Felix’s temper remained sharp. ‘Then why must you infuriate me so? You do it on purpose.’
‘I do,’ Cawl admitted.
‘Why?’
‘I annoy you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Enrage, frustrate, upset and goad you?’
‘Every time I see you.’
‘How does that make you feel?’
‘More determined to get out from under your shadow than you can know,’ said Felix.
‘Well then,’ said Cawl, his smile showing coyly round his augmetic mask. ‘I think we can say that you’re not afraid of me. Are you frightened of me, Decimus?’
Legs rattling, Cawl pulled ahead, humming an ancient air that brought Felix cold chills of recognition.
Annoyingly, Cawl was right. Felix wasn’t afraid of him. Not any more.
They continued down. The geography of the Pharos was uncanny. Felix’s cogitator presented cartoliths that made no sense. According to his auto-senses, they were walking on the ceiling in defiance of gravity, heading down when to all intents they looked to be going up, or passing through the same section several times without doubling back. The device’s attempts to build a meaningful map came to nothing, and it bleeped in frustration. Felix shut the function down before the machine-spirit took ill from the effort.
The corridor branched more frequently, and the branchings became larger. Some of these must have been airtight, for they yielded pockets of ancient air that had kept out the ferrocrete. The tunnel became steeper and narrower, treacherous to ceramite boots, and gave no purchase to either their grips or to maglocking. Felix saw traces of metal in the ferrocrete. When he pointed these out to Cawl, the archmagos paused, drew back his stolen excavators, and pulsed out fresh instructions. When the scarabs burrowed onwards, they left behind ancient walkways and steps cast from plasteel.
‘These are of Imperial make,’ said Felix, taking in the Opus Machina stamped into the metal.
‘They are the product of the old Mechanicum, left here ten thousand years ago,’ said Cawl. ‘We are not the first of our species to come this way.’
Evidently, the mountain had been active, even then, for the Imperial artefacts were half absorbed into the green-black stone of the tunnels. The scarabs seemed to find these additions especially abhorrent, and Cawl needed to repeatedly divert them away from the fastenings holding the walkways to the alien stone.
They passed an open tunnel that corkscrewed around on itself. A walkway followed the curve, warped and buckled and half drowned in living rock.
‘There was a map in the Library of Ptolemy,’ said Cawl. ‘It is useless now. As you can see, the Pharos is not bound to one shape.’
An hour later, the tunnel opened up into a huge cavern. The ferrocrete there was restricted to one side of the space, the inner face rippled with partial absorption. A number of dead scarabs – Felix could think of them in no other way than living things – lay on the ground. Several of Cawl’s hijacked swarm detached themselves to tend to their inactive fellows. They darted over the broken machines, their silver surfaces glinting. In a few seconds repairs were effected. Reactivated scarabs rose from their resting place, and resumed work abandoned who knew how many centuries before.
‘There is a large amount of ferrocrete to remove here,’ said Cawl. ‘I must give the xenos drones my full attention. You may rest, if you wish.’
Felix’s men would do no such thing, but spread out through the cavern. Suit lights bounced off the glossy black rock without penetrating it, although they could see deep within to where luminous shapes moved. Many tunnels opened off the cavern, worming their way to parts unknown. They entered through every surface of the cave, and varied enormously in size, from microscopic to several big enough to accommodate a Land Raider.
Felix looked into the stone. Ghostlights congregated where he watched, pulling his attention closer. Under his gaze, the lights coalesced, becoming shapes that he almost recognised. He reached out a hand. The shining rock rippled.
‘Tetrarch!’ Cominus’ vox snapped Felix’s attention away. His fist clenched. The lights were gone, the rock still.
Cominus was advancing on an aperture five feet high, set in the side of the cave with the base at about waist height. Its oval encompassed blackness, and so it appeared a tunnel, but when Cominus’ light shone through, it glanced off far walls. There was a second cavern on the far side.
‘I saw lights,’ he said. He had his gun ready.
Ixen and Daelus flanked Cominus. They approached the gap from the sides, then Cominus flung himself in front of it.
Light flashed from the other side.
‘There’s someone there!’ Cominus shouted. ‘Adeptus Astartes! Hold fire!’
Lights flashed in and out of the cave. Then Cominus’ gun wavered; he peered forwards, and stepped back, his aim renewed.
‘By the Emperor,’ he whispered.
Felix pushed forwards to stand by his sergeant.
On the far side of the hole he saw Cominus, Daelus and Ixen staring back. The doppelgangers were inverted, standing on the ceiling. Past the tops of their heads Felix saw another Cawl working xenos drones to clear ferrocrete, and other Space Marines drawing near to look.
‘Stand down!’ Cominus said to them.
The other Cominus was doing the same, their guns pointed directly at each other. Felix saw his counterpart reach up a restraining hand as he did so himself.
‘It’s us,’ said Felix. ‘Don’t shoot.’
‘It’s a xenos trick,’ snarled Cominus.
‘I am ordering you to stand down,’ said Felix. He looked to his men. ‘All of you.’
Reluctantly, Cominus put up his gun. The other Cominus did so a fraction of a second later.
‘Astounding,’ said Daelus. ‘What is it?’
‘Come away,’ said Alpha Primus. He joined them. ‘Do not look.’
‘Is it an image?’ said Daelus. ‘Is it a trick?’
Felix noted then that there was no Alpha Primus on the far side. He peered around and saw there were more Space Marines in his stead stood in guard around Cawl. They were all in grey armour, and numbered twenty in total.
‘It is a dimensional mirror,’ said Alpha Primus. ‘We see a representation of reality as it might have been, had fate taken another course.’
Three of the grey-armoured Primaris Marines left their master and approached. They seemed to be arguing. A fourth came, then a fifth, and around the fists and heads of these last two, nimbuses of psychic power ignited.
Felix saw other differences. There was no Ixen in the image. Another warrior stood exactly where Ixen was, and his heraldry was not of the Aquiloan Brotherhood. Gathein wore a normal battle brother’s wargear. Troncus lacked his Martian red and servoharness, and wore Apothecary’s white, while Felix saw belatedly that the hand his other self rested on Cominus’ pauldron was a shining augmetic.
‘Look away from it,’ said Alpha Primus. ‘I can feel agitation. Step back, and the vision will fade.’
‘You know this because of Cawl,’ said Cominus, who turned away.
Primus nodded. ‘Cawl teaches me many things. He made me for these eventualities.’ He drew in a sharp, pained breath. ‘Quickly! We peer through barriers not meant to breached.’
‘It is not the warp,’ said Gathein, fascinated.
‘It is not any place. It is a glimpse of different possibilities,’ said Primus. ‘Other ways things might have been.’
‘Is it real?’
Primus shrugged. ‘Objectively? Who can say? I feel thoughts from them. But it could be a projection of the machine designed to confound us. Ask Cawl. He might tell you, if he feels like it.’
The psychic warriors were coming closer. The alternate Cominus was becoming angry, and threw off his tetrarch’s hand.
‘Do it. Turn away now,’ said F
elix. ‘We do not know if we can interact with them. It is safest to remain ignorant.’
‘I’ll not turn my back on someone holding a gun on me,’ said Ixen.
‘You will, brother, and you will do so now,’ said Cominus.
The entire party turned their backs except Alpha Primus. Slowly, they walked away. Felix expected a bolt-round between his shoulders at any moment.
‘Stop,’ he said, when he had taken a score of steps.
‘Do not look back,’ said Alpha Primus.
‘I must,’ said Felix.
He turned back to look. For a second he saw through the hole into a kaleidoscopic display of variant caves, whence a multitude of Felixes stared back.
Alpha Primus’ hands fell on him and turned him around.
‘That is enough, tetrarch.’
Some minutes later, when Felix looked again, the tunnel mouth had gone. Smooth rock covered it over so flawlessly he doubted the aperture had ever been there.
They stayed close to Cawl while he worked after that. Ferrocrete fell away in glittering showers. The archmagos directed the drones to fabricate more of their kind, and the work hastened. The rest of the energy they stored needed venting, and the cavern sparkled with the reflected light of discharge as from energy, the drones made air.
At length, Cawl stepped back, and the xenos drones fell into a drifting flock overhead, shepherded by his servo-skulls.
‘We’re through’ he said, gesturing to smooth black walls and an open tunnel. ‘After you, Decimus.’
The amount of ferrocrete the party encountered thereafter diminished. Cawl’s suborned swarm of drones spent most of its time flying about him in ordered streams. Each patch of false stone they came across showed signs of having already been gnawed back by particle beams, melted away like snowdrifts dying in the warmth of spring. Likewise there was less and less of the ancient walkway left, until there was none at all, and the Space Marines were forced to proceed slowly in case they slipped and fell into the darkness of the mountain.
They came to a near vertical drop that ran right across the width of the passage. On the far side, the passage continued. It was a distance a Primaris Space Marine could clear with a jump, but Cawl went to the edge of the chute, peered down and said:
‘We must go down. The secondary control stage is beneath us. Primary Location Beta, as my illustrious brethren called it.’
The chute had been cleared by other hands, and no trace of the walkways remained, or else the chute was new and there had never been any structures placed there by humans; either way it was impassible to the Space Marines, being utterly smooth and impossible to climb. Cawl managed it easily enough. He was big enough to brace himself against the sides of the chute, and had enough feet and hands that the stone’s slickness didn’t matter. But the Space Marines could not climb like him. They had no measure of how deep the pit was. Armour could protect them only so much against a fall.
‘I will go alone,’ said Cawl. ‘Primus will accompany me. We will return shortly.’
He waved a hand. The drones flew off back up the passage and landed in neat ranks that stretched far back up the way they had come. Thousands of single green eyes dimmed into blackness.
‘You will not go alone,’ said Felix. ‘I’m coming with you.’
‘If you insist, Decimus,’ said Cawl distractedly. ‘If you insist.’
‘My lord…’ began Cominus.
‘No, sergeant, not this time. Wait here. If we do not return, you are to retreat to the extraction point at the northern landing pad. Is that clear?’
‘Tetrarch…’
‘It is an order, Cominus. Follow it.’
Cawl gave a wave and clanked away down the drop, where he vanished quickly into the inky black.
‘Ixen,’ Felix said. ‘Bring me ropes.’
‘Not necessary,’ said Alpha Primus. He stepped forwards and raised a hand. Blue light blazed around his fist, and he lifted up from the floor and floated forwards. When Primus was over the drop, he raised his other hand and Felix rose up upon a second cushion of psychic force.
‘How do you manage these feats?’ Gathein called to him. ‘Can you sustain levitation all the way down?’
‘I can,’ said Primus.
‘The blackstone pains my soul. Does it not hurt you?’ the Epistolary said as Primus sank down the shaft.
‘It hurts me,’ said Primus. ‘But I am used to pain. Everything hurts, all of the time.’
Felix followed him down the shaft. Beneath his feet the lights of Cawl’s augmetics glanced from polished stone, but he could not see the archmagos himself.
A lip of black rose past his face, and he sank into blackness as thick as oil.
Primus grunted with effort as they set down. If the ferrocrete poured down the shafts in ancient times had got that far, there was no sign of it any longer. They emerged at a nexus where several tunnels came together. Cawl was waiting for them there. The passageway he pointed out for them to follow was tall and narrow, a slot rather than a tube. A servo-skull drifted out, its reconnaissance completed.
‘It is this way, I am sure of it,’ he said. ‘All has changed since the old maps were made, and according to the chronicles the tunnels were inconstant anyway, but this slot is the same as the one described within the tomes of the Library of Ptolemy.’ His pale face, lit blue by his atmospheric energy mask, smiled.
Felix thought there was little chance that Cawl could fit through the gap, but the giant tech-priest contorted himself, various portions flattening out or retracting, until he was of a good shape, and he slid into the slot like a sword into a scabbard. The tunnel curved around inwards, and he disappeared from sight again.
‘You first,’ said Alpha Primus miserably, holding out his hand. ‘I will guard the rear.’
Felix prepared his boltstorm gauntlet.
‘Weapons are not necessary here,’ said Primus.
Felix held his fist out all the same when he headed into the spiral.
Cawl found Primary Location Beta as intriguing as the books had suggested. It was tall, divided into two bell-shaped chambers set neck to neck so that it resembled an hourglass. The top was graced with one of the Pharos’ many tunnels that wound off through stone and time and space. It had a sculpted, purposeful beauty that moved Cawl, all the more so since he was beginning to understand why it was that shape, why the stone shone so, why the wall came in a few hundredths of an inch just so by the entrance. He was on the cusp of discovery, and it excited him deeply.
Expectant silence filled the chamber as surely as water would a pitcher.
Decimus Felix came edging into the bell chamber, then Alpha Primus. They noticed the import of the moment. Alpha Primus tried so hard to be stoic at all times, but this time failed. His miserabilism was too pronounced. He wallowed in sorrow, that one. If Cawl had the capacity to make another Alpha Primus, he would start over and tweak the genes for joy. Regrettably that was impossible. Primus was and would remain unique. Even so, he looked around the chamber in wonder.
Felix, on the other hand, was far more human in his humours. There was a childish defiance in Felix, a desperate need to prove himself worthy of the authority the primarch had bestowed upon him. Felix was a favourite of Cawl’s, he brought out paternal instincts in him he never knew he had. The interface was going to be more difficult with them present, but life with an audience was always better, especially when such great deeds were about to be done.
‘Decimus, stand over there.’ Cawl made his way to the centre of the chamber. He pulsed invisible commands to his attendant flock of skulls, and they filed out in orderly fashion, one by one.
‘The forces that are to be unleashed in here might damage my devices,’ he said. ‘I can’t have that.’ Mechadendrites rattled back into housings. His guns deactivated and pulled in closer to his body. ‘Take my axe, please, Primus
,’ he said, holding out the massive, cog-toothed weapon he bore. Primus took the haft. ‘Go stand by Decimus, right there. Yes,’ said Cawl.
He hunkered down a little as his legs pulled in. He made a show of bracing himself, but he really did need to do it.
‘What I am about to attempt has never been done before,’ he said portentously, indulging himself. ‘I have the means in here,’ he tapped his head. ‘To my knowledge, no Imperial servant has successfully joined with a necron network to the extent that I am about to, not once, ever,’ he said emphatically. ‘Do not leave the side of the room. Do not touch me. Do not touch the walls.’ In his tightly packed cranium, augmetics came alive. He felt the alien heat of the blackstone bead in his head. ‘No matter what happens. Very well?’ Green lights flickered in the rock. Random at first, they drew together, and sketched predictable, circuit-like patterns.
‘Get on with it, Cawl,’ said Felix.
‘You do know how to spoil a dramatic moment, Decimus,’ said Cawl.
He placed his primary hands palm to palm. The lights ran quicker in the stone.
The Pharos sang.
‘Now I begin,’ he said. He plunged headlong into the xenos infosphere, whereupon some potent force slammed into his machine-laced soul.
It hurt to an almost intolerable degree.
Chapter Nineteen
A refusable offer
Belisarius Cawl- the Great Work - Guy Haley Page 23