Honourbound - Rachel Harrison

by Warhammer 40K

  Not after Tula.

  He helped her. Listened to her. Escalated, on her behalf, and it earned him not just death, but dishonour.

  Dishonour, like Lucia.

  Raine looks away from the letters painted on the wall at the sound of footsteps made deliberately louder so she will hear them. It’s a courtesy.

  ‘Commissar,’ Fel says.

  His face is honest, so Raine can see the concern in it, but they can’t speak openly so close to the Antari quarters.

  ‘Captain,’ she says. ‘Follow me.’

  Raine walks with Fel in silence to a narrow room in one of the abandoned wings of the scholam that the Antari haven’t taken as their own. Before the city fell and the scholam with it, it was a library filled with devotional texts and treatises on tactics. A star map covers the entirety of one wall, showing the full extent of the Bale Stars. Every world and every war. It is embroidered on heavy cloth that has grown damp and started to rot. Their boots disturb the scattered parchments and torn pages that lay strewn across the floor. They have started to blacken and mould too, the way things do when they are left untended. Raine knows that Fel is waiting for her to speak, but it takes her a moment to do it. The smell of the paper and damp cloth is cloying.

  ‘The lord-commissar is dead,’ she says.

  There’s a tremor in Fel that most people wouldn’t catch.

  ‘How?’ he asks her.

  ‘They made it look like suicide,’ Raine says. ‘By hanging.’

  ‘Throne,’ says Fel.

  Raine has never once heard him use that word as a curse. Not in nearly two years.

  ‘Because of the records,’ he says. ‘Just for requesting them.’

  Raine nods.

  ‘They murdered him, and made him seem a coward,’ Fel says.

  ‘Yes,’ Raine says.

  Fel takes a slow breath. ‘Whatever Sylar and the Kavrone are doing, they truly don’t want it seen.’

  Raine nods. ‘They are willing to kill for it,’ she says. ‘Even someone of Tula’s standing and reputation.’

  Raine looks to the star map. Laxus Secundus is a tiny silver knot of threads. One of hundreds, joined by starlanes and marks of fealty.

  ‘I suspect it is a grasp for power,’ she says. ‘A coup. It is no secret that Sylar is ambitious.’

  ‘I overheard two of the Kavrone talking at the landing fields. They made it sound as though he is removing any who refuse him, even his own.’

  ‘We cannot trust any one of them,’ Raine says.

  ‘What about their commissar?’ Fel asks.

  She looks at him. ‘When I arrived at the commissariat headquarters, Vander was already there,’ she says.

  ‘So, he is a part of Sylar’s plan,’ Fel says.

  Raine thinks about that conflict she saw in Vander’s face.

  ‘Or he is ignorant to it,’ she says. ‘Either way, he has failed.’

  ‘And the records?’ Fel asks. ‘What do they show?’

  ‘That the Strixians have died more times than they should have,’ Raine says. ‘And that regimental psykers are being reassigned.’

  ‘Psykers,’ Fel says. ‘Do you think they took Pharo?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Raine allows. ‘Or perhaps that truly was the Sighted.’

  ‘I don’t know which is worse,’ Fel says.

  That Raine can agree with, without question.

  ‘Cargo is live,’ Fel says. ‘That is what the script I took said. Are you telling me that those caskets were for moving witches?’

  ‘In all likelihood.’

  Fel shakes his head. ‘I left them there, to be moved and used like animals. That’s not right, witches or not. We need to find them.’

  ‘The records did not say why they were being moved, or to where. The details were either redacted or omitted.’

  ‘Under whose authority?’ Fel asks, with a frown. ‘Could Sylar do that?’

  ‘Not all of it,’ Raine says. ‘Not without help. Nor could he have done what he did to Tula without allies.’

  Fel is all tension now, of the kind that comes from the implication of threat. ‘You were the one to request the records from Tula,’ he says. ‘Could it be traced back to you?’

  Raine reaches into the pocket of her greatcoat and takes out the form she took from Tula’s office and unfolds it. ‘I found the request form when I cut Tula down, which means that they either missed it, or they left it behind deliberately.’ She smiles, bitterly. ‘Though I suspect they would have come for me already, had it been the latter.’

  Fel shakes his head. He definitely isn’t smiling, bitterly or not.

  ‘We need to do something before they do find out. This has to stop.’

  ‘We cannot act without proof,’ Raine says. ‘We need the original records. All of them. Without redactions or omissions.’

  ‘And how do we go about doing that?’ Fel asks.

  ‘I have an ally left to me in High Command,’ Raine says. ‘I will go to the Munitorum complex in the secondary city and get them myself.’

  Fel shakes his head. ‘We are about to deploy,’ he says. ‘The regiment needs you on the line to watch over them, and the Kavrone.’

  Raine frowns, because he has a point, and because she knows what he’s going to say next.

  ‘I’ll go, and bring the records back to you,’ he says. ‘It’s far less risk.’

  Raine cannot help thinking of Zane’s words, then.

  He is faithful, that one.

  She thinks about the creak of the ironwork supports in Tula’s office and the scattered paper on the floor, and she knows that it is time to say what she came here to say.

  ‘No,’ Raine says. ‘You have done enough already. From now on, I will deal with this. It is my burden to bear.’

  Raine knows how to read Fel’s face. His voice. His bearing. She can see how her words wound him as surely as a cut might.

  ‘You are asking me to turn my back on this,’ Fel says. ‘On you.’

  ‘Yes,’ Raine says.

  He frowns. ‘No,’ he says. ‘I won’t do it.’

  Raine can tell that his heart is clashing with his head, and with the conditioning that makes him what he is. She knows it because she feels it too. It is agony.

  ‘Then I won’t ask you,’ she says. ‘I will order you. Leave it. Forget it. Walk out of here, and back to your kin.’

  She sees him flex his fingers as if they hurt.

  ‘No,’ he says again.

  Raine draws her bolt pistol in one movement and points it at his face. She can see the shake in her hands as she looks at him through the iron sights. That isn’t right. She never shakes.

  Never doubts.

  ‘Think about what you are doing, captain,’ she says. ‘I am giving you a direct order, on commissariat authority. This is insubordination.’

  Fel doesn’t move, nor does he look away.

  ‘Then you had better shoot me, Severina,’ he says. ‘Because I’m going nowhere.’

  Raine shakes her head. ‘Tula is dead,’ she says. ‘Murdered because he chose to help me.’

  ‘It was his choice,’ Fel says. ‘And I have made mine, to stand at your side no matter what fate brings.’

  ‘Truly,’ Raine says. ‘That is your choice?’

  She cannot help but feel they are talking about more than just duty, now.

  Fel nods. ‘Until the end,’ he says.

  Raine lets out the breath she has been holding. She lowers her pistol and holsters it. ‘Until the end, then.’

  She puts out her hand and Fel takes hold of it in his own as a way to seal the promise. Both her hands and his are scarred and rough from lifetimes spent fighting. The moment of contact is brief, and then it is over and Raine knows what she needs to do.

  ‘There is something t
hat you should know, if we are going to do this,’ she says. ‘A story I owe you.’

  She puts her free hand in her pocket and takes out the timepiece. Even with its broken face, the ticking is still a comfort.

  Fel nods, with understanding in his grey eyes. He asked her about the timepiece once before, a long time ago now. Raine had only told him that it had once belonged to her sister and that her sister was dead. That was all she could bring herself to say, and he had known better than to ask any further.

  ‘This was a gift to my mother from my father,’ she says, tracing the curve of the case with her thumb. ‘So the story belongs to them as much as me.’

  She keeps looking at the timepiece as she talks.

  ‘My mother was Thema Raine,’ she says. ‘She was Lord-General Militant before Serek. She was fierce and strong. An Imperial hero.’

  Fel must know the name, but he doesn’t speak. He lets her continue. Raine is glad of it, because if she stops, she knows she would not be able to begin again.

  ‘My father was not. He was my mother’s greatest mistake. His name was Ewyn Lauder.’ Raine pauses, letting the words hang in the air. She has not said her father’s name aloud since she lost Lucia. ‘He was a line soldier, a captain in the Darpex One Hundred and Seventy-Fifth.’

  She rolls her fingers tighter around the timepiece and the case creaks under them.

  ‘Five years after I was born, he was fighting in the first civil war on Paxar. It was an ugly war, like this one. There were many losses. Weakness was rife.’

  She finally looks Fel in the eyes.

  ‘His platoon got cut off from the rest of their regiment behind enemy lines, and instead of standing to the last or fighting his way back with his soldiers, my father chose to flee. He abandoned his men and left them to die at the hands of traitors.’

  Raine’s heart is loud in her ears as if she is running under fire.

  ‘I have seen the records,’ she says. ‘The transcription of his confession. He said that he ran because of his daughters. Because he could not bear to die, knowing that Lucia and I would be left behind. He made us the cause of his cowardice, and then he died anyway, and left us to bear that. To bear the weakness of his blood. A coward’s blood.’

  She waits for that change in his face, and the judgement she has seen everywhere else, but it doesn’t manifest. There is no change in Andren Fel.

  ‘Severina,’ he says. ‘You are not your father. His weakness does not make you weak.’

  ‘We spent our lives telling ourselves that,’ Raine says. ‘My sister and I. That we would do better than our blood. Lucia took this timepiece from my mother’s things when she died as a reminder of what made us.’

  She turns the timepiece in her hand and looks at Lucia’s name etched into the back of it.

  ‘But then I lost her too,’ she says.

  Gloam, before

  Severina spits blood onto the old wooden boards of the training hall floor. She is breathing hard, which hurts from whatever is cracked in her chest. Illariya is trying to get up with fury in her eyes. Cozelt is out cold.

  ‘Cease.’

  Drill-abbot Ifyn’s voice carries across the hall. He waves two aides over, who pick up Cozelt and carry him clear. Illariya won’t accept help to get up. She leans on her training blade to do it instead.

  ‘Raine,’ Ifyn says. ‘I must speak with you.’

  Severina sheathes the training blade in the scabbard at her belt. She tries to think what his words might be as she follows him from the training hall. If she performed poorly, or if there is a lesson in the fight that she did not perceive. Even now, with hardly a month left until her graduation to cadet, there are always more lessons.

  Ifyn’s office is a spare cell, like a devotional chamber, save for the wooden desk that dominates it. He takes a seat on the far side.

  ‘Sit,’ he says to her.

  Severina does as she is told. She keeps her back straight and her hands knitted in her lap. She cannot think what it might be. She has undertaken every duty. She won the fight against Cozelt and Illariya fairly, even though they worked together against her.

  ‘Severina,’ he says.

  Ifyn’s face is impassive and cold, as ever, but the use of her given name steals the breath from Severina’s lungs. She blinks. In the moment before he speaks again, she feels a long shadow bear down on her. Heavy on her shoulders, like a weighted cloak.

  She can see that his words are going to hurt.

  ‘This concerns your sister,’ he says.

  Severina blinks again, and sees a hundred deaths for Lucia on the backs of her eyelids. They are all violent and cruel and each one of them breaks her heart, just a little.

  ‘She is dead,’ Severina says. ‘Is that it, master?’

  Ifyn shakes his head.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘She is not dead.’

  For the first time since she was introduced to Ifyn, all those years ago on the landing platform over the ocean, he looks troubled. Severina’s mind begins to rush with even uglier possibilities.

  ‘Your sister has been found guilty of acts of treason and dissent,’ he says.

  The words hit Severina like a physical blow. Her chest aches, worse than before. She clenches her fists, feeling her fingernails press into her palms.

  ‘No,’ she says.

  But she is thinking about that day in the chapel. The day that has haunted her since. The fear and wildness in Lucia’s dark eyes.

  ‘Your sister has chosen to stand against High Command,’ Ifyn says. Severina notices that he will not say Lucia’s name. ‘She has been leaking information to the enemy for months in order to orchestrate the elimination of key members of the command elite. She intended to destabilise and destroy the crusade.’

  ‘No,’ Severina says again. Her jaw aches.

  Ifyn shakes his head. ‘She broke faith, Severina. Your sister is a traitor.’

  Severina wants to scream. To shout. To throw herself at Ifyn and lock her hands around his throat and make him go silent and still. She does none of these things, though. Instead, her injured, shattered heart turns inwards and draws up walls around itself, and she asks the question that she knows and dreads the answer to.

  ‘What will happen to her?’ she says.

  Her voice doesn’t sound like her own. It sounds like some other young woman, cold and distant, as if heard through glass.

  ‘She faces summary execution by firing squad,’ Ifyn says. ‘In one week’s time.’

  Severina thinks of every time she has fired her pistol in training. Of the squeeze of the trigger. The hammer strike. The flame. Then she thinks of Lucia’s eyes. Of the fear she saw in them that day in the chapel. But not just that. She thinks of her sister’s laugh. Of her cleverness and her wicked temper. Of her hand taking hold of Severina’s own on that day on Darpex so long ago. The day they lost their mother. She tries to let the memories go, to push them aside along with her sister and that terrible pain in her chest that cannot just be a broken rib or bruising. It feels like dying.

  ‘That will be all,’ Ifyn says. ‘Return to your duties.’

  Severina slowly uncurls her fingers. The nail-marks in her palms are purple and deep.

  ‘Yes, master,’ she says. ‘To my duties.’

  Ten

  Into shadows

  Andren Fel goes to speak with Tyl before dawn. Before the muster. She is sitting in her quarters cleaning her tattoo needles carefully in boiled and salted water. Fel can see where she has used them to ink a set of balance scales on the inside of her forearm. The arms of the scales look like tree branches, and in each weighing pan, there is a heart.

  ‘Balance,’ she says, when she sees him looking. ‘Thought it made a good reminder.’

  ‘That is why I need to speak to you,’ Fel says. ‘There is something I need to do. A duty. One that me
ans I won’t be going with you into the Sanctum.’

  The needles ring against the dish as Tyl drops them and allows them to sink in the salted water.

  ‘A duty,’ she says, slowly. ‘Captain, what are you talking about?’

  Fel wants to tell her. He trusts Tyl with his life, and with his Duskhounds too. He knows she would help them without a second thought. So would Myre and Jeth, if he asked it of them.

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

  ‘It’s need-to-know,’ he says. ‘I can’t tell you.’

  That’s the moment. The one that cuts like taking hold of a loop of thorns to keep from falling. She looks at him like he has turned his back on them.

  And he knows that he has more than earned that look.

  ‘It’s important, this thing,’ he says. ‘If I could let it be, I would, but I can’t.’

  That’s when he sees that instinct kick in for Tyl. The need to obey that weighs heavy. The same instinct he had to fight all the while when he was talking to Raine.

  ‘I won’t ask you to, captain,’ Tyl says. ‘It’s not my place.’

  Tyl takes the needles out of the salted water and lines them up on a clean linen to dry. The water and the heated steel must burn her hands, but she doesn’t flinch from it.

  ‘Watch carefully in that place,’ Fel says. ‘From every corner. Every angle. Understood?’

  Tyl frowns at him. ‘I will,’ she says. ‘Fate guide you, captain.’

  On hearing those words, Fel can’t help feeling as if it is now, more than it ever has.

  Do you still truly believe that your sister betrayed the crusade?

  That is what Fel had asked her, after Raine had told him of Lucia’s execution and the way she had changed in the lead up to it. The wildness of her eyes.

  Raine had been unable to answer the question honestly, so she had not answered it at all, but the question has made a space inside her to call its own, and now she cannot stop thinking of it. Of the hate and anger that she used to repaint every memory of her sister, and what it would mean if that were unjustified.