by Nick Kyme
‘My duty? A gatekeeper? This is meaningless.’ As a cloud creeps over the sun, my face darkened and I made fists of my hands.
Sensing anger, the farseer retreated back into the light.
‘It is not a trick. I speak the truth, Vulkan.’
I grabbed for him, trying to snatch the edge of his robes and shake this illusion to dust, but there was nothing to hold on to.
‘When the time comes…’ uttered the eldar, his voice and form becoming one with the light as the entire chamber brightened like a sun, ‘you will know what you must do.’
Falling to my knees, I roared, ‘Get out of my head!’
Pressing the palms of my hands against my temples, I tried in vain to push the interloper out and return myself to reality.
‘No more,’ I cried, shutting my eyes to the light as it burned them. ‘No more!’
‘No more…’ I whispered.
The light had gone. The chamber, the alien, everything. Gone.
Reality reasserted itself, and, as I opened my eyes again, for real this time, I saw it was made of dirty stone and dark iron.
I was standing, the chains around my wrists taut as they took my weight. On my forearm a fresh mark was branded into my flesh. Like the others I had noticed, I couldn’t place its origin. The mystery of it would have to wait. Cruciform, I stared out into a different prison. Not the bottomless oubliette from before or even the furnace where Curze had tried to burn me to ash as I had burned the eldar on Kharaatan. This place was new, and yet entirely old.
A long hall stretched in front of me. Embedded in either flanking wall were mechanisms of an esoteric design – great gears and cogs fashioned alongside smaller and more intricate servos. Antiquity met modernity and became a fusion of genius so prevalent in the tech-craft of old Firenza.
Perturabo’s work. I knew it instantly.
Flagstones had been laid along the floor. They were grimy and slick. I suspected that whatever this room’s intended purpose was, Curze had thoroughly tested it before my incarceration. The stone was but a veneer, a grubby falsehood to give this hole a darker, more medieval atmosphere. Sconces set into alcoves along the flanking walls flickered with the torches within. To the naked eye they appeared to be wood, but this too was a lie. They were springs and clockwork, just like every other half-shrouded machine in this dungeon.
The change in surroundings was not the only thing that differed about this particular cell.
Unlike before, this time I was not alone.
At the opposite end of the long hall, huddled together and barred from me by a screen of dirty armourglass, were human captives.
In the gloom I saw Army uniforms, civilian trappings. Men and women both. I was not Curze’s only prisoner in this place and as an unpleasant sensation arose in my gut, a voice uttered beside me, ‘You can see them, but they cannot see you.’
I scowled. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be dead?’
Ferrus chuckled – it was an ugly sound – his ghoulish eyes fixed on the other prisoners.
He extended a bony finger; part of his gauntlet had rusted. Even the miraculous living metal that once coated his arms and hands had sloughed away.
‘Their fate,’ he croaked, jabbing the skeletal digit in the direction of the human prisoners, ‘lies in your hands.’
A dull clunk of metal heard from somewhere deep within the chamber’s unseen artifice heralded the first motion of the machinery embedded in the walls. One of the larger gears creaked, overcoming inertia, and started to move. Others followed, their teeth interlocking, an engine noisily cranking into life before my eyes.
With the action of the gears, the servos started up, too. Pistons exerted pressure as they expanded pneumatically with an unseen hiss of compressed air. Vents opened, momentum built. The exposed clockwork churned and finally there came a louder, heavier clank of metal as some mechanism I could not see disengaged.
Immediately, a savage strain was placed upon my arms as the chains retracted violently into recesses in the walls on either side of me.
I grunted in pain, but my eyes snapped forwards when I heard the cry of terror from the other cell. The prisoners were looking up. Some of the men had got to their feet as the ceiling came down at them. Too heavy for them to bear, the brave men who had stood up were quickly crushed to their knees.
A child screamed. A child. In here.
Above the ceiling line, hidden from the eyes of the other prisoners but clear to me through the dirty glassaic, was an immense weight. And as the chains pulled at my arms, I realised to what they were both attached.
Despite the agony it caused, I heaved and pulled the chains back in.
In the other cell, the ceiling stopped falling.
‘As I said,’ uttered Ferrus, ‘their fate lies in your hands. Quite literally, brother.’
I held on, the muscles in my neck, back, shoulders and arms screaming at me to let go. My teeth were locked together in a grimace of defiance. Sweat drenched my body and trickled through the channels of my bunched muscles.
I screamed and the people who neither saw nor heard me screamed as well. My grip was slipping; the ceiling and the weight bearing down to crush the others was slipping too.
More of the prisoners got to their feet and tried to push back. Their efforts were utterly futile, no strength they possessed would prevail. Through the red rime clouding my vision as capillaries burst in my now bloodshot eyes, I saw those too weak or injured to stand wailing at their fate. Others trembled or clung to each other in the desperate need not to die alone.
One sat by himself. He was calm, accepting of his inevitable death. Though it was hard to tell, I thought I recognised him. I could not be certain but he resembled the remembrancer, Verace. And it appeared as if he were looking at me.
The terrible strain came on anew as the machine exerted even greater pressure.
Legs braced, arms locked, I closed my eyes and held on.
I stayed like that for hours, or so it seemed, my world a prison of constant pain and the plaintive mewling of the men and women I knew I could not save.
When finally it came, the silence was both sweet and bitter.
I was screaming, spitting defiance, half delirious from what I’d been forced to endure.
‘I will not yield,’ I roared. ‘I will never yield to you, Curze! Show yourself, stop hiding behind your victims.’
‘Surrender, Vulkan,’ Ferrus answered. ‘Let go. You can achieve nothing here. There is no victory to be had. Let go.’
‘Not while there is still strength…’
I stopped, realising that I was the only one screaming. The prisoners in the other cell, their voices were silent. Opening my eyes, I saw what had ended their pleas. Through the glass a solid slab of dark iron had filled the cell completely.
I sagged against my bonds, arms upright, my legs buckling beneath me as the last of my strength ebbed from my body.
‘Where are they?’ I asked the apparition beside me, despite the fact I knew he was only a figment of my imagination.
‘Look…’ said Ferrus, a rictus grin enhancing his ghastly features. With each fresh visitation he was becoming more emaciated, more skeletal, as if decaying in my mind’s eye.
Gears churning again, the iron slab slowly rose. It had but to creep a few centimetres before I saw the visceral red that adhered to its underside. Strands of it clung to the deadly weight, stretching and splitting as gravity exerted itself. Fragments of bone and biological matter came unstuck with the resonance fed through the slab by the machine lifting it. They splashed into a lagoon of guts and blood covering the cell floor.
As the chains slackened, my arms fell too, and I with them onto the ground, my face landing hard in the dirt.
Ferrus chuckled, his voice a little reminiscent of Curze, before he sank back into the shadows and left me to my failure
and guilt.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Fulgurite
The excavation site had become a pit for ritual sacrifice. A fresh crop of less than willing supplicants brought from the other districts of Ranos surrounded it on their knees, staring into blood-soaked darkness.
As soon as he had first descended into the pit, Elias had felt the significance of this place. A temple to the Pantheon, raised on blessed stone, fashioned into the holy octed.
Eight walls for the eightfold path; eight temple cities erected around the globe.
‘Eight times eight,’ muttered the Dark Apostle, revelling in the divine provenance of it all.
Elias looked down upon his fell works from a pulpit wrought from piled stone. Black robes entwined with the scripture of his lord and primarch overlaid his war-plate, and he had removed his battle-helm so all could see the mark of the faithful upon his patrician face.
Sixty-four men and women knelt before and below him, their faces pressed to the earth. Some wept or shook, others did nothing but stare as if they had perceived their ending and knew there was no averting it.
Behind them, clad in crimson war-plate, were the legionaries of the XVII. They had borne the Word, and the Word was sacrifice.
Not their blood, but the blood of Ranos and all Traoris when Elias’s ritual was fulfilled.
He muttered incantations, invoking the Pantheon, entreating the Neverborn, guiding them with the bright soul-fires of the cattle he was about to harvest. The Word ran thick and heady from his mouth, uttered in ancient Colchisian, every syllable an affirmation to Chaos.
As the eighth verse began and the shaking supplicants trembled in ever greater fear and fervour, spittle flecking from their lips, tears of blood streaming down their cheeks, limbs jerking in spastic tremors, the legionaries took up the chant. As one they unsheathed their blades, one each for the souls about to be cast unto the aether.
Below them, the abyssal shaft yawned. Above, the sky crackled with hellish energy. A metaphysical event was taking place, a cosmological alteration that had much in common with the Ruinstorm, albeit on a much smaller level. Darkness clung to this place, tendrils of it were returning as the ritual advanced in potency. They had only to extinguish the remaining light to bring the night forth.
Here was the Emperor’s power, Elias reminded himself. Here, he, Valdrekk Elias, would see it broken and supplanted. The fabric of reality was diminishing, like a film of skin stretched over a skeleton too large for it. Patches of it were thinning, allowing the light – and what was drawn to that light – to peer through.
As he spoke, he reached up with his dagger, his words echoing below through his disciples, and could almost touch the beyond…
It had visited Dagon, Amaresh, Argel Tal… Even Narek possessed some measure of its influence, regardless of his denial. Now, Elias would receive its boon for loyal and faithful servitude. It was his due. Erebus had promised it.
The eighth verse drew to a close and Elias brought his gaze downwards towards the pit and the mewling creature clenched firmly in his grasp.
Eight times eight blades were touched to eight times eight throats. The cut was made in unison, the robed disciples acting on their master’s signal as the last words were spoken and sacrificial blood was released, for the glory and sustenance of the Pantheon.
Narek saw the storm several kilometres out. He and Dagon were travelling apart, so if one was discovered the other could better effect escape or counter-attack.
It troubled him, the storm. Narek could see it even above the tallest smoke stacks, billowing in clouds of eldritch lightning. He hoped that Elias knew what he was doing. As he picked his way through the deserted streets, he could imagine Dagon’s beseechments and zealous babbling. He was spared that trial on account of the fact that, without his battle-helm, Dagon was no longer linked to him by vox.
‘We were once warriors,’ he said to the lonely wind, swearing there were voices trapped in it. ‘When did we become fanatics?’ Phantom pain in his missing leg throbbed and he clutched the bionic that had replaced it, feeling only cold metal and the touch of flesh no longer.
His lip was curling with displeasure when he felt something warming his side. His retinal display had triggered no alarms concerning his suit’s efficacy, so Narek assumed that it was undamaged. When he looked down, he found that the source of the heat was his scabbard. For a moment he forgot that he had replaced his gladius, and wondered what the object was that glowed faintly within it.
The fulgurite. The lightning spear.
Narek stopped, gazing in sudden wonder at the sublime artefact in his possession. He hesitated to draw it, and found his hand trembling as he reached to do so.
‘Godlike…’ he whispered, repeating the same word he had used to describe it to Elias.
Finding his resolve, he clutched the haft of the spear and was about to draw it when Dagon’s voice interrupted him.
‘Brother,’ Dagon called to him, ‘why have you stopped? Are you injured?’
Narek released the haft at once, only half turning towards Dagon and clutching his leg.
‘Old wounds, slowing an old soldier,’ he lied.
Dagon approached, only a few metres away when he had called out, and gestured towards the storm. ‘I can feel it, brother.’
Narek’s eyes narrowed behind his faceplate. ‘Feel what?’
‘The touch of the Neverborn, the whispered promise of the Pantheon…’
Narek recalled the voices and realised they were no trick of the wind. Elias was literally reshaping reality, bending it to his will in his attempt to fashion something akin to a gate. Narek wondered briefly if, when that gate was opened, what was on the other side would recognise friend from food.
‘You are more gifted than I, Dagon,’ he replied, though he felt the ripple of the warp’s presence under his flesh, just as he always had. It was an itch, a reminder of what they had all given up in pursuit of so-called ‘truth’.
Dagon clapped Narek on the shoulder, drawing an unseen snarl from the veteran huntsman.
‘We shall all be beneficiaries of the Gods’ boons when this night is done,’ he smiled and walked on ahead. ‘I will take point, brother. Rest your leg, knowing your spirit will soon be nourished.’
My spirit is likely to be nourishment, not nourished, thought Narek.
Glancing at the spear one more time, he waited for Dagon to be lost from sight and followed in silence. The warmth at his side did not abate, but throbbed, reminding him of his every doubt.
Their numbers had swelled since they had first made planetfall. Almost a hundred legionaries and twice that amount in simpering cultists were arrayed before the great ritual pit where Elias sermonised and proselytised. His bombastic doggerel did little to move Narek, who had been last to join the gathering, having followed on behind Dagon, who had already taken his place with the devout.
Offered robe and cowl by a mortal wearing a graven mask and attired in the same priestly vestments, Narek found his place amongst the throng. He watched in mute fascination and revulsion as Elias preached his dogma from on high, standing aloft like a deacon of old Colchis. Narek thought him a petty demagogue, bereft of honour or true purpose. He was Erebus’s puppet, but then Narek supposed that only made him Elias’s hound.
A life given for a life spared, he reminded himself, and barely noticed the humans with their throats slit, cascading into the dark abattoir that awaited their flesh. Their souls… Well, that was another matter.
Many more cattle trembled in their pens, awaiting execution by Elias’s ‘divine’ hand. The efforts of the other legionaries had yielded a ripe harvest. Narek could smell the mortals’ fear, just as he could detect the Dark Apostle’s greed and ambition. Both sickened him.
On Monarchia, they had erected monuments, great citadels of worship. It was worthy endeavour – it was refulgent and glorious
. This was grubby and base. The XVII had sunk low, squirming on their bellies, not much better than the vermin they preyed upon. Yet, he could not deny the sense of power. They all felt it, the warriors of the Legion, the cultists, the other humans in their thrall. It was potent and it was also imminent.
The ritual ended. Elias descended from his pulpit, a prophet to his devoted following, his communion with the Gods over for now.
‘Narek,’ Elias said, his eyes finding the huntsman in the throng, warriors parting with muttered benediction as he approached him through the crowd. ‘Do you have it?’ he asked, eyes still bright from the borrowed power he had siphoned through the ritual.
Narek nodded, fighting a sudden reluctance to relinquish his hold upon the spear.
‘Come,’ Elias beckoned, keen to be away from the others when presented with his prize.
A small encampment had been established in close vicinity to the pit; tents, a shrine at which to worship, flesh-pens to harness the cattle. Elias had deemed it necessary to erect a commune. Narek joined him inside one of the tents. After dismissing a pair of hooded cultists, they were alone.
‘It smacks of more permanence than I thought was needed for this,’ said Narek, indicating the encampment.
‘Blood begets blood, brother, but much must be spilled in order to taint this place.’
‘And is there enough, amongst your cattle and your slaves?’
Elias scowled, unused to being questioned by his disciples in such a manner.
‘What concern has that ever been of yours, Narek? You are a soldier, are you not? A warrior-zealot, devoted to the Word. I am the Word in this place, so your fealty is to me. Is it not?’
The mood had soured quickly, Elias brought down from his euphoria to the canker of mistrust and doubt.
‘I serve you as always, Dark Apostle.’ Wisely, Narek bowed.
A small dark bowl at the back of the canvas chamber was put there for Elias’s ablutions after spilling sacrificial blood. He went over to it now and began cleansing his hands so that he could begin the next octed circle unsullied by the previous one.
