Hammer and Bolter: Issue Twenty-Six Page 8

  Gilead looked once more at Mondelblatt, questioning the old man’s honesty with his eyes, knowing that he could trust the professor or not, but that the last time he had trusted him he had been duped.

  Gilead was an old being. He understood balance and he understood humans.

  He reached his slender thumb and finger into the top of his boot and pulled something out. He held it up between his thumb and forefinger, and Strallan gasped and sighed.

  Surn Strallan burst into silent tears. He made no noise, nor did his face crumble, but the tears flowed freely from his wide-open eyes and he drooled from loose lips. He felt his boots and shirt fill with the sweat that he should have been secreting for the last dozen hours, and the experience made him feel oddly calm. He did not even care that he found himself sitting in a very large pool, of Mondelblatt’s waste, and when he looked at the old man, he too was crying.

  ‘Write in it,’ said Mondelblatt, gesturing with one palsied hand at the pool of liquid gathering around the human pair. Then he held his hand out, palm upwards and waited.

  Finally, Gilead dropped the amulet into the old man’s palm and thrust his hand into one of his pockets. He turned to look at the Liche Priest and Laban, considered for a moment what he might inscribe, and then began.

  He held his hand like a writing tool only an inch or so above the shallow pool, and began to allow the sand to trickle between his finger and thumb in a concentrated stream. The sand was grey, but turned to a blackish purple and glittered as it hit the liquid. It seemed to petrify, turning instantly to something permanent, to a glossy crystalline ridge standing slightly proud of the stone surface of the floor.

  Fithvael did not need to turn when the sound came. He was already watching the Liche Priest. As soon as the first of the sand hit the old man’s urine and the young man’s sweat and tears, the old elf knew that some strange force was working its magic, that between them, the alchemy of the humans, and of the elves and of this great city were somehow working in concert to fight the Liche Priest and his evil intentions.

  The noise did not come as the other noises had come from winds generated by the Liche Priest, from air moving through the cavities of his body. The noise came from the cracking of bone on bone and of bone on sinew. The terrible noise came from failure and from the Liche Priest recognising his defeat. The sound of bones breaking echoed through the dark basement as the Liche Priest flagellated his body with his staff of office. He wielded it against his limbs and ribs and back, and, with his final impact, he broke his own skull.

  All the while, he made no other sound. All the while, the air in the cellar was still, for there were no words to accompany this rite, no celebration, no incantation, no music.

  ‘More sand,’ said Mondelblatt after several long moments of silence. ‘You must have more sand.’

  All of the sand was gone. There would be no sand to be found anywhere in the city of Nuln, no matter who searched for it, for it had all been generated by the Southlanders and it had all been turned by them into an army of familiars for the Tomb King.

  All the sand was gone, except for the sand that resided in Gilead’s pockets, the sand that even the Liche Priest had not the power to influence.

  Mondelblatt shooed Surn Strallan out of the puddle that they had both made, and then gestured for a hand. Laban stepped forward, but Fithvael lifted the old, damp man into his arms before the young elf was able.

  ‘Draw the map,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘Draw the map of where Mr Fithvael found all the bugs. Draw it in our puddle… Do it.’

  Gilead filled his hand with the sand in his pocket, when Strallan grabbed hold of the elf’s wrist. Gilead looked down at the boy’s hand and then into his face.

  Strallan swallowed. He was a little afraid, but it was, nevertheless, a great pleasure to swallow saliva after many hours with only dust in his mouth.

  ‘North’s that way,’ said Strallan, pointing over Gilead’s left shoulder.

  ‘The boy has a point,’ said Mondelblatt, breaking into his choking laugh, which came, on this occasion with an odd gurgling sound.

  Gilead shifted his position, studied the map, and began to draw.

  He drew a line to represent the Wandstrasse first. It formed a firm, solid ridge of square sepia crystals as soon as it hit the liquid. Then he drew two arcing arms, not quite meeting, which were somehow a deep, dark blue. Then he filled in the areas inside the semicircle, which showed in a variety of hues and textures, the sizes and shapes of the crystals varying dramatically, but beginning to form a beautiful and accurate representation of that part of the city. Finally, Gilead drew a trapezium that joined the two arms to complete the semicircle. It stood firm and grey and somehow staunch and permanent where the university should be, and it completed the map.

  A large drop of water fell from the stairwell behind the pillar where they were all sitting or standing, or squatting. Then another, and another. In a matter of seconds they could hear the rain drumming and pelting and sloshing down the steps.

  Mondelblatt, still held firmly in Fithvael’s arms, stabbed his finger into the air above his head, and, taking the hint, the old elf strode out of the cellar and began to climb the steps. They were soaked to the skin before they were halfway up them.

  The rain rolled over the old city wall of the Wandstrasse as if from nowhere. The sky turned black and the heavens opened, and the water poured in sheets, straight down, shredding everything in its vertical path and rinsing away the residue.

  Gossamer wings dissolved on contact with single vast drops so heavy the sound of thousands of them landing together on the cobbled streets was enough to send shockwaves through the wing cases and carapaces of the insects that had not been hit by the rain yet, incapacitating them, stunning them, and killing them in their millions. Then the rains came and washed away the carcasses, battering them against stone streets and iron storm drains, shredding them into millions of pieces, rendering them down to wet dust.

  They had waited thousands of years, trapped in sand, stored in hourglasses, baked in deserts, had been brought back to life by magic and atmospheric pressure and humidity and luck, and a thousand other quirks, and by fate and by the auspices of the Liche Priest and by timing, and now the rains had come.

  The Southlanders measured time in water. Mondelblatt measured time in sand.

  Mondelblatt insisted that Fithvael carry him through the city, in order to see, for himself, the damage that was done, and to know that Nuln would survive, and that it would survive because of the fifty years that he had spent as a scholar. He died as Fithvael carried him across the Glory Bridge on the way to the Temple Shrine of Morr. The hand, still clutching the amulet, fell away, the fingers loosened, and the stone fell into the River Reik. The rain was falling so heavily that the sound of it falling was heard by no one, and the splash it made when it entered the turbulent water below went unnoticed. The old elf gathered Mondelblatt’s arm back onto his chest, and thought that it was fitting that the professor should die at the very spot where the drowned, dragged out of the River Reik, were displayed for identification. Mondelblatt would have thought it fitting, too.

  Surn Strallan wanted to stay with Gilead, except that he was afraid of the elf, more than he was afraid of Fithvael, but perhaps a little less than he feared the professor, certainly less than he feared a dying professor. When he was dismissed by Gilead, there was nothing for it, but to leave, although he wasn’t entirely sure where he should go. He wanted to go back to the Bridge Watch House to gloat, except that was foolish, and he’d never be hailed a hero. Perhaps the South Gate? They’d mock him, but he belonged there. He’d never be able to prove his part in what had happened that day, but he stood a greater chance with these men than with any others.

  He walked through the rain, wetter than wet, wetter than he had ever been, his skin stinging under the weight of the raindrops and the volume of them falling. When he reached the halfway mark on the Great Bridge he stopped and looked over the side. The wind blew
and the River Reik was high and throbbing, foam peaking and running off the surging waves. He put his hand on the capping stone of the waist-high wall and it felt solid under his hand. He didn’t know how he knew it, but he knew this marked the turning point of everything. The famine was over. The next harvest would be better. Prosperity would return to the Empire.

  Gilead sent Laban back to Mondelblatt’s rooms to lie on the old man’s bed and rest his leg. When he got there, the rain was lashing in at the glass-less windows and the floor was swimming in water. It was no longer a wooden floor made of planks, but had a hard shell-like sheen, a shiny gloss, the residue of the sand, now harmless, inert, even beautiful, like a great oil slick cast across the room.

  Gilead stood on the steps of the cellar and watched the rain fall. The casket was still there, the sarcophagus that might yet yield some unknown, evil force.

  It rained and it rained, and it rained. The cellar was ankle-deep in water in moments, and then it was knee-deep. Within minutes, Gilead had to climb higher up the steps lest he be standing in water. When he left, the cellar was under water, as were all the oldest parts of the city, all the parts that had been in existence before the current history of Nuln had begun, all the ancient cellars and undercrofts that had once belonged to other forces, other beings, undead, unnatural things that always lurked somewhere and might one day return. One day.

  They had taken this day, Gilead’s day, and he had turned them away. They would not try again in his lifetime.

  There’s a relief.

  The cursed tale must only be told once by any bard, and the timing is all. Too soon and the curse might just come true, and not just for the teller; too late, and the tale might go untold. I am satisfied. I feel the end drawing swiftly on… I feel the end… Just a breath or two, now… my friends… I am content to go… My tale is told…

  You will not remember… me… Try to remember the tale… Do remember Gilead… and Fithvael too… Such a noble man… Elf…

  One last… I think… One last… One…

  The hand that moments before had been holding a beaker with an inch of wine left in the bottom relaxed and the arm fell away. The beaker had been taken by another, seeing the old dame weaken, taken by someone who wanted the wine more than he cared that the old woman was dying. She’d been rambling for long enough, and he longed for the silence and the chance to sleep.

  The wine was as cheap as everything else in the grotty doss-house in the back streets of the small town west of Bolgasgrad. For this was Kislev, cold and bleak and unforgiving. There were no beds, only benches and floorspace, and it was better to be close to other warm bodies, except that her body wouldn’t be warm for long, so her value was gone.

  ‘I thought she’d never stop,’ said the short, wide proprietor, wiping beakers with a filthy rag.

  ‘Do you suppose it was as dull as it sounded?’ asked his brother. ‘It could have been a long list, a woman’s list of need, of want, of demand for all the passion in that creaky old voice.’

  ‘What was the language, the accent?’

  ‘Empire, to be sure,’

  ‘They have no fire in their bellies, no adventure, no passion,’ said the proprietor.

  ‘It’s true,’ said his brother. ‘Nothing ever happens in the Empire. If you want a real story, Kislev’s the place.’

  ‘I wonder what she was doing here, an old dame like that?’

  ‘Did she pay in advance?’ asked the brother.

  ‘Yes,’ said the proprietor. ‘I suppose her business here was no other business of ours. If I’d known she’d drone on for days, with hardly a break, I’d have kept her out, and never mind her copper coin.’

  With that, he dropped his dirty rag into the beaker he was wiping, strode over to where the old woman was slumped in her chair, lifted her frail corpse easily over one shoulder and took her out of his establishment. She had been tiresome these last few days, droning on in her foreign language that none could understand, never allowing for a moment’s silence, but, at least she had added to the warmth in the room.

  The wolves would have her now, and good riddance.

  THE SIEGE OF CASTELLAX: AN EXTRACT

  Clint Werner

  It came lumbering out of the void, a great darkness that blotted out the stars with its advance. A leviathan from space, a behemoth that roared between worlds like a vengeful devil. It had been born in the cauldron of an angry cosmos, a slab of rock and metal seventy kilo-metres in diameter, a fledgling planet that had never found its place and so had been cast into the emptiness between galaxies.

  There, in the darkness, savage intelligences had found it, had descended upon this abandoned almost-world and through their barbaric technology had given it purpose, a place in the cosmos. A place of horror, havoc and destruction.

  The Vulture was like a fly buzzing about the wings of a hawk, the disparity between the patrol ship and the rok was so immense. The rok was vast enough to exert its own gravitational pull on the ship, dragging her slowly towards it, affording the terrified crew an increasingly clear view of their mammoth adversary.

  The rok was pitted and scarred, pockmarked with the impacts of smaller asteroids against its surface, gouged by the crude excavations of the orks. Towers and bunkers projected from the asteroid’s surface, hangars gaped in the walls of its canyons, gun emplacements bristled from its jagged mountains. Cyclopean engines, their exhausts a hundred metres wide, projected from the rok’s sides, spitting streams of atomic fire as the orks inside the asteroid struggled to direct its trajectory, to exert some measure of control upon the elemental force they had attempted to enslave.

  It was a futile effort. The best the orks could do was cause the rok to revolve, to spin on its axis as it hurtled through the void. For the xenos, however, it was enough, allowing them to adjust the position of their heaviest guns and bring them to bear against those victims unfortunate enough to encounter the rok.

  The crew of the Vulture was almost upon the rok before they were aware of their peril. The deranged array of guns and missile batteries the orks had fitted to the hollowed-out asteroid opened fire in a savage burst of destruction. An armada of alien craft exploded from the canyon hangars and from launch craters littering the surface. The rok had provided shelter to a ramshackle flotilla of smaller ork ships, an ugly assortment of scrap metal that somehow managed to be space-worthy. What the ork ships lacked in grace, they made up for in firepower. Some of the weapons they boasted were so massive that the ships which carried them fairly disintegrated the moment they fired.

  It was punishment the frigate’s void shields were never meant to handle. More and more of the alien barrage was getting through, ripping Bodras’s ship apart.

  The Vulture reeled as another broadside smashed into her. The ship’s artificial gravity struggled to compensate for the rolling vessel, creating a wild confusion of forces upon the bridge. Bodras watched as one of his bodyguards hurtled forwards, then was grabbed and dragged by a malfunctioning inertia dampener. The screaming man smashed into the wall as though he’d been fired from a torpedo tube, his ribcage collapsing as the dampener tried to pull his body through the bulkhead.

  The captain took another pull of his jug and shuddered. Squashed like a bug wasn’t a pretty way to die.

  ‘Damage report,’ he snarled at the bloodied men down in the crew pits. Between overloaded circuits, dislodged machinery and debris from the ship’s infrastructure, not a man in the pit had escaped some sort of injury. The dead had been unceremoniously dumped onto the walkway where the inertia dampener grabbed hold of them. The worst of the wounded had been similarly disposed of until Bodras ordered the practice stopped. Even if they were in the way, the wounded had to be shown some consideration. It was bad for morale if they weren’t.

  Lieutenant Collorus studied one of the flickering pict screens and cried back to the command throne. ‘There is a hull breach aft, exposing three decks to vacuum. The gravity generators can’t compensate, so we’re vacillating bet
ween a seven and ten degree list. Alpha and Beta batteries have been obliterated by direct hits. Gamma battery is still firing but we’ve lost all communication with the gunnery crew.’

  ‘Send runners,’ Bodras snapped. ‘We need to maintain fire control. The only way we’ll survive is by concentrating our fire!’

  Even as he gave the order, Bodras wondered if it would really make any difference.

  ‘Only one macro-cannon still operational,’ an ensign with a raw gash across his forehead reported, cringing back as his terminal spat a shower of sparks at him. ‘Vox communications have been lost throughout the lower decks!’

  Bodras groaned. That would be those filthy missiles the rok had fired into them. The moment they had struck, the crew had breathed a sigh of relief, thinking they were duds. Then the electronic pulses had started, gradually increasing in scope and intensity. Somehow the missiles were both absorbing and projecting energy. The effect was like a massive haywire grenade, shorting out machinery close to the point of impact and utterly severing the lines of communication passing through that part of the ship.

  ‘Fires in the kitchens, crew barracks and officers’ deck!’ another ensign shouted.

  ‘Get a fire control team down there,’ Bodras ordered. If a fire was allowed to go unchecked in that part of the frigate, the ship would be effectively cut in two.

  ‘The team assigned to that area was killed by a hull breach,’ Lieutenant Collorus reported. ‘We’re trying to redirect another team there now.’

  ‘Don’t try, do!’ Bodras roared. He stared at the view-screen beside him. The rok was slowly closing upon the frigate, rotating to bring an obscenely huge cannon mounted on its surface to bear on the Vulture. Some of the smaller ork ships were scattering, intimidated by the approach of their hulking comrade. Others, too lost in their mindless urge to destroy, continued to swarm about the frigate.

  ‘More hull breaches in decks nineteen through twenty-four!’