Both Spiderwidows switched to forward lumens, and pools of hard white streamed into the gap. Despite the power of the floodlights, they made little headway into that murk.
Crowl found that he was sweating.
‘Take us in,’ he ordered.
The first thing Spinoza noticed was the stink of blood – thick and pungent, inescapable, almost unbearable.
She jumped down from the gunship and landed heavily on the deck. The hangar itself was huge, stretching back into the interior of the Fortress further than she could see. Ranks of large vessels stood in the darkness, all deactivated, all silent.
There was no interior illumination at all – everything they could see was picked out by the gunships’ lumens or those mounted on their helms. The darkness felt like it had a life and presence of its own. Whenever she moved her head, shadows moved to eat up the sparse light, slithering up over it, drowning it.
The movements of the storm troopers disembarking echoed eerily. She saw Khazad treading carefully, venturing further in. She went after her. They had barely exchanged words since it had all begun again, caught up in their various assignments.
‘I see you are restored,’ Spinoza voxed.
The assassin nodded. ‘Almost so.’
‘I am glad to have you back with us.’
‘And am glad to be back.’ Khazad was almost invisible in the gloom, her matt-black armour sinking into it. She looked wary, as if not sure what to say to her. ‘You understand this, though – I am here for Phaelias.’
‘It seems we are all caught up in that man’s business, one way or the other.’
It had been intended as a part-jest, something she rarely attempted. Khazad’s lack of response told her the general strategy was a sound one.
‘Listen,’ Spinoza started, hesitantly. ‘What happened, in Courvain–’
‘No, not that,’ Khazad said, abruptly, moving off into the dark. ‘Not here.’
Spinoza almost followed her, but then Crowl was signalling to them. The storm troopers formed up in two squads, one headed by Hegain at the rear, the other by Revus. Crowl paced ahead, his black-and-silver armour picked out by Gorgias’ erratic lumen-beams.
‘Now stay close,’ Crowl ordered. ‘Follow me, and keep moving.’
They moved further up into the hangar’s interior. The storm troopers trained their weapons into the grasping dark, sweeping their viewfinders warily. Crowl had unholstered Sanguine, which glinted silver. Khazad’s blade was out too, though unactivated.
Spinoza kept Argent at her belt. It was too heavy to bear unless needed for combat, but already she felt her fingers itch for it.
Their footfalls echoed up into the high vaults above, though no other sounds penetrated the thick atmosphere. The stench of blood grew more pronounced the further they went. Soon there was something else alongside it, something Spinoza could not place. It was a little like… rot.
They reached a heavy door set into the hangar’s rear wall. It was closed and locked. One of Revus’ troops went up to the lock-panel and attempted to open it. After a few failed attempts, he placed a microcharge over the unit. The charge fizzed, ticked, then blew, shattering the lock panel. The trooper went back to it, and applied a breaker to the exposed electronics.
The doors coughed, jerked, then slid open.
The storm trooper immediately gagged.
Blood trickled across the threshold. In the corridor beyond, the floor was caked with it, glistening blackly under the sweep of the lumens.
Two storm troopers crept forward, angling their hellguns around the corner before disappearing into the enveloping gloom. Spinoza followed close behind Crowl and Khazad.
Once inside the corridor, they caught sight of the first bodies.
‘Keep moving,’ Crowl said again.
Spinoza glanced at the corpses as she went past. They had been adepts of some kind, clad in dark robes that sucked to the flesh like liquid. Their skin was ivory-white in the glare of the helm-beams. They looked thin, almost skeletal, and their arms were outstretched. Their shaven heads were marked with iron implants, including input-rings at the base of the scalp. Their blood lay on the floor, old and stale and viscous. It appeared as if they had been running, possibly, though their bodies were mangled badly and it was hard to tell.
They advanced down the length of the corridor, reached an airlock seal, forced it open, and went through it. Everywhere they looked, everywhere they went, it was the same – suffocating dark, utter silence, corpses lying pale and still. Spatters of blood ran across the walls, thrown like paint-streaks.
‘All the same, so it seems,’ Hegain mused, softly. ‘Adepts, menials. No one from the outside.’
‘Yet,’ said Spinoza.
The further they went in, the worse it got. The bodies were mutilated, contorted, pressed into tiny spaces. They entered a narrow through-passage and saw corpses hanging from the ceiling, twisting slowly in the shadows. Some of them had been despoiled – teeth-marks, claw-rents, angry holes caused by gnawing. A few adepts looked like they had been trying to get out of the chambers and had been dragged down by pursuers. Others looked like they had killed themselves using whatever means they had to hand. In one chamber – once some kind of communal instructional archive – all the pict-screens had been smashed. The operators had used the long shards on themselves.
It became hard to process it all. Spinoza heard her own breathing resonate in her ears, close and moist. Her pulse picked up, beating like a soft drum. Every movement, every glance, brought a flash or blur of something horrific, caught in the sporadic pools of lumen-glare.
Suddenly, from up ahead, a hellgun went off. She dropped to her knees, grabbing Argent’s hilt and kicking the disruptor into shimmering light. More shots zipped out, flashing painfully, making the black walls briefly dazzle.
Revus hurried past her, clamping it all down. She heard mutters of, ‘Nothing, nothing,’ over the comm.
She relaxed her grip on Argent, and stood again.
As she did so, she caught sight of it – the xenos – reaching out of the shadows to her right. In a cold panic, she swung instinctively, smashing it back against the wall, tensing to go after it, before realising she had smashed a carved gargoyle from its mount. The broken stone rocked on the floor, sticky amid the blood. She exhaled, furious with herself.
‘Fortitude,’ Crowl warned over the comm, speaking to them all. ‘We can assume it will get worse. Remember – His truth wards against the lies of the senses.’
Then they were edging through the dark again, treading carefully among the corpses. Khazad drew silently alongside her then, placing a hand gently on hers.
‘I see them too,’ she hissed quietly. ‘Ghosts. This place is more than tomb.’
Spinoza said nothing, torn between anger at her lapse and the gathering sense of nausea that threatened to overwhelm her. Even in normal times, this place would have been hateful – its walls swirled with baroque ironwork, sweeping in unnatural eddies and enclosing strange, semi-figurative sculptures. Everything was black, semi-reflective and oppressive. The Fortress had been dwelt in by psyker-breeds for too long, and it reflected their uncanny, tortured perceptions.
They crossed a high chamber bisected with long lines of slender pillars. Their lumen-beams rippled across great bas-relief images cut into the metal. Mournful theological images of the Holy Primarchs were set against stranger things – serpents, beasts with many heads, whirlpools in which limbs and torsos melded and diverged. More bodies were encountered, each with fresh evidence of horrific ends – spines curving clean away from red-raw flesh, skin stripped from muscle, organs yanked wetly from spreadeagled torsos.
And then, up ahead, something moved. The storm troopers froze. Spinoza shuffled to the fore, where Crowl had also hunched down, breathing hard through his helm’s respirator.
In the distance, indist
inct amid the angled interplay of lumen-beams, a diminutive figure was limping towards them. It was human in outline, albeit too small to be an adult. Spinoza adjusted the gain on her helm’s night-vision augmenter, and saw the grainy profile of a male youth, bare-headed, implants nestling against his pale skin, limping.
Every hellgun was trained on him. He seemed not to have noticed them at all, and his head hung down against his chest.
‘Survivor?’ Revus voxed.
‘Stay back,’ warned Crowl. ‘Maybe.’
The youth stopped moving. He seemed to be dragging something behind him. He stayed perfectly still for a moment, his lips moving soundlessly.
Then the face snapped up, catching the lumens. It was white, just as all the others had been, but the forehead bulged horribly, threaded with black veins. The boy’s eyes were gone too, and streaks of black blood ran down his chin. He was dragging the top half of what had once been another body.
‘The Wound!’ he cried wildly, in a voice that sounded like an animal with its throat crammed full of swarf.
‘End it,’ Crowl ordered, opening fire.
The hellguns snapped in unison, flooding the chamber with light. For a second, Spinoza thought they had dropped it, only to witness the thing leap through the las-beams with horrific agility, pouncing and loping towards them in a judder of extreme speed. It squatted briefly, insect-like, against the bole of a pillar.
A storm trooper darted forward, firing continuously. The boy-horror flicked a wrist, and the storm trooper was propelled across the chamber as if kicked by some massive boot, cracking into the far wall with a wet thud. It scampered towards the rest of them, weaving between bolt-shells and las-blasts, going straight for Crowl.
Spinoza charged, swinging Argent up to velocity, its energy field now flaring, but she was a fraction too slow – Khazad was on it, slashing down with her blade, cutting cleanly between shoulder-blade and neck. The edge ran through the boy-horror’s torso diagonally, emerging under its right arm.
It slapped to the ground, wriggling, and Spinoza saw its empty eye sockets stare blindly at her. It should have been dead – Khazad’s blow had gone straight through it. She strode forward, swinging Argent heavily, bringing it down on the creature’s head.
The thrown storm trooper had not got up. Hegain hurried over to him, bent over to investigate, then stood up slowly, looked at Revus and shook his head.
Crowl joined Spinoza, staring at the bone-flecked remains of the psyker-youth. He dropped down to his haunches, extending a probing finger into the mess of skin and brain matter. ‘Extensive physical corruption,’ he said. ‘Enlarged cranium, major internal changes. How can this have happened, here of all places?’
‘Augurs detecting movement ahead,’ Revus reported, edging protectively in front of Crowl. ‘Many, many signals.’
Crowl got up and calmly reloaded. ‘There will be a command chamber somewhere up ahead. We must find answers.’
Then he was off again, limping into the darkness. The storm troopers went with him, fanning out on either side, covering one another watchfully.
Spinoza shared a long look with Revus. Then he too was moving, staying close to the inquisitor, not giving her a backward glance. Khazad prowled ahead with a hunter’s enthusiasm, her deathmask helm underlit with her blade’s energy field.
She shook her head resignedly, and followed them into the dark.
Chapter Nineteen
Revus felt like throwing up. His throat was full of phlegm, his eyes were stinging.
He knew what it was. They all knew what it was. Every soul still alive within this place had some kind of psychic gift. It was like a stench, albeit one that competed with the very real aromas of vivisection. The fug made it hard to concentrate, hard to focus on what was real and what was not.
He had seen things in the shadows. The scrawny killer he had brought to Courvain had appeared more than once, hanging back under the shadow of leering gargoyles and carved dragons. Roodeker, too. Every time he moved his head, apparitions flickered briefly at the edge of the lumen-flare.
Concentrate, he told himself.
The only one of them who went onward with unfettered enthusiasm was Crowl. The inquisitor was pushing the pace now, pressing ahead, driving them hard. They had quickly moved out of comms range of the gunships, perhaps due to this place’s internal density, but more likely due to the psychic effervescence that played havoc with every piece of equipment in their armoury. Now they were isolated within the gigantic fortress, and already one man down.
Revus didn’t even know precisely what they were doing there. Spinoza had been the one to tell him before they had mounted up for the crossing, and her face had betrayed her long-seated doubts.
‘We activated a link from Rassilo’s network,’ she had told him. ‘In what came back, the Lord Crowl recognised snatches of battle language from the Forbidden Fortress. We therefore believe the third member of the conspiracy is the Master of the Astronomican.’
We believe.
Still, having arrived here now, it was impossible not to see that something terrible had taken place. Had it been his decision, he would have withdrawn immediately and called for back-up, broadcasting to all and any receptors in range.
Crowl had just pressed on, reiterating the need to detain the Master before the chance went, thrusting deeper into the pitch darkness of the interior.
Now they were far from help. No comm signal would escape this colossal edifice. Either Crowl understood more than he was letting on, or they were taking a reckless chance. The inquisitor had taken gambles before, and every time Revus had gone along with them. The fact that both of them were still alive after so many years working together demonstrated the soundness of the general doctrine, and he had learned to trust the old man’s instincts.
Until now. Now, the sickness could no longer be ignored.
They climbed a long, broad stair, stepping over the long slicks of blood. One skeletal adept had been jammed between the spindles of the stone banister, her skull cracked, her ribs protruding like bone fingers. Another had, so it seemed, torn his own innards out.
They reached the landing above, where a dark crystal chandelier had once hung but was now dashed into pieces across the black floor. He checked his malfunctioning proximity meter, and caught a few jerky signals, flickering uncertainly. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the shadows writhe again, playing tricks on his mind.
Except they were not tricks. A robed horror sprang from the dark, swinging down the hem of a long, velvet curtain. A second creature darted out from under a heap of twisted corpses, its face punctured with hooks.
Revus opened fire, missing with his first shots. His troops reacted too slowly, dulled by the weight of mental confusion, and the las-bolts skittered ill-directedly. The corrupted adepts moved as if they were half out of time and space – lurching and shifting, sliding eerily through the swivelling shadows. The lumen beams spun as the storm troopers scattered, trying to gain a hit. Revus thought he saw the first psyker – a horribly emaciated wretch with tattered robes flapping around a cane-thin torso – rise up into the air, before its mind-blast hit him, hurling him from his feet.
The touch was freezing, an agony of frost, slicing through his armour as if it weren’t there and bending him double. He cried out, just one of many shouts and bolt-blasts, making his ears ring and his vision shake.
He unfolded with effort and tried to find a target – any target – in the swing and flash of half-perceived impressions. He saw another one of his own troops sail past him, arms cartwheeling, cracking into the chandelier’s remnants with a sickening crunch.
‘Enough,’ he spat, furious with himself.
He opened fire, clamping his finger to the trigger and punching las-beams right into the onrushing hook-face.
‘The Wound!’ it cried, writhing in obscene ecstasy as the bolts sliced into
it. It stumbled, carried through the las-fire by its momentum, and lurched out to claw at him.
He couldn’t move. He just fired and fired, tearing the flesh from its bones, but still it came on, dragging itself into him. A half-skinned face reared up, pulled into a raw grin by the hooks, its black-in-black eyes wide with hunger.
The charge-pack clicked empty, and Revus swung the hellgun round to smash the stock into its face. By then Hegain was piling in too, hammering at it with his own weapon. A third storm trooper joined in, and they beat it down into the ground, smashing its bones, grinding it into the floor, their movements frantic. Revus heard someone shouting, roaring, screaming – and only slowly realised it was him. Horrified, he jerked away, dragging himself from the wreck of what had once been a human, swivelling around to try to locate the other one.
Hegain and the other soldier withdrew as well, all breathing heavily. The corrupted psyker lay on the stone between them, its tortured body broken. It was still breathing – gargling on its own blood, but somehow dragging breaths in. With a liquid gurgle, it started to slither after him.
Spinoza emerged from the shadows, easing Hegain aside to get into contact. Her crozius was flaming. With brutal efficiency, she swung the maul down over the prone psyker, finally snuffing out those terrible, snuffling gasps.
‘Move,’ she commanded, breaking back the way she had come and beckoning him to follow. ‘Faster, now.’
They did as she said, breaking into a jog. As he went, Revus forced himself to remember the basics – snap a new charge in, keep moving, keep looking out and up. He blinked through the flicker-dazzle of jumping lumens, trying to catch sight of the other creature amid the flash of light-dark. He caught glimpses of more bodies on the floor – his own troops, this time, broken against the walls, bent backwards, thrown aside like puppets.
Hegain limped along with him, aiming his hellgun jerkily as he went, his breathing a little too rapid. Up ahead, a heavy set of doors loomed. Their edges were blurred, sliding around as they sprinted towards them. Revus began to feel like he might pass out, and willed himself to keep going. From somewhere behind he heard a high-pitched scream, then the smack of bolt-rounds striking something hard and unyielding.
Vaults of Terra- The Hollow Mountain - Chris Wraight Page 23