‘You will see terrible things within X-42’s mind, Abrehem,’ said Ismael, his metal-cowled head so like that of the arco-flagellant, and yet so different. ‘This is a very brave thing you are doing.’
‘It is a foolish act of self-indulgence,’ said Totha Mu-32. ‘You will find nothing within X-42’s mind but vileness. Do you think that upstanding citizens who love their children and worship the Emperor every day are turned into arco-flagellants?’
Totha Mu-32 gestured towards the twitching arco-flagellant and said, ‘They are the worst scum imaginable; the dregs of society, the maladjusted, the insane and the irredeemable. That is who this was, and to think otherwise would be a terrible mistake. He is now a servant of the Emperor and the Omnissiah, and that is all he will ever be.’
Abrehem nodded towards Ismael. ‘Just as a mindless servitor was all Ismael could ever be?’
‘That is very different,’ said Totha Mu-32. ‘What Ismael has become is a divine gift, but I cannot accept that the Omnissiah would work through a wretch like X-42.’
‘That’s pride speaking,’ said Abrehem. ‘Saiixek accused you of the same thing, remember? That you claimed to know the will of the Machine-God. You said it yourself, X-42 was a monster. Now he is a servant of the Emperor and the Omnissiah, and I need to know if there is any humanity left within him, any last shred of goodness we can salvage.’
Totha Mu-32 said nothing, his half-human features unreadable beneath his crimson hood.
‘I’m doing this,’ said Abrehem. ‘So either help me or get out.’
Ismael took a step forwards, keeping hold of Abrehem’s hand and reaching out to lift Rasselas X-42’s scarred and callused hand.
‘The moment of connection will be painful,’ said Ismael.
‘I remember the last time,’ nodded Abrehem. ‘I’m ready this time.’
‘No,’ said Ismael. ‘Not for this you are not.’
Ismael was right. Abrehem wasn’t ready for the sudden, wrenching dislocation of having his every sense ripped from his body and rammed into the mind of another living being. It was like having the innards of his skull scooped out and flash-burned before being pieced together again, flake of ash by flake of ash. Abrehem felt his sense of identity slough from whatever form of consciousness he was experiencing, like a serpent shedding its skin and being reborn.
One minute he was Abrehem Locke, bondsman aboard the Ark Mechanicus, Speranza, the next he was…
He was…
He had no idea who he was.
He was Abrehem Locke.
No, he was… no, he was not. He was. He was someone else.
He was someone whose thoughts were like a rabid dog in a cage of its own making, the physical manifestation of an unending scream that was only kept silent by the complex alchemy of numerous pharmacological inhibitors. He sat in the centre of a soulless room of bare stone, coffered steel and bottle-green ceramic tiles, facing a heavy cog-shaped doorway of bronzed steel. Leather restraints at wrists, ankles and torso secured him to a cold steel throne-gurney.
Incense fogged the air and heavy machinery, more suited to the interior of a shipwright’s assembly-hangar, sat idle to either side of the throne. Feed lines pulsed like arteries, venting tiny puffs of oil-rich vapour that tasted of bile and hypocrisy.
He tried to move his head, but clamps drilled into the bone of his skull and jaw prevented any lateral rotation. In his peripheral vision, he could see twin icons stamped on opposite walls; one a steel-toothed cog of black and white with an iron skull at its centre, the other a two-headed eagle with one eye hooded and blind and the other ever-watchful.
Both icons stared at him with impassive and unforgiving eyes.
He – no, the mind he squatted within – felt nothing but contempt for everything they now represented to him.
Chem-shunts buried into the meat of his forearms pumped honeyed muscle relaxants through his bloodstream, and neuro-synaptic blockers had been introduced to his spinal fluid. He knew this because the trembling adepts who’d strapped his drugged body into the throne-gurney had spared no detail in their descriptions of what was about to happen.
The door irised open and a chanting group of robed figures marched through.
Their leader read from a heavy book, its weight too enormous for any mortal man to bear. Instead, it was borne upon the back of a stunted figure with an exactingly contoured hunch to its spine. He saw this arrangement of bones had been surgically crafted simply to bear the book. The figure’s legs were foreshortened stumps of ossified bone and muscle, and he had no doubt its brain had been reconditioned to occlude any thought but the bearing of the book. Every moment spent in so awkward a posture must have brought constant pain, but it believed it was honoured to be allowed to bear the book, which he saw with grim amusement was the Scriptures of Sebastian Thor.
He knew the volume on its back could not be the original, of course. That sat in a stasis-sealed vault on Ophelia VII, guarded by millions of Sororitas warriors and Ecclesiarchy troops, the likes of which he had once led into the fires of battle.
This was, at best, a tenth-generation copy, which still made it an insanely precious artefact.
The man reading from the book was dressed in a white and red chimere, with a cincture of tasselled gold securing it at his waist. He wore a Pallium Pontifex around his neck, and the silver skulls stitched along its draped length winked in the half-light. A porcelain skull mask of pure white veiled his face, its cheekbones exaggerated and its eyes bulging monstrously. The jaw was distended, the teeth gleaming in the half-light as though Death wished to savour the mortal fear of the condemned man. He recognised the lexiconi devotatus the priest spoke; an ornate and complex argot of piety unknown beyond the higher echelons of the Adeptus Ministorum.
Behind the pontifex came three priests of the Machine-God, cowled in red and black. The outlines of their bodies were misshapen, rendered post-human by hulking augmetics and artificial limbs. They walked with unnatural, disjointed movements, each one having transcended humanity to become something more and less at the same time. They had achieved a form of mechanical apotheosis, meaning that their bodies were more metal than meat, yet that was considered an honour.
Finally, a warrior of flesh and bone entered, and where the pontifex’s face was hidden and the Martians were objective in their hatred, this man made no secret of his loathing. A man of violence, he was clad in form-fitting black armour, glossy and well cared for, but old and hard-worn. A reflection of the man inside, he knew. Alone of the new arrivals, his face went unmasked. Its deep-cut lines and flinty eyes were without compromise, without remorse and utterly without pity.
He knew this man. This man was responsible for putting him in this chair.
The tech-priests surrounded him, and though his nervous system was all but paralysed and his bloodstream choked with soporifics, they were still wary of him.
What had he done to earn such enmity from these men?
The pontifex spoke first.
‘Lukasz Król,’ he said – finally a name! – his voice distorted behind the skull mask. ‘You have been sentenced to arco-flagellation by the holy writ of the Ecclesiarchy you once served. Death alone would be insufficient punishment for the monstrous heresies you have committed in the guise of the Emperor’s servant, thus you will atone for your wretchedness and unnatural acts in His holy armies until such time as death claims you. This, it is pronounced, is a true and just command of Ecclesiarchy Helican, enacted this third hour of the hundred and fiftieth day of the nine hundred and eighty-sixth year of the Thirty-Sixth Millennium.’
The pontifex stepped back and the Martians began their work. They plugged themselves into the control mechanisms surrounding him with snaking mechadendrites, and the machine arms to either side of the gurney jumped to life like sleepers suddenly roused to wakefulness. Surgical equipment unsheathed from metallic cowls – needles, arterial clamps and whining bolt-fitters – and nests of components rose from the floor to either side of hi
m.
‘Reduce the balms and begin,’ said the pontifex, ‘He has to feel every moment of this.’
Fear rose up in a smothering wave, blotting out all thought and reason.
This is not my body, this is not my mind.
But the sensations surging through him were no less real, no less indistinguishable from injuries done to his own distant flesh. He wanted to scream, but this was Lukasz Król’s memory and he was not about to let these men see him beg or weep or scream.
Piezo-edged bone saws extruded from the arms of the throne and sliced through his wrists with ultra-rapid precision. Blood jetted explosively, but even as the agony cut through his diminishing chemical haze, cauterising heat was brought to bear, sealing the stumps with a single pulse of agonising heat. As horrifying as the removal of his hands had been, it was nothing compared to what came next.
Clicking machines with calliper hands like the nightmarish claws of a demented toymaker began stripping the skin, muscle and nerve tissue from his forearms all the way to the elbow. Surgical flesh-weavers layered replacement nerve-strands over the reinforced bone and grafted fibre-bundle muscle in place of the discarded organic tissue.
His chest heaved and his limbs thrashed against the restraints. They simply tightened in response. He couldn’t move. He could only watch as his entire body was pared back and remade.
Sealed caskets rotated up from the floor and opened with pneumatic hisses of condensing air. The monotonous stream of binaric nonsense the tech-priests were chanting faltered fractionally as the caskets opened to reveal the weapons within.
Such awesome tools of destruction required reverence.
Through a haze of tears and hate, he watched two of the machine priests step forwards and attach the devices to his arms using implanted bolt-drivers, neural shears, flesh grafts and sacred unguents. He felt every insertion, every bolt driving down into bone and every screaming horror of exposed nerves being spliced together. A burst of power surged through him, and telescoping carbon-steel electro-flails twitched and danced as ancient, barely-understood circuitry meshed with his crude organic functionality.
The gurney tipped backwards, and the drills, excising machinery and clamps went to work on his skull. Trepanning picks bored through bone and the clicking, mechanised hands inserted neural control implants before finally removing the upper dome of his skull. He felt the lid of bone creaking upwards and the horror of his mind being exposed was almost too much to bear.
Sacred arrangements of sacred oil were dripped into his brain cavity, with each anointing accompanied by the sixteen names of the binary saints. Spinning orbs with mechanical blade limbs as thin as spider legs clicked into place before him, whirring with demented glee.
No, no, no, no, not my–
The whirring orbs stabbed forwards and plucked out his eyes.
This is not my body! This is not my body! This is not my body! This is not my body! This is not my body! This is not my body! This is not my body! This is not my body! This is not my body!
Delicate clamps kept his optic nerves taut as complex targeting arrays, broad-spectrum threat analysers and visio-cognitive orbs were attached in place of his eyes and implanted into his skull. A cranial cowl that was part devotional feed, part cortical inhibitor and part death-mask was slotted home, lowered over his slack features and wired to the frontal lobes of what remained of his brain as hymnals blared from unseen augmitters. Like the grinning skull faceplates of the Chaplains of the Adeptus Astartes, it was the rictus agony of the Emperor, and all those whose doomed fate it was to look upon him would know he had been punished by an agency beyond that of mere men. Detailed schematics of the body-plans of the men before him sprang up on the inner surfaces of his eyes, complete with endurable stresses, violation tolerances and a hundred other measures of how they could be ripped into screaming ruin.
The work continued for another hour, agony upon agony, horror upon horror, until there was little sign that a human being had once sat in the throne-gurney. The mortal meat of Lukasz Król had been scraped away and replaced with an instrument of death and annihilation. Only Abrehem remained and even he was a ravaged shell, cored out by the same processes that had made sport of this man’s flesh.
Yet even as his consciousness wept and wished for extinction, he felt the soaring ecstasy of having the power of life and death. For all intents and purposes, he was no longer human, his body enhanced to lethal levels of killing power and stripped back to the most basic physiological functions.
Lukasz Król had effectively ceased to exist, and in his place sat something else.
Something altogether more dangerous and more appalling.
‘It is done,’ said the pontifex, with a solemn nod, stepping forwards and dipping his fingers in an inkhorn of sanctified pigment that a genuflecting tech-priest held out before him. He drew four parallel lines of crimson down the skull mask.
‘In Thor’s Blood are ye anointed. In Thor’s Blood shall ye awaken,’ said the pontifex.
Rivulets of paint slid down the mask like tears of blood, dripping onto a chest that now bulged with cardio-pulmonary enhancers, adrenal-slammers and dormant steroidal compounds. Spinal implants snaked down his back in a chain of injectors, and stimm-reservoirs on his shoulders gave him a hulking, over-muscled proportion to his upper body.
He was a killer now, a render of flesh, a weapon and an act of retribution all in one.
Abrehem revelled in this new incarnation, a being of almost unlimited violent potential to whom no atrocity was beyond his capabilities, no loathsome act of utmost cruelty beneath him. With all need for moral pretence torn away, Abrehem saw the full horror of what Lukasz Król had done, the torture palaces, the rape gulags and the experimentation camps where he had personally overseen all manner of unimaginable affronts to the Emperor.
This was good.
They thought they had taken away his life and made him their own, but they were wrong.
The killer had always been in him.
All they had done was strip the mask of humanity away to rebuild him stronger and more lethal than ever.
‘I take from you the name of Lukasz Król,’ said the pontifex, dipping his hand in the pigment once more and drawing another series of four vertical lines down Król’s chest. The ablative polymer coatings introduced to his dermal layers made the skin feel hard and plastic.
Abrehem watched the pontifex check the serial identifier codes on the requisition form held out by another of the tech-priests and verify them against the name the doctrinal abaci had generated. ‘I dub thee Rasselas X-42, and may the Emperor have mercy on your soul.’
‘Bastards like him don’t have a soul,’ said the man in black armour.
‘We all have souls, chastener,’ replied the pontifex. ‘The words of the divine Thor teach us that a single man with faith can triumph over a legion of the faithless. We have restored this man’s faith, and he will repay that gift in the blood of our enemies.’
The pontifex nodded towards what had once been a psychopathic mass murderer known as Cardinal Astral of Ophelia VII, Lukasz Król.
‘Even the darkest soul can find redemption and salvation in death.’
‘I couldn’t give a ship-rat’s fart about his salvation,’ snapped the chastener. ‘I just want him to suffer for what he did.’
‘Have no fear of that,’ said the pontifex. ‘He will suffer like no other.’
The wrench of dislocation as Abrehem was dragged back to his own flesh was no less jarring, but where he had plunged headlong into an unknown body, this time he returned to his own. Though it scarcely felt like his, and the weakness that filled him after the sense of ultimate strength was almost as painful as the surgeries undergone by Lukasz Król.
He toppled from the stool, as helpless as an automaton with its power cell removed and fell into the combined grip of Ismael and Totha Mu-32. Abrehem screamed like a lunatic as a tide of unremitting horror washed over him. His cybernetic arm clawed at Totha Mu-32 and
Ismael as though they were warp-spawned monsters from the bleakest depths of the immaterium. Abrehem fought with the strength of the demented, hysterical and desperate to escape the abhorrent presence of Rasselas X-42.
He relived stolen memories – decades of nightmarish, unthinkable abuses, sickened and revolted by every grisly detail. Unnumbered souls had been sent screaming into oblivion, and Abrehem pressed his hands to his ears as he head their screams echoing within his skull.
To think that one man could conceive of such things was repellent enough, but to know that entire cadres of the Ecclesiarchy had been dragged into the maelstrom of his insanity by unquestioning devotion was almost too much to bear. How many billions had died at the hands of the very institution that proclaimed its mission was to protect them?
Abrehem bent over and vomited the meagre contents of his stomach over X-42’s dormis chamber, retching and heaving in desgust. He closed his eyes, willing the scenes of torture, murder and degradation to fade from his thoughts.
‘Abrehem,’ said Totha Mu-32. ‘Abrehem, are you hurt?’
He shook his head and wiped the sleeve of his robe over his dripping lips.
‘No, I’m…’
He wanted to say fine, but knowing what he now knew of X-42’s atrocities, he doubted he would ever be fine again. With Totha Mu-32 and Ismael’s help, he climbed unsteadily to his feet, swiftly turning and making his way from the dormis chamber after checking the arco-flagellant’s pacifier helm was securely in place.
‘Did you see?’ asked Ismael.
Abrehem nodded. ‘I saw,’ he gasped. ‘You knew, didn’t you? You knew who he was.’
‘I did, but you had to see for yourself,’ said Ismael. ‘And now you know who X-42 was, do you still think he should be released from his condition? Would you restore the man he was?’
‘Thor’s blood, no!’ cried Abrehem. ‘Lukasz Król was a monster.’