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Empra - Nate Crowley

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Belisarius Cawl: The Great Work’

A Black Library Publication

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EMPRA

Nate Crowley

One

Deep among the manhills of the first people, down south out of Shellforge – that’s where I meet the Angel.

I’m after a fivejaw. A big halfmale, slow from a moult, leaving clumps of crimson fur snagged on the thorngrass. Good fur – the kind I know I’ll need for mother’s burial cloak. So when I see it, I decide to hunt it. I’m on the edge of the old city anyway, digging flux for the forges, so when my shift ends at dusk I just follow the red tufts, all the way down into the old crumble.

I know, I know. Stupid Toa, walking the ghostways at night. But I’m a Shellmaker, not one of the Rivetfolk – I don’t believe in ghosts. And besides, what choice do I have? Tough as they are, even fivejaws are giving in to the poison now. I’ll be lucky to sniff another one this year, let alone before mum needs her cloak.

So here I am, picking my way between the old manhills in the dark, and I can’t even see the lights of the Body Above on account of the fog that’s risen. Stinks worse than spoiled blast-dust, that fog. It’ll be thick with poison, so I wrap a wet cloth over my mouth and nose and hope for the best. I might not believe in ghosts, but I’m jumpy. I keep seeing things looming in the murk, and even though it’s just the worn old statues of the first people, they still make me prickle.

Should be watching my feet, not the fog, ’cause not ten shellwidths later, the dead city makes a fool of me. I think I’m walking over leaf litter, but it’s just a thin crust of vitregren, grown out over a pit in the track. I plunge through it like piss through snow. My forge-breeches save my skin from the glassy stems, but don’t save my arse from the rock below. I hit sloping ground and roll, trying to suck air into my winded gut as I bounce on the stone.

I stop at last, and my spear skitters to a halt a few boltswidths away. There’s no air in me, and I heave for a long moment before I check for broken bones. If a leg’s gone I’ll probably die here, but if an arm’s gone I’ll not be able to dig flux or work the ’phaestus, which’ll be worse. I’m fine, though. Elbow’s taken a solid crack, probably chipped the bone. But my feet carry me and my fingers all bend the right way, so I cross my thumbs, clap my palms to my collarbones, and fan out my hands to make the Quilla in thanks. Hail Two-Bird, hail Empra.

I’ve fallen through the manhill’s skin, into one of the big chambers of the first people. The Rivetfolk say these places are the worst of all, as Two-Bird can’t see into them to shoo the ghosts off. We Shellmakers know better; we take the sight of the Two-Bird – of the Body Above, and Empra – wherever we go. I keep my hands spread in the Quilla, and hold them out like a shield as I look around that musty old cave.

Then I see the sigil – a great white mark looming behind my crossed thumbs, just visible in the dark. A skull daubed in thick pale clay, split in two halves inside a ring of teeth. I freeze like a rat before a gastergrieff, neck-hairs stiffening. A skull within a maw – that’s a holy sign, I know it is. A powerful one. But I can’t remember what it means.

Before I can bring it to mind, something hideous uncurls out of the dark. It’s spindly and red, and I take it for the fivejaw until I clock how big it is – larger than a wild grox. It’s a jungle of tendrils and claws and snippers, spreading out under a baggy red membrane, and it’s got one eye, blazing like hot iron.

My mind’s blank, but my body erupts like a coiled spring, glad to have something to do with all that fear. My spear’s flying before I know what I’m looking at, and it would be a boltswidth deep in the thing, only an arm like a vine whips out and grabs it. The thing snaps my spear like a twig, and then it flows towards me, skittering on the stone with its membrane flapping. I only just get my knife out before it’s on me, and I dodge one, two swipes of its talons. But it’s too fast – before I can get a thrust of my own in, I’m flat on the floor, metal-cold tentacles closed round my wrists.

Figuring that’s my time up, I screw up my eyes and throw my head back, so at least it goes for my throat and makes it quick. But I don’t die. The monster just holds me there, its breath stinking of dust and hot oil, and so I open one eye to get a look at it.

Another eye looks back at me. A human face, or at least half of one. The monster’s head is mostly grimy steel and wires and ventwork. Machinery, somehow – the sort that only comes from heaven, full of the Iron Magic. But on its right-hand side, above a brass jaw and a thick mat of scar tissue, there’s the face of a woman. It makes no sense. Is she imprisoned? Is she being eaten up? Or is she the monster?

‘Inteleggiss,’ growls a speaking-pad on the monster’s neck. Its human eye scowls in concentration, and its machine eye flares. ‘Mey inteleggiss.’

More sounds came out, distorted and grunty, but I’m not listening – the monster’s grip on my left hand is loose, and I reckon I can reach my belt, fish out my skinning blade. I brace myself against the stone, ready to twist free and jam my blade into that eye before it even knows I’m loose. But then the monster surprises me again.

With a click and a greasy-sounding whir, its machine eye turns a deep blue, and casts this glowing web onto the stone beside me. Some of the light touches me and I gasp, but it doesn’t hurt. I can’t even feel it, even though it looks solid. I turn my head and try to focus on the light, and I see it makes a sort of picture. A model, maybe, like the ones the camp’s builders make when they’re planning a new metal store, but made of light and fog that wobbles and fizzes at the edges.

‘Mizerrikoardi,’ says the monster in its weird buzz, and like a spell has been cast, I know what I’m looking at. The light is making a small picture of something vast – a shape I know like I know my own body. Because I see this shape in the sky every day. It’s the Body Above, the Body of Empra. It’s my god, and so this monster has to be an Angel.

Two

After it – she – shows me the picture of the Body, she goes into a sort of seizure, like old Jonus after a gas leak, then goes limp. Whatever she is, she’s in a bad way, and she’s used up whatever strength she had left trying to fend me off. But there’s no question of just leaving her there; she’s a holy creature. And if she is from heaven – if she has touched the Body itself – then her life is way bigger than mine. So I run back to the flux camp, heedless of any ghosts or pitfalls, fetch help from the diggers on the next shift and get her loaded onto a cart bound for Shellforge.

The three who help bring her to the camp are good lads from the hauler’s quarter, the kind with more meat than wits in their heads. They’re curious at first, babbling questions and poking at the Angel’s metal bits. But they know I’m a higher rating than them, so they lay off when they’re told. That’s lucky, as I barely know a thing more than them – all I can tell is the truth: that this Angel’s fallen down from Voyd, and needs healing.

Back home at Shellforge, nothing’s so simple. Because Soft-Voice Kal’s there at the camp gate, checking off the flux carts as they go through and scratching marks on his tally-block. Kal’s alright, as the shamans go – he’s taken on his share of mum’s duties as she’s got sicker, and his faith’s as strong as his good arm. But the man’s obsessed with details, and he can make an hour of fuss from a minute’s error. Two-Bird knows what he’ll make of the Angel, I think, as he catches sight of me and waves the cart over with the blobby spindle of his bad arm.

‘Empratex, Toa.’

‘Empratex, Kal,’ I reply, trying to catch his eye with a cheery smile. But he’s already got his neck craned, trying to look past me into the cart’s bed. He must have heard about it, from someone on one of the other carts.

‘Let’s see it then,’ he says, like I’m five years old and hiding a stolen ration pack behind my back. He levers himself off the gatepost with a huff, and limps over to the side of the cart where the Angel’s laid out under a sheet.

‘It’s a she, Kal, and she’s an Angel from heaven.’

‘We’ll see about that, girl. You wouldn’t be the first to go rooting around in the old city and find some toy of the first people, try to pass it off as Empra’s work. Hmph, an Angel indeed. Let’s take a look at what you’ve rea–’

Kal lifts the sheet with the tip of his bad arm, and his voice cuts off like he’s been brained. He looks that way too: mouth hanging slack, eyes swimming. But then his brow creases and his eyes sharpen up, like he’s recognised something, but he doesn’t know where from.

‘Told you,’ I say sullenly, and put the sheet back before anyone else can wander over for a look.

‘Toa, you need to take her to your mother right now,’ he says, as if that wasn’t my plan already, and I get a little crackle of anger behind my ears. But I don’t answer back, as I’ve barely slept in four shifts, and a fight won’t get the Angel fixed any quicker. ‘Quick as you can,’ he adds, earning himself a look that makes him flinch, before he waves the cart into town.

We pass under the beaten tin Quilla on the gate’s lintel, and head up the main dragway towards the centre of camp, where the sun’s rising behind the bulk of the ’phaestus. It’s a clear morning, so I can pick out all the detail on the side of the giant forge-engine – every vent shimmering in the chill, every gantry crowded with workers coming on shift. Exhausted as I am, I take a moment to thank Empra and Two-Bird for bringing it to us, looking up at the pale bones of the Body Above as I pray. ‘May we work fast, strengthened by the rations,’ I say, ‘and bring your Glory Day soon.’ Then, moving my eyes back down from heaven, I rest a hand guiltily on the Angel’s body, and pray so quietly only it will hear me. ‘Tell me your secrets,’ I whisper. ‘Tell me what life’s like in heaven.’

Three

After I get the Angel to mother’s yurt, she falls into a fever that lasts thirty shifts. At first she’s downstairs behind a screen, but that doesn’t work out. There’s just no peace to be had. Mother’s crackthroat may be in the final stages – the bloody, burbly, bone-mulching stages – but she’s still chief shaman of the forge. That means home’s where the whole priesthood meets and argues, and where gawking kids sometimes need shoving back into the dragway.

The Angel’s got no need of shamans prodding and poking her. So we make a nest for her upstairs in the great yurt’s loft, where mum spends nights in her chair, and where the holy prints are stored in their racks of tubes.

I stay by the Angel’s side all shifts, tending to her according to mother’s directions, and sleeping on a pile of furs beside hers. When mum lets me, I look after her too. I’m allowed to take my rations from the shamans’ stock, and I’m excused from the ’phaestus until either the Angel comes round or she dies. On the night it finally happens, I’m washing her. And like any good Shellmaker daughter, I’m reciting the creed in my head as I work.

I) Empra is the maker of heaven, and the master of the Iron Magic. His home is Tera, the highest vault of heaven, and there he leads the war against his great Enemy.

I scoop the bitter mash of herbs from the bowl, and squeeze the juice out with my hands. Then I lift the furs covering the Angel, and begin to clean. Her strange red robes – which I had reckoned to be membranes like a Barratur’s wings when I first saw her – are off now, and what’s beneath is way smaller and more human than I’d been expecting.

One of her arms is a mess of branching metal claws and tendrils, and her hips gave way to brass legs like an insect’s, plus there’s the half of her head that’s steel. But beyond that, most of her is pale flesh, and skinny as a starveling. Even after the ration shortage last winter, I’d have outweighed her by a stone or two. Her skin is less discoloured now as her blood heals, but it’s still puckered into puffy red rims around the tubes and cables punched into her ribcage. I soothe the seams between flesh and metal with the balm, even though I’m not sure I need to. It’s hard to know what’s infection, and what’s just her nature. It seems like heaven might just be a painful place to live.

II) Empra made the first people long ago, but they forgot him and they forgot the Iron Magic. We are the City-sens, distant and penitent children of the first people. We became the City-sens when Empra came down from Tera in his great steel Body. He came here to make the world a part of heaven.

As I clean the cuts on her meat arm, her hand clenches round the talisman it grips, even in sleep. It’s a strange hand – her fingers can’t be much more than half the width of mine, and are soft as butter – but the thing held in it is even stranger.

When I returned with the boys from the flux camp to fetch her, she’d dragged herself into the little cave under the white sigil. Inside, she was rummaging through a sort of metal pod, just larger than a person, and shaped like a pegwort seed. It was all charred on the outside, like it’d been through a fire, and had one face cracked open to reveal a mess of blood-stained padding. The pod had been alive with the Iron Magic, but the Angel had acted like it was nothing as she foraged jerkily through the insides. Eventually, she’d pulled out this little ridged grey block, with one small glass plate on it, and passed out. She hasn’t let go of it since.

III) But Empra was attacked. His Enemy cleaved his Spirit from his Body and sent it back to Tera, leaving his Body wounded and sleeping in the lowest vault of heaven called Voyd. While the Body Above is broken in Voyd, Empra’s Spirit is trapped in Tera. We cannot meet Empra, and he cannot make the world a part of heaven, until the Body is healed.

‘How’s she faring, Toa?’ comes a quiet, raspy voice from across the loft. Mother’s awake.

‘Still deep under,’ I reply, turning to glance at her through the medicine-haze that drifts through the loft, ‘but I swear on Quilla the worst’s done.’ Mother grunts, either considering what I’ve said or trying to clear her throat. Her face looks tiny. Maybe it’s the mass of hides and gurrux-foam heaped around her that makes her look small, or the sickly orange light flickering up from the herb-burner, but it’s like she’s shrinking in her chair as I watch. She works her jaw, trying to rub moisture into her lips, and winces before she manages to speak again.

‘No blaspheming, girl. Don’t let up on cleaning her, and be sure to pray over the metal… as well as the flesh.’ Mum breaks off in a wet, sucking cough before finding her voice again. ‘There are ’cantations…’ Then she’s asleep again, or just lost in search of a thought – now the crackthroat’s in her head, it can be hard to tell.

I wonder how many days she’s got left, much as I have done most nights in the last year. She’s not dying quick. Secretly, I reckon she can’t stand the thought of letting the tribe’s Works go on without her supervision. Even though Kal and the rest carry much of her burden now, there’s no question who’s chief shaman. Sitting up here, closer to the Body Above than anyone except the workers on the burning mountainside of the ’phaestus, she’s still in charge.

And maybe all she can do now is sip tea and breathe smoke and squint down at the camp through the loft’s little vent-flap – but who’d begrudge her? If anyone’s earned a rest before they die, it’s mother. She’s worked that colossus of an engine out there for thirty years, longer than many live, and been chief shaman for twenty of those. She’s seen the Shellmaker tribe swell to nearly a third of its size again, and increase output from five score shells a year to nearly eight. Two-Bird favours her with the best rations, and even the Girder-people out west honour her name. And her daughter will miss her, when she’s gone.

IV) This is our purpose: to work, and to make the Body whole again. We dig and we smelt and we forge and we rivet, and we offer our Works to the sky. The Enemy sends the poison to dissuade us from our Works. For every day that we strive, it grows thicker in the air. But we are not disheartened.

Mum’s definitely asleep now, her breath keeping pace with the whoosh and whoomph of the big hammers in the night. I wonder if she’s got one ear out for them, even in her dreams. We both know that one of the shells being forged out there is hers. Deep in the ’phaestus, bathed in sparks, is the one that’s going to take her to heaven, and sit in the Body Above until the Glory Day. She’ll be short a cloak, but she tells me not to feel bad about it. Empra will be happier you saved an Angel, she said when I arrived back that night. I hope she’s right.

V) When our bodies fail, we send them to the Body Above, to wait until the work is done. Then, when Empra’s Spirit returns to his Body, he will know his children at last. He will drink the poison of the world away, and begin the Glory Day, when all that is broken shall be repaired by the Iron Magic, and all who are dead shall return from Voyd.

There’s hundreds of tribes out there, each working on a single part of the Body. And we all have our ways of uniting our fallen with Empra, to wait for Glory with him. The throngs of the Girder-people lower their dead into the molten metal that forms their Works, so their people can be woven into the Body’s very bones. The Bloodbrewers of the tar bogs embalm their lost, and set them afloat in the great tanks where the refined godsblood is stored. The Rivetfolk grease their offerings with the rendered fat of their dead, and we stack them in the shells we make. We don’t know what the shells are for – mum thinks they’re Empra’s teeth, on account of their shape – but behind the caps of blast-dust milled for us by the Powdermen, we always entomb a ring of carcasses. Sometimes just one, in the case of someone important like mother.

I try not to think about mum in the shell as I wash the Angel’s body. About how it’ll feel when she’s gone, or how we’ve never really talked about anything but the forge-work. It’s more important to remember that she’ll be back. This life isn’t for living – it’s for working. We’ll have forever to talk come the Glory Day, and we’ll never have to lift so much as a hammer – that’s Empra’s promise.

VI) We cannot touch the Body of Empra itself, as we are too impure, and the air of Voyd would burn us. But the spirit called Two-Bird, with its many bodies of steel, can fly between our world and the heavens. It is Two-Bird who brought us the ’phaestus forges, who brings us the rations that sustain us, and who comes to collect our Works. Two-Bird is Empra’s guardian, and his champion.

As I get to the sixth verse of the creed, it reminds me the Angel needs to eat – and so do I. So I head to the store-basket and fetch back one of the silver packs of rations, stamped with Quilla, the mark of Two-Bird, and say a short prayer before tearing it open. I count out the contents – the three white blocks, the green square, the two red cubes (my favourites) and the pink water.

Rations aren’t the only food, but they’re the best by far. I’ve had world-food from time to time – barratus meat and tunnel-tubes mostly – but it’s messy and hard to prepare, plus it usually makes you ill, so it’s only really for emergencies and ration shortages. Mum says that when she was little there were places called farms, which made stuff that tasted a bit like green squares, but the poison got too bad for them to work anymore. That’s fine though, because green squares are my least favourite part of rations anyway.

After I crumble one of the white blocks into the pink water for the Angel’s feeding tube, we’re ready to eat, and so I close my eyes and say the seventh verse of the creed – the most important one – aloud.

‘Seven – Two-Bird is an aspect of the Body Above, just as the Body is an aspect of Empra. Together, they are Imperium, the whole of god.’

As I finish I open my eyes, and I nearly jump when I find the Angel staring right at me, wide awake. With a soft crackle, her speaking-pad comes to life.

‘Imperium,’ she says, and gives me a look that makes my fingertips shiver. And that’s when things get interesting.

Four

On the surface of it, life’s still normal. The moon comes and goes through another cycle, mum gets sicker somehow, and I return to work. Digging’s done for now in the flux camps, so I’m back working tongs in the ’phaestus, swapping my grazes and coughs for burns and blisters. But it also means I’m in camp, so after shifts I head back to the loft to talk with the Angel.

She sits across from mum in the days, keeping quiet. Healing up, and tinkering with that strange little glass-faced block. From the way she looks at it, I reckon the talisman gives her some way of looking inside herself – but I don’t know what she’s after, or what she’s finding. Now that her red robes are back on, keeping the human parts of her deep in shadow, she’s as hard to read as the flickering glyphs on the talisman itself. She won’t let me wash her anymore, and keeps as much skin covered as possible. It’s like she’s horrified I ever saw underneath the robes; like she’s ashamed of her flesh.

I can see why, maybe. During the fever, she changed. With the robes off, and those red welts between meat and machinery showing, she was starting to seem like a person. Sick and weird, with strange things wired into her. But still a woman, whose skin at least didn’t look much older than mine. Heaven-born she might have been, but she still shat, and she still needed wiping by a forge-rat like me. Now the shroud’s back, and that eye of hers is glowing from under a crimson cowl, she’s an Angel again. An it, not a she – something fierce and faceless and ageless, that you wouldn’t touch unless you wanted to lose a hand.

Still, I can’t quite let go of what I saw underneath. I catch the little scrunch of her eyebrow that shows her annoyance when her tinkering leads to a dead end, and I see the worry in the way she stands when she looks up at the Body Above. Riven through with the Iron Magic though she is, she’s a person. And she’s got problems she doesn’t know how to solve.

In the evenings, between shift-end and sleep, mum and I talk with her. It’s slow going at first, especially with mum losing her voice and blacking out more often. But the Angel learns blazing-fast, and I reckon she’s somehow been listening to us all the time she was out cold. She keeps cagey while she’s picking up our speech, though. Mum and I are forever asking her questions about heaven and the Body – we’ve got the whole tribe asking us, after all, and Kal relentlessly trying to poke his head into the loft. But for now, she tells us only what she wants to, and that ain’t much.

Then comes the day of the Lift. We’re all amazed that mother’s watching this one from the outside of a shell. But there she is – out on the lifting-yard with her ceremonial furs, her forge-staff and her leather cap passed down through forty-two pairs of hands since the first chief shaman. There’s a big autumn storm coming in, and the rain’s the kind that burns your eyes, but she’s sitting in her chair undaunted, tiny jaw set as she looks out over the tribe’s Works. There are seventeen shells arranged on the ’crete – the most we’ve ever forged in one passing of the moon – and each one the height of twenty folk. Between them, they’ll bear eight dozen dead to heaven. The toil of moving them out onto the yard alone is backbreaking, with whole districts pulling in harnesses, and children running ahead to bear the log rollers in their beaten gold casings. But it’s always joyful work, hauling in the cortege, because it’s the holiest work of all. And because of what comes next. What happens now.

Everyone’s gone quiet, but it’s an electric quiet, as they wait in perfect rows for Two-Bird’s descent. A messenger is coming from heaven. The Angel and I watch from an old water tower, just north of the yard. I’d wanted to show the Angel to Two-Bird, but her eye flared at the prospect, and she forbade it. She says I’ll understand soon enough, and her words are barely cool from the fire when the horn sounds.

The horn. Two-Bird’s call. It’s more like weather than sound, like something solid that you can’t see, which shakes your blood as it blasts through you. It comes from far under the clouds, and sure enough, there’s Two-Bird’s shadow growing beneath the boiling grey. ‘Big’ doesn’t even start to describe it. It’s like a mountain in the sky, coming down base first, with lightning flashing off its sides. If it fell, it’d crush half of Shellforge, and yet the creed tells us Two-Bird’s body is only a speck next to the size of the Body Above.

Once Two-Bird’s great belly is poking clear of the clouds, its talons start to descend on thick black chains – chains so heavy they don’t even sway in the wind. Tribesfolk scramble up the brass, ready to attach our offerings to the talons as they descend. It’s lethal work, can get you crushed in a heartbeat. But who wouldn’t risk it, for the chance to touch the metal of Two-Bird itself, still cold from Voyd?

As the climbers abseil down again and the shells are winched up towards heaven, you can see people in the crowd mouthing farewells, and I know that’ll be me soon enough. But the Angel isn’t watching the tribesfolk. She’s staring at the rising shells, like she’s trying to figure something out in that iron skull of hers. The shells lock into racks on Two-Bird’s belly, and there’s another pause. This is it. We all stare upwards, holding our breath. And the hatch opens.

At first it’s a puff of silver, twinkling against the black of the open hatch. But then the individual shapes start to become visible, tumbling in the wind before smacking into the ’crete far below. Ration packs. The scattering becomes a deluge as Two-Bird’s belly empties, and a huge drift starts to build in the yard. A mountain of ration packs, measured out to match the Works we’ve offered. Everyone stays still as statues, eyes fixed on the silver. But then mother twitches her staff, and they bolt for the food.

Two-Bird’s engines come on somewhere up in the clouds. The roar’s almost as loud as the cheering of the tribesfolk as they fill their bags in the yard. But it catches the Angel’s interest, and she speaks at last.

‘What do you call that phenomenon?’ she says with a curious tone, extending a tendril towards the glowing plumes of steam coming down from the engines.

‘It’s the breath of life,’ I say, wondering why she’d be so focused on that, of all things. ‘Two-Bird breathes it out when it goes back to heaven – it keeps the poison at bay.’

There’s a long pause before the Angel replies.

‘We must speak with your mother now, before she expires,’ she says, like she’s finally finished chewing over a problem. ‘All is not well in heaven, and it is time you knew the truth.’

Five

The Angel says we’ve been lied to. At first, of course, we don’t really know what she’s trying to say. Even with all the progress we’ve made, there’s just no match in our language for half the words she uses, especially now she’s talking about the business of heaven and all. But after a little fumbling round the edges of meaning, it gets clearer.

The Angel says Empra made heaven, just like we believe. But she says Empra had the help of another god, who’s been hidden from us. This god – the Mawed Skull – gave Empra the Iron Magic to begin with, and knows all of its secrets. The Angels are its servants, woven in heaven from machines and people.

No matter what the Angel claims to be, I get angry with it. Even if you’re a magical being, you can’t just blaspheme like that in someone’s home. But mother stops me raising my voice, says she knows the truth of what the Angel’s saying. She has me fetch one of the holy prints from its tube in the rack, which she unrolls to reveal an enormous plan of the machinery inside the ’phaestus. And there it is. That sign – the one the Angel had painted in clay in its cave, with the split skull in the ring of teeth – stamped all over the holy prints. The sign of the Mawed Skull. Mother says it’s stamped all over the insides of the ’phaestus too. In hidden places that the shamans know, where they go to say secret prayers.

But that’s not all. This god has been hidden from us by Two-Bird. Two-Bird, who’s not the third part of god – not any kind of god at all – but a parasite working for Empra’s Enemy. What we see as Two-Bird – the great creature that comes from heaven to lift our Works into the void – is just a shell, a haw-ler, as the Angel calls it, created long ago as tools of the Mawed Skull. Two-Bird’s spirit animates them, working through a tide of grey-faced people who bear its sigil.

These thralls also infest the Body Above, in numbers we struggle to picture. They fill its holy spaces like featherworms fill a flyblown gurrux, and they’ve even seized the Angels of the Mawed Skull to serve Two-Bird.

‘They hunted down the faithful,’ says the Angel, ‘called us heretek and slaughtered us. Only I escaped, in a pod they did not see.’

‘But… why?’ I ask, feeling like the bottom’s dropping out of my mind.

The Angel takes a long, hissing breath, looks directly at mother, and answers. ‘The miserik – the Body Above, that is – is all but healed. The Body is prepared for… Empra’s spirit to enter, but Two-Bird has taken control and refuses ingress. Empra is trapped as a spirit without a body, while Two-Bird assumes his mantle and says it acts on his will. Imperium, it calls itself – the whole of god.’ The face of the Angel is a steel mask of hate, seething with the reflection of flames from mother’s herb-burner. But those flames also glitter off wetness in the Angel’s human eye. ‘We were attacked for trying to free the Body. It has… a machine in it for holding a spirit, which Two-Bird keeps… suppressed. We wanted to let that machine blossom, open it directly to Empra. But we were cut down, and now I’m all that’s left.’

‘So what happens now?’ asks mother, straightforward as if she’s asking a shaman for a temperature reading. My mind’s still heaving from having the heavens turned upside down, but she’s already thinking about her next step. The Angel hesitates before responding, but aims a level gaze at mother as it speaks.

‘Two-Bird will keep poisoning your world, while telling you that only Two-Bird can keep the poison at bay. And you’ll keep working for Two-Bird, because soon the rations will be all that’s left to eat. And when Two-Bird has taken all you can give, it will steal Empra’s Body and take it away, and you will choke in the dust of its passing.’

I feel the sort of shock you get when something sharp goes right through you, when you see the blood well up a moment before you feel the pain. I can’t see what the Angel’s saying for the size of it. It’s blasphemy – the sort of stuff you’d be furnaced for even joking about. But it’s an Angel from heaven telling us, and mum’s face says she knows the truth of every word. We’re all living and dying for a parasite.

‘What can we do?’ I ask, after a long time goes by. Because you have to start somewhere. The Angel turns to me with a curious look.

‘Before we were massacred, my cadre developed a piece of… skrapkoad. A… magic spell, which, if it could be cast on the Body’s… spirit-machine, could crack its shackles and allow it to draw in the presence of Empra.’

‘Do you still know the spell?’ asks mother, more alert than she’s been in months, and the Angel taps the little box with the glass plate.

‘I managed to save most of the spell before I escaped, and I have been optimising it since. But I have no way to get it to heaven – even if I could get into or-bitt, the servants of Two-Bird would… detect me in moments.’

I’m still struggling to put it all together, when mum comes out with her answer. The sheer speed of her coming to terms with all of this – it’s like she’s not surprised. Like she’s been waiting all her life to have it confirmed, and had a plan spare just in case. And once I take in what she’s saying, the shock already quivering in my arms goes deep cold.

‘Take my place in the shell, Toa,’ she says, in the nearest the crackthroat will let her to a shout. I jump to my feet, head spinning, but she sits me down with the smallest twitch of her hand.

‘But, mum!’ I say. ‘When Glory Day comes, you’ll not–’

‘Glory Day won’t come at all if Two-Bird keeps its talons on the Body. You have to travel to Voyd, to the Body, and within a shell is the only way. Take my place, and carry the spell to heaven.’

The way she speaks, the look on her face, is like she’s solving a mechanical problem. She’s just given up on resurrection – the one promise that makes this life bearable – but you’d think she’d just told someone where to dump a barrow of flux. I’ve never bothered worrying about the fact I don’t really know her, because I know there’ll be time for that when the Works are done. But if I take her place in the shell, we won’t even get that.

I open my mouth to say so, but I can’t find the words. I want to say I love her, but I can’t face knowing for sure that it doesn’t matter to her. So I look to scripture instead.

‘Even if I did go in the shell,’ I stammer, trying to keep my heart rate down, ‘the air up there… it’d burn me up. We know from the creed we ain’t capable of touching the Body ourselves, right?’

Now the Angel speaks – but it speaks to mother, with the tone of one shaman examining a faulty valve with another. ‘There are materials in my escape pod. It will be tight inside the shell, but we can prepare the space to protect Toa. And inside the body, there is a world with air like this one. The odds of success remain slim, but there is a chance.’

‘How long will it take?’ asks mother.

‘The chamber will be prepared at the exact moment we need it,’ says the Angel. ‘Or very slightly afterwards.’ And although her mouth’s covered in steel and her voice is a monotone buzz, I’ll bet my hands I see a smile in her eye. And in mother’s. If I didn’t know better I’d say they were sharing a joke. Perhaps mother always spoke the Angel’s language after all.

Six

I hear the sound of the horn just as clearly as always, even from inside the shell. It’s like it comes from inside my bones. Winter’s here, but I’m sweltering – my body’s wrapped in layers of fur and leather, and the wet from my own breath drips back on me from the glass in front of my face. We’ve always built tiny windows into each shell, so the dead can be counted by Empra as they arrive in heaven. Now, that window’s the only thing keeping me from feeling like I’ve been buried alive. There can’t be more than a boltswidth between my body and the metal in any direction, and every bit of space is packed with insulation or air-bags.

Mother died a week before today’s Lift, and this shell – always intended for her – is painted all over with stories from her life, in ochre mixed with Barratur-tallow. I think of everyone out there reading the pictures, all thinking she’s laid to rest underneath them. But instead it’s me, packed in with the mechanical guts of the Angel’s pod, and a big cluster of air-filled gurrux bladders.

Mum’s real funeral was secret, and barely anyone came – just those few shamans who were in the know. Her closest, who she’d called on to help outfit this chamber for me. Kal spoke for her, and slid her into the molten depths of the ’phaestus when it was done.

It was a metal burial, in the way of the Girder-people; mum had asked for it at the end, before she lost the energy to speak. The morning after, Kal had pressed a piece of not-yet-cool steel into my hands, and told me to take it safe to heaven. It’s with me now, still warm against my skin. It might not ensure mum’s resurrection, but it lets me hope for it, and that’s good enough. Hitched to the next loop of my belt is another gift – this one from the Angel. It’ll help me cast the spell when I need to, and it gives me a different sort of hope.

I touch both pieces of steel in turn for luck, and begin running through the plan again. The machinery around me starts to rattle with the presence of Two-Bird above, and I can almost feel its shadow pressing down on me. But I keep calm by visualising the map of light the Angel showed me. Following the little moving arrows from the chamber the Angel called Munishionstoar – where I’ll arrive – right through the guts of the Body to a place called Haadpoint, where the spell must be cast.

I’m about to begin reciting the words of Angel-speech I know – Maygos, mekanikas, heretek, haw-ler, stah-ship – when I hear footsteps clanking up the outside of the shell. Things are moving faster than I expected. There’s a thud – I feel it in my bones as the talons are attached to the shell by one of my tribemates. Then a deep stretchy creak, as the chain takes the weight. A tremor in my stomach tells me I’ve left the ground, and I gasp. From now on, I’m in the realm of heaven.

I can only see dirty sky through the tiny slit of the window, until there’s another rumble, and the shell tips forward to clamp to Two-Bird’s – to the haw-ler’s – body. I know to expect it, but it still yanks on my guts when the view swings downward, and I’m lying on my belly with the world spread out hundreds of shellwidths beneath me.

The tribesfolk out on the ’crete aren’t much more than specks from up here, surrounded by all the soot and the stink of Shellforge. As I rise, the tents begin to look like scales on a tattered hide, darker in the bands of old leather yurts, and lighter out where Two-Bird drops the smaller, newer pre-fabbs. The ’phaestus glowers in the middle of it all, shrouded in its own steam. Then it’s all gone, lost in a bank of thick, bitter brown cloud, and I’m alone with the thunder of the rising metal.

When the cloud finally thins I can see the curve of the horizon, and night creeping across it like thick black godsblood. The whole world looks like old leather – brown and grey and grubby, and thicker with scars than a slag-scraper’s arms. Where the dark pools, the land is angry, blazing with furnaces and glowing with firelit smog. How many tribes are down there? How many do we know, and how many have we never even heard of, burning and working and living and dying?

I feel dizzy, to the point where I think the shock of it all has cooked my head. But right before I black out, I remember the Angel saying something about the air… the air! As we get higher, it’s turning to Voyd! Hurriedly I grab the air-mask and start breathing from the gurrux bladders, and the world beneath shimmers into focus again.

The frost on the edges of the glass deepens, and soon I feel cold to the bone, even under all my layers. It’s so much deeper than the cold of winter. A pounding pain starts up deep in my ears, and I grit my teeth. I’m being lifted through Voyd now, and all I can do is hope – hope, and pray to Empra and the Mawed Skull that the Angel’s seals hold. That the air stays in.

After a while I lose all sense of up and down, and it feels like I’m floating, weightless in my cocoon of hides and heaven-stuff. There’s no wind buffeting the shell anymore, and only the deep growl of the engines underscores the silence. Then home swings away. The battered brown curve falls out of view, and all there is, is black. Black, and things I’ve never seen before – white pinpricks that get brighter the longer I look out into the dark. Are they ghosts? Watching eyes? Or windows through to the highest vault of heaven, where Tera waits? I feel so tiny here, and so fragile – a trespasser, in a place only gods are strong enough to endure.

Then I see god itself. The Body. It’s tipped with a blade that could carve the moon – a great steel cliff that slides out of the abyss, more clean and white than a furnace heart. Gold glistens like frozen clouds on its edges, and letters in the script of heaven tower hundreds of times my height as I drift past. ‘PRINCEPS MISERICORDIAE’, they spell – that strange phrase I first heard from the Angel, one of the secret names of god. The metal speeds past outside my window as Two-Bird ascends towards the Body’s spine, and I think I’ve clocked the scale of it all until I see a tiny, winking light in the distance – a welding torch, like the smallest spark from a spilled ember.

At last I’m lifted all the way up that iron cliff, and find myself looking down the length of the Body along its backbone. It must be thousands upon thousands of shellwidths, like the manhills of the old city, but built on the scale of the world. It’s so big I can’t breathe, and I feel pinned to the wall of the chamber. It’s too big for me to hold in my head all at once. And there, crouched like a thundercloud in the middle of it all, is Two-Bird.

This isn’t one of the haw-lers; this has to be the interloper itself. A titanic metal bird, with wings easily a hundred shellwidths across, perched on the Body’s highest hump. Its double heads scream spite into heaven, and one stares directly at me with eyes like black gold. As soon as I see those eyes I shut mine and hold my breath, praying to Empra that it thinks I’m dead, that it didn’t catch me looking. I’ll be lucky – Two-Bird sees everything. It can even see inside you, mum used to say, to see how much you love Empra.

I keep my breath pent up in my chest for a long time, and my eyes shut even longer. I’m just starting to reckon I might have got away with it when there’s a resounding bang against the walls, and I scream. I’m thrashing around, blood hot with panic, until I remember the Angel’s words. This must be the dokk-klamp, and it means I’m being taken in by the Body. It means I’ve survived Voyd.

It’s dark outside the window, with only the vaguest shapes suggesting the shell’s movement. A row of dim lights slips past in the gloom – metal glints. After a while, there’s a sense of enormous doors silently closing as I pass. I must be inside the Body now. After a long time there’s another, softer thud, and then stillness. A weak breeze moans against the outside of the shell. Air. I lie still for a long while in the cold, just breathing, desperately thankful to Empra for having made it. I’ve got tools to open the hatch behind me, but I decide to wait a while, just in case Two-Bird is watching for tricks.

I must have dozed off, because suddenly there’s a skittering and a clanging outside, and a rattling on the hatch. Bolts being undone. My blood runs thick and cold – this wasn’t in the plan. Before I can work out what to be afraid of, the thick hatch is pried open with a wicked crack, and there’s a hiss of air. I breathe the first lungful of heaven, of the Body, and it smells like piss and turds.

Seven

There’s a gaunt face in the hatchway, ruddy with firelight, sniffing like an animal. I open my mouth, stunned, but there’s no time to speak before long arms shoot in to grab me. I’m hauled out like a grub from dead wood, and flopped onto a filthy metal gantry among a forest of scabby grey feet.

There’s at least two dozen of them – dog-thin folk wearing faded leather rags, and decked with strings of little bones. They stink like a latrine, and they’re vile to look at, with sunken eyes and slippery-looking, too-thin grey skin. I get to my feet and they shriek in horror, leaping backwards from me – because of course, they expect me to be dead.

I sway, lightheaded, drawing my knife and tracing drunken circles in the air with it. Keeping them back while I try to make sense of where I am. It’s a bit like the caverns beneath the old city – like the place inside the manhill where I found the Angel – but the ceiling’s so high it may as well be night. I can only see one wall. The others are too far away in the dark. And all around me in every direction are thousands – tens of thousands – of shells. This must be Munishionstoar. Some of the shells are plain and some are painted, with some designs I recognise and others I don’t. Has to be every shell we ever made, and far more besides. Where have they all come from? Are there other Shellmakers?

It’s then I notice that most have their tomb-hatches busted open, and my attention snaps back to the grey people. A few of them are capering around me, keeping away from my blade, but the rest are swarming over the other shells from the Lift, clawing away with crowbars. Pulling bodies out. It all makes sudden, sick sense. Those rags they’re dressed in are the remnants of Shellmaker clothes, and those bones they’re wearing… I fight back vomit as I see they’ve got skinning knives out.

‘Away!’ I roar, barreling one of them aside as I sprint towards the nearest shell. They’ve got the body of a boy I don’t recognise laid out on the metal, but I won’t let them touch him. Despite the layers swaddling me, I move like a steam hammer, and I bellow the striking-cry of my people as I come. But the grey folk are too excited, chattering too loudly to even notice. They’re tearing the clothes off the corpse, and its head is lolling on the grimy mesh, eyes half open.

I don’t even think as I fall on the largest of the people, a gangly man with boils on his skin. The next moments are a mess. His blood shoots out hot and dark where I jam the knife tip into his neck, and all I can think of is how it doesn’t really feel like anything to kill a man. Then there’s three more on me, and I’m hacking at them with the blade, leaving wide, dark wedges in their forearms. The blade gets stuck in the gristle of a woman’s hand, and I have to shove her hard to get free. Blood gets in my eye. They’re smaller than me, and much weaker, so I know I’ll be good so long as I can keep them off me.

But there’s so many of them – too many to keep away. I spin and dodge, but there’s always one behind me, and before I know it there’s dirty fingers scrabbling for my eyes. I throw myself hard to the floor, with one of them beneath me, and there’s a spongy crack that says I’ve busted its ribs. The hands slip off my head, but there’s two more grey faces pouncing at me, and a knife working at the leather over my hip. It punches through, and there’s wet all down my leg. I shield my face, but someone’s kicking at my head. I know I’m going to die, and I’m so much angrier than I expected.

Before the Angel came I wouldn’t have cared about dying – it’s just something that happens, sooner or later. But I can’t die right now. If I die, Empra’s never going to be free of Two-Bird, and Glory Day will never come. I’m suddenly terrified – not of the grisly hands reaching for my throat, but of my own significance. I’m no longer just a forge-rat. I’m responsible for the fate of my whole people. For all people. If I fail, so does everything. I can’t let myself die.

Knowing this gives me a terrible strength. I don’t know whether it’s from Empra, or the Mawed Skull, or just from a girl who’s scared to die. But it’s drastic, bone-deep. I roll, find a place to plant a boot, and launch upwards with my blade, straight into a twitching grey belly. I slice open a neck on the backswing, go to lunge for another, but the surge is already fading. Bellowbreaths later I’m down again, and they’re on me.

Just then, a sharp crack sounds somewhere in the cavern and the grey folk freeze, faces snapping up to stare into the dark. Another crack and they hiss, baring black peg teeth, before turning and scurrying like flies shooed from a wound. They’re off me, loping down the gantry away from the sound and into the night. A few of them try dragging bodies from the shells, but a third crack makes them drop and run.

I try to pursue, but my legs won’t move well. My hand slips on blood as I try to get up, and my vision blurs. There’s voices in the distance, getting closer. They’re talking what sounds like a different language to begin with, but then I realise it’s just my own, pronounced weirdly.

‘Bilgers again,’ growls one, before spitting loudly. ‘Transpired here just afore we.’

‘Pox the skaffers and their hushways. We need to fast up, get here quicker. How many bodies take they, this day round?’ This one sounds like their leader, and the first voice counts under its breath before replying.

‘Noneways, don’t think. Saw ’em fighting just as we came, like. Must’ve kept ’em baffled.’

‘Praise Thee-em-pur. Now have the lads fetch up the worthy-dead for proper burial, while I check the ’nitions. And stack the bilgers for mulching, else their kin’ll be back for nibbles.’

‘Chief,’ cries another voice, much closer, ‘quick now, this one’s alive!’ Then there’s a drumming of boots on metal, and a ring of faces looking down on me. Not Angel faces or ghoul faces, just normal ones, swathed in fur caps against the cold of the cavern. They’re frowning at me like I’m something impossible, but they’ve got no blades out, so I decide to let sleep take me and worry about them later.

Eight

I come round in a corrugated metal shed, not much bigger than the thin mattress I’m lying on. Dim firelight flickers through a curtained doorway, and a huddle of children are watching me, so still I don’t even notice them at first. Immediately, my hand flies to my belt in panic – but the gifts are still there. I’m safe, for now.

Looking out past the door-curtain, which is sewn together from sacks bearing Two-Bird’s sigil, I see a sort of street. It’s lit by fires in low braziers, and filled with people shuffling along with handcarts. The ceiling is low, way lower than in Munishionstoar, and it shakes with constant rumbles and chugs. The voices of distant machines, growling to mark their territory. The air’s cold. It smells of sweat, and the spilled godsblood that shimmers in rainbow slicks on the damp road.

Agitated, I scramble to get up. I need to leave, to get to Haadpoint. But there’s a tube in my arm, attached to a grimy bag on a sort of pole on wheels. The tube makes me think of the Angel’s welts and I pull it out on instinct, leaving behind a cold pain and a pool of red. Stumbling slightly, I lunge for the door-curtain, and have it half pulled aside when a man appears with a steaming bowl.

‘No, no,’ says the lumbering figure, and I recognise the voice as the chief of the group from Munishionstoar. ‘You’re safe hereways. No bilgers – we’re all kru. Now drink,’ he says brightly, gesturing at the bowl. ‘It’s meaty – good stuffs!’

The man sits at the end of my thin blanket, and I take the bowl. As I drink, I notice there’s a small crowd peering curiously in at me around the entrance, but I don’t care. I’m famished, and the taste of the broth is the taste of comfort itself – pink water, with a double portion of red cubes crumbled in.

‘Rations,’ I say, as I breathe the steam in and smile.

The man’s eyes go wide, and he laughs. ‘Correctus! Rations! You mean you eating thems in Terrah too?’

‘Tera?’ I ask, wondering if I’ve heard him right.

‘Yeah, Terrah! You know, the greenworld, the destination. That’s where you’re from, no?’

Nine

The man who saved me is called Pipes. He lives with his children Roq and Hal in Batterytown, a warren of tunnel-streets that fill the Body between Munishionstoar and the district he calls port-broadsyde. His people are called the Loaders, and they are part of a wider people called Kru, who Pipes says live all through the Body. They worship Empra just like us, but they call him Thee-em-pur, and they have other gods besides.

The grey people he saved me from are the Bilgers, who live in a terrible catacomb called the belowdex, in the lowest layers of the body. Honestly, it’s hard to imagine a grimmer place than the overcrowded squalor of Batterytown, but Pipes’ face goes hard when he thinks of the belowdex.

I was expecting heaven to be a bright place, sparkling with the Iron Magic. But although the tunnels throng with countless magic lights and screens, they don’t bring much light to this underworld. Truly, life in Two-Bird’s heaven seems grimmer than it is in our world. Even Pipes’ people seem to believe they live here as some kind of punishment, and it takes me until the Briefing to work out why.

It’s my eleventh shift in Batterytown when the Briefing gets called, but I’ve been expecting it, because Pipes has told me how much he’s looking forward to it maybe a dozen times. We’ve repeated a lot of conversations, these last few shifts, as I’ve been healing up on the mattress in his hovel. Even though he sleeps on the floor with Roq and Hal, and splits his rations with me, Pipes just seems so excited to have me under his roof.

His people think the bodies of my people come from Tera itself, and that’s why they protect them from the Bilgers. He thinks we’re holy, that I’m a living miracle. But I reckon he’d look after me even if he knew the truth. He’s a strange, kind figure, and he strikes me as someone who’s been lonely for a while.

When the bell finally rings from the town square to summon us to the Briefing, he’s overjoyed. He fusses over his children, dressing them in almost-clean tunics with real brass buttons, which they keep in a tin wardrobe just for these special days. He dons a matching outfit of his own, and even finds one for me, which clearly hasn’t been worn in some time.

As we join the crowd in the square, Roq and Hal run round us excitedly, hooting at the other children as they weave between their parents’ legs. There’s a festival mood in the air, like the day of a Lift, and everyone’s watching the dais at the square’s centre. There’s a pulpit there, and speaking-boxes, and everything’s decorated with iron skulls. There’s a lot of skulls on things, up in heaven.

Another bell rings, everyone hushes and the Briefing starts. It turns out it’s a play – a bit like our festival of Empra-Mercy – but it happens every twenty-one shifts, rather than once a year. It’s confusing to start with because of the Loaders’ weird language, but Pipes’ occasional whispers help me make sense of it.

It all starts with a brown sphere, held up on a pole by a woman whose face is painted in ash.

‘That’s Theta,’ murmurs Pipes. ‘That’s where we came from. Failed kolony – a poisoned world. But look, hereways come the stah-ship to take us away!’ Right on cue, three Loaders march onstage with a representation of the Body, painted on sheet metal and fixed on more rusty poles.

Another woman appears at the other side of the stage, this time with a green sphere, and the crowd cheers. Pipes elbows me and points, grinning. ‘Lookways, Terrah! Your home!’

The Loaders carrying the Body begin moving from the brown sphere to the green, but they never make it across the stage. Halfway to Tera they begin leering and grimacing at the crowd, and then they turn and start fighting each other.

‘Sinners,’ says Pipes with a sad shake of his head, before booing loudly. As its bearers brawl, the representation of the Body falls to the floor with a clang, and the crowd starts to bellow in agitation. It’s starting to look like a full-fledged riot is going to start, when a flash of blast-dust goes off in the centre of the stage, releasing a pillar of smoke.

When the smoke clears, there’s a steel frame at the centre of the stage, in the shape of a person, dressed in ornate clothes. To its side, up on the pulpit, a man with a loudhailer addresses the crowd.

‘Kru!’ he roars.

‘Captin!’ they shout back – but they’re not talking to the loudhailer man. They’re shouting at the giant rickety person-shape on stage.

‘Kru, listen up!’

‘Yes, Captin!’ the Loaders shout in unison, and I see tears fleck the corners of Pipes’ eyes.

Drums begin to beat, and the loudhailer man begins to speak in a monotone.

‘This is the mission. We are on our way to holy Terrah – to Father! To Thee-em-pur! But we sinned. We betrayed him, and now are we stuckways in the cold of deep-space! But do not fear, for we have a ways to redemption! Thee-em-pur sends cargo from Terrah to fix the ship. He sends bodies in the cargo, as proof of paradise! When the work is done, we go to Terrah! To paradise-ways! The work absolves us! The Captin guides us! Live by the Captin’s word! Thee-em-pur protects!’

The speaker builds their voice into a frenzy, and the crowd cheers louder with each exclamation. By the end, even the loudhailer is drowned by the screaming, and it only stops when a new figure moves onto the dais and raises a hand for silence. This person is almost as tall as the effigy of the captin, and is dressed in an immaculate version of the tunic Pipes wears, with golden buttons and the sigil of Two-Bird on its breast. They have a hard jaw, a nose like the prow of the Body itself, and eyes like black gold beneath the brim of a gleaming cap. Surely, this creature is something more than human?

In a voice like thunder, the giant starts to read off a list of news from a scroll, but none of it means anything to me. It sounds a lot like the production reports mother would receive from the shamans each month, but with more of a sense of veiled threat. When it gets to the last item on the list, however, my ears prick and I break out in a chilly sweat.

‘Crew,’ warns the figure, saying the word strangely, ‘the hereteks may be defeated, but be vigilant. Rumours abound that their corruption persists, and the Mekanikas Maygos suspects infiltration. If you see anything irregular, it is your duty to the Em-per-or to report it! Has anyone seen anything unusual, of late?’

The giant’s hard eyes sweep the crowd, and only too late do I realise – this isn’t a human at all. It’s surely Two-Bird itself, in disguise! And it’s about to spot me. I’m on the verge of sprinting through the crowd, when Pipes speaks up and I freeze.

‘Sir!’ he shouts, smiling and eager. ‘I saw something! But it’s good news, sir! One of the shells from Terrah, it had a living girl in it! A miracle!’

‘And where is this… girl?’ says Two-Bird.

‘Why, sir, she’s right here.’

But I’ve already turned and fled by the time Pipes answers. I’m hobbling as fast as my leg will allow, ducking below the shoulders of the crowd to avoid Two-Bird’s eyes. I feel a sting of betrayal as I round a corner out of the square, but I can’t blame Pipes. How could I expect him to have seen through Two-Bird’s trickery, to resist its magic, when all of my people have been fooled for generations? I’m angry with myself instead – for getting attached to him, and for not running as soon as he’d rescued me.

But I force myself to let go of it. Mum always told me life’s too short for regrets, and I’ve got more important things to concentrate on. As I stumble through the twisting streets, hip still aching from the Bilger’s knife, I know I’ve got barely a head start on Two-Bird’s avatar, and barely any chance of escape. But I’ve still got Kal’s gift, and the Angel’s. And for now at least, the whole of the Body is ahead of me.

The sense of mad freedom powers my legs, and I visualise the Angel’s map as I run. I’ve spent the last few shifts quizzing Pipes, piecing together a route out of Batterytown towards Haadpoint. But if I take that route now, I’ll not make it a hundred shellwidths. My whole plan was based on hiding in plain sight, blending in with Pipes’ people, and that’s not going to happen now. Footsteps slap against metal just around the corner, and I know I need a contingency plan fast.

Of course, I’ve got one, but I don’t like it. It had been the first route I’d come up with in Pipes’ hovel, as it seemed so direct. But when a talk with Pipes gave me an inkling of where it would take me, I’d rejected it outright. Now, I’ve got no other options. Just a few streets over from Pipes’ hovel, at the border of Batterytown’s ration factory, there’s a sluice gate, which Pipes says has a rusty lock. If I can batter it open, I’ll be able to walk through the bowels of the Body, all the way to Haadpoint. Through the belowdex.

Ten

I make it to the ration factory without being spotted, right as a new shift is headed in to work. The bustle of the crew change gives me a crowd to hide me until I can find the gate with the rusty lock. After that, five bellowbreaths’ frantic hammering with a piece of scrap, while standing in knee-deep factory runoff waiting to be spotted by Two-Bird, wins me a way into the dark.

The way down is steep, and slippery, and reeks of mould and rot. Once my eyes get used to the gloom, it almost reminds me of the old city down here. The floor’s got the same pools of stagnant, chemical water, and the echoes are the same. There’s the same worn, rusty decoration on the walls, and stalactites on the ceiling that make me wonder just how old the Body is.

These tunnels clearly haven’t been used by the Kru for lifetimes. But they’re not abandoned, either. The occasional pile of well-gnawed bones litters the track, and at one point I pass what seems to be a sort of nest, full of degraded ration wrappers and scraps of cloth. Bilgers – or worse.

My mind paints all kinds of grey horror into the dark around me, and every noise – every distant rumble, every trickle of water – makes my breath catch. But I don’t slow down, and I don’t cringe in the dark. Ahead, somewhere, is the place where I can free my god and my people. And all I have to do is find it, before my death finds me. I finger the two gifts that hang from my belt, focusing on the hope they offer, and stride on into the black.

Maybe twenty bellowbreaths into the journey, in a wide, low cavern, it nearly happens. All of a sudden, there’s an explosion of feet slapping on stone behind me, and I flinch as something runs out of the dark – but whatever it is, it sprints straight past me. Running from something. As shrieks echo from the tunnel behind me, I dive into a nook behind a collapsed statue, and lie motionless. There’s heavy footpads on the path, and I swear something leans over the pitted stone and sniffs me. But it passes, and I’m alone again.

I walk deeper into the Body’s bowels. As I go, the walls get more deeply caked in grime, and the floor sinks further into sludge. My clothes are filthy from wading through it – even though I avoid the deeper patches after I see something big roll in the slime. The magical lights in the ceiling, dim and infrequent to begin with, are dying entirely now. When they’re gone, I’m guided only by the greasy light of tunnel-wall mould-slicks. The passage expands into a series of wide, musty caves, and I try not to think about what might be watching me from the shadows.

But again, nothing comes for me, and there is no sign of pursuit. Perhaps at last, my faith in Empra has paid off. Perhaps, in surrendering myself to the depths of his Body, I’ve earned his protection. I thank him aloud in the darkness, not caring who hears, and feel glad to be alive.

And then, I reach a pair of huge steel doors in the gloom, marked with the glyphs the Angel taught me – Haadpoint is beyond them, and access to the Body’s spirit-machine. I’ve been expecting Haadpoint to be a glittery citadel or a tower, not buried down here in the dark and forgotten. But then, nothing in heaven has been what I expected.

Using the gestures the Angel taught me, I speak with the doors, and they begin to grind open.

Eleven

I’m confused, at first. Thinking the Angel must have been wrong. That I’m in the wrong place after all. This can’t be Haadpoint, because it’s not really anything – it’s just a big, dark, empty cave. Like the inside of a skull, with a single red light hanging somewhere near the ceiling.

Then the light moves. The shadows move with it, and I see there’s something in the room with me. Something living. I’m struggling to put its shape together in my head, when I realise the light is its eye, looking down on me.

It’s like the Angel, but far, far bigger. It can only be the creature she warned me about: the fallen Angel called Mekanikas Maygos, which killed her people. It is monstrous. Where the Angel had at least half of a person’s body, there seems almost nothing human about this Maygos. In the ruddy glow of its eye, all I see is a shifting mass of spindles and cables, shadows and fabric, with no certain form. The only flesh I can see, emerging from a thicket of tubes, is the withered mask of its face. Little more than a dried-hard, leathery scowl, clamped around one magical eye, and one blind, withered human one.

For what feels like ages, the chamber is still. Even the rumbling in the walls is faint, this deep in the Body. The Maygos just hangs there in the dark, and I dare to hope that maybe I mean nothing to it, that I’m like a fly, crawling past on tiny business. But of course, this isn’t true. The monster looms down, robes billowing and whispering, until its face is level with mine. A deep ragged wheezing might be its breath as it studies me with that pulsing red glare. And then, in perfect Shellforge dialect – not even a halfway effort, but as purespoken as Kal – it speaks to me.

‘Your faith… is commendable, savage child. What strange things you must believe, to have been guided here.’

‘Empratex,’ I whisper to myself, hand shooting to the two gifts, as if they’ll keep me safe. This monster can loom as close as it wants, but I won’t take a step back. I’m where I meant to get to, and if I die here, I won’t die running. I look the fallen Angel right in its milky eye as it speaks again.

‘Empratex?’ it muses. ‘Ah. I see. What was it that we told you… back at the start? When it became clear we’d have to make… repairs here. The ship was… Empra’s body, wasn’t it? Which you had to heal?’

I nod, jaw set, and manage to prise my mouth open just long enough to speak. ‘That’s right,’ I squeeze out. ‘I’m Toa. I’m a Shellmaker.’

‘You’re a tool,’ hisses the Angel, tendrils lashing in the dark. ‘You’ve been stowed away and sent here by the heretek, tricked into thinking you are rescuing… your god.’ A deeply unpleasant, atonal laugh echoes around the chamber, and the face slithers closer, until it can only be ten boltswidths away.

‘But for all their… resourcefulness,’ rumbles the Maygos, ‘it seems my erstwhile novishate lacked foresight. I have been waiting here, in anticipation of just such a… plan.’

The Maygos speaks for some time, explaining its out-thinking of the Angel as if pointing out the mistakes in an apprentice’s work. In honesty, I understand little of what it says – there are too many of the words of heaven in its speech. From what I can understand, it removed Haadpoint, suspicious the Angel would return with its magic spell, its skrapkoad. Then, at last, the Maygos says something that means something to me, and sets my hope alight.

‘Even if you have been given a successful iteration of the koad,’ it booms, ‘there’s no tuh-minal to use as… a vector for entry. Did she expect me to leave an… unguarded port, ready for sabotage? No. Access to the spirit flows only through my mind now.’

That confirms it. Through the mind of the Maygos – that’s the way to free the Body’s spirit-machine. That’s where the skrapkoad needs to be cast. And what the Maygos doesn’t know is that this is exactly what the Angel has prepared me for. She knew the fallen Angel would have gutted Haadpoint. She knew it would have removed tuh-minal, and put the access point for the spirit-machine inside itself. And she knew, for sure, that it would come in person to revel in its supposed victory.

So I carry out the plan. I strike almost before I know I’m striking, before the Maygos can notice my reaction to what it has said. I know surprise and speed are the only things going for me in this fight – I’m fighting a fallen Angel, by the bones – and neither are going to last for long. So I jam my skinning knife into the beardlike horror of tubes below the Maygos’ face, yank with everything I’ve got and boost myself up onto its body.

I almost tumble to the ground straight away. The handful of cables I’ve snatched are blisteringly hot, but I have to clench hard, feeling my skin blacken, as the monster thrashes to shake me off. The Maygos roars – a terrible, blatting mess of clashing tones – and I pray to Empra just to give me a few more moments.

‘Upstart feral!’ growls the mountain of wiring beneath me, as the stink of mildew and machine oil fills my nostrils. ‘Who are you, even to touch me?’

‘I’m Toa,’ I shout, through gritted teeth and the pain in my hand. ‘I’m a Shellmaker. And I will bring my people – my world – to Empra’s heaven.’ I mete the words out one by one, using them to fuel my climb up the surging robes. If I let it fling me, it will pluck me out of the air with its tendrils and slice me to ribbons, so I have to hold on with elbows and knees.

‘You already have what you seek, savage!’

I resolve not to listen to the Maygos’ lies, but the words seep in.

‘Before we came, you were nothing but huddled primitives. Rebuilding this ship has made you a planet of workers. An Imperial world, like a million others. The work… the duty, is the Emperor’s blessing. Even if you could unwind it all, as the heretek wants, you would render your people meaningless.’

The last word is screamed so loud it makes the inside of my head hurt, but still I cling on. There’s a cold sort of sense behind the Maygos’ rage that rings true with what I’ve seen – heaven, if anything, seems darker and dirtier and more painful than the world. But I can’t let Two-Bird’s lies cloud my head. Snarling like an animal against the burning in my muscles, I throw out my arm and yank back the monster’s cowl. It falls away to reveal a hump of twitching machinery, and at its crest a grey, puckered patch of scalp. The place of access.

As the Maygos rants, I hold on to its robes with one shaking hand. With the other, I reach at last to unhook the Angel’s gift from my belt. The gift is part of her head – a long, encrusted spike called a shunt – which went into her brain and held some of her thoughts, including the skrapkoad spell. Taking out the shunt killed her, but it also gave me a version of the spell that the Maygos will be weak to – if I can only get it in its head.

That’s where the other gift comes in – the long, thin needle forged with mother’s grave-steel, which Kal pressed into my hands before I left. Gripping the fallen Angel’s neck with my knees, I hurriedly click the two gifts together, and draw back my arm as if aiming a spear. Two people died to make this shot possible, so I can’t afford to miss. As I line up the strike, staring at the patch of skull, the monster speaks one last time. I still don’t think it realises what I’ve got in my hand.

‘Do you even know the purpose of the shells you made?’ it says, with cruel curiosity. ‘The tombs of your ancestors?’

‘Teeth?’ I say, wondering why I’m being asked.

‘Bullets,’ whispers the Maygos. ‘That’s all you are to… Empra. And all you will ever be.’

‘Then we shall be free of him too,’ I say, shrugging, and stab straight through the patch of wizened scalp.

It’s done, just like that. The bone caves in like sponge, the shunt crackles and thumps as it discharges and the Maygos’ head snaps back. Before its eyesocket erupts in a plume of black steam, I could swear it looks surprised. Then it’s dead. One last spasm throws me to the chamber’s floor, where I watch the mass of fabric shudder and collapse like a poorly built tent. Then the guttering red light of the eye cuts out, and all is still. For one last, blissful moment, there’s nothing happening, no work to be done and no problems to solve. Peace.

The floor begins to rumble.

Twelve

Soft-Voice Kal never knows exactly what is happening inside the Body of his god. He knows he made the needle to the Angel’s specifications, and sent Toa off to heaven with the satisfaction of a job well done. Even so, when the dawn comes early one shift, he is certain of what has happened. Toa has succeeded, and the Glory Day is at hand. He sees a glow at the apex of the heavens, which swells until it’s brighter than the sun, and he gathers his sons to watch with him. All down the street – all over Shellforge – the people are flooding from their tents to watch, as the Body turns in the heavens, and descends on a pillar of light. When it pierces the veil between heaven and the world, thunder drowns out the sound of every furnace. Kal is deafened, but jubilant, for the dead are coming back in the arms of Empra. He raises his sons’ hands in rapture, and cries in thanks. The last thing Kal sees is the immensity of his god, plunging towards him on wings of fire, promising rest at last.

About the Author

Nate Crowley is a writer and compulsive over-imaginer who lives in Walsall with his wife, daughter, and a cat he insists on calling Turkey Boy. He loves going to the zoo, playing video games and cooking hearty meals. ‘Empra’ is Nate’s second story for Black Library, his first being ‘The Enemy of My Enemy’.

An extract from Belisarius Cawl: The Great Work.

Glittering debris surrounded the corpse of the planet. Grey as old bone, drier than dust, a shroud of shining particulates gathered solemnly around the corpse as it proceeded about the sun. The track the world ran was the most amenable to life, and yet life was absent entirely.

The broken remains of a single void station hung at equatorial high anchor, its decaying orbit recently stabilised. The soft shine of atmospheric shields closing the breaches in one section was just visible against the sun’s glare. Three ships occupied the orbital’s near space. Between the station and the world was a light cruiser bearing rich heraldry of yellow and black. Crossed scythes of gold on a sable background adorned its stern shield plates. In the glare of the sun the scars all over its hull were starkly visible. The scrollwork upon its hammerhead prow bore the name Sterope, one of the ten legendary steeds of Sotha.

Closest to the orbital was a small vessel of the Mechanicus tech-priests. Much of it was bare metal, the rest painted in the rich reds of Mars. It had no name displayed, but several identification plates bore the same number string – 0-101-0. Small in size, it was nevertheless packed with manufacturing facilities and dock points, and a constant stream of drone craft passed between the ship and the station.

The vessel furthest out was a larger Space Marine strike cruiser of new design, fresh from the shipyard, and free of damage or alterations to its original plan. Its deep blue livery was unmarred, the horned ultima displayed in many places remaining crisply white. It was a young yet fierce ship, and was named the Lord of Vespator, for it bore the ruler of that world as he travelled throughout his kingdom.

A hangar door opened in the side of the Lord of Vespator. A single gunship emerged. Exhaust stabbing from the engines made a blade of blue plasma fire and the ship’s hull shone as bright as a jewelled hilt, so that it resembled a sword thrown handle-first to a beleaguered warrior battling a monster.

But the weapon came too late. The monster had triumphed. The world was dead.

So did Decimus Felix, Tetrarch of Ultramar, come to survey the ruin of his domain.

‘A tight fit,’ said Daelus. The Techmarine altered the ship’s path with minute adjustments to the flightsticks. Felix looked out through the armourglass blister. The cockpit was set high back above the transport bays, and the ceiling passed within inches of his face, close enough that he could examine the damage to the metal, and name the bioweapons responsible.

Only Daelus’ skill saw the Overlord squeeze into the hangar. His left hand moved swiftly over the ship’s array of buttons. Jets fringed the blocky double hull with bursts of light and vapour in response.

‘This is not ideal,’ said Felix.

‘I’ve landed in tighter spaces, my lord,’ said Daelus, tense with concentration. ‘Not many, I’ll admit.’

Daelus’ crew consisted of a further Primaris Marine in the red of the forge and three Chapter serfs. They were far too preoccupied with landing to speak to the tetrarch, but peered at their instruments nervously. Troncus, the Techmarine co-pilot, was immobile. Only the tiny movements of his hands as he corrected Daelus’ few errors showed that a living being occupied his armour.

Proximity alarms trilled from several quarters. The prow lights hit a solid wall.

‘Emperor’s will, this is getting worse!’ Daelus said.

The landing bay had suffered catastrophic damage. Efforts to patch it up had shrunk its space by half. A wall of plasteel plating fixed in place with metallite foams divided the bay. Bracing girders holding the wall upright angled into the hangar, making Daelus’ task all the more difficult.

‘Nearly got it,’ the pilot said, more to himself than to anyone else.

Felix watched ruptured metal pass by. The Aegida had possessed many landing decks. The monsters of Hive Fleet Kraken had wrecked them all as they boarded. Only this smaller docking portal had been returned to operational use.

The Overlord’s power core whined up and down as Troncus adjusted the energy flow in preparation for landing. The ship swayed. Troncus looked at the pilot.

‘That’s not my fault,’ Daelus said to his unspoken rebuke. ‘Grav-plating’s no good in here,’ he grumbled. ‘Nothing’s good in here. Troncus, run landing sequence. This is the best position we’re going to get.’

Felix’s ear beads clicked. Daelus had opened an unencrypted vox channel.

‘Sergeant Cominus,’ Daelus said. ‘I’m setting down.’

‘Ready. Open the forward hatches,’ Cominus voxed back.

‘Depressurising holds. There’s no atmosphere. I’m sure you’ve got your helmets on.’

‘I need not remind you I find your levity irritating, Daelus.’

‘He’s no fun, that one,’ said Daelus, making sure Cominus heard before he shut the channel.

‘He serves well,’ said Felix.

‘He could smile while he was doing it,’ said Daelus. ‘Life does not all have to be drill and duty, not even for us.’

The atmospheric retention field was out, leaving the hangar open to space. Daelus joggled the flight sticks against the outrush of air expelled from the twin passenger compartments. The ramps opened as the vessel’s engines gave out one last burst. The starboard wing squealed noisily down the partition wall, causing Felix to grit his teeth.

‘I said it was tight,’ Daelus muttered.

Before the Overlord settled onto its landing claws, eight Space Marines ran out, bolt rifles at the ready, and took up guard at various points of the hangar. Each wore Mark X Intercessor pattern power armour in differing heraldries, but all were united by their richly decorated left pauldrons, where the sigil of the Tetrarch of Vespator was displayed on golden plating. Cominus was more obvious for his manner than the bright red and white wargear he wore or his sergeant’s insignia. He stood in front of the Overlord’s nose, directing Felix’s bodyguard with a flurry of battle-sign, his bolt rifle held upright.

The engines wheezed. The ship sank down on its hydraulics and ceased moving.

‘That’s it, we’re in,’ Daelus said. Troncus clicked a dozen buttons. The serfs visibly relaxed and began post-flight checks. The power plant quieted to a hum. Daelus’ armour sighed as it disconnected from the umbilicus set into the back of the seat. The armour was heavy on him without power, but he turned round naturally enough, and angled his helm to look up at Felix.

‘Welcome to the Aegida Orbital, my lord. Welcome to Sotha.’

They left the hangar, Cominus first. The sergeant insisted on taking point himself, as he did every time the tetrarch ventured out from the Regia Tetrarchia on Vespator. Felix followed his men, the blue of his Ultramarines armour dark in the badly lit station.

Felix disliked pomp but he accepted the bodyguard. Another warrior of his skill might be annoyed by the constant watch, and the implication he could not take care of himself. Felix was pragmatic enough to know that being annoyed by his attendants would do nothing to change the fact of their presence, so he did not allow himself to feel anything much about it, and thanked them often for their service. Likewise, Cominus’ terse, officious manner failed to irritate him. Felix did his best to follow Lord Guilliman’s example in all things, and see a thing for its potential utility, not for how it made him feel.

When he did examine those feelings, he resented the constant cosseting his position forced on him. These moments of weakness only strengthened his resolve to behave as Lord Guilliman would wish. The bodyguards and all his many attendants back on Vespator had purpose and they must therefore be allowed to fulfil it and not be hampered nor criticised merely for being. Theoretical, practical – the Ultramarian way served him well.

But emotions are disobedient creatures, and he found himself glad that he had only his bodyguard with him. He welcomed the break from his staff. Since being appointed as tetrarch, one of the four lords of Greater Ultramar, by Roboute Guilliman, Felix had done his best to visit every sector. This was his first trip this far into the old Sotharan League. His lord castellan on Vespator had pointedly remarked that Felix took his tours to avoid politics. There was perhaps truth in that.

Felix turned his attention outwards to the ruin of the orbital. The signs of recent reoccupation grew more obvious as they made their way towards the command hub. Again his emotions rose up from beneath his conditioning.

‘It is strange the way this makes me feel,’ he said to Veteran Brother Cadmus, who hailed from the Scythes of the Emperor Chapter to whom the station had belonged. ‘There is so little evidence of what happened here, but what remains is as clear as a sword cut in ancient bone. While the tale of the attack is only implied, the evidence tells a more poignant story than a bloody corpse would.’

They continued down a corridor lit by lumens on poles linked by suspended cable. There was no air and no gravity, so the eleven of them walked with the strange, deliberate gait of warriors with active maglocks. ‘I see everywhere the signs of bioweapons. Puncture wounds to the metal, acid burn, the marks of teeth and claws, but no organics remain, all reabsorbed by the Kraken, I assume.’

‘That is the way of the xenos, my lord,’ Cadmus said. Cadmus was a Scythe, but he was also a Primaris Marine, and had never been to Sotha. His voice was level, if a little distant, leading Felix to suspect he too wrestled with what he felt and what he was supposed to feel.

‘You have fought the tyranids?’ Felix asked.

‘My Chapter makes a point of confronting them where they can,’ said Cadmus. ‘I have faced splinters only, the left-behind and the lost. Nothing compared to the fleet that devoured Sotha, but deadly nonetheless.’

Felix nodded. The effects of the tyranid weapons had sculpted the metal. Ahead, sunlight streamed through a huge breach in the hull. It was curious that the deck remained level, he thought, without the distortion to the deck plating one could expect from more conventional weaponry. When they drew level with the hole he saw that the cause of the breach was not a weapon, but partial absorption; the metal had been devoured. The scrapings of tiny teeth were still bright at the edges a century later.

‘They consume more than organics,’ said Cadmus, following his lord’s gaze. ‘The tyranids will take everything.’

‘Then why not all?’ said Felix. He paused in the breach, and his security detail came to an instant halt, arrayed by order of march in a perfect protective pattern.

‘A question for the archmagos, when he gets here,’ said Cadmus.

Felix nodded. ‘If anyone knows, I am sure he will. Did you serve the Scythes of the Emperor long before you joined the Chosen of the Tetrarchy?’

Cadmus stared out into the void. Such blackness in such strong light created an odd, velvety effect that appeared unreal, no matter how many times it was seen. ‘Six years, by the Sotharan date stamp.’

Felix knew this. He selected every man for his Chosen personally, but he preferred to hear the information from the men himself, when he could. There was no soul in cold data. A commander learned a lot from his warriors by listening to them, even if they only said what could be more easily read; the way they spoke, the way they held themselves and how they handled particular subjects revealed their innermost thoughts in a way written words did not. Speech revealed a humanity not even Adeptus Astartes conditioning could blunt.

‘I was there on Hamagora. Most of my experience has been fighting the traitors and their daemons, my lord. The xenos are something else.’ Cadmus paused to better formulate his words. ‘It is impossible to overestimate the hatred my brothers in the Chapter hold for the tyranids. The veterans are fixated, but it affects we Primaris brothers too. It is a contagious hate. It defines us all.’

‘Then it should be made use of,’ said Felix.

‘I agree,’ said Cadmus. ‘Hate is a sharp blade, but there is something else to them that concerns me. A distance to the last few of the original Scythes.’ Cadmus looked at Felix. ‘I apologise, my lord, if I speak out of turn. It is not my place to criticise a man as great as Chapter Master Thracian.’

‘You will speak as you will, Cadmus,’ said Felix. ‘I understand your reticence, but in the matters of the Scythes of the Emperor, I ask you to be my advisor, and not merely my bodyguard. If anything at all gives you reason to doubt, to pause, you must share it. Not all of the Chapters accepted their Primaris brothers easily.’

‘It is not that,’ said Cadmus. ‘We were welcomed as saviours, my lord. We are feted and honoured beyond what our achievements should have earned.’

The orbital was spinning slowly. Its motion brought cold, dead Sotha into view. Stripped of life, it shone mirror bright, white as a polished skull.

‘Then your worries go deeper?’

Cadmus nodded. ‘There were so few of them left, my lord. A handful. The last of the original Scythes are secretive and grim.’

‘They lost much. I have read what records there are. If we are to be honest, they performed poorly in battle. They bear responsibility for their own near-destruction.’

‘I agree with this, but it is more than shame,’ said Cadmus. Again he paused, reluctant to voice his doubts.

‘What, then?’ prompted Felix.

‘I believe they are hiding something, my lord.’

Glaring sunshine cut across them quickly as the movement of the station turned the Aegidan orbital from the planet, swept past the sun, and plunged them back into gloom. Cadmus’ red helm lenses glowed. In the dark, Felix saw the eyes behind them, and the silvered effect of retinas glowing under direct laser data writing. As he confessed his human fears, Cadmus looked far from human.

That was the fate of the Adeptus Astartes. To remain a man, yet to be divorced from mankind, fighting monsters in the dark.

‘I note it well,’ Felix said. ‘And I thank you for your counsel, Brother Cadmus. Advance,’ Felix said to the others. ‘To the central hub. Let us meet these heroes ourselves, and judge them as we find them.’

His bodyguard moved on, weapons at the ready.

The approach to the hub was scarred with bioweaponry discharge and the telltale starburst damage of boltgun fire. Fighting had been heavy there. Further along the scars of acid and claw disappeared under fresh plating. A temporary airlock barred the corridor near the command deck, where new wall sections had been welded in place. A servitor on a tracked unit waited, inactive, outside. A pair of tripod-mounted twin plasma sentry guns, painted the red of Mars and stamped with the maker’s mark of Belisarius Cawl, tracked the Space Marines, their charging coils glowing in readiness.

The way was wide and tall, big enough to take the larger Dreadnought models, but the airlock was small, enough to admit only one Space Marine at a time. A temporary measure.

A skull mounted at the apex of the arch over the airlock came to life. Ocular sensors at the back of eye sockets glowed with sudden alertness. A fleshless jaw worked around a vox-caster, snapping together so hard that had there been an atmosphere in the corridor, it would have rattled out a bony percussion.

‘State purpose and name,’ a grating machine voice blurted into their helmet vox.

Cominus stepped forward.

‘Cominus, veteran sergeant, seconded from the Sons of Orar Chapter Adeptus Astartes, group leader for the Chosen of Vespator, tetrarchy security unit assigned to Tetrarch Decimus Felix of that world.’

‘Ranking officer required. Tetrarch Felix will present himself,’ said the skull. ‘Stand aside.’

Cominus stood his ground until Felix ordered him to step back.

‘I am Tetrarch Decimus Androdinus Felix of the Ultramarines, born of Laphis, Lord of Vespator and the Eastern Marches.’ Felix datapulsed his credentials and the seal of his office to the machine. ‘Allow us entry.’

‘A moment,’ the machine said. The lights went out in the skull’s eyes. The jaw hung slack.

‘Friendly,’ said Daelus. The Techmarine’s servo arms followed the motions of his hands as he gestured at the plasma guns. ‘They are well made, though.’ He bent down so that his faceplate was level with the weaponry and moved his head from side to side. The guns tracked his movement. ‘Very responsive.’ The reactor cores spooled up and the coils glowed brighter.

‘You take too many risks,’ said Cominus.

Daelus stood. ‘Everything I do is weighed against the balance of probability. Theoretical and practical every step of the way. Ultramarian dialectic is a tradition of thought your Chapter could do with reinstating. You can’t hold it against me if I calculate risk better than you do.’

Cominus grunted dismissively.

The skull’s eyes relit, prompting an instant reaction from the Chosen. Bolt rifles aimed smoothly at the door and emplaced weapons.

‘Identity confirmed,’ said the machine. ‘Please proceed within, tetrarch.’

The airlock door rolled back. Cominus made to lead, but Felix stepped ahead of him and entered the pressure chamber first. The chamber had been adapted from the corridor, and was therefore large enough for all eleven of them.

Blast doors of ancient design faced the airlock entrance. They had been repaired, but the great gouges inflicted by tyranid melee weapons were evident as outlines, filed down and filled though they were. The remains of the turrets that had protected the doorway were boxed in with fresh plates. Around these, too, were the score marks of huge claws.

Air rushed into the chamber from a newly installed pipe leading into the command deck. Sound returned to Felix’s auto-senses. The doors screeched back on buckled tracks.

A serious attempt had been made to bring the Aegidan command hub back to a useable state. Besides a supply of air the gravity plates were operational. Wrecked machinery had been cleared away and the holes their removal left had been plated over. Little of the original layout was therefore intact. The central dais and the gallery around the room were integral to the structure and remained, again much-patched, but most else was gone, leaving a large, empty space. Seams of bright metal showed where elements had been cut out. Dull plasteel covered the worst damage. Loose plates provided bridges over utility ducts currently open for repairs. Temporary workstations lined one wall, power cables snaking off from them out through a fresh hole cut to allow access to a functional energy conduit. Alcoves around the room housed statues of ten horses in various states of action. All but one had been damaged in some way. The worst of them had been caved in entirely, turning them into wrinkled bronze sacks with incongruous equine details. They reminded Felix of the abominations of Chaos, and he looked away from them.

A large section of wall had been torn away. This damage had so far been left untouched, and the breach was closed off by an atmospheric energy screen stretching from one side of the room to the other. On the far side of the field’s blue shimmer, void frost glimmered on the ragged deck.

Thirteen Space Marines waited for the tetrarch. Five other beings of human origin occupied the room. Four were mind-slaved combat servitors, two outfitted for close range gunfights, the other pair pure melee models. The fifth was almost as heavily augmented but of free will, being an adept of the Cult Mechanicus. His humanoid body was entirely made of plasteel, though the face atop the banded neck was of flesh and blood. He wore no protection beyond a calming smile. A number of small, subsidiary arms tapped restlessly inside his robes.

The majority of the Space Marines were facing the door in anticipation of Felix’s entrance; those that weren’t were in the process of getting up as he entered. They arranged themselves in groups according to friendship rather than squad, if their markings were anything to go by.

The Chosen filed in and faced the Scythes of the Emperor. Felix had never seen a bigger difference between two groups of loyal Space Marines. His Primaris Marines wore burnished armour with perfect heraldry. The Scythes’ wargear was scuffed and dinged, the yellow and black applied over mismatched components from differing armour marks. There was an Apothecary among them, and a Forgemaster whose presence was marked out by the better state of his wargear as much as by his rank marks and red colouration. A lack of uniformity was common in Space Marine units forced to fight unsupplied for a long time, but the Scythes of the Emperor took it to an extreme. Four of the warriors wore Terminator plate. Three of these were neatly presented, but the fourth’s armour was an ugly mix of different sets, and many elements had been hastily repaired. In a force less desperate, Felix thought, the fourth suit would not have left the armoury. Even his own Scythe of the Emperor, Cadmus, looked apart from his supposed brethren despite their shared heraldry, so clean he appeared like an imposter.

Felix was reminded of the Ultramarines’ tyrannic war veterans. All of the Scythes sported trophies of xenos bone and chitin in faded shades of crimson and cream. They were individuals. There was no coherency to their unit or their attitude. Some stood to attention, others looked ready for combat, one was insolently slouched. Felix realised that although the Chapter had been restored to full strength by the influx of Primaris Space Marines, what was stood in front of him was the remnants of a dying brotherhood. They were the last.

At their head was their Master. His armour was hung with more teeth and claws than all the rest, burying his more conventional honours under a savage display.

Soft chimes in Felix’s helmet informed him that the atmosphere was suitable for breathing, and that the temperature, though frigid, was tolerable. He had barely formed the thought of removing his helm when Cominus privately voxed him.

‘I advise you, tetrarch, to leave your helmet on.’

‘A meeting like this is best conducted face to face,’ Felix said aloud.

He lifted his hands to his head, always an awkward motion thanks to his boltstorm gauntlet. A further barrier was the cowl common to all Gravis armour, but he had had much practice taking out the helm, and he managed it smoothly. Seals hissed. An inrush of freezing atmosphere replaced the breath-warm air in his power armour. He clasped his helm beneath his arm. His features were strong but bland in the mass-produced way of many Space Marines. He had pale brown skin, a last reminder of his homeworld’s thin air. A heroic jaw, a nose that echoed Guilliman’s, piercing grey eyes and black hair. He would have been handsome, were he fully human, but his features were too much blunted by the process of apotheosis to be so. He wore his intelligence for all to see.

‘Do not worry yourself about your master’s wellbeing. I assure you gentlemen, that the atmospheric shield I and my servants fitted to this orbital functions perfectly,’ said the tech-adept.

‘Who are you?’ asked Felix.

The adept dipped his head. ‘I am Qvo-87. I was sent ahead by the archmagos to prepare this station for our rendezvous. I apologise that it has not yet been returned to full functionality, but the damage is extensive. Returning the Aegida to its original glory will take time.’

‘As is evident.’ Felix looked at the blue field holding in the air. ‘You have done well in such a short period.’

Qvo-87 dipped his head again. ‘It will suffice for now. For ten thousand years, the Aegida has stood sentinel over Sotha. It will do so again.’

‘If you can achieve that, Magos Qvo, then you will have my respect.’ One of Felix’s tasks was to evaluate the station for repair. Sotha might be dead, but it was still strategically important. Reports had led him to believe the station was irreparable, but what he had seen so far had been promising.

‘You must be Chapter Master Thracian,’ said Felix, turning to face the leader of the Scythes.

Thracian responded by removing his own helm and showing a scarred, fierce face to the tetrarch. ‘I am he,’ said Thracian. Burns mottled his left cheek; the eye they crossed was milky white.

‘I thank you for attending and for giving your permission to use this orbital.’

‘I could not likely refuse one of the tetrarchs,’ said Thracian. ‘You speak with the authority of the primarch.’

‘You have a reputation as a loyal servant of the Emperor. My thanks are genuine.’

Thracian shrugged. His patched armour wheezed as it matched his movement.

‘The galaxy is in turmoil and Sotha is gone,’ Thracian said with obvious emotion. He looked through the atmospheric field where the planet’s bare skull was rising again. ‘The primarch himself has given over this portion of the Imperium to you to rule as you see fit. I would not deny you.’

Sotha’s seas were empty bowls, the denuded continents showed networks of dry water channels and the spidery fractals of mountain ranges. It was like a precise geological model of a world.

‘Behold the bounty of your realm,’ Thracian said bitterly. Sotha’s barrenness filled the breach side to side. In the harsh light of the star, reflected from the world, the room turned hard monochrome. Every scratch and crack in the ceramite of Thracian’s armour was mercilessly illuminated. The colours that disguised the worst of the damage bleached away. The sockets of the skulls adorning his armour were caves of night staring hungrily at the tetrarch. Thracian’s face was battered, bald, craggy, broken, luminous; the living spirit of the planetary corpse. ‘This is the extent of your forces?’

‘As requested, I brought no more than my bodyguard. I assume the remainder of your men are aboard your cruiser?’

Thracian laughed. ‘This is the extent of my forces. The Primaris young bloods sail the void at Guilliman’s behest aboard the Heart of Cronos. These few veterans you see here are all that remains of the original Scythes of the Emperor. We have business below that is ours alone to undertake.’

‘Cadmus informed me your contingent of original Space Marines had become small.’ Felix frowned. ‘How did this occur? The most recent Munitorum estimate put your Chapter at two companies’ strength at the time of the Primaris reinforcement.’

‘Those figures are a century out of date,’ said Thracian. ‘The rest have fallen into shadow. We are all that remains. When we die, our geneseed will be laid to rest and the Primaris Marines will take our place. They are the future, Emperor be thanked for the gift of Cawl. We are the past.’

‘You brought none of your new warriors with you?’ asked Felix.

‘We welcomed their coming, and honour them, but this mission is not for the new.’ The rotation of the platform pivoted shadows across Thracian’s features as Sotha crept away. ‘Sotha is our world. It never belonged to the children of Cawl. Let them have a fresh beginning as we fade away. It sorrows me that you bring Brother Cadmus to see the source of our shame.’ He watched the world rolling past. ‘The rest of our Chapter have no memory of Sotha, and I have no wish to risk the reborn Scythes on this expedition into the past. The Emperor’s Watch is no place for them, or us. Not any longer.’

‘What risks do you anticipate?’

‘My warriors have a great deal of experience in fighting the tyranids, lord tetrarch,’ said Thracian. ‘When they harvest a world they often leave sentry organisms behind. We surmise this is to inform the hive mind of the return of life. Oftentimes, genestealers roost in some number near sites of settlements, lying in wait to infect those who come to offer aid or to investigate what has happened,’ Thracian said angrily. ‘They are a perfidious race.’

‘Then we are twenty-four Adeptus Astartes, with the warriors of the archmagos to call upon,’ said Felix. ‘Worlds have fallen to less.’

‘And larger forces have been lost without trace.’ Thracian pointed at the great disc of the world, picking out a lonely mountain by a dry sea, its feet cloaked by a dead city. ‘If we overcome the horrors the Kraken will have left behind, the archmagos wishes to disturb the Pharos. No good can come of that, so yes, “risk” is the word.’ Thracian exhaled heavily. The planet continued on its journey over the breach, half of it past the broken walls by now, and its light dimming. The colour crept back into Thracian’s armour. ‘I offer you the chance to turn back. The ten steeds of Sotha will ride on for the Emperor. We owe Cawl a great debt for our Chapter’s resurrection, and so I grant his wish willingly. If he wants to dice with fate, so be it. But as Space Marine to Space Marine, I urge you to go now, Decimus Felix. The heritage of the Scythes of the Emperor is secure.’ He smiled grimly. ‘Who will carry on your legacy if you perish here? Do not enter the mountain.’

Felix’s eyes narrowed at the warning. ‘I live to serve, I do not care for legacies. I have fought daemons and fallen primarchs at the Lord Guilliman’s side,’ said Felix. The passing planet relinquished the command deck to lumen light. ‘Nothing daunts me. Nothing can.’

Thracian smiled again ruefully, the sort of expression an uncle gives an overly confident nephew. He looked down, and when he looked up again, he was suffused with a Chapter Master’s authority, and when he spoke his voice rang. Even Felix, who had stood at the right hand of Roboute Guilliman himself, felt the hairs on his neck prickle.

‘They shall be my finest warriors,’ Thracian quoted the Emperor, ‘these men who give of themselves to me. Like clay I shall mould them, and in the furnace of war forge them. They will be of iron will and steely muscle. In great armour shall I clad them and with the mightiest guns will they be armed. They will be untouched by plague or disease, no sickness will blight them.’ His voice rose. ‘They will have tactics, strategies and machines so that no foe can best them in battle. They are my bulwark against the Terror. They are the Defenders of Humanity. They are my Space Marines and they shall know no fear.’ When he finished the quote, all were silent. Thracian’s voice dropped. ‘Fine words, but I know they are not true. I know there are beings a Space Marine cannot best. I am not ashamed to say to you that I have known fear.’

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