Honourbound - Rachel Harrison Read online

  Wyck blinks. He lets up on the pressure, and the shard of glass comes clear of Lye’s throat. The next thing he knows, he sees stars again as Lye punches him in the face. He falls back against the shelves. More glass breaks. Lye hits him twice more. Hard enough to burst his lip and send him blind for an instant, but then someone grabs her and pulls her clear. Wyck sees who it is through half-lidded eyes, and honestly wishes she had just kept hitting him.

  It’s Fel. The commissar’s damned dog.

  ‘Are you done?’ Fel asks, holding her still.

  Lye doesn’t answer. She is breathing hard, her hands curled into fists. Wyck waits for her to say what he did. What he’s been doing all of this time. To throw him into the jaws of death.

  ‘I asked you a question, chief medicae,’ Fel says, his voice firm and cold.

  Lye doesn’t look at Fel when she answers. She looks right at Wyck with nothing but hate in those grey eyes. Deep grey, like those stones he used to pitch into the lake.

  ‘Yes,’ Lye says. ‘We’re done.’

  Fel lets her go, but he keeps himself between them. ‘Whatever the hells that was, it never happens again. Is that clear?’

  ‘As a springtime sky, captain,’ Lye says. ‘It was a moment of weakness, and nothing more.’

  Wyck knows she isn’t talking about herself.

  Fel narrows his eyes, but he doesn’t question it. ‘Get to your duty,’ he says.

  Lye turns and walks out, glass crunching under her boots. Wyck knows that she meant what she said. That no matter what has gone before, Nuria Lye is done with him. That by sparing him like that, she has paid any debt he might claim of her.

  She owes him nothing.

  ‘You had better find somewhere else to be,’ Fel says.

  Wyck pushes himself away from the shelves, and the room spins lazily. Lye really did hit him hard. Fel’s armour is burned and battered, ruined from the forge, but the icons survived. They catch his eye with their silver edges.

  Twin-headed eagles.

  Something from one of the broken jars drips off the shelf at his back.

  Drip. Drip. Drip.

  Wyck shakes his head to clear it.

  ‘Gladly,’ he says.

  ‘The lord-commissar requires your presence.’

  That’s what the runner that brings Raine her summons says when he turns up at her command tent. He is a young commissariat cadet who introduces himself as Curtz. The cadet can be no older than twenty, but he has already earned a deep scar that carves a line into his dark hair, front to back. He is carrying an umbrella instead of wearing a raincloak, which Raine finds faintly ridiculous.

  ‘Then we should not keep him waiting,’ she says.

  It is best never to do so, with an officer like Mardan Tula.

  Raine follows Curtz to a Taurox transport that is sitting on the edge of the Antari encampment with its engine idling. The constant Laxian storm thunders overhead, churning up the mud and putting runnels through the gravel.

  ‘What is this about?’ Raine asks.

  Curtz collapses the umbrella and climbs up the step into the Taurox.

  ‘The lord-commissar requires your presence,’ he says, again.

  Raine is sure that Curtz isn’t being deliberately obstructive. It’s just that he hasn’t been told the answer. She climbs into the Taurox and takes a seat in the troop bay opposite the cadet. Curtz thumps on the separating wall between the troop bay and the cab, and the Taurox starts to churn away on its tracks. The transport smells of cold iron and petrochem, and the deck of the troop bay is caked in muddy bootprints. Curtz sits there with his hands folded in his lap. The cadet is impeccably dressed, his uniform crisp and pressed, and his boots polished to a high shine. Raine is still wearing her bloodied tunic and trousers. Her dirt-caked boots and gloves. It’s all uniform, as far as she is concerned.

  ‘What happened to Aeryn?’ Raine asks. ‘I hadn’t heard that he made officer.’

  Curtz shakes his head. ‘He was shot, sir,’ he says. ‘On Gholl, during the siege for the second city. He took a bullet for the lord-commissar.’

  Raine closes her hand into a fist and holds it up over her heart.

  ‘Emperor keep his soul,’ she says.

  Curtz looks surprised for a moment. It’s the first time she has seen a natural expression on the boy’s face.

  ‘Did you know him, sir?’

  ‘Yes,’ Raine says. She had met Tula’s previous cadet several times. He had been unsettlingly clever. Looked at you the way a bird of prey might. He would have made a good commissar. ‘But that is not why I said the words.’

  ‘If I may, sir,’ Curtz says, ‘then why?’

  ‘I serve with the Eleventh Antari Rifles,’ Raine says. ‘Do you know them?’

  She knows that he does. All cadets are required to learn of every regiment they may serve with. It is the responsibility of all within the commissariat to know their friends as well as their foes, for when the moment comes that you cannot tell them apart.

  ‘They are tithed from the wild world of Antar,’ he says. ‘Their heraldry is a pair of crossed rifles against a loop of thorns.’

  ‘That is true,’ Raine says. ‘But an adept could tell me that. What else?’

  Curtz almost smiles. She can tell he revels in being tested, which is fortunate for him. He will find no shortage of that, being Tula’s cadet.

  ‘The Rifles are superstitious,’ he says. ‘Steeped in tradition. They name their infantry squads for myth and folklore.’

  ‘There we are,’ Raine says. ‘Now that is an answer.’

  This time Curtz does smile, just barely. The Taurox squeaks and rattles around them as it churns the rough ground under its tracks. The engine is a thunderous, bad-tempered roar.

  ‘In the Rifles, those left behind always do two things for the honoured dead,’ Raine says. ‘First, they make a fire, and use the ashes to paint the name of the lost. Then they speak their words. The same words that have been spoken by generations of Antari, that speak of passing on to be measured and judged, and the peace that comes after.’

  ‘But you did not use their words,’ Curtz says.

  ‘No, because I haven’t earned them,’ Raine says. ‘I am not Antari.’

  She sits back in her seat, letting the roar of the Taurox’s engines tremble her bones.

  ‘But the tradition is a good one,’ she says. ‘It costs nothing to bid a good soul farewell.’

  Andren Fel meets his Duskhounds at the edge of the muster ground, where rows of Chimera transports sit under plastek covers and camouflage netting, just big dark shapes in the rain. There are no trees on Laxus Secundus, so they will have to use one of the collapsed buildings. It isn’t as good a place as a forest for a send-off, but it’s better than no place at all. All of the squads have their own ways, but the Duskhounds by their nature are separate from their kin in many things, mourning included.

  ‘It’s strange,’ Tyl says. ‘To think this whole place was habs, just a month ago.’

  She is right behind him, like always. Fel steps over the puddles that have collected in the collapsed block, by habit more than intent. It’s hard not to tread quietly when you have spent your whole life doing it.

  ‘Is it strange?’ Myre says. ‘It is the same everywhere. Stay somewhere long enough, and it will go to rubble. War finds all of us in the end.’

  Myre has always been melancholy that way. Fel waits for Rol to balance it out, but of course he doesn’t, because Rol is why they are here.

  ‘Here,’ Fel says, when they reach an open chamber high enough to stand up in. There’s enough roof left that it isn’t full of water, but enough missing so the starlight hits the puddles. It’s as close to a tree canopy as they’ll get.

  Tyl opens one of the pouches at her belt and takes out a roll of parchment paper made from Antari trees. She s
ets it down amidst the rubble and ruin.

  ‘You should light it,’ Fel says.

  Tyl looks up at him. She isn’t wearing her carapace, just her black fatigues and her rank pins. Her red hair is shaved clean on the sides and braided long on top. She has washed the forge ashes and blood from her face, as they all have.

  ‘Aye, sir,’ she says, softly.

  He hands her the tinderbox, then sits on the cracked rockcrete floor. Jeth and Myre do the same, so they are sitting like the points of a star around the roll of parchment paper. Tyl strikes the flint and steel and the paper catches quick. Fel thinks for a moment about the rush of the fire down in those tunnels. About how it was so bright that his mask’s visor dipped to compensate. He shut his eyes but still saw it through the lids.

  He wonders if Rol did the same. If he saw it too.

  The paper curls, rolls and collapses in on itself. It takes a few minutes for the embers to die, and for the ashes to go dark and quiet. In that time, not one of them says a word, because you don’t while the fire is burning. Once it’s done, Tyl sits forwards and puts her fingertips into the ashes, because those who light the fire always write the name too, and it couldn’t have been anyone else but Tyl. Not for Rol. The two of them trained together at the scholam. They were family in all but blood. Kith, but as good as kin.

  She paints the letters of his name carefully on the rockcrete. Tyl has steady hands from all of her years of training. From being the one who inks tattoos into any of the Antari who ask it of her.

  But now, she shakes, just barely.

  Tyl draws to the end of the ‘L’ and stops. She puts her hand flat on the painted letters of Caiden Rol’s name.

  ‘Blood and bone dies,’ she says. ‘But the soul goes on.’

  Jeth leans forwards next and puts his hand beside hers. ‘To be weighed and measured,’ he says.

  Myre puts her hand beside Jeth’s. ‘To be known and counted,’ she says.

  Fel is last of all. He puts his hand down too, feeling how the rockcrete is cold but the ash is just barely warm.

  ‘And taken up into His light,’ he says. ‘Evermore.’

  Then they all say the last word again, together.

  The command camp has been established in what remains of Laxus Secundus’ secondary city. The locals used to call the city Overspill, because it is built on top of a network of massive storm drains that take Defiance’s fouled water and empty it into the distant sea. The crusade forces renamed it upon capture, as they often do, calling it Resolve instead. As Raine steps down from the Taurox into the mud and the storm and catches the foul, stillwater smell of the place, she thinks that perhaps the old name was better suited.

  The commissariat hub sits at the heart of the command camp, a prefabricated building made of dark flakboard panels and rigid iron framework. Raine follows Curtz inside, past a pair of Tempestus Scions guarding either side of the door, rain-slick and absolutely still in their carapace plate. They are not sworn to any regiment here, just to Tula and the commissariat. Like Curtz, their armour is gleaming and in perfect condition. Glossy black, like ocean stones.

  Curtz stops in the corridor and bows low. ‘The lord-commissar awaits you in the meeting chamber,’ he says.

  Raine nods and thanks him, and Curtz marches away, his polished boots clicking on the flakboard floor. Raine wastes no time. She pushes open the door to the meeting chamber.

  The room is a large space, mostly occupied by a large wooden table. Projected above it is a slowly turning hololith depicting Laxus Secundus. Six figures in black stand around the hololith and the table, and they all look up as Raine enters the room.

  ‘Ah,’ says Lord-Commissar Mardan Tula, from the head of the table. ‘Severina Raine.’

  Like his cadet, Tula is absolutely immaculate. His uniform could be tailored from dark steel, all sharp edges and crisp folds. His weapons gleam with the dull warmth of polished chrome and bone. The only untidy detail about Mardan Tula is his face. It’s a patchwork of burns on burns that crease around a smile of silver teeth. It’s a face that shows the fights it’s been in. A face Raine feels she can trust.

  ‘Lord-commissar,’ she says. ‘I apologise for my late arrival.’

  Tula waves her apology aside, though she knows he appreciates it. He places a great deal of value on correct decorum for someone who need not use it at all.

  ‘Come,’ he says. ‘Let us begin.’

  Raine takes her place at the table between two figures she recognises. Commissar Arienne Mourne she knows by reputation alone. Mourne serves with the Lions of Bale, and wears a fur cloak over one shoulder as a mark of it. She is dark-skinned with golden-yellow eyes that seem too bright to be anything other than bionics. The other figure is one she knows from past meetings, and past battles. Commissar Lukas Vander is assigned to the Kavrone Dragoons, a regiment that has served alongside the Antari and Raine many times. He is tall and lean, pale as marble, with neatly cut hair that has gone to silver despite the fact he is not much older than she is. As always, Vander is wearing his antique longrifle across his back. It is the sort of thing that could be taken as an affectation if Raine hadn’t seen him use it. Vander glances at Raine as she takes her place. He is brutally honest in all things, including his complete and utter disdain for her. Raine nods her head at him in greeting. Vander scowls, and his eyes go back to the map.

  That disdain and the scowl on his face are the reason that she chose to stand beside him at the table.

  Raine hears reports from her comrades fighting all across Laxus Secundus. Twelve regimental commissars, spread across the world’s face. From the ports. From the oil fields. No matter the location, or the officer delivering the report, there are elements that remain the same. A noticeable change in the Sighted’s strength and disposition. A weakening of morale. And of course, many deaths.

  ‘Now,’ says Tula, looking to Vander. ‘Your report, if you please. How fares Defiance?’

  Vander nods. ‘Progress through the city is slow,’ he says. ‘And rates of dissent are high, even among the command ranks. I have served with the Kavrone for six years, and have never had to execute so many. Company Captain Farain was commended at Steadfast for his actions. He wore the Lion’s Honour. Today he threw down his rifle rather than fulfil the order to clear the hospital sector of traitors, and those too weak to stand against them.’

  Raine sees Mourne scowl at the mention of the Lion’s Honour. It is a mark that is only earned by exceptional sacrifice in the name of the crusade. To show cowardice while wearing it is unthinkable.

  ‘I shot him, of course,’ Vander says. ‘But three of his platoon command turned on me for it. Said that Farain was right to put a stop to it. That they wouldn’t stain their honour by killing those they swore to protect. That they wouldn’t kill any more healers, wounded or sick, even if they have taken up arms.’

  Vander leans on the table, and frowns as if the movement pains him. Raine notices for the first time the bandages wound around his arms under his coat.

  ‘They must have thought three against one good odds,’ he says. ‘They should have known better.’

  Arienne Mourne smiles thinly at that.

  ‘I have seen the same problem,’ Raine says. ‘Here, and on Gholl and Hyxx before it. The Sighted subvert and arm everyone. Priests. Workers. Adepts. They send civilians to spend their blood in the hope that it will make us falter or pause.’

  She exhales a slow breath.

  ‘It has always served them well,’ she says. ‘And with every new warzone it seems to serve them better. Our troops grow weary of killing the people of the Bale Stars, while the Sighted revel in it. That is why even those wearing the Lion’s Honour are throwing down their guns.’

  Vander scowls. ‘Their weariness does not matter,’ he says. ‘Nor their opinion on what is right. They will do as they are ordered, or they will die.’

 
Raine looks at him. ‘I am not suggesting differently,’ she says. ‘Merely making an observation as to why. We are executioners, but we are also judge and jury. The moral hearts of our regiments. If you do not understand the why of the trigger pull, then you are no more than a butcher.’

  Vander’s green eyes are furious. ‘Then call me a butcher, but at least I can say that my blood is clean. I was not born of a coward.’ His face contorts in disgust. ‘And as for your sister–’

  He doesn’t get to finish his sentence, because Raine drives her fist into his face. The sound of Vander’s nose breaking is loud in her ears. Vander touches his hand to his face and then looks at it. At the blood on his fingertips.

  ‘You dare,’ Vander says. He goes for his sword.

  And Mardan Tula’s voice cuts the air.

  ‘Enough,’ he says, without raising his voice even a fraction.

  It is enough to make Raine uncurl her fists, though her heart is still hammering in her chest.

  ‘Your words lower you, Vander,’ Tula says. ‘They lower all of us.’

  Vander at least has the good grace to colour at the lord-commissar’s words. ‘It is the truth,’ he says.

  Everyone around the table is looking at Raine now, even those present by flickering hololith. She sees in them the same thing she has seen many times from her peers and her betters. The narrowing of the eyes. The judgement. It only makes her even more determined to prove every one of them wrong.

  ‘And do you think that I do not know it?’ Tula asks. ‘Do you think that I would allow Commissar Raine to stand beside us if I thought her unworthy?’

  ‘No, lord,’ Vander says, carefully.

  Tula turns to Raine now. She finds that she can’t meet his eyes.

  ‘And you,’ he says. ‘I expect better.’

  The ache in Raine’s hand from striking Vander is drowned out by the ache of shame in her core.

  ‘I apologise for my misconduct, lord.’

  Vander shakes his head. Tula waves her words away for the second time.

  ‘We here have all earned our place,’ Tula says. ‘Our pistols and badges. Our scars. That is the way of the commissariat. Our value is in our deeds.’ Tula looks at Raine. ‘You will receive your new orders officially before long. You and your regiment are being reassigned to Defiance, to assist Vander and his Dragoons in the taking of the primary city. The Lord-General Militant demands the western sector to be cleared. He will wait no longer.’