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Pentimento – Nick Kyme

About the Author

An Extract from ‘The Reverie’

A Black Library Imprint

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Pentimento

Nick Kyme

The body stood erect and cruciform, naked and without modesty. Male, though the anatomical excisions made this difficult to define for certain, as did the general disfigurements to the victim overall. It appeared almost ritualistic. A statement of some kind.

Observation was Mabeth’s art. She had an eye for it, or so Hakasto had joked. Gifted, some said. To her, the old artisan had been like a father. He taught her everything he knew, until eventually she surpassed him. Oka Hakasto’s craft became Mabeth’s craft, she his only student. Then, their work had been venerated around the world, as nobles and oligarchs clamoured for a sitting with the great Hakasto and his protégé. Coin, renown, they had been short of neither.

And now…

They say scent is the most powerful sense memory. Sitting in that empty church, the air thick with the reek of copper, Mabeth remembered her master. His legacy had ended with a knife in his neck and his arterial blood making a terrible mess of his otherwise fine robes.

Coin, renown… but also jealously and greed. She had wept and not changed her mourning robes for six days, her eyes thick with kohl, her lips inked black.

His death, for all its callous senselessness, was mundane. Not like this. This was art. Grotesque, unconscionable, but art nonetheless. And she knew art. Hakasto had not taught her that. That was innate. She bled art.

And there was much blood, lustrous and red.

Now, only the dead would sit for her, and they had little choice or awareness of the matter. As Mabeth sketched, she took in the arms that had been strung by the victim’s own sinews. Hanging limply, as if some godlike and invisible puppeteer held onto them from above. No, not a puppet, she realised. She had misread the artist’s intentions. She sketched splayed feet, their broken toes and bones distended, and the clawed fingers reaching like strange branches. And finally, the position of the body, utterly straight, rigid as any trunk.

‘A tree…’ she murmured aloud, pausing to regard it.

‘What?’ asked Levio. The proctor sounded gruff, his unshaven face further testimony of either a lack of self-respect or the lateness of the hour. Or both. He was badly dressed in a long coat and peacekeeper fatigues, one of several weary lawmen at large in the church. He worried at the aquila rosary wrapped around his wrist, half eyeing the shadows of the dingy church with only stab-lights to lift the darkness. He hid his irritation poorly.

‘A tree,’ Mabeth repeated, her charcoal stylus poised. ‘He has been arranged in the manner and aspect of a tree.’

‘There aren’t any trees in the city.’

‘I didn’t say it was based on anything in Durgov.’

Levio took another look. ‘I only see some poor bastard, tortured to death.’ He turned, frowned. ‘You said arranged?’

Mabeth nodded.

‘What do you think it means?’

‘Growth, rebirth… knowledge, maybe,’ she said. ‘A tree has broad symbolic meaning.’

‘I don’t see meaning. I see madness. City’s infected with it.’

It had got worse. Ever since the sky had changed and the astropaths had died. No word out, no word in. Entire world had been affected. Something had happened, but no one knew what it was, only that it had. Powerlessness bred fear. Fear bred violence. And so it went.

‘Why I am here, Proctor Levio?’

‘Arbitrator wants a record.’ He stalled to pick at something in his teeth. ‘Doesn’t want to come down here to see for herself.’

Mabeth gestured to the perturbed looking hunchback busying around a picter unit.

‘Then what’s he here for? Would a pictograph not capture a more accurate impression of the scene? Not to mention be much faster? I’m not complaining,’ she hastened to add, ‘I need the coin. Not much work for an artist when every patron has decided to start hoarding their wealth for the end of days.’

‘I honestly do not know,’ admitted Levio. ‘So far, he’s done precisely fuck all.’

The hunchback’s dark robes hid several disfigurements, most of them cybernetic in nature. He was a sacristan, conversant in the utilisation and repair of machines. Right now, as he switched out parts from the picter or replaced powercells, he appeared only to be conversant in a varied lexicon of expletives.

‘Here…’ Levio pulled a folder from his long coat and handed it to Mabeth.

She opened it and leafed through several flimsies.

‘They’re all useless,’ she said, frowning. ‘Just blurred images.’

‘Yep. Doesn’t matter what that hunchbacked arsehole does, the picts won’t come out. That’s the sixth picter we’ve tried.’

‘How long have you been in here?’

Levio rubbed his unshaven face and she had her answer.

Mabeth looked back through the images. They were obfuscated as if overexposed or smeared by a sudden jerk of the lens. But the subject was static, the picter secure and the light steady.

‘This is very strange,’ she conceded.

‘I’ve gone from strange to irritating, and I’m circling livid. Or suicidal,’ said Levio, ‘it changes by the minute…’

Mabeth glanced down at her sketch. The rendering was good. The curve of the thigh, the overall musculature, the texture of the lank hair and scarred flesh… As vivid as she had ever been on parchment and almost more real than any pictograph…

‘I see,’ she said, handing back the useless flimsies.

‘So, if you don’t mind,’ said Levio, ‘hurry it the hell up. I can’t get out of here until you’re finished.’

He walked away to berate the sacristan, leaving Mabeth to it.

‘Charming…’ she whispered, but her work was almost done. Just a little detailing remained. She had a leather field case for carrying all her equipment and pulled from it a magnifying lens she attached over her left eye via a skull frame. Up close, even via the lens, the scene felt… intimate. Every knife stroke revealed. Every abuse. And it was neat murder, almost surgical. It spoke to obsession. Through her enhancing lens, she looked through a window into something dark. She lingered on the face, partly hidden by the hair. Something looked back at her from those cold, dead eyes. Recognition? Mabeth found herself drawn, though she wanted to recoil. The lips were barely parted, but she caught the suggestion of white teeth and then… they moved.

Paradise…

Like a lover’s breath against her ear, warm and susurrant. The scent of cloying lavender filled her nose.

Mabeth tore away the lens, letting out a stifled cry.

Levio whirled around, reaching for his sidearm, until he realised the girl had shrieked at shadows.

‘It’s nothing,’ she said, a little breathless, and out of instinct touched her neck. But there was nothing there. It just felt cold, like a strange absence.

Levio scowled, standing down as he went to light up a smoke and muttering some about the bad decisions that had led up to this moment.

Tentatively, Mabeth put the lens back on. Nothing happened. The body remained as it was, horrific but lifeless. There was no voice, no scent of lavender. Just old blood and musty prayer scrolls. She got what she needed and finished up, handing the parchment to the proctor on her way out.

‘I expect prompt payment,’ she said by way of a parting shot.

Levio’s coarse laughter followed Mabeth until she had left the church.

Gethik was waiting for her outside, the servitor’s dull eyes barely comprehending his surroundings and not so different from the corpse Mabeth had just sketched.

‘Follow,’ she uttered as she passed the brutish creature, hearing him fall into clomping lockstep behind her. The city had lost its mind since the killings, so it paid to have protection, even if Gethik was a piece of cyborganic shit better suited to the scrapheap than bodyguard detail. Intimidation went a long way though, and Gethik was big. He smelled of machine oil and rust, but at least it helped to banish the memory of sickly lavender.

‘Must be tired…’ she said and through the gaps in the overarching buildings caught glimpses of the sky. A blood-red blush coloured it, like paint clouding in water. Shouts echoed on the warm night air, a sign of the madness to come. She’d be gone before any of that. Mabeth turned away and headed for the mag-rail.

The other patrons in the carriage gave Gethik a wide berth, though the servitor barely noticed them and the late hour had thinned the crowds substantially so it wasn’t hard to find a seat. Fires lit parts of the city, seen through a grimy window. The violence had started early tonight. It wouldn’t trouble her here, Mabeth reflected, as the rattling journey played out in all its mundanity. Sat in her protector’s shadow, she tried to remember everything she’d experienced in the church.

She must have imagined it, but it didn’t feel imagined. She had felt his breath, smelled lavender… The voice had sounded old, but melodic. Definitely male. Not an accent she knew, though, and not from Durgov. From elsewhere. Her mind had conjured it from some remembrance, she reasoned. She rubbed her neck, her fingers gently caressing. The downy hairs felt soft to the touch, and her eyelids fluttered.

Paradise.

Mabeth sat bolt upright, suddenly aware of her surroundings. Perspiration dappled her skin, her fingertips tingling. A face looked back at her, reflected in the glass. Young and pale from a lifetime spent in her studio, shaven haired with a streak of violet running through it. A writhing serpentine neck tattoo, her own design. Jewellery on her wrists, gold and platinum. Good robes of warm cerise and a vermilion cloak with a silver artisanal clasp. Last season’s fashions; she couldn’t keep up like she used to, but her clothes and trappings were still finer than most. Affluent, it spoke to her success. She admired her reflection, pleased with what she saw.

And just behind it, another face.

Smiling and overlarge. Human and yet…

Mabeth turned around, heart pounding, but there was no one sitting behind her. A couple of factorum workers from farther back in the carriage glanced up at the sudden movement but quickly became downcast again as the day’s labours grew heavy. When she looked back, the face had gone.

So startled was she, Mabeth nearly missed her stop and had to dash for the exit, her lumbering retainer in tow.

‘I need to find a different line of work, Gethik,’ she said, rubbing her eyes as they walked, her hab-tower close by.

The servitor did not reply, and merely shadowed her as always.

‘What’s that?’ asked Mabeth, miming as if he had spoken. ‘I’m in the wrong profession?’ She gave a rueful shake of the head as Auric House came into view. Not so gilded any more with its tatty facade and chipped colonnade. ‘Yes, you’re right, I do need a change in fortune.’

Greeting the door warden with a tired wave, she went inside. He smiled as she passed, his mouth altogether too wide under the vision slit of his helmet, the teeth too white and too many. Mabeth recoiled, but the guard’s sour look had reappeared almost immediately.

I’m losing my damn mind…

She hurried inside.

Her well-appointed rooms greeted Mabeth upon her return. Everything was as she had left it. The chaise, the hookah pipe, her silks and fine drapery, the ornaments and artist’s lectern. Dark, on account of the hour, she instructed Gethik to light the lamps. The gloom lifted, shadows lengthened in corners and filled alcoves. The glass shades coloured the light, turning it into competing jades and crimsons. Mabeth collapsed onto a pile of plush cushions, her hand outstretched for the drink that Gethik then provided.

A sip of absinthe helped ease the nerves, warming as it passed down her throat.

‘Leave me…’ she uttered, reaching for the hookah as Gethik turned without comment and retreated into his alcove, out of her sight. Mabeth supped on the pipe, taking long draughts of kalma smoke. It had been hard to acquire and not a little expensive too. Worth every coin though. She imbibed and smoked until the bottle had drained and her eyelids grew heavy. Fingers slipping from the neck of the pipe, she drifted into a fitful sleep. As she breathed, the smell of over-sweet lavender lingered before something sharper replaced it. And she dreamed, of a forest – not of trees but of the dead, their limbs contorted in branches, their feet rooted to the earth. And the red, red sap of their blood.

Mabeth woke drenched in sweat, the lingering scent of warm copper already fading. Grey light surrounded her, the hour still early. Gethik must have doused the lamps. She started as she saw him looming over her, his dull bionic eye glowing like dirty amber.

‘What are you doing?’ she croaked, annoyed at her own skittishness. ‘What are you doing, slave?’

Gethik didn’t respond. Her throat felt hoarse like she’d been screaming in her sleep. The servitor’s protection protocols must have kicked in.

‘I’m fine,’ she lied, deciding to get up. That’s when she noticed the metal tube in Gethik’s hands. He hadn’t activated because of a protection protocol, he had taken receipt of a package. It came with an attached note. A snap of her fingers and Gethik lit the nearest lamp.

Mab, the note began, I think I may have found the last decent paying commission in this entire shit heap of a city. She knew the handwriting.

Yrenna was Mabeth’s abettor, a seeker of work. It was she who had secured the contract with the peacekeepers. Hardly what Mabeth was used to but it kept the debtors at bay and her decanters full. There was a time when they’d enjoyed more than just a business relationship, but Mabeth’s tastes had changed and so had her suitors. Still, old memories stirred at seeing her delicate script and provoked a frisson of lust. She turned over the parchment onto the opposite side.

Private contract. Three pieces, simple restoration needed. Yes, I know it’s still low end, but it pays better than the peacekeepers and there are fewer dead bodies. She signed off ‘Y’, adding a postscript. And that ugly golem needs a thorough cleanse, by the way.

The note came with the address of the commissioner, and the fee amount her abettor had brokered.

Mabeth smiled and took the metal tube. ‘Well done, Yrenna.’

The tube had been marked with an unfamiliar merchant’s sigil that looked like a ‘V’. Inside, she found three pieces of rolled up canvas. Unfurling each in turn, Mabeth laid them out on the floor, weighing them down with ornaments to keep them from curling back up. They were venerations, holy scenes from Imperial history, albeit faded and in need of repair. She didn’t recognise the saints depicted or the other religious figures, the cardinals and the abbesses. She only saw the work ahead and began immediately.

Mabeth fashioned simple frames for each piece from which she could begin the restoration, and then placed them upon her artist’s lectern, which was wide enough to accommodate all three. Curious, she thought, regarding them as a set, and wondering what interest a mercantile house would have in Ecclesiarchal relics.

A thorough assessment of the condition of the pieces preceded any actual work. The canvas was old, that much was quick to determine, although precisely how old she genuinely couldn’t say. It had been preserved with oils or perhaps some synthetic equivalent, which made the canvas slightly stiff and flaky at the edges. After she handled each piece to clean them, she noticed a farinaceous substance layering her gloves. Again, she couldn’t identify it and it only happened on that first occasion so she assumed the paintings hadn’t been disturbed for some time.

She worked steadily, reinvigorating the tired pastels, giving them vibrancy and depth. Mabeth felt reinvigorated, not unlike the ecclesiarchs in the paintings. The brighter the image became, the lighter her mood, as if faith and protection radiated from it.

Hours passed without her realising, and by the time the fonogram started to drone, she had restored a cardinal’s vestments and trappings. He was depicted standing upon some nondescript promontory, giving a fiery sermon to his flock.

The fonogram droned again.

She tried to ignore it but it began to irritate, and when she turned and saw the peacekeepers’ ident she swore loudly.

Levio’s gravel voice crackled through the receiver cup when she picked it up. ‘Need your talents again.’

‘I have other work, proctor.’

‘That can wait. Your contract gives the city unrestricted access.’

Fucking Yrenna, she thought, feeling less amorous towards the woman as Levio reminded her of that particular clause.

‘Can it possibly wait? I am in the middle of something.’

‘So am I… It’s another one.’

And with those three words, Mabeth knew she would be leaving the hab as soon as the call was over.

‘Same as last time?’

‘Different…’ Levio sounded like he was about to say more, but then swallowed audibly to clear his throat and gave her the address.

‘Different how?’

‘I’m not describing it over the fonogram,’ he snapped, then quickly regained his composure. ‘Just get down here.’

He cut the feed and the fonogram line went dead.

‘Arsehole…’ Mabeth looked back at the paintings. They would have to wait. The dead, it seemed, would not.

Another dilapidated church, another depravity. The sacristans had returned, more out of hope than expectation, and they had just finished rigging a string of lumens to flood the scene with pearlescent light as Mabeth made her entrance.

She had to crane her neck to see. The victim had been suspended on wire – no, not wire, the veins had been pulled from its arms, woven together and used to hang it like a piece of art.

He’s embracing it now, she thought, trying to remain analytical.

The victim hung in front of an immense window, its glassaic smeared in blood and other matter. Wan light streamed through, casting a ragged shadow. Entirely naked, the victim’s arms were outstretched, its legs pinned together. But this was not what marked it out as different to the previous murder. The skin had been flayed from its back and chest, and then spread out like a pair of leathery wings behind it. Angelic. Horrific. The ribs were exposed, rimed with blood and glistening in the light. Intertwined organs had been heaped below, a rubbery tract unfurling from the abdomen like some gory streamer.

The face was untouched but for one detail – one of the eyes had been cut out.

‘Throne…’ uttered Mabeth, and swiftly covered her mouth. She smelled Levio as he sidled up next to her, the reek of sweat and cheap tabac pervasive. ‘I understand why you didn’t want to describe it over fonogram,’ she said, recovering.

‘An aquila,’ he replied, gesturing to the victim’s altered form, ‘even I can discern that much. Who the hells does that?’

‘I don’t know, a religious fanatic? Aren’t you supposed to work that out?’

Levio rubbed his balding scalp. The man looked paler and older since last night. ‘I have no frame of reference for this.’

‘It would take strength…’ ventured Mabeth, ‘and precision.’

‘Still think it’s art?’

‘I think the killer does.’

Levio lit up a smoke. ‘Paradise.’

Mabeth turned on him. ‘What did you just say?’

From Levio’s expression, she must have looked fearsome. He held up his hands. ‘That’s what the witness said.’

‘What bloody witness?’ She was livid, practically shaking. The smile, the sickly scent of lavender…

‘Easy,’ said Levio. ‘Calm down.’

Mabeth stared, heart pounding. She felt feverish. A cold sweat clung to her body like a rotten bandage.

‘Are you all right?’

She snapped back, hard as a spring. The fever ebbed. ‘I’m fine,’ she lied. ‘I just… I didn’t know there had been a witness.’

‘Why does it matter?’

‘Someone is killing people seemingly at random and turning them into grotesque anatomical works of art,’ Mabeth replied, still a little shaky. ‘I am both professionally intrigued and personally appalled. Of course it matters. Who’s the witness?’

‘An old curate. The church is mostly in a state of disrepair. He was effectively the caretaker until it could be restored. Though not much chance of that, given the state of things. He’s back at the precinct house with the interrogators, who are trying to find out what he knows.’

‘He didn’t tell them?’

‘Beyond saying “para–” that word, he hasn’t said much of anything. Whatever he saw, he didn’t like it. And it definitely wasn’t him who did it, before you ask.’

‘I wasn’t going to.’

‘Yeah, yeah, strength and precision and all that. Fancy yourself a peacekeeper, eh, artisan?’

Mabeth didn’t answer. She’d had enough of Levio. She gathered her tools and began. The sooner she got started, the sooner she could leave.

The return to Auric House was conducted in silence. The rioting and unrest in the city had forced her to take a more circuitous route via maglev, and by the time she reached her studio again night had drawn in. It seemed perpetual now, and the memory of the ‘flayed angel’, as she had come to regard it, lingered like the aroma of decay. And no matter how hard she tried to mentally excoriate, it would not go away.

A long pulse shower when she was safely back in her domicile did little but leave her itchy and hot. She dressed in a gown, a glass of absinthe to soothe her fractious nerves. Every mirror shawled by a blanket. On the journey back she had assiduously avoided looking into any reflective surfaces, glass or otherwise, a silver snuff box held to her nose to keep any undesirable odours at bay. No visitations from the lavender man came to her.

‘Am I losing my mind…?’ she murmured.

Gethik, lurking in his alcove, offered no comment.

‘Definitely losing it, if I’m trying to make conversation with a servitor.’

Perhaps she should call Yrenna for a rendezvous, but she didn’t want to go out into the city at night, not with the curfew and the violence, and her domicile was in a parlous state so she couldn’t invite her over. Empty bottles everywhere, the reek of kalma on her rugs and drapes.

She settled for another absinthe instead, before slumping onto a pile of cushions to regard the three paintings sitting on her lectern. Subject matter in kind, but different artists, she reflected.

The work remained, a refuge and a spiritual tonic.

Mabeth sighed. It’s not like I can sleep anyway.

Putting her glass down, Mabeth took up her tools. It was late and the work painstaking but she threw herself into it, as if each small act of restoration cleansed a part of her soul. The images in her mind lessened in intensity, the imagined scent of lavender faded. Saints were brought to life on canvas. And it felt good. She made swift progress, an obsessive compulsive urge to be rid of the taint of remembering driving her.

Then she saw something unexpected.

She had begun to strip back the layers of ink and pigment, intending to rebuild them from the base up where the image was particularly degraded, when she noticed part of a second image, incongruent with the first, revealed beneath. A magnifying lens from her iris attachment brought it into sharper focus. She couldn’t tell what it was exactly, but was certain it was not a part of the religious scene. A layer beneath a layer.

Hakasto had called it ‘pentimento’, when one image is subtly altered or a previous one painted over entirely. Though there was too little of the hidden image to discern much of anything about its subject, the rationale for hiding it was intriguing.

‘Curious…’ Mabeth muttered, and tried to reveal more. She reasoned she could repair the upper image later, but this one beneath, this secret, beguiled her. Her fingers ached, and while a heavy dose of stimms kept her going until the deep night hours, the scalpel eventually slipped her grasp and she fell into an exhausted sleep.

Mabeth woke to a feeling of disquiet, and the vague memory of a troubling dream that try as she might to grasp, dissipated like smoke. Sensations remained, of pain and pleasure, the instinct of peeling back the layers of her skin to reveal the dark places within. She shivered, despite the warmth of the morning and the blanket she had wrapped around herself.

Through the half-light streaming through the drapes, she saw the paintings and felt a moment of profound arrhythmia. More of the secondary image had been revealed. It was the same on all three canvases, despite the fact she could not remember working on the other two, but then she had taken a cocktail of alcohol and narcotics. She had lost time before.

‘Gethik…’ she slurred, still drowsy. The servitor lumbered from its alcove. ‘Show me vid from last night.’

The servitor hard-linked to a cogitator sitting on a low table, and Mabeth waited for the device to warm up. A flicking projector cast the images from the servitor’s gaping mouth onto the wall.

‘Here we go,’ she whispered as the vid-capture began to render and cycle. Then she frowned, and glared over her shoulder at Gethik. ‘I said last night.’

‘Confirmed,’ he said in a mechanised rasp, the voice coming from a vox-unit in the servitor’s neck.

‘This is everything?’

‘Confirmed.’

Her eyes narrowed, disbelieving. ‘Are you certain, Gethik?’

‘Confirmed.’

Perhaps she needed a sacristan herself. The vid units in her domicile, the ones she used to capture her artistic process for later review, had to be faulty. Blurred images filled her wall, like an overexposed pict, only in motion.

She caught snatches of… something. Mabeth drew closer as the vid continued to run, trying to see past the image flicker.

‘What in the hells…’

Not her domicile. Definitely not that. It looked like… bones.

A hard rap at the door gave her a start. She cursed loudly, rubbing her eyes from staring so intently at the image now paused on her wall. She called out, already regretting it.

‘Identify…’

It was Levio. ‘Couldn’t reach you via fonogram,’ he grumbled through the door. He sounded even more perturbed than usual.

‘So you came to my abode?’ Mabeth snapped. She dimly remembered asking Gethik to cut the fonogram shortly after she had entered. A glance at the unit confirmed it.

‘Abode?’ Levio muttered something unseemly about artists and their ilk, then added, ‘So, can I come in or do we shout at each other through your door?’

Mabeth was sorely tempted, but she gestured for Gethik to let the proctor in. He cut the image first, the wall turning blank again.

Even the sight of the proctor, dishevelled, pale, even thin… brought back the fear. He had become synonymous with it.

‘Is it him?’ she asked in a quiet voice. ‘The lavender man?’

Levio nodded, and didn’t challenge her. He had smelled it too. Fuck, that meant it wasn’t in her mind. It was something else. She chose not to comment and instead looked through a gap in her drapes at the dawning sky outside, at the strange heavens that now fell over the city. And she wondered.

‘Take me there,’ she said, sparing a glance at the paintings, and went to get dressed.

It was different this time. In every way. Not a church or a temple. No glassaic or catechisms. A woodland with an overgrown esplanade running through it. In a clearing, a body had been staked out, its limbs meticulously and perfectly bifurcated, four becoming eight, and arranged in a star shape. Pale-white flesh, painstakingly exsanguinated, shimmered like wet marble in the rain.

No sacristans this time. They had learned their lesson, that their technology had no part in this, no purchase upon whatever this was. It was just Levio and a squad of peacekeepers wearing black carapace and carrying shotguns to ward off the curious. Mabeth counted herself among them, but she had been invited beyond the electro-cordon, her servitor waiting dully some distance behind her.

‘Why?’ she asked simply.

‘Why what?’ Levio answered. ‘I’m not a damned mind-shriver, how should I know why the sick bastard is doing this?’

‘No,’ said Mabeth patiently, ‘why do you need me to illustrate this?’

‘It has to be captured. Known,’ he said. Then added more quietly, ‘Allegedly, certain parties are interested.’ He extended his middle finger so it looked like the letter ‘I’.

‘Interrogators?’

‘And worse, I expect.’ He lit a smoke; Mabeth noticed his fingers trembled. ‘Look…’ He blew out a plume. ‘If you don’t want to, I can say I couldn’t find you.’

‘Won’t your colleagues say I was here?’ Mabeth gestured to the peacekeepers on sentry duty in the distance, partly veiled by the rain. She pulled up her coat collar but it wasn’t much comfort.

‘They want rid of this as much as I do. City’s going to the hells, in case you didn’t notice.’

She’d noticed. ‘So they don’t give two shits about you.’

‘Reassuring.’

‘You know what I mean.’

Mabeth stared at the body, so cold, so… beautiful. It was immaculate in every way. The work of a true artist.

‘I want to do it,’ she said, mumbling the words.

The weather soured further as Mabeth worked, a protective sheath over the vellum to keep the ink and charcoal dry. Levio sheltered her with a parasol Mabeth had brought to the scene, his face a picture of resigned annoyance.

‘Is it a statement? Is that it?’ he asked after a while. ‘Is that what he’s doing, do you think?’

Mabeth kept illustrating, her strokes deft and assured, despite the horrific nature of her composition. ‘I thought you said I should stick to what I know, stop trying to be a peacekeeper.’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘Not in so many words.’

Levio grumbled his assent.

‘I don’t think it’s as random as it appears,’ said Mabeth. ‘A tree, an angel… now this.’ She paused to flex her fingers, tight after prolonged use of the charcoal stylus. ‘It’s almost as if he’s recreating something. A ritual perhaps.’

The parasol shivered as Levio tried to stifle a sudden intake of breath. He bit his lip, and kept pulling at the buttons on his storm-cloak. He needed a smoke.

‘Ever since the sky changed,’ he said at length, ‘the city changed. And us with it.’ By ‘us’, he meant Durgov’s citizens. ‘It’s always been bad here. Murder. Discord. The things people will do to each other… I’ve seen it all. But this is the first time I’ve felt such fear. Not just my own, but it’s everywhere. It’s like it slipped in through the cracks when the sky turned red and has been seeping into us ever since, in our air, our food, our bodies…’

‘What are you trying to say, proctor?’

He rubbed his chin, the lip biting now chronic.

‘Have you ever felt rain before it starts? You know, smelled it or tasted it on the air, and just knew?’

‘Of course. Hasn’t everyone to some extent?’

‘It feels like that, like something is coming, only it isn’t rain.’

He fell abruptly silent after that and Mabeth was glad to be rid of his company the instant she was finished. Levio gave a curt wave as she took her leave, a vacant look in his eyes not so different from Gethik. He looked almost hollow.

Something is coming… only it isn’t rain.

The words followed her after she left the murder scene, and so too the scent of lavender, faint on the air. Levio must have smelled it too, but neither spoke of it. To do so would only make it more real.

The paintings would be her salvation. The restoration of the saints, and the cleansing of her soul. She returned to her domicile, the idea of indulging in such pious work soothing.

‘No interruptions,’ she ordered, and Gethik nullified the fonogram before retreating into his alcove.

Mabeth set to work, revivifying old pigment, giving it vibrancy and depth. Purification through art. The brush paused in her hand…

‘I have to know,’ she murmured as a deep obsession took hold.

I am a sailor, and they the siren. I shall go gratefully to their rocks.

A scalpel replaced the brush, and Mabeth’s attention turned to the as yet unrevealed and the promise of the unknown, the image in pentimento. She worked feverishly, almost in frenzy, the scrapings like flecks of skin flayed from a corpse. Mabeth barely noticed. The work came easily, paint peeling away without resistance, as if what lay below wanted to be found. She would let it. She wanted it, too. More than anything.

After several hours, a fresh vista began to materialise beneath the veneer of the first. Not bones, but an Eden of lush and exotic flowers, of strange crystal and dappled sunlight… And something her eyes did not want to acknowledge. And in that stark moment of revelation, a sudden inertialess lurch seized upon her and she realised her mistake, her terrible mistake.

It was…

‘Paradise…’ rasped Mabeth, and fell into a deep, fathomless dream.

She is walking barefoot, the dew cold and refreshing against her skin. A grove had risen up around her, swollen with strange trees that are ripe with luscious, heart-shaped fruit. She is tempted to take a bite and reaches for the branch’s bounty, but something stops her…

In the distance, thunder, or what sounds like thunder. And a white-noise susurration, like a cataract rushing over a cave mouth. She turns, a prey animal alerted to the scent of a predator, and sees him.

In shadow at first, the strange scented arbours of the forest hide him from her sight and she has to twist to see.

He is naked, apart from the modesty cloth around his waist. A study in anatomical perfection, almost deific. Unreal, a statue given perfect animation. His muscles are carved as if from pink opal, and a mane cascades around his shoulders like spun silver. Violet eyes glint and flash, alive. Amused? Desirous? She flushes at the thought, terror and arousal warring like belligerent nations.

In that instant of connection, she knows him. Or rather, what he represents.

He is the paragon of pleasures, a lord of excess, and he is here for her. I know you, he says, though his lips are unmoving. I am you. And for a moment, it is bliss… until the blades unsheathe and the hooks unfurl and she is pinioned and torn. Undressed of her skin, it flutters away like taffeta, like flightless wings.

And he smiles that over-wide smile, his teeth like pearls, and the scent of lavender overwhelms her…

She doesn’t scream, she can barely breathe. Something heavy is pressing against her chest, a noose taut around her throat. She thrashes. A lamp shatters as she kicks it. Absinthe spills in a milky flood. The drapes tear at her grasping fingers and the sunlight crashes in.

Am I dying?

A hot poker in her chest, jabbing at the coals of her organs.

Please…

Then relief, her bindings loosed in an instant. The pain gone.

Mabeth stares, blinking in the harsh red morning. Its light brings revelation. The paintings are not three, they are one. Where the obfuscation of newer paint has been excised to reveal the old, she sees paradise stretched over each canvas. A triptych of pulchritudinous gardens. Vigorous, staggering, like a foreign country to her senses…

Seeded with bones and nourished with blood, Eden springing vibrantly from the slaughter.

The juxtaposition is so incongruous as to be almost indiscernible.

A familiar grove stands out, partially revealed beneath flaking pigment. Its strange trees are burgeoning with heart-shaped fruit. No, not fruit. Hearts. Living, beating human hearts. And they are not trees, they are people, rooted and cruciform.

Mabeth recoiled, the scalpel she didn’t know she was still holding clattering to the floor as she shuffled away on her backside, kicking madly, arms scrabbling. The wall was solid at her back, and she could flee no further. Her gaze was transfixed on the paintings, at the parts still to be scraped away. At horrors yet unknown.

For three days, she didn’t move, didn’t speak, didn’t sleep.

Until Levio contacted her again.

Fires lit the city, the smoke thick but unable to hide the blood-red sky. It had turned a deeper crimson with the onset of night and echoed with the shrieking of desperate men.

Mabeth did her best to avoid the crowds. After alighting from the maglev, she and Gethik took side streets and lesser known byways. It scared her, the rioting, but that fear had been dulled by something darker. It called still, but she ignored it. An effort of will she could not sustain.

Levio looked skeletal as he waited with two armoured peacekeepers beneath the sepulchre’s portico. Deep rings sunk his eyes, like small pebbles at the bottom of a well. He finished a smoke stick, crushing it beneath his heel where it joined a regiment of others, and lit another.

‘Inside…’

Mabeth followed, leaving the two sentries outside.

The tomb had been made for a dignitary of the city, an ecclesiarch judging by the religious statuary. Something lay piled in one corner, folded neatly upon a stone seat. She assumed they were robes. Perhaps they are symbolic, thought Mabeth. A reliquary stood upon a plinth in the middle of the gloomy chamber, the bones of two saints entwined, their heads upturned to a light they would never see, their bony hands outstretched in faux supplication.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Mabeth, frowning. ‘Where is the–’

Levio ignited a lumen and the bones shone faint pink.

She gasped, as the awful truth revealed itself. ‘Emperor…’

‘He isn’t here,’ breathed Levio.

The robes, they weren’t… And then the bones…

‘How?’

Levio didn’t answer, and that was answer enough.

Markings had been scrimshawed into the bone. Mabeth moved nearer for a better look.

Outside, the clamour had grown. Closer.

A word, carved into femurs and rib bones and clavicles. Paradisum. High Gothic, barely used now, but more common several centuries ago.

A warning shout alerted her. One of the peacekeepers. A coalition of voices answered.

Paradise…

‘I can’t do this…’ Mabeth fled the chamber and stepped outside into chaos.

A mob had descended. They were afraid, like wild animals, running with fire and knives, desperate to quench their fear with blood. A shotgun barked, so close it startled her and the sound of it rang in her ears like tinnitus. The sepulchre was sunk into a natural valley, and there were men roaring down a ramp towards it. Towards her.

A second blast, no longer in warning. A man was cut down. The two peacekeepers stepped up, one kneeling as the other stood and braced. They bellowed their authority at the coming horde, but their words lacked conviction. Levio didn’t join them, and stayed with the dead.

Breathless, terrified, her mind close to shutting down, Mabeth called out. ‘Gethik,’ she rasped, ‘get me away from here.’

The servitor obeyed, his lurching, patchwork frame never more reassuring as it drove like a plough into the mob. Mabeth stayed close, a desperate hand clinging to his belt. Behind her, the shotguns spoke again. They spoke one more time, a press of shouting men around her unable to dull the shock of the sound. Then no more.

She was fortunate. The mob had no interest in her, though she would have been collateral if not for her slave. He must have killed a few in his headlong charge. She had heard bone breaking, cries suddenly choked off.

Gethik himself was torn, a dozen wounds spilling blood and oil, the whole mess of it congealing as it turned his boiler-suit black. He stumbled, slowing. A servitor is a cyborg, but it is still flesh. Mabeth knew his injuries were mortal. Dull-eyed, uncomprehending, Gethik got her as far as the only maglev out of the district before he slumped, a puppet left slack on its strings, and did not stir again.

Mabeth reached Auric House in a half-blind panic. The guard was absent his post, likely fled. Bolting up the stairs, she got to her domicile and fumbled with the locks, several nervous glances behind her revealing nothing but a dimly lit corridor.

Inside, the door slammed in her wake. Heart hammering, she lurched through the entryway and into the studio where the paintings stood, apparently innocuous.

And yet…

The old renderings of saints had been further scraped away, by her hand, by another; Mabeth no longer knew for sure.

She tried to raise Yrenna via the fonogram. She had a speech prepared, about demanding to know the provenance of the paintings and the identity of who had bought her expertise. She would reject them, reject the commission. Claim it was occult. Proscribed. She would threaten, mention the interrogators. Her blood was up, and she trembled with anticipation of the furore to come. But Yrenna did not answer and the fonogram returned only dead air.

Mabeth smashed down the receiver cup, partly shattering the plastek. She wanted to scream, anger a natural antidote to fear.

A snarl on her lips, she stalked to the lectern and snatched all three canvases, hastily bundling them under her arms. She recalled the patron’s address in the city and, despite her best good sense, ventured back out.

I should burn them, she thought, but had no desire to add an angry patron to her woes. And the merchants in Durgov were not known for their forgiveness, particular in matters of property. It might not matter, anyway. The city was burning, at least in the slums and the poor districts. A fever had gripped it: fear, the great motivator for selfish men who hide their anxieties behind cruelty and wanton violence. Mabeth wanted nothing more than to shut herself away, but only when this last act was done and she was rid of the paintings could she hide again. She had been hiding for years, ever since Hakasto…

Ever since…

Lost in her thoughts, Mabeth almost didn’t realise she had arrived at her destination.

A razor-wire fence surrounded a nondescript warehouse and offices. A faded sign declared the name of the merchant-combine who owned it, and answered the minor mystery of what the ‘V’ stood for on the metal tube.

Valgaast Exports.

The warehouse was burning, every inch of it wreathed in conflagration. Flames reached up into the sky, turning it a deeper red, staining it black with smoke.

Nothing else burned, only this property, and the mob had not reached this district yet. And the fire did not spread, as if dedicated solely to the destruction of Valgaast Exports. The oddness of it sent a spasm through Mabeth. Her grip tightened on the canvases still clenched in her shaking hands. She wanted to tear them, rend them into pieces and cast them onto the fire. Instead, she sank to her knees and wept.

It took a few moments for Mabeth to regain her composure. She knew she couldn’t stay here. She had to get back to Auric House. Maybe she could try Yrenna again. She hadn’t realised how badly she needed to hear her voice. Any voice.

Stumbling through side streets, it wasn’t long before a part of the mob found her. Mabeth thought perhaps they were bullet-makers, though their grubby overalls would suit many menial professions.

‘Please,’ she said, shivering like prey in a hunter’s sights, ‘I have nothing of value.’

The look on the men’s faces suggested otherwise, and she had to stifle an involuntary yelp as she started to back away from her aggressors.

She had fine clothes, at least to the likes of them. Jewellery. Ostensible wealth. A noblewoman, abroad on unquiet streets and unprotected. Mabeth pulled the collar of her robes tighter. An alleyway she hadn’t noticed before suddenly presented itself and she took it, bolting like a startled gyrinx. She dumped the canvases, to hells with the consequences. The merchants could burn like their fucking warehouse for all she cared. Behind her, she heard the grunting of pursuit and the tread of heavy, dirty boots.

Oh shit, oh shit…

They were closing, driven by something animalistic.

No, no, no…

And then nothing.

After a few hundred yards, Mabeth slowed and then stopped. The faint aroma of lavender pricked her nostrils and she whirled around in a panic, half expecting to see him. But the narrow byway she found herself in was empty, although rude tenements crowded on either side. Turning, she realised no one was chasing her either. The entire street was silent, as if shrinking back into itself and holding its breath.

Not questioning her good fortune, but trembling at so close a call, Mabeth found Auric House again.

She staggered inside, her breathing ragged, and began to shake. Trauma settled in now the adrenaline had bled away. A drink would ease the nerves. Maybe a bottle. Or two.

The absinthe veritably gulped into the glass, the edge chinking as it met the lip of the bottle. Mabeth drained it, poured another and drained that too. Slowly calming down, she took the bottle and the glass and went to find a place to slump.

As she passed the open archway of the studio, the bottle and the glass slipped from her fingers and smashed against the floor.

On the lectern were the three canvases. And as the paint began to fragment, flaking away like dead skin, Mabeth found she was drawn to them. To it.

A single vista, doggedly revealed for her to see.

Without knowing why, she took up her scalpel and began to scrape away the upper layer. And with every stroke, she uncovered greater and greater horrors. A scene of beauty and torture, of unparalleled human suffering so vivid she could almost hear their screaming. Tears streamed down Mabeth’s face but she couldn’t stop. It had her now. Perhaps it had taken her long ago, that first night. Perhaps it was inevitable.

The painting, the true image, was a conduit. Hakasto had always taught her that art is a voyeur upon the soul, its flaws and virtues laid bare upon canvas. Something from the realm of the soul had found its way through. The lavender man stood proudly amongst his depravity, his paradise, immortalised in oil paint. The artist, whoever it was, had captured his essence perfectly. And in a moment of stasis, caught between action and inaction, Mabeth wondered how much of it was actually paint.

A gentle touch nudged her hand back to the task and she shuddered, the scent of lavender stronger now and warm breath upon her neck.

I am here, the killer said without speaking, as I promised I would be.

She had done this. Her pride, her obsession… her excesses. It had brought her to his attention.

‘Please…’ she tried to whisper, but a soft susurration stayed any further objection.

Shh…

Outside her hab, the city had begun to eat itself. The rioting was everywhere, rising like a black tide to wash away anything good, anything pure. The structures would not hold. She bit her lip, using the pain to try to drown it out.

The cloying scent of his perfume made her gag, but she dared not stop. She felt the heat of his skin near her own, both a furnace and a glacier. Mabeth scraped away the above to reveal the below, knowing that as she did so, his foothold in the real would solidify.

A dead sky presented itself, blood red and terrible. A great wall thronged with desperate fighting in the distance. Gods and monsters vying for the fate of mankind…

The thoughts came unbidden, the memories and realisations not her own.

Terra… a voice in her head told her.

She knew it then, the vista revealed upon the canvas. An ancient war, the oldest of wars. The Great Heresy.

The Long War, the voice supplied, and could not hide its bitterness.

The last piece fell away, a nondescript corner but its style at odds with the rest, as if painted by a different hand. Two robed figures…

Mabeth released a gasp, for it was her. A perfect portrait. She had a red blade in her hand and before her on the ground was the second figure. Older, dying, a feeble hand pressed to the wound in his chest as blood poured from his mouth.

Mabeth was transfixed, the bare truth of her crime rendered as clearly as a pict, an impossible image as damning as any confession.

His perfumed breath broke her dark remembrance.

Perfection always comes at a price.

The hand upon her neck was firm but not painful. Not yet. It turned her head and she took in her abode. The indulgence, the trappings of wealth, desire and obsession.

Tell me, what did your master call it… that which is hidden beneath?

‘Pentimento…’ said Mabeth, almost beyond the ability for rational thought. ‘It means redemption,’ she added, a needless translation, her gaze now fixed upon the image of her murdering Hakasto. So she could be preeminent; so she could be perfect.

‘A lie to hide another lie,’ the killer answered, his organic voice as old as millennia.

Mabeth would find no redemption here, she realised, as the blades and the hooks bit into her flesh, and as she screamed they started to pull.

‘But there will always be art,’ the killer replied, as if reading her thoughts, ‘and this my canvas.’

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 The Reverie.

‘We have to go,’ the ghost boy whispered into the darkness. The survivors huddled in the grain pit were vague shadows, their forms dusted by desultory strands of moonlight leaking through the wooden boards overhead, but he didn’t need to see their faces to know their fear. They reeked of it, just as the bodies littering the world above would reek of decay when the winter passed, assuming the wolves and carrion birds left anything for the Golden Season to thaw. Or maybe their killer would devour the dead first. Maybe that was why it had come to the village.

‘We must go,’ he urged. ‘Now.’

‘No,’ Padraig hissed. ‘It’s still up there.’

‘It’s sleeping,’ the boy said. Sleeping wasn’t quite the right word for what he sensed, but it was something his companions would understand, and the best approximation he could find for the sluggish emanations wafting from the destroyer above.

‘You can’t know that,’ Padraig protested.

But I do, the boy thought. Like Padraig’s fear, he sensed the beast’s fury somewhere deep inside himself, grasping it with an intimacy he couldn’t explain. It stank of charred meat and sour wine – a heady, sickening sludge of malice, yet only a vestige of the fury that had gone before.

The rage will return. He felt certain of it. The beast’s hunger for carnage was too fierce to be sated for long, no matter how much blood it spilled.

‘It will find us if we stay,’ he warned.

‘Ain’t found us yet,’ Padraig sneered, recovering a measure of his old belligerence. ‘Won’t find us now.’

The ironsmith’s son was twice the ghost boy’s age and many times his size, with a vicious streak that made them natural enemies, but he was only one of many tormentors and far from the worst. The boy had lived alongside these folk for more seasons than he cared to count, but they’d never shown him any kindness, least of all the red-haired trapper who’d taken him in.

Dead or alive, I’ll always be a ghost to them, he thought, weighing up the shadows clustered around him. He’d led them to this hideaway – saved them from the horror that had torn their village apart – but it made no difference. Nothing had changed.

He’d been no more than seven or eight years old when ‘Red’ Novak had found him in the woods beyond the village – a pale-eyed waif wearing the tatters of finery, half-starved and spattered with blood that wasn’t his own. Nobody had come looking for him so the trapper had claimed him as an apprentice, though a slave was closer to the truth. His master hadn’t even given him a name, though he’d lost his own, along with everything else from his old life except the Blade, which he’d been clutching so tightly it had to be prised from his grip. The dagger was an unusual weapon, its long silver blade set into a bone hilt carved with a corkscrewing pattern. Novak had taken it of course, but the boy had filched it back during one of his master’s drunken stupors. He’d kept it hidden under a loose floorboard in their hovel ever since, but this morning some instinct had compelled him to carry it. Perhaps the weapon had called to him. After all, they were both phantoms from another life. If this one ended today they would pass into the next together.

And into all that comes after, until there’s no more living or dying left in the world.

He ran a hand over the Blade’s hilt, drawing courage from its familiar whorled texture. Courage and something darker…

Novak is dead, he thought fiercely. The beast got him!

He hadn’t seen it happen, but he’d sensed the old monster’s death at the hands of the new. Tasted the bastard’s pain when it wrenched out his spine the way the fisherfolk boned their catch. It had felt good. Right.

‘Just,’ he breathed, savouring the fine word.

None of that mattered now, and yet… The cruelties had never felt so raw, as if all the misery and mockery of his life had been honed to a killing edge. Novak’s death wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough. He wanted to lash out at the dullards around him and–

It’s the beast, he realised, unclenching his fists. I’m drinking its dreams. Falling into them.

‘We’re safe here,’ Padraig was telling the others. ‘If we stay quiet it’ll move on. Leave us be.’

‘You’re wrong,’ the ghost boy said, rising to his feet. The joints in his cramped legs cracked and he almost stumbled. How long had they been down here, crouched in the darkness while the beast rampaged above? Six hours? Seven? Ten?

‘You’ll get us killed, ghost,’ Padraig growled, grabbing his wrist.

‘Can’t kill a ghost,’ the boy whispered. The urge to strike back was almost overwhelming – not with his fists, but with the purer, sharper force of his will. His spirit burned with it, kindled by the beast’s fury. It would be so easy to reach out with a barbed thought and pop this thug’s mind like a stray bug. So joyful!

Hide your taint.

The cold command froze him, as it had done so often over the years. Whenever he’d reached for his secret strength, that soul-deep imperative had been waiting. It was his only memory of his lost life, which made it both precious and terrible. Time and time again it had forced him to withdraw into meek silence while the dirty tide of abuse washed over him – the insults and the beatings and worse. He’d never once pushed back or tried to reshape the crude clay of the villagers’ spirits into something gentler. Never let himself become more than a ghost.

I’m done with hiding, he decided. Done with them.

‘I’m going,’ he said, twisting free of Padraig’s grip. In the same instant he jabbed out with his mind. Though he only used a sliver of the power sheathed in his soul the thug recoiled with a yelp, as if he’d been struck.

‘You stay, you die,’ the boy warned the others. They couldn’t see what had happened, but he knew they’d felt it. The air had turned frigid, yet there was a bright tang to it, as though it was riddled with invisible energy. Agnieszka, the wizened seamstress, was moaning and he suspected Tivoli, the headman’s scribe, had soiled himself again.

‘Witch,’ Padraig croaked. ‘He’s a witch.’

Yes, the boy agreed, accepting the truth he’d always known. To his surprise he felt no shame, only exhilaration. He wasn’t a ghost any more.

Witch.

‘Yes,’ he confirmed aloud. ‘And I’ve seen what’s coming if you don’t listen to me.’

Dismissing them, he climbed the ladder at the pit’s centre then pressed against the trapdoor overhead, nudging it open a crack to peer outside. Moonlight spilled through, shockingly bright after the gloom, accompanied by the bitter cold of midwinter. While his eyes adjusted he tested the night with his subtler senses, ignoring the shivers coursing through his body. The psychic susurration of the beast continued its brooding, stentorian rhythm. It was still lost in whatever passed for slumber in its jagged soul.

But not for long, the boy gauged. The anger won’t let it be.

Blinking, he realised the cylindrical silo that once covered the pit had been wrenched from its moorings and hurled aside. It lay nearby, its planks splintered. The beast had come very close to their refuge, but something must have drawn it away before it spotted the trapdoor. Next time they wouldn’t be so lucky.

You know we’re hiding, don’t you? You’ve smelled us.

Down below Padraig was still muttering his accusation, but none of the others had taken it up. Once they would have turned on the ghost boy, maybe even tried to burn him alive, but the old order of things was broken. Even Padraig understood something worse than a witch had come among them.

‘Quiet,’ the boy hissed into the pit. He wasn’t surprised when the thug obeyed.

Gently he pushed himself through the trapdoor and crouched low, surveying the area. The grain pit was at the southern edge of the village, beside the looming bulk of the mill. Four sweeping wind-vanes jutted from the conical building’s face, motionless and unlikely ever to resume their rotations. No matter how things turned out, this place was done for.

The boy froze as the scene sank in. He’d known things would be bad, but seeing the horror made it real. Tonight was a triple-moon and the combined radiance of the Night’s Trinity was merciless in its clarity.

Truth is the sharpest knife. He didn’t know where the thought came from, which was often the way with his intuitions, but like all of them, its message was undeniable. There was truth here and it cut deep.

At least a dozen bodies were strewn about the mill’s yard, like blood-filled dolls savaged by a vicious child. Many were missing limbs or heads, while others had been torn into ragged, unrecognisable hunks of flesh. Frost had crept over the corpses, freezing twisted forms and spilt blood into white-dusted abstractions of butchery. One man had been pinned to the mill’s door with a fence post, the makeshift stake rammed through his chest like a giant’s nail. Another was draped over a wind-vane, viscera and crimson icicles dangling from his body in a petrified snarl that hung so low it almost touched the ground.

Yet despite the violence, the moonlit scene had a strange serenity about it. The chill air was perfectly still, as though the world had frozen alongside the dead, holding its breath.

Is this war? the boy wondered, staring at the carnage. The village elders had spoken the word in hushed tones, hinting at battles where thousands died in a single day to hold back the horrors that crawled from between the stars. But surely that couldn’t be true, could it? How could there be enough folk in all the worlds to pay such a price? And how could anything live between the stars, even monsters?

‘Why?’ Agnieszka had asked during their first hours in hiding. ‘Why?’

The old woman had mumbled the question over and over, though nobody had an answer. Things like this didn’t happen in the Hinterwylds. Bad things, yes – ugly, spiteful things were common, as the boy knew all too well – but nothing like this. Not monsters.

Why?

But maybe he had the answer now. Maybe the war had been lost and the God-Emperor’s grand armies had fallen. Maybe that’s why the monsters had found them.

‘No,’ he breathed, breaking the terrible train of thought. The Shining Ones who watched over their world wouldn’t let that happen. Even if the great war had been lost, their protectors would endure. They were eternal, Father Fairfield, the village pastor had promised. The Shining Ones had beaten death.

Maybe they’re tired of us, the boy thought suddenly. Maybe they’ve abandoned us. Then something even worse occurred to him. Maybe they were never there at all.

Nobody alive had actually seen the protector knights or travelled to their fabled fastness in the Fjordlands beyond the valley. All the villagers had to go on were the parables of the Saga Scintillant – wonderful, epic stories to stir the soul, but what if they were only stories? What if the God-Emperor Himself was a lie? Could there really be worlds beyond this one, let alone a glorious empire that spanned them? Surely–

No! He wouldn’t – couldn’t – accept the possibility. Throughout the squalor and suffering of his life, he’d clung to the legends and the hope of something better. Nobler. Yes, that was the word Father Fairfield always used when he preached about the Imperium. It was a wonderful word, filled with the promise of great deeds and more to life than drudgery. Sometimes the boy felt sure his memories would come creeping back and that remembering would reveal the truth he yearned for – that he belonged with the Shining Ones.

‘It’s not real,’ Agnieszka muttered beside him. Lost in thought, he hadn’t noticed her joining him. ‘A dream,’ she assured herself dully. She was a bitter, narrow-minded crone, but shock had drawn her poison. ‘Only a dream.’

Turning, the boy saw the others had emerged from the pit, even Padraig. They stood staring at the massacre in slack-jawed shock.

You’re afraid of me, the boy thought, but you followed anyway. Because I’m all you’ve got left.

Unexpectedly his contempt faded. These folk had no answer to this nightmare – no strength or cunning or secret gift to shield them, only a small measure of faith and a wealth of ignorance. Little wonder they were drawn to his power now. Did that make them fools? Worthless?

‘We burn bright so others may live,’ the boy whispered. It was the credo of the Shining Ones, taught to every child of the Hinterwylds and carved beneath the holy aquila in the village temple. It felt good to say the words aloud. Even better to feel their truth.

‘You said we should… leave,’ Agnieszka said hesitantly.

‘It’s near on two days to Vartan,’ Jaktens estimated, pointing at the treeline beyond the mill. The stocky woodsman knew the forest paths better than anyone else among them. ‘More if the snow keeps up.’

‘I won’t make that,’ Tivoli protested, shivering.

‘Follow me,’ the boy said, coming to a decision. ‘Stay quiet,’ he called over his shoulder as he crept away.

‘Wait, lad,’ Jaktens cautioned. ‘That way’s back into town.’

Yes, it is, but you’ll follow me anyway.

There’s no choice, the boy told himself yet again, but with every step he took the argument felt weaker and the urge to turn and run stronger. The ravaged dwellings and corpse-strewn roads of the village mocked his decision. What he’d seen at the mill hadn’t fully prepared him for the carnage that lay ahead.

Everyone’s gone, he judged. The beast got them all.

It looked like the destroyer had swept from house to house, battering down doors or entire walls, then hurled its victims outside, as if to desecrate the streets. The cobblestones were threaded with frozen blood and more of it covered the buildings, mostly in frenzied splatters, but occasionally worked into symbols or fragments of what might have been words, their characters daubed with startling finesse. It confirmed what he’d sensed all along – despite its savagery the beast was more than an animal.

You can think, but you’re forgetting how, he guessed, brushing against the killer’s dreams. It hurts you to remember.

Yet despite his connection to the beast he still had no idea what it actually was. None of the survivors had even glimpsed it. They’d all been on the other side of the village when the screaming started. Moments later a torrent of raw impressions had rushed over the boy – jagged white teeth gnarled and snarling and framed with flames that scorched black to red then back to blacker rage roaring soaring falling feeding falling further faster brighter darker…

The hellish tide had felt physical in its force. Screaming, he’d buckled under its weight and dropped to his knees, clutching his head as it tried to wrench itself from its own neck and hurl itself into the storm. Through the pain he’d glimpsed that it was actually his soul that was being torn away and drawn into the destroyer’s madness. That insight had saved him.

Falling back on the discipline of the cold command, he’d reined in his gift and muted the clamour of impressions to a murmur. Then he’d hauled himself to his feet and begun yelling at the gawping folk around him, urging them to run. Run!

Perhaps it was the terror in his voice or the chorus of screams – still distant, but getting closer – or perhaps he’d unknowingly thrown his gift behind the warning, but a pitiful, random few had heeded him. They were all he could save from the foe.

The foe? He wasn’t sure when he’d started thinking of their tormentor that way. Not so long ago it had simply been a force of nature to hide or flee from. Maybe the change had come when he’d realised both those courses would end badly. The creature had their scent. If they hid it would find them. If they fled it would run them down. That left just one choice – to act as the Shining Ones would and face their foe.

My foe. The clarity felt good. It gave him strength.

‘You’re sure about this?’ Jaktens whispered.

‘Yes,’ the boy replied, tightening his grip on the Blade. He’d told the others to scavenge weapons along the way and they’d obeyed with the same dull hope that compelled them to follow him. Now they brandished scythes, hoes or spades like holy relics. Jaktens had recovered his crossbow and Agnieszka was clutching the wooden darning needles she’d been carrying in her bag. They were nothing like the dashing Imperial soldiers who marched beside the Shining Ones in the stories, but he was proud of them.

I’ll make them heroes, he vowed, channelling his foe’s fury into something pure. The beast was very close now, but his fear was gone. I’ll make them Astra Militarum!

He waved his party to a halt as they entered the village square. There were surprisingly few human bodies here, though scores of animal carcasses were scattered among the overturned stalls and wagons, slaughtered with the same glee as their owners. The boy guessed they’d been abandoned when the folk fled for their homes. Or to the temple…

His gaze swept to the tall, steeple-topped building across the square. Built from coarsely hewn granite blocks, the God-Emperor’s temple was the oldest and sturdiest place in the village. Four columns fronted it, formed from thick tree trunks and arranged into a roofless portico. Each was carved into the likeness of an armoured warrior with a two-handed sword held before it, blade to the ground, and painted in the bright orange colours of the Shining Ones. The workmanship was crude, the knights rendered as blocky caricatures of the elegant woodcuts in the Saga Scintillant, yet there was an honest strength about them. They were noble. At least, they had been.

‘Heretic,’ the boy growled, seizing on another of Father Fairfield’s favourite words. The knights’ visors had been slashed and spattered with blood.

The beast couldn’t bear to look at you, he thought, staring at the claw marks. You shamed it.

Yes, he was sure of that, though it was an odd insight. No matter, the Shining Ones were the enemy of his enemy, which meant they would stand with him in the battle to come, even if only in spirit. The prospect thrilled him, filling him with renewed conviction. It made his hatred righteous. And with that blessing came another: he knew exactly where his quarry was.

Without a word he headed for the temple, no longer creeping but striding with his head held high. He didn’t need to look back to know his army would follow.

This is why I’m here. This was always why.

The heavy temple doors lay before the entrance, smashed into kindling. They had offered no protection for the souls that took refuge here. Doubtless the sacred aquila hanging over the altar had proved equally ineffective. Without faith to empower it, the symbol was just shaped wood.

‘What are we doing here?’ Jaktens asked as the boy stopped before the portico.

‘What we must, brother.’ It was a strange thing to call this man, who’d only ever been a stranger at best, but it was the right thing to say. ‘What we’re meant to do.’

That was when he heard the music for the first time. It was a gossamer crystal threnody, elusive yet insistent, alienating yet captivating, but above all, achingly distant. He’d never learnt the fancy words and notions it evoked in him, yet he grasped them instantly, as if the music had woven them into his mind. None of the others could hear it. It was for him alone, too refined for common senses. But when he reached for the chords with his gift they fell silent, leaving him with a terrible longing.

It is a song of futures yet to pass. Of paths undreamt that dream of being…

As he scoured the void he felt the beast rising through the fitful strata of its torpor, seeking him in turn – eager to wreak ruin again until all hope of beauty was snuffed out. The impossible music would have to wait. Perhaps it would be his reward for fulfilling this quest. Perhaps it belonged to them. The anthem of the Shining Ones…

‘We burn bright so others may live,’ the aspirant knight declared, raising his dagger to salute the desecrated statues. In the moonlight its blade shone pure white.

Then he led his army into the darkness.

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Warhammer horror

A Black Library Imprint

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

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ISBN: 978-1-80026-503-5

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