Broder Able

The fight in the garden had not ended. It had only paused long enough for the agents to count what remained: more than a handful of Vox Shamblers, menials and mechanics who had tended Broder Able's machines and now wore them, cabling threaded through rotting flesh, vox-grilles where mouths had been.

Marius did not wait for them to close. He lined one up and his chainsword took its arm off at the shoulder.

"For the Emperor."

The Shambler answered with the arm it had left. The blow broke against his armour and went no further.

Treave put his arc maul into another, hard enough to be heard over the chainswords. The warp answered the violence. The room began to melt — deck plates softening, the walls running at their seams — and every step afterwards had to be fought for. The Shambler he had struck pounded him in return. Treave shook it off.

Dauphine came in on the same target and left it barely standing, then moved around to flank.

---

The Labourer's Lament was everywhere now. It came through the vox in every earpiece, and it came from the Shamblers themselves, recited in flat mechanical cadence by throats that no longer needed breath to make sound.

Somnus raised a hand. The nearest Shambler's jaw and throat were simply gone. It dropped, black ooze spilling from the front of it.

Another hit Treave hard. Marius swung wide, and the warp pressed in again — everything around the agents shimmering as if seen through heat. A Shambler struck Dauphine and she absorbed it. Treave took a moment in the middle of it all to steady himself, gathering what resolve the fight had knocked loose. The Shambler that came for Marius missed.

Dauphine turned and brought her chainsword down through the top of a Shambler's skull. It came apart in two halves.

Somnus stepped up beside Treave, onto the body of a fallen Shambler, and let the power out. The beam caught fire as it went. It cut the thing in front of him in half, and each half fell to its own side. He did not stop. The last of them burned where it stood.

Then it was quiet.

---

Dauphine went to Treave with her medkit and did what flesh-work she could. He spat out a mouthful of blood and oil and let her finish.

Ahead, one sound remained: a single Shambler pounding on a sealed door, over and over, preaching to whoever was inside.

‘Priest! The Pox wants you, machine and flesh both. Come worship before it, and be remade! Let us sicken and rust as one, and be born again! There is no rebirth without suffering, Broder. Nothing new without the passing of the old. Let us become of one flesh, cog and sinew as your God demands.’

Dauphine shot it. The head came clean off.

The door opened on Broder Able — Senior Tech-priest, caretaker of the garden, and terrified. His mechanical legs skittered back from the threshold until his optics settled on Treave, and something in him recognised a fellow servant of the Machine God. He hurried them inside and sealed the door.

The sight of Treave's wounds did what nothing else had. For a moment the fear went out of him and the Tech-priest came back. His tool-arms went to work, and Treave was repaired far beyond what a medkit could manage.

Then the moment passed.

"It is entirely illogical!" Broder said. "I have run through three-point-one-to-the-tenth possibilities, and all outcomes point to our demise! Either the Omnissiah has abandoned us, or we are somewhere beyond his reach."

Treave picked him up off the deck.

"The Omnissiah would never!"

Outside the door, the Lament went on.