02 - Blood Reaver

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden - (ebook by Undead)

  “Mistress, mistress, mistress,” they greeted her in an irritating chorus. Breathless and aching, she staggered past them, crashing down onto her interface throne. Responding to her presence, the wall of screens came to life before her. Picters and imagifiers mounted on the ship’s hull opened their irises as one, staring out into the void from a hundred angles. As she caught her breath, she saw space, and space, and space—no different from the days before, as they’d sat here in the middle of nowhere, docked and half-crippled by damage. Only now, the stars moved. She smiled as she watched them starting their slow dance.

  On a dozen screens, the stars meandered to the left. On a dozen others, they sailed right, or coasted down, or rose up. She leaned back into the throne of black iron and took a breath. The Covenant was coming about. Ganges hove into view, an ugly palace of black and grey. She felt the ship shiver as its weapons screamed. Despite herself, she smiled again. Throne, this ship was majestic when it chose to be.

  Her attendants closed in around her, bandaged hands and dirty fingers holding interface cables and restraint straps.

  “Piss off,” she told them, and snatched off her bandana. That sent them scattering.

  I’m here, she said silently. I’m back.

  From within her own mind, a presence that had lingered as a tiny, dense core of unrest began to unfold. It spread, great sheets of discordant emotion unwrapping to blanket her thoughts. It was a struggle to keep herself separate from the invader’s passions.

  You, the presence whispered. The recognition was laced with disgust, but it was a faint and distant thing.

  Her heart was a thudding drum now. Not fear, she told herself. Anticipation. Anticipation, excitement, and… well, alright, fear. But the throne was all the interface she needed. Octavia refused the crude implantation of psy-feed cables, let alone needing restraints. Those were the crutches for the laziest Navigators, and while her bloodline might not be worth much in terms of breeding, she felt this ship well enough to reject the interface aids.

  Not me. Us. Her inner voice tingled with savage joy.

  Cold. Weary. Slow. The voice was the low rumble of something tectonic. I awaken. But I am frozen by the void. I thirst and hunger.

  She wasn’t sure what to say. It was strange to hear the ship address her with such tolerance, even if it was patience brought on by exhaustion.

  It sensed her surprise through the resonant throne. Soon, my heart will burn. Soon, we will dive through space and unspace. Soon, you will shriek and shed salt water. I remember, Navigator. I remember your fear of the endless dark, far from the Beacon of Pain.

  She refused to rise to its primitive baiting. The machine-spirit at the ship’s heart was a vicious, tormented thing, and at best—at its absolute least unpleasant—it still loathed her. Much more often, it was a siege just to unify her thoughts with the vessel at all.

  You are blind without me, she said. When will you tire of this war between us?

  You are crippled without me, it countered. When will you tire of believing you dominate our accord?

  She… she hadn’t thought about it like that. Her hesitation must’ve flowed down the link, because she felt the ship’s black heart beat faster, and another tremor ghosted through the Covenant’s bones. Runes flickered on several of her screens, all in Nostraman script. She knew enough to recognise an update of increased power capacity in the plasma generator. Septimus had taught her the Nostraman alphabet and pictographic signals pertaining to the ship’s function. “The essentials”, he’d called it, as if she were a particularly dim child.

  A coincidence, then? Just the engines building up energy, rather than her thoughts triggering the shipwide shiver?

  I grow warm, the Covenant told her. We hunt soon.

  No. We run.

  Somehow, it sighed within her mind. At least, that was how her human awareness interpreted the breathless pulse of inhuman frustration that slid behind her eyes.

  Still uneasy from the ship’s accusation, she kept her thoughts back, holding them inside her skull, boxed away from the machine-spirit’s reach. In silence, she watched Ganges burn, waiting for the order to guide the ship through a wound in reality.

  The warp engines came alive with a dragon’s roar, echoing in two realms at once.

  “Where?” Octavia spoke aloud, her voice a wet whisper.

  “Make for the Maelstrom,” came the Exalted’s reply, guttural over the vox. “We cannot linger in Imperial space any longer.”

  “I don’t know how to reach it.”

  Oh, but she did. Couldn’t she feel it—a bloated, overripe migraine that hurt her head with each beat of her heart? Couldn’t she sense it with the same ease as a blind woman feeling the sunrise on her face?

  She didn’t know the way there through the warp, that was true. She’d never sailed through a tempest to reach a hurricane’s heart. But she could sense it, and she knew that was enough to reach it.

  The Maelstrom. The Covenant heard her torment and responded itself. Waves of sickening familiarity washed over the Navigator as it felt the ship’s primitive memory through the bond they shared. Her skin prickled and she needed to spit. The vessel’s dull recollection became her own: a memory of the void boiling with cancerous ghosts, of tainted tides crashing against its hull. Whole worlds, entire suns, drowning in the Sea of Souls.

  “I have never sailed into a warp rift,” she managed to say. If the Exalted replied, she never heard it.

  But I have, the Covenant hissed.

  She knew the tales, as every Navigator did. To plough into a warp rift was no different than swimming in acid. Each moment within its tides flayed ever more of a sailor’s soul.

  Legends and half-truths, the ship mocked her. It is the warp, and it is the void. Calmer than the storm, louder than space. And then, Brace, Navigator.

  Octavia closed her human eyes and opened her truest one. Madness, in a million shades of black, swarmed towards her like a tide. Forever present in the darkness, a beam of abrasive light seared its way through the chaos, burning away the stuff of screaming souls and formless malice that rippled against its edges. A beacon in the black, the Golden Path, the Emperor’s Light.

  The Astronomican, she breathed in instinctive awe, and aimed the ship towards it. Solace, guidance, blessed light. Safety.

  The Covenant rebelled, its hull straining against her, creaking and cracking under the strain.

  No. Away from the Beacon of Pain. Into the tides of night.

  The Navigator leaned back in her throne, licking sweat from her upper lip. The feeling taking hold reminded her of standing in the observatory atop her father’s house-spire, feeling the unbelievable urge to leap from the balcony of the tallest tower. She’d felt it often as a child, that prickly sense of daring and doubt clashing inside her until the moment she leaned just a little too far. Her stomach would lurch and she’d come back to herself. She couldn’t jump. She didn’t want to—not really.

  The ship roared in her mind as it rolled, the waters of hell crashing against its hull. Her ears hosted the unwelcome, ignorable sounds of human crew members shouting several decks above.

  You will destroy us all, the ship spat into her brain. Too weak, too weak.

  Octavia was faintly certain she’d puked on herself. It smelled like it. Claws stroked the ship’s hull with the sound of squealing tyres, and the crashing of the warp’s tides became the thudding beat of a mother’s heart, overpoweringly loud to the child still slumbering in the womb.

  She turned her head, watching the Astronomican darken and diminish. Was it rising away, out of her reach? Or was the ship falling from it, into th—

  She suddenly tensed, blood like ice and muscles locked tighter than steel. They were free-falling through the warp. The Exalted’s cry of desperate anger rang throughout every deck, carried over the vox.

  Throne, she breathed the word, swearing with her heart and soul, barely cognisant of her lips speaking over the vox to the helmsmen on the command deck above. H
er speech was automatic, as instinctive as breathing. The battle in her mind was what mattered.

  Throne and shit and fu—

  The ship righted. Not elegantly—she’d almost lost their way completely, and the vessel’s recovery was anything but clean—but the ship pounded into a calmer stream with both relief and abandon. The Covenant’s hull gave a last horrendous spasm, rocked to its core as she stared the way she wished to go.

  She felt the primal machine-spirit calming. The ship obeyed her course, as true and straight as a sword. Even if it loathed her, it flew far finer than the fat barge she’d suffered on under Kartan Syne. Where the Maiden of the Stars wallowed, the Covenant of Blood raced. Untouchable grace and wrath incarnate. No one in her bloodline, not in thirty-six generations, had guided such a vessel.

  You are beautiful, she told the ship without meaning to.

  And you are weak.

  Octavia stared into the tides around the ship. Above, the Emperor’s Light receded, while below, the faint outlines of great shapeless things thrashed in the infinite, turgid black. She sailed by instinct, blinder than she’d ever been before, guiding them all towards a distant eye in the storm.

  PART TWO

  HELL’S IRIS

  VIII

  THE CITY AT NIGHT

  He knew he was one of the slow children.

  That was the word his tutors used to describe the children that sat separate from the others, and he knew he belonged with them. In his class, four of the children were slow—already, he formed the word in his mind with the same delicate emphasis the adults around him used when they said it—and the four of them sat by the window, often completely ignoring the tutor’s words, yet never suffering punishment for it.

  The boy sat with them, the fourth and newest of the four, and stared out of the window with the others. Cars passed in the night, their front lamps dull to ease any strain on the eyes. The clouded sky was hidden by tower-tops, each spire decorated by great illuminated signs selling whatever it was that adults felt they needed.

  The boy turned back to his tutor. For a while, he listened to her speaking about language, teaching the other children—the not slow children—words that were new to them. The boy didn’t understand at all. Why were the words new to everyone? He’d read them in his mother’s books a dozen times before.

  The tutor hesitated as she noticed him looking. Usually she ignored him, forgetting he was there with casual, practised familiarity. The boy didn’t look away from her. He wondered if she would try to teach him a new word.

  As it happened, she did. She pointed to a word written across the flickering vid-screen and asked him if he knew its meaning.

  The boy didn’t answer. The boy only rarely answered his tutor. He suspected it was why the adults called him slow.

  As the chime pulsed once, heralding the end of tuition for the night, all of the children rose from the seats. Most of them packed writing pads away. The slow ones put away scraps of paper with childish drawings. The boy had nothing to pack, for he’d done little but stare out the window all evening.

  The walk home took over an hour, and was even slower in the rain. The boy walked past cars trapped in traffic queues, listening to the drivers scream at one other. Not far from where he walked, only a block or two away, he heard the popcorn crackle of gunfire. Two gangs fighting it out. He wondered which ones, and if many had died.

  It wasn’t a surprise when his friend caught up with him, but the boy had been hoping to be left alone tonight. He gave a smile to pretend he wasn’t annoyed. His friend returned it.

  His friend wasn’t really his friend. They only called each other friends because their mothers were real friends, and the two families lived in hab-chambers next to each other.

  “The tutor asked you a question tonight,” his friend said, as if the boy hadn’t realised.

  “I know.”

  “But why didn’t you answer? Didn’t you know what to say?”

  That was the problem. The boy never knew what to say, even when he knew the right answer.

  “I don’t understand why we go to tuition,” he said at last. Around them, the city lived and breathed as it always did. Tyres screeched in the next road. Shouted voices accused, demanded, pleaded with other shouting voices. Music pounded from inside nearby buildings.

  “To learn,” his friend said. His mother had told the boy that his friend would grow up to “break hearts one night”. The boy couldn’t see it. To the boy, his friend always seemed confused, angry, or angry about being confused.

  “Our tutor never says anything I didn’t know before,” the boy shrugged. “But why do we need to learn? That’s what I don’t understand.”

  “Because… we do.” His friend looked confused, and that made the boy smile. “When you even bother to speak, you ask some really stupid questions.”

  The boy let it rest. His friend never understood this kind of thing.

  About halfway home, well into the maze of alleys and back roads that the adults all called the Labyrinth, the boy stopped walking. He stared down a side alleyway, neither hiding nor making himself known. Just watching.

  “What is it?” his friend asked. But the boy didn’t need to answer. “Oh,” his friend said a moment later. “Come on, before they see us.”

  The boy stayed where he was. Trash lined the alley’s narrow walls. Amongst the refuse, a couple embraced. At least, the man embraced the woman. The woman’s clothing was ruined, cut up and torn, and she remained limp on the dirty ground. Her head was turned to the boy. As the man moved on top of her, she watched both boys with black eyes.

  “Come on…” his friend whispered, dragging him away. The boy said nothing for some time, but his friend made up for it, talking all the while.

  “You’re lucky we didn’t get shot, staring like that. Didn’t your mother teach you any manners? You can’t just watch like that.”

  “She was crying,” the boy said.

  “You don’t know that. You’re just saying it.”

  The boy looked at his friend. “She was crying, Xarl.”

  His friend shut up after that. They walked the rest of the Labyrinth in silence, and didn’t say goodbye to each other when they finally reached their habitation spire.

  The boy’s mother was home early. He smelled noodles on the boil, and heard her voice humming in the hab-chamber’s only other room: a small kitchen unit with a plastek screen door.

  When she came into the main room, she rolled her sleeves down to her wrists. The gesture covered the tattoos along her arms, and the boy never commented on the way she always hid them like this. The coded symbols inked into her skin showed who owned her. The boy knew that at least, though he often wondered if perhaps they meant even more.

  “Your tuition academy prelected me today,” she said. His mother nodded over to the prelector—it was blank now, but the boy could easily imagine his tutor’s face on the flat, grainy wall screen.

  “Because I’m slow?” the boy asked.

  “Why do you assume that?”

  “Because I did nothing wrong. I never do anything wrong. So it must be because I’m slow.”

  His mother sat on the edge of the bed, her hands in her lap. Her hair was dark, wet from a recent wash. Usually, it was blonde—rare for the people of the city. “Will you tell me what’s wrong?” she asked.

  The boy sat next to her, welcomed into her arms. “I don’t understand tuition,” he replied. “We have to learn, but I don’t understand why.”

  “To better yourself,” she said. “So you can live at City’s Edge, and work somewhere… nicer than here.” She trailed off on the last words, idly scratching at the ownership tattoo on her forearm.

  “That won’t happen,” the boy said. He smiled for her benefit. She cradled him in response, the way she did on the nights after her owner hit her. On those nights, blood from her face dripped into his hair. Tonight, it was just her tears.

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “I’ll joi
n a gang, just like my father. Xarl will join a gang, just like his. And we’ll both die on the streets, just like everyone else.” The boy seemed more thoughtful than melancholy. All the words that broke his mother’s heart barely moved him at all. Facts were facts. “It’s not really any better at City’s Edge, is it? Not really.”

  She was crying now, just as the woman in the alley had cried. The same hollow look in her eyes, the same deadness.

  “No,” she admitted in a whisper. “It’s no different there.”

  “So why should I learn in tuition academy? Why do you waste money on all these books for me to read?”

  She needed time before she could answer. The boy listened to her swallow, and felt her shaking.

  “Mother?”

  “There’s something else you can do.” She was rocking him now, rocking him the way she had when he was even younger. “If you stand out from the other children, if you’re the best and the brightest and the cleverest, you’ll never have to see this world again.”

  The boy looked up at her. He wasn’t certain he’d heard right, or that he liked the idea if he had.

  “Leave the whole world? Who will…” He almost said Who will take care of you, but that would only make her cry again. “Who will keep you company?”

  “You never need to worry about me. I’ll be fine. But please, please answer your tutor’s questions. You have to show how clever you are. It’s important.”

  “But where would I go? What will I do?”

  “Wherever you want to go, and whatever you want to do.” She gave him a smile now. “Heroes can do whatever they want.”

  “A hero?” The idea made him giggle. His laughter was balm to his mother’s grief—he was old enough to notice it happen, but too young to know why such a simple thing could resonate within a parent’s heart.

  “Yes. If you pass the trials, you’ll be taken by the Legion. You’ll be a hero, a knight, sailing the stars.”

  The boy looked at her for a long time. “How old are you, mother?”