She died before Danielle could reply.
Valdez doffed his hat and began to fan his face. ‘Mordessa,’ he murmured. ‘What’s the significance of that?’
‘It’s – uh – a ghost town. A derelict,’ Sharney replied, discomfited. ‘We don’t know it by that name any more.’
Jula’s father rose, anger stemming the tears. ‘We still know it by that name. Tell them what it is.’
Sharney fiddled nervously with his chain of office. The old woman spoke without looking up: ‘It’s the plague village.’
Valdez took Sharney by the collar and drew him in until the two men were face to face. ‘Then this has happened before.’
Sharney was fast getting out of his depth. ‘Maybe,’ he stammered. ‘I don’t know. The girl’s symptoms are similar.’
‘Tell us about Mordessa,’ Valdez suggested.
‘It was all over long ago. A century at least. There was an outbreak of sickness.’
‘Another psyker?’
‘Psyker, witch. I don’t know. One with so-called powers,’ He glared defiantly at his interrogators. ‘No, the Imperium never got to hear of it. I told you – we can handle our own affairs on Cabellas.’
Mordessa. The name stirred in Danielle’s soul. Sharney had told the truth as he understood it, but there was more. Mordessa. An old name; far older than the pioneers of Cabellas; older, perhaps than the Imperium itself. The shadow of a struggle, ancient beyond memory, flickered in her mind, then fled.
‘So,’ she said. ‘What was done?’
Sharney sat down and cupped his head in his hands. ‘The colony was new; the first habitation of Cabellas since the Age of Strife. Towns and villages were small, easily contained. Guards were posted; no one was allowed in or out of the village.’
Danielle kept probing. ‘And then?’
Sharney shrugged.
‘And then—’ the father’s face was puffy, red, ‘then they put the village to the flames. A hundred men, women and children died. No one has lived there since.’
‘You think Gestartes may have gone there?’ The old man laughed bitterly. ‘Where else would a leper go?’
V
ALDEZ LED
S
HARNEY
, unresisting, back to the marshalry, issuing orders as he thought of them. Far from dismaying him, the news had sharpened his natural instincts of war. For the first time since the crash Danielle saw him invigorated with a sense of purpose.
‘I want horses. And you’d better let me have half a dozen of your men, armed. Oh, and one more thing—’ He paused, and glanced at the covered bier. ‘See to it that body’s burned.’
‘That’s difficult,’ Sharney mumbled. ‘It’s the practice on Cabellas to bury the dead.’
‘Burn it,’ It was not a request. A brief smile flickered on the inquisitor’s face as he walked over to the bier. ‘Or would you care to bury this?’
A stench of decay filled the courtyard as the inquisitor lifted the shroud. Danielle glanced once at the body and turned quickly away.
Sharney looked as though he were about to be sick. He summoned guards with an urgent wave of his arm. ‘Burn it,’ he said. ‘Burn it at once!’
T
HE TONE OF
Tchaq’s voice deepened. ‘That’s bad,’ he said. ‘Could be messy. But there’s some better news. At least we’ll have company.’
The inquisitor’s features lit up in delight. For a moment, Danielle expected him to drop his saddle-bags and hug her. ‘How many safe?’ he demanded. ‘Grunland among them?’
‘Grunland, aye. Franca too; Plovitch and Van Meer. Their raft hit the hills about sixty kilometres north. Took it worse than ours. Brody was aboard but didn’t make it. Rest of them flamed with the ship.’
Valdez tapped the vox-comm thoughtfully. ‘Not bad.’ Survival rate had exceeded probability; as much as could be expected.
‘Get back to Grunland with my commendation. Explain the position and tell him to get his men to the northern approach to Mordessa, and no further. We’ll meet them there. Now, what about Kar Duniash?’
‘All the military channels are shot. We’ll have to try and pick up one of the freight circuits. Golun’s working on it. It’ll take time, that’s all.’
Valdez made a brief inspection of their Cabellan guides. Six thin youths fidgeted uneasily in the saddle, waiting for the order to move out.
The inquisitor frowned. ‘Tech-priest, are you still needed out there?’
Tchaq sounded non-committal. ‘I could stay here supervising Golun. Fact is, he can patch in a commnet with his eyes closed.’
‘In that case you’ll be more use with us. If you set off within the hour we’ll rendezvous well before nightfall.’
There was a pause. ‘And how am I supposed to get there, with no transport?’
Valdez grinned nastily. ‘Then treat yourself to some exercise, tech-priest! Your legs could use stretching. And, Tchaq—’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘Well done.’
T
HE METALLED ROAD
out of the settlement beat a path through scenes from a well-run war. The land was cut into vast squares, fields of cultivated vegetation stretching to the horizons. Where the man-made plateaux ended, legions of alien plant life erupted like a virus, tracing the lines of demarcation, slicing up the face of the land into chessboard squares.
As the journey wore on, closer to the site of Mordessa, the terms of the battle altered. Men grew sparse in the fields, then disappeared. The hard-fought squares of industry became straggling expanses of thin, untended crops. Even the tangle-weeds had given up. Grey rather than green, they sprouted now in intermittent, limp clusters, as though the land had lost all nourishment.
In time the idle chatter of the Cabellan troopers gave way to an uneasy silence. By late afternoon, new growths were flourishing amidst the wild corn: strange black fungi like mutated rain-spore. They oozed a scent of death.
‘Over here!’
A sturdy figure was striding through the field towards them, pushing through the crops and rotting fungus. Tchaq was perspiring under the weight of a disproportionately huge field gun that he’d salvaged from the raft. He was propelling himself towards the riders at a brisk pace, powered in equal measure by determination and bitter curses.
He reached the roadway, keeping a wary eye on the Cabellan troop. ‘What’s this then? More frightened jackrabbits?’
Valdez laughed. ‘A band of heroes to fight for the Imperium. What news?’
Tchaq spat against his sleeve and polished the gun barrel with great deliberation. ‘Golun’s got it in hand. He’ll have Kar Duniash for us, soon enough.’
Valdez nodded, satisfied. ‘Ride up here with me. With luck we’ll reach the village soon after dusk.’
N
IGHT CAME QUICKLY
, as though the dark growths thickening in the fields were leeching the light from the sky. The smooth paved roadway had become no more than a rutted, overgrown path. Few travellers had ventured this way.
Danielle reached out with her mind, beyond Tchaq’s taciturn fatalism and the inquisitor’s sharpening scent for slaughter, into the gathering night. She saw no shadow of living man, but somewhere in the gloom ahead she sensed the first stirrings in a darker well, its epicentre a pool of blackness so deep the universe itself might drown within it.
Somewhere a clock, long stopped, began to mark time again. Old wounds began to re-open.
They had reached their journey’s end.
At first sight Mordessa could have been just another small colony village. A crop of low buildings nestled together in a shallow valley, a spire visible above the rooftops. But, off to one side, Danielle saw other structures. The remains of walls, fluted and curved, inlaid with strange, spiral patterns. Something in their line and form suggested an older, prehuman presence, as though the pioneers of the Imperium had built their village beside the remnants of another, long departed race.
Now Mordessa, too, was dead. As they drew closer the village was revealed as a charcoal shell, a skeletal frame of scorched iron and blackened timber. The spire presided over a grave.
The Cabellan captain shook his head ruefully. ‘This is an unlucky place.’
Danielle dismounted and followed Valdez down the path to a barricade of rusting razor wire. A signboard, faded and rotten, still clung tenuously to the fence. The legend had been obscured but the crude depiction of a skull was still clear enough. The warning hadn’t been heeded. Just beyond the path, the fence had been prised apart.
The sound of feet slithering on stones somewhere in the darkness ahead of them. Cabellan fingers sweated on rifle stocks. A voice called out in greeting: ‘Hold your fire. Friend!’
The inquisitor’s expression betrayed his astonishment. ‘Van Meer?’ He spoke softly seeking corroboration from his companions.
Tchaq shook his head slowly in disbelief. ‘He’s a better man than I. It should have taken them another hour to reach this place.’
Danielle stayed silent. The voice was van Meer’s, she needed no special powers to recognize that. And yet – she bit back a warning word as a tall, powerfully built figure dressed in the night colours of the Third Army of Kar Duniash emerged from the shadows.
Sergeant van Meer strode up the road leading from Mordessa, an unidentifiable load straddling his broad shoulders. The grin on his face was almost as wide.
Inquisitor Valdez returned his salute. ‘Greetings, sergeant. The Third Army surpasses itself yet again.’
‘Captain Granland’s felicitations, your worship. He sends you this little offering,’ He shifted his load over on to one shoulder. ‘Rich pickings.’
The body of a man tumbled from the sack on to the ground.
Valdez turned to the Cabellans. ‘Gestartes?’
The troop captain, Tolmann, nodded nervously. ‘That’s him. The Emperor knows, he never did us any harm.’
‘Nor will he, now. Van Meer, how did you come by this fortuitous catch?’
‘Our paths met as we approached the village from the east. The mutant ran into our arms. He was so ripe with the sickness of evil, he barely knew where he was.’
Van Meer flourished his bolt pistol. ‘A few rounds of this was all the medicine he needed.’
Gestartes stared up at the stars, dead eyes fixed in a mask of blistered wax.
Valdez prodded the corpse with booted foot. ‘We’ll take this and burn it,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Are the rest of the men far?’
‘Not far at all. Captain Grunland’s searching the village as a precautionary measure.’
‘Good. Let’s hope this one’s the last of an unwelcome line.’
‘I’m sure of it,’ van Meer said. ‘I’ve met these diseased mutants before, on Edmund’s World. See this—’ He turned Gestartes’s face with one heel, exposing a dark crop of subcutaneous welts. ‘Until these pretties blossom out, the infection can’t take. We caught him just in time.’
Not true.
A voice, anonymous but certain, spoke in Danielle’s mind.
‘Where did your raft crash?’ She asked the question even before she was fully aware of it. Van Meer looked perplexed, taken aback. ‘What?’
Vexed, Valdez turned to her, but his words were lost. The nebulous darkness which had been bearing down on her suddenly focused. The raft crashed here. Not in the hills. They never left the village.
Valdez was striding out to meet van Meer, hand extended. Danielle reached deep into the soldier’s mind. The physical outline of van Meer faded out of mindsight. Beneath it—
‘Valdez – wait!’
The moment froze. Valdez stood only feet away from the sergeant, surprise turning to anger.
Danielle was taken off-guard by the urgency in her own voice. Then she found the words. ‘Don’t get near him. That’s not van Meer any more. Van Meer’s dead.’
The Cabellans slipped the safety catches on their rifles.
Van Meer had stopped in his tracks, astonishment on his face. ‘What’s this?’ he appealed. ‘What sort of welcome is this for the Third Army? A mad psyker and a gang of blood-lusty farmhands?’
No one spoke. Valdez looked at Tchaq. The tech-priest’s face was unreadable, but his fingers drummed gently against the trigger of his gun.
‘Your worship,’ van Meer implored. ‘We must send word back to sector command.’
The sound of feet pacing carefully on stones behind him. Van Meer’s glance flicked briefly rearwards. His eyes were eager, sparkling. ‘Kar Duniash,’ he insisted. ‘They could have a ship here for us in a matter of days.’
‘Yes,’ Valdez agreed softly. ‘They could.’
Further down the path to the village, a second figure stepped from the shadows. ‘Trouble, sergeant?’
‘A little, sir.’ Van Meer fixed his eyes squarely on the horsemen. ‘The lord inquisitor’s been badly advised.’
‘I see.’
Danielle looked from Valdez to Granland. The squad captain was staying well back by the cover of a ruined outhouse, his face illuminated peach-blonde in a shaft of moonlight.
‘Not to worry, your worship,’ Grunland shouted to Valdez. ‘We’ll leave these oafs here to play with their toys. As for the psyker,’ his gaze rested on Danielle, ‘maybe she’d have been better fitted for the Emperor’s table after all.’ Grunland smirked contemptuously. ‘The village is clean, sir. Time to move off.’
Tchaq nudged his mount forward a few paces. ‘Keen to get going, aren’t we?’
‘Of course. The sooner we—’
One of the horses suddenly reared. Instinctively, van Meer spun round, hand slicing down for his gun. Before he reached it, six rifles blazed. The sergeant was picked off his feet and thrown backwards on to the path.
Utter silence. Even the horses were still.
Van Meer’s body twitched, spasmodically at first, then the spasms became co-ordinated movement. Slowly, steadily, the bear-like figure rose to its feet. Even in the darkness there was no doubt most of the bullets had found their mark. The Imperial uniform had been torn open across the chest, twisted shards of bone bursting from the ruptured cavity. The lower part of van Meer’s jaw had been blasted away. Remnants of a mouth opened in a cavernous smile, dripping a thick, yellow pus.
Fear ran through the Cabellan troop like bushfire. Valdez snarled.
The creature which had been van Meer turned, but Valdez was faster. The bolt pistol spat four rounds before van Meer had a chance to draw. His features atomized, bone and muscle spewing out in a dark mist. The headless monster toppled, and stayed down.