The crystalith’s torso exploded in a fan of broken glass.
Roboute low-crawled over to Pavelka, still queasy at the after-effects of her binaric attack.
‘How in the Emperor’s name did you do that?’
A tech-priest’s expression was never easy to read, but Roboute knew Pavelka well enough to see a mixture of shame and horror.
‘Some old and very bad code I should have deleted a long time ago,’ said Pavelka. ‘But you know what they say, the Mechanicus–’
Before she could finish, Kotov’s savants and menials were gunned down before they even knew what was happening. Kotov’s servo-skulls flitted away overhead in panic as he took refuge behind his frozen skitarii.
A shot grazed Ilanna’s shoulder. Metal, not flesh, thankfully.
‘This gantry is a terrible place to defend!’ yelled Ilanna.
‘You have anywhere better?’ answered Roboute.
Crystaliths surrounded them, front and rear, above and below, and Roboute suspected there was only one reason they weren’t already dead. He picked himself up and ran hunched over to where Ven Anders’s Cadians were pushing down the gantry towards an entrance farther along the wall. They were leaving bodies in their wake, each yard won with the life of a Cadian Guardsman.
Roboute now saw why Telok had kept them moving away from the entrance to the chamber: to better isolate them from any means of escape.
The Black Templars and skitarii remained unmoving. The power armour of the Space Marines was blistering and splitting under repeated impacts. It would only be a matter of time until the warriors within were killed.
‘Surcouf,’ shouted Anders, loosing a pair of shots into a crystalith descending from an upper level. It fell from the wall, falling into the ochre mist below with the sound of breaking glass. ‘You’re alive.’
‘We have to get close to Telok!’ shouted Roboute, snapping off another two shots towards the gantry. Anders gave him a look of disbelief.
‘What?’ he said, snapping a powercell into the grip of his pistol. ‘Are you insane?’
‘The only reason these crystal things didn’t gun us down straight away was because Telok was too close to us,’ said Roboute, ducking as sizzling bolts of green fire flashed past his head. ‘We have to get closer.’
Telok’s face was sheathed in a rippling layer of translucent crystal, yet even through that distorting mask, Roboute saw the god-complex that thousands of years of isolation and autonomy had birthed.
In the midst of the violence, Kotov stepped from behind his ranked skitarii and held his arms up in frantic supplication.
‘End this madness, Telok!’ cried Kotov in desperation.
In response, Telok’s crystal-sheathed Dreadnought limbs reached down and tore Kotov’s golden arms from his mechanised body.
Archmagos Kotov reeled in horror, once again taking refuge within his skitarii. Acrid floodstream gushed from his ruined shoulders. The pungent reek of burned oils hazed the air with their potency. Telok crashed towards him, bludgeoning one of the paralysed skitarii to ruin against the wall. Telok’s distorted laughter brayed through his crystalline helm as he hurled another over the gantry and scorched a third to ash.
Roboute ran forwards as Telok’s energy claw reached down to tear Archmagos Kotov’s head from his golden body.
A deafening howl echoed through the enormous cavern.
It was a nerve-shredding scream of furious, ancient hunger that sent shrieking surges of agony along every nerve in Roboute’s body. The pain was incredible, like a searing, life-ending seizure.
He dropped to his knees, hands clamped over his ears.
Nor were the effects of the deathly howl confined to creatures of flesh and blood. The crystaliths glitched and spasmed as their arcane connection to their master was disrupted.
Even as Roboute felt a measure of control returning to his limbs, a giant of palest ivory and emerald slammed down on the gantry in front of him.
It buckled the metal with its weight.
Roboute blinked in shock.
The giant’s slender limbs were graceful in a way no human machine could ever be. A long-bladed sword of milky white porcelain snapped from its wrist.
In his time with the Alaitocii, Roboute had heard of the giant warrior-constructs known as wraithlords, but had never seen one.
The sight before him made him wish that were still the case.
The wraithlord’s enlarged gauntlet caught Telok’s descending fist and turned it from Kotov’s head. The claw tore through the wall in a squealing howl of tearing metallic cables. The wraithlord brought its other arm around and the white blade sliced cleanly through the hybrid crystalline structure of Telok’s arm.
A barrage of green fire from the crystals growing from Telok’s chest staggered the wraithlord, crawling over its sinuously lethal form like living flames.
Then other figures were landing amid the crystaliths.
Lithe dancers with red-plumed helms and swords of bone. Hunched killers in segmented armour with crackling arcs of lightning wreathing their jaws. Inhumanly proportioned and unnaturally fast.
They fell upon the paralysed crystaliths in a hurricane of blades and biting energy bolts, shattering scores to fragments in the time it took to draw breath.
‘Eldar,’ said Roboute. ‘They’re eldar…’
‘How in the name of the Eye did they get here?’ said Anders, running forwards to haul him to his feet.
Roboute shook his head. ‘Does it matter? They’re helping us.’
Anders shrugged, accepting the logic of it even as he kept firing into the crystaliths.
Telok and the wraithlord rained titanic blows upon one another. Bolts tore loose from the rocky walls with the fury of their struggle. The gantry creaked and swayed.
‘Come on!’ shouted Anders.
The Cadian was just as shocked at the appearance of the xenos, but wasn’t about to waste the chance to escape that their arrival had given them. He shouted at his Guardsmen to move.
‘Eldar…?’ said Roboute, as a nagging, insistent voice at the back of his mind told him that he knew exactly how they’d come to be here.
But the memory wouldn’t cohere, wouldn’t make itself known.
A sinuous figure landed in front of Telok with preternatural grace, one hand extended before her, the other clutching a heavily inscribed staff of entwined bone and silver. It rippled with coruscating light that burned into Roboute’s retinas.
Obviously female, she wore a cloak of interlocking geometric forms over curved plates of armour inscribed with runic symbols that were at once familiar and strange to him.
‘Farseer,’ said Roboute, the memory of this woman growing clearer in his mind. He remembered a darkened vault in a forgotten deck of the Speranza, where dust lay thick and memories even thicker. Where he’d stood before the statue of Magos Vahihva of Pharses and vowed to remember him.
And just as he remembered Magos Vahihva, so too did the memory of the farseer unlock within him.
‘Bielanna Faerelle of Biel-Tan,’ he said, as eldritch fire surged around her and Telok retreated from the psychic tempest. The wraithlord stepped away, the elemental fury of the farseer’s attack driving the two foes apart.
The eldar psychic barrage had one other effect.
Roboute saw the Black Templars and the two remaining skitarii finally throw off the effects of Telok’s code. He saw Tanna’s fervent desire to take the fight to the Lost Magos, to empty his bolter’s magazine into the enemy who plotted the death of the Emperor.
But even the Black Templars were driven back by the howling gales of the psychic storm. With the air alive with immaterial energies, Roboute felt the hatred of the Templars for these aliens and what they had done. Varda drew his sword, his movements stiff and like those of a man recently awoken. The Emperor’s Champion looked
to his sergeant, eager to avenge Kul Gilad’s death, but Tanna shook his head.
Roboute had never witnessed such enormous restraint, and doubted he ever would again.
The psyker’s horned helm turned to him, and he felt the white heat of her intent pin him in place.
‘Take him,’ she ordered, pushing the stricken form of Archmagos Kotov towards him. ‘Take your leader from this place. He must not die here!’
Roboute and the skitarii took hold of Kotov, but the mass of the wounded archmagos threatened to drag them to the gantry.
Then Bracha and Yael were at Roboute’s side, and even with their armour operating far below par, the Templars easily bore Kotov’s weight.
‘Take him where?’ said Roboute.
‘Through the sunset gate, Surcouf,’ said Bielanna.
‘The what?’
The farseer thrust her staff forwards, and a spot of illumination appeared on the wall, like a welding torch burning through a thin sheet of metal. Too bright to look upon directly, it expanded rapidly into a brilliant ellipse of sunlight. Glittering breath gusted from the gateway, together with the sound of laughter and tears, the heat of the desert and the ice of polar wastelands.
‘Go!’ shouted the farseer, her voice taut with the effort of opening the portal. ‘All of you! I can hold the gate for moments only. You must trust me.’
‘Why should we?’ snarled Tanna. ‘You killed our Reclusiarch.’
‘What choice do you have, mon-keigh?’
The crystaliths began moving with a creak of glass on glass, finally overcoming the disruption of the eldar battle howl.
‘None,’ said Roboute, plunging through the gate.
The Machine-Spirit guards the knowledge of the Ancients.
Blaylock was used to Kryptaestrex and Azuramagelli bickering, but now more than just time was at stake. The bulky, robotic form of Kryptaestrex was a product of western hemisphere learning, logical, analytical and objective by nature. Azuramagelli, with his subdivided brain-portions distributed through his latticework form, was pure eastern hemisphere: intuitive, thoughtful, and subjective.
Blaylock knew that, like most such stereotypes, this notion was little more than a myth, yet time and time again it was borne out by those trained in different forges of Mars.
The two senior bridge adepts stood before the Speranza’s command throne, where Blaylock had been trying in vain for hours to contact Archmagos Kotov. Mechanicus regulations required ship-to-surface vox to be maintained at regular intervals, but the atmospheric conditions of Archmagos Telok’s forge world made a mockery of such protocols.
Kryptaestrex’s single, unblinking eye-lens flared in irritation.
said Kryptaestrex.
Satisfied the squabbling magi understood the gravity of the situation, Blaylock said,
Blaylock read the satisfaction in Azuramagelli’s noospheric aura that his suggestion had been acted upon, but the Fabricatus Locum wasn’t yet done.
Azuramagelli signified his assent, and the magi retreated to their stations, hurling binaric insults at one another the entire way.
Blaylock ignored it and smoothed out his robes, black and etched with representations of the divine circuitry. The green optics pulsed beneath his hood and he waved his gaggle of dwarf-servitors forward to rearrange the floodstream cables that regulated the flow of blessed chemicals sustaining his delicately balanced bio-cybernetic form. With a thought, he introduced a blend of stimulants and synaptic enhancers. They would increase his cognitive processing power, but would render the biological components of his body sluggish for a time.
A trade-off Blaylock was more than willing to accept.
He sensed the presence of the loathsome machine-hybrid even before it spoke to him. After what it had done to Mistress Tychon, Blaylock could barely bring himself to look at it.
‘Your magi bicker like novices,’ said Galatea. ‘We would chasten them with data-purgatives and parameter-violating power overloads. We would not tolerate dissent.’
‘Properly mediated, a little rivalry between underlings is never a bad thing,’ replied Blaylock, not wishing to engage with the creature, but knowing he had little choice. Its virtual hijacking of the Speranza’s systems gave it unprecedented power over the ship’s supposed commander.
‘We see nothing but antagonism between Azuramagelli and Kryptaestrex,’ said Galatea. ‘We would have dispensed with one of them long before now.’
‘Adepts Kryptaestrex and Azuramagelli are vital components of this ship’s functionality,’ said Blaylock, finally turning to face Galatea. Its grossly asymmetrical body was an affront to his sense of order, almost as much as its artificially evolved machine intelligence was an affront to his faith.
The brain jars supported on its palanquin body rippled in distorting fluids, each festooned with connective wires, implant spikes and biorhythm monitors.
Which one belonged to Mistress Tychon?
Galatea saw him looking and laughed, the sound a harsh bray of machine noise that scraped along Blaylock’s spine.
‘Archmagos Kotov has been grossly negligent to allow their continued mutual antipathy to impair the efficiency of his bridge crew,’ said Galatea.
‘Then I should thank the Omnissiah that, while you may hold us hostage aboard our own ship, this is not your bridge.’
‘True, it is not, and if Archmagos Kotov does not return, it might yet be yours. Do not pretend that the thought has not already crossed your mind.’
Blaylock shook his head. ‘Kotov will return. The Omnissiah would not have shown him the signs and given us the grace to overcome so much to reach this place only for us to fail now.’
‘You think the Omnissiah brought you here?’ asked Galatea.
‘Of course.’
‘You are wrong.’
Despite his better judgement, Blaylock could not resist such obvious bait.
‘If not the Omnissiah
, then who?’
Galatea looked at Blaylock strangely, its hooded head cocked to one side and its silver eyes dimmed as though unsure as to his true meaning.
‘Archmagos Telok led you here,’ it said. ‘We thought you knew that.’
Blaylock released a sigh of incense-filtered breath, relieved Galatea appeared to be talking in metaphysical riddles.
‘Archmagos Telok has been lost for thousands of years.’
‘And you honestly believe his reach does not extend from beyond the edge of the galaxy to the heart of the Imperium?’ chuckled Galatea. ‘Tell us, Magos Blaylock, how plausible is it that the string of astronomically unlikely events needed to bring the Speranza here might have occurred in so fortuitous a sequence? How likely is it that you would be brought here? The protégé of Magos Alhazen of Sinus Sabeus, an adept fanatically devoted to the continuance of Archmagos Telok’s philosophies? The very adept who sent Roboute Surcouf’s ships to the Arax system, where the saviour beacon of the Tomioka was miraculously found?’
‘The Fabricator General himself seconded me to the Speranza,’ said Blaylock, unwilling to concede anything to Galatea.
‘So the inloaded explorator-dockets testify,’ agreed Galatea. ‘But why would he assign someone who, on the face of things, was already predisposed to believe the mission a fool’s errand?’
‘To ensure Kotov’s desperation did not lose the Ark Mechanicus,’ snapped Blaylock. ‘To act as the eyes of Mars!’
‘By a Fabricator General who served his first three centuries in the Cult Mechanicus alongside Magos Alhazen. Coincidence? You know the statistical unlikelihood of such things, Tarkis. Think on that, and then tell us it was not Telok who brought you here.’
Galatea turned away and clattered along the central nave of the bridge on its mismatched legs.
Blaylock watched it go, feeling the solid adamantium upon which he had built his life crumble like the shifting red sands of the Tithonius Lacus.
Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Page 84