Leclan began to rise into the air, his arms still wide. Water dripped off his suspended boots. Meryn screwed up his face in disbelief. The screech turned into the excruciating, full-on howl of a bone saw.
Leclan disintegrated. Tissue, shredded clothing and shattered bone fragments blasted out in all directions, splattering the room. A small bone shard caught Meryn under the right eye with the force of a slingshot, even though he was metres away.
There was blood everywhere. A drenching mist of it.
Leyr stumbled backwards. A piece of Leclan’s left clavicle had embedded in his throat. He tried to raise his weapon, arterial blood squirting from his neck.
Darkness, wailing like a cycling saw blade, boiled out of the back of the room. It came on like a wall of shadow, a flash-flood of darkness. Leyr loosed two wild shots. Neskon screamed and reignited his flamer. It took two or three frantic pumps to gun it into life.
By then, the rushing tide of shadow had reached him. The saw howled. Neskon shredded. He came apart where he was standing. It looked as though he had been sliced vertically by four or five separate blades. As the pieces of him toppled in a blizzard of blood, the trigger spoon still clutched in his right hand gouted, engulfing Leyr in a sheet of roaring flame.
Leyr, burning from head to foot, dropped to his knees and toppled forwards.
The entire horror had taken just a second or two. Meryn shrieked, and scrambled backwards out of the doorway. The darkness swept towards him, like black water filling the vault.
He ducked aside, about to run, but something clawed at him, holding his arm and shoulder tightly.
He snarled and fought back.
Banda was clinging to him with both hands. He could only see her head, shoulders and arms. She was folded around the door jamb by the armpits, the rest of her inside the room.
Her eyes were so big.
‘Flyn! Flyn!’ she screamed.
He fought to break her grip. It was like a vice on his arm.
‘Flyn!’ Banda shrieked. ‘It’s got me! It’s fething got me! Pull me out!’
‘Let go!’
‘Pull me out, you fething bastard! Pull me out!’
Meryn thrashed wildly. He refused to look into her staring eyes. His churning elbow mashed her left wrist and her grip broke.
Meryn tumbled backwards into the hallway.
‘You fething bastard!’ she screamed as the room pulled her back in. ‘You toxic fething–’ Her fingers raked along the whitewash, leaving bloody scratches. Then she was gone, snapped back like a whip around the edge of the door.
He heard her final scream, mangled by the screech of the bone saw.
Blood squirted out of the doorway and spattered three slashing lines across the floor and up the opposite wall.
Meryn got up, almost crippled by terror. He was tangled in the sling of his rifle. Shadows began to ooze out of the vault like black silk swirling in a breeze. He could smell blood, promethium and burned flesh.
He opened up, firing from the hip at full auto as he backed away. Brick and whitewashed plaster exploded from the walls and ceiling around the doorway. The air clouded with white dust, and the shadow poured through it like a stain.
Meryn hurled the gun away and started to run. He screamed, sprinting for his life.
The hallway was suddenly very long and very straight. There was no end to it. Every three metres there was a burner scorch on the whitewash.
He kept running. Behind him, one by one, the low-burning lamps went out. He heard the pop and fizzle of each globe chasing him like gunshots.
He tried to run faster. He tried to stay ahead of the darkness. His bladder had gone, and he realised the piercing squeals he could hear were his own.
He fell, skinning his palms. He couldn’t breathe. Terror had closed his windpipe.
He looked up. His vision had tunnelled down to a grey haze.
There were two people standing over him. Merity Chass was looking down at him in utter bewilderment. Luna Fazekiel was staring past him, her eyes narrowed.
‘Stay the feth down, captain,’ Fazakiel said.
Fazekiel and Merity opened fire. Meryn screwed into a foetal position, arms clasped around his ears, as Fazekiel’s autopistol and Merity’s carbine blazed over his head. Hot brass bounced off his cheek and neck.
And then it stopped.
‘Check him,’ he heard Fazekiel say. He felt Merity’s hand on him, trying to turn him, trying to uncoil him. He wrenched away from her with a whimper.
He raised his head. Merity was staring at him.
‘What the Throne happened to you?’ she asked.
He didn’t answer. He looked back at the hallway. He didn’t want to, but he knew he had to.
Fazekiel had stepped past him and was staring down the hall, checking the clip of her weapon. The long hallway was empty. The three ceiling lamps closest to them were still lit, fizzling weakly. Beyond them, it was just shadow.
‘I don’t know what we saw,’ said Fazekiel, ‘but it’s gone.’ She turned and looked down at him.
‘What was it, captain?’ she asked. ‘I don’t understand what we glimpsed. We drove it off, but I don’t know if we could do it again. I don’t think I can protect you again. I can’t fight what I don’t understand. Captain? Do you hear me? What was it?’
Meryn shook his head. His mouth wouldn’t work.
Fazekiel crouched down.
‘What did you see, Meryn?’ she asked without a scrap of compassion.
‘I saw everybody die,’ he said.
Eleven: Contact
Handbells were still ringing along the shore line. Squads of packsons hurried through the steep streets of the stacked little cliff-town, going building to building and stopping to question everyone they passed.
Mkoll watched from the top of a bale stack in one of the quayside barns. The roof of the open-fronted barn extended over him, preventing anyone spotting him from above, and he had taken a sheet of tarp from the loading dock and pulled it over him.
Every inch of him ached. His scalp wound had finally stopped bleeding, but the whole area behind his ear was too painful to touch. Dried blood crusted his scalp, the side of his neck and his shoulder. He didn’t have a mirror, but he knew the side of his face was probably purple with trauma.
He was drawn tight with fatigue. He’d rested under the tarp for an hour, but hadn’t dared sleep. Fatigue was just something he’d push through. He’d done it before. It was a matter of will. Body-tired didn’t matter. Mind-tired was the killer. His mind was sharp. The pain had done that.
He watched the scene below him, wishing he still had Olort’s field glasses. The whole of the Fastness was on security vigil – the equivalent, he fancied, of an amber alert in an Imperial garrison. The search teams didn’t interest him much. They were sticking to the higher levels of the city, around the records building. They would have little idea who they were looking for. Their quarry had made a reckless escape across the rooftops of the high town. He was either hiding up there, or had fallen to his death in one of the ditch gullies between the stacked dwellings. They were probably dragging for a body already.
What interested him was the area directly below, a stretch of wharf around the base of one of the loading gantries. Internal freight hoists steadily ferried loads up to the level of the bridge spans where teams of servitors rolled them across to the cruiser’s hold gates. Sixty or more men were working on the rockcrete pan below him, mainly servitors and stevedores, plus a few gangs of Imperial slaves. They were being supervised by several Sekkite officers. They rolled metal carts out from the barns beneath him, carts laden with bales and crates, and shunted them into the hoist cages. A few men rode up with them. The rest waited as empty carts came back down, then clattered them back to the barns to be restocked.