Durham Red: The Unquiet Grave Read online

  Red cursed to herself. The Eye of God was as breathtaking as it was unnerving, a crater so vast it reached to the horizon and beyond. It was impossible to see it as a shape, it was just a hazy wall in the distance, and a cliff dropping away from the front of the monastery, so deep that light never reached the bottom.

  She began trudging along. The wind, fast and icy cold as it was, didn't have much force behind it. There wasn't enough density in the air. It didn't slow her, but every now and then its gentle pushes made her realise how close she was to the sheer drop dozens of kilometres deep.

  "It's a plot," she snarled into the mask. "That little bitch is trying to get me to trip and fall off the edge, let this place do her dirty work for her."

  The rim of the Eye wasn't level or smooth, despite how it looked from the air. The edge of the crater was ragged, torn. Great shards of glassy rock still speared up from it like broken teeth, the remnants of the titan blister that had once stood here, and in other places the ground was shattered and scoured into great gullies. There were rock fragments and frost everywhere.

  Hard going.

  After a while, Red noticed that the width of ground she had to walk on was becoming steadily less. The double crater Rinaud had called the Hourglass almost touched the Eye at a point ahead of her, and the flat space between them was being drawn into a point. Red wondered if she would reach the source of the tracker signal before she ran out of ground.

  She remembered Rinaud's story about the monk who fell into the Hourglass. Had he been making this same journey?

  He was probably down there, freeze-dried, his screaming face frozen forever, looking up at her right now.

  Red swore and shook the thought away. The trip was tough enough without trying to scare herself silly.

  Just before she reached the point where the Hourglass touched the Eye of God, the tracker started to whine. Red took it out of her cowl and saw that the green dot was almost at the centre of the screen. The distance marker was down to a few metres.

  She glanced about. Just bare, gleaming rock, frost, terrifying drops. No sign of a corpse, Iconoclast or otherwise.

  "Great. Snecking great. What the hell am I looking for?"

  She moved forward and risked a glance back towards the monastery. It was mostly concealed by upright shards and boulders, but what she could see of it looked very small indeed.

  "Fine place to hide a body, if there is one. What kind of dipstick would come out here?" She shivered. "Except me. Christ, what am I doing?"

  There was nothing here. It was some kind of trick, to get Red away from the monastery. Maybe Ketta had some other target.

  Maybe she was after Godolkin, and wanted to throw Red off the scent.

  It was time to go back. She turned, began to make her way back along the rim, and as she did so she noticed something to her right. One of the great gullies, the one she had most recently had to climb into and back out of again, had been modified. She hadn't spotted it on the way out—she'd been facing the wrong way. But the wider end of the gully, where it met the Eye, had laser cuts on the western face.

  Red scrambled back down into the gully, at the shallow end, then began to walk towards the Eye. As she got close to the edge, she saw that there was a step there, leading down.

  She peered over the edge. "Bollocks," she whispered.

  The drop soared away from her. Red had never seen anything so impossibly far down and not be empty space. The crater was hemispherical, she knew, but from her scale it was just a sheer cliff, straight down forever. There wasn't a hint of curve.

  But set into the wall, for about ten metres, was a set of steps. They were narrow, barely wide enough to walk down even if you weren't wearing a thermocowl that reached down to the ankles, and rimmed with frost. The prospect of setting foot on them was awful.

  But someone had. There were depressions in the frost, bootprints. Small ones.

  Ketta?

  Red took a deep breath, and lowered herself onto the first step. She wished she had taken Harrow's advice and worn sensible shoes.

  She went down, a stair at a time, hugging the wall.

  By the time she got to the bottom, her heart was hammering worse than it had during the fight with Ketta. If there was nothing at the bottom, she decided, and she had to go back up, she'd have to do it backwards. No way she was going to risk turning around on the bottom step, with the thermocowl dragging her about.

  There was an opening at the bottom of the stairs, a round tunnel leading into the stone of the Eye's rim.

  Red ducked in. The tunnel sloped downward, shallowly, and Ketta's bootprints were here, too. The tracker, when she took it out to look at it again, was whining and blinking wildly.

  It was very dark; Red took an emergency flashlight from the cowl, and shone the beam around. From what she could see, the tunnel went for about a hundred metres before ending in complete blackness.

  Not for the first time, she wished she hadn't left all her blasters on the Crimson Hunter.

  She scrambled along the tunnel. It wasn't high, and she had to stoop. The edges of the thermocowl kept catching on the walls.

  Partway along, she almost slipped on something on the tunnel floor, something frozen onto the rock. She shone the flashlight at it, scraped some frost away with the toe of her boot.

  It looked an awful lot like vomit.

  Red suddenly felt very alone. She had seen things no one should see in a thousand lifetimes: she'd been shot, stabbed, beaten up, kidnapped, drugged, bled and worse. She had drunk the blood of hundreds, had hunted men down for money, and killed more times than she could count. But here, in this freezing, glassy tunnel, staring at a patch of frozen sick, she was afraid.

  "No gun," she said quietly. "Note to self: never, ever go anywhere without a gun."

  The tunnel opened out not long after that. Red stood at the edge and stared. No wonder she had seen nothing but blackness at the end of it.

  There was a cavern ahead of her. It was immense.

  The whole monastery could have been housed in that vast space. It was wider than it was high, smooth-sided where the beam of her flashlight fell, made of the midnight glass-stone of Lavannos. A bubble, trapped under the surface, she realised.

  The tracker was emitting a solid, thrumming whine. She took it out and pressed the control studs until it went silent.

  Red scrambled down onto the floor of the cavern. There was a lot of frost build-up; her boots went in it up to the ankles. Which was how she managed to trip over the corpse before she saw it.

  She managed not to drop the flashlight, but her collision with the body had her legs from under her. Red lost her footing and tumbled, rolling onto her back. "Shit!"

  It took a moment or two to get upright again. The thermocowl was so large—it practically ungulfed her—so heavily padded that it was like walking around under a cupboard. She fought her way upright, feeling like an idiot, then turned the flashlight on the corpse.

  It was a man, naked to the waist, sprawled out under the frost. He was frozen solid, eyes open, mouth full of snow. His face and shoulders were daubed with glittering, crystallised blood.

  It wasn't Godolkin.

  Red looked closer. "Sneck," she muttered. "How did he get out here?"

  There was something strange about the man's head. Red reached down, grabbed the body's frozen arm and hauled it out of the frost.

  And came face to face with the inside of its open skull.

  She gave a yelp of horror and leaped back, letting the corpse topple back. The man's head had been cut completely open on a line just above the eyebrows. The top of his head was missing, and the contents scooped out; there was nothing left inside but frozen scraps of vein and tissue. Red had seen right down to the base of his brainpan.

  "Goddamn!" No wonder there was a pile of vomit in the tunnel. Red might have lost her own lunch, if she'd had any. She took another step back.

  Something crunched under her boot. She looked down and saw frozen fingers s
kittering away. "Aw, crap," she moaned.

  There was another body behind her. A woman this time, perhaps in her mid-forties. No visible injuries, save the shattered hand and the fact that her skull was opened and emptied in the same way as before. Gazing blankly through a mask of blood.

  Red swallowed hard and scanned the flashlight beam across the floor.

  There was another carcass. And another. Two more.

  Several, lying in a heap, skulls full of frost.

  The edge of a great pile of corpses spreading from halfway along the floor of the cavern to its distant edge—rising up metre after metre—a tangle of arms and legs and slack faces and severed skulls. A mountain of corpses, freeze-dried, denied the dignity of decay and rot. Stacked like logs. The ones she had seen first were just the few that had rolled off the pile.

  Red could barely take it in. There were thousands of them. It was a charnel pit, a nightmare.

  Every corpse had been skulled, the brain removed.

  "Godolkin," she whispered. "Don't tell me you're here too."

  "Is that who you're looking for? That heretic?"

  She snapped the flashlight beam up. Major Ketta was crouching in the shadows, to the side of the cavern, hidden under the folds of a black thermocowl.

  Red hadn't heard her in the thin air, hadn't been able to smell her through her breath-mask. "Is he here?"

  Ketta shrugged. She seemed sullen, beaten, as though the horror of this place had stripped all the fight from her. "I've not seen him."

  "You said an Iconoclast was here."

  At that, Ketta pointed to one of the corpses, a few metres behind Red.

  She turned the flashlight on it. The man was on his side, eyes staring blindly into the cavern, his skull gaping. He was quite small and slender, his skin dark. A little jet-black hair still remained around the edges of his opened cranium. "One of yours?"

  "Major Gaius. My predecessor."

  Not Godolkin. There was still a chance, then… Red grimaced, looking closer at the Iconoclast agent. Something inside his skull was flashing, a tiny light in the bone of his head.

  A tracer-implant. Red suddenly felt sick. She snatched the tracker out of her cowl and flung it away. "Sneck, what the hell is going on here? Did your people do this?"

  "Hardly Iconoclast style, Blasphemy." Ketta straightened. "We don't hide our actions away in the darkness. That's a mutant thing to do."

  "Not this mutant." Red gnawed her lip for a moment.

  Where had all the bodies come from?

  Red turned the flashlight beam on the corpse-pile again. She couldn't believe they had been carried all the way down those treacherous steps, not when it would have been far easier just to toss them into the Eye of God.

  The circle of light climbed the mound of bodies, and above.

  There was an opening in the stone, the lower edge fanged with crimson icicles. "There," she muttered, mostly to herself. "They come from up there."

  She started forwards, and began climbing over the frozen bodies.

  The Iconoclast was staring at her. "What in the name of the Holy Patriarch do you think you're doing?"

  Red glanced around at her. "I'm going to find my friend," she said simply. "You can come along if you like."

  Ketta glared at her, not moving.

  "Suit yourself," Red muttered. And kept on climbing.

  8

  The Wheel

  Climbing up to the opening was probably the most ghastly thing Durham Red had ever done.

  The bodies she clambered over were frozen hard, their limbs like brittle wood. She could hear flesh cracking away from bone whenever she put a foot down, could feel the soft crunch of desiccated tissues through her gloves. Some of the carcasses that had been thrown down from the opening were connected to each other; joined as one by slivers of blood that had frozen together. Others were loose, alone, moving treacherously under her as she scrambled over them.

  Partway up she knew she'd never make it with the thermocowl on. Its weight was too much, even in the light gravity, and she couldn't get her legs free of it properly. Eventually she gave up on the thing.

  She found a relatively stable place to perch for a few seconds, and stripped the seal. The cowl's heating fans whirred to a halt, and freezing Lavannos air rushed in through the opening: Red gasped, feeling the cold hit her like a punch to the senses, squeezing the breath from her lungs.

  The cowl came off in one fluid movement. She flung it away from her, down to the floor. It landed next to Ketta. "If you can't do anything more useful, kiddo, look after that for me. I'll be back for it later."

  The Iconoclast didn't reply. Red shrugged, and began to climb again. It was easier without the cowl and the exertion soon warmed her. A human would have frozen to death in minutes, she knew, but Durham Red was much more than human in a lot of ways.

  The last few metres were almost flat; she had reached the top of the pile. She scampered up, wincing as her fingers found purchase on the lip of an open skull, and pulled herself upright. The opening, a round tunnel big enough to drive Rinaud's rover though, gaped in front of her, its lower edge a razored mass of overlapping icicles.

  All the hanging ice gleamed in dark crimson.

  Red shone the flashlight up the tunnel. "Steep slope," she reported, calling down to Ketta. "Looks like a drain: they just slide the poor bastards down it."

  "Shout louder, monster. If the killers are here they might not be able to hear you."

  The Iconoclast's voice hadn't come from the bottom of the pile of human corpses. Red glanced around, and swore under her breath. Ketta had discarded her own cowl, and was scaling effortlessly up the pile of corpses.

  Within moments she was standing upright at the top.

  Red turned to face her. "If you were going to take another pop, you'd have done it down there."

  "Don't count on it."

  "So?"

  "I'm sworn to destroy you, monster. Make no mistake about that. But my primary orders are to find and take—alive if possible—the killer of Major Gaius." Ketta nodded towards the opening. "Amazingly, that seems not to be you."

  The Iconoclast was very close to Red now. If she lashed out without warning she could slam the girl right off the pile, be on her before she hit the floor. There was a good chance she could have Ketta's throat out before she could react.

  But…

  If Godolkin was alive, he would need help. If he wasn't, his killers would find out what it felt like to be ripped open. In either case, an extra pair of fists would be no bad thing.

  Besides, Ketta seemed like a smart cookie. If she could convince this one that she wasn't the monster she was portrayed as, perhaps the news would spread. Maybe, just maybe, she could get these clowns off her back.

  It was a slender hope, but better than none. "Okay, major. Looks like we both want the same thing right now. So until this is over, we call a truce, okay?"

  "Why not? By not killing you when I had the chance, I've signed my own death warrant anyway."

  Red raised an eyebrow. "The chance?"

  "Monster, in case you'd forgotten we are standing on top of a pile of mutilated corpses!" Ketta pointed angrily past her, to the opening. "Is there any chance we could get on with this?"

  * * * *

  The drain-tunnel ended in a metal door.

  Red, bracing herself against the curving wall, the pointed heels of her boots sunk deep into frozen blood, scanned the flashlight beam around the frame. "No controls," she growled. "Bugger. How are we going to get through this?"

  "Prayer?" Ketta scrambled up next to her. "This is designed to be opened from elsewhere, possibly some distance away. No reason there'd be anything on this side."

  "Great."

  "Have faith, monster." Ketta reached down and slid a small panel from her belt. She placed it against the frame.

  Red saw the panel light up, a faint green in the darkness. "You know, Godolkin insists on calling me 'Blasphemy'. I'm not sure I like 'monster' much bette
r."

  "Do you not?" Ketta was sliding the panel over the frame. It was some kind of deep-scanner; as it moved, Red saw a window through the metal and into the systems beneath. "There."

  The panel was over a junction box. It chattered softly and, under the metal, relays in the box flipped over. The door groaned, and began to move aside.

  "That," said Durham Red, "is a very nice toy."

  Ketta gave her a look, and ducked past her through the door.

  Red followed with the flashlight. As soon as she was in she could see that there was an identical door a few metres further up. "Airlock?"

  Ketta didn't answer. She was using the panel again. In a few seconds the door behind them had closed, the one in front was grinding open.

  Dull light filtered through the widening gap.

  Red tensed and killed the flashlight. From the corner of her eye she saw Major Ketta drop into a fighting stance.

  She dived through, into the room beyond, and ducked under a flare of plasma fire.

  The shot screamed over her head; she felt the heat of it scour her back, heard it explode against the metal door. She rolled, came up right in front of the man who had fired. He tried to bring the pistol to bear but he was too slow, the barrel too long. Red grabbed the gun, wrenched it out of his grip, and backhanded him across the room.

  He slammed against the wall, headfirst. Blood exploded as he struck.

  There were two more men in the chamber. Red flipped the gun into the air, caught it by the grip as it came down and blew the furthest man in half. As she did so, something blurred past her and slammed with incredible force into the last attacker. It was Ketta—there was a massive sound, two blows so fast and hard that they were effectively one, and the man spun away, his body sliding back across the room with a carpet of gore behind it.

  Abruptly, the chamber was silent, but for the sound of blood dripping off the ceiling and spattering onto the stone floor.

  Ketta reached down to the upper half of Red's second victim and plucked the blaster from his clenched hand. Red examined the gun she had taken from the first man, and noticed that it still had a finger in the trigger-guard. She made a face and flicked the grisly thing away. "Three down."