by Dan Abnett
‘C-Carl?’ Zael stammered. He looked up.
I was almost insensible with pain. The cold hands of the psykers were upon me, guzzling at my strength, dragging me down to hell. My hold on the incunabula finally gave way.
Its first strike raked across the front of my chair. The second blow, with the other blade, scored the metal deeper. The third punched through, severing vital systems and shooting more pain into my besieged brain stem.
Something knocked the Brass Thief back away from me. I tried to focus through the swirling mayhem of light and wind and debris.
I saw Zeph. He was wounded in the left side from the detonating cannon. His clothes were tattered and bloody, and his augmetic left arm hung in sparking ruins. In his right hand, he clutched Kara’s shivered sword.
He struck the Brass Thief again, drawing a prickle of sparks from its armour, and then blocked the rhyming swords as they cut at him. Stab and parry, one frantic sword against two.
He’d given me a moment’s grace. I focused my will on the most immediate psyker and drove it off me with a barbed psy-lunge. The rotting ghost squealed and retreated a little. But at least two more were there, bleating and greasy.
I could feel some huge psychic force gathering above me, focused on the floor above. Carl’s room. Something born of the darkest warp was boiling into fury up there. I heard screams. Inhuman screams.
In the basement vault, Trice and Culzean looked around at the lead holding tanks. All five were vibrating, like pots on a stove. Warning lights were flashing on all across the biometric consoles. At least three of the handlers had collapsed, blood pouring from their tear ducts and nostrils.
‘What the hell is happening?’ Trice yelled over the uproar.
There was a loud bang and one of the tanks cracked. Suspension fluid squirted out. The fluid was boiling.
‘We’ve lost a psyker!’ Revoke yelled, trying to harness the remaining units.
‘Lost?’
‘He’s dead! Burned out!’
The lid blew off another tank, gushing scalding fluid over the lip. The fleshly body of the psyker inside had just exploded.
‘Is this Ravenor?’ Trice yelled.
‘No,’ said Culzean, his face quite pale. ‘Listen.’
The three remaining psykers were screaming. Screaming out one word, over and over, a name.
Slyte! Slyte! Slyte! Slyte!
Power seemed to leave the psykers assaulting me for a moment. I threw them away from me, summoning my strength to re-engage the Brass Thief.
Zeph Mathuin ducked under one sweeping blow, then sliced the shivered sword upwards with a deft undercut.
It drove entirely through the incunabula’s torso. Miasmal energy, like ichor, dribbled and ran from around the impaling blade.
Zeph tried to pull the sword out, but it was wedged fast.
The Brass Thief lunged.
Mathuin blinked.
The incunabula slowly slid its rhyming swords out of Mathuin’s chest.
Zeph looked around at me, hopeless and lost, and fell dead on his face.
PART THREE
City of Men, City of Gods
One
Later, I came to understand that was the moment that Fury seized me. Fury, grief, outrage and an all-consuming hatred I had never tasted before. I speared my telekinesis out along the devastated hallway and grasped the one parting gift Zeph Mathuin had left me.
The shivered sword stuck through the incunabula’s torso.
I wasn’t thinking any more. I was all but insensible with rage. My will was stronger and more ferocious than I had ever known it. It was as if I were drawing vast supplements of strength from the psychic powers loose in the house around me, or as if some vengeful force of balefire from the most alien recesses of the warp was invigorating my mind.
I wrenched the transfixed sword upwards and split the incunabula’s chest armour through its brass sternum. The golden cage of its ribs broke open, releasing a gout of fetid, violet light from the daemon’s inchoate core.
The Brass Thief twisted and writhed on the impaling sword, merely opening the chest wound wider. It made a mewling, whining sound.
I fired my chair’s psy-cannon. Not just once, perhaps a dozen times, two dozen even. Every scalding bolt I aimed into the incunabula’s ruptured chest cavity, and I kept firing until the relentless salvoes had the desired effect.
The brass and gold mechanism of the incunabula’s form ripped apart in a blossom of fire, whizzing fragments in every direction. The blast was of such force that the shivered sword came spinning away to thump, tip down and quivering, into the floorboards beside my chair. The empty helm was driven upwards by the fireball and embedded itself in the ceiling by its crest.
The feral essence of the incunabula, the azoic daemon-spark, came shrieking out of the blast, free from the ancient device that had bound it for so long. It vanished, never, I imagine, to be found or enslaved again.
The broken brass remains clattered to the floor, like so much scrap metal, smouldering.
I sank back, exhausted, my powers ebbing. There was a noise behind me and I turned my chair quickly.
Wystan Frauka, bleeding from the side of the head and covered with plaster dust, was pulling himself out of the wreckage beside the staircase.
‘H-hello?’ he was mumbling. ‘Ravenor? Anyone?’
‘Wystan!’ I transponded at full volume. ‘Your limiter! Now!’
Foul psychic manifestations were still churning about the upper floors of the house, making torn, keening noises, and we were dreadfully exposed. Frauka fumbled with the small device at his throat and switched it off.
A decompressive boom shook the walls as his untouchable effect closed the area down. The bodiless forms of the invading psykers were banished, negated by the sudden deadness. I heard roof tiles dislodge and shatter as the forces were ejected from the building. Within seconds, a torrential rainstorm began to drench the ninth ward of Formal E.
Frauka gazed across the demolished ruin of the hallway, the shattered walls, the torn floorboards, the shot-up plaster. He saw the body lying near the entranceway.
‘Mathuin…’ he began, then went quiet, realising how pointless his question was.
I powered back up the staircase, or what was left of it. I prayed to the Golden Throne of Earth that I would find Thonius and Zael alive. I was puzzled and disturbed too. The psykers had come for me initially, and then at least half of them had concentrated their attacks on Carl’s room on the first floor, whereupon that loathsome psychic force had begun to gather up there. Why?
The door was closed. Smoke, or vapour of some sort, drifted up from under the door, and a thick coating of rime iced the door and the walls either side, steaming as it began to thaw and slide to the floor.
The door handle rattled, stopped and then rattled again more urgently.
Something was in there, trying to get out.
Kys howled as Unwerth banked the flier hard to evade the swirling flock, but the birds turned as one, like a glittering shoal of pelagic fish, and spurted after them.
Unwerth pulled the nose around again, racing them along an up-stack canyon, missing oncoming air-traffic by the most horrifying of close margins. Heavier lifters, entering the canyon flow from above on guided descent, were forced to abort violently, and rose away from the stacks, sirens sounding. Unwerth yawed frantically from side to side, just avoiding a flier that came head-on, lights blazing, and banked them around the tail end of a massive cargo lifter by executing a virtual stall-turn.
The armoured flier’s jetpods wailed to gather lift as Unwerth drove it on down a crossway. The Unkindness billowed in a sparkling ball as it changed direction to follow them. Swiftly, the sheen birds were gaining again, forming a mercurial ribbon of silver in the air that flowed in and out of the high alt traffic faster than Unwerth could weave the flier between, under and over the slower-moving vehicles in the skyway.
‘What in altercation are they?’ he yelled, fighting with
the stick.
‘Birds!’ Kys shouted back.
‘But machines?’
‘Yes!’
‘Yet they fly like birds?’
‘Yes!’ she screamed. ‘Why? What does that matter?’
The front part of the beating swarm closed around them. They heard thousands of impacts as beaks and wings struck at the fuselage. Alarms sounded. Some of the sheen birds had gone into one or more of the engine intakes, mangled by the jet screws.
‘Hold on!’ Unwerth cried out. He slammed the nose down and hit the boosters.
The flier broke away from the Unkindness swarm and dropped like a missile into the depths of the stack-way, burners lighting blue-hot. The fluttering stream of metal forms spiralled and dived after it.
They were dropping into the lower depths of the towering street, far too fast. Cross-bridges and pedestrian overwalks shot by, Unwerth going over some and under others. Kys could see the multi-lanes of surface traffic coming up to meet them, saw the headlights, the illuminated indicator boards, the jagged neon pointers detailing sink ramps and off-arterial sub-lanes.
‘Unwerth…’ she began.
Still at full boost, the shipmaster grimly kept the nose down.
‘Unwerth!’
The flier levelled and rocketed along five hundred metres of surface street, passing at roof level over the traffic queue so violently that the concussion of its jet-wash rocked transporters on their axles and blew out screens and door windows. Outraged citizens spilled out of their vehicles, only to duck back immediately, screaming in terror as the sheen storm rushed past a second later.
Unwerth sliced the flier between the roof of a cargo-10 and a massive over-road indicator board. Kys covered her eyes.
Unwerth pitched to the left suddenly, leaving the main surface arterial, and powered down over the traffic of a descender ramp. Within moments, they were chasing into the deep chasms of the undersink, into the inter-stack gulfs below the nominal surface level. Flier traffic in the undersink was seriously restricted: it was darker and tighter, and there were many, many more bridges and crosswalks. Roadside klaxons and hazard lamps began to hoot and flash. Indicator screens lit up red with notices to Abort flightpath or Slow down.
Unwerth did neither. He dropped lower, avoiding bridge spans that loomed suddenly out of the blackness, lower still, as if intent on plunging them into the very bottom-most sumps and pits of the hive-sinks.
Still the Unkindness beat down after them.
‘Birds, you said?’ Unwerth repeated, concentrating as hard as he could given the limited view ahead, his hands twisting and yanking the stick, the flier rocking and banking violently.
‘Yes,’ Kys said, holding on tightly. She looked across at him. ‘Why do you keep–’
She yelped as the flier hit something with huge, glancing force. Unwerth had misjudged an overhead duct and the collision had torn part of the upper control surface from the flier’s tail.
He fought to retain command, feeling the machine buck and try to spin out. Debris and crackling plumes of electrical discharge flurried back in the wounded craft’s slipstream. They were losing speed. The front of the flock was beginning to bang and clatter against the hull again
A last turn, down yet another dim sub-level, right into the bilges now. Trailing a swirling, mobbing cloud of sheen birds, they gunned down a deep trench of rusted girderwork, moss-black rockcrete and dripping acid, their rushing lampbeams picking up the accumulated filth and trash that trickled down through the undersink. There was no more ‘down’ they could go.
And now, Kys realised, no more ‘on’ either. She saw the end of the trench ahead of them, a chainlink barrier, decaying hazard notices that were coming up too fast to read. The sump trench was a dead end.
Over the din of the sheen birds hammering and chipping at the hull, she cried out Unwerth’s name at the top of her voice.
If he heard her, he didn’t react in time.
The armoured flier hit the barrier fence, taking most of the chainlink along with it like a veil. It inverted, engines flaring, as it went over the sump wall.
And hit the dark, black water beyond in a huge cone of spray.
‘They’re closing still!’ Kara warned.
Plyton downshifted. ‘This is a Bergman Amity Veluxe,’ she said. ‘No one closes on a Bergman Amity Veluxe.’ The big black transporter surged forward down the steep, high stack ramp, its engine making the most spectacular roar.
Behind it, the grey transporter dropped back a little, then began to push forward again.
At this hour, the arterials of Formal A were fairly quiet. Long stretches of rockcrete highway tunnel flicked by, lit by sodium lamps.
The man with the hellgun was still snapping off shots.
‘That said, find an exit,’ Kara said.
‘Hell with that,’ said Plyton.
‘Do it! Another straight section and they’ll shoot out our wheels, speed or no speed.’
As if to prove her point, a laser bolt hit the boot lid. The Bergman wavered. Lamps bright, the big grey transporter loomed behind them, jockeying to pull alongside, engine revving.
Kara threw herself over the passenger seat into the back, reached out through the shattered rear screen, and fired her handgun. Her first shots missed. In reply, two more energy rounds tore sideways through the roof.
‘Yeah, screw you,’ Kara said, and took aim again.
She pumped six shots through the wide front screen of the big grey transporter. It faltered slightly, then abruptly went into a savage uncontrolled spin.
‘Plyton!’
Plyton hit the throttle and boosted the Bergman forward just fast enough to avoid it being clipped from behind by the big, skidding transporter. The grey machine went across two lanes backwards and hit the central strip defenders – a barrier of sand drums and metal bars – with such force that it tore itself apart in a shower of glass and flying metal.
‘Now get us off this damn arterial,’ Kara said.
Plyton tore down the next exit into a gloomy sub-street. She dropped her speed, and made several random turns through quiet underlinks and cross-streets. Finally, they pulled into a loading dock and parked in the cover of some rockcrete columns. Plyton killed the engine and the lights. They sat for a moment in the soft darkness, breathing hard. In the distance, they could hear vehicles roaring past on the arterial, and the sound of sirens. Not just emergency responders, security alarms too.
They got out. Plyton walked the length of the Bergman in dismay. ‘Look at it! Look at it! Uncle Vally will kill me when–’
She shut up suddenly. To Kara’s surprise, she started to weep.
‘Hey,’ said Kara.
Plyton shook her off and walked away into the shadows beyond the columns.
Kara let the girl be. She fished out her hand-vox and punched in a code. ‘Come on!’ she said. ‘Why aren’t you answering? Ravenor? Ravenor, where are you?’
The channel refused to pick up. Kara was just putting in Harlon’s code when she realised Plyton was staring at her.
‘What did you just say?’ the marshal asked.
‘What?’
‘That name. That name.’
‘Ravenor?’ Frauka had come to join me. He’d drawn his own compact weapon, for all the good that would do on a night like this. The door handle continued to rattle.
‘You want me to…?’ he pointed to his limiter.
‘Only if we really have to. Wait.’
Outside the rain sluiced down. I was sure it wouldn’t be long now before more conventional agents of our enemy arrived.
The rattling finally ceased. There was a click and the door swung open.
Panting, Carl stood in the doorway, leaning for support against the splintered jamb. His clothes were torn, and serious bruises covered the bare flesh of his throat and the side of his face. Blood trickled from his left nostril.
‘Oh Throne,’ he gasped. ‘It’s you.’
‘Carl?’
�
�I thought they were going to kill us. Tear us apart.’
‘Are you all right?’
‘I’ll live. I probably won’t ever sleep soundly again, but I’ll live.’
‘Where’s Zael?’
He gestured into the room behind him and I sped past.
Carl’s room was utterly destroyed. Everything in it had been torn apart, every machine smashed, every stick of furniture reduced to slivers of wood and tufts of fabric. It looked as if a hurricane had passed through. Then again, the rest of the house was hardly what the landlord would describe as ‘in good order’.
Zael was sitting on the floor in the middle of the room. The carpet around him was singed. He was staring into space, his eyes glazed.
‘Zael?’
The boy didn’t reply.
‘What happened?’ Frauka asked.
‘Psykers,’ said Carl, wiping his nose. ‘Two or three of them, I think. I don’t know. The place just turned upside down. These… invisible hands, they pinned me to the wall.’ Carl fingered the dark bruises around his throat. ‘Crushing me, and…’
‘Carl? What?’
Thonius pointed a shaking hand at Zael. ‘Zael… the boy… he just…’
‘What?’
‘Well, I don’t know what he did, exactly. But he destroyed them. I heard the pyskers shrieking in the air. Zael was laughing, like a little kid playing with toys. I think I must have passed out then, because when I came round, everything was quiet and he was just sitting there. Like that. Just zoned out.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Our priority right now is to get out of here. Fast. I’ll deal with Zael as soon as we’re secure.’
‘Look,’ said Carl, ‘there’s one other thing. I know we’re all jumpy about this, and things have been said about Zael, and I sure as hell don’t want to make trouble where there is none. But I heard a name. I don’t know if it was in my mind after I passed out, if I dreamed it, or what. But I’d swear the psykers were howling out a name. They were… they were saying “Slyte”.’
I saw Frauka look at me. It was one of the few times I knew exactly what he was thinking even though he was an untouchable.
