The Master of Mankind

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  ‘Astropaths,’ another man declares. He, too, is from another world. ‘Astropaths. We are to be trained as astropaths. You will see. You shall see. Astropaths.’ He repeats the word as if it were talismanic. Skoia isn’t certain if he seeks to reassure the others or convince himself. Whatever the truth, she has no conception of his meaning. He doesn’t answer when anyone asks him.

  The spirits are silent, have been silent since she first looked up and saw the dead-eyed woman above her back in the forest. Not once has Skoia heard their whispers, perhaps because they are the ghosts of her own planet and she’s far from home, or perhaps because she has been severed from the Wheel of Life by the soulless women who crew this vessel.

  Servitors bring them their food in strange sealed pouches. The food is a rendered brown paste that tastes of nothing natural. Skoia has to force it down with a wash of the powdery water that tastes of machinery and recyc-processing.

  The more violent souls among the captive community have tried to kill the servitors before, but several of the soulless women now stand watch each ration hour. They remain by the doors with their blades held in their hands and bulky pistols that eternally sigh with the threat of breathing fire. Approaching them is impossible. Anyone who tries is wracked with cramps and sickness, vomiting onto the deck, seemingly poisoned for hours afterwards. One man collapsed and didn’t wake for three days.

  ‘Devils,’ some of the captives call the eagle-tattooed women. ‘Banshees.’ ‘Husks.’ ‘Undead.’ Each culture has its own words for the creatures that have captured them.

  ‘They have no sixth sense,’ explains one of the others in a bizarrely accented variation of Gothic. Skoia can follow his words if she concentrates. ‘No anima. No psychic capability.’

  She looks away, saying nothing. His words are without meaning or relevance. She knows the only truth that matters, that these women have no souls.

  The ship often shakes around them, buffeted by the eddies of its voyage through the galaxy. It does so now, but more violently than ever before. Nervous voices begin to clamour. Wide eyes meet other open gazes. The turbulence is enough to send the captives sprawling. Some of them collide with the iron walls, and their voices rise higher, bordering upon panic in proto- or post-Gothic languages Skoia can’t understand. Those that she can are mumbling of crashes and attacks and their own helplessness.

  ‘We are not crashing,’ she says aloud. The men and women nearest to her turn and stare. She swallows her own fear in the face of theirs. ‘I think… I think we are landing.’

  Eleven

  Ossuary

  A shattered silence

  He will live

  They laid the trap in the region known as the Ossuary. Only hours distant from the Impossible City and its main arterial, the Garden of Bones existed in a modest span of the webway where the tunnel walls and ceilings pressed in with vanished into the omnipresent mist. If Calastar was a fallen eldar city, the Ossuary was a ruined monument to that worthless race.

  ‘We only have one chance at this,’ Ra had said at a gathering of leaders in the Godspire.

  Nishome Alvarek, appearing via hololith and clad in her full Ignatum wargear as she sat upon her princeps throne on the command deck of the Scion of Vigilant Light, had resisted the choice of ambush site. It was too small for her Titan to walk, and she had insisted that her Warlord’s weapons would be more than capable of destroying the creature in open battle.

  ‘Your zealotry is invaluable,’ Ra began. Her perspective had been gently argued down: an ambush was critical and it had to be handled with meticulous care. The larger tunnels allowed too easy an opportunity for the creature to escape or get past the Imperial line. ‘You will stay and oversee operations within the Impossible City,’ Ra had decided.

  ‘Do you seek to appease me with charitable morsels of honour, Endymion?’

  Ra had forced a smile and said nothing. Princeps Alvarek had chuckled, letting the matter lie.

  Commander Krole had signed her fervent avowal for Ra’s plan, as had her underofficers.

  Zhanmadao, one of the Tharanatoi Terminator caste, had noted that the creature remained tentative, seeking easy ingress rather than a frontal siege. There would be no better time, he reasoned, than now. It had been herded far enough, by fortune if not by intent.

  Ra had nodded, agreed and let fly the gunships.

  The Ossuary was an aisle, a narrow tunnel path fit for alien processions back when the failed eldar empire had still enjoyed events worth celebrating. Either side of the main roadway, nothing but organic powder residue and gemstone dust remained of whatever botanical and crystalline wonders had once grown in sorcery-touched beauty. Now the misty landscape was given over to broken statuary and the wraithbone husks of unpowered eldar automata. It was as if a culture had brought its funereal artistry here to be forgotten, left in this ill-maintained route of the vast web.

  The Unifiers had spent little time here, initially reporting brief and tense encounters with eldar pilgrims and that species’ kaleidoscopic high priests and priestesses, yet considering that the eldar were known to still use the webway, they had judiciously and fervently avoided almost all Imperial expansion. Many among the Ten Thousand who had ventured deeper into the web suspected the abruptly fused passageways or sealed gateways led to eldar craftworlds, and the aliens were barring human entry into their far-flung domains. What it must it cost them to seal themselves away from their own means of travelling across the galaxy, however, none could guess.

  Ra had originally expected to encounter the eldar a great deal as the Imperial vanguard ventured beyond the Mechanicum’s portions of the webway. Instead he found them recalcitrant and furtive, ghosting back rather than engaging, often sealing themselves away, even to the degree of damaging the webway to enforce their isolation.

  The Ossuary was one such mystery. It seemed to be some xeno-logic amalgamation of graveyard and scrapyard, almost in the form of a refuse tunnel. None knew why it existed. Did the eldar not remake and reuse their wraithbone via the sacred art of bonesinging? Was this a deliberate abandonment of tainted material, discarding resources that were flawed in a manner indecipherable to the human eye? Or was it merely a monument to loss, and thus a place the eldar were unwilling to desecrate with even their own presence?

  He loathed the unknown, even as he and his Custodian kindred were trained to react and adapt to it, perhaps better than any other living beings.

  Ra had studied the eldar in depth, as had all of the Ten Thousand. A wise warrior’s creed was to know your enemy, but the Custodian Guard lived their lives to an extreme beyond desiring typical insight into their foes. They pushed themselves cognitively as much as physically, learning the languages, cultures and histories of their enemies in order to attain an almost enlightened sense of understanding with every one they faced. All in order to counter and oppose them; to stand against their foes and anticipate every action, answering with commensurate, consummate reaction. It wasn’t enough to be able to stop an enemy from doing something – purity of purpose and perfection in duty lay in knowing what they would do before they did it, and what the perfect response would be. By necessity that meant knowing when and why actions would be undertaken at all.

  Yet this mindset held little rigidity. Almost nothing was codified. Lore was gathered not only to predict patterns but also to create a fluid sense of potential and awareness. Perceiving potential threats didn’t mean adhering to formulaic responses.

  There were civilisations in the galaxy, human and alien alike, that had known little but the savagery of Legion conquest or Imperial Army compliance, yet the warriors of the Ten Thousand could speak their local tongues and recite the virtues and pitfalls of their historical military leaders, with deep insight into the cultures’ characters. All done in service to protecting the most powerful and important soul who had ever lived.

  It was what galled Ra more than anything else wh
en facing the creatures calling themselves Neverborn. These daemons were so varied, so populous, so in flux and so utterly alien that attaining any useful comprehension of them was next to impossible.

  The silence of the Ossuary was shattered with the daemon’s arrival. It was no longer alone; it led a shrieking, roaring swarm of its lessers, creatures that had started flocking to its leavings, like the carrion-feeders that trailed after predators in the wild lands of countless worlds.

  Its shape defied sight even when one looked directly towards it. It appeared as a smear across the vision of everyone who sought to follow its advance. Vast wings stood proud of its back, yet it ran on all fours. Its eyes blazed; the warriors who couldn’t describe the creature’s appearance at all could still feel when it turned its attention upon them, even at great distance.

  It loped from the mist at the tunnel’s far end a full kilometre distant, a catalyst for the wretches at its back, sustaining these new followers with its bloodshed. Ra watched through magnoculars, applying filter after filter to pierce the preternatural fog with little effect. Flies surrounded its swollen corpus. Tendrils rose from its back like the curved tails of aggravated scorpions.

  The creature nosed, hound-like, at the carpet of broken eldar wraithbone covering the tunnel floor. The lesser daemons kept back from its inquisitions, cowed from venturing too close in case they suffered the apex beast’s rage.

  Ra lowered his magnoculars and thudded the butt of his spear down against the mist-hidden ground. The sound carried, resonating through the webway’s unearthly material, and the creature’s head rose with inhuman smoothness.

  The Custodians at his side did the same, lifting and pounding their spear butts down in continual rhythm. It was the marching song of some ancient army, echoing for the first time here in an alien realm. Only twenty of them stood together; Ra had refused to risk any more of the dwindling Ten Thousand when the true battle was yet to be fought. Twenty warriors, each drawn from different squads. Twenty souls to serve as bait.

  The creatures responded with roars of their own, none louder than the winged monster in their vanguard. They began to charge. The Custodians kept hammering their spears down in cold, rhythmic unity.

  Ra’s retinal display couldn’t lock on to the approaching figures, but approximations of their shrinking distance ticked along the edges of his eye-lenses. He thumped his spear once more, then whirled the blade forwards, levelling it at the charging daemons. The Custodians at his side did the same, in the very same breaths.

  ‘Kill it,’ Ra voxed.

  The wraithbone cairns shifted, dead eldar machines slipping and tumbling as they were cast aside. Imperial robots rose from their blanketing shrouds of alien bone, their somnolent life sparks kindling at the behest of their Mechanicum masters. Fifty of them lined the narrow avenue, each one standing in ragged harmony with its cousins, cannons whirring and joints snarling. They wore the red plate of Sacred Mars, dented and battered from so many years of fighting away from their stolen home world, but loyal to the last.

  They opened up as one. Castellax, Vorax, Kastelan – pattern after pattern, no two weapon arrays truly alike – each of the robots lit the tunnel with an unremitting salvo of fire. Laser weapons flashed and cut. Energy cannons flared and roared. Spheres of seething plasma spat from scorched muzzles. Torrents of flame belched forth. Maxim bolters thundered and darkfire beams daggered into the heaving pack of charging creatures.

  The daemons went down as if scythed. Those that fell were flayed and taken apart by the ceaseless barrage. Those that kept running were forced down a gauntlet of relentless firepower. At the Ossuary’s end, Ra and his Custodians fired their spears’ bolters, adding to the cannonade.

  Battle tanks rolled forwards from the mist on heavy treads, grinding eldar wraithbone into fragments. The Mechanicum’s transports added their heavy weapons to the assault, as did three of the Ten Thousand’s grav-tanks.

  A squad of axe-bearing Sisters leapt from a golden grav-Rhino, led by Jenetia Krole. They moved to take position behind Ra and the Custodians, weapons raised in readiness.

  All twenty Custodians reloaded in the same two-heartbeat span. All twenty fired again, straight ahead, aiming for the burning, dissolving creature still racing towards them.

  This, then, was pain. This was uncreation. The daemon of the first murder felt itself being taken apart, but keener still was the acid of a thwarted hunt. To be trapped like this, to be unmade by mortal anger. This was pain.

  Escape. Survive. What passed for its cognition plunged into a ravenous loop of primal urges. Escape. Survive. Escape. Survive.

  Still they charged. Hundreds lay dead and dissolving, soon to be thousands, yet still the survivors charged. They answered each of the alpha creature’s bellows, peeling off from the collapsing pack and launching themselves at the closest robots cutting off their escape. Automata fell in smoking, exploding husks. Daemons burst apart with them, willingly sacrificing themselves at their overlord’s whim.

  The creature, the End of Empires, reached the Custodians’ battle-line first. There it met the plunging spears and hacking axes of the Ten Thousand and the Silent Sisters, ignoring their first blows as it shifted into a chimaeric thing of thrashing serpent-limbs and curved claws. It killed even as aetheric blood rained from its devastated form. It killed even as hanks of sizzling flesh were ripped from its corpus, laying it bare to where a true beast would have bones.

  Several of the Castellax battle-automata lumbered forwards, engaging it alongside the humans, tearing at the daemon’s ichorous flesh with their whining buzz saws and industrial fists. They fared no better, their cranial domes and chestplates hammered and mangled, their vital internals torn free in clawed fistfuls of fluid-slick artificial life. They detonated, bathing the daemon in eviscerating shrapnel and petrochemical burns, and still – still – it killed.

  It melted its way through forms, shifting and seeking lethality above all, survival-urge and blood-hunger fusing together to force it through change after change, seeking to escape its cage by butchering those that had trapped it here.

  The Custodians fell back, the Sisters with them. It gave chase, panic granting it aggression, doing all it needed to do in order to rip itself free of the ambush. It fell upon the very beings slaughtering it because to run from them would only mean swifter destruction. Human blood ran. Golden limbs crashed to the ground. Axes fell from dead hands.

  Ra and Jenetia struck in the very same second. The Custodian drove his spear up through the shapeless mass, wrenching it deeper, lodging it within and emptying his bolter inside its body. The Sister-Commander plunged her two-handed blade in alongside Ra’s, tearing a mirrored wound. Scalding filth poured upon both of them, steaming on their armour, burning patches of exposed skin.

  A snake-like limb battered Krole aside. The creature staggered, then fell, crashing into the metal-strewn debris of dead robot and abandoned wraithbone. It reached a grasping claw from its seething mess of limbs, its structure breaking down into something amoebic and many-eyed.

  End of Empires, it said in Ra’s mind, using Ra’s thoughts. It sounded so weak. Almost fearful, though such a thing could feel no fear. End… of…

  The daemon rose from the wreckage like a fire cloud above an annihilated city, haemorrhaging thunder as it roared. Debris and machine oil rose into the air in glistening ropes. Inferno heat rolled from its resurrecting carcass. Black smoke and the blood of its kills congealed into muscle and sinew as its presence billowed higher.

  Gunfire from the survivors yet tore into it, changing nothing, doing nothing. A head formed at its apex, rows of eyes burning as bolt-rounds ripped harmless cinders from its torso. Plates of mangled armour rose from the wrecks of the war machines, charring to black as they folded over the daemon’s form.

  Ra stood beneath it, bathed in its heat, the coldness of the wounded Sisters beside him pressing back against the naked hunge
r of the thing that filled the tunnelway. It opened its mouth and breathed in the golden mist.

  ‘He will live,’ it rasped in a voice that felt like memory.

  ‘Kill it!’ Ra cried the order, desperate fury turning his tone to adrenal fire. Yet there was almost no one left alive to obey.

  The daemon pulled reality towards itself, binding wraithbone and iron and even fire into a new form. It ensconced itself in corporeal armour to ward off the rage of corporeal weaponry.

  ‘Kill it!’ one of the Golden roared.

  Escape. Survive. Anathema. End of Empires.

  And, for the first time in its existence, savaged almost unto uncreation, it truly fled. The survivors’ parting fire tore at its temporary form, breaking armour away, but not enough, not enough. The echo of the first murder fled in bleeding, shambling defeat, puppeting a mongrel form of broken robots that fell apart with each step.

  It would find the horde. It would join the war. It would hide among its lessers, and it would survive.

  Twelve

  Sacristan Apex

  Starved of ammunition

  Renewal

  Weeks into the realignment process, Jaya was still struggling. She slid the last five metres down the ladder, tearing off her helmet and breathing in the crisp, hot metal tang of the hangar bay. Torolec, her Sacristan Apex, was waiting for her.

  ‘It’s the pressure valves in the left knee’s pneumatics,’ she said to the robed figure. ‘It’s affecting the turning circle.’

  Torolec was tall and slender beneath his hooded robe, proud to wear the black and laurel-green and rearing pegasus of House Vyridion. He was beribboned at all times by devotional parchments, often fluttering in the heat wash of engine exhaust as he attended to his sacred work. As Sacristan Apex he was the house’s foremost machine-seer, and at three hundred years of age, he had known and served Jaya her entire life. He’d refused to return to Highrock with the rest of the fleet, and Jaya had respected the wishes of her family’s oldest retainer. Given the circumstances and how events had played out, she was doubly grateful for his presence.