Tomb World, page 19
Khemet silently curses, oaths of disgust and loathing. Has she become so diminished? Has she such little confidence in her sense of self?
‘Evidently not,’ Hekasun says, in ignorance of Khemet’s self-doubt. ‘I have endured. We have endured.’ He gestures at the nobility – his kin – who stand around them.
‘How?’ She asks not because she cares to know, but to give her faltering mind time to find its centre.
Hekasun, enamoured of the sound of his own voice, is happy to oblige, though bitterness is thick in every word. ‘You chose well, Khemet. The Zathanor were all but ruined. Our crownworld was swallowed by its star, and only we’ – he gestures at the small crowd – ‘are the fortunate few who escaped. A single craft, sparing all that was left of a noble house.
‘We drifted for centuries, barely moving through the interstellar void. But in time we reached Menouthis. And what did we find? That you and your overlord had plundered it for its riches. You had murdered its nomarch – my own aunt! – and had stolen its treasures.’
‘There were few treasures on Menouthis, Hekasun.’
It is an ill-considered jibe, and for a moment the lord looks ready to strike her. But cowardice or pragmatism stays his hand. ‘The Traveller found us, as he has so many others. We concealed our allegiance, and waited for this moment to come to be.’
‘And you have been content to lurk in Anrakyr’s shadow, concealing your true allegiance out of fear.’
Hekasun does not deny her accusation. ‘I have played the part of servile courtier for long enough. No longer. Qeretesh will be the cradle of the Zathanor’s rebirth. I demand it of you, in payment for the empire you tore apart.’
Hekasun’s delusion reaches even higher than Khemet had imagined. The Zathanor could never claim to be anything more than a minor house. To name themselves an empire was hubris itself.
‘Why should I serve you now?’
‘I do not care. You now know the truth. Your reasons are your own. But you will do as I command.’
The embers of Khemet’s pride blaze into life. ‘Only one being may command me, Hekasun. And you are not him.’
‘Nevertheless.’
Hekasun and Khemet remain locked in place, oculars fixed upon the other. It is a contest of wills with a single outcome. There can be no denying the debt Khemet owes, and even had there been no debt, it is the duty of every necron to cleanse their invaded worlds of the touch of the Unclean.
Hekasun sees that he has won.
‘Go and win me my world.’
CHAPTER 9
‘My name is Marshal Sinos. Stand aside.’
‘What is your business?’ demands the lieutenant on the far side of the barricade.
Sinos checks, sincerely surprised. Any man who challenges an arbitrator standing beside a Chimera armoured personnel carrier is incredibly brave, or incredibly foolish.
After a moment’s thought, she lifts her scales of justice from their chain around her neck and holds them up before him. ‘Do you recognise this symbol, lieutenant?’
His eyes, a watery and unremarkable brown, flick from hers to the emblem. ‘No. Sir,’ he adds, as an afterthought.
The lieutenant is young, but not so young that he can be forgiven the sin of not recognising the icon of the Adeptus Arbites.
‘This symbol empowers me to summarily execute you, your squad, and every person you have ever met. You have three seconds to move aside.’
Behind her, Abisode shifts his grip on his shotgun. The creak of his gauntlets carries clearly in the cold air.
The young man backs up so quickly he knocks into two of his squad, standing protectively close behind him. He waves an arm for the barricade to be raised.
‘My apologies, marshal. I have orders…’ he stammers, finally settling on sure ground. ‘The Emperor protects.’
‘You are fortunate that He does, lieutenant.’
The Chimera grumbles into the building’s precinct, and Sinos follows. She has secured the use of the vehicle from the Munitorum’s stockpile, freeing her from the need to employ any local security forces as she moves about Verongyl.
That such precautions are a necessity is a sign of how far the rule of the Lex has been degraded.
The young man and his squad are in the white-and-blue uniforms of the Orymousian Defence Corps. Every citizen of Orymous is inducted into its ranks at birth, and trained to serve in the planet’s defence, ready for moments such as these. In the wake of the voidport’s destruction mobilisation orders have been issued across the continent.
There is some wisdom in that. Salvastari seeks to exchange the impotence of victimhood for the purpose and unity of martial action, uniting civilians and soldiers alike in the common purpose of securing their cities and preparing for whatever will come next.
But, on the other hand, it puts men and women not suited to the rigours of martial discipline in uniforms and hands them lasguns.
She regrets her manner with the militia lieutenant. It was a petty display of power over a man who should still be called a boy, doing what he considered his duty.
It is, she knows, a sign that her blood is up. She has been on the trail for three weeks. Or, rather, she has been in search of a trail, and now she senses she may have caught the first scent of it.
She has left the Munitorum to investigate the sabotage of Lifter 575-98 and the destruction of the voidport. That is too big, too sprawling and complex a task to yield any evidence in the time she has. Her investigative team, finally brought down from orbit and ensconced within a corner of Orylesti, is in regular communication with the lead enforcers, but she does not hold out any real hope of leads from that quarter.
The Officio Logisticarum are reacting as she would expect them to. Their enforcers are embarking on an investigation that will require months and draw in hundreds, if not thousands, of adepts whose time would be better spent responding to this new crisis. It will take weeks simply to complete the interrogation of the survivors, producing a mountain of testimony and excruciated confessions to be examined and cross-referenced. But that is the way on Orymous – everything is reduced to a problem of logistics. An equation to be solved by the input of time and energy. Sinos has neither to spare, and so she has taken a different approach.
She has turned her attention to the other crimes, the acts of seemingly random violence and adversity that have steadily tipped Orymous towards disaster. She began by winnowing down her possible targets. The Officio Logisticarum had been typically thorough in its provision of data when she first arrived, burying Sinos’ lexigraphs beneath a mountain of incident reports and arrest records. Sinos has swept much of these aside, her focus solely on the events of the past few years that had the gravest impact on the mustering world, reasoning that whatever agent of chaos is moving in the shadows would not waste their efforts on petty criminality.
The Conveyor Sixteen-Red derailment. The razing of the agri-fields on Orymous Secundus. An outburst of seditious labour collectivisation among the dock workers of Asterni. A tainted starch-processing plant.
The unlikely murder of the Logisticator Primus of Verongyl, and the subsequent suicide of his chief aide.
That particular thread is what has brought her to the sprawling billet-city, and to the door of its principal mortuarium.
Abisode pushes open the front door, a grand slab of wood three times his height. She has only brought the squad leader with her. In Sinos’ experience, two arbitrators are sufficient to ensure the passivity of any detainee.
The interior is lit by recessed lumens dotted about the walls, and a massive chandelier ablaze with dozens of heavy yellow candles. The building must have served some different function in its past; the marble floor, the imperial staircase and gilt furnishings put Sinos in mind of a theatre. The carved faces of grotesques and divines that crown the corners and tops of pillars suggest Sinos’ guess is correct.
A receiving desk sits at the rear of the entry chamber, beneath the point where the two staircases meet. A clerk, looking oddly alert for such a late hour, greets her with the sign of the aquila.
‘I am here to see Chief Verispexor Pyrch.’
He meets her eye. ‘Do you have an appointment?’
Sinos tries not to read anything into the outbreak of belligerent stupidity that seems to have taken hold around the mortuarium.
‘No. I do not.’
The man swallows. ‘Right this way.’
She and Abisode are led up the left-hand curve of the staircase. Beyond another set of doors, any hint of the building’s former nature is lost, replaced by the ascetic functionality of Imperial bureaucracy found throughout the Imperium. The clerk leads her down a long, cramped hallway, the buzz of strip-lumens uncomfortably close above her.
The door to the chief verispexor’s office is as unremarkable as the dozen others that they pass. The clerk knocks, then pushes it open.
‘Verispexor, we–’
Sinos pushes past the man. ‘Verispexor Pyrch, my name is Solome Sinos of the Adeptus Arbites. I require your cooperation and your time.’
They have been led not to an office, but an examination room. Two slabs fill the centre of the room, surrounded by cabinets and counters whose metal surfaces are polished to a mirror finish.
Pyrch looks up as she and Abisode enter. He is at work on a cadaver lying on the centre table. Blood smears his thin plastek gown up to both elbows.
‘Thank you, Cenon, that will be all.’ The clerk, trapped in the desire to object to Sinos’ rough treatment and fear of her, ducks out of the door.
‘It is an honour to meet you, marshal,’ says Pyrch genially. ‘Had I known you were coming, I would have made myself more presentable.’
‘The Adeptus Arbites is not deterred by blood, verispexor.’
He offers a wan smile. ‘Of course. Even so, this can wait.’ He gestures vaguely at the corpse, then pulls off his fouled gloves and gown and stuffs them into a receptacle. He turns to a sink inlaid into the polished countertop behind him.
‘What can I do for you, marshal?’ he asks with his back to Sinos, his hands working vigorously in a flow of steaming chem-wash.
‘Your compliance with my investigation is compelled by the Lex Imperialis.’
‘I am a servant of the Throne, marshal. My compliance is given freely.’
Sinos makes a subtle gesture to Abisode, and takes several paces towards the far side of the room. Pyrch’s manner is far too casual for anyone who has received an unexpected visit from the Adeptus Arbites.
‘Logisticator Primus Farroll. You were the consulted verispexor.’
‘I was.’ He turns, drying his arms with a thin towel that he tosses onto the closest counter. ‘Considering the circumstances, no other hand would do.’
‘You are required to turn over all documents relating to your autopsy of both the logisticator and his aide, Gerand Cadfan.’
‘His killer, I believe you mean, marshal. Of course, my notes are yours. But I filed a thorough report with the Munitorum.’ He reaches above himself to another cabinet, and begins pulling out parchment files and folders.
She loosens the shock maul at her hip. ‘And I would like his body exhumed for re-examination.’
Even this does not give him pause. ‘I’m sorry, marshal. I am afraid his remains were destroyed, in accordance with his wishes.’
‘I will require a copy of that order.’
He continues to rummage for paperwork, entirely too at ease. ‘May I ask the purpose of your investigation?’
‘No,’ says Abisode. ‘You may not.’
He has evidently found all he needs. He gathers them up with one hand, and slips the other into a pocket. ‘These are my handwritten notes of the examination. I will have to ask my assistant to provide you with the rest.’ He walks towards her, holding out the files for Sinos to take.
The exam room door opens with a bang. Abisode whirls at the sound, shotgun rising. The clerk has returned, a look of abject horror on his face.
In her moment of distraction Pyrch drops the files and lunges for Sinos, one hand clenched around something in his palm while the other grabs for her collar.
She steps back sharply, jabbing a fist that snaps the man’s head back. He reels, legs collapsing beneath him. His closed hand opens as he hits the floor.
A fat-bodied beetle, no larger than Sinos’ smallest fingernail, leaps out of his palm and towards Sinos.
She jerks away, gauntlets flailing at the front of her armour. She brushes the thing away and sees it drop to the floor, a black speck against the white tiles. She slams her boot down, and through the thick leather feels it crunch beneath her sole.
The clerk is down, blood pouring from a flattened nose. Abisode spins, levelling his weapon at the verispexor. He is on his hands and knees, scrabbling for something inside a cabinet, his head and torso also fully inside. The rack of a shotgun’s shell carries across the room.
‘No, don’t shoot him!’
Abisode fires, but punches a hole the size of Pyrch’s head into the cabinet next to him.
‘Stand and turn. You are bound by the Lex Imperialis.’ Abisode advances, shotgun unwavering. ‘I have him, marshal.’
Pyrch withdraws, slowly. He is holding something, clutched white-knuckled in both hands. It is a stone tablet, black as night but with a sickly sheen beneath the lumen strips. He turns with the tablet out-thrust, as though it were a shield or a weapon, his stare fixed implacably on Sinos. Its face starts to glow, the same diseased green growing in strength.
‘Put it down!’ Sinos and Abisode bark the command in the same moment.
Sinos’ hand drops to her bolt pistol in the same moment that the first scarab tumbles from the translation plate.
A creature emerges from the stone itself, pulling its body out of the surface with sharp-tipped legs. It is the size of her clenched fist, its shell iridescent blue and gold. It spills from the green glow of the plate, and starts to skitter across the floor. The sound of metal tines on ceramic tiles is audible even over the hammering of Sinos’ pulse.
Two more follow. Then five, then ten, then a swarm of metal beetles, all racing towards Abisode.
‘Throne of Terra!’
Abisode fires, and the blast decapitates Pyrch. His headless body slumps back against the chromed cabinets, blood spurting from the stump of his neck. Abisode racks another shell, but the swarm is faster. He goes down screaming, overwhelmed by the tide of beetles that spill from the plate’s glowing face. Another hammer-blow of his shotgun booms around the tiny room, throwing a handful of creatures into the air and shattering one of the lumen bars overhead.
Sinos draws and fires, aiming to blow the stone tablet to shards. The bolt shell detonates against its face, flinging it across the room. But it remains whole, still releasing more metal creatures that clamber out of its interior.
Sinos runs. She has been a hand of the Emperor’s justice for over a century. She has faced down heretics and mutants, and seen the aftermath of battles against xenos horrors. But Sinos runs now, in abject terror of the skittering horde that cascades across the bloodstained tiles.
She crashes through the exam room’s door, falling onto all fours. She scrambles, legs kicking. She feels the first scarab stab a sharp tine into her leg. She kicks out, smashing the creature against the wood of the door. Finally, her boots find purchase on the polished marble, and Sinos scrabbles to her feet.
The corridor beyond is empty, sterile and bland. The normality of it almost makes Sinos check, doubting her memory of the past seconds. But then the doors click open and the swarm pours out. Sinos takes off.
A verispexor emerges from the next room, white coat curling about his legs. He looks up, not at the swarm but at Sinos.
‘Run! Get out of the way!’
But the man plants his feet, squaring himself to tackle Sinos.
In the moment before they connect Sinos drops her shoulder. Her pauldron slams into the bridge of his nose, and the verispexor is hammered from his feet. Sinos stumbles, legs fouled by his flailing limbs, but she keeps her feet and runs on. The tide flow over and around him, engulfing the man in their chittering bodies.
She is holding her bolt pistol, but she ignores it. Turning now would kill her. Anything but running with all the strength and power of terror will doom her, and she must survive. She must live to tell of the abominations that have infected Orymous.
She reaches the end of the corridor and throws herself bodily at the point where the two doors meet. The wood shatters beneath her weight, and she crashes to the marble floor once more.
As she finds her feet something slams into her back with the weight and grip of a cyber-mastiff. Sinos is knocked forwards, and the force of the impact carries her over the stone balustrade.
She drops twenty feet onto the receiving desk, landing on her back and crashing through its flimsy wood. There is a crunch, and a knife of pain that stabs through Sinos’ shoulder. She rolls aside and levels her pistol. A beetle the size of a canid has been halfway crushed between the broken desk and the weight of Sinos and her armour. The tip of one limb is bloody where it punched between the plates.
Sinos puts a pair of shells into the centre of its loathsome body. It explodes in a shower of knife-edged limbs and metal scrap.
The swarm is cascading down either side of the staircase, and tumbling through the gaps in the balustrade Sinos went over. She runs for the main door, only for it to be kicked open by five enforcers of the Adeptus Arbites, their shotguns levelled and roaring orders for compliance.
‘Fire!’ Sinos bellows the order as she throws herself flat. She skids along the floor as the thunder of shotguns roars over her head.
She thumps to a stop and rises with her pistol in hand. Scarabs and metal creatures of every description are met by blasts of explosive shot. Sinos adds her bolt shells to the fusillade, blowing chunks from the ornate stone floor. Each shot leaves a crater in the marble and a broken scarab in its centre, but there are far too many.
