She knelt over the corpse and spat in its face. ‘He’d have led me right to them if you hadn’t killed him.’
Severian shrugged and took a knee beside her. He turned the dead man’s head in his hand. The slack features were no longer curled in a rictus grin of mockery. Blood still dribbled over his purple lips.
‘What is it?’ said Alivia. ‘Some form of chronic hypoxia?’
‘Maybe, but I doubt it,’ said Severian, bending over the man, as though about to give him the kiss of life. Alivia grimaced as the tip of his tongue flicked over the dead man’s lips. The legionary swirled the taste around his mouth before spitting the tainted saliva onto the wall. It smoked as it slid down the steel panel.
‘What is it?’ asked Alivia. ‘A narcotic?’
‘Yes, and a powerful one too. A blend of some kind of ergot and distilled serpent venom,’ said Severian.
‘Will that help you track where he came from?’
‘It might,’ said Severian. ‘There’s a quicker way, but you won’t like it.’
‘If it helps find Vivyen, then I’ll like it.’
‘Fair enough, but I warn you it’s not pretty.’
Severian’s fist stabbed downwards, fingers extended like a blade. He struck the side of the dead man’s head, splitting the bone with precise force. Severian spread his fingers, levering open the vault of the skull and exposing the pink-grey ooze within. He tossed away the hair-covered bone and dug his fingertips into the wet, pliable meat of the brain.
Alivia knew what was coming; a barbaric custom from millennia ago, resurrected by science and made to work as ancient warriors believed it worked. That had always been His gift, grafting fresh purpose to martial customs and bending them to his will.
She forced herself not to look away as Severian scooped out a handful of jelly-like brain matter. He sniffed it and baulked at the smell and texture.
‘What?’ he said, seeing her surprise. ‘It’s something we can do, but do you really think we enjoy it? The things we see, they never go away. Ever.’
‘Please,’ said Alivia. ‘If there was any other way…’
Severian sighed and closed his eyes, pushing the brain meat into his mouth. He chewed for an entire minute before finally swallowing it.
His eyes snapped open, but they were glassy and unfocused, like an opiate-fiend or false prophet in a fugue state. His mouth hung slack and Alivia felt her gorge rise at the sight of bloody morsels stuck in his teeth.
‘Severian?’
He doubled over and puked onto the deck. Alivia covered her mouth and nose at the ammoniac reek as Severian spat and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
‘Did you see where they are?’ she asked.
Severian nodded and gripped his golden-hilted gladius. Alivia saw its ivory pommel was worked with a cobalt-blue company number enclosed by a wreath. A blade of the XIII Legion.
‘I saw them.’
A lump formed in Alivia’s throat. ‘Is Vivyen alive?’
‘Yes.’
Relief flooded her, swiftly followed by more anguish at the terseness of Severian’s reply.
‘Are they hurting her? Is is bad?’
‘It’s worse than you know,’ said Severian. ‘It’s the warp.’
Until the revelation of the White Naga, Shargali-Shi had always viewed suffering as something to be visited upon others. He had shunned pain, taking ever more exotic compounds to dull his senses to its fiery balm.
The Serpent Gods’ revelations had changed him in ways too numerous to believe, but chief among them was a craving for ever more extreme sensation. No debasement could be too degrading, no pain too sublime, and no violation so grossly beyond the mores of civilisation for him to forego. He had transcended all limitations of mortal flesh, blending the Sacristans technology with the flesh-alchemy of serpents.
Secretly wise, serpents held the keys to immortality.
What other species could shed its skin and yet live?
Their venoms were sacred fluids, opening the mind to realms of perception only madmen knew, every toxic droplet imparting knowledge wrung from each brush with death’s kingdom.
His beloved Lyx had known that.
Her treacheries had crippled her first husband, a man whose hate-filled blood wrought venoms of terrifying lethality and beauty. Her lusts had brought him her last husband, a host of battle Knights and the resources of an entire planet.
But Lyx was dead and the Warmaster now claimed Molech as his prize. He had cursed Horus Lupercal until Molech’s Enlightenment plunged into the empyrean and the designs of the Serpent Gods became clear.
Shargali-Shi was to be their prophet of doom, the blade carrying venomous seed to Terra and poisoning the well at the Imperium’s heart.
Hot and humid as a rainforest, moisture filled the arched chamber in which he had established his Serpent House. It dripped from the reticulated girders overhead and glistened on corroded pillars. It sweated from the hundreds of writhing bodies laid before him, their limbs intertwined.
Watching over the debauched flesh-revels were half a dozen Thallaxii: armoured cybernetics with featureless, brushed-steel heads enclosing agonised scraps of excised nervous systems. Once bound to House Devine, they now served the will of the Serpent Gods, and emerald corposant played across the fangs of their lightning guns. If he listened hard enough, he could hear the lunatic screaming of the Thallaxii within their armoured prisons.
Shargali-Shi hung suspended above all, his skeletal limbs splayed like an ancient crucified god. His flesh was the hue of mouldered vellum, clinging to wasted limbs and bones reduced to viscous sludge. Borne aloft like a grotesque marionette, he hung upon wires attached to clattering pulleys and barbed hooks that stretched his pallid skin taut in tattered flaps. A translucent womb-sac extruded from his bloated abdomen, its contents twitching with undulant life.
His face was an ovoid dome with distended jaws and crooked teeth that drooled venom. Blinded by milky cataracts, his prodigious mind saw all and sustained him when every law of nature sought to claim his tormented flesh.
He knew agony with every hissing breath, but he accepted the pain, transformed it into an act of devotion to the powers that dwelled in the night. The White Naga had taught him how to use that pain, to turn it inwards and reach beyond the veil to the realm where the Serpent Gods dwelled.
Smuggled aboard the warship in the last days of the battle for Molech by men of influence in thrall to his cult, Shargali-Shi had drawn ever closer to his gods. As the vessel ploughed the furrows of the immaterial ocean, he heard their hissing secrets in every sigh of submission, every scream of bliss, every blood-choked death rattle.
An auspicious time was approaching. The movement in the taut womb-sac grew frantic as the life within sensed the imminence of its birth.
‘Yes, my child,’ hissed Shargali-Shi. ‘The Chosen Six will be yours, and the White Naga will claim their envenomed flesh. It shall sculpt their forms anew that they might bear the radiance of its divine form.’
Severian led them deeper into the nightmare, into the bowels of the warship, as he followed splintered memories plucked from a dead man’s skull. An inexact map, they took many wrong turns, and doubled back frequently. Alivia tried not to let her frustration show, knowing what it had cost him to eat the flesh of a corrupted soul.
Below the waterline was a place to be feared, even on a ship as illustrious as Molech’s Enlightenment.
Here, scum sank to the bottom.
Scav-tech gangs of bilge rats shadowed their every step, but their fear of Severian kept even the most desperate from attacking.