Maledictions

by Graham McNeill et al.

  The lead raider rushed towards the ground. Monika knelt beside her master, a slender chain running from her neck to the hook on the Marauder’s belt. The archon’s oily black armour glistened with fresh oils that Monika had applied herself at spearpoint. Her hair had been shaved to the scalp on the left side, and hung long and straight to the right, dyed a pale, ethereal blue.

  ‘Is it not glorious, my pet?’ The Ilarch smiled as she gazed out over the devastation. She no longer bothered to speak Gothic to her slave. Years of exposure had taught Monika to understand the buzzing drukhari tongue. ‘Like good little rodents, your people scurry for the densest brush they can find, heedless of the fact that their cowering retreat only draws them together so they can all be taken in a single stroke.’

  Monika scowled. Amid the wreckage of the shanty-town they approached, once home to thousands of the workers that toiled daily in the vast manufactoria, her experienced eye picked out the hidden aerials and gun emplacements of a concealed command position. So did Kelaene’s.

  ‘Shall we play the game, mon-keigh?’

  Monika rose to her bare, filthy feet. Her clothes had long since been reduced to rags, and her flesh was marked by uncountable scars. Every indignity that could be imagined had been heaped upon her, but behind her eyes boiled enough rage to play the Marauder’s game still one more time. Always one more time. Before each final attack, the Ilarch’s bravado compelled her to wager her entire empire on a fool’s gamble. The drukhari would hand a lethal weapon over to her slave, giving her a chance to strike her master down and be free.

  If she failed, she would be beaten severely. After the raid her flesh would be carved to ribbons and her body suspended from razored hooks. Monika had lost count of the number of times she’d lost. She saw the arrogance in the Ilarch’s eyes, and felt again the temptation to refuse. If she stayed down, proved that she had finally and truly been broken, she knew the Ilarch would tire of her and, finally, let her die. Still, she rose, meeting the drukhari’s contemptuous gaze with all the fury she could muster.

  The Marauder smiled, unbuckled the holster at her side, and tossed her pistol to the slave in a graceful arc. Monika grasped the weapon, staring down at the gun in her trembling hands. She’d been handed a live pistol before only to discover it wouldn’t fire when she tried to turn it on her mistress. Drukhari weapons didn’t feature a safety, but Monika checked that the power core was active before turning her gaze back to the Marauder, who unhooked Monika’s thin chain from her belt and let it fall to the deck.

  ‘Well?’ her mistress taunted. Behind her, the flags of the command centre were whipping by. The raider crew were leaning over the barbed rails of the raider, yelling in glee as their splinter rifles tore through its defenders. Monika didn’t know what form her humiliation would take, but she had played the game long enough to know its general shape: her shot deflected by some kind of force-field, or intercepted by an underling shoved into her line of fire by a chuckling bodyguard. Kelaene never played games that weren’t rigged in her favour. She won not because she was inherently superior, but because she only picked foes who couldn’t defeat her. It might have taken her years, but Monika had finally learned the truth of that lesson.

  Monika turned, aimed at the pilot of the raider, and pulled the trigger. The pilot’s face was a mask of shock as the darklight beam slashed through both his chest and the command strut he stood behind. Its only method of steering destroyed, the raider lurched starboard with a sharp, whining cry. Monika just had time to turn, to see the Marauder howling with laughter, before the raider slammed to the ground.

  Along with the kabalites, Monika was hurled from the deck by the impact. She tried to tuck and roll as she hit the ground, but she heard a dry snap, and felt her arm go numb to the fingers. Her left hip was in agony, the leg twisted in an unnatural way from the knee down. The broken form of the raider tumbled through the lines of infantry and exploded, sending a rain of thin, twisted metal down on her and anyone fortunate enough to have escaped the blast zone.

  The Guardsmen were already rallying, veterans lunging forward to bayonet the drukhari survivors lying on the battlefield. Monika let her head sink to the ground. One of the Guardsmen was trying to speak to her, but she could barely understand him. It had been so long since she’d heard Gothic spoken aloud. Compared to the drukhari she’d been surrounded by, he sounded like a man speaking through a mouthful of potatoes.

  ‘Find the Marauder’s body,’ she whispered, ‘or she’ll live. Find her corpse, or the Marauder lives.’

  Monika’s eyes snapped open. Ephemeral suspicion had crystallised into grim certainty.

  ‘The Marauder lives.’

  She lurched from her bed, the lingering after-effects of the chemical restraints weighing her limbs down and filling her joints with putty. Monika pumped her arms and breathed heavily, desperate to burn the traces of the drugs from her system. The little window over her bed was completely dark, but the meal sitting on her stool was breakfast, albeit a cold one. If it was this dark at midmorning, then the leading edge of the storms had arrived.

  She exercised her body, did her counts, and ate her meal. No one came to lead her out to the gardens: the weather was too foul to allow the patients outside. One of the hospitallers came to the cell to read her scripture, which Monika listened to in numb silence. For once, her retreat into her own mind didn’t plunge her into the abyss of her past; the dangers of the present focused her attention to a hard, bright point.

  She knew she couldn’t have been out for more than a day. The chem-restraints the hospitallers used were good for a few hours, although her own habitual lack of sleep had probably kept her down longer. Still, the storms would have just hit the island. By nightfall, communications would be blacked out for at least a day, maybe longer. Long enough for the Marauder to sweep through and carry every soul in the abbey screaming to the Dark City. By the time anyone realised something was wrong and sent someone to investigate, St. Solangia’s would be filled with nothing but echoes and mystery.

  Her first count for her midday meal produced no rashes, but during her second count she noticed a tingling numbness on her tongue where she’d chewed the kenthia pasta. A tiny, distant voice, that sounded distinctly like the interrogator who had been lost and presumed dead eleven years ago, whispered that the hospitallers were probably just slipping a mild sedative into every­one’s food to minimise patient agitation during the storm, but the Monika who had survived over a decade of hell knew poison when she tasted it. She left the rest of her lunch untouched.

  Monika’s bed spring shiv was gone. So was the shard of glass she’d carefully wrapped halfway up with a strip of sheet and hidden behind her bookshelf. Even the dentabrush she’d filed to a point and tucked under the lip of her chamberpot was missing. She comforted herself by spending the afternoon working the leg of the wooden stool back and forth. Initially there was no give, but by the time the hospitallers came with her dinner, she’d made significant headway. Like a loose tooth, it would need only a single sharp tug to pull free.

  Dinner went untouched; having avoided the laced food earlier, she couldn’t chance a more sophisticated poison. She pulled up her loose stone and ate from the food she had hoarded from previous meals, being careful to do her counts anyway in case the searchers had found her cache while she was unconscious and dosed it as well.

  Throughout the day, black storm clouds raged beyond her cell. The winds howled like fanatical priests, leading their engines of war on a crusade of destruction against the fortress that resisted their assaults year after year. Monika sat in her cell, alone with her thoughts, and realised she was at peace for the first time since she had freed herself from the drukhari. The tranquil gardens and sheltering walls of the abbey had created an anxiety in her, a paranoid anticipation of an attack that never came. The mounting chaos calmed her in a way that the abbey’s manufactured serenity never could.

  T
hey came for her in the night, as she knew they would. When the door to her cell creaked open and a single silhouette crept into her room, Monika felt no surprise whatsoever. Crouched behind her stool, pressed against the wall behind the opening door, she stared at her would-be abductor for a moment, reassuring her senses that they were correct, that they had always been correct. Wyches in Kelaene’s service were unmistakeable. The right side of the kidnapper’s head sported thin, tight braids. Monika couldn’t make out hues in the darkness, but she knew the hair was the same electric blue that tinged the edge of the Marauder’s armour. The left side would be covered in spiralling tattoos across the face and neck. The wych stared at the bed, clearly deciding whether the clump of blankets was her target’s sleeping form, or the lure for an ambush.

  The wrenching squeal of Monika tearing the leg from her stool was enough to give the answer away. The wych turned and raised one arm to block Monika’s strike with reflexes honed over decades in the arenas of Commorragh. The thin armoured plates of the wychsuit absorbed the blow easily, the nail of the improvised club squealing against the armour. The wych swept her own weapon, a grey-green dagger, under her upraised arm, nearly disembowelling Monika with her opening stroke. The wych pulled her blow, clearly trying to subdue her quarry rather than kill.

  Monika jerked her weapon up again, then feinted a knee towards the wych’s gut. The key to fighting the drukhari gladiators was to play on the weakness of their drug-fuelled skills. The wyches’ reactions were superhuman, but they made them prone to overreaction. When the wych bent low to get her abdomen clear of Monika’s knee, Monika brought her stool-leg club down hard on the drukhari’s head.

  A pale, clammy hand clamped itself over Monika’s mouth, and she felt the hard point of a knife dig into her back. This was no lone agent, then. Suddenly the fight was about more than survival. With no telling how many drukhari were moving through the monastery, she knew she had to alert the inquisitor while there was still time. Monika tried to raise her stool-leg, but the nail was imbedded in the skull of the first wych, who was thrashing like a fish on the line. With a mighty dying heave, she managed to wrench the weapon from Monika’s grasp.

  The second kidnapper dug its hand into her face and started to pull Monika into the hallway. Monika grabbed at the hand on her face, at the arm pulling her backwards, but the drukhari’s grip was like iron, its drug-enhanced physique lending her attacker strength. The drukhari’s chest heaved in a sharp rhythm, and Monika had a brief hope that the wych’s drugs were having an adverse reaction, before she recognised the chuffing whisper as soft laughter. She stretched her mouth wide and bit down on the wych’s hand.

  The ceramite teeth bit through ligaments, tendons and metacarpals as easily as a mouthful of soft boiled pulses. The drukhari’s grip on her face vanished, and the murderous silence of Monika’s attackers was finally broken by a sharp, pained wail. Spitting the bloody meat and ruined finger of her assailant aside, Monika lunged forward out of the alien’s grip and lashed backwards with a mule kick. She was rewarded with a soft, yielding impact and an abrupt end to the drukhari’s scream.

  Monika snatched the first wych’s fallen knife and turned on her second attacker. He was young, but covered in scars from the arena. His head was entirely bare, save for his coiling tattoos. The gladiator rocked on the stone floor, struggling to regain his breath and his footing. Monika charged in a flurry of stomping feet and frenzied stabs with the stolen wychblade. When the blood stopped spraying in great fans, she darted away into the darkness.

  Monika didn’t need the abbey’s power to make her way through the halls; she might not have the perfect night vision of the drukhari, but she’d spent over a decade abandoned in the blackness they thrived in. She’d never recovered, not fully, and carried a piece of that darkness away with her. She might have been the least of the night’s children, but a portion of their birthright was now hers, and she moved through the pitch-black halls with the grace and assurance of a jungle cat.

  She had to find Deidara. Monika had a wychblade in hand; the inquisitor would have to believe her now. The drukhari were coming. Keeping to the corners, she raced ahead, twisting and turning her way to the inquisitor’s guest cell.

  Once again, a voice from within stopped her cold. With reflexes born from years of anxious preparation, Monika threw herself against the wall and listened. What she heard made her blood run cold. A single voice, speaking the rolling, buzzing tongue of the drukhari, but in the unmistakeable cadence of a human unfamiliar with the language.

  ‘If she’s not in her cell, then she’s apt to be heading this way. Someone better get here and back me up on the double. I’m not paid enough to fight maniacs in the darkness.’

  Monika crouched low and slipped her head around the doorframe. A human, one of the orderlies employed by the hospitallers, stood in the inquisitor’s room, staring around with the aid of a hand-lumen. The room was in disarray, with books lying on the floor amid a scattering of discarded clothes. The orderly tossed his handheld vox-unit onto the unmade bed and pulled an autopistol from his pocket, tapping it anxiously against his thigh.

  The traitor never heard her approach. She wrapped her right arm around his shoulder and drove her wychblade home just under the apple of his throat. With her left hand she clamped down on his autopistol; the hammer fell painfully on the web between her thumb and forefinger, drawing blood but preventing the gun from firing and sounding the alarm.

  Monika searched the room. There was no sign of the inquisitor. Neither was there any sign of her weapons, her equipment, or any of her sensitive documents. Monika crept back into the hall, still hopeful that her friend was fighting through the abbey on her own. If she could rendezvous with her former mentor, there was every chance they could somehow summon reinforcements, coordinate some kind of defence, or even effect an escape. She angled her direction towards the abbey’s landing pad. The grav-cars and landing vessels there offered little chance of escape. Such light craft would be unable to survive a journey through the storm, even if a pilot were suicidal enough to attempt it. Deidara’s personal ship would be the inquisitor’s most natural fallback point, though. With luck, her more robust vessel might even be able to survive a hop through the storm.

  The arched door to the landing pad was locked down, but the ability to bypass a maglock was one of the first skills Deidara had ever taught her. Lock disengaged, it was a simple matter of throwing her weight against the sliding door, forcing it to recede into its wall slot with a strained push. The wind immediately howled in, driving a sheet of rain that soaked Monika to the bone the instant she was exposed to it. Heedless of the typhoon’s fury, Monika slipped through the gap to the promise of freedom.

  The sight of Deidara’s lander, cockpit empty and running lights dark, stole the breath from her. Monika stopped, trying to convince herself that her traumatised mind was playing tricks on her, but for once reality refused to let her go. The inquisitor’s ship stood silent and alone, a mute testament to Monika’s lost hope. The spacecraft might as well have been graven from stone: a black, lifeless monolith; a memorial to Rozia, Deidara and all the other lives that the Ilarch had claimed.

  ‘Monika! We have to go back inside!’

  Monika whipped around. Sister Amalia had slipped out of the half-open door. The sister was as soaked as Monika was, the rain drenching her, and she had to shout to be heard over the gale of the storm. The wind threatened to tear her mantilla from her head, and Amalia was forced to clutch it tight to her scalp.

  ‘No! The Marauder is coming!’

  Amalia shook her head. ‘The Marauder is dead!’

  ‘No!’ screamed Monika. She pointed with her knife back at the abbey, at her cell and the dead abductors. ‘The Marauder lives!’

  Sister Amalia stared at the knife, then to the autopistol, as if seeing them for the first time.

  ‘Where did you get those?’

  Monika glowe
red. She was tired of being treated as a danger just because she was the only one who seemed aware of the threats around her.

  ‘The Ilarch has sent her servants for me,’ she yelled.

  ‘Monika, listen to me: there are no drukhari here!’ Amalia took a step closer, holding her hand out, pleading with Monika. ‘Look at the weapons in your hands. Are those xenos weapons?’

  Monika glanced down, not missing that Amalia took another step closer. She held the wychknife out, pointing it directly at the hospitaller.

  ‘You think I don’t recognise a wychknife when I see one?’

  ‘That’s not a drukhari knife,’ Amalia yelled. ‘Look at it! It’s a gardener’s vitiberry knife!’

  Monika stared at the blade, the tiny voice that lurked in the back of her mind growing stronger. Sister Amalia had a point: the tapering point and backswept hook did bear a strong resemblance to the gardening implements she’d seen the servants using.

  ‘The stresses of the storm and Sister Rozia’s death are wearing on your mind!’ Amalia yelled. She took another step closer towards Monika, close enough to be heard without yelling. ‘You’re frightened, and you’re hurting people, but I know you: you’re stronger than this. You’re strong enough to put your weapons down, to come inside where it’s safe. You’re strong enough to trust me.’

  Monika looked at her hands, at the rain-streaked bloodstains.

  ‘Where’s the inquisitor?’

  Sister Amalia shook her head. ‘She was called away on urgent business; a xenos raid in a neighbouring system. She swore she would come back to resolve your situation as soon as she was able.’

  Monika frowned. The voice of compliance died.

  ‘No,’ she said, taking a step back. ‘Why would she leave without her lander?’

  Amalia took another step forward, imploring Monika with her outstretched hand.

  ‘The Ordo Xenos sent a ship to pick her up,’ the sister said. ‘She left on that vessel. Please, Monika. Let’s go back inside. Take my hand.’