The Child Foretold

  Contents

  Cover

  The Child Foretold – Nicholas Kaufmann

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘The House of Night and Chain’

  A Black Library Publication Imprint

  eBook license

  The Child Foretold

  Nicholas Kaufmann

  Kavel Trake knelt between the rows of nafar plants and sighed when he saw the thick, blood-red vine that ran through the soil and had wrapped itself in a tight chokehold around the stems. Damn, he thought. It was just as he’d worried after seeing the limp, discoloured leaves on his crops.

  ‘Looks like the warrior weed finally found our little farm, Rahmiel,’ he said.

  He looked up at Rahmiel, who stood silently in the middle of the field, his blind, metallic eyes staring past Kavel at the horizon. Kavel had built Rahmiel from spare bits of metal, wood and straw to keep away the packs of scavenging voraks that tried to eat his crops at night. He couldn’t remember exactly when he’d started talking to the scarecrow, or even when he’d given it a name, but he’d been doing it for long enough now that it didn’t seem strange any more. Besides, who else was there to talk to? Rahmiel was his only companion. There was no one else on the farm, which meant there was also no one to judge him for talking to a scarecrow like he’d lost his mind.

  Although maybe he had. He suspected ten years of solitude and heavy drinking could do that to a man.

  Kavel had known it was only a matter of time before the warrior weed infected his crops, but that didn’t temper his anger. The damned weed shouldn’t have been on Ballard’s Run in the first place. It was an invasive species whose spores had hitched a ride to this world on a supply ship, immediately found a foothold, and spread all over the planet, causing untold damage as it strangled crops and sucked the nutrients out of the ground for itself. The biologis had surely classified it using their own obscure terminology, but the farmers on Ballard’s Run called it warrior weed because when you tried to pull it up, it clung to the soil so tightly that it felt like the blasted thing was fighting back.

  Kavel grabbed a handful of the weed and pulled with all his might. It took several minutes and all his strength to yank it free. Unfortunately, it took a chunk of nafar plant with it. He sighed and tossed the clump of vegetable matter aside. One down, but how many more to go? The warrior weed had likely spread over his entire farm already. It was that fast, and that voracious. Eventually, it would take over his fields and kill everything else. The only way to get rid of it would be to burn his fields and plant new crops, but he couldn’t afford to do that. His nafar harvests barely kept him in credits as it was.

  A loud roar in the sky drew his attention as an enormous armed freighter took off from the space port to the west. He watched it push its way into the twilight sky on huge thrusters, its hold packed with food for the hungry bellies of a hundred Imperial worlds, and then disappear among the first stars that were beginning to show. Kavel had never been off-world, but he had no regrets about that. He’d heard stories about what was out there. Things a lot worse than warrior weed.

  He stood, wobbling for a moment as he tried to find his balance, and then fell flat on his face in the dirt. After so many years, he thought he would be used to the cylindrical metal peg that had replaced his right leg below the knee, but he’d never quite got the hang of it. The stupid thing had tripped him up more times than he could count. It was yet another reason he supposed he should be thankful he lived alone – there was no one around to see him fall. No one but Rahmiel, anyway, and Rahmiel never said a word about it. The medicae who’d attached the prosthesis had assured him that living without his right leg was preferable to dying from gangrene, but sometimes Kavel wasn’t so sure.

  He struggled to get up, but with nothing to hold onto and no one to help him he fell again. The fact that he had finished a whole bottle of amasec last night wasn’t helping, he conceded. He pushed hard against the ground, and this time he managed to get up. To the warp with this day, he thought, and staggered back to the small farmhouse he reluctantly called home.

  Ballard’s Run was a small agri world on the outer rim of known space. Populated by approximately ten thousand farmers and produce workers, it was a major source of food production for the sector, generating everything from nafar to ploin fruit to grox meat. Kavel had never taken to farming the way the rest of his family had, so when he came of age he decided to pursue the only other job available to people on Ballard’s Run – he joined the militia. It wasn’t a hard job, mostly training and drills and helping out the farmers during natural disasters. But then, ten years ago, Ballard’s Run had the bad luck to find itself in the way of an ork migration. The orks outnumbered the militia twenty to one, and over the weeks of relentless fighting that followed, thousands of soldiers and civilians were killed. With the planet’s food production halted by the war and dozens of worlds in the sector at risk of starvation as a result, the Imperial Guard forces finally arrived and beat back the orks. But by then, Kavel had already lost his entire family – his parents, cousins, aunts and uncles, and most devastatingly, his younger brother, who’d also been his closest friend. A single soul in two bodies, their parents had called them. The two of them had talked about everything, shared everything, and now all Kavel had to remember his brother Rahmiel by was an effigy he’d named after him.

  As if that weren’t enough, the war, like an insatiable beast, had taken even more from him, costing him his right leg below the knee. Without the credits to afford an advanced augmetic, he’d been forced to settle for a crude, metal prosthesis. It allowed him to walk again, but he was unable to continue in the militia. But on Ballard’s Run you were either a farmer or a soldier, so when they discharged him they gave him a few acres of isolated farmland. They called it compensation, but the truth was he didn’t have a choice.

  He’d spent every day since then on the farm, alone, tending his nafar crops, bringing his harvests to the nearby processing plant, and waiting, impatiently, to die.

  Sitting up in bed and cursing the warrior weed that had invaded his fields, Kavel reached for the fresh amasec bottle on the bedside table and, as he did every night, poured himself a big glass. He drank it in one, wincing as the high-proof alcohol burned its way down his oesophagus. It didn’t matter that he was still hungover from last night’s binge. He repeated the process until he had enough liquor in him to drift off into a dreamless sleep, secretly hoping he wouldn’t wake up again.

  But he did, much to his disappointment. When he opened his eyes, it was still dark. A sound from outside had woken him. He heard it again – the rustle of leaves, as though something were moving through the rows of nafar plants. The voraks, he thought. They were back to eat his crops.

  ‘Damn it, Rahmiel,’ he muttered as he got out of bed. What was the point of the damned thing if it didn’t keep the voraks away?

  The room tilted and dipped, and his vision swam. The alcohol was still in his system. As soon as the room stabilised, he pulled on some trousers, went to the chest that sat in the back of the room, and opened it. Inside was his shotgun. He pumped one of its eight loaded rounds into the chamber, and threw open the front door. He lifted the shotgun and scanned his fields, but he didn’t see the voraks’ barbed spines moving among the plants. He waited a moment to be certain there were no animals in his fields, then closed the door. He leaned the shotgun against the doorframe and went back to bed.

  His eyes were only closed for a few minutes before a loud banging on his front door forced them open again. He shook his head. He was hearing things. No one came to his farm. No one ever came. But then he heard more banging, frantic and insistent.
He got out of bed and picked up the shotgun. Holding it in one hand, ready to use it if he had to, he carefully opened the door.

  The young woman who stood there looked to be about twenty years old. She clutched a cloth bundle in her arms. Her face was bruised, scraped and crusted with dried blood. Fresh blood dripped from her nose and the corner of her mouth. She stared at him, and then her eyes rolled back in her head and she collapsed. Kavel dropped the shotgun and caught her before she hit the floor, which tipped him perilously forward on his prosthesis. He shifted his weight to his good leg in time to stop himself from falling, then pulled her inside and sat her up against the wall. Her breath was shallow and ragged, but at least she was still breathing. That was a good sign. Her blood-streaked hands held the cloth bundle tightly to her chest. He reached for it, but the bundle moved suddenly and he yanked his hand back. Something was alive in there!

  The young woman’s eyes fluttered open. He could see the fatigue in them, the dimming light. He knew that look well. He’d seen it in the eyes of many during the war. He’d seen it in the eyes of his own brother. She was close to death.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

  ‘My name…’ She coughed, and a trickle of blood dripped from the corner of her mouth. ‘My name is Gwynedes Lucolis. Please, you have to help.’

  ‘Let me get something to treat your wounds.’

  ‘There’s no time.’ She wiped the blood from her lips with the back of one hand. ‘You… you have to keep her safe.’

  ‘Keep who safe?’

  Gwynedes held the cloth bundle out towards him. ‘The baby. Oshi. Her mother was my sister–’ She winced, her body stiffening in pain. ‘Please, help her.’

  ‘A baby?’ Kavel stared at the bundle, sobering up fast. ‘Wait, what happened?’

  ‘Villagers… killed her mother,’ Gwynedes said. She winced again, gritting her teeth against the pain. He could tell she didn’t have much time left. ‘Now they’re… after the baby. I tried to keep her safe. Now you have to. There’s… no one else.’

  He stared at the bundle. It was wrapped so tightly he couldn’t see anything of the baby inside, but beneath the cloth a shape squirmed.

  ‘Take her,’ Gwynedes said again, her voice just a whisper. ‘Help her. Please.’

  Her eyelids drooped. Her arms started to go limp. Kavel snatched the bundle from her before she dropped it, then watched in horror as she slumped over onto her side, dead.

  He looked at the bundle in his hands, felt body heat through the cloth and something moving inside. A baby. Oshi, Gwynedes had called her. She’d begged him to keep Oshi safe, but why? Why had villagers killed the baby’s mother? Why were they after the baby too?

  There was only one explanation he could think of, but it was almost too horrific to contemplate – the baby was a mutant. When the villagers came to kill her, the mother had tried to save her child’s life and died in the process.

  Slowly, nervously, he began to unwrap the cloth from around the infant, bracing himself for whatever grotesque mutations he would find. But when he uncovered her head and freed her tiny hands to reach up and touch his weathered face, she didn’t look any different from a normal human child. It was only when he looked closer that he spotted it – a small series of bumpy ridges along her forehead. They were barely noticeable. Was this all it took for the villagers to become bloodthirsty butchers, so eager to murder a mutant they killed anyone who stood in their way? Were these the same people he’d fought the orks to protect? The same people he’d lost his leg for? The thought sickened him, and for once he was glad he lived apart from the rest of them.

  Kavel inspected the wounds on Gwynedes’ body to try to get an idea of what had happened to her, but all he could tell was that she’d been stabbed half a dozen times. It was a testament to her strength and dedication that she’d survived as long as she had.

  In the light of the double moons, he buried Gwynedes in a patch of open ground beside a grove of twisted, knotted snarltrees, and fashioned a marker for her grave from their thin, interwoven branches. Holding Oshi in one arm, he struggled to remember the prayer for the dead he’d been taught as a child. He hadn’t known Gwynedes in life, but it didn’t seem right not to say something. She’d been brave and strong and had protected the baby for as long as she could. She deserved that much. But in the end all he could remember were the last two lines of the prayer, so that was what he said:

  ‘May the light of the Emperor guide you and protect you from further harm. For the Eternal Emperor is the fire at the heart of all things, and comfort is only His to give.’

  After digging the grave, he was exhausted. He had a few more hours before the sun came up, so Kavel decided to go back to bed and get what rest he could. He pulled the covers over his legs and, by habit, reached for the amasec bottle on the bedside table. But Oshi cooed at him from the other side of the bed, where he’d put her on top of her bundle, and he stopped to turn and look at her. Her big eyes blinked at him under the tiny ridges on her forehead. She smiled toothlessly, and then giggled when he patted her belly, and for the first time in years Kavel fell asleep without drinking a drop.

  Oshi woke him with hungry cries several hours later, when the sun was already high. Kavel stumbled out of bed to find her something to eat, but he didn’t know what to give her. There was a bottle of siltberry juice in the cold storage unit, made from berries that grew in the sediment of Ballard’s Run’s rivers. They looked disgusting, like shrivelled, shrunken heads, but they tasted sweet and were rich in nutrients and vitamins. Would that stop the baby from crying? He put some on the tips of his fingers and let her drink it that way. The siltberry juice quieted her, thankfully. When Kavel caught his reflection in a mirror on the wall, he was surprised to see that he was smiling. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d smiled.

  She fell asleep again in his arms, and he gently placed her back on the bed. His smile faded. What was he doing? What did he know about raising a child? He was a farmer. An ex-soldier. A cripple and a drunk. He’d never taken care of a baby. He didn’t know the first thing about it. Who was he kidding? He had a farm to operate and Oshi would only get in the way.

  And what about Gwynedes? He didn’t actually know her, did he? How could he be sure she was telling the truth? For all he knew, she might have stolen Oshi from the baby’s rightful mother. But even if she was telling the truth, wasn’t he putting himself in danger by harbouring a mutant?

  He couldn’t keep her. He would be a fool to try. Tomorrow he would bring Oshi back to the village, he decided, and let them do with her as they saw fit. Maybe the villagers would take pity on her or maybe they would kill her, but whichever way it went, at least he wouldn’t be responsible.

  Today, however, he still had work to do. The warrior weed wasn’t going to pull itself, and he needed to salvage as much nafar as he could before his crops withered and died. Not wanting to leave Oshi in the house alone, he fashioned a wheeled cart from some wood he’d piled behind the farmhouse and lined it with soft blankets so he could take her out into the fields with him.

  Oshi watched him intently as he struggled to pull up weed after weed, each one more stubborn than the last. When he took a break to rest, he picked up a fallen nafar leaf and tickled her chin with it. She giggled, so he did it again, enjoying the high, easy sound of her laughter. Finally, he let the leaf fall to the ground and got back to work. But a breeze must have caught the leaf, because it lifted off the ground and fluttered through the air into Oshi’s hand. She poked her own chin with it and laughed again. Kavel chuckled, shook his head, and thought nothing of it.

  That night, he put Oshi down on her side of the bed and crawled into his own. The baby smiled at him and cooed, and the heaviness in Kavel’s chest – a heaviness he’d got so used to he couldn’t remember life without it – seemed to lighten. As much as it surprised him to admit it, he’d enjoyed having her with him today. He hadn’t
felt lonely, and when he’d taken breaks to feed her more siltberry juice and some of his own nutrient paste, he’d felt a sense of purpose he hadn’t felt in a long time – not since he’d been with the militia, tasked with protecting his people.

  He decided there was no rush to take her back to the village. He yawned and lay back on his pillow. Maybe tomorrow he would build a crib for her.

  A moment later he was asleep, only vaguely aware that for the second night in a row he hadn’t wanted to drink himself into oblivion.

  Kavel woke in the middle of the night, certain he’d heard someone call his name. He blinked and looked over at Oshi. The baby was sound asleep. He was on the verge of dismissing it as a dream when he heard the voice again.

  ‘Kavel Trake!’

  It was coming from outside. He wiped the sleep from his eyes, got out of bed, and pulled on yesterday’s dirty clothes. He looked out the window by the front door, and in the dark he saw five figures standing outside his house.

  ‘Who’s there?’ he called.

  The clouds parted in the night sky, revealing both moons and bringing light to the darkness. Now that he could see their faces, he recognised the five men outside. They were villagers he’d known all his life, people he’d seen at the supply store or the processing plant. In the centre stood a man Kavel knew right away as Algeros Stormhand, a soldier he’d fought beside when the orks came. Algeros was older now, just as Kavel was, but he was still big and heavily muscled.

  ‘Algeros, it’s been a long time,’ he called through the window. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘We’ve come for the child, Kavel,’ Algeros said. ‘Don’t make this any harder than it has to be.’

  Kavel frowned. It hadn’t taken them long to follow Gwynedes’ trail to his farm. He’d been foolish to hope for more time.

  ‘She’s barely a mutant, Algeros,’ he said. ‘There’s no need for this. Just leave.’

  Algeros ignored him. ‘Don’t make the same mistake the child’s mother did. Don’t try to stand in our way. She’s all we want, Kavel. Give her to us, and we’ll go. No more blood needs to be shed.’