Maledictions

by Graham McNeill et al.

  ‘Identify yourself,’ Veles barks.

  ‘Move, or there will be nothing left of you to move.’ The voice – it was coming from everywhere, every speaker, every channel – clarifies with every threat, acquiring inflection, unsubtle emotion. First: a modicum of pity, which diversifies shortly after to amusement, disdain. A strain of brittle loathing, something that has had years to mature.

  ‘Move, or I–’ Finally, Veles thinks, an iota of identity spun into the endless warnings. He almost welcomes the aggression. Better this than the silence, the insensate dark. ‘–will make sure there’s nothing of you to move.’

  ‘We repeat. Identify yourself.’ Still nothing from his subordinates, no clue as to who might be issuing those statements, no way of verifying if it is a rogue machine-spirit or even, as some have theorised, a psyker who’d surmounted the trick of dying. But whispers of heresy have begun to seep through the listless ranks. Veles finds he can’t argue.

  ‘Nepenthe,’ she whispers, when the ship is lit up like a supernova. ‘I am that which interrupts grief, devours sorrow, an opiate.’

  ‘What are you?’

  ‘Yes.’ The voice surprises Veles with its despair. ‘That is the question, isn’t it?’

  ‘Marcus, she’s calling us.’ He feels fingers lace around his sleeve.

  Though Cornelius’ face now sits fermenting in a tide of bacteria, Marcus can still picture his sibling’s expression, an urgent wonder. ‘She’s here. She’s awake. She’s real.’

  He does not answer. Not at first. Too enraptured by the glissando of her voice, its notes decanted straight into his nervous system, Marcus can only exist, transfixed by the reality of her. They’d waited for so long. Yet, some treacherous nodule of his mind disdains from submitting to the ecstasy, instead persisting in pointing out that this isn’t so much blasphemy as it is mutiny­ing against self-preservation.

  But they’ve come this far.

  And what else do they have?

  ‘Marcus.’

  ‘I hear her, I hear her.’ He untethers his brother’s grip from his robes, every cell subsumed by the rapture of her acknowledgement. Drunk, Marcus thinks. He is drunk on the harmonics of her, somehow, that dose of oxytocin quickly metastasising into a full-on addiction. Anything so long as she doesn’t go silent again. There is just enough of Marcus to understand he should run. But he can’t, won’t.

  ‘Let’s go.’ They move, their escape obfuscated by the final coda of the Scyllax, the muzzle-flash accompaniment.

  To Marcus’ distant astonishment, the genestealers do not follow. But why would they need to? hisses a voice in his head. The brothers were herding themselves to the pantry.

  A killing ground.

  Marcus pushes the thought down.

  The corridor narrows until they can only pass one at a time, the hypaspists taking point. Cornelius crab-walks behind them, the bizarre mathematics of his physique ill-suited for the restrictive space. Marcus comes last. No light whatsoever save for the radiation from their tacticals, the pallid glow from behind the hypaspists’ visors. Briefly, as he anchors the flail at his waist, Marcus considers jury-rigging some method of producing actual luminance, but the thought is superseded by childish superstition: if he can’t see them, maybe, they won’t be able to see him.

  ‘I wonder where she’s taking us.’ Cornelius breaks the quiet, voice muddied by pleasure, embarrassing almost in its intensity, like a lover’s appetite wantonly advertised. His fingers click across the walls, an irregular heartbeat. ‘I wish – I wish I understood what she was saying. But there is so much interference. I wish… I wish…’

  Marcus says nothing. It occurs to him how empty of words he is. Especially now, with nothing but precedent fish-hooked through his breastbone, not even the euphonics of her voice to compel him, its notes dialled to faint static. White noise. Faith and white noise and the knowledge there’s no way to go but forward. A hiss-click of vox frequencies, remarkable only in its stark duality: it means nothing to Marcus, everything to Cornelius.

  In that moment, Marcus learns to hate his brother.

  ‘What is she saying to you?’ Try as he might, he can’t scrub his voice of its envy.

  Cornelius halts. ‘Nothing. Nothing precise. But she has to know we’re here. She has to be calling to us. Why else would she be… singing?’

  Again, language fails him as his body has failed him, is failing him. Marcus digs the heel of his palm into his brother’s shoulder, pushes him forward. They don’t speak at all. Occasionally, Cornelius moans into the dark – closer, closer, Marcus, oh, can’t you hear her, she’s telling us to come closer – like some prophet wasting to bone in the desert, but neither Marcus nor the hypaspists reply, and there is no other sound save for the drip of condensation, their footsteps in lock-step.

  A trapezoid of light razors through the gloom, dust-moted. Through the cavity in the wall, Marcus can hear machinery in respiration, meat in preparation. He breathes in, holds his breath pinned against the roof of his mouth as one of the escorts crooks their gloved hand, beckoning them onward.

  ‘Here,’ murmurs his brother, dazed-sounding, all eloquence drained to effortful slurring. ‘She’s here. She’s here. She’s waiting for us. Can’t you hear her, Marcus? Can’t you hear her call?’

  ‘Yes,’ he lies softly in return. ‘Yes, I can.’

  Inside they discover what might have once been a medbay, save it’d been repurposed for a specific purpose. There are vats every­where, machines by the dozen, each devoted to a separate horror. Here, there is a system cultivating and curating bacteria cultures. Here, a sterilisation vat. Here, a miracle of engineering pulping the fungi, decocting them into food.

  Here–

  Marcus stares at the yellowed skeleton suspended at the heart of the facility, at the glistening sheets of grey tissue draped across its stretched arms. She was female, Marcus thinks, cataloguing the curve of the cadaver’s pelvis bones, the swoop of its bowed spine.

  Mite-like drones crawl across the stretched flesh, pruning it of necrotising cells, harvesting the healthy. Others build circuitry of what they’d collected, tenants them in glass, stacks them in silos twice as high as the gawking tech-priests, every last shelf an oozing constellation of blinking lights and stinking, green-yellow lymph.

  The air convulses and suddenly she is standing before them. Like MAUS, her phenotype markers are distinctive, orbital sockets and jawline bare of ethnic cross-pollination. Unlike MAUS, her appearance demonstrates evidence of corruption: patches of sloughed skin, revealing ongoing computations beneath, arabesques of virtualised protein radiating from her skull in a mist. An aberration, an abomination. Yet for all the grotesquerie on display, she is everything they’d dreamed.

  Marcus slows, arm flung out to stop Cornelius’ motion.

  ‘What are you?’ Such a trite question. The momentousness of the occasion demands profundity, but all Marcus can supply is platitudes, pre-processed wonder as described in societal subconscious.

  ‘It’s her,’ Cornelius whispers to no one at all.

  ‘I was–’ She saccades in place, a zoetrope in slow-motion, while the darkness twitches. Gleaming eyes flood the penumbra. There, Marcus thinks, surprised by his own resignation. This is where we die. He knows that. But he does not mind. All he wants is to talk to her a little longer. Just a bit more. ‘–was-was a psyker, I think. I think that was the word. Psssssskyer. Yes. Once, I’d been meat and hope and dreams everlasting.’

  The air boils from Marcus’ lungs.

  MAUS renders on an adjacent wall. ‘He means, “What are you now?”’

  ‘I am the Nepenthe.’ Her eyes empty of cornea and sclera, become engulfed instead in light so incandescent it is all afterimage, an impression of glare.

  This is why the past is heresy, Marcus thinks hazily, speared by her gaze.

  ‘I am her protector, her-her mo
ther, her guardian. I am the one who keeps her crew safe.’

  Cornelius interjects, some ghost of him restored. ‘Everyone’s dead. There are nothing but genestealers on board this ship, and–’

  ‘There are sixteen hundred and forty-five living beings on the ship,’ she continues, unperturbed, and all Marcus can think of is how much he wishes he knew her name. Her name and not the ship’s, the name of the girl who’d animated the bones standing centrepiece in the room, who was still alive now. ‘I have monitored their biotelemetrics. I have adjusted the climate of the ship in accordance to their requirements. I have ensured optimal conditions for their survival within the limits of available resources.’

  ‘Those aren’t your crew.’ Marcus staggers forward while tentacles bloom in the half-light steeping around the mainframe, an irridescing biome of creeping purples and then eyes, flat and animal. How many of them? How many of them are there? He cannot conjecture a number, refuses to even consider the exercise. The same way he cannot envision what it must be like to be here, alone in the nothing, surrounded by the dead and the hungry, trapped. ‘They’re all dead. Or… or changed. These things aren’t human. Your–’

  ‘Do not touch her,’ MAUS snarls, suddenly in high-definition, three dimensional and already peeling from the wall. ‘Do not touch her. If you touch her, I’ll make sure that you will never stop dying. Do not touch her. Why are you even here, anyway?’

  ‘She called us,’ Cornelius whispers as their escorts finally sag onto the ground, offal puddling from their open wounds, ­slopping outwards in moist clusters. ‘She called us here. Lady, we’ve come so far for you. Through the void and the silence, through the endlessness. Through the hungry dark.’

  ‘There is no way,’ CAT whispers.

  Sccrrrrcccch. Something is pulling the bodies away, dragging them into the blackness.

  ‘We have records.’ Marcus can hear slithering, peristalsis: ­larynx and trachea violated, a cartilaginous tearing, slurping, and a sigh almost sweet in its pained relief. He doesn’t turn. He can’t. ‘Decades of records. We documented the communication. We spoke with her. We tracked her.’

  ‘Oh.’ MAUS laughs aloud, bitterness in the twist of that sound. Elsewhere, she has begun humming again, a lullaby for monsters. ‘Oh. No. No, that’s not what happened at all. She doesn’t want you here. No one wants you here.’

  Marcus snarls. ‘Then why did she call–’

  ‘Psychic residue. They wanted something that’d keep the crew calm, something more tactile than a cool voice through the intercoms. So they vivisected a psyker, came up with a way to clone her tissues, over and again, bind that power to their machinery.’ Here, MAUS releases his rictus. ‘It hurts her. Every time.’

  Outside, the universe trembles. Ballistics and a ballet of propulsion, moving parts thrumming through the bulkhead. Marcus ignores them all. ‘So you–’

  ‘You were never wanted here.’ A clarity seeps into her voice, even as her image blinks into focus, the aberration – I never asked for her name, Marcus thinks again, strangely agonised over the fact – pivoting to face the two, hands joined, head cocked. ‘You were never wanted here. You are not part of my crew. You do not belong on the Nepenthe. Why have you come here?’

  Like them, Marcus is broken, unable to do more than reiterate patterns, his hands hanging nerveless at his side. All these years for nothing. A killing ground, repeats that ghost of his voice. What’s worse is that the Nepenthe hadn’t even been in active pursuit. He and Cornelius, they’d walked themselves there, down into the slaughterhouse, so they could lay their heads on the butcher’s block. ‘You called us.’

  ‘No.’ There is no sympathy in her eyes, blinding still in their fluorescence. If anything, it is disdain he sees there, scaffolded in the bend of her mouth. ‘No, you were never wanted here.’

  Hands circle Marcus’ throat, fingers tenderly cupping the jut of his chin. This close, Cornelius smells of oil and charred metal, flesh weeping plasma beneath the metal. Sweat and desperation. Marcus exhales and relaxes into his brother’s constricting grip, reality abstracted into a vague sense of self-loathing. Yes, this was always how it was meant to end, wasn’t it? With them forgotten, buried in the belly of the ship.

  ‘Lady, I’ll do anything you need, as long as you let me stay. Let me stay in your song. Let me love you.’

  The manifestations exchange looks, vibrantly alive.

  ‘Why not?’

  Snap.

  The lights of the Nepenthe turn black. Veles jolts his head up from his screen and its rotation of panels, predictions conceptualised as shifting graphs, endless calculations.

  ‘What is happening?’ Veles growls.

  Every screen is commandeered by a video feed. In it, Cornelius and Marcus, haloed by pinpoint glows, their faces bloodied but whole. Behind them, Veles can see chrome balustrades and unfamiliar architecture, screens and cogitator racks, acres of bizarre machinery.

  And a body, a corpse, a skeleton suspended above pinpoints of lights, like a saint of strange places.

  Veles feels the questions die in his throat, one after another, swallowed by wonder, by fear, by scholastic lust. The brothers had been right. And now the Nepenthe was waiting to be cracked open, suckled of its secrets, its heart interrogated. He would be remembered forever. They would be remembered forever. Their names would be scorched into the annals of history and even the Omnissiah would marvel at what they had found.

  ‘Reconnaissance completed,’ Cornelius states. ‘There was a small brood of genestealers that had to be eliminated. The others are ensuring the rest of the ship is secure.’

  Marcus dips his head. ‘Whenever you’re ready, Magos. Come aboard. There’s so much waiting for you to see.’

  How did he die, she wondered? How frightened was he when he realised it was over?

  She dwelled nightly on his pain, tormenting herself with his imagined agony. Smothered by the waves, perhaps, shouldered from his boat into the boiling waters; she saw him kicking against the current, the weight of his clothes dragging him down, choking and screaming for help though help was miles away. He would have watched with dread as his boat drifted off into the drizzling light, and then he was under, swallowed by the hungry dark, thrashing and scrabbling for air…

  But perhaps it had been even worse. Maybe he had met his end in the jaws of some lurking horror of the Hopetide seas – a flensfin scavenging the catch, leaping from the sea as he hauled in his net. She saw its teeth rip the flesh from his neck, the spurt of blood in the water as he plunged his fingers into the gaping wound. The maddened frenzy of feeding things, tearing his body to pieces…

  Why not? she thought. The worst was always the most likely.

  She thought of this every night. Every night he died in a hundred different ways. Here on a narrow spur of land amongst the gravestones of the village cemetery, she looked down on the roiling water that surged and swayed and kept its secrets close. He was in there still, locked in the chains of the waves.

  These were the widow tides, the fishermen said. A man left his boat at harbour in such weather and tried to ignore the old wives’ tales of the daemons in the deep. Out there, all the cold acres of the ocean groaned and muttered for their prey.

  ‘Katalina!’

  In the sallow twilight, a figure moved up the slope from the beach. She huddled into her black sealskin, felt the wind pluck and harry at her.

  ‘Katalina,’ he shouted again as he came near, ‘I thought it was you.’

  ‘Radomir,’ she said, and at the same time thought, how does someone get so fat on a diet of fish?

  He leaned against a gravestone to gather his breath. Framed against the dying day, broad and unshaven, he looked solid and unflappable. For a moment she felt ashamed of her grief.

  ‘For Sigmar’s sake, Kat, can’t you see…’ He held his hands out to her.

  ‘See what?�
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  ‘That this isn’t good for you,’ he said. ‘Haunting the graves like this, spending so much time amongst the dead…’ He touched the fishbone charm around his neck. ‘He’s not coming back, you know that. Borys is dead.’

  ‘You can’t be sure.’

  ‘I loved him as much as anyone, really I did. His father was my oldest friend, the boy was like a son to me. But in the end you have to face the truth, no matter how painful it is. Hopetide’s an unforgiving coast.’

  She gazed down into the churning sea, picturing her husband, his thick yellow hair, the wicked glint in his eyes. The black waters of Shyish did no favours to anyone. She was under no illusions; her man was surely dead.

  ‘I know,’ she admitted. ‘But how can his soul find the peace it needs if we don’t have a body to bury?’

  ‘Kat, it’s–’

  ‘He should be waiting for me on the Placid Shore, not lost out there afraid and alone. Don’t you see? He’ll come back to me, one way or another. The sea will give him up. And when it does, I’ll be waiting right here for him.’

  Radomir gave an exasperated sigh. He turned to the path again.

  ‘You’re too sensitive for this place. Always dreaming… I remember when we cut your first sealskin, you cried like a baby! I thought Borys would keep your feet on the ground, but the two of you were more wrapped up in each other than anyone I’ve ever met.’ He smiled sadly. ‘I’m headman of the village, Kat, I’ve got to make the effort. People are getting restless. Sympathy’s a shallow well, and I think you’ve drawn as much of it as you’re going to get.’

  ‘I don’t care about their sympathy. They can think what they like.’

  He dismissed her with a wave, but before he disappeared back down the slope he turned and said in a low, uncertain voice: ‘This isn’t the kind of night to be out, Katalina, take it from an old man like me. Don’t stay out much longer, please. It isn’t safe…’

  Before she left, she paused to read the names on the gravestones, as she did every night. Aleksander Cuffe, Eryk Olsein, Selton Harred. Some of the names were too worn to read, no more than dimpled suggestions in the stone. She ran her fingers over them, wondering if those names now lived upon the Placid Shore, far across the ocean, where the sea was always gentle and kind. Perhaps the very motion of her fingertips over the forgotten letters brought back a spark of memory inside a distant soul?