Sabbat Worlds Anthology

THE HEADSTONE AND THE HAMMERSTONE KINGS (Matthew Farrer)

‘It’s coming for Him. It’s carrying a Magos who’ll examine Him.’

An instant after Jopell had said the words, Kovind Shek’s long, wiry fingers gripped his suit-front and yanked him into a humiliating, stumbling fall into the dust between two slumped and broken engines. He lay there on one elbow, eyes closed, feeling the fine, tawny grit he’d stirred up as it drifted back down and coated his sweating skin with muck. The morning was chilly but having to double-time it into the graveyard in his heavy labourer’s jumpsuit had begun it, and a growing brew of fears in his belly – being caught, being caught and his forged papers spotted, not finding Kovind, how Kovind would take the news when he did find him – had done the rest. Jopell was damp and he stank.

His master had already turned his back and was shouting orders again. Jopell didn’t bother to open his eyes to look. It would be another labour-crew accident, one of the careful fatalities that Kovind didn’t trust him enough to let him help organise. Over the clank of metal he could already hear the frightened groans of the men the accident was going to happen to. For some reason they all had to be men. Jopell had wondered aloud about that once and Kovind had kicked him in the gut hard enough to tumble him over backwards.

‘A Magos who’ll examine Him,’ he muttered to himself again as he pushed himself up onto his arse. His legs jutted into a careless V in the dirt and his belly itched as it overhung them. He had delivered the message in the old Asheki dialect, and the pronoun form it used had a very precise set of connotations: the compound suffix showing respect due to a senior whose authority originated outside one’s own lineage and manory, the vowel intonations carrying nuances of standing in the Customs, the Practices and the Traditions, and the accents denoting forge-work and engine-craft. Context did the rest. There was only one thing he could be talking about.

He leaned back, staring up between the crushed and tarnished steel hulls, and fixed on it: the little dark dot hanging high up above them, looking like a tiny splinter embedded in pallid skin. It had been there for two days; for two more before that it hadn’t been visible at all, except at high magnification through the spyblock they’d stolen from the garrison post. It was taking its time, this ‘Headstone’.

Jopell wondered if he should feel greater unease about it. ‘Examine’, after all. Or at least that would be the closest Low Gothic word for the Asheki k’seoshe, a term which referred to something more complex. It meant careful, competent disassembly by a knowing hand and study by a knowing mind, but with a thief’s agenda – learning a device’s lore outside the formal blessing of the Traditions, examining its naked secrets against its builder’s will, an invasive hand and gaze devoid of respect or shame. It was what they were here to protect Him from. But they were weak now, in hiding since the hives had burned. Would they be able to do it?

He dropped his gaze at a shout from before him, in time to see a scrag-bearded victim duck under the reaching arms of one of Kovind’s thugs and break clear. He was a clumsy runner, the loose-hanging suit flapping around his staggering legs and swinging arms. His mouth gaped with terror and exertion. One thug tried to break off after him, but they had the rest of the victims to restrain and a brawl broke out under the tilting hulk. Kovind cursed and shouted.

‘Brother!’ the man said as he homed in on Jopell. ‘Brother, they’re mad, get out of here! Get the soldiers, get the preachers, I don’t know what they–‘ and then Jopell, who was good with distances and movement, came up off the ground and into him and broke his jaw with an elbow. The man’s feet shot out in front of him as his head was knocked backward and his full-length landing sent up another puff of grit. A moment later meaty hands were dragging him back to the broken machine.

Jopell strolled after the kicking figure, some of his composure seeping back. The hulk was a Skybreaker train, the segments torn off one another and left in an ungainly pile by some ignorant Throne-licking hauler crew who’d have been acid-flayed for their disrespect in a righter world than this one. This segment, one of the rear ones as far as Jopell could tell, was badly balanced on the pile. Pict records and testimonies from the other crews would show that it had already looked liable to topple over. The gantry cranes had waddled into position on one side of it, where they could plausibly claim to have been trying to stabilise the pile for a cutting crew to start work.

These men weren’t a cutting crew. Skilled cutters were valuable, and the most skilled ones knew about the Customs and even the Traditions and had the same loyalties as Kovind and himself. But they carried a cutter rig, an old one that could be spared, and Psinter was doing her thing in the Administratum compound. By the time the bodies were found the records would show these men had been a cutting crew indeed.

The muscle men had been bought with various combinations of favours, promises, stolen Adeptus scrip and crude liquor. They thought they were working for a slightly elevated version of themselves, someone with rackets to protect and reputation to enforce. They didn’t know Kovind Shek’s place in the Traditions. It worked best that way. Now they shoved the victims into position, immobilised one pesky struggler with two heavy heel-stomps to his knees, and backed away. They were barely out of range when Kovind gave the signal and the crane operator let the grip claw disengage. Two of the men screamed, and then the pitted and blast-burned side of the Skybreaker hulk came down on them like a boot on a beetle.

The crane operator and Kovind exchanged thumbs-up acknowledgements. The muscle men guffawed and clouted each other on the shoulder to prove how unmoved they were. Jopell heard a choking cry from under the overturned hulk, but by the time he walked over to join Kovind it had already faded and rattled out.

‘Yes, I heard you,’ Kovind snapped at him, although Jopell hadn’t spoken a word apart from that first message. But the man was talking to himself. ‘Here for Him,’ he rasped again, more quietly now, staring up at the tiny dark blemish in the sky just as Jopell had done. ‘Less time than we thought. We have to move.’

‘A Rune Priest?’ Demi-Lector Vosheni asked. ‘Wait, no, have I misheard?’

‘I don’t know, Master Demi-Lector, have you? Is there a reason to suppose you have?’ It was the first time in hours that Sister Sarell had spoken, and several of the Adeptus started at her voice. Vosheni spent a moment gnawing the fold of leathery ushpiil leaf in his hand before he answered.

‘You’re the one to explain it,’ he said at length. ‘Look, does anyone else remember this? Emperor grant I’m recalling correctly, but I find myself thinking of that one as an Adeptus Astartes rank, not a Mechanicus. Anyone else? Or have I breathed in a gulp of hotstone and set my brain to decaying? An Adeptus Mechanicus Rune Priest – has anyone ever heard of one?’

‘I’ve not even heard of an Adeptus Astartes Rune Priest,’ put in Kinosa as she reached determinedly for the platter of seedmash before Vosheni could finish the lot. Like Vosheni, Kinosa was Administratum: the military liaison with the Guard garrison. Vosheni was from the reconstruction and tithing taskforce, and it had been his idea to convene a regular meal for the seniors of each Adeptus contingent at the Chillbreak fortress reconstruction site. Jers Adalbrect didn’t mind the meals, but he wished that they didn’t keep falling on his fast days. He politely sipped a cup of water and listened to the others bickering.

‘Adeptus Astartes?’ piped up Vocator Nember, and Sarell rolled her eyes. ‘I don’t recall seeing one, but then perhaps I did and didn’t recognise him! Nearly a day I spent around them, when the Iron Snakes’ emissaries attended upon–’

‘You’re remembering the Pageant of Asaheim, sir,’ Adalbrect quickly put in before Nember could tell the story yet again. ‘The play of the Apostate being crushed on Fenris. There’s a song near the end of the first act that refers to Rune Priests among the Space Wolves.’

‘Thank you,’ said Vosheni through a mouthful of leaf. ‘So this one’s Mechanicus?’

‘I don’t believe the ranks are the same,’ said Sarell, ‘and it sounds more like a name coined outside the Mechanicus for someone whose actual function is rather harder to describe. Shall we ask this visitor’s real title when he arrives?’

‘If we even get the chance,’ Nember snorted through his moustache, peering into his wine glass. ‘What’s the bet he stays hiding in their shrine in the middle of that damned graveyard and we never see a scrap of him? He arrived in one of those ships they use to lift Titans. Titans! I don’t care what reasons they dress this up in in their communiques, he’s not here to do any of that ceremonial crap they said they needed this big damn dignitary to do. I’ll bet he’s a junior enginseer who’s drawn the short straw and has to sit out in this sandhole loading dead machinery onto that so-called Headstone of his to keep it out of our hands.’ After a pause just long enough to be rude Nember added a little twitch of his hand to demonstrate that ‘our’ meant the Adeptus around the table, but none of them were fooled. ‘Our’ meant the deeply mercenary consortium of trade houses from Bardolphus who’d managed to get themselves some sort of Administratum marque and were clawing for a foothold in the Ashek reconstruction. When the edict had gone out from the Mechanicus that the legions of Woe Machines the Archenemy had left behind were to be collected in a monstrous graveyard over the Chillbreak Delta, all that Nember’s masters had seen was an attempt to shut them out of something. It was an open secret that Nember was there as a spy.

‘I’m wondering if he’s here to inspect the works,’ said Vosheni gloomily, looking at a stain on his cuff where he’d let his tunic sleeve dip into the sauce dish. ‘The number of accidents, the violence...’

‘Your job to fix,’ Nember scolded him.

‘And his!’ Vosheni shot a finger out at Adalbrect. ‘The Missionaria Galaxia is here to make sure these people are obedient servants to the Throne! What are you putting in your sermons about diligence? Temperance?’ Kinosa took advantage of his distraction to get the last of the seedmash.

It’s more complicated than that, Adalbrect started to say, it always is. Why did people have this ridiculous idea that the Missionaria just had to shout a sermon at someone to throw some sort of switch in their heads marked instant obedience?

‘The work crews here are frail and mortal, Demi-Lector, as are we all.’ Sarell got in before him. ‘Most are war displacees, some are refugees from elsewhere on the world, some are refugees from other worlds repaying the cost of their transp–’

‘I know about the blasted workforce, Sister, I administer it,’ Vosheni cut her off, and then caught himself. ‘Apologies, Sister Dialogus.’

‘Accepted, Demi-Lector. But bear with my point. Spiritually these people have lain too long prostrate beneath grief and darkness. We are helping them back to their feet.’ Adalbrect grinned. She was taking from his sermon of two mornings ago. He liked compliments. ‘But until they get their strength back, sometimes they will stumble.’

‘Y’know what we need to do?’ Nember asked. His goblet was empty and his voice a little too loud. ‘We need to get into that graveyard. See what it is they’re doing in there. It’s not right that these work crews get mark... marched in there and we don’t get to follow them and see what they do with all that.’

‘Inside the graveyard is acknowledged Mechanicus ground,’ said Kinosa, ‘same way as the temple compound belongs to the Ministorum,’ and she tilted her head at Adalbrect and Sarell. ‘And anyway, maybe you’ve forgotten that what they’re collecting in that graveyard are unholy war machines that robbed many brave Throne soldiers of their lives. It was the Mechanicus that broke them so the aquila could return here. Show some respect.’

That shut Nember up, but Vosheni had taken one of his adept’s braids in his fingers and was twirling it thoughtfully.

‘Nevertheless.’ They all looked at him. ‘Nevertheless, let’s not miss an opportunity. Our friends of the cog are reserved, but that doesn’t make them our enemies. We’re all Adeptus. Beyond a certain professional distance, I’ve found Enginseer Daprokk quite agreeable to work with.’ He smiled at Nember, who blinked at him. ‘I think this great dignitary they’ve flown in, this great magos, is just as important as they’ve told us he is. And I think that a request... no. I think that an announcement that a delegation of the most senior Adeptus officials at the Chillbreak reconstruction site will be pleased to present their credentials and welcome such an important visitor to Ashek II is the least that such a position justifies.’

Nember scowled as he tried to get at the idea through the alcohol, but Kinosa grasped it straight away and toasted it with the last of her wine.

‘It’s a trip, then,’ she said. ‘I’ll invite Tosk and Haffith, too. Let’s add a military footing to this thing, make it harder for them to say no.’

‘Where are they tonight, anyway?’ Adalbrect asked.

‘Snap purge in the east quarter of the labourer barracks,’ said Kinosa, pouring more wine. ‘Two new hauler crews came in yesterday with more dead machines. Seems one of ‘em was trying to smuggle in a weapons cache on the side. That’s still a military offence. They took it pretty seriously.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ said Vosheni. ‘Or at least not at that. Who needs this rabble to decide they’ve inherited a job as the Archenemy’s army? Joke, joke!’ and he flapped an arm at Adalbrect, who’d half-risen with a slapped expression on his face. ‘I know you do your job well, preacher, I joked. But honestly, why is some cheap hivestamp stub-gun so important to have out in a place like this? What are they going to do, rob the cooks at the refectory tent for another helping of starch broth? Who needs weapons in an empty desert?’

‘That’s four full crews fully armed. They only got one stash in the haulers, the others are safe. We’ll get them to Orange Five crew at midmorning meal tomorrow. Then we’re ready.’ Psinter was trying to keep her voice quiet and level, but there was an unimistakable satisfaction in it. It had been a hard thing to organise in secret, and their sudden need for haste had made it harder.

Kovind Shek pursed his lips and stared at nothing in particular. His long fingers stretched out and plucked up a stylus from the clutter across his little desk, made the motions of writing the words Orange Five half a centimetre above his writing pad, and dropped it again. It was a habit he was training himself into, to help him remember things. Not a perfect substitute for his old stacks of bound waferbooks, but a much safer one. After the Guard had busted one of their weapon mules, there had been another random snap-search right the length of the southern avenue, and the Ministorum brute squad had torn down and burned three barrack shanties.

‘All our people, then?’ asked Jopell. ‘All of them?’ The other two resistance members gave no answer but a scowl, partly in response to Jopell’s question and partly in response to him saying anything at all. Neither of them wanted him there. Kovind was the trusty, the crew chief who was allowed to supervise the native Ashek labourers. Psinter was his lieutenant in the Traditions and the Practices, and his peer in the Customs, but they had only been able to manoeuvre her into a junior forewoman’s job on the haulers. Jopell’s descent was recent offworld, only four generations on Ashek, with only tenuous ties to the forge-manories and none to the Inevitable Conclave. But in the turmoil after the hives had burned, he had ended up in the work crew draft, had played the compliant and grateful freed civilian so well he had been installed in a foreman’s job straight away, and now if they were going to plausibly pass off these meetings as the quiet evening chats between a crew chief and his offsiders Kovind had to have him there. Jopell usually understood that well enough to keep his mouth shut.

‘All our people,’ said Psinter, glaring at him. ‘The accident fatalities,’ with a salutary nod to Kovind, ‘have given us regular pretexts to reorganise the crews we started with. We’re still under-armed compared to the cog-lickers, though. Our edge over the Mechanicus picket-guards is going to be numbers and surprise, not hardware. And probably not discipline, either. Our people are enthusiastic, but they’re not soldiers. A lot of them are going to die.’

The three of them looked at each other. None of them valued the lives of their followers any more than their own: the Traditions discounted such things and the Customs exalted a very different set of priorities. But it presented a challenge. Neither Kovind nor Psinter needed to describe that challenge out loud. Jopell did anyway.

‘If we rush the pickets and only a couple of people know what they need to do in there, odds are they’ll die and the crew won’t know the next move. Tell everyone on the crew and that’s a real dangerous secret we’ve just told a lot of people.’

Kovind couldn’t quite restrain himself: a fist came down on the little table hard enough to make the lantern blink. The three of them fell silent for a moment as the bootsteps of a camp patrol scuffed by outside.

‘Want to try blabbing again, Jopell?’ hissed Psinter. ‘Just because, you know, you didn’t do it properly the first time and those...’ She took a breath and lowered her voice. ‘They didn’t hear you loud enough?’

I didn’t say anything any more incriminating than you, Jopell thought, but what he said was:

‘Why don’t we just use the delegation convoy?’

‘And so, the graveyard, murmured Jers Adalbrect as they passed beneath the machine-icons swinging on their leaded chains, and the red-shrouded heads of the Mechanicus escorts turned to look at him. ‘A casual vocalisation,’ he said to them before they could question him. ‘Disregard, please.’ They stayed studying him a moment longer, and Adalbrect wondered if he were going to be questioned. The ‘casual vocalisation’ trick was something one of the Logisticae adepts had taught him, back on… damn, was the Augnassis mission really four deployments ago now? The Mechanicus don’t talk to themselves, Mamzel Rindon had told him, they don’t exclaim when they’re surprised or mutter under their breath when they’re pissed off. But the ones who work with the rest of us know we do this casual vocalisation thing. Easier to just get into the habit of reporting to them that that’s what you were doing. He’d noticed a couple of the other Missionaria staff had picked up the habit too.

It took the guards a few moments more to decide there was nothing to concern them, and their gaze swung away again. They hadn’t appeared to confer about him: taped to Adalbrect’s sternum was a small metal plaque that vibrated when it detected silent cant-casts, and there had been no telltale buzzing against his breastbone.

The graveyard, he said again to himself, and this time kept his lips together and the words in his throat. It seemed more appropriate that way. The whole delegation had fallen into silence as they made their salutations to the picket guards and reboarded their carriers.

These were not just ruins that studded the cracked ground in the thickening dusk. They all knew about ruins. After months on Ashek it could hardly be otherwise. They knew about tragedy and death and the horrifying, industrial scale on which an engine of war dealt those things out. They knew the cost at which the Archenemy’s forces had been broken here, and the legacy the diabolical engineer known as Asphodel had left behind. They were not even strangers to the graveyard. They had watched it growing, filling and creeping outward beneath the dust-haze, as the columns of haulers slogged across the hardpan and the cranes tirelessly lifted and dragged. But now, here, in amongst them in the day’s last gore-coloured light...

The glint in the carrier’s running lights was the spread claw of one of the fat four-legged Murdernaut assault machines, the fingers curved, tapered, sleeker than the Imperial engines’ weapon limbs. Even severed, the menace of the open claw was enough to make Adalbrect start back from the window as though the thing had actually tried to clutch at the carrier’s balloon-tyres. There was no hint of where the claw’s owner might be, and Adalbrect’s imagination painted it out there in the darkness, somehow awake again, prowling pilotless after them, looking for warm meat on which to exact vengeance for its lost limb.

Adalbrect shivered and used his right hand to grip the steel aquila token that hung from his left cuff. The sharp points around its edges dug into his palm and he concentrated on the pain.

The engine shifted and growled as they rolled up a brief slope, skirting the wreck of a Coffin-Worm slumped as though exhausted and brooding, its head down, the canopy behind which its crew would have sat shattered, its legs buckled and splayed out on either side of it. Its armoured back hunched up above its main hull. Behind it another one lay on its side, the plates of its flank flaring outward from the explosion that must have gutted it. Adalbrect started again as the remains of the armourglass in its canopy flashed the light from the carrier’s own windows back at him. For a moment it looked like eyes had come to life under the low metal brow. He twitched his gaze away, as if there really had been something in the hulk looking back at him, and looked to the skyline ahead. Two Flensing-Wheels leaned together in silhouette against the red smears of dusk like conspirators whispering plans. Half of a third lay in front of them, he saw as the carrier drew closer, and he imagined that what they were whispering about was revenge for it. He watched them draw nearer, took in the spikes that studded their surfaces and the hooks that reached out from their rims, saw the pocks of high-density stub-rounds that stippled one from edge to edge and the great crater in the centre of the other where the cockpit had been torn or blasted out, gimbals and all.

This didn’t feel like a graveyard to Adalbrect. It felt like the game parks that had surrounded the Suzerain’s spring palace on Engatto Minoris, full of feral beasts that had watched their all-too-fragile little carriage convoy go past with resentful, watchful stares.

They crested the rise, saw the graveyard plain in the ebbing light, and Adalbrect shuddered. The unease that had been seeping into him all trip had soaked through his tense muscles and twitching nerves, and reached his bones.

The dead Woe Machines swarmed the plain, shoulder to shoulder and flank to flank. The high-backed Coffin-Worms leaned this way and that, and the hooks studding the Flensing-Wheels seemed to claw at the sky as though they wanted some of Ashek’s bloody sunset for themselves. Ahead of them towered a cairn of wrecked Blight-Balls, all caved in or ripped open or perforated with lascannon craters, sagging and spilling against the flank of a ruined Skybreaker gun-train whose torn-off tread mountings gave it a staggering lean. Jammed in between the greater machines were ungainly rows and piles of the lesser, whole or in fragments: bulbous Stalk-Tanks, thick-shouldered Murdernauts, batrachian Rackmouths. Adalbrect spent a moment puzzling out an incongruously neat stack of intermeshed girders until he realised he was looking at the severed scaffolds from one of the infamous Abattoir Trees. He remembered the name from the shuddering Guard sergeant who had begged to be allowed to throw himself off the roof from which three orderlies had just dragged him.

Once he’d made the association Adalbrect found his gaze riveted to the stained and dented metal meshes. He fancied that as the lights moved over them he could see the points of the harpoon-barbs, although he knew that that was impossible. The Guard had been meticulous about smashing every weapon mount on the Trees before they had allowed the wrecks to be dragged away. The tech-priests had been furious about it.

The meshes passed out of sight, behind the buckled steel ruins of some building-sized engine now so utterly crushed that Adalbrect couldn’t identify it at all. He closed his eyes for a moment, and realised that in the back of his mind he could still hear that sergeant’s voice, hoarse and low and begging. His mind started to lay in the other sounds of the depot hospital, the sounds the men had made as they fought against their memories of what the Ashek war had done to them, and then his eyes were open again and his nails dug into his palms as he looked around for something to distract him from the memory.

But the burst of gunfire from the nose of the second carrier-eight was not what he had had in mind.

It took a moment for him to realise what he’d heard and jolt upright, and he could see the same reaction from the others as they broke out of the reveries lulled upon them by the rumble and rock of the vehicle and the parade of dead metal grotesqueries past the windows. Then someone in the driving cabin woke up too, flicked the lights from white to battle-stations red, and another flurry of shooting burst out on their tail, a quick whicker of las-shot and two coughing booms from a single-action stubber over the top of a man’s voice screaming in anger and pain.

Sister Sarell was already half out of her seat, her arm across her body to where the lacquered bolt pistol hung at her hip. Vosheni, Kinosa and their two clerks had gone into a huddle in the front seats, and for a moment Adalbrect wondered if they were closing up for protection or trying to console each other. Then the huddle broke and he realised that they had been reciting a prayer over the mag-cells that they now snapped home into slender-barrelled laspistols. Adalbrect looked around to see Haffith, the Colonel’s man, kneeling in the aisle between the seats, his eye glasses shining animal red in the lights, calmly readying a short Guard-issue stub carbine. Finally goading himself into motion, Adalbrect jerked himself into the aisle and snatched his own laspistol out of its holster.

‘Stay low and breathe easy, brother,’ said Haffith behind him. ‘Never any sense in charging out until we know... wait...’ Haffith’s voice trailed off and his head cocked: he was listening to something over his vox-bead. Adalbrect nodded, realising how hard he was slamming his breaths in and out, and made himself relax. After a few more moments of quiet he remembered his office, re-holstered his gun and reached for the aquila-headed rod of rank that rested at the window where he’d been sitting. If he was going to step out of here into a fight then his enemies would know they faced an ordained servant of the Imperial Cult. One fingertip stroked the collar beneath the aquila’s claws where pressure would set the combat blade sliding up through the mount.

The stub gun boomed again, right outside the carrier’s windows, but Adalbrect’s head was clear now and he didn’t jump. He was about to ask Haffith what he’d heard when the speaker link from the driver’s cabin crackled.

‘Tosk. Stowaways from the second carrier. Three have cover by our right side, giving support for another element following the convoy. Step on them, please. Tosk out.’

Haffith was already moving to the right-hand hatch, but Sarell was there before him and Adalbrect hastily fell in behind. With only a little hesitation Vosheni made to lead the other Administratum officers to join them but Haffith shook his head. He motioned Vosheni towards the hatch-handle, whipped two fingers across his lips when the Demi-Lector made to speak, then gave a thumb-up when the man nodded, stayed silent and took a grip.

Haffith jabbed out four fingers, then three, then two, then one, then Vosheni hauled on the handle, lurched back as the hatch slid towards him faster than he’d expected, collided with a seat and overbalanced.

There was a moment of pure anticlimax as a cool breeze spilled gently into the cabin, and then Sister Sarell swung out of the hatchway by one arm, bolt pistol held out in the other and shouting a battle-blessing from some feral world in a voice that had no business coming from such a small frame and narrow mouth.

‘Thunder for Him, wings for Him, words for Him! Thunder for Him!’ By the time Haffith had stepped through the hatch behind her, dropped and spun, Sarell’s weapon had spoken twice and Adalbrect winced at the flat, echoless whud after each shot. Once heard, the sound of a bolt shell detonating inside a body was not forgotten.

Haffith had vanished until Adalbrect stepped through the hatch, dropped in his own turn, landed in a huff of breath and saw the Guardsman rolling in under the carrier, trying to get an angle where his rounds wouldn’t punch through his target and pierce the tyre. Almost as an afterthought, Adalbrect turned to look at the enemy.

Normal. He didn’t know what he’d expected to see, but not this. Two utterly unremarkable men, thick-built and shorn-headed, dressed in the yellow workers’ coveralls he saw in ranks in front of his shrine every day. They were splashed and stained with something darker, and their eyes were stark and wide. Scattered between them were the ruins of what had been a third until Sarell’s rounds had hit home.

He realised his own body was moving. One stride, and here came the slick metallic sound of the nanotempered adamantium blade extending from its mount in the carved aquila, triggering the movements driven deep into his muscle memories over hundreds of hours of drill. A deep low lunge put all the weight of body and weapon behind the blade as it went into one man’s throat. There was a quick red snap of las-fire as his hands convulsed on his gun and then he jerked himself off the blade and crumpled amid the stink of blood and scorched gravel. The second shuddered a moment, too paralysed to decide to shoot Haffith or Adalbrect, and then Haffith found an angle safe enough to shoot out the man’s knee. He went down soundlessly from that, only just drawing breath to cry out when Adalbrect’s blade came in again, another throat strike that silenced him for good.

Suddenly the world was full of sounds again. Shouts and footfalls from behind the carrier. The hatch of the driver’s cab swinging open behind him. His own breathing.

Boots crunched into the stony dust behind him and a hand clapped Adalbrect on the shoulder.

‘Valiant,’ said Colonel Tosk. ‘Might’ve wanted to shoot them, but valiant.’

Adalbrect turned and held up the rod. The blade was still out and the golden aquila was shiny with blood.

‘The aquila doesn’t shirk a fight, colonel.’ He blinked. ‘With respect.’

‘Respect indeed,’ Tosk answered him, his hand still heavy on Adalbrect’s shoulder. ‘Feel up to joining my man there to get the rest of them?’

‘Uh,’ said Adalbrect. He hadn’t quite thought that there would be more of them. The colonel’s hand was turning him to face Haffith, who was already tilting his head.

‘They’re scattering into the machines,’ the adjutant said. ‘Let’s get some of us on their traces.’ He stepped away and Sister Sarell fell in behind him.

‘Lots of pairs of eyes, that’s the way,’ Colonel Tosk put in. ‘Join in with the Mechanicus guards, look like you’re helping, and tell us anything you notice about these stowaways. Same comes back to you, of course.’

Adalbrect nodded, shifted his grip so that the aquila was held high like a standard, drew his pistol with his other hand and followed Haffith and Sarell out into the graveyard.

They still smelled. Adalbrect hadn’t expected that. They didn’t stink, but they smelled. He could pick up a faint metallic tang to the air from the scorched hulls, and the more cloying smell of oils. The desert-scent was flat and barely noticeable, but something thicker had clotted under it and Adalbrect realised he was smelling blood. Not the fresh stuff on the head of his sceptre, but the stale blood and vitals of the Imperial Guard and who knew how many innocent Asheki, still coating the spikes and hooks of the Heritor’s Woe Machines.

That thought hit him in the gut, and a moment later when a las-shot spat against the hull over his head and knocked the patina off the metal, he found himself thinking I’m wearing blood as he felt the powder settling on his face. He dropped into a crouch, unthinkingly leaned back against the hull behind him, and then yelled in pain.

Straight away another two shots skewered the hull, smoke puffing up from the impacts an arm’s length from him. He answered with his pistol, shooting jerkily into the gloom with no clear idea of where the shots had even come from, until Haffith snapped ‘Fire discipline!’ over his shoulder and laid down one-two-three measured stub bursts at something Adalbrect couldn’t see. He tried to drop further into a crouch but the bright and gleeful pain skewered further into his shoulder and he let out another yell. Something was holding him up. Gritting his teeth and growling over the sensation, he tried to shift, then to push himself up, and each time the barb twisted in his shoulder and held him still and wriggling like an angler’s bait. Breathing hard, he muttered a verse of Tobisch’s Fourth Psalm under his breath – ‘with a mirror to His radiant Throne I burn away the night’ – and made himself hold still. Haffith was gone into the shadows, no telling where, but the evening around them had come alive. From somewhere off to Adalbrect’s left came a string of metallic clangs and two voices cursing, one in the hoarse Ashek continental dialect and one in the rolling vowels of the Pragar lowhives. After a few moments they were drowned out by a snarling chainsword motor directly ahead, which revved and then dropped long enough for Adalbrect to hear Sarell’s voice in the middle distance and the screech-bang of bolt shells.

Adalbrect became aware that a foul, greasy adrenaline sweat was oozing into his clothes and giving a chilly edge to the breeze. He shivered and then grunted again when the movement shifted whatever it was that was hooked into his back. He tried to find a way to stand that would take the pressure off it, tried to find a direction he could move that felt like it was lifting him free, and each time he ended up standing in his half-crouch, whispering prayers that increasingly sounded like gabble to ward off panic. He was afraid of what he might do to himself if he panicked even more than he was afraid of what would happen when his legs, already cramping, couldn’t hold him in a half-squat any longer. Bracing himself for the pain, he tried shifting his weight and stretching each leg out in turn while he kept the pistol nosing at the shadows around him, but he couldn’t stop a groan from leaking out between his teeth as the barb winkled back and forth in his flesh. With the groan, the burst of shots from deeper in the graveyard and the tightening of his senses from the pain, he didn’t hear the approaching footsteps until they were next to him.

‘He’s one.’

‘I know, I can see, hurry up.’

‘Do what with him?’

‘Do’s you think, but hurry.’ Curt vowels, consonants clicked against the teeth. Ashek talk, although he’d need Sarell’s ear to identify the region. Adalbrect gulped air, closed his eyes for a moment and rummaged in his mind for the rhetorical tools he’d practised on his voyage here. He lifted up his rod of office, sweat bursting out of him again as the movement flexed the pierced muscles next to his shoulder blade.

‘See the aquila,’ he said. He’d woven the phrase into so many of his sermons that the words should be almost talismanic to anyone who’d heard him. ‘See his gaze on you now? His wings spread wide and there’s room for us all in their shade.’

One of the shapes had turned its back. A flogging, that would have meant at the Chillbreak mission square, turning the back on a raised aquila. Adalbrect could see it making small, panicky darts of its head. Then the other labourer pushed its masked face up to his own.

‘Know you for the preaching-man, so quick now. What’s your aquila want with the Kings? You understand these things.’ The man’s voice was quickening and lowering. ‘What’s the aquila want with the Kings? What’s this Headstone? What?’

Adalbrect was paralysed. The urgency in the voice was as palpable as the gouging in his back, but the pain was disorienting him and he couldn’t start to make the connections. Kings? Kings? Was that what the hive-lords had been called before the Archenemy had deposed them? The Missionaria Galaxia was accomplished at speed-briefing its agents, but its learning sessions weren’t geared to situations like this. What was going on?

Then the man switched his little punch-cleaver to his left hand, reached out with his right and gripped the blood-painted golden aquila as Adalbrect’s arm sagged.

‘Eh,’ he muttered, seemingly to himself. ‘Dead thing. No use.’ He was turning to his companion and never really got the chance to see that that had been the wrong thing to say.

Adalbrect swung his right arm up and jammed his hand in behind his head as though he were trying to scratch his back with the pistol barrel. Face contorted, he fired, fired again, and a third time, hearing the snap of the shots, and the gouging pain turned searing.

A moment later the barb that had held him came loose as he shot through its mounting and Adalbrect stumbled forward, half-embracing the man who’d interrogated him. Both of them shouted, Adalbrect in pain and the Asheki in angry surprise, as Adalbrect’s laspistol went off straight into the ribs of his companion. The first shot staggered him, spasming and choking with a smoking pockmark drilled into his torso, and the second and third struck him in the chest and silenced him.

Adalbrect saw stars as the other man’s forehead cracked into his own, and felt his legs start to sag. He tried to turn the movement to his advantage, gripping the enemy’s shade-shawl and pivoting, desperate to avoid falling back against the barbed hull a second time. But the shawl tore and the man kicked him hard in the belly, sending him sprawling on the packed stones with his shoulder shouting in pain.

‘We listen to our Kings, not to you,’ he heard through the pain. ‘This is the night they find their voices. Hear that, eagle-licker?’ The man was grabbing for his dead companion’s gun, barking out some syllables that Adalbrect didn’t catch. A benediction for a comrade or an appeasement to the weapon, he couldn’t tell.

And it didn’t matter, because he was rolling onto his side with his teeth bared. Another insult to the aquila, and this one would die for it. Two insults, two lives. Not enough payment to extract, but the best a mortal could do.

‘Wings for Him!’ he snarled and used the burning in his back as fuel to drive the rod forward. It caught the man in the sternum, the blade burying itself until the aquila’s heads were pushing into his skin, and he let out a groan like a bending girder and fell to his knees with the rod in front of him. As Adalbrect struggled up onto his feet the man tilted forward, grounding the rod and sinking onto it, until Adalbrect yanked it out and away with his left hand. The man continued to hunch, the back of his neck bare with the shade-shawl gone, and Adalbrect whirled the impromptu weapon up and over. His arm was strong and the head of the rod heavy, and the man’s neck parted in one stroke.

A moment later the strength dropped out of him. He went down on one knee, breath rasping and the gouge in his shoulder burning like hot cinders jammed under his skin. He worked the catch on the rod and with the blade retracted Adalbrect planted its pommel on the dirt and leaned his head against the blood-sticky gold, murmuring lines from the Militant Pilgrim’s Prayer.

‘And another struck down, and another, and let each be dust beneath that righteous tread...’

‘Here he is!’ came a voice he didn’t recognise, swimming into his head through the dark and the pain. ‘The young fellow, the bluecoat. Got him, he’s back here!’

‘What? He didn’t even move!’ That was Haffith’s voice, somewhere behind the bobbing orange lanterns that were appearing through the gaps in the dead machines. The lieutenant’s tone was bantering, only not. ‘Brother Adalbrect? That you? I wondered where you‘d run off to. Didn’t occur to me you’d just decide to hole up and... wait... no. Wait. Are you injured? Throne’s foot, yes, all right, you two! He’s injured, let’s get him moving. Brother, can you tell me where you’re hit?’

Adalbrect shook his head. His mouth was suddenly very dry, wringing his words down to a croak, and he could feel his balance going. A vision danced by him of falling forward with a great flap of flesh ripping free from his back. He clenched his fists and concentrated on not falling. Not falling. The dark hulks around him tilted and the ground seemed to float up towards him and then away again. He groaned. Not falling.

‘Agh, all right, I see what’s happened.’ Haffith was up by his side now, peering behind his shoulder in the lantern-light. ‘Steady him, get his arms, don’t let him fall. We have you, brother, stay with us. You’re in shock. Say a prayer of fortitude with me.’

They went over the words together. Haffith knew a slightly different version to Adalbrect, but they finished on the same lines, and by that time each of Adalbrect’s arms was being gripped by a burly convoy guard. His thoughts were sluggish and his head wanted to loll forward, but he finally realised what had seemed so odd about saying the prayer. His hands were empty.

‘Mhhmmm...’ he managed, then scraped his tongue along his teeth and worked his cheeks until he had enough moisture in his mouth to talk. ‘My aquila. I dropped it. Can you take it... out of the dirt?’ Haffith bent for a moment and then Adalbrect felt the familiar weight and grip in his hand. It settled him a little.

‘Don’t move too much, brother, and don’t get any closer to that bastard’s hull again. You can see there’s plenty more of those shitsump barbs left on it. I’m not game to try and– wait. Sister! Sister!’ At the edge of the lantern-light there came a pale glimmer of tunic and a glint of gold: Sister Sarell was coming back to them.

‘The preacher’s wounded. I’d like one of us to stay with him until we get an all-clear.’

‘Do you think they’ll double back?’ Sarell asked.

‘Who knows? At this point we barely know what they’re even doing. Some of them hid on the delegation convoy and helped a second lot break in behind them. No telling what they want.’

‘But I’m betting it’s not to shake the magos’s hand when he arrives,’ Adalbrect managed to gasp out. Breathing deeply hurt his shoulder, but breathing shallowly made him dizzy.

‘He’ll have already had instructions to delay his landing,’ said Haffith. ‘He’d better have.’ He stood for a moment longer, then stared up at the sky where the speck of the Headstone hung, high enough to still catch some yellow-red daylight. Haffith looked at it a moment, cursed to himself and turned to Sarell.

‘Change of plans, sister and brother. Master Adalbrect, can you walk?’

There had never been any question but that Kovind would carry the main key into the graveyard. He had fretted a little about the other two, knowing how short time would be once they were under way and that not even Psinter would be able to get to two Kings in time. So Jopell was luckier than he knew that he’d hit on the plan to infiltrate the Adeptus convoy: that had earned him the third key and the leadership of the third crew. Nobody else had even remotely the seniority in the Traditions, or even in the worldly hierarchy of the manories. The three of them it was.

He carried the key the way the rakes of the outer manory walks used to carry their knives: gripped loosely in his left hand, the length of it turned back against his arm under his sleeve, the metal cool against his skin. His autopistol was in his other hand and he kept it up and ready as they ran. It was further into nightfall than he had anticipated and as it had darkened he’d been afraid that it would be harder to keep direction through the maze of wrecked machines without the reassuring might of the Kings against the skyline to urge him on. But now he felt unstoppable, as though he were running on a high-speed pedway back in the High Hive, carried along unerringly. The higher mysteries were not for Kovind Shek. He was steeped in Asheki culture, the Customs of knowledge, the Traditions ordering its holders, the ancient Practices of engineering that the glorious Heritor had shown them how to bring to majestic and terrible perfection. But on a night like this he could almost feel the most sublime mysteries that the Heritor’s preachers had sung and danced and screamed about, some power that was carrying him through the night on sombre wings.

The greater moon was beginning to show, and now he could see them, towering over the piled-up machines around them like hive-spires over manufactory blocks. The Heritor’s four greatest children. The Hammerstone Kings.

The Mechanicus guarded the approaches to them, but only during the day when the labour crews were roaming the graveyard. His way to the feet of the Treading King was clear, and he couldn’t help himself: he fired a jubilant autopistol burst into the night sky and whooped for his crew to follow as he opened his stride.

The key seemed to prickle against his skin. Kovind Shek lifted it to his mouth and kissed it, vaulted the ram-prow of a Nadzybar’s Fist assault engine, ducked reflexively at an exchange of stub-shots behind him, and ran on.

Adalbrect’s legs hadn’t been injured, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was the iron barb sawing away in his shoulder and the waves of grey washing across his vision. His left arm was draped across Sarell’s shoulders and he clung to his aquila rod with his right hand as though it were an anchor to consciousness.

‘If we just try and wrench it out we’ll rip your shoulder to pieces,’ Sarell said. ‘You bumped up against a Flensing-Wheel hull. Those spikes are made to shred the flesh.’

‘Thank you,’ he managed. ‘Think you... said that... already.’

‘Well, you need to keep your mind occupied.’

‘With something other than... what’s in my shoulder, maybe? Ahh!‘

‘That was my fault. I moved my arm. Not on purpose. Those scriptures about the righteousness of pain in battle take on a new perspective at times like this, don’t they?’

‘Something other that what’s in my shoulder.’

‘We’re almost at the carriers. And we haven’t been shot at. And you threw two enemies of the Emperor out of this world and into the endless emptiness where they’ll never stand in the way of the light again. What have we to complain about, really?’

‘Nngghn. Don’t! Hurts when I laugh.’

‘Your fault. I’m not joking. The Sororitas never joke.’

‘Never?’

‘So far as you know. Medic!’ Sarell shouted ahead to the face peering at them through the carrier cockpit window.

Psinter didn’t let herself look up at it, not yet. The route to the Blighting King led through an area where the new crews had dumped piles of Gallowspider wreckage from the fourth battle of High Defile. Weaving among them, she couldn’t afford to stop and look up and she didn’t dare take her eyes off her path while she was moving.

‘Covering you!’ shouted Gatter, the chief of the crew she’d been given to lead, over the crackle of the las-salvoes he was spraying back behind them with never a hope of hitting anything. ‘Cover her!’ he shouted again, this time by her ear, and what shooters they had left behind them obligingly sent a ragged little volley off into the dark. Over the end of it Psinter could hear the answering Imperial las-fire, slower and more deliberate. More accurate, too, because when Gatter yelled ‘Two down! Three!’ she realised she hadn’t heard cries. Whoever was chasing them was firing killshots.

She jinked to her right and found a path through the middle of a torn-in-half ‘spider chassis that would get her into the next aisle and able to spring towards the King in cover. She almost paralysed herself trying to stop and weigh it up – a dangerous few metres, but the thought of dying in an Imperial’s gunsight with her mission incomplete was unbearable. Before she’d consciously made the decision she had swerved again, panting, running with exaggerated upward twitches of her knees as though she could already feel cuts on her legs.

‘Throwing!’ yelled Gatter and Psinter heard a clink of metal bouncing off metal, then the throaty explosion of one of the hand-bombs they’d cobbled together from cutter-fuel and scourcrystal. ‘Covering!’ he yelled again, and more las-fire. Stupid macho idiot. He had puffed up his chest when he saw his crew was escorting a woman to the King, and had been running and shouting the whole way, ignoring her orders. If they lived through this she was going to hang his balls from the King’s...

Too late. He hadn’t followed in her footsteps, had tried to clamber through the Gallowspider frame instead, and now he was shrieking and kicking in a tangle of wire he hadn’t bothered to look at before he brushed at it. The ‘spiders were decked with memory-cored razorwire – the casualty rates among their cutter crews was insane – and as Gatter thrashed it contracted and hoisted him upward. Blood started pattering down onto the dust under his boots.

‘Pull yourself together,’ she hissed at him. ‘Stay still so you’re not cut any more and keep shooting as long as you can!’ There was no sign that he heard her. She pondered shooting him, but that would let their followers know there was at least one more left out there. She couldn’t see any of the rest of her crew at all.

She only needed a few more minutes. Psinter flitted away into the moonshadows, the key to the Blighting King gripped in one hand.

‘Graveyard Shrine, do you read me? Graveyard Shrine, please respond on any band. Graveyard Shrine! I am Sister Goha Sarell, travelling in a Munitorum carrier towards your location.’ Adalbrect was kneeling in the passenger compartment of the carrier with Kinosa steadying him and Vosheni sponging blood from the iron stump sticking out of his shoulder. Even the attempt to pull away his jacket had been agony. A numbdrop from the carrier’s medical kit had blurred the pain a little, but blurred his wits along with it.

‘Tell me again what they said?’ asked Kinosa, scowling with the effort of keeping him stable as the carrier rocked through a ninety-degree turn.

‘Th–’ Adalbrect’s mouth clicked dry. He was dehydrating from shock, and nobody had brought a water-flask. ‘This is the night the Kings find their voices. Don’t know what it means.’ He bowed his head again. He was shamefully glad of his dry mouth, of an excuse to stop talking. This had to have been planned under their noses. A whole plot, a whole belief system ticking away while he had happily gone on sermonising at them every six hours and writing sunny letters back to the Missionaria compound at the High Hive ruins. Participation in litanies and hymns is encouraging. Positive reaction displayed to the aquila and the parables selected by the head of mission. Congregants appear to be accepting the spiritual need for the confessional and the scourging rack.

Congregants have risen in arms and proclaimed four Archenemy war-engines to be their Kings. Adalbrect closed his eyes.

‘Graveyard Shrine!’ came Sarell’s voice from the cab, tinny through the internal vox. ‘This is Sarell, Adepta Sororitas Order of the Quill, to any Mechanicus personnel listening! We have reason to believe this insurgent raid is directed at the... Hammerstone Kings. R-Respond!’

‘What is that?’ asked Vosheni, and Kinosa made an uncertain little sound in her throat. Adalbrect, who had thought it was just another note in the ringing, rustling headache stealing up on him, opened his eyes and listened.

A moment later the carrier slammed to a halt. Vosheni and Kinosa cried out; Adalbrect pitched onto his face on the floor matting and howled in pain.

But they could all hear it now, over the vox. Even when Sarell wasn’t speaking, it was getting louder. Some kind of machine-cant, some counter-transmission, but nothing that was intelligible to them.

Just chatter.

Jopell knelt in the cockpit of the Poison King, wheezing softly with exhaustion, watching the flickering frost-blue light of the key and listening to the chatter. A fat-barrelled shotgun sat by his side. A crude thing, not a manufactorium job, it looked like it had been made on the sly by sympathisers in the reconstruction camps. Jopell liked that. It meant there were more survivors carrying on the old ways of Ashek than just the ones who’d followed the coded messages and come out to the graveyard. While the Traditions were kept alive and the Customs followed and the Practices taught, Ashek II was still her true self. The Inevitable Conclave would form again. And Asphodel would return to them. Jopell was sure of it.

He opened his eyes and half stood, grunting as his leg muscles cramped: too much running and climbing then a long cold stop. The Poison King had a poor view: it had done most of its work either right up against Hammerstone fortresses or Legio Tempesta Titans, where big windows were a target, or else at tens of kilometres away with its ugly crest of missile batteries, when all the fighting was over auspex or missile cameras and windows were a distraction. He peered through one of the little armoured slits, although this high up there was little to see.

Across from him, just over a kilometre away, was the slope-backed Blighting King, its collar of rocket-tubes casting the giant chassis into shadow, the smooth line of the launching-ramp up its back now jagged from Imperial bombing. Psinter should be in there by now, lugging her key and her power cell, getting ready to create the second link in the circle.

And the third... Ignoring the muffled sounds of stubfire that were starting to float up through the liftwell, Jopell walked stiffly to the second wall and bent to a vision-slit there. The Treading King struck a fierce silhouette against the horizon, the front of its body locked in its reared-back position, all four front limbs still posed like a pugilist’s. He had heard that the Treading King had ripped the turret off a Shadowsword superheavy tank and dropped it onto the gatehouse at the Passage Stair fortifications to crush a void-shield link. He’d heard that it had simply torn both arms off a Reaver Titan that had allowed it to get too close. In the dark, Jopell’s smile was rueful. It would have been wonderful to see the Kings reawakened, repaired, revenging themselves on the cog and the aquila alike, but he wouldn’t see it. Even if he could sneak back down through the guts of the King and away, he had been given the Poison King to break into, and it had its name for a reason. Its broad treads had taken it out onto the hotstone flows, sucking up the radioactive silt and sifting out the precious rare elements, processing them in foundries in its belly whose complexity and compactness were testament that Asphodel’s genius was not just in machines of destruction. Jopell had climbed up the King through those very foundries, crawling along mineral conveyors and squirming his bulk through the sifter shafts, and now he was coated in toxic metals and bathed in radiation. He already thought he could feel his fingertips and toes going numb. He doubted he’d live a week.

But how could he be unhappy? How could he resent not living to see the Kings ride again, when here, now, he had done the deed that made that awakening possible? Jopell’s little smile grew, split his face, became a happy little laugh. The blue of his key was flickering green as Psinter’s transmission came from the cockpit of the Blighting King, and as the shooting below got loud enough for Jopell to hear the ricochets and smell the smoke he saw the red flashes that were transmissions from the Treading King. The chatter was amplifying, ramifying as it raced around the circuit that the three Kings’ brains had made. They had done it.

Jopell walked to the floor hatch and peered down the ladder in time to see the orange wash of a hand-bomb explosion, the concussion rocking him back a little with his ears now numb to the chatter. He nodded approvingly, grabbed the floor hatch and dragged it over and shut. It was a primitive fitting, but the Poison King was the first King the Heritor had built here, and the most functional. Kovind had saved the grandest one for himself, of course, but at a moment like this Jopell couldn’t even bring himself to resent the bastard. They had done it, after all.

Jopell checked the load in the shotgun, then jammed the butt down through the locking wheel to hold it in place. He positioned himself over it so his corpse would fall onto the wheel and weigh the hatch down, then reached for the trigger. He was still smiling as the blast blew all the chatter out of his head.

The act of craning his head back made Adalbrect groan, but he had got some strength back into his legs and he lurched forward towards the Graveyard Shrine behind Sarell. Even to his blurred vision it was impressive: a grey, floodlit ziggurat topped with a heavy ironwork Machina Opus and sprouting a coronet of gridwork transmission masts. Those were what Sarell was frantically gesturing to as she closed with the two adepts who watched them from the top of the ceremonial steps.

‘Daprokk! Which one of you is Enginseer Daprokk?’ Adalbrect thought he was probably imagining the expressions of surprise as the two red cowls looked at one another, but a moment later one of them, the one whose gown and hood were the brighter scarlet, descended to meet them. The enginseer’s face was in shadow but for four small violet eyelights.

‘Enginseer? The one I spoke to on the vox? You didn’t say whether or not you could hear what we could hear. Can you hear that?’ Behind them the door to the carrier was open and they could plainly hear the odd transmission chattering beneath a layer of static. Sarell waved her hand towards the noise. ‘Please confirm you can hear it.’ For someone whose calling was studying communication and language, Sarell was being astonishingly blunt with the robed shape in front of her, but the enginseer’s reply was perfectly calm.

‘Our transmechanic is evaluating the signal according to the mysteries of her order, which I shall not discuss. The signal is not considered to pose a threat to our installation, and certainly not to yourselves. Its relation to the insurgent action here tonight shall be evaluated. That action is being brought under control. There is no cause for impatience, Sister.’ Daprokk had apparently only just noticed that Sarell was literally hopping from foot to foot. ‘We may proceed to treat your wounded as a token of hospitality, our Order to yours.’

‘No!’ she shouted into the enginseer’s face, enough to make him recoil with a hand out. ‘Jers, tell him!’

‘The Kings are finding their voice,’ Adalbrect croaked as the eyelights turned and regarded him. ‘It’s not just some... harmless thing. They’re doing something with the Kings.’

‘Initial source of the signal may correspond, under analysis, to–’ Daprokk took another step back as Sarell interrupted him again.

‘You don’t need–’ With an almost audible effort she got control of herself, and said, ‘Magos, you don’t need to analyse the signal. You need to block it. Now. Things are happening that we are not in control of. We must re-establish control. Adalbrect overheard the insurgents talking about the Kings finding their voices. Our forces have chased insurgents who were breaking into the Kings. They know about that ship of yours, the Headstone.’

‘The Headstone! They are directing a plan against it? Against Magos Tey?’

‘Against the dignitary you are bringing to examine the graveyard, sir, and this is bigger than we thought they were capable of and they’re in the Kings now and we don’t know what they’re going to do in there.’ Daprokk’s hands and the dendrite arching over his head were all making small, involuntary movements. The darker-robed adept at the top of the stairs stood unmoving. It – he? – had been joined by another figure, stocky and thick-legged with a strange metal hump standing up behind its head. Neither of them spoke a word. ‘Can you guarantee that the Headstone is out of range of any weapon they might bring back online? Can you guarantee that this transmission is so harmless that we can just let them make it? We don’t have the power or the skill to do this from the carrier, but you have these gantry antennae and a transmechanic.’ Sarell took a deep breath and made a deeper bow. ‘Enginseer, please. Will you consider what I have told you?’

The violet lights under the cowl seemed to stare at her for an age.

The end didn’t come quite as Kovind Shek expected.

He had been alone by the time he reached the Treading King. The bulk of his men had spent themselves in staggered ambushes to slow down their pursuers, and the rest had holed up in a row of wrecked Blight-Balls and begun a ferocious firefight with a platoon of Mechanicus guards coming from the Graveyard Shrine to try and intercept them. Under cover of their last two hand-bombs, Kovind had swung up through the scaffolding around the King’s rear legs, slipped in through a plasma breach and begun working his way up through the compartment levels by touch and memory.

The Treading King had been stormed, not abandoned or killed with firepower, and every hatch had been blasted open. There was no way for him to secure the route behind him and so, after he’d ridden out the heady rush of seeing the three colours of the transmission loop, Kovind had made ready to double back and fight. He had only allowed himself a short glance out of the command window at the night’s final prize, and had fought back the urge to weep a little: Asphodel’s greatest creation, the mighty Inheritor King, its magnificent train of spires and steeples surrounded by such junk and pawed over by cog-lickers and eagle-lickers and...

But he had remembered his dignity. He was a man of rank, one of the few with a bloodline that had allowed him to take part of his world’s name as a badge. He could not have asked for a death more fitting to that rank, not if he really stopped to think about what he was doing. He reloaded his autopistol and felt the weight of the hand-bombs in his satchel.

The chatter sped up again, acquired a squeal and then a bass note. Kovind had coded some of it himself, had Psinter refine and recompile it, had drawn on mysteries he had had etched directly into deep memory and could barely recall consciously. Now in the brains of the Kings it was feeding into a matrix that Asphodel himself had laid down. What concepts, what layers of logic and unlogic, might that mind have wielded? Kovind glanced back at the transmission deck. The three colours were still there, the three Kings’ brains all parallel-processing the code as it grew. The telltales on the power-block he had connected to the codecasters were still green, It could run for an hour yet. Could he hold off any Imperial invaders that long? He could try.

And then the subtle song of the chatter matrix was defaced. An ugly hoot of interference blared out of the codecaster lectern, scraping through Kovind’s transmission. He stood there for a moment, pistol dangling in his hand, mouth open, as the lights on the great key flickered, darkened for a moment and came up again, struggling to find their old rhythm. Now in among the chatter was a reedy discord, weaving around a crackling syncopation that Kovind knew had no place in his code. They were being jammed.

In a bound he was back at the console, but what could he do? How could they have prepared for a countersignal? Could they? Kovind growled aloud and looped a fist around to strike himself in the mouth. Focus. Act your rank. Self-recrimination was for lessers.

What could they do? Recoding on the fly was out of the question. Modify the frequency? How could he get a signal to Psinter or Jopell, if they were even still alive? Override the code for a moment? Try to work an instruction into it? Kovind was unaware that he was making panicked little moans under his breath as he scanned the console, looking for the right controls.

This ended with glorious battle in the halls of the Treading King. This ended with his little work entering the greater work and the Hammerstone Kings walking again. It didn’t end like this, not with the squalid little redcloaks and their filthy–

The hellgun shot cratered the top of Kovind Shek’s spine and the back of his head, and the explosive vaporisation snapped him forward at the waist. His face bounced off the controls and his corpse slid slowly down the lectern. By the time it had sunk onto its knees the Guard were in the command bridge and a boot kicked Kovind’s body aside. A moment later the chatter squealed to a stop as Haffith tore the great key out of the codecaster and broke it in half under his heel.

‘Has Transmechanic Ajji managed to confirm what the signal was?’

‘No, magos,’ Daprokk answered. The breeze plucked at his red cowl. The two of them were standing beneath the Machina Opus atop the shrine ziggurat, using vocal conversation that the wind would render hard for vox-thieves to overhear. ‘We... selected a course of action that incidentally matched that which the other Adeptus had... happened to...’

‘You took their advice, enginseer. No need to pretend you didn’t. I was watching you, remember? I’m not holding it against you.’ Daprokk’s hands twitched for a moment.

‘Without knowing what the signal was,’ his interlocutor went on, ‘we’ve no way of knowing whether we managed to defeat its purpose or not. Speaking as part of a priesthood that takes gaps in knowledge as an affront, still this is a particular concern.’

‘The Sister seemed to believe that it was an attack that was to use the three most functional Hammerstone Kings as weapons against the Ramosh Incalculate,’ Daprokk ventured. ‘An attack on you, even, sir. The initial purpose of the delegation was to meet you, but at the time they set off they apparently believed you were still on board the Headstone.’

‘Even they’re using that nickname now, then?’ Daprokk didn’t know how to answer that. ‘No matter. I don’t believe this is any reason to alter my plans, Enginseer Daprokk. Except in one respect. I think it is time to speed them up. When the transmechanic has completed her current analytical cycle ask her to create an encrypted tightlink to Shipmaster Tobin, please.’

Daprokk made the sign of the cog, canted a formal, if slightly rushed, salutation, and hurried to the lifthead, noetic speech already radiating out from his personal links and feeding into the shrine’s manifold. The other magos, in his dusty robe that was almost as much russet as red, watched him go. The successful jamming of the transmission had not eased his mind any.

He walked around the sculpture, adjusting his vision for the floodlights, and stared up at the King the insurgents hadn’t managed to breach. The Inheritor King’s colossal raked prow and spire-bridge loomed over the shrine in the dark.

‘Not the reception I’d wanted,’ murmured Magos-Parralact Galhoulin Tey. ‘I wonder what will happen next?’

Deep night in the graveyard. Blackness and silence in the bridge of the Inheritor King. The breeze-blown dust against the windows could not be heard in here, and the combat shutters were drawn, sealing the little wedge-shaped chamber off from the gentle Asheki moonlight. The great throne where Asphodel had sat, the coding pit where he had crafted his chattercodes, the pulpits from which his lieutenants had commanded this King and passed his orders out to his armies, all now empty and lost in the dark.

There were no lights on the control banks. No movement of instruments, no colour or sound in the readouts. No printout spools. No glowing runes. No power.

Almost none. Deep in a system core that the King’s conquerors had dismissed as inactive, a warm little worm of electricity still flickered. At the call from the Blighting King it awoke, flexed and sparked for a split-second to accept the transmission instructions from the Poison King. Finally, in barely a blink, came the inload that the intelligences of the other three Kings had compiled between them. Only a blink before the suffocating fog of jamming squeal came frothing up from the machine-shrines’ masts, but enough.

For the half-year since Asphodel had fled this chamber the secret nerve-matrices buried deep in the King’s brain had been without function, empty. Blank paper, an unsown field.

Now the pen had been wielded. Now the seeds were here.

In the darkness of the Inheritor King’s core, an intelligence began to wake.