The Master of Mankind

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  Kane emitted an abort code-spurt at the ludicrous imprecision of the technoarchaeologist’s hyperbole. ‘I speak not of an orbital assault, nor of any other traditional attack. I speak of another avenue. One known only among the highest echelons of Imperial command.’

  Amidst the rattle and crash of the repair cavern’s ceaseless industry, Kane leaned in close to his confidants, feeling the words caressing their way through his vocabulator. He felt himself drooling. Lubricant stalactited from his mouth grille.

  ‘The Omnissiah Himself once spoke of a route between the Imperial Dungeon and the timelocked gates of the Aresian Vault. I have seen no such reference even among the Antiquitous Archives, but His word to me is All. This avenue lies within a network of galactic thoroughfares and pathways metaphysically connected to His principal soul engine.’

  Hieronyma stared at him in silence. By some unguessable miracle, even Arkhan Land had nothing to say.

  ‘I speak the truth,’ Kane said. ‘I speak the gravest and greatest secret truth in the twin empires of Terra and Mars, and I speak it to those that must hear it. The fate of the Mechanicum rests upon the triumvirate gathered here now.’

  And still the others said nothing.

  ‘This is the avenue I have demanded reinforced and defended against all costs,’ said Kane. ‘Through this “Aresian Path” we shall return to Mars.’

  Now, Kane saw Land’s thoughts working behind his human eyes. Musing over the principles of flight and distance, of teleportation, of this undiscovered void-lateral technology, too sacred to speak of and too precious to share. He didn’t understand the idea of the webway. And how could he? The structure, if it even was a structure, defied explanation.

  But he would soon see. Yes, he would.

  ‘How can this be?’ Arkhan asked.

  ‘Irrelevant,’ replied Kane. ‘You shall learn all you need to learn in the fullness of time.’

  ‘You mean you don’t know.’

  ‘Irrelevant.’

  Hieronyma was an altogether more obedient and dignified ally. She said nothing, waiting for her overlord’s input. Kane was wearily grateful for that.

  ‘Adnector Primus Mendel was a soul of weak vision and anaemic patriotism,’ said the Fabricator General. ‘Thus it falls to us to work in the Red World’s best interests. We three will oversee the rendering and weaponisation of the Archimandrite’s ascension. We will aid the Ten Thousand in their secret war and record the various avenues of this alien webway. And then, once we have secured the Aresian Path, we will lead our people home.’

  Eight

  Imprisoned

  Trial upon the battlements

  Banners of the III Legion

  Jaya still counted the days, though it was a matter of instinct rather than intent. Time had little meaning between the unchanging walls of her confinement cell, but the regularity of her two meals a day made for a schedule that couldn’t easily be forgotten. Especially since there was nothing else to do but eat and sleep.

  And wait, of course. There was always waiting to do.

  The servitor that brought her the nutrient paste was mono-tasked to the point of lobotomy, rendering it useless for information let alone conversation. On the few occasions she’d pressed it for details regarding the date of her execution, all that had emerged from its wet mouth were a few wordless grunts. She didn’t think the thing had long left to live. It looked halfway dead already with its cataract-milked eyes and black teeth showing between its eternally slack lips.

  The cell had been comfortable at first, a fact that had surprised her given the nature of her crime. The sleeping slab was padded, and the walls were a smooth, dry granite with a thermal strip emanating a modest breath of warmth, rather than the dank, moss-covered stone of the prison cells her family had maintained in the dungeons of her ancestral home, Castle Highrock. There was even a chest for her possessions, few though they were in captivity – she used the chest to store the cheap tin pots of nutrient paste they had been feeding her since she arrived. Jaya, at fifty-one years of age, had never been imprisoned before but she was a cautious soul; leaving a little in each pot and building up a stockpile seemed wise, just in case they suspended her rations as a form of punishment.

  She could have broken and bent the tin pots, fashioning them into slivers of knives, but as weapons such shards would be flimsy and next to useless. She could slash up the servitor that brought her meals, but wounding the damn thing wouldn’t do anything to improve her situation. For one, it might cut off her food supply completely. For two, it would be the pettiest of acts, striking a defenceless and mindless cyborg like that. A truly honourless kill. No war banner would fly in the great hall of Castle Highrock to celebrate that little victory.

  So she let the thing live.

  Her other option was to cut her own wrists, which was no option at all. It wasn’t that she found the notion distasteful – it was that suicide could only be sanctioned as penance for sins against the code of chivalry, not to escape the consequences of crime. Honour demanded that she live until her execution.

  The fact that her captors left her access to ways of killing herself showed their true disregard. It would likely be a convenience for them if she did end her own life.

  She exercised to maintain her health, pushing herself up from the stone floor until the sweat ran from her thinning form, gluing her worn and filthy uniform to her flesh. She ate the thick nutrient paste and drank the brackish, repeatedly filtered water they gave her. She slept in her clothes, refusing to shed her uniform even in captivity. For the first few weeks she’d been appalled and increasingly sickened by the smell rising from her unwashed body, but by the second month the stench had simply gone away. She suspected it was still there, she was merely so used to her own stink that it no longer registered to her senses. Finger-combing her hair had only worked for the first week. Soon enough she’d been reduced to binding it back in a ponytail using one of her bootlaces.

  When she went to her cell’s metal door, all she could see were the smooth walls of the corridor stretching in either direction, lit by dull and flickering lumen orbs. It wasn’t until the third day that she’d realised she wasn’t alone down here – a shout, more of a frustrated scream in truth, had echoed down the corridor. She’d called back, her lungs raw from the dungeon’s bad air, asking who was out there.

  ‘Baroness?’ the reply had come, miserable with hope.

  She’d burst into laughter. One of her courtiers was caged nearby. ‘Sevik?’

  ‘Baroness! I don’t suppose you have a comb, do you?’

  One courtier had turned out to be several. They conducted shouted conversations in the days that followed, such behaviour simply ignored by their captors.

  They grew quieter over time. What was there to say? How many times could they force good-natured laughter about their fate as they all started losing weight and feeling their teeth loosening in their gums?

  The baroness understood. She fell silent too, in the same way, for the same reasons. She withdrew within herself, not to hide but to survive. She refused to be dragged before a firing squad as a ruined echo of herself – so she exercised. She stored her rations, just in case. She composed battle verses in her mind or recited old saga-poems, singing them aloud in a voice that grew shakier week by week. At first she’d tried to sing once a day, and her courtiers had joined in. As their strength failed, the real silence took hold. She’d sometimes hear one or two of them groaning or murmuring in their cells, far down the corridor. Starvation walked among them, caressing with gnawed fingers.

  On the one hundred and fifty-first day, the servitor came with no food. It stood before her door, the interface slot drawn back and open, and mimed pushing the tin pot through the gap. Its pale hand was empty but the mimed action was perfect. It behaved as it always did, not acknowledging that it was delivering a handful of stale air.

  She watched
it from where she’d been exercising, performing slow sit-ups with her boots to the wall. She watched the servitor slide the flask of water through next, no different from usual. She saw the powdery filtration crystals, like silt at the bottom of the flask, spreading their bitter purity through the drink.

  And then she watched the servitor leave.

  Was this punishment? A mistake in allotting food rations? The possibility passed through her mind, icy and unwelcome, that this was the form her execution would take. Perhaps they wouldn’t haul her before a firing squad after all, to let her die proud in her uniform. They’d starve her instead. At best she would be buried in a pauper’s grave on Terra itself, a malnourished husk of her former self. At worst they would throw her body into a funereal incinerator along with worn-down servitors and the prisoners who ended their own lives in dishonour.

  She took the flask of water, not yet giving in to panic. She had supplies. She had a few weeks’ worth of the nutrient-rich gruel built up that she could fall back on.

  The shouting started up again as the day passed. The other prisoners were going through the same farce, being served nothing by the servitor jailor too mindlocked to realise what it was doing wrong.

  All the baroness could do was wait. If the servitor returned later that night and repeated its hollow actions, then she would know something was amiss. Until then, she wouldn’t give in to the rush of fear. Fear was useful: it told you when you should be alert and aware, but it became a poison if allowed to take root. The deeper it nestled in the heart, the more it affected judgement and played havoc with reason.

  She passed the hours exercising, meditating and letting the stale water fill her stomach in place of the rationed paste. When the servitor returned exactly eight hours later, right on cue, she rose to her feet and approached, watching the cyborg’s pallid hands.

  Again it went through the motions of feeding her, with nothing in its grip. This time it repeated the gesture – the flask it offered to quench her thirst was empty. The filtration crystals were piled at the bottom, as dry as desert sand.

  No food. No water.

  The baroness closed her eyes, listening to the servitor’s retreating tread. She could accept the fall of a headsman’s axe or the gunline stare of a firing squad. But a life spent sheathed in steel had ill prepared her to feel this helpless.

  Her hands closed into fists, slowly, firmly, her knuckles showing white.

  ‘If I breathe, I am unbeaten. If I fight, I am unbroken.’

  She raced to the door, pounding on it with the heels of her fists, shouting the words over and over, letting them fill the long corridors of the prison complex.

  ‘If I breathe, I am unbeaten. If I fight, I am unbroken.’

  The words echoed back at her, shouted by dozens of throats, taking up the old, familiar banner-cry.

  One day became two. That was all the evidence she needed. The baroness decided to act before two days became three.

  There was moisture in the nutrient paste, though scarcely enough to sustain a human body. Soon enough the baroness was looking at her cell through gummy, dehydrated eyes, and clutching a shard of can that she’d shaped into a flimsy knife after all. She was under no illusions that killing her servitor jailor would improve her lot in life, but destroying it might trip some kind of system alarm, letting her real captors know that she and her courtiers were dying of thirst and starvation. If no one came to deal with the slain jailor, then at least she’d know whether this was to be her execution.

  It wouldn’t be difficult. The servitor lacked any obvious counter-threat systems or retaliatory weapons beyond its cylindrical shock maul, which it was far too slow and rundown to use with any speed. All she’d need to do is drag the jailor’s hands into the food slot, stun the thing by crashing its face against the door, then cut its wrists with the crude knife. It would likely go back to its duties, bleeding out along the way and hopefully triggering some kind of prison-wide alarm.

  Hopefully.

  When she heard the distant thump of its bionic-legged tread, she clutched the knife tight enough that blood ran from her palm. Dehydration greyed out the edges of her senses, dulling her hearing and making every vein in her skull throb with abandon, but she still managed to rise to her feet and – without consciously realising she was doing it – straighten her ragged, sweat-soiled uniform.

  ‘If I breathe, I am unbeaten.’ The words were a savage whisper. ‘If I fight, I am unbroken.’

  ‘Please stand away from the door,’ the servitor intoned from behind the sealed metal portal. The gaoler had never spoken before. She doubted it even could. For a moment she wondered if her thirst-slowed thoughts had conjured the words as an auditory hallucination. It certainly didn’t sound the way she’d expected. A flash of gold metal shone on the other side of the food slot.

  What the–

  That wonder was banished as a metre-long spear-blade rammed through the reinforced door with a ringing crash. It slid back out to be replaced by golden fingers reaching into the wound. She saw them curl and grip, then wrench the puncture open with a horrendous whine of abused iron. The door came free of the wall, sending tremors through the ground. She flinched at the bang of its twisted remains dropping onto the corridor’s stone floor.

  The figure that entered wasn’t the servitor. It had to stoop to fit through the doorway.

  ‘Baroness Jaya D’Arcus, Warden of Highrock?’

  ‘A Custodian. I’m honoured.’ Her voice was a parched ruin. It shamed her to show any weakness at all before a foe, but she’d be damned before she stood there in silence. ‘Have you come to execute me at last?’

  ‘I’ll accept that as an affirmation. My name is Diocletian Coros of the Ten Thousand, Prefect of the Hykanatoi. Come with me please, baroness.’

  ‘I request the right to die in a clean uniform.’

  ‘Very civilised. And I’m sure that one day you’ll die in that exact manner. However, I’m not going to kill you. You’ve been pardoned.’

  ‘The Sigillite would never overturn my sentence.’

  ‘The Sigillite had never sentenced you at all. Amidst the war’s endless bureaucracy, I suspect he forgot you even existed until you were needed. You are pardoned in the Emperor’s name. Now come with me, unless you want your baronial court to keep rotting in their cells.’

  She followed, though cautiously. ‘Needed?’ she asked. ‘We are needed?’

  The Custodian didn’t reply.

  Immediately outside her cell stood another towering warrior, not quite as tall as the Custodian but still two heads above her. He was clad in red rather than gold and carried his helmet under his arm – a crested portcullis-faceplate of a thing, with a green visor dulled in deactivation. Symbols of white wings adorned his armour plating, as did elaborate silver filigree.

  His features held nothing of sensuality, yet the truth remained: he was quite literally the most beautiful man Jaya d’Arcus had ever seen. The artistry of living beauty rendered in marble. An angel of myth, stricken by the hauntingly elegant pallor of consumption.

  ‘I am Zephon,’ he said with a polite bow. His voice, low yet brutally soft, was made to sing beneath the stars.

  Jaya looked between the two warriors. ‘Free my court. Then, for the love of all that is holy, please tell me what’s going on.’

  Dozens of them stood blinking and sore in the weak sunlight. Clad in the faded and filthy uniforms in which they’d been imprisoned, they nevertheless stood in orderly ranks as they would upon the Highrock parade ground. Jaya’s spirits soared to see them muster in such defiant order on the back of enduring such privation. Her hopes sank soon after – with the courtiers were their attendants, several sacristans for every scion, and the robed tech-adepts had seemingly suffered far more than their masters. They gathered in loose, wheezing, shaking packs; it smote the baroness’ heart to see that her house’s revered engineer
s had been treated so poorly.

  The Court of Highrock, ragged and worse for wear but free at last, stood on the battlements of the mountainous Outer Palace. Thrusting up from among the lance-like spires to the west was the Seberekan Tower, haloed by the watery eye of the setting sun. Jaya resisted the urge to spit at the sight. Engines whined, plaintive and distant, somewhere in the clouds above them.

  Three figures faced them as they waited in ranks. Jaya regarded each of them in turn, cautious of each and mistrusting them equally. The Blood Angel watched the gathered courtiers and their attendants, standing unhelmed in the acrid, polluted breeze. The gentle wind’s fingers plucked at his golden hair. His arms, both bionic replacements, were crossed over the X made by the reinforced cables across his breastplate. He was at once fiercely focused and utterly serene, making no threatening move. Making no move at all that wasn’t inspired by the breeze.

  By contrast, the Custodian paced before them, his burnished features set in neutral regard. The long spear that marked his order was held at his side in one gloved hand. Eyes so pale they were practically colourless stared from his oversized tanned features, catching the gaze of every man and woman willing to meet it.

  The woman seemed to be their leader, or at least they deferred to her in some unknowable way. She was human to Jaya’s eyes, externally unaugmented, tattooed with an Imperial aquila upon her keen features and clad in archaic armour of bronze chain links and golden platework. A hand-and-a-half power sword rode upon her back, the weapon sheathed and deactivated. The power generator in its hilt took the form of a golden eagle spreading its wings to form the quillions.

  ‘I haven’t seen her blink,’ Sevik murmured beside Jaya. The baroness hushed him with a glance. She still suspected this all to be some bizarre ritual before their mass execution.

  The Custodian looked back over his shoulder. The sword-maiden nodded, and the golden warrior began.

  ‘Baroness,’ said the warrior of the Ten Thousand. ‘Step forwards.’