Honourbound - Rachel Harrison Read online

  ‘Mother of spring,’ Yuri Hale says, horrified.

  The Sighted fall back ragged, evidently just as horrified as Hale. All of them are firing at Zane now. The air around her is a storm of las-fire. Some shots graze her, and she staggers. Others are turned aside by reactionary flickers of psychic shielding. Raine gives chase, Hale and his command squad beside her.

  But the Sighted don’t get far, because they run right into four matt-black shadows with the howling faces of spectral hounds painted on their masks. Fully automatic las-fire strobes in the smoke. When the firing stops, and the Sighted are dead and smoking at their feet, the lead figure bows his head in greeting. His carapace armour is peeled back to the grey, and he is masking a limp.

  ‘Not dead yet, then,’ Raine says to Andren Fel.

  The storm trooper captain lifts his closed fist over his heart.

  ‘Not yet, commissar,’ he says.

  Wyck’s heart hammers in his ears. He took another dose in the moments before the explosion, just to be sure. To tunnel his vision for the fight. The stimms make everything sharp. Every sound is crystal clear and loud. Every colour bright and vibrant. Everything else pushes out of his head, to somewhere it can’t haunt him.

  Wyck vaults the barricades without slowing. He can’t, and he won’t. Not because of that aquila pendant in the pouch at his belt, or any of what came before. Guilt does no favours for the dead.

  He lands amongst the Sighted on the other side. They are still reeling from the explosions. There is blood up the barricades from where some were caught in it, and a yawning hole in the floor, toothed and dark. Wyck kneecaps one of the Sighted with las-fire and kicks him into that darkness. He distinctly hears the landing. The snap and the scream. Wyck is already moving to the next of them and firing a las-bolt to blow out the Sighted’s throat. Wyck takes a round to the shoulder from a third. The pain doesn’t filter through, just the impact. It knocks his next shot wide. The Sighted who shot him gets within his reach. She is fast too. Fast and mad, with a deep red spiral cut into the skin of her cheek. She slams the butt of her rifle into Wyck’s face, rebreaking his broken nose. He sees stars and loses his grip on his rifle, so he answers her with his knife instead, punching it between her ribs. Something bursts under the blade, and blood runs down his arm.

  ‘Blind,’ she is saying. ‘You are blind.’

  ‘Better blind than dead,’ Wyck says.

  He twists the blade and her eyes roll back. Wyck pulls the knife out and drops her.

  The rest of the Wyldfolk are over the barricades now. Wyck knows because he hears Crys’ modified grenade launcher go off. Thumpthumpthumpthump. He turns to shout for her. To ask if she’s lost her damned mind, using that thing with the squad so close, but then he sees what she is shooting at and his heart goes cold with fear.

  It’s a damned witch.

  A column of violet light spears up from the Wyldfolk’s position, cutting clean through the smoke. A second later, Raine feels an incredible pressure in her head. She stumbles into cover behind the barricades, her eyesight blurring. The Antari stop firing over the cover and start holding their heads and moaning. Yuri Hale slumps against the piled sandbags and scrap metal, blood running from his nose. Despite the heat in the forge, they all mist the air when they breathe. They would be dead on their feet, if it weren’t for the fact that the Sighted are hurting the same way.

  The vox crackles in Raine’s ear. It is Wyck’s voice, and he sounds terrified. Through the distorted wail of the connection, she hears him say the word she knows is coming.

  Witch.

  The pressure lifts, but the cold grip of fear remains. It’s an animal response. A primal clawing at the soul. Raine recognises it and pushes it aside, just as she does with all distractions. She sees Hale regain his feet too. It looks like an effort.

  But not all among the Antari are quite so capable.

  Dala of the Hartkin breaks formation. Her grey eyes are wide, and she’s muttering those same old words.

  Spare me the ways of the witch.

  ‘Dala,’ Odi says. ‘Stay in line, damn you.’

  ‘It’ll curse us, sarge,’ she says, her voice hoarse. ‘You know it, a thing like that!’

  ‘Stand your ground!’ Raine shouts. ‘Turn away from this, and you forsake everything we have fought for!’

  Raine knows that if they break here they will lose the Delta Gate and the forges too. She cannot allow that to happen.

  ‘Turn away from this, and you forsake the God-Emperor’s will!’

  It’s enough to freeze most of them to the spot, but not Dala. For her, the fear has already grown too large to be pushed aside. She drops her rifle and starts to run, and there is only one response to that dangerous kind of cowardice.

  Raine levels Penance and fires.

  The shot kills Dala outright. She falls heavy and sprawling. The Antari look to Raine now with a new kind of fear. Only this time, it’s of her. It’s a kind she can use.

  ‘We fight,’ she says, loud and clear. ‘No matter the foe. No matter the weapons they use, or the armour they bear. Because we fight for the Bale Stars and all of the worlds within. For every soul from here to the sector’s edge!’

  They know she means Antar too. Raine has served alongside them long enough to know which words will pull at them and which won’t.

  ‘For every soul!’ she shouts again. ‘For the Bale Stars! For the Emperor!’

  This time, she gets an echo as dozens of voices answer in kind. She knows that they hate her in these moments. It’s another animal response that, while it cannot be prevented, can be controlled, which is exactly what Yuri Hale does when he turns to his troops and gives his next order.

  ‘They may have a witch,’ he says. ‘But so do we.’ He looks to Zane. ‘We get you there, and you kill it.’

  If Zane feels anything at being spoken of in the same breath as the traitor psyker, she doesn’t say so. Instead she bows her head and smiles thinly.

  ‘With pleasure, captain,’ she says.

  Daven Wyck fires his lasgun at the witch until the powercell blinks red and empty, but not a single shot goes through. When the smoke clears, the thing is still hanging there, about a metre off the ground. It is dressed like a noble, in finely made clothes the colour of the sky at lowlight. Rings set with jewels glitter on its thin fingers and its feet are bare and bloody. The witch turns its head then and Wyck gets a good look at its pale face, carved with numbers and letters and wicked sigils. A red crystal sits where its left eye should be, and a too-wide grin stretches its face.

  The witch claps its hands together and to Wyck’s right, Karo Efri ceases to be. He doesn’t even get time to scream. Just gets swallowed up by blue light until there’s nothing but ashes. Just like Dal, and Vyne. Gone quicker than a heartbeat passes. Nothing left to judge. Wyck feels the numb shock of it, even through the way the stimms are spiking. Then the witch turns, still grinning.

  Only now it’s grinning at him.

  Wyck’s world centres until all he can see is that grin. Until all he can hear is his heart pounding in his chest like it wants to get out. He is truly afraid, for the first time in a long time, but he can’t look away because that makes witches stronger. He remembers the stories. Don’t look away, don’t turn your back. He murmurs the words they are all taught as children.

  Spare me the ways of the witch.

  He ejects the spent cell and reloads his gun. He won’t turn. Won’t run. Throne, he wants to do both. The witch floats towards him, trailing smoke and shadow, still grinning.

  A splintered soul, aren’t you?+

  The voice in Wyck’s head sounds like wind across water. His vision goes blurry.

  It is the cutting,+ the voice says. +All the blood you have spilt.+

  ‘Dav!’ Awd is shouting for him. ‘Dav, move!’

  The shape of the witch wavers thr
ough the sights of his gun, and then the gun starts to discorporate, turning to ashes in his hands. Wyck still can’t move. He’s frozen, like an animal caught under floodlights.

  It is your peace,+ it says. +The cut and the spill. You should embrace it.+

  The witch hangs in place, right in front of him, still grinning with those needle teeth.

  ‘I already have,’ Wyck says, through his teeth.

  And he unslings Jona Veer’s rifle and fires. This time, the las-bolt punches into the witch’s shoulder. Through and through. The scream the creature makes echoes in Wyck’s head as well as the forges. It puts him on his knees, with blood running from his nose.

  ‘Stupid fool,’ says the witch, in its real voice this time. ‘No more words. No more games.’

  The witch raises its hand, only to have its arm snapped like a piece of dry kindling. First the wrist, then the elbow. The bones breaking sound like gunshots. Wyck knows what’s done that, and it makes him feel no better.

  ‘Oh, now,’ says Lydia Zane, as she steps into Wyck’s peripheral vision. ‘This hardly seems a fair fight.’

  One witch, traded for another.

  Little. Pet.+

  The Sighted psyker turns to face Zane and looks at her with his one human eye and with the gemstone eye too, though she cannot say how that is possible.

  Gifts,+ pulses the psyker, as if she had asked. +Not that you would know anything of gifts.+

  The psyker snorts with effort and the bones in his broken arm reset. His name was Calvar Larat, once. Zane knows this because the unsanctioned blare their thoughts like warhorns. He is not one of the Nine. Not one chosen by the Sighted to lead, though his heart longs for it. He thinks himself a star ascendant. His raw ambition makes Zane want to spit.

  Look at you,+ Larat pulses. +With your collar and your cables. With your watchdog at your back. Such a shame.+

  He sends a wave of force at Zane that she turns aside with a flicker of her kine-shield.

  No,+ she answers. +A shame is you resetting that arm, just so that I can break it again.+

  Zane claps her hands together, sending a pulse of telekinetic force at Larat. It puts him into the barricades with enough impact to bend the metal. Dust bursts up around her, and false wind stirs her robes. Zane does not wait, but attacks again as she walks forwards, slamming the psyker against the barricades over and over and over. For a moment, she is lost in it. In the fury of using her power. She does not feel the way her bones sing with aching, or how her skin opens in wounds from pushing her limits. She does not pay heed to the snap of wings. She will prove to the thing once known as Calvar Larat that she is more than a pet. To the Antari that she is a good soul who uses her power in the right. To herself that she can take all the tests and pass them, because she is strong and she will not break.

  Zane stops in front of Larat’s broken form, looking down at him. He is a mess of tattered finery and blood and splintered bone. Every spare inch of his skin is scarred with words and numbers, some overwriting others.

  You see my marks,+ Larat pulses. +They are fates, little pet. A hundred twists in time’s rope. Knots and loops and nooses all. Every one of them a new truth.+

  Zane raises her hands to put him out of his misery, but finds herself frozen in place. Pinned, like an insect on a board by Larat’s wicked power. He laughs, dribbling blood through his pointed teeth, then rears up, limp and broken and bleeding. His gemstone eye glitters.

  And I have a truth for you too. Would you like to see it?+

  And he takes hold of her face with his clawed, bloody hand.

  Lydia Zane’s eyes open to a wide blue sky. She is falling. The wind whips at her robes and rattles her crown of cables. She is not afraid, though she should be. It is a long fall. Her staff is nothing but a splintered shard in her hand. Her fingernails are broken and bloody. There are three great dark stains across the front of her robes where she has been shot. All of this Zane sees, and all of it she understands.

  But still, none of it makes her afraid.

  When the ground finally embraces her, she lands in soft loam, between the boles of white-barked trees. From that terrible height, the impact still breaks every bone in her body. It is an instant of incredible pain, then a peace like one that she has never known as her nerve endings fail her. With her lungs punctured, Zane can’t breathe. With her organs pulped, she cannot live. So Lydia Zane lies on her back in the loam as blood soaks into it, dying slowly and in absolute quiet. The last thing to go is her bionic eyes, because they are made of metal and wire and they feel no shock at the fall. Before they fail, Zane sees four birds pass across that wide blue sky.

  Ghosts, in silent feathers.

  Daven Wyck can’t move. He is pinned in place when the temperature drops and more blood bursts from his nose. It hits his skin and freezes. The blood is the last thing he sees before he blacks out.

  Wyck watches blood drip from the point of his combat knife. Regular, like a slow heartbeat.

  Drip. Drip. Drip.

  He breathes in and catches that iron smell. Realises that his hands are slick with it. The sleeves of his fatigues are soaked through. They stick to his skin.

  Drip. Drip.

  Wyck’s mouth is dry and there’s an itching behind his eyes. A pressure against them. More blood. His, this time, firing in his veins. Pushed by the stimms. Making him shake. Making more blood drip off that knife.

  Drip.

  The body at his feet is in dark armour. Hard plate. Carapace. But it’s still a body. Still dead. Stabbed through the soft joints. Elbows. Under the ribs. Throat. Armour can’t protect everything. There’s always a weakness. Always a place that can be cut. If you’re fast and vicious.

  And Daven Wyck knows he is both.

  There are markings on that armour, underneath the bloody handprints and smears. And on the other bodies he sees when he turns. All dead. Cut through the soft parts. The markings are silver.

  Laurels.

  Skulls.

  The knife drips again.

  Drip. Drip. Drip.

  Twin-headed eagles.

  Raine sees the darkness roll out from Zane and the traitor witch like smoke. Like fog rolling in off the ocean.

  ‘Hold!’ she shouts to the Antari, in the moment before it hits her.

  Severina Raine is six years old and standing on a rain-lashed landing pad far above Gloam’s furious ocean. Her clothes are soaked and sticking to her. They don’t fit quite right, those new clothes. The dark tunic marked with the icon of the Adeptus Ministorum. The rough weave trousers and soft-soled shoes. The belt with a loop for a blunt training blade. The people that brought her here said that she’ll grow into the clothes in time. That eventually everything will fit that doesn’t, but Severina misses her books, and her maps. She took nothing from her home on Darpex, because she hadn’t really believed she’d never see it again until setting foot on this platform and listening to that angry ocean. It sounds like it wants to swallow her up. Severina looks up at the hive spire. At the way it reaches up into the dark and the clouds, lights glittering on the side of it from torches and lumens. Kilometres high, and the same again deep. It looks as though it would swallow her up, too, and then she’d just be another one of those tiny lights.

  ‘It is always dark here.’

  Lucia’s voice is raised, so that Severina can hear her over the wind. Her sister is standing beside her, rain gathering in the neat, dark braids of her hair. She is taller already, though she is barely two years older. The two of them stand close together, but they don’t hold hands or link arms because that will make the group of people approaching across the landing pad think that they are afraid, when they are not. They are cold and sad and a little angry too, but not afraid. Never that.

  Lucia did take something from home. Something that belonged to their mother. She has her fingers locked tight around the timepiece
as she watches those people approaching across the landing pad. The brass case of the timepiece is the only bit of warm colour in the world right now except for those tiny lights.

  ‘It stays dark because the people who made this place poisoned the sky,’ Lucia says. ‘A long time ago.’

  ‘Why?’

  Lucia looks at her and smiles. It is a sad sort of smile.

  ‘Because they wanted to build a new world,’ she says. ‘And poison seemed a small price to pay.’

  Andren Fel does his best to stay on his feet as his Duskhounds fall beside him, one after another. Fel doesn’t want to lose them like he lost Rol, so he tries to reach for them, but then the world turns around him and he falls too.

  Andren Fel sits cross-legged on the floor of the house. The wind pulls at the timbers, and whistles through the eaves. There is frost on the inside of the thick windowpanes. He hasn’t eaten in a long time, but he can’t go and hunt for something, or fetch it from the trader down the way, because he has to stay and watch.

  Because otherwise the duskhounds will come for his mother. It’s what they do. Come for those that fate forgot to take.

  His mother is lying where she has been for days, pale as that frost on the windows. Andren turns the heavy blade he is holding in his hands. There are fanged faces carved into the hilt. It’s too big for him to use yet, really. It was hers when she went off-world to the crusade. Before she was hurt so bad she couldn’t fight. So bad it should have killed her, they said.

  Only now it is killing her. The old doctor from down the way said so. That they didn’t do a clean job when they tried to heal her in the first place. They didn’t get all of the pieces out. So now she is dying the death she should have had before. Andren knows that’s how it works. He’s been taught so since he was old enough to understand the stories. Fate comes for you, no matter where you go.

  But just this once, he thinks maybe he can stop it, if he’s quick and ready when the duskhounds come.

  His mother shifts, just a bit.