The Colonel's Monograph

by Graham McNeill

  It was perhaps a vain and desperate hope, but it was the only hope I had.

  I pushed onwards, turning and pressing ever deeper into the maze, not knowing if any turn would bring me face to face with the servitor. I gripped the sabre tight, ready to swing it again if I saw him. My hands were shaking, and I tried to keep the memory of Garrett Grayloc’s ruptured body from my mind. I knew that if I let thoughts of what I had done consume me, then I would be overwhelmed and lost.

  At last I emerged into the centre of the maze, and let out a strangled cry of relief.

  The strangely androgynous statue of pinkish coral gleamed in the rain, its surfaces slick and dripping with water. I stumbled forwards and all but collapsed onto the marble bench encircling it, gasping for breath.

  I needed to move. I needed to get back out to reach the groundcar.

  But I had nothing left to draw upon. My reserves of strength and resilience were spent.

  The driving rain and crashing waves were oddly muted through the crooked hedgerows of the maze, but I could hear a curious sound, the source of which I could not at first identify.

  A splitting sound, like hairline cracks spreading through a pane of glass.

  The tenor of the sound changed, becoming the wet sucking noise of something being pulled from the cloying grasp of a swamp. The rain was beating down harder now, and another flash of lightning bathed the sky in violet light.

  My memory flew back to the long causeway traversing the hideous marshland that so disquieted me on my journey to Grayloc Manor. My mind flooded with images of dead and misbegotten things festering unseen in the dark.

  I turned slowly as I felt a growing sensation of warmth behind me.

  Now I understood the source of the sound, and the fraying weave of my sanity begin to unravel yet further.

  The statue at the centre of the maze was moving.

  It rippled with a grotesque internal movement, its once rigid structure now pliant as though the torrential rain had softened it. No longer did it appear to be made of ridged and nubbed coral, but of pinkish folds of layered flesh that were unfolding like a night-blooming flower. It stretched and swelled, as if something confined within its moist innards was struggling to push itself free.

  Like a newborn pushing against the membrane of an egg sac…

  Even as I watched, the stretched skin of the statue tore in a jagged, vertical line. Blood and fluid spilled from the rent, and the stench of burnt sugar drove me to my feet as the mass of the statue peeled away like meat no longer supported by a skeleton.

  Embedded within the folds of flesh were splintered bone shards, scores of gleaming teeth and discarded networks of veins and half-digested organs.

  And in the centre of this mass was a bent and crooked figure.

  Its wrinkled and ancient skin was wet and slathered with a clear, amniotic slime, like the princeps of a battle Titan removed from its command tank. The awful thing faced away from me, and I saw a blasted hole in the back of its head like a gunshot wound. Threads of light and gossamer-thin flesh held the skull together, and but for them, the creature’s cranium would have collapsed to ruin long ago.

  Long silver hair clung to its hunched and twisted back, and beneath the translucent skin, I saw a spine that had been shattered by some ferocious impact.

  Like falling from a cliff…

  The thing turned to face me, and its awful, ravaged appearance was horribly familiar.

  The patrician features, the eyes of rich gold-green…

  Elena Grayloc.

  I fell into the maelstrom of her eyes.

  She was the most beautiful human being I had ever seen.

  Young and filled with the vitality only those who have never known loss can possess. This was Elena Grayloc before her long years in the Astra Militarum, an idealised version of the person she believed herself to be.

  Her eyes met mine, and the sound of the storm was instantly replaced by the soft sound of gentle waves lapping on a beach. Sunlight bathed me, and I trembled at the feeling of a silken touch winding its way around the back of my neck.

  ‘Auburn suits you,’ she said in a whispered voice.

  I looked past her and saw that I now stood on a golden beach, with an ocean of cerulean blue stretching out before me. A copper sun warmed my skin and the sound of a child’s laughter drifted from somewhere just out of sight.

  Elena Grayloc slowly circled me, her fingertips trailing down the length of my arm.

  I followed the movement, and the breath caught in my throat as I saw how smooth my skin had become. I lifted my hand, turning it over and marvelling at its flawless youth. My nails were cherry red, my palms supple.

  Reaching up to my face, I ran my hand over my cheeks and neck.

  Like my arm, the skin was taut and porcelain smooth as it had been in my youth.

  ‘You’re beautiful,’ said Elena Grayloc, stepping back to admire my physique.

  Only then did I realise I was naked, and one look down at my body revealed that all the ravages of age had been undone. Flesh that sagged from muscle was once again tight, the spots and blotches of age had vanished, and a strength flowed through me that I had not known in decades.

  ‘Intoxicating, isn’t it?’ said Elena Grayloc, seeing my cheeks flush and my chest rise and fall with unbridled excitement. ‘How swiftly we forget the vigour of youth. How easily we accept the decline of age and think it normal. But it doesn’t have to be that way.’

  The youthful energy filling my limbs and my heart and lungs was exhilarating. I felt the urge to wield this incredible power; to run, to fight, to couple with beautiful people until dawn crested the horizon. Such power was mine, had always been mine, but the passing of the years had stolen it from me without me even noticing.

  No, it was worse than that. I had let it go.

  I had foregone those pleasures of the flesh, denying my senses the experience of what it meant to be human. I looked back on the ascetic path my life had taken and felt a boiling wave of anger fill me.

  ‘You can have it all again, Teresina,’ said Elena Grayloc, stepping towards me and holding up a jagged shard of glass. I saw myself reflected in its silver depths, my once stern and lined face softened and young again.

  The colour that had only recently begun to seep back into my hair was now fully restored. My lips were once again full, my cheekbones clearly defined and my eyes alive with the vitality and promise of youth.

  ‘What is this…?’ I said, and even my voice was renewed.

  ‘It is life,’ said Elena Grayloc. ‘And it can be yours again. You have a mind of brilliance and flesh I can make whole again. If you let me…’

  She reached out and placed her hands on my flat stomach. I felt motion stir within me, and gasped as the potential of new life fluttered in my once again fertile womb. My hand slipped protectively to the idea of a swelling in my belly, and tears pricked the corners of my eyes.

  ‘Yes,’ said Elena Grayloc. ‘We will put that womb of yours to good use.’

  I frowned at that, but she moved in close to me, and I forgot her presumption.

  Her hands slipped around the small of my back, and my own hands laced themselves naturally around her neck. We stood facing one another like lovers.

  We moved closer, but I could not say who was pulling who.

  Elena Grayloc was beautiful in a way I had never experienced before. I wanted to know what she tasted like, how her skin felt upon mine. The scent of Fireblooms filled my senses and the heat of her skin was like a furnace on me.

  I ran my hands through her hair, feeling the fused and melted shards of skull, the rubbery texture of overcooked meat under my fingertips. Fused brain matter and bone. Flash-boiled cranial fluids spilled over my hands.

  I didn’t care. I wanted to be with her, to lie upon the warm sand and let her sink into my flesh, to let her
know me completely.

  She felt my exploration of her shattered skull and said, ‘The bastard killed me, you know.’

  ‘Who?’

  She ignored the question as her lips brushed against my ear. ‘Came up behind me as I wrought destruction on His temple. Shot me in the back of the head and then threw me from the cliff. But you can make me whole again, Teresina. You can give me my life back.’

  ‘Anything,’ I answered.

  Something inside me was screaming, a silent prisoner with no voice in a cell with no window.

  I knew I should listen to it, that what it was shrieking was vitally important, but the power surging through my rejuvenated flesh was too strong, and too desperate to cling to this rebirth.

  ‘Let me in,’ said Elena Grayloc. ‘My body is too broken, its hurts too deep to heal. The cocoon of my Inamorata has sustained me, but its power is fading. You have a mind I yearn to inhabit, a body I can renew. A body I have renewed. You feel it already, don’t you? The siren song of youth. It calls to you with all the promises of immortality, yes? Let me in and I will show you things you could never imagine, experiences you could never know.’

  She leaned in and kissed me, and I felt the warmth of her tongue part my lips.

  Its texture was rough, its wriggling motion pushing deeper into my throat.

  I gagged as I tasted the reek of warm earth, the scratching texture of insect-like cilia as they wormed her tongue down my throat. The heat of Elena Grayloc’s body changed from pleasurable warmth to a burning fire. I felt as though my flesh was slowly melting, becoming soft and malleable as she pressed herself against me.

  The hardness of her fingers sank into the softness of my hips, pulling us together as though to press us into one body. I tried to resist, but her grip was locked to my flesh. Her tongue was no longer a tongue, but a writhing, frond-tipped proboscis that exuded a sickly sweet sap within me.

  My stomach churned with motion, and again I felt the promise of new life. I felt the skin of my belly stretch as something new and living pulsed with sickening vitality, but this would be no innocent child, it would be a sickly parasite that would draw the life from me with every beat of its filthy heart.

  My body could be young again, but would this be the price I must pay?

  Not like this! Not like this!

  Too often we look back on our lives and wish we could have our time again.

  To do better, to do more, to walk the paths not taken.

  But I have loved and I have learned. I have done my best to pass on my experiences to others. And in that I have no regrets.

  In the end, I think that was what saved me.

  Regret was what Elena Grayloc was counting on, a sense of my wasted potential that could be realised if I would only offer my flesh to her. And, yes, I sometimes thought of how the course of our lives would have been different had Teodoro and I ­chosen to have ­children, but I never once considered our choice to be a mistake.

  But surrendering to Elena Grayloc would be the costliest mistake of my life.

  She felt my resistance and her fury was terrible to behold. She clung to my hips, her fingertips like hot pokers burrowing into the bone of my pelvis.

  But my anger was the equal of her desire.

  I dug my fingers into the shattered edges of her skull and pulled, furiously tearing chunks of hair-covered bone away.

  She tried to pull back, but our lips were still locked together. I bit down on her proboscis tongue, sawing my teeth from side to side. The fleshy organ burst apart in my mouth, and I tasted warm fluid like stagnant swamp water. Rank clots of putrid blood made me gag as I now pushed her away.

  I sank to my knees, bent double, and retched up a torrent of black pulsing things that burrowed into the sand to escape the glare of the sun’s light. My stomach heaved again, disgorging a host of wet, slithering creatures like eyeless glossy eels.

  My hands were bloody to the elbows, and I looked up at Elena Grayloc.

  Not as she wished she had been.

  But as she was.

  In the blink of an eye, I was once again in the maze. Hammering sheets of rain drenched me to the bone. I was on my knees, holding sodden chunks of softened pink bone in my hands, from which hung thin wisps of silver hair.

  Elena Grayloc loomed over me, her veil of glamours stripped away. The fleshy cocoon was draped around her like a shawl, and her broken body writhed in a final act of transformation. Violet light suffused her rippling flesh as it budded new limbs like pulsing tumours, extruded new organs and swelled with a power bolstered by what she had so very nearly stolen from me.

  What I had so very nearly given her…

  Her eyes were no longer rich gold-green, but a terrible, predatory neon-yellow.

  ‘You could have had it all!’ she shrieked, her face angular and daemonic. It was no longer human, yet possessed an alluring beauty that both repulsed and entranced my senses at the same time. I threw aside the gelatinous mass of brain and skull fragments clinging to my fingers and rose to face her.

  ‘I do not want what you have to give,’ I said, knowing she was going to kill me.

  A succubus denied cannot allow those who reject it to live.

  Her arms were slender, hooked things, her fingers no longer recognisable as human, but fused together like the claws of some mutant crustacean. She reached for me, ready to tear me apart, but then her head lifted and I saw a towering fury enter those coruscating eyes.

  ‘You!’ she shrieked. ‘Faithless coward! Come to finish what you started?’

  I twisted my head and through tears of frustration and rainwater, I saw Kyrano enter the heart of the maze, the lasrifle still held at his chest. He lifted his hand and fastened his grip around the bronze plate covering the lower half of his face.

  I had no idea what he was doing until I saw the servo-muscles grafted to his arm flex.

  He pulled at the plate, slowly prising it from his skin. Blood poured down his face as medical sutures and tissue grafts tore loose from their bone anchors. I saw the effort and agony it was taking Kyrano to tear it loose, his organic eye filled with furious determination.

  Finally, the plate came loose in a welter of blood. It trailed an arc of viscous fluids, fused scraps of flesh and powdered bone fragments. A snaking length of rubber hose trailed from Kyrano’s gullet, an oesophageal implant that was part rebreather, part digestive tract.

  The servitor dropped the plate and ripped the tube from his throat. Yellowish stomach acid and intestinal fluids dribbled from its frayed end as he pulled it free. His exposed mouth was a ruin of splintered teeth and rotten gums. He shouted something with the tenor of a command, but its meaning was lost in a wet horror of bubbling blood and phlegm.

  It was a death rattle and birth cry all in one.

  I could not understand what he was saying or if what he was shouting were even words.

  If they were, then they were the shrieks of a damned and tortured soul.

  He shouted again, and this time I understood him.

  Get down!

  I dropped to the mud of the clearing as Kyrano shouldered the lasrifle and opened fire. A storm of blitzing las-fire filled the air, every bolt aimed with pinpoint accuracy. The servitor walked calmly forwards, the colonel’s rifle blazing on full-auto.

  Elena Grayloc came apart in an explosion of gore.

  Half formed and melted bones exploded in the searing heat of the las-fire. Rotten meat vaporised in stinking clouds, and her monstrous limbs tumbled away as they were cut from her in the unending fusillade.

  Eventually only a swaying trunk of bloodied meat remained.

  Kyrano pumped shot after shot into Elena Grayloc’s remains until the weapon ran dry, the powercell whining empty and the charging lever racked back against the breech.

  Nothing remained that was recognisable as having once been h
uman.

  A lasrifle might not be the most powerful weapon in the Imperial arsenal, but at close range and in the hands of a skilled shooter it was devastating. Kyrano slung the rifle and spat a mouthful of black and oily phlegm at Elena Grayloc’s vaporised corpse.

  I had no real idea of the diabolical means by which she had sustained her life, but I felt sure nothing could survive such thorough destruction.

  I rolled onto my haunches and squinted up through the rain.

  Kyrano stood above me, a thick hand held out to me. His misshapen jaw struggled to form the shape of words.

  ‘Am. Not. Servitor,’ he said, and those three words told a horrifying narrative of cybernetically enforced slavery.

  He hauled me to my feet, and I looked into his eye, now seeing life and soul filling the void behind it, a soul freed from what must have felt like an eternity in a lightless gulag.

  ‘She did this to you,’ I said, and he nodded. Perhaps it was the rain or perhaps he wept; I could not tell and would not shame him by asking.

  I gestured towards the burnt ruin of flesh spread out in the mud.

  ‘Is it over?’ I asked.

  Kyrano looked back to Grayloc Manor and shook his head.

  ‘Not. Yet.’

  We drove the Kiehlen 580 from the hangar and I watched through the rear window as Grayloc Manor burned. The storm had blown out with the colonel’s death and the flames were eager to devour her ancestral home. Between us, we emptied two dozen canisters of promethium throughout its structure, taking particular care to ensure that every volume in the library would burn to ash.

  Orange flames lit the night as we drove away from Vansen Falls, and I felt a particular symmetry had been achieved now that both promontories were home to fire-struck ruins.

  I shall not fill these pages with the mundane details of the journey back to Servadac Magna, save to elaborate upon some gaps in my knowledge that Kyrano was able to fill.

  Speaking was still difficult for him, for his transformation into cyborg had not been gentle, and the psychic blockers that had kept him mute and servile were akin to burning nails hammered into the centre of his brain. With Elena Grayloc’s death, their intensity was waning, but it would take time for him to fully recover, if he ever would.