The House of Night and Chain

by David Annandale

  I made my way towards them over fallen rockcrete chunks. As I drew closer, I began to hear their argument.

  ‘Apologise,’ Katrin said. She held the rod with both hands. Her face was contorted with anger. Her body vibrated with its tension. The length of brass might as well have been a shock maul. ‘You can’t say that about my mother.’

  ‘She was a coward,’ the boy sneered. ‘She was weak. We’ve all heard. Vanja’s cousin is a Montfor, and she knows everything. She told us. Your mother was so sad about being alone, she did the window jump.’ He spat. ‘Pathetic.’

  The other children had stopped playing and were gathering around the two opponents. They did not look friendly towards Katrin.

  I hurried faster, tearing the right leg of my trousers on a jutting piece of broken iron.

  ‘Take it back,’ Katrin warned.

  ‘Make me.’ The boy grinned.

  Katrin swung the rod and smashed it against the side of the boy’s head. His face went blank with surprise and pain. He had expected several more rounds of bravado, not an immediate attack. Then he dropped to his knees, screaming and clutching his head. Katrin hit him again, and then again, always bringing the rod down on his head.

  ‘Katrin, no!’ I shouted, and rushed to intervene. She was going to kill the boy.

  Again, I was not there. Katrin was here because I had left, and then Eliana had died. She was the last to fight for the honour of our family, and she was alone. She had only her anger to sustain her, and now she had unleashed it.

  I pulled at Katrin to no avail. I tried to catch the rod. Somehow, its trajectory was always a bit off from where I grabbed, its speed a little too great. She smashed the boy again, and there was blood everywhere. She hit him again, and I heard bone split.

  The sound of the boy’s skull breaking open snapped the other children out of their fascination. Shouting, they rushed at Katrin. She dropped the rod and ran, cursing them as she leapt over the rubble.

  I couldn’t catch up. I was clumsier than the children, and always several steps behind.

  Katrin was making for the schola. They caught up to her at the edge of the rubble. They grabbed at her. She punched and kicked and spat. The children became a tiny riot of hate. As I reached them, two boys grabbed Katrin and threw her into the street. She fell over in front of an oncoming Chimera.

  ‘Stop!’ I shouted, my arms out as if desperation alone would halt the vehicle.

  There was a terrible thump and the crackling of a bundle of wet sticks. Katrin’s head rolled away into the gutter.

  I screamed. I covered my eyes, but the image was there in my mind. It would be there always. Her skull, rolling, rolling, rolling.

  I screamed until I was out of breath and a string of drool hung from my lips. When I looked up, I was in Silling, in its spire’s study. There was laughter coming up from below. The door opened, and Zander came in, accompanied by Veth Montfor.

  Zander was a young man now, barely in his twenties. He was drunk and worse. He swayed, giggling, and Montfor had to steady him. His pupils were dilated. He was pale, and too thin. He looked like he hadn’t eaten in some time. He was consumed by other appetites. His clothes were dishevelled, looking like they had been donned in haste. He was grinning wildly, at once satiated and excited for more.

  There was blood on his teeth.

  ‘Zander,’ I said mournfully. I didn’t reach for him. I knew he would not hear me. I had always been absent. I was absent still.

  ‘That was extraordinary,’ he said. ‘No words, no words. Oh, that was… To do that, to feel that…’

  ‘You went too far,’ said Montfor. She absently stroked her breathing tube, her gaze narrowed with the disapproval of the expert libertine.

  Zander laughed. ‘Of course I went too far! That’s why we’re here, isn’t it? What was it like for you the first time?’

  ‘There was no first time,’ she said. ‘You should not have done that.’

  Zander spun around the room, arms out. ‘I’m floating!’ he cried, delighted. ‘Look at me! I’m floating!’

  ‘I’m having what is left taken out of my house,’ Montfor said. ‘It will be found elsewhere. But the militia will be alerted.’

  Zander couldn’t stop laughing. ‘Listen to you! So stern and proper! Since when did you turn from excess? I saw what you were doing.’

  ‘I know where to stop. Excess without discipline is dangerous.’

  ‘Then it isn’t truly excess!’ Zander shouted. ‘I have surpassed my master!’ He flapped his arms. ‘The ceiling here isn’t high enough. I’m going to bump my head against it in a moment!’

  ‘Listen to me,’ Montfor warned. ‘You will be executed.’

  ‘The militia has to catch me first.’

  ‘How do you intend to escape?’

  ‘Can they fly?’

  ‘No. Can you?’

  ‘I can now!’ He moved to the casement and threw open the window. The great eye of Luctus looked in on us. Zander pointed to the moon. ‘There,’ he said. ‘They won’t catch me there, will they?’

  ‘No,’ said Montfor. ‘I don’t believe they will.’

  ‘Then I thank you,’ Zander said, still laughing. ‘What an evening!’ His eyes widened with his smile, new ecstasy suffusing his face. ‘What a grand evening!’

  He leapt.

  Montfor was already heading back to the door before the crunch of impact.

  Broken by grief, crushed by despair, I moved to the window. Despite myself, I looked down to add one more horror to the images in my mind.

  Zander had hit the ground head first.

  ‘Where were you, father?’

  Katrin’s voice made me turn around. We were in the librarium. She was in the chair where I had sat an aeon ago, reading Eliana’s journal. She was a bit younger than the Katrin that purported to be sleeping upstairs. She wore her indoctrinator’s uniform.

  Katrin looked up from the journal, her face ashen. ‘Where were you?’ she asked again.

  I was standing in front of the window, and she appeared to be looking directly at me. ‘I didn’t know,’ I said, desperate for her to understand. ‘How could I have known? She knew why I left. You know what duty means. What could I have done differently?’

  I trailed off. She was looking right through me. She had been speaking to a father who was not there, and never had been when it mattered.

  Zander sauntered into the librarium. He was less dissolute than he had been in Silling. He was removing his councillor’s sash as he walked in. ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing.’ Katrin closed the journal. ‘It’s all nothing.’

  ‘Not the book. That.’ Zander pointed to a cloth-draped shape on the chair next to Katrin.

  She stood. ‘It’s a gift from Councillor Montfor.’

  ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘I don’t joke.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘Did Montfor say anything in council?’

  ‘About this?’ said Zander. ‘No. I don’t think so.’ He frowned. ‘Now that you mention it, though, she seemed very pleased with herself. Kept making pointed remarks about honour and then smiling at me. I have no idea what she was on about.’

  ‘I do. She was thinking of this.’

  ‘But what is it?’ Zander insisted.

  Katrin hesitated, visibly reluctant. Then, with a sigh, she pulled the cloth away, revealing the portrait of Devris Strock. She backed away slowly until she was standing behind Zander.

  He stared at the painting, convulsively brushing his arms as though something cold had left trails of slime on his skin. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said, though the shudder in his voice showed that, at some level, he did. ‘What does this mean?’

  ‘It’s the truth of our family,’ Katrin said, her voice dead and flat. ‘It’s our destiny.’
/>   ‘It doesn’t have to be,’ I croaked. ‘Together we can fight it.’

  But I was not there, and they did not hear me.

  ‘This is evil,’ Zander said. He took a step back from the portrait. He tried to tear his eyes away and failed.

  ‘Yes, it is.’ Katrin opened her long coat and pulled a bolt pistol from the holster at her waist.

  ‘No…’ I moaned.

  ‘What should we do?’ Zander pleaded.

  ‘I have been reading about our history,’ said Katrin. ‘There is nothing we can do. All has been written. All has been determined. There is only fate.’

  ‘I won’t believe that. The Emperor protects.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Katrin. She shot Zander in the back of the head. His skull exploded into mist. The shell smashed through the wall in front of him and kept going. Blood splashed across the portrait. It flowed onto the arms of the eight-pointed star and was absorbed into the canvas.

  ‘The Emperor protects,’ Katrin said. Her composure broke, and she let out a single, bitter sob in answer to the lie in those words. Then she brought the muzzle of the pistol to her forehead and pulled the trigger.

  I was curled in a ball, eyes closed, tears running down my face, my hands over my ears, trying to blot out the sounds of my children dying yet again. I would stay as I was. I would not look again. I would not subject myself to another vision of horror that I could not stop, another tragedy flowing from the first act of abandonment in the name of duty.

  Gradually, I realised that the only sound was my strangled keening. I was lying on floorboards. I opened my eyes. I was in the first-floor corridor, midway between Katrin’s and Zander’s bedrooms.

  I used the wall for support to get to my feet. I stood still for a moment, finding my balance again. I was numb, but I knew that feeling would pass. Shock was protecting me. Soon the tidal wave of guilt would break through the flood wall.

  ‘Are you well satisfied, then?’ I asked Malveil. I could barely croak the words. My throat was so taut from weeping that swallowing was agony. ‘There is nothing left to take from me.’

  I knew the truth now. Katrin and Zander were dead. They had been taken from me long ago. They had died and died and died before my eyes, and it didn’t matter which vision had been the truth and which ones were lies. Ultimately, they were all true. I had failed my children. I had abandoned them. Now they were dead. The ones who had appeared to me as adults were more illusions, more projections of my grieving, guilt-ridden soul, just like Eliana’s spectre.

  There was no forgiveness. No atonement. No hope.

  There was, though, one last thing for me to do. One last action to take.

  My stride slowly becoming steadier, I headed for the tower and my chambers.

  Chapter 21

  In my chamber, I opened the grand wardrobe and dragged a battered plasteel weapons case out from the bottom. It had been with me through decades of campaigns. While human comrades had fallen, it and what it contained had always been there. I lifted it onto the bed and opened it. Waiting inside were my plasma pistol, my colonel’s sword of rank and my chainsword.

  The ceremonial blade was carefully polished. It shone in the light of the bedside lumen globe. In the artistry of its workmanship and the precision of its lines, it was another reminder of failure. I did not deserve the rank it represented.

  I deserve nothing.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  Rivas stood in front of the closed door.

  ‘I didn’t hear you come in,’ I said.

  ‘You were too focused on that crate.’

  ‘Of course.’ What kind of a fool do you take me for? You aren’t here. You aren’t real.

  He seems so real. Look at his eyes.

  Just like we were thinking about the children.

  Exactly. So we know better now, don’t we?

  Rivas slowly walked towards me. ‘You didn’t answer me. What do you plan to do with that?’

  ‘I think you know.’

  ‘Put it down, Maeson.’

  ‘I’m curious. How did you come to be here?’

  ‘I couldn’t sleep for worrying about you,’ he said. ‘After speaking with Katrin and Zander–’

  ‘Oh yes,’ I snapped. ‘When you told them to come back.’

  ‘Yes. What is wrong, Maeson?’

  I sighed, and looked up at the ceiling. ‘Malveil,’ I said, ‘I’m tired of the games. I’m bringing them to an end.’

  ‘Stop,’ said Rivas. ‘By the Throne, remember who you are. Remember your duty. Remember your oaths to the Emperor. Will you betray Him?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I will not.’ I brought the plasma pistol up, pointed it at his face and pulled the trigger.

  Nothing happened. Just the click of the trigger. The pistol was dead, inert.

  Rivas shook his head. ‘You should know better than to try something like that.’

  The numbness left me all at once. In a second, all my defences against the violence of my emotions collapsed. The grief and the guilt were so enormous, they should have killed me. When they did not, they ignited the flame of my wrath. My hate for Malveil and what it had done to me, what it had done to my family and what it had done to Eliana, was as colossal as my agony. It burned with the heat of a star. I could have cracked Solus in two with my bare hands. All this anger focused on a single point, on this mockery of my friend that stood before me.

  I would no longer allow this thing to be.

  I dropped the plasma pistol. With a wordless roar, I grabbed the chainsword. I depressed the stud as I lifted the weapon free of the crate, and it snarled to life.

  Rivas’ eyes widened. ‘Maeson!’ he said in terror. ‘Don’t!’

  I was no longer prey for illusions. I knew that the fear in the cardinal’s face was a lie, because the face was not real either. I brought the chainsword down in an overhead blow onto Rivas’ skull. The blade whined against bone. Then it cut through the cardinal. It was like breaking open a hollow tree. It felt like killing a man, but there was nothing inside. The shell that looked like Kalvan Rivas split in two, bisected by my blow, the halves of his face frozen in an imitation of terror. Then the body fell to either side of me.

  I stood over the false corpse. My breath came out in rhythmic snarls. I was growling with the chainsword.

  The body lost definition. Rivas’ robes and flesh flowed together, the colours fading until they were just an increasingly vague shape of light pink. Gradually, it melted away to nothing.

  ‘There!’ I shouted at the house. ‘Now we have truth! At last, it is time to end all illusions!’

  I left the bedroom and descended the stairs, revving the chainsword’s motor.

  Back in the hall, I tried Katrin’s door. It was locked. ‘Why would it be locked unless you are a deceit?’ I said. I leaned back and kicked the door with my bionic leg. I kicked three times before the latch broke and the door banged open.

  Katrin was awake and leapt out of the bed as I strode into the room. ‘Father, what–’ she began.

  ‘I am not your father,’ I growled, and came at her with the chainsword.

  She dropped into a crouch, supported herself with her arms and kicked out with both legs. She hit my prosthetic. Though I felt no pain, she struck hard enough to knock my feet out from under me. I fell, the chainsword howling with the speed of its revolutions as it cut through her bed. The room was filled with a cloud of shredded bedclothes and splintered wood.

  Katrin ran from it, shouting for Zander. I was up again quickly and right behind her. I was fast, but she was faster, and as I came out into the hall once more, Zander was stumbling out of his chamber, confused with sleep, his eyes like a startled animal’s. The illusion was good, as convincing as Rivas had been. Zander’s expression was a silent plea for mercy that almost gave me pause.

  They ran, I p
ursued, and Malveil burst into dark life. The floor heaved. The hall rocked back and forth like a ship in a storm. A deep choir of daemonic voices chanted an incantation to horror. I roared so I could not hear, and spun the teeth of my weapon with greater fury. I could not block out the chanting completely. The rhythms were claws on my being. A terrible meaning was rising to the surface. If I did not end things soon, I would witness a revelation my mind could not survive. And deeper yet than the chant was a slow, ponderous blast. It was the pounding on a drum as big as a mountain, the booming of an asteroid impact, the voice of an artillery gun to shatter worlds and the beating of a heart the size of horror.

  I moved like a drunken man, staggering from one side of the hall to the other as the house chanted and rolled. The children reached the stairs ahead of me and started down. A wave passed through the floor as they did, and Zander lost his footing. He fell against Katrin and they both crashed down the staircase.

  When I arrived at the top of the steps, Zander was curled on the middle landing. He moaned as he tried to get to his feet. Katrin had fallen further, and I could not see her from my position.

  The Zander phantom’s pretence of vulnerability enraged me further, and I rushed down the stairs, heedless of the bucking. Anger gave me power, and it gave me speed.

  Zander was upright when I reached him. Eyes wide, he stretched out his arms to ward me off. ‘Father!’ he cried.

  I rammed the chainsword into his chest.

  The blade ground through his ribcage. The teeth spun red. Bits of lung and heart sprayed into my face. Zander shuddered wildly as I pulled the blade up. It ended his scream. It moved up through his torso and into his neck. I was shouting in a storm of blood. I was shouting with triumph. I was shouting with furious joy because here was the death of lies. Now, I was hitting back at the house through the weapons it had used on me. For everything the house had done throughout the history of my family, for everything it had done to me and my loved ones, for the defeat on Clostrum, for the planet that had died because Malveil wanted its toy to come home, this was my act of vengeance. I drew the chainsword up, and it sawed through Zander’s chin and on up through his skull to his brain, until at last the twitching corpse slid wetly off the blade.