They are coming, it whispers in Vaij Echmed’s ear, intimately close, like someone sharing a secret.
The gift of Hearing awakened in him many years ago, on a world with a nightmare sky. However irreverent and aloof, the voice always speaks the truth. Echmed owes his life to this. And today, its words ring especially portentous. Not only have his scars, these gnarled remnants of the brands and tattoos that once avowed his disparate allegiances, been painfully inflamed all night; there is also that unmarked Arbites-issue Carcerator a few hundred metres behind him, prowling with a predator’s patience through the early-morning throngs of shift workers clogging Mudders’ Stretch.
His unease grows. He turns aside and hastens on towards the slums sprawling in the pollution-sodden shadow of the vast Chymoponicum.
A soothsayer plies her trade across the dingy alleyway from Echmed’s home. He does not know the young woman’s name. She sells cheap charms and amulets, and offers readings of the Emperor’s Tarot at her ramshackle stall. Thin and pale, her golden hair greying, she is always clad in the same ragged patchwork garment, a formerly regal up-hive society gown clumsily mended almost beyond recognition.
Its state mirrors her mind’s. Some calamitous event shattered her sanity, Echmed suspects, its pieces never to be put together quite the right way again. Still, she is harmless enough. Some days, she waves to him, smiling, innocent and naïve as a child; other days, she condescends to offer an aristocrat’s dignified nod. Sometimes she sits statue-still, dead to the world, lost in the maze of her broken memories.
Today, he finds her staring at a meticulously laid tarot spread, her eyes huge in her gaunt face. When she glimpses Echmed, she gives him a strange look, haunting and haunted both.
They are coming! The voice chuckles, and Echmed realises that, somehow, she knows it too.
He quickly lets himself into the tiny hab he shares with Pieter, a former Guardsman less than half his age. A hook-charge on Diacon VII took Pieter’s legs; sepsis went on to take his youthful constitution, leaving him a frail, sickly cripple.
The Munitorum authorised augmetic replacements when it invalided him out, cheap, noisy plastek prostheses prone to malfunctioning. Pieter’s minuscule service pension covers neither their upkeep nor the sundry medications he requires.
Yet he bears his lot with saintlike patience, drawing on some deep fount of quiet optimism. Echmed cares for the lad like a son and wishes he could do more for him.
He wishes things had not come to this.
Pieter is seated in front of a freshly prepared and illegally obtained Militarum ration pack when Echmed enters. On seeing the older man’s expression, he laboriously pulls himself to his feet.
‘They are coming,’ Echmed tells him, unthinkingly echoing the voice. ‘They’ll be here soon.’
The lad does not question this. He trusts him, despite having been told all about Vaij Echmed’s many past treasons: the causes forsaken, the oaths betrayed, the comrades abandoned. He knows they are why Echmed is trying to do right by him now.
‘How did they find you?’
Echmed can only shrug. How do they find anyone?
One of Pieter’s knees gives. He sways, clutching the table, and looks down at his legs. On a good day, he can totter around the hab unaided. Today is not a good day.
‘You told me too much, Vaij,’ he says, white-faced but still smiling that gentle smile of his.
‘Maybe,’ concedes Echmed. ‘For decades I’d been lying to others, to myself. To a god or two. You were the first person I’d ever felt I could trust with the truth, because…’
He falters.
‘Because you knew I’d understand.’ Grimacing, Pieter draws himself upright. ‘Well, I won’t tell them a thing, whatever they do to me. Not a fragging thing.’
If only you knew, Echmed thinks, though he is sure Pieter means every word. He is sure, too, that he can faintly hear the Carcerator growling down the alleyway.
‘Come here, lad.’ He draws him into a delicate, one-armed embrace. Pieter sighs, resting his head against the veteran’s shoulder.
‘It’s alright,’ Echmed murmurs. ‘I’ll look after you.’
‘I know. You always do.’
Piet’s augmetic limbs hiss as they settle. A piston groans like a wounded animal. Echmed holds him tight, hoping this closeness can convey his unspoken regrets.
The voice remains gleefully silent. Outside, the Carcerator’s hungry snarl closes in.
Eventually, Echmed forces himself to let go. He eases Pieter back into the chair and gently withdraws his old Militarum combat knife from where he slipped it between the lad’s ribs and into his heart.
Echmed swallows. He has looked upon many a dead man’s face, but none seemed as peaceful as Piet’s. He is reaching out to touch his cheek when a commotion erupts in the alley. Somebody screams. Knowing he should run, he creeps to the door and eases it open to peer outside.
The soothsayer’s stall has collapsed. Two black-coated individuals have seized the woman, deaf to her tearful protests of devotion to Him Upon the Highmost Throne, and are hauling her towards the idling Carcerator. Stumbling along, she tears her gown, thrashing in their merciless grip; her bare feet and their heavy boots alike trample the tarot cards that now lie scattered in the dirt.
When her red-rimmed eyes meet Echmed’s, she quietens. They brim with the misery of knowing she faces life’s last, worst inevitability. He remembers the look she gave him earlier, haunting and haunted both.
Then she is gone, bundled roughly into the transport. Its hatch slams shut with a hollow, funereal boom. Her captors climb aboard, not even glancing in Echmed’s direction, and the Carcerator reverses back up the alley, rumbling contentedly.
A weariness far beyond his fifty-seven years settles on Vaij Echmed. Long after the Carcerator’s low, sated growl has faded into the distance, he is still standing there, bloody knife in hand, staring at the spilt tarot cards.
They came, coos the voice, truthful as ever.
