by Darius Hinks
Grekh shook his head, looking at Audus for support.
She was about to speak up again when Draik yelled an order.
‘On the count of three,’ he said, glancing at his men.
They raised their lasguns and pointed them at the kroot.
‘One,’ said Draik, raising his pistol.
Grekh gave a last shake of his head, then bounded off through the doorway, vanishing into the darkness.
Draik stood there for a few seconds, his pistol still raised, considering how low he had come, how far he was from where he should be.
‘Which way?’ he said, turning to Taddeus, his voice still taut. ‘Where is the vault?’
Audus was shaking her head and cursing under her breath but the rest of the group relaxed, visibly, to see Grekh gone.
Taddeus beamed at Audus, waving his mace at one of the doorways. ‘Take heart. Deliverance is at hand. We don’t need rabid xenos creatures to lead the way.’ He tapped his journal. ‘We are back on the routes I understand. These are the places I have been shown. The God-Emperor’s brilliance has found us, even here, in this lightless pit. We’re almost there.’
After they had rested and checked their weapons, Taddeus led them down the corridor he had pointed out. It was as dark as all the previous ones, but it was far narrower, so the lumens on their guns were enough to light up the walls and flash in their widened eyes. Every few feet they passed circular openings leading to other passageways, but Taddeus rushed on down the main corridor until it opened out into another large hall.
Draik hesitated at the threshold, confused. It looked like they had emerged in a moonlit forest. As in one of the previous chambers, the ceiling was open to the light of the heavens – a vast, faceted dome of crystal that glittered with the radiance of a thousand stars. The light poured down through the dome and splashed, cold and beautiful, across hundreds of columns. They were not trees, as Draik had at first thought, but rods made of the same black substance as the walls. They varied in height, some hundreds of feet tall and others no higher than a man. High up, they were linked with bough-like crossbars, creating shady, bowered walkways and adding to the sense of a forest. As Draik stepped closer, he saw that the rods were arranged in a pattern – complex, but deliberate and familiar in some way. The chamber fell away on one side, a sheer drop that plunged into a pit, beyond the reach of the starlight. On the other side, beyond the columns, was a broad staircase. Draik’s head ached as he followed its meandering, physics-defying course. The steps started normally enough, then veered off at a bizarre angle and looped back, creating an intersection that Draik could not understand, however long he stared at it.
Taddeus had not paused, striding on through the columns with confidence, making for the distant staircase as the rest of the group hurried after him. Draik was halfway across the room, still trying to decipher the pattern of the columns, when Corval placed a hand on his shoulder.
‘Captain,’ he said. ‘What is it?’
Draik shook his head. He had the same odd feeling he’d had when he watched the Dragon’s Teeth move in the same sequence as his childhood training regimes. There was something about the arrangement of these columns that mirrored his past. It was as though the Blackstone were trying to tell him something. He was on the verge of explaining all this to Corval when he realised how absurd it was. He’d sound like one of the fools who became enamoured by the Blackstone’s mystery, imbuing it with religious significance and personality.
‘There’s a pattern here,’ he said, without elaborating. ‘I can’t decipher it.’
Corval nodded, looking around at the featureless poles. ‘It might be significant, captain. Your goal is to decipher the workings of this place. These details might point to a wider pattern.’
‘True,’ muttered Draik, still unwilling to explain that his interest was more obscure.
‘Take a moment,’ said Corval. ‘We’re racing through all these rooms at such speed, without pausing to examine their mysteries. We could miss something crucial if we don’t stop to look when we have the chance.’
It was true. They were sprinting past wonders that might never be seen by human eyes again. As the others rushed on and began climbing the staircase, Draik stepped closer to one of the columns and Corval wandered off through the stone glade, looking up at the distant ceiling.
‘Captain!’ Corval waved Draik over towards the edge of the room. ‘There’s something over here.’
The others had now disappeared from sight, heading on into the next chamber, so Draik moved quickly, not wanting to split the group. He dashed between the columns, starlight flashing on his cuirass as he reached the edge of the chamber.
‘What is it?’
Corval was staring into the darkness, his cowl flickering with psychic resonance as he leant out into the void.
‘I can’t tell. Can your eyepiece penetrate this wretched darkness, captain? Focus it over there. Do you see that?’ Corval pointed down into the unseen depths and Draik saw something moving in the shadows. He stepped past the Navigator, fascinated.
‘I do see something,’ he muttered, dropping into a crouch and opening his optical implant’s aperture as wide as it would go. Something started to materialise. ‘A face,’ he gasped as the features swam into view. Again, he sensed that the fortress was dredging his past. The face was familiar. His breath stalled in his throat as he realised what the Blackstone was showing him. ‘Numa,’ he gasped, his throat dry.
‘Numa,’ said Corval. The Navigator’s voice sounded odd.
Draik leapt to his feet, looking back at Corval. The Navigator had drawn his pistol. It was pointed at Draik’s face.
Corval hesitated, just for a second, his hand wavering, then he fired.
The hesitation gave Draik time to dodge, draw and fire, but his shot went wide as Corval’s blast ripped through his shoulder, knocking him off his feet and throwing him backwards.
Corval said nothing as Draik fell, silently, into the frigid dark.
12
‘She went back in,’ said a voice, loud and grating in his ear.
Bullosus woke with a grunt, sitting bolt upright and looking around the hold. He felt stronger, but the pain in his arm was worse. Lothar and Aurick were watching him with grim expressions on their faces.
‘Who?’ he said. ‘Where?’
‘Audus,’ said Lothar. ‘Back into the Blackstone.’
Bullosus pounded his fist on the table, leaving an impressive dent. ‘With the Terran?’
‘And the priest.’
Bullosus’ anger flooded him with vitality. His mother, father, brother and sisters were all facing a death sentence, while that pompous dandy played games on the Blackstone. ‘Then we’re going back in too.’
Lothar was almost as big and ugly as his elder brother, but fear flashed in his eyes. ‘That place will kill us, Grusel.’
Aurick nodded. ‘It’s not safe.’
Bullosus stared at them both. ‘Without Audus, we cannot save them.’
The words hung in the air as all three brothers pictured the faces of their family. Lothar and Aurick nodded, looking ashamed.
‘Did you tag her?’ asked Lothar.
‘In the chest. She’ll be easy to track.’
‘What about that?’ asked Lothar, pointing at his wound.
Bullosus cursed as he remembered the shattered mess that used to be his arm. The chirurgeon had done enough to keep him alive but the arm was useless. Perhaps he was a fool to go back in? Could there be another way? He slumped back onto the table, looking around the gun cases that lined the walls. There was a fortune to be made if he could just live long enough to sell them. He had been dealing weapons since he first crawled out of the festering hive city that spawned him, but he had never seen anything like the relics in Precipice.
His gaze fell on a broad, curved blade that was even m
ore valuable than the guns. A radium scythe. Throne knows how it had ended up in the Blackstone. It could cut through almost anything. If he lived, it would come close to clearing his debt on its own, but the deal was fixed: Audus for the lives of his family.
As he looked at the scythe, an idea occurred to him.
He nodded to the bottle of amasec his brothers had been drinking. They passed it to him and he downed it without pausing for breath, savouring the heat that rushed up through his chest and cleared his thoughts.
Orphis was still in the corner of the hold, cleaning his surgical instruments, a jaundiced, skeletal husk of a man, hunched and trembling as he packed his things away, eager to return to the Helmsman. There was a chainknife hanging on the back of the door.
‘Cut me above the elbow,’ Bullosus said, glaring at the chirurgeon. ‘Hook the radium scythe to my artery.’
Orphis paled.
‘Mess it up and I’ll kill you,’ said Bullosus. It was a calmly stated fact rather than a threat.
Orphis nodded slowly, then grabbed another bottle of amasec and drank almost as much as Bullosus. He took the chainknife and triggered the blade, filling the hold with the rattling din of saw teeth.
As Orphis leant over him, Bullosus held up his working hand, signalling that he should pause.
‘Sing,’ he demanded, glaring at the squat, amphibian thing in the corner of the room.
As the chainknife’s teeth bit into his arm, and the air turned crimson, Bullosus drifted away, carried on the gentle lullaby that spilled from the cage. The tune took him away from the sweat and blood, back through the decades – back to his childhood, when he was too young to know how messed up everything was.
13
Corval stood at the brink of the precipice, waiting for euphoria to arrive. Three decades, keeping himself alive, holding the horrors of his disease at bay, just to achieve this simple end: the death of one man. But where he had expected elation, he found only numbness. The void before him merged with the void in his soul. What does a man do once he achieves his life’s ambition? Corval had only ever thought of reaching this point: killing Draik – murdering him where no one could hunt for clues, where no one would question his death. But what now?
To his immense surprise, Corval realised he wanted to live. What a joke. Living. The one thing he could not risk. He placed a hand over his chest, feeling the movement beneath his suit. His skin was bubbling like broth, struggling to contain the vileness beneath. His damnation was almost complete. What life could there be for someone like him?
He took a metal syringe and a small canister from his robes. He placed them on the floor and unfastened the hauberk of his thick, rubber-clad suit. He paused, looking around, peering into the shadows to make sure the others weren’t near, then he pulled open his shirt. His chest was deformed, wrenched out of shape by a large, egg-shaped swelling at the centre of his ribs. Corval muttered an oath as he saw that it was splitting down the middle, revealing an amber-coloured eye with a vertical slit of a pupil. As Corval picked the syringe up from the floor, the eye began to roll, as though trying to escape from his chest. Corval hesitated. He had been through this process every day for years, but this time there was something new. Beneath the eye, a narrow depression had formed over his diaphragm. It looked horribly like a mouth.
He pushed the needle into the eyeball and sucked the fluid into the syringe. Once he had lanced the growth, leaving an empty sac, he injected the golden fluid into the metal canister and placed it back beneath his robes, where it clinked against several others he had filled since landing on the Blackstone. He took a tin of salve from another pocket and rubbed it over the wound. The skin blistered, smoking slightly as his skin melted and reformed, sealing the hole.
He looked at the nascent mouth for a moment, unsure what to do. It was moving, mouthing silent phrases beneath his skin. He could see the beginnings of teeth, strong and healthy, clamping and shifting under his stomach muscles. He took some of the salve and rubbed it over the depression. The skin blistered and thickened, obscuring the mouth a little, but he could still see it trying to speak.
‘Not much time,’ muttered Corval, fastening his shirt and hiding his disgrace, wondering what to do next.
He had always intended to take his own life straight after Draik’s, hiding his shameful end in some dark, unreachable corner of the Blackstone, but now he had been waylaid by an absurd, childish hope. An idea had been simmering at the back of thoughts since Draik had first described the Ascuris Vault. The Blackstone followed no laws of physics. The histories were clear on the subject. Even time was mutable within the walls of the Blackstone, chemistry and biology the same. Explorers had emerged from the Blackstone changed – not just mentally, but physically. If Draik’s theory was right, and the Ascuris Vault was the fulcrum of the whole fortress, perhaps it could offer him a chance at redemption? He had tried to crush such thoughts, worried that such absurd fancies might distract him. But now, with Draik dead, what difference did it make? Why not follow Taddeus to the vault? They were so close now. He could suppress his mutations for a little longer. He laughed at the ridiculousness of it, but he ran towards the steps anyway, preparing the lies he would tell the others.
We were attacked. Draik fell. I could not save him.
It would be easily done.
Since Corval had shot Draik there had been a distant rumbling sound echoing round the chamber – a low, grinding moan. He had barely registered it until now, but as he headed back into the stone glade, it grew noticeably louder.
He looked up into the network of beams and saw that one of them was trembling. He had thought they were all smooth and featureless, but this one bore a jagged crater that was glowing faintly around the edges. There was smoke trailing from a spike at its centre. Corval laughed as he realised it was the splinter Draik had fired. He strode on, calling out for the others, trying to sound shocked and upset.
‘Help! We’ve been attacked! Come back!’
There was a loud click as the damaged beam retracted, slid into a column and vanished. The rumbling grew louder.
Corval stumbled to a halt as he saw that several of the poles were now moving, reacting to the fallen beam, repositioning themselves. He shook his head in disbelief as the tremor rippled across the whole chamber, each moving pole causing another one to shift. It looked like a breeze, rippling through crops.
He picked up his pace, sprinting between the columns, but before he got halfway across the chamber they turned and reformed, metamorphosing into completely new angles and shapes. Corval had to dodge and leap as the chamber rebuilt itself, clicking and shifting all around him. Columns rose directly in his path and the noise became horrendous. Through the blizzard of movement, he saw the rest of the group reappear at the top of the staircase, shocked expressions on their faces as they saw him struggling to reach them through such a bewildering scene.
Draik’s attaché took a few steps down the staircase, scouring the chamber for a sign of her captain, but she was driven back as new columns sheared up through the steps. The stairs recoiled, as though alive, moving like a mechanical serpent, rearing and twisting, giving Corval the odd sensation that a colossal monster was rearing over him, preparing to strike.
Isola and the others vanished from sight as the whole chamber rotated, spinning on its axis, ratcheting and clicking, responding to the chain reaction Draik’s splinter had caused.
‘Taddeus!’ cried Corval, amplifying his voice over the din. Without the priest he had no guide. He would be lost. Panic gripped him. His hunger for life was stronger than he expected. ‘Taddeus!’ he howled, lurching across the fragmenting floor.
Corval fell, cartwheeling through the air. He hit a rising column and crashed to the floor, dazed, as the chamber turned around him.
For what seemed like only a moment he lost consciousness, but when he sat up with a gasp, the chamber was still. He climbed t
o his feet, trying to get his bearings. The chamber was completely transformed. There was no sign of the staircase, the columns had vanished and even the walls had shifted, turning the room into a long, crooked triangle with a doorway at each corner.
Corval shook his head, shocked by the scale of the transformation. How could such a vast structure simply rebuild itself? Even the abyss he had blasted Draik into had vanished. ‘Taddeus!’ he cried, rushing into the centre of the chamber.
‘Corval?’ came a distant reply.
Corval whirled around, trying to locate the source of the voice. It was Taddeus, he could recognise the preacher’s strident tones, but he could not see him.
‘Corval?’ came the voice again. It was coming from beneath him, under the floor.
He dropped to his knees and saw that the surface here was not completely opaque. It was like tinted plex-glass – almost black, but not quite – and there was movement underneath. It was like he was crossing the surface of a frozen lake.
‘Audus!’ he cried as the shaven-headed pilot rushed past. She was upside down, her feet on the underside of the surface he had his hands pressed against. She was looking around, frantically, but when she shouted a reply, her mouth moved silently. She was yelling but he heard nothing. ‘Audus!’ he shouted again, but to his dismay she rushed off, not seeming to hear him. He saw the undersides of more boots as the rest of the group ran past, but however loud he shouted, none of them heard.
He scrambled across the floor on his hands and knees, trying to follow, but after a few feet the floor became opaque again and he lost sight of them.
‘No!’ he cried, smashing the handle of his pistol against the floor.
There was no reply and, after a few minutes of fruitless hammering and crawling, he stood up and dusted himself down again, unwilling to behave like an animal, however dire his situation. He looked at the three doorways that marked the corners of the triangular hall. They were identical. How could he choose?
