Incarnation - John French

by Warhammer 40K

  ‘High, high levels of etheric fracturing at play. The Neverborn are walking the world.’ The towering form of Cinis shifted beside them. He alone had not taken the opportunity to get out of the wind.

  ‘Is an alignment forming?’ asked Memnon.

  ‘I cannot tell. The data from atmospherics to etherics is… fluctuating. I… I am, though, detecting vox communications, primitive but steady. There is coding but some fragments are clear. I might…’ She fell silent. Memnon looked at her.

  ‘What?’

  ‘There is an uprising under way. It is flowing from the outer pilgrim areas. It… is not clear but there are indications that it is malefic in nature.’

  Memnon was still for a second and then nodded.

  ‘The threads draw tighter.’

  He took the pouch of dust from under his fur-lined cloak and gave a pinch to the wind. The dust blew, all but invisible in the dark and storm. Then the mist of dust caught the faint hint of light from the monastery high above and gleamed for a second. Memnon looked at the space it had occupied, even after it had gone. Then he was up and moving towards the mountain of buildings. Cinis followed, catching up with the Wanderer after only two strides. The auto-sled lurched after them on its wide tracks and skids. Geddon scrambled in its wake, panting with effort.

  They were walking through snow by the time they reached the rock wall at the root of the monastery. Here there were none of the shanty drifts that clung to the monastery’s southern and western edges. Some had once tried, but the ruins that Memnon and his companions had sheltered in were all that remained of that attempt. The wind howled over the mountains and beat against the northern walls where they met the rock that had been the root of the first cloisters and shrines. No one came here. Even in the season of sun it was a bare desolation.

  Memnon stopped as he reached the ice-covered cliff face. Above him, the bare rock rose for thirty metres before meeting the first stone of the great structure. Geddon reached him as he was moving along the wall. He had a small glow-globe in his hand, and held it close to the rock face as he moved. Under its light the ice and frost shone red and harsh white.

  ‘There is a way in?’ panted Geddon, almost collapsing against the rock face.

  ‘There is,’ said Memnon. ‘So much is forgotten, so much lost.’

  ‘You have been here before?’ asked Geddon.

  ‘I have,’ he said, pausing by a frost-caked section of rock. ‘Years ago. This place has been in my concerns and the concerns of our greater endeavours before.’

  He paused, his hand over a crack, and then thrust his gloved fingers into the jagged gap.

  ‘I know,’ said Geddon, ‘but I thought that the experiment with the Tenth Path was confined to the Crow Complex.’

  Memnon pulled at something out of sight and a section of rock hinged away from the cliff face. A narrow opening burrowed into the cliff beyond. Memnon held the red globe out, and its light caught the edges of dust-covered steps.

  ‘The Tenth Path were placed on this planet because it is… significant. The auguries have drawn us here many times. It is a crucible. Events – perhaps many, perhaps one – will occur here that contribute to the end we seek. That is why we were here before.’ He tapped the surface of the red sphere and it shone with bright, cold light which filled the rock-hewn passage. ‘That is why we are here now.’

  They climbed the steps, up into the underbelly of the great monastery above. Here, down in the stone root of the structure, the air was warm from the geothermal exchangers sunk into Dominicus Prime’s crust. Both Memnon and Geddon shed their furs, stowing them in the auto-sled and taking equipment from the machine’s storage compartments. It would remain inside the entrance to the passage. Only Cinis kept his heavy cloak, his head covered by the fur-lined hood even as it got warmer and warmer.

  After a while, rock gave way to crumbling blocks, and bricks skimmed with crumbling plaster. The gaudy faces of angels watched them pass, their features cracked and fading. The narrow stairs and passages branched and threaded through spaces that were thick with dust. Only the sound of their steps and the buzz and hiss of Geddon’s sensor arrays disturbed the silence. They began to pass through doors. Most were wooden, banded with metal, but some were inches-thick iron and locked with bolts driven by cogs and gears. But Memnon passed through every door, sometimes with a key, sometimes with a touch.

  ‘Master.’ Geddon broke the long silence as they approached a crumbling arch closed by a door of black wood beams and corroded steel. Memnon stopped.

  ‘What have you sensed?’ he asked.

  ‘Beyond this door, multiple heat and motion indicators consistent with a large number of people. From the vibrations in the floor I would guess that they are climbing a wide set of stairs from some other part of the sub-levels.’

  ‘This is the only way,’ he said. ‘We must pass.’

  ‘That’s not all,’ said Geddon, the auspex arrays on her skull fuming coolant gas from nostril-like openings. ‘Etheric indicators are rising.’ A set of bulbous, fluid-filled lenses extended from her back on a set of callipers, and dropped over her left eye. She raised her head and squinted at the door. The fluid in the lenses bubbled and became a luminous indigo.

  ‘There are Neverborn on the threshold,’ she said.

  Memnon looked at the doors for a second.

  ‘On the path of truth the pure and just must pass through the place of serpents,’ he whispered to himself. He turned to Cinis. The tall figure raised his hooded head.

  Memnon nodded.

  Cinis moved forward to the doors. A thick iron bar lay across them. Cinis raised his left arm. His fur cloak fell back from a tattooed muscle. The words and symbols branded and inked across the skin drained light from the air. He gripped the bar and lifted it free of its brackets. It clanged like a struck bell as it hit the floor. Cinis pushed the doors open. A paved landing between two flights of steep stairs lay beyond.

  Figures in red filled the steps and landing. Some of them stopped their descent as the door opened. A few held torches. Others were leading two figures held in webs of heavy chain. Iron bridles circled their skulls. Dried blood ran from black shards of metal hammered into their muscle. Signs had been cut into them. Their skin bulged, sinuous shapes moving beneath. Their hands had been severed and replaced with blades, hooks and lengths of spiked chain. Their heads jerked up as Cinis took a single step forwards.

  The red throng turned. Knives, blades and cleavers slid into hands. The chained figures hissed.

  The cloak dropped from Cinis’ shoulders. Beneath, he was bare to the waist. Words and symbols covered every inch of skin. Jagged marks overlapped with circles, pentacles and words written in languages dreamed by those that had thought they talked to angels. Some marks were scars or brands, others inked in grey pigment mixed from pyre-soot and holy water. Muscle boost and stimm injector plugs ran down his spine.

  The red figures charged. Bare feet slapped on stone. Cinis drew the sickle from his waist. Its blade was a wide crescent of black metal. He gripped its double-handed haft, and swung. Runes blazed with furnace heat along the cutting edge. The air screamed. Ghost light dragged in the sickle’s wake. The marks on Cinis’ arms and hands wept blood.

  The sickle cut the first pilgrim from hip to shoulder. Blood burned to smoke. Flesh and bone crumbled to ash. The charging pilgrims faltered, but Cinis was moving and cutting, his shape stuttering with speed as the sickle blade howled. The runes of its edge were white with heat, twisting into images of teeth, mouths and eyes. One of the chained figures yanked free of its handlers. The Neverborn creature within its flesh howled as it sensed the sickle’s thirst. More pilgrims were pouring down the stairs, but Cinis was a shadow-blur now, prayers of hate and repentance hissing from his lips.

  The other chained figure snapped free of its bonds. Its head burst through its iron bridle, jaw elongating, molten iron drooling from its teeth. It bounded forwards, yanking the handler gripping its last chain into a wall with a we
t crack. The sickle in Cinis’ hand twitched to meet the creature as it pounced. The daemon within the creature was fast and hungry, and driven by hate, but the blade in the sin-marked warrior’s hand was old and spiteful, and its hate was a white star to the creature’s candle. It met the creature’s neck, and cut the head free with a sigh. The skull fell, shedding burning flesh and twisted iron. A sound like metal on glass shivered in the air.

  Cinis did not pause. Within twenty heartbeats there was silence on the stairway. Cinis knelt amongst the remains. The sickle glowed in his grip. Whispers and shreds of laughter hissed in the air as Memnon walked from the door.

  ‘Of these sins that you have done, and of the corruption you bear, you are absolved,’ he said, placing his palm on Cinis’ bowed head. The warrior shivered. ‘In the name of Him on Terra.’

  He removed his hand and the sacred giant stood, fastening the sickle to his waist. The heat of its runes were fading as the daemon within its metal sank into its cold core. Memnon began to climb the steps. Cinis was about to follow when he noticed Geddon at his side. The hunched auspextra held out the warrior’s cloak.

  ‘Yours,’ she said. He looked at her for a second, then nodded once, and took the cloak. Geddon started after Memnon. Cinis draped the cloak over himself and followed.

  ‘Down!’ Gald hissed the word. Josef pressed against the alley wall. He was not feeling cold any more; he was not feeling much of anything. That was not good. Gald and the other arbitrator had slid into cover, their shotguns held tight. Agata dropped to one knee next to him. They were working their way down a twisting alley, keeping the stilt-legged creature in sight, trying to keep it downwind. It was not moving quickly, and its sight was not keen, but Josef had a nasty feeling it might have more senses than the mundane five.

  It paused fifty paces in front of them. Its body became still, its hooded head moving slowly from side to side.

  ‘Do you see that?’ whispered Agata. Josef glanced at her, and shook his head. She had put her helmet back on as they tracked the stilt-walker creature. With the augmented sight of her armour, she could see better than any of them. ‘There, just behind it.’ Josef looked, but could see nothing. The snow covering the buildings and ground gathered and reflected what sparse light there was, but the world was still shrouded in night.

  ‘Sir,’ hissed Gald, and handed Josef an infra-monocle on a headband. He pulled it on and the world became a gritty green. He looked at the creature, and saw what Agata had noticed. There was a narrow opening in the alley wall just behind where it was standing. The stilt-walker paused as it looked around at it, and bobbed its head, the movement awkward, as though it no longer had the bones to bow.

  ‘I see,’ whispered Josef.

  ‘It’s standing guard,’ said Agata.

  ‘Yes,’ said Josef.

  ‘What would they leave behind, but think worth guarding?’ whispered Agata.

  ‘If we want to find out, we are going to have to wait for it to move, or kill it.’ He watched as the creature’s head turned to and fro. ‘Assuming that it’s alone…’ he added.

  They had seen no other red pilgrims as they tracked the creature, but that did not mean they were not there.

  Gald shifted behind them. Josef looked around, about to snap at the proctor to get back into cover.

  ‘Stand by once I have its attention,’ said Gald, collapsing the stock on his shotgun, and cinching it tight across his chest. ‘Once it moves I don’t know how long I can give you, so make it count.’ He looked up, his face pale in the green twilight of Josef’s dark sight. ‘With your permission, sir,’ he added.

  Josef glanced back at the creature. Its head was still moving, back and forth, back and forth.

  ‘Go,’ he said, without looking round. He heard the low scrunch of Gald’s boots on the snow and then nothing. ‘As soon as it moves, we move,’ he said to Agata, and the remaining arbitrator. They did not reply. The snow began to fall more heavily.

  A sound of glass breaking cut the soft quiet. The stilt-walker’s head snapped up, and froze. Then the sound came again, louder and more insistent. The creature’s body pivoted in the direction of the disturbance. Its head thrust forwards and Josef thought that he saw a gleam of teeth inside the cowl. Then it hunched down, whatever limbs hidden beneath its wrappings folding and bunching. It sprang forwards, bounding in skittering leaps across the snow-covered ground. Josef thought he heard a panting hiss as it passed the shadows where they crouched, and then it was out of sight.

  He realised he was holding his breath.

  ‘Move,’ he said, forcing himself forwards across the open ground between them and the narrow opening the creature had been guarding. Agata was up and moving with him, the last arbitrator covering behind them. He reached the opening first, breath sawing in and out of his lungs. He stopped next to the wall beside it. Agata dropped into place behind him.

  ‘On your word,’ she said.

  God-Emperor, give me this strength, he thought.

  ‘Go,’ he said, and went around the corner into the waiting dark beyond.

  TWELVE

  The officer paused at the end of the rust-lined corridor. He cocked his head as though he had heard something. His pupils were pinpricks in his irises, even though the light was low. Ninkurra watched him through the eyes of the hawk perched in the pipes above him. Its wings furled, the bird was utterly still.

  She had watched the hatches between the bilge decks and the upper decks for two hours before she had found what she was looking for. The lower decks were where the order and hierarchy of command gave way to the wild disorder of deck gangs, and the feral void-born that haunted the dangerous and shunned reaches of a ship. The borderland between the two was sometimes hard to find, but there were always people from the higher levels of any society who wanted or needed something that only the lower places could provide. So she had waited, and after less time than she had expected, fortune had smiled on her.

  The man had staggered out of a rust-flecked hatch and clanged it behind him. Ninkurra could read the stimm and kalma use at a glance; that was useful, but it was his uniform that made her smile into the dark of her hiding place. He had removed his rank sash and helmet, but he had not wanted to go deep below decks without his sidearm, and that had marked him as clearly as if he had pinned his household commission papers to his forehead. That, and he still had his jacket crumpled under his arm. An ensign, she reckoned, maybe twenty-four, Solar. He was perfect for what she needed.

  ‘No one,’ he mumbled to himself, speech slurring. ‘No one… Got to keep it together, got to…’ He leant against the wall for a second and then flinched his hand back, stared at it and tried to brush the rust off with his other hand. ‘Watch in five hours…’ He swayed again, looking at his hands, blinking.

  Ninkurra held the threads of her connection to the psyber-hawks taught. Patience… Patience… It was the key to speed, but it had taken her a very long time to learn that lesson. It had taken the Black Ships and then the Seminaria Tenebrae for her to be able to see how speed, and power, and strength all came from one thing.

  The officer lowered his hands, swayed, and then turned back to step through the opening out of the corridor.

  The hawk came out of the dark with a single silent beat of wings. The man started a scream, mouth wide. The hawk’s claws sank into his neck as its beak darted forward and fastened on his tongue. Ninkurra sent a thought and the injectors implanted in the bird’s claws punched into his flesh. Sedatives dumped into his bloodstream. He twitched for a second and then dropped to the deck. The hawk let go of his tongue and withdrew its claw injectors. Sitting on the unconscious man’s chest, it flicked its wings and looked up. From the shadows Ninkurra watched it through its twin’s eyes.

  ‘It was a punishment,’ said Cleander. ‘Or supposed to be, at least.’ He looked up at Iaso. He could see his face smeared across her eye lenses. Her face was utterly still. ‘Could you, I don’t know, nod occasionally, or just make some expression?’


  ‘I am a medicae, not a gurning sycophant,’ she said. ‘You are talking. I am listening.’

  ‘I can’t think why I haven’t sought out conversations like this before,’ he muttered.

  ‘What was the alien race that implanted the technology in you?’

  He shook his head, looking at his hands resting on top of the green plastek sheet Iaso had draped over him. The seal-crest of his house winked back at him, lions and serpents worked in ruby and jet.

  ‘Not yet…’ he said quietly. ‘Let me get there.’

  Iaso nodded.

  ‘As you wish.’

  ‘It began with a species called the “seken”.’ He gave a grunt of laughter. ‘At least that’s what I called them, because that was the sound they made – like birds clicking to each other, seken, seken, seken… It was during the glory times, the high times of fortune. I was at my best and at my worst. I had taken the smallest ship of our fleet out, way out beyond the southern trail. And that’s where I found the seken. They looked like… like a hound had mated with a fish. They spent most of the time in multi-coloured cocoon suits. They had ships, very slow ships, no warp capability, but they were slow blooded and long lived. They didn’t mind spending ages moving between the bits of their domain. They were more curious than anything else. If they had ever seen a human it had been a long time ago. There was just about enough to understand between us that we could do a deal. So that’s what we did.

  ‘They liked some scrap from other worlds that I had no use for. I wanted… well, they had these stones, you see, carved with lines as fine as hair, green and red and blue, jewel-bright. And when you touched them they lit up. The lines glittered, they were just beautiful… but when you held them, when you wrapped your fingers around them, and closed your eyes…’ His fist closed on air, and his eyes shut for a moment. ‘You could see… wonderful things, and for a while the universe was perfect. No needles, no pills, no chemicals washing into your blood – clean and pure and beautiful…’