Alrecht staggered back from the lectern. His robe caught on a spike protruding from beneath the book. The tortured face of the mummy screamed mutely at him. He tried to pull free, and it was as if the tome were holding him fast. Alrecht reached inside his robe as he struggled and pulled out the parchment. He threw the page at Neferata. It fluttered in the air and fell only a few feet from the lectern.
Alrecht wrenched himself free, tearing his robe, leaving a long strip of cloth hanging from the lectern. He ran for the door to the Claw of Memory. It had opened easily for him. Now it remained stubbornly closed. Sobbing, he yanked at it, too terrified to look back and see what was coming for him. His neck prickled in anticipation of the touch of a blade.
Then the door ground open. As Alrecht slipped through, he did look back. He saw Neferata holding up the cloth to the stalker. Then he was running.
The glow from the Claw of Memory followed him, lighting his way. He ran without thought or plan. He thought he had been lost before. Now, he truly was. Everything was lost to him.
He did not know how he got out of the palace. His flight was a blur of dark corridors and the distant laughter of Neferata ringing in his ears. But he was out, and in the streets of Nulahmia. He could think again, though that only increased his terror, because he knew why Neferata had not killed him in the Claw of Memory. She had chosen to toy with him. It would have been a mercy to die in the library. Instead, that thing was going to come for him. He would live with the torment of dread until then. He could feel the spectre's approach, picture its unhurried, relentless glide towards its appointment with him. There was nothing he could do to stop it.
But maybe he could end the curse. Perhaps he could redeem the centuries of futility, his family's unending expiation for Karlet's theft. Alrecht had failed his ancestors, and they had failed too. He swore he would not foil his son. Alrecht would give Lorron and his descendants the legacy of a true history, one they must never forget.
Nulahmia surrounded him with shadow. Every darkened alley and every gaping threshold of every house and every vault threatened to reveal the stalker. He moved as quickly as he could, running when he had the breath. He stuck to the great boulevards, hiding himself in the crowds. He tried to measure his progress against his memory of the hunter's unhurried movement. From stables at the western wall of the city, he paid for a horse and rode the beast to exhaustion. The wind in his ears was the keen of air through the skull of the glaivewraith stalker, and if he listened more closely than he dared, he would still hear Neferata's laughter.
Alrecht reached his house in Enthymia the following night. At the door, he looked around for the gliding, shrouded form. It was not upon him yet. 'Let there be time,' he muttered. 'Please, let there be time.' He did not know to whom he was pleading.
He slammed the door and barred it, though he knew the gesture was useless, and ran past his startled wife to his study.
Hallaya followed him. 'What is it?' she asked. 'Did you succeed?'
'Lies,' he told her. 'All lies.' He sat at his desk and snatched up a quill and a handful of vellum sheets. 'Where is Lorron?'
'In bed. Asleep.'
'Lock his door, and this one.' He grasped Hallaya's hand. 'I'm sorry,' he said, tears coursing down his cheeks. 'I'm so sorry. My time has come. This is the last thing I can do for you and Lorron. I love you both so much, and that is why I must do this.'
Hallaya ran from the room, and Alrecht turned to his task. He wrote frenziedly. There was too much he had to say, too much to explain, in order to bring this to an end. His hand shook, and his writing was a barely legible scrawl. Words came out in a jumble. He had no time to shape a careful argument. Each moment might be his last. When the door opened again, he yelped and dropped the quill.
It was Hallaya, come back to lock the door on this side.
'No!' Alrecht said. 'You have to leave me! You mustn't be here when it comes!'
'When what comes? I don't understand.' She came and threw her arms around him.
I don't understand. That was his fear. That was the terror that surpassed even that of his coming end - that she would not understand, that Lorron would not understand, that no one would understand. His life had been in vain. His death might be too.
Alrecht pulled free of Hallaya's embrace. 'I have to write this,' he said. 'I have to finish.'
The door flew off its hinges. The glaivewraith stalker floated into the room, its blade pointed at Alrecht's heart, its eye sockets empty yet filled with dreadful purpose.
Neferata entered the boy's bedroom. Lorron Verdurin couldn't have been more than eight years old. He was sitting up in bed, holding the rough woollen blanket up to his chin. His eyes were wide with fear, but when he saw Neferata, wonder suffused his face too.
Neferata smiled and shut the door, muffling the screams and the sound of ripping coming from Alrecht's study. She walked over to Lorron, sat on the side of his bed and stroked his hair. 'Don't be afraid,' she said. 'You are safe.'
'Who are you?' the boy croaked. 'Are you a queen?'
'I am. I am your queen. And I have come with a gift for you. And a secret.'
The screams stopped. The glaivewraith stalker had completed its task. Now there were only Hallaya's sobs.
'Do you want to know the secret?' Neferata asked Lorron, distracting him from the sounds of his mother's distress.
'What is it?' he asked.
'Tomorrow, your mother will tell you things about your father, and she will be wrong. She will try to understand, and try to help you understand, some things your father has written. She will not be able to, because they cannot be understood. I am sorry to tell you this, but it is the truth.' She soothed and mesmerised as she spoke. The child stared and nodded. 'So that is the secret. No matter what people say, remember that there is nothing to understand in your father's writings. You must turn all of your thoughts to my gift... Would you like to see it?'
Lorron nodded again.
Neferata opened a scroll tube and removed the parchment inside. She gave it to Lorron. 'This,' she said, 'is one of my most precious treasures. When you are wise enough, you will come to know what it means.'
She had to fight back laughter as she told the great lie. The second purpose of the conclave was fulfilled. She had lured Alrecht Verdurin to the palace, and he, at long last, had been the member of his clan to bring the stolen page with him. The archives of the Claw of Memory were complete once more. But the punishment of the Verdurins would not end. They had paid for Karlet's theft with generations of futile effort. Now they would have a new page to drive them to madness, one she had written for them. The runes on the parchment had no meaning, but they seemed to. They gestured towards a great revelation that did not exist. And Lorron's childhood memory of this night and his encounter with her would grow and poison all his descendants to come.
She leaned forwards and kissed the boy's cheek. 'Study and grow wise,' she whispered, 'until the day comes when you can read your gift.'
THE DARKLING HOURS
RACHEL HARRISON
The city of Termina never stops singing.
Commissar Severina Raine knows that the sound is just the wind cutting through the city's many mineshafts and tunnels. It can be heard all over Termina, from the refineries on the surface to the processing plants far below, where Raine and her regiment, the Eleventh Antari Rifles, are billeted. There is no escaping the city's singing, but in the old overseer's watch room where Raine now sits and waits it is at least a little quieter. The hanging lumens overhead turn in that same wind as it finds its way through cracks in the poorly plastered walls. Light glances off the casing of Raine's timepiece as she watches the hands tick around towards the crack in the top of the face. Her body aches from the previous day of fighting and her eyes are dry and gritty. She should be taking the time she has been given to sleep, but she finds that she cannot. Not while the fight goes on above her.
And certainly not with the city singing.
'It sounds like something
living, don't you think?'
Raine clicks her timepiece closed and puts it back in the chest pocket of her coat. Andren Fel takes a seat on the opposite side of the overseer's table and hands her a tin cup with a loop of thorns scored into the rim. It is warm to the touch from the windfall tea inside it. 'I think it sounds like singing,' Raine says.
'Or howling,' Fel says. 'Either way, it is sorrowful.'
The storm trooper captain is unarmoured, clad in black fatigues that are sewn with the red bars that mark his rank. Fel's dark hair has got nearly to the length where it can tangle, and his face is cut and bruised. His densely tattooed hands are split badly across the knuckles. He is also meant to be taking the two hours they have been given to rest, but Raine knows that is as difficult for him as it is for her. That is why they often spend these hours talking.
'Shouldn't howling be a comfort for a Duskhound?' Raine asks.
Fel laughs at that, a low chuckle. 'True enough,' he says.
A tremor runs through the undercroft that makes the overhead lumens flicker and hum. Dust falls in fine columns from the ceiling and scatters on the wooden surface of the table.
'I saw Devri on the way up,' Fel says. 'He had to pull Blue Company out of the docks. The Sighted sank the lot to keep them from pushing up to the drilling fields.'
Raine nods and drinks from her tin cup. The windfall tea is bitter and spiced. It only grows on Antar, and only in the Northwilds, where Fel was raised before he was taken for the Schola Antari.
'Whatever the Sighted intend to take from Termina, it is in the mines,' Raine says. 'They have either abandoned or destroyed key locations all across the city, but they refuse to surrender the pits.'
'Seems a lot of blood to spend for the sake of promethium,' Fel says.
Raine nods. 'If they just wanted promethium they wouldn't have fled the refineries. It must be something else. Something they can twist and use.'
'Something buried deep,' Fel says.
A second, larger tremor shakes the room. More dust falls from the ceiling, and the lumens fail altogether for a moment. In the brief instant of absolute darkness Raine can't help thinking of the battle before this one, on Gholl, where she was captured by the Sighted and taken into the crystal caverns under the surface.
Buried, deep.
Raine pushes the memory - and the unease that comes with it - aside. She drinks from her tin cup again, nearly draining it. When she puts it down, the leaves cling to the enamel inside.
'You read the leaves before every fight, don't you?' she asks Fel.
He looks down at his own cup and nods. 'I do.'
'Would you show me how it's done?'
'I thought you didn't believe in omens or fates,' he says.
Raine shakes her head. 'I don't, but you do.'
Fel smiles. 'All right,' he says. 'I'll show you.'
Raine holds out her cup to hand it to him, but he shakes his head.
'It has to be you that sets the leaves, so that our fates don't get crossed.' He shows her using his own cup. 'Turn the tea three times, and then tip out what's left.'
Raine does as he says, and tips the remains of her windfall tea out onto the floor before putting her cup back on table between them.
'Where did you learn this?' Raine asks.
'My mother taught me,' Fel says simply.
Raine understands then why the ritual means so much, because it must remind him of home, and of the family he lost. Raine feels the timepiece ticking in her pocket like a second heartbeat.
Fel picks up the cup in his tattooed hand and frowns. Raine cannot help it. She leans forward, just slightly. 'What do you see?' she asks.
'Hunting birds,' he says, turning the cup so that she can see. 'For a chase that ends in blood.'
Raine catches herself smiling.
'Not so surprising,' she says. 'And the rest?'
He turns the cup as if to look at it another way, still frowning. 'The duskhound,' he says, after a moment.
'The story that your squad is named for,' Raine says.
Fel nods.
'What does it mean?' Raine asks, though she can guess, because he's told her the old story.
Fel puts the cup down on the table.
'It means death, following close by.'
The overhead lumens stutter again.
'Isn't it always?' Raine asks.
The vox-bead Raine wears crackles in her ear before Fel can answer her. It is the Antari general, Juna Keene. From the way Fel reacts, Raine can tell he is receiving the same message.
'The timetable has moved up. Tactical briefing in ten minutes in the main control hub.'
'Acknowledged,' Raine says, into her vox-link. She hears Fel do the same.
'Back to duty, then, captain,' she says.
Fel nods and picks up the tin cups.
'Aye, commissar,' he says.
In the quiet that follows his words, Raine listens to the sound echoing from Termina's tunnels and hollows, and realises that she was wrong, and Fel was right.
It really does sound like howling.
The tactical briefing takes place in the old refinery control hub around a hololith projector that's been mounted on the main console. The other lights in the large, rust-stained chamber are switched off to allow the projection to show clearly, leaving most of the hub in shadows.
Andren Fel stands in those shadows and watches the hololith turn, memorising the details by habit. Distances and depth. The number of menial crew. Ingress points and exit options. It is how he always prepares for an operation, but today it is more than that. It is a welcome distraction from the shape he saw in the leaves. In Raine's fate.
The duskhound.
Death.
Raine stands on the opposite side of the hololith from him now, her angular face cast in hard shadows. The green light from the projection catches the edges of her commissariat uniform, turning the golden braiding to jade and finding the edges of every dent and gouge in the silvered chest-plate she wears. Fel meets Raine's eyes for a moment. They are dark, even in daylight, but in these shadows they could as well be the space between stars.
'What you're looking at is mine-pit designate Iota. It is the deepest mine in Termina, and the oldest.'
The words belong to Juna Keene. The general is sitting at ease on the edge of one of the secondary consoles. Her uniform is that of the regulars, green-and-grey splinter, with wear-worn pale leather gloves and boots. Only the white cuffs on her rolled-back sleeves mark her rank. That, and the easy authority in her voice.
'The pit-mouth is twelve-hundred metres across, side to side,' Keene says. 'Last recorded operating depth was around three thousand metres.'
Keene depresses a heavy key in the hololith's base. It resets to a different view, from above. Mine-pit Iota is a wide-open void in the face of the city, like a set of jaws for the world. Grooves made for lifters and transitways run around the edge of it, carved into the walls, down into the depths.
'The Sighted have held the pit since the outset of the war,' she says. 'They have abandoned a dozen other key locations, but they refuse to leave Iota. There is something that they want down there. Something we cannot afford for them to find.'
'Iota is located in the western reaches,' Raine says. 'Which makes Karin Sun's Gold Company the closest for capture. Am I to assume that they have failed?'
'They tried,' Keene says. 'But the regulars cannot get close. The Sighted have a witch prowling Iota, and a powerful one at that. Sun chose to fall back, rather than lose his company to madness.'
Fel can't help but feel unease at the word witch. It's an old disquiet from home. One he is trained to act in spite of, that can never truly be erased.
'If the regulars cannot move in, the war in the western reaches will grind to a halt. We cannot let that happen.'
'Hunt-to-kill, then, general,' Fel says.
Keene nods. 'And you'll need to make it quick. According to Captain Sun, the witch's power grows stronger with proximity and exposure.
It had Sun's troops all dreaming, running, or temporarily mad. Our witches,' Keene pauses, and frowns. 'Our sanctioned psykers fared twice as badly. Apparently Pharo clawed his own eyes out rather than get any closer.'
Fel shakes his head. Witch or not, he would never wish Pharo harm.
'If the witch's power grows with proximity, then that's how we'll hunt it,' he says. 'Go straight for the source of the fear.'
The general nods her head. 'Your Valkyrie is on standby. Once your boots hit the scaffolds, you will have six hours. If you miss your extraction, we will count you as lost. Is that clear?'
'As a springtime sky, general,' Fel says. 'Consider it done.'
Keene looks to Raine then.
'You will accompany them, commissar,' she says.
'Yes, general,' Raine says.
Keene doesn't say why, and Fel doesn't have to ask. There is only one reason to send a commissar along for a hunt-to-kill like this one. It will be Raine's duty to make sure that the Duskhounds don't lose themselves in dreams, like Sun's regulars did, and to deal with them if they do, with that pistol she carries or her sword's keen edge.
Fel catches Raine's dark eyes once more through the hololith. The two of them have fought together countless times since her assignment to the regiment, and Fel has come to know her well, through stories shared and scars earned. He trusts Raine, even if his kinfolk don't, but he has no illusions. Just as Fel is made for the hunt and the kill, Raine is made for judgement, and for the hard choices. If it is necessary, she will not hesitate to pull the trigger. To do anything else would be to break faith.
And that is something that Fel knows Severina Raine will never do.
For the first time in days, Severina Raine cannot hear the sound of the city, because Jova's Valkyrie gunship is howling even more loudly than Termina can.
Black Library Events Anthology 2018-19 Page 7
