Belisarius Cawl- the Great Work - Guy Haley Read online

  He stared at the mountain, until his body became as still as the rock, and his mechadendrites moved on his back as the trees on Mount Pharos had once swayed in the wind.

  ‘We leave tomorrow. Prepare your men, Decimus.’ Cawl gave the tetrarch an earnest look. ‘This will be a difficult mission.’

  Chapter Six

  What Cawl did next

  Circa 10,000 years ago

  Bang. Metal flexed in the mountain breeze, twitching towards a boulder as if teasing it, then slamming hard when the wind picked up. Bang.

  There were not many places in the Emperor’s laboratories where one could rest. There were fewer places to access the outside world, and fewer still that were safe. Cawl, as director of the sub-dermal interface division, had the privileges to venture beyond the walls and the endless security checks. When he could, he liked to go into the thin atmosphere of the Himalazian Plateau, to feel the heat on his back from the weary sun, to smell air that had not been forced through filtration units a hundred thousand times.

  The Emperor’s principal laboratory was high on the massif, but there were others, connected by deep transit lines that spread as secret webs under Terra’s skin. Cawl’s base was at the edge of Himalazia, in the borderlands of the burned out kingdom of Miamar. From the mountains he could see down into the lost city of Putoo, and the shell of its abandoned hive. He was old enough to remember the place when it lived. With each successive era of mankind, civilisation built ever-larger monuments, while pillaging what remained of the natural world. Each cycle brought greater edifices to rot in the dust that followed. Cawl believed that one day there would only be dust, and no more edifices would rise.

  The Emperor offered an end to the cycle. That was why Cawl served him.

  His favourite spot was a bridge over a dry ravine where once a small river flowed. The bridge was primitive, made of stone. It had survived the millennia when other things of more advanced materials had not, like the machine the metal had come from. Clay, stone, piles of earth, these are the things that last for aeons. Shaped metal rusted. Hydro­carbons frittered away. Organics perished. Glass returned to sand.

  Bang.

  Dry mountain cliffs rose over the bridge. Pebbles rounded by vanished water clustered the ravine floor. Trash from a dozen epochs poked out from between the stones: plasteks, metal, bone, carved stone, lumps of aggregated technology masquerading as natural debris, all components of obscure purpose and origin. Cawl stared at the sheet of metal banging in the wind against the boulder. An ancient flood must have lodged it in place, not long before the river dried up forever and Earth’s hydrological cycle atrophied, otherwise the metal would have rusted to nothing.

  Instead it persisted in the desiccated Himalazian air. One thousand, two thousand, three thousand years. Who knew? Cawl himself was old by then, very old. The metal was older.

  Bang.

  The metal had hit the rock so many times it had performed its own minor erosions on the stone, pocking the watered smoothness with ugly holes.

  Bang.

  Ever since the last flood, thought Cawl, that metal has been there, caught in a vice of stone, unable to get free. He examined it from his lofty position over the riverbed, as he had many times before. He knew the metal intimately, though he had never been closer to it than the bridge. He was a dispassionate observer, like a god. A god of metal! He smiled at the idea; it was a preposterous notion worthy of Mars. He despised tech-priests. Mumbling shamans who worshipped the things that they made. It infuriated him that the Emperor dealt with them when they should have been conquered, and their sciences returned to more enlightened minds.

  Bang.

  Large dents covered the steel, not quite obliterating the lines the metal had once possessed. Cawl reconstructed it mentally, seeing again the sleek curves and indented embellishment. Their form suggested the sheet had been part of a shell. Cawl often reconstructed a machine in his mind to fit the metal. Today, he imagined a fast ground car, powerful, fusing science with a sculptor’s art. A fine machine of a kind rare in those days, a public display of wealth not fit for the new world the Emperor was building. He wondered what prince of what era had owned the machine the steel had covered, and if he had ever thought what would happen to it when he was gone, or whether he preferred never to dwell on its end, in case he considered his own death.

  ‘You are lost in thought.’

  The voice made him start. He turned too swiftly.

  Unbearable light smote his eyes.

  Cawl woke from one memory to another.

  Circa 10,000 years ago

  Ryza heaved with refugees from all corners of the Imperium. As a forge world, it existed forever on the cusp of starvation. All the high technologies it guarded would not save it if the flow of food and water from elsewhere ever stopped. The acolytes of the Machine-God prided themselves on their knowledge. They all knew the never-mentioned truth that forge worlds were hostages to fortune.

  Friedisch and Cawl pushed their way through the crowds. Tez-Lar’s bulky presence helped most times, but the occasions when it did not were occurring more often. The districts they were assigned to assess were under the protein reclamation facilities of the Gamma-Kappa spill, the worst in the sector. People pushed at them, so tired and dehydrated they could do little other than wail. Their words were lost in the babble. Incomprehensible accents hindered understanding, but the message was clear: water, water, give us water.

  ‘There is no more water!’ Cawl cried out over the pleas of the crowd. ‘You have had your allotment for the day! Please, stand aside. We are here to conduct our census so you can be properly provisioned. That is why we are here. We are here to help you!’

  ‘We are not the watermen! Stand back!’ shouted Friedisch. ‘Stand back! Can’t you see we’re trying to help?’

  The people did not come any closer, but they did not retreat either. The road ahead was a crooked way between pipes plunging into the bowels of the plant. It was blocked.

  Dozens of vacant, desperate people stared at them.

  ‘I don’t like this,’ said Friedisch. His fingers danced around the holster of his laspistol.

  ‘Leave it alone, for the sake of the three-in-one!’ hissed Cawl. ‘Do you want to start a riot?’

  ‘But they’re not moving,’ whispered Friedisch.

  ‘They’re not bludgeoning us to death yet either,’ said Cawl.

  Tez-Lar stood in front them, his cyborg bulk intimidating those who might dare to harm the tech-priests. Yet every day they came closer. Every day the threat of unrest rose. It was certain. Cawl saw the situation as a numerical set, proceeding by predictable steps to a simple conclusion.

  ‘Give us your water. Give us all of it.’

  The crowd’s noise dropped off immediately and the people drew back in fear, not of Cawl, Friedisch and Tez-Lar, but of the score of men who encircled the three. They were filthy as all the rest, but significantly better fed, and not exhibiting the signs of water-fever that touched the faces of all the others.

  A space opened around Cawl’s group as the crowd withdrew, leaving the men behind like beach rocks revealed by the tide.

  ‘Oh no,’ whispered Friedisch. He drew his laspistol, the rasp of metal on poly-leather loud in the quiet. Cawl already had his volkite up and charging.

  Their leader stepped forwards. He wore the battered uniform of an extinct Imperial Army regiment. The cloth was grimy, as if dragged through oil. On his lapel service medals glinted. They were the only clean thing about him. His hair was a filthy fuzz around his head, his beard matted. Eyes bright as his medals glared from the hair and dirt, their gaze sharpened by deprivation. He carried a makeshift bludgeon torn from a machine, and a battered autopistol. Eight of the others carried similar ranged weapons. All of them had clubs.

  Friedisch canted to Cawl’s implants. p.>

  ‘We are on the business of the Technarchy of Ryza and the Holy Synod,’ said Cawl. ‘Stand aside, or nobody will get their rations tomorrow.’

  ‘I said,’ said the man, ‘hand over your water.’

  ‘We do not have any,’ said Cawl. ‘We are conducting a census to ensure that all refugees in this sector are adequately provisioned.’ He raised his voice to speak to the crowd. ‘If you do not aid us, there will be no water!’

  ‘They won’t help you,’ said the man. ‘They’re scared of us.’ He stepped forwards, and pointed at Cawl with his maul. ‘That’s your fault. I didn’t want to be a criminal. You’ve made us like this. We are robbers only to survive. I fought in the war to protect people like this! I fought to protect the Imperium!’ he said. ‘Now look at me, worse than Horus himself, stealing water from babies, because you cog worshipping bastards care nothing for men. I’ve had enough. Give us water. Give us food.’

  ‘We are here to help,’ said Cawl sympathetically. ‘I understand. I do.’

  ‘I doubt that, all you cogs are the same,’ said the man. He stared with undisguised hatred at Cawl’s input ports, at Friedisch’s electric eye, at Tez-Lar and the red robes they all wore. ‘You don’t care about us because we’re people and not machines. This is your last chance,’ said the man.

  ‘Please,’ said Cawl. ‘Stand aside. We have nothing to give you.’

  ‘And I’ve got nothing to lose,’ said the man.

  The numbers that govern the smooth working of the Machine-God’s Magnum Opus finished their whirring progress. The universe rolled onto a new track. Violence was the proof of the equation.

  ‘Kill them!’ the man shouted.

  Before the words had died on the air, the veteran was dead, speared by a searing thermal beam from Cawl’s pistol that burned out his organs from the inside. Friedisch killed another. Tez-Lar stepped in front of a third man and crushed his throat in an industrial claw.

  The tech-priests’ show of force did no good whatsoever.

  The crowd let out a collective moan. Their individuality was subsumed by herd instinct. Cawl could feel conscious thought slipping from them. It was like watching a man die.

  The crowd surged forwards. Cawl got off a couple more shots, a death on the end of each, but he was no longer firing at individuals, but a beast of many parts, and it did not care for the loss of such tiny limbs.

  A flurry of stinking bodies filled his senses. The crowd pulled him down, part-divesting him of his robes. Starvation’s frailty had them all, and their blows were feather light. Dirty fingernails scraped at his memcore plug, scratching his scalp.

  They’ll kill me simply by weight, he thought, crushing the air from my lungs until I suffocate.

  Friedisch screamed. Tez-Lar let out a terminal burble from his voxmitter as he died his second death.

  This was it then, the end of Belisarius Cawl.

  Something shifted in his head. Things got mixed up.

  There was a bridge over a dry stream where a sheet of metal banged in the wind. A river of light ran arrow straight all the way to a horizon crowded with gargantuan machines, and a voice asked:

  ‘What is the final warning of the Sixteen Universal Laws?’

  A kindly face that was never the same with sad brown eyes that always were. Then the primarch, poor Roboute Guilliman, stood over him, ten thousand years ago and not so long ago, always serious, always worried, no joy in his life of duty.

  ‘Are you sure this is the only way?’ Roboute Guilliman said in despair. ‘Are you sure?’

  The whooping snap of energy weapons crashed over the shouts of the crowd. A machine blared out an alarm. The weight fell off him. A cybernetic hand reached in and pulled him free from a pile of bodies. Each corpse had a precision wound smoking in its back.

  A visibly shaking Friedisch was bracketed by heavily augmented warriors. Dozens of dead refugees lay around the pipes. A fire burned away to the right. People were running in all directions.

  ‘They came, Belisarius! They came!’ said Friedisch. ‘Thanks be to the prime architect!’

  Cawl took in the troops’ garb. They looked like Cult Mechanicus skitarii, but he was certain they were not. If they were, they hailed from some other place than Ryza, for their armour was a soft, pearly white, and their cloaks grey and black.

  ‘Are you Belisarius Cawl?’ A female voice addressed him from beneath one of the helms. An unaugmented hand reached up to detach it, revealing an unaugmented face.

  ‘Who wishes to know?’ he said. The scratches on his scalp stung.

  ‘Belisarius Cawl, adept grade, multiple disciplines, borderline heretic by the reckoning of Mars?’

  ‘That’s very flattering, but you haven’t answered my question.’

  ‘You answer mine or I’ll leave you here,’ she said. She wasn’t very friendly. ‘Once we’re gone, the probability of you leaving this place alive will be significantly less.’

  He couldn’t argue with that.

  ‘I am Belisarius Cawl,’ he confirmed.

  She nodded; she had known all along. ‘Then come with me.’

  The ground shook. Neither the woman nor any of her henchmen nor Friedisch seemed to notice, though Cawl was so unbalanced his arms wheeled.

  ‘Cawl,’ Friedisch’s voice said, though Friedisch did not speak. ‘My lord Cawl. It is happening again.’

  Now

  ‘My lord.’

  Cawl’s visual sensors came back on with a flicker of green light. Data streamed across the inner spaces of his consciousness.

  Transit. Tank. Prime seven class energy cage transport. Destination Mount Pharos. Temporary mental disassociation detected. Cause unknown. Speed five miles an hour. Exterior temperature 97 grades. Angulation of travel nine degrees from horizontal. Direction, fourteen degrees north, relative to planetary magnetic pole.

  ‘My lord? Are you in good function?’ said not-Friedisch.

  Cawl peered out into the outside world.

  ‘Friedisch?’ He realised it was not Friedisch but someone furnished with a facsimile of Friedisch’s voice, a copy, and therefore imperfect.

  ‘Negative. I am designated Qvo-87, my lord,’ said Qvo-87.

  Cawl moved a little out of his transit cradle. Something disconnected from his torso and bleeped urgently. He looked through to the driver’s compartment, where Alpha Primus doggedly piloted the machine up the low hills of the mountain’s skirt. Mount Pharos’ foothills were brief indeed, three undulations, then came soaring sides of bare grey rock. Four other tanks moved in their convoy: two Repulsors of the Adeptus Astartes, and last an ancient Land Raider and a Razorback of the Scythes of the Emperor.

  Cawl had known Arkhan Land. Land was never happy with the name given his tank.

  A fragment of memory from a distant time popped into his head.

  ‘Land’s Raider!’ Arkhan Land said angrily, that strange simian he’d cooked up in a jar jigging about on his shoulder. ‘Land’s Raider!’

  Felix insisted his men go first. The first tank in the column had already passed the castellum and headed on to the fortress-monastery approach. Felix’s Repulsor, its cobalt blue livery liberally smirched with Sotha’s grave dust, was in the process of rounding the side of the ruined fort and disappearing out of view.

  ‘Report,’ said Cawl.

  The castellum overlooked the city and guarded the road to the summit. Its walls were shattered. Craters in the rockcrete showed the effects of acid attack, widened by later digestion processes. Other damage was kinetic, but as always when the tyranids attacked, the projectiles had been reabsorbed during the digestion process. He wondered why the xenos did not take more inert minerals when they stripped a world. Many of them had sophisticated metallic structures in their bodies, and myriad base elements went into their breeding, yet the ferrocrete portions of the castellum, with their l
oads of refined ironides, were barely nibbled.

  He thought this quickly, faster than the time it took Qvo-87 to answer. He thought many other things at the same time. Cawl was always thinking.

  ‘We have had a further tremor event,’ said Qvo-87.

  ‘When?’ Cawl forced himself to focus, pushing his musings on tyranid absorption priorities onto a subsidiary consciousness.

  ‘Concluded three seconds ago, when I woke you. Four point seven seconds in duration. The longest since we arrived.’

  Cawl checked his internal chronometer.

  ‘Simultaneous commencement and the exact duration of the time I was influenced, as before,’ said Cawl. ‘Interesting. Subjective duration of vision does not match the seismic event, yet the two are objectively matched.’

  The tank jolted to the side. A wide fan of rubble that used to be the castellum’s northern tower blocked the road. Alpha Primus took it slowly. Rockcrete fragments scraped along the hull.

  ‘Logging incident. Third tremor since arrival. Third fugue event,’ said Qvo-87. A data-slate emerged from a slot in his side. An autoquill extended from the forefinger of a lesser limb, and he set the nib to the slate. ‘Thermal residue patterns and recent crystalline fracturing in the rock suggest crustal stressing concurrent with your first vision upon the Zar Quaesitor also.’

  With eyes of every conceivable kind, Cawl looked past the castellum to the dead, grey mass of Mount Sotha.

  ‘Most troubling. Most troubling indeed. I had not expected this level of activity so soon.’

  ‘Hypothesis, archmagos dominus?’ asked Qvo-87. ‘For the record.’

  ‘The mechanism is waking, that much is evident,’ said Cawl. ‘The period of dormancy is over.’

  ‘I concur,’ said Qvo-87, though Cawl had no need for his servant’s agreement. Cawl was a genius a hundred times over, Qvo was a… He could barely voice it, even to himself.

  Qvo was a very sophisticated thing.

  ‘I have been thinking of Friedisch a lot recently,’ he said abruptly.