She had come to check on the Benefactor’s guest, as she had every hour since his departure for the planet below. Her warriors had not reported in, as she’d expected.
Igori drew her shuriken pistol and crept towards the open apothecarium, moving silently, every sense straining. She heard nothing – not the rasp of breath, or the tell-tale whine of powered armour. And all she could smell was blood.
Inside, the apothecarium was a shambles. Examination slabs had been upended, materials dumped and scattered. The walls had been gouged by blades and the floor was littered with papers and effluvia from shattered specimen jars. The worst of it was the bio-crèches; all of them had been cracked open and their contents destroyed, including the nascent clones of the Benefactor. These had been crushed and chopped apart, as if to ensure their destruction. Or to amuse the desecrators.
The sight of such defilement gave her pause, and she almost missed the bodies lying stacked and split open on the remains slabs. Her packmates, butchered like cattle, their muscles and ligaments strung about and their organs set aside, as if for later sampling.
She repressed a snarl of rage. These were not wounds earned in battle, but post-mortem mutilation, if she judged the wounds on their throats and skulls rightly. They had been killed quickly and efficiently. The work of the prey.
Fearful now, she moved through the carnage towards the back of the chamber, where the guest was hidden. Had he done this? She did not think so. The Emperor’s Children had been growing restless, in the wake of the Benefactor’s departure. Testing the limits he had established. Perhaps they had come looking for chemical relief, or had simply been following some maddened whim. But she suspected otherwise. They had come looking for something. But had they found it?
Igori tapped the control panel set into the wall. The pict-feed of the cell’s interior flickered. The guest’s chamber was empty. Panicking slightly now, she opened the door, nostrils flaring at the scent of a demigod. He smelled like prey, but not. Headier, somehow. Overwhelming, rather than enticing. She looked up. The access panels of the cell’s ceiling had been removed. She holstered her weapons and leapt, easily catching the sides of the hatch. She boosted herself up into the access tunnel above. She had to find him. The Benefactor had entrusted him into her keeping, and she could not fail him.
Few living things could spend more than a few hours in the cramped labyrinth of convoluted tunnels, amid the artificial jungle of cables and fibre-bundles, and the constant drip of oily water. Rusted metal creaked beneath her weight as she climbed, following the scent of her quarry.
She climbed to and fro in the darkened sub-world, her senses straining against the conditions. She could hear vatborn scuttling just out of sight, and worse things besides. She could feel the steady hum of power running through the conduits, travelling to the various decks. Up ahead, something clanked. She heard a soft exhalation, and smelled a sudden, acrid odour – not quite blood, but something close.
When she spotted him, he was crouched on a gantry, his long limbs bent, his silver head bowed. She was convinced that she had made no sound, but even so his head whipped around, and a lavender gaze pinned her in place.
‘Who are you?’
His voice was soft. Surprisingly so. She had expected a lion’s rumble. His gaze seemed lumen-bright as he studied her. The beast dangled from his bloody grip, its malformed limbs shattered, its bloated skull lolling on a snapped neck. ‘You remind me of a face I saw, as if in a dream. A woman’s face. A woman’s voice, whispering quiet words that I cannot recall. She sang to me, I think. When I was an infant.’
He let the body he was holding fall. The creature had been large. Something from the underverse that had sneaked into the ship, during one of those all-too-common moments when the Geller field fluctuated. Whatever it was, it was dead now. He looked at his bloody hands and wiped them across the ragged environmental suit he wore. ‘Perhaps you are my sister.’
‘Cousin,’ Igori said, after a moment. She rose from her crouch and slid her knife back into its sheath. She hadn’t even remembered drawing it. ‘I think I am your cousin.’
‘Family all the same,’ Fulgrim said. He looked down at the creature. ‘It was eating the little ones, the vatborn – stealing their young. They whispered of it to me. Begged me to help. So I came to kill it.’
‘You did a good job.’
He flexed his hands. ‘It felt good to kill it. It felt right.’ He looked at her. ‘Was it evil? It looked evil.’
‘It was hungry,’ she said simply. In the dark, and several levels away, something roared. A feral howl, full of bestial malice. ‘And it wasn’t alone. Come.’
‘I do not fear them.’ He said it petulantly, like one of her own pups, denied a place at the kill. She grinned without humour, and fought to hold his gaze. It was hard, like staring into the power cell of a plasma weapon, but she held him nonetheless. She had stared down worse things than a half-grown demigod in her time.
‘Then you are stupid,’ she said firmly. ‘They will hunt you, as a pack. They will kill you, as a pack. Or hurt you enough that the next pack finishes the job. Come. Now.’ She was not sure where they could go. She only knew that she could not return him to the apothecarium; it was no longer safe.
Fulgrim blinked, and nodded. ‘Yes, cousin.’ He followed her slowly, with a stately grace that was at once predatory and elegant. His great size seemed no hindrance in the cramped maze of access tunnels. He smelled of the warp, and of clean, running water, and for a moment, she fancied that he was more liquid than solid.
‘If you are found, it will go badly for the Benefactor,’ she said, as they climbed along a steep chute. Power conduits thrummed along either side of them, and she could see strange, crystalline spiders spinning delicate webs among the flickering nodes.
‘Why?’
She shook her head. ‘Do not ask why. He has said, and so it is.’
‘Why do you call him Benefactor?’
She grunted. Full of curiosity, this one. ‘Is your pretty head empty? Is that why you seek to fill it with answers to foolish questions?’
A flash of something that might have been anger crossed his face. ‘I was curious.’
‘A bad habit, aboard this ship.’
He fell into a sullen silence. She glanced down at him on occasion, checking to make sure he was still following. After a time, she asked, ‘How did you get out?’
‘I followed the vatborn. They showed me the secret paths.’ He paused. ‘I hear things, in these hollow places.’
‘What things?’
‘They mean to kill him.’ He said it so urgently that she stopped and turned. He looked at her. ‘They mean to kill you.’
She said nothing, for a moment. Then, softly, ‘When?’
‘Soon.’ His eyes glowed with intent. ‘The vatborn have heard them as well. They do not notice the little ones, and speak freely about them. They would destroy all that Fabius has made, and I cannot allow that. I cannot allow them to harm him.’
She thought of the apothecarium, and the bodies she had left there. Of the destruction of the lab. She could smell war on the wind. Whatever the Benefactor intended, she did not think she could wait to strike. Not if she wanted her pack to survive. She looked at him.
‘Come. I will take you someplace safe. And then we will decide what to do… cousin.’
Chapter twenty-one
The Prismatic Galleries
Wonders and horrors greeted them, as Fabius and the others travelled through the convoluted interior of the tier. They found themselves passing amidst galleries of such size and scope that even Fabius could scarcely comprehend their absolute enormity. The tier was not a flat plane, but instead a series of concentric sub-tiers, each at a varying height, connected by curving stairwells and long walkways. All home to immense galleries, filled with more things than any living mortal might explore in a lifetime
.
Fabius’ enhanced perceptions faltered, stretched to their limits for the first time since he’d gazed upon the unfiltered expanse of the Eye of Terror. All about them was the wreckage of a million impossible civilisations, placed and catalogued with inhuman precision. Unimaginable masterpieces of art and architecture shared space with scenes of indescribable horror. All of it arranged according to some impenetrable symmetry.
Here, the pale light of an eternal last sunset shone forever upon carvings of painful beauty. There, a warband of orks conducted a silent, unending rampage upon a species of unfamiliar, blue-shelled invertebrate. Across the way, a looming shape of many angles glared down at the intruders with stoic fury in its innumerable, unmoving eyes.
Fabius and his Consortium moved at the heart of a phalanx of Emperor’s Children. Palos was evidently determined not to let them out of his sight, if at all possible. Maysha and Mayshana paced to either side of Fabius, having appointed themselves his bodyguards. The Gland-hounds seemed unnerved by their surroundings. He’d brought no others, reasoning that their presence might elicit undue hostility from Palos and his warriors.
Mutants scuttled, loped and stalked in an unruly mass around the tight ranks of the Emperor’s Children, filling the silence with their cries. The heavy shapes of the war-mutants stalked among them, following placidly behind the tracked forms of their servitor-overseers. Diomat plodded in the wake of the renegades, his red gaze sweeping blankly across the galleries that rose wild around them.
‘This place is a tomb,’ Skalagrim said. He strode alongside Fabius, his axe resting in the crook of his arm. For once, his helmet was locked firmly in place.
‘No, it is a museum,’ Fabius said. Their voices echoed strangely through the long gallery, as if the distance sought to swallow up all sound. ‘These are exhibits, petrified at the moment of collection, or else later posed for best effect.’
‘That is the largest ork I’ve ever seen,’ Savona murmured, staring up at a towering, twelve-metre-tall monstrosity that loomed in a nearby nook. ‘And his weaponry…’ The frozen creature wore a crude exoskeleton far in advance of anything the orks now might conceive of. Indeed, from his initial examination, Fabius suspected that it might be in advance of his own battleplate.
‘A krork,’ he murmured. ‘One of the first orks. I read about them in the aeldari texts. I have long theorised that the orks are a form of organic weapons system – a rogue biological agent, unleashed during some ancient apocalyptic conflict. There’s too much about their internal workings that seems designed, rather than evolved.’
‘We killed them easily enough at Ullanor,’ Skalagrim said.
‘Nothing that big, I’d wager,’ Khorag gurgled. He stroked the head of his beast, which lolloped in his wake. The Grave Warden chuckled wetly. ‘If there was ever a place designed to divert the curious, this would be it. Look – there. What do you think that is – or was?’ He indicated a spheroid of two metres in height, composed of rough, leathery skin. A large, albeit withered, sensory organ of some sort sat at the top of the sphere, and around the upper body clustered pale tentacles that dangled to the ground.
Fabius peered at the strange creature. ‘Fascinating.’ His hands itched to collect samples, but he hesitated. He suspected that any interference with the exhibits would elicit some form of alarm. Whatever presence controlled this world so far seemed to have only a passive interest in their presence. But given the technology at work here, he had no interest in provoking a more hostile response.
He heard a sudden intake of breath, and turned to find Saqqara staring at one of the galleries. A winding chamber of statuary, extending back into an enormous recess within the green-veined stonework that made up the bulk of their surroundings. Within the chamber, which had been fashioned to resemble an underground cavern lined by intricately carved columns and swooping, decorative arches, red-armoured figures clashed with blue, amid thick falls of shadow and unmoving cascades of debris.
‘The catacombs of Calth,’ Saqqara said softly. He took a step forward, and before Fabius could stop him, he was wandering among the frozen figures. Palos brought the expedition to a halt. He gestured.
‘Well? Fetch your cur back, Manflayer, lest we lose him in this madness.’
‘Mind your tongue, Palos – remember which of us is indispensable, and which of us is a glorified bodyguard,’ Fabius said, as he hurried after the Word Bearer.
He found the diabolist standing at the heart of the battle. Saqqara indicated one of the crimson-armoured Word Bearers. ‘Hard-light holograms,’ he said, in a hollow voice. ‘Listen.’
Fabius did. A faint susurrus, as of many voices at a great distance. The sounds of war, at a distance of thousands of years. ‘The Underground War,’ Saqqara continued. ‘I was here. With my brothers in the Black Comet, fighting in these depths.’
‘I was under the impression that those who fought at Calth were sent there to die,’ Fabius said. A rumour, but a persistent one, especially given the Word Bearers’ propensity for internal purges.
Saqqara nodded, still studying the immobile faces of the warriors around them. ‘It was a test. A trial of worthiness. Lorgar sent us to die, so that we might live.’
Fabius laughed. ‘And you passed it, did you?’
‘The test did not end here,’ Saqqara said. He looked at Fabius. ‘You should know that better than anyone, heretic. Our tests never end. Our worth is judged only in the striving.’
Fabius snorted and looked away. ‘Trust a fanatic to – eh?’ He paused. Stepped closer to a reeling Ultramarine. The warrior was helmetless, his face daubed in blood and dust. Fabius peered at him, enhancing the scope of his vision again and again. Until, at last, he saw it. A faint tremor in the warrior’s eye, as of a contraction slowed to an infinitesimal crawl. He stepped back with a curse. ‘They’re not holograms.’
Saqqara jolted back from the frozen Word Bearers. ‘What?’
‘They’re not holograms. At least, not the way we understand them. They’re something else. But they’re alive – and conscious.’ Fabius turned, staggered by the conceit of it. A living diorama, wrought from hard-light and some arcane trickery. A form of stasis beyond his own fumbling attempts.
A shout from the group drew his attention. Diomat stalked through the milling mass of mutants and renegades, his head cocked to the shadowy galleries rising above them. ‘Something is here.’ The Dreadnought turned, servos whining. ‘All around us.’
‘I see nothing,’ Palos said.
‘Then perhaps you should take the blinders from your eyes,’ Fabius said acidly. He could feel it now. Something was watching them, though he could not say where the unseen observer was. The stultifying silence of this place was worse even than that of the dead craftworlds he had plundered. ‘Contact the gunships – perhaps a long-range sensor sweep…’
‘We’ve lost contact with them,’ Palos said flatly. He turned, staring back the way they’d come. ‘Listen.’
The boom of heavy stubbers was faintly audible, the sound swallowed up and dispersed, rather than echoing. The vox crackled as Fabius tried to contact Bellephus. Something was interfering with the frequency. He turned to the Word Bearer. ‘Saqqara – what do your pets see?’
‘Nothing. I… appear to have lost them.’ The Word Bearer sounded chagrined. He looked around, fingers tapping at the daemon-flasks hanging from his armour.
‘They escaped your control?’
‘No.’
‘Then what?’ Fabius rounded on the red-armoured diabolist. ‘This is your only skill, and you say that you have somehow failed in it?’
‘They are gone. I do not know why.’ Saqqara reached for a flask. ‘I will call up others.’ Fabius caught his wrist.
‘No. I was a fool to ever trust the senses of such beings, especially in a place like this.’ Further recriminations died on his tongue as he caught sight of a shadowy shape s
cuttling down the incline of a gallery frame. Light seemed to bend around the wide, spidery shape, rendering it all but invisible save for the green glow of its many eyes.
The shape leapt with a curious undulation, and revealed itself as a silvery scarab-like entity, made of a substance Fabius thought was similar to that of the sands above. It put him in mind of a massive spider, moving across an invisible web. It sprang onto Diomat, with an eerie, rattling hiss, proboscis sparking with green lightning. The Dreadnought tore the arachnid shape apart with a flex of his claws. He sent the pieces hurtling in different directions. ‘Brothers – beware. We are beset by xenos filth.’
Fabius looked up. More spider-shapes followed the first, ten, twenty, thirty or more, clambering down from the heights all around them, as if they’d somehow disturbed an unseen nest. He cursed.
A trap. And they had walked right into it.
Arrian studied the flowering tendrils that wrapped themselves around his vambrace with keen interest. The hydroponics bay of the Vesalius was a nightmare jungle of creeping greenery. Most of it poisonous, or hungry, or both. Here, the bastard offspring of a thousand species of plant-life grew all but unchecked.
The air was wet and thick, with condensation and toxic gases that could eat away at the seals of his power armour if he stood still for too long. Roots crept thick across the deck, wriggling into the cracks in the metal, finding sustenance among the nutrient vats that fed the bay. And great masses of splayed vine and creeper had woven themselves in among the upper gantries and stairwells. Heaving blossoms of every imaginable colour dotted the greenery, adding their heady stink to the miasma.
The visual feed in his helmet isolated and identified the inhabitants of this green hell. Most of the plants in the bay had some medicinal or nutritional value. The brackish creepers that occupied the highest gantries made for an adequate dietary paste, suitable for the uncultured palates of the Vesalius’ crew. The scabrous blossoms that huddled beneath the central stairwell secreted a pollen that could be synthesised into a suitably potent – not to mention addictive – narcotic.
Fabius Bile: Clonelord Page 33