Honourbound - Rachel Harrison Read online

  ‘Hounds’ teeth,’ Awd says.

  He gets to his feet unsteadily and starts shouting at Krall to keep his hands up. To dodge her when she swings for him. None of Awd’s advice sticks, but a lot of Crys’ punches do. She takes a couple in return. Gets her lip burst and has to take a step backwards. Krall is leaning into the weight of that augmetic, trying to knock her clean out. It leaves him open on his off side. Fel can see it clear as day, and from the way Crys moves around him, he can tell she sees it too. Krall’s next swing glances off her shoulder, and then Crys gets inside his guard, puts her arms under his and lifts him clean off his feet before slamming him onto the ground, flat on his back.

  Devri pulls a face. ‘You know,’ he says, to Fel, ‘perhaps you do right, not fighting.’

  Crys has her knee on Krall’s chest now. He throws his hands up, gasping the word ‘yield’ through bloody teeth. The Antari whoop and cheer and Fel has never felt so apart among his kin. Not because of the fight, but because of the noise and the way they use it to drown out the day and what they have lost. Fel finds himself longing for quiet, but that will come later. He has questions to ask and answers to find.

  He swore it to Raine.

  ‘That’s that,’ Hale says, with a smile.

  Awd shakes his head. ‘Looks like it,’ he says, mournfully. ‘I need a drink.’

  He walks off to find one, a little unsteadily. Hale picks up all of the ration slips. He hands Devri’s back and puts the others in his pocket.

  ‘I’ll give his back tomorrow,’ Hale says, nodding in Awd’s direction. ‘He will only lose them to someone else otherwise.’

  Hale pauses and picks up his tin cup. His fingertips are still black with ash from speaking the names.

  ‘And I think we have all lost quite enough today.’

  Fel thinks about the way Tyl’s hands shook as she painted Rol’s name on the rockcrete.

  ‘Now that is the truth,’ he says.

  Lydia Zane stands outside the mess hall, listening to her kinfolk cheer and shout and laugh. She takes a step forwards into the shadow cast by the building and lets it swallow her up. Zane knows that Crys is fighting, and winning, not because she has seen it, or even foreseen it, but because she knows that is always the way.

  Zane puts her hand flat against the flakboard. It is cold under her fingertips and slick with rain, but Zane feels something else too. The warmth of lumen light. The coursing fire of spirits drunk from tin cups. She tastes the iron tang of blood and smells leaf tobacco. She hears the gentle thrum of the lute.

  ‘A bright thing,’ she mutters. ‘Such a bright thing.’

  Zane pulls her hand away and shrinks against the wall as two figures emerge from the mess hall. It is Pav, the pretty one, and Dol, from the Fenwalkers. They are drunk. Laughing. Kissing. Zane does not hear their thoughts so much as catch the edge of their feelings. It is like turning the pages of a book. The first pages are the surface feelings. The ones shown on their faces. Want and need. Go further and you find the truth of it. They are afraid. Angry. Hurting. Desperate not to be alone.

  They disappear off into the camp, and their feelings recede like the tide going out until Zane is left with nothing but her own. They are no different, really. She is afraid. She is angry. She hurts.

  But she is different. She cannot choose to simply be the feelings she shows on her face, nor can she drink and fight and forget. She cannot kiss someone pretty. It does not matter what she wants, or needs, because Zane will always be alone in all the ways that matter. More so than ever, her only company will be that of shadows.

  Especially now that there are two birds, instead of one.

  They sit there on the lumen string that rattles in the wind and rain. Their curved talons hold them steady. The black one is unchanged. Unruffled by the weather. The rain cannot touch it, because it is nothing but a shadow. A ghost, born of the wildness of her mind.

  The other is white, with feathers missing in places. The hook of its beak is chipped like the edge of well-used pottery.

  Fall, says the first bird.

  Free, says the second.

  They repeat their mocking, croaking words until Zane cannot tell the order of them. Until they blur together at their edges and become one word.

  Freefall.

  The painkillers that Wyck picked up off the floor of the medicae block are wearing off. He feels every step he takes as a jolt behind his eyes. Every raindrop stings like it has cut him as he walks down the rough dirt track out of the encampment, towards the tankers’ lot. Wyck passes by grey, weatherproof tents and temporary buildings painted in Antari splinter pattern. He passes piles of rubble made from the city that was here before. He passes the latrines and the pits. The smell of that turns his stomach and makes his headache even worse. He is cold too, and shaking, and still covered in filth from the forges. One eye is lidded from where Lye kept hitting him.

  We’re done.

  That’s what she said. Just thinking of the words makes him angry all over again, but there’s something else along with it too. It takes him a long time of walking through that stinging rain to recognise it.

  Regret.

  He would have cut her, back there, if he hadn’t caught himself. If it hadn’t been for the pendant catching the light that way. They were friends, once. Trusted each other. She owed him, sure enough, but he owed her too. She was the one who helped him cheat death the first time, and has been helping him outrun it ever since. Now that link is severed. Snapped like a worn thread. Wyck goes in the pouch at his belt and takes out the necklace with the tin aquila on it. He can see the tool marks on it. It was made crudely, by hand, from an offcut of something bigger.

  He would have cut Lye just like he cut the owner of the necklace. She’d be dead, and so would he. Fel would have shot him, or dragged him in front of the commissar for her to do it. The hounds would have finally had their due, for all of the deaths he’s owed.

  For all of the ones he’s caused.

  Wyck shakes his head. If Lye had just given him the stimms like always, none of it would have happened. He wants to throw the necklace away. To pitch it up high into the rubble that surrounds the camp so that he doesn’t have to look at it. Instead he puts it over his head and tucks it inside the collar of his fatigues, then he keeps going through the rain down to the tankers’ lot. To where he’ll find Kolat, because Kolat doesn’t care about what’s right or whether the doses Wyck takes really are killing him. He won’t argue over anything but the cost of it, and that, along with death, is another thing that Wyck has become skilled at avoiding.

  ‘What did you see?’ Fel asks.

  Devri is slouching, holding his tin cup in his hand. He washes the liquor up the edges while he talks.

  ‘A lot of death, I’ll tell you that,’ he says. ‘Too much. Thought it’d be the lot of us before the Lions turned up like that.’

  ‘Not to forget the Lord-General Militant,’ Koy says. She is still plucking out songs on the lute. ‘I have never seen him in person before. The man who killed Dektar the Ascended. They say he walked back alone afterwards, miles through enemy territory, bleeding all the while. That he should have been dead a dozen times over.’

  ‘But the Emperor spared him,’ Devri says. ‘Because he yet had legends to make. The stories I know. Hyxx and Virtue and the rest. But I don’t think that I truly believed it. Not until today.’

  Fel thinks about what he saw. About the brightness of Serek’s presence, even at a distance, like the story of the pyrehawk’s feathers. So fierce that it hurts to look for long. He can believe it too. All of it.

  ‘I’ll tell you something,’ Yuri Hale says. ‘I have never felt a fear like the one I felt standing before him and hearing him speak.’

  Hale has been quiet until now. Distant.

  ‘Not a fear like in a bad fight, or when there’s a blade coming for you,’ he
says. ‘More like the fear of something much greater than you. Something that could break you soon as look at you. It was like being judged before my time.’

  ‘What did he say to you?’ Koy asks.

  She isn’t strumming the lute anymore. They are all watching Hale and listening.

  ‘That we fought with honour. That the victory was ours as much as theirs,’ Hale says. ‘And that we must go forward and win him another.’ He shakes his head as if to clear it. ‘And I don’t plan on failing him in that, no matter what the Sighted send against us.’

  Devri nods. ‘It was like they knew exactly who they were facing today,’ he says, looking into his tin cup. ‘They had mined the entire way to the Alpha Gate. Longshots took out my mortar teams. My demo teams. They took our teeth, one by one.’

  ‘They did the same to us,’ Hale says. ‘Took Dern and his Sentinels. Elys and her Pyrehawks.’

  ‘They came after mine with camouflage gear,’ Fel says. ‘Kit like I have never seen. Crys took a rifle off one of their dead too. Steadfast-made.’

  ‘That’s bad,’ Devri says, and takes a slug of his drink. ‘I knew it would be, from the first day on this world. There’s something in the air. Feels like a curse on the land.’

  ‘Like a long shadow,’ Fel says, thinking about Zane after the machine fell and how she kept murmuring.

  Devri gestures at him with the hand holding the cup. His knuckles are split along the lines of old scars. ‘That’s right,’ he says. ‘Like a shadow. That’s exactly right.’

  Devri leans in then, elbows on the table. Like Fel, Devri is heavily tattooed, though his aren’t made up of myths or stories. Sale Devri has warding sigils inked into his skin, surrounded by densely-packed words from prayers. The purpose of their tattoos is the same, though. Commemoration, and protection.

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ Devri says. ‘I didn’t see it, but I heard about it. You know Gold Company’s witch?’

  Fel nods. Everyone knows Pharo. If Zane is frightening because of what she can do, Pharo is frightening because of what he can hear, which is everything.

  ‘I heard the Sighted took him,’ Devri says. ‘That he wandered clean off when they got close to the Beta Gate. It was as if something had taken his mind.’

  Fel can’t help thinking about Zane again, and what she might have done had she the strength to stand.

  ‘They tracked Pharo by his locator, but all they found was his collar,’ Devri says. ‘And quite a slick of blood.’

  Fel shakes his head. He doesn’t like Pharo. Nobody does. But he still doesn’t like to think about what the Sighted might do to him. Raine told him what happened on Gholl, about them taking the eyes of their captives. It’s no fate.

  ‘I hope Pharo is dead,’ Fel says, and he means it to be kind.

  Devri nods. He picks up his cup again, but it’s empty.

  ‘Should probably be my last anyway,’ he says. ‘Tomorrow will hurt enough as it is.’ He gets up from the bench with the awkward limp that comes from his augmetic leg, but then he raps on the table. ‘Steadfast-made,’ he says. ‘That’s what you said about the guns.’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  For a moment, Devri’s eyes are clear. Not clouded by the day or the drink or all that death, but they are troubled.

  ‘You should speak to Ghael,’ he says.

  The tankers’ lot is noisy with the sounds of repairs being made. The mechanised support company took a beating getting the rest of the Rifles to the forges in the first place, and almost every machine on the lot is wounded. The sound of the tech-priests singing their soft, atonal songs carries to Wyck on the wind.

  He walks down the line through the spots of floodlights. Each circle of light dazzles him like looking into the sun. Kolat’s machine, Stoneking, is at the end of the line, rain running off the lip of the armour plating and tracing around the wide mouth of the cannon. Kolat himself is sat up on the edge of the Demolisher’s turret. He’s a dim outline in the starlit dark, save for the light of his lho-stick. That’s how Wyck knows it’s him, even in the dark. Most Antari don’t smoke lho. But then, most Antari don’t deal in illegal combat drugs either.

  ‘Ely.’

  Wyck speaks up over the thrum of tools and engines. He hears Kolat cough and sees the light of the lho go out. Kolat’s dim shape moves from the turret down the hull of the tank to a place where he can drop to the ground. He makes a dull sound when he hits the mud.

  ‘Thought I knew the voice,’ Kolat says, stepping into the circle of light.

  Ely Kolat is of a height with Wyck, though he’s stooped and strong across the shoulders from years spent inside the tin can of the tank. His teeth are mostly steel, and often smiling, though it’s always mocking on Kolat’s face. He’s smiling that way now. Wyck’s fists curl. They ache from hitting Lye.

  ‘Not seen you for a time,’ Kolat says, in his lilting southlands voice. It sounds mocking, just like his smile. ‘Thought you must have died.’

  Wyck shakes his head. A hollow cold roots in his bones. He realises that by now he will have missed saying the words for those they lost today. For Efri and Dal and Vyne and the others. He should have been there with his Wyldfolk to do it, but instead he was fighting with Lye, and now he’s here. That’s something else that he’ll pay for, in time.

  ‘Lots of us have,’ he says. ‘But not me.’

  ‘Then you’re lucky,’ Kolat says, absently, glancing at his machine.

  There are grooves and dents pushed into the thick armour plates like fingerprints pushed into wet clay. The tank’s tracks are black and clotted with forge ash. Wyck knows that Kolat’s unit don’t knock out dents like that unless they compromise the tank’s armour. They wear their scars with pride, just like the infantry do.

  ‘Not lucky,’ Wyck says. ‘Just quick and vicious.’

  Kolat snorts and looks back at him. He has dirt painting his face, save for around his eyes where his goggles have been sitting. The mocking smile is back in place.

  ‘Isn’t that the truth,’ he says. ‘What happened to you, anyway? Those bruises look too keen to be from the forges.’

  ‘One of Crys’ fights,’ Wyck says, because he gives no more than he needs to.

  Kolat doesn’t drop that damned smile. He leans against the Demolisher’s mud-caked tracks and takes out another lho-stick. He takes the heavy satchel slung over one shoulder and puts it on the ground at his feet.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Kolat says. ‘You don’t fight in those chalk circles. Everyone knows that.’

  He lights the stick and breathes out blue-grey smoke.

  ‘If I had to guess,’ he says, ‘I’d say it’s got to do with why you’re here, talking to me. There is only ever one reason for that.’

  He nudges at the satchel with his boot. Kolat has the sleeves of his coveralls rolled back, showing the tattoos that patchwork the skin of his arms. All of the tankers Wyck knows have the same mark. The fyregiant, burning as he breaks down a mountain with his fists. They think of themselves that way. Mountain-breakers. Demolishers, just like their machines. Especially gunners like Kolat. Wyck knows of another story that they tell in the Vales. The one that says that the riverfolk fooled a fyregiant into following them onto a cliff’s edge before collapsing it and sending it to drown in the river below. It’s easy to trick the arrogant, and even more so to collapse the ground from under them. You just have to know the moment to do it.

  ‘It’s not standard, what you need, and I would bet that you need a lot of it by now, too, for it to work at all.’ Kolat grins. ‘It’s going to cost you.’

  ‘Cost me what?’ Wyck asks.

  ‘Triple,’ Kolat says. ‘Or a debt. Your choice.’

  Wyck shakes his head. He doesn’t have triple, and there is not a chance that he’s giving Kolat a debt to call on.

  ‘Come on, Ely,’ Wyck says. ‘That’
s no way to treat a friend.’

  Kolat laughs. ‘We aren’t friends.’

  ‘We should be,’ Wyck says. ‘Otherwise there’s no need for me to keep quiet.’

  Kolat’s smile falters, just for a moment. He blows smoke through his nose.

  ‘About what?’ he says. ‘You say a word about what you get from me, and you’re dead too.’

  Wyck shakes his head. ‘I don’t mean about that,’ he says. ‘I mean about Edra.’

  Kolat drops his lho-stick at his feet, though there’s still a drag or two left in it. He glances up the line, but there’s nobody around to hear them.

  ‘You don’t know a thing about it,’ he says.

  It’s painful to smile, but Wyck can’t help it. It pays to know things. More so when you can collect on them.

  ‘Let me count the things I know,’ he says, holding up his hand. ‘Edra was your loader. A good soul too. He led the hymnals when your lot sang.’

  Wyck watches Kolat’s weight shift as he stops leaning on the tank.

  ‘Edra used to come to Crys’ fight circles, though yours aren’t usually the kind to do so,’ Wyck says. ‘He’d come to patch up the wounded and drink with the rest of us. A good soul, like I said.’

  ‘None of that means a thing,’ Kolat says.

  ‘Oh, it does,’ Wyck says. ‘Because a good soul like that doesn’t sit well with a bad one like yours. Too principled. Too concerned with right and wrong. When a good soul like that notices wrongs he feels ill about them. Talks about them. Might even report them, given enough time.’

  Wyck watches Kolat carefully.

  ‘Which I suppose is why Edra ended up under a black sheet,’ he says.

  ‘Shut your mouth,’ Kolat snarls.

  Wyck shakes his head. ‘I came down here looking for you, you know. Saw you when you’d done it.’ He smiles. ‘From the state of you, it must have been a really ugly kill.’

  That does it. Kolat’s calm collapses, just like the mountainside under the fyregiant’s feet. He pulls his service pistol, but his movements are angry and obvious. Wyck strikes Kolat’s outstretched arm with one hand, and grabs the pistol with the other, disarming him. Then he snaps a kick into Kolat’s knee, putting him in the dirt and making him cry out. The tankers’ lot keeps singing around them, because nobody is close enough to hear it.