A Thousand Sons

by Graham McNeill

  Mighty carved columns topped with capitals shaped like curling scrolls formed enormous processional avenues down which entire armies could walk abreast. She wandered parks of incredible beauty nestled alongside the artifice of human hands, the two blending so seamlessly that it was impossible to discern where one began and the other ended.

  Everywhere she looked, she saw perfection of line and shape, a harmony that could only have come about by the seamless fusion of knowledge and talent. This was perfection; this was everything humanity aspired to achieve.

  This was bliss, though she knew it was not real, for nothing created by Man was perfect. Everything had a flaw, no matter how small. As with any paradise, this could not last. She heard a mournful cry in the far distance, a sound so faint as to be almost inaudible.

  Carried from the frozen bleakness of an ice-locked future, the cry was joined by another, the sounds echoing from the sides of the pyramids and lingering like a curse in the deserted streets. It resonated within a withered, atrophied part of her mind – a forgotten, primal remnant from a time when man was prey, simply an upstart hominid with ambitions beyond those of other mammals.

  It was the sound of fangs like swords, claws and hunters older than Man. It was the sound of judgement.

  HER HEART THUDDING in her chest, Kallista Eris jack-knifed upright in her cot bed, drenched in sweat, the haunting cries fading from her mind. The dream of the unknown city faded like mist from her thoughts, fleeting glimpses of shimmering towers, silver-skinned pyramids and majestic parklands all that remained of her magnificent vision.

  She groaned and lifted a hand to her head, a pounding headache pressing against the inner surfaces of her skull. She swung her legs from the bed, pressing a palm to her temple as she felt its intensity grow.

  “No,” she moaned. “Not again. Not now.”

  She rose from the bed, moving to the footlocker at its base on unsteady legs. If she could reach the bottle of sakau before the fire in her brain erupted, she could spare herself a night of pain and horror.

  A sharp spike of agony lanced into her brain, and she dropped to her knees, falling against the bed with a muted cry. Kallista screwed her eyes shut against the pain, white lights bursting like explosions behind her lids. Her stomach lurched and she fought to hold onto its contents as the interior of her tent spun around her. She felt the fire pouring into her, a tide of burning nightmares and blood.

  The breath heaved in her lungs as she fought against this latest attack, and her hands clawed knots in her thin sheet. She clenched her teeth, hauling herself along the bed towards the footlocker. The pain felt like a bomb had detonated within her brain, a blooming fire that raced out along her dendrites and synapses to sear through the bone of her skull.

  Kallista hauled open the lid of her footlocker, throwing aside items of clothing and personal effects in her desperation. Her bottle of sakau was hidden in a hollowed out copy of Fanfare to Unity, a dreadful piece of fawning sycophancy that no one would ask to borrow.

  “Please,” she moaned, lifting the dog-eared copy of the book. She opened it and lifted out a green glass bottle, mostly full of a cloudy emulsion.

  She pulled herself upright, her vision blurring at the edges with flickering lights, the telltale signs of the fire. Every muscle was trembling as she lurched across the tent to her writing table where the hes vase sat alongside her papers and writing implements.

  Her hands spasmed with a spastic jerk, and the bottle fell from her hands.

  “Throne, no!” cried Kallista as it bounced on the dirt floor, but, mercifully, didn’t break.

  She bent down, but a wave of nausea and pain washed over her, and she knew it was too late for the sakau. There was only one way to let the fire out.

  Kallista collapsed to the folding chair at the table, and her trembling hand snatched up a knife-sharpened pencil before dragging a sheet of scrap paper towards her.

  Scrawled notes regarding yesterday’s incredible expedition into the Mountain filled the top of the page.

  She turned it over angrily as the fire in her brain blinded her, her eyes rolling back as its white heat seared through her body its luminous light filling her every molecule with its power. Her mouth opened in a silent scream, jaw locked as her hand scratched across the page in manic, desperate sweeps.

  The words poured out of Kallista Eris, but she neither saw nor knew them.

  IT WAS THE heat that woke her.

  Kallista opened her eyes slowly, the searing brightness of Aghoru’s sun filling her tent with yellow light and oppressive heat. She licked her dry lips, her mouth parched as though she hadn’t drunk in days.

  She was asleep at her desk, a broken pencil still clutched in her hand, a sheaf of papers fanned around her head. Kallista groaned as she lifted her head from the table, dizzy and disoriented by the brightness of the sun and the dislocation of waking.

  Gradually, her memory reordered itself, and she dimly recalled the half-remembered city of her dreams and its dreadful ending. The pain in her head was a dull ache, a mental bruise that left her dull and numb.

  Kallista reached out and poured some water from the hes vase. It was gritty with wind-blown salt, but served to dispel the gumminess that had collected around her mouth.

  Spots of water landed on the pages strewn across the desk, and she saw that they were completely covered in frantic writing. She rose awkwardly to her feet, her limbs still unsteady after their abuse during the night, and backed away from the desk.

  Kallista sat on her bed, staring at the desk as though the papers and pencils were dangerous animals instead of the tools of her trade. She rubbed her eyes and ran a hand through her hair, sweeping it over her ears as she pondered what to do next.

  Scores of sheets were filled with writing, and she swallowed, unsure whether she even wanted to look and see what this latest fugue state had produced. Most of the time it was illegible nonsense, meaningless doggerel. Kallista never knew what any of them meant, and if she was too late to extinguish the fire before it began with a soporific infusion of sakau, she ripped the papers to pieces.

  Not so this time.

  Kallista looked at the angular writing that was not hers, and the morning’s heat was replaced with a sudden chill.

  One phrase was written on the crumpled papers, over and over and over, repeated on every sheet a thousand times.

  CAMILLE CLEARED THE dust of ages from the smooth object buried in the earth with delicate sweeps of a fine brush. It was curved and polished, and showed no sign it had been hidden for thousands of years. She slowly chipped around the object, marvelling at its condition as more of it was revealed. It was pale cream and had survived without any corrosion or so much as a blemish.

  It could have been buried yesterday.

  More careful brushes revealed a bulbous protrusion further along its length, something that looked like a vox-unit. She had never seen such a design, for it appeared it had been moulded as one piece. She chipped away more of the earth, pleased to have found an artefact that was clearly of non-human origin.

  She paused, thinking back to the titanic statues, recognising a similarity between the material of this object and the giants. For all she knew, this could be part of something just as vast. A ghost of apprehension made her shiver, though she was still wearing her gloves, and had been careful not to touch the find with her bare hands.

  Camille stretched the muscles in her back and wiped her arm across her forehead. Even shaded from the direct rays of the sun, the heat was oppressive.

  With more of the object revealed, she lifted her picter unit, clicking off a number of shots from differing angles and ranges. The camera had been a gift from her grandfather, an old Model K Seraph 9 he’d sourced from an Optik in the Byzant markets, who’d looted it from a prospector he’d killed in the Taurus Mountains around the Anatolian plateau, who in turn had purchased it in pre-Unity days from a shift overseer in a manufactory of the Urals, where it had been built by an assembly servitor who
had once been a man called Hekton Afaez.

  Camille looked around, holding her breath as she listened for sounds of anyone nearby. She could hear the repetitive bite of picks and shovels from her digging team of servitors, the gentle murmur of daily life from the nearby Aghoru settlement, and the ever-present hiss of salt crystals blown by the wind.

  Satisfied she was alone, she pulled off one of her gloves, her ivory white hand in stark contrast to the dark tan of her arm. The skin was delicate and smooth, not the hand one might expect to see on someone who spent time digging in the earth.

  Camille slowly lowered her hand to the half-buried object, gently laying it on top with a soft sigh of pleasure. A comfortable numbness soon reached her shoulder and chest. The feeling was not unpleasant, and she closed her eyes, surrendering to the new emotions that came to her.

  She felt the thread of history that connected all things and the residue left by those who had touched them. The world around her was dark, but the object before her was illuminated as though by some internal light source.

  It was a battle helmet, an exquisite artefact of fluid, graceful design, and it was unmistakably alien in the subtle wrongness of its proportions. It was old, very old; so old, in fact, that she had difficulty in grasping so distant an age of time.

  A shape resolved in the darkness, her touch breathing life into the memory of the helmet’s long dead owner. Behind her fluttering eyelids, Camille saw the shadow of a woman, a dancer by the fluidity of her movements. She spun through the void like liquid, her body in constant motion between graceful leaps, her arms and fists sweeping out in what Camille realised were killing blows. This woman was not just a dancer, she was a warrior.

  A word came to her, a name perhaps: Elenaria.

  Camille watched, entranced by the subtle weave of the dancer’s body as it twisted like smoke on a windy day. The shadow woman left blurred afterimages in the darkness, as though a phantom sisterhood followed in her wake. The more Camille watched, the more it seemed as though she watched thousands of women, all moving in the same dance, yet separated by fleeting moments in time.

  The dancers slid through the air, and Camille was filled with aching sadness. Their every pirouette and graceful somersault gave voice to the sorrow and regret carried in their hearts like poison. She gasped as a potent mix of heightened emotions surged into her from the buried object, supreme pinnacles of ecstasy that were matched only by depths of utter misery.

  A pair of glittering swords appeared in the dancer’s hands, ghostly blades that Camille had no doubt were as deadly as they were beautiful. The shadow woman spun through the air with a shriek of unimaginable fury, her swords incandescent as she somersaulted towards Camille.

  With a gasp of disconnection, Camille snatched her hand from the object, her flesh pale and cold, trembling with the aftereffects of powerful emotions. Her breath came in short hikes, and she looked down at the buried object with a mixture of fear and amazement.

  Her flesh crawled with chills, and a feathered breath turned to vapour before her. The incongruous sight of breath on such a hot day made her laugh, the sound nervous and unconvincing.

  “So what is it?” asked a man’s voice, startling her. She jumped in surprise.

  “Throne, Lemuel! Don’t sneak up on people like that!”

  “Sneak up?” he asked, looking down into the trench. “Trust me, my dear, a man my size doesn’t sneak.”

  She forced her face to smile, though the memory of the dancer’s sadness and fury was still etched in her features.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “You startled me.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” said Camille, feeling her heart rate returning to normal. “I could use a break anyway. Here, help me out.”

  Lemuel reached down into the trench with his arm extended, and she took hold of his meaty forearm as he took hold of her slender one.

  “Ready?”

  “Ready,” she said.

  Lemuel hauled her upwards, and she scrambled up the sides of the trench, hooking her knee over the edge and hauling herself the rest of the way.

  “Dignified, huh?” said Camille, scooting onto her belly before pushing herself to her feet.

  “Like a dancer,” said Lemuel, and Camille flinched.

  “So, what is it?” asked Lemuel again, pointing at the buried object.

  Camille looked down at the battle helmet, the violence of the woman’s shriek still echoing within her skull.

  She shook her head. “I have no idea,” she said.

  THE PIT HER servitors had dug on the outskirts of the Aghoru settlement was a hundred metres by sixty-five. Initial excavations had revealed a promising number of artefacts that were not of Aghoru or Imperial origin. Half of those servitors now stood in immobile ranks beneath a wide awning set up at the edge of the pit.

  The idea of servitors needing to take breaks had amused Camille no end until Adept Spuler of the Mechanicum told her that he had been forced to decommission six of them due to heat exhaustion. Servitors didn’t feel fatigue or hunger or thirst, and so continued to work beyond the limits of endurance.

  Still, they had achieved more in one day than Camille could have hoped for.

  Her dig site lay to the east of an Aghoru settlement named Acaltepec, three hundred kilometres north of the Mountain, and this landscape was as lush as the salt flats were barren. The settlement’s name meant “water house” in the local tongue, and Camille had come to understand that the term referred to the oval-shaped canoes used to fish the lake alongside which the sunken village was built.

  The dwellings of the Aghoru were dug down into the earth, and provided shade from the sun and a near-constant temperature, making them surprisingly comfortable places to live in. Camille had been welcomed into Acaltepec’s homes, finding its people quiet and polite, the barrier of language easily crossed by small gestures of kindness and courtesy.

  Camille’s servitors had dug into a series of structures that had long been abandoned. The best the lexicographers could approximate for the Aghoru’s explanation of why they had been abandoned was “bad dreams”. Adept Spuler had dismissed such claims as primitive superstition or a meaning lost in translation, but having touched the alien battle helm, Camille wasn’t so sure.

  She had enjoyed her time on this world, relishing the relaxed, unhurried pace of life and the lack of history pressing in from every individual. She had no doubt that life was hard for the people of Aghoru, but for her it was a welcome break from the hectic life of a remembrancer of the 28th Expedition.

  Masked tribesmen swatted droning insects in the shade of tall trees hung with bright purple fruit, while the women worked on the shoreline, fashioning long fishing spears. Even the children were masked, a sight that had unsettled Camille at first, but like most things, it became part of the scenery after a while.

  Wild plants and fields of sun-ripened crops waved in the breeze, and Camille felt a peace she hadn’t known in a long time. There was history to this world, but it was buried deep, far deeper than any world she had set foot on before. She relished the sensation of enjoying a world simply for what she could see of it instead of feeling its history intruding on her every waking moment.

  Lemuel knelt beside a long tarpaulin where the day’s finds had been laid out, and lifted a broken piece of something that resembled a glazed ceramic disc.

  “A regular treasure trove,” said Lemuel dryly. “I can see why I came now.”

  Camille smiled. “It is a treasure trove actually. The artefacts here aren’t human, I’m sure of that.”

  “Not human?” asked Lemuel, rapping his knuckles against the flat edge of the disc. “Well, well, how interesting. So what are they then?”

  “I don’t know, but whoever they were, they died out tens of thousands of years ago.”

  “Really? This looks like it was made yesterday.”

  “Yeah, whatever it’s made of, it doesn’t seem to age.”

  “Then how do you
know how old it is?” asked Lemuel, staring right at her.

  Did he know? No, how could he?

  Camille hesitated. “The depth of the find and earned instinct I guess. I’ve spent long enough digging around the ruins of Terra to get a good instinct for how old things are.”

  “I suppose,” he said, turning the disc over in his hands and looking at the edge where it was broken. “So what do you think this is made of? It’s smooth like porcelain, but it looks like an organic internal structure, like crystal or something.”

  “Let me see,” she said, and Lemuel handed her the disc. His fingers brushed the skin above her glove and she felt a flicker of something pass between them, seeing a white-walled villa surrounded by sprawling orchards at the foot of a mountain with a wide, flat summit. An ebony-skinned woman with a sorrowful expression waved from a roof veranda.

  “Are you all right?” asked Lemuel, and the moment passed.

  Camille shook off the sadness of her vision.

  “I’m fine; it’s just the heat,” she said. “It doesn’t look manufactured, does it?”

  “No,” agreed Lemuel, standing up straight and brushing dust from his banyan. “Look at the lines running through it. They’re lines of growth. This wasn’t pressed in a mould or stamped by a machine. This material, whatever it is, grew and was shaped into this form. It reminds me of the work of a man I knew in Sangha back on Terra, Babechi his name was. He was a quiet man, but he could work wonders with things that grew, and where I came from, that was a rare gift. He called himself an arbosculptor, and he could grow trees and plants into shapes that were simply beautiful.”

  Lemuel smiled, lost in reminiscence. “With just some pruning shears, timber boards, wire and tape, Babechi could take a sapling and turn it into a chair, a sculpture or an archway. Anything you wanted really. I had an entire orchard of cherry plum, crepe myrtle and poplar grown and shaped to resemble the grand dining chamber of Narthan Dume’s Palace of Phan Kaos for a charity dinner.”