The Twice-dead King: Reign, page 20
Darkness made visible, thought Oltyx, remembering the phrase from one of Mentep’s endlessly quoted homeworld epics. Like Am-heht’s carapace, he saw now, as his recognition array retrieved what refrenation-damaged images it could from the moments when he had looked directly upon the warlock.
For all the unfathomable complexity of the science with which Mentep had cracked it open, this was a brutally simple place. It was so stripped-down, so abjectly barren, that Oltyx even fancied he understood why Am-heht had sneered at the idea of calling it a place at all. It was nowhere in the most profound sense – the nothingness which lay not just in the cracks between dimensions, but in the cracks between the cracks. And since it was nowhere, Oltyx figured, perhaps it could be anywhere, too.
But the king of Ithakas was no philosopher, and saw little point in postulating. The one thing he was sure of was this: for all the reasons his people had disliked the sea, and subsequently the void too, he despised the ghostwind. The necrontyr had been a people of land and of sun, and their deathless successors were beings with literal star-stuff at their cores. This place was anathema to everything they had ever been.
Oltyx could see it, in the way the groups of shipless nobles clustered fractionally closer together across the bridge. Fear. Or if not fear, at least a discomfort which tessellated very closely with the shape of fear. It was subtle, of course. It might not even have been tangible, to one who had not been adjacent to fear so often as Oltyx had. He suspected the nobles themselves, even, did not realise what they felt. But he could see it. It was there, elemental and atavistic: a dreadful, immense sense of hunger to the dark, which he had only encountered once before.
It had been on the day of biotransference, as the C’tan themselves had drifted, vast and tattered, through the ash-plumes of the immolated necrontyr. The evocatory medium had taken Oltyx’s only memory of that day, but the echo of that hunger, that malevolence, could never be expunged.
‘Szarekh’s tears!’ cursed Yenekh, breaking Oltyx from his thoughts. ‘Does nothing work here?’ The admiral was stood at a tactical display of the fleet, most of which was glowing error-blue, in a way the dynast suspected it was not meant to. ‘Once again, recalibrate your carrier wave arrays and repeat yourself, Shipmaster Phyranasz.’
After a few moments, a reply came back, but it sounded as if the speaker was whispering through a hurricane of static.
‘…the recko… …refrena…. attempt…. Onc…’
‘It’s no use, shipmaster,’ barked Yenekh, increasing the volume of his vocal actuators, as if shouting would make a difference. ‘You are not getting through at all. I am going to try something a little more basic.’
The mangled connection broke off, and Yenekh peered distractedly at the ceiling for a moment, as he delved invisibly through the interface protocols linking him with the Akrops.
‘Radio waves, of all things,’ he murmured to himself, hands crabbing at his cloak in frustration. ‘Reduced to the standards of the Unclean. But let’s give it a try. Shipmaster Phyranasz?’
‘Receiving you,’ answered a deep voice, wobbly with distortion, but at least comprehensible.
‘Likewise,’ confirmed Yenekh. ‘Be advised, shipmaster – it seems anything making use of interstitial transmission, either of data or matter, cannot be relied upon here. I am hereby forbidding all translation protocols, with immediate effect. Expect me to forbid more things, as their danger becomes apparent. For now, restrict yourself to zero-level electromagnetic frequencies only for communications, understood?’
‘Ack… ledged, admiral,’ crackled Phyranasz, and Yenekh began the process of hailing the next ship.
‘What appears to be the problem, admiral?’ asked Oltyx, with a sense of foreboding.
‘I’m afraid I know little more than I detailed just now, my king – it seems virtually every shipboard process relying on our more advanced technological principles is either hobbled, or entirely non-functional. I have spent altogether too much time since we entered this place just trying to coax confirmation of arrival from the rest of the fleet.’
‘What of the drives?’ Oltyx asked, with a sting of concern.
‘There’s the good news, at least,’ said Yenekh. ‘It is hard to get accurate data, due to our diagnostic systems being out as well. But I would hazard a guess they are moving us faster than they have managed since the beginning of the voyage.’
‘And our weapons?’
‘Functional too, thank the Triarch, barring a gun or seventeen on this ship, and several more on the escort cruisers. But they have only undergone testing cycles so far – we won’t know their practical worth until they have been fired in battle.’
‘Let us hope for no battles, then,’ said Oltyx, and as he thought it through, something dreadful occurred to him. With all interstitial technology down, as Yenekh had already said, there could be no translation protocols cast within the ghostwind. And such protocols, of course, were responsible for recalling fallen warriors to their home ships for reconstruction. If that could not be done, then in the event of a fight, their every trooper, from the shambling warriors to Oltyx himself, would be truly annihilated at the moment of their destruction.
Durable as their bodies yet were, for as long as they remained in the ghostwind, the dynasty’s survivors had regained mortality of a sort. Still, while Oltyx was getting used to the impossible happening on an exhaustingly regular basis these days, it seemed at least highly unlikely that they would encounter combat before reaching Drazak.
At Drazak, however, who knew, wondered Oltyx. If they got to the end of this road, and it transpired the Bone King was real, then it seemed foolhardy in the extreme to presume his benevolence.
The thought of Drazak brought the sigil from the hollows swimming back into his optic buffer, along with the last time he had seen it, being gouged into a collapsed tomb by the glass-sharp flensing talons of a Flayed One. Oltyx had never been under the illusion that the exodus fleet’s flight from Ithakas would have magically left the curse behind, and he had always been resigned to the fact the curse would take new victims during their flight. Resigned, maybe – but not prepared.
The sight of the sigil itself had shaken him so profoundly that he had abandoned the security of his habitual pessimism, repeatedly telling himself that the scratch must have been made on the world that particular bank of stonework had been taken from. That it was simply a poor carving of one of the lesser-used glyphs, that happened to look a little like the sign he had seen on Antikef. It could conceivably have been Sozusza, the glyph of deliverance, interpreted by the hand of a mason experiencing severe pattern ataxia.
But Oltyx knew better than to believe such comforting fictions. There was no mistaking the hand – or the talons – which had carved that sign. And Oltyx knew he would be a fool to ignore the evidence of a new infestation. It was common wisdom that the more Cursed accumulated in a place, the more fell into madness to join them.
Mentep, of course, had always maintained that this was nonsense, and that there was nothing contagious about his ‘Longing Sickness’. But Oltyx was in no mood to rest on the cryptek’s good word – especially not in this realm of maddening, ravenous darkness, itself like a manifestation of Llandu’gor’s hunger.
Maddening, ravenous darkness…
Something happened in Oltyx’s memetic buffer then, as two ideas, formerly unconnected, snapped together like a pair of magnets and formed a notion too powerful to dispel. At first, the notion thrilled Oltyx, for it finally gave him a way to put Mentep to the test, and a way to gain a measure of power over the cryptek at last. But behind the thrill came horror. Because if the notion was correct, Oltyx would have no choice but to tear down so much of what was left of his world.
The dynast of Ithakas stared out into the blackness of the ghostwind, hoping against hope that he might somehow forget the idea in all that emptiness. But then, to his surprise, the dark was not empty. Standing outside, under the infinite midnight, was a lone figure clad in bloodstained gold. It gazed in at him with its single, knowing eye, cold as the ghostwind itself behind its death mask, and spoke.
You know what you must do.
Oltyx knew.
‘Yenekh,’ said the king mildly, turning to the admiral hunched over his error-plagued tactical display. The Razor’s head snapped up from his work at the sound of Oltyx’s voice. With his body hunched under the folds of his cloak, he seemed almost like a carrion flyer, pulling its blood-guilty jaws from a carcass on hearing the footfall of a predator.
‘My king,’ replied Yenekh, with an awkward, bobbing half-bow.
‘You have been vexed too long by these trivial communications issues… It is time you took a break. Parreg?’
‘Aye, my liege,’ said the Agoranomos, from across the bridge. Sensing something in Oltyx’s tone, perhaps, many of the displaced nobles on the bridge were slyly turning their faceplates to watch the developing exchange.
‘You would be willing to pick away at these… signal problems while Yenekh is relieved, would you not?’
‘With pleasure,’ replied the Agoranomos, sounding like he meant it.
‘Very good. Now, Razor, come with me. It would do us both some good to get out from the gaze of this oppressive darkness, would it not?’
Yenekh’s vocal actuators began wrestling with a reply, but abandoned the attempt when the bridge’s central doors opened. The metronomic clash of silver and steel filled the room, as Pakhet strode in with phase blade and shield in hand, and nine lychguard formed up in an implacable silver wedge behind her. Now the lords were definitely paying attention.
‘I hope you don’t find it rude that I invited my guards to join us, Yenekh. You never know what you’ll find in dark corners, after all.’
That was what the assembled nobles heard. But to Yenekh, Oltyx appended a ripple of nodal light, in the code they had used to keep each other’s secrets for so many years.
‘Or maybe, Razor, I know exactly what I will find in the dark. And so do you.’
The procession of battle-ready guards left a storm of whispers in their wake as they trooped through the ship towards the entry to the hollows, with Oltyx at their head, and Yenekh at the heart of their formation. It was clear from the heaviness in the king’s steps that he did not walk towards pleasant business, and from the snatches of conversation he caught on the periphery of his passing, it seemed Yenekh was doing a poor job of concealing his nerves.
Fleetingly, Oltyx wondered if he was not being too cruel to Yenekh. He did not doubt that the admiral’s declaration of fealty had been sincere, after all. But if Oltyx was right – and with every step he took, he was more certain that he was – then Yenekh’s oath had been empty, regardless of its sincerity.
Royalty was nothing but cruelty formalised, Oltyx reminded himself, to drive the weakness away.
‘It is a fascinating thing, this ghostwind,’ said Oltyx, as he marched his silver tide into Mentep’s enclave at the ship’s heart.
‘It is,’ said Mentep.
This time, he did not continue his work as the king addressed him. After taking one look at the lychguard, and a second at Yenekh, he carefully put down his phase scalpel, and rose to his feet. Xott loomed from the dark behind him, but Mentep laid a slim, mist-white hand on the canoptek’s neck, and it backed away again.
‘Let us not chase the point around like a wounded beast,’ said Mentep, with a resignation in his tone that was as sweet as the memory of sulphur-
wine to Oltyx. ‘Do what you have come to do.’
‘No,’ stated the king. ‘I have been thinking, and I have a question to ask of wise Mentep.’
‘Ask, then.’
‘Can you believe, Mentep, that in all our discussion of your conclave’s works, and the applications of this strange reality we travel through even now, we never touched on the role it might play for the victims of your Longing Sickness?’
‘And what role do you suppose that is?’ asked Mentep, without emotion.
‘They are said to have secret spaces, are they not? A reality all of their own, it is said, where they heap their corpses. Through which they burrow.’ Oltyx found himself spitting the word, as anger rose unbidden. ‘A hole, Mentep, for them to hide in.’
These last words came out like spilt reactor coolant, and as Oltyx spoke them, the blade of his glaive shimmered green, as it came alive in the dark.
‘Am I right, Mentep?’
‘It is plausible, Oltyx.’
Oltyx raised his faceplate with its shorn-off jaw, and admired the jumbled labyrinth of stone where Mentep had made his lair.
‘A remarkable ship,’ he murmured, letting every word spoken calmly feed the rage beneath. ‘To think, we fly in a vessel so grand, it holds whole tombs in its belly. So many tons of patient stone, being ferried to new and sacred ground! I would bolster my spirits, Mentep, by seeing more of the treasures in this store. I see you have replaced your workstation, since my last visit. Replaced it with a heavier one, indeed. Would you move it, so that I might inspect the grandeur it is surely stacked upon?’
‘There is no need for this, Oltyx,’ said Mentep, scorn igniting the amber of his ocular into a fierce coal. ‘Do you not know theatre was made a crime, in the earliest days of the homeworld? If you–’
‘Alas, cryptek,’ said Oltyx softly, ‘if you will not accede to my request, I shall move your work for you.’
Lunging forward like a wild beast, Oltyx threw his hillside of a shoulder into the sarcophagus, rocking it sideways. Before it could fall, he jammed his fingers beneath its base, so they were wedged there when it crashed back down. His nocireceptors reacted as if his carapace were flesh, telling him his hands were crushed to jelly, but the shock of it only deepened his relish for destruction. Priming his actuators with a final, fierce hiss of core-flux, Oltyx bent to a crouch with his hands beneath the colossal stone casket, and then extended in a single, monstrous lift. Even in Mentep’s bubble of gravity, the sarcophagus cleared the ground entirely, landing with a splintering smack, and then a tinkling, as all the cryptek’s equipment that had been stacked on top fell and shattered.
There was a dark, rough-hewn hole in the stone where the sarcophagus had sat. And from it, choking Oltyx’s chemoreceptors to the point of saturation, rose the sweet stench of rotting flesh.
‘Please, Razor,’ said Oltyx with stone-still menace, ushering Yenekh towards the opening. ‘You go first.’
They splashed as they landed. It was pitch dark down in the pit, but Oltyx’s oculars were ready, and immediately switched wavelength to infra-red. What he saw, however, exceeded the worst of his imaginings. He had expected a bolthole, or a small warren at worst. But the chamber was vast – a catacomb, filling the entirety of the accreted tomb-mass in the hollows.
It was awash in charnel. Viewed with heat made visible, the vile cavern was as bright as day, pocked here and there with darker spots, where the empty mouths and eye sockets of corpses gaped. Sweltering heat hovered over the landscape of decay, along with thick swarms of flies, and the air was saturated with moisture, to the point where condensation trickled from the roof in sticky streams. The corpses were human, as he might have expected. Between the sheer number of bodies spilled by the rupturing of transports, and the waves of hopeless boarding actions towards the end of the Akrops’ last battle, there had been no shortage of flesh for those on the hunt.
Oltyx felt somehow detached from himself as he paced the noisome marsh covering the floor. Not long ago, this experience would have broken his mind in one strike. Now, though, it was just more blood. More carnage. More meat. If anything, it felt strangely tranquil down here, in a way the king could not quite make sense of.
But it is an abomination, he reminded himself. And it has been built under my very throne, by those I trusted most. Oltyx felt an undercurrent of relief in his flux, as his wrath took hold once more.
Pakhet’s phalanx had been spared this duty, and so Oltyx marched Yenekh and Mentep towards the centre of the cavern himself, glaive held ready. Here, a mass of bodies hung from scavenged cables, glistening with ropes of exposed muscle and striated sinew where they had been flensed, like clusters of awful fruit. Blocks of glyph-carved tombwork protruded here and there from the putrescent sludge on the floor, and stretched across them, speckled with scurrying insects, were skins.
Yenekh was so consumed with shame at leading his king into this place, that he walked with his oculars turned from as much of the flesh as he could. It was his undoing. Slipping in a rubbery tangle of rot-bloated limbs, the legendary duellist collapsed backwards into the sludge, and his cloak fell open.
It was easy to see, now, why he wore it. For just as Oltyx had expected, his body had become warped. It was stretched in some places and swollen in others, just as Unnas’ had been, distorting the perfect proportions he had been forged with, and making his faceplate look stretched, mean and sly. Even now, Yenekh was rising again, struggling to claw the garment back over his form with too-long fingers, as if he might hide the whole blasphemy around him in doing so. But his movements were slow, addled and clumsy. More disgusted than angry, Oltyx took three steps across the slurry, planted a footplate on Yenekh’s thoracic cartouche, and kicked him back over.
And as the admiral lay and moaned in the filth, Oltyx turned slowly to Mentep.
‘You knew he had the sickness,’ said the cryptek, in an unexpectedly gentle tone. ‘You knew he had the urge to feed. Why do you shame him, for what was inevitable?’
Oltyx shook his head, and waved a gore-splashed arm across the horror of the cavern.
