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  Burned – Darius Hinks

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  A Black Library Publication

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  Burned

  Darius Hinks

  I’m still alive. I still have it. Bring Khorg to Druna Gath. We’ll kill the beast. We’ll take his share.

  Khorg was the strongest. Dumb as an ox. Ugly as a sump rat. Powerful enough to rip a man in half. I’d hoped never to see him again but I’d hoped for a lot of things.

  I stared at the data-slate, still unable to believe what I was seeing. I wiped the muck from the screen. The pict-feed was grainy and jagged with static, but there was no mistaking the truth: it was Thornax. He stared at me through the cracked glass.

  Thornax. I’d watched him go into that blast furnace. I’d heard him scream. It was my boot, planted hard in his back, that sent him out of the game. And here he was, talking to me like we were friends. Talking to me as though he had every right to still be drawing breath.

  I’m still alive. I still have it. Bring Khorg to Druna Gath. We’ll kill the beast. We’ll take his share.

  I took a deep slug of Wildsnake and stuffed the slate back under my flak jacket. Now that I thought about it, there was no reason Thornax should know I was the one who booted him in there. The Iron Bloods had been all over us. I could see how he might not realise I was his killer. Anyone could have knocked him in. But why wasn’t he dead? The tough bastard must have crawled through the furnace. Was that possible? We were Goliaths. We were the Chainfists. Of course we were tough. But I saw fire ripping the skin from his back. The heat was immense. The whole complex had been coming down by then, so I hadn’t waited for the final act, but he was dead – I was sure of it.

  I’m still alive.

  I shook my head and carried on down the roadpipe, kicking rats and rubble, chewing on soot, muttering under my breath. Flames filled my head. I was back there, with him. Feeling the heat. Hearing his screams.

  ‘He should be dead,’ I said, my voice humming through the grille of my chem-mask.

  Rak hurried after me, struggling through the knee-deep ash. Nobody had used this route for months and I suppose it was hard going for him. He was big for a scavvie, but he only came up to my chest. I could see him sweating as he tried to keep up.

  I gave him a look, waving my stubber for encouragement.

  ‘Who should be dead?’ he said. He talked a lot.

  ‘You,’ I grunted, ‘for slowing me down.’

  He laughed nervously, scratching fleas from his verminous little head.

  ‘Duslag Sump,’ he said, chattering away to me like I was his mother. ‘It’s only a few more kloms, right? Daghman Falls, the Drek Gate. Then we’re there.’

  He eyed my bottle. ‘Thirsty work,’ he said, wiping his mouth on his filthy sleeve and grinning hopefully. He looked like a fawning plague zombie.

  I glared at him, wondering if there was still time to go back to the trade post and hire someone less annoying.

  He paled and finally shut up, so I carried on.

  Daghman Falls was the site of an old cave-in. No one could remember the cause, but it had left a pretty impressive mess – broken gantries and charred power cables everywhere. The hole had also been sugar-coated by waste pipes feeding down from Duslag Sump. Slag and ash had poured down from the manufactories until the falls looked like a rotting orifice. Choking, smouldering chem-fires licked across the waste spills, adding to the decorative feel of the place.

  I squinted into the smog and raised my stubber. There were animals in there. Mutants. Some kind of massive insects, clinging to the junkyard walls.

  ‘Salvage crews,’ said Rak, clicking on his lumen and sending a white finger up into the soot clouds.

  As the light flickered across the humps I saw that he was right. They were just lean-tos, welded to the walls. Skavvies, living off the crap, even this deep. This far beneath Hive Primus the underhive took on a particularly impressive aura of tragedy.

  ‘What do they…?’ I began, looking at the lean-tos. Then I shook my head, realising I didn’t care.

  I climbed out over the drop. There were footholds worked into the rusted girders. Perhaps the route was used more than I thought. I looked across to the opposite side, irritated at the thought we might have to fight. The Drek Gate had never been guarded before. I had no desire to shoot my way in. I wanted to reach Khorg unannounced. I knew he would give me a special welcome but I didn’t know if it would be a smile or a bullet.

  Rak was in his element, scampering over the sump walls like the vermin he was, gurning, twitching and smacking his lips as he pointed his lumen to the stable gantries.

  The hump-backed runt was already waiting at the gate when I heaved my bulk down, dropping from a broken tie beam. I landed with a crash, kicking up the rust dunes that were swept up against the gate.

  I drew my stubber as I landed, but there was no one there to greet us. The doors were impressive. Great slabs of rust that must once have guarded something grander than the burnt-out hovels and drinking holes. But they were forgotten. There wasn’t a single sentry.

  How did Khorg end up in this pit? I thought. But I knew, of course. That day at the furnace had been our one shot. Our one chance at a ticket out. All three of us knew it. No ganger ever got their hands on something that valuable. All we had to do was get it out and keep our heads down. Then the shooting started. Like it always does. I saw the flames again. I heard Thornax’s howl. I felt the impact as I kicked him into the furnace.

  I’m still alive. I still have it.

  Rak was staring at me. I was muttering again.

  I clubbed him across the side of the head and sent him sprawling into the rust. Then I looked back at the gates. They were locked, but the metal was so corroded and age-warped that gaps had appeared at the joins. I fired into the lock and it crumbled. The doors were rusted and unfriendly. Three hundred pounds of hulking Goliath changed their mind. I slammed my shoulder against them twice and they welcomed me in with a wail of grinding hinges.

  The glare of an arclight blinded me and I staggered at the threshold. As I shielded my eyes I saw that the main drag was all lit the same way – blazing arclights, hung from gantries and scaffolds.

  The street was pretty empty. Just a few skavvies huddled under corrugated awnings, talking about whatever skavvies talk about. I grabbed the nearest one and lifted him off his feet, breathing fumes into his panicked little eyeballs.

  ‘Khorg,’ I said.

  He went pale. Then shook his head. Then glanced at the far end of the street. It was just another hovel, but bigger than the others. There was an old guilder badge nailed to the crooked door and cans of fyceline stacked out front.

  ‘He works for Stanco,’ gasped the scavvie. ‘Muscle.’

  I dropped him into a fuel drum and marched on down the road, nodding for Rak to follow.

  The other skavvies guessed I hadn’t come to make friends and hid. They crumpled back into their hovels and shrivelled into the shadows, their eyes flashing in the arclights.

  The guilders had put Khorg behind a desk. It was like a bad joke. His massive bulk was even wedged into some kind of chair. He was hunched over the scratched metal of the desk like an imminent landslide. You could have stuffed a bullgrox in there and made a less ridiculous sight.

  He looked up as I stepped in. His face looked like he had shaved it with an anvil and his eyes were as dead and strange as I remembered. Incredibly, though, he had managed to get even uglier. One whole side of his chest and one of his arms had been replaced with augmetics. Augmetics that looked like he made them himself using only his thu
mbs. While he was drunk. And looking the other way.

  ‘Holy Throne,’ I laughed. ‘What did you do?’

  He said nothing, on account of the fact that he had never learned to speak, on account of the fact that he was dumb as a girder.

  He could still recognise a friend though. Before I could even cross the threshold he pulled a stubber from beneath the desk and pointed it at my head.

  It was a tense moment. I stared into his impenetrable, bovine eyes. Did he know? Had he worked out what happened that day? Did he guess that I kicked Thornax into the flames?

  No, I remembered. Khorg was a moron.

  I nodded to the bottle on his desk.

  A muscle twitched in his jaw. His face was mostly jaw, so this had quite a dramatic effect. He kept the gun pointed at my head and cocked it.

  ‘Thornax is alive,’ I said.

  Muscles rolled across his jaw again, in what I took to be an expression of surprise.

  ‘And he still has his piece,’ I said. Then I took out the battered data-slate, being careful to only play him the first half of the message.

  I’m still alive. I still have it. Bring Khorg to the furnace.

  He let out a long, slow breath. The chasms in his forehead softened. He used his stubber to shove a glass across the desk towards me.

  I grabbed it and drank deep, noticing that my hand was trembling. I could forgive myself. Not many men could look down a gun held by Khorg the Beast and remain continent.

  My nerves did not get any calmer as I asked the next question. ‘Do you still have yours?’

  He carried on staring. Then, one by one, his muscles relaxed and he slumped back in his chair. It was a bit like watching an avalanche. He lowered his stubber and let it clang on the desk. He kept hold of it though.

  He nodded at the doorway behind him and stood up, making me look as small as the stunted skavvies outside.

  At the thought of skavvies I remembered Rak and looked around. He was cowering in the crooked porch behind me, watching the exchange with a horrific attempt at a smile.

  ‘Wait there,’ I grunted.

  Khorg squeezed through the doorway into the back of the trading post, looking back at me and gesturing for me to follow.

  There was all sorts of guilder crap back there. Cans of corpse-starch. Mining equipment. Flasks of clean water. Guns. Khorg waded through all of it and pulled out a man-sized cabinet from a dusty corner. He rattled through some keys at his belt and unlocked it. It was a trophy case, stuffed with reminders of the good old days. The days when we ruled the badzones. There were shattered, bleached skulls taken from gangers who crossed him. Even a skull of something inhuman. Some horror from the hive-bottom. A mutant, reptilian thing, with teeth like combat knives. He dragged an iron chest out from beneath all the other stuff and unlocked it, flipping back the lid to reveal something of unexpected beauty.

  ‘The Wings of Caliban,’ I whispered. He only had one wing, of course. Thornax had the other and I had the sword that bound them together. No one knew where it came from. Some said Terra. Others said the nobles upspire. Whoever made it, it was clearly priceless. It was forged from an alloy that never rusted. I think it was the first thing I ever saw that wasn’t brown. It gleamed and sparkled as Khorg lifted it from the box. Tiny runes glittered all over the sculpted feathers. ‘Those are Adeptus Astartes words,’ Thornax had said, the day we lifted it from the zealots. As though he knew what he was talking about. ‘We’re made, boys,’ he said. ‘We’re made.’ And we all knew it was true.

  We both stared at the wing for a moment, remembering the dream it symbolised. When we realised how valuable it must be, we had all seen a way out. When the Orlock mine owners reconsidered the deal, deciding to steal rather than buy from us, Thornax ordered us to each take a third, saying we’d reunite the pieces when the heat died down. He never guessed it would be so many years later. But then he also thought I would be happy to share the money, so he was clearly missing some key truths.

  Khorg wasn’t looking at the wing any more. He was staring at me in that weird, dead-eyed way of his.

  ‘I don’t have my third,’ I said, meeting his stare. I wondered how that would go down. Maybe he would add my skull to the collection in his cupboard. ‘I thought you and Thornax were dead so I sold my third to Cawdor redemptionists.’

  He just kept staring at me.

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ said Rak, from the doorway behind me. ‘The Cawdor priests still have it and I can get you into the Temple of Redemption.’ He grinned cheerfully. ‘I know a safe way past their guards. I’d never get out once the alarms started, but with you two there will be no problem.’

  I wanted to gun him down for following me in there, but I also noticed how expertly he had followed me. I compromised by pistol-whipping him in a friendly kind of way, sending him crashing through a pile of crates.

  Khorg looked at me, an eyebrow raised, practically conversational.

  I nodded. ‘He can get us in. I know where they’re keeping it. They put it at the top of their favourite pyre. It’s the last thing we’ll see if things go wrong.’

  Khorg looked at his third of the relic, still gripping it in his massive bear-paw of a hand.

  It was easier than I’d expected. The stupid lump nodded and stuffed the wing under his jacket. Then he grabbed a heavy stubber and lifted it from his pile of junk like it was a normal gun. Then he strapped it to his back, nodding back towards the door.

  ‘Don’t you need to tell someone you’re going?’ asked Rak, picking himself up from the shattered crates.

  Khorg stared at him in disbelief.

  I hit him again.

  House Cawdor. The Cult of the Idiot. They burn anything they don’t understand and there’s not much they do understand.

  As we crossed the Axium Bridge we walked through a seasonal blizzard of heretic skin. They had been burning skavvies for a month, after another rumour triggered one of their merry pogroms. Most likely someone had sprouted a tentacle in the wrong place and the Redemptionists had got wind of it.

  The smell was disgusting as we jostled through all the morons who had come to hurl advice at the chargrilled damned. They were all chanting hymns about the Golden Throne and the God-Emperor, too drunk on faith to realise that they would be burning next. One of their relatives would grow an oddly shaped toenail and the zealots would arrive with brands and chainswords to offer help.

  Khorg waded through the crowds like a ship slicing through flotsam. A few of the pilgrims glanced up at him in terror, but most were wise enough to look the other way.

  There were Cawdor gangers on the bridge. The Brothers of the Blessed Noose. They were so busy lighting up more skavvies that we marched straight on past with no need of excuses or shooting.

  At the far side of the bridge they had converted an old promethium refinery into their Redemption Temple, decorating it with more heretic toast and lighting up the whole steaming edifice with thousands of lit brands. The fires snapped angrily in the bad air, spitting clouds of embers down onto the pilgrims and priests.

  The gates were open, spilling flagellants onto the bridge, but they were also heavily guarded. Watchtowers on either side and heavily armed sentries on the ground, their ecstatic eyes staring out from behind grubby, leather masks.

  I looked around, trying to spot Rak in the crowds. I was surrounded by an ocean of emaciated human trash. How would I single out one lump of human excrement from another? Then I saw the idiot, perched on a piston of an enormous crankshaft, waving cheerfully at me and gesturing to a smaller chapel to the right of the main building.

  I checked Khorg was following and waded on through the idiots.

  ‘They guard the ventilation shafts,’ said Rak, when we had reached a relatively quiet access tunnel. He waved at the fan of rusting pipes overhead. Then he gave me an irritating, self-satisfied smirk. ‘But the
y never expect anyone to come in through the waste stack.’ He looked around to see if we were being watched, then pointed to an opening at the base of the chapel. It looked like a sewer pipe, but it was spewing a different kind of waste.

  I grimaced.

  ‘Once they burn the mutants they pump the waste through that ash pipe, out into that liftport and down into the hab zones,’ he said.

  ‘We’ll burn,’ I snarled.

  He flinched, expecting me to strike. Then relaxed when I didn’t. ‘No,’ he said, looking smug again. ‘They have to dowse the ash and bones before they pump them out, or the ducts would overheat and burn the place down.’

  Then I hit him, launching him across the little square and knocking down a few other human rats in the process.

  ‘Lead the way,’ I said.

  The smell was even more impressive than the stink on the bridge. We had to crawl through a slurry of half-burned bodies and charred rags, all drenched in stagnant hive water. Twice I had to submerge myself fully in the filth. I kept my spirits up by imagining all the ways I could kill Rak once we were done.

  Finally, we spewed out from the other end, hitting the chapel floor with a wet slap.

  I rose into a crouch, stubber raised, scouring the chamber.

  The room was lit by a circle of smoking braziers, all perched at head height on fancy stands. The air was a wall of thick, incense-heavy fumes but I could see a few silhouettes. All pilgrims. All kneeling and ridding themselves of sense with barbed whips. Squatting over the idiots was a great statue cradling another fire. It was the God-Emperor, sitting in his throne and looking down at them with a look of profound disappointment. I pitied him. Imagine rising up from all the crap, only to end up with these morons as your reward.

  The statue had a sword as big as a hab block across its lap and piled next to the hilt were all sorts of pathetic relics. I wiped pieces of dead people from my face and stared through the smoke. Most of it was rubbish. I could see that even from here. Bones. Bits of old weapons. Someone’s hat. I shook my head. Amazing what people will kneel to. Then I saw it. Wedged under a rotten old banner. My third of the relic. It was a replica of a sword, glittering in the darkness. When we managed to meet up with Thornax, and got his wing back with the one Khorg had, this sword would bind them both together. The zealots were too caught up in religious fervour to know what was valuable and what was junk.