The Master of Mankind

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  ‘I don’t know, sire. I can’t see what might have changed. I cannot see into the skeins of fate.’

  The Emperor was silent for a moment. ‘You speak of seeing the future,’ He finally said, ‘without knowing the limits of what you speak.’

  In a heartbeat the Ullanor Triumph was gone, banished between breaths. Ra and the Emperor stood alone on a rocky shore, ankle-deep in icy saltwater. They faced a great cliff, reaching up hundreds of metres – sheer in many places, sloped in others. Even as Ra stared, loose rocks clattered down its surface, splashing into the rising water not far from where they stood.

  ‘Where you stand now,’ the Emperor said, ‘is the present. Do you see the top of the cliff?’

  ‘Of course, sire.’

  ‘That is the future. You see it. You know what it is. Now reach it.’

  Ra hesitated. ‘Now?’

  ‘Climb, Custodian. You questioned the nature of my foresight. I am granting you an answer.’

  Ra moved to the rock face, looking over the stone, finding his first grips. He tested them, finding them strong, even against the weight of his armour. The weaker ones, he avoided.

  Less than ten heartbeats had passed when a rock cracked and crumbled in his gauntleted hand. Ra skidded, arresting his fall by clutching at the stone; another gave way, sending him the last few metres to the rocky ground in a breathy cloud of white dust.

  ‘You looked for places to safely grip,’ said the Emperor, ‘yet you have already stumbled. You did not know the stone was weak.’

  ‘It looked strong.’

  The Emperor smiled, and it was by far the most unpleasant sight Ra had ever witnessed. Emotion painted across a human face, as false as the grotesques at any masquerade. ‘Yes,’ the Emperor agreed. ‘It did, and you only learned the truth too late. Now climb.’

  Ra hesitated once more, a hesitation that bordered upon defiance. As if such an action were even possible for one such as he in the presence of his master.

  ‘It is not necessary, sire. I believe I understand now.’

  ‘Do you? Look out across the water, Ra.’

  Ra returned to the Emperor’s side and did as he was bid. The water rippled in sedate waves, sloshing around the rocks that lined the shore. At the horizon’s very edge, he could see the mirroring lip of another landmass.

  ‘I see another land. An island, perhaps.’

  ‘It is Albia, many thousands of years ago. But that is unimportant. You see the shore. You know it is there. You know you could reach it by ship, or by swimming, or by flight. That is what you know.’

  The Emperor’s dark eyes lost their focus. He faced towards the distant shore but Ra doubted He was still seeing it. ‘So you journey towards it. But all you can see is your destination. You cannot see the beasts below the water that devour travellers. You cannot know if the wind will blow and throw you aside from your course. And if the wind does blow, will it send you east? West? North? South? Will it shatter your craft completely? Perhaps there are rocks beneath the water, impossible to see until they grind and tear at the hull of your ship. Perhaps the inhabitants of that far shore will fire upon your craft before you can make landfall.’

  The Emperor turned back to Ra, though curiously His eyes didn’t clear. ‘But you can see the shore, Ra. Did you fail to predict any of those possible flaws between here and there?’

  ‘Perhaps I predicted them all, sire. Perhaps I factored in the possibilities of each one occurring.’

  ‘Maybe so. And what of the eventualities you could not predict? Each passing moment is rich with a hundred thousand possible pathways. The craftswoman making your boat may suffer a heart failure before she can gift it to you. Or she decides not to offer you the boat at all. You say the wrong words to her. You offer the wrong currency. She lies to you, for she is a thief. An enemy sabotages your boat before you set sail. You reach halfway across this channel of water, only to see a more appealing coast to the east or west. Minute after minute, possibility upon possibility, path after path. All variables you are unable to see from where you stand at this moment.’

  The Emperor reached out as if He could crush the coast in His golden gauntlet. His expression was cold in its pale ferocity. ‘I can see the coast, Ra. I know what awaits me there. But I cannot see all the infinite vicissitudes between here and there.’

  At last, He lowered His hand.

  ‘That is foresight, Ra. To know a trillion possible futures, and to be left to guess at the infinite ways of arriving at each one. To map out even one possible eventuality, taking into account every decision that every living being will make that will impact upon the others around it, would take all of the lifetimes I have already lived. The only way to know anything for certain…’

  He trailed off, gesturing to the distant shore.

  ‘Is to reach the other side,’ said Ra.

  The Emperor nodded. ‘When the vault was attacked and the Primarch Project compromised, should I have destroyed them all? Or do as I did, and trust that I would be able to restore them to grandeur? If I had destroyed them to prevent their abduction, would the Imperium have risen as it has now done? Or would the Great Crusade have stuttered and failed without its generals? There are no answers yet, Ra. We are in the middle of the sea, beset by strange tides and unexpected beasts, but not yet thrown off course.’

  ‘I won’t fail you, sire.’

  The Emperor closed His eyes and winced as pain flickered across His dusky features. He touched all ten fingertips to His face beneath the weight of some silent strain.

  ‘My liege?’

  ‘The forces of Magnus’ Folly press harder against the Mechanicum’s junctions. I do not know how this can be. Their efforts were already relentless and monumental. Coupled with the intrusions within the original web, I fear time is growing short.’

  ‘We’ve failed to destroy the Echo of the First Murder. Why did it pull back from us? How can it be stopped?’

  The Emperor swallowed, His eyes bloodshot and haunted in their distraction.

  Awaken, Ra.+

  Ra opened his eyes, his senses immediately attuning to the sound of sirens.

  Fourteen

  Zephon’s bandoliers rattled as he walked, the bound arsenal of rad-grenades clinking against his red ceramite. He felt like an imposter in his own skin: the volkite pistols holstered on his thigh plates hadn’t been fired in years, nor had he sparred with the power sword sheathed on his backpack. Similarly, he’d done nothing more than clean and maintain the bolter he now carried over one shoulder, hanging by its thick strap of Baalite mutant hide-leather.

  After an airspeeder conveyance had carried him halfway across Himalazia to the Palace’s high-security core, he walked ever-downwards through the beating heart of the Imperium, occasionally resorting to subterranean transit pods or the elevator platforms in constant operation.

  He had spoken to Diocletian and Arkhan Land, the former telling him of the dark wonders of the Impossible City and the foes faced by the Ten Thousand, the latter waxing loud and long about the structure of the webway and its potential for mankind. He had reviewed the Archimandrite’s implanted map, and yet… doubts lingered. Or perhaps it was hope that lingered. Zephon wished feverishly for such enlightenment to be lies.

  The Blood Angel had no idea what to believe. He knew only that the Ten Thousand had chosen him to serve the Emperor, and he would do so to his dying breath.

  And so, he journeyed to join them.

  Through districts that had evolved into librarium archives; through museum sectors given over to the teeming refugee masses; through storage chambers and arsenals and even old Terran foundries, the Blood Angel walked in solemn silence, his gait exaggerated slightly by the bulky twin turbines of his jump pack. The double engines rose above his pauldrons, wings in intent if not in form. Servo-skulls drifted endlessly past, pausing to aim their sensoria-cluster eye ne
edles at him, scanning him for Unified Biometric Identification. Inevitably they would give a satisfied click and drift away.

  Towards the end of the first day he passed the first seal. The ever-locked iris gate wasn’t locked for him; he entered without hesitation, passing a phalanx of one hundred Imperial Fists on one side of the gate, then five Custodians on the other. The former greeted him with grim formality. The latter ignored him completely.

  His descending path converged with those of his fellow pilgrims. A stream of tracked battle-servitors rumbled along the hallways in their hundreds, en route to the Imperial Dungeon for whatever purpose the Custodians had in mind.

  Not long after Zephon joined this lobo-chipped convoy, they were joined by the tall and striding forms of House Vyridion. The great Knights shook the stone chambers and corridors with their thunderous march, and Zephon felt his bleak heart stir at the sight of Jaya and her war court. Gone was the gunmetal grey and bare steel of the unpainted dregs-machines donated and begged from other houses. Zephon might have expected the blue-green of their former heraldry, but this too was absent. Vyridion’s armour plates had turned black and gold, and while they lacked the banners of their past deeds, they once more showed a sigil on their tilting shields: the Imperial aquila symbolising the unity of Terra and Mars. The simplest, purest symbol they could have chosen.

  Looking at the monstrous form of Baroness Jaya as she strode over and ahead of him, Zephon kindled a shared vox-link.

  ‘Vyridion marches,’ he said with a faint smile.

  ‘Vyridion marches,’ came the crackling reply.

  The lead Knight turned, a great bronze aquila hanging on chains from its bolt cannon swaying with the motion, and sounded its alarm horn through the stone hallways. It was answered by the horns and klaxons of every other Knight in the procession as House Vyridion celebrated its march.

  By the second day’s dawn, the travellers were far from the sun’s light. Zephon’s trudging tread was marked by the clank of pistons and the thunder of heavy metal feet in silent corridors. Billions lived and toiled within the walls of the Palace, but the procession saw none of them, as though this was not the heart of the Imperium after all, merely an empty realm, a kingdom of stone and shadow.

  On they walked. Every few hours they would pass one of the seals, the irises of each gateway open and waiting: unpatrolled, unguarded, unbarred.

  They passed the Hibran Arch, vaulted above the fires of torches that had burned through Old Night and burned still. They walked the Processional of the Eternals, beneath the painted eyes of vanquished warlords. They walked until they had sunk into the underworld of the Palace’s foundations, gouged into the living rock of the planet’s Himalazian spine, and still they descended.

  Servitor workers began to appear at infrequent intervals, along with robed adepts tending to machines and engines squatting in the basalt rock. The earthen corridors remained tall and wide – the Knights never once had to hunch or double back to seek another way – and the ground showed the erosion of countless feet and vehicle tracks.

  Despite an eidetic recollection, Zephon wasn’t certain of the exact moment he realised the convoy was no longer being presented with alternate routes. After the fifth seal? At the sixth? When had the many tributary corridors converged at last into this one final path?

  His instinctive sense of direction slowly began to tell another truth – the twists and turns betrayed his route, not always downwards but never ascending, remaining deep within the planet’s crust: he was walking a labyrinth. Not one akin to the eclectic garden mazes of the wealthy or the prisons of the mythologically monstrous, but a true labyrinth out of Ancient Terran lore, of the kind once seen in holy temples and places of pilgrimage. He knew them from his studies into pre-Imperial spirituality, when they had been embossed onto cathedral floors or etched upon the earth, forming a path for pilgrims to walk every step until reaching the centre. They were meant to be journeys of understanding, from ignorance to enlightenment. Was this such a journey?

  I hear thunder.

  Almost as soon as the thought came he realised its untruth. Not thunder at all, no matter how similar in sound. The false thunder grew louder with the passing of time, turn by turn, tunnel by tunnel.

  Zephon saw faint markings along the walls and brushed aside the dust as delicately as he could with a sweep of one bionic hand. Simple, primal pictures met his curious touch, resembling the cave paintings exhibited by the most primitive human cultures. He walked on, stopping at random to study the primeval artwork: hunting scenes of simple figures bearing spears against great beasts; a community of shadowy humans gathered around the red-orange curls of a fire; dozens of figures with arms raised in worship to the high sphere of the sun.

  It wasn’t long before the travellers reached the bridge, and with it, the thunder.

  The path before them spanned an abyss. The servitors stalked and rolled onwards. The Knights hesitated, reining their war suits to a halt. Zephon stopped with them, sliding from the conveyor upon which he’d been riding, looking with unbelieving eyes at the source of the thunder pouring down into the infinite black. The water of Terra, harvested for the Palace’s underground reservoirs, plunged in vast, roaring falls from the cavern’s roof high above.

  Zephon found himself first smiling, then laughing at the breathtaking sight, such was its scale and the deafening pressure of its crashing bellow. He had fought on oceanic worlds, on monsoon worlds, but the effect was no less majestic to him. He was a child of Baal, and few planets could claim such a radiation-soaked, thirsty legacy as that distant globe.

  Yet on they walked, steps becoming metres, metres becoming kilometres.

  Eventually the thunder receded.

  Zephon’s focus drifted with uneasy wonder as he ventured through the labyrinth, beneath the vast stone statues of humanity’s first false gods, over bridge-spanned chasms that cradled the bones of long-dead settlements. As he traversed another wide stone archbridge he saw the cold, sunless remains of an entire city. Even from his maddening altitude above the grave-city he sensed movement inside the black eyes of glassless windows: the ghosts of a distant past, staring up in hollow and sullen silence at the passing of their descendants and inheritors.

  What was this place when it stood in the sun? He wasn’t certain whether he thought the words or whispered them aloud, until he received an answer.

  ‘Kath Mandau,’ a voice murmured across the vox.

  Zephon didn’t tear his eyes from the dead city five hundred metres below. Impossibly, there was wind here. A soft breeze that tasted of dust.

  ‘Diocletian?’ he voxed back.

  ‘You asked what this place once was. It was the city Kath Mandau. Capital of the nation Sagarmatha, also called Nehpal. It was once the roof of the world.’

  ‘That is very poetic.’ And now it lies dead, part of the Palace’s foundations, remaining only in name in the precincts above. ‘Thank you, Diocletian.’

  The Custodian, far ahead at the front of the column, didn’t respond again.

  The next bridge was reinforced by support stanchions and black iron gantries binding the stone pathway to the cavern’s far-off walls. The air itself gleamed orange from the underworld’s light. Heat assailed Zephon in a rising miasma.

  Molten rock seethed and sludged in the abyss below. The bridge spanned a wound in Terra’s crust, seemingly torn open to the planet’s mantle. A great lake of the world’s liquid blood-fire burned in the darkness far, far below, somehow only breeding more shadows instead of banishing them.

  More and more images showed upon the chamber walls as the procession made its way through the labyrinth. Cave paintings of ochre and charcoal became artful mosaics and impressionist vistas. Images of suns, of the heavens, of the blue Terran sky and the black void beyond. Pictographs of satellites, those earliest machines that sung their songs into the silent night.

  Then ca
me the artistry of the Dark Age, of Old Night, and the Unification Wars that ravaged Terra. Wars of unrivalled savagery wracked cities that couldn’t possibly exist. Men of flesh fought men of stone and men of steel. Zephon swallowed at the sight of Baal among the painted heavens, far too high on a ceiling mural for him to touch. He held his knuckles to his heart in solemn salute and walked on, passing yet more scenes of devastation on a scale never again to be matched, followed in turn by scenes showing the salvation of a species brought together after Old Night by the guiding golden hand of the species’ master.

  Then came the monsters. Devilish forms conjured from human nightmare waged war in realms of fire and ice and smoke and flood. Horned beasts, red-fleshed and armoured in brass. Carrion-eating skeletal dancers with the faces and features of ancient birds. Zephon saw creatures from his own childhood dreams, monsters conjured by his own youthful, slumbering imagination.

  How can they be here?

  No answer presented itself.

  Soon enough, Zephon noted another change. A shift in the surroundings.

  Machines – engines – became far more numerous, set into the ground or half projecting out from unfinished murals and incomplete mosaics. The crash and bang of industry’s metallic song grew louder and louder with each twist and turn. Where the artistry of ages had marked the walls, soon space was given over to the primacy of cables and pipes to feed the machines, seemingly pushed into place and bolted to the Palace’s stone foundations out of rushed necessity.