The Master of Mankind

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  Arkhan Land rose, dusting his hands on his long jacket. ‘Give me back my auspex,’ he said idly. ‘And let’s be away from here. I have a medicae scanner in my supplies, as it happens.’

  Zephon didn’t move. ‘Is there a possibility that you might be able to restore function?’

  ‘Ah,’ Land said with a wry smile. ‘The pernicious spectre of hope makes itself known at last. Please note that I can’t promise an Omnissian miracle. I’m no surgeon-augmeticist or bionic engineer, yet there’s nothing else to do until our departure but stare into the screens and witness nightmares given shape. Given that I’ve checked and rechecked my Raider thrice in the last few hours, you are, at least for now, my only useful distraction.’

  He walked from the chamber, towards where the wounded skitarii were being tended by their artisanal priest-engineers. Beyond that lay the chamber where the final convoy made ready for evacuation.

  The psyber-monkey remained a moment more, cocking its head as it looked up at the Blood Angel.

  ‘Come along, Sapien,’ Land’s voice drifted from the hallway outside.

  The artificimian bolted, leaving Zephon alone. He looked at the arched doorway for some time, deciding whether or not to follow.

  Twenty

  Undivided

  War in the tunnels

  As then, so now

  The daemon soared, free of its iron bindings. Black Sky had grown unsustainable as a host, with its crew slain and its damage going untended, leading to the spread of noisome madness within Enkir’s broken mind. The creature had abandoned the Titan and its princeps with the metamorphic release of casting aside a shed husk. On regrown wings it took to the air.

  And so it soared, watching the hordes of the Four Choirs, each one the scarcest shard of something greater, overrunning the city. No mortal legionaries, here. No god-machines or battle tanks or other corporeal toys. The hosts of the warp marched, spilling from a multitude of tunnels. The city was theirs, though in their triumph they cared not at all. Pursuit of the Golden and the Soulless was all that mattered. The immense, fanged willpowers that drove each shard pressed them onwards, ever onwards. The Golden and the Soulless were almost extinct, the last gate almost defenceless. These creatures and their masters were utterly indifferent to the galaxy burning. Here was the true war, and the hour of its end had come. The Anathema’s throat was bared.

  Many of the Four’s child-shards warred amongst themselves. This was simply the Way, the eternal ebb and flow of the Great Game. Few of them rose against the incarnation of the first murder. Undivided, its genesis was in a song sung by all four Choirs. Among the other shard children, even those of the same Choir might tear at one another to sate bestial hungers or in purified expressions of their incarnated principles. They were daemons, after all, and not to be trusted.

  The creature turned in the immense tunnel’s misty sky. Something pulled at the node of senses within its skull, something that had tasted and revelled in no small measure of violent annihilation. Something still inside the dead eldar city. Something hiding.

  There was no conscious decision to turn and hunt. The daemon hungered eternally, and was drained by the skin-puppetry of possession and immersion in mortal thought. It hungered, so it would feed.

  It swooped low above the teeming ranks of its kindred, beating its wings to the sounds of shrieking fear, hate and adoration rising from lesser throats.

  As with their arrival, there was no boundary to mark their departure. The spires around the evacuating Imperials became more insubstantial, slowly swallowed by the mist, but there was no geographical assurance they were even the same towers that comprised Impossible City.

  Baroness Jaya had no idea when she had left the last avenue and entered the first tunnel, but her focus was most assuredly on more urgent matters.

  Minutes became hours, and hours lost any shred of the dubious meaning they’d so far managed to hold in a realm without any true chronology. The battle raged down tunnel after tunnel, with the Ten Thousand and the Silent Sisterhood forced into a neverending fighting retreat by the sheer weight of numbers hammering against them. Tunnels branched and divided and rejoined on the route back to the Imperial Dungeon, each passageway thick with rebel war machines, legionary battalions and hordes of the warp-wrought.

  The only respite came at the barricades of wrecked vehicles and downed Titans that the defenders pressed into service as fortifications. All pretence of conventional war had been abandoned. At least in the city they had been able to see the assault as a siege. Here, with the foe choking the tunnels, it was like fighting back the tide of Terra’s last ocean.

  Nor were the attacks limited to the very end of the Imperial column. The evacuees came under constant threat from capillary tunnels where the rebel forces and their daemonic ilk had outpaced the Imperial rearguard to strike deep within the refugee column.

  Jaya remained with the Ten Thousand and Sisterhood units making up the rearguard, backed up only by Sacristan Torolec and his small team in their heavily armoured Logrus-pattern munitions loader. The rest of Vyridion’s courtiers were scattered throughout several kilometres of webway tunnels, fighting off secondary attacks along the evacuation line.

  The fighting was at its fiercest and thickest at the rearguard, with an ever-diminishing number of the Emperor’s finest facing the bulk of the foe’s horde.

  Repeated vox-calls for the Archimandrite went unanswered. Demands for servitors and Protectors to return from further down the line were answered with similar silence.

  Gunflare flowered in the golden dark as her cannons chattered their lethal song. Legionaries, and the creatures that added to their ragged ranks, fell before her in droves. The tunnel gave a great heave around her as a Fellblade rolled from the mist, its Legion colours unreadable, belching its main cannons in her direction. The shells erupted against the tunnel wall nearby, shrapnel impacting against her angled energy shield. She knew herself just how worthless targeting arrays were in the mist. The golden fog unlocked and threw off even dead-sight aiming confirmations.

  She veered aside as the debris clattered against her shield. Not for the first time she wondered if these tunnels of alien matter could collapse beneath the weight of the violence inside them. They hadn’t yet. Perhaps that boded well.

  The Ignatum Warhound Ikarial, shield-dead and decorated with the scarification of near-terminal wounds, bounded forwards on sparking, damaged legs, its gunlimbs kicking. One moment Jaya’s display was lit by the gunflare of its mega-bolters, the next Ikarial took an unnaturally awkward step backwards and toppled sideways into Imperial ranks, trailing smoke from where its cockpit-head had been.

  ‘Baroness.’ She knew the voice of Tribune Endymion, and knew his command before he needed to speak the order.

  ‘Engaging,’ she voxed back, slamming her control pylons forwards. Her nameless, inherited Castigator leaned into its loping run with vicious eagerness, kicking through the shrieking infantry at its shins and raising its power sword high in the mist. Lightning raked along the active swordlimb, spitting sparks as it reacted with the golden fog.

  Gunner, she thought. Sweat bathed her inside her suit and stung her eyes within her helm. Driver.

  The Fellblade, Ikarial’s killer, fired again, the boom of its shells shaking Jaya’s bones at such close range. Even clipping her was enough to overload her ion shield and rock her sideways in her throne. Her nimble Castigator staggered but kept its balance – a heartbeat later she was on the tank, one foot slamming down onto its forward plating to arrest her own momentum, plunging her blade downwards in a smooth thrust.

  In and out darted the impaling shaft of lightning-wreathed steel, searing through the dense ceramite of the Fellblade’s turret. Gunner. In and out a second time, just as smoothly, into the plating directly beneath her. Driver.

  A third sweep of the energised blade severed the long-barrelled accelerator cannons halfwa
y along their length. For the sake of it.

  Quad lascannons tore past her as she sprinted back to the line of gold and black, where the Custodians and Silent Sisters were making their stand. She angled her rekindled shield behind her and ran on, risking the sponson fire rather than wade amidst the foe for any longer than necessary. Damage reports showed as angry runes in the corner of her vision. All fine. Nothing critical.

  Something winged slapped against her forward hull. Her automated stubber rattled off a chorus of rounds, ripping the daemon-thing from the air.

  She strode over the warring forms of Ra and Dynastes Squad, their spears spinning with the speed of rotors. Half turning as she walked over them, Jaya sent another stream of high-velocity bolts from her gunlimb in a shredding crescent through an enemy phalanx.

  The smoking cannons whined to silence.

  ‘Falling back,’ she voxed to the front line. ‘Reloading.’

  Torolec was waiting for her once she had weaved between the grav-tanks of the Ten Thousand and the Sisterhood’s skimmer platforms. The munitions loader was an ugly tracked vehicle with a humanoid crane mechanism on its back, appearing as nothing so much as centaur of Terran myth formed from a Sentinel cargo­lifter and a tank. Torolec brought the Logrus around behind her. She locked her stance and waited, tense in her throne, willing them to work faster.

  ‘Where are the war servitors?’ one of the Custodians was calling out across the vox. His voice was ragged with the effort of battle. ‘Where is the accursed Mechanicum?’

  Jaya had no answer. She listened to the heated exchanges, hearing her own scions reporting the absence of significant portions of the convoy’s defenders. Hundreds of servitors, tanks and Protectors were simply not there.

  The Knight rocked gently as ammunition canisters were crunched into place. A moment later she felt the slight sway of her gunlimb as ammunition belt feeds were reconnected.

  ‘For Highrock,’ Torolec intoned the traditional words of readiness.

  ‘For the Emperor,’ she replied, and slammed her control pylons forwards once more.

  An unknowable time later, the enemy fell back. Perhaps more accurately, they failed to pursue the withdrawing Imperials. No more of them drifted from the golden mist; no hunched silhouettes or screaming warriors or ravening beasts emerged from the fog to hurl themselves at the rearguard. Knowing this precious moment of peace wouldn’t last long, Ra made ready to repel another wave.

  ‘Fourth and fifth ranks advance,’ he grunted into the vox. ‘First through third, fall back.’

  Most of the exhausted warriors collapsed where they were, seized by muscle cramps in their first moment of peace in untold hours. Grav-tanks and relatively fresh warriors took their places, advancing in place of the exhausted waves of their kindred who had held until now.

  Ra slumped to the ground, his muscles in spasm, physically unable to bring himself to rise. The stimms and adrenal-spikes were wearing off at last, forcing him to confront the reality of his overworked body. He was poisoning himself with sleeplessness, his blood rich with chemical stimulants and his thoughts prey to the distortions of a brain refused the mercy of rest.

  By his loose calculations he had been awake now for fifteen days, fighting almost every minute since the walls fell, his ears endlessly ringing with a vox-crackling orchestra of conflicting voices. His body was eating itself for nourishment. He struggled to stay aware of how the evacuation was proceeding farther along the passages, but there was no word beyond the Archimandrite’s absence and the predation of foes from many of the side-tunnels. His thoughts were dull and slow, his reflexes slower. Everything he saw was stained by the greying haze of exhausted starvation.

  Fifteen days. His right shoulder had seized days ago, yet there had been no respite. It throbbed with crippling cramps from the sheer repetitive weight of hammering his spear down over and over again, thousands of times each day and night.

  The tall form of Baroness Jaya’s Castigator was a motionless statue above them, staring back into the mist. Waiting, just as they were waiting. Diocletian had done well in finding her. Vyridion’s Knights were precious assets in the close-quarter brutality of these tunnel battles.

  Jodarion, another of the Lords of Terra, collapsed into the road next to Ra, lying atop the last three legionaries he’d slain. Jodarion’s trembling hand managed to drag his blade-split helm free, baring his face to the ashy air. The Custodian sucked it in, in great wet heaves.

  There was very little left of Jodarion’s face. He left some of it on the inside of his cleaved helmet, reduced to a red smear. Ra looked at the gasping, bloody skull next to him, all that remained of Jodarion’s head, half of the teeth hammered away, lost at some point in the last few days. The wounds had clotted almost at once, but the damage was done.

  Ra suspected he looked little better.

  The legionary nearest to him was still alive. A World Eater, bisected at the waist, was dragging himself closer to where Ra kneeled. His armour was more red than white, signifying some unknown change within his treasonous Legion.

  ‘Blood,’ the warrior murmured through a shattered mouth.

  ‘I was there,’ Ra tried to growl at him, but the exhausted words were a snarling whisper. ‘I was there the day we saved your mongrel primarch from certain death.’

  ‘Blood,’ the World Eater mumbled again. His helm had been crushed, savaging the skull and face within. His eyes were glazed, maddened, the pupils mere pinpricks.

  ‘If only we’d left him there.’ The Custodian laughed, feeling his reknitting bones and abused muscles stinging afresh with the squirted application of adrenal elixirs from inside his armour.

  ‘Blood…’

  ‘If only we’d left him to die in those mountains.’ Ra was smiling now. ‘The one primarch who couldn’t conquer his world. The one primarch who lived as a slave. The one primarch who had to be saved from death.’

  ‘Blood!’ The World Eater’s eyes resolved with the ghost of clarity. ‘Blood for the–’

  A spear rammed through the World Eater’s spine, driven down between his shoulder blades. The power pack on his back shorted out and died. The warrior himself went into convulsions. Eyes that had so briefly cleared now rolled back into his broken head.

  Above him, Solon wrenched the weapon left, then right, and finally pulled it free. The Custodian collapsed a breath later, using the World Eater’s corpse as a seat.

  ‘This has been the worst day since yesterday,’ Solon said with no trace of a smile in his tone.

  Ra rolled onto his back, first seeing the empty mist above, then looking to his right. He saw Zhanmadao, the Terminator forced down to one knee, his firepike lost or broken who knew how long ago. Grinding gyro-stabilisers in the Cataphractii suit’s joints sought to bring the warrior back to his feet but Zhanmadao slouched forwards, head lowered. He refused to rise from his crouch, or he simply couldn’t manage it, instead adopting the pose of an ancient knight kneeling in prayer before an altar. Blood had dried while running from rents in his battleplate, and from his mouth in a slow trickle. When he lifted his head to look at Ra, a dirty chasm of scabbed blood and broken bone showed where one eye and one ear had been. Bare skull glistened in the gold mist.

  Unable to speak, Zhanmadao grunted.

  Ra tried to force a nod. Instead, his eyes fell closed.

  He opened them a second later. An hour later. A year later. The Mechanicum’s tunnel was gone, as were his kindred.

  He stood in the throne room, the Emperor’s laboratory has it had been half a decade before, not as it stood now. The walls lacked the hive-like hollows of thousands upon thousands of recesses awaiting stasis coffins. The machinery spat no sparks. The Emperor didn’t sit upon the Golden Throne. That great engine thrummed with automation, independent of the Emperor’s presence yet slaved to His invisible will and the ambitious heights of Imperial dreams.

 
‘Hello, Ra.’

  Ra turned, feeling the broken-bone grind of his malfunctioning armour. He tried to kneel but the Emperor stopped him, a hand gripping his Custodian’s pauldron. The tribune grunted his gratitude.

  ‘Do you remember this day, Ra?’

  The workers performed their duties around him, maintaining the rumbling machines, tending to the connective pipelines and power couplings. It could have been one of any number of days in the throne room, before…

  No. There. There was Valdor. There was Amon. There was Ra himself, one of twenty of the highest-ranking Custodians present in a loose pack, speaking in voices too low, too far away, for Ra’s wounded manifestation to make out.

  Ra’s mouth curled in a tired smile at the sight. How innocent we were.

  He knew of what those ghosts spoke. He remembered it well. He even followed the movements of Amon’s lips, his memory providing the voice he couldn’t hear.

  ‘…no word from Aquillon.’

  Aquillon. Prefect of the Hykanatoi. The Occuli Imperator, Eyes of the Emperor, assigned to watch over Lorgar in the waning years of the Great Crusade. Aquillon, who had never returned from his vigil. One of Ra’s own Dynastes Squad had travelled with Aquillon on that long, distant mission: Sythran – a warrior who had also surely fallen to Word Bearers treachery. Perhaps even on Isstvan itself in the high hour of treachery.

  Stoic, dutiful Sythran. Ra hoped he had died well.

  ‘I remember, sire,’ said Ra. He watched Amon speaking of Aquillon, seeing one of his finest companions mouthing the very last words spoken before the sirens sounded.

  The sirens began to sound.

  ‘Time is short, Ra,’ said the Emperor.

  Men and women were standing still around them. The shouts were starting to rise, accompanying the flashing warning lights. The gathered Custodians spread apart in effortless awareness of each other’s killing reach, the most loyal hands in the Imperium reaching for their spears.

  ‘We may not reach the Dungeon, sire.’ Even here, Ra’s voice was a cracked ruin. ‘The Mechanicum has abandoned us and the convoy is near undefended.’