by William King
‘I would have thought he would have been gone by now. It’s not like him to let any challenge go unopposed.’
Ivan let out a long sigh. ‘There’s still the challenge here on Loki. He’s still obsessed with beating Richter. He won’t give up this world.’
‘He might not have any choice, from what I’ve seen.’
‘Don’t let him hear you say that,’ said Ivan. ‘He has not been kind to those who preach defeatism. That’s what he calls it.’
‘He’s never had any problem with the truth before.’
‘Well, he does now. You can’t say you haven’t been warned.’ Ivan placed a careful emphasis on his words. He wanted me to understand that he was serious. I felt suddenly very tired and I think that weariness showed on my face.
‘Things have changed, Leo,’ Ivan said. ‘He’s not the man he once was. You’ll see when you recover.’
‘I’m not sure I want to recover if things are the way you say.’ I sounded petulant and childish and I knew it. I could not help myself though. I was sick and physically weak and I was beginning to be very frightened.
I had another visitor soon after, although she did not come in the guise of such. I was lying on the bed, listening to the coughing and the screams of pain when a Sister Hospitaller was suddenly standing over me. Her features were very familiar. It was Anna.
‘I thought I saw you before,’ I said. She smiled at me enigmatically.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said.
‘I saw you giving me the serum.’
‘No such serum is available on this world,’ she said. Her face was utterly bland. I knew she was capable of lying with a completely straight face – she would not blink and her pulse rate would not change. Her entire body had been rebuilt to make her capable of such deceptions and far more.
‘I know it was you,’ I said. I was certain it had been, too, although I could not say why. My senses had been highly unreliable of late.
‘Whether it was or it wasn’t,’ she said, ‘I am glad you are all right.’
And that was as close to an admission as I was ever going to get from her. ‘Why are you here?’ I asked. I wondered if she had been sent to kill Richter. After all, one assassin can succeed where an entire army might not. And the rogue general must be a prime target.
‘You should know better than to ask me that by now,’ she said. She was mopping my brow. It made her look more like a Hospitaller, I suppose, but it made me shiver. It was something between us that she never seemed to lie to me directly, or maybe that was just the impression she wanted to give. I have never been sure.
‘You’re supposed to say you came to see me,’ I said.
‘I did. Today at least.’
‘I’m glad you did.’
‘Your friends have visited you often.’
‘You could have done so too. They would not be able to recognise you if you did not want them to.’
‘I have been busy, Leo.’
‘People have been dying unexpectedly, have they?’
‘I do more than kill people,’ she said. It was almost as if I had criticised her. I have no idea why she should feel offended; she had no more conscience about murder than a cat has about killing mice. ‘I gather intelligence. I report it.’
‘So you have been gathering intelligence then?’ I said.
‘You are an exasperating man.’
‘Apparently so.’
‘Yes. I have been gathering intelligence.’
‘And you cannot tell me about it.’
‘What would you have me tell you?’ She was looking at me directly now and I felt as if, just for a moment, I could ask her anything and I might get an honest reply. There was an unguarded look in her eyes, or so it seemed to me. I looked at her for a long time and the moment passed, and she seemed to be wary of everything and everybody once more.
‘Are you comfortable here?’ she asked.
I looked around ironically at the wounded and the dying. ‘It’s better than where I was before,’ I said. She tilted her head to one side and studied me very intently. She seemed to hear something more in my words than I had intended to put there.
‘You are frightened,’ she said. ‘That is not like you. Why?’
I told her about the dreams. I told her about Zachariah. I told her about the things I had heard. I told her I was starting to doubt my own sanity. While I told her this she held my hand; when someone walked by she appeared to be taking my pulse.
As I spoke, she nodded, as if I were confirming things that she already knew. It was a way she had. Maybe she did already know. Maybe it was just her method of encouraging me to speak. It certainly worked – I babbled as if I had somehow been injected with truth serum. Only later did I wonder if perhaps I had been.
Once I had finished speaking, she said, ‘Speak of these things to no one. Your companion, Zachariah, if companion he was, was correct about that. There are matters here that could get you killed if the wrong person learns of them.’
‘Drake,’ I said. The inquisitor could read my thoughts if he chose to.
‘He has his mind on other things just now.’
‘Why do I need to worry about these dreams?’ I wanted to know and she seemed to be in a position to tell me, even if it was foolish to ask.
‘We have come too far,’ she said. ‘Into a place where Chaos seeps through. It is very strong here. What Zachariah told you is essentially correct.’
‘You are saying we should abandon the crusade, go back?’
‘Perhaps it might have been better never to have come here, but it’s too late for that now.’ It was easy to be wise after the fact, I thought, and she could see it written on my face.
‘We didn’t know,’ she said. ‘We couldn’t until we got here and the reports started coming in. Now we do. We need to pull back. If we do not our armies will become corrupt and our way will be lost. It is already starting to happen. The signs are there for those who can see them. Richter had already raised the standard of rebellion and others will follow him down into the darkness.’
‘You think the crusade will fail then, and Macharius with it.’
‘It does not matter what I think, Leo,’ she said. ‘What matters is what the High Lords of Terra think. They are the ones who give the orders and will ultimately decide success or failure.’
‘History and the Emperor will decide,’ I said.
‘Faith, Leo? From you? At this late date? I always thought you were a cynical man. It is one of your more attractive qualities in this age, in these worlds.’
I remembered what Ivan had said. ‘You think he will be removed?’
It was not necessary to spell out who I meant. ‘There are already plots against him,’ she said. ‘They have failed in the past. Sooner or later one is bound to succeed if there are enough of them.’
I remembered the assassin back on the battlefield and shouting a warning. I told her of him. ‘You think he was not a heretic?’
‘He might have been in their pay or suborned by them, or he might have been working for someone else,’ she said.
‘He was very hard to kill,’ I said.
She considered this for a moment, appearing to turn it over and over in her mind. If she did know something she decided not to tell me. She rose and said, ‘Be wary, Leo. You and your friends are caught in the middle of a great web. The fact that it was not meant to trap you will mean nothing when the spiders come to feed.’
She departed. She had not walked more than a dozen steps when she seemed to vanish amid the people. It was something about her way of walking, her body language. She just blended into the crowd as if she had become invisible.
I lay there feeling the faint lingering warmth of her grip on my hand, wondering if this too was a hallucination.
Ten
A warning klaxon woke me. I sat up too quickly and felt dizzy. I glanced around, wondering what was going on, what the panic was. The constant repetitive blaring sound was a sector callo
ut alarm, the sort that you normally only hear in a hive city when there has been a catastrophic failure of life support systems. If that had happened I was in the worst possible place, garbed only in a medical smock, without weapons or equipment.
Another darker thought occurred to me. The heretics might have broken through; they might have invaded the last bastion of the Imperium on this planet. Our defeat might already have been accomplished.
I looked around to see what I could see. Sisters Hospitaller were moving through the chaos. Their faces showed no emotion but they had been trained to deal with the carnage of the battlefield and not to panic. I noticed a medicae adept moving between the beds. His stride was swift, his manner urgent. I saw fear in his eyes. I pulled myself out of bed and stood in front of him.
‘What is going on?’ I asked. He made to brush by me.
‘I don’t have time for this,’ he said. I put a restraining hand on his shoulder and he shrugged it off. I applied one of the holds I had been taught in basic training. I have got a lot of use out of it over the years. Even in my weakened state I was capable of holding him in place. I could tell from his expression he was finding the experience painful, even as he struggled to break my grip.
‘If you keep this up you will either break your arm or dislocate your shoulder. In fact, I might do that for you.’
He listened to my words for a moment. They seemed to take a few heartbeats to travel from his ear to his brain. He stopped struggling.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Now tell me as quickly and clearly as you can what is going on.’
‘The alarm has sounded.’
‘I know. I can hear it. Tell me why.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Guess.’
‘There are rumours of a heretic army in the streets of Niflgard. Of a new plague breaking out. I’ve been hearing them all day.’
No point in asking why no one had told me. No one tells the patients anything in a place like this. I let him go and he scuttled off, looking backwards over his shoulder, angry and afraid. He was not used to being manhandled. He would not have lasted a minute in the streets of the hive where I grew up.
I walked over to the wall, where the emergency rebreathers should have been kept. The cases were open and they were all gone. I guess they had been stripped away and sent to the front a long time ago. Either that or they had been stolen and sold on the black market.
You can fashion an emergency rebreather against certain types of gas from a sheet soaked in your own urine. Don’t ask me why it works, but it does. I lifted a sheet from my bed and tore it into strips just in case. If I had possessed an alembic I would have prepared some urine as well, but I did not. I stood there for a moment, wondering what was going on. I needed to find out more. If the heretics really had broken through, Macharius would either be counter-attacking or regrouping at the space port for evacuation.
I needed clothing, gear, weapons and equipment. A hospital was not a place to find any of those. I might be able to scavenge scalpels or a surgical chainsaw but that would be about the limit. Still, it was better than nothing.
I was feeling stronger now. Adrenaline has that effect. One minute you might feel weak as a newborn kitten, but if your life is in danger, you can find the strength to wrestle an ork if you need to. I strode past a bed on which a figure lay covered in a grubby white sheet. Poor frakker, I thought. A cold white hand grabbed my wrist.
My response was reflexive. I chopped down with my free hand, breaking the grip, then stepped back. As I did so the figure under the sheet sat up. If it was a joke, I thought, it was being executed with spectacularly bad timing and poor taste.
It was not a joke.
The sheet fell away to reveal a dead man. His skin was grey, not with ill-health but with the chill of death. It was the colour of processed meat ground from bone and gristle in a distant food manufactorum. His eyes were an odd bloody red with that hint of corpse-light green burning in their depths. A slight trickle of greenish pus ran from his nostrils and the corners of his mouth when the body moved.
The corpse wheezed and gurgled not because it was breathing, but because its lungs were being compressed within it by its movements, and then it seemed the phlegm was being forced out.
What I noticed most was the smell. It was as if with every false breath it were emitting the stench of all the putrefaction within its body, all of the pus and phlegm and rotting innards. It was a stench to turn the stomach and sour the heart and I had no rebreather. Just the stink of it paralysed me for the moment it took to get from its bed and grab at me. They say that fingernails still grow after death and this corpse had long ones that bit into my flesh. I grunted with pain and responded as I had been trained to too long ago on Belial.
I lashed out with my foot, catching it between the legs. Its movements were slow and clumsy and it made no attempt to dodge. My kick had no effect. The corpse felt no pain. I had turned its testicles to jelly and got no reaction whatsoever. It was dragging me closer to its foul-smelling mouth. Its teeth were bared as if it intended to bite me. Its face had a look of total, all-consuming hunger.
I brought my arms up inside its grip, my forearms against the internal arc of its elbows. It was strong, but my motion broke its grip and jerked its arms apart at the cost of leaving some of my own skin beneath its fingernails. I pulled at the sheet it had left on the bed, tossed it over the dead man’s head and ran. It did not make any sense to stand and trade blows with something that felt no pain, particularly not when other corpses were rising from beneath their sheets and making a grab for the living.
There were at least a score of them, but they induced a panic disproportionate to their number amid all those beds crammed with the sick, the dying and those trapped in fever dreams. To many it must have just seemed like another aspect of their nightmare, until they died with the teeth of a walking corpse buried in their jugular.
I needed to find a weapon, any weapon. I saw a medicae adept lying on his back with a dead man on his chest that gnawed at his throat and pulled out his entrails with bloody fingers. On a trolley near at hand were medical implements, including a surgical chainsaw.
Grabbing it meant getting closer to the feasting corpse. I told myself it seemed busy and lunged forward. My action distracted the dead thing from its meal. It looked at me with its reddish eyes. I saw a network of small broken veins within them. Tears of blood spilled down its cheeks and a line of mucus like the trail of some daemon slug dripped from its nose and down over its chin. It wheezed its stinking breath. There were flies all around it. They seemed to have come from nowhere; perhaps they had hatched within its flesh.
I grabbed for the chainsaw. There was no way to find the activating rune quickly so I lashed out, burying the serrated teeth in the dead man’s forehead. They bit deep and small fragments of brain and juice flowed out, but he kept coming, reaching for me.
I found the runic activator on the grip and invoked a basic technical chant I had learned when I served on Baneblades all those years ago. By chance or the Emperor’s Blessing the blades whirred to life, sending gobbets of flesh and splinters of bone spraying away.
I pushed forward and the blade bit into the skull and passed through, slicing the head in two all the way down to the spine. I twisted at the top of the spinal cord and pulled the weapon free. The dead man dropped like a puppet with its strings cut.
I let out a faint sigh of relief. I had found a weapon that worked and a way of putting the things down. That was the best I could hope for under the circumstances. I turned to look at the medicae but he was most definitely dead, his skin already turning a strange greyish green. He looked not unlike the walking corpse.
A thought struck me. These were not infected heretics who were rising this time, these were our own men. Had the disease mutated again, found a way to jump to the uninfected living and lie dormant until they passed on? If that was the case the plague was definitely growing stronger and more deadly.
Why no
w? Why were they all rising at once? Had some dark ritual been performed that caused them all to rise and hunger? I resigned myself to the fact that I would probably never know, that I didn’t even really want to know, and looked around to see what I could see.
A group of walking corpses was pressing a Sister Hospitaller back towards the door. The woman was trying to keep them at bay, swinging surgical implements at them, slicing flesh, but the walking dead men paid them no attention. I came up on the group from behind and sliced off heads and limbs with all the élan of a woodcutter chopping down trees. It was a crude technique but it was effective.
The ones with the severed heads fell at once, and the others kept coming until I decapitated them. When I finished I turned to the woman. She stared at me. I could not have been a pretty sight, a tall man in a besmirched medical smock wielding a chainsaw and covered in gore. She reacted pretty well, all things considered.
‘Thank you,’ the sister said. She was tall and dark-haired, and had a calm beauty that would have aroused my interest under somewhat different circumstances.
More and more dead bodies were rising and not all of them were coming out from under white sheets. The medicae adept whose chainsaw I was wielding came lumbering towards me, as if determined to reclaim the tool of his trade. He was hampered somewhat by the ropes of intestine wrapping themselves round his leg and forming slimy pools at his feet. Behind him came more and more dead people, arms outstretched, tears of blood running down their faces, uncanny hunger burning in their eyes.
The disease had certainly mutated. The dead were rising much more quickly and the plague seemed to be being passed on from the dead to the living, perhaps at the moment of death.
