‘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 eyelights.
‘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, and 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.’