Part Three Death of a Dream
Fifteen Avenues of the Mechanicum / The true webway / Eternal war
The procession travelled through tunnels of dark metal and glowing circuitry. Arkhan Land, no stranger to the gloom of underground complexes given his chosen profession, yet found it curiously oppressive. It wasn’t the darkness, for the walls themselves radiated a weak electrical light from their circuit lines. Nor was it the fog, which seemed to have no source, for once he had determined it carried no toxic potential, the stuff was easy to ignore.
No, what he found oppressive was the knowledge of what waited beyond these ironclad walls. He had faith, of course. He had all the faith a man could possess that the Omnissiah’s psychic resolve would keep these passages protected.
But still.
Land had never considered himself given to fits of imaginative excess. When venturing into the ancient catacombs of data-dungeons his concerns were largely centred on dealing with the inevitable slew of automated defences, not worrying what mythological monsters might lurk within the shadows outside his torch beams. Now he found himself endlessly staring at the circuit-etched walls, wincing at every shudder of a passing tank or rattling generator, thinking of the warp – the warp itself – crashing in shrieking, monstrous majesty against the outside of the tunnels through which he travelled. He couldn’t hear it, he couldn’t see it, but he knew it was there. A siege, invisible to the senses.
Like travelling beneath an ocean, he mused without a smile. Constantly fearful of the transit tubes springing a leak.
A mind full of these nebulous terrors made for a joyless walk. It wasn’t as if he could confide his fears to the rest of the convoy, either. The Sisters of Silence already knew and seemed wholly unfazed. The Archimandrite was impossible to engage in any conversation beyond the status of the convoy, and the battle-servitors lacked any conversational aptitude whatsoever. Baroness Jaya and her courtiers were still in the dark regarding the truth of the webway and the warp beyond. Now there was an amusing thought. How their limited intellects must be straining to process all of this.
Zephon knew the truth, of course. But placid, angelic Zephon had spent most of the journey alone, when he wasn’t at Diocletian’s side. Ah, well.
Occasionally the sections of the circuitry ingrained upon the walls would shatter and emit sparks. Land flinched each and every time, picking up his pace.
Determining any temporal data here had proved impossible. The procession’s various chronometers tallied seconds, minutes and hours in both directions with no consistency. One servitor’s systems insisted the date was three hundred years before the declaration of the Great Crusade. Arkhan Land’s own chron had functioned well enough for almost four hours, at which point it had started counting between seven and fifty seconds for each one that passed. On several occasions it had stopped for an unknown span, only to come back to life of its own accord. He’d ceased trying to glean any sense from it.
He walked knee-deep in the clinging fog, which was either pale gold or smoky azure depending upon the viewer in question. Despite bringing his Raider he was content to let it guide itself as part of the procession, relying on its onboard servitors and machine-spirit core. The webway was something he simply had to experience outside of his battle tank’s protective plating.
Sapien rode upon his shoulder, the irises of its eyes endlessly click-click-clicking as it recorded picts that appealed to its primitive brain. Frequently Land paused to make auspex scans and take readings – Sapien would leap from his shoulder during each stop, plunging through the mist, doing the Emperor alone knew what. Land regularly pried the beast’s cranium open to review the psyber-monkey’s pict-feed, but the images were of nothing but circuit-inlaid walls and floors, or the featureless spread of colour-bleaching mist.
Arkhan was entitled to travel at the head of the procession alongside the Archimandrite and the unwelcoming presences of Kaeria and Diocletian. More often he chose to travel alone, moving here and there throughout the convoy, sometimes even falling back far enough to walk alongside the rattling strides of Baroness Jaya and her marching Knights. They were an inspiring lot, in their own way.
A Vigilator clade of Protectors brought up the column’s rear, their claws thrumming with waspish, sonic lethality, curved talons clicking out of rhythm with their augmented tread. He knew better than to seek to engage them in conversation. On Sacred Mars they were known as the sicarii – a dune-stalking, inhuman transmogrification of lesser skitarii warriors – and few of them possessed enough personality to be considered companionable.
At no point did they make camp. The servitors required no rest and the convoy never ceased. Land himself was used to the discomfort of months-long expeditions into subterranean vaults, so stealing a few hours of sleep in the back of a Triaros conveyor or his own Raider tank was luxury enough. Sleep didn’t come easily, but it offered the only opportunities to forget what waited behind the curved walls.
The Mechanicum’s sections of the webway were much as he expected them to be, albeit with the added occlusion of the strange and sourceless mist. Tunnel after tunnel of sanctified metal, the walls lacerated by gleaming lines of precious circuitry. The wiring was complicated enough to be almost hieroglyphic in nature, covering every surface of the tunnels’ insides. Unerringly the procession marched forwards, never pausing even when the passages forked or branched, never journeying along a route that would be too confined for House Vyridion’s towering silhouettes. There were several of those.
‘Where do these passages lead?’ he’d voxed to Diocletian from his Raider’s command console.
‘Nowhere,’ was the inevitable reply.
The tunnels are unfinished, then. Or never rebuilt. Or construction was never started after the very first foundations. Curious.
Even so, there was a definite scale to the operation. Arkhan knew from the Archimandrite’s map that the Mechanicum-engineered sections were nothing more than tentative tendrils binding Terra to the true web. It justified the modesty of their efforts, including why he could perceive the ceilings of most tunnels through a haze of mist. Yet was it not said that the Legio Ignatum had committed Titans to the Great Work? How could they have walked their god-machines along these routes?
The answer came to him as soon the question occurred. The Great Workers must have brought any larger Titans piecemeal, their disassembled components shipped along these paths upon grav-convoy slabs to be reassembled deeper in the webway.
What delicious sacrilege. And what would be the fate of any machine-spirit given life in this strange realm? Would it display tics and deficiencies unseen outside the webway? Would Titans constructed within the webway fall victim to the realm’s unnatural juncture in reality?
So many questions. So few answers.
Kane, dear respected Zagreus Kane, hadn’t opposed Land’s decision to devote himself to the Great Work. The Fabricator General’s accommodating position on the matter had come as a surprise, to say the least. He’d anticipated refusals based on notions of expertise and primacy. He was after all a technoarchaeologist, wholly unsuited to war, no matter how respected he might be in his vocation.
Land had his suspicions on just why Kane had agreed, however. Oh, yes. He had his suspicions.
Sapien bared his little teeth and emitted a series of chittering clicks. Land turned, looking back over his shoulder as a tall shape emerged from the mist, becoming the Blood Angel Zephon. The twin turbines rising from his back like brutal machine wings swayed with the warrior’s gait. Battle-servitors trundled past, blind to anything beyond the Archimandrite’s guiding signal at the front of the column.
‘Greetings,’ said the pale Blood Angel. His portcullis-faced Mark III helm was under his arm, leaving his face bare.
‘My Baalite compatriot,’ Land replied. He scratched his scalp, where hair had long since lost the war to maintain a colony on the barren landscape.
Zephon slowed his pace to walk alongside Land. ‘You must be proud,’ he said. ‘To see what the efforts of Mars have wrought.’
Proud? thought Land. Yes, I suppose. In a way. Though the true wonder, the true lore, waits beyond.
‘I am indeed,’ he said aloud.
‘And it was good that your high priestess survived her surgery.’
‘Hieronyma? She isn’t my high priestess. She falls within the circle of a far different aspect of the Martian covens. She worships the Omnissiah as Destruction Itself. As the Unmaker God.’
‘And you?’
‘I revere Him for what He is – a genius. I don’t hold any one aspect of His genius sacred above any other.’
‘I see.’ Zephon raised an eyebrow. ‘Though I note that you corrected my terminology rather than express relief at the priestess’ survival.’
‘Insightful fellow. The Archimandrite Venture is a glory, good sir. But it isn’t a fate I would ever crave. Trapped inside that hull forevermore? Nerve-stripped and muscle-riven and bone-scraped, bound into amniotic soup to sustain a brain and spinal cord?’ Land shuddered theatrically. ‘No, thank you.’
‘I see,’ the Blood Angel said again.
I doubt that, Land thought. You didn’t witness the surgery.
Zephon turned gentle eyes upon Sapien. The psyber-monkey took it as an invitation. It leapt onto the warrior’s pauldron, clinging to the white wing symbol of the IX Legion before scampering up between the jump pack’s turbines.
‘I trust this creature will not urinate on me?’ the Space Marine asked. ‘I am not certain my dignity could survive such a blow.’
Land looked up at the Blood Angel, one eye narrowed. He stroked his pointed beard in thought. ‘Sapien takes nutrients intravenously. What little waste he excretes is via gel-sac deposits. Therefore, the answer to your question is no.’
Zephon chuckled softly. ‘Charming. Here.’ He reached a bionic hand back over one shoulder; the psyber-monkey allowed itself to be lifted by the scruff and handed back to its master. It looked at the immense warrior as it settled upon Land’s shoulder once more, and clicked an inquisitive little chirping sound.
‘I note the instabilities of your bionics,’ said the technoarchaeologist. ‘Flicker-twitches at the metacarpophalangeal knuckles. The work of a poor surgeon?’
Zephon’s smile was gone. ‘Graft rejection.’
‘Indeed? I didn’t think that could happen with your kind.’
‘Now you know otherwise,’ the Blood Angel replied mildly.
‘I’d like to study your bionics at some point, to glean an understanding of their exact deficiencies.’
‘Perhaps, if circumstances allow.’
The silence was approaching awkwardness when Land spoke once more. ‘Is there something you need of me, Blood Angel?’
‘No. I merely wished to ask your thoughts regarding the Imperial Dungeon. The Vyridion Knights witnessed it through gun-feeds and their cockpits’ monitors. The servitors were obviously indifferent. You and I were among the only ones to witness it with our naked eyes.’
‘And you wondered if, what, I found it some profound and moving experience?’
The Blood Angel hesitated. ‘I wondered exactly that. Though the venom in your tone leads me to believe you did not.’
‘It was interesting enough,’ Land replied archly. What was he going to do? Admit to some superhuman brute that he had wept with the revelations of that journey? The galaxy burned because of these ceramite-clad fools. ‘But we of the Red World are used to wonders beyond the ken of mortal minds.’
‘I see. Then may I ask why you accompanied the expedition?’
Land raised an eyebrow. ‘To bear witness. I assure you, nothing could keep me away. Aren’t you honoured to be here, warrior?’
Zephon nodded. ‘Of course. Prefect Coros chose me specifically, though I confess I do not know why.’
Land looked up at the Blood Angel’s statuesque features, seeking any expression or suggestion as to the warrior’s thoughts. Seeing no sign of understanding, Arkhan Land smiled a strange smile, one with no warmth that yet lacked any shred of mockery.
He really doesn’t know, Land thought. And yet it’s so obvious.
‘Something amuses you?’ asked Zephon.
‘Oh, no. Never that.’ Land chuckled, giving lie to the words.
Reaching the end of his patience, Zephon inclined his head in respect. ‘If you will excuse me, Explorator Land.’
‘Of course, of course.’
The Blood Angel walked on, his long stride easily outpacing Land’s.
Touchy fellow, he thought, watching the Blood Angel’s back.
An unknowable time after his encounter with Zephon, a message crackled across the vox, making its way down the processional line. The order was given to brace, to be ready, to detune any aura-scrye sensors and auspex scanners, and diminish any transhuman senses.
‘Ahead is one of the webway’s original sections.’ It was Diocletian’s voice, as distracted and terse as the Custodian always seemed to sound. ‘Adhere to the path at all costs.’
Land’s mouth was dry. Licking his lips made no difference. His tongue was leather. At last. At last…
He walked on, staring ahead through the wide manufactured tunnel, feeling the thrill of excitement that always bubbled up before the possibility of revelation. At his sides, the battle-servitors rumbled on. They, however, were lobotomised far past wonder.
When the iron walls faded away, they took their circuit-laden gleam and the hum of trembling engines with them. Mist rose in place of defined structure – Baroness Jaya had no idea where the path was, or how those at the procession’s vanguard were still following it. The procession’s footsteps no longer echoed from walls of Martian metal; instead the golden mist ate all sound and sent it back to them in fragments.
Was this the webway? The true webway? Yes it was, she soon realised. And no, it was not.
Passage walls became evident where the mist thinned: architecture of some arching substance that defeated any auspex rakes. The invalid returns read as something akin to eldar wraithbone, similar in physical density – and according to Land’s prattling, ‘similar in psychic resonance! Ah, forgive me! You couldn’t possibly understand…’ – yet comprised of no known material.
She’d known from studying the limited available data that the Great Work, this so-called web, was the creation of a race far older than any living in the galaxy. That fact held little awe for a woman who had taken her first xenos life at the age of fourteen. Species dawned and died with brutal regularity: the Crusade had driven hundreds of such species to extinction, and there had been alien empires at war before humanity itself was a brief, portentous meeting of proteins. No, it didn’t matter how old this industrious species had been. What made her skin crawl was the far more visceral reality that her scanners forced her to face.
Illara Latharac, Third Sword Exemplar, had voxed the very same sentiment from farther back in the processional line. Jaya heard her courtier swallow softly. ‘Pray to speak, baroness.’
‘Ever and always.’
‘My gratitude. Whatever this material is, it came from outside our galaxy. How can that be? How can that be possible?’
Jaya shuddered at the thought. Her Knight’s joints groaned in sympathy through their kin-bond.
The tunnels diverged without warning or any impression of which route was worthy over any other. The mist would simply part to reveal two or more alternate passages, each as indistinct as all others. Jaya sent auspex-relays down every passage even long past the point she realised no route would register anything of interest upon her scanners. She switched through focus/refine, through mono-drenching, even through the relative crudeness of colo-scrying, only the latter revealing anything at all. Her instruments measured no life yet a great deal of movement.
‘I have motion,’ she had voxed the first time.
‘I have nothing,’ Devram replied at once. The rest of the column reported their own findings, which varied between the silence of Devram’s scans and the mess of Jaya’s.
The movement ghosted around with each scan, seemingly belonging to no living beings, following no physical possibility. Either an army of spirits danced down many of the tunnels, or the passages themselves were moving in some unearthly, instrument-defeating manner.
Sometimes, she heard her name spoken aloud. It wasn’t a voice she recognised, nor did the vox acknowledge transmission receipt despite the telltale crackle of interference that bordered the man’s speech. More than once she heard his murmuring directly into her left ear, in a whispering tone that was too faint to make out his meaning. She couldn’t be sure if his parched whispers were too soft to understand or spoken in a language she didn’t simply know.
‘Pray to speak, baroness.’ Devram’s voice made her flinch.
‘Ever and always,’ she replied. The formal words seemed stuck in her dry mouth.
‘My gratitude. My vox receiver is malfunctioning, or… I’m not certain. Is anyone’s vox registering indecipherable whispering?’
Nervous chuckles from throughout the column answered the question well enough.
Faces leered at Jaya from the mist, human, alien, other. She watched them on her gun-feeds and through the god’s-eye strip-feed of her Knight’s primary vision realiser. One of the faces wrenched in the mist, turning and melting with the hazy impressions of reaching arms. The mist rippled with the suggestion of flame. That was how her father had died, seared alive in his control seat, too weakened by his wounds to operate the ejection bracers. It took Sacristan Torolec three sleepless days to reverently scrape and respectfully flush all organic particulates from the Knight’s cockpit. In the end, House Vyridion’s courtiers had buried a charred husk still baked into its throne.
Other shadows danced, capered, thrashed in the murk. Jaya did her best to pay them no heed. She kept her grip white-knuckled on the controls. Her hands couldn’t shake that way.
‘Jaya,’ a voice whispered her name with shy care. A youthful voice, one that made her squeeze her eyes closed as if such a gesture could ward her against any haunting. Perhaps it worked, for the voice didn’t return. Grunting in dismissal, she did her best not to think of the voice’s owner – there had been a boy once, a boy from another of Highrock’s monarch-blooded families. The first boy she had ever spent time with, unchaperoned. A lifetime ago now.
She heard several of the others draw in their breath as the column entered the first void. Mist and mist and mist met their eyes and scanners alike.
Objectively, she knew what this must be. Objectively she knew this must be one of the immense regions capable of allowing transit for–
Entities
–eldar wraithbone vessels, the size of Imperial warships. Their own pathway had finally threaded through one of the vast thoroughfares that made up the webway, where–
Alien monsters
–swam through space without need of the warp. She had seen the tale told by the walls of the Imperial Dungeon. She knew what this was. This was the Emperor’s hope for the species. These passages were supposed to be safe.
Why, then, am I trembling?
Jaya had ceased forward locomotion and twist-unlocked the seals of her cockpit. She wanted to stand up in her throne and look out upon the nothingness with naked eyes.
The first thing she sensed was the faint smell of ice, as if this passageway led to some clean, frozen world with aspects of precious normality like a sun and a moon and sane dimensions that complied with physics.
The second thing she sensed was the enormity of the absolute nothingness above her. Around her. Beneath her. Pure void existed with her at its heart. Jaya felt as she always did when looking at images of the deep ocean. The endless murk in every direction, forming an entire reality where creatures of impossible size writhed in the salty, silty dark.
She resealed her hatch and enthroned herself once more. The Knight strode on.
Jaya heard music drifting down several of the misty tunnels, as teasingly familiar and ultimately unrecognisable as the murmurs had been. Half-remembered melodies played on instruments she couldn’t imagine. This, it seemed, was the harmonic accompaniment to the shadows that beckoned to her. More than once she panned her hull-mounted stubber at the capering, thrashing silhouettes, her gloved finger curled against the trigger, stroking with slow need.
Later passages – farther into the webway? she wondered. Deeper? – offered indistinct geometries that no pict resolution could refine. Walls veered away at angles that caused the human observers to blink their watering eyes and turn away from the threat of headaches. Buildings stood in the misty shadows, towers and arches and domes wrought by alien thaumaturgy, either lost to time or far along the path to the oblivion of the forgotten. They seemed out of phase and somehow untouchable, as if imperfectly recalled by a wounded mind.
The path rose. Some tunnels sloped sharply enough to almost be considered a fall. Slants and askew angles became commonplace. Even gravity began to follow its own erratic choices: noting an incline of yaw beneath her Knight’s iron tread, Jaya cast an auspex probe ahead through the convoy, realising that fully half of the procession was travelling along what she’d believed was the tunnel’s westward side, treating it as though it were the floor.
Wonder and adrenaline made for poor sustenance over a protracted period of time. Jaya was tired, having scarcely slept in days. Her leaden limbs were beginning to click and crackle with cramping sinew.
Still she refused to vox Diocletian and ask for an estimation for when they would reach their destination. Vyridion would show no weakness throughout its penitence.
Again the passages divided. Again they branched. Again they rejoined other arteries, meshing into one.
She had advanced to the column’s front when the vox exploded in a storm of static, the white noise shrouding dozens of male voices all speaking over each other in deathly calm. A ripple spread through the convoy, section by section. Servitor motors whined. Tanks rattled and growled.
Jaya slammed both boots into their control holsters, switching to active manipulation.
Is that the main army? Are these the voices of the Ten Thousand? She couldn’t see anything beyond the ghostly buildings in every direction, at odd slopes as the passageway rose. Are we here, at last?
‘Diocletian,’ she voxed. ‘Prefect Coros, are we close?’
‘We are in vox-range of Calastar,’ he replied, distracted. She could almost feel him straining to filter through the conflicting voices.
The Archimandrite entered the channel with a tuning screech of her internal comm system. Her monotone voice followed, ‘I have established cognitive grips within Calastar. The city is heavily besieged. Every war-servitor currently engaged reports overwhelming force arrayed against the defenders.’
Diocletian whispered a curse, some cultural slang from his childhood that made no sense to her. Nevertheless, it was the first time Jaya had ever heard him swear. ‘The walls are already down. The enemy is inside the city.’
Sixteen War in the webway / Dynastes, the Lords of Terra / The Golden and the Soulless
The enemy was without number, an ocean without an end. No two figures in their uneven ranks were exactly alike, each one seemingly born into its own breed, conjured from a unique nightmare. The alien air carried the sounds of crashing blades and waves of searing heat, and above all it brought the creatures’ stench, too strong for even respirator masks and the Custodians’ own helmet filters.
War had a scent of its own, the spice of human carrion underlying the fyceline reek of spent bolts and the ozone tang of air ionised by las-rounds, but this was a reek beyond reason. The smell of unearthed plague graves, with the killing sicknesses living on in the stripped bones. The charnel stink of hopelessness as blood runs from riven flesh. The salt scent of dirty sweat that lines a murderer’s brow. And above all of it, the charred porcine stench of sizzling meat fat, that pyre smell of burning human bodies.
Sagittarus held his ground against this rank tide. Never had he felt farther from the Emperor’s light. One thought played out through his mind, again and again.
We’re going to lose the city.
The stench of the unburied dead outside the city walls was near toxic. For what seemed like days even in this timeless place, the enemy had hurled themselves at the Ten Thousand upon the walls, achieving nothing but the running of their own blood.
The true battle had begun when the Legio Audax pulled down the Impossible City’s walls. Beneath the barrage of fire and plasma and explosive shells spat down from the high barricades, a host of Warhound Titans had done the work almost alone – achieving triumph at the cost of their lives. Each of the war machines staggered and burned beneath burst shields and blistering armour plating, as their harpoons cracked through Calastar’s wraithbone walls. In ragged disorder they pulled back, dragging sections of the wall with them, tearing rifts for the masses of infantry to spill through.
Not a single Warhound survived to enter the city. Their smoking wreckage lay as monuments in the great tunnel expanse, amidst the stilled tide of slain Space Marines and rancid smears of daemonic ichor.
A warmer welcome lay in wait once the foe pushed into the city itself. The Silent Sisterhood and Ten Thousand manned every bridge and junction, reinforced by hordes of Mechanicum battle-servitors and the towering colossi of the Legio Ignatum. Every wall and tower still standing had long ago been fitted with turrets, and the city’s defenders funnelled the advancing tides into courtyards that became slaughterhouses; across bridges that were detonated beneath the teeming press of daemonic creatures and sent plunging into the abyss; into avenues that became killing grounds.
The streets were winding, maddening routes through a city that already made no sense. Reports rattled at the edges of Sagittarus’ perception, some streaming across the red lens of his visor slit, others coming in a stream of conflicting vox voices. He processed all of them with unconscious focus, concentrating on pushing forwards.
The Custodians at his side were veterans of centuries of war at the Emperor’s side. They moved in the loosest amalgamation of a squad, more akin to a pride of hunting lions than a squad of soldiers fighting their way through city streets. Yet they never hindered each other – they had transhuman senses and reflexes coupled with absolute familiarity with each other warrior in their midst. Theirs was a unity that needed no artificial synchronicity. It lacked the gene-bred precision of the Legiones Astartes moving in the cohesion of their lifelong squads, but the Emperor Himself had engineered it to be thus. His Space Marine Legions were built upon the principles of tradition, brotherhood and conformity. The Ten Thousand weren’t bound by such crude rote and militancy to foster obedience. They were left to possess greater individuality, and their bindings of loyalty took the form of other, subtler restraints.
Sagittarus led Ra’s own squad for his strike team. Armed with guardian spears and paired meridian blades, they were Squad Dynastes – called the Lords of Terra by the Emperor Himself, not without a sense of irony. Each one was the scion of now-dead royal Terran bloodlines: the sons and nephews of warlords and witch-queens, taken as tribute in conquest and inducted into the Ten Thousand. Once they had been twenty souls, bled down to twelve after five years of fighting in the webway’s tunnels.
They now moved at a dead sprint, their spears reaving through corroded bronze swords and hewing through unnatural flesh. Sagittarus led them, his Contemptor shell more than able to keep pace with even a grav-Rhino.
Somewhere, a Titan sounded out its war-horn cry, abrasively projecting its machine roar through external augmitters. Another railed in answer, beginning a chorus of distant, arguing metal godlings.
We’re going to lose the city. Sagittarus had no blood left to run cold; whatever synthetic haemovitae sustained him in his amniotic sarcophagus didn’t mimic human blood in such poetic, pointless ways. Without orbital surveillance he couldn’t be sure of the battle’s wider scale, but the voice-shattered vox was alive with unwelcome revelations regarding the enemy’s numbers. More legionaries, more creatures, more Titans than any of the Ten Thousand’s outriders had reported. Horus – or, more likely that accursed witch-king Lorgar – had found a way to flood the webway with his minions.
We’re going to lose the city.
Beasts with rugged red hides and primitive brass armour howled and spat and cursed in a heaving tide, moving with inhuman vigour on their backwards-jointed legs. The blades in their hands were great axes and swords of primitive metal, marked with runes that made the Custodians’ eyes ache just to witness them. Chariots raged through their midst, crescent wheel scythes tearing their own ranks as often as through Imperial formations. Artillery hurled profane payloads upon the defenders, not with the Mechanicum’s volleys of massed energy but in mimicry of the battlefields of Ancient Terra, when such skyfire took the form of crude, physical rain. The enemy launched everything at their disposal, from the hulls of wrecked Mechanicum tanks and great hunks of the city’s broken architecture, to the severed, ensorcelled heads of the Imperial dead.
They were especially fond of the latter. Skulls rained from above, coming down upon Sagittarus in a crashing hailstorm. They broke upon Dynastes’ auramite plating, detonating into clouds of choking blood-mist. Hundreds more burst across the wraithbone buildings nearby or fell to shatter on the rising street.
The mist thickened quickly, rendering automatic vision filters useless and unable to pierce the red fog. Blinded, he sensed shadows in the mist reaching for his hull with gripless clutches, their shadowed embraces ghosting through him. A more superstitious man might have believed them the spirits of whomever had lost their skulls to give the daemonic artillery something to fire. Sagittarus weaved away from the reaching shadows; they didn’t register on his sensors the way that the warp entities did, but real or false, he wouldn’t let them touch him.
Sagittarus moved, unseeing and unbreathing, fighting by sound alone. He swung his fist at disturbances in the air nearby when he heard the creak of daemonic muscle tissue, parrying with his armoured forearm when the whispery song of blade edges cut the air. He panned his kicking, shell-torrenting cannon down alleyways he couldn’t see, butchering daemons he could only sense by their howls.
Some of the creatures could speak Gothic. Sagittarus loathed these most of all. With voices of shrieking fever and drowning gargles, they called out in a language they had no right to know.
‘When will the sun rise?’ they cried. Could he hear fear in those demands? ‘When will the sun rise?’
Sagittarus gave them no answer beyond the fall of his fist and the hot roar of his Kheres-pattern cannon. He clutched at a horned form in the smoke, lifting the thrashing, shrieking thing from the ground and engaging his pneumatic compression. The beast burst after a mere three seconds, falling to the ground in two pieces. One of the halves was still howling; Sagittarus silenced it with a descending metal foot.
Turning, still blind, he opened the ichor-wet fist and discharged the thrumming plasma gun in its palm. The magnetic accelerators whined and spat a sphere of caged fusion. Another of the monsters collapsed headless at his feet, steaming as it dissolved.
Sagittarus ran on, weaving to the left as the roar of bolt shells passed by on his right. He heard them impact and detonate, felt the wet spattering of ichor painting his hull plating. The foul, hissing fluid sent the temperature gauge on his lens readouts spiking high.
He heard wheels ahead, wheels of metal upon streets of shaped bone. He saw it – it was big enough for its silhouette to show through the mist – a chariot, yet another crude echo from the Bronze Epoch battlefields of Old Earth rattling along the curving road, pulled by thrashing, serpentine creatures. A feminine shadow drove the beasts on with cracking whiplashes from the vehicle’s back.
Even as Sagittarus was voxing the warning to Dynastes the driver fell, impaled through the chest by a thrown spear. The vehicle careened from the sloping road, the beasts tangling themselves in their reins as they scattered in bestial indecision. Sagittarus spared a glance for several of his squad plunging their spears through the prone bodies. Whatever the creatures were, they died screaming, sounding almost human.
He covered his men as more of the horned foes drew closer, his assault cannon levelled and groaning as it fired. Above the eternal crackle of the vox he heard the dull crumps of shells punching home.
‘Advance!’ he voxed to Dynastes. The same word, yet again. How many times had he given the order since the walls fell? A hundred? A thousand? ‘Advance!’
His squad broke from the mist at the next junction. Sagittarus took stock of his men as they materialised from the blood vapour. Their armour was marked with molten ichor, their spear-blades smoking as energy fields crisped away the last of the clinging blood.
Eight, he counted. Nine. Ten. Eleven, as Mycorian emerged.
‘Gathas?’ he asked the last warrior.
‘Down,’ Mycorian replied.
Sagittarus bunched useless muscles on instinct. He was already turning to plunge back into the blood-mist when Mycorian moved to stand before him.
‘I would’ve saved him if there were anything left to save.’
A warrior Sagittarus had fought beside for over a century, one of Ra’s own brethren, lost in the mist. Reluctantly they moved on, weapons ready, a hunting party at the heart of an alien city. This was no painstakingly planned siege committed by regimented forces – this was the fulcrum moment of a war, avenue by avenue and step by step.
The sky around the Godspire was miserable with creatures soaring on the nonexistent wind, repelling any aerial approach. Something winged darkened the sky overhead, beating a carrion stink downwards with its leathery wings as it passed. The roaring shape of a Stormbird raged after it on howling afterburners, raining spent shell casings on the warriors far below.
Sagittarus’ retinal display dimmed to compensate against the sudden brightness as the Stormbird went nova. Its gold-and-silver hull was torn from the sky with a dragon’s roar of wrenching, protesting metal. The daemonic shape that sent it to the ground flew from the falling gunship, its black wings beating to carry it free of the detonation.
He looked across the arching bridges to the Godspire, still too distant to make out individual defenders. Gunships rose from nearby only to be torn down like the first, helpless against the sheer numbers of winged creatures circling the central tower. A convoy of Mechanicum crawlers and battle-walkers was threading its way from the tower’s west courtyard, attacking through a thick tide of daemonic blades and flesh.
Sagittarus and Dynastes sprinted across the long bridge, their strides sending echoes through the bone ground. Spears that were growing dull through overuse still cut and carved, blasting their foes apart through the slam of power fields against flesh as much as by the blades’ fading capacities to cleave. Sagittarus was reduced to using his empty assault cannon as a bludgeon.
Another gunship streamed overhead, spinning on screaming engines, falling into the abyss between the great city platforms.
We’re going to lose the city. It wouldn’t detach from his thoughts.
The bridge’s previous defenders had been a regiment of Adsecularis thralls, near-mindless but numerous to compensate. As Dynastes advanced upon the daemons laying claim to the span, they stepped over the bodies of the cyborg slaves that had died to hold the bridge for a few minutes longer.
Sagittarus caught a beast’s blade against his forearm. The creature shrieked a demand to know when the sun would rise, and he killed it with the returning backhand swing. The foulness that served as its blood bubbled and gushed forth.
Blades and whips lashed against his armour plating, slowing him, sending shivs of pain jabbing into the mutilated limbs floating within his cold cradle. He killed and killed and killed by instinct and rote, too weary now for bloodlust or the joy of battle.
He saw Mycorian on the ground with three jagged swords drilled through his back. Standing over his companion’s fallen form was Juhaza, another of Ra’s so-called Lords of Terra, his guardian spear long lost, fighting with his paired meridian swords in a swirling dance. He wouldn’t leave Mycorian’s corpse.
‘He’s gone,’ Sagittarus shouted at his kinsman.
Juhaza had lost half of his face, his features abraded down to the bone. One eye gone, his jaw hanging slack, he didn’t have enough muscle left on his face to speak. His acknowledgement of Sagittarus’ words came through motion alone, as the other Custodian cut his way closer.
Up close, the damage was far worse. Juhaza’s helmet had been wrenched clear, taking a significant section of the back of the warrior’s skull and brain matter with it. Blood had washed into the recesses of his pauldrons and soaked his cloak of Imperial red. Yet the Custodian was fighting on, facing the creatures surging across the bridge, spinning his spear and building momentum. The fact he still stood with those wounds defied reason; Juhaza had no idea he was already dead.
Another war-horn sounded. Sagittarus knew it at once, that unmistakable clarion cry ringing out across the besieged city: the Scion of Vigilant Light – Ignatum’s lone Warlord – fought on, claiming another kill. Risking the clatter and crash of weapons against his hull, the Dreadnought looked up to the mist-hazed sight of the city spread above and beyond in the great tunnel. Those distant streets were just as choked with teeming bodies and the flicker-flashes of discharging weapons. Larger, darker shapes showed Titans – and things the size of Titans – moving between the bone buildings, laying waste to their surroundings as they grappled and marched and fired. Across hundreds of vox-channels, the city’s defenders murmured and appraised and coordinated, dangerously cold and calm where human soldiers would be yelling orders and shrieking of their wounds.
Sagittarus ground the dissolving bodies of his foes beneath his iron tread and moved forwards.
His name crackled over the vox, going unheard until the third repetition. A recall. A recall back to the Godspire.
‘Dynastes is embattled,’ he replied. ‘We require a transport.’
‘It will be done, Sagittarus.’
‘Dio? Is that you?’
The Raider tank resembled a Space Marine Spartan in all but three ways. The first was its increased size: not only did it possess a larger maw and increased cargo capacity, it was also armoured in dense layers of ceramite reinforced with rare Martian alloys considered far too valuable for line service among the Legiones Astartes. The tank was considerably bulkier, turning its smooth red hull into the plated skin of something mythic and bestial. As one might expect, the divided skull of the Martian Mechanicum showed along its sides, along with holy binaric and trinaric scripture painstakingly etched into every inch of its ceramite plating.
The second difference was that it had an armoured servitor-manned turret pod on its roof, giving the massive quad-bound volkite culverin array a three hundred and sixty-degree firing arc.
The third and most dramatic divergence from the mainstay of the Space Marine Legions’ vehicle armoury was the fact it lacked any sign of treads or tracks. This Raider skimmed over a metre above the ground, moving significantly faster than its grounded cousins.
It thundered across the bridge, its anti-grav suspensor panels protesting, grinding monsters into aetheric ichor against its forward hull. The sound of the impacts was the beat of a drum, like great hailstones pounding against a metal roof. Those creatures that weren’t pulped by its momentum fared no better. They burned beneath its guns, hordes of them igniting into shrieking silhouettes under the screaming beams of the tank’s volkite array.
The hardwired servitor spending its existence in the pod itself had been ritually stumped at the knees and surgically fixed into place, mono-tasked with simple – and entirely vicious – find/see/kill protocols. It went about its goal with cold, calculated aggression. It had neither emotions nor nightmares within the shadowy nothingness of its skull, thus the creatures it faced held little clutch on its heart.
Behind the lead tank came three Spartans, hovering on the same anti-grav repulsor fields. These were cast in Imperial gold, marked with the eagle sigil of the Legio Custodes. Ra recognised the squad-specific honour markings along the transports’ hulls at once.
Gang ramps slammed down into the mist. Bulkheads whined open. The three gold-hulled tanks disgorged the bulky forms of Zhanmadao and his favoured Terminator squads, each warrior bringing an incendium firepike to bear. They breathed dragons’ flame across the beasts that sought to assail them. Daemonic corpus melted as surely as mortal flesh when bathed in pyrochemical fire.
The lead tank, proud in its plating of Mechanicum red, was a monstrosity of wrath and sound. The overcharged squeals of its volkite array overlapped one another as it ignited row upon row of the hunched, horned creatures. Its gang ramp slammed down last. Only two warriors stood within. A familiar figure clutched his spear low, firing bolts from the hip. The other was clad in foreign crimson, aiming a bolter he didn’t fire. His hands shook with miniscule tremors.
‘Sagittarus,’ said Diocletian, reloading his guardian spear. ‘Your chariot awaits.’
Sagittarus ordered his warriors – Ra’s warriors – into the vehicle. He was the last to board, still fighting, executing the downed Neverborn that clawed at his ceramite-sheathed legs. Behind him, daemonic limbs were ground to poisonous slush in the hydraulic press of the closing ramp.
He had to kneel to fit his chassis within the confines of the Raider, even with its expanded crew hold. He vented pressure from his hydraulics and settled into an ugly crouch.
Within the red-lit confines of the crew bay, he found himself face to face with an inhuman creature hanging from the commander’s cupola ladder. His gunlimb was half-raised before Diocletian stepped in front of it.
‘It’s harmless, Sagittarus.’
Through the scrolling lists of retinal data, Sagittarus saw the creature’s wide eyes and slinky, furry form in better detail. Sapien gave an unsimian squawk and scampered away as Sagittarus lowered the cannon.
In the driver’s throne Arkhan Land held the steering bars with both hands, peering through the vision slit with an old man’s squint. He was shaking, babbling. Spit flecked his chin. He stammered questions that weren’t questions, questions that he didn’t truly want answered.
‘What am I looking at. What is this. What are these things. What am I seeing.’
‘Back to the Godspire,’ Diocletian ordered the robed man.
‘I… But…’
‘Stay with us, Land. Focus on your duty. Get us back to the Godspire.’
‘I… I… Yes. The spire. The central tower. Yes, of course. At once.’
The tank rattled and banged around them as it tilted in a heavy swerve, crashing through more of the beasts. As Diocletian was greeting his closest warriors, Sagittarus spared a brief glance at the red figure standing slightly apart.
‘Blood Angel,’ he greeted the Baalite.
‘Custodian.’
Sagittarus turned to Diocletian on slow, whining servos. ‘Dio. You took your damn time in the Palace.’
The other warrior nodded. ‘I see you’ve made a mess of Dynastes. Ra won’t be pleased.’
‘We’ve been fighting for two hundred and ninety-three hours since the walls fell,’ Sagittarus pointed out.
‘Twelve days of this would explain why you look terrible,’ Diocletian agreed. There was no humour in his tone.
Sagittarus took stock of Dynastes and found it difficult to disagree with his kinsman’s appraisal. Juhaza was somehow still standing, though his stare was unfocused and he swayed as he held on to the ceiling rail. Solon stood next to him, teeth clenched as whatever corrosive foulness had splashed across his armour still fizzed and popped, unable to eat into the auramite but slowly dissolving the left side of his face.
Solon grinned back at his leader. ‘I’ll live, Sagittarus.’
Arkhan Land groaned a weak, troubled cry. The tank bucked as the relic hunter rammed something at high speed, and there was a brief rise as the repulsorlift plating carried the Raider over whatever he’d struck.
‘I… I can’t–’
‘Don’t stare at them,’ Sagittarus interrupted. ‘Fear makes them stronger.’
‘I…’
‘Who are you?’ the Dreadnought demanded.
‘I… Arkhan Land.’
‘I’ve heard of you.’
‘Just get us to the Godspire,’ said Diocletian.
The daemon no longer soared on great wings above the city of arcane bone, nor did it stalk alone in silent predation. The wounds it had taken in its hunts were lessons of pain etched upon its corpus. No matter that it lacked the capacity to truly reason, it had still learned its lessons well. The threat of dissolution goaded it towards caution. Incarnate murder was unsuited to naked war, and even immortals could learn from agony.
Alone among the horde, the daemon was kindred to every other creature. It was the piercing of flesh with a tool of war, and the blood that ran with the first slaying. It was the madness of the mind that comes from murder, and the rotting of a brother’s body. It was the savage and guilty pleasure of life triumphing over other life, and the panicked pain of knowing your own death has come. It was the deed that reshaped the destiny of a species.
And thus, it could hide anywhere within the host. No shape was forbidden to it. No part of the ravening horde saw it as a shard of another Power. All were its kindred.
The daemon shifted between forms, discontented with mere beasts of myth and pagan nightmare. It propelled itself as something feathered and winged, a creature of lies given hunched, avian form. It crawled on six legs. It slid across the ground slug-like on none. The cluster of senses that throbbed within its corpus skull acted in place of sight and scent, drawing it towards the next kill.
It thinned its corpus to near-nothingness, becoming a virus within another daemon’s ichor sprayed against the faceplate of a Martian war robot. It thinned further, to mist, to air, seeping in through the cracks in the machine’s armour plating, infecting the biological cortex cradled in the cognitive soup. A moment later the Castellax turned its weapons upon its own kindred, annihilating them with its cannon and claws.
Amused but unsatisfied, the daemon ghosted free of that semi-living cage and leapt skywards, embedding itself in the cold, cold metal of an ornithopter passing overhead. Small effort to warp the vehicle’s iron hull, rippling through it, heating it, swelling it – sending biological vein-threads through its inorganic form and rewriting the machine’s essence. The daemon could feel the dull disquiet of the flying vehicle’s pilot as she lost control.
The ornithopter exploded at the head of its formation. It didn’t scatter or fall from the sky; the daemon kept the spinning, burning shards of jagged metal loosely together, each fragment of debris taking its own shape. A flock of flickering, scorched raptor-things veered and whirled, a host of gargoyles with bodies of shredded metal and fire.
Three other ornithopters veered away from the spreading cloud of burning, clawed homunculi, but it was already too late. The cloud of savaged metal razored through them, a thousand cuts shredded their hulls and wings beyond function, plunging them from the air. The daemon lingered within each vessel long enough to savour the sickly sweet death-thoughts of their doomed pilots, then it was gone, coalescing once more in the teeming horde below.
With a predator’s instinct it sensed it was being hunted. Somehow, the Anathema’s Daughters could see it no matter the form it took. When it revealed itself they were the ones to give chase. They summoned the Golden, they directed the machine rage of the towering metal constructs striding throughout the city. The rawness of its consciousness knew pain, and it was not supposed to be this way. As strong as it was, it couldn’t hold to incarnation if it sustained many more wounds. It bled now. Everything that bled could be killed.
The daemon had killed several of the Anathema’s Daughters, finding nothing within to devour. Their flesh was tasteless, their deaths without nourishment or joy. It felt their presence as a devouring chill, their nearness dragging at its incarnated form, unwinding the threads of its essence. With low, hungry cunning it had learned to blend in among its lessers, taking their shape, mimicking the weakness of their forms until the perfect moment at the apex of each kill. Such immersion deceived the Golden and the grey, robotic souls at their sides. But never the Soulless. The Anathema’s Daughters always knew. To face them was to fight crippled and weakened; the daemon knew the weary, desperate weakness from its own hunts, seeing the futile thrashings of those it killed most slowly. To face the Soulless was to face the same destruction the daemon inflicted upon all others.
The creature’s crude, vicious sentience rebelled at being considered prey. It shifted and changed and drifted, starving itself in the heat of war in a bid to go unnoticed. It ghosted away from the running battles, avoiding those where it sensed the tides of its kindred crashing against the leeching resistance of the Soulless.
In hiding, it took forms beyond the sphere of mortal sight. It became a disease. Then a breath, a death rattle, wet and clicking in a man’s throat.
A promise.
A whisper.
A fear.
A regret.
A thought.
It trickled itself into several minds, dividing its consciousness with amoebic mitosis, seeking, seeking, seeking. Many minds were inviolate; they would take too long to overwhelm. These, it left alone. Stars would die before it mastered one of the Golden.
The grey machine-men provided simpler conquests, yet they were uselessly fragile to husk-ride. It settled in the minds of war servitors at barricades across the city, forcing them to turn their weapons upon one another and – in rare, precious instances – to fire into the backs of the Golden advancing ahead. But the Golden destroyed these threats as soon as they became aware of them, and far worse, there was a paucity of thrill, guilt or any emotion at all in servitors made to murder one another. They felt too little; they killed without passion or panic. Thus, they offered no sustenance.
It drifted onwards, plunging at last into a mortal mind that had known enough bloodshed and battle to drench every one of its own memories in bitter red. This man – not one of the Grey nor one of the Golden – was enthroned within cold iron. The daemon looked through his eyes, seeing the compact confines of a piloted vehicle’s cockpit; males and females chattered in their human tongues and machine codes around him, creating an aura of noise. These weaker mortals looked upon their master as a king.
The daemon threaded itself through the man’s thoughts, twining around the man’s aggressive hungers, riding through the lactic tingle of adrenaline in his system. Many of the voices and emotions within his skull weren’t even his own; they goaded him with artificial rage, coming from some synthetic source.
The machine, it knew. The vehicle itself. These were the bond-machine’s emotions colouring the man’s mind with artificial rage.
The daemon knew, then, where it was. It closed its invisible tendrils around the meat of the man’s organs, gently squeezing. Life and lore trickled from the pressured organs, haemorrhaging language and knowledge and insight into the daemon’s cavernous perceptions.
‘Moderati,’ he said, speaking with the mouth of Princeps Enkir Morova of the Reaver Titan Black Sky.
‘Aye, my princeps?’ replied Talla, a woman shorn of hair, haloed in cables, hardplugged into her own control throne.
Enkir bared his teeth in a wet smile. In harmonic response to its master’s amusement, Black Sky blared its war-horns across the embattled city.
Seventeen The covenant of Terra and Mars / Tribune / Unspoken Sanction
The commanders convened at the Godspire. Those who couldn’t withdraw from the field were forced to appear in hololithic form, their life-size images diluted of colour and flickering with interference. Whatever purpose the circular chamber had served in the age of the eldar empire was overshadowed by the machinations of its current Imperial occupiers, who met amidst chattering cogitators and medicaes working on the wounded. A central table ran on low power, projecting a thin green holo of Calastar’s maddening tubular geoscape. Anti-air turrets hammered their payloads skywards in a ceaseless song, sending shivers through the wraithbone tower.
Even as Diocletian drew breath to address the gathered officers, the image of Princeps Feyla Xan shrank back in her control throne and blinked out of existence. Several of the gathered officers made the sign of the aquila or linked their knuckles in the sigil of the cog, gravely acknowledging Xan’s evident demise.
‘The city holds,’ said Diocletian. There were nods around the table. Most were desperately weary. ‘We all have somewhere to be, so let’s be swift. Archimandrite?’
The Archimandrite stood hunched over the holotable, the Domitar-like chassis that had become her new form towering above all others present. Her murky faceplate offered an unreliable suggestion of the face within.
‘I have inloaded a complete and constantly updating awareness field of the Mechanicum’s present forces,’ she vocalised from the bronze speaker-gills in her chest. ‘This information is drawn from the exloaded sensories of each alpha unit active within Calastar. Lacking any orbitals for requisite scanning and atmospheric intelligence, I am devoting significant data runnage to maintaining an active tactical sensory overview for each of these alpha units.’
‘Can you render this information usable by the rest of us?’ asked Diocletian.
‘Yes, albeit in primitive form.’ Unmodified humanity lacked the biomechanical enhancements required to see things in the ’spheric datastreams available to the cultists of Mars. ‘Vocalisation and crude holo-imagery will have to suffice.’
‘It will,’ the Custodian replied.
‘I speak with the aforementioned insight in mind,’ the Archimandrite augmitted. ‘Summation – the Mechanicum has access to the most accurate, evolving overview of the field of conflict, accessible by all unit leaders. Result – cohesion and performance will be accordingly improved. Judgement – as the disposition of forces currently stands, the city will fall. Enemy reinforcement will only hasten the process. This is an unacceptable outcome.’
Dense servos and fibre bundle muscle-cables whirred as Zhanmadao of the Tharanatoi gestured to various points of scathing conflict on the holo. ‘They’ve gained precious little ground so far. Ignatum holds the choke points leading into the repaired arterials, with the majority of the skitarii and the Unifiers’ war servitors. Tribune Endymion has the Sisterhood and the Ten Thousand deployed in defensive positions along major thoroughfares, denying the city to the enemy.’
‘So the city holds,’ Diocletian repeated.
‘The city holds for now,’ declared Zhanmadao. He was a pale figure, almost unhealthily so, clad in the bulk of his shining Cataphractii armour. His black hair didn’t quite hide the faint markings of blue tattoos on his scalp, legacies of a childhood among the coastal tribes of the faraway world upon which he’d been born.
‘But the Archimandrite is right,’ he continued, ‘and this is a shadow of what’s yet to come. Outrider reports have been filtering in for the last two day cycles. Troop transports, Titans, hordes of the warp-wrought. The reinforcements you have brought us today, along with those sent ahead in convoys for the last month, are allowing us to stand our ground. But gone is any realistic vision of crusading forth. This entire sector of the webway is flooded with the foe. We can’t hold the Impossible City for more than three or four days.’
The Blood Angel finally lifted his gaze from the revolving holo. ‘Where, may I ask, is Tribune Endymion?’
‘And Commander Krole,’ added Diocletian. ‘Can no one reach them via holo?’
The Terminator gestured again, indicating a portion of the rotating map on the tunnel’s ‘ceiling’. If the host of flashing runes was anything to go by, the fighting was thickest there.
‘The Sister-Commander has led the forces defending the main entrance to the city’s catacombs,’ said Zhanmadao. ‘The greatest concentration of defenders stands with them.’
Diocletian didn’t need to be told why. If the foe broke through to the catacombs, it was a short journey from there into the Mechanicum’s sections of the webway. And then, on to the Dungeon itself.
‘I am present, as well.’ This from one of the skitarii alphas, manifested as a hololith. The figure was seated on an unseen slab that failed to project into the image. Hands moved in and out of the holo as tech-adepts worked on the augmented warrior’s damaged limbs. A shattered chordclaw was being machined out from his wrist. The hydraulic musculature of his right thigh was being hastily reworked. A scorched chestplate sigil marked him as Echo-Echo-71.
‘Has there been word of Ra?’ asked Zhanmadao.
‘Probes have been dispatched to reach the tribune. He is engaged with the forward elements. The fighting here is spire to spire. Dense. It occludes individuals. Tracking becomes a trial.’
‘I am inloading no vision-data from alpha units present near enough to Tribune Endymion or Sister-Commander Krole to relay accurate streams back to me,’ said the Archimandrite. The robotic chassis lowered on growling hydraulics, seeming to Diocletian suddenly threateningly ursine. ‘Casualties are severe.’
‘Acknowledged and confirmed,’ the skitarii warlord replied. The four mismatched lenses that served as his face within the hood rotated as they refocused.
This is war without orbitals, cursed Diocletian. It had been different in the tunnels for all those years. Jetbike outriders carried messages and reports to and from the barricaded passages, maintaining easy if frantic lines of communication. But with a whole city spread open and besieged, chaos reigned.
This is one of the webway’s principal hubs. Can we afford to lose it? How many years will its loss put the Great Work back?
‘What of any updated evacuation contingencies?’ he asked.
One of the hololiths spoke, a Titan princeps hardwired into an armoured throne. His faceplate was modelled into the same snarling visage as the Warhound he piloted.
‘Prefect Coros! We bled for a year to take this city.’
Diocletian turned to the man’s image. ‘And that year was merely one of the five we have been consigned within the web. If we are forced back into the Unifiers’ passageways, so be it. It doesn’t change our duty. What matters above all is that we defend the Mechanicum’s tunnels. The enemy must not reach Terra.’
‘We can hold the city,’ said another hololith. One of the robed and hooded sicarii, the skitarii elite echelon. He, she, or indeed it – it was impossible to know with many of them – cracked its taser goad into life. ‘Any rumination of evacuation must bear the following factors into the final equation. Primaris – that once abandoned, there will be an infinitesimal probability of retaking Calastar again without significant reinforcement, far beyond what currently stands within the garrisons of the Solar System. Dislodging an entrenched enemy here would be a prospect of mathematically ludicrous possibility. Secundus – the Scion of Vigilant Light cannot flee. Evacuation would necessitate the dismantling and reconveying of the god-machine in its component pieces.’
Zhanmadao shook his head. ‘No time. You know there’s no time, Protector. The Scion would remain, either with its crew evacuated so they might fight another day, piloting another Titan… or ensconced, allowing the Scion to fight as part of the rearguard.’
Several of the princeps and skitarii alphas present shared canted exchanges through their linked vox-melange.
‘I assure you,’ the Custodian Terminator vowed, ‘I’m well aware of the sacrifice that your Legio would be making.’
‘Ignatum cannot accept these terms,’ said the aged princeps of the Empiris Crescir. ‘The Scion cannot be abandoned.’
We are already falling apart, Diocletian thought.
‘Look at me,’ he said slowly. ‘Forget the pride of your Legio, Kaleb Asarnus. Forget the battle-lust of the war machine singing inside your blood. Forget the last five years we’ve waged war together, the banners of heraldic glory that sway from your Reaver’s weapon limbs and the companions we have all lost. Look at me, look at the colour of my armour, and remember whose authority I speak with.’
The princeps’ features were masked behind his ceremonial helm. But he nodded.
This time, the Archimandrite growled a retort. ‘The Mechanicum has committed resources far exceeding acceptable parameters, sacrificing the retaking of Sacred Mars, in order to defend Calastar. It was made clear to us that this was a focal point within the webway. A spoke-nexus. A route-hub. Our participation in the Great Work on this scale came with the condition of keeping the Aresian Path open for a possible invasion of our homeland.’
‘We are doing all we can,’ Zhanmadao pointed out through gritted teeth.
‘You see those of us among the Cult Mechanicum as lacking emotive responses, but that is base ignorance. All souls, augmented and unaugmented, fight harder with something to fight for. The retaking of Sacred Mars galvanises us, as well as being promised to us. Summation – the Impossible City must not fall.’
‘You should have agreed without the need for such assurances,’ Diocletian replied, feeling the first stirrings of real anger. ‘I suggest you watch your words, priestess. Your Omnissiah has need of you. The covenant between Mars and Terra takes primacy over all else.’
One of the Archimandrite’s eye-lenses rotated, projecting the crisp, miniature hololithic image of Sister Kaeria. Diocletian knew at once what the image file was: an archived file from the internal picters of Fabricator General Zagreus Kane. The recorded voice overlaying the image confirmed it.
‘The Mechanicum will supply your war on this single condition – the Omnissiah Himself once spoke of a route within this alien webway that reaches back to Sacred Mars. Adnector Primus Mendel named it the Aresian Path. No matter the cost, no matter the effort, you will see it reinforced and held, ready for use once the Omnissiah’s Great Work is completed. Even if thousands of other routes and passages must fall, you will ensure that the way to Mars remains in Imperial control.’
The image of Kaeria signed her agreement, and blinked out of existence.
‘As evidenced,’ the Archimandrite said, ‘assurances were made.’
‘Made when holding Calastar was practically guaranteed, Martian. Now I say again, we will do all we can, but we all have a duty that stands above personal desire. Evacuating the Unifiers and their supplies takes priority. They are the Emperor’s own adepts and apprentices. We will begin a convoy but it will need defending at all times. The enemy is likely to infiltrate the Mechanicum’s tunnels through any number of capillaries.’
Several of the Mechanicum’s officers – skitarii, princeps, Unifier priests and priestess – looked at one another. The air fairly thrummed between them. Diocletian wondered just what noospheric communion was taking place that the unaugmented present weren’t privy to. It felt argumentative, though Diocletian only had the subtlest of body language reactions to judge by.
One of them snorted in weak amusement. Arkhan Land sat slouched in a corner, holding a ration pack’s fluid phial in shaking hands. He turned haunted eyes upon the others, scarcely noticing them, still seeing the madness he’d witnessed outside in the city.
‘I see now why the Omnissiah kept the Great Work bound in absolute secrecy. To avoid this – this pathetic conflict of mortal minds.’
The Archimandrite turned to stare at the hunched technoarchaeologist. The cyborg construct’s eye-lenses meted out cold accusation, but the man did nothing but snort again, looking away. His hands hadn’t stopped shaking for an hour. Even his irritating ape-creature was bizarrely solemn, sat at his side.
‘We’ll begin evacuation preparations,’ Diocletian said at last. ‘Holding the tunnels is what matters now. We will give them the city, and nothing more.’
Zhanmadao took a breath. ‘Dio, even holding the tunnels may be beyond us for more than a few weeks. The host besieging the city has every chance of driving us back to the Dungeon.’
‘Unacceptable,’ repeated the Archimandrite.
We’re wasting time. Diocletian was on the edge of unmannerly cursing when another hololith appeared at the table. This one wore damaged armour plating, spinning a spear in gloved hands. Weapons and talons slashed into view at the edges of the holo’s range, but the warrior weaved aside from every blow he didn’t block. Bladed replies lashed back, killing the wielders of those weapons. The warrior didn’t break stride. He was always moving.
‘Reload!’ the holo called out, laden with distortion. He drove his spear into the ground by his feet and immediately pulled his meridian swords, turning and whirling into another phase of his arcane battle-dance.
‘Compliance.’ A servitor’s voice, toneless and obedient. The warrior moved away from the spear, it vanished out of the holo’s range.
The swords rose and fell, twisted and parried, thrust and hacked. Blood rained past him in flickering sprays. Endlessly came the crash of energy fields ramming against ceramite, warping the reinforced metal, mangling it, shattering it. The figure of a colourless Space Marine staggered into the holo’s view, tumbling to the ground with a blade through his spine. The warrior severed the falling legionary’s head from his shoulders without looking, already turning to meet another foe.
‘Reloaded,’ came the augmitted, mechanical voice again. The warrior sheathed both blades in a smooth motion, weaved aside from a swinging flail, which missed him by a metre, and reached upwards. He caught the spear in the air, bringing it down in another parry. He disengaged with a roar of effort, throwing his unseen opponent back. The guardian spear banged three times, spitting three bolts in succession, only to spin with another frenzied howl of abused energy fields as the blade punched through another legionary’s chestplate. The spear tore viscera and shards of armour free in a wrenching burst as he yanked the blade back, one-handed. His other fist discharged a laser-spit of digital weaponry from his clenched knuckles, lascutting through the faceplate of a charging, crested Legion officer.
Another fighter joined him in the whirling dance. A cloaked female wielding a circuit-lit zweihander, guarding his back one moment, then guarded in kind a moment later. They couldn’t have looked more unalike – fighting with utterly different styles, at different speeds; male and female, gold and black; towering genhanced warrior in auramite and regal huntress in armour that honoured the most ancient eras of warfare. Yet they moved in savage harmony, never coming close to harming one another. They fought in the spaces created by each other’s fighting styles. She hacked overhead when the long spear whirled aside, killing the enemy that fought to slip within his guard. He thrust over her shoulder, slaughtering the foes that sought to move behind her.
Zephon’s pale eyes narrowed, his concentration absolute, taking in the ballet of violence unfolding before him. He had seen the warriors of the Ten Thousand fight before, albeit only in grainy pict footage. He had heard the countless unpoetic comparisons describing their uniqueness as the perfect exemplar of a process that became diluted and rushed to mass-produce the Legiones Astartes. Yet he had never seen them in battle against Space Marines. This warrior reaved through them – reaved through Zephon’s cousins from the rebellious Legions – cutting them down, butchering them the way Zephon himself had massacred his way across human and alien battlefields.
How easy, all of a sudden, to see how Constantin Valdor, the Captain-General of the Custodian Guard, was considered an equal of the primarchs themselves in matters of blade-work, when any Custodian could be as skilled as this.
Had the Emperor foreseen this? His thoughts curdled, growing gravid with treason. Is this what they were made for? This annihilation? This slaughter of legionaries?
‘We’re here, Dio,’ came the Custodian’s words between panted breaths.
Diocletian inclined his head to the embattled holo. ‘Salutations, Ra. And greetings as well, Commander Krole.’
Kaeria watched the first ship descend through the atmosphere. Black even before the scorching of its heat shielding, its hull was unchanged by the shroud of fire that wrapped it.
The command deck of the Magadan Orbital was never quiet. Servitors limped and murmured and bleated code at one another. Robed adepts spoke in austere tones, avoiding all eye contact as they worked the controls, the buttons, the levers that kept the station in a geostationary orbit above the Imperial Palace. Vox-stations rasped. Doors whirred open and ground closed.
Kaeria was the silence at the storm’s heart. She watched through the great oculus as another of the Black Fleet made planetfall. There was something beautifully dramatic in how a vessel born within the void caught fire when it sought to land for the very first time. The flames of atmospheric entry served as Terra’s welcoming embrace.
Another figure joined her upon the viewing platform. Kaeria didn’t need to turn to see who it was.
The Mistress of the Black Fleet greeted her with clicking talons.
Your melancholic gazing is unbecoming, signed the older woman.
Kaeria rejected the rebuke, her hands weaving a response. Melancholy has no place within me. You mistake dread for discomfort.
Dread?
Yes. Dread. That it should come to this.
We have always known the drama may unfold in this manner. The preparations have been in place since the very first of us forswore the use of her tongue.
Kaeria met the other woman’s stare for a moment, seeking some semblance of emotion, of perspective, beneath the assured facade. She saw no evidence of either.
How resolute you are, she signed, and then gestured to the descending ships. How can you look upon this without fearing what it portends? The Imperium will never be the same with what we do here today.
The Mistress of the Black Fleet stroked her metal talons along the guardrail, eliciting a whispery whine of iron against iron. She replied after lifting the claws from the cold metal.
We are not the engineers of the Imperium’s change, Sister. We merely react to it. The Imperium changed when Horus set his blinded eyes upon a throne he does not deserve.
Kaeria’s eyes burned with sick amusement. You absolve yourself of the malice we are willingly undertaking.
We do nothing but the Emperor’s bidding. This is His will. This is what must be done. Varonika drew back her hood, baring her olive features. She had the dusky melange complexion of most Terran natives, and her eyes were a dark enough brown to be black. There was curiosity in her eyes, the expression not unkind. One thousand souls, Kaeria. Is that really so many? Is that such a sacrifice, weighed against the consequences of doing nothing?
Kaeria met the mistress’ eyes and felt a moment of shame. One thousand innocents, nervously awaiting the soulbinding they were falsely promised. One thousand men, women and children believing they go now to serve their Emperor.
Varonika’s clawed hands gestured a swift reply. And serve Him they will. Few souls in the entire empire can claim such purity of service. What is this resistance inside you, Sister? Have you become so enamoured of battle that you believe yourself above our true calling? You are a warden, Kaeria. Not a warrior.
For a time Kaeria watched the second ship descending, wreathed in atmospheric flame. Carrying its living cargo to their service within the Imperial Palace.
I am both now, she signed. Warden and warrior. The war has made us all both.
Varonika’s expression showed faint distaste. Perhaps so. I will leave you to your contemplation, Sister, and wish you well for your own planetfall.
Kaeria knew she should prepare herself soon. Her place was on the third ship. Wait.
Varonika waited, her eyes on Kaeria’s own.
One thousand souls, Kaeria signed. What do the calculations state? How long will they last?
The Mistress of the Black Fleet lifted her hood back into place, covering her silvering hair. They will burn for one day, she signed.
With that she turned and walked away, leaving Kaeria to watch the oculus alone.
One thousand souls today, Kaeria thought. And what of tomorrow?
Eighteen Demigod of Mars / Evacuation / Let me not die unremembered
She was wounded. Hurting. Weary. But she was also a demigod, and demigods did not lament. They endured. They triumphed. They protected those who looked to them in worship.
She would never see home again. She would never leave this city alive. She knew these things. Fire burned in her bones. The souls inside her shouted and cried out and fought the flames.
She stood above the city, the equal of its wraithbone spires, and saw the war taking place between the faithful and the faithless at her feet. In true wars there was always dust from marching feet and falling buildings, great clouds of it that occluded vision and forced her to rely on the blind echolocation of her auspex or the hunting sense of her heat-maps. There was no dust here. The towers of alien bone fell in brittle shatterings. The lesser buildings gave way beneath her tread like flawed glass. No dust. No dust at all.
The mist, though. The mist was worse than the dust. It came and went without pattern or warning. Even when thin, it sent back false echoes of prey with low-power passive echolocation pulses. When thick, it masked the heat signatures of other engines, friend and foe alike, in a veneer of cold emptiness.
The golden mist was thick now. She couldn’t see those that hunted her.
She lit her void shields, her internal generators layering them the way a colony of spiders labours together to weave a web.
Be silent, she told it. Ignatum marches.
The Scion of Vigilant Light strode through the mist, war-horning to those beneath her tread. Martian hoplites scattered in tactical dispersion as they had thousands of times before. They knew how to wage war in the demigod’s shadow.
The Titan streamed with smoke as she marched. Victory banners swayed beneath her gunlimbs, far above the heads of her loyal infantry. These pennants and standards of red and black marked the Scion as one of Legio Ignatum’s ducal engines, eminent in name and deed. The extinct wasp of Ignatum showed in scratched and battered pride upon her carapace.
When she had first joined this theatre of war, she had felt loose and unready. Her worshippers had reassembled her within this alien city and told her to guard them against ghosts and phantoms that scarcely registered on her sensors. Active auspex chimes were worthless; they reverberated throughout the wraithbone buildings, mis-echoing and false-bouncing until the Scion’s systems insisted the entire city was alive and moving.
The frustration of her human crew had bled through to the Scion’s spirit, infecting her with impatience. But she had learned, and so had they. She had learned to rely on low-grade auspex pulses and to fight via naked vision. She had learned to destroy enemies that barely seemed there at all. And, most recently of all, she learned the enemy had brought demigods of their own.
They had wounded her in these last days, wounded her badly. The demigod was hurting now. She was destined to die today, but not yet. Not yet.
Her brothers and sisters were less sanguine regarding her fate. The arguments had raged between crews until she had silenced them with her decision. To die here was an honour. She would not release her crew to flee with the others. She would stand until she could stand no longer, selling her life to buy time for those fated to fight another day.
It was the newest voice among her pantheon of pilots and crew and worshipful servants. Home was the sanctum-forges on Sacred Mars, a world riven by civil war, where the foundry fires were now lifeless and cold. Home was the mountain fortress where traitorous souls had plundered the wealth and lore of Ignatum in the Legio’s absence. Home. The very word set the demigod’s heart-reactor seething with overburning plasma.
What was she to do? She couldn’t run with the others. She was to die here, selling her life to save theirs. Such sacrifice shouldn’t have to endure homesick keening in spurts of treacherous code.
Be silent! She refused to die with such puling weakness whining in her senses. Onwards she strode. Street by street, lending indifferent rage from her district-killing cannons when a phalanx of tanks or a lone beast of considerable size presented itself as a ripe target.
Presently she halted in her hunt. Minutes later. Hours later. She did not know and it did not matter. She judged the passing of time only by the pain she suffered and the destruction she inflicted.
Her void shields rippled with the incidental fire of infantry shrieking around her feet. This, she ignored. The pain of the fires inside her had dulled to the ache of abused metal. This, she was grateful for.
A low-grade auspex ping rippled outwards, bleakly blind. Her heat-maps showed cold. The Scion panned along her waist axis, staring into the golden mist.
Her pilots worked the controls, not only watching but listening to the calls and cries of their kindred in the skull-cockpits of the Scion’s brothers and sisters.
At her ankles, her hoplites engaged the phantasms, laying in with spears and shields and brief eruptions of volkite anger. The Scion sounded her war-horn once more and moved on. She followed the calls of her siblings.
Onwards. Onwards. Onwards.
She felt her brother die. His agony and fury vented across the communion-link that existed outside any general vox-web. By the time she reached him, he was gone.
Ilmarius Novus lay dead in the street, the Warhound’s shattered form driven face-forwards into the ground with a supreme lack of dignity. The thousand punctures of overwhelming bolt penetration/detonation told the tale of how he had fallen.
His core was still lit; that a critical detonative event hadn’t occurred was something of a grim miracle. Not that it mattered to Ilmarius Novus one way or the other. His armour plating was a blackened ruin. His gunlimbs were reduced to bent wreckage. The last and truest indignity had come after his killer had left; his head had been cracked open with power weapons and hand-held meltas, in order for enemy infantry to drag the soft and vulnerable crew away from their hardplugged thrones.
They hadn’t gone far. Their bodies lay like spilled tears by the Warhound’s cheek, their own cranial wounds showing the manner of their execution. She knew this because her crew knew this. Hardplugged together, they were her and she was them.
Which of the foe had done this? Was the murderer still here? The answer was swift in coming. Engine! She yearned with her flawed sensors, staring into the mist. The foe!
The enemy saw her first; it was already fleeing as she rounded the corner, striding around a cluster of wraithbone spires. A Warhound, sprint-stalking in the customary hunched run of its kind. Evidently it had detected the approach of bigger prey and sought to evade.
Cheers sounded from the Scion’s feet. The enemy Warhound had turned from its kill and had been savaging the surviving Unifiers with massed fire. Now the tide had turned.
Weakling fire streamed up from the divided packs of enemy infantry brave enough to show their faces. Tanks were scattered among the rabble, these vomited hard shells that hammered rippling tremors across her voids. She returned fire from her hull turrets, streaming lascannon beams and high-calibre bolt shells back in return. The weaklings fell silent.
She strode down the avenue, crunching monuments of wraithbone beneath her heavy tread. Her cockpit-head swung on heaving pistoned hinges, expelling air and sucking it back in as she tracked left and right, left and right.
I can’t see it. I can’t see… There!
Her war-horn augmitted a wrathful bellow. There in the mist, half hidden by the domes of buildings that barely reached the Scion’s waist, the enemy engine was flanking around at a joint-rattling pace. Its predatory lean gave it a hungry cast. Its stabilisers must have been straining fit to rupture with the pace it set.
Her gunlimb rose on too-slow joints. The Warhound was faster, clanking its way around the final building and spitting up a twinned torrent of macro-bolter fire from its gunlimbs.
She was turning to bring her own weapons to bear, turning into the blizzard of burning metal shells. Her voids rippled. Shuddered. Flickered.
Held.
…and into her reaching fist. She was too slow, too tall, too wounded to catch the engine that sprint-hunched away, half her height. Her grasping metal fingers clawed great gouges across the beast’s back, stealing its balance but failing to hold it in place. She heard its relieved spurt of exalted, shattered code as it lurched towards escape. Its three-toed feet crashed through a regiment of her skitarii. They discharged small-arms fire at its retreating back. Amazingly, one of her hoplites even threw a spear that bounced from the Warhound’s carapace. It stuck there, wedged between two armour plates.
A heroic cast, her crew were saying. And yet useless, she thought, even as she admired the skitarii’s valour.
She knew the Warhound wouldn’t return again. Even injured as she was, slowed by grievous wounds, she would see it dead if it showed itself once more.
The Scion waited. Trickles of her worshippers began to make themselves known, riding conveyors or journeying on foot, making their way in safety now the demigod stood watch over them.
And here she would remain. She panned on her waist axis, staring, staring. Her motions were industrial thunder. The mist hid all.
Then, a signal. Another of her brothers calling to her. Black Sky! One of her noblest kindred. She had precious few siblings left.
Black Sky! I come.
‘My princeps?’ one of her crew asked, turning in his forward throne. ‘Word from the tribune. Ilmarius Novus was the only engine on-station to guard the Unifiers’ evacuation in this district.’
Princeps Nishome Alvarek opened her eyes for the first time in uncounted hours. ‘Ra wishes us to remain?’
‘Aye, my princeps.’
‘Inform Ra that it is with regret we cannot fulfil his desires. Tell him that we have received word that the Black Sky suffers. If we are to die here, my moderati, then we will ensure the escape of as many of our brother and sister engines as possible. Black Sky calls,’ she said with finality. ‘We walk to his aid.’
The Scion walked. One of the phantasms danced before her – one of the creatures that sent shivery unease through her crew and hurt their eyes to look upon, yet simply didn’t exist to her instruments. Winged, feathered, like some carrion crow warped into spindly humanoid form, it beat the air with great wings, vomiting blue fire upon the infantry below.
She shredded it with turret fire, sending its charred skeleton to the ground. Walking on, she saw engines in the mist. Their hump-backed silhouettes spoke of size and class and weapon loadouts as surely as any scan report. The fog was thinner in this part of the city.
Black Sky stood alone, facing two of the foe. Smoke streamed from his hull, greying the pervasive golden mist. The Reaver retreated in halting strides, backing across a wide bridge over an expanse of golden nothingness. The other engines followed, moving between domes and towers. One Warhound. One Warlord. A hunting cadre, like a primitive king and his faithful dog.
She recognised the excited bleats of code from the lesser engine as the same garbled nonsense of the Warhound that had fled from her before. Of course. Sending a lone Scout Titan ahead to draw prey in pursuit was a common enough tactic.
The Scion took position at the bridge’s end, raising her gunlimbs on ponderous hydraulics. Aware of her now, the enemy engines remained on the far side of the span. She sensed their weapon locks slipping, thrown loose by the mist. She heard their spurts of aggravated code and knew the frustration well. Her long-range targeting systems had refused to focus since the first day she walked within this realm.
They must not be allowed to cross the bridge. A Warlord would wreak untold havoc among the evacuating Mechanicum. But wounded and drained, she knew her chances of survival were at best insignificant. Even with Black Sky aiding her, it would be two gravely wounded Ignatum engines against two fresh foes.
So be it. The Scion would make her last stand here.
The very heart of the Great Work. As fine a place as any, and far finer than most.
Missiles streamed past the withdrawing Reaver, leaving smoke trails in the mist. Launched in haste by unlocked targeting systems, they had precious little hope of impacting at such a range. None of them even brushed Black Sky’s voids.
Across the span, the first of the enemy engines began its approach. The Warlord was undamaged, its sloping and scaled armour typical of forge world Omadan’s engines. The open hand of the forge’s symbol showed scarification upon the palm, runic scarring in patterns that resembled no known language for the Scion to process.
The Warhound loped past and ahead of its slower brother, its hunchback swaying, gunlimbs rising. It crossed the bridge far faster, and the Scion noted the riven markings of its own power fist gouged along the second engine’s back.
You die first.
She was destined to be left here, but she would choose her own death. With hydraulic majesty, the Scion of Vigilant Light rose to her final challenge, war-horn blaring.
The Archimandrite lifted its fist. The rebel legionary thrashing in its one-handed clutch barely even strained the hydraulics of the war machine’s grip. Two bolt shells hammered against the durabonded thickness of its facial armour, causing its visuals to grey out for a fraction of a second. With no more ammunition, the Space Marine hurled the pistol with an impact that would have broken a human’s spine. It spanked off the side of the Archimandrite’s faceplate, as harmful as a kindly caress.
The machine applied pressure, closing its fist by degrees. Purple armour warped, then cracked, then the meat beneath began to bleed through the ravaged ceramite. Bones cracked, then crumbled. Only then did the warrior cry out, as his torso and thighs were reduced to shards of bone and mangled flesh barely held together by a layer of metal. The ruination no longer resembled a man at all.
‘You bore me,’ the Archimandrite told the Space Marine. After dropping the crippled mess to the ground, it silenced the warrior for good with a press of its clawed foot.
To untuned and untrained senses, the evacuation looked much the same as the rest of the siege. The grinding of opposing forces across the city had changed little on the surface. Only in the catacombs was the evidence of flight more profound, as the Mechanicum’s adepts who formed the first wave filtered into the hazy tunnels. War servitors went with them. A carefully cogitated number, a subtle exodus alongside the true evacuation, dispersed almost to the point of being hidden. The Archimandrite oversaw this second dispersal with the same precision it had arranged the first.
A heavy chainsword slammed against the machine’s knee joint, the kind of brute weapon that found easy homes in the more savage Legions, capable of rending an armoured man in two. Sparks arced from where the racing, revving teeth met Martian metal. The Archimandrite didn’t even have time to kill its attacker. The red-plated World Eater collapsed, headless, beneath a sweep of a Custodian’s spear.
The machine, Executor Principus of the Martian Mechanicum’s forces here, approached its role with calculating fervour. In its flesh-life it had wrought weapons, infusing them with spirit and purpose before sending them away to wage holy war. Now it was a weapon in its own right. With each kill, Magos Domina Hieronyma of the Ordo Reductor died a little more inside her own mind. She went willingly, subsumed by the cogitations and mathematical processes of annihilating her foes.
The Archimandrite was in ascendance. No longer a high priestess of the Unmaker God, but an avatar of it.
The Archimandrite was only doing as it was made to do. It had joined the Great Work and in-linked to the entirety of the Mechanicum’s army. Now it saw through their eyes, accessed their thought patterns, and led them into battle.
It canted the word into the noosphere, that metadigital network of datastreams accessible only to those born of the Red Planet and subsequently fitted with high-grade augmetics. Its transmissive was laden with codes and equations and coordinates of birth-foundries and manufactories, of plateaus where great battles were fought between forges.
Many of them canted back replies of their own –
The Archimandrite paid special heed to the Custodians. It was increasingly evident that the Legio Custodes was no unified army. Its warriors fought without formation or Legion-scale order, even at the squad level. Each one was an individual among other individuals, trailed by his own artificers and arsenal thralls, the latter of whom reloaded the Custodians’ guardian spears each time a warrior called out.
Their ranks seemed informal, like gestures of respect towards veterans and gifted individuals rather than a command structure to be rigidly adhered to. Few of them, even Tribune Endymion or those who shared Diocletian Coros’ rank of prefect, ever gave orders.
They simply immersed themselves wherever the fighting was thickest, slaughtering in silence.
And yet, there was unity. Unity of purpose, if nothing else. Despite the lack of order and the length of their spinning blades, they never burdened one another or blighted the paths of the other warriors around them. Consummate reflexes far in advance of a legionary’s own genhanced grace gave them a talent that required years for human soldiers, even Space Marines, to learn through repetitive discipline. Yet the Ten Thousand were masters of it. The Archimandrite watched them whirling and killing, their energised blades passing within a hand’s breadth of another golden warrior, yet never once threatening the other Custodian’s life. Each one of them existed within his own sphere, a warlord unto himself.
Nor was that all. The Archimandrite’s observation revealed an inherent defensiveness in the initial blows of each duel. At first this seeming passivity during the first seconds of engagement made little sense, but further analysis showed the truth. Each Custodian spent those precious moments studying his foe, adjusting his fighting style to compensate, then delivering a killing blow. They could simply overpower their enemies immediately with superior strength, speed and armament. Instead, they learned from each and every fight.
Ra Endymion exemplified this. He would parry twice or thrice, whether it was sword, axe, fang or claw, following his enemy’s movements with brief flickers of attention, then lashing back to impale, to cleave, to sever. According to the Archimandrite’s datastreams, no legionary had yet lasted more than three blows against his advance.
Bodyguards, the Archimandrite mused. Praetorians. This was their purpose, after all. Not to win wars, but to know their master’s enemies and destroy them before they could do Him harm. How many thousands of hours of pict-footage did the Ten Thousand study from each conquered or compliant world? Their lives surely consisted of an eternity of preparatory devotion, studying enemy after enemy in case they ever faced them in battle, atop the physicality of their standard training.
Their preternatural reactions allowed them to block bolts and lasfire alike, deflecting it from their spinning spears, but they could still be killed. The Archimandrite had witnessed that itself. They could be overwhelmed by foes and dragged down, or gunned down while already engaged.
The machine advanced at Ra’s side, its shoulder cannons tracking independently of its primary attention, groaning with the ear-straining choooooom of Martian volkite beams and the heavier staccato crashing of Avenger bolt cannons. Ammunition feeds and power indicators decorated the edges of the Archimandrite’s vision. They flashed with sacred depletion; a prayer to the Unmaker God itself. The armoured energy reactor bound to her back seethed with continually replenishing plasma. The heart of an artificial sun powered her weapons and intellect alike. War had never felt so holy.
A particularly brave legionary launched himself at the Archimandrite from the back of a careening Rhino. The machine plucked the screaming sword-bearer out of the air, holding him as the flamer jets in its wrist incinerated the captive fool. All the while, the Archimandrite fired with its free hand, the double-barrelled energy weapon mounted there – one of Arkhan Land’s more precious gifts – streaming with the fires of artificial fusion.
They fought along the rising promenades, between the impossible towers. Silhouettes of extinguished daemons showed against the eldar architecture, their images burned onto the wraithbone by the Archimandrite’s weapons.
They came from the sky as often as they surged from the ground – creatures falling from the cityscape above onto the advancing Imperials. Diseased things climbed the towers to leap and fall, bursting as biological bombs with smacks of ruptured skin; feathered wreckages of avian mimicry descended on flyblown wings to be lanced through by grav-Raider lascannons and the massed fire of guardian spears. Around the Archimandrite, the wraithbone spires thrummed with an almost metallic resonance each time their smooth walls were struck by errant fire.
The machine calculated as it killed, noospherically assigning more battle-servitors and skitarii to begin the journey into the tunnels beneath the city. The numbers of withdrawing Mechanicum warriors rose subtly, quietly higher than the projected figures the Archimandrite had offered to the Ten Thousand. There were no inloaded questions to mark this discrepancy. No outrage or curiosity at the alterations in the figures. The Custodians and the Sisters of Silence battled on, oblivious.
‘For the Omnissiah,’ it augmitted aloud. ‘For the Unmaker God.’
The Scion stood alone.
She swayed on legs blighted by ruptured stabilisers. She leaned askew, the pistons and pressure junctions of her left leg shattered beyond repair. Oil-blood sluiced from severed pipe-veins, gushing fluid and life and coolant onto the bone bridge beneath her. Torsion-bundle cabling hung from her iron guts, a spillage of intestines.
The bridge was hers.
Inside herself she felt fire and death – the former licking at her internal systems and weakening her bones, the latter resonating in the lost and mournful dirges of dispersing mortal consciousnesses. Her crew were dead or dying, their souls fleeing damaged husks, fading away into whatever nothingness awaited their frail and fleshly kind.
But the bridge was hers.
<Scion of Vigilant Light!> she furiously canted across the falling city. <Scion of Vigilant Light!> The outcry was laden with desperate code: let one of her brothers and sisters hear her, let them absorb that coded cry into their datastreams and carry it with them when they fled this place. Imprinted within the code was the pict-feed footage, weapon reports and crew-linked experiences of her last battle and greatest triumph.
The bridge was hers, and her final wish was that her kindred would remember her like this, as a victor, not as a martyred sacrifice.
Duels between engines rarely lasted long. She had walked towards this last battle amidst a breaker of vox noise. The Warhound closed fast. Both of its gunlimbs were given over to anti-infantry mountings, they screeched up with the explosive rage of several hundred bolt shells per second, lighting the Scion’s shields in prismatic shimmers, rippling them like a lake in a hailstorm. It scampered ferally aside from her own opening salvo, compacting itself at full sprint to run beneath the Warlord’s right gunlimb. This was the way of the Warhounds in battle: to scout and ambush, to harass and to distract.
Indecision tore at her. Behind her, the Warhound might work its evil unmolested, streaming fire upon her rear voids with impunity. Worse, it might even chase the fleeing Black Sky, rendering the Scion’s sacrifice worthless.
She let it go, trusting in the simple hatred of its princeps. The Scion had wounded this engine; she wagered with her life that the Warhound’s commander would hunger for the satisfaction of vengeance, not chase the tactical prize of harrying the wounded Black Sky.
The first missiles shattered and burst against the layered aegis of her void shields. Their impacts did no harm beyond stripping the first shield-skins away, but the occlusion of dirty black smoke across her cockpit windows was an irritant. She blind-fired in reply, an expression of disgust more than anything else, yet felt an immediate stab of gratification when the modest rocket salvo from her right shoulder set off the discordant jangle of abused voids.
In the same second, alarms and flashing runes within her crew’s helms declared the punishment her rear voids were taking. The first Warhound had loped around for an attack after all. She had been right to trust in its stupid hatred.
<Daughter of the Red Star!> the Warhound brayed up at her. Her abused voids screeched under its ceaseless clawing.
The Scion twisted in a half turn. She began to lower herself, forcing her protesting hydraulics down by venting pressure from her pistons and setting her joints into neutral-passive. An ungainly hunch at best. At worst, a shameful bowing of her head before death. As expected, the Warhound darted away from her firing arc just as before, even as the Scion’s gunlimb tracked around at maximum extension.
This time she held nothing back. With every safeguard unlocked and shut down, her shoulders erupted with trailing smoke as her missile pods roared themselves empty. As she purged herself of her munitions, her volcano cannon breathed its magma blast – this combined, flaring payload aimed entirely at the ground around her.
To the credit of the Warhound’s crew, the lithe engine veered away from the discharging volcano blast, avoiding the certain death of its fusion heat. To the credit of the Scion’s crew, however, the unleashing of its primary weapon had merely been a way to shepherd the Warhound to where it wished it to go. Dodging the inferno sent the Daughter of the Red Star striding directly into the rain of falling missiles.
The first impacts arrested its evading stride, forcing it to brace back on its own hydraulics to prevent itself toppling over. It was already dead, dead the moment it weaved away from the volcano cannon: the Warhound’s voids rippled, blistered, sundered, burst in the span of a human heartbeat. The missiles were dozens of falling blades, each one knifing into the Daughter’s carapace and gouging away great chunks of blackened ablative metal. One rocket shattered its knee joint, another hammered into its sloping canine forehead and ripped away half of its cockpit-head, leaving its crew’s burning corpses dangling from its halved skull, still connected to their thrones by their hardplug cables, hanging like executed criminals.
She was rising again, forcing pressure back into depleted hydraulics. Restoring pressure to vented metal bones took time, and she had precious little of it. A barrage from the enemy Warlord struck her front shields with punitive whip-cracks.
Alarm chimes became wailing sirens as her voids thinned and buckled. She silenced her internal warnings with a thought; she knew how much pain she was in and the danger surrounding her. She didn’t need automated systems caterwauling to drive the point home.
She was at half-extension when her voids went dark. She braced, leaning into the punishment striking her forward arc, shaking even before the sonic boom of her voids finally giving out. Hard las-fire raked and gouged her armour plating, cutting into her, rending her apart while she still stood.
Mercifully, the battering ceased almost at once. The approaching Warlord had expended itself in shattering the Scion’s shields. Both engines strained to reload, fresh rockets racking into place, plasma generators roiling as they recharged.
She was deeply wounded now, sparks lighting up the inside of her cockpit-skull through the windows of her eyes. Fire suppressant sprayed through her insides in soothing rushes. Half of her missile racks had jammed, their mechanisms fouled by damage.
Closer the enemy Warlord came, an executioner’s confidence in the shieldless tilt of its wounded prey, needing to be within a kilometre to trust the accuracy of its webway-misted firing solutions. Spraying blind-fire and estimating trajectories was no longer enough. The time had come for the killing blow.
The Scion started walking. Bleeding fluid and streaming smoke, the way she still rose on her resetting hydraulics gave her a distinct, shoulder-charging hunch. The enemy Warlord ceased locomotion at an approximate kilometre, unwilling to draw closer. No doubt its crew was trying to ordain a hasty, coolant-dump weapon recharge.
She started running. A stabiliser-wrenching, metal-stressing lean as her ugly, stomping stride gained speed. She dumb-fired, systemless and trusting her gunners’ eyes, volleying every missile that had managed to reload and lancing a beam from her volcano cannon. Her assault hammered into her foe’s void shields in the precious seconds before the enemy Warlord fired. The Scion felt the brief, electric sweetness of vindication as her foe’s voids stuttered and snap-died with the telltale thunder-crack of overloading generators. Failed shields could be swiftly relit, but overloaded systems required a more lengthy restart. The two engines were as defenceless as each other.
A moment later the return barrage took the Scion high in the torso, exploding along her shoulder, detonating the cache of unloaded rockets in a cacophonic fireburst. Stabilisers braced and held. Others braced and tore free of their housing. She was barely a skeleton now, blackened and stripped of a third of her hull-bulk. Where two immense missile arrays had stood proud of her shoulders there now burned a halo of flame. She left her gunlimb on the bridge where it had fallen, blown free of her carapace by the detonations ripping through her.
<Lexarak!> the Warlord canted its name in confident fury. Even so, it began to back away. The Scion’s stride-eating charge was bringing both engines dangerously close, and Lexarak needed range to use its primary armaments.
The Scion’s overburdened ankle shattered, spraying iron and fire across the bridge. She stumbled, grinding down on the stump of a clawed foot, and strode forwards another step.
Lexarak recognised that its backwards retreat was too slow and risked heading into a turn. Too late now, as well as too slow. Incidental, instinctive fire spat from its defensive turrets, too little, too late.
The Scion crashed forwards on its final step, her power fist slamming against opposing armoured metal and clenching closed. Lexarak fired its volcano cannon at terminal range, careless of the consequences in its need for panicked retaliation. For several seconds the Scion stood motionless, disembowelled by the last shot, lightning snaking its way through her innards, beating out from her critical core.
Fortune was with her for a few moments more. Between the Hexarchon’s momentum and her own weight, she pulled her fist back on squealing hydraulics, wrenching her prize free of the enemy Titan’s body.
The most glorious Titan-kills, and accordingly rare, involved the close-combat taking of an enemy’s head, severing it or dragging it from an engine’s still-living form. The cockpit-heads of eldar Titans made for the finest trophies in a forge’s halls. Lexarak had turned aside, preventing such a triumph. Instead, the Scion’s armoured hand had plunged through the damaged plating of its upper rib armour, just beneath the armpit of its left gunlimb. When she drew her hand back, in her scorched fingers was the hourglass-shaped, cable-strewn heart of the plasma reactor, leaking with fireflash containment breaches.
She held to it, fingers locked. She couldn’t drop it. Her digital gearings had melted and seized.
Lexarak began to topple, unpowered, unbalanced. It fell forwards in a painfully protracted pitch, first shattering the lip of the wraithbone bridge beneath the weight of its legs, then falling – sluggishly, end over end – into the abyss.
The Scion watched it eaten by the golden mist.
As if her words were a signal, the reactor in her fist went critical, the resulting detonation peeling away the armour on her left side and tearing away her remaining arm at the elbow.
She stood stunned and ruined on the precipice of the chasm, weaponless and unarmed, crowned by fire with sparks raining from her joints.
The bridge was hers.
Wounded unto death, the Warlord Titan stood alone now, leaking life and streaming with the smoke of internal injuries.
<Scion of Vigilant Light!> she canted in unison with her failing war-horn. Hear me, she prayed. Hear me. Hear the last words of Princeps Nishome Alvarek and the regal Scion.Hear us both. Let us not die unremembered.
She canted the code-laced cry again, again, again. All the details of her last, best victory. She prayed for them to reach the data-halls of proud Ignatum.
Who?
The gutted Titan began to turn on ponderous, failing mechanisms. The industrial pistons and pneumatics of her waist axis were locked, the failsafe seals the only thing keeping her upright in a ballet of fragile harmony. If they unlocked now and left her at the mercy of her broken stabilisers, she would overbalance and fall.
Slowly, so slowly, Black Sky hove into view. The Reaver Titan had returned. It stood ankle-deep in the wreckage of Legion vehicles and slaughtered war servitors, watching the Scion with the dark panes of its cockpit-eyes.
Her reactor-core churned. Her heart lifted.
The Reaver’s returning cants were hollow and dispassionate. Even through her dying agonies, the Scion felt a battle-queen’s righteous anger at her forge-kin’s lack of awed respect.
I have slain two engines with my last act. My death ensures your continued life. By what right do you stand in near silence?
Another thought pressed through the melting sludge of her thoughts. Eject. Eject. Eject.
She could live. Her princeps could yet live if she could just reach the Black Sky, but the ejection manifolds were fouled along with everything else inside her.
The Reaver began to stride closer.
His moderati were dead. Both of them slouched in their thrones in front of him, their slack features staring lifelessly through Black Sky’s eyes, both of their uniforms blossoming in red flowers where the blood of their murders had dried hours ago. The female crewmember had reclined into her throne almost innocently, seemingly asleep. The male, who had seen his companion’s death and struggled to react, had bled significantly more after being shot through the back of the neck. He’d died halfway out of his throne and now slumped against one side of the seat, his head still bouncing unnaturally with every step the Reaver took.
The daemon that had hollowed out Princeps Enkir Morova and now nestled within the meat of his mortal form was beginning to resemble the proud Ignatum veteran less and less. His eyes were raw and red, having not blinked in several hours. Bony protrusions bubbled beneath his flesh in living, crawling lumps, seemingly searching for places to break through the skin. His lap was full of his own teeth, which had pushed themselves from their sockets in a slow squeal reminiscent of nails scratching porcelain.
In the hours since it had claimed Black Sky as its weaponised sanctum, the Reaver had sustained no small damage from enemy infantry and other engines. The daemon lacked the precision and training of the Titan’s true crew. Now coming to the end of its skin-claiming ride, the daemon struggled to contain Enkir’s mortal knowledge, and though it could feel the creeping temptation to dive deeper into the Titan itself and wrap its essence around the machine’s sentient core, even power such as this would feel limiting to the ancient creature after a time. It had no desire to cage itself, even in such a mighty form.
Its lure had worked to perfection, drawing the Scion to its aid, then feigning flight. Now all that remained was the moment of cold-blooded vindication, one that even the flensed spiritual remnants of Enkir would enjoy, for the princeps himself was a man of war and no stranger to murder. Countless men and women had fallen beneath his gunlimbs, each one capable of levelling hive spires.
The daemon felt him now, the shredded tatters of the man’s soul, screaming in the back of its thoughts as the Reaver Titan drew close to its taller, expiring sister.
The daemon felt Princeps Nishome Alvarek’s dying thoughts, translated into emotion through the code-laced transmissions. The exhausted pride in her meaningless triumph. The more honest desperation she couldn’t quite swallow, of all mortal beings unwilling to accept their own death. And yet she ached for one thing more than even her own survival: to be remembered, for these deeds to be spoken of by those that knew her name. That was all. What fortune that Black Sky had returned.
How much truer and purer this hunt was. How much more satisfying than simply breaking machine-men apart with its claws or duelling the hateful Golden.
The daemon’s answer came in a rise of gunlimbs. The shattered Scion was too wounded and joint-locked to even turn aside.
Rooting through Enkir’s hind-thoughts kept dredging a single word to the surface. The daemon canted it unthinkingly in the moment before both weapons fired.
The Scion of Vigilant Light stood motionless as she was speared through the chest with an inferno blast, killed through shameful execution. The Titan followed the falling form of its last kill, its ravaged silhouette plunging into the mist. The daemon, watching, savoured every moment of Nishome’s screams.
Its entertainment ended abruptly when, rather than vanish into the gold of oblivion, the Scion’s detonating reactor core went nova, sending flashes of thunderstorm light flickering through the mist beneath the bridge. The last of the Scion’s living crew died, consumed in sacred plasma fire.
Black Sky turned in a ponderous arc, and strode off in search of other prey.
Nineteen A thousand souls / Just another tunnel / The pernicious spectre of hope
Kaeria felt precious little awe at the sight of the throne room, or at the labyrinthine dungeon that led to it. Even the bannered avenue that so inspired the souls that ventured this far into the Sanctum Imperialis left her cold; she would look at the army of standards and wonder which of these loyal regiments would be next to cast its oaths into the dirt and stand with the Arch-traitor.
She walked with her sisters now – precious few of them, given their deployment within the web and their dispersal across the galaxy – entering the throne room at the head of the phalanx. Coffins followed in their wake, anti-gravitic caskets with reinforced transparisteel facings, revealing the motionless occupants within. A parade of sorts, if one with most of its participants slumbering in chemically induced stasis.
Kaeria had expected a higher-ranking member of her order to be present in the throne room itself and awaiting her arrival, yet she was the senior Sister here. To be met with nothing more than the nervous gazes of Imperial scientists and the dispassionately expectant stares of Martian priests made her skin crawl. Was the Sisterhood really so depleted that this vile duty fell to her?
Well, so be it.
Coffin after coffin thrummed into the chamber on cheap anti-grav suspensors. Each sarcophagus was wrapped in chains, pushed along by the ever-patient guiding hands of a mind-locked servitor. Kaeria let her gaze wander around the vast chamber, where the roar of unknowable machinery was an unchanging song, and the spitting cracks of lightning arcing between generators no longer made any of the labourers recoil.
How swiftly the human mind attunes to madness.
She kept her distance from the Golden Throne. She could see it upon its raised dais, though she chose to scarcely look at it. Kaeria and her Sisters were forbidden from approaching too closely – their presences sucked at the machine’s power and destabilised any psychically resonant machinery. She considered it a grim reflection of the way other humans treated her; the way they cringed or looked away or even bared their teeth on instinct, often without knowing they were doing so. Enslaved to the most animal of reactions, responding on some primal level to the presence of a woman without a soul.
What made her useful, what made her strong, also rendered her an outsider to her own species.
Similarly, past experience told her that the blinding majesty and stupefaction others felt in the presence of the Golden Throne were wholly absent for Kaeria and her Sisters. She saw a man on a throne, no more, no less. No radiant halo. No psychic corona.
She would have preferred the majestic ignorance. Better to feel everything and see almost nothing rather than stare upon the naked truth: the enthroned Emperor was just a man in pain, His suffering etched plain, His mouth open in a silent scream. The agonies He endured for the sake of the species had wrought lines upon His features, somehow bringing the passage of time to an ageless face.
Occasionally the tortured features would twitch in a quiet snarl. His fingers would spasm. A golden boot might gently thud against the metal throne. At first Kaeria had hoped such tics heralded the Emperor’s reawakening. Now she knew better.
The Sister rested a gloved hand upon the first coffin. A man slept within, his arms crossed over his chest and bound together at the wrists in unamusing mimicry of Gyptus’ faraoh-kings The sarcophagus bobbed beneath Kaeria’s gentle touch as she guided it towards the wall. The aquila tattoo upon her face suddenly itched. Not that she believed in omens.
All eyes were on her now, scientists and servitors alike. Several of the latter moved forwards to perform their function, but Kaeria warded them back with a raised hand.
It should be me, she thought. The first of the choir should be put in place by a Sister of Silence. Kaeria Casryn wouldn’t shirk from the bleakness of her duty at the eleventh hour.
The suspensors rendered the coffin near weightless, and Kaeria lifted it onto her shoulder despite the awkward heft of its bulky shape. She ascended the metal gantry stairs that awaited her, feeling the stares of every living being in the cavernous hall, with only one exception. The Emperor on His distant throne paid her no heed at all. He had other wars to fight.
The socket set into the wall was a two-metre indented cradle of circuitry and dark metal. Kaeria pushed the floating pod into its waiting recess, feeling the seals at the back of the sarcophagus lock tight and bind it into its cradle. The chains were next. These she wrapped around prepared hooks of polished steel, shackling the coffin in place. Nutrient cables and catheters hung like jungle vines nearby; she fixed these in place one by one, locking them tight.
A chime sounded as she linked the last one to the coffin. Primed, read the High Gothic rune on the external display.
Kaeria entered a thirty-digit code into the keypad, setting the sarcophagus to draw power from the machinery in its cradle. The suspensors powered down with a lurch – the coffin swayed slowly, moored to its cradle by the sealed cables and wrapped chains.
The man within stirred with the cessation of his slumber-narcotics.
He opened his eyes. This young man who had been taken from his home world and told he would be trained as an astropath, woke bleary-eyed and drugged inside his own coffin. He met Kaeria’s gaze through the transparent panel.
Whatever he tried to say was lost in the soundproof womb of the sarcophagus. Kaeria stared in at the man, watching the way weariness slurred his words, ruining any hope she had of reading his lips.
‘Sister?’ called one of the red priests from below. A cluster of her own Sisters and various tech-adepts had gathered together, watching her with unwelcome intensity.
She broke her gaze away from the entombed man for the last time and descended the ladder.
Kaeria didn’t even have to sign. A nod was enough to set the hundreds of servitors working, led by the scattering of Sisters and their Martian allies.
She stood in the heart of the Emperor’s throne room and watched every one of the nine hundred and ninety-nine other coffins raised into place along the arching walls. The process took several hours to complete, ending with the dark metal pods all staring inwardly towards the Golden Throne itself.
She refused to dwell on the fact that for each active coffin locked inside its cradle, another nine sockets remained empty.
Zephon had considered his exile from his Legion to be the most shameful moment of his life. It made for an unwelcome capstone to over a century of loyal, capable service. Yet being consigned to remain with the non-combatants after he had reached the Impossible City was proving to be a sentence of similar humiliation.
‘You can’t fight.’ Diocletian’s judgement had been bluntly absolute. ‘You would be useless.’
‘I have journeyed for days to get here,’ Zephon pressed. The tower’s turrets had cleared the skies by then, offering a brief respite to the Imperials using the Godspire as their command centre. The Knights of House Vyridion moved past the Blood Angel and the Custodian in a metallic chorus of protesting joints, striding across the courtyard, marching to join the war. The Blood Angel’s eyes snapped briefly towards them.
‘You agreed to come with me into the webway,’ replied Diocletian. ‘And here you are. I never promised you battle, Blood Angel.’
‘If I cannot fight, why am I here at all?’
‘Your comprehension of the minutiae couldn’t be of less interest to me, Bringer of Sorrow.’ Diocletian had fixed his helmet into place. ‘Farewell, Zephon.’
And with that he had left, boarding a grav-Raider. The gang ramp slammed closed, punctuating the conversation with neat finality.
Days passed. Wounded Custodians and Sisters were brought back in various anti-gravitic vehicles, but Zephon lacked the digital dexterity to even help with their injuries. Any attempts to lend aid failed with his flinching, twitching fingers. On more than one occasion Zephon considered leaving the Godspire alone and joining one of the skitarii forces engaged in the city, but what would be the use? What benefit could he possibly be?
There was no misery or anguish at his fallen circumstances, only cold anger. What was a soldier who couldn’t wage war? Who was he? What was his purpose? The same questions that had plagued him after first suffering his wounds decades before now returned to wrack him tenfold.
He walked the catacombs of the war-shaken Godspire, moving among the wounded skitarii and Unifier priests that made up the day’s evacuation manifest.
Among the crowds, he found the only other soul as isolated as himself. The man was alone in a circular chamber, bathed in haunting blue eldar light emitted from cracked gems mounted in a twisting pattern upon the ceiling. His head was down, his concentration levied upon a hand-held device resembling an auspex or a signum.
‘Technoarchaeologist Land?’ Zephon greeted him.
Arkhan Land looked up, as did the psyber-monkey on his shoulder. Zephon found himself smiling at the bizarrely comedic timing of their twinned movements.
‘Zephon,’ said the Martian distantly. ‘Yes. Hello.’
His eyes were bloodshot orbs in darkened pits. His pointed and immaculate little goat-like beard had spread with several days’ worth of stubble along his cheeks and around his mouth.
‘You look…’ Zephon trailed off, not wishing to be unmannerly.
‘A trifle unwell, I imagine.’ Land turned his gaze back down to the hand-held device. ‘Learning that hell is real and that an underworld of daemons will one day eat all of our souls has a way of meddling with a man’s sleep patterns.’ There was no life to his mockery. The words were spoken with bland indifference.
‘I had believed you gone with the initial evacuation columns.’
‘Oh, no. Not yet. One of the Custodians noted the firepower of my Raider and asked if I would remain to escort the final column. Something about them standing the greatest risk of attack, if the rearguard is overwhelmed.’ His toneless voice murmured on as he stared down at the device.
Zephon approached, going down to one knee by the distracted explorator. The psyber-monkey turned mournful eyes to the Blood Angel’s own, as if this towering red-clad warrior somehow held the answers to its master’s grief.
‘What occupies your attention?’ the Blood Angel asked softly.
Land tilted the device to share the viewscreen. Zephon saw along the barrel of an overheating heavy stubber, high above the ground. It shook as it spat rounds in long bursts into the leathery and thrashing forms of horned beasts below.
‘Gun-feeds,’ Land replied, staring at the images, unblinking. ‘From House Vyridion.’
He cycled through them – the views from the carapace stubbers and meltas of each Knight, then the less reliable feeds of their primary arm weapons. These were far more prone to shake-distortion.
‘How long have you been watching these images?’
‘How long have we been here?’ countered Land. He still didn’t look up. ‘I wanted to watch the Scion’s last stand but I suspect she was out of range when the enemy killed her. I saw her once, many years ago now, striding forth from Ignatum’s forge. She was a proud lady.’
Zephon gently closed his fingers around the device and pulled it from Land’s grip. There was no resistance. The imagifier was laughably small in the Blood Angel’s hand.
‘Why are you here?’ Land asked, finally making eye contact. ‘Why aren’t you out fighting?’
Zephon didn’t want to admit how often he’d tried. Only a mere hour before he’d stood alone in a chamber, weapons in his hands, unable to trigger his own chainsword.
‘My arms,’ the Blood Angel replied.
‘Ah. Yes. The bionics. I remember now.’ Land looked around the chamber, showing emotion for the first time as he curled his lip in distaste. ‘What ugly sanctums these eldar built. It’s no loss, really, that most of them are dead.’
Zephon deactivated the pict-feed, silencing the tinny clatter of stubbers and inhuman roars.
‘There is great elegance in their race,’ said the Blood Angel, ‘but it is coupled with great malice, sadness and even greater hubris.’
Land snorted. ‘You sound as though you admire them.’
Zephon nodded. ‘Aspects of their existence, yes. The movements of the exarchs of their warrior castes are breathtaking to behold. I can think of few higher honours than being recognised for besting one blade to blade.’
‘Have you ever killed an eldar?’
‘Yes,’ Zephon admitted.
‘How many?’
‘I do not know,’ the Blood Angel lied. ‘Many,’ he added, spicing the falsehood with some truth.
‘Good riddance,’ Land exhaled, not quite a laugh. ‘Their technology is fascinating but inarguably foul. Interesting in its occasional efficiency, yet ultimately impure.’
Zephon said nothing. He was beginning to regret engaging with the Martian at all.
‘Something about you has irritated me for some time,’ said Land. ‘What exactly is the significance of “Bringer of Sorrow”? What is the meaning of such an outlandishly theatrical name? It’s ludicrous, even for a son of Baal.’
Zephon didn’t answer. He had a question of his own. ‘You said you knew why I was asked to come here. I would like to know what you believe.’
Now Land did laugh, a bleak little chuckle. ‘Is it not obvious? Have you ever been inside a mine, my angelic friend?’
‘A salt mine, in the compliance of–’
‘Yes, yes.’ Land waved a hand to silence the Blood Angel. ‘Mines are dangerous places, prone to leakages of natural gas. Even resistant servitor labour can suffer, but that’s beside the point for now. Think of deep mine work on worlds where expendable servitor flesh is in short supply, or where workers lack access to machinery capable of detecting gas leakages. Those poor, primitive souls take a caged bird or some other beast with little lungs into the deep dark, and they watch it while they work. If the bird dies, the labourers know the mine is unsafe.’
Land’s smile showed almost all of his teeth. ‘You, Blood Angel, are the caged bird in the mine. Do you see the Imperial Fists here? No, you do not. Because they can’t be trusted. In fact the only legionaries you do see are those rebellious dogs rampaging their way across the Imperium. But what better way, hmm, to test the loyalty of the Blood Angels when it is in doubt? Or to see how a Space Marine handles immersion in the webway, confronted by the monsters of the warp? Why, take a crippled one with you. One who can’t even fire his bolter. One who would be no danger if he succumbed to whatever treason has proven so appealing to half of the Emperor’s Legions.’
Zephon stood quietly. Above them, the Godspire shivered with the siege. ‘I should perhaps be irritated at the manipulation involved,’ he said.
‘Be angry if you like. I’d say you were vindicated, though. Unless I’m mistaken, you haven’t spat on your oaths to the Omnissiah just yet. Whatever the game is, you seem to have won.’
‘Perhaps.’
Land gazed around the room once more. He seemed suddenly deflated. ‘I will be pleased to leave this place, Zephon.’
‘This chamber?’
‘No, no. This city.’ Land reached into one of his belt pouches, producing the flattened and crumbly remains of a foil-wrapped ration bar. The simian snapped it from its master’s grip, devouring its powdery treat with bright eyes.
‘But we have only been here a matter of days,’ Zephon replied.
The technoarchaeologist raised a bushy eyebrow. ‘So?’
‘So are you not aggrieved that we are already preparing to evacuate?’
‘Why would I be aggrieved?’ When the Blood Angel had no answer, Land continued, ‘I’m a scholar first and a gentleman adventurer second. I could, perhaps, be convinced to consider myself a binaric philosopher third, as I’ve always had a passion for debating the dual nature of the Machine-God. But I’m no soldier.’
‘But we are leaving, having seen so little.’
‘Little? We have seen everything.’ Land narrowed one eye, peering at the tall warrior. ‘You are showing terrifying ignorance, Blood Angel. You look around you and you see a city, the first sign of habitation in the webway, yes? You see evidence of civilisation, albeit in the foul architecture of the eldar race. Your perceptions are tricking you, Space Marine. Your brain recognises the presence of urban structure, where life once existed, and attributes undeserved importance to it.’
Land keyed in a code on his vambrace, projecting a scratchy, inexact version of the unfolding, evolving webway map imprinted inside the Archimandrite’s mind. Complete scans of the human body’s veins and capillaries showed fewer branching pathways than the disorderly maze beaming forth in green holo light.
The explorator pointed at one of the tunnels. One that seemed no different to any of the other thousands revealed in flickering light.
‘What does it matter if this city falls?’ asked Land. ‘Do you think Tribune Endymion truly cares? Or Prefect Coros? They have been fighting for almost five years in the tunnels between Calastar and Terra – the hundreds of passageways that lead inexorably to the Emperor’s very throne room. The Impossible City isn’t the focus of the war, Zephon. It isn’t even the prime battlefield of the war. This entire city is merely within a tunnel like any other. Its only real note of import is that it made an easy strongpoint to defend when the Ten Thousand advanced as far as their numbers allowed. So, no, I am not aggrieved. I wished to see the Great Work, and I am seeing it. With all its wonders and horrors.’
For a time neither of them spoke. The only sound was Sapien’s chewing.
‘That will play merry havoc with his digestion,’ Land noted. And then, apropos of nothing, he narrowed his eyes as he regarded Zephon. ‘You really are a beautiful creature, you know. Aesthetically, I mean. And scientifically, of course.’
‘It is said that many of my Legion possess aesthetic qualities considered–’
‘Not that it means anything one way or the other,’ Land interrupted. ‘I’ve never had that drive within me, you understand. No time for those kinds of entanglements – they’re a distraction from real work. I merely find it curious that your primarch’s genetic legacy manipulates human physiology to produce such mythologically iconic figures of beauty. Not very secular, eh?’
Zephon smiled. This was something he had heard and debated on many occasions before.
‘Angels have great cultural significance on Baal. In many ways, Baalite culture holds closer religious similarities to Old Earth in the era of the Holy Pax Romanii Empire than it does to–’
‘Yes, yes. Spare me the lesson in the exact flavour of your tawdry barbarism.’
Zephon smiled despite himself. ‘As you wish, Arkhan.’
‘Hmm. I suppose you are here for me to examine your arms before I leave?’
Zephon’s angelic features remained carefully passive. He showed none of his surprise that the explorator had recalled the offhand comment from their journey, but nor did he desire to put himself under such scrutiny. Out of pity for the haunted man before him and sensing Land’s abiding isolation, he said, ‘Yes.’
‘Well, there’s no time now. The final evacuation column is in three hours and all of my equipment is already loaded.’ He hesitated, regarding the Blood Angel with a critical eye. ‘You’re welcome to ride with me rather than in one of the bulk conveyors this time, if you so desire.’
‘I am touched, Explorator Land. I shall consider it. May I ask why my affliction is of such interest to you?’
‘Listen to yourself, Space Marine. Affliction. Typical Baalite melodrama. The truth is that I’ve always wondered about legionaries and their bionics,’ Land elaborated, evidently warming to the subject. ‘You often leave them unarmoured, yet reverently sheathe the rest of yourselves in ceramite. Even statues of your kind show unarmoured augmentation. I can’t say I’ve been interested enough until now to truly look into it. I’d always assumed it was something pertaining to how bionics fail to interface with power armour.’
‘Primarily,’ Zephon agreed. He felt the conversation getting away from him and wasn’t certain he wished to catch up. Of all the conversations to have, in all the places, with all the people who he might speak with.
‘Primarily?’ Land pressed.
‘There is also an element of inspirational pride to the practice. To present us as invincible, enduring warriors to the Imperium and its enemies. To show that we overcome our wounds and fight on in the Emperor’s name.’
Land gave a wry sneer. ‘Such cheap propaganda. Like the legends of warriors that fought naked so as to show their courage before their allies and their fearlessness to their foes.’
‘There is perhaps an element of that as well,’ Zephon confessed. ‘But as you said, it is largely a matter of interfacing with our armour.’
Arkhan Land rose, dusting his hands on his long jacket. ‘Give me back my auspex,’ he said idly. ‘And let’s be away from here. I have a medicae scanner in my supplies, as it happens.’
Zephon didn’t move. ‘Is there a possibility that you might be able to restore function?’
‘Ah,’ Land said with a wry smile. ‘The pernicious spectre of hope makes itself known at last. Please note that I can’t promise an Omnissian miracle. I’m no surgeon-augmeticist or bionic engineer, yet there’s nothing else to do until our departure but stare into the screens and witness nightmares given shape. Given that I’ve checked and rechecked my Raider thrice in the last few hours, you are, at least for now, my only useful distraction.’
He walked from the chamber, towards where the wounded skitarii were being tended by their artisanal priest-engineers. Beyond that lay the chamber where the final convoy made ready for evacuation.
The psyber-monkey remained a moment more, cocking its head as it looked up at the Blood Angel.
‘Come along, Sapien,’ Land’s voice drifted from the hallway outside.
The artificimian bolted, leaving Zephon alone. He looked at the arched doorway for some time, deciding whether or not to follow.
Twenty Undivided / War in the tunnels / As then, so now
The daemon soared, free of its iron bindings. Black Sky had grown unsustainable as a host, with its crew slain and its damage going untended, leading to the spread of noisome madness within Enkir’s broken mind. The creature had abandoned the Titan and its princeps with the metamorphic release of casting aside a shed husk. On regrown wings it took to the air.
And so it soared, watching the hordes of the Four Choirs, each one the scarcest shard of something greater, overrunning the city. No mortal legionaries, here. No god-machines or battle tanks or other corporeal toys. The hosts of the warp marched, spilling from a multitude of tunnels. The city was theirs, though in their triumph they cared not at all. Pursuit of the Golden and the Soulless was all that mattered. The immense, fanged willpowers that drove each shard pressed them onwards, ever onwards. The Golden and the Soulless were almost extinct, the last gate almost defenceless. These creatures and their masters were utterly indifferent to the galaxy burning. Here was the true war, and the hour of its end had come. The Anathema’s throat was bared.
Many of the Four’s child-shards warred amongst themselves. This was simply the Way, the eternal ebb and flow of the Great Game. Few of them rose against the incarnation of the first murder. Undivided, its genesis was in a song sung by all four Choirs. Among the other shard children, even those of the same Choir might tear at one another to sate bestial hungers or in purified expressions of their incarnated principles. They were daemons, after all, and not to be trusted.
The creature turned in the immense tunnel’s misty sky. Something pulled at the node of senses within its skull, something that had tasted and revelled in no small measure of violent annihilation. Something still inside the dead eldar city. Something hiding.
There was no conscious decision to turn and hunt. The daemon hungered eternally, and was drained by the skin-puppetry of possession and immersion in mortal thought. It hungered, so it would feed.
It swooped low above the teeming ranks of its kindred, beating its wings to the sounds of shrieking fear, hate and adoration rising from lesser throats.
As with their arrival, there was no boundary to mark their departure. The spires around the evacuating Imperials became more insubstantial, slowly swallowed by the mist, but there was no geographical assurance they were even the same towers that comprised Impossible City.
Baroness Jaya had no idea when she had left the last avenue and entered the first tunnel, but her focus was most assuredly on more urgent matters.
Minutes became hours, and hours lost any shred of the dubious meaning they’d so far managed to hold in a realm without any true chronology. The battle raged down tunnel after tunnel, with the Ten Thousand and the Silent Sisterhood forced into a neverending fighting retreat by the sheer weight of numbers hammering against them. Tunnels branched and divided and rejoined on the route back to the Imperial Dungeon, each passageway thick with rebel war machines, legionary battalions and hordes of the warp-wrought.
The only respite came at the barricades of wrecked vehicles and downed Titans that the defenders pressed into service as fortifications. All pretence of conventional war had been abandoned. At least in the city they had been able to see the assault as a siege. Here, with the foe choking the tunnels, it was like fighting back the tide of Terra’s last ocean.
Nor were the attacks limited to the very end of the Imperial column. The evacuees came under constant threat from capillary tunnels where the rebel forces and their daemonic ilk had outpaced the Imperial rearguard to strike deep within the refugee column.
Jaya remained with the Ten Thousand and Sisterhood units making up the rearguard, backed up only by Sacristan Torolec and his small team in their heavily armoured Logrus-pattern munitions loader. The rest of Vyridion’s courtiers were scattered throughout several kilometres of webway tunnels, fighting off secondary attacks along the evacuation line.
The fighting was at its fiercest and thickest at the rearguard, with an ever-diminishing number of the Emperor’s finest facing the bulk of the foe’s horde.
Repeated vox-calls for the Archimandrite went unanswered. Demands for servitors and Protectors to return from further down the line were answered with similar silence.
Gunflare flowered in the golden dark as her cannons chattered their lethal song. Legionaries, and the creatures that added to their ragged ranks, fell before her in droves. The tunnel gave a great heave around her as a Fellblade rolled from the mist, its Legion colours unreadable, belching its main cannons in her direction. The shells erupted against the tunnel wall nearby, shrapnel impacting against her angled energy shield. She knew herself just how worthless targeting arrays were in the mist. The golden fog unlocked and threw off even dead-sight aiming confirmations.
She veered aside as the debris clattered against her shield. Not for the first time she wondered if these tunnels of alien matter could collapse beneath the weight of the violence inside them. They hadn’t yet. Perhaps that boded well.
The Ignatum Warhound Ikarial, shield-dead and decorated with the scarification of near-terminal wounds, bounded forwards on sparking, damaged legs, its gunlimbs kicking. One moment Jaya’s display was lit by the gunflare of its mega-bolters, the next Ikarial took an unnaturally awkward step backwards and toppled sideways into Imperial ranks, trailing smoke from where its cockpit-head had been.
‘Baroness.’ She knew the voice of Tribune Endymion, and knew his command before he needed to speak the order.
‘Engaging,’ she voxed back, slamming her control pylons forwards. Her nameless, inherited Castigator leaned into its loping run with vicious eagerness, kicking through the shrieking infantry at its shins and raising its power sword high in the mist. Lightning raked along the active swordlimb, spitting sparks as it reacted with the golden fog.
Gunner, she thought. Sweat bathed her inside her suit and stung her eyes within her helm. Driver.
The Fellblade, Ikarial’s killer, fired again, the boom of its shells shaking Jaya’s bones at such close range. Even clipping her was enough to overload her ion shield and rock her sideways in her throne. Her nimble Castigator staggered but kept its balance – a heartbeat later she was on the tank, one foot slamming down onto its forward plating to arrest her own momentum, plunging her blade downwards in a smooth thrust.
In and out darted the impaling shaft of lightning-wreathed steel, searing through the dense ceramite of the Fellblade’s turret. Gunner. In and out a second time, just as smoothly, into the plating directly beneath her. Driver.
A third sweep of the energised blade severed the long-barrelled accelerator cannons halfway along their length. For the sake of it.
Quad lascannons tore past her as she sprinted back to the line of gold and black, where the Custodians and Silent Sisters were making their stand. She angled her rekindled shield behind her and ran on, risking the sponson fire rather than wade amidst the foe for any longer than necessary. Damage reports showed as angry runes in the corner of her vision. All fine. Nothing critical.
Something winged slapped against her forward hull. Her automated stubber rattled off a chorus of rounds, ripping the daemon-thing from the air.
She strode over the warring forms of Ra and Dynastes Squad, their spears spinning with the speed of rotors. Half turning as she walked over them, Jaya sent another stream of high-velocity bolts from her gunlimb in a shredding crescent through an enemy phalanx.
The smoking cannons whined to silence.
‘Falling back,’ she voxed to the front line. ‘Reloading.’
Torolec was waiting for her once she had weaved between the grav-tanks of the Ten Thousand and the Sisterhood’s skimmer platforms. The munitions loader was an ugly tracked vehicle with a humanoid crane mechanism on its back, appearing as nothing so much as centaur of Terran myth formed from a Sentinel cargolifter and a tank. Torolec brought the Logrus around behind her. She locked her stance and waited, tense in her throne, willing them to work faster.
‘Where are the war servitors?’ one of the Custodians was calling out across the vox. His voice was ragged with the effort of battle. ‘Where is the accursed Mechanicum?’
Jaya had no answer. She listened to the heated exchanges, hearing her own scions reporting the absence of significant portions of the convoy’s defenders. Hundreds of servitors, tanks and Protectors were simply not there.
The Knight rocked gently as ammunition canisters were crunched into place. A moment later she felt the slight sway of her gunlimb as ammunition belt feeds were reconnected.
‘For Highrock,’ Torolec intoned the traditional words of readiness.
‘For the Emperor,’ she replied, and slammed her control pylons forwards once more.
An unknowable time later, the enemy fell back. Perhaps more accurately, they failed to pursue the withdrawing Imperials. No more of them drifted from the golden mist; no hunched silhouettes or screaming warriors or ravening beasts emerged from the fog to hurl themselves at the rearguard. Knowing this precious moment of peace wouldn’t last long, Ra made ready to repel another wave.
‘Fourth and fifth ranks advance,’ he grunted into the vox. ‘First through third, fall back.’
Most of the exhausted warriors collapsed where they were, seized by muscle cramps in their first moment of peace in untold hours. Grav-tanks and relatively fresh warriors took their places, advancing in place of the exhausted waves of their kindred who had held until now.
Ra slumped to the ground, his muscles in spasm, physically unable to bring himself to rise. The stimms and adrenal-spikes were wearing off at last, forcing him to confront the reality of his overworked body. He was poisoning himself with sleeplessness, his blood rich with chemical stimulants and his thoughts prey to the distortions of a brain refused the mercy of rest.
By his loose calculations he had been awake now for fifteen days, fighting almost every minute since the walls fell, his ears endlessly ringing with a vox-crackling orchestra of conflicting voices. His body was eating itself for nourishment. He struggled to stay aware of how the evacuation was proceeding farther along the passages, but there was no word beyond the Archimandrite’s absence and the predation of foes from many of the side-tunnels. His thoughts were dull and slow, his reflexes slower. Everything he saw was stained by the greying haze of exhausted starvation.
Fifteen days. His right shoulder had seized days ago, yet there had been no respite. It throbbed with crippling cramps from the sheer repetitive weight of hammering his spear down over and over again, thousands of times each day and night.
The tall form of Baroness Jaya’s Castigator was a motionless statue above them, staring back into the mist. Waiting, just as they were waiting. Diocletian had done well in finding her. Vyridion’s Knights were precious assets in the close-quarter brutality of these tunnel battles.
Jodarion, another of the Lords of Terra, collapsed into the road next to Ra, lying atop the last three legionaries he’d slain. Jodarion’s trembling hand managed to drag his blade-split helm free, baring his face to the ashy air. The Custodian sucked it in, in great wet heaves.
There was very little left of Jodarion’s face. He left some of it on the inside of his cleaved helmet, reduced to a red smear. Ra looked at the gasping, bloody skull next to him, all that remained of Jodarion’s head, half of the teeth hammered away, lost at some point in the last few days. The wounds had clotted almost at once, but the damage was done.
Ra suspected he looked little better.
The legionary nearest to him was still alive. A World Eater, bisected at the waist, was dragging himself closer to where Ra kneeled. His armour was more red than white, signifying some unknown change within his treasonous Legion.
‘Blood,’ the warrior murmured through a shattered mouth.
‘I was there,’ Ra tried to growl at him, but the exhausted words were a snarling whisper. ‘I was there the day we saved your mongrel primarch from certain death.’
‘Blood,’ the World Eater mumbled again. His helm had been crushed, savaging the skull and face within. His eyes were glazed, maddened, the pupils mere pinpricks.
‘If only we’d left him there.’ The Custodian laughed, feeling his reknitting bones and abused muscles stinging afresh with the squirted application of adrenal elixirs from inside his armour.
‘Blood…’
‘If only we’d left him to die in those mountains.’ Ra was smiling now. ‘The one primarch who couldn’t conquer his world. The one primarch who lived as a slave. The one primarch who had to be saved from death.’
‘Blood!’ The World Eater’s eyes resolved with the ghost of clarity. ‘Blood for the–’
A spear rammed through the World Eater’s spine, driven down between his shoulder blades. The power pack on his back shorted out and died. The warrior himself went into convulsions. Eyes that had so briefly cleared now rolled back into his broken head.
Above him, Solon wrenched the weapon left, then right, and finally pulled it free. The Custodian collapsed a breath later, using the World Eater’s corpse as a seat.
‘This has been the worst day since yesterday,’ Solon said with no trace of a smile in his tone.
Ra rolled onto his back, first seeing the empty mist above, then looking to his right. He saw Zhanmadao, the Terminator forced down to one knee, his firepike lost or broken who knew how long ago. Grinding gyro-stabilisers in the Cataphractii suit’s joints sought to bring the warrior back to his feet but Zhanmadao slouched forwards, head lowered. He refused to rise from his crouch, or he simply couldn’t manage it, instead adopting the pose of an ancient knight kneeling in prayer before an altar. Blood had dried while running from rents in his battleplate, and from his mouth in a slow trickle. When he lifted his head to look at Ra, a dirty chasm of scabbed blood and broken bone showed where one eye and one ear had been. Bare skull glistened in the gold mist.
Unable to speak, Zhanmadao grunted.
Ra tried to force a nod. Instead, his eyes fell closed.
He opened them a second later. An hour later. A year later. The Mechanicum’s tunnel was gone, as were his kindred.
He stood in the throne room, the Emperor’s laboratory has it had been half a decade before, not as it stood now. The walls lacked the hive-like hollows of thousands upon thousands of recesses awaiting stasis coffins. The machinery spat no sparks. The Emperor didn’t sit upon the Golden Throne. That great engine thrummed with automation, independent of the Emperor’s presence yet slaved to His invisible will and the ambitious heights of Imperial dreams.
‘Hello, Ra.’
Ra turned, feeling the broken-bone grind of his malfunctioning armour. He tried to kneel but the Emperor stopped him, a hand gripping his Custodian’s pauldron. The tribune grunted his gratitude.
‘Do you remember this day, Ra?’
The workers performed their duties around him, maintaining the rumbling machines, tending to the connective pipelines and power couplings. It could have been one of any number of days in the throne room, before…
No. There. There was Valdor. There was Amon. There was Ra himself, one of twenty of the highest-ranking Custodians present in a loose pack, speaking in voices too low, too far away, for Ra’s wounded manifestation to make out.
Ra’s mouth curled in a tired smile at the sight. How innocent we were.
He knew of what those ghosts spoke. He remembered it well. He even followed the movements of Amon’s lips, his memory providing the voice he couldn’t hear.
‘…no word from Aquillon.’
Aquillon. Prefect of the Hykanatoi. The Occuli Imperator, Eyes of the Emperor, assigned to watch over Lorgar in the waning years of the Great Crusade. Aquillon, who had never returned from his vigil. One of Ra’s own Dynastes Squad had travelled with Aquillon on that long, distant mission: Sythran – a warrior who had also surely fallen to Word Bearers treachery. Perhaps even on Isstvan itself in the high hour of treachery.
Stoic, dutiful Sythran. Ra hoped he had died well.
‘I remember, sire,’ said Ra. He watched Amon speaking of Aquillon, seeing one of his finest companions mouthing the very last words spoken before the sirens sounded.
The sirens began to sound.
‘Time is short, Ra,’ said the Emperor.
Men and women were standing still around them. The shouts were starting to rise, accompanying the flashing warning lights. The gathered Custodians spread apart in effortless awareness of each other’s killing reach, the most loyal hands in the Imperium reaching for their spears.
‘We may not reach the Dungeon, sire.’ Even here, Ra’s voice was a cracked ruin. ‘The Mechanicum has abandoned us and the convoy is near undefended.’
‘I know, my Custodian. I know. It is meaningless now.’
More shouting. Workers and scientists were running now, moving away from the overloading machines. The illumination of the throne room took on a strained, desaturated cast.
Constantin Valdor ran to the Emperor’s side, oblivious to the fact his master was playing no part in a performance that had all happened before.
The Emperor had turned to him then, Ra recalled, and said ‘Summon Jenetia Krole. Assemble the Ten Thousand.’ This time though, he did not.
‘At once, my liege.’ Valdor turned away to make it so.
‘Something is coming through!’ cried one of the human workers.
The Emperor ignored the spreading chaos. ‘Hear me, Ra. You must take word to the Ten Thousand and the Silent Sisterhood. I am leaving the Golden Throne. I am coming to you.’
Ra’s blood sang. Eyes wide, he felt riven by sudden hope. It struck him with physical force.
‘Sire… How…’
‘The how does not matter. Hold, Ra. Fight. I will join you in the Mechanicum’s tunnels.’
‘But, my liege, all your work…’
The Emperor silenced him with a stare.
Behind Ra, the discoloured webway portal vomited incandescent flame into the throne room. He felt its searing heat, just as he had on that long-ago day. He watched himself with exalted, distracted eyes, moving to the Emperor’s side, forming a shield of Custodial auramite to protect his monarch from harm.
The machines were detonating around them now. Many of the humans were on the floor, clutching at their bleeding eyes. The hateful radiance emerging from the webway had stolen their sight.
Those still standing were no safer. Shrapnel flew in a lethal, burning blizzard, cutting them down in their dozens, shearing limbs from bodies, severing heads from shoulders. Wreckage clattered against Ra’s armour now, just as it rained against the same armour he had worn five years before. A dagger of jagged metal speared into Amon’s side, causing the Custodian to grunt across their shared vox.
A bleeding, desecrated behemoth melted through the webway portal. It dripped with the blood of the souls it had sacrificed to reach this point in space and time. Laughter haloed its terrible form, the laughter of mad entities pantomiming as gods. Their laughter formed the silver strings of puppeteers, pulling at the creature’s limbs and thoughts.
It said one word, one terrible proclamation with enough psychic ferocity to slay half of the panicking humans still breathing. They warped and thrashed and burned beneath the pressure of that single telepathic damnation, their flesh losing all integrity, their essences devoured from the inside out.
+FATHER.+
Valdor was firing. Amon was firing. Ra, then and now, was firing. He and the image of himself reloaded in temporal harmony, slamming fresh sickle magazines home in their guardian spears, resuming the torrent of upward bolter fire.
The pain of Ra’s wounds was gone. He didn’t think, didn’t care, that this was a memory. He unloaded his guardian spear into the daemonic avatar of Magnus the Red, just as he had done on that fateful day. He screamed through clenched teeth – again, just as he had done before, just as he was doing not two metres away now.
+Awaken, Ra,+ said the Emperor. +Fight on.+
And as ever, His Custodian obeyed.
Twenty-One That most sacred duty / The end of many roads / Awakening
The Archimandrite calculated with all haste. There were doubts, of course. Hesitations. On some level it mused over the heretical nature of its choice, but to consider its actions heresy would be the result of flawed and limited perception. The Ten Thousand and the Silent Sisterhood, proving themselves untrue to the word given to the Fabricator General himself, were the guilty ones. The route back to Mars had to remain viable. The Aresian Path must stay in Imperial hands. Ensuring that circumstance was as far from heresy as could be conceived. Indeed, it was a sacred duty.
And if it could not, would not be fulfilled by those responsible? Then the answer was not to flee back to Terra. Terra was safe. Terra didn’t languish under the traitorous grip of the false cult. Terra needed no reinforcing.
No, there was only one logical answer that conformed to the relevant needs of Martian primacy. Only one course of action to take.
With the webway’s cartography playing out in repetitive reassurance within the Archimandrite’s thoughts, it had been no hardship to plan the dispersal of the war servitors, robots, Protectors and Myrmidon war-priests that answered to the Archimandrite itself rather than the Ten Thousand. Those that the Archimandrite didn’t personally lead were sent with the earliest sections of the evacuation convoy, then granted enough insight into the Archimandrite’s mental map to deviate from the line of retreat and journey through secondary tunnels to double back. They drifted away at key junctions, navigating the webway via their overlord’s exloaded data.
It had been easier still to filter through the layers of their loyalties through unspoken code exchanges, holding noospheric conversations with hundreds of them at once to ascertain their use and potential within the Archimandrite’s growing forces.
It was under no illusions. It couldn’t retake Mars with the force accrued inside the webway. No matter. Holding the Aresian Path would be enough. The Omnissiah would commit far greater forces to the web in the next crusade, and the Archimandrite’s war convocation would be waiting, indefatigably in command of the most vital passageway in the entire network.
If only Ignatum had been a viable consideration. Even one of the few remaining Titans would have been an beneficial omen, but the Archimandrite had known better than to even make the attempt of gaining their aid. The Titan crews of Ignatum were more flesh than metal, and the Archimandrite sensed their loyalties were as tightly bound to Terra and the Ten Thousand as to the Martian ideal. They ached for home as much as any of the displaced Cult Mechanicum, yet they held warrior-bonds with the Imperials and personal, inviolate oaths with the Omnissiah.
Their skitarii, however, had proved far more receptive. Simple, weaponised creatures that they were, the Archimandrite had siphoned them away from around the ankles of the god-machines they protected, drawing them into secondary conduits and capillary tunnels, keeping them from the destruction being levied upon the Sisterhood and the Ten Thousand.
The Archimandrite had canted its avowal to stand with the last convoy, warding them from harm – and then, as the final Imperials had battled their way into the tunnels beneath the Impossible City, it had performed its most calculated gamble and powered down amidst the devastation. Now it seemed to be nothing more than yet another wreck, another robot going tragically unsalvaged in the hours after this terrible battle.
And it had worked. No warp beast had come to tear it apart in daemonic anger.
A sliver of life remained within its core during this slumber, enough to maintain its few biological components. Those precious shreds of viscera that had once been Magos Domina Hieronyma couldn’t be allowed to rot.
In the deep caves of the Godspire’s wraithbone foundations, sealed within a vault established by the Unifiers to house volatile materials for their reconstruction work, the Archimandrite reactivated slowly, sending power throughout its form in a trickle charge.
Home, it thought.
It. She?
It.
Though again… there were doubts. Logically, this yearning for home – could it be the corrupting influence of the core of Hieronyma within the machine? And if so, did that stand as testament to the purity of the Archimandrite’s cause, or was this an emotive flaw, a stutter of the precision of its plan?
Furthermore: consider the role of external manipulation. Had this been anticipated? Expected? Planned by the Fabricator General? Had she been chosen to become It in the knowledge she would put her emotive loyalty to her homeland above the needs of the Ten Thousand?
The Archimandrite cast these considerations aside as irrelevant to its calculations. They were of no consequence now. The Cog, as it was sometimes said, was already turning.
The Archimandrite’s first order of duty was to re-establish its noospheric network with the alphas and unit leaders it had won to its cause. And from there, on to the Aresian Path.
Powering up completely, the war machine rose and began to cant to its underlings, assembling an internal map of where they were positioned.
The alpha individual named and numbered by the signifier KRRJ-1211 (F) could not be said to possess much in the way of personality or ambition. In that regard he was little different from most of the basic-pattern skitarii, all of whom were surgically and chemically crafted for loyalty and obedience. He stared at the world through target-accumulator lenses grafted over eyes that had had their lids removed in order to provide his masters with continual inloads of data from his senses. And in this, too, he was little different from others among his kind.
His lack of distinctiveness made him perfect for the Archimandrite’s purposes. Wholly loyal to Sacred Mars and entirely devoid of the higher brain function necessary to determine the action/reaction cause/effect of his conflict in loyalties, he obeyed the Archimandrite’s cants of
In this instance, however, he was leading them. KRRJ-1211 (F) signalled a halt with a raised fist and a spurt of noospheric code. The warriors with him halted with the inhuman precision of gestalt unity. The conveyors carrying Unifier supplies, and some of the invaluable priests themselves, rolled on ahead through the misty tunnels. Queries from the Mechanicum archpriests responsible for building and rebuilding these very tunnels inloaded into KRRJ-1211 (F)’s senses, to which he responded with the requisite deception.
Not long after, he plunged into the mist of a side tunnel, leading his warband with him. They moved at a dead sprint, their piston legs carrying them at great speed through the winding passageways.
The auxiliary tunnel as laid out on the Archimandrite’s map branched in over one hundred places, and one specific route would lead back to the Impossible City. Most notably, it required a brief traversal through one webway gate, exiting back into the material universe before quickly entering a nearby companion gate and continuing the journey onwards.
Unfortunately for KRRJ-1211 (F), less than a day after the skitarii warband had set off on its sprint through the side passages, they passed from the Mechanicum’s rattling monstrosity of a tunnel into the psy-resonant material of the true web, and emerged into what appeared to be a long-dead garden, situated beneath the stars. The skitarii alpha paid brief heed to the dusty remains of flowers beneath his iron tread. He paid similarly little attention to the oddly angular statuary placed around the lifeless, grey garden. His focus was almost entirely fixed upon finding the companion gateway and returning the web to complete his journey.
<Zzzt,> KRRJ-1211 (F) canted back in irritation.
He had his back to the statuary, engrossed in his search, when the statues began to draw their swords. Even if he had been devoting his full concentration, he wouldn’t have recognised the lithe alien figures pulling blades of enchanted bone free from jewelled sheaths. He had never encountered the eldar species before, nor their funereal sentinels, the wraithkind.
If the statues heard this static-flawed announcement, they showed no sign. Their swords were sheathed. Their heads were bowed. They waited in silence, wardens over new graves among the old.
A clade of war servitors trundled through the web, following the Archimandrite’s precise directions. This particular clade – noted as LAM-Exios in the Fabricator General’s archives – was comprised of Martian criminals sentenced to servitoral repentance, not that any of them remembered who they were or what they were convicted of doing.
Each of the lobotomised slaves bore significant firepower in the form of heavy-barrelled plasma calivers, rad-cannons and flamers enhanced by cognis targeting technology. They were perfect examples of the expendable troops that had died in their thousands defending the Unifiers over the last five years, and those that Zagreus Kane had sent in staggering numbers when Diocletian and Kaeria approached him with a requisition order.
The LAM-Exios clade, to their credit, made it most of the way back to the Impossible City. Their journey halted when they encountered the devastated remains of a XVI Legion Reaver Company and its tank support seeking to cut ahead and ambush the fleeing Imperial convoys.
As they were designed and programmed to do, the battle-servitors of LAM-Exios advanced with kill/extinguish battle subroutines, unleashing a withering torrent of firepower on the enemy units charging towards them.
Aravolos of the Cult Myrmidia, his bulky form shrouded in tattered robes of Martian red, deactivated his link to the noosphere. Simultaneously strangling an officer of the Emperor’s Children with all four of his mechandendrites, and releasing sustained beams of volkite energy at the rest of the sergeant’s squad from his fixed gunlimb, he was already engaged in the consecrated act of waging war.
His muddy, bloodstained consciousness lacked the time and focus for the Archimandrite’s treason.
Heaving with his mechadendrites he lifted the ceramite-clad warrior into the air. A second application of effort crushed the warrior’s gorget, broke his neck and tore both arms from their sockets. Aravolos hurled the remnants towards the ignited, retreating figures of the sergeant’s squad, and turned in search of another life to end.
Echo-Echo-71 abandoned the convoy and led his warriors into the ancillary tunnels, as ordered. He possessed more autonomy than many of his alpha-kind, even among other sicarii, but held little comprehension of the immensity of the Great Work even after several years of fighting inside its boundaries. The equation of his loyalty ended in simplicity: the representative of the Fabricator General had canted that Sacred Mars cried out for liberation, and that duty overruled any other.
His expedition proceeded far more smoothly than many others. Without trouble, he reached the specific rendezvous locations marked by the Archimandrite, bypassing the tunnels she had calculated as most likely to be stormed by the foe. He sent out scouts to mark the passages yet to be taken, then progressed only when confirmation arrived that they were clear. He moved his warriors in disciplined kill-teams, their stalk-tanks and ’strider units dispersed to repel, with maximum force and response time mobility, any sudden ambush.
All was proceeding apace until the tunnel through which they marched ended abruptly. They had long ago branched off into the true webway rather than the Mechanicum’s purpose-built avenues, and now found themselves facing a tunnel that continued on the map, yet appeared blunted before their eye-lenses.
It ended in golden mist. The advance scouts had entered and immediately fallen silent. Quite what this portended, Echo-Echo-71 couldn’t be sure.
He sent in one of his ’striders, warning the female pilot to be high-sense aware and cant back a continual datastream. She vowed obedience, lurched forwards on her spindly legged dune walker as she began exloading a code-flow of perception data, and entered the mist.
Whereupon she immediately fell silent.
Echo-Echo-71 considered this. The Archimandrite’s cartography may have been flawed through inexperience or the vicissitudes of this unnatural realm. The original source may have also been flawed, given that the Unifiers focused their efforts on constructing their own routes to link with the established webway rather than wandering significant distances and recording alternate routes. Archival data showed that such scouting expeditions had been part of the initial steps of the Great Work, but such practices ended with the devastating manifestation of Magnus the Red, and the deployment of the Ten Thousand and Silent Sisterhood to defend the Mechanicum labourers.
Whatever the truth, whether out of date or recorded incorrectly to begin with, his map was unreliable.
None of these musings solved Echo-Echo-71’s conundrum. Retreating and reconsidering the route would mean deviation from the Archimandrite’s plan. Advancing along the unmodified route would mean venturing into this anomaly through which there was no evidence of survival, let alone drawing nearer to his goal.
All the while,
‘Forward,’ he commanded in a spurt of code. ‘For Mars and the Omnissiah.’
As relatively valorous as a skitarii elite could ever be, Echo-Echo-71 led his warriors into the mist. He was immediately and completely disassembled beyond even the atomic level, wiped from existence as he plunged from an eroded section of the webway into the raw matter of the warp. What passed for his spirit, a machine-thinned whisper of consciousness, ignited in the Sea of Souls and lasted a statistically insignificant amount of time longer than his body.
With no way of knowing their alpha had been obliviated by immersion into the naked daemonic aether that raged behind the material universe, every one of his warriors dutifully marched forwards and shared his fate.
The words rang out, augmitting to dozens of warbands, most of whom were dead by the time they would have received the message, or trapped in capillary tunnels and fighting for their lives against hordes of the warp-wrought.
In that respect, at least, they did indeed protect the convoy. Their lives were sold to slow the enemy, even if only by the chance of misfortune.
The Archimandrite processed the spillage of inloading data with a sense of dawning horror. She coded back to her surviving warbands, requesting updated positional information and sending them rerouting cogitations that would allow them to link up with others to form a more cohesive fighting force.
First she attempted to band the surviving regiments together in order to break through. Within seconds of her primary calculations failing, she was settling for demanding they fall back, flee, do whatever they could to escape. Even then she received precious few canted replies. Most of them were already dead.
She – She? – stared at the datastreams within her own mind, gripped by a traitor’s icy guilt. She had led thousands upon thousands of Mechanicum souls into annihilation. She had failed to hold the Aresian Path despite betraying the Omnissiah’s own praetorians to do so.
Mistakes have been made, she thought with a cognition-failing, creeping unreality.
The fate of the Imperials was nothing in light of her own careless treason; there would be no forgiveness for this. The Fabricator General would pull her organics from her body for this sin, and crush them in his hands before her failing vision.
The depleted core of Hieronyma surfaced through the mess of the Archimandrite’s ambitions. She heard footsteps in the chamber, which was patently impossible given the seals in place at the containment door, and streamdumped herself from the noosphere in order to turn and face the intruder.
The first thing she saw through the unresolved failures of her target locks was that the door remained sealed. The second thing she saw was a human male, his features hazy, his shadow too long across the floor.
She deployed an army’s worth of weapons from her shoulders, her wrists, her forearms, even her chest cavity. Weapons based on Arkhan Land’s forbidden lore, many of which still lacked Imperial names.
‘Hieronyma,’ said the approaching figure. His speech was awkward, as if he had only recently mastered not just Gothic but any language at all. He moved his mouth out of time with the syllables he spoke. ‘I sensed you. You have known such bloodshed…’
His face twisted in something that began by resembling a smile, but was really just a rending of flesh. The thing inside him tore itself free, reaching for her.
All of her treasured, unnamed weapons fired, far too late to make any difference.
Kaeria’s captives sang as the machines began their work. In none of the circumstances and possibilities that she had considered would the doomed prisoners sing.
She couldn’t hear them, couldn’t even be certain they were singing at all. She was only alerted to this unforeseen behaviour by one of the tech-adepts retracting his secondary arms into his robe and turning his sun-starved face to the coffins above. Hundreds of them were bound to the wall, chained in place.
‘They are singing,’ he said in faint wonder.
Kaeria’s narrowed gaze saw a host of emotions on the various captives’ faces. Some were shouting in their soundproof pods, beating their fists bloody against the transparent panels. Some were curled in foetal positions and seemed to sleep. Several even seemed to be in silent rapture, utterly calm and composed. Others lay with their heads back, eyes and mouths open, and… Yes. She could imagine, just about, that these last souls with their rigor mortis expressions were tortured singers.
She had believed they were screaming. Given what was being done to them, it seemed far likelier.
What could they possibly sound like?
She could summon one of the young novices who hadn’t yet oathed her tongue to tranquillity, to ask on her behalf. Yet as Kaeria stared around the chamber, hearing only the rumble of the Golden Throne’s supplemental generators, she felt grateful for the gift of her hollow heart. Some questions needed no answers.
She turned her gaze to the enthroned Emperor, feeling the acid of bitter irony. Here sat her king, committing His consciousness to the machine created to save a species. And yet, chained in place across the chamber and trapped within parasitic coffin-pods, one thousand prisoners screamed in silence and psychically sang their souls away. Batteries for the Throne, so the Emperor might be free. Human lives reduced to sources of psychic power.
Sacrifices. The thought set her scalp prickling.
The throne room’s power flickered for a moment on the edge of failure. Machines around the chamber slowed, several of them giving ugly whines of protesting mechanisms until the power stabilised. One of the coffins emitted a hauntingly gentle chime as the data panel on its surface flashed red with warning signs.
The first one has died, Kaeria thought. Died already, so soon.
Upon the Throne itself, as the generators around the chamber hummed louder, the Emperor of Mankind opened His eyes.
III Choir
This is now. All of her memories, all of those thens, reel to a close. No longer lying on the grass, hearing a distant storm. No longer confined in the cargo hold of a spaceship, treated as a slave. They were then, and this is now.
Skoia opens her eyes.
She is bound within her own coffin, bathed in tremulous sound. It rises, octave by octave, and she thinks of deep-sea monsters, ship-eating creatures stirring and thrashing upon the lightless ocean beds as they begin to rise.
She breathes in, managing only a shallow mouthful of air. Her heart beats slowly, so slowly.
She presses her hands to the thickness of the vision panel, knowing instinctively that it isn’t for her to see out, it’s for her captors to look in. To see her, to see if she’s still alive.
Her next breath is harder than the first. She has to fight to suck it in, and it scarcely gets past her throat. Already the edges of her vision darken to grey.
She beats her fists against the window, making the coffin sway gently, the motion no different from a rocking cradle.
Her third breath barely comes at all. In that moment she cries out – not with her mouth but with her mind. She screams for the spirits to come to her. She beseeches them for their aid. She curses them for their silence. Panic drives her past holiness into blasphemy, and still she screams.
Other cries join hers. Some, like Skoia’s, beseech ancestor-spirits or the memories of the lost, others are offered up as desperate prayers to the Emperor or the false and half-forgotten gods of distant worlds. It is the unified cry of people drawn from hundreds of cultures voicing their psychic gifts in terminal harmony.
Not all are pained. Some are obliviously joyful, others are sixth sense distillations of helpless rage or simple, crude fear. The chorus of outreaching emotion rises, and the battalion of interconnected machines all run louder, harder, in sympathetic response.
She is fading now. Her breaths no longer come, and that only amplifies her silent cry.
She slumps forwards, cheek pressed to the unbreakable glass, her lips trembling, her eyes wide and shivering. The stiller she becomes, the darker her sight falls, the louder she screams inside her skull.
And now, only now, does she hear the melody of the other souls of the one thousand sharing the same fate, suffering what she suffers. Their screams and prayers and panic and fears entwine, unseen by all, and form one sound, one impossibly perfect note. Those outside the coffins may yet hear it, but its true purity is unheard by any but the dying souls themselves.
It is the very first note in a song that will last ten thousand years, and perhaps beyond.
She, Skoia, is its first singer.
Twenty-Two The Anathema’s Daughters / Only in death does duty end / Sunrise
Arkhan Land watched as Zephon fired his last shot and ducked back into the darkness of the tank’s interior to reload. The spent magazine clattered to the deck as he slapped a new one home. Hauling himself back up into the cupola, the Blood Angel braced again and opened fire once more.
The technoarchaeologist, his face bleached with scrolling viewscreen data, veered the tank in a slow arc. Volkite cannons squealed in arrhythmic discord. Small-arms fire rained against the blessedly reinforced ceramite hull, reduced by the dense plating to dull bangs.
The grav-Raider’s interior reeked with the porcine scent of burned gore. Wounded Sisters and Custodians lay across the deck of the hold, too injured to keep fighting. Land suspected several of them were already dead.
Zephon ducked back into the tank and slammed the cupola closed. ‘I am out of ammunition,’ he stated. His eyes glimmered with what Land suspected, quite correctly, was battle-lust – a rather primitive emotion that the Martian thankfully had no experience with whatsoever.
The Blood Angel locked his bolter to hip with a thumbed activation of magnetic seals. He crouched by one of the injured Sisters, who clutched the stump of her arm against her chest. The severance of her left arm was the least of her wounds if the running of blood beneath her was anything to go by. Something had gone badly wrong inside her during the battle. A sword through the guts, most likely, thought Land. A pathetic way to die. A death worthy of a primate in Terra’s Stone Era.
He loathed the female warriors, and couldn’t for the life of him fathom why. They were private, yes, but seemed agreeable enough. Yet merely looking at them made his skin crawl. Being near enough to smell one of them, or Omnissiah forbid accidentally come into contact with one of them, was enough to make his bile rise.
He was even more careful not to stare towards the enemy. The Raider’s automated and servitor-manned volkite array was more than capable of responding to threats. The last time Arkhan had looked too long out across the enemy horde, he’d been unable to summon speech for several minutes. No aliens, no matter their world of origin, walked as a host of blade-bearing, cyclopean corpses able to ignore the butchery of their own flesh. Many of the horned, graveborn entities seemed animated from Imperial dead. Shattered plates of golden armour still tumbled from their bloated flesh.
Zephon aided the Sister with her wound bindings. His metal hands twitched, but not enough to ruin his efforts. Land knew that the cure, such as it was, wouldn’t last long. It was too hasty, too fragile: fixed as it was to the back of the Blood Angel’s neck and crudely drill-locked into the meat beneath the armour, to say nothing of the cables and wires running along the outside of his ceramite to link in fifty places across each forearm.
Land had used a biometric current regulator of the kind used to dampen agony-twitches in Ordo Reductor cyborgs. He’d ripped it right from the rib bracing of a slain Thallax. It effectively blocked any sign of their inner spasms from translating visibly to their robotic bodies; reversing its purpose and amplifying its sensitivity was no leap of genius – it was a fundamental principle in the technology used by the very wealthy of many worlds in rectifying muscle wastage and paralysis. Still, Land felt a kernel of pride in his jury-rigged battlefield solution. Fragile as the cure might be, the Blood Angel had been firing his bolter with murderous precision.
‘This isn’t even language,’ Land said, a hand at his earpiece.
‘Cease listening to them,’ said Zephon.
Land offered a withering look by way of reply. Sweat had turned his clothing rank and his skin sour. He kept licking his dry lips to no avail.
Land guided the Raider into a whirring skid, aggravating its anti-grav plates. He scanned the last of the convoy, seeing damaged vehicles drifting into the curling golden mist. On this side of the gateway, the Mechanicum’s ingenuity was masterfully bolted in layers of gleaming metal over the plain hideousness of the original ancient artistry. The arch itself was carved from a material resembling ivory, marked by silver runes in no known language.
Even as Land watched a tracked conveyor crawl through, three skimmers bearing cadres of Silent Sisters raced back out. If ever there was a time for reinforcements, it was now.
The Raider glided between the other advancing tanks, turning and returning to the crash of the front lines grinding against one another. Spear-wielding male warriors in gold moved in bloodied, exhausted harmony with sword-wielding female soldiers in chainmail. They were being pushed back, step by step, each Custodian or Sister falling opened up another hole in the rapidly diminishing Imperial line. Land’s Raider vibrated with the squeal of its high-powered volkite arrays. Creatures and legionaries farther back in the enemy horde ignited beneath the beams, spreading the flames to their closest brethren.
Zephon rose again, clambering back up the crew ladder. The metal rungs bowed beneath his weight as he opened the cupola and looked out at the battle.
‘Blood of the Angel.’
‘What now?’ Land barked.
‘The Archimandrite. It is here.’
‘Unlikely, given that the Archimandrite is almost certainly dead.’
<It is time,> she had canted, and Land had mourned her treachery in disbelieving silence. He refused to follow her whims. He wouldn’t turn his back on the Omnissiah.
‘It is here,’ Zephon repeated. He reached for his chainsword, gunning it loudly in the oppressive, red-lit crew bay.
Land turned in his seat, reaching for the periscope. He dragged a sleeve across his face to clean his stinging eyes, and peered into the lenses. The thing he saw was bathing squads of retreating Sisters in coruscating beams of darkfire energy, atomising them in sweeping arcs. Custodian spears broke against its plating. Lascannon fire skewed aside from its flickering shields.
And yet.
‘That,’ he said, ‘is not the Archimandrite.’
Devram Sevik had named his Knight Aquila from the Ashes. He had worked on its tilt plate himself, daubing the new sigil of House Vyridion with his own hand. As much as he was a man who revered the peerless work of sanctified artistry-armourers and sacristans in their maintenance of a Knight suit, he was also given to a personal flourish here and there. And so the Imperial eagle upon his tilt plate was more stylised than the stencilled ubiquity of most, with flaring wings and trails of plumage below as it took wing above a field of black ash.
‘Engaging,’ he voxed to Jaya, to his fellow scions, to anyone still drawing breath and capable of hearing.
Aquila from the Ashes crashed bodily into the Archimandrite at full stride, shoulder charging the machine with a hammer-blow bang and the choral whine of protesting, warping metal. They stood deadlocked, living machine-flesh against industrial piston-muscles, metal grinding, armour scraping, spraying sparks. Aquila from the Ashes had size and weight against the Archimandrite’s original husk, but the Archimandrite was blasphemously altered now. The fruits of the Fabricator General’s vision and the possessing daemon’s strength shoved back against the taller machine, its taloned feet seeking purchase and clawing into the nameless material of the webway’s ground.
Devram’s cockpit flooded with alarms and warning runes. He felt his suit’s stance buckling as the creatures around his knees began hacking away at his stabilisers. A strained look at one of his torso-feed screens showed the Custodians and Sisters fighting their way to him, but they were fighting through an ocean of heaving, seething flesh with mere mortal blades.
It was down to him. This deed would mark his shield or mark his grave.
Enough left for a four-second burst. Devram forced his gunlimb up, sacrificing his last shot against the beasts around his legs, jamming the gatling cannon into the Archimandrite’s sloping, featureless face. It cycled live, rotating, spinning–
His knee buckled, burst. He fell, the last four seconds of his ammunition screaming wide, arcing up into the golden mist as wasted thunder. The sickening lurch in his stomach told him what the failing pict-feeds didn’t, as his Knight toppled sideways. Impact gel squirted from his support cradle to cushion him but the excretors were poorly maintained; his helmed head slammed against the cockpit wall and something – the wall? his helmet? – crunched.
His visor went black, denying all input. Unseeing, feeling hot wetness in his mouth, Devram fought to pull his helmet clear. Fingers that had turned suddenly clumsy scraped at the helmet’s bindings as all around him metal bent, wrenched, tore.
The pressure of enclosing metal was unrelenting, first squeezing him into his throne, then crushing him into it, breaking his knees, his shoulders, his hips, his elbows, his ribs with vicious slowness. He screamed as he was compacted beneath the Archimandrite’s iron tread, silenced only when his neck and jaw gave with wet, clicking snaps.
The creature stepped over the malformed remains of the taller machine, unknowingly crushing Sevik’s hand-painted tilt shield into a mangled ruin. It hunted the Anathema’s Daughters now, and all else was but a distraction.
Its lessers among the weaker Choirs lashed out blindly, unable to even sense the human maidens slaughtering them. The weakest of them all, the most wretched and insignificant within their ranks, dissolved even before the fall of the Daughters’ killing blades.
The daemon of the first murder was prey to no such gullible weakness. It didn’t need to sense them or see them in order to kill them. Its clustered node of hunger-senses flowed outwards over the hundreds of warring bodies, sensing the dissolution of its own kind. Wherever its lessers were drained of their strength, wherever their corpuses haemorrhaged potency, there it turned its guns. Blinded by the Sisters’ soullessness, it hunted the holes in its perceptions, firing streaming volleys of solid shot or bolts of dark energy wherever its kindred suffered against foes it couldn’t see.
The weapons so preciously crafted by ancient hands and recovered by Arkhan Land did their duty once again, chewing through the embattled Sisters with murderous precision. It raked them with explosive fire or reaved them down with energy beams – one it even managed to destroy by crushing her beneath its foot when it sought to impale the daemon’s stolen metal corpus.
The daemon exhaled blackness, its breath staining the golden mist around its maw. Its tongue slithered free, hanging long and undulating in the fog. It wasn’t capable of pleasure beyond the fulfilment of its nature, but there was satisfaction here. These hollow impressions of human females were far easier to kill when they could be torn apart with mortal weapons that vomited killing energy.
Though it wasn’t born of war, it sensed the ebb and flow of the battle around it. Each of the Anathema’s Daughters’ deaths was a lessening of pressure against the creature’s pained perceptions. Each burst body let the warp’s song grow louder once more. Every one that fell allowed the daemon’s lesser kindred to rise again, to fight harder.
Floating war machines raged at the creature, blasting portions of its stolen body apart. This punishment scarcely slowed it. Blood, old and new, painted its armour plating. The mist around its towering form was rancid and red with the shrieking of souls torn from their bodies since its arrival in this realm. Flesh-machine growths added to its size, quivering pods and birth-sacs of lesser daemons in rapid gestation, and thrashing tentacles of sinewy, veined metal that drilled through battle tanks to seek the mortals within. Its back-mounted weapon arrays annihilated whole swathes of the front lines, feeding the warfare while the daemon itself paid no heed to it. The creature butchered only the Golden and the war machines that sought to oppose its advance on the Anathema’s Daughters.
As the warp’s song grew and grew, threatening an exalting crescendo, the daemon of the first murder felt the defenders’ desperation gaining a stained, queasy brittleness. It cast its senses wide to see why, and immediately let forth a roar that was half canted across the noosphere and partially bellowed into the webway’s relative reality. The Anathema itself was within reach, stilled and crippled and bound to its Throne. These last, exhausted defenders were all that stood in the daemon’s path.
Two of the dead Golden approached in their metal shells, weapons crashing, ripping yet more shards of armour-flesh free. The daemon lashed back with its tendrils, hammering one of them away, sending it tumbling into the ranks of the creature’s own kindred to be pried open and the meat within devoured.
It lifted the second in its coiling grip, smelling a familiar soul. It knew this one.
‘End of Empires!’ it voxed, screamed and canted. ‘End of Empires!’
Land made a sound in the back of his throat, one he wasn’t proud of. He had to swallow before he could speak. Even the Custodians were falling back from what the Archimandrite had become. It had downed Sevik within mere heartbeats. It killed one of the Ten Thousand’s Dreadnoughts as quick as Land could blink. It lifted another in its tentacles, and…
‘What in the Omnissiah’s name will your chainsword do against that?’
‘Very little,’ Zephon replied. Yet still he gunned it. ‘Bring us in closer.’
Arkhan did so, his eyes locked to the visions feeds.
‘Baroness D’Arcus,’ Zephon voxed. ‘I require your aid.’
Zephon climbed out onto the tank’s roof. A second later, Land heard the thruster bark of the Blood Angel’s jump pack igniting.
Sagittarus was drowning. Or suffocating. He didn’t know which. He was struggling to breathe in the womb-fluid of his coffin, each inhalation coming with the coppery taste of blood and a sour tang of oil. Whatever was left of his physical form – even Sagittarus had never been sure how much of himself remained inside the coffin – banged and thumped inside the life support sarcophagus, sloshing in the amniotic fluid but no longer submerged within it.
Leaking. That thought held primacy in the darkening light of his perceptions. Crippled. Hurt. Leaking.
He faced ahead, trying to raise arms that wouldn’t obey. He had to pull himself out of the monster’s tendrils. His weapons clunked, devoid of ammunition for hours. His chassis, alive with warning readings for so long already, was held together only by dumb luck.
Yet he’d charged the Archimandrite. Limping and bleeding and ammo-starved, he’d charged it as it stepped over the dead Knight. There had been no choice. Its cannons were devastating the faltering Imperial lines.
Only in death does duty end.
One blow was all he’d been able to land, a shattering strike from his fist that ripped the plating from the Archimandrite’s chest, revealing a subdermal layer of secondary ablative plate. And then, he was in the creature’s clutches, hauled from the ground.
To his shame, he cried out when his right arm tore free. He had no nerves in his Dreadnought shell but the synaptic backlash of being mutilated was all too real. The Archimandrite brandished the ripped limb, still spitting with sparks, before hurling it away into the seething tides below.
Sagittarus’ world lurched as he was lifted even higher, the whine of protesting metal resounding in his ears through the murky, muffled coffin. He felt the pressure in his thigh as the daemon took a firmer grip, then the wrenching jolt of dislocation that followed. Another crack of synaptic feedback coursed through his revenant flesh. Malfunctioning systems railed at him. Empty weapons cried out for him to fire.
Turbines screamed as a figure in bloody red thudded onto the Archimandrite’s shoulder. The Blood Angel, Zephon, cleaved down with a two-handed blow of his chainblade, the sword ripping into a tendril’s joint where flesh met machine in unholy fusion. The sword rose and fell, tearing away chunks of bloody metal, spitting its own teeth as its revving track was fouled by gore and dense armour.
The Archimandrite pivoted but the Blood Angel’s jump pack spurted stabilising gas jets, long enough for a fifth blow to bite deep into the carved wound. The tendril deformed with the damage, gushing oil and slime as it fell limp, dropping Sagittarus into the melee below.
His last sight before plunging into the battling bodies was the Archimandrite’s left hand closing around the Blood Angel’s torso, dragging him from his unstable perch.
Sagittarus rolled with all of the grace of an overturned sand turtle, clawing his remaining fist into the ground, and dragged himself back.
‘Five,’ he heard Zephon vox, the Blood Angel’s voice marred by strain for the first time.
Four.
Zephon thrashed in the beast’s grip, laying into the machine’s forearm with his damaged chainsword.
Three.
A lucky nick at the wrist tore a fluid-wet spillage of cabling from its housing, weakening the grip before it fully closed. The Blood Angel fired his jump pack, red ceramite scraping against the Archimandrite’s clutching fingers as he boosted free, straight up.
Two.
With a grace any winged being would envy, the Blood Angel twisted in the air, angling his propulsion to veer him back to the Imperial line.
One.
The bandolier of grenades mag-locked to the back of the Archimandrite’s head detonated in incendiary harmony, sending shrapnel rainstorming across the embattled lines. Daemons near to the detonation howled at the punishment delivered to their predator-monarch. The Archimandrite, missing a significant portion of its hunchback and both shoulders, staggered forwards, emitting a shriek that the true war machine was incapable of producing.
‘Engaging,’ came Jaya’s voice in Zephon’s helm.
She had expended her ammunition hours before, even depleting Torolec’s reserves. Her swordlimb was a cracked ruin; it had shattered against a Warhound after cutting through the bare metal and severing the leg at the thigh. Lacking any other recourse, she was down to clubbing with the broken hilt and her ammo-starved gunlimb, doing her best to guard the front ranks from harm by warding them from the Archimandrite’s onslaught with her ion shield.
Zephon sent the signal. Jaya forced her Knight into a sprinting run, charging as Sevik had charged, heaving her Castigator’s weight against the staggering Archimandrite. Hunched as she was, she found herself face to face with the Mechanicum’s creation, looking down into the broken cranial armour left in the wake of the grenades’ detonation. Fluids ran and bubbled in scorched cables. Fleshy matter was burned against the insides of the dome – what had once been Hieronyma’s brain and spinal column. The incinerated remnants still quivered with impossible life.
End of Empires, she heard in her mind. In the same second, warning chimes began singing their familiar song. The creatures were swarming around her knees and she had no means of shoving them away. The Custodians and Sisters were too far back to reach her.
Jaya reversed her grip on the control levers, throwing the Knight into a leaping backstep, coming down awkwardly on the flesh of the daemons around her. Freed from the pressure of her weight, the Archimandrite overbalanced and stumbled forwards – meeting the rising energised remains of Jaya’s swordlimb. The uppercut blow pounded into the machine’s ruptured chest-plating, sinking all the way to Jaya’s elbow joint.
‘For Sevik,’ she spat into her external speakers. ‘For the Emperor.’
The Archimandrite’s only reply was to slump, powerless, dead. For precious seconds they remained there together, fused at the point of death. Her cockpit shook as the creatures beneath her began crawling and cutting their way upwards, ascending her Knight’s savaged armour plating.
The Archimandrite began to topple, dragging the Knight down with it. Jaya locked her stabilisers and compensator balancers, buying her a few more seconds of standing upright. Her gloved hands scrabbled for the ejection release, but it had either not functioned since its initial repairs or fallen into uselessness during the days of fighting. The seals blew in the hatch above her, but her throne remained locked in place.
She heard the first creature reach the top of the Castigator’s carapace, its talons pulling at the seal-blown hatch. Yet when it ripped away, a figure in arterial-red stood silhouetted and haloed in the golden mist. It reached down and offered her its shining metal hand.
Jaya grabbed it, immediately hauled up into the Blood Angel’s grip. She barely had time to suck in a breath before his turbines kicked in and sent them skywards, shaking every bone and pulling every muscle in her body.
They hit the ground no gentler. Zephon’s armour was built to withstand the pressures of his short-burst flight, but Jaya felt something snap inside her when they thudded onto the misty ground behind the Custodians and Sisters in the front lines. The Blood Angel didn’t release her, half carrying her into the dim bay of Land’s volkite-squealing grav-Raider.
One-armed and one-legged, Sagittarus lay on the tank’s internal decking, taking up almost half of the bay. The stylised helm that housed his sensorium relays stared up at her with shattered eye-lenses.
‘Dawn,’ he intoned, drawling and unfocused. Jaya had no idea what he might mean.
‘Something is…’ said Arkhan Land, looking right through the vision slit. His curse was a breathy whisper as he blinked tired, gritty eyes. ‘Teeth of the Cog…’
Jaya turned towards the technoarchaeologist. The unhealthy radiance of the viewscreen was gone from the explorator’s features; instead he was bathed in white light streaming through the vision slit. Dust motes danced in the beam of illumination.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Arkhan stammered. ‘It looks like the sun is rising.’
And in a sunless realm, the sun rose at last.
The light of dawn was palpable on Ra’s armour as well as his skin. It was a pressure, a presence with searing physicality. The enemy hordes felt it as acid on their skin. The creatures – daemons no matter what secular truths held strong – lost what little order they had ever possessed.
The Anathema! Ra heard their frantic agony as a sick scraping on the edges of his mind. The Anathema comes! The sun rises!
His features were those of one born in the wild lands of Ancient Eurasia. His skin was a Terran blend of bronze and burnt umber, His eyes darker still, His hair darkest of all. The long black fall of His hair was held by a simple circlet crown of metal leaves, binding the mane back from His face so He could fight. More practical than regal.
He moved as a man moved, coming through the straining ranks of His guardians on foot, pushing through the press of bodies on the rare instances they didn’t instinctively move aside for Him. He wore gold, as all of His guardians wore gold. The same sigils of Terran Unity and Imperial nobility that showed on their armour were cast thricefold upon His own. His armour joints didn’t growl with the crude industrial snarl of mass-manufactured legionary plate, but purred with the song of older, purer technologies.
On His back, held by a simple strap against His flowing red cloak, was an ornate bolter of black and bronze. In His hand He carried a sword – one that looked nothing like the blade portrayed in the victory murals and illustrated sagas. By the standards of Terran lords and kings it was inarguably beautiful, but in the grip of the ruler of an entire species it was, perhaps, rather plain. A weapon to wield, a tool for shedding blood, not an ornament to be admired. Impossibly complicated circuitry latticed its blade, black and coppery against a silver so hallowed that it was almost blue.
In other wars on other worlds He had greeted His Custodians with subtle telepathy, speaking their names as He passed them before a battle. Here He was more restrained, moving to the embattled front rank without offering any acknowledgement at all.
Of the Neverborn, some broke ranks and fled. These cowardly shards of their vile masters knew that destruction had come. Some tore into each other, cannibalising their kindred for strength in the face of destruction. Some lost what little grasp they had on corporeality, their forms melting and dissolving before the sword-wielding monarch even reached the front lines.
The strongest raged at the sin of His existence. With a gestalt bellow loud enough to shake the windless air of this alternate reality, they fought to reach their archenemy.
Ra was at the Emperor’s right side, spear whirling, lashing out to punch through the amorphous bodies of flailing blue creatures that wailed through their many mouths. Sweat baked his face inside his helm. The blood in his muscles was heavier than liquid lead.
‘Orders, sire?’
The Emperor raised His sword in a two-handed grip. As His knuckles tightened, the geography of circuitry ignited along the blade’s length, spitting electrical fire and wreathing the sword’s length in flame.
He didn’t speak. He didn’t look at any of His warriors. The sword came down. The webway caught fire.
Twenty-Three Dawn / The reason for illumination / When all that remains is ash and dust
Shapes raged in the flames – shadows and suggestions doing battle with the daemons, their fiery forms indistinct and ever-changing. The fire-born avatars of fallen Ten Thousand, knee-deep in psychic fire and thrusting with lances of flame. The silhouettes of Space Marines, the betrayed dead of Isstvan bearing axes and blades and claws; half-seen sigils of slaughtered Legions obscured by the ash of their blackened armour. A giant among giants, its great hands bared and ready as it seared forwards at the crest of the tidal fire. The tenth son of a dying empire, so briefly reborn in his father’s immolating wrath.
Daemons burned in their thousands, their aetheric flesh seared from their false bones. White flame haloed from the sword in corrosive, purifying radiance. It coruscated in thrashing waves from each fall of the Emperor’s blade. To look at Him was to go blind. To stand before Him was to die.
And with a roar, the Custodians followed their lord and master. They reaved the Neverborn, banishing them with each thrusting spear and bellowing boltgun. Their blades carved through daemonic flesh, sending acidic blood raining in corrosive sprays. It wasn’t mist that occluded sight now, it was ash from the incinerated dead. Spears flashed silver in the dust-thickened air. The Last Charge of the Ten Thousand.
Behind the golden warriors came their arming thralls, bearing fresh ammunition and armour sealant; warriors in their own right but sheltered from harm by their masters’ spinning blades.
It didn’t matter that all these years of secret war had depleted the Legio Custodes to a ghost of itself. It didn’t matter that they had fought and bled and died for the last half-decade in this sunless, merciless realm populated only by the dead and the damned. Their king had come, the sun had risen and they charged with a cry that far eclipsed the wails of the daemons dying on their blades.
The beasts that survived the Emperor’s onslaught staggered and lurched towards the Custodians, raising brittle blades in dissolving hands, uselessly staring through bleeding, blinded eyes. Something dead – a creature hunched and bloated, still bearing within its flesh the plague that had slain it – lunged at Ra. His spear thrust burst its eye and cracked through the malformed skull. Hissing and bubbling blood sluiced across Ra’s gauntlets, steaming as it burned away in the Emperor’s aura.
He loosed his last explosive bolts, sensing the weapon was empty before the warning sigil flashed on his visor. ‘Reload!’ Ra cried as he hurled the weapon back towards the armoury thralls, already drawing his meridian swords in its place. The curved blades ripped through diseased flesh, spilling rotten organs to the misty ground. The swords’ energy fields spat kinetic aggravation at every impact.
A rune chimed on his retinal display, flickering white. He sheathed the twin sabres in a smooth turn and caught his guardian spear as the ammunition thrall threw it back to him. The moment he had a fist around its haft, he was killing again. This was the way of his kind.
For Ra, time ceased to exist. There was nothing but the beat of his heart and the lactic burn of his muscles. All he saw were the blades and claws flashing towards his face. The ash of dying, dissipating Neverborn coated his armour.
‘Reload!’ Solon called from behind him. Ra heard the snap-crack of Solon’s meridian swords activating, and the rumbled murmur of compliance as the armoury thrall gathered the guardian spear left thrust into the ground.
Ra parried a cut from a heavy brass blade, returning a blast from his digital lasers that blew the creature’s face out the back of its sloped head. Daemonic slop from the burst skull rained across the Emperor’s back, turning to ash before it touched the monarch’s armour.
Torrents of chemical fire marked Zhanmadao’s position to Ra’s left. Ra could hear the draconic roar of incendium pikes, burning the still-thrashing creatures that had fallen beneath the blades of the Custodians’ first rank. The Ten Thousand and their golden king were shin-deep in ash, the smoky spectres of daemonic entities flailing as they were swallowed by the Emperor’s fire.
The daemons that managed to reach the Emperor suffered worst of all. The strongest, most savage of their kind, they swung weapons at a man who was no longer there, cleaving through the golden mist that swirled in His place. With thunder-cracks of psychic force, the golden warlord would appear at the beasts’ backs, His flaming sword already buried in their spines. Fire erupted behind their eyes, boiling and bursting them from within. Their sizzling gore soaked Ra and the Custodians closest to their sire.
Exaltation quickened Ra’s blood, the cure to the weariness that had slowed him. He was tired beyond belief, yet that had never mattered so little. Each beat of his still-living heart was vengeance, vindication.
We’re winning. He could feel it in the renewed curses and oaths across the vox as the Ten Thousand advanced. They weren’t just holding their ground. Whatever genius the Emperor had worked in order to stand with them in this final hour had worked. Nothing could stand before them.
The Emperor turned to Ra, hurling His sword as a spear. It lanced over the Custodian’s shoulder, driving to the hilt in the skull of a creature Ra barely even saw before it was reduced to burning sludge. In a flare of sun-enriched mist, the blade was back in the Emperor’s hand, spinning, falling, killing.
And still the Emperor advanced. A reptilian canine leapt at him only to rip through the air where he had been standing. It gurgled molten blood as the Emperor’s sword manifested within its throat. The warlord clutched it in place a second longer before ripping it free and moving on.
Still the enemy came – a tide, a flood. Ra stole glances back to the wraithbone gateway, so incongruous against the Mechanicum’s machinery, watching robed Unifiers passing into the blue mist, escorted by packs of the last surviving Silent Sisters.
Soon enough only the Ten Thousand remained at their master’s side.
+Be ready, Ra.+
‘My liege?’
The Custodian launched himself over the slumping form of the vulturish creature that had fallen to his final six bolts, hurling his spear back behind the front line and drawing his meridian swords while still in the air. He landed by the Emperor, back to back with his master. Their blades wove a lattice of silver light, eviscerating everything that approached their edged web.
+Be ready.+
‘For what, sire?’
Ra’s retinal display flashed its white sigil. He caught the returned weapon, spinning it with the force and speed of a rotor blade. The tunnel around them cracked and sparked with the strain of overworked generators.
+There, Ra. It draws near.+
The Emperor moved on, cutting, carving. He led His guardians into the very hordes of a mythological hell, and like the paladins of yore, they followed their king.
Rare emotion spiced the Emperor’s silent words. +I sense such purity of being. Such pure, unadulterated malice.+
Ra weaved back from a swinging axe blade, returning a spear thrust that punched through the creature’s scaled throat. He dared a glance left to Diocletian, seeing his kinsman hauling his own spear from the innards of a pot-bellied, horned grotesque, impaling a prize of rotted entrails. Flies droned around the decayed tangle, swarming at the loss of their hive.
Even immortals could tire. Ra’s breath sawed between his closed teeth. Inside his helmet, sweat drew lines of wet fire down his face. His retinal display kept auto-dimming to compensate for the fire and light bursting into being with each fall of the Emperor’s blade.
‘I see only the horde, sire.’ He didn’t like the rapt fascination in his lord’s tone.
+Reveal thyself…+
The Emperor raised His blade, bringing it down in a crescent of fire. A tide of flame bellowed forth in an incinerating arc, bathing the ranks of the Neverborn before him. Mortis-ash blasted back in the windless air, coating the closest Custodians in the dust of dead daemons.
A shadow. A shape in the ash.
A man. Just a man. Long of hair, dark of skin, tribally bearded, wearing jewellery of shaped bone and bearing a spear of knapped flint vine-lashed to fire-hardened wood. A man wearing wounds almost as grievous as those he had inflicted upon so many others. Hundreds of spear slashes and sword cuts marked his flesh. The freshest and bloodiest showed on his chest, the legacy of Jaya’s last blow.
One man, leading the ranks of howling madness behind him.
+The Echo of the First Murder.+ The Emperor’s words broke into Ra’s skull with crushing gentleness.
‘The Anathema,’ was its sick, slick reply.
Predators always revealed themselves in the seconds before they struck. Wolves howled as they chased; sharks cut the ocean’s surface with their fins as they hunted. Here the ashen silhouette moved through the Neverborn’s ranks, lesser creatures parting before its too-human tread. Whatever the creature’s true form, it wasn’t this muscled Stone Epoch war-chief. It merely aped the form of the first humans.
For the first, terrifying time, Ra saw doubt flicker within his master’s eyes. The sight flooded him with the unfamiliar taint of dread.
‘Sire,’ Ra whispered. ‘We should–’
But the Emperor was gone. Monarch and daemon ran at one another, sliding in and out of existence, outpacing their lessers on both sides of the battle. And the two entities, one the salvation of a species and the other its damnation, met blade to blade.
Blood burst into the ashy mist. The Emperor arched, the warlord’s body taut with the utter unfamiliarity of agony. Five talons, each one the length and width of a spear, dripped red as they stood proud of the Emperor’s back.
Ra had heard tell that every man, woman, and child saw a different face, a different skin tone, a different temperament when they looked upon the Emperor. The Ten Thousand had no experience with such an effect. They considered it doggerel from the strains of unready minds when confronted by a true immortal. To Ra’s eyes, the Emperor was a man like any other. The Custodians saw only their master.
In that moment, as the claws ran red with his king’s blood, Ra saw what the rest of the species saw. The boy who would be king. An old man, cloaked and hooded, life running from his cracked lips. A knight in his prime, maned with dark hair, crowned with a wreath of laurels. A barbarian warlord, barbarous and strong, grinning through teeth turned red with His leaking blood.
Images. Identities. Men who once were. Men He might once have been. Men who had never drawn breath.
The Emperor’s boots left the misty ground. He barely even struggled as He was lifted, impaled by the five spearing talons. His sword fell from His gloved hands to disappear in the shrouding fog.
‘To the Emperor!’ Ra screamed the order loud enough that his retinal display blurred for a half-second. ‘To the Emperor’s side!’
He ran, killing faster than he’d ever killed, energised by an adrenal cocktail of loyalty, hatred and the alien touch of something nameless that tasted foul on the tongue.
Not fear, no, never that. Surely never that.
I am the End of Empires.
The thought wasn’t Ra’s own. It belonged to the silhouette in the ashes, the Emperor’s killer, speaking by twisting the thoughts of the humans in its presence. A wrenching violation, with crude, cruel fingers pulling at the insides of Ra’s skull, forcing his thoughts to form the daemon’s words.
‘Kill it!’ Ra shouted, half an oath, half an order. The man-shape turned in the settling ash, still holding the Emperor above the ground. The warlord clutched at the impaling arm. His telepathic voice was raw.
+Stay back. All of you. Stay back.+
I am your death, the creature promised the Emperor.
+Perhaps one day. But not this day.+
Gold light flared bright enough to blind unshielded eyes. The Emperor manifested at Ra’s side, down on one knee, one hand clutched to his chest, hair hanging down to veil his features. Blood, human blood no matter what the legends said, ran in runnels from the Emperor’s sundered armour.
+Ra.+ The sending was thick with pained defiance. And then, ‘Ra,’ He said aloud, raising His eyes to meet His loyal Custodian’s horrified gaze.
A blade ran through the Emperor’s body. An ornate sword, as much sorcerous bone as metal, a weapon with writhing, shrieking faces soul-carved upon the steel. The faces shrieked as they drank the Emperor’s divine life. It thrashed as the Emperor clutched it in His hands. It was alive, starving, its form rippling and growing indistinct.
With a cry the Emperor pulled the weapon free, unsheathing it from His own body. He hurled it from His grip, casting it aside with a surge of armour-boosted strength and devastating telekinetic force.
Ra blinked once with the impact, feeling it as a thunder-crack against his chest. He swallowed, finding himself unable to breathe. Blood streamed from his mouth, denying the passage of air.
It was a blade through his body. It was a daemon embracing him. It was a disease in his blood, eating at his bones. It was there and it wasn’t there, everything and nothing.
The Custodian fell to his knees, hands curling around the impaling blade. The thwarted rage of the daemon sent nerve pain lightning-bolting through his fingers.
‘Why?’ Ra asked his king.
The Emperor stood tall once more, looking down, eyes cold.
In that moment, Ra knew. The Emperor’s words, spoken what felt like an eternity ago, flashed through his blackening mind, infusing his thoughts with red revelation.
To illuminate you, the Emperor had said, as they looked upon the wonders and sins of the galaxy’s past. You will fight harder once you understand what you are fighting for.
And now he knew. Ra Endymion, the one living soul shown the entirety of his master’s dreams and ambitions. An enlightenment not gleaned for the purpose of waging war, but… for this. To know the truth when all others believed in shadows and fragments, and to suffer that truth until it tore him apart.
Ra rose on shaking limbs, leaning on his spear for support. The sword was gone now. The daemon was within him, caged by his flesh, bound by his agony-drenched will. He felt its tendrils circling his bones, wrenching at them, thrashing in its need to reach the Master of Mankind. The creature tunnelling through his blood would never stop, never die. It couldn’t be destroyed, only imprisoned.
The Custodian didn’t meet his sire’s eyes. He didn’t demand any explanation or apology. Ra was born to serve, raised to obey and chosen for the greatest illumination preceding the darkest duty. Inside him raged a beast even the Emperor couldn’t kill, the daemon destined to end the empire.
Every step he took away from the Emperor, separating this daemon from his master, would mean another day that the Imperium stood unbroken.
The Emperor still bled, still clutched His wounded chest with one gloved hand. Blood flecked His lips. ‘When all that remains is ash and dust,’ He said, strained, ‘be ready.’
The sword rose, and once more it fell. Fire tidal-waved from its killing edge, immolating all in its path. Clearing the way. The Neverborn dragging themselves over the ashen remains of their kindred tasted the same destruction.
The Emperor spoke to Ra one final time, a single command heard by no other.
+Run.+
Ra Endymion, Drach’nyen’s golden gaoler, the son of a water-thief, obeyed the last command he would ever be given.
He ran.
Twenty-Four The death of a dream
Diocletian tore his helm from his head, breathing in the ozone and machine-stink of the Imperial Dungeon. Sweat sheened his face. Blood painted his armour, much of it his own. He was the last one through.
‘The tunnels are detonating,’ he declared, breathless. Golden mist still pulled at his armour from the portal behind him. ‘The circuitry is igniting. Whole sections of our tunnels are falling away into the mist. I couldn’t see Ra. He didn’t die, I’m sure of it. I was at his side. I would have seen.’
He knew he was raving. He didn’t care. He spat to clear his mouth, spattering treacly blood-spit on the floor of the Emperor’s throne room. Beyond the ringing in his ears he was aware of a sound, some kind of mechanical droning, a hum falling slowly through the octaves.
Diocletian’s spear clattered to the ground, deactivating the second it left the gene-coding of his grip. Blood followed it, running from wounds too deep to swiftly seal. The blood ran down his arm and surfaced through breaks in his auramite, dripping from his curled fingers.
‘Seal the gate!’ he ordered, not even knowing if it could be done. ‘They’re still coming. Thousands of them. Seal the gate now, or we lose Terra.’
They were already trying, he saw. Adepts and engineers clustered around the machines, working the controls of each system. His war-struck thoughts made the connection with the slowing mechanical drone: the chamber’s attendants were deactivating the machinery, but not fast enough.
A single glance at the coffin-pods in the sockets told him what had happened in his absence, and how the Emperor had been able to come to their aid. The Sisters of Silence had enacted their secretive Unspoken Sanction. They fed the Throne with the lives of a thousand psykers. In every pod he could see a corpse that had thrashed in its death throes, raking uselessly against the transparent panels. All of them were dead. Every one of them. None of them looked to have died swiftly and painlessly.
Confusion reigned across the vox and among the gathered warriors as to the source of their salvation. Some had seen a dawning star or a sunrise, others had seen the Emperor Himself. Still others claimed to have witnessed a tidal surge of fire.
Everywhere, men and women were lost and dazed. Baroness Jaya was there on the chamber floor, her helmet in her hands, unblinkingly staring at her reflection in the visor. The Blood Angel, Zephon, was helping carry wounded Sisters from Land’s Raider. The technoarchaeologist himself was kneeling on the ground by his battle tank, rocking back and forth, his trembling hands clutching a necklace of Martian prayer beads, his delicate fingers stroking each bauble of volcanic obsidian in turn.
‘My Omnissiah,’ he was chanting softly, eyes unfocused. ‘My God. The Machine-God. My Omnissiah.’
Sagittarus lived, his chassis scored and ruined, the smokestacks on his back belching unhealthily from his overpushed generator. The Dreadnought had his back to the side of Land’s tank, leaking vital fluids from its internal sarcophagus in an oily puddle.
Sisters and warriors of the Ten Thousand gathered in monumental disorder, all of them looking to the portal’s arch, all of them hearing the slow drone of machinery powering down.
Diocletian was still demanding answers of the others when Kaeria came to him. ‘Where’s Ra?’ he asked her. ‘Did he make it back? He didn’t fall. I know he didn’t fall.’
Her eyes tightened with tension.
‘He didn’t fall,’ Diocletian repeated. ‘I was right next to him in the battle line. I would have seen it. He’ll be on the wrong side of the gate when it closes.’
Sister-Commander Krole came to Kaeria’s side, signing briefly for Diocletian’s benefit. He didn’t know her as he knew Kaeria – he couldn’t read her meaning by expression alone. Her signing was blighted by the fact she had lost three fingers from her left hand. Wounds patterned her features while her armour showed the ruination of too many hours in the front lines.
‘No,’ said the Custodian. ‘I was at his side, commander. He didn’t die. One moment he was there, the next he was not.’
Machines were going dark all around them. Great engines of the Emperor’s own vision – centuries in the design and decades in the making – were cycling down, haemorrhaging power. Slowly, slowly, far too slowly.
Diocletian sought the Emperor Himself, seeing His master ascending the steps to the Golden Throne once more.
‘My liege!’
The Emperor enthroned Himself, His grip loose on the armrests.
‘Sire! Seal the gate!’
The Emperor waited, staring towards the portal. Even from such a distance, Diocletian could see the intensity of that stare. The Emperor fixed his gaze on the gateway, waiting, waiting. Hesitating to do what must be done? Reluctant to abandon His greatest ambition? Or hopeful, yet, that another figure might manifest from the golden fog?
A shape darkened the mist. Something winged and clawed. Another figure, bloated and horned. And more. Others. A host of inhumanity. The Throne-engines were still cycling down.
‘Sire!’ Diocletian pleaded.
The Emperor closed His right hand into a fist, clenched within His glove. With a harmonious pattern of thunderclaps, every generator within the chamber went dark, their internal mechanics rupturing, starving the Golden Throne of energy.
The archway that led to humanity’s doomed salvation was nothing more than an ornate doorway, leading to the bare rock of the throne room wall.
Power failed completely, plunging the Imperial Dungeon into darkness.
Alone but for the daemon seeking to devour him from within, silent but for the caged beast’s murderous howls inside his head, a golden figure sprinted through the hazy passages of the ancient webway, leaving the Mechanicum’s aborted Unification behind.
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