Planetkill, page 16
The Castle of Sighs, sacrosanct domain of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica on Celare Artem, was traditionally both dark and silent. Its blind occupants needed no light, and the stillness of quiet made adopting astrotelepathic trances easier. The disturbances wracking the warp around the usually stable Beltane Gate had been making communication with systems elsewhere in the sector increasingly sporadic and that was poor for morale in the Castle. But since word of his first reading had leaked, the darkness and silence had entirely ceased to be a comfort. The approaching doom had infected the minds of the forge-world’s astropaths, flitting telepathically from one to another, growing and mutating so that uncertainty became doubt and doubt became fear and fear… Well, now there was a horde of panicking menials, making crude attempts to break into the stronghold. A century of the Tech-Guard was deployed to keep them back. And the latest news was that the Archmagos Ghuul had hit upon an ingenious solution to the problem.
‘Wait here,’ he instructed his assistants.
Xenoch entered the Chamber of Silence and sealed the door behind him. It was the only Null Chamber in the Castle of Sighs and, as the door sealed and the wards of shielding energised the psychic wall, he felt the constant link to his brothers and sisters of the Castle suddenly break off. For the first time he could remember in his long life, it was a relief to be separated from the minds of his adopted family.
Alone with his thoughts, his psychic sense of place and surroundings shut off by the Null shielding, he was nothing but a blind man: a scared blind man. But the cards were waiting for him on the table. He felt his way there and seated himself carefully in the throne-like chair.
For most astropaths, to meditate with one’s psychic senses closed off was almost impossible. And few could master the practice of reading the Emperor’s Tarot in a Null chamber. But the psyker’s mind resided more fully in the nightmare realm of the warp than did the mind of the blunt human. He was open, Xenoch knew, to malign influences with strange agenda. The open mind – even of an astropath, soul-bound with the Emperor Himself – was a door of invitation to the spawn of darkness that clustered, waiting for the moment of weakness that called them…
But even a Null chamber could not entirely dim an astropath’s connection to the warp. He was blind, physically and psychically, but the spark of power that had bound him in love and in pain to the mighty soul of Him-on-Earth still burned with an inextinguishable light. Xenoch focused on the light, letting it grow within himself, until his mind fell away. The doubt fell away. The fear fell away. Only the light was left: the unbreakable link through time and space to the enthroned God-Emperor.
‘Prime Xenoch,’ came a voice over the intercom and the astropath tutted at the interruption.
‘What?’ he snapped back.
‘The rioting is getting worse. The skitarii have fallen back to the inner curtain wall and have taken casualties.’
‘I will be there directly,’ Xenoch replied, sharply. ‘Do not interrupt me again.’
Xenoch heard the intercom connection click off and, re-gathering his calm, he stretched out his hands to the cards. Their toad-like psychic corpulence had been quashed with the sealing of the chamber’s door and now they were mere cards: immensely precious, psycho-crystalline wafer cards, hand-crafted by a magos of the Collegium Psykana and precisely attuned to Xenoch’s own self but, ultimately, just cards. With the chamber’s Null shielding switched off, the cards blossomed with psychic life so fresh and bold that it was visible even to the non-psychic. But the ridges and bumps painstakingly crafted along the edges of each card were all that could tell him their identity now.
He touched the first: the Eye of Terror. It sat in the master position at the centre of the spread as harbinger of change and refuge of the damned. At the hub of the spread, it spoke of corruption at the very heart of things.
Beneath it, the Knight of Spheres lay inverted.
Xenoch sighed. The import of the cards seemed no less dire to him now than it had at his first reading. The gaze of Dark Powers had fallen upon Celare Artem; that much was indisputable.
Following the cards clockwise around the circle, Xenoch touched each in turn, refreshing his memory as to their exact locations, mining deeply within his knowledge and instinct to read the import of each.
The Nine of Chalices was a card of weak leadership and uncertainty. The Traitor stood at the right hand of the Eye of Terror. Above him was the Ace of Staves, foretelling the abuse of power. At the head of the Eye of Terror stood the magos, inverted – a dire warning of secret knowledge best left untouched – then the Two of Weapons, which stood for duality and for motives unclear even to the prime movers. On the left hand of the eye lay the Leviathan (the touch of the Ancients) and, below it and last in the spread, the Seven of Weapons, inverted (confusion and the threat of the mob).
‘Prime Xenoch!’
The voice on the intercom was panicked, but Xenoch was too intensely focussed upon his work to notice immediately.
‘I am not to be disturbed!’ he shouted, hands shaking.
‘Menials are in the Castle, Prime Xenoch! The skitarii–’
The voice cut off suddenly and Xenoch glanced reflexively towards the door. Was that a noise from the corridor?
His hand fell upon the last card once more: confusion and the threat of the mob? Surely –
The door of the chamber shot open, the Null shielding collapsed and the three dark figures poured in along with telepathic screams of terror, death and blood.
‘No!’ Xenoch had time to cry out before the crude bludgeon of the menial’s metal arm fell crushingly upon his skull and the astropath tumbled, dead, to the floor. Around him, his precious cards fell like a shower of rain.
At dawn, the representatives of the Collegia met to receive the news of the death of Astropath-Prime Xenoch and his entire complement of astropaths. But the fear-sharpened anger at the loss of their only means of interstellar communications was blunted by the delighted report of Archmagos Ghuul. It was only logical, Ghuul concluded, that the condemned menials, who had so brutally murdered the astropaths, be handed over to him for further experimentation on the link between life-force and the coherence of the defence shield.
At noon, the Nine ritually invested Bastian Ghuul with Magenta authority and three thousand more expendable menials.
By sunset, a new structure had begun to grow on the great basalt doorstep of the Portico Publicum and its interior hummed in bilious luminescence. This new child of the Tabulum Aethyricum grew like twin trees, curling in weird organic curves up mighty amphibolite columns. As night fell, the structures reached their zenith, curving together across the architrave and intertwining their malign branches. With a static crack of ignition, the Annihilator burst into life: a shimmering, green window to oblivion.
Ghuul glanced sideways at Moritz. Only centuries of experience allowed him to interpret her expression behind the patchwork of scars that consumed her face. The Skitaria’s eyes sparkled with glee as she watched the Annihilator consume each team of menials. The new device was almost divinely efficient. To have continued impaling menials on the dimension probes would have been preposterous – the remains of several early experiments still hung from their places, as a grisly memorial to their sacrifice to the Machine-God. The Annihilator, though, directly fed life-force to the shield generator whilst reducing the sacrifices to nothing more than insubstantial atomic dust.
‘Are you all right, Moritz?’ he asked the normally benevolent soldier.
‘Don’t you sense it, archmagos?’ she asked. ‘Can’t you feel the rightness of our path? Look–’ she gestured at the flock of menials being herded through the gate by the hooded skitarii guards. ‘Even they can feel the call of the device!’
Ghuul nodded distractedly. It was true. They had set up a plascrete tunnel to conceal the effects of the Annihilator from its waiting victims, but menials who had at first approached cautiously and fearfully were now surging forward in confused enthusiasm. The skitarii scarcely had to even point them in the right direction – although some swung their shock mauls anyway; whether to look busy or merely out of bullying instincts, he could not tell. But he saw nothing sinister in the change. They had seen dozens of their fellows go in already. There were no screams and the skitarii were disciplined and orderly. Why should they fear anything malign?
Of course, he could sense the effect that the device was having – as its power grew and spread, a sense of intense calm and security filled him. But the sacrifice was not a gleeful activity – it was merely necessary: the only way to protect his homeworld. The machine brought safety and a future in the truest expression of the Machine-God’s benevolence. It was unusual to see an effect drawn from the life-force of humans, but it had always been that way in a sense, had it not? Weak flesh dies. The Machine endures.
But this effect on Moritz was disturbing.
‘Archmagos?’ The Praetorian-Captain of the Temple Guard interrupted with a formal salute. ‘We are nearing the end of the supply of menials.’
Ghuul tutted.
‘We’re barely at a consistent thirty per cent coverage and far from the power estimates my calculations predicted. I’ll petition the Nine for more.’
‘No!’ barked Moritz suddenly.
Ghuul turned to Moritz in surprise, but she pushed past him and stabbed her augmented right hand at the skitarius officer.
‘We don’t have time to wait for those relics to make up their minds when we know what our world needs!
‘Get out there, captain, and round up every menial your regiment can find.’
The skitarius saluted again, turned and marched away.
‘Relics?’ Ghuul queried, stunned. ‘And when did the Temple-Guard start following your orders? I have Magenta clearance.’
‘This is too important, Ghuul,’ snarled Moritz, her mechadendrites waving aggressively. ‘I obtained Dark Magenta clearance and the rank of Magos Commander to take control of the skitarii regiments. You concentrate on keeping your damned engine running!’
Moritz walked away and Ghuul silently watched her leave.
My project, thought Ghuul bitterly. My research, my vision, my genius, Moritz. You will not build your own worthless reputation where my glory should stand!
Outside the House of Nine, Ghuul paused on the threshold and wondered what he would say – could say – to persuade the Fabricator Lords of Celare Artem to sacrifice even more menials to the strange idol he had built. But even as he hesitated, the great doors cracked apart to swing silently inwards on perfectly balanced bearings and he immediately thrust his hands respectfully into his sleeves and bowed his head. A fog of smoke, heavy with incense and rare oil fractions, rolled across him like the unfragrant breath of a dragon, and the Fabricators spoke – many voices enunciating the same words in scratchy, amplified unison.
‘Does it work, young Ghuul?’
Ghuul could hear the fear as well as the hope in their voices. A coolant leak somewhere nearby was spilling a thin layer of nitrogen in an undulating carpet across the floor but, here and there, it broke to reveal the gleaming, black marble floor and, in it, the reflections of the Nine, encased in their life support systems, orifices plugged and ancient skin gleaming with moisturising lubricant. They were trapped by their own power, Ghuul thought suddenly. They had sacrificed their humanity to knowledge. But did that make them more or less than human?
‘Yes, my lords,’ he bowed. ‘We have sustained thirty-four point seven per cent coverage for up to twenty minutes. But we have a permanent output of twenty-seven per cent.’
‘Unacceptable!’ rumbled the Fabricator Lords. He sensed a forest of serpentine mechadendrites above his head, waving and clattering in panic.
‘We have extracted catalysing agents from barely three thousand menials,’ explained Ghuul, venturing to raise his head slightly. ‘And each extra percentage point needs a geometrically-greater quantity of agents to achieve.’
‘You have Vermillion clearance, Ghuul,’ they announced, and he lifted his head all the way up to look at the Nine. His visual units cut through the gloom to fully reveal their withered and ancient forms, trapped in communion with the Machine. They were fragile and flimsy, for all their immense knowledge. Their fear made them vulnerable and weak. They did not, truly, possess the faith in the power of the Machine that Ghuul knew he had: the certainty of the rightness of his course. They did not deserve their supremacy.
‘Vermillion?’ he queried. ‘Vermillion Prime?’
‘Vermillion Prime,’ they agreed.
Without a bow, Ghuul turned and left. The armoured doors swung shut behind him. He almost believed he could feel the fresh authority that had won him victory not only over that upstart girl, Moritz, but also over the pathetic husks of the Nine. Vermillion Prime clearance made him the single most powerful tech-adept on the whole of Celare Artem. The sense of tangible authority might have been an illusion, but the responses from the systems around him were real and instant.
A swarm of servo-skulls swept down from the ceiling, reprioritized from whatever they had been doing, to serve his needs; cogitator banks lit up in obedient, eager readiness to the passing touch of his mechadendrites and, as he reached the central hall of the Temple, the head of every priest, skitarii and menial turned instantly towards him, their own deep conditioning responding as one to the authority codes being invisibly transmitted from his person.
Closest to him stood Moritz. The shock of the signals that even now were coursing through the skitarii’s systems stood out clear on her face. But Ghuul just smiled, the auxiliary cables beneath his bionic eye twisting at the motion.
‘Round them up,’ he ordered. ‘All of them.’
It was astonishing, thought Ghuul as he swam free in the soup of data that had now been placed at his disposal. Here, he could sense the whole planet shifting and moving in step to his direction. With less than a nod, regiments of skitarii Tech-Guard moved at his whim. The sagitarii veterans drove stragglers from their hiding places within the forests, burning them into the open. The cataphracti rumbled along the wide avenues of the forge-world’s many cities, driving the soft mass of menials before them.
But Moritz had been right: there was little of the resentment and resistance he had expected. The riots of just two days ago had calmed under the benign influence of the growing shield. The population had become compliant and docile. It occurred to him that perhaps the fragmentary alien designs from the Tabulum Aethyricum had been designed as much for this purpose as for the shielding. For the first time since he had found them, he wondered what race had preceded them on this world. The earliest stacks were unconnected to the data altar and always had been. What had the first settlers been so afraid of?
‘Forty-two point nine per cent, archmagos,’ announced Udo from somewhere far away.
With a conscious effort of will, Ghuul dragged himself up to the surface and out of the deep connections his new authority had opened up to him. It was easy to see why the Nine so easily surrendered their mobility for this sort of intimacy with the Machine. And why it was so hard to rouse them to anything close to normal consciousness.
‘For how long?’ he asked as he opened his eye.
‘Permanent, master,’ reported Udo, with a smile. ‘Although it still takes a geometrically greater input of material for each increase, we are sustaining almost half your predicted output.’
‘Still not enough,’ sighed Ghuul. ‘How many have we used?’
‘Four hundred and eight thousand and sixty-three and counting, archmagos.’
‘Barely a tenth of the total menial population, then?’ grunted Ghuul. ‘I shall redirect Phi-Omega Maniple to Artem Peripheral, and tithe the remainder a further ten per cent.’
‘Yes, archmagos.’ Udo bowed and retreated. The chamber in which Ghuul sat was known as the Chapel of Bronze, but his assistants already treated it with the reverence reserved for the House of Nine. Ghuul knew that his authority, so lightly given, had done more than merely raise his status. It had brought him closer to the Machine. He was becoming more like his God.
With a sigh, he descended once more into the deeps.
But something had changed in the world, even as he had spoken to Udo. The population data had shifted significantly. He quickly patched into a low-orbit satellite to look down at the nearest example of the shift in Artem Tertius and, yes: a great mass of people was leaving the city! Were they fleeing?
Immediately, though, he could see that they were moving, not away from Artem Prime and the Annihilator, but towards it. The tram lines were full and the great transport flyways that arched over Celare Artem’s fastidiously-crafted forest regions were increasingly busy with every form of transport. Even the footways bore a steady stream of pilgrims on every major link running towards Artem Prime…
Pilgrims, he thought. That was what they were, after all. They were coming to him. Coming to the mighty new idol of the Machine-God that he had raised in the Great Temple, but which cast its shadow of protection over the whole planet: a shadow built from the very soul-stuff of the world’s children. It was poetically beautiful. He dismissed his earlier doubts with a smile. His plan was perfectly at one accord with the very spirit of the Machine God. How could it be otherwise?
They came to do homage in the tens of thousands until the streets of Artem Prime were choked with pilgrims, camping on every corner and blocking the wide boulevards with their numbers. And still they came.
