Anarch - Dan Abnett Read online

  Domor had evolved that way. Most of the veteran Ghosts were only veterans because they could look fear in the eye and remain functional. The crucible of battle did that to a man or woman quickly, and they coped or they died. The initial startle response was still there, but you barged through it and used your heightened state to push on rather than be crippled by it.

  Some called it the rush. Hark called it fight time. A good Guardsman turned his own poleaxing biological responses into a weapon.

  But this… this wasn’t a battlefield. There was no whip-crack of passing las to trigger the startle, no visible threat to engage the mind with. Domor had no idea why this was the most terrifying experience of his life.

  That puzzled him, and it felt like a weight lifting. His bafflement acted like a sponge, blotting up the fear. His mind became occupied with the question of why he was so uniquely scared rather than the fact of being scared.

  He wrested control of his breathing.

  ‘Are you still there?’ he whispered.

  A hand squeezed his arm in affirmation.

  Domor sheathed his blade, and fumbled with his optics. There was a fizzle of green light as the augmetics came back on. He glimpsed the chamber, awash with water; his own dripping hands, ghost-white and radiant. Then it went out again.

  The reassuring hands gripped his shoulder and guided him backwards. His boots kicked blindly at step risers, and he felt his way up them. A dry floor. His right hand found the wall beside him.

  His optics flashed back on.

  He saw Zweil ahead of him. The old ayatani was trailing a hand behind him, trying to lead Domor as he groped blindly along the wall.

  Domor reached out and tucked Zweil’s arm under his.

  ‘I can see, father,’ he whispered. ‘Move with me.’

  ‘There’s something down here,’ Zweil said very quietly, cocking his head and trying to sense Domor in the darkness.

  ‘It’s just the lights,’ whispered Domor. ‘The lights have failed.’ He knew he was lying. He knew the sound he’d heard.

  ‘No, son,’ said Zweil. ‘It’s just the darkness.’

  The Scion Relf had a stablight slotted on the under-barrel rail of her weapon. When she turned it on, the light made Merity jump.

  ‘Nice and calm now,’ Relf said. There was a glass-squeak edge to her voice that undermined her reassurance. She brought her weapon up to her cheek, and aimed ahead. The weapon was a short-form lascarbine that had been strapped to her back from the moment Merity met her. It wasn’t a battlefield weapon, but its compact length made it ideal for close-quarter protection duties in interior spaces.

  ‘Feth nice and calm,’ Merity said. ‘It’s just a power-out.’

  Now there was light, the hard stripe beaming from Relf’s weapon, Merity’s anxiety dropped. What had it been about the darkness? The suddenness of it? No. The thickness, the density of it. The lights hadn’t just cut. An airless darkness had swallowed them.

  Relf’s beam picked up the waste water extending towards them. In the wobbling oval of light, it looked like blood. Merity could hear it gurgling. It was a sound she’d heard before in the infirmary, and in the aftermath of hot contacts on Salvation’s Reach. Blood leaking from wounds, the steady, hideous trickle of life leaking away. She looked at the black water slopping towards them and swallowed hard. It looked like blood. It looked as though the ancient bowels of the palace were bleeding out.

  ‘Come on,’ said Relf. She turned, tweaking the stablight in different directions.

  Merity heard her curse. It seemed like an odd sign of weakness.

  ‘Scion?’

  ‘Where are the stairs?’ Relf asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The stairs, missy. We just came down the stairs…’

  She panned the light right and left. The smooth, whitewashed walls looked like snow-covered ground.

  ‘And the billets…’ Relf said.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Merity.

  Relf swung the light behind them and then forward again fast. Merity glimpsed the encroaching water.

  ‘We came down the stairs,’ Relf said, as if rationalising it to herself. ‘Came down, turned, walked along. The flood was ahead of us.’

  She twitched the stablight back and forth again.

  ‘Flood there, stairs there. And archways… through to the billets, there.’

  The disc of light hovered on glacial whitewash.

  ‘I understand what you’re saying,’ said Merity. ‘I just don’t understand what you mean.’

  Relf snapped around, tilting the light so it underlit their faces. She looked hurt, as if she’d been slapped for no reason.

  ‘The stairs have gone. The access to the billets has gone. Where have they gone?’

  ‘You’re mistaken,’ said Merity. ‘We must be confused. The steps were behind us.’

  She moved into the darkness, hands raised, expecting to catch her toe on the bottom step. Relf reached to stop her, but there was no need. Merity had come to a halt, her hands pressed flat against stone wall.

  ‘That’s just fething impossible,’ she said.

  Relf grabbed her arm. ‘With me,’ she said, pulling Merity after her. She was heading for the water, the light-beam bobbing.

  ‘What? Where to? The water’s that way–’

  ‘I know, I know,’ said Relf. Merity could smell the woman’s sour fear-breath. ‘But somehow we’re in a… in a dead end. The water’s rising fast, so we can’t stay put.’

  They were already sloshing into the spilling tide of water. It rose around their boots like a stream that had burst its banks after a rainstorm.

  ‘Relf? Scion?’

  ‘Just walk,’ Relf said, pulling her arm. ‘You’re right. We’re just confused. The dark confused us. There will be an exit. Just nearby.’

  The water was shin-deep and flowing hard. Merity thought – no, she knew as an awful certainty – that Relf was wrong. Something had happened. Something had changed in the darkness. Things had shifted like the walls and faces in the stress nightmares that had haunted her as a child.

  All of which was impossible. She wondered if it was still pitch dark and this was all some imagined nonsense. Maybe her concussion was worse than the medicaes had said. Maybe she was hallucinating. Her head ached. She had a rasping itch in her ears. But the water around her knees, her thighs, was not impossible. It was soberingly cold. In fact, everything had suddenly become much colder.

  ‘Scion, stop.’

  Relf wouldn’t. She pulled at Merity, then she froze. They had both heard it.

  A quick, purring buzz. A whine, as though someone nearby was squeeze-testing a drill or a powered saw. It came again, twice, like an insect droning past their ears.

  ‘What was that?’ Relf asked.

  ‘Hello?’ Merity called out. They’d heard voices from the billet spaces when they’d first come down. There had to be people close by. Why was it so quiet?

  ‘Shut up!’ Relf snapped. ‘Shut up, shut up.’

  There was a tremor in the light beam. The Scion’s hands were shaking. Merity could hear Relf’s rapid, shallow breathing.

  The lights came back on, stark and over-bright. It made them wince. Then they died back down to a filament glow and went out again. While the light lasted, Merity saw the cellar hallway, thigh deep in gleaming black water, and an archway ahead to the left.

  ‘That way!’ she hissed. ‘That way!’

  The lights came back on, along with a brief chirrup of faulty alarms. They lasted two seconds, long enough for Merity to see that there was no archway ahead to the left.

  Not any more.

  Merity didn’t have time to mentally process that. The cellar lights began to flash on and off like an intermittent strobe. The lights came on for half a second then off for two or three seconds, then ba
ck on. The rapid, erratic blinking made Merity feel nauseous. She reached out to hold onto Relf.

  But Relf wasn’t there.

  In darkness, she gasped the Scion’s name.

  The light fluttered on and off again. In the third flash, she saw Relf on the far side of the tunnel, clawing at the wall. In the fourth flash, Relf had vanished.

  In the fifth flash, Merity saw a figure standing directly ahead of her, its back to her. A figure standing nearly waist deep in the blood-black water. A figure waiting, still and upright, her hands at her sides. A simple smock dress. Head shaved.

  Blackness.

  ‘Yoncy?’ Merity called out.

  A saw buzzed somewhere in the darkness.

  In the sixth flash, nothing.

  Blackness.

  In the seventh, a heartbeat later, the figure was there again, its back to her still. But it was closer. Three metres closer.

  Blackness.

  In the eighth flash, Yoncy was still there, and she was starting to turn. Starting to turn slowly to face Merity.

  Blackness.

  An angry warble of damaged alarms.

  Abrupt las-fire ripped across the hallway in the dark. Merity flinched. She saw the searing bolts of energy, heard the close-by shriek of the carbine. One shot passed her head so close it crisped the downy hairs on her neck. She could smell the hot ozone as it went by, cooking the chill air. Scalding steam erupted where the las bolts hit the water.

  Merity staggered backwards, eyes wide and hungry for light. She saw Relf’s stab-beam moving wildly, reflecting in the water, tracking across the walls. More howling las-shots overlapped it.

  ‘Go back!’ she heard Relf yelling. ‘Go back!’

  Something that sounded like a surgical saw screamed in the tight confines. Merity covered her ears. Water splashed across her chest and face.

  Silence. Blackness. The reek of superheated air and brick-dust. The lap and gurgle of the water. Merity moved, blind, hands out, splashing through the flood.

  She saw a point of light ahead, a pale blue glow. It bobbed, then drifted down and away from her, foggy and distorted.

  It was Relf’s stablight, still attached to the weapon, sinking slowly in the black flood, the beam spearing up through the rippling water.

  Merity plunged and grabbed at it before it sank out of sight. She pulled the short-form carbine out of the water, and turned it, holding the thing like a massively oversized flashlight rather than a gun.

  ‘Relf? Relf?’

  Debris floated on the choppy, dark water. Scraps of fabric, flecks of foam insulate from a body jacket liner, a few broken rings of armour scale. Small slicks of jelly.

  Two human teeth. Some shreds of hair.

  Merity gathered the dripping carbine up, and gripped it properly. It felt heavy as feth. Steam smoked from the muzzle as the heat of its recent discharge evaporated the water. She panned around, gripping it tightly with trembling hands.

  The lights came back on, first a flutter, then straining half power. In the amber haze, she saw someone up ahead, someone wading through the flood towards her.

  ‘Relf?’

  Luna Fazekiel aimed her sidearm at Merity, then slowly lowered it.

  ‘Merity?’ she mumbled.

  ‘Commissar?’

  Fazekiel blinked. She looked unsteady and distressed. Her eyes were red and sore, and the expression in them was dull. Merity was shocked. Fazekiel was ordinarily the most immaculate figure in the regiment. Even the tiniest blemish on her uniform would famously irritate her deeply. Now, her clothes were torn and stained, and buttons were missing. Merity saw blood dribbling from Fazekiel’s ears and one nostril.

  ‘You’re hurt,’ Merity said, wading forward.

  Fazekiel shook her head. ‘Heard shots,’ she said. ‘You?’

  ‘No, Relf. The Scion with me.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘I don’t know. She–’

  ‘Did you see anything else?’ Fazekiel asked.

  ‘I saw Yoncy. I think.’

  Fazekiel nodded. ‘We’re in hell,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  Fazekiel shook her head, gulping for breath. She had the zoned-out look of a soldier who’d been in contact for too long. She was soaked through, and pawed at the blood seeping from her left ear.

  ‘We’re in…’ she began, then shook her head as if what she wanted to say was too hard to articulate.

  ‘You’re bleeding,’ said Merity.

  ‘Where?’ asked Fazekiel, as though it didn’t matter. ‘So are you. Are you hit?’

  ‘I’m not–’ Merity said.

  ‘There’s blood on you. Your face and neck.’

  Merity looked down and realised that the front of her tunic was soaked, and it wasn’t just water.

  ‘It’s not my blood,’ she said.

  Luna Fazekiel wiped her hand across her mouth.

  ‘When?’ she asked. ‘When did you come down here?’

  ‘Just minutes ago,’ replied Merity. ‘Just before the lights went out.’

  Fazekiel looked at her sharply. The dead exhaustion in her eyes scared Merity.

  ‘That’s not right,’ said Fazekiel. ‘The lights have been off for days.’

  The undercroft lights had come back on at low power. It was a sickly, wavering light, an ochre glow no brighter than the trickling fizz of a slow fuse.

  Gol Kolea sloshed through the shin-deep water of a flooded connecting passage. The cast of the wall lamps caught the moving surface of the water, and lapping reflections trembled along the whitewashed ceiling, creating an illusion that the ceiling was awash too.

  The sobbing had stopped. Kolea hadn’t heard anything in a while. At one point, he thought he’d heard Erish somewhere, and just after that, he was sure he’d heard Bask shouting, much further away.

  He turned off his stablight to conserve power, but kept his rifle ready. The world was closing down, as though the malice of the under-universe had seized control. This was no longer a matter of technical problems.

  It was here. He knew it was. It had followed him all the way from Aigor 991, across a decade and billions of kilometres. Gaunt’s stoical reassurances seemed so flimsy now, Kolea was shocked at how readily he’d believed them. The Ruinous Powers had marked him, and they had come for him.

  And they had lied. Everything the voice had said to him in that gloomy supply dump had been a lie. Even the promise that if they delivered the eagle stones it would cease to threaten him and his children.

  Kolea hadn’t done its bidding, but he hadn’t denied it either. The Ghosts had brought the eagle stones to Urdesh. But that hadn’t been enough. It had come for them anyway.

  ‘What did you want?’ he asked the shadows around him. The damp silence made no reply. ‘What did you want us to do? Did we fail? The stones are here. Is here not where you wanted them?’

  Nothing answered. That was a relief, in a way, but part of him wanted the voice to speak, so he could challenge it and deny it.

  It had broken its promise. That’s what the warp did, so it came as little surprise. The things that dwelt in the shadows that life cast were made of untruths and demented logic. They were lies incarnate and could never be trusted. Their promises meant nothing.

  But his did. He didn’t break them. Not his allegiance to the Astra Militarum, not his trench pledges to the brothers in his scratch company at Vervunhive, nor his fealty to Number Seventeen Deep Working that had been his living before that, and certainly not his vows to Livy Kolea. Livy Tarin, as was, bright in his mind as the day he’d met her.

  He’d made an oath to protect his children, and all of his comrades, from the bad shadow stalking them. He’d face it down, and he’d kill it. And his promises couldn’t be stronger if they’d been wrought from the metal ore he’d once dug out of t
he Verghast pits.

  ‘When are you going to show yourself?’ he asked. ‘When are we going to have this out, you and me? Or are shadows your only trick?’

  He knew they weren’t, but he was angry, and taunting the darkness felt good. Maybe he could annoy it, and provoke it into revealing itself.

  Give himself a target.

  It had played with him all along. It had toyed with him, and its lies had even made him doubt his own kids.

  Gol hesitated. His priority was to find Dalin and Yoncy, and anyone else stuck in this hellhole. He had to find them before the shadow did, and stand in its way. It had made an enemy of Gol Kolea, and any bastard could tell you that was a bad idea.

  He moved forwards, swilling the flood around his knees.

  ‘How dare you,’ he murmured. ‘How dare you make me think my kids were part of this. That was just torment, wasn’t it? A way to plague me and make me weak.’

  His mind went to the cruel fantasies that had been rattling around his head for months. Stupid, stupid thoughts. What had Gaunt said to him?

  A brother would know his sister.

  Fething right. It was so ridiculously easy to demolish the warp’s falsehoods. If only he’d had the clarity to do that months ago. Some things just don’t get thought when a man’s head is all of a jumble. Some things just don’t get said. They get left unspoken. Simple things that lasted and held more power than anything the warp had ever conjured. I love you. I care. I’ll walk into hell for you.

  Well, this was hell, and he was walking into it. But his mind was clear now, sharp as straight silver. The Ruinous Powers had threatened the wrong man.

  At the end of the flooded hall was a flight of brick steps that led to the door of a billet hall. The lights in the stairwell were fluttering out. He thought he could hear voices.

  He edged up the steps, shoulder to the wall, lasrifle aimed from the jawline. He peered out.

  The billet hall was dry. Forty cots stood in two rows under a low arched roof of whitewashed stone, lit by low-power lamps. There were signs of disarray, of possessions disturbed, of people leaving in a hurry.