Wolfsbane

by Guy Haley

  The VI were a diminished force in every way. Even so, they remained potent enough to turn the tide of any battle. Dorn had made no secret that he would prefer that battle to be at Beta-Garmon.

  The Praetorian's last orders to the Wolf had turned to pleas. All went unanswered.

  Bypassing the Martian blockade, the fleet of the Rout flew with all engines burning to the edge of the Solar System, and to the jump point there.

  Eight

  The Domina's Guest

  Cawl came around with a headache so pronounced he seriously considered replacing the whole of his brain with an augmetic. The inside of his head felt scorched, a sensation he had not thought possible before experiencing it. His brain throbbed with the painful insistency of a scalded hand. His skull felt like an eggshell. He avoided moving for some time for fear it would break, and spill the matter that housed his soul over the table.

  He could not move much anyway. Metal straps at his ankles, waist, throat and wrists pinned him in place to a slatted interrogation bench held at twenty degrees off the vertical. His mind had its own fetters. Warding codes kept him from interacting with machinery. Each attempt to reach out was met by a wall of screeching binaric that did nothing for his pain. But his eyes were uncovered, and he could look around freely.

  The table was in a large room made small by clutter. Red light gave it a sanguinary, arboreal air, like a forest floor at sunset. Bunches of cabling hung down from the ceiling in liana-like profusion. Banks of machines lined every wall and more stood in badly placed islands like the trunks of giant trees.

  Walls of dials ticked with metronomic regularity. Cogitators on down time burbled self-diagnostic cant and made smug pronouncements as to their optimal functioning. A metre away from Cawl was a trio of servitors who oversaw the running of the room. He recognised the type. Only the brains were required for the task, but for whatever macabre reason their bodies had not been pruned back fully. They were heads, mounted like trophies on the wall, and even retained their faces as coverings of dead grey skin over their skulls. From neck caps their spinal columns and the disembodied remnants of circulatory systems plunged, rootlike, into glass cylinders of nutrient fluid.

  More cables ran over the floor in dangerous, foot-snagging twists, furthering the illusion of an electric forest. Beyond Cawl's immediate vicinity, the chamber opened up into an octagonal shaft. He supposed he must be in the private chambers of Domina Hester Aspertia Sigma-Sigma. The domicile was more machine shop than home, a garage for a mechanism that owed nothing to humanity. It therefore had little in the way of material comfort, but the shaft was dominated by a vast articulated cradle within which Cawl assumed the domina rested and was serviced when she wasn't scuttling around the connected stations of the Heptaligon. Only that detail made his location clear to him. He could otherwise have been anywhere.

  He was left alone for an age. One hour, twenty-two minutes, three seconds, according to this internal chronograph, though on the human scale it felt a lot longer than that. He was alone, unconnected from the noosphere. Without the constant background chatter of machinery and conjoined souls that made up the hinterlands of a tech-priest's consciousness, Cawl was left isolated and alone. It was cruel.

  Belisarius Cawl - Tech-Acolytum. He was therefore defiant when the domina finally came to interrogate him.

  She rushed into the room like a metal wind, sure-footedly evading all the many hazards her poor maintenance practices created. Her mechapeds made a menacing clatter on the harder parts of the floor. When they encountered softer ground, it was more sinister still, a padding rustling with predatory overtones. The relict animal parts of Cawl's brain filled him with terrors of fangs and multi-limbed things hurrying over leaf litter.

  She arrived over him, and her immobile, silver face seemed to wear a mocking smile. The flasks swinging from her chest clacked together. In the privacy of her rooms, she did not bother to cover them with her robes, giving Cawl an unwelcome sensation of intimacy.

  'I have reviewed your service records,' she said. 'You are old for a tech acolytum, of the age that suggests one of three possibilities - lack of enthusiasm, incompetence, or guile. It can't be the first, or you would not have bothered to learn what you evidently have. It can't be the second, or you would not have been able to do it. Logic dictates that it is the third.' A run of floating text scrolled through the air, displaying Cawl's gene-code, upgrade serials, images, preferences, psychological profile and other, precious secrets. 'Mars, Ryza, Antioc, Belacane, Verica VII, Trisolian,' she said. 'Six forge worlds in nineteen years. You have delayed promotion to a higher rank, although your command of the mysteries entitles you to a grade four above the one you possess. In each world, you have had many masters. I am your third dominus here. Did you plunder all their knowledge before moving on, I wonder? You have mine, I know,' she said with quiet menace. 'How have you managed to move so freely?'

  The war, Cawl did not say, and before that, the Great Crusade. Adepts travelled all over the galaxy on missions to recover old data, unlock the secrets of xenos technologies before condemning them to the pyre, minister to the machines of the colony fleets, build the

  technical infrastructures of conquered worlds, and a million other things. Personnel were always in short supply, and Cawl was very good at ingratiating himself. It had been remarkably easy to move about.

  He kept his silence about all that. Aspertia waited patiently for him to speak. He stared back dumbly at her mirror mask.

  'So that is the way you want to go. Your choice, tech acolytum.' Metal tendrils pushed themselves from the table, infiltrating his data and utility sockets. Their cold invasion made him tense.

  She leaned down, and asked her first question.

  'Cawl, what am I to do with you?' she said.

  'Let me go?' said Cawl.

  'Do not be glib with me,' she warned.

  A burst of agonising electrical force rushed through his nervous systems, both native and grafted. A high current like that, so many delicate connections, so much electronic arcanery nestled within flesh…

  It hurt a lot.

  Cawl screamed. Aspertia shut it off.

  'You have been caught in the crime of unsanctified modification. To break with ritual is to break with faith!' she scolded him. 'Remember the Sixteenth Lore.'

  'I think of little else, domina,' said Cawl.

  A second, painful jolt of electricity passed through his body, stinging hardest where metal met flesh.

  'Let the Motive Force castigate the heretek and the experimenter,' she said emotionlessly. 'I shall assess the full extent of your blasphemies.'

  A green, vector line holograph of his modified intelligence core popped into being. She swung her mirrored face to look upon it. 'You have been a very, very wayward boy,' she said. 'And yet there is artistry here. There is intellect. But do you have understanding? Do you comprehend the things you have done to yourself?'

  Cawl fought through the after-effects of the shock to nod his head. 'Of course I do,' he said angrily. 'Else how could I have done it?'

  Another mind-flaying burst of power seared through him. His jaws clenched. Had his tongue been in the wrong place, he would have bitten through it.

  While he spasmed upon the table, Aspertia Sigma-Sigma held up one of her many clawed, mechanical hands and turned it around. Haptic interfaces embedded in her metal fingers rotated the image of Cawl's heretekal device.

  'How did you come by this knowledge? From which data cache did you steal it?'

  Cawl could not reply. She glanced at him disinterestedly - she was far more interested in Cawl's work than the individual named Cawl - and disengaged the electrical pulse.

  'I didn't steal it!' spat Cawl. A rope of milky phlegm hung from the corner of his mouth. 'I worked it out myself.'

  She gave him a long, hard look. 'This work is original?' Her electronic voice was weirdly modulated.

  He nodded. There was no point in denying it.

  'Your crime is far wo
rse than I expected. You have contravened the Law of Divine Complexity,' she said. 'Improving that which, by its nature as knowledge gifted from the Machine-God, is unimprovable.' She shook her head slowly, with great and deliberate menace. 'Do you realise I could have you dropped in cleansing acid for this?' She looked at the graphic again. 'Why did you expose yourself by commandeering the automata?'

  'I could have just let the extractor crew die,' said Cawl. 'But I've always had an irksome heroic streak.'

  'If I said you perform unholy acts and should be destroyed, what would you say?'

  'I would say you are wrong.' In his frustration he tugged hard at his straps. 'I have done nothing wrong! I seek knowledge, and through it travel the path of the lore. Intellect to understanding to comprehension! I honour the Machine-God in all I do. I want to ascend the mysteries like any other person of our creed. The Quest for Knowledge is all that matters in the universe.'

  'But you perform experiments on yourself,' she said. 'Without consolation with the ancient teachings and without full understanding. This sort of work should only be undertaken after you have absorbed the knowledge necessary from the existing sources, and then only with sanction from your betters. How can you have the temerity to reinvent what is already known?'

  'It is because it is already known that I knew I could work it out.' he snarled.

  'You presume to be as good as the sages of the holy Age of Technology? A poor answer,' she said. She sounded almost regretful. 'No!' shrieked Cawl. Another bolt of power burned through him. 'This sort of cybermancy is above your position. You are not entitled to engage with these mysteries.'

  'There are many paths to knowledge,' panted Cawl. His heart palpitated worryingly. Muscles clenched and unclenched randomly inside him. He was in danger of soiling himself. When he looked inside his mind, his supplemental mind's eye display was a wall of aching static. 'Experimentation is one of them. I have done nothing against the Machine-God.'

  'Many would disagree,' said Hester Aspertia Sigma-Sigma. 'Most would say your actions are the basest form of heresy. You presume knowledge you do not have. You assume the wisdom of the ancients when you have no right. And yet…'

  Cawl screwed his eyes shut in anticipation of another bursa of pain.

  None came. He opened his eyes Aspertia was pondering the alterations to his intelligence core. 'There is genius in this work ergo, there is genius in you.' He let out an involuntary gasp, perhaps of relief, perhaps of fear unrealised. He was afraid, he wasn't ashamed to admit that.

  'Really?' he said, more to delay the next jolt of pain than any other reason.

  'Careful, Cawl,' warned the domina, wagging a metallic claw at him. 'Genius is rare, but genius is still only sentience, the third level of the mysteries. You have much yet to learn.'

  'Learning is all I have ever striven to do.'

  She withdrew and performed movements outside Cawl's sightline. The probes detached themselves from Cawl's limbs with so many metallic rasps, like mechanical leeches sated with knowledge and done with their feeding.

  The restraints followed, unclasping and beeping out deactivations. The domina muttered prayers for proper function as she released her prisoner.

  Cawl waited a moment before cautiously sitting. He felt disassociated from himself, and feared permanent damage either from his commandeering of the automata squadron or the punishment meted out by the domina, if not both.

  She twisted around ganglionic bundles of dangling cables, sure as a serpent in its burrow amid the tree roots. Big as she was, the room was large enough to hide her bulk from Cawl.

  'What will become of me?' he called out.

  'Of you?' she replied, her voice emanating from a vox-projector in the wall over the display of twitching gauges. She returned a moment later clasping a bundle to the canisters hanging from her front. 'I will let you live, on sufferance. You will serve me directly from now on as an officer of the Taghmata. You may continue your work. Indeed, I expect it.'

  'You do?' he said.

  'You said that there are many paths to knowledge, Belisarius Cawl,' she said. 'Why should we neglect any route, as long as it leads to enlightenment? The means do not matter. It is the end result, the comprehension of the Machine-God's purpose. That is the goal,'

  'You agree with me?' Cawl said in amazement. His hand dropped from massaging his wrist, his pain quite forgotten.

  'You might say that. I shall remain quiet on the matter. From this day forth, anything you discover, you will inform me of immediately. What you know, I will know.'

  'Knowledge is the price for my life,' he said glumly.

  She threw the bundle at Cawl. He caught it. Inside a plastek wrapper was a tech-priest's robes, embroidered with the domina's symbology and badges of a permanent member of the Mechanicum's military.

  'If you had spent a little more time safeguarding your position in the hierarchy, you would know that knowledge is the price for everything. You cannot simply opt out of Martian society, Cawl. You are a part of it, it is a part of you, for good or ill. You have broken the lore. I can protect you, for a price. Or you can perish.'

  'Then I will serve you,' he said.

  'Good,' she said. 'Good.' She rubbed together half a dozen manipulators. The flasks on her chest banged on the elbows. 'Congratulations on your ascension to the next rank. Your days of itinerancy are over, Adept Belisarius Cawl.'

  Belisarius Cawl - Tech-Acolytum.

  Nine

  The Ill-wyrd

  They said the Ruinstorm was abating.

  Abating was a relative term.

  The Vlka Fenryka took Hel's ride through the warp. Their ships shook in the eddies of dying cross currents. All of the Rout suffered black dreams when they slept, so much so that many of them quietly took to staying awake.

  The Rout remembered their youthful voyages upon Fends' seas. A source of good-natured debate on Fenris was whether winter sailing or summer sailing was worst. The voyage through the warp was a summer voyage. Towering waves, the sweltering heat, the deadly upheaval of land and water, all felt like it was going on outside the plasteel hulls of their refuges. Upon Fenris, the Rout were masters of their own destiny, their own will pitted against the best efforts of their planet to kill them. There a man's skill as much as his wyrd dictated whether or not he would die in the hot oceans of summer or upon the iron-hard ice of winter. Aboard a void ship they were at the mercy of others. They crouched in their smoky dens, chanting the cantrips they had learned upon ships of wood into echoing halls of plasteel. Every threshold gained new warding eyes and thickets of protective runes. Though only the Navigators could see the things clawing at the outside of the Geller fields, every thinking being on board those vessels could sense them.

  Corridors quaked. Hasty repairs were undone by violent shivers running the lengths of the ships. Metal shrieked with the stress. Subsonic noise from the straining warp engines stuttered through the fabric of vessels, worsening the atmosphere. The integrity generators struggled, and cabling feeding the fields gave out in showers of sparks, necessitating hurried replacement.

  The warp warned them that they were not welcome.

  Leman Russ had his fleet push on regardless.

  Three times during their voyage, Russ attempted to speak with Kva about what must be done upon Fenris. Every time, Kva rebuked his primarch.

  'Not now, my lord!' he would say. 'We sail the Sea of Souls. The Underverse is watching. We cannot speak of such things until we are safely home, where Morkai may guard our souls. Be patient.'

  Each time, Russ growled and stalked off, dissatisfied. He tried to speak with other Rune Priests but they backed away on seeing him coming, body language submissive but resolute. Even the kaerl-gothi avoided him, and so he took to his quarters, and there brooded upon what must be done, until he grew sick of the smell of them and their closeness, and went to the Wolfs Hall where he brooded some more.

  Leman Russ sat alone in the Wolf's Hall. He drank wine from a goblet, for the hard into
xication mjod gifted was unpalatable to him at that time. Wine could not dull his senses in the same pleasurable way, or raise his war-spirit for the murder-make, but there was a sophistication in good wine that he craved. The taste evoked lost summers and far-off lands. Wine was a sorrowful drink. It completed his mood.

  So he drank a drink that could not affect him, and idly named to himself the chemical compounds his keen hunters senses discerned in the liquid.

  Attempts to unpick his wyrd had failed. His runes lay in a confusing pattern across the floor. Dorn's anger on Terra still stung at him. Sanguinius withdrawn behaviour worried him. And Magnus' last words echoed daily in his ears. You are a sword in the wrong hands. You have severed an innocent neck.

  He stared around the hall. He had been duped once. In pursuing Horus he could be making the wrong decision again. Choosing the Fenrisian way of outright attack over Terran circumspection could be wrong. The trouble was, it wouldn't be clear until it was too late.

  He snorted. He was neither Terran nor Fenrisian. Sometimes, he didn't know what he was.

  He heard the quiet mechanisms of a lesser door working at the back of the hall. To his sharp ears the sound was as good as any herald. When the doors rolled back into the walls to reveal Kva, Russ was already staring unblinkingly at where he knew the Rune Priest would be.

  Few but Kva could stand Russ' piercing stare when he was in contemplative mood.

  The Rune Priest was not old by Legiones Astartes standards, but his disease made him appear so. He walked with obvious effort across the black stone floor, his armour amplifying his difficulty for others to see even as it aided him to move. He glanced at the scattered runes, careful not to crush them underfoot.