The Resting Places, page 15
There is no response.
It is an unbearable insult to lavish such attention upon a machine. My senses race to the chamber’s periphery, skittering against the cold rock for a sign of the alcove where the master must have secreted themselves. My soul-potency goes with them, blossoming as I embrace my own totality. There is danger in this. I am split, both cocoon and emergent creature, yet each form feels the dread attention fall upon it, the whisper upon the neck, the thirsting claw that rakes the mirror – but what of it?
I am singular.
You will yield to me.
‘Aspirant approved. Organic matter accepted for Engine-meld.’
The words are spoken in a dead register. I recoil at their leaden mundanity, which hangs in the air for a moment like a handful of stones cast in the path of divinity. As their resonance fades, my eminence curdles to wrath, even as a distracted spar of my intelligence wonders at something dreadful: Stones have gravity, too.
I feel the predator at my back withdraw as exultance gives way to fury and violence comes quicker than thought. I draw my destructor and raze the head of the armature, searing its dead faces to vapour and exposing the metal beneath. Something guttural escapes me as the acid completes its corrosive work. Then fury returns: I sweep the weapon in a swift orbit, casting its beam towards the ceiling. I compose myself amidst the chaos of tumbling equipment and rent razorwire.
Yet the destruction of the master’s chamber cannot alter a course whose purpose is only now understood. Neither wrath nor terror has the power to neutralise the corrosive truth to which I am exposed, the acid recursion of Seethe. I am drawn back to the Feast of Keening Razors, feeling myself hang low and heavy over the fighting pit, radiating the same grief and ecstasy that I now struggle in vain to contain.
‘Soul-drift within tolerances. Scarlet abiding.’
These words barely register above the undignified collapse of the workshop’s stores of grisly material. Only a few voices remain.
‘Nadirist rising. Apothist rising. Division-rune ignition.’
A single whispering source, now. Above, within the Engine.
‘The work concludes.’
Behind me, the entrance to the master’s domain yawns wide. Through it lies an outbound journey that culminates in Commorragh, in new lives and new paths to power. Above me, in the shell, a darker passage opens. I do not require nerve-grafted sensors or darting ocular arrays to locate it. I feel it. I felt it in the moment that goaded elation gave way to rage, in the desolation that has followed the subversion of my pride.
The domain of tithes has collapsed, and what remains is an unnavigable ultimatum – a twist of paradox like the jaws of a snare. To take the outbound path is to concede failure, to refuse to complete the work, to defy the master’s assessment and declare myself insufficient. To complete the work, however, is to accept terminal bondage. I perceive now what Talec understood – the endless curvature of the inbound path, whose final form is an unbreakable knot of strife.
I locate the mark of Seethe within myself and regard it with detached admiration. It is a singular reagent, difficult to procure, the end product of a process like alchemy, whose elements must be held in the most delicate balance for an unthinkable amount of time. I recoil at the taste of my own soul, recognising a richness born of slow and deliberate fermentation.
I rise upon my coiling spine. The shell draws me in, and I am greeted in love and agony by a thousand flensing barbs.
The work begins. There is nothing else.
OLD SOLDIERS
Richard Strachan
Amelya was sitting by the fireplace when he came in, a stub of candle fizzing on the table by her side. Her face was as sallow as the lamplight peering through the window, and she started when he limped into the low room.
‘Father!’ She came over as if to help him into the chair, but he brushed her aside.
‘Leave off your fussing, damn it,’ Druner growled. ‘I’m no bloody invalid.’
‘It’s cold this evening,’ she said, creeping back to her chair. ‘I was worried when you didn’t come back for supper…’
‘I was at the Old Chain Post,’ he said. ‘As you damn well know. Took my supper there.’
‘And…?’
‘Aye!’ he roared. ‘And a few ales as well! Why not, I might ask? Tonight is fifty years since Brennung Field, or had you forgotten?’ He thumped his chest, the badge of service on his black lapel. ‘Twenty years in the Ashpounders, lass. Good comrades gone to the Underworlds, and there’s naught wrong with letting grateful folk stand me a pint now and then.’
He gave her a red glare on the word ‘grateful’, and to his satisfaction saw her turn away. The tears would be on their way soon, he had no doubt. Tears, and pleas to heed Sigmar…
There was the creak of heavy feet coming down the stairs. Druner grimaced, and when Amelya’s husband came into the room, he turned the glare on him, too.
Vikter was a big man, arms thick from stunning cattle in the rending yards. A black beard bristled on his chin and his brows were dark. As soon as he stepped into the parlour, the room seemed half its size. Other men might have been intimidated, but Druner had known his sort in the Freeguild. All front, all glower and threat, but when battle came down they wept like children. When the dead were littered on the ground, and when the dirt was wet with blood and the enemy came pouring over the scrubland…
Druner clutched the handle of his walking stick. He tried to lock the tremor in his jaw.
‘What’s all this?’ Vikter said in his thick Greywater accent. He took Amelya in his arms. She looked like a doll nestled there, hiding her face against his chest. ‘You make her cry again, old man? What’s the matter with you? Your own daughter gives you shelter, and this is the way you treat her?’
‘Shelter?’ Druner spat. ‘I’ve seen hobgrot hovels more luxurious than this place. Happy living in a slum, are you?’
A flinch in that heavy black brow, a downward twist of his lip. Aye, Druner thought. That stings all right.
‘Times are hard,’ Vikter said. ‘All over. Work is scarce, you know that.’
‘Don’t talk to me about hard times.’ Druner stared him dead in the face. ‘I’ve seen harder times than you can possibly imagine, lad. Times that would turn that black beard of yours as white as snow. Aye, and I’ve seen harder men than you and all.’
Druner slowly hauled himself from the chair, leaning all his weight on the stick as he dragged his stiff leg into place. At the door, his daughter called to him in a tremulous voice.
‘We’re going to the temple tomorrow morning, father,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you come with us? Please. Sigmar’s grace will ease your mind, I know it will.’
‘The hell with Sigmar,’ he muttered as he opened the door. ‘The hell with all of you.’
They came for him that night.
He had felt it for days, a dark feeling on the edge of his mind as the anniversary drew close, a lurking sense of mystery and threat. Even all the ale he’d sunk in the Old Chain Post couldn’t keep those memories at bay. They would come for him. He knew it. They would not let him forget.
He woke in darkness, the sheet tangled around his body. He was drenched in sweat. The narrow little room felt like a coffin, the ceiling pressing down on him, the walls squeezing in tight. An aetherlamp on the street outside cast its green light into the room. There was a smell in the air of death and rot, of fresh blood and ruptured guts, the choking stink of cordite and gunpowder.
The smell of Brennung Field, when the battle was done.
He groped for the jug on his bedside table, poured himself a tepid glass of water as his heart slowed its clatter. The smell receded. The shadows settled. It was long gone now, he thought. Years back. It was all over…
He saw Lukas standing at the foot of the bed – Lukas dead these last five decades. Half his face had been blown off. The jawbone dangled loose, a hook of smashed teeth, the bloody tongue lolling against his throat. The right eye was gone, the cheekbone crumpled into itself. A dribble of brains leaked from his skull, the front of his sergeant’s tunic black with blood.
Fynn was crouched in the corner of the room, like a gargoyle squatting in the shadows. Both legs gone, the chest burst open, the ruptured heart like a bloody knuckle hanging in his ribcage. A lung had flopped out and dribbled fluid onto the dusty floorboards. His face was wrenched to the side, white teeth bared in a grin, the sightless eyes like broken windows in an empty house. He champed his jaw, clacked those white teeth, said nothing.
Druner felt time lurch and stutter. He choked on the mouthful of water, spat it out down the front of his nightshirt. The house was silent around him. A warm breeze slithered across the back of his neck. That smell of gunpowder again. That smell of corpses, and death, and Brennung Field.
Ingryd stood by the window. When Druner saw her, he gave a hoarse cry. The light from the aetherlamp painted her skin in green flame, a crust of dried blood in that pale blonde hair, her white eyes rolling in her broken skull. Shreds of flesh and smashed bone hung from her shoulders. Her swollen lips moved, but no sound came.
‘Lukas!’ Druner wept, his hands out to ward them off. ‘Ingryd, Fynn! Gods above, please!’
Suddenly they lurched towards him, shuffling, thumping on the boards – Fynn skittering across the floor, dragging himself with his burnt hands, black eyes blazing, Lukas moaning as he staggered along the side of the bed. Ingryd wailed like a winter wind, the most mournful sound he had ever heard.
Druner screamed. He writhed in the tangled sheet, threw himself from the bed.
‘Get away! Get back, I beg you!’
He crashed to the floor. Pain spiked up into the bone of his bad leg, stabbed into his hip. The sheet fell across him like a shroud, and the smell of death was thick in his nose. Death and burnt blood, smoke and flame and all the horror of it…
‘Lukas, I’m sorry!’
Light bloomed in the doorway, the warm amber glow of a bedside lamp. Amelya rushed to him, Vikter standing there with the lamp in hand, staring with a frown into the empty room.
‘Father, what is it?’ She tried to lift him, but he was too heavy. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Get away!’ he cried. He tried to push her off, but his limbs felt like water. Vikter was beside him then, his strong arms lifting him up and back into bed. Druner gazed wildly around, but the room was empty now. The shadows held no corpses. The darkness did not hide the dead.
‘Come on, old man,’ Vikter said, not ungently. ‘It’s just a bad dream, that’s all. Just old memories, eh? Back to sleep and you’ll feel right as rain in the morning.’
Amelya helped him change out of his sodden nightshirt. Groggy as he was, Druner still saw the look that passed between husband and wife as Vikter left the room. He was nothing but an irascible old man to them, a mean old goat with a bad leg and a foul temper. But he’d been a soldier once…
Amelya smoothed down his thinning hair and pulled the sheet across him.
‘Think about the temple in the morning,’ she said as she kissed his forehead. ‘Sigmar’s arms are open to all who approach him. You’d find peace there, I know you would.’
‘Peace,’ Druner grumbled. He closed his eyes and tried to keep the sob out of his voice. ‘I’ve already paid the price of peace, girl. I’ve had my fill.’
When she had left the room, he stared into the empty shadows. Lukas and Fynn, and Ingryd… Perhaps it had just been a dream? A nightmare brought on by too much sour ale at the Old Chain Post, bad memories of the past on this day of all days. He had never really let it go, he knew. It lurked in him still, all these years later.
Carefully, he levered himself out of bed, wincing at the pain in his hip. He knelt on the dusty floor and reached under the bed, pushing aside the chamber pot, an old travelling bag, a rolled-up length of groundsheet. His fingers clasped the handle of the chest and he pulled it out as quietly as he could. It was an old thing, the black lacquer peeling away, the bronze handles tarnished green. He flipped the lock and reached inside, drawing out a small leather case no more than eight inches long. The leather was cracked and worn, as wrinkled as an old apple.
He brushed his fingers against the clasp, but at the last moment drew them away. He held the case to his chest, and to anyone who might have seen him, it would have looked in that moment like he was praying. But Druner didn’t pray. Not any more.
He tucked the case under his pillow and slowly clambered back into bed. He tried to pretend that he couldn’t still smell the faint scent of death, the scorched black powder stink of Brennung Field.
He heard his daughter and her husband leave for the temple in the morning. Amelya stood by his closed door and called his name, but he didn’t answer, and after a moment he heard her resigned tread as she retreated down the corridor.
Lukas and Fynn, and Ingryd… The rockets’ cones as red as blood, the screech of the wheels as they levered the battery into place. He could still hear it, all these years later. Could still smell the brackish tang of the burning wicks, the flash of the priming pans. The Aqshian dust underfoot as they dragged the battery onto higher ground.
He dressed quickly, or as quick as he could with the stiff leg. He stood there in his room, looking over his shoulder at the empty corners, the low seat beneath the windowsill. There was nothing there. A bad dream, that was all.
Last night’s ale had left a sharp pain behind his eyes, a sour taste in his mouth, so he took himself out into the streets of the Hooked Acre to clear his head. Walking stick in one hand, unruly with fatigue, Druner limped along the narrow cobblestoned streets, from the scruffy block of tenements to the wider spaces of the marketplace. He picked between the stalls for a while, casting his eyes over the fruit and vegetables, the leather goods and bookbinders, but hardly seeing any of it. After a while, the harsh cries of the stallholders were like knives in his ears, and so he limped off into the quieter streets behind, where Heldensen Road stretched off towards the mustering grounds for the Heldenhain’s 75th Regiment, the Linebreakers.
He sat on a bench by the side of the avenue, in the shade of a line of woe trees. The dead leaves whispered against the dusty pavement. Carts and horses passed on the street, great lines of aurochs brought in from the Ghyranian side of the city, destined for the slaughterhouses where Vikter worked. He could hear the tramp and crash of marching soldiers from the 75th’s barracks. Mere line infantry, he thought. Smart enough, but nothing like us. The glare of the rockets streaking across the battlefield, the flat thump of the explosion, that smell… always, wherever you went, that damned smell in your nose.
The traffic on the road seemed to slacken then. A scattering of dust, frozen in the air, the hot steel plate of the sunlight fracturing somehow, and all the buildings as they soared in their mad profusion becoming strangely flat and two-dimensional, as if there was no more backing to them than a sheet of parchment. Druner raised his head, looked to the tall iron gates of the barracks on the other side of the avenue, all the Freeguild soldiers standing there on the parade ground at silent attention.
Lukas was sitting beside him. Druner didn’t turn his head, but the shape of the dead man loomed there in the corner of his eye. The drip of blood, the slush of wet flesh as the jawbone slapped against his throat. The smell – burnt hair, black powder, cooked meat. Druner felt his gorge rise, even as the hairs on the back of his arm began to quiver in the airless day.
Something shuffled behind him, slithering across the pavement. Snuffling, like a pig. The click of teeth, the hiss of those ruptured lungs. Down and to his left, he could see a shadow creeping around the corner of the bench. Black, empty eyes staring up at him, the chest burst open, the legs torn away.
He looked across the road, saw Ingryd in the shadows beneath a woe tree, a red streak against the grey trunk. Perfectly still, the head drifting to the side, blood dripping from the shoulders where her arms had been. Those white eyes.
Druner swallowed, kept his gaze fixed on the soldiers in the mustering yard. He clutched his walking stick, hands shaking.
‘What do you want?’ he said in a dry voice. ‘What do you want from me?’
They said nothing. A liquid gulp from Lukas, Fynn retching in the dust, Ingryd just standing there like a bad dream on the other side of the street. The smell crept over him like a shroud, like it had hands to grasp him close. He could almost feel the stench on his skin.
Fynn, hunched on the pavement, reached his burnt black nails up to the arm of the bench. Lukas jostled suddenly, as if caught in a web of pain. Fynn’s hand came closer, closer…
‘Please,’ Druner said. ‘It was so long ago.’
Their hands were like steel, pinning him to the bench, Lukas lurching across and grasping one arm, Fynn hooking his blackened fists to the other. Druner cried out – and then Ingryd’s haunted face was suddenly thrust against his own, her gaping mouth like a black tunnel into the depths of despair, white eyes as unseeing as stars. Her dead grave-stink was overwhelming, a rasping cough retched up from her guts, and in the midst of it, two hissed words that Druner knew only too well.
Brennung… Field…
He had no peace for days. Every night he sat up in bed, sleepless, the small leather case held tightly to his chest. In the cramped, constricted house he caught sight of them lurking behind the doors, in the shadows under the stairs, through the dingy glass of the windowpane – Ingryd always staring with those dead white eyes, Fynn always leering up at him from a puddle of blood, Lukas twitching as his dangling jaw shook out a rain of broken teeth. They sat there at the dinner table beside Amelya and Vikter while they ate, invisible to those they did not care to torment. They followed him out into the street, silent under green lamplight, hushed and weary in the mellow afternoon glow of any tavern or inn where he might seek refuge. Any hour of sleep he managed to snatch was always broken by Ingryd’s cold wet breath in his ear, her mumbled whisper of Brennung Field, Brennung Field… Wherever he turned, there they were. They would not let him be.
