The furious eyes of the crewman go wide and white as I cut him down with my sword. The man falls to his knees, still murmuring. Still trying to claw at my vestments and my armour with bloodied hands.
‘I saw it,’ he slurs. ‘T-the abyss.’
Then the man chokes and shudders and falls silent. Falls onto his face. Blood spreads slowly from beneath him towards me.
‘This is a cruel duty.’
The words belong to Haskia, and she does not speak them to me, but to herself, as she looks down at the body at her own feet. One clad in the white remnants of medicae clothes.
‘This is the price of failure,’ Qi-Oh says.
She lowers her chainsword slowly, the teeth still turning. They are stained dark, as is the deck. As are the walls of the corridor. As are my gauntleted hands. The smell of all of that blood washes over me, carried on the warm, wet air of the lowdecks. It smells sour, and old. Rotten.
‘It is a mercy,’ I say, to both of them. ‘Nothing more.’
Haskia nods slowly. Qi-Oh says nothing. None of my Sisters do. No words. No praises. Just solemn silence. I turn to Ashava. Her face is streaked with dirt, her eyes turned gold by her flamer’s pilot light. Beyond her the corridor is littered with the bodies of vassals and ship’s crew. Of serfs and savants. Of those like the crewman I just killed, who could not stand the sight of the abyss. Who gave in to madness and murder the moment the lights went out. Disgust blooms outwards from my core, but the emotion is not alone. Another feeling clings to it, inseparable.
Guilt.
‘Sister Superior?’ Ashava says. ‘Your orders?’
I tear my eyes from the bodies and look at her.
‘Burn them,’ I say, just as I have in every chamber and every corridor before this one.
Ashava nods and hefts her flamer as I turn away to continue on into the ship. I hear the rush of flame at my back even as I hear more screaming from up ahead. Those same few strangled words that echo through the hollow bones of the Unbroken Vow on every deck. In every chamber, hall and corridor.
I saw it.
I saw the abyss.
It takes three hours for my Sisters and I to cut our way through to the place that we saw in the mirror-daemon’s crystal skin.
Just like everywhere else, the corridor that leads to the lowdecks chapel is littered with the dead. Here, though, mercy has already been given. The cruel duty already done. The bodies of the lost have already been burned, reduced to little more than black stains on the decking. The air is cooler here, too. It smells of smoke and burning, and it carries on it the sound of voices. Of singing.
Of my Sisters.
I pick up my pace, and so do the rest of my squad. Smoke billows and coils around us as we reach the lowdecks chapel and go inside. This place too is anointed with ashes. The fleurs-de-lys pinned to the wall are all grey with it. But in amongst the ruin and destruction I see them. My Sisters are bruised and battered, their vestments torn, but they are still standing. I was right. What the daemon showed us was a lie. Relief rushes through me like cold, clean air and I cross the chapel to greet them. I start to smile. Open my mouth to speak. But then I realise that I am looking at four Sisters and not five. That I see Joti and Veridia. Sarita and Munari.
But not Calyth.
‘Where is she?’ Qi-Oh asks the question before I can. She is right beside me despite her injuries, her voice as taut as the muscles in her face. ‘Where is Calyth?’
Not one of them says a word, they merely step aside to let us see the shallow steps leading up to the chancel. Calyth lies on her back on the steps, her armour punctured and split. Scored, by dozens of blades. Blood has spread around her like the wings of the saint, running down the steps in thin red rivulets. Her hair is dyed dark by it.
Qi-Oh lurches forwards as if she is being propelled. She goes to her knees beside Calyth on the steps and puts out her hand, resting it on her fallen Sister’s brow. I do not move. Nor do I look away. I am held in place by an ugly, shameful feeling. One that has no place in the chapel, or in my heart.
Envy.
‘How did it happen?’ I ask.
‘The darkness drove them mad,’ Joti says, without a trace of a smile in her voice. ‘The crew. The vassals. Even the chapel wardens and the priests.’
‘She was killed by civilians,’ Qi-Oh says, without looking up. ‘By those she was sworn to protect.’
‘Yes,’ Sarita says, and she nods. Her slender face is a mess. Her nose is badly broken, and her left ear has been as good as torn off. ‘They were many.’
‘And we were few,’ says Munari. She is as much a mess as her twin, her lips split and ragged, and her teeth pinked with blood.
Qi-Oh looks up. Not at Joti, Sarita or Munari, but at me.
‘You need not have been,’ she says. ‘You should not have been.’
‘Qi-Oh.’ I say her name in warning, but she ignores me. Instead Qi-Oh gets to her feet and stalks down the steps towards me. She is breathing fitfully from her injuries, and from her anger.
‘Daemons lie,’ she snarls. ‘That is what you said.’
‘It is the truth.’
‘Calyth is dead!’
Qi-Oh bellows the words. They echo around the ruined chapel, and echo between us, too. I stare at her in disbelief.
‘Death in battle is an honour,’ I say. ‘The greatest honour.’
Qi-Oh stands there a moment just breathing, her shoulders rising and falling with it.
‘Evangeline is right, Sister,’ Joti says to her, softly. ‘Death draws the God-Emperor’s eye to us. It is a blessing. You know this.’
Qi-Oh does not look at her. Her eyes stay locked on mine. One crimson, and one hazel. There’s a slim line through the blood and ash on her face where a tear has painted it clean. A rivulet, like Calyth’s blood on the steps.
‘Not like this,’ she says. ‘Not this death.’
And then Qi-Oh strides past me, heading for the chapel exit. Joti tries to stop her, as does Ashava, but I hold my hand up.
‘Let her go,’ I say.
And they do, allowing Qi-Oh to leave the chapel without another word. All falls quiet, then, save for the Vow’s creaking and the stirring of thousands of votive flowers. I sheathe my sword, and approach Calyth’s body. I kneel beside her and take hold of the sleeve of my vestments, tearing away a strip of the crimson fabric. I fold it three times to make a fleur-de-lys and place it in Calyth’s hand before closing her fingers around it gently. I look at her face. Despite the manner of her death, Calyth’s expression is peaceful. Beatific. As if she is looking up into warm sunlight.
‘Taken unto Him, sword in hand,’ I say.
From behind me, seven voices speak as one.
‘May her blade never dull.’
I stand then, and turn away from the chancel and from Calyth, lying still in her meadow made of ash-coloured flowers. My Sisters look to me, expectant.
‘Sister Superior,’ Ashava says. ‘Your orders?’
I hesitate before answering, my jaw aching.
‘Burn them,’ I say.
We cut and we kill and we burn our way from one end of the Unbroken Vow to the other, sparing the few members of the ship’s crew that we can and delivering mercy to the rest. Our cruel duty takes us through the ship’s gunnery decks and the crew billets. Through respite areas and training halls. Through furnace chambers and fighter berths. Like my Sisters, my ammunition quickly runs dry, leaving me with nothing but my sword. The blade weighs heavy in my hand, almost completely blackened from use, making the words engraved there illegible.
Some resist the mercy we bring. Those for whom the line was already drawn, who gave in willingly at the sight of devils from the abyss. They fight and claw, their eyes rolled back to white and their jaws slack and unhinged. But they are the minority. Most of those who failed do not resist. Instead they plead for death, pressing their bloodied hands to my armour. They weep and they speak my name, though I have not given it to them. They thank me. With each utterance and with each kill I feel that same ugly envy I felt over Calyth’s death, and the beatific look on her face. I grow more empty with it. Hollow, like the halls of the ship without the crew to fill them.
Qi-Oh does not return, and I do not vox for her. I tell myself it is because I am allowing her temper to cool, but in truth I am just unsure what I would say to her if I did hail her. In the wake of the battle, I am unsure of everything. The decisions I made during the fight. The blade in my hand. My purpose, and my destiny. But I can speak of this to no one. To doubt is to sin. So I do not speak. I do not stop. I do what I have been bidden, leading my Sisters as we cut and kill and burn what is left until we finally reach the ship’s stern, and the armourers’ workhall.
Inside, the workhall is dark. There are no candles. No lumens. Particles of ice turn and glitter under our stablight beams. Save for that, it is still as the grave.
‘I hear no screaming,’ Ashava says. ‘No blasphemous words.’
I listen a moment, my sword held in guard. Ashava is right. There are no screams, but there is another sound carrying on the air.
Sobbing.
‘With me,’ I say, and I follow the sound past the hollow, half-built armour suits, and the racks and racks of weapons. My breathing mists the air, and my boots crush the rough, heavy frost that has formed underfoot.
There are bodies here, too. Stories told in bloody handprints that streak along the walls and the edges of workstations. My heart sinks at the sight of it, and only sinks further still when I finally come upon the source of the sobbing. A woman sitting with her shoulders hunched, cross-legged on the floor. She is void-born thin, with long, augmetic fingers. Another woman lies sprawled out on the deck in front of her, her limbs bent in ways they shouldn’t, a pool of blood slowly painting itself wider around her.
‘Wait here,’ I say to the others.
My Sisters hold position as I approach the two women. One sobbing, and one still.
‘Wyllo,’ I say.
My armourer turns and looks up at me, her dark eyes wide in the lambent light cast by my sword’s power field. Wyllo’s pale face is streaked with blood. Darker than darkness.
None of it hers.
‘M-my lady,’ she says, prostrating herself before me, hands flat on the frozen deck.
‘You needn’t bow,’ I say softly.
Wyllo sits back on her bended knees and looks up at me. ‘The Geller field. It–’
‘Flickered,’ I say. ‘I know. Did you see it? The abyss that waits beyond?’
Wyllo nods. A muscular tic pulls her lips back from her teeth. ‘It saw me,’ she says. ‘Saw all of us.’
Wyllo looks to her left, where Dallia lies, broken.
‘She wouldn’t stop screaming,’ she says absently. ‘On and on. I had to make her stop.’
My heart more than sinks then. It collapses slowly, like fuel at the heart of a fire.
‘You killed her,’ I say.
‘I can still hear it,’ Wyllo says. ‘I shouldn’t be able to hear it.’
She looks up at me again, tears spilling from her edgeless eyes. She gets to her feet, unsteadily.
‘M-make it stop,’ she says. ‘Please.’
That tic is worse now, baring her teeth for her. Her hands are curling into tight, shaking fists.
‘Inventi sumus in fide,’ she stammers, looking at my blade. ‘In faith, we are found.’
‘Yes, we are.’
And then I take hold of her and plunge my sword into her chest. A heart-strike. A clean kill.
A mercy.
Wyllo coughs blood. Struggles for air. Then the life goes out of her eyes. I pull the blade free and lower her to the deck gently, so that she is lying beside Dallia. I hear footsteps at my back. Slow, and uneven. Ashava kneels beside me, though it must hurt her to do it. She does not speak, and nor do I, but something breaks the silence in our stead. The solemn, distant tolling of the Vow’s bells.
‘Eight bells,’ Ashava says, when it stops.
I look down at the sword in my hand. At the blackening of the powered blade.
‘I would have called it later,’ I say softly.