Honourbound - Rachel Harrison Page 17

  ‘Sounds like another witch,’ Sun says, with some venom.

  ‘It is unclear,’ Keene says. ‘But likely. The Sighted rarely elevate those who are not warp-touched.’

  ‘If that is true,’ Sun says. ‘If we know one of the Nine to be there and the spire is proving so hard to capture, then why are we trying at all? Why aren’t we just bombarding it?’

  ‘Because our second company are still inside it,’ Jeraine snarls.

  ‘You know as well as I do that your second company are likely dead by now,’ Sun says.

  Jeraine looks at Sun like he wants to crush him, now. Sun ignores him. Instead he reaches out and points to several locations around the Sanctum of Bones.

  ‘Hit it in the right place, and you’ll collapse the lot. Sighted and all. One of the Nine, made as dust.’

  ‘No.’

  Sylar’s voice carries easily. It is a snarl that ill-suits that strange softness of his face.

  ‘We are to capture it,’ he says. ‘To excise the Sighted, no matter their strength, and preserve what is left of the facility.’

  Raine thinks about those containers the Kavrone were moving, and wonders if there is something in the Sanctum of Bones that Sylar wants to move too.

  ‘The facility must be of great value,’ Raine says. ‘To spend as much blood as this, instead of choosing to rebuild.’

  Sylar looks at her and Raine is reminded of those debriefs she undertakes with Zane.

  Apply pressure.

  Observe the results.

  The Kavrone general’s eyes are dark, and seem set further back than they should be, like deep pools. There is not a flicker in his distorted face.

  ‘Commissar Severina Raine,’ he says. ‘The Lord-General Militant spoke to me of you. He said that you conducted yourself with honour in the war for the forges.’

  Raine can feel the Antari looking at her at the mention of Serek’s name. Vander is too, though in an altogether different way.

  ‘The lord’s words honour me,’ she says, carefully.

  ‘Then honour them in return,’ Sylar says. ‘And do not question. Capture. Excise. Preserve. Those are your orders, and your only concerns.’

  She can see what he is doing. Using Serek’s name as a mirrored shield because it means something to everyone around the table. It is a coward’s play, and a conceited one at that.

  And Raine counts that as two things she has learned about General Kaspar Sylar.

  ‘The Bale Stars will require a good deal more blood to be spent before our work is done,’ Sylar says. ‘Before it belongs to the righteous and the worthy.’

  Raine nods. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Of that, there can be no question.’

  Sylar’s face twitches into a sneer, but he is the first to look away.

  And Raine counts that as another thing learned about the Kavrone general.

  Lydia Zane has not slept an hour since the blank and his soldiers were taken by the black water. When she closes her eyes, the image of it swallowing them up paints itself on the lids. When she opens her eyes, her two birds sit there and watch her. Their unblinking black eyes seem judgemental, now. So Zane spends her time before the battle to come in her assigned quarters in the old scholam building, keeping her mind occupied with training and meditation. With prayer, and with offerings.

  ‘In my time I have killed many,’ she whispers. ‘Traitors and monsters and heretics.’

  The white one ruffles its untidy feathers.

  ‘But never have I killed like that,’ she says. ‘Never have I had to make a secret of it.’

  The black bird opens its beak as if to speak, but says nothing. A cold wind blows through the gaps between the stones that make up the wall of her quarters. The room is small and spare, with no furniture. Zane can sense from the sorrow soaked into the stone that it was used for punishments. For the type of training that leaves scars. It seems appropriate, given that it now belongs to her, however temporarily.

  ‘There is much that I already bear,’ she murmurs. ‘But this secret is a heavy thing.’

  She shakes her head, thinking of those shapes that she took from the soldier’s mind before he died. The needles. The flame. The wings. At first she had taken those for the wings of her white bird, but now she realises she was wrong. There was no snap of feathers, only a soft and near-silent beat, like the heartbeat of something colossal, booming and regular.

  ‘There was a darkness in those men. A malice.’ Her voice wavers. ‘But still the secret of it is heavy. Still I doubt. If what was done was sin, then I welcome judgement.’

  The wind howls and the building around her creaks, but Zane hears no judgement in the song of the storm. Even her birds remain blessedly silent. Then the wind dies down and Zane looks up to the idol. It is a simple thing that she spun from wood, using her gifts. The Emperor, seen as she knows Him, with a halo of leaves and a cloak of sky and arms outstretched like branches. As He must have been when she heard His voice through the rustle of the singing tree’s leaves, all those years ago on the cliff over the ocean.

  ‘My soul is a good soul,’ she says. ‘I swear it. I know it. In all things I am guided. In all I am tested. This weight is but another test.’

  The Emperor’s eyes are burned dark by the act of making. Unblinking. Zane takes a ragged breath. She looks down at the thing she has made, just as she made the idol all that time ago. It is a dagger, freshly spun from wood. One that she will use should High Command send any more soulblind. She will not be caught without talons or claws. Not again.

  ‘And in this test,’ she says, to the Emperor and the blade at her feet, ‘as with every other, I will not break.’

  When the briefing comes to a close, Raine returns to her assigned quarters. It is high in one of the scholam’s dormitory wings, where the wind howls loudly. Pollivar Curtz is waiting for her accompanied by two commissariat-sworn Tempestus Scions, and several double-locked crates stamped with the crusade seal.

  ‘Sir,’ says Curtz. ‘The lord-commissar sends his regards.’

  Raine nods. She unlocks her quarters and picks up one of the crates.

  ‘Bring them inside,’ she says.

  Curtz nods to the Scions. They say nothing, but they move the crates as ordered until they are all stacked up inside the spare concrete cell. It was a dormitory chamber at one time, and still bears the standard proclamation painted on the wall in that same red paint.

  IDLENESS IS SIN.

  With the crates moved, the Scions leave the cell and take up position in the hallway without Curtz having to say a word. Curtz hands Raine a hard case last of all. It’s the sort that carries datacrystals.

  ‘There is one more thing, sir,’ Curtz says. ‘Words, from the lord-commissar. He would only have me speak them directly to you.’

  Raine takes the case and puts it in her pocket. The same pocket as the timepiece. All data together.

  ‘Then speak them,’ she says.

  Curtz hesitates and clears his throat.

  ‘He asked me to tell you that escalations have been made,’ he says, then he frowns, just a little. ‘And to ask you to think on his words. What he said to you about deeds.’

  Raine knows the words he means. Tula’s rich voice comes back to her immediately.

  Deeds, Severina. They are what made your mother, and your father. Your sister too. In time, you will have to answer for yours, so make sure that you choose them carefully.

  What she cannot be sure of is whether the words are a warning, or a threat.

  ‘I can return a message,’ Curtz says. ‘If you have one.’

  Raine thinks on that for a moment.

  ‘Give the lord-commissar my thanks,’ she says. ‘And tell him I will fight fiercely, just as he ordered. No matter how large the storm grows.’

  Daven Wyck sits on a supply crate in the Wyldfolk’s bill
et with his rifle across his knee. The room was a mess hall, or something like it once. It is built of cold, old stone, the mortar turned black with age. What kit they have is in boxes, or part-unpacked. Crys has already pitched her cot by the window, because she likes to listen to the rain, and nobody has the heart or the want to argue with her. There is room enough in the billet to sleep twelve, though Wyck doesn’t have twelve anymore.

  But then that’s why the new folk are standing in front of him.

  The two of them are just about eighteen, both wearing clean fatigues and armour with not a nick out of them, nor out of those faces, either. Before today they were regimental support. They undertook training in preparation for the day they would join the regiment proper. They cleaned guns and helped put kit on the line. They have never been on the line themselves. Never fought a proper fight. But now they are both standing in the Wyldfolk’s assigned quarters, watching him and waiting for him to say something.

  ‘Told you,’ Awd says, from beside him. ‘They are just new growth.’

  Wyck puts his rifle down, and his knife. He’d been scratching loops of thorns into the gun’s barrel. Making it his, and not Veer’s. The action of it was helping him keep his headache at bay. He can feel it coming back now, rising in his head like the sun over the world’s edge.

  ‘Names,’ he says, to the two new folk.

  ‘Haro,’ says the first one.

  She is tall and corded like rope, with rings through her ears.

  ‘Haro, sir,’ says Wyck. ‘Try again.’

  Haro colours, and stands up a little straighter. ‘Sorry, sir,’ she says. ‘I meant to say my name is Haro, sir.’

  ‘And you?’ Wyck asks the other.

  ‘My name is Jey, sir.’

  His voice is low and soft, and he is pale as fog, even to his eyes. They are the grey of young ice. Jey and Haro both look like Antari, but they don’t sound like it. Wyck picks up the wrong kind of lilt from both of their voices.

  ‘You are both void-born,’ Wyck says. ‘Isn’t that right?’

  They look at each other then, just for a moment. Then Haro nods.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ she says. ‘Me on the Wrath Unending.’

  ‘And me on the Pyre’s Light,’ Jey says.

  ‘Then you’ve never seen home,’ Wyck says. ‘You have never known Antar.’

  ‘No, sir,’ they answer together.

  Wyck looks at Awd. ‘This is what they give us,’ he says. ‘To replace Efri and Dal and Vyne. Void-born.’

  ‘Looks that way, sergeant,’ Awd says.

  ‘No. I don’t think so,’ he says. ‘You’ll both have to go back.’

  ‘We can’t,’ Jey says. ‘Sir, please.’

  Wyck shrugs. ‘Not my problem,’ he says. ‘If you can’t go back, then find something else to do, because you’re not needed here.’

  Wyck picks up his rifle and goes back to etching the thorns into the barrel of it.

  ‘It is your problem.’

  Haro’s voice is a snarl. Wyck glances up at her. She’s got her hands rolled up in fists.

  ‘We aren’t going anywhere,’ Haro says. ‘We were sent here to be Rifles. To be Wyldfolk.’

  He laughs, and watches her face colour again when he does. This time it’s because she’s angry.

  ‘To be Wyldfolk,’ Wyck says. ‘When you haven’t seen home but on maps. You’re barely Antari, never mind Wyldfolk.’

  It’s Jey this time who speaks up. He’s not soft-spoken now.

  ‘Our eyes are grey just as much as yours are. We might need your say-so to be Wyldfolk, but we need nobody’s to be Antari.’ He twists his face as if he wants to spit. ‘That’s something your words can’t change, sir.’

  There’s a moment of quiet while the rain lashes against the windows, and then Wyck laughs again.

  ‘I think I could like them,’ Awd says, laughing too.

  Jey and Haro just stare, still furious.

  ‘Antari, maybe,’ Wyck says. ‘But you are not Wyldfolk. Not yet.’

  He puts the rifle down again and gets himself up off the crate. He keeps hold of his knife in a loose grip.

  ‘Tell me what you know the Wyldfolk to be,’ he says.

  To their credit, both of them ignore the knife. They keep their eyes on his. Grey, just like they said.

  ‘Wyldfolk are the spirits of the woods,’ Haro says. ‘They defend the land from those who would hurt it.’

  ‘And how do they do that?’ Wyck asks.

  ‘They bleed them,’ Jey says. ‘Take the shape of briars and cut them.’

  ‘And if you are cut by the Wyldfolk?’ Wyck asks.

  ‘Then you die,’ Haro starts.

  ‘Because those cuts always kill,’ Jey finishes.

  ‘Deep or shallow,’ Wyck says. ‘Many or few. It doesn’t matter. The Wyldfolk cut you, and you die.’

  He holds out his hand, so that they can see the flat of his palm, and the scar across it. It’s one of his oldest ones. Keller did it with his combat blade all those years ago, back before Cawter and the fire and the ashes.

  ‘The only way to pass safely is to pay up front,’ he says. ‘That’s the way of it.’

  Awd shows them his hand too. The scar that runs the same way.

  ‘You take this mark and you’re one of us,’ Wyck says. ‘Until you’re dead, so you had better be sure before you pay.’

  They don’t glance at each other, or hesitate. They both put out their hands. The left, like his. Just like the old stories say. Wyck makes the mark on Haro first, then takes her hand and makes her roll it into a fist so that the blood bubbles over and off it. It hits her boots and the stone floor. Then he does it for Jey too. More blood on the stone. Wyck tries not to think of the blank or the soldiers. Not in this sacred kind of moment. He pushes the thoughts under so they sink, just like the dead.

  ‘That’s payment made,’ he says, when there’s enough blood spilt. ‘Now you defend the land, as we do. You cut those who would hurt it. You fight sharp and fast and you never stop when you chase.’

  The two of them smile, though the cuts will be hurting them. That’s the moment where he truly sees it in them. A wicked spirit.

  ‘That payment grants you the name of Wyldfolk,’ Wyck says. ‘Now you just have to earn it.’

  Severina Raine finishes reading another of Tula’s records and flips it closed. She leans forwards, and puts it onto a pile to her right. Raine is surrounded by folders in jagged stacks and loose sheafs of parchment, spattered with ink. She has been sorting and reading the documents for hours, going back through almost a decade’s worth of redeployment and requisition. She has found records for guns and for tanks. For fleets of ships. Lives, in the millions, all captured in droplets of black ink. But what she is really looking for still eludes her.

  And it feels more than a little deliberate.

  Raine opens the next folder on the unread stack. It is one of many detailing troop movements for the battle at the Coris Belt. She scans the pages, her frown growing deeper with each turn of the parchment.

  It has been redacted, just like the others. Locations. Troop numbers. Executable orders. Everything but the regiment name.

  The Strixian 99th.

  Raine closes that folder too and puts it on top of the previous one, on the pile to her right. The pile that contains reams of similar documents pertaining to the Strixian 99th, and the Kavrone Dragoons. Just as Fel suspected, the Strixians have died several times over only to reappear months or even years later, on a different front. They are resupplied, and reinforced, just like any other regiment. Then they die, again. That is where the peculiarity lies.

  Because the Strixians always die to a soul. No survivors.

  Unfortunately, with the other details redacted, that is the only peculiarity that Raine can prove. It is flimsy at best. Easy to attribute to
a Departmento error, or inaccurate reports. Easy to dismiss, for the right people.

  Raine sits up straight and pushes her hair from her face. She allows her eyes to close, just for a moment, hiding the room and the documents from view.

  So many things, hidden.

  Raine lets out a slow breath and opens her eyes. They sting, even in the dim glow of the overhead lumens. For a moment, she is tempted to close them again. To sleep, even just for a few minutes, but those painted words on the wall of her quarters draw her eyes.

  IDLENESS IS SIN.

  Raine can’t help the wry smile at reading the words. It just finds its way onto her face.

  She leans over and picks up another folder.

  The scholam’s abandoned undercroft is a maze of interlinked corridors that Andren Fel treads alone, following the trail left by his targets. Boot prints on the stone. He passes by cells with their heavy doors ajar. Fel knows them to be isolation cells. That there will be no lumens in them, that the walls and floor will be bare, the cell not big enough to lie flat in. He knows how dark it would be if he were to shut himself inside one and pull that heavy door closed. So dark his mind would make shapes of it, whether his eyes were open or closed. He remembers it clearly, from a different time. A different world.

  From home.

  The first two targets come from the darkness of those cells to try and kill him with a pincer attack. One left, one right. Fel disarms the target on the left and knocks her legs out from under her, putting her wheezing on her back in the water and old dirt. Her laspistol skitters on the floor, and he kicks it further. The target on the right fires his pistol with a flash, but Fel knocks it wide and high before answering with a killshot of his own. One dead, but the first target is back up now and she gets Fel in a chokehold.

  ‘You’re dead,’ she says, in his ear.

  ‘Not yet,’ Fel says.

  He slams her back into the wall and her grip goes loose, then he rolls her over his shoulders and puts her on the floor again. This time, he fires his pistol before she can get up. Another kill. In the quiet that follows, Fel can hear water running and hitting the stone floor. The hum of old lumens as they flicker overhead, erratic. He hears something else too. Footsteps. They are soft and measured, but he can hear them all the same, approaching where the corridor bends sharply. Fel puts his back against the wall and slows his breathing as if he’s taking line of sight. He moves up to the bend in the corridor but not beyond it.