Fire and Thunder

by Rachel Harrison

  Hale picks up his inkmarker again. He circles the aqueduct on the map, before drawing a line back through the burial district to their current position.

  ‘Looks like it’s just over nine miles of built-up terrain,’ he says. ‘The Deadways are old. All ossuaries and burial halls. Crypts and tombs. Plenty of cover.’

  ‘The avenues are narrow, too,’ Raine says. ‘Too narrow for heavy armour.’

  Hale huffs a humourless laugh. ‘Or for aircraft to strafe,’ he says.

  Raine nods. ‘If we strike out at dusk then we could be at the aqueduct by dawn, with only the Sighted themselves to kill on the way.’

  Hale nods, slowly.

  ‘Devri took Blue Company into the Deadways days ago,’ he says. ‘They got bloodied badly for the trouble. He had to pull back even before the order went out for the full-scale retreat.’ Hale pauses, and frowns. ‘He said the Sighted had made it a slaughterhouse.’

  ‘That may be,’ Raine says. ‘But objectively speaking, it is our best option.’

  Hale casts his eyes once more over the map, and sighs.

  ‘I’d say so too,’ he says. ‘The Deadways it is.’

  With an hour to go until dusk, most of the others try to get some sleep. Crys is out almost before she hits the bunk. She can sleep anywhere. Wyck has seen her fold her arms, close her eyes and doze off only a mile from a front-line barrage. Her snoring damn near drowned out the artillery. Koy sleeps too, propped up against the barracks wall with her legs stretched out in front of her. The Mistvyper rests one tattooed hand on the stock of her rifle, the cell disengaged. In the other, Koy clings to a bunch of ident-tags, the chains wound around and around her hand. Some of the tags are scorched and twisted. All of them are spotted with blood. Those who can’t sleep spend their time praying, like Awd, or sharing what little food they’ve got and telling one another quiet stories from home. Wyck is too edgy for stories or prayers. Too nauseous to eat. Too wracked with aches in his body and his head to sleep.

  And then there’s Hale’s plan.

  The Deadways. Going slow through the long Balfaran darkness with Zane in the hope of reaching The Saint’s Blessing. It doesn’t feel like a blessing at all. It feels like a joke. Like a death sentence. The witch’s words come back to Wyck again and they feel like prophecy. Like a curse.

  Death is watching you.

  Wyck can’t sit there any more while everyone else laughs and talks and eats and sleeps, so he leaves the others to their own devices and goes looking for Nuria Lye instead.

  He finds the medic coming out of a room at the far end of the hallway. It was an isolation chamber once. A punishment cell. It’s where she’s letting Zane rest up before they move out.

  ‘Seems appropriate,’ Wyck says, as she pulls the door closed. ‘Putting the witch in a room that bolts from the outside.’

  Lye turns and frowns at him. There was a time, years ago, when she might have smiled at the sight of him, but not now.

  ‘I’d ask what you want, but I think I can guess,’ she says.

  Wyck offers Lye a smile. Even that hurts.

  ‘Maybe I just came to talk to you, like old times,’ he says.

  Lye shakes her head. ‘Cut the crap. We both know that’s not true.’

  It’s how their conversations always go now. That used to be different too, before. Wyck glances back down the hallway to make sure there’s nobody else around.

  ‘I don’t need much,’ he says, in a low voice. ‘Just enough to make it to dawn.’

  Lye’s frown escalates. ‘You should have plenty,’ she says. ‘I gave you six doses before deployment. How many have you got left?’

  ‘One,’ he says.

  It’s not a frown on her face any more. It’s thunder.

  ‘One?’ she hisses. ‘Are you a damned fool? I thought that taking the stimms was about trying not to die.’

  Her words sting, and Wyck feels his temper boil up. It happens all the time lately.

  ‘I needed it,’ he says, because he did. Because he’s forgotten what it’s like not to. ‘And I won’t get out of this place without more.’

  Lye shakes her head.

  ‘You’ll have to,’ she says. ‘I’ve got nothing to give you.’

  Wyck feels the world tilt.

  ‘What?’ he asks, and his own voice sounds far off, as if he’s hearing it over water.

  ‘You heard me,’ Lye says. ‘This is a warzone, Dav. I’m carrying field kit and that’s it, and I’ve barely got more than bandages left even then. I’m sorry, but I can’t help you. Not this time. You’ll have to make do with what you’ve got.’

  Wyck shakes his head. There was a time when one dose would have been just enough to go until dawn, even on a world like this, but not now. It gets worse after every war. The rush gets shorter and shorter. Lately he’s been doubling most of his doses, though she’s always told him never to do that, because it’s the only thing that works. That keeps death away.

  ‘And when it wears off?’ he snarls. ‘When I’m slow as anything in all that darkness, what do I do then?’

  Lye puts her hand on his shoulder. The contact makes him flinch. Makes his pulse fire like he’s under threat. Wyck has to physically keep himself from reacting to it. From hitting her.

  ‘The same as the rest of us,’ Lye says. ‘Fight, pray and try not to die.’

  Raine sits alone in the barracks’ mess hall, with what is left to her arrayed on the table. One complete magazine for her bolt pistol. Just eight shells. Her sabre, and a short knife for fieldcraft. Three packs of dry rations. One canteen, two-thirds full. Her timepiece. It sits open on the table, counting down to dusk. Raine doesn’t really need it for the time. Hale will call for her when it is time to deploy. Raine put the timepiece out on the table because she finds the ticking of it a comfort. She finds it calming, when she is troubled.

  It is not the impending march through the Deadways that troubles Raine. As she told Hale, it is the best option. The most survivable. What is troubling Raine is the bombardment that collapsed the Bridge of Graces. Not the shock of it, or the damage it caused, or the lives that it took.

  It’s the fact that the Sighted have not used artillery once during Raine’s deployment in Whend. Aircraft and armour, yes, but not artillery. Just as when she was planning with Hale, Raine considers the possibilities as she packs away her weapons and gear.

  The first is that the Sighted captured an artillery piece during the conflict. That is something that Raine has certainly known the enemy to do. They loot and steal. They corrupt and coerce. It would not be the first time.

  But then, surely, the bombardment would have come from the northern quarter, or the west. The moment of the bombardment was chaotic, but Raine is almost certain that the shells came from the east. From the outlands. Which makes the second possibility the more likely one.

  That they were fired on, in error, by their own forces.

  Raine exhales a slow breath. She stands from the bench. Slides her magazine back into her pistol and picks up her sabre. Puts her timepiece back in the inside pocket of her greatcoat. Raine briefly considers telling Hale what she suspects but decides against it. The Antari are already shaken. Bloodied and exhausted. She will not risk demoralising them for the sake of a possibility. Of a hunch.

  Even if she is almost entirely certain that she is right.

  Without the light from the twin suns, Whend is pitch-dark. It’s not just the light they lose, either. The temperature falls away quickly as the wide night sky drinks up the day’s heat. Despite the cool air, Wyck is still sweating through his fatigues as he moves through the Deadways with his squad. Zane limps alongside them, half carried by Crys. The witch is breathing like a set of split bellows. The sound of it makes Wyck’s ears ache and sets his temper afire. His palms are slick on the stock of his gun, and he has to count his breathing in and out to
keep it steady. Without the stimms, his awareness is narrowed. Sight and sound and hearing. It’s like looking at everything through a smeared scope. Like trying to hear footsteps after a charge has gone off. Everything looks like something it isn’t. Like a threat. But Wyck can’t dose. The commissar is too damned near. So he keeps counting every breath in his head as he jogs along the narrow avenue.

  Breathe in. One. Two. Three.

  The burial district is still and quiet. Every lantern has been smashed or smothered. The buildings twist up tall on either side of him, clustered together like trees.

  Breathe out. One. Two. Three.

  Tiny embers carry down on the wind, kicked up by the northern quarter as it burns. They wander through the air like lights left behind by restless souls. Where they hit Wyck’s flak-plate and fatigues, they snuff themselves out.

  Breathe in. One. Two. Three.

  Wyck raises his hand for his squad to stop and moves ahead to take up overwatch in the arched doorway of a burial hall. Narrow bridges criss-cross overhead, and devotional banners snap in the wind. The burial hall is decorated with the weatherworn bones of the faithful dead. Wyck glimpses long bones and splayed ribcages. Finger bones and spines.

  Hundreds and hundreds of grinning skulls.

  Death is watching you.

  Wyck shakes his head.

  Breathe out. One. Two. Three.

  He sights down his rifle, straining his eyes to see if there’s anything waiting in the darkness ahead. For a moment he thinks he sees a figure moving against the black, but then it’s gone again. He can’t be sure it was ever there.

  Breathe in. One. Two. Three.

  ‘Are we clear?’ Hale asks, over the vox.

  Wyck can’t say yes. He can’t say no. He can’t be sure. He needs to be sure, otherwise he’s damning them all to death. It would all be his fault.

  And it wouldn’t be the first time.

  ‘Hold on,’ Wyck replies, glancing back to make sure the others stay where they are.

  He wanted to wait until halfway, but he can’t. He needs to be sure. He needs to dose. His heart is already rattling for the rush. For the focus, so sharp that he’ll forget everything else. It only has to get him to the edge. To the way out. Clear of death’s jaws for one more day.

  Wyck goes into the pouch at his belt where he keeps the vial and takes it out, but his heart starts sinking because it’s lighter than it should be. Wyck tries to breathe, to count to three, but he can’t.

  Because the vial is cracked, and every drop of the dark liquid inside is gone.

  ‘No,’ he murmurs. ‘No. No.’

  Wyck closes his fist tight around the vial to break it the rest of the way, hoping that there’s something left on the glass. Anything. Blood bubbles up through his fingers, and he counts the seconds, but he feels nothing. No rush, no focus, just the stinging of his hand where he’s cut it, right along the old oath-scar on his palm. Dread rolls over him like lake fog in winter. He’s got nothing to get him through this. Nothing to keep him clear of death’s jaws. Wyck tries to swallow, but it feels as though his mouth is full of mortar dust. His fatigues are soaked with sweat and sticking to him.

  ‘Dav,’ Hale says, over the vox. ‘Is it clear?’

  ‘Hold on, Yuri,’ Wyck manages to say. ‘Give me a second.’

  He drops what’s left of the injector and sights down his rifle again, his bloody hand slipping on the stock. Wyck stares into the darkness. Holds his breath until his lungs ache. He can’t see the figure again. Not right now. It must have just been the darkness. Just his mind, making shapes of it. Wyck finally exhales and counts it out.

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

  ‘Clear,’ he says, his voice a rasp.

  The Sighted hunting party is made up of two squads of nine.

  It is the third of its kind that Raine and the Antari have come across since entering the burial district two hours earlier. Just like the others, the Sighted are little better than reavers. Their flak-plate is scored with spiral patterns and their scarified faces are painted with thick stripes of blood. Wave-bladed obsidian swords hang at their waists, and they sweep their stub-rifles back and forth as they advance up the avenue. Trophies made from broken bones clatter against their armour as the Sighted step over debris, and the dead. When Devri had told Hale that the Deadways was a slaughterhouse, he had not been exaggerating. The burial district is fortified and barricaded. Cratered with shell-holes and littered with shell casings and abandoned fieldworks and the still, stinking dead.

  ‘We let them get much closer and they’ll see us,’ Wyck says, over the vox.

  Like Raine, Wyck is crouched with his Wyldfolk behind one of the pockmarked, ash-stained barricades that criss-cross the avenue, watching the Sighted approach. His flint-grey eyes are wide, and he is tapping an absent, silent pattern on his rifle’s stock as he sights down the barrel. Raine keeps half an eye on him, as she has been doing in the hours since the bridge collapsed. Since she joined the regiment, almost two years ago. Like Zane, Wyck is an asset that can be used to great effect, despite his failings. He is a fighter by nature, with more recorded kills than any of the other Antari sergeants. Save for the Duskhounds, Wyck’s Wyldfolk are Grey Company’s sharpest edge. But just like with Zane, it is only a matter of time before Wyck becomes more of a risk than an asset. Before Raine has to bring him to task for every one of his failings.

  ‘Hold position,’ Hale murmurs, in reply. ‘Wait for my mark.’

  Hale is in position further along the line with the rest of his command squad. The Sighted reavers tread closer, speaking to one another in low voices. They step right over Crys’ carefully disguised cables and cords. Raine tightens her fingers around the hilt of her sword. The Sighted are close, now. Close enough that Raine can clearly see the fate-marks cut into their faces.

  ‘Now,’ Hale says.

  Raine sees Yulia Crys thumb her detonator trigger. Det-cord hisses to life behind the Sighted reavers, blocking their escape. A series of small shrapnel charges detonate. Two of the Sighted go over wounded and reeling as the Wyldfolk and the Mistvypers open fire. Three more of the Sighted fall, but the rest of them charge towards the barricades. Right towards Raine and the Antari. The ambush quickly becomes a melee. A series of violent instances that Raine glimpses between every strike and clash of her own sword. Yuri Hale shoots one of the Sighted with his pistol, sending the reaver sprawling, a twist of smoke spiralling up from the killing shot. Wyck slams another of the Sighted against the barricades, then opens the reaver’s throat with his knife. The rest of the Wyldfolk put themselves between the Sighted and Lydia Zane. Yulia Crys fires her sidearm until the cell blinks empty, and then sets about breaking bones.

  One of the Sighted charges to face Raine down. The reaver is lithe and tall, her crest of hair coloured with dye and laced with feathers. A cut gemstone glitters where her right eye should be, and her wave-bladed sword shines like a mirror as she swings it. The Sighted is skilled with the blade, and quick, too. The wave-bladed sword catches Raine across the arm and puts a deep groove in her silver chest-plate, but Raine has been training and fighting with a blade since the day she was old enough to lift one unaided. She is skilled, too.

  And she is much quicker.

  Raine catches the Sighted’s sword on her own and twists the blade upwards and away, before cutting the reaver open from shoulder to hip with a downward strike. Evenfall hums, the powered blade cutting straight through armour and flesh and bone. The Sighted’s human eye goes wide and she drops her sword, falling first to her knees and then onto her face. Around Raine the Antari are bleeding anew, but still standing while all of the Sighted are dead, save for one. The reaver is slumped against the barricades, lung-shot and struggling for air. As Wyck levels his rifle at the Sighted, the reaver lifts his lolling head and smiles through blackened, bloody teeth.


  ‘You are all fools,’ he laughs, his words running together. ‘Blind to where the path takes you. A shadow grows within, and every death is a gift. Change is comi–’

  Wyck fires. The burst of rounds hits the reaver centre-mass and silences him. The Sighted collapses heavily onto his side, but his smile stays fixed, even in death.

  ‘A shadow grows within,’ Hale growls. ‘The hells is that supposed to mean?’

  Wyck lowers his rifle, slowly. ‘Nothing good,’ he says.

  Raine looks at where the reaver’s blood runs into the cracks between the cobblestones and thinks of everything she has seen, from Gholl to Umbra. Of the Sighted’s growing strength and influence.

  And for once, she finds herself in agreement with Daven Wyck.

  ‘The Deadways,’ Yuri Hale says. ‘A name twice earned.’

  Looking at the way ahead, Raine cannot help but agree. Overhead, Balfar’s slender moon has reached its zenith, casting dim, pale grey light into the avenue. It catches on the white stone faces of the buildings. On the thousands of skulls and bones cladding them.

  And on the countless dead, strewn across the cobblestones.

  There are so many bodies that Raine and the Antari have to pick their way through slowly. Every breath is cloying and thick with the smell of spoiling blood. Vermin hiss and skitter away, their fur slick-wet under the stablight beams. Raine sees the blue-and-white livery of the Kavrone Dragoons amongst the dead. The Sighted, too, with their spiral sigils and their mirrored cloaks. There are even Balfaran civilians, barefoot and dressed in white. All of them are lying flat on their backs, as if they have been turned to face the sky. Their arms are outstretched, like those of the statues on the Bridge of Graces.

  Or like wings.

  ‘Mother of spring,’ Hale says, softly.

  He stops moving and crouches down by one of the bodies.

  ‘This is one of Devri’s,’ Hale says. ‘And they have made quite a mess of him.’

  Raine passes the stablight mounted on her pistol over the dead man. He is one of Blue Company, going by the armband, but she could not say who. The Antari trooper’s throat has been messily slit. His grey eyes are gone, and a single numeral has been marked in his skin, over and over.