The Child Foretold

by Nicholas Kaufmann

  The villagers grabbed him and pulled him forward. The creatures in the cavern hissed and cheered in rapturous exaltation. Kavel nearly stumbled on his metal prosthesis several times, but the sheer size of the crowd kept him upright. They pulled him through a huge, rough-hewn archway in the cavern wall.

  Beyond was another large cavern, although this one was decorated like a shrine. Heavy cloth banners hung on the stone walls, adorned with strange, unrecognisable symbols. Fires burned in huge bronze braziers. At the far end of the cavern was an enormous dais, upon which squatted a giant, nightmarish statue. The villagers brought Kavel in front of it and threw him prostrate upon the ground. They knelt in reverence around him, bowing their heads before the monstrous statue. Kavel looked up at it. Its horrific features bore no resemblance to humanity whatsoever. Nor did its body, with four long-clawed arms, two squat legs and a spiny ridge down its hunched back.

  Then the statue turned its head towards him.

  Kavel scrambled away from it in terror and ran back towards the archway, but he tripped over his prosthesis and fell to the floor, banging his chin against the hard, compacted dirt. He rolled onto his back and tried to stand, but discovered he couldn’t move. It felt like an invisible weight was pressing him down into the ground.

  Drameon loomed over him, still holding Oshi. ‘She doesn’t want you to leave. She wants you to join us.’

  ‘No,’ Kavel groaned. ‘It’s not her doing this. It’s you, or that creature up there!’

  Drameon shook his head. ‘Poor Kavel, too closed-minded to see what’s right in front of his face.’

  Oshi squealed, and a long shred of nafar leaf peeled itself off the bottom of Kavel’s boot. It floated through the air up to Kavel’s face, then rubbed itself against his chin in a clumsy imitation of the way he’d tickled her chin on the farm with a similar leaf. Oshi laughed as the leaf dropped to the ground, but Kavel went cold.

  Gods above, it was her! She was exactly what Drameon said she was – a psyker. He thought back to the way the shotgun had torn itself out of his hands before he could kill Drameon. That had been Oshi’s doing. She’d wanted Drameon to live, because he was her father. Because she’d wanted him to bring her home.

  ‘No,’ he said again, but he knew it was true.

  Oshi refused to let him get up. She wouldn’t even let him move as the hulking monstrosity leapt off the dais, its heavy footfalls shaking the ground beneath him. It took another thudding step, its great size allowing it to cross the space between them in a single stride. It loomed over him. Kavel stared up at it, desperate to run, to crawl, to get away any way he could, but he couldn’t move an inch. Its long tongue snaked out of its mouth, slithering towards his face. He saw a strange, pronged hole at the tip of its tongue, and he struggled again, trying to force himself to move, but it was no use. Oshi held him fast.

  ‘Receive Grandsire’s kiss and be sanctified,’ Drameon said. ‘There’s nothing to fear. It is the kiss of life in a galaxy teeming with death. It is the kiss of peace in an age of endless war. It is the kiss of painless belonging in an existence that knows only suffering and misery.’

  The creature’s tongue lowered towards Kavel’s mouth. He turned his head, shutting his jaw tight, but a force much stronger than him turned his head back and prised his mouth open. As the creature’s tongue slid into his mouth, he heard Oshi squeal with delight. The tongue tasted like old, slimy leather, and Kavel gagged in disgust. But it kept moving, forcing its way into Kavel’s throat and down his gullet. He felt it slide like a worm into his stomach and deposit something there, something as cold and sharp as a shard of glass.

  When the creature pulled its tongue out of him, retracting it into its toothy maw, Oshi finally released him. Kavel rolled over onto his hands and knees, and vomited.

  ‘Tell me, Kavel, what has the Imperium of Man ever done for you?’ Drameon asked.

  Kavel heaved and spat, but he could still feel it inside him.

  ‘You sacrificed your leg for them, and they don’t even know your name,’ Drameon said. ‘You toiled in the fields for them, and all they did was take your bounty for themselves.’

  It spread through him like a fever, growing stronger by the second.

  ‘You owe them nothing, Kavel. Not your loyalty, and certainly not your life.’

  Kavel shook his head, trying to clear away the encroaching clouds that threatened to smother his thoughts.

  ‘There is another way,’ Drameon said. ‘Our way.’

  Kavel rose from the ground, the pain and confusion gone. Where a gigantic, hideous monstrosity had stood before, he saw only a benevolent and godly figure beaming down at him. He looked around himself at Drameon and the villagers and the waves of creatures flowing into the shrine, and his heart lifted. After all these years, he wasn’t alone any more. He thought he’d lost the last of his family to the orks, but he had a new family now, one that was much bigger than any he’d known before. And with his new family came a new purpose, one that was much more worthwhile and fulfilling than being a nafar farmer.

  Because now he understood why he’d been kept alive, why Oshi wanted him to join them. He was her protector. He’d already been her protector, proving to her that he could keep her safe from anyone who meant her harm, and now he could continue to do that for her.

  His new family gathered around him, welcoming him. Drameon handed Oshi to him, and he held her, the child Grandsire Mordephus and the rest of the broodcoven had waited so long for. She was beautiful, and one day she would be the leader of their congregation, speaking on behalf of their grandsire. But until then, Kavel would protect her – he would protect all their children, until they grew big enough to fulfil their destiny of domination.

  On this world and every other.

  About the Author

  Nicholas Kaufmann is the critically acclaimed author of numerous works. Professionally immersed in books his whole life, he’s been the Publicity Manager for a small literary press, a pitchman for a PR firm specialising in TV and radio author appearances, a bookstore clerk and an independent bookstore owner. Nick lives in Brooklyn, NY.

  An extract from The House of Night and Chain.

  ‘It’s haunted,’ Katrin said the first time she saw Malveil. She spoke with the adamantine assurance of an eight-year-old, and Zander, who was four, began to cry.

  ‘It is not,’ Eliana said. She crouched beside our daughter and gave her a hug, but her face showed alarm at Katrin’s blasphemy. ‘Never say that.’

  I lifted Zander in my arms. He rested his face against my shoulder, wetting my uniform with his tears. He did not turn his eyes from the house, though. He stared at it, terrified, his sister’s statement confirmation of what he had already decided for himself.

  We were standing at the gates to the grounds of Malveil. The house was some distance away, brooding at the top of its hill. From this vantage point, under the leaden sky, the great mansion was a dark shape, the silhouette of its towers jutting up from the walls. The details of the facade were invisible. Malveil was a hard mass of black, and I could understand the children’s reaction, even as I regretted it. The grounds were rugged and broken, gnawed apart by the generations of mining. The industry that had burrowed into the stony hill was the foundation of the Strock family’s wealth and power, though much of the machinery was quiet now. The seams were almost exhausted. We would not be drawing much more wealth out of the ground. We no longer needed to. With enough accumulation, wealth and all that flows from it is self-sustaining.

  ‘Ghosts do not exist,’ I told Zander and Katrin. ‘Do not offend the Emperor by believing in such nonsense.’ I spoke gently, but I needed them to know there were ideas no one should have. I patted Zander’s shoulder and smiled at Katrin. ‘Anyway, you shouldn’t be frightened of Malveil. You should be proud. This is our family’s home. It is a great house. The greatest on Solus.’

  ‘If it is our
house, why don’t we live there?’ Katrin asked. She did not sound eager to do so, but at least it was curiosity, rather than fear, that prompted her question.

  ‘My uncle Leonel lives there now. It is his home, because he is lord-governor of Solus.’ Over time, the line between family estate and governor’s palace had blurred. Though Malveil was not officially the seat of government, it had become so in practice since the rise of the Strocks to prominence. As long as a Strock was governor, Malveil would be the governor’s residence. Our line had had its share of travails, but there was still no sign that power might slip from our grasp. Even in the present circumstances.

  ‘But you’re governor,’ Katrin said.

  ‘Governor-regent,’ I said. ‘Just for a little while, until Leonel is better.’ He had been ill for some time now. The precise nature of his affliction was unclear, and he had become a recluse, never leaving the house and rarely admitting visitors. He was an absent ruler, and I had been recalled from my Astra Militarum service as captain in the Solus Nightmarch to act as governor until Leonel recovered or a proper regency could be established, one that would, naturally, both ensure stability on Solus and see off any political challenges to Strock supremacy.

  This period lives, in my memory, as a golden time. I was home on Solus for most of a year, and had been given that rare opportunity for an officer – the chance to be a part of one’s family, even if only for a short while. I had left to do my duty to the Imperium while Eliana was still expecting Zander. That I had been able to see Katrin through her first years had itself been an unusual dispensation, a privilege granted by my family’s standing. I had not expected to return until – if I survived – late in life, by which time both children would be complete strangers to me, assuming they were still on Solus at all and not swept up in a subsequent Astra Militarum tithe themselves. So Leonel’s affliction had become my blessing.

  That year was a glorious one. Its memories sustained me in the time that followed, whether I was facing the horrors of the battlefield or other, more personal griefs. But when I finally came back to Solus for good, it was this day that loomed over all the others, casting its shadow upon the entire year. Even before my return, it had begun to grow, metastasising, becoming the dominant image of that year, hauling my thoughts back to it with an irresistible gravitational pull. I should have been recalling my games with the children in the grounds of the family’s secondary residence, near the centre of Valgaast. I should have been picturing the two of them splashing in the fountains of the courtyard. I should have been thinking of Eliana, and her smiles as she watched them. I should have been thinking of her hand in mine.

  Instead, I kept coming back to Katrin’s fearful pronouncement and Zander’s tears. And the moments that followed.

  ‘Will you ever be governing governor?’ Katrin asked.

  I exchanged a glance with Eliana, and she pressed her lips tightly together, holding back a laugh. ‘That’s hard to say,’ I answered. ‘It depends on whether Leonel has any children.’ An unlikely prospect at his age, but not impossible. ‘If he does, then one of them will become governor, not me.’

  ‘Good,’ said Zander.

  ‘Oh?’ I teased. ‘You don’t think I’d make a good governor?’

  Eliana had straightened up from hugging Katrin, but now our daughter pressed herself tightly against her mother’s waist. ‘We don’t want to go in that house,’ she said.

  ‘Please, papa,’ Zander sobbed. ‘No, papa.’

  ‘We’re not about to move there,’ Eliana said. She ruffled Katrin’s hair and gave me a sign that it was time to go. ‘We can’t even visit it, so stop your worrying.’

  We started walking again, Zander quaking in my arms, Katrin clutching Eliana’s hand and snuffling through her tears. We put the high wall of the grounds behind us as we headed back down the Malveil Road, making our way through the industrial sector, back towards the residential quarters of Valgaast. I looked over my shoulder to get one last glimpse of the house before a curve in the road took it out of sight. I had never feared Malveil. It had always been a palace of dreams for me while I was growing up. It represented the highest summit a Strock could climb, the highest honour and, as my understanding matured, the noblest duty. I did not think of it as haunted. When I looked back at it at that moment, I felt pity for Leonel, gratitude for my time as regent and wistful longing to see again the halls that I had visited only once before.

  I had no dark thoughts. I felt no presentiment of menace.

  But when I turned back to my family, a wave of vertigo struck me. I stumbled, almost dropping Zander, as the ground turned treacherous beneath my feet. It seemed to be as thin as cobwebs, about to give way and throw us into a nightmare chasm. Zander was limp in my arms, his head a lolling dead weight, his neck broken. Eliana was dragging Katrin’s corpse, heedless of the blood pouring from our daughter’s open throat.

  I gasped, struggling to find the air to scream. I was drowning, falling and suffocating all at once.

  And then the moment passed. The horror receded, evaporating from my memory. The road was solid, my children unharmed. I had had a brief dizzy spell, that was all. My stride was sure, and within seconds, all that had happened was that I had looked forward too quickly and gone light-headed.

  For years, that was all I would recall. Even when the memory of Katrin and Zander’s terror grew large, my terrible vision remained buried, hidden from my mind’s eye. It did not resurface.

  Not until I returned to Solus. Not until I looked upon Malveil once more.

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