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Cover

Nightfall on Stygies – Stark Holborn

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Belisarius Cawl: The Great Work’

A Black Library Publication

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NIGHTFALL ON STYGIES

Stark Holborn

Isonovere Holt, dauntless excavator of divine truth and magos explorator of the Technoarchaeology Sanctum, has returned to Stygies VIII unannounced from her ten-year expedition to the Calixis Sector. One of the most famed explorators since Corvilhan – may the Omnissiah see fit to cleanse his name – Holt arrived at 08:01:45 this morning aboard her vessel, the Tenebris Lucet, unaccompanied but for her legion of servitors…

– Vox-stream Epsilon V, broadcast across Praecordia Inexcitabilis, Stygies VIII

The news was everywhere. It flooded my streams, her name bleeding red across clean lines of data. By the time the great work bell sounded Exolvuntur Quinque, the whole of Stygies VIII, living, dying, waking, slumbering, knew that something extraordinary was happening.

I hurried along an echoing corridor of the Technoarchaeology Sanctum, the chimes echoing through my skull. Glowing feeds obscured my vision – datastreams and reports topped by different versions of the same words: Magos Explorator Returns. Like a starved feral-worlder falling upon a hunk of grox I combed the streams for facts: Holt’s vessel, the Tenebris Lucet, was last seen five years ago leaving Fenksworld. That she had set foot in such a place – home to exiles and hereteks and the dangers of the Library of Knowing – was enough to cast her into the darkness of suspicion. And yet, this was the same Isonovere Holt who discovered the Textoris Protocol, its binharic power hidden within the tortuous code knots of an aeldari diadem. The Holt who had sacrificed both her legs to the jaws of a predator in the jungles of Biegel-9 in order to return with the possible STC that kept our order burning midnight oil to this day.

As soon as I stepped within range of the scriptorium, a summons appeared.

<Thess 4/90.>

My official designation. Magos Xenologis Ratibor al-Aban’s datapresence filled the noosphere, stern and commanding. I made genuflection.

<Affirmative, magos?>

<You knew Holt. You were an adept under her.>

It was true. I had once been a cog in her workshop, one of thousands seconded to the task of cataloguing minor finds.

<Forty years ago, magos.>

<Time is of no matter. Report to the council chamber gallery of the Auricularium.>

The terseness of the code told me the request was immediate, but still I hesitated. The council chamber was six levels above my current rank. Even as I thought it, an access code appeared, topped by Ratibor’s sigil.

I could not help the interrogative that slipped into the noosphere.

An admonition cut across the channel, the error-correcting algorithm highlighting my impertinent question.

<AND WHERE THE MACHINE SPIRIT FALTERS, DARKNESS GROWS AND WHERE DARKNESS GROWS, CORRUPTION DOES FOLLOW, AND THUS DESPOILED WE FALL TO THE XENOS TAINT, INTO DEPTHS WHERE THE OMNISSIAH’S LIGHT CANNOT REACH.>

The Admonition Against Diminishing Efficiency. I bowed my head, the haptic sensors in my skull and neck sending out pain signals to simulate the sensation of receiving the lash.

<Omnissiah forgive me,> I recited. <May my joints be ever firm. May my plating resist the xenos taint…>

Ratibor’s datapresence simmered.

<Keep your prayers. We are about to hear the testimony of Isonovere Holt.>

‘Inquisitor?’

Balphus Grun looked up from the charts spread before him, marked all over with sites of possible heresy, a pox spreading across the ancient, thin flesh of the Imperium. A pox that too often had no symptoms and did not show itself until it was almost too late.

‘What is it, Eshmer?’

The Tempestor’s expression did not change. To some, he might have looked blank, even vacant, but Grun knew better: beneath the stony exterior, loyalty to the Imperium burned with an unquenchable flame.

‘We found her,’ Eshmer said.

Grun straightened, setting a belt of liturgical interrogation instruments clinking as he summoned the information before him. A blinking route stretched across the stars like lurid poison through a body’s veins: the path of the Tenebris Lucet.

‘She emerged from the warp near Hydraphur,’ Eshmer reported. ‘I believe she is running for home.’

Inquisitor Grun stared at a red point on the charts. Stygies VIII – the Ever-Staring Cyclops – festered in the Segmentum Pacificus like a canker. Crushed between daemon worlds, feral worlds, tomb worlds, its priests were too hungry for what they should not possess, the place wretched with rumours of illegal caches of xenos tech, experiments that far surpassed the lines of heresy. Grun and his Scions had hunted many a Xenarite through its hollow halls. If it were up to him, he would have scoured the moon from the system.

He considered for a moment sending word to his ordo for backup, but what would they do that he and his Scions could not? If the poison aboard the Tenebris Lucet had already spread to Stygies, then the only thing to do was burn it away with swift and certain judgement.

Grun’s dry lips twitched in a smile. ‘Set a course,’ he said.

I had only set foot in the Auricularium once before. The High Council edifice rose hundreds of feet in the air above the mile-wide, raised walkway that separated it from the rest of Praecordia Inexcitabilis. All around, chimneys stretched into the distance, propellant plants belching out gouts of flame, manufactories weeping rivers of molten metal five storeys deep. The air was thick as axle grease, the sky pink as raw flesh. My rebreather doubled its efficiency, filtering out the worst toxins as I stepped into the shadow of the Auricularium.

The emblem of the Adeptus Mechanicus blazed from the blackened steel façade. I watched, awed, as a legion of crimson-armoured skitarii marched through the yawning doors. I slipped by in their wake.

A data-skull was waiting for me – ancient bone and crimson oculars, a candle burning upon its crown. I recognised it as one of Ratibor’s, and sure enough, as soon as the beams of its oculars swept across me, it spun in the air and led me through the darkness of the inner chambers, to an unmarked door of blackened steel where a complex lock mechanism glowed red as a dying coal. I made observance before it, coding a prayer of admission into the noosphere. The lock winked green in response and swung open.

At once, I realised where I was. I was above the council chamber itself, in a viewing gallery encircled by rusted latticework that hid me from view. Below, the Archimandrite was in assembly. My nerves creaked as I recognised them: Orm Van de Rauss, archmagos biologis, may the Omnissiah protect her from the failures of the flesh; Vettaph Leach, magos reductor, may His iron protect us; Magos Ratibor; and there – at the centre of the dais – Fabricator General Sigma 3-Soth himself.

<Thess,> Ratibor coded privately.

<Present.>

<Instruction: Watch. Listen.>

I pressed close to the grating and increased the magnification of my oculars, dialled up the sensitivity of my auditory sensors as the great steel doors at one end of the chamber groaned open.

If not for the respirator my breath would have caught as Isonovere Holt strode into the chamber on bronze prosthetic legs as thick as girders, their clawed soles enamelled black. A cloak of plaited hide rippled behind her; trinkets of bone and stone and glass clattered from a bandolier that held a plasma torch and a Mordian-pattern power sword. Two additional arms emerged from beneath her cloak, one ending in a heavy pincer and the other with a mass of coiling dendrites. Her flesh arms were bare, glowing with thief’s light from electoo skinplants. A fall of black ribbon cable spilled from her hood, mimicking tresses of organic hair, an affectation which made me uncomfortable for reasons I could not adequately interpret.

I zoomed my oculars, taking in every detail. She did not walk alone. A servo-skull hovered above her left shoulder. For reasons that defied logic, Holt favoured this one above all others, and insisted upon calling it ‘Gripus the Deathless’ after the rogue trader who had once been her expedition partner. Whether she had repurposed his skull as a symbol of respect or as a warning to others was a matter of popular debate among adepts.

Finally, came Holt’s industrial servitors, treads for legs, heavy lifting gear fused to their remaining flesh. They dragged something: an unmarked hermetic crate.

The procession came to a stop in the centre of the silent chamber, and the chatter in the noosphere died.

<Explorator Holt,> Fabricator General Soth began. <You have been summoned here on charges of insubordination, disregard for protocol, behaviour that borders upon the heretekal…>

Holt raised her head, smiling with a jaw full of steel teeth. ‘So you don’t want to know what I’ve found?’

I clapped a hand to my auditory sensor as it shrieked and whined at the sudden noise. She had spoken aloud using her vocal cords. Not only that, she’d augmented her throat with vox-boosters, forcing the entire council to recalibrate their sensors. I gasped at the audacity of it.

<That is not the matter under discussion,> Archmagos Van de Rauss coded severely. <You are here to answer as to your irregular actions.>

<So please the council, I will explain.> Holt’s code was laden with deferential denotations that bordered on mockery.

She cleared her throat. ‘I have journeyed here with all haste from the Markayn Marches, risking my life and my eternal soul to the Eye of Terror in order to bring fame to Stygies VIII, victory to the Emperor – may He shine eternal – and everlasting glory to the Omnissiah.’

She took a step, metal soles echoing through the chamber. ‘What I bring you today is the prize of a decade’s work. In the Library of Knowing in Nova Castillia, I came across a reference to a great battle fought upon the feral world of Fedrid. A terrible place, one of horrors, of beasts more vicious than any imaginable.’

She was speaking and coding simultaneously, loading the data with haptic feedback that prompted a response from olfactory sensors: I smelled thick, rotting vegetation, felt stultifying heat, heard the deathly chatter of insects and the world-shattering roar of predators…

‘At great peril to myself, I journeyed deep into the jungles, deeper than I believe any servant of the Imperium has ever gone. And there, I indeed found the site of a great battle, where the ground still smoked after a hundred thousand years. I found a crater. And at the centre of that crater, I found what I believe is a fragment of a weapon which ended that mighty battle – a weapon with the power to level cities and turn armour to steam. I believe the artefact that I have brought you contains nothing less than an ancient machine spirit, which – if awoken and tamed – will give us the power to crush the vile ork Waaagh! that has long threatened our sector, for the glory of Stygies VIII.’

As the echoes of her voice died away, I emerged from what felt like a deep defragmentation procedure. The Archimandrite had not moved, but I could tell from Leach’s switching dendrites that a furious debate was likely taking place in the classified noosphere.

<What is it that you want, explorator?>

It was Ratibor who spoke, whether by agreement or his own design I could not tell. Holt raised her head.

<Only what protocol demands,> she said. <The opportunity to study the artefact in the name of the Omnissiah.>

<You return unclean, dragging the xenos taint,> Van de Rauss accused.

<Understanding is the True Path to Comprehension,> Holt retorted. <Comprehension is the key to all things.>

<To break with ritual is to break with faith,> the archmagos told her. <You did not obey quarantine procedures. You refused to undergo the correct rites. It is aberrant. You are aberrant.>

Aberrant. One step away from heretek. I refocused my oculars on the Fabricator General, trying to read the mass of tubes and augmentations that made up his external aspect.

<The artefact will be seized and isolated while the Pura Reditus is spoken,> he coded at last. <For the Glory of the All-Seeing Omnissiah, May His Holy Wisdom Guide Us.>

I expected Holt to argue, to use her loud voice again, but she merely bowed her head and unfurled the dendrites of her left hand one by one in submission.

<For the Glory of the Omnissiah,> she said.

At a command, her servitors dropped the cables they had been carrying and began to trundle from the chamber, leaving the hermetic crate behind.

<Follow her, Thess.> The order arrived on Ratibor’s encrypted channel. <Get close. Be my sensors.>

<Affirmative.>

But as Holt passed beneath the gallery where I stood, I thought I registered something – a whisper of binharic cant, code so pure and clean it seemed to speak directly to my soul, resonating through steel and bone.

Then Holt turned and it was gone.

Follow her.

As if I could do anything else.

‘Broadcast intercepted from Stygies VIII,’ a voice said, breaking Grun’s sequence of flagellations. He drew in a breath, quenching the flame of impatience. He had asked to be kept abreast of developments, after all.

‘Speak.’

One of the Scions, Zadakand, stood in the doorway, a coil of paper in their fist. ‘It’s from a local vox datastream in Praecordia Inexcitabilis. Holt claims she found the thing on Fedrid. Swore it to the Archimandrite.’

‘Lies.’ Grun dealt himself another lash, punishment for letting Holt make it back to the bosom of the Cult Mechanicus with her poisoned prize. ‘Add treachery to the charges.’

‘Done,’ Zadakand said. Grun felt their eyes tracing the blood that ran down his back. ‘We will reach Stygies in seventy-two hours.’

Another lash.

‘Make it sixty. Who knows what damage she will do by then.’

Holt’s tower was located at the edge of an abandoned manufactoria district where vast dunes of rusted slag stained the earth like old blood, as if some great battle between sentient machines had taken place here and left behind a graveyard – may the Omnissiah rid me of such profane imaginings. Among that ruin, an armoured shot tower of sheet metal stood whole. I began the long walk towards it.

The first security protocol almost tripped me up: my sensors registered it just in time, and I threw up a block that saved my processors from being fried. After that I was more cautious. Holt had many surveillance and protection viruses running, not to mention her Charron-pattern battle servitors who roamed armed with heavy bolters. I stayed motionless as a Kataphron Breacher rolled past, crushing the dust with its treads, before slipping towards the base of the tower.

Despite the doses of relaxant and anxiety suppressant my med-augment was shooting into my system, my weak flesh was shaking with fear. Was it true that Holt kept murder servitors? I splayed my fingers, wondering which of the archaeological instruments that slid free from the knuckles might work as a probe to explore the lock mechanism, when the air shifted and the cold metal of a needle kissed the inch of exposed flesh that remained on my neck.

‘What do we have here?’ Holt’s voice was so close it razzed in my hearing. ‘An Archimandrite spy rat?’

<No,> I coded desperately, before clearing my oesophageal passage, trying to loosen the rigid cords. ‘No,’ I rasped. ‘I came on my own. I wanted to see you…’

But it was not Holt who stood behind me. It was her favourite servo-skull, the one she called Gripus the Deathless. It surveyed me through green-glowing eye sockets, a syringe protruding from one of its thin arms. As I stared, its processor whirred and the needle retracted.

‘I know you.’ Holt’s voice emerged from the clacking jaw. ‘There is a physiognomy match in my databank. You are Thess 4/90. Artisan for Magos Ratibor. Former adept.’

The cool wash of fear-suppressant did little to stop the trembling in my limbs. ‘May the Omnissiah bless your remembrance of me.’

Gripus’ oculars flickered, Holt regarding me through its eyes.

‘Enter,’ she said.

For the second time that cycle, I followed a servo-skull into the unknown. Through a series of airlocks we went, each protected by a complex security protocol. I coded a series of sub-orisons to the Omnissiah for courage, but as soon as I stepped inside the tower, my recitations stalled.

The space was vast and dark and echoing, like the inside of a titanic bone. Sealed glass cabinets stretched from floor to ceiling, each holding items I struggled to identify. Nightweave silk ribbon – purportedly cursed, a plaque told me as I passed a strip of glimmering fabric. Moliochin Fire Heart flashed up on another label, and all the while my noospheric recognition programs faltered – <No visual match> <CENSORED> <????> – until I had to blink them away. Revulsion and fascination warred within me; some appeared to be dangerous xenos items. And yet, upon each glowing lock I saw the sigils of members of the Archimandrite, including Ratibor’s own: Holt must have been granted an exemptio xenologica code for every item in her collection.

In that moment, I remembered Ratibor’s instruction. Be my sensors.

I followed Gripus into a mag-lift, which flashed to life and sent us shooting upwards to the very highest floor of the tower. That was where I found Holt.

Red-gold light flooded the circular room, the dying rays of the sun strained through smog and particle clouds. If the galleries below were fascinating, Holt’s inner sanctum was utterly bewildering. I had never seen anywhere like it on Stygies. Instead of order, chaos reigned: priceless Crimson Bestiaries lay open at random, bits of scrap metal jammed between their pages. Scrolls unfurled across the floor, broken tech scattered like fallen stars across every surface. And in the centre, Holt sat at a great workbench, her clawed feet propped on the desk and the ribbon cables that hung from her scalp almost red in the rays of the sun. One of her dendrites was curled around a metal goblet.

When she saw me, she smiled wide, steel teeth and radiance. ‘Thess,’ she said, indicating the chair opposite her. ‘Sit. Eat.’

I blinked at the desk. What I had taken for components were instead morsels of food: delicate rolls of slick grey flesh. Acetic acid, my sensors told me. Ethanol plus engine coolant. Unidentified aquatic vertebrate.

‘Pickled Catachan Face-eater,’ Holt explained, selecting one. ‘A delicacy. Especially with Gorsk white gyn. Developed rather a taste for it on Fenksworld.’

I stared, trying to recall the last time I had eaten with my mouth, rather than filling the feed tank in my system with corpse-starch. But Holt, she opened her jaw and dropped the morsel in, synthetic tongue bifurcating to wrap around it. Her dark flesh eye closed in seeming bliss before she casually spat something into her hand: a neat parcel of tough flesh and bones, which she tossed over her shoulder.

‘Waste pellets,’ she explained, raising her goblet. ‘An efficient way to extract flavour. I got the idea from owls.’

I resisted the urge to run a query upon the word in order to focus my full attention upon Holt, who continued to speak.

‘So tell me, Thess. Why are you here?’

For a moment, I considered injecting firewall code into my response. Instead, I found myself telling her the truth through sticky vocal cords.

‘I want to know what you brought back. I want to know what you found in the Calixis Sector.’

Holt smiled. ‘The Omnissiah has blessed you with an inquisitive mind.’ Her ocular focused in on me, stripping me down to ones and zeros. ‘You were human-born. To drudges in Grubsturm.’

I nodded, fighting down the old shame. But rather than sneer in pity or disgust, Holt’s eyes blazed.

‘I knew it. That is what makes you different. That is why you hear it, just as I do.’

In a flash it returned to me – that fragment of perfect binharic code I had heard in the council chamber.

Holt leaned forward, her goblet forgotten. ‘I am right, am I not? It calls to you, just as it calls to me. Why else would you be here?’

‘“It”?’

She rose from the desk. ‘Come with me.’

In the rushing darkness of the mag-lift, her physical presence seemed enormous. She smelled of pickle and raw alcohol, engine grease and unknown spices, holy incense and a strange feverish heat – the scent of pure electricity. She turned to me, speaking with that haptic-boosted voice that sent shivers through my flesh. ‘Can you run a Level I obfuscation program, Thess?’

‘I have the processing capacity. But–’

Holt seized my arm. I gasped as one of her dendrites snaked out and plugged itself into the terminal at the base of my neck. For a heartbeat we were connected, her datapresence vast in my mind, code flowing between us. And as we stood there I heard it again, clear as the Exolvuntur bell: that line of pure binharic cant, spooling, calling…

Holt’s dendrite broke away and the sound vanished. I staggered. She had injected a high-level obfuscation program directly and untraceably into my data library. It was a powerful thing, more potent than any sequence I had the clearance to use, and my body trilled with it.

I expected the mag-lift to stop on the ground floor, but instead we sailed past, down and down into the earth.

‘As above, so below,’ Holt murmured, the blue light of her ocular prickling in the darkness. Finally, after forty-eight point three seconds, the doors hissed open to reveal a long underground tunnel with thick metal doors inset into the walls.

‘What is this place?’ I asked as Holt strode forward, her clawed feet crushing dust.

‘A repository,’ she answered. ‘A safeguard.’

I blinked at one of the doors, waiting for my processors to translate the words scrawled upon it, but they did not. We were too far beneath the earth for signals to reach, I realised with a jolt. There were no relay beacons within range.

I reached out a dendrite towards another door, and a howl burst from it, the metal shuddering. There was something alive in there.

Holt’s flesh hand closed on my sleeve, pulling me onwards. ‘Just a clawed fiend.’

Uneasily, I accessed the recorded memory of the archmagos’ sigils on the locked cases in the gallery above. ‘Do the council know about it?’ I asked.

Holt smiled bitterly. ‘Most of them are fools. We cannot fight orks or any other xenos threats without data. We must know our enemy. Rather than destroy we must delve deep, reach into their bodies and brains and rip out their secrets.’

We reached a metal door larger than all the others. Holt uttered a chant in raw machine language, hand flicking through a complex devotional gesture, and the lock flashed, the door swinging open to reveal a shadowy cave. And in the centre of the cave, a hermetic crate, identical to the one I had seen in the council chamber.

‘But…’ I began, recalling the Fabricator General’s quarantine order.

‘A decoy,’ Holt said impatiently. ‘I could not allow the council to slow my progress for the sake of a few liturgical formalities.’

Heresy, a voice whispered in my head. Sacrilege.

‘Thess.’ Holt was looking at me. ‘Do you wish to see what I found?’

The crate hissed open, air spilling out. Suspended in the centre was a lump of fused and corroded metal. It looked as if it had once been part of a larger structure, ripped away and burned almost to destruction.

Then something shifted in the air, and I heard it – faint at first but growing stronger – that whisper of binharic cant, purer than any program I had ever experienced. It seemed to smooth all my edges, swallowing dead or bloated code from my systems, sweeping away redundancies until I felt as if I was stepping from a ritual bath, cleansed by the Omnissiah’s divine light.

As it began again, I looked up at Holt in silent question.

Her flesh eye glittered with tears. ‘I believe what we hear is the voice of an ancient machine spirit, imprisoned by some foul xenos race and used as a weapon millennia ago. I call it the Manubiarix. An angel in chains, dragged down by the dark and used against us. Those who have undergone the Rite of Pure Thought will never hear it. Only those with an active and flexible right hemisphere will. Like you.’ Her hand closed on my shoulder. ‘Work with me, Thess. As you did once before. Only this time, as my adjunct, my partner.’

I had long surrendered tear ducts along with my human eyes. Had I not, I would have wept. ‘Magos Ratibor–’ I began.

‘I shall send a request to the magos for you to be seconded to me, to assist with cataloguing my finds. He will not object.’ She brought her head close, setting off a series of logic problems in my chest. ‘What do you say, Thess? Will you help me?’

May the Omnissiah forgive me, I invoked, even as I nodded.

And so I left behind the workroom in the Technoarchaeology Sanctum and relocated to Holt’s tower. The other artisans bombarded the prox-channel with interrogatives about my secondment when I collected my few belongings, but I told them little – due both to the obfuscation program and my own reticence. Holt and I were comrades, soldiers-in-arms in a fight against ignorance.

Over the coming cycles, we worked long hours in the cave, executing emergence subroutines unearthed from Holt’s library of tomes, anointing the artefact’s bubbled surface with holy oils, taking samples and running them through spectrum analysis. It soon became obvious that Holt’s theory about the imprisoned spirit she called the Manubiarix could be correct: the artefact had a hollow at its centre, like a ribcage around a beating heart.

I learned to ingest Gorsk white gyn through my feed system, to enjoy the harsh sting of it as Holt and I sat together, lost in theories, our throats raw with litanies, the song of the Manubiarix pulsing through our shared noospheric channel. We pushed on through sleep, barely pausing to defrag when the observation grew too taxing.

Holt kept no other crew. Only her servitors, who shambled constantly around the perimeter or through the tower, tending to basic tasks. When I asked her why, she kissed her steel teeth and said that servitors were not capable of betrayal. Anxiety scratched at me when I remembered Ratibor’s directive to report upon Holt’s movements – so far I had sent him only the blandest of updates – but I told myself the occlusion was justified. Though the means were different, our ultimate goal was the same: to serve the Omnissiah.

We had four cycles, barely that, before everything changed.

I was communing with the artefact, eighty-three cantos through the nine hundred and seventy-four verses of the Rite of Suscitatio Perpetuus, when Holt wrenched the smoke censer from my hands.

‘Move,’ she ordered.

‘What’s happening?’

Her ocular flickered with processing activity. ‘They’re here.’

<Who?> I coded as I heard myself say, ‘But the rite…’

‘Move, Thess! We have only moments!’

I stumbled after her, the machine spirit’s perfect song fading as I staggered into the tunnel. Holt slammed and locked the door and ran for the mag-lift, metal feet pounding. Gripus was already waiting there. Holt’s dendrites snaked towards the servo-skull, plunging themselves into Gripus’ ocular ports.

‘Grun,’ she swore. Her other two arms were busy, the pincer compressing into a hammer, flesh hand rummaging beneath her robes to draw out a cluster of metallic ovoids.

Mindscrambler grenade, my noopsheric sensor identified. Core: egg sac of Cthellan electrogenesis cephalopoda. Damage gradation: class IIIb. Damage description: severe neural trauma.

I blinked it away and put my hand on hers. ‘Holt, who is here? Tell me!’

She stopped, focusing on me in fierce desperation. ‘The Inquisition.’

Dread ran through me like leaking acid. ‘Why?’

‘Because they are blinded by fear. Because they would rather destroy and plunge us into darkness than reach for the light.’ She gripped my shoulder as the mag-lift approached ground level. ‘Remain alive, Thess. The obfuscation program will protect you. The Manubiarix needs you.’

Before I could answer, the doors slid open and Gripus shot out, dendrites flailing. Holt followed, chanting as she went, her vox-boosted voice filling the tower, overlaying itself across every feed in the noosphere. The cant was powerful, irresistible, and it was all I could do to remember my training and not give in to its call.

With her pincer she smashed open a glass cabinet and snatched at something inside. By now the tower itself was shaking – the deafening roar of a ship overloading my auditory sensors, my brain a mess of clashing adrenaline and fear-suppressants as my systems switched to combat mode, binharic cantrips flooding to the front of my mind.

Reaching the centre of the tower, Holt stopped and raised her head, power sword in hand as the doors exploded open.

They roared in on a wave of red dust, footfalls heavy as pistons, clad in carapace armour and wielding hotshot lasguns, their mask oculars blazing green.

Tempestus Scions, my systems identified immediately, picking out the insignia on the ceramite plates that marked one of them out as Tempestor. Ten in total, all with weapons primed on Holt. Hotshot lasgun, aka ‘Hellgun’. Fire capability: semi-automatic and rapid fire. Damage gradation: class II, projectile velocity, density ratio…

Probabilities and percentages plummeted as my combat system analysed the danger and told me what I already knew – that we were outmatched.

‘Isonovere Holt,’ a voice cut through the clamour, raw and unaugmented. ‘You stand accused of xenophilia, rebellion, and the ultimate charge of techno-heresy.’

The man who spoke was tall and thin as an iron pole, his long grey hair pulled back from his face in a tight knot. A leather robe billowed behind him, the armour beneath scored with a tally, like gouges in flesh. The Inquisitorial rosette clanged against his chest as he came to a stop, black eyes fixed upon Holt. ‘Where is the artefact?’

I magnified one of my oculars upon his face and interpreted fury in the pulse of blood through his veins as my system calculated his elevated heart rate. He yearned to kill Holt. But more than that, he wanted what she had found in the Calixis Sector, so that he might destroy it, totally and personally.

‘The artefact? It is in quarantine, inquisitor.’ The vox-augment allowed Holt to speak even while her cant grew louder, combat code flooding the noosphere.

‘Deception. You misled the Archimandrite, as you must have done many times in the past.’ The inquisitor threw a disgusted glance at Holt’s gallery of xenos items. ‘Treachery. Sabotage. Sedition most foul against the Imperium.’

‘Retrieving valuable artefacts, for the glory of the Emperor, you mean?’

The inquisitor snarled, raising his voice over Holt’s cant, and I could feel it – the probability of conflict increasing, digit by digit. ‘Was it in the name of the Emperor that you and your servitors slaughtered the sensor technicians at the Immacoris Watch Station orbiting the dead world of Klybo? Was it in the name of the Emperor that you landed in the wastelands of that hell-dredged place, without authorisation, to dig among xenos ruins and drag a polluted artefact to light? Was it for the glory of the Emperor that you misled the Archimandrite about that artefact’s origin and nature? That you put this moon, nay, the entire system at risk?’

I stared at Holt, waiting for her to refute the claims, to spin once again her account of Fedrid… But she did not. She only smiled with her steel teeth.

‘Yes.’

‘Then by my order and judgement, you shall–’

She did not let him finish. Instead she spun, servos whirring, dendrites flying, hurling a grenade with one hand and swinging her sword in a haze of blue energy, slicing clean through the chain of the inquisitor’s rosette, sending him staggering back.

I turned and ran as the grenade shattered. It was not a Mindscrambler, my system reported as chaos unfolded behind me, but a target-befouling device that filled the air with a mist of micro-particles to throw off the lasgun sights. It would buy us two point five-four seconds…

With a guttural roar and a splitting of metal, Holt’s Kataphron Breachers crashed into the room, arc claws spitting blue death. Behind them rushed battle servitors, plasma and arc rifles fused in place of their hands, ready to deal out destruction. They moved as a pack, faces blank as they responded to Holt’s chant, her voice tearing the syllables into the air, urging them on.

A servitor swung at a Tempestus Scion with an arc maul, only to explode in a thick rain of flesh, scorched metal and twisted wires. A second Scion fired a hotshot volley gun at Holt, releasing a spitting howl and a rain of fire that shattered glass and metal but did nothing to catch her as she hurled another target-befouling grenade down in her wake.

Inquisitor Grun clenched his teeth at the noise but did not fall back, uncoiling a razor whip as he closed in on Holt, eyes like burned metal.

Arc-fire split the air, a bolt of blue lightning catching a Scion full in the chest and sending them convulsing within their armour, their body shaking itself to death.

Desperately, crouching against a cabinet, I began a binharic cant of my own, mind slipping on the right code for a stealth-screen that would hide me from view. But I was only on line twenty-two of fifty when a Scion swung his lasgun towards me, its targeter glowing. A solar second before he fired, a pale shape shot into the air between us: Gripus, an unpinned frag grenade held in its spindly pincers.

I threw all of my arms over my head, huddling against the cabinet as it exploded, shattering the glass above me. When I looked up, my oculars buzzing and swarming with warning code, the Scion was down, clawing at his crushed mask. One of Gripus’ arms lay on the ground. The rest of the servo-skull was gone.

Everywhere, Scions battled servitors, wrenching arms from torsos, blasting heads into pulps of brain matter and silicone. The tower’s floor was a swamp of blood and fluids, gobbets of flesh and fizzing components. The chainsword-wielding Tempestor leapt onto the back of a Breacher, roaring in fury as he swung and decapitated the servitor within.

And all the while, Holt moved like an arco-flagellant, dendrites whipping, hide cloak deflecting bullets, power sword carving truth. I saw her slice a Scion’s arm clean off and send it flying, saw her sever a lasgun in two as it discharged, but she was one and they were many, and it was only a matter of time…

<HOLT.> I threw her identifier into the noosphere as a plasma bolt caught her in the chest, bursting armour and flesh alike, sending her falling back. A second shot tore off one of her arms, a chainsword blow crushed one leg beneath her in a ruined mass of metal. Before she could rise, Inquisitor Grun’s razor whip flashed through the air to wrap itself around her throat. Its blades scraped sickeningly against her steel jaw.

‘Isonovere Holt,’ Grun hissed, his ash-coloured face streaked with bright blood. ‘I hereby condemn you to Servitude Imperpituis, so that you may, in your degradation, work to redeem your everlasting debt to the Emperor.’

Holt’s eyes found mine, and for a moment I could have sworn I heard the song of the Manubiarix, raised in lamentation.

‘Glory,’ she whispered, her vocal actuators crackling with static before Grun wrenched the whip with a savage twist and snapped her neck.

Physical augment failure: 79 per cent

Blood loss: 43 per cent

Coolant levels: critically low

Probability of terminal collapse: 69 per cent

One of my oculars was gone. The other was cracked, the lens splintered and smeared. My bio-regulation systems no longer functioned, destroyed by Grun’s gauntleted fist. An augment ripped out or shattered for every question I could not answer, for every answer he did not like. The extra arm I had worked for a decade to earn lay on the floor in a twisted mockery of supplication, the technoarchaeological instruments sheathed within pulled out and snapped one by one. The dendrites that I had been so proud to possess lay like dead snakes, their ends sparking in the liquid that poured out of me.

The agony was unbearable, my brain pounded by pain signals, cogitators bombarded by invasive penetration tests. I coded all I was capable of: a basic request to the Omnissiah for the oblivion of total shutdown.

Someone grasped the back of my sodden cloak and pulled my head up. Grun’s face loomed above me.

‘I ask again, in the name of the Inquisition – where is the artefact?’

Liquid ran from my mouth. ‘Don’t know.’

<Invalid question: Location unknown,> I coded, again and again. <Location unknown.>

‘You worked with Holt. She must have shown you.’

‘Cataloguing… minor finds.’ My voice sounded wrong. ‘Rocks and dust.’

Someone let my head go and it lolled forward, as if my neck too had been snapped.

‘Anything?’ Grun barked at his Tempestor, who peered at the device in his hand, attached by wires driven into my cortices.

‘Nothing, inquisitor,’ the Scion answered calmly. ‘Either they are telling the truth or their systems were damaged in battle and they can no longer access the information.’

The obfuscation program. I clung to the secret knowledge of it. Deep, deep in my cogitator it was running, so quiet as to be almost invisible. Any datamancer would have found it, given time. But these Scions were not tech-priests. They were killers, weapons wielded by the Imperium. And now, they would kill me, or worse, sentence me to become a servitor or an arco-flagellant, may the Omnissiah redeem me…

‘Release them.’

A tug, a red needle of pain, and the wires tethering me to the device were yanked free. I slithered from the chair into a pool of my own fluids.

Inquisitor Grun’s boot tipped my face back.

‘Your naivety does not excuse the disgrace you have brought to your order and your name, Thess 4/90,’ he proclaimed. ‘I will recommend the Archimandrite issue the severest penance applicable.’

Penance… but not death. Not deletion. A question bubbled to my lips, but Grun turned away.

‘Get out.’

Run, a tiny voice commanded, from somewhere deep within. Run, before he thinks twice.

Getting my legs under me was like trying to code in lingua-diabolis, but I did it, then clawed my way up the wall with broken fingers and staggered, boots skidding in my own insides, through the door and out.

Tempestor Eshmer stood to attention in a pool of the tech-priest’s blood. His expression was detached, his jaw firm as Grun set about retrieving his holy instruments, one after another.

‘Do you wish me to track them, inquisitor?’ he asked.

Grun stared down at the artisan’s ruined ocular before crushing it to silicone goo beneath his boot. ‘Yes. From a distance. Get the others patched and move out.’

It took me two full cycles to make my way back to Holt’s tower, by foot amid the gawping human crowds, by air, crouching in a servitor transport. The sight of all those vacant eyes and drooping mouths made my insides turn to acid. The thought that Holt – brilliant, shining, vibrant Holt – was now just another brain-dead drone was too much for me to bear. I called up the fragment of the Manubiarix’s angelic code and let its purity wash over me. It was the only thing that mattered now. But the more I listened, the more I heard a new note in the song – a denotation of sorrow, despair… The spirit was growing weaker.

At last, I saw it through the rust clouds: the site of all my longing and torment. The tower. It stood silent, vacant. The doors were a twisted blackened mess, the display cabinets universally smashed and plundered, everything of value carried away to be hoarded or incinerated. No silks, no alien hearts. Only silence and devastation. I stepped into the mag-lift, half expecting it to clunk, dead, but to my surprise it responded to my touch, blinking faint green. I stroked the panel with broken fingers, coding an orison of thanks to the Omnissiah as the mag-lift took me down into the earth once more.

This time, the lack of noospheric connection in the tunnels was a blessing, rather than a constant reminder of all I had lost. The moment the doors opened, it hit me: the song of the Manubiarix, high and keening. The code swam in my vision, the flawless lines repeating over and over. It seemed Holt’s shrouding protocols had held; the Scions had not been able to find their way down here. The clawed fiend’s door was silent, and I wondered if the creature inside was dead before the Manubiarix drew me on.

By the time I reached the cave, my weak, physical body had begun to shake, dry heaves of relief emerging from my throat. Shame ran through me, hot as flux, as I fought to eject the illogical emotions and focus on the complex security cantrip, my fingers slipping on the glyphs, thankful that the obfuscation program took care of the security protocols. With a sensation like something pulling open my chest, the door swung free.

I fell inside, crawling towards the artefact. It glowed, the poor Manubiarix within desperate to be free of its xenos prison and unite with the eternal glory of the Omnissiah. I had none of my tools, but I seized a plasma torch and, without any of my usual technical caution, began to cut away the pitted metal. The surface was harder than anything I had worked before. The torch went through two fuel cells before I managed to make an opening wide enough to fit my ruined hand inside.

Within the void of the artefact, my fingers brushed something smooth and burning cold. Interrogatives and bio-system warnings flooding my system, I pulled it free.

It was an octahedron, made from a metal so pure and fine it looked like the space between the stars. It oscillated slightly, resonating with the song of the spirit trapped within. If I could just find the correct release protocol…

‘Thess.’

A voice from the darkness. Beneath the Manubiarix’s song, my damaged systems trilled a warning as a pale shape moved into the light.

Gripus. Half its skull was blackened, one of its telescopic arms missing, but it was whole, green eyes burning with fervour as it drifted towards me.

‘Thess,’ it said again in Holt’s voice.

I crouched, stunned. <Isonovere?>

‘I knew you’d come,’ the skull said. ‘I am sorry for how they hurt you.’

‘You…’ Words failed me. <You are alive.>

‘In a way.’

<I saw you die.>

The skull’s oculars flickered. ‘The consciousness transfer was not perfect. Nor was this vessel ideal. My research into the necron technology I based the procedure upon was far from complete. Another ten years, and perhaps…’ Holt-as-Gripus wheeled back to me. ‘But we must thank the Omnissiah for what we have. In this form, I have cheated death. In this form, I can keep the vow I made.’

The words fuzzed through the noosphere, underscored with warnings. ‘Necron?’ I dared not code it, dared not run a local search to confirm what little I knew of the metallic, undead hordes that slumbered on tomb worlds. ‘You used necron technology? Upon yourself? That is heresy, that is–’

‘It is triumph in the name of the Omnissiah to usurp xenos technology so powerful and turn it to our own ends,’ Holt said severely. ‘Neural transference is a wonderful thing, Thess. With it, we can transcend physical form. Be as close to the Omnissiah as it is possible to be.’

Nausea roiled in my feed systems. ‘Holt–’ I began, when a crash thundered through the cave, sending rock dust showering down. A second later I heard the mag-lift doors squeal, forced open.

The skull’s eyes flashed red. ‘They’re here. You led them here.’

Boots in the tunnel, armour clattering. I backed away. <No.>

‘Don’t let them take it.’ Holt’s voice was desperate, mingling with the voice of the Manubiarix, raised in defiance, in hope. ‘Don’t let them, Thess!’

The Scions burst through the door – no talk this time, no warnings, just howling guns and light and fury. I threw myself behind the crate, shots searing the air around me.

‘Open it, Thess!’ Holt screamed. ‘Let the Manubiarix protect you! Open it!’

A dendrite snaked from Gripus’ mechanism. In panic, I seized it and jammed it into one of the ports that remained on my neck. In an instant, knowledge flooded my mind: a release sequence – a complicated series of movements, cantrips, code, some of it in a language so twisted and strange it brought bile to my throat. As the Scions rounded the crate, sights piercing the darkness, I shut down my ocular and completed the sequence to open the object in my palm.

A force blew me backwards. Pain: ringing, terrible pain, and light – that was all I knew. A shape filled the cave, growing and growing until matter seemed to shift and the low ceiling morphed into the vault of a cathedral. The Manubiarix’s song turned to shrieks, shrieks to a wail of pure hunger. Scions opened fire with their lasguns, but the spirit only absorbed the energy, growing brighter with every projectile before letting out a scream of raw machine code. As one, the hotshot lasguns exploded in their wielders’ hands, melting flesh, eviscerating limbs as the song infected their wargear. Those who threw down their guns and tried to retreat fared no better: claws of light struck out, the Tempestor dissolved into a mist of blood. Another Scion was sucked to a dry husk, turning to dust as he was tossed aside, yet another torn limb from limb, another folded through a tear in dimensions like meat through a grinder.

I caught a glimpse of Grun, his face twisted in terror and defiance as he bellowed a challenge at the Manubiarix, holding his razor whip in one hand, his Inquisitorial rosette in the other, as if he could use the Emperor-given authority he held to command it. The spirit flashed forth claws and tore the armour from his body, then the skin from his muscles, then the muscles from his bones, then the bones from his marrow, until all that was left was a tangle of twitching nerves and organs.

Then, ravening, rejoicing, the Manubiarix turned its attention towards me.

My arms acted of their own accord, raising the octahedron that remained in my grip, my fingers reversing the sequence. It was as if someone was puppeting me – Holt, I realised. I was still connected to Holt. My tongue was moving, uttering xenos-taint words that filled my mouth with black bile. The spirit let out a soul-shuddering howl of pure rage and surged forward before the final panel of the octahedron clicked and it was snuffed, like a flame, out of existence.

The silence rang in my damaged head. The cave just a cave once more, filled with the stinking remains of the Scions. I vomited black matter while Holt-as-Gripus plucked the octahedron from my hand and hovered through the air to examine each corpse.

‘Not…’ I croaked when I could speak, my systems poisoned by xenos code. ‘Not a machine spirit.’

‘No,’ Holt agreed. ‘It is something older. Something greater. Capable of transcending dimensions.’ She dropped lower to hover before me. ‘Now that it is within our power, we can do more than any members of the Adeptus Mechanicus have ever done. You and I, Thess.’

I crawled backwards, thinking only of the mag-lift, of getting to the surface where I could send an emergency alert to the council, a warning…

‘No.’ Bile dribbled down my chin. ‘Won’t let you. Kill me, first.’

‘Oh, Thess.’ Holt drifted closer, and the voice that echoed from the skull was tinged with regret. ‘I cannot kill you. But neither can I let you go, now. Your body is enough like mine once was to allow for a successful consciousness transfer in the future.’

Dendrites shot out once more and attached to the port in my neck. I wrenched away, but it was too late; Holt was already overriding control of my body, and all I could do was watch as my ruined hands began to perform the release sequence once again.

‘I will keep you safe, Thess, a prized specimen, until the day we can walk together again. This I vow.’

In terror, I saw a panel of the octahedron swing open to reveal a yawning void of utter darkness, far greater than the object that held it, as if infinite space had been folded in upon itself. A dimension? I thought in bewildered terror, even as something began to tug at me with a force so great I thought the remaining flesh would be torn from my bones. I reached out a hand to grab at something, anything, but the only thing was Holt, looking down at me through the skull’s glowing oculars.

‘May the Omnissiah preserve you, Thess 4/90,’ Holt whispered, before my own fingers sealed my fate.

Darkness. Endless darkness. No time, no causality. Just hunger – the fathomless, cold hunger of a predator that feeds on suns, that sucks down whole worlds. I flee it with legs that do not exist, until finally I see something in the fathomless dark: a human shape lying huddled, wearing the black-and-white robe of my order. Sobbing, I stumble towards it. I have been alone for so long.

<Help,> I beg. <Help me.>

I reach out to roll the body over, and when I see who it is, I scream soundlessly. My own face leers back, the eyes empty, the mouth a gaping chasm that extends wider and wider to swallow me up, as the shard of the C’tan laughs, devouring my soul over and over again, into eternity.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stark Holborn is the author of the BSFA-Award-longlisted trilogy The Factus Sequence, the British Fantasy Award-shortlisted Triggernometry series and the Nunslinger series. Based in Bristol, Stark is also a games writer. ‘Nightfall on Stygies’ is Stark’s first story for Black Library.

An extract from Belisarius Cawl: The Great Work.

Ezekiel Sedayne was dying.

There was a time when he stood tall among men, as much a physical as an intellectual giant, but those days were done. He was old. He was at the end. His seven-foot frame had shrunken in. His spine curled with calcium loss. His hands were knotted with arthritis. His skin was slack, flowing around brittle bones like draped cloth. His lustrous black hair had turned as fine and white as the silk of a spider’s nest. It spread around his head on the pillow as if it, like his skin, had been laid there, and if he stood, if he had been capable of standing, he would have left it behind as a cloud of down.

Sedayne’s life had lasted longer than any child of Terra had a right to expect, but all things are finite, and his existence was coming to a close.

Human beings are aware of their mortality, yet they deny it to the very last. Sedayne regarded his intelligence to be in excess of most others. He believed he was free of the delusions that ruled the mind to reason’s detriment, yet now he succumbed. He could scarcely believe death was knocking at his door.

This cannot be happening to me, he thought. But it was.

Sedayne had come from nothing to become one of the greatest scientists of his age. Despite his failing body his mind was sharp. His insight clear. In numb amazement, he insisted he felt young in his soul. The ravages of age on his body gave the lie to that.

He appeared in many respects like a corpse. Lips drew back from yellow teeth made long by the recession of dark gums. No matter how fast his thoughts raced, his body barely moved. His chest trembled with the bird flutter of his heart. Every inhalation was a bellow’s wheeze.

But he was not dead yet. The breaths kept coming, and when the door to his bedchamber creaked wide his eyelids flickered open and his eyes, which were strikingly moist in the dry valleys of his parchment skin, swivelled to fix themselves upon his visitor.

‘The Altrix Herminia,’ he wheezed. His top lip stuck to his teeth for want of saliva, spoiling his smile. He was drying up from the inside out, like a spice pod left out to desiccate in the sun. Soon every drop of life would be wrung out of him, and there would only be an arid husk left. Then there would not even be that.

The Altrix came forwards with a rustle of layered, soft, plastek clothing. Upon her breast pocket she wore a caduceus in red and white that contrasted with the pale green of her dress. The uniform was formal and tightly laced, a symbol binding her to her duty, but though her garments were restrictive she moved with easy grace that suggested athletic, if not dangerous, power.

‘My lord director,’ she said, dipping her head respectfully. The sharp curve of her fringe swung neatly over her eyes.

‘Your arrival pleases me.’ Sedayne’s head moved feebly to the side so he could follow her approach. The appetites of a younger man tormented him. ‘Age does not agree with me,’ he said. He was tiring, his breath rasping harder. He was a machine close to shutdown. He looked to the Altrix’s face, then at the fat syringe she carried in her hand.

‘The time… is close…’ Each word was an individual effort. Each syllable required him to assign it a painful breath. Such care and attention his words received now, when once they were spent so carelessly.

‘It is, my lord,’ said the Altrix. ‘You are dying.’

Sedayne gave a death’s-head grin. ‘I can always trust you to dress things up prettily for me,’ he said. ‘How goes the search?’

‘I have identified seven possible candidates, all acolytes of Diacomes. Recovery missions are outbound.’

‘Then administer the last of the elixir. I want to walk and move again. I have been confined here too long.’

‘You are sure?’

He nodded his head painfully. ‘You brought it. You knew what I would say.’

‘This is the last,’ she said. Marbled, opaque, silvery liquid that moved to currents of its own filled the glass cylinder. ‘The Adarnians are gone. The last rendered down. Their world is empty. Once I inject this dose, there will be no more. I am sorry.’

The Adarnian race was decreed harmless during the Great Crusade, and allowed to live under an Imperial protectorate. It had not prevented them being harvested to extinction. Unluckily for them, their body chemistry had miraculous effects on the human organism.

‘A shame… I… never…’ he swallowed twice, trying to summon enough spit to lubricate his creaking larynx. ‘Learned how to synthesise it,’ he said in a breathless rush.

‘Are you certain that now is the time, my lord? We could delay a few days. There is sufficient here to return you to health for a few months, no more. It may be better to wait until a candidate has been selected and returned to Terra.’

He closed his eyes. ‘No. Do it now.’

He was too weak to hold out his arm, so Herminia pulled it gently from under the covers, fetched a stirrup rest and strapped the limb in place. The veins in the crook of his elbow were ruined by repeated injection, and it took an amount of coaxing to find a suitable place for the needle. The drug had to be administered directly into the bloodstream in large amounts; pneumatic injection or skin absorption would not do.

Adarnian elixir was the last resort of dying men when all other rejuvenats failed. It came with many prices, not least the atrocity of its making. The elixir was illegal, its use punishable by death. Sedayne didn’t care about the xenos or the law, but there were other, more immediate costs. Firstly, when the elixir’s positive effects were exhausted, the user returned to a worse state than before. Every dose brought the certainty of hurried deterioration. This last dose would kill him.

Secondly, there was pain.

‘Are you ready?’ she said.

He blinked his assent. She set the needle to his arm. She had no need to tell him it would hurt.

The bee sting of the needle piercing his flesh made him gasp. The real pain came with the plunger’s depression. Health-giving poison pressed from the organs of sentient beings flooded his system, and with it came a fire that scoured age back with its heat, reforging frayed genes and kick-starting the machineries of life.

Stolen youth ran riot through his body.

Ezekiel Sedayne screamed.

Click here to buy Belisarius Cawl: The Great Work.

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