Sccrrrrcccch. Something is pulling the bodies away, dragging them into the blackness.
‘We have records.’ Marcus can hear slithering, peristalsis: larynx and trachea violated, a cartilaginous tearing, slurping, and a sigh almost sweet in its pained relief. He doesn’t turn. He can’t. ‘Decades of records. We documented the communication. We spoke with her. We tracked her.’
‘Oh.’ MAUS laughs aloud, bitterness in the twist of that sound. Elsewhere, she has begun humming again, a lullaby for monsters. ‘Oh. No. No, that’s not what happened at all. She doesn’t want you here. No one wants you here.’
Marcus snarls. ‘Then why did she call–’
‘Psychic residue. They wanted something that’d keep the crew calm, something more tactile than a cool voice through the intercoms. So they vivisected a psyker, came up with a way to clone her tissues, over and again, bind that power to their machinery.’ Here, MAUS releases his rictus. ‘It hurts her. Every time.’
Outside, the universe trembles. Ballistics and a ballet of propulsion, moving parts thrumming through the bulkhead. Marcus ignores them all. ‘So you–’
‘You were never wanted here.’ A clarity seeps into her voice, even as her image blinks into focus, the aberration – I never asked for her name, Marcus thinks again, strangely agonised over the fact – pivoting to face the two, hands joined, head cocked. ‘You were never wanted here. You are not part of my crew. You do not belong on the Nepenthe. Why have you come here?’
Like them, Marcus is broken, unable to do more than reiterate patterns, his hands hanging nerveless at his side. All these years for nothing. A killing ground, repeats that ghost of his voice. What’s worse is that the Nepenthe hadn’t even been in active pursuit. He and Cornelius, they’d walked themselves there, down into the slaughterhouse, so they could lay their heads on the butcher’s block. ‘You called us.’
‘No.’ There is no sympathy in her eyes, blinding still in their fluorescence. If anything, it is disdain he sees there, scaffolded in the bend of her mouth. ‘No, you were never wanted here.’
Hands circle Marcus’ throat, fingers tenderly cupping the jut of his chin. This close, Cornelius smells of oil and charred metal, flesh weeping plasma beneath the metal. Sweat and desperation. Marcus exhales and relaxes into his brother’s constricting grip, reality abstracted into a vague sense of self-loathing. Yes, this was always how it was meant to end, wasn’t it? With them forgotten, buried in the belly of the ship.
‘Lady, I’ll do anything you need, as long as you let me stay. Let me stay in your song. Let me love you.’
The manifestations exchange looks, vibrantly alive.
‘Why not?’
Snap.
The lights of the Nepenthe turn black. Veles jolts his head up from his screen and its rotation of panels, predictions conceptualised as shifting graphs, endless calculations.
‘What is happening?’ Veles growls.
Every screen is commandeered by a video feed. In it, Cornelius and Marcus, haloed by pinpoint glows, their faces bloodied but whole. Behind them, Veles can see chrome balustrades and unfamiliar architecture, screens and cogitator racks, acres of bizarre machinery.
And a body, a corpse, a skeleton suspended above pinpoints of lights, like a saint of strange places.
Veles feels the questions die in his throat, one after another, swallowed by wonder, by fear, by scholastic lust. The brothers had been right. And now the Nepenthe was waiting to be cracked open, suckled of its secrets, its heart interrogated. He would be remembered forever. They would be remembered forever. Their names would be scorched into the annals of history and even the Omnissiah would marvel at what they had found.
‘Reconnaissance completed,’ Cornelius states. ‘There was a small brood of genestealers that had to be eliminated. The others are ensuring the rest of the ship is secure.’
Marcus dips his head. ‘Whenever you’re ready, Magos. Come aboard. There’s so much waiting for you to see.’
How did he die, she wondered? How frightened was he when he realised it was over?
She dwelled nightly on his pain, tormenting herself with his imagined agony. Smothered by the waves, perhaps, shouldered from his boat into the boiling waters; she saw him kicking against the current, the weight of his clothes dragging him down, choking and screaming for help though help was miles away. He would have watched with dread as his boat drifted off into the drizzling light, and then he was under, swallowed by the hungry dark, thrashing and scrabbling for air…
But perhaps it had been even worse. Maybe he had met his end in the jaws of some lurking horror of the Hopetide seas – a flensfin scavenging the catch, leaping from the sea as he hauled in his net. She saw its teeth rip the flesh from his neck, the spurt of blood in the water as he plunged his fingers into the gaping wound. The maddened frenzy of feeding things, tearing his body to pieces…
Why not? she thought. The worst was always the most likely.
She thought of this every night. Every night he died in a hundred different ways. Here on a narrow spur of land amongst the gravestones of the village cemetery, she looked down on the roiling water that surged and swayed and kept its secrets close. He was in there still, locked in the chains of the waves.
These were the widow tides, the fishermen said. A man left his boat at harbour in such weather and tried to ignore the old wives’ tales of the daemons in the deep. Out there, all the cold acres of the ocean groaned and muttered for their prey.
‘Katalina!’
In the sallow twilight, a figure moved up the slope from the beach. She huddled into her black sealskin, felt the wind pluck and harry at her.
‘Katalina,’ he shouted again as he came near, ‘I thought it was you.’
‘Radomir,’ she said, and at the same time thought, how does someone get so fat on a diet of fish?
He leaned against a gravestone to gather his breath. Framed against the dying day, broad and unshaven, he looked solid and unflappable. For a moment she felt ashamed of her grief.
‘For Sigmar’s sake, Kat, can’t you see…’ He held his hands out to her.
‘See what?’
‘That this isn’t good for you,’ he said. ‘Haunting the graves like this, spending so much time amongst the dead…’ He touched the fishbone charm around his neck. ‘He’s not coming back, you know that. Borys is dead.’
‘You can’t be sure.’
‘I loved him as much as anyone, really I did. His father was my oldest friend, the boy was like a son to me. But in the end you have to face the truth, no matter how painful it is. Hopetide’s an unforgiving coast.’
She gazed down into the churning sea, picturing her husband, his thick yellow hair, the wicked glint in his eyes. The black waters of Shyish did no favours to anyone. She was under no illusions; her man was surely dead.
‘I know,’ she admitted. ‘But how can his soul find the peace it needs if we don’t have a body to bury?’
