Merity staggered backwards, eyes wide and hungry for light. She saw Relf’s stab-beam moving wildly, reflecting in the water, tracking across the walls. More howling las-shots overlapped it.
‘Go back!’ she heard Relf yelling. ‘Go back!’
Something that sounded like a surgical saw screamed in the tight confines. Merity covered her ears. Water splashed across her chest and face.
Silence. Blackness. The reek of superheated air and brick-dust. The lap and gurgle of the water. Merity moved, blind, hands out, splashing through the flood.
She saw a point of light ahead, a pale blue glow. It bobbed, then drifted down and away from her, foggy and distorted.
It was Relf’s stablight, still attached to the weapon, sinking slowly in the black flood, the beam spearing up through the rippling water.
Merity plunged and grabbed at it before it sank out of sight. She pulled the short-form carbine out of the water, and turned it, holding the thing like a massively oversized flashlight rather than a gun.
‘Relf? Relf?’
Debris floated on the choppy, dark water. Scraps of fabric, flecks of foam insulate from a body jacket liner, a few broken rings of armour scale. Small slicks of jelly.
Two human teeth. Some shreds of hair.
Merity gathered the dripping carbine up, and gripped it properly. It felt heavy as feth. Steam smoked from the muzzle as the heat of its recent discharge evaporated the water. She panned around, gripping it tightly with trembling hands.
The lights came back on, first a flutter, then straining half power. In the amber haze, she saw someone up ahead, someone wading through the flood towards her.
‘Relf?’
Luna Fazekiel aimed her sidearm at Merity, then slowly lowered it.
‘Merity?’ she mumbled.
‘Commissar?’
Fazekiel blinked. She looked unsteady and distressed. Her eyes were red and sore, and the expression in them was dull. Merity was shocked. Fazekiel was ordinarily the most immaculate figure in the regiment. Even the tiniest blemish on her uniform would famously irritate her deeply. Now, her clothes were torn and stained, and buttons were missing. Merity saw blood dribbling from Fazekiel’s ears and one nostril.
‘You’re hurt,’ Merity said, wading forward.
Fazekiel shook her head. ‘Heard shots,’ she said. ‘You?’
‘No, Relf. The Scion with me.’
‘Where is she?’
‘I don’t know. She–’
‘Did you see anything else?’ Fazekiel asked.
‘I saw Yoncy. I think.’
Fazekiel nodded. ‘We’re in hell,’ she said.
‘What?’
Fazekiel shook her head, gulping for breath. She had the zoned-out look of a soldier who’d been in contact for too long. She was soaked through, and pawed at the blood seeping from her left ear.
‘We’re in…’ she began, then shook her head as if what she wanted to say was too hard to articulate.
‘You’re bleeding,’ said Merity.
‘Where?’ asked Fazekiel, as though it didn’t matter. ‘So are you. Are you hit?’
‘I’m not–’ Merity said.
‘There’s blood on you. Your face and neck.’
Merity looked down and realised that the front of her tunic was soaked, and it wasn’t just water.
‘It’s not my blood,’ she said.
Luna Fazekiel wiped her hand across her mouth.
‘When?’ she asked. ‘When did you come down here?’
‘Just minutes ago,’ replied Merity. ‘Just before the lights went out.’
Fazekiel looked at her sharply. The dead exhaustion in her eyes scared Merity.
‘That’s not right,’ said Fazekiel. ‘The lights have been off for days.’
The undercroft lights had come back on at low power. It was a sickly, wavering light, an ochre glow no brighter than the trickling fizz of a slow fuse.
Gol Kolea sloshed through the shin-deep water of a flooded connecting passage. The cast of the wall lamps caught the moving surface of the water, and lapping reflections trembled along the whitewashed ceiling, creating an illusion that the ceiling was awash too.
The sobbing had stopped. Kolea hadn’t heard anything in a while. At one point, he thought he’d heard Erish somewhere, and just after that, he was sure he’d heard Bask shouting, much further away.
He turned off his stablight to conserve power, but kept his rifle ready. The world was closing down, as though the malice of the under-universe had seized control. This was no longer a matter of technical problems.
It was here. He knew it was. It had followed him all the way from Aigor 991, across a decade and billions of kilometres. Gaunt’s stoical reassurances seemed so flimsy now, Kolea was shocked at how readily he’d believed them. The Ruinous Powers had marked him, and they had come for him.
And they had lied. Everything the voice had said to him in that gloomy supply dump had been a lie. Even the promise that if they delivered the eagle stones it would cease to threaten him and his children.
Kolea hadn’t done its bidding, but he hadn’t denied it either. The Ghosts had brought the eagle stones to Urdesh. But that hadn’t been enough. It had come for them anyway.
‘What did you want?’ he asked the shadows around him. The damp silence made no reply. ‘What did you want us to do? Did we fail? The stones are here. Is here not where you wanted them?’
Nothing answered. That was a relief, in a way, but part of him wanted the voice to speak, so he could challenge it and deny it.
It had broken its promise. That’s what the warp did, so it came as little surprise. The things that dwelt in the shadows that life cast were made of untruths and demented logic. They were lies incarnate and could never be trusted. Their promises meant nothing.
But his did. He didn’t break them. Not his allegiance to the Astra Militarum, not his trench pledges to the brothers in his scratch company at Vervunhive, nor his fealty to Number Seventeen Deep Working that had been his living before that, and certainly not his vows to Livy Kolea. Livy Tarin, as was, bright in his mind as the day he’d met her.
He’d made an oath to protect his children, and all of his comrades, from the bad shadow stalking them. He’d face it down, and he’d kill it. And his promises couldn’t be stronger if they’d been wrought from the metal ore he’d once dug out of the Verghast pits.
‘When are you going to show yourself?’ he asked. ‘When are we going to have this out, you and me? Or are shadows your only trick?’
He knew they weren’t, but he was angry, and taunting the darkness felt good. Maybe he could annoy it, and provoke it into revealing itself.
Give himself a target.
It had played with him all along. It had toyed with him, and its lies had even made him doubt his own kids.
Gol hesitated. His priority was to find Dalin and Yoncy, and anyone else stuck in this hellhole. He had to find them before the shadow did, and stand in its way. It had made an enemy of Gol Kolea, and any bastard could tell you that was a bad idea.
He moved forwards, swilling the flood around his knees.
‘How dare you,’ he murmured. ‘How dare you make me think my kids were part of this. That was just torment, wasn’t it? A way to plague me and make me weak.’
His mind went to the cruel fantasies that had been rattling around his head for months. Stupid, stupid thoughts. What had Gaunt said to him?
A brother would know his sister.
Fething right. It was so ridiculously easy to demolish the warp’s falsehoods. If only he’d had the clarity to do that months ago. Some things just don’t get thought when a man’s head is all of a jumble. Some things just don’t get said. They get left unspoken. Simple things that lasted and held more power than anything the warp had ever conjured. I love you. I care. I’ll walk into hell for you.