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Howdy everyone, know I haven't been much present here on the forums as of late and it don't look much to change any time soon seeing as how with school full time and work part time my time's been about gone but I have been working, on this and on that.

The three chapters here presented are the opening to what I hope will be a novel length labor stretching to about 200-250 pages and I feel I've got a decent fifty plus that's worth sharing with all of y'all. A brief summary of Ouroboros, its an open ended narrative following the exploits of a band of mercenaries who fight a guerrilla war with the Dark Eldar and as such is not for the feint of heart nor the children(s). The title itself comes from a song by earth of the same name that I heard in passing one day and I felt that it fitted the story quite nicely. As with most of my latest works there are no quotation marks but rather a wanton plethora of run on sentences scribed in that way mostly because I'm trying for a more lyrical text as opposed to the more common, obtuse way of writing. And all that said I'm done with my little harangue, please enjoy.

PS Comments be welcome good bad or indifferent 8)

Chapter I

They were three. Riders on horseback riding out the archipelago an island at a time never stopping to pitch a camp, to kindle a fire, to raise a child like advocates of some esoteric nomadism. Crossing the sea upon wooden ferries and bunking in the creaking holds with their animals silent as thieves only to depart again wordless on landfall like transient gnomes to be gazed upon. They came to a brush land where there was dust and rock and grass and much grinding and gnashing of teeth. Here in this country two of the riders died. One by fire and the other by lightning and that last rider, seeing that he was alone in the country without companion or kin dismounted his horse and squatted in the withering grass. He said, See you are much reduced in this country in frame and friendship. There is little to be found in this land save jagged rock and there is none to look after me in my age. Let me then build a home here that I might have a bastion from which to alter this world and that I might not yet subside quietly into my grave. So he gathered up what of the brown grass was about him into little sheaves and piled them and then he reached into his pocket to produce a shard of flint and a fragment of a grindstone and marked a place in the dry earth and kindled his fire.


The Colonel, his entourage, they’d been an hour waiting at the edge of the airfield when the first glint of the ship appeared out of the sun like a phoenix reborn in metallic form. He shielded his eyes with one hand to watch its approach, the old cruiser arcing in the blue sky, lining up with the airstrip. When it came over the strip it yawed its great nose upwards and the thrusters on either wing spewed forth great plumes of fire and the dusty wash as it descended passed about them as if they were columns of an older architecture that the sands endeavored to erode.

When the engines died down he dusted himself with swipes of his hand and smoothed the hem of his gray uniform and checked and corrected the rows of ribbons at his breast and then strode forwards. As he did, so did his retinue. They kept pace slightly behind him as if they were shades of his being e held in reserve for whatever occasions might arise. A major, his adjunct, was nearest to him and he suggested that perhaps it was a mistake to have enlisted the dregs of society, for did it not sully them all. For was it not true that he who allows whether through word or no word is as fully responsible as those who commit themselves to the deed. If the major having said this expected reprisal it was only due to experience in another command. But this was not the Colonel and in fact his thoughts much reflected his underling’s and said so.

They watched as a pair of trolleys came forth and how the crews hooked cables thick as a man’s arms to the ship and then towed the cruiser to one of a row of hangars lining the landing strip. They followed in the ship’s wake as if they were disciples to that metal behemoth. When they reached the hangar the massive blast doors ground open and the trolleys gave their final haul and then departed leaving the ship hidden in those three and open walls. No sooner had the trolleys detached that the aft ramp began to lower on a hydraulic hiss as if suddenly a den of snakes had been uncovered accidentally by some depayse interloper. They saw revealed a mass of figures crowding about the exit and bathed in red emergent light and when they disembarked from the craft the colonel could well see that it was a whole legion of mercenaries bearing arms and reeking like a company of heresiarchs hell-bent on some nightmarish sacrilege. Scoundrels and vagabonds all in their number and a plethora of knaves, rapscallions, rogues, pickpockets, jacks, patricides, looters, thieves, adherents to every villainy some sober more drunk all staggering under the weight of their burdens and all marked by the misfortunes of life and by needles and knives and some were bereft of fingers, eyes, whole hands and scalps so that all those losses added together there might have been a dozen men more made present.

A lieutenant, a clean shaven one, removed his cap and wiped the sweat of his brow away and put his cap back down and looked over at the Colonel.

This doesn’t even begin to approach a right. He said.

The Colonel shook his head. No it doesn’t.

They waited until the last of the mercenaries had egressed the ship and then they called together that throng of ragged miscreants and led them away. Among that wicked mass was a man named Preetish whose name meant god of love and in whom there was no trace of either god or love. He wore a belted leather jerkin that seemed apt for the desert country he now found himself in and his pants were of cured animal hide tinged red as his skin and he shouldered a shotgun and a belt of rounds and the butt of a las pistol stuck out of his pocket, no holster at all. He followed the officers to an old command bunker where they halted on a dying lawn and the leaders of all the bands were told to step apart of their servient brethren who would be left to linger in the scraggly grass to follow them inside.
They were led into through a granite atrium decorated with portraits of men of war down a wide stairwell that seemed to lead into the bowels of the earth down to a subterranean cathedral replete with pews and statues and colored lancets artificially illuminated and with clergy all in the robes of their offices and performing the duties of their offices. The sounds of their jack boots and sandaled heels and the padding of bare feet echoed up the painted granite walls and they were bid by the clergy to take their seats while the Colonel assumed a position on the pulpit and looked over what manner of thing he had brought.

These men shuffling into the pews as they had never before in their lives and murmuring and swearing amongst themselves and eyeing the sculptures arranged against the walls as if they expected the effigies to spring into life and level their lithic swords in accusation. When the mercenaries had been seated the clergy filed down the aisle like clothed sheep to the rear of the cathedral and up a vast staircase to the gallery for they had abdicated their right of rule and from those high seats they observed the Colonel upon their dais who watched their dour proceedings and who once maybe twice looked up at their starved faces the skin on their tight on their bones and grimacing as if they suffered some offense or agony. He waited till those holy ones had seated themselves, as was proper, before beginning his address.

He started with a prayer but he’d not spoken two words when the precentor rose out of his seat crying out travesty, travesty and invoking the holy Emperor’s name and wrath. Inciting the mercenaries to a great fury and more than one did draw their firearms and threaten to shoot that madman if he did not by god shut up. The precentor was quickly subdued and dragged off howling like some restrained beast and on the staircase he broke free and charged the mercenaries with one of the tall brass candelabras that lined the walls. One of the rearward mercenaries rose from his seat and vaulted the pews and intercepted the rogue choirmaster and struck him down with a blow from a hardwood shotgun stock and the man collapsed and the blood streamed from his forehead to the floor.
The Colonel called for order and it was some minutes before the rabble settled again and it was not until the unconscious body of the precentor was dragged away by two menials amidst the yelling of the mercenaries like trespassed primates that they did. When he began again there was no prayer.
Gentlemen. Said the Colonel. Welcome to Airbase Pennia. You have all just landed on the third largest island on Meniapho. El Criso. Four hundred and fifty thousand square miles of desert, plain, and mountain bisected by the rivers Seriema and Jiboya.

When the Colonel had said this a pair of servicemen appeared bearing a large metal projector and they set it down before the dais. One of the bearers switched it on and immediately there was a three dimensional display of the world and he manipulated the device until it centered in the southern hemisphere on the island in question.

The Colonel went on. Since I know none of you has heard I will be the first to break the news. The Eldar presence that you were initially contracted to mop up has surged with the arrival another force.

He stopped then to take out a handkerchief out of his breast pocket with which he wiped away the sweat from his face like a piglet auctioneer. Among the lectured there began murmurings of discontent but he quieted them down with motions of his hands.

The exodite threat which you were originally recruited for has in the last three months been supplemented by a race of degenerates the local ordos has identified as the dark cousin kin of the Eldar.

Now those who were aware of the existence of that foul race a few of them stood up to leave but more of the officers came forth to bid them stay seated and after some malignant threats they became once more.

Obviously this is an unexpected event. And I do understand your apprehension. The sudden appearance of these vile creatures has taken Imperial command by surprise and the resultant loss of man and material has forced us to hunker down while awaiting reinforcements from the neighboring sector. However your own unmolested arrival presents a peculiar opportunity. The Imperial Guard is not made for guerilla fighting however men such as yourselves who were employed for the very reason of your irregular fighting styles may prove to be effective against these new aliens. Perhaps contrary to what you all have heard but these things are quite mortal.

In fact your mission as auxiliaries has survived this impasse with only slight modification. Killing aliens was what you were brought here to do and I’m proud to say that has not changed in the slightest. Your new objective has simply expanded in its scope of targets. Your new task is to venture out into the country and harry and hunt these renegades. Of course it goes without saying that your new rates will reflect the additional hazard of this duty. Mind you also as you go out that the there still exists a vestigial exodite population who are resisting Imperial occupation. Should the opportunity arise and I can’t imagine a situation where it wouldn’t I’d take it as a personal favor if you slaughtered those bastards down to the last man.


The men were mostly asleep when Preetish returned their heads hidden beneath hats of straw or leather. A few played cards and talked lowly with each other in languages of different worlds, cultures, professions. Bethel sat upon his rucksack fanning himself with his doffed hat when he saw the red skin of their commander approaching out of the heat.

What’s the news? He called.

Preetish came into their number and squatted down and slapped a few men to wakefulness and told them.

In the afternoon of that day the bands dispersed to gather supplies and the promisings of their contracts. Bethel had been ordered out to secure a Chimera from the motor pool and he with two others drove it now. They went to the supply warehouse and received boxes of rations and spare rifles and ammunition and canteens and extra packs and helmets which none wore and gloves and hot weather gear and webbings and tents and thin nylon blankets and sleeping bags and they spent all the light of that day loading those supplies into the Chimera and driving back to the bunker.

Here the rest of the band waited for them, thirty in number. Amongst the many hundreds who had arrived. Bethel got on the loudspeaker and called out for Preetish to break from the rest of the mercenaries. When they were fully separated Preetish came aboard and began dispensing out what materials they’d received and it was well into night by the time he’d finished.

They ate by floodlights the canned beefs and salted vegetables. The mercenaries were still ordering themselves and Bethel sat about on a little wooden stepstool watching the proceedings. He was playing with a churchkey making notches in the ribbed tin. The one Chimera in their possession it was deemed would not be enough to transport the holdings of the company and men had been sent out to secure other means of transport from the civilian presence. Buying and bartering and in some cases outright stealing every vehicle that could be had. So that now parked in the road before the bunker was a long row of cars in every design like an expo of which twenty Preetish laid claim. They were trucks for the most part and a few had been outfitted with tracks or had chains thrown onto the wheels but there were a few sedans and hatchbacks and Bethel chuckled at the idea of waging war in such vehicles. Under the bright white light men slaved away installing weapon mounts into every vehicle that would take one and sawing off the tops of the sedans and bullet proofing what they could and performing every offense one might think against the Omnissah so that the priests of that mechanical god who happened by had to be restrained from assaulting them.

They were under guard all that night by sentries from the guard regiments stationed at the base. Even so sometime in the night a few of the mercenaries slipped away and broke into the supply depot and knifed the sergeant and the corporal of the guard and made off with supplies and in the morning a clerk discovered the bodies with their jaws agape and their eyes wide as if in their last moments there’d been some revelation and in the pool of blood around them there were streaks as if there had been done a dance or jig around their corpses.

In the morning an inquiry was made and the trio of men selected for this duty spoke individually with the mercenary leaders but there were lies of a dozen varieties told and eventually it was dropped. But that would be the last day the mercenaries would stay on base for they were soon after ushered out at the Colonel’s insistence. Later that same day the mercenaries left out and in confidence he told the major it was of little importance for he reckoned they’d all be dead in the week.

They are night driving now into the plain country. On the horizon lightning is shooting down from an invisible storm. Bethel is watching the hot white forks branch out like the naked roots of albino trees. He feels the rumbling in the ground like the stirring of some titanic beast. Can feel its trembling roll through the hot air. They strike earth. Once. Twice.

Just before dawn the mercenaries go their separate ways like species tuned to different migrational patterns. Preetish takes his company to the northeast and soon he is calling a halt. They stand in the beds of their trucks leaning on the chrome roll bars peering between the unlit floodlights or out of sunroofs or stepped half out of the cabs their forearms resting on the rims of opened doors. What they see is an exodus of life, rodents, insects, games of all kinds, gazers and predators, thousands across a swathe mile longs all fleeing through the tall grass past their staggered ranks no care given over to the watching hominids. Behind them the far dust line glows as if the sun had broken tradition and decided this day against every other it would overtake the world and see it burned to the core.

The mercenaries with some wonder watched the advance of those four legged exodists and from the cabs there was radio chatter from other bands reporting similar scenes of flight. Preetish got onto the hull of the Chimera and squatted down and studied the animals. Then he leveled his shotgun at the animals and told his men to do likewise and then they shot them, what else would they do. Shot all they could. The sudden eruption of gunfire broke the fragile kinship of hazard among the animals and they went bounding and sprinting through the weeds. They shot everything but the wolves and for nearly ten minutes and then they reloaded and went about the mewling wounded that thrashed and bucked on the flattened grass and dispatched them coolly with bullets to the head or quick knife swipes or war picks and claw hammers. Killing everything and tearing apart the flesh and breaking bones so that when they finished the soil was bogged with their communal lifeblood and the mercenaries had to trudge through it like any other mire. As if they were christening the lands for a higher life.

They dressed every animal. Like poachers getting the last out of a trade near run up. They went with knives of every sort slitting throats and cutting open the furred abdomens and hauling out the neatly ordered entrails tearing out every organ, tearing them loose from arteries and veins that vomited blood until the emptied cavities held puddles of that curdling life. They even skinned some of the larger game for their hides so that here and there were just bones clothed in stiffening musculature. Bethel was sitting on a stump that might have been the only evidence of trees in sight while beside him a bearded deserter from Cadia turned a kind of reptilian rat inside out and hooked it by the heel to his belt.

That’s things gonna rot. Said Bethel. There’s not even any meat on it.

The deserter looked at him and then the rat as if it might have some say in the matter. It didn’t have a head just a neck whose flesh was singed by the bullet passed through it. Its tiny claws spasmed yet even in death clutching at some phantom perch.

There’s a little on it.

Not much.

Yeah but there’s a little.

Not enough to eat.

You can eat a little.

Bethel smiled at the deserter. Talson you just do what you want.

Always do.

Bethel rose and walked amongst his bloodstained fellows humming a jazzy tune he’d heard in some city some age ago. He pointed out methods of carving and once or twice he stopped and pulled out the small paring knife he kept in his back pocket and made a few demonstrative cuts to the benefit of the less experienced.

Come morning they could well see the bushfire and the black smoke of it roiling up like a wall into the sky as if it were barricading some hadean land they’d no warrant in.

Preetish drove them on towards the flames and it fast grew hot though there was not a star to be seen now. When they reached the edge of the flames he called a halt and walked out to the fires as if he’d have their counsel or perhaps he was counseling the fire on its journey as if he’d been on just such a one in years before.

A man by the name of Gastowski approached after some minutes of his standing there. This new man had earlier harvested the skins from a pride of leones de garra, lions of claw as the locals called them for the hairless beasts walked on the tip of their talons and had heads bearing the likeness of those old African kings, and he now wore them draped over his shoulder.

What do you want to do? Yelled the skinner.

Preetish turned from the wall of fire that spoke in its quiet roar and spat. I wanna get to it.

They drove through the flames like valhallic marauders all whooping and howling, their vehicles now heavied with the skins and carcasses of over a hundred animals whose last blood drizzled upon the frames of that motorized company like war paint on the first mounted cavemen.

The land they drove had been blackened and it smoldered and the day was hazed and shadowed beneath the smoke. They came across the twisted charred bodies of animals consumed by the flames like mummies bathed in tar and left to dry. At noon there was an anomaly on the Chimera’s radar screen and the operator relayed this to Preetish who called a halt. The redskin came over to the console and eyed the white signature in that sonographic display. When he saw it his eyes grew narrow and cold as if he were seeing the presence of some benthic monster that had done him injury.
The operator did not see this.

Maybe it’s someone from Kolbs outfit. He said. They’re not too far from us and they might have gotten lost in the fire.

Preetish said nothing.

Maybe it’s a wreck. Guard says the lost a lot out here.

It could be.

The operator swiveled around in his seat. You wanna check it out?

How far do you make that out to be?

The operator turned and looked over his shoulder at the display.

Forty miles give or take northwest. Flat ground all the way to it and all around it and pretty far beyond it too. A couple hills once you approach the Jiboya.

How about to desert country?

That’s maybe four hundred miles north of the river and all that is just a narrow strip between the rivers. But it gets pretty nasty up there. No roads from the maps I’ve seen. If I had to give you a course I’d say take the coastal routes. There’s enough of em to not have too much to worry about ambush.

Ok.

Ok what?

Let’s go check the signal out.

You sure?

I am.

They cruised over the crispened plain a cloud of black dust behind them like a swarm of pestilence. Preetish had his head out of the top hatch and his eyes were running over inch of that terrain searching for an ambush that wasn’t laid. Every minute or so there was an update shouted to him by the operator and it was always that the anomaly was not moving. A mile or so out they saw a raiding skiff and nine figures squatting at the foot of a thin trail of smoke. When he saw it Preetish ducked down into the chassis and shouted for the gunner to put a volley in the skiff and not on his life to let the aliens get it going. The mounted auto-cannon swiveled on its turret and spat a burst of round and even three quarters of a mile away they punched holes from aft to fore through the thin armor of the skiff just as it was starting up. The little raiding ship listed back down to the earth and Preetish watched as the nine bailed out of the ruined craft.

The Eldar didn’t bother running. Where would they go? A few took cover behind the jagged prow of the ship and a few others stood out in the open and fired on the company and the company gave em right back. A deafening volley, all fire and the aliens exposed dropped some like dolls and others clutching wounds and stumps jetting blood in hot arcs that watered the sand. By the time the company pulled up all that were left unwounded were behind the prow and they had ceased in their firing. Preetish emerged out of the top hatch and he began shouting for them to throw down their arms and surrender.

There was nowhere to go. Nothing but flatland for as far as the eye could see and it all venting smoke as if beneath the ground raged a coal fire. To run was to be shot and there was a panicked one among them who did and left the world with a dozen bullets in his backside.

You come out now and I’ll let you live. Said Preetish.

How can I trust you? Called a voice, alien in its raspy singsong quality.

How can you not? He called back.

There was a moment when those words were considered and then one by one they came out with their hands held above their heads, six of them. Men disembarked and carefully approached and herded them into a line and forced them to sit on the ground then they nudged the gun barrels into the helms until they were removed and set aside.

Preetish climbed out of the hatch and walked down the armored hull and slipped off. He came up and down that new formed line and laid hands on every one of the surrendered like a slave trader inspecting stock. He raised their arms and checked their teeth and their ears and in the chasms of their nostrils and peered into each set of eyes as if he would take measure of their being.

He selected two at the end of his examination and he directed them away and they went without word or glance to their fellows who watched them go with venom in their eyes and a few slightly turned their heads rearward as if they’d see the blows.

Those remaining were executed. They were shot, all but two. And those unfortunates were held down screaming and thrashing while their armor was stripped away and once naked Gastowski who with a pail of fuel siphoned from the skiff doused them and set them afire and watched the blue torches scramble across the ground like spirits out of a cartoon.

The chosen two observed this spectacle without comment as if it were an outdated form of pornography that held their interest nonetheless. When the burned two finally died a rug was brought out and unrolled on the ground and Preetish gestured for them to sit. They did and he sat opposite of them. Before he spoke he looked about as if to be sure that his location was appropriate. The men of the company were establishing a perimeter so that they might respond to any new threat and there was the slightest nod of his head as if satisfied with the proceedings.

The aliens sat bore themselves with great dignity and he made one final appraisal before speaking. They were tall and lithe and pale the way the moon would be. Each taller than himself. The armor they wore was slick black and finned along the arms with razor edges and fit their forms tightly. One of the aliens had removed his spiked gauntlets and laid them down upon his thigh in observance of propriety.

What friends do you have in this country? He asked the gloveless one.

None. Said the Eldar.

And of enemies?

I have no enemies.

I am not your enemy?

You are not my enemy.

Preetish nodded his head primly as if in his mind this was a fact needing confirmation or one he’d supposed but had wanted consensus upon.

How did you come to be alone?

We didn’t think anyone else would be out here. A fatal mistake apparently.

Why did you think that?

Because at the time there wasn’t.

Preetish smiled. He reached into his jerkin and took out a carved wooden pipe and a little cardboard ammunition box and opened it and filched out some tobacco and stuffed it into the bowl. Then he took a box of matches and struck one and lit the tobacco. He took a few cautionary puffs to get the cherry going.

Do you smoke?

I’ve never tried.

He offered the pipe. The Eldar took it carefully and put the bit to his lips in perfect emulation and inhaled the smoke into his lungs.

Relaxing?

Yes.

A habit worth keeping?

Yes.

What are you called?

Silikai.

Silikai.

Does the name carry meaning?

Perhaps once it did, I don’t know anymore.

He reclined slightly and put his hand upon his chin. It’s not good to have a name of whose meaning you’re unsure. That is a problem with many of the men in my own company. For there is an authority in words as there are in names and ignorance of that authority leads men to conduct themselves in false manners.

Would the knowledge of my name have changed me?

How could it not? The very act of knowing changes perspective, an altered perspective leads to altered decisions.

Perhaps, but I still have no notion as to the name’s meaning, likely I never will.

Likely?

Well is that not the matter at hand?

Yes of course.

The Eldar sat smoking the pipe. As an afterthought he handed it back.
My apologies.

It is quite alright. I don’t like to conduct negotiations at the end of a gun.
We differ in that.

Undoubtedly. But tell me Silikai where did you see yourself tomorrow?

I’m no seer and even if I was, what’s certain in the world? I can be undone by the smallest of things. What point is there in speculating?

Tell me then rather where you would want to be.

Home.

How would you get there?

I could walk. I’ve good legs.

Where is your home?

Commorragh.

Is that a city?

Yes it is.

I’ve heard tell of the name before. I’ve not seen it.

Pray that you don’t.

At the Eldar’s warning he turned suddenly austere.

Come and work for me. I don’t have slaves; I pay every man an honest wage according to his skill. There is no favoritism here we go by lots any hazard.

And an alternative?

Do you wish for an alternative?

The Eldar studied the redskin. I wish to know that there is one.

Of course there is, there are infinite alternatives. Some are within your power to bring to fruition others lie within my own jurisdiction and more still without. What you want can you make it be?
No. I cannot.

Then you are bound to me or bound to this earth.

I’ll work for you.

Good. That’s good.

He took a last draw on the pipe and then emptied out the ashes then he rose.

You’re not a slave Silikai. You’ll be in my employ one year to this day. Then you’re free to go or free to stay, I don’t care yet which one. You’ll have a share of any bounty or loot we capture and you’ll be free from harm from any human authority. I guarantee it.

Is that so?

It is.

A fair deal.

Very much so.

Preetish put away his pipe. Then he pointed towards a burly Nordic soldier leaning against the Chimera and toting a light machine gun.

That’s Sagitta. Go see him and he’ll issue you some new clothes.

Alright. He said and came to his feet and walked over.

Preetish watched him go and then he turned and drew his pistol and shot the other alien who to that moment been silent in the gut and he doubled over clutching at the wound. Then he turned away and called for the company to pack up again and that they would move on.


The wounded xen watched as the company diminished into the dust line like mirages that deemed to quit their false world in search of another. He followed the sipes for a while until he couldn’t anymore. He waited feeling very alone, a solitary exile in the immenseness of nature, sitting in the burnt refuse of feather grass. He watched in the west the liquid haze of storm clouds rush across the plain. He thought they’d pass him by. Maybe quench the fires farther to the south. Lastly he thought himself very small in comparison to both. As if the universe had conjured these phenomena for the sole purpose of acknowledging his insignificance.

Chapter II

All that day and the day following Preetish queried his new recruit about those island stalkers he had been contracted to hunt. He asked where they were based and how many were in that location at any given time and how many roamed the open country and who led them and where they most likely to ambush a company of their size and where did they get their supplies. He inquired about weapons, armor, vehicles, and every other making of that alien army. And he asked too about the culture if it was varied among the militants or did they all submit to the same tradition. He asked until he’d
formulated a picture of these interlopers and he was much pleased with what he saw.

Everything asked the Eldar told and told truthfully. He said nearly twenty-nine thousand Eldar were on the island and the island just north. That they were all armed to the teeth and that they flew a fleet of skiffs in a hundred variations and that they had shortages of no one thing in concerns of armaments. In the northern mountains there was an outpost used as a staging area for raids but it was not where the bulk of the forces were stationed. That headquarters lay to on that other island and they journeyed daily between them. He told also that the raiders had long ago expended any stores of food and now they hunted the local wildlife or pillaged the fishing villages and the plain settlements attacking human and Eldar alike.

Lastly he told of the Archon, Leliso. A youngster who heralded not from the dark city but from some other hell and she was much feared by the denizens of that land. Silikai had been in her employ for barely two months and he knew little beyond that this was her first outing into the Imperium proper. She’d conducted raids on mining operations and some of the more isolated Tau colonies but she’d never endeavored a prolonged campaign before and as such she had come somewhat ill prepared.

At the onset of hostilities she could count upon a force of over fifty thousand. The element of surprise had allowed her to route an imperial garrison twice that size in a matter of weeks but there had been more than one battle in which she pitted her army in standup fights against the guard with appalling losses the greatest of which quartered her army and nearly saw her dead. Nor was she thorough, she had more than once secured a victory over an army only to be harried by survivors left for dead in the wilderness. Neither could she call upon the exodites for help for they opposed her openly at every opportunity and had even aided the Imperials against her. The most recent impediment was her lack of food. For she had not taken into consideration the land she’d be raiding as most Archons did and hence she had brought little and the army now was forced to ravage the countryside if it wanted to eat.

The Eldar asked if he might defeat her with this information. The redskin didn’t say if he could or if he couldn’t but he had a smile and he asked no more.


That night they fired the plain a hundred miles south of Jiboya near a dried basin on whose edge men pissed down reckoning that perhaps together they could refill the lake and give life to the land once more. Everywhere in the encampment were the sounds of men hacking at the carcasses and the sizzling of fat as it slipped off the bone and into the coals. A sweet smell, one that carried on the night air and lured close the wolves. Bethel from his place around the fire watched them lope just outside the light as if there was a pain in luminescence so that their hot yellow eyes seemed to jump and dash about like disembodied orbs or crazed drunken fireflies. Once after he’d eaten he cut a string of meat off the spitted roast and tossed it into the full dark and listened to the snapping jaws and pained moans like expectants entering labor as the wolves bloodied themselves for the scraps and then howled and groused for more.

This is a hungry country. He announced. What we got ain’t goin last forever.


They drove up to the Jiboya. A wide snake tinged red from iron veins. As if the world were flesh and flayed to reveal this vasculature. Trees grew here, larches and agathis, and thin gray-green shrubs grew in abundance. They drove along its length searching for a bridge or a tract shallow enough to cross. After forty miles there wasn’t a sign of either and they radioed the other bands to see if any other had had any luck. Just one, but they were hundreds of miles westward and Preetish wouldn’t backtrack. They went on. At a bend he stopped the company and got out and squatted at the muddy bank and studied the water as if he were demanding it empty itself. He looked about. There were trees dotting the bend a few dozen. They were massive things and old and he eyed them without endearment.

Bethel. He called.

Bethel came up.

Yes sir.

Get a saw.


All that day they sweated at their task and such was the heat that the sun seemed to pulse like a beacon on a ship. They cut every tree, sparing not one conifer. Working in teams of two or three they’d chop at the browned trunks with axes or spades or chain-swords, the few that had them. By noon every tree was down and the freshly sawn stumps jutted up out of the earth like the remnants of some explosion or the wake of a logging company. To every one of those felled timbers they lashed rawhide ropes and tethers and commenced to dragging them to the shoreline and committing them into the waters. And they continued until the waters had by all the conifers been dammed and the outflow dwindled to little more than a trickle.

They crossed the drained and muddy bed of the river one man to a vehicle and the Chimera gone over first with Preetish inside. The crossing was without injury but the two sedans they kept sank into the mud upon their run. A detail was quickly drawn up and those men descended into the riverbank armed with shovels and cables and they set to digging out a path for the tires and to linking up the passenger cars with the Chimera. Bethel sat on the bank watching them at their labor. The Eldar was among them and he was behind one of the sedans pushing it along with all his might and his new clothes were coated in mud and his face was contorted as were the faces of the men he slaved beside. When the first car was linked up the Chimera jerked forwards dragging it slowly through the mud. It took some time but eventually they succeeded in getting the car across and then they set to hitching up the second one and it was noon or past noon when they finished.

He studied the Eldar as he came up. A slender, bony thing, pale beneath the mud. He looked strange in his clothes. He wore a pair of light jeans and tan leather boots like the Guardsmen wore and a calico shirt made for women and embroidered about the hem. When he reached the top of the bank he stopped him and offered up his canteen.

You look thirsty.

The alien regarded the out held bladder as if the notion of camaraderie was foreign to him. After a moment he took it and unstoppered the cap and drank.

Thank you. He said.

Ain’t a problem.

The Eldar moved to stand aside him. He tried wiping the mud from his face but all he did was smear it around.

Maybe not what you’re used to?

No. But I’d rather be dirty than dead.

Ain’t that the god’s honest truth.

Silikai took one last drink from the canteen then handed it back. Men were still in the river. They were cursing loud everything they laid eyes on as they slopped through the mud like crazed bogmen emerged from a muddy birth.

You’d think there was a better way to do this. Bethel said.

There are.

But we don’t have em.

No you don’t.

They went on. Off to a less arable land where they camped in the lee of a great and barren hill. They sent lookouts up to the crest and what were left sat around the fires with the mud hardening on their skin so that they looked like ponderous trolls conceiving some evil to wreak upon the world.

Of their warrants there had yet to be any sign. No tracks, no bodies. By then the specifics of Silikai’s briefing had been disseminated among the company and to each other they speculated upon their headings and their conditions. For northwards lay the bloody raiding grounds of the dark kin and it was a northern heading they took. There was difficulty in the fathoming. For that night they also heard the fate of one of the bands reported to them over the VOX. Seventeen men snuck up on in the dead of night. Their every throat slit ear to ear and skinned and left out for the wolves. And they were not more than a half-day’s drive away.

At this news concerns were voiced some reasoning that they should return to Pennia but they were quickly hushed. A soul not one favored going back to the Imperials but none wished making for that mountainous bastion nor staying on the plain, for it seemed their options were restricted to those two equally fatal ends.

A man suggested that the Emperor would protect wherever life might take them but he was jeered and shouted down by the heathens in his company. An old anchorite by the name of Yule commented on those happenings and he said they should not be afraid of dying or even of the way they died and when lads known for their bravery demurred and called into question his manhood he rose and lifted his shirt and showed where once he had been sliced open from sternum to scrotum and hunk by fishhooks in a tree for two days before being rescued. He said it was no alien that’d hung him but a lifelong friend who was convicted on twenty counts of murder and sentenced to death. He said he was present at the execution and how just before the trap was sprung the condemned gazed upon the crowd assembled with the greatest satisfaction as if all along he’d intended a gathering of those very people and saw no man what should be there absent.

And still, men dissented.

Bethel sat apart of them in the bed of his truck. He leaned against the cabin and he puffed on a cigarette and picked at a cold can of salted beef. The Eldar was with him and he rested on the bed gate. Those two had stuck together since the river and they talked of this and that and they talked now.

What do you think? Think it matters how ya go?

Silikai turned to regard the anchorite, a frail one with a flowing beard and smoking a cobbed pipe with a certain deference.

That man’s insane. Said the Eldar. But then you shouldn’t be afraid to risk death. Even a horrible one.
What constitutes a horrible one?

The Eldar didn’t say immediately. His eyes drifted over the bonfire as if he were weighing every injury a body could endure in that very moment.

After a while he supposed a few grievous harms. Getting eaten. Being buried alive or skinned.
There’s a whole manner of things that fall into that category. He said.

You forgot marriage. Longest death there is.

What?

Bethel held up a finger with a gold ring around it.

Wives.

The Eldar shrugged. There’s no custom like that for us. We find someone we want, we feth them, we go on our way.

Smart.

I’d say so.

What about kids?

What about them?

What do you do with them?

We raise them what else, some of us. Others just to a point and then they set them off. It’s considered ill-advised to abandon your young, if they survive they might come after you. Generally if they survive it means they can.

Bethel spat. Aye that’s pretty bad.

I’m making it sound worse than it is.

What about your parents did they raise you?
They did.

And?

And what?

What was it like?

What would it be like?

I don’t know. My parents dipped the moment I came out. I got found in a dumpster with my older brother. Course there was something wrong with him. He wasn’t right in the head. Didn’t matter too much cause fore his ninth birthday he caught a bullet and that was the end of him. And I today am the final torch bearer of the Bethel brand.

I see. If I had to say any one thing I’d say it was, comforting.

That so.

Aye.


That night sleep wouldn’t come. He lay awake listening to the breaths of men and the enactments of their haunting. Somewhere in the hills were the lookouts but he couldn’t see them. Somewhere, another lay restless cocking and uncocking the hammer of his weapon. A noise not unlike the ticking of a clock. He rose just before dawn and paced along the riverbank. Eastward was a faint azure glow and he could just make out deep in the mud the frenzied tracks of men, the sorties of small animals come to drink at the seep. He had a zippo lighter and he wondered if he were the only of his in possession of such a thing. Coming off the river was a dense fog. He grinded the flint to sparks and held the tiny flame aloft like a doomed ferryman overlooking some viscid ocean or an explorer lost in an ethereal cave. He put his hand out, the fingers splayed, and watched the cool vapor wisp around them like a nebula passing through bodies oddly shaped and astronomical. He thought all the lesser orders could do was mimic that which gave them form. He thought they could do no better.


In twos and threes they stirred from their earthen beds. Already it was hot and the dust fell from them in mists like the haze of summer storms. Bethel wiped his brow with the back of his hand and then he flung the sweat off with a few shakes. He was bent over leaning on his knees looking out at the river. The fog had gone and he could see for miles that charred country. He looked nearby where the Eldar squatted in the dust like some silted bird of prey.

Hot enough make you wanna kill something. He said.

The Eldar didn’t move but his eyes. Yes it is.


A morning entire they drove to the massacre. They stopped only once at a pond to refill their canteens and water jugs and Bethel splashed the greening water against his face and chest and brought a palmful up and let it trickle down his neck.

Chagres was waiting for them when they arrived. He was a tall lanky creature and he wore a raw hide hat and stonewashed jeans and he was scratching at something beneath his sweat heavy hair. Arranged in a row before him were four Eldar that he’d ambushed and slain and stripped and skinned out on the fragmented rocks that lay like broken pottery on the ground. Everywhere were the slit-throated ones all serene looking and appearing to be asleep like models posed for some artwork. About him his soldiers, for they were all of a military background and they wore their age worn uniforms from all their worlds, lounged about like a pack of rangy dogs overlooking a successful hunt upon the larger constructions of rock. A fifth alien had been captured and that having been some hours ago that gruesome husk now was chained to a tree and dead. For the men had according to his custom trophied parts of that alien anatomy partaking teeth, fingers, ears. Some had even performed surgeries, cutting away rib bones to be made into flutes other daggers and one man had quite expertly removed the clavicle. So that when Bethel gazed upon that slack corpse he reckoned it an aborted endeavor as if the creator had failed to determine a constitution of that failed being.

Chagres was eying the redskin as he came up and he voiced no welcoming. Preetish asked if he’d gotten a chance to interrogate any of the aliens. Chagres spat and nodded.
Did you?

Did I what?

Did you talk to them?

Not a one.

Why not?

What would they have said?

Preetish cast his gray irises over the raw skin bodies of those ordered dead. At the row’s end a knifeman had the skins inside out lying on a flatrock and using the wooden hilt to kneading out the bits of fat and vein so that he might make shirts of them.

How did it happen? Asked Preetish.

They snuck up sometime in the night. Killed the sentries, you’ll find them skinned down a ways hanging off a ridge, got into camp and slit everyone’s throat.

Preetish nodded grimly.

Just then some of the soldiers came up and hauled away the aliens. Dragged them over to that lone tree and punched holes with a screwdriver through their ankles and strung lengths of black cord through them and tossed the cords over the dry branches and pulled the bodies up and secured the cords around the partaken one’s neck so that he strained against the metal links bonding him.
He watched them dangling upside down in the breeze and he heard the knotting of the cords as they twisted. Watched their fingertips drift along the scorched sand dark with their blood.

Is that all of them? He asked.

Chagres removed his hat and scratched his shaggy dome.

I don’t believe it to be so. We found some hover tracks not far away. They were headed north but we didn’t follow them all the way through for reasons I don’t think need saying.

Can you show me where.

Sure.

The redskin followed Chagres out to where the tracks were. Just a gently flattened strip in the soil. Like the smoothing action of an iron laid over a wrinkled piece of cloth.

They go north about two miles and a little beyond that.

What do you think they were doing alone out here?

Chagres spat. Hell if I know. Maybe they just thought no one would come after them. According to the Guard they’ve had free reign for a while now.

Preetish grunted.

I figure they’ll catch on pretty quick though. I don’t expect to take anyone unawares like this again.

Maybe.

Yeah.

Honestly, I don’t think they even know we’re out here yet.

Nah. I’d say they know were here. I reckon they just don’t care. Just another bunch of raff coming through ain’t no thing to be worrying about.

I suppose.

Of course I can’t imagine a world where they’re not this close already to wising up about these facts. Sure enough them fellas hung in the tree know well enough already.


When the two commanders returned they divvied up the possessions of the slain among the companies equally and then parted. Chagres took his men back south to group with another band near the Jiboya along whose banks they’d patrol for any transgressors into the southlands. Preetish took his men to the coast and they drove all that cold night and for two days following until the scent of salt hung in the air.


The village had stood for maybe a thousand years and in the evening veil of crimson it stood now silent and homely like a pastoral scene. They could smell fish. They could smell rain and they could feel the thunder in their boots. The ridge sloped into the ocean and back in country some miles and the edge was a sheer drop overlooking the village. They hadn’t driven any of the vehicles up to that grassy ledge but a few of the villagers bearing torches and lanterns had congregated at the base of that stony bluff below to gawk up at them.

Can you hear them? Asked Bethel.

The Cadian didn’t say if he could hear he just squatted down and hocked a logy over the edge. He turned to a bald domed legionnaire by the name of Grieves and asked again. He was a pale gaunted thing inked with penal icons and effigies and on his neck with a crude stenciling of the Aquila. When he spoke he turned his head and the burning orbs sunk deep beneath those hairless brows did glaze over him with an intelligence reptilian and malign.

I can hear them talking but I don’t know what they’re saying. He said.

Maybe one of us should go down there and talk to em.

Maybe you should go.

Maybe I will.

The Cadian rose up. I’ll go down. He said.

You ain’t got a gun. Said Grieves.

Yeah but I got my mitts.

They watched the Cadian go off as did the villagers. He half-stepped down the declivity towards the shoreline and then negotiated the narrow switchbacks into the ocean where slabs of mafic stones lay stacked or protruding out of the water. He kept close enough to touch the face of the ridge and he stepped carefully from stone to stone until he had rounded the bluff and reached the shore. When he got there he found the villagers waiting for him and upon setting eyes on his blood crusted form they winced and one or two hurried away towards the sea huts. He hailed them and only one did likewise.

Any of you know Gothic? He asked.

The woman who answered wore a flaxen tassel shawl died a light blue wrapped about her shoulders and she was the color of that golden beach they stood upon. Her nose held a gemmed stud and her ears were pierced with crude rings. She said that all the people of the island spoke gothic and had for many centuries and then she asked if they were from the Guard.

I can’t say exactly that I am. Said Talson.

Then where are you from?

I’m from Cadia.

I’ve never heard of the place.

Well you have now.

Yes. Yes I have.

She looked off towards the village docks where fishing canoes were tethered to the smoothed wooden pilings.

Finally she said, we don’t have anything here for you to take.

That’s alright we’re not here to take anything from you.

The woman eyed him. Then why are you here?

We’re just passing through.

Do you want a tribute? The guardsmen always wanted that. The dark ones asked it too.
I don’t want anything from you.

Ok.

Are you in charge here?

Yes.

Young as you are?

I’m the oldest one here.

What happened to everyone else?

The dark ones came. They came and they killed many of us in a raid and then they came back and demanded we hand over twenty of our people. As if they couldn’t take them on their own.

What’d you do?

What else would we do? We drew lots to see who went.

Then what?

They took them and then they came back and killed some more.

Throne. I’m sorry.

It’s ok. We’re alive.

Still. Do you need anything?

No.

Do you want anything?

No.

Listen Ma’am were not here to take anything or hurt anybody. If you need help just ask us. We’ll help you. I’ll help you. Is that ok?

Alright.

Alright what?

How many of you are there?

There’s about thirty of us. Can you quarter that for the night?

Just for the night.

Yes Ma’am. Just the one.

I can do that.

Alright.


The company came down into the village where Talson gave introductions like some primitive ambassador. The Eldress shook Preetish’s hand though it went against her culture and she led them to a lodge where they could dine and bunk and which was all in that village made of timber all else being just the lashing together of reeds and thatch.

The lodge was small by any standard but even so the populace of that village had been so reduced that even supplemented by the company it was mostly empty even with all in attendance. There was but one room and its length was filled by two tables of unpolished oak parallel to another and running up to the trio of fireplaces at the front of the lodge. The chairs were just hewn tree stumps. There weren’t any windows, just cracks in the logging where slivers of graying light passed through. Neither was there a door just a cut opening that they all passed through and from which diffused, like a litter coming out of a wooden birth canal. The air was full of dust and musty and carried a stench of blood strong enough to taste and salt and sweat and old meals and charcoal. Throughout the hall there were signs of violence. Bullet holes dotted the walls and here and there the bark was chipped away to reveal the pale cambium and in places the sap had run and in places more the wood was darkened from the blood absorbed. In the fireplaces there were bones amongst the ashes, the carbonized skulls of infants. Of the villagers a few came forth with cloths and began dusting down the seats and tables and others went into corners to retrieve platters that they set on the table. One or two took brooms and swept out the fireplaces and took the bones in their hands and went weeping from the premises and but for those few weepers all was quiet and not even the boots against the earthen floor broke the silence.

When the lodge was cleaned to the eldress’s satisfaction they put kindled fresh coals and men who had earlier been sent out into the ocean were by now beginning to trickle in with their catches dangling from reed lines. They brought in all kinds of fish or creatures that qualified as fish in that land. The men watched the strange monstrosities pluck at their captors wrists with thin purple tentacles and try to pry their fingers open to no avail and eyeing them all with a great menace or sadness as if this had not been in their plans, not then, not ever. There were a variety of crustaceans too, clawless things like none had ever seen before, which chittered to each other and snapped their beaked jaws at the air and arched up like centipedes and with as many legs too. The fishermen carried them all over to the newly cleaned and lighted fireplaces where the women had installed wireframe grills and then they handed them off and the cooks committed alive each of those creatures to the fires where they for some minutes shrieked and writhed in agony until their brains had fried or run like a gray mucous out of their every orifice.

It only took a few minutes before the food was ready. They arranged the grilled beasts on the platters and set them on the table beside the companies own contribution to the dinner. Cuts of meat from their own hunt, filets, strips, slabs of ribs. They had some canned fruits and vegetables but Preetish was wary of sharing those and thus there were only a few there and of the villagers only the eldress in possession of the little tin cans. When the food had been doled out the Eldress stood and proceeded to address her people and the mercenaries. She offered thanks to the mercenaries though she did not specify for what and she offered prayers to her gods which did dwell in the frothy abyss that eroded their shores and which glinted like some thousand faceted diamond in every moment, in every turn.

The villagers ate in silence eying another and those foreigners who reeked of toil and senseless violence. Though there had not been any at the onset of that feast there soon became prevalent among the mercenaries bottles of alcohol that seemed conjured up out of thin air. And it was not long before the men began to carouse and become rowdy and make unbelievable boasts of violence and virility. A half-dozen conversations were started all appearing to be in competition for absurdity and it was not long before enmities hidden in the ragged corners of those vile men’s souls arose and fights were picked and brutal melees engaged. Long before the food had grown cold the feast had devolved into some hostile gathering of mindless primates all vying for supremacy over another and they laughed and spilled their drinks and propositioned the few lasses that’d survived yet all those predations of the dark kin and who shied away and excused themselves hastily amid cat calls and every kind of lewd gesture.

By midnight they had spilled out of the lodge in twos and threes leaving the Eldress alone with Talson and Preetish. The redskin seemed unfazed about these happenings and he sat with his elbows resting on the table and watching that dark portal as if he expected a visitor. Talson was trying to calm the Eldress for the tears were pouring out of her dark eyes and he was petitioning Preetish to enact some intervention but the redskin heeded him not. She was trying to leave the hall but he arrested her by the arm and cautioned her of the dangers but she would not be persuaded and so he followed her out like a chaperone into the fiery dark.

She wandered the streets in his shadow and in the shadow of the huts and in the light of the fires that followed in the mercenaries wake and seemed to have no origin or fuel as if their very presence somehow kindled them. As if there was some catalytic agent contained in their blood that now was splattered upon the earth by fist and blade.

A few of the huts had been set afire and Talson tracked down the arsonists and beat them to within an inch of their lives and then he accompanied further the Eldress stopping only to yank men away from their acts of random destruction. When they went out to the dunes they saw a trio of men prostrating themselves about a shrine to the blood god made up of slabs and shards of rusted iron on which they cut their hands and to which they chanted in some barbarous tongue. They were stripped to the waist and what upon their sordid flesh was tattooed made her hide her eyes in his shoulder. Leering visages, all demonic, that contorted and flowed across their beings snaking this way and that and coiling around necks and torsos and engaging in combat with another and inflicting great wounds that seemed only to bleed their mortal hosts. They were covered in blood and they were in pain and they were not dead nor seemed likely to become so.

Oh God. She said. Oh God.

He took her back to her hut and they sat together on the earthen floor not saying anything. After a while she got up to leave again to investigate some primal scream but he held her wrist and when she turned to look at him he just shook his head and after a while more she sat back down and started to cry.


The night was starless and the wind ebbing slightly and it was plain to see that a storm would soon be upon them. Bethel was drunk as was the Eldar and together they wandered about the village drinking and firing wildly into the air little volleys as if they’d shoot out the stars and eventually they found themselves back in the lodge where Preetish sat still, his position not changed at all. They set down at the far end of the table as far away as they could and they picked at some of the leftover food and eyed the redskin with a wariness as if his presence itself were sobering. They sat for a few minutes and then they got up with a few platters of food and went and sat back at the other table that had been to that moment unused.

Silikai was smiling a toothy fanged smile and laughing almost uncontrollably and trying to lift a bottle to his lips and failing.

I’ve been here before. He said.

Oh?

Not two weeks ago. We were here. I remember a few things. I remember.

Bethel sipped his drink. Well ye is here again.

Indeed I am.

Did ye figure ye’d be back here again?

I figured.

Yeah ye’s a damn liar.

I figured.

Bethel looked back at the redskin.

You wanna know how I met that guy?

I figured who?

Old Preetish.

How?

Well I got shot. Running on six years now. I was on Inthic and I got arrested for trafficking drugs out of my landlord’s basement. What happened was one day this old crone smells something and reports it to the authorities and morning next I wake up and there’s an arbite with a shotgun in my face. Well they found the drugs and it was an open and shut case. Sentenced to get the lobes carved up and out. Spend the rest of my life as one of those damn machines wheeling around libraries and such. It would’ve happened too. They sent me down to lockup for holding and one of the guards even gave me the date. I waited two days fore I got transferred out to one of those damn cathedrals where they got all kinds of crazies just waiting to get into your skin with knives and all kinds of nasty gak.

Well I got put in down in a cell in the basement of that gothic architecture and it was three days hence of my arrival that I was to go under. Course I wasn’t alone down there. There were other folks chained up some for crimes like me but there was a good number actually had volunteered to have themselves thrown in a cell and getting flogged every morning and evening as part of some kind of a prayer. And doing it to themselves too. I couldn’t believe it but there were as far as I could tell as many of those fanatics as there were us criminals. And they didn’t even segregate us. They just lotted us all together. I shared a cell with a pair of thieves who were only there to serve out a lashing sentence. They take twenty and then they’re free and they took them and by the second day they were gone and I was alone with this rabid proselyte from some backwater who gibbered some nonsensical bs I can’t even begin to describe. Well he whipped himself every morning noon and night till the mortar lines in our cell ran red like some bloody aqueduct.

Now we didn’t get along for a reason I can’t much remember and one day this crazy come at me with his lash and he got me good to at first on account of me being asleep. Well I tackled him to the ground and got the lash out of his hands and beat him till my fists swolled up and I couldn’t hardly move my finger no more.

And just in that moment a guard come down the stairwell calling out this guy’s name which I happened to of picked up. This guard comes to stand before the cell bars and he looks at this beaten monk that don’t look like a monk at all and he looks at me and I’ve got the lash in my hand and I can see he’s about to say something so I start lashing myself on the back and crying out all kinds of accusations against that heathen there lying on the floor. Well the guard takes one look at me and you could tell he was at odds with any kind of interaction with me but he asked me if my name was something or another and I claimed it to be. Well the guard told me something to the effect that I was free to go if I so chose and I said I couldn’t suffer one moment more the presence of that heretic and that if there’s any justice in the world I’d see that man burned at the stake. The guard didn’t say nothing he just opened up the cell and let me on out and escorted me up the stairs into the cathedral and right out of it. And I wasn’t going to argue with that.

A long time I wondered why exactly the guard didn’t know who I was and as it turned out unbeknownst to me and everyone else there had been a change in administration, all knew people in the higher ups and a switching around of guards so they didn’t know any of us yet.

Course that ain’t the end of the story. That’s just an epilogue. I tossed the lash and headed right on down the street looking for the most crowded place I could find. I knew they’d probably realize their mistake eventually but I didn’t think they’d realize it in less than five minutes flat and with me still on the same damn block. I see them guards hustling up out of the cathedral with four of them leather clad bastards in tow. I knew what was up. I set to running and I gave em a good chase almost our miles of cityscape. I almost lost them in a bazaar but they spotted me just as I was going into this tent that sold carpets and by then I guess they just didn’t feel like chasing me anymore cause they just pulled out their guns and started shooting up the tent. Hit me twice in the right lung. Lodged a bullet right in the clerk’s brain and had it flooding out the back of his skull in chunks. Killed the clerks daughter too and two of the customers went down screaming and clutching on to these red flowers blooming on their shirts as if they were some kind of new and liquid flora.

So I’m lying there all perforated and leaking blood out onto this ancient damn carpet when my pursuants barge in. I thought they’d finish me off and I reckoned it was better than getting part of my head chopped off so I took some solace in that but as the gods willed it was not to be. Old Preetish just happened to be there, why I couldn’t tell cause I never asked, and that dead clerk just happened to be his friend. Those arbites and that guard came in the first thing any of them knew was Preetish cutting clean off one of their heads with a machete. I watched it fall right off and it rolling past me and I swore those eyes were following mine following em all the way across the room.

Telling me to make this right somehow.

I know there some gunfire cause I remember crawling over the shells and burning the palms of my hands. I went past a man with a meat hook piercing his throat and his mouth working like a fish and spewing up a little fountain of blood that ran down his cheeks like an idiot drowning in his own saliva. I got to Preetish and I remember just clinging on to his leg, I couldn’t say why. He tried removing me with the stock of a shotgun like I was some kind of needy child but he didn’t manage. I don’t know why he didn’t shoot me, maybe cause he didn’t have no ammunition but he didn’t want to take me with him I knew that. He, and I swear on my life, dragged me out of that tent stopping every few feet to try and shake me off. Dragged me halfway across the square before he decided to help me up. After that he took me to a hospital, some unsterile place where only the poorest of the poor ever dare go. It took a week before I got fixed to where I could even open my eyes and when I could the first thing I saw was Preetish looming over me like some kind of red god. He offered me a place in the company and well seeing as how there wasn’t much else to do I signed on and I’ve been here ever since.

At that Bethel grew then and his eyes bored into the crispened eyes of some shelled animal. This is not to say he’d become somber or upset by these recollections for he hadn’t. He much enjoyed telling stories and he had come to terms with his life and its follies and lacking many years before.

After a while he looked up grinning.

Hell Sil. He said. There ain’t a soul here didn’t have it rough. Look at me. Hell, look at you. Near bit it in the desert without a soul to care for ya.

The company was late in waking. It wasn’t till noon that the very first among them rose all bleary eyed and stinking in their rags. Those few disrobed where they stood and staggered down to the beach and waded into the cold ocean and sat nearly submerged there like haired alligators watching the shore.

For all the violence of the prior night there was only one casualty and he was of the company. His name was Coleson and he lay dead with a single bullet passed into his brain and his locks lay over the bloodless hole and the blood encircling his head in the sand was like an aureole out of some byzantine painting. As if he was someone to be worshipped.

Who shot him? Someone asked.

No one confessed for in truth no one knew.

During the night some of the revelers had set fire to a few of the huts on the outer edge of the village and now you could see the aboriginals going about quiet as lambs smothering the tiny flames with sand and eying the mercenaries with a furious circumspection their bloodshot eyes did fail to register as if there was no consequence to those people as if by some means they had been exempted of causality and what was done to them could affect not at all what was done by them.

The day was cool and growing cold. Of the sun there was no sign. Offshore there could be seen the advance of a dark overcast like the veiling of the world. It drew close fast on winds that howled and sent waves crashing against the bluffs. They retreated to the lodge, the villagers and the company alike, all save Preetish who stood on the shoreline and watched the waters rise to his ankles, his knees. When the waterline was to his waist he turned and in that moment the current sucked his legs out from under him and he plunged into the water. He’d been dragged twenty feet from shore before he even gained his senses and he was being dragged further still. He clawed at the sand until he found a handhold in the form of an egg shaped rock that he clung to with the tips of his fingernails. When he felt the current slacken he hauled himself forward and placed his two feet against it and propelled himself up to the surface. He burst coughing up water and gasping and turned in time to see a wave crash down upon him and he was under again in some greenish black void out of which only the outlines of shapes could be discerned like a simplified viewing of life. He got his bearings and swam back to the surface and let the wave carry him towards the shore. When he felt the current tugging him back he adjusted himself so that he floated on his belly and then he commenced to kicking and stroking against the tide. Cupping his hands and plunging them into the cold water and straining them backwards and again and again until his muscles burned and more so until they began to knot and by then there was another wave and he rode that to the shore where he stood and puked seawater and shambled forwards into the village.

He hobbled into the lodge dripping blood from the fingertips of his right hand and streaming water from everywhere else like some criminal sea monster newly arisen. The occupants of that place turned at once to regard the entrance of this being of rage.

He said but one thing and that that they were leaving and then he turned and went back out into the storm.

What echoed in the lodge was no argument or inquiry but the rising of the mercenaries and the donning of their equipment before they shuffled out. The villagers studied them as they went and some looked about and some at her and when finally she looked down from the vaulted ceiling she began to follow them out. Outside the hurricane was nigh upon the coast. Already the docks were submerged and just the wooden planks could be seen when the waters receded. But for one upturned and riding upon the waves the canoes were all pulled over and then that too was gone. They marched out into the stinging rain without deference to the tempest as if it was an agent from a chamber of whose jurisdiction they were independent. They went towards the back end of the village and climbed up the sandbar behind which they’d parked their vehicles. They stood there now rocking on their springs like metallic beasts adjusting themselves in metallic dreams still laden with the bodies of animals now beginning to rot. They popped open the doors and dropped off their gear and started their vehicles and went to check if all their holdings were secure and to run after this item or that that the wind had picked up and deposited in some elsewhere and kneeling on their two knees and digging out tires with their bare hands like dogs. From atop the sandbar the villagers watched these proceedings like war widows as many of them were. The gales were coming in with such ferocity that they were constantly finding their footing as if they were playing some child’s game or the ground was on fire.

Talson was not among them. He was beside Preetish and he was talking of them. His shouts were but whispers on the wind. He wanted to take her with him. Not the rest, he didn’t care about them, but he wanted her to come and he knew the two parties to be inseparable. He knew any breaking of those bonds would be catastrophic and he knew to stay was to die and so his case was made with wild gestures thrown about in the air. He pointed up to those haggard few, not even fifty, and he pointed at the vehicles which could with some organizing accommodate such a number. He spoke of the weapons of that murdered band which lay unused in cabins with none to claim them. He said it’d be foolish to pass up a people in need of revenge.

Preetish turned into the wind and studied the watchers upon the bar. Young they were. The youngest being children, the eldest the woman so enamored with and she perhaps not more than twenty-six. Scrawny arms, scrawny legs, bodies frail and shivering in the cold and every climate other. A commonality in wretchedness, vessels that were the recipients of every unbridled violence. You could see him now, the gears clanking away within his skull, the dark thoughts interred there sequencing possibilities by likelihood and disposition. Finally he acceded and sent Talson up to go and talk with the eldress. When he came back with the villagers in tow he oversaw their allocation and directed them by capability to man this vehicle or that. And he gathered all that were feeble and all that were meek and afforded them a retinue which would in the course of that day lag behind the company to become separate and then discard those souls to the mercies of the hurricane.

Not even six hours later they were dead those unsuited to the life. Upon returning to the company that evening their given alibi was that one of the trucks had stalled out due to rainwater and they were for a few hours cleaning out the engine with rags. They said they were almost done when a devil wind fell upon them and overturned one of the trucks crushing a few of the villagers and carrying off the rest like puppets whose strings had been pulled. They said they’d tracked every body down but had not bothered to take them along. What would have been the point?

The villagers received this news with grim stoicism and they counted it as just one more misfortune heaped upon them but there was no truth to the tale and when Talson asked for a factual accounting here is what Bethel said:

He said he’d driven the truck laden with that human cargo. Ridden with Yule and a frontiersman from Newark called Hestle eighty miles or so inland. He said after that they’d begun to slow until the taillights of the company had diminished into the bluing mist and then they stopped. They sat in the cabin waiting to see if anyone might come back for them but none did and after a time in which the company gave no sign of appearing they stepped out into a dark pasture of grass and small cold white flowers that whipped about their legs. The rain had just barely stopped and it looked to start again any moment. The wind was the sound and the rhythmic swiping of the windshield wipers and the chugging of the motor and the door chime and the grass swaying and crushing underfoot and the bodies of the villagers shifting to watch them. They gestured for them to disembark. They did. They took their weapons and placed them in the bed and got back into the truck and drove off. He said there hadn’t been a word spoken. Said on their faces wasn’t surprise but resignation as if they’d expected this, as if in their infant years it’d been told to them.

He watched them evaporate in the rearview mirror, dark shapes, like ghosts coated in oil.













Chapter III

In a pale fire’s light he sat and no other. The grass was slick and damp and the wind jostled about the blades and overhead the clouds sounded out steady drum beats, the tattoos of war. He was resting on his side with one hand palm down on the grass and the other on his thigh and his legs stretched out and stacked atop another. He heard her creeping up behind him, the softest ruffling, and he sprang up and raked his hand through the coals grabbing a single briquette glowing red hot and he charged into the darkness with just that red eye in his hand for light. The wych encroaching on the camp was taken by surprise and in haste she lunged at him with a jet black trident that sung through the air a crisp note as if the air itself was being cut. He swung his whole left side outwards and the three prongs shot past him and he seized upon the cold ebony shaft and pulled it close to his waist and then he smashed the coal into the eye of the wych in an explosion of blood red sparks and ground it there till it was bits of glowing dust rising in the air. Half-blind she released her hold on the trident and fell backwards and he rode her to the ground where she tried to dismount him from her but he wrapped his hands around her throat and began to close her windpipe with his two thumbs and she reached into her belt and pulled out a dagger and swiped it outwards opening him up along the side and she made to thrust it into his chest but he caught her at the wrist and pinned her arm to the ground. She was squirming beneath his weight and his hand was searching for a stone more in the dark on the ground and when he found it he hefted it up and bashed it against her skull again and again until her temples were fountaining up blood and again until the bone concaved like a plate subducted into some thoughtful mantle and again until the bits of gray matter splashed up and rolled out onto the ground.

He stood not seeing nothing but rays of light flashing into being, an onset of a world out of a voided universe. Revelating in thin streaks of pale light thin pale gods grounded on thin pale earth.

That scantily clad corpse they filed past solemn as owls like mourners at a funeral or coroners afforded a glimpse at a new cause of death.

That’s a damn shame. Said Grieves.

Bethel looked up. His hand was bandaged and he was shirtless with a gauze pad strapped to his side. He held the wound as if it might run from him. He held a bottle of whiskey half drunk and him drunk and getting drunker. He stood over her triumphant like a lion lording over his first kill. He had a smile on his stubbled face. He waved and nodded to those going by.

Above the carrion was beginning to gather, three feathered symbols of war small in a cloudless caesious sky.

Think she saw that coming? He asked.

The Eldar shrugged. Then he smirked and slapped his thigh. I know I didn’t. He spoke some Eldar curse or blessing to the wych and turned and walked away.

You don’t think he’s sore about this? Asked Hestle.

I don’t know why he would be.

Maybe he knew her.

He don’t seem the type to get caught up with a woman.

I suppose you’re right.

He drank and shot out his tongue and licked the air. I suppose I am.

They set out of that place but not before Preetish had come and dropped his buckskin draws and whipped out his manhood and pissed fiercely into that bloody receptacle that had once held all that a person had ever been or dreamed to be.


What lay ahead was all desert, highland country. A strip of land not a hundred miles wide of wrinkled sand and clay beds and limestone outcrops and fields of scoria or fine dust like powder that spouted out behind the treads of the company like a massive plume of steam out of an engine. A land where what grew were shrubs with naked limbs that curled upwards like the segmented legs of dying spiders.

They progressed through a barren forest of desiccated trees that stood rooted together in haphazard proximity and wrought in pruinrosed forms that seemed to wail silently as if they all together were the lithified remnants of some ancient exodus, a forest of refugees frozen and dried out. Here men grew quiet and speculative upon even the most trivial occurrences. As if they suspected the very woods of treachery. If among them there was any conference at that time it was only the villagers who whispered to each other coastal oaths in a language none but they could understand and perhaps those entombed souls that waved wantonly at their passing.

Before the noon was up the woods were behind them and they’d come over a rise and down into a stretch of clayland baked red and fissured. They found a horseshoe depression that looked like the hoof print of some giant equine and they descended sixty yards into it. A dank tomb where their voices echoed up the stratified walls stained with hematite depictions of hunts indistinguishable from those Paleolithic artists of old. Following the river crossing the carcasses, those that hadn’t been prepared properly, had begun to rot and now the men were taking the opportunity to cut loose the bloated chunks of meat and let them fall to the floor where those that hadn’t been gutted burst open in a shower of pus and gore and noxious gases that sent more than one man scrambling away gagging.

They left out with nothing but guns and food on their persons. That ragged gaggle marching up out of the hole and standing at the lip of the descent and studying the chain of sanguine hills that seemed to amble across the northern horizon.

They’ll come over those hills. Said the Eldar. I can’t say exactly where.

Preetish eyed him. Can you give an estimate?

He held his hand up and let it hang there a moment as he tried to search out a suitable crossing. Finally he extended the arm to where there could just be made out a syncline in the hills.
There maybe.

Why do you say that?

Because that’s where I crossed.


All that day near to the end of it they were reaching the hills and they were bone tired when the first of their leather soled boots struck against the talus mound accumulated over the centuries. A large sliver of orange in the west slanted every shadow from them and even in that eighth of sun their profiles were wholly contained so that from a distance their laboring seemed to be images contained upon the surface of that broiling eye like the replaying of old dreams.

They shambled up the acclivity and sat on the exposed bed rock all stratified sandstone and kindled fires and ate their dinners and watched the vast swathe of red dust they’d traversed. So still they could make out the prints in the dust as clean as the moment they’d been made.

They went on. A mile beyond the domelike apex of the hill that was patched grass that protruded out of the regolith like scalp hair and surveyed the folded land newly afforded them so covered in that spindly brush. In the northern distance was a sink seemed to have been pressed down by a giant thumb and beyond that the land was rippled or maybe it was a mirage and off to their right and off to their left the range disappeared into the night.

They’ll run three hundred miles that-away. Said a village scout. His name was June and he was young and boyish and he grinned too much and he was sitting on his haunches in faded threadbare rags like some peasant Ionian routed from his country and he held his knees to his chest with one arm and with the other pointed what way the chain would run. Then they’ll curve to the north and dwindle back into the earth. A year’s travel from that point they say lay the mountains. The whole northern coast is mountains they say. From one end to another. Nothing but pointed stones the color of dried blood. They say nothing grows there. They say many things about them. They say you shouldn’t go.
The bedrock of the range was sandstone and by some igneous intrusion the layers had all been angled upwards and the ground was veined with quartz and with carnelian tinged red from the iron and the felsic outcroppings of rhyolite stood like polyps excised from some mummified corpse or boils breaded in a coarse red dust. The hills all seemed accordioned against another so that in places where they bunched there might not be thirty yards between the hilltops. And they were pockmarked and ravined and there were narrow foot trails feathered with brushes that led up and down the hill grades.

Over the night they spread out over two adjacent hills bisected by a narrow saddle and with spades and bayonets carved holes into the face of the hill that they might lay themselves down in cover. Towards the end of the night one among the company uncovered the tibia of some ancient aves and he pulled out a massive lighter and sparked a flame and held it low to the ground and blew upon the bones as if they might by their antiquity dispense wishes or some other unknown blessing. He called out into the dark and soon men entered into his globe of light and bore witness upon his discovery. Twenty men had gathered when they began to excavate the skeleton. Taking every precaution and using their fingers and cleaning rods and steel tooth brushes and bits of cloth or cured leather and can openers and every other device that could be repurposed to the endeavor and in the morning when the bones were revealed they stood about in a loose circle all looking down and muttering and gesturing like amateur paleontologists.

The man who’d discovered the fossils was called Corrigan and he led the cultists and he viewed this discovery as a favorable portent. He was bald and pale and his great dome had begun to peel and blister under the sun and his eyes were lightless and blank like the eyes of the blind and a thick brass bull ring pierced both his nostrils so that he looked like a creature whose taming had failed catastrophically. He squatted over those jaundiced bones and ran his fingers along the hooked beak and the vertebrate noting in two places where the discs were fractured and he pointed out where along the hips and the tibia and the skull there were deep gouges made by talons of another beast and he said that there was a sanctity in blood that all creatures recognized and he said what waged war would last and what yearned for war would last eternal. He said what was would come to be.

They waited in the hills for days and Preetish had sentries posted out along the flanks and the rest laid within their unmarked graves hardly moving and waited. Waited out the nights and the days to come and the nights to come thereafter till morning of the sixth day arrived and with it a streak of black ships in column all racing towards the hills.

Corrigan watched them. He counted six skiffs coming alongside the sink miles yet out and though their black painted prows were aimed towards their left flank they gave no indication at all of any awareness to the company’s presence. They were as the Eldar said they would be. Corrigan sat in his earthen pit leaning on the far wall. He was motionless and covered in dust as were they all and beside him another man sat ramrod straight so that he appeared a feature of the land or an Inukshuk built by way warders. He glanced about. The company was staggered across those two scraggly hills and it was quiet enough that you could hear the hammers cocking back and the soft whining as the las rifles charged and the slow grinding of the gravel under their elbows like some strange clockwork as they tracked the skiffs that moved even still unaware. He watched and he made himself a little smaller and then he produced his own weapon. It was fashioned in an older time and fired a 9.3x64mm pointed bullet naked of case and chemically propelled. He brought the rifle up from between his crossed legs and put the copper plated stock into the crook of his shoulder and leaned forwards to let the hand guard settle on the ground and sighted in on the lead skiff and reached and drew back the charging handle installed atop the stock and then he reached down to its belly and thumbed open the ejection port. Then he waited.

A mile out the aliens still hadn’t seen them. When they were only a quarter mile away they opened fired. In an instant there was a cloud of dust rolling off the hill as if a great beast buried there had risen and the loud pops and the electric cracklings were all that could be heard. Down below the first of the skiffs began to veer drunkenly until it capsized and rolled to the ground where the second skiff crashed into its midsection and tore through and kept on. He fired and fired until his magazine went dry and he depressed the catch and reached into the bandolier strung over his chest and took a magazine and slammed it home and sent the handle forward. And he kept firing. All the while the skiffs dispersing this way and that and shedding slender black figures like ticks bloated with blood that would sometimes burst upon collision with the ground or rolled like metal dolls some of which came apart at the seams and spilling dark patches onto the sand.

They fired until the ships reached the lee of the hill and by then two more of the raiding ships were down and not five seconds later every skiff that had survived that crucible rocketed up into the air and the alien gunners manning the pintle mounted lances and cannons strafed their positions and men rose up dead. Shorn in halves in their foxholes or perforated by the thin barbs that whistled through the air and then the ships slammed down behind the company and were off again.

They turned to address the rearward threat but these aliens whose numbers had been taken wholly by surprised and dwindled greatly had forgone any notion of fighting and were now retreating southward. The company rallied out of their dugouts and chased after them but such bravado was futile for already they were mere shadows racing for the horizon, already vanishing into the earth.
An hour later a vanguard was descending into the kill zone on foot. Bethel led them. Mostly what they found was dead. A few of the Eldar lived yet but they were in a bad way. They stripped the wounded of anything useful and then with a pair of rusted garden shears clipped off their fingers and their toes and let them be. They looted everything. They took the suits of armor that were strangely light and the splinter rifles reminiscent of halberds fitted with firearms as an afterthought and they salvaged parts from the skiffs. Two men went and wrenched up a lance from its mount and they shouldered it now back up the hill.

June watched them work like a childish supervisor overseeing some grisly salvage. He stood over Bethel who was knelt over one of the xenos carving a symbol of Slaanesh into its chest and he was, the boy, making irreverent declamations upon the nature of their enemies. Bethel ignored him. When he finished his engraving he moved on hoping that the child wouldn’t follow but he always did. He came to a leathery old warrior who’d been snipped and who was crawling slowly away on his forearms. Bethel flipped him over onto his back and pinned him with one knee shoved into his sternum. He set to carving and the warrior moaned and pressed his palms feebly against him but to no avail.

Why’re you doing that? Asked June.

No reason. Said Bethel.

Then why do it?

What difference does it make to you?

I don’t know. I just want to know. I thought if a person would do something he’d have a reason.
There ain’t a reason for everything kid.

I know that.

Finished, Bethel removed himself from the warrior’s bleeding chest and he turned around on his heels to eye the boy. Then why’d you ask?

I don’t know.

He spat and looked around. He looked at the boy. Ain’t ye have something to occupy your time.
Do I?

I’m thinking ye should better find something.

June stood there dumb looking.

I don’t know what to do.

You can’t think of nothing productive.

No.

You can’t just take a look at everyone else and do what they’re doing.

The boy looked at what was being done around him. ‘Twas Bloody work without exception.
I don’t want to do that. I don’t think I can do that.

Life ain’t about what you want kid.

I know.

Then why are you still here.

I can’t go back to the company?

You asking?

Yes.

No. Stay here.

He began to scrape clean a patch of desert with the toe of his shoe. “Well I don’t want people to think I’m lazy or anything. I’ll work. My father taught me how to run the fishing lines. I helped lay boards for the docks. I can work but I don’t want to do this.

You can’t just salvage what’s lying on the ground.

There’s blood on everything.

That’s old blood.

It’s blood all the same.

Can’t be afraid of getting a little blood on your hands June. We need everything here, we ain’t goin get resupplied by anybody save ourselves. It’s either doing this or run out of ammo somewhere along the line and get cut down and strung up.

All the same I’d rather not.

Bethel pointed to Silikai who was sitting on the ground tinkering with a splinter rifle laid across his lap.

You see Sil over there. You know what he said to me?

What’d he say?

Better dirty than dead. Ye’d do well to learn that.

Maybe.

Ain’t a maybe to it son.

I’m not like any of you. I’ve never done this kind of thing before. I don’t know how you do it. Don’t you feel bad at all?

About what?

All this killing.

They’d do the same to us. As I recall they did the same to you.

That doesn’t make it right.

Bethel smiled and hung his head and shook it. He looked up and put his eyes to the boy’s and the boy felt a little surer under that warm vision.

He said, Ah son, you’ll learn that one day too.

In the same evening they trekked back to the depression where for a starless night they bivouacked. Wolves had ventured there in their absence and it could be seen in the lamp light the paw tracks clean in the dust and encircling the rotting carcasses in inspection. None of that rancid flesh had been partaken but by one starved beast and it lay not far away whimpering its stomach bloated horribly and a sickly froth escaping its quivering jowls. One of the men was kneeling over it his knees pressed up against its spine. An enormous machete held proper in his hands. He drew the blade down the belly of the wolf, a narrow slit, a new gory witch, and reached his hand inside and withdrew with one mighty tug the offended organ and held it up and squeezed it till the contents burst forth, diseased flesh, noxious and smoking.

A sordid light by which the company rumbled up out of the hole and a malefic eye what watched their progress across the desert. They followed a caravan trail towards the woods of san grais that had been the scene of a battle or route. The chimera hulls blackened and the bones of guardsmen rattling dully in their torn and bloodied uniforms. The dirt hued a deep red and clumped and dry flaking as if the very ground were rust.

Quite a fight. Said Grieves.

The alien smiled. No. He said. It wasn’t at all.

They drove up to an arroyo and stopped to drink. All of the men kneeling hatless as if before a trough like cattle or proselytes enacting a rite of prayer or benediction. They followed the water till it simply vanished and then they crossed the playa.

Read the first entry, was a great read. The only problem i see is that it needs a wee proof read. There are some occasional missteps in tense and maybe a few of the sentences are a tad long. An example, "Scoundrels and vagabonds all in their number and a plethora of knaves, rapscallions, rogues, pickpockets, jacks, patricides, looters, thieves, adherents to every villainy some sober more drunk all staggering under the weight of their burdens and all marked by the misfortunes of life and by needles and knives and some were bereft of fingers, eyes, whole hands and scalps so that all those losses added together there might have been a dozen men more made present. " Wonderful language but without punctuation some of it, i feel, is lost.

Hey Perkustin thanks for the reply and I'm glad you're enjoying the story so far. I am aware of the tense changes I put them in deliberately. To be honest I really enjoy writing long sentences and I am aware that this kind of runs against the grain of accepted grammar but I feel it has a more poetic timbre. That said I suppose a comma here and there wouldn't be too terrible I'll see what I can do for the next installment.

Just the last part of chapter :3 merry holdiays to ye all

They stove out of the desert pale ragged men into a northern wilderness crowded with yew and larch and alder and game trailed throughout and flowered with the local breeds of yarrow and azalea. On the fourth day they arrived upon the shore of a lake. The water was salty and abundant with fish and it was decided that a sojourn would be had and they unloaded their collective dunnage onto the sorrel colored bank.
All the days to come they made sport of the wildlife and some of the men committed themselves to trial against the cultists and they went ambling down the doe trails shooting off the tiny piping heads of the eyas as they bobbed up out of their spindly nests and the snow flecked accipiters circled overhead for days crying an unceasing lament until the men tiring of their calls shot them out of the sky. In the blue evening twilights the men in threes and fours would sometimes go down to the bank and bath naked. Squatting in the shallow water they’d ladle water up onto their backs and into the filthy mattes of their hair with calloused hands and after a while by some unspoken consensus rise up again all at once in ponderous locomotions like bands of hairless simians innocent of any morality and emerge up out of the water like fabled bog creatures and some would go and dress and dry themselves by the fires they never let cease in their burning and some went naked along the muddy shore the shadowed and featureless reflections dogging their thin haggard silhouettes as if therein the waters was contained the true nature of their bleak souls. And these here meandering vagrants like the vestigial record of past occurrences did seem by their assembly to evidence a recondite and juristic principle ubiquitous and harrowing whose purpose was the inscribing of all the years and the months and the days and the hours of the days into that esoteric repository where all that ever was was compounded for latter judgment.

They drifted into the light and into the shadow and jigged around the fires all in all their disparities like beings whose existence was speculative and altogether unlikely. As if to suppose that each motley member had been ordained to that time and place by a schizophrenic god risen out of some abyssal deep.


Sabri and Tinol, the sons of Siam were the first to desert. In the predawn while the men dreamt drunken dreams scattered in other realms they pilfered a handful of supplies and two rifles and departed. Their absence was quickly noticed and within the day a party was cavelled and sent in pursuit. They caught up with the two fisher boys barely eight miles away barricaded in a cove in the side of a coppiced hillock. The approach to the mouth of the cave was rough and stepped with schist outcroppings and rife with thickets and thin vine wirings. The mouth of the cave jutted out of the hill like the hooked beak of some lithic bird of prey. The deserters must have been hunkered there for a while for the maw of that place had been converted into a bunker with fallen timber stacked before it. They were armed and let it be known they were with a pair of warning shots at the approaching cultists.

Corrigan sat now in plain sight of the boys with his three reprobate disciples. They weren’t talking and after a while he stood and handed off his rifle and approached the cave slowly with his hands spread out like a walking crucifix.

I ain’t goin hurt you lads. He said.

He could see the fisher boys leaning forward on the logs drawing nervous beads on him but they didn’t say anything.

He didn’t hear the shot but birds frightened flushed from their perches out through the canopy. His whole body shuddered and he rose up onto his tippy toes and put one hand to the wound just below his heart. A crimson tear drop was running down the filthy front of his threadbare vaquero shirt just white yet in places. His hands were wet with blood. The cultists behind had all risen and drawn their weapons.
You fething little cur.

The boy who heard this let out a meek cry and dropped his gun and fled back into the cave while Tinol turned shouting at him to come back. Corrigan spat a bloody phlegm then charged up the hill leaping onto the flat stone steps and crashing through the vine work and stomping underfoot the saplings that were everywhere. By the time Tinol looked back he was already at the cave and he reached through the narrow visor slit and seized the barrel of the child’s rifle and ripped it from his hands. Tinol started forwards his hands trying for the weapon but Corrigan turned it around and muzzle punched him in the face and he fell backwards sputtering out his teeth. Corrigan withdrew from sight to the side of the cave and took out a butane lighter much like the one he’d sold the alien and flipped open the hinge lid and worked the thumbwheel and struck flint. A blue incandescent torch spouted up and he put it to the dry timber here then there then stepped back to watch it burn. The flames spread slowly and all the while he leaned against the rough granular stone overlooking the entrance and cautioning loudly the two boys besieged within not to come out.

The fire caught the smaller limbs first and the few dry leaves shriveled up and floated away winking cherry lights, little tablets of rising hell. Soon the mouth was engulfed in fire. He could hear the children sobbing. He pushed himself off the stone face and began to stagger away when behind him he heard the logs crashing down. He looked to see the two children pressing with bare hands against the flaming timbers. He stopped to watch the endeavor. They were catching even as they struggled their skins blackened about the hands but the bunker they did erect by their own selves gave way to them and they stumbled out both alight and screaming like escapees from a hell land and a Tinol in all his agony seeing him came after and Corrigan shot him dead and Sabri catapulted over the ledge and rolled down the hill until the flames were out. The child lay still, smoking. Everything above his torso was black and bits of scorched cloth hung off of him. After a moment he began to move again, crawling slowly forwards his skin peeling off like a molting snake.
Samuel who had watched impassive this spectacle stood now and went over to the child and yanked down the thing’s leggings and loosened his own belt and sodomized him and when he finished he took the claw hammer from his belt and collapsed the charred plates of his skull.


More desertions followed. Plans hatched in dead of night with results little different though the conspirators varied. Rarely were the bodies returned and not once did any tongue utter the truth of their ultimate fates. On an afternoon she strode up to him sitting cross-legged as he was want to do. He had the alien in his attendance and they were discussing future ventures together.

We’re not your prisoners. Said the Eldress. Her arms were crossed and her eyes aged and sad and she was dressed shabbily.

Do I look like a warden? Asked Preetish.

You look like a madman.

Even so.

We want to leave.

Who wants to leave?

Everyone. Everyone.

Preetish reclined slightly then adjusted himself. He eyed the alien.

There are still parties roaming about. None might be as keen on your survival as I am.

Oh?

But you’re free to go. I’ve no contract with any of you. Any action you so choose I’ll not dissuade you from. But know this country is undergoing a revolution. This current tumult is not the natural state of any state. The previous order has been unmoored and cast away. And the players of this field are well aware.

There can be no supremacy achieved, otherwise a new order would have been established and we would not be here. The slow erosion of power that persisted before is now abolished. The introduction of new catalytic agents has thrown into disarray all fortunes, an outcome perhaps foreseeable to some, perhaps not to others.

But all are blind to the end, there is no omniscience, and any augury is false and the prophet false. The arrival of new and undefined variables has caused the governing system to self-destruct and the matrix wherein it was once contained must now reconstruct an economy capable of accommodating the destroyers. Even now it is performing the calculations necessary to ultimately provide for a new congruency.
The conditions permitting the rise of certain elements within the matrix are no longer existent. Nothing will survive in its current iteration. The violent synthesis by which we will be newly formed is already underway.
He nodded to Silikai.

The energies propelling us towards one another and the collisions will reveal a valence inherent in ourselves, an elemental form of self-preservation. The bonds which are our common tether will be tested and those unable to endure the strain will be shattered and the resultant forces subsumed or else annihilated outright.

You, Amina, have been subsumed.

Cold day what come and to follow. Heavy storms loomed in the west a felon wind its engine and the sower of sands like lacework or a veil. What localities a man rests in peace after a time of war he does become intimate. The departure was bemoaned and vicious oaths uttered into the smoke of their breath. The war waited for them. Somewhere in the ravaged wilds were their disputants seeking them also and perhaps after just such a respite in just such a place.

The rains came down, fat droplets to bloat the loam. TO flood the narrow trails and aggregate into creeks to streams to rivers flowing in currents brush and branch and drown the rodents in their burrows and suck them out and carry them along to surface and sink their faces. The company cabled together and the Chimera in lead the headlights glowering and the prow lowered paving a way through the desolation.
Upon a crossroads they found an exodite settlement. They passed through the wraithbone ruins each his eyes upon the glossed rubble. They found the aliens some miles away migrating upon an old wagon trail worn to the stone. An exilic ragged lot they were. Wasted plaster figurines laboring under possessions and toting burlap sacks and filthy.
They killed them all in an afternoon and piked the heads along the road on shaved sticks and then they left out.

Just the first page of the fourth chapter, figure'd I'd set it up apparently dumping mass loads (hahaha) on the forums isn't the best way to endear a readership

Chapter IV

The days burned onward. Weeks in their future were the frothing waters of the Seriema clotted with mutilated men, Imperials all. In a bend they’d find them, a tangled human cork to stopper the current, where afore them the water surged over the banks and flooded the valley and came forth through the grass and trickled back into the drying channel.

They camped in the salted crop fields of the fleeing exodites and made forays into the ruined villages for supplies. Everyday patrols were set out and sometimes they’d find stragglers and lynch them. Once they saw Mercer and his companionship driving up to the north and they hailed them and bartered for supplies. They turned over pelts and boots and clothing and stolen jewelry and other artifacts to the men of that estranged fellowship. Leering specimens clothed in uncured skins and furs like rotting half-beasts. They took ammunition in return.

Mercer as he told them had struck out to go it alone, forsaking all prior alliances. He’d entrenched himself and his company at a stony locality not too many miles distant and from his fortress sallied forth to prey upon the human villages in the region. Already there were stories of this new unleashed horror and he shared them in private with Preetish in the night. Often they took captive the brown-skinned women folk for breeding. You could see them now squatting under guard in the twilight in their rusted iron shackles murmuring softly amongst themselves.

A heavy tent woven of flax was pitched and the two commanders sat about in the mag’ad on a carpet that’d been unrolled there. Isotropic patterning in the weave. They drank and spoke of the war of which both admitted to having long since divested themselves of and later they spoke the fortunes of war. When dark came torches were lighted and their crude laughter like drowning men drifted out into the camp. Mercer reclined in his seat. He asked what he’d take for the eldress.

In that same night the boy came to sit by his fire. It burned clean and smokeless and the fat of his supper licked down into the coals in sinewy wires like glistening worms drawn to the heat. The boy said nothing. Grieves sat cross-legged nearby, his wrists rested on bent knees. He was drunk and his head was hanging near his hest but his eyes were on Bethel who was also drunk and drafting horribly with his hands obscure equations in the cold air, attempting to incite an impromptu discourse on the unreliability of women and consciousness. He spoke in reverence of the universal tongue that bore no false ordering and he disdained openly Corrigan and his followers and his religion, repudiating any attempt to reckon that other realm beyond human knowing. And he reminded those who would listen of the uncharted regions where dragons once be’d and which were now mapped in their entirety and brought naked out into the light.

June asked if he believed in god.

No.

What about any other god?

I try to keep from it.

Then what?

What what?

What do you believe in?

Well you tell me there’s a devil in country I’ll trust in that.

The boy studied him. This here wayward scholar who was friend to drunk and criminal, an outspoken dissenter of inherited edicts, a regular in bars and jails alike.

Neumann said if you believe in the Emperor you’ll go to him when you die. Said the boy.

Good God son. June you keep your ears deaf to that lunatic he’ll have you howling at the moon and leaking blood out of your ass.

What?

Bethel spoke a drawn out gak.

I don’t see how you can say that.

Say what?

I mean if there’s evil in the world doesn’t there have to be some good?

Nope.

No?

The presence of evil, and well define that value in a good moment, doesn’t necessitate an equality in good. In the absence of order there is by default chaos, they are separate existences, one’s got nothing to do with another. Evil, so far as morality is concerned, constitutes an opposition against nature. The natural ordering of things. What strains against the instinctual law encoded in our genes is ultimately destructive to the whole and not simply the self.

Self-destruction is rife in nature, often times encouraged. Males in some cannibalistic species after mating, commit suicide, so that the female afterwards has a healthy meal, thus further ensuring the propagation of his genes. Mind you I ain’t advocating you die after gettin your dick wet. An example other might be a mother dying to protect her young where in any other case she’d ditch for a land other. The point being is that your makeup is more than happy putting you in the grave given certain conditions.

Likewise nature is a constant pitting of oneself against every other self. If you’d been raised barebones on your own, you’d have no compunction tossing people’s babies off a cliff, something generally frowned upon, but all it is, is just your body’s way of elbowing out competitors. A child born without instruction is no different from any animal that’s ever been, he’s gifted, as are us all, with a tendency towards predation. In civilized worlds this instinct is suppressed and left unhoned due mainly to an abundance of the essentials. In every place where food and water are lacking the converse is true. And these lands are ravaged by war and disease and every kind of murder you’d care to imagine. Left to his own devices man will kill just about every single thing come across his path and I’d mind you know that even were he to club out a child’s brains and eat the flesh from his bones he’d do so without malice. That son is nature and it ain’t pretty, but it ain’t what I’d call evil.

Saying what is however, is difficult, cause it’s an arbitrary call dependent wholly on circumstance. I’d say it’s that going against instinct or maybe beyond it. You see for all the times instinct tells you to kill something it’s a dozen times more telling you to compromise and work together. It’s a tool to be tailored to the situation and it’ll inform you what’s appropriate for each. I’d say what’s evil is every time you don’t stop and take heed.

June seemed to consider the man’s words. He eyed the tattooed legionnaire who’d moved not at all and not seemed to have blinked once in that entire monologue. He scooted over closer to Bethel and leaned in close.
What about them? He asked pointing at the cultists.

Bethel looked over and smiled.

I wouldn’t label them evil. Misguided certainly but they’re hardly alone in that particular fault.

I’ve seen some of the things they’ve done. So have you. You work with them.

I do that. Bethel spat and adjusted himself. I’d say they’re just creatures of their environment. Little unrealistic to expect a saint out of hell.

You wouldn’t call them evil.

He smiled and reached for the bottle of amasec and took a long drink.

Nah. He said gazing at those felon heathens. Not any more than myself.

In the morning Mercer’s newfound countrymen departed. With them the eldress was missing and of her whereabouts there were none more than ignorant. When Talson in his rounds, for everyday he sought her out, a perpetual and hopeless courtship, could not find her he went trembling with rage through the camp seizing upon the collars of his fellows and interrogating them one by one. The last man he put the question to was Corrigan and he found the ringed man alone of his consorts sitting at his fire.

Corrigan. He said.

There wasn’t a man present not now aware of the Cadian’s torment and the cultist not looking away from the ragged flames said plainly he was in no more possession of the facts than he was.

You didn’t see her nowheres? Not last night?

I haven’t cared to see that bitch since the beginning.

Call her a bitch again I’ll cut your fething head off.

Corrigan looked up. Try it.

The words had no sooner left his mouth that the Cadian snatched upon the brass ring piercing his nose and hauled with one massive arm the whole of his being upwards. He rose and before half so the ring came free in two impotent spurts of dark blood and then the Cadian had him with his other hand by the throat and raised him to his full height and butted his skull with his own and he fell back into the dust. Corrigan reached for the handless knife he kept in a leather sheathe at his side grabbing hold of the skeleton tang and whipping out the blade in a vertical arc that sent Talson leaping backwards. Men by now had gathered round in a circle howling like deranged speculators at a prizefight and Talson was pushed back into the improvised arena where Corrigan was now slicing away at him and him fending now with his bare bloody hands the swipes and stabs. Bets were made on the spot. Year’s wages were laid to risk and murderous encouragements were shouted by the jostling bandits to their party of favor. The two combatants were beaded with sweat and blood and ragged in their breaths and they circled another like prowling beaten dogs in a territorial dispute. Corrigan feinted for a low stab and then brought the blade up to disembowel his opponent but Talson sidestepped the cut and grabbed his wrist and spun around and planted an elbow in his temple. Dazed the cultist hobbled sideways and crashed into the human wall where he was immediately cast back and into Talson’s fist that broke his nose and laid him out on his back. The men were crazed now veritably stomping up and down calling for the finishing blow or for the Cultist to get back up. But Corrigan didn’t seem to be getting up. He laid there near senseless and the wound below his heart had begun to bleed again. His hands moved without purpose over his whole body as if inspecting it for damages. The knife lay beside him hidden in the risen dust. The Cadian had paused in this moment to catch his breath and he was swaying from the blood loss and now he was moving again and now he was standing over his downed foe who now seemed conscious of this threat and let out a vicious snarl, a hyena laugh. Talson raised one boot and as he brought it down Corrigan found the knife and plunged it through the leather sole and wrenched it about and finally sat up and put a hand to Talson’s patella and pushed him back, the knife still stuck in his foot. Talson went down kicking so hard that he lost grip on the blade and he had to stand and jump over both legs to get at him. He collapsed onto the Cadian’s chest and fought away his arms and jammed a thumb into his socket and popped out an eyeball and leaned in and bit off a part of the man’s lip. The man half-blinded screamed and yelled and struck out with his every limb throwing off the cannibal and coming to his feet, standing with the blade still in his foot and tracing with his one eye the movements of his enemy and chasing him around and kicking and screaming at him guttural obscenities. He was covered in blood, it gushed from his mouth and drained out the bottom of his foot and his eye and his hands were slick and he lurched about a few feet and then he sat down and he didn’t get up again. His mouth hung open dripping blood. Corrigan would have killed him where he sat dumb and bleeding but that ancient Newarkan with an antique double barreled muzzleloader packed with rock salt cleared away the spectators and unloaded a barrel into his backside and the cultist shot forward and sprawled in the hot and drifting sand.

The evening of that day ended in hues of sapphire and the morning thereafter saw a raging oxblood orb leering enormous upon that ravaged pastureland like a gateway into hell. The endless acreage awash in a sanguine haze and the wheat fields what hadn’t been flattened thrashed about like gold stemmed whips with barbs at their ends.

They drove onwards to the North on a cobblestone road for the morning and the endless rurality they drifted into that was devoid of any mark of war seemed to stir a calming in their ired hearts.

By noon they’d stopped again at the domal crest of a barrow infested with a rampant colony of unfettered gerbera that rose nearly to their waists. They disembarked and fanned out along the culm and some wandered about shifting the petals of those fiery blossoms in their fingers like deranged armed botanists. Yet more crowded to set eyes on what lay ahead for overlooked by the hill was an abandoned exodite ghost town which for all its quiet stillness remained untouched. The town was settled into a vast hollow where streamed a tributary of the Jiboya. In the southern district there were massive garden pavilions with flat terraced roofs shingled from tiles of pure silver and upheld by colonnades oddly Doric in their styling and floored with polished terrazos depicting scenes portentous and fabled. Painted villas made of solid cutstone or polished travertine filled the valley and the gutterless streets were paved with granite smoothed by the feet of a thousand thoroughfares. Across the thrice arched passerelle spanning the stream lay a spire domed palace, a publici juris for all its regality, under whose auspices was a plaza lined with marble sculptures of that alien pantheon, Eldanesh, Khaine, Cegorach, Kurnous, Isha.

They descended into the valley like debauched Visigoths and there was more than one in that company could lay claim to such a lineage. Cautiously and in small teams they investigated the city from one end to another but they found nary a soul. Everywhere were signs of panicked migration. The streets themselves filled with fear and the discarded possessions of the fleers. Clothing, furniture, toys. The villa interiors all eerily untouched. The tables set with half-eaten meals on pewter and tin ware and pioneer rodents already staking claims for their particular breed on whole sections of that picturesque urbane. And all the attic warrior personages inhabiting the wall mosaics seemed to watch from their lime coated planes this new and barbarous citizenry as if they’d have their measure.

Seems they’ve quit for greener pastures. Said Bethel.

Seems so.

They billeted in the palace, what residence other would suffice that grand abhorrence? The men all shuffling up the gneissic steps, the stone dressed and banded with mica and hornblende, feldspar and quartz, the inky foliation like purgations of liquid stone. The palace itself was faced with sylacauga marble and gridded stain glassed clerestories arched on either end lined the upper stories and a pair of spiral fluted columns running clockwise flanked either side an arched wainscot gateway reminiscent of those medieval christian portals. The door was locked. They battered their shoulders into it until their arms ran yellow and blue and the flesh grew tender and they kicked with their boots in concerted efforts to no avail. Eventually a shotgun was appropriated and the three inch slug employed exploded a ragged hole in the door and they began to creak slowly open. Preetish booted the doors wide with a violent crack and the vandals entered demurely into the vestibule. Here the floor was marbled, bianca venatino, and the gallery windows seated high in the walls were drawn with veil like curtains that trailed gracefully upon the floor and ahead was an enormous staircase with a branching landing and overlooking them all was an enormous rendition of Asuryan in his armor hung against the wall like some benevolent grandfather.

They wasted no time at all in exploring the interiors. The company departing in pairs and trios to wherever their individual wills might lead them. He went off with the alien down a gallery to the eastern court eying along the way the extravagant adornments and the etched vases sat upon carved wooden stands designed for that sole purpose and the walls from ceiling to floor covered in gold framed portraits of various sizes, benefactors and notaries and warriors of every path and persons of every note. Everywhere were wraith bone curios containing artifacts and relics acquired through means diplomatic and warlike, gifts and spoils and from every race to ever plough the dark chasms between stars. And here he saw an archaic shuriken catapult which had once belonged to an autarch by the name of Vilandiel and he saw a towering equestrian sculpture of Isha carved out of marble and conjoined to a rotundate base of such under which on a polished silver plate near ten feet in length and five in width there was stenciled in labored calligraphy the entirety of her legend which Silikai patiently related to him. He went down the halls stopping to gate at each treasure in childlike awe. And there were relics too of humanity and in great abundance. Old weapons belonging once to infamous inquisitors now felled and rusted shell casings taken as mementos from old battles forgotten by all, and paintings and books bequeathed by dearest friends and here a copy of the Book of Kells and hung there above the passage to the courtyard a Peasant Burning Weeds.

They walked out into the courtyard where the breeze was cool and where crazed tangled trees wrapped about each other in harmony or perhaps in wont. A floor above them two souls idled about on a balcony leaning on the balustrade whispering to each other. In the center of the court a fountain spouted water in intersecting arcs into the air and in the distance he could see the stone aqueducts that ran throughout the town and he thought it no small feat of masonry.

When they finished walking the courtyard they reentered the premises through a nave into a place of worship and turned and went about the ambulatory like incredulous visitors skeptical yet of their surroundings. Outside they could just hear the sound of the trucks being pulled up onto the plaza and other than that sound there was none other. They’d not seen a quarter of the palace by the time it was dark. Preetish had called the men all back to the vestibule and once they were all in attendance he led them up the stairs and down another gallery and into a vast dining hall. Someone had earlier located the larder and he’d found the redskin and returned with a detail and together they broke down the doors and raided as much as they could. There wasn’t a respectable cook among their numbers but they shattered chairs into kindling and set fires right there on the floors and tried their hands at the culinary arts and their labors set now on that solid stone table on silver platters. And that plucked roasted fowl and pork and scorched pastries and misshapen leavened breads like the skulls of deformed infants and steaks dried and grilled and the men laughed and jostled about and offered congratulations to the squad of amateurs who had prepared in but a few short hours this feast. There were drinks too and the men filled chalices worth more than a year’s wages and pilfered bowls in which sacraments were once held and tankards and goblets and their own personal cups with alcohols alien and domestic. They screamed and hollered and joked well into the night and they without exception gorged themselves even those once fishers of the sea who had long since given up any hope of normality. Even the prior day’s combatants joined in, injured as they were born aloft by their comrades on velveteen couches and set before the buffet where they might reach. Each in incredible agony. Them all merrying the lonesome night away.

Early the sordid morning next Bethel sought out the wounded Cadian. Wandering the passages now with puddles of urine or vomit and the fragments of broken finery and the portraits amended with juvenile scrawling. Out in the courtyard Neumann stood solitary afore a pyre of burning artifacts his patriarchal mind deemed heretical. Outside the dining room amid bones and rinds and the streams of spirits was the upholstered couch the cadian had earlier been convalescing on yet no sign of the cadian himself. He ambled the palace awhile until he came into a trashed antechamber where on a wooden settee passed out and clutching an empty bottle lay Talson.

Go figure.

Bethel went over and took the bottle and hurled it crashing across the chamber. He nudged the sleeper. Talson opened his one eye.

Hey there fella.

What do you want?

Just checking to see you ain’t expired yet.

I’m not dead. I feel it though.

gak.

I can’t see on my left side.

That is a symptom of not having a left eye.

What?

Ah hell you done been drifting in and out for a while.

I can’t remember gak.

That’s a symptom of alcohol poisoning. Your own fault. Kindly surprised it didn’t put you under. You was close enough to the grave as it was. Don’t you remember the fight.

Talson was quiet for a moment. He reached up to touch the empty socket. Yeah I remember it. Where is that grungy mother fether?

They got him downstairs in one of the bedrooms.

I’ma kill that man.

I’d kindly appreciate it if you refrained.

How come?

Hell Talson. He’s my friend.

Some friend.

Talson tried to rise and groaned with the effort and then settled back down.

You want me to prop you up?

No, just leave me be.

Bethel turned away. He went and got a lounge chair lying on the floor by the leg and righted it before the settee and straddled it and crossed his arms along the rim of its back.

You got it in for this man.

Yeah.

That’s a fight if you don’t already know.

I know it.

His guys ain’t gonna let you just come up and put one in his dome.

I’m intending to put one right in his right eye.

What about your old gal. Amina wasn’t that her name?

Yeah.

What about her?

What about her?

You ain’t goin after her?

If I knew where she was.

My lord Lee. You’re just about plumb full of stupid this morning ain’t ye.

You know something I don’t?

Everyone knows something you don’t. Your girl, she goes the same time Mercer goes. Little much coincidentin?

The thought crossed my mind I just never got to it.

Well if so how’s to come you’re picking fights?

That fether had it coming.

He ain’t the only one apparently.

Talson sighed. He tongued the strip of missing flesh. You could see the pale white teeth glistening.

Beth I feel like I got hit by a train.

Ye might as well have.

There a place here a man can get a bath?

You askin?

Yeah.

Alright. Come on.

Bethel took the man’s arm and got it over his shoulder and helped him off the seat.

Who’s the deft little grouse patched me up.

Old sawbones Jones.

I’ma kick his ass.

They went hobbling together down the corridor back into the vestibule and went down the stairs and crossed over to the western court and down a few halls to the bathes. Inside the spacious confines hung thickly with steam. He set him down on a bench and the gory hospitaler began to unbutton the filthy linen shirt he wore.

I hope you ain’t charging by the minute. Said the Cadian.

You can do this your damn self if you want.

Please.

Alright.

Bethel left the man to undress and went a ways and undressed himself.

Out of the fog Talson asked, How’d you get that bruise on your head?

Bethel touched the purple contusion on his forehead. Some late night fracas. I think it was a desk. Maybe a cistern.

Someone hit you?

Nah. I was drunk.

Bethel stripped down and waded into the waters. Soothing warmth, someone must have started the hypocaust. He floated a moment on his back his eyes closed and let himself sink down to the coarse bottom. After a while he pushed himself back to the surface and started to lap the bath, it being long enough to do so, but as he came to the far end he spied out of the dense mist a maiden naked and so absorbed in her thoughts that she scarcely registered his presence at all. He ceased in his swimming and crouched half-submerged watching her, that tawny skinned lass.

Hey. He called. She did not look up. That girl possessed of great somberness. Hey.

Finally she turned and saw him. That wide toothed grin and the little pond of gore and filth slowly spreading from that sutured being.
Hey there.

The girl squealed and covered her small breasts and pulled her legs close to her bosom and glared menacingly at him. Bethel laughed.
Calm down child. I didn’t know ye was in here.

Well now you do.

Aye.

Now you can leave.

Oh for lord’s sake girl ye ain’t got nothing I ain’t seen a hundred times before.

Behind them Talson splashed into the waters.

I hear something over there? He called.

Yeah we just got ourselves one of them native waifs here. But don’t come over she’s indecent.

That’s my favorite kind of gal.

Bethel laughed. Ah stay over there you fething pervert.

He studied the girl and after a while he sighed and rolled his eyes. Where’s your towel at?

On the other end.

Alright wait here.

Bethel stood and sashayed lecherously away. He passed by a bare and bloody Talson sitting on the edge and dangling his feet in the water. The slitted one oozing a miasmic bloody tinge.
Who is that? He asked.

One of the natives. I don’t know her name.

He got out and went along the far wall until he found the girl’s clothing in a folded pile a blue towel atop them. He gathered them up. Just then the bathe doors opened and in walked the alien hunched and wild eyed and exhausted. He didn’t seem to have slept at all and he was certainly still imbibed for he swayed unsteadily on his feet.

Hey there Sil.

Beth.

You ok?

Silikai shook his head. No. No.

What happened?

I think someone stabbed me.

Where?

In the back.

He smiled. Good a place as any.

Silikai grunted.

Let me see.

The alien turned around and lifted the hem of his shirt. Bethel came over and stooped to see. A clean hole where a man’s liver would be.

Yeah someone got you good. Looks like with a pair of scissors. You goin live?

He didn’t answer. He let down his shirt and shambled off a few feet and divested himself of his livery and entered the waters. He exchanged greetings with Talson and they soon fell into conversation.
When he returned to the girl she was much as before. He set down the bundled pile on the deck beside her and then stepped gingerly back into the bathe and swirled around to face her.

Who else came in? She asked.

Silikai if you know him.

I don’t. Who is he?

The xeno. Lank fellow.

Oh. She eyed him dourly. Are you still staring at me?

Sorry. He looked away.

When he did she reached over and grabbed the towel and stood and wrapped it about herself.
You don’t know June do you? He asked.

I know him.

How’s he holding up?

Why? Is he not ok?

Maybe. I think he knew them two boys got killed running away.
I knew them too.

Sorry.

I don’t see why you keep them here with you.

You mean Corrigan’s crew?

Yes.

Why not I say. They’re good folk, don’t bother them they don’t bother you.

No. They don’t bother you. They bother us plenty.

Well I can’t help that.

You could try. Tell them to leave us alone.

They ain’t goin listen to me. Same as I wouldn’t listen to them. In this company we all do our own thing and we don’t much interfere but if it makes you feel better you can hang round with me and Grieves, Sil too for that matter, he’s a right kindly son of a bitch.

I can hear you two talking. Said the alien from afar.

Well then you know it was a compliment. Shut up and mind your own damn business.

There was a faint guffaw.

I need to get dressed.

Bethel smiled. Hell, don’t let me stop you.

Chapter V

He couldn’t sleep or perhaps he dreamed. The vaulted firmament had undergone a glaucous endarkening and thunder rolled idly in the south and a thick haze of rain hummed sunwise through the valley, a vespertine evensong. The air was warm. In the corner of the chamber a weathered thymiaterion smoked thin tendrils to coil into some breed of gray effervescent snake. Jasmine. The sheets were a rippled mess and he was alone in that silken entanglement. The four pale painted iron posts of the canopy rose over him and the white canopy net wafted gently in a breeze. He couldn’t sleep. Was he sleeping?

Are you sleeping?

He opened one eye and then the other. No, he did not think so. He cast off the sheets and threw his legs over the bedside. He reached for the glass of water on the night stand and drank it dry and set it back down and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. He sighed loudly, gazing absently at the shrouded floor, at the mindless ideations of candle wicks aflame. The walls likewise covered in a red discursive scrawl, deranged noumenons true only in the crazed intelligence that drafted them. In a distant somewhere he could hear an inhuman wailing. Those anguished voices invoking in him memories of a different land, denizened by a seething mass of grotesque plebeians. He craned his head to one side straining his long pointed ears. No sound but the breeze and all knew that souls did sometimes drift upon their sightless currents.

You’re just hearing things.

He laid back down and fluffed the pillow and positioned it beneath his head and closed his eyes. Not two seconds had passed before he was up again.

No you’re not.

He got out of bed and lifted the net and passed under it and strode cross the cold chamber floor to the door. He pulled it slowly open and stepped through into a gloomy corridor where the light was dim and the shadows long and blurred and blotted as if there was some intrinsic proprium which those casted frames could not rightly mime. As if that spectral format were so unsuited to the housing of men’s hearts that what could be replicated were the delineated shades they made. The hall stank where the village folk had come and squatted against the walls and evacuated their bowels on the floor. The madman who had theorized his ungodly realms in the bedchamber had come this way through and the walls were adorned with diagrams of siege contraptions employed to purposes other than their designs. He went cautiously down the hall. Somewhere a conversation was being had, low Iscariot voices echoing through the halls. He kept on towards the dining room but there was no one there, nor the antechamber before it. Everywhere were the signs of men. Walls punched or caved in or marked upon and notches in the wooden stools and stands where men had picked at them with knives. Blood trails ran to and fro like strings to venture forth into labyrinths. When he reached the vestibule he found at the upper landing a shrine to the blood god. Eight slabs of rusted metal had been erected upon a foundation of human bones and slathered with blood and decorated with human skins and inscribed with strange pulsing runes.

The wailing had not stopped. He could hear it clearer now than before. He went down the staircase under the gaze of an ancient god. At the base of the stairs he halted with one hand on the railing. The voices were echoing through the great hall but they were coming from the eastern court. The galleries.

Beth. He said. Bethel. You out there?

There wasn’t an answer. He drummed his fingers on the railing and glanced about. The lower floor was devoid of any life but when he looked back up at the top landing he saw the redskin standing nude half in shadow and slick and gleaming in a canescent light eyeing him.

Hey.

Preetish kept quiet. He turned and disappeared from sight.

Alright.


In the gallery he came upon the source of the noise. They were rodents. Hundreds of them. All crucified to the far wall and mewling pitifully like a horrific living squirming carpet. He could scant believe such a thing and he was a minute in acknowledging its existence. When he recovered his senses he drew near to the wall and examined one of the creatures. Its limbs had been skewered to the wall by surgical needles and its mouth worked noisily and its tail swatted left and right, a bezerk and hairless pendulum, and its eyes could not seem to get enough of the room for they would not lie still in their orbits. The rat beside it had been splayed open and the organs identified with tiny flags like claims on a new land. The one above it had its throat slipped and the matted fur dark with blood. He stepped away from the wall and then he looked at the floor and then after a while he looked down towards a turn in the hall where he could hear the squeaking of shoes on the floor. He set off at a hurried pace and when he rounded the corner he did surprise the curator of that insane mausoleum. A squirrely frantic youth, a bedizen creature clad in an aposematic dress as curious as the boy was himself. He wore a bright red felt cap backwards and a yellow scarf about his shoulders and he wore two ragged shirts stitched haphazardly together, one plaid and the other of denim and each seemed to have been resurrected from the remains of yet other garments and he wore shorts of uncured hide over filthy long johns and a pair of mismatched socks and laceless sneakers that had been with the boy during his first incarceration nearly six years ago and his toes sticking out of the tongues and wiggling expectantly.

Daniel. He said.

The boy scooted back and then stood up. He was clutching a plastic box of needles with both hands and behind him a burlap sack rolled like something alive.

Daniel.

Yes.

Hey. He gestured with his hands. What’re you doing?

Daniel smiled sheepishly. I don’t know.

Hey. Look at me.

The boy did.

Silikai fanned out a single arm to encompass the wall. Is there a story behind any of this?

Hestle told me to go hunt mice so I went and did what he said. He was the one gave me the bag I didn’t steal it.

The boy turned around and grabbed the sack and held it up as if to show that it was yet unstolen property.

How long have you been at this?

Since the afternoon.

And you caught all these things on your own.

Yep.

Silikai turned to study the wall. Then the boy was too.

After a while he said, You know, this ain’t too bad.

The day to follow they left out. To the north they drove along a puckered route where families of dispossessed emigrants in attic livery labored under the shadows of loess hills under packs and rucks and carried camps and the great flocks of them skitted off into the tall bladed grass at their approach. And the farther their progression so more did the country open and so less the people they came upon. The hills were furred with a yellow grass that glistened in the morning suns like the thin hot tongues of vespertine whores and their paths snaked ultimately into the hills and the scouts before them sent reported caravans of refugees pitched in the corrugated folds, eldar and human alike. They drove up the switchbacks in file and gazed at the exhausted squatters that intervaled the road that harried lot of exodites eying the burlesque passengers onwards. Porcelain hominids them all and they shouted out indignities and obscenities and they abducted one from her recess in a hill and raped her till she was dead and the many still queued kept at it.