‘Throne, it is true,’ Drake says, softly.
‘You do not understand,’ Serek snarls. ‘You cannot. I have given everything for this crusade. I have torn down cities. Laid waste to armies. I have taken every wound and stayed standing, but it was still not enough. I would have lost everything I have given, and everything that I have done. My crusade and my sector, all because of a weakness in my blood.’
When he looks back at Raine there is so much hatred in his crystal-blue eyes.
‘I denied it,’ he says. ‘I changed my fate for the sake of my Bale Stars. For the sake of my crusade.’
‘No,’ Raine says. ‘You denied it for the sake of no one but yourself.’
And she fires her pistol. The boom of it echoes in the vaulted chamber, and Serek falls backwards into his gilded throne. Blood mists the air.
And the chamber erupts with agonised noise and gunfire.
Lydia Zane cannot help feeling the pull of sorrow, watching Alar Serek fall and die. Not because he had not earned such a death. His sins more than fated it. Zane feels sorrow because a part of her believes that Serek’s sins grew from noble intent. From momentary weakness, when remaining strong mattered most.
Zane blinks away the sorrow as she throws herself through the melee that the audience chamber has become. Her bare feet slip on the bloodied floor. Her limbs ache, and her lungs burn with every breath. Without her gifts, Zane is weak. Limited. But she knows exactly who it is who has taken them, and she will have them back.
She will use them for what is right. She will remain strong.
The soulblind Lion is heavily-built and tall with a blunted, war-scarred face. He is well-armoured and well-armed, too, with a pistol and rifle and a brutal combat blade, but the Lion is distracted by Raine and Tyl and Jeth and the execution of his master. He does not know that Zane is close until she has punched her darkwood dagger into his back, into the space between his carapace plates. Into the space just beside his spine.
The soulblind Lion cries out then, and drops his pistol. Blood wells over Zane’s hands as she pulls the blade free again. The Lion twists around and drives his fist into her face. Zane falls onto her back and the Lion comes with her, leaning all of his weight on her chest. He puts his big, blunt hands around her throat and squeezes. The absence of his soul worries at Zane even as he chokes the life from her. Zane’s false eyes stutter and dazzle. Her lungs burn and over the ringing in her ears she hears him speak.
‘You’re nothing without your magicks, witch,’ he snarls.
Those words make Zane’s heart stir, even as it aches and struggles and thunders in her ears and she screams through her teeth and punches the darkwood blade into his left eye. The Lion lets her go, moaning shapelessly with the blade buried so deep. He rolls clear of Zane and seizes and shakes and dies slowly. Slowly enough for Zane’s voice to return to her.
‘Even without my magicks, I am still Antari,’ she rasps. ‘And that is enough.’
The audience chamber is a warzone.
All around Raine, the Lions of Bale advance, firing into the crowd. The Antari surge forwards and fight back even though they are unarmed. Juna Keene knocks one of Serek’s Lions to the ground with a heavy punch from her augmetic arm while Sale Devri fires a stolen pistol, defending her. On the dais, the remaining five members of High Command are intent on killing one another. Veris Drake is taking cover behind her ornate, gilded throne, trading fire with Lord-Castellan Caradris. General-Primary Hu Sul is locked in a duel of sabres with Gulieta Vallah. High-King Araxis is crawling along the marble to escape danger, his fine robes tattered and spattered with blood.
‘Traitor!’
Raine turns at the sound of Kaspar Sylar’s voice as he fires on her with his ornate pistol. The high-yield las-round impacts against Raine’s chest-plate, winding her, and knocking out her aim. Before Sylar can fire again, a loud boom splits the air and Sylar falls messily onto the marble floor, executed by Lukas Vander.
‘Raine!’ he shouts, over the noise. ‘The kastelan!’
Serek’s slaved automaton steps down off the dais with a heavy thud. Crimson lights glow from within its face-plate as it turns its domed head towards Raine. She raises her pistol and fires three times as it moves inexorably towards her. The bolt-rounds put craters in its metallic hide, but the kastelan keeps coming with smoke trailing from its armour and lightning crackling around its heavy fists. Raine takes a step backwards, and fires again. That shot shatters the kastelan’s face-plate. Tyl and Jeth chase her gunfire with their own high-powered las-fire. The kastelan blares machine noise and staggers, blinded. Raine ducks away as it swings for her, crashing its powered fist against the floor and powdering the marble. She draws her sabre. Evenfall is made for endings, and it sings as Raine splits the kastelan’s armour with it, cutting a deep groove up the front of the automaton’s chest and its domed head, sending sparks and smoke into the air. The power fields on the automaton’s fists flicker and die, but it still rears up again, blaring static and shedding sparks and shaking the marble with its ponderous, inexorable tread. It raises its massive fist again.
And then the kastelan automaton crumples and folds and bends and ruptures, catching fire as it dies. The automaton falls forwards and hits the marble with a thunderous crack, still burning. Felled, like a tree.
Lydia Zane falls to her knees beside Raine. The Antari psyker is bloodied and bruised, panting like a hunted animal.
‘It is not over,’ she rasps, and points to the dais.
A spear of light lances up from Serek’s gilded throne, stealing Raine’s vision for a split second. When her sight returns, Alar Serek is on his feet once again. His white tunic is painted red with blood and his arctic eyes no longer remain.
Blue fire burns in their place.
There is a mournful roar around Raine from every soul in the chamber. She hears cries of Chaos, of traitor and of the Antari word that means sent-from-the-hells as they all recognise Serek for what he has become.
‘Heretic,’ Raine says, and she points her pistol at Serek, and pulls the trigger.
The others all fire on him too. Everyone who can. Light blooms on the dais a second time from las-fire and detonating pistol rounds, but when it clears, Serek still stands. The blue fire in his eyes burns all the brighter.
‘Enough,’ he says.
And everyone in the chamber around Raine freezes. Silence falls like a shroud as Serek descends to the gallery floor with his sabre drawn. It trails splinters of darkness that look for all the world like feathers. He moves for Raine, almost too quickly to see, and she barely turns aside his sword with her own.
‘You look at me with such hate,’ he says, his voice a twinned echo of the one she knew.
‘Because you are a monster,’ Raine snarls.
She turns his sword aside again and brings Evenfall around in a glittering arc. It is as fast as she has ever moved.
Fast enough to cut him.
Evenfall’s powered blade draws a thin red line across Serek’s sword arm. Black blood sprays into the air. Raine catches the scent of death as Serek bellows and attacks again. Raine parries, but it rattles her arm so numb that she cannot catch his next strike. The one that plunges straight through her armour and into her chest. She loses her grip on her sabre and her pistol. They clatter to the floor beside her as Serek kicks her onto her back. He puts his boot on her chest, and Raine’s vision dazzles.
‘I am not a monster,’ Serek says. ‘I am what is necessary. In the decade since Steadfast we have reclaimed more worlds than in the first thirty years of the crusade combined. We have felled tyrants, and toppled citadels, but our enemies are changing and so too must we. Only through change can we endure.’
‘No,’ Raine manages to say, ‘we endure through faith. We endure through will, and great sacrifice in the God-Emperor’s name.’
Serek shakes his head. ‘The God-Emperor,’ he says,
coldly. ‘I dedicated my life to service in His name. I fought and bled and killed for Him, but when my body failed me, and I looked to Him for salvation, He turned His golden eyes elsewhere. After all I had done.’
‘Because He does not deal in mercy,’ Raine says. ‘To seek it is weakness.’
‘Weakness is limiting yourself,’ Serek says. ‘Weakness is knowing that great power lies within your reach and failing to use it. With those machines I could change everything, Severina. I could reverse the massacre at Coris. I could undo the Shattered Years. I could twist the ropes of fate around the Nine and unmake them. I could restore the Bale Stars, edge to edge. Every injustice, undone. It is not too late.’
The balefire in Serek’s eyes flickers and he extends his hand to her.
‘I can spare you. I can spare everyone.’
For an instant, Raine thinks of it. Of the unwriting of all those wars, and the blood it would spare. She thinks too of Lucia. Of what it would mean to be able to bring back her sister, and to undo that particular injustice. To unsay all of those terrible things that she said, and to be made whole again.
But then Raine thinks too of what Lucia said those years ago on the platform over Gloam’s angry ocean.
They wanted to build a new world, and poison seemed a small price to pay.
And she knows that no matter the reward, poison is always too much to pay.
With incredible, blinding effort, Raine reaches out and grabs her bolt pistol. Raises and fires it. Bloody mist scatters across her as Serek staggers backwards, bleeding anew from that old wound of his. Bleeding black. His hold on the others breaks, and they right themselves and rally and fire upon him. The hail of las-fire pushes him backwards as Antari hands pull Raine back to her feet. Keene and Devri. Raine’s blood drips onto the marble as she advances on Serek and raises her pistol again. The Antari follow her. The Kavrone too. Vander and the Lions that are left standing. Serek is pushed back against the edge of the dais by the weight of las-fire and by Lydia Zane. The psyker bleeds anew through her bandages as she forces the monster that was once Alar Serek to his knees, burned and bleeding and trailing smoke.
‘Lord-General Militant Alar Serek,’ Raine says, between ragged breaths. ‘I find you in dereliction of your duty to the Bale Stars Crusade, and to our Holy Lord on Terra. The punishment for this is death.’
Serek looks up at her then, and for a moment, his eyes are not lit by balefire. They do not look like cut crystal. They are a deeper shade of blue, like a twilight sky. They are his own.
‘I just wanted to live,’ Serek says, softly. ‘I was afraid. Angry.’
Raine shakes her head. ‘There is fear in everyone,’ she says. ‘And anger. It is what we choose to do in the face of it that damns or defines us.’
Serek nods, slowly. ‘Those are good words, Severina Raine,’ he says, in his odd, echoing voice. ‘Words to die by.’
And then Raine pulls the trigger, and her pistol barks and Alar Serek does die.
Truly, this time.
The Wrath Unending, before
Raine calls only for a chosen few. Those that she has the best measure of, whose responses she can best predict and direct. The first is Juna Keene. The Antari general is a necessity. Without her, the plan will not work. Raine calls for the three captains, too, to help her enact it. Yuri Hale, Sale Devri and Karin Sun. The last of Fel’s Duskhounds and Nuria Lye. Last of all, Raine sends for Lydia Zane, because the plan will not work without her, either.
And because there is little point in trying to keep secrets from a psyker.
The meeting takes place in a disused storage chamber in the lower decks of the Wrath Unending during their warp-transit towards the Laxian shipyards. Old wounds from the Wrath’s many fleet engagements mar the walls and deck. The damage has been repaired, but not concealed. Like the Antari, it wears its scars openly.
‘This feels like trouble, commissar,’ Hale says.
He sits on one of the old crates beside Devri. Karin Sun stays on his feet, with his arms folded.
‘I am inclined to agree, captain,’ Juna Keene says. ‘What are we doing down here, Raine?’
The Antari general is seated too, on another of the crates. Keene makes a show of looking at ease, but Raine can see suspicion in her grey eyes.
‘You found the manticore,’ Zane says, absently. ‘That is why we are here.’
The psyker is sitting with her legs crossed beneath her on the treadplate of the floor. Like always, when they are aboard ship, she is barefoot.
Keene frowns. ‘Manticore,’ she says. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘This is what the captain spoke of, isn’t it?’ Tyl asks. ‘What he couldn’t tell me.’
‘It is what he bled for,’ Raine says. ‘What so many have died for.’
She takes out the datakey from the pocket of her greatcoat and loads it into a portable hololith projector which she places on the floor.
‘It is the truth,’ she says.
And then she spools up Isabella Luz’s records and lets them play. It is no easier to watch it a second time, even after speaking with Serek and seeing the truth of it in his face. Raine wants to cry out all over again. The Antari are silent throughout, and for what seems a long time afterwards too. All Raine can hear is the burn of the Wrath’s engines.
‘He is the manticore,’ Zane says, softly. ‘He who was afraid to die, so he twisted free of the noose.’
‘Serek,’ Keene says. ‘This cannot be true.’
The general gets to her feet as if she wants to leave but goes nowhere. She just stands, tensed like a threatened animal. Nuria Lye thumps her fist against the crate she is sitting on and curses softly, in Antari. Raine catches the phrase oath-breaker.
‘Serek killed Dektar the Ascended,’ Hale says, with his head in his hands. ‘He liberated Steadfast and Paxar and saved us from death in the forges. He is the crusade.’
Karin Sun says nothing, but Raine sees a tear roll down his blunted, scarred face. He doesn’t try to brush it away.
‘It can’t be,’ Devri says. ‘It just can’t.’
Cassia Tyl shakes her head. She looks resigned. ‘Of course it can,’ she says, in a hollow voice. ‘Fate-marks don’t lie. Serek was broken by the threat of death.’
‘And he made a choice that changed him,’ Jeth says.
‘The man that Serek once was is dead,’ Raine says. ‘He died on Steadfast, all of those years ago. He died the moment he made that choice.’
She pulls the datakey and Isabella Luz’s frozen face disappears.
‘Serek means for me to die at the shipyards,’ she says. ‘He is willing to sentence the entire regiment to death if needs be, to keep his secret.’
She looks at the Antari.
‘But we will not die. We will emerge from the Laxian shipyards victorious, and then we will expose him for what he truly is.’
‘He will come for you,’ Zane says. The psyker speaks with cold certainty. ‘The moment he learns that you live, he will hunt you. He cannot afford to stop.’
Raine nods. She hasn’t stopped thinking about it since leaving the Bale’s Heart.
‘I know,’ she says. ‘That is why he must believe me dead.’
‘And once you’re dead?’ Karin Sun asks. ‘What then?’
‘Serek is bound by the expectations of the rest of High Command,’ Raine says. ‘He could not call an order like that and let victory pass without a ceremony to mark it. He will look upon it as a display of power. A chance to show anybody left who might challenge him what happens to those who do. Serek thinks himself above reproach, and that in itself is another advantage.’
‘Nobody is above reproach,’ Keene says. ‘Nor beyond the reach of death and judgement.’
‘Just killing Serek is not enough,’ Raine says. ‘He has to be exposed. Torn down in front of everyone else. It
is not enough to cut out the source of the rot, everything touched by it must be removed too.’
Raine takes a breath.
‘But I cannot do this alone,’ she says. ‘So, I am asking you to stand with me.’
There is a moment of silence amongst the Antari. Raine knows that they are waiting for their general to speak. Juna Keene raises her augmetic arm and turns her hand to look at it.
‘I earned this arm fighting on Cawter in Serek’s name, hoping that I could prove myself as strong as he was on Steadfast.’
Keene exhales a slow breath and extends her hand. Raine grips Juna Keene’s hand, and the general claps her on the shoulder.
‘We will stand with you, Severina Raine,’ she says. ‘Loyalty, before the threat of death.’
‘For the Bale Stars,’ Raine says. ‘For the Emperor.’
The Antari all speak those last three words with her. Keene lets go of Raine’s hand. She nods her head and gestures to her captains.
‘We have much to do,’ she says. ‘So, let’s get to it.’
Everyone leaves the room then, save for Cassia Tyl. Raine knows what Tyl is going to say before she speaks.
‘You’ll want this keeping from the captain,’ she says.
Raine hasn’t stopped thinking about that since leaving the Bale’s Heart either, and she knows her answer. It’s just the saying of it.
‘He cannot know,’ she says. ‘Not any of it.’
Tyl’s face clouds, but she nods her head. ‘Operational risk, commissar. I understand.’
Raine nods, though it’s not just about operational risk. She trusts Andren Fel with her life. She will not tell him her plan because she knows that he will try to aid her, when he can’t. That he’ll likely get himself killed into the bargain. Raine knows what it will do to him, to think her dead, but it cannot change her answer.
All that Raine can do is hope that she is still standing at the end of all of this to ask his forgiveness.
Twenty-four
An empty throne
Severina Raine stands in the audience chamber aboard the Bale’s Heart. The blood has been cleaned from the marble, but the damage from gunfire remains. From the killing shot she fired on Serek. The damage is deep. Cracks spread through the stone from it, long and dark. The damage done to Raine runs deep too. Every movement pulls at the stitching and cautery in her chest. Her broken ribs ache, as does the gunshot wound she took from Sylar. But she is still standing. She endures, just like the marble, and the Bale’s Heart.
Honourbound - Rachel Harrison Page 40
