All the while,
‘Forward,’ he commanded in a spurt of code. ‘For Mars and the Omnissiah.’
As relatively valorous as a skitarii elite could ever be, Echo-Echo-71 led his warriors into the mist. He was immediately and completely disassembled beyond even the atomic level, wiped from existence as he plunged from an eroded section of the webway into the raw matter of the warp. What passed for his spirit, a machine-thinned whisper of consciousness, ignited in the Sea of Souls and lasted a statistically insignificant amount of time longer than his body.
With no way of knowing their alpha had been obliviated by immersion into the naked daemonic aether that raged behind the material universe, every one of his warriors dutifully marched forwards and shared his fate.
The words rang out, augmitting to dozens of warbands, most of whom were dead by the time they would have received the message, or trapped in capillary tunnels and fighting for their lives against hordes of the warp-wrought.
In that respect, at least, they did indeed protect the convoy. Their lives were sold to slow the enemy, even if only by the chance of misfortune.
The Archimandrite processed the spillage of inloading data with a sense of dawning horror. She coded back to her surviving warbands, requesting updated positional information and sending them rerouting cogitations that would allow them to link up with others to form a more cohesive fighting force.
First she attempted to band the surviving regiments together in order to break through. Within seconds of her primary calculations failing, she was settling for demanding they fall back, flee, do whatever they could to escape. Even then she received precious few canted replies. Most of them were already dead.
She – She? – stared at the datastreams within her own mind, gripped by a traitor’s icy guilt. She had led thousands upon thousands of Mechanicum souls into annihilation. She had failed to hold the Aresian Path despite betraying the Omnissiah’s own praetorians to do so.
Mistakes have been made, she thought with a cognition-failing, creeping unreality.
The fate of the Imperials was nothing in light of her own careless treason; there would be no forgiveness for this. The Fabricator General would pull her organics from her body for this sin, and crush them in his hands before her failing vision.
The depleted core of Hieronyma surfaced through the mess of the Archimandrite’s ambitions. She heard footsteps in the chamber, which was patently impossible given the seals in place at the containment door, and streamdumped herself from the noosphere in order to turn and face the intruder.
The first thing she saw through the unresolved failures of her target locks was that the door remained sealed. The second thing she saw was a human male, his features hazy, his shadow too long across the floor.
She deployed an army’s worth of weapons from her shoulders, her wrists, her forearms, even her chest cavity. Weapons based on Arkhan Land’s forbidden lore, many of which still lacked Imperial names.
‘Hieronyma,’ said the approaching figure. His speech was awkward, as if he had only recently mastered not just Gothic but any language at all. He moved his mouth out of time with the syllables he spoke. ‘I sensed you. You have known such bloodshed…’
His face twisted in something that began by resembling a smile, but was really just a rending of flesh. The thing inside him tore itself free, reaching for her.
All of her treasured, unnamed weapons fired, far too late to make any difference.
Kaeria’s captives sang as the machines began their work. In none of the circumstances and possibilities that she had considered would the doomed prisoners sing.
She couldn’t hear them, couldn’t even be certain they were singing at all. She was only alerted to this unforeseen behaviour by one of the tech-adepts retracting his secondary arms into his robe and turning his sun-starved face to the coffins above. Hundreds of them were bound to the wall, chained in place.
‘They are singing,’ he said in faint wonder.
Kaeria’s narrowed gaze saw a host of emotions on the various captives’ faces. Some were shouting in their soundproof pods, beating their fists bloody against the transparent panels. Some were curled in foetal positions and seemed to sleep. Several even seemed to be in silent rapture, utterly calm and composed. Others lay with their heads back, eyes and mouths open, and… Yes. She could imagine, just about, that these last souls with their rigor mortis expressions were tortured singers.
She had believed they were screaming. Given what was being done to them, it seemed far likelier.
What could they possibly sound like?
She could summon one of the young novices who hadn’t yet oathed her tongue to tranquillity, to ask on her behalf. Yet as Kaeria stared around the chamber, hearing only the rumble of the Golden Throne’s supplemental generators, she felt grateful for the gift of her hollow heart. Some questions needed no answers.
She turned her gaze to the enthroned Emperor, feeling the acid of bitter irony. Here sat her king, committing His consciousness to the machine created to save a species. And yet, chained in place across the chamber and trapped within parasitic coffin-pods, one thousand prisoners screamed in silence and psychically sang their souls away. Batteries for the Throne, so the Emperor might be free. Human lives reduced to sources of psychic power.
Sacrifices. The thought set her scalp prickling.
The throne room’s power flickered for a moment on the edge of failure. Machines around the chamber slowed, several of them giving ugly whines of protesting mechanisms until the power stabilised. One of the coffins emitted a hauntingly gentle chime as the data panel on its surface flashed red with warning signs.
The first one has died, Kaeria thought. Died already, so soon.
Upon the Throne itself, as the generators around the chamber hummed louder, the Emperor of Mankind opened His eyes.
III
Choir
This is now. All of her memories, all of those thens, reel to a close. No longer lying on the grass, hearing a distant storm. No longer confined in the cargo hold of a spaceship, treated as a slave. They were then, and this is now.
Skoia opens her eyes.
She is bound within her own coffin, bathed in tremulous sound. It rises, octave by octave, and she thinks of deep-sea monsters, ship-eating creatures stirring and thrashing upon the lightless ocean beds as they begin to rise.
She breathes in, managing only a shallow mouthful of air. Her heart beats slowly, so slowly.
She presses her hands to the thickness of the vision panel, knowing instinctively that it isn’t for her to see out, it’s for her captors to look in. To see her, to see if she’s still alive.
Her next breath is harder than the first. She has to fight to suck it in, and it scarcely gets past her throat. Already the edges of her vision darken to grey.
She beats her fists against the window, making the coffin sway gently, the motion no different from a rocking cradle.
Her third breath barely comes at all. In that moment she cries out – not with her mouth but with her mind. She screams for the spirits to come to her. She beseeches them for their aid. She curses them for their silence. Panic drives her past holiness into blasphemy, and still she screams.
Other cries join hers. Some, like Skoia’s, beseech ancestor-spirits or the memories of the lost, others are offered up as desperate prayers to the Emperor or the false and half-forgotten gods of distant worlds. It is the unified cry of people drawn from hundreds of cultures voicing their psychic gifts in terminal harmony.
Not all are pained. Some are obliviously joyful, others are sixth sense distillations of helpless rage or simple, crude fear. The chorus of outreaching emotion rises, and the battalion of interconnected machines all run louder, harder, in sympathetic response.
She is fading now. Her breaths no longer come, and that only amplifies her silent cry.
She slumps forwards, cheek pressed to the unbreakable glass, her lips trembling, her eyes wide and shivering. The stiller she becomes, the darker her sight falls, the louder she screams inside her skull.
And now, only now, does she hear the melody of the other souls of the one thousand sharing the same fate, suffering what she suffers. Their screams and prayers and panic and fears entwine, unseen by all, and form one sound, one impossibly perfect note. Those outside the coffins may yet hear it, but its true purity is unheard by any but the dying souls themselves.
It is the very first note in a song that will last ten thousand years, and perhaps beyond.
She, Skoia, is its first singer.
Twenty-Two
The Anathema’s Daughters
Only in death does duty end
Sunrise
Arkhan Land watched as Zephon fired his last shot and ducked back into the darkness of the tank’s interior to reload. The spent magazine clattered to the deck as he slapped a new one home. Hauling himself back up into the cupola, the Blood Angel braced again and opened fire once more.
The technoarchaeologist, his face bleached with scrolling viewscreen data, veered the tank in a slow arc. Volkite cannons squealed in arrhythmic discord. Small-arms fire rained against the blessedly reinforced ceramite hull, reduced by the dense plating to dull bangs.
The grav-Raider’s interior reeked with the porcine scent of burned gore. Wounded Sisters and Custodians lay across the deck of the hold, too injured to keep fighting. Land suspected several of them were already dead.
Zephon ducked back into the tank and slammed the cupola closed. ‘I am out of ammunition,’ he stated. His eyes glimmered with what Land suspected, quite correctly, was battle-lust – a rather primitive emotion that the Martian thankfully had no experience with whatsoever.
The Blood Angel locked his bolter to hip with a thumbed activation of magnetic seals. He crouched by one of the injured Sisters, who clutched the stump of her arm against her chest. The severance of her left arm was the least of her wounds if the running of blood beneath her was anything to go by. Something had gone badly wrong inside her during the battle. A sword through the guts, most likely, thought Land. A pathetic way to die. A death worthy of a primate in Terra’s Stone Era.
He loathed the female warriors, and couldn’t for the life of him fathom why. They were private, yes, but seemed agreeable enough. Yet merely looking at them made his skin crawl. Being near enough to smell one of them, or Omnissiah forbid accidentally come into contact with one of them, was enough to make his bile rise.
He was even more careful not to stare towards the enemy. The Raider’s automated and servitor-manned volkite array was more than capable of responding to threats. The last time Arkhan had looked too long out across the enemy horde, he’d been unable to summon speech for several minutes. No aliens, no matter their world of origin, walked as a host of blade-bearing, cyclopean corpses able to ignore the butchery of their own flesh. Many of the horned, graveborn entities seemed animated from Imperial dead. Shattered plates of golden armour still tumbled from their bloated flesh.
Zephon aided the Sister with her wound bindings. His metal hands twitched, but not enough to ruin his efforts. Land knew that the cure, such as it was, wouldn’t last long. It was too hasty, too fragile: fixed as it was to the back of the Blood Angel’s neck and crudely drill-locked into the meat beneath the armour, to say nothing of the cables and wires running along the outside of his ceramite to link in fifty places across each forearm.
Land had used a biometric current regulator of the kind used to dampen agony-twitches in Ordo Reductor cyborgs. He’d ripped it right from the rib bracing of a slain Thallax. It effectively blocked any sign of their inner spasms from translating visibly to their robotic bodies; reversing its purpose and amplifying its sensitivity was no leap of genius – it was a fundamental principle in the technology used by the very wealthy of many worlds in rectifying muscle wastage and paralysis. Still, Land felt a kernel of pride in his jury-rigged battlefield solution. Fragile as the cure might be, the Blood Angel had been firing his bolter with murderous precision.
‘This isn’t even language,’ Land said, a hand at his earpiece.
‘Cease listening to them,’ said Zephon.
Land offered a withering look by way of reply. Sweat had turned his clothing rank and his skin sour. He kept licking his dry lips to no avail.
Land guided the Raider into a whirring skid, aggravating its anti-grav plates. He scanned the last of the convoy, seeing damaged vehicles drifting into the curling golden mist. On this side of the gateway, the Mechanicum’s ingenuity was masterfully bolted in layers of gleaming metal over the plain hideousness of the original ancient artistry. The arch itself was carved from a material resembling ivory, marked by silver runes in no known language.
Even as Land watched a tracked conveyor crawl through, three skimmers bearing cadres of Silent Sisters raced back out. If ever there was a time for reinforcements, it was now.
The Raider glided between the other advancing tanks, turning and returning to the crash of the front lines grinding against one another. Spear-wielding male warriors in gold moved in bloodied, exhausted harmony with sword-wielding female soldiers in chainmail. They were being pushed back, step by step, each Custodian or Sister falling opened up another hole in the rapidly diminishing Imperial line. Land’s Raider vibrated with the squeal of its high-powered volkite arrays. Creatures and legionaries farther back in the enemy horde ignited beneath the beams, spreading the flames to their closest brethren.
Zephon rose again, clambering back up the crew ladder. The metal rungs bowed beneath his weight as he opened the cupola and looked out at the battle.
‘Blood of the Angel.’
‘What now?’ Land barked.
‘The Archimandrite. It is here.’
‘Unlikely, given that the Archimandrite is almost certainly dead.’
‘It is here,’ Zephon repeated. He reached for his chainsword, gunning it loudly in the oppressive, red-lit crew bay.
Land turned in his seat, reaching for the periscope. He dragged a sleeve across his face to clean his stinging eyes, and peered into the lenses. The thing he saw was bathing squads of retreating Sisters in coruscating beams of darkfire energy, atomising them in sweeping arcs. Custodian spears broke against its plating. Lascannon fire skewed aside from its flickering shields.
And yet.
‘That,’ he said, ‘is not the Archimandrite.’
Devram Sevik had named his Knight Aquila from the Ashes. He had worked on its tilt plate himself, daubing the new sigil of House Vyridion with his own hand. As much as he was a man who revered the peerless work of sanctified artistry-armourers and sacristans in their maintenance of a Knight suit, he was also given to a personal flourish here and there. And so the Imperial eagle upon his tilt plate was more stylised than the stencilled ubiquity of most, with flaring wings and trails of plumage below as it took wing above a field of black ash.
‘Engaging,’ he voxed to Jaya, to his fellow scions, to anyone still drawing breath and capable of hearing.
Aquila from the Ashes crashed bodily into the Archimandrite at full stride, shoulder charging the machine with a hammer-blow bang and the choral whine of protesting, warping metal. They stood deadlocked, living machine-flesh against industrial piston-muscles, metal grinding, armour scraping, spraying sparks. Aquila from the Ashes had size and weight against the Archimandrite’s original husk, but the Archimandrite was blasphemously altered now. The fruits of the Fabricator General’s vision and the possessing daemon’s strength shoved back against the taller machine, its taloned fee
t seeking purchase and clawing into the nameless material of the webway’s ground.
Devram’s cockpit flooded with alarms and warning runes. He felt his suit’s stance buckling as the creatures around his knees began hacking away at his stabilisers. A strained look at one of his torso-feed screens showed the Custodians and Sisters fighting their way to him, but they were fighting through an ocean of heaving, seething flesh with mere mortal blades.
It was down to him. This deed would mark his shield or mark his grave.
Enough left for a four-second burst. Devram forced his gunlimb up, sacrificing his last shot against the beasts around his legs, jamming the gatling cannon into the Archimandrite’s sloping, featureless face. It cycled live, rotating, spinning–
His knee buckled, burst. He fell, the last four seconds of his ammunition screaming wide, arcing up into the golden mist as wasted thunder. The sickening lurch in his stomach told him what the failing pict-feeds didn’t, as his Knight toppled sideways. Impact gel squirted from his support cradle to cushion him but the excretors were poorly maintained; his helmed head slammed against the cockpit wall and something – the wall? his helmet? – crunched.
His visor went black, denying all input. Unseeing, feeling hot wetness in his mouth, Devram fought to pull his helmet clear. Fingers that had turned suddenly clumsy scraped at the helmet’s bindings as all around him metal bent, wrenched, tore.
The pressure of enclosing metal was unrelenting, first squeezing him into his throne, then crushing him into it, breaking his knees, his shoulders, his hips, his elbows, his ribs with vicious slowness. He screamed as he was compacted beneath the Archimandrite’s iron tread, silenced only when his neck and jaw gave with wet, clicking snaps.
The creature stepped over the malformed remains of the taller machine, unknowingly crushing Sevik’s hand-painted tilt shield into a mangled ruin. It hunted the Anathema’s Daughters now, and all else was but a distraction.
The Master of Mankind Page 32
