by Col Buchanan
Cole could hear their shouts echoing down the passageway as the skymen ran ahead, though his mind was too flown with the wildness of the moment to take it all in, the frantic last few seconds in which he had been hacking with his machete at a kree scout until it lay still. Fear was squirting through his guts.
Another muffled explosion shook the ground. A sudden wash of hot air rushed along the passage from behind, stabbing his ears with pressure. The old farlanders were tossing grenades back there, throwing them like firecrackers at the warriors giving chase.
He stumbled into a chamber filled with giant mushrooms, only to find the rest of the men waving their torches at the surrounding kree, trying to create a path through them, while young Aléas whistled for the cat.
Cole tried to remember precisely where they were within the warren, and shook his head to clear it. They were still deep, still far beneath the level that would take them upwards to the first main chamber of the nest. Workers pressed closer on all sides. Behind him, Ash and Kosh staggered out of the tunnel to rejoin them and to wave the group onwards.
Where’s that damned cat, Cole wondered again, but then at the foot of one of the far tunnels he finally spotted a line of sap glowing like the fungi in the darkness.
‘That way,’ he gasped, pointing towards it.
With Ash tossing another grenade behind them, Cole surged across the chamber after the others’ reckless haste, driving the kree workers back with his torch. He glimpsed more warriors converging on them as they hurried into the mouth of the tunnel, and then he noticed that the slope of this passage was taking them blessedly upwards.
Up he scrambled after the men’s bobbing torches, as keen as the rest of them to seek the surface. But now he could hear more fighting behind him, and as Cole hurried onwards a debate was flashing through his head, whether to stop and help the old farlanders or to push on while they held the warriors at bay.
Images from the past flashed in Cole’s mind, as though they had happened only yesterday: fighting retreats in the passages beneath the walls of the Shield, studded with the wild grimy faces of his comrades from the Specials, men and women alike, near-buried in collapsed tunnels with the nightmare of violence all around him. Blades and pistols flashing in the darkness, explosions rocking everything; sobbing as he fell back, sobbing as he left them to their fates.
Cursing to himself, Cole swung around with a whoosh of his torch and spotted the two old Rōshun not all that far back from him – a pair of naked figures dancing in the torchlight with their blades flashing faster than he would have ever believed, faster even than the kree.
Holy kush, look at them fight.
They were holding the kree back, those two old farlanders – with swords alone they were holding off a tunnel full of kree, filling it from side to side with bodies. But now a warrior was rearing up against the roof with its limbs scrabbling at Kosh, dislodging chunks of earth onto their heads while they fought it off, and Kosh tumbled backwards from an audible strike from one of its limbs.
It was enough to spur Cole downwards, hacking at the creature too, cleaving through one of its legs with his machete. In a rush of air its jaws swung around and knocked him into the wall with his breath and his torch and his machete all flying away from him.
No chance at all to regain his feet in those next desperate moments. He glimpsed another warrior attacking Ash before the sight of it was blocked by the closer kree rearing over him. On his back, Cole snatched the two hooryas from his belt and used their crescent blades to fend off the kree’s silent frenzy, the reek of the creature’s attack scents filling his mouth and his head. As it lashed out at him Cole squirmed backwards along the wall, striking back blindly with the smaller punch-blades of the weapons, feeling the pain of every barbed lash against his arms, knowing that he was done for.
But not quite, not yet. Blinking through sweat, Cole glanced up to see the warrior turning on Kosh again, who was staggering about in the shadows thrashing his blade at its limbs. Kosh hacked through another limb, but the warrior side-swiped him with its jaws and caught his thigh. A crunch of bone and Kosh went tumbling one way and his leg another.
Cole scrambled to his feet in the precious moments it bought him. The warrior pounced, and he bent low and stabbed and stabbed again at its underhood, aiming for its eyes before he was smashed aside once more.
He glimpsed Kosh next to him. The Rōshun was yelling without sound at the sight of his missing leg, half gone now. Above them, the warrior thrashed blindly into the side of the passage.
Cole grabbed the fallen man and dragged him away from the creature. He fumbled to untie the loop of rope still fixed around his waist so he could tie off the wound, though it was difficult just then, for he was seeing images of war again in his mind, companions dying of shock from severed limbs just like this one, and they were making him shake.
‘Ash!’ he roared out with all his fury. ‘Ash!’
Backwards the old farlander danced, with his torch describing wild roaring arcs through the air, no chance yet to notice his friend bleeding to death behind him.
‘I’ve got you,’ Cole said down to the prone man, who gasped and squeezed his eyes shut in pain. He tightened the rope as a tourniquet but the blood kept spurting from Kosh’s wound.
‘Go,’ Kosh told him through gritted teeth, and Cole saw that his lips were turning blue already. ‘Get out of here.’
Another grenade exploded along the tunnel, another rush of hot air.
‘Ash!’
At last the farlander saw Kosh lying there, and dropped to his fallen companion with rapid blinks of surprise.
‘He’s dying,’ said Cole, then rose to the sound of screaming ahead, where the torches of the skymen were distant specks in the blackness. More damned trouble.
In that moment of pressure, the longhunter felt something brush against his side and turned to see that it was the cat, returned to him in those moments. His spirits soared just to see her alive.
Ash was already hauling Kosh onto his back, almost buckling from the weight of him. The farlander’s expression was a mask of grim determination. Cole turned away from them, drawn by the sound of the cat growling down the sloping passage filled with kree carcasses.
Quickly he scooped up a fallen torch and threw it as far back as he could.
Suddenly Cole laughed aloud – a crazy, half-second laugh of hopelessness – for he saw the movements of kree massing behind the fallen bodies, trying to get past the dead warriors with their flailing limbs, dragging at them to clear the way. They were moments away from flooding the passage.
The longhunter took a step backwards.
‘Ash. Your grenades there.’
*
Kosh’s blood was spilling all over him.
‘Let me down, let me down,’ Kosh kept saying across his back, and each time he did so his voice grew a little fainter, a little closer to death.
Ash knew that he needed to staunch the wound of the severed leg somehow and that he needed to do it now, but there was no time.
‘Save your breath,’ he gasped at his failing friend on his back, truly frightened at last. He knew that he was losing him.
‘Put me down,’ panted Kosh again, and this time his wish was fulfilled. An explosion rumbled through the earth from behind, and then a sudden rush of hot air slapped Ash from his feet, spilling Kosh to the floor.
He crawled to Kosh and breathed down fast into his friend’s sweaty features. Kosh’s eyelids were flickering fast.
‘I’m going down,’ came his feeble voice from where he lay.
‘No!’ Ash commanded and slapped Kosh hard. ‘Stay with me now. Stay awake!’
‘I’m going down, Ash. I can feel it.’
‘Kosh!’ shouted Ash, and he yanked free one of the bulging skins of Milk from his belt, intending to pour some into Kosh’s mouth, never mind that it had not fermented yet . . . But through his blurring vision he saw the fading pallor of Kosh’s skin and the slowing rhythm of his shallow breaths, and kne
w that it was true, that it was too late.
Dripping sudden tears, Ash lay a hand on Kosh’s bare, fluttering chest. In the torchlight he saw the tattoo there from their days in the revolution, the same design which adorned his own chest: the lines of a path converging into the distance towards a shining star.
‘Kosh,’ he said again with his voice breaking.
‘My children,’ Kosh’s lips were mumbling. ‘Where are my children?’
His eyes flared for a moment and seemed to focus on Ash. A hand rose without the strength to reach him. Ash gripped the sweaty hand and squeezed it with force, his own hand trembling.
‘I’m going,’ whispered Kosh with the last wisp of his breath.
His old friend lay still.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
A Purging in Q’os
Kira dul Dubois, mother of the recently deceased Holy Matriarch, stared through clouds of steam at the shrunken figure splayed on the floor before her in his manacles and chains, and reflected on how easy it would be to stamp on his skull until there was nothing left but shattered bone and brain matter; this man who long, long ago, had been her first true lover.
But they remained only thoughts. Outwardly Kira was composed as she settled herself gently on the bench along the sweating wall of the vault and clasped her hands in her lap, waiting for the man to speak.
‘You took your time,’ the ancient sack of flesh and bones croaked to her from the floor, straining weakly against his bonds.
‘Yes,’ Kira rasped. ‘In fact I took all the time that I could.’
In response he offered a dry retching sound; the man’s closest approximation to laughter.
Nihilis had never laughed in those early days of the Empire, back when he had ruled as the first Holy Patriarch of Mann. Nor before then, when Mann had been nothing more than an urban cult with fingers reaching into every aspect of Q’osian life. Such things as laughter and smiles, he had told his worshipful followers, were for fools and the weak only, and they had all believed him, for of course it was true.
Yet now, all these decades later – that awful cough of laughter churning in her ears, a habit which Nihilis seemed to have developed only in his extreme old age. Perhaps living down here in seclusion had softened him over the years, these secret vaults that were a tomb for the still-living deep beneath the Empire’s capital city of Q’os, where Nihilis had retreated over forty years ago after faking his own death – easier to rule a people, an empire, he had explained at the time, when no one knew you were ruling it at all, or that you were even still alive.
‘Are you sore at me, little Kira?’
The words were a trap, and hovering in the tread of the snare Kira realized fully what she had just said to this man. She clenched her own withered hands together even harder, telling herself to be calm, to keep her mouth shut, to control her anger before it betrayed her entirely.
‘You catch me in a foul mood tonight, my Patriarch, that is all.’
‘You’re always in a foul mood these days, Kira,’ he replied, and she blinked at the naked hypocrisy of his words. But that was Nihilis for as long as she had known him. Always he had thrown at people the barbs which came most from his own unrecognized failings. ‘Where have you been then, that I can smell smoke clinging to your robes so fiercely?’
She was amazed he could smell anything here amongst all the steam. It was a result of the Milk he supped upon endlessly to keep himself alive, heightening his senses.
‘I was down visiting the Shambles. Some unrest has broken out in the streets. I thought I should see it for myself.’
‘Oh?’ he replied, though he seemed to be barely listening now.
She shut her false teeth with a crocodile clack, saying no more.
Nihilis, first Patriarch of Mann, screwed up his withered features and blew three fast pants of breath in an effort to maintain his focus of will. The man lay with his head clamped securely by wooden blocks, which trapped his forehead directly beneath the spout of a six-foot metal cone hanging from the ceiling. From the end of the cone dropped a slow steady drip of water, falling onto a furrowed brow that flinched involuntarily from each successive strike. Kira knew from her own experience that the water would be bitterly chilled and his head a maddening agony by now.
‘Ah, the Shambles, the place of your birth,’ he croaked aloud. ‘I remember now. You came to us as little more than a street runner, a girl with barbs in her eyes willing to do anything.’ A wet noise as he smacked his toothless gums together, and then the man opened his eyes against the droplets bursting against his head. ‘Are the Bastards up to no good again?’
He referred to the recent strikes during the Augere du Mann, sparked by the burning down of one of the almshouses in the Shambles, where a gathering of the Bastards of Saint Charlos had been locked inside while the flames had consumed them all; an act which Kira herself had suggested to her daughter, the Holy Matriarch, in order to cower their organization.
‘Yes. They appear to have occupied my family’s mills.’
‘What are their demands?’
‘The usual fare. They complain that fourteen-hour working days are too much for them. That they should have two days off in every week. That they should be paid compensation even when they are too ill or injured to work.’
‘Kill the ringleaders along with their families. Divide the rest with the usual methods. And do it quickly, before they raise an example for others to follow.’
He was quoting from his own writings, as he was wont to do in his more self-engorged moments, for Nihilis had written the manual on how to control unruly populations. Several of them, in fact.
Kira bit her tongue, trying to ignore how he stated the obvious as though she were a simpleton, trying to remind herself that it was only another technique of his to belittle and provoke, yet another method of control.
The city’s Regulators were already setting into plan what Nihilis was advocating. Already they had moved snatch squads into position who would arrest those ringleaders still refusing to be swayed by gold or blackmail; prepared the chattēros of the city’s newspapers with suitable briefs to reprint as stories in the morning, explaining why the bloody actions had been necessary. Fermented trouble and division amongst the Bastards themselves through the use of agitators and spies. Further afield, amongst the general population of the city, the Regulators would spread the official narrative wherever people met together socially, using agents paid to speak out as though they were only citizens enraged by these collective actions of the Bastards, which were clearly selfish and unpatriotic, and bad for them all.
Like a sickness, the Bastards would be isolated as much as was possible from the rest of the population, and then extinguished for good.
Yet care still needed to be taken. Push too hard at the wrong moment and you could have even worse on your hands, a full-scale uprising, as had happened in other cities of the Empire. Push too selectively, and suddenly you could have martyrs strengthening the very cause you were trying to crush.
Still, they would be dealt with. And quickly too, before her family’s cartel lost even more desperately needed revenue flow than they already had. The Dubois clan was stretched to the limits as it was in terms of liquidity. Following the death of her daughter Sasheen, the Holy Matriarch, they had been forced to watch their shares in the family cartel plummeting in value even deeper than the rest of the markets now falling into decline, profits and confidence driven downwards by the unexpected collapse of crops in Ghazni.
‘Kira?’
‘Of course, the matter is being dealt with.’
A scream sounded through the open doorway of the steamy vault, long and frenzied in its torment before it faded to a sobbing voice that pleaded to be released; a woman who could take no more of her self-inflicted torture. Kira heard chains rattling from outside in the larger chamber beyond, where members of Nihilis’s coterie were Purging themselves too – people buried alive with him down in these bright, subterranean vaults benea
th the city, lit by strips of gaslights and reflective walls that made Kira’s eyes hurt just to look at them.
Nihilis gritted his teeth fiercely. How many hours had he been doing this? How many days?
His one and only redeeming feature. He still puts himself through the Purgings, even now.
The man growled for the strength that it gave him, then spoke loudly to the roiling drifts of steam in the air. ‘Mann is the faith of reason, of madness, of human desires,’ he recited loudly. It was a passage from his Book of Truths, the Hidden Book. His favourite source when under extreme duress, when reaching the height of his Purging. ‘Know only one thing of the divine flesh and you will know it all: life is the will to power and nothing more.’
What of love? Kira found herself asking in silence, and outwardly she blinked, startled at herself, as though some intruder had leaned close to her ear and whispered the words from nowhere.
Nihilis grinned, chewing his teeth in his madness, flinching from each collision of water against his skull. His gaunt face glistened wet from the tiny splashes. His small and narrowed eyes glowered at the cone hanging over him.
Perhaps he wasn’t the only one who was insane, Kira considered, recalling the hours behind her now, the desire she had seized upon of crossing the river with her ageing Diplomat Quito for protection, hoping to return to the Shambles and her family home to make certain that her mother was safe.
Only to recall, in a startling moment of confusion in a smoky side street, that the house was gone and her mother long dead; decades dead.
Maybe we’re all mad, she suddenly thought; another intruder whispering into her ear.
Kira dabbed the moisture from her face with a sleeve of her white robe, noticing how sodden the garment was becoming, and tried to calm the sudden distress in her mind. She wondered if she was in need of another Purging herself, so soon after the last one.
‘Your daughter’s death must have been hard on you,’ he rasped across the chamber, as though sensing her tensions. ‘I know you were both close.’
