Tomb World, page 5
Khemet nods. ‘The flaws in their stasis coffins are significant and extensive, very likely embedded at their point of construction. There is no hope of recovery.’ She hesitates. ‘All those who have awoken thus far have required the rite of silence.’
Indeed, that is the duty from which the Traveller’s arrival has summoned her. Under the watchful oculars of the Zathanor’s crypteks, and restrained by the same lychguard who had been their guardians sixty million years before, the insane lords of the Zathanor have been put to death by blasts from Khemet’s rod of covenant. Isolated by Khemet from the tomb world’s reanimation protocols, it is a true death, though not as quick as Khemet would prefer.
Her hesitation does not arise from distaste. The euthanasia of necron nobility whose sanity has not endured the Great Sleep is the most solemn duty of the praetorians, and Khemet is not daunted by the act. She is, however, curious how the overlord will react to the execution of his noble peers.
‘The Zathanor were ever paupers.’ Anrakyr’s tone is forgiving, not contemptuous. ‘What of their warriors?’
Khemet can hear the hunger in his voice. ‘Initial reports from the crypteks suggest that the failure rate for the commoners’ vaults will be within expected norms.’
The necron body is ill-equipped to express emotions without words, but nevertheless the overlord’s relief is palpable. He leans back slightly, planting the butt of his warscythe firmly in the sand, evidently considering how best to continue. Khemet does not interrupt him; there is a form to what they both know will play out next.
‘It was my understanding,’ the Traveller begins, ‘that Menouthis is the last bastion of the Zathanor.’
‘Indeed. Their crownworld was lost to stellar detonation seven million years ago.’ Khemet knows this for a fact; she witnessed the moment the Zharetkh star became a supernova. ‘They had few other holdings. Those that I am aware of have been lost or overrun by the Unclean.’
‘And with your culling of its last members, would you agree that the house has run its course?’
Khemet cannot smile, but even if she could she would not. In spite of the necessary pantomime both she and Anrakyr are playing out, it is no trivial act to pronounce the death of a dynasty.
‘I would.’
The Traveller, for his part, does not outwardly revel in his unexpected and bloodless triumph. ‘What, then, will become of their thralls?’
With his stately voice, Khemet can almost believe that he is expressing true concern.
‘In the absence of any extant leadership, and without the prospect of one emerging, I have dissolved the dynastic claim upon Menouthis.’ Khemet makes Anrakyr wait, examining his demeanour. But the overlord is patience itself.
‘I render this world to your care, lord,’ she says finally.
With a thought, she transmits the command protocols for the entire tomb world to the Traveller, which she had claimed by Triarchal fiat upon her discovery of the court’s corruption. The act, at a stroke, gifts Anrakyr dominion over all but the most independent minds within its vaults.
This is no small thing. She has erased an ancient, if minor, house of necron nobility, and granted all that is left of its holdings to the Traveller. Menouthis, for all its impoverished status, holds tens of millions of necron warriors in its depths, to say nothing of its precious seraptek constructs, war machines and voidfaring vessels. No matter how large his legions, this will no doubt swell the overlord’s ranks to new heights.
And all of it sanctioned by a praetorian of the Triarch, whose judgement can be overturned only by the will of the Silent King.
‘I accept this honour and burden.’ Satisfaction burns in the azure outgassing of Anrakyr’s central reactor. He turns, and with a curt gesture dismisses the Night Scythe still hovering at his back. The doors and portals of Menouthis are now open to him; he has no need of the scythecraft’s wormhole to return to his fleet.
Khemet doubts he will linger, beyond ensuring that the resurrection of his new cohorts has been set in motion. The Traveller, if all she has heard is true, is a crusader, not content to sit idly in lordship of any single world. Menouthis will likely be turned over to one of his favoured allies to govern, to ensure the steady supply of awoken troops for his campaigns.
‘In which case,’ he says, ‘I believe I will review the disposition of the vaults, and ensure the crypteks are equal to their task.’ At an interstitial command, the Traveller’s Immortals begin their march once more, their formation splitting smoothly to pass around their master and Khemet.
‘As you will, lord.’ Khemet takes a single step back, ceremonially opening the way for Menouthis’ new overlord.
‘And what will you do?’ he asks.
This time, Khemet does regret her inability to smile. ‘I will accompany you, lord.’
‘By all means.’ There is genial warmth in his voice. He sets off after his Immortals, and Khemet falls into his wake. As they pass beneath the great lintel stone that marks the entrance of the tomb, Anrakyr turns slightly to address her.
‘I believe this may be the beginning of a prosperous relationship, Praetorian Khemet.’
Kamoteph is watching her, though denied his prying window into her mind. She is glad of this; she is not proud of the Zathanor’s dissolution.
She recalls her conviction in the moment, the necessity of their destruction. But now, with distance from the act, she is ashamed by the transactional manner in which she entered into the Traveller’s service. The ending of a dynasty is a solemn deed, and Khemet traded their holdings to Anrakyr without hesitation to prove her value to his enterprise.
She serves.
Khemet is a part of the Traveller’s court, attaching herself as others have done to his crusading host. She is Anrakyr’s outrider, a harbinger of his approach. She smooths the way for his entreaties with nomarchs and lords. She is warden of the worlds that are swept clean of the intruder races, and shepherd to the nobles who rise from their caskets. At times she is his nemesor, commanding armies in his name.
She becomes his most trusted proxy, and she is content. The Traveller’s quest aligns with her praetorian’s duty, and she finds much to respect in the overlord. He is the consummate phaeron, adept in matters of both war and state. The codes of honour that bind the strata of necron society are enforced within his court firmly yet fairly, and often by Khemet’s own hand. After millions of years of wandering, of isolated acts of service to an abstract ideal, to have her course set by the will of one whom she trusts is to shed an immense burden.
For a time, she is content. But then her duty takes her to the crownworld of Lazar.
‘What is it?’ He sees her stutter, even going so far as to stretch out a hand in aid.
‘None of your affair.’ She will not share this with him. She can feel the memories lining up, the engrams queuing in her buffer to be replayed, experienced afresh. She can feel them, and she knows that the shame that is to come is inescapable, because it has already struck.
The enemy charge again.
From atop her Stalker Khemet observes their advance, their lumbering movements captured by the war machine’s scrying tines and fed directly into her mind.
She sees their advance and blunts it. Gauss beams lance from unmasked batteries, peeling away atoms of armour and flesh layer by layer. Canoptek wraiths melt from shrouded bastions, seeming to rise out of the ground itself. Khemet adds the weight of her own weapons, raking the Stalker’s particle shredder across the face of the warriors’ formation. A stream of antimatter meets matter, and the humans are enveloped by elemental fire.
But for each clutch of armoured figures who meet their doom, more press in from the flanks.
They wear a riot of conflicting heraldry. Khemet has identified five distinct factions, their gaudy armour bearing icons of rampant beasts, stooping avians, and a profusion of human heads bleached of flesh. The most numerous call themselves the Silver Skulls, and the light of gauss volleys ripples across their burnished armour.
The Adeptus Astartes, as she has learnt they are named, are the finest warriors the race of humans can produce. They are exemplars of that upstart empire’s strengths and flaws. Brutish creatures, dogmatic and proud. Tactically proficient, though after ten thousand years of incidental engagements Khemet knows the vast majority of their sects to be hidebound and limited in their doctrine.
Sadly, that doctrine is often bluntly effective.
The Stalker takes two small steps, shifting its weight as the ground roils beneath its slender limbs. The humans are bombarding the crownworld from orbit, unleashing crude munitions of enormous weight that bore and burst through ancient rock. Interstitial reports have already told Khemet what she feared – the bombardment is breaking through to the tomb vaults beneath the earth, annihilating tens of thousands of warriors before they can be summoned from their crypts. Worse, their destruction extends through the vaults and down into the world’s crust, triggering tectonic instability that will destroy more than the Adeptus Astartes themselves ever could.
Khemet does not know what summoned the humans to the Lazar crownworld, but she has wasted a significant proportion of her cognitive capacity cursing the accident of their arrival. The crownworld had awoken only eight years prior, the latest dynastic holding to receive the Traveller and his fleet. Its stasis vaults are replete with millions of warriors, to say nothing of the hoards of treasure, artefacts, and antiquities of the bygone age of the necrontyr. Khemet had been left to oversee its animation, another bastion of the resurgent necron empire.
Or so it was meant to be. With fifty more years of work by the crypteks Khemet could have met the humans’ champions with a world’s worth of warriors, and sent them mewling back to their polluted crownworld and its crippled king. But with so little of Lazar’s strength awoken, Khemet could not contest the landing of their troops, nor the bombardment of the planet’s surface.
This, Khemet knows, is a battle she will lose.
But while the first clash will belong to the Silver Skulls and their allies, the war’s outcome will be a different matter. Khemet commands a rearguard action, buying time for all that can be saved to be spared from destruction. Beneath her feet, the crypteks are bypassing all safety protocols to force warriors from their sleep. Capable of following only the simplest of instructions, they are marching in endless ranks into portals spread across the besieged world. These portals carry them in an instant to the crownworld’s brethren, the moons and minor planets that circle the Lazar star.
Even now, the humans’ vessels will be registering the surges of power erupting from the dozen planetoids of the stellar system. Khemet allows herself a brief moment to imagine their horror at the readings of their scrying screens, and the dawning knowledge of the wrath they have awoken.
Not that she can take any satisfaction from what is yet to come. Though she will save what she can, the loss of the crownworld is a grievous blow.
For now, all she can do is punish these augmented humans who have been arrogant enough to assault the necron empire. Khemet grips the Stalker’s controls, and unleashes a blaze of arcane anger.
The shame of defeat is a tangible thing, a knot of recursive code that Khemet cannot purge. But the worst, she can sense, lies ahead. She must follow where this leads.
‘Well met, praetorian.’
The Traveller sits upon his throne. Tapered digits grip the godsteel arms. Sapphire oculars do not waver from Khemet’s faceplate. His great warscythe stands beside the throne near at hand, held erect by subtle magics.
‘Khemet. I had not expected to return so soon to the Lazar worlds.’
The Traveller’s court looks on. In the course of Anrakyr’s crusade he has taken more than just warriors in tribute. Lords and nobles drawn from dozens of tomb worlds now accompany the Traveller, some as admirals, generals and advisors, others merely hoping to achieve such status. They range, in Khemet’s estimation, from the truly capable to the entirely useless, fit only to be hostages against the good manners of their more able dynastic brethren.
The court stands in clusters on the periphery of the chamber, lurking in the shadows of noctilith columns. A few whisper jibes and slander to their neighbours, their vocal emitters pitched at a volume that she can just perceive. They are the bold and the foolish, the ones willing to risk her retribution in the future. Many more, she knows, will be exchanging snide remarks across their interstitial networks, outside her awareness.
The Traveller does not appear to heed their murmurs. He sits, rigid as only a necron can be, oculars fastened on Khemet.
‘But the worlds seem changed since last I passed this way. Depleted, somehow.’
She does not object to his sarcasm, ill-deserved though it is. Khemet knows that she has done all that could reasonably be expected with the force at her command. She has spared much from the wrath of a potent enemy, and bled that enemy through two years of attrition that the human empire could ill afford. The Traveller’s judgement is unfair, unjustified, ignorant of all that she has achieved in service of his ambitions.
But she does not beg for forgiveness, or plead that hers was an impossible task. Stained as she is by failure, before this lord of hosts and before this assemblage of her race’s nobility, Khemet will endure her chastisement.
Few of the gathered lords and viziers would show such stoicism, such is the distance between her people’s highest aspirations and their conduct. But Khemet’s role is to be the paragon, to uphold their empire’s codes of honour in both word and deed.
‘I placed a crownworld in your care, Khemet. The centrepiece of a dynasty. And look what you have allowed to pass.’
The Traveller rises from his throne, a vision of necron majesty. The bronze crest that rises from his crown shimmers in the torchlight. The azure furnace of his central reactor blazes, in contrast to the emerald-green glow that burns within Khemet’s own thoracic cavity.
‘I had such trust in you.’ He takes a slow pace towards her, and another. Each footfall strikes the deck with the chime of an abyssal bell. ‘But I see that this is my error. All that we have achieved together. All that you have done for me. It blinded me to the simplest of facts.’
He comes to a halt a single step from Khemet, forcing her to tilt her head back to meet his gaze.
‘You, my most loyal praetorian, who wears the weight of your years so heavily.’
There is no forgiveness in his tone, no compassion. But neither is there mockery. His manner is that of a forbidding patriarch disappointed in a wayward child.
‘You have laboured for so long. It is only to be expected that you would one day falter.’
This, finally, is too much. The pride of a praetorian can only bear so many insults.
Before she can speak, the Traveller raises his steepled fingers to his faceplate, a picture of imperious contemplation.
‘Yes. You should rest.’
Khemet does not see the threat before it is too late. So certain is she of her position, so inviolate is her rank and role amid the overlord’s court, that she fails to recognise the danger in Anrakyr’s movements. Her familiarity with his proximity blinds her to his intent.
The Traveller extends one hand. His warscythe leaps from its place beside his throne to slap into his open palm. Its jade edge describes a glimmering arc as Anrakyr brings it round and up, cutting towards Khemet’s chestplate.
As the warscythe ascends, light flashing from its edge, Khemet’s chronosense awakens in a violent lurch. The overlord’s movement slows to a crawl, his rising blade less than a cubit from her body.
Through the shock of betrayal, she sees that the strike is not directed at her head or central reactor. Anrakyr does not aim to kill her, but disarm her. Outrage is layered upon the shock that still grips her.
She can do nothing as the blade carves through the necrodermis and reinforcing spars of her forearm. The limb falls away, Khemet’s rod of covenant still clutched in its grip.
A familiar blaze of light floods the chamber, reflecting from the leering faceplates of the Traveller’s court. Khemet does not need to turn to know that a tesseract labyrinth has opened behind her, a portal to a nether dimension of its master’s choosing. Banishment to these prison-realms has been the Traveller’s favoured punishment for centuries; Khemet herself has hurled many unfortunates into their lightless depths. In the dilated seconds before she meets the same fate, the irony is not lost on her.
Anrakyr lashes out with a silver foot, and a monumental impact crashes into her chest. Her thoracic cage buckles, setting off countless alarms that demand but fail to claim her attention.
As she staggers back, lifted from her feet by the force of the blow, Khemet cannot look away from her rod of covenant. The dilation of her chronosense makes it seem to hang in mid-air. The pain-signal of her severed hand has not yet reached her, but Khemet’s outrage at the loss of her icon of office is instantaneous.
In the final moments before she is consumed by the labyrinth’s glare, Khemet locks her oculars on those of the Traveller.
And then there is nothing.
CHAPTER 5
Khemet’s hand is re-forming.
Now she knows the cause of its loss, whatever mental or mechanical block that had prevented its restoration has fallen away. In deference to her restored calm, Khemet has secured the use of a maintenance scarab, rather than stealing the necrodermis from the body of a fellow necron. The construct has clamped itself to her forearm and is steadily extruding a string of living metal from between its mandibles to knit with Khemet’s body. Her morphic field readily accepts the material and shifts it to where it is needed – in a few days, Khemet will be whole again.
Or, at least, her body will be restored.
She has been left undisturbed for several shipboard cycles. Kamoteph has, mercifully, been detained with other duties, leaving her to process all that she now recalls of her imprisonment, and the events that led to it. Though her thoughts are turned inwards, Khemet has returned to her idling, undirected roaming of the Senusret. She still abhors any form of stillness.
