Trials - Rachel Harrison Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Trials – Rachel Harrison

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘Honourbound’

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  Trials

  A Severina Raine story,

  by Rachel Harrison

  Columns of dirt shake themselves loose from the trenchworks around Severina Raine as she follows the rough-cut tunnel towards Dugout 30. The damp earth scatters against her armour, coat and cap with every heavy detonation from the surface. The Sighted have been systematically bombarding the length of the Antari lines for days in an effort to break through to the port-city of Atraxis, forcing Raine and her regiment, the Eleventh Antari Rifles, to take shelter underground, in the tunnels and dugouts and bunkers of the trenchworks. Raine’s world has become one of cold, dark earth and stale air, of thunder and quaking and palls of dirt as she waits with her troops for the bombardment to break.

  Or for something else to.

  Raine walks the tunnel, as she does every two hours, checking in on the guard posts and looking into the hollowed caverns and dim-lit chambers where her regiment are billeted. She passes by roughly-hewn caves where the Antari are sitting and eating their half-rations. Some are praying, too, or maintaining their kit. Some are playing half-hearted field-games with hands of cards, or telling stories. All are battered and bruised and bandaged from repelling the ground assaults that are nearly as frequent and systematic as the bombardments. None are sleeping. It’s impossible, with the thunder from overhead. No matter what they are doing, the Antari all stop and look up when Raine passes through. They all acknowledge her. Some do so with softly-spoken words. A murmured ‘commissar’, or ‘sir’. Others do so with a salute, one hand over the heart. The rest simply catch her eyes before quickly looking away again. Raine does not linger. She does not need to. It is enough for her to see the Antari, and for them to see her. So, she keeps going down the tunnel with the thunder and the sound of their lilting songs carrying after her. Dirty water drips down around her and collects on the floor in dark puddles. The air smells of oil and damp and rot, and vermin skitter just out of sight, disappearing into the dark spaces in the earthen walls between the support beams. The string-lumens rattle and turn, making long shadows.

  Overhead, the Sighted bombardment continues, unbroken.

  Dugout 30 is the last one on the tunnel line, and the smallest posting along the trenchworks. It is old. Older than this war. The ceilings are low and oppressive, supported by thick wooden beams and rockcrete blocks that creak and groan with every detonation from above. The dugout is made up of three distinct areas. A barracks that is big enough to sleep six, but currently sits empty, then an armoury and store room that is nearly as empty as the barracks. Lastly there is a small room that is little more than a cave, used for planning offensives. It is in this room that Raine knows she will find Andren Fel.

  The storm trooper captain is sitting in the planning room alone, his hellgun in pieces on the table in front of him, each component carefully laid out and arranged. The barrel is heat-scored and blackened, and the matt-black paint is chipped from the stock. Fel’s carapace armour is much the same. Burned and scored and split in places. Fel has the upper section of the rifle’s receiver in one hand and is using a pin-shaped tool to free one of the internal components with the other. Two tin cups and a pack of dry rations sit on the table beside the component parts of Fel’s rifle.

  ‘Captain,’ Raine says.

  Fel looks up from his work. His face and throat are cut and bruised and his grey eyes are shadowed from lack of sleep. He is still sitting up straight, though. No slouching.

  He still smiles at her.

  ‘Commissar,’ Fel says, and he pushes out the opposite chair with his boot.

  Raine takes the seat he offers her, and then takes her canteen from her greatcoat pocket. She fills the tin cups in turn with water. It is lukewarm, with the oily quality of recyc, but it is all that she has left.

  ‘Thank you,’ Fel says, putting down the rifle’s receiver carefully. ‘Have you eaten anything?’

  Raine has to think about it for a moment, counting the time backwards in bombardments.

  ‘Not since first watch,’ she says.

  ‘Thought that might be the case,’ Fel says. He cleans his hands on a strip of linen, before opening the dry rations. He snaps the bar in two and passes her half of it.

  ‘Thank you,’ Raine says, in return.

  Fel nods and goes back to working on the rifle’s receiver as Raine breaks up her half of the ration bar. She dips each piece in her own cup of water to soften it before she eats it. The bar is dense and mealy, with the distinct aftertaste of vat-grown protein. It’s something that she somehow finds herself missing when they are aboard the fleet.

  ‘Is it damaged?’ Raine asks. ‘The rifle?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Fel says. ‘The focusing crystals just need changing. The output’s so high that it stresses the array. The crystals get fogged, and when they fog they grow weak.’

  There’s a soft click, then, and the component gives way. Fel tilts the receiver and lets the crystal array fall into his hand.

  ‘And then it’s only a matter of time before they break,’ he says.

  Fel leans across the table and passes the array over for her to look at. When Raine holds the component up to the lumen light she can see the way the crystals have started to cloud, from the edges inwards. It looks like blood dropped into water.

  ‘How do you know when they have started to fog?’ she asks.

  Fel sets about replacing the array with a new one from his kit. Raine knows that he could rebuild the rifle from scratch, if he needed to.

  ‘Slight delays in trigger-response. The bolts hiss when they should whisper. Sometimes there’s distortion in the beam.’

  ‘You just know,’ Raine says.

  Fel nods. ‘Aye. You just know.’

  A silence falls between them for a moment then, the sound of the bombardment growing to fill the space. Raine finds herself thinking about what the surface must look like, now. She has seen enough warzones to know that there will be little left of the Atraxian Plains but blasted, black earth. The agri-pastures will be gone. The irrigation canals. Even the remains of the dead will have been made as earth by the constant shelling. No need for graves.

  ‘I spoke with General Keene earlier,’ Raine says. ‘She said that the civilian evacuation is taking longer than they expected.’

  Fel nods. ‘I heard. The word from Operations is another two days.’

  ‘Then we should expect it to be three.’

  ‘Sure enough,’ Fel says, without a trace of bitterness in his voice. ‘Whatever it takes. Whatever He asks of us.’

  It’s the kind of answer Raine has come to expect from him. Andren Fel isn’t the kind to flinch, or to falter. It is part of the reason that Raine trusts him in a way that she cannot trust anyone else. Certainly not the rest of the regiment. She thinks of them then, sitting in the bunkers and the dugouts, singing their songs and their praises. She thinks about their bruises and bandages and their hollow grey eyes. The dead they have had to leave for the barrage to bury. She might not be able to trust the rest of the Rifles, but she can read them easily. Anticipate their actions. It is what she was trained for. What she was made to do. Just like Fel does his rifle, Raine knows how people look and act and sound in the instant before they break, and she knows exactly what to do when it happens. That, too, is something that she was trained for at the scholam on Gloam. Raine remembers each of her trials keenly. The lessons le
arned and what was asked of her. In that moment, though, she finds herself thinking of one in particular.

  ‘The last trial,’ she says, putting down the broken lens array. ‘Is that a practice they kept at the Schola Antari?’

  Fel glances up from the rifle’s receiver. ‘Yes, they did.’

  ‘Would you tell me about it?’

  Fel nods. ‘The last trials always fell in midwinter,’ he says, continuing to work on the rifle as he talks. ‘We were told very little. Just that we would be taken into the wilderness and left in the deepest part of the black forest, alone. That to pass the trial, all we had to do was survive the forest and find our way back to the walls before the sun sank three times.’

  ‘But it wasn’t that simple,’ Raine says.

  Fel smiles again, briefly.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘Nothing ever is.’

  The words apply to so many things that Raine can’t help returning the smile, however slight it may be.

  ‘The masters kept the details from us, as is their right.’ There is still no trace of bitterness in Fel’s voice. Just that same measured calm. ‘They did not tell us that we would be drugged into a slumber. Blindfolded. Bound at the hands and feet. They did not tell us that they would take our armour, our gloves and our boots and leave us in training clothes and soft shoes, with only our blades to see us back to the scholam walls.’

  Fel puts down the parts of the rifle and takes the combat blade he carries from his belt. The carvings on the hilt catch the light as he turns it. Raine sees monsters and myths, just like those inked into Fel’s skin.

  ‘It was dark when I woke,’ he says. ‘But that meant nothing. It is always dark that deep in the forest, because the trees twist their crowns together to keep the sun out. There was no snow, but the earth was frozen hard as stone. With no moon or sun or stars to see, everything looked black and white and grey. Everything but the blood.’

  Fel pushes the knife point into the table’s surface so it will stand, then rolls back his sleeve and traces the shape of a long scar that runs down the inside of his left forearm with his gloved fingertips. The scar is pale. Older than all of his tattoos.

  ‘They made the cut as payment for the ones who watch the forest,’ he says.

  ‘The wyldfolk,’ Raine says, thinking of when he first told her the story, sitting on the hillside on Drast. Not more than six months ago, but it feels like a lifetime thanks to all of the blood they’ve spent since.

  ‘Just so,’ Fel says. ‘But the cut itself was as much a trial as the cold, or the darkness. It’s not just the fae or the trees who want for blood. It’s the wyldwolves, too.’

  They are another Antari creature Fel has told her about before, though this one isn’t folklore or fable. This one is real. Raine sought out texts on them after listening to Fel’s stories of home. The biologis records list the wyldwolf as a category four apex predator. An intelligent, strongly-made pack hunter of the Canid genus specialised and made vicious by generations of isolation.

  And definitely the top of the food chain, when all that you are left with is a knife.

  ‘I found the way east and kept to it,’ Fel says. ‘The black forests are as wicked as those who roam them. The trees will turn you and tempt you to keep you from finding the way out. The wyldfolk will take the shape of briars and block the way. They’ll snag and slow you long enough for the wolves to make ground. The only way is to stay the course and hold to the path.’ Fel shakes his head. ‘But even then, the wolves might still catch you up.

  ‘By the time they did I’d used two of my sunsets,’ Fel says. ‘There were two of them. A bonded pair. One black, and one grey. Big and scarred and snarling. I knew that there was no hiding from them, and that I wouldn’t be spared by running.’

  Raine thinks about all those who have tried. The ones who allowed themselves to weaken and break with no thought for those left behind. She thinks of the timepiece she carries, ticking away the moments in her pocket.

  ‘Nobody ever is,’ she says, absently, before she pushes the thoughts away. ‘So, if you could not run or hide, what did you do?’

  ‘I stood my ground,’ Fel says. ‘Held my knife in guard and waited for them to come for me. They howled and snarled and snapped their jaws, trying to put me to flight, but I wouldn’t run. I shouted back at them until I was hoarse. That made the black-pelted wolf wary. It held its distance. But it angered the grey. It lunged for me, and knocked me down.’

  He puts the flat of his right hand to the left side of his chest, across the collarbone. Just shy of the throat.

  ‘It got its teeth into me here,’ he says. ‘Tried to shake me to death.’

  He pulls his combat knife out of the table.

  ‘But I had teeth, too, so I cut the wyldwolf back. It made a sound like all the hells come at once, but it let me go, though that hurt more than it did when it shook me.’ Fel shakes his head. ‘I don’t know how I got up, but I did. They were both looking at me, then, the wyldwolves. Not snarling or snapping. Just watching. The grey was bleeding all over the floor, and so was I.’

  ‘More payment for the forest,’ Raine says.

  ‘Just so,’ he says, with a smile. ‘And perhaps it was enough, because when I took a step forwards the wyldwolves turned and loped away. They left me to the rest of the trial. After that, I kept going east. All I remember is walking and bleeding. The wolf’s fangs had split something inside, so I had to try just to breathe.’

  Raine knows that feeling from bad cuts and gunshots, and can’t help but imagine it all over again. Struggling for air when it surrounds you. The pinhole wheeze of a punctured lung. She shakes her head.

  ‘But you reached the walls,’ she says.

  He nods. ‘The sun was low, but not sunk. It set the sky alight to the edges. All gold.’ He pauses, his grey eyes softening almost imperceptibly. ‘That, I do remember.’

  That feeling Raine doesn’t know, and she can’t imagine it either.

  ‘I have never seen a sky so bright,’ Raine says. ‘Gloam was always dark, save for the light we made ourselves.’

  ‘The same is true for many places,’ Fel says. ‘Here, especially.’

  A series of loud booms shake the room again, drowning out the distant singing of the rest of the Antari. Raine can’t help but watch the ceiling until the dirt stops falling. The dirt made of the dead.

  ‘Here, especially,’ she says, with a nod.

  The noise returns to background thunder, and Raine stops watching the ceiling. She takes a sip from the recycled water in her cup.

  ‘Our last trials came in midwinter, too,’ she says. ‘In my final year, it was almost all that the others would speak of. Always in whispers, and always after the lumens were dimmed in the evening, or before the dawn bells. On the gantries in the high winds. Somewhere the abbots could not hear.’

  Fel laughs softly at the last part as he goes back to rebuilding his rifle. He is almost finished, now. Just the outer casing and the attachments to go.

  ‘The others would say they had heard what shape the trial would take,’ Raine says. ‘That we would be tethered at the oceanside like animals and left to face the tide. That we would be forced to choose from three chalices, two of which were poison. That we would be bound and blindfolded and left in the depths of the undercroft, or made to fight with nothing but our hands until one candidate remained.’

  Fel isn’t laughing now.

  ‘There is always at least a little truth in rumour,’ he says, softly.

  Raine nods. ‘In the months leading up to the day of graduation, the whispers stopped. Talking stopped. We existed alone, together, awaiting the moment we would be tested, but never knowing when it would come, or whether it already had. If we had already failed.’ Raine shakes her head, ruefully. ‘As if we could have failed without knowing it. Without punishment.’

  She takes another sip
of the oily, gritty water in her cup.

  ‘As we approached the ceremony day, some of the progena vanished altogether. Our numbers dwindled, the dormitories growing emptier and quieter. It kept me awake, that quiet. I had grown used to the company of others, even if I could call none of them friend. I would lay awake at night for hours, missing the noise.’ She pauses, and frowns. ‘Which is why I was still awake on the night that Yuzoh came for me.’

  Fel stops his work on the rifle, and just listens.

  ‘It was just less than ten weeks before our day of graduation,’ Raine says. ‘When the dormitory door opened and closed I thought perhaps it was one of the others coming back. Illariya, perhaps, or Cozelt. But the footsteps weren’t right. I sat up in my cot and Yuzoh was there. He had a service pistol in his hand, and he was pointing it at me.’

  Raine remembers that moment with utter clarity. The dull matt casing of the pistol. The howl of the wind through the scholam’s embrasures.

  Yuzoh’s dark eyes, and the desperation in them.

  ‘I kept a blade close by, of course,’ Raine says. ‘And I drew it on him even though I knew I wouldn’t be quicker than a pistol shot, because I was damned if I would die without fighting it. But Yuzoh didn’t shoot. He did what you should never do.’

  ‘He hesitated,’ Fel says.

  Raine nods. ‘I think it was because I was awake. He’d wanted to face the trial quietly, without facing me. He must have thought it would be easier that way.’

  ‘Killing’s killing,’ Fel says. ‘Nothing will change that. It’s all blood.’

  ‘It is,’ Raine replies. ‘In truth, I was surprised. Yuzoh was a good candidate. He was fiercely clever, and I had never once seen him lose his composure, no matter what was asked of us. In that moment, though, he looked furious. Frightened, even. He looked like a child.’

  She shakes her head.

  ‘I thought to disarm him. To knock him down and take the gun and use it on him as he had intended to on me. I started to move to do it, too, but then he spoke. Snarled the words at me. “Damn you, Raine,” he said. He kept the gun trained on me all the while as he moved back to the door. Before he fled, he looked at me and spoke again.’