Otami shuddered at the ghastly realisation. ‘But there was blood when Baron Eiji was killed.’
Toshimichi led her up the stairway. ‘Was he killed? We have to go back and see. We have to make sure.’ He glanced back at the gate. ‘Hurry! There is not much time. When Yorozuya is finished with them, he will come back for us!’
The great hall in which the séance had been conducted was still veiled in darkness when Toshimichi and Otami stepped inside. The crawling cold that had impressed the scholar before was absent, so too was that musky stench of the grave. Yet there was still a sense of hideous evil here. Human evil.
‘Be ready,’ Toshimichi warned Otami. ‘He may not wait for Yorozuya to kill us.’
Otami shook her head. ‘His own mother…’
‘The Dowager must have realised what he was doing,’ Toshimichi said. ‘That is why she gave him the pendant. It was her way of telling him she accepted her fate.’ He remembered the corpse of the old woman and how different her visage looked from those of Gunichi, Masanori and Komatsu. There had been a composure there, almost as though the Dowager were pleased to die.
Toshimichi’s fingers tightened around Otami’s arm. He stared into the darkness where the arcane circle had been. ‘The baron is here,’ he stated. He gestured with his hand, calling upon one of the cantrips he had learned in his studies. The candles, extinguished earlier in the séance, flared back into life. Brighter than before, their light dispelled the darkness.
Baron Eiji sat within the circle, a cold smile on his face as he stared at Toshimichi and Otami. The scholar noted that the nobleman had kept within the octagon shape he had drawn earlier.
‘That is the only real protective barrier, isn’t it?’ Toshimichi challenged him.
Eiji nodded, his head quite secure upon his neck. ‘The rest of the circle is an illusion. A bit more tangible than the vision of my murder, perhaps, but no less of a trick.’ His smile broadened. ‘The séance wasn’t, though. You really did help me summon Yorozuya to this castle. He could not resist such a concentration of Nagashiro blood.’
‘Why?’ Toshimichi demanded. ‘Why help the curse along? Why bring us here to simply kill us?’
‘Your own mother!’ Otami snapped at the smirking baron. ‘You did not spare even her.’
Baron Eiji’s visage flushed with colour, his eyes smouldering with fury. ‘I could not spare anyone! I even brought you here because I could not risk that my brother might have consummated your marriage despite himself! If even one drop of Nagashiro blood was not here, I could never be sure…’
‘Sure of what?’ Toshimichi asked. If he knew why Eiji had done all of this, he might figure out a way to stop him.
Eiji laughed at the question. ‘Of them all, Toshimichi, I was the most worried that you would have learned the truth as I did. Let me tell you, then.’ He leaned forwards, to the very edge of the octagon that defended him. ‘There is no curse on the Nagashiro family.’
The statement struck Toshimichi almost like a physical blow. ‘But, the murders! The near extermination of our family…’
‘Yet always the Nagashiro endure,’ Eiji pointed out. ‘That is because the curse is not upon us. It is Yorozuya that is cursed. Condemned to spend eternity striving towards an unreachable goal!
‘I will tell you how it happened,’ the baron continued. ‘When King Ashikaga ordered Yorozuya to massacre our ancestors, the Lord Executioner betrayed his master. The captured Jubei had hidden away enough wealth to buy the life of his youngest son from Yorozuya. In exchange for the money, Yorozuya let the child escape. His treachery was discovered, however.’
Baron Eiji laughed, a grisly chuckle that echoed through the hall. ‘Oh yes, the king’s anger was great. No honourable death for Yorozuya! The executioner was bound in his own coffin and coated in honey to draw insects to his trapped flesh. Spells sustained his life while the worms and beetles fed off him. Even when there was no flesh left and even his bones were eaten away, his spirit endured.’
‘Condemned to haunt the Nagashiro,’ Otami said.
Eiji corrected her. ‘Condemned to complete his task. Condemned to never rest until our family is wiped out. But he can never complete his mission. Always the last member of the clan is safe from him, just as Jubei’s son was safe from him long ago. Yorozuya can never escape the taint of his treachery, so he can never strike down the last of our blood.’
Toshimichi felt sick as he appreciated Eiji’s plan. ‘That is why you did this. Why even the Dowager had to die. You can only be sure of escaping Yorozuya if you are the last Nagashiro.’
‘Too late, you understand,’ Eiji said. ‘Tell me, if you knew what I know, how could you do anything else? It is the only way.’
Toshimichi glared at the nobleman. ‘You forget one thing. Now that I know, I can do the same thing. I can wipe out that circle which hides you from Yorozuya. You can take the same chance the rest of us have.’ He reached into the sleeve of his robe and drew out a long knife. ‘Or I can mimic Komatsu and offer your head to the wraith.’
‘You could,’ Eiji conceded. ‘If you had the time.’
Otami screamed. Toshimichi spun around, his gaze locked upon the dark shadow that loomed in the entryway. Baron Eiji had been so forthcoming with the details of his scheme because he had been playing for time. Waiting for Yorozuya to come.
Toshimichi shoved Otami aside. It was an even chance whether the wraith would go after her or him. Though he felt it would be a futile gesture, he tried to draw the ghost’s attention. He let the knife fall from his hand and instead produced a bag of coins.
‘Yorozuya!’ Toshimichi shouted at the wraith. ‘Once you sold your honour for gold! Once you cast aside your duty for a bribe! Here, murdering wretch! Here is your chance to do so again!’
The Lord Executioner swept towards him, its eyes leaping with angry flickers of ghostly light. The immense sword was raised, ready to deliver the killing blow to this mortal who dared to mock its curse.
Before the wraith could strike, an anguished shriek filled the hall. Toshimichi looked aside, following the source of the sound. He saw Otami standing over Baron Eiji, one of the heavy braziers clenched in her hands. Blood dripped from the implement, the same sanguinary fluid that now leaked in earnest from the nobleman’s body. Eiji crawled across the circle, gasping for mercy.
Otami brought the brazier down again, smashing Eiji’s skull.
An enraged roar rippled from Yorozuya. The grubs and maggots dripping from the wraith became a cascade, swiftly diminishing its shadowy essence. The Lord Executioner brought its sword flashing down. Toshimichi felt an icy cold sear through his body, slicing through him from neck to shoulder. But the cut was only a shadow itself, unable to truly harm his flesh. Unable to take his head.
Yorozuya raised the blade for another blow. The angry glow had fled from its eyes and now there was something akin to despair in the wraith’s gaze. Toshimichi felt the same cold pass through him as the sword came slashing down, incapable now of harming him.
The worm-eaten bones were visible now, so much of the wraith’s shroud and mask had evaporated with the crawling vermin. Toshimichi stared back at the leering skull as the last of the gravelight faded from its sockets. A moment more, and then the bones crashed to the floor in a confused jumble. Soon even this residue was gone, vanishing in a greasy fume.
Otami dropped the gory brazier. ‘Is it over?’ she asked.
Toshimichi looked over at her. ‘For now,’ he said. ‘Until another hundred years has passed and Yorozuya rises again from his grave.’ He glanced at Baron Eiji’s body. ‘He was right, Yorozuya couldn’t hurt the last Nagashiro.’ Toshimichi returned his gaze to Otami. ‘But I don’t understand. You should have been the last of our blood.’
Otami shook her head. ‘No, you were the last,’ she said. ‘You see, Baron Eiji was right about something else.’
‘
I don’t think his brother really cared for women,’ she said, a sad look in her gaze.
Toshimichi thought of all the dead littered throughout the castle. ‘That is for the best. Any family you had would have simply perpetuated the curse.’ He stared at the spot where the wraith’s essence had disintegrated. ‘I am now the last. The Nagashiro line will end with me.’
‘Then Yorozuya will have no reason to again rise from the underworld.’
Vardan IV, Astra Militarum Advance Firebase Theta 82
Three months ago
Sergeant Rachain read the names of the Missing in Action to the platoon every morning.
Every morning, the list was longer than it had been the day before.
‘Emperor’s grace,’ Corporal Cully muttered to himself as the reeking, poisonous rain beat down hot around him, pounding on the canvas covering of the muster tent overhead. ‘There won’t be any of us left before we get out of here at this rate.’
‘What say, corporal?’
That was Moonface, from Three Section. Cully looked at the boy’s fat, sweating face, and he could see the fear written there in the premature lines around his young eyes.
‘Nothing, trooper,’ he said. ‘Old Cully’s just muttering to himself, don’t you worry your pretty little head about it.’
Cully had no idea what Moonface’s real name was, but it didn’t really matter. On Vardan IV it didn’t really matter what anyone’s name was, at least not until they had survived their first firefight. Most of them didn’t, after all.
The steaming jungles were infested with orks, and the Reslian 45th were chewing through new recruits as fast as the troop ships could deliver them. Cully, though, he’d been deployed there for the last two years. So had Rachain, of course.
They were tight, the pair of them, and Sergeant Drachan and Corporal Gesht and the others from Two Section. They were the old guard, the backbone of Alpha Platoon, D Company. The hardened veterans.
The survivors.
Corporal Rikkards and his mob were all right too, he supposed, especially that huge lad who Cully called Ogryn, but never where he might hear him. Lopata, he thought the man’s name was. Still, they were in Beta Platoon and tended to keep themselves to themselves and didn’t mingle much with the others, so to the warp with them.
No, it was the old guard who mattered. Rachain and Cully, Drachan and Gesht. Veteran sergeants and their top corporals, that was what made a platoon. Rachain was lead sergeant of Alpha Platoon. He was top canid in D Company, and Cully was his right hand man and his best friend.
That was how you ran an army, Cully thought. Lieutenants were only there to do paperwork and take the blame if the wheels fell off an operation, and who even knew what captains did. Anyone higher up than that might as well not exist, in Cully’s opinion. It was boots in the mud that won wars, not generals polishing chairs with their arses.
‘It’s a lot of names, corporal,’ Moonface said.
Cully had forgotten the boy was there. He blinked and looked at him.
‘This is war, Moonface,’ he said. ‘People go missing, in the jungle. People die. That’s what we’re here for, in case it had escaped the memory capacity of the tiny brain that hides behind that enormous face of yours. We’re the Imperial Guard. Dying is what we’re for.’
‘Yes, corporal,’ Moonface said, and that really was the only right answer he could have given.
Cully headed up One Section, Alpha Platoon, and that made him Rachain’s top canid. No recruit boot from a lower section was going to answer him back, not if they knew what was good for them.
‘Corporal,’ a voice rasped behind him, sounding like it was coming straight out of an open grave.
That was Steeleye, Cully knew. He turned and looked at the veteran sniper. Steeleye had been in One Section since even before Cully’s time, and ever since she got her naming wound she had refused to answer to her real name anymore. Cully respected her capability enormously, but that didn’t make her any easier to look at.
‘What is it?’ he asked, feigning nonchalance as his eyes took in the ruin of the woman’s face.
Steeleye had met an ork up close, once. Very close indeed.
It had bitten her face off.
Her left eye socket had been crushed too badly for the medicae to be able to do anything except seal over the collapsed mess of broken skull with hideously shiny synthetic skin, giving her whole head a disturbingly lopsided appearance. Her right eye had been replaced with the bulbous metallic augmetic from which she took her name. She had no nose, just a ragged open snout from which thick green snot ran almost constantly, and the bone was exposed along the length of the left side of her jaw where the synth-skin had refused to take.
She carried a specially customised long-las over her shoulder, topped with a scope that interfaced so perfectly with her augmetic eye that the entire weapon became part of her body. She had recorded eight hundred and thirty seven confirmed kills on Vardan IV.
‘Stop winding the poor brat up,’ Steeleye said, nodding sideways at Moonface. ‘You ain’t been listening to the list.’
Cully shrugged. He hadn’t been listening to the morning list for the last eighteen months.
‘So?’
‘Drachan made it.’
Cully blinked. Sergeant Drachan had been the platoon’s top scout.
Making the list, that was what they called it when you went out into the green and didn’t come back. Sometimes a trooper might be confirmed Killed in Action, if they were shot down right in front of their comrades and someone managed to bring their ident-tags back for the Munitorum to log the death and send The Letter to their next of kin, but it was rare. In the impenetrable, greenskin-infested jungles of Vardan IV, ninety per cent of casualties were officially listed as MIA for the simple reason that no one could find what was left of them after an engagement.
‘You sure?’
Steeleye nodded, and paused to wipe her oozing snout with the back of her already crusty uniform sleeve.
‘Emperor’s word,’ she said. ‘He went out with Two Section yesterday, didn’t come back. Gesht’s in pieces.’
Cully nodded slowly. He knew Drachan and his corporal had been close. Maybe too close, if you cared what the regulations said.
Cully didn’t care one little bit.
‘I’ve got some sacra in my tent,’ he said. ‘I’ll go see her. Thanks, Steeleye.’
The old veteran nodded her ruined head at the corporal, and no more words needed to be said between them. Moonface just looked on in simple, naive bewilderment as the day to day business of the Astra Militarum went on around him.
Death, loss, grief.
It was just another day in the glorious Imperial Guard.
Vardan IV
Now
Cully squeezed down on the trigger of his lasgun and blew the ork apart with a sustained burst of full auto.
‘Emperor’s teeth, but there’s a lot of them,’ Gesht’s voice growled in his vox-bead.
The other corporal was five, maybe six hundred yards to Cully’s left, away through the curtain of suffocating rain with her own section spread out around her.
Alpha Platoon were deep into greenskin country, on an advance recon mission.
‘I hear you,’ Cully replied. ‘Concentrate on the big ones, they’re the bosses.’
‘You think I’m some new boot?’ Gesht snapped. ‘I know that, Cully.’
Cully shrugged, for all that he knew the woman couldn’t see him.
‘Sure, Gesht,’ he said. ‘Just watch your arse, and watch your section’s arses even harder.’
‘Teach me to suck a bleedin’ egg,’ Gesht started, then her inevitable obscenities were cut short by a crackling barrage of automatic lasgun fire through Cully’s vox-bead.
‘Say again?’
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Sorry, I
was just doing my job. What are you doing?’
Cully bit back a reply and pulled himself forward on his elbows and knees through the stinking mud and rotting vegetation. The light was greenish yellow in the rain, filtered through the high jungle canopy above them. Everything in Cully’s world was made of sweat and mud and filth.
His webbing chafed at his shoulders through his flak armour, rubbing his sodden undershirt against the constant friction sores that were a simple part of life on Vardan IV. Enormous insects swarmed around him, biting at his exposed skin, and more than once he’d had to stop and brush hideous, translucent arachnids off his sleeve.
‘Status report,’ he said, after a moment.
‘About five hundred on your nine,’ Gesht said. ‘No more contacts. Closing on the boss.’
‘Acknowledged,’ Cully said. His section were finally out of orks to kill, too.
They were both closing on Rachain, bringing their sections forward to the sergeant’s position. He was in the command squad, of course, with Lieutenant Makkron who was at least nominally in charge of Alpha Platoon’s deep recon patrol.
If Makkron had even half a brain, Cully thought, he would be doing what Rachain told him. The officer was fresh out of the cadet scholam back on Reslia itself. They still did things the old-fashioned way on Reslia; sent anyone with good breeding straight to officer school. That meant anyone with money, obviously. He was maybe twenty Terran-standard years old at the most. Rachain was almost twice his age, and had spent all those extra years in the Guard. He knew what he was doing.
A newly commissioned lieutenant outranked a platoon sergeant, of course, but he would have to be a special kind of stupid to try to enforce it. Cully really didn’t want to have anyone that stupid in command of him and his men.
‘Hey, Gesht,’ Cully said, flicking his vox-bead over to their private channel. ‘What do you make of the lieutenant?’
Gesht snorted in his ear. ‘Wetter behind the ears than the last one was,’ she said. ‘The next one will still be in nappies, at this rate.’
‘I hear you,’ Cully said. ‘You reckon he’s listening to Rachain?’
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