A central nave ended at a communion altar, at which stood the unmoving figure of the nameless Mechanicum adept mono-tasked with overseeing the engine functions.
Sitting cross-legged before the altar was a bearded, tattooed warrior in the unadorned plate of the Knights Errant. He was assembling the components of a bolter he’d spread out on the deck.
Loken lowered his shotcannon as the warrior looked up with a disappointed shake of his head.
‘What,’ said Loken, ‘are you doing?’
‘I got bored of waiting for you to find me,’ replied Severian.
ELEVEN
Screaming
Responsibilities
Invasion
Molech was screaming.
It bled magma from a score of wounds gouged by the wreckage dropped from orbit. It burned black where macro-munitions punched through the atmosphere and carved blazing canyons in its crust. Night was banished. The engine plumes of incoming warheads and the explosions of intercepted ones eclipsed the light of the moons.
I have been here before, but I do not remember it.
Little Horus Aximand watched the wreckage of Lord Admiral Brython’s fleet fall like continually dividing meteors. They scratched painfully bright parabolas in the sky. They shed blazing debris over tens of thousands of kilometres. The southern horizon was a fiery smudge of distant conflagrations and hard-burning retros. A pall of smoke pressed down on the landscape, underlit by the apocalyptic radiance of city fires.
Strange lightning arced in the clouds, the inevitable by-product of the sheer volume of metal piercing the atmosphere. Wrecked starships were coming down all across Molech, mostly on the industrialised landmass across the ocean. Its coastal embarkation facilities, starports and Army bases were in ruins, and saturation spreads of the Death Guard rad-bombs had rendered much of it uninhabitable for centuries.
There would be no reinforcements coming from that quarter.
The Catulan Reavers secured the Stormbird’s landing zone, a rain-lashed harbour in the lee of a partially collapsed tower. Waves boomed against the quay, sending up walls of foaming water.
Coming in ahead of the main invasion force, the Warmaster was exposed and vulnerable. Maloghurst and the Mournival cited the assassination attempt on Dwell as reason enough not to descend to this northern island, a volcanic scrap of rock named Damesek.
Horus had brooked no disagreement.
He would be first to Molech’s surface.
Lupercal stood at the base of the tower, resting a bare hand on the pale stone of a buttress. His head was bowed, his eyes closed.
‘What do you think he’s doing?’ asked Grael Noctua.
‘Lupercal will tell you in good time,’ said Aximand.
‘In other words, you don’t know,’ grunted Kibre.
Aximand didn’t bother to answer the Widowmaker, but Abaddon gave him a clout on the back of the head for good measure. The Warmaster craned his neck to see the tower’s upper reaches. Aximand did likewise and hoped this rainstorm would topple it into the sea.
Horus grinned and rejoined the Mournival, nodding as though in answer to an unheard question. The lustre of his battle armour had been restored, the amber eye upon its breast made whole once again. Had he not been blockaded on Mars, Urtzi Malevolus would have sought fault with the restoration work, but Aximand could find none. Unconsciously, his hand lifted to the split Mournival mark on his own helm. The half moon quartered.
‘It’s the sea, you understand,’ said Horus. ‘I recall the smell of it. The salt and the faint hint of sulphur. I know I remember it, but it’s like someone else’s memory.’
He turned on the spot, looking back at the tower, as though trying to picture what it might have looked like in its heyday.
‘You know what this is, of course?’ said Horus.
‘A ruined tower?’ said Kibre.
‘Oh, it’s so much more than that, Falkus,’ said Horus. ‘I’m almost sorry you can’t feel it.’
‘It’s the tower from Curze’s cards,’ said Aximand.
Horus snapped his fingers.
‘Exactly! Curze and his cartomancy. I told him no good would come of trafficking with arcana, but you know Konrad…’
‘I don’t,’ said Aximand. ‘And I count myself fortunate.’
Horus nodded in agreement. ‘He is my brother, but I wouldn’t choose him as my friend.’
‘Sir, why are we here?’ asked Noctua. ‘I don’t understand why we landed on this island when there’s plenty of tactically superior beachheads on the mainland. We should have dropped straight on Lupercalia.’
Horus let his hand drift to Worldbreaker’s haft.
‘You have a fine appreciation of tactical necessity, Grael,’ said Horus. ‘It’s why Little Horus here put your name forward, but you have a lot to learn about people and why they do things.’
‘I don’t understand, sir.’
Horus led Noctua to the tower. He put his new Mournival son’s hand on the stone and said, ‘Because he was here. The Emperor. Everything I learned on Dwell was true. My father came here a long time ago and left from this very tower.’
‘How can you tell, sir?’ asked Abaddon, examining the tower as if it might give up its secrets if he stared hard enough. The First Captain’s scalp was now shaven smooth, his manner still contrite.
‘Because I can feel it, Ezekyle,’ said Horus, and Aximand had never seen their master so vital, so alive. The Warmaster had not felt such a connection to his father since Ullanor, and it was energising him.
Horus closed his eyes again and said, ‘A being like the Emperor does not move gently through the world. His passing leaves a mark, and He left a very big bruise when he left Molech.’
Tilting his head back, Horus let the rain wash his skin. It fell in a hard, violent baptismal. Aximand smelled the smoke from the myriad fires, saw the ruddy haze that was this world’s red dawn.
Lupercal wiped a hand across his face and turned to Aximand.
‘This is where the Emperor left Molech,’ he said. ‘I mean to follow His steps and find what He took from it.’
To rouse dreaming gods from their mountain holds was no small thing. The darkness under the earth was cool and the promise of rest seductive. Decades of slumber had made the gods forgetful, but the siren song of war was insistent. Dreams became nightmares. Nightmares became memories. Marching feet, braying horns and thundering guns.
They had been built for war, these engines of destruction, so to sleep away the years was not for them. In red-lit choral chambers, the plainsong of the Legio warhosts was carried to the domed cavern temples of the God-Machines.
Beneath Iron Fist Mountain, holdfast of Legio Crucius, Paragon of Terra’s reactor roused itself as the embers of its fury were fanned and ritual connections made to the command casket of Princeps Etana Kalonice. Nine hundred and forty-three adepts attended her revival, one for every year of the God-Machine’s existence. They intoned blessings of the Omnissiah for her survival and recited a litany of her victories. Carthal Ashur led the songs of awakening from the inviolate summit of the mountain. Binaric subvocalisation inloaded the horrifying reality of Molech’s tactical situation.
At Kalman Point, bastion of Legio Gryphonicus, Invocatio Opinicus added his voice to that of Ashur’s, his basso tones soaring and filling the gradually awakening god-engines with the urge to fight.
Farther north in the Zanark Deeps, where Legio Fortidus buried itself in shadowed catacombs, Warmonger Ur-Nammu beat binary drums, her guttural call to arms a paean of loss and savagery. Treachery on Mars had destroyed her Legio’s brother engines, and these last survivors were intent on vengeance.
Ten thousand Mechanicum priests fed power to the Legio war engines. Their hearts filled with strength, their armour with purpose and their weapons with the scent of the enemy.
War had come to Molech and the world would soon ring to the tread of the god-engines.
Alivia Sureka ditched the groundcar when the floodwater blew i
ts motor. The engine block geysered steam and she swore in a language not native to Molech.
No way it was moving. Looked like she was on foot from here.
She’d keep to the back streets and avoid Larsa’s main thoroughfares. Terrified people were fleeing the doomed city and she didn’t have time to waste fighting her way through crowds.
Alivia climbed out the car. Ice cold water reached her knees.
And the day had started so well.
One of Molech’s principal starports and commercia centres, Larsa sat at the end of a wedge-shaped peninsula a few hundred kilometres north of Lupercalia’s white noise. It enjoyed a temperate climate carried over the bay from the jungles of Kush, and was kept fresh with coastal winds from Hvitha in the north.
All in all, Larsa wasn’t a bad place to live.
That had been true until this morning, when the burning remains of an Imperial frigate impacted twenty kilometres off the coast. Larsa’s littoral regions were underwater now, its commercia halls abandoned, its bustling markets and traders swept out to sea.
A foamed lake of debris and corpses engulfed the harbour, and only the greater elevation of the inland port districts had saved them. Disaster control squads were engaged in a desperate rescue effort to save those who might still be alive down there.
Alivia didn’t reckon on them finding anyone.
She’d endured the great flood of antiquity, and while today couldn’t compare to that deluge, she knew this was only going to get worse. A second or third wave would be building out to sea, and could be anywhere from minutes to hours away.
She needed to get back to the hab she shared with Jeph and his daughters. They lived on the edge of the Menach district in a hillside tenement along with another two thousand other port workers. Not the most exotic place she’d ever lived, but certainly better than many could hope to afford.
Alivia knew she ought to grab another transport and get the hell out of Larsa. Should have left the minute she heard the Warmaster was coming. Alivia’s time was short, but a stab of guilt knotted her gut each time she thought of abandoning Jeph and the girls.
She bore a heavy burden of duty, but now she’d acquired responsibilities. Mother. Wife. Lover. Just words she’d thought, cosmetic affectations to enhance her anonymity.
How wrong she’d been.
Alivia captained a pilot tender in the harbour, guiding the cargo tankers from Ophir and Novamatia through the submerged defences of Larsa’s approaches. Like everyone else, she’d paused to watch the lights flickering in the night sky. They bloomed and faded like a distant fireworks display. Her first mate said it looked pretty until she snapped that every flash probably meant hundreds of people were dying in battle.
Abandoning the trans-loader she’d been guiding in to port, Alivia immediately put to shore over the protests of her crew. It wasn’t logical, but all she could think of was getting home, hoping Jeph had been smart and kept the girls indoors. He wasn’t the sharpest knife in the block, but he had a good heart.
Perhaps that was why she needed him.
She’d grabbed the first groundcar she could hotwire and driven like a maniac into the hills. She’d reached the mid-level commercia districts when the darkness was dispelled by the fiery descent of the downed starship. Dauntless-class, she had thought. Alivia didn’t bother to watch it hit and drove even harder, knowing what was coming.
The impact tsunami slammed a kilometre and a half into Larsa before the drawback dragged half the city’s inhabitants to their deaths. Caught at the farthest extent of the wave’s force, Alivia had been slammed around by the flood. Old reflexes honed over the years steered the car through the chaos until its motor eventually died.
Fortunately, she was less than a kilometre from the hab-tenement, so didn’t have far to go. Alivia sprinted uphill, the water level dropping the higher she went. The streets were thick with people, some looking down in horror at the drowned coastline, others sensibly packing their belongings.
Alivia pushed on, finally reaching her hab, a mid-level stack of bare plascrete and dirty glass on the edge of the walled starport.
‘Clever boy,’ she said, seeing the hab shutter pulled down over their ground-floor residency. She ran over and banged her fists on the bare metal.
‘Jeph, open up, it’s me!’ she yelled. ‘Hurry, we’ve got to get out of the city.’
Alivia hit the shutter again, and it rose with a clatter of turning gears and rattling chains. She ducked under as soon as there was enough room and took a quick inventory. Miska and little Vivyen clutched their father’s overalls, their sleepy faces lined with worry.
‘Liv, what’s going on?’ asked Jeph, doing a poor job of keeping the fear from his voice. She took his hand and steadied him with gentle stimulation of his pituitary gland to produce a burst of endorphins.
‘We’ve got to go. Now,’ she said. ‘Get the girls ready.’
Jeph knew her well enough to know not to argue.
‘Yeah, sure, Liv,’ he said, calm without knowing why. ‘Where are we going?’
‘South,’ said Alivia as Jeph began wrapping the girls in heavy outdoor coats before helping them pull on their boots.
‘The cargo-five ready to go?’ asked Alivia, bending to retrieve a burnished metal gun-case from a cavity she’d cut in the floor beneath their bed. There was a gun in it, yes, but that wasn’t what was most precious to her in there.
‘Yeah, Liv, just like always.’
‘Good,’ she said, stuffing the gun-case into her kit bag.
‘This why you always say we got to keep it fuelled?’ asked Jeph. ‘In case of trouble?’
She nodded and his shoulders sagged in relief.
‘You know, I always worried it was so you could get out quick if you ever decided you’d had enough of us.’
Alivia didn’t have the heart to tell him both reasons were true.
Miska started crying. Alivia fought the urge to pull her close. She didn’t have time for sentimentality. As one of Molech’s principal port facilities, Larsa was sure to come under attack from Legion forces. She couldn’t be here when that happened.
‘Liv, they’re saying half the city’s underwater.’
‘Maybe all of it soon,’ she said, her eyes sweeping the room to make sure there wasn’t anything else of use they might need on the journey south. ‘That’s why we need to go right now. Come on.’
‘Sure, Liv, sure,’ nodded Jeph, hugging the girls tight. ‘Where are we going again?’
‘We drive south until we hit the agri-belt arterials and hope they’ve not been bombed to oblivion by the time we get there.’
‘Then what?’
‘Then we go to Lupercalia,’ she said.
Far to the east of Lupercalia, the Knights of House Donar held the Preceptor Line, a grand name for a crumbling curtain-wall that marked the edge of civilisation. West were inhabited cities, east the unchecked jungles of Kush, and beyond that only black-gulfed Ophir.
Immense predator beasts stalked the jungle’s humid depths, beasts that had once roamed freely across the land. Centuries of hunting had driven them to the fringes of the world, to hidden mountain fissures, jungle lairs or the arid southern steppe.
Armoured in jade and brass, House Donar boasted seven functional Knights and had kept vigil at the Preceptor Line for thirty generations. That regiments of Belgar Devsirmes and armoured squadrons of the Kapikulu Iron Brigade were also stationed along its length was, in Lord Balmorn Donar’s opinion, hardly worth mentioning.
Flocks of azhdarchid, flesh-hungry mallahgra or roaming packs of xenosmilus rarely emerged from the jungle, but when they did, House Donar was there to drive them back with chainsabres, battle cannon and thermal lances.
Lord Donar ducked beneath the lintel of the main curtain-wall, though the rusted iron arch was easily tall enough to accommodate his Knight’s bulk. His son’s Knight limped after him, one leg stained with oily blood where an azhdarchid matriarch had gored him. Towering, flightless b
irds with oversized necks and crocodilian beaks, azhdarchid were comical in appearance, but fully capable of wounding a Knight.
As Robard Donar had found to his cost.
Behind the wall, redoubts of dug-in Shadowswords and Baneblades, Malcadors and Stormhammers covered the two Knights as the gate slid shut. Thousands of soldiers mustered on the martial fields, embarking onto armoured transports. The invasion of the traitors had shifted the mobilisation up a gear, but the Preceptor Line had been on a war footing ever since a company of Belgar had been found slaughtered in the jungle.
Dying in the jungle was easy, it had a hundred ways to see a man dead, but something unutterably savage had killed these men. Any number of the jungle beasts might have attacked the men, but what manner of beast would take ident-tags as a trophy?
Just one of many mysteries of the Kushite jungle.
‘Walk tall,’ ordered Balmorn. ‘Don’t let these Army dregs see you limping. You’re a Donar, for Throne’s sake. Act like one.’
Balmorn marched his Knight up a long sloping roadway of scaffolding that led to the widened ramparts. The few functional turrets scanned the jungle. Thermal auspex hunted for targets. Robard followed his father, slower as he compensated for the buckled joints of his leg.
‘Foolish of you to get caught out like that,’ said Balmorn, as his son finally reached the ramparts and braced his Knight’s piston-driven leg against an adjacent blockhouse with no roof.
‘How could I have known the azhdarchid were going to stampede?’ snapped Robard, tired of his father’s baiting. ‘We were lucky to get away at all.’
A gaggle of Sacristans scurried towards the damaged Knight, but Robard warned them off with a bark of his hunting horn.
‘Luck’s got nothing to do with it, lad,’ said Balmorn, rotating his upper body to take in a full panorama from their elevated perch.
It wasn’t pretty.
The sky painted a gloomy picture for Molech. Furnace orange and coal black burned in every direction. The wind carried the stench of burned stone, heated steel and fyceline. Electromagnetic storms raged over the fertile landscape and flashes of orbital weapon detonations mushroomed on every horizon. Balmorn didn’t like to think how big explosions had to be for him to see them all the way out on the Preceptor Line.