2. Aftermath

Brother Zil wheezed from exertion as he hauled Chosen Ghilabrious, breathing but otherwise a dead weight, along narrow tunnels. He released Ghilabrious to open a maintenance hatch and winced as his leader's head clanged off the deck with a resounding thud. As he dragged Ghilabrious into the even tighter vent, feelings of guilt over the fresh injury he had just inflicted warred with feelings of relief; both Ghilabrious and Doctor Nostrox would assume these bruises also came from Ghilabrious being knocked unconscious during the skirmish with the Hellhounds.

Zil gave a high-pitched laugh as he realised that responsibility for getting Ghilabrious to safety at least took his mind off the bloodbath they had just escaped. Despite already knowing he was not being watched, he paused in his furtive movements to look around and check no-one had heard that laugh. He wasn't sure it sounded quite sane. Zil pushed aside more loops of tubing and insulated wiring and continued to drag Ghilabrious.

As his journey continued, Zil entertained the notion that maybe he would be Valued for saving Ghilabrious. But no, there would be no Value attached to a debacle such as this. He wasn't sure Prophet Zicarios would even be grateful for Ghilabrious's life. And it had all started so promisingly. The tainted ones had fallen back in the face of the brood's advance. One of them had even fallen to Ghilabrious's pistols, Blaze and Glory. As Zil passed the body, he noticed smoke rising from the eightfold mark upon the man's face, as if his gods were punishing him for his failure. Zil had taken it is a good omen, a sign from the Amethyst Emperor that victory would soon be theirs. The enemy were surrounded, and doomed. It was a nonsense that everything then went so wrong.

By the time the screams stopped and the smoke cleared, Zil could see prone kin from the Good News Brood sprawled at impossible angles across the battlefield of corridors and storage bays. He regretted leaving Brother Lum as he choked on his own blood, but the safety of Chosen Ghilabrious took priority. Only Kor and Cos looked healthy as they helped a limping Sebastophon and a dazed Krug shuffle away.

Zil's mind returned to the present. He crossed one final major traffic artery without incident. Only a half-starved mongrel watched him as he dragged Ghilabrious across from one hatch to the next and into the dark safety. The mutt made no sound, a sense self-preservation keeping it quiet, but it pinched its nose at their scent. 

Through the hatch, the network of crawl-spaces and voids led to home; The Church of the Amethyst Emperor. With his task almost over, Zil began to feel a different kind of fear. Not the urgent fear of flight, but the gut-deep dread of a perilous future. Nostrox would not be happy, and worse, with so few surviving Brothers and Elders, other gangs would see the Church as vulnerable.