Raine keeps a steady grip on the handhold built into the Valkyrie's airframe as the pilot banks over the city on the approach to Iota. Cold wind rushes through the troop compartment from the open side doors, carrying with it the smell of fyceline and smoke. The wind stings Raine's eyes and catches at the collar of her buckled short-coat. She is wearing her funerary blacks and heavy, weatherproof gloves. Her silver chest-plate is deliberately dulled to keep it from catching the light. She has strapped extra armour plates over her boots for the drop. The drop for which she needs the jump-mask slung around her neck, and the bulky grav-chute harness on her back.
'It will be quick,' Fel says. 'Straight down into Iota, and onto the eastward landing pad. It is only halfway down, but it's as far as we can go before there's too much strike risk from the scaffolding.'
Fel is standing beside her, with one hand on the airframe and his hellgun slung. He is fully kitted for the fight to come, with grenades and charges locked to his belt and the heavy-bladed knife he carries sheathed at his waist. Like Raine, he is wearing a grav-chute, though his is modified to be worn with storm trooper carapace. The tactical display built into Fel's vambrace shows the schematic of Iota rendered in green, and the landing pad as a bright white circle.
'The display in your jump-mask will keep the platform flagged,' he says. 'Once we hit the platform, we will shed the grav-chutes and move down towards Iota's heart. Clear?'
Raine nods. She has completed perhaps a tenth of the combat drops the Duskhounds have, but Raine has enough experience to know how to make it to the landing zone in one piece. The principles for use of a grav-chute are simple. Fire the thrusters as a method of aerobrake in adequate time before literally hitting the landing zone. Do not thrash your limbs. Do not panic. It is a matter of control and discipline under pressure, like many things.
'Completely,' she says. 'Just give the word, captain.'
Fel smiles at that 'Aye, commissar,' he says.
The Valkyrie's internal vox crackles.
'We are close to Iota,' Jova says. 'I'll maintain at five hundred metres above the pit-mouth, but you'll want to make it quick.'
'Understood,' Fel replies.
He pulls on his Duskhounds mask and locks it in place, the eye-lenses glowing red in the dim combat lighting of the troop compartment. Like the rest of his squad, Fel's mask is painted with a snarling hound's face to represent the creature of Antari folklore that gave the squad their name. Seeing it now, Raine can't help but think of the shape he saw in the leaves, back in the overseer's watch room.
Three loud thumps split the air, then, and the gunship's airframe shudders, rattling all of the way down Raine's arm.
‘Well, now. There's no need for that,' Jova says, over the internal vox.
The pilot cuts speed and drops the Valkyrie into a curving dive. Inertia pulls at Raine's bones, and the airframe shakes and groans, but then the turbojets fire and Jova levels out again. Rol, Fel's second-in-command, whoops. The Dusk hound is braced against the frame of one of the Valkyrie's open side doors with his hellgun raised. Rol has his mask in place too, but Raine can guess that he is grinning. 'Honestly, it's as if you wish for death,' Tyl says.
The Duskhounds' sharpshooter is braced in the other door; her rifle pointed out into the clouds and darkness. Tyl's rifle is modified for distance kills, with a variable scope and a longer, accurised barrel that she has scored with kill markings. Her tone is patient and good-natured. Tyl and Rol could be taken for true family. They are both lean and strong, with the same lilting accents. In a fight they are inseparable, each a spare shadow for the other.
'Glory, maybe,' Rol says, with a smile in his voice 'The After can wait.'
Tyl laughs.
'I wish you wouldn't make light of it like that,' Jeth says. 'Death is no cause for laughter.'
Jeth is the only Duskhound built stronger than Fel is. His matt-black carapace is scored with words from hymnals written in the old Antari script, and he wears a loop of luckstones at his belt.
'You know I didn't mean it like that,' Rol says. 'Tell him, Myre.'
'Jeth is right,' Myre says, in her solemn voice. 'Mocking death will only bring it quicker.'
Myre is the youngest of Fel's Duskhounds, but you would not know it from her voice. It always sounds as though she has seen a sector's worth of sadness. Myre sits in one of the Valkyrie's restraint thrones, checking her gear briskly and locking it to her belt and thigh-plates. Raine sees heat-charges and blind grenades, and a loop of krak grenades that Myre passes straight to Jeth without needing to be asked. The Valkyrie thrums and shakes as more detonations light the clouds through the open side doors, and Raine sees the wide, dark mouth of Iota far below through the ashes and smoke.
'Do you all feel that?' Jeth asks. 'It's like knives running over my bones. I think we just crossed into the witch's circle.'
Raine realises then that she does feel it, the very edge of a creeping unease. She tightens her grip on the handhold above her head and takes a breath, pushing the feeling aside.
'We must deny it,' she says, over the roar of the Valkyrie's turbojets. 'It is the only way to defeat a psyker who intends to twist your own mind against you.'
Raine thinks back to Gholl. To the crystal caverns, and how her own mind was twisted against her. How she managed to deny it.
'There is a way to know the falsehoods from reality,' she says. 'There are always details amiss, even when the psyker is powerful. Hold to what you know to be true. Trust your instincts. It is much more difficult to fool the heart than it is the eyes.'
Fel looks to his Duskhounds.
'Listen well to the commissar's words,' he says. 'We hunt, we kill and we get out. All of us. Is that clear?'
'Aye, captain,' the Duskhounds say, as one.
Inertia pulls at Raine again as the Valkyrie cuts speed and holds position above the pit, its vectored engines roaring. Rol and Tyl slam their side doors closed and take position by the ramp with Myre and Jeth.
'You are good to go,' Jova says over the internal vox. 'I'll hold until you are clear.'
'Understood,' Fel says.
Raine pulls her jump-mask on and secures it. It closes tight to her face. Her own breathing becomes very loud, contained by the mask. The air supply through the breather apparatus is stale and dry. Her visor lights with the simple guidance data that will guide her to the lifter platform and a drop distance counter flickers in the corner of the display. Distance to target: 2134 metres.
'Ready?' Fel asks.
'Aye, captain,' the Duskhounds reply, and this time, Raine joins them in their response.
'Let's go make some fates,' Fel says, and he hits the release for the Valkyrie's rear ramp.
The ramp yawns open to reveal Termina's thunderous sky, underlit by the fires of war and the refineries that are still burning. Tyl and Rol go first, straight over into the dark. Then Myre and Jeth. The wind buffets Raine as she steps to the edge alongside Fel. She blinks. Breathes. Glances once more at the drop distance counter in her visor's display.
And then she jumps out into the war-torn sky.
As Raine falls through Termina's sky, towards the open void of Iota, she focuses on what she was taught.
Breathe. Don't stop breathing.
Arms and legs outstretched and stable.
Don't thrash. Don't blink.
Remain calm.
The sky lights with anti-aircraft fire and lightning flashes. The ground grows larger. Darker. Iota yawns wider. The wind tears at Raine's uniform and tugs on her limbs. Her fingers are cold and numb, despite the gloves. The drop distance counter tracks down quickly.
Distance to target: 1711 metres.
Breathe.
Don't stop breathing.
The landing zone in Raine's visordisplay is a bright white circle. Below, Iota grows wider and wider until there is no ground to see, and then she is below the line of the pit-mouth and falling into the darkness of Iota itself. Scaffolding and lifters blur past, and the counter tr
acks down. Raine cannot see the others, but then the pit is so dark and the wind is so strong. Her visor beads with water that runs in streaks to the edges.
Distance to target: 1226 metres.
The longer the freefall, the less likely it is you'll be seen. But the longer the freefall, the less control you have. The more likely it is you will hit something.
Don't blink.
Just breathe.
Her eyes sting and ache and Raine thinks for a moment of the shape in the leaves. She glimpses it again in the streaks of water beading on her visor. The Duskhound. Death. Her heart is racing.
'Breathe,' she says to herself.
Raine knows that it is the psyker's influence pushing at the edges of her mind, making her see those things. Making her heart race even more than the fall does. She also knows that to panic is to die, so she keeps breathing deeply from the stale air of her mask and forces her limbs to stay locked as the counter keeps tracking down.
Distance to target: 914 metres.
But then there is a loud crack and Raine is dizzied. Her limbs go slack for an instant before she recovers her senses and realises that something struck her visor. An enemy round, or some kind of debris. She is falling fast, uncontrolled. Iota blurs around her. The wind is deafening. She can't catch her breath. She can't see. Can't stop spinning.
Just.
Breathe.
With the tactical display crazing in front of her eyes and the vox pickup hissing loudly in her ears, Raine fights the wind and the vertigo and the dizziness to right herself, and slow the fall before it kills her. She gets herself level, but she cannot tell if she is off-course. She cannot clearly see the white circle that marks the landing zone. In the corner of the display, the distance to target flickers and splinters.
It looks as though it says Distance to target: 94 metres.
Or is that 34 metres.
'Throne,' Raine says, through her teeth.
She fires the grav-chute's jets. Inertia pulls hard on her limbs and jolts her spine. Raine's vision dizzies again for a moment, and when it clears she can see the landing zone below. Close. Coming up fast, despite the jets. What she was taught rushes through her mind. Use the fall. Don't lock your limbs. Roll with the speed of it.
Don't close your eyes.
Raine kills the grav-chute jets a moment before she hits the deck of the landing platform and rolls. She doesn't lock her limbs, or close her eyes, which is how she sees that she hit at a poor angle, right by the edge of the platform.
And that she's about to go over it.
Raine twists as her body slides over the platform lip and manages to snag hold of the grating of the floor, though it nearly pulls her arm from its socket and she can't help but cry out. She hits the release for the grav-chute and lets it fall away into the pit below as two figures clad in black carapace drop to their knees and help to drag her back up onto the platform. Fel and Myre.
'Hells,' Fel says. 'That was close.'
Raine gets to her feet and pulls the jump-mask off. Iota's howling is even louder without it. The crystalflex of the jump-mask is crazed with cracks that burst outwards from a hole the size of a trade-coin. Raine becomes aware of her face stinging where she has been cut, and of warm lines of blood painting their way down her cheek. For a moment, she almost sees a shape in the damage to the visor. Teeth and eyes.
Raine shakes her head to clear it and drops the damaged jump-mask on the deck. Fel meets her eyes for a moment.
'Ready?' he asks her.
Raine nods and draws her bolt pistol from the mag-secured holster at her belt. The cold weight of Penance is comforting.
'Let's go,' she says.
Andren Fel was taught many things at the Schola Antari. He was taught how to lead others. How to memorise and strategise. He was taught how to survive with very little, and how to fight and kill with even less, but Fel's scholam training also granted him another skill.
Something that the masters would call resilience.
Those days are distant now, but Fel remembers them as clearly as any other. He remembers being bound and blindfolded. He remembers shocks and lashes, knives and blood, and the masters asking him the same question over and over again and expecting him to break.
Do you want it to stop?
Every cadet finds a different way to endure the resilience trials, and to keep themselves from answering yes to that question. The method is always secret, and personal, so that it cannot be broken. Fel's is a simple thing. An old evensong that his mother used to sing when he was a child.
Beware the darkling hours, my son,
For that is when the duskhounds come.
Keep within the light as the fire burns,
Until the morning sun returns.
Andren Fel thinks of those words again now as he follows the wide, rocky slope down into Iota. Down into the darkness. The words help to keep the witch's work at bay. The unease, as if he is being followed. The shadows, coiling and twisting and making shapes at the edges of his sight.
The glint of watchful eyes in the darkness.
The path down into Iota is wide and set with scuffed steel rails for excavation trains. Line of sight is fouled by large piles of rubble and the still, silent drilling machines that creak in the ceaseless wind. Iota's howling is louder the deeper they go. More than loud enough to cover any sound Fel might make as he gets shadow-close to the two Sighted scouts patrolling the path ahead. The two of them are wearing fully enclosed reflective helmets and dull blue flak armour marked with that sigil they all wear. The spiral, with the eye at the centre.
Not unlike the spiral of Iota, seen from above.
The shards of mirrored glass hanging from cords on the Sighted's flak armour knock together as Fel grabs hold of the scout and breaks his neck with a twist of his hands. Beside him, Rol quiets the other with the edge of his combat blade, then the two of them drag the bodies to where they will be hidden by the darkness and debris, before moving further down the slope.
Fel drops into the shadow of a mining machine, and Rol does the same. Ahead, the slope leads down onto a rubble-strewn plateau that is lit by oil lanterns strung between poles driven into the stone. The dim lights dance like faerie fires in the wind, painting long, restless shadows on the ground. A tunnel yawns in Iota's wall that wasn't on Keene's schematics. It has been cut jagged, leaving shards of rock pointing inwards. Outside it, an excavation trolley sits empty on the tracks. Iota's howling is much louder here. Twinned, almost.
'Well, that looks the sort of place you might hide a witch. Don't you think, captain?' Rol's voice is without a smile, for once.
'I'd say so,' Fel says.
It's not just the look of the tunnel. Fel can see his Duskhounds' vitals in the corner of his display. Their heart rates are all reading as elevated, the price of resisting the witch. Fel feels it just as much as they do, unease welling up inside him like blood from a bad wound.
Beware the darkling hours, my son, says his mother's voice.
Fel shakes his head, hard. It's getting worse, which is proof that they are on the right track.
He sends a burst of vox, and the rest of his Duskhounds approach with Raine. She drops into cover beside him with her sabre drawn. Raine has dulled Evenfall's blade to stop it catching the light. In the darkness, the blood drying on her face looks black.
'We've got movement, captain,' Rol says.
Fel looks back around the cover to see a group of Sighted come up and out of the tunnel. A dozen of them, wearing those reflective masks, just like the others. Fel marks the leader by the mirrored cloak he wears, and the finely made sword at his hip. Eight of the Sighted are working together to carry a heavy, sealed casket over to the excavation trolley, where they set it down with a dull thud.
'We cannot let whatever that is reach the surface,' Raine says.
Fel shakes his head.
'Pattern? Rol asks.
Fel watches as two of the Sighted stay behind to guard the trolley, and the rest turn back
for the tunnel. 'Hangman's noose,' he says.
The first Antari story that Andren Fel ever told Raine was that of the duskhounds. The story goes that the hounds come to take the souls of those fated to die and drag them to the After for judgement. He told her that duskhounds can appear in the slimmest of shadows, even that of those they are sent to take.
In the moment that the hangman's noose closes, Raine believes every word of the old Antari story.
Raine is moving from cover to cover across the plateau with Fel when Myre and Jeth resolve from the shadows around the Sighted guarding the trolley. The Duskhounds grab hold of the two scouts and drag them from their feet into the darkness before reappearing moments later, without a sound. Myre drops to one knee and sets to work attaching her burn-charges to the trolley. The rest of the Sighted do not turn back. They just keep moving towards the tunnel mouth, as good as deafened by Iota's howling.
Fel sends a single burst of vox, then. The signal that means close the noose.
Near-silent flashes of hellgun fire lance from the darkness as Raine breaks cover alongside Fel. Three of the Sighted fell in rapid succession, masks shattered and coiling smoke from Cassia Tyl's pin-accurate kill shots. The rest of the Sighted turn and shout and scatter and raise their own weapons to fire back, only to find that death is already much too close.
Raine draws her blade through the first of them. Evenfell sings, cutting through the Sighted's blue-grey flak armour with ease. Black blood mists Raine's face as the woman spills over backwards without a sound. Raine lets her momentum carry her forward as the Duskhounds engage around her. Rol shoots one of the Sighted, centre-mass, before burying his combat blade in another. The Sighted staggers backwards but refuses to die. He raises his shotgun to fire on Rol, point-blank. Before he can pull the trigger, another whisper of hellgun fire cuts the space between the two of them and sends the Sighted spinning to the ground.
'Good eyes, Cass,' Rol says, over the vox.
'It's like you said,' she replies, from her sharpshooter's position. 'The After can wait.'
Raine sees one of the Sighted go for Fel with a jagged, hooked blade. He lets his rifle swing by the strap so that he can catch the Sighted's arm and break it. Fel twists the scout off his feet, before taking up his hellgun again for the kill shot in one swift movement.
Black Library Events Anthology 2018-19 Page 8
