Vaults of Terra: The Carrion Throne Read online

  Revus kept up the barrage, hitting it again with sharp, perfectly aimed salvoes, giving Crowl time to reload. Its torso aflame, the magos rushed the captain, enveloping him in a clutch of metal-linked arms, its claws scraping down his armour and the drills going for his helm. Crowl fired once, twice, hitting the base of its neck and blowing burn-holes in the billowing robes, but that didn’t halt it. Revus kept firing at point-black range until he ran out of space. Gorgias aimed another spike, but was hit by an electro-flail and sent spinning through the dark.

  Crowl holstered Sanguine, glanding motovine, then hurled himself into the heart of the tentacle cluster. He reached out with both hands, grabbing the magos’ damaged neck-stalk and tearing at the vertebrae.

  The tech-priest shrieked in alarm, whirling away from the assault on Revus and clawing its tools down the back of Crowl’s armour. The drills bit, the saws cut and ceramite flecks blew out in dust-plumes.

  Crowl punched hard into the magos’ mandibles, smacking its head back, then seized a thicket of neck-cabling, yanking hard until the wires tore free in a welter of fizzing sparks.

  The magos reeled, collapsing in on itself, its mechadendrites suddenly jerking. Revus, free to move again, joined Crowl in the assault, smashing his way through the forest of limbs with his pistol butt. Together they slammed the creature up against the wall, cracking it into the rockcrete and forcing it, blow by blow, to the floor. Revus shoved his pistol muzzle into the magos’ exposed ribcage and twisted it up against a metallic lung-sac, while Crowl restored his gauntlet-grip on the creature’s ravaged throat. He pressed hard, popping out rivets on the tech-priest’s augmetic spinal column.

  ‘What… pact?’ he asked again, panting.

  The magos’ eyes flickered in and out, and snarls of energy rippled across its broken jawline. There was nothing like a human face there – just a gaggle of rebreathers, compound eye-lenses, sensory pores and heat filters. It wasn’t respiring properly now, and its metabolic internals clanked like a sclerotic Rhino.

  ‘You… know,’ it wheezed.

  ‘I do not,’ said Crowl. ‘I know very little. There was a ship – the Ohtar – is that right? It brought something down here. What did it bring?’

  ‘So many… inquisitors,’ blurted the magos, its machine voice close to garbled. ‘Who are you with? The first or the second?’

  Revus pushed the pistol hard against lingering organics within the shattered ribcage, and the magos writhed in pain.

  ‘Is out now,’ the magos gasped, a rattling, white noise-infected squeal. ‘Cannot stop it. It was an error. Critical error.’

  ‘What is it? A soldier? A machine? There are worse things than termination, magos, so tell me now.’

  ‘Alarum,’ warned Gorgias, spinning high towards the blown portal. ‘More are coming.’

  ‘Think I fear dissipation?’ rasped the magos. ‘Fear nothing.’

  ‘Then for the sake of the Omnissiah, for the sake of the old treaty. We both serve the same source. Damn it, tell me something.’

  The magos’ cracked lenses dimmed, then flashed in a broken sequence. Its whole structure twitched, and fresh sparks of power ran down its web of cabling.

  ‘No point now,’ it crackled, its vox-unit slurring into static. ‘Quantrain could not halt it. What chance you have?’

  From the corridor outside came the echoing clang of metal claws on a metal floor, lots of them. Crowl shot a glance at Revus, who shook his head.

  Crowl stood, drew Sanguine and placed it up against the magos’ chrome forehead.

  ‘You were not really very helpful,’ he said, and blew the skull-unit apart.

  Then they were running, both of them, with Gorgias swooping in behind, back along the paths and the chambers. Behind them came the rattle of advancing skitarii, and the mingled lumens of their gunsights flared in the broken dark.

  ‘What now?’ asked Revus, running swiftly but without panic, changing his pistol charge-pack while he ran.

  ‘Nothing more to be taken,’ replied Crowl, not moving so fluently, his power armour boosting his pain-spiked limbs. ‘Primary tasking – get out alive.’

  Spinoza told her everything. She told her of the Custodian’s testimony, of the discovery on the Rhadamanthys, of Crowl’s mission to Skhallax. Throughout it all, Khazad listened, absorbing the information hungrily, studying it for fallacies or inconsistencies.

  The two of them had disentangled and limped along the bridge towards a partially sheltered hollow under the shadow of a halfway brace station. Night had fallen fully by then, and the skies burned a sullen, old red. Rampant fires were burning in the open spaces between the great towers, lattices of rubies spread out across the urban vastness. Down amid the endless roar below, klaxons blared from arbitrator squads and Ministorum fervour-bringers.

  ‘So that is what I know,’ said Spinoza, sitting in the lee of the brace station. ‘How about you?’

  Khazad did not respond immediately. She had taken off her helm to reveal a starkly beautiful face, albeit bruised. The assassin had the deep brown skin common to natives of the death world of Shoba. The cult tattoos on her right cheek were plentiful, a riot of her home world’s iconography mingled with the death’s heads and kill-marks favoured by the ordos. Olive-shaped eyes stared out at her with uncanny directness, and a full-lipped mouth remained sullenly closed.

  Shoba’s culture was entirely devoted towards the warlike arts of survival. Its male children were taken as aspirants for the Iron Shades Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes, and both male and female adolescents were selected for service in the Imperial armies, usually as agents or shock troops for the specialised divisions. No Gothic was spoken on that world, not even amongst what passed for Imperial authority, and so it was always learned late. The difference in syntax made the transition difficult, something that served as a marker for those who knew what to listen for.

  ‘It is months now,’ Khazad said. ‘My master works on it for long time. We have agent within office of Deputy Speaker of Chartist Captains, high enough to monitor comms between departmentos. For long time he gets nothing, just rumours within Palace. They know Feast is coming. There are cabals recruiting, slaying, close to walls, hard to pin down. And then whisper begins – a weapon, brought in, ready to carry insurrection. They are going to move on from random kills, stage something bigger. We obtain transcripts of coded vox-calls from adept in deputy speaker’s citadel, but no detail, and then he is removed.’

  ‘When was this?’

  Khazad thought for a moment. ‘Three weeks. A little more. We get nowhere, then my master has to talk to Provost Marshal. He is sure something is coming. They order soak-search. Every ship is tested. You know how hard this is to do? Thousands of troops, hundreds of lifters. It gets them scared. Our agent is shut down. The Palace is into kind of panic. They tell me word gets to Custodians – my masters says he speaks to one of them.’

  Khazad’s brown eyes flickered a little as she spoke. Her cheeks were hollow, the rings under her lids dark. Spinoza wondered how long it had been since she’d eaten properly, slept properly, or done anything but run and fight.

  ‘Then we discover it is failed,’ said Khazad. ‘They find nothing. Lord Phaelias remains sure something has broken cordon, begins to scan orbital records. He has savant, Vaskadre, who is good. They are working fast, burning out. I am sent to underhives, to monitor gangs, in case they make delivery ahead of time. I study them, close, and that keeps me out of way. So I do not see it. They are being killed, and I never know.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘All of us. They move quickly. Whoever does it can mobilise force. I do not know when they catch my master. I do not know where he is. Do you?’

  ‘No. Crowl – my inquisitor – has been following the same trail. He believes a ship came down in Skhallax.’

  Khazad pursed her lips. ‘Maybe. Maybe. Fabricator General – he could b
e in this. We think there are three. Phaelias always thinks there are three.’

  Mention of the High Lords made Spinoza instinctively resistant. They were the ultimate power of the Imperium, inviolate and sacred. Crowl’s casual jibes at their expense had offended her, and this speculation was in the same vein.

  ‘Who killed your comrades?’ Spinoza asked.

  ‘I do not know.’ Khazad shook her head, and for a moment the shock of it was visible in those brown eyes. ‘An order goes out. We are all targets, make us excommunicate traitoris. They say we are heretics of the gangs, witches, xenos-friends, you name it. Every arm is turned against us. I try to get back to my master, and they nearly get me. Still fast, though. Too fast for them.’

  ‘Aido Gloch,’ Spinoza said. ‘He said he’d fought you.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The one you escaped from, when we last met.’

  Khazad smiled bitterly. ‘Do not know all the names. When world is after you, you run.’

  ‘But you followed us. You followed me.’

  ‘I had to know. Who gives the orders? Who is working to finish task? I follow you, I follow others. There are agents crawling through whole of underhives, you know this? They are all hunting something.’

  ‘The Angel’s Tears.’

  ‘Some of them. Others, something else. I think plan has gone wrong. I think things have unravelled. Weapon is not delivered, not to the right place. But I don’t know.’ She shivered. ‘I never learn much.’

  Spinoza weighed up the information. Crowl would need to be told. He would need to judge whether it could be trusted, and whether the assassin could be sheltered. Such claims demanded testing, possibly under the trials.

  She tested the comm-link, which still buzzed with static. She switched channels to Courvain, with the same result.

  Khazad laughed. ‘Too late for that.’ She gestured with her outstretched hand, sweeping across the firelit vistas. ‘It is begun. Rites. Every vox-relay in five hundred kilometres is overloaded. They move to Gate now.’

  As if to confirm the limitations of that, Hegain’s voice crackled over the close-range link, distorted but just audible. ‘Lord! Militarum convoy detected as … so you will it but … coming in now, to … trust you are preserved? Please, acknowledge signal when you…’

  ‘I came to Boreates on advice,’ said Spinoza, looking up at the hive summits that angled around them like the points of a great iron crown. ‘I was told the Angel’s Tears were concentrated here. That was my mission – you were a hypothesis.’

  Khazad laughed. ‘So what now? You regret not killing both of us?’

  ‘I still have my orders, and you are under interdict. Unless there is something specific you can contribute.’

  Khazad gave a weary, sceptical look. ‘Hypothesis?’

  ‘You have been out here a long time.’

  The assassin shifted position, a little painfully. Her body must have taken a beating; Crowl had told her Phaelias had gone missing twenty days ago – a long time to be surviving alone in a world roused against you.

  ‘Your intelligence, it is good,’ Khazad said. ‘Up to point. He makes his base here, but it is not easy to penetrate. If it is, I try it already.’

  ‘If we are to do this,’ said Spinoza, ‘it must be now. I have troops, I am prepared. Show me the way, and this can be redemption for you. Crowl protects his bloodline.’

  ‘His what?’

  She had slipped into the language so easily. ‘Will you show me?’

  Khazad did not have to think long. The hammering whine of the returning Nighthawk began to beat from below, sending the wind-drawn clouds into fresh whirlpools of turbulence.

  ‘What choice do I have?’ said Khazad. ‘Yes, then, interrogator. I can take you to this False Angel. Then you will see what is what.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  The skitarii caught up with them before they reached the precarious safety of the Shade. That was to be expected – they were heavily augmented techno-soldiers, used to the terrain and familiar with every twist of Skhallax’s dizzying innards.

  Crowl had made it back across the landing stages when the first bullets skidded past, hitting the walls beyond in a blaze of green energy. He swivelled, still running, and fired Sanguine twice, hitting something that screamed and collapsed in a pile of bronze limbs and crimson robes.

  More of them were following, loping like wolves, their galvanic flintlocks aimed and charging. Revus reached the portal that led back into the city’s innards, dropped down to one knee and let off a volley of las-bolts, sprayed in a horizontal arc at waist level. That sent the pursuers scrambling for cover, giving Crowl and Gorgias time to make the entrance door.

  ‘We kicked the nest,’ Crowl said, piling through the gap before reloading.

  ‘And the ants came running,’ replied Revus, loosing a final barrage before falling back through the doorway. Then they were sprinting across the vast empty floors of the abandoned halls. The desolate machinery lay just as it had done before, dark and sepulchral, and their bootfalls clanged on the rust.

  Revus’ volleys didn’t keep them back for long. Before the three of them had made it halfway across the floor, skitarii swarmed through the portal. More appeared from hatches up in the high ledges, galloping along the walkways and kneeling to get a shot. More galvanic charges spun across the emptiness, cracking into bulkheads and old heaps of chain-links.

  Crowl ducked, feeling a bullet zip over his shoulder. Revus was hit, a glancing blow on his armour-plate that nearly knocked him from his feet. He kept going, head low, still running hard. Crowl spun around to take out the two closest pursuers. He fired twice, letting his armour’s guidance systems find the target – one bullet found its mark, the other flew wide.

  He turned and ran again, swerving to avoid the rain of projectiles now pinging and cracking into the corroded walls. Gorgias swooped erratically back and forth, firing all the while with his needle gun.

  Once again Revus was first to reach the next bulkhead, sliding into a crouch and hammering down a wave of suppressive fire. Crowl ran on through it, trusting his captain not to hit him, before skidding down to join him.

  They were near the junction that led into the long series of alleyways. Two empty hoppers shielded them from incoming fire, but their shells were too fragile to take many more hits, and already the rust-flecks were flying as the galvanic rifles found their range. At the other end of the hall came the skitarii, dozens of them now, racing across the echoing space.

  Revus fired coolly, picking off the leaders. He moved his hellgun across the planes – horizontal for the ground-level assault, angled up into the walkways for those clambering down the ladders from the roof. Crowl didn’t join in, but pressed a series of call-runes on the inside of his forearm. Gorgias careened overhead, pursued by a flurry of bullets. One of them hit the skull, sending it spinning madly then crashing into the wall overhead.

  ‘Mamzeri!’ it shrieked, firing back.

  ‘This will not shield us long,’ said Revus, watching as their cover was steadily blown apart. The skitarii were getting closer with every second, heedless of the danger, and their green eyes glowed in the dark like a swarm of insects.

  ‘It doesn’t need to,’ said Crowl, completing the sequence and joining in with Sanguine. A fresh scatter of bullets scythed across the hall floor, downing three more tech-soldiers, before the judder of engines boomed up from the wall at their backs.

  ‘Keep down,’ warned Crowl.

  Just as he spoke, heavy bolters smashed across the thick wall-plates overhead. Debris cascaded into the hall, thrown metres by the impacts, and the heavy profile of the Shade broke through the destruction. The gunship’s rotary cannons opened up, sending a brace of bolt-shells blasting into the oncoming ranks of skitarii.

  Crowl leapt up and raced to the hovering gunship, grabbed a rail and hauled
himself up to the cockpit door. The machine-spirit kept the machine aloft, auto-firing at the now-retreating skitarii, slowly rotating on a vertical axis to maximise the angle of destruction. Revus clambered up close behind, firing one-handed even as he leapt for the cockpit and pulled himself inside. The Shade spun round, Crowl at the controls now, and boosted back towards the breach it had just blown open. Gorgias ducked inside the still-open canopy at the last moment, tumbling to safety as the engines shuddered into full power.

  The Shade smashed back out of the hall and down the narrow alleyways. The long pipes ran alongside them, so close they could scrape the edge of its folded-back wings, but they could not gain loft yet. A hundred metres ahead was the first opening – a narrow shaft of open night, flanked on all side by the heavy overhang of industrial architecture.

  ‘Incoming signals,’ reported Crowl, glancing at the tactical overlays.

  Revus took control of the bolter-arrays, calibrating them for ranged air-to-air firing. ‘I see them.’

  They reached the opening and angled steeply upwards, accelerating out into the open air. Skhallax’s inferno unfurled before them, angrier and redder than before, studded with lurid flames. Flyers had been scrambled from deep within – six of them, with more emerging beyond. They were servitor-drones, crab-shaped gun-pods skimming along on single-burner engines and armed with prow-mounted autocannons.

  Crowl applied full power, sending the Shade kicking into the night. Its wings slipped open and the bolter-housings retracted. Revus took aim and sent a heavy bolter burst straight into the heart of the drone wing. One blew clean apart, its carapace splitting into fragments and its central capsule spinning wildly into the chimneys below. The rest scattered, running wide and high, their burners flaring into the night.

  Skhallax’s border sped towards them, and Crowl pushed the Shade higher. Armour panels on the rapidly approaching walls slid open, revealing the unfurling bulbs of gun turrets.

  ‘They might cause some tro–’ began Crowl, just as Revus locked on, smashing the three closest with a rapid arc from the bolters. Then the Shade shrieked across the perimeter, barely higher than the wall’s spiked summit, before dropping down low on the far side.