The Outcast Dead

‘A lot of memories here for you, I expect,’ said Tortega.

Kai nodded and said, ‘I reallyhate you.’

IT WAS FOOLISH to be out on the streets this late, but Roxa

Fumes from chemical burners clung to leaning structures built from prefabricated panels stolen from the spoil heaps of the Mechanicum or the construction fields before the palace walls. Whip ante

Roxa

Palladis had given her directions to the Serpent House, and Roxa

And just as the city was never truly dark, nor was it ever truly silent.

Metal hammered on metal, children cried, mothers shouted, lunatic preachers read their holy writ of the Emperor, and drunks yelled obscenities at the air. Roxa

That, her carefully-vetted tutors told her, had been an ancient age, an age before the coming of the Emperor. To Roxa

Roxa

She put such thoughts from her mind and concentrated on the route ahead.

Dangerous enough to roam the streets of the City this late without letting her mind dwell on the injustices of the world or the life on which she had turned her back. Thiswas her life now, and it was about as far from the one she had known as it was possible to get.

Swathed in a hooded robe of rough muddy brown fabric that Roxa

The less notice she attracted the better.

The Serpent House was deep in Dhakal territory, and she most assuredly did not want to run into any of the Babu’s men before she got there. At best they would kill her quickly and rob her. At worst they’d take their time in violating her before dumping the mutilated corpse in the gutter.

Roxa

Yes, it was dangerous to be out in the Petitioner’s City after sundown, but Maya’s little ones needed counterbiotics and Antioch was the only chirurgeon who had medicine that hadn’t been cut with too many impurities to do any good. The old man’s prices were ruinous, but that didn’t matter to Palladis when it came to children.

In any case, what price could you put on a life when the temple was never short of money?

The bereaved were generous with their coin, as though fearing any hint of pecuniary reticence would somehow prevent their dead from finding peace. Imperial truth owned to no life beyond the corporeal, that death was the end of a person’s journey, but Roxa

She shook off such dangerous thoughts, feeling her breath quicken and her heartbeat race. Suppressed memories threatened to surface, horrors of skinless bodies on fire from the marrow, wet organs hanging from ruptured torsos and skulls licked clean from the inside, but she fought to quell them by fixing on something inconsequential.

The wall next to her was daubed with graffiti, and she focussed the entirety of her attention upon it as her memory recalled the smell of blood and the ozone stink of failing shields. It was a mural depicting hulking warriors of the Legiones Astartes atop newly conquered worlds, gaudy in colour and robust in vigour if not aesthetic merit. The artist was clearly ignorant of their true scale, as the armoured figures were not much bigger than the mortal soldiers accompanying them.

Roxa

The mural had been vandalised, and several of the figures were partially obscured with hurled whitewash and slogans that reassuringly told her that the Emperor protected. The purple of the Emperor’s Children and the blue of the World Eaters was almost completely gone, while the white and ochre green of the Death Guard poked out from a numerous angry brush strokes. A Luna Wolf howled from behind a wide splash of paint, while an Iron Warrior’s face had been unfairly hacked from the wall and lay in pieces on the hard-packed earth.

Roxa

‘In the desert there is no life,’ she said, repeating the mantra her tutors had taught her so long ago. ‘In the desert I am alone and nothing can touch me. I am inviolate.’

‘Too bad you’re far from a desert, little girl,’ grunted a voice behind her.