Fire Caste Page 3

  Sometimes I wonder what became of them all…

  Iverson’s Journal

  Following its ordeal in the warp, the transport ship was slumbering at low power, recovering its strength and resolve for the return journey. Its passage to Phaedra had almost ended in catastrophe and now there was hell to pay. While the ship’s tech-priests worked frantically to salve its pain and the captain whipped his crew back into shape – and in one case into death – the passengers on Q-deck were left in ignorance. To the Navy men the Imperial Guard were little more than cattle with guns.

  After the crisis a junior lieutenant had descended from the bridge to brief the regiment’s officers, talking patronisingly of power outages and fluctuations in the Geller field – meaningless words that said nothing of the horror that had overtaken the eleven men billeted in Dorm 31 when the warp had seeped into the ship. Colonel Cutler had broken his nose and sent him blubbering back up to the bridge. After that the Guardsmen had heard no more.

  All things considered, Major Elias Waite had to admit it was a bad start to the regiment’s first campaign away from home. The 19th Arkan Confederates had travelled a long way from Providence, but they had a lot further to go in their hearts before this new life made any sense to them. Having passed his seventieth year, Waite doubted he’d be travelling the whole way with them. He was still technically their second-in-command, but he knew many of the officers regarded him as a spent force, and since the horror in Dorm 31 he’d begun to wonder if they were right. By the Emperor, he was tired of it all…

  As he navigated the murky labyrinth of Q-deck, his lantern painting strange shadows across his path, he couldn’t shake the feeling that the walls were just a thin line between life and the void. His path was carrying him along the skin of the ship, where the membrane seemed tense and fragile, ready to dissolve from one step to the next. His mind told him this wasn’t so, but his blood told him otherwise and he was sure every man and woman in the regiment felt the same way. The Arkan simply weren’t bred for deep space.

  Well plenty of folks aren’t, Waite chided himself, but most learn to live with it. We’ll just have to learn the trick along with the rest of them. We’re true Guardsmen now and space is part of the job.

  The Imperium of man was a troubled giant and it was a Guardsman’s lot to be shuffled back and forth across the galaxy as duty called. Besides, few Imperial forces had been as fortunate as the Arkan regiments, who’d fought all their wars at home for so long.

  But were we really so lucky? Waite wondered.

  Long ago, someone very wise and very bleak had remarked that civil wars were the worst kind. After the madness that had ravaged his home world, turning parish against parish and brother against brother, Waite wouldn’t argue. The rebels had called it Independence, the brave old Union of Seven Stars reborn brighter and better than before. How the fools had rallied to their ‘March of Freedom’ – croppers and collarmen, hicks and gentry, even some of the savage tribes, banding together to throw off the shackles of Imperial tyranny.

  Eleven years of blood and betrayal!

  Suddenly Waite was breathing hard and there were tears in his eyes. It was the sheer waste of it all that hurt so much. What chance had the separatists ever had? Even if they’d won – and they’d come pretty damn close at Yethsemane Falls – well, what then? How could one planet have hoped to stand against the juggernaut of the Imperium? Fortunately it had never come to that. The price of victory had been high, but the Arkan faithful had put their own house in order before the wrath of the Imperium had come crashing down on their world.

  ‘And now here we are, a billion leagues from home, come to do it all over again to some other poor fools,’ Waite told the darkness. ’emperor-damned rebels…’

  There was to be no rest for the loyalists of Providence. With the civil war finally over, the surviving Arkan regiments had been thrown into the lottery of galactic deployment and scattered across space on the whims of some distant, inscrutable strategy. For the 19th Confederates that whim had led to a backwater subsector on the Eastern Fringe of the Imperium and a world called Phaedra.

  Well, as the Emperor wills it, Waite decided wearily.

  Realising he’d come to a standstill, he spat and got himself moving again. He wasn’t usually a man prone to introspection. In his youth he’d been a traveller, wandering the high sierras and rift valleys of the frozen north, taking his chances as a trapper and a prospector, but always careful to play fair with the Norland tribes. They were a moody folk, not much inclined to trust a stranger (more inclined to spit and gut him if the truth be told), but he’d won them over. The fact was he’d always liked people and thirty years in the Guard hadn’t changed that. True, he was old now, his face a brown leather walnut and his hair a fond memory of better days, but he’d kept his muscles and could still swing a sabre with the best of them. Damn, but he had to shake off this oppression. It was clinging to him like a leech…

  Like the abomination Trooper Norliss had become in Dorm 31. Like the broken things they’d put to the sword in that blighted town back home. Like the tolling of the daemon bell hanging at the town’s rotten heart. Waite had prayed never to hear those soul-jangling chimes again, but they had followed the regiment across the stars. Or maybe they had always been there, waiting in the warp for fools to listen. Whatever the truth of it, the daemon bell had tolled again inside Dorm 31.

  Ringing in Trooper Norliss’s changes…

  But no, he mustn’t go there. These were not memories to dwell upon at the best of times and certainly not in this gloomy mausoleum. Unconsciously Waite’s fingers brushed the aquila symbol hanging from his neck. He was vaguely surprised to find that he had reached his destination. The viewing gallery was a grand atrium of fluted marble pillars and delicate murals, but in the dim emergency lighting it looked forbidding. He saw stars twinkling through the immense window in the outer wall, promising something brighter than this shadow-haunted concourse. Two figures were framed against the void, one very still, the other almost manic as it stalked back and forth, gesticulating with sharp, angry motions. Waite heard the murmur of their conversation, but the words escaped him. It was just as he’d expected: the colonel was with his witch again.

  With a sigh Waite entered. Something loomed from behind a pillar and he leapt back, his hand reaching for his sabre before he recognised the giant. The man’s face was pale against a cascade of ebony braids, his eyes canted above high cheekbones. He had a feral look that sat strangely with the smart cut of his grey Confederate uniform, almost like a wolf in man’s clothing.

  Waite cursed himself for a skittish fool. He should have expected the Norland giant. Wherever the witch went, her weraldur followed. The warrior had been ritually bonded to her when she’d first manifested the wyrd as a young child. As tradition demanded, he had waited patiently while his charge had made the long journey on the Black Ships to be tested for any trace of taint. If she had been found wanting and failed to return to Providence within a span of seven years that same tradition would have demanded his ritual suicide. Their fates were bound tightly in life, tighter still in death. He was her guardian and potential executioner. The double-headed axe strapped to his back was consecrated to grant the Mercy if his charge fell to the warp. Unsurprisingly the weraldur path was one of the few Norland traditions the Imperium had actively encouraged.

  ‘The God-Emperor’s blessings upon you, Mister Frost,’ Waite said, feeling uncomfortable with the title. To call a strapping Norland warrior ‘Mister’ or one of their fierce, mysterious women ‘Lady’ was absurd, but after the war the Imperial witch hunters had come down hard on all the Outlander folk. Although many of the tribes had fought alongside the loyalists, the fanatics had campaigned to ‘civilise’ them all. The first things they’d stolen were their old tribal names. Take away a Norlander’s name and you were halfway to owning his soul. It was the kind of logic that appealed to a witch hunter.
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  Waite tried a smile. ‘Your vigilance commends you, weraldur, but I’ve words for the colonel.’ He made to step past the giant, but the Norlander blocked him again. The major’s expression turned hard and he raised his voice: ‘I’m here on the God-Emperor’s business, so step aside.’

  He wasn’t expecting a reply. The giant was a mute, his tongue removed during his bonding to the witch, but the confusion in his eyes was answer enough. Waite’s brand of down-to-earth piety was well liked by the troops and since Preacher Hawthorne’s death he’d served as the regiment’s surrogate priest – which gave him a hold over this devout savage.

  ‘Stand aside in His name, weraldur!’ Waite boomed theatrically.

  Frost frowned, trying to weigh up his divided loyalties. Suddenly he cocked his head, as if listening to a secret voice. The talk by the window had ceased and the silhouettes were watching them. Queasily Waite realised he’d been right about that secret voice. The witch was talking to her guardian, brushing his mind with hers. A moment later the giant stepped aside.

  ‘Well now, I’ll be damned if I recall asking for visitors,’ a voice bellowed across the gallery, flush with anger and easy authority, ‘but someone’s here so I guess I must be damned or just plain stupid.’

  ‘Never stupid, colonel!’ Waite called back. ‘And not damned yet if I’ve any say in it.’

  Silence. Then laughter, deep and bitter and laced with something Waite didn’t much care for.

  ‘Get your scrawny arse over here, old man. There’s something I want you to see.’ Now there was genuine humour in the voice and Waite shook his head, already sure he wouldn’t find the words to challenge his commander.

  The witch drew back as Waite approached, hiding her face in the dark arch of her cowl. The colonel was still pacing across the stars, his back rigid with tension, his left hand clenching and unclenching ferociously, the right locked to the hilt of his sabre. His wide-brimmed hat was slung over his back, bouncing about as he stalked back and forth. He hadn’t cleaned up since the horror in Dorm 31 and his rawhide jacket was still blotched with black stains. There was a gash in his right leg where a thorny tendril had whipped past his guard, but Waite knew it was useless telling him to see a medic. These days it was useless telling Ensor Cutler anything. These days he only had ears for the witch.

  ‘Take a look outside, Elias,’ Cutler said without breaking the fierce rhythm of his pacing.

  Waite peered through the glass. The grey-green swathe of a planet curved away beneath them, looking mottled and moist, like a colossal fungal puffball. Unclean. A ship hung on the horizon, sharing their orbit. Waite could tell it was a behemoth and a warship, its prow blunt and pugnacious, its decks encrusted with gun turrets and sensor spikes. A welter of scars pitted the hull, culminating in a deep furrow carved across its midriff where something had almost sliced the ship in half. The fissure showed no signs of repair and Waite suspected any attempt to move the vessel would seal its destruction. The leviathan had taken a mortal wound and this planet would be its grave. If it weren’t for the lights glittering in its portholes he’d have wagered the ship was already dead. He squinted, trying to decipher the faded tattoo of its name.

  ‘The Requiem of Virtue,’ Cutler said, as if reading his mind. ‘Damn strange name for a warship.’ Abruptly he stopped pacing and sized up the vessel. ‘I don’t trust it, Elias. And I trust that filthy planet even less.’

  Waite hesitated, unsure whether the colonel expected an answer. He prided himself on reading the hearts of men, but Cutler had become increasingly mercurial over the last couple of years. Since Trinity and its bell. By Providence, that daemon-haunted town had cast a long shadow over the regiment.

  ‘Zebasteyn. Estevano. Kircher.’ Cutler chewed through the words one by one, evidently not much liking the taste.

  ‘I don’t follow your drift, colonel…’

  ‘Another name I don’t trust. Kircher’s the Imperial Commander here – our lord and master until this war’s done.’ Cutler nodded towards the ship. ‘Man runs the whole show from up there, hiding away in that floating hulk, keeping his boots squeaky clean while he throws good men after bad, pulling the strings and watching the chips fall. Calls himself the ‘Sky Marshall’, whatever the Hells that’s supposed to mean! Is he army? Navy? Maybe even an Inquisition lackey…’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t trust any of it. This war is old, Elias. It makes our little uprising look like a backyard tussle.’

  When he got angry, Cutler always slipped into his Yethsemane drawl. Like Waite, he wasn’t a product of the aristocratic academies that churned out most of the Arkan officer class. He was a patrician, but his family had been knee-deep in debt, so young Ensor Cutler had signed up with the Dust Rangers, a rough-and-ready cavalry outfit. While other officers had studied strategic theory at Point Tempest, Cutler had made his name hunting feral greenskins in the Badlands. The rawhide jacket he wore in lieu of the regulation grey was a legacy of those wild days, its tassels woven with greenskin tusks and finger bones. That coat had raised a few eyebrows when Cutler had finally received his commission from the Capitol, but he’d refused to discard it. It was the kind of thing that made him who he was – the kind of thing that got him into trouble. Inevitably the Old Guard had clipped his wings, only granting him his colonel’s stars when the war was over and they could pack him off into space.

  ‘It don’t smell right, Elias,’ Cutler was suddenly glaring at Waite, his eyes bright, his lips drawn back into a snarl. Looking at that fierce, leonine face, with its shoulder-length mane and tangled beard, Waite sensed this tarnished nobleman was more savage than any Norland tribesman. But it was the whiteness that unnerved him the most.

  Cutler wasn’t yet fifty but his hair was dead white from scalp to beard. Before Trinity there hadn’t been a white hair on his head. That town had changed so much about him, but the whiteness was its most visible mark. Waite wondered if Cutler knew his men had nicknamed him ‘the Whitecrow’. And if he knew, did he even care?

  Suddenly Waite was sure time was running out for all of them. He had to find the words to get through to this man who’d once been his friend. He had to know what Cutler had found inside the mouldering temple at Trinity’s heart. Waite had been by his side when they’d purged the town, but only the witch and her guardian had faced the source of the cancer with him. Only they had seen the daemon bell.

  Why did I let him talk me into staying behind? Why didn’t I insist on going in there with him? But in his secret, guilty heart Elias Waite knew that nothing could have made him walk into that desecrated shrine.

  ‘The bastards promised me a full sitrep once we made orbit,’ Cutler stormed on. ‘Campaign records and troop dispositions, field maps and recon reports… Some Emperor-damned orientation! And then they send me that!’ He jabbed a finger at a crumpled sheet of parchment on the floor. ‘One damn page!’

  Waite bent to retrieve the document but Cutler waved him back. ‘Leave it. You’ll hear it all soon enough, but don’t hold your breath.’

  Suddenly Cutler frowned and glanced at the witch, his eyes narrowing as she whispered into his mind. The intimacy of it made Waite’s skin crawl. Lady Raven, the men called her, and unlike her warden’s childish name, hers felt right. His distrust for her came from the gut. She was a psyker, a mutant cursed with heightened psychic potential that made her a living, breathing time bomb of corruption. Yes, she had survived the tests that culled all but the strongest of her kind and been sanctioned to practise her craft in the Imperium’s name, but you could never be sure with a witch. To Waite’s mind a sanctioned psyker was just a rubber-stamped monster. How could Ensor allow her to touch his mind? And was there any truth to the whispers about them? She always kept her face hidden, as was the way of the Norland women, but it was rumoured that she was beautiful.

  ‘Ensor…’ Waite began, realising he hadn’t used his comrade’s first name in almost a year. Suddenly he was s
ure he had the words to get through to him. ‘Ensor, we have to talk about Trinity. How did that thing in Dorm 31 know…’

  But the colonel waved him to silence, his attention on the witch. Finally he nodded and straightened up, rubbing his unruly beard.

  ‘I have to go clean up, Elias. We’ll be making planetfall in a couple of hours and the men deserve better than this. I’ll see you at the assembly old man.’ Cutler stalked away, trailed by the witch and her guardian. Alone in the dark, Elias Waite realised he had lost the words again.

  ‘Word is Norliss went void crazy and chopped ’em up while they was sleeping. Chowed down on ’em too.’ Kletus Modine licked his lips suggestively. In the dancing pilot light of his flamer he looked like a leering gargoyle. Not that the hulking, barrel-chested pyrotrooper was a pretty sight in any light. With his brutal potato head and bright red crest of hair, he was an archetypal Badlander and Dustsnake squad was his natural home.

  The squad was hunkered down in a corner of the hangar bay, chewing over the fat as soldiers always did before deployment. There were near on eight hundred troops scattered around the cavernous chamber, clustered up in squads around their lanterns, creating pockets of light in the gloom. The emergency strips were running, but their thin red haze was somehow worse than the darkness. Everyone was jumpy after what had happened in Dorm 31 three days back, although nobody knew exactly what had happened. Nobody except the officers and they weren’t talking. Sure, Verne Loomis had seen it too, but he wasn’t doing much talking either these days.

  ‘He ate ’em?’ Boone’s eyes were wide in his broad bumpkin’s face.