Sepulturum - Nick Kyme

by Warhammer

  Morgravia did not dwell on the unsettling nature of that.

  ‘In this… underworld?’

  ‘Yes. Cold, red eyes,’ Hel went on. ‘Blades for limbs and metal bodied. Stalkers. Machine-killers. Like me. They sent them to find it. I found it first.’

  The encounter before they had reached the precinct house returned to Morgravia in lurid technicolour. Chime, scrape. Chime, scrape. The butcher’s song. Hate red.

  Morgravia shut her eyes hard, banishing the image.

  ‘You are not a machine, Hel.’

  The assassin stopped, head cocked slightly to the side.

  ‘Am I not a tool though, Mother? Fashioned for a specific purpose. A machine by any other name?’

  Morgravia remembered saying those words as Hel was uttering them. A pang of regret weighed heavy.

  ‘You are a servant of the Emperor,’ she said, uplifted.

  ‘And am I good?’

  ‘In His eyes and mine, you are righteous.’

  ‘And have I always been this way?’

  ‘You are as the Emperor made you.’

  Hel seemed to consider that.

  ‘I am sorry I took so long to find you, Mother,’ she said, carrying on. ‘The world below is larger than I realised and has sharp teeth.’

  Morgravia glanced at the shadows, wondering what they harboured and what all of this portended. The return to equilibrium was slow, arduous. Without all of her memories, she felt naked, unarmoured.

  ‘None of that matters now,’ she murmured, thoughts returning to the parasite churning within and to whether or not Hel would have to kill her before it tore loose. ‘Take me to what you have found.’

  She looked up at a curved ceiling, its low arches glistening with condensation like a ribcage of wet bone. It led on into the darkness, a whispering cavern of half-heard voices and penumbral stirrings. Something brushed against her boot and Morgravia glanced down. It was a jawbone, drifting on a scum of black ash. Other bones swam with it, a finger, a piece of skull, a fragment of pelvis. A littering of the macabre, a floating declaration of mass murder.

  Hel saw it too, and drew her sword with a rasp of steel against leather.

  ‘Nearly there now…’ she said.

  A memory intruded, of a little girl standing before a temple, her name surrendered to duty, of the scent of rain, of a door closing in her wake and the silent tears that followed.

  Chapter XXVIII

  The abyss

  A savage hiss echoed through the cavern as the cage hit the water, smoke and steam pluming. Cristo plunged into darkness, cold and suffocating. He tasted ash, the brackish water filling his nose and mouth. A deep lagoon beneath the pit, a sump of sewage and chemical waste. Skin stinging, heart burning in his chest. A heavy throb in his skull as he began to drown. Fierce panic, then slow calm. Cristo kicked, and flailed, and broke the surface.

  A huge, painful wrench of air filled his lungs. The stench worsened. He gasped, half drowned upon the bank, aching with the effort of survival. And turned, and dived back in.

  Blackness, a crushing closeness and the terror of never again seeing the light edged in. He denied it, denied the fear and the paralysis. He swam, down and down, reaching with outstretched fingers, pawing at the fathomless dark as pieces of old bone brushed against him. He felt metal, coarse and pitted. The cage. Blind, he quickly traversed the edge, bars used as handholds until he found the gate. It opened stiffly, dragging on filth and against the grimy water. A hand reached for his and he took it firmly, pulling her into his embrace, this half-dead thing, and kicked like hell for the light.

  Coughing up black water and ash, Cristo grasped at the bank. He hardly dared look at Celestia, who breathed raggedly, her skin a mess of red-raw burns. She shivered on her back, trembling at the pain. Gently, Cristo took her into his arms and out of the sump. A cavernous tunnel presented itself, a vaulted chamber with rib-boned arches stretching off into the distance.

  He put Celestia down on a raised stone lip. She looked small and shrivelled, a candle worn almost to its wick.

  He cast around for a way out, and found the priest.

  Convocation lay slumped against the bank, his neck twisted at an unnatural angle and evidently broken. He still had the ceremonial sword lashed to his belt. Cristo took it, drawing it reverently.

  Celestia’s eyes followed him, alighting on the sword as he placed it softly into her trembling grasp.

  ‘You are…’ rasped Celestia, her lips burned away to blackened gums and teeth, her once beautiful golden hair reduced to ash-white threads plastered to her skull, ‘a good man.’

  She pulled Vanquish to her chest, her arms brittle as charcoal and dark as overcooked meat. The skin flaked, red beneath the black, sore and agonised. She shut her eyes, and abruptly the tremb­ling ceased.

  Cristo buckled, dropping to his knees as he wept. Another senseless death, when he had survived to suffer on. He sank down into a different abyss entirely, and would not have come up but for the tingling in his skull. It began as a pinprick then turned into knives stabbing. He lurched, vomited, red pain thundering, black oblivion threatening at the edge of sight.

  The presence he had felt. It called to him. And powerless to resist, he followed its keening.

  Karina clamped her jaw shut for fear of what pain and anguish she would allow in if she didn’t. Her father had gone, leapt into the darkness, trailing fire. And the priest had gone with him.

  A dumbfounded silence stole across the Divine, a flock without its shepherd. Afraid and disorientated. They looked at each other and then the pit. One man pulled off his mask, slow and lingering, like tearing away false flesh. Another sagged to her haunches, an axe lying at her feet where she had dropped it. Convocation had indoctrinated them so thoroughly that in his absence, without his will to puppet them, they were empty, their animus draining like poison from a wound.

  ‘Let us out,’ Karina uttered to one of the guards.

  He turned dumbly.

  ‘Let us out,’ Karina repeated, gesturing to the keys on his belt. ‘Just hand me the keys. It’ll be easy. And then you can leave. We can all leave.’

  ‘L-leave?’ he asked. ‘Leave where?’

  ‘Anywhere.’

  She felt the anticipation of the others in the pens, watching and waiting, their fate depending on the outcome of this moment.

  ‘Hand me the keys.’

  The guard took them off his belt and held them up.

  Carefully, Karina stretched through the gate of the pen and took the keys. She watched the guard as she turned the lock, felt the satisfying clack. The gate opened and she stepped through it.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, then ripped the guard’s knife from his belt and slashed his throat. Blood spray anointed her and anyone nearby. The guard crumpled, gurgling, dying.

  His death turned a mental lever. The prisoners broke from the pen, and savagely fell upon their captors, stabbing, punching, kicking.

  The violence worsened and Karina knew instinctively that this wasn’t just the outpouring of pent-up fear. It felt like a low throb in her skull, a migraine waiting to bloom and spread its cold grey agony. Karina clutched her head, as if holding it might prevent her skull from cracking open. She had felt this before, at the gully, when the Death Kings and the Red Hands had slaughtered each other. Weaker then, not as intense.

  She looked around, the knife still in her bloody fist, and saw madness. Tearing, pummelling and killing.

  A few retained their sagacity. They screamed. A man was borne down, his arms and legs pinned as a rabid pack opened up his stomach with knives and teeth and pieces of glass. A clawed hand delved and she saw the man’s expression change to choked, excruciating pain and then disbelief as the glistening rope of intestine was pulled forth and stuffed in hungry mouths. It didn’t end there. Soft red meat remained within, and the pack
yearned for it.

  Karina, teeth clenched, needles of fire splitting her skull, fled for the gate.

  And overhead, through the fog of agony, she heard engine drone. Low and throaty, it trembled the ground. A shadow grew above her, descending as an actinic charge crackled the air.

  Cristo staggered, sloshing through the murky brine, letting bits of corpses slap against his legs. He moved in a daze, wearing a perpetual grimace. He travelled downwards, through a crack in a cistern wall. Older here, the architecture was archaic, the cistern expansive and long since polluted and drained. The keening drew him on like an invisible thread tethered to his neck, gently pulling. Darker here, colder, a place light had not touched in centuries or more. Musty air made him choke and cough, but he persisted. He felt with his hands, took careful steps. Chill stone, gelid to the touch, echoed every sound back like a conversation.

  And then he stopped, a tiny shaft of light directing his eye to the middle of a great room. He wondered how far down it was from the church and reasoned it could not be that deep. Columns, some broken, others miraculously standing, delineated a frescoed square. Rubble had fallen; it might have been aeons old, and cracks gaped in the stone like jagged grins.

  A casket – no, a sarcophagus – lay at the heart of the room. Old pipes, the rubber perished and begrimed, coiled from its sides. A filthy patina turned the brass green and foetid. Wires trailed like intestines, some frayed, others lost to the dark. The grainy shaft limned the edges of the sarcophagus, dust motes spiralling at his disturbance. Cristo approached and saw a hand reaching from the broken lid, its fingers outstretched as if trying to touch the light. Mimicking the gesture, he went to touch it. The keening made resistance impossible.

  And like a sprung trap, the hand snapped over his.

  He recoiled on instinct but the hand felt cool and shone with gunmetal lustre. A cybernetic. A machine. It clenched harder and now he felt true fear, then pain as the bones in his fingers snapped like twigs. A muted cry struggled from his open mouth before a metal, tentacular thing inserted itself within. Cristo gagged but couldn’t spit it out, his free hand wrenching at the prehensile appendage squirming down his throat. He shook, nerves misfiring. The hand clenched tighter, and his bones were reduced to powder, eliciting a strangled whimper. And the keening went on and the presence imposed itself, filling him.

  It consumed and usurped, a consciousness in need of a shell. His mind, its mind. Draining marrow and blood, the agony of every fresh violation like liquid fire through his nerve endings.

  He felt its will, its desire, its need as it spread and overwrote.

  It wasn’t enough. The invasion stalled. The slow absorption reversed, the tentacle retracted, and like an organ incompatible for its host, it rejected him.

  A discarded shell remained, half cracked and bloody on the inside. A soft and boneless thing that had once been a man.

  Cristo lived long enough to see the face of death coming for him out of the darkness, and then there was the black and–

  Hel held her sword to the pile of offal and sloughed skin that had presumably once been a man. It quivered in its death throes and fell still, steaming and broken like a butcher’s leavings.

  ‘Stay back,’ warned Morgravia, one eye on the sarcophagus as she shone a light upon it.

  ‘This is it,’ said Hel, poised, her blade high and ready to strike. ‘This is what they are seeking, Mother.’

  A tentacle slid back into the hollows, slithering away like a worm afraid of the light.

  ‘I’m not your…’ Morgravia stopped mid-sentence. A voice ­echoed in her mind, a mewling, whining need.

  I am afraid, it said.

  I am dying, it said, though in no language that could be spoken. It had to be parsed, processed. Meaning was formula, equation. It was the same language as in the red dream, of the machine surgeons as they had her on their slab, dissecting and experimenting. The magi of the Valgaast.

  I need you, it said. An impulse. A piece of clever cognition bound up in machine code.

  I love you, it said.

  The wrongness of it made Morgravia recoil and shrink back from the old remembrance it provoked.

  The girl… as she had turned to face the door. Her eyes, burgeoning with tears. Her fear. Her love. Not knowing she would be remade. That they would take away her fear and replace it with something cold and unfeeling.

  Morgravia had been grateful for the rain when it came. It made hiding her sorrow easier.

  Memory gave way to reality.

  ‘Hel… stay back,’ she said, retreating. A parental instinct, an old feeling of disquiet before the veil fell and horror was revealed. The dust motes froze, glinting like dying fireflies in the light. A charge lit the air, crackling like static. The scent of ozone and heat.

  Morgravia blinked, suddenly surrounded.

  The Cult of Valgaast were here.

  Chapter XXIX

  The monster inside

  Clad in dark robes, the sigil of the cog and star conjoined stitched into the fabric, they encircled Hel and Morgravia like a flock of patient ravens.

  ‘Shall I kill them, Mother?’

  A chuckle, mechanistic but dripping with derision.

  Seven voices spoke as one, their hoods hiding their faces and only the faint glow of blood red beneath betraying their cybernetic natures.

  ‘You are undone,’ they said.

  Hel raised her sword a fraction, but Morgravia lifted a hand in warning. At the periphery she saw them, hate-red eyes, blades for limbs. The magi had not come alone. As they closed, details were revealed. Mutations, the curl and twist of the unnatural. Arcane devices carved into metal. Aberrant biology and flesh. Bestial limbs, a serpentine tail. Rot and rust upon one. A cloying, soporific musk on another. Furnace heat, the coppery reek of slaughter. Mirrored facets instead of a face, colours iridescent and ever-changing.

  ‘You are the Valgaast?’ said Morgravia, her pistol drawn but held low.

  One of their number nodded. An eighth spoke to the cult’s wheel. Tall and thin, its robes draping something skeletal. She saw metal, a plate riveted across its mouth to mute it. Runes had been fashioned into the plate, sickening to look at. It closed on her, raising its head with the whirring of servos and gears. Light flared, two red suns looming, and inwardly Morgravia quailed. She knew this monster, the magos who had presided over her unmaking. Her skin itched, the monster stirring within.

  Hel tensed, eager for violence. Exactly as she had been made, her childhood sacrificed to turn her into a weapon.

  ‘Mother…’

  Morgravia was shaking her head. ‘Don’t…’ She had been here before. Captured, eviscerated, unmade. Hel had rescued her, not knowing what she had done. The signal unleashed. It was inside her. It had to end. There was no other way.

  She took her pistol and rammed it under her chin.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ she swore. ‘Too many have died, but if it takes one more to make it stop then so be it.’

  ‘It will accomplish nothing,’ uttered the seven voices, and somehow Morgravia realised it wasn’t seven but one, it was him, their muted lord, the hub of the wheel, who spoke through them.

  ‘I disagree,’ Morgravia replied, though she felt Hel’s uncertainty mirrored by her own. ‘I will sever the signal from its source.’

  ‘You mistake your purpose. Let us teach you…’

  A vice of agony exerted itself upon her and she struggled to hold onto the pistol. She glanced at Hel, wanting to reach out, but she stood perfectly still, her sword now lowered, arms by her sides.

  Hel had rescued her…

  Afraid, disorientated, Morgravia had fled. Oshanti had led them through the tunnels, having cut her free. They had made a breach. Carnergie was dead. Roper too. He looked shaken. He asked about Hel but Morgravia didn’t know. She barely knew her own name back then.

 
Hel had rescued her. She had stayed behind, luring them away, fighting.

  How long had it taken her to find her? It felt like hours but it could have been days.

  She recalled the words she had spoken to Hel back in her hab.

  ‘They’re waiting,’ she had said. ‘For me to remember.’

  And now she did.

  ‘And so you are enlightened,’ said the seven voices.

  The pain eased. Morgravia lowered the pistol from her chin, tears in her eyes as she regarded Hel.

  ‘You never escaped.’

  ‘You let us go…’

  ‘As I said, you mistake your purpose.’

  ‘It’s not within me. It’s her. She is the signal.’

  Hel, as if she had been paused and now resumed, turned.

  ‘Mother, shall I kill them now?’

  Morgravia raised her pistol. And fired.

  ‘Yes, daughter…’ she gasped, tears steaming as the weapon slipped from her grasp. Hel collapsed, a gaping hole in her chest. Her eyes met her mother’s, and Morgravia held them like she wanted to hold her. They clung to each other like that, staring, holding on, trying to grasp a sliver of a life not lived, a life that had ended as soon as the doors to the temple had closed. ‘And then you can sleep.’

  ‘It changes nothing,’ said the seven voices. ‘You mistake your purpose.’

  ‘You mistake your reach,’ snapped Morgravia, heart clenched by grief but still defiant, straining as the monster within uncoiled, slowly waking. ‘It won’t end with me. The Inquisition will find you. They will burn your grubby cult to ash. Valgaast is but another heretic footnote in the great war.’

  ‘You are as wilfully ill-informed as you are insignificant. Valgaast is not a cult. It is beyond your mortal comprehension. It is the unpinning of the universe. It is the grand unmaking. We are but humble servants, gratefully beholden to its will and majesty. You speak of burning cults as if this will end it. You have no say in this. You do not know what this is.’