The crane operator and Kovind exchanged thumbs-up acknowledgements. The muscle men guffawed and clouted each other on the shoulder to prove how unmoved they were. Jopell heard a choking cry from under the overturned hulk, but by the time he walked over to join Kovind it had already faded and rattled out.
“Yes, I heard you,” Kovind snapped at him, although Jopell hadn’t spoken a word apart from that first message. But the man was talking to himself. “Here for Him,” he rasped again, more quietly now, staring up at the tiny dark blemish in the sky just as Jopell had done. “Less time than we thought. We have to move.”
“A Rune Priest?” Demi-Lector Vosheni asked, “wait, no, have I misheard?”
“I don’t know, Master Demi-Lector, have you? Is there a reason to suppose you have?” It was the first time in hours that Sister Sarell had spoken, and several of the Adeptus started at her voice. Vosheni spent a moment gnawing the fold of leathery ushpiil leaf in his hand before he answered.
“You’re the one to explain it,” he said at length. “Look, does anyone else remember this? Emperor grant I’m recalling correctly, but I find myself thinking of that one as an Astartes rank, not a Mechanicus. Anyone else? Or have I breathed in a gulp of hotstone and set my brain to decaying? An Adeptus Mechanicus Rune Priest—has anyone ever heard of one?”
“I’ve not even heard of an Astartes Rune Priest,” put in Kinosa as she reached determinedly for the platter of seedmash before Vosheni could finish the lot. Like Vosheni, Kinosa was Administratum: the military liaison with the Guard garrison. Vosheni was from the reconstruction and tithing taskforce, and it had been his idea to convene a regular meal for the seniors of each Adeptus contingent at the Chillbreak fortress reconstruction site. Jers Adalbrect didn’t mind the meals, but he wished that they didn’t keep falling on his fast days. He politely sipped a cup of water and listened to the others bickering.
“Astartes?” piped up Vocator Nember, and Sarell rolled her eyes. “I don’t recall seeing one, but then perhaps I did and didn’t recognise him! Nearly a day I spent around them, when the Iron Snakes’ emissaries attended upon—”
“You’re remembering the Pageant of Asaheim, sir,” Adalbrect quickly put in before Nember could tell the story yet again. “The play of the Apostate being crushed on Fenris. There’s a song near the end of the first act that refers to Rune Priests among the Space Wolves.”
“Thank you,” said Vosheni through a mouthful of leaf. “So this one’s Mechanicus?”
“I don’t believe the ranks are the same,” said Sarell, “and it sounds more like a name coined outside the Mechanicus for someone whose actual function is rather harder to describe. Shall we ask this visitor’s real title when he arrives?”
“If we even get the chance,” Nember snorted through his moustache, peering into his wine glass. “What’s the bet he stays hiding in their shrine in the middle of that damned graveyard and we never see a scrap of him? He arrived in one of those ships they use to lift Titans. Titans! I don’t care what reasons they dress this up in in their communiqués, he’s not here to do any of that ceremonial crap they said they needed this big damn dignitary to do. I’ll bet he’s a junior enginseer who’s drawn the short straw and has to sit out in this sandhole loading dead machinery onto that so-called Headstone of his to keep it out of our hands.” After a pause just long enough to be rude Nember added a little twitch of his hand to demonstrate that “our” meant the Adeptus around the table, but none of them were fooled. “Our” meant the deeply mercenary consortium of trade houses from Bardolphus who’d managed to get themselves some sort of Administratum marque and were clawing for a foothold in the Ashek reconstruction. When the edict had gone out from the Mechanicus that the legions of Woe Machines the Archenemy had left behind were to be collected in a monstrous graveyard over the Chillbreak Delta, all that Nember’s masters had seen was an attempt to shut them out of something. It was an open secret that Nember was there as a spy.
“I’m wondering if he’s here to inspect the works,” said Vosheni gloomily, looking at a stain on his cuff where he’d let his tunic sleeve dip into the sauce dish. “The number of accidents, the violence…”
“Your job to fix,” Nember scolded him.
“And his!” Vosheni shot a finger out at Adalbrect. “The Missionaria Galaxia is here to make sure these people are obedient servants to the Throne! What are you putting in your sermons about diligence? Temperance?” Kinosa took advantage of his distraction to get the last of the seedmash.
It’s more complicated than that, Adalbrect started to say, it always is. Why did people have this ridiculous idea that the Missionaria just had to shout a sermon at someone to throw some sort of switch in their heads marked instant obedience.
“The work crews here are frail and mortal, Demi-Lector, as are we all,” Sarell got in before him. “Most are war displacees, some are refugees from elsewhere on the world, some are refugees from other worlds repaying the cost of their transp—”
“I know about the blasted workforce, Sister, I administer it,” Vosheni cut her off, and then caught himself. “Apologies, Sister Dialogus.”
“Accepted, Demi-Lector. But bear with my point. Spiritually these people have lain too long prostrate beneath grief and darkness. We are helping them back to their feet.” Adalbrect grinned. She was taking from his sermon of two mornings ago. He liked compliments. “But until they get their strength back, sometimes they will stumble.”
“Y’know what we need to do?” Nember asked. His goblet was empty and his voice a little too loud. “We need to get into that graveyard. See what it is they’re doing in there. It’s not right that these work crews get mark… marched in there and we don’t get to follow them and see what they do with all that.”
“Inside the graveyard is acknowledged Mechanicus ground,” said Kinosa, “same way as the temple compound belongs to the Ministorum,” and she tilted her head at Adalbrect and Sarell. “And anyway, maybe you’ve forgotten that what they’re collecting in that graveyard are unholy war machines that robbed many brave Throne soldiers of their lives. It was the Mechanicus that broke them so the aquila could return here. Show some respect.”
That shut Nember up, but Vosheni had taken one of his adept’s braids in his fingers and was twirling it thoughtfully.
“Nevertheless.” They all looked at him. “Nevertheless, let’s not miss an opportunity. Our friends of the cog are reserved, but that doesn’t make them our enemies. We’re all Adeptus. Beyond a certain professional distance, I’ve found Enginseer Daprokk quite agreeable to work with.” He smiled at Nember, who blinked at him. “I think this great dignitary they’ve flown in, this great magos, is just as important as they’ve told us he is. And I think that a request… no. I think that an announcement that a delegation of the most senior Adeptus officials at the Chillbreak reconstruction site will be pleased to present their credentials and welcome such an important visitor to Ashek II is the least that such a position justifies.”
Nember scowled as he tried to get at the idea through the alcohol, but Kinosa grasped it straight away and toasted it with the last of her wine.
“It’s a trip, then,” she said. “I’ll invite Tosk and Haffith, too. Let’s add a military footing to this thing, make it harder for them to say no.”
“Where are they tonight, anyway?” Adalbrect asked.
“Snap purge in the east quarter of the labourer barracks,” said Kinosa, pouring more wine. “Two new hauler crews came in yesterday with more dead machines. Seems one of ’em was trying to smuggle in a weapons cache on the side. That’s still a military offence. They took it pretty seriously.”
“I’m not surprised,” said Vosheni. “Or at least not at that. Who needs this rabble to decide they’ve inherited a job as the Archenemy’s army? Joke, joke!” and he flapped an arm at Adalbrect, who’d half-risen with a slapped expression on his face. “I know you do your job well, preacher, I joked. But honestly, why is some cheap hivestamp stub-gun so important
to have out in a place like this? What are they going to do, rob the cooks at the refectory tent for another helping of starch broth? Who needs weapons in an empty desert?”
“That’s four full crews fully armed. They only got one stash in the haulers, the others are safe. We’ll get them to Orange Five crew at mid-morning meal tomorrow. Then we’re ready.” Psinter was trying to keep her voice quiet and level, but there was an unmistakable satisfaction in it. It had been a hard thing to organise in secret, and their sudden need for haste had made it harder. Kovind Shek pursed his lips and stared at nothing in particular. His long fingers stretched out and plucked up a stylus from the clutter across his little desk, made the motions of writing the words Orange Five half a centimetre above his writing pad, and dropped it again. It was a habit he was training himself into, to help him remember things. Not a perfect substitute for his old stacks of bound waferbooks, but a much safer one. After the Guard had busted one of their weapon mules, there had been another random snap-search right the length of the southern avenue, and the Ministorum brute squad had torn down and burned three barrack shanties.
“All our people, then?” asked Jopell. “All of them?” The other two resistance members gave no answer but a scowl, partly in response to Jopell’s question and partly in response to him saying anything at all. Neither of them wanted him there. Kovind was the trusty, the crew chief who was allowed to supervise the native Ashek labourers. Psinter was his lieutenant in the Traditions and the Practices, and his peer in the Customs, but they had only been able to manoeuvre her into a junior forewoman’s job on the haulers. Jopell’s descent was recent offworld, only four generations on Ashek, with only tenuous ties to the forge-manories and none to the Inevitable Conclave. But in the turmoil after the hives had burned, he had ended up in the work crew draft, had played the compliant and grateful freed civilian so well he had been installed in a foreman’s job straight away, and now if they were going to plausibly pass off these meetings as the quiet evening chats between a crew chief and his off-siders Kovind had to have him there. Jopell usually understood that well enough to keep his mouth shut.
“All our people,” said Psinter, glaring at him. “The accident fatalities,” with a salutary nod to Kovind, “have given us regular pretexts to reorganise the crews we started with. We’re still under-armed compared to the cog-lickers, though. Our edge over the Mechanicus picket-guards is going to be numbers and surprise, not hardware. And probably not discipline, either. Our people are enthusiastic, but they’re not soldiers. A lot of them are going to die.”
The three of them looked at each other. None of them valued the lives of their followers any more than their own: the Traditions discounted such things and the Customs exalted a very different set of priorities. But it presented a challenge. Neither Kovind nor Psinter needed to describe that challenge out loud. Jopell did anyway.
“If we rush the pickets and only a couple of people know what they need to do in there, odds are they’ll die and the crew won’t know the next move. Tell everyone on the crew and that’s a real dangerous secret we’ve just told a lot of people.”
Kovind couldn’t quite restrain himself: a fist came down on the little table hard enough to make the lantern blink. The three of them fell silent for a moment as the bootsteps of a camp patrol scuffed by outside.
“Want to try blabbing again, Jopell?” hissed Psinter. “Just because, you know, you didn’t do it properly the first time and those…” She took a breath and lowered her voice. “They didn’t hear you loud enough?”
I didn’t say anything any more incriminating than you, Jopell thought, but what he said was:
“Why don’t we just use the delegation convoy?”
“And so, the graveyard,” murmured Jers Adalbrect as they passed beneath the machine-icons swinging on their leaded chains, and the red-shrouded heads of the Mechanicus escorts turned to look at him. “A casual vocalisation,” he said to them before they could question him. “Disregard, please.” They stayed studying him a moment longer, and Adalbrect wondered if he were going to be questioned. The “casual vocalisation” trick was something one of the Logisticae adepts had taught him, back on… damn, was the Augnassis mission really four deployments ago now? The Mechanicus don’t talk to themselves, Mamzel Rindon had told him, they don’t exclaim when they’re surprised or mutter under their breath when they’re pissed off. But the ones who work with the rest of us know we do this casual vocalisation thing. Easier to just get into the habit of reporting to them that that’s what you were doing. He’d noticed a couple of the other Missionaria staff had picked up the habit too.
It took the guards a few moments more to decide there was nothing to concern them, and their gaze swung away again. They hadn’t appeared to confer about him: taped to Adalbrect’s sternum was a small metal plaque that vibrated when it detected silent cant-casts, and there had been no telltale buzzing against his breastbone.
The graveyard, he said again to himself, and this time kept his lips together and the words in his throat. It seemed more appropriate that way. The whole delegation had fallen into silence as they made their salutations to the picket guards and reboarded their carriers.
These were not just ruins that studded the cracked ground in the thickening dusk. They all knew about ruins. After months on Ashek it could hardly be otherwise. They knew about tragedy and death and the horrifying, industrial scale on which an engine of war dealt those things out. They knew the cost at which the Archenemy’s forces had been broken here, and the legacy the diabolical engineer known as Asphodel had left behind. They were not even strangers to the graveyard. They had watched it growing, filling and creeping outward beneath the dust-haze, as the columns of haulers slogged across the hardpan and the cranes tirelessly lifted and dragged. But now, here, in amongst them in the day’s last gore-coloured light…
The glint in the carrier’s running lights was the spread claw of one of the fat four-legged Murdernaut assault machines, the fingers curved, tapered, sleeker than the Imperial engines’ weapon limbs. Even severed, the menace of the open claw was enough to make Adalbrect start back from the window as though the thing had actually tried to clutch at the carrier’s balloon-tyres. There was no hint of where the claw’s owner might be, and Adalbrect’s imagination painted it out there in the darkness, somehow awake again, prowling pilotless after them, looking for warm meat on which to exact vengeance for its lost limb.
Adalbrect shivered and used his right hand to grip the steel aquila token that hung from his left cuff. The sharp points around its edges dug into his palm and he concentrated on the pain.
The engine shifted and growled as they rolled up a brief slope, skirting the wreck of a Coffin-Worm slumped as though exhausted and brooding, its head down, the canopy behind which its crew would have sat shattered, its legs buckled and splayed out on either side of it. Its armoured back hunched up above its main hull. Behind it another one lay on its side, the plates of its flank flaring outward from the explosion that must have gutted it. Adalbrect started again as the remains of the armourglass in its canopy flashed the light from the carrier’s own windows back at him. For a moment it looked like eyes had come to life under the low metal brow. He twitched his gaze away, as if there really had been something in the hulk looking back at him, and looked to the skyline ahead. Two Flensing-Wheels leaned together in silhouette against the red smears of dusk like conspirators whispering plans. Half of a third lay in front of them, he saw as the carrier drew closer, and he imagined that what they were whispering about was revenge for it. He watched them draw nearer, took in the spikes that studded their surfaces and the hooks that reached out from their rims, saw the pocks of high-density stub-rounds that stippled one from edge to edge and the great crater in the centre of the other where the cockpit had been torn or blasted out, gimbals and all.
This didn’t feel like a graveyard to Adalbrect. It felt like the game parks that had surrounded the Suzerain’s spring palace on Engatto Minoris, full of
feral beasts that had watched their all-too-fragile little carriage convoy go past with resentful, watchful stares.
They crested the rise, saw the graveyard plain in the ebbing light, and Adalbrect shuddered. The unease that had been seeping into him all trip had soaked through his tense muscles and twitching nerves, and reached his bones.
The dead Woe Machines swarmed the plain, shoulder to shoulder and flank to flank. The high-backed Coffin-Worms leaned this way and that, and the hooks studding the Flensing-Wheels seemed to claw at the sky as though they wanted some of Ashek’s bloody sunset for themselves. Ahead of them towered a cairn of wrecked Blight-Balls, all caved in or ripped open or perforated with lascannon craters, sagging and spilling against the flank of a ruined Skybreaker gun-train whose torn-off tread mountings gave it a staggering lean. Jammed in between the greater machines were ungainly rows and piles of the lesser, whole or in fragments: bulbous Stalk-Tanks, thick-shouldered Murdernauts, batrachian Rackmouths. Adalbrect spent a moment puzzling out an incongruously neat stack of intermeshed girders until he realised he was looking at the severed scaffolds from one of the infamous Abattoir Trees. He remembered the name from the shuddering Guard sergeant who had begged to be allowed to throw himself off the roof from which three orderlies had just dragged him.
Once he’d made the association Adalbrect found his gaze riveted to the stained and dented metal meshes. He fancied that as the lights moved over them he could see the points of the harpoon-barbs, although he knew that that was impossible. The Guard had been meticulous about smashing every weapon mount on the Trees before they had allowed the wrecks to be dragged away. The tech-priests had been furious about it.
The meshes passed out of sight, behind the buckled steel ruins of some building-sized engine now so utterly crushed that Adalbrect couldn’t identify it at all. He closed his eyes for a moment, and realised that in the back of his mind he could still hear that sergeant’s voice, hoarse and low and begging. His mind started to lay in the other sounds of the depot hospital, the sounds the men had made as they fought against their memories of what the Ashek war had done to them, and then his eyes were open again and his nails dug into his palms as he looked around for something to distract him from the memory.