Tomb World, page 7
‘Khemet.’ Ahnuret’s voice is an atonal burr, but it does not mask the faint amusement in her repetition. ‘An esteemed name.’
She ignores this. The root of her name is kemmeht, an ancient term for the most sacred ground of the necrontyr. The parents Khemet can no longer recall presumably chose it out of piety. For Khemet, it is just a name.
‘How did you come to be here?’ she asks instead.
‘I am a member of Kamoteph the Crooked’s hierotek circle,’ says Ahnuret flatly.
‘The Crooked?’ It is rather blunt, but such epithets usually are.
‘It is well earned, and not simply for his stature. Be wary of him, praetorian.’
Khemet glances over at the cryptek, and sees that he has noticed her conversation with his assassin. He is watching their exchange with undisguised curiosity.
‘If you have something to say, speak plainly.’
Ahnuret is unwilling to be drawn in front of her master. ‘I offer only words of advice. Caution is rarely unwise.’
Khemet cannot argue with that.
Several hours pass, during which the Senusret slows from its relativistic pace to a more sedate glide. Its passage describes a gentle arc through the void, curving in towards a dull red star and an unremarkable stellar system.
The vessel’s pilot, a lychguard hardwired into its station on the deck’s forecastle, suddenly speaks. ‘We have arrived, my lord.’
The courtiers’ conversations cease at the announcement, and all turn towards the visualising plates mounted about the deck.
A dense cloud of rock drifts serenely, several thousand khet ahead of the Senusret. At its centre is a vast mass of base metals – the core of a sundered planet, Khemet sees, surrounded by the shattered remnants of its crust.
‘This was Amenset,’ announces Kamoteph. ‘A coreworld of the Urgenesh Dynasty.’
Khemet has never visited this world. ‘What became of it?’
‘The Unclean,’ answers Hekasun. ‘Humans, to be specific.’ There is an edge of mockery in his voice. He is enjoying this moment of superiority over her, enjoying the possession of knowledge she does not have. ‘The Imperium of Man laid claim to Amenset in our absence. They came. They built their little buildings and their statues. They bred, spreading like a cancer.’
Hekasun pauses, amusement dying with his description of humanity’s desecration of one more necron world. On the far side of the chamber, Ahnuret has emerged from the shadows. Her hands clench and unclench around the grips of her disintegrator pistols.
‘Their profusion was their undoing,’ Kamoteph says, taking over the telling from his master. ‘The tyranid genus is drawn towards any great weight of biology. The aliens came to feast. In their terror, the humans obliterated their cities, and the planet beneath, to deny the beasts their meal.’
‘And in their ignorance destroyed the tombs of my cousin dynasty,’ adds Hekasun.
Khemet says nothing, returning her attention to the scrying feed. The borderless vista, with its scatter of rock in constant motion, is a soothing sight, even with the knowledge that each boulder is a gravestone for the necron world.
One of Hekasun’s sycophants asks the question Khemet will not. ‘For what purpose have you brought us here, o lord?’
The self-satisfaction returns to Hekasun’s aura. ‘Well, technomancer? Do not keep us in anticipation.’
Kamoteph nods slowly. His hands make practised motions, and the scrying feed shifts. Khemet’s gaze is drawn to one of the greater fragments, its surface pockmarked from impacts with its lesser kin. It is vast, an entire tectonic plate set free from its planetary core. As it turns, Khemet can make out the shattered remains of a mountain range, upthrust along a fault.
The feed takes her closer, and closer still. Broken rock resolves into peaks and valleys, trenches and plains, all bleached by radiation. Khemet’s imagination paints the lost landscape onto the shattered plateaus: snow and grass, scree and stone.
The Senusret peers further, until finally the feed comes to rest above the ridge of a low mountain. Some quirk of geology had carved an enormous amphitheatre from the rock, hundreds of khet across. The feed shifts slowly, in deference to the rotation and drift of the tectonic plate through the void.
Embedded within the mountainside’s bowl is a vast slab of noctilith. Once precisely cut, it has clearly been eroded by aeons of exposure to the climate that was annihilated by the humans. The slab is mounted atop two pillars made of the same black stone, each as worn as the crossmember.
For a moment, Khemet does not recognise what she sees. Time and trauma have passed since she last saw such an object – a creation of such surpassing rarity that she had thought herself aware of each and every example in existence. But it appears that she is wrong.
It is a dolmen gate.
It has been an age since Khemet last set her gaze upon a dolmen gate.
They had once been the most precious tools and treasures of the Infinite Empire. They were doorways to the under-realm, breaches into the inexplicable matrix the Old Ones had constructed within the empyric domain that lies behind reality.
Its makers had called it the webway. Through its tunnels they had moved armies and armadas about the galaxy with a rapidity the necrontyr could not match. The creation of the gates, permitting the violation of the webway, had been the turning point of the War. Millions of warriors had marched beneath their vast lintels, carrying death to the hated foe.
Like so much, the dolmen gates had been the gift of the C’tan. The star god Nyadra’zatha, the Burning One, had taught the art of their making to a select cabal of the Silent King’s most able crypteks. Each had been the work of decades, requiring every resource of the newly immortal necrons.
Unlike all else the C’tan had pressed upon the empire they had enslaved, Nyadra’zatha had asked for nothing in return. The screams of the Old Ones and their child races had been all the payment the cruel entity required.
Now, in the era of awakening, the dolmen gates were incalculably rare. Were any cryptek with the understanding of how to construct them to rise from their tomb, they would command a power such that any phaeron would grant them the greatest portion of their fiefdoms in return. Even the locations of those that remained would obtain a price to elevate any astromancer to the status of an overlord.
Khemet aches with sudden curiosity, but she is unwilling to deepen her position of ignorance. How Hekasun – or, more likely, Anrakyr – came to know of this gate is something she will learn later.
The lordling leans forwards in his throne, as enraptured by the sight as every other in his court.
‘Kamoteph. Open it.’
The cryptek bows his head. ‘As you command, my lord.’
He shuffles towards a station at the centre of the deck, enclosed on three sides by the sharp-edged panes of interface consoles. With no small amount of effort, Kamoteph levers his hunched form to its greatest extension, arms raised as though in praise of the dread being that brought the gates into existence.
And he begins.
A signal spills from the Senusret, a soft warble of aethermancy. Kamoteph moves with ritual precision, hands curled into claws to sculpt the signal that whispers from the lodestones set within the ship’s body.
Through the scrying feed, Khemet sees the gate come to life. It begins slowly, the faintest thrum of power rising from the base of each pillar. The Senusret sees the gathering energy, drawn from within the matrix of the gate itself, and paints an image of viridescence glowing in the void.
The power builds, travelling along ancient veins set within the noctilith. Of all its valued properties, the greatest quality of blackstone is its resonance with the realm that lies beneath the mundane dimensions of the galaxy. It could repel, annulling the empyrean’s unnatural influence upon the soul-bound species, or it could amplify.
As the gathering energy reaches its apex, Khemet hears the harmonics radiating from each megalith across the vastness of the void, and through the godsteel of the Senusret’s hull.
The gate opens.
Khemet corrects herself. A dolmen gate does not open. It punctures.
The power summoned by Kamoteph and channelled by the esoteric mechanisms of the dolmen stones is spent in a fraction of a second, drawing in and somehow down, funnelling towards the epicentre of the gateway’s arch. A blaze of light erupts, the by-product of arcane interactions that Khemet, even with her epochal lifespan, cannot begin to comprehend.
The light does not fade. Indeed, it grows, shifting from lambent jade to strident gold. Tongues of colour flicker and mingle in an interface that expands by the moment, drawing open in the manner of an iris pulling back around an ocular.
The skin of reality is clawed apart, cubit by cubit. Within the arcane storm is a void, revealing the alien realm Khemet last saw over sixty million years before.
The bare rock between the menhirs of the dolmen gate has disappeared, obscured by the black expanse that the Senusret’s perceptory tools cannot pierce. Faint wisps of phantasmal energy curl from the opening, the occasional flare of aureate power lashing from its edges to strike the dolmen stones.
‘The way is prepared, o lord.’ There is no strain in Kamoteph’s voice, only triumph. The ancient power of the gate has done its work – the cryptek simply provided the key.
Hekasun’s hands grip each arm of his throne. ‘Then let us take it.’
The brace of lychguard slaved to the ship’s navigation consoles lights the engines. The Senusret accelerates smoothly, diving towards the opening.
Khemet has no breath to hold, but the weight of anticipation nevertheless sits heavily upon her. She resents the nagging prickle of rethreading necrodermis around her incomplete hand, a distraction from the solemnity of the moment.
There is a single, pregnant pause as they pass through the threshold, and then the Senusret and its occupants abandon the material plane.
CHAPTER 7
Blades made of lightning hunger for her soul, and go wanting. Shards of porcelain fill the air, and chip and shatter against her limbs. It is still new, this awful prison of metal, and though Khemet’s thoughts echo with her own screams she revels in the strength of it. She revels in the tears of the Unclean who throw themselves at her, and break upon her fury.
There is so much she cannot recall. No matter how she reaches for them, the details are lost to time’s corruption.
She remembers marching in lockstep with her brethren, all servants to a single will. The Silent King watches them from atop his dais. He watches her. This she remembers with absolute clarity – the intoxicating, terrifying awareness of her lord and master’s eye upon her.
Mist coils about her legs as she duels with Unclean heroes, the spawn of their creators’ arrogance and desperation. The mist is burnt away by shafts of fire that flay the ground itself. A realm is broken by the stride of seraptek constructs, and the unchained warcraft of attacker and defender alike. The echo of shattering porcelain is matched only by the shriek of gauss and the mournful cries of the defeated.
The power of an empire has come to the webway, enriched and impoverished by the treachery of slavering gods. An epoch of the galaxy ends in almighty war, the greatest war, that burns with the strength to end the stars themselves, and at its climax it is the necrons who stand atop the cinders.
Khemet and her people sold their souls for this victory. There is hate enough left within her to consider it a price worth paying.
Khemet sheds the swirl of sense-memories in a state of panic, furious with herself that she lapsed within sight of Hekasun and his court.
That panic dies when she looks about the chamber and sees every other necron lost in the same memory. Passing beneath the dolmen stones has awoken something in them all, a need to relive the greatest triumph of the Infinite Empire.
‘Close the gate, technomancer.’ To her surprise, Hekasun is the first to shake off his reverie. Khemet can sense his attention return to the scrying feed, and the courtiers follow his lead.
‘In progress, lord.’
Hekasun’s order, and Kamoteph’s response, are curt. But their discourtesy arises from fear, not arrogance. In a way Khemet’s people have never been able to ascertain, the webway is sentient. Or, at least, it is capable of responding to breaches in its walls, sensing the violation of the dolmen gates and reacting to stem the entrance of foreign bodies. It will seal itself, cauterising the wound even at the cost of a piece of itself. Any force that enters via a dolmen gate must swiftly close it, or move rapidly to penetrate the webway to a depth that cannot be severed. Whole legions had been lost in the necrons’ first assaults before they learnt that lesson.
Presumably those lost cohorts are still active, in the severed branches of the webway. The thought sets an uncomfortable chill in Khemet’s mind.
The battle of energies through which they have passed is suddenly ended, sealed by an inversion of the key that Kamoteph used to open the gate. Khemet judges they have been swift enough. Their entry is a minor incision in the webway, rather than a grotesque wound.
With the portal closed, the Senusret is swallowed by a darkness that its many eyes cannot pierce. Hekasun speaks first. ‘Why are we blind, Kamoteph?’
The scrying feeds show absolute nothingness. Khemet’s mind flees the feeds, a lurch of self-preservation and fear that almost rocks her on her heels.
On the other side of the chamber, Ahnuret continues to watch Khemet.
‘Permit me a moment, lord.’ Kamoteph’s attention darts from console to console, augmenting the work of a trio of apprenteks at other stations further forward of their master.
‘All stop,’ Hekasun commands, fearing a collision with the walls of the webway.
Quite apart from their struggles, Khemet is fighting her own battle. Tentatively – and furious that she has become so timid – Khemet rejoins the Senusret’s data streams. The darkness of the visual feed is too much, so she shifts her focus to the data assembling from the ship’s proximity sensors. Or, more precisely, the absence of data.
They can see nothing because there is nothing to see.
The Senusret is suspended in emptiness. There is the faintest trace of atmospheric particles, but the wraithbone walls that form the borders of the webway are absent. They appear to have pierced a lightless, fathomless void.
‘I require an explanation, technomancer.’ There is a touch of alarm in Hekasun’s demand.
Kamoteph is more sanguine. ‘Allow me to supply one, lord.’
Khemet’s senses suddenly lurch as Kamoteph shifts to the long-range sensors, which scry not on the order of khet but on the scale of light-minutes.
The webway is a vast and changing landscape, a true realm of its own nature. Khemet knows this from experience. She has fought in capillaries that were narrow enough for a single warrior to hold up an advance, and tunnels so vast that there were no walls, simply a single enormous surface that curved up and around upon itself. In the air above the cities nestled in the webway, necron scythecraft and aeldari interceptors had duelled without any fear of collision with its boundaries.
It is said, though Khemet has never seen them for herself, that there are passages so broad as to permit the greatest vessels of the aeldari to traverse the webway. These craftworlds are the last outposts of the once-proud race, as immense and sedate as planetoids in their movements. To accommodate such craft, the webway’s channels would need to stretch for tens of thousands of khet.
This tunnel – though such a word is unequal to the vastness of the cavern in which the Senusret hangs – is one of them.
They have forced their way into one of the great trunks of the webway.
For the briefest moment, Khemet forgets herself sufficiently to feel genuine awe. No matter that it is the work of her people’s most ancient enemy. No matter that the Infinite Empire has built wonders of its own, fit to eclipse any achievement of the Old Ones. This is an edifice beyond mortal scale and mortal ambition.
‘What now, my lord?’ asks a noble, breaking the spell.
Hekasun radiates icy, fragile calm. ‘We press on.’
This domain is unnatural.
Of course, so is Khemet’s own soulless existence. But she is intimately accustomed to the contradictions of her second life, to the point that she gives them no thought at all. The webway is a challenge all of its own.
She has encountered scattered testimonies from the younger races which tell of their experiences of the webway. Whether through the intercession of the aeldari or through their own cunning, many humans and other Unclean have found their way into the realm over the millennia, and some – a few – have lived to document their ordeals. All speak of the unsettling effect it had upon their spirits, the attenuating of their focus and strength that seem to leach away into the ever-present mists.
Khemet had thought herself immune, not least by the absence of a spirit within her metal form. She had not experienced this feeling of creeping dread during the great battles that had shaken the webway to its foundations. She spent years fighting through its galleries and tunnels, and had never known anything other than calm, adamant purpose and the thrill of triumph.
Perhaps it is the webway that has changed. Perhaps the destruction of the Old Ones robbed their realm of some vital element, permitting entropy to enter its bones and veins. No doubt the aeldari have some florid poetry to express what Khemet is ill-equipped to describe.
It may be that the webway is the same, but it is Khemet who has changed. The lurking trepidation that stalks her could be a symptom of her imprisonment, another manifestation of the weakness that has taken root in her psyche.
However, she feels confident that she is not alone in these feelings. The triumphal spirit that had animated the courtiers has waned since their entry. Many of Hekasun’s confederates have turned away from the scrying feeds and left the hall, to pass the time in whatever idleness amuses and distracts them. They feign boredom, but it is plain to see that they feel the same unease that nags at Khemet.
She ignores this. The root of her name is kemmeht, an ancient term for the most sacred ground of the necrontyr. The parents Khemet can no longer recall presumably chose it out of piety. For Khemet, it is just a name.
‘How did you come to be here?’ she asks instead.
‘I am a member of Kamoteph the Crooked’s hierotek circle,’ says Ahnuret flatly.
‘The Crooked?’ It is rather blunt, but such epithets usually are.
‘It is well earned, and not simply for his stature. Be wary of him, praetorian.’
Khemet glances over at the cryptek, and sees that he has noticed her conversation with his assassin. He is watching their exchange with undisguised curiosity.
‘If you have something to say, speak plainly.’
Ahnuret is unwilling to be drawn in front of her master. ‘I offer only words of advice. Caution is rarely unwise.’
Khemet cannot argue with that.
Several hours pass, during which the Senusret slows from its relativistic pace to a more sedate glide. Its passage describes a gentle arc through the void, curving in towards a dull red star and an unremarkable stellar system.
The vessel’s pilot, a lychguard hardwired into its station on the deck’s forecastle, suddenly speaks. ‘We have arrived, my lord.’
The courtiers’ conversations cease at the announcement, and all turn towards the visualising plates mounted about the deck.
A dense cloud of rock drifts serenely, several thousand khet ahead of the Senusret. At its centre is a vast mass of base metals – the core of a sundered planet, Khemet sees, surrounded by the shattered remnants of its crust.
‘This was Amenset,’ announces Kamoteph. ‘A coreworld of the Urgenesh Dynasty.’
Khemet has never visited this world. ‘What became of it?’
‘The Unclean,’ answers Hekasun. ‘Humans, to be specific.’ There is an edge of mockery in his voice. He is enjoying this moment of superiority over her, enjoying the possession of knowledge she does not have. ‘The Imperium of Man laid claim to Amenset in our absence. They came. They built their little buildings and their statues. They bred, spreading like a cancer.’
Hekasun pauses, amusement dying with his description of humanity’s desecration of one more necron world. On the far side of the chamber, Ahnuret has emerged from the shadows. Her hands clench and unclench around the grips of her disintegrator pistols.
‘Their profusion was their undoing,’ Kamoteph says, taking over the telling from his master. ‘The tyranid genus is drawn towards any great weight of biology. The aliens came to feast. In their terror, the humans obliterated their cities, and the planet beneath, to deny the beasts their meal.’
‘And in their ignorance destroyed the tombs of my cousin dynasty,’ adds Hekasun.
Khemet says nothing, returning her attention to the scrying feed. The borderless vista, with its scatter of rock in constant motion, is a soothing sight, even with the knowledge that each boulder is a gravestone for the necron world.
One of Hekasun’s sycophants asks the question Khemet will not. ‘For what purpose have you brought us here, o lord?’
The self-satisfaction returns to Hekasun’s aura. ‘Well, technomancer? Do not keep us in anticipation.’
Kamoteph nods slowly. His hands make practised motions, and the scrying feed shifts. Khemet’s gaze is drawn to one of the greater fragments, its surface pockmarked from impacts with its lesser kin. It is vast, an entire tectonic plate set free from its planetary core. As it turns, Khemet can make out the shattered remains of a mountain range, upthrust along a fault.
The feed takes her closer, and closer still. Broken rock resolves into peaks and valleys, trenches and plains, all bleached by radiation. Khemet’s imagination paints the lost landscape onto the shattered plateaus: snow and grass, scree and stone.
The Senusret peers further, until finally the feed comes to rest above the ridge of a low mountain. Some quirk of geology had carved an enormous amphitheatre from the rock, hundreds of khet across. The feed shifts slowly, in deference to the rotation and drift of the tectonic plate through the void.
Embedded within the mountainside’s bowl is a vast slab of noctilith. Once precisely cut, it has clearly been eroded by aeons of exposure to the climate that was annihilated by the humans. The slab is mounted atop two pillars made of the same black stone, each as worn as the crossmember.
For a moment, Khemet does not recognise what she sees. Time and trauma have passed since she last saw such an object – a creation of such surpassing rarity that she had thought herself aware of each and every example in existence. But it appears that she is wrong.
It is a dolmen gate.
It has been an age since Khemet last set her gaze upon a dolmen gate.
They had once been the most precious tools and treasures of the Infinite Empire. They were doorways to the under-realm, breaches into the inexplicable matrix the Old Ones had constructed within the empyric domain that lies behind reality.
Its makers had called it the webway. Through its tunnels they had moved armies and armadas about the galaxy with a rapidity the necrontyr could not match. The creation of the gates, permitting the violation of the webway, had been the turning point of the War. Millions of warriors had marched beneath their vast lintels, carrying death to the hated foe.
Like so much, the dolmen gates had been the gift of the C’tan. The star god Nyadra’zatha, the Burning One, had taught the art of their making to a select cabal of the Silent King’s most able crypteks. Each had been the work of decades, requiring every resource of the newly immortal necrons.
Unlike all else the C’tan had pressed upon the empire they had enslaved, Nyadra’zatha had asked for nothing in return. The screams of the Old Ones and their child races had been all the payment the cruel entity required.
Now, in the era of awakening, the dolmen gates were incalculably rare. Were any cryptek with the understanding of how to construct them to rise from their tomb, they would command a power such that any phaeron would grant them the greatest portion of their fiefdoms in return. Even the locations of those that remained would obtain a price to elevate any astromancer to the status of an overlord.
Khemet aches with sudden curiosity, but she is unwilling to deepen her position of ignorance. How Hekasun – or, more likely, Anrakyr – came to know of this gate is something she will learn later.
The lordling leans forwards in his throne, as enraptured by the sight as every other in his court.
‘Kamoteph. Open it.’
The cryptek bows his head. ‘As you command, my lord.’
He shuffles towards a station at the centre of the deck, enclosed on three sides by the sharp-edged panes of interface consoles. With no small amount of effort, Kamoteph levers his hunched form to its greatest extension, arms raised as though in praise of the dread being that brought the gates into existence.
And he begins.
A signal spills from the Senusret, a soft warble of aethermancy. Kamoteph moves with ritual precision, hands curled into claws to sculpt the signal that whispers from the lodestones set within the ship’s body.
Through the scrying feed, Khemet sees the gate come to life. It begins slowly, the faintest thrum of power rising from the base of each pillar. The Senusret sees the gathering energy, drawn from within the matrix of the gate itself, and paints an image of viridescence glowing in the void.
The power builds, travelling along ancient veins set within the noctilith. Of all its valued properties, the greatest quality of blackstone is its resonance with the realm that lies beneath the mundane dimensions of the galaxy. It could repel, annulling the empyrean’s unnatural influence upon the soul-bound species, or it could amplify.
As the gathering energy reaches its apex, Khemet hears the harmonics radiating from each megalith across the vastness of the void, and through the godsteel of the Senusret’s hull.
The gate opens.
Khemet corrects herself. A dolmen gate does not open. It punctures.
The power summoned by Kamoteph and channelled by the esoteric mechanisms of the dolmen stones is spent in a fraction of a second, drawing in and somehow down, funnelling towards the epicentre of the gateway’s arch. A blaze of light erupts, the by-product of arcane interactions that Khemet, even with her epochal lifespan, cannot begin to comprehend.
The light does not fade. Indeed, it grows, shifting from lambent jade to strident gold. Tongues of colour flicker and mingle in an interface that expands by the moment, drawing open in the manner of an iris pulling back around an ocular.
The skin of reality is clawed apart, cubit by cubit. Within the arcane storm is a void, revealing the alien realm Khemet last saw over sixty million years before.
The bare rock between the menhirs of the dolmen gate has disappeared, obscured by the black expanse that the Senusret’s perceptory tools cannot pierce. Faint wisps of phantasmal energy curl from the opening, the occasional flare of aureate power lashing from its edges to strike the dolmen stones.
‘The way is prepared, o lord.’ There is no strain in Kamoteph’s voice, only triumph. The ancient power of the gate has done its work – the cryptek simply provided the key.
Hekasun’s hands grip each arm of his throne. ‘Then let us take it.’
The brace of lychguard slaved to the ship’s navigation consoles lights the engines. The Senusret accelerates smoothly, diving towards the opening.
Khemet has no breath to hold, but the weight of anticipation nevertheless sits heavily upon her. She resents the nagging prickle of rethreading necrodermis around her incomplete hand, a distraction from the solemnity of the moment.
There is a single, pregnant pause as they pass through the threshold, and then the Senusret and its occupants abandon the material plane.
CHAPTER 7
Blades made of lightning hunger for her soul, and go wanting. Shards of porcelain fill the air, and chip and shatter against her limbs. It is still new, this awful prison of metal, and though Khemet’s thoughts echo with her own screams she revels in the strength of it. She revels in the tears of the Unclean who throw themselves at her, and break upon her fury.
There is so much she cannot recall. No matter how she reaches for them, the details are lost to time’s corruption.
She remembers marching in lockstep with her brethren, all servants to a single will. The Silent King watches them from atop his dais. He watches her. This she remembers with absolute clarity – the intoxicating, terrifying awareness of her lord and master’s eye upon her.
Mist coils about her legs as she duels with Unclean heroes, the spawn of their creators’ arrogance and desperation. The mist is burnt away by shafts of fire that flay the ground itself. A realm is broken by the stride of seraptek constructs, and the unchained warcraft of attacker and defender alike. The echo of shattering porcelain is matched only by the shriek of gauss and the mournful cries of the defeated.
The power of an empire has come to the webway, enriched and impoverished by the treachery of slavering gods. An epoch of the galaxy ends in almighty war, the greatest war, that burns with the strength to end the stars themselves, and at its climax it is the necrons who stand atop the cinders.
Khemet and her people sold their souls for this victory. There is hate enough left within her to consider it a price worth paying.
Khemet sheds the swirl of sense-memories in a state of panic, furious with herself that she lapsed within sight of Hekasun and his court.
That panic dies when she looks about the chamber and sees every other necron lost in the same memory. Passing beneath the dolmen stones has awoken something in them all, a need to relive the greatest triumph of the Infinite Empire.
‘Close the gate, technomancer.’ To her surprise, Hekasun is the first to shake off his reverie. Khemet can sense his attention return to the scrying feed, and the courtiers follow his lead.
‘In progress, lord.’
Hekasun’s order, and Kamoteph’s response, are curt. But their discourtesy arises from fear, not arrogance. In a way Khemet’s people have never been able to ascertain, the webway is sentient. Or, at least, it is capable of responding to breaches in its walls, sensing the violation of the dolmen gates and reacting to stem the entrance of foreign bodies. It will seal itself, cauterising the wound even at the cost of a piece of itself. Any force that enters via a dolmen gate must swiftly close it, or move rapidly to penetrate the webway to a depth that cannot be severed. Whole legions had been lost in the necrons’ first assaults before they learnt that lesson.
Presumably those lost cohorts are still active, in the severed branches of the webway. The thought sets an uncomfortable chill in Khemet’s mind.
The battle of energies through which they have passed is suddenly ended, sealed by an inversion of the key that Kamoteph used to open the gate. Khemet judges they have been swift enough. Their entry is a minor incision in the webway, rather than a grotesque wound.
With the portal closed, the Senusret is swallowed by a darkness that its many eyes cannot pierce. Hekasun speaks first. ‘Why are we blind, Kamoteph?’
The scrying feeds show absolute nothingness. Khemet’s mind flees the feeds, a lurch of self-preservation and fear that almost rocks her on her heels.
On the other side of the chamber, Ahnuret continues to watch Khemet.
‘Permit me a moment, lord.’ Kamoteph’s attention darts from console to console, augmenting the work of a trio of apprenteks at other stations further forward of their master.
‘All stop,’ Hekasun commands, fearing a collision with the walls of the webway.
Quite apart from their struggles, Khemet is fighting her own battle. Tentatively – and furious that she has become so timid – Khemet rejoins the Senusret’s data streams. The darkness of the visual feed is too much, so she shifts her focus to the data assembling from the ship’s proximity sensors. Or, more precisely, the absence of data.
They can see nothing because there is nothing to see.
The Senusret is suspended in emptiness. There is the faintest trace of atmospheric particles, but the wraithbone walls that form the borders of the webway are absent. They appear to have pierced a lightless, fathomless void.
‘I require an explanation, technomancer.’ There is a touch of alarm in Hekasun’s demand.
Kamoteph is more sanguine. ‘Allow me to supply one, lord.’
Khemet’s senses suddenly lurch as Kamoteph shifts to the long-range sensors, which scry not on the order of khet but on the scale of light-minutes.
The webway is a vast and changing landscape, a true realm of its own nature. Khemet knows this from experience. She has fought in capillaries that were narrow enough for a single warrior to hold up an advance, and tunnels so vast that there were no walls, simply a single enormous surface that curved up and around upon itself. In the air above the cities nestled in the webway, necron scythecraft and aeldari interceptors had duelled without any fear of collision with its boundaries.
It is said, though Khemet has never seen them for herself, that there are passages so broad as to permit the greatest vessels of the aeldari to traverse the webway. These craftworlds are the last outposts of the once-proud race, as immense and sedate as planetoids in their movements. To accommodate such craft, the webway’s channels would need to stretch for tens of thousands of khet.
This tunnel – though such a word is unequal to the vastness of the cavern in which the Senusret hangs – is one of them.
They have forced their way into one of the great trunks of the webway.
For the briefest moment, Khemet forgets herself sufficiently to feel genuine awe. No matter that it is the work of her people’s most ancient enemy. No matter that the Infinite Empire has built wonders of its own, fit to eclipse any achievement of the Old Ones. This is an edifice beyond mortal scale and mortal ambition.
‘What now, my lord?’ asks a noble, breaking the spell.
Hekasun radiates icy, fragile calm. ‘We press on.’
This domain is unnatural.
Of course, so is Khemet’s own soulless existence. But she is intimately accustomed to the contradictions of her second life, to the point that she gives them no thought at all. The webway is a challenge all of its own.
She has encountered scattered testimonies from the younger races which tell of their experiences of the webway. Whether through the intercession of the aeldari or through their own cunning, many humans and other Unclean have found their way into the realm over the millennia, and some – a few – have lived to document their ordeals. All speak of the unsettling effect it had upon their spirits, the attenuating of their focus and strength that seem to leach away into the ever-present mists.
Khemet had thought herself immune, not least by the absence of a spirit within her metal form. She had not experienced this feeling of creeping dread during the great battles that had shaken the webway to its foundations. She spent years fighting through its galleries and tunnels, and had never known anything other than calm, adamant purpose and the thrill of triumph.
Perhaps it is the webway that has changed. Perhaps the destruction of the Old Ones robbed their realm of some vital element, permitting entropy to enter its bones and veins. No doubt the aeldari have some florid poetry to express what Khemet is ill-equipped to describe.
It may be that the webway is the same, but it is Khemet who has changed. The lurking trepidation that stalks her could be a symptom of her imprisonment, another manifestation of the weakness that has taken root in her psyche.
However, she feels confident that she is not alone in these feelings. The triumphal spirit that had animated the courtiers has waned since their entry. Many of Hekasun’s confederates have turned away from the scrying feeds and left the hall, to pass the time in whatever idleness amuses and distracts them. They feign boredom, but it is plain to see that they feel the same unease that nags at Khemet.
