The Twice-dead King: Reign, page 32
It was a change that affected not just him, but Yenekh too, and the whole of the great, surging pack which ran with them both. For the first time, after aeons spent mentally huddled against an overwhelming sense of doom, every creature in that mass felt a sense of undeniable purpose. More than that, Oltyx knew, they felt that purpose together. Beneath the cacophony and the gore, there was no mistaking the fearsome unity of the necrontyr, which had once given them the strength to topple gods.
And despite the degradation of their minds over years, centuries, aeons of torment, the Flayed Ones knew it. No longer were they exiles or vermin. They were soldiers again, as they had once been, so long ago. None of them had quite forgotten how that felt. And despite the tattered, warped grotesquerie of their forms, their pride had never quite been extinguished.
Oltyx intended to stoke that fire into an inferno. After the slow desperation of shepherding the ever-dwindling resources of the exodus fleet, he suddenly had an army again. He even dared wonder if perhaps Ithakas had never been lost at all; merely transmuted into something else, which he had not been able to see until he had crossed the threshold himself.
In moments, the exile army fell upon its first prey. A great rabble of bilge-dwellers, several hundred of them, were marauding up-ship with whatever weapons they had been able to scrounge from their middens. Whether they sought revenge on Oltyx for those he had killed, or to recapture him for their scrap pile, he did not know. He did not care. All that mattered to him was the brief moment of animal panic he witnessed in them, as they saw a wall of screeching, razor-clawed death come rushing from the dark to claim them.
The bilge-dwellers turned and fled the moment they saw Oltyx’s host, but they never had a chance. The fastest of the kindred accelerated past their king, claws curled, in a bestial knuckle-run, and had sunk their talons into the fleeing humans within seconds. Perhaps half the prey turned to fight, then, and their courage at least earned them a faster death.
It was not an orderly assault that unfolded then. But it was coordinated, on a level Oltyx could not yet fathom. It tessellated, with sub-packs coalescing at random from the melee, and rushing in where others had lost momentum, so that there was always a wall of flickering claws, descending where it was needed most. The feral humans fell like cut reeds. And even as Oltyx led the vanguard onwards, he heard the frantic, wet tearing sounds of feeding behind them, as the fallen were torn to shreds by the next wave to come howling from the chapel’s mouth.
Already, he was leading the frontrunners to fresh meat. And their next feeding would be a feast, as the carnage in the bilge had not proceeded quietly. Sure enough, as Oltyx reached the place where he had seen the shell being winched overhead, through the shattered vault of the ceiling, he heard the piercing wail of an alarm siren drifting from the heights above. His phantasory buffer coruscated with thoughts of the horror that he knew must be spreading in the higher decks now, as a deafening, otherworldly chorus of shrieks rose from the depths of the ship.
He would give the defenders no time to steel themselves. Hanging down through the shattered vault above were clusters of waist-thick winch chains, leading all the way up into the vertical expanse of the gunnery decks. They would take his horde into the very heart of the ship, and before he had even wondered how he might articulate his will to them, they had begun to scale the iron.
Yenekh was the first. Bounding ahead with a fierce, loping stride, he leapt up three times his own height, and hooked his claws onto a link with an explosion of sparks. The horde split itself behind him, according to form. The ranks of the necron legions had ever been identical in shape, but here, any regularity had long been shattered by the ravages of the curse. But the Flayed Ones knew how to address the situation. Rangier, longer-limbed kindred leapt after the Razor to climb the chains, as they were able, while others simply scuttled up the corroded walls of the bilge, as rapidly as insects.
Oltyx was astonished to see them tackle the problem with such decisive alacrity. He had always thought the Cursed to be almost devoid of reason, but the former warriors, he saw, seemed perfectly able to choose their own course up the chasm. There seemed to be no real hierarchy within the mass, beyond the essential recognition of him and Yenekh as their lords.
This… egalitarianism should have seemed offensive, even blasphemous. But however he considered the idea, Oltyx could find only sense in it. Whatever their original status, these creatures had been beaten down to a place from which they could descend no further. They had become kindred in the abyss of their secondary death, and Oltyx saw no reason why they should not rise from the blackness together.
Every few moments, it appeared, Oltyx had to reconsider some long-held certainty of his culture. Since he had risen without the royal glyph on his breast, his whole understanding of what it meant to be an inheritor of the necrontyr had begun to dissolve. And though he had no idea yet of what shape it might reassemble itself into, he could not help but welcome it.
Disorder, uncertainty, change, thought Oltyx, as the first screams and barks of gunfire began to make their way down the chain to him. It was hard to imagine a situation that Djoseras could have been more distressed by. In the end, Oltyx supposed, perhaps he had been the right choice for the throne.
The Polyphemus was a vessel of hideous size, more akin to a nation in flight than a city. Unlike the Tyresias, whose masters had at least paid some heed to the worth of automation, it seemed to be operated, wherever possible, through the application of human toil. Its slave-workers alone, Oltyx guessed, must have numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Then, in addition to the vessel’s naval crew, the warship garrisoned infantry in numbers sufficient to conquer entire planets, as well as throngs of priests, fanatics and unarmed pilgrims.
A conventional boarding by the dynastic legions might have taken days to battle its way through the vessel’s thousands of decks, against this press of organic resistance. And with reinforcements brought in from other ships in the armada, such an operation would have had the potential to become a never-ending stalemate.
Oltyx’s new army, by contrast, moved through the Polyphemus with a speed that defied comprehension. With each minute that passed after their ascent to the gunnery decks, another of the great cannons fell silent, its crew reduced to slurry and blade-hacked bone. Even as the massacre progressed, Yenekh’s exile horde continued to stream in from the bowels of the ship, leaving frost in their footsteps from the cold of the ghostwind. Soon, as more and more districts began to fall dark beneath the tide of claws, the Children of Llandu’gor started to find other points of ingress from the night.
They travelled like a poison in the body of some gargantuan beast, injected from a dozen points at once, and leaving dead flesh in their wake. Surging through the giant ship’s arteries, they sent hunting packs off in new directions every time they reached a branch, and plotted their course with instincts that escaped all human reason. They travelled through the vents and ducts and abandoned places of the ship, skittering silently above and below whatever barricades the crew could erect. The defenders only ever glimpsed them as dark flashes at the edge of vision, or at fatally close range, as they pounced from the shadows behind the humans’ gun nests.
It was not a battle. It was butchery. Soldiers were deployed by the thousand to stem the tide, but they had no hope of success when they did not know where their enemy was coming from. They could only react – and every time they were sent to reinforce a strongpoint, they would arrive only to an empty corridor, sluiced with blood, shell casings and flecks of bone.
The only thing which moved through the ship with greater speed than the kindred, in the end, was the fear of them. Disquiet spread to even the most heavily fortified sanctums of the ship, as position after position fell silent. It was not long before barricades were being abandoned entirely, at the first sign of claws rattling behind the walls.
Then, one of the bloated, half-dead holy men was cut to pieces at his lectern, in the middle of delivering a sermon to a bay packed with nervous pilgrims, and panic sparked at last. Within moments, the ghostwind was alive with desperate, crackling radio transmissions; the whole of the armada was ordered to pull back from the heels of the necrons, and pump troops into the ailing flagship.
But with no Astartes left to swoop from the night and rescue their weakling masters, the response was doomed from the start. For all the dizzying mass of troops pledged to the defence of the Polyphemus within moments of the call going out, their delivery was contingent on the ability of the armada’s logistical clerks to move millions of humans across the void in the space of minutes.
It was almost an hour before the first troops arrived. They came in a great, wallowing bulk carrier, and were cut down in the hold of their own ship, before it had even opened its airlocks. Shortly afterwards, another transport exchanged fire with a ship bearing the heraldry of the Imperial faith, in a conflict over how to clear the lifeless troop carrier from the Polyphemus’ docking array.
Finally, after the exodus fleet had been outmatched time and time again by the sheer mass and manpower of their foe, the human fleet’s scale had at last been made to work against it. Oltyx might have held a developing suspicion that humanity had an inherent cruelty to rival that of the necrontyr. But from that point on, he knew he would rest secure in knowing that his people would always hold the edge as bureaucrats.
Nevertheless, for all the speed with which the assault progressed, it nearly came to nothing, in the end.
Since before Pakhet had fallen, the Polyphemus had been hammering away at the aft hull of the distant Akrops with a pair of primitive, yet brutally powerful directed energy weapons. The cannons were built into a fortified structure on the ship’s dorsal flank, and as soon as the Flayed Ones had begun to spread through the hull, the entire structure had been packed with platoons of the ship’s best infantry, and sealed off with adamantine bulkheads.
Even as the other guns had fallen silent, and even when the crusade’s vanguard had been recalled in panic at the incursion of the Cursed, those two infernal weapons had kept spitting their crude beams into the night ahead, carving chunk after chunk from the Akrops’ perilously fragile remaining armour.
Oltyx and Yenekh had been pushing through the decks of the ship’s spinal ridge, towards the crowning edifice which housed its bridge, when they had realised the peril of the situation. They had been leading a pack down a corridor lined with thick, condensation-smeared armaglass panes, and as the guns had fired, it was as if a sun had ignited suddenly in the dark outside. Immediately after, a corona of faint green light had bloomed in the distance, over the faint gold crescent of the Akrops, and Yenekh’s predatory muzzle had snapped round to fix Oltyx with a look of alarm.
‘Two more shots,’ he had rattled on Oltyx’s armour, ‘and it is over.’
Oltyx had wasted no time, then. Without a further word, he had clubbed at the armaglass beside them with the full mass of his forearm, until it had given way in an explosive blast of atmosphere. And then, pursued by a trickle of spidery black shapes as the Flayed Ones had clambered after them, they had trekked across the Polyphemus’ hull, beneath a starless sky, towards the mountainous guns.
Now, Oltyx watched from just a few khet behind the weapon’s barrels, as the first of the two shots that would kill the Akrops lanced across the dark. Beside him, a seething mass of kindred hacked at the turret’s armour. For all they had excelled in eviscerating the ship’s organic component, they were struggling against solid metal, and Oltyx knew there was no chance they would claw their way in before the weapon could charge again.
It seemed such a pathetic, arbitrary way for things to end, to the point where he struggled even to find anger at the situation. After all that had transpired, how could he have foreseen this? He looked to Yenekh, who had begun to pace restlessly across the frigid hull, and the admiral paused, glancing back. Increasingly, during the terrorisation of the Polyphemus, they had found ways to supplement their communication when Yenekh was beyond arm’s reach – there was a lot, it turned out, that two Flayed Ones could exchange in a shared glance.
There’s nothing we can do.
No. But maybe they might do something.
Oltyx turned back to the distant shape of the necron flagship, labouring under a pall of leaking drive-flux. Beneath his footplates the lance battery was vibrating with increasing frequency, and a wobbling yellow guide-pulse was forming ahead of each of its barrels. If whoever is left intact aboard the old ship is going to do anything extraordinary, he thought, now would be the moment.
That, of course, was when his oculars registered an irregularity in the light reaching them from the Akrops’ sputtering drive banks. It seemed as if a dimensional appendix – the kind used for storing small voidcraft or war machines – was being inverted, directly in the wake of the ship. Oltyx had known of no such assets still in the dynasty’s possession, bar one. And given who possessed that asset, its use could be discounted as an impossibility.
But then, what was that speck of light, perched on the very precipice of the Akrops’ rear arc?
Oltyx cast the magnification protocols of his oculars to their maximum extent, and peered in at the miniscule spot of brightness. It was a necron, he could make out, waving a plainly ornamented sceptre into the void, towards the patch of increasingly distorted emptiness behind the ship. It was difficult to see clearly, through the haze of the unfolding dimensional pocket, not to mention the rapidly intensifying glow from the energy cannon’s barrels. But with just a few seconds left before the weapon fired, Oltyx glimpsed the distant figure’s austere, armoured brow-crest, and rescinded his assumption about what was possible.
The figure was Denet. And at the exact moment that the shot was fired that would kill the Akrops, he summoned the monoliths. Directly into its line of fire.
The ancient constructs only existed in the ghostwind for a fraction of a second before they were annihilated. Denet himself was obliterated by their shrapnel nearly instantaneously. But although a fraction of the beam’s energy had passed through the group of war machines to strike the Akrops, it had been dissipated to a survivable level.
Fifteen seconds later, a plume of freezing gas blasted from the mass of Flayed Ones working at the control tower’s hull, telling Oltyx that one claw-tip at least had broken through. As he turned his back on the Akrops, readying himself for the assault, he found himself hoping there had been time for Denet to realise what he had achieved, before he had been granted rest at last. After three centuries of him going on about those blasted monoliths in the synedrion on Sedh, they had, for a few minutes at least, saved Ithakas from destruction.
Now, it was up to Oltyx.
EPILOGUE
BOATS AGAINST THE CURRENT
Much later, in the silence of the ghost ark’s deck as it ferried him to the Akrops, Oltyx looked back on the shattered derelict that had been the Polyphemus, and wondered exactly when it was that the spirit of the crusade had finally been broken.
After the guns had been silenced, the entire hunger of the exile horde had been directed at the palatial structure housing the Polyphemus’ bridge. It had been a stronghold of planetary calibre, and the command centre at its core had been buried behind a mountain’s weight in armour. Thousands of human soldiers, captained by the fiercest of the crusade’s holy orders, had retreated to its fastness, and there they had waited, with weapons levelled at empty corridors, as they had prayed for relief from the rest of the armada.
That relief would have come, in time: reinforcements had been arriving by the battalion already, in hangars along the length of the ship. But it would take them time to traverse those tangled decks and reach their masters. And the Flayed Ones had already been at their door.
It had begun with the skittering of claws across frozen steel, as the kindred had swarmed over the fortress’ exterior, probing for ways inside. Had the faint ticking of their talon-tips sounded like rain, Oltyx wondered, to the souls trapped within? What images had their minds conjured, in that stifling, sweat-stinking gloom, as they had heard the sharp fingers working at the seams of their final stronghold? Had they realised, then, as the darkness closed in, quite how far they had strayed from the light of their home stars?
Had their faith begun to waver, he wondered, as the first, terse reports had been broadcast, of things half-sighted and scuttling in the darkness of the lower decks? Or when those reports had started ending abruptly, midway through sentences? When lines of petrified riflemen had started backing away from viewports crowded with lifeless, rictus grins, only to feel the feather-light touch of claw-tips on the backs of their necks? When the broadcasts from the outer perimeter had collapsed into a cacophony of screams, and then gone silent altogether, had the defenders of the inner sanctum still been sure their corpse-Emperor would protect them?
They had held their lines, at least. Knowing that midnight had come at last, the holy warriors had moved to their positions in the ring of fortified corridors that surrounded the adamantine-domed vault of the bridge itself, and had steeled themselves to face whatever broke through. Oltyx wondered whether, when the power had died, leaving their breath fogging in the light of their gun-barrel torches, even one of them had guessed that their doom was not going to come from beyond those walls?
Yenekh had taught Oltyx, by then, how the kindred moved through the ghostwind. It was nothing like translation via the interstices. No; it was infinitely more sophisticated than that – and like all sufficiently complex technologies, it felt as effortless as sorcery. Yenekh had asked Oltyx to lead the way, but the king had refused; if anyone had deserved this honour, it was Yenekh. It had been time for the Razor of Sedh to remind the galaxy how his name had been forged.
