‘Perhaps, if circumstances allow.’
The silence was approaching awkwardness when Land spoke once more. ‘Is there something you need of me, Blood Angel?’
‘No. I merely wished to ask your thoughts regarding the Imperial Dungeon. The Vyridion Knights witnessed it through gun-feeds and their cockpits’ monitors. The servitors were obviously indifferent. You and I were among the only ones to witness it with our naked eyes.’
‘And you wondered if, what, I found it some profound and moving experience?’
The Blood Angel hesitated. ‘I wondered exactly that. Though the venom in your tone leads me to believe you did not.’
‘It was interesting enough,’ Land replied archly. What was he going to do? Admit to some superhuman brute that he had wept with the revelations of that journey? The galaxy burned because of these ceramite-clad fools. ‘But we of the Red World are used to wonders beyond the ken of mortal minds.’
‘I see. Then may I ask why you accompanied the expedition?’
Land raised an eyebrow. ‘To bear witness. I assure you, nothing could keep me away. Aren’t you honoured to be here, warrior?’
Zephon nodded. ‘Of course. Prefect Coros chose me specifically, though I confess I do not know why.’
Land looked up at the Blood Angel’s statuesque features, seeking any expression or suggestion as to the warrior’s thoughts. Seeing no sign of understanding, Arkhan Land smiled a strange smile, one with no warmth that yet lacked any shred of mockery.
He really doesn’t know, Land thought. And yet it’s so obvious.
‘Something amuses you?’ asked Zephon.
‘Oh, no. Never that.’ Land chuckled, giving lie to the words.
Reaching the end of his patience, Zephon inclined his head in respect. ‘If you will excuse me, Explorator Land.’
‘Of course, of course.’
The Blood Angel walked on, his long stride easily outpacing Land’s.
Touchy fellow, he thought, watching the Blood Angel’s back.
An unknowable time after his encounter with Zephon, a message crackled across the vox, making its way down the processional line. The order was given to brace, to be ready, to detune any aura-scrye sensors and auspex scanners, and diminish any transhuman senses.
‘Ahead is one of the webway’s original sections.’ It was Diocletian’s voice, as distracted and terse as the Custodian always seemed to sound. ‘Adhere to the path at all costs.’
Land’s mouth was dry. Licking his lips made no difference. His tongue was leather. At last. At last…
He walked on, staring ahead through the wide manufactured tunnel, feeling the thrill of excitement that always bubbled up before the possibility of revelation. At his sides, the battle-servitors rumbled on. They, however, were lobotomised far past wonder.
When the iron walls faded away, they took their circuit-laden gleam and the hum of trembling engines with them. Mist rose in place of defined structure – Baroness Jaya had no idea where the path was, or how those at the procession’s vanguard were still following it. The procession’s footsteps no longer echoed from walls of Martian metal; instead the golden mist ate all sound and sent it back to them in fragments.
Was this the webway? The true webway? Yes it was, she soon realised. And no, it was not.
Passage walls became evident where the mist thinned: architecture of some arching substance that defeated any auspex rakes. The invalid returns read as something akin to eldar wraithbone, similar in physical density – and according to Land’s prattling, ‘similar in psychic resonance! Ah, forgive me! You couldn’t possibly understand…’ – yet comprised of no known material.
She’d known from studying the limited available data that the Great Work, this so-called web, was the creation of a race far older than any living in the galaxy. That fact held little awe for a woman who had taken her first xenos life at the age of fourteen. Species dawned and died with brutal regularity: the Crusade had driven hundreds of such species to extinction, and there had been alien empires at war before humanity itself was a brief, portentous meeting of proteins. No, it didn’t matter how old this industrious species had been. What made her skin crawl was the far more visceral reality that her scanners forced her to face.
Illara Latharac, Third Sword Exemplar, had voxed the very same sentiment from farther back in the processional line. Jaya heard her courtier swallow softly. ‘Pray to speak, baroness.’
‘Ever and always.’
‘My gratitude. Whatever this material is, it came from outside our galaxy. How can that be? How can that be possible?’
Jaya shuddered at the thought. Her Knight’s joints groaned in sympathy through their kin-bond.
The tunnels diverged without warning or any impression of which route was worthy over any other. The mist would simply part to reveal two or more alternate passages, each as indistinct as all others. Jaya sent auspex-relays down every passage even long past the point she realised no route would register anything of interest upon her scanners. She switched through focus/refine, through mono-drenching, even through the relative crudeness of colo-scrying, only the latter revealing anything at all. Her instruments measured no life yet a great deal of movement.
‘I have motion,’ she had voxed the first time.
‘I have nothing,’ Devram replied at once. The rest of the column reported their own findings, which varied between the silence of Devram’s scans and the mess of Jaya’s.
The movement ghosted around with each scan, seemingly belonging to no living beings, following no physical possibility. Either an army of spirits danced down many of the tunnels, or the passages themselves were moving in some unearthly, instrument-defeating manner.
Sometimes, she heard her name spoken aloud. It wasn’t a voice she recognised, nor did the vox acknowledge transmission receipt despite the telltale crackle of interference that bordered the man’s speech. More than once she heard his murmuring directly into her left ear, in a whispering tone that was too faint to make out his meaning. She couldn’t be sure if his parched whispers were too soft to understand or spoken in a language she didn’t simply know.
‘Pray to speak, baroness.’ Devram’s voice made her flinch.
‘Ever and always,’ she replied. The formal words seemed stuck in her dry mouth.
‘My gratitude. My vox receiver is malfunctioning, or… I’m not certain. Is anyone’s vox registering indecipherable whispering?’
Nervous chuckles from throughout the column answered the question well enough.
Faces leered at Jaya from the mist, human, alien, other. She watched them on her gun-feeds and through the god’s-eye strip-feed of her Knight’s primary vision realiser. One of the faces wrenched in the mist, turning and melting with the hazy impressions of reaching arms. The mist rippled with the suggestion of flame. That was how her father had died, seared alive in his control seat, too weakened by his wounds to operate the ejection bracers. It took Sacristan Torolec three sleepless days to reverently scrape and respectfully flush all organic particulates from the Knight’s cockpit. In the end, House Vyridion’s courtiers had buried a charred husk still baked into its throne.
Other shadows danced, capered, thrashed in the murk. Jaya did her best to pay them no heed. She kept her grip white-knuckled on the controls. Her hands couldn’t shake that way.
‘Jaya,’ a voice whispered her name with shy care. A youthful voice, one that made her squeeze her eyes closed as if such a gesture could ward her against any haunting. Perhaps it worked, for the voice didn’t return. Grunting in dismissal, she did her best not to think of the voice’s owner – there had been a boy once, a boy from another of Highrock’s monarch-blooded families. The first boy she had ever spent time with, unchaperoned. A lifetime ago now.