We will sing the song together–
‘No!’ Tooms’ truncheon sank into what was left of Agert’s head, ripping the top away with a sound like tearing paper. The body sagged, deflating like a puffball, filling the air with spores. He tried to hold his breath as he turned.
Panic seized him, as mould-covered shapes closed in on all sides. Soft, flabby hands reached for him, and he drove the truncheon down, splitting Dayla’s skull. It came apart in swirling clouds and he staggered past her crumpling shape, blind.
He heard Huxyl and Skam as they clawed at him, but he ignored their voices – no, not their voices. Her voice. Her voice, issuing from a hundred mouths. Singing now, as the soft fungal bulges along the walls and floor sang, and he reached up to clutch his head.
He’d dropped his truncheon somewhere, but he still held the lantern. And it still burned. Maybe–
Tooms stopped. Turned. She was looking down at him now, her face vast, her expression strange and sad. A hand, massive, shaped from a cloud of spores, reached for him, as if to scoop him up. Her eyes burned like a summer wildfire, and her words were like the crash of distant waves. He could hear, but could not understand now. He had torn himself from the song, and her words were not meant for him, or any mortal. Yet she spoke nonetheless, like a mother attempting to reassure a frightened child.
‘Don’t you see, it is a kindness we do you,’ a hundred mouths murmured, in her voice. ‘We only want to help you – we only wish you to hear what we hear…’
Tooms slammed the lantern down, splattering burning oil across the patches of fungus. Even in the damp air, it couldn’t help but catch. Duardin oil could burn, even on water. And it spread greedily, leaping and prowling through the forest of swaying bodies. The singing became shrill – a keening wail. Not of pain, but of disappointment.
As the fires roared up, Tooms ran into the dark, leaving the others behind.
He fled from the goddess and her terrible garden.
But the sound of her voice followed him.
Her voice took root in Tooms, as he stumbled.
‘A single seed was all it took. A single spore. Just a tiny thing. And look. See. Is this not better? Is this not preferable to the noise and the smoke and the noose?’
Not far now. That was what the water said. A good thing, because his legs weren’t working at all. He fell against the wall, and tried to pull himself along, but his fingers broke off one by one, leaving yellowish smears on the stones.
‘Don’t look back,’ Agert’s voice said. ‘Just follow the current.’
He tried to draw in the breath to speak, but nothing happened. Not even a whisper of a groan escaped him. His leg gave way, cracking like a rotten log, spilling him down into the water. There was no pain, only a sense of vertigo as he fell.
He was unravelling. Coming apart, but still following the water. Not towards Cathedral Hill now, he knew, but back towards the Old Fen Gate. He wasn’t going to make it. He’d go missing, just like Agert. Just like the others. And then someone would come looking. He wondered what they would find.
‘A single seed. A single spore,’ she crooned as she lowered him gently into the water. He had not heard her come, but here she was, smaller now, and beautiful, rather than monstrous. ‘One tiny thing. That is all it takes. Fire is nothing. Stone is nothing. Life persists.’ She leaned forward and kissed him upon the brow.
Something in his skull gave. All of his fears and worries, all of his pain, were caught in the current and carried away. The water closed over him and the song rose, drowning out everything else.
Tooms closed his eyes and let it.
‘What a clever animal you are.’ The drukhari commander stretched out one hand to caress Monika’s face. The interrogator grimaced but said nothing.
The drukhari forces spread out across the rooftop landing pad, their sleek, chain-studded raiders circling overhead. Only a fraction of the craft had managed to disgorge their occupants; the rest of the fleet circled the towering Munitorum building like predatory jungle cats just waiting for an opening.
The two wyches who had been holding Monika aloft dropped her to her knees on the rockcrete surface, abandoning her to slice trophies from the fallen. Monika wasn’t certain which was worse: that so many of her friends and colleagues in the service of the Inquisition were dead, or that she had been captured alive. She struggled, trying to get her hands free of the barbed net that restrained her, but her attempts at escape only drove the hooks deeper into her flesh. Each time she tried to work herself lose, the agony from the many-tined barbs drove her to the verge of unconsciousness.
The wyches disappeared into the building, presumably to look for the human captives they’d come in search of. Their kabalite companions took up lines at the edges of the landing pad and braced for a counter-attack. Several of the warriors bore banner poles on their backs, displaying the same symbol emblazoned on the side of the raiders: a twining knot of barbed wire crowned by a blue flame. Like the raiders themselves, the warriors’ armour was painted an oily black, trimmed at the edges with a bright, cold blue.
A horned incubus emerged from the flight control room. His bone-white armour gleamed in the lights of the open landing pad. He held up a rigged bundle of wires and circuits, and shook his head with the slightest of movements.
The drukhari commander looked down at Monika, placed a boot on the human’s shoulder, and pushed her over to lay on her side. Monika stared up at the archon, wishing she could wrench even a single hand free. The drukhari had a repulsive beauty. Her movements, even in her cruel, segmented armour, betrayed a grace that the pure human form could never emulate.
Her features were delicate and cold, devoid of any spark of empathy or compassion. The drukhari’s hair, dyed brilliant pink, was styled into a stiff, sharp mohawk. Tattoos of entwined serpents coiled across the left half of her face.
‘The beacon. It was a decoy?’ the archon asked. Her diction was flawless, but her sing-song accent betrayed her. The alien tongue refused to speak Low Gothic with the flat, dull cadence of a human being.
‘What? The mighty aeldari can’t tell the difference between a real beacon and a fake one?’ Monika felt no need to clarify things for the drukhari, especially when the truth was painfully obvious. There were no evacuees at the landing pad, and there never had been.
Monika’s friend and mentor, Inquisitor Deidara, had discovered the impending drukhari raid, even uncovering the traitors in the governor’s household, but there was no way for a single inquisitor to change the currents of the warp. The world of Telesto would receive no military assets in time to repel the drukhari, save for those already there. Half of Deidara’s retinue had organised an evacuation to Telesto’s moon. The other half had set up the false beacon, broadcasting where the primary ‘evacuation point’ for the city would be for all the drukhari forces to hear. Monika only regretted that they hadn’t been able to flee the rooftop before the drukhari assault had begun.
The drukhari looked at the device her incubus held, and Monika readied herself for death. Before the incubus’ blade could fall, a series of explosions drew the attention of those assembled on the rooftop. Several of the raiders began weaving defensively. The archon’s head snapped down to stare Monika in the eyes, the alien’s mouth drawn into a predatory grin.
‘Is this your doing as well, mon-keigh?’
Monika just laughed. Bait was no good without a trap to accompany it, a role the Telestonian 87th had been only too happy to play. An autocannon found its mark, blasting a hole through one of the raiders overhead, which plummeted out of view. The drukhari commander appeared calm, but the other xenos were scrambling back to their craft. Monika winced, but knew her torment was nearly at an end. With any luck, one of the Telestonian artillery rounds would put her out of her misery before the drukhari got the pleasure of it themselves.
To her surprise, the drukhari archon laughed, her voice a cawing, grating sound, like a murder of crows.
