‘Lord commissar,’ the trooper on Seroff’s right said, pointing. ‘Inquisitor Schenk is returning.’
Returning was not the word Seroff would have used. He would have said fleeing or retreating. His heart sank as he watched Schenk stagger uphill the rest of the way. She pulled her rebreather off when she reached Seroff’s position. ‘We have to go,’ she hissed. ‘Now. This cannot be contained.’
Seroff hesitated. Whatever his mistakes had been, he had never abandoned a post. To do so was contrary to everything that defined him. He was still a lord commissar. He still had the duty of that identity, and that was to hold the position, no matter what the cost.
‘Remaining is futile,’ Schenk said, and it struck home to Seroff that it was a member of the Inquisition urging him to flee. ‘There is no duty here. There is nothing that can be fought. There is only death.’
‘What happened?’
‘The plague is spreading everywhere. I cannot fathom how it functions, but I know we cannot stop it.’
Seroff looked again at the thickening dust clouds overhead. The moaning from the quarantined zone was growing louder and more and more inhuman. Schenk looked terrified. His mouth went dry. Duty fell away from him, ambition crumbled, and he was merely an old man who didn’t want to die. ‘We’re pulling back,’ he announced. ‘Regroup at barracks and prepare for new orders.’ Those orders would never come. He wanted the troops to leave the way clear for his own retreat. Then a finger of shame made him add one more command. ‘If I fall, then do as necessity requires.’ Meaningless words, but he used them as a shield against his guilt as he and Schenk began to run.
The quarantine line broke apart. The growing cries from inside the infected zone and the sounds of strange, heavy movement made Seroff’s orders the signal for all-out flight. The soldiers ran with the moaning of doom at their backs. They were young and fast, and in moments Seroff and Schenk were alone. Seroff felt that he was, at least, spared being seen fleeing by his own troops.
Schenk pointed north as they struggled past an abandoned Administratum complex.
‘The spaceport?’ said Seroff.
‘There will be no refuge anywhere on Eremus,’ said Schenk. ‘The only refuge is off-planet.’
‘How long do you think we have?’ The spaceport was more than ten miles from their position. It would take hours to reach it.
‘I don’t know,’ said Schenk. She was breathing very hard, and Seroff slowed to match her pace. She had not had the chance to catch her breath back at the line. ‘All we can do is try,’ she continued. The words were a desperate prayer. ‘We have no choice. It is our only option.’
Seroff nodded. He did not look back. The dust storm would come before they were ready, or it would not. There was nothing he could do about it.
Yet he wanted to understand. ‘How have we not been infected?’ he asked. ‘Are we immune?’
‘I have wondered the same thing. That both of us should be so lucky, and for no apparent reason, seems unlikely.’
‘Even so…’
‘Even so,’ she agreed. ‘And immunity does us no good when the city itself is infected.’
They cut through the site of a manufactory that had been so completely stripped of usable material that it had become an empty quarter. It was quick to pass through. The ground sloped upward, and they came to a rise, from which they were able to see the next few miles. To the north-west, on their left, Seroff’s tower was just visible over the jagged hills. The spaceport was still far out of sight, but dead ahead, directly in Seroff and Schenk’s path, another plume of dust was rising to the clouds.
‘The prison,’ Schenk groaned.
‘We sealed the cell,’ said Seroff.
‘That doesn’t matter. The dust spreads the plague to inanimate matter.’
As if the dust, or the will it embodied, had been waiting for them to bear witness, and to know their way was closed, the storm struck. The cloud over Schenk’s quarters fell upon the city with a dark embrace of change and death. Seroff did look back now, and the gritty clouds behind them billowed, expanded, and came down too. In seconds, the vistas of Eremus before and behind them erupted with screams. Downslope from the manufactory shell was a group of malnourished scavengers. They stopped what they were doing and looked around. From where they were, they could not see the dust, but they could hear the cries. They dropped the scrap metal they had been piling up and broke into blind, panicked flight.
Seroff and Schenk ran too. They made for the lord commissar’s tower. There was no logic in this decision either. There would be no shelter there. The tower was not immune to change. When the dust came for it, it too would fall to monstrosity and decay. But there was nowhere to go, and the familiarity of the tower created the illusion of refuge. They moved as quickly as they could, though they were slowed by obstacles and age.
The cries of the transforming city drew closer. It seemed to Seroff that they were caught in a tightening noose of plague. Despair and exhaustion dragged at him, urging him to lie down and accept his end. Fear drove him on. So did resentment, and bitterness. Containing a new plague would have been the chance to rise again. Instead, a world would fall under his watch.
‘What is this plague?’ he demanded. ‘How have we avoided contagion?’ That was the last shred of hope he had, that their luck might continue.
‘I don’t know,’ said Schenk. ‘I can’t make sense of the infection’s form. There is no clear pattern to what it does. It is irrational. The only constant is horror, as if that could be the contagion. The plague behaves more like the dream of a disease than the reality of one.’
The nightmare closed in on them. The sky was thick with the terrible dust everywhere Seroff looked. As they drew close to the tower, they passed another manufactory complex, one of the few still working. Its chimneys screamed. Maws opened midway up their height. Fire burst from between the teeth, and then came a torrent of black and green liquid that burned and writhed in pain. Even the molten, reclaimed metal was infected, coming to life only to die.
They reached the tower just ahead of the dustfall. Seroff slammed the iron door behind them. There was no power in the city any longer. The only light in the dim entranceway came from the narrow slits of windows. Seroff stared at the inquisitor and saw his own terror and helplessness reflected back at him. His knees buckled. His legs felt like lead. He could barely draw breath. They had run, they were here, and there was nothing left to do.
Now what? Seroff wanted to say, crying out to Schenk to give him an answer different from the one he already knew.
Now what?
The tower answered. The walls began to glisten. They twisted and groaned. Mould sprouted from the rockcrete and along the iron framework of the staircase. It grew tendrils with claws that jabbed into the new flesh of the tower. Foul-smelling blood ran in rivulets from the wounds. The tower swayed back and forth, moaning and gurgling wetly. The floor became spongy. Seroff lost his footing. He fell to his knees, his hands sinking into matter that was soft, gelid. It split, and red-flecked yellow pus oozed between his fingers.
The tower trembled as if in an earthquake. The floor heaved, throwing Seroff and Schenk off their feet. Deep fissures opened in the bleeding walls. The entire building was about to collapse, and it also seemed to be trying to uproot itself from the ground, as if it might walk.
The upheavals became more violent. The tower was not trying to walk, Seroff thought. It was trying to leap.
Over the deafening shrieks of the tower, Seroff heard what sounded like the roar of heavy engines. The moment was a brief one, and the howl of the tower’s legion of mouths overwhelmed him. His ears bled. He could hear nothing except the screams.
The tower fell, and it wrenched upward at the same time. Rockcrete masses plunged down on Seroff, but they did not crush him. They were too soft now. They were flesh, turning to slime and soon to dust. They smothered and they choked. He was trying to swim through something that was midway between avalanche and waterfall. The foulness slammed down on him, but he was also rising. The sensation was dizzying. Gravity crushed him, and he knew they were ascending, and his words came back to him. What has fallen from the sky will make us rise again.
Seroff choked on the slime of the tower. He struggled, squeezed by liquefying flesh, the screams tight around his skull like an iron band. The foulness forced its way into his nose and mouth and filled his lungs. Decay was drowning him, and his bones cracked under the pressure of the ascension. He tried to cry out, but only inhaled even more deeply of the slime, and he blacked out.
Seroff came to, retching and coughing up dust in thick, blackened wads of phlegm. His ears still rang with the screams. He was coated in dust, and lying deep in filth. Every bone ached. He felt as if he had been used as the clapper in a huge bell. He managed to get to his knees, then rubbed at his face, cracking the layers of dust. He began to breathe again, and he managed to pry his eyes open. The ringing in his ears faded to an insect buzz.
Schenk was a few feet away, also regaining consciousness. They helped each other up, then turned around slowly, taking in their new surroundings. They were no longer in the tower. It was dead and gone and dust. They were in a huge, dark space. There was a faint vibration beneath Seroff’s feet. ‘We’re on a ship,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said Schenk, her voice cracking with despair. ‘We are cargo.’
