Thump.
Tonst tensed. ‘Just a crate,’ he muttered.
Thump. Thump.
He cursed softly and let his lights play across the opposite side of the hold. In the gloom, something moved. A soft sound – a groan? – echoed. ‘A survivor?’ he said, his voice loud in the quiet. He approached the place the sound had come from, moving quickly. A survivor could be bad for business – or exceptionally good, if they were from a sufficiently wealthy family.
‘Anyone alive down here?’ he called, hesitantly. ‘If so, I claim salvage rights as per artycle eight, point three…’
Another groan. Followed by a fumbling sound. He closed in on it, wondering if it was just the wind making a fool of him. His lights fell across another corpse. He stopped. The dead duardin’s boots had twitched. Tonst sighed. A survivor, and a poor one, to judge by his gear’s lack of ornamentation. ‘Just my luck. Well, come on then. Let’s see you, you wanaz…’
Tonst reached down, and the crewman caught at his wrist. The wounded duardin lurched up, helm crumpled, revealing frost-blackened features. Eyes like misted glass glared sightlessly at him, as teeth champed mindlessly. He jerked back, yelling, as the duardin – not wounded but dead, he realised, dead and moving! – thrashed in pursuit.
The corpse of the crewman flopped towards him, making gabbling noises that sounded more like a beast than a duardin. Tonst backed away, reaching for his cutter. Something hissed from behind him, and he turned awkwardly, hampered by his endrin. Another crewman crouched atop one of the few intact crates in un-duardin-like fashion. Broken limbs quivered as the corpse crept closer. It lunged, groaning.
‘No,’ Tonst snarled, snatching his cutter from its sheath and sweeping it out. His blade sank into the corpse’s chest with a wet crunch, and snagged there. He twisted a control valve and slid away from the stumbling corpse, as others nearby began to twitch and moan. Hands flailed at his boots as he hurtled back the way he’d come, anchor chain clanking in his wake. He caught it up as he half ran, half hopped towards the gap in the hull. The wreck was shaking worse than before, as if it might tear itself to pieces at any moment. Dead crewmen rose around him, lurching into view as he fled.
He had to get out. Out, out, out!
He exploded out of the wreck, trying to reel in the anchor. Cold hands groped, catching hold of it. The chain stretched taut. Tonst was jerked to an unsteady halt. He snarled curses as he twisted in place, endrin straining. He flailed at the release catch for the chain, but the sudden halt had jammed it. The chain trembled. He tried to angle himself to see what was happening. When he did, his flailing became more desperate.
He was still trying to release the chain when they dragged him back.
The Chamber of the Broken World occupied the aleph of the Sigmarabulum – the point from which the entirety of the ring, and Mallus itself, could be seen. It sat atop a great tower on the edge of the ring’s inner curve, facing the world-that-was. The Tower of Apogee was said to have been the first part of the Sigmarabulum to be constructed, the seed from which the rest of the ring had grown.
Smaller towers, connected by hundreds of walkways, spread out around it. Lightning played about the great pylons that crowned each of them, and ran like water down their sides. These were the soul-mills: the storehouses of the slain. Often, fallen Stormcasts could not be immediately reforged – whether due to the sheer number of deaths or some more esoteric reason – and so their souls were instead drawn into the soul-mills, where they waited, unformed, but not necessarily unaware.
He could hear the towers shaking with the agonised fury of innumerable souls as he and Tyros climbed the steps of the Tower of Apogee. ‘The soul-mills are active, more than I have ever seen,’ he said.
‘Count yourself lucky in that regard.’ Tyros steadfastly ignored both the shuddering towers and the muted cries that came from them. Despite being reduced to raw soul-stuff, the dead could still scream, and their wails were audible throughout the Sigmarabulum.
‘Something is going on – a new push into enemy territory?’
Tyros grunted. ‘There is always a new push. Something is always going on. We are at war, brother. We fight on multiple fronts, in multiple realms, and every victory is bought at the price of our brothers’ souls.’ He sighed. ‘But such is the way of it – much is demanded of those to whom much is given.’
Balthas could think of no fitting reply. He turned away from the soul-mills, leaving them to shake and scream as they would. Instead, he took in the tower before him. As ever, its scale staggered him. The wide, slabbed steps, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, spilled down the sides and back of the tower.
This cascade was broken at regular intervals by great porticos and enormous doorways. These were overlooked by high, semi-enclosed archways, where heavy artillery pieces known as celestar ballistae sat, ready to repel anyone foolish enough to attack the tower. Devised by the war-engineers of the Conclave of the Thunderbolt, the lightning-infused bolts they launched could punch through even the strongest shield, or the scaly hides of the star-born monstrosities that occasionally slunk down from the outer dark.
When they reached the uppermost portico, where the entrance to the chamber lay, two great clockwork gargants, made from gold and brass, stood to either side of an immense pair of double doors, covered in celestial carvings far beyond the skill of any mortal hand.
The two false gargants had been fashioned after the appearance of two of the ancient lords of that race, humbled aeons before by Sigmar. The Twin Kings, Mog and Gamog, had served for centuries as Sigmar’s shield-bearers in penance for their defiance. Both had been slain in those final days before the Gates of Azyr had been sealed, leading their tribes into the safety of Azyr’s mountains. Now, their death-masks adorned two great automatons, crafted by the Six Smiths in honour of the fallen brutes.
As one, the pair moved to admit the lords-arcanum into the halls beyond. The air shivered with the screech of the massive hinges, and the thunderous whirring of the gargant’s gear-driven limbs as they hauled the doors open. Censers hung from the archway rotated in the sudden breeze, casting lazy comets of sweet-smelling smoke across the air.
The entry hall beyond the doors was enormous. It stretched beneath a curved roof, decorated with a faded mural depicting celestial phenomena. Great pillars of marble upheld the roof, and at the opposite end of the hall, two huge statues stood to either side of a set of massive double doors. The statues resembled Stormcast Eternals, if highly idealised, and were crouched and bent beneath the weight of the roof above.
An immense, contiguous bas-relief occupied the walls to either side of them. Among the many thousands of intricately carved figures, Balthas saw not just warriors, but delvers and masons, farmers, harpers and smiths. Not all of them human, but duardin, aelf and others. He spotted a looming gargant and the shuffling lines of the dead, as well. It was as if some unknown craftsman had attempted to capture the soul of the realms – the very stuff of life – in stone. A memory of a golden age, now long past, but preserved for all time.
Mosaics, crafted from innumerable small, polished stones, covered the floor. These depicted discrete stories rather than the vast sweep of history. Stylised moments of heroism and wonder, like Templesen’s stand at Archiba, or the last charge of the Skyblood clans. Balthas, as ever, found himself distracted by the mosaics. More than once, he fell out of step with Tyros and lagged behind to better study one of the images.