The darkness was a falsehood, one that cleared as soon as he passed through it. The first thing to hit Zephon’s senses was a retinal smear of migraine light, bright enough that even his occulobe implant was useless in defending his eyes against it. He narrowed his gaze to a slit, one hand raised against the fierce illumination.
The second thing to strike was the burning machine-stink of overworked metal. He’d fought in manufactories on several worlds, breathing in the charcoal and scorched iron reek of machinery slowly dying, wearing out its moving parts. He knew that same smell at once, even spiced as it was by the acidic tang of charged ozone.
The third element was the sound. The shouting voices. The lightning lash of sparking machines. The primeval hum of running engines. He felt it as much as heard it; he felt it in his blood, in his bones.
‘Keep walking.’ Diocletian’s voice.
He kept walking, seeing little, sensing everything. Ahead of him, someone shrieked.
‘Keep walking!’ shouted Diocletian across the vox.
Pivoting to find who had called out, Zephon saw only the faintest silhouettes. Maddening. Insane. His genetic modifications were born of the Emperor’s own genius; a Space Marine saw in near-darkness and overcame blinding light with equal ease. Yet he could see almost nothing.
Another cry, this time from his side. An unknowable distance away, there was the crash of falling metal beams or perhaps a collapsing gantry. He saw none of it.
Am I blind?
‘I cannot see,’ he said aloud.
‘You don’t need to,’ replied Diocletian. ‘Move forwards. Keep walking.’
His eyes did adjust, though far slower than he’d ever known. Zephon saw the pale stone floor beneath his boots, and the dark bronze of immense, humming machines at the edges of his vision. Pain knifed awkward cuts at his eye sockets as he raised his head to see what lay before the marching procession.
An archway. A door. A portal. A construct of light-stained marble that disgorged golden mist into the chamber. He couldn’t make out its exact shape – Circular? Oval? – nor its exact boundaries, where the alien mist ended and the structure’s sides began.
‘Don’t look back,’ came Diocletian’s voice once more.
Row after row of battle-servitors rumbled into the golden fog, mind-dead to all but their orders. A Krios tank was swallowed a moment later, its passage doing nothing to disturb the mist.
One of Jaya’s Knights strode in alongside another servitor host, enveloped by the portal’s exhalations. Another of them stood inactive by the portal’s edge, grasped by tendrils of golden fog, half turned away to look back over the rest of the marching column. Zephon could hear the baroness shouting at the courtier, demanding he keep moving.
The pilot’s voice came back stammering, shattered. ‘The Emperor. My Emperor. The Omnissiah.’
‘Don’t look back,’ Diocletian snapped. ‘Baroness, lead your scions through now.’
Jaya’s towering form lurched in a heavy stride, shaking the ground as she clanked forwards. The remaining Knights followed in a ragged march, moving between and stepping over the servitor horde.
When Zephon reached the portal’s cusp, the curling wisps of mist formed breathy tendrils against his armour plating. It carried no scent, no taste, no presence beyond what he could see. Above him swayed the idle form of the awestruck Knight. Either side of him, Thallaxi cyborgs marched into the mist. Their blood-filled face domes reflected the golden fog.
Zephon turned – and ceased. What would he see if he looked back? The light’s intensity as a sun’s flare, ringing a structure raised above the ground? A core of blackness in the heart of a thunderstorm’s flickering light? A throne, with a corona of energy, and a figure upon it, a figure that–
‘Don’t look back!’ Diocletian was there, shoving the Blood Angel with the haft of his spear.
But the Emperor… The very Throne of Terra…
‘Move, Bringer of Sorrow. Move now.’
Zephon swallowed, faced the golden mist head-on, and took his first step into the webway.
Part Three
Death of a Dream
Fifteen
Avenues of the Mechanicum / The true webway / Eternal war
The procession travelled through tunnels of dark metal and glowing circuitry. Arkhan Land, no stranger to the gloom of underground complexes given his chosen profession, yet found it curiously oppressive. It wasn’t the darkness, for the walls themselves radiated a weak electrical light from their circuit lines. Nor was it the fog, which seemed to have no source, for once he had determined it carried no toxic potential, the stuff was easy to ignore.
No, what he found oppressive was the knowledge of what waited beyond these ironclad walls. He had faith, of course. He had all the faith a man could possess that the Omnissiah’s psychic resolve would keep these passages protected.
But still.
Land had never considered himself given to fits of imaginative excess. When venturing into the ancient catacombs of data-dungeons his concerns were largely centred on dealing with the inevitable slew of automated defences, not worrying what mythological monsters might lurk within the shadows outside his torch beams. Now he found himself endlessly staring at the circuit-etched walls, wincing at every shudder of a passing tank or rattling generator, thinking of the warp – the warp itself – crashing in shrieking, monstrous majesty against the outside of the tunnels through which he travelled. He couldn’t hear it, he couldn’t see it, but he knew it was there. A siege, invisible to the senses.
Like travelling beneath an ocean, he mused without a smile. Constantly fearful of the transit tubes springing a leak.
A mind full of these nebulous terrors made for a joyless walk. It wasn’t as if he could confide his fears to the rest of the convoy, either. The Sisters of Silence already knew and seemed wholly unfazed. The Archimandrite was impossible to engage in any conversation beyond the status of the convoy, and the battle-servitors lacked any conversational aptitude whatsoever. Baroness Jaya and her courtiers were still in the dark regarding the truth of the webway and the warp beyond. Now there was an amusing thought. How their limited intellects must be straining to process all of this.
Zephon knew the truth, of course. But placid, angelic Zephon had spent most of the journey alone, when he wasn’t at Diocletian’s side. Ah, well.
Occasionally the sections of the circuitry ingrained upon the walls would shatter and emit sparks. Land flinched each and every time, picking up his pace.
Determining any temporal data here had proved impossible. The procession’s various chronometers tallied seconds, minutes and hours in both directions with no consistency. One servitor’s systems insisted the date was three hundred years before the declaration of the Great Crusade. Arkhan Land’s own chron had functioned well enough for almost four hours, at which point it had started counting between seven and fifty seconds for each one that passed. On several occasions it had stopped for an unknown span, only to come back to life of its own accord. He’d ceased trying to glean any sense from it.
He walked knee-deep in the clinging fog, which was either pale gold or smoky azure depending upon the viewer in question. Despite bringing his Raider he was content to let it guide itself as part of the procession, relying on its onboard servitors and machine-spirit core. The webway was something he simply had to experience outside of his battle tank’s protective plating.