Tomb World, page 26
‘You have disabled the ship’s reanimation protocols,’ spits Hekasun.
‘Indeed.’
‘You are willing to gamble your own existence for the chance to kill me?’
Kamoteph feints the head of his staff at Hekasun, then sweeps the butt up and around to crash into his skull. Hekasun drops like a felled tree. ‘I have been able to kill you since the day we met.’
Hekasun rolls away from the cryptek. He kicks out at a scarab the size of his chest that leaps for him, and uses the momentum to throw himself upright. He lands in time to catch Kamoteph’s swing against the flat of his blade. He is thrown back, falling into one of the console pits. Two warriors, battling the constructs that perch atop their stations, are crushed beneath his fall.
The interstices are silent, blocked by the cryptek’s malice. There will be no rescue for the nomarch, nor for the nobles who have been swamped beneath the weight of metal and piercing limbs.
But Kamoteph is no warrior. Hekasun, for all his flaws, possesses a form god-forged to rule and command. Even with his disguise thrown off, Kamoteph is slighter and weaker than the lord he seeks to kill.
Kamoteph may be no warrior, but he is a cryptek and master of the canoptek beasts. Constructs assail Hekasun in a blinding swarm. For every step and swing he makes at the treacherous cryptek, he must make another at the scarabs and spyders that seek to foul his legs. He moves in a whirling dance, never ceasing, always lashing out, defending the grasping talons and particle beams of Kamoteph’s pets.
It is not a question of endurance – both could fight for centuries without tiring – but of focus. A single error will see either duellist fall.
Ptah flees. On the far side of the chamber the cryptek has steadily retreated, hurling blast after blast of pure energy into the baying mob. But his courage in the face of oblivion can only last so long. He throws up a nimbus of crackling energy and runs, following the last of Hekasun’s kin who could not face the prospect of true mortality.
‘Coward!’ Hekasun cannot help but call out after his disloyal servant.
This is the lapse that dooms him. In the moment Hekasun’s attention flicks to his fleeing cryptek, a canid-sized scarab throws itself towards him. Hekasun carves it in two, but another leaps upon his back. An acanthrite drops from its lurking hover and hacks a sliver of necrodermis from his shoulder. The constructs mob the lord, grasping the joints of his arms and legs.
He falls, as he must. More canoptek creatures add their weight to his frame and he crashes to the noctilith. He tries to rise, but a wyrm rears up beside him. Hekasun slashes a sickle across its face, but a canoptek construct cannot be blinded. The wyrm bites down, grasping Hekasun between its mandibles, pinning his arms against his sides.
Kamoteph seizes his moment. His staff rises and falls, slashing through both of Hekasun’s legs, carving the limbs from his body. The wyrm shakes Hekasun’s dismembered form. Under the immense pressure his ribcage cracks, venting a gout of flame into the wyrm’s ruined skull. It throws him aside, sickles flying from his grasp.
Hekasun sprawls, fear settling on him for the first time. The last of his lychguard are dead, along with those of his dynasty whose loyalty outweighed their sense. They are truly dead, their engrams trapped within their sundered bodies. Shards of metal carpet the blackstone, and gauss scars blacken the chamber’s stone.
Kamoteph stands above him. His metal is scarred from a dozen cuts, and his reactor core coughs a smoky residue. But he stands unbent above his broken lord.
Hekasun stares up at him. ‘Betrayer.’
‘Fool.’
‘You cast away all that we have done for petty ambition.’
Kamoteph manages a wheeze of laughter. ‘All I have done. You are nothing. A name. A means to obtain all that I required.’ He raises his staff. ‘Your use ended the moment we set foot upon Qeretesh.’
He throws back his staff, body bending into a monstrous killing blow. The shimmering head describes an arc of viridian light that flashes over and down onto Hekasun’s broken body.
Khemet’s rod of covenant knocks the blow aside. The staff’s blade slams into the deck, sinking deep into the blackstone.
‘I will not allow this.’
CHAPTER 10
Kamoteph whirls away, the curtain of tiles on his arm flying up to clatter against Khemet’s face. She catches its trailed edge with the tip of her staff, and half a dozen shards of crystal and necrodermis fly away to skitter into the corner of the room.
‘You have chosen a strange time for treachery, cryptek.’
‘This is our victory, Khemet. Let us claim it together.’
She ignores his limp attempt to win her to his cause, and instead lifts a fallen blade from the deck and hurls it at him. He knocks it aside, and the blade buries itself in the blackstone at his feet.
Kamoteph backs away, retreating behind the bodies of his constructs and the fallen nobility. She can see the calculus behind his eyes. The Adeptus Astartes captain came close to ending her, and the damage to her hip is slow to mend. But despite her hindrance, and for all his new and potent stature, he cannot hope to defeat her.
As Khemet takes a step, the eternity gate set into the forward wall of the bridge blazes into sudden life. Viridian energy parts like a curtain, revealing a thing pulled from the nightmares of necrontyr children.
The tomb stalker rears up. It is a massive construct, the peak of the canoptek arts. Forty cubits of bladed limbs, a thickly armoured back, and an insectile maw. A bulbous head crowns its body, snapping mandibles on either side.
It moves like lightning, a staccato thunder of legs drumming against noctilith. It is across the chamber in the blink of an ocular, head lowered and body moving with the weight of a freight conveyor.
Khemet is smashed aside, barely avoiding the grasp of its snapping jaw, but her rod of covenant is not so lucky. The tomb stalker’s razored mandible hooks around the staff, and in an instant her weapon disappears into its enormous mouth. The creature turns like a whip, flexing its body into a tight coil with Khemet at its centre. It snaps for her again and she leaps, landing atop its back. Shards of necrodermis are carved from her body by its razor spines, but she hangs on. The stalker bucks, a ripple of violent motion that runs up from its tail to whiplash its head. Khemet digs her hands into the space between two armoured plates and holds on as the construct throws her back and forth. She flails but jams her hands deeper, seeking the column of signal relays that runs along its spine. She finds it, grips, and tears the bundle free.
The stalker’s body crumples instantly, each segment collapsing against the other.
Khemet slides from its corpse. In the second she takes to assess the damage to her body Kamoteph is on her, throwing rapid thrusts at her broken torso.
Khemet jinks away, giving ground, letting the cryptek follow her across the deck and up a shallow ramp towards the scrying consoles. Her rod of covenant now lost in the maw of the tomb stalker, she is left with no option but to evade, whirling her body around Kamoteph’s blade-head.
Her metal is cut in a dozen places, her reactor stressed to its maximum. There is no more ground to give, and she has no weapon. There is only one tool left in her arsenal.
Khemet reaches into the depths of her mind and awakens her chronosense.
The world lurches. Kamoteph jerks to a halt, his staff drawn back in the first motion of a swing. Across the chamber, Hekasun ceases his twitching. The flickering orange flames rising from his cracked chest become solid, each ghost of copper and red rising and vanishing in beautiful chaos.
It is simplicity itself to catch the blow. Though she moves no quicker than Kamoteph, she has the time to perfectly compute the angle, direction, and strength of his swing. Khemet feels a part of her unclench, the release of a fear long-held and now dispelled.
The moment metal touches metal the world spins back to speed. Khemet releases her chronosense as she catches Kamoteph’s staff, trapping his grip with her hand. She slams down with the other, punching into the thin struts of his wrist. The metal cracks and she continues, slamming blow after blow down against the joint of his arm.
With a final crack and a burst of sparks, Khemet tears the cryptek’s hand away. Kamoteph lurches back, surprised more than pained.
Khemet seizes her chance. She steps close and clamps both hands around his skull. The jewel in her brow blazes into life, and Khemet pours herself into the cryptek’s mind.
Khemet stands on black sand, with a desert wind blowing hot against her face.
She is flesh. Her metal body is gone, replaced by brown skin and warm, yielding muscle. She wears a blue robe, bound loose about her waist. Leather sandals shield her feet from the scorching touch of the sand. Her rod of covenant is in her hand, the metal smooth and cool beneath her touch. Over the crest of a nearby dune she can see low buildings, smoke rising from a cooking fire at their centre.
This is wrong. Khemet has no memory of the life she lost, but she knows that not a day passed without pain. And in this place the infirmity in her bones, the curse that haunted the necrontyr, is absent. This is a fiction, not a memory.
Kamoteph stands beside her. Kohl rings his eyes, and a dark-blue pigment stains the skin of his arms and chest. He walks with a staff, but his body is upright, his back straight and strong.
‘This is how you render yourself?’ She glances down at her body, as false and as fabricated as the metal form she has left behind. ‘This is how you imagine we were?’
‘No.’
Pain explodes throughout Khemet’s being, pain that she had left behind an eternity ago. Agony throbs from within her bones, pulsing out of the diseased marrow of her limbs. Black necrotic sores bloom across her skin. The hot wind becomes a gale, driving sand with the force of a hurricane into her open wounds. Her robe rots with her flesh, falling away to reveal the metal skeleton that lies beneath. Gobbets of meat slide from her necrodermis, taking with it her memories, her sanity, her duty to–
‘Enough!’
The desert is gone. Her degrading body, Kamoteph’s, the black sand and the hot wind, all are destroyed in an instant, consumed by the ferocity of the azure light that blazes into being behind her. Kamoteph’s twisted fiction dies in the face of Khemet’s reality.
Relief pours through her like a cool river, but she can spare no runtime for it. She isolates the relevant synapses and cuts off the distracting tug of emotion.
Beneath her, caught like an insect under the glare of her authority, Khemet perceives the spectre of Kamoteph. He appears as a black mote, a sphere that swallows the light that she embodies.
‘Do you mean to prolong this further?’ Kamoteph’s attempt at trickery has soured any impulse for mercy that might have survived his treachery.
‘No,’ he replies, with the false contrition with which she is so familiar. His words are not spoken, but appear in Khemet’s mind fully formed.
‘Had you succeeded,’ she asks, ‘do you imagine I would have allowed you to keep your ill-won gains?’
‘You have no love for Hekasun,’ says Kamoteph. ‘And he despises you. Duatekh. That is his judgement. Why are you defending him?’
‘I am not defending him.’
It seems to Khemet that Kamoteph’s shade is weakening, shrinking by the moment. ‘I see.’
‘Why do this? Qeretesh is won. You steered Hekasun at every turn. Did you really need to sit upon its throne to wield its power?’
He does not reply for some time. ‘I grew tired of serving,’ he says finally.
She says nothing.
‘I could fight you,’ Kamoteph says. ‘This is my mind, after all.’
‘You could.’
‘But the truth is, praetorian, I have no need to fight you.’ The black sphere that is Kamoteph begins to grow. It expands, pressing back the cobalt rays. The interface between Khemet and Kamoteph’s mental strength crackles with force, both their minds making real the struggle for dominion.
‘Hekasun is venal, but he is not a fool. He knew you, before even I did. He knew your nature would threaten his desire for power.’ The pretended humility that Kamoteph hides behind is gone. This is the truth of the cryptek, laid bare as it had been in the Senusret’s throne room when he threw off his crooked disguise.
‘Hekasun feared you. And so when I rebuilt your mind, he asked me to free him from that fear.’
The beast comes from the darkness, bursting out of Kamoteph’s shadow just as his tomb stalker emerged onto the command deck. It has the form of a wyrm, a spine-tipped nightmare of metal and ravening jaws.
It encircles Khemet, the segments of its body forming coil after coil. It wraps about her light, over and under, enclosing it, containing it. Squeezing tight about her, reducing the world of her mental landscape to nothing but blades and metal and snapping fangs.
But as the first of its needle spines comes close to touching her, the creature freezes.
‘I am disappointed, Kamoteph,’ says Khemet. ‘You have underestimated me since the moment you released me from the labyrinth.’
The beast struggles, thrashing with all its might. But she holds it with the merest fraction of her will.
‘I found your wyrm long ago.’
She squeezes, and the beast crumbles, blown to dust in a jet of white-hot nuclear fire.
Kamoteph diminishes in that same fire, shrinking as violently as he grew. That he does not flee from her, attempt to hide from her, is to his credit, but only barely. He knows that there is nowhere within this realm he could hide from her.
She says no words of parting. Her mercy does not extend so far as offering a benediction to a betrayer.
The fire blazes on, ripping through his corpus, setting fire to all that was and had ever been a part of the cryptek. It takes only moments for the final mote of Kamoteph to burn to ash, and then to nothing.
Slowly, but with accelerating fury, the world collapses.
Khemet does not linger. She has been trapped in this place before.
The strength and horror of living metal cages Khemet once more.
She releases Kamoteph and steps away. His oculars are dull and lifeless, his limbs weightless. If there is anything left of the cryptek it is far afield, lost in the desolation she has made of his mind.
There was a time when she would have left him in that state, naming it a just punishment. But, for better or worse, she finds herself unable to countenance that final cruelty.
She raises a hand, and her rod of covenant erupts from the broken body of the tomb stalker. It speeds towards her across the chamber, snapping firmly into her grip. She lifts the staff in both hands and holds it level with Kamoteph’s chestplate. The cryptek is unmoving. The curtain of tiles on his arm, the measure of all he achieved in life and in his life-after-life, hangs limp at his side.
Her rod of covenant glows, and Kamoteph is immolated in a rush of jade-green fire.
CHAPTER 11
She lets the charred remnants of Kamoteph’s body clatter to the floor. No longer the crooked, but the cleaved.
Her own form is broken, but it will mend. That is the gift the C’tan gave the necrons, for all that they took away.
Hekasun is far more damaged. His legs are truncated stumps, sparking fitfully as his body sends signals to limbs it no longer possesses. His chestplate is a ruin, bleeding vital fluids from its cracked vents.
But he too will mend. If Khemet allows it.
She limps over to him, and he watches her approach, levering himself up on his remaining arm.
‘Do you remember when I freed you from the Traveller’s prison?’ He has chosen spite to mask his fear. ‘I do. I remember how pathetic you were. How addled were your senses.’ A gout of flame erupts from his fractured chestplate, and Hekasun sprawls onto his back. He laughs, a single snarl of distortion. ‘How the tables have turned.’
‘Many months ago,’ Khemet says after a moment’s contemplation, ‘you told me that I owe you gratitude for freeing me.’
Khemet stops, looming over him. She lets the staff’s end strike the deck, chiming a broken note from the blackstone. ‘Perhaps that is true. But I think you would agree, that debt is now paid.’
Hekasun growls, as close to bitter laughter as he can manage. ‘You save me, only to slay me yourself.’
‘You assume that I will kill you.’
Something has changed within Khemet. In killing Kamoteph – in executing him – something has been shaken loose, or jarred into waking. The agony of uncertainty, of self-doubt, is gone. She can sense the adamant surety on which she has built her existence, which for so long has eluded her. It is there for her to grasp. Not a splintered memory of strength but a fact, tangible and real.
‘My cryptek and my nemesor,’ says Hekasun, ignoring her. ‘Usurpers both. Clawing for what is not yours by birth or breeding. Thieves wearing the guise of servants.’
He is pulling himself away from her with his remaining arm, crawling like a worm. Where he hopes to go, she does not know. Perhaps this is simply Hekasun’s cowardice, seeking to prolong his existence in the face of destruction.
‘I won your world, Hekasun. Me. As did he.’ She gestures at Kamoteph’s broken body. ‘Without our labour, you would be lord of nothing. Nomarch of a slumbering, conquered tomb.’
‘At my bidding. All you have done was in service of me.’ His strength gives out, and Hekasun sprawls onto the deck. His head lands on the carcass of a spyder, propping him up so his oculars can meet hers.
‘Yes,’ Khemet says. ‘That is our way. Kamoteph. Ptah. Even I. We are moved solely by our lords’ command. All any of us do is in their name.’
‘And now you will kill me, and cast off your shackles. Become a servant only to yourself.’ Hekasun manages to find a new layer of contempt to add to his anger.
‘No. I am a praetorian. I am a servant of the Triarch of the necron empire. My duty has never been to you.
