The Master of Mankind Read online

  He thought back to the Emperor’s words, spoken in the memory dream of where the Master of Mankind had first risen among the fields and mud huts. Words of promise, of responsibility. The necessary command of humanity, to bring about law and progress.

  He thought of his own words to Diocletian and Kaeria before sending them to the surface. Scarcely one in ten of the Ten Thousand remain here.

  He thought of–

  The spear slipped a second time. Ra tightened his grip before the blade could fall from his hands, but the damage was done.

  He stilled in his movements, breathing heavily. The stone alien maiden still stared down at him, imploring without meaning. He turned from her, looking up through the shattered dome ceiling.

  With no sun there was no day. With no sky there was no night. The Impossible City – none of its defenders used the eldar name except in amused derision – stretched on for kilometres in every direction. In every direction: to look to the east and the west was to see a cityscape of winding streets and crumbling towers rising at unbelievable angles, as though the ground curved in the shape of an unimaginably vast conduit. To look directly up was to see yet more districts of the ancient wraithbone city, kilometres distant and difficult to perceive through the realm’s haze of mist. Those tall towers of smoothly curving alien architecture reached down just as the spires on the ground reached up. In truth, once a traveller approached the city there was no way of knowing where the true ground was; gravity was unchanged no matter where one walked. None of the Mechanicum’s instruments could explain the phenomena, but precious few Martian instruments had worked reliably in this realm since first entering it years before.

  It was here that the primarch Magnus had led an ocean of daemons in his wake, in his quest to warn the Emperor of Horus’ treachery. And it was here, with the naivety of a proud and wayward god-child, that Magnus had set a sword to the throat of the Emperor’s dreams. The catacombs of Calastar led directly to the Imperial Dungeon. If the Impossible City fell, Terra fell with it.

  No one knew what cataclysm had ravaged Calastar in epochs past. Whatever had driven the eldar from the Impossible City was a mystery that the Imperial vanguard had no capacity to solve. Much of Calastar’s core was a labyrinth of Mechanicum-born sections bolted into place, bridging the divide between the Imperial Dungeon and the dead hub-city itself, great spans of tunnels, bridges and channels forged by the blood, sweat and oil of countless priests in the Mechanicum’s sacred red.

  How the Emperor had first conceived this inconceivable project was a similar mystery, but the Mechanicum’s greatest minds had followed the many hundreds of pages in each exacting schemata nevertheless. In reverence of his vision, a new caste of tech-priest had risen unseen by Terran and Martian eyes alike: the Adnector Concillium, the Unifiers.

  And they had done it. They had bound Terran steel and Martian iron to avenues of senseless, unnatural materials previously shaped by long-dead, long-forgotten alien overlords. They had unified physical machinery with the psychically resonant matter of another dimension, and rebuilt the heart of an alien city.

  The Impossible City was a gateway to the webway beyond. At its borders, the web began: thousands of capillary tunnels and great thoroughfares worming through the ancient alien network, leading to other worlds and regions in the galaxy. Every junction, every tunnel, every bridge, every passage leading out of the city – whether too small for anything but a lone human or vast enough for a Battle Titan – was held secure by entrenched Mechanicum thrall-warriors, Oblivion Knights of the Sisters of Silence and the Emperor’s own Custodians.

  Calastar was not made up of roads and sectors as the human mind would contextualise urban order, but was formed into winding pathways across plateaus and rises, all leading to apex structures of presumably great import. Each bridge spanned a stretch of infinite abyss. The Mechanicum’s seers had reported that anyone falling from the bridges of Calastar would die of old age before reaching the bottom. Looking down into the nothingness, one could easily believe it.

  A great spire rose highest of all in this district, the long promenades on the rising approach to it lined with eroded statues of what were initially believed to be eldar heroes.

  ‘Gods,’ Diocletian had said half a decade before, bluntly correcting the Mechanicum overseer responsible for the initial scouting probes. A hololithic map had cast flickering half-light across his features at the time. ‘I have studied their profane and foolish lore. These are not merely statues of heroes. Many of them are depictions of the aliens’ false gods.’

  And so it was named the Godspire. Tribune Endymion and the Soulless Queen now used it as a command centre.

  The approach was once a scene of stunning, if alien, beauty. An eldar traveller in the time of that star-spanning empire’s glory would have made a long, sloping ascent through gardens of luminescent singing crystals, across arcing bridges that curved over the bottomless void between tier platforms, before standing at the gates that led into the tower at the city’s heart. Now the crystal formations were melted remains on their floating pedestals, many supporting the weight of automated Tarantula gun batteries. Most of the bridges were broken, their spans long since fallen into the nothingness below the Impossible City. The courtyard’s once-open expanses housed a bustling hive of Mechanicum arming stations, supply depots, prefab barracks and landing pads.

  In the cathedral, Ra levelled his gaze at the statue of the alien goddess-maiden once more. A filthy creature, forever staring with her slanted eyes. Who was she to judge the species that fought this new war in the ruins of her city? Her time, and the time of her people, was over. The eldar had been weighed by the implacable whims of the universe, and they had been found wanting.

  His spear began its singing spin – the first blow shattered her reaching hand, sending sundered wraithbone clattering against the floor; the second cleaved through the goddess’ neck, toppling her hooded head to the floor with an echoing ring. A great crack lightning-bolted across her pale features from forehead to throat. Her severed neck steamed from the vicious kiss of the spear’s power field.

  ‘A fit of temper?’ came a gentle voice from the temple’s entrance.

  Ra turned slowly, irritated that he’d not sensed his visitors’ approach. Truly, his humours were more unbalanced than he had realised if it was so easy to enter his presence undetected.

  A woman and a girl. He hadn’t expected them so soon.

  ‘Not quite,’ he admitted. ‘I disliked how the alien stared at me.’ He braced himself as they took the last few steps, resisting a hissed intake of breath at the pressure squeezing its cold fingers inside his skull. ‘Commander,’ Ra greeted the first figure, and ‘Melpomanei,’ he greeted the second.

  The commander of the Silent Sisterhood had come accompanied by her aide – a girl-child of nine or ten years, her head shaved bare and marked with aquila tattoos, clad in a simple adept’s robe of white, and beribboned with trailing parchments listing observances and rites that Ra had no desire to know of.

  He immediately looked away from the soulless child. The Sister-Commander was bad enough alone, but these two together threatened to steal all hope of concentration. Breaking eye contact helped. Barely.

  Krole’s presence was even harder to tolerate, yet impossible to dismiss. She was a tall figure, clad in contoured silver plate and cloaked in the grey-brown fur of some great off-world beast; it was a struggle for Ra to fix his attention on her, yet difficult to concentrate on anything else. She ate at his thoughts the way the night eats light, dulling and dimming everything else around her. The sensation was far from pleasant – she pulled at the Custodian’s focus not because she outshone everything else, but because she drowned and eclipsed it. To stand near her was to be near something hollow, something starving, something that sucked at the inside of Ra’s skull.

  She was empty. Nothing in the form of Something. A void masquerading as a pre
sence.

  Jenetia Krole greeted Ra with a nod, her eyes gently closing for the gesture. Her mouth remained hidden behind a great silver mouthpiece, surgically bound to her jaw and cheekbones. As she dipped her head, her high crest of red-dyed hair swayed gently. Ra knew of that ritual; the Sisters of Silence never cut their hair from the moment they took the Oath of Tranquillity. Krole’s mane, even bound at the roots into a topknot, was long enough to reach the base of her spine.

  If anyone could ever be in doubt as to her authority – were the evidence of their senses somehow not enough – all lingering misunderstandings would be banished by the Zweihander sword Veracity sheathed along her cloak, its hilt and grip showing over her shoulder. The lord of an entire species had once wielded that blade, before making a gift of it to the maiden who now bore it on her back.

  ‘Greetings, Ra Endymion,’ said the child at the Sister-Commander’s side. Her voice was a delicate lilt at odds with the armoured warrior-maiden towering above her. Jenetia kept her sharp, dark eyes on the Custodian’s. She lifted one hand, performing an artful series of gestures with her gauntleted fingers in the air before her chestplate.

  The girl-child spoke for her mistress, staring just as brazenly as the older woman. ‘You have received word from the Emperor.’

  There was no accusation in Melpomanei’s tone, nor in Jenetia’s stare. An accusation would imply the possibility of doubt.

  ‘I have,’ admitted Ra. He didn’t bother to ask how Jenetia knew.

  Jenetia signed her reply, her dark eyes fierce but her gloved hand moving patiently and slowly. Many of the Ten Thousand no longer required their Silent Sister allies to employ the signs and gestures of thoughtmark at all, having fought at their sides for years and learnt to interpret their moods and meanings from even the slightest movements or facial changes. However, no one could claim that degree of familiarity with Commander Krole. Necessity demanded that Melpomanei remain a constant presence at her side. Something in Krole’s appearance slid greasily from the senses, refusing to remain in his mind. He would be looking directly at her, watching her hands move in patterns he knew as well as any spoken language, yet sense and meaning came in fragments, as though he were hearing the barest scraps of any conversation.

  ‘The withdrawal proceeds apace,’ translated the bald girl. ‘All forces are en route to the Impossible City.’

  ‘He was so weary, Jenetia. I fear news of our failure only added to His burdens.’

  ‘The failure was Kadai’s,’ replied the girl-child, watching her mistress’ hands. ‘Not yours. Not mine. Kadai reached too far, with too much pride, against your counsel and my wishes. Regardless, even Kadai could not have known of the hordes infesting the outward tunnels.’

  Ra found precious little reassurance in that, no matter how true it might be. Krole noticed his reluctance. ‘You and I will hold this vile city until it falls, tribune. And when it does, we will go back to fighting tunnel by tunnel, as we did when we were first ordered into the web. There is no other choice.’

  Ra nodded and said nothing. There was nothing to say. Defeat was inconceivable.

  ‘What are our master’s wishes?’ the child asked.

  Ra forced the tension from his muscles, his armour joints murmuring at the subtle change in demeanour. ‘He commanded me to tell you that you must enact what He referred to as the Unspoken Sanction.’

  Krole’s pupils were pinpricks in the alien light. ‘He said this?’ asked the young girl. ‘You are truly certain?’

  Ra knew better than to ask what the command might mean. The Sisters were an order apart. They had their secrets just as the Ten Thousand had theirs. Such was the Emperor’s will.

  Ra met the Sister-Commander’s eyes. Sensing his sincerity, Krole nodded and signed a reply.

  ‘Sister Kaeria Casryn will accompany Diocletian on his return to the surface,’ said the young girl, ‘in order to enact the Emperor’s command.’

  ‘As you wish,’ Ra agreed.

  Jenetia followed this with a question, her eyes darkly urgent.

  ‘Will He join us?’ Melpomanei asked.

  ‘He remains bound to the Golden Throne. The forces besieging him outside the webway are growing in strength. He won’t stand with us.’

  Melpomanei watched her mistress’ hands with a distant gaze, her mouth moving all the while. ‘What He commands, we will enforce.’ As she finished signing, Jenetia shifted once more. Rather than gesture a full sentence, she merely reached up over her shoulder, close to the back of her neck, and tapped her fingertips to Veracity’s long grip. It was enough for the child to translate. ‘Is the Emperor well?’

  ‘The pressure torments Him, but He remains resolute. Beyond the assault against His psychic defences, He spoke of a new presence, drawing near. Something old. Something already in the webway.’

  Jenetia cut him off with a gentle wave of her hand. The motion moved seamlessly into more sign language. ‘That is why I am here,’ said Melpomanei. ‘If you have finished your meditations, will you please come with me?’

  ‘As you wish.’

  The Custodian followed as the commander strode from the cathedral. Together they looked across the mist-wreathed vista of Calastar as the Impossible City stretched before them, around them, above them. Gone were the times such an insane view triggered disorientation in even Ra’s enhanced senses. Now when he looked at the eldar ruins, he saw a bastion of Mechanicum-armoured and gun-platformed towers and bridges that would be infinitely easier to defend than several hundred separate tunnels – but with no margin for error. Withdrawing to the city itself meant losing any fallback point.

  The entire city was an unlikely hybrid of Imperial technology grafted onto time-eaten eldar wraithbone. When it came to the Impossible City, Ra’s awe had long ago been replaced by cold calculation and concerns of logistics.

  And there stood the Godspire, where a golden Stormbird swinging in to land was silhouetted by the mist of middle distance. Three propellered Mechanicum ornithopters flapped in a slow arc above the landing gunship. The Koloborinkos flyers were mercifully silent at this distance. Up close, the machines’ flapping wings and spinning rotors gave off a brutal roar.

  Scarcely even a quarter of the Godspire’s height, yet standing as a colossus above the marshalling Mechanicum forces, was the Scion of Vigilant Light. Freshly returned from one of the widest and tallest tunnels, the Warlord Titan was crawling with repair crews and maintenance servitors, who swarmed over its armour plating like ants clustering over a kill.

  ‘Are you troubled?’ Ra asked the Sister-Commander. ‘I cannot read your expressions.’

  Jenetia Krole elaborated with several gestures for the girl to speak aloud. ‘Have you heard the reports of Thoroughfare HG-245-12-12?’

  Ra nodded, paying heed to the background murmur of the dimmed vox reports playing at the back of his focus, whispering of the unfolding war. Fighters at the barricades fighting, falling, launching counter-attacks. The endless cycle. He had dulled them to near-mute while sparring and meditating upon the Emperor’s will, yet he knew at once of which report the Sister-Commander spoke.

  ‘I have already requested the Mechanicum send one of the Uridia-caste patrols,’ Melpomanei qualified. ‘They are less efficient since Adnector Primus Mendel was slain, but they assured me it would be done. Now you tell me the Emperor Himself has sensed this being’s approach. A Protector and its war machines may not be enough. What would be powerful enough alone for the Emperor to sense? What could be out there?’

  ‘There are a million things out there,’ Ra replied, ‘each more impossible than the last.’

  Jenetia Krole signed her reply slowly and very clearly. ‘This,’ said Melpomanei, ‘is something different.’ She hesitated then, almost awkward as she signed once more. ‘May I ask what form the Emperor’s message took?’

  Ra found the concept of what he’d seen, that pure and
ancient world, difficult to frame in simple words. Jenetia noted his hesitation and stared, intrigued.

  ‘He showed me His childhood,’ the Custodian admitted, ‘and told me of the moment He first learned that humanity needed rulers.’

  It was gratifying, in a way, to see Sister-Commander Jenetia Krole – the Soulless Queen of the Imperium – show genuine shock. As much as Ra felt discomfort at the sight, it was still a revelation to witness. Her hands hesitated in the air before her breastplate before moving into another series of smooth signs.

  ‘His childhood?’ the young girl said. ‘Elaborate please, Custodian.’

  Ra felt the cold of Krole’s fierce adamance. ‘I saw Terra. More accurately, perhaps, I saw Old Earth.’

  ‘Neither Kadai nor Jasaric ever spoke of receiving such a vision. The future, the present, the recent past, yes. All of those. Never a reflection of Old Earth.’

  ‘I saw what I saw.’

  ‘Yet why would He show you this?’ the girl asked, her neutral tone conveying none of Jenetia’s mute amazement.

  ‘You ask a stone why the wind blows, commander. I don’t know.’

  ‘I must think on this. Thank you, Custodian.’ The Sister-Commander clicked her fingers, beckoning the girl, and offered Ra a polite bow of farewell.

  He didn’t return it. He bowed and knelt only to one man. He did however force a weary smile to Melpomanei, aping the pleasant expression in an attempt to be disarming.

  For the first time, Melpomanei spoke without her mistress signing. ‘You look monstrous when you pretend to be human,’ said the little girl.

  Ra kept smiling. ‘As do you, soulless one.’

  Three

  Sunlight

  First of the Ten Thousand

  War council

  Diocletian Coros stood upon the wall of a fortress that shouldn’t exist, bathed in a halo of unwanted sunlight. While the first natural light to grace his skin in over five years should have been a blessing, he found himself pained by its unwelcome glare. His eyes were far too used to the sunless, skyless half-light of the realm below the Palace.