The Darkling Hours - Rachel Harrison

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  The Darkling Hours – Rachel Harrison

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘Honourbound’

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  THE DARKLING HOURS

  Rachel Harrison

  The city of Termina never stops singing.

  Commissar Severina Raine knows that the sound is just the wind cutting through the city’s many mineshafts and tunnels. It can be heard all over Termina, from the refineries on the surface to the processing plants far below, where Raine and her regiment, the Eleventh Antari Rifles, are billeted. There is no escaping the city’s singing, but in the old overseer’s watch room where Raine now sits and waits, it is at least a little quieter. The hanging lumens overhead turn in that same wind as it finds its way through cracks in the poorly plastered walls. Light glances off the casing of Raine’s timepiece as she watches the hands tick around towards the crack in the top of the face. Her body aches from the previous day of fighting and her eyes are dry and gritty. She should be taking the time she has been given to sleep, but she finds that she cannot. Not while the fight goes on above her.

  And certainly not with the city singing.

  ‘It sounds like something living, don’t you think?’

  Raine clicks her timepiece closed and puts it back in the chest pocket of her coat. Andren Fel takes a seat on the opposite side of the overseer’s table and hands her a tin cup with a loop of thorns scored into the rim. It is warm to the touch from the windfall tea inside it.

  ‘I think it sounds like singing,’ Raine says.

  ‘Or howling,’ Fel says. ‘Either way, it is sorrowful.’

  The storm trooper captain is unarmoured, clad in black fatigues that are sewn with the red bars that mark his rank. Fel’s dark hair has got nearly to the length where it can tangle, and his face is cut and bruised. His densely tattooed hands are split badly across the knuckles. He is also meant to be taking the two hours they have been given to rest, but Raine knows that is as difficult for him as it is for her. That is why they often spend these hours talking.

  ‘Shouldn’t howling be a comfort for a Duskhound?’ Raine asks.

  Fel laughs at that, a low chuckle.

  ‘True enough,’ he says.

  A tremor runs through the undercroft that makes the overhead lumens flicker and hum. Dust falls in fine columns from the ceiling and scatters on the wooden surface of the table.

  ‘I saw Devri on the way up,’ Fel says. ‘He had to pull Blue Company out of the docks. The Sighted sank the lot to keep them from pushing up to the drilling fields.’

  Raine nods and drinks from her tin cup. The windfall tea is bitter and spiced. It only grows on Antar, and only in the northwilds, where Fel was raised before he was taken for the Schola Antari.

  ‘Whatever the Sighted intend to take from Termina, it is in the mines,’ Raine says. ‘They have either abandoned or destroyed key locations all across the city, but they refuse to surrender the pits.’

  ‘Seems a lot of blood to spend for the sake of promethium,’ Fel says.

  Raine nods.

  ‘If they just wanted promethium they wouldn’t have fled the refineries. It must be something else. Something they can twist and use.’

  ‘Something buried deep,’ Fel says.

  A second, larger tremor shakes the room. More dust falls from the ceiling, and the lumens fail altogether for a moment. In the brief instant of absolute darkness Raine can’t help thinking of the battle before this one, on Gholl, where she was captured by the Sighted and taken into the crystal caverns under the surface.

  Buried, deep.

  Raine pushes the memory – and the unease that comes with it – aside. She drinks from her tin cup again, nearly draining it. When she puts it down, the leaves cling to the enamel inside.

  ‘You read the leaves before every fight, don’t you?’ she asks Fel.

  He looks down at his own cup and nods.

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Would you show me how it’s done?’

  ‘I thought you didn’t believe in omens or fates,’ he says.

  Raine shakes her head.

  ‘I don’t, but you do.’

  Fel smiles.

  ‘Alright,’ he says. ‘I’ll show you.’

  Raine holds out her cup to hand it to him, but he shakes his head.

  ‘It has to be you that sets the leaves, so that our fates don’t get crossed.’ He shows her using his own cup. ‘Turn the tea three times, and then tip out what’s left.’

  Raine does as he says, and tips the remains of her windfall tea out onto the floor before putting her cup back on the table between them.

  ‘Where did you learn this?’ Raine asks.

  ‘My mother taught me,’ Fel says simply.

  Raine understands then why the ritual means so much, because it must remind him of home, and of the family he lost. Raine feels the timepiece ticking in her pocket like a second heartbeat.

  Fel picks up the cup in his tattooed hand and frowns.

  Raine cannot help it. She leans forward, just slightly.

  ‘What do you see?’ she asks.

  ‘Hunting birds,’ he says, turning the cup so that she can see. ‘For a chase that ends in blood.’

  Raine catches herself smiling.

  ‘Not so surprising,’ she says. ‘And the rest?’

  He turns the cup as if to look at it another way, still frowning.

  ‘The duskhound,’ he says, after a moment.

  ‘The story that your squad is named for,’ Raine says.

  Fel nods.

  ‘What does it mean?’ Raine asks, though she can guess, because he’s told her the old story.

  Fel puts the cup down on the table.

  ‘It means death, following close by.’

  The overhead lumens stutter again.

  ‘Isn’t it always?’ Raine asks.

  The vox-bead Raine wears crackles in her ear before Fel can answer her. It is the Antari general, Juna Keene. From the way Fel reacts, Raine can tell he is receiving the same message.

  ‘The timetable has moved up. Tactical briefing in ten minutes in the main control hub.’

  ‘Acknowledged,’ Raine says, into her vox-link. She hears Fel do the same.

  ‘Back to duty, then, captain,’ she says.

  Fel nods and picks up the tin cups.

  ‘Aye, commissar,’ he says.

  In the quiet that follows his words, Raine listens to the sound echoing from Termina’s tunnels and hollows, and realises that she was wrong, and Fel was right.

  It really does sound like howling.

  The tactical briefing takes place in the old refinery control hub around a hololith projector that’s been mounted on the main console. The other lights in the large, rust-stained chamber are switched off to allow the projection to show clearly, leaving most of the hub in shadows.

  Andren Fel stands in those shadows and watches the hololith turn, memorising the details by habit. Distances and depth. The number of menial crew. Ingress points and exit options. It is how he always prepares for an operation, but today it is more than that. It is a welcome distraction from the shape he saw in the leaves. In Raine’s fate.

  The duskhound.

  Death.

  Raine stands on the opposite side of the hololith from him now, her angular face cast in hard shadows. The green light from the projection catches the edges of her commissariat uniform, turning the golden braiding to jade and finding the edges of every dent and gouge in the silvered chest-plate she wears. Fel meets Raine’s eyes for a moment. They are dark, even in daylight, but in these shadows they c
ould as well be the space between stars.

  ‘What you’re looking at is mine-pit designate Iota. It is the deepest mine in Termina, and the oldest.’

  The words belong to Juna Keene. The general is sitting at ease on the edge of one of the secondary consoles. Her uniform is that of the regulars, green-and-grey splinter, with wear-worn pale leather gloves and boots. Only the white cuffs on her rolled-back sleeves mark her rank. That, and the easy authority in her voice.

  ‘The pit-mouth is twelve-hundred metres across, side to side,’ Keene says. ‘Last recorded operating depth was around three thousand metres.’

  Keene depresses a heavy key in the hololith’s base. It resets to a different view, from above. Mine-pit Iota is a wide-open void in the face of the city, like a set of jaws for the world. Grooves made for lifters and transitways carved into the walls run around the edge of it, down into the depths.

  ‘The Sighted have held the pit since the outset of the war,’ she says. ‘They have abandoned a dozen other key locations, but they refuse to leave Iota. There is something that they want down there. Something we cannot afford for them to find.’

  ‘Iota is located in the western reaches,’ Raine says. ‘Which makes Karin Sun’s Gold Company the closest for capture. Am I to assume that they have failed?’

  ‘They tried,’ Keene says. ‘But the regulars cannot get close. The Sighted have a witch prowling Iota, and a powerful one at that. Sun chose to fall back, rather than lose his company to madness.’

  Fel can’t help but feel unease at the word witch . It’s an old disquiet from home. One he is trained to act in spite of, that can never truly be erased.

  ‘If the regulars cannot move in, the war in the western reaches will grind to a halt. We cannot let that happen.’

  ‘Hunt-to-kill, then, general,’ Fel says.

  Keene nods.

  ‘And you’ll need to make it quick. According to Captain Sun, the witch’s power grows stronger with proximity and exposure. It had Sun’s troops all dreaming, running, or temporarily mad. Our witches,’ Keene pauses, and frowns. ‘Our sanctioned psykers fared twice as badly. Apparently Pharo clawed his own eyes out rather than get any closer.’

  Fel shakes his head. Witch or not, he would never wish Pharo harm.

  ‘If the witch’s power grows with proximity, then that’s how we’ll hunt it,’ he says. ‘Go straight for the source of the fear.’

  The general nods her head.

  ‘Your Valkyrie is on standby. Once your boots hit the scaffolds, you will have six hours. If you miss your extraction, we will count you as lost. Is that clear?’

  ‘As a springtime sky, general,’ Fel says. ‘Consider it done.’

  Keene looks to Raine then.

  ‘You will accompany them, commissar,’ she says.

  ‘Yes, general,’ Raine says.

  Keene doesn’t say why, and Fel doesn’t have to ask. There is only one reason to send a commissar along for a hunt-to-kill like this one. It will be Raine’s duty to make sure that the Duskhounds don’t lose themselves in dreams, like Sun’s regulars did, and to deal with them if they do, with that pistol she carries or her sword’s keen edge.

  Fel catches Raine’s dark eyes once more through the hololith. The two of them have fought together countless times since her assignment to the regiment, and Fel has come to know her well, through stories shared and scars earned. He trusts Raine, even if his kinfolk don’t, but he has no illusions. Just as Fel is made for the hunt and the kill, Raine is made for judgement, and for the hard choices. If it is necessary, she will not hesitate to pull the trigger. To do anything else would be to break faith.

  And that is something that Fel knows Severina Raine will never do.

  For the first time in days, Severina Raine cannot hear the sound of the city, because Jova’s Valkyrie gunship is howling even more loudly than Termina can.

  Raine keeps a steady grip on the handhold built into the Valkyrie’s airframe as the pilot banks over the city on the approach to Iota. Cold wind rushes through the troop compartment from the open side doors, carrying with it the smell of fyceline and smoke. The wind stings Raine’s eyes and catches at the collar of her buckled short-coat. She is wearing her funerary blacks and heavy, weatherproof gloves. Her silver chest-plate is deliberately dulled to keep it from catching the light. She has strapped extra armour plates over her boots for the drop. The drop for which she needs the jump-mask slung around her neck, and the bulky grav-chute harness on her back.

  ‘It will be quick,’ Fel says. ‘Straight down into Iota, and onto the eastward landing pad. It is only halfway down, but it’s as far as we can go before there’s too much strike risk from the scaffolding.’

  Fel is standing beside her, with one hand on the airframe and his hellgun slung. He is fully kitted for the fight to come, with grenades and charges locked to his belt and the heavy-bladed knife he carries sheathed at his waist. Like Raine, he is wearing a grav-chute, though his is modified to be worn with storm trooper carapace. The tactical display built into Fel’s vambrace shows the schematic of Iota rendered in green, and the landing pad as a bright white circle.

  ‘The display in your jump-mask will keep the platform flagged,’ he says. ‘Once we hit the platform, we will shed the grav-chutes and move down towards Iota’s heart. Clear?’

  Raine nods. She has completed perhaps a tenth of the combat drops the Duskhounds have, but Raine has enough experience to know how to make it to the landing zone in one piece. The principles for use of a grav-chute are simple. Fire the thrusters as a method of aerobrake in adequate time before literally hitting the landing zone. Do not thrash your limbs. Do not panic. It is a matter of control and discipline under pressure, like many things.

  ‘Completely,’ she says. ‘Just give the word, captain.’

  Fel smiles at that.

  ‘Aye, commissar,’ he says.

  The Valkyrie’s internal vox crackles.

  ‘We are close to Iota,’ Jova says. ‘I’ll maintain at five hundred metres above the pit-mouth, but you’ll want to make it quick.’

  ‘Understood,’ Fel replies.

  He pulls on his Duskhounds mask and locks it in place, the eye-lenses glowing red in the dim combat lighting of the troop compartment. Like the rest of his squad, Fel’s mask is painted with a snarling hound’s face to represent the creature of Antari folklore that gave the squad their name. Seeing it now, Raine can’t help but think of the shape he saw in the leaves, back in the overseer’s watch room.

  Three loud thumps split the air, then, and the gunship’s airframe shudders, rattling all of the way down Raine’s arm.

  ‘Well, now. There’s no need for that,’ Jova says, over the internal vox.

  The pilot cuts speed and drops the Valkyrie into a curving dive. Inertia pulls at Raine’s bones, and the airframe shakes and groans, but then the turbojets fire and Jova levels out again. Rol, Fel’s second-in-command, whoops. The Duskhound is braced against the frame of one of the Valkyrie’s open side doors with his hellgun raised. Rol has his mask in place too, but Raine can guess that he is grinning.

  ‘Honestly, it’s as if you wish for death,’ Tyl says.

  The Duskhounds’ sharpshooter is braced in the other door, her rifle pointed out into the clouds and darkness. Tyl’s rifle is modified for distance kills, with a variable scope and a longer, accurised barrel that she has scored with kill markings. Her tone is patient and good-natured. Tyl and Rol could be taken for true family. They are both lean and strong, with the same lilting accents. In a fight they are inseparable, each a spare shadow for the other.

  ‘Glory, maybe,’ Rol says, with a smile in his voice. ‘The After can wait.’

  Tyl laughs.

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t make light of it like that,’ Jeth says. ‘Death is no cause for laughter.’

  Jeth is the only Duskhound built stronger than Fel is. His matt-black carapace is scored with words from hymnals written in the old Antari script, and he wears a loop of luckst
ones at his belt.

  ‘You know I didn’t mean it like that,’ Rol says. ‘Tell him, Myre.’

  ‘Jeth is right,’ Myre says, in her solemn voice. ‘Mocking death will only bring it quicker.’

  Myre is the youngest of Fel’s Duskhounds, but you would not know it from her voice. It always sounds as though she has seen a sector’s worth of sadness. Myre sits in one of the Valkyrie’s restraint thrones, checking her gear briskly and locking it to her belt and thigh-plates. Raine sees heat-charges and blind grenades, and a loop of krak grenades that Myre passes straight to Jeth without needing to be asked. The Valkyrie thrums and shakes as more detonations light the clouds through the open side doors, and Raine sees the wide, dark mouth of Iota far below through the ashes and smoke.

  ‘Do you all feel that?’ Jeth asks. ‘It’s like knives running over my bones. I think we just crossed into the witch’s circle.’

  Raine realises then that she does feel it, the very edge of a creeping unease. She tightens her grip on the handhold above her head and takes a breath, pushing the feeling aside.

  ‘We must deny it,’ she says, over the roar of the Valkyrie’s turbojets. ‘It is the only way to defeat a psyker who intends to twist your own mind against you.’

  Raine thinks back to Gholl. To the crystal caverns, and how her own mind was twisted against her. How she managed to deny it.

  ‘There is a way to know the falsehoods from reality,’ she says. ‘There are always details amiss, even when the psyker is powerful. Hold to what you know to be true. Trust your instincts. It is much more difficult to fool the heart than it is the eyes.’

  Fel looks to his Duskhounds.

  ‘Listen well to the commissar’s words,’ he says. ‘We hunt, we kill and we get out. All of us. Is that clear?’

  ‘Aye, captain,’ the Duskhounds say, as one.

  Inertia pulls at Raine again as the Valkyrie cuts speed and holds position above the pit, its vectored engines roaring. Rol and Tyl slam their side doors closed and take position by the ramp with Myre and Jeth.

  ‘You are good to go,’ Jova says over the internal vox. ‘I’ll hold until you are clear.’

  ‘Understood,’ Fel says.

  Raine pulls her jump-mask on and secures it. It closes tight to her face. Her own breathing becomes very loud, contained by the mask. The air supply through the breather apparatus is stale and dry. Her visor lights with the simple guidance data that will guide her to the lifter platform and a drop distance counter flickers in the corner of the display.