The whispering was getting louder, buzzing from the entrance like the sizzle of churning blow-flies.
They stepped through the doorway.
Eight Sons of Sek moved a slave gang along the walkway, then herded them through a hatch onto the main spinal.
Mkoll and Milo waited until they were out of sight, then moved out of cover and set to work attaching the last of the mines.
‘We’ve taken too long,’ Milo said.
Mkoll didn’t reply. The timer mechanism was refusing to set.
‘I need to be in there,’ Milo said.
Mkoll glanced at him.
‘You know duty, Oan,’ Milo said. ‘Better than most. This is mine.’
‘Yours?’
‘Sek,’ said Milo.
‘This is an opportunity, that’s all.’
Milo shook his head. ‘I’ve seen things,’ he said. ‘I’ve walked at her side and seen the galaxy the way she sees it. Learned to a little, at least. There’s chaos, but there’s order. An order driven by will. A grace that holds the chaos at bay.’
‘We all believe that,’ said Mkoll. He cleared the timer and tried to rewind it.
‘No,’ said Milo. ‘We believe it. But I’ve seen it. I thought they were coincidences at first. Just quirks. Chances. But I see a pattern now. She showed me that. Taught me to notice it. An orchestration. A determined force, vastly outnumbered by the immaterium, but holding it in check. Out-playing it, move-for-move, like a game of regicide. It doesn’t always win, but it moves the pieces it has, and places them where it can for the best effect.’
‘I prefer cards,’ said Mkoll. He took the mine off and blew into its corroded timer. ‘Suicide Kings…’
‘I’m serious.’
‘I know. You’re talking about fate.’
‘That’s one word. Call it what you will. I think it’s why I made it off Tanith with the First, why we found Sanian, why we… It’s why she chose me. She knew… she understood, that one day I would be here.’
Mkoll smiled. ‘To kill Sek?’
‘Are you mocking me?’
‘No, Brin. If you believe that’s why you’re here, as a chosen instrument, a weapon selected and deployed by… I don’t know… destiny, then Throne bless you. That’s the strength that drives you. Use it.’
He looked at Milo. He could believe it. There was a purity of purpose in Brin’s eyes. Not the blind fanaticism of the zealot or the pilgrim-radical, nor the howling and unquestioning fealty of the warp-corrupted Archenemy. A true faith, a certainty. He could see that long years in the company of a creature as gnomic as the Beati could do that to a man. It could affirm his purpose, give him a sense of calling that would carry him through the darkest and most hellish events. The boy piper had truly long gone. Milo had become a warrior of the Throne, as sure and committed to his function as any Astartes.
‘Don’t you feel it?’ Milo asked. ‘Aren’t you the same? You, and the Ghosts? I was there in the early years. I saw what was accomplished. And I’ve read the reports since. The deeds, the achievements. Gaunt, the regiment, you. That doesn’t just happen. That isn’t just luck. I think we’ve all been guided by that grace, all along, whether we like it or not. Whether we know it or not. It’s taken us to the places we’ve needed to be so that we could do the things it’s needed us to do. You must feel that too.’
Mkoll shrugged.
‘I don’t think on it, Brin,’ he said. ‘I suppose I only ever consider the immediate. The shadows around me, the foe ahead. I haven’t had the opportunity to see things the way you have, at her side. You’re a weapon. I don’t doubt that, I really don’t. We’re all weapons. I trust in the providence of the Golden Throne, but I don’t have the vision to see any great plan at work. I’m just Guard, Brin. Just Guard. I go where I go and I do my damnedest when I’m told to march or fight. I tell you this much, though… I find it hard to swallow that fate has any great plan spun out across the years. Our side or theirs. Reading the variables across a thousand worlds? Planning moves decades in advance? Plotting the future and setting players in position to execute some ingenious gambit years down the line? I don’t think it works that way, not for us or the Archenemy. I think it’s all a brawl. A free-for-all. Just carnage, and you swing when you can. Instinct. Reaction. Opportunity. What is it Hark calls it? Fight time? Shit just happens, the moment’s on you, and you just do. Then you see who walks away. That’s all there is. No transcendent plan. Just moments, one after the other, bloody and senseless. You do what you do. Duty gets you through, or you’re dead.’
He clamped the last mine in place and set it running.
‘Guess we’ll see which of us is right, eh?’ he said.
Mazho stepped into the Oratory, jostled along by the press of bodies passing through the door. Fear was almost strangling him. He could feel his rapid breathing sucking against the hand-strap across his mouth. He looked up.
The Oratory was huge, even bigger than the exterior shell had suggested. It was a vast, circular theatre. Rings of tiered stalls, each level fringed by a rail, stepped down the lower half of the sphere to a large dais in the centre of the floor. They were entering through the main doors at the equator of the sphere, around which ran a wide, railed walkway. Steep flights of steps ran down between the banks of stalls to the dais below. The place was packed. Sekkite officers, the magirs of the vessel, tribal dignitaries and arbitors of the warp-faith were filling the stalls, finding places to stand, talking and greeting and exchanging the hand-to-the-mouth salutes. Hundreds of them. Bloody hundreds of them. The weight of the mines packed in his pockets felt like they’d give him away. His mind raced. He was just a packson. All around him were seniors of the Anarch’s host. They would know he was too lowly to be present. They would know.
The press of bodies carried him forwards. He was forced onto the steps, descending from the equatorial ring into the tiers of stalls. Voices were all around him. Whispers in his ears. He’d lost sight of Holofurnace. The flow of the crowd had separated them. He shot anxious glances, trying not to look jumpy, scanning the stalls around him as they filled. Where was the Space Marine? He saw robed V’heduak giants. Each one was cowled. Was that the Snake there? Was that one?
The air stank of dry dust. Sweat was running down his spine. The whole auditorium was made of human bone: the floor, the steps, the platforms of the tiers. The handrails dividing each ring of stalls were fused from polished human long bones, fashioned not crudely but with precise craftsmanship. He glanced up. The dome above, hazed in the golden candlelight, was a mosaic of skulls. Thousands of them, fixed side by side on concentric shelves, staring out blindly, like some vast ossuary, a catacomb’s bone house displaying the relics of the dead. So many staring sockets. So many gaping jaws. The whole ceiling, the whole dome, was solid with yellowed skulls.
He was forced into one of the stalls halfway down the tiered bowl. The Sekkites around him spoke to each other, nudged him impatiently to move along and make room. He ran out of space, boxed in by packson damogaurs and V’heduak giants. He got a place at the rail, gripped it to steady himself, then took his hands away. Bone. He didn’t want to hang on to bone.
Below him, the dais was a platform raised on a scaffold of bones, turned, shaped and jointed like the work of the finest cabinet maker: interlocked femurs, some laminated to form thick post uprights, the cross-braces secured with shoulder blades and sacral plates, inlays of carved finger-bones. The railing around the edge of the dais was a basketwork of ribcages supporting a top-rail made of vertebrae carefully matched for size, and fitted together to make one long, continuous spine. The joinery had been done with experienced precision. Everything was polished, and delicately carved and veneered, like an exquisite ivory sculpture. It gleamed, a warm glow.