The Master of Mankind

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  None of this surprised her. What surprised her was that the killer stood unhelmed, showing a face that had once been human.

  ‘I’ve never seen one of you like this,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t even sure you had faces.’

  ‘Now you know otherwise.’

  Koja Zu watched as the assassin tilted his head slightly, hearing the whisper of priceless mechanics in the collar of his golden armour. Though his towering form was scaled-up by whatever genetic meddling his master had performed to enhance the brute’s intellect and physicality, no gene-weaving could hide his roots. He had been human, once. An Albian heritage, perhaps, going by his features beneath the weathered flesh and battle scars.

  ‘May I at least know the name of my killer?’

  He hesitated, and she dared to believe she’d caught him with an unexpected question. Yet his dark eyes never wavered.

  ‘My name is Constantin Valdor.’

  ‘Constantin,’ she repeated slowly. Her schooling in Old Earth’s mythology had been extensive, and she often hearkened back to old tales and legends in her speeches. All the better to inspire the teeming masses of godless, hopeless dregs who served her. Now the minister found herself smiling, no matter that her son was to be stolen away to a fate of genetic torment; no matter that her own death was mere breaths away. She smiled a madwoman’s smile, all teeth and wide eyes. ‘I am to be killed by a man with an ancient king’s name.’

  ‘So it seems. If you have any last words, I will ensure they reach the Emperor’s ears.’

  Koja Zu’s lip curled. ‘Emperor. How I loathe that title.’

  ‘He is the ruler of this world and the master of our species. No title is more appropriate.’

  She bared her teeth in an expression too ugly and defiant to be a smile. ‘Have you ever considered just what kind of creature you serve?’

  ‘Yes.’ The dark eyes stared on. ‘Have you?’

  ‘The “Master of Mankind”.’ She shook her head, feeling the welcome flare of righteousness. ‘He isn’t even human.’

  ‘Minister Zu.’ The golden warrior made a warning of her name. One she didn’t heed.

  ‘Does He even breathe?’ she demanded. ‘Tell me that, Custodian. Have you ever heard Him breathe? He is a relic left over from the Dark Age. A weapon left out of its box, now running rampant.’

  Valdor blinked once. The first time she’d seen him blink so far. That rare human movement was unnerving – to her it felt false, like it had no right taking place upon his statuesque features.

  ‘Terra,’ he said, ‘is a thirsty world.’

  She knew, then. With those words, she knew which of her many crimes she was to die for. The one she’d least expected.

  A laugh, queasy and unwanted, tore itself from her throat. ‘Oh, you vile slave,’ she said, unable to keep the sick grin from her face.

  ‘Other worlds suffer a similar thirst.’ The golden killer’s eyes had glassed over with an inhuman serenity made all the more uncomfortable by the living intelligence shining behind it. ‘Yet none of them hold the war-scarred, irradiated honour of being mankind’s cradle. This world is the beating heart of the Great Crusade, minister. Do you know how many men, women and children now make their slow way back here – to humanity’s first home? Do you know how many pilgrims wish only to see the ancestral Earth with their own eyes? How many refugees flee their flawed and failing worlds now the veil of Old Night has been lifted? Already it is said that unsettled land on the Throneworld is the most valuable commodity in our nascent Imperium. But this is not so, is it? One resource is far more precious.’

  She clutched the autopistol tighter as he spoke, breathing slowly and calmly. Even knowing she was to die, even knowing she had no hope of drawing the weapon, the body was reluctant to surrender its survival instincts. Instinct demanded she fight to live.

  ‘What I did,’ she said, ‘I did for my people.’

  ‘And now you will die for what you did for them,’ he said without malice.

  ‘For that alone?’

  ‘For that alone. Your other treacheries are meaningless in my master’s eyes. Your cleansing pogroms. Your trade in forbidden flesh. The army of gene-worked detritus you have sequestered in the bunkers beneath the Jermanic Steppes. The prospect of your rebellion was never a threat to the Pax Imperialis. Your crimes of apostasy are nothing. You are dying for the sin of your harvester machines drinking the Last Ocean.’

  ‘For stealing water?’ She felt like laughing again, and the sensation wasn’t a pleasant one. The laughter was creeping up through her blood, seeking a release. ‘All of this… because I stole water?’

  ‘It pleases me that you understand the situation, Minister Zu.’ He inclined his head once more, with a curious courtesy and another subtle purr of machine-muscles. ‘Goodbye.’

  ‘Wait. What of my son? What is his fate?’

  ‘He will be armed with silver, armoured in gold and burdened by the weight of ultimate expectation.’

  Zu swallowed, feeling her skin crawl anew. ‘Will he live?’

  The golden statue nodded. ‘If he is strong.’

  In that moment, her trembles subsided. The fear bled away, leaving only naked defiance somewhere between relief and hope. She closed her eyes.

  ‘Then he will live,’ she said.

  There was a bang, throaty and concussive, and she was falling, drowning, choking in thunder. There was pressure and heat and grey, grey, grey. And then mercifully there was nothing.

  Nothing, at least, for her.

  The creature formed from the twinned screams of the first murder clawed its shrieking way free from the womb of the warp. It dragged itself through a wound in the universe, breaching reality with all the exertion expected of a being forcing its own birth. Once away from the nurturing tides of the Sea of Souls, its flesh steamed and shivered. Reality immediately began to eat its corpus, gnawing at the beast that should not exist.

  It rose, stretched out its limbs and senses, and shook off the slick, wet fire of its genesis.

  It hungered.

  It hunted.

  True to its nature, it hunted alone in the cold of this sunless realm, ignoring the jealous, wrathful and fearful cries of its lesser kin. It had no capacity for kinship even with those monsters that shared similar births, considering them – insofar as it had the intelligence to form any thoughts at all – as lesser reflections of its primacy. Their existences, and the weaknesses they suffered, were nothing and less than nothing.

  Had any Imperial scholar managed to pry open the daemon’s skull, and were there a brain within to dissect for answers, the creature’s mind would have been laid bare as a node of punishingly sensitive perceptions. An animal might hunt by a prey’s movement or the smell of its blood, but the daemon didn’t comprehend such miserable trails of scent and sight and sound. It hunted not by the crude mechanisms of its prey’s bodies, but by the very light of their souls.

  The monster moved unseen through the great tunnels and chambers, its tread spreading corrosion through the arcane material that made up this unnatural realm. It clutched no weapon. If it needed a blade or a bludgeon, it would fashion one from its own essence, using them to break open the brittle shells of its victims and feast on the life within. More likely it would rely on its strength, its talons and its jaws. These would suffice for all but the toughest prey. They had survived when the creature had incarnated itself in the past for other hunts on other worlds.

  It crawled along the shattered walls of the expansive tunnel, reaching out with its impossible perceptions. The daemon listened to the song of souls nearby, the chorus of human emotion beckoning like a siren call. The Anathema was somewhere in this realm, as were its childlings, the Golden. The daemon would find them, and rend them apart with weapons shaped from its hating heart.

  The boiling oil of the creature’s thoughts locked on to the promise of p
rey. Instinct dragged the daemon west.

  On it crawled, sometimes moving through tunnels so large they defied the daemon’s senses, seemingly great empty expanses of nothingness. It stalked through the knee-deep golden mist that pervaded so much of this realm, and it shifted as it moved, its flesh rippling and solidifying, crusting over in scales of burnished metal.

  Pinpricks of life needled against its senses. The creature slowed, halted, turned. Saliva, hot as magma, dripped from between its bared teeth.

  It launched forwards, shadow-silent, faster than the eye could follow.

  A boundary servitor sensed the creature’s approach. AL-141-0-

  CVI-55-(0023) was a tech-slave, a woman who for fifteen years had been answering to a numerical signifier in place of the name she no longer remembered. She’d earned her sentence through the murder of a forge overseer during a food riot. Now she turned what was left of her head towards the scanner anomaly.

  ‘Tracking,’ AL-141-0-CVI-55-(0023) said aloud.

  That one word began an awakening among the other servitors nearby. They stalked closer with the pathetic grace of the half-dead wretches they were. Immense weapons rose. Clouded eyes squinted through targeting lenses. Razor-thin tracer beams lanced out from cannon muzzles and targeting arrays.

  As rudimentary as they were, the servitors were primed for sentry duty. They were aware that many of their number, once linked to the shared vox-grid, had fallen silent. They knew, in their own simple way, that their kin were being killed.

  In a different breed of ignorance, the daemon didn’t know what a servitor was. It knew nothing of the lobotomising process that scraped a criminal’s brain free of deeper cognition, or the grafting of crude mono-tasked logic engines in place of a reasoning mind. It knew only what it sensed, which was that the diminished souls in this hunting ground were just alive enough to bleed, and the running of blood was all that mattered.

  It drew closer. Their clockwork-simple machine thoughts whispered against its essence. It tasted the warp-scent of their weapons – not the fyceline primer or the vibrating magnetic coils, but the weapons themselves. Instruments of destruction with their own spiritual reflections. They were caresses of pressure prickling at the monster’s mind. The daemon sensed anything that had shed blood or taken life. A creature of murder knew its own kind, whether it was formed of aetheric ichor, mortal flesh or sanctified metal.

  ‘Tracking,’ said AL-141-0-CVI-55-(0023) again. Three of the others repeated the word, slightly out of sync. Her head snapped this way and that on an augmented spinal column, seeking, hunting. Prickles of sensory data buzzed at the sides of her slow consciousness. It was enough. ‘Engaging,’ she voiced.

  ‘Engaging,’ the other three repeated, still out of time, as the sensors in their skulls registered the approaching creature a moment later.

  AL-141-0-CVI-55-(0023) devoted her stunted brain processes to two subroutines. The first was to pulse a three-beat signal of white noise across an unclosable vox-link, notifying her handler of her heightened state of alertness. The second was to brace her bionic foot against the unseen surface of the tunnel’s floor. The immense heavy bolter that replaced her right arm clunked twice, weighty with purpose. An ammunition feed rattled from the weapon’s body to where it connected to her bulky backpack.

  The daemon – still nothing more than a nebulous threat throbbing at the edge of her sensory input feeds – ghosted through the shattered buildings thirty-two degrees to the left. The servitor pivoted with a snarling melody of mechanical joints and opened fire with her heavy bolter. It bellowed its roaring staccato, shaking her entire body with the force of a seizure. After a second and a half the crude recoil compensators fused to her muscles and bones kicked in to keep the weapon aimed true. The cracked fragments of her teeth had already crashed together with enough force to start her gums bleeding. She felt no pain from this. The nerves in her gums had been stripped away to immunise her from that very reaction.

  The other servitors followed her lead, bracing their feet and opening up with their own salvos of explosive bolts. None of the four units registered the impacts of accurate fire. Each of them recorded their misses in the simplified data engines at the cores of their skulls.

  When their weapons cycled down with the target lost, the total number of successful hits tallied at zero.

  ‘Committing to scout-predation subroutine,’ AL-141-0-CVI-55-

  (0023) vocalised. She walked ahead, her auspex vista narrowed and focused in search of the surely wounded foe. Even her blunted brain could process the anomaly at play. Her targeting computations suggested the creature should ha, ve been struck by between twenty-nine and forty-four .998 calibre shells. It should no longer be moving at all, let alone moving swiftly enough to ghost away into hiding again. AL-141-0-CVI-55-(0023) vox blurted this anomalous detail to her handler.

  She never acknowledged the reply. The daemon propelled itself from somewhere beyond the detection of her sensory array with a single contortion of its unnatural muscles, burying a claw-spear of ichorous cartilage into her torso, destroying every mono-programmed engine acting in place of her removed organs and annihilating her sole biological lung, which had miraculously survived unaugmented for over a decade.

  ‘Enemy sighted,’ the servitor tried to say. Blood and chips of broken teeth left her lips instead, gouting across the taloned arm that had killed her. The claw-spear lashed back from her body with a whip-crack of abused meat. The servitor fell to the ground in several wet, suffering pieces.

  ‘Enemy sighted,’ the largest of her component pieces tried to say once more. Her torturously primitive thought processes couldn’t fathom why her primary weapon wasn’t firing. She lacked the capacity for diagnostic function and her nervous system had been chemically rethreaded after her sentencing, so she had no idea that she had been torn asunder.

  Bolters roared, utterly silent to the daemon, whose senses knew nothing of sound. The beast lunged three more times, jaws grinding shut on flesh spiced with artificial oil, claws lancing through brittle armour plating to the softer tissue beneath.

  The blood that ran was impure and unsuited to beat through a human heart, corrupted by the nature of the cyborging procedure, but these impurities were irrelevant to the creature. It savoured the sensation of murder, wearing different skins and shapes until it adopted a form capable of crouching over and nuzzling at the streams of blood snaking their way across the mist-shrouded ground.

  Two of the downed servitors protested voicelessly and limblessly, straining to go about their duties unto their dying breaths. On the ground, half lost in the low mist, the dismembered torso and head of the lead servitor miraculously survived – in no small amount of agony – for almost two minutes. The only thing she could sense beyond the pain of her damaged mechanical organs failing to sustain her was the proximity of the entity that had destroyed her.

  ‘Enemy sighted,’ she tried to warn her handler across the vox, though without functioning lungs or most of her throat she was unable to make any sound at all. The last thing she heard, recorded by her fading cognition core, was her killer feasting on the remains of her counterparts.

  The beast, ruled by its illogical and depthless hunger, spread its great wings with aching crackles of ragged sinew. The blood of the slain servitors was saturated with chemicals, tasting grey upon the tongue and failing to hold the creature’s interest. Hunger was pulling at the threads of the creature’s form.

  Far from satisfied, it ached to devour stronger souls and fresher blood than that of these false, reforged humans. Driven by murder-lust and blood-need, the daemon born of the first murder turned its array of inhuman perceptions towards a dead city that had, in recent years, been claimed by new invaders.

  Sometimes it mattered very much from whence the blood flowed.

  Two

  The boy who would be king

  A false god’s name

  The
Impossible City

  The boy who would be king held his father’s skull in his hands. He turned it slowly, running his fingertips across the contours of skinless bone. A thumb, still browned with field dirt, traced across the blunt ivory pegs of the gap-toothed death smile.

  He lifted his eyes to the stone shelf where the other skulls sat in silent vigil. They stared into the hut’s gloomy confines, their eyes replaced by smooth stones, their faces restored with the crude artistry of clay. It was the boy’s place to remake his father’s face in the same way, sculpting the familiar features with wet mud and slow swipes of a flint knife, then letting the skull bake dry in the high sun.

  The boy thought he might use sea shells for the eyes, if he could barter with the coastal traders for two that were smooth enough. He would do this soon. Such things were tradition.

  First he needed answers.

  He turned the skull once more, circling his thumb around the ragged hole broken into the bone. He didn’t need to close his eyes and meditate to know the truth. He didn’t need to pray for his father’s spirit to tell him what happened. He simply touched the hole in his father’s head, and at once he knew. He saw the fall of the bronze knife from behind; he saw his father fall into the mud; he saw every­thing that had happened leading to this moment in time.

  The boy who would be king rose from the floor of his family’s hut and walked out into the settlement, his father’s skull clutched in one hand.

  Mud-brick huts lined both sides of the river. The wheat-fields to the east were a patchwork sea of dark gold beneath the eye of the setting sun. The village was never truly quiet, even after the day’s work was done. Families talked and laughed and fought. Dogs barked for attention and whined for food. The wind set the scrubland trees to singing, with the hiss of leaves and the creak of branches forming their eternal song.