Tomb World, page 16
In Sinos’ moderately extensive experience, there is enormous variation in the nature of Imperial worlds. For each planet of ancient cities and oppressed millions there is an agri-world, dominated not by people but by the mono-crops that sustain them. There are half-wild worlds, given over to untamed jungles and wind-swept steppes. She has even visited a forge world, one of the hellish domains of the Adeptus Mechanicus, where the very soil and air were poisoned by the mighty works of Imperial industry.
But what is common to every planet the marshal has walked is that the powerful find a measure of seclusion for themselves. The ruling elites – be they courtiers, tribal elders or Mechanicus dominars – are able to escape the worst aspects of their world. This might be atop vast starscrapers, deep within subterranean lairs, or simply in the grandest of the tribe’s tents, curtains drawn to veil the elders from view. Just rewards of power, sanctioned and indeed encouraged by Imperial cultural norms.
On Orymous, the refuge of the nobility takes the form of the Plakid Islands.
‘Your flight was to your comfort?’
‘The Mechanicus build the Valkyries for war, not for comfort, my lord.’
‘Quite right, of course.’ Lord-Militant Salvastari sips his drink. ‘And your passage from Fort Damascus?’
The lesser said about Sinos’ journey through the warp, the better. Two months of nightmare-riddled sleep, fractious Naval officers and recycled air.
‘Tolerable, my lord.’
They sit in what Sinos considers the most decadently comfortable space she has ever entered.
Salvastari’s palace sits on the fringes of an inland lake upon the largest of the Plakid Islands. It eschews much of traditional Imperial architecture. Its walls are built of a pink, open-pored stone, not unlike the corals that Salvastari explains grow around the islands. Covered walkways lead down to sun-drenched beaches, shaded from the heat of the day by canopies stretched along wooden frames.
Servants outnumber the served by ten to one, although there are a large number of Imperial Guard officers and Munitorum adepts in Salvastari’s unusual court.
Sinos is, as she expected, deeply uncomfortable. Her black carapace armour is at odds with the loose fabric robes. Her task is not one typically discussed around plunge-pools and finger food.
To her surprise, he acknowledges this directly.
‘My apologies, marshal. So many of my guests are keen to embrace the comforts of the islands. You, however, are burdened with grave purpose.’
‘This is so, lord.’
‘Then let us speak. You come at my request to solve a problem.’
‘What befalls Orymous,’ Sinos supplies.
‘Indeed. Now, your presence is not intended to slight my logisticators and their adepts.’ He says this with a placating hand to the assembled courtiers. ‘Simply that, given the nature of the incidents we have seen, an outside eye is warranted.’
Sinos hesitates before responding. ‘With respect, my lord, I believe the situation is more acute than that.’
Salvastari says nothing, but she can see that he agrees. This is not, Sinos thinks, the distant and effete ruler he appears.
‘These incidents have steadily tipped Orymous towards disorder,’ she continues. ‘There are, if the reports I have been given are correct, severe food shortages in many of your billet-cities. Civil disobedience has risen markedly in the last two years. And the mutiny of the Malfian Sixty-Fourth–’
‘Orymous is a mustering world, marshal.’ A general wearing a blue terry cloth beach suit interrupts her. ‘Soldiers will, on occasion, grow restless.’
‘Nevertheless, general. There are lines that cannot be crossed.’ Salvastari offers Sinos a slight nod of apology. ‘The simple fact is that action is required. Disorder, whatever its source, is an offence to the God-Emperor’s divine rule. The Officio Logisticarum will see it corrected.’
Salvastari stands suddenly, prompting Sinos to also rise.
‘I would offer you my seal, to empower you however you see fit. But I suspect that that icon’ – he gestures to the scales of justice around her neck – ‘will grant you all the power you require.’
‘I am grateful, my lord.’
‘I will not detain you.’
CHAPTER 4
Khemet finds Ahnuret in the commoners’ vaults.
The vaults are vast, each one a cavern stretching for hundreds of khet from edge to edge, and from noctilith floor to stone ceiling. Canoptek constructs roam the chambers, bringing their background whisper of metal on blackstone to even this disregarded corner of the tomb complex.
She considers the state of the vault with unfiltered disgust. Here, the poverty of the Zathanor Dynasty is plain to see. This chamber forms the deepest level of the complex in this part of the world, and it seems that the architects of its construction had elected to exploit pre-existing lava tubes, voids left over from the world’s making, rather than hew a new vault from the living stone. They had not even lined its walls and ceiling with blackstone. The rocky roof, thirty khet above Khemet’s head, had been carved in mimicry of the beams of a grand hall to conceal the miserly nature of the masons’ work.
The dynasty’s parsimony has reaped its just rewards. In dozens of places molten rock has breached the walls and ceiling, admitting thin streams of magma that have pooled and spread. In other places it has seeped in, drop by drop. After sixty million years of gradual, unrelenting geology, the stalactites are as broad as monoliths, and reach from ceiling to floor in imitation of the carved pillars that hold the weight of the world above.
Tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of stasis coffins have been swallowed by the slow spread of liquid stone. And this is just one of hundreds of vaults in this hemisphere of the world.
Ahnuret is standing at the edge of a gallery, observing this state of ruin. Far below her, a hall that had contained – and still does, in a way – two full cohorts of warriors is blanketed in black igneous rock. The tops of many coffins are visible, piercing the uneven, porous crest that has slowly oozed its way through the chamber.
‘Who were they?’ Ahnuret asks as Khemet approaches. She does not turn to greet the praetorian.
Khemet consults the interstitial network. ‘A detachment of the Eight-Hundred-and-Seventeenth Decarion Legion.’
‘No, who were they? The commoners who became the warriors within this crypt?’
Khemet has had plenty of time to consider such philosophical questions. ‘It does not matter.’
Now Ahnuret turns, regarding Khemet sharply. ‘Do you believe that?’
She does, without any shadow of doubt. ‘There is nothing to be gained from this line of thought. Do not waste your pity on chattel.’
‘They were necrontyr once, praetorian,’ says the deathmark, coming as close as she dares to reproach. ‘They lived.’
‘They served,’ Khemet corrects. ‘They were born and they served their masters, as their ancestors served before them. You ask who they were, and I tell you that it does not matter. It matters not which were kind and which were cruel. Which were selfish, and which were loving. How each lived their life has no bearing on the function of those lives. They were servants. The only distinction between these wretches and the thousand generations that came before them is they will serve for all time.’
Or they would have, were it not for the austerity of their masters. That is the true tragedy Khemet sees before her. The waste of resources, squandered by Zathanor frugality.
‘Do you see nothing in them to pity?’
Khemet releases a mechanical sigh. ‘I did not take you for a fool, assassin. Pity is the greatest waste of energy I can imagine.’
Ahnuret’s shoulders hunch, the closest she can come to a scowl of recrimination.
‘Why did you seek me out?’ she asks.
‘You know why.’
The necron form cannot display guilt, or remorse, but Ahnuret’s posture does, somehow, shift to become defensive.
‘It is my duty to kill.’
‘Not indiscriminately. Not without judgement, or consideration of our greater mission.’
Khemet gestures at the ranks of buried stasis-coffins. ‘You are not one of them, to be aimed towards the enemy as a battering ram. You are a scalpel, not a scythe. Your duty is murder, not slaughter.’
Ahnuret says nothing for the longest time. Khemet, for all her earlier scorn for pity, waits for the deathmark to find her courage.
‘I cannot stop,’ she says finally.
Khemet steps in front of the deathmark, forcing Ahnuret to meet her gaze. ‘If you cannot control yourself, I have no use for you.’
‘I cannot stop,’ she repeats. ‘Life, everywhere. When I am among it, I feel its foetid nature infecting me.’
Khemet shifts her stance. Ahnuret’s growing fervour has the feel of frenzy.
‘It stains me. It smears itself across my metal. It is in the air, billions upon billions of microbes that cling to me like putrid oil. The Unclean exhale them. It is disgusting. I have the scarabs cleanse me but I feel it still, seeping into my centre.’
She rounds on Khemet. ‘I have to kill it, praetorian. All of it. You demand that I stay my hand when all that I am urges me to kill, to purge, to cleanse this world of its contagion–’
Khemet strikes. Without warning she reaches forwards and places a hand against Ahnuret’s forehead, digits curling around the planes of her skull. She pushes. The power crystal mounted in Khemet’s own skull glows with sudden exertion, a single pulse that drives the praetorian’s will into the deathmark.
Ahnuret seizes, her motor functions stolen, her consciousness driven into dormancy. Khemet has called on ancient protocols to drive her into slumber, sending her into the same thoughtless, dreamless sleep in which the millions of warriors below her reside.
Khemet releases her. The deathmark rocks, briefly, but fortunately her centre of gravity is stable and she does not suffer the indignity of tumbling to the ground.
Now the act is done, Khemet questions whether she was correct. Certainly, the assassin will not forgive her for the violation. But it is a necessity. Khemet cannot conduct a war with unstable tools. She would rather deprive herself of Ahnuret’s talents than risk her pathology revealing the necron presence on Qeretesh before Khemet is ready to do so.
Khemet now faces a choice. Without any intervention, the assassin’s cognitive centres will reset in a few days, allowing her to slowly rise back to a state of consciousness. The alternative is to summon Kamoteph or one of his apprenteks and make the deathmark’s stasis permanent. Inter Ahnuret within one of the Zathanor crypts until such time as the Destroyer curse can be overcome.
Perhaps, she thinks, it would be the merciful course. Perhaps a period of inactivity will repair some of the degradation, or at the very least sever the recursive cycle of genocidal anguish in which Ahnuret had been locked.
An unsolicited memory rises from the depths of Khemet’s engrammatic vaults. A memory of falling without falling, of struggling against absence. Of her mind collapsing in on itself, her senses wandering and sanity breaking.
She will not inflict that on another.
Khemet pulses a command to Qeretesh’s tomb spirit, dispatching a clutch of spyders to bear the deathmark away to her chambers.
CHAPTER 5
Four million soldiers of the God-Emperor’s Astra Militarum wait to be carried off to war.
The eastern embarkation fields spread from horizon to horizon, as vast, compressed and complex as any of the cities in which these men and women have been billeted since their arrival on Orymous.
Some have barely set foot on the planet before they are whisked away. Newly founded regiments, in uniforms freshly stamped from the manufactorum, collected from their homes by fat-bellied troop transports and then deposited on Orymous by the same lifters they now wait to reboard. They have hardly even had the chance to explore the local black market that any gathering of Imperial troops attracts, and which on Orymous employs a considerable proportion of the planet’s civilian population.
For others, their months and years idling on the mustering world are all they have seen of war. They have been trained to the peak of the drill instructor’s art. Every word of the Imperial Infantryman’s Uplifting Primer has been permanently etched in their minds. They have been honed to a lethal edge, but their commanders fear that no troops can keep that edge indefinitely. Without a war they have become bored, resentful of their officers and their commissars’ attention, too used to the comforts of the billet-cities. Privately, General Cullen’s great staff of logisticians and strategos anticipate a higher rate of loss among these regiments than the newly raised troops when they finally face battle.
For the veteran regiments, their time on Orymous has been a blissful reprieve from the realities of their service. These soldiers wait with indifferent patience for their time to bundle into the local conveyor-cars and be carried into the brutalist sprawl of landing platforms that loom above them. They claim the comparative peace of these days and weeks spent in the shadow and deafening roar of the lifters, secure in the knowledge that there will be little peace or comfort to be found when they reach their destination, out among the stars of a savage and uncaring galaxy.
Though the state of constant motion and barked commands can hardly be considered peaceful. Night and day, squads of infantry are shuffled on an hourly basis from endless acres of tents to cramped tenement blocks to the narrow confines of the conveyor-trains, pressed ever onwards towards their goal by the timetables and hand-chronos of the adepts of the Officio Logisticarum. Armoured companies are marshalled in their hundreds, the grunt and grumble of their assembled engines louder than the thunder of the cannons they bear. Indentured civilians struggle to avoid the attention of the soldiers they serve, whose tempers boil amid the heat and the noise and the ever-present awareness that they will soon face the cauldron of war.
For the fortunate few, the general officers and lord-commissars and Munitorum adepts superior, the wait is less arduous. They arrive in the carousel of flyers that continuously buzz overhead, landing just long enough on one of the hundreds of tributary platforms that ring the lifter pads to unload their passengers. These worthies are led by robed Logisticarum officials, carefully courteous despite the maelstrom through which they move, through back-corridors that the common soldier will never see. They board each colossal shuttle through their upper doors, while thousands of troopers shuffle into the gaping hangar mouths below.
Lieutenant Bragin Nestor wipes his brow with a linen kerchief pulled from the pocket of his uniform tunic. Even in the sheltered channels that vein Platform Sixty-Seven, the heat is intense. Tight-packed bodies, the backwash of orbit-capable engines, and Orymous’ baking sun allow no relief.
His uniform is no help either. General Cullen, for whom Nestor works as a runner, has an unyielding standard for presentation, and the fabric of his tunic is stretched tight around his midriff.
The commander of the Beathen Crusade strides ahead of Nestor, the picture of martial prestige in a crimson frock coat bedecked with gold trim and black braid. The majority of his staff have already been conveyed to their various transports, leaving Cullen attended by just eighty of his closest advisors and functionaries. The mob of officers and adepts flows like the tail of a comet in the general’s wake as he takes each corridor and corner at a pace just short of an outright run. Cullen is not a man capable of approaching anything slowly.
They are led through the warren of passageways until a change in the air tells Nestor they have reached their destination. The temperature, already baking, rises to a furnace, and the crash of boots on metal grows from a distant echo to a percussive grumble that crowds out all other sound.
Cullen crosses the extended bridge to Lifter 575-98 first, his entourage in tow. A thousand feet below, the troopers of the 812th Carpathian Guard disappear into the craft’s cavernous innards. The grind of Chimera transports ascending a ramp between the lines of men adds a metallic shriek to the discord.
The general’s staff are greeted by another set of attendants and led to a modestly appointed executive cabin. The far wall is made up of duraglass windows, showing the fiendishly complex network of pipes and cables that line the interior of the landing platform’s walls. The cabin’s seating is arrayed in back-to-back rows, their coverings a tarnished green.
A narrow bar top runs the length of the cabin, with bottles of various liquors and receptacles strapped in place inside transparent cabinets above it. Several of Cullen’s aides make their way towards it, but a stern voice carries over the tramp of boots and muted conversation.
‘There will be time enough for that later.’
Cullen’s order is heeded, and his staff meekly find their places. Nestor, instead of following his peers, heads towards a hatch on the far side of the cabin.
‘Take your seat, lieutenant.’ Cullen’s eye misses nothing, even as he straps a lap-belt closed.
It takes Nestor five rapid beats of his heart before he finds his voice. ‘Would you excuse me, general?’
‘Why?’ Cullen asks brusquely.
‘I… must make use of the ablutorial before we launch,’ he replies, clutching at his swollen stomach.
Cullen gives Nestor a look of unconcealed disgust, but waves him away. Nestor swiftly makes his escape. An attendant at the door attempts to direct him back to his seat as he leaves, but the lieutenant roughly pushes past the man.
In accordance with protocol, the hatch is slammed shut behind him. Nestor straightens as the metal closes with a crash, his performance abandoned immediately. There is limited time before the lifter takes off.
