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The Cache – James Brogden
About the Author
An Extract from ‘Sepulturum’
A Black Library Imprint
eBook license
The Cache
by James Brogden
Lyse Urretzi was on the verge of opening up a cluster of unexplored chambers in the Spike’s mid-reaches – almost half a mile below the inhabited levels where her clan and their neighbours lived – when the crawlers attacked.
Obviously nowhere below the hab-halls was entirely safe, but even so, for crawlers to venture so far up from the lower reaches was unusual. Who knew what had drawn them? Hunger? Well, every living creature in the Spike was starving to some degree. Something bigger and fouler than themselves moving into their territory? Lyse didn’t like to think about that. All she knew was that one moment she was doing her job – squeezing her scrawny body down through the wreckage that blocked this particular shaft and bolting a vertical zip line to the wall as she went – and the next, a grille to her left was smashed open by something pale that chittered as its claws flailed and snatched.
If she had been wearing clothes she would surely have been snagged and dragged to her death. As it was, garments only hindered the work of a pit-rat like herself, who often had to squeeze through the most claustrophobic of spaces, and so apart from a utility harness, boots and gloves, her biolux tattoos and a generous amount of engine grease covering everything else, there was nothing for the crawler to snag. Even as she yelped, its grip slipped on her slickened flesh.
She fell, and the lightless gape of the shaft swallowed her instead.
A dozen deaths flashed through her mind. Brains splattered on riveted hull plating. Torso impaled on some jagged barb, guts unspooling. Garrotted by tangled wiring. Broken but alive, helpless at the mercy of the crawler’s kin. She dashed the images away and fumbled for the emergency glob-gun.
Then she hit something hard enough to knock the wind out of her. A sloping surface, so that even as she was groping for a handhold the protective grease betrayed her, and she fell and bounced off something else, her skull cracking against the metal hard enough to make bright spots flare. By then she’d got the glob-gun free and fired upward blindly, praying to Saint Geller for salvation. He must have been listening because in the darkness above, the glob hit something and stuck. The strand of goo that attached it to her harness stretched under her weight like jellied sinew. Her invisible anchor point shifted with a grinding squeal of metal, but held, and she bounced and spun like a crude toy, ricocheting from one wall of the shaft to the other. Eventually, her mad penduluming calmed to a slow spin. Her eyes clenched tight as she whispered, ‘Thank you, thank you, oh thank you.’
The blue biolux glow of her tattoos showed the walls of the shaft around her: riveted plating, pipes and conduits, torn wiring. Close by was the narrow oblong of a half-open doorway, and blackness beyond. She looked up. Blackness above, too. Calling for help – or even just to let her crew know that she was alive – was out of the question, since it would only draw more crawlers. As for climbing up without the zip line? Impossible. She looked at the doorway again. There could be anything in that chamber – a hundred ways to die. On the other hand, it could be exactly the kind of thing that she was down here to look for in the first place: fragments of tech from long ago, when the Spike had been something else entirely. Such things were ancient and unfathomable to her, but Brother Putorius could sacrifice them to keep the Geller generators alive for another day. Her clan’s ancient duty. Her duty, as the daughter of Sutomore Urretzi, clanfather. Also, her only chance of finding her way back to the hab-halls was to hope that there were stairs or another shaft, something that she could climb.
Lyse swung herself over to the doorway, caught the jamb and spun herself around to sit on the threshold with her legs dangling over the abyss as she detached the glob strand. Then she took a deep breath, offered up a prayer of thanks to Saint Geller and went inside.
There was a drop to the floor on the other side, of course, but it wasn’t as far as some. She landed, crouched and still, and listened. No echoes of crawlers, just a distant drip and trickle. She was in a cavernous space of huge, angular shadows, the darkness overhead criss-crossed by the dim columns of ducts fallen and jammed at all angles from one side to the other. It was cold, with condensation sheeting the walls. Any water was a precious commodity, and she tasted some of it from a fingertip. It was sulphurous but didn’t burn her tongue, so was probably no more toxic than anywhere else. She swept more from the wall with her palms and licked them.
In such vastness the meagre light emitted by her tattoos was useless for anything more than illuminating her immediate surroundings as she picked her way through a junkyard of wreckage, wincing at every scrape and clatter that she made. Occasionally she passed an opening to left or right, but nothing that smelled like it might lead upwards. And all the while her senses strained for any sign of tech – the fire-spark flicker or whispered hum of powercells doggedly clinging to life despite the utter dereliction of the devices that they had once served, dying alone in darkness and futility. It was a mercy, her work, salvaging these expiring gasps of the machine-spirit and putting them to one final use, to keep the clans safe. It was holy.
What she found deep in that chamber was the exact opposite.
Towards the far end, the wall was shrouded in tall drapes of heavy fabric, in front of which there was a raised, circular platform many yards across. It gleamed with what she assumed to be more condensation, and a tumble of organic shapes was stacked in the middle. She smelled shit and old blood, the miasma of violent death, and was about to turn away because no good could come from whatever this was, but then she caught it – that fire-spark flicker, a tremble of amber right in the middle of the stack.
Her excitement at the promise of tech turned to revulsion when she saw what surrounded it.
Around the platform’s circumference, unlit candles sagged in their own tallow like degenerate monks, some cupped in severed hands, some socketed in skulls, all joined by a perimeter rope of intestines. Lines painted in blood linked them, and where they intersected something had been built out of the remains of those who had given hands, heads and viscera. Whatever abomination it was supposed to be had no place being formed from human parts. It had far too many limbs, for a start. The teeth in its leering mouth were the stumps of a shattered ribcage; its eyes were the loops at the bottom of a pelvis with the wings flaring high above like a crest. In the effigy’s lap was cradled a blood-crusted bowl, and littered around its feet were smaller bones that she didn’t have to look at too closely to know were scored by gnawing.
Cannibalism itself didn’t particularly shock her. The Spike’s dead were routinely given to the corpse-starch vats. It was only in lean times, when there was a blight or a power failure, that a clan might resort to the flesh itself to survive – and even then, it was kept firmly within the family, with Prime Adjutant Galla Domitia using her arbiters to enforce a ban on inter-tribal killing. For the Urretzis there was only ever reverence and gratitude towards those who gave their bodies for the clan’s uttermost need. This, though, revolted her on every level. There was no love here. No respect. This was an abomination, mutilation for its own sake, a glorification of torment in worship of… what? There were rumours of some who gathered in forgotten chambers and raised shrines to the things Outside that hungered to get in – as they surely would if her family failed in their duty to maintain the machines that kept them at bay. There were few absolute heresies in the Spike: as long as nobody endangered the welfare of all, Prime Adjutant Domitia was content to let them do as they liked. Worship of the Outside most defin
itely was an absolute heresy. Lyse would report it, and delight in watching this atrocity put to the torch, along with those who had committed it.
But not before she helped herself to the glimmering thing that hung around the effigy’s neck.
She tiptoed across the dais, careful to avoid touching any of the body parts. They glistened as she passed, as if shifting to watch her, and she couldn’t shake the impression that nothing here was entirely dead. Up close, the effigy’s stench was like the breath of something rotting alive. The tech was a large and ornate medallion hanging about its throat; she checked for booby traps or alarms, but whoever had built this was obviously arrogant enough in their power to not bother. Her knife made short work of the cord, and the medallion fell into her hands.
It was a lot heavier than it looked – probably gold, but in this light that was a guess – and ridged with concentric dials that were themselves busy with slide-switches and mechanisms whose purpose she couldn’t begin to guess at. All she cared about was that the large central crystal held a dim flicker of amber within its depths, like a welding torch seen far down a shaft. She hoped it was enough for Brother Putorius to keep the machines running – maybe just for a day, maybe only for a few hours.
It would now be a simple matter to follow the tracks of those who came here, ideally back to the hab-halls or at least somewhere close. She stashed the medallion in a pouch and turned to go, and as she did so her biolux caught something metallic woven into the drapes cloaking the wall – some kind of tapestry created from stripped electrical wiring. Maybe there was another chamber behind it, a door, a passage and stairs up. There was a cord running from somewhere high above and anchored to the edge of the platform. She pulled it slowly and the covering drew to one side.
Instead of a door or passage there was some kind of twisted mural, and the shock of seeing it made her reel backwards.
‘Blessed Saint Geller,’ she whispered, aghast.
Daubed in pigments made from human bodily fluids and who knew what else, it was like the twisting roil of fire in a no-grav zone, or a multi-fingered hand of static electricity discharging at a worm’s crawl through a haze of blood-coloured smoke. It was as if the darkness behind her eyelids had spilled free and vomited itself across the wall, seething with half-formed shapes and punctuated by eldritch sigils that squirmed away from direct attention. She uttered a small, terrified whimper as she realised what she was looking at.
It was a picture of the Outside.
The artist who had rendered this could not have seen the Outside directly, as the Spike’s viewports were protected by Saint Geller’s intervention, and so this must have been how it appeared in their mind – in which case surely they must have been irretrievably insane. A deep, throbbing ache grew at the base of her brain, and her vision blurred. The image’s churning grew more agitated as if it could sense her distress, coalescing into the forms of leering faces and clutching claws in her peripheral vision. They wanted her to look at them, because then they could become real – all she had to do was take one step towards the mural, then another, as close as possible so that she could give them her terror to feed on and her imagination to clothe them, and they could slip through the painting and be free…
She tottered on the edge of the platform, nearly losing her balance. It snapped her back to herself and she found that she had moved almost to within touching distance of the mural, her right hand outstretched. She recoiled in disgust, and dropped the draw-cord as if it were a live cable. The curtain fell back, and the Outside was hidden again.
Lyse drew a deep, shuddering breath. How close had she come?
‘Idiot.’ She slapped herself. She needed to leave now before she attracted the attention of anything else.
Sure enough, there was a trail through the debris which led to a small door and then a warren of shafts and chambers leading upwards. She knew she was getting closer to the hab-halls when it started to grow warmer and she heard the rattling of the pipes that carried heat from the Spike’s lower reaches, but this district was unfamiliar, and since she didn’t know whose territory it would take her to, she advanced more cautiously. Most were friends to the Urretzis, but by no means all. The final door wasn’t much more than a hinged panel, probably disguised to look like something innocuous on the other side. The air was thick with a familiar acrid pungency and she could hear the churning of vats, and she finally knew where she was. It was almost enough to make her return to the shrine and its loathsome effigy. This was Jaax territory.
She’d only ever been here once, in the company of her father and Prime Adjutant Domitia to present her betrothal gift to Clanfather Hadzor Jaax. It was a good match; everybody said so. A Jaax-Urretzi child would ally two of the most powerful clans in the Spike, streamlining both food production and the maintenance of the Spike’s defences, and put an end to generations of bloodshed. The prime adjutant had negotiated it for months. The fact that Lyse would rather let herself be eaten alive by crawlers than share a wedding bed with Hadzor Jaax was irrelevant. He was a leering, cadaverous beast of a man whose lifetime proximity to the corpse-starch vats he controlled had afflicted him with a chronic fungal flesh-rot that caused pustulant boils. He’d had two wives already, but one had proved barren and it was rumoured that the other had thrown herself down a shaft in shame after having bred a crawler. The idea that he, or someone in his clan, was worshipping a being of the Outside with human sacrifice and cannibalism didn’t surprise her one bit. From her memory of the vat halls, they were dark and noisy places – easy to sneak through unnoticed unless she was unlucky.
She eased the panel open and slipped inside.
Instantly the noise, smell and cloying humidity all intensified. Like most of the Spike’s larger chambers it was taller than it was wide, but long, and filled with ranks of towering vats that churned the yeast-based gruel which kept most of the Spike’s population fed. Occasionally the discovery of a cache of ancient ration packs would be cause for a feast, but most had been plundered generations ago. Jaax’s vat-workers clambered amongst the pipes and ducts which fed the containers, stirring, hammering, shouting, while servo-skulls floated around them performing their unknowable tasks.
She kept her head low and her biolux dark, and slid through shadow, hoping to find the exit before she was seen. There was plenty of cover for someone small, and she crept behind the machinery along the wide gallery that led to the exit. When a servo-skull suddenly rose up in front of her with its eye sockets gleaming and mechanical mandibles a-quiver, she froze, heart hammering. It regarded her for a moment, but she obviously didn’t fit the criteria of ‘intruder’ because it ignored her and zoomed away on its business. Lyse heaved a sigh of relief and continued creeping.
The shout came like a knife between the shoulder blades – expected, but still a shock. ‘Hey! Who are you?’
Lyse didn’t bother looking at who it was. She just ran.
She twisted and turned randomly as much as possible to confound pursuit until she could find the way out. Only a few passages separated Jaax and Urretzi territories, but home might as well be at the bottom of the Spike if she was caught.
Racing footsteps pounded after her, clattering on metal catwalks above. Whistles, catcalls, whoops and jeers. Someone stepped out from a corner brandishing a wrench, but she slid underneath his wild swing, rolled, and came up running. The medallion in its pouch slapped heavily against her hip, and the fear of letting down her father was almost as bad as that of what the Jaaxes might do to her.
Ironically, it was the tech that got her caught. She was running on instinct and doing what she did best, finding small spaces and squeezing through them – gaps between pipes, underneath conduits, behind tanks – while her pursuers yelled to each other, coordinating, driving her and cutting off her escape. She tried to go feet first through the gap between two metal steps, but she’d forgotten about the extra bulk she was carrying and it got wedged – not
tight enough to get her stuck, but it slowed her down, and as she was cursing and tugging herself free, a hand on the other side grabbed her ankle and dragged her out.
‘Gotcha, thieving maggot!’ The owner of the hand grabbed her throat. He was a nondescript vat-rat, scrawny but heavier than her, and his arm was livid to the elbow with burn-scar tissue that made it look half melted.
She made her biolux flare so that he could see her tattoos, the clan-sigils inscribed in her flesh. ‘I am no thief!’ she retorted. ‘I am Lyse Urretzi, first daughter of Clanfather Sutomore Urretzi, and you will unhand me before I have Prime Adjutant Domitia feed you to your own vats!’
It was a risk, giving away her identity, but she had nothing else to fall back on now except her status. Whether it was the threat or just the sudden blaze of light, he blinked, and she took advantage of it by ramming her knee into his crotch, fleeing as he doubled up, retching. Saint Geller must have been looking favourably on her courage because around the next corner she saw the wide gates that opened onto the passage between Jaax and Urretzi territory, and she collapsed sobbing over the threshold of home.
‘I will not hear this!’ shouted her father. ‘I will not waste the prime adjutant’s time with old wives’ tales!’ Brother Putorius looked up briefly from his devotions at the shrine of Saint Geller, frowning at the interruption. The saint’s reliquary was a vast sarcophagus of black iron, decorated with panels depicting Geller victorious in battle over the abominations of the Outside and preaching in glory from the apex of the Spike. Snaking into it from all directions were the hissing pipes and trembling conduits that it was Putorius’ duty to placate with his mumbled prayers and invocations. ‘And even if your story is true, just because you ended up in Jaax territory doesn’t mean that what you found has anything to do with them.’
‘Who else could it be?’ she retorted.
‘Regardless of that,’ he ploughed on, ‘you thought this… this thing’ – he prodded the medallion with disgust – ‘which was part of something blasphemous, would somehow make up for your intrusion?’
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