Vaults of Terra: The Carrion Throne Read online

  The slope became steeper. Soon they were struggling up old rough-cut stairways, smoothed by age and erosion, overlooked by half-lost galleries in the heights above. The air was foul – a musty clag that spoke of millennial confinement. Slinking amid the mess of smells was the growing aroma of perversion and extremity, the musk of the xenobreed.

  ‘Now I hear them,’ voxed Khazad.

  Then Spinoza did too – a high-pitched whine, almost unbearably thin, echoing down the shafts from up ahead.

  ‘Prepare flares,’ ordered Lermentov. The perfect dark made them vulnerable, even with massed lumen coverage.

  The ragged army swept up through the twisting paths, scrabbling on loose rocks, stumbling over broken steps. They never saw the graven images of angels and daemons in the alcoves high above, carved before the Master of Mankind had ever come here, hung like petrified ghouls over the empty vaults and rotting into lumpen twists of stone. All hearts were beating rapidly now, all palms twitching with sweat.

  ‘Remember your orders,’ said Spinoza on the closed channel. ‘The master. Let all else go.’

  And then they were out, pushing up through a final derelict archway and into a chamber paved with cracked flagstones and withered columns. It was still pitch-dark, and the lumen beams switched and swayed, oval pockets sliding over snatches of half-glimpsed detail.

  ‘Flares!’ roared Lermentov, and the first of the charges spiralled up into the high void, blowing apart to expose a rock-bored hall of immense proportions.

  Flickering light spread across a mass of uncurling horror, an ophidian swarm of alien surfaces. Black hooded masks swung their way, already laced with glowing drool. Wasp-waists twisted unnaturally, straining warped spinal cords. Claws unclasped, some clutching long serrated cleavers, other terminating in thickets of dripping syringes. Bloodshot eyes lit up behind slits in the masks, deranged and famished.

  Lermentov hesitated, his gun frozen in his hands. The rabble-army spilled into the chamber, then slowed, halted by what they saw. Even the ogryns, too dull-witted to dread, stumbled in their onward charge.

  ‘For the Emperor!’ cried Spinoza, igniting Argent in a blaze of gold. She and the storm troopers sprinted forwards, accompanied by a burning halo of lasfire from the hellguns. Khazad came with them, picking up speed for the leap that would take her crashing into the ranks of horrors ahead.

  That roused the rest. ‘For the Throne!’ Lermentov shouted, opening fire. His bodyguard did likewise, adding to the blistering volley of las-bolts that sent overspill flashes swinging up into the distant heights. The abhumans lumbered back up to full tilt, roaring in wild aggression, followed by the masses still arriving from the tunnels, the hundreds who had limped and scampered through the under-dark in hope of exterminating the nightmares that preyed on them.

  Ahead of them, vast and smooth, rose an expanse of pure black adamantium, curving gently away until it disappeared through the rocky roof a hundred metres up – the base of the wall, its roots laid deep underground, cutting down into the corpse of buried cities older than the Imperium itself. These were foundations of foundations, planned in outline by the Emperor Himself, bolstered by the labour of the blessed Dorn, sunk into the honeycombed layers of mankind’s forgotten empires as a marker of permanence, of stasis, of domination.

  Between the army and the wall were the xenobreeds, a teeming mass of black-pinned, grey-skinned giants. There must have been more than sixty there, twice the tally of counted cages, hunched, contorted, massive. As the las-bolts slapped and scorched across their hides, they screamed in an overlapping chorus of blind hatred, and loped jerkily towards the threat.

  They were huge, malefic terrors, three times the height of the humans – far faster, far stronger, implanted with spines and wires and spike-clamps, berserk and blood-hungry. Spinoza met the first of them as it bore down on her and swung her crozius heavily. It connected with an outstretched gauntlet, frying the metal glove and hurling the xenobreed’s arm back out wide. Then Hegain’s squad hammered a barrage of las-bolts into it, puncturing the stretched flesh and shattering capsules of glowing fluids.

  Still it came on, screaming with something like a human’s voice. Hegain kept firing, round after round. Spinoza smashed it again with the crozius, showering it in crackling energy. Khazad leapt across its turning back, slicing into its exposed spine and blowing a row of feeder-vials.

  Still it came on, crunching aside a storm trooper with a heavy lunge, punching a spiked gauntlet into an oncoming fighter from Lermentov’s command group. Blood streamed down its muculent chest and arms, but it waded further, tearing the head from a third warrior even as las-beams lanced directly into its screaming facemask. Spinoza slammed her maul into the creature’s trailing calf, crunching through muscle and bone and cauterising the wound with disruptor-flare. Hegain’s soldiers kept up the fire-rate, punching more holes in its pale grey flesh.

  Still it came on, pushing past Spinoza, throwing her to the ground and limping straight into the oncoming mass of the rabble army, shrugging off its wounds, reeling drunkenly as it bludgeoned fighters aside in a whirl of thrown blood.

  Hegain dropped down by Spinoza, firing steadily as more neared. ‘Tough bastards,’ he spat, panting.

  Khazad hadn’t given up. She raced towards the next grotesque, her sword slashing in wild arcs, matching it for speed if not strength. The bulk of Lermentov’s troops were now shambling into contact, filling up the floor of the huge chamber. The ogryns were leading something of a charge up the left flank, the only ones able to come close to physically matching the xenobreeds; the rest were already being ripped apart.

  Spinoza got to her feet. Already more of the grotesques were closing in, their movements jerky and over-rapid.

  ‘Where’s the master?’ she asked.

  Her helm’s proximity auspex was swimming with targets, awash in a haze of white noise. More flares went up, exposing bloody carapaces heaving amid a sea of frenzied limbs. Up ahead, against the wall itself, something was happening. The grotesques were shielding something, and the air began to fizz with gathering static.

  ‘We have to get to it,’ Spinoza ordered. Hegain nodded, and the surviving storm troopers pulled together. ‘Right flank. Go.’

  They pushed on, firing steadily, making for a wide stair cut into the rock along the nearside wall of the great chamber. The grotesques flailed at them, though the sheer number of bodies in the flickering space now made the battlefield choked and confused. A xenobreed leapt straight at Spinoza, claws extended, and took a whole volley of shots direct to its chest, which dropped it heavily. Spinoza pounced, ramming Argent into the grotesque’s neck and pressing down. The energy field raged, burning and cutting. Hegain raced to aid her, firing at point-blank range as the creature tried to lash her loose. The grotesque shuddered, its neck spewing stimm-fluids, its chest streaming with puncture wounds.

  Then she pulled away, running again, her squad coming with her. Khazad followed, darting and ducking under the roaring assault of the grotesques that tried to bring her down.

  Spinoza made the stairs and raced up them two at a time. From the vantage she caught sight of something buried beyond the mass of raging xenobreeds, still hidden but active. Snaking lines of coal-black force were kindling, rippling out across the stone and snaking up the wall itself.

  ‘Bring it down!’ she ordered, dropping to one knee and reaching for her laspistol.

  The storm troopers fired, but the press of xenobreeds took the impacts and kept coming at them, loping closer in a rolling tide of hissing malevolence. Spinoza got a glimpse of the thing beyond the tide of warped bodies, just for a second – something hovering, skeletal and emaciated, with a hyperextended neck, whiteless eyes, fluttering robes of night-black.

  Then the world shook. An elemental crack shivered out from the epicentre, making the rock beneath their feet tilt and shudder. More black lightning speared out against th
e wall, latching on and flickering like caught flame. The air seemed to suck out of the chamber, tearing towards an unseen singularity, and the high-pitched whine became unbearable. Black sparks raced across the adamantium, spinning and bouncing, before coalescing into a pulsar of darkness.

  ‘No…’ breathed Spinoza, reaching out as if she could somehow stop it.

  Reality blinked. The entire chamber reeled, then suddenly reconstituted, and tendrils of black matter cobwebbed out from the nexus, crawling across the wall and leeching at it. The adamantium froze, cracked, flexed, then sucked inwards like water pulled down a whirlpool.

  ‘Not possible,’ Khazad hissed, crawling beside her as the unbreakable stone liquefied and ran deeper, dissolving into nothingness, snatched out of existence. A perfectly circular tunnel opened up, glowing darkly at the edges, burrowing further in.

  ‘It will get inside,’ said Spinoza, getting to her feet, firing again. ‘By the Throne, bring it down.’

  Half the grotesques were now piling into the circular breach in the walls, the sheer edges surrounded by a raging corona of black electricity. The creature at their heart went with them, disappearing over the cracked lip of the tunnel, swept along as if by a palanquin of its slaved horrors. The rest of the xenobreeds stayed where they were, killing freely and rampaging further into the oncoming battalions of the rabble army.

  Spinoza watched it go, horror making her sluggish. She looked across the chamber, where the grotesques were killing, Lermentov’s army dying, the last spirals of the flares tumbling into hopeless darkness.

  It is inside.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The Shade plummeted fast, falling below the parapet levels and down into the inside lee of the great wall. A blurred line of shadow fell across it, the terminator of the wall’s long summit, smothering the diffuse haze of the billion lumens out beyond the perimeter. The flyer dropped between mighty defence towers crowned with aquila-lined bolter banks and kept on going.

  The Custodian flyer came down with them, content for now to follow Crowl’s lead. Its engines hammered, throwing out power extravagantly.

  ‘Did you detect it?’ Crowl demanded, turning to Gorgias.

  The skull chittered indeterminately. ‘Veritas, yes, yes, for momentario, then… no.’

  Revus swore under his breath, battling to hold the Shade steady in the turbulence caused by the heavy engines roaring above him. They were falling fast, and the defence tower’s lower lumen tracks blurred past them and up into oblivion.

  ‘No strong fix,’ the captain muttered, fighting the control columns. ‘Work harder, skull.’

  Gorgias’ eye flared up in anger. ‘Foulness! You fly the–’ Then it swivelled, processing hard. ‘Affirmitivo. Trace signal, longa via, down-down.’

  The Shade’s console flickered with light as Gorgias shunted the data to the captive machine-spirit. Revus reacted instantly, dropping the Shade’s nose and sending them running along the base of the wall.

  Crowl sat back, wincing at the sudden shift of direction. ‘How far?’ he asked. ‘What nature of detection?’

  Revus accessed the auspex feed from Gorgias’ instruments. ‘No idea,’ he said, hesitantly. ‘It looks like… No. I have no idea.’

  Crowl reached over to look at the data himself. ‘So I see. Not possible indeed.’ His eyes flickered up, out ahead, watching the nominal ground-level race up to meet them. ‘But actual, something, and concrete. That’s it.’

  His audex-feed crackled into life. ‘We sense nothing,’ came Navradaran’s preternaturally calm vox voice. ‘Confirm course of action, inquisitor.’

  ‘A radiation signature,’ Crowl replied. ‘In sympathy with the ones recorded in the void-hauler. It’s faint, but trust me – this is our target.’

  The two flyers shot down further, sinking below the level of garrison blocks and training squares. Floodlights whirled overhead, picking out the hovering gunships of rapid-reaction Guard units, many liveried in the white and gold of the Palace’s own.

  ‘Will you alert more forces?’ Crowl asked Navradaran, just as the Shade boosted over the edge of a vertical shaft-mouth and the last of the light from above was swallowed up.

  ‘Negative.’

  Crowl hesitated. ‘There are hundreds of–’

  ‘Negative. Prepare to disembark – we approach the base.’

  Both aircraft were now far below the level of the great halls and spires, and had travelled deep down the straggling curve of the inner walls.

  Revus looked at Crowl. ‘What do you make of that?’

  Crowl reached for Sanguine. ‘That there are still secrets he is unwilling to share,’ he said.

  The Shade’s lumens kicked in, throwing bars of harsh light across steadily darkening rockcrete. They passed tenements pocked with empty windows, collapsed lintels, low smouldering fires. Deeper chasms striated filth-ridden platforms, old tiers of columns cracked and bowed under the gargantuan weight above.

  Then they made a landing, hard against the corroded plinth of some ancient statue – a winged knight with hollow eyes, striding out into the grimy murk to face some unseen enemy. Dust kicked up by the Shade’s descent billowed around them, and Crowl reached for the cockpit release.

  The Custodian flyer set down a few metres away, making the earth tremble with the impact of its landing. Crowl watched its occupants disembark – Navradaran leading four others down a gilt ramp. They were all the same – arrayed from head to foot in a complete shell of gold, immaculate, their black robes snapping in the heatwash of the turbines. All carried guardian spears, and the blades shimmered coldly in the dark.

  ‘Just four?’ Crowl asked.

  ‘It will suffice.’

  Doubt seemed to be something Navradaran did not entertain. Perhaps he was incapable of it.

  ‘It’s a long way down,’ Crowl said, checking the auspex reading and moving to the edge of a deep, square-edged well-mouth. A stone stair wound down the inside of it, clinging to the face of sheer rockcrete. There were no railings, no barriers, and the hot wind sighed up out of its dark heart with what felt like malevolence. Above them, perched on age-withered pediments, rows of gargoyles leered out into the eternal gloom, tongues poking out over rows of curved teeth. The rad-streaked sky was lost, a memory of the levels far above.

  Navradaran strode to the head of the stairs, and gestured for Crowl to lead on.

  ‘Then there is no time to lose,’ he said.

  Spinoza shook off her shock. She saw Lermentov struggling out in the centre of the chamber, surrounded by his ogryns and his best fighters. His beleaguered formation was holding its ground but little more.

  ‘The wall,’ she voxed to him. ‘We must make the wall.’

  She saw him look up at her, his helm covered in blood, then acknowledge. A vox-augmitter order went out, just audible over the screams and the roars, and the ogryns suddenly pushed forwards, driving a wedge through the ranks of the xenobreeds. Spinoza leapt down from the stairs, accompanied by Hegain’s troops, and they fought their way to his side, weaving between the flying blades and hooks.

  ‘This will kill us,’ Lermentov panted, firing in rapid bursts as his ogryns threw themselves suicidally into the enemy.

  ‘You are dead already,’ Spinoza said coolly, reverting back to Argent and sending the maul cracking into the hides of the grotesques pressing around them. ‘The master. That is everything now.’

  The toll of the charge was terrible. Abhumans went down in droves, their heavy bodies pulled into strips by the surgical weapons of the xenobreeds. The human troops fared even worse, their armour too weak and their weapons too crude – dozens were flayed into gore-flecked chunks by the whirl of blades, their screams cut abruptly short. With their guiding intelligence gone, though, the grotesques fought without formation and without strategic purpose. They went for blood, for pain, for slaughter, caring nothing for
where they got it, and the hordes of fodder still charging at them provided an orgy of targets for their agony-blinded minds to process.

  That left a narrow window for a disciplined core to cut through. Spinoza and Lermentov fought at the apex of it, backed up by the remains of Hegain’s squad, now down to four after taking further losses. The sacrifice of the abhumans proved just enough to break through, and they pushed towards the wall breach even as the last of the ogryn bodyguard fell under whirring talons.

  Spinoza was first, leaping up into the mouth of the tunnel as the energies of its creation crackled around her. Argent’s light glittered along an impossibly perfect inner surface – the breach was over ten metres in height, circular, driven ramrod straight as if created by a precision excavation tool. Ahead, she could just make out the onward progress of the intruders, still cutting their way further in and heedless of pursuit.

  Lermentov joined her. Less than fifty of his vanguard had made it through – behind them the orgy of slaughter was ramping up, fed like a furnace by the huge numbers still pouring into the chamber from the deep tunnels beyond.

  ‘There is nothing we can do for them,’ Spinoza said, grabbing Lermentov and pushing him bodily into the tunnel ahead of her.

  Hegain and Khazad came with her, and they started to run again. Even as Spinoza picked up speed, feeling Argent snarl in her grip, the madness of it was perfectly obvious. Perhaps thirty of the huge xenobreeds remained up ahead, all of them loping into the heart of the Palace itself. Stripped of the ogryns, what remained of Lermentov’s forces was hopelessly insufficient to match them, and even if the hunters caught them they would surely be finished off swiftly.

  But there was no alternative. Whatever tech-sorcery the creature had employed had done what was needed, rending physics, imploding pure adamantium, and now it was in the Palace. In the Palace.

  She ran harder. The delved tunnel felt like it went on forever – the wall must have been over two hundred metres thick. By the time they reached the end of it, the xenobreeds were far ahead, galloping across the deserted floor of another yawning, dust-filled hall and into the mazes beyond. The grotesques travelled with single-minded purpose, racing up forgotten stairwells and streaming across dank, echoing balconies. They clearly knew where they were going, and yet Spinoza had no idea where she was, her helm-unit still scrambled, her senses disorientated by the dark and the flailing lumen beams. At any moment she expected them to hit an inhabited section where the defenders of the Inner Palace would come swarming to counter the threat… but perhaps they were too far down. Perhaps they had emerged into sections so ancient and enclosed and buried in ignorance that no watch was kept on them.