Execution - Rachel Harrison Read online

  The first time Raine saw a forest was after the scholam, when she first went to war as a junior commissar. The smell comes back to her as Andren speaks. Such a strange smell. Wet and rich and living.

  ‘The woodsman’s son followed his father’s path, but soon found it blocked by coiling briars,’ Andren continues. ‘When he turned back, they stood behind him too. The woodsman’s son waited, hoping they would uncoil and let him pass. The forest grew dark. The shadows long. The woodsman’s son grew hungry. He could not wait any longer, so he pushed his way through the briars. They snagged at his clothes and raked him with their thorns. The boy cursed the briars. Cursed the forest. Then he set to running, bleeding from the dozens of shallow cuts they had given him.’

  Andren wipes the blade of his knife on the leg of his fatigues and sheathes it.

  ‘The woodsman’s son tried to run home, but the path seemed to wend in ways it hadn’t before. The cuts he had been given kept bleeding until he was weak. Until he stumbled and fell. Still, he did not stop bleeding. Not until every drop was spilt and taken by the forest. For cuts from the wyldfolk never close, and they always kill.’

  ‘That is how it goes?’ Raine says.

  ‘That is how it goes.’

  For a moment, they both just watch the blood well up on Andren’s thumb.

  ‘A whole year, and I haven’t heard an Antari story yet that isn’t made up of blood and death,’ Raine says.

  Andren looks at her and laughs.

  ‘Aren’t everyone’s?’ he says.

  Raine watches her timepiece again as the mounted guns roar. The glass is scuffed from use, and there is a tiny fracture in the edge of it, right at the very top of the face. The fracture has been there since the day it came into her possession. It does not seem right to fix it. To undo the damage.

  She opens a vox channel to two of the other sergeants that fell under Lun’s command. Now her blood to bear. They are far along the line from her position, hunkered in their own stretches of the earthworks.

  ‘Hartkin,’ she says. ‘Mistvypers. Acknowledge.’

  ‘Aye, commissar,’ says Selk in reply. The Mistvyper sergeant’s voice is a semi-mechanical rasp, thanks to the augmetics replacing a good deal of her larynx.

  ‘Receiving, commissar.’

  By contrast, Rom Odi’s voice is soft, with the strong lilt of Antar’s southern settlements.

  ‘We move on the next cycling,’ Raine says. ‘Up to the shield and through it. Once we reach the other side, the guns will no longer have sight on you.’

  ‘Nor will their rebels, when I have finished with them,’ Selk says.

  Raine would expect nothing less of Selk. The Mistvyper is one of the regiment’s best marksmen. Andren often says she should have been a Duskhound.

  ‘Breach at the base of your target bastion, then make haste to the twelfth level,’ Raine says. ‘We will silence the guns from there.’

  Her eyes flick to her timepiece. There are mere moments until the guns cycle. Her limbs burn in anticipation of the charge.

  ‘Ready yourselves,’ she says.

  ‘Aye, commissar,’ Selk says.

  ‘On your mark,’ says Odi.

  She looks along the line.

  ‘Ten seconds,’ she shouts.

  Around her, the Antari brace themselves against the earthworks. Raine can hear Zane humming to herself in the scant moments between the firing of the guns. It’s a song Andren hums sometimes. Something from Antar.

  ‘Five!’

  The hand ticks down, approaching that tiny fracture in the glass.

  ‘Four!’

  Wyck laughs, all edges.

  ‘Three!’

  Andren Fel steeples his fingers, that same Antari gesture.

  ‘Two!’

  Crys puts her hand on the top of the earthworks.

  ‘Forwards!’

  Raine calls the charge as she leaps up the slope and out of the trench. The mounted guns run dry with a whine. The cycling starts, the clatter echoing across the open ground in front of her.

  Raine runs. Her heart hammers in her ears. The air is dust and dirt and smoke that catches in her throat, stings her eyes. Beside her, the Wyldfolk run too. Andren’s Duskhounds are a couple of paces behind with Crys and Zane. She can hear the psyker’s ragged breathing. The Mistvypers and the Hartkin are moving up from their own positions along the trench network.

  As they run, the Antari forces still within the trench line start their own concentrated assault, pummelling the void shield with mortars and rockets and long-range autocannon fire. The void shield flickers, but doesn’t fall. It’s not expected to. Their assault is a distraction. A means to draw that baleful eye away from Raine and her platoon. Spears of light punch up into the sky far to Raine’s left, and the vox crackles in her ear.

  ‘We have been noticed, commissar. They aren’t pleased.’

  Devri sounds pleased, though. The captain of the fourth platoon is the type who wants desperately to prove his worth. To write legends. That fervour makes him endlessly useful.

  ‘Keep it up,’ Raine says, between breaths. ‘As much noise as you can.’

  ‘More thunder,’ Devri says. ‘Aye, commissar.’

  A moment later, Raine hears a distant series of booms, as if the surface of Drast is trying to throw them all clear. Devri’s thunder. The noise makes her heart sing as she runs.

  The land they have to cross to reach the fortress walls was once fortified with forward staging posts and bunkers, and expansive airfields for the Drastian airforce to mobilise from. The berths and refuelling stations are now blasted wrecks, the smooth rockcrete cracked and torn up. Trench lines have been carved into the earth by both sides, wounds cut deep into the face of Drast. Raine and her soldiers run between the slumped remains of fortifications and foxholes; between the burned-out shells of tanks and jagged-edged craters. Everywhere there are coils of razor wire. Those Antari soldiers who pushed forward the previous day are tangled in them, bloodied, torn and dead. They are not the only bodies. Rebels and Antari alike lay all around, whole and in pieces. Looming over all of this is the fortress, a slab-sided edifice that has stood, unbroken on the hill, for a thousand years or more. It is still unbroken. Untouched, even. Protected by a void shield of ancient design, there is not a mark on the stone that the rebels did not put there themselves. The greatest of these is the baleful eye that the rebels have taken for their name, rendered in crimson and gold on a ragged banner that hangs half the height of the fortress wall.

  ‘They do not see us!’

  The shout comes from Gryl. He is running ahead and to Raine’s left.

  ‘An eye like that, and still they are blind!’

  Gryl laughs loud at his own joke, at least until a bolt of high-powered lasfire silences him. He falls forwards, dead. A series of cracks follow, and more lasbolts blaze the air. It’s not coming from the fortress. There are rebel soldiers firing from their own trenches and emplacements all around them. Raine sees the glint of rust-red carapace armour, deliberately dulled with mud and dust. She hears the lies the rebels shout, carried on the wind. Blasphemies that make her grit her teeth.

  ‘To those without faith, we bring thunder!’ she cries. ‘Put them down!’

  She aims her bolt pistol at the closest of the rebels as he comes up over the top of his own trench. He is an officer, wearing a curved chestplate trimmed with gold. Across the silver surface he has carved that baleful eye. He’s done the same to the skin of his face. Dozens more rebels swarm behind him, clawing their way up and out of the earthworks. The officer raises his own bolt pistol. Opens his mouth to shout. For a moment it is like looking into a dark mirror.

  Then Raine fires.

  That chestplate can’t protect him from a headshot. His body falls backwards into the trench. Onto his own rebel soldiers. The Antari cheer.

 
; ‘Forwards!’ Raine shouts.

  She sees Wyck up ahead. He’s firing his rifle in twitchy bursts. Twice she sees him shoot out their knees, rather than go for a clean kill.

  Yulia Crys ducks into the shadow of a collapsed hangar, then takes a grenade from the bandolier slung across her chest. She pitches it hard and high. It lands well within the rebels’ trench network, detonating with a throaty boom.

  Lydia Zane flicks her hand upwards and a rebel soldier flies ten or twelve metres into the air. He screams until he hits the earth. Andren Fel and his Duskhounds move around her, making clean kills, never passing in front of one another. Five shadows in matt-black armour with snarling faces painted on their masks.

  ‘How long before we have the big guns to worry about?’ Andren says over the vox.

  Raine fires her bolt pistol. The soldier charging her falls backwards, his rifle firing wildly into the sky. She has been counting since they left the trench.

  ‘Three minutes,’ she says. ‘Roughly.’

  ‘We are wading when we should be running.’

  ‘Agreed,’ Raine says.

  She’s about to call out to push through when a bolt of lasfire hits her shoulder and knocks the breath from her lungs. It spins her. Staggers her. Her cap of office falls from her head, landing in the dirt. Raine stops. A second lasbolt scores her thigh, burning like a brand.

  Pain blooms in her shoulder, in her leg. It’s dizzying, but she does not falter. Raine finds her breath. Grits her teeth. Then she stoops and picks up her peaked cap, letting lasbolts crackle around her. She puts it back on her head, square and straight, then looks to the rebel soldier who shot her. Like the officer, he has cut his face into patterns. Between those angry red lines, his mouth splits, showing blackened stubs of teeth.

  ‘Theatrics,’ he says, in accented Gothic.

  He drops his rifle and draws a long, curved combat knife from his belt. His intention is to charge her, to force her to duel him. Severina Raine does not enter into honour duels with heretics. She shoots the rebel soldier before he can put one foot forward. The bolt-round makes a crater of his chest, and he falls backwards, bloody foam spilling from his mouth. She keeps moving, firing again to finish him.

  When she looks around, Raine sees Andren watching her. He doesn’t say a thing, just turns away and goes after the rebels. But Andren Fel isn’t the only one. She can feel the eyes of all of the Antari on her, even as they fight and die. Just glimpses and glances, but each one significant. Each one followed by a battle cry.

  Not theatrics, Raine thinks, as she draws her sword. Symbolism.

  ‘One for one,’ Andren says. ‘Now you owe me a story.’

  It’s fully dark now. In the landing fields behind them, the Antari are performing combat drills. Raine wonders if they would be sleeping either, if they could. The fortress keeps drawing her eyes. A distant grey shape, lit by floodlights and fires. The unbreakable fortress of Morne.

  ‘I was raised in one of the scholams on Gloam,’ she says. ‘Do you know it?’

  Andren shakes his head.

  ‘Gloam is a cold world with a dim star,’ Raine says. ‘No forests. No fauna but vermin. The oceans that remain are made black by industry. It hates life, yet we persist there, as if to spite it.’

  ‘We are at our best when we are pitted against things that hate us,’ Andren says. ‘Worlds included.’

  Raine nods.

  ‘There was a task they had us do,’ she says. ‘A test, I suppose.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ he says.

  She knows he can. He lived it as well, in the scholam on Antar. She’s heard the stories. Seen the scars.

  ‘Gloam is a hive,’ she says. ‘Layers stacked up on one another so you can’t say for sure where the real ground is anymore. In the deeper layers, the vermin grow big. They are numerous and cunning.’

  Andren looks out to the fortress. The shadows catch in the deep scar that runs up his cheek and across the bridge of his nose. His grey eyes narrow.

  ‘As vermin are inclined to be,’ he says.

  The void shield that protects the fortress is invisible, but Raine knows when they are getting close. It’s not because of their position relative to the grey stone, or because of how far they’ve run.

  It’s how the fortress looks, slightly out of step with the world around it. How the air is sharp with ozone. How minute reverberations run along her bones and rattle her teeth. Somewhere between pleasant and painful.

  ‘That feeling is hateful,’ Wyck says, clearly tending more towards the latter. ‘It’s like being boiled from the inside.’

  The sergeant is breathing hard as he runs. It isn’t because he’s tired. It’s because he’s frenzied. His arms are scorched with lasburns, and the bayonet has snapped clean off his rifle. He left it buried in a rebel soldier’s chest.

  ‘So we just go right through?’ Wyck asks, as he runs up the shattered hull of a tank.

  ‘Right through,’ Raine says. ‘The shield might be proof against bombardments and energy weapons, but it won’t stop us.’

  That’s what every report and technical specification she has read says, anyway.

  In front of them, a full squad of rebel soldiers charge from the shadows of a collapsed pillbox. They are screaming, but the words aren’t Drastian. They are something odious that turns Raine’s stomach. The Antari clash with the rebels, green-grey striking against crimson. Wyck drops two of them with bursts of lasfire, then slides down the other side of the tank. A third charges Raine. He is clad in thick red armour plating from his knees to his neck. Imperial sigils have been scratched out. Defaced. He bellows at her. She should see the whites of his eyes this close, but there are no whites to see. Just black orbs that shine like ocean stones. For a moment, she thinks of nightfall on Gloam. Of the sound of the sea, hidden by the darkness. How it roars, hungering for the land.

  The rebel swings at her with a jagged-edged sword; the kind that will snag when it cuts. Raine knocks the blade aside with her own. The power field of her sword crackles. She ducks under the next swing, dodges the one after. It reminds her of close-quarters training with new recruits back at the scholam. The rebel is bigger than her, so he thinks he’s stronger.

  He’s wrong.

  Raine turns away another frenzied blow. The rebel curses in his own tongue, but he’s cut short when she drives her sword through his chest. Raine pulls downwards, shoulder to hip, splitting the plated armour just as easily as the flesh beneath it. When she pulls her sword free, blood clings to the blade, despite the power field. It is black too, like his eyes. She kicks the gutted soldier onto his back and sets to running again, her legs burning. That’s the last of them. There’s not another rebel standing between them and the void shield.

  ‘How long?’ says Wyck, keeping pace with her.

  Raine is about to answer when the clattering noise from the fortress grinds to a halt. It is swiftly replaced by a building whine.

  The rebels have finished reloading the guns.

  They are out of time.

  ‘There’s a particular kind of vermin on Gloam,’ Raine says. ‘An especially dangerous kind. The drill abbots called them sin-thieves, because they would come from their holes to gnaw on the wicked and the weak, growing fat on their sin.’

  ‘Sound like rats to me,’ says Andren.

  ‘Perhaps they were, once,’ she says. ‘But they’d become something else. Something worse. As things often do when they are left to their own devices.’

  Andren nods.

  ‘One of the scholam boys awoke screaming one night because one of them was sitting on his chest, biting the flesh from his arms. It was the size of a mastiff.’

  Andren does a low whistle.

  ‘He killed it, him and one of the others, but his wounds went bad by morning. Everyone said that all the sin they stole had poured back into him.’
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  ‘And you call us superstitious,’ Andren says.

  Raine permits herself a smile.

  ‘The drill abbots could not bear it, nor could we. None of us wanted to go bad. To have stolen sin poured into us by a vermin’s teeth.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  Raine’s smile fades.

  ‘We went to find the nest.’

  ‘Through the shield!’ Raine’s vox broadcast goes out to the Wyldfolk and Duskhounds with her. The Mistvypers and Hartkin along the line, too.

  ‘Crys,’ Raine calls the combat engineer to her side. ‘Gather up the demo charges. We need that breach as fast as you’re able.’

  Crys grins and tugs at her bandolier.

  ‘I even saved my grenades, sir,’ she says. ‘Well, most of them.’

  She looks back over her shoulder to another of the Wyldfolk. One who is a good way behind.

  ‘Varn,’ she voxes back. ‘Hey, Varn, move your arse! I need your charges.’

  Varn shakes his head. He is a big man. Big enough to make the grenade launcher he carries look small.

  ‘I am not built for this sort of running,’ he says, picking up his pace. ‘Not with all this kit.’

  ‘I carry kit just like yours,’ Crys says. ‘You just like your rations too much.’

  Lydia Zane is close by when she turns to look at Varn. Her eyes go wide.

  ‘Run,’ she says, in her rough-edged voice.

  ‘What?’ Varn says, panicking.

  ‘Move!’

  Raine yells her order at Varn, but her voice is lost beneath the roar of the wall-mounted guns as they fire. Raine sees Varn duck his head and throw up his arms, but the rounds never hit him, they stop short and burst instead into dozens of bright white blooms of light. Zane’s hands are up, curled like claws. She’s shielding him. The psyker starts to bleed from her nose and ears.

  ‘Through the void shield!’ Raine shouts to the others over the vox. ‘Through the damned shield, now!’

  Varn keeps running. High above, the guns track across the line, angling to follow him and the others that Zane is protecting. Her kine-shield starts to crack.