Rise – Ben Counter Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Rise – Ben Counter

  About the Author

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  Rise

  Ben Counter

  It was a rising and seductive pain; a delicious, serpentine thing that wound around his bones and seethed through his muscles. He felt it galloping up and down his spine, accompanied by the slow suffusing of his brain until his senses were bathed in red agony.

  It would devour him, if he let it. It would become a part of him from which he could not separate, and he would never wake up.

  Skanis demanded his body fight it. He felt his wrists and ankles straining at the straps that held him down. Another restraint around his neck choked him as his body arched against the slab. He forced his eyes open and his sight, sharpened by hours in darkness, picked out the glimmer of metal.

  The face of the haemonculus grinned down at him. Its name surfaced from Skanis’ memory. Urviel. The haemonculus’ face was a mask made from the skin of another creature, fastened to the front of its skull by metal staples. Its emaciated ribcage was skinless and organs slithered between the white bones. Four many-jointed arms sprouted from his shoulders, each ending in medical implements and powered saws instead of fingers. A filthy length of hide was wrapped around its waist, with pockets and loops holding blades and drills of every dimension.

  ‘It wakes,’ said Urviel. One of its extra arms ran bladed fingers down Skanis’ chest.

  ‘Is it done?’ gasped Skanis. The tide of pain was receding, slowly relinquishing each joint and organ.

  ‘Oh, little bird,’ said Urviel. ‘It will never be done.’

  Skanis thrashed against the restraints. A panic welled in him and he wondered if he would ever leave the haemonculus’ lab. He realised the creature’s promise to transform him could have been a trick to lure him upon the slab in order to experiment on him forever, to turn him over and over again into new shapes of malleable flesh until his life finally gave out.

  Urviel held up a hand. A mockery of contriteness passed over its mutilated features. ‘I jest,’ it said. It released the buckle holding the strap around Skanis’ neck, then freed one of his hands. Skanis pulled at the strap around his remaining wrist as the haemonculus backed away.

  The laboratory was almost pitch black and infernally hot. Body parts from a dozen species hung on the walls, arms and legs racked together, heads hanging by lengths of chain from the ceiling. Cages held heaps of spoil and rags that might once have been alive. The floor was swamped with noxious fluid. Every workbench and operating slab was covered in the detritus of Urviel’s work. Scalpels and forceps. Vials of corrosive. Rib spreaders, circular saws, industrial shears, bottled organs and a bowl of eyes.

  Skanis released his ankles and slid off the slab. He stumbled, his legs unsteady beneath him. His body felt different – tauter, quicker and more sensitive. He still wore the battlegear of his warrior clan, now opened up in several places, recut and cinched in around his new, slenderer frame. The pain was pooling now in the areas the haemonculus had worked on – his knees, hips and shoulders, two hot red strips down his back, a deep throbbing ache in his bones. His whole body felt tuned up and tightened. He moved an arm experimentally, and the limb reacted with an insect-like quickness.

  ‘What have you done?’ he asked, his throat so raw that the words came out in a croaking hiss.

  ‘All that you asked,’ said Urviel. ‘I hollowed your bones. Your pelvis is new – something of my own design. Do you like vertebrae? You have many more. My speciality.’ Urviel’s fingers folded in on themselves like the fronds of an anemone. ‘I like spines.’

  Skanis craned his neck, trying to get a glimpse behind him.

  ‘Indeed, it is as you wished,’ said Urviel, ‘They are there. Freshly harvested. I am so glad I found a home for them before they decayed.’

  ‘I have to use them.’

  Urviel shook his head. ‘Not here. You will never leave the ground. You need thermal currents for the first time. I have seen it. Commorragh will not let you go with ease. You must rise above it first.’

  ‘Then I will.’ Skanis reached a hand behind him. He felt delicate frills of flesh there, and the nerve endings he found fired back sensations from skin and muscle he had never possessed before. ‘I will leave this city of filth behind.’

  ‘You will return,’ said Urviel. ‘It is addictive. You will never find another drug quite as intoxicating as the changing of the flesh, little bird. But before you go…’

  ‘What?’ said Skanis impatiently.

  ‘You must know how few of you find what you seek,’ said the haemonculus. ‘Always they say they will be the one to prevail. If one in a hundred, one in a thousand survives, every one believes it will be him. I have done fine work. None better in fact. But even so, the fates say you will die.’

  ‘What do you care?’ retorted Skanis. ‘You have your payment.’

  ‘Six corpses,’ agreed Urviel. ‘Young and fresh.’

  ‘I can never go back to my kabal because of what I did to get them.’ Skanis looked up through a gap in the ceiling of the ruin that served as the haemonculus’ lab. The spires of the city rose in every direction, dark spears thrust up into the cloud layer, their pinnacles lost in the smog that blanketed the city. He felt the new talons of his toes digging into the flagstones, and the grit of the floor beneath him made his stomach cramp in disgust. ‘And I will never return here, either. My feet will never touch the ground of Commorragh again.’

  Kaledari Spire was the tallest structure in this region of Commorragh. Skanis had heard of it, but never entered, for his kabal had been obsessed only with holding onto the wretched patch of the city they considered theirs. To them, that tangle of streets and slaughterhouses was the entire galaxy. As Skanis looked up at the dozens of levels of the spire, he caught a glimpse of how vast reality was, of how endless a single soul’s experience could be if he only left the filth of the streets behind.

  The spire entrance yawned, unguarded. The lower floors were in disarray. Fallen rubble choked the surrounding alleyways, and the archways were dark and blinded. Skanis’ sharp eyes caught movement, focusing in like a bird of prey seizing on its quarry.

  A tiny winged shape struggled down in the murk. Skanis crouched down and saw it was a young razorwing chick. Half-lizard, half-bird, the razorwings were raptors uniquely adapted for the toxic atmosphere and cruel ecosystems of Commorragh. They were survivors. This one, however, was mewling and writhing on the ground. On the lintel of the archway above was a nest of metallic fibres and bones from which the chick had fallen.

  ‘You tried to fly too soon,’ said Skanis. He picked up the chick and the ruffling of its knife-like feathers was a strange cascade of pain against the inflamed nerve endings of his palm. Its plumage was dark red and gunmetal, its beak bright silver and its eyes tiny flecks of flint.

  ‘Come with me. We will fly together.’ He placed the razorwing chick carefully on his shoulder. It dug its talons into the flesh and perched there, the pinpricks of pain a reminder that Skanis wasn’t quite alone in his quest.

  He walked through the shadowy archway into the spire’s ground floor, aware that his talons had left the soil of Commorragh for the last time.

  The lower levels of the spire were barely lit by age-clouded lanterns that shed pools of painful green light. Old, gnawed bones clogged crusted drains cut into the floors. Skanis realised this place had once been an abattoir where the fruits of drukhari raids had been dismembered for a purpose Kaledari Spire had long forgotten. Sculptures of kabalite warriors, with their features hidden behin
d the smooth faceplates of their armoured helms, stood sentinel along the walls. Chains and manacles were rusted away to brown stains. Acts of savagery had played out in dark splendour here. Now, it was worse.

  Skanis felt eyes on him the moment he had walked through a second archway. It was not long before he heard the sound of skin against stone and glimpsed the flicker of a moving shadow.

  Everywhere in Commorragh had its predators. Here, they were slithering things without faces that lurked and waited, shivering with anticipation of the first glimmers of body heat. Skanis knew the tales. Their own unnatural flesh was no good. They needed outsiders. They needed something warm.

  Skanis backed up against the wall as he heard something slapping on the wet floor. His hand went to the splinter pistol in its holster at his waist. It was a custom model, one he had crafted himself, fully loaded with a core of fragmenting crystal. In his other hand, he had the curved dagger that he had possessed for as long as he could remember and honed against the bones of other kabalites.

  The creature emerged into the light. Skanis had never seen one so close up before. Its flesh was not just dark; it glowed like black crystal, and the interior sparkled as if it were a portal onto a view of the void. Green light played along the rises and falls in its almost featureless face. It carried a pair of serrated blades and wore the remains of a set of dark burgundy robes, now barely clinging to it.

  ‘Come with us,’ said the mandrake, its voice a dry slither. ‘We will show you the way.’

  ‘You lie,’ replied Skanis. He was aware of more movement behind him. They were trying to surround him and cut him off, like a feral pack closing off the prey’s escape routes.

  ‘Grant us payment,’ said the mandrake. ‘A finger. Just a finger. It’s all we want.’

  ‘I remember your kind,’ said Skanis. ‘The archons hired you to spy on our enemies. You took gold and living slaves for your services. Everyone spoke of you with dread. But what are you now?’ Skanis indicated the chewed bones on the floor. ‘This is what they feed you? Scraps from their table? They have turned the mandrakes of Commorragh into animals, and you let them do it.’

  The lead mandrake took a few steps closer. ‘We are suffered to live. One day we will rise again. We will eat our fill and take our desires. One day, outsider. For now, just allow us a taste. A few red drops and we will take you to them.’

  ‘You will devour me alive.’

  The mandrake’s head tipped slightly to the side. With no features on its face to read, it was impossible to guess whether it was smiling or not. ‘Maybe. Would you like us to?’

  As a second mandrake lurched screaming out of the darkness, Skanis’ reflexes surprised even him. The splinter pistol was out of its holster and levelled at the creature instantly. He pulled the trigger and a stream of crystalline shards punched through the face and upper chest of the mandrake. Liquid blackness poured out of its torn body.

  The razorwing chick squawked and leapt off his shoulder, flittering off into the darkness.

  Skanis reeled with the unfamiliarity of his new body. He staggered and the wounded mandrake leapt at him. Its full weight barged Skanis into the wall behind him and his head rang off the stonework. Serrated blades stabbed towards his abdomen and he squirmed out from under the mandrake, falling back to the floor as the mandrake’s knives drew sparks from the wall.

  Skanis’ mind whirled. He commanded his uncoordinated limbs to obey him. They jerked and spasmed as if they were wound too tight to be controlled. He scrabbled away from the mandrake, and its vestigial features contorted in what might have passed for a smile.

  Its hunger was its weakness.

  The mandrake pounced on Skanis, eager to rend and devour. Skanis rolled out from under it and drove a hand into the back of its head, slamming it face-first into the floor. He raised his knife hand and drove it down, aiming for the place where spine met skull. Resistance gave way and the mandrake flopped down to the ground.

  Skanis was back onto his feet and running without seeming to will it. The other mandrakes had smelt blood and were following him, led by the one who had spoken. Skanis wheeled around a corner and backed against one of the kabalite statues.

  Their hunger was their weakness. In their desperation to feast on him, the mandrakes were no more than animals. They could not think. That was how he would beat them. While he was still learning how to use his new body, Skanis had to rely on his mind.

  The lead mandrake rushed around the corner headlong, heedless of Skanis lying in wait. Skanis fired once, the shard flying wide, before he ran at the mandrake and let it stab its knife towards his chest. Within his guard, it was off-balance and Skanis parried its second blade, catching its arm in the crook of his elbow, wrenching it back and down.

  He had learned to fight and kill while claiming his place among the warriors of his kabal. Skanis had been destined to be a future dracon or even archon, to assassinate his way into a position of power and lead an army of Commorragh. He cared for none of that now, but knew the murderous ways he had learned to get him there would serve him here too.

  The mandrake’s shoulder separated. Skanis slammed his other elbow into its back, forcing his weight down onto it. A third creature screeched as it leaped and kicked off the walls towards him, but Skanis shot it out of the air with a shard through the throat. It tumbled as it hit the ground in a flurry of obsidian limbs.

  ‘You were once nightmares,’ spat Skanis. The thing beneath him howled and hissed. ‘Fear itself! Now you are vermin.’ He drove his knife into the side of the mandrake’s head. It spasmed under him, just once, then was still.

  Skanis’ heart was hammering faster than it ever had before. Finally, the pain caught up with him. He looked down and realised one of the mandrake’s knives had sliced his forearm and opened up a long gash. Warm blood ran down his arm and dripped off his elbow.

  He had been too slow. He was still getting used to his new form, and as heightened as his senses and reflexes were, he was not immortal. The first mandrake had nearly killed him. Had they been in possession of their senses, the next two would certainly have finished him. His hollow bones were fragile now, and if he was caught unawares, he would die.

  Skanis tensed as he spotted movement again, but realised it was the flickering of tiny wings. The razorwing chick hopped between the scattered bones and onto the corpse at his feet. Skanis held up his hand, slick with the Mandrake’s blood. The chick landed upon it and nipped at his fingers to lap up drops of cooling blood.

  Slithering footsteps sounded in the darkness. ‘There will be more,’ Skanis told the chick. ‘I can’t kill them all. Not yet.’

  Ahead of him was an area of collapse and disrepair. A section of the floor above had fallen in, the debris forming a crude staircase. Lights glimmered in the levels above, and from somewhere Skanis could hear the strains of music.

  ‘Upwards,’ said Skanis to the chick. It let out a purring trill in response. ‘Let us find who throws the scraps to these vermin.’

  Music was coming from an orchestra of skinned and articulated corpses. Each body was from a different species. The huge shoulder muscles of an ork bunched and contracted as it worked the bow of a stringed instrument as tall as itself. The delicate rise and fall of its tones made a mockery of the creature’s brutal frame. A human body bent over a drum made of another creature’s ribcage and stretched skin, its finger bones tapping out the rhythm that underpinned the music. A four-armed, snake-bodied sslyth played a complex reed instrument with compressed air piped through its glistening jaws.

  The music played for the benefit of a grand court inhabiting the lavish, perfumed mansion that took up this floor of the spire. Skanis’ jaw clenched as he looked across the scenes of the court. He had hoped he could move through here unnoticed, reach the entrance halls past the main audience chamber and continue upwards. But that would be impossible.

  The lord of this
court watched over the grand hall. His bulk was considerable, though most of it seemed taken up by the machinery mounted on his back that hooked dozens of cylinders of narcotic fluids up to his spine. The skin of his face sagged like melting wax beneath the half-mask of idealised features. Surrounded by a pungent haze of opiates, the lord sat on a throne of near-naked drukhari, whose athletic bodies were twined into the shape of a high-backed chair big enough to support the lord’s mass.

  A trio of dancers moved in time to the corpse-orchestra’s music. They had the lean, dangerous athleticism of the wych-cultists who fought in the arenas of Commorragh. A beautiful lady with an elaborate ivory-coloured dress and a silver half-mask watched them, as did other, lesser ladies-in-waiting gathered around her like a flock of attentive birds. A gaggle of sycophants and fawners surrounded the lord’s throne. Many of them were all but insensible from the narcotics pumped into them through lines hooked up to the lord’s own apparatus, while others stood patiently to wait on his every need.

  Knots of courtiers lingered everywhere, all in the impractically flamboyant fashions of Commorragh’s nobility. Some admired the dancers or whispered advice to those more grandly dressed than themselves. Others simply observed, sending pages to carry messages back and forth through the court of Kaledari Spire.

  The noble lady in white approached Skanis, accompanied by two handmaidens who carried the train of her long dress. Her silver half-mask had red-rimmed eyespots giving her a ravenous, daemonic look.

  The razorwing chick trilled in alarm and discomfort, as if it smelled something on the lady it did not like.

  ‘You are a newcomer,’ she said with a smile. Her voice was as clear and brittle as glass. ‘Few come to Kaledari Spire. Certainly not one as exotic as yourself.’ She ran a hand through the fleshy fronds protruding from Skanis’ back, and he shuddered with the input from the new nerve endings the haemonculus had implanted there.

  ‘I’m not surprised you are alone,’ said Skanis. ‘Your pets below are less than welcoming.’