by Warhammer
And then it was over.
He lived, a virtual hecatomb surrounding him.
‘I should be dead,’ he murmured, and plunged to his knees in a mire of blood.
‘But you’re not,’ said a quiet voice behind him. He felt a light touch upon his arm, as of a muleskinner daring to approach a fierce animal. ‘You’re alive,’ said the novice, little more than a girl, ‘and so are we. Thanks to you.’
Her tonsured hair shone despite the blood, her youth obvious by her face. Plain, pretty. How Karina used to be before the world hurt her, before it wore at the bond between father and daughter, fraying it until finally it snapped.
He encased her hands in his. It almost felt wrong to tarnish her with the blood of slaughter, but he was tired and had stopped caring so much.
‘Is she all right…?’ He gestured at Karina.
‘She’s unconscious. Hurt, I think.’
‘There was a riot. She got caught up.’
‘I see.’ The girl looked pensive, wary.
‘I won’t hurt you,’ said Cristo.
‘It wouldn’t matter if you did,’ she said, gazing over to where the priory still burned and her Sisters burned with it. The fire had spread out into the courtyard, creeping closer, consuming, cleansing. Perhaps it was for the best.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Cristo, rising, the girl helping him. Now the adrenaline had fled, an ache came over him. He wanted to sleep, but dared not close his eyes for fear he wouldn’t open them again.
The girl walked up to the blaze and for a moment Cristo thought she might leap into it in an act of self-immolation. He almost cried out, but stopped when she wrapped a cloth around her hand and reached down to draw the ceremonial sword.
It was still bloody, but she unstoppered a canteen taken from her pack and cleaned it until it shone anew.
‘This was Sister Verida’s blade. She named it Vanquish.’ The girl turned and slid Vanquish through her belt. ‘I am the relic keeper now, the lore mistress. I am all that is left.’
Cristo thought she was the bravest damn kid he had ever seen. She didn’t weep, she didn’t falter. No weakness. Only strength.
She stepped away from the flames, and looked down at Karina. ‘Is she your daughter?’
‘Yes. Her name’s Karina.’ He put a hand against his chest. ‘I’m Cristo.’
The girl bowed her head. ‘Celestia.’
‘Can you help her? Are you a medicus?’
‘I am a novice, low skilled in the physik arts, but I have had some tutelage.’
‘If I can get us to a safe place, somewhere to lie low until whatever this is blows over, will you help her?’
Celestia nodded.
‘Then I know somewhere, but getting there will take us back into town. I just hope it’s still standing,’ said Cristo, and went to pick up his daughter. They headed west, towards Hallow’s End.
Chapter VII
Barricades
Morgravia’s autoloader clacked empty, which meant no more ammo beyond whatever was left in the oversized mag. She put a high-calibre bullet through a pallid’s face, painting the wall behind it with greasy brain matter. The nomenclature felt appropriate given the waxy, bled-dry skin. It was necessary. Give a monster a name, you limited its power, you made it tangible. Killable.
Her knife found the head of another. She jabbed hard through the ear, dropping the pallid as she yanked free the gore-slicked blade. The creatures were deep into the bar, taking down prey, feeding their hunger.
A few of the other patrons had put up a makeshift barricade of chairs and tables and were defending it with their lives. Morgravia stood on its shaky rampart. She caught the drover out the corner of her eye, wisely taking the high ground as she had, alternating between pistols, firing off short bursts to conserve ammo. They cleared the last of the pallid on the bar side of the barricade but these were just outliers. The horde pushed in from outside, too many to easily count.
She kicked one in the chin and sent it flailing into the ravening mass below. Several clamoured to get through the door, partly impeded by their own rabid urgency as they attempted to push their way inside at once. Those patrons with the wit and will to survive had pulled pistols and small-arms. Some improvised, wielding broken chair legs and bottles. Between them, they reaped a slaughter. But so did the pallid. A carpet of bodies lay between the barricade and the entrance, the dead of both sides entwined in perverse union.
The front of the bar was overrun, the communal area smothered by the horde.
Morgravia heard the sudden clunk of a hidden mechanism, gears turning, then saw a blast door inching from a concealed housing in the ceiling.
She willed it to move faster.
Barak’s hands trembled around the shotgun. He hadn’t fired it in years and even the act of using it to break open the security panel brought back the old anxieties. He had kept it pristine. He might have lost his nerve in the darkness of the underhive but he had retained his self-respect and sense of duty.
He tried to see Jana through the mesh but the churn of milling bodies made it impossible. He shouted for her, ignoring Fharkoum’s invective as his manservant hammered at the cage surrounding the bar. They wanted to get inside.
‘Jana!’ Barak needed to see her, to know she was all right.
Then he did.
Fharkoum had her, his fat hand wrapped around her neck.
A fist of panic clenched Barak’s heart, and the shotgun felt heavy as a corpse as he brought it up to the mesh and pointed it at the merchant.
‘Take your hands off her,’ he breathed, unsure if Fharkoum understood his words but certain the obese merchant had caught the meaning.
The manservant, Kharata, rapped on the mesh with the muzzle of his pistol. ‘Open up.’
Tears streaked Jana’s face, though she bravely tried to hide her fear. She looked pale, and struggled to breathe in the fat man’s oily grasp. Blood trickled down her leg, leaving a shallow puddle where she was standing. She mouthed, Don’t.
Barak lowered the shotgun and let them in.
The moment Barak released the lock, Kharata wrenched open the gate to let his paymaster through. He kept any intrepid patrons at bay with his flechette pistol as he retreated after Fharkoum, sealing the gate behind him.
‘Please… let her go,’ said Barak, looking at his wife.
Kharata jabbed him in the throat.
Barak fell to his knees, choking. He tried to rise, and remember his old training, but a kick in the chest hurled him back. Blood in his mouth, dimly aware of Jana’s angry screaming, Barak reached out to steady himself but ended up dragging a rack of amasec down onto his head. Glass shattered and the air suddenly reeked of strong alcohol.
The beating ended. He felt a cool, gentle touch on his skin. Jana coalesced before him, her hands cradling his face. Her expression flitted between pain and concern. She wept and Barak knew her tears were for him.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked once he’d caught his breath.
She nodded, but he caught the lie in her eyes. She was hurt. Her leg. He could smell the blood, acerbic and metallic above the spilled amasec, and guessed it was bad. He was about to scratch around for the medi-kit he knew he had back here somewhere when Jana gripped his shoulder and he stopped and looked at her.
‘Veran’s dead,’ she said softly. ‘They took him, Bar. He stood in their way for me and they took him, and they… they…’
Throne… Veran… Barak had known him for years. They had been friends. He buried the grief, it wouldn’t serve him now, and concentrated on what he had left. He touched Jana’s cheek, then softly stroked her raven hair. She’s so beautiful.
‘Don’t,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Don’t. You’re here, that’s all that matters right now.’
He noticed Kharata, who wore a smirk that made him look uglier than he a
lready was, and then Fharkoum. The fat merchant had helped himself to a bottle of Jovian brandy, the finest and most expensive spirit Barak had, and swilled it down like cheap grain whiskey. He spilled most of the priceless vintage down his chins and sweat-stained robes. When he had emptied the bottle, he sagged, casting it aside. Barak winced as it shattered, just another senseless indignity piled atop all the rest. Ruddy cheeked, breathing hard, Fharkoum looked haggard, unused to physical exertion. He cast a nervous glance through the mesh, no doubt wondering if his fortune could keep him alive long enough to continue enjoying it.
Kharata’s continued loyalty would determine that. He had picked up Barak’s shotgun, and checked the ammunition before adding it to his arsenal.
You’ll bloody well need it, reckoned Barak.
Then Jana collapsed into his arms and Barak forgot about all of that. He held her, softly patting her face and rubbing her arm. Blood soaked the hem of her dress and her leg glistened wetly with it. He cast about, trying to find the medi-kit, caught between not wanting to let go of Jana and the need to help her. A small metal tin slid towards him and Barak looked up into the face of one of Fharkoum’s courtesans. She was young and pretty, much too young for the life she had been forced into, but she looked kind. Smudged alabaster whitened her face, contrasting with the dark rouge painting her lips and the pale amaranth dusting her cheeks and around her eyes.
‘Maela,’ she said, her manicured fingers tapping her heart, and pushed the tin closer.
Barak replied with his own name and then, nodding, took the tin. A small caduceus had faded on the lid but the supplies within were still good. He grabbed up a handful of bandages and gauze, but hesitated to expose the wound.
A touch on his hand alerted Barak to Maela’s presence. She nodded to reassure him, giving a furtive glance at her master, who was busy draining the bar of its strongest liquor and had no time for, or interest in, his slaves, then took the bandages and gauze. She gently pulled the dress away from the wound, moving slowly because the blood had stuck it to Jana’s skin. She writhed a little with the pain but Maela soothed her with low, calming words.
Past the mesh, the fight continued, and Barak tried to put it out of his mind and focus on his wife. He felt an involuntary pang of grief at the laceration to Jana’s leg. It went deep, souring at the edges where the vague impression of teeth marks could be discerned. Terror gripped him then on what that might mean, but Maela gave it no heed, cleansing it with a cloth and vial of counterseptic before patching on the gauze and then wrapping the bandage.
‘Very good, little bird,’ said an ugly, silky voice, thickly accented. It was Kharata, still his master’s shadow, with one eye on the front of the bar and one behind it. ‘You haven’t lost your touch.’
Maela lowered her eyes, afraid of attracting Kharata’s regard further but the manservant had already moved on, laughing as he did so.
Petty hurts, from petty men, thought Barak, remembering a day when he had punished men like Kharata, before muscle had turned mainly to fat and will had been supplanted by fear.
‘Merciful Throne,’ he breathed, ‘you’re damn good at that. Were you a medic in a previous life or something?’
Maela lifted her gaze, overcoming her timidity to tap the caduceus on the tin lid and then her chest.
‘Is that what he meant? Then… how?’
‘Refugee,’ she said. She struggled with the word.
‘And your friend?’ asked Barak, gesturing to the other courtesan who huddled beneath the bar, clinging to one of its supports and staring into the shadows.
Maela shrugged. Evidently, they weren’t that well acquainted.
Barak clasped her tiny, miraculous hands in his and nodded.
Maela gave a shallow dip of her head, before the sound of tormented metal reverberated through the bar.
The blast door jammed with a groan of protesting plasteel. It lurched, fighting the ground-up bone and viscera fouling its mechanisms, then shuddered to a halt. Smoke exuded from the hidden compartment from which the door had descended before a metallic death cry presaged complete loss of function. Lights flickered in Hallow’s End, suggesting the strain placed upon the local generator, but stayed on.
The pallid kept coming, and Morgravia felt the ground shift beneath her in more ways than one as the integrity of the barricade began to fail.
‘Back!’ she cried, grabbing one of the defenders, hauling on his coat collar. ‘Back!’
She took him with her – an old gate watchman wielding an unpowered maul – clambering down the rough flank of the barricade. The drover retreated too, though he went alone. A plucky cryer, still carrying a satchel of missives that would never be delivered, lingered too long. His shot-pistol got off one more thundering retort before his foot slipped and the horde overwhelmed him. The barricade couldn’t hold, the door had been the defenders’ last chance, and now, as the brave few retreated, Morgravia wished she had saved a bullet. Oshanti’s face returned uncomfortably in her mind and she cursed it for being one of the few things she actually did remember.
She met the drover on the other side, along with a handful of others.
‘I’ve never seen anything like these things…’ said the watchman, breathless. ‘Gunter,’ he added, holding out a hand for Morgravia to shake. ‘Thank you.’
She nodded back but didn’t take his hand. ‘We’ll need every man and woman capable of wielding a weapon.’
Slowly, Gunter let his hand fall, perturbed at what he saw as rudeness. Morgravia could not give a single shit.
‘Will it hold?’ asked a road warden in a long, tan coat and wielding a dirty knife. He looked less than salubrious, the kind of low-cred gun-hand you wouldn’t trust to guard a gutter, let alone an actual road.
A dockhand jammed an errant chair onto the pile, a hunk of broken brick in his other hand which he then threw on top. ‘It has to.’ A length of chain was wrapped around his work belt, and had recently served as a weapon judging by the matted gore. He looked young. They all did, except for Gunter and the trapper, the latter cradling a spent crossbow over one arm as she cast about for an improvised weapon. She found a hefty glass shard and, wrapping a piece of tape around its thicker end, fashioned a decent shank.
‘It’ll fail,’ she drawled, chewing noisily on a piece of tabac, her teeth stained brown from its juices. ‘We’ll have to fight our way out.’
‘Merciful Throne…’ A weaponless scribe, his face spattered with someone else’s blood, fell to his knees.
Morgravia hauled him up. ‘On your feet,’ she rasped harshly. ‘Find something to fight with.’ She glanced at the trapper. ‘She’s right. They’re coming through. Nothing can stop that except us.’
She sounded bolder than she felt, her ire at Hel’s conspicuous absence the only thing maintaining her edge. Morgravia reckoned they had minutes before the pallid clawed through the barricade. None climbed, seemingly compelled to take the shortest route to their prey regardless of what was in their path.
She caught the eye of the drover, who was checking his pistols. ‘If you smile now,’ she warned him, ‘I swear to the Emperor…’
He looked ruefully at the pair of empty mags. ‘No, I’d say this ain’t a time for smiling,’ he said, holstering his sidearms with a flourish before drawing a punch dagger from his belt. ‘I’d say we’re pretty screwed at this point.’
It proved too much for the scribe, who collapsed into a gibbering heap. Morgravia let him. The strong would live, the weak would not. Or maybe no one would, but she would die on her feet, not weeping like some wretch.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked the drover.
He frowned. ‘Come again?’
‘Your name. If we’re dying here then I’d at least know who you are.’
‘Drover.’
‘Shut up.’
‘No, really. It’s Drover. Arum Drover
.’ He put his hand solemnly on his heart. ‘Since I was a babe in arms. I would say ask my mother if you don’t believe me, but she died of the lung rot when I was a boy. Even if she hadn’t, I don’t reckon we’ll make it out of this place for you to have met her anyway.’
Morgravia turned to the Broker, who was waiting near the bar with the sommelier. She noticed a fleck of blood on the servitor’s face, all but confirming her earlier suspicions that he didn’t just serve wine.
‘You are obviously not without resource. Any ideas?’
‘Only that I should have chosen a different place for our meeting, but that hardly matters now.’
‘I thought you might say something like that.’ Morgravia looked past her to the merchant. ‘That mesh won’t hold them,’ she said. ‘I know you can’t wholly understand me, but your hired gun speaks decent Gothic.’ She glanced at him. ‘They’ll kill us, then they’ll tear it down and kill you.’
To Morgravia’s surprise, Fharkoum answered.
‘You are lying.’
‘Been holding out on us, have you?’ She turned for a second at an ominous creaking coming from behind her, but the barricade still held.
‘Yes, I speak your tongue well enough, but I choose not to. It is an ugly language, the dialect of pigs and apes.’
‘It’s not a lie,’ said Morgravia, wanting to ram her fist down the fat bastard’s throat and pull out his lungs.
‘Let them in,’ demanded the barkeep, and looked like he was about to do it himself until Kharata intervened. The barkeep put up his hands, not wishing to add to his bruises.
‘This is no ordinary contagion,’ said Morgravia. ‘They’re stronger than they look. They’ll tear it down.’
Fharkoum offered a derisive chuckle. ‘What do you know, woman?’
She scowled, tired of subterfuge. She brandished her rosette. It shone, its authenticity undeniable. Her manner was even less so. ‘I am Inquisitor Morgravia Sanctus of the Ordo Sepulturum, and by the authority of the Immortal Emperor of Mankind I order you to open up that damn gate.’
