Prisoner 52 (31 page)

Day 55

The snow and the winds blew around them and overhead the skies burned as if lit with an inner flame and bulged toward the earth in prelude to some celestial armageddon. The ice crystals broke against the plating of their armor and slashed at the naked skin of their heads and faces. They looked down on the glacial plains that stretched out from the ridge on which they had been forced to kneel and surveyed from perfect vantage the bedlam that went on below, the haphazard columns of inmates that filed across the icy surface of the planet and the HEVs that swerved amidst them and all to some point unseen
save in their guesses at what lay north and east for them.

"Do you see him?" Tezac said to Leargam and the old man leaned forward, looked steadily out at the field and made no other moves.

"Yes," He said and his breath caught. "Down there, in the middle of all of them. The only one not going the same direction. You see him?"

Tezac peered with him and searched for the lone man among
thousands and said that he didn't.

"Where's he headed?" He asked. "Why are they letting him go?"

"Shut up." One of the men before them said and beat their heads away with the butt of his rifle. "No talking."

Tezac glanced across the barrels of the rifles levelled at them and the prisoners that bore them, attired in as complete of exo-suits as could be found among the dead of murdered g
uardsmen, and then to the oil-stained rags that were tied round their arms. He listened to what sounded like orders and spoken by the man who alone stood apart from the others and watched as they did the exodus ongoing below, though whatsoever command he could have made had from what he could see little effect on its disorganization.

H
e leaned over to Sejanus and said, "Who are these punks?"

"Blackbloods." He said. "Scumfucks that still think they're soldiers."

"We are still soldiers, Sejanus." The man said. "The Black Blood of the Concilium is now a faction of irregulars operating within the boundaries of known space in support of the true Concilium, as of this moment. I am its commander."

"And who are you?" Tezac said.

"Julius Agrifficus Nyar." One of the others proclaimed in a voice loud enough to be heard over the winds. "Imperadux of the First Penal Legion of Cocytus; veteran of the Taan Conflict and Third Reclamation War; Vizeopt of the third grade; Bane of the-"

"Spare me the titles." Sejanus said.

"Oh Sejanus." Nyar said and went to him and forced their eyes to meet by his grip upon the sides of his shaven head. "If you'd shown proper respect for your betters, you might’ve avoided the situation that you’re in now. All the same: there will be time enough to cure you of these – sentiments."

"I'd hate to ruin your Blackblood speciest party," Leargam said. "But it doesn't look like you'll have time for much of anything."

He nodded at the effulgent clouds and as though it awaited for his acknowledgement alone, as though the old man were the porter for the universe, what lay beyond then broke through. Tendrils writhed out from within the sky's burning nebulae and so great that Tezac knew them for those he had seen in sleep, those that had thrown down the aspirant towers of antique empires and had wrapped their sickly grasp round the foundations of cities renowned across the race of their builders and rendered them unto ruin. They elongated and grew as they emerged until at length was revealed the crooked, grotesque maw to which the ancient tentacles were anchored and then the great eye which loomed terrible and despondent in turn above it – caught all within the tumorous flesh parasitized onto the body of the machine that bore the entity forth out of the heavens and which next appeared as it descended.

The thing levelled out over the glacial plain and soared as a ship a thousand times greater than any those there had seen. It droned then, by some unseen machination hidden deep within the rotting bowels of its mouth, and drowned out the wail and blow of the storm and contained within its cosmic noise the screams of the dying and the tortured and the mad. Those below whose heads wer
e naked clutched their ears and, when it failed to shut out the cacophony, drew their knives and drove them into the canal so as to hear nothing if never to hear such a sound again.

A
light bloomed forth from its underbelly and there yawned an orifice as wide around as a dozen dropships and from within the emerald light it cast a great deluge of like colored bile spilled out and turned the men or machines it poured onto to smoking goo that moved of its own accord, burbling. It melted great pits into the glacial plain and disappeared the HEVs that had avoided its cataract.

Points of darkness appeared
within the glow that fell from within the recesses of the living ship, few that in moments became many and in their descent the distant blots became humanoid shadows in the radiance that flowed round them. But as the moments passed things began to part from the prevailing indistinguishability of their forms that squirmed from their heads which in turn pendulated as bulbs at the end of long, lilting necks and as their limbs did from their bodies.

They drew nigh the inmates upon the field below, now in battle array with their make
shift legions and centuries, and who fought against the animated globs of human jelly that cared not for their bullets. They then opened fire upon these newcomers too, these emaciated grey things from beyond the stars that had set down upon them. The creatures dropped from their places in the air, caught in seizure by the impact of bullets from rifles and HEV turrets, and they fell dead as sure as stones do. But in their illimitable numbers these progeny of the ship came on still and took men from the earth with the long tendrils of their faceless faces and drifted away again toward the glow.

"Sir,"
One of the Blackbloods said over his shoulder to Nyar, his captain.

"Stay where you are." He said. "Keep your guns where they are."

"Sir." The man said again and turned round to face Julius Nyar.

The Imperadux turned as well and drew his sidearm and fired a burst into his visor. The duraglas cracked into chaotic webs where the bullets passed through and the Blackblood fell dead into the snow upon the ridge.

"I won't have any dissent." He said to them and said no more so that his words, with the death cries of those below and those of the planet itself, took hold of their thoughts. "Elreist, Richards: get in the piloting wombs. The rest of you load into the personnel bay. Shoot the prisoners."

A
darkness drew over the viridian light that flowed about their shoulders and a new shadow joined their own and the Blackbloods turned round on their commander. He held the pistol out at them still and looked between them, unaware of the thing that hovered over him. They raised their rifles at its horrid, desiccated grey flesh and limbs long to uselessness and the tendrils that spasmed madly in the radiance that streamed round it and Nyar aimed his gun at them. They fired at the pallid flesh of its head that then leered down upon their Imperadux from atop its neck that was as a serpent and he depressed the trigger at random into any form he could find.

Sejanus took the rifle from the corpse of the Blackblood that had been first shot and scrambled away from the firefight and watched from afar as the bullets fired at the thing passed harmlessly into black nothingness before it, the somber expression of the
horribly human mouth they could now see unchanged. Tezac rose up, a giant in the light that bathed the ridge, and threw one of the Blackbloods from it and took his weapon from where it lay in the snow. Nyar turned his pistol on him and the lips of the thing that hovered above him opened, so wide that even for its size it was not possible, and in it the teeth were human.

             
It descended upon him and engulfed him and when its jaws had shut closed again it did not swallow, but neither did any body remain to encumber its gaping maw. Its tendrils lashed out at the Blackbloods that yet stood and took the three into three of its arms and crushed the life from them and floated onward as it did so, drawing nigh to where Leargam kneeled before it like the mad worshipper of a mad god.

             
A spear passed over his head and the airjets along its ebon haft activated and sped into the sunken breast of the creature and plowed into it. The thick, runed blades of the spearhead punctured the bone with a bloody thud and a sickly fluid spewed out from the wound as the spear bore away with it its target. The thing let loose a hollow, crazed kind of moan as it went and sailed back through the wintry air, falling away somewhere beyond the ridge. Their ears were filled then of a sudden with the rush of air and above them passed a chariot of black steel drawn by the winged beasts of some outer hell and in it the sleek-armored figures of their jailors in the mortal realm.

"Maerazians." Sejanus said and sped over to T
ezac at the edge of the plateau, helping Leargam to his feet as he went. "It's the Maerazians."

A fleet of such craft stormed over
where they stood and upon the winds from the east and joined battle with the airborne hordes of the creatures descending from the ship. The spears they cast often disappeared into the spontaneous voids brought about the forms of the things when under threat, being now aware of them, and so those who watched from below began to see the weird works of the magicks they brought with them from the depths of the Gulf.

They saw from their place upon the ridge the figures that stood protected at the heart of each vessel and which worked their staves in the air and,
as those knew who in lifetimes past had fought against them, called upon the power of the names writ as runes into their blackened armor. Gouts of baleful flame shot forth in great bursts from the coursing chariots and the beasts that drew them across the skies nipped and tore at the travellers from beyond the stars. Shrieking, spectral zephyrs blew shimmering through the air and all of those they touched fell to the earth lifeless. Serpents of sinew and bone sprouted large from the shoulders and spines of their hosts in some few of the crafts and at turns spat sprays of boiling blood upon the alien flocks they passed and bit at or constricted those lone enemies they happened upon.

Soon there
entered into the midst of the squadrons, lowering of its will down into sight from above, a stagnant glow. A globe that scintillated and crackled as if with eldritch lightning and contained within it, they saw, the massive and lank abomination released out of a buried epoch and a magnetic tomb deep in the earth. The warlord of the Maerazians had come and had begun to draw earthward toward the figure that in the depletion of the escaped inmates stood alone still in the emerald brilliance of the living ship, untouched by the beings that issued from it, and as his attendants skirmished with those of the man they knew as Tobias Simms.

"Come on." Sejanus said to them and sli
pped over the edge of the ridge and skidded down the rocky slope beyond.

"Sejanus," Tezac called after him. "Godsdamn it."

"We better follow him," Leargam said and they set to doing so. "Before he gets himself killed."

Below, the Maerazian warlord stretched his hand out
to Tobias and the characters that smoked black upon his white skin tore away and formed from within their patterns in the air a lance of blackest fire that overtook the man, oblivious of his presence, and burned the clothes from his body and the skin from his flesh. Tobias stopped and turned, smoking and bubbling and crisping, and waved his hand at the pale giant in the distance.

The ice shattered before the Maerazian and from beneath it rose a tendril as massive and ichorous as it was m
alodorant and knobby with sores. It whipped at him and knocked him aside in its suddenness. He rolled to his taloned feet across the glacial plain and vanished to reappear beside the thing and with the long claws of his long hand severed it into two. Then he braced his feet and seemed to peer hard at Tobias and from his eyes spewed forth a legion of wailing spirits that swamped him and took him up so that he could not move and tore at parts of him that could not be seen with mortal eyes.

T
he Maeraizan cast his taloned hands to the sky and those who followed them and looked themselves to the stars saw one of their number to shift from its place in the northern heavens. There were then two such points and of them the lower sped toward them until at length a sphere of luminescence appeared at odds with the three moons and descended upon their world. It grew so bright that nothing but the brightness could be seen and the earth shook beneath their feet so that they were thrown from their feet.

The warlord studied the pit that he had made and approached it through the carnage of the battle that went on around him. He crept near the edge and peered down into the blackness beyond and so listened faintly to the voice that sounded to filter up from below. Its words rose from the deep watery places that are the domains of the dismal forgotten aberrations of time and spoken by no mortal throat and which in that moment became a roar that blew him backwards through the aerial fray.

A green light flared from the pit and the Maerazian got to his feet as a figure rose into the air within its radiance, warped and twisted with the impact of what had fallen upon its body. It reached out with the single, working arm left to it, the only limb left whole save a leg yet crooked and bent to uselessness, and a shimmering wave blew towards him. He held up his arm to it and the miasmatic symbols written there flew apart and so met the blast with the umbral shield they contrived to form.