Hellsreach - Aaron Dembski-Bowden [71]
Her memories – the fractured, flashing images that were all that kept her mind from being completely hollow – were of a hundred worlds she could not recall seeing, and a hundred wars she could not remember fighting.
Worse, they were each tainted by an emotion she had never felt – something inhuman, abrasive, sinister… and partway between exaltation and terror. She saw these moments of memory, and felt the unnerving presence of another being’s emotions instead of her own.
It was like drowning. Drowning in someone else’s dreams.
Who had she been before? Did it even matter? She slipped deeper. What remaining sense of self existed began to break away and diminish, sacrificed to buy a peaceful, silent death.
Then the voice came, and it ruined everything.
‘Zarha,’ it said.
With the word came a weak understanding, an awareness. She had memories of her own – at least, she had once possessed such things. It suddenly seemed wrong to no longer have access to her own recollections.
As she resurfaced slowly, the infiltrating memories returned. The wars. The emotions. The fire and the fury. Instinctively, she pulled away again, preparing to return deeper within the nothingness. Anything to escape the memories belonging to another soul.
‘Zarha,’ the voice clawed after her. ‘You swore to me.’
Another layer of comprehension returned. Within the revelation were her own emotions, waiting for her to reclaim them. The overwhelming sensory storm of the other mind’s memories no longer frightened her. They angered her.
She would not be so easily shackled. No false-soul’s thoughts would conquer her like this.
‘You swore to me,’ the voice said, ‘that you would walk.’
She smiled in the nothingness, rising through it now like an ascending angel. Stormherald’s memories assailed her with renewed vigour, but she cast them aside like leaves in the wind.
You are right, Grimaldus, she told the voice. I did swear I would walk.
‘Stand,’ he demanded, stern and cold and glowering. ‘Zarha. Stand.’
I will.
The voice came without warning, emerging from the vox-speakers on the coffin.
‘I will.’
Crew members flinched back from the sound, their hands white-knuckled as they clutched the backrests of their thrones. Only Grimaldus remained where he was, face to face with the glass sarcophagus, his blood-smeared skull mask glaring into the milky depths.
The old woman’s body twitched once, and her head rose. She looked around slowly, her augmetic gaze at last coming to rest on the knight before her.
Rubble scattered in an avalanche, and a dust cloud rose again as the wreckage of fallen buildings went tumbling aside. With a thunderous grinding of gears and the clanging-hammering of a multitude of tank-sized pistons in its iron bones, Stormherald raised its immense bulk, metre by painful machine-squealing metre.
The avenue shuddered as its bastion of a right foot pounded onto the road. The sound was loud enough that the nearby buildings still untouched by orkish demolition charges lost their windows in a blizzard of breaking glass.
As the crystal rain fell to the scarred streets below, the Imperator raised its weapons, standing – once more – defiant.
‘Shields up,’ the Crone of Invigilata demanded.
‘Void shields active, my princeps,’ responded Valian Carsomir.
‘Make ready the heart.’
‘Plasma reactor reports all systems at viable integrity, my princeps.’
‘Then we move.’
The chamber shuddered with a familiar rhythm as the god-machine took its first step. Then a second. Then a third. Throughout the metal giant’s bones, hundreds of crew members cheered.
‘We walk.’ The ancient woman turned in her tank, looking at the tall knight once more. ‘I heard you,’ she told him. ‘As I was dying, I heard you calling me.’
Grimaldus removed his filthy helm. Although he didn’t look a day over thirty, his eyes told his true age. Like windows into his thoughts, they showed the weight of his wars.
‘There is a story of my father,