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?’ asked 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!’