Fabius Bile: Clonelord Read online

  Fabius left Key to its studies and turned his attentions to his own. Over the course of the intervening centuries, he had begun a careful exploration of certain spurs of the webway, with Key’s obliging aid. The labyrinthine dimension was littered with the detritus of a fallen culture. Most of it was altogether useless for his purposes. But some of it had value, and was worth acquiring.

  For the past several decades, that had been his driving focus, or distraction, perhaps – gathering what he could, to pore over and study. Like a carrion bird, picking at the bones of a forgotten empire. The thought was not displeasing. After all, there was much that could be learned from bones, if one was observant.

  He watched the gateway draw closer and his gaze slid over the multifarious, intricate carvings that covered every speck of its surface. Even this – a simple interdimensional hub – was nothing less than a work of art. Next to it, even the greatest cathedrals of Terra were nothing more than rude hovels, their stones grubbed from the earth and stacked with haphazard care. Though he doubted any cathedral had ever suffered as great a daemonic infestation as this edifice did.

  It was always the same. Wherever there was a closed gate, you would find the Neverborn, lurking on the threshold. As mindless and as predictable as insects. And like insects, they came in a variety of forms, each with its own purpose. Once, he’d made a study of such creatures, taking several apart at the base level. They were frustratingly unique, even those with similar physiognomies.

  ‘I will never understand your fascination with these creatures,’ Saqqara said, stepping past Key. ‘Eldar are nothing more than rootless vermin. Fit only as sacrifices.’

  ‘Aeldari,’ Fabius corrected absently, still watching the daemons.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Aeldari – it’s what they called themselves before their empire imploded. Or as close as the human mouth can come to shaping that particular term. A fascinating language. At the height of their culture, even the most banal conversation between equals was akin to a performance.’

  ‘A useless affectation for a useless race,’ Saqqara said.

  ‘Oh, I’d say they have some small use,’ Savona said, playing with the necklace of spirit stones she wore. The colourful stones were mostly cracked and dull, though one or two still flickered with an inner light. She smiled, as if listening to something only she could hear, and tapped one of the stones against her lips.

  Saqqara shook his head in disgust. ‘Sybarite,’ he said loftily.

  ‘Yes, and quite good at it.’ Her forked tongue slid from between her lips and curled lewdly. The Word Bearer looked away, his scarred features set and still.

  Skalagrim laughed at the exchange. ‘Why are you even here, Saqqara? Come to pray for our souls?’

  Saqqara snorted. ‘Prayer is for the faithful. Which you are not.’ A cruel smile spread across his face. ‘Doubly damned, is what you are. Tell me something, turncoat, how did it feel, helping the Clonelord kill your own kin? Was the reward worth it?’

  ‘Truthfully, I would have done it for free.’ Skalagrim’s grin was a sharp slash of yellow. ‘Do you have any idea what it’s like, living in a tomb among those who are all but ghosts? Walking and breathing, but ghosts all the same. My brothers were naught but broken automatons by then – trapped in dreams of the past, and held fast in those dreams by the blind gaze of a dead demigod.’ He took a step towards Saqqara. ‘They made pilgrimages, you know. To sit and stare at that ravaged husk, as if they might dredge some meaning from its ruined features. Every day, more and more of them.’

  ‘Horus was the chosen of the gods, the uncrowned king,’ Saqqara snapped, face flushed with religious fervour. ‘In him was the will of the Primordial Annihilator made manifest for all to see and glory in.’

  ‘Yes. Glorious, right up until the point his father snuffed him from existence, as easily as you or I might crush a serf’s skull. The gods stripped his divinity from him quickly enough after that.’ Skalagrim bared his teeth in something that was more like a grimace than a smile. ‘And us, with him. All that we had fought for, all that we bled for – gone.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Just like that.’

  ‘Hardly as quick as that,’ Fabius said. ‘Victory slipped through our fingers the moment Horus chose to reach into the dark and something reached back. We sacrificed our ambitions on the altar of his hubris, and when he fell, he dragged us all down inexorably with him. And not just Horus – Fulgrim as well. And Angron. Magnus. Lorgar.’ He looked at Saqqara. ‘The gods you worship are nothing save lies, hidden behind masks of folklore and superstition. Interdimensional cancers, their mindless hunger confused for sentience by the lost and the damned.’ Saqqara flinched.

  ‘Speaking of which, the last time I saw that many Neverborn was aboard the Terminus bloody Est,’ Khorag grumbled, gesturing to the screens. ‘Can’t stand the blasted things, myself.’ He patted Paz’uz, mussing the nest of writhing, frond-like tendrils atop its head.

  Saqqara looked down at the panting beast, and then up at its master. ‘So I see.’ He stepped back as the creature’s drool began to eat through the deck. ‘They haven’t noticed us yet, but they will soon enough.’ He shot Fabius a wary glance. ‘You’re not planning on dropping the Geller field again, are you?’

  Fabius snorted. ‘Have no fear, Saqqara. We will be doing this the old-fashioned way.’ He turned to Wolver. ‘Roll out the guns, if you would.’

  Wolver nodded. ‘The Vesalius is happy.’

  Fabius smiled. ‘I knew it would be.’

  A few moments later, the frigate’s weapons turrets spat destructive lances of incandescent light. The light struck the vast edifice like lightning, scouring daemons from their perches by the hundreds. Defensive batteries opened up a moment later, as thousands of darting, in­human shapes flung themselves into the void as a billowing cloud. It wasn’t a battle so much as pest control, and it was over almost as quickly as it had begun.

  Fabius turned to Key. ‘Now, quickly, before they reform. Open the gate.’

  Key raised its hands and began to sing. There were no words to the song, nor even anything resembling a recognisable sound. Nonetheless, the wraithbone within the Vesalius resonated with the non-sound, and that resonance echoed outwards, into the void. Like the tolling of some ancient bell, buried deep beneath the black earth. The reverberation washed over the webway gate, and the primeval sensory apparatus within the construction awoke for the first time in millennia.

  Slowly, the flat sheen of the gateway began to crack. Veins of shimmering light speared through its expanse. Then, with a roar that Fabius felt in his bones, the gateway opened. ‘All ahead full,’ he snapped.

  The Vesalius surged forward, defensive batteries still firing as the daemons began to regroup. The frigate plunged through the antediluvian gateway like a scalpel into flesh. Colourless bands of lightning played across the surface of the gate as its own defensive systems struggled to awareness. Fabius turned to the hololithic projection of the gateway, studying the scans they’d made of it. Experience guided his eye to a singular point – the control node for the hyperspatial nexus.

  He rattled off a string of coordinates, and Wolver, following procedure, directed a lance strike at the control node. With the node destroyed, the gateway would remain open, until he decided it was time to destroy it. He paid little heed to the daemontide that flooded into the webway in the frigate’s wake, already intent on calibrating the necessary sensor sweeps. His quarry would be close. It was just a matter of getting to it before any other scavengers. Key fell silent as the ship entered the webway, the echoes of its song drifting to the far corners of the command deck.

  The Vesalius slid easily through the darkness of the compromised pathway. Such was rarely the case – most of the hyperspatial network had collapsed, or been destroyed, during the aeldari’s fall from grace. What was left was often too small to traverse, save on foot. Luckily, such was not the case
here.

  On the display screens, the pan-galactic expanse of navigable tunnels spread out around the ship, in all possible directions. A labyrinth of scalloped coils, curving away at impossible angles, at once a thing of the materium and the warp. A sideways place, existing between what was and what should not be, spanning entire dimensions. The glowing tunnels reminded Fabius of nothing so much as an exceedingly complex network of capillaries and arteries, running through some vast, unknowable corpus.

  ‘Beautiful,’ Fabius murmured. ‘Look well, and long. Know sorrow, and weep. For we shall never see such grandeur again.’ It was an old quote, but apt.

  ‘Until the next time we break into the webway,’ Skalagrim said. ‘And the next, and the next, until you find some new obsession.’

  The Vesalius drifted on, engines at half power. There was no need for speed, here. The sensor-feeds from the hull flashed across the screens as the ship’s cogitators calculated and recorded every aspect of its surroundings over the course of the next hour. As the numbers scrolled across the real-time hololithic projection, Fabius added them to a digital map. While there was little chance of ever discovering the full extent of the webway, he could at least make some attempt to chart those areas they had explored. Periodically, a thin lance of plasma fire carved a mark in the crumbling stratum above the ship.

  ‘Chalk marks on a labyrinth wall,’ Arrian said, as the afterglow of one such burst faded. ‘You foresee us returning here, at some point?’

  ‘No.’ Fabius looked up from the cogitator feed. ‘But what is the point of exploration, without some mark of our passage?’ An alert flashed on his feed and he stiffened. ‘Ah.’

  A moment later, Wolver, echoing the servitors below, said, ‘Destination sighted.’

  Fabius turned from the hololith as the craftworld crept into view. It was a leviathan of a ship, like a continent ripped free of some world’s crust and twisted into an arrowhead. Its design was almost organic – as if it had been grown, rather than made. Given what he knew about wraithbone, that seemed entirely possible.

  As the Vesalius drew closer, docking towers became visible, surmounting the dorsal frame of the craftworld. There were hundreds of the thin, needle-like protrusions, rising from the vessel’s back like quills. Scattered among them were blister-like defence turrets and launch bays. All dark, all silent. The craftworld had been dead for centuries. According to the records Fabius had plundered in his travels, many craftworlds had launched themselves unfinished into the webway, desperately seeking to save themselves from the expanding warp rift that would become the Eye of Terror. Some had survived, despite all odds.

  Others, like this one, had not. He turned back to the hololith. The Vesalius’ sensors had begun feeding information about the silent hulk into the system. Every craftworld was different, though they all shared some similarities.

  ‘What was it called?’ Arrian asked, studying the hololith.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Fabius said dismissively. ‘What is in a name? It is no less a treasure trove for being unidentified.’ He spun the image, increasing its size. ‘Smaller than most, but in better condition than expected. Yes, a treasure trove indeed.’

  ‘It’s just another dead world, in a dead universe,’ Skalagrim said. ‘How many have you plundered now, Fabius? Fifty? A hundred?’

  ‘Hardly so many as that,’ Fabius said. ‘In any event, a thousand would not be enough. I am rebuilding a base of knowledge that has not existed for aeons. Knowledge far beyond anything we are familiar with. The knowledge that enabled the ancient aeldari to carve tunnels through sub-space, or cage suns.’

  ‘Or live forever, eh?’ Skalagrim laughed. ‘I know you, you old fiend. I know what drives you. You’re nothing more than a Wahmpuryi, scuttling from century to century.’

  ‘And, pray tell, what is that?’

  ‘A blood-drinking daemon, from Cthonian folklore. There were similar legends on Barbarus and Terra as well.’ Khorag chuckled. ‘Superstitious, are we, Skalagrim?’

  ‘Merely making a point, you wheezing canker.’ Skalagrim gestured with his axe. ‘A blind man could see it. Oh, he boasts of his New Men – his apex beasts – and how they will replace us and the mortals both, but for all his talk of dying with dignity, he has no intention of doing so. You’re a hypocrite, Fabius. And I grow tired of humouring you.’

  ‘You are free to leave at any time, renegade,’ Fabius said. ‘As I have told you the last three times you’ve made this complaint. There are gunships in the bays. Take one. Set your own course, Skalagrim. The universe is vast, and a wise man can find his own destiny.’

  Skalagrim fell silent. Fabius smiled. ‘But you won’t, will you?’ He twitched a finger chidingly. ‘You never have. Because you are Skalagrim the Judas. The Twice-Damned. He who betrayed his lord, not once, but twice, to save himself. Where would you go, Skalagrim? What warband would have anything to do with a treacherous butcher like yourself?’

  ‘Abaddon wishes his company, at least,’ Saqqara said idly. ‘He has offered quite the reward for the pelt of the False Son. Perhaps we should turn him over ourselves…’

  ‘Try it, god-botherer,’ Skalagrim snapped. ‘I’ll split your gullet and feed you to the beasts that howl beneath the engines.’

  ‘Hide your fangs, Skalagrim. You are safe here, as I promised all those years ago. Whatever else, I keep my promises.’ Fabius turned away from the seething Apothecary and back to the hololith, his hands clasped behind his back. ‘Besides, I may well have need of you, before this is done.’ He smiled. ‘Waste not, want not, remember?’

  The dead craftworld drew close. No lights lit its sullen frame, no flicker of power tripped the Vesalius’ sensors. Then, Fabius had not expected any of its systems to still be active, not after so long. He could not say with any certainty how long it had floated here, but it was a prize unlike any other. Most such husks were badly damaged, or crawling with Neverborn, or worse. This one was seemingly intact. Perhaps a plague had claimed its inhabitants, or some form of mass, ritual suicide, leaving the vessel itself unharmed.

  Fabius rotated the hololith again, studying the sensor feeds of the craftworld. He identified one of the tertiary docking spires as the easiest point of access. ‘We’ll take one of the assault landers in – not Butcher-Bird. Not after last time.’

  The gunship had strafed their prize, possibly out of spite, but more likely out of boredom. Like the Vesalius, it was a patchwork thing, and the infernal spirit that inhabited it was far too destructive for an operation like this. Instead, they would take one of the several reclaimed assault landers that now occupied the lower bays. While no more pleasant than the gunship, they were at least more sedate, controlled as they were by dull-witted servitors.

  ‘That place is cursed,’ Saqqara said, bluntly. ‘I can hear the death screams of the vermin which inhabited it from here. They died even as they closed that gate behind them.’ He spat and the deck sizzled. ‘Useless creatures. The galaxy is better without them.’

  ‘I am inclined to agree,’ Skalagrim said. ‘Never trust the knife-ears. They are lies made flesh. Worse than Neverborn.’

  ‘Perhaps. But they were wise, in their wickedness. And I would know what they knew. The survival of the species may depend on it.’

  ‘And yours as well, Chief Apothecary,’ Arrian said softly.

  Fabius did not reply.

  Chapter five

  The Ghost Halls

  The craftworld had been smothered in darkness for time out of mind. Its empty galleries and crumbling, untended habitation domes had seen no light in countless centuries. Now, it was filled with the echoes of an army. A small army, but noisy nonetheless. A tangle of stab-lights swept out around more than a dozen armoured forms, illuminating the gentle curve of fluted columns and the fragile-seeming walkways of the dead world they traversed without fear or respect.

  The Emperor’s Children moved in loo
se formation, with all the casual arrogance of veterans of the longest war. Savona prowled at their head. A golden death-mask of a helmet, which had once belonged to an eldar autarch, encased her narrow skull.

  Beside her, as always, strode her amanuensis, Bellephus. The gutter-poet seemed to be her loyal dog, for reasons known only to them. The hulking renegade wore battleplate inscribed with line upon line of obscene verse, and his helmet bristled with unnatural fleshy growths. Despite the state of his armour, the bolter he carried was well cared for, as was the sword sheathed at his side. Fabius knew him for a steady hand, as far as such things went.

  Savona gestured silently and the Space Marines closest to her spread out, always staying in sight of one another, and their commander.

  Fabius watched approvingly, as he and the other Apothecaries followed the armoured figures. Savona was competent, despite her proclivities. Though she was not of the Legion, she had adapted well to their ways. Her warriors trusted her as they would any Legion officer. Which was to say, not much. But that was enough. Savona glanced back at him, her gaze unreadable behind the sculpted visor of her helm.

  She did not want him dead, he thought. Not anymore, at least. Savona could not lead a Legion warband, save at the whim of another. There were limits to the loyalty of his brothers. But she had come to understand that he had little interest in the games of command. Once she’d realised that he did not intend to usurp her authority, she’d sheathed her knives and fallen mostly into line. Her support of Thalopsis had been nothing more than a whim, or perhaps a subtle way of disposing of a rival. Fabius approved of such subtlety, so long as it did not inconvenience him in any way.

  A short, sharp yelp caught his attention. Gland-hounds ghosted through the shadows, keeping pace with the Space Marines. The augmented mortals moved silently, staying in contact with each other by brief blurts of sound. Their enhanced hearing allowed them to triangulate the calls of their fellows, where scent and sight were not optimal. Ident-runes flashed as his augurs scanned the codes tattooed on his servants.