She canted the code-laced cry again, again, again. All the details of her last, best victory. She prayed for them to reach the data-halls of proud Ignatum.
<I hear you.>
Who?
The gutted Titan began to turn on ponderous, failing mechanisms. The industrial pistons and pneumatics of her waist axis were locked, the failsafe seals the only thing keeping her upright in a ballet of fragile harmony. If they unlocked now and left her at the mercy of her broken stabilisers, she would overbalance and fall.
Slowly, so slowly, Black Sky hove into view. The Reaver Titan had returned. It stood ankle-deep in the wreckage of Legion vehicles and slaughtered war servitors, watching the Scion with the dark panes of its cockpit-eyes.
Her reactor-core churned. Her heart lifted. <Brother.> Even her canting was slowed and slurring. Her princeps was on the edge of unconsciousness.
<I hear you.> The Reaver’s returning cants were hollow and dispassionate. Even through her dying agonies, the Scion felt a battle-queen’s righteous anger at her forge-kin’s lack of awed respect.
I have slain two engines with my last act. My death ensures your continued life. By what right do you stand in near silence?
Another thought pressed through the melting sludge of her thoughts. Eject. Eject. Eject.
She could live. Her princeps could yet live if she could just reach the Black Sky, but the ejection manifolds were fouled along with everything else inside her.
<Come,> she canted to Black Sky. <Enkir. Aid me.>
The Reaver began to stride closer.
His moderati were dead. Both of them slouched in their thrones in front of him, their slack features staring lifelessly through Black Sky’s eyes, both of their uniforms blossoming in red flowers where the blood of their murders had dried hours ago. The female crewmember had reclined into her throne almost innocently, seemingly asleep. The male, who had seen his companion’s death and struggled to react, had bled significantly more after being shot through the back of the neck. He’d died halfway out of his throne and now slumped against one side of the seat, his head still bouncing unnaturally with every step the Reaver took.
The daemon that had hollowed out Princeps Enkir Morova and now nestled within the meat of his mortal form was beginning to resemble the proud Ignatum veteran less and less. His eyes were raw and red, having not blinked in several hours. Bony protrusions bubbled beneath his flesh in living, crawling lumps, seemingly searching for places to break through the skin. His lap was full of his own teeth, which had pushed themselves from their sockets in a slow squeal reminiscent of nails scratching porcelain.
In the hours since it had claimed Black Sky as its weaponised sanctum, the Reaver had sustained no small damage from enemy infantry and other engines. The daemon lacked the precision and training of the Titan’s true crew. Now coming to the end of its skin-claiming ride, the daemon struggled to contain Enkir’s mortal knowledge, and though it could feel the creeping temptation to dive deeper into the Titan itself and wrap its essence around the machine’s sentient core, even power such as this would feel limiting to the ancient creature after a time. It had no desire to cage itself, even in such a mighty form.
Its lure had worked to perfection, drawing the Scion to its aid, then feigning flight. Now all that remained was the moment of cold-blooded vindication, one that even the flensed spiritual remnants of Enkir would enjoy, for the princeps himself was a man of war and no stranger to murder. Countless men and women had fallen beneath his gunlimbs, each one capable of levelling hive spires.
The daemon felt him now, the shredded tatters of the man’s soul, screaming in the back of its thoughts as the Reaver Titan drew close to its taller, expiring sister.
The daemon felt Princeps Nishome Alvarek’s dying thoughts, translated into emotion through the code-laced transmissions. The exhausted pride in her meaningless triumph. The more honest desperation she couldn’t quite swallow, of all mortal beings unwilling to accept their own death. And yet she ached for one thing more than even her own survivaclass="underline" to be remembered, for these deeds to be spoken of by those that knew her name. That was all. What fortune that Black Sky had returned.
How much truer and purer this hunt was. How much more satisfying than simply breaking machine-men apart with its claws or duelling the hateful Golden.
The daemon’s answer came in a rise of gunlimbs. The shattered Scion was too wounded and joint-locked to even turn aside.
Rooting through Enkir’s hind-thoughts kept dredging a single word to the surface. The daemon canted it unthinkingly in the moment before both weapons fired.
<Foedeath.>
The Scion of Vigilant Light stood motionless as she was speared through the chest with an inferno blast, killed through shameful execution. The Titan followed the falling form of its last kill, its ravaged silhouette plunging into the mist. The daemon, watching, savoured every moment of Nishome’s screams.
Its entertainment ended abruptly when, rather than vanish into the gold of oblivion, the Scion’s detonating reactor core went nova, sending flashes of thunderstorm light flickering through the mist beneath the bridge. The last of the Scion’s living crew died, consumed in sacred plasma fire.
Black Sky turned in a ponderous arc, and strode off in search of other prey.
Nineteen
A thousand souls / Just another tunnel / The pernicious spectre of hope
Kaeria felt precious little awe at the sight of the throne room, or at the labyrinthine dungeon that led to it. Even the bannered avenue that so inspired the souls that ventured this far into the Sanctum Imperialis left her cold; she would look at the army of standards and wonder which of these loyal regiments would be next to cast its oaths into the dirt and stand with the Arch-traitor.
She walked with her sisters now – precious few of them, given their deployment within the web and their dispersal across the galaxy – entering the throne room at the head of the phalanx. Coffins followed in their wake, anti-gravitic caskets with reinforced transparisteel facings, revealing the motionless occupants within. A parade of sorts, if one with most of its participants slumbering in chemically induced stasis.
Kaeria had expected a higher-ranking member of her order to be present in the throne room itself and awaiting her arrival, yet she was the senior Sister here. To be met with nothing more than the nervous gazes of Imperial scientists and the dispassionately expectant stares of Martian priests made her skin crawl. Was the Sisterhood really so depleted that this vile duty fell to her?
Well, so be it.
Coffin after coffin thrummed into the chamber on cheap anti-grav suspensors. Each sarcophagus was wrapped in chains, pushed along by the ever-patient guiding hands of a mind-locked servitor. Kaeria let her gaze wander around the vast chamber, where the roar of unknowable machinery was an unchanging song, and the spitting cracks of lightning arcing between generators no longer made any of the labourers recoil.
How swiftly the human mind attunes to madness.
She kept her distance from the Golden Throne. She could see it upon its raised dais, though she chose to scarcely look at it. Kaeria and her Sisters were forbidden from approaching too closely – their presences sucked at the machine’s power and destabilised any psychically resonant machinery. She considered it a grim reflection of the way other humans treated her; the way they cringed or looked away or even bared their teeth on instinct, often without knowing they were doing so. Enslaved to the most animal of reactions, responding on some primal level to the presence of a woman without a soul.