Vainglorious (Ciaphas Cain: Warhammer 40,000 Book 11) by Sandy Mitchell

Author:Sandy Mitchell [Mitchell, Sandy]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2023-08-12T00:00:00+00:00

Seventeen

‘I feel like Tobit the Tallarn,’[105] Jurgen grumbled, pulling his hood a little further forward to conceal a bit more of his face – which I’m bound to say came as a distinct improvement. If it bulged a little where his helmet was, like the odd protuberances around his shoulders where the bulk of the melta and his lasgun were concealed, it only added to the effectiveness of his disguise; most tech-priests were so heavily augmented that the silhouette beneath their robes varied to some extent from the human standard. For that matter my own weapons had a similar effect, and I’d drawn back one of the sleeves to leave my augmetic fingers visible, which I felt would add an extra degree of verisimilitude to our imposture.

I have to confess to feeling more than a little ridiculous myself, but to my relieved astonishment our makeshift disguises didn’t seem to elicit so much as a glance from any of the tech-priests we’d passed in the corridors since leaving our accommodation. It hadn’t taken us long to fashion a rough approximation of the robes most of them wore from a couple of bedsheets, although the hems were distinctly ragged where we’d hacked through the fabric with our combat knives, and the joins were rather less than workmanlike, held together as they were with chirurgical tape from the primary aid kit Jurgen habitually kept squirrelled away in one of his utility pouches. (Something for which both of us had been grateful on far too many occasions.) Fortunately, the cogboys’ taste for russet hues even on something as mundane as bed-linen made our deception relatively easy; I’d known a few acolytes of the Machine-God favour other colours over the years, chiefly white, but what that signified I had no idea,[106] and I’d seen none of them around Metallum Majoris in any case, so adopting any of those would probably have made us stand out almost as much as if we hadn’t even bothered.

Despite our unexpected success, I must admit to a distinct sense of relief when we left the more crowded corridors for the comparatively lightly travelled passages of the mine itself. As I’d expected, they connected directly to the main habitation area, funnelling us through a warren of utility zones filled with arcane mechanisms of quite stunning size and complexity on the way. Some of these I was familiar with from our tours of inspection, but many meant nothing to me at all, beyond the most tentative of guesses at what their purpose might be. I’d been paying enough attention on these earlier jaunts to be pretty clear where I was aiming for, though: a large and echoing cavern where the bounty from the lower shafts (or, to be more precise, a prodigious amount of rock fragments from which the bounty would later be extracted) reached the surface.[107] Warned by the increasing noise level we slowed our pace as we approached it, feeling the vibrations thrumming beneath our feet, and the booming roar

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