Secret War: Warhammer 40,000 by Ben Agar (reading eggs books TXT) 📖

be proud Attelus."

She sniffed again, but this time it had humour in it, "when we took you to Taryst's medicae facility, they said there was no way you would survive, that you would die within hours, but I knew you were stubborn, and you held on, you lived and-and most importantly, thank you, thank you for living, thank you."

Oh, how I dearly wished I could reach out and comfort her or even thank her, but everything was so hard, so, so hard, couldn't keep my eyes open, anymore, anymore, I blinked, once then twice, then I embraced the sweetness of sleep.

 

 

Chapter 5

 I lunged, the crackling power sword in my hands, slicing a horizontal arc at my opponent's torso.

My movements were so sure, so fast, so skilled that my eyes could barely follow; never had I known myself to be this good and never had I ever wielded a power sword either.

But somehow, despite my incredible speed, my breathtaking confidence and skill, blindingly fast my enemy managed to dodge. Serghar Kaltos back-peddled just away from reach, and the handsome, grim-faced man that was my father slid in, slashing through vertically with his power sword.

Never would I ever had dreamt I could fight my father to a standstill Serghar Kaltos' skill was legendary; his speed and agility rivalled that of an Eldar's, and these immeasurable talents honed from decades and decades of experience and training. When I was young, he and I would spar for countless hours. I was good, excellent, but I would never win no matter how hard I tried; never could I ever even begin to touch my father, and I could tell even then that he was just forever toying with me, forever holding back his real skill and strength.

Now he wasn't, but still, my blade was able to come around and knock his attack off course; my body seemed to move on its own like water and fire in one. In the blink of an eye, I riposted and stabbed forwards in perfect balance, the tip of my power blade aimed at impaling his chest.

The ever-practical Serghar Kaltos simply sidestepped the thrust. Still, my body followed on as if expecting such a trick, keeping the thrust forwards, I turned my hips, causing the crackling blade to follow after my father's movement.

Serghar didn't hesitate; he parried with his blade on an angle, so my momentum caused my sword to slide up to it and, off-course, throwing me into being overextended and overbalanced, then he came in to perform the killing blow. A short slash aimed to disembowel.

I cried out, knowing this to be the end, that no matter how good I was, there would be no way I could ever hope to counter. And yet, despite my overbalance, despite my overextended position, my body moved. With extreme cat-like dexterity beyond my comprehension, I slipped clear in a move of outrageous audacity I slid forwards, sliding around and behind my father while he was still in mid-cut, and then I stabbed my power sword through his back.

I wanted to scream out no to halt the blow! But my body wouldn't let me. I resented my father, he was a hypocrite and a liar, but I never wanted to kill him. He was still my dad; he was always the one who looked after me, put up with me, who taught me how to shoot a gun, how to wield a sword, how to read and write, how to survive. I had no intention to ever hunt him down in some mislead vengeance.

Without my permission, my body lent in and said something into the dying Serghar Kaltos' ear, but what I uttered I could not hear.

Then abruptly, I pulled back and tore my blade from his torso in an angle which caused his body to spin around to face me and for one brief moment, I was able to look into my father's face, but now it wasn't Serghar Kaltos. No, the wide-eyed dying form which faced me now was that of Glaitis. Who, despite the ugly gaping hole in her chest, grinned at me with hideous, terrifying insanity. But it was when I looked into her glazed eyes then I screamed, as utter terror tore through me, terror which far exceeded anything I had ever felt before, terror which consumed me and drove me to the brink of insanity.

Because it was in the reflection of her large, blue beautiful eyes, I saw myself; I saw my face so much like my father's but framed by my long brown hair. Still, my expression was contorted, twisted and deformed into an insane, hideous, and grinning maw, a mirror of Glaitis' own.

My screams turned into muffled yells as I awoke back into the medicae ward, back into the agony of the real world, but despite the pain, relief washed over me as I realised it was a dream. I lent back into my pillow, my yelling turning into strangled gasps.

It was then the medicae rushed through the door and to my bedside. I instantly recognised him as I had met him the first and only time I remembered to visit Torris after his injury, but to my annoyance, I could not quite recall his name.

"Mr Kaltos, are you alright? I heard screaming."

I could not answer; it still hurt to talk; I could only look up at him.

"I see," he said, "it was a nightmare."

He pulled out a small flashlight from his white jacket pocket and shone it into my eyes. "After what you had gone through, I would not expect any less, young man."

When he pulled away, I caught a glimpse of his name tag, Feuilt that's right, medicae Yarran Feuilt, the guy, seemed decent enough from the very brief bits of passing dialogue we have shared.

"It's good to see you are finally awake, Mr Kaltos; everyone was beginning to worry; it has been more than a week since you last woke up."

I clenched my teeth in disbelief, a frigging week!

"But believe it or not, you have been through the worst of it; you're lucky you are young. Another solid month of recovery, and you should be back in working order."

A month of recovery? Wait, another month! I have been unconscious for that long! By the Emperor! But I shouldn't have been surprised; it was a miracle that I was still conscious at all, actually going from what Castella had said a month was way too quick, really.

I don't believe in 'miracles' and, in all honesty, I didn't believe any of Castella's earlier claim either. There was no way in hell that I could have held off that beast for so long that all those people could escape. I remembered well the size of that room and the size of the crowd stuffed into that space.

There was no way in hell that there couldn't have been collateral damage; I would have had to dodge and weave its attacks. Perhaps she had just worded it wrong, but I doubted Castella would not be so sloppy. If Glaitis had concocted this lie, she would have engineered it to sound more legitimate, surely.

Or perhaps that I am just legitimately that excellent, or perhaps Castella just wanted to give good news when I finally awoke, and she would tell me the truth later? But that would piss me off because she lied and-.

I wanted to scream and roar out the frustration and anger that suddenly flooded to the surface. Do you have any idea what it is like to live in a world that you can't believe in anything! That everyone close to you lies about anything and everything, that you are forced to question any act of kindness because there may be some treachery behind it? Everyone has their petty agenda, everyone! And there would be nothing they couldn't resort to see their ambitions through. I am an idiot, a complete and utter idiot that it has taken me this long to realise that.

'Trust nothing, suspect everything' a saying which now seemed so redundant it was laughable.

It was then I realised that medicae Feuilt was studying me; his beady eyes glinted with concern.

Suddenly he turned, grabbed the nearby stool, slid it next to my bed and sat down.

"Now I am no psyker, but I can tell when a patient is in distress and well," Feuilt paused, grinned and scratched the back of his skull, "but you wouldn't need to be a psyker or a thirty-year veteran of the healing arts to tell that you must have a lot of questions."

I set my jaw and treated him with the best glare I could dare; oh, you could not imagine the stockpile of questions I have gathered and needed answered, I thought.

"And well, you are not exactly in the condition to ask them, so I will tell you what I know and of the best of my ability," he sighed. "When you were first taken into us, you were in bad shape; well, to be honest, saying that you were in bad shape is like saying a star going supernova is a bad thing for the planets orbiting it. It is an understatement."

Well, I would have never figured that out, I thought sardonically.

"Almost every bone in your body was broken, well, shattered, but remarkably your skull and spine were mostly still intact, and you had the slightest of life signs." Feuilt's expression turned hard. "Honestly, we had pegged you for dead. As I said, your bones shattered; there was no way we could re nit them and even if you did survive the trauma of the impact which caused it, that your brain would have been damaged beyond repair. But your employer, Glaitis, she wouldn't give up and under her orders and too much, much sweat and toil, we managed to stabilise you for the first week. So you lived long enough that she could," he hesitated, and an almost incredulous expression creased his already old face. "So she could bring in a new surgeon, who uhm, worked by interesting methods. For only an hour at most, we were not allowed to enter this room while that new surgeon worked; whoever it was, it never even asked us anything. Still, I could not deny the psychic presence emanating from this room." Feuilt shivered, "after that, that hour whoever it was just left, as quickly as they came."

I wasn't too sure what to make of this news so far if Feuilt was telling the truth, which I did believe, or at the least, he thought it was true. Then perhaps, the story of Castella's "you were stubborn and held on to survive" was complete and utter frig, but I could see that Feiult wasn't telling me the whole truth. Like if the healer were indeed a psyker who somehow didn't get its healing of me detected by the local authorities after the incident at The Twilight Bar. Indeed any new psychic activity would have been treated with extreme suspicion if it was sensed, of course, and then why did Taryst allow it? And also, why would Glaitis go to so much effort to save me? A mere, lowly apprentice?

But all that paled in comparison to one substantial huge lingering question, why were we