There was a strange, guttural caw from ahead. All three of them stopped for a moment, their attention fixed on a shadow that flickered in the flashing light of the ingress lumens. A hunched avian cocked its head at them, ruffling its mangy feathers. It shook the sheaf of quills behind its beady eyes and a long and jagged beak.
‘Right,’said Deel. ‘Probably some kind of pet–’
There was a flicker of movement.
‘Or a distraction,’ she continued, slowly lowering the barrel of her gun. ‘Don’t make any sudden moves.’
She turned slowly to see four figures dropping down from the pipes above, their olive green anatomies lithe and sparse. Clawed feet like those of birds clanged onto the metal floor of the corridor, and long rifles, each of which was tipped at either end by vicious blades, whipped around to point right at them.
Deel felt oddly proud that two of the four were pointed at her, leaving one each for del Aggio and Markens.
The xenos stared over their blunt beak-maws with penetrating black eyes. The nests of quills that jutted from the back of their heads fanned up, as if to make their silhouettes larger. The quills rattled, whilst some tinkled where nuts and metal trinkets had been woven in amongst them. The kroot were clad in leather and covered in what looked like thick, fatty grease; in places, it was dark, and streaked like warpaint.
‘We are here to parley,’ said Deel in Low Gothic. She felt something lift one of her dreadlocks from behind, and turned just a fraction to see the tip of a rifle blade an inch from her eye. The blade tugged a few more dreadlocks free, its owner making the approximation of a cackle before letting it fall.
‘Par-lay,’ cawed the kroot in front of her, a scarred brute some eight feet in height. He was missing a large portion of his skull, and had a scorched black augmetic in its place. ‘Sal-taw Vec-kas,’ he trilled, his pointed black tongue sticking out from his blood-encrusted jaws.
‘Saltire Vex, yes,’said Deel. ‘We want to hire you.’
The kroot threw back their heads, making shrill cawing sounds that Deel was almost sure were mocking her. She smiled insincerely.
‘Carm toh see mas-tar shay-par,’ said the kroot leader. He shouldered past her roughly, his fellows close behind. The bodily contact left a smear of evil-smelling fat on Deel’s shoulder. Under the grease, his anatomy had been hard, strong; little more than muscle over bone. It felt... hungry, somehow.
‘Deel?’said del Aggio softly.
‘I think he said “come to see master shaper...”’
‘Huh,’ said Markens. ‘That sounds like who we want, right?’ He put his weight against the promethium drum and started rolling it once more. The kroot ahead clicked and cawed to one another, making the shrill mocking sound once more as they went.
‘I hope so, Markens,’ said Deel, noticing a patch of stitched pink leather dangling from the rearmost kroot’s belt. The hairs on her neck and forearms stood up as she realised it had eyes, nostrils and a mouth.
‘I really very much hope so.’
The cavernous space of the kroot leader’s court was huge. Oppressively hot and stinking of acrid xenos flesh, it was lined with hundreds of tall, branching structures, each somehow reminiscent of Deel’s old arboreal pict-book – yet this jungle was made of girders, coiled wire and iron stanchions twisted out of true.
Lithe, quadrupedal shadows slinked in its reaches, jaws agape, whilst dozens – no, Deel thought as she looked closer; hundreds – of kroot-mercenaries leaned against, sat near and dangled from the steel trees. They were hard to make out – deliberately so, for their grease-painted skin was streaked with dark discolouration by way of camouflage. Tendrils of actual vegetation hung from the structures in places, and strange multi-jointed insects buzzed and fluttered in shafts of light that stabbed down from above.
The largest beam illuminated the king of this strange assembly. Seated on an immense pile of captured weapons and bone trophies at the heart of the cavernous space, he was massive even by the standards of his looming kindred. The sheaf of greyish quills that protruded from his skull stuck out in all directions, each spine-like appendage adorned with complex metal jewellery, and his eyes were covered by complex infrascopic goggles that would have looked more suited to a Space Marine Scout than a barbarian warlord.
A hunched, elderly kroot perched on his haunches on a rickety platform at the warlord’s side, wearing a cloak of long feathers and a stylized leather mask holding his own sheaf of quills. He stood unsteadily, propping himself on a gnarled staff of lacquered heartwood.
‘Yu-mans bow bee-fore the Grey King,’ he said in a harsh croak.
Shivering, Deel bowed low. Markens followed suit after shoving his barrel upright with a clang that sent a hundred bladed rifles clattering upwards to focus on him. He froze mid-bow, not daring to stand again.
‘That wun not bow,’ said the feather-clad speaker, motioning at del Aggio.
‘That’s right,’said the rigger loudly, ‘I do not. Far too much–’
A shadow moved nearby. The hilt of a kroot rifle thumped into del Aggio’s gut, hard enough to send her to her knees in a wheezing, red-faced ball.
‘You doo now,’ said the speaker. The Grey King gave a croaking, bass caw that was a little too much like human laughter for comfort.
‘Yoo come as food,’ said the speaker, cocking its head. ‘Small flesh,’ it added, its quills dipping in disappointment.
The pungent stench of the place was getting thicker. It was so foul it was beginning to make Deel’s eyes water. That was what she told herself, at least.
She was definitely not tearing up through fear.
‘We come as employers,’ she said, keeping her voice steady. ‘To enlist your services as mercenaries. All of you.’
A great cacophony of cawing, barking, hooting and clapping of hands came from all around as the metal jungle came to life, the sound deafening in its sudden intensity. Deel waited for it to subside. Sure enough, the Grey King raised a giant clawed hand, and the assembly gradually fell quiet.
‘Yoo want to hi-yer us,’ said the speaker, his tone harsh. The feathers on his back fanned out, and Deel realised with a start that they were not a cloak, as she had first thought, but wings. ‘Watt could you poss-ab-lee offer us?’
Willing every ounce of her self control into keeping her hand steady, Deel held up a finger. She took out the hip flask and tinderswitch she had seconded from del Aggio from her jerkin – a dozen rifles swinging around to cover her as she did so – and unscrewed the top.
‘Al-ca-haul?’ said the Grey King, his posture stiffening in his chair. He snorted like a rhino about to charge.
‘No,’ said Deel, swigging a big gulp from the flask whilst fighting the urge to vomit. She flicked the tinderswitch and, lips pursed, breathed out a great cloud of promethium droplets.
They caught instantly. A massive pillar of flame and greasy black smoke shot up from her lips to the ceiling, sending crazy shadows dancing in the metal trees and sending the assembly into a hooting, cawing cacophony once more.
‘Promethium,’ she said, kicking Markens’ barrel with a steel-toed boot. It gave a pleasingly loud clang. ‘Pure, undiluted firejuice.’
‘We have that,’ said the speaker. His tone was still harsh, but his wings were folded back again, and his eyes were bright. He flung out a hand. ‘We are war-sphere, Vawk Karaow. One bar-ral is nuth-ing.’
‘This is just a quality sample of our goods,’said Deel. ‘We have literally tens of thousands of barrels of the finest stuff. Tens of thousands. All you need to do is land, and we roll it aboard. One berth, one barrel.’
‘One berth one bar-ral,’said the speaker.
‘Yes. Then we debark at the next system along, and leave the goods with you. You’ll have all the fuel you need for years, decades. And there’s room enough on this vessel for all of us.’
‘Isss there,’ hissed the Grey King.
‘Yoo have weap-ons of t’au ser-vant,’said the feathered speaker, pointing at her pulse carbine. He had made ‘t’au’ two staccato halves, and mangled a few syllables, but the more he spoke to her, the better his facility with Low Gothic seemed to get. She had heard of the kroot’s ability to mimic others, but to see it in practice was truly impressive. No wonder they made such adept mercenaries.
‘We are not bound to Great Good,’ the speaker cawed, something close to disdain in his eyes and the cocking of his head. ‘Here away from septs, we do as we see fit.’
‘The T’au’va is a noble ideal,’ said Deel. ‘And it united our planet, once. But there are those amongst the t’au that would see us dead, just for the crime of being human. What kind of unity is that?’
The rhetorical question hung in the air. Deel could not tell if it was the silence of contemplation, or whether the kroot had lost interest and were thinking of their next meal.
‘We come to you as independents,’ she said, pressing on. ‘As a people with much to offer, but no allies to offer it to.’
There was another long silence.
‘One berth, one barrel,’said the speaker, tilting his jaw back.
‘Yes.’
He nodded, running a string of finger bones through his talons. ‘Tell more,’ he snapped. ‘We make pact.’
Deel felt a cold shroud lift from her heart, fluttering above it, but ready to descend once more.
‘Halt it,’said the Grey King.
Down came that shroud, over Deel’s heart.
‘Hau do, we-know,’said the warlord. ‘Hau do you tell truth we know.’
Deel frowned. ‘I don’t lie. Check the quality of that barrel’s contents if you don’t believe it’s the good stuff.’
‘Not enough,’ said the speaker, slowly shaking his head. ‘To risk war-sphere. I say to you, no, we cannot.’
‘Come heer,’ said the Grey King, extending a long talon and beckoning Deel closer. The talon was like the claw of some ancient saurian, scaled and black-nailed. It had three other claws ready to grasp, to rip, to plunge into human flesh behind it. ‘Come.’
Deel stepped forward hesitantly, then caught herself and strode, confidence radiating from her every step despite the fact she felt nothing but pure terror inside.
‘Giffft me,’said the warlord, motioning at her fingers. ‘I will taste-trooth.’
Every instinct in Deel’s mind screamed at her not to hold her hand out.
She held her hand out anyway.
The warlord grabbed it, enfolding her brown digits in his giant claw. His grip was a wrench-vice, inescapable. The warlord leaned in, his acrid stench overpowering. His eyes, though hidden behind the high-spec Imperial sniper goggles, seemed to bore into her.
Then the warlord’s massive, jagged beak, more like that of a snapping turtle than a bird, darted forward and clipped off two thirds of Deel’s little finger in a single motion.
Deel’s lips curled as she fought with all her being not to scream. She yanked her hand back and pinched the stem of her severed finger to save from drizzling blood all over the makeshift throne.
The warlord sat back, licking the edge of his beak clean of Deel’s blood. She heard the crunch of her own fingerbones as the master shaper chewed thoughtfully on her flesh.
‘Hah,’ he said eventually, as if surprised.
The feathered speaker clicked and whistled in the unintelligible kroot tongue.
‘She is, trooth-teller,’ said the Grey King in response, nodding. ‘And psy- spiced.’
‘Psy-ling?’ said the speaker, his eyes glinting as his quills rose high. ‘Good meat, for shay-man.’
‘No,’said the king, shaking his head. ‘Too use-fuel.’
The shaman’s quills drooped once more.
‘One berth, one bar-rel,’ said the giant xenos thoughtfully, looking down at Deel. She was shaking now, uncontrollably.
‘Y-yes,’ she said. ‘Just get us off Saltire Vex, and put us down somewhere safe. Warm. We don’t care where.’
‘You seek warm,’ said the kroot monarch, eyelids lowered.
‘Yes,’she nodded. ‘Please.’
‘Done.’
A flood of relief washed over Deel as she backed away, bowing low. She saw the black spots return at the edge of her vision, and fell back, only to feel del Aggio catch her and carry her back over to Markens.
Whilst del Aggio tore off a strip of cloth from her cuff and bound the finger-stump as best she could, Deel leaned heavily against Markens’ reassuring bulk.
The smell of his stale sweat was reassuringly human after the olfactory assault of the kroot’s stench-grease.
Deel frowned. Come to think of it, she could hardly smell the vile stench of the kroot. It had all but disappeared.
‘Go now,’ said the speaker from atop the podium. ‘Ready your people. We will come for you on fifteen day from here.’
‘Fifteen days,’ said del Aggio pensively. ‘With the evac protocols already in place...’ She paused, counting on her fingers. ‘And by then, the waters around the rigs will already have started to floe...’
Two heavy-set kroot approached Markens and yanked the promethium drum away from him, cawing harshly in triumph as they carried the barrel between them to the rear of the warlord’s throne.
‘All yours,’said Markens. ‘You’re welcome to it.’
Jensa felt her senses swim back into focus as the kroot king waved them away.
She leant heavily on Markens as they made their way back to the lighter.
‘Deel, my girl,’ said del Aggio, the dragons on her eyebrows kissing as she frowned. ‘I think I might just love you a little bit.’
