by Warhammer
‘Father…’
He didn’t hear her at first, and took another step. A piece of roof bent underfoot, raising a metallic din. A fallen beam cracked, nothing left to it but charcoal. And there were bodies. Not just those out front, or in the conglomerated heap, still gently simmering. These were inside.
‘Father…’
Bits of skulls. Teeth. A skeletal hand. Pieces disparate from their concomitant bodies.
‘Father!’
Cristo looked down…
‘Karina…’
…and felt the strength leave his limbs entirely. He sank knee-deep in the ash, his daughter detaching herself from his grasp to leaven the burden. She stood unsteadily, touching the dried blood on her head. Any disorientation she might have felt fled in the face of her father’s near expiration.
Cristo fell down on one hand, and Karina fell too, moving with him to hold him steady.
‘It’s Hallow’s End…’ he rasped. ‘It’s Barak’s old place.’
Karina looked around, disbelieving. She knew this place. Her father had drunk at Hallow’s End, she just a girl in his shadow, listening to Jana and Veran playing on the stage. It had been the only peace they had ever known. But things had changed. She had changed. No longer content to sit in her father’s shadow, unwilling to submit to the endless toil of the bullet farms. That life had taken her mother and ruined her father, she vowed it would not take her. But what kind of choice was there between the grind and the gangs? She was as disorientated then as she was now.
‘I can’t…’ she said, trying to piece together her present and reconcile it with the most recent past she remembered. ‘What’s happening?’
Her gaze alighted on Celestia, lying prone in the street.
‘Who is that?’
‘Holy Sister.’
Karina’s gaze snapped back to him, incredulous. ‘A what?’
Cristo shook his head, too tired to give an explanation.
‘Is she…?’ asked Karina.
‘I don’t… know.’
‘Did you…?’
‘No.’ He was broken, beaten. A strong man, laid low, and he needed her.
‘Throne,’ Karina wept, whispering, ‘Dad.’
A decade rolled back like the recoiling of the tide, all those years washed away, and all it took was for him to die.
‘I’m sorry…’ Cristo rasped. ‘For all of it. I never wanted any of this… for you.’
He slumped forwards like so much dead weight and Karina hadn’t the strength to keep him upright. Cristo felt the kiss of wet ash, and let its scent fill his nostrils, let its blackness smear his skin. He wanted to rise, to fight. He could feel the dead approaching, detect their voices and half-heard susurrations scratching on the wind.
You have to run, he tried to say but could only gasp, his mouth opening and closing in impotent frustration.
Darkness crowded his sight, beginning at the edges and creeping inwards. He kept his gaze on Karina. Her face, his daughter’s face, fraught with worry for a father who had failed her in life, the bond between them perhaps restored, but which he would never know again. Cruel that it should happen now, at the end. He should have been better. He wished he had been better.
Then Cristo shut his eyes, and the darkness became absolute.
Chapter XIV
Hate red
The roads through Meagre were empty, the town and the district apparently deserted. No crowds bustled, no vendors hawked their wares; even the preachers of the Imperial faith had been silenced. Debris from collapsed buildings littered the streets, fires faintly guttering in their burnt-out remains. A makeshift stockade had fallen as if sacked by an attacker, its barricades rent and torn down. The detritus of the riots lay everywhere, and was widespread. A stampede had come through here, and it had left the remnants of humble lives in its wake: a scribe’s broken quill, a few scattered coins, a shoe without its owner. The Mule crushed everything under its heavy tread, relentless and inexorable. Rubble parted before its dozer blade, old standing barricades were flattened.
The ride was dulcet enough, the trailer rattling and vibrating to the pitch of the terrain. Barak had found sufficient blankets to make sitting comfortable and the Broker had taken advantage, curled up like a feline against the cross-legged figure of the sommelier. Waiter, warrior and concubine? Morgravia preferred not to assume either way as she regarded her fellow passengers. One of Fharkoum’s courtesans had found a corner to become lost in. She hunched up her knees to her chest and stared at the grubby blankets, perhaps hoping a door would open up inside their folds and let her escape the nightmare.
Morgravia sat against one of the flanking trailer walls and looked out into the night, feeling its wintry regard. She tried not to imagine what might lurk beyond her sight but knew the pallid were but a symptom of something worse, something she had been hunting. She again considered the cause of the plague, the unlikelihood of a pathogen and the even less probable notion of the taint of Ruin. Meagre, all of Blackgheist, was a faithless place. Any contagion brought about by unbelief and the embrace of the Dark Gods would have manifested long before now. And the sheer masses infected… It was as if someone had thrown a lever.
‘Please…’ a wheedling voice enquired.
She looked across the flatbed, irritated to be turned from her thoughts, and glared into the fearful eyes of the scribe. Finely attired, though worn by recent events, he exuded softness.
‘I can’t do this,’ he said.
Morgravia wanted to hit him but Drover, who had been leaning nearby and smoking a black cheroot, put a reassuring hand upon the scribe’s shoulder.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Sir?’
‘What does your mother call you?’
‘Oh… Arkyle.’
‘Listen to me, Arkyle,’ Drover said, squeezing a little tighter, ‘no one wants this, but you’re alive. You are doing this. We’re all doing this, like it or not.’ He paused, conceding, ‘Mostly not.’ He smiled then, pulling his punch dagger so quickly that even Morgravia was taken aback. ‘I can shorten the experience, if you want,’ he said, his voice soft, the scribe’s eyes widening at the blade suddenly held to his throat. ‘It’ll be clean, and I promise it won’t hurt much. I’m good. Real good. I’ve done it for cattle more times than I care to count. Not a one of them ever made a peep. Would you like me to snuff you out, quiet and gentle like? I’d do it quick, a little pain, a little heat, a little cold and then…’ He made a flourish of his other hand then put a finger to his lips. ‘Is that what you want?’
Arkyle stared, he stared for so long unmoving that Morgravia began to think his heart might have stopped, but then he shook his head – a slight movement, a near-imperceptible gesture.
‘So, you’re doing this,’ Drover confirmed.
Arkyle nodded.
‘Don’t make us have this conversation again,’ Drover warned, ‘and if you refuse to fight when you need to fight, I will slit you open from neck to nethers and leave you to bleed out with your guts round your ankles, understand?’
Another nod, shallower than the preceding one. The eyes widened further.
Drover leaned back, sheathing the knife and gesturing to the ruins of the town with the glowing ash of his cheroot. ‘This here is shit. It’s as shit as it gets. We are nostril-deep in it so we ain’t got no choice but to suck it up, and there ain’t no way out we don’t make for ourselves, and that is a f–’
He stopped, wrong-footed by the courtesan springing to her feet and leaping onto the cabin.
‘The hell…’
She crawled, half slid, and threw herself under the wheels.
Barak slammed the brakes hard, and Drover nearly pitched out himself as the others were smashed forwards, but it was too late.
The Mule ground to a halt, muddy red tracks left in its wake, and from the
cabin Barak shouted a raft of expletives. After he’d recovered, the two-way vox-receiver in the flatbed hissed and his voice crackled through.
‘Who was that? What the hell was that?’
Picking herself up, Morgravia answered. ‘One of Fharkoum’s harem.’
‘What did you do?’
‘Nothing, damn your soul. She did it herself.’
Drover had leapt down to the ground, landing in a crouch.
‘As we’re stopping, someone should keep a watch,’ he said.
Morgravia agreed and tossed him the shotgun, which he caught deftly as he moved to the front of the rig. She heard him whistle as he inspected the carnage.
She heard the low thrum of shrouded engines, like a lander or a gun-cutter on mute, but looking into the night sky she couldn’t discern anything unusual. Just smoke and darkness.
‘You hear that?’ she asked of no one in particular.
Then something moved nearer the ground. Morgravia saw it flicker in her peripheral vision and turned her head to try to track it. Nothing.
‘Get us moving, Barak,’ she said into the vox-receiver. The sky still looked clear.
‘She’s entangled in the drive axle,’ he called back, having stepped out of the cabin to take a look himself. ‘Merciful Throne…’
Morgravia went to the trailer edge and leaned over, acutely aware of the Broker watching silently. She had sat up, the sommelier still close. Drover wandered into her eyeline, coming from the front of the rig.
‘It’s a mess. Strings of meat, cracked bone. Hair.’
Morgravia scowled. ‘Barak, get us moving now. Loitering in the open is a very bad idea.’ She hadn’t seen or heard anything of Fharkoum or Kharata, and she assumed the fat merchant had no opinion of the ugly death of his slave.
‘I see something…’ It was Drover who spoke, slowly walking the perimeter of the Mule, shotgun at the ready.
Morgravia followed his gaze, briefly wishing she hadn’t surrendered the weapon.
A soft chime emanated from the darkness, like metal ringing against metal. A scrape followed, metallic like the first sound, a butcher sharpening his knives.
Another chime pealed from the north, the same pattern repeating, then from the south, east and west.
Chime, scrape. Chime, scrape.
Drover had roamed farther out, muzzle switching between cardinal points, all the while the metallic refrain growing louder.
Morgravia recalled him, kicking out the trailer’s rear ramp so that it slammed down to the ground.
‘Back here, now.’
Drover turned, about to say something pithy, but thought better of it when he saw Morgravia’s face. He slung the shotgun on its strap and hurried back to the trailer, scurrying aboard with a hand up from the inquisitor before helping pull up the ramp.
The engine surged, a high-pitched shriek that set their teeth on edge. The front wheel turned on the right-hand side and the rig slewed in a half-circle, kicked out of true by the sticking left wheel.
Watery red lamps flared in the shadows, distant, but becoming more distinct.
Chime, scrape. Chime, scrape.
A veritable chorus sang out the butcher’s song. The red lamps multiplied into a crimson constellation.
‘Let’s get underway,’ Morgravia urged down the vox.
The engine replied, shrieking, the rig turning as the rear wheels propelled it around the sticking drive axle. They were almost facing back the way they had come.
‘Barak…’
‘I’m damn well trying…’
The circle of red lamps closed, hot embers now, unfettered by distance or the thready smoke still clouding the township. A noose enclosed, one with sharp paring blades.
Chime, scrape. Chime, scrape.
Drover still had the shotgun and panned it full circle, following the sounds.
Morgravia had pulled her knife and turned to the others in the trailer. Her gaze fell on the Broker and the sommelier in particular. ‘Are you prepared to fight?’
The sommelier, already standing, conceded the slightest nod and Morgravia swore she saw his arms tense inside the folds of his robes. She imagined a weapon concealed beneath, one the sommelier was well practised with. Even the scribe, Arkyle, since Drover had given him the talk, had found a crowbar and clung to it with both quivering hands.
‘Kharata,’ Morgravia snarled down the vox, ‘get your sorry carcass up here with the rest of us, or is the scribe who near pissed himself the braver man?’
There was a moment’s pause in which those inside the trailer watched the periphery and the red lamps burning. Morgravia squinted as a figure started to resolve. Metallic, spindle-limbed, blades for arms. The sight of it stirred something in her besides fear, a vague memory which coalesced only to scatter like a wisp of smoke against the wind. She felt her scars itch, the slow and agonising unstitching of flesh, the physical abuses of her body.
She knew this thing, or its ilk. The cyborganic butchers of the heretic Mechanicus. What past transgression, what blight against reason had Blackgheist committed to bring these flesh carvers and technological perversions to its door?
Morgravia dearly wanted a gun. Instead she called to Drover. ‘There!’
The spindle-thing ran, breaking from the circling pack, its reverse-canted legs pistoning hard.
Drover’s blast hit it left of middle, forcing its shoulder to dip and turn. It stumbled, fragments falling from its skeletal frame. The eye burned, hate red.
‘Kill it!’ Morgravia shouted.
A second burst riddled its torso, tearing out wires in a flash of sparks. Oil and vital fluids sprayed its countenance where a mouth-pipe bulged with laboured intensity. It got ten feet from the trailer when Drover took off its head, neck and part of its clavicle. It collapsed into a mire of its own fluids, limbs twitching like a dead arachnid.
Drover clacked a fresh round into the shotgun’s breech. ‘What the Throne is that?’
‘Only the first,’ Morgravia replied.
Two more were coming, barrelling on all four limbs, back legs kicking as the blade arms dug into the ground and propelled them.
The first spun on its heel, back leg shot out, opposite front limb torn off as Kharata demonstrated the stopping power of his flechette pistol.
Good of you to join us, Morgravia wanted to say, but settled for withering contempt in her gaze instead.
It kept going, the spindle-thing, crawling and scraping on one leg, one arm, before a flechette round to the head ended it.
Drover took out the other one, cleaner this time having now assessed his enemy, a focused blast to the skull leaving it decapitated and floundering as it skidded onto its front and slid to stillness.
‘Barak!’ Morgravia roared.
The engine roared too, harder this time as Barak hammered the fuel pedal. The Mule whirled so sharply the Broker tipped out, shrieking a little as she did so. Without a moment’s hesitation, the sommelier leapt after her, his robes parting to reveal a battle-harness beneath. A long chained whip unfurled, its segmented parts snapping like a tongue as the sommelier energised each link. It lashed out, carving two more spindle-things to wreckage, cleaving through metal with horrific ease. They discombobulated where they stood, torso, limbs and face pulled apart by simple gravity as they were separated.
The Broker crawled, reaching her formidable protector as he looped the whip around, scything at the spindle-things as they rushed in. She kept going, getting back to the rig where Morgravia leaned down to haul her up, grunting with the weight of the Broker’s augmetics.
Drover and Kharata fended off the rest as they piled in, a machine herd bent on slaughter. This wasn’t the plague, the ravening as the Drover had referred to it. It had the hallmarks of a purge, a determined and thorough execution and eradication. Meagre had been cleared out and now just the dr
egs remained, Morgravia amongst them. Illegal psykers, mutants, heretic cults – each were worthy of such focused pogroms, but the motivation here was beyond her ability to currently fathom.
At last Barak freed the drive axle, grinding away whatever bone and matter had gummed its workings. The Mule lurched but then turned, its forward momentum restored. The Broker was shouting from the back of the trailer, her usual composure fracturing under the very real and present threat to her sommelier, who fought ferociously as the spindle-things came for him. Drover sent forth another blast and even Kharata added to the fusillade, but the Mechanicus killers were numerous, and they were fast. They swarmed the sommelier, cutting him off from the rig.
His eyes met with the Broker’s, a momentary connection that suggested he had a good degree more sentience than Morgravia had first given him credit for. He didn’t cry out or plead for rescue or even urge the others on, he simply fought, that one look he gave to his mistress the only indication of his will. But he couldn’t engage them all, and the overspill made for the rig, blade limbs scything, legs poised to spring.
‘Move damn it, Barak. Get us out of here. Now.’
Wheel-spinning in the sludge, the rig sped off, kicking up filth in its wake.
Clinging to the back wall of the trailer, the Broker stared as the sommelier fought. The machines flocked him, only kept at bay by the fatal revolutions of his whip. She stared until the fight had become a smudge and then nothing but a memory as the darkness claimed it. Even then she stared, her eyes on the night, listening to the distant chimes of battle, until even they fell still and all was shadow and silence again.
Only then did she release her grip, only then did she retreat from the wall and turn her gaze upon Morgravia.
The rig rumbled on, as the precinct house grew ever closer. And in the night sky, faint and distant, crimson lights.
Chapter XV
Ruination
The blade felt sharp against the skin, tucked just under the jugular. A quick slash and the carotid would open, spilling a river of red. This was the first thing Cristo thought of as he regained consciousness. The second was simply, I’m alive…
