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Old Wounds, New Scars – Graham McNeill
About the Author
An Extract from ‘Heralds of the Siege’
A Black Library Publication
eBook license
Old Wounds, New Scars
Graham McNeill
“A voice from old heroic days,
When life was counted dust,
Weighed in the scale with nobler things,
Honour, and faith, and trust.”
I
The skies of Terra were what Alivia missed the most.
She remembered how blue they’d been. How wide.
The view from the summit of the Black Cuillin on her island home was breathtaking: misted glens, sprawling forests and deep oceans stretching in an endless blue expanse.
But most of all, she remembered a sky so wide it seemed it would never end.
Alivia had climbed all the mountains of Old Earth, even the towering white peaks now mantled in stone and steel.
But nothing could compare to this view over the cold ocean to the New World.
Alivia tasted the air: the cool aroma of pine, the wet warmth of wild animals and the thorny tangles of gorse.
She’d seen other worlds, other wonders, since then.
She’d scaled the colossal slopes of Olympus Mons, swum the world oceans of Talassar, even explored the ruins of Fringe Space.
Miracles and marvels all, but the glory of the Throneworld was too powerful, too connected to Alivia’s soul for anything to eclipse it.
Maybe that’s why Horus wants it so badly.
The sentiment was an intrusion. It wasn’t hers.
Her memory’s gaze shifted, down from the endless skies to the forests of highland fir. The trees grew close, only whispering shadows of sunset visible between their pollarded trunks.
Grazing at the edge of the treeline was a powerful stag.
The sheer magnificence of the animal took her breath away.
Its russet hide shone gold in the dying sun, and its antlers forked upwards like bone lightning. This was the master of the glen, and when the wild hunt thundered over the hills, he would lead it.
Alivia held her breath, lest even a whisper of movement break the spell.
The stag’s head came up, its nostrils twitching.
The animal met her gaze, and in its eyes, she saw an ageless soul. Tears pricked her eyes to see a kernel of doubt in its noble strength.
A chilling howl echoed from deep within the forest, the cry of a wolf. Others joined it – dozens, then hundreds. Maybe more.
The stag turned and bolted, its powerful legs carrying it farther up the mountain, leaping over rocks and scrambling along treacherous pathways.
A black-furred wolf raced from the trees, its eyes red and rabid. The pack followed it, red wolves, grey wolves and wolves with moulting fur. They raced after the stag, driving it towards the cliffs where others would be waiting.
She wanted to shout after the fleeing animal.
To warn it that it was heading into a trap.
I always loved that about you, Alivia; your metaphors were always so damn pretty.
II
Alivia woke with a cry on her lips.
She blinked, breathing hard, the vision of the stag fleeing into mountains fading. Darkness overhead. Dim glow of lumens from the creaking corridor beyond.
Night aboard Molech’s Enlightenment. Above her, the hard, oil-stained metal of the compartment’s ceiling. She rolled onto her side, looking over to where Vivyen and Miska lay. Her adopted daughters were asleep, curled together on their makeshift bunk.
Next to her, Jeph rubbed his eyes and yawned.
‘Did I wake you?’ she asked.
‘Yes, but it’s okay.’
She smiled. They’d all picked up some of the old slang.
‘Another bad dream?’ he asked.
She nodded. ‘Yeah.’
‘The one about the snakes?’
‘Thankfully not,’ she said, letting her breathing even out.
Jeph propped himself up on one elbow, running his fingertips across the sweep of her shoulder.
‘Who’s John?’ he asked.
III
John Grammaticus.
She hadn’t thought of her old lover in a long time.
He came to mind only infrequently – if she heard a specific inflexion of tone or caught a precise sardonic expression out of the corner of her eye. She’d spin around, expecting to see him standing there with a knowing grin, as if he’d only been gone for a few hours and not ages of the world.
When was the last time she’d seen John?
She rolled over in her bunk, knowing exactly when.
The Khyber.
A smoky bar in Kabul, back before the tanks of the Iron Czar reduced the entire city to rubble. Close to the Palace of Amanullah Khan, the Khyber was the preferred watering hole for a rogue’s gallery of strangers in a strange land, drifters thrown together by tides of crime, betrayal and loss.
John wasn’t with their circle of acquaintances that day. He’d been thrown out three days earlier for loudly berating the bar staff for serving watered-down liquor, and was still serving penance by being forced to drink in the factory bars down by the Janagalak.
She’d just laid down a winning hand of panjpar, to loud wails of protest from her opponents, when she felt his presence. Alivia looked over her shoulder and saw John at the louvred entrance, frantic and bathed in sweat like the time he’d run the first marathon.
He’d just started to shout her name when the Khyber exploded.
A single 152mm shell from an Akatsiya artillery piece deployed outside the city smashed down through the roof and detonated in the bar, killing everyone in the building in the fires of an earth-shaking blast.
Alivia remembered the flames and the thunder of collapsing masonry. The sensation was powerful, and she cut it off abruptly. Painful experience had taught her it was never a good idea to relive powerful emotions in the warp.
The breath caught in her chest, and she knew she wasn’t getting back to sleep again anytime soon. She swung out of bed and dressed in the dark with the efficiency of someone who knows the exact location of everything she needs.
‘Where you going, Liv?’ asked Jeph.
‘Going to head up to the bridge,’ she said, lacing up her heavy boots. ‘Captain Sulaiman and I need to figure out how we’re going to stretch our supplies long enough to reach Terra.’
But Jeph was already slipping back to sleep.
She envied him that ability.
Alivia leaned over and kissed his cheek. Jeph was a good man. He wasn’t exceptional, nor was he handsome or rich, but he loved her and his girls deeply.
What more could someone like her ask for?
She kissed the girls. Miska, the cherub-faced mistress of mischief and backchat managed to look entirely innocent while asleep, and Vivyen the storyteller, so like her father.
Alivia saw the chapbook she’d long ago taken from the Odense Domkirke library clutched tight to the girl’s chest. Ever since Alivia and Severian of the Luna Wolves (he’d been careful to make the distinction) had rescued Vivyen, she’d never let the book go.
Alivia left them sleeping and quietly slipped out of the maintenance compartment that served as their cabin. Smaller than an Arbites gaol cell, but it was more than most people on Molech’s Enlightenment had.
IV
The deck corridor beyond was only fitfully illuminated, and Alivia saw the area around the
door was again strewn with trinkets and small offerings of food. Picts of lost loved ones were pinned to the door frame and inked strips of votive paper fluttered in the sour air drifting from the recyc-vent above.
Every morning it was the same.
Alivia knelt to gather up every gift and every scrawled request. The gifts she’d redistribute, the requests she’d read later and try to help where she could.
Molech’s Enlightenment was a destroyer, a small ship by Naval standards, but still over a kilometre in length. Fast and manoeuvrable, she was a pack hunter without a pack, a lonely traveller limping back to the system of her birth.
Under normal circumstances, the vessel would boast a complement of around fifteen thousand, but now carried almost double that.
These times were anything but normal.
The ship’s holds and empty torpedo bays were now home to thousands of refugees from Molech, a world taken by Horus in his galaxy-wide betrayal.
Almost two years had passed since their escape, years in which many of those who had begun the journey from Molech had died in the darkness. Many more had succumbed to warp sickness or the pressures of their desperate existence. It seemed as though they might escape the ravages of Horus, only to succumb to the slow attrition of the voyage back to Terra.
Alivia had stepped up and worked closely with Captain Sulaiman to make conditions aboard the vessel bearable. She’d overseen the regular distribution of food and water supplies, worked with Noama Calver and Kjell to establish a functioning medicae facility, and put in place a system to ensure the fair allocation of habitable living spaces.
She’d found myriad ways to keep thousands of people crammed for months in an Imperial starship from turning on one another out of fear and desperation.
They recognised she had kept them all alive, and they loved her for that.
Someone had given her a nickname, Saint Liv, and though Alivia disliked it, she’d found it impossible to shake. It reminded her a little too much of what she’d read on a faded palimpsest a grateful patient had left on their medicae bunk.
The Lectitio Divinitatus, a quasi-religious text that deified the Emperor and set Him in the holy role of mankind’s golden protector.
She’d ripped it up with a sigh.
People always looked to higher powers when night closed in.
Alivia had since seen at least seven shrines around the ship, and knew there would be more. But as much as she loathed the idea of the Emperor being revered as a god, the nascent belief offered a sliver of hope to the desperate.
For now, that was all that sustained some people, so she swallowed her bitterness and let them believe the impossible.
Alivia set off towards the bridge, feeling the vibrations of the starship’s engines through the metal deck plates. She could hear the groaning of the ship’s superstructure as a distant rumble, and she paused to place her palm on a nearby stanchion.
The bare metal was warm, a side effect of feedback from the Geller field as it resisted the insane tides of the immaterium.
‘Only a little farther, steel-heart,’ she said.
V
Two thousand people called Lateral Companionway Epsilon-77 home. It had been designed as a way to swiftly move rapid-response troops to any hull breaches; now every inch of the deck was carefully divided into sleeping areas, ration dispensaries, medicae bays and refectory spaces. The environment-scrubbers were on their way out, and stale sweat, unwashed bodies and the ammoniac reek of recycled air added a tangible texture to every breath. Magos Cervari only gave them a fifty-six per cent chance of remaining functional long enough for the ship to reach Terran space.
Alivia emerged onto a wide, transverse gantry that spanned the companionway, trying to cross as swiftly and quietly as possible.
It didn’t do any good.
People looked up as she passed overhead, and more and more lifted their faces towards her as word of her presence spread.
Alivia looked down, meeting the gaze of a woman she’d helped find food for her three children. Her name was Orabella, and she kissed her fingertips before placing them over her heart.
The gesture was swiftly copied by other refugees: a man whose life she’d saved when she’d found a last bottle of counterseptic to treat a gash in his thigh; a teenage girl she and Noama had helped through a difficult birth; a child who’d suffered warp nightmares, and who she’d rocked to sleep every night for a month until they faded.
Alivia had listened to their anguished stories of fleeing Molech with nothing but the clothes on their backs, their legacies of heartache and fear. She held them close as they spoke of lost husbands, wives, children and siblings.
She’d cried more tears aboard Molech’s Enlightenment than she could ever remember shedding. To be an empath on a ship of refugees was to feel every hurt, every loss and every stab of grief that much deeper.
But she’d turned that despair into hope.
It was fragile this hope, forever in danger of being extinguished like the first sparks of a fire in a windy hearth.
She breathed soft life to it by listening with compassion to everyone who needed catharsis or closure, then speaking healing words in return. She helped shoulder every burden, and, in doing so, lessened theirs.
Alivia left the companionway and its swirling emotions, moving farther up the ship and crossing rally points now serving as dormitories, and ordnance stowage bays pressed into service as ablutions chambers.
She passed a team of servitors running a series of replacement pipes where a buckled stanchion had sheared a power conduit. Captain Sulaiman had told her the unpredictable tides of the empyrean were surging as he’d never seen them before, like a hurricane breaking upon the shore. Both of them knew upon what world’s shores the warp tides would be breaking.
Alivia…
She winced in pain, feeling an icy chill pass through her.
She looked for a speaker but she was alone, a singular enough experience on Molech’s Enlightenment that it immediately struck her as strange.
Alivia…
She put a hand to her chest as the temperature dropped.
Her skin was cold to the touch, and her breath feathered the air. She felt the hard ridges of scars, three vertical ones where the Warmaster’s claws had pierced her, and one where Severian had split her heart with Proximo Tarchon’s gladius.
The moment passed, and Alivia straightened.
Travelling through the warp, you learned to accept the odd muttering shadow or sourceless whisper. This certainly wasn’t the first time she’d heard her name being called in an empty corridor.
Such harmless phenomena often indicated a ship was about to translate back into real space.
Alivia reached out and rapped her knuckles three times against the nearest bulkhead and said, ‘Going to have to do better than that if you’re trying to spook me.’
She moved on, turning into the approach corridor that led to the bridge.
Behind her, three answering knocks echoed from the bulkhead.
VI
The bridge of Molech’s Enlightenment was hot, coolant fluids being a carefully controlled substance now. Much to Magos Cervari’s chagrin, the cogitators were forced to run close to overheating before their machine-spirits were appeased by a carefully rationed burst of cooling balms.
He’d predicted a binharic revolt within the logic engines, but thus far it seemed the spirits within were accepting this sacrifice to keep the ship running.
Captain Sulaiman stood at his command podium, immaculately dressed as always in his white frock coat, and flanked by two black-carapaced armsmen carrying shot-cannons. Once, the soldiers had bristled at the informality of her entrance to the bridge, but Alivia had earned her place here.
‘Captain Sulaiman,’ said Alivia. ‘Am I right in thinking I just heard translation ghosts?’
Sulaiman turned to face her, his caramel-coloured skin clean shaven and immaculate. His augmetic eyes danced with barely contained enthusiasm.
‘Mistress Sureka,’ he said, ignoring her question. ‘How are you?’
‘Tired, hungry and looking forward to seeing some sky over my head for a change.’
‘You say that every time.’
‘Then you should know not to bother asking.’
Sulaiman cocked his head to the side, giving her a curious look. Or was it concern? The augmetics made it hard to be sure.
‘You’re testy today,’ he observed.
‘Are you surprised?’ she responded, exhaustion fraying familiarity into a lack of respect for Sulaiman’s rank. ‘We’ve been transitioning for nine months now. Who knows how long has really passed or what’s happening in real space? For all we know Horus is already sitting in the Palace and drinking the Emperor’s favourite wine.’
Sulaiman flinched as if she’d struck him.
‘I could have you shot for saying that,’ he said.
Alivia bit off a caustic retort.
She and Sulaiman had a cordial working relationship now, but it hadn’t always been that way. It had taken time and effort for her earn a measure of his respect, though she suspected he still thought of her as little more than a jumped-up civilian with delusions of her own importance.
This was, after all, a proud vessel of the Imperial Navy, and Sulaiman would never believe that she too had captained ships of war in equally dangerous times. She remembered the Straits of Artemisium, commanding warships of another man people foolishly called a god-emperor.
Sometimes she had to remind herself of what men of war in this turbulent age saw when they looked at her.
A wife. A mother. They didn’t see the warrior beneath.
‘I apologise, captain,’ she said, rubbing the heels of her palms against her eyes. ‘I’m not sleeping properly, and I keep hearing warp-whispers around every corner.’
‘Anything I should be concerned about?’
She shook her head. ‘No, just the usual nonsense. Anyway, how are we doing up here? You look like the cat that’s got the cream.’
He stared at her blankly, her meaning lost on him.
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