Fire Caste Read online

  It had scared the Hells out of Joyce seeing Uncle Sergeant Calhoun retching like that. He’d always thought the old man was a rock – immovable and invulnerable, but he’d been the first to pay his dues to the sea. Only the half-breed had managed to hold it all in, but Joyce figured that must be down to his Norland blood. The savages were tainted so maybe they liked keeping the puke inside them. That made sense, didn’t it? He clung onto the thought because nothing else made much sense anymore…

  Major Waite was dead. Joyce had seen it happen and he still didn’t believe it. The Confederates had been lined up for inspection when the major’s drop-ship had touched down with the 2nd Company. Everyone had watched proudly as the Old Man had marched over to meet the welcoming party from the battleship. But then there’d been a lot of arguing and another holy man had come down from the iron castle and joined in. Joyce could tell the newcomer was really important because he was taller than anybody he’d ever seen in his life. At first the boy had wondered if the man might even be a Space Marine, but he wasn’t wearing the sacred armour he’d seen in all the paintings so Joyce had decided he was probably a saint instead. Later he’d heard the sailors call the man Confessor Gurdy-Jeff, which sounded like a pretty holy name to him.

  As a child Joyce had once seen Deacon Jericho give a sermon and thought him the holiest man alive, but Confessor Gurdy-Jeff made Providence’s senior witch hunter look like a common street preacher. Despite the stink of this heathen world Joyce had felt his heart soar at the thought of fighting alongside a hero like that, but for some reason Major Waite had kept arguing with the saint, shaking his head and waving angrily, like he’d been told to jump into a fire or something. Joyce hadn’t understood him at all – if Confessor Gurdy-Jeff had asked him to jump into a fire he’d have leapt without a second thought, content in the knowledge that he was doing the God-Emperor’s work.

  Worried that Major Waite would make the Arkan look like heretics to these holy folk, Joyce had grown angry. The saint must have been angry too, because suddenly he’d quit talking and jabbed a hand into the major’s face, the fingers straight and pointed as knives. Some of the others weren’t sure what had happened, but Joyce had seen the major’s eyes pop. The Old Man had fallen to his knees with blood running through his hands. He’d squealed like a stuck hog until the saint had brought that holy fist chopping down onto his neck so hard that Joyce swore he’d heard the snap. Sergeant Hickox, who’d been with the major forever, had tried to pull a gun then, but the three commissars from the battleship had been faster and he’d gone down in a storm of las-bolts. Then Lieutenant Pettifer had tried to step in and they’d just shot him too. They hadn’t stopped shooting until all three bodies were sizzling and smoking like boomerfish on a griddle.

  After that everybody had gone real quiet, just standing there like the sky was raining frogs, the way that Deacon Jericho always said it would if folk didn’t do right by the God-Emperor. Then some of the others had gone for their guns, but Captain Machen had shouted them down and across the deck Captain Templeton had done the same. That was when Joyce had noticed how the gun turrets on both sides of the deck had spun right round to cover the Confederates. If it had come to a scrap those big guns would have minced them up in no time.

  Joyce wasn’t too sure about what had happened next, but Captain Templeton had gone over to the saint and started gabbing away, all nice and peaceable like. Joyce hadn’t caught any words but he figured they must have straightened things out because suddenly the priests in chainmail had been everywhere, rushing around and blessing the Arkan with some mighty fine words. Their cog priests had followed, sticking needles into folk, taking blood and checking it in a machine that one had growing right out of his gut.

  Cog priests had always made Joyce queasy. With their strange machine bits and messed up metal faces no two were ever the same, but all were as ugly as sin, even the pair who served the regiment. The Arkan called their cog priests ‘professors’ because that’s what their kind had been called before the Imperium came to Providence, but the name didn’t make them any better. Professor Mordecai’s face looked like a steam engine had tunnelled through it and got stuck halfway, but Professor Chaney was even worse. Under his hood there was nothing but a windmill of mirrors that reflected a man’s face right back at him in a thousand different shapes and sizes, all spinning and whirling like a silver twister. They both made Joyce’s skin crawl, but since they were priests he guessed they must be all right. He still hadn’t got that part of the Imperial Gospel figured out…

  ‘Why do we call them priests?’ Joyce wondered out loud. ‘The professors I mean, how come they’re priests too?’

  Everyone in the stinking, heaving boat looked at him like he was snakebite crazy. He remembered that his brothers didn’t worry about the Gospel as much as he did, which was kind of sad and probably bad too.

  ‘Only thing I want to know about those coghogs is why they took Klete,’ Dix said, wiping the puke from his lips. There was a dazed look in his eyes that had nothing to do with his messed up guts. Joyce guessed he must be missing his friend and knew he’d feel the same way if the cog priests had taken Uncle Sergeant Calhoun instead of Brother Modine. Something bad had shown up in Modine’s blood and the priests had said he’d need ‘noculating’ against the sickness in the jungle. They’d promised to give him back but none of the others had really believed it and Brother Modine had looked real scared. For a while Joyce had thought he might even put up a fight, but in the end he’d just chucked down his flamer, told them to find her a good home and gone quietly. The cog priests had marched him off, along with a couple of boys from the 2nd Company.

  ‘Why’d they have to go and pick Klete?’ Dix moaned again.

  ‘Maybe those sailor boys were running short of fresh meat,’ Roach taunted. ‘Plenty of meat on good old Klete…’

  ‘Shut your trap, breed,’ Dix snarled. The snarl turned into another gut heaving retch as the boat bucked violently. Toomy lolled against Roach again and blood oozed from his broken mouth as he groaned wetly.

  ‘I’m just saying…’ Roach shoved Toomy away. ‘If you wanted meat for your larder you could do a lot worse than Kletus Modine.’

  ‘Knock it off, both you maggots!’ Calhoun snapped, but there was no fire in it. Joyce had never seen the sergeant looking so tired, but then he’d never seen the sergeant looking tired at all. Hunched down on the metal bench with Modine’s flamer cradled in his lap like a lost dog, Willis Calhoun looked old.

  Although he was only a greencap and this was his first time in the fire, Joyce was pretty sure wars didn’t usually go like this. He wasn’t sure about much else though – like why they were on this boat and where it was taking them. Things had happened so fast after the cog priests had done their tests. The sailors in red had herded them onto the boats hanging alongside the battleship like big metal boxes, corralling them fifty to a boat like cattle in a stockade. One wall of each box had been tilted down into a gangway, waiting for them to get on board, then snapping shut like a trap afterwards.

  There’d been a sailor waiting inside, sitting up front in a little cabin while everyone else was left out in the rain. He’d turned and welcomed them with a grin like a hungry landshark, but there was an aquila branded into his forehead so Joyce guessed he must be all right. Speaking with a voice like broken glass, the sailor had ordered them to sit with their backs straight and grip the safety rails, warning them to keep their jaws shut unless they wanted to bite off their tongues. The man had laughed at that last part like it was the greatest joke ever told and Joyce had decided maybe he wasn’t all right after all.

  One of the Steamblood Zouaves had boarded the boat alongside them, clanking onto the deck like a clockwork god. He was too big for the benches and too proud to listen to the grubby sailor anyhow, so he just stood in the aisle, looking grand. Joyce wasn’t sure if the Steambloods were properly holy, but they did look mighty fine and he was glad t
o have one along for the ride.

  And then the sailor had pulled a lever and sent the boat plunging down into the sea. Joyce’s guts had rushed up into his mouth and his butt had surged off the bench. Scared half to death, he’d gripped the safety rail and forced himself back down, fighting for his life against the freefall. Just then the Zouave had come careening down the aisle, all out of control. He caught Toomy’s head with an iron boot as he flew past and it was a miracle he hadn’t kicked it clean off! There were no miracles left for the knight though. Joyce had seen his eyes through his visor as he flew past and they were wide with a surprise that was bigger than fear. And then he was gone, tumbling over the stern gunwale like a scrap metal bird. They’d heard him splash into the ocean a heartbeat behind the boat, but nobody had tried to do anything. Even a greencap like Joyce knew the iron man must have sunk like a stone. Only the sailor had reacted, giggling hysterically like he’d played a fantastic joke on the new boys.

  Nope, nothing made sense anymore.

  Bobbing about in a puke-filled box on a sea of sewage, Joyce remembered the knight’s eyes and wondered if everyone looked that way when they were about to die. The thought made him uneasy so he prayed instead. He prayed for the soul of the lost knight who’d died without honour or glory. He prayed for poor Brother Toomy who was looking really bad right now and he prayed for Brother Modine who’d looked so scared when the cog priests had taken him away. But most of all he prayed that doing the God-Emperor’s work was going to get a whole lot more glorious than this. And somewhere along the way it seemed to him that the God-Emperor answered.

  Imperial Seabase Antigone, the Sargaatha Sea

  I’ve been on this creaking, ocean-straddling base for over a month now, healing up while I wait on High Commissar Lomax. She’s never liked me and I doubt my unauthorised sojourn in the wilderness will have improved her opinion much. She’ll want answers, but where do I begin? How can I explain the path that led me to those Verzante deserters when I don’t understand it myself? How can I make her believe I was on the trail of Commander Wintertide when I’m not sure I believe it myself? Perhaps she’ll have me shot. Or more likely she’ll just do it herself.

  But no, I’ve been given a new eye and a new arm so execution won’t be on her agenda. Did I say ‘new’? In truth both the augmetics are ancient, doubtless salvaged from one corpse after another. The hand is a tarnished metal gauntlet that grinds whenever I flex the fingers and locks up unless I keep it lubricated, but the optic is worse. It’s like an iron spike rammed into my eye socket – a hollow iron spike with an angry wasp trapped inside it. Not that I’d give a damn if it worked properly, but sometimes things flicker or flare and suddenly I’ll see the world through a hash of snow or broken down into a crude mosaic of reality. And sometimes I’ll see things that aren’t there at all. It’s just as well I’ve learned to recognise true ghosts.

  Take Niemand for example. He has stood vigil at the foot of my bed throughout my time in the infirmary, invisible to the medics and orderlies, but occasionally glimpsed by the worst of the wounded. A few days ago they wheeled in a man who looked like a heap of raw meat and I saw him staring at my revenant in abject terror. Doubtless the dying man thought the shade had come for his soul. He could not know that Niemand cares only for me.

  Detlef Niemand is the least of my three ghosts, yet his hate runs the deepest. He was always a cold bastard, the kind of man who brought nothing but malice to the Commissariat. I once believed that our kind were exemplars of the Imperium, unflinching in the face of death and faithful to a fault. How else could we be trusted with the power of life and death over our charges?

  ‘We have to be the best of the best, Iverson,’ my mentor Bierce used to say, knowing full well that few of us ever were. Even so, Niemand was amongst the worst of the worst. He was assigned to me on my first tour of the Mire and although he was just a cadet back then, I could see the darkness hiding behind his pale, colourless eyes. He was morbidly proud of the six executions he’d already made and took every opportunity to regale me with the details. I loathed him from the start and never understood why he was so reverent of me, a twenty-year veteran with a paltry ten executions to my name. When he finally earned the scarlet and took his own commission his departure was like a shadow lifting from my soul.

  The next time our paths crossed we were equals: joint commissars serving with the 12th Galantai Ghurkas in the kroot-infested tributaries of Dolorosa Magenta. By then Niemand had tallied almost two hundred executions, taking a life for even the slightest misdemeanour amongst his charges.

  ‘Iverson, you think too much,’ he chided whenever I confronted him, echoing Bierce’s old admonitions. ‘You and I are engines of the God-Emperor’s will, unshackled from the doubts and passions that enslave lesser men. Hesitation can be our only crime!’

  That icy façade never fooled me for an instant. I could see how much he enjoyed the killing. That was why I left him to the kroot. How did it happen? We were lost deep in the Mire when he took a wound to the gut – a solid slug that tore him right open. He pleaded with me to carry him out or make a clean end of it. Instead I shot off both his hands so he couldn’t do it himself. As I walked away I remember him begging and cursing and then finally screaming when the xenos found him. You see the kroot are particularly foul lapdogs of the blueskins. They are avian carnivores that delight in tearing their enemies apart and eating their flesh. And not always in that order...

  I suppose Niemand’s return was inevitable, but I underestimated his poison. One way or another he damned me. After he came back I grew increasingly careless with the final resort, almost trebling my executions in the space of two years and thinking nothing of it. Thinking nothing much at all in fact, until Indigo Gorge and Number 27, the girl with the eyes of a saint. After that everything changed.

  Iverson’s Journal

  ‘But you can’t come in here!’ the young drop-ship pilot blustered, his eyes agog at the antique autopistol in the intruder’s hand. ‘The shipboard regulations are quite unequivocal about–’

  ‘Nothing’s ever unequivocal son, except the man pointing a gun in your face,’ said the white-haired madman who had burst into the cockpit. ‘And maybe the Emperor’s word, though I’m none too sure about that one right now.’

  ‘Besides, the man is already here, Jaime,’ the co-pilot observed languidly. ‘And I’d wager he’ll not be going away any time soon.’

  Colonel Cutler turned from the youth in the pilot’s chair to the much older man lounging in the seat beside him. The co-pilot’s thinning grey hair was tied back into a drooping ponytail, giving him the air of a faded rake. His mahogany skin was deeply seamed and the bags under his eyes mirrored the sagging sack of his gut. Cutler guessed he was well past sixty and looked every day of it.

  ‘Your name, sir?’ the colonel asked, unable to decipher the letters on the rogue’s crumpled jumpsuit.

  ‘That would be Ortega, señor.’ The co-pilot’s cadence was almost theatrical, the voice of a man who enjoyed talk for talk’s own sake. ‘Guido Gonzalo Ortega, pilot third class and falling, 33rd Verzante Skyshadows, indentured unto the glorious 6th Tempest in service to his Holiness the esteemed Water Dragon Aguilla de Carajaval, may his exalted bones bless this pestilential snake pit unto eternity.’

  ‘That is heresy, Ortega!’ his comrade protested stridently. ‘The Water Dragon is doing the Emperor’s work in the Mire, cleansing the savage and purging the xenos.’

  ‘The Water Dragon drowned in his own blood and vomit years ago, boy.’ There was an unexpected bitterness in Ortega’s tone. ‘Along with every one of the poor fools he dragged into the Mire with him. No, we Skyshadows are the last of the 6th Tempest, Jaime.’

  ‘You will address me by my full rank, sub-pilot Ortega!’

  ‘Son, why don’t you just fly the ship and leave the talking to us oldsters,’ Cutler said, waving his pistol at Jaime.

 
Indignantly the pilot returned his attention to the helm and swore at the blinking red light that indicated yet another clogged engine filter. The drop-ship was submerged in the effluvium of the Strangle Zone, Phaedra’s miserable excuse for a cloud layer. Flying through the dense strata of floating fungal detritus was dirty work, but dropping below the smog was far more dangerous. The fleet had lost countless birds to enemy ‘sky snipers’ – high altitude drones armed with lethal rail guns.

  With expert fingers the pilot flicked a sequence of switches and flushed the filter. The red light winked out and he sighed with relief. It was Ortega’s job to supervise the filters, but the fool couldn’t be trusted with anything these days. Jaime had reported his laxity many times, but the Sky Corps was so short of airmen that Ortega had escaped with a demotion. More importantly the report had earned Jaime Hernandez Garrido the silver badge of the Skywatch, an honour awarded only to men of impeccable loyalty. Garrido wore the winged eye on his lapel with pride, relishing Ortega’s dislike of it. Unfortunately the old goat’s retribution had been a vigorous campaign of flatulence that had turned the cockpit into a toxic no-man’s-land to rival the smog outside. With any luck Ortega’s luck would run out soon and Jaime would be assigned someone younger and more devoted. It was the natural order of things. There was no room for broken relics in a holy war.

  The metal gangway crashed down onto the shore and Ambrose Templeton, captain of the 4th Company, lurched from the boat. Still reeling from the boiling embrace of the sea he stood blinking on the ramp, trying to make sense of the chaos that was the beach. Searching for words…

  Blind, bound and broken heartless, dancing eyeless to a symphony of sorrows.

  Templeton had written those words on the killing fields of Yethsemane Falls, scrawling them feverishly into a notebook with blood-slick hands, diverting the horror to the page before it could drown his sanity. Beneath his gaudy finery the captain was a grey man, sallow faced and balding, but beneath the grey he was a riot of restless words. Before the Providence uprisings he’d been an assiduous historian of warfare, poring over the strategies of the past to inform the tactics of the future. The discipline had served him well during the conflict and the scholar had become a fine officer. And in time the fine officer had become a fair poet. After Yethsemane, Templeton had come to see the materiel cost of war as material for his own epic, his ‘Canticle of Crows’…