Vaults of Terra: The Carrion Throne

by Chris Wraight

  ‘Try again,’ it slurred, the words forming strangely from alien lips.

  The xenos looked half-destroyed. The limbs it had carried over its spinal cord hung uselessly, their sinews wrenched out and their bones broken. Its leather bodyglove was ripped open, revealing long gashes down the length of its skeletal torso. Long lines of dark fluid traced their way down its bony throat.

  And yet it breathed still, albeit in a disconcerting rattle. Its steel jaw was intact, and at least one of its arms still clutched a long, curved dagger. The pain could halt it, but only momentarily. Give it long enough, and it would feed off its own destruction.

  Then it stumbled, coughing. Its dagger hand trembled. Crowl kept his arm raised, aiming the needles, holding position with difficulty.

  ‘You’re dying, human,’ the xenos rasped. ‘I taste it in your blood.’

  Crowl shifted painfully. The creature’s speech was grotesquely accented, pulled from a mouth that rarely made such sounds, and yet it was Gothic, perfectly comprehensible and artfully cruel. It tried to rise again, limbs shaking, failed, and smiled ruefully.

  ‘I wished to see it,’ it murmured. ‘The carrion throne. Before it dies.’

  ‘You lie.’

  ‘All the time.’ It tried to smile, and coughed up more bile. ‘I wished to see your Emperor’s face, just me and Him. We’ve both been around a long time. And after that…’

  ‘You’d never have got that far.’

  ‘But I was close.’ The xenos shuffled closer, and Crowl saw its eyes gazing at him from the dark. ‘And there will be more of us.’

  ‘Give me names,’ said Crowl, feeling the muscles in his arms begin to fail.

  ‘Dangerous knowledge.’

  ‘I’m dead already. Tell me.’

  The xenos looked at him strangely then, as if devising some new torment, or perhaps recognising something of interest where it had not expected to find any.

  ‘There were three. They were–’

  The spear slammed into its chest, whistling silently through the dark and carrying the creature back with it across the stone. Impaled on an arc of ravening plasma lightning, it twitched and screamed, unable to rise.

  Crowl started, tried to get up, then collapsed again, spewing up blood. His muscles felt heavy, far too heavy. He barely saw Navradaran stride past him, heading towards his kill to finish the task. As his head swam and his strength collapsed, he heard the final shrieks of the xenos, cut short suddenly.

  He rolled onto his back, gasping. Far above, many hundreds of metres up, past the cables and the pipes and high spans, he could see the faint sheen of gold again, spilling down towards him like distant rain.

  But it never rained on Terra.

  Navradaran came towards him, his heavy armour marked with a hundred las-scorches. The Custodian stooped, kneeling beside him.

  ‘You could have let him finish,’ Crowl muttered.

  ‘This is ended,’ Navradaran told him.

  Crowl felt his last strength ebb away. He’d fought hard against it, but his awareness was fading. ‘Too old for this sort of thing,’ he slurred, focusing on the nimbus of gold far above. ‘Maybe I’ll just stay here.’

  ‘You have earned death already,’ said Navradaran. ‘Remain, and I shall enforce it.’

  Crowl looked up at him, both amused and annoyed. ‘Earned death? For running down a traitor and a xenos?’

  ‘This is sacred ground.’

  ‘This is the Palace. It never got as far as the Throne.’

  Navradaran said nothing.

  Slowly, Crowl lost his crooked smile. He looked up at the cabling again. He looked at the ancient granite frieze with its twenty heroes engraved on it. He looked up at the massive mechanisms suspended above, level after level of them, and he looked at the stairs winding up towards the haze of gold. He heard the low hum that never ceased, that made every surface shake, and that filled the air with static. Far above, far, far above, he perceived vague shapes hidden amid that haze, impossible to make out clearly, shimmering as if caught in a burning heatwash, churning like a furnace, radiating both awe and fear.

  He tried to reach out, to lift his hand towards it.

  ‘Oh, my–’ he began.

  Then his strength failed. His head fell back hard, hitting the rock floor. The walls dissolved around him into eddies of swaying liquid, the world tilted, the haze snuffed out, and then, at last, he knew no more.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The air was filled with cheering. A billion voices were raised in unison, swelling into the toxic air, burgeoning through the narrow ways between the endless towers. Drums rolled and hammered, war-horns blared, huge batteries of defence cannons discharged in salute. In every cathedral, priests raised bloody offerings before their altars, and the congregations wept and roared. A great shaft of blood-red light, powered by lumen banks the size of battle­ships, shot into the night air over the Sanctum Imperialis, creating a ghost-memorial so huge that every eye within a hundred kilometres of the Palace could witness the apex of the Feast.

  Spinoza watched it from Courvain’s summit. The worst of her wounds had been treated, but her entire body still ached from overexertion. She hadn’t slept properly for days, and she felt feverish. Still, the column of light gave her some comfort. That told her the procession had reached the Eternity Gate. Those assembled there, the elect of the elect, would only have moments to glimpse the splendour of the banners, the Titans, the great golden doors, before they were hurried away again. In their exhaustion and their excitement, most would see nothing at all. Only a few might retain a grasp of their faculties, and realise that they gazed at the immortal halls of the Emperor Himself. They would see the great hololith of Sanguinius standing defiant across the threshold, and their devotion would reach its apogee.

  Incense-laden wind brushed against her face, scouring the bruised flesh. A billion lanterns wafted into the dark sky, blown by Terra’s sluggish air currents. For a moment, just a moment, the populace had forgotten its fears. There would be many prayers accompanying those fragile baskets of flame and paper, whispered quietly from fervent lips.

  She remembered Rassilo’s words to her.

  That’s why they light the fires, to push the shadows back.

  It was primeval, a celebration whose form had existed since the earliest days of the species, one that would continue as long as humanity existed in a hostile galaxy.

  ‘Impressive, is it not?’ Crowl said, coming alongside her.

  She had heard him coming from a long way off. Even out of armour, his trace limp was now recognisable to her, but she did not wish him to know that.

  Of course, he probably did.

  ‘My soul exalts,’ Spinoza said, and that was true enough.

  Crowl nodded. His grey gaze traced the path of the lumen-shaft.

  Spinoza stole a brief glance. Her master’s face, always gaunt, looked haggard now. A scatter of cuts across his skin was healing messily and his lips were blistered.

  ‘You should take time to recover, lord,’ she said.

  ‘As should you.’

  Ahead of them, out in the lamplit skies, an Ecclesiarchy sky-crawler traced a long arc across the forest of spires. Hymns blared from its vox-augmitters, enthusiastically taken up by the teeming hosts below. For once, the manufactoria were still, the forges cool, the Munitorum production lines quiet. All were out in the terraces and the streets, embracing one another and crying out fervent praise to the God-Emperor.

  ‘I could not help but notice, lord,’ Spinoza ventured then, cautiously. ‘You referred to the Lord Rassilo by her given name. I reflected on that. It struck me as unusual.’

  ‘Did it.’

  ‘And was your association… close?’

  ‘Mind your own damned business.’

  She smiled. Out in the fevered night, ghostly shapes were being
projected into the shafts of red light – the primarchs, the saints, the great heroes of the Adeptus Astartes. Each one brought a fresh cheer, a wave of displaced sound that briefly overshadowed the perennial growl of Terra’s urban processors.

  ‘I have learned some things,’ Spinoza said at length.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Some things you told me. About fear. I think I understand what you meant.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Though I shall speak frankly. I do not much like your methods. I find your impiety troubling.’

  ‘You sound like someone else I know.’ Crowl leaned heavily on the balustrade. ‘So was there anything else, Spinoza, or is that the sum of your complaints for this night?’

  ‘Only that it is unsafe for servants of the Emperor to labour alone, for many eyes may be required to identify dereliction of character.’

  Crowl raised an eyebrow. ‘I see.’

  ‘And that we may suit one another,’ she said. ‘That is all.’

  ‘I told you to speak your mind, once,’ Crowl said, sourly. ‘I recant that now.’

  ‘As you will it, lord.’

  ‘Though you could, for the love of Him on the Throne, please stop calling me that.’

  ‘I promise I shall make the attempt.’

  Crowl became breathless, and his scarred hands clutched at the stone more tightly. Questions clustered in Spinoza’s mind, ones that had been formulating during the rare snatches of time she had had to herself since arriving on the Throneworld. It did not feel right to raise them now, when the entire world was gripped with rare thankfulness, but then she did not know if she would ever get another opportunity.

  ‘I asked about you,’ she said. ‘When I could. They always told me the same thing.’ She turned to face him. ‘They said you were not always alone.’

  Crowl looked straight ahead, his thin face turned to the lights in the sky.

  ‘No, not always,’ he said. ‘It was a long time ago.’ Perhaps it was his wounds, but he looked worse than ever. ‘It takes that long, to get over some losses. We’re human, Spinoza. Some of us, anyway.’

  Spinoza did not know what to say. That admission might have struck her as indulgent before, but somehow did not now.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked.

  ‘Your master happened. The butcher of Forfoda happened.’ Crowl’s face was static, a mask of old sorrow. ‘He didn’t stop to question why, just as ever. It was pointless, and it was a mistake, but that mattered nothing to him. She was innocent. How could she not have been, since she and I were…’ He trailed off, then shook his head. ‘When her body was gone he barely paused before lighting the next pyre. And then the next, and then the next, tracing his bloody path across the galaxy. Another man would have sought vengeance then, but I was too slow, and there were always duties, and so it festered.’

  Spinoza looked away. ‘Tur died on Karalsis.’

  ‘So they tell me,’ Crowl said. He drew in a long, wheezing breath. ‘And I’ll join him soon enough – you know by now I’ll not live out this millennium.’ He looked down at his gauntlets. ‘So once he was gone, I looked at my life, and its solitude, and saw an empty throne in Courvain and relived the loss of the one soul who might have given me a reason for enduring. I resolved to spite him in the only way he would never understand. I would take the best of his retinue, the proudest and the most pious, and I would change it. He raised butchers and I would raise a soul in my own likeness. He had deprived me of my legacy, I would subvert his.’

  Spinoza raised her eyes to the hololith. The spectral image of the last primarch, Sanguinius, was beginning to fade, to dissolve back into the myriad light of the world-city.

  ‘I was a tool in your disputes, then,’ she said, softly.

  ‘That was how it began.’

  ‘And what do you think now?’

  She did not look to see if Crowl’s expression had changed.

  ‘That not all cruelties are of the body,’ he said. ‘That there are feuds that must be let go lest they never end. That you have exposed the foolishness of an old man, and that you do not need to stay here any longer, should you wish to leave now and make your own way. You will be a formidable inquisitor whichever creed you choose to cleave to.’

  The cheering never relented. As the primarch-ghosts faded into nothingness, fireworks began to shoot up into the sky – military rockets converted to shower starbursts over the cathedral heights. The celebrations would go on until the grey dawn came, and the manufactoria klaxons sounded once more; a weary world would return to its drudgery after a brief, cathartic interlude of euphoria.

  It was impossible not to be angry. Tur had taught her that beyond all else – to use anger, the last and most powerful emotion. She could hear his strident voice now, reminding her of her dignity and her destiny. She could hear what Erastus would say too, confronted by decay in the place of vitality.

  And yet… From only days ago, though it already felt like a lifetime away, she remembered some of the first words Crowl had spoken to her.

  ‘Pay no attention to the voices you can hear,’ she said, repeating them. ‘Pay attention to the ones you can’t.’

  Crowl looked up at her, then smiled wryly. ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘I forget.’

  He nodded. ‘An enlightened attitude to take, though,’ he said.

  ‘This is Terra,’ she replied, watching the golden stars as they fell to earth. ‘One gift given, another returned.’

  He had been sitting in the cell for a long time. How long was impossible to tell. They had treated him for his wounds, just enough to keep him alive, taken him in a transport with no windows, deposited him in a lightless room with a pitcher of oily water and no food. There had been no brutality – one of the guards had even apologised for tightening the wrist-shackles too much and drawing blood – but then there had been no need for it, for his fear had become crippling.

  At first he had tried defiance. As the hours wore on, that became harder. He started to shout, to rail against the injustice of it, but there were no answers. That was when the fear truly began to take over. Much later, having had no contact for however many hours it had been, he found himself pacing methodically. Then, after more hours had passed and physical weakness had set in, he could no longer do that, and sat slumped in the cell’s stinking corner. Then the shaking started. You could hear strange noises in that place, terrible noises, and it got to you, just as was intended.

  He knew what they were doing. He was versed enough in the arts to understand exactly how they were taking his mind apart, but knowing made it no easier to resist.

  By the time the door opened again, he was exactly where they wanted him to be – in the chair, shivering despite the oppressive heat, his hands clasped together in their shackles, his face down.

  He only looked up again as his interrogator entered – a tall man in fine black armour with silver detailing. His face was severe and bore the marks of recent illness or injury, though his grey eyes were calm and he moved fluidly enough.

  The door closed behind him, sealing them both in, and he took a seat opposite.

  ‘Salvor Lermentov,’ the man said, clasping his gauntlets together and looking directly at him. His voice was low, intelligent, flavoured with more Low Gothic than he might have expected.

  Lermentov found he couldn’t take his eyes off a skull-form rosette fashioned from iron and pinned to the trim of the man’s cloak. He resolved to keep his eyes fixed on that. In what was to come, he had been trained to find something to latch on to, for that was supposed to help him hold out for a little longer, which despite everything he was determined to do.

  But this was the end, he knew. All that remained was token defiance, for once you entered a fortress of the Inquisition, you did not leave.

  He nodded. His interrogator brought out a thin sheaf of parchments, and beg
an to turn them over, studying the script upon them carefully.

  ‘Say nothing,’ Crowl told him dryly, precisely, beginning all over again. ‘Listen with utmost care.’

  About the Author

  Chris Wraight is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Scars and The Path of Heaven, the novella Brotherhood of the Storm and the audio drama The Sigillite. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written the Space Wolves novels Blood of Asaheim and Stormcaller, and the short story collection Wolves of Fenris, as well as the Space Marine Battles novels Wrath of Iron and Battle of the Fang. Additionally, he has many Warhammer novels to his name, including the Time of Legends novel Master of Dragons, which forms part of the War of Vengeance series. Chris lives and works near Bristol, in south-west England.

  An extract from Magnus the Red: Master of Prospero.

  Magnus did not know this place.

  Not as it was now.

  He remembered the Pyramid of Photep as a place of light, of polished glass and dazzling reflections. A place where starbeams and sunlight made sport on the earth below.

  Beautiful people had once gathered within its golden-vaulted atria, holding impassioned debates on ethics, morality and virtue. They once delighted in the knowledge that their world was founded on principles of reason, wisdom and the pursuit of higher truths.

  Now its interior was cold and lifeless, home only to muttering shadows and broken glass reflections he dared not heed. Its fellow pyramids of the Fellowships were sagging ruins of charred-black adamantium, hollowed out skeletons adrift in a dust-choked wasteland.

  Lightning danced on the horizon beyond the pyramids, their broken framework throwing stark shadows around him. Magnus took a moment to orient himself. Once he would have known exactly where to go, but times had changed.

  The frames of the pyramids had buckled in the heat of their burning, but it had been the translation from Prospero to this protean world that rendered every one of them into something hideously deformed. Their angles, once so true, were twisted unnaturally, as if to mock their perfect forms.