‘Seal the gate!’ he ordered, not even knowing if it could be done. ‘They’re still coming. Thousands of them. Seal the gate now, or we lose Terra.’
They were already trying, he saw. Adepts and engineers clustered around the machines, working the controls of each system. His war-struck thoughts made the connection with the slowing mechanical drone: the chamber’s attendants were deactivating the machinery, but not fast enough.
A single glance at the coffin-pods in the sockets told him what had happened in his absence, and how the Emperor had been able to come to their aid. The Sisters of Silence had enacted their secretive Unspoken Sanction. They fed the Throne with the lives of a thousand psykers. In every pod he could see a corpse that had thrashed in its death throes, raking uselessly against the transparent panels. All of them were dead. Every one of them. None of them looked to have died swiftly and painlessly.
Confusion reigned across the vox and among the gathered warriors as to the source of their salvation. Some had seen a dawning star or a sunrise, others had seen the Emperor Himself. Still others claimed to have witnessed a tidal surge of fire.
Everywhere, men and women were lost and dazed. Baroness Jaya was there on the chamber floor, her helmet in her hands, unblinkingly staring at her reflection in the visor. The Blood Angel, Zephon, was helping carry wounded Sisters from Land’s Raider. The technoarchaeologist himself was kneeling on the ground by his battle tank, rocking back and forth, his trembling hands clutching a necklace of Martian prayer beads, his delicate fingers stroking each bauble of volcanic obsidian in turn.
‘My Omnissiah,’ he was chanting softly, eyes unfocused. ‘My God. The Machine-God. My Omnissiah.’
Sagittarus lived, his chassis scored and ruined, the smokestacks on his back belching unhealthily from his overpushed generator. The Dreadnought had his back to the side of Land’s tank, leaking vital fluids from its internal sarcophagus in an oily puddle.
Sisters and warriors of the Ten Thousand gathered in monumental disorder, all of them looking to the portal’s arch, all of them hearing the slow drone of machinery powering down.
Diocletian was still demanding answers of the others when Kaeria came to him. ‘Where’s Ra?’ he asked her. ‘Did he make it back? He didn’t fall. I know he didn’t fall.’
Her eyes tightened with tension.
‘He didn’t fall,’ Diocletian repeated. ‘I was right next to him in the battle line. I would have seen it. He’ll be on the wrong side of the gate when it closes.’
Sister-Commander Krole came to Kaeria’s side, signing briefly for Diocletian’s benefit. He didn’t know her as he knew Kaeria – he couldn’t read her meaning by expression alone. Her signing was blighted by the fact she had lost three fingers from her left hand. Wounds patterned her features while her armour showed the ruination of too many hours in the front lines.
‘No,’ said the Custodian. ‘I was at his side, commander. He didn’t die. One moment he was there, the next he was not.’
Machines were going dark all around them. Great engines of the Emperor’s own vision – centuries in the design and decades in the making – were cycling down, haemorrhaging power. Slowly, slowly, far too slowly.
Diocletian sought the Emperor Himself, seeing His master ascending the steps to the Golden Throne once more.
‘My liege!’
The Emperor enthroned Himself, His grip loose on the armrests.
‘Sire! Seal the gate!’
The Emperor waited, staring towards the portal. Even from such a distance, Diocletian could see the intensity of that stare. The Emperor fixed his gaze on the gateway, waiting, waiting. Hesitating to do what must be done? Reluctant to abandon His greatest ambition? Or hopeful, yet, that another figure might manifest from the golden fog?
A shape darkened the mist. Something winged and clawed. Another figure, bloated and horned. And more. Others. A host of inhumanity. The Throne-engines were still cycling down.
‘Sire!’ Diocletian pleaded.
The Emperor closed His right hand into a fist, clenched within His glove. With a harmonious pattern of thunderclaps, every generator within the chamber went dark, their internal mechanics rupturing, starving the Golden Throne of energy.
The archway that led to humanity’s doomed salvation was nothing more than an ornate doorway, leading to the bare rock of the throne room wall.
Power failed completely, plunging the Imperial Dungeon into darkness.
Alone but for the daemon seeking to devour him from within, silent but for the caged beast’s murderous howls inside his head, a golden figure sprinted through the hazy passages of the ancient webway, leaving the Mechanicum’s aborted Unification behind.
Epilogue
The Desert
The sun was a hammer, the desert its scorched anvil. Here the world laboured under the draconic swelter of seething heat, the wind slow-whipping in outraged howls across the dune sea. The barren sky offered no shadow. The lifeless landscape offered no hope of shade.
A lone traveller walked this realm, his boots scuffing the powdery grit, his cloak rippling in the alkali gusts. He trudged onwards, leaving tracks that marked his passage across the featureless expanse. He never looked back. There would be nothing to see even if he did.
His journey brought him to the edge of a chasm, a riven slice of the planet’s skin where the world’s tectonics had once pulled apart after warring in grinding uproar. The traveller descended the ravine’s cliffside while the high sun remained in vigil.
Soon enough, blessedly, he entered a realm of shadow where the sun no longer stared.
Within the ravine lay the broken bones of a dead city. Silent for so long, free from the ravages of the dusty wind, it echoed only with the sound of the traveller’s footsteps. He passed through this place of mournful memory, careful not to the touch the ashen smears that its fleeing people had become.
He walked through time-eaten cathedrals to forgotten gods, through fire-fallen palaces that once housed dynasties of kings and queens who laid claim to whole worlds. He walked with no purpose beyond seeing what lay there in the abandoned shadows.
In the deepest lightless reaches of that slain civilisation, the traveller halted at last. He stood within a cavern several days’ journey below the surface, where the stone walls showed precious few remaining signs of the culture that once thrived here. It wasn’t from here that those ancient monarchs had ruled their realm, but it was the core-place, the heart of their power, that had allowed them to do so.
Thunder rolled. A week away, far above him, a storm tore across the desert. Dust clattered from the cavern roof, clattering soft melodies of desecration upon dead machines.
The traveller turned in the darkness, raising an illumination globe clutched in a rag-gloved hand.
‘Hello, Diocletian,’ he said.
The warrior stood in the dark, his spear held in a loose fist. He was helmless, breathing in the earthy smell of a million memories.
‘My liege,’ he said. Somehow his voice was a gunshot in the nothingness, breaking the silence in a way the Emperor’s had not. Things moved in the shadows, crawling away from the defiling sound of speech.
The Emperor walked among the stilled enginery – the sand had blighted everything, even down here – running His gauntleted touch along the fire-blackened metal.
‘Sire? What is happening? Why am I here?’
‘Do you recognise any of this machinery?’