Tomb World, page 9
The noble pauses, contemplating the rows of warriors waiting for his command.
‘Kamoteph. Open the gate.’
‘As you command.’ The cryptek’s acolytes have gathered on the chamber floor and now hurry to obey, moving swiftly to the rear of the space where the sharp pillars of an eternity gate stand proud from the wall’s surface.
The gate is tall, ten times taller than is needed to permit even the greatest necron to pass beneath its lintel. A phalanx of warriors could march abreast between its pillars, to emerge wherever a counterpart gateway could be found. The gates are an integral element of necrontyr warfare, carried within monolithic war machines to permit the rapid deployment of force to wherever it was required.
As Kamoteph’s creatures work, Khemet’s gaze is drawn to the warriors in their rows. They are, to be charitable, less than pristine. Each one’s necrodermis is chipped and stained, their oculars dull and listless. Leaking fluids gather at their joints, and the flux of their reactor cores burns with an unclean haze.
Khemet has never enjoyed observing the line warriors of necron phalanxes up close. To consider them with care, to examine the unique patterns of scars and corrosion that mark each one, is to be reminded that they were once individuals. Bakers, carpenters, water carriers – the great mass of serfdom upon whose servitude the necrontyr empire had been built. Better to think of them as a singular mass, undifferentiated, each a tiny and indistinguishable fraction of the mighty whole. Better to think of them as constructs, rather than necrontyr. Rather than as the billion members of a people robbed of their souls and consigned to living death.
Khemet checks her descent into maudlin recrimination. The truth was that the lock-brained warriors before her had been little different before the treachery of the C’tan chained them within their metal skeletons. They had lived, they had died, and neither act had meant anything of consequence for them or for the galaxy.
‘It is a shame that the Traveller did not provide a complement of his Eternals,’ Khemet says. The memory arrives, unbidden, of flawless warriors marching into a hurricane of fire and shrapnel. The Pyrrhian Eternals, hailing from the phaeron’s home world, were an elite legion, hardened and respected troops that had carried their reputation and ability through the treachery of biotransference.
Hekasun ignores the implied insult she gives to his warriors. ‘He offered, but I deemed them unnecessary. We will soon have all the might we require.’
Eagerness makes him forget his habitual scorn for Khemet’s contributions. His gaze remains hungrily locked upon the eternity gate, as though through will alone the lordling will bridge the leagues between his ship and his prize.
Kamoteph’s apprenteks complete their manipulations of the control consoles beside the vast pillars, and at an unspoken command from their master prime the gateway. The Senusret reaches out, questing across the void, through air, through rock, until it finds its match far beneath the surface of Qeretesh.
Khemet feels the briefest pulse of electromagnetism, a slight tug at her carapace, and then the chamber is flooded with emerald light. The quantum tunnel has latched on to another eternity gate, somewhere within the tomb world’s galleries and vaults.
Such doorways had once reminded Khemet of a waterfall she had witnessed on a nameless primordial world. She can remember the feeling, the soft pleasure she had taken in watching the flow of energies across its face evoke a cascade of water over a mountain’s edge.
But now she feels nothing. This new Khemet sees merely a tool, one of many wonders her people forged and mastered in ages past.
Mandulis has detached himself from his lord, and now leads a squad of lychguard out from beneath the observation platform’s lip. These warriors show no sign of the degradation that mars their lessers, the gift of their heightened synaptic powers. Unlike their serf-born peers, lychguard possess sufficient self-awareness to maintain themselves, and even take command over limited elements of a wider battle force.
The royal warden glances up at his lord, and Hekasun waves his vargard forwards. Mandulis and his unit do not hesitate, and set out with gauss blasters held low and ready for use. They reach the threshold of the eternity gate and step forth into its tumult. They are swallowed in an instant.
Slow seconds tick by as Hekasun waits for an interstitial report from his warden. Despite herself, Khemet finds herself gripped by anticipation. It has been too long – far, far too long – since she has walked the corridors of her people’s worlds.
The discordant click of scarab legs warn Khemet of Kamoteph’s approach. The cryptek is bent even lower than usual, hardly able to raise his head and meet Khemet’s ocular.
‘Praetorian.’
‘Cryptek.’
‘It has pleased me to see your recovery in these past weeks. I flatter myself to believe that I played a part in those first days.’
Khemet has no desire to be reminded of her enfeebled state, nor to indulge Kamoteph’s vainglory.
‘And yet, if you will permit me, I still sense some reticence in you. A hesitation to embrace your full power.’
She turns towards him, intent on demonstrating how wrong he is. But the cryptek speaks quickly to forestall her hand.
‘Fortunately, I have something that I believe will address that.’
He passes a hand over his hip, fingers moving in sequence. He summons an object from his pocket dimension, emerging into reality with a soft blaze of light. It is a long and slender staff of godsteel, of a height with Khemet. Each end is bladed, its head crowned with a gem of sublime power and sculpted into the ultimate symbol of authority – the ankh of the Triarch.
It is her rod of covenant.
Khemet moves without thought. She extends a hand and the rod leaps from Kamoteph’s grip and into hers, the shaft slapping her metal palm with the clang of a cracked bell. The blade whirls, and comes to rest with the tines of its sigil enclosing the cryptek’s thin neck.
‘This was not yours to keep.’
Kamoteph bends lower, the segments of his spine extending in its crabbed arch. ‘It was placed into my care by the Traveller, to hold in readiness for your restoration.’
Khemet is tired of those who presume to judge her. She is their judge, their arbiter. With this staff she has ended dynasties, pronounced the fate of worlds, destroyed untold Unclean foes. And yet she is forced into the service of the petulant, the petty and the vain.
‘It was not yours to keep.’ She lifts the blade from his neck.
On the far side of the platform, Hekasun has received an affirmation from his vargard. He leans forwards, and speaks a single word to his warriors.
‘On.’
As one, the phalanx turns away. Their long axe-tipped gauss flayers rise in their grip, coils glowing, and rank by rank they set off. Khemet cannot begin to count the times she has watched warriors stride forth in this manner, stalwart as only the wholly subservient can be.
Hekasun contains himself until the last rank is enveloped by the gateway’s energies, then gestures to his court.
‘Let us depart.’
He leads the way, descending from the observation platform at a pace calculated to project dignity and strength. The nobles behind him march with far less poise and order than their minions. Several have armed themselves with glaives and scythes, in keeping with the martial air of the moment. Hekasun himself wields nothing save the arrogant self-possession that advances before him like a bow wave. In ones and twos, his court cross the chamber floor and disappear into the curtain of viridian light. Kamoteph, with his circle of apprenteks and thrall guardians, and the cryptek Ptah stand ready to follow.
Hekasun stops at the threshold. ‘Duatekh. Attend me.’
Khemet has not joined in the noble’s advance. She lingers atop the platform, her hands slowly turning her staff about her. She watches its bladed head, alight with power. This weapon has been with her for sixty million years. Yet it is far more than a weapon. It is a symbol, which she has carried through the darkest and emptiest nights of a galaxy that grew to forget the necrontyr. To forget the empire that conquered it.
‘Praetorian.’
Khemet deigns to answer Hekasun’s petulant call. She lights the anti-gravity pack in her torso and drifts down to meet him. It is the first time she has woken her powers of flight since her release, and the sensation is potent. This is her place, looking down upon Hekasun and his lackeys, staff in hand.
‘You have one purpose,’ says Hekasun. ‘Do you comprehend it?’
‘Entirely. You ask that I give you a world.’
Hekasun glares up at her. ‘You are to claim for me what is mine. You are a key. A tool. Nothing more. Do not forget that.’
He turns and disappears into the gate. His servants follow.
Khemet lands. The gateway’s face towers over her, boiling with energy, a cascade of power rendered mundane by ancient arcana. It is as familiar as her own faceplate – a doorway to yet another world.
She could remain here. Abandon Hekasun and Kamoteph to whatever fate awaits them on Qeretesh. To face the humans, and their crude and engulfing form of war. She could remain here, abstaining from her duty to defend the tombs of her people out of pique and injured honour.
Khemet looks up at the gate, and steps into its current.
CHAPTER 9
Khemet staggers as she emerges from the curtain of energy, undone not by any enemy but by a wave of relief so palpable it makes her senses blur.
She is home. She has never set foot upon Qeretesh, but she is a praetorian of the Infinite Empire, and every world of that great domain is her home.
A weight she had not been consciously holding rises, a recursive thread of anxiety that has unknowingly wormed its way through her active and passive processes. She is back, returned to the immensity of blackstone halls, the silent peace of the tomb.
Her relief lasts all of a fraction of a second, as Khemet peers into the chamber’s depths and sees the battle unfolding within sight of the eternity gate’s threshold.
The light of the dimensional doorway blazes into the vaulted tomb, illuminating the struggle. The backs of Hekasun’s warriors shine with a dirty green glare, each rib and spar sharp against the darkness. The canoptek constructs they are fighting emerge from the twilight, a chittering horde scuttling and swarming forwards on pincer legs.
The air is alive with the skitter of sharp talons on stone and the shriek of gauss rending metal. Constructs in the forms of spyders, scorpions and wyrms hurl themselves at the thin line of warriors, double-ranked and bent in a crescent with the eternity gate at their back. The chamber in which they fight is small, no more than a dozen khet across, open only on the side facing the gate. The single archway is a hundred cubits high but barely twenty across, constricting the flow of canoptek beasts that seem to come without end.
Khemet has only moments to examine the battlefield before the gate closes, unleashing a plate-glass crash of unchained energies that pushes Khemet away from its breaking face. Tongues of viridian lightning arc into the surrounding stone, and then the only light in the chamber comes from the blaze of necron weaponry.
Khemet’s oculars momentarily struggle to adjust to sudden blackness, streaked through with searing blasts of gauss. A hundred shafts of virulent energy puncture the darkness with each second, each one peeling away metal from the carapaces of the constructs. In reply, kaleidoscopic beams of particle casters lash the necron formation. From above, scorpion-tailed acanthrites trace cutting lances over the bodies of their scuttling kin.
Kamoteph is ahead of her. He has conjured a summoning plate from a pocket dimension, and from its jade face spills a tide of canoptek creatures. Spyders and scarabs, locusts and hawks tumble and fly from the surface of the arcane stone. Kamoteph’s creatures throw themselves into the fray, matching talon with claw and thermal lance with particle beamer.
The intellect behind the constructs that oppose Hekasun’s arrival is clear to Khemet. Each tomb world, like each ship of the necron fleet, is imbued with an autonomous spirit. It is the intelligence that holds the complex together, regulates its function, directs its canoptek servicers to renew its workings and monitor its slumbering occupants. The spirits, even more than Khemet and her fellow praetorians, have been the shepherds of the necrontyr through the long years of the Great Sleep.
Unfortunately, after so long, some spirits are reticent to give up their power.
‘Cease your defiance, Qeretesh. Your lord is come.’ Hekasun’s voice rises above the fray, imbued for the first time in Khemet’s hearing with a fragment of true nobility.
‘NO,’ the tomb world replies. It speaks its denial from vocalisers built into the jaws and mandibles of every construct that assails Hekasun’s force. The single word hammers Khemet’s aural receptors, reverberating from the walls of the tomb itself.
‘Still all defensive constructs. Submit to my dominion.’
‘INTERLOPER. INTRUDER. USURPER.’
The would-be lord stands rigid, one hand extended in the manner of a cryptek casting a spell. Mandulis and his lychguard encircle Hekasun, twin-barrelled gauss blasters shrieking destruction into the acanthrites and scarab swarms that dive and scuttle towards the noble. Fragments of segmented tails and broken mandibles tumble in a metal rain that clatters from the shoulders of the lychguard.
Khemet is impressed; despite his command to her just moments before, Hekasun’s arrogance has led him to challenge the tomb world’s spirit himself.
The noble’s fist is clenched, ocular shields closed, all his energies turned inwards. Khemet is not privy to the battle in which Hekasun is locked, but she knows it well enough. It is not a simple matter of speaking a prescribed word or forcing a coded command past the spirit’s ire. Hekasun is matching wits with an intelligence whose mind is powered by the molten core of an entire world. Scenarios and riddles, conundrums and paradoxes. Across an interstitial link Hekasun is countering puzzle with answer, enigma with solution, hoping to prove cubit by cubit that he holds the authority to command Qeretesh and all it holds.
‘I come vested in the power of the Zathanor. I bear their sigil. I speak their rites.’
Every construct bellows the tomb world’s dissent. ‘YOU ARE NOT MY LORD.’
Hekasun stands firm. ‘But I will be.’
Khemet has broken the will of a tomb’s spirit, severed of its master’s hand. It was a malignancy that had shed its purpose and forced its way into the minds of those whom it was meant to serve. The effort had almost broken her in both mind and body, and she had sacrificed an entire legion of warriors to shield her from the tomb world’s death throes.
But this is not the case with Qeretesh. Khemet can feel it, as she tentatively stretches out into the interstices. Qeretesh is not a severed world, maddened by aeons of isolation and lashing blindly at all who approach. It defends its hearth from intruders, lords of foreign dynasties intent on plunder and usurpation. Qeretesh is acting precisely as its directives require.
The blinding beams of particle casters lash at the noble’s warriors, stripping living metal from their skeletal forms. As Khemet watches, the warrior closest to her drops, its leg severed at the hip. Its fire stutters, but from the ground its gaunt head rises, and its flayer follows the warrior’s gaze. A beam of jade light coughs forth from its end, and the broken creature continues its fight.
‘Praetorian.’ Kamoteph’s call pierces Khemet’s mind like an arrow from a bow. ‘Will you join us?’
The cryptek is right. She has been a spectator for long enough. Khemet lights the anti-gravity pack that forms the greater part of her torso and leaps into the air.
A flight of acanthrites immediately change their course, voidblade tails lunging for her. With three broad slashes she carves the constructs into halves that tumble to the ground. Khemet stills her lifting pack, and allows the ballistic curve to carry her over the warriors’ line and into the midst of the charging torrent.
She lands with her rod of covenant outstretched, and thrusts into the cognitive stem of a lunging wraith. The blade shears through its skull and the construct crumples. More come, and more are destroyed, hacked to shards. The energised top and tail of her staff describe a whirling arc about Khemet’s body, dismembering all that approach. A wraith leaps high over its kin, whip tail extended, and Khemet unleashes a blast of energy that burns through the construct’s thorax in an instant.
This is not how she imagined her return to the cauldron of combat, but it is undeniably cathartic.
Khemet hacks her staff through the abdomen of a spyder, then spins aside as a wyrm charges with the aim of smashing her to the ground. As Khemet recovers herself, an azure beam of light stabs down from somewhere far above her and punches through the skull of a leaping locust. The praetorian deftly steps aside as the construct crumples into a heap, inertia throwing it headlong into the front rank of the phalanx. More shots lance out of the darkness; Ahnuret has joined the fray.
To her left, one of Kamoteph’s raptors catches a wraith by its snaking tail and hurls it over the heads of its peers, only to be borne down onto the stone by a brace of spyders. To her right, Ptah wields the glowing shaft of an eldritch lance, blasting a torrent of plasma into any construct that approaches. Behind the line of warriors, Hekasun’s court fire thermal lances and throw out particle whips, participating loyally if not particularly effectively.
If Hekasun cannot overcome the tomb’s spirit, they will all die here. The tomb world’s reanimation circuits will reject the engrams of the interlopers in its midst. The complex can call upon millions of constructs, and swamp Hekasun’s warriors beneath a tidal wave of claws and blades and rending jaws. It is only a matter of attrition.
But Khemet can prevent that.
For a moment, Khemet allows herself to indulge in the swell of power this knowledge brings. The choice is hers. Continued existence, or permanent death for Hekasun, Kamoteph, and all his minions. Now she is truly restored, not by the rod of covenant in her hand but by the decision set out before her.
