Ghosts and Bad Shadows by Dan Abnett

Author:Dan Abnett
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2018-12-21T11:48:53+00:00

XI

Gol raised the slate and studied the access codes. He slunked back the heavy metal weather-cover of the hatch controls, exposing the keypad.

‘Weapons set,’ he told his team. They all stood ready.

‘Why are you Astra Militarum devils so wary?’ Arskil asked.

‘Because we’ve danced this dance before, more than once,’ Caober replied. ‘Besides, we’re ruffians.’

Kolea began to punch the code into the old, worn keypad. A yellow light glowed, and then turned green. The massive hatch opened, ripping root tendrils and creepers aside.

A sigh breathed. Ancient air. Stale air.

Kolea turned suddenly.

‘I heard it that time,’ he stated. ‘“Bring them to me.” Someone distinctly said “Bring them to me.” Which one of you was it?’

Rerval, Caober, Maggs, Luffrey and Baskevyl looked at one other.

‘Nobody said anything, Gol,’ Bask replied.

‘You really are quite agitated, sir,’ remarked Arskil. ‘I wonder why you–’

His head came off.

One moment it was attached to his body, the next it was spinning away into the shadows, slack-mouthed, trailing a corkscrew spray of blood.

Arskil’s severed neck vented arterial spray. His headless body sank to one knee, as if he were about to be decorated or promoted, and then fell over. Copious amounts of blood darkened his dark blue tunic and stained his brocade.

‘Wait,’ said Rerval, almost baffled. ‘His head just came clean off. How the feth did that happen?’

Kolea and Maggs were already firing, loosing wild shots into the trees. Baskevyl, Luffrey and Caober swiftly followed suit. Rerval found his weapon and started shooting too.

‘There’s something in the trees!’ Maggs yelled.

‘There’s something in the fething shadows!’ Kolea yelled back.

‘Keep shooting!’ Bask cried.

‘At what?’ Kolea shouted.

The air was full of sap and shot-torn leaves. Vines burst and snapped. Creepers spurted juice.

‘What’s happening?’ Rerval yelled, firing on full auto.

Bad shadows, Kolea thought, bad shadows.

Something uncurled from the darkness to his left. A squiggle of malicious blackness.

It looked like–

Gol Kolea remembered. He remembered. The memory stabbed into his head like a warknife.

Tona’s cabin. Dinner. Just a precious few nights before.

Yoncy. His baby girl Yoncy.

A drawing. He still had it in his pocket. It had shown an anguished, heartfelt black squiggle of chalk made by his child’s hand. The ­squiggle had been ground into the paper. The chalk stick Yoncy had used had broken several times during the furious effort. There had been something desperate about the marks, as if the child had been trying to destroy the paper and erase an image so terrible that she hadn’t wanted it to take form.

‘I was going to draw more trees,’ Yoncy had explained, ‘but I picked up black instead of green by accident, and it made a bad shadow shape, and I didn’t like it so I scribbled it out.’

He could hear her saying it.

Bad shadow.

Bad shadow.

Kolea pump-ejected a spent clip and slammed home a fresh one. He kept firing at the bad shadow.

The picture had been done in coloured chalk. There had been spiky things, several figures, and two sickle shapes in what Gol had presumed was the sky. The sickle shapes had made no sense at the time.

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