Gone, she thought. All of it, my life. Gone. Oleg, I’m so sorry – it thought it was helping me, I swear…
‘Sigmar’s Light! Katalina, step aside from that thing!’
Radomir stood there on the path to the dunes, a stave in his hands. Despite his bulk, his presence in the world, he had never seemed more fragile to her then. Appalled, he looked from Katalina to the creature who held her.
‘I’m sorry, Kat. I tried to stop them, but Agata saw it and – it’s right there!’ he shouted. ‘The creature, it’s–’
The words were only a moment from his mouth before the blade flashed once, quicksilver in the firelight.
Salt, metal, the last trickling murmur of his breath. A great fan of blood unfurled from Radomir’s throat, cutting a crimson line across her face.
‘Go!’ the creature wheezed at her. ‘Now. Run.’
It took the dune paths, sure-footed, clutching its wounded chest. Katalina stumbled after in a haze. The smoke curled around their feet. She thought of Radomir – saw, as if scoured into her mind, the sight of his head falling back, the gaping wound in his throat vomiting blood.
‘What have you done?’ she whispered. ‘What have I done?’
The path rose ahead of her, and in the wavering dark, half-lit from the fire of the burning cottage, Katalina stumbled along it. Her eyes were stinging from the smoke and there was the taste of blood in her mouth. She dragged herself on, and when she reached the cemetery she fell amongst the graves, weeping. The creature was hunkered there behind a headstone, looking back on the village and her burning home. The cottage streamed flames into the night. Katalina could see the villagers milling there with their boathooks and clubs, shouting, some of them even laughing.
She fell back into the grass, utterly spent. The sea was a blurred presence beyond the headland, the vast waters in constant motion, heaving against the brittle shore. To range yourself against such a thing… what bravery it took, as brave as any soldier. And far on the other side, past all the reckoning of men, lay the Placid Shore where in time all souls will meet. Oleg and Radomir, and Borys…
I’m coming, Borys. I am done with this place.
The creature was looming above her, moving like a cold current in warm waters. It held the caged light in its hand, and that strange, submerged glow began to pulse. It compelled her, lured out the essence that was seeded into every cell of her body and every contour of her mind. As she felt herself pulled along into black oblivion she saw the light from the fire smear out into incandescence, the totems shiver on the beach – and then it was cold, so cold she couldn’t bear it. She heard dark laughter in the distance, and some dim and smothered part of her reached out for the Placid Shore, those gentle waters and perfect sands, but then she was gone, and every motion of her body was fluttering away into nothing, like spindrift, like the cresting foam untethered from the waves when the wind begins to blow, just a scrap of foam adrift and floating on a violent tide.
They found her body amongst the graves. Most thought she was dead. Some swore they felt the flutter of a pulse, but others were convinced that she would never wake. ‘The sea sickness’, they called it. There was no cure; everyone knew that. They placed her with Radomir’s and Oleg’s bodies in a back room of the mead hall. The next morning there would be a meeting to discuss what had happened – early, because a mist was rising across the water, ill-omens from the deep. The widow tides were up.
They found the burned man on the frothed shores of a sump pool at the edge-drifts of the wastes. The last shift klaxon echoed from the ashward manufactories, and it was long past time for them to get back within the walls of the schola progenium. But the opportunity of a maybe-dead body was too enticing to let slip away.
Strang was looking to rob him; Pasco thought it’d be funny to push him further into the toxic sludge to see if he floated. Zara wanted them to drag him from the muck, but she was always the one with the biggest heart. Probably why Cor was a little in love with her, even if he could never bring himself to say that out loud.
‘Go on,’ said Strang, elbowing Pasco in the ribs. ‘Check him. Big fella like him’s bound to have a few credit chits on him.’
Pasco shook his head. ‘I ain’t touching him,’ he said.
‘You scared?’ said Strang, bending to pick up a length of corroded rebar. He gave the body an experimental prod. ‘Think he’s some ash-scavvy, gonna get up’n bite ya?’
‘Ain’t clever to touch dead meat,’ said Pasco. ‘Sister Caitriona says corpses down here get all yukked up inside. Says spine-worms nest up in ’em. That’s bad goo, Strang!’
‘Yeah,’ said Cor, bending down to get a closer look at the dead man. He was big; bigger than anyone Cor had ever seen, but his flesh was pale and wasted, like he’d been powerful once, but somehow the bulk had been sucked out of him.
His skin was punctured across his chest and arms, with what looked like plastek rings around the holes.
‘What d’you reckon they are?’ asked Cor.
‘Look like medicae shunts,’ said Zara.
‘See!’ said Pasco. ‘Told ya. Sick, he is. Looks like he got ash-blight or summat.’
‘Nah, they don’t put medicae shunts like that in folks who’re gonna die,’ said Strang. ‘Sister Caitriona’s got a couple in her back.’
Cor nodded, though he wondered how Strang knew that.
The man had taken a bad blow to the head, and one of his legs was bent at an angle that made Cor wince. He looked into the haze overhead, past the dripping pipes and hissing vents worked into the stained rock of the cliffs to the soaring silhouette of the hive spires in the sulphurous yellow clouds.
Had the man fallen from somewhere there?
‘Who’d y’reckon he is?’ said Pasco. ‘A heretic that got left behind when the Fists kicked the rest of ’em back to the Eye?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Cor, kneeling and pointing to the remains of an eagle tattoo, partially obscured by a nasty burn on the dead man’s shoulder. ‘Don’t know of any heretics wear the Aquila, do you?’
Pasco shrugged and said, ‘This guy got smacked up hard. Looks like a Dreadnought beat on him.’
The dead man groaned and rolled onto his back.
Cor yelled and fell back on his haunches. The others laughed as he scrambled to his feet. Zara helped him up and he wiped the grime from his patched and worn out breeches.
‘This son of a grot-rat’s still alive!’ said Cor.
‘Not for long, he ain’t,’ said Strang, and Cor saw him toying with the idea of sending the man to meet the Emperor with the sharpened bolt-shiv he kept in his pocket.
The older boy claimed to have bled three people, once boasting he’d even killed a slumming uphiver who wouldn’t take no for an answer. Cor didn’t know if that was true, but Strang had a quick temper and wasn’t above using his fists on the smaller kids of the schola progenium.
‘Don’t,’ said Cor, placing his hand on Strang’s arm.
Strang threw off his hand and pushed him away. ‘Don’t you touch me! I’ll bleed you deep and good!’
