The Twice Dead King: Ruin, page 1
More Necrons from Black Library
THE INFINITE AND THE DIVINE
Robert Rath
INDOMITUS
Gav Thorpe
SEVERED
Nate Crowley
THE WORLD ENGINE
Ben Counter
More Warhammer 40,000 from Black Library
• DAWN OF FIRE •
Book 1: AVENGING SON
Guy Haley
Book 2: THE GATE OF BONES
Andy Clark
• DARK IMPERIUM •
Guy Haley
Book 1: DARK IMPERIUM
Book 2: PLAGUE WAR
• BLACKSTONE FORTRESS •
Darius Hinks
Book 1: BLACKSTONE FORTRESS
Book 2: ASCENSION
• THE HORUSIAN WARS •
John French
Book 1: RESURRECTION
Book 2: INCARNATION
BELISARIUS CAWL: THE GREAT WORK
Guy Haley
RITES OF PASSAGE
Mike Brooks
BRUTAL KUNNIN
Mike Brooks
Contents
Cover
Backlist
Title Page
Warhammer 40,000
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
About the Author
An Extract from ‘The Infinite And The Divine’
A Black Library Publication
eBook license
For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of Mankind. By the might of His inexhaustible armies a million worlds stand against the dark.
Yet, He is a rotting carcass, the Carrion Lord of the Imperium held in life by marvels from the Dark Age of Technology and the thousand souls sacrificed each day so that His may continue to burn.
To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. It is to suffer an eternity of carnage and slaughter. It is to have cries of anguish and sorrow drowned by the thirsting laughter of dark gods.
This is a dark and terrible era where you will find little comfort or hope. Forget the power of technology and science. Forget the promise of progress and advancement. Forget any notion of common humanity or compassion.
There is no peace amongst the stars, for in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.
DRAMATIS NECRONAE
The House of Ithakas
Unnas, The dynast and king of Ithakas, equivalent in rank to a phaeron.
Djoseras, Kynazh and eldest scion of Ithakas, next in line to the throne.
Oltyx, The youngest scion of the Ithakas Dynasty; once kynazh and second in line to the throne, but now exiled and appointed as Nomarch of Sedh for the last three centuries.
Hemiun, Royal vizier of Ithakas, appointed despite his lowlyheritage.
Zultanekh, Heir to the throne of the Ogdobekh Dynasty, and a commander of their forces.
Oltyx’s subordinate minds
Doctrinal, Derived from Oltyx’s understanding of Ithakan and necrontyr royal culture.
Strategic, Derived from Oltyx’s abilities as a general and a logician.
Combat, Derived from Oltyx’s aggression, martial prowess and close-combat instinct.
Analytical, Derived from Oltyx’s raw capacity for processing and analysing data.
Xenology, Derived from Oltyx’s grudging interest in, and loathing for, alien species.
The Council of Sedh
Mentep, A cryptek from an unknown dynasty, who has come to Sedh to research the flayer curse. An engrammancer.
Xott, A canoptek reanimation construct.
Yenekh, High Admiral of Sedh, known as the Razor for his prowess in Szarekh’s war, and one of the world’s few remaining nobles of high rank.
Neth, Praetor of Sedh, and warden of the garrison, assigned to the service of the nomarch.
Lysikor, A low-ranking noble from elsewhere in Ithakas, who is technically a nemesor after killing everyone who outranked him before they could wake.
Borakka, The Red Marshal. Formerly a common soldier, now a war machine afflicted with the Destroyer curse.
Brukt, Like Borakka, but significantly less sophisticated.
Denet, Sedh’s Master of Monoliths – a once great general afflicted by severe pattern ataxia.
Parreg, Sedh’s Agoranomos
Taikash, Sedh’s Polemarch
Erraph, Sedh’s Dikast
What is this self inside us, this silent observer,
Severe and speechless critic, who can terrorise us
And urge us on to futile activity
And in the end, judge us still more severely
For the errors into which his own reproaches drove us?
– Verse attributed to the scribe Eliot of Britania,
in the first millennium of the Age of Terra
Do not speak arrogantly, my friend; why give water to a beast at dawn before its slaughtering in the morning?
– Fragment of a text by Imenyâs-son-Imena,
of Ancient Gyptus, predating the Age of Terra
EXILE
CHAPTER ONE
PATHETIC CREATURES
‘How has it come to this?’ growled Oltyx to himself, his voice low as the frozen wind, as he noticed the creature bleeding out on the flagstones. Once, Oltyx had been the brightest scion of an empire that had ruled a thousand stars. The kynazh, no less: third foremost of the great House of Ithakas, and destined one day for the dynastic throne. But things had not worked out that way, and he had ended up here.
Sedh: a ball of toxic sleet so enfeebled it no longer spun, but wallowed in place, with one hemisphere forever turned towards its dying sun. A desolate fringeworld, home only to outcasts and lunatics, on the very edge of Ithakan space. When Dynast Unnas had robbed Oltyx of his birthright and cast him from the royal house, he had appointed him as Sedh’s nomarch. Exiled him, in other words, to an endless twilight spent fending off incursions of vermin from beyond the border. And now, going by the shivering green lump beginning to stain the snow in the corner of his vision, it seemed the resources required to do that properly were slipping beyond his reach.
Even a lowly nomarch was above the vile work of clearing up organic waste. But Oltyx could already feel his doctrinal partition, where the first of his subminds sat, growing noisy with outrage over the intrusion, and he knew from bitter experience that it would not cease its hectoring until he dealt with the wounded thing himself.
Weary is the head that wears a crown, he thought blackly, and began descending the broad steps from the tomb’s entryway, down to where the intruder lay.
The Ossuary’s gates were fronted by an austere portico, shaped from a ledge jutting out from the cliff into which the complex was built. Oltyx had been standing in its shadows for the last twelve hours, staring gloomily out over the infantry picket. The intruder, no doubt, had thought him to be just more architecture: a weather-beaten statue of a skeletal giant, as still and lifeless as the columns beside it. But if it had looked closer through the gathering snow, it would have seen the faintest smouldering of emerald fire, like dying coals in the hollows between his iron ribs. Now, as his anger welled up from his deep core-flux, those coals caught flame, spreading their fury to the discharge nodes arrayed across his frame, until they glowed bright enough to cast a green halo on the snow where he passed.
Oltyx’s anger never truly receded. It was always there, waiting for a reason to rise. And now, it had several. He was angry at the legions, who were meant to be an extension of his own hand, for their failure in holding the line. He was angry at those who had cast him out and reduced him to this. But most of all, he was angry at the creature.
Sedh might have been an inconsequential holding, and his posting there a calculated insult from Unnas. But frigid, poison-throttled backwater though it was, it was still a world of Ithakas, and of the necrontyr. Their claim, staked an eternity ago, could never be conceded. Every inch of land within those ancient bounds, even a rock so meagre as Sedh, was kemmeht: ground fit only for gods and their servants, sacred beyond the comprehension of flesh. No place for the living.
This tomb was a place more sacred than most. The Grand Ossuary, while nothing compared with the tombs of the crownworld Antikef, was the greatest of Sedh’s sepulchral complexes. It was the bastion and resting place of this outpost’s lords, and those who had risen maintained their quarters here still, while its galleries were home to those still trapped in the long sleep. And in its deepest catacombs, of course, lurked the grim, ever-swelling crowd of those who had woken, only to slip into the second death of the
Ithakas had woken far earlier than its neighbouring dynasties, and the Ossuary had stood as a frontier bastion during those fierce, proud years of reclamation. It had remained unbreached through the long centuries that followed, despite endless incursions from the land-hungry upstart species of the Unclean. Even as the dynasty had begun to slip into decline, its sanctity had been preserved, thanks to the tireless vigil of Sedh’s dwindling garrison. But now, on Oltyx’s watch, its stones had been befouled.
The interloper had only made it as far as the Temenos, the sacred precinct bordering the tomb’s entrance. But as the pious whisper from his doctrinal partition was already reminding him, that was a severe enough transgression.
The scar conferred on my master’s honour, it sneered, dripping with patrician disdain, will be indelible.
Oltyx examined the intruder, and agreed. The defilement had been achieved at the hand of perhaps the most pathetic of all the Unclean creatures encountered by Oltyx in his long existence. Glowering at the thing, he cued his xenology partition for a designation.
Grohtt, his fifth submind told him after a moment, is this thing’s name in the tongue of the orks.
‘Grohtt,’ murmured Oltyx out loud, after turning the word over in his vocal buffer like a wad of something foul. If nothing else, the enemy had a talent for onomatopoeia. The beast looked exactly as revolting as its name sounded. Snivelling, and wheezing through a punctured chest, the runtish green thing was the embodiment of furtive, animal cowardice. It was durable, though. The slave-beast had hauled itself two khet from where it had fallen at the infantry line, and had leaked a long smudge in the ash-grey snow, which repulsed Oltyx most of all.
‘Why can it not just die,’ he wondered aloud, to nobody but himself, ‘without wiping itself everywhere?’
Now, to his acute disgust, it had hooked a single, filthy talon over the bottom stair, and had begun pulling itself up. Oltyx swept down the last few steps to intercept it, swift and silent as a swooping raptor. He was, by now, extremely annoyed.
There had been eight waves of the grohtts so far, driven from the ork line to rush across the snow-sludge plain at the Ossuary. Whether the orks were fool enough to hope to exhaust the defenders’ ammunition, or just found it entertaining to send their thralls to their deaths, Oltyx had no idea. They were as stupid as they were cruel, after all. Either way, wave after wave had been cut down like reeds at the necron line, extinguished with archaic efficacy, despite the garrison’s woeful state of disrepair. Or at least, Oltyx had thought that had been the case. This survivor, apparently, had found the limit of his garrison’s capabilities. It probably thought it was lucky. But Oltyx would show it the opposite was true.
He towered over it, motionless as the gateway columns once more, as he waited for it to look up. When his title had been taken from him, he had undergone a rite of excoriation, which had burned the shining silver finish of Ithakas from his carapace. Left behind was the raw sublayer of his necrodermis, rough as lava rock and dark as night, with the pinpricks of his discharge nodes spread across it like constellations of green embers. They would be invisible to the grohtt’s vantage, however, drowned out by the blazing of the glyphic cartouche on his thorax – the dynastic sigil, lit directly by his core-fire. And above that, the baleful glow of his oculars, as he stared down at the alien in contempt.
Oltyx coaxed the tame, compact star of his core into a higher burn-plateau, radiating even more energy through his flux, so his lights would begin to edge from green into searing white. As the reactor rumbled, the dirty snow began to hiss into steam where its flurries brushed his carapace, making his ire into something tangible. Though it was scant remedy for the defilement, he could at least ensure the wretch spent its last moments overcome with awe and dread.
The grohtt peered up at him, red eyes squinting down the length of its hideous proboscis, and bared the jagged yellow nubs of its teeth. It regarded him for a long time, quaking with cold as it died, but it didn’t look particularly awed. If anything, it looked confused. Eventually, with a cackle that became a wet, wracking cough, it spat a great glob of black mucus onto his footplate.
That was enough, at last, to transmute his anger into fury. It began as something cognitive – a matter of rapid-collapse logic states, refrenations and cascading induction failures. But his mind and body were no longer truly separate, and soon the discord surged through him with the roiling currents of his core-flux. Along with it rode the phantom sensation of having once had blood, and the unexpected revulsion tore away the last of Oltyx’s self-control. His heel flattened the creature’s skull, the grohtt sullying him further with a spray of cranial fluid, and fury-patterns wracked his discharge nodes through the steam that wreathed them.
When it became aware of the gore-clots fanned across his leg plating, his doctrinal submind was scandalised.
Fl*sh! it wailed, before falling into a horrified susurration of Taboo, Taboo, Taboo, as it queued a needless quantity of cleaner scarab summons to his interstitial node. But Oltyx swiped the whole stack away. After the submind had spent so long needling him over lost honour, he would gladly endure the mess, if only to make the pompous little ghost suffer. However, there were other consequences due, and so he muted its shrieks.
‘Praetor Neth!’ he boomed over the howling wind, the rough iron of his voice echoing down the snow-crusted friezes of the Ossuary wall. ‘Come, warden, and account for yourself.’
To a mortal, the praetor would have been a sight to inspire terror. Almost as tall as Oltyx himself, and broader across his armoured shoulders, Neth had been a commoner in life, but had served faithfully and arduously enough to earn an eternity of conscious service as the warden of Sedh’s garrison. He suspected the praetor thought of himself as a vargard of sorts to the nomarchial throne – but if so, he was mistaken. Oltyx’s rank might have been lowered to this posting, but his standards remained those of a kynazh; the likes of Neth would only ever be fit to direct the mindless ranks of the peasantry on his behalf. And here, the orders provided could not have been more simple: Neth had been given fifteen of the garrison’s most intact legions of warriors, and told to hold the line at the Temenos’ edge.
But Neth was a fool, with a mind full of holes. Degraded by the pattern ataxia that beset so many, he had been in a poor state even back when Oltyx had inherited him with the garrison, and he had only grown worse with time. All too often now, he could barely hold a sentence together, let alone a line of battle. And like the countless others in his condition or worse, he could never be repaired.
Neth knew it, too. Oltyx could see his shame in the way his head hung as he walked through the falling snow. The praetor was… cringing, his discharge nodes rippling with shame-patterns that only served to stoke the violence thrumming in Oltyx’s core. Even the grohtt had faced him with more courage, thought the nomarch, as Neth knelt before him with a grinding of time-worn joints.
‘A th-thousand apologies, my lord,’ croaked the praetor, actuators stuttering and distorting around the words. ‘Th… they… are many, however, and the ph-phalanxes are spread too th… thin along the line. We–’
‘You were required to make do with what was provided you, praetor,’ said Oltyx in a stentorian rumble, underscored by the sizzle of snowflakes on his glaive, as an exhumation protocol brought it to hand from the dimensional appendix that served as its sheath. ‘My word was clear – nothing was to pass the line. Repeat the rest of my command, praetor.’
‘My nomarch, I… beg you…’
‘Repeat my command!’ spat Oltyx, vocal actuators fuzzing from the force of his anger, as he sent Neth sprawling with a blow from the glaive’s butt. The praetor did not say a word as he clattered down three more steps, just rose stiffly into a kneeling position once more. His slowness was agonising to watch, but this was no time to let pity take root.
‘These s-s-sacred stones are not to be defiled,’ recited the praetor hopelessly, ‘until you, yourself, ha-v-v-v-ve fallen in their defence.’
‘And yet, the stones are defiled,’ reasoned Oltyx, with a gesture at the carcass. ‘Insufficient.’ He let the silence stretch, and when he spoke again, he let the vibration of his actuators take on the softness of deep foreboding. ‘All is not lost, however. It would seem there is a contingency yet open to you, praetor, allowing you to honour the spirit of my command. In retrospect, at least.’
