by Dan Abnett
But it was still there. There was room for hope, and room for doubt.
Tey had not been sent to Ashek so that he could report back about hopes and doubts.
In the locked bolthole that the archmagos’s inload had created in his mind, that thought-process continued to linger and buzz, like a bone-deep itch or the deep creak of a joint.
Tey had to know.
A moment later he came back to himself, standing in the dark among the Inheritor King’s treads.
He had to know.
Tey woke his noetics and sent a command sleeting away through the graveyard’s manifold for his servo-skulls to come and join him. Somewhere along the great mass of the Inheritor King there was bound to be somewhere he could get inside.
He walked away through the dimness, with Barrel’s splayed feet shuffling up the dust and leaving it hanging in their wake.
XIX
For most of his long walk through the chambers and passages of the Inheritor King, Galhoulin Tey moved in reverie. The most superficial layers of his consciousness stayed aware of his surroundings, navigating his feet and turning his head, adjusting the sensitivity of his eyes, marshalling the servo-skulls. And that awareness filtered through into his meditations, as he had fully intended it should. A stately orbit of construct-templates and blueprints wheeled and tumbled through his thoughts, the darker shades of memory and inload meshing into and then parting from the brighter forms that were the real-time observations of his skulls as they swooped and flitted around him.
He had entered the King in one of the rearmost carriage-segments, given over mostly to the machinery that supported the rear-facing gun-decks. Little of it was operational. The Inheritor King had still been no more than two-thirds built when Asphodel had had to roll it out of its forge-hive, burning through his workforce mercilessly to get the plasma furnace operational and the motor assemblies running. He was driving the beast northwards like a mountain riding an earthquake even as the Legio was cutting down through the atmosphere on the daring lifter strike that wrecked the hellish Chaos-hives that the Heritor had made his capital. His hereteks had been frantically cobbling its combat systems together even as they had rolled up the southern canyons, and when that thought crossed Tey’s mind his vision obligingly sorted what he was seeing into layers: the surgically-precise lines of the original forge-worked hull, then the progressively cruder and hastier jury-rigs as the King had neared the battle lines and Asphodel’s technicians had had to do ever more with ever less.
Tey walked along the companionways past craters where finished weapon mounts had been blown right out of the hull when the Mershan and Pragar regiments had finally trapped and besieged the King. He could see crude weld-scarring in the lower galleries where the crew had bodged together pintle mounts for whatever weapons they had managed to salvage from their home hive or loot from the Imperial wrecks they had found or made along the way. Behind the gun-decks were the winch-lifts and cavernous ammunition magazines that had never been filled. The magazine chambers were still littered with bedding, empty ration packs and discarded clothing. Little of it matched anything that had been issued to the work crews here at the graveyard – Tey guessed that the chambers had been filled with crew, or troops, or opportunistic forge-labourers eager to claim a berth that would take them out from under the descending Imperial Titans.
The rear carriage was roofed over with rough, heavy slabs of metal and plascrete. Had the King been finished this would have been a nest of great artillery pieces, sending macro-shells arcing forward over the King’s back and into its path to plough up any enemy resistance. As his skulls skimmed low over the deck Tey fed himself their auspex data and saw how the floors were sprung to take the battering of recoil, and honeycombed with shafts for the suspensors that would have steadied the cannon as they fired. The improvised roofing that had been fixed over the carriage in their place had apparently been recycled from the hive-slope fortifications as Asphodel’s crews tore the forge down around them.
Again he saw his surroundings in layers: the shadowy ruin he stood in, lit dimly by the lights of the Headstone hanging in the sky and the red and blue eyelights of his skulls. Over that came the blueprint his systems were reverse-engineering from what they were seeing, a rippling layer of construction diagrams, metallurgical analyses, circuitry tracks. And over that came the grainy, jolting images from the optics of the skitarii commandos who had been the first to drop into through the breach after the Unguis Argenta’s monstrous close-combat arm had peeled the corner of the carriage open. In amongst the gaudy battleplate and canted war cries Tey could make out the ash-grey uniforms of the Pragar infantry and human voices shouting for the Emperor’s attention. They seemed to have met little resistance, at this breach at least. Tey turned in place, watching a brutal close-quarters battle that had ended a year before he had even seen the light from Ashek’s star. Racing parallel processes deep beneath his conscious mind assembled the optical feeds into a real-time reconstruction, figures scrambling and tumbling around him, flickering out here and there where there was no record of where someone had moved. Dampers in his hearing muted the blast of grenades down to soft clangs and thumps and muffled the screams and the bellows.
From the defenders there was almost no sound at all, or so they thought. His files recorded no oaths or battle-cries characteristic of the Heritor’s foot soldiers. He tilted some of his audio settings a little to hear the enemy clearer, but there was not much to be had. Hoarse shouts in the southern Asheki dialects, orders, encouragement to hold fast, rapidly turning to crude biological obscenities and then simply wordless cries as the skitarii did their work.
But there was something else. Tey froze the battle footage into a tableau and walked through it, eyelights flickering in his platinum-steel face, bringing his auditory processes into conscious focus to strip out the sounds of battle.
The Inheritor King’s defenders had tactical halters over their heads and around their chests, hung with las-clips, combat blades and blasphemous charms: images of Asphodel’s rune-brand or machine-components that the Heritor had personally touched or blessed. And high on each left shoulder rode a heavy, blocky vox-caster.
Tey prowled among the frozen ghosts of his reconstruction, and stood in the spot each skitarius had occupied at that split second so he could experience the sound as they had. Then he dismissed the image overlay and stood amongst the wreckage that that battle had left. The woman who had been snarling into a skitarius’s crosshairs flickered out and Tey could see the pitted stain on the bulkhead that that skitarius’s cannon had made of her a moment later. The two lanky men with grey hair hanging in their eyes, caught in the middle of a dive to escape a Pragar flame trooper, vanished and Tey could see the charring across the metal deck where the flames had caught them.
He dismissed all the video, muted the analytical feeds, stripped out the audio until he had the strand of the recording he needed. The sound that had been buzzing out of the enemy troops’ vox-casters. The sound he recognised from the night of the partisans’ raid.
The chatter.
It would be hours yet before he realised that he wasn’t just hearing it in his recording.
XX
The passageways between the carriage-segments (sleeved in interlocking armour segments whose design and interplay were quiet little marvels) brought Tey into the next chamber of the King, even less finished than the gun-decks, a cavernous space sliced this way and that with grey support struts veined with cables. Tey’s own eyes saw nothing but pitch blackness, shaded every now and again with a tiny, distant spark as one of his skulls darted across his field of vision, somewhere high and distant, but he felt the space take shape around him as his skulls mapped the struts and girders, the scaffolds where the assembly of the interior decks had begun, the litter of trash on the floor.
All old, all coated with grit, fragile with decomposition although the air was too dry for rot. No new
litter, no disturbance to what was already here when the King had fallen. Tey knew that the cutting crews had been sent to the Hammerstone Kings. Had none of the crews to be sent in here made a start on their work? Not even to disable the mechanisms, cut the cables, sever the treads? Had the Asheki partisans infiltrated the graveyard’s workforce so totally?
He stood in the darkness for a time, letting his deep mind continue to sort through the structure around him while he mulled over the interview with Adalbrect, and the camp overseer’s logs, and the maps of cutting-crew fatalities. Eventually, with the seal-rune fizzing in his mind like limestone in acid, he moved on.
XXI
Tey passed through the central carriage without stopping. Barrel kept pace with him as always, but his skulls skipped above and below him, auspexes prodding at the machinery around them. Tey felt their senses niggling at the edges of his own as their input streamed in through his compilers. Flickering lines shaped themselves in his mind as they traced the routes of optical circuits. The superconductor stanchions felt heavy and slick in the auspex fields; the folded piezo-electric layers around the furnace core scratched on his senses like sacking and sand.
The reactor seemed unexceptional. Tey had inloaded the Ashek Illuminata from the Mechanicus war-temple they had passed in orbit, and so now he knew in detail which designs the Asheki used and how they applied them. The construction that his skulls’ senses perceived in the nested decks above him settled comfortably into that knowledge – here and there came little pushes against Tey’s mind as one feature or another showed a change, modifications Asphodel had made to the machine his conquered forges had already been working on. The oddnesses hung around him with the faint nagging sensation of a picture hanging crooked in the corner of vision, but nothing about them triggered any alarm and he let the knowledge sink into his deeper mind, for his beta- and gamma-processes to contemplate while he moved on.
The forepart of the prow-carriage was walled off at every level but for one access point, a great processional gate whose chamber climbed up through four decks. There was still a little light here – not all of the self-contained lamps in the walls around and above him had been destroyed in the final storming of the King, and Tey could see the four galleries where the decks behind him finished and faced off against the great carved wall in front.
Tey spent a moment trying to amuse himself by cataloguing all the horrific impracticalities of the design. A choke-point for evacuation of the prow. An unsealable channel for fire, contaminants, invaders. A gap in the reinforcing structure. He was sure he would find more as he peeled away the layers. But Asphodel did not just build war machines. He built horrors, artworks, avatars and shrines to his own twisted genius. And the Inheritor King, the engine that was to have been his personal fortress and chariot, he had built to be the grandest of all.
The doorway to the King’s prow and bridge stretched up nine metres in front of Tey, a giant ogive arch that seemed to be cast from a single bifurcating slab of adamantised steel. It was sheer, undecorated, and not because there had been no time: Asphodel’s artisans had had the chance to ornament the towering bulkhead wall it was set in, and had made the most of it. The archway slab was there to flaunt its mass and cow the thralls who had been brought into its shadow to serve in the Heritor’s sanctum.
The doors themselves were wedged back at an ugly angle. In their centre was a blistered crater-scar from where the skitarii’s ram had slammed into the portals, welded itself in place, seized control of the door’s systems through its own noetics and thrown the magnetic locks open. Once the doors had parted the ram had immolated itself rather than risk carrying any taint of enemy code on with it. Tey stopped in front of the doors and said a small, sombre prayer for the sacrifice of its machine-spirit while his skulls swept out to either side, mapping the friezes on the walls.
He had thought that the doors were covered in carvings, as the wall around them was, but the realisation of what he was looking at arrived at the same time as the information from the logs he had inloaded days before. The skeletal forms that seemed to swim out of the metal in front of him were not carvings. They were human bones, from bodies that had been arranged up and down the length of the door until they covered it and melted into the metal.
Tey shot a query-line down into where his subprocesses were churning through his data files on the Inheritor King, but there was no firm record on whether the corpses were willing victims – it was a known tradition of Asphodel’s to sacrifice a clutch of his own enginseers once a major work was under way, to consecrate it – or enemies who had resisted his takeover of the southern forges. Tey wondered how he might go about finding out, his auxiliary mind festooning the edges of his thoughts with threads about verispex recovery procedures, Biologis lore texts, forensic tracts on human sacrifice practices along the segmentum’s northern border lines, ethnographic data on skeletal patterns of southern Ashek that might hold a clue.
Data patterns began to jump and cohere in his foremind and he realised he had already started running the matching processes on the tangle of bones before him against his dossiers of ceremonial wound patterns. With an irritable flick of a thought he shoved the process down his priority list and brought his skulls in and down to join him.
Tey stepped between the breached doors and started up the staircase to the King’s command decks, picking his slender metal feet around the divots the skitarii’s meltas had left in the steps. The ceiling over the stairs was ribbed and vaulted, in a pattern that Tey could see the basic echoes of in the unfinished passages he had passed through. The designs that had covered the outer wall were repeated here, in finer detail, in gold and glass instead of perspex and pig-iron.
Something about those designs was nagging at Tey. He switched his attention for a moment to the analytics that were processing the input from his skulls’ eyes, but all he saw was calm dataspace around the cool turquoise information flow describing shapes, composition, proportion, pattern repetition.
There was still something out of place. Something missing. When Tey weighed up the analytical feeds the feeling was akin to lifting a container and finding it lighter than it should have been. He shifted some processing power from his foremind to reinforce the filters, tightened their parameters and kept walking. He was dimly aware of the soft metallic sounds coming from within the folds of his sleeves as his slender steel fingers curled and clicked against one another.
The stairs arrived not at the grand landing Tey had expected when he first inspected the plans, but in another solid wall, broken by slots barely wide enough for even Tey’s narrow-shouldered frame to fit through. Each doubled back on itself once, twice, and when Tey cast an eye up and down the walls he saw they were scorched with las-shot and scraped with shrapnel and solid-slug marks. The baffles were to choke off the momentum of any charge up the stairs and force attackers to fight their way through the tiny, back-hooking passageways.
The passages opened out into a broad arena, a dozen metres wide, beneath a high, railed gallery. The battle-damage at this end of the baffle covered the doorways from floor to ceiling, the scarring so ferocious that it blurred and deformed the lines of the doors and the smooth faces of the walls. The gallery had been raised so that a platoon of defenders on each side could sluice down fire on attackers as they came single-file out of the baffles.
Tey walked forward, his skulls swooping up to survey the gallery. He cued the pict-feed reconstructions of the final battle for the bridge but did not bother to run them, working from his rough datagrams of the final skitarii incursion. The bridge itself had been almost abandoned and had yielded with minimal resistance; the peak of the assault’s savagery had been–
Tey’s foot hit something soft and yielding. A split second later the same sensation came to him from Barrel’s senses as the servitor’s leading foot kicked something away with a slick wet sound, and then crunched into something else.
Tey froze both
of them in place and brought his skulls whipping back around, spinning around him so fast their eyelights began to streak in his vision, switching power to his limbs and readying a combat overlay to his thoughts. That alert kicked his sensory suite up to maximum, and an instant later his olfactory webs were drenched with the stink of rot. Locked in engagement mode, the skulls’ weapons armed and hunting, his vision and foremind a firework display of analytics and queries, Tey looked down.
They were walking on hands.
Human hands, severed hands, some hacked off halfway up the forearm and some cut so low on the wrist that the thumbs were almost falling off. Some were still covered in sagging, withering flesh, but many more were bundles of bone held together with shrivelled, rotting scraps and the oldest of all were just loose collections of fragments half-scattered across the floor.
In places, the piles came up to knee height. Tey muted his olfactory screens back down to diminish the sickly stink, and started picking his way forward through the charnel mess.
How long had this been going on? Tey’s parallel cortices had instantly started analysing the piles, cross-referencing decomposition stages, distance from the entrance, placement of each relative to others. Webs of association started to build on each other and throw out speculative thought-strands to connect to archives elsewhere in his memory. The silent flashing and wheeling of thought and pattern was reassuring, keeping the reeking reality at bay, but Tey found that the essential foulness of it kept reaching through to tweak his thoughts with rotting fingers. How long? How many deaths?
No grand arrangement was suggesting itself from his analytics. The scatter patterns on the hands that had come apart suggested they had been thrown from the entrance, or close to it. No elaborate rituals here. The partisans had crept aboard the Inheritor King, come up the stairs, tossed their freshly-severed hands onto the floor and… what? Left it at that? A quick cross-reference with the work logs from the graveyard overseers suggested just that. The crews wouldn’t have had time to do much more without an absence being noted.