The Master of Mankind

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  ‘Greetings,’ said the pale Blood Angel. His portcullis-faced Mark III helm was under his arm, leaving his face bare.

  ‘My Baalite compatriot,’ Land replied. He scratched his scalp, where hair had long since lost the war to maintain a colony on the barren landscape.

  Zephon slowed his pace to walk alongside Land. ‘You must be proud,’ he said. ‘To see what the efforts of Mars have wrought.’

  Proud? thought Land. Yes, I suppose. In a way. Though the true wonder, the true lore, waits beyond.

  ‘I am indeed,’ he said aloud.

  ‘And it was good that your high priestess survived her surgery.’

  ‘Hieronyma? She isn’t my high priestess. She falls within the circle of a far different aspect of the Martian covens. She worships the Omnissiah as Destruction Itself. As the Unmaker God.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I revere Him for what He is – a genius. I don’t hold any one aspect of His genius sacred above any other.’

  ‘I see.’ Zephon raised an eyebrow. ‘Though I note that you corrected my terminology rather than express relief at the priestess’ survival.’

  ‘Insightful fellow. The Archimandrite Venture is a glory, good sir. But it isn’t a fate I would ever crave. Trapped inside that hull forevermore? Nerve-stripped and muscle-riven and bone-scraped, bound into amniotic soup to sustain a brain and spinal cord?’ Land shuddered theatrically. ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘I see,’ the Blood Angel said again.

  I doubt that, Land thought. You didn’t witness the surgery.

  Zephon turned gentle eyes upon Sapien. The psyber-monkey took it as an invitation. It leapt onto the warrior’s pauldron, clinging to the white wing symbol of the IX Legion before scampering up between the jump pack’s turbines.

  ‘I trust this creature will not urinate on me?’ the Space Marine asked. ‘I am not certain my dignity could survive such a blow.’

  Land looked up at the Blood Angel, one eye narrowed. He stroked his pointed beard in thought. ‘Sapien takes nutrients intravenously. What little waste he excretes is via gel-sac deposits. Therefore, the answer to your question is no.’

  Zephon chuckled softly. ‘Charming. Here.’ He reached a bionic hand back over one shoulder; the psyber-monkey allowed itself to be lifted by the scruff and handed back to its master. It looked at the immense warrior as it settled upon Land’s shoulder once more, and clicked an inquisitive little chirping sound.

  ‘I note the instabilities of your bionics,’ said the technoarchaeologist. ‘Flicker-twitches at the metacarpophalangeal knuckles. The work of a poor surgeon?’

  Zephon’s smile was gone. ‘Graft rejection.’

  ‘Indeed? I didn’t think that could happen with your kind.’

  ‘Now you know otherwise,’ the Blood Angel replied mildly.

  ‘I’d like to study your bionics at some point, to glean an understanding of their exact deficiencies.’

  ‘Perhaps, if circumstances allow.’

  The silence was approaching awkwardness when Land spoke once more. ‘Is there something you need of me, Blood Angel?’

  ‘No. I merely wished to ask your thoughts regarding the Imperial Dungeon. The Vyridion Knights witnessed it through gun-feeds and their cockpits’ monitors. The servitors were obviously indifferent. You and I were among the only ones to witness it with our naked eyes.’

  ‘And you wondered if, what, I found it some profound and moving experience?’

  The Blood Angel hesitated. ‘I wondered exactly that. Though the venom in your tone leads me to believe you did not.’

  ‘It was interesting enough,’ Land replied archly. What was he going to do? Admit to some superhuman brute that he had wept with the revelations of that journey? The galaxy burned because of these ceramite-clad fools. ‘But we of the Red World are used to wonders beyond the ken of mortal minds.’

  ‘I see. Then may I ask why you accompanied the expedition?’

  Land raised an eyebrow. ‘To bear witness. I assure you, nothing could keep me away. Aren’t you honoured to be here, warrior?’

  Zephon nodded. ‘Of course. Prefect Coros chose me specifically, though I confess I do not know why.’

  Land looked up at the Blood Angel’s statuesque features, seeking any expression or suggestion as to the warrior’s thoughts. Seeing no sign of understanding, Arkhan Land smiled a strange smile, one with no warmth that yet lacked any shred of mockery.

  He really doesn’t know, Land thought. And yet it’s so obvious.

  ‘Something amuses you?’ asked Zephon.

  ‘Oh, no. Never that.’ Land chuckled, giving lie to the words.

  Reaching the end of his patience, Zephon inclined his head in respect. ‘If you will excuse me, Explorator Land.’

  ‘Of course, of course.’

  The Blood Angel walked on, his long stride easily outpacing Land’s.

  Touchy fellow, he thought, watching the Blood Angel’s back.

  An unknowable time after his encounter with Zephon, a message crackled across the vox, making its way down the processional line. The order was given to brace, to be ready, to detune any aura-scrye sensors and auspex scanners, and diminish any trans­human senses.

  ‘Ahead is one of the webway’s original sections.’ It was Diocletian’s voice, as distracted and terse as the Custodian always seemed to sound. ‘Adhere to the path at all costs.’

  Land’s mouth was dry. Licking his lips made no difference. His tongue was leather. At last. At last…

  He walked on, staring ahead through the wide manufactured tunnel, feeling the thrill of excitement that always bubbled up before the possibility of revelation. At his sides, the battle-servitors rumbled on. They, however, were lobotomised far past wonder.

  When the iron walls faded away, they took their circuit-laden gleam and the hum of trembling engines with them. Mist rose in place of defined structure – Baroness Jaya had no idea where the path was, or how those at the procession’s vanguard were still following it. The procession’s footsteps no longer echoed from walls of Martian metal; instead the golden mist ate all sound and sent it back to them in fragments.

  Was this the webway? The true webway? Yes it was, she soon realised. And no, it was not.

  Passage walls became evident where the mist thinned: architecture of some arching substance that defeated any auspex rakes. The invalid returns read as something akin to eldar wraithbone, similar in physical density – and according to Land’s prattling, ‘similar in psychic resonance! Ah, forgive me! You couldn’t possibly understand…’ – yet comprised of no known material.

  She’d known from studying the limited available data that the Great Work, this so-called web, was the creation of a race far older than any living in the galaxy. That fact held little awe for a woman who had taken her first xenos life at the age of fourteen. Species dawned and died with brutal regularity: the Crusade had driven hundreds of such species to extinction, and there had been alien empires at war before humanity itself was a brief, portentous meeting of proteins. No, it didn’t matter how old this industrious species had been. What made her skin crawl was the far more visceral reality that her scanners forced her to face.

  Illara Latharac, Third Sword Exemplar, had voxed the very same sentiment from farther back in the processional line. Jaya heard her courtier swallow softly. ‘Pray to speak, baroness.’

  ‘Ever and always.’

  ‘My gratitude. Whatever this material is, it came from outside our galaxy. How can that be? How can that be possible?’

  Jaya shuddered at the thought. Her Knight’s joints groaned in sympathy through their kin-bond.

  The tunnels diverged without warning or any impression of which route was worthy over any other. The mist would simply part to reveal two or more alternate passages, each as indistinct as all others. Jaya sent auspex-relays down every passage
even long past the point she realised no route would register anything of interest upon her scanners. She switched through focus/refine, through mono-drenching, even through the relative crudeness of colo-scrying, only the latter revealing anything at all. Her instruments measured no life yet a great deal of movement.

  ‘I have motion,’ she had voxed the first time.

  ‘I have nothing,’ Devram replied at once. The rest of the column reported their own findings, which varied between the silence of Devram’s scans and the mess of Jaya’s.

  The movement ghosted around with each scan, seemingly belonging to no living beings, following no physical possibility. Either an army of spirits danced down many of the tunnels, or the passages themselves were moving in some unearthly, instrument-defeating manner.

  Sometimes, she heard her name spoken aloud. It wasn’t a voice she recognised, nor did the vox acknowledge transmission receipt despite the telltale crackle of interference that bordered the man’s speech. More than once she heard his murmuring directly into her left ear, in a whispering tone that was too faint to make out his meaning. She couldn’t be sure if his parched whispers were too soft to understand or spoken in a language she didn’t simply know.

  ‘Pray to speak, baroness.’ Devram’s voice made her flinch.

  ‘Ever and always,’ she replied. The formal words seemed stuck in her dry mouth.

  ‘My gratitude. My vox receiver is malfunctioning, or… I’m not certain. Is anyone’s vox registering indecipherable whispering?’

  Nervous chuckles from throughout the column answered the question well enough.

  Faces leered at Jaya from the mist, human, alien, other. She watched them on her gun-feeds and through the god’s-eye strip-feed of her Knight’s primary vision realiser. One of the faces wrenched in the mist, turning and melting with the hazy impressions of reaching arms. The mist rippled with the suggestion of flame. That was how her father had died, seared alive in his control seat, too weakened by his wounds to operate the ejection bracers. It took Sacristan Torolec three sleepless days to reverently scrape and respectfully flush all organic particulates from the Knight’s cockpit. In the end, House Vyridion’s courtiers had buried a charred husk still baked into its throne.

  Other shadows danced, capered, thrashed in the murk. Jaya did her best to pay them no heed. She kept her grip white-knuckled on the controls. Her hands couldn’t shake that way.

  ‘Jaya,’ a voice whispered her name with shy care. A youthful voice, one that made her squeeze her eyes closed as if such a gesture could ward her against any haunting. Perhaps it worked, for the voice didn’t return. Grunting in dismissal, she did her best not to think of the voice’s owner – there had been a boy once, a boy from another of Highrock’s monarch-blooded families. The first boy she had ever spent time with, unchaperoned. A lifetime ago now.

  She heard several of the others draw in their breath as the column entered the first void. Mist and mist and mist met their eyes and scanners alike.

  Objectively, she knew what this must be. Objectively she knew this must be one of the immense regions capable of allowing transit for–

  Entities

  –eldar wraithbone vessels, the size of Imperial warships. Their own pathway had finally threaded through one of the vast thoroughfares that made up the webway, where–

  Alien monsters

  –swam through space without need of the warp. She had seen the tale told by the walls of the Imperial Dungeon. She knew what this was. This was the Emperor’s hope for the species. These passages were supposed to be safe.

  Why, then, am I trembling?

  Jaya had ceased forward locomotion and twist-unlocked the seals of her cockpit. She wanted to stand up in her throne and look out upon the nothingness with naked eyes.

  The first thing she sensed was the faint smell of ice, as if this passageway led to some clean, frozen world with aspects of precious normality like a sun and a moon and sane dimensions that complied with physics.

  The second thing she sensed was the enormity of the absolute nothingness above her. Around her. Beneath her. Pure void existed with her at its heart. Jaya felt as she always did when looking at images of the deep ocean. The endless murk in every direction, forming an entire reality where creatures of impossible size writhed in the salty, silty dark.

  She resealed her hatch and enthroned herself once more. The Knight strode on.

  Jaya heard music drifting down several of the misty tunnels, as teasingly familiar and ultimately unrecognisable as the murmurs had been. Half-remembered melodies played on instruments she couldn’t imagine. This, it seemed, was the harmonic accompaniment to the shadows that beckoned to her. More than once she panned her hull-mounted stubber at the capering, thrashing silhouettes, her gloved finger curled against the trigger, stroking with slow need.

  Later passages – farther into the webway? she wondered. Deeper? – offered indistinct geometries that no pict resolution could refine. Walls veered away at angles that caused the human observers to blink their watering eyes and turn away from the threat of headaches. Buildings stood in the misty shadows, towers and arches and domes wrought by alien thaumaturgy, either lost to time or far along the path to the oblivion of the forgotten. They seemed out of phase and somehow untouchable, as if imperfectly recalled by a wounded mind.

  The path rose. Some tunnels sloped sharply enough to almost be considered a fall. Slants and askew angles became commonplace. Even gravity began to follow its own erratic choices: noting an incline of yaw beneath her Knight’s iron tread, Jaya cast an auspex probe ahead through the convoy, realising that fully half of the procession was travelling along what she’d believed was the tunnel’s westward side, treating it as though it were the floor.

  Wonder and adrenaline made for poor sustenance over a protracted period of time. Jaya was tired, having scarcely slept in days. Her leaden limbs were beginning to click and crackle with cramping sinew.

  Still she refused to vox Diocletian and ask for an estimation for when they would reach their destination. Vyridion would show no weakness throughout its penitence.

  Again the passages divided. Again they branched. Again they rejoined other arteries, meshing into one.

  She had advanced to the column’s front when the vox exploded in a storm of static, the white noise shrouding dozens of male voices all speaking over each other in deathly calm. A ripple spread through the convoy, section by section. Servitor motors whined. Tanks rattled and growled.

  Jaya slammed both boots into their control holsters, switching to active manipulation.

  Is that the main army? Are these the voices of the Ten Thousand? She couldn’t see anything beyond the ghostly buildings in every direction, at odd slopes as the passageway rose. Are we here, at last?

  ‘Diocletian,’ she voxed. ‘Prefect Coros, are we close?’

  ‘We are in vox-range of Calastar,’ he replied, distracted. She could almost feel him straining to filter through the conflicting voices.

  The Archimandrite entered the channel with a tuning screech of her internal comm system. Her monotone voice followed, ‘I have established cognitive grips within Calastar. The city is heavily besieged. Every war-servitor currently engaged reports overwhelming force arrayed against the defenders.’

  Diocletian whispered a curse, some cultural slang from his childhood that made no sense to her. Nevertheless, it was the first time Jaya had ever heard him swear. ‘The walls are already down. The enemy is inside the city.’

  Sixteen

  War in the webway

  Dynastes, the Lords of Terra

  The Golden and the Soulless

  The enemy was without number, an ocean without an end. No two figures in their uneven ranks were exactly alike, each one seemingly born into its own breed, conjured from a unique nightmare. The alien air carried the sounds of crashing blades and waves of searing heat, and above all it brou
ght the creatures’ stench, too strong for even respirator masks and the Custodians’ own helmet filters.

  War had a scent of its own, the spice of human carrion underlying the fyceline reek of spent bolts and the ozone tang of air ionised by las-rounds, but this was a reek beyond reason. The smell of unearthed plague graves, with the killing sicknesses living on in the stripped bones. The charnel stink of hopelessness as blood runs from riven flesh. The salt scent of dirty sweat that lines a murderer’s brow. And above all of it, the charred porcine stench of sizzling meat fat, that pyre smell of burning human bodies.

  Sagittarus held his ground against this rank tide. Never had he felt farther from the Emperor’s light. One thought played out through his mind, again and again.

  We’re going to lose the city.

  The stench of the unburied dead outside the city walls was near toxic. For what seemed like days even in this timeless place, the enemy had hurled themselves at the Ten Thousand upon the walls, achieving nothing but the running of their own blood.

  The true battle had begun when the Legio Audax pulled down the Impossible City’s walls. Beneath the barrage of fire and plasma and explosive shells spat down from the high barricades, a host of Warhound Titans had done the work almost alone – achieving triumph at the cost of their lives. Each of the war machines staggered and burned beneath burst shields and blistering armour plating, as their harpoons cracked through Calastar’s wraithbone walls. In ragged disorder they pulled back, dragging sections of the wall with them, tearing rifts for the masses of infantry to spill through.

  Not a single Warhound survived to enter the city. Their smoking wreckage lay as monuments in the great tunnel expanse, amidst the stilled tide of slain Space Marines and rancid smears of daemonic ichor.

  A warmer welcome lay in wait once the foe pushed into the city itself. The Silent Sisterhood and Ten Thousand manned every bridge and junction, reinforced by hordes of Mechanicum battle-servitors and the towering colossi of the Legio Ignatum. Every wall and tower still standing had long ago been fitted with turrets, and the city’s defenders funnelled the advancing tides into courtyards that became slaughterhouses; across bridges that were detonated beneath the teeming press of daemonic creatures and sent plunging into the abyss; into avenues that became killing grounds.