by Guy Haley
‘We are done,’ said Casson.
Harrtek’s eyelids opened, cracking the crust of blood painted over them. He felt like he had been sleeping standing up, though he did not remember falling asleep or even shutting his eyes. The room was shifting, stretching, like shimmering air over sun-baked mudflats or an overheated engine vent.
‘Follow.’ Casson beckoned over his shoulder. The acolytes lined the princeps up. All were as dazed as Harrtek, some more so. There was a febrile light in their eyes. One of them – Bassack, Harrtek thought – was jittery, hands clenching, mouth working, a man on the edge of violent outburst.
Why couldn’t he tell who this man was? Was it Bassack? He knew them all, but he didn’t know them at all. He couldn’t recognise them. His thoughts weren’t his own. He felt drugged – no, that was wrong. Was he? He was intoxicated by anger. He wanted to fight.
‘The way is open, open the way. The door parts to the eightfold path,’ sang the chief acolyte. His voice was no longer Casson’s.
Such a pompous thing to say to a door in a room of such mundane purpose. Then the door opened, and it did not seem so foolish any more.
Hard orange light flooded the room. Furnace blast roared in. The shock of the heat after the cold came close to flooring Harrtek. The air was so hot when he breathed that it seemed too thick to pass into his lungs. He choked. The scent of hot iron and brass was all pervasive. It was like drowning in blood. A giant chamber lay beyond, surprising in its size, and full of diabolical industry.
Drums boomed in aggressive, arrhythmic contest.
‘Onwards!’ said the cult leader. One by one, they were led into the orange light, and a scene of unreality unfolded before him.
Dominating the hall were eight Warlord Titans arrayed around a giant octed graven into the floor. The symbol had been cut half a metre deep into the decking, shearing through wiring and pipes under the plating with a precise, neat carelessness for their function. The Titans stood inactive at the points of the octed. They did not appear to have been tampered with, but in the volcanic atmosphere they radiated a sense of divine potency that Harrtek was sure owed nothing whatsoever to the Machine-God. From one wall Nuntio Dolores stared at him with hungry eyes, like a trusted animal companion gone wild.
Harrtek and the others were led to posts set between the feet of each Titan, from which dangled chains of blackened metal. Scratches in the soot coating them showed a pale gold, suggesting they were of brass.
The drums were the discharge of giant guns. They were the pounding of axes on shields. They were rocks smashing into skulls.
Harrtek let himself be chained to the post between Nuntio Dolores’ legs. With a curious sense of detachment, he wondered why he did not resist, but by the time the sluggish thought had wound itself through the folds of his brain, he was held fast, arms crossed above his head.
Nuntio Dolores’ torso projected over him, its massive chin a boulder held in place by some tenuous force on the edge of breaking. Its weapons framed the hall in a murderer’s embrace.
What purpose the room had before was difficult to say with any certainty. It was vast, its ceiling lost in a confusion of pipes and smoke, and that suggested an assembly yard or manufactorum for larger components of Gardoman Hub’s output. It could have been a foundry, or a smeltery. But though it was equipped with eight giant crucibles of molten metal so hot they glowed orange, they seemed too primitive to have been used in the making of void craft. They were crude things, the tools of steam engineers, fired by mounds of coals and mounted on cast iron carts on iron rails. Huge banners so caked in gore their designs were invisible shifted in the updrafts coming off the liquid. Small figures moved everywhere between giant machines. Many were clad in the black of the New Mechanicum, but the majority were in the blood-purple robes of cult acolytes, and their number only seemed to increase as Harrtek drifted in and out of the moment.
How did it come to this? thought Harrtek. A moment of desperate clarity settled on him when he saw the situation as it was. Once, he had fought for the Imperial Truth; now he was in thrall to a primitive cult. A profound dismay had him, then blew away, cobweb fine, as he slipped and fell into blood-warm torpor.
The promise of power beckoned. The brazen horns sang louder in his mind.
The drums thundered out their conflicted barrage. Harrtek’s head pounded with every sounding, like it too were a drum, and his heart also. His eyes swam, refusing to focus, and when they did he was not sure of what he looked on. Reality smeared, flickered, was replaced by dark images of black flames and screeching monsters. He tried to blink this vision away, but it would not go. When it disappeared, and the hall returned, Apostle Vorrjuk Kraal was suddenly in the room. Perhaps Harrtek had passed out from the heat and come around. The creatures could have been some sort of drug-induced dream, for by now he was certain he had been poisoned somehow.
Some time had passed. Kraal wasn’t there, then he was, dominating everything around him. He was the sole transhuman in the hall, towering over the unmodified humans and the New Mechanicum alike. Burnished armour reflected the glow of molten metal. The flames painted on his shoulder plates danced with a life of their own. A line of chained, naked slaves, painted red with blood from their shaven heads to the soles of their feet, were led towards the crucibles. They were ecstatic, wailing and singing, their eyes so wide the whites were visible from all the way across the hall.
Kraal was to perform the ritual, but not alone. Ardim Protos had also appeared from nowhere, and was working his way around the circle with a band of lesser tech-priests. They sang hard hosannas in binharic cant to the God of Blood. The air thickened. Clouds of red smoke spilled from their censers. Jabbering cyber-constructs wheeled over them like vultures, drizzling vitae from fanged maws.
It took the tech-priests an age to pass around the great circle, but in no time at all it seemed, Protos was standing in front of Harrtek. The tech-priest stopped his procession, and approached the princeps.
Harrtek raised his head with great difficulty. It felt as if it were full of lead. Protos watched him with interest as he forced his tongue to move.
‘What is this sorcery?’ he asked. His words were lumpen, poorly formed, barely intelligible, but Protos understood.
‘It is not sorcery, not quite. This god does not approve of magic tricks. Call it an invitation instead,’ said Protos. ‘All done to the most stringent scientific principles, naturally.’
Harrtek’s head fell forward. Protos reached out a metal hand to steady it. The prosthetic was so hot, Harrtek’s skin sizzled.
‘You were the most difficult to convince. I am glad you saw sense,’ he said. ‘Power of unimaginable potency will soon be yours. All you must do is bear a little pain.’
Harrtek tried to speak, but his words would not form in his brain, let alone his mouth.
‘What was done on Astagar will be done again. This time it will be better. Our two gods working in one mechanism, with but a few souls required to seal the bargain.’ He let Harrtek’s head drop. ‘All for your benefit, of course. The gift of iron, of brass and of blood is yours. I am almost envious.’
Droning chants receded. Harrtek’s mind slipped further into redness. The horns blared constantly. The ring of blades filled his ears. The next he knew he was surrounded by the thunder of drums and a massive, armoured hand gripped him by the head.
‘For the glory of the pantheon undivided, we beseech you, Khorne, provide us with the might of your right arm!’ More words followed. Knives flashed. The patterns on Harrtek’s skin were renewed as his flesh was opened up, and his own blood overwrote the flaking vitae painted there earlier. Harrtek’s body screamed, but the pain was distant, and from a far battlefield he looked on his weakness and despised it.
Time blinked. Giant machines around the hall whooped with tortured thunders. Lightning streamed upwards. Harrtek was
shaking from fatigue and loss of blood. The drums reached a brief crescendo. Chanting scaled exultant heights. Kraal, now far away again, brandished his maul. It dripped with gore. Teams of sweating slaves tugged enormous chains, and the crucibles rolled to the edge of the octed, hit wedges, and toppled forwards under the force of their own momentum, pouring oceans of spitting metal into the design. The symbol acted as a giant mould. Surging waves of metal rushed down the arms, meeting in the middle with a loud slap of liquid. Droplets burst upwards, showering over the worshippers. They screamed in holy agonies as their robes burst into flames.
Kraal dropped the head of his maul to the deck with a clang. With a perfunctory brutality the lines of slaves were shoved into the incandescent metal by the singing cultists. They toppled in neat lines, shrieking out devotions as they plunged under. They rose up, flailing, screaming for real now, human torches whose dying wails joined the chorus of insane worship.
The sacrifices were the final act. From high above, a furious voice roared, coming closer rapidly as if falling from a far-off heaven. Composed of inchoate sounds, the roaring was nevertheless possessed of sentience, and raged against its summoning. Another howling voice joined it, followed by a third, and fourth, until eight bellowing demigods joined the choirs of humans screaming out their dedication to the god of blood and war.
The roaring descended until it drowned out all else, but Harrtek saw nothing. Red lightning sheeted across the hall. Something heavy impacted on Nuntio Dolores, and the machine sagged with the blow. Burning heat blasted from the Titan, immolating the banners arranged behind it. One by one the other roars cut out and the Titans were bowed by invisible impacts. The shouting, drumming, blaring, singing praise of Khorne lost its final pretence at musicality, breaking apart into a discordant cacophony of screams and shouts. Worshippers turned upon one another. Knives flashed. Blood hissed on the cooling octed.
Harrtek’s body filled with uncontrollable anger. His muscles swelled. His thoughts fled. Yanking against the chains that bound him until his wrists wept blood, he howled, and in a new, daemonic voice, Nuntio Dolores howled with him.
Part Three
The TitanDeath
Twenty-Three
Machine Dreams
There was wind upon her skin.
The breeze was forge hot. From distant prairies of burnished brass came the scent of burned oil and heated metal. Her hair was a frizz of swarf that rattled in the breeze. Sharp and unsettling metal trees stretched down to plains of copper plates. Tiny metallic beasts ran through sharp steel grasses. Iron birds clattered in a yellow sky. In the forest, chimney pines trailed black smokes that caught upon high thermals, where they wound together in double helices before smudging into a pall that smeared the light of sun into orange, lemon, and rich pollutant brown. Her body burned with a heat that was inimical to human life. Her heartbeat was a single moment drawn out forever, an inferno blaze with no sound, no pulse. When she uncurled her fists, her fingers were guns. Her feet were spread claws. Her eyes were glass.
Children made of plasteel alloys crowded her legs, their undeveloped cannon-arms reaching up for her, pleading for attention she could not spare. She ignored them. She had so many children she did not know their names. Their squealing war-horns went unanswered. Her nervous oculi fixed on the distant place where metal met sky. There was something wicked on the horizon, and it was coming for them all.
Movement caught her many senses: infrared, seismic, sonar, aural, radar, lidar and all the other machine blessings that were hers by birthright. Her sight was layered with many palettes waiting to be selected, each promising the revelation of a different set of secrets. She heard sounds so deep they troubled the planet’s molten core, and so high no living thing could perceive them.
The tap of hoofs upon the ferrous landscape entered into her awareness. A clockwork horse, twice life-size, galloped past. It seemed to her no bigger than a toy. She recognised it with a melancholy so deep it threatened to drown her.
‘Hamaj!’ When she called to it her voice was the wordless blare of a war-horn. The horse panicked. Exposed springs unwound quickly in its hindquarters, driving gears that drove pistons that slammed cast bronze legs hard into the ground. It galloped faster than any horse of flesh or blood could. It was not fast enough.
‘Hamaj!’ The Great Mother called. Again her voice was the earth-shaking wail of war-horns. Venting towers on the horizon spat fire in response. She forced her way through her squalling children, crushing trees to scrap. The horse fled, pores fed by syringes weeping a sweat of blood down its steaming flanks.
She bent down and uncurled her weapon fingers to trap the horse. It switched direction and she missed. Her enormous fist dented the ground.
‘Hamaj!’ she cried. Another blare, polyphonic and mournful, blasted across the metallic world. Her hand slammed down again, this time in front of the clockwork horse, causing it to rear. Mohana reached to catch it, bullets from her fingers tearing up the rusty soil, steam whistling from pipes in her knuckles. Wild now with panic, the clockwork steed kicked and bucked. She tried to calm it, but her words were the uniform, aggressive blare of battle music. A finger touched its rear leg, a gentle caress that was deadly to the horse’s delicate mechanisms. The leg broke. A spring unwound and burst free. Tiny cogs bounced across the wrought landscape in gentle, random musicality.
The horse screamed. Its forelimbs sparked from the iron earth, but it could not rise.
‘Hamaj!’ she blared, and this time the horns captured something of human speech, rising and falling the way the name should, though they presented no meaningful sound.
‘Mother!’ the children wailed, their war-horns now the flat-toned grind of malfunctioning servitors.
She swung about, swatting them down in her clumsy immensity.
‘Great Mother.’ Another voice. Booming. Human. It came from the sky. She looked up. The sun had gone; a black hole replaced it. The clouds were striped with ribbons of data streaming towards oblivion. Within that void was something vast.
‘Great Mother,’ said the voice.
‘Non-functional. Synaptic disconnect. Neural network non-associable. Machine binding seventy per cent and rising.’ The second voice spoke not in words, but in the rapid pulsed screeching of lingua technis.
She remembered eyelids. They fluttered. Sensation spread from them, outlining her face in the warm bath of preservative fluid.
‘She is waking,’ said the human voice.
‘Negative,’ said the machine.
‘No, she returns!’
Mohana Mankata Vi awoke.
Mohana Mankata Vi’s dream was slow in fading. Doubled sight swam around her visual centres. The blurred, white-grey nothingness of the amnion, sticky against her eyelids, slipped over a drop-ship interior rendered in pin-sharp resolution by Luxor Invictoria’s augurs. The views fought with each other, neither of them finding the upper hand, leaving them both indistinct. A remote command suppressed her native vision with a painful jolt. To be so under the control of another that she could be blinded at will outraged her, and Luxor Invictoria, still inactive, grumbled in its sleep. There were many tech-priests on the drop-ship hangar floor, and more upon a gantry crammed with machinery whose cabling snaked up into the Titan’s head.
She looked out solely through the machine’s eyes now. The sense of her own body, never near, seemed far distant.
Magos Principia Militaris Goten Mu Kassanius resolved himself in her optical sense. The Vox Omni Machina Mal-4 Chrysophane was at his side, rising and lowering himself upon his piston legs.
‘Rarely do I see both heads of the Legio’s priesthood together. Matters must be serious.’ Mohana tried for levity. Her voice was not her own, even slightly. The emitters on the Titan’s head shouted every word without a trace of her modulation, removing any scrap of humanity.
The infospheric patterns of the magi betrayed t
heir discomfort.
‘It is almost time,’ she said, trying vainly to keep her voice to a human level.
‘It is,’ said Goten Mu respectfully. ‘You are on the cusp of ascension. Your union with the Machine-God is not far away.’
‘I will dissipate into the manifold.’
‘You shall be the first to become one with this Titan. You will forever be a part of it,’ said the Vox Omni Machina with religious awe. ‘Your imprint will guide those who come after. No one else will ever have this honour! There can be only one who is first.’
‘I shall still be dead,’ said Mohana Mankata Vi. She paused. ‘I do not remember being deactivated.’
‘It was an emergency precaution,’ said Goten Mu. ‘You suffered a severe cognitive break when you learned of Princeps Esha Ani Mohana’s wounding. Do you remember? You were on the wall at Hansu. Princeps Esha Ani Mohana was ambushed.’
Another pause, filled with dread. ‘Is my daughter… Does my daughter live?’
‘She lives,’ said Chrysophane, ‘and she did you credit assuming leadership of the Legio while you were inactive, although Magos Principia Militaris Goten Mu Kassanius has been taking all strategical decisions and will continue to do so until the succession is ratified.’
‘Until I am dead,’ said Mohana darkly, enjoying the electric field of discomfiture spiralling around the adepts at her bluntness. ‘How long have I slept?’ she asked.
‘Weeks, Great Mother,’ said Chrysophane.
‘Weeks?’ she said. ‘Then it is almost time.’
‘It is, I regret,’ said Goten Mu.
‘And the war?’
‘The war goes as it did,’ said Goten Mu. ‘Hansu Hive holds. While we maintain control, the Chymist’s Sea zone is safe, and Beta-Garmon III will remain in Imperial hands. There have been several more attempts to attack from the south with enslaved regiments of Garmonites. The first took us unawares, the rest have been less successful. Engine loss is at an acceptable rate. Legio Astorum continues to repulse attacks from the traitors. Loyal forces destroyed the Iron Warriors siege battalion. Since then, the combat efficacy of our attackers has decreased by approximately twenty per cent.’
