Wolf Hunt Read online

  ‘My name’s Ekata,’ she says. ‘He went north, towards the cliffs above the Temple of Woe.’

  At first Nagasena thinks she must be mistaken. Why would Severian head back to where the hunt began? Then he remembers what Severian wants and it all makes sense.

  ‘Does that help you?’ asks Ekata.

  ‘More than you know,’ says Nagasena, wishing he could help her, that he could rebuild her faith in the Imperium. Coming to a decision within himself, he removes a jade cartouche from around his neck. The polished oval stone is etched in gold with the image of a serpentine dragon. He places the cartouche in Ekata’s palm and closes her fingers over it.

  ‘Do you know the Chitwan path on the southern approaches to the upland work camps?’

  ‘Yes, at the Primus Gate barracks.’

  ‘Take the path until you come to a fork marked with a small cairn of black and gold rocks. Walk the path on your right and follow it uphill until you reach a red-roofed villa with the same dragon symbol on the gates. Present yourself to the mistress of the house, a woman named Amita, and tell her that Master Nagamitsu’s pupil wishes you to be treated as a guest until his return. You understand?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Ekata, her smile making her beautiful.

  ‘Go now, for night is coming and the Petitioners’ City is no place to be out after dark.’

  Ekata stands and unpins the crimson flower from her breast and leans forwards to attach it to Nagasena’s breastplate.

  ‘For luck,’ she says, embarrassed by the superstition. ‘A rosette.’

  Severian had chosen a route up the eastern sides of the projecting bluffs of the cliff face to keep himself clad in shadows. The climb was difficult, the exposed face worn smooth by abrasive winds and the quarryman’s drill. Each handhold was a finger-breadth wide, each toehold a sliver of a projection. More than enough for a Luna Wolf.

  The sun arced further into the west, the rich blue deepening to subtle purple and the sounds of the city rising to meet him. As the sun dipped to the horizon, the Palace was bathed in its dying light, painting it the colour of blood. Severian remembered a time before it had assumed so imperious a title and appearance, when it had been no more than a mountain citadel, a bastion for a council of war – a fastness from which the conquest of the galaxy had been planned.

  It had been a time for heroes, the beginning of a new epoch. For the first time in uncounted centuries, light was eclipsing dark. The solar system was poised to fall, and the galaxy was opening up to mankind. In a mighty diaspora that echoed humanity’s first great explosion into the stars, the expeditionary fleets of the Legions knifed into the void to reclaim that lost empire.

  But Severian would not be part of that noble endeavour.

  As the 63rd Expedition breached the heliopause, Severian was returning to Terra with full honours to join the Crusader Host. As part of a new brotherhood, he had stood proudly with his brother legionaries in glory. They had been visible paragons of the new order carving the Imperium into the flesh of the galaxy.

  That time was long gone, and Severian found it increasingly difficult to reconcile that memory with his current plight. Stranded and alone, the last survivor of a disparate group of warriors thrown together by circumstance, then chosen by Atharva’s design. He had long ago given up trying to understand why Atharva had only freed the seven of them when there were plainly others who would have been sympathetic to their cause.

  What of the representatives of the Night Lords, the Word Bearers and the Iron Warriors?

  Might their escape have fared better with a son of Nostramo or an Olympian at their side?

  At first Severian didn’t notice the scratching voice emerging from the static, thinking it was simply his imagination. A trick of memory and isolation. But it came again, rising like a whisper in the quiet of a deserted fane. He paused in his ascent and tapped a finger to the side of the helm.

  The voice came again, louder and more distinct.

  This time there was no question of what it was saying.

  ‘Severian,’ said the voice.

  Shock pinned him to the cliff. He twisted his head left and right, then up and down. He saw nothing to indicate he was being observed, but any hunter this good wouldn’t expose himself to his prey.

  ‘Severian,’ said the voice again.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked, resuming his climb.

  ‘My name is Yasu Nagasena.’

  Severian made the connection. ‘You are the hunter who tracked us to the temple.’

  ‘Yes, and now I have tracked you here.’

  ‘How is it you are talking to me?’

  ‘The helmet you wear belonged to a warrior from an earlier age,’ said Nagasena. ‘I saw how your fellow warriors were clad in the temple and requisitioned a similar communications device from the Palace reliquaries.’

  ‘Clever,’ admitted Severian.

  ‘It required no great insight on my part,’ said Nagasena modestly.

  ‘No one else thought of it.’

  ‘I am not everyone else.’

  ‘You won’t be triangulating me with this,’ said Severian, recalling what he knew of Unity tech-levels. ‘These work on open-wavelength broadcasts. Anyone with a receiver tuned to the right frequency could hear this.’

  ‘I do not need to track you this way. I know where you are going and I have you in my sights right now.’

  Severian laughed, the first moment of genuine amusement he had felt in a long time.

  ‘Then take the shot, hunter.’

  Moments later a portion of the cliff face to his left puffed with the impact of a long-las round. Severian blinked away the after­image and the acrid heat haze of dust.

  ‘Are you psychic?’ he asked. ‘Has the Imperium decided that yet another class of useful psykers are worth special dispensation?’

  Nagasena seemed amused at his outburst. ‘I am not psychic, just a very good tracker. The first axiom of the tracker is to understand what your target wants.’

  ‘And what do I want?’

  ‘What death denied Atharva of the Thousand Sons and your fellows. The truth.’

  Severian paused in his climb. ‘What truth?’

  ‘The truth of how the galaxy has changed. You are adrift, Severian. You are told your primarch has betrayed you. Betrayed the Imperium. You want to look your brothers in the eye because you cannot reconcile that truth with what you remember.’

  ‘I know Horus Lupercal was a better man than any other I met. He would never turn on his father.’

  ‘You do not really believe that,’ said Nagasena.

  ‘Don’t tell me what I believe,’ snarled Severian.

  ‘You do not believe it because if Horus was ever to turn on his father, you know this is exactly how he would do it. A sudden, shocking betrayal followed by an apparently suicidal gambit that results in the massacre of the Emperor’s best chance to stop the rebellion before it gains momentum.’

  Severian said nothing, knowing Nagasena was right. What little he knew of the massacre at Isstvan V was just the manner in which Horus would open a rebellion.

  ‘I do not lie,’ said Nagasena. ‘On the blade Shoujiki, I swear it.’

  ‘Then why have you not shot me from the cliff?’

  ‘Perhaps I will before you reach Vadok Singh’s villa.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Severian, resuming his climb.

  ‘Then let us say that Horus may be a traitor, but I do not yet know if you are.’

  Nagasena’s voice faded from the helm, lost in a squall of interference from a test firing of the Palace’s void generators.

  Severian continued climbing, drawing closer to the top. With each moment of ascent, he wondered if Nagasena would shoot him from the cliff, but quickly dismissed the possibility. If Nagasena wanted to kill him, he would be dead already.
/>   The sun was gone now, and only the faint haze of starlight and the arc-lights from the Bhabhar work camps and the Mechanicum ship forges on the Terai-Duar flatlands illuminated the rock face.

  As he approached the lip of the cliff, he pressed his cheek to the black rock and focused his gaze on the boundary between stone and sky. Sure enough, he saw a wavering bloom of disturbed air.

  The faint haze of a laser tripwire covered the full length of the cliff edge.

  Severian took a firm grip of the rock in one hand and let himself dangle. He turned himself around and re-established his handholds as he braced his feet flat against the cliff, knees bent, muscles tense. He took a shallow breath and gathered his concentration, visualising the planned movement in his head, rehearsing the duration of each muscle contraction and snap of limb until he was certain of its success.

  Severian pushed off, powering his legs out and up, using his handhold as a hinge about which his body arced like the overpowered swing of a pendulum. Halfway through, he released his grip and twisted his body, snapping around in a gymnast’s crunch. He landed a metre beyond the edge of the cliff and dropped to his knees in a sandy courtyard, one hand pressed flat to the ground, the other balled into a fist.

  He awaited the scream of an alarm, the hue and cry of a sentry or the chatter of an automated weapon system. Nothing. Only the sigh of the wind and the hiss of his own breath disturbed the silence.

  ‘I expected better from you, Warmason,’ muttered Severian. ‘If you are Dorn’s architect, then the Warmaster will simply walk into the Emperor’s throne room.’

  The courtyard was enclosed on three sides by tiered steps that led up to a cloister. Night-blooming plants with albino leaves spread themselves to the moon, and their bitter, almond scent hinted at bespoke genecraft. A stone-flagged path led around the edges of the courtyard, at the centre of which gurgled and frothed a fountain topped by the finial of a square and compass.

  The numerous branches of the path enclosed rectangles of sand in which were rendered miniature sections of construction models of blockhouses, elevations and bastions. Intersecting lines of fire and dead zones were marked in the sand, together with guild markings that made no sense to Severian.

  He recognised the Dhawalagiri in one, the Eternity Gate in another and the growing fortifications spreading at the opening of the Mohan. Severian ascended to the cloister, padding softly over the polished terrazzo. The heads of the flowers followed his movements.

  He followed the cloister to the villa’s central pavilion, a wide elevation with a tall tower at its heart from which the Warmason could survey his great works. The landing platform and Singh’s tiltjet shuttle were on a raised plateau to the front of the main building. Severian had only the most basic knowledge of operating such a craft. He could fly it, but not well enough to avoid the inevitable interceptors and their seeker warheads.

  No, if he was to reach the orbital plates alive, he needed to give his pursuers a reason not to shoot him down.

  What better a reason than the Emperor’s own Warmason?

  Severian paused, sensing a subtle, undefinable change in the air. The smell of almonds had vanished, replaced by something ammoniac. Instantly his hand flashed to his blade and he pressed himself against the wall.

  A panel beside him slid open, and a multi-barrelled cannon pushed out on a circular gimbal mount. A green-lensed range-finder tracked across the courtyard, and Severian saw its twin emerge from the opposite wall. Its tracker beam panned across him and green flashed to red.

  A blitz of shells hammered the air and he pushed off the wall as the cannon beside him spun around. He sprang up and wrenched the barrel around, its bucking motion like wrestling a greenskin. Its servos fought him, but he kept his grip firm and walked its fire into the opposite cannon. High-velocity shells ripped through it, tearing it from the wall in a blaze of impacts.

  Severian jammed his blade into the cannon’s rotator mechanism, and threw himself to the side as the shells exploded in the breech, ripping the weapon apart in a spray of wild shots. He rolled to his feet and ran for the edge of the cloister. Vaulting from one of its supporting pillars, he swung up and hauled himself onto the tiled roof as more guns unmasked below. Having seen the Warmason’s schematics in the sand, Severian knew there would be no dead ground in which to hide.

  Movement was his only ally here.

  He ran along the ridge of the cloister’s roof as a wailing siren blared in alarm and light flooded the mountainside. Previously concealed arc-lights swung up and bathed the villa in blazing illumination that left him no shadow. More of the night-blooming flowers were situated at regular intervals in ornate planters. Spores misted their heads and Severian gagged at the stench, now realising how he had been unmasked so swiftly. These were bio-engineered plants, presumably tailored to react to any unfamiliar genetic sample.

  Severian vaulted onto the higher roof of the main structure as four figures emerged from cavities worked into the lower reaches of the tower. Automata, rendered in glossy black flex-metal and moving with a suppleness that only connections to the high magi of the Mechanicum could procure. Superficially human, their heads were mannequin-blank, concealing a lethal array of combat wetware grafted to the cauterised remains of a human cerebral cortex. Each was armed with a long, whipping blade and an implanted energy weapon. Two of them came straight for him, the third and fourth taking to the air on repulsor packs. A flurry of shots scythed towards him. Severian ducked and rolled, knowing on an instinctual level where their targeters would aim.

  He ran towards the first, drawing and firing a Black Sentinel’s pistol in one motion. The weapon was ridiculously small in his grip, but the nearest automaton went down, its head broken open. The second sprang away to the side.

  Right into the arcing grenade Severian had thrown at the same instant.

  The detonation sent it spinning down into the courtyard in flames. A shot struck him in the back and he grunted in pain as the beam punched through his armour. His war-plate would have stopped the shot, but this was armour of an earlier age.

  He rolled and came up firing. The automata had spread out. His shots punched empty air. Severian kept moving, hearing the clatter of yet more emplaced sentinels being thrown into the fray. Escalating threat response; the more he killed, the more would come at him.

  Another shot struck him, and this time searing heat burned him a cauterised wound. Severian turned as he heard the buzz of an approaching enemy. The blank-faced automaton crashed down beside him, and Severian swung two pistols to bear. It struck out with its implanted blade, skewering him through his lower ribs. He slammed his fist down, snapping the blade at the root, and emptied one pistol’s magazine into the automaton. The impacts battered it down the slope of the roof, but pitch-perfect balance-gyros kept it from toppling over the edge. It took aim at him, but a grenade at its feet blew it off the roof in a cascade of broken tiles and fire.

  Severian wrenched the flex-blade from his body as the fourth automaton dropped down ten metres behind him. It had seen the destruction of the first three and was in no hurry to share their fate. Severian ran towards the tower, chased by weapons fire. Shots blistered the air around him as he saw more of the blank-faced sentinels circling the structure.

  Severian skidded to a halt, dropping to a crouch. His arm lifted and shot forwards. Black, nano-carbon steel flashed and the automaton went down with a bloodied flex-blade punched through its skull. It crumpled to its knees, but Severian was already on the move.

  He dived into the recess from which the nearest of the automata had emerged.

  Yasu Nagasena watches the battle on the rooftop with a hunter’s fascination. He is impressed that Severian has managed to penetrate this far. Vadok Singh dismissed his warning as unnecessary, yet here they stand in the Warmason’s extremis chamber, surrounded by free-floating pict-feed images generated by a holosphere.

  Vad
ok Singh is accompanied by a migou pit-fighting creature and two of his glossy black automata. The warrior cyborgs were crafted in the forges of Magos Lukas Chrom, a Mechanicum adept now thought to be a traitor. Singh clearly valued Chrom’s work over his reputation.

  The Warmason’s body is tall and willowy, engineered for height and guild-work. It looks too fragile and too breakable for Terran gravity. Nagasena has been in the presence of the gene-forged many times, but something in Singh’s form unnerves him more than any primarch, legionary or chimeric Mechanicum adept.

  Singh glances over at him, stroking the wax-paper schemata Nagasena asked to see.

  ‘He is resourceful,’ allows Singh, his voice a mix of irritation and admiration. ‘But he is just one warrior.’

  ‘One warrior who has evaded capture by the Emperor’s Custodians and the Black Sentinels. Trust me, you do not know this man.’

  ‘Nor do you,’ snaps Singh.

  ‘To hunt a man is to know him,’ answers Nagasena, his presence here surely making the truth of his words self-evident.

  Singh leans forwards as an explosion on the rooftop blanks the screens for a fraction of a second. The Warmason frowns, tracking the pict-feeds on the roof around in confusion.

  Severian is nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Where is he?’ demands Singh, as though Severian’s disappearance is a personal affront.

  Nagasena has no answer for him. Severian has vanished, and he can do nothing trapped in the extremis chamber. He realises it was a mistake to trust the Warmason’s assurances that there were no blind spots in his defences.

  ‘Open the door,’ he says. ‘Now.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ replies Singh, sifting through myriad holos with impatient haptic gestures.

  ‘Open it,’ repeats Nagasena. ‘I need to be out there.’

  ‘Very well,’ says Singh, tapping a code into a floating keypad of light. ‘But this door will not open again. Not for you or anyone else.’

  ‘I understand,’ says Nagasena as the metres-thick armoured blast door swings slowly open. He slips through as soon as it is wide enough.