Honourbound - Rachel Harrison Read online

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘For almost a month now.’

  ‘Tell me of it,’ Severina asks. ‘Please.’

  ‘Still the same. Still asking questions.’

  That thin smile flickers on Lucia’s face again. It reminds Severina of the painted faces of saints. It is the sort of smile that has a weight.

  ‘The world was Virtue,’ she says. ‘What can you tell me about Virtue?’

  It is a game they used to play as children. Lucia would teach Severina the names of planets. Their exports. Tithed regiments. Their saints and their stories. Then the two of them would sit by candlelight, late into the night, and Severina would repeat back to Lucia all of the things she already knew. Those memories are still some of Severina’s fondest.

  ‘Virtue,’ Severina says. ‘Virtue is a cold world in the western arm of the sector. Ice and rock. No regiments are raised there because all they do is mine promethium.’

  ‘We gave it the name Virtue,’ Lucia says. ‘Though there is nothing of virtue on that world. It is fuel, to be taken and used for the crusade’s ends. Something to be hollowed out and left behind.’

  Severina frowns. It is not just Lucia’s thin smile that is weight for her to carry. For the first time, she notices the deep scars that craze their way up her sister’s throat. They are healed, but not pale yet.

  ‘You are troubled,’ Severina says.

  Lucia doesn’t acknowledge the words. She keeps her dark eyes trained on the Emperor.

  ‘The Sighted had taken all but one of the mines,’ Lucia says. ‘They slaughtered some of the workers, but a good portion of them simply turned. Cast off their allegiances and threw their lot in with traitors and fools.’

  Severina’s stomach turns at the idea of it.

  ‘They will find no peace,’ she says. ‘Not even in death.’

  Lucia nods. ‘And we did grant them their deaths. Every one of them.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘We fought for days inside those mines,’ Lucia says. ‘But we could not root them out. They collapsed tunnels on us. Buried whole squads and platoons in ice.’

  ‘How did you answer that?’ Severina asks.

  ‘We buried them in return,’ Lucia says. ‘We turned the mines into mass graves.’

  She shifts, rubbing at her left arm absently as if it pains her.

  ‘It wasn’t just the enemy that we buried,’ she says. ‘It was our own too. The ones who were cut off or trapped or just too deep into the mines. It was necessary, but it caused outcry and disorder. Disobedience. I was with Commissar Morbin when they turned on him.’

  Severina looks at her sister. The cold air seems unwilling to fill her lungs.

  ‘The Kavrone defied orders,’ Severina says, softly. ‘They attacked him.’

  ‘And me,’ Lucia says.

  ‘What did you do?’

  Lucia looks sidelong at her.

  ‘What should be done, in such a case?’ she asks.

  Severina doesn’t have to think this time.

  ‘Every dissident must be shot. Every weakness ended.’

  Lucia nods. ‘That is what I did. Morbin and I shot every one of them, though we both got cut badly for it. When it was over, I thought Morbin dead, but he kept breathing long enough for us to get back to High Command. Long enough to graduate me to full officer.’

  ‘Then what?’

  Lucia blinks. ‘Then he died,’ she says, simply. ‘It is to be expected, from so many cuts.’

  Severina doesn’t say that she is sorry, because you do not apologise for death. Instead, she bows her head.

  ‘Emperor keep him,’ she says.

  It feels a long time before Lucia finishes the words.

  ‘Once and always,’ she says, eventually.

  Even with the story told, that heaviness remains in Lucia’s face and her posture. She doesn’t turn to leave. She just stands there, looking up at the Emperor’s golden eyes.

  ‘It is more than Morbin’s death that troubles you,’ Severina says.

  Lucia is still for several ticks of the timepiece. Then she nods. Mouths the word ‘yes’ in silence.

  ‘Tell me,’ Severina says. ‘Please.’

  Lucia looks at her then, properly, then grabs her and draws her into an embrace. The last time they held each other in such a way was the day their mother died.

  ‘Change,’ she whispers in Severina’s ear. ‘That is what troubles me. The crusade is not as it was, nor are the Bale Stars. It is no longer about duty, or honour. It is about ambition and greed. It is broken, sister. Faith has been broken.’

  Severina breaks free of her sister’s grasp. Her mind rings like the muster alarms, and her heart is beating loudly in her ears.

  ‘Don’t say that,’ Severina says. She is shaking. Shaken. ‘Don’t say those vile things. Not you. Not ever again.’

  Lucia covers her mouth with her hand. She blinks once. Twice. Then her dark eyes clear and her hand falls away. She bows her head.

  ‘Forgive me,’ Lucia says. ‘It is Virtue. Morbin. The Kavrone. I allowed it to unsettle me.’

  ‘Then they were just empty words,’ Severina says.

  It would read like a question, but she doesn’t mean it as one, and Lucia knows that too. She nods.

  ‘Just empty words,’ she says. ‘And nothing more.’

  Seven

  A matter of loyalty

  While the rest of the forward operating camp sleeps, or trains, or heals wounds, the landing fields are awake and active, moving materiel and souls. Bulk landers lift off and touch down, their engines burning like new stars. Heavy lifters move to and fro. Soldiers shout and gesture. The place is floodlit to ward off the night, but there are still shadows to step into if you know how.

  And there’s nothing Andren Fel knows like shadows.

  He watches through a set of magnoculars from the top of a rise as the Kavrone soldiers patrol the largest of the landing bays. The one that Krall and Brannt spoke about. It is a massive open square that’s been panelled flat and surrounded by temporary storage hangars that can be collapsed with ease when the crusade front moves on. In the middle of the square sits a bulk lander with its ramp down. Figures move up and down that ramp, loading materiel, just like Krall said. Fel can’t tell exactly what, from this distance, but he can see the size of some of those containers. It looks like more than just guns, but he won’t know without getting closer, which is exactly what he is working out how to do.

  Around the edge of the landing field there is a high, double-thick wall that looks to be easily twice his height. It’s definitely scaleable, especially given that he’s without his heavy carapace and his gun. He is unmarked in all ways, wearing plain fatigues, gloves and a cloth mask that hides everything but his eyes. Just in case. There are two direct entry routes, both large gates, wide enough to take a tank. One to bring supplies in at the front, one at the back to send them out again. The one at the front, closest to Fel, is guarded by two Kavrone sentries. It would follow that the other gate is the same. Then there are the roving patrols. The Kavrone move from floodlight to floodlight in pairs, with overlapping routes. They are armed with rifles and wear their raincloak hoods up against the weather. That’s one thing that helps him. The noise of the storm is loud anyway and inside a hood like that it will be like vox distortion in the ears. Added to the rest of the racket of the place, it will more than cover any kind of noise he might make.

  Fel watches for another couple of minutes, memorising the routes the Kavrone take. The overlap of their patrols means that any disruption in the pattern would be noticed within two minutes. It’s not long, but it could be worse. Fel takes note of the Kavrone themselves too. He picks out the tired ones from their pace, and the way they shift from foot to foot when they stop. His best option is to wait for those Kavrone who are the most tired and distracted, and to let them pas
s before going over the wall in the darkest space between the floodlights. He’d come down on the other side behind one of those storage hangars. Minimal risk of contact. If he has to drop anyone to get away unnoticed, he’d rather do it on egress.

  Fel’s best option comes back around. It’s the two Kavrone who are slouching. One of them is smoking a lho-stick as he walks. Fel stows the magnoculars and moves down the rise as they walk their route, marked by that coil of blue smoke. He sticks to the shadows as he moves towards the landing field and everything goes out of view but the fence and the floodlights and the distant dark shape of the bulk lander over the top of them. The ground between the landing field and the rest of the camp is open, but it isn’t flat. They only collapsed the parts they needed, so there’s enough rubble and broken stone to keep him hidden until he’s close enough to make the wall. It’s just about knowing when to go still.

  When he gets close enough, Fel can hear the Kavrone talking as they come to a stop under one of the floodlights.

  ‘I wish I were being shipped out with those boxes,’ the one with the lho-stick says. ‘Another day in that city will kill me.’

  The other one shakes his head. ‘If you don’t stop with that griping, I’ll kill you myself.’

  Lho-stick laughs. ‘Go ahead,’ he says. ‘It’d be a damned mercy. Spare me from walking around here for the rest of the night.’

  He looks up at the fence and blows smoke.

  ‘I don’t see the need,’ he says. ‘For the sake of some munitions and whatever else it is they are moving. The supplies aren’t even ours.’

  The other Kavrone growls. ‘Thought I told you to stop griping,’ he says. ‘We guard it, like the general ordered us. You know how it goes if you question Sylar. You heard what happened to Halliver and the others.’

  Lho-stick’s shoulders slump. ‘Yeah, I heard,’ he says, with some cold in his voice.

  The two of them get to walking again. Fel waits for the distance to make the stablights on their lasguns go dim, and their voices a murmur, then makes for the spot at the wall where the shadows are deepest. He crosses the open ground at a run, putting his momentum into a jump right at the wall to propel himself up it. It hurts, with the stitches in his arm and the weakness in his leg where he was shot, but both of his hands hit the top and he pulls himself up and over, then drops to the ground on the other side. He crosses straight to the back of one of the storage buildings. Straight into the shadows. He goes still and waits a moment, listening for noise from the other side of the wall. Fel hears nothing but the rain. The wind. The sound of the landing field activity. No vox chatter. No shouting.

  No contact.

  Lydia Zane sits cross-legged on the floor of her tent and tries to meditate. To calm the storm of her mind and send the bird away.

  No. The birds.

  She opens her eyes slowly and lets out the breath she has been holding. It steams in the cold. Around her, objects turn lazily in the air. A handful of glass beads. A straw doll. A tattered old pict. Several shining rounds of ammunition. Beyond them, the birds sit and watch. One black. One white. Both utterly still.

  She ignores them.

  Zane hums as she sends the objects spinning. The temperature drops another couple of degrees. Frost begins to form around her feet. The song is one that Zane’s mother would sing to her when she was just a child. When her gifts were still hidden, and her hands were unbloodied. Zane usually finds calm in the song when all else fails, but not today. She cannot rid herself of Calvar Larat’s mocking words.

  Freedom, just for a moment. That is my last truth. My last gift, to you.

  Freedom. It is a violent gift, and she had revelled in it as she killed him. A moment unwatched. Unjudged. But then she thinks that perhaps that was not the freedom he meant after all. That he was speaking of the death he showed her. Her death. Painful. Agonising. But oh, so quiet. Those four birds against a bright blue sky.

  Four, not two, so there is still time yet.

  The glass beads clatter together and one cracks. Flakes of old straw splinter from the doll’s arms and legs. The wounds on Zane’s own arms ache and sting in sympathy. She hums her song louder, but the pain grows worse and not better and Zane realises that it is not just because of Calvar Larat, nor is it because of the birds. That there is another reason that her mind cannot grow calm, despite the song.

  It is the long shadow. The one from the forges.

  She can still feel it, here on Laxus Secundus.

  Shapeless. Deep. Dark.

  Without name.

  No.

  Is it?

  There is a noise outside Zane’s tent that disrupts her thoughts, and then her mind does calm. The objects drop out of the air around her, hitting the floor of the tent in sequence. Zane gets to her feet and steps out of the circle of scattered earth that she made for herself. She ducks out of her tent, her staff in hand, and finds herself looking at four figures. Three of them are soldiers, wearing black and silver carapace plate. Their helms are enclosed, with round green eye lenses. The fourth figure is unmasked. He wears a dark uniform with no marks on it that she recognises. He is not Antari. He has not the height or the lean weight and his eyes are blue, like winter ice.

  He should not be here. Not unescorted.

  ‘You are Lydia Zane,’ the uniformed man says instead. ‘Primaris psyker. Antari Rifles.’

  Something about him makes her want to scream. Her skin crawls. Not one of the soldiers moves. They just stand there, rain slick and still, their faces hidden behind their masks and their glowing eyes locked on her.

  ‘Aye,’ she says. ‘Who is asking?’

  ‘Requisitions Officer Andol Toller,’ he says, with a bow. ‘On behalf of High Command.’

  Zane cannot tell if he lies, and that frightens her. Her mind is not just calm now. It is silent. Blind. That sickness and panic grows worse by the moment.

  ‘You are soulblind,’ she says. ‘A blank.’

  Toller’s face stays careful. Neutral. He does not acknowledge her words.

  ‘We have come here to collect you,’ Toller says. ‘You are being reassigned.’

  Zane takes a step backwards. It does not feel like a reassignment. It feels like a snare. Blind the animal. Trap it. Use it. She is suddenly very aware of the distance between her tent and those of the rest of her regiment. The witch circle that makes them feel safe, that now serves against her. She is aware of her fragility, without her gifts. Of the ache in her bones and the guns carried by those silent soldiers.

  ‘Reassigned to what?’ she asks. ‘To where?’

  Toller shakes his head. ‘Classified, I’m afraid.’

  ‘If you cannot tell me, then I cannot go,’ Zane says.

  Toller narrows his ice blue eyes. ‘It is not optional,’ he says. ‘It is an order.’

  ‘Not unless it comes directly from my superiors,’ she says, keeping her voice level.

  ‘High Command are your superiors, which makes me your superior also,’ Toller says. ‘But if you insist.’

  He produces a data-slate from the pocket of his dress coat. On it is Lydia Zane’s name, and her assigned code, given to her at the Scholastica Psykana, along with many other things. The bindings, inside and out. She blinks rain from her eyes and stares at the screen. At the words that glow red like a harmful thing. Like something that can poison.

  Approved for reassignment.

  Nowhere does she see a signature, facsimile or otherwise, from any of her regimental commanders. And then there is the matter of Toller himself. They would not send a blank after her unless they were expecting conflict, or to have to take her by force. Toller’s presence is a threat.

  And Lydia Zane does not like to be threatened.

  ‘Your slate changes nothing,’ she says. ‘Return here with Captain Hale or General Keene and have them explain it themselves. Until I have wor
d from my own, I go nowhere.’

  The smile that flickers across Toller’s face is ugly.

  ‘Your own,’ he says. ‘It is strange that you think of them that way, when they don’t extend you the same courtesy. They fear you. Hate you. You owe them nothing.’

  Zane knows that her kin fear her. Hate her. But she knows them, and the way of their hate. This man she does not know, and she cannot know, because he is soulblind. Because he has been sent to disarm her, with three soldiers at his back.

  ‘Word from my own,’ she says, again. ‘Until then, I have nothing more to say to you.’

  Toller scowls. ‘You are an asset, like a gun or a tank. Nothing more. Neither of those things question their reassignment or use, and neither will you.’

  He snaps his fingers, and the three soldiers in carapace step forwards with their guns raised.

  ‘And like any other asset,’ he says, with that ugly smile still in place, ‘if we have to dismantle you to move you, then so be it.’

  Daven Wyck is halfway back from the tankers’ lot when he hears raised voices carrying on the wind. That’s not strange to hear around the encampment, especially for the night before a deployment. It’s hard for any one among them to wait until morning to fight. What’s strange is the fact that he’s not in the encampment yet. He is in the empty, rubble-strewn land between the tankers’ lot and the tent fields, not far from the edge of the witch’s circle that separates Lydia Zane’s tent from everybody else’s. Another cry carries to him, and this time Wyck is certain that the voice belongs to Zane. He frowns. The witch is always murmuring. Whispering. Speaking in her damned riddles. But she doesn’t shout, not like that. That means something is wrong, and the idea of all of the things that could be wrong when it comes to her sends his bones cold.

  Wyck wants to keep walking back to camp. To pretend he’s not heard it and leave the witch for someone else to deal with. Preferably the commissar, with a bolt-round. Maybe they could kill each other into the bargain and then he’d be free of both of them and the way they look at him like they know what he is. But he doesn’t keep walking. Can’t take another step.