Shadowbreaker - Steve Parker Read online

  Bastogne growled back, ‘If his lordship says you try, you bloody well try.’

  But Sartutius had tried, and it was clear that Epsilon’s bone-engraver had done all too good a job on her agent.

  There was only one option left.

  Bastogne reached in and lifted the cylinder from the case. Somewhat gingerly, he pressed the release on the hinged titanium cap. With his other hand, he took a pair of slim metal tongs, dipped the ends into the top of the cylinder and withdrew one of the squirming creatures.

  The worm’s puckered facial orifice immediately rolled back, revealing a cluster of red cilia that began questing in the air, seeking living flesh. At the base of those cilia, Bastogne saw glimpses of the small black bone-cutting beak.

  By all the saints, how he hated these things!

  He closed the cap and placed the cylinder with its remaining worms back in the case. With the tongs held well away from his body, he crossed back to the centre of the room and the wretched man suspended there.

  He stopped a metre in front of Lyndon and raised the worm slowly towards his face. Sensing the proximity of a living host, the worm’s cilia began moving frantically, greedily. The creature writhed, struggling to break free from the grip of the plasteel that held it.

  ‘You know what this is,’ said Bastogne, voice low, resigned. It was not a question.

  The regret was genuine. Truth be told, he didn’t want to do this. Lyndon was forcing him, and for what? The ordo always got what it wanted in the end.

  The prisoner raised bloodshot eyes under a bruised and swollen brow and saw the squirming organism just inches in front of him.

  He twisted away in panic, feebly yanking on his restraints. The two men holding the ropes tensed, fixing him in place, the muscles of their forearms hardening like lengths of plasteel cable.

  Lyndon knew this creature. Seven years ago, he’d had to use one, and for seven years, he’d tried and failed to forget that day.

  ‘Don’t,’ he breathed. ‘Epsilon still serves the ordo. I serve the ordo. I cannot tell you what you want to know… But have faith. Please. Just… don’t do this.’

  The look of reluctance on Bastogne’s face as he brought the creature closer to Lyndon’s nose was no act. ‘I have orders, agent. The ordo needs to know why she went dark. I need her location. Give me reason not to use this before it’s too late.’

  How Lyndon wished he could talk. His mind was already busy making the sentences he could speak to avoid this worst of fates. The worm meant more than death – it meant an agonising descent into madness, the dissolution of his mind. Once it was inside him, it could not be stopped. And still, no matter how much he yearned to escape that fate, he would not – could not – betray her ladyship’s trust. Epsilon’s discovery was of greater importance than the life of any man. The chance that Al Rashaq was no mere legend, that it could conceivably be found and exploited… It was worth many more lives than his.

  It could change everything.

  So Lyndon held his tongue and steeled himself for the mind-destroying agony that was about to become his entire existence.

  Two

  Haluk scowled, baring white teeth in a darkly tanned face.

  All around him, heresy.

  Faithless dogs. Traitors. Xenos-loving scum!

  He pushed his way between them, jostling, shoulders set hard, knocking one or two off balance. No false apologies. These people had forgotten their debt. The God-Emperor of Mankind had not suffered in singular agony for the last ten thousand years that man and xenos might live as one.

  The Tychonite majority – the city people, as Haluk thought of them – had cast the Imperial creed aside, so greedy to share in all that the filthy pogs1 had offered.

  For over three decades, this world had been part of the t’au domain. Since day one, the Tychonite majority had embraced the blue-skins as saviour and kin. Not so the old tribes, the loyal, the unblinded.

  Someone bumped into him from behind. Another from his left. Brief apologies. So damned busy here in the capital. The crowds so dense. And the noise, the constant buzz of conversation, the braying of beasts laden with goods…

  So unlike the haunted, rain-drenched havens of the far north.

  The souk through which Haluk moved was a tangle of covered alleys and small market squares filled to bursting with brightly robed figures haggling over price and quantity. There were grains, spices, fruits, salted meats, even officially approved narcotics in unprocessed, leafy form.

  No women, of course. They were forbidden from entering the souk. Since the first days of commerce on Tychonis, the markets were places for men alone. Women were thought to bring bad luck here. In their presence, negotiations would fail, partnerships would dissolve, agreements would fracture. Whole businesses would collapse and die. On seeing a single female, even a girl-child, the superstitious traders would throw their hands up to the sky, swear coarsely and pack up shop for the day.

  Haluk was glad to see some things, at least, had not changed.

  His gladness was short-lived. Though no women were present, the crowds were dotted with others that did not belong. A multitude of aliens mingled and bartered with the merchants and shoppers. Some were of the so-called integrated races – a mish-mash of diverse and bizarre beings from far-flung worlds which had submitted to the domination of the arrogant t’au.

  Most, however, were t’au themselves. Water caste. Merchants and traders.

  Blue-skinned dogs!

  Typically shorter than their human counterparts, they were not easily spotted in the densest parts of the throng. But every so often a gap would open in the churning sea of commerce and Haluk would see one of the wiry, bony, blue-skinned curs in spotless robes accented with high-tech accessories and shining status tokens. His upper lip curled in distaste. The hairless, earless heads; the noseless faces; the four-fingered hands… How he despised them.

  As Haluk glared unnoticed at a pog merchant with particularly dark blue skin, he found himself wondering how they did it, how they managed to speak, to move, to gesture in such a human way. It seemed so effortless to them.

  Was it something they did consciously, this mirroring? A clever trick to make themselves seem less alien, to ingratiate themselves?

  Conscious or not, Haluk saw through the deception. He saw behind the mask. The Speaker of the Sands had chosen well. His heart was hardened and his mind unclouded. He would not be swayed from his purpose.

  The t’au trader made a jest to the three men with whom he was bargaining. All laughed – warm, genuine, friendly. Haluk turned away, unable to stomach more.

  These men fraternise with murderers. Do they know nothing of our struggle?

  He pressed on. Currency was changing hands all around him, the incessant buzz of conversation and negotiation punctuated with the jangle and clink of coins. Here in the western capital, Chu’sut Ka – simply Chusuk before the invasion – Imperial coinage had been replaced by lozenge-shaped discs of a strange alloy, light but incredibly strong.

  T’au money. T’au rules. T’au culture.

  They have tainted everything.

  Not so in the rebel-held Northern Territories, the so-called Drowned Lands where Haluk had been raised. There, the people still used the Imperial ducat and centim, coins that bore the proud double-headed eagle, the aquila of the Imperium of Man.

  Once the reckoning was over, all men would use them again.

  So much had to be put right, but it would all come to pass in time.

  The Speaker’s visions had been powerful. The dream of the loyalist tribes would become a reality.

  I will not live to see it, thought Haluk. But that is the price all martyrs pay. My reward awaits me in the Life Hereafter.

  He moved on, eyes hard. Voices called out to him from the brightly coloured stalls on either side, announcing today’s prices, but he was not
here to trade. He was kharkeen, a holy warrior on a sacred mission. Here among the crowds of the faithless, he hid in plain sight, waiting for his hour to arrive, to the eyes of those around him just another unremarkable local in an unremarkable place on an unremarkable day.

  It was critical not to draw attention. To climb the tower too early was to risk being marked by t’au surveillance drones. He raised his eyes to the deep blue sky visible between the gaps in the market awnings. No sign of the murderous machines from down here, but they were there, ever present, humming and drifting over the city, looking for rare signs of unrest.

  How Haluk hated the drones. To die at the hands of a mindless machine diminished a man’s soul. It was not a fitting end for a kharkeen. He feared it, that unworthy death. No matter what, he would not let a machine claim his life this day.

  He stopped at a stall, feigning interest in a pair of boots, hand-made, crafted in the old way. As he pretended to consider buying them, he realised he was thirsty.

  So dry here in the summer. So different from the north. It is good. The planet longs to return to the days of the great deserts. She strains under the smothering swathes of green and blue that the pogs have forced on her. We will help her cast them off. Soon, she will shimmer again with the bright gold of endless sands, and our way of life will be restored.

  That would take a total reversal of the blue-skins’ vast planetary engineering project. Their great machines would need to be researched and reset. Simple destruction would avail the Ishtu and Kashtu people little now. As Haluk understood it, the balance point had been tipped. The new weather systems were more or less self-sustaining at this point.

  It had taken centuries for the t’au to turn this former desert world into an agricultural juggernaut supplying foodstuffs to worlds in a dozen other seized systems. It was a change that had all but destroyed the old desert communities and their ancient and noble culture, as it had pushed them to the far north and south where no others chose to live.

  They should have finished the job, but they did not. We will make them regret that.

  The original Tychonite tribes had been well adapted to desert life, to a life that constantly tested and challenged living things. It made men strong and resilient. An easy life made men fat and wasteful. Self-indulgent. The evidence of that was all around him in the souk today.

  Up ahead, he spotted a trio of tall, broad-shouldered men in brown uniforms. They cut through the crowd like ships through water, the merchants parting before them on reflex.

  Polished stubber-guns and tokens of rank winked as they caught the sunlight.

  ISF. Integrated Security Forces.

  Men who had pledged themselves to t’au military service.

  Haluk moved to the side, turned his face away from them and began bartering with a food-seller over the price of a chilled uanoor – a sweet purple fruit native to the more temperate mid-northern latitudes.

  The ISF officers went by, paying him no mind.

  Haluk wished he were armed. He visualised himself stealing up behind them with a poisoned blade and stabbing all three before they could turn. The Speaker and the Kashtu elders had insisted he carry no weapon on him. A wise decision.

  The ISF had joined with the t’au fire caste in pushing his people out, driving them from their homelands. The far north had been their only choice. Haluk had seen the vids, seen men cut down by other men on the orders of the pogs. His people had fought fiercely, but they had been less experienced in those days, unaccustomed to combat with a highly technological and well-organised enemy.

  ‘Well?’ demanded the chubby merchant from his silk pillows. ‘What say you?’

  Haluk was already turning to move on as he said, ‘I suddenly find myself bereft of appetite.’

  The merchant muttered curses at his back as he walked away.

  There was no lessening in the density of the crowds as the sun moved across the sky. Haluk pressed on, pushing through a gaggle of noisy men in the bright orange, yellow and red robes of spice traders. He clashed shoulders with one and the man stopped to glare, expecting to force an apology from Haluk’s lips. He was a large man, well fed, and well appointed judging by the gold he wore. He was probably used to being respected, but if he thought he would intimidate Haluk with that indignant glare, he was wrong. Haluk stared back, eyes cold and hard, as threatening as storm clouds.

  The man found his courage rapidly abandoning him under the tribesman’s eyes. He relented without comment, turned and moved off with his fellows. As they walked away, Haluk heard him tell the others, ‘There’s something ill about that one.’

  Pigs! Their lives were so easy here in the capital. Their children didn’t die of lung-rot. Swamp-haunters never stole their young women from the food-gathering parties. Kroot patrols didn’t roam here, slaughtering anyone they came across.

  Here was safety, health and prosperity for all; just bend the knee before the alien, turn away from the truth, forget that one’s very life was a gift from the God-Emperor. Simply turn from His light and embrace the rule of the xenos.

  Bow before the wisdom and munificence of the Aun.

  Haluk discreetly made the cursing claw with his fingers.

  Life was not meant to be easy. The Emperor did not endure eternal suffering so that ungrateful men might live easy lives.

  The Emperor wanted men to be strong. How else would they survive in a galaxy filled with vile and murderous abominations?

  For all their talk of the Greater Good, their beloved alien credo, the t’au were still a race of invaders, as eager as any other to expand and dominate, whatever it took. Where men resisted, the t’au made war.

  Haluk had been awakened to hatred of the xenos by his mother, Galta. She had often read transcripts of the Speaker’s speeches to Haluk and his siblings before bed.

  No father. Pictures only. Galta’s husband had been killed on a reconnaissance patrol before Haluk’s birth.

  Haluk would go to sleep with dreams of becoming a great hero to his people. In his dreams, the man in the pictures spoke to him of honour and glory.

  Even at six years old, he would wake demanding to be trained.

  Encouraged by his fervour for the transcripts, his mother had asked some of the elders to tutor him in the books of the Imperial creed. By the time he was twelve, Haluk could recite verbatim over seven hundred passages from the writings of various celebrated Imperial saints and Great Ecclesiarchs. How proud she had been! She had hoped he would one day join the Ministorum, but for that to happen, the usurpers would have to be driven out. Even to the most optimistic and dedicated of the faithful, that did not seem a likely prospect in his lifetime. So when Haluk reached the age of nineteen, having grown into a hard, lean, athletic man like his late father, his mother had given her blessing and permitted him to enter the ranks of the holy warriors. The Speaker himself had come to conduct the initiation ceremony with its sharing of the bonding drug, nictou, and the taking of blood oaths.

  That was the day Haluk had become kharkeen, and his path to great glory had begun.

  Weaving his way east through the souk, Haluk recalled the tears that had run down his mother’s cheeks, a mixture of pride and sorrow.

  The kharkeen were not fated to die peacefully in their beds. There would be no grandchildren to soothe a mother’s heart when news of his success came, only the knowledge that her oldest son would walk forever in the warm light of the Great Saviour and eat from His Bountiful Orchards. She’d had that knowledge, at least – that and the hope that perhaps Haluk’s younger brother, Farid, would not follow the same path.

  She hadn’t lived long enough to find out.

  She and the women of her foraging group had been out in the mangroves south-west of their home when a kroot patrol had caught sight of them. The beaked ones slaughtered without compunction. They did not take prisoners. They revelled in butchery.

 
Farid had collapsed, shaking and weeping, when their mother’s remains were brought back to the settlement. A single round to the head had killed her, but much of her flesh had been stripped from her bones. The bite patterns were those of great, sharp beaks.

  The kroot were known to eat the flesh of those they killed.

  Haluk had not wept. Kharkeen shed tears only for the God-Emperor’s pain. Instead, he said a prayer that his mother’s spirit-journey to what lay beyond would be swift and straight, then steeled his heart and renewed his commitment to the secret mission the Speaker had given him.

  Above the noise of the crowds, the hot air of the souk filled with shrill, musical bird-calls, breaking him free from the painful memories.

  The calls of the kjantil, a small avian species which the people of Tychonis had, for as long as history could remember, trained to sing precisely on the hour. This call marked the second hour after midday. It was the sign Haluk had been waiting for. Pushing through a gaggle of men bartering over sacks of sajarti rice, he turned into an alley that opened at its far end into bright sunshine and the broad, baking expanse of the main highway that led to the Inner Districts.

  Already, beige-armoured figures had started appearing on the corners of the roof gardens and terraces lining the road.

  T’au security forces.

  Surveying the streets below, they fingered the grips of their long-barrelled energy weapons. Haluk had seen how accurate and deadly those weapons could be.

  He felt his heart racing, his breath quicken. His moment was almost at hand.

  He turned left and headed north along a narrow street that ran parallel to the main road. He moved against increasing foot traffic now as word spread through the crowds that the procession was approaching. The markets were emptying, everyone moving towards the main road, eager to see the return of the planet’s most senior military figure.

  Shouldering people from his path, Haluk turned down a narrow alley on his right. At the end of it, he found the iron gate he was searching for. There, tied around one of its bars, was the scrap of red cloth he had been told to look for. The gate was unlocked. He pushed it open. The old hinges creaked. He stepped through, closed it behind him and slid beyond it into the cool shadow of a pillared path.