by Darius Hinks
Audus stopped shooting for a moment to stare at him, surprised. For the first time since they met, she dropped her cynical sneer and looked serious. ‘Well said,’ she muttered.
‘What now?’ demanded Isola, her face ashen as she watched the ur-ghuls gathering below.
‘How did you know to avoid this route?’ said Draik, turning to Grekh. The question had been scratching at the back of his thoughts since he reached the top of the ramp. He still didn’t trust the creature but, whatever the kroot’s motivations, he seemed to know a lot about the Blackstone.
Grekh shrugged.
‘How can we get across this hall? How can we stop those things?’
‘We can’t,’ said Grekh.
‘But someone else could?’
Grekh looked at the hall, taking in the narrow doorways, the crystal spire and the vast, empty expanse of floor. ‘The Blackstone brought us together.’
Corval shook his head. ‘This thing speaks in riddles so it doesn’t have to tell the truth.’
Draik was looking in the same direction as Grekh, his eyes skipping over the featureless floor. No, not featureless, he realised. It was marked by the same network of grooves they had seen in the first chamber. ‘Yes,’ he said quietly. ‘I see it.’
‘We can do this,’ he said, staring at Vorne. ‘All of us.’
Vorne looked at Taddeus, but Taddeus gave her a relaxed smile. ‘He carries the God-Emperor’s fire. Trust him.’
Vorne’s relief was obvious. She valued her life as much as anyone else, but her faith was so strong that she would have sacrificed herself anyway. The idea hit Draik with the force of a revelation. He had witnessed countless acts of martyrdom during his life, but his horror was always lessened by the belief that religious zealots were so faith-drunk they were barely human. Even as a child, he had been inured to the horror of pilgrims dying on the crowded roads to the Imperial Palace, because he thought them lunatics, happy to die for their faith. The idea that Vorne was sane and still prepared to sacrifice herself disturbed him.
‘What’s your plan, captain?’ asked Emissary Corval, interrupting his train of thought.
‘Run as fast as you can and make for the maglev. I’ll deal with the rest.’
‘Run as fast as we can?’ Vorne’s relief was replaced with scorn. ‘That’s your plan?’
Taddeus placed a hand on her shoulder. ‘I have faith in him.’
Vorne looked no less convinced, but she was clearly not in the habit of challenging Taddeus. She nodded and looked back at Draik, a fierce warning in her eyes.
He looked at each of them in turn, then gave the signal to run.
They sprinted across the hall with ur-ghuls approaching from every direction. No one was shooting anymore. Faced with such numbers, it was pointless. When they were about halfway across the hall, and the ur-ghuls were almost on them, Draik slashed his palm open with the edge of his rapier and stopped.
None of the others even noticed his absence, dashing on towards the maglev, but the scent of his blood drove the ur-ghuls into a frenzy and they rushed towards him, snorting and gasping. Draik was quickly surrounded by a circle of ur-ghuls as they forgot about the rest of the group and singled him out, their needle-teeth glistening in anticipation of a feast.
They were seconds from Draik when he dropped to one knee and pressed his bloody palm against one of the intersections on the floor, squeezing the blood through the gap. Then he turned on his heel and sprinted after the others.
Behind him, the floor exploded. Iron-dark shards burst from the ground, clicking and clacking as they snapped together, forming hundreds of pyramids. The ur-ghuls tried to stop, but it was too late. Their momentum threw them into the cyclone of whirling stones, hissing and pinwheeling their gangly arms as they failed to halt. Draik did not stop to look back as he raced towards the maglev.
The others had already reached the chamber and opened the door and, as he ran towards them they looked past him with dazed expressions on their faces. Draik could not see the carnage he had caused, but he could hear it – an explosion of clattering plates, tearing flesh and juddering limbs. He was moments away from the doorway when a heavy shape thudded into him and sent him sprawling onto his side, sliding across the sheer, black floor.
Las-blasts flashed through the air, and he saw, in the corner of his eye, an ur-ghul being torn apart as Isola and the others gave him covering fire. He staggered to his feet and ran on, and was just a few feet from the chamber when more of the creatures slammed into him. Gunfire screamed all around him as the others tried to defend him, kicking ur-ghuls away from him in every direction, but pain exploded in his bicep as one of the creatures sank its teeth into his arm. The creature tore furiously at him and the air turned to blood mist.
Draik rammed his rapier into the ur-ghul’s chest, planted his boot in its stomach and kicked it away. He scrambled to his feet and ran in to the chamber as the others fired into the tumult outside.
‘Go!’ he cried. ‘Close the doors! We have to–’ He fell silent as he turned and saw what he had done.
The entire hall had erupted into motion. Every surface was fractured and split, creating a storm of oil-black shells. There were thousands of them, spiralling up into the air and crashing down in landslides, all matching the same tessellating, pyramidal design. The ur-ghuls were being torn apart. Hunter had become prey. They tried to flee back to the other doors, but every space they trod on sprouted pyramids. The constructs swarmed over the ur-ghuls like mechanical toys, whirling and juddering as they sliced through their flesh.
Draik was so dazed by the scale of the destruction that it took him a moment to realise that there were still some ur-ghuls trying to follow them into the maglev chamber.
Audus was next to him, spitting curses as she smashed the butt of her pistol into the face of one monster, while on the other side of him Taddeus was pummelling another with his mace, shattering its skull with prayer-fuelled rage. The area around the doorway was heaped with wounded xenos that were still trying to reach their prey.
The main threat was no longer from the aliens, though. The wave of pyramids was spreading out across the hall, and hundreds of the machines were scuttling towards the maglev. In a few seconds they would shred Draik and the others in just the same way they had devoured the ur-ghuls.
‘Close the doors!’ cried Draik, looking around the chamber for a control mechanism. There were niches in the walls, chest height and filled with the same black liquid as the previous maglev. But this time there were four of them, side by side and identical.
Draik looked at Taddeus, but the priest shook his head.
‘I saw this chamber in my visions, but we approached from the other direction.’ He stared at the four little alcoves. ‘I’m not sure.’
Draik shook his head. ‘The doors won’t close until we trigger the mechanism.’
‘Quick,’ said Audus, firing at the approaching host.
‘Grekh?’ said Draik, noticing that the creature was outside the chamber, hunched over one of the fallen ur-ghuls.
‘Throne,’ spat Corval. ‘What is it doing?’
The mountain of black shells was about to crash into them.
‘Grekh!’ howled Draik.
The kroot lurched to his feet and loped back towards them, a piece of grey alien flesh in his mouth and blood rushing down his neck. Draik’s hand edged towards one of the niches as he saw a chance to leave the grotesque creature behind, but an oath was an oath. He waited until Grekh had leapt into the chamber, still clutching some of the xenos corpse, before he turned to Taddeus.
‘Choose one.’
Taddeus stared at the alcoves, still shaking his head. ‘I have not seen this, captain.’
‘Now!’ cried Isola as the pyramids crashed over the final few feet.
‘Ask Grekh,’ cried Audus. ‘He understands this place better than any of you.’
The kroot swallowed some of the still-warm flesh and nodded at the middle alcove.
Draik thrust his hand into the niche.
11
The sun was a memory, ennobling temple walls, illuminating banners, but long estranged from the sky. Pilgrims did not seek Holy Terra for natural illumination, of course; they sought an illumination of the soul. Did they ever find it, wondered Draik, as they breathed their last – crushed beneath oblivious multitudes, reaching for gates that never opened and clouds that never broke. He looked at them crawling through the muck, watching them through a spear-tip window so tall he could not see the apex. The glass was leaded and stained, ablaze with saints and scholars and framed by a casement wrought in the shape of a vast, double-headed eagle.
Draik’s father was a few feet away, finalising the commission that would take Draik to the far side of the galaxy. He had already explained that this was not a punishment but an honour, crushing Draik’s soul with every lie.
‘Captain,’ he said. ‘Can you hear me?’
Draik frowned. His father never addressed him as captain. There had been a galaxy between them by the time Draik had assumed that title. And the voice was not his father’s age-ravaged croak, but a metallic, inhuman burr. As Draik tried to place the voice, a dark tide poured into the streets below, washing over the statuary and engulfing the pilgrims, boiling and rolling, turning the horizon black.
‘Captain Draik,’ said the voice again as darkness enveloped him.
An icy chill radiated through Draik’s coat, throbbing in his bones and reminding him of where he really was.
‘The Blackstone.’ His speech was clumsy, as though he had just awoken. He opened his eyes but saw only darkness.
‘Yes, the Blackstone,’ said the voice, sounding pleased. ‘Hang on to that thought. The fortress is beguiling you – sending you back into your past. I am Emissary Corval. We have come to the Blackstone seeking its innermost chamber. Do you remember?’
For a moment, the darkness lifted and Draik glimpsed the three lenses of Corval’s helmet. Light flashed in the glass, reminding him of candlelight on windowpanes and pushing him back into the past.
‘Sound the trumpets,’ said his sister as she walked towards him, trailing velvet, ermine and vitriol. ‘Bang the drum.’ A sea of powdered wigs and coronets parted to let her join him at the window. ‘Behold, as Terra’s most noble son prepares to sally forth.’ She laughed, leaning close, whispering in his ear. ‘I won’t tell them the truth if you don’t.’
He kept his gaze fixed on the crowds beneath the window. If he saw the victorious look in her eye there would be violence, and there had been enough of that.
She sipped her wine and looked at the crowds below, pitiful and bleeding, no idea of the high-born eyes looking down at them.
‘Even those filthy wretches will enjoy the privilege you have been denied, brother. While you breathe your last in some dreadful backwater, they will be here, talking their drivel in the blessed streets of Holy Terra.’ She laughed again, looking back into the room, at the distant figure of their father. ‘And the irony is that it’s breaking his heart. It’s killing him to send you away.’ Her tone soured. ‘Thanks to your stupidity, he will have to make do with me, a mere daughter. All your embarrassing breaks with protocol, all those inelegant deals, all those ill-advised duels and then, finally, this – a murder, Janus. A murder. What son ever disappointed a father as completely as you have?’ She sneered. ‘I could weep for him, I really could.’
Draik wanted to argue, to explain, but the candlelight shimmered again and left him facing Emissary Corval. He saw the Blackstone more clearly this time. They had emerged from the maglev into a small, octagonal antechamber with a doorway in each wall. Something was wrong. Audus was curled in a foetal position on the floor, cursing and raging. Pious Vorne was wrestling with Taddeus, who had blood rushing from what looked to be self-inflicted head wounds. As Vorne grappled with the heavyset preacher, he was moaning frantically and trying to reach his eyes with his fingernails. Isola was still inside the maglev chamber, pummelling the faceted walls with her fists as though trying to break through solid rock. Grekh sat quietly, gnawing thoughtfully on a piece of flesh, and Draik’s guards were hurling abuse at each other, on the verge of drawing weapons.
He grabbed Corval’s arm and climbed to his feet. ‘What happened?’
Corval held him until he was steady then turned back to the others. ‘This is it – the madness Taddeus warned you of.’
As Corval reached Draik’s guards, he placed one hand against the side of his helmet and extended his other hand towards the arguing soldiers.
A tracery of circuits blazed around the Navigator’s cowl, flooding energy down his sleeve and causing his gauntlet to pulse with cool inner fire.
‘You are with Captain Draik,’ said Corval, his voice amplified and strange, resonating through the gloom. ‘You are on the Blackstone Fortress.’
The guards ceased their argument, but Corval kept his hand raised and the light grew more powerful, distorting the air with heat haze and causing the men to stagger, clutching their heads.
‘Follow the sound of my voice,’ said Corval. ‘The fortress is trying to confuse you.’
The men became still as Corval approached them, looking around with dazed expressions. He gripped each of them in turn, grabbing their shoulders with his shimmering hand and channelling the light through their uniforms. He stayed with them for a few minutes, until they nodded at him, looking embarrassed but less confused.
Corval moved round the whole group, with the exception of Grekh, repeating the process until everyone was calm. Then they gathered around him in silence. Until that moment, Corval had been a shadowy presence in the group, barely acknowledged by anyone but Draik; now they looked at him as a leader, horrified by whatever memories had gripped them and desperate to avoid slipping back.
‘What do we do?’ asked Draik, still trying to shake the memory of his sister’s vicious laughter.
‘Celebrate,’ said Corval, with an unusual note of levity. ‘According to our spiritual guide,’ he nodded at Taddeus, ‘this malady only occurs near our goal. We have almost reached the vault.’
Taddeus whispered a prayer and his face turned a worrying shade of purple. He seemed too excited to breathe. ‘The blind shall be made to see,’ he muttered, gripping his power mace and closing his eyes.
‘But what of the…’ Isola looked anxiously back at the wall she had just been pummelling.
Corval shook his head. ‘I’m shielding us. It was surprisingly easy. Perhaps the Blackstone is not quite as impenetrable as it might seem.’
Draik nodded his head in a slight bow. ‘You are modest, emissary. Your skill has made light of a problem that would have crushed a lesser mind. We are all in your debt.’
Corval returned the bow. ‘I would suggest a few minutes’ rest before we press on to the Ascuris Vault. I know we are eager to reach our goal, but you have all just been through an unusual psychic trauma. There may be aftershocks.’
The fight with the ur-ghuls had left most of the group exhausted, so the Navigator’s suggestion was met without argument.
Draik looked at his attaché, who was standing on guard beside him. ‘Isola, you too. Take the time…’ His words faltered as his gaze fell on Grekh. The kroot still seemed oblivious to everything that had happened, sitting just outside the maglev, gnawing on the bit of meat he had salvaged from the previous chamber. Draik stepped closer, a dreadful realisation washing over him.
He stooped and grabbed the kroot’s arm, pulling it closer so he could see what Grekh was holding. The flesh was chewed beyond recognition, just a pulpy mess, but it was still encased in sodden shreds of cloth – torn fragments of a House Draik uniform.
Grekh stopped eating for a moment, staring back at him.
The oth
ers gathered round to watch the exchange.
Draik remembered seeing Grekh snatch something from the guard who died fleeing from ur-ghuls. ‘That’s from one of my men?’ he said, his voice tight with rage.
Grekh nodded.
Images of glorious Terra were still echoing round Draik’s thoughts, scenes of nobility and privilege, and here he was, consorting with a snorting, man-eating savage. Rage jolted through him like a current and he whipped his pistol from its holster, jamming it against the creature’s forehead, directly between its blank, impenetrable eyes. His finger settled over the trigger.
There was silence. He could feel the others behind him, waiting to see what he did next.
‘He was dead,’ said Grekh.
One of the other guards hissed in disbelief and Draik heard the sound of weapons being readied.
He stood in silence for a moment, pressing his gun harder into the kroot’s face. Then he stepped back.
‘That thing has no place in your company,’ said Corval.
‘We would never have got here without him,’ said Audus, glaring at Corval. She looked pale and shaken from whatever visions had been tormenting her, but she stepped to Grekh’s side with a determined scowl. ‘You never would have found me without him and he’s done nothing but watch our backs since we landed. The kroot just think differently about death, that’s all. He didn’t kill that man. And it’s not like we’re going to be giving anyone a burial in this place.’
Draik lowered his pistol. Even through his outrage, he could hear the sense in Audus’ words. But there was no way he was going to spend another minute with the vile creature.
‘Go,’ he said, grabbing Grekh by the shoulder and hurling him across the chamber towards one of the doorways. ‘Get out of my sight.’
Grekh stood, shaking his head, shreds of meat still hanging in his grip. ‘My debt…’ he said.
‘Is repaid,’ snarled Draik, still battling the urge to kill him. He knew the name of the man Grekh was currently digesting. ‘Go. Before I change my mind. Audus says you know this place better than any of us. I’m sure you’ll find a way out.’
