The World Engine

by Ben Counter

  Hallucinations, vivid dreams and other intrusive mental imagery are to be reported to a command authority. The specific imagery to be monitored for includes: any image of a face, human or xenos, with three or more eyes; the sensation of existing within a star; sympathy for or identification with the xenos species colloquially referred to as ‘necrons’; antipathy towards or inclination to act against the instructions of a command authority or a representative of the Inquisition. Anyone reporting such intrusive imagery is to report to the Armed Explorator Craft Needlefang under guard.

  Failure to act in accordance with these standing orders is sufficient cause to deem an individual as presenting a moral threat.

  In the name of the Holy Ordos of the Emperor’s Inquisition.

  – Lord Inquisitor Quilven Rhaye.

  SIX

  Chief Librarian Hyalhi

  ‘He lies, Lord Amhrad,’ said Hyalhi.

  ‘Did your psychic senses tell you that?’ asked Amhrad. His voice was clear enough now over the vox – getting the higher ground had improved the integrity of the vox-net.

  ‘No,’ replied Hyalhi. ‘It is just obvious.’

  Hyalhi and his honour guard had reached the upper levels of a belfry or watchtower atop a building shaped something like a church. The building stood on a low rise among the maze of many-levelled structures that took up this district of Borsis. They resembled residential buildings, albeit on a larger scale, though there was no sign of anyone living there. It was possible they were slave quarters recently evacuated, though if that was the case the slaves had left no sign of their existence. The squad stood at guard as Hyalhi conferred with the Chapter Master over the command channel. They were lacking one of their number, Brother Ghazin, who had fallen during the expedition into the reclamation vault.

  ‘I shall soon speak with our new friend Turakhin,’ said Amhrad. ‘I cannot say what his offer will be or whether we can accept it, but I have every intention of arming myself with all the information on this alien that I can. I entrust you with this, Chief Librarian. Again I ask much of you.’

  ‘Again, I give thanks that I may do my duty,’ said Hyalhi.

  ‘So the Codex would have you say,’ said Amhrad, ‘but I know our brethren are embattled and any Astral Knight would rather go to their aid than run errands I set for him. But that is what you must do. The slaves indicate that Turakhin’s rule was conducted from the palace of the Magadha dynasty. The place is proscribed now and Heqiroth permits no necron to set foot there. If there is intelligence on Turakhin at the palace, I would have it before I begin negotiations with him. At the very least I may be able to trap him in a lie, and reveal if he is deceiving us.’

  ‘The slaves were compromised,’ said Hyalhi. ‘Is it possible they are feeding us information planted by Heqiroth?’

  ‘It is,’ said Amhrad. ‘That is why I am sending you, Chief Librarian. If any Astral Knight can see a trap coming, it is you.’

  ‘Can you spare the Maxentius to transport us?’

  ‘It is on its way now. Fear not, Chief Librarian. We can survive awhile without you.’

  Hyalhi walked to the edge of the belfry, where a wide window looked out across the district. The Astral Knights force led by Amhrad included the Seventh Company and stragglers separated from their own companies by the chaos of the crash. Amhrad’s force was still the closest to the crash site of the Tempestus and the column of smoke could be seen rising among the spires and minarets on the horizon. The squads of the Seventh were scattered across the area, each forging ahead through the cramped streets. A faint glitter of light catching steel suggested the necrons moving after them, closing in on the district in their thousands. Amhrad was keeping his strikeforce fluid and manoeuvrable, but there were only so many numbers that squad tactics could negate.

  Perhaps Amhrad would survive here until Hyalhi returned. Perhaps not. That risk was one Amhrad had taken into account and considered acceptable.

  ‘Then the Emperor lead you, Lord Amhrad,’ said Hyalhi.

  ‘Emperor lead you,’ said Amhrad. ‘And lead us, Hyalhi, in turn.’

  Darkness lay across the seven hills as if night had pooled on the surface of Borsis. Though the sun of the Varv system was still visible as a dirty glow through the streaky iron-coloured cloud, the palaces seemed to rise through the night sky on the opposite side of the planetoid.

  The Magadha dynasty had been built on antiquity and wealth. Whatever the necrons considered valuable, the Magadha had possessed the most of it. A circle of slender gilded towers ringed the seven hills on which the palace was built, forming a border between the dynasty’s overt opulence and the drab steel of the surrounding area. Each wing of the palace was built on one of the hills, connected to its neighbours by bridges hung with chains of gemstones and precious metals.

  The palace was untouched. Time had dulled its silver and tarnished its gold, but it had not fallen to corrosion and collapse as other abandoned areas had. Even the rust seemed to obey Heqiroth’s proscribing of the place. The palace looked less abandoned and more frozen in darkness, cursed and forbidden.

  ‘There,’ said Hyalhi, leaning over the shoulder of the gunship pilot Brother Kodelos. ‘The south-western wing. Turakhin’s chambers. Take us in low and circle before we land.’

  Kodelos worked the controls of the gunship Maxentius and it ducked beneath the level of the palace towers, levelling out to swing around the south-western wing. The wing was an eight-sided building of countless complex angles and facets, forming an interlocking geometry picked out in silver and red gold.

  ‘Looks clear,’ said Kodelos. ‘There’s nothing moving down there.’

  ‘Take us down by the southern entrance,’ said Hyalhi. ‘Stay above us. Be vigilant.’

  The Maxentius drifted down towards the entrance, the superheated exhausts kicking up clouds of iron filings. The rear ramp swung open and Hyalhi’s honour guard jumped out, bolters up, ready to shoot down any necron constructs that might lurch at them from the shadows gathering around the palace.

  Hyalhi was last out. Above him rose the entrance to the south-western wing, a massive set of double doors inlaid with images of the Magadha dynasty’s lords. Borsis itself was in the centre, ringed by the dynasts who had ruled it.

  ‘Open them,’ said Hyalhi.

  Burhan stood ready with his flamer as the rest of the squad hauled the doors open.

  The darkness inside did not leap at them. The palace was silent.

  Hyalhi stepped up to the threshold. He felt the serpent inside his mind straining to uncoil. It was dangerous to give it too much freedom, but equally dangerous to ignore it.

  ‘Spread out,’ ordered Hyalhi. ‘Sweep and secure.’

  The serpent rattled around again inside his head. He let it uncoil, just a little. He could not give it free rein, not here in a place so heavy with unknown history. His senses bled out and edged the ornate interior of the palace in unnatural colours, the light of the warp shining through from the other side of reality.

  History was heavy. The burden of its impact on the warp weighed down the substance of real space. Hyalhi had to force his senses through it, like wading through sucking mud. But through the murk, Hyalhi could see the threads hanging behind everything.

  Fate tied the galaxy together, and fate was a tapestry of everything that would one day happen. No one could read that tapestry, no matter how insane warp-prophets or the farseers of the alien eldar might claim to know the future. Only individual threads could be perceived, and the way they entwined with the threads beside them.

  One thread wound around a single necron who sat enthroned deeper into the palace. He wore the accoutrements of the Magadha dynasty, familiar from the images on the palace doors and the pictograms lining the walls. Behind the necron stretched the echoes of past dynasts, similar in shape but flesh and blood instead of the living metal of the tech-constructs. Their faces
were hazy, clouded by time and the imperfection of memory. Hyalhi had the impression of greyish, lesioned flesh and a twisted and hunched body shape, echoed in the form of a necron warrior. They were skeletal and hideous, compensating for their living decay with the gold and finery of rulership.

  And they were suffused with death. Every thread wrapped around the necron dynasties of the past led towards death. Even while they lived, it was death that had obsessed and consumed them.

  Hyalhi knew when he was standing at a nexus of history. The past and the future of Borsis ran through the south-western wing of the Magadha palace.

  ‘Onward,’ said Hyalhi. ‘Be alert. This is a place of death.’

  The squad fanned out to scout the immediate surroundings. The south-western wing was built around a central temple, not to the gods this necron world hinted at, but to Turakhin himself. Adjoining chambers held a mechanical cradle into which a necron tech-construct could be plugged, perhaps to recharge or self-repair, and what resembled a library of thousands of panes of crystal held racked up on the walls. Side chambers were set up for negotiations – in one was a grand table of steel and obsidian with a map of Borsis, the sections of its cityscape rendered in silver and gold. Strategic locations were marked with precious stones.

  ‘Pict-steal that,’ said Hyalhi.

  ‘Already done,’ replied Apothecary Saahr, who was poring over the map.

  ‘There’s nothing here,’ said Brother Felhidar.

  ‘Nothing visible,’ corrected Hyalhi. He returned to the temple. The face of a necron, presumably Turakhin in the body he had inhabited prior to being usurped, glared down from one wall. It was rendered in polished grey stone and was fully the height of the room. An altar before it held a heap of small precious metal cubes left as an offering. Perhaps Turakhin had left them as a sacrifice to himself. It would seem a very necron thing to do.

  Hyalhi knelt. He removed the gauntlet of his power armour and placed his bare palm against the ground. The patterns of the floor echoed the intricate shapes of Borsis’s cityscapes as seen from the gunship.

  Hyalhi could feel what had happened there. Betrayal. A confluence of power. He could feel the arrogance of Turakhin, and the shattering of it by Heqiroth’s coup. And beyond it, far in the past, another betrayal. Something awesome in scope, the betrayal of an entire species.

  They killed their gods. It was the only clue the Astral Knights had about the distant history of the necron race. What Hyalhi felt was an echo of deicide.

  He caught the skittering vibrations of insect legs on the floor. A necron scarab crawled along the base of the shrine room’s wall. Hyalhi picked up it with his bare hand and held it in front of its face. It was no bigger than the roaches that were such a problem on every Imperial battleship. Its tiny legs wriggled as it twisted in his grasp to get free.

  Hyalhi placed the scarab carefully on the floor by his feet. It scurried away and Hyalhi followed it. It passed through a small side door into what Hyalhi had assumed was a vestment chamber or storage room for sacred implements. Hyalhi followed it and saw the room was a narrow, low corridor, one which would have forced even a human of normal size to duck. Hyalhi could barely squeeze his armoured shape through it.

  Other scarabs clung to the walls. They joined the lone scarab as it moved, forming a mobile patch of glittering metal. Hyalhi followed as his shoulder guards and psychic hood scraped along the passageway.

  The passageway ended at a small room with a necron cradle mounted on each wall, roughly humanoid depressions hung with cabling and studded with spikes that looked like they fitted into ports on a tech-construct’s body. Quarters for palace functionaries, perhaps, or even backup bodies for Turakhin to use should his regular body fall to violence. If so, he had been too slow to use them when Heqiroth made his move.

  Hyalhi could feel a force pulling at his mind. It was not another psychic being – he had stayed alert for any hint of another psyker on Borsis and had felt nothing, and any xenos witch would have stood out like a flaming beacon to Hyalhi’s psychic senses. But it was a will powerful enough to register in Hyalhi’s mind even without any psychic ability. It was drawing him in, but he was at a dead end. Hyalhi was supposed to forge deeper into the palace. There had to be a way in.

  ‘Brother Saahr,’ voxed Hyalhi.

  ‘Chief Librarian, where are you?’ came the reply.

  ‘Take two brothers. Find three necron bodies. Salvage is acceptable but they must be mostly intact. Bring them to the shrine chamber. And be quick.’

  Hyalhi’s honour guard had long been used to obeying his orders without asking why they were given. Hyalhi kept his own counsel, and it was said among the battle-brothers that Amhrad was the only man with whom he spoke as an equal. They were right, too, not because Hyalhi thought of the other Astral Knights as beneath him but because a Librarian had to stay a mystery. His powers were a potent weapon, but they were also as dangerous to the user and those around him as they were to any enemy without the relentless mental discipline the Chapter Librarium had taught. The battle-brothers had to remain apprehensive about all witches, they had to see them as different and sinister. A psyker was the most dangerous creature that could exist in the galaxy, and it took a psyker to understand that.

  Saahr did not question as he, Burhan and Masadh returned less than an hour later, each carrying an inactive necron construct. One was relatively new, stained but not corroded with time. The other two were very old but intact, and the construct Burhan carried looked like one of the elites with massive shoulder guards and plates of tarnished gold armouring its torso.

  Hyalhi directed the squad to take each necron corpse into the small chamber the scarabs had led him into. The scarabs were still there, gathered on the ceiling as if in anticipation of something.

  ‘Speak, Brother Burhan,’ said Hyalhi from within the corridor.

  ‘I said nothing,’ said Burhan.

  ‘But you wish to,’ replied Hyalhi.

  Burhan heaved the necron off his shoulder. ‘We are spending time following your hunch, Chief Librarian, time when our brothers are fighting and suffering. I believe only in what I see before me with my own eyes. That is what I wish to say. But you are my commander, and I am not a psyker, so I held my tongue.’

  ‘That is why I asked for you to join my honour guard, brother,’ said Hyalhi. ‘If I followed every intuition blindly with no one voice to dissent, I would soon be lost in darkness.’

  ‘Then you will listen to me?’ asked Burhan.

  ‘Not this time,’ said Hyalhi. ‘Continue.’

  The Astral Knights heaved the necron corpses up into the cradles on the walls. Probes snicked into ports on the steel bodies and cabling retracted as the alcoves altered to accommodate the dimensions of the constructs. The necrons looked like nothing so much as metal skeletons nailed to the walls of a dungeon.

  For a moment there was silence. The Astral Knights backed away from the walls as much as they could in the small room.

  Ancient metal ground against metal inside the walls. Hyalhi caught the smell of rust and machine oil. The floor tilted and slid downwards, breaking up into segments that formed the steps of a staircase spiralling down. The walls hinged inwards, forming an archway over the newly formed stairway.

  Burhan pointed the nozzle of his flamer into the darkness below. A faint glimmer pulsed along the walls, rippling along the lines of hieroglyphs carved into the metal. The air was hot and dry.

  Hyalhi let his mind shimmer outwards, touching the veil that separated reality from the warp. It was there that the threads ran, criss-crossing the surface of time. The threads – not truly threads, that was just the concept that Hyalhi used to comprehend them – were the substance of fate. Few spoke of fate as anything but a metaphor or a curse, for in the minds of a non-psyker fate was something without meaning. They could not see or touch it, they could not read or follow it. At the most they mi
ght claim to believe in it, to absolve themselves of responsibility for their lives.

  But Hyalhi could see fate. It was not like looking at a painting or a holo of an event. Just looking at fate changed it. It was art, not science, and needed imagination instead of perception. Imagination was not a trait common to Space Marines. The way Hyalhi’s mind worked was at odds with the way a Space Marine’s should, which was why men like him were so rare. That Hyalhi’s mind contained so much strangeness, but that he could still serve as an Astral Knight, was a testament to the discipline the Chapter Librarium had instilled in him.

  Hyalhi picked out a single thread and followed it. Vibrations of victory, madness and uncertainty ran along it. It was a familiar thread, for it represented Hyalhi’s own fate. It ran through the palace and down the staircase, where it became tinged with blood-red conflict and violence.

  Other threads ran alongside it. One Hyalhi was sure represented Borsis itself, a cold and artificial thing, and he was more certain even than before that this was a synthetic planet created by an awesome power an aeon ago. Thousands more were almost invisible as if they barely registered on the face of the universe, shorn of some essence that allowed living things to make an impact on the veil – Hyalhi guessed these were individual necrons, perhaps the nobles who led the soulless masses of tech-construct warriors. They were tainted with sadness and regret, and the taste of treachery. What had happened to this artificial race? They had not always been that way. They were betrayed and they had lost their souls, and become the ancient machines that now ruled Borsis. Hyalhi could discern no details, except that it had happened on a vast scale and a very long time ago.

  The Astral Knights were proud bright threads tangling with the necrons in a dense braid of impenetrable conflict. Each one plunged into the haze of the future. Sometimes Hyalhi could see a thread from beginning to end, and tell when a man had been born and where and how he would die. It was rare. The future unravelled everything – fate was a force, but it was mutable and uncertain, and most fates were not fixed enough to show where they ended. The Chapter and the necrons of Borsis followed theirs to an uncertain ending.