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Nightbleed – Peter Fehervari

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Sepulturum’

A Black Library Imprint

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Nightbleed

Peter Fehervari

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

The Needlesong

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rozalia Temető.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More real.

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

When had she ever felt so horribly, nakedly alive?

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

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

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

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

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

Get moving!

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

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

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

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

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

But that was all before…

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

I wish I could.

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

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

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

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

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

ITZ A LY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of course the city knew him by yet another name…

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Gonna put out your lights, dedhedz!’

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

Yes, this was going to be a good night.

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

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

There was a scraping noise along the shunned corridor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do you mean? What are–

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

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

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

The noise stopped just outside.

Waiting for me to choose…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Skreech leapt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

On me…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This isn’t me!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh no, they were full of needles!

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

The Needlemen…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I had to try it.

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

We… know… you…

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

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

The reality?

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

As… within…

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

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

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

Distilled darkness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And maybe that was the point…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was blind. Now I see.

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

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

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

Not people. Not any more.

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

Processed like sewage.

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

We’ve turned them into soul-eaters.

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

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

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

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

‘Who are you?’ she whispered.

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

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

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

‘Nothing that wasn’t there before.’

He frowned. ‘You all right, doc?’

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

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

‘The look?’

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

Chel lowered her eyes, unsettled by the observation.

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

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

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

‘Can you show me?’

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

‘Please, sergeant. It’s important.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Why?’ the woman asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You sure?’ His expression teetered between gratitude and guilt.

‘I am. Thank you.’

‘I’ll be right outside then,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Holler if you need me.’

Chel watched him go then faced the vessel again. There was a brooding expectancy about it, as though it had been waiting for her. How long had it been here? And who’d brought the sample to her lab? It hadn’t appeared with the regular batches. For that matter, the name on the testing requisition form – Vedas – had been unfamiliar, though its authorisation stamp was in order. How was that–

No, such mysteries were inconsequential. The drug had come to her because it wanted to. Wanted her. She felt sure of that.

‘Why?’ she asked, taking the final steps towards the barrel. ‘Why me?’ That was the only question that really mattered. ‘Tell me.’

Up close, she saw the bands girdling the container were engraved with runes, though she couldn’t make them out clearly in the gloom. Hesitantly, then with sudden eagerness, she reached out and ran her fingers over them, trying to identify their forms by touch, though she couldn’t say why. Like so much else recently, the action felt inevitable, as if she were snared by some implacable gravity that rendered volition obsolete. Perhaps that had always been the way of things, but she’d never noticed before. Maybe choice was only ever illusory. She couldn’t decide whether the possibility was repellent or comforting.

There was a scuffling sound somewhere behind her, punctuated by a harsh gargling. Chel tried to turn, but the runes wouldn’t allow it. They crawled beneath her fingertips like worms etched in water, urging her to follow their flow. Follow… Closing her eyes, she circled the barrel, drawn along by the riddle. Follow…

‘What are you?’ she murmured.

‘What are you, Chel Jarrow?’ the enigma asks in answer.

Opening her eyes the Grey Woman sees she is in the infinite ward once again, standing over the sick girl. No… not sick. Rozalia Temető is already dead, her face livid with decay, yet her eyes are open, their faded irises fixed on her.

‘Why?’ the corpse demands in a drowned voice. ‘Why me?’

The Grey Woman stares at her victim, aghast.

‘Tell me.’

‘An accident…’ she confesses. ‘It was an accident.’ She had been so tired that night, drained by a triple shift she should never have accepted, but pride had demanded. She’d misread the bed numbers, mistaking XVI for XIV, and administered a blood thinner to the wrong patient – a girl whose metabolism had reacted violently to the error. ‘It was a terrible mistake.’

‘Then it was for nothing,’ the dead girl croaks.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I don’t want your pity.’

‘No,’ the Grey Woman whispers. ‘But–’

‘Make it mean something.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Believe in it. Embrace it. Choose it.’

‘Choose it?’

‘Make me a sacrifice.’

‘I…’ The Grey Woman hesitates, sensing a final, unforgivable precipice. ‘I can’t change the past,’ she protests.

‘But you can choose your present.’ The revenant leans towards her, its body creaking with rigor mortis. ‘Choose!’

‘Yes,’ Chel breathed, accepting her fate. In that moment her hand found the barrel’s spigot. It protruded from an octagonal panel, almost level with her face. The plate was embossed with the cryptic acronym, along with a phrase in bold Gothic script:

VLG

~ AS WITHIN, SO WITHOUT ~

While her eyes lingered on the words, Chel’s fingers turned the spigot’s tap. Then her mouth found the spout.

As above, so below, she prayed as the dark nectar gushed past her lips.

The Needleman took the watchman as he left the warehouse, slitting his throat with a strike intended to silence and slay in the same instant. The wound was mortal, yet the old man still fought back, scrabbling for his killer’s throat as his life leached away. The fury on his face was exhilarating to behold – so much sweeter than the dog’s mindless rage – but like the beast before him, he was defeated by his foe’s iron visage.

‘So it flows,’ the victor whispered, lowering the watchman’s body gently, wary of alerting its true prey. ‘Until all the world’s bled dry.’

Sighing in anticipation, the Needleman crept into the warehouse. The overhead lights were sparse and feeble, leaving much of the chamber in darkness, but that was no impediment to its purpose. No, it was the leg wound that dismayed it. Spasms wracked the hunter’s muscles and its vision fluttered as it moved, threatening to disintegrate altogether.

‘I am legion,’ the Needleman hissed, steadying itself with the promise of its brethren.

The woman was waiting beside a massive container, her back to the hunter. She turned as it approached, meeting its gaze without surprise or fear. Indeed her long, pale face was entirely devoid of expression. Dark liquid trickled from her lips, staining her chin and the front of her jacket. Woven logos of the tin-can deity grinned from her lapels, revelling in its worshipper’s excess.

‘Will you, won’t you rise to fulfil the Fall?’ the Needleman asked, stalking towards her. This was the customary question it offered the chosen ones, though whatever they wailed or whimpered in response, whether threats, bribes or pleas for mercy, the answer was always the same.

‘Oh yes, you will!’ the herald confirmed, whirling its claws in a slashing salute. Then its step faltered as it noticed something else about its prey.

Her eyes were black.

The Dark Woman regarded the creature before her with detached contempt. It was an inane, unfinished wretch, drenched in blood and banality. She recognised the supernal entity its makeshift claws and mask aspired to, but the mimicry fell far short of the graffiti that had enthralled her earlier that night, let alone the reality. The youth who’d stalked her skulked behind the sham, clinging to his delusions like a drowning man.

‘You are nothing,’ she judged. Picturing his mask’s cord, she tore it free with a twist of her will. ‘Let me make something of you.’

The boy stared at her, terror and envy warring for supremacy on his face. Stripped of his façade he was pitiful – a frail and quailing thug who’d imagined himself so much more. Only the violence in him survived his exposure, too ingrained to scour away.

‘Come then,’ the Dark Woman goaded, knowing he couldn’t resist the challenge. ‘Kill me if you can.’

With a snarl the youth lurched towards her, his claws slashing in dual swipes. To his foe’s heightened senses the attack appeared sluggish, as though he were wading through water, while her domain was air. She darted inside the languid arcs and rammed her shok-jak’s blunt prong between his jaws, shattering his teeth and tearing through the tongue behind. The charge activated when the tip hit the back of his throat, spewing electric current through his skull. His eyes widened as they broiled, then burst wetly. Sparks played about the charred sockets, teasing out black smoke. More leaked from his jaws, which had melted around the prong jutting from them.

‘You were a lie,’ his executioner declared, releasing her weapon. She stepped away as the dead man’s claws completed their passage, gnashing together like teeth. The impact unbalanced the corpse and it toppled over, flat on its back.

‘For the Fall,’ the Dark Woman proclaimed, granting the fool a purpose in death. Her eyes met the vacant gaze of the mask beside him.

Will you, won’t you? it asked.

Deciding she would, the night’s new herald picked it up. It was a crude thing, yet they shared the same creed. They had both sacrificed to hasten the coming darkness. In time she would far outstrip the grubby offerings of its creator, but the mask itself was potent.

This isn’t me, a plaintive voice beseeched her, but it was buried too deep to matter any more, if it ever had. Ignoring the ghost, she glanced at the liquid-filled monolith. The urge to worship at its fount and drink again was strong, but she understood she’d had her fill. Whatever remained was for others to savour. She would approve it as an additive, of course. That would be her final act in this squalid temple-factory, for she wouldn’t be returning. Soon the nectar would find its way to Carceri’s forsaken, too diluted to awaken their flesh as it had awakened hers, but sufficient to open their eyes. Their enlightenment would be one of many unravelling threads in this world’s greater dissolution.

‘Thank you,’ she whispered to the monolith. ‘For the choice.’

Leaving the warehouse, she stopped beside the dead watchman. When the bodies were found questions would be asked, but quickly quashed in the name of productivity. The authorities would never hear of the murders. And in due course the cadavers would return here in another form.

‘I’m sorry,’ the Dark Woman said to the old man. It was her second apology of the night and the last she would ever offer.

Skreech lay in a darkness more complete than anything he’d ever desired, dead yet horribly present, severed from sensation, yet all too aware of the voracious, watchful giant looming over him. Pleading without words, he begged for forgiveness – for another chance to serve – but if his dark god heard him it paid no heed.

The Dark Woman took the stairwell back to her old apartment, striding up the mountain of steps as confidently as her former self would have crossed a room. Occasionally she passed shabby, broken-faced figures, but they slunk away from her, sensing she wouldn’t be easy pickings, which was the only kind they cared for. Reaching her floor, she stopped to peruse the hallowed graffiti that had signposted her path. The mandala was still there, testifying to the sanctity of this place, but the figure was gone, its message served and its territory relinquished to a new custodian.

‘We are legion,’ the Dark Woman acknowledged. Later she would ascend further and claim the tower’s derelict heights as her eyrie, along with the abandoned souls who congregated there, taking some as worshippers, others as sacrifices, for they were ripe for either role. But first she must accept the sacrament that would seal her allegiance to the night.

The supplicant donned her predecessor’s mask then walked the corridor she had always shunned, shivering as its shadows caressed her. Soft but insistent, they teased her flesh and bones into finer, sharper forms with every step she took, eliciting pleasure and pain in equal measure.

Will we, won’t we… the mask murmured, sharing its wearer’s epiphany.

The Dark Woman gasped as her fingers lengthened then split, budding crooked blades that chittered when she flexed them. Her elbows splintered in sudden sympathy, then multiplied and knitted into new configurations that would defy mortal eyes. A few steps later her knees followed, twisting into manifold opposing arcs, yet she kept her balance, instinctively adapting to the changes. When her torso shattered she screamed from the soul, then moaned as the fragments realigned and spun thorny tendons to bind themselves anew, though the knots were restless, for rigidity offended them.

We are legion!

As she neared the end of the passageway the mask tightened about her face, fusing with the skin and skull beneath. Creaking, it distended further, gouging fresh eyes along its length as its chin passed her riven waist.

We are legion!

The pilgrim’s path ended at its old apartment. It slipped through the cracks in the door and flitted to the bed it had once shared with a fool. The man was there now, his jowls quivering as he snored, lost in the last refuge he would ever know. Even in sleep he reeked of arrogance. His atonement would be lengthy and extravagant, his confessor decided. Its claws clicked in anticipation, drooling shadows over the oblivious penitent.

‘As above, so below,’ the Needleman intoned in a voice that swarmed with barbs. ‘As within, so without.’

Then it set to work and True Night drew a little closer.

About the Author

Peter Fehervari is the author of the Warhammer 40,000 novels Requiem Infernal, Cult of the Spiral Dawn and Fire Caste, as well as the novella Fire and Ice from the Shas’o anthology. He has also written many short stories for Black Library, including the T’au-themed ‘Out Caste’ and ‘A Sanctuary of Wyrms’, the latter of which appeared in the anthology Deathwatch: Xenos Hunters. He also wrote ‘Nightfall’, which was in the Heroes of the Space Marines anthology, and ‘The Crown of Thorns’. He lives and works in London.

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

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