Deathwing (36 page)

‘Welcome to my kingdom,’ the voice purred. Bitter mockery tinged the accents Jomi heard in his mind. ‘Our kingdom, now—’

(‘Mine tooo…’) A malicious, disappointed echo seemed to haunt the voice, perhaps unheard by it, perhaps all too familiar. (‘Failure, feeble failure… But here’s a soft body at least…’)

The lid of a small porthole slid aside. Jomi pressed his face to the thick plascrystal as floodlight beams lanced from the robot. He stared at a great grotto of metal, from which several steel tunnels ran away into stygian gloom. Strange machines jutted from the plated floor and from the ribbed walls. A debris of loose tools and cargo floated like dead fish in a dank pond.

‘There’s one other such machine as mine on board,’ the voice confided, as if oblivious of the soft, sinister echo that Jomi had heard. ‘It has been inactive for millennia, lacking a person’s mind to fill it, but I can revive it now. With my science, I’ll put you into it. First, of course, I’ll need to cut away your body—’

(‘That’ll be an exquisite hour or so…’)

Jomi vomited in terror.

‘—soon, before you use all the air I sucked in on that moon. Once you’re activated we can play games. Hide and seek, for instance… You’ll need to rely on the resources of your lovely mind. At least I’ll have company now. Oh the madness, the madness. Maybe my imaginary companion will go away. Into you, maybe…’

A figure in a blood-red cloak drifted into view, out in the giant grotto. Its frozen arms stretched out vainly towards a vista which, prior to the flare of illumination, it couldn’t possibly have seen…

W
HAT
-
MIGHT
-
BE
– and might still be – vanished. Jomi still stood before the robot.

‘Daemon, daemon, hidden daemon!’ he shrieked at it. He spat. Reaching into his memory for an incantation, he recalled Farb’s prayers, and howled:

‘Imperator hominorum, nostra salvatio!’

‘Jomeeeee! Do not betray meeee!’

The whitehot cauldron inside Jomi spilled over. The inner furnaces, so suddenly revealed to him, gushed psychic fire. Hardly knowing how, he sprayed a fountain of defensive mental energy, ill-focused yet incandescent, at the voice, which would have betrayed him.

‘Nostra salvatio, hominorum Imperator!’

‘Aiieee!’ cried the voice, keening through his head like a scalpel blade attempting to severe the sinews of his new-found psyker ability, raw and unshaped as yet.

Recoiling, his brain in agony, Jomi nevertheless summoned another spout of hot repulsion to hurl at the robot.

T
HE BOY
’
S RAW
power! And his piety too, all be it born of terror! Bathed in the backwash of inner light from the volcanic upheaval within the boy, with his own senses extended Serpilian had partaken of Jomi’s vision of what-might-be.

As if an actor in Jomi’s dream, the inquisitor had experienced the death-agony of passing through the portal. Of collapsing lungs. Of utter, absolute chill… He had also known Jomi’s claustrophobic, dreadful dismay. Moments later Serpilian found himself still sprawled on the battlefield; and the battlefield was a blessed place by contrast.

Scrambling up, Serpilian signalled back towards Hachard, hoping that the Commander could see and would understand his gestures. Then he resumed his reckless run towards the boy who was holding the robot at bay, like a rat defying a bull. He no longer pointed his jokaero needler.

Casting his own aura of protection, Serpilian seized Jomi by the shoulder.

‘In the Emperor’s name, come with me to safety! Come swiftly, Jomi Jabal!’

H
ACHARD MUST HAVE
understood. As soon as Serpilian had hauled the boy to some reasonable remove, and had ducked with him behind a boulder, the las-cannons of the Land Raiders opened fire. Shaft upon shaft of searing energy lanced at the robot. The Space Marine infantry added their contribution. Wounded ogryns scattered, abandoning the remaining groxen which had been preoccupying them.

Had the giants not engaged with the savage reptiles, by now one of those might have attacked Serpilian or the boy…

The robot launched jets of plasma and energy beams. A Land Raider exploded, raining hot shards of plasteel. Several Marines fell victim to beams and jets. The Imperial energies cascaded off the robot’s shields, pluming into the sky, rendering the landscape bright as day.

Yet now the robot seemed confused. It backed. It lumbered. Perhaps the mind within was anguished. Perhaps, infected by Jomi’s vision, it imagined that it had passed safely back through the portal, though the nightmare evidence was otherwise. Perhaps it was running low on energy.

At last an Imperial energy-beam tore loose a weapon arm. Another beam pierced the vulnerable hatch. Part of the robot’s mantle flared and melted. Still firing – but falteringly now, seemingly at random – the great, damaged machine stomped back towards the portal. Land Raider beams focused in unison upon its back, so that it seemed to be propelled in its retreat by a hurricane-torn, white-hot sail woven from the heart of a sun.

As it entered the portal, the robot incandesced blindingly. A detonation as of a dozen simultaneous sonic booms rocked the torn terrain. Glaring fragments of the robot’s carapace flew back like angry boomerangs, like scythes. The bulk of its disintegrating body pitched forward, out of existence, vanishing.

S
ERPILIAN DEACTIVATED HIS
energy armour, and Jomi, smeared with dirt and stinking of sweat, wept in his arms.

‘I shall,’ vowed Serpilian, ‘recommend you for the finest training – as an inquisitor yourself.’

The boy cried, ‘What? What? I can’t hear! Only the awful terrible thunder.’

‘Your hearing will return!’ Serpilian shouted into the boy’s streaked face. ‘If not, that can be repaired with an acoustic amulet! One day you will serve the Emperor as I serve him. I came a long way to find you!’

A
FTER A WHILE
, Jomi listened to Serpilian’s thoughts instead and began to understand. This cloaked figure had come a long way to find him. Why, so had the voice; so had the mind, and the daemon, in the robot…

Jomi would be sent far away from the wretched moon, to Earth itself. He thought fleetingly of Gretchi; but as the voice itself had suggested, that kind of yearning seemed to have become extremely insignificant.

G
ROANING, AND RUBBING
his head, Grimm ambled back to where the BONEhead lay sprawled; but it was undeniable that Thunderjug’s whole skull, including the riveted battle honours, was missing. The dwarf patted the toppled giant consolingly on the shoulder. ‘Huh!’ he said.

Bilious-hued power armour loomed. Commander Hachard himself stood over the ogryn.

‘I watched him charge,’ said Hachard’s external speaker. ‘The other subhumans remain alive – I think so, by and large – but not their sergeant. The Grief Bringers are… honoured, by his bravery.’ Ponderously, the Space Marine Commander saluted.

What about me? thought Grimm. I nearly got bloomin’ blown to pieces. But he said nothing. It was Thunderjug who was dead.

Bending, assisted by the squat, Hachard dragged the ogryn’s corpse into his powered arms.

As Grimm gazed up at the indigo sky, the stars stared back down at him blindly. The portal had disappeared a while since, yet a tremor seemed to twist the night air, warping the heavens. Or was the distortion due to moisture in his eyes?

MONASTERY OF DEATH

Charles Stross

T
ENZIG DIDN
’
T REALIZE
what was going on until he viewed the book in the crypt beneath the library, but when he did it began to come clear. And it didn’t make a nice picture.

He was still hunched over the fading screen of the viewer hours later, when the master of the secret arts passed by his booth and touched him on one shoulder with the tip of a finger. Tenzig turned in his seat, then looked up enquiringly. The master beckoned, and Tenzig forced himself to his feet. The world seemed to be spinning around his tired head as he followed the master out of the silence of the scriptorium and into the echoing brightness of the pentagon. The condition of silence was lifted, but even so his lips were too dry for speech. ‘Why?’ he croaked.

The master spared him a brief, enigmatic glance before turning back to the path. ‘White noise,’ he said, gravel crunching beneath his sandals. The day was dry and mild, the clouds overhead masking the starglare into a lambent glow that washed all trace of shadows from the scene, so that they seemed to walk through liquid light.

‘You will join me in my retreat,’ the master said, rubbing his shaven scalp with the heel of one hand, as if the enlightenment of ages required the polishing of flesh. ‘Such things are not… fit for conversation in public. Perhaps some novice, overhearing these matters, might panic. Perhaps the sky might fall…’

Perhaps, perhaps, Tenzig thought. “Perhaps” was the holy word of the order, an admission of doubt in the face of overwhelming probability. The master might equally well say, perhaps not. The facts, as Tenzig saw them, were absolutely terrifying.

The Imperium was returning.

T
HE MASTER
’
S RETREAT
was high in the north tower of the monastery, one of the oldest buildings in the complex and, indeed, one of the oldest on the planet. Cold-chiselled blocks of stone had been placed atop one another without mortar, their massive weight holding them in position. The clement weather and lack of quakes in this area had allowed them to last for a long time; hundreds of generations of monks had lived, toiled and died beneath the gaze of those high windows.

That was not to say that the retreat was austere. His master had many rooms, floored and walled in polished parm-wood that had achieved a dark, glossy finish through centuries of rubbing. The furniture was of greater antiquity than Tenzig’s ancestry. And it was into this environment that the master of the secret arts led his postulant and offered him hospitality.

‘Please be seated,’ said the master as Tenzig slid shut the screen door behind him and stood, uncertainly, in the portal. A thin smile flitted across the master’s face as he strode over to the window and looked out. With measured movements his eyes scanned the horizon; then, as if satisfied, his fingers rested for a moment on a concealed spot on the window frame. Tenzig stared with fascination as his silhouette shifted: where behind him there had been landscape and sky, now there was only a glowing plane of light.

‘A randomizer,’ his master said, still with that faintly knowing smile. ‘We are safe from eavesdroppers, for the time being.’ He moved to the wooden reading-throne beside the window and sat in it, hands resting on armrests polished black by generations of his predecessors in office. ‘Now, Tenzig. Perhaps you are ready to report to me what you have seen, so that I can convey the joyful tidings to brother abbot?’

Tenzig shifted in his seat. The cushion beneath him felt unnaturally soft after years of meditation on polished wooden floors.

‘I fear that there are scant glad tidings for the master of temporal administration,’ he said hesitantly. ‘As you suggested in your wisdom, I consulted the archives for reference to this ancient body of lore. The old paper archives, the chronicles of the ancients; not the true library. It would appear that at one time the Bodies Secular were visited on a regular basis by an overlord from beyond the sky; while he claimed high office, he claimed that others ranked higher yet than his exalted person. Such taxes as he extracted he took in their name. Insurrectionists were dealt with cruelly, but the last such visit occurred many centuries ago: before the time of the foundation of our order, even before the near stars went out. The texts say little on the matter of the Imperium he claimed to represent, save only what we already know – and that none can stand against such force.’

He fell silent, and the only noise in the retreat was the faint soughing of the north wind outside the walls. The master of the secret arts, those arts upon which the monks had depended for their defence across the centuries, bowed his head in silent contemplation. Tenzig felt fear. If he had caused even the master of the secret arts to despair, a man who possessed such awesome powers that it was whispered that he could cause a leaf to wither by blowing on it, the implications were barely worth considering.

I am a channel, he recited to himself in silence: a stream through which the water of history can flow. I cannot obstruct, I cannot distort, and with the passage of my life I enlarge the channel a little, so that my successors can expand it further. This was the catechism of the Order of the Heavenly Virtues, who defended wisdom in a world so plainly lacking in it – and that branch of the order known as the secret arts, who defended the defenders of wisdom. Tenzig shivered, feeling the roots of his being bend in an unholy tempest of doubt. For if the master could not see a solution, what hope was there for such as he?

The power from beyond the sky would brook no rivals. And, through force of circumstances, the order might almost be one…

The master’s head snapped up, and Tenzig froze before his gaze like a small bird before a snake. Eyes of utter blackness seemed to drill right through his soul. His muscles tensed in reflex and he found himself unable to move.