The Eye of Medusa

by David Guymer

  ‘She will fail,’ Harsid surmised.

  Stronos silently agreed with that assessment, triggering another outburst of laughter from the grizzly beast, Ymir.

  ‘Another would try to justify denying an inquisitor her authority. I like you Iron Hands. I find your stubbornness amusing.’

  ‘I am not representative,’ said Stronos. ‘And nor is Lydriik.’

  The Epistolary looked pained by that.

  ‘I have been led to understand as much,’ said Harsid, softly, then turned to the ironglass behind Stronos. He looked up, as if to appraise the etched depiction of the Raven Guard and his Iron Hands protector. ‘When I first saw Lydriik work his glass I was astonished. Your art is hardly what you are famed for.’

  ‘My brothers prize function,’ Lydriik answered softly, evidently rehearsing an argument from some ongoing philosophical debate. ‘To assume that we would accord art no value is to assume that art has no function. Ferrus Manus himself was said to have kept a small private collection.’

  The wraith-like captain smiled. And Stronos had thought his own brothers cold.

  ‘See how he tests me.’ Harsid turned to Stronos and there was no smile there now, nor any evidence that one had ever left its mark. ‘I hate to be tested, by him, by Ymir, even by Yazir. And I like Lydriik, Ymir and Yazir. I don’t like many people, Iron Hand. There are things on Thennos that many people would be astonished to see the Iron Hands take interest in. Believe me, the people I know aren’t easy to astonish.’ His voice rose in ardour as he spoke, without ever climbing above a whisper.

  ‘The Mechanicus have something at Locis Primus,’ said Lydriik, taking on his commander’s line. ‘Something that goes far beyond their license. With the complicity of the Iron Council or merely exploiting their dysfunction, it’s impossible to know.’

  ‘But we mean to find out,’ finished Harsid.

  ‘Thennos is a Medusan world in all but the banner it flies,’ Lydriik went on. ‘An uprising there is a black mark against the might of the Iron Hands. You might then wonder why the Iron Fathers make it so difficult for you to crush it.’

  ‘I warned you to keep away from my thoughts.’

  Lydriik shook his head and bared his hands. ‘I don’t steal this from you, brother. The inquisitor has other sources, as do I. I know what your orders are, and why you are here. You asked me what I was doing on Medusa – do you not think I would have done the same had I not already known?’

  Stronos had no answer and so did not give one. Ymir nodded in mock appreciation. ‘It’s like moving ice to a half degree above freezing and watching it melt, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not now, Ymir,’ Harsid hissed.

  ‘All I’m asking,’ said Lydriik, ‘is that you go before the Iron Council and see for yourself. I am not an Iron Father. I’ve not undertaken the trials or made pilgrimage to Mars. They won’t admit me. But you go under the aegis of Ancient Ares. His word opens many sealed doors.’

  ‘I do not expect to be heard.’

  ‘Nor do I. Just listen. Listen and make up your own mind.’

  Stronos’ bionic eye clicked, a physical crutch for a mental tumult that was unflinchingly organic. The Iron Council had not been the core of strength that they should have been these past centuries, and yet the forty-one Iron Fathers were the physical repository for tens of thousands of years of accumulated knowledge. They were due respect if not unwavering obedience, and would surely have disdained the latter had it been offered. But when had Lydriik ever asked him for a favour? When had outsiders last trod the Maze of Glass?

  ‘You will never trust.’

  That most quoted passage from the Scriptorum of Iron rose in his mind. The cycles of history demonstrated that it was a teaching worth reiterating, even if it was lacking in context, shorn of nuance to produce a truism with which there could be no confusion. Never­theless, Stronos found it open to interpretation. Recalling the fate of the primarch, he had always felt it was a rejoinder against placing too much faith in oneself.

  ‘Stronos!’

  Blurry reflections of a brute in spiked terminator armour approached through the glass walls from several directions at the same time as his name was spat into the conspiratorial huddle like a gas round. At the last moment, Stronos saw the genuine Iron Father Verrox clump through an intersection towards him, Ares and Raan following behind. Heat vented off the Clan Vurgaan Iron Father’s old, much-modified battleplate like a miasma. Ymir bared his teeth and Verrox glared back, an alpha beast enhanced by extensive mechanisation. In his altered Indomitus plate the Iron Father had half a metre in height over the Space Wolf and more than twice the breadth. His cheeks unzipped to reveal an extended row of belt-driven diamantite teeth. Ymir backed down.

  ‘I told you that Deathwatch duty would ruin you,’ Verrox said to Lydriik.

  ‘I remember. But I don’t see it that way,’ the Librarian returned.

  Verrox grunted. Harsid bowed his head to the Iron Father, and by example convinced Ymir to do the same. Accidents of birthplace notwithstanding, Lydriik was still one of the Iron Hands at his core and not designed to bow. Stronos noted, however, the soft­ening wetness of his eyes as he looked up and beheld Tubriik Ares for the first time.

  ‘Do we know you?’ asked Ares, parchment banderole with golden inscription fluttering over his powerful augmitters.

  ‘I… would remember, ancient one,’ Lydriik answered.

  Ares appeared satisfied by that answer and said nothing more.

  ‘Get them back to the surface,’ Verrox said to Lydriik, speaking over the two Deathwatch Space Marines. ‘I would hate to stumble on their armour in the maze fifty years from now.’

  ‘Now,’ said Captain Raan, his words apparently for Stronos rather than for Lydriik. ‘The conclave has already overrun by two hundred years. Do not expect it to be held one minute for us now.’

  II

  Melitan Yolanis peered out from behind her dataslate as the three Iron Hands and Ancient Ares neared the blast door at the end of the hallway. The Iron Hands slowed to a halt, disturbing the white vapour that seeped into the corridor through the cracks in the door. The one called Verrox stepped from the group and bared his armour’s spirit to the ident scanner. Melitan shivered as triangulating beams crisscrossed the Iron Father’s pallid scars and stapled flesh, and rinsed down his armour. The scanner deactivated as though the lasers had been sucked back into the emitters, and brown lights flashed as the door cracked across the diagonal and slid open.

  The Iron Hands entered together. None of them spoke.

  Melitan breathed out, the air misting in front of her face.

  ‘Why don’t we just go with them?’ Callun’s nervous expression hung from his face as though its maintenance was too much effort for him. His eyes were bloodshot, but the slur was gone from his voice and Melitan estimated that he would be fully sober, if a little rougher for the experience, in an hour or so. Another advantage of his subspecies’ extraordinary metabolism.

  ‘They’ll recognise me.’

  ‘Of course they won’t.’

  ‘Stronos will.’ She felt oddly certain of that. There were parts of Medusa where the red robes of the Cult Mechanicus were almost a field of invisibility, but Stronos was different. He would recognise her. She had seen it in his eyes. ‘And then what if they’d said no?’

  ‘I’d get over it. Look, this has been exciting, but I think it’s time to turn back. If someone finds us here we can just say we got lost. Another cautionary tale for the pilgrims.’ He pointed on down the corridor. Yellow-brown lighting flashed through the vapour cloud that billowed through the open door. ‘There’s no talking our way out if we get caught down there.’

  ‘You just assume I’ll get caught?’

  ‘It’s not just you though, is it?’

  She shook her head firmly. She needed Callun. His neural implants allowed him to reta
in complex machine schemata and logic pathways that were otherwise too precious to be removed from their stasis vaults: navigating the Maze of Glass struck her as no different. It was either that or pray for another serendipitous party of Iron Hands to latch onto.

  This, she had decided, was a test. The Voice of Mars and perhaps even, through him, the Omnissiah himself had set these trials for her that she might prove her worth as their servant. She shivered at the thought of an imminent end to the horrors of her current servitude. That her escape from the effluvium slums of Fabris Callivant had not worked out exactly as she or her parents had hoped was a niggling worry that she tried to ignore.

  The door slid shut behind Verrox’s party with a resounding clang, the echoes lingering in the ironglass long after the lights stopped flashing.

  ‘Come on,’ she said and hurried after the departed Iron Hands.

  The air grew colder as she moved down the corridor, the vapours disturbing her blackened lungs and making her want to cough. She muffled them with the loose sleeve of her robe, holding in her hiking ribs with the other arm. Black and white figures loomed out at her from the ironglass. Black and white. So much like the frescoes of her birthworld, as if she was still that little girl, hurrying home under the angel wings of ash-darkened heroes. The underground tremors and the play of light made some of them appear to move, to shift between panels. A trick of the light, she told herself, but remembering some of the pilgrims’ legends she quickened her step.

  Up close, the door was monstrous. It stretched away from her, machined metal, up above her head and way, way out to either side, as though she had come to infiltrate the fortress of a race of giants.

  ‘What now?’ Callun hissed.

  Melitan bit her lip. Positioning herself more or less where Verrox had been, she stood on tiptoes and spread her arms. Even if the gaps between head and arms and arms and legs had been filled with ceramite rather than cold gases then she would still not have equalled the Iron Father’s massiveness, but just as she closed her eyes to pray, the ident scanners blinked into life. She felt the beams of topaz against her eyelids, giving her a blood-gold imprint of her own venous web, and uttered her prayer.

  ‘See me. Judge me. Find me worthy.’

  The lasers vanished. There was a clunk. The warning lights began to flash and the doors once again slid wearily aside. Melitan opened her eyes, her whole body shivering as dirty grey vapour spilled across her, and let out a nervous laugh. This was a test, and she had passed. Callun numbly made the sign of the cog.

  ‘I suppose adepts must pass this way after all,’ he said.

  Searching through the cloud for his hand, she took it in hers. He returned the clammy pressure and let her pull him through.

  It was an elevator, but on a stupendous scale. Two Land Raiders could have fit inside easily, if it had been possible to manoeuvre one through the Maze of Glass. The walls were bare, riveted metal and looked thick. The floor and ceiling were practically mirror images of one another, reinforced with identically angled struts. Melitan found a control panel on one bulkhead and walked to it. It was a bleak slate, set proud of the bulkhead with an iron bolt in each corner and a colorimetric side display that blinked in sequence. It didn’t appear to be designed for human fingers. Melitan studied it, finding what appeared to be a plug-in port hidden behind the column of winking diodes. Her medicae-dendrite snaked out from under her robes, then slotted into the port.

  She moaned in connectivity. Her eyelids trembled as the dataverse gave up the authorisation key to command the doors. They slid shut. She imagined the warning lights in the corridor going out as another identical set began to flash inside the elevator, swiping the walls with yellow and brown. Shadows grew from the heavy struts, bent, stretched, and then faded again as the lighting strobed.

  Melitan threw out an arm for one of the reinforcement struts as the floor shuddered, her work-calloused palms finding easy grip on the equally rough metal. Her medicae-dendrite tendrilled back to her, slid under her robes and slotted into her spine. She was still holding Callun’s hand and she felt him squeeze her, as the elevator began to descend.

  She had once found a theoretical recreation of the lunar impact that had devastated ancient Medusa in the Broken Hand’s hololith archives. Though it had not been slowed down, its degraded playback had seemed to run on forever, simply because the bodies and distances involved were so huge.

  This felt the same.

  Impact shock continued to rumble through the bracing structures and along Melitan’s arms and legs long after the initial grinding crash.

  ‘Are we there yet?’ Callun whispered, hoarsely.

  Without any interference from the two enginseers the doors parted and the flash of lights again transferred to the corridor beyond.

  There was no ironglass here, just riveted metal. Snaking coils of cabling ran along the ceiling and through the walls, and both cast shadows. The warning lights stroked the semi-reflective surfaces with oranges and browns. Melitan and Callun clutched each other. Their breath mingled and fell out of the air between them as frost. Melitan gave his frost-crinkled robes a squeeze, then took a step away and turned towards the door.

  The clump of a boot made her freeze.

  Her throat tightened in guilt and fear, emitting a strangled gasp, and she watched, rooted to the decking, as the awesome bulk of an Iron Hands Space Marine strode past her without so much as a sideways glance. She put her hand over her throat and breathed out. ‘God of the Machine. Oh, God…’ The Space Marine’s footsteps boomed down the metal-walled passage. She could hear the hum of his armour, the chitter of semi-autonomous systems.

  Callun craned his neck over her shoulder. ‘That was close.’

  Shaking herself of her fright, Melitan fished in her robe’s deep pockets for the dataslate she had put there. She drew it out, clutched it to her breast as if it were a shell casing from the relic-Knight, Ubiquites, and mustered a smile. ‘Try to look as if we’ve a reason for being here.’

  ‘I suppose we know that adepts do come here.’

  Melitan followed the sinuous lines of cabling in the ceiling as she padded away from the elevator. ‘We go everywhere.’ A hazard sounder blared once and the elevator doors banged shut. The lights flashed out, plunging the corridor into darkness. She could feel Callun’s breath on the nape of her neck.

  ‘Do you have a plan?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course,’ she whispered back, glad that Callun couldn’t see her face. And then, after a moment’s hurried agonising, ‘We’ll follow the Iron Hand. He must be going somewhere.’

  She started forward, quietly, careful in the dark, her hand hovering along the wall, feeling every bolt, brace and join. After a few minutes her eyes began to adapt, and she realised that the dark was not quite as absolute as she had thought. A subliminal glow pervaded the passageway, fed by electrical sparks where the insulation coating the overhead cables had peeled, and by radiant emission from plasma coils and cells. Melitan was agog at the concentrated might of the machine here. It was a weight, drawing this place nearer to the Omnissiah, the way the mass of a black hole distorted the materium of spacetime.

  ‘I see the mind of the Machine God,’ Callun murmured in awe.

  ‘I can hear his thoughts,’ Melitan agreed, then frowned.

  The words she thought she could hear were spoken not in the divine forms of binharic, but in what sounded like a harsh Medusan dialect that vibrated through the piping. She waved Callun quiet, a hand gesture that told him to stand still, and pressed her ear to the wall. She hissed at the bite of cold metal on her face and made herself concentrate. The sounds came through more distinctly, but muffled still, and she couldn’t make out the words. It didn’t sound like any strain of Medusan she’d heard before.

  But at least they were going in the right direction.

  ‘For Ares, Callun.’

  ‘For Ares.’ />
  Walking with more confidence, reaching for the reassurance of the wall only every few paces, she came to a junction, only to spring back as another pair of Iron Hands marched past. They were escorted by a Helfather. Melitan stumbled into the wall and tried to do anything but stare. The fascination she had felt in the safety of the starport felt inimical to the both of them now. Here, in the heart of the Helfather’s subterranean domain, she felt her knees weaken before the leaden horror that crossed her path.

  Callun stuffed his hand in his mouth and screamed into it. ‘What was that?’ he said, after the three warriors were well out of sight. ‘It felt like–’

  ‘I know,’ said Melitan.

  She looked down at her dataslate as if for guidance. All of a sudden, she decided that Callun had been right – being here wasn’t such a good idea after all. Too late for that now.

  She focused on how exactly she intended to get an audience with Nicco Palpus and get out of here. She doubted she could very well just walk in on the Iron Council mid-session and take him to one side. She peered down the corridor in the direction taken by the two Iron Hands and their escort. If she could find the council chamber, perhaps she could find somewhere to wait until it was over, then waylay the logi-legatus as he left. A noise echoed down the corridor as she considered, but she thought nothing of it. It was just the Iron Hands, their footsteps distorted by the metalwork making it sound as if there were more of them than just three.

  She turned to Callun to explain her thinking just as the other enginseer tugged on her robes. His wide eyes pointed her back in the direction she had just turned from.

  A maniple of skitarii encased in ceremonial gold armour marched back down the corridor towards them. Their long cloaks swept along the floor. Their tall helmets were plumed with electronic fibres that fizzed as they brushed the ceiling.

  ‘What are skitarii doing here?’ Callun hissed.

  Saying nothing, Melitan endeavoured to look inconspicuous examining a section of bundle cabling. She saw the maniple alpha point at her. His eyes were an actinic blue inside his helmet exoskeleton.