The Darkling Hours - Rachel Harrison Read online

  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.

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  Cover illustration by Marc Lee.

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  Table of Contents

  Cover

  The Darkling Hours – Rachel Harrison

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘Honourbound’

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  The Darkling Hours – Rachel Harrison

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘Honourbound’

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  The Darkling Hours – Rachel Harrison

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘Honourbound’

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license