Auric Gods

Chapter Fourteen City of Vorganthian, Kobor, within Terra’s light

The warehouse was large and as black as an ocean without moonlight. Gedd’s last flare had faded, fizzling to smoke, but the roof was more dilapidated here and enough ambient light came in from above that she could see fairly well without it.

She had yet to draw her sidearm, but felt the urge to now.

It was ahead. Something framed by the light. It reminded Gedd of a roadside shrine, an effigy mounted on a crude frame.

As she drew closer, she felt an instinctive urge to turn around. To not look at the shrine. Nothing good could come of knowing what the shapes were, silhouetted in the light, or why it smelled like it did. She brandished the smoking flare like a warding charm, despite how ridiculous she knew that was.

She was only a few feet away when the wind ripped loose a roof tile and the grey light fell upon the thing in front of her.

Gedd’s knees buckled and she fell hard. She was vomiting violently, the urge to do so almost subconscious. She stayed like that, on all fours, head down with one hand still on the flare and wanting the other to draw her gun but unable to.

‘Holy Throne,’ she murmured, surprised at her sudden piety. ‘Emperor… gird my soul against all evil.’

She tried to rise but couldn’t. It was as if a heavy weight had been looped around her neck. It pressed against her and made it hard to breathe. Gedd’s heart was pounding much too fast. A cardiac arrest felt imminent.

‘Breathe…’ she told herself, and in her head her voice sounded small and insignificant, like it had been when she was a child and her father had gone off to ply the deeps. A memory imposed itself in her mind, of a cold hab, of a weeping mother, of a drowned father…

‘Breathe…’ she snarled, and her voice sounded older, and the memory faded, consigned to the mental compartment where Gedd locked away all of her fears and doubts.

‘Now, get the hell up,’ she said through gritted teeth, anger lending her much-needed strength. ‘Get up!’

She lifted her head, still trembling, and then managed to get to her knees. She wiped the sick from her mouth, the flare wafting madly in her shaking grip. She held it as steady as she could, pointing it at the abomination and looking at it even though she knew the nightmare would forever haunt her afterwards.

The man hung upside down, attached to a thick iron ‘X’ like a tank trap that kept him in a cruciform position. Wire bound his ankles, wrists and neck. Someone had taken a blade to his eyelids, and his dead gaze bored into her. The flesh around his chest and abdomen had been neatly cut, and the skin flayed and pulled away from his body. He glistened, the frost upon his exposed bones turned red and shiny. The ragged flesh had been stitched to his hands and the two translucent flaps reminded Gedd of wings.

A sacrifice. An offering.

It resembled a perverse homage to the aquila, only in reverse. Purity seals nailed to his ribcage gently fluttered in the air like rotting feathers. The man had been a priest, one of the Ecclesiarchy.

Out of the corner of her eye, Gedd saw the silhouette of a second figure. It turned slowly on a length of chain, its limbs wrapped in razor wire. Beaten, battered, adorned with savage cuts, the eyes had been–

‘Holy Emperor…’ Gedd sobbed.

Then a third figure, vast and distended, writhing with parasites and a fourth bound with studded leather, its skin peeled away to reveal–

Tears blurring her vision, she looked away.

Gedd cast aside the dead flare as she began to weaken, the terror pushing her down. Bile rose up in her throat, hot and acerbic. She vomited again and saw something black and vaguely resembling a feather amongst her leavings. She had to get away, to get out. She would die if she stayed. Gedd crawled. Indistinct chattering worried at the edge of her hearing like the rapid snapping of many beaks or the clack-clack of bird talons.

She found the strength to rise, pushing up onto her heels and staggering at first before she ran, teeth gritted, into the snow and the night.