Anarch

Five: Leaving Sadimay

The cloister air smelled of burning: burning history, burning faith, burning tradition. Packsons were in the record house and librarium of the old Basilica, sweeping books off the shelves and bundling them onto bonfires that had been lit in the low stone walk. Mkoll walked past them, his knife-hand pressed into the small of Olort’s back, guiding him. His instructions had been plain, and he’d made them in Olort’s language: draw attention to me and you’re the first to die.

Some of the packsons even threw ritual salutes – the hand across the mouth – to the damogaur and his sirdar as they passed. The sirdar’s uniform was a barely adequate fit. The man had been both taller and broader than Mkoll. But the chief scout made a few adjustments, hoping that dirt and drying blood would cover any discrepancies, and besides, the uniform discipline of the Sons of Sek never seemed that precise to him. They all looked like a mob of filthy, ragged barbarians to him, wasteland raiders who cared little if a button or epaulette was out of place, or a pair of boots unpolished.

But what did he know? He was Imperial bred. He understood and recognised the uniform codes of the Astra Militarum in all its variation. He could tell a Throne trooper from a non-Throne at a glance because of cultural familiarity. But the packs were not his heritage. This ruined island, this world, was no longer his culture. He was deep in the heart of the Archenemy, deeper than he had been on Gereon. What nuances was he supposed to notice, what details might he miss with his ­unfamiliar eyes? He found himself working obsessively about details. The mud on men’s boots, the blood stains on their patched tunics. Was that just random, just dirt? Or was there some deliberate significance… marks daubed or smeared to signify something?

How was he giving himself away? The customs and habits of the Sanguinary Tribes, from whose far-rimward feral worlds Sek and that bastard Gaur drew their forces, were entirely alien to him.

Mkoll fancied that when, inevitably, he was finally discovered, it would be some ridiculously small detail that would give him way. Some tiny Sanguinary custom that he couldn’t possibly have known.

As they walked along the cloisters, he decided it might be the helmet. He’d buckled it across his face, the foul-tasting leather mask across his nose and mouth. Tanned human hide, a boneless hand, a trophy turned into a chin-strap that symbolised the Sons of Sek’s gesture of humility to their Anarch. That was it. The touch of it against his mouth made him gag. He’d tear it off to be free of it, unmask himself, and be revealed.

They walked out onto a colonnade that overlooked the Basilica’s harbour. The hillside below the Basilica plunged away almost sheer to the docks and stone-built ware barns below. Mkoll made Olort stop beside the low ouslite wall, and looked out.

The day was grey. There was rain in the air. Thirty kilometres ahead of him, across the unwelcoming waters of the strait, lay the mainland, the industrial shorelines and dingy habs of south-west Eltath.

That was where they’d brought him from.

He couldn’t see the city itself. Its bulk, and the massive rise of the city mound and the palace mount were lost behind weather and wind-drawn banners of smoke. The fighting in those south-western wards had been intense. Whole areas were on fire, and the smoke plumes dragged back across the sky for kilometres, dense and dark.

It looked so close. The strait looked swimmable. But he knew the scale was deceiving him. A thirty kilometre crossing, in sub-zero water, with strong currents. If he made that, which he wouldn’t, then it was another forty kilometres on foot through the industrial zones of the Dynastic Claves before he even reached the formal outskirts of Eltath. And that was all enemy ground, held by the Sons of Sek. Even the city fringes were disputed.

Mkoll changed his view. The great black crags and hilltop Basilica of Sadimay Island stood to his right, but over its rugged shoulder, he saw the hazed waters of the channel, and the mauve shapes of other islands. He searched his memory, trying to recall the overheads of charts he’d seen during briefings in the last few weeks. His focus had been on Eltath and its maze of streets and quarters. He’d paid little attention to what lay outside, the greater clave zones, the industrial heartlands, the neighbouring forge-towns. He knew the Strait ran from the bottom of the Great Bay of Eltath southwards, and was a major shipping channel. It separated the island chain from the mainland. Sadimay was one of the principal islands because of its religious centre. There had once been regular ferry links for pilgrims and forge devotees. But it was just one of many. The whole planet was blistered with islands in chains and groups and archipelagos, most of them volcanic. Sadimay was just one of hundreds in this particular chain, some closely spaced, divided by much narrower channels, no more than a couple of kilometres in places. Might he find sanctuary there, perhaps? Just for a while. Get himself to one of the small islands, something the Sons of Sek regarded as strategically unimportant, and just wait it out?

Was that even what he wanted to do?

Mkoll had an idea, a notion, and it made him fret to even think of it. Did it come from madness, or desperation, or some higher calling? He’d never believed in that last thing much, so he put it down to desperation.

He looked down at the small harbour. The island’s little port was swarming. Watercraft were coming inshore in small fleets, some staying off-station while they waited for quaysides to clear. They were laden with Archenemy troops withdrawing from the mainland or bringing more Imperial captives to Sadimay for processing.

But the agriboats and barges were loading again as fast as they emptied. The enemy was in the process of abandoning Sadimay too. Packed tight and low in the water with the weight of men and vehicles, the barges were leaving the dockside and chugging out into the Strait, turning south on slow, steady curves of wake water.

Turning right. Heading towards the channel into the island chain.

Mkoll reached for Olort. The movement made the damogaur flinch.

‘Be calm,’ Mkoll hissed in the enemy tongue. He fished Olort’s field glasses from his belt pouch.

He scanned the harbour, resolving greater detail through the small, grimy glasses. Miserable huddles of prisoners on the wharf, waiting to be loaded for transport. So they’d kept some alive, and were shipping them into the islands. The prisoners were all Guard. Were they men who had turned? Had they been offered the same choice Olort had offered him, and said yes?

If they were, then induction awaited them in the islands. Induction, and the pledging of their new loyalties. And you couldn’t pledge without there being someone present to pledge to.

He loosened the vile chinstrap, and wiped his mouth. Who? An etogaur? A senior chieftain? Someone more significant than that?

He panned the glasses around again. At the north end of the docks, he saw a cluster of small craft tied up. Small cutters and jet-launches, and two or three skiff bikes.

Small and fast. Just sitting there. One of those could get him across the Strait in less than an hour. A sirdar on a one-man skiff, carrying confidential orders to officers on the mainland. Maybe he could pull that off. Maybe he could get down there, commandeer one of the jet-launches, and get clear.

Maybe he could even get as far as the harbour mouth before someone challenged him and the shore batteries began tracking to blow him out of the water.

It was a chance. It was as slim as a fething knife-blade, but that was the sort of chance he’d dealt with his whole life.

‘Planning flight?’

Mkoll glanced at Olort. The damogaur was staring at him in vague amusement.

‘Shut up,’ he said.

‘You wouldn’t get far, Ghost,’ Olort said. ‘Someone would notice.’

‘Not you,’ said Mkoll.

Olort shrugged. ‘Nen. Not me. I’d be dead. You’d cut my throat for my silence before you attempted such misadventure. But someone would.’

‘Shut up,’ said Mkoll.

‘Give up now,’ said Olort. ‘Give up these dreams, Mah-koll. You won’t be killed. This, I swear. You are special. You are enkil vahakan. We would transport you to where deliverance awaits. You would share words with he that speaks all truth. Life would be yours, if you repudiate and pledge. This, I can promise you.’

‘You’re not really in a position to make or keep any promises.’

‘Oh, I am, despite the knife at my back,’ said Olort.

‘Don’t pretend that you care whether I live or die,’ said Mkoll.

‘I do not,’ said Olort with a surprisingly honest shake of his head. ‘You are the archenemy. I would that I could bless you – vahooth ter tsa. Take your light from this world. But I think of myself. You are enkil vahakan. You have value, and such value may be transmitted to those who find you and deliver you. Our voice told us to be alert for you.’

‘So you’d benefit?’ asked Mkoll.

Olort shrugged again, diffidently, as if it was of no consequence.

‘Bringing me,’ said Mkoll. ‘That would be a good mark for you? Raise your status? Win you favour? What would you get? A promotion? Etogaur Olort?’

Olort winced in distaste at the sound of the word on an enemy’s lips.

‘Kha,’ he admitted, grudgingly. ‘I would be elevated. Perhaps receive a bounty.’

‘Money? Blood money?’

Olort frowned.

‘The things your kind place value on, Ghost,’ he muttered. ‘Money. The elevation of rank. We do not chase these foolish nothings. I mean a gift would be bestowed. A passport – is that the word? A passport to the elite. A command posting. Responsibility. Authority. Presence. Or even perhaps a gift of reworking.’

‘What’s that?’

‘The great blessing of the Eight Ways. A reshaping of form, an influx of holy gifts. To be wrought and reworked by our magir’s ingeniants. To be chosen and changed, perhaps even as a Seneschal of Ways, or as a Qimurah.’

‘A what? I don’t know that word.’

‘The chosen of chosen. The blessed reworked.’

Mkoll chewed his lip and studied the damogaur’s smiling face.

‘You’re an ambitious little feth, aren’t you?’

‘I go where the voice calls me to go, Ghost, and I ascend through my devotion.’

Mkoll glanced back at the grey waters below. He had a choice. Either way, there was no coming back. A desperate, perhaps suicidal flight to find safety, or something even more insane.

‘You found an enkil vahakan today, damogaur,’ he said. ‘If you’d kept control of him, if he hadn’t got a knife at your back, what would you have done? Where would you have taken this special prisoner?’

‘To the Fastness,’ said Olort.

‘Where’s that?’

Olort gestured to their right. The island chain.

‘So you’d have taken me to the voice?’ Mkoll asked.

‘Yes,’ said Olort.

The rusting barge was an old agriboat that had long passed the end of its useful life. The sirdars running the quays had pressed all available watercraft into service. Its deck and flanks were a corroded mess, and it stank of rot and mildew. Almost seventy packsons were crammed aboard, along with a dozen manacled and terrified Imperial prisoners.

The barge chattered out of Sadimay harbour, engines groaning and rumbling, leaving the drab rock of the sea cliffs to aft. High above, the Basilica had been put to the torch. A crown of flames clung to the clifftops, lifting a thick pall of black smoke into the sea air. Soot and cinders fluttered down, as gently as snow.

The agriboat was one of eight in a small, puttering flotilla, barges and tub-hulks. One was even being towed by another on a long, caulked hawser. They nudged out into the Strait, wallowing in the chop, sluggish and heavy as a funeral procession. The men aboard held on to the side rails or to wire stanchions to stay upright in the churning swell.

They cleared Sadimay and its burning crown, and chugged south into the Strait. A couple of kilometres ahead, they could see other small flotillas like their own, turning south into the paler waters of the channel. Beyond that, islands, some crags and atolls, some larger bars of purple in the wet haze.

The voyage lasted three hours, passing islands and rock slopes on either side, until a great section of the sky ahead, what had appeared for some time to be the lowering black form of an approaching westerly storm, resolved and solidified.

Another island. High cliffs as black as the rich loam of the lost Tanith forests. It was huge, many times larger than Sadimay, its towering sides like the ramparts of some keep raised by the titans of old myth. There were rainbow slicks of promethium on the approach waters, and the air stank of bulk machines and heavy industry.

The chugging flotilla came in over the shadow of the cliff wall. There was a huge inlet, an arch like a sea cave a couple of kilometres wide. The barges followed the channel in, until they began to pass under the arch of rock, the island consuming them.

It grew dark. The noise of the flotilla’s weary engines echoed louder in the wide confines of the rock-roofed passage.

Mkoll stood at the barge’s stern, beside the rail. His hand at Olort’s back. The darkness slid across him, blotting out the sky.

There was no going back.