‘Gloch,’ she breathed.
‘How could he answer the summons?’ Crowl said, turning his pistol on Rassilo then. ‘He couldn’t. Only on Terra could a man as universally famous as Quantrain never exist. Or, to be more accurate, share existence. With you, Adamara.’
Khazad suddenly screamed, her sword snarling, and leapt up at Rassilo, her face contorted with loathing. Crowl lurched forwards, trying to interpose himself, but too late. Rassilo swung round, firing her bolter and missing before the assassin barrelled into her.
The storm troopers opened fire, hitting the Custodians and sending all five reeling. Gloch roared back to his feet and raced after Khazad, firing from his autopistol and reaching for a combat blade. The entire chamber erupted again in a hail of noise and light. Caught between the explosion of violence, Lermentov’s troops cowered helplessly, running for cover as the storm troopers took on the Custodians.
For a split second Spinoza had no idea what to do. Hegain looked to her urgently for guidance, unsure where to aim or who to take on, and she had none to give him. Gloch engaged with Khazad, winging her and then going after her with the knife. Rassilo had disappeared, lost in the blaze of las-discharge and the sudden surge of bodies. The Custodians were fighting back now, wading into the storm troopers and laying about them with their spears. She was duty-bound to aid both sides, and yet had no idea why they were fighting.
‘What orders, lord?’ asked Hegain.
She saw Khazad being battered by Gloch then, driven back into the press of advancing storm troopers. The assassin was in no shape to resist, but still fought back, just as she had done before.
‘Locate the Lord Crowl and protect him,’ Spinoza ordered Hegain, hefting Argent and racing towards Gloch. ‘I will handle the giant.’
Crowl glanded a heavy slug of motovine, giving up on the pretence of restraint. Running again was pure pain, shooting up his diseased limbs and striking at his labouring heart, but the need for haste was now acute.
He had miscalculated, exposing Rassilo while the assassin was so close. Then again, only at that moment had he realised who she must be – Phaelias’ old acolyte, sufficiently driven by loathing of Quantrain to risk everything for the kill.
The xenos had reacted instantly, taking advantage of the confusion, shifting under a cloak of darkness and scampering through the mass of advancing bodies. Its physical demise, seemingly, had been illusory, artfully constructed to project weakness, and now it was loose again, bereft of its servants but still racing towards its goal.
The shouts and cries of combat faded into the distance. Crowl had lost sight of it, but the tunnels only led one way now. For all its subterfuge, the thing had been battered by Navradaran – surely even a creature of its perverse abilities would be slowed a little by that.
Now they were headed even further down, threading through deep capillaries cut into the stone. The heat became crushing, just as it had up in the Sanctum Imperialis. The arched roofs descended with every step, narrowing the stale airspace further, choking under the press of the Palace’s straggling foundations.
He was alone. Revus had raced to aid Navradaran, and he had no idea where Gorgias had ended up. If there had been time he might have called them back, but now it was too late, and he was already deep into the tortuous mazes snaking through the roots of the old mountains. His body was giving up on him – he could feel the old wounds cluster, draining his strength, fighting against the artificial stimms that clogged his blood.
This can only end badly, he thought to himself, breathing hard, running hard, driving himself onwards through the depths.
Down, down and ever down he went, following the trace stench of corruption, trusting to instinct, never pausing. He vaulted down spiral stairs, raced under the eaves of ancient, empty vaults. He passed great barred doors, braced with iron and sealed with runes of obscure provenance. Slivers of static snaked across the ceiling again, sparkling in the deep dark. He must have been as far down below as the spires soared above, and felt like an insect scrabbling through the soil of humanity’s eternal domain, lost under the furnace-slag of its long forging.
He lost track of time, lost track of space. At points there was nothing to hold on to, and he staggered blind, his night-vision faltering. He heard massive growls from below, as if tectonic plates ground up against one another, and the rock beneath his feet became hot even through the soles of his boots. There were sounds in the dark – eldritch wails, the echoing clank of infernal engines, the slow beat of the world’s heart.
He was going mad. He could feel his exhaustion catching up with him, amplified by the insanity of this place. More runes swam before his vision, surely graven aeons ago, dull red with residual warding power.
Then he was out. He felt the oppression lift, the air decompress. A flat plain of empty stone stretched away, broken by a chasm running transverse just before an immense screen of granite that soared up on the far side. The screen was carved just as the Eternity Gate had been carved – a vast tapestry of overlapping, elaborately occult depictions of bestial and legendary figures. There were twenty great knights shown in a huge circle surrounding a magisterial icon of the Emperor Enthroned. Some of those knights looked like the Ministorum-sanctioned images of the Holy Primarchs, but why were there twenty of them?
The chasm stood more than fifty metres away. Above him, a great void opened that went up and up, bridged by vast spans of gothic stonework. Huge pipes interlaced with the stone, ringed with bundles of thick cabling and the unmistakable mark of Mechanicus devices. It all hummed, barely audibly at first, but deep and throbbing and redolent of something unutterably gigantic. A faint glow, like the first blush of dawn sunlight, bled down from the heights, only partly obscured by the haze of smog and darkness below. There were stairs threaded up into those high clerestories, wrapped around the boles of gigantic columns and twisting through the filigree of flying buttresses.
Dust lay everywhere, still like a fall of grey snow, choking and matted. The heat was incredible, the sense of oppression absolute. Crowl felt an almost overwhelming urge to sink to his knees, to give in and let his labouring heart judder and his tortured lungs cease their wheezing efforts, but he couldn’t, for he was no longer alone. Out in the open, on the edge of the chasm, two figures faced one another.
Rassilo had been faster than he, and had the xenos pinned down. The creature looked to have been shot again, and carried its eldritch blade weakly now. Grimly, checking that Sanguine was fully loaded, Crowl dragged himself towards the both of them, keeping his weapon aimed firmly at Rassilo.
‘Remain where you are!’ he shouted, coming closer, working hard to retain focus.
Rassilo did not move. The xenos sank to its knees, its nightshade eyes unblinking, watching Crowl draw up.
‘What shall I call you, then?’ Crowl asked Rassilo grimly. ‘Which name serves best?’
Rassilo smiled. ‘Whatever you want, Erasmus. But you do not look well. Why not sit awhile?’
Crowl kept Sanguine aimed at her forehead. Rassilo kept her bolter aimed at the xenos, while the xenos stared hungrily at both of them.
‘You do not wish to kill it,’ Crowl said. ‘This was your cargo. Why?’
‘I had my orders,’ said Rassilo. ‘Set in motion a long time ago. I am only a small part in it. You are an even smaller one. If you think you can stop it now, you are, I am afraid, quite in error.’
‘Tell me why.’
‘Or you will shoot? Come, now. Our friend here will finish you before my body hits the ground.’
The xenos let slip a fractured smile of its own then, exposing black teeth in pearl-white gums.
‘For the sake of the past, Adamara,’ said Crowl, softly. ‘Whatever you planned here has failed. Tell me, before they wring it from you later.’
Rassilo lost her smile. ‘Ah, Erasmus,’ she said. ‘I always said it – you spent too long in
Salvator. The battle was here, within the Palace, and you wasted yourself out there.’ Her bolter never wavered. ‘I counselled against it. When all this is done, tell them that. I told them the creature could not be trusted, but still they persisted. And I was right. We got it as far as Terra, and then we were betrayed.’
‘It cannot betray,’ said Crowl. ‘It is the enemy.’
‘There were guarantees, for what it is worth,’ said Rassilo. ‘Bargains made. Many souls were handed over, and I do not like to think what happened to them. All for this one, to come here, to confer with us and advise us on the Project.’
‘The Project?’
‘Forged in desperation. Tell them that as well. Tell them if there had been any other way, then even this would not have been countenanced.’
‘You are speaking in circles. Tell me plainly.’
‘They cannot repair the Throne. You understand that? You see what that means? So they are searching for something else, something beyond the understanding of the Martian Priesthood. Embassies have been sent. Treaties made. Technology, souls, planets – all have been traded. To judge if… they could truly help us, one would have to be brought here, to speak to those charged with maintaining what remains, to be shown the faults. And though we knew the risks, and we knew there were those on the Council who would never agree to it, the order was given.’
Crowl listened with mounting disbelief. ‘Then you have damned yourselves,’ he said.
‘We have. But consider the alternative.’
‘Only rumours.’
‘Yes, rumours. But from the mouths of High Lords. Could you discount them? I could not.’
Crowl swallowed painfully. He could feel blood trickling down the inside of his breastplate, and his head became light. He gripped the hilt of Sanguine harder.
‘Kill it here.’
‘I cannot. It goes with me.’
‘Your orders are void. The Palace is roused. You will never make it.’
‘I must.’
‘Damn you, Adamara!’
‘Remain vigilant – it hungers for both of us.’
He could sense himself slipping. The xenos was aware, and began to twitch under Rassilo’s scrutiny. If he aimed at the xenos then Rassilo would disable him. If he shot at Rassilo then the xenos would leap at his throat. His head swam, and a numb prickling broke out below his knees.
‘You could recant, even now,’ he ventured. ‘I would be your advocate.’
Rassilo laughed. ‘Erasmus,’ she said, sadly. ‘For a clever man, how little you know.’
‘More than you, it seems.’
She looked at him, and there was a terrible regret on her refined face. ‘Maybe it was ever thus,’ she said.
Then she swung to aim at him.
Instinctively, Crowl fired, sending a bullet through her forehead. Even before her body hit the ground, before he could twist around to face the xenos, it went for him, leaping with frightening speed and sending them both tumbling across the stone. Crowl struggled, feeling the stench of terror sink over him, but felt something spiked bite into his ribcage.
He cried out, thrusting with both gauntlets. Sanguine skittered away, teetering on the edge of the chasm, and then the xenos was on top of him, its horrific face just inches from his.
‘Clever man,’ the thing echoed, its eldritch voice a bizarre corruption of a human’s. ‘This will hurt.’
Chapter Twenty-Six
There was an insanity to it. The storm troopers had been given their orders and so obeyed them, even though it was getting them systematically killed. Spinoza saw the evidence of it as she ran between them – the bodies flung through the air, the echoing crackle of power glaives whistling to and fro like butcher’s knives. By the time she closed on Gloch’s position, weaving through the web of las-bolts, it was clear this would not last for much longer.
Khazad was still on her feet – just. She traded blows with the much larger Gloch, giving ground, smashed and battered back away from the epicentre of fighting and into the shadows.
‘Murderer!’ she spat, her voice shaking with hatred. ‘Traitor!’
Gloch said nothing, parrying her power sword with his own blunt blade before firing at her again with his autopistol. A shot connected with her dropping shoulder, sending her sprawling across the floor. He followed up, ready to issue the killing blow.
Spinoza caught up and swung the maul, slamming him off his feet and straight into a column. Gloch’s armour took the brunt of the impact, but still he struggled to turn to face her.
‘Leave her,’ Spinoza ordered, standing between Khazad and him.
Gloch grinned, a gruesome sight in the flashing dark with his helm half hanging off. ‘So you did know where to find me,’ he laughed. ‘Good. I thought you had promise.’
He leapt towards her, firing again while keeping his blade raised. Spinoza veered away from the shot, balanced to swing the crozius two-handed. Gloch’s blade swept in close and she smacked it away, wrenching it from his hands with a heave of power-armoured strength.
He reeled from the blow, levelling his pistol again, but she never let him get enough space, following up with a flurry of wild blows that crunched and cracked into his carapace plate. She flailed out hard, feeling every impact with grim relish. The crozius fizzed as blood boiled off the disruptor field, and she kept on going, driving him back and back until he was pinned against the same column as before, slamming into it and still trying to get a shot.
She drove Argent into his gun-hand, grinding it hard against the stone and pushing downwards. With a cry of pain, Gloch let the gun fall from his grip, and it bounced across the dust. Spinoza released the pin only to drive her maul crossways into his chest, breaking his breastplate open and hurling him to the ground. Then she dropped down to him with her fist clenched and punched once, twice, until his chin was broken and blood poured down freely to the gorget seal.
‘I told you,’ Spinoza growled, readying for the final blow, ‘to leave her.’
He tried to speak, but she hit him so hard that his head snapped back sickeningly, more bones breaking, and he lolled weakly into unconsciousness.
Then she was running again, weaving back across the chamber as the las-bolts flew and the cries of anger and pain rang out. Khazad had dragged herself out of the centre, leaving a long trail of blood on the floor. Spinoza crouched down beside her.
‘Preserve yourself,’ she said. ‘Justice will be done, Crowl will see to it.’
Khazad grinned at her, and only then did Spinoza see just how badly she had been wounded. ‘Already has.’
She reached out, her arms shaking, and seized Spinoza with an uncertain grip. Her power sword lay in the dust, still burning.
‘Watched you do that,’ she slurred. ‘True Shoba.’
Then she went limp, her grip loosening, and her hands fell away. Spinoza let her down gently, then turned.
Rassilo’s storm troopers were still suicidally taking on the Custodians, though there was no sign of the inquisitor herself. Spinoza ran a quick check for her signal, and found nothing. She was gone, Crowl was missing. Gloch was out cold, Khazad was near death. Lermentov, if he still lived among all the confusion, had no authority.
That left her.
Spinoza strode back into the heart of the fighting, making no attempt to hide herself from the oncoming Custodians. She fed the maximum flare-pattern to Argent, sending a cloud of gold flooding out across the entire crypt.
‘Enough!’ she roared, using the full spread of her armour’s vox-augmitters. ‘Soldiers of the Inquisition, stand down! Damn you all, stand down!’
For a second longer, they kept fighting. That was all the time they needed to determine that their master was no longer present and that the order came from the highest ranking member of the ordo left standing. The lasfire shuddered out, the advance halted, the chamber sank
back into echoing silence.
Dozens of bodies lay across the floor, some twitching, some still. The Custodians stood amid piles of them, their blades bloody, their armour criss-crossed with las-burns. The closest one to Spinoza inclined his helm by a fraction, then lowered his halberd.
‘Lord Rassilo has fled,’ she told him, picking her way closer. ‘This is over.’
The Custodian shook his head. ‘Not yet.’
It was only then that she noticed the xenos was gone. She started to move, a sick sensation kindling in her stomach.
‘Where is your captain?’ she demanded, pushing past the Custodian.
The Custodian pulled her back, taking her arm firmly to prevent her leaving, and she found herself looking up into his implacable, unknowable golden facemask.
‘Where do you think?’ he said.
Its breath was foul, stinking of rotten flesh. Crowl felt its talons pierce his armour as if it were soft leather. He punched out frantically with his gauntlet, catching it on the side of its skull. He hit it again, working the wounds Navradaran had already given it, and managed to shove it back far enough to crawl out from underneath it.
It came after him, scuttling across the stone. Sanguine was too far to reach, and the xenos leapt back in close, its blackened eye alive with greedy malice.
Crowl blink-clicked an activation, and needle-spines flicked out from nozzles in his armour’s forearm, striking the xenos just as it got within talon range.
It froze, its veins bulging, and started to choke. Crowl pulled clear, pushing back to his knees, breathing heavily. His heart was racing. There was enough toxin in those darts to fell an ogryn, but the xenos remained conscious, coughing up a thick dark bile from its swelling throat. It looked up at him, grinned widely, then swallowed. The creature’s skin, caught in the light of Crowl’s armour lumens, seemed to darken, to stiffen, then restore itself.
Crowl levelled his needle-launcher again, and the creature gazed at the nozzles fearlessly.
Vaults of Terra: The Carrion Throne Page 29
