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Day of Ascension – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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1

The body of Fabricator General Burzulem, lord of Morod, was like a great bronze bell clad in red and gold. His bald head, set in a writhing nest of segmented cables without any obvious neck, projected from the shadow of its upper slopes, most often pitched downwards so as to properly condescend towards his kneeling inferiors. When he walked, it was with a swaying gait, as though there should be the toll of a clapper with each step. It was a disquietingly fluid movement from a man who had long ago done away with human feet. The dozen articulated limbs that carried him along should skitter, Gammat Triskellian strongly felt, rather than let such a great weight of metal drift and eddy like a denizen of sunless alien sea-floors.

Right now, the Fabricator General was at rest, which for him did not mean sitting, the metal shell of his body lacking any manner of waist. Instead, Burzulem crouched on a dais, canted to observe the supplicants below with a regard benign or otherwise as the mood took him. At one shoulder – or at least the juncture where cyborg arms projected from his body – was Fabricator Locum Alloysia, his constant sycophant. She was a stiletto of a woman, all sharp edges and a coiling of servitor tentacles holding writs and scrolls and an ancient reckoning engine. Each tech-priest to come forward would have his requests weighed and measured on the cogs of that relic and given a moiety of Burzulem’s bounty for the coming year.

And there had been some bare years for Triskellian and his fellows in the Genetor order. Their work seldom attracted Burzulem’s approbation. Error and bias, he thought, awaiting his turn, but what could he do, outside these protocols and procedures? Triskellian had submitted his order’s requests for the coming calendrical research term, a long screed of closely written proposals for expeditions, experiments and devotional exercises seeking that ultimate perfection where flesh and machine could more elegantly express the intent of the Omnissiah. So much that we are on the very brink of. Except Burzulem had his favourites, and Triskellian’s people were not among them.

The current petitioner was long-winded. Alloysia shifted on the sharp points of her metal feet. Behind her, the bulk of her Kastelan robot mimicked the movement ponderously.

‘Entirely, absolutely and in all other ways contraindicated,’ Burzulem cut the man off. ‘Egregiously tedious, Matriculus. Don’t you think, Alloy?’

‘Monotonous to the point of sedation, Fabricator General.’ Alloysia made a great show of yawning, something her engineered respiratory system had no need for.

‘Nothing for you, Matriculus. Join the conscription pool. Go round us up some fitting offerings.’ A hollow chuckle rang through Burzulem’s frame. ‘Now, who do we have here? Pronotum Tan? Forwards, Master Tan, and let us have your insights.’

Tan, a crony of Burzulem of old, had a dozen of Morod’s manufactoria in his care. He wished, he said, to revisit a metallurgical technique long fallen into disuse but recently unearthed by his researchers. Nothing significant, Triskellian noted with disdain. Just one more paring of knowledge fallen on the foundry floor a century before, and now swept out from under the tables by a plodder like Tan. And it was mercury, of course. Tan was obsessed with mercurial alloys, no matter the toll they took on flesh. He was reeling off his estimates now: two per cent greater durability, four per cent increase in production speed. And, buried in the figures, eleven per cent reduction in the estimated lifespan of the manufactorum workers, from contact with all that toxic metal. And that would impact productivity in a generation’s time, Triskellian knew, and doubtless that was why the practice had been abandoned the first time. We go round and round, abandoning bad ideas only for someone to come along and ‘discover’ them all over again…

But Tan received a generous allocation of the research bursary for his bad idea, and then it was the turn of Triskellian to step forwards – almost the very end of the long line – to shepherd in his own proposals. He stood as tall as he could, irising his artificial eyes to steely blue dots, manually releasing a little pressure from the bellows in his chest to give his voice a steadier tone.

‘Oh,’ Burzulem said, rolling his one organic eye. ‘Observe, Alloy, it’s our esteemed colleague the Visceral Triskellian.’ A nickname that had dogged Triskellian since their common youth in the seminary.

‘Fabricator General–’ But then he was waved to silence as a servitor bustled jerkily in with news. Burzulem took the scroll from the man-shaped thing and held it back and forth, his living eye squinting and its brass counterpart telescoping in and out.

‘Aha!’ An expression of glee that set the man’s body ringing with resonant echoes. ‘Our steel prodigies have returned, splendid. My learned colleagues’ – his voice abruptly turned up to twice the volume to encompass the whole room – ‘I am informed that we have today in orbit some proud sons and daughters of Morod. Our faithful conscripts, who left our shores in times past to be remade from gross flesh into gallant skitarii. They who left our world to nobly quest under the light of other stars have returned to welcome those whom we send to join their cybernetic siblinghood. And we must not shame them, my learned colleagues. We must ensure that they are welcomed with fireworks and ceremony and all the precisely calculated degrees of appropriately calibrated jubilation. And fresh conscripts, of course. Lots and lots of conscripts. Forgive me, colleagues, this places such a burden of administration on my head.’ And the bell-frame of his body was lifted up onto its many little feet, ready to drift away as though blown by the wind.

Triskellian adjusted his bellows again until a sound like a cough issued from his chest. Burzulem stopped, one eye and then the other swivelling down.

‘Oh,’ he said, without relish. ‘Oh yes, mustn’t go before listening to old Visceral. Uncase your contents and reveal all, Visceral.’

Triskellian ground his teeth but held on to both patience and dignity. ‘Fabricator General,’ he said, passing his scrolls to a servitor to be ferried to Burzulem’s bronze grasp. ‘The genetors put forward a wide-ranging and pan-disciplinary research curriculum primarily focused on my own work with the skitarii. As you know, current practice on remote reconfiguration of our skitarii in the field relies heavily on adaptation only of their mechanical components, often to the detriment of their remaining living systems, impairing function and reducing operational lifespan. I am experimenting with a philtre that would grant greater resilience and adaptability to organic tissue, thus allowing us the same degree of control and manipulation of their living substance and therefore–’

‘Ugh,’ Burzulem interrupted. ‘Same old Visceral. I know your type likes to dabble in all manner of unspeakable substances but this can only be characterised as unseemly. Insalubrious. Do you concur, Alloy?’

‘Positively infested with organic effluvia,’ Alloysia agreed. She had the great weight of proposals held up now, her tendrils leafing through them in a blur. ‘And unprecedented, Fabricator General. I don’t see a single seal or writ of dispensation certifying this research. Where were these techniques originally set out, Visceral?’

‘I am following a revised line of enquiry,’ Triskellian said carefully. ‘You’ll see that I have conducted an analysis on the gaps in recovered research, and I am attempting to reconstruct the original through… novel procedures that follow a statistical best-fit model.’ He had been shuffling forwards as she read, and now he was right at the foot of the dais, looking up at them. Hating himself for having to beg, but this once he needed to impress his loathsome pair of superiors. I could reach out and…

‘Follow, do they?’ Burzulem echoed. ‘But Triskellian, it seems to me that you haven’t been following at all. This all sounds as though you have just been making it all up like any layman might, in his folly.’ Abruptly his face was all hard and stern, levity banished. ‘If this work is the righteous labour of a tech-priest, show me where it has been perfected and performed by our predecessors. Show me in the histories, O wayward genetor, where these things have been judged fit for our rites and doctrine. Because this looks to me as though you feel you can trample over how things are done in your haste to get to places our forebears never went. And if they never went, Visceral, it was for good reason. You will follow these novel enquiries of yours all the way to heresy. If it were meant for us to do these things, then these things would have been done.’ And most of the other tech-priests there echoed the litany in a droning mumble.

I could just… ‘Where the ancient routines are incomplete, then only experimentation can determine what the original processes might have been,’ Triskellian equivocated hurriedly. ‘I swear before the writ of the Omnissiah that I shall–’

‘No,’ Burzulem stated. ‘We will keep you from temptation, my wayward genetor, for you are ours to protect from your own worst impulses.’ A metallic snicker. ‘No resources allocation for Gammat Triskellian and his genetors, Alloy. Note that down.’

‘Duly noted, Fabricator General.’

‘Instead, the conscription pool. After all, we mustn’t shame our returning heroes, now that the vagaries of the warp have brought them back to us for our festivities. We shall have an Ascension Day fit to remember! The greatest for a century! But don’t think I have forgotten you, dear Visceral. The conscription pool yawns for you, Triskellian. In fact, because I love and value you, you shall have the responsibility of meeting quota. Let your novel enquiries be put into the best manner of rounding up a new batch of prospective servitors and skitarii. Harvest us a good crop, Visceral, and maybe next year you might have a little bursary of your own.’

‘Fabricator General, please!’ And before he could stop himself, Triskellian leant forwards, actually laid a hand on the taut fabric of Burzulem’s robe. Even went so far as to tug at the man, pulling him forwards, teetering at the dais’ edge. And I could. I could cast him down. The thought was simultaneously sacrilegious and electrifying. What biased calculations placed him over me? Shift one decimal and it would be me there denying him!

‘How dare!’ Burzulem shrieked. ‘Alloysia, have him unhand me!’

The gunfire began even with his last words, a figure bursting through the assembled tech-priests, scattering them like pins. Triskellian saw two hands brandishing pistols. Two, and then a third. There were skitarii shouldering in after, virtually clubbing the junior priests down in their haste to get to the assassin. The first shots had torn great gouges in Burzulem’s finery, leaving bright scars on the metal shell of his body. The next–

Triskellian pulled. He still had a fistful of the torn robe and he hauled on it with all his strength, dragging the Fabricator General off his pedestal with a wail. Burzulem hit the ground with a sonorous bronze peal, his many feet kicking and rattling for purchase. The guns blazed.

Triskellian’s world went white. He felt a moment of incandescent agony about his arm and shoulder, and then the limits he had set within his flesh killed the pain before it could overwhelm him. His internal chronologue informed him that he had lost one and a half seconds of experienced time as his nervous system overloaded and was brought forcibly back. He was draped over the rocking, protesting form of Burzulem. Or most of him was. There was an arm lying in rags and tatters, spattered up the steps of the dais. Triskellian’s left arm. The salvo of pistol fire had blown it clean off his shoulder.

Up on the dais, Alloysia was stock-still, frozen as though her limbs had glitched. Her Kastelan robot mimicked her startled posture, no help at all.

The assassin was standing over him. Triskellian’s eyes – the two blue-lensed replacements he’d had installed after one explosive lab failure too many – kept shifting focus between the three barrels. Three hands. In the seconds before his surely impending death he focused on ridiculous details: the toughened horny skin of those fingers, like chitin or machinery, perfect in its articulation. He looked past the guns to the killer’s face, seeing a woman’s features stretched, the eyes sheer black, the mouth wide.

The skitarii opened fire then, the blue-green light of their carbines crackling about the room. At least one junior tech-
priest was caught where he shouldn’t have been and cut down in error – must recalibrate their targeting; what thoughts to have, in the last moments of one’s life! – but then the assassin staggered as they found her. Even then she turned and shot down two of them, bullets seeking out vital battery connections and fluid pumps. Another iridescent scatter of shot raked across her and she went down to one knee, pistols jumping from spasming hands.

Burzulem bucked and jolted his rider off him. Triskellian landed hard, a searing sensation shooting through his body – not pain but the recollection of it – which had been locked away in those one point five seconds of blanked memory. The assassin was snarling, hissing, pinned down by the metal hands of five skitarii as another levelled a rifle at her misshapen head.

‘Hold.’ Burzulem actually sounded composed as Alloysia helped him to his feet. ‘Such an unpardonable insult as this deserves more public proceedings.’ He didn’t even sound out of breath, but then of course whatever was breathing for the Fabricator General was independent of whatever spoke for him. ‘Ascension Day is upon us, after all, and along with a crop of offerings we will need entertainment. Electric excruciation, I think, for the greater glory of the Omnissiah. And in this case we will need to build the frame especially. The mines will keep turning out their mutations, will they not?’ He poked at the wounds of the assassin, as she hung in the skitarii’s grip. ‘Remarkable. She has too many arms and you, Visceral, now have too few.’ He looked down at Triskellian, who was exploring the ruin of his shoulder to see what could be saved. ‘Doubtless, left to your own experiments, you would amputate one of hers and merely add it to the frailties of your own flesh. I shall save you from the baseness of your proclivities. Go, have yourself fitted with an appropriately metallurgical replacement. And then to your duties! After all, we have a momentous day planned. Go and prove you’re worthy of a little responsibility.’

Without a backward glance, Burzulem drifted from the room, his many little feet tapping lightly on the floor. The other priests followed after him, bowing and scraping and commending his wisdom.

One of the skitarii helped Triskellian to his feet. He made an abortive movement towards the wreck of his lost arm, feeling light-headed at the loss of blood, or at least fluids. Shock was setting in, he knew. He needed to get back to his lab, where a cocktail of biological suppressants would have him thinking clearly again.

‘Wait.’ The word was out of his mouth before he knew why he’d said it. The skitarii had been hauling the assassin off – rendered unconscious by her own shock and blood loss, he saw.

‘Tech-priest?’

‘Make sure she lives,’ he got out. ‘So she can be executed in public.’ Servitors had arrived to clean up the mess, and again he wanted to reclaim his arm, one more piece of the dwindling biological material he’d been born with. Sentiment, though, and that had no place in a man of his station. He was staring at the killer’s sagging features, her weirdly proportioned head. It reminded him of something he’d read about, long ago. The obscure researches of priests who’d come before him. A mutant, Burzulem had said. Triskellian wasn’t so sure.

But by then he really did have to get to his lab before the shock overcame his implants and took him down. And then there was the conscription pool, mean and menial work as it was. He stumbled off, waving away any attempt at help. He needed to think about his future.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2021.
This eBook edition published in 2021 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Vladimir Krisetskiy.

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ISBN: 978-1-80026-626-1

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