The Master of Mankind

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  Some of the engines spun chemicals the way a centrifuge spins blood. Others juddered as they sucked power, or generated it, or acted as junctions to spit it elsewhere. Towers of crates lined the walls of each chamber, eclipsing the incomplete architecture. Workers, robed or coated or suited, were everywhere.

  Zephon removed his helmet to wipe silent tears from his eyes. The agony of the journey, of this entire labyrinth, burned at his core in place of the doubts he’d previously held.

  This journey would have been the first step of humanity’s life without the warp. This was the route to the webway… Mankind should have walked through this labyrinth as a journey of understanding, bathing in the symbolism, preparing to step into the stars anew. A species reborn, saved from damnation by one man’s vision.

  Yet it stood darkened and unfinished, so much stone yet undressed, the passageways that were supposed to lead to enlightenment now blighted and defaced by archeotech machines bolted into place in the wake of Magnus’ Folly. War had touched this place of last hope.

  Suddenly it was all too easy to see this place defiled in the months to come, suffering at the rabid, iconoclastic hands of Horus’ rebels when they reached Terra. Would they care for the promise of this unfinished labyrinth, or would they desecrate it with the wrath of the ignorant?

  Zephon’s smile was a weak, dark little thing. Mere days before, he’d not been sure what to believe. Now he mourned the incompleteness of the Emperor’s vision of salvation. He had walked the labyrinth and learned all he needed to know.

  He closed his pale eyes.

  ‘Why do you weep, Blood Angel?’

  Zephon turned to see Jaya’s Sacristan Apex. He’d believed only servitors were nearby in this section of the processional. Torolec, that was the priest-artisan’s name. Zephon had only met the man once before, on the battlements weeks ago.

  ‘Loss,’ he said, and added nothing more.

  ‘Are we close?’ Baroness Jaya voxed across the general channel.

  ‘Close to what?’ Diocletian’s reply was blithe.

  ‘To the Imperial Dungeon. To the Emperor’s laboratory.’

  The Custodian’s reply was immediate. ‘They are the same thing,’ he said. ‘We have been in the Imperial Dungeon since passing the final seal. This is the Emperor’s laboratory. All of it.’

  Zephon replaced his helm, sealing his collar lock with a snap-hiss of air pressure. He breathed the recycled air of his battleplate and walked on.

  Less than an hour later, they reached the Eternity Gate.

  The procession stopped at the heart of the labyrinth.

  Zephon stood in the final promenade, surrounded by a multitude of banners standing in honoured rows. A cavalcade of colours stretched out on both sides of the downward-staired marble avenue, each woven standard showing the names, numbers, sigils, worlds or proud avataric beasts that embodied one of the Imperium’s regiments. Every regiment that had ever worn the Imperial eagle and fought under the Emperor’s aegis was represented by a flag, banner, trophy or pennant. A field of markers stretching in their tens of thousands, all leading ever-downwards toward the door of the Emperor’s throne room.

  The great doors of the Gate stood open at the end of the descending avenue, their two-hundred metre height reaching up to the cavern’s arched roof. Moisture wept from the sedimentary rock sky, painting a thousand shining trickle-rivers down the surface of the metal doors. An image of the Emperor was bisected by their parting: a great embossed mural of the Master of Mankind wielding a spear against the draconic beasts and machine horrors of Old Night.

  And between those wide doors, only darkness.

  For the first time in several hours, no machinery was bolted to the walls and floor, and no workstations or storage crates obscured the beauty of what lay before him. Yet Zephon sensed the subsonic thrum of power cables beneath his boots, as energy cobwebbed throughout the labyrinth. Ostentation may have eclipsed pragmatism here at the Eternity Gate, but it hadn’t replaced it.

  Shadows and spectres stood at the edges of Zephon’s sight, overlaying the truth of his senses with stories not yet told. Each time he shifted his gaze he witnessed some other echoing ghost, some other suggestion of what might yet be.

  The great doors were unguarded, yet there stood two towering Reaver Titans either side of the arch, their armour plating cast in the aggressive blazonry of Mars’ own Legio Ignatum.

  The ocean of banners stood in windless silence, yet there walked a host of hunchbacked priests dressed in the flayed skin of their forefathers, swinging incense braziers and chanting prayers to the souls of those men and women who fought beneath the icons across the galaxy.

  The air above the avenue was empty, yet there circled the ungainly anti-gravitic forms of cherub-like drones, seemingly cloned child-angels wheeling through the air. They trailed banners from their ankles and rang hand-held bells, tolling who knew what.

  The doors were wide open, yet they stood closed in their ethereal echo, and the rendition of the Emperor showed Him surrounded by a wheeling cosmos of daemons and mythological beasts. He was haloed by the sun, triumphant above the impaled body of something horned and serpentine.

  Each baroque ghost glimpse told a tale from a time when the Imperial Dungeon seemed more of a cathedral than a laboratory, a time when the Emperor Himself was worshipped rather than revered.

  And there, last of all, out of tune with the other echoes… An Angel stood before the gate, armoured in bleeding gold, bearing a sword of silver fire. Its great white wings spread wide in defiance, the swan feathers ragged and bloody red.

  ‘Father,’ said Zephon through numb lips, but the Angel was gone and the words were fading behind him as he stepped forwards. The gate yawned wide before him.

  Alongside rumbling tank-treaded servitors unable to acknowledge their surroundings beyond track/kill subroutines, Zephon entered the Emperor’s throne room.

  The darkness was a falsehood, one that cleared as soon as he passed through it. The first thing to hit Zephon’s senses was a retinal smear of migraine light, bright enough that even his occulobe implant was useless in defending his eyes against it. He narrowed his gaze to a slit, one hand raised against the fierce illumination.

  The second thing to strike was the burning machine-stink of overworked metal. He’d fought in manufactories on several worlds, breathing in the charcoal and scorched iron reek of machinery slowly dying, wearing out its moving parts. He knew that same smell at once, even spiced as it was by the acidic tang of charged ozone.

  The third element was the sound. The shouting voices. The lightning lash of sparking machines. The primeval hum of running engines. He felt it as much as heard it; he felt it in his blood, in his bones.

  ‘Keep walking.’ Diocletian’s voice.

  He kept walking, seeing little, sensing everything. Ahead of him, someone shrieked.

  ‘Keep walking!’ shouted Diocletian across the vox.

  Pivoting to find who had called out, Zephon saw only the faintest silhouettes. Maddening. Insane. His genetic modifications were born of the Emperor’s own genius; a Space Marine saw in near-darkness and overcame blinding light with equal ease. Yet he could see almost nothing.

  Another cry, this time from his side. An unknowable distance away, there was the crash of falling metal beams or perhaps a collapsing gantry. He saw none of it.

  Am I blind?

  ‘I cannot see,’ he said aloud.

  ‘You don’t need to,’ replied Diocletian. ‘Move forwards. Keep walking.’

  His eyes did adjust, though far slower than he’d ever known. Zephon saw the pale stone floor beneath his boots, and the dark bronze of immense, humming machines at the edges of his vision. Pain knifed awkward cuts at his eye sockets as he raised his head to see what lay before the marching procession.

  An archway. A door. A portal. A construct of light-stained marble
that disgorged golden mist into the chamber. He couldn’t make out its exact shape – Circular? Oval? – nor its exact boundaries, where the alien mist ended and the structure’s sides began.

  ‘Don’t look back,’ came Diocletian’s voice once more.

  Row after row of battle-servitors rumbled into the golden fog, mind-dead to all but their orders. A Krios tank was swallowed a moment later, its passage doing nothing to disturb the mist.

  One of Jaya’s Knights strode in alongside another servitor host, enveloped by the portal’s exhalations. Another of them stood inactive by the portal’s edge, grasped by tendrils of golden fog, half turned away to look back over the rest of the marching column. Zephon could hear the baroness shouting at the courtier, demanding he keep moving.

  The pilot’s voice came back stammering, shattered. ‘The Emperor. My Emperor. The Omnissiah.’

  ‘Don’t look back,’ Diocletian snapped. ‘Baroness, lead your scions through now.’

  Jaya’s towering form lurched in a heavy stride, shaking the ground as she clanked forwards. The remaining Knights followed in a ragged march, moving between and stepping over the servitor horde.

  When Zephon reached the portal’s cusp, the curling wisps of mist formed breathy tendrils against his armour plating. It carried no scent, no taste, no presence beyond what he could see. Above him swayed the idle form of the awestruck Knight. Either side of him, Thallaxi cyborgs marched into the mist. Their blood-filled face domes reflected the golden fog.

  Zephon turned – and ceased. What would he see if he looked back? The light’s intensity as a sun’s flare, ringing a structure raised above the ground? A core of blackness in the heart of a thunderstorm’s flickering light? A throne, with a corona of energy, and a figure upon it, a figure that–

  ‘Don’t look back!’ Diocletian was there, shoving the Blood Angel with the haft of his spear.

  But the Emperor… The very Throne of Terra…

  ‘Move, Bringer of Sorrow. Move now.’

  Zephon swallowed, faced the golden mist head-on, and took his first step into the webway.

  Part Three

  Death of

  a Dream

  Fifteen

  Avenues of the Mechanicum

  The true webway

  Eternal war

  The procession travelled through tunnels of dark metal and glowing circuitry. Arkhan Land, no stranger to the gloom of underground complexes given his chosen profession, yet found it curiously oppressive. It wasn’t the darkness, for the walls themselves radiated a weak electrical light from their circuit lines. Nor was it the fog, which seemed to have no source, for once he had determined it carried no toxic potential, the stuff was easy to ignore.

  No, what he found oppressive was the knowledge of what waited beyond these ironclad walls. He had faith, of course. He had all the faith a man could possess that the Omnissiah’s psychic resolve would keep these passages protected.

  But still.

  Land had never considered himself given to fits of imaginative excess. When venturing into the ancient catacombs of data-dungeons his concerns were largely centred on dealing with the inevitable slew of automated defences, not worrying what mythological monsters might lurk within the shadows outside his torch beams. Now he found himself endlessly staring at the circuit-etched walls, wincing at every shudder of a passing tank or rattling generator, thinking of the warp – the warp itself – crashing in shrieking, monstrous majesty against the outside of the tunnels through which he travelled. He couldn’t hear it, he couldn’t see it, but he knew it was there. A siege, invisible to the senses.

  Like travelling beneath an ocean, he mused without a smile. Constantly fearful of the transit tubes springing a leak.

  A mind full of these nebulous terrors made for a joyless walk. It wasn’t as if he could confide his fears to the rest of the convoy, either. The Sisters of Silence already knew and seemed wholly unfazed. The Archimandrite was impossible to engage in any conversation beyond the status of the convoy, and the battle-servitors lacked any conversational aptitude whatsoever. Baroness Jaya and her courtiers were still in the dark regarding the truth of the webway and the warp beyond. Now there was an amusing thought. How their limited intellects must be straining to process all of this.

  Zephon knew the truth, of course. But placid, angelic Zephon had spent most of the journey alone, when he wasn’t at Diocletian’s side. Ah, well.

  Occasionally the sections of the circuitry ingrained upon the walls would shatter and emit sparks. Land flinched each and every time, picking up his pace.

  Determining any temporal data here had proved impossible. The procession’s various chronometers tallied seconds, minutes and hours in both directions with no consistency. One servitor’s systems insisted the date was three hundred years before the declaration of the Great Crusade. Arkhan Land’s own chron had functioned well enough for almost four hours, at which point it had started counting between seven and fifty seconds for each one that passed. On several occasions it had stopped for an unknown span, only to come back to life of its own accord. He’d ceased trying to glean any sense from it.

  He walked knee-deep in the clinging fog, which was either pale gold or smoky azure depending upon the viewer in question. Despite bringing his Raider he was content to let it guide itself as part of the procession, relying on its onboard servitors and machine-spirit core. The webway was something he simply had to experience outside of his battle tank’s protective plating.

  Sapien rode upon his shoulder, the irises of its eyes endlessly click-click-clicking as it recorded picts that appealed to its primitive brain. Frequently Land paused to make auspex scans and take readings – Sapien would leap from his shoulder during each stop, plunging through the mist, doing the Emperor alone knew what. Land regularly pried the beast’s cranium open to review the psyber-monkey’s pict-feed, but the images were of nothing but circuit-inlaid walls and floors, or the featureless spread of colour-bleaching mist.

  Arkhan was entitled to travel at the head of the procession alongside the Archimandrite and the unwelcoming presences of Kaeria and Diocletian. More often he chose to travel alone, moving here and there throughout the convoy, sometimes even falling back far enough to walk alongside the rattling strides of Baroness Jaya and her marching Knights. They were an inspiring lot, in their own way.

  A Vigilator clade of Protectors brought up the column’s rear, their claws thrumming with waspish, sonic lethality, curved talons clicking out of rhythm with their augmented tread. He knew better than to seek to engage them in conversation. On Sacred Mars they were known as the sicarii – a dune-stalking, inhuman transmogrification of lesser skitarii warriors – and few of them possessed enough personality to be considered companionable.

  At no point did they make camp. The servitors required no rest and the convoy never ceased. Land himself was used to the discomfort of months-long expeditions into subterranean vaults, so stealing a few hours of sleep in the back of a Triaros conveyor or his own Raider tank was luxury enough. Sleep didn’t come easily, but it offered the only opportunities to forget what waited behind the curved walls.

  The Mechanicum’s sections of the webway were much as he expected them to be, albeit with the added occlusion of the strange and sourceless mist. Tunnel after tunnel of sanctified metal, the walls lacerated by gleaming lines of precious circuitry. The wiring was complicated enough to be almost hieroglyphic in nature, covering every surface of the tunnels’ insides. Unerringly the procession marched forwards, never pausing even when the passages forked or branched, never journeying along a route that would be too confined for House Vyridion’s towering silhouettes. There were several of those.

  ‘Where do these passages lead?’ he’d voxed to Diocletian from his Raider’s command console.

  ‘Nowhere,’ was the inevitable reply.

  The tunnels are unfinished, then. Or never rebuilt. Or c
onstruction was never started after the very first foundations. Curious.

  Even so, there was a definite scale to the operation. Arkhan knew from the Archimandrite’s map that the Mechanicum-engineered sections were nothing more than tentative tendrils binding Terra to the true web. It justified the modesty of their efforts, including why he could perceive the ceilings of most tunnels through a haze of mist. Yet was it not said that the Legio Ignatum had committed Titans to the Great Work? How could they have walked their god-machines along these routes?

  The answer came to him as soon the question occurred. The Great Workers must have brought any larger Titans piecemeal, their disassembled components shipped along these paths upon grav-convoy slabs to be reassembled deeper in the webway.

  What delicious sacrilege. And what would be the fate of any machine-spirit given life in this strange realm? Would it display tics and deficiencies unseen outside the webway? Would Titans constructed within the webway fall victim to the realm’s unnatural juncture in reality?

  So many questions. So few answers.

  Kane, dear respected Zagreus Kane, hadn’t opposed Land’s decision to devote himself to the Great Work. The Fabricator General’s accommodating position on the matter had come as a surprise, to say the least. He’d anticipated refusals based on notions of expertise and primacy. He was after all a technoarchaeologist, wholly unsuited to war, no matter how respected he might be in his vocation.

  Land had his suspicions on just why Kane had agreed, however. Oh, yes. He had his suspicions.

  Sapien bared his little teeth and emitted a series of chittering clicks. Land turned, looking back over his shoulder as a tall shape emerged from the mist, becoming the Blood Angel Zephon. The twin turbines rising from his back like brutal machine wings swayed with the warrior’s gait. Battle-servitors trundled past, blind to anything beyond the Archimandrite’s guiding signal at the front of the column.