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The Twice-Dead King: Ruin – Extract

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Chapter One

PATHETIC CREATURES

‘How has it come to this?’ growled Oltyx to himself, his voice low as the frozen wind, as he noticed the creature bleeding out on the flagstones. Once, Oltyx had been the brightest scion of an empire that had ruled a thousand stars. The kynazh, no less: third foremost of the great House of Ithakas, and destined one day for the dynastic throne. But things had not worked out that way, and he had ended up here.

Sedh: a ball of toxic sleet so enfeebled it no longer spun, but wallowed in place, with one hemisphere forever turned towards its dying sun. A desolate fringeworld, home only to outcasts and lunatics, on the very edge of Ithakan space. When Dynast Unnas had robbed Oltyx of his birthright and cast him from the royal house, he had appointed him as Sedh’s nomarch. Exiled him, in other words, to an endless twilight spent fending off incursions of vermin from beyond the border. And now, going by the shivering green lump beginning to stain the snow in the corner of his vision, it seemed the resources required to do that properly were slipping beyond his reach.

Even a lowly nomarch was above the vile work of clearing up organic waste. But Oltyx could already feel his doctrinal partition, where the first of his subminds sat, growing noisy with outrage over the intrusion, and he knew from bitter experience that it would not cease its hectoring until he dealt with the wounded thing himself.

Weary is the head that wears a crown, he thought blackly, and began descending the broad steps from the tomb’s entryway, down to where the intruder lay.

The Ossuary’s gates were fronted by an austere portico, shaped from a ledge jutting out from the cliff into which the complex was built. Oltyx had been standing in its shadows for the last twelve hours, staring gloomily out over the infantry picket. The intruder, no doubt, had thought him to be just more architecture: a weather-beaten statue of a skeletal giant, as still and lifeless as the columns beside it. But if it had looked closer through the gathering snow, it would have seen the faintest smouldering of emerald fire, like dying coals in the hollows between his iron ribs. Now, as his anger welled up from his deep core-flux, those coals caught flame, spreading their fury to the discharge nodes arrayed across his frame, until they glowed bright enough to cast a green halo on the snow where he passed.

Oltyx’s anger never truly receded. It was always there, waiting for a reason to rise. And now, it had several. He was angry at the legions, who were meant to be an extension of his own hand, for their failure in holding the line. He was angry at those who had cast him out and reduced him to this. But most of all, he was angry at the creature.

Sedh might have been an inconsequential holding, and his posting there a calculated insult from Unnas. But frigid, poison-throttled backwater though it was, it was still a world of Ithakas, and of the necrontyr. Their claim, staked an eternity ago, could never be conceded. Every inch of land within those ancient bounds, even a rock so meagre as Sedh, was kemmeht: ground fit only for gods and their servants, sacred beyond the comprehension of flesh. No place for the living.

This tomb was a place more sacred than most. The Grand Ossuary, while nothing compared with the tombs of the crownworld Antikef, was the greatest of Sedh’s sepulchral complexes. It was the bastion and resting place of this outpost’s lords, and those who had risen maintained their quarters here still, while its galleries were home to those still trapped in the long sleep. And in its deepest catacombs, of course, lurked the grim, ever-swelling crowd of those who had woken, only to slip into the second death of the curse.

Ithakas had woken far earlier than its neighbouring dynasties, and the Ossuary had stood as a frontier bastion during those fierce, proud years of reclamation. It had remained unbreached through the long centuries that followed, despite endless incursions from the land-hungry upstart species of the Unclean. Even as the dynasty had begun to slip into decline, its sanctity had been preserved, thanks to the tireless vigil of Sedh’s dwindling garrison. But now, on Oltyx’s watch, its stones had been befouled.

The interloper had only made it as far as the Temenos, the sacred precinct bordering the tomb’s entrance. But as the pious whisper from his doctrinal partition was already reminding him, that was a severe enough transgression.

The scar conferred on my master’s honour, it sneered, dripping with patrician disdain, will be indelible.

Oltyx examined the intruder, and agreed. The defilement had been achieved at the hand of perhaps the most pathetic of all the Unclean creatures encountered by Oltyx in his long existence. Glowering at the thing, he cued his xenology partition for a designation.

Grohtt, his fifth submind told him after a moment, is this thing’s name in the tongue of the orks.

‘Grohtt,’ murmured Oltyx out loud, after turning the word over in his vocal buffer like a wad of something foul. If nothing else, the enemy had a talent for onomatopoeia. The beast looked exactly as revolting as its name sounded. Snivelling, and wheezing through a punctured chest, the runtish green thing was the embodiment of furtive, animal cowardice. It was durable, though. The slave-beast had hauled itself two khet from where it had fallen at the infantry line, and had leaked a long smudge in the ash-grey snow, which repulsed Oltyx most of all.

‘Why can it not just die,’ he wondered aloud, to nobody but himself, ‘without wiping itself everywhere?’

Now, to his acute disgust, it had hooked a single, filthy talon over the bottom stair, and had begun pulling itself up. Oltyx swept down the last few steps to intercept it, swift and silent as a swooping raptor. He was, by now, extremely annoyed.

There had been eight waves of the grohtts so far, driven from the ork line to rush across the snow-sludge plain at the Ossuary. Whether the orks were fool enough to hope to exhaust the defenders’ ammunition, or just found it entertaining to send their thralls to their deaths, Oltyx had no idea. They were as stupid as they were cruel, after all. Either way, wave after wave had been cut down like reeds at the necron line, extinguished with archaic efficacy, despite the garrison’s woeful state of disrepair. Or at least, Oltyx had thought that had been the case. This survivor, apparently, had found the limit of his garrison’s capabilities. It probably thought it was lucky. But Oltyx would show it the opposite was true.

He towered over it, motionless as the gateway columns once more, as he waited for it to look up. When his title had been taken from him, he had undergone a rite of excoriation, which had burned the shining silver finish of Ithakas from his carapace. Left behind was the raw sublayer of his necrodermis, rough as lava rock and dark as night, with the pinpricks of his discharge nodes spread across it like constellations of green embers. They would be invisible to the grohtt’s vantage, however, drowned out by the blazing of the glyphic cartouche on his thorax – the dynastic sigil, lit directly by his core-fire. And above that, the baleful glow of his oculars, as he stared down at the alien in contempt.

Oltyx coaxed the tame, compact star of his core into a higher burn-plateau, radiating even more energy through his flux, so his lights would begin to edge from green into searing white. As the reactor rumbled, the dirty snow began to hiss into steam where its flurries brushed his carapace, making his ire into something tangible. Though it was scant remedy for the defilement, he could at least ensure the wretch spent its last moments overcome with awe and dread.

The grohtt peered up at him, red eyes squinting down the length of its hideous proboscis, and bared the jagged yellow nubs of its teeth. It regarded him for a long time, quaking with cold as it died, but it didn’t look particularly awed. If anything, it looked confused. Eventually, with a cackle that became a wet, wracking cough, it spat a great glob of black mucus onto his footplate.

That was enough, at last, to transmute his anger into fury. It began as something cognitive – a matter of rapid-collapse logic states, refrenations and cascading induction failures. But his mind and body were no longer truly separate, and soon the discord surged through him with the roiling currents of his core-flux. Along with it rode the phantom sensation of having once had blood, and the unexpected revulsion tore away the last of Oltyx’s self-control. His heel flattened the creature’s skull, the grohtt sullying him further with a spray of cranial fluid, and fury-patterns wracked his discharge nodes through the steam that wreathed them.

When it became aware of the gore-clots fanned across his leg plating, his doctrinal submind was scandalised.

Fl*sh! it wailed, before falling into a horrified susurration of Taboo, Taboo, Taboo, as it queued a needless quantity of cleaner scarab summons to his interstitial node. But Oltyx swiped the whole stack away. After the submind had spent so long needling him over lost honour, he would gladly endure the mess, if only to make the pompous little ghost suffer. However, there were other consequences due, and so he muted its shrieks.

‘Praetor Neth!’ he boomed over the howling wind, the rough iron of his voice echoing down the snow-crusted friezes of the Ossuary wall. ‘Come, warden, and account for yourself.’

To a mortal, the praetor would have been a sight to inspire terror. Almost as tall as Oltyx himself, and broader across his armoured shoulders, Neth had been a commoner in life, but had served faithfully and arduously enough to earn an eternity of conscious service as the warden of Sedh’s garrison. He suspected the praetor thought of himself as a vargard of sorts to the nomarchial throne – but if so, he was mistaken. Oltyx’s rank might have been lowered to this posting, but his standards remained those of a kynazh; the likes of Neth would only ever be fit to direct the mindless ranks of the peasantry on his behalf. And here, the orders provided could not have been more simple: Neth had been given fifteen of the garrison’s most intact legions of warriors, and told to hold the line at the Temenos’ edge.

But Neth was a fool, with a mind full of holes. Degraded by the pattern ataxia that beset so many, he had been in a poor state even back when Oltyx had inherited him with the garrison, and he had only grown worse with time. All too often now, he could barely hold a sentence together, let alone a line of battle. And like the countless others in his condition or worse, he could never be repaired.

Neth knew it, too. Oltyx could see his shame in the way his head hung as he walked through the falling snow. The praetor was… cringing, his discharge nodes rippling with shame-patterns that only served to stoke the violence thrumming in Oltyx’s core. Even the grohtt had faced him with more courage, thought the nomarch, as Neth knelt before him with a grinding of time-worn joints.

‘A th-thousand apologies, my lord,’ croaked the praetor, actuators stuttering and distorting around the words. ‘Th… they… are many, however, and the ph-phalanxes are spread too th… thin along the line. We–’

‘You were required to make do with what was provided you, praetor,’ said Oltyx in a stentorian rumble, underscored by the sizzle of snowflakes on his glaive, as an exhumation protocol brought it to hand from the dimensional appendix that served as its sheath. ‘My word was clear – nothing was to pass the line. Repeat the rest of my command, praetor.’

‘My nomarch, I… beg you…’

‘Repeat my command!’ spat Oltyx, vocal actuators fuzzing from the force of his anger, as he sent Neth sprawling with a blow from the glaive’s butt. The praetor did not say a word as he clattered down three more steps, just rose stiffly into a kneeling position once more. His slowness was agonising to watch, but this was no time to let pity take root.

‘These s-s-sacred stones are not to be defiled,’ recited the praetor hopelessly, ‘until you, yourself, ha-v-v-v-ve fallen in their defence.’

‘And yet, the stones are defiled,’ reasoned Oltyx, with a gesture at the carcass. ‘Insufficient.’ He let the silence stretch, and when he spoke again, he let the vibration of his actuators take on the softness of deep foreboding. ‘All is not lost, however. It would seem there is a contingency yet open to you, praetor, allowing you to honour the spirit of my command. In retrospect, at least.’

It took Neth a moment to follow his lord’s meaning, but he got there.

‘So be it,’ said the praetor, voice like a whisper of tomb dust as he bowed his weathered faceplate in supplication. ‘I will g-gladly-y pay that price, for honour.’

Slowly, grimly, and watched by nobody, since the empty-minded ranks of the warriors only stared off into the clouds on the horizon, Oltyx raised his weapon. Satisfied at last, at least in comparison with its usual state, Doctrinal stacked commendation-glyphs in the corner of his vision.

My master acts in the manner of a true ruler, the submind told him. It was patronising and stuffy in its delivery. But it was correct. There was a reason it was ranked first among his partitioned selves, after all. These terrible moments of hardness, where propriety overcame all sentiment, were the moments where he knew he was still a leader: that he could still be great, despite the shame inflicted on him by Unnas.

Neth’s oculars flickered for a moment, and a faint shiver across Oltyx’s interstitial node told him the praetor had shut down his recall protocol. When he was cut down, his patterns would not be translated back to the Ossuary’s heart for reconstruction. The immortal warrior was readying himself for death. To his horror, Oltyx found his anger stalling in the face of the praetor’s humility. Neth had done his best. With the warriors of the garrison growing dimmer and slower with every year that passed, was it any wonder his troops had not achieved perfection? And yet here he was anyway, willing to die as penance for falling short.

Oltyx arrested the thoughts before they could grow into compassion. Compassion, he knew, was weakness speaking. He could not make excuses on behalf of his lessers. Though he might no longer be kynazh, he was still royal. His orders were not requests, but statements of fact. If the universe did not conform to their truth, it was his subjects’ duty to remake it until it did. To fail in that service was to call him a liar – or worse, to deny his heka; the presidence of his will over reality. Neither could be permitted.

Oltyx swung the glaive.

But before the blade could connect, a light seared through his optic buffer, accompanied by the sensation that his limbs were being torn from his control. His arms spasmed, and the strike went wide of the praetor’s neck.

No. The voice came from his strategic partition, and it was almost indistinguishable from the voice of his own thoughts – after all, that was very nearly what it was. The strategic submind was the second of his set of five, and just like the first in the doctrinal partition and the fifth in xenology, it was a shackled, partial duplicate of his own consciousness.

We must not, it stated.

That was unusual, thought Oltyx, too shocked to be affronted as he connected the facts. Had Strategic just caused that spasm? It was impossible, by design, for his subservient mirror-selves to intercede in his actuator functions – or for that matter any of the vital systems reserved for his access alone.

At least, it should have been impossible. He would have to speak to Mentep, the engrammancer who had forged the subminds in the first place, about that. When he returned, that was. True to the nature of his caste, Sedh’s resident cryptek moved around local space like a piece on a board that only he could understand, and had vanished some days ago, on unspecified business. For the time being, Oltyx supposed he should let Strategic explain itself before he did anything drastic to it – it was possibly the copy of himself he despised least, after all.

Please do explain, Oltyx thought acidly to the second submind, as he quietly queued encryption-rewrites for every kinetic actuator in his body.

You asked yourself, master, why the orks sent their slaves to die on our line, reported Strategic, in its usual clipped tones. Now you know. They hoped to sow disorder. The orks are cruel, but not stupid. They know our pride – what division it might cause if something so lowly as a…

Grohtt, sneered the xenology submind, unable to resist flashing a disgust-glyph, for its fascination for the Unclean was matched only by its hatred of them.

…was to breach our line. Now this has happened. For the price of a slave, they will have killed a general.

Neth is no longer fit for duty, submind. You know this.

Perhaps – but who better will replace him?

Grim realisation settled over Oltyx then, like the poison snow on his rapidly cooling carapace, as he realised the strategic mind was right. He was so used to despising Neth, he tended to forget the praetor was still the most capable asset in his direct command. Certainly, Oltyx had access to a whole community of exiles, deviants and vagabonds on this sorry frontier fringeworld, and many of those lords had thousands of troops at their command. But they were not his. Since his royalty had been cut away with his silver, and he held only the post of nomarch, Sedh’s nobles were allies to be reasoned with, rather than subjects to be ordered.

Under the rigid hierarchy of the dynasty, then, his only assets were the three tessarions of the garrison, comprising thirty-five decurions spread between them. Fifty thousand soldiers, in theory, along with supporting detachments of canoptek constructs and war engines. In practice, though, nearly a quarter of the garrison had been lost to the curse, and barely a third of the remainder – perhaps fifteen thousand warriors – still functioned with any real efficiency. The garrison’s command network was in a sorrier state still, and the various subsidiary commanders were so degraded they made Neth seem as cunning as Orikan himself by comparison: almost all had either slipped downwards into the bafflement of engrammatic degeneration, or sideways into the madness of the curse.

A failure though he was, therefore, Neth was still too precious to waste – even if protocol demanded his deletion. Oltyx had known this on a rational level, but he had not seen the truth through his anger, which looked exactly like righteousness when it grew dense enough. This was why he had commissioned Mentep to augment his mind, he supposed. Even if he had preferred it when his subminds had not taken such a… direct involvement in his decision-making, they saw truths sometimes, which he could not. While leadership meant putting propriety over sentiment, in Oltyx’s opinion at least, genius lay in knowing when to put reason over propriety.

Djoseras, the elder kynazh of his house – and so heir to Dynast Unnas – would have been appalled. But Djoseras had always been appalled when it came to Oltyx. While the younger of the pair believed in pragmatism, the elder believed in propriety over everything. It was the reason they had fallen into the feud that had eventually led to Oltyx’s exile by Unnas, and the reason Djoseras had stood by and let him be banished, despite the injustice of the sentence. Oltyx reminded himself that he owed the fastidious prig nothing, least of all his consideration. Exile had, at least, put his decisions back into his own hands, away from the elder scion’s constant criticism.

He would spare Neth. But he stayed silent and mind-blank as he lowered his glaive, unwilling to let Strategic have the satisfaction of knowing it had been right.

I am glad you listened to my suggestion, master, said the submind anyway, appending a glyph of faint amusement to the statement, as it had seen right through him. Now look to the horizon – see why I offered it. After that it withdrew to its partition and Oltyx, fuming with its insubordination, locked the metaphorical door behind it, putting it under a seal of silence until he felt otherwise. The damned thing would have to ask permission before it spoke to him again.

Neth, meanwhile, was still waiting patiently for death. And if the warden was confused by Oltyx’s apparent mercy, he wasn’t daring to show it. No matter; the fool could keep waiting. Whatever the feelings of his strategic partition, there was no way Oltyx was letting the praetor escape all consequences. Bristling with fresh irritation, he tasked his third submind – Combat, which paced its partition like a beast, snarling rather than speaking – with working out how grievously he could batter Neth and still leave him repairable. Combat set about the task with relish.

Then he sent for the cleaning scarabs at last, as the grohtt’s phlegmy neural tissue was beginning to freeze onto his leg, and it repulsed him to his core. Finally, and with petty satisfaction at leaving it until last, he followed Strategic’s suggestion and looked to the horizon.

Ah, thought Oltyx then, as he quietly rescinded the order he had given to the combat partition. Apparently, he would need Neth fit to fight somewhat sooner than expected. The orks, at last, were on the move.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2021.
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