Shield of Baal: Devourer

by Joe Parrino

  They were the ones who had died during the Time of Flesh, whose mortality had prevented them from seeing the true glory of the necrons. These were the fallen leaders of necron society, those who gasped out their last as cancers destroyed their bodies, politicians assassinated in their prime and generals culled in the ages-long wars against the Old Ones and their servants. They were the ones deemed worthy of remembrance and reconstitution.

  Nuensis, who had led the necrontyr in battle. Gevegrar, inventor of great and terrible technological marvels. Maantril, one of those who had opened negotiations with the c’tan. Names and beings she had heard stories of when she herself had walked Kehlrantyr in the flesh. Heroes. Luminaries. Now their simulacra would be awoken to advise the Dynasts.

  But they were just complex machines, no better nor worse than the tomb constructs that the necrons created to serve their purposes. In such ways was the wisdom of ages preserved and brought to immortality. Valnyr could hear them already stirring, restless in their tombs, locked away behind curtains of rippling scarabs.

  ‘We will awaken them soon,’ Valnyr said. ‘Our focus must be the ruling Dynasts. They will lead us through this crisis.’

  They moved through the Dynasts’ necropolis, hissed at by tomb constructs curious about these interlopers but which withdrew after recognising their authority and legitimacy. A cloud of flowing scarabs buzzed before them, tiny jewelled wings and humming ripples of anti-gravitic fields fluttering in the gloom.

  The corridor, wide with marching symbols and friezes, ended in one large looping circle. At the centre of the ring, rising in a stepped ziggurat, was the tomb of the ruling Dynast, Phaerakh Nazkehl.

  A statue of the formidable phaerakh stood guard over her tomb, hanging from the ceiling with one hand clutching an ornate weapon and the other cradling a map of the galaxy. Its eyes were dead, black pools, while its skeleton bore the telltale signs of circuitry. Valnyr’s escort took station around the chamber, each standing equidistant from the others.

  Recessed niches in the wall hinted at Nazkehl’s own lychguard, where they slumbered away the eons. Valnyr paid them no attention. They would be the last to be awoken. Their services were not required yet.

  The cryptek stepped forward onto the dais. Colours inverted as ancient programs scanned everyone in the room, searching for interlopers and tomb robbers. Horns blared. She began to recite the ritual of High Awakening, the words flowing in time to the instruments. Every step she took was marked by green lights in the glassine obsidian.

  A sarcophagus rose from the highest tier, pitched vertically. The front was transparent, revealing the ornate chassis of Nazkehl. She was still clad in ancient wisps of frayed fabric. One hand clutched the sceptre of her authority while the other crossed over to hold a recurved sword.

  Glass slowly hinged open and lights played along the phaerakh’s chassis. Her mouth yawned open.

  She screamed.

  Valnyr and her lychguard recoiled back. They knew the sound. They’d heard it before. It was the same static-laced cry of the necrons whose minds were corrupted and controlled by the flayer virus.

  ‘The phaerakh is cursed,’ cried one of the lychguard.

  Nazkehl fell to her knees, cables detaching from her body, hissing and flapping with escaping vapour and energy. Long-fingered hands, tapered with rippling necrodermis talons, clawed at the stone of her ziggurat. The corrupted phaerakh snaked her clawed hand around Valnyr’s shinbones. She looked up, met the cryptek’s horrified gaze. The static-scream echoed from her open maw.

  Valnyr panicked, her mind seized by indecision. Loyalty protocols warred with the instinct for self-preservation. Self-preservation won out and Valnyr’s staff slammed down into Nazkehl’s skull, crunching the metal, driving it into the stone with a deep crack. Her vision blurred. Pain danced along her limbs as punishment engrams crackled through her circuits. Hunger blazed through her again, but it was momentary, drowned beneath the agony.

  Shaudukar dragged Valnyr away from the spasming phaerakh.

  ‘Corrupt, my cryptek. We must leave. The tomb world is lost.’

  Valnyr heaved, lost in momentary panic as her mind struggled to remember that she no longer lived. ‘How deep does the contagion extend? Some of the Dynasts must surely be pure.’

  ‘Where will we go?’ one of her lychguard asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Valnyr said. ‘I don’t know.’ Her thoughts fled. No plan of action existed. ‘What contingency could exist for such as this? How could we anticipate and plan against such horror?’

  Emptiness filled her, along with a hollow, grief-stricken fear. Emotions burbled that her existence could not countenance or express. What posture could she adopt to say that she had just killed the being she served? What gesture could announce that her people were corrupted, irredeemably so?

  ‘The gates,’ Valnyr said. ‘We make for the gates. We go to the surface and find…’ What? What would they find outside the tomb? Refuge? Relief?

  It did not matter. She needed to move, to escape this horror. Her lychguard waited, patient, loyalty programs ensuring that they would accept her every command. But they offered no opinions or ideas of their own. They stood, silent and still as statues.

  She hated them then. She hated the responsibility they gave her, hated the mockery they made of the beings she had known in life. These slaves, these unquestioning constructs, were no better than the false necrons or the ranks of warriors. A reminder, as if she needed any, of the doubts that plagued the cryptek.

  More static-laced screams emerged from the darkness, mocking her. Her lychguard readied their shields and hefted their warscythes. They left the phaerakh’s chamber behind.

  Automatic processes awakened more of the ruling Dynasts. The static-screams revealed the state of their sanity. Flayer-touched highborn crawled from their tombs, exiting niches in the walls where their metallic chassis had lain for millions of cycles.

  Warscythes flashed down and killed the ones who had once ruled over Kehlrantyr, the ones whose minds and bodies had been remade by the vengeance of one of the gods of her people. They died, flailing and broken, destined to be forgotten at the heart of their former glory.

  Constructs sought to halt them, confused at the sight. Necrons fighting necrons was inconceivable to their programming. They hovered, gravitic repulsors pushing them from one side to another. In the end, their programming motivated them to attend to the fallen bodies of the exterminated Dynasts.

  Valnyr and her lychguard were nearing the end of the chamber when a gang of lesser lords from late in Kehlrantyr’s history sprang upon them. One of the lychguard pushed Valnyr out of the way and was pulled to the ground by the cursed highborn. Screaming his own curses, the lychguard was subsumed by flashing metal limbs and pulled to pieces.

  Bright light skewered the lords seconds later from Valnyr’s staff. From behind her, lightning flickered and killed other hunched, flayer-touched necrons. Lychguard heads turned to identify the new threat.

  The false necrons marched from their tombs, ornate weapons flashing as they obliterated the flayed ones.

  ‘Cryptek,’ said the warlord Nuensis. He inclined his head in respect and greeting. ‘We have been waiting to remind the tomb world of our worth.’

  ‘Your intercession is appreciated, warlord.’

  ‘What afflicts these Dynasts?’

  ‘The c’tan.’

  ‘Such slavish devotion to the star gods,’ said Nuensis, his eyes shifting to regard the hunched and hiding figure of Maantril. Several of the false necrons began to make sigils of obeisance to the star gods before ingrained engrams prevented the motions from completing.

  ‘It is beyond that,’ Shaudukar said.

  Valnyr added, ‘They are afflicted by the curse of Llandu’gor.’

  ‘We should relieve them of this affliction,’ Nuensis said without hesitation. He hefted a great, c
urved sword. He sketched the posture for bloodthirsty and anticipation. He was clumsy and awkward, lacking the poise of a true necron. He had never needed the postures and poses in life.

  ‘There is no time,’ Valnyr asserted. ‘The world is lost to this curse.’

  ‘Your plan, cryptek?’ asked Maantril.

  ‘We head for the surface, to find succour or relief.’

  The false necrons shared knowing looks. ‘What of the Dolmen Gate?’ one asked.

  ‘No,’ said Valnyr. ‘Such technology was fickle in its prime. After all this time, to trust that it would still function is madness.’

  ‘For all we know,’ added Shaudukar, ‘the eldar still haunt the twisting paths. They were mighty of old and while they are frail compared to the strength of our kind, we lack the comfort of numbers. The eldar are cunning creatures.’

  ‘How do we know the eldar linger into this age? Perhaps they have earned their final extinction,’ insisted Maantril.

  Nuensis hissed a laugh. ‘I wish that it were so, but they were persistent creatures. It is equally likely that they rule the galaxy now. Have you had access to updated knowledge since your awakening, cryptek?’

  ‘No,’ said Valnyr. Her thoughts were distracted, still lingering on the option presented by the Dolmen Gate. Further technology granted to them by the wiles of the c’tan, the Dolmen Gates had been stolen from the Old Ones and their eldar servants. There too lurked tricks and turns not anticipated by the naïve necrontyr. Like the biotransference that had ensured their unending half-life, the Dolmen Gates offered the unexpected and the unwelcome. They were access points to the webway, a means of travelling across vast distances at great speeds and without touching reality. But to move so close to the nightmare dimensions of the otherrealm, to tempt the beings that dwelled therein, was madness.

  ‘A last resort, then,’ said Maantril. ‘I may be no more than a simulation, but I have no wish to face the darkness of the real grave.’

  Valnyr surveyed the gathered necrons. She nodded. ‘A last resort.’

  Nuensis grunted his agreement. ‘We make for the surface. We shall stride Kehlrantyr once more.’

  Chapter Eight

  Bioforms in their shrieking millions dived into the necron line, mindless beasts driven to the slaughter. But for every ten, twenty thousand cut down by the mindless discipline of the necron warriors, hundreds of thousands took their place.

  Anrakyr’s back was to a wall, metal scraping against stone. There was more evidence of necron artifice now, the great gates of Kehlrantyr. Storied things, they were said to have once been carved with colossal friezes of the ruling Dynasts. A waste of time and resources, evidence of too-obvious arrogance. Crypteks and canoptek constructs sawed through the carvings, reducing them to atomised ash.

  Chronomancers surrounded the Traveller. Each faced the wall, humming harmonics that disrupted the flow of time and space. They projected a field of slipped time. The necrons caught within the field moved at a greatly enhanced pace, allowing work that would take hours to take minutes.

  Still, it was too slow; the tyranids felled too many necrons, and too few were reanimating to wreak mindless revenge on their killers.

  Nimble creatures dropped from the sky, accelerated through the time field and impacted into geysers of unwholesome flesh. More fell, cratering into the rock floor. One of the tyranids knocked into a working canoptek spyder, denting the construct and dropping both to the earth.

  An idea germinated in Anrakyr’s skull. ‘So simple,’ he said. ‘Three of you,’ he bellowed to the working crypteks. ‘I require three of you.’

  Three of the crypteks detached themselves from their efforts at the wall, moving like blurs until they reached the edge of the time dilation fields. They approached Anrakyr with bodies posed in anxiety and subservience.

  ‘How may we serve, my lord?’ they chorused. Their chassis featured ornate markings and esoteric runes scrawled over every surface. A single, cyclopean eye stared from each cryptek’s forehead, the lens nictitating. The markings of Anrakyr’s own tomb world, Pyrrhia, featured heavily. They were of the tattered few, Anrakyr’s original servants. Forces from other tomb worlds made up the bulk of the Traveller’s forces now. His own sub-phaerons and lords from Pyrrhia had been allowed a degree of autonomy, striding the stars to issue Anrakyr’s proclamation of empire and begin the diplomatic process.

  The Traveller grabbed one of the working crypteks by the shoulder and roughly shoved it around.

  ‘Join the front line. Employ your chronomancy for my warriors. Let time serve as our ally to enforce the harvest. These tyranids offend my sight.’

  The three crypteks bowed. If they felt any trepidation, any fear, at taking their place in the line of their mindless brethren, Anrakyr did not care, nor did he notice. They departed, moving with alacrity.

  The triarch praetorians stepped down from the sky. Vapour wafted from the ends of their covenant rods. They surrounded Anrakyr the Traveller.

  ‘This will fail,’ said Khatlan.

  Dovetlan added, ‘This world will give you nothing.’ As if to punctuate the praetorians’ words, a doomsday barge detonated in an expansive cloud of green-tinged fire.

  Anrakyr waved their words away. ‘Be gone,’ he said. Inwardly, he was disquieted. These praetorians were proving to be prescient. ‘You are a chorus of the unwelcome.’

  The praetorians remained where they stood, eyes boring into the Traveller’s. ‘This will fail,’ asserted Khatlan again.

  ‘You already said that,’ Anrakyr growled. ‘What do you know? What will happen here?’

  Ammeg shrugged. ‘There are too many tyranids.’

  ‘What of the legions that slumber below?’ asked Anrakyr.

  ‘Worthless,’ said Dovetlan. ‘You will find them to be useless.’

  ‘You will need allies,’ said Khatlan.

  Anrakyr laughed. He knew their game now. In his desperation, he was supposed to call on their master. ‘The Silent King will answer? I suppose all I must do is pledge my eternal fealty.’

  ‘No,’ said Ammeg.

  Anrakyr was taken aback. That was not what he expected them to say. ‘Then who?’ he asked.

  They paused, glancing at one another. ‘You will need allies,’ repeated Khatlan.

  ‘How do you know this?’ Frustration bled through Anrakyr’s voice.

  ‘Orikan the Diviner revealed this to the last triarch long ago,’ said Ammeg.

  ‘And you only tell me this now?’

  Their heads jerked up. Something in the front line had caught their attention. They stalked forward, hunched forms moving awkwardly.

  ‘We will speak more on this later,’ said Dovetlan over her shoulder.

  The insolence of these enigmatic servants of the Silent King set Anrakyr to fuming. He followed the praetorians, wading through the acidic blood that flooded the battlefield. Their pace increased as a screeching wail sounded from the tyranid swarms.

  Flapping creatures streaked overhead, darkening the skies. Warriors angled their gauss rifles towards the sky, firing streams of lightning up above. Smoking corpses fell like rain. The ground shook as they marched forward.

  Power reserves, generators supplied by clouds of linked scarabs, swirled around the crypteks. As the art of the chronomancers took hold, scarabs fell, sparks consumed by the hungry science of necron technology. The effect took moments to begin.

  It started small, hardly noticeable. A slightly increased tempo in gauss shots from the necron warriors betrayed the effect of the time meddling. Then the true apocalypse began. Where before, disciplined volleys had lashed out at the flowing tides of tyranids, now came sheets and sheets of green lightning. The fabric-tearing refrain of gauss weaponry increased to become a deafening, constant sound, like the crash of rocks falling, but magnified and made constant.

  Anrakyr stepped into the fi
eld of increased time, marvelling as the tyranids before him slowed. Creatures swarmed towards him, moving like they were wallowing through mud. Anrakyr laughed. This was necron technology functioning as intended.

  But some creatures, already monstrously fast, charged forward heedlessly. Numbers pushed them beyond the deadly volleys of the necron warriors and into the field. The ground shook violently beneath them.

  Clumsy warriors fell over, made unstable by the tremors. Rock cracked and exploded upwards. Five metres to Anrakyr’s right, a wormlike tyranid with six pairs of grasping limbs spat acid and pulled warriors down. These creatures were bursting all amongst his battleline.

  Anrakyr ran towards the burrowing animal, but it retreated down its hole before he drew close. Then it exploded back up, just below the Traveller. Anrakyr cursed as he was thrown up, legs caught in the organism’s jaw.

  It started to twist, to rend and bite, trying to pull the overlord beneath the earth. Anrakyr flailed, thoughts and plans flashing through his mind, but instinct took over, honed in a time he could barely remember. His spear stabbed down, diving into the top of the creature’s head. It exhaled a carrion wind, spewing the cloying reek at Anrakyr. His blow carved a furrow through the chitin that guarded the organism’s braincase. Blood oozed, but the creature continued to live.

  Grunting with effort, it continued to drag the overlord below ground. He dropped his spear and grabbed at the lip of the hole, trying to find purchase. But he failed, drawn inexorably backwards in convulsive motions.

  ‘Assist me,’ Anrakyr yelled. No one answered him.

  Light flashed, and the creature that held him exploded into clouds of ash.

  Dovetlan and Ammeg stood at the lip of the hole. They offered no words and Anrakyr offered no thanks. He retrieved his spear and took up his place once more in the line.