by Warhammer
A fresh tide swell gained momentum in the direction of the gate, braving the thready remnants of the gas and the threat of the guns, impelled by the fear of something worse. One of the watchman had his eye to a scope and called out. His outstretched finger pronounced death as if it had been granted godlike power in the very act of pointing. Men, women, children were ripped apart and torn down, or else burst into flames as every weapon on the wall opened up.
Though he dearly wished to, Kharata could not look away. A savage yank of his shoulder brought him around and he found himself staring into the verminous, bloodshot eyes of his employer. A cloying stench assailed his nostrils, a mix of poorly masked body odour and pungent halitosis.
‘Offer to pay…’ Fharkoum hissed through clenched, overly white teeth. One molar glinted with a precious gemstone.
A blow from the flat of Kharata’s palm sent Fharkoum sprawling back into his seat. The fat merchant’s expression went from confused, to angry, to fearful as he fell under the hired gun’s regard.
‘Do not touch me like that again,’ Kharata warned, but then answered the pilot’s frantic calls with the instruction to bribe the watchmen.
Their answer was emphatic. A rocket blasted towards the gun-cutter, riding a contrail of ignition. The gun-cutter banked hard, and Kharata flew out of the side-hatch as Fharkoum was flung from his seat and hit the side of the hold. The hired gun clung to the guide rail, managing to get a toehold on the edge of the hatch and pull himself in.
He hammered the vox, screaming at the pilot to turn around. He spared a glance for Fharkoum, who was bleeding from a head wound and crawling across the deck reaching for something to cling to.
The pilot didn’t reply as he banked again to avoid a second rocket. A shudder trembled through the fuselage as the rocket exploded against the hull. The shriek of tearing metal followed. Then they were spinning, the view through the open side hatch flitting past in frenzied revolutions. Smoke obscured everything, spilling into the hold, choking the buffeting air. Through the vox, the pilot urged them to brace. Seconds later, hard impact and the screech of deformed metal as the hull bunched and split. A wing tore off; Kharata saw it spiral away into the murky distance like a leaf tossed on a hurricane. Earth churned, the gun-cutter’s prow turning plough as it dug its burial furrow. Armourglass shattered as the cockpit crumpled inwards, unable to resist the forces being exerted against it. Kharata hung on, battered against the inside of the hold. He tasted blood, felt a bone snap. Bit back the hurt behind a barricade of clenched teeth. On and on it went, the rumbling, rattling cacophony of the crash, pieces ripping away, split off like satellites in a decaying orbit, metal yielding and buckling.
The gun-cutter shuddered to a halt, spewing steam and smoke. At the edge of hearing, fire crackled dulcetly.
Kharata opened his eyes, relieved to be alive. He lay on the deck, his eye drawn to a thick shaft of light spilling through the open side hatch. He had no idea where they had crashed; his only view was bright but indistinct. A sodium lamp, flickering. Inside. They had speared through a building. Rock dust, dangling as motes in the hot air, confirmed it.
The pilot was dead. Nothing remained of the cockpit. A hand extruded from a crush of deformed metal. A single blood trail did little justice to the ruin inflicted on the body.
Fharkoum floundered like a swollen rat, trapped against the deck by a heavy spur of metal. He groaned, writhing in unfamiliar agony, unable to fathom why he couldn’t move properly.
Kharata tried to get to his feet but a sharp spike of pain put him down again, and he realised his leg was broken. He found a piece of shredded pipe, something from the inside of the hull, and fashioned a splint with wiring wrenched from a broken wall panel. He tied it tight, grimacing, and found a thin but long piece of panelling to use as a crutch.
He heard Fharkoum groggily slur his name from across the hold. Kharata looked up from his labours but didn’t go to his master. The fat merchant started shouting, his rage and pain congealing into something base and primordial.
Rising gingerly, Kharata tested the crutch and his leg. It hurt like hell, but he was up at least.
Another groan from Fharkoum, and now his bleary gaze found the hired gun. He swore, a veritable barrage of expletives, first promising riches, and then retribution if Kharata did not act to rescue him.
‘Get me out, get me out…’ Fharkoum blathered, pushing pathetically at the spur firmly pinning him to the deck. He flailed and lurched, his obese frame contorting ineffectually.
‘Kharata…’ he snarled, and then as he realised his plight he uttered much more softly and incredulously, ‘Kharata?’
The hired gun turned away, his only gift to his master a contemptuous look as he shuffled through the side hatch of the grounded gun-cutter and into the ruined building beyond.
‘Kharata! Kharata, you bastard! I’ll skin you, whoreson! Guttersnipe! Kharata… help me… Any price. Name any price… Kharata!’
Fharkoum’s screamed threats and accusations followed him, as did pleading. And weeping.
As he limped away from the gently burning wreck, Kharata saw the pallid converging. They were still a little way off, enough time for him to be on his way. A maglev tunnel offered a way out and he made for it with a little urgency. As fat as Fharkoum was, the pallid were voracious and would not feast for long.
He had put a decent distance between himself and the wreck as the pallid reached it. Fharkoum’s screams rose to fever pitch, a shrieking girlish terror that abruptly cut off into silence.
After a last look back, darkness swallowed Kharata as he entered the maglev tunnel. It went deeper into Low Sink, running south, but that hardly mattered. The gate was impenetrable. No one would be getting through, although a last image surfaced in his mind as he ventured into the black, of the pallid at the gate, climbing…
A low hum betrayed the lethal energy coursing through the rail and Kharata made certain to stay clear, hugging the opposite side of the tunnel. Slowly, his eyes adjusted to the darkness. A gaunt, pale visage loomed for him. A pallid, slow and ailing. He shot it through the head, flechette pistol in one hand, crutch in the other. He kept moving. Debris caught underfoot and he stumbled more than once. A second pallid staggered from the murky darkness. It wasn’t alone. Kharata killed it, and the rest.
The flechette pistol clicked empty. He patted his bodyglove but had no further reloads, so he tossed the priceless weapon and focused on moving.
Limping hard, sweat beading his face, sticky beneath the bodyglove, Kharata felt the fear return. He heard them nearby, shuffling, sniffing, snarling. He felt the tunnel rumble as a crackle of energy surged through the rail. The maglevs ran on an automated schedule and the next carriage flashed by, raucous and bright. The harsh light revealed more pallid. Lots more. They clamoured down the tunnel, emerging from alcoves and nooks, starved and desperate.
Kharata hurried on, but the broken leg slowed him like an anchor. A glow flickered ahead, the promise of a station. He pushed on harder, striving to reach the light, to reach salvation. Heart thudding, breath scything. Then he fell, the crutch having snapped beneath him. White pain flared, every nerve ending aflame. A scent of rot and dank wafted over and he knew they were close. Too close.
He felt the electrical jolt of the rail. It was near enough to touch.
Kharata knew men like him died in one of two ways. Either they were killed in the prosecution of their profession, or their fallen morality would eventually catch up to them and they would swallow a bullet to escape their self-hatred. He did not believe in the latter, thinking it the way of cowards. A sociopath like him had no morality. He only had his mantra.
Survive or die.
Rancid breath washed across his ear, pricking his nostrils.
Kharata made his choice. He reached out and seized the rail.
Chapter XXIII
Buried in the flesh
The Mule headed north, its passengers riding in funerary silence, the rig’s jangling metal refrain a lament to their mourning. The precinct house was a lightless and towering shadow in the background, its haunted shell gratefully left behind. A few miles off yet lay the border, and from there a few more miles to the gate to uphive. Morgravia watched as Meagre submitted to slumber again, as if the horrors had retreated to lick their wounds; or perhaps they simply lay in wait. Hunched figures still shuffled along the periphery, too far away and too slow to be of concern. Meagre had never been an affluent place, but now it belonged to the pallid.
Drover had the wheel. He had been quiet since they left the precinct, uncharacteristically so. Barak slept fitfully in the back, his injuries having earned him a respite, his head on Jana’s shoulder. The Broker sat alongside, a dignified distance between them, staring into the shadows outside the window as the skeleton of the settlement slipped by in jagged silhouette. She clung to the wrist of her ruined hand as if the very act of grasping it would ease the pain of her fused fingers.
‘This horror…’ the Broker said, her voice barely louder than a murmur in the back.
Jana stirred, but Barak slept on.
‘It will consume this place. I can taste it, on the air… the fear. It will drive us all mad. Perhaps it already is.’
Jana leaned over to put a consoling hand on the Broker’s shoulder.
‘Have hope. We are alive. If we can reach the border then–’
‘It will not matter,’ said the Broker, and turned towards the front of the cab. ‘She knows.’
Morgravia looked up but didn’t speak. Her skin prickled as if reacting to an intense heat, but it was cold in the cab. Sweat beaded her face and she wiped it away with a gloved hand.
‘She knows what follows,’ the Broker continued, ‘if this does not stop. They will burn it. Her kind. To preserve the body, sever the limb. Is that not the way? A purging fire? No one is getting through that gate alive. They simply will not allow it.’
The bitterness radiated as palpably as the heat prickling Morgravia’s feverish skin. A sense of violation had begun to overwhelm her, like mites burrowing into her flesh. Only through an effort of will did she keep it in check. Her chest thumped with palpitations as a bout of dyspnoea took hold. Her throat constricted, her every nerve raw and burning. Pain flared in her eye like a hot needle rammed into the iris. Her will collapsed, like a dam capitulating against the wrath of a raging torrent. It gave, and so did she.
‘Let me out…’ she croaked, so hoarse it barely registered.
Drover turned an ear but hadn’t really heard her.
Morgravia gasped, wrenching out a breath, barely able to draw in more. She clenched the rig’s front panel, finally getting Drover’s attention.
‘You all right?’ he asked, looking askance at her, his eyes mainly on the road.
An old mining district loomed in the distance, abandoned and drenched in foreboding. The rig had taken the main road that led through it, the ramshackle silos and warehouses drifting closer.
‘Let me out,’ Morgravia said, louder, a fire surging through her flesh as whatever had been buried within fought for release.
Drover frowned. ‘In this wasteland? There’s nothing here.’
‘Right now, damn it!’ Morgravia shouted, the urge to be violently sick forcing her stomach to contract.
The rig slewed to a halt on a patch of scrubland.
She tumbled out, half leaping, half falling and vomited all over the ground. Spitting out the last of it, Morgravia expected to see something in her ejection, some grim evidence of the contagion she harboured. A foetid pool of regurgitant swilled before her, but it was largely an accretion of bile. It stung her throat, hot and acerbic.
The sensation did not end with the evacuation of her stomach. It stirred, the feeling within, like surgical tools probing.
‘I need a moment…’ she said, gasping at the pain inside her, and staggered towards the dilapidated shell of a manufactory, limned by the glow of the rig’s lamps. She needed to get away, out of sight, a few minutes to think, to understand. Only the lower floor of the building remained, but Morgravia had caught sight of an ablutions block, old, disused but still standing. She made for it.
‘Inquisitor?’ asked the Broker, before opening the door and stepping outside.
‘What the hell is happening?’ said Drover.
‘Stay with the rig,’ Morgravia called to him, and said nothing more.
The Broker started to follow her.
Drover leaned out of the window. ‘And where are you going? This ain’t no time to be wandering off.’
‘I forget the part where the money I paid you affords you the right to question me,’ the Broker replied, and walked away.
Drover swore again, lighting up another cheroot as he watched her go.
A narrow gantry bridged a labour trench that led to the entrance of the manufactory. Whatever ores dug from the earth it had once refined had dried up long ago. It was lightless and cold, like a snuffed candle in winter. An industrial odour pervaded. The manufactory had been stripped of anything of worth. Dust had settled like a shroud. Gang insignia daubed slate-grey walls. Evidence of recent fires littered the ground. Chains hanging from the high ceiling reminded her of nooses as they gently swayed this way and that, clinking whenever they touched.
The ablutions block was appended to the main manufactory and comprised several small cells. Each had a basin, mirror and wash faucet. Grimy off-white ceramic tiled the immediate surrounds. As she stepped into one of the cubicles, Morgravia felt her heart thundering like heavy ordnance. The pain flared, a sensation of violent rebirth running through her body. She clung to her sides, hoping to hold in whatever felt like it was trying to push itself out. Her eye burned, and she clenched the lid shut as she engaged the old sodium lamp above the basin and clung on like she had in the barracks.
She breathed, slow and steady, reciting the mantra.
‘A mind without purpose will walk in dark places…’
She reminded herself who she was, what she was, despite the ever-present sense of disassociation. Her will was everything. She had seen the abyss and had not flinched. And slowly but certainly, Morgravia found calm. Her breathing eased and her heart resumed a more natural rhythm.
‘Is this why…?’ a voice asked behind her.
It was the Broker, having followed her from the rig.
‘An injury taken at the precinct house, that’s all,’ said Morgravia, though she didn’t turn around at first, nor did she look at her reflection.
‘Not a good lie,’ the Broker said. ‘I have heard better.’
Morgravia clenched her fists, the echo of the itch in her flesh stirring. ‘What do you want?’
‘I want to know your secret. Why are you out here?’
‘I learn secrets, I don’t divulge them.’
‘I have to say, it intrigued me,’ the Broker continued, as if Morgravia hadn’t spoken. ‘An inquisitor in need of an unsanctioned psyker. I thought it might be a trap at first. That’s why I brought a friend.’
Morgravia licked her lips, surprised at how dry they’d become. She tasted bile and winced at the caustic flavour. ‘You don’t mean Arum Drover, though.’
The Broker’s expression soured. Morgravia saw it in the mirror, relieved to see her own face reflected back at her and not something else.
‘He is a hireling, exactly as you said,’ the Broker went on. ‘Hallow’s End had a reputation. I thought I might need the extra protection.’
‘And the cipher you gave him?’
‘Useless. I just needed you to believe I had a proxy who could deliver what you wanted.’
‘So you were planning on betraying me.’
‘Of course.’
‘And him too.’
‘He had already been paid. He l
oses nothing.’
‘So, why are you really here? It’s not to know my secret. It’s to divulge yours, isn’t it?’ She turned then, her face impassive. ‘You’re the Empath.’
A moment of silence stretched between them, a gulf of indecision which would change their relationship forever.
In the end, the Broker decided to relent. ‘How long have you known?’
‘I wasn’t certain until I saw the brand. That’s a witch mark. An old one. I assume you escaped your persecutors. What was it, local militia, bounty hunter?’
‘Neither. They were just men. Blinded by fear and hatred. Petty minds who wanted to hurt what they didn’t understand because it made them feel safer. I killed them. After they branded me. I eviscerated their minds, turned them into empty vessels. Then I fled and found solace of a kind in Meagre. I plied my trade, became known as the Broker. Did well. I am good at knowing what someone wants.’
‘And now you’re being hunted again.’
The Broker gave a bitter smile. ‘I was… incautious. An ear to the ground, I heard a hook had been cast. I was not lying when I said I had made enemies.’
‘What if it’s me?’ said Morgravia flatly. ‘What if the reason I am here is you?’
She smiled again, wryly. ‘You are not here for me, and we both know it. More likely it is a–’
A shot rang out, startling in the quiet of the ablutions block.
Morgravia drew her pistol on instinct, then saw the red bloom unfolding across the Broker’s robes. Or the Empath’s. It made no difference when she fell, slowly, to one knee, and then lay on her side, gasping for breath.
‘It’s like I told you,’ Arum Drover’s voice issued from the shadows, ‘not everyone is always what they seem.’
He emerged slowly, a spectre from the gloom. The charm remained, but tempered by something cruel and greedy.
‘You’ll drop that hand cannon if you please,’ he said, wagging his gun at her. ‘I like you, inquisitor, but not that much. And unlike that witch dying on the ground over there, I ain’t the trusting kind.’
