Arcana Universalis: Danse Macabre

by Chris J. Randolph

  “You are human, fleshbender, perverter of life,” a monster had told him, and it was right.

  Component.

  Abomination.

  A look of worry in the necrontier’s eyes became Caleb’s first warning. As his thoughts spiraled out of control, every muscle in his tortured body tensed and began to wrench back and forth with inhuman speed and strength. His chest heaved, his teeth rattled, and his vision became a spastic blur while the examination chair that held him shook, its steel manacles beginning to stretch and distort.

  Perverter of flesh.

  Abomination.

  “Hush child,” Aldebaran said, and with those words returned the welcoming dark. “All will become clear with time. Be still and sleep.”

  But as Caleb drifted off to sleep, the ravening terror sunk its claws in him deep.

  Book II:

  Third Fragment

  A fog bank approaches in the distance, drawn across the rolling waves like a billowy comforter on a world preparing for bed. Ahead of it, the shimmering iridescent sails of starships glitter on their bobbing march into the heavens, catching slivers of the late day sun and reflecting it in a kaleidoscope of colours.

  She’s there. Eyes as green as the valley, brown hair that rolls and tumbles like a waterfall. She’s leaning against a metal rail with the frothy ocean crashing ashore far below.

  The world looks like a painting; the fog, the sails, the darkening sky, and the already lit lanterns hanging like a row of fireflies frozen in time. He wants this moment to last forever, just the two of them together on the eve of his journey. This is the moment he chooses. This is the right time to ask.

  “Lisbeth,” he says.

  She turns. She holds out her hand to him. She smiles with lips as red as blood, but then sadness blemishes her eyes.

  It all pulls away from him.

  She cries out, and the painting disperses like a cloud of dust.

  Caleb woke on a featureless slab in a darkened chamber. Similar slabs lined the walls like shelves in a crypt, most filled with human figures that were completely motionless, never stirring nor breathing.

  For long minutes, he lay there listening to the clash and clamor that came from somewhere outside. It was an organic thump of flesh pounding flesh in a broken, evolving rhythm, accompanied by cheers and shouts of fury. He couldn’t guess what was making the noise and had no great urge to investigate, but the only other option was to remain in his stone bed with nothing to keep him company but his own festering shame.

  Slowly, he turned and lowered his feet to the ground. His body felt strange, with funhouse proportions that made every movement clumsy and uncoordinated. Purified and new, he recalled Aldebaran saying, but he hadn’t anticipated being quite this new.

  In a fit of impatience, he levered himself forward and tried to stand, but went straight past upright and teetered clear across the way. Stepping, stumbling, both feet lurched and stuttered, relying on a lifetime of muscle memory made faulty by a necrontier’s morbid designs, until his head struck the far wall with a crack.

  But he kept his feet. His right hand—Bibbs’ hand—gripped a rough stone slab, and he held himself still. “Spiritus, can’t I even walk?” he grumbled.

  Step after fitful step, he worked toward the far end of the chamber with the wall’s assistance. Every organ shuddered and seized as he went, making his body a quivering riot of spasms and crackling hurt. Yet even as he noted them, the rolling cascade of aches and quakes began to subside, and his walking grew more natural with every step. By the time he reached the chamber’s far end, he’d progressed from a toddler’s clumsy floundering to the comparatively respectable stumble of a recently stabbed beggar.

  He found a short flight of stairs and climbed them, emerging into bright light and dizzying cacophony, but what awaited him there wasn’t quite as terrible as he’d imagined.

  The chamber was tall, angular, and had a flat and featureless floor with a recessed pit at its center. The high walls were covered in shelves and alcoves, while between them protruded numerous thick beams which radiated toward the chamber’s heart, like the skin of a cactus turned inside out.

  Everywhere in that chamber, around the pit, in the shadowed alcoves and perched upon the beams were the teeming numbers of Aldebaran’s gruesome revenants, their hairless flesh like chiseled granite and eyes so black they devoured any light that struck them. Those near the pit whooped, cheered, and pumped their fists into the air in waves, cheering at two of their kind locked in combat. Wait, circle, strike, retreat. The two warriors landed blurred blows that sounded out across the chamber like sledgehammers in a quarry.

  What surprised Caleb most about the revenants (and virtually all of it was surprising) was their sheer number: he never imagined the Ashkalon’s cohort was even a tenth this size, and yet here they were, nearly two-hundred by his fast estimate with more doubtlessly uncounted in the darkened crypts below. The idea that a single necrontier could maintain so many at once, each tied to him by its own umbilicus, was simply mind-blowing.

  Caleb approached in dumbstruck wonder, still moving with the speed and coordination of a flu-addled cripple. He eyed the revenants with suspicion, each a unique display of precision craftsmanship, a muscular frame marked by the wandering scars of its manufacture and the twisting tattoos which granted it synthetic life. Darkened theloglyphs covered them head to toe, the greater like tiger stripes, and lesser like veins in marble.

  After a moment, his analytical mind stepped aside and his objectivity crumbled. With grim finality, he realized that this was what he’d become.

  He began to pick out others just like himself. Neophytes. The freshly turned. Like Caleb, they moved sluggishly and with obvious effort, and their faces wore dour expressions of mourning, introspection, and despair. Five skirted the edges of the crowd just as he did, and unless he was mistaken, one was Adept Tarkanian, the seer who had led the ill-fated expedition to Zayin.

  The cheering intensified and Caleb turned his attention to the fight now entering its final phase. The two revenants, each bearing copper streaks along their cheekbones, stepped lively over hard-packed soil, hunting after one another with the ferocity and grace of wild cats. Though both were badly beaten—muscles pounded into misshapen mounds and sunken craters, their clay-like skin covered in deep bloodless gashes—neither showed signs of exhaustion, except perhaps for the lowered tempo of their attacks. Even the dead couldn’t withstand such punishment for long

  There came a pause, then the stockier and more robust revenant smiled and attacked. He dashed forward and leapt, sailing through the air with his fist coiled back, preparing to unleash his coup de grâce.

  The slender revenant remained still. Was he caught off guard? Frozen in terror? Caleb simply couldn’t tell, but in the next instant, all became clear. The revenant’s response began with a subtle shift of weight which made the attacker’s target insubstantial. The blow landed on his shoulder and spun him with its terrible force, and he turned that energy to his advantage, transforming his spin into a counterattack. As he came back around, he brought his elbow down on the back of his enemy’s skull and drove him face-first into the ground.

  The crowd’s shouts turned to silence. The revenant on the ground lay still. The victor raised his hands, and his audience erupted in celebration.

  Caleb didn’t know whether to cheer or be sick.

  “That’s Stover. Finest fighter in the cohort.”

  Caleb didn’t turn. The voice belonged to someone he didn’t know, and looking wouldn’t change matters. “The other man… is he dead?” Caleb asked.

  “No more so than an hour ago.” A dry chuckle followed. “Take a knock to the brain-case like that, and you’ll be in the dark for a while, but don’t worry. Nothing a few hours in the tank can’t fix.”

  The crowd parted and Stover mantled the pit’s seven-foot wall, while two others moved to retrieve the broken doll he left laid out on the floor.

  “The tank is some sort of r
epair artifact, then?”

  “Nutrient bath. A rev’s body does the rest. Wanna see?”

  Caleb turned and appraised the other man. He was a bit taller than average, with a long face and eyes that had trapped a smile long ago and never quite let it go. A prominent scar split his sternum, and another crossed his mouth diagonally.

  “Yeah, I’d like that,” Caleb said. “My name’s Caleb, by the way. Caleb Gedley.”

  “I know. I’m Driscoll, the master’s man-at-arms.” At that, Driscoll turned and began walking at a brisk pace, beckoning Caleb to follow with a wave of his hand. “Come along, then. Lots to see, pup.”

  Caleb limped along double-time to catch up. “You’re a knight then?”

  “More of a functionary, really. Keep an eye on the lads, draw up duty rosters, greet fresh kills like yourself. I run the show in the master’s absence.”

  “And how often is that?”

  “Just about all the time.”

  That didn’t bode well. Caleb had questions only the necrontier could answer, and more were occurring to him every minute.

  Driscoll led him around the pit, where three new pairs of revenants were already sparring. The energy inside was more subdued now, exercise rather than mortal combat, and most of the crowd had scattered either down into the crypts or up into the alcoves lining the walls.

  “Is there always someone in the pit?” Caleb asked.

  “More or less. We don’t eat and don’t need to sleep. Isn’t much to fill the hours beside our shipboard duties and the few books we smuggle in, so most practice. Some hardly stop.”

  Driscoll headed for one of the many stairwells leading down into the floor and Caleb struggled to keep up.

  “Paints a pretty bleak picture,” Caleb said.

  “No one ever said being dead was all rainbows and daisies…. did they?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “Thought not.”

  These stairs opened into a chamber quite unlike the crypt where Caleb awoke. It was a wide arcade with rows of clear tanks on either side, each one a half-cylinder facing upward and filled with a cloudy fluid that glowed a faint blue. Caleb assumed the colouration was faint, at least. Mists curled up from the fluid’s surface, producing a fog that crept along the floor.

  As Caleb walked the center aisle, he noticed revenants in a few of the tanks. Each was perfectly still just like the others he’d seen at rest. It wasn’t sleep, he realized; they were shut off.

  “I understand the composition is similar to blood plasma,” Driscoll said, indicating the tanks. “Contains all the nutrients we need to rebuild ourselves, and the rest happens naturally. On second thought, naturally probably ain’t the right word.”

  “Blood plasma doesn’t glow,” Caleb replied.

  “I said similar, didn’t I? Smart ass.”

  Driscoll stopped and motioned toward one of the tanks, where two revenants were submerging a third. Their patient was the stocky man who’d had his brain bashed in a few moments before, and he was still lumpy and misshapen from the ordeal. As Caleb approached the tank though, he could see that the worst wounds were even now stitching themselves over.

  “Amazing,” he said.

  Driscoll smiled. “Suppose it is. The novelty wears off after a few decades… but it’s quite a thing.”

  “Quite a thing,” Caleb repeated. As he focused on the sight of it, his vision sharpened suddenly of its own accord, allowing him see the necrotic flesh do its work in startling detail. Tendril-like threads inched across the open wound, gripped one another and pulled tight, like a tapestry somehow weaving itself without a loom.

  “This man, is he one of the green hoods?”

  “Yeah,” Driscoll said. “That’s what the copper on his cheeks means. He’s Sabian, leader of Beta Host.” He flashed a subtle smirk. “Been tryin’ to take over Alpha for a few years, but he hasn’t gotten it yet. Thinks defeating Stover will open the door, so he picks a fight every now and again.”

  “From your tone, I assume that won’t help?”

  Driscoll shrugged. “It could. Up to the master, really. I just don’t think he’ll ever manage it. And to be quite frank, he’s a prick.”

  Caleb smiled and continued to stare in wonder at the revenant’s repair process. “I wonder what he’s dreaming about,” he said.

  Driscoll let out a dry chuckle. “Sorry lad, but we dead men don’t dream. Just another side-effect of your luxurious new lifestyle.”

  But Caleb was sure he’d been dreaming. What else could that vision have been, as he stood there on the shores of Mydora with Lisbeth? He was about to ask but thought better of it; recent experience had taught him the value of keeping a few things to himself.

  Driscoll turned. “Come along, then. More and more to see,” he said, and beckoned again with his hand.

  Caleb struggled to keep up.

  Over the next several hours, Driscoll gave him a tour of the hidden Ashkalon, first around the shield-arm and then across the rest of the ship. They made their way through a network of darkened tunnels located above, below and alongside the Ashkalon’s more spacious halls, which allowed the revenants to travel freely without disturbing the living crew. Though it occurred to Caleb that folks might be more disturbed at an endless traffic of dead men hidden just on the other side of the walls.

  Along the way, Driscoll described all the different sorts of work the cohort does, from menial tasks like handling hazardous materials, to hard labour like moving cargo or repairing the hull. Much to Caleb’s surprise, none of it was quite as demeaning as what he’d done as an apprentice aboard the ship, and some of it was even quite interesting. The common thread was that they were each too dangerous for normal living workers, or at least too expensive and complex to be done safely. Those same corrosive chemicals, corruptive energies, and even the empty vacuum of space itself posed little more than an annoyance to the dead.

  Driscoll’s tour finally petered out in a larger tunnel crammed full of tubes and hanging cables, lit by glowing conduits which lined the walls. Caleb’s sense of colour was so faint that he couldn’t puzzle out precisely which hues were on display, but he had the impression they were shifting and changing all the time.

  “Alright, take a guess where we are,” Driscoll said.

  Caleb reached out and knocked on one of the metal tubes. He listened to the tone ring out into the distance, and just for a moment, he could almost imagine the distant shapes those sounds had ricocheted off. “I don’t rightfully know,” he said as he examined the tunnel. The place was like an overgrown steamworks. “Near the impeller bay?”

  “Not a bad guess. Actually, we’re right under the damnatus.”

  Caleb didn’t even attempt to keep the wonder from his face. Damnati were at the foundation of the modern Imperial Armada, artifacts capable of storing and discharging unthinkable levels of energy. The Ashkalon was free to travel anywhere in the universe at anytime, unbound by the fluctuating transcosmic currents which drove sail ships, and it was all thanks to its damnatus.

  “Thought it might interest you, what with all your book learning,” Driscoll said.

  And it did. Caleb had always been keenly interested in the particulars of such a device, but Academy had glossed over it like minor trivia. He still vividly remembered the only diagram that even mentioned the damnatus; it was a rough blueprint of an Imperial Broadsword, a massive warship more than three miles long, with a tantalizingly blank cipher near its center that said, “Damnati: 3”.

  He spent days afterward hunting through the research library for any scrap at all, but all he ever found were vague hints and sideways allusions. “First crafted by Magus Granwyll (Artifex) and Hierophant Radniz (Zoëtrist) during the reign of Emperor Spiritus XXIII,” one said, while another claimed the device was, “potent as a small star.”

  His lines of research quickly ran dry, though. Any hint about the device’s construction or operation had either been systematically expunged from the library or simply never mad
e it there in the first place. All, that is, except for a single puzzling entry in the card-catalogue which listed a tome by Granwyll & Radniz entitled A Practical Method of Rapid Inpotentiation Through Cyclic Somatic Resonance Infusion.

  The book was nowhere to be found, of course, and no matter how long Caleb meditated on those large and frightening words, no meaning ever emerged.

  A question suddenly struck him: why a zoëtrist? An artifex—a practitioner who crafts potent devices—made perfect sense, but zoëtrists studied and healed living things. They weren’t often credited with major inventions.

  “Can I see it?” he asked.

  “The damnatus? I guess there’d be no harm in it…” Driscoll’s voice trailed off. “You’re sure you want to? It can be… unsettling.”

  Caleb looked down at his hands, both streaked with ragged scars and black tattoos, and the one on the right wasn’t even his own. “I seriously doubt anything could unsettle me at this point.”

  “You’d be surprised,” Driscoll replied, the words invested with decades of experience. In another moment, his mind was made up and he motioned for Caleb to follow.

  They marched through a handful of access tunnels and climbed a vertical shaft. Caleb was impressed at how quickly he could already follow behind Driscoll, who accomplished his own leaps, swings, and jumps from one handhold to the next like an orangutan.

  The old revenant opened an overhead hatch and they climbed out into the comparatively cavernous hallway. A stone arch stood before them with ominous inscriptions marked along its legs, and a seal bearing the circle of thorns on its keystone. The tunnel beyond split left and right, continuing on in a circle to their final destination.

  A terrible noise echoed within.

  Driscoll ventured on wordlessly and Caleb followed on his coattails. They took the left fork and followed it around, the noise growing louder as they went, until they reached the other side and the final door.