Devourer - Joe Parrino Read online

  They made their way down a memorial processional, an arterial that ran through the entirety of Kehlrantyr’s interior. The ceremonial route of kings and phaerons, it would once have been lined by the living. Now it was a thing of empty shadows and forgotten grandeur. Scarabs scuttled down the walls, attempting to repair yawning fissures through the carvings. All around them towered immense friezes depicting the necrons of Kehlrantyr at their height of glory, figures from countless tomb worlds bowing before the might of Kehlrantyr’s Dynasts.

  Silence, broken only by the clack of their footsteps, surrounded the necrons. A dull green glow emanated from scuttling scarab lenses. Valnyr took heart at the silence. Silence meant order. Silence meant assurance.

  At times the road became a statue-lined bridge. Below, in rank upon silent rank, Valnyr could see the legions of Kehlrantyr. The bulk of the planet’s population, personalities and identities removed, waited in the darkness. Once, these had been the ordinary citizens of the Necron Empire. Once they had been artisans, children, mothers, fathers, farmers, writers, artists and merchants. The nonessential. Mephet’ran’s deception saw them converted into mindless creatures, their entire existence erased and burned away.

  Valnyr almost felt sorry for them, almost felt remorse at what became of the vast populations of the empire. But better that they lose their identity than her. She shuddered at such a fate, could barely understand an eternity of unwitting and unwilling servitude. They were abhorrent things, a reminder of her race’s glory and its decline. They represented her deepest fears, the violation of all that she was, the erasure of everything that made her an individual, deleted in order to create an unthinking, unreasoning construct no better than the scarabs that serviced the tomb worlds.

  Metal rasped along stone. The flickering sparks of talons screeching through the obsidian echoed down a side route, followed by running footsteps. The lychguard readied their weapons.

  A group of warriors emerged, eyes shining in the darkness. They were altered, gripped by the same changes that had afflicted Poblaaur. Red lights played along their bodies, while their hands stretched into talons. Bent double by unnatural, insatiable hunger, they stalked forward, muttering and screeching at random. Valnyr could hear buzzing, low and subsonic.

  ‘Flayed ones,’ said Shaudukar.

  The lychguard formed a shield wall, once more placing themselves between the corrupt and their cryptek. Dispersion fields activated on their shields, repelling the shambling flayers into the obsidian walls. Three lychguard held the broken necrons in place, while the others approached.

  Their warscythes flashed down, crunching into the corrupted warriors’ skulls. The light in their eyes immediately died, while the bodies collapsed to the floor. The warscythes struck once again, severing the flayed ones’ torsos from their legs along the vulnerable spine section.

  The lychguard pulled back in lockstep, resuming their guardian position around the cryptek. More hissing came from the shadows. More red lights blinked as corrupted warriors shambled forward, mouthparts clicking open and closed. Their chassis were tarnished by ages uncounted. They spat static at the party of sane necrons.

  ‘Mistress?’ Shaudukar asked over her shoulder.

  ‘Through them.’

  The lychguard leaned behind their shields and advanced. The flayer-touched flew backwards, propelled by the dispersion shields.

  Valnyr and her lychguard rushed through the depths, passing through the decrepit majesty of Kehlrantyr, leaving the flayer packs behind. Kilometres separated them from their goal, the sleeping chambers of the ruling dynasty. Kilometres filled with slumbering warriors and ages-old chambers.

  Ruin crept in the closer they came to the crypts of the Dynasts. Fissures lanced from the ceiling, cracking deep through carved walls. There was greater activity in this place, scarabs swarming in the darkness. Canoptek wraiths and other constructs flittered about, attending to pre-programmed tasks, running the same routines for presumably millions of years, guarding for intruders that would never come and enacting repair protocols on damaged regions that could never be fixed.

  ‘How much have we lost while we slept? How far has our glory fallen?’

  ‘Mistress? I do not remember.’

  Valnyr was shocked to find herself saying, ‘I do not either.’

  Some of her memories were gone. She could feel the gaps, the aching wounds in her psyche that were filled with some malignant emotion that recoiled at her scrutiny.

  Weak sunlight drifted from fissures, descending from miles above. They walked between the beams and Valnyr felt a moment’s flush of pleasure at the sight.

  Something shrieked, something that sounded horribly organic. The screams approached, moving with fierce rapidity. A creature landed in front of them, black eyes staring with malign intelligence. It was bone-white and red. Tendrils stretched from its head, waving like worms or snakes. Great spiked limbs descended from its shoulders, arching over. A tail whipped through the air behind it. The tentacles around its mouth reached out and vile ooze dripped from its pores.

  The necrons froze. Green light played out from their eyes, scanning and analysing.

  The creature fixed its gaze on them. It sucked in great breaths, betraying its disgusting organic origin. It shuffled forward, moving in quick hops. Bioluminescence rippled along its fleshy skin, tracing out complex patterns. Parts of the creature’s body blended in with the stone surrounding it.

  As it drew near to the lychguard, the beast turned its head from side to side. Its tendrils reached outwards. Then it screamed. Hooks shot out from its chest, clattering off the lychguards’ shields.

  ‘What foulness is this?’ someone asked.

  More screeches sounded from far above as the lychguard bulled forward. The creature leapt over the necrons’ heads, twisting in midair. Spiked appendages slammed into one of Valnyr’s guardians and wrenched him apart. He continued to attack, even as he was torn in half. The fallen lychguard used his warscythe and shield to crawl forward, still moving stubbornly towards the source of the attack.

  But the creature was already moving out of the way, darting towards Valnyr. The cryptek held her staff out, beginning to summon the energy to freeze the animal in time, to halt it in its tracks. She knew, even as she did so, that it was too fast.

  ‘No!’ she yelled. ‘I will not die here!’ Panic flew through her. Buzzing overwhelmed her senses.

  Shaudukar grasped the creature by the spine. It stalled and mewled in pain, still reaching for the cryptek. The tendrils around its head fluttered as it breathed out. Shaudukar ripped out the beast’s spine with a wet meat thunk. The creature collapsed and flopped against the floor, obscene, pallid flesh glistening against the obsidian.

  Blood spilled out in a pool. The necrons gathered around it, curious. It was the first glimpse of organic life they had seen since beginning the Great Sleep. It screamed as it died, still writhing.

  More screams answered. Creatures swarmed down the fissures. Buzzing clouds of scarabs met them. Arcs of green lightning stabbed from tiny jaw-gripped weapons. Greater canoptek creatures fired whining streams of energy. Gouts of alien flesh rained down on Valnyr’s head, but the tide was too strong.

  There were four-armed beasts, gaping maws filled with sharp teeth. More of the larger beasts with the tentacled faces followed. All moved quickly, scuttling with disgusting living motion, blue and red and purple, flying through the gloom in blurs faster than Valnyr could track. Whirring winged organisms engaged the scarabs in miniature dogfights.

  Valnyr could only stare, overwhelmed by the revulsion that swept through her. She suddenly felt hungry, a half-remembered sensation that ghosted through her. The lychguard were frozen, gazing up at the descending animals.

  Valnyr knew they were considering, adapting, planning an assessment of the encroaching aliens. But there were too many and they were too slow. They would be overwhelme
d.

  More canoptek constructs were advancing down the processional. For a moment, Valnyr was distracted, seeing the advancing tide of burnished metal as a mark of the lost glories of her people, the processional reasserting its previous function this one last time.

  Flayer-cursed appeared, clambering down walls from hidden crevices, climbing up the bridge with talons spearing into the cracks of the stone.

  ‘Move,’ she commanded. ‘We must find a way to neutralise these threats.’

  Her words echoed, slicing through the static-screams of the flayer-cursed and the organic sounds of the alien organisms. Beneath it all, she could hear the laughter of the necrontyr, almost mocking.

  An idea came to her. ‘Halt,’ she commanded her lychguard. ‘Listen.’

  Aliens sprinted for them. With a grunt of effort, Valnyr froze them in time, pausing the organisms mere metres away.

  All around them, quiet and distant, came the noises of a bustling city, the sounds of the long dead and the long forgotten. She could hardly hear them through the ever-present buzzing. She focused, concentrated, and pinpointed the hall the echoes originated from. A new plan began to crystallise. It was desperate, but what other hope did she have?

  ‘We move down there!’ she yelled.

  They fled through empty dwelling places, marked with sigils proclaiming the habitation of early necron scientists. Aliens and flayers poured after them, some drifting into eddies of battle and the shrieks of hunger.

  Valnyr knew this district. She had served here in life. Its emptiness disquieted her, but desperation urged her on. Legs that would no longer tire drove her forward, fear adding to her flight. She outpaced her lychguard, the larger necrons fighting a desperate rearguard against the twin threats that pursued them.

  Valnyr heard a faint cry and glanced back. She saw one of the lychguard pounced upon by flayers and torn apart beneath a metallic mass of flashing blade limbs.

  She turned down a side passageway and her lychguard followed. Dwellings were replaced by defunct laboratories. The sounds, louder now, screamed all around them, keening with horror and loss. They were thick with the noise of some calamitous event. Valnyr ignored them, focusing only on the origin point.

  At the end of the passageway, carved into the obsidian darkness, stood an open laboratory. Half-seen shapes moved through the gloom, pale and translucent. Valnyr burst through them, sparing no glance for the time-dilated ghosts of her lost kin. She emerged into a vast chamber and the sounds of a battle waged in the unimaginable depths of the past. Her lychguard stumbled in moments later.

  ‘Defend the entrance,’ she told Shaudukar. ‘Buy me time.’

  The lychguard nodded and took up position. They hefted their shields and prepared to serve their cryptek. Valnyr cast them from her mind and tried to ignore the sounds that surrounded her: the ululating cries of the aliens, the static-laced screams of the flayers and the time-wounded echoes of her lost kin. Panic and fear drove her. Through her mind, in some dark corner of her being, some facet of her demanded in increasingly shrill tones that she survive.

  She knew this chamber, knew what it represented. This had been a room where the early chronomancers practised their art. Here they had perfected the sciences that Valnyr used. She knew the theory behind what had been accomplished in such a place.

  She began to chant, activating long dormant protocols in the laboratory. Rock rumbled and lights flickered on. Ancient scenes of glory from the history of the necrontyr looked down from the walls, an inspiration to those chronomancers who would have worked within. The panels slid down, exposing blinking sensors and whizzing gears.

  Valnyr recited names, placing exception commands on her and her lychguard. There was no time to fine-tune what she attempted.

  Echoes rose around her, sounds of battle and loss, mixing with the looping static of the flayers and the keening of the interloping aliens.

  ‘Let them through!’ she snarled.

  The lychguard did not question her words. They tumbled back, some driven to the ground by organisms or flayers.

  Valnyr backed up, running towards the wall. A grim carving showed eldar and necrontyr forces fighting one another above her. She stumbled and an alien dived onto her, four bladed and clawed arms stabbing at her chassis. She raised her staff to ward it away.

  There was no time to consider the consequences of what she attempted, no time to replicate perfect conditions. She had to act now. Valnyr shouted the activation command.

  Light flashed. Sounds stretched. The buzzing grew louder.

  Then the light faded and silence engulfed the chamber.

  The aliens and the flayers were gone. So were three of her lychguard, although Valnyr found that she could no longer remember their names.

  A new panel on the walls caught her attention. Necrontyr forms battled what could only be altered necrons and stylistic representations of the nameless organisms. A new event in the history of Kelrantyr, but one that, now, had always happened. Such was the power of her art.

  ‘Mistress?’ asked Shaudukar, shaking her from her reverie.

  ‘We make for the Dynasts, as before.’

  Already they could hear the static cries of more flayer packs and the mindless screaming of the organic beasts.

  Chapter Five

  Anrakyr’s anger rose. His plans were rapidly being thwarted, lost amid the swarming tyranids.

  His already depleted army, comprised of necrons from dozens of tomb worlds, faced countless aliens. That the swarm diverted to consume the oozing remains of the humans offered little consolation. Already the warrior-beasts were probing his lines, already they were attacking his necrons. His deathmark spies, kept hidden in their pocket dimensions, reported massive feeder tendrils descending into the oceans. Crypteks said that the planet’s orbit was destabilising as colossal volumes of liquid were funnelled into orbit.

  A monolith dived for the ground, coated in flapping, gnawing creatures. Careening into a wall, it carved a swath through battling necron phalanxes of warriors and scuttling, clawed things.

  While it allowed his army to face the uncounted numbers of aliens, they were still vulnerable to attack from the sky. Monoliths anchored the line, but they were slowly being overwhelmed.

  A gap opened before him. Necrons were flung into the air. Warriors were broken. Destroyers were rent asunder by clawing, shrieking animals. Huge, towering tyranid beasts sprinted towards him and his sentient attendants.

  A great creature, towering three times Anrakyr’s height, came rumbling from the swarms of its lesser brethren. Great scythe arms were brandished to the sky, while a brutal call emerged from its mouth. It barrelled towards Anrakyr, mouth gaping open and oozing ichor.

  Anrakyr met its charge, driving a wedge of sentient necrons, immortals and the like, into the tyranids. The huge warrior-beast threw itself upon him, trying to crush his skeletal chassis beneath its bulk.

  The Traveller fell. He landed awkwardly, spear stuck beneath his bones. The mass of the tyranid creature cracked down, pushing him into the stone. Anrakyr struggled to get his hands beneath him, to gain leverage against the hulking beast. Blood dripped from above, staining his body and eating into the necrodermis. The living metal reacted, repairing the damage as quickly as it was wrought.

  He realised the blood’s source: the axehead crest of his Pyrrhian overlordship. He sawed his head back and forth, carving into the blubber and flesh of the creature above. It roared in pain and fury. Anrakyr carved a space for himself, and soon he was able to push himself to his knees and retrieve his spear.

  Blood dripped down his body, pitting the pristine metal, and Anrakyr tried to ignore the cloying disgust that threatened to drown him. More space was opened. He could see green lightning flickering and hear the screams of dying tyranids through the quivering flesh of the beast. He swung the spear, hitting something vital, and a great torrent of
acid-blood and viscera gouted out from the animal. Its movements slowed and it ceased breathing.

  Anrakyr continued to pull himself through, bursting through the skin, bones and chitin of the monster. He clambered up, stood upon the vast bulk of the tyranid beast and surveyed the battle.

  Tyranid creatures milled as something like shock passed through the swarm. Warriors and other slow-moving necrons punished the animals, reaping and killing.

  He hoisted his spear into the sky, stabbing out towards the occluded disc of Kehlrantyr’s sun. A cheer emerged from those battered sentient necrons that surrounded him.

  Behind him, at the far end of the defile, his crypteks, broken warriors and programmed constructs chewed their way into the mountain range. Beneath, behind, below, lurked his entire reason for coming to this planet. The tombs of the Kehlrantyr Dynasts. Legions of warriors. Enough to drown these aliens, and not just these, but the paltry humans that grew like scabs of bacterial life across planets once belonging to the necrons.

  But he must wait to secure them. He must survive long enough.

  The tyranids threw themselves at his line, unheeding of the casualties they suffered. Necron warriors endured the onslaught. Anrakyr watched as warriors were pulled beneath thrashing tyranids, dragged beneath rending claws that beat futilely at metal forms. They stood, seconds later, shrugging off the beasts with a stubbornness bred out of ignorance.

  What went on within the skulls of Anrakyr’s warriors, he could not even begin to guess. Did they still think? Did they know that they fought? In the end, it mattered little to the Traveller.

  Anrakyr threw himself into their midst, stood shoulder to shoulder with the barely cognisant, the dull-minded warriors who made up the bulk of his host and his race. Vast jaws gaped towards him, hissing and spitting acid. One scrabbled over a warrior to his fore, spiked limbs flailing. Its jaws crunched into his head. Diamond-hard teeth punched through the metal of his skull. Something akin to pain flashed along artificial synapses. A thick, glistening tongue slapped against his face, trying to find purchase. Bladed limbs scrabbled against his body, getting hooked into the gaps between his ribs. The jaws tightened. Anrakyr grabbed them. He began to pull.