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Wolf Mother

Graham McNeill

A cruel smile played over Xisan’s purple-stained lips as the woman stumbled. She looked up with terrified eyes.

‘Please, my daughter, she–’

Xisan backhanded his fist across her face.

‘You don’t get to speak.’

She spat blood and looked up from the deck with hate.

Xisan laughed. He’d discovered her in a darkened sub-transit of Molech’s Enlightenment, calling the girl’s name and frantic with dread.

Too good an opportunity to ignore.

She’d run to him, eyes wet with tears. Hoping for help.

Xisan had been tasked with finding children, but with the warship overburdened with refugees fleeing the Warmaster’s victory on Molech, finding anyone alone was a gift.

He’d clubbed her to the ground and bound her wrists with baling twine before administering a hypo loaded with soporific venom. Not enough to put her out completely, just enough to render her compliant.

She begged in slurred fragments, not for her own life, but that of her daughter. Perhaps she knew, with the psychic womb-tether of mothers, that he’d been the one who’d taken her.

Her fear energised Xisan. It empowered him.

He remembered the girl. Vivyen, she’d called herself.

The Serpent Gods favoured innocence in those offered unto them, but in such times of tribulation all offers of flesh were welcome.

Shargali-Shi would be pleased to have a mother and daughter to offer the Serpent Gods. Those linked by blood were a greater prize than strangers.

He ignored the woman’s slurred protests as he dragged her through the hidden pathways of the ship. Down into the darkness below the waterline. Down to where Shargali-Shi awaited.

The Ophiolater heard the sibilant voices of the Serpent Gods in his venom-fugues and spread their wisdom among the Vril-yaal. Only a very few of the chosen people had escaped aboard Molech’s Enlightenment, and they used the darkness to rebuild, to renew their faith.

House Devine had fallen on Molech, but enough of the Vril-yaal remained to carry their faith to the stars. Such times of trial were necessary, claimed Shargali-Shi, for only through such testing would true strength emerge.

The woman’s fear increased the deeper they delved into the creaking, lightless bilges of Molech’s Enlightenment. Rusted ductwork gurgled and moaned, exhaling reeking steam and sweating foetid liquids; the bowels of the vessel in all senses of the word.

Some of the Vril-yaal claimed to hear this darkness mutter or that inhuman shadows moved in the silences between breaths. Xisan once thought he’d caught a glimpse of a giant in grey with frost-blue eyes. He never knew if that had been something real or the result of the many ergots he’d ingested.

The woman suddenly stopped, eyes wide, brow furrowed.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Don’t you dare.’

‘You don’t get to speak,’ said Xisan again.

Something slammed into the deck plates behind him. Something with mass and density to buckle sheet metal.

He spun around in time to see a vast shape filling the transit. Faint slivers of light reflected from burnished plate emitting a sub-aural buzz that set his teeth on edge. Xisan smelled caustic lapping powders and oily sweat.

He heard bellows breath like that of hormone-bulked livestock.

‘And you don’t get to live,’ growled the giant.

A glittering blade rammed into Xisan’s gut, punching out through his spine. The giant twisted the sword and hooked out Xisan’s bowels. His intestines followed, splattering the deck like mortuary slops.

He dropped to his knees, aghast at the life-ending quantities of blood leaving him. The woman stood over him, all traces of fear gone. Inexplicably, she now held a gun pointed at his head, a weapon of chromed steel with the inlaid form of a white snake coiled around the barrel.

‘Don’t you die on me, damn you,’ she said, all traces of the slurred pleading tones erased from her voice. Her eyes were clear, honed like razors.

She held his dying body upright, the warm anodized steel of the cannon’s barrel pressed hard into his neck.

‘Where’s Vivyen?’ demanded the woman. ‘Where’s my daughter? Tell me and I’ll end you quickly.’

Xisan grinned through a mouthful of blood.

Alivia Sureka kicked the corpse to the deck and turned her weapon on the armoured Space Marine who’d disembowelled him. She thumbed back the hammer as he took a step forward. He made no sound, surely an impossibility for one of his kind.

‘Why the hell did you have to kill him?’ she said, keeping the sights centred on his bare head. Space Marine or not, one bullet would carve a canyon through his skull.

‘You’re welcome,’ he said.

‘I needed him alive.’

He grinned. ‘You mean you weren’t his helpless prisoner?’

Alivia sighed and waggled the gun barrel. ‘Hardly.’

‘Looked like you were.’

‘That’s what I needed him to think.’

‘And why was that?’

‘He took my daughter,’ said Alivia, her voice almost cracking at the thought of this bottom-feeding predator’s coven holding Vivyen. ‘He was taking me to his lair.’

‘Ah, so you let yourself be captured.’

‘You catch on quick,’ said Alivia as the warrior bent to clean his blade on the dead man’s tunic. A golden-hilted gladius, fashioned for transhuman hands, and yet it seemed a small weapon for one so powerful. Alivia had seen plenty of Space Marines in the course of her existence, but the sheer inhuman scale of them never failed to disgust her.

Of all His creations, she disliked them the most.

This one was bearded with a scalp of close-cropped auburn hair. His worn-leather skin was heavily scarred from recent combat. Dark tattoos of curved blades and blood drops painted his cheeks. Gang markings, serpentine around his eyes and brow. Indistinct in the shadow, but chillingly familiar.

An ash-dulled bolt pistol was mag-locked to his thigh, and strapped to the opposite hip was a serrated combat blade and a grenade harness. Alivia saw three explosive canisters buckled in the loops.

‘That’s an interesting weapon you have,’ he said, rising to his full height and ramming the gladius into a cobalt-blue sheath at his belt.

‘I could say the same thing,’ countered Alivia, sensing the power unwittingly bound to the blade. ‘That’s no ordinary line weapon. It’s shed some potent blood.’

‘And that’s no ordinary gun.’

‘It’s a Ferlach serpenta,’ said Alivia.

The Space Marine nodded. ‘Nice.’

‘Crafted by the lady herself to my exact specifications.’

‘Unlikely.’

‘How so?’ asked Alivia.

‘Theresia Ferlach died in the Burning of Carinthia.’

‘And you know that how?’

‘I set the fire that burned her weapon forges.’

Alivia applied fractionally more pressure to the trigger.

‘Who are you?’ she asked. ‘And how does a Space Marine come to be aboard this ship?’

‘I’m Severian,’ he said with a feral grin, the tattooed blades twisting on his gnarled skin. And Alivia finally remembered where she’d seen his gang markings before – the last time she had truly feared for her life.

‘Cthonia…’ she said. ‘You’re a Son of Horus.’

Alivia pulled the trigger.

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Blades of the Traitor in 2015.
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