Vaults of Terra: The Carrion Throne

by Chris Wraight

  It was irrational. He had left such things behind him a long time ago, and yet the terror only grew. Every step became harder than the last. His palms pricked with sweat, he had to force himself to keep going. Navradaran remained silent, a brooding presence at his shoulder, striding heavily through the vaults and the transepts, his gait as secure and solid as the glinting basalt columns around them. They began to descend, to wind down long, long spiral stairways that seemed to go on forever. The last of the angled light from the world above them faded away, replaced by the dour flicker of votive candles.

  Eventually they reached another portal. Navradaran gestured, and the doors unbarred of their own accord, swinging open to unfurl a yawning gulf on the far side. They emerged high up on the face of an internal wall over two hundred metres tall. Crowl hesitated at the threshold, feeling his residual assurance begin to collapse, but the Custodian beckoned him, and that was enough to pull him over.

  They stood on a narrow balcony, less than three metres deep and ten metres in width. Heavy silk drapes hung on either side of them, thick with dust. The baroque plasterwork flaked under his touch – the gilt finery was fragile. They were alone.

  ‘Behold,’ said Navradaran. ‘The object of your conspiracy.’

  For a moment, seeing what he was being shown, Crowl forgot to breathe. When his lungs forced him to drag a gulp of air in, it only made his heart race harder. He gripped the railing, feeling like he might fall through it. He felt his lips moving, and realised he was praying, over and over, the words spilling unbidden from cynical lips that had foresworn ostentatious observance a long time ago.

  There were stairs, rising gently from the southern end of the hall. They were hewn from grey marble, faintly glinting in sepulchral occlusion. Many were chipped or cracked, their edges broken by the impacts of bootfalls, and none had been repaired.

  On either side of the stairway were banners. They stood like some frozen primeval forest, static in the dark, row after row, file after file, gently climbing in the distance until the mind could no longer process them. Some standards were bloody, mere threads of fabric clinging to charred poles. Others were intact, slung tight under the apex of mighty iron staves. There were skeletons on those battle-flags, and winged lions, and flaming swords, and masked angels, all painted with impeccable care on chequerboard grounds and argent fields. Swathes of fine mist sighed between the endless image-fields, sighing over the staves and slinking across their emblems.

  Each standard had been stained by the dust of another world. Some of the regiments their honour rolls recorded were long-gone, their heroism lost to legend and their mortal constituents expired. Some ennobled detachments were still extant, carrying the eternal war into the deep of the void while their ancient battle-standards rotted here in the dark. Other sigils, many others, Crowl did not recognise. No living man, surely, could have catalogued them all. This was an infinity of remembrance. This was a grotesque and abundant surfeit of interstellar grief.

  Child-faced angels floated high above the whispering shrouds spilling incense from thick chain-held ewers. Their metal faces, scored by metal tears and studded with metal eyes, swung back and forth across the landscape of mourning. Their steel pinions snapped and furled in clockwork jerkiness, swinging them around in lazy curves, tracing arcs of faint powder-burn into an artificial sky.

  The walls of that hall were half-lost in penumbral distance, their smoky stonework merging with the drifting mist-banks. Crowl could just make out the immense curve of load-bearing arches, the lamplit outlines of austere column ranks, hints of aisles and chapels beyond. There were figures moving in those shadows, many hundreds at least, all in the ornate gold of the Custodians, their guardian spears glowing like stars in an earthbound void.

  But in the end, the long stairs ran out. They rose towards their apogee at the far end of the immense hall, blurred into nothingness, and then the Gate itself, the portal to the Inside, rose up from their terminus, and that was an artifice of such outrageous extravagance, even on a world brimming with outrageous extravagance, that it near crushed the soul.

  Crowl knew the Gate’s provenance, just as every educated child in the Imperium knew it – purest adamantium thrice-forged, inlaid with ceramite, braced with titanium alloys, then faced with gold, hectares of it, beaten down over sacred images stretching over half a kilometre tall, aureate like the armour of the Palace’s protectors. The Master of Mankind was depicted there, armoured, youthful, dreadful, smiting Serpentine Horus with spear and shield-rim, surrounded by a zodiacal bestiary and the occult symbols of his pantheon.

  At the base of the Gate were ranks of Custodians in silent vigil, their weapons held ready, their helms blending into golden coronae of diffuse reflection. On either side of that regiment, half hidden in darkness, were two Reaver Battle Titans, their cannon-arms draped in banners bearing the interlocking emblems of the Adeptus Terra and the Adeptus Mechanicus, of the Throneworld and the forgeworld. Those twin overwatchers towered into the echoing dark, static yet terrible, their cockpit lights smouldering within the shadows.

  ‘Now you see it,’ said Navradaran, his voice soft. ‘The holiest portal in all the Imperium. You see the Guards Visible, and you sense the Guards Invisible. Your heart is beating. You are sweating. You wish to fall on your face and offer your soul to He Who Dwells Beyond.’

  It was all true. Crowl tried to breathe more evenly.

  ‘And you, Crowl, are a lord of Holy Orders,’ Navradaran went on. ‘You are trained to resist weakness of mind and body, tested in the greatest trials, and live every day knowing the terror of what awaits should we fail.’

  It was hard to remember that now. The air around him was like an electric soup, thick with incense and heady with the accumulated decay of sacred banner-fabrics.

  ‘And you tell me,’ said Navradaran, ‘that a weapon brought down from a single ship and given to cabals of flesh-cutters could jeopardise this place. This place, where the Angel stood, where the tides of darkness crashed, then foundered.’

  Nothing could break that gate. No army, no power, no mind could break it – not then, not now, not ever.

  ‘If Phaelias thought it, he was wrong,’ said Navradaran. ‘If you continue to believe it, you will be in error also. When the elect come before the Gates, they will be as secure as any place in the sacred realm of mankind. This is the last bastion. This is the ward against the Outer Dark.’

  ‘So you brought me here,’ Crowl said with effort, ‘to demonstrate this?’

  ‘I brought you here to show you how things stand.’

  ‘Have you been… beyond?’

  ‘I have.’

  Crowl wanted to ask more. Despite all his training, he was desperate to know what it was like. Even from the far side he could sense the titanic power locked down there, and it made him nauseous and light-headed.

  He collected himself. ‘But there is a threat,’ he insisted. ‘Phaelias studied this for longer than you or I. He believed the Gate was the target.’

  ‘This place was built to keep out armies,’ Navradaran said. ‘There is a reason that Titans guard it, for it is the only passage inside that a god engine can traverse. But you know Terra, inquisitor. You know that there are ways beneath ways.’

  At that, Crowl finally understood. He looked back out across the emptiness towards the mute Titan guardians. ‘This is where all eyes will be turned,’ he said.

  ‘We cannot watch every crack in every catacomb. We will have millions entering the Palace, and only a fraction will be permitted to come this far. All must be watched, and that strains us further.’

  ‘But you must be able to–’

  ‘I could show you things, inquisitor, if the time remained,’ said Navradaran. ‘I could show you wells running under the crust of buried mountains, many of which have never been sounded. I could show you whole cities lying under the crypts of our cathedrals, some still bearing d
regs of life, harbouring relics that entire sectors would go to war to possess. I could show you tunnels bored ten thousand years ago that have never been capped. You understand me, I think.’

  Crowl still could not take his eyes off the Titans. Somehow there, in the shadows and the silence, they looked even more formidable than on the open battlefield. ‘I do not know where,’ he said, trying to think if he’d missed something, if the clue existed in something that Phaelias had said.

  ‘Neither do I,’ the Custodian said. ‘None of my agents have come close.’

  Crowl finally pulled his gaze away from the fields of banners. ‘It came down in Skhallax,’ he murmured. ‘From there it has stayed hidden, moving closer but remaining out of the light.’

  ‘And Quantrain?’

  ‘He must be found, but even if we locate him we are still no closer to our real target.’ Crowl laughed bitterly. ‘It’s escaped him, you see? He let it slip through his fingers. No doubt he’s hunting just as hard as we are.’ He shook his head, as if in self-reprimand. ‘No, you were right the first time we met. The killings, escalating since this thing arrived, they’re the key. I didn’t want to believe it – it was too neat – but having seen inside Skhallax my mind has changed.’

  ‘I have catalogued the sites of atrocity,’ said Navradaran. ‘For a week my loremasters have been collating the records, seeking a pattern.’

  ‘They won’t find one,’ said Crowl. ‘Not one they understand. You people spend your lives in these temples – you have no idea what it’s like outside.’

  ‘Then it is well you are here with us, Crowl.’

  Crowl smiled. ‘Show me what you have.’ Then he turned for the last time, looking out over the twilit marches beyond, feeling the numinous press against his temples once more.

  ‘It is too much, though, this close,’ he said, quietly. ‘I don’t know how you stand it.’

  Navradaran reached for the heavy curtain, and drew it across the balcony’s railing, sealing off the visions of Imperial mourning.

  ‘For me,’ he said, ‘I do not know how a man lives without it.’

  For the first time, Hegain truly resisted an order.

  ‘He is a heretic, lord,’ he protested.

  ‘He knows the source of the flesh-cutters,’ said Spinoza.

  ‘Then take it from him, if you pardon me, and we may use it ourselves. Summon the Lord Crowl, if that remains possible, and bring in more of us. Sanctioned troopers, lord – ones that may be trusted to it.’

  ‘Take it from him? We are under his sufferance here. And you identify the problem yourself, sergeant – no time remains. Lord Crowl believed the weapon would be brought to bear when the procession reached the Gate, and we have already seen the calibre of those who would use it.’

  Khazad said nothing. She slumped in the corner of the cell, arms around her knees. Bandages had been wrapped around her wounds, but she looked in a bad way. For all her skills, surviving in the underhive for so long had weakened her.

  The other storm troopers of Hegain’s command also said nothing, letting their sergeant speak for them. Their looks, though, gave away what they thought of allying with the Angel’s Tears.

  ‘I’ve seen the things these people do, lord,’ said Hegain, clearly unhappy about protesting against her will but unwilling to concede. ‘You have too. I took vows, and my soldiers too. You ask for them to be broken now.’

  ‘I ask nothing,’ said Spinoza. She looked across the assembled dregs of her task force. They were battered but essentially whole. ‘Listen. I do not trust this man. His sins are many, and they will catch up with him. For now, though, for now, we have a more urgent target. This is what the Lord Crowl was pursuing. If he has been successful, then he will be ahead of us. If we do not act then we endanger everything he has done. Lermentov has many hundreds under command, perhaps more than we’ve seen, but you witnessed how they fight – they are hab-dwellers and menials, not soldiers.’

  ‘And what cause do they fight for, lord?’

  ‘Their own, and that is sinful, but for the time being it elides with ours. We do this now, we join their hunt for the xenos pain-bringers, and then things go back to how they were.’

  ‘This is dangerous, lord.’

  ‘Life is dangerous, sergeant. That is how we like it.’

  At that, Hegain let slip his old half-grin. ‘Throne, I knew it when I saw you,’ he mumbled, grudgingly. ‘You will give account of yourself, I said.’

  ‘They are the dark eldar,’ said Khazad then, grimly. ‘It take more than rabble to hunt them. Even you, even me. Grotesques – they are not masters.’

  ‘There cannot be many,’ said Spinoza. ‘It was a single landing.’

  Khazad laughed scornfully. ‘That was not landed. I tell Lermentov this. It is made. Here, on Terra, maybe one week ago, maybe two. May be tens now. May be hundreds. And they are not worst. Ever fight a wych, interrogator?’

  ‘Not yet. But I matched a Shoba, so my expectations are high.’ Spinoza ran her gaze over the rest of them. ‘We have our armour, we have our weapons. Lermentov’s army is already moving, and we will join them. Enough talk. Remember your vows, and get to your feet – time is running short.’

  The storm troopers, led by Hegain, complied. Whatever reservations they retained were subsumed for now under the absolute authority of an order. Khazad clambered up more slowly.

  ‘So where is it?’ she asked.

  ‘Armengand. You know the name?’

  Khazad shook her head, and walked past her to the cell doors. ‘Why should I?’ she asked. ‘This not my world. Is yours.’

  Is yours.

  Perhaps it was, now. How swiftly ownership was assumed.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Navradaran took Crowl back the way they had come, out from the echoing halls of the Sanctum Imperialis and back into the gaping caverns of the vast basilicas. Life returned around them – mortal life, the bustle and hurry of robed adepts, the mechanised clank of gun-servitors, the heavy stride of the Palace guards. Every so often, rarely and always at a distance, he would spy a Custodian, half seen amid the yawning depths, standing sentinel over some nexus of significance.

  The further they retreated from the Sanctum, the easier it became to breathe. The air remained gritty with toxins, but the terrible weight relented a little, the static slithered away. They passed, briefly, out into the open and Crowl looked up to see the darkening spiral of lightning-underlit clouds. For a long time he had assumed that the storm-that-never-broke was a chemical phenomenon, a consequence of the poisoned world’s hyper-urban sprawls, but now it was less easy to maintain that belief. The presence under their feet, the god on His soul-throne, leashed to a life of unrelenting torment – it was Him, lodged in the wound, atrophying the elements themselves and turning them into endless stasis.

  We are becoming what He is, Crowl thought. We are all suspended between life and death.

  On the passage over, Crowl’s audex unit crackled into life again, and he started to receive databursts. He blink-checked for Spinoza, found nothing, but then noticed a priority signal from Erunion at Courvain. It had been sent an hour ago, lost in the tumult of the world’s overloaded grids, and once transmitted had been stored for retrieval. He accessed it while walking, negotiating the security protocols silently.

  ‘My Lord Crowl,’ came Erunion’s recorded vox-print. ‘I have attempted to contact Interrogator Spinoza with no success. Throne damn these failing grids, and now I am prevented from reaching you too. However, herewith the results from the interrogator’s auspex probe, in case it proves useful when this is finally decoded by either one of you. The provenance of the radiation from the device is not of human origin. I do not have the facilities here to make a full diagnosis, but I estimate with seventy per cent chance of veracity that it is of the xenotype eldar. To be specific, the beta faction of the race, the pain-brin
gers. We may assume that the weapon is of alien provenance, no doubt accompanied by members of that depraved remnant. I do not have the means to probe further – in any case, your knowledge of them far exceeds mine. May you tread carefully, lord. You do not need me to tell you what their presence here portends.’

  The recording hissed out. Still walking calmly, Crowl mentally cursed. The dark eldar, on Terra – such a thing had not been heard of in a hundred lifetimes. Phaelias would have known more surely how to counter them. Had he known with certainty what he faced? Doubtful – there had been no indication in the recording taken from Skhallax.

  They passed over a long arched bridge, still hundreds of metres above the chasms where the pilgrims were being herded. Navradaran reached a plaza before a tall building with bronze doors and marble pillars. A huge circular window swept up across its west face, smoke-damaged but still bearing the eroded stained-glass depictions of aquilae and various occult symbology.

  Crowl noticed that every door in the Palace opened for Navradaran. The Custodian never made so much as a gesture, and still the rosewood panels, the gold-beaten portals, the heavy adamantium blast shields, they all slid silently apart as he approached. It was as if the Palace itself moulded itself around him.

  ‘What is this place?’ he asked.

  ‘You asked for data,’ said Navradaran. ‘I brought you to it.’

  They passed within the basilica’s gates, and the air immediately became thick with the familiar stenches of an Imperial archive – mouldering parchment, mouldering vellum, mouldering leather bindings and rotten tallow stumps. They walked down a long aisle before entering the central chamber, a domed intersection that swept up high amid riots of lead-framed stained glass. Every wall was lined with flaking scrolls and chained tomes, their titles picked out in thin gold script and attended to by flocks of twittering servo-cherubs. Down at floor level, ranks of scribes a hundred long bent heavily over piles of retrieved manuscripts, obsessively copying the contents of books onto fresh vellum with iron-clawed hands and thick quills. Red lens glows bled out from under their cowls, illuminating both sallow flesh and the crustaceous masses of augmetic units.