Revus shrugged. ‘It is not my job to like or dislike. If I have not given adequate service, then–’
‘It has always been exemplary,’ she said.
He said nothing in reply. He drank again, cradling the metal cup in both hands as if needing its warmth to keep himself alive.
‘You saw the way he was,’ Spinoza said carefully.
No response.
‘You have known him longer than I. Has he ever been like this before?’
Still no response.
‘I got close to the creature myself,’ she said. ‘I still see its face whenever I blink. He, though – he spoke to it. It breathed on him. I do not think he has been the same since.’ She toyed with her cup, tilting it idly. ‘I am not saying the hunt is not worthy. I am not saying we should do anything other than our duty. I am merely voicing concern for his welfare, and for the wider situation.’
Revus did not look up. ‘I saw it, too,’ he said, eventually. ‘I tried to bring it down, and failed. I was not as close as you were. Not as close as him. But… Yes, it stays with me. The smell of it.’
Spinoza regarded him carefully. ‘Then you know of what I speak.’
‘Maybe. Right now, I do not place much faith in my judgement.’
She tried a different tack. ‘You were out in Salvator, before this all took place. What was it like?’
‘Restive.’
‘Worse than you’ve known it?’
‘Yes. And now, after this, much worse.’
Spinoza leaned forward, lowering her voice further. ‘There is concern at the highest level. I have seen transmissions that indicate this is a planetary phenomenon. Planetary. I do not get any sense that the worst of it is over. In such circumstances, I am unsure that pursuing this business, as we are being asked to do, can be the right course of action.’
She had overstepped with that, and knew it instantly. Revus’ grey eyes flickered up towards her, hard as ice. ‘He is the inquisitor.’
‘Yes,’ she admitted, rowing back. ‘I know.’
‘That is a judgement for him.’
‘You are correct.’
An awkward silence fell. Revus drank again. Spinoza left hers untouched.
‘I do not know if he will find anything,’ she said eventually. ‘My enquiries were useless. It seems he discovered little, too. But I am under no illusions – he has a formidable mind. If he should find a way to take this forward, and we are still confronted with the worsening situation in the city, and it comes down to a choice of duties…’
There were no easy ways to finish that sentence.
‘Tell me what you came to tell me,’ Revus said, still not making eye contact.
She drew in a breath. ‘I came to Terra, of all worlds, for a reason. Well, more than one, but one in particular that meant something, given my past, given what I still believe is important.’ She kept her voice low, her head close to Revus’. ‘If a moment comes, only if, but if a moment comes, a crisis, a significant crisis… then I can call on help.’
‘What kind of help?’
‘Help.’
Revus smiled dryly. ‘Ah.’
Now she was on dangerous ground. ‘I only mention it–’
‘No, I understand.’ He finally looked up at her. ‘But I believe you came to speak to me about what comes next.’
He was no one’s fool. ‘Just so. We have been damaged. We have made choices. We must move beyond them.’
‘I agree.’
‘I made the call on the Corvus protocol,’ she said, pushing her cup away. ‘Guilt is an unworthy emotion, captain. Get over yourself.’
The ghost of the same smile flickered across his lips. ‘By your will, lord,’ he said.
‘The portals in the lower citadel are safe to enter now. I will survey them, and send my findings to you. Any deficiencies, I shall expect you to remedy them.’
‘By your will.’
‘Very good, captain.’ She rose, shoving the metal bench back and making to leave.
He looked up at her. ‘For what it is worth, I do not remember ever disliking you, interrogator,’ he said. ‘I do not dislike many people. Even those I have to kill. They are just faces, just names. You have to understand – there have been very many of them.’
Spinoza did understand. ‘This is Terra, after all.’
‘It will consume you. If you let it.’
She nodded. ‘Then we will speak again.’
‘Aye,’ Revus said, returning to his drink. ‘We will.’
The biohazard teams worked quickly, once the first set of all-clears were given. They went methodically, level by level, clearing up the bodies, hosing down the blood, raking the debris away and re-opening the portals. Slowly, steadily, contact was re-established with all the major external doorways. They were re-sealed, then re-guarded.
Many things became apparent during the process. The enemy had not had things entirely their own way – a few knots of resistance were discovered. A couple of storm troopers, cut off from the main squads, had led counter-attacks in one isolated corner. Some of the prisoners’ cells had been broken open, letting out some extremely dangerous people, who had gone on to cause their own kind of havoc. In truth, though, Revus’ tactical decisions were largely vindicated by the sheer numbers of enemy bodies the hazard teams came across. There were heaps of them, piled up at every choke-point and intersection, their limbs stretched out and their mouths open and gasping. Tracked vehicles had been brought in to the larger chambers, most armoured, all with heavy weapons mounted on their backs, the engines still growling and kicking out smoke.
None of those encountered, defender or invader, had survived the chemical attack. They lay where they had fallen, twisted and choking, their armour-plate or robes flecked with blood.
Crowl walked alone through the debris. He had been present on many battlefields of various kinds during his long life, but this was by far the most painful. The stains and chips on the walls gave away the ferocity of the initial firefights, but all was now frozen in a kind of stasis – a freeze-frame image of momentary, fleeting torture.
He should have sought sleep. His mind was getting even murkier. He could feel his thoughts slowing down, just as he could feel his limbs begin to seize up. He would have to retire soon, or his body would shut down entirely.
Sleep, though, brought dreams. And, besides that, there was so much to do.
He found the entrance to the archives in disarray. The reclamation teams had not been there long, and lifting work was still under way. A masked storm trooper on duty saluted as he approached. Servitors lumbered past him, dragging bodies behind them.
He passed within, treading carefully. The place was charred black and stank of smoke. Fire suppression squads had got in late, just in time to save a portion of the archive shelving at the rear of the chamber. Much of it, though, was gone – a mess of melted steel braces and blackened parchment.
He walked up to Huk’s cogitator station. It, too, was half-destroyed, burned away by a mess of las-shots and grenade detonations. Huk herself lay in the middle of it all, her crippled body folded up, her arms bent backwards around the cables that had both imprisoned and liberated her.
Crowl knelt down. No one had dared go near her yet – she was just as she had been when the nerve agents had started flowing. He smoothed a tangle of matted hair away from her grey cheek. Her facial muscles were more relaxed now than they had been for a very long time. It made her look younger.
‘I am so sorry, Yulia,’ he said, with feeling. ‘So sorry.’
He allowed himself, briefly, to remember how she had been. Vital, enthusiastic. Always eccentric, even before the accident, before the misjudgement, but that was to be expected. She had hated it down here, despite knowing the reasons.
As he knelt there, his ceramite-clad finger running down her skin, he he
ard the voice again in his mind – that mocking voice, dredged up from its alien sump of corruption, steeped in aeons of existential cruelty; needling and vicious.
You should have been here, Crowl, it said. You should have taken the transmission.
He stood up. He called over the officer in charge. ‘Prepare this body for cremation,’ he said. ‘Let me know when all is ready. Take extreme care of it. I shall preside.’
The man made the aquila and withdrew, hurrying to pass the order on. By then, Crowl had moved on himself, driven by his latest compulsion, entering the vaults where the books had been. He had to tread carefully. The lower deck was littered with still-hot debris. Some servitor carcasses slumped in the corners, their overdeveloped upper bodies lacerated by las-fire. The chains that had once borne them up into the heights swung loosely, clinking.
Further back, beyond the inner layers of the great well of shelves, more archive silos stretched away into darkness. Many of these radial shafts were more or less intact, protected from the fires just long enough for counter-measures to halt the damage. He walked along one of them, letting his fingers run over rough, metal-studded spines.
Right at the end of the shaft, deep into the citadel’s structure, the last of the light gave out. The tomes here were heavily proscribed, and all were bound in thick chains. Crowl knelt down in the black dust, searching near the base of the shelves. Here were forbidden books, books so dangerous that even an inquisitor might balk at admitting ownership. Some were written in ancient forms of Gothic that had long since passed out of use. Some were transcriptions, imperfect no doubt, from pre-Imperial languages – Francish, Inglish, Mandrin. Making sense of any of those was difficult for all but the most gifted lexicographers and archaeoscribes, though it could not be doubted that the contents were, to the right reader, precious beyond price.
Crowl paused at a volume marked Ethica, Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata, and smiled to himself. Then he was hunting deeper, pulling aside heavy slabs of bound vellum. After some rummaging, he found what he was after, and withdrew a cracked and iron-bound volume. This one was heavily chained, with two separate locking devices. It took him a while to unclasp the second, for it relied on a very old pass-phrase that he had to delve deep to recall. As he touched it, he felt a stasis-field over its front panel prick at his fingers. Only the rarest, the most obtuse and the most perverse books had such precautions attached.
He looked down at the spine title. This was a copy of a copy of a copy, made in a scriptorium that had been razed to the ground six thousand years ago. In the eyes of a man like Tur, its presence here alone might have constituted just cause for extermination.
Crowl parsed the text with difficulty, for the characters were not Gothic. Offer-bearing, was the best he could manage in the absence of a translexer.
Then he tucked the book under his arm, and walked back the way he had come.
When he emerged back into the light, he saw that Huk had been taken away, but Khazad was there instead, rooting around amid the destruction. He limped up to her.
‘I am sorry for this,’ he said, offering a grim smile of apology. ‘You come here to work for us, and now… this.’
Khazad shrugged. She seemed to be back to herself. Her skin had regained its healthy glow – the longer she stayed on Terra, the more that would fade – and she carried herself with her old poise. ‘Means nothing to me,’ she said. ‘I wished to fight longer.’
‘Spinoza made the right judgement,’ Crowl said. ‘Painful as it is. There will be other days.’
She looked hard at him, her gaze as uncompromising as ever. ‘You will not stop now, will you?’ she asked. There was an element of desperation in the question.
He shook his head. ‘No. We will find them.’
‘Good.’ She grinned, a flash of a savage smile, relieved. ‘Good.’
Crowl found himself smiling too. It was the first time he had done so, without irony, for quite some time. ‘You are a refreshing presence here, assassin.’
She shrugged again. ‘I have vengeance-debt for my old master. And now, loyalty-debt to my new one. Kataj once, and now, Saijan.’
‘Those are Shoba terms, are they not?’
‘I leave the planet. The planet does not leave me.’
Crowl chuckled. ‘Do not stay here for long, then. This world suffers no rivals for affection.’ He hoisted the book under his armpit. It was heavy, and his limbs were aching. ‘I won’t insult you by warning you of the danger. They have missed the heart with their first strike. They will have to try again.’
Khazad appeared supremely contemptuous of that idea. She gazed around her, at the devastation and the signs of burning. ‘They made mistake,’ she said. ‘Should have brought twice as many. So they are not without fault.’ She sniffed. ‘On Shoba, there is old war-manual. It is called Elements, by Ataya. We study it, all children. There is famous line. In war, more is unknown than known. Assume your enemy understand more than you, and you will be slow to move against him.’ She raised an eyebrow – an odd gesture, which might have signified something different to her than it did to him. ‘They are in dark, too, I think.’
Crowl thought on that. ‘You may be right,’ he said.
‘So what is next?’
He hefted the book under his arm. ‘Study,’ he said. ‘Sleep. Then we move again.’
‘To where?’
He started to walk. That was the question.
‘The answers will come,’ he said, more confidently than he felt, retreating into the old ordo maxims. ‘Apply, interrogate, and the answers will come.’
Chapter Seventeen
Spinoza had been unconscious for less than an hour when the chime sounded at her bedside.
The wrench from sleep was painful, and it took her a few seconds to realise what was happening, her head still filled with semi-nightmarish dreams of lips and teeth and kohl-black eyes.
She raised herself onto her elbows, floundering to silence the chime’s bleating. The lumen flickered on, and she gradually blinked her way into focus.
It was Crowl.
‘I wish to see you in the observatory,’ he said. ‘Ensure you are in your full armour.’
The link cut before she could reply. She sat there for a moment, feeling drunk with fatigue. Her whole body protested, demanding that she return to sleep.
Sighing, she pulled herself from her cot. She stumbled from the bedchamber into the arming room, where her armour hung on its rack, ready for donning. As she laboriously applied the pieces, feeling the weight of them snap into place, something like alertness returned. She took a swig of water, rinsing it around her mouth and spitting it into the sink. Then she ran her fingers through her short hair.
The corridors outside were quiet. It was the deep of the night, and only the watch-shifts were in operation. With the re-occupation of the main citadel, the command sections felt empty and echoing, starved of occupants by the death-toll during the raid. There were barely enough bodies left to man the sentinel stations, let alone keep the myriad functions of a fully operational citadel ticking over as they should. Courvain felt sicker and more threadbare than ever – an ague-weakened body on faltering life-support.
The observatory was, as one might have expected, placed right at the summit of the main pinnacle, only overshadowed by the long comms towers with which it was linked. It jutted from the flank of the upper horn-tip of the fortress, a hemispherical protuberance with ornately inlaid windows that gave the distant impression of compound eyes. The most sensitive of the citadel’s listening equipment was housed there, together with the mid- and long-range augur arrays. The space was cluttered with linked machines, tended carefully by trained menials, continually clicking and cycling and churning out ribbons of etched parchment.
When she arrived, the place was flooded with red light. It wavered across the floors, making the tall banks of cogitators appear to
sway and tremble. Erunion and Crowl were waiting for her, alongside the duty menials in their robes.
The light came from outside. It looked as if half the horizon were aflame now, and the silhouettes of the greater spires stood against a backdrop of angry, lava-like turmoil. A low rumble could be heard through the armourglass – louder than the usual grind of vehicles, a kind of glowering reverberation that got under the skin.
‘Good,’ Crowl said as she entered. ‘Now we can begin.’
Erunion looked as shattered as she felt. He shot her a weary half-smile, before turning to one of the great creations of valves and transistor-crystals and fiddling with the wires.
Of all of them, Crowl was the most animated. His eyes were glistening, his movements were agile. Perhaps, Spinoza thought, a little too agile. There was an element of brittleness to his demeanour, as if he had taken something potent to keep him going.
He came up to her, smiling that reptilian smile of his. ‘It was Khazad, really,’ he said. ‘I like her. I like her attitude. That is what we need right now.’
Spinoza steeled herself. She had a feeling that she would not like what came next. Crowl looked restive, agitated, and couldn’t stay still. He walked around the machines, back towards her, then over to Erunion again. ‘I had forgotten the first insight we had,’ he said as he moved. ‘The very first one. We know that Rassilo is dead. We know those with her were taken by the Custodians. We forgot that they do not. They do not know what happened to her. They will be anxious about that. They will be worried that she is currently in some dungeon somewhere, apt to be interrogated. That must be their great fear now, for she knew all there was to know.’
His hands were kneading one another. He kept pacing.
‘And now we know that Gloch is still missing, too,’ he went on, speaking rapidly. ‘They do not know where he is, either. So they found his contacts and implanted the tripwire devices, trusting that those holding him, or perhaps looking for him too, would wish to tidy away the loose threads. This is about their weakness, and our strength. They are scared of us, what we might know.’ He laughed. The sound was a little forced, a little febrile. ‘They were trying to protect themselves.’
Vaults of Terra- The Hollow Mountain - Chris Wraight Page 20