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Boot in the gut. Fingers wrenching my grip on the airlock broken hammering horror and gone—
blink out an instant, soundless, blanked by terror, then back in—
sick sick falling a rock in me pulling me down. His damned faithless face already tiny and vanishing as I fall—hollow, erased, like he’s the one suffering. Disappearing. Don’t let go of the container. Clutch it so hard to me it hurts. Everything I see hear feel a sharp sick shock of this-is-happening, a handful of razors squeezing tight.
The fucking dog. The company man. The Emperor’s fucking bootlicker. His goddamned zombie blood still sticking my clothes to me, inside the haz suit. I’ll feel his hot filthy fucking blood on my hands again before the end. I swear it.
The shock lessening already. Still clutching razor-fear but razor-lucid too, now. Falling feels like floating. No atmosphere. Two and a quarter hours of biosupport power left in this suit: hitting planet surface from low orbit takes… three hours? Four? Have to calm down to conserve oxygen. Shaking like a fucking drive belt. Gideon betrayed me. But he couldn’t have known the mission. Hadn’t so much as triangulated my location in weeks. But then all at once he was forty-eight hours away, and knew my target. So…—
The woman sabotaged me. It had to be her. No one else knew. No one else would have fucked me over like this. She must have sent Gideon after me, to strike me down on the threshold of the Emperor’s doom.
It explodes in me like a mortar shell. Burning shrapnel everywhere. Put out the fire. Have to calm down. Poison clouds bloom red in amniotic sky. Months of planning, of struggling, suffering, puking—months of carrying this fucking thing like a curse inside me—shot in the back of the head. The container, a ten-ton weight locked in my arms.
That shrivelled fucking zombie backstabber and her shrivelled poncy fuck of a pal. Thinking of them spikes my heart rate hard as an upper. I fantasise in mad rapid gulps: A quick knife in her eyeball, pop, twist, wipe. Her dead-rose hair, wilting from my hands in bloody clumps of scalp. Her screaming angel’s face. As for him—his perpetual lit cigarette extinguished on his piss slit. Meat all pulped inside the wrapper, his shimmering robe so much wadded butcher’s paper. Their prissy wrinkled mouths pursing into shocked little asterisks, asshole-tight, as their deadheaded heads make tracks across the floor. Their garlanded guts, loud with colour, embarrassed to be caught so entwined. And me, the master tactician, fool enough to trust not one fucking zombie but two, scrabbling through the cooling pool and making their organs smooch. I’d scream aloud but I can’t spare the oxygen.
You’ll never clear the mission if you don’t calm the fuck down, greenie. Can’t pull the breaker, electrical fire hard behind my eyeballs; but can steady the breath. Take the shot. Sniper mission. Imagine the necro in your sights. It’s the only zombie on the field. Your cell is counting on you. You’re golden, if only you can calm your hand, still your eye: take the shot.
Slower, now. I can sip a slow breath. My heart can unclench its dizzy fist. I can grapple the container to me with an arm and both legs, fish a jump cable out of the suit belt to clip it to me. Payload won’t get away now. I can breathe; I can stretch out my biosupport as long as it’ll last, maybe get down into atmosphere before it runs out; maybe I can still execute the mission. If I can fight off a pack of mad skull-faced coffin-worshipping wizards with my cunt ripped open, asphyxiated half to death. But no need to count coup before the moment comes. I’ll raze that bridge when I get to it.
Gideon, though. Fool enough to half-trust him, too. His blood on the floor of the shuttle another cooling pool, plain red just like the rest. He couldn’t have known; the way he looked at me—looked at the bomb—then back at me. He was stunned. Just following orders, Lord.
(I watch the battery display on my haz suit blink from four bars down to three. I might still make it on this charge.)
You never received an order you didn’t follow, did you, you son of a bitch, never heard a secret you didn’t keep to the grave. Never met a lover you didn’t run through on your precious prince’s say-so, holding her close till the twitching stops, the sheets still warm with your embrace. (His blood sticking my clothes to me, inside the suit.) And what did it get you, man of God? What did it ever fucking get you? You can’t even die until he cuts you free.
The horizon rises on all sides. Haz suits were never made for this. My clock is ticking. The mission, the mission, the mission. I might still make it on this charge. I might still make it.
And then when she seized the reins from him: the way she looked at the bomb. The way she held it, tried to take it from me. Whose baby did she think that thing was? What bullshit did she tell herself, what kind of hero did she think she’d somehow suddenly become? Baby-saver Pyrrha Dve?
(The container rotates slowly in free fall, display glowing faintly, half-shadowed in the starlight.)
Did she think she’d be some noble force of justice, just for a change, instead of a self-interested leech hiding in someone else’s body? A little fucking late to start now. A little late to pick a side, you two-faced zombie lover, you liar. (Anyone would think we were in it for the long haul, I’d almost said last time, the way we keep carrying on. The battery blinks from two bars down to one.) Now you’ll have another dead lover to eat your heart out over. Blow me a kiss goodbye. Hope it eats you up inside.
Can’t change out the battery in my suit; can’t hit the ground faster. I can only fall.
My blood’s sizzling like I’ve got the bends. That stifled-breath feeling I used to get. Hunkered too long in the back of the truck through the military checkpoint, minute after minute strangling the urge to rip off the tarp and leap out into the sunlight and start shooting. When it comes to that feeling, I’m a veteran: I know how to kill it. But there’s nothing to rip off here, no fresh air to breathe. No sunlight to feel.
The longing hurts anyway. So for just a little while, let it live.
Let it dissolve me, sweetly wound me, imagining it finally fulfilled. The weary campaigner at last dismissed. The shuttle slamming its hatch closed, lifting off. The sun on an upturned face.
Fuck me, I’m a fool.
The container’s emergency light comes on. POWER LOW, it says. The display on my haz suit says 12 minutes left. Here we go, Bomb. Let’s run on fucking fumes. Plug it in with cramping fingers; the container light goes green and happy. Had to suck me dry one last time, didn’t you, you little parasite, for old times’ sake. Can’t lie to myself any longer that I’ll last the distance. Now I just want to imagine a world where Gaius is cold in the ground.
A world where the dead sleep; an unknown future. I’ll be another portrait on the wall of the headquarters, if they remember me. I think they will, my people. A future where my name is spoken again and again by a hundred friends’ voices, allies’ voices, strangers’. Part of me passed down to another young soldier in the final step of their initiation, their hard eager face turned solemn and shining. Or maybe, in this strange future, kids like that won’t have to be soldiers.
A future I’ll be long vanished from: evanesced back into the molten core of the turning murdered world, that one day long hence, it might live again. A helpless dream to keep the panic down, to keep my throat from closing. My spirit, if not my flesh, returned to the soil of Eden, soaking it as spring rain soaks the gleaming meadow.
Our ancestors have never felt this close to me before. Even when I recalled or read aloud their names as we told and retold the stories, shooting the shit, crouching round the cockpit or the cookstove, remembering them; even when we stilled our tongues in silent ceremony and lit the joss for the valiant dead. They feel real to me now, our dead ones. The only thing real. I try to kill the fear; to open my arms wide. Soon I’ll be one of them.
Please, daughters and sons and martyrs of Eden, please grant me your auspice, please welcome me among you. You who precede me, teach me to follow. I have never died before.
My craft is frail and the water is wide: please guide my heart on its voyage home.
The planetoid fills the view of my entire visor. Beside my falling body, Bomb tumbles in its container, newly buffeted by the vapour-thin atmosphere. It sucks part of its hand. Its eyes are half-open slits. It’s alive.
My chest is clenching again, and not only from fear. A bucking animal refusal to believe there’s no more air. The haz suit display has escalated from glowing red to blinking red to epileptically flashing red and yellow. Can’t stop myself from kicking, thrashing for it. Can’t stop myself from fighting. I always thought death would feel like something different. Something noble, a defeat, a surrender. My oldest enemy. But it’s just the same old bullshit: you can’t breathe, you are in pain, you hate them for doing this to you.
And at the last, I have no stomach left for prayer. I just want to fucking kill them all.
I suck hard, desperate. Nothing. Gasp a staticky red lungful of nothing. The ground hurtles toward me. Blacking flat out at the edges, sparkling tunnel walls constricting toward darkness, falling faster through the whipping atmosphere …
Splash
𝚯
Darkness swept over her eyelids. The doom of her fate overcame her.
Plunged like a pebble in water whose ripples spread wide and then vanish—
So Wake, the bright blade of her people, was covered and lost in the River.
Cold were the tides and upwellings; they stirred up anonymous tissue.
Ghosts crowded close in the current, their dead limbs enshrouded by shadows.
Black blood blurred their features like water. Their names were all lost and forgotten.
“O mothers!” Wake shouted, “come near me! Who welcomes me home as a daughter?
Newest among our dead heroes, I claim red revenge as my birthright!
Will anyone hear and remember?”
But no answer came from the water.
She cried out the parts of their Blood-names her feverish mind could remember:
Markswomen and killers and sisters, turned putrid and grey like the others.
With rough cracking sobs she appealed them until no more speech could she utter.
Then sick River-madness broke on her, like screams from a mouth frothed and bloodied—
Clouded and glassy her vision became like a corpse on the war-field.
She drifted through foul tides of slaughter, of children choked dead in their cradles,
Of warriors no one remembered, and parents whose cold arms lay empty,
Of leaders of phalanxes mighty, struck down in ranks like felled cypress,
Of youths who had known only laughter, now mingled with silt and with sewage.
No poet could tell all that multitude, that host of the dead and the rotting,
Not if she had ten tongues to name them, ten mouths like the devils of Antioch,
A voice droning onward unbreaking, a beaten bronze heart in her bosom.
Once, faintly, the proud refrain echoed that she was a woman, a soldier—
That she was the king of her people, their lives borne as her precious burden.
Drowned with her lungs full of water, all this she forgot in her terror.
In anguish she strove and she struggled, and faltered, so costly the battle;
She almost surrendered forever.
Then into the ferment of madness,
Piercing as deep as a death-wound from a mortal and swift-singing bullet—
A summons rang out on the water and shivered its very foundations.
It called out to Wake past the moan of the corpse-seas, and shocked her to waking:
Her enemies walked with the living, and vaunted themselves as the victors!
The Emperor! throned by a genocide, and crowned with the bones of an infant;
The two who had used and betrayed her! their foetuses useless as garbage;
The foe who had slain her in treachery, a faithless attack on his lover!
The man who had caught her in labour, and destroyed her with damnable pity!
The river-eyed wizard, the Lyctor; the corpse who yet walked, who had loved her.
His name was a curse and an omen—his name she would spit on forever—
“Gideon! Gideon! Gideon!”
Her voice was a roar in the River.
No longer did corpse-water choke her—no deeper did dark madness take her.
Her wrath burned as hot as a wildfire—her rage in its strength razed the mountain.
Her hatred for Gideon fed her, and sweeter than meat was its savour,
And bright as a nova it burned within her breast. Forward in fury
She surged to the River’s foul surface, to seek out revenge on her lover.
And just as she clawed for position, the horde of the dead crowding closer,
A blood-scent grew thick in her nostrils; the hunger for life overcame her.
A quavering voice rose about her that swore she would have all she wanted:
A slaughter, a sacrifice, anything to stoke her desire with its promise.
She lunged at the scent and the offering to regain the shores of the living.
Drawn up by a force overwhelming,
she gasped as she shattered the surface—
𝚯
I crash out into waking like the hounds of fucking hell. It’s dark wherever I am. I can hear a torrent sucking at me, half dragging me under. The bio-container’s nowhere in sight. Air’s musty, coffin-cold, but above the sterile stone something smells like life.
I’m boxed in by half a dozen zombies, all painted like corpses and chandeliered with human bone. Grab for my gun but my hand misses. Baton and knife, then, no problem with close-up wetwork, it’s that nightmare I can’t stand, my lungs choked with water, warm as fresh sewage—sick with fury I slash out at the closest, then the next.
Nothing happens. Their scabrous voices keep yodelling in House, in a weird dialect I can barely understand. I whip from one to the other, striking, stabbing, but the bone necklaces in their hands clatter without a pause. Ancient, all of them, huddled shoulder to shoulder in this dim catacomb and staring at me with hungry avidity. No, not at me—through me. I scream aloud, but the sound is insubstantial over the crashing waters; and it’s like they hear nothing.
At some invisible sign, nothing I’ve done, the circle tightens. The eldest hugs a great iron bowl to her chest and raises her voice to declaim in that antique dialect: “Who are you, what are you, stranger? By the best of our blood, I beseech you: return to the living and tell us.” And she reaches out her age-spotted hand—reaches through me, oneiric, slow, fresh blood dripping from her crabbed fingertips—toward the altar.
I back away, slue-footed as a dream. The water roars in my ears.
That’s me, lying on the altar. That’s my body. Cyanosed by death. Cut half out of my haz suit, like a failed C-section. Ringed by smoking, stinking candles and dribbled round with milk and the blood from the wizard’s hand. The head and foot of the altar run red with it.
My heart leaps in my chest. Life: the smell of life.
My mouth goes sticky and dry with my sudden thirst. A howling emptiness, glassy eyes, foamed teeth. The beautiful blood would glut my gullet and streak from the corners of my mouth. My shadow, at least, would live again.
The chanting swells. The rosaries rattle. And once I quench this hideous hunger, all I need to do is move my dead lips and speak aloud my name…
No!—no, you fucking vultures, try again, you ghouls!—you won’t get me that fucking easy. More zombie shit, that’s all this is—a red-headed minion or victim they’ve mutilated to look like me, and drugs or spells to make me believe in their death cult and crave their sacrifices. But they didn’t hear me, don’t see me… and I couldn’t strike a single one—
In a cold panic, I plunge the knife into my body’s heart. It slides off like a sheet of ice. Empty hands. No knife. The oily black smoke from the candles doesn’t even flutter.
My terror can’t beat back the truth. I’m a ghost, a dead thing. My body isn’t me anymore. Gideon cut me out of it and kicked me into deep water to drown. And now in this horror house they’ve slit a wrist or an innocent throat, and with it, made me a monster. Maybe they even used my bomb for the job—commandeered it for a new demolition. I called them both cannibals, my half-alive lovers, the single face and doubled gaze of my downfall; but they’ve never hungered for the offering bowl like I do now.
And if the bloodthirst is real, and my death was real, and the water was real…
It breaks over me like a wave: The zombies were right about everything. Hell is a river.
Rage towers over me, the water that drowned me boiling off in bloody pillars of steam, the fire purifying me to a single realisation. The Empire was right all along. The zombies were right. Going home to Eden, the many becoming one, our steady rain of spirit falling until the blasted land blooms back to life: all bullshit. Every ancestor I lit the joss for; every Edenite whose name I took. We’re all just a logjam of putrid bodies, dissolving into God’s leach field.
Wherever Pyrrha Dve is, she must be fucking laughing.
These horrible animate carcasses haven’t stopped their ritual in the meantime. The furrows in their wrinkled faces glisten with bloody sweat, like any zombie at their foul work. At their feet, a mandala of filthy ash encircles the altar, the candles. Its byzantine design looks from above like the bars of a cage. The call of the blood offering grows stronger still—my tongue feels black with thirst.
But now that I know what they want from me, I fight it like the animal fights the chain. They think they can puppet me, they think they can make me talk? I’ll break my teeth on their fucking death magic, I’ll shred my nails on the walls of my corpse as they try to force me back inside. You won’t get me. You won’t fucking get me.
The high beacon of flame is the only sound roaring above the roaring of the water. To get away from them, and from my blank-eyed doom in the river, I fling myself onto the pyre. It burns brighter as I fan it, heap fuel on fuel: Gideon’s green and melancholy glance. The way Pyrrha kissed me, the first time. That rotten mummy of a Lyctor, smirking sour-faced to herself at the handoff. Gaius; sucking the universe dry; getting away with it for ten thousand years.
I need more: I go deeper. My sister. She didn’t even know my mission; she doesn’t know yet that I’m gone. The last time I ever saw her, my pregnancy had just started to show, and I was sick as a dog with it. She said she was the same way with her first. We lay together on her cool tile floor and sucked on cubes of frozen sugar water. Her daughter, having to grow up in a universe like this one. At least the kid has the guts for it. That last stifling day, she kept trying to show me her best hand-to-hand moves, her face wet with sweat as she stammered how she’d kill the bad guys like that! and that!—you’re not looking, Aunty!
Sometimes I scream to fan the hate hotter. It’s that, or go down in the river.
Time flows strangely, half-submerged, but my jailers are dropping and I’m still not beaten. More than one have crumpled in harness and been replaced by someone from the B-team. The new additions are wide-eyed and clammy with the responsibility. Their chains of bone load my shoulders; they stoop to deeper and deeper depravities to bind me down. The fire inside is all I have, burnt to a blinding point, a lone hot pinprick in the howling dark. Won’t let them get a fucking thing out of me. But the noose keeps tightening.
In the end, I go down raging at Gideon. He was the one who made me like this. He was the one who turned me into one of them. His hollow, empty face, disappearing as I fall. I dash my fury against the walls of their spells, battering fists, breaking knuckles. But my body closes around me anyway, stiff and dirty purple with livor mortis. It hurt so badly to leave it—now it’s an abandoned prison, and the cell door is closing on its only fugitive. I’ll never eat a bite of food, spar with a friend, kill my enemy, kiss my lover, feel the breeze on my face again. This meat will be my grave. My only other choice is the river.
But as they force me down at last, tether hand into hand and foot into foot, something feels strange. I become more substantial. My body is cold and lifeless, but it still exists in the world of the living. One thing remaining that’s still mine. One weapon left.
The noise of the water fades a little, enough to hear another sound stir and clank beneath it: the rattle of bones like an anchor cable. Something I can cling to. If I’m bound to a benchmark in reality—a foothold in time and space—maybe I can return to the river without going mad, and escape this tomb of the living. I sure as hell won’t stay here to watch what they do to my body.
As I knuckle under, I cup the white fire close in my breast, drive the anchor deep into my mortal flesh, and think of all I hate. I weld myself to my bones with the flame of my wrath. Then I fall into my dead self like a bullet into a brain.
It rips from my corpse’s mouth before I can stop it:
“Gideon! Gideon! Gideon!”
In the shock of their success, the zombies let a little slack in the choke chains. They’re tired, they’re stumbling—they need to keep it together all the time, but all I need is once. I can’t go adrift in the river. I have too many motherfuckers to execute.
I’ve been a prisoner before: I know when to take my chance. I hit the ground running.
𝚯
O Wake, dread [commander / leader], whom first and whom last did you slaughter?
. . . ] distant deaths points on your [compas]s, but real as the dim [ . . . ]ion:
Whose lives were in your design forfeit when once more you plunged in the River?
The keepers of tombs of the nameless, who [ . . .] [. . grisly;
And all of the Cohort battalions whose broadswords had slaughtered her comrades;
And all of the wizards and Lyctors whose magic had murdered the planets;
]
]
] . . Pyrrha, who [ . . . ] believe [ ] could ever [trust?] in a zombie;
And Gideon, lover, betrayer] [death she’d bestow as a blessing;
And finally, Emperor Gaius, whom justice ] . . [ strike without mercy.
The chasm of death could not hold her; the waters of death could not choke her.
Though madness [ . . . ] [ ] gnawed her, it could not snuff out the white fire—
But long would she drift in the River, awaiting the hour of destruction.
The years shambled on [ . . .
]
] Wake’s body rotted in solitude.
Her bones were her lodestone and solace without [ . . . . . ] . [ . . . ] vanished.
When [anchorites? fem.] came with a basket and collected her remnants in silence,
Tumbling them into the boiling-pot to scour them clean of her tissues,
Her heart [
] at the trespass.
She knew that her foes would do anything.
She strangled her horror, and used it to feed the coalbed of her vengeance.
The night [
[
[ . . . ] as cold as the cold hand of empire,
And silent as grave and as grave-dirt, [ . . . ] [moon]less as [Eden]’s deepest chasm.
The world and the River seemed one now, interred in the same mausoleum.
]skeletons tending the fields and cloisterites painted like death’s-heads—
] could not tell the difference between the dead and the living.
] . . . fled this debasement and floated on distant dark waters.
] imagined her people, their voices [ringing in] threnody,
] speeches and stories and laughter; then lighting the joss in her memory.
But these tender figments grew dimmer the farther her life on earth dwindled.
The crypt where she lay was half-empty [ . . . ] . [ . .
]catacomb yawning with niches to house a whole [host / army] . . .
]twilight
. . .] cruel silence ] [ hideous hush worse than wailing,
[every ] . [in Drearburh [ . . ( . ) ] [speechless . . . with
[burden]
] and heavy as cordwood, the next bundle
]
] an armful.
Their limbs . . . loosed] [unknotted. . .
Erased]
[ children of Drearburh.
]a battering rainstorm scours out . . . the straits of the harbour,
]every boat swamps in the flood-tide—the fisherman clings to his tiller—
]two hundred dead children [swelled . . .] the nauseous ranks of the River.
] filthy seas [ ] foundered, but [Wake] [?] her anchor[
Mourn . . . blood shed by zombies—revenge ] [ murdered ten billion—
Revenge, and the King’s execution. Thus fed [ . . . ][tombs of the Ninth House.
And thus, as an ocean-washed pebble grows smooth [
[
[
churned ]
] sea-glass,
] . . . sharper, till all that remained was Wake’s hatred.
To her it was food, friend, and lover] [. . .] . [. . like an ember.
Although it grew smothered and black[ ] [ . . . ( . ) ] afire,
Laid [molten / liquid] as the ashes when a towering city is vanq[uished.]
If, living, Wake’s singular focus could rival a knife honed[
In death all had fled her but patience, and purpose, and terrible[ . . .
]retribution [ . . . ] twenty years if she [
𝚯
From a long way off, the smell of fresh blood lures me back to the House of the Ninth. Been a while. They never tried to summon my ghost again, after that first knockdown-dragout fight, but I’m always alert in case they might. In death I’ve finally raked myself over the coals enough for those two years of stupid, cocksure hubris. I’ve finally learned my lesson once and for all: with zombies, never let your guard down, and never let them get close to you. Never. So make your blood offerings and drag me in again, if you must. If you’re just gagging for another bellyful of this. I’m ready.
But when the water pours off me, and I wade close to the shores of the living, I come up in the same corpse warren where my bones lie. No altar, no standing stones. No priestesses of death. No gruelling struggle. The catacomb is black and empty. But, coming from somewhere, the blood scent is white-hot and alive.
I almost don’t notice the kid.
Just one, kneeling before my niche, so young I can’t tell its gender at first. Its chubby hand splays flat on the unetched slab before it, and it’s piping the same phrase over and over in the ancient dialect they speak here. The kid’s hopeful little voice is sexlessly shrill. I come closer, from a long way off, to try to hear over the water.
“Mum?”
Absolutely not. Some lost little whelp with the wrong directions to its zombie mother’s grave. And the kid’s a zombie, too, obviously: the making of the blood offering proves that. They start them young in the empire.
But… Red hair. Yellow eyes. And every other child here is dead. It must be her—who else could it be?
The small voice stammers. “Mum, are you there?”
My little brick of gelignite. My Bomb.
They’ve got her dressed the part, in black belted robes with her head shorn. No bone jewellery, though. Half-healed nicks on her scalp show where the shearer was careless or cruel. I still can’t swallow the idea that they didn’t butcher her straight out of the bio-container when they first tried to summon me. Seems like the kind of thing they’d do. Why harm a hair on one of your own, when you could kill someone else’s?
But she lived, anyway, and she’s no infant anymore; she looks about as old as my cellies’ kids when they started tagging along to the shooting range. Eight, maybe, or nine. Has it been that long since I died? Years compress into a moment with her here now.
“Mum?” She clears her throat. “Uh… um, by the best of my blood I beseechew…”
Her robes are pulled back and the sleeve rolled up to the shoulder, exposing her fat little arm. The flesh is opened by half a dozen cuts, jagged and inexpert. Blood fills the wounds and oozes down to her elbow. Beneath it, the kid’s paler than I was at her age; paler than Gaius’s pictures too, may hell burn his bones to ash. (Some reflexes never decay.) She’s like a grub, living her whole life in the dark. This fucking place.
The bomb cups her fingers beneath the sluggishly bleeding wounds in her arm and prints her palm onto the rock. My niche is surrounded by these bloody handprints, I realise—a whole kindergarten wall of them. They’re what called me in.
“Mum?”
A long, urgent pause. She milks a little more blood out of her cuts and smears it on the stone.
“Can you hear me, mum?”
Her eyes strain at the darkness.
Finally, she drops her gaze. “I gotta show you something.”
A long, broad box lies beside her, longer than she is tall. I can just see her bringing it down here, holding it in both arms like a two-metre stepladder, banging it off wall after wall as she staggers down the endless stairs. Kids are shitty at stuff. In the dim shaft of light piercing the crypt from the tier outside, her profile looks just like her cousin’s, puppy-fat cheeks and all. My sister’s kid would be horrified to be compared to a zombie, though, even a little one. The pain of the thought is a shadow above the surface of the water.
She’s pulling the lid off the box. Her voice is hushed and strangely shy. “Look, I got a sword.”
Cohort two-hander, standard-issue. I’ve seen a dozen friends cut down by swords just like this one. My little parasite’s graduated from stealing my oxygen to slitting the throats of whole cities, populations, planets. Knee-deep in civilian entrails. A chestful of medals by age seventeen. —But who am I to talk about monsters? I can resist the pull of the blood on the stone, but that doesn’t mean I don’t feel it.
The kid is talking again. “It’s really mine, Captain said. She said I could train with it later when I’m taller. I’m learning how to fight.”
After another silence, she blurts, “Do you wanna see?”
She holds the big sword in both hands and, wobbling on tiptoe, slides it into the niche atop my bones. Her hand leaves a print-creased stamp of blood on the blade, cracked like the black soil of a river delta. I smell it, I smell it, I smell it. It’s real as a mouthful of hot saliva. She is the blood of my blood. My life was her life, once.
Then, sharp as hunger, sharp as a shot of vinegar to the eyes, I understand: this is my chance. Cohort sword means Cohort training, means Cohort ships and installations. Means off-planet. Means the Lyctors; means the King. My little bomb, all grown up with a chestful of medals, winning an audience with the Emperor.
“See, mum?” she pleads. “It’s real.”
“I’ll tell,” comes a childish voice. “I’ll tell you took it out of the training room, Griddle.”
It’s another kid, appearing like a spectre in the entrance to the crypt. Festooned in ghastliness, just like her elders, bones and all, with a hell of a skull-paint job. Distantly, I recognise her look: a scornful, autocratic sneer, too grown on her hollow little face. Zombies sneer like that at the rabble of a steal planet. This little wraith makes my bomb in her shabby robes look like a kid wearing a costume.
The bomb—Griddle? awful name—makes a move like she’s going to shield the niche with its protruding hilt, then, belatedly, realises she’s too short to hide it. Dumb kid.
“That won’t work,” the baby zombie says smugly. God, I hate her ass. “I already saw it, stupid. I saw you take it.”
“Don’t tell. Don’t tell, Harrow.”
But the bomb’s agonised hiss falls on deaf ears. The Harrow kid’s noticed the clutter of handprints on the catacomb wall. She comes closer, laughing.
“Were you trying to show it to your mummyyyy? It doesn’t even work like that. You don’t know anything. You’re not even an adept.” Unlike the bomb, Harrow’s not keeping her voice down. Her jeer bounces off the mildewed stone. “I bet she hated swords anyway. I bet she would think they’re for losers.”
“You’re a loser!” The bomb’s face is a blotchy, addled reddish brown. It’s a rookie mistake to let your enemy get in your head so quickly. I could have told her that. “I hate you, you creep. Just leave me alone!”
“I’ll tell Aiglamene and she’ll take it away.”
By the time Harrow finishes the last syllable of Aiglamene, my bomb’s already scrambling toward her, whisper-screaming: “You better not or I’ll kick your ass!”
The horrible little zombie obviously gets this a lot. Without a flinch, she shucks a bone bracelet off her wrist and pitches it at her oncoming attacker. A bouquet of spindling fingers catches my bomb around the ankle and throws her at full length on the ground. Another clattering chunk of bone grows into a tumorous femur to smash at Bomb’s face. Her nose flattens beneath the blow as beneath a malformed hammer. While Harrow sags and sweats with the effort of generating these wizardly atrocities—young, young, they start them young—my bomb screams thickly and lurches up to tackle her.
I don’t care as much about the rest. Two children fighting in the dark. More blood is spilled, a little of Harrow’s, mostly the bomb’s. I’ll kill that Harrow kid one day, but she’s only the newest entry on a long fucking list.
All my attention is taken up by the blood on the sword, flaming bright as a brand. The blood of my blood. The seed and steel of my oldest enemy. The blade brings a shining edge to my razor-cold purpose. My little girl, all grown up with a chestful of medals.
The tumult of the river roars like a host of thousands. Awake, remembrance of these valiant dead.