Tooms wanted to scream, but had no tongue. He wanted to beg forgiveness, to flee, but could do neither. Her eyes filled his vision, burning like the green suns of Ghyran, boiling into him, searing away all his courage and hope. Leaving him hollow and withered.
Stone does not live. Iron does not live. It is cruel.
He saw Greywater Fastness, a jumble of hard angles, and choking smog. Narrow streets, filled with huddled forms, and clattering machinery. Home, but distorted to grotesque proportions that he barely recognised. A darksome blotch – a tumour of stone. Was this how they saw it?
But we are kind… so kind. And you will thank us, when the rains fall, and the streets sprout, and you all, at last, hear the song he has denied you.
The city changed. It twisted and thrashed and was no longer a beast of stone and iron, but a great, heaving mound of fleshy, fungal growth. And within its runnels, hundreds of thousands of shaggy, unmoving shapes the colour of the dawn.
We will sing the song together–
‘No!’ Tooms’ truncheon sank into what was left of Agert’s head, ripping the top away with a sound like tearing paper. The body sagged, deflating like a puffball, filling the air with spores. He tried to hold his breath as he turned.
Panic seized him, as mould-covered shapes closed in on all sides. Soft, flabby hands reached for him, and he drove the truncheon down, splitting Dayla’s skull. It came apart in swirling clouds and he staggered past her crumpling shape, blind.
He heard Huxyl and Skam as they clawed at him, but he ignored their voices – no, not their voices. Her voice. Her voice, issuing from a hundred mouths. Singing now, as the soft fungal bulges along the walls and floor sang, and he reached up to clutch his head.
He’d dropped his truncheon somewhere, but he still held the lantern. And it still burned. Maybe–
Tooms stopped. Turned. She was looking down at him now, her face vast, her expression strange and sad. A hand, massive, shaped from a cloud of spores, reached for him, as if to scoop him up. Her eyes burned like a summer wildfire, and her words were like the crash of distant waves. He could hear, but could not understand now. He had torn himself from the song, and her words were not meant for him, or any mortal. Yet she spoke nonetheless, like a mother attempting to reassure a frightened child.
‘Don’t you see, it is a kindness we do you,’ a hundred mouths murmured, in her voice. ‘We only want to help you – we only wish you to hear what we hear…’
Tooms slammed the lantern down, splattering burning oil across the patches of fungus. Even in the damp air, it couldn’t help but catch. Duardin oil could burn, even on water. And it spread greedily, leaping and prowling through the forest of swaying bodies. The singing became shrill – a keening wail. Not of pain, but of disappointment.
As the fires roared up, Tooms ran into the dark, leaving the others behind.
He fled from the goddess and her terrible garden.
But the sound of her voice followed him.
Her voice took root in Tooms, as he stumbled.
‘A single seed was all it took. A single spore. Just a tiny thing. And look. See. Is this not better? Is this not preferable to the noise and the smoke and the noose?’
Not far now. That was what the water said. A good thing, because his legs weren’t working at all. He fell against the wall, and tried to pull himself along, but his fingers broke off one by one, leaving yellowish smears on the stones.
‘Don’t look back,’ Agert’s voice said. ‘Just follow the current.’
He tried to draw in the breath to speak, but nothing happened. Not even a whisper of a groan escaped him. His leg gave way, cracking like a rotten log, spilling him down into the water. There was no pain, only a sense of vertigo as he fell.
He was unravelling. Coming apart, but still following the water. Not towards Cathedral Hill now, he knew, but back towards the Old Fen Gate. He wasn’t going to make it. He’d go missing, just like Agert. Just like the others. And then someone would come looking. He wondered what they would find.
‘A single seed. A single spore,’ she crooned as she lowered him gently into the water. He had not heard her come, but here she was, smaller now, and beautiful, rather than monstrous. ‘One tiny thing. That is all it takes. Fire is nothing. Stone is nothing. Life persists.’ She leaned forward and kissed him upon the brow.
Something in his skull gave. All of his fears and worries, all of his pain, were caught in the current and carried away. The water closed over him and the song rose, drowning out everything else.
Tooms closed his eyes and let it.
‘What a clever animal you are.’ The drukhari commander stretched out one hand to caress Monika’s face. The interrogator grimaced but said nothing.
The drukhari forces spread out across the rooftop landing pad, their sleek, chain-studded raiders circling overhead. Only a fraction of the craft had managed to disgorge their occupants; the rest of the fleet circled the towering Munitorum building like predatory jungle cats just waiting for an opening.
The two wyches who had been holding Monika aloft dropped her to her knees on the rockcrete surface, abandoning her to slice trophies from the fallen. Monika wasn’t certain which was worse: that so many of her friends and colleagues in the service of the Inquisition were dead, or that she had been captured alive. She struggled, trying to get her hands free of the barbed net that restrained her, but her attempts at escape only drove the hooks deeper into her flesh. Each time she tried to work herself lose, the agony from the many-tined barbs drove her to the verge of unconsciousness.
The wyches disappeared into the building, presumably to look for the human captives they’d come in search of. Their kabalite companions took up lines at the edges of the landing pad and braced for a counter-attack. Several of the warriors bore banner poles on their backs, displaying the same symbol emblazoned on the side of the raiders: a twining knot of barbed wire crowned by a blue flame. Like the raiders themselves, the warriors’ armour was painted an oily black, trimmed at the edges with a bright, cold blue.
A horned incubus emerged from the flight control room. His bone-white armour gleamed in the lights of the open landing pad. He held up a rigged bundle of wires and circuits, and shook his head with the slightest of movements.
The drukhari commander looked down at Monika, placed a boot on the human’s shoulder, and pushed her over to lay on her side. Monika stared up at the archon, wishing she could wrench even a single hand free. The drukhari had a repulsive beauty. Her movements, even in her cruel, segmented armour, betrayed a grace that the pure human form could never emulate.
Her features were delicate and cold, devoid of any spark of empathy or compassion. The drukhari’s hair, dyed brilliant pink, was styled into a stiff, sharp mohawk. Tattoos of entwined serpents coiled across the left half of her face.
‘The beacon. It was a decoy?’ the archon asked. Her diction was flawless, but her sing-song accent betrayed her. The alien tongue refused to speak Low Gothic with the flat, dull cadence of a human being.
‘What? The mighty aeldari can’t tell the difference between a real beacon and a fake one?’ Monika felt no need to clarify things for the drukhari, especially when the truth was painfully obvious. There were no evacuees at the landing pad, and there never had been.
Monika’s friend and mentor, Inquisitor Deidara, had discovered the impending drukhari raid, even uncovering the traitors in the governor’s household, but there was no way for a single inquisitor to change the currents of the warp. The world of Telesto would receive no military assets in time to repel the drukhari, save for those already there. Half of Deidara’s retinue had organised an evacuation to Telesto’s moon. The other half had set up the false beacon, broadcasting where the primary ‘evacuation point’ for the city would be for all the drukhari forces to hear. Monika only regretted that they hadn’t been able to flee the rooftop before the drukhari assau
lt had begun.
The drukhari looked at the device her incubus held, and Monika readied herself for death. Before the incubus’ blade could fall, a series of explosions drew the attention of those assembled on the rooftop. Several of the raiders began weaving defensively. The archon’s head snapped down to stare Monika in the eyes, the alien’s mouth drawn into a predatory grin.
‘Is this your doing as well, mon-keigh?’
Monika just laughed. Bait was no good without a trap to accompany it, a role the Telestonian 87th had been only too happy to play. An autocannon found its mark, blasting a hole through one of the raiders overhead, which plummeted out of view. The drukhari commander appeared calm, but the other xenos were scrambling back to their craft. Monika winced, but knew her torment was nearly at an end. With any luck, one of the Telestonian artillery rounds would put her out of her misery before the drukhari got the pleasure of it themselves.
To her surprise, the drukhari archon laughed, her voice a cawing, grating sound, like a murder of crows.
‘You lured me here with the promise of ten thousand defenceless refugees,’ she said, ‘and it is no small thing to deceive the Marauder, Archon Kelaene Abrahak, Ilarch of the Lords of Iron Thorn.’ At a gesture from her, the wyches grabbed the shardnet and hauled Monika up for Kelaene to take. ‘As a prize for your accomplishment, I shall keep you alive until you’ve been given each and every gift that those ten thousand slaves would have received at our hands.’ The Ilarch began dragging Monika towards a waiting raider, pulling her over the rough landing pad by the hooks embedded in her body. Monika closed her eyes and screamed.
Monika awoke in total darkness. Waking from the visceral, all too real dreams of the past was always disorienting. Her heart was hammering, her teeth locked onto her own lips. A low crack of thunder brought her attention to the fading sound of rain on stone. That was good. There was no stone on a drukhari raider. There never had been. Stone meant the monastery. It meant the relative safety of St. Solangia. She lay in the darkness, breathing slowly, and allowed the tension to drain away from her limbs.
Carefully, Monika took stock of her whereabouts. The hard, cold stones of the monastery floor beneath her were a comfort, giving her something solid and ancient to focus on while she oriented herself to the present. The thick steel bed frame, centimetres from her face, meant she was still safely hidden. She flexed her lips, feeling the familiar pain. Stifling her screams had become a survival strategy, so much a part of her that even in her sleep she would bite clean through her lips before she opened her mouth to shriek. Shifting first her shoulders, then her hips, she worked her way out from underneath the bed. She took a moment to stretch, working the soreness out of her neck and back. She slid the bed from beneath the window, across the floor, and back to the corner where the Sisters wanted it, working slowly and carefully in order to keep the heavy bed frame from making enough noise to alert the hospitallers. She moved the small bookshelf that was allowed to her away from the door, and placed the empty water glass back on her night stand. She made sure to rumple the linens on the bed to make them look slept in.
Monika went to the polished metal mirror set into the wall. Although her status as a servant of the Inquisition afforded her many freedoms at St. Solangia’s, the privilege of a real mirror had been revoked after a violent misunderstanding with another patient whose schizophrenic patois had borne an unfortunate resemblance to the aeldari tongue. She checked beneath her eyelids, behind her ears, and at the base of her neck, searching for marks of chem-injection. Monika paused for a moment to assure herself that the face in the mirror was her real one. When she had first been recovered from Kelaene’s forces, Monika’s visage had looked quite different: fishbelly pale from years spent in near-total darkness; scars and brands spiralling and crisscrossing, decades’ worth of torturer’s graffiti; her teeth filed to wicked points. Through Inquisitor Deidara’s beneficence, the hospitallers had restored much of her body, including rad-scrubbing her tattoos and replacing her unnatural dentition with a more human set of ceramite implants. Satisfied that she hadn’t been drugged during the night, Monika turned back to her cell.
‘Cell’ was an apt word, but only because St. Solangia’s had been an abbey before it had ever been a medicae facility. In truth the room had been furnished comfortably, if sparsely. Anything more lavish would have set Monika’s teeth on edge, long experience having taught her that good things were usually a trap.
Monika went and stood beneath her window. A thick iron bar crossed in front of the arched alcove. Once it would have hung a tapestry, but Monika preferred the sunlight: a warm, tangible reminder that she was far from the realm of the drukhari. She stood there for a moment, letting the still-emerging morning sun warm her shoulders, savouring the feeling while it lasted. The spring storms were coming more frequently, and soon they would have days where the sun never shone at all through the black thunderheads. After a moment, she stretched her hands up and took hold of the tapestry bar and began her pull-ups. She used to use gymnastics to train, but her confinement made that prohibitive. Sister Rozia had taught her a combination of military calisthenics and intense bodyweight exercises, and Monika found the strength training and combat readiness more valuable than the manoeuvrability of a gymnast.
The Sisters brought her breakfast to her. One of them watched Monika carefully while the other set her tray down on the stool in front of Monika’s bookshelf. They nodded to Monika, who nodded politely back and waited until they’d left the cell to approach the tray. Common sanatoria might cut costs by feeding their patients on ration packs, but St. Solangia’s catered to the psychoses of the powerful and the wealthy. The patients there received actual food, if simply prepared. Monika examined the meal critically: protein-rich porridge with two slices of bread, a link of canid-meat, and various pulses in a dark orange sauce. Monika sniffed the tray, then carefully dipped her finger in the porridge and dabbed it on her wrist. She did the same with each offering on the tray, rubbing it on a spot further up her arm. Then she began counting softly, and resumed her exercise.
After counting out fifteen minutes to herself, she went to the window and examined her arm in the sunlight. Satisfied there was no rash on any of the applied food-spots, she returned to the tray and took a small bite of each food, chewed them briefly, spat them into her chamber pot, then waited another twenty minutes. After not becoming ill, she returned to the plate and swallowed a small bite apiece, then returned to her calisthenics. Half an hour later, finally satisfied the meal was safe, Monika knelt in front of the stool and wolfed her breakfast down. The pulses had grown cold and the gruel clumpy, but these were trivial concerns. She finished her meal with a swallow of water from the jug on her nightstand. The water in her jug wasn’t provided by the Sisters; she was allowed to draw it herself each night, so it did not require her counts to ensure its safety. One piece of bread she saved, and added to a small emergency cache of food she kept hidden behind a stone she’d loosened in the wall beneath her bed. It would go stale quickly, but in the dry air of the monastery it would take some time to go mouldy.
Sister Superior Amalia normally visited her in the mid-morning to escort her to the gardens, so Monika was surprised when the opening door revealed not the pinched face and stocky frame of Amalia, but that of Inquisitor Deidara. Sister Amalia liked to use their journeys to the gardens as an excuse to try to coax Monika to speak about her memories, ostensibly to help her recovery. She resented Amalia’s unflappable calm, which too often felt like condescension, but suffered her counselling in the hope of serving the Inquisition again. On the occasions that Deidara was able to visit, however, laying bare the torments she had suffered at the hands of the drukhari was a service to the Inquisition, and Monika opened her psychic wounds readily for her old friend.
Monika chewed the edge of her thumbnail as they walked. She didn’t look Deidara in the eye. The inquisitor could be trusted; if there was a threat it would come from any
angle but her old friend.
‘Do you remember what we talked about last month?’ Deidara asked. Monika gave a nod that would have been imperceptible to the average person.
‘I found the butts from six lho-sticks in the west garden,’ Monika said. She worried at a hangnail. She had always hated nail-biting, but faking the habit gave her an excuse to keep a hand in front of her mouth. ‘Eight sticks, if distilled for their pure components, can provide a lethal dose of niqatrate.’ Monika glanced around quickly. She trusted Deidara to keep a faithful eye out for danger, but she still needed to verify that there was no one behind her. ‘I thought someone might be brewing a poison in their cell, but Sister Rozia says that Hembra the orderly is just a lho-addict.’
‘Very good,’ said Deidara. The two of them walked slowly. To all appearances, Deidara’s gait was the slow, deliberate shuffle of an old woman. Her weakness was as feigned as Monika’s nail-biting, but the leisurely pace helped keep Monika calm and centred. ‘However, I was referring to the story you were telling me about trying to escape to an aeldari corsair fleet by posing as a hellion.’
Monika nodded again. She fell silent, considering her words carefully as they passed out of the monastery and into the south garden. Sister Amalia believed the fresh air helped calm her patients, but the garden always made Monika a little uneasy. She knew the island was isolated, but the garden itself still felt perilously vulnerable to attack. Save for a single gardener tending the twin rows of vitiberry vines, no one else was present. Rather than sit on one of the ornamental stone benches and enjoy the view of the sun over the Cressidian Sea, Deidara guided her former protégé through the low acicularis hedges surrounding the vine trellises. Monika respected her old mentor’s wisdom. Amalia always encouraged her to sit during interviews, but staying in motion helped Monika stay focused on the present.
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