Tomb World, page 13
‘Faster!’
The lights had died three days earlier. In itself, this was not extraordinary; Delmenyl is not an affluent district, and rolling blackouts are common in the winter months. But this is different. Every lumen in the city of Pasken died in the same breath. The power plants in the east, fed by the offshore promethium rigs, erupted in a monstrous explosion that had shattered windows for miles around. Taron has seen the reports – the power plants are still burning, and the local municipal backups are failing one after the other, for reasons no red-robed coghead can explain.
The reports had passed across his desk along with countless others. He is a clerk, grade secundus, for the Delmenyl enforcer blockhouse. He serves the Lex, but does not wear the shield. His role is to catalogue, to archive and record. That makes him a knowledgeable man, at least in regard to the criminal activities of Pasken, but that is not how he first heard of the daemon.
Jonie slips on a patch of ice, and Taron breaks his stride to pull the boy along by his arm. Jonie cries out. His father is hurting him, and he does not understand why they are out in the cold and the dark.
Every district of Pasken, every city on Orymous, has a daemon. Or perhaps it is the same daemon, stalking the darkened streets, making murder where it goes.
Taron had not believed it, at first. Violence is a fact of Pasken – gang wars, madmen, and the inevitable blood shed in the enforcement of the Lex. When the stories had begun a little more than a year ago, shared by gossiping investigators and drunken sanctioners, he had paid them little heed. But then the daemon had come to Delmenyl, and he had seen it for himself.
Taron has seen the verispexy picts, and wishes he had not. Hundreds of bodies hacked apart. The deacon of Saint Trypiyat’s, strangled and hung from his pulpit by his entrails. And always blood, an ocean of blood, spilt from alleyways and promenades and dock wharves and mansions. Wherever there is darkness, they say, the daemon moves. And always there is the sound of its blades against the stone.
Taron Gethisme had been a pious man, diligent in his worship of the God-Emperor. But he has cursed His name for abandoning him, for abandoning his family, to the cruelty of the thing that lurks in the shadows of Orymous.
The daemon has haunted the world for months, killing wherever it wills. But now, with the city plunged into darkness, the daemon has made Pasken its home. Hour by hour, the reports have flashed across the enforcers’ vox. Dozens butchered in a marketplace, their lungs spread like an angel’s wings. Hab-blocks razed, burning like chimneys. Two hundred people vanished while at prayer, the chapel emptied of souls as though by the Emperor’s own hand.
Fifty steps. That is all that is left. The length of a hab-block, and they will be safe. The shelter has been opened by Taron’s blockhouse’s captain, defying the city governor’s order that they remain inviolate and ready in case of war. But Taron knows Orymous is at war, at war with a shade that kills in ways Taron has never imagined.
Twenty steps.
There is a picter mounted above the door, and Taron waves his free arm as he runs. Taron has sent word ahead, secured a place for himself and his family.
‘Let us in! In Terra’s name, let us in!’
Ten steps.
The door opens.
Something catches Taron’s collar, ice cold against the nape of his neck.
The scrape of metal on stone carries deep into the shelter.
Khemet kills quickly, efficiently. She moves from room to room within the bastion, careful to always drag one hand through the powdery stone from which the humans have built their fortress. Talon marks adorn the walls of this ugly pretence of a city.
She does not kill them all. Mystery and stealth have their place in her campaign, but her purpose in Pasken is to stoke fear. She is a revenant, a thing birthed from human nightmares to haunt their waking hours. To be truly effective, the tales of her deeds must spread.
She selects three at random. She cuts their eyes from their skulls and leaves them for others to find. The mutilation is gratuitous, but that is its purpose. It is not enough to simply kill, or even to massacre. Khemet must make statements with each broken body, to inspire the stories that will spread through the Unclean and cause them to dread every moment of their lives.
Tonight she has struck three other bastions, and a cathedrum of the humans’ corpse-god. She has made them fear the places their leaders have told them are safe, to which they should flee in times of peril.
Tomorrow she will go into their homes.
The hiss and grind and slam of machinery is all that Llewellyn can hear. Everything, that is, except for the screaming.
He makes his way along the catwalk, ignoring the wet heat and punishingly vile smell that rises from the vats below. Each enormous drum, twenty feet across and forty feet deep, processes enough liquid slab to produce tens of thousands of bricks from each three-day cooking cycle. The protein slurry is poured in from the pipes that run overhead, mixed and boiled in the enormous vats, then drained off into the moulds. Every hour of every day, and each step of the noxious process, is watched by Llewellyn and the other plant overseers.
Llewellyn stops above Vat Three, mopping his brow with a filthy rag. There are other plant workers on the gantry, sweating freely in the muggy air. He waits until they have passed. He must not be discovered. That was key. His master had been quite insistent.
He hears the screaming again, from somewhere far off.
Llewellyn waits until the clanks of footfalls recede, then reaches into a pocket. He uncorks the vial and tips its contents over the railing in a single action. The glass tube disappears back into the pocket.
There are six more vials concealed within his apron, one for each of the remaining vats on this level. He does not know what the liquid will do, though he can guess.
It will take days before the taint is discovered and traced back to the plant. There would be hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of bricks that would have to be recalled and destroyed. And that was ignoring how many people would sicken and die from the tainted slab before his work is noticed.
He sets off again. Nothing shows on his face besides overheated boredom. He nods to a fellow overseer as they pass on the gantry.
In a corner of his mind, Llewellyn screams in horror at what he has done. The scarab nestled at the base of his brain stem pinches its mandibles tighter, and the screaming stops.
Every lumen-bulb in Verongyl’s Administratum palace is ablaze. The plate-glass roofs of its halls glow like beacons in the night, casting their glare over the city that its occupants are meant to govern.
‘As you commanded, lord. Every chandelier has been lit, every lumen-strip shines.’
Captain Tamya Nasan stands at attention. It is well that it is a stance that Nasan finds as natural as breathing, because she has been awake for forty unbroken hours. It is only muscle memory and duty that hold Nasan upright. If Logisticator Primus Darien notices the dirt and sweat-marks that stain her uniform, or the deep shadows that ring her eyes, he does not mention it.
‘Very good, Nasan. And the guards?’
‘All checkpoints within the palace have been doubled, and I have ordered roaming units throughout the east wing. The Six-Hundred-and-Seventy-Ninth Argellians patrol the grounds.’
‘Thank you, captain.’ Darien makes it heartfelt, and Nasan drops her gaze to meet his eye.
‘Of course, lord.’
Darien replaced Logisticator Primus Farroll after his death, though it has taken six months for his elevation from secundus rank to be confirmed by the lord-militant’s office. In normal times, Darien might have proved an able governor for Verongyl. But these are not normal times.
‘You understand about the lumens? My daughters… It is hard to deny rumour when it has persisted for so long.’
‘I understand, lord.’
Nasan is grateful for the logisticator’s concern for his family, for her own children live within the palace compound, and they too have heard the whispers of the metal daemon that stalks the night. More importantly, Nasan has seen the reports from Pasken and the other cities of Orymous. Whatever hunts the God-Emperor’s subjects lives in the darkness. She has heard that since the killings began in Verongyl, Saint Polaryn’s Cathedrum has been giving out lumen-sticks blessed by the cardinal to its petitioners, to be carried like totems through the streets.
‘What of the city?’ asks Darien.
The panic started at daybreak the previous morning. Claw-marks had been etched into the stone portico of a district market, slashing through the Imperial aquila carved into the building’s face. Word spread on wings of fear, and in a matter of hours the city had descended into chaos. Industry and commerce have ceased. Those brave enough to step outside their habs have used the opportunity to raid Administratum supply depots, hoping to alleviate their hunger while others concern themselves only with surviving the coming night.
‘Widespread disturbance, lord,’ says Nasan.
‘Is it contained?’
Nasan cannot help the wince that crosses her face. ‘We are hearing that up to half of the sanctioner corps has not reported for duty.’
Darien is sanguine. ‘I cannot condemn that, I suppose. I have you to protect me and my family. We must all look to our own, in such times.’
Nasan says nothing. The 679th Argellian Grenadiers had been ordered to Verongyl with the explicit purpose of keeping the city’s key industries active, and Darien has deployed it to augment his own defences. But as captain of the logisticator primus’ guard, she cannot pretend she is displeased to have a regiment of the Astra Militarum digging in around her palace grounds.
‘Do you believe it?’ Darien has turned away from her and is staring into a window, though with the corridor’s lumens ablaze he can only see his reflection in the glass. ‘That Orymous is cursed?’
Tamya Nasan is too tired to summon a more discreet reply. ‘The Ecclesiarchy tell us that the God-Emperor protects us from such things.’
Logisticator Primus Darien absorbs this in silence.
The vox-bead sewn into Nasan’s collar clicks. In the window’s reflection, Darien watches the colour drain from her face.
‘My lord.’ Captain Nasan cannot keep the quaver from her voice. ‘Eleven minutes ago, several checkpoints in the Lozens district reported hearing unusual sounds emanating from a nearby chapel. The squads sent to investigate have not returned.’
It could be nothing. On any other night, in any other year, such information would have never reached the Administratum palace guard. There are any number of explanations for squads of sanctioners failing to report in.
Darien steps away from the window, nothing but sedate calm showing on his face. ‘I am going to be with my daughters, captain.’
Enmitics are Ahnuret’s favoured class of weapon.
Enmitic energy reaches into the very molecules of a target’s being and tears them apart. Each Unclean struck by the twin beams of her pistols is explosively reduced to their constituent atoms, the swiftest, cleanest, and most final end Ahnuret can achieve.
That finality is what she seeks. Ahnuret does not see the killing of the Unclean as a means towards a greater end. The praetorian seeks to terrify the humans, weakening them before the inevitable conflict that is coming. Ahnuret desires only that they die now, as swiftly and completely as possible. If she could pour enmitic energy across the entire face of the world, Ahnuret would do it.
The Unclean run, and she pursues them. With each shot another is unmade. Another that is no longer able to befoul her with their existence. To pollute this planet, this necron world, with their foetor.
This is not what Khemet wants, but Ahnuret is running out of patience for the praetorian’s campaign. She is able to kill any human on this world, and the only challenge is adhering to Khemet’s order that her hand in their death goes undetected.
It is not that Ahnuret seeks to upend the praetorian’s plans. It is simply that their importance for the deathmark dwindles with every passing day.
The Arvus-class lighter bucks as its landing engines fire, arresting its meteoric descent through white clouds and blue skies.
The lighter is tiny, as Imperial craft go, its hold barely large enough for the seven armoured bodies who sit on the fold-down seats that line its boxy interior. The passenger hold is divided from the pilot’s cramped cockpit by a fixed wall, against which Marshal Solome Sinos rests her back.
The brutal vibrations of atmospheric entry have been replaced by the violent shuddering of landing, accompanied by a rolling roar of engines that penetrates the sense-defenders of her helmet. A dataslate sits in her lap, unregarded but near at hand should she need it. Sinos has memorised its contents already. She has had plenty of time to do so; it has been two months since the astropathic plea from Orymous reached Fort Damascus and almost a month since Sinos boarded the Salrivarum to bear her here. Sinos has chafed at every hour of that passage, because the picture painted by the dataslate’s contents is grim.
The Officio Logisticarum is a new organisation, by the standards of the Imperium. In its novelty Sinos sees the sin of pride. A desire, perhaps understandably, to prove itself the equal of the ancient and noble institutions on which the dominion of mankind is built.
That, she assumes, is the reason the planetary governor of Orymous waited eighteen months before contacting the Adeptus Arbites to request their aid. It is a hypothesis Sinos intends to investigate when first she meets with the noble lord, for his delay has imperilled the order of a world that is vital to the subsector’s function.
The vast billet-cities are in a state of uproar. Agri-fields have been burned. Officials murdered. Suicide. Sabotage. Riots and calamity, sweeping across conurbations that house millions. Talk of daemons haunting the darkness, killing at will.
Orymous, it seems, is breaking.
The cause is clear, though the perpetrator is not. It could not be more apparent to Sinos that the mustering world is under attack by some malign force. An Imperial world, particularly one so strictly ordered as Orymous, does not suffer the anguish of anarchy without a guiding hand, an architect of the suffering and misery that afflicts the planet.
She has not brought a substantial force with her. Orymous has no need of more troops; there are seven million Astra Militarum soldiers billeted on the world, and she will commandeer whatever troops or resources she needs. With her is a squad of enforcers for personal protection – a requirement of her rank – and a modest cadre of analyticians, verispexors and cipher-knives. Sinos has brought the tools and talents necessary to solve a mystery, and end a violator of the Emperor’s order.
The engines’ howl grows in the last moments of flight. Through the tiny viewport in the closed embarkation ramp, Sinos can see the suggestion of white-capped mountains, knife-peaked gothic towers, and then the dirty grey of rockcrete bunkers. A thump carries through the hold and Sinos’ seat as the lighter settles on a pair of fixed metal skids that briefly shriek against the landing platform.
It takes several minutes for the post-flight checks to be completed and the engines to settle into idleness. Finally, the caged lumen-bulb at the hold’s rear shifts from amber to green, and the single hatch disengages with a hiss of pneumatics.
Cold air rushes in, carrying the ubiquitous reek of promethium and the pleasant sharpness of icy mountain air. Orymous’ planetary capital is high in the Prandalii Mountains, nestled amid a series of plateaus and sheer-sided valleys. Much of its sprawl is buried within the rock of the mountains themselves. A fitting location for a strategic hub of the Imperial war machine.
Her squad of enforcers exits first, armed with high-yield shotguns and armoured in charcoal plate. They march down the short ramp in single file to form a black barrier of defence against any waiting foes. No doubt the serfs and technicians of this voidport have seen many such arrivals, but such displays are a necessary and effective tool of Imperial authority, as is Sinos’ own appearance.
She sweeps the weight of her coat from her lap. She straightens the golden chain from which hangs the icon of the Adeptus Arbites – a mailed fist bearing the scales of justice, couched within the Imperial ‘I’ – resting it against her chestplate. Her helmet’s visor is clicked into place, and the dataslate is slipped into a pouch on her thigh.
The visor dims as she ducks beneath the lighter’s hull, saving her the indignity of squinting against the glare. It is midday, and the yellow orb of Orymous’ star hangs harsh and bright above the crown of mountains that encircles her. A few even have the faintest streamers of grey snow streaking their tops.
Sinos lowers her gaze from the natural grandeur to the man-made mundane. The landing platform is one of millions like it, conforming to Adeptus Mechanicus patterns of construction with unsurprising precision. Flared segments of armoured plates line its edge, tilted up to deflect engine exhaust away from the works beneath. Men and women approach from a ramp on its northern face, Mechanicus menials who come to tend to the lighter’s abused frame.
Behind them is the welcoming party Sinos has expected. A squad of Tempestus Scions, full-faced helmets down and overpowered lasguns held tightly, stomp in time onto the landing platform. The Scions form their own line, the equal of Sinos’ arbitrators in both armoured heft and arrogant authority. Sinos’ squad part to allow her through, and the blue-cloaked Scions do the same.
No less than an Astra Militarum general has come to greet her, alongside a stern-faced commissar. She recognises both officers from the briefings prepared by her staff during the transit.
‘General Modin. Commissar-Captain Gwenned.’
‘Marshal Sinos,’ said the former. ‘Welcome to Orymous.’
CHAPTER 2
