25 For 25

by Various

  One of the first company wounded was dead by the time they reached the bottom of the shaft, where the lift cage was waiting for them. ‘He stays down here,’ Freytha told his three surviving companions.

  Brael had been unable to prevent Freytha slipping aboard the cage moments before it had descended into the mine, but he had ordered her to remain at the bottom of the shaft, ready to tug on the cage’s telegraph handle, which would give the signal to those above to raise the lift. Even if every human down here was dead, those above had to be told. ‘The less weight we have on board, the faster we get to the surface.’

  One of the dead man’s comrades stepped forward menacingly, unwilling to be told to leave another friend below ground, equally unwilling to be ordered to do so by a girl. Lollak stepped between them.

  ‘You know she’s right,’ he said quietly. ‘Honour his memory by staying alive and killing more greenskins.’

  Even though the dead weight was left at the bottom, propped against the shaft wall in a seated position, cold hands clasped in his lap in an attitude of prayer, the ride to the surface was agonisingly slow. The grinding rumble of falling rock faded and light seeped down from above. Instinctively, everyone in the cage lifted their faces, like plants seeking sunshine, anxious to be out of the dark.

  A wave of tiredness rolled over Brael as the lift made its way to the surface, a reaction to the powerful sense of dread he had experienced just ahead of the arrival of the greenskins’ reinforcements. As always when he felt this tired, he found himself thinking of his home, his bed and his family. And as always, he pushed those memories back down, as deep inside himself as possible.

  ‘…an… ear… thing…’t?’ Freytha touched his arm and, Brael assumed, was shouting her question. He frowned a question in reply and she repeated herself.

  ‘A little!’ Brael shouted, after working out what she was asking. He could hear some of the louder clanging and grinding from the cage superstructure and the chain as it drew them to the surface. Hopefully, this meant that his hearing would return to him.

  The cage rose into soft light and a cold breeze. Time seemed to have stopped while they were underground but, above them, the day had come to a close. Dusk painted the sky a delicate rose and the early evening breeze dried the sweat on their skin as they stepped from the cage. An anxious crowd awaited them. Brael estimated there were at least two companies of men, armed and ready to descend, should the news from Freytha have been bad.

  Beyond the armed men was a crowd of civilians – though no one in Mallax could really be counted as a civilian any more. Women, older men and the very young – some might have gathered around the pit head in the hope of seeing a loved one emerge alive. Others may have wanted to know if the greenskins had broken through and, therefore, how much longer they had left to live.

  ‘You!’ Tombek had spotted a familiar face in the crowd: Massau. The former guildsman had disappeared on some unspecified errand of his own, moments before the call to the mineshaft came. Now he hung around the edges of the crowd, perhaps hoping to discover to how many of his comrades he would have to explain his absence. Seeing Tombek lunging through the crowd towards him, Massau’s face assumed an expression of almost comic alarm and he darted away.

  ‘Tombek, leave him,’ Brael called after the tall Vinarian and was relieved to discover that he could hear his own voice again, even though it sounded as if he was speaking from a distance. ‘You need rest. And food. We all do.’

  ‘And we need to mourn our dead,’ added Kleeve, who was still supporting Fellick. Brael saw that the normally voluble Primaxian looked haggard, his face pale from the amount of blood that continued to seep through the rough dressing.

  ‘First we take care of our living,’ Brael countered, indicating Fellick. Tombek slipped Fellick’s other arm over his shoulder and he and Kleeve went in search of the nearest physic station. The bonesetter would only be able to stitch the wound shut and dress it with a clean bandage. It would be up to Fellick’s powerful constitution to get him back on his feet. When the final assault came, Brael feared he would have to meet it without his oldest comrade at his side.

  From amongst the gathered militia companies, officers and men alike were firing questions at Brael and the others. How many greenskins were down there? Were they sure the rock fall blocked the tunnel? Brael answered those that he was able to work out from the fragments of speech he was able to hear. No one who was down there could doubt that Kobar’s charges had brought down enough rock to completely block the greenskins’ passage into the city via the mine. However, Brael realised as he answered the question, it also had cut off any hope of escape under the walls when Mallax fell.

  After standing in line to collect food from one of the communal kitchens set up throughout the city, Brael returned to his company’s reserve station on its wide walkway, halfway up the tall curtain wall. The station was occupied by a company of strangers, who informed him that his company – ‘Both of them!’ one of the strangers laughed – had been sent to take up position on the wall itself.

  Costes and Perror, still dutifully guarding the machine-rifle, greeted Brael’s arrival with twin looks of horror. Realising that they thought he was the only survivor, he quickly reassured them as far as he could, considering the losses their company had sustained. ‘The others are getting food, some are looking for baths to wash off the greenskins’ blood.’ Brael looked down at the mess of drying blood and ichor that coated his clothing and wondered if he shouldn’t do the same. ‘I think Lollak said something about a sweet-faced young wound-dresser at the physic station under the foundries to the west.’

  ‘Tylor, Distek, Kobar,’ Perror muttered. ‘After so long together.’

  ‘And Fellick?’ Costes asked.

  ‘Time will tell,’ was all Brael would say. He looked out through the firing hole in the barricade that had been built on top of the wall’s ancient metal and stone battlements through which Costes and Perror had mounted the machine-rifle. It was summer and the long dusk was coming to an end. The sky was still streaked with pink, but the horizon was already dark – except where it was lit by the campfires of the enemy. The hulking shadows of their encampments lined the horizon from flank to flank. Flames gouted from the exhausts of their war machines as they made ready for what Brael was sure would soon come.

  He imagined that they had been awaiting word from the infiltrators; had they broken through, some signal would have been given and the rest of the army would have roared towards the city. But the defeat of the probing mission through the mines would not stop them. Soon the greenskins would send their whole army against Mallax. He imagined that he saw them coming: a black, flame-belching line rushing towards the city from the horizon, through the abandoned districts outside the gates, to wrap itself around the city walls and begin the brutal, unstoppable process of battering their way in.

  ‘Time will tell,’ Brael repeated softly as he watched the smoke from the distant army blot out the last of the sky’s colour. ‘Time will tell.’

  According to most of the primary sources found in the vaults beneath the city’s central librarium, Mallax was known not only for its manufactoria, its workshops and the pall of dust and smoke which was said to hang perpetually over it, but also for the effect which some of the ores that were mined by its inhabitants and the processes by which the ores were refined and worked (cross ref. 695/446-A. Mechanicus archive: smelting and related processes; chemical cracking and combining) had on future generations of the miners and refinery workers.

  Those most grossly afflicted rarely survived post-partum. Most mutations, the sources report, were minor – a third eyelid, perhaps, or additional digits. However, without the guiding hand of the Imperium to weed them out, Mallax’s population grew to exhibit greater variations from the blessed human norm.

  The Priesthood of the Varks, Agra’s oldest religion, was one such self-selecting variant group.

  – Extract: ‘Inquisitorial communiqué 747923486/aleph/Samax I
V’ Author: Inquisitor Selene Infantus. M41,793

  Mallax had always been a restless city. At its height, the mines, foundries and manufactoria worked day and night. The warehouses that sat grouped around the iron caravan termini were always receiving or dispatching goods: foodstuffs, wines and luxury cloths came in; farm machinery, parts for steam- or water-powered looms went out. And to slake the workers’ thirst and satisfy their hunger, the streets were always busy with food vendors, the taverns always open to welcome men at the end of their shift.

  Though Mallax’s glory days were generations past, it maintained much of its insomniac energy. Brael had been awed by it the first time he had come here. It had seemed unnatural, a ceaseless motion divorced from the rhythm of the seasons. Though he never admitted it to Vika, it unnerved him that men could create such a place.

  Since the greenskins came, however, he had come to share Mallax’s insomnia, even before he arrived at the city for the second time in his life. And though dusk had passed and night had fallen, he roamed the streets while the rest of his company – how had they become a ‘company’, Brael wondered, when once they were just a group of men thrown together within a brigade of scratch militia – dozed atop the battlements.

  People streamed through the streets, some carrying messages between generals, each of whom had command of a section of the defences, others on the look-out for fresh weapons, powder or ammunition for their companies.

  Brael knew that he would never find what he sought in the city’s streets, but that didn’t stop him looking.

  Vika hadn’t wanted to leave Brael, but, head throbbing, he had insisted. Many of his clan had already sent their families south on the iron caravans that travelled the rails less and less frequently. The men and boys of fighting age had presented themselves at the gathering places in the market towns nearest to their farmsteads. The time it took Brael to persuade Vika to take Bron to Mallax meant that he was the last of the Corfe clan to leave the land.

  Word had it that the next iron caravan to pass through Clovis Halt, the staging post closest to Brael’s farm, would be the last. On a clear day, it was said, columns of smoke were visible, towering into the sky on the northern horizon. Brael made it clear to his beautiful, stubborn wife that he expected her to take their son to safety, to a city she revered. Something in her eyes told Brael that her faith in the Dogma of the Holy Varks was not as powerful or as comforting as once it had been.

  ‘I need you to be safe,’ he told her late into their last night together, camped along with ten or twenty others around the small collection of huts that made up Clovis Halt. ‘I need to know that whatever happens, whatever I have to do if any of these stories are true, that, when it’s over, I’ll be able to go and find you and bring you home.’

  Brael was as surprised by this speech as his wife. During the months since he loaded them aboard one of the caravan’s iron wagons, he wondered if she only really decided to go after hearing that.

  If that was the case, then no one could argue: he had killed his wife and child.

  Following their arrival at Mallax, Brael’s company was debriefed by a major from a Primaxian regiment who, Brael estimated, could be no older than the boy Vikor they had found and lost at Grellax. If boys had risen to become majors, it didn’t bode well for the defence of Mallax. After debriefing, the wagon and horses they had taken from the battlefield outside Grellax were commandeered to join the pool of wagons being used to ferry men and arms through the city streets. Brael and his men were assigned a section of the wall to defend when the time came and a reserve post at which they would spend the hours when they were not on guard.

  As soon as his men had settled, Brael went in search of the terminus at which Vika and Bron’s caravan would have arrived. He remembered it from his last visit: its metal roof had been turned green by a lifetime’s exposure to the rain and to the effluvia of the neighbouring manufactoria.

  Beneath the vaulted cathedral roof the iron caravans sat silently. Refugees – mostly the elderly and the very young – had set up camps along the platforms. He moved among them, asking if anyone had worked on the caravans, if anyone could tell him what had become of the last caravan from the north.

  An old man claimed to have travelled on the caravan that had been sent out to the site of a disaster – a ‘derailing’, he called it. The southbound caravan had somehow jumped from the tracks and twisted itself into a tangle of iron and blood.

  ‘So many people dead,’ the old man’s reedy voice took on an almost priestly tone in the cathedral space of the terminus. ‘Crushed and broken. Women. Children. So young.’

  Brael described Vika and Bron to the old man – Vika’s northern complexion and fair hair would have marked her apart from most of the caravan’s passengers – but the old man could tell him no more. They could do nothing but salvage what parts they could from the engine and the wagons – Mallax was a city devoted to salvage, to maintaining the ancient machinery. The rails were beyond swift repair. The few survivors – wide-eyed, most of them, and trembling with shock – were loaded aboard the caravan along with the salvage and carried the rest of the way to Mallax.

  And so Brael walked the city. He knew Vika and Bron had died on the caravan he had insisted that they take. He knew it with the same certainty he had known when to leave Grellax, that reinforcements were about to enter the mine gallery, and as he had known when and where to move to avoid countless dangers during the long hard year that had led him to Mallax. He felt it in his heart, just as he felt the itching of the fingers he no longer possessed – lost the last time he tried to ignore the wisdom, as old Aunt Brella would have it, that was forcing its way out of him.

  Brael knew it, but the old man had not said for certain that he had seen their corpses.

  And so he walked in the vain hope of seeing a face, a splash of fair hair in a crowd or hearing a voice inflected with a northern accent or a snatch of the boyish laughter that echoed in his mind during the moments he allowed himself to rest.

  The sound of raised voices reached him as he walked through the narrow streets of the old town. Ironically, the old town was the most brightly lit part of the city, the only place where the oil-fired gas lanterns still worked. Brael was walking through pools of gentle yellow radiance when he heard the voices, then the sound of something breaking.

  Cutting down a side-alley in the direction of the noise, Brael emerged in a street he was surprised to recognise: a thoroughfare that cut through the close-packed old town. It was lined with open-fronted shops that once sold fruit, meats and wines intended for tribute, sacrifice and libation in the pyramidal temple whose precinct dominated the square into which the thoroughfare opened. He had walked down this street once before, when Bron had been very young.

  Brael jogged along the road and out into the open square. Yet more stalls that once had sold religious tokens, artefacts for the faithful to have blessed within the temple, then returned for installation in a household shrine. Brael caught a faint whiff of old straw and remembered that one of the stalls was a chaos of caged birds and young porkers and bleaters – the stall-holder, claiming some minor dispensation from the temple elders, would bleed an animal and prepare it for offering to the priests within the precinct.

  At the far side of the square lights burned atop the gateposts of the precinct, illuminating the angry crowd at the gates. The sound Brael had heard was that of the gates being forced inwards, one wrenched off its hinges by the weight of the crowd.

  Brael jogged across the square, hands unconsciously checking the weapons at his belt. The last of the crowd, whose shouts had grown louder and more violent since they had achieved their initial aim of gaining entry to the precinct, had pushed through the gateway, leaving a robed figure slumped against the precinct wall.

  ‘Are you badly hurt?’ Brael asked the priest of the Holy Varks. His hood had been partly torn from his robe in the scuffle that erupted when he stepped out between the gates in an attempt to calm the crowd. At fi
rst, all Brael could see was the top of his shaven head as the priest raised a tentative hand to the middle of his face. Blood had already begun to drip from his nose and pool on the flagstones.

  ‘I think my nose is broken,’ the priest replied, his voice shaking slightly. Removing his hand from his face, he regarded the blood on his fingers, then looked up at the stranger who stood over him.

  ‘They want the Varks,’ the young priest said as he looked up, his single eye blinking away the last of the tears caused by the punch that broke his nose. Every member of the priesthood was the same, each had but a single eye set just above the bridge of the nose. ‘They say we’re to blame.’

  Brael was surprised to experience a powerful sense that he had been here before, talking to this priest outside the temple. He half expected that, if he looked to his side, Vika would be standing there, six-month-old Bron in her arms. Of all the unusual forms the bodies of some Mallaxians took that shown by the priest of the Holy Varks was the one that shook Brael the most.

  The priest was on his feet and running across the precinct in the wake of the mob, which had hit the doors of the Sanctum like a crashing wave. On its way to the Sanctum, the mob had vented some of its anger on the plinths atop which were set votive candles and bowls of scented water and had shattered the small shrines that lined the walls before which Brael remembered Vika kneeling while the priest took Bron before the Holy Varks, behind the Sanctum’s tall wooden doors.

  Brael followed in the priest’s wake. He doubted that the priests still inside the Sanctum would be foolish enough to open the doors while members of the mob struck it with their fists, slammed against it with their shoulders and howled for the destruction of the holy thing within. None of them had ever seen the Varks – only initiated priests were ever allowed into the Sanctum – but, from their shouts and threats, it was clear that they blamed the Varks for the arrival of the greenskins.