IN THE HALLS OF YSSARILE
LEAVES OF DARKNESS
IN THE NAME OF THE HOLY GOD-EMPEROR
Someone, somewhere close by, was using one of those damned shuriken catapults. I could hear the jhut! jhut! jhut! of the launcher mechanism and the thin, brittle sounds of the impacts.
There was blood in my mouth, I noticed. I’d worry about it later. Crezia would fuss no doubt. ‘You should not be doing this,’ she had warned me fiercely in the infirmary of the Hinterlight.
Well, that’s where she was wrong. This was the Emperor’s work. This was my work.
‘Moving up,’ Nayl said over the intervox. ‘Twenty paces.’
‘Understood,’ I replied. I stepped forward. It was still an effort, and still very much a surprise to feel my body so wretchedly slow. The crude augmetic braces around my legs and torso weighed me down and forced me to plod, like an ogre from the old myths.
Or like a Battle Titan, I considered, ruefully. One heavy footstep after the next, lumbering to my destiny.
It was the best work Crezia and Antribus had been able to manage given the time and the resources available. Crezia had passionately wanted me confined to vital support until I could be delivered to a top level Imperial facility.
I’d insisted on being mobile.
‘If we throw together repairs now,’ she had said, ‘it’ll be worse in the long term. To get you walking we’ll have to do things that no amount of later work can repair, no matter how excellent.’
‘Just do it,’ I’d said. For the opportunity to reach Pontius Glaw, I’d happily sacrifice prosthetic sophistication. All I needed was function.
Barbarisater trembled in my right fist as it sensed a bio-aura, but I relaxed. It was Kara Swole.
She jogged back down the chasm towards me, dressed in a tight, green armoured bodyglove and a thick, quilted flak coat. She had a dust visor on, and a fat-nosed compact handcannon slung over her shoulder.
‘All right, boss?’ she said
‘I’m doing fine.’
‘You look…’
‘What?’
‘Pissed off.’
‘Thank you, Kara. I’m probably annoyed because you and Nayl are having all the fun taking point.’
‘Well, Nayl thinks we should tighten up anyway.’
I voxed back to the second element of our force. In less than two minutes, Eleena and Medea had joined us. Along side them came Lief Gustine and Korl Kraine, two men from Gideon’s band who had subbed as reinforcements, as well as Gideon’s mercenary archaeologist, Kenzer.
‘Moving up,’ I told them.
‘You managing okay, sir?’ Eleena asked.
‘I’m fine. Fine. I just wish you’d…’ I stopped. ‘I’m fine, thank you, Eleena.’
They were all still worried about me. It had only been three and half weeks since the carnage at Jeganda. I’d only been walking for five days. They all quietly agreed with Crezia’s advice that I should still be in the infirmary and leaving this to Ravenor.
Well, that was the perk of being the boss. I made the damn decisions. But I shouldn’t be angry with them for worrying. But for Kara and Eleena’s frantic emergency work on the pinnace, I’d be dead. I’d crashed twice. Eleena, the only one whose blood-type matched mine, had even made last minute donations.
Pulled apart at the seams, my band was pulling together tighter than ever.
‘Let’s pick up the pace,’ I said. ‘We don’t want Nayl and Ravenor to have all the glory.’
‘After you, Ironhoof,’ Medea said. Kara sniggered, but pretended she was having trouble with her filter mask.
‘I can’t imagine why you think you can get away with that nickname,’ I said.
We heard the shuriken catapult buzzing again. It was close, the sound rolling back to us around the maze of the gorge.
‘Someone’s having a party,’ said Gustine. Bearded, probably to help disguise the terrible scarring that seemed to cover his entire skin, Gustine was an ex-Guardsman turned ex-pit fighter turned ex-bounty hunter turned Inquisition soldier. He said he came from Raas Bisor in the Segmentum Tempestus, but I didn’t know where that was. Apart from that it was in the Segmentum Tempestus. Gustine wore heavyweight grey ablative armour and carried an old, much-repaired standard Imperial Guard lasrifle.
He’d been with Ravenor for a good many years, so I trusted him.
The whizzing sounds echoed again, overlapping with laser discharges.
‘Ravenor’s friends,’ Medea said. None of us were comfortable about the eldar. Six of them had arrived on Gideon’s ship as a bodyguard for the farseer. Tall, too tall, inhumanly slender, silent, keeping themselves to the part of the ship assigned them. Aspect warriors, Gideon had called them, whatever that meant. The plumed crests on their great, curved helmets had made them seem even taller once they were in armour.
They’d deployed to the surface with Ravenor, the seer lord and three more of Ravenor’s band.
A third strike team of six under Ravenor’s senior lieutenant Rav Skynner, was advanced about a kilometre to our west.
Ghül, or 5213X to give it its Carto-Imperialis code, was nothing like I had imagined it. It didn’t at all resemble the arid world I had glimpsed in Marla Tarray’s mind, the dried-out husk where primaeval cities lay buried under layers of ash. I suppose that was because all I’d seen was her own imagined view of the place. She’d never seen it. She hadn’t lived long enough to get the chance.
I wondered if Ghül matched the farseer’s vision. Probably. The eldar seemed unnecessarily precise bastards to me.
We’d approached the world in a wide, stealthy orbit. The Hinterlight was equipped with disguise fields that Ravenor was reluctant to explain to me but which I felt were partly created by his own, terrifyingly strong will. High band sensors had located a starship in tight orbit, a rogue trader of some considerable size that didn’t appear to realise we were there.
Ghül itself was invisible. Or nearly invisible. I have never seen a world that seemed so much to be not there. It was a shadow against the starfield, a faintly discernable echo of matter. Even on the sunward side, it lacked any real form. It appeared to soak up light and give nothing back.
When Cynia Preest, Ravenor’s ship-mistress, had brought us the first surface scans to study, we thought she was showing us close up pictures of a child’s toy.
‘It’s a maze,’ I remember saying.
‘A puzzle… like an interlock,’ Ravenor decided.
‘No, a carved fruit pit,’ Medea had said.
We had all looked at her. ‘The works of the Lord on the heart of a stone?’ she asked. ‘Anybody?’
‘Perhaps you’d explain?’ I’d said.
So she had. A some length, until we grasped the idea. The hermits of Glavia, so it seems, thought no greater expression of their divine love for the Emperor could be made than to inscribe the entire Imperial Prayer onto the pits of sekerries. A sekerry, we learned, was a soft, sweet summer fruit that tasted of quince and nougat. A bit like a shirnapple, we were reliably informed. The pits were the size of pearls.
Thankfully, no one had made the mistake of asking what a shirnapple was.
‘I don’t know how they do it,’ Medea had gone on. ‘They do it by eye, with a needle, They can’t even see, I don’t think. But they used to show us liths of the carved pits, magnified, in scholam. You could read every word! Every last word! The works of the Lord on the heart of a stone. All laced together, tight and compact, using every corner of the space. We were taught that the prayer pits were one of the Nineteen Wonders of Glavia and that we should be proud.’
‘Nineteen Wonders?’ Cynia had asked.
‘Golden Throne, woman, don’t get her started!’ I had cried out. But there had indeed been something in Medea’s comparison. The surface of Ghül had been engraved, that’s what it looked like. A perfect black sphere, engraved across its entire surface with tight, deep, interlocking lines. In reality, each of those lines was a smooth sided gorge, two hundred metres wide and nine hundred metres deep.
I wondered about Medea’s description. I remembered the chart we had witnessed during the auto-seance on Promody, and the way dear Aemos’s notes had taken on the same scrolling forms of the chart as he struggled to decipher it.
Ghül could very well be engraved, I decided. The warped ones’ entire culture, certainly their language, had been built upon expressions of location and place. I imagined that the inscribed wall we had seen during the auto-seance had been part of just such a maze of lines, from a time when Promody had looked like Ghül, the capital world.
Cynia Preest’s sensors had located heat and motion traces on the surface. We’d assembled the teams, and prepared for planetfall. The Hinterlight’s ship-mistress had been told to line up on the enemy’s ship and stand ready to take it out.
Our three vessels, my pinnace and two shuttles from Ravenor’s stable, had sunk low into the thin atmosphere and skimmed across the perfect, geometric surface, their shadows flitting across the flat black sections and the deep chasms.
We’d put down in adjacent gorges near the target zone.
The first surprise had been that the air was breathable. We’d all brought vacuum suits and rebreathers.
‘How is that possible?’ Eleena had asked.
‘I don’t know.’
‘But it’s so unlikely… I mean it’s unfeasible,’ she had stammered.
‘Yes, it is.’
The second surprise had been the discovery that Medea was right.
Kenzer had knelt down with his auspex at the side of the gorge, studying microscopically the relationship between chasm floor and chasm wall.
I didn’t need him to tell me they were perfect. Smooth. Exact. Machined. Engraved.
‘The angle between floor and wall is ninety degrees to a margin of accuracy that… well, it is so precise, it goes off my auspex’s scale. Who… who could do a thing like this?’ Kenzer had gasped.
‘The hermits of Glavia?’ Medea had cracked.
‘If they had fusion beams, starships, a spare planet and unlimited power supplies,’ I had said. ‘Besides, tell me this: who polished the planet smooth before they started?’
We moved down the gorge. It curved gently to the west, like an old river, deep cut in its banks. Long before on KCX-1288, facing the saruthi, I had been disconcerted by the lack of angular geometry. Now I was disturbed by the reverse. Everything was so damned precise, squared off, unmarked and unblemished. Only a faint sooty deposit in the wide floor of the trench suggested any antiquity at all.
We caught up with Nayl.
‘They know we’re here,’ he said, referring to the sounds of battle in the nearby gorge.
‘Any idea of numbers?’ I asked.
‘Not a thing, but Skynner’s mob has found trouble too. Vessorines, so he reckon, wrapped up in carapace suits and loaded for bear.’
‘We’d best be careful then.’
I tried Ravenor, using my mind instead of my intervox.
Status?
THE ASPECTS HAVE–
Whoa, whoa, whoa… quieter, Gideon.
Sorry. I forget sometimes you–
I what?
You’re hurt, I meant to say. The aspect warriors have engaged. It’s quite busy here.
I could feel the sub-surface twinges of power as he channelled his mind into his force chair’s psi-cannons.
Opposition? I sent.
Vessorine janissaries and some other heterodox mercs. We–
He broke off. There was a grinding wash of distortion for a moment.
Sorry, he sent. Some sort of fusion weapon. They certainly don’t want us in here.
In where?
He broadcast a sequence of map co-ordinates and I took the map-slate out of Nayl’s hands and punched them in.
A structure, Ravenor sent. Ahead of us, south-west of you. It’s built into the end pier of one of the gorge junctions. Although I can’t see how. There are no doors. The Vessorine are coming out of somewhere, though. There must be a hidden entrance.
More distortion. Then he floated back to me.
The Vessorine are fighting like maniacs. My lord seer says they have already earned the respect of the aspects.
Your lord seer?
Send again. I didn’t make that out.
Nothing, Gideon. We’re going to try and come round on your flank, around the north-east intersection of the gorge.
Understood.
Come on! I urged. The others all jumped, all except Eleena, and I realised I was still using my psyche. Sloppy. I was tired and in pain. Still no excuse.
‘My apologies,’ I said, vocal again. ‘We’re moving forward. This chasm turns south-west and intersects with two others. Target site’s at the junction, so Gideon reckons.’
We hurried forward, moving through the steep shadow of the gorge.
‘Glory be!’ exclaimed Kenzer suddenly. He was looking up.
Bright flashes lit up the starry sky framed by the sides of the chasm. They washed back and forth like spills of milk in ink. Alerted to our presence, Glaw’s starship had presented for combat and the Hinterlight was answering. Vast blinks of light lit up the sky like a strobe.
‘I wouldn’t wanna be up there,’ said Korl Kraine. Kraine was a hiver who’d never served in any formal militia. His allegiance was to Ravenor first and to the underclan of Tanhive Nine, Tansetch, second and last. He was a short, pale man wearing patched and cut-off flak-canvas. His skin was dyed with clan colours and his eyes were cheap augments. He wore a string of human teeth around his neck, which was ironic as his own teeth were all made of ceramite.
Kraine raised his night-sighted Tronsvasse autorifle to his shoulder and scurried forward. He’d lived in a lightless warren of city all his life until Ravenor recruited him. This gloom suited him.
The sound of catapults grew louder. There were several of them at work now, buzzing out a duet with heavyweight lasguns. I heard the gritty thump of a grenade.
Kenzer, the archaeologist, was lagging. He wasn’t part of Ravenor’s official troop, merely an expert paid to help out on Promody. I didn’t like him much. He had no fibre and no real commitment.
I didn’t need to read his mind to see that he was only here for the potential fortune a few exclusive academic papers about the Ghül discovery could make him.
‘Hurry up!’ I yelled at him. My back was getting tired and the blood in my mouth was back again.
Kenzer was hunched down at the base of the chasm side, fidgeting with his hand-scanner.
I called a halt and stomped back to him, my heavy boots, reinforced with the brace’s metal frame, kicking up soot. Ironhoof, indeed!
I believed my greatest annoyance wasn’t the brace-frame or its weight or the lumpen gait I was forced to adopt, not even the non-specific haemorrhage that was seeping into my mouth.
No, the worst thing was my cold scalp.
I really couldn’t get used to it. Crezia had been obliged to shave my head in order to implant the cluster of neural and synaptic cables that would drive the augmetic frame around my legs. She had been upset all through the implant procedure. It really was terribly crude, even by basic Imperial standards. But out in the middle of nowhere at all, it had been the best she and Antribus could cobble together.
Needs must, as they say.
I was bald, and the back of my skull was raw, sore and clotted with the multiple implant jacks of the sub-spine feeds my faithful medicaes had installed to make my leg frame work. The steel-jacketed cables sprouted from my scalp and ran down my back into the lumbar servo of the walking brace. The bunched cables were flesh-stapled to my back, like a neat, augmetic ponytail.
I would get used to it, in time. If there was time. If there wasn’t, what the hell did it matter?
I stopped beside Kenzer, throwing a hard shadow over him.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Making a recording, sir,’ he gabbled. ‘There’s a marking here. The carved walls we’ve seen so far have been blank.’
I peered down. It was difficult to bend.
‘Where?’
He pulled a puffer-brush out of his kit-pack and blew the soot away.
‘There!’
A small spiral. Cut into the smooth face of the rock.
It looked like a tiny version of the chart we’d seen on Promody, or a really tiny version of the mazed surface of this planet.
‘Record it quickly and move on,’ I told him. I turned away. ‘Let’s go,’ I called over my shoulder curtly.
Kenzer screamed. There was a flurry of las-fire.
I wheeled back immediately. Kenzer was sprawled on the floor of the gorge, ripped apart by laser shots. He was only partially articulated, such had been the point-blank ferocity of the shots. The wide puddle of blood seeping from his carcass was soaking into the soot.
There was no sign of any attacker.
‘What the hell?’ Barbarisater was in my hand and had been purring, but now it was dull.
Nayl dropped close to me, his matt-black hellgun sweeping the area of the corpse.
‘How in the name of Terra did that happen?’ he asked. ‘Lief? Korl? Upside?’
I looked back. Gustine and Kraine were walking backwards slowly, scoping up at the cliff tops of the gorge.
‘Nothing. No shooters above,’ Gustine reported.
I slapped my palm against the cold stone face of the gorge above the marking Kenzer had found. It was unyielding.
We moved forward, following the sweep of the chasm. Kraine was covering our backs. After we’d gone about fifty metres, he suddenly cried out.
I turned in time to see him in a face-to-face gunfight with two Vessorine janissaries in full carapace-wear. Kraine staggered backwards as he was hit repeatedly in the torso, but managed to keep firing. He put a burst of rounds through the face plate of one of the Vessorines before the other one made the kill shot and dropped him into the soot.
Nayl and Medea were already firing. The remaining Vessorine swung his aim and squeezed off another salvo, winging both Eleena and Nayl.
Then he walloped over onto his back as Kara’s cannon ripped him apart.
‘See to them!’ I ordered, pointing Medea at Nayl and Eleena. Nayl had been skinned across the left arm and Eleena had a flesh wound on her left shin. Both kept insisting they were fine. Medea opened his kitbag for field dressings.
I looked at the corpses, Kraine and the Vessorines. Gustine appeared beside me. ‘Where the jesh did they come from?’ he asked.
I didn’t answer. I drew my runestaff over my head out of its leather boot, and gripped it tightly as I focused my force at the gorge wall. Soot and the debris of eons puffed out, and I saw another spiral mark in the wall like the one Kenzer had found.
‘Charts,’ I said.
‘What, sir?’ asked Lief.
I bent down, spitting on my fingers then rubbing my hand across the spiral marks. I tried to ignore the fact that there was a smear of blood in the spittle.
‘No wonder Ravenor couldn’t find a door. We’re not seeing this in the right dimension.’
‘Pardon me, but what the craphole are you talking about?’ asked Lief. I liked him. Always honest.
‘The warped ones understood location and moment in way we can’t imagine. They were, after all, warped. We see this as a geometric network of mathematically precise chasms, a maze. But it’s not. It’s four dimensional…’
‘Four?’ Gustine began, uncertainly
‘Oh, four, six, eight… who knows? Think of it this way, like a… a woven garment!
‘A woven garment, sir?’
‘Yes, all those thick, intertwined threads, such a complex pattern.’
‘All right…’
‘Now imagine the knitting needles that made it. Just the needles. Big and hard and simple.’
‘Okay…’ said Medea, joining us.
‘This planet is simply the knitting needles. Hard, rigid, simple. The reality of Ghül is the garment woven from it, something we can’t see, something complex and soft, interlaced round the needles.’
‘I’m sorry, sir, you’ve lost me,’ Lief Gustine said.
‘Lost,’ I said. ‘That’s damn right. These marks on the wall. They’re like mini charts, explaining how the overall reality can be accessed and exited.’
Ghustine nodded as if he understood. ‘Right… so, going back, where the jesh did the janissaries come from?’ he asked.
I slapped the hard wall.
‘There. Right there.’
‘But it’s solid rock!’
‘Only to us,’ I said.
As we moved on again, down the gorge, we formed a pack that covered all sides, like phalanx of spearmen from the old ages of warfare. The sounds of Ravenor’s battle had become frenetic. Nayl reported grimly that he couldn’t raise Skynner or any of his force any more.
We all hunted the walls for further carvings
‘Here, sir! Here!’ Kara sang out.
I ran over to the spiral cut she had found. ‘Wait,’ I ordered.
Like an eye blinking, the smooth rock opened. Suddenly it just wasn’t there. A Vessorine janissary in combat carapace pushed out, weapon raised.
Nayl had him cold, felling him with a single shot. But there were more behind the first.
Medea started shooting. Two more mercs had blinked out of the gorge wall on the far side of us.
There was no cover. No damn cover at all.
In a moment, we were fired on from a third angle.
I had already drawn the big Hecuter autopistol I had borrowed from the Hinterlight’s arsenal. Gustine’s old las was cracking away beside me and Eleena was emptying her pistol’s extended clip on semi-automatic.
They’d just been poaching us up until now. This was a full scale ambush. I counted at least fifteen janissaries, as well as an ogryn with a heavy weapon. Nayl went down, hit in the thigh, but he kept blasting. A las round sparked bluntly against the heavy brace on my left leg.
Time to reset the odds.
‘Cherubael!’ I commanded.
It had been drifting high above the gorge, trailing us like a kite, but now it descended, gathering speed, beginning to shine.
I had been much more careful in my design of this daemonhost. Elaborating on the basic and hasty ritual construction Aemos and I had wrought in those last few minutes aboard the Essene, I had supplemented the wards and rune markings on its flesh to reinforce its obedience. This daemonhost would not be permitted to have any of the capricious guile of the previous versions. It would not rebel. It would not be a maverick that had to be watched at all times. It was bound and locked with triple wards, totally subservient. I liked to think I could learn from my mistakes, at least sometimes.
Of course, there was a price to pay for such security. This Cherubael could manifest much less power, a direct consequence of its reinforced bindings. But it had enough. More than enough.
It swept down the gorge, warp-flame trailing from its upright body, and demolished one group of attackers in a blurry storm of aether. To their credit, the Vessorines didn’t scream. But they broke and started to fall back.
The ogryn fired his heavy weapon at the incoming host. The impact fluttered off Cherubael like petals. It punched its talons into the squealing abhuman’s chest and lifted the big brute off the ground.
And then threw him. The ogryn went up. Just simply went up and kept going.
Cherubael changed direction and skimmed across the gorge towards the retreating mercs. Our guns had whittled their numbers down by then and we were in pursuit, though Eleena had stayed with the sprawled, cursing Nayl.
I noticed something else about this new Cherubael. It didn’t laugh any more. Ever. Its face was set in an implacable frown. It showed no signs of taking any pleasure in its slaughter.
I was pleased about that. The laughter really did used to get on my nerves.
It was going to take a while to get used to Cherubael’s new face, though. Once installed within the flesh host, the daemon had made its usual alterations – the sprouting nub horns, the talons, the smooth, glossy skin, the blank eyes.
But it had not entirely erased the features of Godwyn Fischig.
It killed the last of the ambushers, all save one who reached the gorge wall and accessed the dimension trap they had emerged from.
‘Hold it!’ I ordered. ‘Hold it open!’
Cherubael obeyed. It atomised the last merc as the trap blinked open and then braced its arms wide, preventing the trap from closing. Even for Cherubael, this was an effort.
‘Hurry. Up,’ it said, as if annoyed with me.
I reached the trap.
There wasn’t time to get us all through. Gustine hurled himself in, headlong, and I followed, shouting to the others to stay back and stay together.
The last thing I heard was a loud, liquid impact that must have been the ogryn finally obeying the law of gravity.
The trap blinked shut.
I felt a sickening twist of translation. I landed on top of the sprawled Gustine in a dim, boxy space that smelled musty.
‘Ow!’ he complained.
I got to my feet. That in itself was ridiculously hard. I was sweating freely by the time I was vertical.
‘You okay?’ Gustine asked.
‘Yes,’ I snapped. I wasn’t really. My head was throbbing, and the pain in my legs was beginning to overcome the power of the drugs that were self-administering from a dispenser Crezia had fitted to my hip.
‘You had better not expect me to carry you,’ Cherubael whispered behind me.
‘Don’t worry. Your dignity isn’t in danger.’
I drew Barbarisater, holding it in my right hand, and gripped my runestaff in my left.
I stomped forward. Darkness. A wall. I turned. Another wall.
‘Gustine?’
He’d switched on a lamp pack, but it was showing him nothing but black walls. There was no sign of a ceiling.
‘How far can you see?’ I asked Cherubael.
‘Forever,’ it said, floating alongside me.
‘Fine. In practical terms, how far can you see?’
‘Not far in here. I can see that the wall ends there. There is a gap beyond it.’
‘Very well,’ I plodded ahead. My back really hurt now where the implants went in and my nose was bleeding. Gustine clipped the lamp pack to the bayonet lug of his las.
He tried to reach Nayl on the vox. Dead and silent.
I made an effort to reach Ravenor with my mind. Nothing.
Heavy footed, I moved through the darkness with my odd companions. The runestaff was trembling, sniffing some focus of power.
‘You feel that?’ I asked the daemon.
It nodded.
I decided we would follow it.
‘Have you noticed we can breathe in here too?’ Gustine remarked a few minutes later.
‘Gosh, I wouldn’t have picked up on that.’
He frowned at me, put-upon. ‘I mean, the air’s right, inside and out.’
‘It’s so the enemy can breathe,’ Cherubael said.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘They got here first. They got inside. Ghül made the atmosphere appropriate for them as soon as Ghül sensed they were there.’
‘You’re talking like Ghül is alive.’
‘Ghül has never been alive,’ it said.
‘It’s never been dead, either,’ it added a moment later.
I was about to ask it to expand a little on that alarming notion, but Cherubael suddenly surged forward in the blackness ahead of us. I saw the flash of its light, a laser discharge.
It came back, blood steaming off its talons.
‘They’re hunting for us,’ it said.
I have seen wonders in my life. Horrors too. I have witnessed vistas and spectacles that have cowed my mind and dwarfed my imagination.
None of them compared to the mausoleum under Ghül.
I cannot say anything about its size except to use inadequate words like vast, huge…
There was nothing to give any scale. We came out of the black tunnels into a black abyss that was to all intents much the same except that the blackness that had been walls was now immaterial. Tiny, scattered specks of light, dozens of them, illuminated small parts of the face of some impossible structure, as dark and cyclopean as the eternal wall ancient philosophers used to believe surrounded creation. The edge of the universe. The side of the casket an ancient god had wrought to keep reality in.
Which god, I wouldn’t like to say.
It was warm and still. Not even the air moved. The dots of light showed small parts of a vast design etched onto the face of the mausoleum. Hints of spirals, lines and swirling runes.
This was where the warped ones had laid their dead king to rest.
This was the tomb of Yssarile, over which Ghül had been raised in the strange eons before man.
The sight even stunned Cherubael to silence. I hoped its lack of comment was down to awe. I had a nasty feeling it had more to do with reverence.
Or dread.
Gustine lost it for a while. His mind refused to deal with what his eyes were seeing. He began to weep inconsolably, and fell to his knees. It was a dismal sight to see such a robust, fearless man reduced in such a way.
I let him be as long as I dared, but the sounds of his weeping carried in the dark and seemed alarmingly loud. Some of the tiny lights on the face of the mausoleum began to move, as if descending.
I took hold of the sobbing fighter and tried to use my will to calm him.
It didn’t work. No persuasion could anchor the edges of his sanity where it had come adrift.
I had to be harsher. I numbed his mind with a deep psychic probe, blocking his terror out and freezing his thoughts but for the most basic instincts and biological functions.
We approached the mausoleum across a plain of lightless stone. The further we got, the further away I realised the structure actually was. It was evidently even bigger than I had first realised.
I had Gustine switch off his lamp pack. We simply followed the dots of light up ahead. I suggested that Cherubael might like to warn us if the darkness around us became anything other than a flat table of stone. A chasm, for example.
The only advantage in the mindless scale of the place as I could see it was that the enemy would have a hard job finding us. There was so much space to search.
After what seemed like an hour, we were still a very long way from the tomb. I checked my chronometer to determine precisely how long it had been since we accessed the interior of Ghül, but it had stopped. Stopped isn’t right exactly. It was still running and beating seconds, but the time was not recording in any way.
I recalled the clock in Aemos’s suite, chiming to mark out times that had no meaning.
As we closed on our destination, I was able to make more sense of the lights. Tiny dots, they had seemed, casting little fields of light.
They were massive lamps, high power, of the sort used to light landing fields or military camps. Mounted on suspensor platforms, they floated at various points in front of the face of the mausoleum, lighting up surface details in patches of glare the size of amphitheatres. There were forty-three of the platforms, each with its own lamp. I counted them.
There were men on the platforms, human figures. Glaw’s men, I was sure, some of them mercenary guards, most of them adepts of arcane lore enlisted to his cause.
As we watched, some of the platforms drifted slowly or adjusted the sweep of their light.
They were reading the wall.
By whatever catalogue of means, Glaw had learned of this place, found it and made his way inside to plunder its vile treasures. But its innermost secrets clearly still eluded him.
That was why he had wanted the Malus Codicium so badly.
To turn the final lock, to get him through the final barrier.
One of the platforms began to climb vertically, its lamplight flickering across the passing relief of the tomb face. It climbed and then halted far up above at what seemed to be the top of the wall. Its beam picked out an open square, an entrance, perhaps, though who would put an entrance at the top of a wall without steps?
I scolded myself for asking. The warped ones.
‘Glaw is up there,’ Cherubael said.
It was right. I could smell the monster’s mind.
We hurried the last distance to the foot of the mausoleum wall. Several cargo fliers and two bulk speeders were parked down here, alongside metal crates of equipment and spares for the lamp platforms. Their base camp.
We waited. I considered our options.
Almost at the same time, two of the platforms descended the wall to ground level, dimming their huge lamps. There were about six men on each one.
One settled in and two men jumped down, hurrying towards one of the cargo fliers. I could hear them, exchanging words with the crew on the platform. A moment later the other came down softly beside it.
I could see the men. They were dressed in light fatigues or environment robes. Some carried data-slates.
The men who had gone to the flier returned, carrying an equipment crate between them. They loaded it onto the platform and it immediately began to climb back up the wall, its lamp powering back to full beam to resume its work.
‘Come on,’ I said quietly.
More men were loading more crates onto the other platform. There were six in all – four in robes and two armoured mercs operating the platform controls.
Barbarisater took the three loaders out with two quick strokes. Gustine dragged a man backwards over the platform rail and snapped his neck. Cherubael embraced the two mercs from behind and they turned to ash and sifted away.
We got on board.
‘Get ready with the lamp,’ I told Gustine. I studied the platform control panel quickly, and then activated the lift. The attitude controls were a simple brass lever.
We rose. The tomb face whispered by. As we lifted past the lowermost of the working platforms, Gustine powered up the lamp and angled it towards the wall.
I couldn’t remember quite how far up the platform had been before it had descended for spares. How long before we passed our designated spot and were noticed by the others?
I hoped they were all too engrossed in their work.
We were about two-thirds of the way up when we heard shots from another platform and a lamp swung our way. Almost immediately, so did several others, tracking our ascent. Las-fire pinged across at us. Gustine dropped down by the rail and returned fire. I kept us rising.
‘Do you want me to…?’ Cherubael asked.
‘No, stay put.’
Gustine’s next salvo took out the lamp of a platform rising after us. A huge shower of sparks erupted out and drizzled down the tomb face. I felt multiple jolts as shots impacted against the underside of our rig.
Almost there.
We rose up next to the entrance. It was square, maybe forty metres across. A platform was already floating outside it and, clumsy with the controls, I slammed us against it. The men aboard began firing. There were others inside the dim mouth of the entrance. Gustine blasted back. I saw one topple back onto the deck of the other platform, and then another pitch clean off and drop like a stone.
Las-fire and solid rounds raked our vehicle, tearing strips and nuggets out of the deck plating and the rail. Shot through, the lamp died.
I hauled on the control stick and slammed us sideways into the other platform, deliberately this time. We ground against them and drove them into the tomb face. The edge of their hull shrieked out sparks as it tore against the stone. I did it again. They were screaming and firing.
‘Let’s move!’ Gustine yelled.
He heaved a grenade into the mouth of the entrance to clear us a path.
There was a dull bang and a flash, and two figures came flailing out into the air.
Gustine tossed a second onto the other platform and then leapt over the rail into the tomb entrance, blasting into the wafting smoke haze with his lasrifle.
I followed him, Cherubael drifting at my heels. It was damn hard to step wide enough and span the gap between the platform and the entrance’s stone lip.
Gustine’s second grenade ripped a hole through the deck of the other platform. It sagged and then dropped, like a descending elevator, trailing flames.
Far below us, it tore through two other platforms and spilled men and debris into the air.
The jolt of the blast had come at the wrong moment for me. Our platform shuddered and yawed out like a boat at a dock, and I was still halfway across, forcing my stiff, heavy limbs to carry me.
I was going to fall. The brace around my body felt as heavy as an anchor, pulling me down.
Cherubael grabbed me under the arms and hoisted me neatly into the entrance.
I was grateful, but I couldn’t find it in me to thank it. Thank Cherubael? The idea was toxic. Then again, just as unlikely was the notion of Cherubael voluntarily saving my life…
Gustine was fighting his way forward down the entrance, which we saw now was a long tunnel that matched the dimensions of the opening. Crates of equipment were piled up in the mouth, and floating glow-globes had been set at intervals along the wall. They looked like they went on for a long way.
Four or five mercs and servants of our adversary were dead on the tunnel floor and half a dozen more were backed down the throat of it, firing to drive us out.
Cherubael swept forward and obliterated them. We came after him. I so dearly wished I could run.
The tunnel opened on the other side of the tomb face. We set eyes on the interior. By now, I had become numb to the inhuman scale of things. The tomb was a vault in which one might comfortably store a continent. The inner walls and the high, stone-beamed roof were lavishly decorated with swirls of script and emblems that I swore I would never allow to be seen by other eyes. This was the crypt where Yssarile lay in death, and the walls screamed his praise and worship.
I could make out little of the dark gulf below, but there was something there. Something the size of a great Imperial hive city. I discerned a black, geometric shape that was fashioned from neither stone nor metal nor even bone, but, it seemed, all of those things at once. It was repellent. Dead, but alive. Dormant, but filled with the slumbering power of a million stars.
The barque of the daemon-king. Yssarile’s chariot of unholy battle, his instrument of apocalypse, with which he had scoured the warped fortresses and habitations of his own reality in wars too dreadful to imagine.
Glaw’s prize.
From the globe-lit tunnel, we could make our way out onto a massive plinth of dark onyx that extended from the edge of the inner wall. There was a block raised there, a polished tooth of dark green mineral forty metres tall, set deep into the plinth. It was wound with carved spirals.
Glow-globes floated around it and tools and instruments lay at its foot. Pontius Glaw had been studying this discovery himself. But the noise of our violent entry had alerted him. He was waiting for us.
He emerged from behind the standing block, calm, almost indifferent. His tall, gleaming machine body was as I had remembered it from the auto-seance. The cloak of blades clinked as he moved. The ever-smirking golden mask smirked.
‘Gregor Eisenhorn,’ he said softly. ‘The galaxy’s most persistent bastard. Only you could scrabble and slash and claw and crawl your way to me. Which, of course, is why I admire you so.’
I stomped forward.
‘Careful!’ Gustine hissed, but I had long passed the point where being careful was a high priority.
I faced Glaw. He was broader than me and a good deal taller. His blade-cloak jangled as he stroked a perfectly articulated duralloy hand across the surface of the green block. Then he raised the same hand and held it up for inspection.
‘Magos Bure did a fine job, didn’t he? Such a craftsman. I can never thank you enough for arranging his services. This is the hand I killed him with.’
‘There’s more than his blood on your hands, Glaw. Do you answer to that name now, or do you prefer to hide behind the title Khanjar?’
‘Either will do.’
‘Your daughter didn’t take either of your names.’
He was silent. If I could get him angry, I could perhaps force an error.
‘Marla,’ he said, ‘so headstrong. Another reason to kill you, apart from the obvious.’
He was about to say something else, but I had waited long enough. I blasted my will through the runestaff, and lunged forward, swinging my blade.
The psychic blast knocked him back, and he half-turned, his cloak whirling out and turning Barbarisater aside with its multiple edges. His turn became a full spin and I lurched back to avoid the lethal hem of his blade-cloak.
Gustine moved in, firing bolts of light that simply reflected off Glaw’s gleaming form.
Cherubael came in from the other side. Its searing attack scorched Glaw’s metal, and I heard him curse. He slashed at Cherubael with his open hand, extending hook blades from slots in the fingertips.
The hooks ripped into Cherubael’s flesh but it made no cry. It grappled with Pontius Glaw, psychic power boiling the space between them and flaring out in spasming tendrils of light. The very air crisped and ionised. Glaw’s dancing metal feet chipped flakes of onyx off the plinth beneath him. I tried to get in, to land a blow in support of the daemonhost, but it was like approaching a furnace.
Gustine simply looked on, open-mouthed. He was so far out of his league it wasn’t funny.
Glaw tore out a savage blow that spun Cherubael away for a second and followed it up with a lance of mental fury that actually made the daemonhost tumble out of the air. Cherubael got up slowly, like a thrown rider, and rose up off the ground again.
In that short break, I rejoined the struggle, driving at Glaw with alternate blows of staff and sword, keeping the most powerful mind wall I could erect between us.
Glaw smashed the wall into invisible pieces, struck me hard and tore the staff out of my hand. His blades lacerated my arm and ripped my cloak.
I exerted all the force I had and rallied with Barbarisater, cutting in with rotating ulsars and heavy sae hehts that chimed against his rippling cloak armour. The runestaff had fallen out of reach.
I ducked to avoid a high sweep of his razor-hem, but I had forced myself too hard. I felt cranial plugs pop and servos tear out of my back. Pain knifed up my spine. I barely got clear of his next strike. My sword work became a frantic series of tahn feh sar parries, as I tried to back away and fend off his hooks and cloak-blades.
Cherubael charged back at Glaw, but something intercepted it in mid-air. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Cherubael locked in aerial combat with an incandescent figure. They tumbled away, off the plinth, out over the gulf of the tomb.
‘You don’t think you’re the only one to have a pet, do you?’ Glaw jeered. ‘And my daemonhost is not restricted in its power like yours. Poor Cherubael. You’ve treated him so badly.’
‘It’s an “it”, not a “him”,’ I snarled and placed a high stroke that actually notched his golden mask.
‘Bastard!’ he squealed and swept his cloak around under my guard. The thick metal of my body-brace deflected the worst of it, but I felt blood welling from cuts to my ribs.
I staggered back. The agony in my spine was the worst thing, and I was certain my already limited motion was now badly impaired. My left leg felt dead and heavy.
Ironhoof. Ironhoof.
He thrust at me with his talons and nearly shredded my face. I blocked his hand at the last second, setting Barbarisater between his splayed fingers and locking out his strike.
He threw me back. I was off-step, out-balanced by my slow, heavy mechanical legs.
Laser shots danced across Glaw’s face and chest as Gustine tried vainly to help out. Glaw pirouetted – a move that seemed impossibly nimble for such a giant – and his cloak whirred out almost horizontally with the centrifugal force.
Hundreds of fast moving, razor-sharp blades whistled through Gustine, so fast, so completely, that he didn’t realise what had happened to him.
A mist of blood puffed in the air. Ghustine collapsed. Literally.
Glaw turned on me again. I’d lost sight of Cherubael. I was on my own.
And only now did I admit to myself that I was out-matched.
Glaw was almost impervious to damage. Fast, armoured, deadly. Even on a good day, he would have been hard to defeat in single combat.
And this wasn’t a good day.
He was going to kill me.
He knew it too. As he pressed his assault, he started to laugh.
That cut me deeper than any of his blades. I thought of Fischig, Aemos and Bequin. I thought of all the allies and friends who had perished because of him. I thought of what his spite had done to me and what it had cost me to get this far.
I thought of Cherubael. The laughter reminded me of Cherubael.
I came back at him so hard and so furiously that Barbarisater’s blade became notched and chipped. I struck blows that snapped blade-scales off his clinking cape. I struck at him until he wasn’t laughing any more.
His answer was a psychic blast that smashed me backwards ten paces. Blood spurted from my nose and filled my mouth. I didn’t fall. I would not give him that pleasure. But Barbarisater flew, screaming, from my dislodged grip.
I was hunched over. My hands on my thighs, panting like a dog. My head was swimming. I could hear him crunching over the onyx towards me.
‘You’d have won by now if you’d had the book,’ I said, coughing the blood from my mouth.
‘What?’
‘The book. The damned book. The Malus Codicium. That’s what you were really after when you sent your hired murderers against me. That’s why you tore my operation apart and killed everyone you could reach. You wanted the book.’
‘Of course I did,’ he snarled.
I looked up at him. ‘It would have unlocked the prize already. Done away with this endless, fruitless study. You’d simply have opened the tomb and taken the daemon’s chariot. Long before we could ever get here.’
‘Savour that little triumph, Gregor,’ he said. ‘Your little pyrrhic victory. By keeping that book from me you have added extra months… years, to my work. Yssarile’s weapon will be mine, but you’ve made its acquisition so much harder.’
‘Good,’ I said.
He chuckled. ‘You’re a brave man, Gregor Eisenhorn. Come on, now – I’ll make it quick.’
His blades clinked.
‘I suppose, then,’ I added, ‘I’d have been mad to bring it with me.’
He froze.
With a shaking, bloody hand, I reached into my coat and took out the Malus Codicium. I think he gasped. I held it out, half open, so he could see, and riffled the pages through with my fingers.
‘You foolish, foolish man,’ he said, smiling.
‘That’s what I thought,’ I said. With one brutal jerk, I ripped the pages out of the cover.
‘No!’ he cried.
I wasn’t listening. I fixed my mind on the loose bundle of sheets in my hands and subjected them to the most ferocious mental blast I could manage. The pages caught fire.
I threw them up into the air.
Glaw screamed with despair and rage. A blizzard of burning pages fluttered around us. He tried to grab at them. He moved like an idiot, like a child, snatching what he could out of the air, trying to preserve anything, anything at all.
The pages burned. Leaves of darkness, billowing across the plinth, consumed by fire.
He snatched a handful, tried for more, stamping out those half-burned sheets that landed on the ground.
He wasn’t paying any attention to me at all.
Barbarisater tore into him so hard it almost severed his head. Electricity crackled from the rent metal. He rasped and staggered. The Carthean blade sang in my hands as I ripped it across his chest and shattered part of his cloak.
He fell backwards, right at the edge of the plinth, his finger hooks shrieking as they fought to get a purchase on the smooth onyx. I swung again, an upswing that ripped off his golden mask and sent it spinning out over the gulf. The interior of his head was revealed. The circuits, the crackling, fusing cables, the crystal that contained his consciousness and being, set in its cradle of links and wires.
‘In the name of the Holy God-Emperor of Terra,’ I said quietly, ‘I call thee diabolus and here deliver thy sentence.’
My own blood was dripping off Barbarisater’s hilt between my doubled handed grip. I raised the blade.
And made the ewl caer.
The blade split his head and shattered the crystal into flecks of glass.
Pontius Glaw’s metal body convulsed, jerked back and fell off the edge of the plinth, down into the gulf, into the blackness of the daemon-king’s tomb, its cloak-blades chiming.
I was sitting on the plinth, with my back against the tomb wall, blood slowly pooling around me, when a flight flashed out in the darkness of the vault.
It came closer.
At last, Cherubael floated down and hovered over me. Its face, limbs and body were hideously marked with weals, burns and gashes.
I looked up at it. It was hard to move, hard to concentrate. There was blood in my mouth, in my eyes.
‘Glaw’s daemonhost?’
‘Gone.’
‘He claimed it was more powerful than you.’
‘You don’t know how nasty I can be,’ it said.
I thought about that. The last of the diabolic book’s pages were mere tufts of black ash, scattered across the plinth.
‘Are we finished here?’ it asked.
‘Yes,’ I said.
It frowned.
‘I’m going to have to carry you after all, aren’t I?’ it sighed.