He knew this man. This man was responsible for putting him in this chair.
The tech-priests surrounded him, and though his nervous system was all but paralysed and his bloodstream choked with soporifics, they were still wary of him.
What had he done to earn such enmity from these men?
The pontifex spoke first.
‘Lukasz Król,’ he said – finally a name! – his voice distorted behind the skull mask. ‘You have been sentenced to arco-flagellation by the holy writ of the Ecclesiarchy you once served. Death alone would be insufficient punishment for the monstrous heresies you have committed in the guise of the Emperor’s servant, thus you will atone for your wretchedness and unnatural acts in His holy armies until such time as death claims you. This, it is pronounced, is a true and just command of Ecclesiarchy Helican, enacted this third hour of the hundred and fiftieth day of the nine hundred and eighty-sixth year of the Thirty-Sixth Millennium.’
The pontifex stepped back and the Martians began their work. They plugged themselves into the control mechanisms surrounding him with snaking mechadendrites, and the machine arms to either side of the gurney jumped to life like sleepers suddenly roused to wakefulness. Surgical equipment unsheathed from metallic cowls – needles, arterial clamps and whining bolt-fitters – and nests of components rose from the floor to either side of him.
‘Reduce the balms and begin,’ said the pontifex, ‘He has to feel every moment of this.’
Fear rose up in a smothering wave, blotting out all thought and reason.
This is not my body, this is not my mind.
But the sensations surging through him were no less real, no less indistinguishable from injuries done to his own distant flesh. He wanted to scream, but this was Lukasz Król’s memory and he was not about to let these men see him beg or weep or scream.
Piezo-edged bone saws extruded from the arms of the throne and sliced through his wrists with ultra-rapid precision. Blood jetted explosively, but even as the agony cut through his diminishing chemical haze, cauterising heat was brought to bear, sealing the stumps with a single pulse of agonising heat. As horrifying as the removal of his hands had been, it was nothing compared to what came next.
Clicking machines with calliper hands like the nightmarish claws of a demented toymaker began stripping the skin, muscle and nerve tissue from his forearms all the way to the elbow. Surgical flesh-weavers layered replacement nerve-strands over the reinforced bone and grafted fibre-bundle muscle in place of the discarded organic tissue.
His chest heaved and his limbs thrashed against the restraints. They simply tightened in response. He couldn’t move. He could only watch as his entire body was pared back and remade.
Sealed caskets rotated up from the floor and opened with pneumatic hisses of condensing air. The monotonous stream of binaric nonsense the tech-priests were chanting faltered fractionally as the caskets opened to reveal the weapons within.
Such awesome tools of destruction required reverence.
Through a haze of tears and hate, he watched two of the machine priests step forwards and attach the devices to his arms using implanted bolt-drivers, neural shears, flesh grafts and sacred unguents. He felt every insertion, every bolt driving down into bone and every screaming horror of exposed nerves being spliced together. A burst of power surged through him, and telescoping carbon-steel electro-flails twitched and danced as ancient, barely-understood circuitry meshed with his crude organic functionality.
The gurney tipped backwards, and the drills, excising machinery and clamps went to work on his skull. Trepanning picks bored through bone and the clicking, mechanised hands inserted neural control implants before finally removing the upper dome of his skull. He felt the lid of bone creaking upwards and the horror of his mind being exposed was almost too much to bear.
Sacred arrangements of sacred oil were dripped into his brain cavity, with each anointing accompanied by the sixteen names of the binary saints. Spinning orbs with mechanical blade limbs as thin as spider legs clicked into place before him, whirring with demented glee.
No, no, no, no, not my–
The whirring orbs stabbed forwards and plucked out his eyes.
This is not my body! This is not my body! This is not my body! This is not my body! This is not my body! This is not my body! This is not my body! This is not my body! This is not my body!
Delicate clamps kept his optic nerves taut as complex targeting arrays, broad-spectrum threat analysers and visio-cognitive orbs were attached in place of his eyes and implanted into his skull. A cranial cowl that was part devotional feed, part cortical inhibitor and part death-mask was slotted home, lowered over his slack features and wired to the frontal lobes of what remained of his brain as hymnals blared from unseen augmitters. Like the grinning skull faceplates of the Chaplains of the Adeptus Astartes, it was the rictus agony of the Emperor, and all those whose doomed fate it was to look upon him would know he had been punished by an agency beyond that of mere men. Detailed schematics of the body-plans of the men before him sprang up on the inner surfaces of his eyes, complete with endurable stresses, violation tolerances and a hundred other measures of how they could be ripped into screaming ruin.
The work continued for another hour, agony upon agony, horror upon horror, until there was little sign that a human being had once sat in the throne-gurney. The mortal meat of Lukasz Król had been scraped away and replaced with an instrument of death and annihilation. Only Abrehem remained and even he was a ravaged shell, cored out by the same processes that had made sport of this man’s flesh.
Yet even as his consciousness wept and wished for extinction, he felt the soaring ecstasy of having the power of life and death. For all intents and purposes, he was no longer human, his body enhanced to lethal levels of killing power and stripped back to the most basic physiological functions.
Lukasz Król had effectively ceased to exist, and in his place sat something else.
Something altogether more dangerous and more appalling.
‘It is done,’ said the pontifex, with a solemn nod, stepping forwards and dipping his fingers in an inkhorn of sanctified pigment that a genuflecting tech-priest held out before him. He drew four parallel lines of crimson down the skull mask.
‘In Thor’s Blood are ye anointed. In Thor’s Blood shall ye awaken,’ said the pontifex.
Rivulets of paint slid down the mask like tears of blood, dripping onto a chest that now bulged with cardio-pulmonary enhancers, adrenal-slammers and dormant steroidal compounds. Spinal implants snaked down his back in a chain of injectors, and stimm-reservoirs on his shoulders gave him a hulking, over-muscled proportion to his upper body.
He was a killer now, a render of flesh, a weapon and an act of retribution all in one.
Abrehem revelled in this new incarnation, a being of almost unlimited violent potential to whom no atrocity was beyond his capabilities, no loathsome act of utmost cruelty beneath him. With all need for moral pretence torn away, Abrehem saw the full horror of what Lukasz Król had done, the torture palaces, the rape gulags and the experimentation camps where he had personally overseen all manner of unimaginable affronts to the Emperor.
This was good.
They thought they had taken away his life and made him their own, but they were wrong.
The killer had always been in him.
All they had done was strip the mask of humanity away to rebuild him stronger and more lethal than ever.
‘I take from you the name of Lukasz Król,’ said the pontifex, dipping his hand in the pigment once more and drawing another series of four vertical lines down Król’s chest. The ablative polymer coatings introduced to his dermal layers made the skin feel hard and plastic.
Abrehem watched the pontifex check the serial identifier codes on the requisition form held out by another of the tech-priests and verify them against the name the doctrinal aba
ci had generated. ‘I dub thee Rasselas X-42, and may the Emperor have mercy on your soul.’
‘Bastards like him don’t have a soul,’ said the man in black armour.
‘We all have souls, chastener,’ replied the pontifex. ‘The words of the divine Thor teach us that a single man with faith can triumph over a legion of the faithless. We have restored this man’s faith, and he will repay that gift in the blood of our enemies.’
The pontifex nodded towards what had once been a psychopathic mass murderer known as Cardinal Astral of Ophelia VII, Lukasz Król.
‘Even the darkest soul can find redemption and salvation in death.’
‘I couldn’t give a ship-rat’s fart about his salvation,’ snapped the chastener. ‘I just want him to suffer for what he did.’
‘Have no fear of that,’ said the pontifex. ‘He will suffer like no other.’
The wrench of dislocation as Abrehem was dragged back to his own flesh was no less jarring, but where he had plunged headlong into an unknown body, this time he returned to his own. Though it scarcely felt like his, and the weakness that filled him after the sense of ultimate strength was almost as painful as the surgeries undergone by Lukasz Król.
He toppled from the stool, as helpless as an automaton with its power cell removed and fell into the combined grip of Ismael and Totha Mu-32. Abrehem screamed like a lunatic as a tide of unremitting horror washed over him. His cybernetic arm clawed at Totha Mu-32 and Ismael as though they were warp-spawned monsters from the bleakest depths of the immaterium. Abrehem fought with the strength of the demented, hysterical and desperate to escape the abhorrent presence of Rasselas X-42.
He relived stolen memories – decades of nightmarish, unthinkable abuses, sickened and revolted by every grisly detail. Unnumbered souls had been sent screaming into oblivion, and Abrehem pressed his hands to his ears as he head their screams echoing within his skull.
To think that one man could conceive of such things was repellent enough, but to know that entire cadres of the Ecclesiarchy had been dragged into the maelstrom of his insanity by unquestioning devotion was almost too much to bear. How many billions had died at the hands of the very institution that proclaimed its mission was to protect them?
Abrehem bent over and vomited the meagre contents of his stomach over X-42’s dormis chamber, retching and heaving in desgust. He closed his eyes, willing the scenes of torture, murder and degradation to fade from his thoughts.
‘Abrehem,’ said Totha Mu-32. ‘Abrehem, are you hurt?’
He shook his head and wiped the sleeve of his robe over his dripping lips.
‘No, I’m…’
He wanted to say fine, but knowing what he now knew of X-42’s atrocities, he doubted he would ever be fine again. With Totha Mu-32 and Ismael’s help, he climbed unsteadily to his feet, swiftly turning and making his way from the dormis chamber after checking the arco-flagellant’s pacifier helm was securely in place.
‘Did you see?’ asked Ismael.
Abrehem nodded. ‘I saw,’ he gasped. ‘You knew, didn’t you? You knew who he was.’
‘I did, but you had to see for yourself,’ said Ismael. ‘And now you know who X-42 was, do you still think he should be released from his condition? Would you restore the man he was?’
‘Thor’s blood, no!’ cried Abrehem. ‘Lukasz Król was a monster.’
‘He was indeed,’ agreed Ismael, ‘but Lukasz Król was once a good man, a man driven by faith in the Emperor to excesses of violence against the enemies of Mankind. But he began to see deviance and heresy everywhere he looked, and his bloody pogroms soon turned on his own people.’
‘Król?’ asked Totha Mu-32. ‘The Impaler Cardinal?’
Abrehem shrugged. ‘I don’t know, maybe. I’ve never heard of the Impaler Cardinal.’
‘Few have,’ said Totha Mu-32, as he and Ismael set Abrehem down on his cot bed. ‘The Ecclesiarchy are understandably reluctant to admit to one of their own going insane. Some, like Vandire or Bucharis, are impossible to deny, but Król’s reign of atrocity was mercifully short-lived and confined to a single system.’
‘How do you know about him?’ asked Abrehem.
‘Król’s actions were recorded by the Mechanicus personnel who oversaw the dismantling of his bloody regime after an army of Adeptus Arbites led by Chastener Marazion brought him down. It makes for unpleasant reading, even to those who can detach themselves from empathy and physiological responses to revulsion. Now do you accept that no good can come of X-42’s emancipation?’
‘Absolutely,’ said Abrehem, pointing a shaking hand towards the dormis chamber. ‘Check the pacifier helm and seal that monster in there again. We can’t risk that any shred of Lukasz Król might still be in there.’
‘There will always be something of him in there,’ said Ismael, gently lowering Abrehem to the cot bed. ‘And that is the greatest tragedy.’
A dreadful sadness and soul-crushing weariness settled upon Abrehem, but the memories of Król’s atrocities were already receding. Abrehem just hoped that in time they would fade completely. No-one needed horrors like that festering in their brain.
‘Rest now,’ said Ismael.
Abrehem nodded, already feeling his eyelids growing heavy. He felt a blanket being pulled over him and rolled onto his side. It had been foolish of him to venture into the psyche of a mind-altered killer, but at least he knew that Rasselas X-42 would never hurt anyone ever again.
‘Shut it down,’ he murmured as exhaustion smothered him. ‘Shut it down forever and seal this place up so no one ever finds it again.’
‘I will see to it,’ Totha Mu-32 assured him.
Roboute had always known the Speranza was a vast starship, he’d seen it from space and its inhuman scale was hard to miss. He’d berthed his ship within its cavernous holds, and he knew four god-machines of the Titan Legions, as well as thousands of Imperial Guard and skitarii, were billeted aboard – together with their armoured inventories and vehicles. He knew all this and more, thanks to reams of statistics provided by Magos Pavelka in awed, reverent tones.
So why did he now feel claustrophobic, like a rat in a maze, desperately hunting for a way out?
Ever since he’d brought the shuttle back aboard the Speranza he’d had an unidentifiable sense of being watched, that tingling at the back of the neck that tells a soldier a sniper has a bead on them. He had no evidence of this, but in the weeks since they had left Hypatia he’d felt like a helpless mammal being stalked by an invisible predator that could pounce at any time, but delayed the moment of the kill for anticipation’s sake.
He’d taken to carrying his pistol with him at all times, even going as far as to keep the safety off, which continually chafed at his Ultramarian training. He took Adara with him at all times, even when traversing well-populated areas of the ship. Much of his time was spent helping Sylkwood and Pavelka repair the damage done to the Speranza and the shuttle or visiting Linya Tychon on the medicae decks.
The Speranza had already passed the outer planets of the uncannily geometric system and would achieve orbit within another two days at most. No-one had yet named their destination, for if the Lost Magos was indeed alive and well on the forge world’s surface, it was likely he had already done so, and Archmagos Kotov was nothing if not a stickler for the proper taxonomy of planetary nomenclature.
His days were filled with reading the myth-cycles of Ultramar to Linya and being hectored by Ilanna Pavelka at the terrible damage he and Emil had wreaked on the ship. When armpit-deep in the guts of a non-functional machine or lost in tales of the young Primarch Guilliman, he could almost forget the lingering presence that flitted around him like a persistent swampfly.
Eventually, he tired of walking on brittle ice and decided he’d had enough of sitting in the cross-hairs. If there was someone watching him, it was high time he knew who it was. Roboute unbuckled his pistol bel
t and laid it on the rosewood surface of his desk before striding from the Renard. He randomly picked one of the embarkation deck’s exit archways and began walking. Each time he came to a junction of passageways, a stairwell or a processional convergence templum, he took the pathway that looked the least inviting or which had been scrubbed of all locational identifiers.
Within minutes he was hopelessly lost within the warren of dimly lit passageways, mesh-walled and steel-floored. Steam gathered in the upper reaches of vaulted cloisters, and meltwater from ice filling the breaches between passageways and chambers partially open to the void ran in metallic gutters. He walked in darkness, in shadow and by the light of looming vent towers that belched flame into the heating systems.
He marvelled at vast chambers of cog-driven pistons, each larger than a Warlord’s leg, roaring machines with connector rods and couplings that scissored back and forth like the arms of a threshing machine or the oars of an ancient trireme of Macragge. The few tech-priests he saw largely ignored him, or steered him away from areas of high radiation or some other danger of which he was clearly unaware.
Wandering through row upon row of titanic cylindrical towers like grain silos, he tasted the greasy tang of bulk foodstuffs, and realised he was looking at the Speranza’s food supplies. Roboute walked along a raised walkway between the towers, coming at last to a chamber filled with noxious smells and eye-watering caustic vapours. Three dozen enormous vats, two hundred metres across, stretched into the distance, each filled with a grey-brown sludge of reclaimed matter, meat substitutes, protein pastes and complex carbohydrate additives.
Servitors on repulsor discs floated over the viscous mulch, plunging sample staves into the deep strata or removing contaminants. The sight sickened Roboute and he left the chamber, taking turns at random and always picking a route that had no markings to indicate where it might lead.
Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Page 72