A/N: A Khornate and a (sort of?) traitor Guardsman are chilling with an Inquisitor and her cadre. Prepare for shit to hit the fan. Thanks a million to all who've read and who've reviewed, and without further ado... back to Armatura we go.
Kalaina Spiker wasted little time with formalities. While it seemed, miraculously enough, that she didn't want Marrlë dead, her reaction upon seeing him was more of surprise than the merriment he now clearly was exuding, and I began to doubt that her recollections of whatever adventures they'd had together were quite as upbeat as his. Nonetheless, I was relieved; her presence appeared to have diverted his single-minded focus on vengeance, for the time being, anyway. By that same token, she unsettled me a little; my experiences with members of the Inquisition in the past had been less than endearing. It didn't help when she informed Marrlë that she was now a fully-fledged Inquisitor, having been ascended to the position several years ago – nor did the suspicious glances from the Sister of Battle reassure me in the slightest.
"A Logis Key," she said, when Marrlë asked why she had come. That caught me off guard; I had been expecting her to be much less forthcoming about her reasons for being here. "Magos Vingar was granted it by his direct superior on the Lathe Worlds, with instructions to go and retrieve lost information from a forge here on Armatura."
"A strange order, we agreed," said the tech-priest, his vox-transmitted voice thick with beeping and whirring, "but it is not for me to question the Omnissiah's decrees."
"We arrived two days ago, but our search for the forge has yet to yield anything." A note of frustration crept into Spiker's admission. "We were told it would be around these mountains, but there's nothing here besides, well… mountains."
I hesitated, then realized our best chance at forging an alliance with them was to be honest – well, as honest as we could be, without revealing our heresy. If that Sister of Battle was making me nervous, then the psyker was pushing me to the brink of paranoia. All it would take was one mind-scan, and Marrlë and I would be dead meat. Still, I cleared my throat and piped up. "I know where it is."
The Inquisitor's all-too-knowing eyes fixed on me, narrowing as if noticing me for the first time. "Do you, now?"
Swallowing my nervousness, I nodded and pointed back up the slope down which Marrlë and I had driven for our lives. "Up there, a little ways down from the ridge. There was a dust storm, and we stumbled into it by accident."
"We did?" Marrlë frowned, and I nodded emphatically.
"There's a tunnel. I went down it to see what I could find, and there was a door with the Mechanicus symbol on it." I shrugged, trying not to appear intimidated by their combined stares. "I mean, I can't be certain it's what you're looking for, but-"
"But it can't hurt to look," the Inquisitor decided, turning to the tech-priest at her side and asking him a silent question. He caught her eyes, while one of his mechadendrites slithered through the air to peer at me. I stood perfectly still as the little camera at the end of his back-mounted tendril scrutinised me a moment longer, then withdrew as he drew a conclusion.
"There are no records of any other Mechanicus establishments on Armatura; at least, none that survive to this day." Something beneath his red robes clicked and whirred, making my skin crawl. Just how much of him was metal? "It is likely he is telling the truth." As discreetly as possible, I let out a relieved breath and fell in line as Spiker started leading us up the mountain. Though I had met her perhaps twenty minutes ago and could not make a measured judgement of character as of yet, I noted with approval that she really was leading the way, as opposed to ushering us up in front of her; a small detail, perhaps, but a telling one. As we slogged our way back up the mountainside, the Sister of Battle slowed down to walk beside me. "What's your name, Guardsman?"
"Um," I floundered for a moment, finding myself addressing a military superior for the second time in over two months. "Fenwick. Thomas Fenwick, Sister."
"Where's your regiment, Guardsman?" She wasn't going to call me by my name, it seemed. That was fine by me.
"I never belonged to one. I was shipped here with a bunch of conscripts, and when we arrived, we were attacked by orks, who had already overrun the camp. The conscripts I came here with are all dead, I'm afraid."
"I see." The Sister's eyes narrowed. Just how much did she 'see'? "And why are you alive, Guardsman?" By way of answer, I nodded up at Marrlë's back. As if sensing he was being referred to, the red-haired axeman turned his head to flash the Sororita his signature iron grin; to her credit, she barely seemed fazed by it, but I saw the corners of her mouth curl downwards at the sight of those metal spikes. I silently cursed Marrlë's lack of prudence; at this rate, they'd find us out before we got to the damned forge.
Having witnessed the exchange, the Inquisitor called down with another question: "And you, Marrlë? What were you doing here?" Oh, Throne. I almost sent up a silent prayer to the Emperor that my companion would have the sense to be guileful in his answer, and then stopped myself; in this instance, he was not the one to pray to. As I had no other god to address, I simply watched in gut-wrenching silence as the undercover Khornate shrugged.
"What am I ever doing anywhere, Spiker?" he jested, and I relaxed; while that was far from a masterful deflection, he hadn't blurted out the identities of our past company. "You know me. Drifting from world to world, just me and my axe; that's my lot in life." The Sister seemed on the verge of sputtering a protest at this obvious evasion, but the Inquisitor beat her to the punch with a barking laugh.
"True. Aimless as ever, I take it?" He gave a slight nod, and she smirked before turning back around and continuing to climb. The Magos had outstripped us in our ascent, his eagerness to reach the hidden forge made obvious by his haste. In contrast, the psyker was hanging around the back of the group, his eyes half-lidded as if only semiconscious of what was happening around him. He was silent as a stone, but I knew better than to write him off as nonthreatening; while he was no Damantin, anyone capable of exploding three orks' heads at once was not to be trifled with.
The rest of the way up found us faced with several more questions, each of which we dodged with varying degrees of grace. Sometimes, we were forced into inventing flat-out lies, while other times we could answer plainly, as long as if fit with what we had already told them. Most of the time, though, we were required to tweak the truth just enough for it to appear lacking in heresy. By the time we had reached the mouth of the tunnel, I was practically swooning with relief; we had managed to keep our story pretty straightforward, and neither I nor Marrlë had said anything concretely incriminatory. The one uncertainty that was still nagging at me was how we would disassociate ourselves from the theft of their ship. I turned that loose end over in my mind as we headed down into the dark of the tunnel. Eventually, we were greeted with a familiar red glow, and when the tunnel widened out into the hallway it really was, the tech-priest cackled with glee – a sound which reminded me somewhat of a shotgun pump. "Still active, after all these years untended. The machine spirit here is a strong one indeed."
He scurried forward to open the door while the rest of us hung back, not entirely sure if what he was doing was safe or not. Our trepidation soon proved to be unfounded; after producing a small object from his robes and poking around the door with his mechadendrites, a triumphant noise issued from the Magos's vox, and the skull icon split in half, along with the rest of the door. The two sides slid into the walls, grinding on the metal floor as they did, and once they had fully retracted, they fused so seamlessly with the walls around them that I wouldn't have known there was anything there unless it was pointed out to me. I took a moment to marvel at this small detail before Magos Vingar led us inside, and my breath was taken away. The Mechanicus forge was not some hovel tucked away inside the mountain – it was the mountain.
The six of us looked around in awed silence, taking in the vastness and sombre majesty of the dead forge. Though the innumerable machines were immobile and covered in a heavy coating of dust, it didn't detract in the least from the wonder I felt at their complexity, and the sheer size of some of them. It staggered me to think humans had built such things, which in turn led me to wonder just how human the Mechanicus were. Certainly the Magos, with all of his implants and bionics, appeared less human than Marrlë; but then, Marrlë was not your average man either. These musings were completely overshadowed by the metal spectacle surrounding us, but they still swam in the back of my mind, and I knew that I would return to those thoughts later.
It was odd to see a tech-priest, reputed to be inscrutable, taciturn folk, so openly ecstatic, whirring and clicking away as he began leading us through the maze of iron, an indecipherable string of technical information riddled with intermittent slips into binary issuing from him as he pointed to this lever or those servo-arms or that tangle of wires. Dead servo-skulls littered the ground, or at least, we thought they were dead; the Magos picked one up, examining it with his optical mechadendrite before extending a wire from his palm and reaching up into the skull's circuitry. Its extinguished eyes blinked with sudden red light, and Vingar stood connected to it a moment longer before raising his hand and releasing it, as a child might free a balloon to the sky; only, this balloon immediately set about in reviving its fellows which had fallen by the wayside. I watched the industrious little skull float down beside one of the grounded ones, and extend its wires to feed new life into the sleeping machine. Before I could see any more, we were beckoned onwards by the tech-priest, who now claimed to know the way down into the heart of the mountain-forge, where the object of his quest lay.
Taking the vastness of the forge into account, the complexity of the route he led us on was no surprise. Along narrow passageways, squeezing between twisted wires and pipes and climbing down ladders beginning to show hints of rust, we descended into the stomach of the forge, and as we went, I became aware of a dim light shining up from below. I frowned, uncertain of what I was seeing, and the tech-priest ceased chattering once he too perceived it. "That is odd," he clicked, sounding less sure of himself. "I was not aware that there were any spirits awake within this forge. The servo-skull said nothing of this."
"Do you know what it is?" asked Spiker, her booted feet clanging onto a metal grill platform as she stepped off the last ladder. From there, a spacious elevator was the final step on our descent.
"I dare not say," the Magos answered ominously as we walked onto the elevator. The sturdy machine hardly registered our weight; it had been constructed to hold several tech-priests at once, all of whom would weigh several times as much as an average human. Vingar punched a code into the elevator's keyboard, and with a shudder, we were bound for the lowest floor. "If my suspicion is correct, something truly unorthodox is afoot here." His words put us on edge, but nothing could prepare us for the sight that greeted us as we descended towards the very bottom of the manufactorum. The light that shone from the floor was thrown up against a massive metal construct. Though it was vaguely human-shaped, by its sheer size it looked like someone had, with great care and impossible levels of technical and architectural skill, turned a cathedral into a humanoid machine. We were lowered past metal beams and scaffolding, flitting by our vision as our eyes remained fixed on the colossal machine. Guns the size of small buildings jutted from the monstrous contraption's arms, and I imagined that the thing could have destroyed our old base with a single salvo of gunfire. It was bigger than the Gargant we had destroyed by a significant margin, and I wondered how anything so enormous could actually move across the ground without shattering under its own weight.
"Emperor's blood," Spiker whispered. "A Titan."
"A Warlord Battle Titan," the Magos specified, in reverential awe of what he was seeing. "An avatar of the Omnissiah, made to sanctify the earth it walks and rain holy fire upon the foes of mankind." The elevator clanged to a halt, and I only remembered to walk off when the Sister pushed me in the back, perhaps a bit harder than was necessary. Even so, my steps were slow as I gazed up at the Titan in awe, and as such, didn't notice Marrlë sidling up to me until I felt his fist hit my shoulder. Being used to the gesture, I simply looked over at him expectantly, and saw suspicion written on his features. I was instantly on my guard, noting that the others had walked a little way ahead.
"What's the matter?" I asked, keeping my voice low. His eye flickered up to the Inquisitor and her cadre ahead of us, then to the sleeping Titan.
"Something's off," he said, and paused. Before I could ask him to elucidate, he continued. "I'm not sure exactly what it is, but I feel… comfortable. I'm sure it's got something to do with the Titan, but I can't put my finger on it just yet."
"The tech-priest doesn't seem to have noticed anything," I muttered, eyeing the giddy Magos as he rushed over to a mess of cables linking up to a cogitator in the corner. Marrlë scoffed.
"He's drunk on finding a Titan. You'd be, too, if you were a cogboy. I'm telling you something's up, Fenwick."
"Okay, I trust you. Don't worry about me, Marrlë – I'll keep my guard up." He nodded and the two of us strode forwards to catch up to the others, who were watching the Magos from a distance. Unintelligible metallic noises were coming from him as he sorted through the cogitator's databanks, and as we looked on and the minutes ticked by, the initial excitement in the sounds faded, gradually being replaced by what could only be confusion. We ourselves stood in a silence that was rapidly becoming uncomfortable. A chill ran up my spine when I happened to see the psyker's dull eyes slip down to fix upon Marrlë's axe, and he frowned. Just as it looked as if he might comment on something he'd noticed, the tech-priest spoke out in Low Gothic.
"This isn't right," he clicked, slowly backing away from the cogitator, whose screen cast an eerie glow around his robes. "The cogitator is telling me that the Titan isn't sleeping. All the processors are treating it as if it were active and combat-ready, but if there were a princeps, or any Skitarii present, they would have hailed us by now." We spent a moment digesting his words in grim silence before looking up at the Titan in a new light. It now seemed different somehow; I could feel something ebbing at the fringes of my consciousness, a faint pulse behind my eyes that coloured the edges of my vision red.
All at once, three things happened: First, the psyker screamed and doubled over as if punched in the stomach; second, the veins in Marrlë's neck bulged as an inhuman snarl split his features, and I thought I saw blood dripping from his gums; thirdly, a figure shifted in the shadows, and with a whooshing noise followed by a crunch of metal, split the Magos's head in half.
There was no stunned silence; at this point, I knew better than to react in such a way, and had seen enough not to be fazed by surprises like that. The others were all highly experienced as well. Instantly, they sprang into action; Gorelady's distinctive howl split the air, while the Sister darted to the side and levelled her bolter. Spiker's power sword hummed into life, and her previously-free hand was now holding a hand flamer. As for me, I readied my forearm-mounted bolt pistol and drew my knife. In the end, though, it turned out there was no need for that; before we had gotten into position to fire around the Magos to his killer in the shadows, a pair of mechadendrites burst from the back of his robes, coiling around and aiming downwards in front of him. The shadows made it difficult to see what exactly was happening, but I knew that at the end of each of those mechadendrites was a small meltagun. A baleful whoosh, followed by a metallic screech, signalled the demise of his unseen attacker; unfortunately, the Omnissian axe buried in the tech-priest's head had done its job. Vingar fell backwards, tendrils spasming wildly like the death throes of a den's worth of serpents. We leapt out of the way of those lashing mechadendrites, two of which were still spouting uncontrollable streams of super-agitative infrared light.
"We weren't expecting you," came a cackling voice, seeming to issue from the entire massive chamber. "But you will do just as well."
"Who are you?" shouted Spiker, looking up into the darkness above. She was met with more cackling; clearly, whoever was speaking was feeling very smug about something.
"We are of little consequence," replied the voice; when it spoke, it sounded like hundreds of metal legs clicking against the floor. We saw them now – asymmetrical eyes of green and yellow, staring down at us from beneath frayed red hoods. All of them emerging from the shadow of the Titan, standing with gear-bladed axes grasped in their augmetic claws. Marrlë, however, wasn't looking at them; his eye was focused on the crimson trail now snaking across the chamber, channeled by grooves dug in the floor, right to the feet of the Titan. The blood of the slain Magos flowed freely towards the construct's legs, and once it reached them, began to climb, ascending the Titan's form like obscene veins over its metal surface. These impossible trails glowed as they rose higher and higher. We watched in abject horror as at last they reached its 'head', and twin red lights winked into life where eyes might have been. For a single, horrible moment, the head dipped, and those eyes fixed on me. Incredible bloodlust shone there, such as I had only seen once before: the very same as that which burned within the single crimson eye of the youth at my side. That realization chilled my blood and filled me with terror.
"Awaken, mighty Adelram, and walk. It is time to bathe the soil in blood, in the name of the Lord of Skulls."
Then that gaze was gone, writing me off as insignificant, and from the Titan's huge square chest came an unearthly bellow, nearly driving me to my knees. The others reeled along with me, and before we could recover, the ground beneath our feet shook, almost knocking us off our feet.
The Titan had taken a step. And then, another. The priests of the Dark Mechanicus had vanished, no doubt having climbed into the Titan, directing it in its dark purpose. We worms, squirming futilely in the shadow of the monster, were apparently beneath its concern. It narrowly missed stepping on the trembling psyker, knocking him over anyway with the impact of its gargantuan foot upon the manufactorum floor. It stood now before the wall, behind which I knew was a mountain's worth of stone and earth, and brought two of carapace-mounted guns to bear. No way, I thought, and was immediately proven wrong. The first of the guns, a melta cannon the size of a large tank, blazed away at the metal walls, disintegrating them with the sheer heat of that blast. The other, which looked like someone had turned ten heavy bolters into a pair of gatling guns, spun into a blur before proceeding to utterly destroy the mountainside.
The dust-dimmed natural light of Armatura streamed into the manufactorum, momentarily blinding us with the sudden shift. Ignoring us altogether now, the Titan began stomping into the plains through the gaping hole in the mountain, each step echoing with grim purpose, and all around us, that electronic cackling slowly died, while at once becoming more and more frenzied even as it decrescendoed. We were left in stunned, breathless silence, watching the walking mass of death depart. Eventually, Spiker's hoarse rasp put an end to the gut-wrenching quiet. "We," she started, and forced herself to continue. "We should go back to the ship."
"No." My blood froze at the sudden word. All heads turned to Marrlë, his crimson eye blazing as he looked after the receding Titan. There it was again: vengeance incarnate, with only a single cure.
"What do you mean, 'no'?" The Inquisitor was too surprised to be angry; at this point, the only thing in her voice was disbelief.
"You can't return to your ship." My heart leapt into my mouth. Surely he wasn't going to tell them.
"Why not?" The Sister demanded, her grip on the bolter tightening.
"Because our former companions stole it." I wanted to scream, and nearly did when I felt the Sister's gun pressed up against the side of my head. In similar fashion, Spiker's plasma pistol was now pointing into Marrlë's face, which displayed a dissonant self-assuredness.
"Give us one reason – a single reason – not to kill you immediately," the Sororita hissed. Marrlë's eye fell on her, and perhaps my sight deceived me, but I thought I saw her shiver. I couldn't blame her if she did, of course; looking into that eye was to see sheer rage and murderous force of will. It was a small comfort to know that that killing intent was being reserved for another. The Khornate chuckled, low and more than a little menacing.
"Well, we're still here, aren't we? It wasn't us who stole your ship; our former companions did, and we were powerless to stop them." Obviously unimpressed with his smug iron grin, Spiker's grimace grew more pronounced.
"'Powerless' isn't a word I'd ever use to describe you, Marrlë. Just who were these companions of yours, really?"
Marrlë opened his mouth before his eye roved across my face, registering the panic and fear written in bold print all over my features. And then, with such impudence as I had never seen before in my life, used that eye to wink at the Inquisitor. "I'll tell you that story if we survive," he said, echoing what he had once told me concerning the very woman holding a gun to his head. I simply could not believe it, and for a second I thought she would just shoot the idiot and order the same fate to be administered to me immediately thereafter. I don't think I've ever been more surprised and relieved than when I saw her lower that pistol and motion for the Sister to do the same.
"You've obviously got some scheme up your sleeve, bastard," she hissed. The ice in that rasp would've shaken me, I knew; my companion, on the other hand, seemed accustomed to it, and it occurred to me that this might not have been the first time they had been in such a predicament together. "So let's hear it. What incredible genius is behind that smirk?"
Marrlë smirked more. "We're going to follow that Titan."
"Explain yourself."
"Tell me, Spiker – how much do you know about the ork presence on Armatura?"
"I don't- oh, Emperor's guts. You're going to tell me there's an entire Waaagh out there, aren't you?"
His lack of an answer only confirmed that. Cracks were showing on Spiker's harsh façade; her disheartenment was visibly growing. Mine was not, but only because it had already hit rock bottom a while ago. And all the while, Marrlë's horrible, knowing grin gleamed on in the dim light. I found myself wanting to punch him in the face; no one should look so smug in the situation we were in. Simultaneously, intense jealousy of his self-assurance boiled in the pit of my stomach. How I wished I could be that composed.
"Now, from the things those hereteks said, we know that they're devoted to Khorne, the Dark God of… senseless carnage. If a bunch of Khornate tech-priests were commanding a Titan, what do you think they'd do with it?"
"How do you know about Khorne?" the Sister demanded, but was cut off by Spiker raising a hand sharply.
"Get to the point, Marrlë."
"They're heading to wherever they can engage in senseless carnage, of course. And where better to find it than in the middle of an ork army? They're practically made for each other."
A hint of understanding dawned on her face. "They're going to destroy one another."
"Yes, they are." Marrlë's eye gleamed unsettlingly. "And when an ork warboss is killed-"
"The Waaagh falls apart, and the orks will lose what little organization they have. They might even start fighting each other." She was picking up steam, quickly grasping Marrlë's plan. It was simple and unrefined – just like he was. "So you intend to use the chaos as the orks and the Titan clash to pick off the Warboss?"
I really, really wished she hadn't put it that way. Marrlë's grin widened, seeming like it might actually rip the corners of his mouth. "Exactly," he hissed. "That Chaos will be the key to our salvation."
Spiker dwelt upon his words, while the Sister and I looked from her to Marrlë and back again, both of us unable to believe what was happening. At last, she made her verdict. "It's incredibly reckless, and furthermore, it's proof that you are quite insane – as if we needed any. Not to mention our odds of finding the Warboss in that turmoil are miniscule – let alone killing it in the mix. But it is all we have, I suppose."
"Finding it will be the easy part," Marrlë declared, stepping over and giving the psyker a solid punch in the shoulder. The telepath, still shaking from being overwhelmed by the Titan's bloodlust, jumped at the touch, eyes wide, and barely relaxed when he saw who had hit him. "We'll let this quivering peon do that for us. Just look for the biggest, baddest ork in the mix – shouldn't be too hard, eh?"
He said nothing. I felt a bit sorry for him; he looked like he had just looked into hell, and perhaps he had. With an apologetic glance at the beleaguered psyker, Kalaina Spiker grimly pursed her lips and turned to the Titan, now mostly hidden by the dust. Her next words were for all of us. "Our mission has changed," she said, and her voice was like iron striking stone. "We're going to kill the ork warboss." With the resigned sigh of a dead woman, the Sororita scowled and nodded. As they turned away, Marrlë, that glorious bastard, smiled at me, as if he expected me to congratulate him on convincing them to follow his ridiculous plan. For the life of me, I could not bring myself to return that smile, and so only gave him a slight nod as I turned my head to stare into the dust. What was the Thousand Sons' battle cry again?
All is Dust.
Those three words echoed, wraithlike, in my mind now, as we walked off towards our inevitable demise. I could only chuckle hollowly at how apropos they seemed.
