Vaults of Terra: The Carrion Throne Read online

  ‘You do not smile much, captain,’ Spinoza said.

  ‘This is Terra, interrogator,’ he said, shrugging, and withdrew.

  Rassilo had said the same thing. It seemed to be something of a mantra, This is Terra, used when no further explanation could be given.

  Before she could reflect on that further, the doors before her opened, swinging silently on hidden hinges.

  The chamber beyond was lit poorly by a few suspensor lumens. Just as elsewhere, there were no external windows. The entire place felt as if it might have been buried underground.

  Her new master sat beneath two great iron candelabras, robed in silver-lined black, his face illuminated from below by the flickering green of a data-slate. Above his shoulder hovered a servo-skull, its single red eye glowing in the gloom.

  ‘Closer,’ he said.

  She took in more details as she approached, automatically appraising, judging, filing. The inquisitor was tall, gaunt, clad in extremely fine armour. His skin was pale and ridged with a faint crust of old scar tissue.

  ‘Thank you for your summons, lord,’ Spinoza said, coming to stand before him.

  ‘Nothing to thank me for. And call me Crowl.’ The man’s voice was dry as a gnawed bone, unfiltered by vox enhancement. He pressed an armoured finger to the data-slate, and the green light flickered out. ‘You spoke to Rassilo?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘She’ll have given you a file on me.’ Crowl smiled, and it made his pale face flex strangely. ‘Read it yet?’

  ‘I have seen no file.’

  ‘Good answer. Sit down.’

  There was a heavy seat, carved like a throne, opposite Crowl’s. Everything in the chamber had the weight of age on it. Spinoza did as she was bid, trying to work out how much of the inquisitor’s display was genuine and how much feigned.

  ‘I’ve been following your career,’ Crowl said. ‘I suppose it’s now that I tell you what a good man Tur was, and how sorry we are that he died like that. But he wasn’t, was he?’

  ‘He was an excellent inquisitor.’

  ‘That’s possible too. Did you conduct many actions?’

  ‘I think I earned my position.’

  ‘I agree.’ Crowl’s forehead was lit by the soft blush of red from the servo-skull’s hovering presence. ‘You were tutored on Astranta. You must like rain.’

  ‘Then you know it?’

  ‘A long time ago. What did they teach you there?’

  ‘Everything that I needed to know.’

  ‘To love the Imperium, I suppose, which endures forever.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘What would you say if I told you that it was a lie, and that nothing lasts forever?’

  Crowl’s speech was rapid, his mouth moving economically. Spinoza could see how that might unsettle an interrogation suspect, and resolved to study the auditory patterns later.

  ‘Then I would call you heretic,’ she replied, ‘and have you terminated.’

  ‘Good again,’ Crowl said. ‘But down here, every spire has a million tongues, and every tongue is forked against its neighbours. We tell them to inform on their own kind, and they do. All the time. If I wanted, I need never leave this tower, and still they’d find their way down here, all ripe for destruction. You’d be busy, if you terminated them all.’

  ‘Better to die, than to–’

  ‘–infect an innocent. You’d be burning the bodies of liars. They come to us because they’re jealous, lustful, or their minds have gone. I had a man tell my processors his own mother had fallen to the dark. He wanted to take her hab-unit. Three metres square, stinking like a grox-pen, underground, unheated. But it would have been his.’

  ‘I hope he was punished,’ said Spinoza.

  ‘Nothing I could devise would have been worse than the life he’d made for himself.’ Crowl leaned forwards. ‘Here’s the point, interrogator. There are witches on Terra, but to see them, you have to filter out the noise. Pay no attention to the voices you can hear. Pay attention to the ones you can’t.’

  ‘I shall heed the warning.’

  Crowl laughed, a dry chuckle. ‘Maybe you even will, in time.’

  ‘Ignoro, child,’ rasped the servo-skull suddenly, whining as it gained loft. ‘Filth toto mundo. Burn-burn.’

  Spinoza raised an eyebrow.

  ‘This is Gorgias,’ said Crowl.

  ‘The skull has a different philosophy to yours, then,’ said Spinoza.

  ‘It’s good to be faced with contrary views. Some of the time. Now, are you ready?’

  ‘Give the order.’

  Crowl got to his feet. ‘I conducted an action yesterday,’ he said, gesturing for Spinoza to join him, and they walked back towards the doors. ‘A man. He had the mark. You know it? When you sense it, like a smell. I almost put him to the trials, but he was resisting me. Most of the time my presence alone is enough to induce terror, but he was ready to face more of it before he broke. So that made me curious, and I let him go.’

  The doors opened. Revus was waiting on the other side, his armour now fully sealed and his black-visored helm in place. Behind him were six others of the unit. The storm troopers offered salute, and stood aside to let them pass.

  ‘Captain Revus tracked him,’ Crowl went on, moving into the corridor. ‘The subject resisted temptation for a while, but they always give in, sooner or later, and so he led us to his minders. Someone has power over him, and I wish to know why.’

  ‘What do you intend?’ Spinoza asked.

  ‘Cut out the den, find someone who knows something, bring them back here for a quiet conversation.’ Crowl sniffed. ‘There’s something stirring out there, I think.’

  ‘And Sanguinala is coming.’

  ‘You noticed that? Keep up, Spinoza – I want you close on this. It’ll be a good introduction to the glory of our infinite city.’

  They marched further into Courvain’s depths, always down. Revus and his squad followed close behind. Gorgias whined overhead, staying close to Crowl’s shoulder. A wicked-looking needle gun extended from a socket under its left cheekbone.

  They reached a blast door, which slid back on their approach. A low hangar chamber opened up, lined with personnel carriers. Most were Nighthawk gunships, black liveried with Inquisition sigils, capable of carry­ing twelve and armed with rotary cannons under their stubby wings. They were squat, blunt things, designed to operate at close quarters in confined spaces, their twin-angled turbines giving them lift in any direction.

  Spinoza clambered inside one, following Crowl. The storm troopers piled in after, shackling their hellguns to wall-mounted claws and buckling up. Before the outer hull doors locked closed, Spinoza glimpsed the entire hangar wall fold slowly outwards, exposing the grey haze of the Terran exterior.

  She sat back as the turbos juddered into full power. Things were moving fast, but that was no bad thing. It was better to be in action than mired in sloth, and she mentally ran down the pre-battle litanies to aid her readiness.

  May He guide my arm, may He guide my strength, may He keep me from the crime of hesitation, of weakness, of mercy.

  The gunship lifted, then boosted clear of the hangar’s exit channel. They were out. Through a narrow real-viewer slit in the armoured hull, Spinoza watched man-made cliffs soar up around them, lit from within by sickly lumens. Then the gunship dropped, filtering through the lines of milling aircraft below. The pilot drove the Nighthawk hard, heedless of the other vehicles hurrying to get out of the way of the Inquisitorial transport. Soon the gunship was up to full speed and rattling along the canyons between the spires.

  ‘How far?’ Spinoza asked.

  ‘Closer than you’d think,’ said Crowl, allowing his body to sway with the gunship’s jerking movement. ‘We’ll be out of Salvator soon, into Malliax Profundis. It only gets dirtier.’

 
The further they went, the more the weak sunlight faded away. Spinoza glimpsed vast arches passing overhead, twinkling with watery light-points, and equally vast chasms below, yawning into blackness. Perhaps, she thought idly, there was no ground level here at all, just an endless procession of deeper foundations, spiralling down to the world’s core.

  Despite the darkness, the press of humanity around them showed no signs of slackening. She could see crowds everywhere, cramming the causeways leading to the spires’ enormous gates, cramming the transit­ways that spanned the gulfs between them, cramming the plazas and cramming the dust-kicked railheads. Soon they were unindividuated – all she saw was a slowly oozing swamp of grey work-shifts, dirty synthwool cowls, head torches bobbing through the brume.

  ‘Locus approach, ten seconds,’ announced Revus, pulling his hellpistol from its holster and checking the power pack.

  The boom from the gunship’s engines lessened as it spiralled to the drop-point. The storm troopers calmly took up their hellguns, adjusted their helmets, made final equipment checks.

  ‘Standard purgatus,’ Revus told them calmly. ‘Take the leader, the rest to be terminated.’

  Spinoza looked over at Crowl, who had closed his eyes. It looked like he was meditating, his sidearm still holstered, his hands clasped loosely before him. She took up her own weapon. Even after it had been modified, a crozius arcanum of the Adeptus Astartes was a heavy piece. She looked down at Argent’s scrimshawed outer casing, the thick bone marked with battle honours, its charred disruptor black from a lifetime of energy dissipation. Despite her physical conditioning, the equal of any mortal human, without her armour she would not have found it possible to wield effectively. As it was, though, given her artificer suit of red-gold plate, forged on the anvils of Ophelia itself, the crozius made her deadly.

  ‘Five seconds,’ intoned Revus.

  The gunship was dropping vertically now, exterior lights doused, whining down a well shaft into nothing. The storm troopers’ helm-lumens flickered into life, glinting from black visors. From outside the shaking hull, Spinoza could just about make out screams of panic, something crashing heavily, a siren wailing.

  Then the Nighthawk’s hull doors slammed open, and the storm troopers spilled out, leaping down from the hovering gunship and into ankle-deep water. It was nearly pitch-black. Massive rockcrete columns rose up on all sides, each one as wide as a Titan, dented and pitted. Crowds were scattering, splashing and swarming like gutter rats into whatever crevice would take them.

  Ahead of the dropsite was a gaping circular outlet, ten metres in diameter and rimed with a coat of ancient rust. The iron bars that had once prevented entry had either rotted away or been broken, and now the orifice gaped blackly, taller than a man and ringed by toothy oxidised stumps. Above it rose a riveted wall of black steel, clustered with clots of grime.

  The storm troopers sprinted to the outlet, leaping over the frothing lip and into the thick dark beyond. Crowl and Spinoza brought up the rear.

  ‘Where is this?’ asked Spinoza, activating the disruptor on Argent and flooding the tunnel with electric-blue light.

  ‘This is the foot of Spire Malevolens et Diabolus Traitoris Nine,’ said Crowl, kicking up the foul water as he strode. He had still not drawn a weapon. ‘You are as close to the earth of Old Terra as most will ever come.’

  The cold hiss of lasfire echoed from up ahead, distorted by the tunnel’s curve. The two of them pushed on, reaching a domed chamber twenty metres high. Cascades of water ran from cracks in the roof. Rows of pump stations, all inactive, sunk into the oozing mire, their valves and filters clogged. More chambers stretched off ahead, linked by arched roofs, clustered with more defunct machinery and tangles of corroded pipework.

  The storm troopers were doing their work. Already the water underfoot had turned a murky red, and bodies floated face down in the foam. Revus had pushed on ahead, taking three of his squad into the chambers beyond. The remaining three skirted the dome’s edge, scanning for residual threats.

  Spinoza went warily. The place stank of mouldering sewage. A hundred ambush points remained in the claustrophobic dark, but Crowl strolled after Revus as if he were ambling in the cloisters of a Ministorum oratory.

  Then an explosion went off – a crack, muffled by distance and thrown-up water – followed by agonised screams. Then more lasfire snapped out, echoing and overlaid on itself, then nothing.

  Crowl led her into the chamber beyond, and the one beyond that. The storm troopers stayed close, and the bodies piled up, more and more of them, punctured and bloody. Some of the corpse-faces stared out from the foetid pools, grey and luminous under the glare of armour lumens, shock still visible on their pallid features.

  They reached a brick-lined arch, dripping with rivulets of oily liquid. As Spinoza ducked to pass under it, she caught a flicker of movement to her right. Instinctively, she swung out, thrusting the crozius protectively.

  A man leapt out at her, rags sodden, his face contorted with loathing. He tried to slash out at Spinoza’s face with a knife.

  Spinoza pulled back smoothly, letting the man fall out of balance, then swung the crozius down onto his neck. Her assailant screamed briefly, caught in the flare of corrosive energy, before his spine snapped open and his body slapped, limp, into the water.

  Crowl glanced down at the mess, then up at her.

  ‘Easy to use, that thing?’ he asked.

  ‘Not very.’

  ‘Heavy, I’d guess.’

  ‘There are exercises, to develop speed.’

  ‘You must show me sometime.’

  Then he was moving again, passing under the arch and into the chamber beyond. Spinoza followed him, stepping over the wet corpse at her feet.

  This one was circular, thirty metres in diameter, crowned with another dome of sodden brick and stone, a patchwork of old repairs that leaked in dirty cascades. Stalactites, black with age, hung from the roof. The floor was lost under a morass of the same foul water, rimed with chem-yellow foam and studded with more floating bodies.

  Revus had already secured the space. Every enemy still drawing breath – three souls only by then – was now isolated against the far wall. Two were abhumans: bloated, over-muscled, their pulpy necks bulging against work-shift collars. They both carried cable-wrapped iron wrenches two-handed, looted from some manufactorum assembly line and converted into primitive shock mauls. The third was human-normal, wearing dirty robes, his head bare and shaved. The same look of almost fanatical loathing lit his scrawny features, but he was weaponless and his hatred was impotent.

  They had backed away, those three, until the wall rose up at their backs. Revus’ squad had them pinned, and faint red points of sighting-beams rippled across their blotchy faces.

  One of the abhumans was already twitching, its pudgy eyes flashing with panic. As Crowl and Spinoza approached, it broke out, splashing towards the inquisitor. The storm troopers opened up, punching a flurry of las-spears into the oncoming mutant, and it stumbled, crashing into the mire. The foam boiled red around it.

  That left two. Only then did Crowl take out his pistol.

  ‘To cleanse the soul,’ he murmured, aimed, and fired a single bullet.

  The robed man was caught in the chest, flung back against the wall and splayed like a spider. The body slipped down into the mire, leaving a long black stain on the crumbling bricks, eyes wide the whole time.

  Spinoza looked at Crowl. ‘I thought you wanted him alive, lord?’

  None of the storm troopers moved.

  ‘This is Terra,’ Crowl said, strolling up to the trembling abhuman. ‘I have the one I wanted.’

  Only then, walking with Crowl, did Spinoza get close enough to see the surviving mutant’s eyes. They were not as twitchy as the other one’s, not as febrile, although they gave away fear. A lot of fear.

  Crowl came up close, heedless of the dan
ger from the looming shock maul. Gorgias hummed overhead them both, chuntering to itself semi-audibly.

  ‘You’d rather have died without agony,’ Crowl said, addressing the mutant. ‘You’d rather have given up that slave to my knives, and he would have let you do it, too.’

  The abhuman looked down at the inquisitor, defiantly, but his jowls quivered. ‘He was a faithful son.’

  ‘There’s no faith in this place.’

  ‘You won’t get what you want from me.’

  ‘No,’ said Crowl, turning to look at Spinoza. ‘But she will.’

  Then the abhuman lunged, hammering the shock maul down at Crowl’s exposed head.

  Spinoza leapt between them, skidding through the slime to bring her own maul to bear. The two weapons screamed against one another, shrieking with unleashed electric power, before the abhuman’s weapon cracked apart. Spinoza lashed out, left, right, smacking the shards away before pressing her crackling crozius up against the mutant’s chins and driving him back against the wall.

  ‘Enough, Spinoza,’ said Crowl, coming alongside her and placing a restraining hand on her arm. The stench of burning flesh rose pungently from the abhuman’s charred jowls. ‘But very good. Really, very good. I can see why the Space Marines liked you.’

  Spinoza relaxed the pressure, slowly. The abhuman had been surgically altered. Up close, she could see the suture lines. Underneath all that blubber and vat-grown muscle fibre was a human-normal, mutilated and stretched, but with standard mental capacity.

  ‘How did you know?’ she asked.

  ‘You get a sense.’ Crowl studied the pseudo-mutant up-close, reaching out to feel the fat-rolls between his fingers. ‘He’s yours now, anyway. Find out what they’re doing here.’

  Then he turned, splashing his way towards Revus, who was waiting in silence at the chamber’s edge, his hellpistol trained unerringly on the cult’s sole survivor.

  ‘All corpses to be preserved,’ Crowl said. ‘Get them sent to Gulagh for processing. I’ll handle the scholarship myself this time.’

  Revus saluted. ‘Then cauterise?’

  Crowl kept on walking. ‘Yes, captain. Burn it all.’