by Darius Hinks
The man was horribly thin, weighing no more than a child, and his eyes were sunk deep in bruise-dark sockets. He reeked of alcohol.
He recoiled at the sight of Antros. ‘In the name of the Emperor,’ he hissed, his words slurred. ‘Keep your hands off me, you…’ His words trailed away and he frowned suspiciously at Antros.
‘You aren’t him,’ he said, looking warily past Antros to see if anyone else was in the shaft.
‘Who?’
‘The daemon,’ slurred the man. ‘The vampire with wings.’
Antros shook his head.
‘Mephiston!’ snapped the man, his face contorted by hatred. ‘Are you his servant?’
Antros was about to say yes, but the soldier’s demeanour made him pause. ‘What do you know of Mephiston?’ he asked. ‘What have you seen?’
The man’s face flushed with colour and he tried to cry out, but a violent coughing fit rocked his body. He coughed with such force that blood spattered across the walls of the shaft, bright and vivid on the rusted plates. He tried repeatedly to speak, but each time he began the coughing grew worse, until his face had turned a purplish blue. He curled into a foetal position, breathing in short, shallow gasps.
After a few minutes, the man’s breathing returned to something approaching normal, but he was obviously close to death. His eyes were yellow and bloodshot and they were rolling frantically in their sockets, unable to focus.
When he spoke again, he seemed to have forgotten that Antros was there. ‘Daemon!’ he wheezed. ‘Murderer! You knew the xenos would be waiting. You took us to them. You are in league with the ancients. Vampire! Killer! Traitor!’ he groaned, writhing and twisting across the floor.
Then, as though waking from a dream, he sat upright and stared at Antros, his eyes clear. ‘Stop him,’ he said, his body shaking. ‘He’s a traitor. You have to stop him.’ He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘He’s in league with the xenos. He’s working with them.’
The man’s eyes started to roll again and his words descended into gibberish. He babbled incoherently for another ten minutes, then he could do nothing but cough and gasp. His breaths grew weaker and weaker and finally stopped. Antros whispered a prayer, commending the man’s soul to the Emperor as his last breath whistled through his blackened teeth.
He stared at the corpse for a moment, troubled by the man’s choice of words. Then, as he turned to leave, he noticed something strange on the man’s neck. He was covered in scars, old and new, but there was a burn at the base of his neck that seemed familiar.
Antros pulled down the collar of the man’s coat and undid the shirt beneath. As he drew back the material, uncovering the man’s emaciated chest, he saw that the burn was in the shape of a sword hilt, and he recognised the design – it was the handle of Mephiston’s force sword, Vitarus.
He backed away, shaking his head. That means nothing, he thought. The man may have been a traitor. The old, vile doubt came back to haunt Antros and Dragomir’s words echoed round his head. ‘There are some who question the source of his power.’
As Antros’ mind whirled, he realised the walls of the shaft were starting to buckle and pop, twisting and breaking in response to his anguish. He tried to suppress the emotion but it was no use. The more he wrestled with his doubts, the more violently the metal shaft warped. The sound of shearing metal rang out as some of the supports gave way. Soil drummed down on his power armour.
If he did not control his mind quickly, the whole tunnel would cave in. He had not come all this way to die alone, killed by soil and rocks.
The Sleepless Mile, he thought, recalling the great news he was bringing to his lord. He closed his eyes and whispered the mantra Dragomir had taught him, casting his mind away from Morsus, centring himself on the path.
His mind was alive with aetheric currents but he managed to calm his thoughts and reach the centre of his consciousness. The Sleepless Mile was unlike any discipline he had attempted before. He was not projecting his thoughts through the galaxy or scrying in other men’s minds – he was seeking wisdom in the hidden corners of his own psyche.
He sank deeper into his trance and his mind showed him a crowd of pilgrims, jostling and stumbling their way across a statue-lined bridge. Antros felt a rush of excitement. He knew these were only pictures in his mind, but they were wonderfully vivid. There was no sunlight, but the statues clutched enormous beacons, blazing with bright, holy fire. The flames flickered and danced in a stiff breeze, making it hard to see the pilgrims with any clarity. The shifting shadows made it seem as though their robes were stretching and shuddering – like reflections in a disturbed pool.
Beneath the bridge sprawled the lights of a vast, Imperial city. Tiny landers and hulking void ships drifted lazily over the spires of a thousand glittering palaces and cathedrals.
‘Terra?’ breathed Antros, wondering why his mind would show him such a thing.
He fought his way across the bridge and on the far side he entered the colonnaded walkways of a formal garden. Mingled in with the pilgrims were gold-armoured giants – the Emperor’s personal honour guard, the Adeptus Custodes, watching as impassively as the statues as the hooded pilgrims shuffled past them, making for a grand, eagle-winged portico at the far end of the walkways. Antros knew this was not reality, but it was so clear that he found himself carried along with the charade, accepting the vision as fact.
He paused as he saw a familiar light, shimmering in the shadows at the edge of the garden. It was the same pale fire he had seen burning in Dragomir’s mind – the source of his equilibrium and power. He left the main flow of pilgrims and hurried towards the light. As he approached, it faded, but in its place Antros saw something equally familiar. It was another power-armoured colossus, but this one wore lacquered, crimson plate that gleamed like blood and his hair trailed behind him like a pale, ragged pennant.
‘Chief Librarian?’ called Antros, but no voice emerged and he remembered that this was only a waking dream.
Mephiston was quickly vanishing into the night, so Antros hurried on, eager to see what else his mind had to show him.
He had almost caught up with Mephiston when the Chief Librarian stepped off the path into a small, pagoda-like chapel and approached a pilgrim waiting inside.
Antros paused a few feet away, feeling a vague sense of dread.
As Mephiston drew closer to the pilgrim, the light of the distant braziers failed to reach beneath its hood, but the pilgrim gave off a psychic aura so grotesque that Antros recoiled. The thing was a daemon. Antros felt it like a kick to his stomach. Everything about it was malign and unholy. Mephiston was conversing with a creature of the warp.
As Antros watched in horror, Mephiston leant close to the hideous thing, whispering urgently into its deep hood and laughing.
Antros could not recall ever seeing Mephiston laugh before. It was a surreal, incongruous sight – almost as disturbing as the presence of the daemon.
The hooded creature nodded its head in reply, then reached out to hand Mephiston something. Antros’ disgust grew as he saw that, rather than a hand, the daemon’s limb ended in a nest of serpents that coiled and tumbled over the ribs of Mephiston’s battleplate in a grotesquely sensual caress. It placed a small object in Mephiston’s hand and, as the Chief Librarian held it up to examine it more closely, Antros saw that it was a simple pewter locket.
Antros was so appalled that he forgot this was all in his mind. He gripped his staff and began mouthing an incantation. He could not understand what Mephiston was doing but he could not permit the warp thing to spend another minute defiling such a holy place.
Before Antros could complete his incantation, Mephiston nodded to the daemon. Incredibly, he seemed to be bowing. Then the Chief Librarian hurried from the chapel and sprinted off through the gardens, making for the distant gates of the Emperor’s Palace.
Antros let ou
t a mute howl and charged at the daemon, but when he entered the circular chapel it was empty. He cried out again, but this time his voice did carry. The nearest of the gold-armoured sentries turned in his direction and lifted his spear – a power weapon that crackled with cool blue current as the Custodian rushed towards him.
Antros backed away from the approaching guard, shaking his head, then stepped from the Sleepless Mile, whispering the mantra and wrenching his soul back to reality, back to the mines of Morsus.
The ventilation shaft had almost completely caved in. The dead Guardsman had vanished from sight, buried beneath flickering rocks and shards of the corrugated ceiling.
The weight of the cave-in had forced Antros into a lying position, but he managed to twist around and look back the way he had come. The tunnel was bent and narrow but there was still a thin space left for him to crawl through. He hauled himself that way, so shocked by what he had just seen that he forgot he had more strengths at his disposal than mere muscle. After a few seconds of fruitless clawing, his mind cleared and he opened his thoughts to the aetheric currents coursing through his flesh.
The ground buckled and heaved in response, tearing itself back into the semblance of a tunnel. Then the whole mass gave way, crashing down onto him with a resonant boom.
Antros had a choice: be crushed to death, or unleash the power he had taken from the Great Rift.
Warp fire ripped from his mind, spilling through his flesh and out of his eyes. He blasted tonnes of soil and rock, burning a new tunnel through the ground. It was dizzyingly easy. He became a storm, raging through the stone, tearing through granite and mud. He forgot who or where he was, revelling in the heady thrill of destruction. He was a raw, sublime force, with no ties of conscience or morals – just the need to survive.
Finally, with a howl of pleasure, he toppled back out of the shaft and flew over the blazing drop, still sparking with psychic energy. For a moment he drifted there, thinking about what he had just done, still feeling the aftershocks of the warp blast humming through his veins. His armour was damaged in several places and he had been wounded, but Antros found that he could not bring himself to care. What did wounds matter now that he could tap into such incredible power? With a few whispered words he bathed himself in a dazzling halo. It rippled over his battleplate, sealing the cracked ceramite and healing his wounds until he looked as resplendent as if he had just left Baal.
The disturbing vision flashed through his head again, confounding and confusing, but he drove it away, refusing to give it credence.
He grabbed the auspex. It was battered but still working and he saw that the life signs were still there, moving quickly away from him. They were heading towards the largest of the bastion mines and going deeper, beneath even the lowest galleries and sumps into an area unmarked on his schematics. Several members of the group were clearly Adeptus Astartes – he could see their twin heartbeats flickering on the grid – and the most powerful signal could only be the Chief Librarian.
‘I must speak to him,’ whispered Antros, trying to quell the energy still jangling through his bones – trying to recall his original purpose. ‘I must tell him of the Sleepless Mile.’
A terrible thought occurred to him. What if the Sleepless Mile led Mephiston to the creature in the chapel? What if he was about to send Mephiston down the path to ruin? He had only grasped the basics of the discipline before he rushed away from the Dawnstrike.
Perhaps he needed to return and learn more before he spoke to Mephiston?
No. He had come this far. He had to speak to the Chief Librarian now. He had seen enough to know that the Sleepless Mile was the answer. Mephiston could summon Dragomir at a later date if needed. Antros plunged down the shaft, more eager than ever to find Mephiston.
Chapter Nine
‘Heliomancer Xhartekh,’ droned a distant voice, ‘high priest of the Still-heart Conclave and scion of the Luminous Prince, do you prostrate yourself before our mighty lord, his majesty, Menkhaz the Unmortal?’
Xhartekh had been kneeling for three days, in the same spot, with the same ceremonial blade tapping infuriatingly on his left shoulder. Ping. Ping. Ping. By the time these words finally came he was ready to kill. He was not, thankfully, one of those deluded fools who imagined his body was still flesh and bone. He knew his knees did not really ache, or seize up. And he knew the blade was not really drilling through his flesh. No, the only genuine pain he felt was to his pride.
He looked up, allowing himself a brief glimpse of the mortuary temple. Like the rest of the complex, the central chamber of the necropolis was strangely unmarked by time. It was a wonderful glimpse into the past. The air was heavy with incense and smoke from the braziers that lined the walkway, creating a shifting, dreamlike scene. Xhartekh could almost imagine he was back in the glorious heyday of his people, when they still walked the stars as creatures of living flesh, ruling the galaxy with unbowed legions, their dynasties still untainted by the madness of the Great Sleep. Even through the smoke he could see the beauty of the walls – delicate, dawn-blue calligraphy traced across the polished ebon stone, intricate veins of lapis lazuli that shimmered in the firelight, so that the walls resembled the surface of a moonlit lake. The central walkway was colonnaded but he could see no top to the vast columns – they soared out of sight, disappearing into a ceiling of perfumed smoke, hundreds of feet above. The city of Nekheb-Sur was a stirring reminder of what his race had lost, and it was better preserved than any necrontyr tomb Xhartekh had ever seen. He was slowly growing to hate it.
‘Thy power, I have recalled,’ he recited, the words embedded in his memory after so many repetitions. ‘Thou hast my sword and my loyalty. I say this to thee, thine majesty, I will reach into the heart of thine enemies and tear out their lies. I will reach into mine own heart and bring forth the truth. Thou bringest the ardent law. Manifold are my prayers to thee. Countless are mine oaths. I devote myself to thy word and I prostrate myself to thy will.’
As usual, there was no reply. The words echoed around the grand chamber, swallowed by the dancing shadows. Xhartekh could not even see any of the courtiers or bureaucrats that had crowded the previous chamber. They were alone with the statuary. Like all of the preceding audience chambers, the walls were punctuated with leaf-shaped alcoves, each more than fifty foot tall and framing a glowering statue of their host, the phaeron. After seeing Menkhaz’s face, rendered in diorite, from so many different angles, Xhartekh thought he probably could have sculpted it himself.
‘How many more?’ he hissed.
Vargard Hattusil, his bodyguard, was kneeling behind him, leaning against his glaive.
‘This is the fifth sepulchre, my lord.’
‘Only the fifth? Still? Two years to get here from Nekhsoss and then another year waiting for an audience. Overlord Osokhor will be furious at sparing me for so long. I have studied glaciers that display a greater sense of urgency. This phaeron requested my presence, Hattusil. I am not some adoring petitioner, come to beg for aid. He needs my help.’ Xhartekh’s voice was as cold and metallic as the rest of him, but there was an edge of wounded pride – an echo of the mortal he had once been. ‘How can they move at such a leisurely pace when their crown world is on the brink of the abyss? The trans-dimensional rift could consume them. Have they no concept of how much danger they are in?’
A statue at the far end of the colonnade had started walking towards them. As the light of the braziers washed over it, Xhartekh realised his mistake. Rather than a statue, it was a great lord. He was impressively built, seven or eight feet tall and trailing a flurry of ceremonial robes. His hulking body was painted the same iridescent blue as the courtiers Xhartekh had met in all the previous sepulchres, but it was far more intricately worked, engraved with the same fine calligraphy that covered the walls. His skull was a peculiar design – the metal shell was crowned by a tall, razor-edged mohawk that glinted in the firelight, clearly a badge o
f high office, but also a dangerous weapon.
Like everything else Xhartekh had seen since his arrival, the noble was oddly perfect – there was no trace of corrosion anywhere on his armour and he moved with a fierce vigour. There was something odd happening in the necropolis that intrigued Xhartekh. The lords of Nekheb-Sur had reversed the flow of time, freeing their constructs from age and decay. He had visited countless tomb worlds but never seen anything like it. Xhartekh realised there may be more than one cause for wonder on Morsus.
The gleaming lord was followed by a train of equally immaculate servants and towering lychguard. This was clearly a noble of some significance. Energy hummed through Xhartekh’s capacitors and diodes, flickering at his joints as he realised that, after a year of waiting, he would finally speak to someone with authority.
When the lord spoke, Xhartekh knew this was the voice that had addressed him from the shadows as he progressed so slowly through the necropolis.
‘Thou art welcomed by the lords of the Royal House of Khenisi,’ said the noble. ‘I am Suphys, mouth of the phaeron, first herald of his majesty, Menkhaz the Unmortal.’
Activation runes flickered into life at the back of the hall and the braziers flashed brighter. As the flames rose, Xhartekh saw the source of the thick smoke. The fuel for the fires was human flesh. There were broken, blackened remains piled in the wide copper bowls.
‘The fifth sepulchre is named the World Soul,’ said Suphys. ‘It is here that we burn animals in a daily tribute to his majesty.’ He beckoned Xhartekh closer. ‘You may rise, supplicant.’
Xhartekh bit back his annoyance at being called a supplicant. He would not risk being sent back to the first sepulchre due to a breach of protocol. He stood and walked down the colonnade. His iron feet clanged against the ancient stone floor, echoing around the vast chamber like a ceremonial bell.
Hattusil followed at a respectful distance, head bowed.
‘It is gracious of you to grant me an audience so soon,’ said Xhartekh with a low bow, unable to resist the thinly veiled sarcasm. ‘I am Lord Xhartekh, high priest of the Still-heart Conclave and heliomancer of the seventh rank. My regent, Overlord Osokhor, sends you his greetings. The lords of Nekhsoss are honoured to assist his majesty the phaeron in this matter.’
