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The Cache – James Brogden

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Sepulturum’

A Black Library Imprint

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The Cache

by James Brogden

Lyse Urretzi was on the verge of opening up a cluster of unexplored chambers in the Spike’s mid-reaches – almost half a mile below the inhabited levels where her clan and their neighbours lived – when the crawlers attacked.

Obviously nowhere below the hab-halls was entirely safe, but even so, for crawlers to venture so far up from the lower reaches was unusual. Who knew what had drawn them? Hunger? Well, every living creature in the Spike was starving to some degree. Something bigger and fouler than themselves moving into their territory? Lyse didn’t like to think about that. All she knew was that one moment she was doing her job – squeezing her scrawny body down through the wreckage that blocked this particular shaft and bolting a vertical zip line to the wall as she went – and the next, a grille to her left was smashed open by something pale that chittered as its claws flailed and snatched.

If she had been wearing clothes she would surely have been snagged and dragged to her death. As it was, garments only hindered the work of a pit-rat like herself, who often had to squeeze through the most claustrophobic of spaces, and so apart from a utility harness, boots and gloves, her biolux tattoos and a generous amount of engine grease covering everything else, there was nothing for the crawler to snag. Even as she yelped, its grip slipped on her slickened flesh.

She fell, and the lightless gape of the shaft swallowed her instead.

A dozen deaths flashed through her mind. Brains splattered on riveted hull plating. Torso impaled on some jagged barb, guts unspooling. Garrotted by tangled wiring. Broken but alive, helpless at the mercy of the crawler’s kin. She dashed the images away and fumbled for the emergency glob-gun.

Then she hit something hard enough to knock the wind out of her. A sloping surface, so that even as she was groping for a handhold the protective grease betrayed her, and she fell and bounced off something else, her skull cracking against the metal hard enough to make bright spots flare. By then she’d got the glob-gun free and fired upward blindly, praying to Saint Geller for salvation. He must have been listening because in the darkness above, the glob hit something and stuck. The strand of goo that attached it to her harness stretched under her weight like jellied sinew. Her invisible anchor point shifted with a grinding squeal of metal, but held, and she bounced and spun like a crude toy, ricocheting from one wall of the shaft to the other. Eventually, her mad penduluming calmed to a slow spin. Her eyes clenched tight as she whispered, ‘Thank you, thank you, oh thank you.’

The blue biolux glow of her tattoos showed the walls of the shaft around her: riveted plating, pipes and conduits, torn wiring. Close by was the narrow oblong of a half-open doorway, and blackness beyond. She looked up. Blackness above, too. Calling for help – or even just to let her crew know that she was alive – was out of the question, since it would only draw more crawlers. As for climbing up without the zip line? Impossible. She looked at the doorway again. There could be anything in that chamber – a hundred ways to die. On the other hand, it could be exactly the kind of thing that she was down here to look for in the first place: fragments of tech from long ago, when the Spike had been something else entirely. Such things were ancient and unfathomable to her, but Brother Putorius could sacrifice them to keep the Geller generators alive for another day. Her clan’s ancient duty. Her duty, as the daughter of Sutomore Urretzi, clanfather. Also, her only chance of finding her way back to the hab-halls was to hope that there were stairs or another shaft, something that she could climb.

Lyse swung herself over to the doorway, caught the jamb and spun herself around to sit on the threshold with her legs dangling over the abyss as she detached the glob strand. Then she took a deep breath, offered up a prayer of thanks to Saint Geller and went inside.

There was a drop to the floor on the other side, of course, but it wasn’t as far as some. She landed, crouched and still, and listened. No echoes of crawlers, just a distant drip and trickle. She was in a cavernous space of huge, angular shadows, the darkness overhead criss-crossed by the dim columns of ducts fallen and jammed at all angles from one side to the other. It was cold, with condensation sheeting the walls. Any water was a precious commodity, and she tasted some of it from a fingertip. It was sulphurous but didn’t burn her tongue, so was probably no more toxic than anywhere else. She swept more from the wall with her palms and licked them.

In such vastness the meagre light emitted by her tattoos was useless for anything more than illuminating her immediate surroundings as she picked her way through a junkyard of wreckage, wincing at every scrape and clatter that she made. Occasionally she passed an opening to left or right, but nothing that smelled like it might lead upwards. And all the while her senses strained for any sign of tech – the fire-spark flicker or whispered hum of powercells doggedly clinging to life despite the utter dereliction of the devices that they had once served, dying alone in darkness and futility. It was a mercy, her work, salvaging these expiring gasps of the machine-spirit and putting them to one final use, to keep the clans safe. It was holy.

What she found deep in that chamber was the exact opposite.

Towards the far end, the wall was shrouded in tall drapes of heavy fabric, in front of which there was a raised, circular platform many yards across. It gleamed with what she assumed to be more condensation, and a tumble of organic shapes was stacked in the middle. She smelled shit and old blood, the miasma of violent death, and was about to turn away because no good could come from whatever this was, but then she caught it – that fire-spark flicker, a tremble of amber right in the middle of the stack.

Her excitement at the promise of tech turned to revulsion when she saw what surrounded it.

Around the platform’s circumference, unlit candles sagged in their own tallow like degenerate monks, some cupped in severed hands, some socketed in skulls, all joined by a perimeter rope of intestines. Lines painted in blood linked them, and where they intersected something had been built out of the remains of those who had given hands, heads and viscera. Whatever abomination it was supposed to be had no place being formed from human parts. It had far too many limbs, for a start. The teeth in its leering mouth were the stumps of a shattered ribcage; its eyes were the loops at the bottom of a pelvis with the wings flaring high above like a crest. In the effigy’s lap was cradled a blood-crusted bowl, and littered around its feet were smaller bones that she didn’t have to look at too closely to know were scored by gnawing.

Cannibalism itself didn’t particularly shock her. The Spike’s dead were routinely given to the corpse-starch vats. It was only in lean times, when there was a blight or a power failure, that a clan might resort to the flesh itself to survive – and even then, it was kept firmly within the family, with Prime Adjutant Galla Domitia using her arbiters to enforce a ban on inter-tribal killing. For the Urretzis there was only ever reverence and gratitude towards those who gave their bodies for the clan’s uttermost need. This, though, revolted her on every level. There was no love here. No respect. This was an abomination, mutilation for its own sake, a glorification of torment in worship of… what? There were rumours of some who gathered in forgotten chambers and raised shrines to the things Outside that hungered to get in – as they surely would if her family failed in their duty to maintain the machines that kept them at bay. There were few absolute heresies in the Spike: as long as nobody endangered the welfare of all, Prime Adjutant Domitia was content to let them do as they liked. Worship of the Outside most definitely was an absolute heresy. Lyse would report it, and delight in watching this atrocity put to the torch, along with those who had committed it.

But not before she helped herself to the glimmering thing that hung around the effigy’s neck.

She tiptoed across the dais, careful to avoid touching any of the body parts. They glistened as she passed, as if shifting to watch her, and she couldn’t shake the impression that nothing here was entirely dead. Up close, the effigy’s stench was like the breath of something rotting alive. The tech was a large and ornate medallion hanging about its throat; she checked for booby traps or alarms, but whoever had built this was obviously arrogant enough in their power to not bother. Her knife made short work of the cord, and the medallion fell into her hands.

It was a lot heavier than it looked – probably gold, but in this light that was a guess – and ridged with concentric dials that were themselves busy with slide-switches and mechanisms whose purpose she couldn’t begin to guess at. All she cared about was that the large central crystal held a dim flicker of amber within its depths, like a welding torch seen far down a shaft. She hoped it was enough for Brother Putorius to keep the machines running – maybe just for a day, maybe only for a few hours.

It would now be a simple matter to follow the tracks of those who came here, ideally back to the hab-halls or at least somewhere close. She stashed the medallion in a pouch and turned to go, and as she did so her biolux caught something metallic woven into the drapes cloaking the wall – some kind of tapestry created from stripped electrical wiring. Maybe there was another chamber behind it, a door, a passage and stairs up. There was a cord running from somewhere high above and anchored to the edge of the platform. She pulled it slowly and the covering drew to one side.

Instead of a door or passage there was some kind of twisted mural, and the shock of seeing it made her reel backwards.

‘Blessed Saint Geller,’ she whispered, aghast.

Daubed in pigments made from human bodily fluids and who knew what else, it was like the twisting roil of fire in a no-grav zone, or a multi-fingered hand of static electricity discharging at a worm’s crawl through a haze of blood-coloured smoke. It was as if the darkness behind her eyelids had spilled free and vomited itself across the wall, seething with half-formed shapes and punctuated by eldritch sigils that squirmed away from direct attention. She uttered a small, terrified whimper as she realised what she was looking at.

It was a picture of the Outside.

The artist who had rendered this could not have seen the Outside directly, as the Spike’s viewports were protected by Saint Geller’s intervention, and so this must have been how it appeared in their mind – in which case surely they must have been irretrievably insane. A deep, throbbing ache grew at the base of her brain, and her vision blurred. The image’s churning grew more agitated as if it could sense her distress, coalescing into the forms of leering faces and clutching claws in her peripheral vision. They wanted her to look at them, because then they could become real – all she had to do was take one step towards the mural, then another, as close as possible so that she could give them her terror to feed on and her imagination to clothe them, and they could slip through the painting and be free…

She tottered on the edge of the platform, nearly losing her balance. It snapped her back to herself and she found that she had moved almost to within touching distance of the mural, her right hand outstretched. She recoiled in disgust, and dropped the draw-cord as if it were a live cable. The curtain fell back, and the Outside was hidden again.

Lyse drew a deep, shuddering breath. How close had she come?

‘Idiot.’ She slapped herself. She needed to leave now before she attracted the attention of anything else.

Sure enough, there was a trail through the debris which led to a small door and then a warren of shafts and chambers leading upwards. She knew she was getting closer to the hab-halls when it started to grow warmer and she heard the rattling of the pipes that carried heat from the Spike’s lower reaches, but this district was unfamiliar, and since she didn’t know whose territory it would take her to, she advanced more cautiously. Most were friends to the Urretzis, but by no means all. The final door wasn’t much more than a hinged panel, probably disguised to look like something innocuous on the other side. The air was thick with a familiar acrid pungency and she could hear the churning of vats, and she finally knew where she was. It was almost enough to make her return to the shrine and its loathsome effigy. This was Jaax territory.

She’d only ever been here once, in the company of her father and Prime Adjutant Domitia to present her betrothal gift to Clanfather Hadzor Jaax. It was a good match; everybody said so. A Jaax-Urretzi child would ally two of the most powerful clans in the Spike, streamlining both food production and the maintenance of the Spike’s defences, and put an end to generations of bloodshed. The prime adjutant had negotiated it for months. The fact that Lyse would rather let herself be eaten alive by crawlers than share a wedding bed with Hadzor Jaax was irrelevant. He was a leering, cadaverous beast of a man whose lifetime proximity to the corpse-starch vats he controlled had afflicted him with a chronic fungal flesh-rot that caused pustulant boils. He’d had two wives already, but one had proved barren and it was rumoured that the other had thrown herself down a shaft in shame after having bred a crawler. The idea that he, or someone in his clan, was worshipping a being of the Outside with human sacrifice and cannibalism didn’t surprise her one bit. From her memory of the vat halls, they were dark and noisy places – easy to sneak through unnoticed unless she was unlucky.

She eased the panel open and slipped inside.

Instantly the noise, smell and cloying humidity all intensified. Like most of the Spike’s larger chambers it was taller than it was wide, but long, and filled with ranks of towering vats that churned the yeast-based gruel which kept most of the Spike’s population fed. Occasionally the discovery of a cache of ancient ration packs would be cause for a feast, but most had been plundered generations ago. Jaax’s vat-workers clambered amongst the pipes and ducts which fed the containers, stirring, hammering, shouting, while servo-skulls floated around them performing their unknowable tasks.

She kept her head low and her biolux dark, and slid through shadow, hoping to find the exit before she was seen. There was plenty of cover for someone small, and she crept behind the machinery along the wide gallery that led to the exit. When a servo-skull suddenly rose up in front of her with its eye sockets gleaming and mechanical mandibles a-quiver, she froze, heart hammering. It regarded her for a moment, but she obviously didn’t fit the criteria of ‘intruder’ because it ignored her and zoomed away on its business. Lyse heaved a sigh of relief and continued creeping.

The shout came like a knife between the shoulder blades – expected, but still a shock. ‘Hey! Who are you?’

Lyse didn’t bother looking at who it was. She just ran.

She twisted and turned randomly as much as possible to confound pursuit until she could find the way out. Only a few passages separated Jaax and Urretzi territories, but home might as well be at the bottom of the Spike if she was caught.

Racing footsteps pounded after her, clattering on metal catwalks above. Whistles, catcalls, whoops and jeers. Someone stepped out from a corner brandishing a wrench, but she slid underneath his wild swing, rolled, and came up running. The medallion in its pouch slapped heavily against her hip, and the fear of letting down her father was almost as bad as that of what the Jaaxes might do to her.

Ironically, it was the tech that got her caught. She was running on instinct and doing what she did best, finding small spaces and squeezing through them – gaps between pipes, underneath conduits, behind tanks – while her pursuers yelled to each other, coordinating, driving her and cutting off her escape. She tried to go feet first through the gap between two metal steps, but she’d forgotten about the extra bulk she was carrying and it got wedged – not tight enough to get her stuck, but it slowed her down, and as she was cursing and tugging herself free, a hand on the other side grabbed her ankle and dragged her out.

‘Gotcha, thieving maggot!’ The owner of the hand grabbed her throat. He was a nondescript vat-rat, scrawny but heavier than her, and his arm was livid to the elbow with burn-scar tissue that made it look half melted.

She made her biolux flare so that he could see her tattoos, the clan-sigils inscribed in her flesh. ‘I am no thief!’ she retorted. ‘I am Lyse Urretzi, first daughter of Clanfather Sutomore Urretzi, and you will unhand me before I have Prime Adjutant Domitia feed you to your own vats!’

It was a risk, giving away her identity, but she had nothing else to fall back on now except her status. Whether it was the threat or just the sudden blaze of light, he blinked, and she took advantage of it by ramming her knee into his crotch, fleeing as he doubled up, retching. Saint Geller must have been looking favourably on her courage because around the next corner she saw the wide gates that opened onto the passage between Jaax and Urretzi territory, and she collapsed sobbing over the threshold of home.

‘I will not hear this!’ shouted her father. ‘I will not waste the prime adjutant’s time with old wives’ tales!’ Brother Putorius looked up briefly from his devotions at the shrine of Saint Geller, frowning at the interruption. The saint’s reliquary was a vast sarcophagus of black iron, decorated with panels depicting Geller victorious in battle over the abominations of the Outside and preaching in glory from the apex of the Spike. Snaking into it from all directions were the hissing pipes and trembling conduits that it was Putorius’ duty to placate with his mumbled prayers and invocations. ‘And even if your story is true, just because you ended up in Jaax territory doesn’t mean that what you found has anything to do with them.’

‘Who else could it be?’ she retorted.

‘Regardless of that,’ he ploughed on, ‘you thought this… this thing’ – he prodded the medallion with disgust – ‘which was part of something blasphemous, would somehow make up for your intrusion?’

It was true. She hadn’t considered it that way. At least she hadn’t told them about the mural and its effect on her. Bad enough that he thought she was an idiot; if he suspected that she had been polluted by the Outside he might very well throw her to the crawlers. The doctrine was implacable, first daughter or not. ‘I thought you’d be pleased,’ was the best she could come up with.

‘What would please me would be for you to stop running around the lower reaches like a child playing hide and seek, and live up to your responsibilities by marrying Hadzor Jaax and bearing him a son!’ he snapped.

She stared at him, horrified. ‘You still think there can be an alliance? When they are worshipping the Outside? Father, they’re spitting in the face of everything we believe! How can you say this?’

‘I can say this, daughter, because we are starving. It’s that simple.’ He wouldn’t face her, and she realised that what she had taken for coldness was the bleak despair of a trapped animal. ‘Now go and clean yourself up. And get rid of this!’ He tossed the medallion back to her.

The evening’s gruel was thin on sustenance, but there was enough awkward silence for a banquet. The last time they’d had fresh protein had been the discovery of a nest of foot-long albino centipedes, and just remembering the smell of their frying made Lyse’s mouth water. When she’d been very small her father had once brought home an oilskin-wrapped package that he had presented to his family with great ceremony. The lettering on it had long since faded and nobody knew what the contents were, and once it had been divided up amongst the family she’d received little more than a dice-sized lump, but even that had been enough to send her bouncing off the walls for the rest of the evening.

The awkward silence was broken by the arrival of a nervous-looking sentry, who announced that Hadzor Jaax was at the gate demanding to speak to the clanfather. He had the prime adjutant with him, accompanied by a squad of arbiters. Lyse’s father shot her a cold glance and rose from the table to accompany the guard. She excused herself and returned to her sleeping alcove – not just because of the day’s shocks, but also because there was a metal grille in the wall above her pallet that carried sound from the surrounding passageways if the airflow was in the right direction.

She pulled the curtain closed and stood on her pallet with her ear pressed to the grille, and found that she could hear the argument that was unfolding.

‘My daughter is no thief!’ her father shouted. Her heart glowed at that. He might be furious with her, but would never side with anyone against her no matter how wrong she was.

‘She was found in the vat hall, where she had no right to be,’ replied Jaax, his voice low and controlled – amused, even. ‘She even identified herself to one of my men, and threatened to have the arbiters called.’ Jaax’s chuckle was thick with the arrogance of power. ‘Be careful what you wish for, wouldn’t you say?’

A woman’s voice – Prime Adjutant Domitia, cold and without inflection: ‘Calm yourself, Sutomore. If she has taken nothing, you should have no fear of her being searched.’

‘This is not fear!’ snapped her father. ‘This is outrage! This accusation is baseless slander! An insult to my family and beneath the dignity of your office.’

‘Have a care how you tell me to do my job,’ Domitia said, her voice steely.

‘My apologies,’ he replied. ‘Nevertheless, prime adjutant…’

There was only one way this could end and Lyse didn’t need to hear any more. Her father would capitulate, their chambers would be searched, the medallion would be found and Jaax would murder her – probably not until she’d bred him a healthy son, but all the same. It would be easy to throw the object down a shaft beyond recovery and feign innocence, but to discard a piece of ancient tech like trash felt worse than wasting food. She needed a place to hide and a way of finding out what the medallion was, and she knew one person who could supply both, assuming that he was still alive and sane enough to not kill her on sight.

Cracius the Eremite. The ancient tech-priest of no hall and no clan.

Some said Cracius was the oldest living soul in the Spike. Some said that he had exiled himself after a failed attempt to overthrow the prime adjutant’s predecessor. Others whispered that he stole and ate children. All Lyse knew was that Brother Putorius considered him to be a dangerous heretic in possession of outlawed knowledge, and right now that was exactly what she needed.

She scooped up some uneaten food into a flask for an offering, gathered the rest of her things and slipped away.

For as long as anyone could remember Cracius had lived in a region called the Cyst, which scavengers like Lyse made long detours to avoid. This was, quite simply, because it was haunted.

It lay half a mile below the hab-halls but not quite as far as the lower reaches, and its effect was felt differently by those foolish enough to get close. It caused dizziness and disorientation, spinning you around and spitting you out in a different location. Sometimes it provoked profound unease, the sense that you were about to plunge into a bottomless shaft or were being followed by unseen things. Worst were the hallucinations: of being asphyxiated by gas, or burned alive, or chased down tunnels boiling with hordes of crawlers. If you bullied your way past all of this by brute willpower, you came to places where the straight up-and-down passages and shafts were blocked by curving bulkheads of strange, leathery material. Anyone with any sense took the hint and kept well away, unless they were a half-mad tech-priest or somebody desperate enough to be looking for him.

She knew she was getting close when the shadows in her peripheral vision began to scamper, and the pressure that had been building in her head began to feel like hydraulic pistons on either side of her skull. She gritted her teeth and forced herself forward, trying not to be distracted by the leering faces that she knew weren’t really there. When a tall, multi-limbed silhouette clambered out of the walls of the passage ahead she nearly blundered into it, convinced that it too was an illusion. Cracius’ form was bulky with robes over a metal carapace that wheezed and creaked, and was hung about with arcane devices and amulets. Without warning, articulated mechanical claws gripped her wrists and she was hauled off her feet to be held, kicking uselessly, in front of a face that glared from within a thick transparent dome.

‘What is it?’ rasped a voice, distorted through amplification. ‘Human,’ it continued, as if the question hadn’t been meant for her. She was turned this way and that, inspected. ‘Three-seven point two kilograms/malnourished… Female/possibly/err percentile one-seven point zero-four. What does it want?’ After a moment he shook her like a doll and repeated, ‘What does it want?’

It seemed she was being addressed after all.

‘Master… Cracius,’ she gasped. It was hard to breathe with her weight hanging off her arms. ‘I have… food.’

‘Food, is it?’ She was hauled closer for a more detailed inspection. Behind his protective visor, Cracius’ face was wizened with age, his eyebrows like white wire brushes, and parts of his bald skull were plated with riveted metal from which tubes drained a brackish-looking fluid. He must have been satisfied with what he saw because he grunted and let go, and she dropped to the floor. ‘Let’s have it then,’ he ordered.

She fumbled for the flask of leftovers. A segmented tentacle emerged from amongst his robes, took the flask, and withdrew. ‘I assume this is payment for some favour you are about to waste my time by requesting,’ he rasped.

‘I have something,’ she replied, and showed him the medallion. ‘Can you tell me what it is?’

He peered at it, and grunted. ‘Possibly. First, though…’ He reached within himself and pulled free a tube. An intravenous needle tipped the end, from which a bead of blue fluid welled. ‘This. It will help with the hallucinations. Shield your meat brain.’

She looked at the needle. No way was she sticking that in any part of her. ‘I’m fine, thanks.’

He shrugged. ‘Come with me,’ he said, and set off down the passage, his heavy footfalls making the floor shudder. She ran to catch up. Grasping hands came out of the floor to grab at her ankles, but they weren’t really there. She focused on the tech-priest’s disappearing back and followed him.

Master Cracius’ cell was so crammed with tech that she wondered how he managed to move around. There were teetering piles of machinery, wires, gears, pistons, valves, data-slates, even a small pyramid of broken servo-skulls, and a hundred other things that she couldn’t begin to identify. In only one place was anything clear: a section of wall that bulged outward slightly and appeared to be made of a different substance to the rest – something dark and pearlescent – the wall of the Cyst. It was covered by a mosaic of data-slates connected by venous cables, their screens scrawling with glyphs busily writing themselves.

The tech-priest took the golden medallion to a device that looked like a giant overturned spider on a lectern, and placed it in the centre. Then he detached one of the cables from deep within his robes and inserted it into the spider’s head, whereupon its legs spasmed and curled themselves over and began to probe at the medallion with surprising delicacy. Meanwhile, ugly slurping sounds came from within Cracius’ carapace as he ingested her leftovers. She tried to ignore how the bulge of wall was growing, because she knew it wasn’t really happening, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away from its distended swell, like a pregnant belly gravid with horrors, or the smaller bulges roaming around as whatever was on the other side seethed to be born…

In an effort to distract herself she asked him, ‘What makes the hallucinations?’

‘Sequence/iteration/else/cogit-failure,’ he muttered. ‘That’s not the question you need answering.’

‘It isn’t?’

‘Null/else/this: you must be aware that this place was once populated more densely than is currently the case. You’ve seen the evidence everywhere.’

Lyse nodded. ‘We find remains sometimes, but not often. Crawlers ate most of them long ago.’

He turned to regard her. ‘Have you never stopped to think what the crawlers actually are?’

‘I don’t understand. They’re just… crawlers. Messed-up meat.’

‘Yes, well, we’ll come back to that later. Anyway, before the Spike became what it is, her name was the Spira Tenebris, and she was a battleship.’

Lyse knew ‘battle’ well enough. ‘What’s a ship?’ she asked.

‘Don’t interrupt. Now, the crew complement of the Tenebris numbered in the hundreds of thousands – virtually a small city…’

‘What’s a–’

Cracius glared at her, and she shut up.

‘A city that had to be provisioned,’ he continued. ‘From stores containing enough to feed a quarter of a million mouths for the few weeks of a campaign.’

Lyse continued listening in the hope that he might say something coherent.

‘Keeping track of those stores was the responsibility of the master sergeant victualler. This,’ he said, indicating the medallion, ‘is the Victualler’s Seal.’ He waited, plainly expecting her to be impressed.

She looked at him. ‘And?’

‘And it contains stock data, location and access codes for all the food caches on board, you ignorant oaf of a girl!’

She sat up straight. ‘Wait – did you say food?’

‘Yes, I did. And mark you, I’m not talking about spit-roasted rat or this corpse-starch slop.’ Her flask fell out from within his robes, empty now, but she didn’t rush to collect it. She didn’t want to think about where it had been. ‘I’m talking about protein bars, vitamin supplements, freeze-dried ration packs, water-purification tabs, cal-gel… things your taste buds couldn’t begin to dream of.’

‘Well, where are they?’

The spider device probed the Seal some more while the tech-priest muttered words which might have been prayers to the Machine-God, or equally curses. Abruptly, the central amber stone burst into life, and a glowing apparition sprang into the air above it. Lyse drew her knife and backed away. ‘It’s a ghost!’

He squinted at her. ‘In a way, yes, it is. This is the Spira Tenebris as she was, in the time of your grandmother’s grandmother.’

The apparition was long and sketched in a network of bright geometric lines, like a picture of a bone scratched in fire, but it wasn’t flat; it rotated slowly, and it wasn’t a smooth bone but wickedly pointed at one end and heavily flared at the other and jutted with angular excrescences along its length.

He was still squinting at her. ‘Do you recognise this?’

‘No. Should I?’

‘Var/aspect/exec,’ he muttered, making further adjustments, and the phantom swivelled from a horizontal to a vertical alignment, the sharp point uppermost. ‘How about now?’

Lyse shrugged. ‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to be looking at.’

He sighed with irritation and pointed to the top, where it curved into something like a fang. ‘This is where the prime adjutant and her arbiters have their quarters. Below that, the hab-halls of the five families. Then down through a mile of wreckage and devastation to the lower reaches where crawlers make their nests and the air is poison and the djinn fires burn eternally.

‘Much data is lost, but either the grav-generators failed or else it happened during the first moments of upheaval when the Tenebris was open to the immaterium. The shafts that you clamber up and down were once halls and galleries, thronging with people and the glorious song of countless machines. Now all is silent,’ he murmured. ‘All is dark. It is the Spike. Our home.’

She stared, wondering at the strange melancholy that had come over him. Then she burst out laughing.

His voice was a low growl. ‘I did not realise I was being amusing.’

‘I’m sorry!’ she sputtered, trying to stifle her giggles. ‘It’s just that what you’re saying…’

‘Yes?’

‘Well it’s nonsense, isn’t it? You’re insane.’

Instead of being insulted, Cracius seemed to consider this seriously. ‘That is entirely possible,’ he admitted. ‘In which case you’re not going to like this.’ The spider probed a third time, and the image filled with fire-spark points, each orbited by a tiny ring of numbers and figures. ‘Each one of these is the location of a cache of provisions. Food, to you. Unless I’m insane,’ he added drily.

‘But…’ she stammered. ‘But there are so many of them!’ Enough food to last a few thousand people for centuries. And it wasn’t just something to fill bellies, it was freedom from the tyranny of scraping a hand-to-mouth existence, freedom from the Jaaxes’ control over the vats, freedom from her obligation to marry a man she loathed.

‘Correction: there were so many of them.’

One by one, the fire-sparks began to die.

‘No…’ she whispered. ‘No!’ They were disappearing. She grasped at the image to stop them, but her fingers just closed on empty air, and they kept dying inexorably. She turned to Master Cracius. ‘What’s happening?’

‘The Seal is updating its records. Your ancestors plundered those caches long ago. But look.’ He pointed, and she turned back. Two fire-sparks remained. One, which was just a plain glowing icon with no halo of orbiting figures, was in the middle of the image, close by a sphere of empty space. ‘That one,’ he said, ‘is this,’ and he indicated the Seal. The second fire-spark was ringed with numbers and was a lot lower down the Spike, almost at the very bottom. ‘That one,’ he said, ‘is a cache that has not been plundered. Yet.’

Its depth explained why it hadn’t been found before. It was in the lower reaches. Crawler territory. Dangerously close to the djinn fires and the kind of place you never went without protective gear, weapons and a full support team – none of which she had.

‘Well that’s–’ she said, and was interrupted by a high-pitched wail coming from a servo-skull that had floated from its perch amongst the stacks of equipment; its eyes were flashing an urgent red.

‘Visitors,’ commented Master Cracius. The skull glided over to him and he connected a cable, communing with the device. ‘Friends of yours,’ he added drily. ‘Jaaxes and a squad of arbiters, headed by the prime adjutant herself, no less. You should be flattered.’

‘Can you hide me?’

He shook his head. ‘Domitia and I have an understanding, but I am of no hall and so my influence is limited. I will not detain you, but that is the most I can offer.’

‘Thanks for nothing.’ She held out her hand. ‘I’ll have my tech back.’ When he hesitated, she waved her knife. ‘Let’s you and I have an understanding too, then – a quarter of whatever I find, or else I see how much damage I can do to your funny little tubes before the arbiters get me.’

He laughed, and it sounded like stones rattling in a bucket. ‘Half. I will input the cache’s coordinates so that the Seal directs you to it.’

‘Done.’

He made his adjustments to the device’s sliding switches, muttering in his arcane machine language, and returned it to her. She saw now that rather than a medallion it was a compass, suspended in a gimbal of rings that allowed it to rotate in three dimensions.

‘It will now point to the cache at all times,’ he said, then added with a dark amusement that she did not like, ‘though it will not guide you through whatever is in the way.’

As the servo-skull’s shrilling grew louder, Lyse fled.

Down, then. Except that if Master Cracius was to be believed, down had once been along. The idea of being able to walk in a straight line for more than a dozen yards without obstacle was simultaneously fascinating and so alien that it threatened to overwhelm Lyse’s imagination, so she pushed it aside and concentrated on finding a way down to the last cache. If she could find it without being killed by crawlers, and then open it, and if there was anything left, there might be something that she could use to barter with Domitia for her freedom. It was a ladder of ‘mights’, any rung of which might slip from under her footing and send her plummeting to her death.

There was only one zip line that travelled so far down, laid years ago by some foolhardy or desperate scavenger who had never returned to tell of what they had found, and she prayed to Saint Geller that it was still there. With only hearsay and tall stories to guide her it was difficult, but her consolation was that her pursuers didn’t even have that, and would be moving much slower than herself. She kept her biolux low, and trusted to her instincts.

Despite telling her imagination to keep its mouth shut, she couldn’t help examining her surroundings as she passed, looking for evidence to support Cracius’ absurd tales. It might explain why nothing seemed designed properly for people: doorways were sometimes so low that you had to crouch to get through, and all over the Spike there were vertical rows of sigils on the walls, but since she couldn’t read she had no way of telling whether or not they were the right way up.

She found it in the end – a wide-mouthed shaft as derelict as any other, with a pair of metal tracks running down one wall. She cocked her head to one side and experimented with seeing that wall as a floor, and the tracks being used to transport something to and fro. It was impossible. The zip line was there, bolted to the wall, and she wondered how far down it went, who had set it there and what they had seen. Had they fallen under the claws of crawlers or looked on the djinn fires with their own eyes, or even reached the very bottom of the Spike itself? Until Cracius had shown her the ghost of the Spira Tenebris she had never thought of the Spike as having a bottom; it had always seemed to just go on, down and down forever. If it had a bottom, then what was on the other side? The Outside? It hurt her head to think this way.

There was a good chance that this was all nothing but his idea of a joke, sending her to certain death on a quest for something that had never existed in the first place. But what choice did she have?

‘Damn you, Cracius,’ she muttered, then clipped onto the line and lowered herself over the edge.

She could feel a faint vibration thrumming up the line, as if it were descending through levels where massive furnaces roared in the darkness. She took it slowly, not trusting the old anchor points to be secure, and paused often to listen, sniff the air, and feel the vibrations in the metal walls. There were no blockages, thank Saint Geller, and no sign of any crawlers. She knew they were there, of course. They were probably watching her right at this moment, and had just decided not to show themselves. Not for the first time she wished she had brought a decent weapon. Her small size and sneakiness were always going to be her best assets, but it would be nice to have something larger than her little utility knife to wield. She made a small detour along a side tunnel off the shaft and found a length of piping that felt comfortingly heftable, shoved it through the back straps of her harness and resumed her descent.

Gradually Lyse became aware of a current of warm air bathing her from below that she didn’t like the feel of at all. It might be coming from the djinn fires, in which case it was poisonous and to be avoided at all costs, so she left the shaft and took to a transverse passage. The Seal only gave her the crudest directional guidance, and so she was constantly forced to backtrack and find ways around blockages, jammed doors and abysses that yawned unexpectedly at her feet. Eventually, however, she reached a place where its compass began oscillating as if confused, and she knew that she must be close. Lyse found herself before a wide, low door much like any other, except that it had a circular depression in the wall above it, just about the same size as the medallion.

It fitted perfectly.

The Seal, locked into place by something powerfully magnetic, pulled itself out of her hand, and she stepped back in alarm. The concentric slide-controls around its central stone moved on their own, clicking into position, and she heard a heavy grinding of unseen gears and pistons as the door opened from the bottom up. A gust of stale air blew around her. The gap was less than two feet when something gave way with a scream of hydraulics and a judder that she felt through her feet, and jammed.

She went dark, folded herself into a corner and waited, heart pounding.

Nothing happened. Nothing lurched out of the gap to snatch at her. Nothing came out of the tunnel, alerted by the noise of the ancient mechanism. She eased herself down on the floor and put one arm through the gap, flexing her fingers wide to activate the biolux tattoos, and peered in. There was some kind of jumbled mound on the other side, gleaming in the meagre illumination.

She slithered under the jammed door, praying that it would not unjam and crash down again, slicing her in half like a worm. But it didn’t. She stood straight in the room on the other side and gasped in amazement.

A mountain of packages sealed in some strange kind of oilskin that shone like polished metal, canisters, tins, bottles and containers of every shape and size lay amidst the wreckage of the shelving from which they’d toppled. Many had spilled or burst, their contents spoiled, but the majority appeared to be intact. She picked up a small bar of something that lay nearby, tore open one corner and sniffed at it. It didn’t really smell of much, certainly not something rotten, so she tried the tiniest of nibbles. The taste was rich, heavy and sweet, and her mouth instantly began to salivate. Before she could stop herself she wolfed the whole thing and three more, squatting on her haunches and scoffing with both hands. Whatever was in them, it surged into her blood like battery acid, burning the fatigue out of her muscles and clearing her head. She was so overwhelmed by the sensory overload that she didn’t notice what had entered the room behind her until it spoke.

Ours now.

She spun, knife in her hand, expecting Hadzor Jaax and his men, backed up by the prime adjutant’s arbiters.

Instead she saw an army of crawlers.

They crowded under the door, pulling themselves into the room on pale limbs. No two were alike – most of the eyes that stared at her were blind and white but others glittered with malevolence. Most had legs but some dragged themselves along the floor and up the walls with wide, sucker-lined hands or hooked claws. She saw faces that had melted into torsos, vertebrae that protruded from the skin in barbed spines, figures that carried their naked organs ahead of themselves like offerings, and others with jaws that hinged wide to reveal multiple rows of teeth and snake-like tongues that lashed and leered. Some were even wearing the ragged remains of clothing. The one that had spoken – which she assumed was the leader either because of its ability to use human speech or because its deformities were the most extreme – was being carried by two of its brethren. Part of its skull was missing, or else had been removed, and in the naked, pulsing brain underneath a milky eyeball rolled at her.

We have waited a very long time for this to be opened, it said, and she was amazed at the perfect clarity of its speech before realising that it had no mouth, and was speaking directly into her mind. Shocked and revolted, she back-pedalled up the pile of ration packs, stumbling as they slithered out from beneath her.

Many wanted to eat you, it continued. But you were thinking so loudly about opening the cache that we thought we’d wait to see if you could do it. And you did, for which we thank you. But now it, and you, are ours.

‘Blessed Saint Geller, protect me,’ she whispered, still backing away awkwardly, and hauled out the iron bar to defend herself.

The crawler’s mocking laugh filled her skull. Oh child, do you have any idea what it is that you are actually praying to?

‘What… what do you mean?’

Then consider this a mercy. We’re putting you out of your ignorance.

At some unheard command they surged towards her.

She clubbed at pale flesh and felt something snap beneath her iron bar before her feet were snatched from underneath her and she fell into the pile. Then a crawler was on top of her, snapping and drooling, while another seized the meaty flesh of her right calf and worried at her like a rat fighting over a scrap. No mercy of a swift fall or a bullet here; they were going to eat her alive while she watched and screamed. The stench of them choked her, and the darkness was raucous with their looping howls.

A burst of gunfire from the hallway crashed over the din and for a moment everything froze. Something uttered a high-pitched, gibbering shriek and there was another rattle of shooting, and the room exploded into frantic motion as the crawlers abandoned their prey and attempted to flee.

Lyse lay, dizzy with shock, listening to the screams of battle. Only arbiters possessed proper firearms, which meant that Prime Adjutant Domitia was close, which meant that Jaax was too, but at this very moment Lyse couldn’t have cared less. This place and everything in it was hers. She had found it by law of salvage, and if her claim wasn’t honoured then Master Cracius would vouch for her, otherwise he wouldn’t get his share.

Then the pain in her savaged leg woke up, and she cried out. In the dim glow of biolux her blood was black; she was glossy with it from knee to toe. The noises of fighting abated as the crawlers fled into their tunnels and Lyse hauled herself to her feet, using the iron bar as a makeshift crutch. When the first arbiter slid under the door, sweeping the chamber with a flashlight on the end of his gun, she put her free hand up in surrender.

‘Don’t shoot!’ she called. ‘I am Lyse Urretzi, first daughter of–’

‘We know,’ said Prime Adjutant Galla Domitia, sliding in after her soldier and standing. ‘And a merry dance you’ve led us, too.’ She was tall and carapaced in body armour, with a shock of close-cropped iron-grey hair and a hatchet face that looked like it had forgotten how to smile a long time ago. Nevertheless, surprise widened her eyes as she looked around the room and saw its riches.

‘Claim!’ Lyse declared. ‘This is mine!’ She took the iron bar in both hands, though it meant having to totter on one leg, and brandished it as if she were prepared to fight all of them.

One corner of Domitia’s mouth quirked and she inclined her head slightly. ‘Your claim will be honoured, have no fear.’ The rest of her squad entered the room one by one, and fell upon the loot with whoops and hollers, but Domitia barked at them to stand down.

‘Thank you, prime adjutant.’ Lyse almost allowed herself to relax, but then Hadzor Jaax squirmed into the room last of all. His armaments were much cruder than the arbiters’ – his gun looked like it had been cobbled together from plumbing and scrap metal, and as likely to take his own hand off as actually hit his target. Lyse ignored him. She could afford to now.

‘Cracius told you where I was going, didn’t he?’

‘Yes,’ said Domitia, ‘but don’t be angry with him. My chasteners didn’t leave him much of a choice, and after all, it saved your life. He also told us about the Seal. Where did you find it?’

It was only Jaax’s flicker of a glance at Domitia that saved her life. In it Lyse saw him weighing up the odds of shooting either the prime adjutant or herself – which one he could best get away with to suppress the discovery of his heresy. Lyse wasn’t conscious of the knowledge, however; it slithered straight down into her animal hindbrain and triggered her fight-or-flight instinct.

His gun shifted, and he shot her.

She fell to one side as something punched her in the shoulder, and she scrambled under the door and into the passageway outside. It was littered with the corpses of crawlers and slippery with their blood, and she skidded and limped through them.

She had to give Jaax his due, he was fast. He tried to slip out after her, and almost made it. She fought every instinct screaming at her to run, and turned back to the door. The prime adjutant was shouting with outrage, and maybe somebody was trying to hold Jaax back, but he was halfway out from underneath, grabbing at her.

‘Little bitch!’ he snarled, and seized her ankle. He was bringing his gun up to bear on her when Lyse plucked the Victualler’s Seal from its lock.

The door slammed down on his torso, crushing his ribcage, and a gout of blood spurted from his mouth. His eyes bulged and his arms spasmed, the gun went off but nowhere near her, and he was still.

Lyse fell amongst the crawler corpses, sobbing.

The prime adjutant’s shouts were faint and distant.

Hadzor Jaax began to move again.

Except that it wasn’t Hadzor Jaax any more.

Its hands gripped the lower edge of the door and began to push upwards, which was impossible because the door must have weighed a ton. But then the hands themselves were swelling, growing talons that left gouges in the metal as if it were paper. Everything about Jaax was growing and thickening, sprouting spines and horns, mutating into something new and terrible – the living nightmare of which the effigy, obscene as it was, had been only a shadow. It made the crawlers that had so nearly killed her look like mere rats in comparison, and she could only gape at it, her mind numbed by disbelief. Transfixed by its eyes, she felt the same kind of sick fascination as when she had looked at the blasphemous mural. It grinned at her, its tongue lolling across teeth as black as rot.

‘Don’t worry my dear,’ it drooled in Jaax’s voice. ‘You will still be my bride.’ It got to its knees, shouldering the door upwards with immense strength. Behind it, in the room, people were screaming, guns firing, and stray bullets zipped through the gap around her. ‘But first I have business to attend to.’ It ducked back inside, dropping the door behind it, and she heard the gunfire and screaming escalate to frenzied heights, accompanied by wet, rending noises and the laughter of something that gloried in its work.

Released from its gaze, Lyse fled.

This couldn’t last long, she knew. She was sobbing and slipping in her own blood and stumbling every other step, her leg burning with agony, her shoulder adding its fuel to the fire even though that whole arm was numb with pins and needles. She should have collapsed by now, but whatever she had eaten was still burning in her blood. All the same, she had no plan – she couldn’t lead the Outsider upwards to the hab-halls, nor was there much further down to drop; all she could do was slip through the smallest gaps and run from the inevitable for as long as possible.

The Outsider announced its pursuit, calling her name, laughing and jeering. Presumably it had finished with the arbiters. It would do to her clan – all the clans – what it had done to the best-armed of them, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

Lyse’s attention was so consumed by the pursuing horror that she nearly fell headlong into the shaft that opened before her.

She pinwheeled her arms and regained her balance. Light and warmth struck her face from below. There was an angry orange glow far down the shaft, which could only be one thing: the djinn fires. All the stories told that the djinn fires were poison – that their breath would corrupt your flesh and make you a mother to crawlers – but that hardly mattered now since it didn’t seem likely that she was going to live to be a mother to anything. She must be almost at the very bottom of the Spike.

‘Lyse, my love, come to me and we shall be one in Valgaast!’ howled the Outsider, and shrieked with laughter that hurt her ears. It was a lot louder, a lot closer.

It was so tempting to simply throw herself in and have done with it, but that would have meant abandoning her family to the creature without even offering what pitiful defiance she could muster. Instead, she closed her eyes and offered what she feared was her last prayer to Saint Geller. Then she turned, putting her back to the burning abyss, and limped towards the monster’s voice.

‘No!’ she shouted. ‘You come to me!’

It emerged around the corner, bigger than before, so large that it had to stoop. Maybe killing the arbiters had empowered it. She didn’t care. ‘You were a pitiful sack of shit when you were a man and you’re just a bigger sack of shit now!’

The Outsider roared and charged.

Lyse was small – that was partially how she had survived so long in the Spike. Small and quick. She held her ground to the very last second and then flattened herself to the floor as the Outsider swept towards her with its claw-tipped arms bent like scoops to snatch her up.

And missed.

Its speed carried it towards the shaft, feet scrabbling against the smooth metal of the floor, but even as it plunged towards the edge it somehow managed to twist and use its momentum to leap over the gap, where it landed awkwardly on the other side.

The Outsider grinned and opened its slavering mouth but then stopped, staring at something stuck to its chest: a lump of sticky green goo and a wire-tight strand stretching from it to the glob-gun in Lyse’s hand.

‘Little bitch!’ she spat, and pulled as hard as she could.

The creature outweighed her massively, and if she’d given it a moment to regain its balance would easily have been able to resist. But she was quick, and like a precariously balanced machine pushed past its tipping point, the Outsider fell howling into the void.

Lyse collapsed at the edge, exhausted and broken, and a bit pissed off. She was going to have to get a new glob-gun now. Then as the fire left her blood she began to laugh – a high, crazed sound indistinguishable from the weeping or howling that echoed through the twisted passageways and empty galleries of the Spike like the shrieks of a lost and demented soul.

She laughed, and laughed, and laughed.

Master Cracius surveyed her critically. ‘Quer/invent.: you are sure that you have everything?’

Lyse, once first daughter to the Urretzi clan but latterly of no hall, checked her gear for the third time, more to reassure him than out of necessity: glob-gun, riveter, line-grabber, mag-pads, the message that was her errand and the gifts that would ease its reception. ‘Everything,’ she said.

‘Quer/loc.: the schematic is clear to you?’

She patted the satchel which held the data-slate and its map of her route. ‘Yes, grandfather.’

He scowled. ‘That is not amusing.’

‘Yes it is.’ She couldn’t claim to know the old tech-priest from the short time that she had been quartered with him, but she could tell when he was responding more or less as a human when his responses weren’t prefaced by some machine language gibberish.

He grunted, which was the closest he got to agreement. He was more predictable than the Urretzis, at least. When she had returned with her clan tattoos warped out of recognition the celebrations had quickly turned to whispers that she had made some kind of pact with the Outside, and she had left before the whispers became accusations of heresy. The shrine and effigy had both disappeared, but she didn’t for one second imagine that its worshippers had too.

We shall be one in Valgaast, the Outsider had said. She had no idea what that meant, but the very shape of the words in her mind was enough to cause nightmares.

Cracius had not so much taken her in as neglected to throw her out when she started sleeping amidst his scrap hoard, and he didn’t seem disturbed by the way she screamed herself awake most nights. In time she had even proved herself to be useful to him, retrieving components from places he was too bulky to go. Now he had given her a message to deliver, and the trust that this implied swelled her heart with a strange feeling that might have been happiness.

‘Go on, then,’ he said, and turned from her to work on one of his incomprehensible devices.

She grinned, and left for the crawler warrens.

About the Author

James Brogden is a writer of horror and dark fantasy. A part-time Australian who grew up in Tasmania and the Cumbrian Borders, he has since escaped to suburbia and now lives in the Midlands, where he teaches English. When not writing or teaching he can usually be found up a hill, poking around stone circles and burial mounds. He also owns more lego than is strictly necessary.

An extract from Sepulturum.

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-maCristo 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.

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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.

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the purchaser of a Black Library e-book product (“You/you/Your/your”)

(jointly, “the parties”)

These are the terms and conditions that apply when you purchase a Black Library e-book (“e-book”). The parties agree that in consideration of the fee paid by you, Black Library grants you a license to use the e-book on the following terms:

* 1. Black Library grants to you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free license to use the e-book in the following ways:

o 1.1 to store the e-book on any number of electronic devices and/or storage media (including, by way of example only, personal computers, e-book readers, mobile phones, portable hard drives, USB flash drives, CDs or DVDs) which are personally owned by you;

o 1.2 to access the e-book using an appropriate electronic device and/or through any appropriate storage media.

* 2. For the avoidance of doubt, you are ONLY licensed to use the e-book as described in paragraph 1 above. You may NOT use or store the e-book in any other way. If you do, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license.

* 3. Further to the general restriction at paragraph 2, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license in the event that you use or store the e-book (or any part of it) in any way not expressly licensed. This includes (but is by no means limited to) the following circumstances:

o 3.1 you provide the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.2 you make the e-book available on bit-torrent sites, or are otherwise complicit in ‘seeding’ or sharing the e-book with any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.4 you attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.

* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.