Honourbound - Rachel Harrison

by Warhammer 40K

  The footsteps are close. Perhaps fifteen paces. He waits a moment.

  Ten paces.

  Another moment.

  Five.

  Then Fel rounds the corner with his laspistol already raised and points it square at Cassia Tyl’s face. He pulls the trigger and the gun lights with a mock flash.

  ‘You’re dead,’ he says.

  She lowers her own pistol. It was risky to jump her, because usually she’s quick. Quicker than he is, sometimes.

  ‘Myre and Jeth?’ she says, trying to look past him.

  ‘Dead too,’ says Jeth.

  They are already on their feet. Myre stoops to pick up her pistol from where Fel kicked it.

  ‘You made a mess of it,’ Myre says to Jeth. ‘Fired before you had a killshot.’

  ‘At least I kept hold of my gun,’ Jeth says.

  ‘You both made a mess of it,’ Fel says. He points back to where they fought. ‘Boot prints on the floor, never mind the marks you left in the dirt when you opened those cell doors wider to hide.’

  Jeth scowls, but he nods assent. ‘Aye, captain,’ he says.

  ‘It won’t happen again, sir,’ Myre says.

  ‘And you I heard,’ Fel says to Tyl. ‘Just whispersteps, but it was enough.’

  Tyl looks more than disappointed. He sees shame in her face. ‘Next time you won’t,’ she says. ‘I swear it.’

  ‘I know,’ Fel says. ‘And I know that our balance has changed. That losing Rol is like losing a limb or an eye.’

  The three of them nod.

  ‘But we will be four until we can get a fifth,’ he says. ‘Until I can choose a fifth.’

  He has tried to avoid thinking about it so far. The idea of assessing candidates to take Rol’s place still sits poorly with him, even after saying the words and saying goodbye. It’s not the way most regiments do it. Usually a replacement would be selected without their say so. But then most regiments don’t run their own storm trooper units, either. They certainly don’t allow them to hold onto their past or their homeworld as the Antari do. Fel has fought alongside Tempestus Scions before. Those who are mind-scoured and carved out from the inside. All of their stories lost. It is a practice that Antar’s scholams stop short of, because it is the Antari way to make a soul strong not by forgetting, but by remembering. That is the way that things have always been done. It is tradition, and one that has never failed them.

  ‘Until then we need to make ourselves balanced,’ Fel says. ‘This world will try to kill us plenty more times before we are finished, and I don’t want cause to light another fire.’

  He puts his hand out, palm down. The three of them put their hands on top of his. In that moment of contact with his kin, his family, he feels like a fraud. It might not just be the world that’s trying to kill them, or the Sighted – it could very well be their own.

  But he can’t say a thing. He swore it to Raine.

  ‘Eyes and ears,’ he says, instead. ‘That’s what you trust in the Sanctum. That and your hearts. Is that clear?’

  If they think it a strange thing to say, they don’t question it. Instead they all nod their heads.

  ‘Aye, sir,’ his three Duskhounds say, together.

  ‘Now,’ he says to them, dropping his hand away. ‘We go again.’

  The hour is late when Raine notices something in the report that she is reading. It is not related to the Kavrone, or to the Strixians, but it is still something. She goes through the carefully arranged piles of records, pushing them aside until she finds one to match it. Then another. Then another. Reassignment requests. Redeployment orders. All for sanctioned psykers. All being moved from their parent regiment. Raine didn’t notice it at first because it was sparing. Irregular. Now they are being moved in greater numbers, more often, but it is still the same as the earlier records.

  Once the psykers are reassigned, they disappear, never to re-join their regiments. They are not reported as KIA, or MIA, warp-lost, or executed.

  They are ghosts, just like the Strixians.

  And just like the Strixians, the records are untraceable to those making the request. To those who redacted it. It’s the absence of information that proves the connection.

  Consequences, erased.

  Raine thinks about the shadow Lydia Zane sensed at the heart of the forge. The one that wants everything. The stars and the spaces in between. She thinks about what Fel found at the landing grounds.

  Cargo is live.

  Those thoughts put a cold in her more fierce than a deepwinter gale.

  And then her long-range communications set begins to chime.

  Raine gets to her feet. They sting and ache with sitting for so long. The hour is late. She picks up the receiver, enters her authorisation and is greeted with an automated message.

  Priority signal, the message says, in icy machine tones. Immediate attendance is required. Central command. Commissariat hub. Priority signal.

  The message repeats itself until Raine shuts down the link. She picks up her coat and her hat. Her pistol and sabre. Then she stands for a spare moment, looking at the records at her feet, before picking those up too. Just a few. The hardest to dismiss. Tula asked her to think on his words. To choose her deeds carefully, for when she is made to answer for them. But Raine cannot choose carefully now. She cannot ignore the shadow, or the ghosts.

  She can only do what is right, and brace herself for the answer.

  Nine

  Oaths and promises

  When Raine arrives at the commissariat hub, there are no Tempestus Scions guarding the entrance, and Curtz is nowhere to be seen. She does see a figure that she knows, though.

  Lukas Vander.

  He approaches as Raine drops from the Taurox’s steps into the churned mud. Vander doesn’t look immaculate now. He is soaked from the weather and muddy to the knees. His green eyes are wide.

  ‘Raine,’ he says. ‘The priority signal.’

  ‘I received it,’ she says. ‘Why do you think I am here?’

  He grabs at her arm to stop her as she passes him.

  ‘Wait,’ he says. ‘Listen to me.’

  Raine shrugs him free. ‘I came here to speak with Tula,’ she says. ‘Whatever you have to say can wait.’

  Raine heads for the commissariat hub, the records held safe in a weatherproof case. The storm is roaring overhead, bringing flecks of ice on the wind that sting her face.

  ‘Raine!’ Vander is shouting. ‘Wait, damn you!’

  She doesn’t. Raine ignores him as she goes inside and follows the corridor. That is where she finds Curtz. The cadet is sitting with his back to the flakboard wall, his legs drawn up. He is turning something in his hand and muttering. A badge, marked with a golden eagle. The words are prayers, soft-spoken. He flinches when he notices her.

  ‘Sir,’ he mumbles, getting to his feet. ‘My apologies.’

  ‘Where is Tula?’ Raine asks.

  Curtz doesn’t answer, but he glances to the door of Tula’s office. It is ajar.

  ‘Wait,’ Curtz says, just like Vander did.

  Raine ignores him too. That cold feeling has taken hold of her again, a vice grip on her heart and her mind. She goes to the door and pushes it open the rest of the way and sees what Vander must have seen, and Curtz before him. That vice grip tightens so that she can’t speak or blink or move. She almost drops the record case.

  Because lord-commissar Mardan Tula is dead, hanging from the iron support beams of his office by the rope around his neck.

  Raine stands in Tula’s quarters, looking at the way the paper has spilled from the desk. It is scattered across the floor. Dog-eared. There are wet, muddy boot prints on some of those pages, made by the militarum wardens and the medics that came to remove Tula’s body.

  It is such a mess. A mess that he would have hated.

&nbs
p; Raine drops down and starts to pick up the papers.

  ‘You should not have moved him,’ Vander says.

  Raine turns to look at him. Vander is standing in the doorway, his green eyes narrowed. Sylar’s words from the briefing come back to her.

  The Bale Stars will require a good deal more blood to be spent before our work is done.

  Raine looks at Lukas Vander and the coat he wears that’s lined with Kavrone blue and she feels a rush of heat behind her eyes. He is either complicit, or oblivious. She is not sure which she would hate more, but she knows that she wants to hit him again. Over and over. But she won’t. Not here. Not now.

  ‘You should not have cut him down,’ Vander says.

  It had been hard to do, to cut Tula down. To saw through the thick cord that had twisted itself tight, and to lower his body to the floor amongst those scattered papers.

  The weight had been a lot to bear, alone.

  Raine straightens up, with Tula’s papers held in her hand. They are creased and crumpled, and becoming more so because she’s gripping them so tightly.

  ‘You would have had me leave him,’ Raine says. ‘You would have let him hang, in dishonour.’

  Vander scowls at her. ‘It is not about dishonour,’ he says. ‘It is about procedure. About doing things correctly, not that I would expect you to understand that.’

  ‘Procedure,’ Raine says, in disbelief. ‘We are not talking about thievery or laxity or a minor infraction. Tula is dead.’

  ‘I know that!’

  Vander shouts the words. It is the first time Raine has heard him raise his voice away from the field. There’s a break in it, and there’s a break in Vander too. In his posture and his bearing. He crosses to her, standing no more than arm’s reach away.

  ‘Suicide,’ he says. ‘It is a crime. Worse than that, it is cowardice.’

  Raine stares at him. His green eyes are clouded.

  ‘Tula was no coward,’ she says.

  Vander isn’t like Tula was, or Serek is. He isn’t so hard to read. Raine can see the conflict in his face, like two waves colliding before they reach the shore.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘I do not believe that he was.’

  Raine watches him carefully.

  ‘Then what do you believe?’ she asks.

  Vander shakes his head. His eyes stop looking quite so clouded.

  ‘That everyone is capable of making poor choices,’ he says, his voice cold again. ‘Selfish choices.’

  He straightens that blue-lined coat. Raine can see where it has been mended up close, the lining replaced and repaired. It is not quite so immaculate, under hard light.

  ‘You wanted to speak with Tula,’ Vander says. ‘What was it about?’

  Raine turns her back on Vander and puts Tula’s papers down on his desk, square to the edge. The topmost form is marked and countersigned in red by Departmento adepts and holds the seal of the Bale Stars Crusade. Her breath catches in her throat. It is Tula’s copy of the requisition form for the records she had him secure.

  ‘Nothing,’ she says, slipping the form off the stack and into her coat. ‘Just a matter of paperwork.’

  Lydia Zane follows her two birds through a corridor built of stone and black mortar. Ironwork juts from the walls on either side of her, razor-edged, like pharyngeal teeth. All around her, her kinfolk are frozen still in the moment of the fight. Picked out in detail, like a painting in oils. Zane walks between them. She passes by Yulia Crys, locked still in the moment of putting down one of the Sighted with a thrown punch. Zane can see where the impact of it has shattered the Sighted’s teeth as well as his jaw. Fragments hang in the darkness. There is a snarl on Crys’ face. A show of her own teeth. Her eyes are bright with fury. Zane sees all of this by the light of Gereth Awd’s flamer. Caught as it is, the flames remind her of blooming flowers, bright and aching. Zane puts her fingertips close, but she feels no warmth from it. She pulls away like she did from the mess hall. This brightness is not for her. Awd is not looking to what he is burning. He is mid-shout, and he is looking to Wyck.

  Wyck is alone, further out than any of his Wyldfolk, like always. Furthest into the darkness. He has drawn his knife through the throat of one of the Sighted, and an arc of blood follows behind it, glittering. Zane moves closer. There is a fury in Wyck’s eyes too, though it is a different kind to that she saw in Crys’. Bright and aching, just like the fire. Behind Wyck, another figure looms from the darkness, barely a heartbeat from burying his knife in Wyck’s back. The figure is all shadow, no matter how closely Zane looks. No matter how she concentrates, all she can see is the silver of the blade. The serrated edge.

  Zane hears a cry from her birds, and turns to look for them. They wait at the very edge of the light, watching her as they always do.

  ‘Free,’ says the first bird.

  ‘Fall,’ says the second.

  And then the birds take wing and flutter further into the darkness. Zane continues to follow them, leaving her frozen kin behind. The floor becomes wet against her bare feet. She cannot feel her toes. Zane stops a moment and crouches on her heels. It is oil, she thinks, slicked on the floor, though it smells so rich and heady, like the smoke does at a speaking of the words. She puts her fingers into it and they come away black.

  Zane rubs her hand clean on her robes. They are tattered and torn. Spattered with blood, though she cannot recall the making of the damage nor the stains. She cannot remember where it is that she left her darkwood staff, but she misses the weight of it and the cooling presence of the crystals it carries.

  Zane follows her birds until it is so dark that she cannot see the oil-slick floor or the jutting ironwork of the walls. She can only see the birds because they seem to make their own light, soft and indistinct, like candlelight. They perch on something, tapping their clawed toes. It is colder here. Colder the closer she gets. Through her robes and her skin and her muscle and marrow and bones.

  ‘Free,’ says the first bird.

  ‘Fall,’ says the second.

  Zane approaches the birds, and by their flickering light she sees what it is that they perch upon. A casket of dark metal. It is the source of the spreading oil. Of the rich smell like earth and smoke and death. Of the cold. So cold. She blinks frost from her eyelashes.

  Zane puts out her hand. It is bony and pale and crooked like the talons of her birds. She places it flat on the casket and it opens with a hiss and a roar and a blast of icy wind. The birds cry and snap their wings and fly free. Zane can only hear the second as it echoes away into the darkness and leaves her with the casket and what is inside.

  ‘Fall,’ it says. ‘Fall. Fall. Fall. Fall.’

  Zane looks down through coiling mist and dancing motes of ice. She sees then by the light spilling from inside the casket, blue and cold like stars.

  ‘No,’ she says.

  Inside the casket, she sees herself. She is pale as death, her skin stretched thin over her bones. Wires puncture her arms, her legs, her throat. Her head nestles within a coiling mass of cables that hum and sing and scream. They are draining her. Taking her gifts.

  No. Not gifts.

  Her power.

  Her life.

  In the light spilling from the casket, Zane can see the others too. Dozens more caskets that hinge open around her, all cradling the gifted. Other psykers. Some are military, as she is. Some are future-dreamers and gift-sellers. Some are barely old enough to be tithed. The other psykers are all being drained too, turned to nothing but skin and bones by their cable crowns. Figures in black carapace plate stand guard around the caskets. Their eyes are green, glowing discs.

  ‘No,’ Zane says, again, taking a step backwards.

  And she feels, rather than hears, the soft beat of great wings at her back. Zane turns and looks and sees it then, looming over her. A man. No, a monster. With a king’s noble face and ho
oked claws that reach for her and wings that could curve around every one of those caskets. Its talons grow so close that she cannot focus on them.

  ‘No!’

  This time, Zane shouts the word as she snaps awake.

  ‘The King of Winter,’ she whispers, as her artificial eyes adjust to where she is.

  Zane is not in her quarters. She is not even inside the once-scholam anymore. She finds herself outside in the darkness of the muster yard, with the icy rain lashing her skin. It feels like being cut open.

  Like talons, raking her skin.

  Zane’s robes are filthy and soaking, and her feet are bare and numb from the walk she made whilst dreaming. She clutches not her darkwood staff, but the spun dagger that she made for herself, holding it out in a shaking hand as a threat to the darkness.

  Zane thinks of how it felt to stand before that great wicked monster with its mighty wings. The King of Winter is here, on Laxus Secundus. It is seeking the gifted and the cursed alike. The men who came for her did so for the king.

  It is not one of the Sighted.

  She remembers the look in the monster’s eyes. The feelings, boiling from it.

  ‘You are a creature of wanting,’ she says, though she knows that the king cannot hear her. ‘Of pride and ambition.’

  Zane wavers on her feet.

  ‘But that is not all that you are,’ she whispers, slowly lowering her knife. ‘You are hurting. Angry. Afraid.’

  A smile stretches over her teeth.

  ‘Because you too have known the touch of death.’

  And then Lydia Zane stands there and laughs, alone in the rain and the cold and the darkness.

  ‘I think they thought you serious, you know,’ Awd says. ‘Jey and Haro.’

  He is sitting opposite Wyck on the cold stone floor of the Wyldfolk’s billet, heating two tins of protein mash over a gas stove. They both could have gone down to the mess to fetch something with Tian and the void-born, but Wyck couldn’t face the noise, nor their earnest faces. Awd could have gone anyway, but he hasn’t, which means he’s got something to say. Probably something Wyck’s not going to like much. Awd takes one of the tins off the flame with his bare fingers and lets it sit for a moment before sliding it across the floor. Wyck picks it up and pries it open with the edge of his combat blade. The protein mash inside the tin is hot, and the smell of it makes Wyck want to throw up.