The Last Verse

Ansel was on his feet before the first of them reached the doors.

Mathias had not seen him draw. There was a bolter in the brother’s hands and he was firing past Aldric’s shoulder into the corridor in short, even bursts. Pale shapes came down the passage along the walls and the ceiling both. The first fell at the threshold. The second climbed over it.

“Can you walk?” Hadrian said.

“I can.”

“Then you will walk in the middle.”

They went out the way they had come, straight through the middle of it. Aldric took the point, Mathias fell in behind him, Ansel behind Mathias, and Hadrian held the rear. The corridor became a long tube of noise and muzzle flare, bolters rattling off the plating, the creatures dying at ten paces and eight and five. They came from the vents, from the ceiling, once up out of an open hatch in the deck. Ansel killed his share without a word, quick and economical, a Templar who had been doing this for a very long time and had not forgotten how.

They passed the chapel at a run. The scars on the wall showed bright in the flare, and from this direction they looked exactly the same.

By the second deck Ansel’s breathing had changed. Mathias heard it over the din the way he had learned to hear Hadrian’s knee: a catch at the top of each breath, then a long pull of air. He glanced back. Ansel’s jaw was locked tight, and the ridges along his brow had darkened and spread.

“Brother?”

“I am well.” Ansel did not look at him. “Keep moving. It is louder down here.”

The hangar doors hung open as they had left them. The Thunderhawk sat in her cradle with the ramp down and the lamps cycling, forty paces of clean deck away. Aldric reached the ramp first and turned to cover the others, and at that moment three of them dropped from the ceiling at once, so close together they might have been a single animal.

Hadrian took two. His sword went through the first and his shoulder drove the second into the bulkhead, and he was fully occupied with both. The third came down between Mathias and the ramp, and Aldric came off the ramp to meet it.

Mathias brought his sword up. Behind him, Ansel had stopped walking.

“Brother Reinhart.” The voice was calm, formal, and very close. “Step away from me.”

“Brother?”

“Now.”

Mathias turned. Ansel stood with the bolter hanging from one hand, and the other had come up in front of his face. The gauntlet was split along the seam. The fingers inside had lengthened and curled, the nails gone black and hooked, and Ansel was looking at them with a courteous, distant expression, like a man examining a stain on his sleeve. Then his head came up, and his eyes, which had been dark all the way across since the bridge, found Mathias’s.

He dropped the bolter and drew his sword. It was very fast.

The first stroke came in high, and Mathias took it on the flat of his blade and felt it travel up to the shoulder. He knew the stroke. It was the third form of the drill, the one every neophyte learned before he was given a live weapon, and Ansel threw it as cleanly as a master throws it on a practice floor. Mathias gave the answer the form asks for. Ansel was already somewhere else.

He fought defensively. He could not help it. Every cut he made went toward the sword arm, the shoulder, the knee. He was looking for the place where he could put a man down without ending him, and Ansel would not give him the place. The old brother had been faster than Mathias for a hundred years, and under that speed there was now something else, a looseness in the joints, a way of turning that no human spine allowed. Claws raked the front of his breastplate and the ceramite screamed. Mathias drove his shoulder into the brother and got a hand on his sword arm, and for a moment they stood chest to chest like men in a doorway, and he saw how dark the eyes were.

Ansel’s knee came up into his thigh, hard enough to shift the plate, and the sword came round and opened the joint at the hip. Mathias felt a line of cold, then heat. He staggered, and Ansel followed with the blade low this time, the fifth form, and Mathias answered with the fifth, and the swords met with a note like a struck bell. They traded it back and forth six, seven times, the same drill passing between them. Under the noise Ansel was speaking, fast and low, in a voice that was not entirely his own, and Mathias understood after a moment that it was the vow. The wrong verse, over and over. Ansel never missed a step, and Mathias was losing.

The clawed hand came down in a long hook. Mathias caught it on the blade and the fingers closed around the steel and held. Ansel’s sword arm swung for his neck, and Mathias saw, for half a heartbeat, the blade falter. The arm dropped a hand’s breadth and the guard stood open, as though the man behind it had decided something. The other hand did not drop. It tightened on Mathias’s sword and wrenched it sideways.

He did not think. He let the wrench carry the sword round, and when the point came back it was under the ribs, and he put his weight behind it and drove it up. Ansel went still against him, upright, one clawed hand fisted in the front of his armor.

For a moment his face was only his face. It was a tired man’s, a Templar’s, with grey at the temples. Then he slid off the blade.

Hadrian finished the last of the scouts and the hangar went quiet. Aldric came down the ramp, bolter in one hand, and knelt beside the body. He did not say anything.

“The Penance does not return to the Crusade,” Hadrian said, after a while. “Nothing aboard her does.”

“The crew,” Aldric said.

“The crew, the brothers, the holds. She burns, and everything with her, so that nothing from her ever reaches a port.” He looked at the body. “He goes with her.”

Mathias breathed in, and the cut at his hip told him about it. “Yes,” he said.

He unclasped Ansel’s sword from the fallen brother’s belt. The scabbard was cold. He held it a moment, then carried it up the ramp and strapped it to the bulkhead beside his own.

They lifted with the ramp still closing. Aldric took the vox and called the cruiser, flat and exact, and when the answer came he said only, “Acknowledged. The Ardent Penance is to be burned, with all aboard.” The viewport showed the strike cruiser dwindling, grey against the dead star, still dark, still waiting. Then the torpedoes arrived, and she was not.

For some time the cabin was silent. Aldric sat with his hands on his knees.

“He used to say I talked enough for both of us,” he said.

Mathias did not answer. He was looking at the second sword on the bulkhead. After a while he said the vow aloud, the way it was written, to nobody in particular.

“I will not turn from the foe. I will not yield the field.”

Hadrian did not turn from the viewport. “Again,” he said.

Mathias said it again.