Vaults of Terra: The Carrion Throne Page 7

  ‘But they should be afraid,’ said Spinoza. ‘They should be afraid. Afraid of us, if they need to be, for if they ever stop fearing their protectors then all that waits for them is…’

  ‘I know it.’

  ‘Do you?’ Spinoza caught herself too late, and after that she could only glare at him defiantly, the truth of her scorn now out in the open.

  Crowl laughed – a low, dry laugh – and sat back in his chair. ‘That’s better, Spinoza. Say what you think.’

  ‘It is just that… your words,’ she said, trying harder. ‘I know you do not mean them, but–’

  ‘I mean everything.’

  ‘–if you were not of this order, I would have to…’ She looked down. ‘Is this a trial?’

  ‘No, not that. I’m not trying to catch you out. Far from it.’ Crowl placed his empty goblet to one side, his drawn face catching the last reflected light of the sunset. ‘When’s your raid scheduled?’

  ‘Before dawn, lord.’

  He clasped his hands together, pressing the fingertips against one another. ‘I’ll take it over. They’ll be expecting you, if they have any sense, and a more subtle approach might be what is required.’

  Spinoza felt her cheeks flush, and she bowed awkwardly. ‘If you wish it,’ she said.

  Crowl laughed again. ‘Do not sulk, Spinoza – this is not a demotion. I have another task in mind for you – one that I’ll be very pleased to see you carry out.’

  Journeymaster Agister Holbech padded down the winding passage towards his personal chambers, feeling the effects of a twenty-hour shift prey on his aging constitution. His belly flapped across an over-tight belt, his soft-soled shoes slipping atop polished stone flags. Pseudo-flames guttered low in framed candelabras, an antique touch of nonsense that the Chartist guilds were fond of preserving in their private sanctums. Through narrow mullioned windows he could make out the night glitter of the eternal city running west, luminous under low-hanging cloud-banks. There was no moon. There was never a moon, not unless the rad-blooms higher up broke apart for a moment, gifting the terrestrials a fleeting look at the skies that had once been the species’ inspiration to break out into the void.

  He reached his chamber and absently tapped the nine-digit cipher into the door-slot. A micro-needle punched a miniscule incision into a pudgy finger, the analytical cyclers whirred, and the lock-lumen winked green. He pushed against the brushed steel surface wearily, and it slid to reveal a cramped and semi-lit interior.

  Holbech lurched inside, throwing the day’s tally scrolls onto a low sideboard. Dirty windows on the far wall offered a privileged vista of the nightscape outside – a landscape of jagged spikes, studded with lurid points of light from hab lumens, search-beams, furnace plumes and the glowing swarms of air traffic, all set against the stained churn of the ever-moving thunderheads. The air was hot, humid, like the break point before a storm, except that those clouds never broke – they just boiled and shifted, hemming in the heat, wreathing the world below in a gasping clutch of desiccation.

  He was sweating, and he poured himself a long drink – refiltered water, laced with pure alcohol, flavoured with synthetic cardamom. Then he went over to a long couch, the leather real but patched, the steel frame speckled with rust. As he sank down onto it the joints squealed and the coils sagged.

  He looked over his apartment, high up on the spire’s western flank. It was a privileged position by most standards, but not as high as he’d have liked; not up into the opulent levels where the air was scraped through filters to excise the grit and the floors were cooled and there were living plants – living plants! – watered from cisterns that the parched multitudes below could have survived off for a year.

  To Holbech’s mind he hadn’t quite achieved his potential – it was a thought that occupied his mind every night after a long shift, as he remembered his performance in the distant guild examinations or recalled the time he’d imagined himself competing for a seat on the Schedulists councils, or the wardenship of a major traffic node, or – and why should he not have dreamt of it? – the speakership itself.

  Holbech took a long draught of his semi-palatable cocktail, and looked out miserably across the little realm he had been able to secure for himself. The stipend for a journeymaster was substantial by objective standards, for he was responsible for the safe berthing of hundreds of cargo-haulers every day, and yet still his hab-space was no more than ten square metres, two-thirds of the way up the decent zones of a middling spire complex on the edge of the mundane Salvator zone. He looked with regret at the things he had collected – the cheap vases, the parchment records of obsolete vessel-types stacked in bundles, the chairs, the tables, the broken vid-relayer with its data sets of Missionaria improvement sessions.

  Then he saw the man sitting in the shadows, under the window, with the laspistol aimed at his head, and froze.

  ‘Good evening, journeymaster,’ said Maldo Revus, staying just where he was.

  Holbech considered doing something, but not for very long. His antique Haus revolver was safely stowed in a drawer next to his cot, and even if he had had it by his side, he guessed that it wouldn’t do much against his visitor, who was wearing a quite brutal amount of armour.

  ‘How did you get in here?’ Holbech asked, impressing himself with the relative lack of panic in his voice.

  ‘The same way I get in everywhere. How was your day?’

  Holbech felt a trickle of sweat run down his fat, shaved temple. ‘I have no coin here.’

  ‘You have plenty, much more than your stipend allows for. If I were here to take it, though, I would already have done so, so you should ask yourself again, why I am still here?’

  Holbech began to speculate. The level of corruption in his subsector processing node was probably a little below average, and in any case implicated a regional judge, so there was little to grasp at. There had been that sordid business with the trainee menials two years ago, but that was the kind of weakness overlooked by all but the most fastidious of priests, and the man before him was no priest.

  ‘I do not–’

  ‘What work do your cadres do, journeymaster?’

  Surely all knew this. ‘The usual business.’

  ‘Enlighten me.’

  ‘Processing lifters entering the Triad port zone. Bulkers, void-haulers, some pilgrim transports. Three hundred standard crew, all screened, all Astra-conditioned. No problems, no difficulties.’

  ‘Good to hear. I am an efficient man myself, journeymaster. It is good to meet a like mind.’

  ‘I am… glad you think so.’

  ‘Now think harder. Think about your signals staff, those at quintus grade.’

  Holbech thought. ‘I have seventy-four–’

  ‘Are you missing any, journeymaster?’

  ‘You know it’s an Adeptus-level offence for me to give menial data out,’ said Holbech, warily.

  ‘And you know that I care less than nothing for your offence.’

  ‘I thought this was all done with. I thought Phaelias had what he wanted and the matter was closed.’

  ‘It’s not closed.’

  Holbech started to become exasperated. He was not a mere nobody; he was a registered member of the Adeptus Terra, one of the exalted citizens of the eternal Imperium, and that gave him rights.

  But then he looked at the man’s expression – just like the woman who had come before, the one who had spoken strangely and had those brown eyes that never blinked. Throne, where did they get these people?

  ‘You’ve been sent by Phaelias?’ Holbech asked.

  ‘Don’t worry where I’m from. Tell me about the scribe.’

  ‘It was days ago. I thought it was done with. I told the last one that he’d not turned up to his station for two duty-cycles, and that I had informed the superior and the communal dorm-master. That was it. I’m not his regist
ered guardian, and I didn’t take the matter further. Sometimes people go missing. They say that there’s something loose in the underhives in Malliax, and perhaps that got him. Who knows? There are some bad people in this world. No doubt you know a few.’

  ‘His name?’

  ‘Hieron Valco. Of the Ketan-Theta lower combine.’

  ‘How long had he worked here?’

  ‘Two years. I barely knew him. No problems on his report-slate. He was diligent. He reported anything anomalous on the schedules, and that saved me a lot of grief.’

  ‘His task was to monitor the landing of ships? Pilgrim transports, lifters?’

  ‘Most of the time. And he had to scan the records and scrub them of errors before submitting to the archives.’

  Revus never moved his hand – it remained as still as if moulded in rockcrete. ‘Did he report anything of note before he disappeared?’

  ‘There are always errors. A big lifter touches down on a Triad platform every twenty seconds, twenty-four hours a day, and there are sixteen platforms in our jurisdiction. Everything is logged, then placed into Archive Gothic, then transcribed onto vellum by the scholiasts before being taken down to the scriptorium for storage. We have to check the schedules against the berthing records, compare the manifests, check for security alerts–’

  ‘Your work must be very fulfilling. How can I access the documents worked on by him?’

  Holbech began to lose his fear again, and felt his drink warming up unsatisfactorily. ‘See, I thought you had already taken this information. The woman was insistent that–’

  ‘Remind me.’

  ‘You can’t get them. The scrolls were quarantined by the arbitrators after I reported him missing. I don’t know where they took them after that, but it’s given us pain, as the Schedulists are demanding reconstitution of the missing archive lists, and of course we can’t do it.’

  ‘Which judge sanctioned that?’

  ‘You think I asked them? Might as well ask which one sanctioned you coming here and poking guns at innocent men.’

  Revus thought for a moment. ‘When did we last make contact with you?’

  ‘You don’t know that?’

  ‘Answer the damn question.’

  ‘Four days ago. Like I said, I thought this was all–’

  ‘You’ve been helpful, journeymaster. That will be all.’

  Holbech dared to take a sip of his drink. Warmed-up, it was even fouler than usual. ‘Nothing else?’

  ‘If I think of anything, you’ll know. One more thing – I was not here, we did not have this conversation.’

  Holbech snorted. ‘Or you’ll file a report to the judges, eh?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  Revus rose, moving out into the open, and for the first time Holbech caught a glimpse of just how powerfully built the man was – tall, bulky, his savage face a mass of scar tissue and tattoos. Holbech swallowed, and found his throat dry.

  ‘What’s this all about, then?’ he asked.

  ‘I ask the questions,’ Revus said, holstering his sidearm and walking to the hab-unit entrance. He pulled the door open and left, without giving a backward glance.

  For a few moments Holbech sat, his heart still beating too hard, his armpits sweatier than before. He drank again, then again, until the glass was empty. Then he looked up again, back at the cityscape vista, the crooked spires glowing under a dirty sky.

  ‘Throne, I hate this place,’ he breathed.

  Chapter Six

  Crowl hunkered down, keeping his body low to the ground. The pain in his calves flared, and he considered another gland-burst of heiloquat. He was about to move when Revus’ call sign flitted across his audex feed.

  ‘Anything?’ he asked, keeping his voice low. Ahead of him the squad of storm troopers crouched in the dark.

  ‘Subject’s name is Hieron Valco,’ said Revus. ‘Stationed at a Triad watchtower. Disappeared six days ago.’

  ‘Well done. Anything else?’

  ‘I have the location of Valco’s hab-unit from the spire’s central allocator. Do you know the name Phaelias?’

  Crowl thought for a moment. ‘No. Why?’

  ‘Valco’s superior had been questioned already. Someone else is interested in our corpse.’

  ‘Irritating.’ Crowl shifted position slightly, easing the burn in his legs. ‘Go to the hab, get what you can. We’ll speak back at Courvain.’

  ‘By your will.’

  The link cut. Crowl’s attention snapped back to his surroundings.

  Ranks of empty promethium tanks led away into the gloom, overhung with a low ceiling of rusting iron. Empty cables swirled like entrails over a greasy floor. At the far end of the echoing hall was a fortified slide-portal, unmarked and unlit. Crowl observed the approach carefully, his eyes flickering from point to point. The storm troopers, a full squad of ten this time, led by Hegain, remained spread throughout what remained of the old manufactorum node, sheltering behind the tanks that had once held chem-solutions for the Jeroda Deredian industrial cluster away to the north. The node’s walls were heavy slabs of buttressed adamantium, built to be sufficient to contain an explosion and shield the inhabited zones above and below.

  Crowl activated a proximity scan, but it was baffled by the heavy layers of shielding. He opened a channel to his sergeant. ‘Has all been put in place?’

  ‘As you commanded,’ Hegain replied, his voice low. ‘Nerve-charges in place, spider-pattern, covering all ingress routes. A tidy job, now it’s done. You’ll be pleased when you see it. If you see it. If we do it.’

  ‘Then I think it’s time, don’t you?’

  ‘Absolutely, yes, I do.’

  Hegain gestured – a brief finger-ripple that sent five of the squad creeping up close to the portal, covered by the rest. Crowl advanced more steadily, shadowed as ever by the servo-skull.

  ‘Burn-bu–’

  ‘Hush,’ voxed Crowl sternly. ‘Not now.’

  Gorgias dropped a little, its eye dulling to a sullen brown. Crowl silently drew Sanguine, running his finger down the curve of the long trigger, enjoying the weight of it in his palm. The lead trooper reached the portal, dropped down close and placed a tumbler-cracker over the lock-unit. The cracker hissed as it worked, spinning through the combinations, then clanked open. The portal’s clamshell doors shivered as the bolts shot back.

  ‘Go silent,’ said Hegain, moving up to point, his hellgun trained at the central join. He looked back at Crowl, bringing up the rear, who nodded, then motioned for two of his squad to haul the doors open while the others formed a semicircle around the portal, all guns aimed at its centre.

  The chamber on the far side was pitch-black, stinking, silent. Hegain was first in, his hellgun-mounted lumen sweeping across a narrow, dust-thick space. Four more followed, then Crowl stepped across the threshold, his cloak sliding smoothly over the oxidised edge.

  ‘No one home,’ voxed Hegain, pushing further inside.

  ‘Don’t be hasty,’ said Crowl, sweeping the area with Sanguine’s ornate muzzle. ‘You smell it?’

  Blood – the old metallic tang over a background fug of mould and decay. The chamber was low-ceilinged, claustrophobic, unlit and stuffy. It had once been a storage cell, fit for little better than heavy STC tox-crates, but hadn’t been in service for a very long time.

  They pressed deeper, going carefully around the carcasses of old transporter platforms, keeled over and caked in dust. Crowl looked down and saw cracks between the floor panels. The space was hollow beneath, its original underpinning having rotted away.

  ‘Watch your step,’ he warned, following Hegain’s careful progress, taking time to scan into the void below.

  They moved into a further chamber, a little wider, just as decrepit. The smell of humans was stronger here. A series of plasteel crates had been shoved toget
her in the room’s centre to act as some kind of table. Open storage cylinders lined the walls, some still containing ration-packs, most empty.

  ‘What do you suppose that is, lord?’ asked Hegain, looking up at the far wall. ‘Never seen that before. I mean, I reckon I may have, of a kind, but there’s a bit more art to it, I think? Or maybe not.’

  Crowl angled his armour-halo towards the indicated spot, flooding cracked plasterwork with a severe light-pool. The painted angel had been slapped on the wall in red, and for a moment he thought that might have been the source of the blood-stench, but spectral scans said otherwise. The figure took up the entire wall space. It was a messy, gauche daub – semi-abstract, like some tribal scratching on the curve of a cave-edge. It needed the dance of firelight to complete the effect.

  He took a pict-record of it, and turned his attention to the table. Images were stacked on its surface, dozens of them. They were cheap lithochromes, pulled out from any one of a thousand picter workshops in the vicinity, rendered onto mouldering paper in watery colours. He leafed through them, taking in the catalogue of horror they documented – body parts extracted, eyes pinned open, ribs exposed, shutter-frozen screaming.

  He put them down distastefully, letting the images flutter to the ground. Committing the crime to lithochromes was just another imposition of violence.

  ‘Take these,’ he ordered. Crowl moved away from the central table, into the gloomier corners, and stooped low. The floor – a badly laid screed of cheap ceramic tiles – was shiny with a black film. This was what he had smelt. He ran a finger through the film, lifting its glossy scrapings to the light. The blood was congealed, perhaps a long time ago. Whatever had taken place here, they could not have intervened in time to prevent it.

  ‘And samples of this,’ Crowl added, getting back to his feet.

  ‘By your will,’ said Hegain, gesturing to one of his troops to comply.

  Gorgias had adopted a holding position directly in front of the painted angel, scanning repeatedly as if it could decipher something about the image from looking at it. Crowl moved his scrutinising gaze around the rest of the chamber. The place had the stench of desperation about it – a black hole, buried under the crust of civilisation, a place where elaborate pain had been curated. And yet…