Dead Men Walking (Warhammer 40,000) by Steve Lyons

Author:Steve Lyons [Lyons, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2010-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

How long had it been now?

It felt like months since the Iron Gods had come. It felt like forever. The time before was a fading memory, already so distant that it was hardly missed, while the future…

The future was endless days like this one: backbreaking, fourteen-hour shifts in the ruins of the city, eating, sleeping, rising for work again. It was remarkable how routine this had become, how quickly the human body adapted to the aches and strains, and the mind – for fear of going mad – to the confines of the here and now.

Arex’s pickaxe had come to feel like an extension of her arms. She was barely aware of the calluses on her once-soft hands, beneath its wooden handle.

Sometimes, however, her mind could still slip its chains and drift to a white-carpeted bedroom in the High Spire or an illicit liaison in a downmarket eatery, to the brush of a loved one’s lips, and then she was staggered by the pain of all she had lost.

Arex sank to her knees and wept, drawing the attention of a grizzled overseer who screamed at her to resume her work and prodded her with a proctor’s baton. She tried to obey him, she honestly did, but the hunk of plascrete she had lifted without thinking about it a moment ago now seemed as heavy as the world itself.

The overseer activated the baton’s stun charge, and Arex cringed, waiting for the jolt to slam through her as had happened many times before. Instead, she heard angry voices, a scuffle, and she peered through her tears to see that a fellow slave had come to her defence. A ruggedly handsome man, she thought, like all of them grimy from the morning’s exertions. He had wrested the baton from the cowering overseer, and he seemed almost angry enough to use it too. Then common sense dampened the fire in his eyes, and he cast the weapon scornfully to the ground instead.

‘She’s tired,’ he growled, ‘that’s all. We’re all tired and hungry, and brutalising this young woman isn’t going to change that.’

He lifted Arex to her feet, put a water bottle to her lips. The overseer had recovered his baton, and his nerves, and was raging impotently: ‘You’re on half rations for three days, Tylar, and I’m reporting this incident to Amareth, do you hear me?’

‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ said Arex regretfully, as the overseer stomped away to make good on his threat. ‘You shouldn’t have got yourself in trouble for me.’

Her saviour, Tylar, shook his head. ‘I’ve been in trouble for one thing or another since I got here. At least, this time, it was in the best of causes.’

‘I’ll share my rations with you,’ she promised. ‘I won’t see you go hungry.’

‘You’ll do nothing of the sort,’ said Tylar. ‘You must keep your strength up. You know what they do to people who can’t serve. Don’t worry about me, Arex, I’ll get by – on sheer stubbornness if needs be. I wouldn’t give that goon the satisfaction of breaking me.

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