Hammer and Bolter 4 Read online

  And if I didn’t go soon, I knew there were any number of predators gathering in the brush, ready and eager to help me on my way.

  I wasn’t worried. Far from it.

  I knew that my men were nearby. I knew they would never stop searching for me. And I knew that, whatever it took, they would find me. They would carry me off to the surgeons, as they had done a hundred times before.

  I could trust them.

  And when I heard their distant footsteps, I was still able to force a smile.

  The Barbed Wire Cat

  Robert Earl

  In the darkness, the thing called Skitteka sat and schemed and stroked his pet. A single lantern lit his stone-gnawed burrow. The guarded flame produced barely enough light to lend a twinkle to his beady eyes, although it was sufficient to set the blonde of his pet’s hair aglow. Everything else was in shadow.

  Skitteka hadn’t had a pet before. Apart from anything else, not many humans could have borne his touch. Most would have cowered or flinched, or just broken and tried to run. But Adora was not most humans. She purred as he dragged his filthy claws through her hair, and pressed herself into his verminous caress with every semblance of pleasure.

  ‘I wonder, little cat,’ Skitteka said, ‘how long I will have to wait to become chief overseer.’

  Despite his bulk Skitteka’s voice was a high-pitched shriek, like nails being drawn down a slate. Adora seemed not to mind. Quite the opposite, when she cocked her head to listen it was with a keen interest and that, at least, she didn’t have to fake.

  ‘The slaves all wonder the same, master,’ she told him, her voice perfectly modulated to that sweet spot that lay just between terror and adulation; that sweet spot she’d spent so many hours practising. ‘They see that you are the most powerful, and the most magnificent. And they fear that when you become chief overseer they will have to work harder.’

  Skitteka hissed with pleasure, the twin chisels of his incisors gleaming in the scant light.

  ‘They are right,’ he boasted, his claws scratching deeper into her scalp to show his pleasure. ‘That fool Evasqeek doesn’t know how to handle humans. He should be removed. Replaced.’

  The tremble in his paw belied the defiance in its voice and Adora felt a flash of frustration.

  So she thought about her father. He had died when she had been a toddler, all she remembered about him was a kindly face, the smell of pipe smoke, and the one thing he had said which she had understood and remembered. It’s a poor craftsman, he had told her three-year old self, who blames his tools. Perhaps he would be proud to know that, whatever else Adora had turned out to be, it was not a poor craftsman. Ignoring the tremble in Skitteka’s paw she arched her back and hummed in a way that she knew pleased him.

  When he had stopped trembling she said, ‘Some of the slaves heard Evasqeek talking yesterday, master. He was in the main seam hiding behind his stormvermin.’

  ‘Hiding, yes,’ Skitteka said, finding reassurance in the description. ‘And what did he say?’

  ‘He said that he was tired of being frightened all of the time,’ Adora decided. ‘He said that it was too much and that he just wanted to go back to his burrow and sire lots of whelps.’

  ‘He said that it was too much?’ Skitteka asked, his voice as flat as a blade on a grindstone.

  ‘That’s what the slave who heard him told me,’ Adora said, and wondered if she had gone too far.

  She had.

  ‘No,’ Skitteka said. ‘No, no, no. Evasqeek wouldn’t tell his stormvermin that. They would kill him’

  ‘That slave must have got it wrong then,’ Adora said, letting the blame slide from her with a practiced ease.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Skitteka said, grabbing a fistful of her hair and squeezing so that every root screamed out in pain. ‘Or perhaps it’s lying. Either way, it can’t be trusted. Which one was it?’

  Most humans would have hesitated. Even those whose decency had been outweighed by their terror would have struggled to fabricate a scapegoat without missing a beat. But Adora wasn’t most humans.

  ‘It was Jules,’ she said, handing out the death sentence with an instinctive understanding of who was valuable to her and who was not.

  ‘Jules,’ Skitteka said, savouring the name of its next victim as much as it would any other tasty morsel. ‘Jules. Very well, little cat. Send Jules to me. I will sharpen his ears for him.’

  Adora pretended to share the amusement of the thing as he hissed, his murderous laughter as sibilant as an adder’s.

  ‘But first,’ he said, throwing something splattering down onto the stone of the floor. ‘Eat up, my little cat. I need healthy little helpers in this mine.’

  The shapeless gobbet of flesh lay in the filth, glistening. Adora gave effusive thanks as she crawled forward to it. It was meat. That, she told herself, was all that it was. Meat. Down here you could either eat it or you could be it, but either way, meat was life. Adora gnawed off a chunk and swallowed. Then she went to find Jules.

  Skitteka didn’t kill Jules outright. Skitteka never killed anybody outright. Despite his stupidity and his clumsy bulk, the thing had a surgeon’s skill and the wounds he inflicted, although always lethal, were seldom immediately so.

  Adora found her scapegoat lying by the side of one of the access tunnels. He had been left there so that the other slaves could see him as they trudged down past the warped and trembling mine supports and into the cancerous glow of the main seam. His intestines had been wound out of him and tied into grotesque shapes. His limbs ended in cauterised stumps. He had been blinded. And worse.

  The slaves bowed their heads in sympathy for the ruined man. Why not? Sympathy was easy. But none of them dared to brave the guards’ whips by offering him comfort. None but Adora. She sat beside Jules and cradled him. He had been the one who had taught her how to make soap down here: how to mix charcoal and fat, combining dirt in order to achieve cleanliness.

  He died in her arms. The last fading rhythms of his pulse disappeared within his wasted frame, pattering away in contrast to the strong beat that pounded within her own breast. He sobbed for his mother right until the end, but it wasn’t his mother who comforted him during his last hours in this eternal night. It was Adora. When he was dead she kissed him, a final blessing, then left the cooling meat of his corpse and hurried along after the other slaves. As Skitteka’s pet she had some privileges. She was left unshackled, loose and generally untouched. Even so, there were things down here with more authority than her patron, and their whips left scars.

  She hurried down the claustrophobic squeeze of the narrow tunnel to rejoin her fellow slaves. Even the shortest of them walked with a permanent stoop, the ceiling of their captors’ tunnels being too low for them. Their guards had no such problem. This subterranean world had been built around their rat-like forms, and they scuttled back and forth effortlessly, the razored tips of their whips hissing towards anybody who faltered or stumbled.

  As the column entered the weird green glow of the mine proper, one of the slaves fell to his knees. There was a cacophony of shrieking voices, the busy whine of whips and then screaming. The man in front of Adora used the distraction to turn and whisper to her.

  ‘Was he dead?’ he asked, his voice thick with an Estalian accent. He was called Xavier, and of all the men down here Adora judged him to be the strongest. Although smaller than the northerners she was used to, he had a wiry strength that even this hellish captivity hadn’t been able to sap. He had a hardness in his eyes too. It suggested that, even though he was defeated, he still had enough pride to dream of revenge.

  Adora had high hopes for him. So much so that, after casting a quick glance around, she took the risk of whispering a reply.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘He’s lucky.’

  ‘Don’t be a fool,’ she told him.

  The man looked at her. In the sickly green light it was impossible to make out his expression but Adora could see that it was either a
nger or amusement. As far as she was concerned, either would do.

  ‘How long have you been down–’ he began, but the sentence changed into a hiss of agony as a guard sliced him with a whip.

  ‘No talking,’ it squeaked, then chittered something unintelligible as it struck him again. The leather cut through rags and skin both, and his blood spattered onto the floor, black in the sickly light.

  Then the column was moving again. The green glow of the wyrdstone grew brighter. Adora felt her skin crawl and her teeth ache as they reached the first deposit. Tools were handed out and she stumbled forward, eyes watering as she started to hack away at the stone in search of the wyrdstone fragments entombed within.

  She studied her captors as she worked. As always happened in the presence of the wyrdstone, their demeanour had changed. They had not become calm so much as transfixed by the sickly green glow. They still watched the slaves, in as much as the slaves were revealing the accursed stuff, but mainly they watched each other. The pure black orbs of their eyes glittered with suspicion, and although their whips rested, their paws often strayed to the hilts of their poisoned blades.

  Adora could recognise greed when she saw it. That was why today, as every day, she waited to see if an opportunity would present itself.

  It did. One of the slaves hacked a lump of the wyrdstone loose, crying out in pain as it sprang away from the rock face with a sudden burst of painful light. The overseers clustered around the find, their scaly tails twitching with horrible excitement and their beady eyes blind to all else, and that was when Adora struck. In a single, fluid movement she grabbed the wyrdstone fragment she had been standing on and concealed it amongst the rags which bound her legs. She only touched it with her bare skin for a moment, but in that moment her bones ached and her muscles squirmed and she had to choke back the cry of horror which rose unbidden to her lips.

  The pain faded slowly as she carried on working. She paid it no heed. However vile the wyrdstone was, it was valuable to them and so, she reasoned, it was valuable to her.

  ‘He’s coming? Here?’ Evasqeek bared his incisors. The guards who were gathered in the chief overseer’s burrow cowered at their master’s agitation. Only the runner who had brought the tidings remained unmoved by his reaction.

  ‘Yes, master,’ said the runner, revelling in malicious pleasure at the fear it had brought. ‘Chief Vass will visit the mine to see that all is well. He is concerned that production is down.’

  Evasqeek lashed the ground with his tail, and his eyes rolled around in panic.

  ‘The seam is running out,’ he whined. ‘There is less and less of the stone every day. It’s not me, it’s the deposit.’

  Then he remembered who he was talking to. Vass was one thing, the vicious old fool, but this runner wasn’t worthy of an excuse. Worthy of punishment, perhaps…

  The runner, as though seeing the vengeful turn of the chief overseer’s thoughts, interrupted them.

  ‘My Lord Vass requests that I return with your estimate of the stone you will have when he arrives,’ he said. In fact, Lord Vass had requested no such thing. It was just that the runner’s whiskers were twitching with the knowledge that this chief overseer wanted a victim, and that it wasn’t going to be him.

  ‘Tell him forty ingots,’ Evasqeek decided.

  ‘Is that all?’ The runner asked, pushing his luck.

  ‘Maybe more,’ Evasqeek said, suddenly aware of how dangerously frightened he had begun to smell in front of his stormvermin. ‘Now go. I have work to do.’

  ‘I know,’ the runner said and, before Evasqeek’s spite could overcome his caution, it turned and scuttled back out of the burrow.

  ‘Go and fetch Skitteka,’ Evasqeek said at length. ‘He is the slave master, and the slaves produce the stone. So if we aren’t producing enough, it’s his fault.’

  It was a reassuring thought and one that Evasqeek clung to as he worked out how best to shift the blame.

  The slaves had no idea how long their shifts lasted. There was no day down here, only an eternal night. The guards merely waited for the first of their charges to collapse before letting the rest of them return to their quarters. All but the one who had collapsed, of course. He’d be flayed alive, a miners’ canary of human frailty who paid the ultimate price for everybody else’s rest.

  When that was done the survivors would drag themselves back to where they were quartered, gulp down a bowl of whatever vile broth their captors provided, and then clamber down into the lightless oubliette where they were kept. There were no other exits from the dungeon apart from the hole in the roof though which the ladder descended. The dank cavern stank of human misery and human waste, and if it hadn’t been for the cracks in the rock the inmates would have drowned in the latter long ago.

  Now, after gulping down a bowl of something greasy and congealed, Adora climbed down into this stinking pit. The rest of the slaves had already collapsed, allowing themselves to fall victim to terror and exhaustion. Adora felt a flicker of contempt for them as she forced herself to keep moving, keep thinking. Keep one step ahead.

  The trapdoor banged closed above her and the darkness became complete. It was a heavy leaden thing, this darkness, as though it bore every ounce of the tons of rock that lay above. The weight crushed some of the slaves, and their howling and sobbing echoed against the damp stone walls. Others raised their voices in a ragged chorus of desperate prayer, the Sigmarite chants a feeble defiance against the all conquering night.

  Adora ignored them as she ignored the soft confusion of broken bodies beneath her feet. She was too intent on the cache she had hidden in one of the crevasses that lined the walls.

  Over the past weeks she had amassed perhaps half a kilo of wyrdstone. The fragments produced a nerve shredding heat even through the rag bundle she had wrapped them in, and it was no coincidence that the ground beneath them was the only part of the cavern not tumbled with human bodies.

  When she had made sure her poisonous treasure was secure she took a deep breath and finally allowed herself to think about sleep. Not here, though. Not by the wyrdstone.

  She started picking her way back through the mass of bodies, ignoring the whimpers and cries of protest. Then from beneath her she heard one voice that was neither fearful nor hurt.

  ‘I’ll thank you not to stand on my hand,’ it said, and Adora realised she had found the Estalian.

  ‘Then I’ll thank you to make room for a lady,’ she said and, pausing only to knee somebody aside, slid down beside him.

  ‘Feel free to take a seat,’ he said, and when Adora heard the unmistakable tone of irony in his voice, her heart leapt. Irony. It was like the scent of clean air or a glimpse of blue sky, a thing that could only come from a place of freedom.

  ‘My name is Adora,’ she said, as though she had just handed him the keys to a kingdom.

  ‘And my name is Xavier Esteban de Souza,’ he replied, sounding as though she actually had.

  ‘You haven’t been down here long, have you?’ she asked, and leaned into him with a total lack of self-consciousness. He was lean but not wasted, his slim frame corded with the tight muscles of a fencer, or perhaps an acrobat. She pressed against him, enjoying the warmth of his body against hers.

  ‘Perhaps a month,’ he said, carefully not moving away. ‘Perhaps more. It’s difficult to keep track.’

  ‘Try,’ Adora told him.

  ‘Why bother?’ he asked.

  Adora didn’t reply. Instead she slid her hand gently down his forearm, selected a hair, and pulled it out. He yelped with surprise as much as pain.

  ‘If you and I are to be friends,’ she told him, ‘you are never to ask that question again. Never even to think it.’

  He grunted, and she thought he understood. She hoped so. Nobody survived down here once they started to ask that question. Nobody.

  ‘Where are you from?’ she asked him, stroking the forearm from where she had plucked the hair.

  ‘From Estalia,’ he said simply
. ‘I am a swordsman, as was my father and his father before him.’

  ‘Are you any good?’ Adora asked, and she could tell by the way he sat a little straighter that he was.

  ‘One of the best. When we are boys, the sons of our family train amongst pens full of the toros negros, the wild bulls from the mountains. They have horns blacker than this night and natures as fickle as any woman’s.’

  ‘As fickle as that?’ Adora asked.

  Xavier chuckled, and the sound was so alien in the darkness that a silence descended around them.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘as fickle as that. You can never tell when they will turn on you or your opponent. It gives those of us who survive eyes in the back of our heads.’

  ‘If you have eyes in the back of your head,’ Adora teased him, ‘then how were you caught?’

  ‘Sorcery,’ Xavier replied simply. ‘I was a guard on a caravan. One night there was an alarm and suddenly we were all choking. After that, I don’t remember much. We were all split up, and then there were endless passages. Endless days.’

  ‘There is no such thing as endless passages,’ Adora told him with the cast iron assurance of a mother telling her child that monsters don’t exist.

  Xavier just shrugged.

  ‘You’re right of course,’ he shook himself. ‘But endless or not I will escape through them. I just haven’t found a way yet.’

  ‘Maybe I can help with that,’ Adora said. ‘In the meantime let us remember why we should bother.’

  She turned her head towards his and kissed him, and amongst the squalor, the madness and the fear, they reminded each other that it was worth staying alive.

  Uncountable hours later the trap door opened and the ladder descended into the pit. In the sudden flare of torchlight, Adora watched the struggling mass of slaves as they fought to climb it. They pushed and elbowed each other aside, their tiredness forgotten as they raised their voices and clenched their fists.

  One man struck another with a crack of knuckles against bone. Another was pulled down and trampled by the men behind him. With a sudden shriek another gave in to panic and hurled himself towards the ladder, trying to swim through his fellows. He didn’t get far.