A Company of Shadows - Rachel Harrison Read online

  ‘Post-mission debrief,’ she says, loud and clear for the vox-recorder. ‘Operation one hundred and sixty-two. The infiltration and destruction of the Sighted stronghold in the Caulder mountain range on Gholl.’

  She uncaps her pen and dips it into the ink.

  ‘Name and rank,’ Raine says.

  Zane doesn’t shift in her chair. Her silver eyes are focused on the surface of the table. Her hands are knitted in her lap. Lye has cleaned the blood off her and stitched her wounds, but it only serves to make her look as though she has been brought up from the mortuary tent. Silver cables run from the ports in her scalp to the psy-reader on the table. She is locked to her seat by the collar bolted at her neck. It is studded with sedative injectors, primed to fire.

  ‘Lydia Zane,’ she says. ‘Primaris psyker. Graded Epsilon. Eleventh Antari Rifles.’

  The psy-reader starts to push out parchment, marking gentle spikes onto the paper with an auto-quill. Raine holds her own pen ready. Ink beads on the point.

  ‘Where were you born?’ she asks.

  Zane still doesn’t shift. ‘On Antar,’ she says. ‘On the western coastline, in a settlement on the cliffs overlooking the sea.’

  More gentle spikes track on the reader. Raine writes down Zane’s words verbatim. She keeps every transcript. Compares and contrasts them. Checks for inconsistencies that might point to a problem.

  ‘What did it look like?’ Raine asks, though she knows. She has asked this question many times.

  ‘The cliffs were grey,’ Zane says. ‘The sea was grey, too. They say that is why our eyes are grey, because they took their colour from the sea and the stones, but that is just a story like so many others.’

  ‘And were there storms?’ Raine asks.

  ‘Storms,’ Zane says. ‘Yes. Especially in the winter months. Rain and hail, but the sea never froze. You cannot freeze so much water.’

  Raine scratches the answer onto the form. ‘And in yourself? Are there storms?’

  Zane scratches at the stitched wound on her forearm. ‘Storms,’ she says again, still looking at that same spot on the table.

  The psy-reader scratches too. The spikes climb a little steeper. Blood bubbles up under Zane’s fingernails.

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘Not storms. Just thoughts. Stories. Shadows.’

  The spikes on the psy-feed grow steeper still. A mountain range, etched in black ink. Just like the Maw.

  ‘Shadows?’ Raine says. ‘What do you mean?’

  Zane finally looks up from that spot on the table. ‘Dark spaces in my head, made from the things that I have done. Nothing more.’

  ‘What sort of things?’ Raine asks.

  A wan smile grows on Zane’s face. ‘Everything,’ she says. ‘Every action casts a shadow, for good or for ill.’

  Raine looks to the feed as the psy-reader’s auto-quill goes back to painting shallow spikes. Even the steepest it has captured are still within the acceptable range. She waits for a few heartbeats, thinking about her own shadows, paraded before her by Verastus in the cave beneath the Maw.

  ‘Will that be all, commissar?’ Zane asks.

  Raine watches for a moment more, but the peaks stay shallow and even. The auto-quill doesn’t twitch, and now neither does Zane. She is still again, not worrying at her wounds.

  ‘That will be all,’ Raine says. ‘For today.’

  Raine’s debriefing duties on her return to the Antari staging grounds take hours, and the weather has turned when she finally arrives back at her command tent. Raine pauses for a moment upon entering, listening to the way the rain lashes the canvas. She walks over to the table and picks up the tin cup. It is stamped with a Departmento Munitorum mark and chipped around the rim, cool to the touch. It feels real. Raine lets out a slow breath and puts the cup back down.

  Her uniform awaits her on the table. Her medals, greatcoat and gloves. Her peaked hat. They have been carefully folded, but they still bear tatters and bloodstains. She puts on her gloves first, then her coat. Her hat last of all. The weight of the coat, the creak of the gloves. The borrowed pistol in the holster at her hip. It’s all a comfort. A restorative act more so than any amount of pain medication or rest. Not that there’s time for rest. She has their new deployment orders sitting in her pocket. There is always another fight. Another war. Another duty, unfinished.

  Raine puts her hand into the inner pocket of her coat and her fingers close around cool brass. Ticking burrs against her hand. There’s no damage to the timepiece, except for that crack it already had. Raine can’t quite believe it. She turns it over in her hand and runs her thumb over the engraved letters of her sister’s name. Remembers how she made those shapes with the point of a pocket knife, and why.

  What about that timepiece you carry? Tell me about that.

  Raine turns at the sound of Andren Fel’s voice, but there is no sign of the Duskhound. No sign of anyone at all, just the howl of the wind and the lashing of the rain against the tent’s canvas.

  About the Author

  Rachel Harrison is the author of the Warhammer 40,000 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 Cadia Stands.

  Below them, the planet was poised half in light and half in darkness.

  Major Isaia Bendikt could not tell if a new day was coming on, or if the night was falling. He stood with Warmaster Ryse and his posse of command staff on the viewing platforms of the Fidelitas Vector and remembered how he’d left Cadia over twenty years before.

  In those twenty years, he’d had more than his fair share of benighted ice-worlds, void-moons and jungle worlds with blood-sucking nanobes that dropped onto you from the branches above.

  He’d seen the worst of the galaxy and now, looking down upon Cadia, he remembered his last moments on his home world.

  A young Whiteshield, without a kill to his name.

  Bendikt’s father had never got the chance to go off-planet. He was one of the one in ten Cadian Shock Troopers whose draft drew them as a territorial guard. It was his life to stay at home and stand ready to protect Cadia. But war had not come, and that uneventful career was a shame that had discoloured his life.

  When the sixteen-year-old Isaia Bendikt drew an off-world draft he was both proud and envious of his son. It was a hard thing for a dour father to express, so he’d done what many fathers had before him – bought a bottle of Arcady Pride and got both himself and Bendikt drunk.

  Bendikt remembered the night clearly. They had been sitting at the round camp table that stood in the middle of the small sub-hab central room of their home. His father had drawn up the camp chairs and slammed the bottle down between them, set two shot glasses on the table.

  He had forced a smile as he unscrewed the top, crumpled it up in his hand and threw it back over his shoulder, where it had rattled in the corner of the room. His mother had left them a few plates of boiled grox-slab and cabbage on the table. Bendikt had tried to line his stomach as his father poured them a shot glass each.

  ‘Here,’ he’d said and held out the brimming glass.

  They’d tapped the rims against each other and tipped the glasses high. Shot by shot they’d drunk and slowly knocked the bottle back. When the muster bell rang there was only a little amasec in the bottom of the bottle. ‘To your first kill!’ his father had slurred. His mother, a thin, worn, earnest-looking woman, had joined in with the last toast.

  It was a short walk to the muster point, where other Whiteshields were being loaded onto rail trucks, their apprehensive faces staring­ out from under their Cadian-pattern helmets. All the tracks led straight to the landing fields outside Kasr Tyrok.

 
Bendikt and his parents pushed through the crowds to find his truck. Both his mother and his father had last words for him, though he was damned if he could remember them. He was only sixteen and so drunk he could barely stand. There were no tears. It was poor form to show sadness when a Cadian was sent to fight. It was part of the rhythm of life: birth, training, conscription, death. It was natural that a young Whiteshield would go and kill the enemies of the Imperium.

  Bendikt had imagined himself many times taking the straight route south, and never seeing his home again. Before climbing aboard, he checked himself one more time to make sure that in his drunken state he had not forgotten anything.

  He had boots, webbing, jacket, belt, combat knife, lasrifle, three battery packs, Imperial Primer in his left breast pocket, water canteen in his right. He pulled in a deep breath. He was ready, he told himself, to face anything the galaxy could throw at him.

  ‘So,’ Bendikt said. They said goodbye to one another, and his mother briefly embraced him and stuffed a packet of folded brown paper into his jacket pocket. ‘Grox-jerky,’ she whispered.

  She was a tough woman, brought up on a planet where the only trade was war, and little given to expressions of emotion.

  ‘I want to thank both of you for giving me life. I promise you I will be all that a Cadian should,’ he said. It was a speech he had prepared, but being drunk he stumbled on his words and left much of it out.

  Then he saluted and turned to climb aboard the truck. He looked out to wave goodbye to his parents, but darkness was falling and they had already turned for home. That was the last Bendikt had ever seen or heard of his family. For the next twenty years, other Guardsmen had been his brothers and sisters, and the Emperor his father.

  Bendikt found it hard to remember his father’s face but had never forgotten the hug his father had given him, and feeling his father’s thick arms wrap around him, his broad, rough hands on his back. His mother’s voice had never left him; he could recall her whispering ‘grox-jerky’ into his ear, and those words stayed with him, and somehow came to mean ‘Look after yourself’, and even ‘You are well-loved, my son.’

  As Cadia revolved beneath them Warmaster Ryse put both hands to the carefully tooled brass railings and leaned forward, his breath misting a little on the chill of the foot-thick glass.

  He wanted to mark this moment with something momentous, yet poetic and memorable. Something that could go in his ­memoirs when, and if, retirement came. As if sensing its moment, the Warmaster’s servitor-scribe, an emaciated body with augmetic stylus right arm and waist-mounted scroll, shuffled forward, knocking a few other sycophants out of the way.

  The scribe had come with the title of Warmaster and Ryse seemed to rather like having his every word taken down for posterity. And now that there was no more Deucalion Crusade for Ryse to lead, it had occurred to many of them that perhaps Ryse might not be a Warmaster much longer.

  Perhaps, many were thinking, Ryse’s star was on the wane, and it was time for them to find one that was rising.

  Ryse coughed to clear his throat, then his bass-baritone rang out, ‘We have returned to our mother in her time of direst need.’

  There was more, and Bendikt thought the Warmaster’s speech could have been better, but the Warmaster finished with a ­flourish, like an Imperial preacher waxing lyrical. ‘Men shall not say that we forgot our duty, nor that we forgot from whence we came.’

  As he spoke, there was the scratch of stylus on vellum, leaving a trail of precise minuscule, in neatly justified blocks of text. Bendikt could not help reading over the scribe’s shoulder while Ryse paused as if waiting for it to catch up, letting the words ring through his head.

  Bendikt looked away. The Warmaster turned, and as if picking him out for not paying due attention, asked, ‘What do you think, Major Bendikt?’

  ‘She looks peaceful enough to me,’ Bendikt stammered.

  Ryse smiled indulgently. ‘Yes. Cadia sent out the call and we have returned. Her need has not been forgotten.’ The motors of the Warmaster’s bionic arm whined gently as he patted Bendikt on the back. No doubt he had meant this to be a human gesture, but Bendikt did not find the crude press of metal fingers comforting.

  ‘How long until we disembark?’ Ryse asked a thin, pale officer with a shock of white hair.

  The officer snapped his heels together. ‘Governor Porelska has sent his personal barge to bring you down, Warmaster. ­Sacramentum is being loaded onto it as we speak. As soon as it is stowed down, I will let you know, sir. The freight captain did not think it would be more than a few hours.’

  Sacramentum was Ryse’s Leviathan. A brass-worked marvel of gunnery and armour and engineering that had spearheaded at least two assaults on the hive world of Owwen.

  ‘Good,’ Ryse said. ‘Good.’ He was one of those men who liked to fill silences with his own voice. At that moment one of the adjutants touched the Warmaster’s sleeve. The commander of a battalion of Mordians had arrived on the viewing deck. They were standing by the lift in a formal and uninviting group, waiting for an introduction.

  ‘Ah!’ Ryse said as if a passing chat with the Mordians was all he wanted in the world, and nodded to them all. ‘Excuse me, gentlemen.’

  As Ryse’s entourage fell away only one other man remained, ­staring down at Cadia.

  Bendikt took him in through the corner of his eye. He was a first-degree general from his epaulette, but he wore combat drab, not dress uniform, and had both hands placed firmly on the brass railing, his fists clenching it so tightly that his knuckles had gone white.

  His boots had not been polished since embarkation. There were mud splatters on the hem of his coat and dried mud stains on his knees as well. That was a detail worthy of note: generals didn’t often kneel, never mind in mud.

  Bendikt couldn’t hold himself back. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ he ventured. ‘Are you General Creed?’

  The man turned to him. He was broad and bull-necked, with close-shaven hair. His eyes were hard and intense. Bendikt coloured. ‘Sorry. I mean, are you the General Creed?’

  ‘Well, there are four generals named Creed last I counted.’ The other man’s eyes had a mischievous twinkle.

  ‘General Ursarkar Creed?’

  ‘Yes. I am one of two whose name is Ursarkar Creed. The other, a fine old man of three hundred and twenty years, has retired to the training world of Katak. I spent six months with him there, working with Catachans. Good bunch. General Ursarkar Creed had a particularly good stock of amasec, though I didn’t think much of his stubs. They were a little too refined for me. I like something with a little more punch.’

  Creed’s mouth almost smiled. ‘As he came first, he has the ­honour of being plain General Ursarkar Creed. Because I am the second, I am known as Ursarkar E. Creed.’ He put out a hand and Bendikt returned the hard grip.

  ‘I am honoured to meet you,’ Bendikt said.

  Creed seemed amused by the word. ‘Honoured?’

  ‘Yes,’ Bendikt said. ‘We were in the same draft.’

  ‘Were we now?’

  ‘Yes. I always thought that my career had gone well until I heard you had made general. The first of our draft.’

  To make general by the age of forty years, Terran standard, was a feat almost unheard of.

  Once he’d got over his envy, he’d studied Creed and his tactics, and when they’d been in the same warzone, Bendikt had followed Creed’s career through memos and regimental dispatches.

  ‘How do you feel? I mean, you’ve been predicting this recall for nearly two years now,’ Bendikt said.

  Creed seemed impressed, but there was no joy for him in being right. ‘I have. You’re right. It would have been better if the recall had started two years earlier.’

  ‘And you were demoted for your troubles.’

  ‘Only pending investigation. Ryse – should I say, Warmaster Ryse – st
uck by me.’

  ‘Is that because you saved the day on Relion V?’

  Creed laughed. His breath smelled faintly of amasec. Creed was also famous for his prodigious appetite for the bottle. ‘That’s probably half the reason. The other half is that Ryse is no fool.’

  There was a moment’s pause as Creed took in Bendikt’s uniform and regimental badge. ‘You must be Major Isaia Bendikt of the Cadian One Hundred and First. Twice awarded the Valorous Unit Citation. You have one of the most highly decorated tank regiments in the whole of Cadia. Between you, your crew has won six Steel Crosses, four Steel Aquila and the Order of the Eagle’s Claw.’

  Bendikt’s cheeks coloured and he didn’t know what to say. ‘Well, yes, sir. My regiment prides itself on its service to the Golden Throne.’

  The smell of amasec grew stronger as Creed leaned in and spoke to Bendikt in a low, confidential voice. ‘Did you ever think you would make it back to Cadia alive?’

  Bendikt knew the statistics as well as any other: half of all able-bodied Cadians left the planet to fight across the Imperium of Man but fewer than one in a thousand of those ever returned. He barely needed to think. ‘Never. You?’

  Creed pursed his lips as his knuckles whitened again. Night was falling on Cadia and the Eye of Terror was starting to glow. There was a long pause. Creed smiled. ‘Oh, I’ve always known that I would come back.’

  Bendikt did not know how to answer that. He looked down at their home world – grey and blue in the half-light of her sun.

  ‘And you really think Cadia is in danger?’

  ‘The utmost danger.’ Creed’s nostrils flared. ‘The whole sector has been under attack for years. Plague. Treachery. Heresy. We see all these proud defences, but Cadia is like a kasr whose walls have already been undermined.’

  Bendikt was lost for words again. They both looked up to the viewing dome above their heads. In the darkness of space they could see the turret lights of orbital defences, floating gun-rigs and the bright engine flares of patrolling frigates and stub-nosed defence monitors.