The Cache by James Brogden (books you need to read txt) 📗

She pinwheeled her arms and regained her balance. Light and warmth struck her face from below. There was an angry orange glow far down the shaft, which could only be one thing: the djinn fires. All the stories told that the djinn fires were poison – that their breath would corrupt your flesh and make you a mother to crawlers – but that hardly mattered now since it didn’t seem likely that she was going to live to be a mother to anything. She must be almost at the very bottom of the Spike.

‘Lyse, my love, come to me and we shall be one in Valgaast!’ howled the Outsider, and shrieked with laughter that hurt her ears. It was a lot louder, a lot closer.

It was so tempting to simply throw herself in and have done with it, but that would have meant abandoning her family to the creature without even offering what pitiful defiance she could muster. Instead, she closed her eyes and offered what she feared was her last prayer to Saint Geller. Then she turned, putting her back to the burning abyss, and limped towards the monster’s voice.

‘No!’ she shouted. ‘You come to me!’

It emerged around the corner, bigger than before, so large that it had to stoop. Maybe killing the arbiters had empowered it. She didn’t care. ‘You were a pitiful sack of shit when you were a man and you’re just a bigger sack of shit now!’

The Outsider roared and charged.

Lyse was small – that was partially how she had survived so long in the Spike. Small and quick. She held her ground to the very last second and then flattened herself to the floor as the Outsider swept towards her with its claw-tipped arms bent like scoops to snatch her up.

And missed.

Its speed carried it towards the shaft, feet scrabbling against the smooth metal of the floor, but even as it plunged towards the edge it somehow managed to twist and use its momentum to leap over the gap, where it landed awkwardly on the other side.

The Outsider grinned and opened its slavering mouth but then stopped, staring at something stuck to its chest: a lump of sticky green goo and a wire-tight strand stretching from it to the glob-gun in Lyse’s hand.

‘Little bitch!’ she spat, and pulled as hard as she could.

The creature outweighed her massively, and if she’d given it a moment to regain its balance would easily have been able to resist. But she was quick, and like a precariously balanced machine pushed past its tipping point, the Outsider fell howling into the void.

Lyse collapsed at the edge, exhausted and broken, and a bit pissed off. She was going to have to get a new glob-gun now. Then as the fire left her blood she began to laugh – a high, crazed sound indistinguishable from the weeping or howling that echoed through the twisted passageways and empty galleries of the Spike like the shrieks of a lost and demented soul.

She laughed, and laughed, and laughed.

Master Cracius surveyed her critically. ‘Quer/invent.: you are sure that you have everything?’

Lyse, once first daughter to the Urretzi clan but latterly of no hall, checked her gear for the third time, more to reassure him than out of necessity: glob-gun, riveter, line-grabber, mag-pads, the message that was her errand and the gifts that would ease its reception. ‘Everything,’ she said.

‘Quer/loc.: the schematic is clear to you?’

She patted the satchel which held the data-slate and its map of her route. ‘Yes, grandfather.’

He scowled. ‘That is not amusing.’

‘Yes it is.’ She couldn’t claim to know the old tech-priest from the short time that she had been quartered with him, but she could tell when he was responding more or less as a human when his responses weren’t prefaced by some machine language gibberish.

He grunted, which was the closest he got to agreement. He was more predictable than the Urretzis, at least. When she had returned with her clan tattoos warped out of recognition the celebrations had quickly turned to whispers that she had made some kind of pact with the Outside, and she had left before the whispers became accusations of heresy. The shrine and effigy had both disappeared, but she didn’t for one second imagine that its worshippers had too.

We shall be one in Valgaast, the Outsider had said. She had no idea what that meant, but the very shape of the words in her mind was enough to cause nightmares.

Cracius had not so much taken her in as neglected to throw her out when she started sleeping amidst his scrap hoard, and he didn’t seem disturbed by the way she screamed herself awake most nights. In time she had even proved herself to be useful to him, retrieving components from places he was too bulky to go. Now he had given her a message to deliver, and the trust that this implied swelled her heart with a strange feeling that might have been happiness.

‘Go on, then,’ he said, and turned from her to work on one of his incomprehensible devices.

She grinned, and left for the crawler warrens.

About the Author

James Brogden is a writer of horror and dark fantasy. A part-time Australian who grew up in Tasmania and the Cumbrian Borders, he has since escaped to suburbia and now lives in the Midlands, where he teaches English. When not writing or teaching he can usually be found up a hill, poking around stone circles and burial mounds. He also owns more lego than is strictly necessary.

An extract from Sepulturum.

Morgravia awoke with the taste of sump filth in her mouth. She knew it was an illusion, a weird sense memory and her mind’s oh-so-humorous way of remembering her past trauma.

‘Lumis…’

Candles flared, their sodium generators buzzing noisily as they activated. The light revealed a small hab-unit. It was bare ­ferrum, a chair in one corner where Morgravia had draped her clothes