The Darkling Hours - Rachel Harrison

by Warhammer 40K

  Distance to target: 2134 metres.

  ‘Ready?’ Fel asks.

  ‘Aye, captain,’ the Duskhounds reply, and this time, Raine joins them in their response.

  ‘Let’s go make some fates,’ Fel says, and he hits the release for the Valkyrie’s rear ramp.

  The ramp yawns open to reveal Termina’s thunderous sky, underlit by the fires of war and the refineries that are still burning. Tyl and Rol go first, straight over into the dark. Then Myre and Jeth. The wind buffets Raine as she steps to the edge alongside Fel. She blinks. Breathes. Glances once more at the drop distance counter in her visor’s display.

  And then she jumps out into the war-torn sky.

  As Raine falls through Termina’s sky, towards the open void of Iota, she focuses on what she was taught.

  Breathe. Don’t stop breathing.

  Arms and legs outstretched and stable.

  Don’t thrash. Don’t blink.

  Remain calm.

  The sky lights with anti-aircraft fire and lightning flashes. The ground grows larger. Darker. Iota yawns wider. The wind tears at Raine’s uniform and tugs on her limbs. Her fingers are cold and numb, despite the gloves. The drop distance counter tracks down quickly.

  Distance to target: 1711 metres.

  Breathe.

  Don’t stop breathing.

  The landing zone in Raine’s visor display is a bright white circle. Below, Iota grows wider and wider until there is no ground to see, and then she is below the line of the pit-mouth and falling into the darkness of Iota itself. Scaffolding and lifters blur past, and the counter tracks down. Raine cannot see the others, but then the pit is so dark and the wind is so strong. Her visor beads with water that runs in streaks to the edges.

  Distance to target: 1226 metres.

  The longer the freefall, the less likely it is you’ll be seen. But the longer the freefall, the less control you have. The more likely it is you will hit something.

  Don’t blink.

  Just breathe.

  Her eyes sting and ache and Raine thinks for a moment of the shape in the leaves. She glimpses it again in the streaks of water beading on her visor. The Duskhound. Death. Her heart is racing.

  ‘Breathe,’ she says to herself.

  Raine knows that it is the psyker’s influence pushing at the edges of her mind, making her see those things. Making her heart race even more than the fall does. She also knows that to panic is to die, so she keeps breathing deeply from the stale air of her mask and forces her limbs to stay locked as the counter keeps tracking down.

  Distance to target: 914 metres.

  But then there is a loud crack and Raine is dizzied. Her limbs go slack for an instant before she recovers her senses and realises that something struck her visor. An enemy round, or some kind of debris. She is falling fast, uncontrolled. Iota blurs around her. The wind is deafening. She can’t catch her breath. She can’t see. Can’t stop spinning.

  Just.

  Breathe .

  With the tactical display crazing in front of her eyes and the vox pickup hissing loudly in her ears, Raine fights the wind and the vertigo and the dizziness to right herself, and slow the fall before it kills her. She gets herself level, but she cannot tell if she is off-course. She cannot clearly see the white circle that marks the landing zone. In the corner of the display, the distance to target flickers and splinters.

  It looks as though it says Distance to target: 94 metres.

  Or is that 34 metres.

  ‘Throne ,’ Raine says, through her teeth.

  She fires the grav-chute’s jets. Inertia pulls hard on her limbs and jolts her spine. Raine’s vision dizzies again for a moment, and when it clears she can see the landing zone below. Close. Coming up fast, despite the jets. What she was taught rushes through her mind. Use the fall. Don’t lock your limbs. Roll with the speed of it.

  Don’t close your eyes.

  Raine kills the grav-chute jets a moment before she hits the deck of the landing platform and rolls. She doesn’t lock her limbs, or close her eyes, which is how she sees that she hit at a poor angle, right by the edge of the platform.

  And that she’s about to go over it.

  Raine twists as her body slides over the platform lip and manages to snag hold of the grating of the floor, though it nearly pulls her arm from its socket and she can’t help but cry out. She hits the release for the grav-chute and lets it fall away into the pit below as two figures clad in black carapace drop to their knees and help to drag her back up onto the platform. Fel and Myre.

  ‘Hells,’ Fel says. ‘That was close.’

  Raine gets to her feet and pulls the jump-mask off. Iota’s howling is even louder without it. The crystalflex of the jump-mask is crazed with cracks that burst outwards from a hole the size of a trade-coin. Raine becomes aware of her face stinging where she has been cut, and of warm lines of blood painting their way down her cheek. For a moment, she almost sees a shape in the damage to the visor. Teeth and eyes.

  Raine shakes her head to clear it and drops the damaged jump-mask on the deck. Fel meets her eyes for a moment.

  ‘Ready?’ he asks her.

  Raine nods and draws her bolt pistol from the mag-secured holster at her belt. The cold weight of Penance is comforting.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she says.

  Andren Fel was taught many things at the Schola Antari. He was taught how to lead others. How to memorise and strategise. He was taught how to survive with very little, and how to fight and kill with even less, but Fel’s scholam training also granted him another skill.

  Something that the masters would call resilience .

  Those days are distant now, but Fel remembers them as clearly as any other. He remembers being bound and blindfolded. He remembers shocks and lashes, knives and blood, and the masters asking him the same question over and over again and expecting him to break.

  Do you want it to stop?

  Every cadet finds a different way to endure the resilience trials, and to keep themselves from answering yes to that question. The method is always secret, and personal, so that it cannot be broken. Fel’s is a simple thing. An old evensong that his mother used to sing when he was a child.

  Beware the darkling hours, my son,

  For that is when the duskhounds come.

  Keep within the light as the fire burns,

  Until the morning sun returns.

  Andren Fel thinks of those words again now as he follows the wide, rocky slope down into Iota. Down into the darkness. The words help to keep the witch’s work at bay. The unease, as if he is being followed. The shadows, coiling and twisting and making shapes at the edges of his sight.

  The glint of watchful eyes in the darkness.

  The path down into Iota is wide and set with scuffed steel rails for excavation trains. Line of sight is fouled by large piles of rubble and the still, silent drilling machines that creak in the ceaseless wind. Iota’s howling is louder the deeper they go. More than loud enough to cover any sound Fel might make as he gets shadow-close to the two Sighted scouts patrolling the path ahead. The two of them are wearing fully enclosed reflective helmets and dull blue flak armour marked with that sigil they all wear. The spiral, with the eye at the centre.

  Not unlike the spiral of Iota, seen from above.

  The shards of mirrored glass hanging from cords on the Sighted’s flak armour knock together as Fel grabs hold of the scout and breaks his neck with a twist of his hands. Beside him, Rol quiets the other with the edge of his combat blade, then the two of them drag the bodies to where they will be hidden by the darkness and debris, before moving further down the slope.

  Fel drops into the shadow of a mining machine, and Rol does the same. Ahead, the slope leads down onto a rubble-strewn plateau that is lit by oil lanterns strung between poles driven into the stone. The dim lights dance like faerie fires in the wind, painting long, restless shadows on the ground. A tunnel yawns in Iota’s wall that wasn’t on Keene’s schematics. It has be
en cut jagged, leaving shards of rock pointing inwards. Outside it, an excavation trolley sits empty on the tracks. Iota’s howling is much louder here. Twinned, almost.

  ‘Well, that looks the sort of place you might hide a witch. Don’t you think, captain?’

  Rol’s voice is without a smile, for once.

  ‘I’d say so,’ Fel says.

  It’s not just the look of the tunnel. Fel can see his Duskhounds’ vitals in the corner of his display. Their heart rates are all reading as elevated, the price of resisting the witch. Fel feels it just as much as they do, unease welling up inside him like blood from a bad wound.

  Beware the darkling hours, my son, says his mother’s voice.

  Fel shakes his head, hard. It’s getting worse, which is proof that they are on the right track.

  He sends a burst of vox, and the rest of his Duskhounds approach with Raine. She drops into cover beside him with her sabre drawn. Raine has dulled Evenfall’s blade to stop it catching the light. In the darkness, the blood drying on her face looks black.

  ‘We’ve got movement, captain,’ Rol says.

  Fel looks back around the cover to see a group of Sighted come up and out of the tunnel. A dozen of them, wearing those reflective masks, just like the others. Fel marks the leader by the mirrored cloak he wears, and the finely made sword at his hip. Eight of the Sighted are working together to carry a heavy, sealed casket over to the excavation trolley, where they set it down with a dull thud.

  ‘We cannot let whatever that is reach the surface,’ Raine says.

  Fel shakes his head.

  ‘Pattern?’ Rol asks.

  Fel watches as two of the Sighted stay behind to guard the trolley, and the rest turn back for the tunnel.

  ‘Hangman’s noose,’ he says.

  The first Antari story that Andren Fel ever told Raine was that of the duskhounds. The story goes that the hounds come to take the souls of those fated to die and drag them to the After for judgement. He told her that duskhounds can appear in the slimmest of shadows, even that of those they are sent to take.

  In the moment that the hangman’s noose closes, Raine believes every word of the old Antari story.

  Raine is moving from cover to cover across the plateau with Fel when Myre and Jeth resolve from the shadows around the Sighted guarding the trolley. The Duskhounds grab hold of the two scouts and drag them from their feet into the darkness before reappearing moments later, without a sound. Myre drops to one knee and sets to work attaching her burn-charges to the trolley. The rest of the Sighted do not turn back. They just keep moving towards the tunnel mouth, as good as deafened by Iota’s howling.

  Fel sends a single burst of vox, then. The signal that means close the noose .

  Near-silent flashes of hellgun fire lance from the darkness as Raine breaks cover alongside Fel. Three of the Sighted fall in rapid succession, masks shattered and coiling smoke from Cassia Tyl’s pin-accurate kill shots. The rest of the Sighted turn and shout and scatter and raise their own weapons to fire back, only to find that death is already much too close.

  Raine draws her blade through the first of them. Evenfall sings, cutting through the Sighted’s blue-grey flak armour with ease. Black blood mists Raine’s face as the woman spills over backwards without a sound. Raine lets her momentum carry her forward as the Duskhounds engage around her. Rol shoots one of the Sighted, centre-mass, before burying his combat blade in another. The Sighted staggers backwards but refuses to die. He raises his shotgun to fire on Rol, point-blank. Before he can pull the trigger, another whisper of hellgun fire cuts the space between the two of them and sends the Sighted spinning to the ground.

  ‘Good eyes, Cass,’ Rol says, over the vox.

  ‘It’s like you said,’ she replies, from her sharpshooter’s position. ‘The After can wait.’

  Raine sees one of the Sighted go for Fel with a jagged, hooked blade. He lets his rifle swing by the strap so that he can catch the Sighted’s arm and break it. Fel twists the scout off his feet, before taking up his hellgun again for the kill shot in one swift movement.

  ‘You will see.’

  The words come from the Sighted’s leader, as he charges Raine with his sword raised. Her reflection grows larger in his mirrored mask. The Sighted is quick, the shards of glass on his cloak catching the lumen light as he ducks and parries and swings for her. Raine catches the Sighted’s blade on her own and turns it aside before plunging Evenfall into his chest.

  ‘You will see the truth,’ the Sighted rasps, from behind his mask. ‘All of your fears.’

  ‘Fear means nothing when you have faith,’ Raine snarls, pulling her sabre free.

  The Sighted falls to his knees.

  ‘You will see,’ he gurgles. ‘You are beheld.’

  Then the Sighted collapses and dies, black blood spreading around him on the stone like outstretched wings. With the remaining Sighted dead, Myre and Jeth approach and the Duskhounds gather around Raine, their armour scored and gouged by blades.

  ‘Beheld,’ Rol says. ‘That cannot be good.’

  And then another sound overtakes even Iota’s ceaseless howling.

  Laughter.

  The sound echoes from every surface, mad and cruel and almost songlike. The Duskhounds point their rifles into the darkness and Raine raises her sabre, but there is nothing to fight. Nothing to kill. The laughter grows louder and the shadows seem to draw closer, spilling over the stone like oil. Jeth mutters the Antari word for ghosts with horror in his voice and Raine catches a glimpse of a figure amongst the shadows. Her ghost is clad in commissariat black with her arm outstretched, as if to take Raine’s hand. The timepiece in Raine’s pocket thunders like a second heart.

  Severina , says the ghost.

  Raine shakes her head.

  Breathe, she thinks, just as she did during the fall. Just keep breathing.

  ‘We have to move,’ she says, through her teeth.

  ‘I hear you,’ Fel says. ‘Myre, burn their prize.’

  Myre nods and keys the bracer on her wrist. The Sighted’s casket lights with heat-charges, silently burning. The laughter becomes strangled and angry and the ghosts turn away.

  ‘Everyone into the tunnel,’ Fel says. ‘Now.’

  The tunnel is cut steeply and jaggedly, as if it was made by claws, or frantic hands. Oil lanterns hang from ropes overhead and a thick, iridescent fog drifts along the tunnel, coiling around Andren Fel’s feet as he follows the path. Contact risk down here is high. Field of fire is restricted, and line of is sight is limited by the steep grade and the curve of the tunnel as it loops downwards. Hollows have been blasted and cut into the walls all around Fel and new tunnels splinter off left and right. Eyes burn in the shadows, only to vanish when Fel draws sight on them. Claws click against the stone.

  You are beheld.

  ‘Watch careful,’ Fel says. ‘Don’t stray, or separate.’

  His Duskhounds vox affirmatives as they move swiftly at a ragged spread, their targeting lasers glancing off the fog. Raine keeps pace with Fel easily, her pistol drawn in steady hands. Her breathing mists the air. Fel checks the readout on his monitron’s display. The ambient temperature in the tunnel reads as near-freezing.

  ‘It shouldn’t be this cold down here,’ he says. ‘Not so far underground.’

  Raine shakes her head.

  ‘It is the psyker’s doing,’ she says. ‘We must be getting close.’

  Fel nods. Iota’s howling sounds almost joyful now, and much closer. He catches the smell of coalfires.

  ‘Captain, we’ve got Sighted dead.’

  The voice is Tyl’s. She is a short distance ahead with Rol, crouching down in the fog. She straightens up as Fel approaches and shakes her head.

  ‘Looks as though they kept digging until they died,’ she says with disgust.

  The Sighted at their feet is lying curled on his side. He wears one of their masks, but no armour, just worker’s coveralls painted with their spiral mark. The Sighted’s bare arms a
re cut with fate-marks in jagged whorls. As the fog stirs with Jeth and Myre approaching, Fel sees that the Sighted’s hand is closed tightly around something that glitters, blood-red and iridescent like the fog. Fel has seen the like before, given to the Sighted’s witches and commanders in place of their eyes.

  ‘They are digging for crystals,’ Fel says. ‘For seeing stones.’

  Jeth snarls a curse and takes a step back from the Sighted’s body.

  ‘That’s what we burned,’ Myre says softly. ‘Seeing stones.’

  Raine nods. The look in her dark eyes is midwinter cold.

  ‘That must be how the psyker can reach so far and hurt so many,’ she says. ‘The crystals are acting as a psychic amplifier.’

  Such clever puppets.

  The voice echoes from every wall of the tunnel, and inside of Fel’s head, too. It makes his vision run at the edges. He tastes blood.

  ‘Go,’ he says to his squad and to Raine.

  The witch starts to laugh again as they move down the steep tunnel at pace. The walls seem to billow and swell like sails, studded with jagged chunks of that same crystal, burning red.

  ‘The psyker will try to turn your senses against you. To trick and unnerve you with falsehoods and fears, but you must deny it,’ Raine says, her voice ringing clear, even with the laughter and all of Iota’s howling. ‘Hold to what you know to be true.’

  Fel does as she says. He takes a slow breath and holds to his truths. To the words of the evensong, and the cold weight of his hellgun, braced against his shoulder. The swift, quiet tread of his Duskhounds all around him.

  And to Severina Raine, and the depths of her dark eyes.

  Fel keeps his footing despite the scree and the steepness and the psyker’s laughing, and rounds a sharp turn in the tunnel with the others beside him, stepping into a vaulted cavern filled with crates and barrels. Fuel, for the lanterns. A single figure stands in the middle of it, clad in a mirrored mask and holding something in an outstretched hand. A flare.