Honourbound - Rachel Harrison Read online

  ‘My boy,’ she says. ‘My son.’

  Andren gets up from the floor on numb legs and walks over, still carrying that blade.

  ‘I told you to go,’ she says. ‘Why didn’t you go?’

  He tells her all the reasons why and she smiles, just a little. It’s something she doesn’t often do, because it hurts her to do it. Not on the outside. On the inside.

  ‘We all have our fates,’ she says. ‘This is mine. You have yours. You will do something great. A righteous thing. I know it.’

  That’s something else he’s been taught. Something else she has always said. She read it in the leaves.

  ‘What, though?’ he asks her. ‘What will I do?’

  ‘Your heart will know it,’ she says. ‘When the time comes.’

  And then there’s a noise from outside the house. Andren moves to the door as it opens wide and fast. He raises his mother’s knife and he goes for the shadowed shapes that enter the house. The duskhounds, come to finish fate’s job. He knocks into the first one and nicks at the shadow. It cries out, and he thinks he can do it. He can stop them and make them wait a bit longer. But then a second one grabs him and locks his arms so he can’t fight them. Andren kicks instead until they stop him doing that too.

  ‘Boy cut me,’ says one of the shadows. ‘Look.’

  Another of them laughs, and Andren realises they aren’t hounds. They are men and women, though their armour makes them look like monsters. It’s the same sort of armour his mother wore when she went off-world. He stops kicking.

  ‘Let me go,’ he says. ‘I need to watch her. To keep the duskhounds away.’

  The man he cut bobs down and shakes his head.

  ‘No,’ he says, sounding a little sorry. ‘No, you don’t.’

  Andren Fel looks back and sees that he doesn’t. That they have already taken his mother, but that even so she is still smiling, just a little. He couldn’t keep the hounds away, no matter how quick or how ready he was. How much he watched.

  ‘Fate still found her,’ he says.

  The man he cut nods. ‘And now it has come for you too.’

  Aching, bleeding and her mind alight, Lydia Zane finally puts Calvar Larat on his back, not to rise again. He just lies there, his throat clicking with blood and his arms turned to ragged, splintered stumps. Zane can see the unlight of his soul twisting away to be judged. It’s the same as the unlight that makes the Antari dream.

  ‘Little pet,’ Larat says, and now he uses his mortal voice too. ‘Little monster let out of her cage. Off her tether while her watchdog sleeps and her kinfolk dream.’

  He grins still, even now.

  ‘Freedom, just for a moment,’ he says. ‘That is my last truth. My last gift, to you.’

  Zane twists her hand, and silences Larat for good by breaking his neck. The light in his human eye dims. Even the gemstone appears to go dull. The psychic storm Larat created begins to clear, and the Antari around her stir. Zane does not move. Instead, she stands and stares at Larat’s one remaining fate-mark that is clear to see, cut into his chest just above the collarbones. It is a date and a time, just like the others. The date is today’s. The time is marked down to the second. To the exact second that Calvar Larat’s soul finally twisted away.

  His death, writ in his skin. Foretold to the moment.

  Just as her fall was foretold in the vision he showed her.

  The bird has returned, the way it always does. It perches on what is left of Larat’s face, still watching her with those black eyes, but this time it opens its beak and speaks.

  Fall, croaks the bird.

  And Zane feels the rush of wind on her face. Her stomach turns over. She cannot get a breath.

  ‘Mists alive.’

  The bird and the feeling vanishes and Zane snaps around to see Daven Wyck leaning against the barricades, holding the rifle he took from Jona Veer. For once, there is not a trace of a smile gracing his even features. Just fear, which like so much else turns to anger inside Daven Wyck. Zane knows that she is the source of that fear and that Wyck hates her for it. He has never made a secret of it.

  Not like all of those other secrets he carries. Ugly secrets.

  ‘Is it dead?’ he asks her.

  Zane glances back at the mess she has made of Calvar Larat.

  ‘He is dead,’ she says.

  Wyck lowers his rifle, but not completely. Always armed, that one. Always ready to fight. His hands are shaking, and his mind is like white noise, or a storm against glass. Loud and roaring.

  ‘It put lies in my head,’ he says. ‘Made me see things.’

  Zane thinks about what she saw. About falling into that loam, and the breaking of all of her bones. The pain and the silence. The birds, passing in front of the blue sky.

  And she knows that it was not a lie.

  ‘A truth,’ she says. ‘That is what Larat said. Yet to come, or been and gone.’

  Wyck laughs, and it is a cruel sound.

  ‘A truth,’ he says, flatly. ‘From a witch, and a traitor one at that. I don’t think so.’

  For a moment, Zane wants to break his bones the way she broke Larat’s. She cannot tell if the feelings are hers, or Wyck’s. Violence bleeds from him like ink into water. A tremor rolls from her, rattling the plasteel of the floor. Wyck’s eyes go wide and he raises the rifle that he took from his dead kin, but then something eclipses Zane’s anger altogether and she reins in her power.

  It is the shadow at the heart of the forge. She had thought it to be Larat, but now she feels it anew. Stronger.

  Zane looks past Wyck, towards the Delta Gate. ‘Look,’ she says. ‘Something comes.’

  He turns and looks. Sees what she sees.

  The Delta Gate is opening.

  Raine is one of the first to gain her feet. All around her, the Antari are shaking and struggling to get up. They murmur superstitious words in their own tongue. Some are still and lifeless, killed by the shock of the dreams they were given. Despite herself, Raine finds that the dream clings to her too. The cold. The thousands of tiny lights. Lucia’s voice too.

  It is always dark here.

  She shouldn’t call it a dream, because that’s not what it was. It was a memory, and one that she hasn’t thought of in a very long time. Raine shakes her head to clear it. She pushes it aside, just like before.

  Far aside.

  ‘Fate.’

  The voice is Andren Fel’s. To anyone else, he would sound perfectly calm, but not to her. She knows him better than that. Fel is kneeling in the dust and ashes, turning his combat blade in his hand. Light catches on the carvings on the hilt. Raine asked him once if he made those markings, and he told her no.

  ‘It was fate,’ he says, absently.

  ‘Are you with me?’ Raine asks.

  Fel stirs as if waking, and looks up from the blade.

  ‘With you,’ he says. ‘Of course.’

  ‘Get the others on their feet,’ Raine says. ‘Now.’

  ‘Aye, commissar,’ Fel says.

  There is a change in his bearing, as if he has found his balance. He gets up and goes to rouse the Duskhounds, and Raine goes for the others. She pulls Hale upright first. His skin is as grey as his eyes, and he is shaking with the after-effects of the psyker’s dream. He struggles to keep his balance, and Raine realises that it isn’t just Hale who is shaking. It is the floor under their feet too. She looks up and over the last remaining barricades to see the two halves of the Delta Gate sliding slowly apart beyond the smoke.

  ‘Why in Terra’s name would they open the bloody thing?’ Yulia Crys says, leaning on the barricades. ‘After all they’ve done to keep us from it?’

  Zane comes up through the smoke. The psyker is in such a state that Raine is surprised she can stand. Her grey robes are tattered, and her furs are matted with blood and filth. There
are deep shadows around Zane’s false eyes. Her veins show dark through her paper-thin skin. Wyck is a pace behind Zane, watching her warily. He is shaking too, but it is nothing to do with either psyker’s work. That kind of shake is the sign of a stimm-user. Wyck thinks that Raine doesn’t know, that he can escape her judgement. He doesn’t realise that he is only running ahead of it, like the tide. That when he becomes more of an issue than an asset, he will be overtaken by it and made to answer for his weaknesses.

  ‘Something comes,’ Zane says. Her teeth are pink with blood.

  ‘Another witch?’ Hale asks her.

  Zane sniffs wetly. ‘Something comes,’ she slurs again.

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’ Hale says to Wyck.

  Wyck spits on the ground, still watching the psyker. ‘Damned if I know,’ he says. ‘She started saying it when the gate began to open, and now she won’t stop.’

  Crys’ eyes have gone wide. She starts pulling at the pouches on the bandolier across her chest to reload her grenade launcher. ‘Zane’s right,’ she says. ‘Something is coming. Something with a bloody great engine.’

  Raine can’t understand how the Antari can pick it out from the sound of the gate grinding open and the forge machinery, especially half-deaf, but if there’s one thing Crys knows, it’s things built to kill.

  ‘What is it?’ she shouts up to Fel. ‘What do you see?’

  ‘Something bad,’ Fel shouts back. He drops down off the high portion of the remaining barricades. ‘Something they have made.’

  Raine looks over the barricades. She sees it now too. Not a tank. Not a war machine or a Cybernetica robot. It is an abomination. The Sighted have fused parts of a super-heavy tank onto a set of jointed mechanical legs. Exhaust stacks stick up from the back of it like spears in a sea monster’s back, spewing thick dark smoke. It is metal and crystal and thick clots of oil where the two materials meet. Its hooked limbs punch holes in the plasteel of the floor as it approaches them.

  She wonders if this is what the Sighted with the gemstone eye meant. If this thing is the life they have made here.

  ‘Throne of Terra. What have they done?’ Crys looks distraught. ‘Those guns mounted on it. Those are Vulcan mega-bolters.’

  ‘On your feet!’ Raine shouts, moving among her soldiers. ‘Now!’

  Hale is beside her, shouting for grenades and for the missile teams. For the Antari to fall back firing. He orders them to aim for the vision slits and the joints of the limbs and to try to halt it. But then Raine loses the sound of Hale’s voice. She loses every other noise in the forge, because the Vulcan mega-bolters begin to fire. Raine sees Crys, firing her grenade launcher. She can’t hear it over the racket of the mega-bolters. She just sees the barrel of it lighting.

  Flash. Flash. Flash.

  The grenades land in front of the abomination and against it, but when the smoke clears, there’s barely a dent in the armour.

  ‘Keep firing!’ Raine shouts over the vox, and she can hardly hear her own voice. ‘Collapse the floor! Make a grave for it!’

  They are losing their ground. Losing their lives. Next to her, Jole of the Hartkin is hit. He vanishes, and blood-spray mists across Raine’s face. The guns track. More of the Hartkin are torn away. Craters are punched into the barricades. Fel is throwing demo charges for the abomination to find as it chases them. Rounds tear up the floor. Missiles trace overhead from the Antari heavy weapons teams. There’s an arc of plasma fire from Elys, last of the Pyrehawks. Then there are no Pyrehawks at all because she’s gone too. Vaporised. Raine knows the likelihood of breaking anything on that thing with a bolt pistol from this range, but she fires anyway, because she won’t die without fighting it. And in that moment, a part of her is certain that is what is about to happen. That she’ll die here. Turned to a mist of blood like Jole and Elys and all of the others that are simply gone now. The abomination puts one of its metal claws over the barricades and onto Fel’s charges. They go off, splintering the limb and unsteadying it, but the abomination doesn’t stop. It makes a sound that is all too much like a scream and pushes through. It is right on top of them.

  Then Lydia Zane steps up beside Raine and throws out her hand.

  For a handful of heartbeats, the abomination’s guns spin down. Its legs freeze and twitch. Zane is locking them. Holding it still. In the ear-ringing absence of the sound of it firing, Raine can hear Zane screaming. Her back arches and lightning runs up and down her thin limbs. In the moment of respite, while the abomination is without its teeth, the Antari fire on it. Their last missiles. Last grenades and demo-charges. Las-rounds and flamer fuel and solid shot from snipers. Raine fires her pistol, too, until it clicks empty. The abomination is engulfed in flame and Raine’s heart leaps. She hears Wyck laughing, though she can’t see him for the smoke. But then Zane collapses and the smoke clears and the abomination’s guns begin to whine and spin again. The barrels are red-hot spirals, like the markings cut into the faces of the Sighted. Raine takes a breath. Blinks. Light fills the forges. Blinding and white. She thinks this must be it. Death.

  But the light doesn’t come for her. It spears into the abomination instead. A beam fired from behind the Antari. A second shot follows it, cutting deep into the thing’s armour and rocking it on its clawed legs. The abomination staggers backwards and ratchets its guns upwards in answer, only to be struck again. Raine chances a look back, and her heart sings.

  Behind them, through the smoke and the ashes and misted blood, stride two Imperial Knights. The massive, bipedal war machines are halved in violet and white, armed with glowing thermal cannons and hung with pennants that ripple in the hot air of the forge. They blare the sound of victory horns from their vox-emitters. Between them rolls a command tank, trimmed in red and gold, a roaring lion sculpted on the forward-facing armour. It bristles with guns and trails devotionals. Hundreds of foot soldiers follow behind, silhouetted by the smoke. The Lions of Bale. Raine knows them as she knows the man she can see in the cupola on top of the command tank, lit in gold by the forge light, his fist raised in the air in defiance. The hero of the Bale Stars Crusade. Living avatar of the Emperor’s will.

  ‘Serek,’ she shouts, into the vox. ‘The Lord-General Militant!’

  And every one of the Antari answers by shouting his name as more furious spears of light arc towards the Sighted’s ailing machine creation.

  Serek!

  The machine reels. Staggers backwards.

  Serek!

  The ammo hoppers for the Vulcan mega-bolters rupture, then so does the abomination’s reactor.

  Serek!

  There is a scream and a flare of white light as the abomination collapses. Raine is knocked to the ground, winded and bruised and momentarily made blind and deaf by the explosion.

  But she is smiling too.

  Three

  The Lord-General Militant

  Daven Wyck ejects the last powercell from the rifle he took from Jona Veer, and uses the gun like a club instead to put the Sighted down with a blow to the face. Killing him takes three strikes, and it is noisy, and messy.

  ‘They are running,’ Awd says, from beside him. ‘Routed.’

  Awd has been out of flamer fuel ever since the machine that tried to kill the lot of them succumbed to the barrage from the Knights. He’s using a knife and his fists now because they are the only weapons left to him as they push up through the halls behind the Lions’ tide, sweeping up what remains of the Sighted.

  ‘Damn right they are routed,’ Wyck says.

  He goes to take a drink from his canteen and finds it empty. It’s the stimms that do that. Dehydrate him. Make his brain feel as though it’s pulling away from the insides of his skull. Especially on the comedown, which is hitting him like that rifle stock hit the Sighted’s face. It’s been worse lately, and he knows it’s because he’s been upping the dose.

  He also knows he hasn’t g
ot a choice. Less will do nothing, and what’s a bit of extra pain on top of the rest?

  ‘Why do you think they do that?’ Crys asks.

  The combat engineer nudges at one of the bodies with the toe of her boot. The Sighted has cut up his face, like they always do, but Wyck knows that it’s not that she means. It’s the eye. Or more precisely, the jagged red stone in its place. He thinks about that witch. The one who put a nightmare in his head.

  ‘Because they are mad,’ Wyck says. ‘Corrupted. Faithless. Pick a reason. They’re all true.’

  Crys nods her head, but she drops into a crouch to look closer.

  ‘If you’re not careful, you’ll go the same way,’ Wyck says. ‘Looking too far into that stone.’

  ‘He’s right,’ Awd says with a soft laugh, though Wyck didn’t mean it as a joke. ‘You know the stories.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ Crys says. ‘It’s this.’

  She pulls the Sighted’s lasrifle free, snapping the strap at the fastening. She turns the rifle in her hands.

  ‘A rifle,’ Wyck says, flatly. ‘There are plenty like it.’

  ‘Look at the mark on it,’ she says, and throws it for him to catch.

  Wyck does as she says. It is stamped with a Departmento marking, like all standard issue lasrifles. The serial code reads STE12550021. It just looks like a normal serial code. He frowns, and it makes the headache growing behind his eyes even worse.

  ‘Like I said, there are plenty like it. Well over twelve million of them. What’s your point?’

  Crys puffs out her cheeks and takes the rifle back from him. ‘This rifle was manufactured on Steadfast,’ she says. ‘And it isn’t standard issue.’ She ejects the powercell and weighs it in her hand. ‘It has a larger capacity cell, and they counterbalance the rifle, so you don’t feel the difference. They are good guns.’

  Wyck holds out his hand, and Crys puts the cell back in and passes the rifle to him. He tests the weight of it and realises she’s right. It is a good gun.

  ‘Thing is,’ Crys says, ‘they’ve only been manufacturing that type of rifle on Steadfast for the past two years.’