia, but his face was like a foreign country to her.

She glanced over to the opening in the tunnel, where Oshanti had told her they had blasted through to reach her, and found a gaping dark iris staring back. Screeches echoed in that darkness, something sharp scraping against stone, and there was the scent of the abattoir heady on the thick, underground air.

‘We can’t stay here,’ she said. Even with her fragmented memory, she knew that much.

She had been saved, she supposed. It certainly felt that way. She had awoken, her arms and legs bound and Oshanti frantically sawing at the bonds with his combat knife. Her strength had returned slowly, her senses slower still. They were halfway back down the tunnel before Morgravia realised she was out, but she couldn’t remember from where.

She had tried to get answers but only got Oshanti’s name before the thing came out of the darkness at him. He fired his pistol, four heavy booms that echoed loudly off the smooth tunnel walls. The thing recoiled, injured fatally it seemed, though it all happened too fast, and it was too dark to tell anything about its nature.

Morgravia found out a little later that it had cut him, opened him like a burst tyre. And that was that.

‘We can’t stay,’ she repeated, more urgently, when Oshanti did not respond.

He nodded then, slow and ponderous like an oil derrick tipping towards the ground. She’d begun to wonder if his head would rise again, when it did and he gripped her hand, the one already holding onto his. The lips moved, gummed up with the same gory matter that stained the wall, but he emitted no more than an agonised gurgle. A bundle of red loops sat in his lap, glistening in the stuttering lumen light overhead. He stared blankly, forlorn and disconsolate, at his partially eviscerated intestines.

The screeching from the tunnel came louder now, undercut by a breathy wheezing like a punctured bellows.

By the time she looked down again, Oshanti had pressed his hand and hers to Morgravia’s chest. His eyes widened, conveying everything his voice could not. Another nod, one of resignation this time. He unclipped the clasp on his belt holster, tugging loose the heavy-gauge stub pistol that had sat snug, surrounded by dark leather. It took some effort, and as he pushed the weapon into Morgravia’s outstretched hand, his face had paled to the colour of alabaster.

He held up two fingers on his right hand, the number of bullets left in the pistol.

One for him, then one for me.

It was only then, when faced with the inevitability of her own imminent mortality, that Morgravia realised how fast her heart was beating. It thundered with a god’s voice.

She took the pistol in a firm grip.

The scraping and wheezing neared the tunnel mouth and silhouettes began to form in the foggy black beyond.

Aiming at Oshanti’s bloody face, she saw relief as the eyelids began to close and the breath he had been holding eked out of him, like a slowly deflating balloon.

Reacting, not thinking, Morgravia lifted her aim and fired off into the tunnel mouth. The pistol boomed, loud enough to subdue her thundering heart for a few seconds, and she hit something in the darkness. A lumbering thing, a heavy, hot, exhaling thing that brought with it the reek of copper and cold, dead meat. It fell back, or she thought it did; it was hard to tell, the light was so bad. Another screech tore into the shadows. Of pain. Of death? She hoped it was death.

Oshanti had opened his eyes, expecting the pistol’s retort to signal his end and obviously wondering why when it did not. Morgravia only had one answer, and it was a poor one that she hated herself for giving.

‘I’m sorry…’ she said, absorbing every scrap of fear and anger in Oshanti’s jaundice-yellow eyes, and ran.

The scraping followed, more numerous, more frantic than it had been before, pausing only long enough to make Oshanti scream.

Morgravia tried not to imagine the wet-meat tearing that would come after as she half ran, half stumbled down the sump pipe. The tunnel connected to it, the subterranean sewer works that served the factoria and hab-blocks of the greater hive. A foul-smelling swill of shit and industrial waste splashed underfoot as she ran. It made her sick to her stomach, but she couldn’t stop. They were coming, whatever they were. Heaving, hulking shadows surging up in her wake, that scraping refrain like a never-ending scream.

Morgravia clung to the pistol. One shot left. She knew she wouldn’t use it on herself. Either self-preservation or just rank cowardice wouldn’t allow her to do that. She grasped it, a near-useless lump of metal, holding onto the grip like a thirsty man holds a cup of water in an endless desert. And then she felt something give beneath her, a low cracking of rusted sump pipes and shearing metal. It was like stepping onto a stairwell in the dark that she didn’t realise was there, as a brief but stomach-lurching sense of vertigo seized her and she fell, fell screaming into darkness until she hit grimy water. She panicked as the cold struck her, punching the breath from her lungs, sending needles through her nerve endings.

Not like this not like this not like this.

But fate doesn’t care much for desire, and Morgravia sank beneath the water, her body carried along by its violent current. It filled her mouth, her nose, made her blind and deaf as the searing heat of drowning crushed her with vice-like finality… and then… peace.

Morgravia awoke with the taste of sump filth in her mouth. She knew it was an illusion, a weird sense memory and her mind’s oh-so-humorous way of remembering her past trauma.

‘Lumis…’

Candles flared, their sodium generators buzzing noisily as they activated. The light revealed a small hab-unit. It was bare ferrum, a chair in one corner where Morgravia had draped her clothes and other meagre belongings, a deep metal wash sink in the other. A rough mattress served as her bed. Scowling at the fever sweat dampening her thin sheets and blankets, and shivering at the chill prickling her flesh like a haunting spirit, Morgravia hauled her weary body into a sitting position. Pain struck her with a legion of daggers. It was all she could do to stop herself from crying out.

A single hexagonal skylight let in the flame-lit predawn of the low-hive. She stepped through its grainy shaft and over to the chair, where she rummaged around in her longcoat. Finding a handful of stimms, she bit down, wincing at the chalky non-taste, and went to stand before the room’s full-length mirror. She looked upon her naked form, enacting a daily ritual.

She was lean-limbed, muscled but not grotesquely so. Pale, milky skin reflected the light. She was tall, around six foot. One ice-blue eye looked back at her, alive with more vitality than she felt; the other one, yellowed and bloodshot, was a truer reflection of her physical and mental state. Silver-grey hair, shaved at the temples, a short mohawk forming a raised channel running between them, framed a stern but not unkind face. Yet it was strange to her, a rogue identity staring back from the dirty glass. Only the scars made sense, and these she found mostly unchanged. They threaded her body like zippers, a cross-hatching of permanently discoloured flesh that forced a mildly disgusted frown onto her face. One pull and she would unravel. All the warm wet red inside would come tumbling out, her flesh left a flaccid and empty vessel in its wake.

Undone, she thought, tracing the frenzied lines of scarification with her fingers.

It had been thirty-one days since the tunnel.

‘Emperor’s mercy…’ she whispered, and looked away, reaching for her tunic.

Morgravia froze, her hand poised in midair, her body half-turned.

A sinister figure stood before her, limned by the skylight, and for a moment she wondered if it were an actual spectre and not just the fever sweat washing her skin that had caused the chill in her bones. It smelled of blood and oil, and detached itself from the shadows with silky, yet syncopated movements. A blade flashed, its edge silvering in the light. A face with a rictus grin, two hollow sockets gaping around faintly glowing red eyes, regarded her.

Morgravia set down the pistol she had snatched from her gun belt, letting out a shuddering breath.

The rictus face crumpled into a frown.

‘You should put on some clothes, Mother. You will catch your death.’

Morgravia scowled and grabbed her tunic. ‘What do you want, Hel?’

Cristo had worked in the labour-pits of Meagre all his life. He was a bullet-maker, and a good one. His shells and munitions had a ninety-three per cent approval rate. Not many factorum labourers hit ninety-three per cent. He took pride in his work, though it was back-breaking and largely thankless. His proficiency at his job did yield some benefits. Slightly better food, his pick of the munition lines. Not much, but it left his belly fuller and his skin cooler, positioned as he was as far away as possible from the smelting furnaces under the labour floor.

It also attracted jealousy from some of his fellow workers. Toil in the pits was hard, relentless; it bred strong bodies but resentful minds. That resentment was usually reserved for the overseers, who tempered the slightest suggestion of unrest with the lash or the pain-maul, all the while sermonising on the purity of hard labour, the cleansing baptism of honest sweat given in the Emperor’s name. When offered the opportunity to direct his impotent fury somewhere other than the untouchable enforcers of the Emperor’s will and war machine, a man would take it. He would exercise that crushing sense of futility where it could be vented, where his suffering could be displaced onto another.

Cristo had heard the muttered threats, and caught the bitter glances directed his way; he had never believed they would be acted upon. Not at first. The labour-pit was a congested battery farm of human bodies, lurching in metronomic tandem. So numerous were the workers that maintaining vigilance over the entire labour cadre at all times was impossible, and yet no one man would raise hands against another for fear of reprisal. Not in the labour-pits, at least.

There were antechambers that bled off from the main pit, however, and these were less frequented. Several refectoria allowed for the taking of meals and an ablutions block served doubly as a decontamination chamber.

They had come for him here, jagged metal shivs glinting in the grimy washroom light. Three men, none of whom Cristo knew by name, though he recognised their faces well enough. The encounter had been short, brutal. He had killed them all, naked and caked in the rough, powdery scrub that served as a cleansing agent. Cristo was not a small man. He had bulk and muscle that his attackers’ strength in numbers failed to balance. It had happened quickly and almost silently. Cristo had been left with half a dozen lacerations, bleeding red into the grainy grey run-off gurgling down the drainage vent. Of his three attackers, one suffered a broken neck, another took a shiv through his jaw and up into his skull, and the third had his eyes gouged out so deeply it was possible to glimpse the inside of the back of his head through the grossly distended sockets.

Cristo had dressed quickly, sluiced the ablution cubicle down and dragged the dead men one by one to the furnace. Dull-eyed and indifferent servitors were the only witnesses to the deed.

He had never spoken of what had happened, for to do so would invite the strictest censure. The men would not be missed. Their loss, if it was noticed at all, attributed to the high attrition rate within the labour-pit. Punishment for murder would result in lobotomisation, and Cristo had no desire to join the pallid ranks of the half-alive automata that saw him immolate three corpses. To kill in the Emperor’s name was one thing, to kill those indentured to His holy service was very much another.

Cristo considered this as he waited beneath the overhang, a knife strapped to his belt and a handful of spent bullet casings clenched in his fist, and knew he would have to kill again. He stood in the shadow of Wrecker’s Curve. The old bridge between the ferro hives and the commercial district called Fallowhope had seen better days. It arched like a broken man’s spine, dilapidated and only fit for demolition. Two-thirds of the way across, it ran to a sheared cliff edge that plunged into a deep gully where the detritus of its collapse still lay in heavy ferrocrete chunks and twists of metal rebar.

Moving out from under the lee of the bridge, Cristo descended into the gully towards a ring of distant torchlight. As he drew closer, he made out a dozen drum fires arranged in a loose circle, a crowd of jeering, catcalling figures in rough leather and scavenged factorum overalls leaning in around the cordon of flame light.

The crowd were animated to the point of fervour, amped up on narco and cheap still-alcohol. Most were armed. Cristo saw cudgels, freight-rail spikes, blades. No guns though. Gaps appeared as the crowd shifted to bay or shove or hustle. Each offered a fleeting glimpse of what lay beyond them, of what was in the circle. Two urban gladiators, hands wrapped in bandages for grip, armoured in warpaint and leather. One carried a length of broken chain, her hair a fiery red and sticking up in spikes. The other hunched behind a drum lid, using it as an improvised shield, one side of her head shaved, the other left to grow long so a violet swash of hair covered half her face. Both were cut, the one with the chain hungrier for the kill. As she raised her arm to lash out at her opponent, Cristo got a decent look at her.

That’s when he started to run.

Chapter II

Chainblades

‘And stop calling me that,’ said Morgravia, pulling on her breeches before buttoning up her tunic. ‘I’m not your mother.’

Hel sketched a jerky bow, the effect more than a little disconcerting, and Morgravia gave a slight shake of the head.

‘You’re as messed up as I am,’ she muttered.

‘You look tired, Moth– my lord.’

Tough to argue with that, thought Morgravia. Crimson tunic, dark brown breeches; at least they concealed some of the outer scars.

‘I feel like someone set off a chainblade inside my body. I’m beyond tired. I’m livid with pain.’

‘I have been abroad in the hive city,’ Hel announced, cheerfully changing the subject. Her short and slight appearance and oddly naive demeanour belied her lethality. That’s what made her so dangerous, Morgravia reminded herself. Hel whipped one of her swords over her shoulder, sheathing it in a thin scabbard strapped to her back. She did it swiftly, fluidly and with a trained killer’s grace.

This is what she was, of course. A killer. A rough blade honed to a lethal edge by one of the Emperor’s death cults. The Sanguinous or some-such, Morgravia could not remember; but these days that was nothing new.

‘Just tell me you didn’t murder anyone,’ she said, tugging on knee-length boots that went over her breeches and then picking up a dark green flak-weave bodice. A bullet-stopper at anything but point-blank, pretty good against ranged weapons too. Fuck all use against a knife, though. ‘Here…’ she said, and gestured to her disturbing companion, ‘don’t just stand there looking grim and forbidding, make yourself useful.’ The bodice pushed in her ribs as Hel tied it off and affixed the mag-clasps around the back.

‘Throne,’ Morgravia gasped. ‘I do not enjoy wearing this thing.’ She gave Hel, who was bound in a black-red bodyglove, a side glance. A raft of exterior metal studs caught the light, and the rags of death oaths were tightly cinched around Hel’s arms and legs. A synthetic skull mask was near imprinted on her face. ‘How do you even stand wearing that all the time?’

Hel canted her head, like a predator assessing a sudden peculiarity in its prey.

‘Pain and forbearance brings us closer to His glory,’ she said.

‘I thought you’d say that,’ Morgravia replied, strapping on her weapons belt before engaging the fingerprint access of a small lock-casket secreted in the inner pocket of her longcoat. The lid clicked loose with a hiss of depressurisation. ‘Did you see any sign of them?’ she asked.

‘I did not.’

‘But you found trouble?’

‘There is always trouble in Blackgheist.’

Morgravia smirked and gave a mirthless chuckle. ‘Too true, though we agreed you’d do it quietly.’

‘Confrontation was inevitable.’

‘So you did murder someone.’

‘Several someones.’

Morgravia swore under her breath.

‘It was necessary to retrieve the information you desired.’

Hope coloured Morgravia’s voice. ‘You found him?’

Hel nodded, Morgravia reciprocating with a nod of her own.

‘Good,’ she said.

‘Hallow’s End.’

‘I’ve heard of it.’ She still held the lock-casket, not yet ready to lift the lid on what was inside. Morgravia let her eyes close for a few seconds. ‘Throne, this needs to be ended.’

She eased open the lid, looked down.

‘Perhaps they have given up the hunt?’ suggested Hel after a few moments.

‘No, that’s not it. They’re waiting.’

‘For what?’

‘For me to remember,’ said Morgravia and took an item from the lock-casket. It was a sigil, an adamantium metal strip fashioned into the shape of a capital letter ‘I’ with three bars intersecting its horizontal axis. A synthetic wax seal in the shape of a jawless skull affixed to the midsection.

Morgravia regarded the sigil in her hand.

‘We were here for a reason, Hel. I just wish I could remember what that reason was,’ she said, and put the Inquisitorial rosette away. Throwing on her longcoat, she made for the door. ‘Are you coming?’ she said, but Hel had already gone. ‘Quietly…’ she said reflectively. ‘Good girl.’

The city stank of rot and venality. Tall gothic structures pressed in either side of a main street, leaning over the shuffling crowds like bent-backed old men. Huge statues sprouted liberally amongst the urban decay, pushing aside buildings and soaring so high into the false atmosphere their heads were wreathed in mist like the summits of mountains. Rivulets of moisture clung to their sculpted stone bodies, enhancing their godly aura, hands raised to the heavens as if holding up the very roof of the world. A thin river of effluence wended through the heart of it, peeling off into little tributaries, a manufactured delta of filth and industrial waste.

Morgravia drank it all in as she moved through the habitation district of Low Sink. She stuck to the bigger crowds, hood up and head down, her gaze flicking up every now and then to the overhangs, the gantries and the walkways. Hel would be up there somewhere, staying out of sight, flitting from perch to perch with an acrobat’s easy grace.

She trusted the death cultist, acknowledging she had little choice in the matter. Hel had dragged her from the sump outflow on the night Oshanti had died with his guts hanging out. She’d found the hab-unit, tended her wounds and wiped away every trace Morgravia had left behind. Without Hel, she would probably be dead. But Hel didn’t know anything, save she had a duty to the Inquisition and therefore Morgravia with it. She possessed no knowledge of the mission or what the threat might be. She was a weapon, nothing more, and a slightly broken one at that.

A light rain pattered on Morgravia’s longcoat, drizzling through the mouths of gargoyles crouched on the edges of slab-stoned tenements and spired factorum-cathedra. Daisy-chains of sodium lamps hung along the main civilian route, flickering and spluttering, casting long, knife-sharp shadows. Morgravia shuddered as the memory of the tunnel intruded on the present. She increased her pace, bulling her way past grimy dockhands, factorum serfs and grey-faced servitor units. Several streets converged into a public concourse where a preacher babbled from a makeshift pulpit, spitting zeal and fury as he brandished a tatty book in the direction of his onlookers. He’d attracted a decent crowd, though the roads out of Low Sink were so rammed he could hardly have not. Even the proctors, shock mauls swinging lazily from their belts, clad in black carapace and glaring through rain-spattered helmet visors, struggled to make way. One bellowed through a loudhailer, reminding every citizen of their Throne-expected duty to report any mutant, heretic or witch to the Imperial authorities. Vigilance, he said, protects.

Morgravia sincerely doubted that, and besides, she would have to flout that directive if she had any aspirations of convincing the Broker. And she needed to convince the Broker.

Pushing through the throng, edging around a burly ogryn hauling a stack of crates wrapped in a tarpaulin on its back, Morgravia made for a side street. She had taken a few steps beyond the alley threshold when the pain hit like a mag-trans locomotive, poleaxing her to the ground…

flesh stretched taut tearing ripping every seam pulled apart to reveal red hot and red hearts beating organs steaming blades pushing through skin twisting bones splintering skull cracking spine bent double and bleeding red red red pain and pain and agony a cut a slash peeling back every layer no crevice left untouched bruised and battered knives two red suns looming shearing pinned back and exposed a crimson flower in bloom its petals spread to every cardinal destination flensing grinding excise and exsanguinate until only red remains and red is all there is

She came to, a cry half-stifled in her throat, hot tears stinging her cheeks, to see a shadow looming over her. For a second, Morgravia panicked, taken back to a past trauma she couldn’t remember, a memory of knives and blood. Then she realised where she was. His hands were inside her longcoat, rummaging. Morgravia jabbed the stub pistol into the thief’s side, snarled.

‘I squeeze and the bullet perforates your liver. It will hurt. You will bleed to death in this alleyway and no one will mourn you.’

The thief backed away empty-handed, mumbling fearfully. Little older than a boy, he had a faint wash of downy stubble and bright, scared eyes. Dressed in rough clothes, he looked like a dock runner, and capered off as soon as he hit the crowds, leaving the whiff of ammonia in his wake.

Morgravia got up and dusted herself off. Someone had shoved a burning poker in her skull. That’s how it felt, how it always felt. The red dream. She vomited in her mouth, tasting the acerbity of stomach acid as it seared her throat. She spat it up, wishing she had something to drink. She could imbibe later when she reached Hallow’s End.

Sweeping her gaze across the ledges and gantries above, she scowled.

‘I see you pick and choose when you watch my damn back.’

Hel, if she was watching, didn’t make her presence known.

Morgravia was about to walk on when she heard a commotion from the street outside the alley. She heard shouting. Some of the proctors were bellowing orders for people to stand aside. Someone screamed. Even the preacher’s sermon had been interrupted. Wanting no part of it, Morgravia headed for Hallow’s End, where the Broker would be waiting.

The juve fell like a sack of dead meat.

The gangers had enough sense to post lookouts at the perimeter of their territory but Cristo moved swiftly for a big man and had a keen eye for trouble. He was also supremely motivated. He didn’t kill them. He loathed killing and felt the weight of those who had died at his hands like an ever-thickening noose around his neck. He hurt them though. Broke bones. Rendered them unconscious. Male, female, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was the chain-wielding banshee in the fighting pit.

The cordon of flickering drum fires drew closer with every step. As Cristo moved deeper into the gully he realised he knew this place, more by reputation than familiarity. It was Red Hand territory, at the least the very edge of it. The juves he had put down wore patches depicting a crowned skull. Mark of the Death Kings. Such ridiculous names they gave themselves, but the Death Kings were a rival faction to the Red Hand, which only meant more trouble and the possibility of a ticking chrono. Cristo upped the pace to the rattling tune of a chain raking at a drum shield as the fight in the pit intensified. The mob bayed with every lash, urging violence, thirsty for more. Then a horn sounded like a distant war cry, discordant, blaring. Cristo turned, they all did, towards a ridge of refuse and debris that rose up like a grubby cliff. Lights flared, eye-achingly bright spots of magnesium white, and the rumble of engines suddenly eclipsed the catcalls like thunder rolling across a dirt sea.

‘Shit…’

The ticking chrono was ringing.

The interlopers had bloody handprints daubed on their faces and rode down the ridge on grit-bikes, jinking left and right, kicking up dirt, dust pluming from their tyres. Blades and axes whirled menacingly as they arrowed in on the other gang. An ash-runner, a much larger bike, grunted behind them. Petrochem spewed from its twin chrome exhausts. The rider was leant back in the saddle. His plate armour and the chainblade strapped to the bike’s hefty frame marked him out as the gang leader.

Gun shots rang out. The riders had sidearms as well as blades. The Death Kings gathered around the fighting pit scattered. A few pistols barked back. Someone in the crowd got hit and went down. The girl in the pit with the improvised shield took her chance, and Cristo cried out despite himself when she smashed her chain-wielding opponent in the neck. Heads turned, shocked at the burly bullet-maker in their midst, but they were too busy with the riders to really worry about him.

Cristo barrelled on, hoisting a ganger that got in his way up and over his shoulder. He barged another from his path, swatting the ganger aside, not missing a step as he rushed into the fighting pit to the side of the fallen.

‘Karina…’

She lay curled in foetal agony, choking for breath and clutching at her throat.

A rider sped past a few feet away, whooping and crowing. He hit something, a hatchet blade slapping into skin. Blood arced. It spattered Cristo’s cheek, hot and sudden, and he looked up to see one of the Death Kings juves fall with her head caved in.

The girl on the ground next to him could barely breathe. Her eyes rolled as a bruise blossomed menacingly across her larynx. She’d taken some licks in the pit too, deep cuts that bled beneath a leather jerkin. Cristo’s palms came away wet and red and he stared at them, horrified, for just a second. Then he swept his massive arms under and around the girl, scooping her up.

She gripped his arm, pinching the skin with what little strength she had, her eyes bright with fury.

‘You can shout at me later,’ he said, and that was that. They were moving, Cristo ploughing back up the ridge towards the overhang while Karina clutched his bullet-maker’s garb. She need not have worried about him dropping her. Cristo kept a tight grip and nothing but death itself would see him relinquish it.

He only slowed down when a rider came circling around, whooping and hollering, his grit-bike carving an arc in the dirt. A long spiked chain shrieked around his head, the brutal torturer with his lash. It whipped out towards Cristo, who ducked its bite and kept moving. Swiftly losing interest, the rider peeled off and went in search of better prey in the gully.

Skirmishes had broken out across the entire expanse below the overhang, as fighters poured in from either faction. Cristo had to run through them, though chose to largely skirt their ranks. In the snatched glances he got, he reckoned the Red Hands had the better of it. Their riders cut back and forth, scything through the Death Kings like horse-mounted savages, but reinforcements for the beleaguered gangers were still coming. Crackling gunfire rippled across the gully in staccato starbursts of muzzle flare as gangers ran between snatches of cover, or else fell clutching wounds or simply fell and did not rise again.

Cristo felt a sharp pain in his arm and looked down. Karina had dug in her nails, drawing blood.

‘Down…’ she rasped.

‘We need to keep moving.’

They were out of the worst of the fighting now, just a few fleeing juves flanking them at a distance, but they wouldn’t be safe until they reached the overhang so Cristo ignored the pain and carried on.

She stabbed harder and he had to clench his jaw to keep from crying out.

‘Down…’

He put Karina down.

She immediately snatched a knife dropped by a dead juve, whose eyes were fixed upwards to a sky he would never see, a bullet hole gaping in his forehead. Karina barely noticed him. She immediately headed eastward across the gully, cutting back in a diagonal line from the fighting, but Cristo put a hand on her shoulder to stop her. She whirled on him, her expression furious.

More gunfire snapped from below, pushing them into the shelter of a broken piece of the old bridge. Shots pranged off the granite chunks before being directed elsewhere.

Cristo shook his head. ‘Not that way.’

‘East is Death Kings territory. Red Hand won’t risk approaching the border.’

‘Like you didn’t with their territory.’

She frowned at that. ‘Where then?’

Cristo pointed to the arc of the sundered bridge and the shadows beneath it. ‘The overhang.’

‘And then what? Back to Meagre? I don’t think so.’ Karina continued in her original direction but Cristo stopped her again. She snarled, lashing out with the knife, but Cristo caught her wrist.

‘I can make you, Karina,’ he said, his voice harder than he meant it to be before it softened again, ‘but I don’t want to.’

He saw in her eyes that she knew he could do it.

‘You won’t take me back,’ she swore. ‘I belong here.’

She looked to her gang, but the fierceness in her expression slowly turned to despair as she saw the Red Hands literally taking the Death Kings apart.

‘Here is about to become nowhere,’ said Cristo.

She turned on him, savage and snarling. ‘Then I’ll be nowhere.’

Cristo held her gaze, knowing she had to climb down from her anger on her own, and anything he said now would inevitably be taken in exactly the opposite way it was intended.

Seething, still fighting for breaths, Karina relented. ‘I was winning,’ she said, stifling a sob.

‘You were fearsome,’ said Cristo, and meant it, though it went against every instinct to say so.

There was a short moment of silence between them, filled by the sounds of gangers fighting and dying, before Karina relented and they made for the overhang.

‘Why did you come for me?’ she said after a few paces.

‘I don’t know how you can ask that.’

Cristo risked a look back, making sure they weren’t being followed. He had been about to elaborate further when he thought he saw something in the skirmish below that made him slow down. And then stop.

‘Don’t tell me you’ve changed your mind,’ said Karina, stopping too. She was a little way ahead – even injured she was faster on her feet than him – and looked back down the ridge.

Cristo didn’t answer. The overhang was close, but he was drawn to the battle as if his mind couldn’t reconcile what he was seeing and therefore refused to let him look away.

‘Something happening…’ he began, but couldn’t finish.

Karina snapped irritatedly. ‘What is it?’

The skirmishes had coalesced, devolving into a massive brawl. Either the gangers had run out of ammunition or they simply wanted to hack at each other hand-to-hand. But this wasn’t just bloodlust or territorial anger. Several gangers, badly wounded by the look of them, were fighting frenziedly. They had abandoned their knives, cudgels and other weapons, and went at their foes with bare hands, nails… and… teeth?

There was screaming. Not the kind of screaming to fire up the blood, or even the mortal scream of death or severe pain. It was terror, pure and abject.

Some of the gangers were trying to break loose but got snarled up. Cristo couldn’t quite make out why. He did see the leader of the Red Hand. His ash-runner had got snagged too. Something had tangled around the wheels. They looked like… limbs. Stood up in the saddle, he hacked around himself with the chainblade. Gore and matter flew wildly. Then he was dragged down by dozens of grasping hands, and his last stand ended.

Cristo’s eyes narrowed. ‘Bloody Throne…’

He quickly turned, suddenly aware of Karina behind him. He didn’t want her to see this.

‘It’s nothing,’ he said.

‘Damn it, Father,’ she shouted.

Cristo got in her way, making sure she wouldn’t see. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said again. ‘Please…’ he added, and in the use of this simple plea he saw understanding, if not full comprehension in her eyes.

She relented but asked in a quiet, almost fearful voice, ‘What is it?’

‘Nothing we need be a part of,’ he said, and gently turned her away.

No father would want his daughter to see this, assuming he could even say for certain what he had actually seen.

They pushed on, Karina flashing nervous glances in her father’s direction, Cristo doing his best not to look shaken. His head hurt all of a sudden, like he’d been squinting under the labour-pit’s lumens for too long, a dull ache that pressed in at his temples like insistent, probing fingers. It couldn’t erase the image from his mind, though, as he and Karina reached the shadow of the overhang.

Of what he had seen in the gully.

They were eating each other.

Chapter III

Fog

Morgravia took a maglev to the other side of Low Sink.

The mag-trans was about the only thing in low-hive that still functioned with moderate dependability. It served as a public shuttle for the labourers, scriveners and other menials required for the hive to function, and Blackgheist’s ‘overmen’, the nobles, oligarchs and plutocrats that ran the city, had a financial interest in its continued reliability. The world’s industrial output, the raw materials extracted and mined from her bedrock, had made the overmen rich and powerful. Ostensibly, they served the Imperium, meeting their tithes and observing their duties in the furtherance of the great war machine; actually, they served themselves, their ivory towers built on the blood and bones of less privileged men, shielding them from the worst of the lower city’s depravities. The mag-trans kept those towers lofty, shipping goods as well as labour and ferrying it to the high-docks where it was packaged, sealed and assigned for usage off-world.

The train ran the edge of the natural basin into which the settlement of Low Sink had agglomerated over time, the name having sprung from its concave geography. Magnetic repulsion kept the heavy metal carriages a few inches above the rail, though the commute was far from smooth. A rattling coffin box with slits for windows and standing room only was a less than inviting environment in which to take a long journey. Morgravia shared air, space and body odour with a sweaty press of dirty factorum workers, dockhands and other sundry folk. Few spoke, their minds on whatever toil lay ahead, though the quiet shaking of the carriage was broken up by religious sermons piped through vox-emitters.

Maintain your vigilance.

Fear the witch.

Mutation is heresy.

Corruption lies in apathy.

She knew the words by rote; she had spoken them enough times, though recalling any specific instance was currently beyond her reach. That’s why she needed the Broker. Instincts remained – how to fight, how to move covertly, how to interrogate – but actual, solid memories did not. She knew the extent of her influence, the power it granted her, but she dared not risk employing it, not when the face of the enemy was still hidden. They had tried to kill her, whoever her quarry was. This she knew with instinctive certainty too. For now, they either thought she was dead or had stopped looking for her. That anonymity had to remain intact. It meant receiving no help beyond what she already had, and no transport that would attract attention. Ships, even junkers, were out. And so she favoured the maglev. Public, nondescript; no self-respecting inquisitor would deign to traverse in that cattle barge. It served her well as a perfect disguise and a place to marshal her thoughts.

Morgravia supposed that Hallow’s End had been chosen as a venue for the meeting with the Broker on account of its relative obscurity. Situated at the very western fringe of the basin just inside the border of a settlement called Meagre, it had one foot in the badlands, the territory of the gangs. This did not concern her. The red dream on the other hand… It had manifested after her liberation from her captors, and the natural assumption was one had caused the other. The dream must be tied to her fragmented memories, but the kaleidoscope of images and the sensations that accompanied them defied rationalisation. To piece herself back together, she needed a witch.

A sudden jerk arrested those thoughts as the maglev slowed to a stop. The carriage lowered itself down onto the guide rail beneath it as its repulsion engines cycled down. With a hiss of released hydraulic pressure, the doors lumbered open on screeching casters to let in the reek of Meagre. In the distance, a bell tolled. The last of the passengers pulled on rebreather masks or tied scarves as they left the carriage. Morgravia shuffled along with them, attaching her own mask as she ventured out.

Hazy fog lingered low to the ground, clinging in a creeping veil. Jaundiced with toxins, where it met structures it lapped at their sides like an ethereal sea. Its tendrils gently tugged around Morgravia’s ankles and reduced the departing passengers to muddied silhouettes. It obscured much of the cityscape but even with this generous softening of detail, the impoverished nature of the place was all too apparent. The faces of beggars loomed out of the morass like unquiet spirits desperate for exorcism. Sickly children huddled together for warmth, taking shelter in the shells of dilapidated buildings. Feral dogs scurried through ruins, barking mournfully, only kept at bay by grim-faced proctors who travelled in packs.

Morgravia took side streets, following signs of flickering neon until she came upon a pugnacious blockhouse, barely visible through the fog. It squatted between larger industrial structures, its stout frontage flanked by ferrocrete buttresses and jutting like a pugilist’s chin. A shed stood appended to one side, slabbed by plate and bolted tight. Armoured shutters sheathed the windows, yielding to a single dingy aperture that served as the entrance of the establishment.

A light flickered in the mouth of the doorway, not exactly an invitation but neither was it unwelcoming. The faint strains of music echoed from within. Morgravia followed them.

Hallow’s End beckoned.

It was as warm and dark as a womb inside. Old sodium lanterns threw off a weak, bluish glow that described a large room flanked around three sides with private booths. A communal area lay in the middle, a roughly carpeted expanse that led to a raised bar protected by a cage of wire mesh, with drinks served through narrow gaps like arrow slits. To one side of the bar a small stage played host to a female singer in a long dark dress that went beyond incongruous all the way to appropriate in the eclectic setting. She sang of sorrow, of dead men heading off to war and the loved ones they left behind. A wizened theremin player provided accompaniment, plying the invisible strings of his instrument in a beautiful lament. His green velveteen suit matched the gemstones on his ringed fingers. The musicians appeared indifferent to the seedy surroundings, lost in the reverie of their song, and Morgravia found she envied them.

She delved deeper, and plunged into a cloud of obscura smoke. It floated in purple ribbons, giving off the scent of spice and lavender, and coiled around the patrons like an eager lover. The colourful pall emanated from a fat man supping on a hookah pipe, chortling at his own indolence as he pawed at a bevy of languid, dull-eyed courtesans attending him. His considerable bulk nearly filled a private booth, and he sweated in the heat under saffron-hued silks and gilded finery. A merchant, trade-rich and morality-poor. His shadow was in considerably better physical shape, and exotically armed. He wore a flechette pistol tucked in a visible shoulder holster that wrapped around the hired gun’s bodyglove like it was a part of his genhanced musculature.

The Broker was exactly as his or her name suggested. A trafficker, a very exclusive purveyor of goods, introductions and favours. Finding them had been difficult, getting a meeting even more so. Hel’s red sword would testify to that. The initial business had been conducted through factotums and underworld intermediaries and now it came to it at last, Morgravia realised she had no idea how to identify the Broker.

Wealth, she assumed, was as good a barometer as any, and so she made for the fat man’s orbit, but stopped when she felt a light touch on the arm. She turned sharply, slipping a hand beneath her longcoat, sliding fingers around the hilt of the combat knife tucked behind her back.

Even in the dingy light, she saw the hard living in the scars of the man in front of her. He had swarthy skin with a soldier’s cut, hair shorn short around the temples and a little longer on the crown, and wore hardy travelling fatigues. A duster coat was swept over the back of the seat he had vacated, along with a gun belt that holstered a pair of ivory-handled autopistols. A ruddy, ragged scarf looped round his neck and there were small plates of armour stitched into his jerkin.

Catching Morgravia’s gaze, he lifted his hand to show her both palms in a placatory gesture.

‘No trouble here,’ he said in a low drawl. He had the look of a badlands drover, a cattleman. Either that or he was ex-Militarum.

‘Not for me, anyway,’ she warned him, relaxing her grip but not letting go of the knife.

‘So long as you stay away from Fharkoum, then sure.’

Something in Morgravia’s expression must have suggested confusion because the drover, or whatever he was, decided to elaborate.

‘The fat man draped in gold with his own harem. You don’t want anything from him.’

She stepped in closer, so barely half an arm length stood between them. ‘And how do you know what I want?’

The drover rubbed the bristles on his chin, as if appraising something. ‘I know he ain’t it.’

‘I suspect you know very little. What do you want?’

Morgravia wondered if Hel might put in an appearance, but it wouldn’t have been the first time she had let her fend for herself.

The drover smiled but she cut his charm to the quick when the knife pricked at his throat.

‘This is a monomolecular cleaving blade,’ she told him. They were close enough to kiss, but Morgravia had something much deadlier in mind. ‘It can cut through carapace like parchment. Push hard enough…’ she said, leaning in so the tip nicked the drover’s skin to let a crimson bead roll gently down the blade, ‘and it can even penetrate adamantium and ceramite. Do you know what kind of warriors wear armour like that?’

‘I most certainly do,’ replied the drover, maintaining his easy charm despite the knife held to his neck. ‘I can see you are a serious woman and I have no wish to incur your ire further, but I believe we may be at cross purposes.’

‘Is that so?’

‘It is.’

‘Are you going to tell me why I shouldn’t push ten inches of monomolecular plasteel through your larynx or shall I just begin?’

‘A very serious woman,’ said the drover and took a slow, backwards step and then another to the side. A booth had opened up behind him, one that hadn’t been there before. He smiled again, gesturing to the booth like a major-domo shepherding a guest of his master’s household.

‘The Broker will see you now.’

They entered the fog bank east of town, having gained the ridge and hurried past the shadow of Wrecker’s Curve. The old bridge was still visible behind them, its broken edge sagging into the gully like a flaccid tongue.

‘Saints’ blood, this came in fast,’ Karina remarked as the yellow morass closed in around them, and she began to think they weren’t moving fast enough. Something had happened in the gully; her father had seen it and wasn’t talking.

She had no desire to return to Meagre. That place hadn’t been home for a long time, but her choices were limited. Even still, she recognised the shacks made from scavenged metal and the grain silos raised up on stalks that marked the border. She had crossed it enough times. Broken agri-servitors paced the fields of hard earth, digging irrigation channels with their shovel-like hands. She hated them, with their idiot expressions and pallid skin. A red-scaled raptor alighted onto the head of one of the creatures and began pecking out the soft jelly of its eyes. Karina’s lip curled in disgust. Such toil to gain so little. A few of the servitors had collapsed, left to disrepair, their joints rusted through. Rot tainted the air. Blind to the strangers in their midst, they paid them no heed.

‘You hear that?’ Cristo had stopped part way through one of the fields and turned his head, frowning as he tried to listen.

Karina couldn’t hear anything beyond the misery and industrial churn of Meagre.

‘If you mean the soulless, beating heart of this shit heap, then yeah, I hear it.’

Cristo appeared not to acknowledge her but kept turning his head, first west then east. The fog thickened by the moment, and soon it would be difficult to tell one direction from another.

‘What is it?’ He was scaring her, though she wasn’t about to admit that. Something haunted him, like an old ghost hungry for his blood.

Then she heard it, muffled by the fog. Footsteps, coming fast. Lots of them. Then heavy, rabid breathing. Karina felt a bead of sweat trickle down the small of her back. Her heartbeat felt like a storm battering her chest. She understood what was wrong with a sickening and despairing clarity.

He was afraid. Desperately afraid.

Though they were at odds, she had always respected his fearlessness. He had fought to keep them alive in Meagre. No daughter should ever see her father scared. It went against nature, but with a profound feeling of unease, she realised that whatever was out there in the fog went against nature too.

She gripped his hand, hers still bound in the bandages from the fight.

‘Father…’

He turned to face her, his expression confused, as if he couldn’t remember who she was. Then he squeezed her hand back and, together, they ran.

The agri-servitors toiled in their wake, solemn as mourners and oblivious to what came after.

Chapter IV

Riot

Sirens wailed throughout Meagre. Proctors marched the streets, a veritable army of the bastards, bellowing through loudhailers and herding the scared populace like cattle. Curfew had been ordered. Citizens ran for their domiciles with the fervour of rats fleeing fire. Mothers clutched babes to their chests. Weak and fearful men looked to their own safety. Families huddled close, desperate to stay together. The churn of humanity ploughed ahead in a nervous mob, obeying the blaring of the horns, willingly ignorant of the false protection the proctors offered. As they made for their own hab, Cristo and Karina had little choice but to be swept up in the mayhem.

‘Have you ever seen so many?’ she asked, reckoning on about two hundred of the law keepers. Rank after rank of black carapace, helms and tower shields.

They’re more afraid than we are…

‘Not since the grain riots,’ Cristo replied, and looked hounded by his thoughts.

They were moving slowly through one of the main thoroughfares, hemmed in by bodies, the air tinged with fear but still short of outright panic. Karina dreaded to imagine the slaughter if the herd decided to stampede.

‘What did you see?’ she said as they were pressed close, whispering into his ear so they weren’t overheard. ‘In the gully… What was it?’

Cristo shook his head, staring as if whatever he had witnessed replayed before his mind’s eye.

‘Not sure.’

‘Yes, you are. You know exactly what you saw, you just don’t want to say it.’

Because that would make it real.

Cristo had been about to answer when a shout came from behind them. One of the proctors was reacting to something. He gave a few curt orders and a section of their ranks peeled off to deal with an unseen threat. They headed east.

‘The fields…’ said Karina, meeting her father’s wild gaze.

He grabbed her wrist. ‘I’m getting us out.’

She let him pull her along as he pushed through the crowd. The shouting grew worse, and quickly turned into screaming. A proctor yelled through his loudhailer.

‘Disperse! Disperse!’

Shotgun discharge thundered, the dull percussive booms overlaying each other in a desperate chorus. Now the crowd was running, scrambling… falling. Karina, half dragged by her father, saw a docker disappear into the mass of bodies. He didn’t rise again. She felt a sharp pain in her ribs, hands grasping at her hair and clothes, pulling her back like a human riptide. Lashing out, her elbow struck bone and the pulling eased. Cristo drove on like a battering ram, one hand clamped to his daughter, the other tearing at the undulating wall of bodies standing in their way. Blood flecked his face and hands. He roared, savage, driven.

A grey canister spiralled into the air, and Karina just caught sight of as it descended, corkscrewing smoke, before detonating right in the midst of the throng. Tear gas spewed out in a dense cloud. More screaming followed, both pain and terror. Half a dozen more canisters arced towards the crowd, fired from grenade launchers.

Karina watched their slow parabolas with increasing horror as one landed a few feet away.

‘Oh, Throne…’

A surge of light and heat struck her, and she lost her father’s grip as the blast took her sideways. Dazed, prone, her ears ringing, it took Karina a few seconds to realise that it wasn’t tear gas. The proctors were hurling frag grenades. They were trying to decimate the crowd and remove it as an impediment.

A factorum worker, face burnt black, overalls shredded and bleeding from a dozen shrapnel wounds, staggered and fell right in front of her. A mother in the robes of a low-level scrivener cast about for a missing child. Those caught in the explosion milled around, clutching the stumps of ruined limbs, searching for the pieces of them that were missing. Others wailed, blinded, bloodied and afraid. Stillness briefly reigned, the passing seconds abruptly stalled by the shock of the recent present. Then everything came crashing back, the fear and the agony, a river of it tearing through its banks and letting loose a flood.

Karina sat up. And screamed.

‘Murdering bastards! You’re killing us! You’re killing us!’

She tried to rise, and got struck by a flailing leg. The city spun, blurring. East became west as she stumbled and fell hard. Pain seared through her knee, burning needles piercing the bone, and she yelped. She rose again, unsteady, until a blow to her midriff put her on her back. Groaning, panic and desperation filling her gut with ice, Karina rolled over. Then she crawled, elbows dragging, blood fogging one eye and turning everything she looked at an ugly shade of crimson. She perceived legs, desperately scurrying, and the cold faces of the dead staring from the heaps of bloody bodies. A foot thudded into her back and she gasped as the breath was punched violently from her body. She kept crawling but got kicked in the chin. Starbursts erupted across her vision as a copper taste filled her mouth. Karina reached for her knife – at least she could die fighting – but grasped an empty scabbard.

Proctors scrambled as all pretence of order devolved into a desperate fight to survive. They were killing now – Karina watched them through the gaps in the panic – scything through the citizens of Meagre like butchers culling cattle. Mauls rose and fell, slick and bloody. Riot shields crushed and bludgeoned. Loudhailers fell, discarded. Shotguns replaced them.

Amidst the scrum of bodies, Karina caught a glimpse of what had terrified the proctors. And suddenly her father’s fear made perfect, horrific sense.

Another mob, but this one ran towards the carnage, their eyes glaring with feral hunger. A tide hit the proctors, pulling, tearing, biting…

Death swept through Meagre.

Karina fought. She kicked and thrashed and punched until she lurched to her feet. She found her knife, providence skittering it back within her reach, and held the blade before her like a torch to ward off the dark.

Except the dark could not be kept at bay. It would engulf the town and everyone in it.

The dimmed lamps in the booth framed a slight-looking figure in dark blue robes. The figure wore a deep hood to hide its face, but the dull flicker of augmetics caught the light. The figure’s hands, concealed in the folds of voluminous sleeves at first, shone with a metallic glint as it steepled mechanical fingers.

Morgravia glanced at the drover – in lieu of a name, she had come to think of him as such – who dabbed at the wound on his neck with a cloth, then she looked back at the robed figure apparently waiting for her.

‘You’re the Broker,’ she said, a statement of fact, not an interrogative, and took the seat opposite.

The robed figure gave a shallow nod.

Close up it was possible to discern that the Broker was female – or at least the parts of her that were still flesh and blood.

‘You’re a data-smith,’ Morgravia realised, ‘or at least you used to be.’

Another nod confirmed it.

‘So, what now?’ asked Morgravia.

At a curt gesture from the Broker, a servitor in a sweeping velvet robe brought over two long-stemmed crystal chalices. Far from the gruesome automata that toiled in the labour-pits or the holds of voidships, the creature looked almost civilised, though its visible skin was utterly devoid of hair and its gender impossible to determine. Apart from an odd dewy complexion, the only concessions to its ‘otherness’ were a small aural circuit chip behind its left ear and a hexagonal, ruby-like vox-emitter that had been fitted into a brass torc around its neck.

‘Incarnadine wine,’ the servitor explained, in an incongruous, urbane voice. Only one of the chalices had any liquid in it, a dark substance that put Morgravia in mind of blood.

‘I’ll pass, if it’s all the same to you.’

The servitor paused, its courtesy protocols momentarily wrong-footed, before retreating back into the shadows with its offering. ‘As you wish.’

‘I had thought a drink before we begin,’ offered the Broker once the servitor had become one with the bar’s dubious ambience. Her voice was resonant, almost mechanistic.

Morgravia raised an eyebrow. ‘You do speak, then?’

‘I speak.’

‘Fortunate, given your line of work, though I suppose your sommelier could act as intermediary.’

‘I am the intermediary,’ she replied. ‘That is my function.’

‘Is buying your clients a drink part of the transaction too?’

‘It can be.’

‘Though you won’t drink with me.’

‘Neither of us are drinking.’

‘Ah, but I’m thinking you never drink?’

‘I have no need to. Though I do appreciate the ritual, if not the actual imbibing,’ she conceded, interlacing her fingers. ‘But I do not believe you are interested in my habits.’

‘On the contrary, I always like to know with whom I am dealing.’

‘That’s a formal and antiquated way to put it.’

‘I am from a very formal and antiquated profession. One of the oldest, in fact.’

‘I see. Perhaps that bodes well for our transaction then?’

‘Too early to tell, though I have taken some pains to arrange this meeting.’ Morgravia glanced around. ‘I admit, I’m surprised you chose this place.’

‘What’s surprising about it?’ The Broker’s keen, artificial eyes remained intent on Morgravia’s. She had yet to blink. ‘It is a public establishment, but one of questionable moral repute. I can imagine there are many in here who would take issue with a profession as, how did you put it, “formal and antiquated” as yours.’

Morgravia smiled thinly. ‘Does your drover not provide you with adequate protection?’

The drover had finished tending to his wound and gave Morgravia a wink as she glanced at him.

‘Does your death cultist? I assume she is lurking here somewhere?’

Morgravia hid her surprise behind a curt laugh, and chose to bluff.

‘She’s as near as I need her to be,’ she said.

‘I see. He is not a drover, by the way.’

‘Of course he isn’t. He dresses like one, though.’

The Broker appraised her gun-hand as if doing so for the first time, then looked back to Morgravia. ‘I concur, he does.’

‘Does he have a name?’

‘That is highly likely.’

‘Do you?’

‘I am the Broker.’

‘I see,’ said Morgravia, her expression neutral.

‘Do you? See, I mean?’

Morgravia decided upon a different tack and wagged a remonstrating finger. ‘You’ve been watching me.’

‘As you say, I am a data-smith. My currency is information, and information keeps me alive.’

‘And rich. I assume the gun-hand and the silky major-domo aren’t your only servants.’

‘And rich,’ the Broker reiterated, though Morgravia caught a flash of something – anger? – in her eyes. Her next sentence confirmed it. ‘I have enjoyed our parlay but I believe one of us is perhaps wasting the other’s time.’

‘That’s an astute observation.’

‘Indeed. The only thing I do not comprehend is why?’

‘Information keeps me alive too.’

‘That is… reasonable, but perhaps we should move to business. Shall we begin with you confirming what it is that you want?’ The Broker paused, laying her hands down upon the table. ‘Assuming, of course, you can get what I want?’

‘Passage off-world on a rogue trader vessel. Undocumented, uninhibited. Yes, it is within my means to grant you this favour.’

‘And I am to take this on faith?’

‘How is this for faith?’ said Morgravia and showed her Inquisitorial rosette.

A tremor of unease rippled through the Broker at the sigil that had condemned heretics and witches to death and torture the galaxy over. Morgravia took no small amount of satisfaction from watching the Broker squirm.

‘That will more than suffice,’ she said, gently clasping her hands over the rosette to hide it, a silent urging for her companion to put it away. ‘We can proceed.’

‘I’m glad we could establish a measure of trust,’ Morgravia said, returning the ordo sigil to the folds of her longcoat.

‘I would not say that.’

Morgravia gave a mock frown. ‘You hurt my feelings.’

‘I sincerely doubt that,’ said the Broker. ‘Your terms, then?’

‘First I want to know why you want passage off-world.’

‘You definitely live up to your profession’s namesake,’ the Broker replied, trying to hide her annoyance. ‘Why does it matter?’

‘Why does anything matter? I don’t know, yet, but if I am to do this for you then I would like to know for what reason you need a ship.’

‘Let us just say that in my trade I make certain people nervous. Knowledge is power, and there is nothing the powerful fear more than knowledge. I have an abundance of it.’

Morgravia’s eyes brightened with a sudden revelation. ‘So that’s why you wanted us to meet here. You’re in hiding, aren’t you?’

The Broker’s silence answered for her.

‘You took a sizeable risk by treating with someone like me,’ said Morgravia.

‘I have. I am. Now you know my reasons, so all that remains are your terms. If you please.’

Morgravia stared at the Broker, still weighing and measuring. She had little choice, though. In thirty-one days she had not found a better lead, and the fact that the Broker was scared enough to make this deal with her when she knew she was being hunted went some way to assure her of its authenticity.

‘I have been…’ she tried to find the right word, ‘compromised. My memories are incomplete. This is a state I cannot allow to continue.’

‘Because you too are hunted.’

Morgravia saw no point in dissembling further. ‘I believe so, yes. My business here is my own, and you want no part of it, but I cannot conclude it without–’

‘Your memories. You say I would want no part in your business here, but you cannot say truly what that business is. The heretic or mutant or witch you were hunting is unknown to you, your purpose here likewise. It puts you at great risk and I think, perhaps, you have already fallen foul of these men or women before.’

Morgravia felt herself tense self-reflexively at the reference to her obvious physical injuries, the scarring on her hands and face all too apparent even in the dingy light of the bar.

‘How do you know they are men and women?’

‘That is true. Then let me correct myself and say, the parties whom you were hunting and now hunt you inflicted this hurt. And it was they who shattered the mirror of your memories also.’

‘Are you asking me or telling me?’

‘I believe you know the difference, inquisitor.’

Morgravia held the Broker’s gaze, putting a little steel in it.

The data-smith’s augmetic fingers tapped the table nervously. ‘I am in touch with an unsanctioned–’

‘The ordo I serve is not interested in rogue psykers. Tell me about the witch.’

‘She is called the Empath.’

Morgravia scoffed. ‘Really? Do any of you in this business have actual names?’

‘For someone used to the precautions of a clandestine agency, I am surprised you have to ask.’

Morgravia shrugged, then said, ‘The Empath, you were saying…’

‘She is what is sometimes regarded as a psychic chirurgeon. I know her whereabouts and can ensure an audience.’

‘I don’t need an audience,’ snapped Morgravia, harder than she intended, ‘I need my mind. Restored. Can she do that?’

‘She can do that. If she’s assured your intent is not hostile.’

‘How do you know my intent won’t be hostile?’

‘That measure of trust you mentioned, and I can detect your desperation.’

Morgravia wondered what else the Broker’s augmetics could discern, acutely aware of the risk she was taking and still wondering what had become of Hel. She was about to ask how she would make contact when a sudden scream made her turn.

A drunk had staggered in from the outside or some other part of the bar and was wrestling with one of Fharkoum’s courtesans. The girl screamed, struggling in her assailant’s grip. Addled by obscura smoke, the fat merchant was slow to realise the transgression against what he regarded as his property but now he cursed and spat, incensed at the interruption to his revels. He snarled something in a foreign tongue, prompting his hired gun to step into the fray and draw his weapon.

The hired gun barged in, jacked on stimms, sweeping out his flechette pistol like it was a badge of authority.

‘Release the chattel…’ he growled, exuding violence.

The girl staggered, having wriggled free. She was gasping for breath, pale with trauma. As she turned, the kohl and rouge bleeding down her tear-streaked face, Morgravia realised why.

Then everything changed.

The courtesan clung to her own severed forearm, like a marionette showing its broken parts to its master and not understanding why it was broken. The joint had been bitten through. Arterial blood painted the vicinity. And the chaos began.

Chapter V

Shotgun

Cristo knew his daughter was about to die. She knelt in the middle of the main street, a lonely light surrounded by darkness and about to snuffed out. Proctors surged past her, oblivious. They fled with utter abandon now, throwing off helms, breastplates, discarding anything that could slow them down. A few even dropped their weapons, a crime punishable by death according to the book of the law, the Lex Imperialis. Something worse than death followed them, a hungering tide that slowed only to feast on flesh.

Back in the gully, Cristo had tried to deny it. He knew of men who had eaten the dead, explorators who had ventured into the ash wastes in search of fortune. Cannibalism was not an uncharted map. It had history. Certain dubious cults, those amongst the outlander tribes as well as others, venerated the flesh, believing it passed on the strength and memories of the owner. This, whatever it was, defied definition.

They lingered just beyond the far edge of the crowd, an undulating host, killing, feeding.

Cristo had made it to the edge of the road but as the crowd thinned, either dead, dying or scattered, he saw a way back. He ran, upending a proctor who had the misfortune of getting in his way. The proctor’s helm came loose as he hit the ground, revealing little more than a youth, his face chalk white with fear. He didn’t fight and limped away, leaving his combat shotgun where it fell. Cristo took it, holding the weapon in both hands as he barrelled into the mob. He barged into a rake-thin scrivener, heaving the man aside, then smashed a dockhand with the butt of the shotgun. Someone grasped for the weapon, so he struck out with an elbow and they fell back. In his urgency to get to his daughter, Cristo barely registered any of it.

Karina had a knife held out in front of her, and a burly proctor was about to trample her when Cristo wrapped an arm around her midriff and hauled her clear. He let off a burst from the shotgun, keeping his aim high. It served its purpose as the crowd screamed and scattered out of his way.

They reached the side of the street and Cristo pulled her into a side alley, guarding the entrance after he put her down. No one followed.

‘Are you hurt?’ he asked, and glanced over his shoulder. Fleeing bodies rushed past the side alley in a frantic blur. One stumbled and died beneath the feet of those that followed.

Karina rose unsteadily, her fingertips touching her ear and coming back wet and crimson.

‘Think I hit my head…’

Then she fell.

Cristo cried out, slinging the shotgun over his shoulder on its strap as he ran to his daughter. Then for the second time that day, for the second time in only the last five years, he swept her up into his arms.

‘I’ll get help. Hang on, Karina,’ he said, and ran.

Fharkoum gagged as the girl collapsed, her vitae jetting over his face and general corpulence. The hired gun cried out as the blood lanced across his eyes, and he desperately scrabbled to clear his vision. What he saw, what everyone saw, defied belief.

The attacker had been human once, female, but was now undeniably inhuman. Like the myths of changelings taking on the appearance of their victims, something else inhabited the flesh now. Her red eyes gleamed hungrily from a gaunt and shrunken face. Pallid skin clung to her emaciated skeleton like shrivelled parchment as she crouched over the girl, stripping the bone clean with a hurried, eager gnawing. Blood spittle flecked her chin and smeared her mouth. Whatever crude sentience remained in that cadaver-like shell became aware of being watched. Her head jerked up, agitated, rabid, and she glared between greasy strands of lank hair.

Morgravia reached for her weapon, having seen enough, and made for the creature.

Fharkoum threw aside the courtesan that had been fawning on his lap. She yelped, hitting the floor hard, but the merchant could have been discarding a glass for all the regard he paid her. The last courtesan he barged aside, trying to put as much distance between himself and the cannibal thing gorging on the least fortunate of his harem.

‘Kill it,’ he spat in heavily accented Gothic.

The hired gun experienced a moment’s pause before his master reiterated in the most strenuous of terms.

‘Fucking kill it!’

The hired gun pulled the trigger, lacing the air with dozens of scything discs. They ripped through the stricken girl, turning her to chunks of meat, and cut down a slew of patrons unlucky enough to be in the way. The cannibal took the brunt of it, her torso shredded and one arm torn off. She reeled with the impact of the flechettes but did not fall. Either she could withstand the immense pain or simply didn’t feel it. Drooling blood, her mouth matted with gore, she dropped the bone and sprang towards the nearest warm body. Her teeth clamped around the soft flesh of a dockhand’s neck, and the man shrieked. She clung to him, arms and legs wrapped around his body as she bit down savagely. He thrashed briefly but then was still.

Pain and panic took hold. There were perhaps thirty patrons in the bar and Morgravia battered through most of them, shoving people aside as they scurried or hid. Her pistol led the way but she couldn’t get a good shot through the terrified throng.

The drover was ahead of her, taking aim, twin autopistols quickly in his grasp. He shot the cannibal thing through the forehead before Fharkoum’s hired gun could unleash further collateral damage. She fell this time and did not rise again.

He slickly holstered his pistols, twirling them with the panache of a carnivale gunslinger, then exchanged a look with the hired gun who said gruffly, ‘I had it handled.’

‘Sure you did,’ answered the drover, a glance taking in the carnage the flechette burst had left in its wake. ‘I reckon you’d have killed another six people before you got your mark, but you’d have done it all right. Good for you.’

The hired gun stepped right up to the drover, eyes bulging with fear, trembling with adrenaline from the stimms. He had a roughly shaved face, the stubble an affectation rather than laziness. A slabbed forehead protruded slightly, an indication of a primordial mindset. Carefully cut cheekbones had been crafted cosmetically and his black hair was sculpted, a coiled serpent shaved into the left temple, the symbol of the consortium whom he served. His custom bodyglove had fibre tracing like sinews that enhanced strength. It reeked of sweat.

‘Want to make something of it?’

The drover smiled, feigning charm. ‘Now you look like the kind of man with an enlarged amygdala. Is that the case? Are you suffering from an overabundance of aggression, my friend?’

The hired gun’s finger twitched on his sidearm and he looked like he might use it, until he felt the pinch of a heavy-gauge stub pistol in his side.

‘I would not advise that…’ Morgravia said with quiet menace. She jabbed the pistol harder. ‘At this range, that fancy bodyglove might as well be parchment. Let it go.’

‘Kharata…’

The hired gun turned at the mention of his name, Fharkoum summoning his lackey. The other courtesans cowered near his bulk, too afraid to move, staring glassy-eyed at the bloody remains of their former associate.

Grunting an expletive at the drover, the hired gun obeyed his paymaster and returned to his side. Morgravia watched him depart.

‘A man could get ideas, seeing a woman come to his rescue like that.’

Inwardly, Morgravia groaned. ‘Get some different ideas.’

The drover smiled, not remotely dissuaded.

‘You don’t look like a hired gun,’ she said, scornful.

‘Not everyone is always what they seem.’

Sighing, Morgravia took in the situation. As of yet, none of the patrons had fled, which she took to be a good sign. They looked nervous, but curiosity overrode their fear as a few shuffled closer to the corpse killed by the drover.

Morgravia crouched by her side. In death, she appeared relatively ordinary. There were no obvious mutations, and she didn’t bear a witch’s mark or evidence of possession. This was no alien horror or plaything of the daemonic. It was a woman, a bullet-maker judging by soot stains on her fingers and burn marks on her upper arms.

‘Ever seen something like that?’

The drover had sunk down next to her, the fragrance of some balm or oil wafting off his skin. It was not unpleasant, Morgravia decided, finding his presence less irritating given his sudden sincerity.

‘Tell me what you see,’ she said.

‘Nothing, and that’s the strange thing. She’s just a low-hiver. I thought maybe a stimmer or obscura addict with a bad batch, but…’ He shrugged. ‘She’s ordinary.’

‘She is far from ordinary.’ Morgravia felt his regard as he turned.

‘I’m thinking you have some idea, then.’

‘And you’re hoping I share that with you?’

‘Oh, I know you can’t say anything here, not with these folks gathering like sump flies around shit,’ he smiled, and Morgravia’s ire rose anew, ‘but perhaps later?’

‘There is no later.’

‘I am afraid that is not entirely accurate.’ The Broker had emerged from the shadows, the exceptional circumstances pushing her into the open. ‘A cipher will verify your credibility to the Empath. Without it, she will not treat with you.’

Morgravia scowled, her wrathful gaze moving from the Broker to the drover. ‘I assume he has it.’

‘Yes.’

The drover gave her a playful wink. ‘Like I said, “later”.’ Then he frowned, his expression clouding. ‘You hear that?’ he said, drawing his guns as he looked towards the entrance.

Faint at first, it grew louder with each passing second.

‘Got caught by a badlands herd once,’ said the drover, rising to his feet. ‘Damn bovids went crazy. Sumpkroc had got into the paddock. Started killing. Bovids ran like hell, broke open the gate. Came thundering down on me like the wrath of the God-Emperor.’

‘A stampede,’ said Morgravia, now on her feet too.

Fharkoum had shuffled to the other end of the bar to remonstrate with the owner, his harem and the violently predisposed Kharata following in train. Plenty of other patrons still loitered near the entrance and they turned in eerie synchronicity at the steadily loudening clamour. The bar floor shook.

It began like heavy hail. A dense thud hit the outer walls of the bar, then another and another, until a rattling thunder of mortar reverberations rippled through the brickwork. Cataracts of dust spilled from rafters. Shutters dented, pale fingers reaching through the razor-edged gaps in the metal. It kept on going. Impact after impact, like a flock of suicidal raptors striking a viewport. Bones broke. Slicks of blood oozed through the cracks in the battered shutters.

Morgravia bellowed at the barkeep, ‘Shut the damn entrance!’

But it was much too late for that.

The patrons nearest the entrance started to run, but then something spilled in.

Hurtling through the gaping doorway, careening off the sides of booths and each other, creatures with pale skin and fever-red eyes sprang upon the hapless serfs, scriveners and hawkers. A slaughter began. Teeth bit skin, nails clawed hair, fingers dug into flesh. Bloody, raw gobbets clutched in skeletal hands were held up like offerings and devoured. A foaming red frenzy descended, undercut by screaming.

Muzzle flare from the drover’s autopistols lit up the horror in stuttering, monochrome bursts. The heavy boom of Morgravia’s stubber joined it. Her heart was drumming, all her old instinctual training kicking in to keep her sharp and alert. To blunt the horror welling in her gut.

‘Close the damn door!’ she cried at the barkeep, her attention on the pallid things piling through the gaping entrance. The ammo counter on her pistol clicked into the red.

Barak heard the woman, and was trying to extricate himself from the argument with Fharkoum, edging his way to a panel at the back of the bar. No sole proprietor worth his salt, or still breathing, would set up a place at the edge of the badlands without adequate precautions. And Barak was nothing if not cautious.

He struggled to focus. Jana was out on stage somewhere, and Veran with that damn theremin. How he hated that instrument and would have gladly smashed it to kindling but for the creds it yielded. Jana was his priority. Even a glance of her face would have done, just to know she was all right. He’d had trouble before. No badlands bar endured as long as Hallow’s End without a few battles and a few scars. But this wasn’t gang strife or even overzealous proctors pressing their protection rackets. Barak had no earthly thought what this was that had come to his door, but it scared the shit out of him.

Hands shaking, he fumbled the lid clasp over the panel and it got stuck.

‘Shit!’

That fat bastard, Fharkoum, raged at his manservant. Barak didn’t speak the dialect but knew a stream of expletives when he heard them. Then he felt that same ire directed at him, acutely aware of the patrons battering at the mesh cage behind him. How he wished Jana was in here with him.

He glanced at the archway leading to the storeroom out back. He had servitors in there. Hefters. Not fighters, but they were strong. Maybe one of them could…?

No time for that.

Barak wrapped his meaty fist around the clasp and pulled, hissing a curse as he slipped and cut his hand. Blood leaked from the jagged wound.

The rattling against the mesh grew worse. His patrons shouted, pleaded. Behind him, people were dying. He reached and grabbed a case off the wall, yanking it open. An old service-model combat shotgun, a ‘man-stopper’, sat inside it. The polished black stock shone, replete with sad memories. He wrenched the gun loose from its housings and turned it on the clasp.

‘Fucker!’

The blast tore off the clasp, taking part of the lid with it. Trying to drown out the screams, praying he wouldn’t recognise Jana’s voice amongst them, Barak threw the lever inside and whispered thanks to the Emperor as the mechanism kicked in.

Chapter VI

Burning the dead

Meagre was gone, swallowed up like a town lost to flood and sunk beneath the sea. Forgotten. No one would come. The old structures meant to preserve order had broken down. Mankind had begun to eat itself. Literally.

A sick feeling twisted Cristo’s gut. He tried to deny it, like a deserter tries to deny the firing squad’s bullet, but they’d both probably die if he didn’t find help. He took side streets to avoid the crowds. The rioting was everywhere. Habitats lay deserted, manufactoria empty. Even the great bell tower that stood at the heart of Meagre and could be seen from anywhere in the township, calling the hours for labour, for worship, for sanity, had fallen silent. Fires had broken out, either started deliberately or through misadventure, and coloured the air with the scent of burning. Ash drifted from the smouldering pyres of vellum-makers. The scent of crackling pig fat made him hungry and wretched at the same time. Although Cristo passed a few other citizens, hiding in their dwellings or staggering around lost and dumbfounded, no one challenged him. Despite taking byways and half-forgotten tunnels, they could still hear the desperate clamour of the riots. Eventually, it became background noise that gnawed at Cristo’s nerves. Even during rare moments of quietude, spared from the aural horrors, the memory of it lingered so viscerally that he could no longer tell the difference.

It haunted him, a heavier burden than the daughter in his arms.

He went north, reasoning that both east and west had likely been overrun or else occupied by the gangs, and southward would take them deeper into the township and trouble as yet unseen. He didn’t trust the protection of the proctors. It was possible there were no proctors left, at least not in any meaningful sense. Whatever had befallen Meagre had infected the populace. Therefore, the greater chance of survival was away from people. Cristo avoided the mag-trans too, reckoning that large swathes of the surrounding populations of Low Sink would be headed that way.

Even on foot, it didn’t take long to reach the outskirts of town. The industrial and habitation districts gave way to wilder and unkempt terrain. Old agri-mills stood like ruined monuments, colonised by massive fungal growths, bulging at their ferrocrete seams like overstuffed fruit. Roads were choked and cracked by massive roots, and floating spores thickened the air. Attempts had been made to cut back or otherwise burn off the roots and fungus but nature had repulsed every sortie and so continued its besiegement.

A thick brume drenched the land here, the colour of dirt and reeking of loam. Cristo had torn strips of cloth, first wrapping one around Karina’s mouth and nose, then his own, to fend off the worst of the smell. It was heady and strong like bad grain alcohol. Mercifully, the passage was uneventful and they soon broke clear, emerging into a rugged landscape of shallow metal escarpments and old rubble mounds.

Here the land swept up in a gentle ridge that overlooked the edge of an under-lake known locally as Iryn Mere, so named for its hue and the ferrous deposits that poisoned its grey waters. A jagged fissure in the ridgeline offered a narrow slice of the water. A few junkers and old tugs still plied the dead expanse, though nothing had lived in it for decades or more. They were salvagers, searching for sunken wrecks. The ships Cristo could see looked quiet, abandoned. That was strange, the sight of the barges and their patchwork hulls creaking as they lolled on the water. A couple had collided, prow to prow, and nudged against one another. He dismissed them and Iryn Mere. The under-lake was self-contained and led only to the hive edge. They wouldn’t find salvation there. He needed to find the tower.

An order of Hospitallers had built their priory here on the high ground. Called Saviour’s Rock, it had harboured the sick and injured since before Cristo was a boy. None were refused alms and as such the priory had garnered a sort of respect, even amongst the less salubrious types of low-hivers, that saw it ride out the vicissitudes of the years intact. Only when he smelled the smoke, and tasted its bitterness on the breeze did Cristo consider this indomitable history might have reached its terminus.

As he crested the western face of the ridge and the scudding smoke parted, Cristo saw them. Fleeing. Fire ate through the priory and shadows of the Sisters danced in its flames, except they weren’t dancing, they were burning.

Writhing.

Dying.

An abbess leapt from a high balcony. She plunged like a candle flame, her robes alight. Smoke swallowed her before she hit the ground. Several of the Sisters fought in the courtyard with table legs and candelabras. One wielded a ceremonial sword, its blade slick and black. A mob of rabid figures surrounded them. Cristo thought he recognised the markings of the Red Hand and Death Kings, though the actual gangers were wasted and more cadaverous than before, as if whatever contagion had swept through the districts was feeding on the life of its hosts and burning them out. He saw grimly transformed salvagers too, and suddenly understood why Iryn Mere had fallen silent. They dragged the Sisters down, their heroism as meaningful as a footnote, and tore them apart.

Old fears resurfaced like a bloated corpse in a river, the horrors he had half-witnessed in the gully still fresh. Cristo wanted to flee, to take Karina and run like hell and not look back, but then he saw the novice, scrambling and falling and desperately trying to live, and he knew he could not. Her robes were simpler than those of the rest of her sorority, and she went unhooded. She wore a plain auburn surplice over rough white robes, her sandalled feet slipping as she strove to put distance between herself and the cannibal flock. A simple leather knapsack was slung over one shoulder, brimming with scrolls and other irreplaceable religious arcana.

Strange what we find to cling to.

He couldn’t save the others, but the novice had broken free of the horde. Her Sisters had given her a chance but she wouldn’t make it. Not alone. She was young, as young as his daughter was before they had become estranged…

But then he thought of Karina as she was now and the fact she needed medical attention. He wouldn’t find it here. He should just leave, turn his back and look for help elsewhere. He knew a place, though he and the owner hadn’t spoken in several years. He thought of those men he had killed, the ones who would surely have killed him. The shame of it burned like the remembered heat of the furnace where he had disposed of their bodies. It had been justified. Running now was justified. No one would blame him. He had his daughter to think of.

The noose felt heavy enough, more sins than he cared to count. He didn’t want another.

Gently, he put Karina down and hefted the shotgun.

Galloping up the ridge, he called out.

‘Here!’ he cried, trying to get the novice’s attention.

She saw him, eyes streaming with tears, hair plastered to her face with blood and sweat and soot.

So much like Karina was before…

Whatever decision she made, it happened quickly. Hiking up her robes, she ran, one arm clutched around the knapsack, the other swinging furiously.

A boom reverberated, and a cannibal spun, its body shredded by buckshot.

She ducked, almost fell, but recovered and kept moving.

‘Come on, come on!’

Cristo roared and the shotgun roared too. Another cannibal fell, its legs ripped out from under it, practically sawn in half.

He was moving, hurrying to the novice, then bracing himself in a wide stance before firing off another blast. He aimed down the barrel, like a hunter picking off the herd. After the sixth cannibal-thing had gone down, the shotgun gave a heavy chack, its ammo expended. He might have panicked then but the fury was on him, the old anger he had sworn to leave behind him. Cristo kept on going, using the barrel like a bludgeon. He clubbed the first. It had overtaken the novice, ignoring her for the big angry man laying down fire. Its head snapped back as the nose drove into the skull. It didn’t rise. Cristo caught a second on the swing, using the full weight of the weapon. He broke its neck and near tore its head right off. He was in the slaughter now, grinding through the horde, putting his strength and bulk to killing. Sin after sin, thickening the noose, adding to his rope and his burden.

They stank; they stank like the dead, for that’s what they were.

The last of the Sisters fell just as the novice ran past Cristo, his bellowed urges telling her to keep moving. To run and run and run. Perhaps he was being selfish. Perhaps he hoped the novice Sister would find and tend his daughter. And then his burden would be done with. He had failed her as a father but perhaps he could do this one thing. Perhaps he had earned this death at the hands of the dead. Was it penance? he wondered. Did any of it really matter? Only now, as he waded into the thick of the dead, did Cristo realise what he had done. The dead were many and he was just one. It was sacrifice, so they could get away.

No, it was suicide and cowardice. But if the ends were the same, did it really matter?

Cristo roared, the bloody club of a broken shotgun clutched in his hands and swinging. It was his death song.

And then it was over.

He lived, a virtual hecatomb surrounding him.

‘I should be dead,’ he murmured, and plunged to his knees in a mire of blood.

‘But you’re not,’ said a quiet voice behind him. He felt a light touch upon his arm, as of a muleskinner daring to approach a fierce animal. ‘You’re alive,’ said the novice, little more than a girl, ‘and so are we. Thanks to you.’

Her tonsured hair shone despite the blood, her youth obvious by her face. Plain, pretty. How Karina used to be before the world hurt her, before it wore at the bond between father and daughter, fraying it until finally it snapped.

He encased her hands in his. It almost felt wrong to tarnish her with the blood of slaughter, but he was tired and had stopped caring so much.

‘Is she all right…?’ He gestured at Karina.

‘She’s unconscious. Hurt, I think.’

‘There was a riot. She got caught up.’

‘I see.’ The girl looked pensive, wary.

‘I won’t hurt you,’ said Cristo.

‘It wouldn’t matter if you did,’ she said, gazing over to where the priory still burned and her Sisters burned with it. The fire had spread out into the courtyard, creeping closer, consuming, cleansing. Perhaps it was for the best.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Cristo, rising, the girl helping him. Now the adrenaline had fled, an ache came over him. He wanted to sleep, but dared not close his eyes for fear he wouldn’t open them again.

The girl walked up to the blaze and for a moment Cristo thought she might leap into it in an act of self-immolation. He almost cried out, but stopped when she wrapped a cloth around her hand and reached down to draw the ceremonial sword.

It was still bloody, but she unstoppered a canteen taken from her pack and cleaned it until it shone anew.

‘This was Sister Verida’s blade. She named it Vanquish.’ The girl turned and slid Vanquish through her belt. ‘I am the relic keeper now, the lore mistress. I am all that is left.’

Cristo thought she was the bravest damn kid he had ever seen. She didn’t weep, she didn’t falter. No weakness. Only strength.

She stepped away from the flames, and looked down at Karina. ‘Is she your daughter?’

‘Yes. Her name’s Karina.’ He put a hand against his chest. ‘I’m Cristo.’

The girl bowed her head. ‘Celestia.’

‘Can you help her? Are you a medicus?’

‘I am a novice, low skilled in the physik arts, but I have had some tutelage.’

‘If I can get us to a safe place, somewhere to lie low until whatever this is blows over, will you help her?’

Celestia nodded.

‘Then I know somewhere, but getting there will take us back into town. I just hope it’s still standing,’ said Cristo, and went to pick up his daughter. They headed west, towards Hallow’s End.

Chapter VII

Barricades

Morgravia’s autoloader clacked empty, which meant no more ammo beyond whatever was left in the oversized mag. She put a high-calibre bullet through a pallid’s face, painting the wall behind it with greasy brain matter. The nomenclature felt appropriate given the waxy, bled-dry skin. It was necessary. Give a monster a name, you limited its power, you made it tangible. Killable.

Her knife found the head of another. She jabbed hard through the ear, dropping the pallid as she yanked free the gore-slicked blade. The creatures were deep into the bar, taking down prey, feeding their hunger.

A few of the other patrons had put up a makeshift barricade of chairs and tables and were defending it with their lives. Morgravia stood on its shaky rampart. She caught the drover out the corner of her eye, wisely taking the high ground as she had, alternating between pistols, firing off short bursts to conserve ammo. They cleared the last of the pallid on the bar side of the barricade but these were just outliers. The horde pushed in from outside, too many to easily count.

She kicked one in the chin and sent it flailing into the ravening mass below. Several clamoured to get through the door, partly impeded by their own rabid urgency as they attempted to push their way inside at once. Those patrons with the wit and will to survive had pulled pistols and small-arms. Some improvised, wielding broken chair legs and bottles. Between them, they reaped a slaughter. But so did the pallid. A carpet of bodies lay between the barricade and the entrance, the dead of both sides entwined in perverse union.

The front of the bar was overrun, the communal area smothered by the horde.

Morgravia heard the sudden clunk of a hidden mechanism, gears turning, then saw a blast door inching from a concealed housing in the ceiling.

She willed it to move faster.

Barak’s hands trembled around the shotgun. He hadn’t fired it in years and even the act of using it to break open the security panel brought back the old anxieties. He had kept it pristine. He might have lost his nerve in the darkness of the underhive but he had retained his self-respect and sense of duty.

He tried to see Jana through the mesh but the churn of milling bodies made it impossible. He shouted for her, ignoring Fharkoum’s invective as his manservant hammered at the cage surrounding the bar. They wanted to get inside.

‘Jana!’ Barak needed to see her, to know she was all right.

Then he did.

Fharkoum had her, his fat hand wrapped around her neck.

A fist of panic clenched Barak’s heart, and the shotgun felt heavy as a corpse as he brought it up to the mesh and pointed it at the merchant.

‘Take your hands off her,’ he breathed, unsure if Fharkoum understood his words but certain the obese merchant had caught the meaning.

The manservant, Kharata, rapped on the mesh with the muzzle of his pistol. ‘Open up.’

Tears streaked Jana’s face, though she bravely tried to hide her fear. She looked pale, and struggled to breathe in the fat man’s oily grasp. Blood trickled down her leg, leaving a shallow puddle where she was standing. She mouthed, Don’t.

Barak lowered the shotgun and let them in.

The moment Barak released the lock, Kharata wrenched open the gate to let his paymaster through. He kept any intrepid patrons at bay with his flechette pistol as he retreated after Fharkoum, sealing the gate behind him.

‘Please… let her go,’ said Barak, looking at his wife.

Kharata jabbed him in the throat.

Barak fell to his knees, choking. He tried to rise, and remember his old training, but a kick in the chest hurled him back. Blood in his mouth, dimly aware of Jana’s angry screaming, Barak reached out to steady himself but ended up dragging a rack of amasec down onto his head. Glass shattered and the air suddenly reeked of strong alcohol.

The beating ended. He felt a cool, gentle touch on his skin. Jana coalesced before him, her hands cradling his face. Her expression flitted between pain and concern. She wept and Barak knew her tears were for him.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked once he’d caught his breath.

She nodded, but he caught the lie in her eyes. She was hurt. Her leg. He could smell the blood, acerbic and metallic above the spilled amasec, and guessed it was bad. He was about to scratch around for the medi-kit he knew he had back here somewhere when Jana gripped his shoulder and he stopped and looked at her.

‘Veran’s dead,’ she said softly. ‘They took him, Bar. He stood in their way for me and they took him, and they… they…’

Throne… Veran… Barak had known him for years. They had been friends. He buried the grief, it wouldn’t serve him now, and concentrated on what he had left. He touched Jana’s cheek, then softly stroked her raven hair. She’s so beautiful.

‘Don’t,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Don’t. You’re here, that’s all that matters right now.’

He noticed Kharata, who wore a smirk that made him look uglier than he already was, and then Fharkoum. The fat merchant had helped himself to a bottle of Jovian brandy, the finest and most expensive spirit Barak had, and swilled it down like cheap grain whiskey. He spilled most of the priceless vintage down his chins and sweat-stained robes. When he had emptied the bottle, he sagged, casting it aside. Barak winced as it shattered, just another senseless indignity piled atop all the rest. Ruddy cheeked, breathing hard, Fharkoum looked haggard, unused to physical exertion. He cast a nervous glance through the mesh, no doubt wondering if his fortune could keep him alive long enough to continue enjoying it.

Kharata’s continued loyalty would determine that. He had picked up Barak’s shotgun, and checked the ammunition before adding it to his arsenal.

You’ll bloody well need it, reckoned Barak.

Then Jana collapsed into his arms and Barak forgot about all of that. He held her, softly patting her face and rubbing her arm. Blood soaked the hem of her dress and her leg glistened wetly with it. He cast about, trying to find the medi-kit, caught between not wanting to let go of Jana and the need to help her. A small metal tin slid towards him and Barak looked up into the face of one of Fharkoum’s courtesans. She was young and pretty, much too young for the life she had been forced into, but she looked kind. Smudged alabaster whitened her face, contrasting with the dark rouge painting her lips and the pale amaranth dusting her cheeks and around her eyes.

‘Maela,’ she said, her manicured fingers tapping her heart, and pushed the tin closer.

Barak replied with his own name and then, nodding, took the tin. A small caduceus had faded on the lid but the supplies within were still good. He grabbed up a handful of bandages and gauze, but hesitated to expose the wound.

A touch on his hand alerted Barak to Maela’s presence. She nodded to reassure him, giving a furtive glance at her master, who was busy draining the bar of its strongest liquor and had no time for, or interest in, his slaves, then took the bandages and gauze. She gently pulled the dress away from the wound, moving slowly because the blood had stuck it to Jana’s skin. She writhed a little with the pain but Maela soothed her with low, calming words.

Past the mesh, the fight continued, and Barak tried to put it out of his mind and focus on his wife. He felt an involuntary pang of grief at the laceration to Jana’s leg. It went deep, souring at the edges where the vague impression of teeth marks could be discerned. Terror gripped him then on what that might mean, but Maela gave it no heed, cleansing it with a cloth and vial of counterseptic before patching on the gauze and then wrapping the bandage.

‘Very good, little bird,’ said an ugly, silky voice, thickly accented. It was Kharata, still his master’s shadow, with one eye on the front of the bar and one behind it. ‘You haven’t lost your touch.’

Maela lowered her eyes, afraid of attracting Kharata’s regard further but the manservant had already moved on, laughing as he did so.

Petty hurts, from petty men, thought Barak, remembering a day when he had punished men like Kharata, before muscle had turned mainly to fat and will had been supplanted by fear.

‘Merciful Throne,’ he breathed, ‘you’re damn good at that. Were you a medic in a previous life or something?’

Maela lifted her gaze, overcoming her timidity to tap the caduceus on the tin lid and then her chest.

‘Is that what he meant? Then… how?’

‘Refugee,’ she said. She struggled with the word.

‘And your friend?’ asked Barak, gesturing to the other courtesan who huddled beneath the bar, clinging to one of its supports and staring into the shadows.

Maela shrugged. Evidently, they weren’t that well acquainted.

Barak clasped her tiny, miraculous hands in his and nodded.

Maela gave a shallow dip of her head, before the sound of tormented metal reverberated through the bar.

The blast door jammed with a groan of protesting plasteel. It lurched, fighting the ground-up bone and viscera fouling its mechanisms, then shuddered to a halt. Smoke exuded from the hidden compartment from which the door had descended before a metallic death cry presaged complete loss of function. Lights flickered in Hallow’s End, suggesting the strain placed upon the local generator, but stayed on.

The pallid kept coming, and Morgravia felt the ground shift beneath her in more ways than one as the integrity of the barricade began to fail.

‘Back!’ she cried, grabbing one of the defenders, hauling on his coat collar. ‘Back!’

She took him with her – an old gate watchman wielding an unpowered maul – clambering down the rough flank of the barricade. The drover retreated too, though he went alone. A plucky cryer, still carrying a satchel of missives that would never be delivered, lingered too long. His shot-pistol got off one more thundering retort before his foot slipped and the horde overwhelmed him. The barricade couldn’t hold, the door had been the defenders’ last chance, and now, as the brave few retreated, Morgravia wished she had saved a bullet. Oshanti’s face returned uncomfortably in her mind and she cursed it for being one of the few things she actually did remember.

She met the drover on the other side, along with a handful of others.

‘I’ve never seen anything like these things…’ said the watchman, breathless. ‘Gunter,’ he added, holding out a hand for Morgravia to shake. ‘Thank you.’

She nodded back but didn’t take his hand. ‘We’ll need every man and woman capable of wielding a weapon.’

Slowly, Gunter let his hand fall, perturbed at what he saw as rudeness. Morgravia could not give a single shit.

‘Will it hold?’ asked a road warden in a long, tan coat and wielding a dirty knife. He looked less than salubrious, the kind of low-cred gun-hand you wouldn’t trust to guard a gutter, let alone an actual road.

A dockhand jammed an errant chair onto the pile, a hunk of broken brick in his other hand which he then threw on top. ‘It has to.’ A length of chain was wrapped around his work belt, and had recently served as a weapon judging by the matted gore. He looked young. They all did, except for Gunter and the trapper, the latter cradling a spent crossbow over one arm as she cast about for an improvised weapon. She found a hefty glass shard and, wrapping a piece of tape around its thicker end, fashioned a decent shank.

‘It’ll fail,’ she drawled, chewing noisily on a piece of tabac, her teeth stained brown from its juices. ‘We’ll have to fight our way out.’

‘Merciful Throne…’ A weaponless scribe, his face spattered with someone else’s blood, fell to his knees.

Morgravia hauled him up. ‘On your feet,’ she rasped harshly. ‘Find something to fight with.’ She glanced at the trapper. ‘She’s right. They’re coming through. Nothing can stop that except us.’

She sounded bolder than she felt, her ire at Hel’s conspicuous absence the only thing maintaining her edge. Morgravia reckoned they had minutes before the pallid clawed through the barricade. None climbed, seemingly compelled to take the shortest route to their prey regardless of what was in their path.

She caught the eye of the drover, who was checking his pistols. ‘If you smile now,’ she warned him, ‘I swear to the Emperor…’

He looked ruefully at the pair of empty mags. ‘No, I’d say this ain’t a time for smiling,’ he said, holstering his sidearms with a flourish before drawing a punch dagger from his belt. ‘I’d say we’re pretty screwed at this point.’

It proved too much for the scribe, who collapsed into a gibbering heap. Morgravia let him. The strong would live, the weak would not. Or maybe no one would, but she would die on her feet, not weeping like some wretch.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked the drover.

He frowned. ‘Come again?’

‘Your name. If we’re dying here then I’d at least know who you are.’

‘Drover.’

‘Shut up.’

‘No, really. It’s Drover. Arum Drover.’ He put his hand solemnly on his heart. ‘Since I was a babe in arms. I would say ask my mother if you don’t believe me, but she died of the lung rot when I was a boy. Even if she hadn’t, I don’t reckon we’ll make it out of this place for you to have met her anyway.’

Morgravia turned to the Broker, who was waiting near the bar with the sommelier. She noticed a fleck of blood on the servitor’s face, all but confirming her earlier suspicions that he didn’t just serve wine.

‘You are obviously not without resource. Any ideas?’

‘Only that I should have chosen a different place for our meeting, but that hardly matters now.’

‘I thought you might say something like that.’ Morgravia looked past her to the merchant. ‘That mesh won’t hold them,’ she said. ‘I know you can’t wholly understand me, but your hired gun speaks decent Gothic.’ She glanced at him. ‘They’ll kill us, then they’ll tear it down and kill you.’

To Morgravia’s surprise, Fharkoum answered.

‘You are lying.’

‘Been holding out on us, have you?’ She turned for a second at an ominous creaking coming from behind her, but the barricade still held.

‘Yes, I speak your tongue well enough, but I choose not to. It is an ugly language, the dialect of pigs and apes.’

‘It’s not a lie,’ said Morgravia, wanting to ram her fist down the fat bastard’s throat and pull out his lungs.

‘Let them in,’ demanded the barkeep, and looked like he was about to do it himself until Kharata intervened. The barkeep put up his hands, not wishing to add to his bruises.

‘This is no ordinary contagion,’ said Morgravia. ‘They’re stronger than they look. They’ll tear it down.’

Fharkoum offered a derisive chuckle. ‘What do you know, woman?’

She scowled, tired of subterfuge. She brandished her rosette. It shone, its authenticity undeniable. Her manner was even less so. ‘I am Inquisitor Morgravia Sanctus of the Ordo Sepulturum, and by the authority of the Immortal Emperor of Mankind I order you to open up that damn gate.’

It wouldn’t last, the barrier. She hadn’t been lying about that. Fighting in a bottleneck… maybe they could wear the pallid down, find a way out. It was all about attrition now. At the least, it might give the survivors a few more minutes and that was worth something. The look on Fharkoum’s face was worth immeasurably more.

The merchant paled, his mouth lolling open like a dullard. He hesitated, calculating, deciding, until he whispered, ‘Do it.’

Kharata pulled up short. ‘Master?’

‘I said fucking do it. She is Inquisition, you idiot!’

Kharata had opened the gate and the first of the survivors were coming through when the barricade collapsed in on itself and the horde rushed in.

Then the lights cut off as the power failed, and everything fell into darkness.

Chapter VIII

Maggots

Something moved in the agri-fog.

They had reached as far as the old mills when Celestia stopped. She appeared nervous, but Cristo could hardly blame her. Mercifully, the wind had turned and the smoke and the stench of burning drifted across the Iryn Mere half a mile or more behind them. It couldn’t carry away the images though, the screaming; that was ingrained now, and as bad as it was for Cristo to remember, he could only assume it was magnitudes worse for the Sister-novice.

‘Are you sure…?’ he hissed, squinting into the murky brown fog. Karina slumped fitfully in his arms. About halfway from the priory, once the ruins had been out of sight but not out of mind, they had stopped in the lee of a metal overhang where the hive layers had accumulated to create a sort of crag. Condensation had made it slick, and tiny cataracts of coppery watery ran off its rough edges. He had set Karina down, agitated at having to stop but knowing she needed urgent medical treatment. Celestia had applied a balm and given her a tincture from a small silver phial. Cristo hadn’t known what the phial contained, but it had brought Karina round briefly before she descended back into a deep slumber.

‘She’ll sleep. Heal,’ the Sister-novice had said. Then they had moved on and had been making decent progress until the mills.

Now the light was fading, surrendering to night, and cast deep shadows that had the aspect of claws.

Celestia put a finger to her lips, urging silence. She listened hard, poised at the threshold of the fog that snagged at the hem of her robes as if trying to pull her in. Cristo listened too. He heard the groan of old metal, the creak of grotesquely oversized roots and the rustle of leaf litter.

Then a crack, and Celestia turned her head at the sudden crepitation.

A shape shifted in the fog, a lightly swaying silhouette.

Cristo felt a bead of cold sweat run down the nape of his neck. Suddenly his breath seemed inordinately loud and he fought the temptation to hold it. He strained his eyes, attempting to discern the silhouette more clearly. Definitely humanoid, upright. He didn’t remember any signs of habitation when he passed this way earlier but the old mills covered a large area, and they had come farther west than before. He considered the dead, for he could think of them as nothing other, that had assailed the priory.

Had to have come from somewhere…

Vanquish rattled in Celestia’s grasp and Cristo reached out a hand to gently tap her shoulder. She had barely moved since they had stopped but almost leapt back as he touched her. Daggers glared Cristo’s way and he apologised with his eyes, before putting Karina down and then taking the sword, only having to overcome a little resistance.

It felt light, well balanced, though small in his hand. An artificer’s weapon. Blade held in front of him, Cristo edged into the fog. Beyond the threshold, the reek of the old mills and their spilled guts became sickly and noisome. His eyes watered, impeding his ability to properly make out the silhouetted figure. It swayed still, its head lolling, feathery hair ruffling gently in the breeze. It smelled bad, worse than the saccharine root sap and botanical mulch underfoot. There was meat rot and putrefaction.

Dead.

Cristo felt a lump in his throat like a lead ingot, and swallowed hard to clear it.

Then he ran, full tilt, muscular strides eating up the yards, and swung hard. The blow caught the figure around the neck, shearing through papery skin and sloughed muscle, releasing a truly appalling odour and a vicious swarm of carrion flies interrupted mid-feasting.

Cristo felt the insects biting his neck, his arms, his fingers as he tried to make sense of what he had just beheaded. The flies dispersed, driven off by further swings of the blade, and Cristo was left looking at the headless body of a servitor. Its machine parts had rusted through, fixing it in place like some kind of slowly decomposing scarecrow. The flesh components were rank, barely clinging to bone. Much of it had turned to soup, and was oozing through its biological and artificial orifices.

‘It’s all right, it’s just a…’ Cristo was turning around, about to wade back out of the fog when he saw the lie in his words.

Skulking in the miasma, hunched over, it hadn’t seen him yet. Snorting and shovelling noises emanated from its busy mouth. Something twitched in the fog. A hand, one of the fingers spotted with blood. A wayward traveller. Then the dead thing turned, eyes gummed and red. It raised its head to sniff the foul air, revealing a little of its face. Gaunt, pale. A crimson smear across its features made it look like a lazy clown, but Cristo saw no humour there. A ribcage lay exposed behind it, steam curdling in the air above. Cracked open, the contents either churned in the creature’s distended belly or dangled in gory ropes from between its teeth.

It had been a woman, this hunched thing, wasted and emaciated now, but formerly human. A scrivener, judging by the ragged, dirty robes.

Cristo stared, transfixed like prey confronted by its predator, then took to his heels.

‘Run!’ he bellowed, hoofing through the fog. He collided with a disused agri-plough, pranging off its rusty shear and tearing a hole in his trousers. A fresh line of blood edged the blade. It drew the creature on, its olfactory senses doing what its eyes could not. It came after him, scurrying low like vermin, sniffing and snorting. A ragged bark articulated its displeasure and raw hunger.

‘RUN!’

Celestia had Karina over one shoulder, her arm draped over the Sister-novice’s back, half dragging her along the edge of the incorporeal fog. She made little headway, lacking the strength to hoist the other girl up and run with the burden in her arms like Cristo could.

Cristo heard more creatures, their grunting and shuffling made obvious by sudden manic animation. He thought they might be farther off. At least he couldn’t smell them, not like the one champing at his back. The reek of putrefaction made him gag. He had almost reached Celestia and Karina again when he turned, swiping low with Vanquish. The sword met flesh, and kept going until the dead thing’s skullcap and the upper portion of its brain lay on the ground separate to the rest of the head. A lucky blow, but Cristo felt he was due.

‘Give her to me,’ he demanded, breathless, pausing only long enough to see the dead thing collapse. He took Karina, his arms aching but having to find the strength regardless, and glanced at the fog and the shapes scurrying through it.

They ran, skirting the edge of the agri-mills, first heading north and then west. He kept one eye on Celestia. She had the sword again, having traded it for Karina, and it slapped against her leg as she ran. She was falling behind, her long surplice robbing her of movement. Cristo glanced back and saw the determination in her eyes, but she was waning and stumbled, almost spilling over, before she righted herself again.

One more slip was all it would take.

Please… she mouthed, the creatures closing on her like bloodhounds. Please…

‘Save me’ or ‘don’t let them take me alive’, Cristo didn’t know which.

Several feet separated them now.

Cristo turned back around, mindful he needed to watch the way ahead, that any serious stumble could be the end. His heart hammered so hard it hurt. All he could think about was Karina, and getting her safe. But letting Celestia die… He felt the imaginary noose around his neck tightening. Another twist of the rope to add to its weight.

I am a good man… I want to be.

He stopped, lungs fit to burst, legs shaking, and prepared to fight.

Celestia had collapsed. The sword was still in her grasp, held there by her sacred oaths and nothing more.

Of the dead, there was no sign.

Cristo waited. He looked. He listened.

Nothing happened. Until it did.

The sky had darkened to the point of dusk when he heard the engine drone, low and throaty, trembling the earth. The hive lamps flared, little halos of weak fire bullied by the shadows. Urging Celestia to her feet, the three found shelter in the split carcass of an old silo. Rotted grain spewed out of it like innards. Maggots writhed in the mass, but Cristo hunkered down, content to let them crawl across his skin, watching the skies as the drone grew louder.

A shape moved in the darkness, too black to really see, but it was big and hovered above the old mills like a night raptor searching for food. Something fell from the shape, spindly and agile, landing quietly in a crouch. A faint red eye burned like a hot ember, strafing the agri-fields.

Cristo shrank back into the ruptured silo, it the cave and he the primordial man recoiling from fire. It stalked, the shape, its syncopated movements like that of an avian. Its head canted and turned in the same manner. A lamp flicker caught the edge of a blade: a pair, one held in either hand. Something insectile persisted about its appearance, though the shadows obscured any detail.

It turned its head, its multifaceted eye-lenses flaring as if suddenly kindled.

Then it took a step towards them, twitching in that avian way, clicking, whirring.

Cristo found an old piece of brick and held it tightly, maggots squirming over his fingers.

Another step, and the blades lifted a fraction. Sharp enough to flense skin from flesh from bone. He thought of the precise butchery they could reap, the monomolecular steel hot as it cut into his body. A frenzied surgeon at the scalpel.

The brick felt useless in his grasp, faced by this thing. A killing thing, a cold thing unconcerned by mercy or pity. A machine.

Clicking, whirring, then the chirrup of detection as the lenses expanded.

Cristo braced himself. He dared not move, but felt Celestia’s trembling presence behind him. The maggots quested, infiltrating his clothes, his hair… squirming across his face. He tried not to think of them feasting on his dead flesh, coring out his body, and the stripped-bare bones he would leave behind. He fought the urge to scrape them off, to flee the wretched silo with its rot and its stench. He should not have come this way. He should have headed straight for Hallow’s End. He had no business here, but wishing it all otherwise would not make it so.

He remained still as the machine seemed to regard him, only ten or fifteen feet between them, the fog creeping slowly outwards to obscure the distance.

A dull chime sounded and it turned, loping away on reverse-jointed legs. In seconds it had gone, off to some grim purpose, and the hovering shape went with it.

Cristo waited six more minutes before he scraped off the maggots, urgently, disgustedly. Then he emptied his stomach, coughing up a puddle of hot bile and little else. It didn’t help the fear or the bone-aching fatigue. His muscles burned. He wanted to stop, to sleep. On his hands and knees, spitting out the acerbic taste in his mouth, he considered it. Karina stirred, a little moan escaping her lips. He rose, slow but back on his feet.

‘West…’ he said to Celestia. She looked as pale as marble, but gave a weary nod.

They returned to the fog, resigned to its monsters.

Chapter IX

No way out

The watchman, Gunter, died first. The pallid took him quickly, screaming into the black, a trail of finger marks clawed into the floorboards in his wake. Blood dashed Morgravia’s cheek, hot, arterial. A cry suggested it belonged to the road warden. Other sounds followed, chewing and rending. She shut them out, already moving, eyes adjusting to the darkness as she fumbled for the gate, wishing her gun wasn’t empty.

The trapper snapped on a lamp attachment for her crossbow, and swung it madly to try to get her bearings. The grainy beam alighted on corpse faces, hungry and malicious, stained red and fouled by strings of meat. She recoiled, tripping, and went down. They fell upon her like a pack of carrion-eaters. She screamed, and fought, until the screams rose higher and more desperate as she became aware of what was being done to her, of how she was being unmade and consumed. And then there was no more, just snorting and ripping, and the frenzy of the feast.

Part of the barricade collapsed on the dockhand, almost burying him. He fought his way free, the fallen lamp’s beam lighting up his struggle in staccato flickers. He was almost out when a clawed hand grasped his face. Nails tore into his cheek, pulling a part of it away as he shrieked, his youth laid bare by his fear. He kept moving, despite the red pouring from him, until another hand snatched at his ear and ripped it off. Another clamped across his forehead, digging furrows in his scalp and flensing part of it free. Another dug around his other cheek, pulling. Flesh tore like wet paper. Then his neck. Teeth biting into his shoulder, the meat of his forearm. In the end, he was so disfigured as to be barely describable as human.

Morgravia clamped her mouth shut as she witnessed his cannibalisation, turning away as he became no more than meat. The lamp fizzed and shut out, crushed underfoot as the pallid swallowed it beneath their masses.

She made it through the gate, with the lacerations to testify as to how close it had been. Arum Drover slammed it shut in her wake, throwing the heavy bolt before quickly stepping back as a host of gnarled and grasping talons reached for him. The pallid pushed hard against the cage, the mesh biting into the skin of those at the front of the horde and drawing blood.

The swiftest of looks between her and Drover yielded a slight nod in return. He was an insufferable arsehole, she had decided, but perhaps not an entirely useless or uncourageous one.

‘Is there a back way out of this place? A cellar? Anything?’

The barkeep, whom she had been addressing, shook his head. ‘Sealed it up years ago. Fewer ways in made it easier to keep the place safe from the gangs.’

‘Fewer places in, fewer places out…’ bemoaned Drover. He had taken up position near the Broker, evidently honouring his contract to her as a protector. The sommelier stood close by too, and Morgravia wondered again how far the servitor’s skills extended beyond pouring wine for his wealthy mistress. Even in all of this shitting mess, the Broker appeared composed, her arms folded neatly across her body, her hands concealed within the sleeves of her robes.

The room out the back of the bar enclosed spartan living quarters and also storage. A pair of blank-eyed servitors stood dormant in alcoves, unpowered, their forked lifter arms slack by their sides. They were different to the sommelier. Cruder. Grubbier. Their cyborganics were obvious. Patchwork.

‘Can you get them working?’ she asked the barkeep.

‘It’ll take time.’

‘We don’t have any.’

‘Then no.’

Morgravia scowled inwardly. She looked again. A little light spilled in from outside through ventilation slits, but they were much too narrow to traverse. A lighter shade of brick indicated where the rear door had once been. Racking lined the walls. Barrels and crates, the odd loose bottle or keg, piled up in the corners. No weapons. Nothing useful beyond the space itself. The feckless scribe had survived. He had retreated here, huddled in the dark, trying not to listen, to think. She was tempted to throw him back out and make him earn his place, but given how the mesh was already bending inwards it probably wouldn’t matter soon anyway. Fharkoum had taken up residence too, though sat alone, content to let his hired gun face the dead as he worked his way through a crate of expensive spirits.

‘Do something…’ he said, wiping the spillage from his mouth. ‘Or are you not as powerful as you claim?’

Morgravia yearned for the time not so long ago when he hadn’t spoken her language. Bad enough to listen, now she could actually understand the fat bastard.

He sneered. ‘You are Inquisition. Your warriors… bring them.’

‘There are no warriors,’ replied Morgravia grimly, ‘just me.’

The sneer deepened, spiced by a little threat. ‘Then you have no power.’

‘I have the Emperor’s authority. I have His will and purpose. I have power,’ she declared, strident, giving Kharata the eye by way of warning not to do anything that would shorten his already very likely brief life expectancy. He had wandered up to the doorway when he heard the exchange. ‘I just don’t have the power to save you.’

The mesh bulged again. The sheer mass of bodies pressed against it caused it to deform like a tumour in the metal, and a corner broke away from its fastenings. The scribe wailed and kept wailing, until Fharkoum leaned over and slapped him so he shut up.

‘Not one more sound out of you, wretch.’ He glared at Kharata then, the fear showing in his eyes if not his demeanour. ‘You. Do something.’

The hired gun nodded, firing a burst of flechettes against the pallid pulling at the breach but only succeeding in shredding parts of the mesh. Hands thrust in through the ragged gaps, flesh tearing and exposing ruddy bone.

Morgravia gave him a scathing look, which was met in kind by one of unimpeachable arrogance.

‘Don’t do that again,’ she warned.

Kharata had the good sense not to retaliate.

The available space grew tighter as the pallid started pushing and those behind the bar edged back. They were rabid, the creatures, driven, almost desperate. Something had made them this way, a plague, unnatural or manufactured, one Morgravia felt sure she had been charged to prevent. Its architects must be close; in Blackgheist, maybe even Low Sink. Like tendrils of fog slowly receding before the light, the pieces of her obscured memory started to edge back into focus.

Too slowly. None of it would matter if she couldn’t escape. Trapped in the hive, hunted by enemies she didn’t know and couldn’t effectively counter… Fharkoum was right. She had no power. None that she could bring to bear.

The cage lurched as more holding bolts sprung from their fastenings.

‘It’s coming down…’ warned Drover, and betrayed the first real sign of concern at their likely fate.

The Broker retired to the storeroom at his quiet urging, the sommelier in tow. Kharata followed, summoned by his master’s scared bellowing.

Morgravia held onto his arm as he went to move past her. ‘Are you leaving the fight?’

Kharata tried to hide his fear behind a scornful mask. ‘There’ll be no fight,’ he said quietly and made to move on but she wouldn’t let him.

‘Then you won’t be needing two guns.’

He looked down at the shotgun, the barrel poking out of his side from where it hung over his shoulder. He yielded without much resistance.

‘Take it.’

She did, and then let him go. Kharata backed away, off to hide in the darkness with his master.

‘I feel safer already,’ said Drover, and Morgravia scowled.

Only the barkeep and the singer in black were left, as well as the two courtesans and Drover.

‘Can she be moved?’ Morgravia indicated the singer.

‘Jana, my wife…’ said the barkeep.

‘Can she be moved?’

He shook his head. ‘Her leg. She’s injured.’

‘I’ll stay,’ said one of the courtesans. Morgravia noticed the other one staring into the darkness, and recognised shock when she saw it.

‘Then stay down and hope they come to us.’

The cage buckled again. It shook, wrenched back and forth, twisting and creaking, the thin metal barrier between life and something worse than death.

‘I don’t know about you,’ she said to Drover, ‘but I’d rather die on my feet.’

‘I’d sooner not die at all,’ he replied, ‘but since that’s not on the table…’

The barkeep was up too. He’d found a heavy-looking mace from some concealed alcove or other. It looked regulation-issue.

‘Shock maul,’ said Morgravia as the three of them took position, almost shoulder to shoulder, on the lookout for where the cage would surrender first. ‘You were a lawman?’

‘Barak,’ said the barkeep, ‘I’m an ex-proctor.’ He nodded to the shotgun. ‘That’s from back in the day, too.’

Morgravia gave him a rueful smile. ‘All hail the Lex.’

Barak thumped his fist against his chest in an old salute. The flare of the shock maul cast a dull crackling glow as it activated.

Drover looked down at his punch dagger. ‘I won’t deny, I’m experiencing some serious notions of inadequacy at this moment.’

‘Have no fear…’ Morgravia replied, her eyes on the pallid, their hordes pushing and reaching, ‘the Emperor protects.’

Drover’s colourful expletive was drowned out by the sound of the cage bending and snapping as a welter of bodies tumbled in.

The shotgun boomed, loud as artillery fire. It bucked in Morgravia’s grip, kicking like a punch to the shoulder. Muzzle flame flared, magnesium bright. Faces and bodies disintegrated, reduced to mist and offal. Something burned, a pallid with its hair alight, cooking in its own wretched skin. The smell of ozone and heat arose as Barak lit up another. He had the maul on maximum discharge. It was practically a flaming brand.

In the snatches between the thunderous retorts of the shotgun, Morgravia saw Drover. He fought behind a rampart of bodies, killing with a pit fighter’s ferocity, his face a mask of blood.

Not enough, thought Morgravia as the pallid kept coming, their numbers endless. Not enough, as the shotgun fed its last round into the breech. Hand to hand, they would quickly be overrun. Her senses slowed, the last seconds stretching like time smeared across the pane of her existence. Sound distorted, robbed of its clarity. She tasted blood, and smelled the actinic bite of another place. The red dream came again, uncaring of its inconvenience, and as she fell and the pain needles took their due, Morgravia looked up into the rafters at an arachnoid shape descending, silver fangs glinting, poised for the kill–

Then the dream took her.

hot blades severing paring dissecting organs heaped upon a slab clicking whirring the tools descending bone yielding cracking snapping the stink of burning fusion melding made and unmade metal and rods and sinew and muscle skin burning cold dark warm bright the throb of the machine droning chirping a long chime stretching on into forever dying dying endlessly dying the loop unbroken as two red suns loom over red red red

A flash of captured silver brought her back. The bar had partly collapsed as the mesh had been wrenched away and she stared through a canyon of splintered wood at the darkness. It was a sword she had seen. Held by a shadow, dark against light. A second joined the first. Two long, arching blades, snapping with serpentine quickness, wielded in tandem, scything and reaping. They severed hands and scalps, and legs and torsos. They impaled and cleaved and sheared.

Hel had arrived for the pallid in more ways than one, and it wore the face of death.

She sprang like a clockwork thing but with a dancer’s grace, fluid and syncopated at the same time. A heel turn, a pirouette. No pallid could touch her, but she went through their foetid ranks like a threshing machine, night black and deadly. She moved across the floor, the walls, the ceiling, as if the laws of physics and gravity did not apply to her, slashing and weaving, her swords like silver lightning.

Morgravia groaned, ‘Late as usual,’ and felt a soft hand stroke her calloused grip. She turned to see one of the courtesans, her face pale white but with a reddish rose colour around the eyes. Morgravia released her, tried to stand, stumbled, snarled a refusal of help and then stood upright on the second attempt.

The cage had come down, torn right off its hinges, and hung slack like a broken jaw. Bodies were trapped beneath it, within it, snagged where they’d tried to reach through the mesh. All were unmoving, dismembered or beheaded.

Barak sagged against the bar, exhausted.

Drover was wiping his punch dagger on a grimy trouser leg. He had a wild, faraway look in his eyes and didn’t meet Morgravia’s gaze at first. When he did, he just stared, the blood spattering his face like warpaint.

The others lived, the singer in black and the other courtesan, though she remained hunched up below the bar and had not broken eye contact with the shadows there. Morgravia wondered if there was much of her left beyond the shell she still possessed.

Every pallid was slain. Disassembled. An abattoir stench pervaded, the charnel devastation all too apparent. In the midst of it stood a slight figure: a girl, really, though she had ceased to be that for some time, if she ever really was one.

Morgravia felt a pang of something lost as she regarded her, this leather-clad assassin, as bloody as any corpse, staring from behind the hollows of a grinning skull.

Hel slid her blades back into their scabbards.

‘Hello, Mother,’ she uttered pleasantly, ‘did you miss me?’

Chapter X

Relentless

Wearily, they trudged through Meagre. At first, Cristo had insisted they keep to the side alleys and narrower streets, the ones less travelled. He need not have concerned himself. The town was deserted, its districts ominously silent, its commercia and habitats empty as if they had all been abandoned at the same time. It was as if some unknown signal had gone out and now everyone was simply gone.

Scraps of parchment, fluttering strips of torn fabric and propaganda leaflets scampered across the main street, pushed and pulled by the breeze. Somewhere a recyc-fan turned, its lazy revolutions an eerie drone that put Cristo on edge. He glanced at Celestia. She clung to the sword, gazing up at the high buildings, at the squalor and the dilapidation. She hadn’t spoken since they had fled the agri-fields. Nor had he, the memory of the machine ever at the edge of his mind.

He had seen servitors before, the cyborganic creatures that fulfilled the labours at the bullet farm that no mortal could endure. But that stalk-legged thing, the red eyes strafing… It had been made to hunt and would have killed them both had it not been called away.

‘It is a grimy place,’ Celestia observed, pulling him from his thoughts.

‘Can’t argue there,’ Cristo replied, glad of the distraction. ‘It’s not usually this quiet. You’ve never seen Meagre before?’

She shook her head. ‘I have never left the priory.’

‘Ever? How did you come to serve the Church?’

‘My Sisters…’ she faltered, biting her lip to contain her grief. ‘They took me in as a baby. And raised me in their ways and beliefs. My aptitudes lay in healing, and so they tutored me also.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I have no regrets. I yearned for nothing more than the opportunity to serve Him. And to heal others.’

‘No,’ said Cristo, realising she had misunderstood. ‘I meant, I’m sorry you lost them. Your Sisters.’

Celestia’s face darkened and she replied in a small voice. ‘As am I.’ She looked up at him, tears brimming in her eyes but her emotions held in check. ‘Thank you. For saying that. You are a good man.’

Cristo gave a mirthless laugh. ‘I have sin enough for two lifetimes. If you knew what I had done, you would not think of me so favourably.’ He paused, considering the right words. ‘I want to atone. I want to be better.’

Celestia gestured to Karina. ‘For your daughter.’

Cristo nodded, and cast a fearful glance in her direction. ‘She’s all that matters now.’

Celestia smiled and for a moment she seemed older than her years, the teachings of her order ageing her artificially. ‘I do not know what you’ve done, Cristo, these sins you speak of. I only see what is before me, and that is not an impious man.’

Cristo bowed his head, feeling unworthy of her absolution.

He belonged here, amongst the filth and the rot. He knew that. Though the people had disappeared, the stench would always remain, the eye-watering reek of effluence that stuck to clothes and refused to depart. Blood scent coloured the air now too, so thickly that a great quantity of it had to have been spilled, but Cristo saw no bodies. He saw a few weapons here and there, a discarded riot shield. No one alive though. No one dead either.

He was wondering why that was when he felt a sort of low throb that hurt his ears. Then came a stirring of the air, a faint susurration of a distant disturbance. Celestia heard it too and turned to him, her eyes wide as silver coins.

Grasping her wrist, he pulled her into a parchment maker’s, the wares scattered around a dingy chamber and trailing unkemptly out of the open door. Bloody footprints marked a few of the pages, mixing with the smeared ink and dirt, and he wondered where the person who they belonged to had gone.

They crouched down, Cristo still holding onto Karina and listening, trying to discern where the sound was coming from.

‘What is it?’ hissed the Sister-novice before Cristo pressed a finger to his lips indicating that they should stay quiet.

He remembered those killing edges again and that cold regard. If the machine they had met earlier stalked the town… Cristo suddenly wished he’d stopped to pick up one of the weapons he’d seen lying around. Then he quickly dismissed the idea. There would be no fighting something like that. The only chance they had would be to stay hidden.

But it wasn’t the machine. It was something else. Maybe something worse. He knew it with all the gut-wrenching certainty of a man who can’t escape his fate, who is destined to face the penance he is due. He almost sank then, down to his knees, ready to accept, to relent at last.

Then he closed his eyes, clenching them tight and thought of Karina in those days gone, of the daughter he still owed and the girl crouched nearby he had sworn to himself to protect.

I want to atone. His own words returned to judge him.

They would not stop coming. They had no pity. No remorse. Cristo opened his eyes, ready to bear his burdens again.

Find the strength. Be like them. Never yield, not until she’s safe. Until they’re both safe. Then you can stop. Then you’ll be done.

He met Celestia’s scared gaze and reached out to grip her small hand in his.

‘We have to run.’

The dead had returned.

And they were coming.

Chapter XI

Plague

Barak disliked most people. He found them shallow and likely to disappoint, but he would miss Veran. He had been an ostentatious character in life, fond of jewelled rings and fine attire. At least as fine as he could afford, and the jewels were really just cut glass. Fake emeralds had been his favourite. Still, it gave him an air. Barak smiled sadly at the memory his thoughts provoked.

‘Damn theremin,’ he murmured, surprised at the thickness of his voice.

The instrument had emerged unscathed and intact, which was more than could be said for poor Veran himself. During the initial surge he had saved Jana, and Barak would be ever grateful for that sacrifice. He had wanted to bury him, but not enough remained to give to the earth, and as he hunted around the shed attached to his bar he realised he didn’t own a shovel anyway. The blanket he had wrapped Veran in would have to suffice instead, as it had for the others. Until they were all burned.

‘Is it still here?’ asked a quiet, hardened voice.

He nodded, not needing to turn around to identify the speaker. He’d known she’d want to see the Mule as soon as he’d mentioned he still had it. Barak worried she might sanction him, but he suspected they were beyond all of that.

‘Are you really one of them?’ he asked.

‘A woman?’

Barak chuckled, appreciating the effort at levity. ‘Well that answers one question,’ he said, his old hands finding the edge of a dusty tarp. It felt coarse against his fingers. ‘They don’t bleed you of humour at least.’

‘Oh no, they let us keep that. It helps when faced with the abyss.’

‘I should think it does,’ said Barak, hauling on the tarp, pulling it back and away. A small dust cloud kicked up and he coughed, waving his arm back and forth to help clear it. ‘Been a long while since I took her out.’

‘We’ll need it. No way we’ll get out of here on foot.’

The chains and clamps were still in place. Barak needed keys and they were back in the bar. He didn’t relish the thought of returning there. It was why he left in the first place when everyone else was still afraid to. Apart from her, of course. And the other one. He tried not to think about the one in black, grinning like death.

‘Will it run?’ asked Morgravia.

He faced the inquisitor. He caught an inkling they weren’t alone and found he had a sudden desire to leave.

‘She’ll have to.’

Barak departed, leaving Morgravia alone to her thoughts. At least for a short while.

‘I can feel you watching me, you know,’ she said, and stepped away from the shed.

Hel emerged from the shadows, poised like a dancer. Her head canted one way then the other, jerky and avian.

‘Are you angry with me, Mother?’

‘I asked you not to call me that,’ said Morgravia sternly. ‘And no, I’m not angry. You saved my life. You saved several lives.’

If that registered on any sort of emotional level, Hel didn’t show it. She had been well indoctrinated, a blunt blade honed into a killing weapon by the Sanguinous. Morgravia wondered if she’d had a part in that, handing a child into the hands of a death cult to be hollowed out and shaped into something lethal. She supposed she must have.

‘Is this a part of it, the reason why we are here?’ asked Hel.

Morgravia thought on that a moment, and decided that it probably was. ‘What did you find?’

‘It is bad, Moth– my lord. The plague has taken the town. Many are infected.’

‘Infected how?’

‘Unknown. The contagion affected masses at once. Entire districts.’

‘Spores? A chemical attack?’ Morgravia considered. ‘No… it can’t be the air. We would have felt its effects, and been turned ourselves. Blood or saliva? A biological toxin? That wouldn’t explain the mass infections.’

She ran through the probabilities aloud, collating what she could remember. The Ordo Sepulturum had a particular interest and efficacy in dealing with what had been termed ‘plagues of unbelief’, the miraculous and horrific rising of the dead. Chaos taint, the belief in old infernal gods and the rejection of the Imperial creed, was a supposed catalyst. A corruption of the faith as well as the body. In this case, the symptoms did not match the disease. The pallid were alive. At least at first. This was different. Without the expertise of a magos biologis or even a sanctioned chirurgeon, she could only postulate.

‘And the other matter?’ she asked. ‘Have you found any sign?’

‘They remain clandestine.’

‘It must be connected.’

‘I agree.’

A mild spike of pain had Morgravia pinching the bridge of her nose and shutting her eyes to ward it off.

‘The malady?’ asked Hel.

Morgravia nodded. ‘Still here. Ignore it. This is nothing.’

‘Has it worsened?’

Morgravia paused but saw no need to dissemble. ‘Yes.’

‘Perhaps it is connected too.’

‘Thought had crossed my mind.’ The pain ebbed and Morgravia opened her eyes again. She regarded Hel. ‘Why did you return?’

Although the rictus of her skull mask remained fixed, the slight angle of Hel’s head gave it the impression of confusion. Her voice sounded hurt. ‘You needed me.’

‘But how, Hel? How did you know I was in trouble?’

The head twitched again, jerky like before, an expression of incredulity.

‘I think I felt it.’

Morgravia frowned, walking past her to appraise the darkened town, wondering if Hel was in fact a latent psyker, but the idea didn’t resonate despite the ambiguity of her fractured memory.

It was quiet out in the beyond. Deathly so. Meagre had become a tomb, fit only for the dead. Morgravia stared down the darkness. They had waited here long enough.

‘Have I disappointed you?’ asked the assassin, interrupting her thoughts.

Morgravia shook her head. She caught a whiff of Hel’s odour near to her, the scent of charnel houses, the sweat of exertion. For a moment she had the distinct impression that the assassin might be reaching out to touch her or leaning in to smell her. ‘It’s just another unanswered question.’

She turned but Hel remained as she had been, having adopted a coy, almost childlike mien.

‘This is escalating. I need answers.’

‘Did you meet with the Broker? Can we trust her?’

The data-smith had yet to tell her where she would find the Empath. Given the current state of things, Morgravia supposed she could be forgiven for abandoning the idea in favour of self-preservation, but she needed her mind back. It mattered, she knew this much. Some small ember of urgency flared at the thought, a memory still without form, though the importance of its recovery impressed itself upon her.

‘Almost certainly not, but she’s desperate enough to deal. That’s longer term. I need an edge now. Something that gets us closer.’

‘Am I to hunt?’

Morgravia considered it. Having Hel by her side yielded obvious advantages, but the assassin made her uneasy, and finding the ones hunting her had become a priority.

A slow nod saw Hel disappear back into the dark.

Chapter XII

No choice left

The dead lay heaped in front of the bar, right where Barak had left them. Foolish to think they would do anything other than simply be, but he had seen things very recently that had put his mortal preconceptions to the question. In any event, they were still there. Bodies entangled with bodies, human and inhuman alike. The sight of it appalled Barak, but served as a stark reminder of watching as his two hefter-servitors hauled out the corpses.

He and Drover had found Veran and the others who had become part of the horde. It didn’t feel right to let the servitors take them. They were lumbering, indelicate things, prone to shovelling the bodies, mass piles of them and their constituent parts, pushing them out into the street to fester. Barak picked up what was left of Veran, weeping as he did so, not just for the man but for everything he had lost, for what might become of Jana. It was bitter to think that Veran’s sacrifice might have merely forestalled the inevitable.

It was grim work, and the smell would linger on long after. It had to be done though, to leaven the smell inside if nothing else. The bodies would have to be burned. He wanted to burn his clothes too but he had no spares. Fear had kept the pyre unlit, fear of what the smoke or fire might bring.

The night harboured a threat Barak could not see but knew was there. A disconcerting quiet had descended over the town, and he stood upon his stoop listening to it. He lit a stick of tabac, and was taking a deep draw to steady his nerves when he saw the light.

Bright and crimson, it coloured the sky as far as he could see before fading back into darkness. Barak moved down off the stoop, squinting for the light. It returned, as vibrant as before, red ink distilled in water. A blood drop expanding, reddening the clouds. Barak winced as a shriek split the night, so loud, so appallingly loud after the silence. It ended as abruptly as it had begun, and then faintly – barely audible despite the returning stillness, and therefore distant – there came a rumble. Barak imagined churned earth, the cracking of stone.

Digging…?

He doubted the mining consortiums of Low Sink would be operating. Their owners would have fled uphive by now to escape the terror.

Raised voices emanated from within the bar, briefly arresting Barak’s attention, as the others argued around their petty agendas. Tension lingered in the air like an uninvited guest. Death roamed Meagre. For now its shadow had moved on, but it was still out there somewhere, amidst the ghost town of empty buildings and silent streets.

The light did not return a third time. A glint of metal caught his eye instead. It came from a ringed finger, the hand it belonged to curled by death into a claw. It had flopped out from beneath its rough shawl, the gem upon the band a vivid green.

Deciding he had been out on the stoop long enough, Barak returned to the bar.

The stench of blood and decay remained.

It was over, Barak knew that. Assuming he survived whatever followed, Hallow’s End would not. Had not. It bore a taint, something foul and as indelible as memory that could never be removed. It had endured fire and flood, gang war and taxation, but not this. Whatever this was had ended it.

Jana was where he had left her, resting in a leather-backed chair in one of the booths. She slept fitfully, Maela by her side, gently holding her hand. Barak nodded to her as he crossed the threshold and she smiled back, mustering a grace he had, to his shame, thought a courtesan slaved to Fharkoum incapable of.

He gave a furtive glance to the shadows at the periphery of the room, relieved to find the morbid effigy still absent. She had exuded menace, that assassin, intentionally or not. He had seen what she had done to the pallid and wasn’t ashamed to admit it scared the shit out of him. He had met killers. He had put some of them away, and others in the dirt. In low-hive, mankind’s many depredations found expression. But he had never encountered anyone like that, so uniquely disposed to the art of killing. So, although the assassin had departed, Barak stayed alert like a man who has lost track of a wild beast but knows it could return at any moment.

A few of the others had gathered around a table, one still left more or less in one piece.

Earlier, Barak had found some old sodium lamps in the storeroom and their flickering glow illuminated an old, waxy map Drover had weighed down with coins and tankards. They had all become acquainted in the short time after, exchanging names and sometimes greetings, as if any of that really mattered any more. Mankind will find comforts where it may, he supposed, and approached the table.

‘Getting to the precinct house won’t be easy,’ Drover was saying. ‘This road,’ he pointed to the map, tracing a gloved finger down the map, ‘is the most direct route but that makes it the busiest. The place is a fortress, no way it’s been breached.’ He looked up as Barak stepped up. ‘Let’s hope your old comrades are in a charitable mood and open up for us.’

‘I can get them to open the gate,’ said Barak, with more confidence that he felt. He would have to trade on his old alliances, and even then he couldn’t seriously vouch for everyone in the room. As long as he and Jana were safe…

Another agenda, he thought. I’m no better than the rest of them.

The precinct district had a walled border dividing it from the rest of low-hive, handy in the event of a block riot or a gang war. A single high-sided gate was the only way in. Two guard towers manned by snipers and auto-turrets maintained overwatch. A kill box extended outwards from the wall for over a hundred and fifty feet.

Drover regarded Barak keenly, as if measuring the truth in his words. ‘Then I feel better already,’ he said, the smile he gave not reaching his eyes.

Fharkoum barked something in his native tongue. Apparently, he had tired of speaking Gothic.

He sat at a remove from the others, resting against the wall, sweating and drinking. The manservant, Kharata, stood close and translated for his master.

‘Our business is not with the proctors.’

Drover leaned back to put his booted feet up onto the table, one after the other, and crossed them. ‘Anyone would think you’re avoiding the upholders of the Lex.’

‘Do you trust them?’ asked Kharata.

‘That’s hardly the point, is it? I don’t trust you,’ then he gestured to Fharkoum who was muttering something to himself, or at least that’s how it appeared, ‘and I really don’t trust him. But there’s no staying here for any of us.’

Fharkoum scoffed, deigning to speak. ‘I have no business with proctors,’ he said.

‘Nor do I,’ said the Broker, who sat opposite Drover, the epitome of poise and studied neutrality. She and Fharkoum shared a glance and Barak sensed a deal had been made between them. ‘This crisis could be over in hours, days, it might already be.’

‘If you truly believed that you would have already left,’ Drover replied.

‘Remember who is paying you,’ the Broker said, the threat more than implied.

Drover appeared unconcerned. ‘Your coin buys my gun arm, not my free will.’ He flicked a glance at the sommelier standing behind her. It looked nondescript enough, but he evidently knew better.

The Broker didn’t press the issue. ‘Regardless, I need the inquisitor before I can leave,’ she countered. ‘I am still owed.’

‘A debt I swore would be paid in full,’ said Morgravia, having overhead everything. She stopped in the doorway. They had raised the blast door manually, using a crank located in the storeroom, and the wan light from outside framed her imposing silhouette. ‘It will be,’ she promised, moving inside.

She looked pale, almost haunted, and Barak wondered if the ‘abyss’ she had spoken of earlier had begun to show its toll. He hadn’t forgotten her collapsing during the fight, but had chosen not to mention it.

‘But we can’t stay here any longer,’ said Morgravia. ‘Meagre is without power, maybe all of Low Sink. It is also seemingly without order. Whether this crisis has abated or not, a different one will have arisen to replace it or complicate it further. The precinct house is close. It has troops and weapons. We have discussed this.’

‘In actual fact, you declared it,’ said the Broker.

Morgravia pressed on, ignoring the discontent. ‘We head there, find out what the proctors know. If you want to leave after that… No one will stop you.’

The Broker bowed her acquiescence but Barak didn’t think she looked placated.

‘You, inquisitor…’ uttered the fat merchant, sweaty and dishevelled. He inflected the word so it sounded like an expletive rather than a form of address. Contempt tightened the inquisitor’s face. ‘What is all of this…’ he gestured to the blood and the strings of viscera still gumming up the partly sealed blast door, ‘…shit.’

He sneered at Morgravia, and she returned the sentiment, her eyes narrowing to knife-slits.

‘Beyond your understanding,’ she said.

Barak could see Fharkoum rooting through the shadows with his eyes, trying to determine if the assassin was still nearby. He wondered what the merchant was thinking – if, via his hired gun, he would be bold enough to try anything. He looked scared, and scared men were prone to making poor decisions.

‘I’ve seen something like this before,’ Drover cut in, forestalling the need for violence. ‘Out in the herds. Called it the ravening. Beasts eating beasts, foaming, raging. Messy. Never heard of it being passed on to humans though.’

Ravening, thought Barak, always such colourful names.

‘You might be thinking about getting out of low-hive,’ said Morgravia, apparently uninterested in whatever bestial ague Drover had encountered in his past. ‘A sane idea. But the border gate is several districts away, and I can vouch for what’s between here and there. Even assuming the mag-trans still functions, and that’s a large ask, it’s a distance.’ She met Barak’s gaze, and he imagined she must have seen it falter when he realised Morgravia alluded to the possibility of Jana never surviving such a journey. ‘Precinct house is reachable, and it’s about the only safe haven left.’

Fharkoum muttered something to Kharata, the hired gun smiling coldly. Barak didn’t trust them and wondered how long the fragile alliance between the survivors would last. A barked invective then saw the courtesans scurrying to the fat merchant’s side. Maela sent a furtive glance to Barak, who nodded by way of silent gratitude.

Drover swung his feet off the table and stood.

‘It’s decided then,’ he said, flashing an adder’s smile at Barak. ‘We impose upon the lawmen, and hope they have kind hearts and a lot of fucking guns.’

The throaty growl of an engine had presaged the arrival of the Mule.

Drover had made some comment about its reliability, suggesting the vehicle was less than fit for purpose and should perhaps be sold off for parts, but it ran. And it looked tough.

It was a rig, an armoured truck, ostensibly used for riot suppression. Its flanks were shielded by metal plates, its hood fitted with a triangular dozer blade. Heavy, chained tyres tore up the ground, ripping furrows in the dirt as it came to a halt, and a pair of cowled lamps at the front cut through the dark like lances. A ladder unfolded down from the cabin to the ground. The cabin itself had enough room for six, two sitting up front and four behind. A flatbed trailer mounted onto the vehicle chassis could take more.

Barak drove, familiar with the vehicle’s operation. The Broker sat next to him. Fharkoum took up two seats in the back, the others going to Jana and Maela. The merchant didn’t much like being estranged from his hired gun, nor did Kharata for that matter, but there was little choice.

Morgravia stood up in the trailer, hands braced against the lipped edge. An acrid scent thronged the air, and as they got underway she followed the trailing smoke.

A fire burned. It had spread to the stoop, then crept further until the frontage of the bar crackled with flames. It was voracious, devouring bone and flesh. It ran rampant through old timber, catching on scraps of parchment and cloth. It rose up like a dark beacon, pluming with oily black clouds. Vortices of ash spiralled upwards, churning, growing. The breeze turned thick with the reek of pig fat, though it wasn’t pig but crackled and spat just the same. A thunderous boom resounded as the fire reached the alcohol and it cooked off.

‘Damn…’ Drover murmured, holding up a hand to ward off the heat and the glare of the fire.

Rain was falling. It hissed against the flames, a reaction of the mild toxins in the water.

As the distance grew and the sight of Hallow’s End became less and less distinct, Morgravia watched in silence as the two servitors they had left behind lit up. They stood like sentinels, unmoved by pain, unconcerned by the fire consuming them. As their sinews and wires blackened away, one of the servitors collapsed to its knees and then plunged forwards. Its skin was burning. The other followed swiftly afterwards, just two more bodies for the pyre.

The smoke billowed, drifting until it cloaked the bar from sight.

Chapter XIII

Hollow

The rain felt good against Cristo’s skin. It vented from the upper strata of the hive and possessed low-level alkalinity, a product of atmospheric compressors and colossal air filtration. The rich would breathe clean, pure air with all its harmful elements extracted, while the working poor would make do with less. At least it was cooling and kept him awake.

Fatigue gnawed at his body. His muscles ached. His limbs dragged as he walked and he didn’t dare put Karina down for fear he wouldn’t be able to pick her up again, such was the stiffness in his arms. They had fled through Meagre, dead-legged, pushing on through raw adrenaline and terror. The town was abandoned, offering nothing but silence and the slow creak of vendor signs or the scuttle of refuse stirring on the breeze. It was quiet enough to hear the approach of the horde, slower than before, though they had yet to see it, its feral groaning more laboured.

That and that alone had given them the slightest of chances to reach Hallow’s End.

Cristo stumbled then righted himself, belatedly noticing Celestia standing by his side. She had sheathed the sword, and wrapped both her arms around Cristo’s thick bicep to help keep him on his feet. He nodded, too tired to speak, and held up his face to the alkali rain, unconcerned by the gentle stinging against his skin.

‘How far?’ Her voice came out a weakened rasp.

Close, thought Cristo, I hope it’s close. Then he smelled the ash and soot on the air.

‘God Emperor… no,’ he croaked, and tried to run. He staggered, stride leaden, hot agony searing through his limbs.

Celestia staggered with him, half pushing, half dragged, her own reserves of strength way past the redline. She gasped, a starved breath. A grunt of pain.

Then came the end of hope.

Emerging from an alleyway, Cristo stopped dead. Unprepared for the abrupt halt, Celestia bundled into him.

The rain had doused much of the fire. It crackled in embers now but must once have raged like an inferno. Hallow’s End was gone; it had simply ceased to be, and in its place remained a shadow, a hollow and burnt-out shell. Blackened timbers reached up, splintered like broken bones. Soot smeared and funereal, the stone and metal had endured, though both were cracked and warped by heat.

Cristo staggered on. He felt Celestia’s arms untether from his own and heard the dull thud of her body as she crumpled to the ground. He took another step, two more, the fire-gouged ruin almost goading him. He came upon two bodies at the periphery, the corroded machine parts amongst their bones revealing them as servitors.

Cristo passed them. He still had Karina in his arms, unable, unwilling to put her down.

She stirred then, coughing from the smoke that lingered throughout the devastation. It curled, grey and black, phantasmal in the falling rain.

‘Father…’

He didn’t hear her at first, and took another step. A piece of roof bent underfoot, raising a metallic din. A fallen beam cracked, nothing left to it but charcoal. And there were bodies. Not just those out front, or in the conglomerated heap, still gently simmering. These were inside.

‘Father…’

Bits of skulls. Teeth. A skeletal hand. Pieces disparate from their concomitant bodies.

‘Father!’

Cristo looked down…

‘Karina…’

…and felt the strength leave his limbs entirely. He sank knee-deep in the ash, his daughter detaching herself from his grasp to leaven the burden. She stood unsteadily, touching the dried blood on her head. Any disorientation she might have felt fled in the face of her father’s near expiration.

Cristo fell down on one hand, and Karina fell too, moving with him to hold him steady.

‘It’s Hallow’s End…’ he rasped. ‘It’s Barak’s old place.’

Karina looked around, disbelieving. She knew this place. Her father had drunk at Hallow’s End, she just a girl in his shadow, listening to Jana and Veran playing on the stage. It had been the only peace they had ever known. But things had changed. She had changed. No longer content to sit in her father’s shadow, unwilling to submit to the endless toil of the bullet farms. That life had taken her mother and ruined her father, she vowed it would not take her. But what kind of choice was there between the grind and the gangs? She was as disorientated then as she was now.

‘I can’t…’ she said, trying to piece together her present and reconcile it with the most recent past she remembered. ‘What’s happening?’

Her gaze alighted on Celestia, lying prone in the street.

‘Who is that?’

‘Holy Sister.’

Karina’s gaze snapped back to him, incredulous. ‘A what?’

Cristo shook his head, too tired to give an explanation.

‘Is she…?’ asked Karina.

‘I don’t… know.’

‘Did you…?’

‘No.’ He was broken, beaten. A strong man, laid low, and he needed her.

‘Throne,’ Karina wept, whispering, ‘Dad.’

A decade rolled back like the recoiling of the tide, all those years washed away, and all it took was for him to die.

‘I’m sorry…’ Cristo rasped. ‘For all of it. I never wanted any of this… for you.’

He slumped forwards like so much dead weight and Karina hadn’t the strength to keep him upright. Cristo felt the kiss of wet ash, and let its scent fill his nostrils, let its blackness smear his skin. He wanted to rise, to fight. He could feel the dead approaching, detect their voices and half-heard susurrations scratching on the wind.

You have to run, he tried to say but could only gasp, his mouth opening and closing in impotent frustration.

Darkness crowded his sight, beginning at the edges and creeping inwards. He kept his gaze on Karina. Her face, his daughter’s face, fraught with worry for a father who had failed her in life, the bond between them perhaps restored, but which he would never know again. Cruel that it should happen now, at the end. He should have been better. He wished he had been better.

Then Cristo shut his eyes, and the darkness became absolute.

Chapter XIV

Hate red

The roads through Meagre were empty, the town and the district apparently deserted. No crowds bustled, no vendors hawked their wares; even the preachers of the Imperial faith had been silenced. Debris from collapsed buildings littered the streets, fires faintly guttering in their burnt-out remains. A makeshift stockade had fallen as if sacked by an attacker, its barricades rent and torn down. The detritus of the riots lay everywhere, and was widespread. A stampede had come through here, and it had left the remnants of humble lives in its wake: a scribe’s broken quill, a few scattered coins, a shoe without its owner. The Mule crushed everything under its heavy tread, relentless and inexorable. Rubble parted before its dozer blade, old standing barricades were flattened.

The ride was dulcet enough, the trailer rattling and vibrating to the pitch of the terrain. Barak had found sufficient blankets to make sitting comfortable and the Broker had taken advantage, curled up like a feline against the cross-legged figure of the sommelier. Waiter, warrior and concubine? Morgravia preferred not to assume either way as she regarded her fellow passengers. One of Fharkoum’s courtesans had found a corner to become lost in. She hunched up her knees to her chest and stared at the grubby blankets, perhaps hoping a door would open up inside their folds and let her escape the nightmare.

Morgravia sat against one of the flanking trailer walls and looked out into the night, feeling its wintry regard. She tried not to imagine what might lurk beyond her sight but knew the pallid were but a symptom of something worse, something she had been hunting. She again considered the cause of the plague, the unlikelihood of a pathogen and the even less probable notion of the taint of Ruin. Meagre, all of Blackgheist, was a faithless place. Any contagion brought about by unbelief and the embrace of the Dark Gods would have manifested long before now. And the sheer masses infected… It was as if someone had thrown a lever.

‘Please…’ a wheedling voice enquired.

She looked across the flatbed, irritated to be turned from her thoughts, and glared into the fearful eyes of the scribe. Finely attired, though worn by recent events, he exuded softness.

‘I can’t do this,’ he said.

Morgravia wanted to hit him but Drover, who had been leaning nearby and smoking a black cheroot, put a reassuring hand upon the scribe’s shoulder.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Sir?’

‘What does your mother call you?’

‘Oh… Arkyle.’

‘Listen to me, Arkyle,’ Drover said, squeezing a little tighter, ‘no one wants this, but you’re alive. You are doing this. We’re all doing this, like it or not.’ He paused, conceding, ‘Mostly not.’ He smiled then, pulling his punch dagger so quickly that even Morgravia was taken aback. ‘I can shorten the experience, if you want,’ he said, his voice soft, the scribe’s eyes widening at the blade suddenly held to his throat. ‘It’ll be clean, and I promise it won’t hurt much. I’m good. Real good. I’ve done it for cattle more times than I care to count. Not a one of them ever made a peep. Would you like me to snuff you out, quiet and gentle like? I’d do it quick, a little pain, a little heat, a little cold and then…’ He made a flourish of his other hand then put a finger to his lips. ‘Is that what you want?’

Arkyle stared, he stared for so long unmoving that Morgravia began to think his heart might have stopped, but then he shook his head – a slight movement, a near-imperceptible gesture.

‘So, you’re doing this,’ Drover confirmed.

Arkyle nodded.

‘Don’t make us have this conversation again,’ Drover warned, ‘and if you refuse to fight when you need to fight, I will slit you open from neck to nethers and leave you to bleed out with your guts round your ankles, understand?’

Another nod, shallower than the preceding one. The eyes widened further.

Drover leaned back, sheathing the knife and gesturing to the ruins of the town with the glowing ash of his cheroot. ‘This here is shit. It’s as shit as it gets. We are nostril-deep in it so we ain’t got no choice but to suck it up, and there ain’t no way out we don’t make for ourselves, and that is a f–’

He stopped, wrong-footed by the courtesan springing to her feet and leaping onto the cabin.

‘The hell…’

She crawled, half slid, and threw herself under the wheels.

Barak slammed the brakes hard, and Drover nearly pitched out himself as the others were smashed forwards, but it was too late.

The Mule ground to a halt, muddy red tracks left in its wake, and from the cabin Barak shouted a raft of expletives. After he’d recovered, the two-way vox-receiver in the flatbed hissed and his voice crackled through.

‘Who was that? What the hell was that?’

Picking herself up, Morgravia answered. ‘One of Fharkoum’s harem.’

‘What did you do?’

‘Nothing, damn your soul. She did it herself.’

Drover had leapt down to the ground, landing in a crouch.

‘As we’re stopping, someone should keep a watch,’ he said.

Morgravia agreed and tossed him the shotgun, which he caught deftly as he moved to the front of the rig. She heard him whistle as he inspected the carnage.

She heard the low thrum of shrouded engines, like a lander or a gun-cutter on mute, but looking into the night sky she couldn’t discern anything unusual. Just smoke and darkness.

‘You hear that?’ she asked of no one in particular.

Then something moved nearer the ground. Morgravia saw it flicker in her peripheral vision and turned her head to try to track it. Nothing.

‘Get us moving, Barak,’ she said into the vox-receiver. The sky still looked clear.

‘She’s entangled in the drive axle,’ he called back, having stepped out of the cabin to take a look himself. ‘Merciful Throne…’

Morgravia went to the trailer edge and leaned over, acutely aware of the Broker watching silently. She had sat up, the sommelier still close. Drover wandered into her eyeline, coming from the front of the rig.

‘It’s a mess. Strings of meat, cracked bone. Hair.’

Morgravia scowled. ‘Barak, get us moving now. Loitering in the open is a very bad idea.’ She hadn’t seen or heard anything of Fharkoum or Kharata, and she assumed the fat merchant had no opinion of the ugly death of his slave.

‘I see something…’ It was Drover who spoke, slowly walking the perimeter of the Mule, shotgun at the ready.

Morgravia followed his gaze, briefly wishing she hadn’t surrendered the weapon.

A soft chime emanated from the darkness, like metal ringing against metal. A scrape followed, metallic like the first sound, a butcher sharpening his knives.

Another chime pealed from the north, the same pattern repeating, then from the south, east and west.

Chime, scrape. Chime, scrape.

Drover had roamed farther out, muzzle switching between cardinal points, all the while the metallic refrain growing louder.

Morgravia recalled him, kicking out the trailer’s rear ramp so that it slammed down to the ground.

‘Back here, now.’

Drover turned, about to say something pithy, but thought better of it when he saw Morgravia’s face. He slung the shotgun on its strap and hurried back to the trailer, scurrying aboard with a hand up from the inquisitor before helping pull up the ramp.

The engine surged, a high-pitched shriek that set their teeth on edge. The front wheel turned on the right-hand side and the rig slewed in a half-circle, kicked out of true by the sticking left wheel.

Watery red lamps flared in the shadows, distant, but becoming more distinct.

Chime, scrape. Chime, scrape.

A veritable chorus sang out the butcher’s song. The red lamps multiplied into a crimson constellation.

‘Let’s get underway,’ Morgravia urged down the vox.

The engine replied, shrieking, the rig turning as the rear wheels propelled it around the sticking drive axle. They were almost facing back the way they had come.

‘Barak…’

‘I’m damn well trying…’

The circle of red lamps closed, hot embers now, unfettered by distance or the thready smoke still clouding the township. A noose enclosed, one with sharp paring blades.

Chime, scrape. Chime, scrape.

Drover still had the shotgun and panned it full circle, following the sounds.

Morgravia had pulled her knife and turned to the others in the trailer. Her gaze fell on the Broker and the sommelier in particular. ‘Are you prepared to fight?’

The sommelier, already standing, conceded the slightest nod and Morgravia swore she saw his arms tense inside the folds of his robes. She imagined a weapon concealed beneath, one the sommelier was well practised with. Even the scribe, Arkyle, since Drover had given him the talk, had found a crowbar and clung to it with both quivering hands.

‘Kharata,’ Morgravia snarled down the vox, ‘get your sorry carcass up here with the rest of us, or is the scribe who near pissed himself the braver man?’

There was a moment’s pause in which those inside the trailer watched the periphery and the red lamps burning. Morgravia squinted as a figure started to resolve. Metallic, spindle-limbed, blades for arms. The sight of it stirred something in her besides fear, a vague memory which coalesced only to scatter like a wisp of smoke against the wind. She felt her scars itch, the slow and agonising unstitching of flesh, the physical abuses of her body.

She knew this thing, or its ilk. The cyborganic butchers of the heretic Mechanicus. What past transgression, what blight against reason had Blackgheist committed to bring these flesh carvers and technological perversions to its door?

Morgravia dearly wanted a gun. Instead she called to Drover. ‘There!’

The spindle-thing ran, breaking from the circling pack, its reverse-canted legs pistoning hard.

Drover’s blast hit it left of middle, forcing its shoulder to dip and turn. It stumbled, fragments falling from its skeletal frame. The eye burned, hate red.

‘Kill it!’ Morgravia shouted.

A second burst riddled its torso, tearing out wires in a flash of sparks. Oil and vital fluids sprayed its countenance where a mouth-pipe bulged with laboured intensity. It got ten feet from the trailer when Drover took off its head, neck and part of its clavicle. It collapsed into a mire of its own fluids, limbs twitching like a dead arachnid.

Drover clacked a fresh round into the shotgun’s breech. ‘What the Throne is that?’

‘Only the first,’ Morgravia replied.

Two more were coming, barrelling on all four limbs, back legs kicking as the blade arms dug into the ground and propelled them.

The first spun on its heel, back leg shot out, opposite front limb torn off as Kharata demonstrated the stopping power of his flechette pistol.

Good of you to join us, Morgravia wanted to say, but settled for withering contempt in her gaze instead.

It kept going, the spindle-thing, crawling and scraping on one leg, one arm, before a flechette round to the head ended it.

Drover took out the other one, cleaner this time having now assessed his enemy, a focused blast to the skull leaving it decapitated and floundering as it skidded onto its front and slid to stillness.

‘Barak!’ Morgravia roared.

The engine roared too, harder this time as Barak hammered the fuel pedal. The Mule whirled so sharply the Broker tipped out, shrieking a little as she did so. Without a moment’s hesitation, the sommelier leapt after her, his robes parting to reveal a battle-harness beneath. A long chained whip unfurled, its segmented parts snapping like a tongue as the sommelier energised each link. It lashed out, carving two more spindle-things to wreckage, cleaving through metal with horrific ease. They discombobulated where they stood, torso, limbs and face pulled apart by simple gravity as they were separated.

The Broker crawled, reaching her formidable protector as he looped the whip around, scything at the spindle-things as they rushed in. She kept going, getting back to the rig where Morgravia leaned down to haul her up, grunting with the weight of the Broker’s augmetics.

Drover and Kharata fended off the rest as they piled in, a machine herd bent on slaughter. This wasn’t the plague, the ravening as the Drover had referred to it. It had the hallmarks of a purge, a determined and thorough execution and eradication. Meagre had been cleared out and now just the dregs remained, Morgravia amongst them. Illegal psykers, mutants, heretic cults – each were worthy of such focused pogroms, but the motivation here was beyond her ability to currently fathom.

At last Barak freed the drive axle, grinding away whatever bone and matter had gummed its workings. The Mule lurched but then turned, its forward momentum restored. The Broker was shouting from the back of the trailer, her usual composure fracturing under the very real and present threat to her sommelier, who fought ferociously as the spindle-things came for him. Drover sent forth another blast and even Kharata added to the fusillade, but the Mechanicus killers were numerous, and they were fast. They swarmed the sommelier, cutting him off from the rig.

His eyes met with the Broker’s, a momentary connection that suggested he had a good degree more sentience than Morgravia had first given him credit for. He didn’t cry out or plead for rescue or even urge the others on, he simply fought, that one look he gave to his mistress the only indication of his will. But he couldn’t engage them all, and the overspill made for the rig, blade limbs scything, legs poised to spring.

‘Move damn it, Barak. Get us out of here. Now.’

Wheel-spinning in the sludge, the rig sped off, kicking up filth in its wake.

Clinging to the back wall of the trailer, the Broker stared as the sommelier fought. The machines flocked him, only kept at bay by the fatal revolutions of his whip. She stared until the fight had become a smudge and then nothing but a memory as the darkness claimed it. Even then she stared, her eyes on the night, listening to the distant chimes of battle, until even they fell still and all was shadow and silence again.

Only then did she release her grip, only then did she retreat from the wall and turn her gaze upon Morgravia.

The rig rumbled on, as the precinct house grew ever closer. And in the night sky, faint and distant, crimson lights.

Chapter XV

Ruination

The blade felt sharp against the skin, tucked just under the jugular. A quick slash and the carotid would open, spilling a river of red. This was the first thing Cristo thought of as he regained consciousness. The second was simply, I’m alive…

Relief quickly turned to fear, the revelation coming as he opened his eyes and saw men gathered around them.

A circle of masks, ragged strips of robes masking old military fatigues or factorum uniforms. One of those masks regarded him, the eyes that were visible through the slits bright and azure like chips of sapphire. It wore a simulacrum of a blank face, the strange figure, and his dirty red vestments smelled of cloying incense and blood, as if one had been deployed to obscure the other. Instead, both mingled into something noisome.

Cristo glanced about, only moving his eyes. He counted seven more figures, thuggish kinds, with masks of saints or laurel-crowned paragons. Two wore the faces of eagles. The aquila daubed their attire, roughly drawn, a dark stain that reminded Cristo of blood. Cudgels and rusty knives hung from studded leather belts. A few had a flagellant’s binding rope lashed around their ankles, the dried matter trailing from its inward-facing spikes like little tears of penance. Some carried trophies. Cristo saw bones, a rotting skull. They stank, despite the effort of cloves and garlic to suppress their foul odour.

The one with the knife – it was silver, double-edged and had the ornate look of an athame – leaned in to speak into Cristo’s ear. His breath reeked of soiled meat.

‘Weary traveller,’ his voice slid with the honey of a practised demagogue, ‘I am called Convocation, and these are my flock, the Divine.’

Zealots, Low Sink had them in abundance. Most deprived settlements did, their easy charms and false promises playing well with the disenfranchised and the desperate. Ordinarily, the proctors would suppress their bolder ambitions, but the Lex had departed Meagre altogether and left something primal in its place. Gang rule was now the only law, and the largest gang of all was that of the Imperial cult.

Power abhors a vacuum, or so Cristo had heard it said. An old phrase from old lips, but it held true. And in the absence of the proctors, a new law had arisen.

Belatedly, Cristo realised the skulls hanging off their belts were of the infected. Distended and emaciated, they could be no other. Then he saw Karina and Celestia, pushed to their knees, hands bound behind their heads, and Cristo tried to rise. The knife bit, deep enough to sting and draw a thick crimson rivulet that beaded down the blade.

‘No,’ the priest called Convocation said, ‘you stay.’

‘Don’t–’ Cristo snarled.

But Convocation smiled, certain of his absolute dominion.

‘Tell me, brother of man,’ he said, like a mendicant in search of alms, ‘do you believe in the Emperor’s light and righteous judgement?’

Two burly zealots hauled Cristo up, one wearing a hessian hood emblazoned with the eagle, the other an angelic mask. The latter’s false-face only came halfway down his features; a stubbled chin was left jutting and exposed, and in direct opposition to the serenity evoked by his porcelain visage. They had short-hafted maces looped to a length of rope that tied their makeshift robes together. Heavy boots and coarse fabrics were just visible beneath. Cristo thought he caught the fringe of a partly hidden proctor’s uniform on one of them.

Make an already weak man feel powerless and watch him join the first cult that offers him succour. Convocation kept the knife close throughout Cristo’s rough handling, an eagerness for violence lighting his eyes. Cristo gave the priest no cause to act upon it, even when they dragged Karina and Celestia to their feet too.

Eight further masked figures emerged through the murk and the rain, like pale spectres. A few wielded spiked clubs, improvised lengths of timber with nails punched through the ends. Two carried large hammers. Several had pistols tucked in their rude belts. One had an autogun slung over her shoulder on a strap. Begrimed, raggedly attired but so armed, they had the look of psychotic beggars.

Convocation withdrew but didn’t speak. Instead, he gestured with the ritual knife. Two flicks of the wrist, a feudal lord ordering his vassals, and Cristo was ushered forwards.

Then began a slow march through the ruins of Meagre.

Abandoned buildings gave hollow greeting as they passed. Fires still burned in some places. In the distance, an old watchtower spewed out smoke. A sense of profound absence had taken the town. Death had swept through it, death and fear, leaving it raw and exposed like a wound. It was quiet now, barring the rain, but so is a cemetery.

Cristo tried not to imagine the lives lost or those who had succumbed to the contagion sweeping the districts. He had his head down for most of the march, trying to think, to plan a way out. Karina and Celestia were kept behind him, their fate concealed also, and Cristo thought it was probably a means to keep him in line. Not that he was in much fit state to do anything other than comply. He had slept earlier, at least. He didn’t know for how long, and it been a fitful rest brought on by exhaustion. The priest had fed him a pungent draught that Cristo had tried to refuse at first, but then rough hands had gripped his arms, his neck, before levering open his jaw, and he had drunk. It tasted vile, like strong hooch, and he thought it drugged but it had invigorated him, even quenching a little of his thirst.

‘Where are you taking us?’ he asked, but Convocation didn’t answer.

They marched in silence, a column of pilgrims being led to paradise, except Cristo thought his idea of what that meant might differ from what it meant for the priest and his flock. They were lean folk, their eyes hard and hungry, sustained by will – or more accurately the fear of what Convocation might do to them if they defied him. Cristo knew Meagre had fallen far, but for its people to accept such demagogues unflinchingly and absolutely in such a short span of time told him exactly how far.

That they encountered none of the dead was the only saving grace. Cristo feared for his daughter, and for Celestia. Not because of what the zealots might do to them but because he felt powerless to prevent it. By the time they reached the gaping maw of the maglev tunnel that fear hadn’t lessened. Apart from the uninviting dark and the cold and existential dread that comes from staring into an abyssal void, the first thing that struck Cristo was the smell. Something had died in that tunnel. It had become a burial place, a tomb of the unquiet. He had no wish to go that way, and even less for his daughter to accompany him.

‘What is this?’ he asked, slowing his footfalls and feeling the resistance of the two men charged with his compliance. Convocation had lifted the knife from his throat and now paced alongside Cristo. Surprisingly, he answered.

‘Salvation…’ The priest smiled, but it was humourless, a product of cruelty and mania. ‘Perhaps.’

‘You sound doubtful about that.’

Convocation tutted, a lecturer telling off a foolish student. ‘Not doubt. Though,’ he conceded, ‘not everyone can be saved. To be judged one must first enter the dark and see into their immortal soul.’

And so they did.

At Convocation’s gentle urging, Cristo was led into the maglev tunnel and the rest of the pilgrims followed. A chill touched the air, redolent of a butcher’s meat locker. Old blood, spoiling flesh and the actinic tang of active magnetism ran riot across his tongue. His nose wrinkled at the stench of it. Darkness swept down on him, tenebrous and abject. It smothered him. He was immediately blind and forced to rely on his other senses for navigation. More than once he slipped, near twisting his ankle. The live maglev rail hummed in his right ear, promising a swift death. Break from his captors, leap onto the rail. It would be easy enough. As his minders backed off, Cristo suspected Convocation was testing his resolve.

‘You’ll have to kill me first…’ he whispered, to which he heard to his dismay, ‘Good, good…’ and knew he had been right.

The dead found them here, in dribs and drabs, in a part of the tunnel where the lights yet flickered. Nothing like the horde that had swept Meagre and gutted it. Spiked clubs, maces and staves did for these pitiable creatures, their gaunt faces rendered up in spastic flashes of cold grey light. They were slower than the ones Cristo had previously encountered and he wondered if this enervation was somehow symptomatic of whatever contagion had infected the populace. Certainly, it made them easier to kill, which the zealots did with unfettered abandon. It was savage, gratuitously violent, and it took Cristo a few moments to realise what it actually was. Anointment. A baptism in blood. The masks came back rubricated.

‘And so are we judged…’ he heard Convocation murmur.

Eventually, the tunnel opened out, still illuminated in spasms but here the light described a subterranean station. More or less intact, Cristo could scarcely believe his eyes when he saw the functioning mag-trans carriage aloft a few inches off the humming rail.

More of the infected lingered here, though they were skeletal, emaciated and beyond the point of perambulation. Wallowing, grasping impotently, teeth bared in a permanent grimace. Wasted, like flames deprived of air and close to extinction.

He stared as he passed them, then kept staring as they mounted the mag-trans and it ferried them deeper into hell.

Chapter XVI

The fortress

It stood empty and silent like a ransacked tomb. A fortress, sacked but unsullied.

The rig drove through into the yard, through an open gateway, unseen and unremarked. Sentinel watchtowers loomed but did no more than cast long shadows. Beyond them, beyond the perimeter wall, lay the keep itself. Stout, buttressed flanks. A ferrocrete stockade crowned by razor wire. Auto-sentry guns jerked with spasmodic motion recognition, their ammo hoppers bled dry. The most heavily guarded and well-fortified structure in all of Meagre. Precinct IX, the proctors’ last redoubt. In the end, it had not availed them.

A carpet of shell casings crunched under the rig’s tread, pushed into the dirt like brass seedlings as it trundled past. A ramp led to a canopied depot, its parking zones also empty. Barak still brought the vehicle to a halt within the chevroned lines, habit harder to break than the ex-lawman’s spirit. He wore a stony expression as they brought Jana out from the back of the cabin, Maela assisting her as she climbed down the short ladder.

She stepped gingerly on her wounded leg, the pain obvious from her pinched features. Barak took her then, clasping his wife’s hand as if to try to squeeze the hurt out of her or perhaps absorb it into himself. He wrapped his arm around her back, gently holding her up as they walked the approach road to the keep’s entrance.

The others followed, weary from the ride, a few casting nervous glances at the darkness they had left behind them. Nothing had followed, at least nothing that could be seen or heard. The Broker had fallen into silence and melancholy, the loss of the sommelier more akin to that of a loved one than the indentured slave he had appeared to be.

Fharkoum and his man muttered to one another, the fat merchant dragging Maela close like one might cling to his property in the presence of a thief. Her scorn kept the worst of his pawing at bay, a resilience having flourished in her since Hallow’s End and everything that had come after. Barak looked about to intervene but a careful glance from Maela warned him off.

See to her, it said. And he did.

Before Barak reached the entrance, Morgravia cut him off, Drover in tow.

‘Why would they leave the keep?’ she asked.

‘Your guess is as good as mine.’ Barak frowned. ‘Could be the entire precinct got deployed.’

‘And they happened to leave open the gate behind them?’

‘Fair point.’

Morgravia gestured to Drover, who looked back at her mildly aghast, poking a finger against his own chest.

‘You’ve got the gun, hireling,’ she explained.

He had smoked his cigar down to the nub and clenched it between his teeth, puffing a slow purplish smoke trail as he said, ‘Best see if anyone’s home then, eh?’

Shotgun held at waist height, Drover ducked inside.

The lumens ignited with a flash of sodium brightness, a heavy clunk echoing through the barren complex as Drover threw the lever.

Having made it as far as the generator room and now returned to a wide, dirty lobby, the nerves of the party began to ease. Barak had secured the entrance, the door sealed behind manual slide bolts, and had procured lock codes from behind the raised pulpit where the proctors processed their intake. Procedurally, it appeared little had changed since his tenure as a law keeper.

Each lock code was a sheaf of parchment like a wafer, but hardened to the stiffness of plastek, and Barak showed them to the group as they gathered around him.

‘Armoury, ammunition store, mess hall, med-bay and vox-station,’ he said, leafing through the cards like a street gambler explaining a lure to his marks.

‘Pair up, divide the tasks between us,’ said Morgravia, and no one contradicted her. Lessened in agency or not, she was still Inquisition and that commanded a certain measure of obedience.

‘Well, I for one will feel better when I’ve fed my children,’ said Drover, patting his autopistols. He then unhooked the shotgun and threw it back to Morgravia, who caught it deftly. He took the lock code for the ammunition store, and wrapped an arm around Arkyle’s back as he moved off. ‘You’re with me, partner.’

‘You know what you’re looking for?’ Morgravia called.

Drover eyed the hefty sidearm holstered to the inquisitor’s belt. ‘I’m guessing cannon shells.’

Morgravia smiled thinly, her eyes betraying her amusement. ‘You’ll do just fine.’ She turned to Barak. ‘You and I are going to the armoury,’ she told him.

He cast a glance at his wife, who he had left in Maela’s care. The courtesan held her close, Jana barely lucid in that moment.

‘I will take her,’ she said. ‘The med-bay.’

Fharkoum grunted something to Kharata, prompting the hired gun to step forwards. ‘I’ll go with them,’ he uttered, eyes cold, ‘for protection.’

Barak began to mouth a protest but Morgravia stepped in.

‘Now, why do I think you’re more concerned about your master’s property than getting this injured woman to the med-bay.’

Kharata shrugged. ‘Like I give a shit what you think.’

Morgravia let her gaze linger on him just long enough that he knew she’d kill him if anything happened to either of the two in his charge, then turned back to Barak. ‘You know the armoury. You know the guns, and you’re another pair of hands that I trust.’

He nodded by way of agreement, though still didn’t look happy about the arrangement with Kharata.

‘Then I shall procure sustenance,’ said the Broker, having reasserted her air of calm. Whatever grief or blame she harboured for the sommelier’s fate, she kept it hidden for now. The mess hall was closest to the entrance. It was visible from the lobby. It therefore didn’t surprise Morgravia when Fharkoum went with the Broker.

The lobby was a hub with several avenues all trailing off from its main nexus. A map mounted on the wall made navigation easier. The precinct house was a fortified keep but it wasn’t huge. Three floors, one sub-basement where the cells and archives were located. This area would remain sealed. According to Barak it also ran on a separate generator, so the lights would still be out.

Nothing down there for us, thought Morgravia and followed Barak towards the armoury.

Stripped almost bare, the main armoury was a sorry sight.

‘Is this it?’ asked Morgravia, scowling.

‘Precinct’s only got this one cache.’

A pair of shotguns, three stub pistols, one autogun, a few sodium lanterns and a belt of tear gas grenades. It wasn’t much. They took everything.

‘Here,’ said Barak, throwing Morgravia a handheld vox. She caught it and checked the power. A rasp of static issued out.

Barak snagged its twin to his belt. ‘Channel two,’ he said, having already clicked it into place on his own vox.

Morgravia nodded and did the same.

‘What about the sub-basement?’ she asked, reassessing her earlier assumption as she armed up. She took one of the shotguns, a lantern and a stub pistol. Like a packhorse, Barak carried the rest.

The ex-proctor rubbed at his stubbled chin. ‘Could be something useful. There’s a few old stores down there. Mainly machine parts back in the day, but that might’ve changed.’

‘It’s worth a try.’ She hefted the shotgun. It was weighty, reassuring. ‘We won’t get far on these.’

Barak raised an eyebrow. ‘How far do we need to go?’

‘Hive edge, to the gate. We need to move uphive and quickly.’

She didn’t mention that she had other concerns, ones that might mean spending more time in Low Sink. That would all depend on the Broker giving up the location of the Empath. Up until now, Morgravia had been focused on survival, but with the immediate danger passed a different imperative took hold.

‘Won’t the gate be sealed?’

‘Not for me.’

That too was misleading. She doubted she would be headed to the gate, and so she needed to find another way to ensure it remained unbarred for Barak and the others. A problem for later, although not much later.

‘Okay then,’ Barak replied, and something in his tone suggested scepticism. Lying, for an inquisitor, was like breathing. Perhaps she was losing her touch.

As she slung the shotgun over her shoulder, Morgravia noticed a barrack room leading off from the corridor to the armoury.

‘Is there a washroom back there?’ she asked, feeling the patina of grit and dirt crusting her body. She needed a bath, a shower, something. Right now, she’d settle for semi-clean water and a hose.

‘Should be a basin or two,’ said Barak. ‘You feeling all right?’

‘Tired.’

‘You want me to wait?’

‘Find your wife.’

‘What about the stores in the sub-basement?’

‘I’ll deal with those.’

Barak nodded, grateful. Before he left, he said, ‘I saw you collapse. Back in the bar.’ He held up his hands. ‘I’m not prying. I’m not. Just want to make sure I’m doing the right thing by leaving you.’

Morgravia smiled. A loyal and dutiful man. That was rare, in her experience.

‘I’ve faced the devils of the abyss, Barak. I’ve stared them down and vanquished them with this very hand.’ She showed him. ‘The chivalry is appreciated but I’ll be fine.’

Barak nodded again, but lingered.

‘Those machines…’

‘You want to know what they were?’

‘Not really. I’d rather not know anything about your world. Mine was bleak enough, serving the Lex. I can’t imagine the burdens of knowledge an inquisitor has to deal with. Are they…?’

‘Anything to do with me? Yes. I think that they probably are.’

‘Will you stop them? Can you?’

‘I am the Emperor’s servant,’ was all Morgravia said.

Barak’s face suggested he doubted that would be enough, then he said, ‘Outside the bar, before we left, before it burned to the ground, I saw lights in the sky. Red lights. And then a high-pitched shrieking. I’ve heard that sound before, or at least something similar. A mining tool, sonics. It’s used for digging. No Blackgheist mining consortium is burrowing for ore when all this shit is going on, least not one in Low Sink. I doubt any are left. Could it be related to the other machines?’

‘I’m assuming you didn’t just crack skulls as a proctor.’

‘I was an investigator too.’

‘Pretty good one, I’d say.’

‘Had my moments. So, what do you think?’

Morgravia paused, considering how much she should say. ‘I saw them too. The lights. Didn’t hear the shriek but I did hear something else. Engine drone. Low, masked. Something small like a gun-cutter. Do the proctors have anything like that?’

Barak shook his head. ‘Not in my day. Besides, proctors are noisy. Bright lamps, loud engines. Dominate, subdue and control. Not big on stealth.’

‘Another unanswered question then.’

‘I think they’re looking for something and they don’t want anyone else to know they’re doing it.’

‘Who’s they?’

‘I hoped you might have an idea.’

‘I might.’

‘Care to share?’

‘Not just yet. Let’s focus on gearing up and getting out. Something’s off about this place. I don’t think we should overstay.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘See how your wife is doing. Then meet back at the lobby.’

That seemed to satisfy Barak, who nodded then went on his way.

Once he was gone, Morgravia entered the barrack room and found the two basins he had spoken of. A cracked mirror reflected a haggard face back at her. Dark rings around the eyes had the appearance of kohl, and the skin was pale. Still, the features were strong, the expression resolute. Morgravia turned the faucet, releasing a slow but steady stream. After a few seconds, the briny appearance of the water cleared and she cupped her hands to make a reservoir, splashing her face. It felt warm but wet and some of the grime washed away, leaving dark trails in the sink. She found a cloth, wiped the back of her neck and ran a hand through her silver mohawk, finding it wretched with gritty particulate.

She stared, one ice-blue eye, the other jaundiced and bloodshot staring back. And then she saw it, a reflection of light on the mirror, momentary but not imagined. Her ice-blue eye flashed, a ripple of brilliance through the sclera. Like a bionic.

Morgravia had no bionics.

She gripped the basin with one hand, tentatively touching the edge of her eye with the other. She was breathing hard, fast. Her heart galloped. She felt around her eye socket, gently probing. It was cold, colder than the rest of the skin around it. Another flare of light. This time unmistakable. Azure, clean. She discerned focusing rings, turning slowly on concentric arcs. She probed deeper, wiggling a finger into the tear duct, searching for a gap. She found resistance. Metal. Both hands suddenly clenched the edge of the basin as Morgravia almost fell and the red dream lingered, eager for release.

‘A mind without purpose will walk in dark places,’ she murmured, looking down as she repeated the words like a mantra. She’d read them in an old book several years ago, surprised at the clarity of recall.

Taking a breath, she looked up. Nothing had changed, no horrific transformation had taken place, and the eye seemed like an eye again. But she knew. She knew. In that moment, her scars took on fresh meaning. Hurriedly, a rising fear in her gut threatening to overwhelm her if she didn’t do it quickly, she undid the flak-weave and removed the tunic underneath.

She stood naked from the waist up, examining the roadmap of pain traced across her body. Old wounds presented themselves, bullet holes, abrasions, stabbings, but the longer scars reminded her of a clothier’s markings and the segmenting of material. She had been re-sewn like a garment. She had no idea why, but felt the presence of something parasitical within, she its host.

Pressing her fingers against the edge of a thready cicatrice running down her sternum she began to dig with her nails. It hurt but only a little, as if some of the nerve endings had been scraped away, and blood started to bead…

A vox crackled, stopping Morgravia, releasing her. She blinked, and heard Drover’s voice. For a second she thought it was the handheld unit but then realised it was coming through a fluted vox-horn set in one corner of the barrack room, next to the ceiling.

‘He’s gone…’ He sounded pained. Angry. ‘The little shit’s gone.’

Dragging on her tunic, Morgravia found the voxponder and spoke into the boxy unit’s receiver cup.

‘What’s happening?’ she demanded. Her head felt heavy, hungover. She breathed deeply to clear the fogginess from her mind.

‘Bastard hit me. Hard. And he ran.’

‘Ran where? Who? What the hell are you talking about, Drover? Are you at the ammunition store?’

‘Didn’t get that far. Said he felt dizzy, so I went to find a canteen. Some water. Next I know, I’m on my knees nursing a cracked skull.’

Morgravia swore under her breath then said, ‘I think I know where he’s going.’

She turned, about to explain further, when she saw the Broker standing in her way.

The shotgun stood upright against the basin. She’d unslung it when she’d washed her face. The stub pistol lay on the basin’s edge, well within the Broker’s grasp. Morgravia’s monomolecular knife was still tucked in the back of her belt.

Morgravia didn’t move. ‘I wondered when we’d have to do this.’

Chapter XVII

Evidence

As Barak made his way to the med-bay, he found bullet casings, las-burns on the walls, the parts of now tumbledown barricades. He had no doubt the proctors had been deployed in force, but whoever had been left had fought hard to try to hold the keep. Against whom, he didn’t know, but the gangs had been growing bolder for years and Meagre was hardly a pillar of law and order to begin with. The few signs of incursion revealed little evidence to go on. Fifteen years since he had last trod these halls. In all that time, Precinct IX had never looked so beleaguered. He also knew its ways, and had taken a shortcut in order to get to Jana quicker. Upon happening on the shell casings that goal had been subverted.

Stooping to examine one of the spent casings, Barak found the shards of something resembling a human cheekbone, only made from porcelain. At first he thought it might have come from a doll or child’s toy but upon closer inspection realised it was part of a mask, broken from a heavy blow and missed in the clean-up. He didn’t know of any gangs that wore porcelain masks as their signature, but then it had been a while.

He had passed several wanted edicts on his way through the precinct, the kind usually given to bounty hunters, for their kind was rife in Low Sink, the pickings of vagrants, gang leaders and other recidivists abundant enough to serve a great many private contractors. The proctors were known to occasionally enlist outside help, wherever a criminal element might be beyond their reach or means to apprehend or kill. Barak couldn’t remember seeing any porcelain masks, or masks of any description, amongst them and figured he might have better fortune with the archive.

The med-bay resided on the third floor but the archive would be here on this one. Reuniting with Jana had been his utmost priority since leaving the armoury, and he didn’t like the thought of her or Maela with that bastard Kharata, but he’d found a piece of evidence and knew he should follow his old instincts. All the talk with the inquisitor had rekindled a desire he thought long extinguished. He was an investigator, and he yearned for answers. For the truth.

And then there was the smell, faint at first but unmistakable now. It was rot and death. He followed it to the archive.

A locked door barred entry. With a brief moment’s hesitation, Barak shoulder-barged it. The lock broke but something else had wedged the door, and it only opened a few inches. The reek intensified, foul enough to make Barak wretch. He considered again the wisdom of breaching the door. In all his years as a proctor, he had never gone against his instincts. He had to know. Stepping back, he fired off two shots, their retorts deafeningly loud in the quiet corridor, and destroyed both hinges. The door fell back with the creak of old metal. It thudded heavily and left a rectangular void in its wake.

Barak stepped up to it.

A records cabinet lay across the threshold, the barricade keeping him out. He climbed over it. The second-floor archive was more of an office – the proper historical records were kept in the sub-basement – but he reckoned the mask and the perp who wore it were likely to be referenced here. All thoughts of digging into it evaporated, though, when Barak discovered the cause of the smell.

The watch captain was seated at his desk, the contents of his cranial cavity littering the opposite wall.

Instinctively the shotgun came up, a shell snapped into the breech.

No movement came from inside, and the air smelled ripe. The watch captain had been dead a while and must’ve barricaded himself in while death reigned outside. Wrapping an old bar cloth around his nose and mouth, Barak moved in to investigate.

A small, leather-bound journal lay open on the desk next to the watch captain. Barak picked it up, careful to avoid the sticky blood pool that had thickened to a syrup around the dead man’s chair. A pistol lay half consumed in it, but Barak wasn’t desperate enough for more ammo to attempt to retrieve it. A dead man’s gun, especially when used for a self-inflicted wound, was a bad omen.

He flicked through the journal, finding notes on criminal activities, names of informants, suspected gang territories and illegal enterprises – the usual material. A section had been devoted to a gang referred to as ‘the Divine’, a religious cult that had become more than a nuisance in the districts. The record mentioned burnings, abductions. The Divine were doomsayers and while they had been tolerated, their influence had been growing, and their behaviour more and more aberrant. Arrests had been made. Confessions extracted. Proctors had identified what they thought was the Divine’s main hideout, an old church on the outskirts of Meagre at the maglev north terminus. Plans had been devised to storm the location and purge it, stamp out the fire before it grew into a conflagration.

The riots put paid to that. As did the horror that followed. It made for harrowing reading. Lists of criminals gave way to lists of the dead, those proctors taken casualty by the growing civilian unrest. It referenced deployments, not just in Meagre but in other townships of Low Sink like Fallow and Drudge, as well as other parts of Blackgheist. The spread had been endemic to low-hive. Most of this, Barak already knew or had deduced. The last paragraph was effectively a suicide note; the one immediately preceding it chilled him like cryo-ice.

So absorbed was he in his reading, he had failed to appreciate the significance of the gentle fizz of activation emanating from the pict screen in one corner of the room. Divided into four separate feeds, each focused on a part of the precinct house. Three of the images were crazed with static, representing signal loss; the fourth was grainy but depicted the sub-basement and the cells. Not unusual for a watch captain to want to keep a close eye on his prisoners. Except in this case, most of the lights had been doused. The words in the journal returned to him.

They appear to be agitated by light.

Sodium lamps in the corridor leading to the cells still burned. The greyscale rendering of the pict feed made the light watery, but Barak saw the shadow flit past all the same. Fresh fear overlaid that already cultivating in his gut, like a bacterial infection rapidly worsening. He tapped a few iron keys on a slate next to the screen, cycling to a different feed that offered a wider view of the corridor.

The scribe, Arkyle, had found his way to the sub-basement. Even with the poor resolution of the feed, he appeared manic.

Inmates present an irritated state, their mood fractious and urgent.

He scurried, his movements frenetic, stopping occasionally to scratch at his scalp or hunker down in the nook of the wall to gently rock on his heels.

Complaints of headaches are common.

He avoided the light, or turned from it whenever he got too close.

Violent outbursts.

Several deaths.

He shuffled around in the darkness, searching for something.

We lost four proctors trying to keep them contained.

Couldn’t reach them.

Heard their screaming.

We left them, Throne forgive us.

Arkyle found the secondary generator.

Had to lock down the cells. Too many.

Emperor help us.

Arkyle threw the lever and the lights flickered, once, twice, revealing what was inside the cells, and then held steady.

Drover’s voice burst through the precinct vox-emitters, and Barak nearly dropped his shotgun. He was trembling. He hadn’t shaken this bad for fifteen years. No, that was a lie, he had much more recently, back at Hallow’s End.

The last line in the journal imprinted itself in his mind.

They were eating each other.

Stuffing the journal into his pocket, Barak ran.

He barrelled through the halls of the precinct house, breath heaving, until he reached the med-bay.

‘We have to get out,’ he said as he barged in, breathless.

Then he frowned as he fully took in the scene.

‘Where’s Kharata?’

Chapter XVIII

A reckoning

The Broker glanced at the gun and then back at Morgravia.

‘I don’t need that to kill you,’ she said.

Morgravia had guessed the Broker would have protection that extended beyond the servants she had surrounded herself with. Something in the augmetics, she assumed. Haptic weapons. Finger implants.

‘And is that why you’re here?’

‘I have every right to.’

‘Oh? How did you come to that conclusion?’

‘He died.’

‘We all die. Well,’ the inquisitor conceded, ‘most of us do. You need to be more specific.’

The weapons lit, an array of warm light glowing at the fingertips of the Broker’s right hand. Morgravia had goaded her, wanting to know what she was up against.

‘Do not be facetious, inquisitor,’ the Broker warned, emotion clouding her voice. ‘It does not suit you.’

‘That’s fair,’ Morgravia conceded. ‘Though you don’t know he’s dead.’

‘I know.’

Morgravia let that go too. ‘You are not as cold as you make out, are you?’ she said. It was a deduction not a question. ‘Though you hide it well. Voice modulation to clean out tonality, inflection.’

‘Are you investigating me now?’

‘Not currently. I warn you, though–’

‘You warn me?’ A flash of anger saw sparks crackling across the Broker’s haptic implants, like she had lightning captured in her fingers.

‘I warn you,’ Morgravia repeated, with all the confidence and strength that her rigorous training and indoctrination afforded. Her memory might be broken, but instincts were ingrained. She had lost events, moments, but not herself. ‘This will not unfold the way you want it to. The likely demise of your servitor was regrettable but could not be helped.’

‘He was no mere servitor.’

‘I assumed as much. A body-slave?’

‘A friend. A concept as alien to you as the monsters you hunt, I am sure.’

Morgravia felt that barb a little more keenly than she expected to. She was, for all intents and purposes, alone. Her enemies had isolated her, made her vulnerable and robbed her of her greatest asset – her mind. It was also very possible they had left something behind, but she couldn’t worry about that now.

‘I’m not looking for a friend,’ she said. ‘I do need your help though. And, if the weapons and the servants are any gauge, you need mine. What are you running from?’

The activation glow around the haptic weapons faded and the Broker let her arms fall to her sides.

‘What are any of us running from but our fate.’

‘Profound.’

‘Sarcasm doesn’t suit you either.’

‘It helps in my sworn vocation.’

The Broker eyed Morgravia silently, the tension having lessened but still not entirely dissipated from the encounter.

‘If you’re not here to kill me, what are you here for?’

After a few seconds, the Broker answered. ‘The machines. The ones he lost his life to…’

Morgravia gave her a rueful look. ‘You’re the second person coming to me with theories.’

‘Oh?’

‘Doesn’t matter. Go on.’

The Broker gave her a shrewd look but then continued. ‘I have made many deals, inquisitor. Acquired many different items for an array of clients. That list extends to the Mechanicus.’

‘Those creatures were not of the red world.’

‘I didn’t say they were Martian.’

‘And what are you saying then?’

‘What were you investigating?’

‘I told you, my memory–’

‘Partial retrograde amnesia does not impede your intellect or deductive capacity, inquisitor.’

Despite herself, Morgravia was actually starting to like the Broker, which had to mean they were really in trouble.

‘A cult. It has to be.’

‘Hereteks,’ the Broker confirmed. ‘Renegade magi who rebel against the strictures of the Mechanicus in the pursuit of dark science and proscribed fields of study.’

Morgravia nodded.

‘Such creatures do not simply appear at a whim,’ the Broker went on. ‘There is a design in this.’

A shrug, as Morgravia made a surprised expression. ‘Have you ever considered the ordos?’

The Broker’s contemptuous narrowing of the eyes answered for her. ‘What is the cause of all this?’ she asked.

‘Of the plague?’

The Broker scowled. ‘Yes, the plague. Have you considered that? I have. I observe behaviour. I judge. Theorise. Connect. It is how I have survived this long, though not without injury.’ She held up her augmetic arms to emphasise the point and intimate a dark episode in her history. ‘It is not biological in origin. The singer, the one in black from the bar, has been bitten. This is not the causal element of the plague. Her symptoms are consistent with mild blood poisoning.’

Morgravia’s eyes narrowed, intrigued. ‘And why do you say that?’

‘Consider the rapidity of contagion. Propagation and saturation.’

‘As if someone had flipped a lever, infecting large masses at once.’

‘Precisely.’

‘So what are you saying?’

‘Exactly what I have said.’

‘A switch, is that it? You think a psyker is pulling strings?’

The Broker stiffened at the term but gave no other outward reaction. Perhaps a witch had taken her arms. ‘Have you encountered many psykers who could subjugate a population?’

‘If I could remember, I’d tell you,’ replied Morgravia, somewhat bitterly.

‘What about a psyker powerful enough to alter the mental architecture of the populace of an entire city and send it rabid? Or do you think it is faith that Low Sink is lacking? Is it a grand manifestation of Ruin, of the will of the Dark Gods and we its mere playthings?’ the Broker sneered. ‘You don’t believe any of that.’

‘Say I don’t. Where does that leave us?’

‘Us?’

‘Survival now depends on our ability to work together, so, yes, us.’

‘I felt it, didn’t you? The pain, like a headache only more invasive.’

‘We’re back to mental manipulation again.’

‘Yes, we are, but not through psychic means. I think this is something else. A frequency, one specifically attuned to the human populace of the hive, and designed to elicit aberrant behaviour.’

‘Like a canine will howl if it hears the appropriate pitch?’

‘Reductive, but yes.’

‘Doesn’t turn the canine rabidly cannibalistic though.’

‘As I said, your example is reductive, crude. This frequency is of a much more sophisticated nature.’

‘How? Why?’

‘Isn’t that where your profession comes in?’

‘Helpful as ever. See, sarcasm does suit me. Are we done here?’

The Broker seemed to consider it, as if deciding whether killing Morgravia would advantage her more or less in the long run.

‘He made his choice,’ said the inquisitor softly. ‘He chose to save you.’

‘Yes. Yes, he did.’

At this admission, the tension bled away and Morgravia retrieved her weapons. ‘Help me with this,’ she said, indicating the flak-weave. Arkyle was still on the loose somewhere, doing Throne knows what. He had to be herded, questioned, possibly sanctioned. He might have answers, given willingly or otherwise. Light might be shed on the theory of the frequency, the signal that had turned human beings into the pallid.

But then the vox crackled, and upon hearing Barak’s voice she knew it was too late for any of that.

Chapter XIX

Red ribbons

He waited at the gate, drenched in darkness as most of the lights had cut out. Those that lit the cells had been doused. Even in the shadows, the scribe looked a pitiable figure. His robes were torn and edged with dirt, his wasted body depleted by hunger and fear. He was weak. Barak had seen plenty of men like him in Hallow’s End. Meek but cruel. He would have sacrificed everything and everyone to save his own skin. And now? That desperation looked about ready to break him.

‘Arkyle,’ Barak called. He’d overhead Drover use the name, and hoped he hadn’t misheard.

The scribe turned a fraction, confirming it. He looked pale, like an exsanguinated corpse. Cadaver white with red-ringed eyes.

‘Arkyle…’ he repeated, and began to walk the corridor, ‘it’s all right. Easy to get lost in this old place.’ Barak’s guns were holstered, his hands up and palms showing, though he kept the pistol loose in its holster. He prayed the sweat didn’t give away his anxiety. His entire back was wet with it, his shirt dragging at his slick body. He was wire-taut, close to snapping. As soon as he’d seen that Jana was all right, he’d left her and Maela in the med-bay and told them to stay there and seal the door. To not let anyone in, unless it was him or Morgravia. Hurrying down to the sub-basement had left him a little breathless. In his haste, he’d forgotten he had the vox. Taking care not to make any sudden moves, edging one step after another, he flicked the audio switch to transmit and clenched the button.

The scribe didn’t react or show much awareness of anything at all, which was either good or really, really bad.

‘Arkyle, what are you doing here in the sub-basement,’ he said. ‘Nothing down here but old records and machine parts.’ Still walking, Barak paused to lick his lips. ‘Come away from the gate, son.’

Twenty feet of grimy, whitewashed corridor stood between them. The dried blood was patchy and black as pitch. A killing place.

‘I can’t…’ rasped Arkyle, then in a sobbing voice, ‘I’m sorry… it’s already too late.’

The low lumes flickered overhead, the scribe shrinking from their sodium glow as they flared and revealed that the gate was already open. Barak felt his mouth dry up like an ash desert.

‘Oh shit…’

Rank upon rank of the pallid stood on crooked limbs, dishevelled and emaciated. Gangers, low-life scum, enforcers; all and sundry stood behind the opening of the gate. Waiting. They stared dully out into the corridor.

Barak froze, torn between the urge to cross the last twenty feet and shut the gate or to run like hell.

In the end, the pallid chose for him.

They came awake as one, as if a spark had been lit, provoking sudden and violent ignition.

Turning on his heel, Barak fled. His last sight of the cells was of Arkyle, swept up by the onset of the horde. He simply vanished, absorbed into the mass. His screams only lasted a few seconds before being swallowed up too. As he released the transmit button on the vox, Morgravia’s voice came through.

‘…Barak, answer me! What the hell is happening?’

‘They’re coming.’

He slammed into the corner, jolting his elbow and nearly dropping his gun as he hit the stairs.

‘Who’s coming? We’re headed down to the sub-basement.’

‘Stay away. It’s the pallid… A shitload, right behind me.’

He fired off a shot over his shoulder and caught a glimpse of the onrushing horde, skittering around the corner after him, bodies slamming into bodies in their haste. A few were crushed, red smears lapping up the wall. Limbs tangled with each other in a disorganised scrum. Others clambered, bestial and urgent. A host of dead faces glared, withered and cadaverous. And the hunger. That awful, insatiable hunger. They had shambled at first, tight limbs finding their rhythm. Momentum threw them on like a tidal surge. Flesh, and tooth, and nail. Clawing and snarling.

Another shot. Barak couldn’t miss.

‘Med-bay…’ he gasped, heart hammering, face burning with effort. Another flight of stairs behind him, the pallid unrelenting. ‘Jana.’

‘We’ll get her,’ said Morgravia.

A third flight. Barak neared the landing to the first floor. There was door with a slide bolt. It was sturdy.

‘Kharata…’ he said, hoofing three steps at a time. Needles in his chest. Something grasped at his trouser leg but scraped cloth, then air. Fabric tore. He redoubled his efforts. More pain. He could hardly breathe. Black spots began to crowd his vision. ‘He’s gone,’ he rasped.

He reached the landing, arm outstretched for the door. Grasping it, he felt a sharp tug on his back and then he was falling. He didn’t fall far, just a couple of steps. Instinct pumped the trigger of his pistol. Three pallid lurched back, their skulls blasted outwards. Gory matter sprayed. Then came agony. Hot and bright and spiced by primordial terror. Barak kicked, felt his boot hit, a jaw yield then break. His arm came back shredded, ugly teeth marks in his flesh and blood spewing. He crawled backwards, the three pallid he had killed impeding the rest, a corpse barricade plugging up the tight corridor. The fourth had recovered, its rancid jaw hanging like a snapped hinge as it leapt and raked Barak with its claws. Skin came away in ribbons, Barak’s chest a crimson mess. He threw a punch, wrenched off the jaw completely. His gun was pressed against his body but he fired it anyway. The burst took out a chunk of the pallid’s torso: shattered rib bone dripped with gore, the cavity limned in red. He got a knee up, fighting to stay awake, to stop from passing out from the pain. He managed to extend his leg, pushing the pallid back, holding it at bay as it frantically clawed the air. Then it started scratching at Barak’s leg, and he roared.

Cold static fizzing through the vox. Black and red in his eyes.

He had led a violent life, at least at first. He had expected a violent end. A ganger’s knife. An angry patron’s bullet. Dead in an alley. Killed in his own bar.

Not this, not this way. Oh Throne, please not like this.

A bullet took the pallid in the eye, punched it back. A spray of lead followed, whipping through the horde, pinpoint and deadly. Over in seconds, it felt like minutes. The bodies jammed up the rest. Barak felt a hand grip his collar, and for a moment feared one of the bastards had got behind him.

‘You’ve been in tighter binds than this, I’d wager,’ said Drover, the labour in his voice betraying the aura of easy charm. ‘Get up, lawman. On your feet.’

They reached the door, Barak in an agonised fugue, vaguely aware of the gunslinger hauling his sorry carcass back up the stairs and through to the first floor. As soon as they were clear, Drover slammed the way behind them shut, wrenching across the deadbolt.

Drover whipped off his belt to employ as a tourniquet on Barak’s arm. Then he smiled, breathless and blood-flecked.

‘I suggest we get gone.’

Barak nodded. ‘I can stand,’ he said. The wounds to his leg and chest were painful but not so bad he couldn’t move. His arm hung by his side though, and he’d need to get it patched up sooner rather than later. Every breath felt like inhaling ground glass.

Fevered scratching sounded at the door, the hinges immediately bulging against a sudden pressure from the other side.

Drover slammed a fresh clip in both autopistols. Evidently, he had reached the ammunition store after all. ‘I’ll save your hide but I ain’t carrying you, lawman.’

Barak bit back his pain. A feverish sweat lathered his body. He felt heavy, unsteady.

‘You won’t need to,’ he growled, wavering.

And then collapsed.

Chapter XX

Bind the wound

The lights flickered overhead, casting strange shadows through the dingy precinct. Morgravia held her pistol in front and trained it on every doorway, every alcove. Cold sweat dappled the back of her neck. Her mind wandered, and she fought to remain focused.

A frequency, the Broker had said. A signal that overrode human behaviour and turned it abnormal. Morgravia’s thoughts returned to what she had seen in the mirror. Every spasm of the sodium lamps provoked an image in her mind. Replayed over and over. The eye. The focusing lenses. A traitor in her own skin. A foreign object embedded in her flesh. And no memory of it. Not merely a piece to excise, but an actual replacement. It was both invasion and absence in one. She smelled blood, felt bullet casings crushed underfoot. A frantic buzzing filled her ears, a swarm of cognitive dissonance threatening to engulf her.

The red dream began to encroach…

cutting scything peeling back the layers red bone cracking cold metal blood stench pain two red suns looming closing…

She shut it off, closing her eyes and murmuring a benediction to anchor herself to the present as she felt herself slipping.

The Emperor is my shield, and I His will made manifest…

Here, now. That’s what mattered. The rest would have to come later. Like gauze wrapped around a split in her psyche, she’d keep it tight, hold back the blood, so she could keep moving. Bind the wound. Keep going. She had to.

The precinct swam back, like the reality of the world rushing in after breaching the surface of the ocean. So did the situation at hand. Barak had seen them. They were here. The pallid. And they were coming. He might very well already be dead. Drover too.

‘You look unwell.’

Morgravia opened her eyes as she heard the voice beside her. ‘I’m fine.’

‘You’re lying.’

‘I’m lying.’

‘Then what is it?’ She sounded irritated.

Morgravia stopped and turned to face the Broker. ‘Have you ever felt pain in your dreams? Pain so vivid it felt real? I have. I wake from them with remembered agony and I don’t know why. I am cut and bleeding, my flesh is sundered and split. There is heat then cold. I look upon my skin and I don’t recognise it. I see a face whose features I don’t trust. I am a foreign presence inhabiting my own body. I need my mind restored. I think I might turn insane without it.’

‘And I need a ship that will take me off-world.’

‘And I ask again, why?’

The Broker would not answer.

‘And so you see,’ said Morgravia, ‘everyone has their secrets. The difference is mine are even secret from me.’

‘I heard the vox,’ said the Broker. ‘We need to leave. They might both be dead.’

‘Thought had occurred. In any case, we are leaving.’

She carried on walking. The med-bay was close, just a few more turns.

‘I mean you and I,’ said the Broker. ‘Right now.’

‘I swore an oath.’

‘I have no wish to die a heroic death for strangers.’

‘You think of Drover as a stranger?’

‘I believe the word you used was hireling. That’s accurate. I needed a gun, he provided one. Our relationship is purely transactional.’

‘And yet you trusted him with the Empath.’

‘Did I?’

Morgravia scowled. ‘More lies? It appears you trade in them too.’

‘I do,’ the Broker said brazenly. ‘You would know. I saw it in your eyes, as you looked in the mirror.’

A spike of sudden anxiety had Morgravia’s heart thundering. Ever since that moment in the barrack room, an itch had begun to irritate her, something deep within the flesh. A sense of unease nested inside her, spreading like a contagion, consuming her thoughts. She stopped to regard the Broker.

‘What did you see exactly?’

‘Only that you are hiding something. And this is a secret you do know.’ The Broker paused, considering her for a moment, the two of them standing in the flicking half-light in the industrial grime of the abandoned precinct. ‘I’ll give you the Empath,’ said the Broker in a quiet voice. ‘Get me out of the low-hive and I’ll honour the bargain we struck. You have my oath.’

‘How do I even know she is alive?’

‘She is alive. I would know if she was not.’

‘And what if I need to know what’s in my head to get us out?’

‘Then,’ said the Broker, her expression one of grim resignation, ‘we are both destined for disappointment.’

Morgravia sighed and trudged on. Soon enough, they reached the med-bay.

Jana had been patched up, and a tight if slightly yellowed bandage bound her lower leg. She perched on the edge of a low bunk, still frail, but her skin had lost its waxy sheen and ashen pallor. An empty vial of pain suppressors sat within her reach. Maela stood nearby rinsing medicae tools in a basin.

‘Where is Barak?’ Jana demanded.

‘He’s coming,’ said Morgravia. ‘Can you move?’

‘I think so.’

‘Good, because we can’t stay.’

‘Not leaving without Barak,’ said Jana, and shrugged herself off the bunk. She landed gingerly but straightened as she looked Morgravia in the eye. ‘I’ll find him alone if I have to.’

Morgravia swore under her breath.

‘You know what I am?’ asked the inquisitor.

‘I don’t care. I’m not asking you to come with me, I’m telling you I am going to get my husband.’

Morgravia applauded her fearlessness. Not many ordinary Imperial citizens would dare to speak to an inquisitor in that way. Fharkoum’s indolence and arrogance were inbred and fuelled by a sense of entitlement; Jana’s bravery came from an entirely more decent place.

‘And you?’ she asked Maela.

‘I stay too,’ she said without hesitation. Her accent was thick but her intonation of Low Gothic perfect. ‘With her.’

Morgravia swore again, a little louder this time. She gestured to Maela’s handiwork. ‘You made those bindings?’

‘I did.’

‘You were a medic?’

‘I still am.’

An educated woman in thrall to a wretched, solipsistic man. Morgravia smiled ruefully.

‘Fharkoum, he does not like you,’ Maela offered.

‘Feeling’s mutual.’

‘I overhear them talking. They think I do not listen. That I am beneath their notice.’

Morgravia wanted to hurt Fharkoum very, very much.

‘What did they say?’

‘He has a ship and a pilot. He wants to bring it here.’

‘A flyer?’ the Broker interjected, hope rising in her voice.

‘And leave us for dead, I assume,’ said Morgravia grimly.

Maela nodded.

‘Bastard…’ Morgravia’s gaze went to Jana. She slipped the shotgun over her shoulder on its strap and offered it to her. ‘If we’re going after Barak, you’ll need protection.’

Jana took it, and expertly shucked a round into the breech. Years of being the landlady of a downhive dive bar had evidently yielded some useful experience.

‘You cannot mean to go down there,’ said the Broker.

‘That’s precisely what I mean to do,’ said Jana.

Maela raised a hand, urging the others to be quiet. ‘Listen… Can you hear that?’

And in the distance, echoing through the dimly lit confines, they heard shouting and knew they wouldn’t need to go anywhere. The monsters had come to them.

Chapter XXI

Survive or die

Kharata had been less than subtle.

Sparks riddled every scrap of equipment, every device he could lay hands on once he had got what he needed from it. Tiny serpents of electricity ran rampant over wireless units, auditory scrubbers, transmitters and receivers. Static whispered through the air like the half-heard voices of the dead.

Ejecting the empty casing of his flechette pistol, Kharata took a replacement from his belt and left the vox-room behind. He moved quickly, headed to the lifter. He’d need to disable that too. A deft knife-slash through the cable would suffice. Clean. Simple. No sense in complicating matters more than they already were. It was his method. How he had survived so long doing what he did. Keep it simple. Survive or die. No moral ambiguity. No hesitation. He served Fharkoum because the fat merchant paid well, and because it suited his needs. Loyalty could be bought if you had enough coin.

The ship was coming, a way out of this merciless shit they were in.

Kharata’s only regret was not killing that bastard cattle-hand and the inquisitor. He took solace from the fact they would die anyway. The pallid would have them. More grist for mankind’s ever-churning mill.

He reached the lifter, the doors parting to reveal the odious bulk of the merchant. Sweat poured off his ample frame and Kharata had to make a concerted effort not to wrinkle his nose at the stench. He presented a mask of implacability instead.

‘When will it arrive?’ snarled Fharkoum, wiping his mouth with the cuff of a dirty sleeve. Waddling out of the lifter, he clutched Kharata’s shoulder. His laboured breath smelled faintly of lavender and soured milk.

‘Imminently.’

Fharkoum’s lip curled in an ugly, sadistic grin.

‘Then let’s make sure that inquisitor bitch and the other dregs die in this shithole.’

He patted Kharata’s cheek, a master praising his dog but with a savagery in his eyes that promised a beating if it ever failed him.

Resisting the urge to retch at the merchant’s gelid touch, Kharata dealt with the lifter cable and then led them on. The route up to the roof was close, and he fancied he could already hear the sound of faraway engines drawing nearer.

Barak was on his feet, but limping. He looked groggy, half delirious from all the blood he was losing. His shirt was drenched in crimson and he left a dark smear in his wake, his right leg dragging behind him like a dead weight. Drover kept them moving, an arm around his back, Barak’s over the gunslinger’s shoulders. A pistol hung languidly in his grasp, close to falling.

Jana ran, her injuries forgotten in her desire to reach him. Barak smiled, teeth bloody, his features haggard. She embraced him, the pair slipping slowly to the ground, arms enfolding, clenched tightly. She kissed his face, his cuts, his lips. Held him by the chin so she could see him alive, and wept for his hurts.

He breathed, ‘I’m sorry…’

And Jana shook her head, tears cutting tracts in the dried blood.

Drover sagged beside them, leaning on the wall, exhausted with the effort of heaving the hefty ex-proctor halfway through the precinct. He held his autopistol in a loose grip, and wore a bulky musette bag slung over one shoulder. He looked nearly as ragged as Barak.

‘How many?’ asked Morgravia. The itch had returned, insistent and uncomfortable. She tried to quash it through a barricade of clenched teeth.

‘Enough. We barely made it out. Managed to get a door between us but it won’t hold long.’

She gestured to the bag and Drover pulled out a clip of heavy shells, the exact fit for her stub pistol.

‘Everything on your list.’

‘And more besides?’ she asked, partially recovering her composure.

Drover nodded, a searching look in his eyes that Morgravia ignored. ‘In case we ran into trouble,’ he said, looking behind him and then tossing the bag to Maela who caught it by the strap. She had a medi-kit in the other hand with everything she could scavenge from the med-bay. ‘They’re coming, Morgravia,’ said Drover. ‘They’re coming right now.’

A long corridor swept into darkness behind him, but sound travelled easily through the gloom, a chattering, snarling refrain of bestial voices.

They waited in the darkness, a light rain slicking the landing pad and turning it black like tar.

Through the clouds of smog and pollutant, a heavy lamp beam strafed, cutting through the morass. Grainy, dispersed light fell upon the precinct roof, and Kharata winced. He stepped forwards at Fharkoum’s barked request, flagging down the gun-cutter as it hove in to land. Rivulets of rainwater ran in tiny cataracts off its wings. The nose dipped, a giant, gunmetal bird of prey nodding its acquiescence. The backwash of stabiliser jets kicked up squalls of water, little typhoons swirling away from the lander’s descent. It touched down on clawed metal pinions, a rear ramp lowering to admit its passengers.

Fharkoum hurried over to it, grimacing at the wet and the noise. He hoisted the damp skirts of his robes, the hem sodden and stained, revealing fat, pale ankles and blotchy, yellowed-nailed toes.

‘No one follows,’ he snapped back at Kharata, shouting above the drone of cycling engines.

Kharata nodded, but experienced a moment’s hesitation as he watched the fat man struggle up the ramp and into the waiting gloom of the hold.

‘Hurry up,’ snapped Fharkoum, a hand braced against the inner side of the hold, ‘or you share their fate.’

The door to the roof was sturdy. Thick metal, heavy. A tiny slit in its face allowed Kharata to peer through to the corridor inside. He saw them, barrelling and careening in their desperation. And they saw him, his dark eyes through the slit, glittering with unashamed malice. Losing the slave girl was regrettable but he could easily procure another. The rest were nothing to him.

The cattle-hand shouted something, some bawled invective, then he raised a pistol. Kharata ducked back, hissing in pain as the bullet tore along his cheek. It missed by a hair’s breadth, but the hot brass seared his skin and left a mark.

He swore, then slammed a brace against the door so it stayed shut.

‘Survive or die,’ he muttered, grimacing as he touched the burn on his cheek and ran for the gun-cutter.

Drover aimed a kick and the door shuddered but held. He threw his body against it, rebounding off, teeth gritted at his bruised shoulder.

‘Won’t yield…’ he said, rolling back against the wall, a half-glance at what was coming for them.

Morgravia pressed her face against the slit, peering into slanting rain and darkness at a ship soaring away, its engine roar diminishing as its lights faded, consumed by cloud. She turned, and saw hope die in the others’ faces. Her skin felt hot, taut, as if stretched. The itch. It gnawed at her, slowly unpicking the stitches of her sanity.

She focused on the present, on the death that was coming for them. Farther back, lit by jerking bursts of sodium brightness, she saw the pallid.

‘You want to live…’ she said, striding forwards with her pistol arm outstretched, ‘then fight. It’s us or it’s them. Survive or die. This is it.’

She fired and in the rapidly closing distance a body fell. The pallid trampled it, barely hindered, the corpse consumed by a mudslide of bodies. A shotgun blast took another, ripping away a leg and thudding it into the wall to be dashed then crushed by the onset of the horde. Jana racked a shell into the breech and fired again. Morgravia’s pistol boomed. Drover stepped up, autopistols blazing. Then came Barak, one-handed with his pistol; Maela on the second shotgun, not as capable as Jana but so close she could hardly miss. A firing line erupted, a deadly fusillade lighting up the corridor in pellucid white. It tore into the pallid, bursting torsos, shredding limbs. Heads were sundered and blown apart in the storm of shells. Another foe would have balked, fled against the onslaught of violence. The rabid herd knew no such fear, only instinct, only hunger, their minds eroded by the signal.

They reached the defenders, decimated but relentless, and fell upon them without mercy or restraint.

Morgravia lost sight of Barak in the scrum. He fell back, Jana reaching for him with a cry on her lips. She caught snatches of Drover, shouting and stabbing. Maela disappeared, having stepped in front of Barak as the old man collapsed. Stray gunfire rattled then fell silent, subsumed by animalistic voices.

She heard a shriek, like a power coil charging, and felt a flash of heat; saw a beam of perfect blue light, severing and burning. It strafed the corridor, not one beam but several, slowly turning and overlapping, scorching the walls black with their irresistible trajectory. Bright, blinding. The reek of seared flesh filled the narrow space, cloying and choking. Morgravia retched, sinking to her knees. She clutched her Inquisitorial rosette, willing herself to rise.

The light faded, the deafening shriek retreating into obscurity, leaving behind a whining tinnitus.

Smoke threaded the air, thin and dissipating. It hung over bodies dissected, butchered and almost bloodless. Every cut had cauterised, a raft of flash-seared pieces, the stumps of limbs and half-torsos, of necks, precisely severed.

Nothing remained. Pieces of plaster detached from the walls and crumbled inwards. A sodium lamp swayed like a hanged corpse until its tether snapped and it fell too, the crash obscenely loud in the sudden silence.

Only the Broker was left standing, her right arm outstretched. The fingers of her hand had fused, the hot metal of her ruined augmetics steaming and shimmering with heat haze. A fallen hood revealed her for what she was. Pale, with scratches of hair, her skin patchy with the scars of old burns. A faded brand in her flesh. Self-consciously she reached for her cowl and pulled it back over her ravaged scalp.

‘I tried…’ she uttered, her voice hoarse. ‘No one can say I didn’t try.’

Amongst the dead was Maela. She had been spared the severing beam. A dark wound blossomed on the left side of her chest, her sightless eyes staring back at the others from where she lay amongst a tangle of bodies.

Barak sank to his knees by her side. Softly, he closed her eyelids and pushed a stray hair from her face. Jana stood behind him, a hand upon her husband’s shoulder, her face contorted with sorrow. She had saved her, this courtesan; a stranger, and yet one who had risked and given everything. It seemed a poor end for such altruism.

‘Just a girl…’ muttered Barak. ‘Should’ve been me,’ he said, and started to gently weep. ‘Stupid, old, broken-down man. It should’ve been me.’

Jana’s grip tightened and Barak clasped her hand in his, shaking with grief. She wept too, tears for a daughter they never had or ever could.

Morgravia looked on, dulled to their pain. She should say something, remind them that they could not stay here. That they had to leave low-hive. Pity stopped her at the last. Let them have this, at least. They had already lost so much.

In the end, Barak spoke, intruding on her thoughts. ‘Before the precinct fell,’ he said, stiffly getting to his feet, ‘the proctors had been watching a religious cult.’

Morgravia eyed him shrewdly.

‘I found references to it in a watchman’s journal,’ Barak went on. ‘He called them “the Divine”. Mentioned their hideout too, old church at the north edge. I’m thinking they attacked the precinct, maybe even took some prisoners.’

‘What makes you say that?’ asked the inquisitor.

‘On account of the lack of bodies, and that I found this.’ He produced the piece of shattered mask he had recovered.

Drover lit up another cheroot. ‘Once a lawman, always a lawman, I suppose.’

‘The Divine wear masks like this,’ said Barak, ignoring him. ‘These are bad men, inquisitor. Really bad. Burnings, abductions.’

‘And what are you saying, exactly?’ asked Morgravia.

‘I’m saying it’s a lead. Even without your memories, even if this one,’ he jerked his chin at the Broker, ‘doesn’t make good. It’s worth following.’

Morgravia considered it. She had no guarantee even if she reached the Empath, if any of it was real, that it would cure her and that the answers she sought would be buried in her subconscious. At absolute best, it was a hunch.

‘And will you make good?’ she asked of the Broker, who had recovered a little of her poise.

‘You know my terms.’

‘We might all be dead before I can meet them.’

‘Then for all our sakes I hope it does not come to that.’

Morgravia bit back a reply. She didn’t think she could compel the Broker to reveal the Empath’s location or she would have already done so. With little other choice, it had to be this way. Quid pro quo, just as the Broker had said.

‘The gate lies to the north,’ she decided eventually, ‘so does the church if it’s at the north edge.’

Drover took a drag on his tabac and exhaled a long plume of smoke. ‘That’s settled then.’ His eyes fell on the Broker. ‘I assume the Empath lies that way too?’

The Broker didn’t answer, though her face betrayed her ambivalence as she picked her way through the bodies.

The others followed, and left only the dead behind.

Chapter XXII

Swallow the bullet

Kharata saw the gate to uphive ahead, an immense ferrocrete barrier than had more in kind with an ancient fastness than a border wall. Distant figures moved along its battlements too far away to discern any details. They faced a mass of desperate humanity, the crowds before the gate swelling like a living sea. A riot of bodies, made anonymous by its sheer number, hammered at the unyielding metal to be let through, but the monolithic gate stayed firm.

As the gun-cutter came in low under the smog layer, specifics resolved at an accelerated rate.

A thicket of razor wire crowned the walls, which were marginally lower than the gate itself and bridged the relatively narrow causeway between low-hive and uphive. Watchmen in up-armoured proctor garb manned the ramparts, a garrison stationed for the express purpose of keeping people out. Flamer teams stood at the ready, poised before murder slits, prepared to douse the region directly in front of the gate should there be an unauthorised breach. Heavy stubbers angled low on their pintle mounts, piled on threat, but didn’t fire.

Not yet.

Kharata counted eight gun nests from where he crouched by the gun-cutter’s side hatch. He watched as a dozen canisters jetted out into the crowds trailing vapour. Tear gas erupted in bulbous mushroom clouds, quickly blanketing the rioters, who recoiled like a single organism. He heard distant screaming and imagined the stampede below.

‘Hail them,’ snarled Fharkoum, peeking at the carnage through a vision slit as he dabbed the sweat from his lips.

Kharata used the hold’s vox to contact the pilot, who did as bidden. The reply from the wall was terse. It mentioned the phrases ‘restricted area’ and ‘turn back immediately’. Two of the gun nests had two-man rocket tubes. One lined up on the gun-cutter’s trajectory.

Fharkoum swore, his fear and arrogance bleeding from his pores in a sickly-smelling sweat.

‘Offer to pay,’ he said, ‘any amount.’

‘These are gate watch, master,’ Kharata offered, still hanging out of the side hatch. His eyes narrowed. Behind the milling crowds, he saw movement, an army on the march. ‘They do not accept bribes.’

‘I don’t fucking care. Do it!’ Fharkoum roared, spittle flying, a hacking cough erupting from his corpulent body.

No, not an army, Kharata realised. A horde. The pallid.

Urgent requests for clarification hissed through bouts of vox static, as the pilot started to get nervous. They were still on course for the gate, and now a second rocket tube had angled towards the gun-cutter.

Kharata barely registered. He watched in morbid fascination as the pallid scurried below like a greasy flood, the tendrils of the horde reaching like talons. Panic rippled through the crowds at the gate as they slowly realised what was upon them. The rear edges, those too afraid to get close or sent reeling by tear gas, disappeared first. Absorbed. Consumed. The hungry tide spilled on and now the crowds fled or fought. Not that it mattered. Two opposing poles met in the middle and were crushed. Confusion took hold, abruptly dissipating as the realisation of what the rear ranks were running from became apparent.

A fresh tide swell gained momentum in the direction of the gate, braving the thready remnants of the gas and the threat of the guns, impelled by the fear of something worse. One of the watchman had his eye to a scope and called out. His outstretched finger pronounced death as if it had been granted godlike power in the very act of pointing. Men, women, children were ripped apart and torn down, or else burst into flames as every weapon on the wall opened up.

Though he dearly wished to, Kharata could not look away. A savage yank of his shoulder brought him around and he found himself staring into the verminous, bloodshot eyes of his employer. A cloying stench assailed his nostrils, a mix of poorly masked body odour and pungent halitosis.

‘Offer to pay…’ Fharkoum hissed through clenched, overly white teeth. One molar glinted with a precious gemstone.

A blow from the flat of Kharata’s palm sent Fharkoum sprawling back into his seat. The fat merchant’s expression went from confused, to angry, to fearful as he fell under the hired gun’s regard.

‘Do not touch me like that again,’ Kharata warned, but then answered the pilot’s frantic calls with the instruction to bribe the watchmen.

Their answer was emphatic. A rocket blasted towards the gun-cutter, riding a contrail of ignition. The gun-cutter banked hard, and Kharata flew out of the side-hatch as Fharkoum was flung from his seat and hit the side of the hold. The hired gun clung to the guide rail, managing to get a toehold on the edge of the hatch and pull himself in.

He hammered the vox, screaming at the pilot to turn around. He spared a glance for Fharkoum, who was bleeding from a head wound and crawling across the deck reaching for something to cling to.

The pilot didn’t reply as he banked again to avoid a second rocket. A shudder trembled through the fuselage as the rocket exploded against the hull. The shriek of tearing metal followed. Then they were spinning, the view through the open side hatch flitting past in frenzied revolutions. Smoke obscured everything, spilling into the hold, choking the buffeting air. Through the vox, the pilot urged them to brace. Seconds later, hard impact and the screech of deformed metal as the hull bunched and split. A wing tore off; Kharata saw it spiral away into the murky distance like a leaf tossed on a hurricane. Earth churned, the gun-cutter’s prow turning plough as it dug its burial furrow. Armourglass shattered as the cockpit crumpled inwards, unable to resist the forces being exerted against it. Kharata hung on, battered against the inside of the hold. He tasted blood, felt a bone snap. Bit back the hurt behind a barricade of clenched teeth. On and on it went, the rumbling, rattling cacophony of the crash, pieces ripping away, split off like satellites in a decaying orbit, metal yielding and buckling.

The gun-cutter shuddered to a halt, spewing steam and smoke. At the edge of hearing, fire crackled dulcetly.

Kharata opened his eyes, relieved to be alive. He lay on the deck, his eye drawn to a thick shaft of light spilling through the open side hatch. He had no idea where they had crashed; his only view was bright but indistinct. A sodium lamp, flickering. Inside. They had speared through a building. Rock dust, dangling as motes in the hot air, confirmed it.

The pilot was dead. Nothing remained of the cockpit. A hand extruded from a crush of deformed metal. A single blood trail did little justice to the ruin inflicted on the body.

Fharkoum floundered like a swollen rat, trapped against the deck by a heavy spur of metal. He groaned, writhing in unfamiliar agony, unable to fathom why he couldn’t move properly.

Kharata tried to get to his feet but a sharp spike of pain put him down again, and he realised his leg was broken. He found a piece of shredded pipe, something from the inside of the hull, and fashioned a splint with wiring wrenched from a broken wall panel. He tied it tight, grimacing, and found a thin but long piece of panelling to use as a crutch.

He heard Fharkoum groggily slur his name from across the hold. Kharata looked up from his labours but didn’t go to his master. The fat merchant started shouting, his rage and pain congealing into something base and primordial.

Rising gingerly, Kharata tested the crutch and his leg. It hurt like hell, but he was up at least.

Another groan from Fharkoum, and now his bleary gaze found the hired gun. He swore, a veritable barrage of expletives, first promising riches, and then retribution if Kharata did not act to rescue him.

‘Get me out, get me out…’ Fharkoum blathered, pushing pathetically at the spur firmly pinning him to the deck. He flailed and lurched, his obese frame contorting ineffectually.

‘Kharata…’ he snarled, and then as he realised his plight he uttered much more softly and incredulously, ‘Kharata?’

The hired gun turned away, his only gift to his master a contemptuous look as he shuffled through the side hatch of the grounded gun-cutter and into the ruined building beyond.

‘Kharata! Kharata, you bastard! I’ll skin you, whoreson! Guttersnipe! Kharata… help me… Any price. Name any price… Kharata!’

Fharkoum’s screamed threats and accusations followed him, as did pleading. And weeping.

As he limped away from the gently burning wreck, Kharata saw the pallid converging. They were still a little way off, enough time for him to be on his way. A maglev tunnel offered a way out and he made for it with a little urgency. As fat as Fharkoum was, the pallid were voracious and would not feast for long.

He had put a decent distance between himself and the wreck as the pallid reached it. Fharkoum’s screams rose to fever pitch, a shrieking girlish terror that abruptly cut off into silence.

After a last look back, darkness swallowed Kharata as he entered the maglev tunnel. It went deeper into Low Sink, running south, but that hardly mattered. The gate was impenetrable. No one would be getting through, although a last image surfaced in his mind as he ventured into the black, of the pallid at the gate, climbing…

A low hum betrayed the lethal energy coursing through the rail and Kharata made certain to stay clear, hugging the opposite side of the tunnel. Slowly, his eyes adjusted to the darkness. A gaunt, pale visage loomed for him. A pallid, slow and ailing. He shot it through the head, flechette pistol in one hand, crutch in the other. He kept moving. Debris caught underfoot and he stumbled more than once. A second pallid staggered from the murky darkness. It wasn’t alone. Kharata killed it, and the rest.

The flechette pistol clicked empty. He patted his bodyglove but had no further reloads, so he tossed the priceless weapon and focused on moving.

Limping hard, sweat beading his face, sticky beneath the bodyglove, Kharata felt the fear return. He heard them nearby, shuffling, sniffing, snarling. He felt the tunnel rumble as a crackle of energy surged through the rail. The maglevs ran on an automated schedule and the next carriage flashed by, raucous and bright. The harsh light revealed more pallid. Lots more. They clamoured down the tunnel, emerging from alcoves and nooks, starved and desperate.

Kharata hurried on, but the broken leg slowed him like an anchor. A glow flickered ahead, the promise of a station. He pushed on harder, striving to reach the light, to reach salvation. Heart thudding, breath scything. Then he fell, the crutch having snapped beneath him. White pain flared, every nerve ending aflame. A scent of rot and dank wafted over and he knew they were close. Too close.

He felt the electrical jolt of the rail. It was near enough to touch.

Kharata knew men like him died in one of two ways. Either they were killed in the prosecution of their profession, or their fallen morality would eventually catch up to them and they would swallow a bullet to escape their self-hatred. He did not believe in the latter, thinking it the way of cowards. A sociopath like him had no morality. He only had his mantra.

Survive or die.

Rancid breath washed across his ear, pricking his nostrils.

Kharata made his choice. He reached out and seized the rail.

Chapter XXIII

Buried in the flesh

The Mule headed north, its passengers riding in funerary silence, the rig’s jangling metal refrain a lament to their mourning. The precinct house was a lightless and towering shadow in the background, its haunted shell gratefully left behind. A few miles off yet lay the border, and from there a few more miles to the gate to uphive. Morgravia watched as Meagre submitted to slumber again, as if the horrors had retreated to lick their wounds; or perhaps they simply lay in wait. Hunched figures still shuffled along the periphery, too far away and too slow to be of concern. Meagre had never been an affluent place, but now it belonged to the pallid.

Drover had the wheel. He had been quiet since they left the precinct, uncharacteristically so. Barak slept fitfully in the back, his injuries having earned him a respite, his head on Jana’s shoulder. The Broker sat alongside, a dignified distance between them, staring into the shadows outside the window as the skeleton of the settlement slipped by in jagged silhouette. She clung to the wrist of her ruined hand as if the very act of grasping it would ease the pain of her fused fingers.

‘This horror…’ the Broker said, her voice barely louder than a murmur in the back.

Jana stirred, but Barak slept on.

‘It will consume this place. I can taste it, on the air… the fear. It will drive us all mad. Perhaps it already is.’

Jana leaned over to put a consoling hand on the Broker’s shoulder.

‘Have hope. We are alive. If we can reach the border then–’

‘It will not matter,’ said the Broker, and turned towards the front of the cab. ‘She knows.’

Morgravia looked up but didn’t speak. Her skin prickled as if reacting to an intense heat, but it was cold in the cab. Sweat beaded her face and she wiped it away with a gloved hand.

‘She knows what follows,’ the Broker continued, ‘if this does not stop. They will burn it. Her kind. To preserve the body, sever the limb. Is that not the way? A purging fire? No one is getting through that gate alive. They simply will not allow it.’

The bitterness radiated as palpably as the heat prickling Morgravia’s feverish skin. A sense of violation had begun to overwhelm her, like mites burrowing into her flesh. Only through an effort of will did she keep it in check. Her chest thumped with palpitations as a bout of dyspnoea took hold. Her throat constricted, her every nerve raw and burning. Pain flared in her eye like a hot needle rammed into the iris. Her will collapsed, like a dam capitulating against the wrath of a raging torrent. It gave, and so did she.

‘Let me out…’ she croaked, so hoarse it barely registered.

Drover turned an ear but hadn’t really heard her.

Morgravia gasped, wrenching out a breath, barely able to draw in more. She clenched the rig’s front panel, finally getting Drover’s attention.

‘You all right?’ he asked, looking askance at her, his eyes mainly on the road.

An old mining district loomed in the distance, abandoned and drenched in foreboding. The rig had taken the main road that led through it, the ramshackle silos and warehouses drifting closer.

‘Let me out,’ Morgravia said, louder, a fire surging through her flesh as whatever had been buried within fought for release.

Drover frowned. ‘In this wasteland? There’s nothing here.’

‘Right now, damn it!’ Morgravia shouted, the urge to be violently sick forcing her stomach to contract.

The rig slewed to a halt on a patch of scrubland.

She tumbled out, half leaping, half falling and vomited all over the ground. Spitting out the last of it, Morgravia expected to see something in her ejection, some grim evidence of the contagion she harboured. A foetid pool of regurgitant swilled before her, but it was largely an accretion of bile. It stung her throat, hot and acerbic.

The sensation did not end with the evacuation of her stomach. It stirred, the feeling within, like surgical tools probing.

‘I need a moment…’ she said, gasping at the pain inside her, and staggered towards the dilapidated shell of a manufactory, limned by the glow of the rig’s lamps. She needed to get away, out of sight, a few minutes to think, to understand. Only the lower floor of the building remained, but Morgravia had caught sight of an ablutions block, old, disused but still standing. She made for it.

‘Inquisitor?’ asked the Broker, before opening the door and stepping outside.

‘What the hell is happening?’ said Drover.

‘Stay with the rig,’ Morgravia called to him, and said nothing more.

The Broker started to follow her.

Drover leaned out of the window. ‘And where are you going? This ain’t no time to be wandering off.’

‘I forget the part where the money I paid you affords you the right to question me,’ the Broker replied, and walked away.

Drover swore again, lighting up another cheroot as he watched her go.

A narrow gantry bridged a labour trench that led to the entrance of the manufactory. Whatever ores dug from the earth it had once refined had dried up long ago. It was lightless and cold, like a snuffed candle in winter. An industrial odour pervaded. The manufactory had been stripped of anything of worth. Dust had settled like a shroud. Gang insignia daubed slate-grey walls. Evidence of recent fires littered the ground. Chains hanging from the high ceiling reminded her of nooses as they gently swayed this way and that, clinking whenever they touched.

The ablutions block was appended to the main manufactory and comprised several small cells. Each had a basin, mirror and wash faucet. Grimy off-white ceramic tiled the immediate surrounds. As she stepped into one of the cubicles, Morgravia felt her heart thundering like heavy ordnance. The pain flared, a sensation of violent rebirth running through her body. She clung to her sides, hoping to hold in whatever felt like it was trying to push itself out. Her eye burned, and she clenched the lid shut as she engaged the old sodium lamp above the basin and clung on like she had in the barracks.

She breathed, slow and steady, reciting the mantra.

‘A mind without purpose will walk in dark places…’

She reminded herself who she was, what she was, despite the ever-present sense of disassociation. Her will was everything. She had seen the abyss and had not flinched. And slowly but certainly, Morgravia found calm. Her breathing eased and her heart resumed a more natural rhythm.

‘Is this why…?’ a voice asked behind her.

It was the Broker, having followed her from the rig.

‘An injury taken at the precinct house, that’s all,’ said Morgravia, though she didn’t turn around at first, nor did she look at her reflection.

‘Not a good lie,’ the Broker said. ‘I have heard better.’

Morgravia clenched her fists, the echo of the itch in her flesh stirring. ‘What do you want?’

‘I want to know your secret. Why are you out here?’

‘I learn secrets, I don’t divulge them.’

‘I have to say, it intrigued me,’ the Broker continued, as if Morgravia hadn’t spoken. ‘An inquisitor in need of an unsanctioned psyker. I thought it might be a trap at first. That’s why I brought a friend.’

Morgravia licked her lips, surprised at how dry they’d become. She tasted bile and winced at the caustic flavour. ‘You don’t mean Arum Drover, though.’

The Broker’s expression soured. Morgravia saw it in the mirror, relieved to see her own face reflected back at her and not something else.

‘He is a hireling, exactly as you said,’ the Broker went on. ‘Hallow’s End had a reputation. I thought I might need the extra protection.’

‘And the cipher you gave him?’

‘Useless. I just needed you to believe I had a proxy who could deliver what you wanted.’

‘So you were planning on betraying me.’

‘Of course.’

‘And him too.’

‘He had already been paid. He loses nothing.’

‘So, why are you really here? It’s not to know my secret. It’s to divulge yours, isn’t it?’ She turned then, her face impassive. ‘You’re the Empath.’

A moment of silence stretched between them, a gulf of indecision which would change their relationship forever.

In the end, the Broker decided to relent. ‘How long have you known?’

‘I wasn’t certain until I saw the brand. That’s a witch mark. An old one. I assume you escaped your persecutors. What was it, local militia, bounty hunter?’

‘Neither. They were just men. Blinded by fear and hatred. Petty minds who wanted to hurt what they didn’t understand because it made them feel safer. I killed them. After they branded me. I eviscerated their minds, turned them into empty vessels. Then I fled and found solace of a kind in Meagre. I plied my trade, became known as the Broker. Did well. I am good at knowing what someone wants.’

‘And now you’re being hunted again.’

The Broker gave a bitter smile. ‘I was… incautious. An ear to the ground, I heard a hook had been cast. I was not lying when I said I had made enemies.’

‘What if it’s me?’ said Morgravia flatly. ‘What if the reason I am here is you?’

She smiled again, wryly. ‘You are not here for me, and we both know it. More likely it is a–’

A shot rang out, startling in the quiet of the ablutions block.

Morgravia drew her pistol on instinct, then saw the red bloom unfolding across the Broker’s robes. Or the Empath’s. It made no difference when she fell, slowly, to one knee, and then lay on her side, gasping for breath.

‘It’s like I told you,’ Arum Drover’s voice issued from the shadows, ‘not everyone is always what they seem.’

He emerged slowly, a spectre from the gloom. The charm remained, but tempered by something cruel and greedy.

‘You’ll drop that hand cannon if you please,’ he said, wagging his gun at her. ‘I like you, inquisitor, but not that much. And unlike that witch dying on the ground over there, I ain’t the trusting kind.’

Morgravia did as he asked, her heavy stub pistol landing with a thud.

‘You were hunting her,’ she said, putting herself between Drover and his mark.

‘Not me specifically, but I took a contract. I like to get close to my kills before I pull the trigger.’

‘And she was under your nose all this time.’

Just like he was right under mine and I missed it.

‘I’ll admit that’s a little galling, but I didn’t know the Empath, what she looked like, her hideouts. No one did. That’s what interested me. I did know of her Broker, though. She puts herself around. Has to in her profession, I suppose. I kept my ear out, found out someone was looking,’ he nodded to Morgravia, ‘and offered my services as a mercenary.’

‘Who’s even left to pay you?’

‘I’ll find a precinct house that’ll honour the fee. If not, I’ll find her stash. Shouldn’t be too hard. I reckon there’ll be enough there to compensate. Broker was a rich woman.’

‘Still is.’

‘Not for much longer.’

‘I can’t let you kill her.’

Drover’s face rumpled in mock perplexity. ‘Don’t see as how you have much choice, given I’m the one holding the gun and I don’t see your skull-faced assassin anywhere hereabouts. She’s a helluva thing, by the way. Never seen anyone kill like that. Where’d you find her? Oh, that’s right,’ he said, wagging a finger in self-remonstration, ‘you don’t remember, do you? Can’t imagine what that must be like. You have my sympathies, and I mean that sincerely, but I have a contract to fulfil and I’d like to do so before there’s no leaving this place. So… if you don’t mind.’

‘Can’t do it.’

Drover gave a curt sigh and bit his lip, agitated. ‘How’s about this. I let you get what you need from her and then you head on your way. I get my fee, you get your memories. No downside.’

‘Can’t. Do. It.’

He swore. ‘She’s about half dead already. Nothing to gain here by being obstinate. Now, stand aside so I can finish her off. No reason for you to die.’

Morgravia held her ground. She felt the itch, strong and insistent, the slow uncoiling of something within her, a waking presence reacting to the threat.

‘I am a servant of the Holy Ordos,’ she said with difficulty, trying to hold the itch at bay, but it grew, expanding, conjoining as the red dream became suddenly more tangible.

cutting parting bones reshaped replaced with metal and piston blades and gears red as blood cables and wires like veins

‘And I have no desire to kill one,’ said Drover, ‘but I will.’

‘You’ll bring the wrath of the Inquisition down on you…’ she gasped, the ends of her fingers burning as she felt something sharp pushing through the tips.

‘I doubt that. If they gave a shit about you, they’d already be here,’ said Drover, seemingly oblivious to Morgravia’s discomfort.

She reeled.

Is this a symptom of my fractured mind?

He was still talking. ‘This city is going to hell. It’ll be assumed you died along with it.’

She blinked, and a grainy red haze overlaid her vision. A data stream scrolled across her iris, the focusing rings expanding and contracting. Gauging, measuring.

‘I can bring you Hel…’ she said, trying to hold on, trying not to collapse as she teetered on the brink.

‘Is that what you call her?’

‘Only to her face,’ said Morgravia, glancing at the shadows behind him. Drover half turned, fearing the effigy of death in his midst, and pulled his aim. Just enough.

Morgravia rushed him, her monomolecular blade carving a silver blur through the air. She heard the pistol retort, and felt the pinch in her side. Her armour absorbed the worst of it, but the bullet found flesh. A second shot followed the first, this one pushed aside before the muzzle flared, Morgravia’s hand on the barrel. A tile splintered with the impact. Her other hand slashed up with the knife, carving a ragged red line through the Drover’s duster.

He swore. ‘Can’t believe I fell for that,’ he growled, still wrestling to draw a bead on the inquisitor. ‘I must really like you.’ Firing off a burst, he raked the wall instead. More splinters, shattering ceramic.

Morgravia brought her knee up into his stomach. Drover let out a grunt, tossed one pistol and drew the other. Bleeding profusely, he got off a shot and Morgravia cried out as the bullet clipped her shoulder. She was empty-handed, and as the autopistol fell from Drover’s nerveless fingers he realised why. A monomolecular blade was embedded in his chest up to the hilt.

No, it wasn’t the knife. That lay on the ground, flecked with blood. She had dropped it. A blade extruded from Morgravia’s flesh, her fingers having split and conjoined into a lengthened spear of metal.

Drover staggered back as the blade slid out of him, the tongue of metal retracting as if sentient, and spat up a little blood. Barging into a basin, he slid to his rump, legs akimbo, arms by his sides. Breath sawed from his mouth, blood pooled in his lap. He gaped, eyes widening as a look of sheer, unreasoning terror contorted his features. He reached for a gun that wasn’t there, then he slumped over and did not move again.

Morgravia groaned, clutching at her arm, aghast at the bloody spar of metal inexplicably conjoined with her body. A lurching sensation overcame her, like a moment of disconcerting weightlessness before a fall. Head spinning, she crumpled onto her elbows and knees as something uncurled inside her gut. Letting out a thin, wordless cry, she tried to crawl as kaleidoscope images surfaced in her mind, crashing together like disjointed tides. The red dream… every aberration, every abuse and incursion of her flesh, collapsing and reforming…

Coalescing.

The scent of chemical sanitisation and iron, of meat and cold tangs the air. A laboratory takes form. Robed figures huddle around the slab upon which she is lying. They are festooned with blades, with scalpels and saws, and drills and hot, red beams. Their regard is alien and automated. She is a living autopsy splayed out for experimentation. Her skin is pinned back, her organs exposed. A heart pulses, rapid and arrhythmic. It glistens in the cool light like a fleshy apple mutated with arteries. It takes a few moments for her to realise it is hers. A pair of lungs inflate and deflate in stuttering dyspnoea, also hers. Ribs, cracked open and wide, admit invaders. They come with the intent to cleave, to cut, to sever and partition. They click and whirr, her faceless surgeons, creatures of metal and the sparest flesh. They remove bone and parts of her intestines. Steam rises from several nearby basins, reeking with an abattoir stench. Her surgeons emit a series of curt shrieks and whines, undercut by hissing static as they converse. Parsing their language is impossible and leaves only the impression of screaming, a cacophony of hoarse, emotionless screaming. And she realises she is screaming too, in horror, as agony descends in a red veil and the reality of their violation of her embeds itself like cold ice. As she is remade. And the surgeons cut and converse, deaf to her dismay, as cold and uncaring as the void, and in the shadows, two red suns loom over her before blackness sweeps in and the rest is lost.

She tasted dirt, and realised her face was touching the ground. Morgravia rose, slowly and experimentally. Fearing what she would see, she looked at her arm but it was flesh again, albeit with a thin seam of dried blood around the forearm and the gaps between her fingers. Like a zip, or the petals of a flower closing at dusk. The irrefutable reality of that struck her like a blow, and she fought to quash the profound sense of unravelling.

Morgravia clutched her shoulder, biting back the pain from the bullet hole. It gave her focus, an anchor to ground her. It staved off the nebulous sense of dread rising like bile up her throat. Trauma had provoked a reaction. The tenebrosity veiling her memories had parted a fraction allowing in a sliver of revelation, but still the answers would not come.

She saw the Empath, lying in a pool of blood, and crawled to her. One glance at the wound in the Empath’s chest and Morgravia knew she was near death. The psyker reached out to the inquisitor, fingers trembling. Her mouth gaped, opening and closing in a futile attempt at speech. Morgravia took her hand, but the Empath wrenched it away and strained to touch the inquisitor’s forehead.

Trembling herself now, Morgravia leaned in and closed her eyes. She felt the chill caress of hoarfrost and the convulsion of an electrical charge as the gated vaults of her memory opened and were let out.

Chapter XXIV

Burning for our sins

After what felt like several hours, the terminus of the maglev rail led Cristo and the others to a dilapidated church. An old, tarnished effigy of the eagle crested a broken spire and bore down on anyone walking beneath it like a fell omen. Fire had devoured the roof, leaving black spurs like ribs in its wake. The reek of cooking meat choked the air, directing Cristo’s gaze from the monolithic church to a nest of hanging cages. Within each cage he saw partly burned bodies, their limbs like sticks of charcoaled kindling. A glance at Convocation, at the dewy state of his wide eyes, betrayed the fact he had put these men and women to death. He had judged them, possibly first with the blade, but then with the flame. He had done so under the auspice of the Emperor’s will, framing it as righteous. Necessary, even. Men such as the priest always sought excuses for their depravity. Cristo knew then that he would have to kill this man, or he would surely kill all of them. The alternative was indoctrination, subsumption into the cult.

‘His glory upon us…’ Convocation whispered, nodding for his flock to drag the prisoners onward.

It had been fortified, this church of perverted faith. Thorny tank traps stood outside, an impediment to the restless dead. Scaffolds holding up makeshift watch stations were occupied by snipers carrying crude rifles. A gate fashioned from two pieces of tank armour plate, doubtless stolen from an abandoned manufactory and welded to a pillar and hinge, barred the way. At Convocation’s shouted proclamation, the gate opened, admitting them into the heart of his twisted fiefdom.

Beyond its fortifications, the church was less rigorously intact. Its narthex had all but collapsed into disrepair, amounting to little more than a fractured arch of stone. Only when they entered the crumbling nave did Cristo finally understand what had happened to the people of Meagre, at least those yet living.

Crude pens had been erected and here the survivors were amassed, dirty, hollow-eyed and awaiting judgement. And before them lay their fate. A massive pit had been dug into the heart of the nave, extending down into darkness so deep it could have been fathomless, the stone flags split and sundered around it. The sheer size of it defied belief as a man-made excavation and yet the sounds of toil from below could be heard faintly echoing, putting the lie to its bottomless appearance. A crude wooden gantry zigzagged down one interior flank, disappearing into darkness. Another jutted out over the pit like a gangplank.

The pens looked down into this great yawning chasm, a sacrificial pit in all but name, the burn cages suspended above it. Their inhabitants were both fuel for sacrifices and recruits for Convocation’s army. Queues of pale-faced, haunted individuals snaked from the pens to a pair of lecterns, where a robed acolyte interrogated them. Cristo couldn’t hear what was being said but he saw the outcome of these terrifying interviews. A false answer, a sentiment that did not support the faith of the Divine, and you were dragged to the cages and hoisted over the pit to await immolation. Demonstrate enough fervour, a taste for the aberrant creed of madmen, and you were awarded a mask and a cudgel or knife.

There was weeping, screaming. Several prisoners wore the torn uniform of proctors. Most of these ended up with a mask. Cristo saw one poor soul beaten to death for trying to resist and another slit her own throat with a jagged piece of glassaic rather than face the flames. The cages were filling, and he had the sense that the lesser acolytes had been waiting for their high priest to return. Eighteen cages in all, suspended at various heights. The charred corpses of their former occupants were released by long pikes unlatching the bases of the cages and then letting the blackened remains fall as ashen offerings. It wasn’t always clean, though. Skeletal hands came apart from their former wrists and were left clinging to the bars like fetishes, a grim foretaste of what awaited whoever next entered the cage.

Cristo could scarcely believe his eyes. ‘Holy Throne…’

He watched as a factorum worker was led onto the gangplank, the two lecterns either side looming down upon him. Rather than submit to the ruling of the court, the man ran, bolting for the gangplank’s edge, preferring a quick death to being burned alive.

A pistol shot rang out, clear as a clarion, and the man slumped a few feet from making his fatal leap. Crimson blossomed on his back as two masked thugs fetched him and dragged him away.

‘None shall besmirch His glory,’ uttered Convocation, the pistol in his hand still trailing smoke from its recently used barrel. He had appeared silently alongside Cristo, his tread soft but his aroma unmistakable. ‘You asked me before where you were being taken,’ he said. ‘Look now and see… Ruination! The end of mankind as we know it, and the Emperor’s judgement over all sin.’

‘You think that pit is the Emperor?’

‘It is the maw that must forever be fed. For the Imperium to thrive, sacrifices must be made.’

‘This is insane…’ It slipped out, as natural as breathing, but the priest did not react adversely, though his eyes widened as he sermonised.

‘It is the only sanity that remains to us. A return to the old ways, to fire and purity. His will!’

He gestured, and they were ushered into the pens. As they stumbled through the gate, joining with a mass of others who were awaiting their fate, Cristo took Karina in his arms. She hugged him back fiercely, her eyes afraid.

‘What is happening? What are they doing?’

Cristo shook his head. He had no answer. ‘Stay together,’ he said. ‘I’ll get us out.’

‘How?’

‘I don’t know,’ he replied, his gaze wandering the crowd for inspiration.

The earlier hysteria that had led to the deaths had faded, replaced by a weary acceptance. The prisoners remained huddled but shuffled towards their end like dull-eyed cattle.

Celestia stared about herself, bewildered.

‘It’s an aberration,’ she said. ‘They are depraved. The mad have begun to eat each other.’

Cristo reached out and took her hand. The zealots had taken her ceremonial sword, Celestia wise enough not to try to stop them, but she watched as Vanquish was presented to the priest and Convocation slid it into his belt, a trophy of conquest. She had already earned several dark looks from the priest’s flock, her religious vestments a challenge to their own twisted beliefs. They had yet to act upon it, but Cristo thought it was only a matter of time.

‘I shall see it returned to you,’ he said.

Another promise he likely couldn’t keep.

‘They will perish for this,’ she answered, her voice vehement. ‘Not for the sword but for what they have done in His name.’

Truly the Emperor had forsaken this place and in His stead had arisen something darker, a simulacrum of the Imperial faith, but one held up to a dirty mirror and reflected back.

Staring into the darkness of the pit, Cristo could not help but wonder what was down there and why these twisted men and women had raised the church of their religion around it.

A shout rose up from the ranks of the Divine as if in answer. Part signal, part affirmation.

‘Look away,’ he told his daughter, but she did not. None of them did.

The cages were lit. The screaming began anew.

Chapter XXV

Fractured memories

Fragments resolved, pieces of a greater whole. She didn’t remember everything, not immediately. Oshanti flying the ship as they came in to land over the haunted spires of Blackgheist. His laughter as Roper made a dumb joke, stroking his coiffured moustaches for effect. Roper’s cold, dead eyes as she crawled over his gunshot body. Hel eager to leave the ship’s hold, and her graceful cartwheeling as the rear hatch opened. Carnergie following in her wake, making some sardonic comment about the ebullience of youth. And then Carnergie atomised by a flash of light, too late raising her forcefield, too drunk to notice the trap their enemies had set.

The memories returned in a violent cascade that threatened the banks of Morgravia’s mind. They were ill-ordered, confused, a melange of thoughts and emotions.

A word rose prominently, however, and the inquisitor knew instinctively that this was the reason she had been hunting.

Valgaast.

A cult of the machine, of arcane technologies and proscribed science. They were a cancer requiring excision and Morgravia had been the scalpel.

That had been then. Before she was sprawled on the ground, jackknifed in agony. Before her mind had been flensed and raked. Before her agents were slaughtered with only the sparest flickers of memory as proof of their existence.

Morgravia had lived. She had been taken, bloody and beaten, and dragged before the heads of the cult. They wore dark robes, sigils woven into the fabric resembling both the machine cog and the eight-pointed star, the mark of Ruin. Of evil.

She had underestimated them, both their reach and the depths of their depravity. Arrogance had blinded her. Impatience had sealed her fate. They reduced her to a subject, an experiment. They remade her, cut her flesh, emptied her and refilled the void with horrors, before restitching her again.

I am a vessel for their evil…

The heavy stub pistol glinted in the coarse light of the ablutions cell. Morgravia reached for it, contrition framing her expression as she gathered the sidearm into her grasp and looked down upon the Empath. She was dead, frostbitten and cold to the touch. Tiny icicles glittered on her eyelashes like diamonds.

‘I am the signal…’ she uttered, unsurprised at the bitterness in her voice.

Not only had the Valgaast violated her flesh, they had engineered it so she would betray herself and all she stood for. It was a hard pill to swallow, so she put the gun into her mouth instead. Bit down on the barrel, angling it just right so it would blow out the back of her head. One pull. Her life for thousands. It wasn’t suicide. It was necessary. A sacrifice. Stop the signal, end the threat. She would not become an abomination, not for them.

Morgravia closed her eyes, felt her finger tightening on the trigger. Just a little pressure needed…

Then hesitated.

It wasn’t enough. The cult had to burn. Root and branch. It was the only way to be sure they were done.

Easing her finger off the trigger, she gagged, tears in her eyes as she removed the gun barrel from her mouth. The taste of it lingered. Warm metal and cordite. She took a long, shuddering breath and hauled herself to her feet.

Barak and Jana were waiting for her as she trudged back to the rig.

The ex-proctor looked sallow, leaning heavily against the rig, Jana by his side.

‘Where are the others?’ she asked, silently noting the inquisitor’s haggard appearance. ‘I heard gunshots.’

‘Dead. Drover killed the Broker and I killed Drover,’ Morgravia replied flatly, and kept on walking. ‘Take the rig. Get to the gate.’ She dug around in her longcoat, pulling out her Inquisitorial rosette. She tossed it to Jana, who scrambled to catch it.

‘What’s this? And what do you mean they’re dead? What’s happening?’

‘An ending, at last.’ She gestured to the rosette. ‘You’ll need that. They won’t let you through without it. Say you’re my acolytes. That you’re on Inquisition business. They’ll be too afraid to challenge you. Easier just to let you through.’

At least, I hope they will.

Barak stepped into Morgravia’s path as she was passing the rig. He gently clasped her wrist and asked very softly. ‘Why are they dead?’

‘Because neither were what they seemed,’ Morgravia told him, ‘and nor am I, it would appear.’

If Barak thought anything about that last remark he didn’t mention it.

‘We can’t just leave you here,’ he said. ‘I won’t do it.’

‘I walk alone, Barak,’ Morgravia replied. ‘I have to. It’s not safe for either of you. You have to let me.’

He held her gaze for a moment as if gauging her veracity then nodded, letting his hand fall to his side. ‘You’re headed to the church, aren’t you.’

‘In a manner of speaking, I am.’

He nodded at that too, though the tension in his jawline told her he wanted to come with her and avenge the dead from Precinct IX.

‘Be careful,’ said Barak.

‘Just reach the gate. If I fail, it’ll be all that stands between the plague and the rest of the hive. I’d prefer you on the other side of it.’

Barak looked like he wanted to say more but thought better of it. Morgravia preferred it that way. She had never been one for sentiment, and felt nothing of it now. She carried on walking.

‘We won’t meet again,’ she called back. ‘And do not try to find me.’

Because I’ll be dead.

Barak gave no answer. A few minutes later, the rig sputtered and chugged away into the distance.

A lonely figure waited for her in the shadows. It was short and lithe, and held itself with a dancer’s poise, but Morgravia knew better.

A stir of old memories swilled to the forefront of her mind as she looked at Hel. A young girl, nervous and afraid, barefoot as she held onto her mother’s hand. At the temple of the Sanguinous, its huge bronze doors opening. A forbidding darkness and the scent of death. A tiny hand slipping loose from hers, as soft footsteps led up to the threshold. Innocence sacrificed. Silent tears. Darkness all consuming. The doors shut on one life, then open on another. Loss compounded by loss, and magnified.

‘I have found you, Mother,’ uttered Hel, and gave a shallow curtsey.

‘Not just me,’ Morgravia replied. ‘You’ve something else, haven’t you.’

Hel bowed. ‘Have you remembered?’

‘Some.’

‘Follow me then, I know the way.’

Morgravia fought back grief, fought the urge to touch Hel’s face, to feel the innocence she knew had long departed. It was a longing in her, a deep yearning. She betrayed none of this. For she did not understand it, the lacuna in her memories conspiring to elude her.

Chapter XXVI

Faith

The unbelievers burned. They burned all the way to the bone, writhing in their cages, skin blackening, until nothing remained but ash. Those in the pens still awaiting their fate were made to watch. Some wept, others looked on with dull fascination. Most of the prisoners huddled together in groups, some because they were kindred, others out of simple tribalism. Mankind is not meant to live alone. Its evolutionary cycle is driven by the innate desire to propagate. Every man requires a clan. It is primordial, an imperative survival instinct. For alone, a man is weak but together, he is strong.

He is also stupid, thought Cristo, reflecting on these words he had read once. A mob mentality had overtaken the cult; their demagogue, Convocation, the firebrand and stoker of its aberrant beliefs. He promulgated as he murdered and immolated, professing the Emperor’s will and offering those in the flames to the darkness below. What horrors lay in that abyssal deep Cristo could not begin to fathom but the thought of drifting down into it as nothing more than charred bone and ash terrified him. It terrified him more than death or pain, for he was forced to acknowledge that some sliver of him might believe there was something in that darkness. A misappropriation for certain, but he felt it, a confession he had only recently admitted to himself as he looked upon the pit.

A presence. He wondered if those suspended above it, in the moments before their deaths, felt it too.

He kept Karina close. She had said little since regaining consciousness. A part of him wished she had not. At least then she would be spared this hell. Literal fiery fucking hell.

A few factorum workers, bullet-makers and armour-shapers clustered with them.

Clans.

He only realised Celestia had slipped away when it was too late. She stood alone, apart from any tribe, for hers was dead, immolated by fire just like those in the cages, or else devoured by some devolved version of mankind.

They too had a tribe, the cannibalistic creatures. A horde. Though they did not seem to trouble the church. Perhaps that was how Convocation had yoked so many to his cult. He had offered protection, a haven from the dead, and though ignorant of how he had prevailed, he had called it – like so many small-minded men who crave power do – faith. That which cannot be proven, it must only be adhered to, blindly and absolutely, to the destruction of anything raised in opposition to it, however rational.

Cristo reached out, shrugging his way through the crowded pen as he tried to get to Celestia.

‘Blasphemy…’ She said it quietly at first, an appraisal and confirmation all at once. ‘Blasphemy,’ she uttered louder, getting the attention of a masked acolyte who approached the pens, a cudgel gripped easily in her fist.

‘Shut up,’ snarled the acolyte, threatening with the cudgel.

Shoulders straight, chin raised, Celestia faced her down.

‘Blasphemy.’

The acolyte lashed out but Cristo weathered the blow, interceding on Celestia’s behalf.

‘Don’t touch her,’ he snarled, his paternal instincts extending beyond just his daughter. He saw Karina moving up, but warned her off with a look. He was in this now, she didn’t have to be.

The acolyte summoned several of her cohorts, some freshly anointed and eager to vent their fear by inflicting suffering on the helpless. Cristo was far from that, but he was outnumbered. As if sensing the change in mood, the frightened cattle in the pens shuffled back and a gap formed between Cristo and Celestia, and the rest.

‘Defiance will not be tolerated,’ the acolyte told them in a low voice that promised the violence to come. ‘You must be judged.’

The gate to the pen opened, the guards either side ready with shabby-looking autoguns to scythe down anyone who attempted to flee. The memory of the other attempted escapees still lingered fresh, pinning the prisoners in place.

Cristo was about to step up as the slighted acolyte and her thugs entered the pen but felt a light touch upon his shoulder that kept him back. He turned.

Celestia regarded him, her eyes limpid, her pretty face serene. She gave him just the faintest shake of her head and moved ahead of him to embrace her fate. She almost glided, diaphanous and pure, her defiance a rod of adamantium running through her.

‘I am Sister Celestia of the Order of the Silver Lantern,’ she declared. ‘I am the Emperor’s daughter and in Him–’

A heavy blow sent her to her knees and Cristo cried out, ready to surge forward until Celestia’s shaking hand stopped him. She rose groggily to her feet, a jagged cut across her forehead bleeding into her eye, and confronted the acolyte, who trembled with rage.

And fear. There was always fear in the violent.

‘And in Him do I place my faith. I am His instrument, His sainted sword.’

‘You’re a dead girl, is what you are,’ promised the acolyte, backed up by her fellow cultists.

Celestia remained undaunted. ‘I denounce you,’ she said. ‘I denounce these foul works. I denounce you!’ she cried, and at this the acolyte appeared to pale; whether the Sister-novice’s vehemence had made an impression or something else stayed the thug’s hand, the next blow did not fall.

For a fleeting moment, Cristo dared to believe that Celestia had somehow got through to the mob, that her true faith had returned a measure of their sanity. It was not to be.

Convocation appeared at the head of the aggressors. He gutted the acolyte with Vanquish, prompting a cry of anguish and anger from Celestia, then as the woman lay bleeding on the ground he struck the Sister-novice across the head with the hilt, a blow savage enough to render her half unconscious.

The priest was breathing hard behind his mask like a dog left too long in the sun, trying to marshal his anger in the wake of violence. His gaze went first to Celestia, her crumpled body lying at his feet like a discarded doll, before alighting on Cristo. A glimmer of something hungry and sadistic flashed across his eyes.

‘Take them both,’ he ordered. ‘Judgement awaits.’

They had to drag Cristo. It took four men, the screams of his daughter ringing in his ears with every resisted step.

He was ushered before one of the lecterns, a cosh to the back of his head to make him compliant. Convocation presided, his gaze imperious as he looked down upon them both.

‘Righteous are the just,’ he began, ‘who do not shirk from the Emperor’s light. False prophets have no purchase here, nor do heretics or the followers of aberrant faith.’

Celestia was pushed forward. Her hands were bound and she stumbled.

‘Unbelievers shall be cleansed, purged from the Emperor’s sight.’

She squirmed, her anger muffled by a gag tied around her mouth. It bit deep, the edges of her lip sore and bleeding as it chafed her.

‘Please…’ Cristo slurred, skull throbbing from the blow to the back of his head. A cultist either side held his arms, their attention on their priest. ‘Please,’ he said again, ‘put me in the cage. I am a fallen man,’ he declaimed. ‘I have killed. I am not righteous. I deserve punishment. Take me instead.’

Convocation’s ire had its focus now and would not be swayed. At a subtle gesture, a thug smacked Cristo across the stomach, winding him. He stooped, gasping for breath. He saw Celestia looking back, saw all her youth betrayed in the tears running down her face, in the soft weeping stifled by the gag, in the trembling of her limbs.

‘You are condemned,’ decried the priest, seizing upon the edges of the lectern as he leaned forwards. ‘You are condemned! Do you seek redemption?’ he asked.

Celestia blinked, suddenly confused. She tried to look at Cristo but a rough hand on the back of her neck thrust her face forward at Convocation.

‘Remove it,’ snapped the priest, ‘let the condemned speak. Let her confess to sin so that we might all hear it.’

The gag was removed, a painful wince on Celestia’s face making Cristo’s fists clench in impotent fury. He felt the grip of his captors lessen as religious fervour stole upon them, an incoherent baying erupting from the entire flock.

‘I… I…’ Celestia struggled to form words, every effort to speak rewarded with pain.

Convocation grew impatient, demanding, ‘Do you seek redemption?’

‘I… I…’ A bead of ruby blood trickled down her chin and dripped on her bare feet. ‘I do.’

Convocation leaned back, satisfied with his work. He was about to sermonise when Celestia interrupted.

‘As do all of His true servants,’ she said, ‘those who lead imperfect lives. I seek it. In my every deed, just as I seek it now as I denounce your heresy.’ She scowled. ‘False priest… zealot.’

Silence fell, the baying voices faded to a shocked murmur. Convocation did not react at first, his mask impassive. He took a shuddering breath, made the holy sign of the aquila over his chest, and then calmly pronounced judgement.

‘Take her to the cage, where she shall burn for her sins.’

The chain creaked ominously as the cage came down, the old links corroded and black.

At first she did not struggle, but as they took her to the edge of the gantry and lowered the cage to her in which she would be interred, Celestia fought. She cried, and punched and kicked. Cristo fought too but the gun pressed to the back of his neck soon quieted his outward quarrel.

‘Take me,’ he whispered, shedding tears of his own as he watched Celestia thrust into the cage and the door slammed and sealed behind her. ‘Take me.’

She stared dumbly as if resigned to her fate. A dousing of skin and cloth commenced, the reek of petrochem astringent in the church’s cold air. A torch was lit, the crackle of wood and flame like savage laughter.

‘Take me…’ Cristo wept, the zealots deaf to his pleas.

And despite all of her courage, Celestia screamed as they burned her body.

The baying returned, louder and more guttural than before. Men had become beasts and they each turned their faces to the fire, basking in its dark glow. Cristo bowed his head, feeling the presence of the noose, the burden of all his sins pulling him down. He thought of Karina, standing in the crowd, of her watching as he did nothing. He raised his gaze and found his daughter’s eyes in turn. She bellowed, her face twisted in anger and fear.

‘Father!’

The fire blazed, mere moments old, the silhouette of a girl writhing inside it. Her hair and clothes aflame. An endless scream as the cage slowly rose up on its protesting chain…

‘Father…’ Karina roared, louder than the mob, louder than the wailing crowds, ‘give her mercy!’

Stay alive, Karina… Stay alive.

One last look at his daughter, imprinting her image on his mind like a photograph, and Cristo surged to his feet. He threw off the guards, near delirious in their sadistic revels, and lunged for Convocation.

The priest had turned to exult his flock, arms outstretched as if in benediction. An inkling of disquiet had him look over his shoulder at the burly bullet-maker bearing down upon him. He raised his pistol and Cristo felt the shot sting as it entered his body, but by then he was leaping and tackling Convocation off his feet, the pair of them crashing into the fiery cage as it was still rising. A shriek of metal and the chain snapped.

The cage, Cristo and the priest fell burning into the abyss.

Chapter XXVII

Arteries

They entered the tunnels through an old outflow, wading through brackish water riddled with the corpses of vermin. A vast network, like arteries in a body, threaded through Low Sink’s grimy underhive and beyond. The air stank here, cloying with sewer heat and the backwash of huge, subterranean generators. The mechanisms were ancient, as large as landed starships, and droned like the voice of some primordial spirit of the deep earth.

Morgravia didn’t believe in such fancies. She didn’t need wild stories to convince her of the uncanny. She knew it existed, only her experiences were not some romanticised folktale; they were blood and horror and the death of worlds. This she knew. Ingrained. The price of her profession. Know the secrets, harbour the secrets, learn to live with them. Insanity, death or damnation rewarded those who could not.

She wondered which she would succumb to first. Perhaps she already had.

The itch in her flesh had abated at least, but not gone away entirely, like a creature slumbering, dormant until roused again. She had followed Hel into the maw of the outflow, old memories churning of poor Oshanti, dying with his back to the wall and two bullets in his gun. Morgravia grimaced at the thought, and the fate she had condemned him to.

As her sodium lamp parted the darkness, she knew these were not the same tunnels but almost certainly a part of the greater network, a tributary. Did the cult operate here? She could not remember, only that they felt familiar.

‘Why are we here, Hel?’ Morgravia asked.

Hel roved ahead, ankle-deep in silty runoff, though she made little sound as she slid through the murk. Pale cadavers bobbed in the turgid water like driftwood. Bloated by putrefaction, with teeth rotted to black stumps and cavernous sockets for eyes, many were too large and too humanoid to be vermin.

‘As the plague worsened they grew complacent,’ she said, neither turning nor slowing. ‘I waited, a rook upon my perch. The pallid did not bother me there. I can be still when I wish to be, as still as the dead. I watched and eventually they revealed themselves, seeking openly, in the dank and the dark. In the forgotten places.’

Morgravia did not dwell on the unsettling nature of that.

‘In this… underworld?’

‘Yes. Cold, red eyes,’ Hel went on. ‘Blades for limbs and metal bodied. Stalkers. Machine-killers. Like me. They sent them to find it. I found it first.’

The encounter before they had reached the precinct house returned to Morgravia in lurid technicolour. Chime, scrape. Chime, scrape. The butcher’s song. Hate red.

Morgravia shut her eyes hard, banishing the image.

‘You are not a machine, Hel.’

The assassin stopped, head cocked slightly to the side.

‘Am I not a tool though, Mother? Fashioned for a specific purpose. A machine by any other name?’

Morgravia remembered saying those words as Hel was uttering them. A pang of regret weighed heavy.

‘You are a servant of the Emperor,’ she said, uplifted.

‘And am I good?’

‘In His eyes and mine, you are righteous.’

‘And have I always been this way?’

‘You are as the Emperor made you.’

Hel seemed to consider that.

‘I am sorry I took so long to find you, Mother,’ she said, carrying on. ‘The world below is larger than I realised and has sharp teeth.’

Morgravia glanced at the shadows, wondering what they harboured and what all of this portended. The return to equilibrium was slow, arduous. Without all of her memories, she felt naked, unarmoured.

‘None of that matters now,’ she murmured, thoughts returning to the parasite churning within and to whether or not Hel would have to kill her before it tore loose. ‘Take me to what you have found.’

She looked up at a curved ceiling, its low arches glistening with condensation like a ribcage of wet bone. It led on into the darkness, a whispering cavern of half-heard voices and penumbral stirrings. Something brushed against her boot and Morgravia glanced down. It was a jawbone, drifting on a scum of black ash. Other bones swam with it, a finger, a piece of skull, a fragment of pelvis. A littering of the macabre, a floating declaration of mass murder.

Hel saw it too, and drew her sword with a rasp of steel against leather.

‘Nearly there now…’ she said.

A memory intruded, of a little girl standing before a temple, her name surrendered to duty, of the scent of rain, of a door closing in her wake and the silent tears that followed.

Chapter XXVIII

The abyss

A savage hiss echoed through the cavern as the cage hit the water, smoke and steam pluming. Cristo plunged into darkness, cold and suffocating. He tasted ash, the brackish water filling his nose and mouth. A deep lagoon beneath the pit, a sump of sewage and chemical waste. Skin stinging, heart burning in his chest. A heavy throb in his skull as he began to drown. Fierce panic, then slow calm. Cristo kicked, and flailed, and broke the surface.

A huge, painful wrench of air filled his lungs. The stench worsened. He gasped, half drowned upon the bank, aching with the effort of survival. And turned, and dived back in.

Blackness, a crushing closeness and the terror of never again seeing the light edged in. He denied it, denied the fear and the paralysis. He swam, down and down, reaching with outstretched fingers, pawing at the fathomless dark as pieces of old bone brushed against him. He felt metal, coarse and pitted. The cage. Blind, he quickly traversed the edge, bars used as handholds until he found the gate. It opened stiffly, dragging on filth and against the grimy water. A hand reached for his and he took it firmly, pulling her into his embrace, this half-dead thing, and kicked like hell for the light.

Coughing up black water and ash, Cristo grasped at the bank. He hardly dared look at Celestia, who breathed raggedly, her skin a mess of red-raw burns. She shivered on her back, trembling at the pain. Gently, Cristo took her into his arms and out of the sump. A cavernous tunnel presented itself, a vaulted chamber with rib-boned arches stretching off into the distance.

He put Celestia down on a raised stone lip. She looked small and shrivelled, a candle worn almost to its wick.

He cast around for a way out, and found the priest.

Convocation lay slumped against the bank, his neck twisted at an unnatural angle and evidently broken. He still had the ceremonial sword lashed to his belt. Cristo took it, drawing it reverently.

Celestia’s eyes followed him, alighting on the sword as he placed it softly into her trembling grasp.

‘You are…’ rasped Celestia, her lips burned away to blackened gums and teeth, her once beautiful golden hair reduced to ash-white threads plastered to her skull, ‘a good man.’

She pulled Vanquish to her chest, her arms brittle as charcoal and dark as overcooked meat. The skin flaked, red beneath the black, sore and agonised. She shut her eyes, and abruptly the trembling ceased.

Cristo buckled, dropping to his knees as he wept. Another senseless death, when he had survived to suffer on. He sank down into a different abyss entirely, and would not have come up but for the tingling in his skull. It began as a pinprick then turned into knives stabbing. He lurched, vomited, red pain thundering, black oblivion threatening at the edge of sight.

The presence he had felt. It called to him. And powerless to resist, he followed its keening.

Karina clamped her jaw shut for fear of what pain and anguish she would allow in if she didn’t. Her father had gone, leapt into the darkness, trailing fire. And the priest had gone with him.

A dumbfounded silence stole across the Divine, a flock without its shepherd. Afraid and disorientated. They looked at each other and then the pit. One man pulled off his mask, slow and lingering, like tearing away false flesh. Another sagged to her haunches, an axe lying at her feet where she had dropped it. Convocation had indoctrinated them so thoroughly that in his absence, without his will to puppet them, they were empty, their animus draining like poison from a wound.

‘Let us out,’ Karina uttered to one of the guards.

He turned dumbly.

‘Let us out,’ Karina repeated, gesturing to the keys on his belt. ‘Just hand me the keys. It’ll be easy. And then you can leave. We can all leave.’

‘L-leave?’ he asked. ‘Leave where?’

‘Anywhere.’

She felt the anticipation of the others in the pens, watching and waiting, their fate depending on the outcome of this moment.

‘Hand me the keys.’

The guard took them off his belt and held them up.

Carefully, Karina stretched through the gate of the pen and took the keys. She watched the guard as she turned the lock, felt the satisfying clack. The gate opened and she stepped through it.

‘Thank you,’ she said, then ripped the guard’s knife from his belt and slashed his throat. Blood spray anointed her and anyone nearby. The guard crumpled, gurgling, dying.

His death turned a mental lever. The prisoners broke from the pen, and savagely fell upon their captors, stabbing, punching, kicking.

The violence worsened and Karina knew instinctively that this wasn’t just the outpouring of pent-up fear. It felt like a low throb in her skull, a migraine waiting to bloom and spread its cold grey agony. Karina clutched her head, as if holding it might prevent her skull from cracking open. She had felt this before, at the gully, when the Death Kings and the Red Hands had slaughtered each other. Weaker then, not as intense.

She looked around, the knife still in her bloody fist, and saw madness. Tearing, pummelling and killing.

A few retained their sagacity. They screamed. A man was borne down, his arms and legs pinned as a rabid pack opened up his stomach with knives and teeth and pieces of glass. A clawed hand delved and she saw the man’s expression change to choked, excruciating pain and then disbelief as the glistening rope of intestine was pulled forth and stuffed in hungry mouths. It didn’t end there. Soft red meat remained within, and the pack yearned for it.

Karina, teeth clenched, needles of fire splitting her skull, fled for the gate.

And overhead, through the fog of agony, she heard engine drone. Low and throaty, it trembled the ground. A shadow grew above her, descending as an actinic charge crackled the air.

Cristo staggered, sloshing through the murky brine, letting bits of corpses slap against his legs. He moved in a daze, wearing a perpetual grimace. He travelled downwards, through a crack in a cistern wall. Older here, the architecture was archaic, the cistern expansive and long since polluted and drained. The keening drew him on like an invisible thread tethered to his neck, gently pulling. Darker here, colder, a place light had not touched in centuries or more. Musty air made him choke and cough, but he persisted. He felt with his hands, took careful steps. Chill stone, gelid to the touch, echoed every sound back like a conversation.

And then he stopped, a tiny shaft of light directing his eye to the middle of a great room. He wondered how far down it was from the church and reasoned it could not be that deep. Columns, some broken, others miraculously standing, delineated a frescoed square. Rubble had fallen; it might have been aeons old, and cracks gaped in the stone like jagged grins.

A casket – no, a sarcophagus – lay at the heart of the room. Old pipes, the rubber perished and begrimed, coiled from its sides. A filthy patina turned the brass green and foetid. Wires trailed like intestines, some frayed, others lost to the dark. The grainy shaft limned the edges of the sarcophagus, dust motes spiralling at his disturbance. Cristo approached and saw a hand reaching from the broken lid, its fingers outstretched as if trying to touch the light. Mimicking the gesture, he went to touch it. The keening made resistance impossible.

And like a sprung trap, the hand snapped over his.

He recoiled on instinct but the hand felt cool and shone with gunmetal lustre. A cybernetic. A machine. It clenched harder and now he felt true fear, then pain as the bones in his fingers snapped like twigs. A muted cry struggled from his open mouth before a metal, tentacular thing inserted itself within. Cristo gagged but couldn’t spit it out, his free hand wrenching at the prehensile appendage squirming down his throat. He shook, nerves misfiring. The hand clenched tighter, and his bones were reduced to powder, eliciting a strangled whimper. And the keening went on and the presence imposed itself, filling him.

It consumed and usurped, a consciousness in need of a shell. His mind, its mind. Draining marrow and blood, the agony of every fresh violation like liquid fire through his nerve endings.

He felt its will, its desire, its need as it spread and overwrote.

It wasn’t enough. The invasion stalled. The slow absorption reversed, the tentacle retracted, and like an organ incompatible for its host, it rejected him.

A discarded shell remained, half cracked and bloody on the inside. A soft and boneless thing that had once been a man.

Cristo lived long enough to see the face of death coming for him out of the darkness, and then there was the black and–

Hel held her sword to the pile of offal and sloughed skin that had presumably once been a man. It quivered in its death throes and fell still, steaming and broken like a butcher’s leavings.

‘Stay back,’ warned Morgravia, one eye on the sarcophagus as she shone a light upon it.

‘This is it,’ said Hel, poised, her blade high and ready to strike. ‘This is what they are seeking, Mother.’

A tentacle slid back into the hollows, slithering away like a worm afraid of the light.

‘I’m not your…’ Morgravia stopped mid-sentence. A voice echoed in her mind, a mewling, whining need.

I am afraid, it said.

I am dying, it said, though in no language that could be spoken. It had to be parsed, processed. Meaning was formula, equation. It was the same language as in the red dream, of the machine surgeons as they had her on their slab, dissecting and experimenting. The magi of the Valgaast.

I need you, it said. An impulse. A piece of clever cognition bound up in machine code.

I love you, it said.

The wrongness of it made Morgravia recoil and shrink back from the old remembrance it provoked.

The girl… as she had turned to face the door. Her eyes, burgeoning with tears. Her fear. Her love. Not knowing she would be remade. That they would take away her fear and replace it with something cold and unfeeling.

Morgravia had been grateful for the rain when it came. It made hiding her sorrow easier.

Memory gave way to reality.

‘Hel… stay back,’ she said, retreating. A parental instinct, an old feeling of disquiet before the veil fell and horror was revealed. The dust motes froze, glinting like dying fireflies in the light. A charge lit the air, crackling like static. The scent of ozone and heat.

Morgravia blinked, suddenly surrounded.

The Cult of Valgaast were here.

Chapter XXIX

The monster inside

Clad in dark robes, the sigil of the cog and star conjoined stitched into the fabric, they encircled Hel and Morgravia like a flock of patient ravens.

‘Shall I kill them, Mother?’

A chuckle, mechanistic but dripping with derision.

Seven voices spoke as one, their hoods hiding their faces and only the faint glow of blood red beneath betraying their cybernetic natures.

‘You are undone,’ they said.

Hel raised her sword a fraction, but Morgravia lifted a hand in warning. At the periphery she saw them, hate-red eyes, blades for limbs. The magi had not come alone. As they closed, details were revealed. Mutations, the curl and twist of the unnatural. Arcane devices carved into metal. Aberrant biology and flesh. Bestial limbs, a serpentine tail. Rot and rust upon one. A cloying, soporific musk on another. Furnace heat, the coppery reek of slaughter. Mirrored facets instead of a face, colours iridescent and ever-changing.

‘You are the Valgaast?’ said Morgravia, her pistol drawn but held low.

One of their number nodded. An eighth spoke to the cult’s wheel. Tall and thin, its robes draping something skeletal. She saw metal, a plate riveted across its mouth to mute it. Runes had been fashioned into the plate, sickening to look at. It closed on her, raising its head with the whirring of servos and gears. Light flared, two red suns looming, and inwardly Morgravia quailed. She knew this monster, the magos who had presided over her unmaking. Her skin itched, the monster stirring within.

Hel tensed, eager for violence. Exactly as she had been made, her childhood sacrificed to turn her into a weapon.

‘Mother…’

Morgravia was shaking her head. ‘Don’t…’ She had been here before. Captured, eviscerated, unmade. Hel had rescued her, not knowing what she had done. The signal unleashed. It was inside her. It had to end. There was no other way.

She took her pistol and rammed it under her chin.

‘I’ll do it,’ she swore. ‘Too many have died, but if it takes one more to make it stop then so be it.’

‘It will accomplish nothing,’ uttered the seven voices, and somehow Morgravia realised it wasn’t seven but one, it was him, their muted lord, the hub of the wheel, who spoke through them.

‘I disagree,’ Morgravia replied, though she felt Hel’s uncertainty mirrored by her own. ‘I will sever the signal from its source.’

‘You mistake your purpose. Let us teach you…’

A vice of agony exerted itself upon her and she struggled to hold onto the pistol. She glanced at Hel, wanting to reach out, but she stood perfectly still, her sword now lowered, arms by her sides.

Hel had rescued her…

Afraid, disorientated, Morgravia had fled. Oshanti had led them through the tunnels, having cut her free. They had made a breach. Carnergie was dead. Roper too. He looked shaken. He asked about Hel but Morgravia didn’t know. She barely knew her own name back then.

Hel had rescued her. She had stayed behind, luring them away, fighting.

How long had it taken her to find her? It felt like hours but it could have been days.

She recalled the words she had spoken to Hel back in her hab.

‘They’re waiting,’ she had said. ‘For me to remember.’

And now she did.

‘And so you are enlightened,’ said the seven voices.

The pain eased. Morgravia lowered the pistol from her chin, tears in her eyes as she regarded Hel.

‘You never escaped.’

‘You let us go…’

‘As I said, you mistake your purpose.’

‘It’s not within me. It’s her. She is the signal.’

Hel, as if she had been paused and now resumed, turned.

‘Mother, shall I kill them now?’

Morgravia raised her pistol. And fired.

‘Yes, daughter…’ she gasped, tears steaming as the weapon slipped from her grasp. Hel collapsed, a gaping hole in her chest. Her eyes met her mother’s, and Morgravia held them like she wanted to hold her. They clung to each other like that, staring, holding on, trying to grasp a sliver of a life not lived, a life that had ended as soon as the doors to the temple had closed. ‘And then you can sleep.’

‘It changes nothing,’ said the seven voices. ‘You mistake your purpose.’

‘You mistake your reach,’ snapped Morgravia, heart clenched by grief but still defiant, straining as the monster within uncoiled, slowly waking. ‘It won’t end with me. The Inquisition will find you. They will burn your grubby cult to ash. Valgaast is but another heretic footnote in the great war.’

‘You are as wilfully ill-informed as you are insignificant. Valgaast is not a cult. It is beyond your mortal comprehension. It is the unpinning of the universe. It is the grand unmaking. We are but humble servants, gratefully beholden to its will and majesty. You speak of burning cults as if this will end it. You have no say in this. You do not know what this is.’

Morgravia’s eyes flicked to the sarcophagus, to the childlike hand reaching from its shattered lid and the tendrils slowly eking from its dark confines.

‘It is the Simulacrum. It is older than ages, a relic from before. It is sentience in the machine, the apogee of aspiration. You have been remade for it, the perfect incubator. That is your purpose and now you shall fulfil it.’

And it was dying, Morgravia realised. Whatever dark technologies had preserved the Simulacrum had begun to fail. She was to be its vessel, a host fashioned so it might endure, nourished by her machine body. Hel had brought her here willingly but unwittingly, another pawn in the game.

Hel… scraped clean of her humanity, a killer without a face. A daughter laid upon the sacrificial slab of the Imperium. Death by any other name. And now she had suffered another. Her final death.

Morgravia felt it scratching at the core of her, aching to be unleashed. The monster inside.

Let it…

The rage and grief spilled out of her, skin unstitching, limbs distending. She became blades and churning teeth and whips of razored metal, lashing. Unmade. Remade.

Shouts in the machine language of the cult suggested panic. She had already eviscerated two without thinking, her flesh face dappled with oil and blood. Their parts lay scattered, perfectly, brutally dissected. Offal and scrap.

The stalkers lunged for her, cantering out of the shadows to the defence of their black-robed masters, hacking and cutting.

Morgravia flung herself in a whirr of teeth and blades. She bifurcated, eviscerated, decapitated. Cleaved and severed. Tore and wrenched. An orgy of violence, sickening and satisfying in its application. The monster well fed, but far from sated.

The last of the stalkers slid off her bladed limb, impaled. The machine light died in its single eye. She did not slow nor consider. Humanity faded, an overexposed image turned to white. Whatever she had become, whatever they had made her, it was no longer human. Arachnoid, insectile, she sprang onto the cult, stabbing with the mandibles unfurled from an overstretched jaw. She tasted them as they died. Their oily plasma, the gelatinous fluids pumping like ichor through their bodies. She drank of it, revelled in it. Slashing and hunting and gorging herself until only two remained.

‘It is inexorable,’ said the seven voices that now were one. ‘Nothing you do here will stop it.’

She speared the voice, slitting it down the middle and leaving the two halves sparking and spewing in a shivering heap. Then she met the gaze of the last, the leader. He seemed untroubled when she took his head. A single snip, paired blades scissoring his machine neck. Black sludge gushed from the wound, corroding and dissolving.

Morgravia sank down and felt her flesh reknitting, her limbs retracting. Pain, abject and magnesium bright suffused her like acid. She shuddered, howling her anguish. Screaming it over and over until, at last, the resonance of her agony faded and she was left silent and alone.

Naked but for the scraps that remained, she hobbled over to the sarcophagus. The tendrils reached for her as she closed, a neonate grasping for its mother’s sustenance. It lay within the Simulacrum. A face, beatific, infantile, gave expression to a tentacled abomination, a slithering accumulation of malign and proscribed science. It felt. And as Morgravia looked upon it, as its tendrils gently but purposefully wrapped themselves around her, she realised it did not want to die. That it would do anything to live, kill anyone to perpetuate.

I love you, it said, that cold alien presence intruding, persuading. I love you, Mother.

Morgravia stiffened, her lip curling.

‘I’m not your fucking mother,’ she uttered, her pistol against the Simulacrum’s tiny forehead as its tendrils squeezed desperately.

A loud boom resounded, emphasised by the confines of the sarcophagus.

The tendrils slackened, letting Morgravia slide away. She slumped down, her back against the sarcophagus. A pistol lay in her hands, heavy with purpose. One bullet remained. She crawled across the pieces of bodies and the machine wreckage, through spilled blood and oil. To reach her.

Hel.

Trembling, she took off her mask and found a girl behind it. Pale skin, eyes like fiery amber. Her hair shaved, but still a girl. Her girl.

‘Now we end it…’

Morgravia touched a hand to Hel’s cheek, pressed the gun against her own left temple and spent the last bullet.

Chapter XXX

Survivors

They got almost half a mile away from the gate when Barak decided to turn back. Jana didn’t argue or even object. Still weak, still pale, he reversed the rig and headed south. To the church. To Morgravia.

He drove in silence, Jana loading up the shotguns as he hammered the accelerator.

Two hundred feet away and he saw the girl. Thought it an apparition at first, a symptom of his injuries. It was only when Jana yelled at him to stop that he pumped the brake and slewed the Mule to an ungainly halt. She stood there, half lit by the forward lamps, a young female ganger. Scared, alone. Needing help.

Jana stepped out, a shotgun slung across her back.

‘I don’t…’ the girl grimaced, running a hand through her hair, looking this way and that, ‘I don’t know where I am.’ She wrung her hands, wet her lips. ‘They were killing each other. Eating each…’ She trailed off, her face turning blank. ‘Oh, Throne…’

‘It’s all right,’ said Jana, holding out her hand. ‘It’s all right. You’re not alone. Come with us. We’ll help you.’ She edged closer. ‘But you need to put that down.’

The girl frowned, eyes glazing as she regarded the bloody knife in her hand. Her arm was slick. It glistened tackily in the light.

‘I must’ve…’ she said, touching the base of her neck.

‘Come with me now,’ said Jana. ‘You don’t need that any more. Come with me and you’ll be safe.’ She smiled. ‘What’s your name?’

‘My name?’ The girl looked around, as if searching for the answer. ‘Karina,’ she said at last. ‘I’m Karina.’

‘I’m Jana,’ said Jana, ‘and this is my husband, Barak.’

‘Barak? My father knew a man by that name.’

Barak had stepped out of the rig and his eyes narrowed as he recognised the girl in the young woman before him.

‘Karina,’ he said, disbelieving. ‘You’re Cristo’s daughter.’

Karina wept, nodding. She let go of the knife and Jana embraced her, held her long enough that she could stop crying.

They didn’t head any further south. Nothing left there, Karina told them. Nothing but the dead.

The gate remained sealed as they approached it, the rig giving its last dying breaths. Its engine failed at the edge of the long processional leading to hive edge. Bodies burned on either side of it, some contorted by the plague, others simply corpses. Barak found it hard to count, to even fathom. He led his wife and the girl through the fields of the dead, past cleansing crews in proctor garb.

As they reached the gate, looking up upon the vast and indomitable edifice, he saw evidence of a vicious battle for the ramparts. A watchman speaking through a loudhailer addressed him, demanded they turn back. Uphive was sealed until further notice. Containment, he said. Plague, he said. Weapons edged from murder slits, anonymous and deadly.

Barak held up the rosette Morgravia had given him, a spark of grief lighting within at the thought of her as he raised it, for surely she must be dead.

A scope peered down. Seconds passed, freighted with the possibility of imminent execution. He heard shouted orders. Hurrying feet.

The weapons retracted.

The gate to uphive opened.

Two years later…

The ship was coming, and throughout Low Sink bells rang in celebration. A landing field had been prepared, near hive edge overlooking the Iryn Mere and the old ruin where a priory had once stood. A blackened spur of rock stood there now, a sapling having taken root in the rich soil left in its wake.

Karina stood, shoulders back, her face tilted to the sky as she watched for the lander. She had a knapsack slung across her back, a knife in her belt that she hoped they’d let her keep. Rugged clothes and a heavy coat that Barak had given her.

He and Jana stood nearby, proud as parents, already missing the daughter they never had.

Karina had never told them what happened at the church. In truth, she remembered little after she had fled. There was a shadow, a ship suspended above her. And then she was in the street, wandering, alone and afraid.

They had found her and they had taken her in. She had found purpose, inspired by her father’s example. She would give her life for something greater than herself. She had answered the tithe and would find her place amongst the stars as a soldier. She knew it would be hard, that the galaxy held terrors the recruitment parchments omitted. Death held no fear. Insignificance did.

Rumbling the earth, engines growling as it made its descent, the lander came into view. Smog parted, pushed aside like waves before its mass and power. Fire lit the sky, muted and diffuse across the heavy cloud layer.

A klaxon sounded, signalling for the recruits to advance onto the landing field.

Karina turned before she headed out, a smile and a wave for the man and woman she had come to trust and think of as her family. Both held back tears, clinging to one another, already wondering how they would fill their lives without her.

A Munitorum officer approached her at the threshold of the landing field, one of an advance party here to ensure the tithe went smoothly and in an orderly fashion.

‘Name,’ he said curtly, eyes on a data-slate cinched in the crook of his elbow, a stylus in the other hand primed to write.

‘Karina Cristo.’

The officer ran through the names, and made a face. ‘Not many from Blackgheist.’

Karina stiffened as old, unpleasant memories intruded.

The officer frowned then, rubbing at his temples. He looked suddenly ill, a vein throbbing in his neck like a cord of rope. Flushed, sweating, he appeared starved of breath.

‘Are you all right?’ Karina asked.

It passed, whatever it was, a shadow withered by the sun.

‘It’s nothing. Just a headache.’ He gave a watery smile, and thrust a piece of parchment in her hands, stamped and approved for tithe. ‘Must be the hive air,’ he said. ‘Never much cared for it.’

Karina smiled back. It was a tight, contained thing, almost cold.

‘Neither have I,’ she said, and advanced onto the landing field.

About the Author

Nick Kyme is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Old Earth, Deathfire, Vulkan Lives and Sons of the Forge, the novellas Promethean Sun and Scorched Earth, and the audio dramas Red-Marked, Censure and Nightfane. His novella Feat of Iron was a New York Times bestseller in the Horus Heresy collection, The Primarchs. Nick is well known for his popular Salamanders novels, including Rebirth, the Sicarius novels Damnos and Knights of Macragge, and numerous short stories. He has also written fiction set in the world of Warhammer, most notably the Warhammer Chronicles novel The Great Betrayal and the Age of Sigmar story ‘Borne by the Storm’, included in the novel War Storm. More recently he has scripted the Age of Sigmar audio drama The Imprecations of Daemons. He lives and works in Nottingham.

An extract from
‘Suffer the Vision’
by Jake Ozga
from the Warhammer Horror
anthology Anathemas.

A detail captures my attention: there is something about the way the dead woman is lying that suggests she was crawling even while she bled out. Her arm is outstretched, her hand lost amidst viridian undergrowth. I brush the flowers and vines aside with my boot to reveal a child’s doll, a simple thing carved from a single piece of wood; it lies broken, splintered and snapped. Even though my soul is bereft of poetry, I can see the obvious parallels with the scenes of slaughter that surround me, and the sight is strangely poignant. I contemplate it for a while, even as the savage sun beats down and the flies begin to settle.

We have seen no sign of any child. I reappraise the dead woman; with her barbaric tattoos and animal-hide clothing it is hard to think of her as anything more than another wildling creature in this realm of beasts and monsters. But she could, I consider, be a mother that fought protecting a child and then died reaching for this doll in a final, futile gesture. A mother’s desperation fuelled by a mother’s love. I have heard of such a thing.

The clearing smells of blood and excrement, of death and pollen and fresh rain. The forest already reclaims the filth into rich, black soil. In this realm nothing is sacred for long: life is wild and death is voracious. Scavenger beasts have disturbed the corpses so that they are scattered and mauled, the flowers are trampled, and body parts and vividly coloured petals sit in pools of congealed blood, gathering flies. The events here are hard to interpret. I see a clump of red hair; I see tanned flesh patterned with blasphemous symbols. I see dark eyes, frozen in the moment of death. I see wounds wrought by tooth and claw. But I am far from an expert in the ways of beasts and this is not my realm, and so I travel here with guides.

It is my holy duty to seek those who would hide from Sigmar’s embrace: the apostate preachers, the children of a poisoned seed, the beasts that hide in the flesh of men. I lead a savage band, men of this land that turned on their own kin and renew their pledge of devotion to the God-King with unsurpassed violence. I strive every day to serve my god. I strive every day to be more holy in his eyes, for I know that he watches me. And at my back, I bring a storm.

‘Witch hunter.’ One of my companions calls to me. Grar is a man with eyes like chipped flint, twice my years and a native of this realm. He is a veteran who has worked alongside many witch hunters, but he is new to my employ and indeed, I am inexperienced at working with others. In his mouth my honorific is made to sound like an insult – these men bark and snarl like the animals they track. But it is merely posturing, or else it is some game of baiting they play amongst themselves, and either way it concerns me not at all.

He speaks again, and his accent – that of the Olg’hal hill tribes, one of the smaller tribes in this remote region of Ghur – is thick and his words seem to snag on teeth filed to points. ‘A bear, maybe an amberback. Not so common. This happened two days ago, at most.’

It is not like Grar to sound uncertain. He pauses to spit – more posturing. There is a sheen of sweat on his skin that the dirt and the pollen clings to. He is stripped to the waist and his scarred flesh is stained dark blue with a powerful dye that the Olg’hal apply as warpaint. The heat is oppressive, smothering. He copes with it far better than I.

‘A bear, then, a large one. They disturbed it in its lair.’ My guide gestures at the nearby cave. ‘And it reacted badly.’ He bares his sharpened teeth in what passes for a grin, then turns a body over with his foot. ‘They were Gath’ok tribe. This one was their warband leader. The others were his family or his slaves. They share family markings. See here? He had sworn them to Dark Gods.’ Grar spits in his hand and runs it over his shaven pate, a gesture I have come to recognise over these past few days as a sign of warding.

He looks me in the eye. ‘This beast has done good work for us, I think.’

‘And the child?’ I use my scabbarded sword to point to the broken toy, and he shrugs with practised indifference.

‘No sign of a child. Maybe the bear took it. Maybe swallowed whole.’ He gestures broadly at the mess made by scavengers. ‘Impossible to tell.’

I persist. ‘Could a survivor have fled into the cave?’

Grar looks unconvinced. ‘Or to the village, witch hunter. We are close now. Maybe the villagers have already strung the little beastling up for us, to celebrate our arrival.’ He bares his teeth again and I look away. This is no place for a child.

The other two trackers join us, fellow warriors of the Olg’hal. Like Grar they are outcast: men that now hunt their former tribe and the slaves of the Ruinous Powers. They are savages in exile, hunters in the service of the God-King. One of these men – No’grok – is the size of an ogor, while the other – Rhukhal – is a young man, maybe of an age with myself. They too have shaved heads, filed teeth and skin stained blue with warpaint they can never remove. The bond between the three men is deep, formed by the severing of all other ties. They have each other and no one else. I have no tribe of my own, no kin. I have my god.

The younger tracker pauses at the corpse of the woman, and with a practised motion he cuts off an ear, threading it onto a belt along with dozens of others. At first these trophies appalled me, but I have come to respect what they represent – when they turned on their former kin, these men burned all their bridges, and there would be no mercy for them now among the tribes. It is man’s nature to be duplicitous; all men are liars and deceivers, but these three make their truth a simple thing. They are a bane to Chaos. They are dogs that tear at the throats of monsters. Should my god judge them, he will find them to be true.

‘Witch hunter.’ Rhukhal addresses me with slightly more respect than Grar. ‘We should leave this place now. Before the storm comes. Before the beast gets her hunger back.’

I nod in agreement. Beyond the next hill lies the village we seek, and so we resume our journey. We pass the cave mouth cautiously. No’grok hefts his warhammer over one massive shoulder and waits, tense with anticipation, but all remains quiet. I stare into it, into the yawning darkness. It is only my imagination that it stares back.

We have travelled for eight days through jungle and forest to a place far removed from Sigmar’s gift of liberation, here at the edges of this so-called Realm of Beasts. The village we approach now was discovered by a warrior angel, borne aloft on wings of light. Seen from a distance, the Stormcast Eternal described a place untouched by the violence of this land. It seems unlikely that we will truly find free people here in this place of monsters – this land of warring tribes pledged to dark gods – but if there are men and women that have defied the corruption then I must find them and claim them for the God-King, to offer them his embrace. And if the corruption has claimed them first – if it has wormed under their skin and into their souls – then in the name of Sigmar, I will judge them, and I will show them what it means to defy the God of Lightning.

Black clouds gather in the distance, growing closer. The air is redolent with the promise of electricity – I feel it on my teeth. I bring the storm and it chases at my heels like a hound. It growls with anticipation of violence and the land trembles in reply. My head throbs with pressure behind my eyes – this pain is not a new thing but it worsens as the storm approaches. This is the weight of Sigmar’s gaze as he looks upon me from his throne in Azyr, as he has for all of my life. The attention of a god is enough to bring a man to his knees.

The forest thins as we approach the village and we see it clearly for the first time. A small stone tower, half in ruin, sits to one side of a collection of simple thatched hovels. No wall, no defences. It sits incongruously in a clearing, amidst a sea of flowers, surrounded by lush forest, and in the distance, the great snow-capped mountains of Ghur. It is a scene from a painting. It is beautiful, idyllic in a way that takes my breath away. A vision of a life without war, without death.

Grar sucks his teeth. ‘Such a place should not exist. It is not so hidden that the tribes could not find it.’

No’grok shrugs. ‘Maybe they are lucky.’

‘Then we come,’ Rhukhal mutters, ‘and so their luck has run out.’

We step from the treeline into the field of flowers. I shield my eyes from the blazing midday sun. Despite the heat, I fasten my cloak about me, the sigil of the Order plainly visible on my breast. It would not do to be mistaken for a marauder. But there are no sentries, no cry of alarm or barking dogs. There is no such thing as luck.

When I was a boy I lived among the peasants of the Denebreke. We called ourselves an army, though we saw little in the way of battle. The Denebreke were one of many such armies that raised a holy banner and the people of the city flocked to it, eager to follow in the footsteps of Sigmar’s crusading Stormcast Eternals, eager to share in their glory. I do not remember life before the Denebreke, nor do I remember my father in the years before my mother was taken by the God-King and remade, reforged. I longed to catch sight of the Stormhost in whose path we followed, but we never saw anything of them save for the devastation that they left in their wake. We were an army overcome with holy zeal, fuelled by righteous purpose. We marched in the footsteps of conquering heroes. I imagined that if we could but catch up, I would see my mother again, fighting in that holy host. I willed us to march faster, I prayed that we would. But instead, the Denebreke became a nightmare.

Click here to buy Anathemas.

Warhammer horror

A Black Library Imprint

First published in Great Britain in 2020.
This eBook edition published in 2020 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Rachel Williams.

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ISBN: 978-1-78999-339-4

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This is for my editors, Kate Hamer and Hannah Hughes, for all your enthusiasm, encouragement and belief in my work. You’ll never truly know what that means to me. Thank you.

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