Honourbound - Rachel Harrison Read online

  ‘We are running out of time,’ Raine says.

  Hale nods. ‘And support too. Blue Company are pinned down on approach to the Beta Gate, and Gold have yet to reach the inner forges. I’m calling the push now, before the Sighted can send whatever draws near against us, or we lose everything we’ve bled for.’

  ‘Understood, captain,’ Raine says. ‘We will not fail.’

  Hale glances to where Jona Veer lies dead. Raine knows him well enough to see what he is feeling by the set of his shoulders, and the way his eyes narrow. Hale is disappointed. Ashamed, on the boy’s behalf. Raine also knows that, despite all of Veer’s failings, it is hard for Hale to accept judgement against one of his own.

  ‘Is there anything else?’ Raine says.

  Hale looks back to her. ‘No, commissar,’ he says. ‘Not a thing.’

  Then Hale gets to rounding up the Antari, voxing orders to the rest of his company pushing up through the machine halls. They have orders to fulfil, traitors to silence, and those machines to retake.

  And her judgements are something that Yuri Hale knows better than to question.

  Lydia Zane can feel the touch of death on every inch of her body. It makes her ache, skin to bones. The Sighted are doing something in the forges that casts a long shadow. Something that echoes in the immaterium like a scream. It has been the same for Zane since the moment she set foot on Laxus Secundus, death’s long shadow clinging to her.

  Like that damned hateful bird.

  It is sitting there now, talons crooked around the rim of a girder. It is so very still, that bird. She has not yet seen it blink. It never cries, or ruffles its feathers. It just sits still and stares.

  On the pillar below the bird’s perch is a symbol, daubed in blood. The smell carries to Zane even over the heavy stink of smoke. The symbol is a spiral surrounding a slit-pupilled eye. The mark of the Sighted. The rings of the spiral are just a hair off perfectly spaced, and it makes the breath in Zane’s lungs thinner, looking at it. The Sighted who painted the symbol lies broken at the foot of the pillar. So very broken. He is clad in fatigues and feathers, his skin inked with iridescent, metallic tattoos. The Sighted was one of the flock hunting Jona Veer through the machine halls. Zane caught sight of him slipping into the shadows between the half-built tanks during the gunfight. He thought himself hidden, but he was wrong. There is no hiding from Zane, because she does not need footprints or line of sight or even sound in order to hunt. She followed him into the darkness by the stink of his traitor-thoughts and came upon him painting the spiral and the slitted eye.

  And then she broke him.

  Zane winds her fingers tighter around her darkwood staff. The psionic crystal atop it hums. One at a time, bolts pop out of the pillar and join the objects floating in the air around Zane. Tools. Rivets and screws. Empty shell casings. Splinters of bone. They drift around her absently. The floor tremors under her feet as the panels start to bend upwards. Zane tastes blood, running thick over her lips. Blood on the pillar. Blood that makes up the painted eye at the centre of the spiral, unblinking.

  Just like the bird.

  ‘Zane.’

  She turns away from the bird and its black eyes and the way it never blinks them. Commissar Raine is standing there with her pistol drawn, but not raised. A threat in waiting. Zane finds she cannot speak. It is as if her lips have been sealed by all of that blood. The objects circle her like a storm, with lightning arcing between them. Raine does not flinch.

  ‘Control,’ Raine says, the word carrying clear.

  The pistol does not move. The barrel is round and dark, like the eye painted in blood. Like the eyes of the bird. Like Raine’s eyes, unblinking.

  ‘Control,’ Zane slurs.

  More blood finds its way into her mouth.

  ‘Tell me about the tree,’ Raine says.

  ‘About the tree,’ Zane says, her voice a rasp. ‘The singing tree.’

  ‘And why is it called the singing tree?’ Raine asks.

  Zane blinks. Against the back of her eyelids she sees it. The singing tree standing on the cliff’s edge, the roots curling over it like the bird’s talons around the girder. The bone-white branches reaching up to meet Antar’s thunderhead sky.

  ‘Because that is where we would go to sing to Him on Earth,’ she says. ‘Because it was as close as you could get to the heavens.’

  ‘And He spoke to you there,’ Raine says.

  ‘In the rustle of the leaves,’ Zane says.

  ‘What did He say?’ Raine asks.

  Zane feels the ache in her bones lessen. The objects orbiting her begin their fall to earth.

  ‘That I will be tested,’ she says. ‘And that I must never break.’

  Metal objects clatter off the metal floor, and it sounds like a storm.

  ‘Lydia Zane,’ Zane says, finishing the ritual words. ‘Primaris psyker. Graded Epsilon. Eleventh Antari Rifles.’

  The cables connecting to her scalp click as they cool. Zane wipes her hand through the blood on her face, painting a red streak up the back of it.

  ‘Apologies, commissar,’ she says, bowing low. ‘It is this place. The darkness in it.’

  ‘The Sighted?’ Raine asks.

  ‘I know the shape of their darkness,’ Zane says. ‘This is different. Things are changing.’

  ‘If you see anything, tell me,’ Raine says.

  Zane knows that she means foresee, not just see, but it still feels like a cruel joke given the bird. The bird that she has been seeing for months now, since she walked the crystal tunnels on Gholl. The bird that she will speak of to no one, especially not to Raine, because to do so would be to invite death.

  Because Zane knows that, like every instant of her life so far, the bird is just another test, and that she will not break.

  Sergeant Daven Wyck waits until the commissar has gone after the witch before he fetches Jona Veer’s rifle. He knows better than to do something like that in front of her. That it’s better not to draw her eyes at all if he can help it. Around him, the rest of his Wyldfolk are securing the area at the end of the assembly line, watching for Sighted movement in the smoke. They tend their rifles and replace spent powercells and share out grenades and charges. Clean their bloodied combat blades on their fatigues. Wyck slings Veer’s rifle over his shoulder by the strap, then takes his knife and his grenades too. Veer hadn’t used even one of them. So stupid, not to shoot, or act at all.

  Even more so to get found out.

  ‘Really, Dav?’ Awd says.

  Wyck gives his second a look. The sort that says shut up.

  ‘He isn’t going to use them, is he?’ he says.

  Awd looks as though he’s smiling, but it’s just the way the burn scars tug at the skin of his face. His eyes aren’t smiling at all.

  ‘You’d truly leave him with nothing for where he’s going?’ Awd asks.

  Wyck looks down at Veer’s body and remembers the way he spoke, with that lilt of the Vales. It’s the same place that Wyck grew up before he was tithed to the Rifles, all deep black lakes and tangled forests. It’s a big place, with the people spread thin. Wyck didn’t know Veer then. He didn’t know him now either, not really, but he was kin all the same. Even if he was a coward, and a stupid one at that. Wyck stoops and puts back the knife. Awd’s right. He can’t leave Veer with nothing for when judgement comes.

  ‘There,’ he says. ‘Now it’s up to him to answer for his deeds.’

  Awd nods. ‘As we all will, in death.’

  Wyck shakes his head. ‘Death will have to catch me first,’ he says.

  That makes Awd laugh so hard he starts to cough, a wet hacking sound from deep in his chest. It’s the flamer he carries that makes his lungs rattle that way. All the ashes from the fuel and the things he burns.

  ‘Death will have to be lucky,’ Awd says. ‘Sharp soul like you.’


  Wyck smiles, but it doesn’t go deeper than his teeth. He curls his hands into fists. They ache from fighting. From every trigger pull, every swipe of the knife. From throwing punches and breaking bones. That ache doesn’t stop him wanting to fight, though. To cut and shoot and kill. If anything, it makes him want it more.

  ‘Wyck.’

  He turns to see Hale standing there. The captain definitely notices the extra lasrifle and the grenades, but he says nothing about either. Wyck has known Hale a long time. Longer than he’s had to call him captain.

  ‘We are pushing the Gate,’ Hale says. ‘I need your Wyldfolk up front.’

  The order is no surprise. Wyck runs his twelve-strong infantry squad fast and sharp, so Hale always puts them in the teeth of it.

  ‘Aye, sir,’ Wyck says. ‘I wouldn’t be anywhere else.’

  Hale claps him on the shoulder and for the sparest instant Wyck’s instinct is to react as if he’s been hit. He has to consciously stop himself from throwing a punch at his captain and force himself into stillness. It’s the adrenaline, mostly.

  ‘Fire and thunder,’ Hale says.

  Wyck thinks about the way his blood burns and his heartbeat rolls like a drum and the old words seem almost funny. He has to stop himself laughing, just like he had to stop himself throwing that punch.

  ‘Fire and thunder,’ he says, instead.

  It takes Raine and the Antari another hour to fight their way from the assembly lines into the casting halls. The colossal, vaulted chambers are the midpoint of the forge complex, and the most direct path to the forge halls and the Delta Gate beyond. Like the rest of the Forge Primary, the casting halls are still working unabated despite the conflict taking place across the complex. All around Raine, vast machines judder and roar. Overhead, great buckets of molten steel are raised by lifters and poured, spitting, into the moulds beneath. Censers swing over the moulds, and slaved cherubim drop ritual ashes, still running on subroutines that were set long before the war began. The panels move down the line to be beaten, quenched and cooled by blasts of dirty water, filling the halls with smoke, steam and the smell of industry.

  To Raine, it feels like running through hell. It makes her long for the icy, ocean-spray winters of Gloam, where she was trained. For clothes stiff with frost, and for the misting of breath in the air.

  The casting halls are occupied by dug-in squads of Sighted infantry. Most of them are sworn rebels and traitors that wear blue and grey flak plate and the trappings of heretics. Mirrored glass on bits of cord. Feathers that pierce their skin. The spiral-eye symbol, daubed in red. The rest are faith-breakers, a mixture of manufactorum workers, tech-savants and defected Laxian soldiery that have torn away their icons and excised their loyalty tattoos. Raine cannot say which disgusts her more, but no matter the nature of their betrayal, they will all be granted the same fate.

  Death.

  ‘Leave none standing!’ she cries, as she charges into combat alongside the Antari.

  One of the Sighted looms from the steam and smoke. His eyes are solid black, and his teeth are filed to sharp points. Heretic sigils run and bleed on the Sighted’s flak armour, and the heavy, two-handed sword he carries seems to swallow what little light there is. Raine dodges him as he swings for her with that heavy blade. It could take her head clean off if it were to hit her, but the Sighted plants it in the riveted metal of the floor instead, where it sticks for an instant.

  An instant is all Raine needs.

  She opens the Sighted up from belt to throat with an upward swing of her own powered blade. As he falls, she fires her pistol past him, knocking another of the heretics to the ground in a burst of blood. Behind him, there are more. Dozens more. Hale is right beside her, his laspistol drawn. It’s a heavy variant with warding words carved into the grip in Antari script. One sleeve of his fatigues is torn and smoking where las-fire has caught him, and his flak armour has been scored by a dozen blades.

  ‘They are different,’ Hale says, between breaths. ‘They have always had numbers, and ferocity, but this is more than that. They are well-armed. Organised.’

  Raine fires her pistol as the Sighted fall back towards their own lines and the cover of the forge machinery. They are doing it in good order, under smoke. Some carry slab shields, protecting those beside and behind them, making a mobile defensive line. On Drast, they fought her as if their minds were lost, until they had no limbs left to do it with. They dropped their rifles in favour of knives, because they placed more value on blood than survival. They were dangerous, but they were feral, and fractious. Zane’s words echo in Raine’s ears.

  Things are changing.

  ‘You are right,’ she says to Hale. ‘But we will kill them all the same.’

  Hale nods, and speaks his next words into the company vox-channel.

  ‘All squads advance,’ he says. ‘We break them as they run!’

  Raine raises her sword. Misted water from the machinery hisses on Evenfall’s powered blade. ‘Give them death,’ she shouts. ‘In the Emperor’s name!’

  The Antari of Grey Company cheer. The Hartkin. The Mistvypers. The Pyrehawks. The ones to cheer the loudest are those right beside her in the teeth of it. Wyck’s Wyldfolk. They are leading the push, like always. Hale uses Wyck as a blade’s edge, because it is what he is good for.

  ‘Yulia!’ Wyck shouts. ‘Deal with those shields!’

  Yulia Crys grins and unslings her grenade launcher. Raine takes cover in the shadow of a casting machine for the moment it fires. The noise of it is like thunder, a series of rapid, automatic thumps that puts half a dozen grenades in the Sighted’s lines, in and around those slab shields. They detonate almost immediately. Raine can’t see the damage for all the smoke and the fire, but she hears it. The crack of armour and bone. Screams. The scattering of debris landing around her.

  ‘What shields, sarge?’ Crys shouts.

  Wyck laughs. It is an unpleasant sound.

  ‘Keep pushing forward!’ Raine shouts.

  The breath she takes tastes of ash and smoke, and blood too. The Sighted that Crys’ grenades didn’t kill are running now, much less ordered. Raine fires Penance twice, putting two of them down with quick kill shots. The Wyldfolk light the casting halls with bright flashes of las-fire all around her. The tide has turned. The Sighted are faltering. Dying. But then Raine is hit by a heavy calibre round that impacts against her silver chest-plate and puts a fist-sized dent in it. It knocks the air from her lungs and cracks something in her chest, knocking her aim out. Raine’s vision swims, but she catches sight of the Sighted who shot her. He is a tall, whipcord-thin man wearing blue-grey carapace with a cut stone replacing one of his eyes. It is a mark of rank on them, a stone like that. He raises his snub-nosed shotgun to fire again and smiles. Raine raises her pistol, but before she can pull the trigger Wyck slams into the Sighted and knocks him onto his back. Raine hears the shotgun go off. Hears Wyck laugh. She makes an effort to breathe until it isn’t agony to do it. The Wyldfolk have the other Sighted dead or running. She makes her way to where Wyck is kneeling. The Sighted underneath him is a mess. His throat is open and pumping blood all over the floor.

  ‘Too slow,’ Wyck says, softly. ‘Much too slow.’

  ‘Enough,’ Raine says to him. ‘On your feet.’

  He looks up at her. For an instant, there’s no recognition in those grey eyes of his. Barely any grey either. It’s all swallowed up by the black of his pupils. But then he blinks and takes a ragged breath.

  ‘Enough,’ he says, getting to his feet. ‘Yes, commissar.’

  His voice is deliberate and careful. His use of her rank even more so. Wyck often cloaks himself in obedience and piety when he is being watched.

  ‘He said something,’ Wyck says. ‘That we can’t kill the life they will make here.’

  The words, and the implication of them, turn Raine’s stomach. She knows w
hat the Sighted are capable of. She has seen it first hand, on Gholl and Drast, and all of the worlds before them. Devastation, and desecration. Whole populations sacrificed in rites and rituals. Blood spilt on a massive scale, all in the name of their false prophets.

  And now the Sighted intend to make life.

  Whether it is soldiers or slaves, or something worse, Raine cannot allow it.

  ‘Whatever it is that they intend, we will stop them,’ she says. ‘At any cost.’

  Raine thinks then of the machines that the Antari have been charged with capturing. Those that would cause catastrophe if the enemy were to use them.

  Here, and across the crusade front.

  Wyck flinches and turns to look up the avenue, towards the Sighted’s lines, where the traitor infantry disappear into the smoke and steam.

  ‘There’s something coming,’ he says. ‘Something heavy.’

  Raine strains her ears over the sounds of the casting machines and then she hears it too. Heavy, clanking footsteps.

  ‘Make ready!’ she shouts.

  The rest of Grey Company have caught up to them now. They take what cover they can behind the casting machines and reload their rifles and pistols. Water spray from the machines runs off the brim of Raine’s hat, mingling with the sweat in her eyes. Steam rolls across the avenue like ocean fog.

  Through it stride three armoured shapes, half as tall again as the tallest of the Antari. They have domed heads and heavy fists that end in blaster weapons. Carapace-mounted flamethrowers track back and forth on their shoulders. The kastelan automata are stripped back to bare steel, save for the great red spirals painted on their domed heads. At the centre of each is a slit-pupiled eye. With them moves a figure that is human only in shape, dribbling oil onto the forge floor from beneath its black robes. Mechadendrites thrash at its back. The tech-priest turns its face to the Antari, to Raine, and it blares machine noise from the grille of its mouth.