Road to Redemption, page 14
Five or six days ago, the sight of it might have been enough to break Zeke’s spirit and send him running, leaving the rest behind him in the hope that the monster would feed on them first. Had such a creature lumbered into Floodgrave he’d have likely done nothing more constructive than hide and whimper, and hope that someone else would drive it away.
That was before his neighbours had all been killed, and he’d faced down slavers, and he’d fought his way through a mob of dregs to kill Prince Reibus, and had ended up killing Trugg. The Zeke standing on top of the crawler, wearing a mask made for him by his followers, was a new Zeke.
Or possibly an old Zeke. Either way, he wasn’t going to be using the bottle of spirits in his hand to get drunk.
‘Come and get some, you Throne-damned filth!’ he roared, and hurled the spirits at the huge spider. It wasn’t a hard shot to make, and it struck true, shattering on the beast’s head. It hesitated, apparently unhurt but working its monstrous mandibles in what seemed to be confusion. Raw underhive liquor dripped off it, pooling beneath.
Zeke’s autopistol probably wouldn’t put a scratch in the thing’s carapace, and he was in no mood to try sharpshooting for an eye. He aimed for the alcohol pool and fired a burst.
The dust of the underhive could lie deep in places, and the ash of Deadwired’s funeral pyre lay atop it here, but the latter few shells of Zeke’s volley burrowed through it to the bare metal beneath and kicked up sparks, and suddenly the alcohol was aflame. The fireball blossomed upwards with a gentle whoomph, and then the gigantic spider’s head was ablaze too.
Emperor, how the monster shrieked! It bucked and reared, and for a moment its legs flailed in different directions as though it couldn’t decide which way to run, but after a second or two it began to scramble backwards as though seeking to outrun the heat and pain that had engulfed its front end. Zeke watched it lumber away, bumping blindly off things as it did so. When it disappeared from view he reached down and pulled out another bottle, then turned towards Stonefist. The squat was staring up at him, open-mouthed. As, Zeke noted uncomfortably, were many others.
‘We have wounded,’ he called, throwing the bottle. Stonefist might have been in awe, but he was still alert enough to catch spirits when they were thrown at him. ‘See to them, if Goodsire Stonefist can find a use for you! Everyone else…’
He looked around. There were several spider bodies lying here and there, being given a wide berth by the survivors. But Zeke had lived in, or at least passed through, the depths of the underhive at times in his youth, in the true badzones where guilder scrip was sneered at by some. He knew that the eyes of Necromundan giant spiders were made of pure crystal, and that had value. To be sure, these weren’t the giant blood mares of the sump, with eyes as big as your head: just one of those would set a person up rich for the rest of their life, assuming they could hold onto the money. But comparatively small though they were, these eyes were still worth having. The caravan would need food and ammunition, not to mention medical supplies.
Zeke pulled out his belt knife. ‘Everyone else, get the eyes out of the spiders. We’ll pool them together, like everything else.’
‘What about the big one’s eyes?’ someone shouted.
‘You want to go get them, you go right ahead!’ Zeke replied, but no one hurried off in pursuit of the burning monster. ‘Where’s Down Town Brudo?’
No one answered. He looked around. Domitry was pointing towards the ceiling, his expression sick. So Brudo was one of the casualties, then, subdued and taken away by one of the monsters that had descended from above.
‘Kat!’ Zeke shouted. ‘Quickhand Kat!’
There was a shuffling of bodies and then Kat emerged, her face still white with fear. ‘Yes, father?’
Zeke leaned into the unearned title she’d given him. Right now, he’d take all the authority he could get, because a crowd full of frightened people needed leadership to prevent them from splintering apart. If that happened, Zeke would be left in the ruins of Deadwired on his own, or near enough so, and that really didn’t appeal.
‘You’re in charge of supplies,’ he told the Escher. ‘Food, water, spider eyes – the lot.’
Kat’s eyes went wide. ‘But… but, father – why?’
Zeke forced himself to smile in what he hoped was an encouraging manner. ‘You’re the safest pair of hands we have. Who would be stupid enough to try to thieve from a thief?’
‘But how can you trust me?’ Kat asked, still shocked. ‘I’m a thief! I’ll let you down!’
‘I don’t trust you,’ Zeke told her firmly. ‘I trust the Emperor, and I trust that you won’t let Him down.’
Kat swallowed, and then she nodded, very deliberately. ‘Right. Yes.’
‘Good.’ Zeke turned away from her and jumped down from the crawler. ‘Get to it! I want us ready to move as soon as we can, this is no place for the wounded! Someone get Voran, and find out where the nearest settlement is that wasn’t on fire the last time he saw it!’
Alin Choll was watching him with the closest thing to an odd expression that a Delaque could get. ‘You took command well,’ they commented. Zeke couldn’t tell if they meant it as a compliment, or whether there was something else lurking in the words.
‘Someone had to,’ he said. Why did he feel defensive about it? ‘I used to be good in crisis situations.’
‘“Used to be”?’
‘Mmm-hmm.’ Zeke reached the second spider he’d killed, flipped it over and dug into its head to prise out an eye.
‘What happened?’
Zeke paused, and considered telling the Delaque to go take a swim in the sump. But it was a fair enough question, given what he’d just said.
‘I made a crisis so big I couldn’t handle it,’ he said, honestly enough. ‘I ran away from it. And everyone.’
‘The Emperor seems to have returned your courage to you, yes?’ Alin offered, as Zeke cut out a second eye. He could tell Alin meant it positively, perhaps even sympathetically, but he couldn’t let it go.
‘No, you don’t understand,’ he replied, leaving the spider’s corpse and standing up to face Alin, looking up into those reflective black lenses. ‘It was the right decision by that point, courage be damned. Sometimes you screw up so badly that the only thing left to do is run.’
Alin tilted their head to one side slightly, then nodded.
‘Looking at my own situation… I would be forced to agree. I am an outlaw, unable to return to those I once counted as my kin, yes? If there is a place where Ash and I can rest, it will be far from here.’
Zeke was going to reply – probably something encouraging, and maybe even genuine – when he noticed Ash Choll hastening towards them, and he shut his mouth again. He’d come to the conclusion that he liked Alin, which was a startling thing to realise, but in the few day-cycles they’d been together the Delaque had seemed nothing less than genuine. Ash, however… well, he still hadn’t forgiven the younger sibling for apparently persuading half of Bad News that he was some sort of holy man, and he didn’t feel like having this conversation in front of them.
Ash looked serious, more serious than usual. ‘Have you seen?’ they asked, as soon as they came alongside Zeke and Alin.
Zeke frowned. ‘Seen what?’
‘Over there,’ Ash said, pointing more or less in the direction they’d originally been heading. ‘Something’s still burning, yes? I saw the light of flames, just briefly.’
Zeke looked at Alin. For something to still be burning, when the rest of Deadwired was mere smouldering wreckage…
‘Did Annie make it through in one piece?’ he asked Ash, who nodded. ‘Right. Go and get her, then the four of us will go and investigate.’
‘What will we do if the spiders attack us?’ Alin asked as Ash hurried back to the rest of the caravan.
‘Simple,’ Zeke replied, checking his guns. His right pistol was nearly out, his left one was full, and he had one spare magazine. Not a great deal, for weapons with their rate of fire. ‘We hide behind Annie, and shoot anything that moves.’
Deadwired hadn’t been large, and the one remaining fire was slap bang in the centre of it. The reason for its longevity was no accident, either.
‘Emperor on the Throne,’ Zeke breathed in horror as he took in the scene. A circular trench had been dug – essentially a moat – and into it had been poured more promethium than he could recall ever seeing in one place before. A giant tank of the stuff had been dragged into position nearby, and continued to pour a steady trickle in, through a nozzle which must have prevented the flame from travelling up into the tank itself. Someone had wanted this to burn for days, sacrificing an unthinkable quantity of this precious fuel to make a statement.
But that in itself wasn’t the statement. The statement stood inside the moat.
A giant sheet of metal was visible through the smoke and heat haze, braced by various support struts to keep it standing. And hanging from it…
Oh by the Emperor, hanging from it…
It had been a man, once. Until his legs had been amputated halfway down the thighs, and the skin stripped from his spreadeagled arms and left to hang downwards until it gently crisped and curled in the heat from the flames, and his head split in two with each side nailed so it faced a different way. It was a grotesque mutilation of the human form, but even as Zeke’s stomach heaved, his head knew what he was looking at.
‘What is that supposed to be?’ Alin asked, their voice wavering in horror. Beside them, Ash was throwing up. Zeke’s throat clenched too, but he was still able to speak as he raised his arm and traced the lines in the air, encompassing the enlarged arms, the truncated legs, the head.
‘It’s an aquila.’
Alin Choll’s hand flew to their mouth in shock.
Someone had made the Imperium’s double-headed eagle out of the body of a man, raised it up in the middle of a burning town, and left a moat of fire around it.
‘Who did this?’ Annie Three-Teeth whispered. It was the first time since he’d met her that Zeke could remember her sounding anything less than sure of herself.
‘Who do you think did it?’ Alin Choll said, scrubbing their face with their hand as though the action could somehow rid them of the abomination they were witnessing. ‘There’s only one possibility.’
Shut up, Zeke thought desperately.
‘The same people who burned down Floodgrave,’ Alin said deliberately. ‘The same people who have Essy and Donnel. It has to be.’
Shut up, don’t say it, don’t say it…
‘The Cult of the Red Redemption. Yes?’
MONSTERS
Essy hadn’t been able to see much of what had been happening, but she’d heard screams, and heard gunshots, and smelled smoke.
Donnel had stopped crying and wailing. At first Essy had thought that was a good thing, but then she realised that her brother wasn’t really doing much at all. He barely ate or drank when their captors put in food and water for them, he didn’t speak to her, and even when he was looking at her, he wasn’t looking at her. His face might be turned towards her, and his eyes might be pointing in her direction, but he didn’t seem to be seeing her. So she held him close, and sang hymns softly, and told him that everything would be right again, even though she was no longer sure that was possible. Donnel still thought of their captors as monsters, and Essy had come to as well, even though she’d caught glimpses of human faces and heard human voices. Just because you were human didn’t mean you weren’t a monster.
The only thing Donnel really still did was shrink back from the monsters when they came to the bars of the cage. They had to pull him out of it when they decided it was time for the children to empty themselves, and they ignored Essy’s screams to be gentle with him. It wasn’t that they were rough, as such, just… uncaring. So far as they were concerned, Essy and Donnel needed to be moved from inside to outside so they could urinate and defecate, and then get moved back in again. That was going to happen whether they wanted it to or not, and if they weren’t as quick about it as the monsters wished them to be, the monsters would drag them out or throw them back in.
Then, one day – Essy wasn’t sure which day, because she’d lost track of them – they weren’t bundled back into the cage as soon as they’d finished their business. One of the monsters grabbed her by the back of the neck, and one picked Donnel up, and they were hauled away from the cage. Essy started to struggle against the man’s grip, then tried to force herself to relax. She didn’t want to go back into the cage, after all. Maybe they were going to be let go?
That was a terrifying thought anyway, because she had no idea where they were, and she didn’t know how long she and Donnel would last in the underhive. Snake-Eye Val had told them stories of a family who’d got stranded in the depths somehow, and had found all they’d needed to build their own home and eat until their bellies were bursting, but Da had got angry at her when he’d thought Essy couldn’t hear, and yelled at the old woman about filling his children’s heads with nonsense. Certainly, Essy had wondered why, if the depths of the underhive were so full of food, her family were living near the border of Hive City and not always growing enough slime to feed them all.
Even so, she might have taken her chances with the underhive, but she didn’t get that opportunity. It was only a few dozen steps, through a press of red-robed, masked figures, until Essy was forced down onto her knees, with Donnel dropped beside her. She looked up, and her breath caught in her throat.
Towering over them was another man, but his robes were different. They still bore the red and yellow of flame, but they were meticulously embroidered with line after line after line of script. Essy had her letters, more or less, and she could make out some of the words: they all looked to be prayers to the Emperor, every one of them, and her quick glance didn’t show her two that looked the same.
The man crouched down, bringing his head more onto a level with her own. His hood was flame-red, and he had all manner of small carved bones and animal teeth hanging from his robes and even around his neck, every one inscribed with prayers or images. His mask covered all of his face except his nose and mouth, and it too had prayers on it, but these were etched into metal plates that covered it. His eyes were in shadow, but his chin was bearded; a straggly affair, unlike her Da’s neat and tidy one, and with more grey in it than brown.
‘Good morning, children,’ the man said. ‘I’m very glad to see you. What are your names?’
The words were polite, friendly even, but Essy didn’t trust his voice. It sounded like he was laughing at her, and trying not to show it. She folded her arms and glared at him like she imagined her Ma might.
‘Shall I tell you something, girl?’ the man said, in that same voice. ‘The only person in the entire galaxy who cares about you right now is me… other than the Emperor, of course.’
‘Ma and Da care about me!’ Essy shot back at him. He wrinkled his nose at her.
‘So where are they?’
Essy couldn’t answer that, because she didn’t know.
‘They’re not here,’ the man said. ‘They’re not coming to get you, because they don’t care about you. No one does, except me. You see these people around you?’
Essy didn’t answer him, and the man standing behind her cuffed her on the back of her head: not hard, not as hard as Essy was sure he could have done, but hard enough to bring tears to her eyes at the sudden pain. The man in front of her raised one hand, and the man behind her stepped back instead of striking her again.
‘When I speak to you, I expect a response,’ the crouching man said softly. ‘Now. Do you see these people around you?’
Essy was sure that things could get a lot worse if she didn’t cooperate, so she nodded once. ‘Yes.’
‘They don’t care about you,’ the crouching man told her, and she was prepared to believe that well enough. ‘They might leave you here to die, or they might not. They might give you food and water, or they might let you starve. The only reason they feed you, and give you water, and have been keeping you safe from all the dangers around us, is because I have told them to. Do you understand that?’
‘Yes,’ Essy said again, as the man behind her shifted his feet as though to move closer to her again.
‘Good,’ the crouching man said. ‘And I do that because I care about you. Two lost children, without anyone in the world to look after them, whose parents won’t come and get them… it’s not right. Someone has to take care of children like that, and that person is me.’
Essy’s voice said the words before she could stop herself. ‘Why did these people burn our home?’
The crouching man’s beard twitched slightly as one corner of his mouth quirked upwards for a moment. ‘Do you love the Emperor, child? My people tell me you do – they tell me you’ve been singing a lot of hymns.’
‘Yes,’ Essy admitted. She shouldn’t feel ashamed to say that she loved the Emperor; shouldn’t everyone love the Emperor? But she thought this man wanted her to say it, and so she didn’t want to say it, but she said it anyway. The Emperor hated lies; her parents and Zeke had all agreed on that.
‘There were people in that town who didn’t love the Emperor,’ the crouching man told her soberly. ‘It’s a sad thing, child, but it’s true. And the only thing I care more about than taking care of children like you, is punishing those who don’t love the Emperor. You agree that heretics should be punished, don’t you?’
Essy did agree, but she still didn’t want to agree with him. But the Emperor hated liars. ‘Yes, but–’
‘You’re going to tell me that the people in your town did love the Emperor,’ the crouching man said, talking over her. ‘You’re going to tell me that they were good people, and I believe that you believe that. But the Emperor protects, child. That is the first thing we are taught. The Emperor protects. Except He didn’t protect your town, because the people in it were sinners.’
