by Dan Abnett
And so then there had been the suicide mission to awaken the Kings themselves, the riots and the punitive lockdowns, and the sabotage and desertions and violent, escalating disobedience. By the time the Headstone had descended to the ground the work of the graveyard had ground to a halt as the hands of the loyal Imperials were filled with simply trying to keep their former charges locked up and stamped down. The camp was a trashed shambles, the Adeptus fortifications had battened down their hatches and evacuated most of their personnel, and hunting escapees through the graveyard had become a full-time task for the handful of skitarii the shrine had been allocated. The kills Tey had witnessed that morning were nowhere near the first, and nobody expected them to be the last.
Tey fancied that even had he known none of this, he could have deduced much of it from Adalbrect’s face. The preacher had not been at his best when they first met, lurching out of the night with the shot-off Flensing-Wheel spike still in his shoulder, but he looked worse now.
Adalbrect sat in his little chamber at the back of the Missionaria cloister, in a hot gloom behind closed shutters. The floor was a litter of his possessions: not one square metre of the camp had been untouched as order had disintegrated, and the jumble around them showed little sign of the quasi-military discipline that most Missionaria clerics displayed. The preacher’s desk had been smashed in the last wave of rioting and he had been scribbling notes on a paper held down on the back of a broken large-format data-slate that he had balanced across his knees.
Adalbrect’s face was stretched and haggard from exhaustion and fasting, and puffy from poor sleep. He was not old, but he stooped over his makeshift writing-table like a long-faced gargoyle hunching out over the corner of a hive tower or off a spaceship prow. He made no effort to stand or salute when Tey entered. He closed his eyes for a moment, then laid down his stylus and stiffly placed the slate by his feet.
(A subprocess of Tey’s normal vigilance routines snapped a pict of the notepaper in the half-second that it was exposed, reversed it to see the writing properly and began analysing his notes, cross-referencing it for context with the visual log the magos’s brain had been keeping since they had arrived at the camp and looking for correspondences with whatever other documents had been visible when Tey had glanced about the room upon entry. Tey had not deliberately commanded this, nor was he consciously aware of it. He just knew that all of it – picts, transcripts, analysis, context and conjecture – would be there for him the instant he needed it. And if he never needed it, it would live in Barrel’s data-coils forever.)
There was no second seat. That was fine. Below the base of his neck there was no longer any part of Galhoulin Tey that was organic. He locked his limbs in a stable position and waited to see if Adalbrect would greet him.
‘You’re the one who was watching,’ the evangelist said at last. His voice was smooth and well-trained, but low and flat. ‘I saw you. The night that it…’ he waved a hand listlessly, ‘the night that we went into the graveyard. I got cut.’
‘Yes,’ Tey said, and stopped talking again. There was plenty he wished to know from the man, but questions could wait. He was interested to see what he could learn from just watching the way Adalbrect started a conversation. Or didn’t.
‘We thought it was you they were after,’ the man said eventually. ‘I think. You were all we had talked about for a while. We had only had junior coggers…’ His voice trailed off and he stared at the floor between his feet. ‘Pardon, magos. That was disrespectful. There had… We had met the members of your priesthood responsible for the routines of your graveyard, but no one from a high rank approaching…’ He glanced up and Tey watched the priest glance at his sternum, shoulder, hood, wrists, robe-hem, all the places where a regular magos would have markers denoting rank and station. Finding no help, Adalbrect glanced past him looking for followers. No retinue behind Tey apart from Barrel.
‘…uh, yours. I suppose you were on our minds. We were thinking that you would take command. Change things. You’re the, the machine priest? Is that right?’
‘That is an Imperial Gothic idiom, originating outside the Mechanicus,’ Tey said. The right side of his vision flared with associative threads on Imperial Gothic dialects, conceptual and linguistic analyses of spoken Gothic to formal to High to pure machine-cant in all its forms, theses on linguistic/cognitive/cultural shaping of the Mechanicus culture and religion and its classic Imperial counterparts, and more. They fizzed and jostled and tried to push their way into his primary thought-processes. As so often, it took conscious self-control to avoid leaving the conversation to a placeholder process and letting his alpha-mind go chasing off among the endless, wonderful data-streams.
‘“Magos Parallact” is a formal designation of mine that is appropriate for your use,’ he went on. ‘It is a position outside our priesthood’s formal hierarchy. You need not concern yourself with details of rank.’
Adalbrect nodded and let his head drop again. Tey’s brief distraction had not lasted long enough for an observer, especially an unmodified one, to notice any gap in the conversation. For this one, even focusing on speaking seemed to be an effort.
‘But I don’t think they were, were they? Don’t think that now.’ Adalbrect’s voice seemed to be floating slowly up from inside him, like bleached, dead driftwood rising through dark water. ‘We keep finding new evidence. They were organised. They were planning these things…’ That little wave of the hand again.
‘They were planning these things well before any word of my arrival reached them,’ said Tey, who had judged it time to prod the man along a little. That, and he wanted to round off the conversational thread. Leaving it open was irritating his sense of order. ‘If anything, it seems to have been my arrival that forced their hand before their preparations were complete. There are all manner of operational flaws to suggest that this leader of theirs…’
‘Kovind Shek was his name.’
‘…this Kovind Shek, then,’ said Tey, who had known that and had the man’s picture and dossier unspooling in front of him as he spoke, ‘was unable to carry out his final mission to the level that his other operations suggest he was capable of.’
That got a reaction. Adalbrect’s face twisted as though Tey had slid a blade into him.
‘He was pretty capable, wasn’t he?’
‘You had some contact with Kovind Shek. He had been appointed to positions of trust within your congregation. What was your assessment of him when you worked together?’
It was a pitiless question. He was asking Adalbrect to damn himself just a little bit further, to explain in his own words just how successfully Shek had fooled and defeated him.
He found himself admiring the way the preacher didn’t miss a beat.
‘My assessment at the time was that he was… earnest. Like all the Asheki I’ve known. Close, taciturn, slow to speak. Thinking all the time. You know…’ Adalbrect imitated the pursing and tightening of the lips that was a favourite local mannerism when they were keeping their own counsel on something. Tey, whose own face was incapable of expression, nodded anyway.
‘He was very convincing,’ Adalbrect went on. ‘However this sounds to you, I know I wasn’t the only one taken in. Shek got warrants of trust from all of us. He really seemed to be what he made himself out to be. An Asheki war displacee who had kept himself free of the Archenemy’s tech-cults and who wanted to purge his world and rebuild it under the aquila.’
‘Was he a senior member of your congregation? What were his religious practices?’
Adalbrect shrugged, then winced again. Evidently the wound to his shoulder was not fully knitted.
‘He didn’t have any particular religious rank,’ he said. ‘He was observant. He was at every one of the services I preached to the labour crews. I suppose now that he was being careful to keep his cover shored up. He knew the call-and-response routines when the congregation was testifying or
self-denouncing. He was… not noticeably pious, and not a conspicuous troublemaker. He blended in.’
‘Just a man among many.’
‘A man among many. He was a hard worker but that wasn’t my remit. I attend to the spiritual rebuilding of Ashek, not the physical.’ Adalbrect’s voice showed a quick flare of defiant pride when he said that. Tey was oddly glad to hear it.
‘Shek’s close associates? The ones using the names Jopell and Psinter?’
‘Oh, were they false names? I don’t have much to tell you. I know they were the ringleaders. That’s all. You want to talk to the Administratum overseers for that.’ He gave a bitter chuckle. ‘The ones that have been left after the last riots burned the logistics hubs.’
‘You are, however, attuned to the morale and general tenor of the labour camps,’ Tey said. ‘Your vocation centres on knowing your congregation. Are these riots calculated and directed, as the continued infiltrations into the graveyard are?’
Adalbrect shook his head. For the second time that conversation, a trace of animation crept back into him.
‘My assessment? They’re spontaneous. The pattern while the active conspirators were organising disturbances to cover themselves was pretty apparent with hindsight and these riots don’t match it. They’re still angry, and they know that Shek is dead so they feel they’re in free fall with nothing to lose, and they’re scared that something is still going to happen to their Kings.’
‘Their Kings,’ echoed Tey.
‘Their Kings.’
‘Plural. Interesting.’
‘Definitely plural. The two I met in the graveyard were very definitely using the plural. Are you thinking about one of them in the singular?’
‘I have been thinking about all of them. Remind me about your encounter in the graveyard. Work to be commended, by the way. You acquitted yourself valiantly. Any number of your colleagues would not have survived the encounter at all.’
‘They made me angry.’
‘Your after-action report didn’t allude to your emotional state, in fact. But I can understand it.’
‘“Eagle-licker” was what they called me.’
‘The wrong choice of insult, it turned out,’ Tey said.
Adalbrect was still staring at the floor, remembering.
‘Told me that they listened to their Kings, not the aquila.’
‘That was the night the Kings found their voices. That was what they told you, correct?’
‘Correct,’ Adalbrect said. ‘Definitely Kings. Plural. Are you wondering why the Inheritor King was the only one not to speak?’
Tey did not reply, but he tilted his head toward his left shoulder as he stared at Adalbrect – a quirk of body language his brain remembered from his full-organic days.
‘It’s the Inheritor King you’re here to learn about. It must be. It’s the only one that’s in remotely working shape because it’s the only one that was never fully commissioned in the first place. They’d only just finished building it and started it rolling north when the Titans burned High Hive. It never saw battle. The others are all wrecks. That has to be what you’re here for, doesn’t it?’
Adalbrect shook his head.
‘Don’t mind me. I’m not exactly a threat to anyone. Not even the other Adeptus are really listening to my sermons any more, I don’t think. We’re just going through the motions until one of those senseless riots finishes the rest of us off. Then they’ll all come knocking at your graveyard gates. They’ll be your problem then. You can tell those enginseers in there that I tried to warn them.’
‘You have that little faith in the Administratum adepts still here? The Munitorum overseers?’
Adalbrect gave a humourless deaths-head grin.
‘They’ve stopped begging for more armsmen to keep this lot suppressed – the front’s moved on, the next stage of the war is sucking all the armed soldiery off this planet faster than they can fill out the requisitions to replace any of it. And the ones who haven’t been able to get out already have all started begging for transfers away from this…’ another nerveless wave of the hand ‘…this place. They won’t get moved. Nobody wants anyone associated with this benighted mess anywhere near them, and they won’t throw good resources after bad trying to prop it back up and get it working again. They’re going to let us all rot in the desert along with the machines we were trying to finish off for them.’
The grin faded. The bloodshot eyes looked up into Tey’s face. Adalbrect picked up his little knee-desk again. The notes he had been writing were the opening of an Ecclesiarchy psalm of contrition, over and over again, copied out with joyless, methodical precision.
‘We’re going to die here. I’m just the one who’s made his peace with it.’
XVII
‘May I ask what you learned out at the labour camp, magos?’
Tey heard Ajji’s question but he did not respond, at first. He was standing next to Barrel where one of the wider pathways debouched into the circle of clear space around the lower slopes of the Inheritor King. His view of it was what Asphodel had intended as an Imperial’s last ever view of it, or so he imagined: the point of the giant ramming-prow almost overhead, the great bastions looming over him as though they were about to topple and crush him. Tey could barely imagine what having the thing actually bearing down on him would be like. Even inert, the sheer sense of mass and might it gave off seemed to bend everything else in his vision around it.
He had disembarked from the Munitorum carrier-six at the graveyard perimeter and taken a second to inload the previous day’s activity logs from the skitarius that had met him and escorted him in. It had been a quiet day, and Tey had decided to come and see the Inheritor King on foot. He had even felt confident enough to entrust the business of walking to an automated process linked to his own eyes and Barrel’s, while Tey himself tuned out from the physical and meditated in the waterfall of data that his archive banks were pouring over him.
Droplets of it were still in his vision now. An icon-stack of files about the Inheritor King sat beneath the crimson security rune that Archmagos Gurzell had locked into his data mosaic. Tey watched it rotate in his vision, and thought his thoughts.
Until Ajji hailed him again, and the subsystems that handled his local environment pointed out that she was using a physical vocalisation that was coming from nearby. In fact, she was standing just behind him.
Transmechanic Ajji was broad and heavy of build, her green-bordered red gown cinched in to her body by metal-weave sashes holding data-arks and router phylacteries. Befitting her station at the shrine – she was higher in her order’s mysteries than Daprokk was in his – she had a retinue, albeit only a single servitor. It walked directly behind her carrying a graphene transceiver antenna aloft like a palm leaf, keeping Ajji’s personal noetics linked to the heart of the graveyard manifold.
Tey had far more senses than the human five, and he could see the electromagnetic shadows ghosting around Ajji’s body and read her link to the relay behind her. Her cortical augmetics were running at elevated rates and the metabolic governors for her organic body were drawing more physical and processing power than was usual for such systems. The signs pointed to excitement, fear, or angry displeasure. Probably the latter.
‘I restate my question, magos, for lack of a response from you.’
Definitely the latter. Tey made the sign of the cog and canted a complicated self-referencing salutation and blessing that was specific to the transmechanics’ cult, but it failed to appease.
‘Affairs are far from in order here, magos. We retain control in the graveyard by a slimmer margin than I think you realise. We had thought that someone of your reputation and credentials would increase that margin rather than give us another unpredictable element to work with.’
Certain rarefied circles of the Adeptus Mechanicus delighted in unpredictability. It meant that s
omething was not yet fully understood, and that meant the challenge of uncovering or reclaiming more knowledge. Tey felt it best not to make that observation aloud. Ajji had very clearly not meant it as a compliment.
‘Free fall,’ he said instead, slightly surprising himself. The phrase had been Adalbrect’s. They’re in free fall with nothing to lose. He hadn’t given it any great weight at the time, but the records of that whole interview had been marinating in his parallel processors and when he brought them into his conscious mind again, the memories suddenly as fresh as though he had just walked out of the preacher’s room, there it was at the centre of the data web.
Ajji, unimpressed, snapped a single piece of code at him: the most basic protocol marker for an ‘awaiting data status’.
‘A remark from the Missionaria Galaxia preacher there, that informs your own about order and control,’ he said. ‘He describes the Asheki as being in free fall. They have abandoned any rational framework of thought or behaviour that might be used to influence them. The Administratum and Munitorum are keeping themselves from being overwhelmed by superior arms and main force, but Preacher Adalbrect does not seem to expect matters to do anything but deteriorate. His impression is that this place has become an embarrassment. He implied to me that the reconstruction authorities will deal with the graveyard by simply failing to reinforce or resupply us. The graveyard and its work camp are not close to self-sufficient. A month with no resupply drops would do the job, I imagine.’
‘They lack discipline and any sense of higher purpose,’ Ajji said with what sounded almost like satisfaction. ‘The Adeptus Mechanicus had bid for a workforce composed entirely of our own servants. Had we been resolute on that this would have been different.’
‘Had we been resolute we would have united the other Adeptae against us, made no ground at all on the matter and the graveyard would have been in the sole hands of the Administratum. Who knows what the bureaucrats and the woe machines would have made of one another?’