Tomb World, page 14
Khemet stands in silence, contemplating the projection of the world before her.
It is the same cartograph she showed Hekasun when they first came to Qeretesh two years ago. It marks the human population centres, their mass-conveyor lines, their bloated growth fields and water-cleansing facilities, their landing fields and lifter platforms. Most of all, it shows the millions upon millions of humans that are slowly, unknowingly dying.
It shows decline, unfolding by degrees but utterly unstoppable. Khemet has struck methodically at the systems that underpin human survival. She has rocked the supply of food that their organic forms require in such gargantuan volume. She has destabilised their countless bureaucracies, and subverted their addiction to hierarchy to her will. She has spread fear, the most virulent weapon of them all, into the hearts of every Unclean on Orymous.
She has used need and desperation to turn the humans against themselves. Their animalistic nature in the face of privation has turned every serf and soldier into a potential agent of Khemet’s end. Order is fraying within their sprawling settlements, and only the violent oppression of their populace holds the desperate at bay. It will not be long – one more year, perhaps two – before the humans are incapable of offering even a token martial resistance to the might of the legions Khemet gathers beneath them.
And it is all so shockingly simple. A targeted act of butchery, an assassin’s knife, and the knowledge of where to strike is all that is needed to bring a world to the brink of chaos. To fracture the humans’ understanding of permanence and stability, and render them back to the beasts they are.
This is not how Khemet is used to fighting. It is the way of the necrontyr to call one’s enemy to the field of battle, to meet them there and match strength with strength, wit against wit. The lives of a dynasty’s warriors are freely spent upon the field in displays of tactical acumen and martial power, until one side submits and yields to their acknowledged betters. That is the old way, the honoured way, stretching back into the earliest history of the galaxy and of the necrontyr. The Wars of Secession that had riven Khemet’s people had been fought in this way – supreme violence undertaken within the strict parameters of nobility and virtue.
But the Unclean are undeserving of such considerations. Why risk so much on the resilience of one’s warriors, and the skill of one’s nemesor? Why take the chance that an enemy might detect the cunning placement of one’s elite troops, when a poisoner can spoil the water supply of an entire city? Why feed and house and clothe and train an army, when an assassin’s touch can sow disorder through an approaching legion?
The Unclean have never deserved the mercy of necron honour, particularly when they besmirch the kemmeht of her people and pollute the galaxy with their unwarranted arrogance. Thus, it is merely with pride and a small degree of pleasure that her shadow war is achieving its end.
She turns the projection, sending the globe into a slow spin about its axis. Khemet watches the lights of cities and armies turn through the air. She has spent much of the past two years where she stands now, a control plate in hand. Observing, annotating, considering this map and its meanings. Plotting. In many ways, it has been the closest and most valuable companion in her effort to reclaim Qeretesh.
Certainly, it has been the most reliable.
Kamoteph has proven to be capricious in war. Much of the intelligence displayed upon Khemet’s map is provided by the host of humans he has shackled to his will, but she is sure there is just as much that the cryptek does not tell her. She is reliant on Kamoteph for much of their ongoing efforts to undermine the humans’ infrastructure, but she cannot trust him.
Hekasun, despite her repeated warnings, has been an almighty hindrance to her efforts to prepare the way for conquest. He has never accepted Khemet’s strategy, though offering none of his own. Thus, for two years he has urged her always towards more speed, more haste, all the while contributing little of his own and at times actively undermining her designs.
His acquisitive rampage through the Zathanor’s vaults has not stopped. A muted struggle to direct the time and efforts of Qeretesh’s crypteks has been waged between the lord and Khemet for many months. Hekasun tasks his mages with disinterring the petty nobility of the world, the minor scions over whom Hekasun enjoys his grandstanding. He has them rouse the few seraptek constructs and voidcraft held within the grandest chambers of the tomb world so he might toy with them, walk their halls, and imagine himself lord of Qeretesh in deed as well as word.
Khemet, however, commands the crypteks to wake the commoners’ vaults, spilling their contents in a slow but steady stream from their coffins. Many vast chambers throughout the tomb world have become marshalling points, holding entire legions in immobile ranks, waiting for the moment Khemet can unleash them upon the usurpers of the world.
Her actions, always, are tempered by the knowledge that the humans are watching. Their seismic sensors around the planet are always listening, and she fears they will detect the tramp of metal footsteps through the rock and stone. Fortunately, the humans’ stunted approximations of crypteks have shown little curiosity about what lies beneath their feet. They appear blind to the danger that stalks them – or, at least, they cannot see the hand that directs their downfall.
‘Praetorian, you requested I alert you when the deathmark named Ahnuret re-enters the north-eastern quarter.’
Qeretesh speaks to her. The tomb world is a compliant thing, and Khemet’s interstitial node hums with the constant feed of data it provides. Always there is something new for her to consider. The status of a freshly woken cohort. The power cycles of the caged singularity at the tomb world’s centre. Readings from the many scrying devices dotted throughout the planet’s crust. Khemet never lacks for something to occupy her mind.
In this case, the spirit’s message breaks Khemet’s idle contemplation, and forces her to think on the question of Ahnuret.
She has shown herself to be the least reliable of all. The deathmark is an undischarged explosive, awaiting – indeed, actively seeking – its detonation. Every task Khemet assigns her somehow ends in overt, extravagant violence. Her thirst for Unclean blood has threatened to cast into ruin all that Khemet has worked to achieve.
Ahnuret’s effectiveness as a killer is unquestioned. She has successfully ended the life of every human against whom Khemet has set her. She has penetrated their most closely guarded bastions and struck down city governors, military leaders, civilian officials. Anyone whose death will leave a void in the Imperium of Man’s workings, according to Kamoteph’s information and Khemet’s insight.
And yet as an infiltrator the assassin is utterly compromised. Ahnuret’s abilities as a deathmark allow her to enter any stronghold, but once she is inside she has run rampant. Ahnuret has committed massacre, when murder is required. Kamoteph has had to divert significant resources to purge any lingering evidence of the deathmark’s presence, often at the cost of mindshackled human servants that were to play a more useful function in the future.
But despite tidying up Ahnuret’s mess, the cryptek has otherwise ignored the deathmark’s cognitive decline. As a member of his hierotek circle, Kamoteph is responsible for her actions, and yet he has displayed calculated disdain for the assassin ever since Khemet first awoke aboard the Senusret.
And, thus, it has fallen to Khemet to deal with her.
She waves a hand over the control plate. The map of the world collapses into a single mote of jade light, then vanishes.
It does not take Khemet long to reach her. The commonplace marvels of necron technology allow her to travel from one hemisphere of the planet to another as easily as she would cross a room.
On occasion over the past two years, when she has felt the need to escape Hekasun’s arrogance and the demands of her task, Khemet has explored the silent quarters of the tomb world. She has delved into vaults not yet raided by Hekasun or Kamoteph, the first in millennia to disturb the coils of mist that wreathe the rows of coffins. She has walked between the towering noctilith pillars that hold the weight of the world, and idly stared into the molten abyss of the planet’s mantle. She never seeks anything in particular, other than the sensation of finding paths she has yet to tread.
Since coming to Qeretesh the laying of fresh mental tracks, and the paranoid monitoring of her faculties, have become second nature. These behaviours have settled into her background processes – there, if she cares to give them thought, but no longer clamouring as they once did. She might intermittently be given to wander a darkened hall, and her faculties might briefly swim when an act in the now mirrors a memory of the past, but these are exceptions. Dismissed as swiftly as they occur. Not of any real concern.
This journey serves that purpose, as Khemet has never had reason to visit Ahnuret’s chambers. The tomb world feeds Khemet a soft string of interstitial directions, leading her into a cavernous hall whose walls are lined with modest, single-room dwellings, platforms and walkways spanning the gaps between them. Such chambers are a moderately common sight across the tomb worlds. They were built in the waning years of the necrontyr empire, after the treachery of biotransference stole the souls of a civilisation. So much of the necrontyr’s cities were made redundant by the C’tan’s betrayal. Mind-locked serfs had no need of houses or tradeshops, no need for sustenance or distraction. Only those few who retained their higher functions had any conception of a dwelling, much less a need for one. But for those who did, spaces such as these were built, a sop to the vestigial psychological need for a home.
Who they once belonged to is irrelevant, at least for now. It will be decades before the full populace of Qeretesh is awoken, and the consequences for squatting in another’s cell are easy to dismiss.
Khemet enters at the lowest point of the domiciliary chamber, and spends a moment considering and cataloguing the rows of rooms. They put her in mind of an insect’s hive split open.
Each of the dwellings is empty, save for one, from which a familiar green glow is cast into the darkness. Khemet rouses her anti-gravity pack, and rises gently up to its level.
Khemet has never given any great thought to her material possessions. As a warden of a slumbering empire, her duty has taken her across the length and breadth of the galaxy for millions of years, by whatever means she has commandeered. And, of course, her nature as an immortal construct of living metal ensures that she will outlive any objects to which she might form a sentimental attachment.
Which is why she is surprised to find the chambers Ahnuret has occupied are richly, even opulently, furnished.
Tapestries hang on each wall, freed from the stasis fields that guard against time’s decay. Statues and totems line the stone shelves and sconces. False candles burn, a casual trick of technology to replace the wick and tallow that could not endure the ages.
It is an echo of home, of an entire culture’s ideal of home, brought jarringly into the present. That Ahnuret would construct such an artifice speaks not of madness. Khemet has known those beset by such affliction, seeing flesh where there is metal, unable to accept the reality of their imprisonment within their necrodermis shells.
No, Khemet sees and knows that this is the work of the most abject sorrow. Ahnuret longs for a life she cannot recall, and so surrounds herself with the trappings of a society that has not existed for millions of years.
Khemet’s pity is discarded the moment her gaze leaves the room’s furnishings and alights on Ahnuret.
The deathmark stands rigid in the centre of the room, arms outstretched. She has divested herself of all weapons and tools, standing clothed only in the bare necrodermis of her form. And it is growing barer with every moment.
A clutch of scarabs is climbing back and forth across her body. They are stripping the outermost layers of atoms from the deathmark’s necrodermis, flensing away all trace of the air and organic matter to which she has been exposed outside the tomb world’s tunnels. As Khemet watches, one of the scarabs clambers up Ahnuret’s neck and wends its way across and around her head. The glow of gauss from its thorax traces its way over her faceplate and her single oversized ocular, and the broad span of the deathmark’s shoulders. What remains is pristine, unblemished metal, as pure and ascetic as the moment Ahnuret walked from the furnaces.
The cause of all of Ahnuret’s inexplicable destruction is now made clear. What Khemet had attributed to the ungovernable nature of the deathmark is revealed to stem from a far bleaker motive.
Ahnuret is absorbed in the ritual, and it is some time before she detects Khemet’s presence. She does not move, does not change her pose or shoo the constructs away, but levelly meets Khemet’s gaze.
‘You are afflicted by the Destroyer.’
Ahnuret does not immediately react. She lowers her arms, dismissing the scarabs from her body. Khemet cannot read resignation, relief, or resistance from her stance.
‘I am afflicted by nothing. If you wish to deny the universal truth then that is your foolishness.’
It is not the first time that Khemet has heard the adherents of the Destroyer cult speak in such terms. It is one of the lurking horrors of the necron psyche – a seed of corruption that can strike at random, and render the most honourable warrior into a creature of remorseless, endless fury. A cursed being, whose only desire and purpose is omnicidal slaughter.
There are many ways this can play out. Ahnuret’s curse is the reason Khemet has been forced to expend so much energy on stealth, concealing the presence of the necrons upon Qeretesh. She could lift her rod of covenant and obliterate Ahnuret for her failure to heed Khemet’s command. Many other praetorians would do just that, either as punishment or simply out of fear that Ahnuret might infect others with her genocidal urges.
But the deathmark could also choose to leave. She could depart through a hyperspace oubliette, fleeing Khemet’s judgement. But she has not.
‘I once did as you seek to do,’ says Khemet. Ahnuret’s gaze travels back to the praetorian, curious despite whatever mixture of shame and defiance is within her.
‘I exterminated all life from the principal continent of Jaliste. Everything, down to the last microbe.’ She pauses. ‘It took me eight hundred years.’
‘You embraced the truth of the Destroyer?’ asks Ahnuret.
‘No. This was purely an intellectual exercise.’ Khemet looks at her. ‘Sixty million years is a long time.’
The deathmark says nothing, her ocular fixed on Khemet’s. It is hard to tell whether awe, jealousy, or horror lies behind her stare.
‘I trekked from one coast to another, eradicating all that I found. Flora, fauna. I sterilised the ground itself. I flayed four cubits of topsoil from an entire continent.’
For the first time in many months, Khemet can feel the onset of a lapse. The memory unfolds from her engrammatic vault, curling at the edges of her perceptions. Khemet feels the weight of the gauss blaster in her hands, though she grips her rod of covenant. She registers the ionised particles of dirt and blood in the air, when there is only burning kyphi candles in their sconces around the room’s edge.
‘But when I returned to where I had begun, to the red sand of that first shoreline, I found I had been undone.’
Ahnuret cocks her head, but waits for Khemet to continue.
‘Phytoplankton. It had washed in with the tides. Algae coated the rocks. I could have scoured the shore again, but it was clear. Given enough time, life would return, crawling from the depths.’
The room is gone, replaced by countless grains of fine red sand into which her metal feet sink.
With her on the sand, Ahnuret shakes her head. ‘You simply lacked the resources. And the commitment. Had you boiled away the planet’s oceans, or seeded the water with toxins, you would have starved the organisms of their preferred environment.’
The deathmark trips slightly over the word ‘organisms’, disgust heavy in her voice, but her hesitation goes unregarded. Khemet is hearing the hiss of ocean spray.
‘Praetorian?’
Khemet heeds the distant sound of her title. With effort, she isolates the engram and banishes it back to its repository.
‘My efforts on Jaliste taught me a simple truth. A sincerely universal truth,’ she says, surprising herself with her own vehemence. ‘Life always finds a way.’
Ahnuret considers her words in silence.
‘I cannot fight a war with tools I cannot trust.’
Ahnuret looks up sharply. Whatever self-reflection Khemet might have begun is swiftly undone. ‘I kill the Unclean you ask me to kill. I expose myself to their filth without complaint.’
‘Every human you destroy without cause risks exposing our presence before we are ready for the true war.’
‘Without cause? They are the Unclean, praetorian. That is all the cause we require.’
Khemet’s choler rises to match the deathmark’s. ‘I will not give you license to indulge your madness if it imperils our victory on this world.’
The deathmark’s glare matches Khemet’s own.
‘Khemet, attend me.’
The interstitial message arrives at the worst possible moment. With immense difficulty, Khemet responds.
‘I do not have the time to service your whims, Hekasun.’
The noble’s reply is immediate. ‘I summon you, duatekh. Do not make me have you brought before me.’
Her fury is visible only to Ahnuret, who sees the outgassing of her core flare into violence. ‘Very well.’
Ahnuret registers the change in her and tenses.
‘Hekasun summons me.’
The deathmark nods understanding.
‘We will speak further,’ promises Khemet. ‘But know this. I will suffer no more errors.’
She finds Hekasun at her map table, a collection of courtiers with him. They are unfamiliar to Khemet. Their presence suggests a purpose to this meeting that Khemet has little patience to indulge.
It is the same cartograph she showed Hekasun when they first came to Qeretesh two years ago. It marks the human population centres, their mass-conveyor lines, their bloated growth fields and water-cleansing facilities, their landing fields and lifter platforms. Most of all, it shows the millions upon millions of humans that are slowly, unknowingly dying.
It shows decline, unfolding by degrees but utterly unstoppable. Khemet has struck methodically at the systems that underpin human survival. She has rocked the supply of food that their organic forms require in such gargantuan volume. She has destabilised their countless bureaucracies, and subverted their addiction to hierarchy to her will. She has spread fear, the most virulent weapon of them all, into the hearts of every Unclean on Orymous.
She has used need and desperation to turn the humans against themselves. Their animalistic nature in the face of privation has turned every serf and soldier into a potential agent of Khemet’s end. Order is fraying within their sprawling settlements, and only the violent oppression of their populace holds the desperate at bay. It will not be long – one more year, perhaps two – before the humans are incapable of offering even a token martial resistance to the might of the legions Khemet gathers beneath them.
And it is all so shockingly simple. A targeted act of butchery, an assassin’s knife, and the knowledge of where to strike is all that is needed to bring a world to the brink of chaos. To fracture the humans’ understanding of permanence and stability, and render them back to the beasts they are.
This is not how Khemet is used to fighting. It is the way of the necrontyr to call one’s enemy to the field of battle, to meet them there and match strength with strength, wit against wit. The lives of a dynasty’s warriors are freely spent upon the field in displays of tactical acumen and martial power, until one side submits and yields to their acknowledged betters. That is the old way, the honoured way, stretching back into the earliest history of the galaxy and of the necrontyr. The Wars of Secession that had riven Khemet’s people had been fought in this way – supreme violence undertaken within the strict parameters of nobility and virtue.
But the Unclean are undeserving of such considerations. Why risk so much on the resilience of one’s warriors, and the skill of one’s nemesor? Why take the chance that an enemy might detect the cunning placement of one’s elite troops, when a poisoner can spoil the water supply of an entire city? Why feed and house and clothe and train an army, when an assassin’s touch can sow disorder through an approaching legion?
The Unclean have never deserved the mercy of necron honour, particularly when they besmirch the kemmeht of her people and pollute the galaxy with their unwarranted arrogance. Thus, it is merely with pride and a small degree of pleasure that her shadow war is achieving its end.
She turns the projection, sending the globe into a slow spin about its axis. Khemet watches the lights of cities and armies turn through the air. She has spent much of the past two years where she stands now, a control plate in hand. Observing, annotating, considering this map and its meanings. Plotting. In many ways, it has been the closest and most valuable companion in her effort to reclaim Qeretesh.
Certainly, it has been the most reliable.
Kamoteph has proven to be capricious in war. Much of the intelligence displayed upon Khemet’s map is provided by the host of humans he has shackled to his will, but she is sure there is just as much that the cryptek does not tell her. She is reliant on Kamoteph for much of their ongoing efforts to undermine the humans’ infrastructure, but she cannot trust him.
Hekasun, despite her repeated warnings, has been an almighty hindrance to her efforts to prepare the way for conquest. He has never accepted Khemet’s strategy, though offering none of his own. Thus, for two years he has urged her always towards more speed, more haste, all the while contributing little of his own and at times actively undermining her designs.
His acquisitive rampage through the Zathanor’s vaults has not stopped. A muted struggle to direct the time and efforts of Qeretesh’s crypteks has been waged between the lord and Khemet for many months. Hekasun tasks his mages with disinterring the petty nobility of the world, the minor scions over whom Hekasun enjoys his grandstanding. He has them rouse the few seraptek constructs and voidcraft held within the grandest chambers of the tomb world so he might toy with them, walk their halls, and imagine himself lord of Qeretesh in deed as well as word.
Khemet, however, commands the crypteks to wake the commoners’ vaults, spilling their contents in a slow but steady stream from their coffins. Many vast chambers throughout the tomb world have become marshalling points, holding entire legions in immobile ranks, waiting for the moment Khemet can unleash them upon the usurpers of the world.
Her actions, always, are tempered by the knowledge that the humans are watching. Their seismic sensors around the planet are always listening, and she fears they will detect the tramp of metal footsteps through the rock and stone. Fortunately, the humans’ stunted approximations of crypteks have shown little curiosity about what lies beneath their feet. They appear blind to the danger that stalks them – or, at least, they cannot see the hand that directs their downfall.
‘Praetorian, you requested I alert you when the deathmark named Ahnuret re-enters the north-eastern quarter.’
Qeretesh speaks to her. The tomb world is a compliant thing, and Khemet’s interstitial node hums with the constant feed of data it provides. Always there is something new for her to consider. The status of a freshly woken cohort. The power cycles of the caged singularity at the tomb world’s centre. Readings from the many scrying devices dotted throughout the planet’s crust. Khemet never lacks for something to occupy her mind.
In this case, the spirit’s message breaks Khemet’s idle contemplation, and forces her to think on the question of Ahnuret.
She has shown herself to be the least reliable of all. The deathmark is an undischarged explosive, awaiting – indeed, actively seeking – its detonation. Every task Khemet assigns her somehow ends in overt, extravagant violence. Her thirst for Unclean blood has threatened to cast into ruin all that Khemet has worked to achieve.
Ahnuret’s effectiveness as a killer is unquestioned. She has successfully ended the life of every human against whom Khemet has set her. She has penetrated their most closely guarded bastions and struck down city governors, military leaders, civilian officials. Anyone whose death will leave a void in the Imperium of Man’s workings, according to Kamoteph’s information and Khemet’s insight.
And yet as an infiltrator the assassin is utterly compromised. Ahnuret’s abilities as a deathmark allow her to enter any stronghold, but once she is inside she has run rampant. Ahnuret has committed massacre, when murder is required. Kamoteph has had to divert significant resources to purge any lingering evidence of the deathmark’s presence, often at the cost of mindshackled human servants that were to play a more useful function in the future.
But despite tidying up Ahnuret’s mess, the cryptek has otherwise ignored the deathmark’s cognitive decline. As a member of his hierotek circle, Kamoteph is responsible for her actions, and yet he has displayed calculated disdain for the assassin ever since Khemet first awoke aboard the Senusret.
And, thus, it has fallen to Khemet to deal with her.
She waves a hand over the control plate. The map of the world collapses into a single mote of jade light, then vanishes.
It does not take Khemet long to reach her. The commonplace marvels of necron technology allow her to travel from one hemisphere of the planet to another as easily as she would cross a room.
On occasion over the past two years, when she has felt the need to escape Hekasun’s arrogance and the demands of her task, Khemet has explored the silent quarters of the tomb world. She has delved into vaults not yet raided by Hekasun or Kamoteph, the first in millennia to disturb the coils of mist that wreathe the rows of coffins. She has walked between the towering noctilith pillars that hold the weight of the world, and idly stared into the molten abyss of the planet’s mantle. She never seeks anything in particular, other than the sensation of finding paths she has yet to tread.
Since coming to Qeretesh the laying of fresh mental tracks, and the paranoid monitoring of her faculties, have become second nature. These behaviours have settled into her background processes – there, if she cares to give them thought, but no longer clamouring as they once did. She might intermittently be given to wander a darkened hall, and her faculties might briefly swim when an act in the now mirrors a memory of the past, but these are exceptions. Dismissed as swiftly as they occur. Not of any real concern.
This journey serves that purpose, as Khemet has never had reason to visit Ahnuret’s chambers. The tomb world feeds Khemet a soft string of interstitial directions, leading her into a cavernous hall whose walls are lined with modest, single-room dwellings, platforms and walkways spanning the gaps between them. Such chambers are a moderately common sight across the tomb worlds. They were built in the waning years of the necrontyr empire, after the treachery of biotransference stole the souls of a civilisation. So much of the necrontyr’s cities were made redundant by the C’tan’s betrayal. Mind-locked serfs had no need of houses or tradeshops, no need for sustenance or distraction. Only those few who retained their higher functions had any conception of a dwelling, much less a need for one. But for those who did, spaces such as these were built, a sop to the vestigial psychological need for a home.
Who they once belonged to is irrelevant, at least for now. It will be decades before the full populace of Qeretesh is awoken, and the consequences for squatting in another’s cell are easy to dismiss.
Khemet enters at the lowest point of the domiciliary chamber, and spends a moment considering and cataloguing the rows of rooms. They put her in mind of an insect’s hive split open.
Each of the dwellings is empty, save for one, from which a familiar green glow is cast into the darkness. Khemet rouses her anti-gravity pack, and rises gently up to its level.
Khemet has never given any great thought to her material possessions. As a warden of a slumbering empire, her duty has taken her across the length and breadth of the galaxy for millions of years, by whatever means she has commandeered. And, of course, her nature as an immortal construct of living metal ensures that she will outlive any objects to which she might form a sentimental attachment.
Which is why she is surprised to find the chambers Ahnuret has occupied are richly, even opulently, furnished.
Tapestries hang on each wall, freed from the stasis fields that guard against time’s decay. Statues and totems line the stone shelves and sconces. False candles burn, a casual trick of technology to replace the wick and tallow that could not endure the ages.
It is an echo of home, of an entire culture’s ideal of home, brought jarringly into the present. That Ahnuret would construct such an artifice speaks not of madness. Khemet has known those beset by such affliction, seeing flesh where there is metal, unable to accept the reality of their imprisonment within their necrodermis shells.
No, Khemet sees and knows that this is the work of the most abject sorrow. Ahnuret longs for a life she cannot recall, and so surrounds herself with the trappings of a society that has not existed for millions of years.
Khemet’s pity is discarded the moment her gaze leaves the room’s furnishings and alights on Ahnuret.
The deathmark stands rigid in the centre of the room, arms outstretched. She has divested herself of all weapons and tools, standing clothed only in the bare necrodermis of her form. And it is growing barer with every moment.
A clutch of scarabs is climbing back and forth across her body. They are stripping the outermost layers of atoms from the deathmark’s necrodermis, flensing away all trace of the air and organic matter to which she has been exposed outside the tomb world’s tunnels. As Khemet watches, one of the scarabs clambers up Ahnuret’s neck and wends its way across and around her head. The glow of gauss from its thorax traces its way over her faceplate and her single oversized ocular, and the broad span of the deathmark’s shoulders. What remains is pristine, unblemished metal, as pure and ascetic as the moment Ahnuret walked from the furnaces.
The cause of all of Ahnuret’s inexplicable destruction is now made clear. What Khemet had attributed to the ungovernable nature of the deathmark is revealed to stem from a far bleaker motive.
Ahnuret is absorbed in the ritual, and it is some time before she detects Khemet’s presence. She does not move, does not change her pose or shoo the constructs away, but levelly meets Khemet’s gaze.
‘You are afflicted by the Destroyer.’
Ahnuret does not immediately react. She lowers her arms, dismissing the scarabs from her body. Khemet cannot read resignation, relief, or resistance from her stance.
‘I am afflicted by nothing. If you wish to deny the universal truth then that is your foolishness.’
It is not the first time that Khemet has heard the adherents of the Destroyer cult speak in such terms. It is one of the lurking horrors of the necron psyche – a seed of corruption that can strike at random, and render the most honourable warrior into a creature of remorseless, endless fury. A cursed being, whose only desire and purpose is omnicidal slaughter.
There are many ways this can play out. Ahnuret’s curse is the reason Khemet has been forced to expend so much energy on stealth, concealing the presence of the necrons upon Qeretesh. She could lift her rod of covenant and obliterate Ahnuret for her failure to heed Khemet’s command. Many other praetorians would do just that, either as punishment or simply out of fear that Ahnuret might infect others with her genocidal urges.
But the deathmark could also choose to leave. She could depart through a hyperspace oubliette, fleeing Khemet’s judgement. But she has not.
‘I once did as you seek to do,’ says Khemet. Ahnuret’s gaze travels back to the praetorian, curious despite whatever mixture of shame and defiance is within her.
‘I exterminated all life from the principal continent of Jaliste. Everything, down to the last microbe.’ She pauses. ‘It took me eight hundred years.’
‘You embraced the truth of the Destroyer?’ asks Ahnuret.
‘No. This was purely an intellectual exercise.’ Khemet looks at her. ‘Sixty million years is a long time.’
The deathmark says nothing, her ocular fixed on Khemet’s. It is hard to tell whether awe, jealousy, or horror lies behind her stare.
‘I trekked from one coast to another, eradicating all that I found. Flora, fauna. I sterilised the ground itself. I flayed four cubits of topsoil from an entire continent.’
For the first time in many months, Khemet can feel the onset of a lapse. The memory unfolds from her engrammatic vault, curling at the edges of her perceptions. Khemet feels the weight of the gauss blaster in her hands, though she grips her rod of covenant. She registers the ionised particles of dirt and blood in the air, when there is only burning kyphi candles in their sconces around the room’s edge.
‘But when I returned to where I had begun, to the red sand of that first shoreline, I found I had been undone.’
Ahnuret cocks her head, but waits for Khemet to continue.
‘Phytoplankton. It had washed in with the tides. Algae coated the rocks. I could have scoured the shore again, but it was clear. Given enough time, life would return, crawling from the depths.’
The room is gone, replaced by countless grains of fine red sand into which her metal feet sink.
With her on the sand, Ahnuret shakes her head. ‘You simply lacked the resources. And the commitment. Had you boiled away the planet’s oceans, or seeded the water with toxins, you would have starved the organisms of their preferred environment.’
The deathmark trips slightly over the word ‘organisms’, disgust heavy in her voice, but her hesitation goes unregarded. Khemet is hearing the hiss of ocean spray.
‘Praetorian?’
Khemet heeds the distant sound of her title. With effort, she isolates the engram and banishes it back to its repository.
‘My efforts on Jaliste taught me a simple truth. A sincerely universal truth,’ she says, surprising herself with her own vehemence. ‘Life always finds a way.’
Ahnuret considers her words in silence.
‘I cannot fight a war with tools I cannot trust.’
Ahnuret looks up sharply. Whatever self-reflection Khemet might have begun is swiftly undone. ‘I kill the Unclean you ask me to kill. I expose myself to their filth without complaint.’
‘Every human you destroy without cause risks exposing our presence before we are ready for the true war.’
‘Without cause? They are the Unclean, praetorian. That is all the cause we require.’
Khemet’s choler rises to match the deathmark’s. ‘I will not give you license to indulge your madness if it imperils our victory on this world.’
The deathmark’s glare matches Khemet’s own.
‘Khemet, attend me.’
The interstitial message arrives at the worst possible moment. With immense difficulty, Khemet responds.
‘I do not have the time to service your whims, Hekasun.’
The noble’s reply is immediate. ‘I summon you, duatekh. Do not make me have you brought before me.’
Her fury is visible only to Ahnuret, who sees the outgassing of her core flare into violence. ‘Very well.’
Ahnuret registers the change in her and tenses.
‘Hekasun summons me.’
The deathmark nods understanding.
‘We will speak further,’ promises Khemet. ‘But know this. I will suffer no more errors.’
She finds Hekasun at her map table, a collection of courtiers with him. They are unfamiliar to Khemet. Their presence suggests a purpose to this meeting that Khemet has little patience to indulge.
