Hammer and Anvil

by James Swallow

  ‘She comes too,’ said Imogen, cutting at the air with her weapon. ‘It is time to reveal all the damned truths hiding in this place.’

  The entrance corridor to the stasis-tomb sloped away, and the steady tread of Ossuar’s iron-clawed feet echoed in the heavy air. A single pair of lychguards stood sentinel at the entrance to the nemesor’s vault, warscythes crossed over their chest-plates, the tall fans of their ornate skulls raised as dead eyes stared into nothing. They had not even acknowledged the presence of the cryptek. Instead, after a moment of sampling the intelligence stream via mnemonic probe from the complex’s knowledge nexus, they silently interpreted his intentions and let him pass. Ossuar scanned them as he passed, making a vague attempt to glean an understanding of their thought processes. But the works of the mind of the battle-forms were always hard for him to grasp. It was a cryptek’s way to see the universe in a different manner from those of the warfighting castes, after all.

  Ossuar and his kindred were harbingers, and that had been their singular purpose since biotransference, unchanged despite the passed aeons of the Great Sleep. Psychomancers like he were the ones who knew the hearts of the unenlightened child-races the best, and he had often fought with his gift-powers at the fore. Ossuar’s brethren, be they geomancer or plasmancer, the time-weavers or the storm-callers, were the intellectual elite of the necrontyr, echoing in eternity what they had been before the C’tan had come to uplift them. But he and his kind were not soldiers. They were ultimately thinkers, the learned of the dynastic houses. It was not their place to engage in the petty actions of killing the meatbound en masse.

  Although… On some level, Ossuar had to process the truth that engaging the human females in direct armed conflict had been briefly… exciting.

  He followed the inclined corridor down towards the antechamber, led by a vee of wayfinder scarabs etched with the sigil of the Sautekh clan. The cryptek bore the same mark himself, etched by laser on his steel sternum. Data traps in the walls registered him and let him pass, deactivating lethal gauss emitters hidden inside ornamental carvings.

  The nemesor’s sleeping chamber opened to him, and the scarabs bowed on their six legs before retreating into their wall-slots. Ossuar paused to examine the latest status update in the Somnus Codex and saw that the revival process was well into the final stage. Beyond, to the right, the annex chamber brimmed with weapons of all kinds, a personal armoury that contained flayers and etherium projectors, gauntlet-mounded voidblades and null spears, tachyon arrows and hyperphasic swords. Ossuar found such an overt display of these killing tools to be without purpose. In his existence, the cryptek had never found the need to use anything other than the abyssal staff he carried with him at all times. But then warfighters did so fetishise their weapons, a truism that appeared to be valid across all species, even the most inferior ones.

  Ossuar made the sacrosanct signs of Activation and Eternity for the monitor eyes observing the interior of the tomb, partly as it was expected of him to pay such ritual obeisance to the Stormlord, but largely to operate the gestural control interface that would lower the force wall between him and the inner chamber. The glittering field dissipated and the cryptek entered the sleeping room proper.

  The nemesor’s sarcophagus had already risen from its holding claw and was in the process of moving from the horizontal plane to the vertical. A thin trickle of dust rained down from the intricately-machined surface of the iron coffin. Although the slumber in this outpost had been only an infinitesimal fraction of the millions of cycles their kind had spent in the Great Sleep, Ossuar still experienced a moment of trepidation. Awakenings were always difficult things, he recalled, and trauma of mind was sometimes the result. The cryptek recalled his own rise from the Timeless Dream and how helpless it had made him feel at the start, in those vulnerable moments before his machine body re-engaged with his essence. It was not an experience he would ever wish to repeat. Ossuar had privately vowed he would never go dormant again, and that had been in great part why he had taken the role of woken custodian of this place.

  The lid of the sarcophagus broke in a line across its centre, and then its length. The four quadrants of metallized stone folded up and away, and the nemesor was revealed.

  The warlord, like Ossuar, displayed the same skeletal form as all humanoid necrontyr did, the shape a deliberate echo of the frail bones they had left behind when they embraced the majesty of biotransference. But where the cryptek was spindly and long of finger, the warrior-general was almost muscular. Layers of redundant lamellar armour made of living alloy plated his torso and limbs, and a splayed head-crest framed a gaunt steel face that was bright with copper accents. The Sautekh symbol was brazen upon the general’s forehead, as sharp this day as it had been when the master of their dynasty, the undying Imotekh, had burned it there with his fire gauntlet. The Royarch of Mandragora had favoured the nemesor, and the mark made it certain that all who gazed upon the warlord would know so.

  A green flash signalled the return of awareness to the figure in the coffin, and his eye slits glowed with renewed life.

  Ossuar bowed his head. ‘My Lord Khaygis, dream no more. You are needed.’ The nemesor’s name had not echoed in the halls of the outpost for many cycles.

  The general’s vocoder favoured a vocalisation like stones grinding across one another. ‘Cryptek…’ said Khaygis, weighing the title. ‘How long?’

  ‘A breath of wind, little more.’

  The general rose, slowly and carefully, testing his limbs as he stepped free of the casket. Tiny phylacter arachnids scuttled across him before flinging themselves back into their container, now that their tasks of repair and maintenance were done. ‘It must be an issue of import, then.’ Khaygis’s intonation had a hollow quality, a resemblance to something echoing down a long stone tunnel. ‘It must be so, for the great Ossuar to admit he faces something he cannot overcome with intellect alone.’

  The cryptek cocked his head. ‘I would say that I require… your unique insight.’

  ‘Of course you would,’ Khaygis replied, folding knife-blade hands into a fist and back again. ‘Show me now.’

  ‘Very well,’ began Ossuar. ‘But first it might be necessary for me to explain certain facts.’

  The nemesor gathered up his robe of command and settled it over his steel shoulders. ‘You misunderstand, cryptek.’ He closed on the other necron, his leering metal face straightening. ‘I have no wish to listen to you give me the interpretation of things you think I should know. I told you to show me.’ He reached up and folded his talons around Ossuar’s jaw. ‘So show me.’

  The cryptek felt Khaygis’s intrusive mnemonic probe as it beamed from the antennae hidden in his crest, the data-philtre touching Ossuar’s outer consciousness. Hastily, he re-ordered his internal firewalls to protect his deep secrets as the nemesor looked into his recent memory stores.

  It might have been possible for Ossuar to fully resist the violation of his mindframe, but to offer even token resistance to the nemesor would have been seen as disobedience. Khaygis was cementing his place in the hierarchy from the very start, reminding the cryptek that although he had exalted rank as one of the Stormlord’s greatest harbingers, he would never be beyond the general’s command.

  The two of them shared nothing but suspicion of each other’s motivations. The cryptek considered the nemesor to be little more than a violent braggart, while in return the general saw the harbinger as ill-focussed and obsessive.

  Reluctantly, Ossuar accepted the situation and allowed Khaygis to duplicate a full memory feed of everything that had transpired during his dormancy.

  As she had been commanded, Sister Miriya leaned forwards and rested the barrel of her bolter against the back of Questor Tegas’s skull, her finger upon the trigger.

  ‘At my word of command,’ said the canoness, biting out every syllable, ‘you will kill this mendacious wretch, is that understood?’

  ‘Aye, mistress,’ she replied, holding the weapon steady.r />
  The veteran glanced across to where the ragged, hooded woman stood watching, with Sister Verity at her side. Sepherina frowned, weighing her options.

  ‘She helped us,’ Miriya volunteered. ‘We all would be dead now if not for her, and this perfidy would have gone unchecked.’

  From his position on his knees in the Great Chapel, the Mechanicus adept made a clicking, sighing noise. ‘If I can be allowed to explain? All will be made clear.’

  At the corner of her sight, Miriya could see where the rest of Tegas’s group were surrounded by a ring of similarly-armed Battle Sisters led by Pandora, who cradled a storm bolter in her grip. All of them were experienced in the duties expected of an Adepta Sororitas execution detail.

  Sepherina looked to Sister Imogen. ‘The device,’ she began. ‘Where is it now?’

  ‘Secure,’ Imogen replied tightly. ‘Sister Danae and a group of Retributors hold it in one of the deep prayer cells as we speak. Wards have been placed around the object and explosive charges made ready. If it so much as twitches, it will be destroyed.’

  ‘You cannot do that,’ said Tegas.

  ‘You have no right to demand otherwise,’ Sepherina snapped.

  ‘You misunderstand,’ Tegas replied, his head still bowed. ‘I make no demand of you. I simply tell you the facts. You cannot destroy it. You will not be able to. The material it is composed of is a living alloy.’

  The canoness’s eyes narrowed. ‘You know so much, questor. How many things have you kept from me since Paramar?’ She advanced on him, her fury building. ‘Lies standing upon lies! There is nothing you have said to me that I cannot doubt, your every word and gesture subterfuge and artifice!’

  Miriya had watched the silent tide of anger rise in the veteran’s face as Imogen brought the Mechanicus adepts before her and explained what had taken place. She could not miss the way that Tegas hung on the Sister Superior’s every word when she described the portals that took them to the Obsidian Moon, and the tale of what they had encountered there. Miriya suppressed a shudder as Imogen described the echoing metal corridors of the necron complex, the thought of being there crawling at the base of her neck.

  It was only now that she had returned to the convent that Miriya was able to parse the sensations she had felt in the lair of the machine-xenos. In all the time they had up there, it was like something in the Battle Sister’s spirit had come loose and disconnected. Now that feeling was gone, and she found a moment of understanding.

  There was a numbness about the necrons and their machines that leaked into the air around them. A sense of dead space, of decay. Not like the rot of a plague zombie or the charnel stench of a battlefield, worse than that. It was a complete and total absence of the force of life.

  Miriya had walked in a place and encountered beings that could only be described as soulless. For one whose existence orbited around the light of faith and the power of the human spirit, to experience that chilled the Sororitas to her marrow. The necrons were antithesis, raw and real and made manifest.

  She fought down the cold in the core of her soul and snapped back to the moment at hand.

  ‘A concealed dig site, staffed by explorators from your ministry,’ Sepherina was saying. ‘It is not enough that Inquisitor Hoth and his lackeys disrespected our dead and engineered the exile of the Sisterhood from their own outpost! Now I learn that the Adeptus Mechanicus has been here, perhaps for years, grubbing in the dirt in secret!’

  ‘I admit,’ Tegas said carefully, ‘that some omissions of data have been made.’ The canoness made a growling noise and spat; the questor pressed on before she could order him shot. ‘I was aware of Adept Ferren’s presence on the planet. I did not know how large his party was, or what they were doing.’

  ‘Liar,’ snarled Imogen, and Miriya was forced to agree.

  Tegas kept speaking. ‘I came here to deal with him. Quietly. Ferren was acting on his own initiative, without oversight. His actions jeopardised the Mechanicus’s relationship with the Ecclesiarchy!’ The questor shook his head. ‘I knew, yes. But how could I have told you? How would the Order of Our Martyred Lady have reacted to such information?’

  ‘With burning censure,’ Imogen replied.

  ‘Exactly.’ Tegas nodded sharply. ‘I came to order Ferren to cease his work here, to remove himself from this world. Please, milady, you must believe me.’

  Sepherina moved back and forth in front of the questor, shaking her head. ‘That is your explanation? I break through the shell of your untruth and find another nested beneath. Will there be another beneath this one, and another and another?’ She pointed a finger at him. ‘I submit to you, adept, that you have abused the trust of the Adepta Sororitas to bring you to Sanctuary 101. Once before you warned me that you and your masters might annex this planet for your own needs. I believe that you have attempted that very thing, you and Hoth together in alliance for whatever spoils lie beneath these sands!’

  ‘But why involve us?’ Miriya let the question slip.

  The canoness looked across at her. ‘To cover their lie. Because even they cannot be seen to defy the Imperial Church so blatantly. They pretended to share this duty with us, but all along we are seen as nought but an impediment.’ Sepherina looked back at Tegas. ‘Tell me, questor. Is Hoth coming here? Have you drawn plans to destroy my Sisters, bury us in the dust on this distant world where no eyes will see?’

  ‘You do not understand,’ said Tegas, his tone turning flat and cold. ‘This is more important than the corpses of a few dead women.’

  Sepherina drew her chaplet and a thin blade emerged from its length with an oiled click. ‘I’ll slit your throat for your betrayal!’

  ‘Be sure to take the life of your Sister Superior and this one with the gun at my head into the bargain,’ Tegas retorted. ‘If your blade seeks traitors, they are deserving.’

  ‘A pathetic ploy!’ snorted Imogen.

  ‘Is it?’ Tegas spat back. ‘I have analysed all sensor data on that… female.’ He nodded at the revenant. ‘You have allied yourself with a monstrosity! A xenos hybrid! You have willingly consorted with something that is inhuman! That is a grave sin against Saint Katherine’s name, is it not so?’

  ‘More lies…’ said Miriya.

  But the canoness hesitated and pointed her chaplet blade at the revenant. ‘You,’ she said. ‘Lower your hood. Show yourself to me.’

  Recollection flowed like icy waters.

  Time was an abstract for a necron. Once, when they had been organics, the passing of the eras seemed like such a terrible burden, a great cosmic weight upon the back of their species. But when the C’tan came with their gifts of understanding, all that had changed. The passage of the Stargods through the lives of the necrontyr race had left them forever changed, and with the ending of the great war with the Old Ones, they had found a new purpose. Led by the Silent King, the necrons revolted against the powers that had remade them from meat-matter unto the immortal perfection of steel – and finally, trapped in a history mortally wounded by war, they went to the Great Sleep to wait out the millennia.

  Time… So much time had passed in the null-state. Both the cryptek and the nemesor shared the same sensation from their past, the same sense of affront they had experienced on awakening. The galaxy they had left behind sixty million years ago had been broken wreckage, a warzone torn open by battles that had erased entire star systems from existence as easily as insects were swatted from the air. The one they awoke to was whole and healed… But it was infested. Not just by the accursed eldar, the lackeys of the old enemy, but by new things that pretended at intellect, that swarmed in the dirt of worlds and believed themselves superior.

  The throneworld Mandragora the Golden had awoken to changed fortunes, newly rich in this strange, pestilent present. Its master, the Stormlord Imotekh, had grasped the reality of things far quicker than any of the other Royarchs who had survived the Timeless Dream. Served by a legion of dynasts that counted Ossuar and Khaygis in their number, Imot
ekh’s crusade for dominance began in emerald fire.

  It was this fire that swept to the star the humans called Kavir.

  Imotekh’s steady march across the galactic plane wove its course even now, out in the depthless tracts of interstellar space where necron tomb ships and harvester cruisers travelled at near-light velocities. The Royarch’s grand schema, embedded in the mindframes of every necron in his service from warlord to drone, was to reunite the scattered, sleeping remnants of their species under his sigil. They had come to the Kavir system in search of the Obsidian Moon, and the Dolmen Gate that lay hidden beneath its surface. The Atun, the dynasty that had built it, was weak and scattered, and the Sautekh had claimed it for themselves.

  It was almost as an afterthought that the pocket of organics on the surface of the nearby planet were exterminated. Worthless things in the eyes of the Stormlord, impediments to the cause, the human outpost died and the moon was annexed. It was victory.

  Or to be accurate, it was a victory of a kind.

  Hidden inside the moon, a treasure trove of Atun soldiery and weapons inert but undamaged, ready to be reprogrammed and turned to Sautekh allegiance. Great value to any Royarch, even one as powerful as mighty Imotekh, whose war fleet already brimmed with death-dealers. And there, the Gate itself, rare and precious. Capable of penetrating the immaterial walls of the subspatial network existing in the bones of the void itself.

  Rare and precious, indeed. And broken, much to the Stormlord’s annoyance. Perhaps by the ravages of time, perhaps in the final spasms of the war with the Old Ones… It mattered not. Without the Dolmen Gate in full order, the weapons stored inside the Obsidian Moon could not be deployed, their function stunted.

  Ossuar remembered this moment well. He remembered Imotekh’s irritation at cracking open this prize only to find it useless to him.

  The cryptek saw opportunity and took it. Every member of the Stormlord’s hierarchy knew their master was driven by his fire, his eternal desire to press on and never again be tethered to just one single world. Despite the counsel of his trusted warlords – generals like Khaygis – Imotekh refused to remain and dig in at Kavir. There was too much out there, too many other Tomb Worlds yet to be found and awakened, too many dangerous and savage child-races to be left unculled.