The Inheritor King by Matthew Farrer

Author:Matthew Farrer
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2019-01-03T16:13:47+00:00

XXII

He must have been expecting something, because after he had walked into the broad upper deck beneath the great slant of the forward windows, Tey realised he was waiting. For what, he had no idea. A flourish of trumpets? The cant and lights of a system start? An attack? He shrugged inwardly. Another magos might have fretted about that odd, unfocused expectation, and audited their thoughts to find where such an unproductively open-ended process bundle was running and why. Galhoulin Tey, who depended on the messiness of his thoughts to produce insights that pre-engineered logical forms could not, simply noted the sensation and moved on.

Through the bridge windows he could see constellations: not the star-spatter of Ashek’s night sky (and its overlay of twinkling debris from the war) but tidy, symmetrical lines and clusters: the running lights of the Ramosh Incalculate’s all-encompassing arkosect bay. The lifter had been constructed to ferry an entire formation of Titans down to a planetary surface: to carry away the Inheritor King, the walls between the Titan silos had been stripped out, turning the ship’s belly into a single enormous open-floored hangar. Tey, who had started to feel a little like an ant creeping through the carcass of some great predator, found the sight something of a relief. Here was a slightly more solid reminder that he was on an Imperial-held world. The war was over here. The graveyard of enemy machines was a tribute to that fact.

Tey laced his fingers together and stood in the centre of the bridge with his head bowed, his cowl falling forward and dropping a russet fringe around the edge of his vision. The ocular skulls circled him, painting the catwalks and the control banks around him with their eyelights, turning the darkened bridge into a surreal mosaic of glints and glimmers and textures. The great dark throne that would have been Asphodel’s high seat loomed in the bridge’s rear chamber. Tey turned his back on it.

What were you thinking, then? Tey thought half-aloud. You were a creature of mind, so-called Heritor. Still are, wherever you are now. What did that mind of yours draw on? What fuelled you? I want to see it. I am standing in what you intended to be your greatest creation, I am in amongst your thoughts and ambitions made manifest in glass and steel and adamantite. But it’s not enough. Your followers are poor scraps of what they were when they stood in the shade of your banner, Asphodel. Your woe machines are wreckage and your three fighting Hammerstone Kings are hulks. And your Inheritor King stands mute. I do not know what I need to. And I do not like not knowing what I need to. There will be a way to make your thoughts speak to me. I will know how your mind was when you were here, Asphodel. I am the servant of a greater god and a purer machine than you.

He walked forward, around the gracious swoop of the outermost control banks that curved beneath the bridge windows themselves.

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