Old Earth

by Nick Kyme

  Deep trenches, crowned by coils of barbed wire, mustard-yellow gas intruding, an ecstasy of fumbling. Hot jungles, men sweating away to bone. The harsh caress of a napalm sunrise. Endless deserts, dusty roadsides, forever wary of the incendiary devices in the burned-out carcasses of vehicles vanquished by aimless shelling. The reek of oil on the breeze.

  The images felt unfamiliar. Almost borrowed.

  The stranger did not look like a soldier. He did not even look like a man.

  The staff he carried looked ordinary enough, but the loose robes hanging off his body had unusual runes woven into the fabric. The farmer thought he knew the language, but his memory failed him. It had been doing that a lot of late. Vestiges of old remembrances sometimes came to him in the night. Terrors, in truth – battlefields, blood and deaths, the old wars. By the time morning came, they had faded, but a mote of those nightmares lingered still. A storm was coming.

  Adjusting his grip on the scythe’s haft, he thought about hailing the stranger to ask him his business. He looked to the stoop of the agri barn.

  For guidance? Permission?

  But the smoking man who had been sitting there and watching him throughout the long afternoon had gone.

  And then the farmer realised something as the stranger closed, coming towards him. Memories began to return.

  ‘This is the storm.’

  Eldrad let his hand drift through the ears of corn and the long grass, even though he knew it wasn’t real. Not really.

  Their soft barbs caressed his skin. The sun warmed his weary body. He had seldom felt pain as acute as this but then, he reasoned, he should probably be dead instead of Slau Dha. That had been foolish, and arrogant. He resolved not to make the same mistake with Prytanis.

  ‘Where are you, Damon?’ he hissed, his voice captured by the wind and echoed back at him.

  The Perpetual had left the stoop.

  He saw the other one up ahead. Diminished. A gentle psychic touch had begun to unweave his shrouded memories. Of Anatol Hive, of the asylum, of Nurth of Traoris, of Macragge… All cascading like coloured glass from a broken kaleidoscope.

  Sudden movement, little more than a stirring of the wind, caught Eldrad’s eye. Beyond the minor compulsion he had invested in the farmer, he found his psychic sight inhibited and realised the chamber must be shielded in some fashion. Either that or Prytanis was.

  He murmured as much to his companion, though his gaze remained on the point where the long grass had moved, and hissed, ‘Find him’.

  Eldrad edged closer to the source of the disturbance, his route taking him away from the farmer. His time would come. Eldrad slowed, not just his gait, but his breathing, even his thoughts.

  Ever so carefully, Eldrad drew his sword.

  Something crouched there, in that long grass: poised, waiting.

  Though it pained him, Eldrad sank down into a low fighting stance, his blade held close to his face, two-handed, the edge turned outwards like a spear pointing out prey.

  ‘I have you…’

  ‘You really don’t,’ said a voice from behind him.

  Eldrad turned, throwing up a hasty defence as a burst of hyper-velocity monomolecular discs scythed towards him. Most of the rounds broke apart or embedded in the psychic barrier, dropping down harmlessly as it dissipated, but one got through, cutting across Eldrad’s thigh and eliciting a cry of agony as he sank down further into the grass.

  Wheat barbs lashed his face as he scurried away from the attack, chased by the whining drone of paired shuriken pistols. The rate of fire kicked out by the sling guns cut long tracts in the field and left a wake of severed stalks, but the seer evaded the deadly projectiles.

  ‘You’ve brought a sword to a gunfight, seer,’ crowed Prytanis. He was a slovenly man with an ill-favoured look about him. Even his voice had a swagger. Of all the immortal mon-keigh he had met, Eldrad disliked him the most.

  Another scything burst pushed the seer deeper into the fields, and farther away from the farmer. He recognised the brace of sidearms, though his sight of them had been brief and under consider­able duress. Guh’hru and Meh’menitay. Their names had grandiose and overly belligerent meanings. Slau Dha had never been one for subtlety, a trait that extended to his armoury, an armoury he had evidently extended to his lackeys.

  Prytanis kept up a nigh-relentless barrage of fire but his efforts smacked of the experimental.

  ‘A little help here?’ Prytanis asked of his charge, but the farmer looked numb, beyond his reach.

  Even injured, Eldrad could move fast. The human had already lost him, but spoke between bursts, hoping to goad his target into revealing himself.

  ‘I hear Gahet is dead. Can’t say I’ll mourn him. I liked him the least,’ said Prytanis. ‘And by least, I mean not at-fugging-all. And if you’re here – I mean really here,’ he added between two curt salvoes – ‘then Slau Dha must be dead too. I’m thinking that wasn’t easy. He had help. Protection.’

  ‘So do I,’ said Eldrad, and it was Prytanis’ turn to react to the voice behind him. He did, faster than a human had any right to, firing from the hip. A razor-edged storm spat from the guns cutting Eldrad in half, only for his hologrammatic simulacrum to flicker and ­reassert itself a metre to the left.

  ‘Clever. You took one of their dathedi suits,’ muttered Prytanis, just as a hulking figure in Legion war-plate emerged from the long grass.

  ‘And you brought a friend,’ he added, a little dismayed, and began to run.

  At the same time a musical note sounded, incongruous against the bucolic backdrop of chirruping birds and the gentle drone of insects reaping pollen.

  As the dull, flat report of a rifle cut the air, Eldrad recognised the chime.

  ‘More are coming,’ he warned his ally, who paused in the action of sighting down his weapon. In the distance, Prytanis made for the cover of the agri barn, not so foolish as to match a pair of pistols – admittedly, extremely deadly pistols – against a Brontos-pattern legionary breech-loader.

  The farmer stood still, seemingly unable to react. He wasn’t able to. Eldrad had him, psychic dampeners or not.

  Down, he sent, and the farmer dropped his scythe and disappeared beneath the golden wheat.

  Barthusa Narek had reverted to a kneeling position, rifle braced over his right thigh, as six warriors in black fed into the chamber. Not a field at all, its false horizon had limits. The warriors had just emerged out of them. The first went down with a shot to her elliptical eyepiece. Blood spurted from the back of her head as the rear section of the helmet shattered. She dropped. The others­ spread out, segmented armour plate catching the sun. They returned fire, shredding the air and turning the field into a blizzard of flying wheat.

  Eldrad heard a grunt as Narek took the pain. He heard him swear too, a Colchisian expletive he did not understand but which brought a smile to his lips regardless.

  Fight well, Barthusa.

  He did not see what happened next. He had his back to the fight, intent on the agri barn where he had last seen Prytanis.

  If the warriors thought to stop him, no shots came his way. An eldar will always choose a mon-keigh as its enemy in preference to one of its own.

  The agri barn loomed, oddly quiet despite the battle happening within earshot. Flat, hard rifle bangs warred with the high-pitched whine of rapidly dispersed flechette rounds.

  Before he entered, Eldrad tried to find the farmer. He had become psychically visible since the seer had eased the bindings on his mind. He remained in hiding, instinct as well as impulse keeping him safe for now.

  Prytanis proved much more elusive.

  ‘Slau Dha taught you to guard yourself then,’ whispered Eldrad as he stepped slowly, painfully onto the stoop.

  It smelled of wood-chip and tree sap, the cloying aroma of sacked grain and spelt, as he passed under the arch of the door. Sh
adows loitered within, leavened only slightly by the faint shafts of simulated sunlight penetrating through the beams above. A shallow creak ran throughout the floor as Eldrad stepped on an old board, resonating all the way to the wooden struts that held the barn several metres off the ground.

  Metal storage bins and old agricultural equipment crowded an otherwise expansive floor space. It churned and rattled, shaking with recent activation and anointing the heady scents of the fields with the more industrial reek of burning oil and dusty machinery.

  A stairway led off into an attic space above. Farming tools had been stacked beneath it. Ahead, a trapdoor set into the floor led down.

  Eldrad made for it.

  He clenched his fist and the trapdoor shattered into splinters. Through the ragged gap, he found another stairwell. This one led down into penumbral gloom. Chains rattled in the basement space, the hooks on their ends clinking against one another in the breeze flowing from above.

  Eldrad had almost reached the last step when Prytanis came at him. Eschewing the sling guns, he went with a short-pattern chainsword instead. Eldrad barely made the parry, sparks spitting between whirring metal teeth as they cut the edge of his witchblade.

  In desperation, he threw out a telekinetic pulse that sent the chains lashing but which Prytanis deftly avoided. A thrust with the chainsword gored Eldrad’s thigh, shredding his robes and cutting flesh. He screamed, in both shock and pain. He had expected the duel to be swift. Without the psychic inhibitors retarding his abilities, he could have crushed Prytanis with a thought. As it was, his powers were much reduced, practically that of the lowliest warlock.

  Narek,+ he sent, retreating farther into the darkness, letting the hooks nip at his skin, belatedly realising he had also said the name aloud.

  ‘Your hired muscle is otherwise engaged,’ said Prytanis. ‘What are you even doing here, seer? You can’t exactly kill me.’

  ‘I need to cut… another strand,’ said Eldrad, clamping a hand over the wound in his thigh to staunch the blood. A thought knitted the skin, but left it taut and sore. He limped into the shadows, gathering them around him, making it difficult to be seen.

  ‘Smart,’ he heard Prytanis say, ‘but I can disappear too…’

  Silencing the burring chainblade, he blended into the darkness.

  For a few moments, even the ambient sounds of the field and the distant battle faded, leaving Eldrad alone with his ragged breathing.

  That tranquility did not last.

  ‘So you’ve turned then?’ asked Prytanis, his voice echoing from the left.

  Eldrad stood his ground, ignoring the bait.

  ‘Cheap tricks,’ he said, wary.

  ‘Just doing my job, seer. Like you should be.’

  ‘You are insouciant, even for one of your blind race.’

  ‘You would not be the first to mention it.’

  Eldrad still couldn’t detect him. The cellar seemed large, far larger than it had appeared from the upper floor based on the outer walls of the barn above. Threats lurked in every shadow.

  ‘And if I told you what you had been fed was a lie, that there was another way?’

  ‘I take my orders from the Autarch, you know that.’

  ‘Slau Dha is dead.’

  ‘Then his last orders stand, which do not, I am sorry to say, include helping you.’

  ‘And what about the other one? He who you have been set to watch.’

  That provoked a twitch, a subtle movement Prytanis had not intended. Eldrad crept towards it.

  ‘What about him? Your plan fugged him to hell and back. He’s mortal now. No more do-overs.’

  ‘Not all men want to live forever. What do you want, Damon?’

  ‘Bargaining? Shit, you must be desperate. How badly did those klowns cut you?’

  Deep, thought Eldrad but said nothing. He crept closer, but the impression of movement kept shifting, confounding his efforts.

  ‘What do I want?’ asked Prytanis, his voice echoing from left then right and back, impossible to pinpoint. ‘A drink might be nice. Out of this rustic nightmare runs a close second, though.’

  ‘I can give that to you. Release. Help me. Help him. There is a third way.’ Eldrad raised his sword, a hook plinked lightly off the blade.

  ‘No can do, I’m afraid. Orders, see.’

  Prytanis leapt out of the darkness. Somehow he had got above Eldrad and descended upon him, the chain-teeth of his weapon hungering.

  A hulking figure smashed throughout the cellar wall, leaving a ragged hole that bled in the light.

  Narek took Prytanis in a sweeping charge, lifting him bodily across the cellar floor. The chainsword stabbed down repeatedly, but Narek would not be dissuaded. Flechettes protruded from his armour like little razored nubs. Bleeding from half a dozen cuts carefully made through the vulnerable mesh joints in his war-plate, Narek thrust Prytanis through the opposite wall and threw him back out into the field.

  Prytanis bounced hard, an ankle bone breaking audibly, a rib or two likely fractured, then rolled up onto his feet. Remarkably, he still had a hold of his weapon but dropped it in favour of the pistols holstered at his hips.

  Muzzle flare streaked like a fiery smear as he moved. He had already begun to regenerate, the ankle bone fused and knit. It barely slowed him down.

  Narek held up his arm, warding off the hasty burst fire, shards embedding in his vambrace. He bounded after Prytanis, who shot as he moved, one arm behind him, firing blind. Narek leapt over a salvo, rapidly covering the distance between him and his prey, then slamming down.

  Prytanis arrested his run, pulling up short and diving out of harm’s way, pistols tucked beneath his body as he rolled and the earth caved in his wake.

  Narek swiftly rose from the crater he had made, drawing and swinging his gladius in one fluid movement.

  Prytanis bent back on his heels, arching his spine and folding his knees just enough that the legionary blade missed his body, taking only three buttons from his jacket. They had barely hit the ground before he was moving again.

  Narek lunged and thrust, trying to find extra reach but Prytanis wove aside from that blow too. He rolled backwards, foot over head, and made enough room to bring up Guh’hru and Meh’menitay.

  The gladius suddenly impaling his left palm spoiled Prytanis’ aim.

  Narek glared, his right arm still extended from the throw, fingers loose.

  Prytanis wrenched out the blade with effort, then wielded it in his uninjured hand. It looked cumbersome.

  ‘If I jam this in your eye, will it kill you?’

  Narek smirked. ‘Try, and find out.’

  ‘I will.’

  Prytanis lunged, fast.

  Narek moved faster. He trapped his opponent’s arm with one hand, and seized Prytanis’ throat with the other.

  ‘You’re a big, ugly bastard,’ said Prytanis, struggling to breathe, to speak. ‘Anyone ever told you that before?’

  Narek stared, unmoved. ‘Legion weapons are heavy,’ he said, ‘burdened with the blood from the lives they have taken. Mine is weightier than most,’ he added, and snapped Prytanis’ neck.

  The Perpetual fell limp in his grasp and Narek let him go. He had dropped his rifle near the agri barn and saw it waiting for him, ­nestled in the wheat.

  Eldrad staggered into the light, still bleeding despite his best efforts to heal himself.

  ‘A toll has been taken,’ he whispered, and gritted his teeth as he closed on where the farmer was hiding.

  ‘John,’ he called.

  Grammaticus emerged from the golden wheat.

  ‘I won’t lie, it has been a pleasant fiction,’ he said, when Eldrad was close enough to hear it. ‘Is any of this real?’

  ‘It was real to you.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  Pale wraithbone had begun to
show through the gaps in the wheat and grass. The sun took on a more artificial cast, as of strange lumens, and seemed to lose its natural warmth. The agri barn remained, a fabricated structure placed here to complete the illusion.

  Grammaticus glanced over to where Prytanis had collapsed, flinching slightly when he saw Narek. The legionary barely acknowledged him as he retrieved the rifle.

  The long grass near to where Prytanis had fallen began to stir…

  ‘You are allies?’ said Grammaticus to Eldrad, incredulous. ‘He tried to kill Damon and myself. Is that why you’re here now, to finish what he started on Macragge? Now I’ve done your dirty work for you.’

  ‘Barthusa Narek has another purpose, John. Your death isn’t it.’

  Grammaticus shrugged, though he appeared far from convinced. ‘I guess I should feel relieved.’

  ‘You have another purpose,’ Eldrad confirmed.

  ‘And now I’m back to being terrified and colossally annoyed.’

  Eldrad stared, unmoved by the human’s histrionics.

  ‘Where is the human Ollanius Persson?’

  ‘How the hell should I know?’ replied Grammaticus, his attention half on the legionary as he loaded a round directly into the rifle’s breech. Even at a distance, it didn’t look to Grammaticus like an ordinary bullet.

  ‘You recognise the ammunition, don’t you, John.’

  Grammaticus nodded, eyes still on Narek. ‘It’s smaller than I remember. No mistaking its power though.’

  ‘That which cannot die can be slain by the fulgurite or its shards.’

  ‘You’ve used it?’ Grammaticus looked away, back to the seer, as the corpse of Damon Prytanis began to rise, renewed…

  Eldrad nodded.

  ‘It has severed more than one immortal thread.’

  A shot reported across the field, echoing strangely in the false idyll of rurality the eldar had made for their ‘guest’.

  Grammaticus did not flinch, and Eldrad could tell by his eyes that he knew Prytanis was dead. Really dead this time.