Chapter 18: Finn Valentine's Past
Duvette drew a deep breath.
Charge.
He pushed off hard with his left foot and launched himself like an arrow from a bow, combat knife cutting the air in front of him. The seven veterans behind him followed in almost the same instant, their footsteps merging in the narrow tunnel into a single urgent surge.
At the corner, six mutant heretics were leading two Chaos hounds on patrol, the hounds built like leopards and twice as mean. The mutants' skin was covered in profane tattoos and grotesque growths, their faces distorted by what their devotion to the Dark Gods had already done to them. They wore patchwork armour and carried crude firearms.
The hounds had no fur and no skin. Crimson muscle and sinew were exposed directly to the air, fangs visible where their mouths hung open, a thick, viscous liquid dripping from the tips.
The enemy had not expected to encounter anyone here.
Duvette reached the nearest mutant first. He drove his left hand down hard onto the gun barrel the mutant was trying to raise. Few baseline humans have the strength to overpower a Schola Progenium graduate in good condition. The heretic in front of him was not among them.
His right-hand knife was already in the mutant's throat, the blade passing through cartilage and trachea with a dull tearing resistance. The mutant's eyes went wide. Both hands closed uselessly around the blade. Then the body dropped.
Duvette did not stop. He heard the rush of displaced air behind him, dipped low, felt the attack miss, changed his knife grip, and drove the blade up through the attacker's chin.
"Turns out I'm not half bad at this," he muttered, flicking blood from the blade. Who would have thought. Pure muscle memory from the Schola, and it was doing the job.
Across the tunnel, the other veterans had reached their targets almost simultaneously.
Knife light flickered in the dim glow of the gas lamps.
One veteran hit the second mutant from the side and both went to the ground. The veteran ended up on top, drove the knife into the mutant's chest with both hands, three times fast, until the struggling stopped.
On the other side, two soldiers combined to bring down the third, blood striking the mud wall and hissing against it.
The most dangerous close-combat threat in the patrol was the two hounds.
One of them let out a piercing sound that was more pressure than noise and lunged at the nearest soldier. The soldier got his arm up in time. The hound's fangs punched through muscle and bone and drew a pained grunt, but the man held, and his other hand drove the knife toward the hound's belly.
The hound released and jumped back fast. The blade left only a shallow line across the exposed crimson muscle.
A shape came out of the dark from the side.
Finn Valentine.
The masked sniper did not use a knife. He went directly at the hound, arms locking around its neck with the grip of something that had been squeezing things to death for a long time. The hound thrashed violently, claws tearing deep furrows in the mud floor, tail hammering against Finn's back again and again.
Finn did not let go.
The muscle in his forearms pulled tight. His breathing through the mask became audible and heavy. The hound's snarling gradually became a throttled whimper and the struggle weakened with each second. Thirty seconds in, the body went fully limp.
Finn opened his hands. The hound's body settled against the floor.
The second hound had been handled by two soldiers working together. One drew its attention, the other put a blade through the eye socket and into the brain.
The fight had lasted under two minutes from the moment they cleared the corner.
Six mutants. Two Chaos hounds. All of them down.
Duvette caught his breath and swept his eyes across the scene. His soldiers were confirming the bodies. One man's arm had been bitten through and a soldier was wrapping it tight with bandaging. Everyone else had minor scrapes.
"Well done," Duvette said quietly. "Pull the bodies toward..."
He stopped.
A shout from ahead.
More of them.
Duvette turned hard.
A second patrol had appeared around the far corner. Three mutants and one hound. They had clearly heard something from the direction of the first engagement but were not yet certain what. The lead mutant had his weapon up, scanning cautiously toward them.
Duvette's thinking moved immediately. Advance. Reach them before they can fire.
The mutants had not expected a charge.
The lead mutant hesitated for a single moment. That moment was what it cost him.
Duvette closed the distance, drove the knife upward through the mutant's chin, through the roof of the mouth, the tip emerging from the back of the skull. He wrenched it clear. The body went backward.
The remaining mutants had already reacted.
Weapons came up.
Finn hit the second mutant from the side and both of them went down together. The mutant swung the rifle butt at Finn's head. Finn rolled his head aside, brought his knee hard into the man's stomach. The mutant folded. Finn took the rifle away from him, reversed it, and put the butt into the mutant's temple twice. The sound from the second impact was different from the first.
The veterans reached the last mutant and the hound at the same moment and finished both.
It was over.
Duvette let out a long breath, hands on his waist, and gave himself a moment to let the adrenaline settle. Then he looked over at Finn.
The sniper was about to push himself up from the ground. Duvette walked to him and put out his hand.
Finn paused. Then he took it.
Duvette pulled him up. It was only then that he noticed Finn's face. The mask had torn during the fight, the grey fabric ripped open to reveal the skin underneath.
The scarring was old. The edges had healed long ago. But the skin across that section of his face had the twisted, ridged texture of tissue that had been burned severely and had never properly recovered, the coloring a dark, uneven red running from the cheekbone all the way down to the jaw.
Finn seemed to register where Duvette's gaze had gone.
He was quiet for a few seconds. Then he exhaled and pulled the damaged mask the rest of the way off, revealing the full extent of it. The burns covered the right half of his face entirely. The right eyelid drooped slightly. The corner of his mouth was pulled fractionally off-center by the scar tissue below it.
"Old wounds," Finn said.
Duvette did not press him. He put a hand on Finn's shoulder, then turned back and gave the order to the group. "Pull the bodies and hide them. Cover the blood with dirt. Fast."
The soldiers moved.
Duvette went to the soldier with the bitten arm and looked at the wound. The hound's teeth had gone through the muscle. They had not reached an artery.
"Can you still fight?" Duvette asked.
The soldier nodded. His color was not good but his eyes were steady. "Yes, sir."
"Good."
The blood was covered over with loose stone and earth, rough work that would not deceive anyone looking closely, but would not announce itself to someone moving through in a hurry.
When everything was dealt with, Duvette signaled the team to head back.
On the return, Finn walked beside him, his voice low and continuous, working through prayers to the God-Emperor in the dark.
Duvette listened for a while to the familiar words. Then he asked, without looking over: "Were you a Ministorum priest?"
Finn shook his head.
"A worker," he said. "I am not from K3192. I came from Gryphonne IV. I worked a production line there for twenty years."
He paused. His voice dropped.
"Then the heretic rebellion started. They bombed the factory where I worked. My wife and daughter were in the residential district nearby at the time..." He did not finish the sentence. He did not need to.
He smiled. The expression looked different on the scarred half of his face than it did on the other.
"I wanted every one of those bastards dead. So I joined the Guard." He glanced at Duvette. "I wanted to stop feeling the weight of what I had lost. So I found faith in the God-Emperor. Prayer gives me somewhere to put it."
Duvette was quiet for a moment.
"Does it work?"
"Sometimes," Finn said. "At least it quiets my mind."
Noise came from the tunnel ahead, faint but distinguishable. They were nearly back to the main column's waiting position.
Duvette took one last look at Finn's face, then turned his eyes forward toward the amber glow of the gas lamps ahead.
"Hide the bodies," he said. "Then we keep moving."