by Ben Counter
Suspended over the sea of sinners was a huge circular platform, with raised edges like the seats of an amphitheatre. This was the ritual ground, a place infused with unholy energy by the torment of those being punished below. It was covered in bloodstained sand into which complex designs had been drawn in dried blood and lengths of offal, the ritual carcasses discarded in a pile to one side. The sacrifices had been specially bred on a daemon world deep within the Eye of Terror, each one worth a lifetime's fealty to the Dark Gods. More incense billowed from burners made from the skulls of the Hellforger's less useful crewmen and more heads hung from spiked chains from the distant ceiling, weeping black rain onto the sacred ground.
'Feogrym!' called Urkrathos, reaching the ritual floor. Feogrym was a wizened, hunched figure sitting in the middle of the arena. He looked up as Urkrathos approached and slunk forward, crawling towards the Hellforger's captain. 'I need to know now. We have entered real space and it will not be long before we reach the world. Is it genuine?'
Feogrym - scampered forwards on his hands, dragging his legs behind him until he was almost prostrate at Urkrathos's feet. 'Feogrym knows!' he spluttered. The sorcerer's face could have been mistaken for that of an extremely wrinkled, wizened old man from a distance. Up close it was clear it was actually a mass of tiny writhing tentacles that only formed human-like features out of a force of habit. 'Master, the Fell Gods speak, they speak... yes, they talk to Feogrym, tell him the truth, yes they do and old Feogrym can tell the truth from the lies...'
Urkrathos kicked Feogrym away from him, the boot of his power armour crunching through ribs Feogrym could heal easily enough. 'Don't try that nonsense with me, sorcerer.' he said impatiently. 'Abaddon warned me about you. You're no holy moron, you'd stab us all in the back the second you saw the chance. Take it from me you won't get that chance. Now, once again, sorcerer, is the signal real? I will not have this fleet wasting its time chasing echoes around the warp.'
Feogrym clambered to his feet and dusted the blood-caked sand off his tattered brown robes. 'Yes, the signs have been conclusive.' he said, rather more sanely. He looked nervously up at Urkrathos, who was twice the height of a normal man in his full terminator armour. 'Lord Tzeentch speaks with me.'
'His daemons speak with you, old man and for every truth a daemon tells nine lies. You had better be right.'
'Of course. Have I not witnesses?' Feogrym pointed to the far side of the room and Urkrathos saw, through the billowing incense, the hundreds of desiccated corpses sitting in ranks around the amphitheatre like an audience. Urkrathos wondered for a moment where Feogrym had got them all and then realised he couldn't have cared less as long as the sorcerer discharged his duties to the Warmaster as he had agreed.
'So. What do you know?'
'Listen.'
Feogrym spoke a few words, dark sounds that didn't belong to any register a human was supposed to hear. Urkrathos scowled as he recognised the dark tongue used by worshippers of Tzeentch, the Change God. Feogrym was one of those degenerates who worshipped one Chaos god over all the others, not realising that they were all part of the same many-faceted force that men called Chaos.
The blood rose in flakes off the floor, the flakes liquefying and running together like floating pools of quicksilver. The pools quivered and hundreds of crude, shifting faces were hanging in the air, their mouths working dumbly.
'Bridge,' commanded Urkrathos through the ship's vox-net. The vox-net whispered back at him as it transmitted his voice to the bridge crew. 'Play back the signal.'
The signal burst in a barrage of sound from the sky, bellowing through the ship's vox-casters. The blood faces began gibbering wildly, flowing into one another in agitation.
'Focus!' snapped Feogrym. 'Truth from the lies! The Changer of Ways commands you!'
The volume of the signal dropped and Urkrathos could make out the individual sounds, dots and dashes like some primitive code, wrought into a complex rhythm which he could tell had old, old magic pulsing at its centre.
The faces murmured a low babble of sounds, until words began forming in their speech, the words that formed the true message hidden so deep in the signal that only Feogrym's black magic could get to it.
'By the Fell Gods and the destiny of warp.' they began, 'By the death of the False Emperor and the dying of the stars, we bring to you, Warmaster Abaddon, Beloved of Chaos, Despised of Man, this tribute. For now these last days are the final fires burning, the black flames that consume a galaxy, the storms of the warp that drown out life, the End Times and the dawn of a galaxy of Chaos. We swear fealty to the Gods of Chaos and their herald, Abaddon the Despoiler, with this tribute that it might strike fear into the followers of the Corpse-Emperor and that through it they may see the true face of death...'
'Enough.' said Urkrathos. Feogrym waved a hand and the voices screamed silently as they dissolved into gobbets of blood that flowed up into the incense clouds. 'This is genuine?'
'Daemon-wrought.' said Feogrym. 'Most ancient. Yes, it is real.'
'Abaddon suspected rightly, then. It is an offer of tribute. Does it tell us what they are offering?'
Feogrym spread his hands. His tentacles writhed and for a moment Urkrathos saw the pulpy, grey mass that made up the sorcerer's real face. 'Would that I knew, Lord Urkrathos. Perhaps the exact tribute is so great they wish for you to know of it for the first time through your own eyes, magnificent as you are.'
'I warned you, Feogrym. I am less easily flattered than your acolytes.'
'Of course. Nevertheless, if they are new to our cause they may wish to impress us with their offering by not revealing it until we are there.'
'I have been around for ten thousand years. It will take a great deal to impress me.'
'And is it your intention, Lord Urkrathos, to give them the chance?'
Urkrathos glared at the sorcerer. The ways of Tzeentch, Changer of Ways, were by definition impossible to divine. Warp only knew what went on in the creature's head. Urkrathos didn't care. As long as he could serve Abaddon and the greater reign of Chaos then he would accept whatever the gods threw in his way.
He would still kill Feogrym, though, when the time came. A chosen of Abaddon was not to be mocked with impunity.
'I will keep my own counsel on that matter, sorcerer.' he said.
'So you will, then?'
Urkrathos scowled. Even without the enhanced strength of his terminator armour he could have pulled the sorcerer apart like a bored child might pull apart a fly. But he also knew that Feogrym was the type of creature that would not die just because you killed him. He would have to find some other way of destroying the man when he had outlived his usefulness.
Urkrathos turned and stomped off the ritual floor, leaving the madman to his divinations. Perhaps he would strip the soul from the sorcerer's body and cast it down into the pool of torments below them, so he would serve to fuel the spells of whatever sorcerer was sent by Abaddon as a replacement. The gods would be pleased by that.
But for now, Urkrathos had what he had come for. The Black Legion's fleet at the Eye of Terror had picked up the signal and Urkrathos had confirmed it was real. Now all that remained was to reach the planet and collect whatever was due to the Warmaster and perhaps bring the signal's author into the war effort. The Imperium was resisting with the tenacity of a hive of insects and the Black Crusade needed all the bodies it could throw into the fire. Urkrathos would be greatly rewarded if he could bring new allies in on the side of the Fell Gods.
Urkrathos reached the far end of the bridge and the deck elevator at the end, a shuddering, stained cage of steel that reeled up and down the throat-like shaft to give Urkrathos access to all levels of his ship. For now he was heading to the command deck, where he would give orders for the last stage of the journey to Chaeroneia.
Chapter Eight
'Beware in all things, lest the path forwards be the same path leading to hell'
- Primarch Roboute Guilliman
‘Codex Astartes’
ALARIC LED THE way with Archis at his side, the pilot light on the Grey Knight's Incinerator always lit, ready to douse anything they encountered with flame.
They were leading the strike force up a narrow, treacherous path formed from a huge serpentine skeleton. The skeleton was wrapped around a thin, endlessly tall spire of smooth black glass, its ribs forming the precarious steps of a spiral staircase.
Alaric glanced down. He couldn't see the floor of the city's underhive now, only a layer of pollutants trapped between the cold air below and the warmth pulsing off some mass of flesh living in the tower opposite. The snake's body was getting narrower towards the skull and Hawkespur and Thalassa were both roped to members of Alaric's squad. The Grey Knights might have been far larger and heavier but, paradoxically their augmentations and training also made them far more dextrous.
'Entrance up above.' said Archis. 'See it?' The nozzle of his Incinerator was pointed at an opening just ahead, a large hole smashed in the black glass. The edges still looked sharp.
'We're going in.' said Alaric. 'Haulvarn, watch the rear. Everyone else follow us.'
They had been travelling along the hive floor for some time, always keeping in cover as best they could. Several times Alaric had been sure there were grav-platform patrols homing in on them, but each time the Mechanicus had lost the strike force in the wreckage and gloom. Apart from a few rogue menials and stray servitors they hadn't seen anything else alive down there, not even vermin - just bones and waste fallen down from above. But they couldn't stay down there forever since the data-fortress itself, assuming it was still there, was several layers above the hive floor. They had to head up and hope there were enough connections between the spires to take them there. The black glass spire was the first one they had found that looked like it provided a reliable way upwards.
Inside, the spire was quiet and cold, evidently riddled with irregular tunnels, like flaws in its crystalline structure. The tech-guard and Grey Knights clambered in, the tech-guard having to take great care not to cut themselves through their fatigues on the edges of broken glass. Saphentis glided through the gap, climbing effortlessly with his additional bionic limbs, hauling Thalassa behind him with a spare hand.
'Tech-priest, are you alright?' asked Alaric.
'I am fully functional.' replied Saphentis.
'I meant you.' said Alaric, looking at Thalassa.
'I'll be fine.' she said, though she looked far from it. 'I just don't like heights.'
'A fall from more than six metres is potentially fatal.' said Saphentis. 'Assigning any higher risk to greater heights is irrational.'
'Do you know where we are now?' continued Alaric, ignoring Saphentis.
Thalassa consulted her dataslate. 'We've been going steadily for a day. We're about half of the way there horizontally, but we still need to get much higher.'
Brother Haulvarn was last in. Haulvarn had been with Alaric for a long time, since before the capture of renegade Inquisitor Valinov that had started Alaric on the road to confronting Ghargatuloth, and he was the most level-headed of Alaric's men. Just the kind of man you wanted watching your back. 'The way's clear.' he said, making a final sweep of the outside with his storm bolter raised.
'Good. Archis, stay up front. We don't know what's in here.'
Saphentis ran a bionic hand over the faceted black surface of a wall. 'This looks like data medium.'
'You mean there's information in it?' asked Alaric. The Adeptus Mechanicus often used crystalline substances to store large amounts of data but they never let on just how they achieved such an advanced trick.
'Perhaps. Corrupted and incomplete, of course. Thalassa?'
Thalassa put a hand against the smooth surface. Small, drill-tipped probes emerged from her palm and bored a little way into the crystal. Pulses of light ran across the circuitry embedded in her skin, outlining her face and hands in the gloom.
'We don't really have time for this.' said Hawke-spur quietly. She had taken off the hood of her voidsuit and Alaric saw there was a smudge of pollution around her nose and mouth.
'I know. But this mission is all about information. The more we have the better our chances.'
Thalassa gasped. She pulled her hand sharply away and breathed quickly for a few moments. 'There's hardly anything left.' she said. 'The damage is extensive. I could only find a few basics before the local data net collapsed.'
'Nothing that can help us?' asked Hawkespur.
'Well... there's the date.'
'And?'
'It doesn't make any sense. The corruption must be even worse than it looks. Even the datelines on the data are off. As far as this planet is concerned we're somewhere at the end of the forty-second millennium, that's more than nine hundred years out.'
'Let us hope the data-fortress is more intact.' said Saphentis.
'And let's keep moving.' added Hawkespur.
The strike force moved upwards, through the flaws that spiralled up through the black glass. Here and there they found great silver probes drilled deep into the glass, like massive versions of Thalassa's own dataprobes. In other places crude faces had been hacked out of the crystal, faces with one eye or two mouths, or bestial features that blended with the fractured structure of the glass.
They clambered upwards for more than an hour, Thalassa always lagging behind, until eventually the flaw opened up into a massive glass-walled chamber, its walls sculpted into sweeping curves like crashing waves.
Alaric was first out with Archis. The chamber was the size of an aircraft hangar and pale bluish light shone from the walls, glinting off every curved edge so the room seemed like an arching skeleton of light.
Rows and rows of spindly machinery filled the floor, ancient and deactivated, their joints and moving parts sealed shut by a chalky patina of corrosion.
'Grey Knights, get up here and sweep. There's nothing moving but there are plenty of places to hide.'
Saphentis followed the Grey Knights out. He took in the sight with his faceted eyes, pausing to drink it in - the machines were spindly and elegant, a world away from the massive machinery more typical of the Adeptus Mechanicus. He knelt down by the closest machine. His insectoid eyes changed colour, thin lines of red light playing across the workings as Saphentis scanned their every detail.
'Fascinating,' he said to himself.
'Really?' said Alaric as he directed his Grey Knights to check the floor for hostiles. 'Enlighten us.'
'This appears to be an autosurgeon. Very sophisticated. But its function is unlike any I have seen before. It seems designed to only dissect, not to knit back together again.'
'Throne of Earth.' whispered Alaric, 'what were they doing here?'
Saphentis moved over to another machine, one with a large cylindrical tank of clouded glass and several armatures poised to reach into it. 'Here... here the parts were placed.' A probe extended from one bionic finger and emitted several rapid flashes of light. 'Yes. Yes, traces of biological matter. Here they were placed and broken down.' The next machine in line had a long conveyor belt that ran maybe a third the length of the room, passing through dozens of rings on which were mounted hundreds of tiny articulated arms. 'And then, the rendered substance was taken along here and woven together... into long strands... muscles, yes, that's it, ropes of muscle.' Saphentis straightened up and looked right at Alaric. 'Do you see? They took their unwanted menials and fed them in and they were rendered down and their proteins woven back into raw muscle. The living things they fuse with their machinery, this is where they began making them.'
'Just another tech-heresy.' said Alaric bitterly. 'It doesn't sound like anything to get excited about.'
'I forget, justicar, you are not one of us. To a tech-priest, this alone is a revelation. Do you not see? This world is self-sufficient! It makes perfect sense to me now. This is just one sign. How could a world live a century alone and yet build so much? How could they create what they have here, w
ithout raw materials from any other world? Chaeroneia had great mineral wealth but there is not one forge world in the Imperium that could survive in isolation - raw materials, manpower, food, it all had to be imported by the shipful. But not here. Here they took the one resource they had in abundance and made their whole city out of it.
Their menials, justicar! Humans! It is so perfect. Humans breed, they grow, all of their own accord. They bred a surplus and took those they did not need, fed them in here and created the living things they fuse with their machines. There are magi pecuniae who have spent generations seeking a way to make a world entirely self-sufficient. Here, they solved that problem in a mere century. Amazing.'
Alaric rounded on Saphentis. 'Archmagos, you seem to admire this world more than you hate it. That is a very, very dangerous thing to suggest to me.'
Saphentis held out his arms, presumably in an attempt to look apologetic. 'This is pure heresy, justicar. Of course I realize that and I should not have to point it out to you. But the fact remains that their ways have suggested solutions to problems that have plagued the Mechanicus for thousands of years. The Omnissiah despises the man who has knowledge placed before him and yet refuses to understand it.'
'Well, the god I worship hates a man who lets himself be seduced by the ways of the Enemy. In any other situation I would have you arrested as a heretic, archmagos, and you could explain your admiration of this world to the Inquisition. And when we get off this world I will do just that. But if you do anything more to suggest you find Chaeroneia worthy of any kind of respect, I will have Hawkespur officiate at your execution here and now.'
A few strange colours flickered over the facets of Saphentis's eyes, too quick for Alaric to follow. 'Of course, justicar.' he said after a pause. 'My apologies. I forget how zealous a servant of the Emperor you really are. I will submit to the will of the Inquisition, as must we all.'