Spear of the Emperor - Aaron Dembski-Bowden Read online

  ‘Master!’ Tyberia yelled.

  Even on his knees, they beat at Amadeus with gun butts and weapon hilts. The power-chains wrapping him prevented him from fighting back, but he uttered no sound.

  Tyberia’s Engager sang one last time, rattling shrapnel against the closest Pure’s battleplate. He jerked with the bang, but paid her no heed at all, focused instead on ­driving my master down with a heavy boot to the faceplate.

  She had no weapons capable of harming them any more. The God-Emperor alone knew where my sword was, lost in the chaos. We were down to laspistols and wristblades. I drew the former, deployed the latter with a metallic shink! but ­Tyberia pulled me back, threatening to drag me off ­balance in her exhausted urgency.

  ‘It’s suicide,’ she panted. ‘Come on.’

  We ran. At last, we ran, clawing over the bodies, not looking back as we sprinted on shaking limbs. We ran into the dark ­tunnels, back out of the astropathic bastion. There would be Spears here soon. There had to be. We’d meet them, running in as we were running out. Spear reinforce­ments that would turn the tide. Spears that would slaughter the Pure and free our master.

  But we sprinted through empty tunnels.

  ‘The slaves,’ came a guttural call behind us. ‘Get the slaves.’ Boots pounded on the deck towards us, belonging to mutants feverish with the need to please their masters.

  We ran the way we’d come, only to crash into a sealed bulkhead. Tyberia, stripped of her armour, had no voice on the vox. I called over the command channel for Serivahn to unseal the door, but received no answer beyond static. The bulkhead stayed locked.

  ‘This way.’ Tyberia led us down an adjacent tunnel, and fifty yards later we met another sealed bulkhead. We weren’t true crew. We had no clearance to open them.

  Tyberia took off again, seeking another route. I could hear her, panting hard, breathing the words ‘It makes no sense, it makes no sense’ over and over. And she was right. ­Sealing the bulkheads meant nothing to the invaders; the Pure were already here, and any boarding party would have melta ­weapons to reduce bulkheads and barricades to slag.

  A third door barred our path back into the deeper parts of the ship. It felt as though we were being herded like livestock, driven to the slaughter pens.

  Tyberia covered me as I caught my breath. Her laspistol cracked, spitting beams into the mutants chasing us. I handed her mine; she fired both of them in continual streams while I wheezed into the vox.

  ‘Is anyone… still alive… in the Dreaming Chambers…’

  ‘Anuradha? Tyberia?’

  My blood ran cold. ‘Tolmach?’

  ‘Anuradha.’ The dead Spear said my name with calm, ­untroubled clarity. He didn’t even sound wounded. ‘Where are you? Have you evaded the Exilarchy?’

  ‘No… We’re running. We’re in the capillary corridors of the telemetry conclave. They’re right behind us.’

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘That’s good. Where exactly are you?’

  My throat closed. ‘You’re not Tolmach. I saw Tolmach die.’

  After a pause – a hesitation? – the connection broke into static. ‘Anuradha?’ said a second voice.

  ‘Lord Brêac.’ It was his voice, to perfection. I didn’t for a moment believe it was him.

  ‘We’re sealing the astropathic bastion and the telemetry ­conclave,’ he said. ‘You have to get out now.’

  ‘We’re trying. Why are you sealing the districts?’

  ‘To slow the threat.’

  Which will achieve exactly nothing against the Pure, I thought. All it would achieve would be to trap the survivors in here with the Exilarchy’s forces. Did the lives of astropaths and Chapter-thralls mean so little to the Spears?

  ‘You’re lying,’ I said to whoever was on the other end of the vox. Why would you trouble yourself with two helots on the run? ‘Who are you? Why are you trying to herd us?’

  ‘There’s no time for this idiocy,’ Brêac snapped back. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Who are you?’ I demanded again. The vox cut out.

  Again we ran, keeping ahead of the mutated tide at our heels, firing back at them for whatever it was worth. Another five sealed bulkheads stole any choice we might have had: we hit the descension ramps in our breathless, stumbling sprints, heading down into the tighter ventral tunnels that would lead into the Hex’s auxiliary spinal hallways. It was the only way out left to us.

  Salvation, when it came, didn’t come in the form of the Spears. Tyberia saw him first and cried his name.

  Kartash, in an antechamber, stood before one of the Pure. The Traitor warrior was on his knees as if praying to our hunchbacked companion, casting the scene in eerie reflection of Amadeus’ capture. A blade of humming green jade extended from the Pure’s back, haloed in wet sparks where it penetrated the warrior’s back-mounted power pack. I’d never seen a blade like it. It was inhuman, forged from no ­technology I’d ever heard of, not even the most ancient archives.

  The sword withdrew. The Pure fell dead.

  I made it in first. ‘Kartash,’ I gasped, my eyes stinging with relief. ‘Kartash.’

  He was serenity itself, albeit coldly focused. ‘Where is Amadeus?’

  ‘They took him.’ The jade weapon was no longer in Kartash’s hands, if it had ever been there at all. I knew I couldn’t trust my senses. ‘He was captured.’

  Tyberia stormed into the antechamber behind me. ‘They’re coming. I don’t know how many.’

  From there, everything happened at once.

  The hunchback smashed Tyberia to the floor with a fist to her stomach, driving the pathetic remnants of her breath from her lungs. Her face started to darken at once as she clawed at her throat, close to asphyxiation, gaping up at Kartash with eyes dreadfully wide.

  His first kick shattered my wristblade. His second crunched through my breastplate and threw me back through the open door. I was rolling across the deck while my drunken vision was still trying to process his first movements.

  Bootsteps clanked, loud as rolling boulders, ever closer. I was on my feet again, driven by adrenal panic, only for Kartash to meet me in the antechamber doorway. He gripped me with a strength he couldn’t possibly possess, and this time he floored me too fast for me to even understand how. I sensed rather than felt a displacing crack in my spine, and I struck the deck with a cry as my arm and shoulder ignited with pain.

  Kartash stepped over the heaving, gawping form of Tyberia. She pawed weakly at his shins, and he repaid her by absently grinding her forearm beneath his boot.

  And then he was gone, ghosting through the final bulkhead that led from the district. I watched it close. I watched the cog-locks rotating. I heard the machine-bolts seal: crunch, crunch, crunch.

  The bootsteps were on top of us now. Filthy hands grabbed at Tyberia, hauling her from the deck. I couldn’t move. I could barely breathe. Greyness threatened at the edges of my vision, blackening fast. Everything started to drift.

  The last thing I saw was the panic in her eyes. Then I was gone, down into the dark.

  XV

  A REVELATION OF DESTRUCTION

  1

  I didn’t wake as if from slumber. Whether sudden or slow, waking implies a restoration of awareness. This was different. This was a halting, dragging emergence, with a delirious lack of haste. It was a crawl back to consciousness, inch by inch, little by little. Sometimes there were sounds in the silence. Sometimes there were impressions in the nothingness. A flare of pain in the numbness. A splash of grey in the black.

  Nothing as solid as memory or thought, just moments of sensation, each one separated and out of context. The banging of hammers on metal. The rough roar of flames. The hiss of unclean tongues.

  Down again.

  Deep, deep down.

  But the voices began following me. They intruded on my bleary oblivion. They w
ere whispery and meaningless, and whether they belonged to the living or the dead, I neither knew nor cared. I shrank back from them. For a time, it worked.

  But then… a voice I knew.

  ‘This heat, Anuradha. Throne, I’ve forgotten what fresh air feels like.’

  Tyberia?

  She sounded impossibly far away, and the only clear thought I had was that her words hadn’t come with the chitinous crackle of sound over a vox-link. I remember it so adamantly because it was the first clear thought I’d had in the uncounted hours of that timeless time.

  I didn’t pursue her, or the mystery of her voice. I sank, back into the black.

  2

  Later, I surfaced again. How much later, I don’t know, but I surfaced far and high enough to find the pain I’d been hiding from. It was there, lying in wait, and it seethed, passionlessly vicious, as it embraced me. Acid, in the back of my head. Fire, in my fingers. Burning oil in my eye sockets. I was blind, absolutely and utterly blind.

  ‘If you touch her,’ Tyberia said, ‘I’ll kill you.’

  Another voice said… something. Words I either couldn’t hear or couldn’t understand.

  ‘No. No. If you touch her, I will kill you.’ Tyberia’s voice was weighed down by exhausted savagery. ‘Do you hear me?’

  The other voice faded away. Tyberia spoke again, her voice softer now. ‘No more convulsions, Anuradha. Not another fit. I’m begging you. Let me sleep. Let me sleep.’

  I sank again, not for Tyberia’s sake, but to go back beneath the layer of pain.

  Safe.

  3

  Once, I surfaced to the sound of Tyberia’s breathing. Deep and heavy, almost against my ear.

  ‘Tyberia?’ I asked, but instead of hearing my own voice, there was a brief, nasal moan that set my head aflame with slow, searing heat.

  A shifting. A shaking.

  ‘Anuradha,’ Tyberia said, sounding sounded tired and defeated, too weak to make a question of my name.

  ‘I’m awake,’ I answered. Except I wasn’t. I was already sinking. ‘Tyberia, I’m awake…’

  Not even a moan that time.

  Back down. Down.

  4

  ‘Kartash. Kartash did this. It’s Kartash’s fault. Kartash left us.’

  My thoughts. Surely my thoughts. But were they my words? I didn’t know the voice. It was too ravaged.

  ‘Hush, Anuradha…’ came the softest reply.

  ‘It was Kartash.’

  ‘I know,’ said Tyberia. ‘I know.’

  5

  My eyes were burning. My throat burned hotter, even harsher. Smoke inhalation. Choking in the dark.

  I hadn’t escaped the fire aboard the Hex. I was still there, still on the deck, dying with my face against the melting steel.

  ‘Easy. Easy now.’

  Tyberia?

  The devouring heat began to fade. Began to cool.

  I opened my eyes, except I didn’t, because they wouldn’t open. Pain glued them shut. Fire lapped at my lips. I gagged, fearing that if I cried out, I’d suck the fire inside me.

  ‘Swallow,’ Tyberia bade me. ‘It’s water. Just water.’

  And with those words, it was just water. I felt it on my face, so cold it was vicious in its cool caress, so much of a relief against the heat and my thirst that it was causing me pain.

  I swallowed, and the pain of that icy fire flowed through me. I felt it even in my fingertips. It tingled there, a little like a cooling breeze, and a little like burning acid.

  The cloth against my face was glasspaper, raking over my skin. The trickle of cold, cleaning water against my closed eyes was–

  Rain?

  Thunder. The thunder of drums.

  Rain. The rains of Nemeton.

  –the sweetest pain I’d ever felt. She was cleaning me, cleaning my face, and making me drink. She was keeping me alive. She’d been keeping me alive for I didn’t know how long.

  ‘Tyberia,’ I said. And this time, I really said it.

  I opened my eyes. And this time, they really opened.

  The gloom hit me like sunlight, my eyes were so tender from disuse. From how poorly I could make out Tyberia’s scarred and dirty features, I realised only one of my eyes was open. My thoughts were sludge, still drifting away from me. It took far too long, through the dizziness of the pain that welcomed me back to the waking world, before I remembered why my vision was so diminished.

  The Pure. My helmet. The snap.

  I reached to touch my face.

  ‘Don’t touch it,’ Tyberia whispered. She gripped my wrist as I moved. I had the strength of a dying animal, and she held me with pathetic ease.

  Yes, I remembered. I only had one eye.

  ‘Don’t touch the socket,’ said Tyberia. ‘It’s infected.’

  When I tried to defy her, to bring my other hand to my face, she didn’t need to stop me. I was crippled on that side. Paralysed, broken worse than Serivahn.

  ‘I can’t move,’ I told her. My lips were deliciously cold from the water she’d given me. My mouth was the only part of me that didn’t hurt. ‘I can’t move my arm.’

  She smiled. It was the thinnest, most awkward, most tenderly knowing smile I’d ever seen on her face. On anyone’s face.

  ‘You can move,’ she said. ‘You’ve been convulsing with seizures for days. You’re moving your arm now.’

  ‘I mean… my other arm.’

  Finally, with darkly hilarious lethargy, came the second revelation. I rolled my head to the side, my halved vision taking in the impossible sight at my shoulder.

  ‘Where is it?’ I asked her, as my eyes darkened, as the depths called me back. ‘Tyberia? Where’s my arm?’

  ‘Back on the Hex,’ she said gently. ‘Where it fell after Kartash tore it off.’

  XVI

  IN CHAINLESS SERVITUDE

  1

  Eleven days.

  For eleven days, Tyberia had watched over my unconscious form in the iron bowels of the Exilarchy warship Venatrix. Sometimes she’d held me in her arms, bracing me as I convulsed, keeping me still because she feared the seizures would aggravate my injuries. Her concern soon darkened when I didn’t wake. She began to worry the cranial wounds I’d suffered in the battle were the surface signs of a deeper brain injury. Even so, she cleaned the tormented flesh of my face as best she could, gave me brackish water from the ship’s supplies, and fed me with portions of the slime that passed for nutrient gruel among the enslaved crew. Sometimes, other captives had threatened to tear me from her arms; two of the dead prisoners had already been eaten, and Tyberia threatened to kill anyone that tried to do the same to me.

  I felt the unexpected caress of shame when she told me all this, and I wondered if she’d slept at all for more than stolen snatches of respite, given she’d fought so hard to keep me alive.

  ‘But you began to come around,’ she said, ‘slowly and surely.’

  We sat together as she related what had happened, sharing a vast smoke-darkened chamber with hundreds of other slaves grouped in loose packs. Some were recent captives like us, others had lived aboard the Venatrix for weeks, months or years judging by the accrued filth on their clothing and skin. Slaves from other worlds in the Veil. Some even from Kouris, captured on the warship’s last visit to sow the first seeds of rebellion, years before.

  My memory was a broken thing of too many dead ends and unfinished passages offering no enlightenment. The wounds to my head had corrupted my data-spools, rendering much of my archived recordings lost for good. I’d never forgotten anything before, at least not since my cranial enhancements. To be unable to remember the events of even a few days and weeks ago was as uncomfortable as my injuries.

  Every breath I took drew the reek of dirty bodies and piss-stained steel into my lungs. My vision was still blurred a
s well as halved, but I could see well enough to count forty-seven Spear thralls confined in the chamber with us, their azure robes variously grimy, bloodstained or both. Food and water were brought twice a day by teams of armed over­seers, carried in the kinds of trough-cauldrons used to feed beasts. There was never enough of it. Fights broke out over the slop they served us.

  The heat was cloying and eternal, the dry heat of a desert that existed only to be hammered by a merciless sun. If you breathed through your nose, the edges of your nostrils would scab and flake. If you breathed with your mouth open, within hours your throat would feel scraped for want of fluid.

  Even after waking, I was still as weak as a child. My severed arm was a constant source of pain, where the nerves still sang from the broken connection to the bionic limb that was no longer there. It hurt most when I instinctively reached for something with an arm that no longer existed, or moved in any one of a thousand ways that were perfectly natural when I’d been whole. The thwarted brain signals had no arm to obey their commands, so instead they danced along my abused nerve endings.

  My eye was worse. Behind the bionics was natural tissue, and the socket wouldn’t heal. Infection thrived in that miserable heat, and my wounds weren’t the only ones to fester; all of us carried injuries sustained in our capture. I bandaged my sundered eye socket with a wad of cloth and a linen wrap. It did nothing for the distracting pain, or the accursed itch, but at least it soaked up the watery trickle of bloody pus that wept without end.

  Tyberia and I slept back to back. Some of the Spear thralls allied with us in a coterie of sorts. Others wanted to take their chances alone, or lost all hope together.

  Two days after I’d awoken in Tyberia’s arms, we were visited by a phalanx of the Venatrix’s overseers. These mutants and warp-touched men and women prepared to herd the slaves from the prison chamber, to fates we could only guess. A Pure led them, his polished white armour marking him as a prince among wretches.