Tomb World, page 28
Such a shame he could not take the whole thing.
Given time he could extract it, perhaps even lock the entire temple in a stasis field and transplant it whole to his historical gallery on Solemnace. To have the gemstone in its original context would be a rare coup. But somehow these primitives had sensed the coming of his acquisition phalanx, and there was no time. In truth, he had broken protocol by waking even thirty of the lychguard before their time. Doing so had damaged their neural matrices, making them little more than automatons that followed tactical programs and explicit commands.
But if they could not remember this expedition, so much the better – Trazyn was not supposed to be here anyway.
He approached the base of the World Spirit – the chamber was a full league across – and beheld the true genius of its creation.
The structure sprouted from the skull of a predator lizard twice Trazyn’s height, its lower jaw removed and sickle-like upper teeth buried in the wraithbone floor. A glow, like the orange light cast by wind-stoked embers, emanated from the cavities of the creature’s eye sockets.
Trazyn’s vision stripped away layers of bone and he saw the gemstone embedded in the predator’s fist-sized brain cavity.
‘A carnosaur. Astonishing.’
He brushed a metal hand over the skull’s cranium, an emitter in the palm casting electromagnetic radiation through its core.
It was old. Older than he had thought possible. Indeed, perhaps Trazyn should have tempered his dismissal of the aeldari tales, for it was indeed a meteorite, and one of extreme antiquity and unknown make-up. He reviewed the spectromantic divination results manually, to confirm its findings. Given the age of the components, their degradation, and the style on the beam-cut faces of the gem, it was entirely possible that it dated from the War in Heaven.
A delicious shiver passed through Trazyn’s circuitry.
‘Well met, my dear,’ he said, his cooing tone offset by the hollow echo of his vocal emitter. ‘It is not so often that I meet a thing as old as I am.’
He was so entranced, in fact, that he did not see the dragon riders coming.
Deep focus tended to dim his circumspection protocols, and the beasts’ footfalls had been masked via training and sorcery.
And for all his inputs, scryers, protocols and diviners, the movements of the empyrean were muffled in his senses. When it came to warp sorcery, he was like a deaf man at a dinner table, able to make out words through dampened sounds and lip-reading, but unable to even notice the voices behind his back.
An interstitial alert flashed in his vision and he wheeled, dialling back his chronosense to slow the world and give himself time to calculate a microsecond decision.
Scales, claws and sawtooth fangs were about to break down on him like a wave – twenty cavalry riding knee to knee in tight formation, wraithbone lances braced, tattooed swirls on arrowhead-sharp faces. Scrimshawed charms dangled from the halters of their raptor mounts, each leather harness crisscrossing a scaled snout that ended in flared nostrils and hooked teeth. The raptors – underwater slow in Trazyn’s enhanced vision – swung their avian frames low, shifting weight to their bunched haunches in preparation for a final lunge.
One lance came at him so directly, its tip looked like a circle in his vision.
Minimal options, none attractive. But his proximity to the World Spirit had at least given him a moment to act as they pulled their charge, afraid of smashing into their venerated ancestral tomb.
Trazyn slid left, past the first lance tip.
Before the warrior could swing the long weapon around, Trazyn gripped the haft and tore the tattooed Aspect Warrior from his saddle. He watched the rider’s face twist as he fell from the mount, long hair flying free and hands sheltering his face as he tumbled to the bone floor.
Trazyn, who is called Infinite, a voice said. It was not audible speech. Nor was it telepathy, to which he was immune. Instead, it was a wavelength of psychic pulses pushing on his auditory transducer to mimic language. One of these riders must be a farseer.
He ignored it.
The riderless raptor struck at him, jaws closing on the place where his ribcage met his hooded neck. Trazyn had overcommitted himself and could not dodge.
You will not keep what you seek.
Hooked teeth met the cold surface of his necrodermis – and shattered.
Trazyn channelled kinetic force into his fist and punched the dinosaur in the throat.
Vertebrae popped, cartilage tore. The raptor went down with the noise of a bugle player experiencing sudden and unbearable agony.
Listen to the song. This world sings for the blood of Trazyn.
And it was true – even through the syrupy haze of slowed time he could hear the keening chants of the knights. That he did not have blood was no matter, these aeldari wanted it anyway.
But their formation was not optimised to deal with a single opponent. It was jumbling, folding as the knights tried to get to him. And he had just created a gap.
As the unit tried to wheel on itself, Trazyn slipped through the hole in the line – making sure to step on the fallen warrior on his way through.
Behind him, riders collided and mixed.
‘Aeldari,’ he scoffed. ‘So old and wise. You are children to us.’
This World Spirit is our ancestry, Trazyn. Our culture. Our dead. And it will wither without the Solar Gem.
That’s when Trazyn saw the carnosaur. He’d missed it before now, his focus overwhelmed by the charging raptor riders and senses clouded by witchery. It reared above him, its well-muscled chest protected by a breastplate shaped from dinosaurid bone, twin-linked shuriken cannons emerging like tusks from its chin. Serrated blades fashioned from the teeth of aquatic predators studded the armour plates clamped to its feet and spine. A calcium scythe capped its lashing tail.
And on its back, the farseer – her willow-thin face half-covered by the mask of an unfamiliar god, graceful frame armoured in mother-of-pearl, and pink hair gathered into a topknot.
We have long known that you desire it, but if you take it, the World Spirit will die.
‘If you knew I was coming,’ Trazyn said. ‘You should have made a contingency plan.’
I know you will return, the farseer said. But I will still enjoy this.
The carnosaur bit down on him at the waist, his whole upper half trapped inside the wet darkness of its mouth. Nine-inch fangs – even now, he could not stop analysing, cataloguing – sank into the tough tubes and pelvic ambulation structures of his torso. Vital systems tore and failed. Emerald sparks erupted from the wound, lighting the interior of the carnosaur’s mouth with baleful flashes. He felt his legs separate.
Trazyn channelled his diminishing reserves into a fist and reshaped it into a brutal spike. He stabbed at the carnosaur’s lashing tongue, hot reptilian blood spurting over his oculars. To his annoyance, his systems autonomously ran an analysis of the genetic make-up.
He marked it to read later.
The muscular tongue flipped and rolled him to the side. He sprawled, saw a sawtooth strip of light as the jaws opened.
He regretted slowing his chronosense as he watched the row of jagged teeth close on him, puncturing his oculars, driving through his neural fibre spools and crushing his skull.
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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION
First published in Great Britain in 2025.
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With thanks, as ever, to Paul, for hauling me across the finish line once again.
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