“Change of plans, sister and brother. Master Adalbrect, can you walk?”
There had never been any question but that Kovind would carry the main key into the graveyard. He had fretted a little about the other two, knowing how short time would be once they were under way and that not even Psinter would be able to get to two Kings in time. So Jopell was luckier than he knew that he’d hit on the plan to infiltrate the Adeptus convoy: that had earned him the third key and the leadership of the third crew. Nobody else had even remotely the seniority in the Traditions, or even in the worldly hierarchy of the manories. The three of them it was.
He carried the key the way the rakes of the outer manory walks used to carry their knives: gripped loosely in his left hand, the length of it turned back against his arm under his sleeve, the metal cool against his skin. His autopistol was in his other hand and he kept it up and ready as they ran. It was further into nightfall than he had anticipated and as it had darkened he’d been afraid that it would be harder to keep direction through the maze of wrecked machines without the reassuring might of the Kings against the skyline to urge him on. But now he felt unstoppable, as though he were running on a high-speed pedway back in the High Hive, carried along unerringly. The higher mysteries were not for Kovind Shek. He was steeped in Asheki culture, the Customs of knowledge, the Traditions ordering its holders, the ancient Practices of engineering that the glorious Heritor had shown them how to bring to majestic and terrible perfection. But on a night like this he could almost feel the most sublime mysteries that the Heritor’s preachers had sung and danced and screamed about, some power that was carrying him through the night on sombre wings.
The greater moon was beginning to show, and now he could see them, towering over the piled-up machines around them like hive-spires over manufactory blocks. The Heritor’s four greatest children. The Hammerstone Kings.
The Mechanicus guarded the approaches to them, but only during the day when the labour crews were roaming the graveyard. His way to the feet of the Treading King was clear, and he couldn’t help himself: he fired a jubilant autopistol burst into the night sky and whooped for his crew to follow as he opened his stride.
The key seemed to prickle against his skin. Kovind Shek lifted it to his mouth and kissed it, vaulted the ram-prow of a Nadzybar’s Fist assault engine, ducked reflexively at an exchange of stub-shots behind him, and ran on.
Adalbrect’s legs hadn’t been injured, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was the iron barb sawing away in his shoulder and the waves of grey washing across his vision. His left arm was draped across Sarell’s shoulders and he clung to his aquila rod with his right hand as though it were an anchor to consciousness.
“If we just try and wrench it out we’ll rip your shoulder to pieces,” Sarell said. “You bumped up against a Flensing-Wheel hull. Those spikes are made to shred the flesh.”
“Thank you,” he managed. “Think you… said that… already.”
“Well, you need to keep your mind occupied.”
“With something other than… what’s in my shoulder, maybe? Ahh.”
“That was my fault. I moved my arm. Not on purpose. Those scriptures about the righteousness of pain in battle take on a new perspective at times like this, don’t they?”
“Something other that what’s in my shoulder.”
“We’re almost at the carriers. And we haven’t been shot at. And you threw two enemies of the Emperor out of this world and into the endless emptiness where they’ll never stand in the way of the light again. What have we to complain about, really?”
“Nngghn. Don’t! Hurts when I laugh.”
“Your fault. I’m not joking. The Sororitas never joke.”
“Never?”
“So far as you know. Medic!” Sarell shouted ahead to the face peering at them through the carrier cockpit window.
Psinter didn’t let herself look up at it, not yet. The route to the Blighting King led through an area where the new crews had dumped piles of Gallowspider wreckage from the fourth battle of High Defile. Weaving among them, she couldn’t afford to stop and look up and she didn’t dare take her eyes off her path while she was moving.
“Covering you!” shouted Gatter, the chief of the crew she’d been given to lead, over the crackle of the las-salvoes he was spraying back behind them with never a hope of hitting anything. “Cover her!” he shouted again, this time by her ear, and what shooters they had left behind them obligingly sent a ragged little volley off into the dark. Over the end of it Psinter could hear the answering Imperial las-fire, slower and more deliberate. More accurate, too, because when Gatter yelled “Two down! Three!” she realised she hadn’t heard cries. Whoever was chasing them was firing killshots.
She jinked to her right and found a path through the middle of a torn-in-half ’spider chassis that would get her into the next aisle and able to spring towards the King in cover. She almost paralysed herself trying to stop and weigh it up—a dangerous few metres, but the thought of dying in an Imperial’s gunsight with her mission incomplete was unbearable. Before she’d consciously made the decision she had swerved again, panting, running with exaggerated upward twitches of her knees as though she could already feel cuts on her legs.
“Throwing!” yelled Gatter and Psinter heard a clink of metal bouncing off metal, then the throaty explosion of one of the hand-bombs they’d cobbled together from cutter-fuel and scourcrystal. “Covering!” he yelled again, and more las-fire. Stupid macho idiot. He had puffed up his chest when he saw his crew was escorting a woman to the King, and had been running and shouting the whole way, ignoring her orders. If they lived through this she was going to hang his balls from the King’s…
Too late. He hadn’t followed in her footsteps, had tried to clamber through the Gallowspider frame instead, and now he was shrieking and kicking in a tangle of wire he hadn’t bothered to look at before he brushed at it. The ’spiders were decked with memory-cored razorwire—the casualty rates among their cutter crews was insane—and as Gatter thrashed it contracted and hoisted him upward. Blood started pattering down onto the dust under his boots.
“Pull yourself together,” she hissed at him, “stay still so you’re not cut any more and keep shooting as long as you can!” There was no sign that he heard her. She pondered shooting him, but that would let their followers know there was at least one more left out there. She couldn’t see any of the rest of her crew at all.
She only needed a few more minutes. Psinter flitted away into the moonshadows, the key to the Blighting King gripped in one hand.
“Graveyard Shrine, do you read me? Graveyard Shrine, please respond on any band. Graveyard Shrine! I am Sister Goha Sarell, travelling in a Munitorum carrier towards your location.” Adalbrect was kneeling in the passenger compartment of the carrier with Kinosa steadying him and Vosheni sponging blood from the iron stump sticking out of his shoulder. Even the attempt to pull away his jacket had been agony. A numbdrop from the carrier’s medical kit had blurred the pain a little, but blurred his wits along with it.
“Tell me again what they said?” said Kinosa, scowling with the effort of keeping him stable as the carrier rocked through a ninety-degree turn.
“Th—” Adalbrect’s mouth clicked dry. He was dehydrating from shock, and nobody had brought a water-flask. “This is the night the Kings find their voices. Don’t know what it means.” He bowed his head again. He was shamefully glad of his dry mouth, of an excuse to stop talking. This had to have been planned under their noses. A whole plot, a whole belief system ticking away while he had happily gone on sermonising at them every six hours and writing sunny letters back to the Missionaria compound at the High Hive ruins. Participation in litanies and hymns is encouraging. Positive reaction displayed to the aquila and the parables selected by the head of mission. Congregants appear to be accepting the spiritual need for the confessional and the scourging rack.
Congregants have risen in arms and proclaimed four Archenemy war-engines
to be their Kings. Adalbrect closed his eyes.
“Graveyard Shrine!” came Sarell’s voice from the cab, tinny through the internal vox. “This is Sarell, Adepta Sororitas Order of the Quill, to any Mechanicus personnel listening! We have reason to believe this insurgent raid is directed at the… Hammerstone Kings. R-Respond!”
“What is that?” asked Vosheni, and Kinosa made an uncertain little sound in her throat. Adalbrect, who had thought it was just another note in the ringing, rustling headache stealing up on him, opened his eyes and listened.
A moment later the carrier slammed to a halt. Vosheni and Kinosa cried out; Adalbrect pitched onto his face on the floor matting and howled in pain.
But they could all hear it now, over the vox. Even when Sarell wasn’t speaking, it was getting louder. Some kind of machine-cant, some counter-transmission, but nothing that was intelligible to them.
Just chatter.
Jopell knelt in the cockpit of the Poison King, wheezing softly with exhaustion, watching the flickering frost-blue light of the key and listening to the chatter. A fat-barrelled shotgun sat by his side. A crude thing, not a manufactorium job, it looked like it had been made on the sly by sympathisers in the reconstruction camps. Jopell liked that. It meant there were more survivors carrying on the old ways of Ashek than just the ones who’d followed the coded messages and come out to the graveyard. While the Traditions were kept alive and the Customs followed and the Practices taught, Ashek II was still her true self. The Inevitable Conclave would form again. And Asphodel would return to them. Jopell was sure of it.
He opened his eyes and half stood, grunting as his leg muscles cramped: too much running and climbing then a long cold stop. The Poison King had a poor view: it had done most of its work either right up against Hammerstone fortresses or Legio Tempesta Titans, where big windows were a target, or else at tens of kilometres away with its ugly crest of missile batteries, when all the fighting was over auspex or missile cameras and windows were a distraction. He peered through one of the little armoured slits, although this high up there was little to see.
Across from him, just over a kilometre away, was the slope-backed Blighting King, its collar of rocket-tubes casting the giant chassis into shadow, the smooth line of the launching-ramp up its back now jagged from Imperial bombing. Psinter should be in there by now, lugging her key and her power cell, getting ready to create the second link in the circle.
And the third… Ignoring the muffled sounds of stubfire that were starting to float up through the liftwell, Jopell walked stiffly to the second wall and bent to a vision-slit there. The Treading King struck a fierce silhouette against the horizon, the front of its body locked in its reared-back position, all four front limbs still posed like a pugilist’s. He had heard that the Treading King had ripped the turret off a Shadowsword superheavy tank and dropped it onto the gatehouse at the Passage Stair fortifications to crush a void-shield link. He’d heard that it had simply torn both arms off a Reaver Titan that had allowed it to get too close. In the dark, Jopell’s smile was rueful. It would have been wonderful to see the Kings reawakened, repaired, revenging themselves on the cog and the aquila alike, but he wouldn’t see it. Even if he could sneak back down through the guts of the King and away, he had been given the Poison King to break into, and it had its name for a reason. Its broad treads had taken it out onto the hotstone flows, sucking up the radioactive silt and sifting out the precious rare elements, processing them in foundries in its belly whose complexity and compactness were testament that Asphodel’s genius was not just in machines of destruction. Jopell had climbed up the King through those very foundries, crawling along mineral conveyors and squirming his bulk through the sifter shafts, and now he was coated in toxic metals and bathed in radiation. He already thought he could feel his fingertips and toes going numb. He doubted he’d live a week.
But how could he be unhappy? How could he resent not living to see the Kings ride again, when here, now, he had done the deed that made that awakening possible? Jopell’s little smile grew, split his face, became a happy little laugh. The blue of his key was flickering green as Psinter’s transmission came from the cockpit of the Blighting King, and as the shooting below got loud enough for Jopell to hear the ricochets and smell the smoke he saw the red flashes that were transmissions from the Treading King. The chatter was amplifying, ramifying as it raced around the circuit that the three Kings’ brains had made. They had done it.
Jopell walked to the floor hatch and peered down the ladder in time to see the orange wash of a hand-bomb explosion, the concussion rocking him back a little with his ears now numb to the chatter. He nodded approvingly, grabbed the floor hatch and dragged it over and shut. It was a primitive fitting, but the Poison King was the first King the Heritor had built here, and the most functional. Kovind had saved the grandest one for himself, of course, but at a moment like this Jopell couldn’t even bring himself to resent the bastard. They had done it, after all.
Jopell checked the load in the shotgun, then jammed the butt down through the locking wheel to hold it in place. He positioned himself over it so his corpse would fall onto the wheel and weigh the hatch down, then reached for the trigger. He was still smiling as the blast blew all the chatter out of his head.
The act of craning his head back made Adalbrect groan, but he had got some strength back into his legs and he lurched forward towards the Graveyard Shrine behind Sarell. Even to his blurred vision it was impressive: a grey, floodlit ziggurat topped with a heavy ironwork Machina Opus and sprouting a coronet of gridwork transmission masts. Those were what Sarell was frantically gesturing to as she closed with the two adepts who watched them from the top of the ceremonial steps.
“Daprokk! Which one of you is Enginseer Daprokk?” Adalbrect thought he was probably imagining the expressions of surprise as the two red cowls looked at one another, but a moment later one of them, the one whose gown and hood were the brighter scarlet, descended to meet them. The enginseer’s face was in shadow but for four small violet eye-lights.
“Enginseer? The one I spoke to on the vox? You didn’t say whether or not you could hear what we could hear. Can you hear that?” Behind them the door to the carrier was open and they could plainly hear the odd transmission chattering beneath a layer of static. Sarell waved her hand towards the noise. “Please confirm you can hear it.” For someone whose calling was studying communication and language, Sarell was being astonishingly blunt with the robed shape in front of her, but the enginseer’s reply was perfectly calm.
“Our transmechanic is evaluating the signal according to the mysteries of her order, which I shall not discuss. The signal is not considered to pose a threat to our installation, and certainly not to yourselves. Its relation to the insurgent action here tonight shall be evaluated. That action is being brought under control. There is no cause for impatience, Sister.” Daprokk had apparently only just noticed that Sarell was literally hopping from foot to foot. “We may proceed to treat your wounded as a token of hospitality, our Order to yours.”
“No!” she shouted into the Enginseer’s face, enough to make him recoil with a hand out. “Jers, tell him!”
“The Kings are finding their voice,” Adalbrect croaked as the eyelights turned and regarded him. “It’s not just some… harmless thing. They’re doing something with the Kings.”
“Initial source of the signal may correspond, under analysis, to—” Daprokk took another step back as Sarell interrupted him again.
“You don’t need—” With an almost audible effort she got control of herself, she said, “Magos, you don’t need to analyse the signal. You need to block it. Now. Things are happening that we are not in control of. We must re-establish control. Adalbrect overheard the insurgents talking about the Kings finding their voices. Our forces have chased insurgents who were breaking into the Kings. They know about that ship of yours, the Headstone.”
“The Headstone! They are directing a plan against it? Against Magos Tey?”
/>
“Against the dignitary you are bringing to examine the graveyard, sir, and this is bigger than we thought they were capable of and they’re in the Kings now and we don’t know what they’re going to do in there.” Daprokk’s hands and the dendrite arching over his head were all making small, involuntary movements. The darker-robed adept at the top of the stairs stood unmoving. It—he?—had been joined by another figure, stocky and thick-legged with a strange metal hump standing up behind its head. Neither of them spoke a word. “Can you guarantee that the Headstone is out of range of any weapon they might bring back online? Can you guarantee that this transmission is so harmless that we can just let them make it? We don’t have the power or the skill to do this from the carrier, but you have these gantry antennae and a transmechanic.” Sarell took a deep breath and made a deeper bow. “Enginseer, please. Will you consider what I have told you?”
The violet lights under the cowl seemed to stare at her for an age.
The end didn’t come quite as Kovind Shek expected.
He had been alone by the time he reached the Treading King. The bulk of his men had spent themselves in staggered ambushes to slow down their pursuers, and the rest had holed up in a row of wrecked Blight-Balls and begun a ferocious firefight with a platoon of Mechanicus guards coming from the Graveyard Shrine to try and intercept them. Under cover of their last two hand-bombs, Kovind had swung up through the scaffolding around the King’s rear legs, slipped in through a plasma breach and begun working his way up through the compartment levels by touch and memory.
The Treading King had been stormed, not abandoned or killed with firepower, and every hatch had been blasted open. There was no way for him to secure the route behind him and so, after he’d ridden out the heady rush of seeing the three colours of the transmission loop, Kovind had made ready to double back and fight. He had only allowed himself a short glance out of the command window at the night’s final prize, and had fought back the urge to weep a little: Asphodel’s greatest creation, the mighty Inheritor King, its magnificent train of spires and steeples surrounded by such junk and pawed over by cog-lickers and eagle-lickers and…