Trials - Rachel Harrison Read online

  Two successive booms from overhead interrupt Raine momentarily. More dirt falls around her and she brushes it from the table. It sticks to her hands.

  ‘It was just one word that he said,’ she says. ‘“Sorry.”’

  ‘Do you think he meant the apology for you, or for himself?’

  ‘Both, I think,’ Raine says. ‘The God-Emperor, too. All who saw.’

  Fel shakes his head. ‘He must have been afraid.’

  Raine remembers the way Yuzoh’s hands shook as he pointed the pistol at her.

  ‘Yes,’ she says, softly. ‘I think he was.’

  She drains the rest of her water. It leaves a fine layer of wet grit and recyc scum behind.

  ‘The next day, Yuzoh had vanished like so many of the others. I reasoned that I must have been his trial, and that he had failed in it. I continued with my training, and my duties, and I waited for my own. I felt dread over it, but that did not stop me wishing for it, too. That probably seems like madness.’

  ‘It doesn’t,’ Fel says. ‘Not at all.’

  Raine smiles, faintly.

  ‘After five days, I returned to my dormitory to find a sealed parchment scroll waiting for me. None of the others had touched it, because they knew what it was, just as I did.’

  ‘The trial,’ Fel says.

  Raine nods. ‘When I opened it, there was a number written there. Five-oh-four. The number of one of the scholam’s isolation cells. The order script beneath it read, Your trial is judgement.’

  Raine shakes her head.

  ‘I was sure then that I was to be hanged or shot. That Yuzoh had been my test, and that I had failed. But there is no denying orders, so I rolled the parchment and took it with me down to cell five-oh-four.’ Raine pauses, remembering. ‘You could hear the ocean everywhere in the spire, but especially in the undercrofts. The water thrashed against the walls as if it wanted to break them. It was dark down there. Cold. The undercrofts weren’t just ice-rimed but covered in thick coats of glittering frost. Five-oh-four was closed but not bolted, and when I opened the door, I saw no abbots. No gallows. I saw that the cell wasn’t for me, and I was not the one who had failed.’

  ‘It was Yuzoh,’ Fel says.

  Raine nods. Just like the night he was sent to kill her, her first sight of Yuzoh in that cell is etched into her memory with exceptional clarity. He had looked like a shade, or a poor pict-capture. Thin, in a way that was more than physical.

  ‘He was manacled by his hands and feet and between us stood a steel table. There was a service pistol sitting on it. The same one he had failed to use on me.’

  Fel exhales a slow breath, but he says nothing.

  ‘He looked up at me the moment he heard the door open,’ Raine says. She remembers Yuzoh’s eyes. They had looked like dark hollows in his face. Desperate. ‘I waited for him to get to his feet, but he didn’t. He just sat there.’

  Raine turns the tin cup in her hands, absently. ‘He spoke, then. He asked if I was there to judge him, and I told him that I was.’

  Those dark hollows in Yuzoh’s face had grown wider then. More desperate.

  ‘He told me to be reasonable. That the trial was a cruelty in a universe that already hates us, and that I shouldn’t give in to the abbots’ bloody games.’

  ‘And what did you say?’ Fel asks.

  ‘Nothing,’ Raine says. ‘So Yuzoh kept talking. He said that he had excelled in every other regard. That he didn’t deserve this. He told me about the heroism and nobility in his bloodline, and how that should be enough to prove his worth.’

  Raine shakes her head. Yuzoh had started crying then, without a sound. No hysteria. Just tears painting slow trails down his face.

  ‘Yuzoh told me that he didn’t want to die. That he’d spared me, and didn’t that mean anything?’

  Fel is watching her carefully now. ‘Didn’t it?’

  Raine has thought about it many times since. In some small way she thinks about Yuzoh every time she makes the choice to take a life in the name of duty. Because it’s always that.

  A choice.

  ‘I told Yuzoh that his failure to kill me was just that,’ she says. ‘A failure. I told him that it was weakness, and that his apology in the dormitory was proof to me that he knew it just as well as I did.’

  ‘So, what did you do?’ Fel asks, quietly.

  Raine remembers picking up the service pistol. The cold weight of it and the sound of Yuzoh’s voice as she took aim. One last word that told her without question that she was correct in her judgement and that Yuzoh was broken, far beyond repair.

  Please.

  ‘I didn’t hesitate,’ she says.

  Fel falls silent then, and so does Raine, and for a moment the only sound is the thunder of the artillery as the Sighted bombardment continues overhead.

  Unbroken.

  About the Author

  Rachel Harrison is the author of the Warhammer 40,000 novel Honourbound, and the short stories ‘Execution’ and ‘A Company of Shadows’, featuring the character Commissar Severina Raine. She has also written the short story ‘Dirty Dealings’ for Necromunda, as well as a number of other Warhammer 40,000 short stories including ‘The Third War’ and ‘Dishonoured’.

  An extract from Honourbound.

  Commissar Severina Raine slides a fresh magazine into her bolt pistol with a hard click. She has replaced the eight-round magazine four times. Thirty-two shots fired.

  Six of them to execute her own troops.

  Raine has fought many wars on many fronts across the Bale Stars, and almost all of them have been against the Sighted, or their splinter cults. She has seen the way they turn worlds with whispers and false promises. The way they set workers against their masters, and guards against those that they are meant to protect. It’s what makes them dangerous. When you battle the Sighted, you battle the people of the Bale Stars too. Scribes and soldiers. Priests and peacekeepers. The poor, the downtrodden, the ambitious and the reckless. For some of those that serve with her, that knowledge is too much. For some it is just fear that means they find the trigger impossible to pull. No matter the reason, they will find themselves looking down the barrel of her pistol, Penance, in turn. Just like Penance, Raine is made for the act of judgement. For the instant before the strike of the hammer and the burst of flame. She understands what it means to pull the trigger, and what it makes her. She is not driven by anger, or malice. That would undermine her purpose, which is the same no matter the crime.

  To eliminate weakness.

  Raine crouches down and takes Jona Veer’s ident-tags from around his neck. They will not be sent back to Antar as with the honoured dead. They will be disposed of at the end of the fight on Laxus Secundus. His name will go with them, to be forgotten in time by everyone but her, because Raine never forgets the dead, honoured or not.

  ‘Commissar.’

  The voice belongs to Captain Yuri Hale. It’s rough-edged, like he is. The captain of Grey Company is tall, like most Antari. Three deep, severe scars run down the left side of his face from hairline to chin. The Antari call him lucky because he managed to keep his eye. They say he must have been graced with that luck by a white witch, or by fate itself. Raine doesn’t believe in luck. She believes that Yuri Hale survives the same way the rest of them do.

  By fighting for every breath.

  ‘More power spikes from the inner forge,’ he says.

  Raine puts Veer’s tags in her pocket, where they clatter against the others, then she gets to her feet and looks to the dust-caked screen on the auspex kit Hale is holding. When the regiment first entered the forges, more than six hours ago, it was registering soft spikes. Now the peaks are jagged, with the regularity of a great, slow heartbeat.

  ‘Whatever the Sighted are doing in there, it’s burning hot,’ Hale says, and he frowns. ‘Kayd’s been picking up enemy vox t
oo.’

  ‘On an open channel?’

  ‘Aye, it’s as if they don’t care if we hear it.’

  ‘Anything of use?’ Raine asks.

  Hale’s frown deepens, and it pulls at the scars on his face. ‘The words were Laxian. Kayd reckons they said something like “it draws near”.’

  Despite the arid heat of the forge, Raine feels a distinct chill at those words. The tactical briefing two days prior had been clear. The primary forge on Laxus Secundus is an invaluable asset, both tactically and logistically, and not just because of the super-heavy tanks built there, but because of what waits in the inner forges. High Command did not disclose the purpose of the machines that Raine and the Antari would find there, only that they must not fall into Sighted hands. That for the enemy to use them successfully would be catastrophic, not just for the battle inside the forges, but for the war effort across Laxus Secundus and the crusade front.

  ‘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.

  Click here to buy Honourbound.

  A Black Library Publication

  First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

  Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

  Cover illustration by John Michelbach.

  Trials © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2019. Trials, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.

  All Rights Reserved.

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-1-78999-407-0

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

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