Heaven's Gate (2 page)

“
Keep them from us for a while and I may yet tell you, if only to have the pleasure of seeing you find your ‘salvation’. I might do this for you, if it takes my fancy but I should tell you that you misapprehend, I do not ask.”
 

The hollow reply, unspoken yet somehow clear in those dead eyes, eats into his mind like a chill wind; turning him against his will with its force.

Blake feels the urge to give into that gradual, irresistible pressure, to feel the bliss and relief he knows will follow. Instead he forces himself to focus on the dark red fluids gurgling through the tubes into the sarcophagi, reminding himself that those tubes are filled with the innocent blood of others, who had similarly succumbed.

“You are not bothered by that; you know you will not be used so.”
The voice in his mind soothes

“No! But it is likely that I would die in your service, all the same.” He answers more to remind himself of the reality than from any hope of debating with the implacable will even now worming its way through his mental defenses.

“
You must not judge. You have killed, just as we must. You have served our kind before have you not?”
The sleeper whispers in his mind, anticipating his objections and quieting his churning thoughts.

“Never again!” Blake snarls, through gritted teeth grown sharp with use. Yes! Remember the anger, the despair. It is all there is left to fight with.

“
Do you not want your redemption after all?”

“You offer no redemption, only servitude. I will take what I need from your veins.” Blake promises vehemently, for a second his own eyes burn with the same pale flame that has sustained him thus far.

“
It is as I thought, you have been ruined. Still you will serve to buy us the minutes we need.”

“Never…” Blake growls but already his voice is wavering. The old subservience is shutting down his thoughts, leaving him at the mercy of a mind stronger than any he has ever known.

“In there! Follow the bloodstains. Quickly! A voice commands from outside the chamber.

Blake remembers the priest’s voice, the unease he had always felt even at a distance. Somehow the thought of the priest seems to ease the pressure on Blake’s struggling mind. The sleeper’s eyes widen in shock at the sound of the voice, panic races through the gathered creatures at what their leader reads in the captain’s mind.

As one, the lids of the Sarcophagi fly up, spilling gaunt figures,
spattered
with the blood spilled by exiting their strange beds too quickly. If the undead that he had fought in the passageways were daunting, then these beings are the beyond any mortal description! Wild and vital, yet with all the dread of the grave hanging about them like a mantle. One look into the flashing eyes around him and Blake knows he’d been a fool to ever think he could wrest his salvation from these fell creatures.

Then the Crusaders come flooding into the room wielding fire and sharp blades and those pale eyes are mercifully turned on these new attackers. Men die with each sweep of the newly risen creatures talons and more spill their blood on the ferocious lords’ razor teeth but as quickly as they can tear them down more troops spill into the room hacking and burning with fanatical zeal. The voice in his mind is an insistent scream now urging his help. Before Blake can react one way or another, Rugan enters the room. At the sound of his voice many of the fallen stumble back onto their feet, ignoring mortal wounds and renew their attacks.

Seemingly indifferent to the carnage, the priest gives his orders.

“Lay that one out, we don’t know how much they have dominated him. More fire! Burn this unholy place to its foundations!”

“No,
wai
….” Blake begins to protest, but a blow to the head sends his exhausted body and his hopes tumbling forward into darkness.

Strong hands lift him and drag his unconscious body, back out into the last rays of the sun. The blood of the fallen is already beginning to steam in the chill of the impending desert night. His watering eyes seem to open and close of their own will so that he gets only flashes of the scene around him. He catches one more blurry glance of the broken walls surrounded by the twisted dead, then feels them hoist him onto a cart with the other wounded. He hears their groans and forces his eyes open to stare into the face of the man laid next to him.
 
To his surprise the dying man does not support the military blue but instead has clothes of various hues, the man still clutches the flute with which he had gained the General’s favour.

“I thought they would keep you away from the front line,
Etine
.”

“I held onto this better than I held the pistol!” The man says with a rueful smile, the bells at his throat jingling with each ragged breath. “But I had the
honour
of entering beside the General and I suppose, at the last, they needed every fool.” The little troubadour’s wit is
undulled
by the pain in his eyes.

“Too many fools have died already.” Blake chokes back, he tries to rise but there is more than the blow to his head holding him back now, he has lost too much blood, ignored too many wounds. He gives much of the strength he has left to seal the worst of his injuries, before he falls unconscious again, his exhausted mind holding onto the image of a pillar of blue-white flame piercing the sky.

 
Chapter 1
(UY 1816):

“Ghost Town”

A train’s coming. That’s what all Robert Tenant’s senses tell him, senses honed by long years scrounging his way across the treacherous grid of abandoned tracks that wind through the Bowl. The Bowl, the great wasteland that stretches from the sheer, unassailable,
plateaux
of the
Southwal
range to the brooding grey crags that mark the boundaries of the North; known to map makers as ‘The Wraiths’ and to a few crazed silver miners as ‘home’.

No one has dared brave that barrier in many years, there are no explorers left to give new names to whatever lies beyond, the inhabitants of the Bowl know the shape of their prison well enough. Bob had certainly not set off on his wanderings out of curiosity or a need to ‘see the world’, one stretch of sand looks much like another to those bred in the rich towns that lie on the Blue Snake and the Western line. Only the hermits and savages of the great desert know any different and most city folk wouldn’t care to learn the skills that allow the mutants and death cults to survive in the true desert, on the Anvil.

In common with all of his ilk, the lure of money was what drew Bob and often took him further into the wastes than good sense would allow. Since he was old enough to man a station on a handcart, he’d gone in search of treasure, metal or salvage from the many towns that had sprung up and just as quickly been abandoned to the relentless sands of the desert. Over the course of a decade a town could rise, made rich by ore or by one of the great trains incorporating a new stop on their route, but when the ore failed or the train stopped coming for their own mysterious reasons the richest city could be a ghost town by year’s end. Each month more hopefuls limped back from the wilderness to the stability of the Union Cities, leaving pickings ripe for men with the courage and daring to retrieve what had been left behind.

Of course, these days, there was more to be had than the slim leavings of those returning pioneers.
 
Less than six years ago the Inquisition had burned its brightest and Angus
Leedon’s
Grand Crusade had swept like wild fire through the west, scouring many of the settlements clean with holy
fervour
and flame, leaving behind whole towns, which the pious Crusaders were too sanctimonious to properly loot. All a
cartman
need do was follow the abandoned tracks marking the train’s meandering; there were innumerable forgotten fortunes still waiting at the end.

Nothing seemed permanent in the Bowl except the Western line, the single great track that stretched from the city of
Hale
in the east to hard won Triumph in the west.
 
The line was the backbone of the Union and for uncounted years
Tyre
and Flame had maintained it. So long as anyone could remember, at least one of the two trains had kept the rhythm on which the towns of the Free Union relied, while the other laid its own meandering tacks through the desert, in constant search of metal or fuel. It was the reliability of the line that allowed the free cities of the Union to thrive, silver from Limit and Triumph, lumber from
Brigton
and Island City, all moved with the trains. The great cities had even sprung up around the places where the trains routinely stopped. Anything which the trains did not supply or were light on, was supplemented by what men like Bob Tenant and his boys, could dig out of the desert and load onto their hand carts. Thus human civilization had maintained a tenuous grip, despite being surrounded by the savage chaos of the desert.

Right now, that civilization is only a distant hope for Bob Tenant, a hope that recedes
 
with his growing certainty that there is a train running behind them. The lanterns have already been lit on the carts, even though it is a little over half an hour till actual sundown. On the rear carriage the shuttered light winks off a smeared mirror, which has been carefully strapped on top of the rich haul that represents a month’s scavenging. Was he imagining the
tremour
in the glass or the rumble beneath his feet?
 
At the moment only Gill and Clark Hayman are working the two great hand levers that propel the cart and its single cargo carriage. Their clean regular strokes could not be producing the vibrations shaking the mirror, yet both are evidently unaware of the impending danger. Bob looks again in disbelief at his timetable wondering if he could be mistaken, but he knows better than to trust the table over his own instincts, even if no one else seems to share his sense of alarm.

Tyre
and Flame are forces unto themselves, if one of them has broken the routine laid out on the timetable all he can do is get out of the way, or watch his rig and everything he has fought for, be scooped up by their greedy silver arms. That’s assuming he didn’t just decide to go down with the rig! He was so far in hock to the bank on this trip that it was unlikely he’d ever be able to get his own rig together again, not to mention the likely slow death that awaited him & his crew if they attempted to make it out of the desert on foot without more supplies than they could grab before abandoning the cart.
 
The rare paper of the timetable buckles under his fingers as his fist balls in frustration, he forces himself to relax.
 
A lot of the money he owed had been spent on the, apparently useless, train timetable in his hand.

“Shit!” Bob expresses his frustration, before leaping up and making his way back to take his place at the hand pumps.

“Something wrong boss?”

“Train’s coming, Brett,” the
cartman
answers, without bothering to look back. Instead he is craning to see if he can catch some hint of the coming train, but the undulating terrain gave him little hope of seeing it until it was nearly on top of them. No smoke rose from behind them but that didn’t necessarily mean anything, everyone knew that the trains didn’t always run on coal if it was in short supply.

“You sure?” the dark man asks snubbing his rollup and joining his boss in studying the rise behind them.

“Sure as I’ve been working these tracks for ten years, I feel it in my bones.” Bob replies, resenting to having to explain himself.

Gill and
Clark
wouldn’t have even asked, not that Gill could ask much, his brother had introduced him as a mute and Bob never heard him make a sound. He had sometimes wondered, though as he watched the tireless motions of the brute’s strong arms, if the term could have more than one meaning. Still,
Clark
kept the big man in line, they both followed orders and if there was more than lumps of muscle under the big, stained, green shirt Gill always wore, Bob didn’t care, so long as he kept pumping. Let the priests and doctors worry about the purity of the race, a
cartman
has to keep his profit margin.

“What do you mean ‘these tracks’? I thought you said this was your first time this far west of Limit?” Brett contradicts him yet again.

Cheap isn’t always good Bob reminds himself, bitterly but there is no time for a fight, the rumble in the old tracks is getting nearer.

“I don’t see any difference between these tracks and any other I’ve found in the wastes, besides, ‘All tracks touch’,” he counters, quoting an old
railman’s
saying. “Now get on that lever and pump, if we don’t find a side track before she’s on us we’ll lose everything and that includes your share of the profits.”

The threat is enough to stir Brett, despite his doubts and all four men take up a quick steady rhythm, which drags the whole rig forward at a speed a little above a man running. Their pace increases still further when light blooms on the horizon behind them and the white eye of a train’s headlamp stabs through the gathering dusk.