Vaults of Terra: The Carrion Throne

by Chris Wraight

  At the far end of the immense nave, a priest was reciting passages from the Rule of the Administratum one after the other, leaning heavily into a vox-dispersal array as if he wished to collapse into its embrace entirely.

  ‘…and the act of duplication is preferable to the act of creation, for duplication is an abundance of what has been sanctified, whereas creation is, by virtue of the principles of mortal fallibility, the destruction in potentia of the righteous and the introduction of the suspect. In all things recall the lexicon of precaution and do not deviate from the…’

  They passed across the width of the nave, ignored by the labouring scribes. Navradaran took Crowl into a side-chapel, where great charts had been piled on top of a wide marble map-table at least eight metres across. Hololiths flickered like ghosts over the creased vellum stacks, reacting to the glyphs on display and rotating to offer three-dimensional simulacra of the Palace environs. Servitors bowed jerkily as they entered, then went back to the methodical tasks of sorting, delivering, smoothing and scraping.

  Crowl leaned over the heaps of parchment, marvelling at their intricacy. Each map had been drawn by hand in fading inks, embellished with devotional imagery and injunctions for purity, then stamped in red by various scrutinising bodies of the Administratum. The detail was fantastic. A mortal scribe might have spent an entire lifetime over a single leaf, carefully scouring ancient architects’ records and lost scrolls from semi-disclosed Mechanicus vaults before collating the data into this thing of rare artifice. Crowl began to turn the thick pages over, lost for a moment in the wealth of knowledge on display.

  ‘You keep the best for yourselves,’ he murmured. ‘If we had this on the outside…’

  ‘Here is what you seek,’ said Navradaran, reaching for the largest of the charts and hauling it across the tottering heap. The hololiths picked up on the glyphs and a fresh ghost-image of the Imperial Palace’s southern perimeter filled the incense-clouded space between them.

  It rotated slowly, giving a full three-dimensional representation of the architecture. For a moment, the cornucopia of information was impossible to process. The Terran world-city was not built across a flat plain, but delved as far underground as it reared above it, everything intermingled and interlocked in a mad embrace of accumulated complexity. Only one factor remained constant amid the morass of connection – the wall itself, driving between the groves of grasping towers, cleaving them like a blunt axe-blade. Once you latched on to that, using it as a bearing, then the rest of the schematic began to make sense.

  ‘I will indicate where we discovered signs of flesh-cutting,’ said Navradaran. As he spoke, points of light scattered across the hololith, clustered under and around the walls themselves.

  ‘And where is Skhallax?’ asked Crowl.

  Navradaran illuminated the enclave-city, and it became immediately clear that the trail of bodies traced a path from the northern edge of Skhallax towards the hab-zone complexes south of the wall itself. Once close to the Palace precincts, however, the scatter of blood became more diffuse, as if the impetus had run out, and the pattern dissolved.

  ‘What have you done with this data?’ Crowl asked.

  ‘Observe where the attacks have neared the walls,’ Navradaran said. ‘Extra patrols have been employed, and soundings made of the pits below. The entire southern rim between bastions thirteen and thirty-one has been reinforced with psycho-screened Militarum shock units. Six of my comrades have been taken from the Gate to oversee further strengthening of the outer watch. By any normal metric, it remains impregnable.’

  Crowl looked carefully at the ancient schematics. The hololith showed some of the old catacombs like worming lines of light, twisting down into the crust like parasites. The Custodian was right – those uncharted depths were dangerous. Something determined enough might discover a way in, given enough time, enough power, and a great deal of luck. He scanned across the sites Navradaran had identified, and saw immediately how closely they aligned towards the warrens gnawing at the base of the ancient walls. It was as if a tentative hand were feeling along the expanse of wall, probing for weakness.

  ‘Why did they kill so often?’ mused Crowl.

  Navradaran looked at him. ‘What is your concern?’

  Crowl watched the light-points turn, and his unease grew. ‘Order the servitors out,’ he said. ‘Is this chamber secure?’

  Navradaran dismissed the attendants, who shuffled and dragged themselves through the doorway. Once it was sealed, the Custodian turned back to Crowl. ‘Perfectly.’

  Crowl indicated the distribution of kill-sites. ‘We have fugitives making their way towards the Palace. To say this place is heavily guarded would be a ludicrous understatement, and so their only chance of survival, let alone success, is to remain hidden. And yet they leave a smear of bloody corpses everywhere they go.’

  ‘They were ritual kills. There can be power in them.’

  ‘Of course, but how much? Seriously? There are wards on this place capable of halting the greatest servants of the Archenemy – sacrificing a few mortal souls would not dent them.’ He walked around the map table, drumming his fingers absently as he studied the topography of the Outer Palace. ‘We are looking for xenos, or someone using a xenos weapon,’ he said.

  ‘How do you know this?’

  ‘Information taken from the Rhadamanthys. The dark eldar. Consider what this means. There cannot be many of them, and so they will not take any of the major portals by force. Their purpose here cannot be sorcery, for their people shun it, and in any case the defences against unholy magicks are immense. They only have subterfuge. So I say again, why make so many kills?’

  ‘It is believed that they live for pain.’

  ‘Yes, yes, that is believed.’ Crowl ran his hands over his brow, rubbing the skin. He could feel his own pain levels growing again, but dared not gland in case it slowed him. ‘But they could hunt anywhere. Down in the tunnels, where the arbitrators don’t go. Were we wrong about the Angel’s Tears?’

  Crowl felt his mind working sluggishly, perhaps a residue of his experience at the Gate, and worked to clarify his thoughts.

  The Angel’s Tears. What were they? Never mind. Concentrate on this. Put yourself in their mind. They have to get in, but all ways are barred. How do they do it?

  He looked over the parapets, the turrets, the immense laser batteries, all defined in glowing lines of force. Navradaran was surely right – any attack would have to be underground, where the old foundations of old citadels crumbled under the weight of ten thousand years of accumulated construction. But that left hundreds of kilometres to survey.

  ‘You showed me that the Eternity Gate was a distraction,’ he said at last. ‘All eyes will be on it. That is the purpose with the other sites too. Create havoc, create terror, pull troops to watch over the murder-sites. The xenos grow stronger from the kills, true, but they have no other significance. When the attack comes, the true attack, it will be nowhere near them. It will be in a place where the walls are strongest and attack unimaginable, from where watchers have been pulled in order to guard these bloody fingerprints.’

  ‘There are no unguarded walls.’

  ‘There are a million guards within this place and still it is not enough. You said it yourself.’

  Crowl looked harder, analysing the scatter of the sites, the relationship to Skhallax, the arteries, the tunnels, the insane intricacy of transitways and shafts. Taken together, it was impossible. But there were limitations – the xenos cargo had been landed twenty days ago. Its bearers had remained within a radius of about a hundred kilometres of Skhallax, rarely straying much further in pursuit of kills. Perhaps they needed to. Perhaps they could not move too far, because they were building something, or working on something, or…

  ‘They do not just feed on pain,’ said Crowl, rapidly now, growing more confident. ‘They use it. They can create monsters, creature
s to aid them, but that takes time, so there are limits to where they can move.’ He shuffled further along the map table, watching as the hololith’s gradual rotation brought fresh detail into view. He saw long, straight subterranean transit tunnels running north-south, then snaking under the titanic foundations of the hive complexes – Boreates, Romandus, Clytemstrata, and then further into the industrial wastes of Armengand leading up to the Xericho waste-sinks.

  ‘It would need to be out of the way,’ he muttered, seeing what his prey would have seen. ‘Hidden, far away from the visible kills, but with access to the southern walls when the moment came. Somewhere… there.’

  Navradaran moved to stand beside him. ‘Those foundations are deep,’ he said. ‘No known weaknesses.’

  ‘That’s the point. Can troops be moved there?’

  ‘Not soon. So many have already been drawn to the Gate.’

  ‘And that’s the problem.’ Crowl’s eyes narrowed, committing the layout to memory. ‘I’ll travel there. Ensure I have sanction – if someone shoots me down I’ll be very annoyed.’

  ‘What can you do?’ asked Navradaran, his deep voice unconvinced.

  ‘What I spend all my time doing. Hunting.’

  ‘This thing has killed many times.’

  ‘So have I. And I’ll have Revus, unless you’ve caged him again.’

  ‘It will not be enough.’

  ‘Then come too.’

  Navradaran looked at him for a long time. The ruby-red of his helm-lenses gave nothing away. For the first time since meeting the Custodian, Crowl sensed doubt there, a conflict between instincts. Navradaran would have been raised and trained in a world of ancient, immutable protocols, steeped in the arcane rituals of the unchanging Inner Palace. To leave the holiest sanctums now, when the great Feast beckoned and the population of an entire planet surged towards the epicentre of its austere faith… Perhaps he asked too much.

  ‘I sought to punish you by showing you the Gate, Crowl,’ the Custodian said at last. ‘And to test you – only the devout withstand it. Despite it all, despite what you wish the world to think, you passed. And now I am tested in turn. So His will unfolds.’

  Crowl laughed. ‘Is that a yes or a no?’

  ‘I will show you to your vessel,’ said Navradaran, hefting his guardian spear and moving towards the doorway. ‘In the time it takes to reach it, I will decide.’

  The hunters broke out from the catacombs under the shadow of Boreates, divided into platoons and jogged down narrow capillary tubes. It was pitch-black, and coil-powered lumens bobbed on makeshift helms, throwing meagre pools of illumination across a scabrous landscape of ruin. The fighters ran surely, their eyes used to the eternal gloom, their feet used to the slippery metal floors and the toxic pools of sludge. Just as before they carried improvised weapons, rifles and shotguns, combat knives, the odd power saw looted from a production line, masonry drills and claw hammers.

  Lermentov led his main divisions north east, breaking down through sparsely occupied ganger levels until the vanguard emerged inside an old sewage conduit heading up towards the Armengand industrial zone. As his bodyguard, mostly burly abhumans equipped with shock mauls, rumbled through the narrow mazes the blind and ivory-pale inhabitants scuttled into the shadows, cloth-bound feet splashing in the dark.

  Spinoza, Khazad and the storm troopers ran with him. The False Angel had been as good as his word, and their full armour and weapons had been restored to them. Back in the fortress, one of Lermentov’s men had hauled Argent up to her, his brow sweat-soaked from the weight of it, and she had taken a cold satisfaction in taking it from him lightly in one hand. The False Angel himself wore decent armour of his own – a Militarum-issue flak-suit, closed-face helm, synthleather boots – and he carried a regulation M35 lasgun.

  ‘You’re Guard, then,’ Spinoza remarked to him once they’d set off.

  Lermentov nodded, breathing hard. ‘Was.’

  ‘What brought you down here?’

  ‘Served for ten years,’ he said. ‘All across the sector. Saw a lot of fighting. Then I came here.’ A hollow laugh. ‘I was a pilgrim, you believe that? Applied for leave, and they gave it to me. We were shot to scraps, our commissar was dead – they knew the end was coming. I told them I’d be back.’ He kept on running. His command group, such as it was, came on behind, filling the sewer with foul-smelling eddies of kicked-up water. ‘I never went back. It’s not hard to disappear here. But then you see what the world’s like once you’re nothing.’

  They jogged on in silence for a while. Spinoza’s tactical readout had been damaged during the attack on the assembly hall, and her comm-unit was scrambled. She tried to open a channel to Crowl, and met the predictable wall of static. Then she tried Rassilo, and to her surprise got a faint counter-reading.

  ‘My lord inquisitor,’ she voxed over an internal ciphered link, shielding the transmission from Lermentov. ‘Transmission from your servant Interrogator Luce Spinoza, retinue of the Lord Crowl. Onward coordinates are sent with this databurst. I take you at your word, and request immediate aid. Xenos encountered under Armengand. Supposition: large numbers, significant force required to repel. Am in the company of irregular militia and temporarily making use of their numbers. If you find us, request respectfully you do not terminate allies until xenos priority threat neutralised. End transmission.’

  That was it – there was no indication of whether it had made it. She only just finished when Lermentov spoke to her again.

  ‘I didn’t want this,’ he said. ‘Why would I want it? But they were good to me when my luck ran out. They’re not all vermin and gangers in the underhive. There’s a better system, and we show them what it looks like.’

  ‘Do not attempt to excuse yourself,’ said Spinoza. ‘I do not wish to hear it.’

  ‘No, of course you don’t.’

  ‘How far?’

  ‘This takes us under Armengand. It’s on the western sprawl. Not far.’

  ‘Those… things. They’ll cut you apart.’

  ‘They know it.’

  There were few illusions down here, where life was measured in a few half-decades and the sun was never seen. Still, the rabble-army ran on with enough enthusiasm, knowing what inaction would cost them. Spinoza had told Lermentov nothing of Crowl’s suspicions over the purpose of the xenos incursion – it would make no difference to their desire for vengeance, something she could approve of even if everything else was anathema.

  They ran, and the air became cold and clammy. Spinoza had not been cold since arriving on this roasting, parched planet, and it felt strangely alien to her. The stench became overwhelming – if the sewer tunnels had once fed into active processing stations, the systems had long since broken down. The sloped walls and roof were caked in a glowing mat of organic pulp, and straggly creatures scampered through the shallows ahead of them, draggled and sleek. All told, Spinoza had around her the only living things still capable of thriving on this old, spoiled world – humans, rats and algae.

  Their course took them down steeply. The water became viscous and slime-choked, the tunnels narrower and more decrepit. Whole ceiling sections had collapsed into rubble, and cracks opened up in the walls and floor, gaping blackly into nothingness. The warbands maintained a good pace for the most part, though the weaker began to struggle as the fumes intensified and their malnourished bodies began to creak.

  Spinoza sniffed hard, flaring her nostrils to draw the air in deep. Amid the filth she could almost detect it again – that musk of sickliness, the one from the void-hauler, also exuded by that horror chained up in Lermentov’s fortress. They were getting nearer.

  ‘Stay close,’ she voxed to Hegain on the closed squad-channel. ‘Any sentient xenos, they are the priority. If we can extract one and withdraw, we do it.’

  ‘As you will it,’ replied Hegain. ‘And the Lord Crowl?’

  ‘I w
ill maintain attempts at contact. We are a long way down.’

  ‘Heh. You have the right of it. Further down than I’ve been, I will say it. It is cold. Imagine it – cold. I had dreamed of that, some days and nights. So there’s that.’

  Spinoza smiled. Hegain seemed restored. Only Khazad remained silent, running hard in the dark alongside them, a little less fluently than before, but still exuding power.

  ‘You could have left,’ Spinoza voxed.

  ‘And go where?’

  ‘This is not your cause.’

  ‘Is what Phaelias wish to know. Say no more, interrogator. Course is set.’

  Spinoza cut the link. The level of mutual distrust was almost amusing, and the only thing binding them together was the promise of uncovering more abominations, which if they existed in any number would likely be enough to kill all of them, down in the dark and far from any conceivable help.

  The tunnel began to level out. A chamber loomed ahead of them, and the bootfalls echoed strangely in the unfurling space. They burst out into a sodden, stinking subterranean hall, and weak helm-lumens swept across rotting piers of brickwork. The floor was scored by what looked like old rail tracks, thick with slime and pitted with the endemic rust.

  The aroma was pungent now. Several of Lermentov’s troops began to retch as they breathed it in. More exits led away from the chamber, many little more than raw cavern maws, blacker than old bile. Lermentov’s abhumans, too stupid to fear, started to push ahead into them, ducking under sagging girders and grunting noisily.

  ‘Hold,’ said Khazad, edging towards one of the openings, her sword drawn and glimmering in the perpetual night. ‘Tell them not trample over this.’