Maledictions

by Graham McNeill et al.

  ‘You’ve been seen, Kat! Consorting with that thing!’

  The creature stood there, drawing bright patterns in the air with the tip of the blade. There seemed such fury in it then, and even this wounded and weak she feared it could kill half the men out there in a heartbeat. Any cornered animal would do the same.

  Flames licked up the window, staining the glass.

  ‘This way, please!’ She took its arm and its skin was like ice. ‘Please – don’t hurt them.’

  The door burst from its frame. At the back of the house there was a cupboard where she kept her buckets and brooms, and she ran there through the cloying smoke. High in the wall was a single-paned window just wide enough to climb through, but as Katalina fumbled for the latch she felt rough hands against her shoulders, smelled the stink of rum. Oleg – she had heard him singing in the temple on Sigmar’s Day, watched him help the fishwives haul their baskets, always smiling and laughing. And now here he was with hate in his eyes, grabbing at her hair and trying to pull her back into the smoking hall.

  ‘Oleg! Please…’

  ‘Where is it?’ he barked at her. ‘Tell me!’

  ‘Why are you doing this?’

  The point of a blade flashed then like a silver tongue from his open mouth. She watched the slow horror on his face as the life slipped from him in a gout of blood. The creature drew the knife from the back of Oleg’s head and threw his body down.

  ‘Where?’ it said.

  Her fingers moved in a dream, reaching for the latch and popping the window open. Her face was wet with tears, and the sea air was a cold kiss against her skin. From somewhere in the blazing night she thought she could hear Agata’s delighted cackle.

  Katalina dropped from the window and sprawled into the muck. The creature leapt and landed beside her. Smoke was rising now from the cottage behind them, smoke and flames. The whole building was ablaze.

  Gone, she thought. All of it, my life. Gone. Oleg, I’m so sorry – it thought it was helping me, I swear…

  ‘Sigmar’s Light! Katalina, step aside from that thing!’

  Radomir stood there on the path to the dunes, a stave in his hands. Despite his bulk, his presence in the world, he had never seemed more fragile to her then. Appalled, he looked from Katalina to the creature who held her.

  ‘I’m sorry, Kat. I tried to stop them, but Agata saw it and – it’s right there!’ he shouted. ‘The creature, it’s–’

  The words were only a moment from his mouth before the blade flashed once, quicksilver in the firelight.

  Salt, metal, the last trickling murmur of his breath. A great fan of blood unfurled from Radomir’s throat, cutting a crimson line across her face.

  ‘Go!’ the creature wheezed at her. ‘Now. Run.’

  It took the dune paths, sure-footed, clutching its wounded chest. Katalina stumbled after in a haze. The smoke curled around their feet. She thought of Radomir – saw, as if scoured into her mind, the sight of his head falling back, the gaping wound in his throat vomiting blood.

  ‘What have you done?’ she whispered. ‘What have I done?’

  The path rose ahead of her, and in the wavering dark, half-lit from the fire of the burning cottage, Katalina stumbled along it. Her eyes were stinging from the smoke and there was the taste of blood in her mouth. She dragged herself on, and when she reached the cemetery she fell amongst the graves, weeping. The creature was hunkered there behind a headstone, looking back on the village and her burning home. The cottage streamed flames into the night. Katalina could see the villagers milling there with their boathooks and clubs, shouting, some of them even laughing.

  She fell back into the grass, utterly spent. The sea was a blurred presence beyond the headland, the vast waters in constant motion, heaving against the brittle shore. To range yourself against such a thing… what bravery it took, as brave as any soldier. And far on the other side, past all the reckoning of men, lay the Placid Shore where in time all souls will meet. Oleg and Radomir, and Borys…

  I’m coming, Borys. I am done with this place.

  The creature was looming above her, moving like a cold current in warm waters. It held the caged light in its hand, and that strange, submerged glow began to pulse. It compelled her, lured out the essence that was seeded into every cell of her body and every contour of her mind. As she felt herself pulled along into black oblivion she saw the light from the fire smear out into incandescence, the totems shiver on the beach – and then it was cold, so cold she couldn’t bear it. She heard dark laughter in the distance, and some dim and smothered part of her reached out for the Placid Shore, those gentle waters and perfect sands, but then she was gone, and every motion of her body was fluttering away into nothing, like spindrift, like the cresting foam untethered from the waves when the wind begins to blow, just a scrap of foam adrift and floating on a violent tide.

  They found her body amongst the graves. Most thought she was dead. Some swore they felt the flutter of a pulse, but others were convinced that she would never wake. ‘The sea sickness’, they called it. There was no cure; everyone knew that. They placed her with Radomir’s and Oleg’s bodies in a back room of the mead hall. The next morning there would be a meeting to discuss what had happened – early, because a mist was rising across the water, ill-omens from the deep. The widow tides were up.

  They found the burned man on the frothed shores of a sump pool at the edge-drifts of the wastes. The last shift klaxon echoed from the ashward manufactories, and it was long past time for them to get back within the walls of the schola progenium. But the opportunity of a maybe-dead body was too enticing to let slip away.

  Strang was looking to rob him; Pasco thought it’d be funny to push him further into the toxic sludge to see if he floated. Zara wanted them to drag him from the muck, but she was always the one with the biggest heart. Probably why Cor was a little in love with her, even if he could never bring himself to say that out loud.

  ‘Go on,’ said Strang, elbowing Pasco in the ribs. ‘Check him. Big fella like him’s bound to have a few credit chits on him.’

  Pasco shook his head. ‘I ain’t touching him,’ he said.

  ‘You scared?’ said Strang, bending to pick up a length of corroded rebar. He gave the body an experimental prod. ‘Think he’s some ash-scavvy, gonna get up’n bite ya?’

  ‘Ain’t clever to touch dead meat,’ said Pasco. ‘Sister Caitriona says corpses down here get all yukked up inside. Says spine-worms nest up in ’em. That’s bad goo, Strang!’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Cor, bending down to get a closer look at the dead man. He was big; bigger than anyone Cor had ever seen, but his flesh was pale and wasted, like he’d been powerful once, but somehow the bulk had been sucked out of him.

  His skin was punctured across his chest and arms, with what looked like plastek rings around the holes.

  ‘What d’you reckon they are?’ asked Cor.

  ‘Look like medicae shunts,’ said Zara.

  ‘See!’ said Pasco. ‘Told ya. Sick, he is. Looks like he got ash-blight or summat.’

  ‘Nah, they don’t put medicae shunts like that in folks who’re gonna die,’ said Strang. ‘Sister Caitriona’s got a couple in her back.’

  Cor nodded, though he wondered how Strang knew that.

  The man had taken a bad blow to the head, and one of his legs was bent at an angle that made Cor wince. He looked into the haze overhead, past the dripping pipes and hissing vents worked into the stained rock of the cliffs to the soaring silhouette of the hive spires in the sulphurous yellow clouds.

  Had the man fallen from somewhere there?

  ‘Who’d y’reckon he is?’ said Pasco. ‘A heretic that got left behind when the Fists kicked the rest of ’em back to the Eye?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Cor, kneeling and pointing to the remains of an eagle tattoo, partially obscured by a nasty burn on the de
ad man’s shoulder. ‘Don’t know of any heretics wear the Aquila, do you?’

  Pasco shrugged and said, ‘This guy got smacked up hard. Looks like a Dreadnought beat on him.’

  The dead man groaned and rolled onto his back.

  Cor yelled and fell back on his haunches. The others laughed as he scrambled to his feet. Zara helped him up and he wiped the grime from his patched and worn out breeches.

  ‘This son of a grot-rat’s still alive!’ said Cor.

  ‘Not for long, he ain’t,’ said Strang, and Cor saw him toying with the idea of sending the man to meet the Emperor with the sharpened bolt-shiv he kept in his pocket.

  The older boy claimed to have bled three people, once boasting he’d even killed a slumming uphiver who wouldn’t take no for an answer. Cor didn’t know if that was true, but Strang had a quick temper and wasn’t above using his fists on the smaller kids of the schola progenium.

  ‘Don’t,’ said Cor, placing his hand on Strang’s arm.

  Strang threw off his hand and pushed him away. ‘Don’t you touch me! I’ll bleed you deep and good!’

  Cor backed away, his hands raised. Strang’s normally sallow complexion was ruddy and his bloodshot eyes were wide with fury.

  ‘Easy, Strang,’ said Cor.

  The boy coughed and spat a wad of dark phlegm into the pool.

  ‘Help… me,’ said the wounded man, holding a wasted and burned arm out towards them. His hairless scalp was coated in vivid red blood, and fragments of broken glass were embedded in his skin. ‘Now…’

  Zara stepped between Cor and Strang.

  ‘Enough, you two,’ she said, pushing them apart with a confidence Cor wished he possessed. ‘We have to help this man.’

  ‘Why?’ said Strang. ‘Don’t look like he’s gonna live, even if’n we could drag him out. You seen the size of him?’

  ‘That’s not the point,’ said Zara, fixing Strang with a stare that had seen kids much older do what she wanted. ‘That eagle tattoo tells me he’s a fella as needs our helping. And anyhow, where’d you be if Sister Caitriona hadn’t taken you in, Orson Strang? You’d be dead or worse in the forge-mines of the Mechanicus, that’s where. So I’ll hear no more from you on this. We’re helping this poor man and that’s that. Am I clear?’

  ‘As up-spire air,’ replied Strang.

  Cor hid his grin as Strang nodded like a broken servitor and moved his hand away from the bolt-shiv.

  The man was heavier than he looked, and it took their combined efforts to lift him from the pool. They hoisted him between their shoulders, groaning under his weight.

  The man winced as his leg banged into a jutting piece of exposed pipework, and he turned pain-filled eyes on Cor.

  Dark and depthless like a pool of clean oil, they were set in an impossibly wrinkled skull, rheumy with age and gunky ­cataracts. His breath reeked and his skin smelled like the vents around the crematoria.

  Strang was right; this fella likely wasn’t long for this world.

  ‘Hey, what do they call you, old man?’ he asked.

  The man slumped between them, blinking in confusion, as if trying to dredge a memory up from an impossibly dark abyss.

  ‘I don’t… I don’t remember,’ he said.

  When the Departmento Munitorum first built the Saint Karesine schola progenium in the lower reaches of Agri-Hive Osleon, they envisioned an institution dedicated to crafting new generations of officers for the Astra Militarum. Filled with orphans made in the First Equatorial Rebellion, it had been a magisterial edifice of ironwork columns, mosaic-frescoes depicting the heroes of the early Imperial crusades, and wide steps leading to its grand portico.

  More than two hundred orphans of that war had been raised within its walls, many of whom had gone on to lead traitor regi­ments in the Second Equatorial Rebellion, forever poisoning its reputation and tainting the heroism of its later progena.

  In the three centuries since then, the institution’s fortunes had further waned as sector-adjacent crusades shifted vectors and that ill reputation had settled upon its walls like a curse. Uphive nobility and the commissars of the Officio Prefectus eventually decided they’d wasted enough time and effort on its upkeep, and that the sons and daughters of the Astra Militarum would be better served in other Imperial institutions.

  As the hive grew and the influx of orphans dwindled, the Saint Karesine schola progenium became something of a joke among Osleon’s sump-dwellers and juve-gangs. Its once-mighty roof leaked, the basement dormitories were partially flooded with noxious runoff, and the pipes supposed to pump warm air around its many rooms now spread fumes that smelled like an ogryn’s crotch.

  At last headcount, a mere thirty-three progena slept with any regularity at Saint Karesine’s.

  Cor and the others barged through Saint Karesine’s front door, scattering a bunch of the younger kids prying nails out of the warped floorboards. The old man hadn’t said much that made sense since they’d struggled to drag him from the pool, just some gibberish about someone named Nesh. Cor didn’t know the name.

  Maybe it was whoever had jumped him.

  ‘Sister Caitriona!’ shouted Zara. ‘We need your help!’

  The door to the prayer rooms swung open on rusty hinges and the mistress of Saint Karesine’s emerged, wiping one hand on her grimy robes. The other hand gripped the leather-wound hilt of a long-bladed chainsword that hadn’t housed a powercell in decades.

  ‘What’s all the noise?’ she demanded. ‘I’ll have no shouting here!’

  Sister Caitriona towered over the children in her care. Dressed in the flowing robes of the Orders Hospitaller, she was a dark-skinned woman with an augmetic arm she alternately claimed was the result of an ork cleaver or a tyrannic monster.

  Her hair was shorn close to her scalp, and despite her severe appearance, Cor thought she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. Apart from Zara, of course.

  Sister Caitriona had stayed on even when the coffers ran dry and every other member of staff had left in search of more fulfilling roles. She took one look at the injured man and said, ‘Strang and Pasco, you boys take him to the back dormitory.’

  Cor shucked the old man from his shoulder, relieved to be rid of his weight and his smell. He went to follow after the others, but Sister Caitriona stopped him with a gentle hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Corvus,’ she said. ‘Wait here, there’s something I need to tell you.’

  She knelt beside him with a wince and creak of popping joints.

  ‘It’s about your brother,’ said Sister Caitriona, and Cor felt a cold hand make a fist over his heart.

  ‘Nicodemus? He…’

  ‘I’m sorry, Cor, but the blight–’

  ‘Stop,’ said Cor. ‘Your voice only goes like that when someone dies.’

  The back dormitory was quiet, its occupants mostly asleep.

  Ever since the roof of the actual infirmary had collapsed, Sister Caitriona used this long, high-ceilinged room as an ad-hoc infirmary, and a dozen beds were occupied by children with rasping coughs or any number of the sicknesses that stalked the lower reaches of the hive.

  Cor sat on a stool next to Nicodemus’ bed with his head hung low over his chest. Tears and snot coated his lips in a greasy film, and he wiped them away with his sleeve. Cor held his older brother’s hand, still finding it impossible to imagine he was gone.

  Nicodemus had been three years older than Cor, built like one of the Adeptus Astartes and twice as mean. He’d looked out for Cor ever since their parents, a captain and a strategos savant, had been killed when their Aquila crashed over the ash wastes.

  His older brother had put out three of Big Augie’s teeth when he kept stealing Cor’s water ration, and had gone in search of two uphive nobles who’d thought it was funny to throw rocks at Cor and his friends when they’d been walking by one of the exteri
or lifters.

  And now he was gone. The ash-blight had gotten into Nico­demus’ lungs and he’d deteriorated fast, his skin losing what little colour it had and his eyes filling with black fluid. A hacking cough had bent him double until he was retching blood onto the sheets every day. Counterseptics didn’t help, nor did any of the medicines Sister Caitriona was able to obtain from her Order.

  Nicodemus had rallied over the last few days and had been able to keep down some moist bread and soup. Cor had heard of folk who’d recovered from the blight and his heart had soared at the prospect of his brother beating this sickness like he’d beaten everything else in life.

  Now he was dead and Cor was truly alone.

  He rummaged in his pocket and pulled out a tiny mechanical toy he’d been given by a pretty girl on the day his parents had died. A tiny clockwork dancer, he’d treasured it all through the years, but now he just wanted to smash it to pieces. Tears spilled down his cheeks, but instead of breaking the dancer, he placed it in Nicodemus’ palm and closed his cold fingers over the warm metal.

  ‘You take her. I hope she dances for you at the Emperor’s side.’

  ‘He was your brother?’

  Cor pulled the filthy sheets up over the dancer and turned on his stool. The old man they’d brought in was awake. He’d drifted into unconsciousness almost as soon as Strang and Pasco laid him down, and Sister Caitriona had warned them he might not wake up. Zara had cleaned the blood from his head wound and Sister Caitriona stitched it closed before wrapping the man’s hairless head in clean bandages.

  ‘Yeah, he was.’

  ‘The… What was it you called it? The blight?’

  Cor nodded and the old man let out a wheezing sigh. ‘You have my sympathies. I have seen many people succumb to all manner of sicknesses over the years. It is never easy.’

  Cor wanted to tell the old man to shut up, to stop talking, but Sister Caitriona had taught him better than that. The man was a guest in their house, and guests were always to be treated with courtesy.