Vaults of Terra: The Carrion Throne

by Chris Wraight

  Her lungs burned, her leg muscles throbbed. They had been on the run for a long time, and the creatures before them were more powerful and seemingly never tired. From distance, she caught sight of the xenobreeds sprinting out over a long, narrow span, suspended high over a chasm that fell away into unguessable depths. At the far end was a gate in the shape of a gaping dragon’s mouth, barred by doors of verdigrised bronze. The creature, the master, paused for only a moment to destroy it, shattering the barrier in a blaze of unnatural whip-curl energies, but that lost them time. Spinoza saw the chance, and drove herself even harder to catch up. Khazad, fastest of them all, came with her. The two of them gained the broken gate and burst through into the chamber beyond.

  The space was silted with blankets of dust. An octagonal floor stretched away in all directions, overlooked by ranks of skull-headed column clusters. Devotional statues stood in their hundreds, half-hewn, unfinished, their empty expressions blind to the curtains of unbroken shadow.

  Xenobreed nightmares turn to face the incomers, their ranks briefly parting to expose the withered horror in their midst.

  Khazad and the others skidded to a halt, opening fire as soon as they entered, spraying the ranks of grotesques with a flurry of neon-hard las-beams.

  For a moment, Spinoza didn’t understand why the beasts had turned to fight – they should have been far ahead still. Screams rang out from the grotesques. Their momentum left them, and their pale limbs thrashed in the flicker of shadows. Las-beams scythed across, latticing the open space and searing black scorch marks into the ancient walls.

  Something hissed in her helm’s audex unit, then a stream of raw sound waves roared out of the damaged intake. She reached to shut it down, just as the feed juddered back into intelligibility.

  ‘…sponse to your message. Take cover and pull left – we will pin them down. Thanks to the Throne, child – we had rather given up hope.’

  Rassilo’s voice. Spinoza narrowed her eyes, blinking against the flare of las-discharge, and finally saw the reason for the firefight – rows of Inquisitorial storm troopers in regulation grey, maybe two hundred, lined up along the far wall of the chamber, dug in and already firing in disciplined drill-lines. Their inquisitor lord was there with them, leading the foremost into a charge against the xenobreeds, a smoking boltgun clutched in her armoured fist.

  Praise Him, thought Spinoza, relief washing over her. Rassilo had answered. A defence had been organised, and now the ways further in were barred.

  ‘Pull left!’ she roared, driving the others to comply with the orders, knowing that the barrage from the storm troopers would only give them so much time. The grotesques were reacting now, lurching with typical abandon towards the humans hemming them in. There were still so many – perhaps too many – but at least they were fighting now.

  ‘My lord!’ Spinoza cried, seeing Rassilo fighting her way towards her. ‘How did you–’

  ‘Not now, child,’ Rassilo replied coolly, swivelling smoothly on her heel to take aim again. ‘Just fight, if you please.’

  ‘I hear them,’ said Navradaran, picking up the pace.

  The Custodian ran with a heavy, fluid grace, powered by armour systems far grander than Crowl’s own. His squad sped through the labyrinth of the lower levels, churning up dust that had lain undisturbed for millennia. Their helm-lenses glowed a vivid red in the dark, their armour glinted in thin outlines of dark gold.

  Crowl struggled to keep up. His lungs felt like they had been scraped clean by rusty blades, and his breaths came with effort now. He could no longer hide the limp in his right leg and had to run through the pain. Gorgias hovered overhead, Revus maintained a solid pace, and the chambers passed by in crepuscular procession.

  He was tempted to look. Out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of aisles leading back into gloom, alcoves and antechambers swathed in dried-out cobwebs. Everything down here was as old as the Imperium itself, some of it possibly older. A rogue trader might give up his fortune for just a few minutes alone in those rooms; a warlord of the outer worlds would trade her empire, a cardinal his diocese – and yet there was no time to look, to absorb, to study, and despite all that was at stake, that near broke his heart.

  Such was the tragedy of the times. Terra still held its riches, diminished from glory but still greater than a thousand other worlds combined, and yet they were forever cloistered, kept locked down by ignorance. If some catalyst could be found to revive the species’ questing spirit, to shake off the terror of the new and escape the dread hand of the Mechanicus and the Priesthood, then those treasures might yet be used.

  But they never would be, not now. All that remained was the continual struggle for another decade or two of life, to endure just a little longer amid the gasping terror while the beasts circled. Human presence here was an aberration, born of desperation, and when they were gone the shadows would close over, perhaps never to be broken again.

  ‘Signals,’ Revus reported.

  Crowl blinked his proximity scanner across the retinal feed. There were hundreds of signatures, close-packed, just up ahead. He looked at Navradaran, who must have seen the same thing, but the Custodian said nothing and kept going without pause. His squad’s guardian spears were alight now, flaming like brands, their silver disruptor shrouds streaming into the dark.

  And then he saw it – Spinoza’s auspex signature, there among Hegain’s, and the others. His heart leapt, and a sudden burst of energy shot through his agonised muscles.

  ‘We are in time,’ he breathed, to himself as much as Revus, reaching for Sanguine.

  They burst into another wide chamber, its floor a sea of dust, its cavernous interior marked by an eerie procession of half-made statues. Old electro-tools lay discarded in the filth, cast aside by long-dead masons before their works could be completed.

  Las-bolts criss-crossed between the stonework sentinels, smashing carved heads and torsos, and sending shadows jumping crazily across the floor. Crowl saw huge outlines stalking between the graven images, far too big to be human, moving fast amid a maelstrom of noise and confusion. He took aim, only to see a squad of human troopers retreat across his path, firing steadily at one of the monsters before it tore into them.

  The Custodians charged directly into the heart of the battle, their spears kindling a blaze of iridescence that sent the shadows flying back. They were just as fast as the nightmare creatures, just as strong, their staves swinging around them in tight, brutal arcs, leaping from one strike to the next before crashing down among their prey in scattering clouds of thrown blood. Two of them pushed on past the battleground, hunting for xenobreeds fleeing back into the dark, the other two stayed with their captain and began the slaughter in earnest.

  ‘I see her!’ Revus shouted, firing as he ran, pulling towards the right flank and darting between tottering, las-blown statues. Crowl raced after him, jumping clear of a secondary column even as the weight of impacts sent it smashing to the ground. He could see Spinoza’s armour now, lambent blood-red in the light of the Custodians’ blades. She was in the heart of the fighting, wielding her crozius two-handed in mighty, bone-shattering swipes. She and others stood before some kind of stone altar, huge and heavy, their backs against it as they fought off more of the xenobreeds. He caught flashing glimpses of the others – an assassin, the remnants of Hegain’s squad, a man in an Astra Militarum uniform carrying a bad wound, more Inquisitorial forces doing their best to hold their rapidly diminishing ground.

  And among them was Lord Inquisitor Rassilo – Rassilo – fighting against something wizened and blackened and bedecked in tatters of shadow.

  ‘That one,’ he ordered Revus, indicating the withered creature.

  Revus reacted instantly, switching his aim towards the creature in rags. Crowl tried to get a shot away, but the creature seemed to have an aura of misdirection crackling around it, a shimmer of fractured reality that slid and pop
ped with its every move. He fired a single round where its head looked to be, only to see the bullet slip into nothingness.

  The creature swivelled, discharging some spidery web of kinetic force that hurled Rassilo to the floor and sent a dozen storm troopers tumbling after her. It lurched towards Spinoza, hoisting a hooked blade in one of its many hands, moving too fast to halt. Crowl fired again, too far away to intervene, and could only watch his bullet flicker out of existence as it hit the reality-warping field around the alien.

  He wouldn’t get there in time. Nothing could stop that blade falling, shearing through dimensions to shatter its target.

  Except for Navradaran. The Custodian hit the centre of the battleground like a forge hammer, smashing through grotesques to get to the prize. He travelled like a god out of legend, wreathed in streamers of pure gold, the runes on his armour coruscating and swimming with unshackled ether-light. He leapt for the tattered wretch and seized it by the neck, reaching through the distortion field unscathed, hauling it back, then slamming it hard to the ground. The thing screamed, writhed, tried to fight back, but Navradaran was inexorable, crunching his fist in and cracking the bones in its glass-fragile face. The xenos tried to lash out at him with spine-mounted scything arms, but Navradaran broke them, smashing them, snapping them across the haft of his blade and twisting the black-blooded remnants aside.

  He dragged the xenos to its feet, now a bedraggled and wounded mess, then crunched its battered body onto the altar top, grinding ravaged flesh into the stone and blasting the reality field into black-edged slivers.

  Crowl limped closer, unable to take his eyes from the display of pure, brutal dominance. The remaining grotesques were being taken apart by the other Custodians, impaled on their blades even as they tried to stagger back into the dark, rendering irrelevant the Inquisitorial troops still present on the battlefield.

  But the xenos master was still alive. Crowl crept closer to the altar, feeling waves of nausea emanating from its crushed body. Spinoza limped alongside him, her armour bloodied and her maul still fizzing with power.

  ‘You were right, lord,’ she panted, looking unsteady on her feet. ‘The Rhadamanthys was–’

  ‘Later, Spinoza,’ said Crowl, taking her by the shoulder, looking her over. ‘You are preserved? You are not wounded?’

  She shook her head weakly. By then Navradaran had pinned the xenos to the altar as if in preparation for sacrifice. He raised his blade to sever its neck, and harsh light spilled on to the thing’s face, exposing for the first time just what manner of being had penetrated so deep into humanity’s most sacred site.

  It was emaciated by human standards, so thin that its bones protruded like iron staves from under a lace-slender press of skin. Veins were visible, a black web just under the surface, pulsing weakly. Its spine was as arched as those of the grotesques, implanted with blades and wickedly curved devices, now mostly smashed into fragments by Navradaran’s fury. Under its leather robes it was dressed in figure-hugging greaves studded with steel pins, and loops of chains hung about its impossibly narrow waist, from which dangled crystal bottles filled with virulently coloured fluids.

  Its face was covered in blood, its cheekbones cracked. Its lower jaw looked to have been entirely excised, replaced with a mask of spattered steel connected to ripped cheek-flesh by rings of jewelled metal. Its skull was bald and tattooed with arcane symbols from its debased xenos culture.

  The worst thing was its eyes. Nothing in the deepest of the Palace dungeons was as black as those eyes. They were like pits, ringed with creased lines punched through with flecks of wire, holes into an abject nothingness. Crowl had looked into many eyes over his career, knowing all the character traits given away by them, but these orbs betrayed only an awful, hungry ennui, a desperate gnawing that had long since outstripped any hope of being satisfied. Those eyes had witnessed things no living thing should ever have sought to witness, atrocities that dwarfed anything seen in the criminal vaults of the underhives, and the imprint of it lingered in patterns of concentric, kohl-black horror.

  It still breathed. Navradaran pressed the tip of his blade against its neck. The xenos looked up at its executioner, struggling to inhale, bubbles of oily blood forming at the edges of its thin-lipped mouth, its many limbs broken. There was no hatred or desperation in that look, only a meagre kind of contempt.

  ‘End it,’ hissed Crowl, urgently.

  But Navradaran did not move.

  ‘End it!’

  Crowl whirled around, looking for a reason why he had stayed his hand.

  Rassilo had recovered her feet. Her bolter was aimed directly at the Custodian, and at a range that would puncture even his peerless armour-plate. The rest of her battalion, still over a hundred of them and freed of the need to fight the grotesques, had similarly levelled their weapons at the remainder of Navradaran’s squad, all of whom had devoted their attention to slaying the surviving xenos and were now exposed.

  ‘Adamara?’ Crowl asked, warily. ‘What is this?’

  ‘The end, Erasmus,’ she said, never moving her bolter muzzle. Behind her, dozens of storm troopers began to edge closer. ‘Custodian, move clear of the xenos. You should never have come for it. It is, and has always been, mine.’

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The last of the las-bolts fizzed away. The screams had gone, echoing into the long vaults, but the blood was still hot on the stone. Spinoza, breathing hard, her head swimming with fatigue, looked at Crowl, then at Rassilo, then back at Crowl.

  She stood with what was left of her own squad and Lermentov’s soldiers, a pitiful remnant of what had been brought up from Boreates. They were surrounded on all sides by Rassilo’s own forces – heavily equipped storm troopers in full carapace armour bearing both hellguns and carbines. Khazad had been fighting hardest of all, and was now bent double, panting hard, her power sword still glimmering in a loose grip. The greater part of the illumination in that catacomb came from the five Custodians’ power weapons, all of which still snarled away with vivid silver energy fields.

  Even in the very midst of fighting it had been impossible not to be drawn to their magnificence. They were something else – imposing, arrayed in a dazzling overabundance of heraldic livery, standing like living repudiations of the species’ long decline.

  And yet they were frozen now, each of them tracked by multiple targeting beads from the ranked hellguns. Rassilo, Spinoza’s sponsor and confidante, held her weapon taut, aimed at the lead Custodian’s helm, her stance unyielding.

  ‘It will not be suffered to live,’ the Custodian said, making no move to drive his blade further.

  ‘Indeed, but it will not meet its end by your hand,’ said Rassilo, as collected as ever, her voice crisp under the resounding arches. ‘This creature is under the auspices of the Holy Orders.’

  ‘This is the Palace, lord inquisitor.’

  ‘That makes no difference.’

  Spinoza looked at her in disbelief. Khazad had fallen to her knees, cradling some fresh wound taken during combat, while Lermentov looked merely exhausted and bewildered. Only Crowl retained his composure, standing beside Revus with Sanguine still in hand.

  ‘Don’t be a fool, Adamara,’ he said. ‘You’ve failed. My advice – don’t anger this one.’

  Rassilo never even looked at him. Her severe face was drawn tight in concentration. ‘Take the blade away,’ she said again, speaking to the Custodian. ‘Have no doubt, at the first movement to end the xenos, I will open fire.’

  Spinoza took an uncertain step forwards, her own weapon still fully active and crackling. ‘My lord–’ she ventured, in truth not knowing which of her masters to address.

  ‘Silence, child,’ Rassilo snapped. ‘You are of the ordo. Do your duty.’

  That was correct. Spinoza was honour-bound to obey her superior, an instinct that had been honed and strengthened over many years of psycho-con
ditioning. Even before thinking, she found herself holding Argent more tightly, preparing to use it, and her gaze was drawn once more to the massive figure in its baroque armour, still motionless over the prone body of the xenos.

  But then the spell broke. Crowl laughed – the same dry scrape she had heard in his private chambers, as cynical as it was unaffected.

  ‘I thought it was Quantrain,’ he said, slowly and carefully reloading. ‘That was the name that kept coming up, again and again. I even summoned him here.’

  At the mention of Quantrain, Khazad’s face suddenly lifted, and the hatred in her brown eyes was virulent. One of Rassilo’s storm troopers, her captain by the sigils on his armour and his bulk, noticed too and edged protectively closer to her, all the time keeping his weapon aimed at the Custodian.

  ‘It’s not often I’m wrong,’ Crowl went on, snapping the chamber closed on Sanguine. ‘So you can imagine how it feels to discover the truth.’

  He raised the pistol and fired a single shot. Rassilo’s captain was hit full in the helm, sent sprawling back against the bole of a stone column. He slumped, dazed, and the broken faceplate fell away from where Crowl’s shot had sheared the ceramite. With a start, Spinoza recognised the face underneath – a grey-streaked beard, spilling out at the gorget where the helm had fractured.