CH. 4 - When the dead allow

The Cardinal of the Twice-Shielded loves me on sight, and it is one of the most uncomfortable experiences of my long life.

His name is Sabatine — old, gaunt, magnificent in vestments worth a frigate — and when I walk into the Governor's council chamber behind Ulvar Stormbrand, his eyes go past the Wolf Lord, past a dozen storm-grey giants, and land on the black cross on my pauldron like a drowning man landing on driftwood.

"An Angel of the Cross," he breathes, and actually comes down the dais steps to grip my gauntlet in both his thin hands. "The God-Emperor sends His own iconography. You see, Governor? You see which of His servants Heaven chooses for Ashkarran?"

Behind me, I can feel Bjarn deciding this is going in the saga.

The council is larger than I expected and quieter than it should be. Lord-Governor Hurn at the head of the table — heavy, tired, soldier's eyes, a stylus she keeps picking up and putting down. Sabatine at her right hand, radiating scripture. The Master of the Defence Auxilia, grey-faced, holding casualty projections he clearly hopes nobody asks him to read aloud. And at the far end, apart from everyone, a woman nobody introduces: plain storm-coat over very fine carapace armour, no insignia, a plain-faced retinue of four standing over a stasis-crate the size of a coffin.

It's Hurn who opens, and Hurn who cannot close. She wants evacuation corridors — but only for the lowest districts, unless the projections worsen, in which case the middle terraces, unless that starts a panic, in which case a phased approach, pending the Cardinal's blessing, pending—

"Governor," Ulvar says, not unkindly, the way you'd take a map out of a lost man's hands. "You are asking the wrong question. You are asking how much of this can stay the same. None of it can. Here is what is actually on your table." He holds up one scarred finger. "One: you give my Wolves your deep-mine schematics, every borehole and tunnel that touches the deadlands' roots, and we go down tonight and cut the heads off both tombs while they are still yawning." A second finger. "Two: you attempt to evacuate twelve billion souls with orbital lift for perhaps one in a thousand of them, and you spend the next month deciding which one in a thousand." A third. "Three: you pray."

"The Wolves of Fenris," Sabatine says acidly, "traditionally recommend option one."

"The Wolves of Fenris," Ulvar agrees, "are traditionally still alive."

"There is a fourth option," says the woman at the end of the table, and the room's temperature drops by several degrees of rank.

She stands. She does not hurry. From under the storm-coat she produces a rosette — the sigil of the Holy Inquisition — and sets it on the table with a click that lands in the silence like an orbital strike.

"Calvia Rhen," she says. "Ordo Xenos. Until this morning, I did not exist on Ashkarran. As of this morning, I am the ranking authority in this system, and the disposition of this world is an Inquisitorial matter. Congratulations, Governor — the decision you cannot make is no longer yours."

Hurn puts her stylus down for the last time and looks, more than anything, relieved.

"Let us also retire the word miracle," Rhen goes on. "What sleeps under your world is older than your species and does not worship anything. My ordo calls them necrons. Your preachers will call them the Sleepless Dead, because preachers need poetry. What matters is this: they do not negotiate, they do not tire, and they were here first."

"And the twelve billion?" the Master of the Defence Auxilia asks — the first words he has risked all council.

"Are why you should be grateful I am here. Read your projections aloud, Master. The ones under your hand. For a general waking."

He doesn't want to. He reads them anyway, and his voice gives out on the third number, and nobody asks him to continue, because the third number has five zeroes behind it and a percentage in front of it and the percentage starts with nine.

"Thank you," Rhen says, without cruelty, which is somehow worse. "That is the arithmetic every option must beat. Now. The fourth option is all of the Wolf Lord's three, in order of my priorities. And my priorities begin with cargo."

She rests one gloved hand on the stasis-crate, and does not open it, and does not explain it.

"This leaves Ashkarran on the fastest, best-armed hull in orbit. That hull is currently called the Wyrmslayer."

"My ship," Ulvar says, with the mildness of an avalanche deciding, "is not a courier."

"No. It is now an Inquisitorial transport with a Great Company aboard." The rosette stays on the table between them. Wolf Lord and Inquisitor look at each other for a long moment — a very old argument being had at very high speed without any words at all — and it is Rhen who bends, exactly as far as she chooses to. "When your hunt is done, Wolf Lord. I have no interest in dragging you from a kill; it would be expensive and I would lose. But when the Wyrmslayer breaks orbit, my cargo is on it. In exchange: my authority, my resources, and every door on this world unlocked for your hunt. The shrine district evacuates first."

"The shrine district—" Sabatine begins, rising.

"—sits directly above the equatorial resonance source, Cardinal, which you know, because I have read your private correspondence with your architect-provosts, which is a sentence you should think about carefully." Rhen doesn't raise her voice. She has the loudness of writ, which needs no volume. "Your saint can bless the evacuation columns. That is what saints are for."

Sabatine sits down grey-faced, gathering his dignity around him like a torn robe, and I find I pity him — a man watching the map win an argument with the miracle, in front of witnesses.

It's as the council breaks that she reaches me. I've been waiting for it; her eyes had found the cross on my pauldron within a heartbeat of my entering, the way a lockpick finds the odd tumbler.

"A Templar," she says, "in wolf-iron." Her gaze goes down my rune-etched legs and back up, cataloguing, unhurried. "Riding with a Great Company, three marks out of fashion, wearing a plate pattern I have only seen in armoury archives. You are a very interesting set of discrepancies, brother."

"I am a servant of the God-Emperor attached to Lord Stormbrand's campaign," I say, which is true, and answers nothing, which we both notice.

"Mm." A small smile with no warmth and, oddly, no malice either — pure appetite for information, banked for later. "We will speak, you and I. When the dead allow."

She's three steps gone when Hakon, who misses nothing, rumbles from behind me: "How long have you been on our dig site, Inquisitor?"

Rhen doesn't stop walking. "Long enough."

The waking signs, Magos Ferrin's report said, began five months ago. Nobody at the council says this out loud. Bjarn says it in the corridor afterward, quietly, in the form of a question I will not repeat, and no one answers him either.

Nine days into the evacuation, Sector Thirty-One-Low goes silent at second bell of the night watch.

Not riot-silent. Not fire-silent. Vox-silent, pict-silent, life-sign-silent — an entire underhive district of ninety thousand souls dropping off Karsala's boards between one auspex sweep and the next, clean as a ledger line. The Governor's marshals won't go down. The Wolves go down at a run, and I go with them, and my iron legs eat the descent stairs six at a time while flesh recalculates flesh around me.

Thirty-One-Low is a mid-shift district. We find it mid-shift.

Cook-pots steaming on ten thousand stoves. Looms still running, weaving cloth for no one. A tram frozen at its platform with the doors open, headlights burning down an avenue where every lho-stick and ration-bowl and half-written letter sits exactly where a human hand set it down — and no hands. No bodies. No blood. No breach. Ninety thousand people subtracted between heartbeats, and every chrono on every wall stopped at the same second.

"Same as the listening post," Bjarn says. Quiet. "The whole district. In one breath."

"Not the whole district," Ketil says, head cocked, young ears catching it first. "Listen."

Under the loom-clatter and the steam-hiss: a sound like sleet on a tin roof, getting closer. Skittering. Thousands-of-legs skittering.

They come out of the service ducts and the sewer mouths in a silver flood — beetle-things of living metal the size of hounds, eyes like drops of green fire, moving in perfect lockstep waves, and behind them, striding through the flood on too many jointed legs, come the collectors: tall spindle-limbed constructs of tarnished silver, ribcages of open scaffold, and inside each scaffold — glowing softly, stacked like grain — the green-lit outlines of human forms, dormant, suspended, catalogued.

Ninety thousand people. Being carried away as inventory.

"WOLVES OF FENRIS," Ulvar Stormbrand roars, and the night comes apart.

I will say this for the Sleepless Dead: they make a battlefield honest. No screaming, no fury, no fear to feed on — just green fire and arithmetic. Their beams don't burn you; they unmake you, layer by layer, flaying armour and flesh and bone in ordered strata like a butcher who bills by the slice. A Grey Hunter two paces from me loses a pauldron to one and the ceramite doesn't melt, doesn't shatter — it unbecomes, dissolving into powder that was never anything.

And I find — the God-Emperor forgive me the joy of it — that Ashkarran's crushing gravity is mine. The Wolves fight the planet and the enemy both; I fight only the enemy. My iron legs plant on rockcrete like they were poured into it, pivot without tiring, drive me through the scarab-flood in lunges no flesh could fund. My chainsword howls its hot animal wrath — it has waited months for this — and where its teeth meet living metal the machine spirit's fury is a physical thing, chewing sprays of silver from constructs that do not bleed and do not care.

Ketil fights at my left the whole way, laughing like a lunatic, calling my kills for the saga. I stop counting his. He is very easy to fight beside, which is a thing I will examine later, in private, with suspicion.

We are carving toward the nearest collector — Bjarn on its legs, my sword aimed at the scaffold-ribs full of sleeping people — when the far end of the avenue lights up green, and the second army arrives.

They are not the same.

I know it before I could say how I know it. Different silhouettes — these are warrior-forms, skeletal soldiers in ranks, tarnished gold where the collectors are silver, glyphs down their chest-plates that curl where the collectors' glyphs cut. They advance up the avenue in a phalanx older than my species, weapons levelled.

Not at us.

The volley goes over our heads and takes the nearest collector apart in green fire. The scarab-flood turns like a tide to meet the gold phalanx. And the Wolves and I stand in the middle of a xenos avenue, momentarily unaddressed, while two armies of the ancient dead annihilate each other over the inventory of Sector Thirty-One-Low.

"They're fighting each other," Ketil says, delighted and horrified in exactly equal measure.

"The anthems," I hear myself say. Two songs in two keys. Two houses under one roof, waking out of step — and they are not allies. They are rivals, and we are standing in the disputed estate.

"WOLVES," Ulvar bellows over the vox, wise enough not to waste the gift, "the collectors! Break the cages — take our people back while the dead have their politics!"

We save eleven thousand.

Eleven of ninety. The rest go down into the dark inside silver ribcages, or ash on the avenue, or simply elsewhere, subtracted beyond even the arithmetic of the dead — and the gold phalanx, when the collectors are driven off, does not thank us and does not turn on us. It re-forms, faces us for one long moment with a thousand green eyes that hold nothing at all, and marches into the earth.

Afterwards, in the recovery lines, Ottar the Rune Priest walks among the survivors we cut from the cages — and stops, and goes greyer than his beard.

"They have no dreams," he says. To Hakon, to Ulvar, to nobody. "I cast the wyrd across that whole battle and it came back empty. The constructs, aye — the dead are a hole in the world; that I knew. But the sleepers in the cages, the saved and the taken both—" his hand is not quite steady, and I have known this witch a fortnight and already I understand that his hand is never not steady "—nothing. Whatever those cages do to a soul, the Sea does not receive it. They are not harvesting bodies, Wolf Lord. They are harvesting something I cannot find afterward."

I hold my cross and do not say what I am thinking, which is that for one moment at the height of the fight — when a collector's green gaze swept across me and paused, the way a clerk pauses at an entry that does not belong in the ledger — the iron of it was warm through my gauntlet, warm through ceramite, warm like a hand on the back of the neck saying not this one.

The itch at the back of my skull is very loud tonight. I don't reach for it. I am starting to be afraid of what happens when I finally do.

Word comes down from the spire before dawn: the Inquisitor has moved her lift-window forward. Whatever is in that stasis-crate, Calvia Rhen wants it off Ashkarran considerably sooner than she wanted it yesterday — and she has doubled the guard on it, which is an interesting thing for a woman to do on a world where the enemy does not steal cargo. Unless she believes the cargo is what the enemy counts.

Nobody says that out loud either. We are accumulating quite a pile of things nobody says out loud.

And at dawn, Magos Ferrin's seismic report reaches the strategium, and it says what everyone already feels through the soles of their boots. The equatorial anthem has changed tempo. Faster. And for the first time since the Wyrmslayer made orbit, the south-polar anthem has changed to answer it — the two songs speeding, converging, like two hearts that have decided to race.

Ashkarran's dead are not waking anymore.

They are mobilising.