The Path of Heaven Page 9

  Veil stopped running, pressed himself up against the algae-smeared walls, and tried to catch his hacking breath.

  The sky was orange still, lit up by incendiaries. He could feel the tremors under foot, the afterglow of the earth-breakers. Walls soared up into the night around him, rain-streaked, stinking. He did not even know the name of the city he was in, and had only discovered the name of the principality – Navanda – two days ago. The security detail had been with him then, at least those who’d made it out of Vorlax, and they been running together, moving at night, trying to blend in amid the general fog of panic and movement.

  One by one, though, the detail had been whittled away. They had died as they had been trained to die – hurling themselves into harm’s way, taking the rounds meant for him. They had all been so well drilled, so fanatical in their devotion to the House. Some of it was training, some breeding, but that could not have been the whole story. Achelieux had inspired love. He really had. It could be unnerving, sometimes, to see how completely he did it. Even now, Veil could not quite bring himself to hate him all the time, despite all that had happened. Not all the time.

  Veil felt his heartbeat begin to slow, his straining throat start to clear. Rain sleeted down, worming under the collar of his robes, making him shiver. The buildings on the far side of the street were ruins now, still hot from old bombing. The eaves he sheltered under were mere façades onto empty blown-out husks. Everywhere was hollow, or home to the hunted or the dispossessed.

  He had seen the refugee columns heading north in the early days, when the Administratum announcements had first passed on the orders to leave the urban centres, and wondered how they would survive out in the stone-wastes, where the air was a soup of toxins and the earth burned with rads. Pieter Achelieux had left standing orders before he departed, telling them, at all costs, to remain at their stations. They had trusted Pieter, for he was an Achelieux, the Achelieux, and so they had all remained in place until well after the vox-horns had fallen silent and the orbital barrage was under way.

  Too late to run then, but they had tried anyway.

  Veil shivered. It was impossible to get warm. He hadn’t eaten for three days, and the foetid rainwater was making him ill. He pushed clear of the wall and out into the street again. Some of the sodium lamps were still operative a few metres towards the manufactorium sector, and he skirted around their dirty pools of light.

  He had seen them himself, days after the first assaults. Most of the cities were aflame by then, their suburban zones rendered down to slag and rubble. The core spires had been preserved by void-shield generators, and so the enemy had landed troops to clear them out. They had come down in gilded caskets, dropped from the heavens to spear into the heart of the reeling world. Monsters had emerged from those caskets – Space Marines, the Angels of Death, such as he had only seen from afar on the ceremonial days in different liveries.

  But this time they came bearing weapons primed to unleash not upon the enemies of the Imperium, but upon them.

  The noise had been the worst thing – they were cloaked in a rolling wave of shrieks, laughs, maddened roars. He had seen rockcrete burst into powder from it, and witnessed men with blood running from burst eardrums, eyes staring, mouths gaping in pure, abject shock.

  By then they’d all ignored Pieter’s commands. They’d dismantled the security cordon and began to run for themselves. The security teams had come with them – thirty troopers for the senior magisters, twenty for the technical cadres. Veil himself had commanded over forty of them, each pledged to defend him to the last. He’d seen them die, most of them in the first fire-fights getting out of Vorlax. Just one of the legionaries came in pursuit then, arrogant in its invulnerability, smashing through the crackling streets, hunting for prey.

  Horaff, the security detail’s commander, had taken half his men, the best-armed, the best-armoured, to take it down.

  Veil had tried to talk him out of it. ‘You can’t stop it,’ he’d said. ‘Not one of these.’

  Horaff had nodded, perfectly aware. ‘We’ll slow it, magister. Give you time to get out.’

  ‘Better to run.’

  ‘Take the grav-transports west. Do not follow the crowds. This atrocity will be overturned. Restitution will be made.’

  This atrocity will be overturned.

  He wondered if Horaff had really meant that. His last memory of the commander was of him and his men charging off into the shadows, determined to bring down the monster that hunted them, probably knowing that it was futile.

  For himself, he’d just kept running. He hadn’t even heard the screams. He’d gone with the rest of the detail, now led by Horaff’s junior officer, Ariet, a burly woman with a brawler’s voice and manner. By the time they’d reached the grav-transport bunkers, most of the big bulkers had gone or been destroyed. Ariet had commandeered one, turfing out its terrified passengers at carbine-point and shoving him on board. Then they’d set off, out across the stone-wastes, going fast. So Horaff had done at least what he’d promised – given them time.

  After that, it had been city to city, trying to keep ahead of the tsunami of destruction. The monsters were ever on their heels, ravening, pulling everything apart. He’d never been able to make any sense of it – they were not there for conquest, just annihilation. He’d seen terrible, terrible things – whole settlements with their inhabitants eviscerated and left to die in the open, blood running ankle-deep through the slurry levels of burning hive spires, endless shrieks through the long nights, noises even an animal wouldn’t have made.

  Pieter should have warned them. Had he known this was coming? It was hard to imagine he hadn’t. He had always given the impression of knowing everything.

  ‘This will collapse soon,’ Pieter had once told him, back when their work had just been starting up. ‘The system is unstable. I do not think he can control all the elements.’

  Veil had not understood that, and had learned never to ask. Pieter could be inscrutable – that was the price of his genius, but he had also cultivated the aura.

  Now, twenty-seven days later, something was still following him. He had begun to listen out for the treads behind him. Now that he was alone, there was nothing between him and the monsters, not even Ariet, who had been the last to die protecting him.

  It had been hard to keep running with her cries echoing in his ears. They did not just kill you, the monsters. They defiled everything they touched. Something horrendous had happened to them, something from the very pits of species-nightmares, and the canker spread in their wake. Herevail had always been a hard place to live on. Now it was a living purgatory.

  ‘Damn you,’ he breathed, pulling his cloak tight about him, thinking of Pieter. Pieter must have known. There were no secrets for men like that – they ate and drank them like lesser souls took on food and water.

  Then he was hurrying off again, scampering weakly through streets stripped of life and now home only to the echoes of old screams, knowing that they were only a few steps behind, and knowing too, with perfect certainty, that they would catch him soon.

  Night came, but it made little difference. Orbital destruction of the scale that had come to Herevail blocked out of the light of the sun, masking it in sooty cloudbanks that stretched from horizon to horizon. Veil eventually hunkered down in the shell of an old meat-packing plant, the floor greasy with what he hoped was the remains of its old work.

  He was shivering hard, sliding down onto his haunches and pressing his elbows against his thighs. The robes he wore had never been designed for the permawinter ushered in by the war, and were in any case torn to ribbons. As his teeth chattered, he stared nervously out over the plant’s deserted packing floor. Dim illumination, burned orange, glowed from blown-out windows, exposing the outlines of rusting heavy machinery. It was hard to imagine such things ever being used now, though just a month ago the whole complex would have been operat
ing at full tilt, absorbing the efforts of a thousand menials, producing nutrient-packs for millions.

  He felt a hot pressure at his temples and recognised the first signs of fever. Exposure was killing him faster than his pursuers would, and he had few resources to fight it. He was no true soldier, despite the training he had undertaken half a lifetime ago. He had not been successful in his scavenging. His stomach ached emptily, and his dry mouth throbbed.

  He needed to sleep. The heavy weight of fatigue sank down, vying with the cold for control.

  If he slept, he knew he would dream. That was almost the worst of all – he would see the faces of those who had died. The acolytes were surely all gone, the House guard, the indentured thralls. They had come to Herevail three years ago to be free of the dead hand of the Nobilite, its agents and its poisonous feuds, so Achelieux had told them. They had come to pursue matters of importance, in which isolation was an advantage.

  When the nerve-bombs had started falling, for a moment Veil had thought it might have been some scheme of Pieter’s, the result of one of the deeper researches. Pieter had long been off-world by then, of course, but they had expected him back. It was essential that he came back. Had some trick been played? Was he dead? Was he behind it? You never knew, not with him.

  We alone see the world behind the veil, he remembered, reciting to himself the words of inculcation of House Achelieux. Pity those that do not. Scorn them not. We are their guides.

  His shivering became unstoppable, a jarring rhythm that scored the open sores on his back.

  What had happened? What had turned the Emperor’s Legions against the worlds they had carved out for humanity? Of all things, it was frustrating to know that death would come for him before he could seek out the answers, and before he had had a chance to accomplish his goal. A man could accept his demise, particularly one who had lived for as long and seen as much as he had, if only he knew why it came.

  Veil pulled his robes tighter. As he did so, the darkening skies flared up in dull streaks of red again. He felt the earth shake, and heard the distant crack of the drop-caskets again. That was strange. He had believed that the enemy had landed all that they needed to land. There was precious little left on Herevail to kill; to send more torturers to prolong its terror seemed profligate.

  He let his eyes close. The far-off tremors continued. Those strikes were like final stabs into a cooling corpse, and just as pointless, but they went on and on and on, staving off the sleep he knew he needed.

  But you couldn’t sleep when those noises were ringing out. They were the hammer-blows of fate. They marked the end of old visions, ones that had been nurtured for centuries before his birth. He knew something of them. Others knew more. Perhaps that was why the legionaries had come to Herevail. Perhaps they had been sent to punish ambition.

  All gone now, anyway. All taken away.

  ‘Scorn them not,’ he breathed soundlessly as sleep crept up on him, trying to still his cold-locked jaw-line, to understand, to forgive. ‘We are their guides.’

  He awoke suddenly.

  Moving his shoulders sent cold spears running down his curved spine. Veil opened his mouth gingerly, rolling his tongue around parched gums. Slowly, very slowly, he uncurled his limbs. He must have finally lost consciousness while propped up against the metal wall, hunched over tight.

  The light hadn’t changed much – perhaps a fraction less clouded than it had been. Weak shadows barred the floor, spread from the giant processors that stood sentinel around him. It must have been dawn. He could taste the faint change in the air – the slight increase in heat, the dulling of the night’s killing edge.

  He tried to clamber to his feet, and the pain in his joints made him grunt aloud.

  Then he froze, listening hard. Something had stirred with him.

  He waited, motionless, breathing lightly, fully alert now, his pulse thudding.

  No further sounds broke the dawn silence. Through the jagged frames of smashed windows, he could see the scudding cloud-cover outside. A broken lumen at the far end of the processing hall flickered intermittently.

  Carefully, painstakingly, he nudged himself from the wall, rising to his haunches. He could feel sweat starting to bead on his palms.

  He cocked his head, listening intently. He couldn’t place the sound he thought he’d heard – a dull machine growl, just on the edge of hearing, instantly stilled.

  He started to creep forwards, pulling himself up to his full height. His legs prickled as sluggish blood returned to them, and the frigid air made him shiver again. He clamped his teeth together.

  He had made it to the edge of the city the night before. Ariet had told him to keep heading out, beyond the rad-barriers and into the wastes beyond. That would be no good for his precarious health, but then the monsters weren’t either. He might be able to scrape survival there for a few days. Whether that was better or worse than a quick death in the city was something that he hadn’t asked her – nor indeed what purpose was served by staying alive just a little longer.

  It was just instinct, in the end.

  To keep going. To keep dragging in the breaths, to keep the cold from sapping his strength and making a corpse of him.

  Veil edged closer to the hall’s exit gate, peering hard into the gloom around him, hugging the inky shadows of the processor-columns. As he passed under the gate’s lintel, high and wide enough to admit a grav-crawler from the distribution hubs, the city’s outlands stretched away from him – a jumble of low-rise habs and manufactoria, hazy in the rising dawn mist. The orange sky above throbbed like a wound. Thin columns of smoke snaked up from the eastern horizon, black and sour.

  He crept outside, surveying the streets ahead. The widest led down a long incline, flanked by empty warehouse fronts, a trickle of oily water bisecting its length. Others branched out into the warren of inter-block transit ways. He chose to take the smaller thoroughfares – those routes at least had some cover, even if they would keep the warmth of the masked sun from his chilled back.

  And then, as he moved off, he heard the machine growl again, closer this time. His limbs locked. He snapped his head around, and saw what he had feared ever since leaving Vorlax.

  It stood twenty metres away, watching him. It was massive, far bigger than he had thought any of them ever were. Its armour-plate was purple and gold, in an orthodox Mark II configuration and bearing standard III Legion iconography. The residue of killing was draped across it, clinging like sinew. The noise Veil had heard earlier came sporadically from its armour’s power-pack, which hunched the warrior’s back, and it went helmless, exposing a pale, sickly face.

  It did not move. It just watched him, smiling hungrily. Its pure black gaze made him want to scream and scream until his throat was vomited out from it.

  Somehow, drawing on reserves he had thought long depleted, Veil managed to run. He scuttled awkwardly into the nearest alleyway, heart hammering. He heard it set off after him – heavy thuds in the dust, a lazy stride, a throaty hiss coming from between its teeth.

  Veil stared frantically around him, searching for some escape, some hole he could squeeze through. All he saw were blank rockcrete walls, some blasted apart, most charred from old fires. Empty windows passed by, opening out into deserted hab-chambers. He thought he heard crashes from further back in the city, and more cracks of munitions going off.

  More of them, he thought, bitterly. By the Paternova, there are more of them...

  He reached the end of the alley, where it switched left between two teetering, bombed-out habitation towers. He could hear the monster’s breathing at his back. Sprinting, given speed by fear, he skidded around the corner, nearly slamming into the far wall. He lost his footing, and grazed his knee in the dust.

  A gauntlet fell across his shoulder, pinning him. Even through his robes, the touch was like an insect-sting, and he cried out.

  The m
onster reeled him in, dragging him from the ground and turning him. He found himself staring directly into the creature’s ruined face. Vestiges of an old humanity still lingered, but sacs now pulsed at the monster’s neck, translucent and quavering. Its eyes were like pits into the void. Its breath was sweet, sickeningly so, and he gagged from it.

  ‘You had help from others,’ the monster said, squeezing tighter. ‘Why was that? Who are you?’

  Veil would have answered. The creature’s voice cut through him, crushing his will to resist.’

  ‘I am–’

  Those were the only words he got out. The world suddenly burst into a cascade of hard golden light, throwing him clear into the air. He landed heavily, feeling his collar-bone snap. A rush of dizziness made him reel, and he saw nothing clearly – just a blur of movement amid the dazzling luminescence. He caught the vague impression of a monster of similar size wading through the curtains of gold, this one encased in ivory plates. The two creatures fought, and their blows made the dust jump and scatter.

  Veil tried to crawl away, but the pain in his neck became unbearable, and he curled up into a shivering heap. The first monster was finally smashed across the far side of the street, its armour broken open and crackling with a blinding aura of gold. The second creature strode over to finish it off, bearing a heavy staff, skull-topped, festooned with strips of leather. The heel of the staff came down on the monster’s neck, punching through the sacs of flesh, driving it down into the dust. Its gauntlets clutched for a few moments more, furious but impotent. The life was choked out of the monster, and it expired in a messy froth of blood and clear fluid, cursing in a language that Veil did not understand.