The Bleeding Chalice by Ben Counter

Author:Ben Counter
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2011-08-24T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

Septiam Torus was a garden world. Its two main continents were covered in temperate grasslands and deep, lush forests. The faint rings around the planet lit up the sky in shimmering rainbows, with sunsets of a million colours. Crystal-clear rivers wound their way through breathtaking countryside and plunged down spectacular waterfalls before joining a great shining ocean teeming with coral reefs. The planet’s ecosystem had never evolved far beyond plant life, and so there were no animals to act as predators or scavengers save for the species introduced to pollinate the planet’s small crop of soulfire flowers – flocks of birds with green and blue plumage that streaked across the skies like comets.

Soulfire stamens were the source of some of the most potent combat drugs the Imperium issued to its penal legions and more expendable Guard regiments, and so Septiam Torus was accorded special status. Its tithes were paid in the soulfire crop alone and the ruling family – descended from the first rogue trader to find the planet and annexe it in the name of the Emperor – was granted perpetual rights over the world.

Septiam Torus remained unsettled and unspoilt apart from its sole city, a sprawl of marble, like a vast colonnaded palace, with a barracks and brig for its private law enforcement regiment and endless tile-roofed streets housing the crop workers.

One day a ship’s lifeboat was glimpsed in the upper atmosphere, its distress beacon bleating that it contained a sole occupant severely injured. The pod thudded home into the middle of a field, kicking up a plume of purple-black petals. The Septiam Torus Enforcement Division sent a paramedic team to recover the occupant and bring him for treatment to the city. They found a body badly charred but alive, and brought it back to the infirmary in the shadow of the senate house.

For three weeks the infirmary staff tried to coax life from the victim. Eventually they caused their patient – they couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman – to flicker an eyelid in recognition.

At that moment one of Septiam’s senators was visiting the facility. It was the sort of duty expected of all senators, representing as they did a loose family group expected to outdo one another in service to their world. The senator disliked the infirmary but it was crucial to keeping the crop workers secure and happy on Septiam Torus, and she blandly absorbed the facts and figures the medical staff handed out as she followed them around the wards.

She rounded a corner and saw the charred form of the crash victim, suspended in a wire harness and wrapped in bandages that were yellow and stained even though they had been changed barely an hour earlier. Monitoring equipment blinked and chirped. The perfumed curtains that hung around the patient couldn’t mask the faint odour of cooked meat.

‘Ah, our visitor.’ The senator smiled – ostensibly to show a friendly face to the unfortunate, but really because the seeping raw body was the first interesting thing she had seen all day.

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