Devourer - Joe Parrino Read online

  ‘No!’ Valnyr commanded.

  Denied its ability to test, to assure purity, the machine drifted away and awaited further orders, looking somehow chastised. Granted a degree of autonomy not usually seen among the constructs of the necrons, the canoptek spyders were responsible for the maintenance of the necrons in their sleeping state. Granted incredibly resilient and robust processors, they had even mimicked independent intelligence.

  She appreciated the efforts of the machine in the same way that a person would appreciate an unthinking tool. If there were issues with her awakening, Valnyr would rather test them herself than rely upon the canoptek spyder’s probing senses. Corrections could be made without the constructs’ in-built programs accidentally detecting anomalies and prescribing eradication as the only possible solution. Worry gnawed at her, but she reasoned away the malignant fit as a side effect of the awakening process.

  Doors of polished obsidian cracked open. Valnyr left her chamber, canoptek spyder following on her heels, and strode off into the silent tomb world. She entered into a far vaster chamber than the one she had awoken in. On obsidian walls, resplendent in unbroken glory, carved and shaped by the whims of her long-dead people, phalanxes of Kehlrantyr’s most fabled heroes marched.

  The skeletal shapes of necrons warred with the lithe alien eldar. Stylised and wrapped in stygian shadows, the carvings were a thing of wonder. Evidence of the pride of Kehlrantyr, its legions of fierce warriors marched across the walls, bound for the glorious wars that served as her history.

  Bulwark of the War in Heaven, defender of the dead and doom of the living. This was the reputation Kehlrantyr had earned in ages past. The walls were pristine, kept serviced by scuttling scarabs. They betrayed little of the entropy that had greeted her in her awakening chambers. But the silence was a melancholy thing, thick and turgid in the air. It spoke of ages lost, of time slipped by unremembered and unmourned. The Great Sleep smothered Kehlrantyr.

  She stopped in a vast, circular room. Warrior friezes, twelve in all, stared out from the walls. Valnyr walked towards one of the figures and rested her hand on the cheek of the warrior’s skull.

  ‘Shaudukar,’ she whispered. The name helped dispel the disquiet she felt, driving it to the back of her mind. Then she stepped back, moving towards the centre. The canoptek spyder merely hovered, waiting, probes extended.

  An infrasonic buzzing vibrated her metal bones, emanating from the circuitry that laced the walls. Cracks sounded and vapour shot from new fissures. This was no sudden onset of the passage of eons, however. Valnyr adopted the pose of restful relaxation and waited.

  Sections of the walls, each marked by a single stylised warrior, pulled away from the rest of the obsidian panels and floated. Slots opened in the floor and the blocks ground into the depths of Kehlrantyr. Vapour hissed with greater intensity. Cruciform shapes resolved from the white steam, and caskets, similar to the one she had recently stepped from, were carved with the images of those who slumbered within.

  Her left hand indicated a smile, while her right began the pose of greeting.

  Shaudukar’s, fittingly, was the first casket to open. The lychguard was her friend from the time before biotransference. Armoured in thick plates of metal, spine overarched to shelter her head, Shaudukar was a fearsome sight.

  Poblaaur’s casket opened next, followed by ten more, until her lychguard surrounded her. They hung, crucified in the sleep of eons. Cables and circuits were attached all over their bodies, snaking through their metal bones. Green lights flickered around them, shining through the steam. The canoptek spyder behind her chattered and broadcast the frequency of awakening.

  The bodies jerked in their cradles.

  Valnyr awaited their resurrection with excitement. She looked forward to the reunion, eager to hear the voices and thoughts of her guard. Their bonds had been forged in the turbulent days of war against the treacherous and hateful eldar. Those bonds had only been strengthened by conversion as loyalty engrams had rewritten portions of the lychguards’ personality to ensure devotion beyond even that which they had exhibited in their mortality. These lychguard were Valnyr’s wardens, gifts from the Dynasts.

  The green lights gave way to arcs of corposant that juddered between the limbs and along the spines of the lychguard.

  Emerald balefires flashed in Shaudukar’s eyes, winking with intelligence programs being brought back online. She awoke, the first to do so. Shaudukar, oldest and truest friend of the cryptek called Valnyr. Shaudukar, leader of her lychguard. She fell from the casket. The others followed, some crunching to their knees. Shaudukar’s fist crashed to her chest plate in the old salute. The others echoed her scant seconds later, except for Poblaaur.

  Shaudukar said nothing as her sentience resumed control of her body, as she shrugged off the Great Sleep. She reached for her weapons from behind her casket, arming herself with her warscythe and shield. No nonsense and no fuss, as she had been in life. Valnyr felt relief to see her unchanged by sixty million years of dormancy.

  Poblaaur kept his eyes dim, facing towards the wall.

  ‘My mistress,’ Shaudukar said. She stared at her hands.

  Valnyr approached her, standing nearly uncomfortably close. For the status-obsessed necrons, where distance often indicated hierarchy and respect, it was an expression of great affection.

  ‘Shaudukar,’ Valnyr whispered the name. ‘I am glad you are awake.’

  The lychguard leader inclined her head. ‘I am too. Is there a reason for our awakening?’

  ‘No. Not so far as I can tell, at any rate.’

  Shaudukar nodded. ‘Your orders?’ She never removed her gaze from her hands. Her fingers continued to flex. ‘Do these… Do my fingers seem longer?’

  Valnyr’s head cocked to the side. Her right hand adopted the position signifying confusion.

  ‘We do as the programs dictate. We awaken the Dynast and her kin.’

  This was her sacred duty, her charge and purpose. While the lesser, mindless creatures of Kehlrantyr awoke, it was her duty to ensure the Dynast had weathered the ages and awoke in comfort, attended by a cryptek of her calibre.

  The other lychguard waited in patient silence.

  Poblaaur’s mouth clacked open, drawing Valnyr’s attention. Then he began to scream, the noise screeching and static-laced. The lychguard collapsed, clattering into a pile of awkwardly laid bones. He placed his hands beneath his shoulders and began to rock back and forth. Crackles sounded from his metal bones. Spikes erupted all along Poblaaur’s body, along with hooks and wicked edges. He juddered along the floor, sending cracks crazing through the obsidian with mindless blows.

  The infrasonic buzzing increased in pitch.

  Valnyr retreated, hands held out in warding. Her other lychguard placed themselves between her and Poblaaur. Their loyalty engrams ensured that they would defend their cryptek even when doing so contravened their natural instinct of self-preservation.

  The light in Poblaaur’s eyes twitched. He stopped shuddering. His hands had lengthened into talons. Erratic madness betrayed his every motion. The intelligence that should have governed his movements, made them economical and precise, was nowhere to be seen. He stood. Static spilled from his mouth, pulsing in time with the buzzing. His fingers flexed.

  Disgust and panic warred in Valnyr’s mind. She recognised the signs, believed she knew the affliction clawing through Poblaaur’s soul.

  ‘What is happening?’ demanded one of the lychguard.

  ‘The flayer curse,’ Valnyr whispered, her voice filled with horror.

  What had begun as the merest whisper of calamity was now confirmed before her eyes. The flayer virus. A curse from a broken and vengeful god.

  ‘How did it come to Kehlrantyr?’ asked the lychguard, Othekh.

  Valnyr answered, ‘The refugees.’ Her mind was distracted, latching onto the implications and the possibil
ities. ‘To survive so much and to lose it all, to preside over… and then to lose it all to the witless afflictions and hunger of an ancient curse.’

  She was muttering, the words emerging thick and fast. They flew, along with her thoughts, racing down paths that she had no desire to consider. The implications flashed through her mind. How deep did the taint run? How far had the words of accursed Llandu’gor reached?

  The thought was horrifying. The sudden loss of identity, personality and memory flooded beneath the inescapable and inevitable hunger for flesh and blood. The desire, the need, to profane the body with the fluids and fibre of organic life. That was what the rumours had said, brought by distant necrons fleeing such existential horror on their own tomb worlds.

  Some amongst the Khelrantyri had argued for the immediate destruction of such brothers and sisters, that they carried the flayer virus like an unwitting plague host. Cooler heads had prevailed. Sympathy, and a form of patronising dynastic arrogance, had ruled and the Dynasts allowed the unfortunates to strike the sigils of their original tomb worlds from their chassis and to anoint themselves with the glory of Kehlrantyr.

  But perhaps that had been wrong. Perhaps they had been blinded by their sympathy. In the eons while they slept, when personality codes had been duplicated by necron artifice and back-up systems, the infection might have spread, leached into the core processes of the tomb world. Even now, the legions that faced awakening might be irretrievably afflicted by the flayer virus.

  Horror such as Valnyr had rarely known flowed along her nerve-bundles. Personality fail-safes, designed to prevent the erosion of her mind by strong emotion, enacted themselves and calm slipped into her limbs, even as Poblaaur screamed his transformation before her eyes.

  The necrons watched, unable to move, unable to act.

  The canoptek spyder barrelled into the flayer-touched lychguard, knocking the still-screaming necron to the ground.

  But the contact was enough. The green lights running along the tomb spyder flared, then dimmed. The construct spasmed. Spikes erupted from its back and the thing blurted out static and screams.

  Most of the lychguard remained immobile, waiting for their moment to strike, confusion reigning as they assessed threats and friendly targeting prohibitions prevented them from assaulting one of their own. The lychguard were designed to be patient, designed to judge the best moment to strike, but they were also limited by ingrained assurances for loyalty.

  Valnyr gripped her scythe and canted activation protocols. Time froze. Poblaaur, locked in a snarling hunched shape, was unable to move. Sound ceased. The buzzing ceased. Valnyr strode forward, feeling as though she were moving through mud.

  The energy necessary to stop the passage of time was prodigious, the effort – especially so soon after her awakening – draining. She waded forward, buying each step with a silent grunt of pain. The green lights that played through her circuits dimmed, power drawn away to propel her motive functions against the flow of time.

  Supplemental energy flowed from her staff of light, augmenting her power reserves. She approached Poblaaur one stubborn step at a time. Placing herself equidistant between the corrupted lychguard and the tomb spyder, she lowered her staff and fired.

  A beam of incandescent fury began the slow crawl out of the head of the staff as the passage of time started to reassert itself.

  Reality snapped back. Poblaaur launched himself to his feet while the canoptek spyder continued to spasm and writhe, viral programs rewriting the construct’s processes.

  Fire shot from Valnyr’s staff and speared the struggling tomb spyder through the head. Another beam took Poblaaur through the chest as he stumbled to his feet, carving the necron in two.

  The lychguard’s torso collapsed, hissing and screaming. Poblaaur clawed his way towards Valnyr, mouth stretched open and teeth sharpened to fangs. Another beam burned away his skull and the room descended into silence.

  ‘What just happened?’ Shaudukar demanded.

  ‘The flayer curse.’

  ‘It is real?’

  ‘So it would seem.’

  ‘But how?’

  Valnyr had no answer. Around her, screams reverberated from the darkness, similar in pitch and timbre to Poblaaur’s. More necrons were awakening to the dreadful hunger, to the loss of identity and the erosion of all they had been.

  Chapter Two

  Anrakyr’s army marched through the human settlement, culling the living from the face of the world. A curious destroyer called Armenhorlal hovered near the Traveller and hummed to himself.

  The trio of praetorians emerged from the smoke, covenant rods held across their chests. They took up station behind Anrakyr as he paraded through the dying settlement.

  As he left the burning, broken concourse behind, Anrakyr toyed idly with a cluster of stones hanging from his neck. Marked with the curving, looping rune-script of the eldar kind, they had been recovered from the snow-coated fields of Carrh-enn-Derac.

  Carrh-enn-Derac, the last battlefield he had walked. Carrh-enn-Derac, butchered by the eldar tongue into Carnac in the sixty million cycles the necrons had slept. It was now the site of their latest conflict, another battle in the War in Heaven that still raged. The last tomb world graced by his presence.

  Anrakyr could not discern the purpose of the stones, but their ubiquity among the fallen foe, the way the eldar had screamed as he stole them, spoke to their value. At times, as now, the necron overlord believed he could see glimmers in their depths, could catch the faint whisper of torment from within.

  Anrakyr had vented his displeasure on the eldar’s world spirit, a rudimentary collection of utility programs and personality repositories that crudely mimicked the majesty of the circuits that cradled a necron tomb world. Such ramshackle attempts at technology were an affront, a reminder of the failures of lesser races. The bruised construct had been given to Trazyn the Infinite in fulfilment of the bargain that had secured the eldar defeat.

  Now he came to Kehlrantyr to awaken the tomb world’s fabled legions and welcome them into his growing empire. Hope had flared in his breast, enough to override his distaste at dealing with the worms that were the Kehlrantyr Dynasts. Renowned equally for their flippant arrogance and the limitless numbers of their population, the Kehlrantyri were a necessary evil. Anrakyr found it curious they had yet to awaken, that they had yet to stride forth from their tombs.

  The Traveller dropped one of the subtly glowing gems and stabbed it with the edge of his warscythe. He expected to feel something, some emotion or some sense of action. He analysed his responses, examined the tactile sensations of the breaking gem, the change in structure of the stone as it went from whole to shattered, but the metal chassis of his body conveyed no feelings. No emotions welled within him, just empty nothingness: calm, assured, ordered. Only a mild curiosity remained, dissatisfied by the petty experiment. He left the other stones in his hand, dangling from chained wraithbone. He could not see why the eldar invested so much value in the stones, but then, the reasons behind so much of what the living races did escaped him.

  Clutching the rest in shining digits, stained by the blood of human animals, Anrakyr tried to ignore the insidious hiss of the organic liquid that dripped down his spine. He clicked together the fingers of his other hand, let the relief at the gesture calm him, let lightning arcs crawl over him and wash away the taint of life, abrading the stain with puffs of burned smoke.

  Gravel crunched beneath his feet as he moved through the burning human settlement. Warriors scuttled around him, and the hum of anti-gravitic motors set his skull to vibrating. The metal skirts he wore rustled around his legs.

  Movement caught his gaze, drawing the fell fury of the Traveller’s attention. A knot of warriors, their gauss weaponry abandoned, were feasting on the bodies of the slain creatures.

  Meat ripped. Blood flashed in the afternoon air. They stuffed flesh down the
empty caverns of their mouths. Anrakyr watched, annoyed, angry, as the organic matter dripped down through their chest cavities to flop into the dusty gravel at their feet.

  ‘Sickness. Accursed,’ Anrakyr said. Disgust flared through him. Without turning, he gestured to the floating destroyer that shadowed him. The flayer-touched had been a constant problem on Kehlrantyr. Normally they followed Anrakyr’s forces in small numbers, cowed by the threat and majesty of the overlord’s presence. Kept confined to their nightmare realm in the aptly named Ghoul Stars, lorded over by the whispered name of Valgûl, the flayed ones were a plague that rarely troubled Anrakyr. Until coming to Kehlrantyr, that was. Something about this tomb world was corrupting his warriors, drawing the flayer curse to rewrite their already damaged souls and psyches.

  ‘Attend,’ the Traveller ordered. ‘Cull the flayer-touched. Purge those beholden to the dead words of Llandu’gor.’

  It was no longer strange to utter the true names of the c’tan. He and his kind had shed that taboo when they broke the c’tan into shards, when they turned gods into servants. Thus they displayed their mastery over the beings to whom they had once owed fealty. Mephet’ran, Llandu’gor, Hsiagn’la. Others existed, lost to the half-forgotten mythologies of the necrons.

  The destroyer cackled. His own madness, the nihilism that so gripped his kind, flowed through the laughter. Light crackled along the necron’s spine as it sucked in power, drawing it from the atmosphere in a microscopic siphoning of energy. The heavy barrels of the gauss cannon that was Armenhorlal’s arm flashed blindingly green.

  Malignant energy unleashed, chain-whipping into the pack of unwitting flayers and wiping them from existence. Their shadows stretched for a moment, dark against the bright green. The spreading virus of vengeful Llandu’gor manifested more and more among those who walked beneath the Traveller’s banner. All who succumbed would share this fate.