Soulless Fury, page 6
‘Um, sure,’ replied Brann, unsure why there was an official investigation. Brutal gang battles were a daily occurrence in the underhive.
The scrutinator turned to leave, but hesitated. She looked back at Brann with what he swore was a smirk on her face. ‘You might send someone in to clean up the Cawdor shrine. It looks a bit like your office.’
And with that, she wheeled around and strode out of town towards the transport lift, which Brann suddenly realised he should probably check on as well. As for the shrine, he would let the Cawdor clean up their own mess. No reason that cost should come back on him.
‘I need new clothes,’ said Kordon to no one. No way was he going back to his office, and he hated to let the workers see him looking like sludge trash. But as he walked down the street, something about that last conversation with the scrutinator kept nagging at him.
What kind of evidence are they looking for? he wondered. What was going on with Donna that warranted a full squad and a scrutinator?
Brann found himself standing in front of the Cawdor shrine, looking at the doors torn off their hinges and lying on the floor. Maybe he’d have a peek inside, and see what the Cawdor had been hoarding while they thought he wasn’t looking. It couldn’t be worse than the scene in his office.
Brann picked his way past the broken doors and moved inside. Hundreds of bullet holes pierced the pews, walls and windows. A pile of dismembered bodies littered the dais at the far end of the shrine, mirrored by a small mound of dead rats in the middle of the room.
How odd, thought Kordon. He’d seen rats in the shrine during services, and the Cawdor were known to utilise them. But this many, dead like they were? He made to move closer, when the giant hole in the side wall caught his attention. It was an odder sight, and one less likely to twist his already turned stomach.
Of course, as Brann got close to the hole, he saw the gory bits on the floor beside it. One Cawdor had been cut in two, his torso dangling off the edge of the pew and his legs lying in a pool of blood below. Another dead Cawdor, his head split open, lay draped across the top of two pews. On the floor nearby was the body of a third Cawdor with no feet and a hole through her chest.
Kordon dropped to his knees and vomited again. He’d been wrong to believe this scene couldn’t be worse than his office. Then, as Brann wiped his mouth on the cleanest section of his suit sleeve that he could find, he noticed something flickering underneath a pair of bloody severed legs.
He crawled beneath the pews into the pool of blood, not caring any more about the state of his suit, and reached underneath the viscera. Beneath he found a glowing dataslate, drenched in blood.
Now that looks like a piece of evidence, thought Brann. I wonder how much it might be worth – and who will pay the highest price?
CHAPTER 7
THE LONG CLIMB
D’onne was pleased that the plasma-gun stunt had worked, but she had no idea how much time it would buy, so she started climbing as soon as the enforcers cleared the sanctuary below. The first part was easy. She climbed up Dog’s body. Between the ogryn’s bulging muscles and armour plating, she found plenty of hand- and foot-holds.
Dog’s grunts and groans when her boots ground into the square of his back were icing on the cake. Once on top of Dog’s head, D’onne glared into the gloom above her. The shaft rose into blackness, but she knew it reached into the dome above. Even if there wasn’t an exit up there, she’d happily cut her way out.
The bad news was that Dog was beginning to slide. Their combined weight was too much for the ogryn, whose fingers and feet were digging into the soot-covered plasteel sheeting in a vain attempt not to slip past the bottom of the shaft and down to the sanctuary floor below.
‘Sump me!’ muttered D’onne. She pressed her own hands against the shaft, raised her feet off Dog’s head, and set them against the walls to brace herself. ‘Looks like we shimmy, Dog,’ she said, hoping the ogryn’s grunt was an affirmative response.
With their backs pressed against the shaft, D’onne and Dog pushed themselves up the sooty smokestack one agonising inch at a time. About halfway to their goal, as D’onne’s arms and legs were going numb, she heard what sounded like an echo of their movement reverberating above them. She stopped moving, but the scratching and scraping echoes continued.
‘What now?’ muttered D’onne. She craned her neck to peer up the shaft. At first all she saw was a writhing mass of shadows descending the shaft. It looked like twilight had come alive and was crawling towards them on a thousand tiny legs.
‘Rats!’ gasped D’onne as the roiling shadows resolved into a horde of mangy, disease-ridden rodents scrambling down towards her and Dog. The rats poured over the top edge of the shaft above them, making it look like the smokestack was being devoured by a writhing shadow.
They had no way to get out of the path of the rodent swarm. Their only exit was ten metres above, past a mass of filthy fur, wicked claws and sharp teeth. And they had no way to fight. Both Pig and Countless were too unwieldy in this confined space and more likely to destroy the shaft and send them falling to their deaths than to kill more than a dozen of the hundreds of rats.
The time for ‘what-ifs’ was over, though. D’onne could see the beady, blood-red eyes of the closest rats. But she saw something else as well: fear. Their eyes were wide and wild and their legs were moving so fast they kept tangling together with the rats around them as they climbed over one another to get to the front of the pack – to flee something behind them.
They didn’t need to kill the rodents, D’onne realised. They just needed to not die from a thousand frightened tooth-and-claw attacks as the horde ran past and over them.
‘Dog!’ she called to her loyal companion, ‘Hold perfectly still.’ D’onne stepped on Dog’s head and threw her body against the opposite side of the shaft. Before Dog slid too far from the extra weight, D’onne pushed backwards against the shaft wall and slid down facing Dog, wedging herself in place without having to use her hands.
Then the rats were on them. The first wave climbed onto D’onne’s head and scrambled down her face, digging their claws into her forehead, ears, cheeks and jaw. She closed her eyes and reached overhead to flail her arm at the little monsters. She dislodged those on her face, which fell and landed on her corset, where they dug their claws in again.
But the movement of her arms stopped the horde from climbing over her face again. She opened her eyes and glanced up. As the next wave of rats closed on her, she swatted at any approaching her powdered wig, and slapped away any that landed on her shoulders.
The rat horde instinctively understood there was a blockage in its path and started to part above D’onne’s head like a wave breaking on a ship’s prow. D’onne took a moment to check on Dog, who had taken a different, much more Dog-like tactic to deal with the rats.
She watched with disgust as Dog grabbed rat after rat in either hand and squeezed until their heads and rumps exploded from the pressure. He then dropped the bloody bits of fur and mashed entrails down the shaft and grabbed another pair.
After several agonising minutes, the swarm had passed them. D’onne peered down the shaft to see the writhing mass of bodies disappear into some crack or crevice near the bottom of the shaft, past the waste disposal room.
Perhaps it was some sort of migration, thought D’onne. She decided she would not think about what they could have been running from.
D’onne looked at Dog. The ogryn was covered in bloody rat fur and rodent droppings. The smell was worse than usual.
‘I’m going first,’ said D’onne as she began inching her way up the wall again. This time, she had no intention of climbing up Dog to save time.
It was slow going. When D’onne’s hands reached the top of the shaft, she barely had enough strength left to pull herself over the edge and collapse on the floor of the cavern. Dog crawled out moments behind her.
D’onne felt a surge of adrenaline as the ogryn’s enormous, rat-gore-covered bulk came towards her. She rolled out of the way as Dog fell to the cavern floor, spraying bits of bloody fur as he hit the rockcrete.
Scrutinator Servalen strode out ahead of the enforcer squad as they marched back towards the lift that would take them to the top of the cliff overlooking the White Wastes. The rusting hulks of ancient machines dotted the cavern around her.
Dim lights from those that had been converted into dwellings pierced the oppressive darkness through crudely cut windows in their sides. Others were rusted hulks that had succumbed to the ages, listing to the side or falling in on themselves.
KB-88 padded next to its master in silence as Servalen mulled over everything that happened since they had descended into Sludge Town, and worked at cataloguing all the various pieces of information within her well-ordered mind. The mastiff knew not to interrupt. It seemed content to keep pace and be near its master.
Sadly, Nox did not understand the scrutinator’s process as well as her mechanical dog did. The sergeant strode up beside Servalen, his metal-clad feet clanking against the rockcrete and matched his superior’s pace for several long seconds as Servalen tried to maintain her concentration.
‘With all due respect, ma’am–’ began Nox after a minute.
Servalen shot her hand out to the side, palm facing the sergeant, to cut him off. She then raised her index finger to indicate he should wait one damn minute as she entered the tunnel that would take them to the lift. The two walked in silence, with the scrutinator’s hand extended for several more minutes before Servalen spoke.
‘You want to know why we are leaving Sludge Town, correct?’ she asked, dropping her hand back to her side, but not bothering to look at or acknowledge the sergeant.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ replied Nox. ‘I do.’
His words were a bit clipped and curt, it seemed to Servalen. Good, she thought. He needs reminding about who is in charge of this mission.
‘We know where D’onne is headed,’ she said out loud. ‘It is my intention to get there first.’
‘We had her back there,’ protested Nox. ‘We could have trapped her in that shaft.’
She stopped, exhaled slowly and, finally, turned to regard the sergeant for the first time since he had interrupted her thoughts.
‘So, you wanted to follow the deadliest woman in the underhive up a narrow shaft, sergeant?’ asked Servalen. She began ticking off points that Nox had apparently not considered on her fingers. ‘She had higher ground, a plasma pistol that would burn through your armour as easily as it would a slab of corpse-starch, and an ogryn behemoth she would happily drop on anyone who tried to follow her.’
Servalen glanced back at the squad, who to their credit, had come to a quick halt and were busily securing the area, without acknowledging their arguing superiors.
‘Is that the type of battle advantage you would have pressed, sergeant?’ asked Servalen, drilling her point home. ‘Would that have been your tactical advice in the Cawdor sanctuary?’
The sergeant lowered his eyes towards his boots and shook his head. ‘No, ma’am,’ he said.
‘I didn’t hear you, sergeant,’ stated Servalen sternly, her words more clipped than Nox’s had been earlier.
‘No, ma’am!’ stated Nox immediately, his palanite drill instincts apparently taking over.
‘Excellent,’ said Servalen. A smile curled across her face that she was certain looked in no way reassuring. ‘Now, we must beat D’onne to Dust Falls. She will show up there, I assure you. So, double-time.’
‘Yes, ma’am!’ said Nox before turning to the squad and taking his frustration out on them. ‘Get a move on, you layabouts!’ he yelled. ‘Who ordered you to halt?’
Servalen allowed the squad to pass by before moving forward again. She scratched her metal canine’s head between its mechanical ears. It looked up at its master with glowing red eyes.
Servalen pressed a finger to her lips. ‘Don’t you worry, Eighty-Eight,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I’m fine.’
Servalen paused, then collected herself, and considered what they knew. D’onne had attacked a seemingly insignificant guilder’s assets to get at a Cawdor gang. She’d ignored targets of more value, and stayed in one place longer than she usually did to interrogate a survivor – which she usually didn’t leave – about a boy. The boy had been in the sanctuary. The Cawdor said that D’onne had missed him. That fight in the shrine was a diversion, Servalen realised. The low-level Cawdors gave their lives so the elders could spirit the boy away before D’onne got hold of him.
It all made sense now. The Cawdor elders must have left with the boy around the time Servalen was interrogating that idiot guilder, because if they’d left any later Mad D’onne would’ve run straight into them. What were they trying to keep from her? What could have got the zealots so riled up that they’d risk going against her to protect some random kid? Was the boy a psyker? She’d felt an effect on her mind half a kilometre out. That would take a lot of power!
Wait a minute! Servalen remembered a report coming across her desk. It had been some vague directive to report the discovery of any previously unknown psykers directly to the lord provost marshal. Servalen had thought nothing of it at the time. She always reported intelligence of unregistered psykers up the chain of command. In light of today’s events, though, that report indicated the Spire probably already knew about this new psyker.
A psyker of that power level could be of enormous use to the enforcers, thought Servalen. Or to her. She had to find it first. The boy was a prize that everyone who craved power in the hive would kill to possess, which meant everyone in the hive would soon be after him.
Luckily, the scrutinator knew a bit about the ways of Cawdor and how they tended to deal with psykers. She had taken down some Cawdor of a recidivist bent in the past. There were only a few places they would take such a prize, and only one near Sludge Town: the Deep Pyre.
As Servalen followed the enforcer squad out of the enlarged utility tunnel and onto the lift platform, she knew she had to get to Dust Falls quickly, not to beat D’onne there but to have any chance of catching up to the Cawdor elders and the psyker before they placed him on the Pyre.
CHAPTER 8
OUT OF THE RAT PAN
After the long climb and the rat stampede, D’onne wanted to lie on the floor of this new chamber forever, or at least until she could feel her arms and legs again, but something up here had driven the rats down the shaft, so there was no time to rest. She struggled to a crouch to see where they had ended up.
The dim light they could see while climbing came from bioluminescent lichen growing in patches on the ceiling and other surfaces, giving everything a sickly yellow glow. The stench and grime of the smokestack permeated every surface, as whatever outlet had spirited it away in the past had clearly been blocked for decades.
She scanned the cavern. It was no more than three metres high from floor to ceiling and filled with pipes and ducts running in every direction, turning the low cavern into a maze of metal tubes.
It was a utility level, one of those spaces in between domes. They crisscrossed the hive, creating random patterns as they filled in the gaps between habitable regions. Gangs used them to move unseen from base to battleground. Bugs, rats and worse things found their way into them and built enormous colony nests. What a wonderful place to travel through. Nothing dangerous here.
A few metres to one side, D’onne saw a cylinder opening. The large plasteel tube ran off into the distance along the ground. It was the continuation of the smokestack they had climbed. The rest of the utility tubes and ducts were too small for her and Dog to use and none seemed to go anywhere particular for long. They twisted at odd angles around each other as they carried energy, waste, air or whatever else throughout this section of the hive.
D’onne continued scanning for whatever had driven the rats down the shaft. ‘Nothing,’ she said at last. ‘In any direction.’
Of course, she knew this meant that if something had driven the rats down the shaft, whoever – or whatever – they were, they were either still here somewhere, or had given up on the rats and left. D’onne had no illusions they were gone. The trick would be getting out of this cavern with Dog in tow without being spotted by them.
The best option was the horizontal smokestack. D’onne stood and investigated the cylinder. She could feel air moving through it, which meant it connected to some exit – possibly at the cliffs over the White Wastes.
‘Interesting,’ muttered D’onne. This would hide them from any local residents and should be a short trip. Unfortunately, going this way meant a treacherous climb up the cliffs where they would be totally exposed. Plus, they’d be trapped inside the shaft with no room to fight – again – if and when they were attacked. Fresh air almost assuredly meant someone living near it.
D’onne reassessed. They needed information about the Deep Pyre, and then they’d need to get to it. Quickly. That meant finding more Cawdor, and to be in an accessible enough spot to find their way to the Deep Pyre without added difficulty. There was only one place nearby that fitted that bill. They needed to go up.
‘Come on, Dog,’ D’onne said, prodding the giant ogryn with her boot. He still lay on the rockcrete ground next to the open smokestack, covered in rat gore on top of Cawdor gore on top of venator gore. He moaned and rolled over. When he got to his hands and knees, he shook himself like a wet animal, spraying blood, fur and guts in every direction.
‘Ugh,’ sighed D’onne, her boots and leggings drenched in a fresh layer of rat guts. Every day in the underhive was much like any other. Rip your enemies in half and then rinse their blood out of your clothes.
Now, thought D’onne, assuming the smokestack goes where I think it does… She oriented on the large pipe and then turned 90 degrees from that line and strode with fresh purpose. We need to go this way.
