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The Darkling Hours – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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The Darkling Hours

Rachel Harrison

The city of Termina never stops singing.

Commissar Severina Raine knows that the sound is just the wind cutting through the city’s many mineshafts and tunnels. It can be heard all over Termina, from the refineries on the surface to the processing plants far below, where Raine and her regiment, the Eleventh Antari Rifles, are billeted. There is no escaping the city’s singing, but in the old overseer’s watch room where Raine now sits and waits, it is at least a little quieter. The hanging lumens overhead turn in that same wind as it finds its way through cracks in the poorly plastered walls. Light glances off the casing of Raine’s timepiece as she watches the hands tick around towards the crack in the top of the face. Her body aches from the previous day of fighting and her eyes are dry and gritty. She should be taking the time she has been given to sleep, but she finds that she cannot. Not while the fight goes on above her.

And certainly not with the city singing.

‘It sounds like something living, don’t you think?’

Raine clicks her timepiece closed and puts it back in the chest pocket of her coat. Andren Fel takes a seat on the opposite side of the overseer’s table and hands her a tin cup with a loop of thorns scored into the rim. It is warm to the touch from the windfall tea inside it.

‘I think it sounds like singing,’ Raine says.

‘Or howling,’ Fel says. ‘Either way, it is sorrowful.’

The storm trooper captain is unarmoured, clad in black fatigues that are sewn with the red bars that mark his rank. Fel’s dark hair has got nearly to the length where it can tangle, and his face is cut and bruised. His densely tattooed hands are split badly across the knuckles. He is also meant to be taking the two hours they have been given to rest, but Raine knows that is as difficult for him as it is for her. That is why they often spend these hours talking.

‘Shouldn’t howling be a comfort for a Duskhound?’ Raine asks.

Fel laughs at that, a low chuckle.

‘True enough,’ he says.

A tremor runs through the undercroft that makes the overhead lumens flicker and hum. Dust falls in fine columns from the ceiling and scatters on the wooden surface of the table.

‘I saw Devri on the way up,’ Fel says. ‘He had to pull Blue Company out of the docks. The Sighted sank the lot to keep them from pushing up to the drilling fields.’

Raine nods and drinks from her tin cup. The windfall tea is bitter and spiced. It only grows on Antar, and only in the northwilds, where Fel was raised before he was taken for the Schola Antari.

‘Whatever the Sighted intend to take from Termina, it is in the mines,’ Raine says. ‘They have either abandoned or destroyed key locations all across the city, but they refuse to surrender the pits.’

‘Seems a lot of blood to spend for the sake of promethium,’ Fel says.

Raine nods.

‘If they just wanted promethium they wouldn’t have fled the refineries. It must be something else. Something they can twist and use.’

‘Something buried deep,’ Fel says.

A second, larger tremor shakes the room. More dust falls from the ceiling, and the lumens fail altogether for a moment. In the brief instant of absolute darkness Raine can’t help thinking of the battle before this one, on Gholl, where she was captured by the Sighted and taken into the crystal caverns under the surface.

Buried, deep.

Raine pushes the memory – and the unease that comes with it – aside. She drinks from her tin cup again, nearly draining it. When she puts it down, the leaves cling to the enamel inside.

‘You read the leaves before every fight, don’t you?’ she asks Fel.

He looks down at his own cup and nods.

‘I do.’

‘Would you show me how it’s done?’

‘I thought you didn’t believe in omens or fates,’ he says.

Raine shakes her head.

‘I don’t, but you do.’

Fel smiles.

‘Alright,’ he says. ‘I’ll show you.’

Raine holds out her cup to hand it to him, but he shakes his head.

‘It has to be you that sets the leaves, so that our fates don’t get crossed.’ He shows her using his own cup. ‘Turn the tea three times, and then tip out what’s left.’

Raine does as he says, and tips the remains of her windfall tea out onto the floor before putting her cup back on the table between them.

‘Where did you learn this?’ Raine asks.

‘My mother taught me,’ Fel says simply.

Raine understands then why the ritual means so much, because it must remind him of home, and of the family he lost. Raine feels the timepiece ticking in her pocket like a second heartbeat.

Fel picks up the cup in his tattooed hand and frowns.

Raine cannot help it. She leans forward, just slightly.

‘What do you see?’ she asks.

‘Hunting birds,’ he says, turning the cup so that she can see. ‘For a chase that ends in blood.’

Raine catches herself smiling.

‘Not so surprising,’ she says. ‘And the rest?’

He turns the cup as if to look at it another way, still frowning.

‘The duskhound,’ he says, after a moment.

‘The story that your squad is named for,’ Raine says.

Fel nods.

‘What does it mean?’ Raine asks, though she can guess, because he’s told her the old story.

Fel puts the cup down on the table.

‘It means death, following close by.’

The overhead lumens stutter again.

‘Isn’t it always?’ Raine asks.

The vox-bead Raine wears crackles in her ear before Fel can answer her. It is the Antari general, Juna Keene. From the way Fel reacts, Raine can tell he is receiving the same message.

‘The timetable has moved up. Tactical briefing in ten minutes in the main control hub.’

‘Acknowledged,’ Raine says, into her vox-link. She hears Fel do the same.

‘Back to duty, then, captain,’ she says.

Fel nods and picks up the tin cups.

‘Aye, commissar,’ he says.

In the quiet that follows his words, Raine listens to the sound echoing from Termina’s tunnels and hollows, and realises that she was wrong, and Fel was right.

It really does sound like howling.

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