Tomb World, page 1
Contents
Cover
Warhammer 40,000
Tomb World
Prologue
ACT 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
ACT 2
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
ACT 3
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Epilogue
About the Author
An Extract from ‘The Infinite and the Divine’
Backlist
A Black Library Publication
eBook license
For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of Mankind. By the might of his inexhaustible armies a million worlds stand against the dark.
Yet, he is a rotting carcass, the Carrion Lord of the Imperium held in life by marvels from the Dark Age of Technology and the thousand souls sacrificed each day so his may continue to burn.
To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable. It is to suffer an eternity of carnage and slaughter. It is to have cries of anguish and sorrow drowned by the thirsting laughter of dark gods.
This is a dark and terrible era where you will find little comfort or hope. Forget the power of technology and science. Forget the promise of progress and advancement. Forget any notion of common humanity or compassion.
There is no peace amongst the stars, for in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.
PROLOGUE
The Imperium of Man stretches across the galaxy. A million worlds, each turning beneath the vigilant light of the God-Emperor.
Orymous is one such world. Billions of souls live out their lives upon its surface, serving His design. They huddle together in its cities, vast stains of rockcrete that spread along coastlines and over mountain plateaus. They labour in its fields, enormous agri-complexes that cover continents. They plumb the depths of its indigo oceans for promethium, the lifeblood of the Imperial machine. They live, as untold trillions do, praying to the Holy Throne of Terra for salvation from all that blights them.
The void above Orymous teems with vessels, great blade-tipped craft put forth from the shipyards of the Adeptus Mechanicus. They come and go in their multitudes, carrying soldiers and arms and machines and the immense produce required to sustain them all. Orymous is a mustering world, a gathering place for the God-Emperor’s armies. Wars of conquest, of reclamation and of retribution have sallied forth from this planet, carrying the Imperium’s wrath across the stars.
But Orymous has not always been a human world. Indeed, Orymous has not always been its name.
ACT 1
CHAPTER 1
A fire burns beneath a metal grate. Above the fire is a sigil, carved from polished onyx, wreathed in oily smoke.
The sigil is the icon of the Triarch, known to every witness gathered about the fire for it is affixed upon their bodies. These bodies, formed of living metal, are aglow from the light of the fire, and aglow from within.
Placed at intervals around the fire are other objects, grains of sand and shards of brass. The fire is unnecessary, as is the sigil and the rest. In truth, almost all of the sorcerous adornments placed about the chamber are unnecessary. Kamoteph has ever scorned the trappings of ‘magic’, the cloak-and-shadow lies that many practitioners of the cryptek arts employ to conjure mystery and conceal the true source of their powers.
But the trappings have their uses.
Lord Hekasun watches all that transpires with rapt attention. His sharp-edged skull twitches left and right in the manner of an avian as he struggles to comprehend that which is beyond him. Each of Kamoteph’s smallest gestures draws his sponsor’s gaze, his copper oculars glowing like banked coals within the depths of their sockets.
The fire dances along the planes and edges of the cube, the only object that is truly needed for the ritual’s success. It is smooth, no larger than the cryptek’s clenched fist, cradled at the peak of a pyramid of metagold struts. A work of uncommon artifice, the tesseract labyrinth is an example of the necron mastery of space and time. It can serve as repository, archive and receptacle for anything its bearer chooses to place outside the strictures of reality.
In this case, it is a prison.
A chant echoes from the stone walls, stirring the air that has been pumped into the chamber to serve as fuel for the flames. It is an ancient language, drawn not from memory but from the texts of a dead empire. The twelve most gifted of Kamoteph’s acolytes form a circle about him, though between them stand the impassive forms of Lord Hekasun’s lychguard. Mandulis, the lord’s vargard, is closer at hand, a bare pace from his master and rigid with restrained violence.
Kamoteph’s dominion-link with his apprenteks make them extensions of his will, subordinate to his needs. In the driest, most mechanical sense, Kamoteph has linked their processing power with his, expanding his capacity to interrogate the gargantuan reams of data that exist within the cube’s matrices. In the arcane sense, which is at once more true and more false, he has slaved their meagre abilities to his, sustaining him as he explores the labyrinth’s dimensionless interior.
Kamoteph stands hunched over the fire and sigil, arms and hands moving occasionally between ritual poses. He is bent almost in half, his spine a heavy arc of necrodermis that forces his head low, a bare cubit from the sigil and the flames beneath. Kamoteph the Crooked is the name he has been given by unfriendly courtiers, a mocking sobriquet to which the cryptek is entirely indifferent.
He draws metal hands together, digits shifting into the seventh configuration of Olm. Kamoteph has been at work for thirty-one days, his mind bound to the infinite medium of the labyrinth. Such endurance offers no challenge for his god-wrought body, but it is not his body that has been taxed.
It is like casting a noose around smoke. Slowly, infinitely slowly, the cryptek shapes and sculpts the mist, sifting each speck of unreality for a trace of what he seeks. Those he finds, he husbands with deft gusts of power, drawing each fragment together from the diffuse nothingness in which they dwell.
This analogy is good enough for Hekasun’s stunted imagination, but it is also wrong in every way that matters.
‘Well?’ Hekasun interrupts, not for the first time. It is fortunate that much of the ritual is purely for show, as Kamoteph’s lord and master is an impatient and querulous creature.
Lifting even a fraction of his attention from the miasma of the labyrinth is a trial, but Kamoteph does so. ‘I am drawing near, o lord.’
He is. His task requires immense focus and sublime skill, but Kamoteph possesses both. The ephemeral sense of a consciousness, of metal and fusion and a functioning mind, are all coalescing from the labyrinth’s innards.
‘I name you, Khemet.’
Kamoteph speaks the words aloud. This is not for show. The cryptek is summoning a thinking mind from a void, beckoning it to remember itself. He can feel it respond. The ephemeral is becoming enduring, the diffuse becoming whole.
‘I name you, Khemet. I call you. I seek you, and bind you, and pull you near.’
The chanting grows in strength in response to Kamoteph’s unspoken command.
‘I name you, Khemet, and I call you forth.’
It happens in a rush. Like hauling a boulder up one side of a mountain, eventually the stone reaches the peak and tips.
Atoms remember their bonds with one another. Crystalline synapses draw together, firing in sequence. Fragments of matter bind, becoming metal bones, metal limbs, metal sinews. The caged star that burns at the centre of each necron remembers its strength, and a blaze of jade light erupts within the labyrinth’s surface.
Now is the critical time. He is the conduit, the path out of the maze. Kamoteph must hold himself together. He is the beacon, the lighthouse, the flame in the darkness.
The apprenteks’ chant reaches a furious pitch in response to their master’s need. Their core-flux vents blaze with the effort, each taxed to their limits. In the sconces the flames rise, dancing in time with the chant, and the shadows lengthen. At Kamoteph’s side, all but forgotten, Hekasun leans closer, entranced by the occult magic at work.
An apprentek succumbs. His reactor core gutters like a candle in a gale, and he collapses to the godsteel deck with a discordant crash of metal that is lost beneath his brethren’s chanting. Kamoteph ignores the death, drawing harder on his bond with those that remain. He must endure. If he falters now, all that he has done to reach this point shall have been for naught.
Something stirs in the labyrinth’s depths. It comes as though from a great distance, growing from the merest flicker of movemen
It is only in the final fraction of a second that Kamoteph is able to perceive what it is he has summoned, and a shiver of fear racks his metal frame.
For the longest time, she has been nothing.
Less than nothing. Whatever was thrown into the labyrinth has not survived its torment. She has been broken. Torn apart by the relentless march of time. Riven by utter and total absence.
And now, without warning, she is restored.
Existence is incomprehensible. Nothing is as it should be. She feels metal where there should be flesh. Her thoughts are shards of arithmetic calculation, not the lightning storm of consciousness.
There is a void where her soul should reside.
It is too much. Whatever kernel of self that still lies at the centre of her being rebels. She cannot endure the horror of the real, and so she flees back into the oblivion that has been her sanctuary.
The thing that emerges can barely be called a necron.
It writhes, a flailing tangle of metal that bursts from the blaze of light that shines from the labyrinth’s surface. It crashes through the fire, scattering charred wood and casting the priceless cube from which it has escaped into the farthest corner of the room.
A wordless moan pours from a maw that gapes open, a cry of utter horror that lashes at the chamber’s walls. Its jaw grows wider to unleash the scream, drooping under its own weight until it detaches and crashes to the floor. Necrodermis sloughs from its limbs as its morphic field falters, leaving a skeletal under-structure that thrashes in purposeless fury. Jade light explodes from fractures that open in its torso, so much so that Kamoteph fears that all his work to pull the creature from the labyrinth will be wasted in a gush of unchained core-flux. But it holds itself together, scrabbling against the godsteel floor in a snarl of limbs.
Hekasun steps back, horrified, and his vargard takes his place. The brace of lychguard that flank the ritual stamp forwards with their warscythes levelled, replacing the apprenteks, who falter in their chanting and scatter in terror.
Whatever shred of consciousness the benighted creature possesses detects the threat. With a swirling crash of struts and spars it hurls itself towards the vargard’s blade. Mandulis catches the leap with the staff of his scythe, throwing it aside.
It lands in a heap, only to scuttle back to all fours and take off. It moves in an uncoordinated shambles, throwing itself forwards to catch itself on emaciated hands and feet. The sound of broken knives clattering against steel fills the room, beneath the moan that continues to howl from the ruin of its face.
‘Seal the chamber!’
Hekasun’s order comes too late. Despite its disordered gait it moves with unnatural speed. The entrance to the chamber is a low archway, lit by the soft glow of power conduits from the corridor beyond. A pair of warriors stand before it, gauss flayers crossed to bar the way.
The thing crashes through the meagre barrier and lopes beneath the archway’s lintel. The sound of violence and horror echoes away as it charges, heedless, into the bowels of Kamoteph’s ship.
‘What madness have you unleashed?’ Hekasun rounds on the cryptek.
Kamoteph does not breathe, but he is breathless, exhausted by the final rush of effort necessary to draw the object of his search from her prison. He steps into the strewn wreckage of the ritual fire and retrieves the carved onyx sigil of the Triarch.
‘I have released her, my lord.’
‘As one would a plague?’ Hekasun stabs an accusatory finger towards the cryptek’s faceplate.
‘Hardly, my lord.’ Kamoteph is not accustomed to error, and exhaustion and pride make his reply sharper than is wise. When Hekasun’s oculars narrow, the cryptek bows low in apology. ‘I had not anticipated such a degree of synaptic degradation.’
‘It was folly to allow you to convince me of this course. Now I must hunt and eradicate a feral warrior through the decks of the ship.’
Kamoteph starts forwards in alarm. ‘I beseech you, lord, do not. Khemet has what we require. Everything hinges upon her.’
Hekasun stares at the cryptek. ‘We do not need her.’
Kamoteph bows low again. ‘With the greatest respect, my lord. We do.’
CHAPTER 2
She runs, without understanding the act of running, nor from what she flees or to where.
Whatever is left of her mind is all but gone, ragged and thrashing like torn sailcloth in a gale. It is pure instinct that drives her body’s motions, instinct and the hundred thousand background processes that regulate the power levels of her core reactor, the actuators in her joints, the processing language of her neural mesh.
what am I what am I what am I what am I
There are flashes of memory – images and sensations and the code-facsimiles of emotions – that erupt as knife-edged shards out of the misfiring operating cores of her brain. A figure towers over her, and betrayal stabs at her centre. A crown is cold and distant, and supreme. Pride lifts her, and she soars over a battlefield that spans the stars themselves.
She is dying. Whatever strength is propelling her is waning, falling away with the clods of silver metal that melt from her skeletal limbs like candle wax. Alarms add their wail to the chaos of her colliding thoughts, and alert-glyphs dance in her sight. Each one is another barb to her sanity, driving her further into the recesses where she can escape the horror of her being.
She does not run in search of succour. The place she finds herself in is dark and barren. The walls and floor and roof are sheer faces of black stone, veined with geometric lines that pulse with a sickly light. She knows that nothing lives in such places. She is a gheist, haunting the tunnels of a tomb.
She rounds a corner and there are figures ahead. Six of them, stick thin, their bodies reflecting the poisonous light from the corridor’s walls. Fear rises as they march towards her, and she sees their appalling mockery of life. Eyes that are green coals burn in deep sockets. Their mouths are slits cut into metal faces, immobile and thick with malice.
They hold long, sharp implements in their hands, glowing with the same bilious radiance that emanates from behind their open ribcages. She knows these things. They are weapons, made to kill, made to strip the flesh from the living.
She throws herself upon the closest, bearing it to the floor beneath the force of her impact. There is no skill or martial art in her attack, just wild fear escaping in undirected violence. The creature emits an electronic grunt of protest, but it is Khemet who screams when she looks into the eye of a monster and sees herself in its reflection.
This is what she is. She is kin with these creatures, these constructs, these false imitations of life and strength, these…
Necrons. We are called necrons.
The realisation awakens something, forces a connection with a ravening flash of heat and pain. She is a necron. A soulless intellect bound to an immortal frame by the duplicity of spiteful gods.
The fragile essence that is hiding from all that assails her finally breaks under the assault, and in the breaking Khemet is freed. The horror of her existence is too great to behold, and so she does not see it. She smothers her dread, burying it to scream and wail and shudder in its revulsion. But the greater part of her rises, deaf and blind to the aberrance of her being.
She is a necron. And, what is more, she is powerful.
She is still dying, but she can save herself. Senses Khemet has forgotten she possesses reach out and into the warrior, into the hollow cavern of its brain, and override its core functions. She grips its faceplate with a hand and the metal deforms, binding itself to her fingers. Khemet leaches the necrodermis from the warrior’s frame, metal flowing like water from its gaunt body to hers.
It is over in moments. Its body has been withered to its skeletal essence, its strength siphoned away. Something like a muted scream barks from the dying warrior’s faceplate, and then the light of its appalling eyes grows dim.
Khemet stands.
The theft of the warrior’s metal has invigorated her, or perhaps it is the awareness of her nature. In either case, the erratic firing of her thoughts has calmed, if only by a fraction.
