‘It’s a veritable family affair,’ Skalagrim barked, baring his teeth at the newcomers. A normal human would have cowered in fear. These returned the gesture. Though they looked human, they were not. Or, rather, they were the epitome of the human. The apex of the species, wrought from raw flesh by the hands of the one they called Benefactor. Gland-hounds. Angel-hunters.
Devils incarnate, by any other name.
The pale, malformed members of the Vesalius’ crew were scattered before them, like vermin before hungry felids. And the hungriest of them all was their matriarch, Igori. She was old now, her hair the colour of ice, her skin tight over muscle and bone. All excess flesh carved away by time’s passage. She still wore the battered fatigues and battle-armour that had carried her through the corkscrew streets of Sublime and the wraithbone corridors of Lugganath, still wore her necklace of Adeptus Astartes teeth – heavier now, with new additions, click-clacking against her chest.
Her hand rested on the eldar shuriken pistol thrust through her belt, as she stopped before Arrian. She tossed off a lazy salute. ‘We have collected three more glands, cousin,’ she said, smiling. She spread her long, muscular arms. ‘Three more false warriors dead, to be reborn by his hand, in more pleasing shapes.’
Her pack set up an ululation at her words. A primal shriek of joy that set the beast within Arrian snarling. Not in pleasure, but in warning. He studied them through hooded eyes, noting the enhanced musculature, the chiselled, too-perfect features – like statues come to life. Though these statues were dressed in scavenged bits of battleplate and mismatched fatigues, rather than the finery of better days.
Skalagrim clapped. ‘You do him proud, curs. But shouldn’t you be in your kennel, growling over scraps? We are too busy to play with you at the moment.’
Igori fixed him with a bland glare. ‘We come to make our report to the Master of the apothecarion. That you are here as well is irrelevant.’
Skalagrim grinned. ‘I could make it so, if you like.’ He ran a thumb across the diamond teeth of his chainaxe.
‘She will kill you,’ Arrian said. ‘They would pull you down in an instant, and render you to your component parts. If that is how you wish to depart this life, do so elsewhere. I have a coup to put down.’ He looked at Igori. ‘Report.’
‘We have herded them into the flesh market, as you commanded. Most of them are there now. Safety in numbers. There are a few others scattered throughout the ship. My kin hunt these, as is our right. The others we have left for you, Honoured Arrian.’
Skalagrim chuckled at the honorific. Arrian ignored him. As the Chief Apothecary’s equerry, the Gland-hounds afforded him a certain amount of respect. He had hunted alongside them more than once, to satiate those urges that his chemical concoctions could not. Those occasions had taught him to respect the New Men, as even their creator did not. The Chief Apothecary saw them as children, or worse. But Arrian now knew that they were anything but.
In the dark and the quiet, a new race had come into the universe. The first generations of New Men had been made, augmentation by augmentation. Trial and error. But now they needed no fleshcrafter’s knife to grow their numbers. Igori was mother – aye, and grandmother – to her successors. Her sisters and brothers, those few who had survived as long as she, were the same. One pack had split into two, two into four, four into eight. Now an army prowled the silent spaces of the Vesalius, awaiting the moment the command came and they were unleashed to hunt their favoured prey.
‘Good,’ he said, after a moment’s consideration. In the silence, the dead voiced their opinion. Good, he says… We are thirsty, brother… will you let us drink?
‘Yes,’ he said, stroking the skulls of his brothers. ‘Yes.’ It was always best to have a consensus. He gestured. ‘Rouse the packs, Igori. The Twelfth Millennial has outstayed its welcome.’
He flexed his hands in anticipation, as his dead brothers whispered in satisfaction.
‘It is time to hunt.’
Fabius Bile was dead.
He had been dead before, and would be again. Such was the nature of the universe, and his place in it. Death was not the end. Instead, for him it was akin to an enforced rest. A period of quiet inactivity, during which his mind turned in on itself, like some ancient mollusc seeking the safety of its shell. In death, he could explore the great storehouses of knowledge within himself at his leisure. It was almost a relief.
Yet, beneath this relief was the sure and certain awareness that the universe would press on without him. That events would play out and spiral into unpredictable patterns, possibly endangering the work of ages. All for want of a steady hand and a firm mind. That too was the nature of the universe. The centre could not hold. And anarchy was ever one moment in the future. Inevitable and inexorable. Only by his will could it be held at bay. Or so he told himself, in quiet moments of indulgence.
In truth, he knew that he could no more hold back the tide of entropy than a king might hold back the sea. Everything fell apart. Change was the only constant in an inconstant universe. It was a fire that would devour all things, leaving naught but ashes in its wake. But after every fire, there came growth. What had once been, could be again. Stronger. Hardier. Better able to weather perennial cosmic conflagration.
These were among the certainties that comforted Fabius in the grey stretch between death and life. He – his mind, at least, the part of him that was still aware, despite the breakdown of his biological functions – wandered through corridors of stone and shadow. He could taste lightning, and the stink of wet dog. Old memories, these. Older than the man he was, squatting at the deepest depths of his psyche. He heard snatches of songs, and the drip of voices, their words worn smooth and unintelligible by time.
As he wandered, he wondered. How had he died this time? Not through violence, he thought. Those deaths left a mark, a red haze over the grey. No, his body had simply given out. They did so with more regularity these days, consumed from within by a blight beyond even his capacity to eliminate. A mote on the heart of eternity, eating it inside out.
Once, the blight had been the aleph of his existence. It nestled within the gene-seed of the Emperor’s Children, flourishing unseen until the moment it began to devour its host. Only by his efforts had it been prevented from utterly obliterating the Third Legion, in the early days of the Great Crusade.
Even so, they’d been whittled down to scarce two hundred in number. Then had come Fulgrim, and the infusion of fresh, untainted gene-seed. Or so they’d thought. But the blight was as hardy as the warriors it afflicted. It had rallied, spreading through the new recruits like a scouring flame, despite his best efforts. He felt a sudden weariness, as if his thoughts were wrapped in heavy chains. His first failure – and his greatest. The echoes of which still haunted him.
As far as he knew, he was the last sufferer of that scourge. Perhaps it was because he was the last of his Legion as yet untainted by the touch of the warp. Cursed by his own purity. A cruel jest, but then the universe knew no other kind. He laughed bitterly, the sound of it echoing strangely in this place of dreams and nightmares.
The echoes of that laugh stretched, joining present and past. He followed the sound, tracing his way through his memories. Ghosts swept past him, their faces blurred. He’d known them once, but with every passing century, every death and rebirth, he lost a bit more of who he had been. A mind was not an infinite storehouse, whatever some claimed. Soon, he might not even remember where this place had been – or what.
He stopped and reached up to touch his head. It had begun to ache, a sure sign that his time here was coming to an end. Even here, pain brought clarity. As he rubbed his skull, he caught sight of a familiar face among the wandering ghosts. One that was not blurred. It was as sharp and as vivid as the day they’d met. An old face. The face of a man who had never been young.
He could not recall the old man’s name. Perhaps he hadn’t ha
d one. That was always a possibility with the lower gene-castes. They consoled themselves with nonsensical designations, assorted numbers and letters that meant little outside the meat-crèches of their creation. The old man had served his family as a retainer – a horse-leech, Fabius thought, though he did not recall his family owning any horses.
He had been stooped and thin, but powerful. Like a tree, hardening even as it withered, with a face like a knothole, and lank, greying hair that tumbled down about his hunched shoulders like smoke. What stuck most in the memory were his hands – artificial. Archaic. Ancient, clicking spidery things. Skeletal and unnerving in their eerie grace. A triumph of biomechanics.
He had made such curious toys with those hands, that old man. Silvery spheres that hummed gently as they carved strange patterns on the air. The tiny homunculi, made from clockwork and wood, that waged mock-war at a single twitch from one cybernetic finger. But most wondrous of all were his chimeras. Scaly cats with stinger-tipped tails, and bipedal dogs clad in specially tailored finery were among the most common, but there were others. Each more monstrous than the last. More beautiful.
The old man had taught him much, about the arts of meat and blade. How to stretch muscle and reshape bone, for the sheer joy of creation. How to dull pain, and increase pleasure, so that his creations did not writhe unnecessarily beneath the knife. The memories flowed strongly now. Vivid and sharp. Just like the old man’s knives.
Using these lessons, Fabius had trained a selection of white mice to dance and to duel, for the amusement of his parents. Dressed in minuscule finery, they mimicked the blood-feuds of the great houses of Europa. Tiny blades clicked in a skilful rhythm as he practised his latest routine. One mouse drew blood on another, and the wounded rodent squealed and launched itself at its attacker, teeth bared. Even then, he felt the flash of frustration and anguish as his creations tore each other apart in a bestial frenzy. No matter how much he screamed, or activated the tiny control nodes he’d implanted in them, they would not heed him.
And so, they’d died. Again and again. Though he’d shed few tears, and only in private, he had been inconsolable. Only the old man had thought to even attempt it. Then, what else could one expect of such a lowborn creature?
‘Do you know why you failed, boy?’ A grating voice, that. Like the scrape of a spade through dry soil. One finger reached out to prod a tiny corpse clad in silks and ruffles. ‘The beast flesh. The stubborn beast flesh, boy. It creeps back. It always comes back. No matter how much flesh you strip away or alter, you cannot change the soul of a thing.’ The man’s cybernetic hand clenched, sparks dripping from the clicking joints. A metal digit dug painfully into his chest. ‘And only the soul matters, in the end.’
The boy he had been nodded, knowing the wisdom of those words, even at such a tender age. A good lesson. And, as it turned out, the final one. A day later, he left home to join the rest of the flesh-tithe, bound for the Terran holdings of what would become the Third Legion. A children’s crusade, bound for a land – and a life – less than holy. A land where the old man’s lessons had served him well.
As they still did.
The old man, the room, himself, it all began to fade, then. The ache grew into a sharp pain. He touched his face, and fingers came away red. ‘At last,’ he murmured.
Fabius awoke from his dreams of the past to find a diseased gargoyle looking down at him. Not the most pleasant of sights, nor the one he’d expected. ‘I have asked you not to stand so close to me, Khorag. Especially when I have open wounds.’
‘My apologies, Chief Apothecary. Your physiognomy fascinates me.’ Khorag Sinj stepped back. The pallid, weathered plates of his ancient Cataphractii Tactical Dreadnought armour rustled like loose flesh. ‘Still, the sleeper awakens,’ he wheezed, clouds of miasmic incense billowing up from the cracked vents and ruptured hoses of his helmet. ‘Mind intact, then? All neurons firing correctly, are they?’ A slobbering sigh. ‘Good, good.’
Khorag was one of the few remaining Apothecaries of the 14th Legion. Nurgle’s chosen rarely needed medical treatment of any description, and the former Grave Warden had abandoned his brothers, and the services of Calas Typhon, to travel down darker avenues of research as a member of Fabius’ Consortium.
‘You performed the operation,’ Fabius said, somewhat shakily. ‘You?’ The thought of those diseased fingers prying about inside his skull sent a chill through him. There was no telling what sort of effluvia was even now floating within him.
‘At a safe distance, Chief Apothecary, I assure you. I operated through the gentle hands of your hounds.’ A thick paw gestured to several attentive Gland-hounds. They stood nearby, watchfully. ‘Quite deft, these children of yours.’
‘Say grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, rather.’ Fabius peered at one – a callow youth, but already heavy with altered muscle and covered in scars. They started early, down in the kennels. ‘One of Igori’s?’ he asked as he sat up.
‘Yes, Benefactor,’ the youth murmured. He glanced down and quickly stepped aside as several stunted, hooded shapes squirmed between the Gland-hounds. The little creatures, in their heavy robes and hissing rebreathers, clustered about the examination table Fabius lay strapped to. With simian swiftness, they scrambled across the table, loosening the straps and unhooking the biometric sensors. They gurgled and chirped as they worked, and he stroked the sloped skull of one with affection.
The vatborn looked alike, sounded alike, and even smelled alike. The tiny mutants might as well have been stamped from a mould, despite being several hundred generations removed from the nutrient vats he’d grown their ancestors in. They bred like vermin, in out-of-the-way places. He was perversely proud of them – they were hardy, loyal little beasts. ‘Hello, my friends,’ he murmured. He looked at the Gland-hound, studying the barcode tattooed on his cheek. ‘You are… Nialos, yes? Bring me my panoply, Nialos.’
As the Gland-hounds hastened to obey, Fabius swung his legs off the examination table. He looked around, re-familiarising himself with his apothecarium, his laboratorium. His sanctum. The chamber was a circular knot of alternating antechambers and open space. Magnetised trays of surgical tools, not all of them designed by human hands, occupied the walls in seemingly haphazard fashion.
Nestled among these gleaming racks were diverse charts, documenting the progress of ongoing experiments, as well as his observations on such. Enhanced pict-captures of unique nerve clusters framed scraps of poetry, collected from a thousand worlds.
Beneath this detritus lay the progenoid bio-vaults, which paid for his safe passage through the more conflicted regions of Eyespace, and a variety of material storage cylinders. A chill mist emerged from the refrigeration units built into the deck, curling across the floor, the cold causing the various hololithic projectors mounted about the central chamber to flicker with static. Vatborn scurried back and forth through the mist, taking diagnostic readings and recalibrating the various machines.
‘All is just as you left it,’ Khorag assured him.
‘Why you? Where is Arrian? Where are the others?’
‘Ah, well. It seems, in your absence, that there has been a bit of a… breakdown in discipline. They are attempting to restore order.’
Fabius rubbed his face. It was younger than he was used to. Firmer. His hair was thick, long and pale. It would be gone soon enough. It was inevitably the first thing to go. He caught sight of his distorted reflection, in the edge of the examination table. There was much of Fulgrim in that face – a tad sharper, perhaps. Less perfect. The aquiline beauty giving way to an almost vulpine savagery. The beast flesh, creeping back.
He pushed away from the table and dropped to the deck. He stretched, feeling the strength in his new muscles. It was good to be strong again, if only for a little while. Somewhere, alarm klaxons were sounding. The ship. He was on his ship. The recent past returned to him in fits and starts, flickering pict-captures that sp
un and stretched across his mind’s eye. He had collapsed, not from combat, but simple overexertion. A straw death.
He chuckled. No death was a good death. Death simply was. Behind him, something hissed. ‘It has missed you, I think,’ Khorag said. He sounded uneasy. ‘If such a thing can be said to feel separation anxiety, I suspect it is that damnable machine.’
The spider-scorpion shape of the chirurgeon twitched eagerly in its rack. The arachnid-like assembly of blades, saws and syringes writhed, its spinal contact-nodes dripping with an oily solution. He had designed the complex medicae harness himself, in the first years of his apprenticeship in the apothecarion. But now, almost a millennium removed from those more innocent days, the chirurgeon had developed a proto-will of its own.
It was not truly sentient, he thought. But it was aware, in some way. As if it had… evolved somehow. Its machine-spirit was as complex as its multifarious functions. It was programmed to learn, though he had begun to think that it kept most of what it learned to itself. ‘Then, we all must have our secrets, eh?’
He went to the rack and turned. ‘Come, my friend. We have been apart too long.’ He grunted in momentary discomfort as the harness latched onto him with preternatural strength. The dermal nodes hissed as they sealed themselves tight, and thin, articulated hoses and neurofibre bundles slid home in sub-dermal contact-ports. Bone clamps pierced his flesh and carapace to latch onto the vertebral column. Fibrous filaments emerged from the clamps and insinuated themselves through specially installed apertures in his spinal canal, to sink into the nervous tissue of the spinal cord.
The chirurgeon purred in pleasure, as its dim awareness brushed against his own. It was as pleased to be reunited as he was. After so long, he felt… incomplete without the harness. He wondered, briefly, if it felt the same.
He looked at Khorag. ‘You mentioned a breakdown?’ he asked finally.
‘A coup, Chief Apothecary.’ Khorag chuckled wetly. ‘It seems they want the ship and your head. Not necessarily in that order.’
Fabius Bile: Clonelord Page 2
