They piled through the doors. Once across the threshold, Revus dropped down and swung around, attempting again to find something to aim at in the murk. He felt other bodies blunder past him, Crowl among them, then the assassin, then, last of all, Spinoza, striding tall in her blood-red armour.
Someone hit a control, and the shutters clattered down. Blast-panels slid together behind them, sealing them in with a tight, final snap.
The noises of combat echoed away. Revus stayed hunched down. His blood thundered in his temples. His hands were shaking, his legs were like liquid.
Get a grip, he told himself. It’s just witchery.
They were in a circular chamber. Sensorium equipment lined the walls. A hololith column dominated the central space, marred by three corpses draped across it like macabre decorations. Crowl had sunk to his knees too, one curled fist resting on the floor, recovering himself. Revus could see ten of his storm troopers there, plus the assassin and the interrogator. Gorgias darted around, back and forth, his lumen beam winking and flaring in the dark.
‘Did we get the second one?’ Khazad asked, her voice uncharacteristically uncertain.
‘I shot it,’ Hegain offered weakly, sounding like he only half knew where he was. ‘Do not know, in truth, if that was the end of it.’
‘The place is infested,’ Spinoza muttered, checking the door-seal.
Crowl got awkwardly to his feet. ‘So it seems.’ He limped over to the hololith column. ‘And we are in the dark, most literally. Sergeant, if you please?’
Hegain roused himself and hurried to assist. Revus joined them.
This chamber was much like all the others they had passed through already – depowered, completely dark. They dragged the bodies away from the main column and examined the power inputs. Everything was cold and dead. Hegain pulled a portable cell from his webbing and adjusted the interface. He set the cell for maximum drain and slotted it into the column’s auxiliary power feed.
The mechanism reacted instantly. Lights strobed up its baroque base-station before spinning out across the flat iron surface. A series of rune-controls glowed into life, all sickly green against the deep dark.
Crowl leaned forward, his breathing shallow, condensation steaming from his helm. ‘Good,’ he said, studying the interface. ‘This is a start.’
He depressed one of the runes, and a hololith of the Fortress spiralled into instantiation over the column’s octagonal top.
Revus forced himself to focus, to absorb himself in the schematic. It took a moment for his eyes to even focus properly, but he narrowed them and blinked hard until they did.
The Astronomican’s central sphere was clearly visible at the heart of the complex. A bewildering array of internal chambers and corridors were picked out in translucent lines around that core, all slowly rotating. Status indicators and personnel locators blinked all across the network, clustered in various locations like corpuscles in a bloodstream.
‘Life-signs,’ Spinoza said, indicating a series of markers making their way steadily inwards. ‘Withdrawing to the central region.’
Crowl nodded. ‘An inner defence layer. Some survived, at least.’
Hegain moved over to a pict-screen, and connected it to the newly powered cell-grid. More runes blinked into life across the crystal surface. ‘Not many,’ he said. ‘Reports here from all over the Fortress. Sudden breakdown in controls. Sector after sector… they did not have any time.’
‘What caused it?’ Crowl asked.
‘Unknown.’
Spinoza peered intently at the schema. ‘Why no distress calls?’
Hegain worked the dials, prompting more runes to skid across the display. He shook his head. ‘Unsure, lord. There are confused reports… Comms towers overrun, that is plain.’ He looked up. ‘If they lost the transmitters–’
‘Someone would still notice,’ Spinoza said. ‘This is the Fortress.’
‘A thousand fires are burning,’ Revus said. ‘Unless a persistent distress call made it out…’
Crowl laughed. The sound was so strange, so jarring, that for a moment Revus didn’t know where it had come from. ‘That is it, captain,’ he said. ‘Pride. They left it too late, tried to keep a lid on it, and now their mouthpiece has been taken away from them.’ He leaned in closer, gripping the edge of the column. ‘He is still in there, though. The one we came for. He cannot run now.’
‘That may be true, lord,’ said Spinoza. ‘But you can see what has happened. We must find a way to raise the alarm.’
‘Not what we came for,’ said Crowl, staring intently into the heart of the hololith.
Revus looked over at Spinoza. Hegain too broke off from his work and looked up at Crowl. Even Gorgias stopped spinning.
‘This is the Astronomican, lord,’ Spinoza said, quietly. ‘This is the Emperor’s Light.’
‘Yes, Spinoza. That it is.’
‘You have seen the… corrupted. We must summon aid. We cannot halt it by ourselves.’
‘We did not come to halt it.’ Crowl straightened, seemingly having seen enough. ‘We came for the Master. I have memorised the path – come, we must be swift, lest they complete their inner defence and lock us out.’
He moved away from the hololith, clearly expecting the rest of them to come with him.
Spinoza, though, stayed where she was. ‘You cannot be in earnest, lord,’ she said.
Crowl halted. ‘I am always in earnest, interrogator. Some catastrophe has befallen this place – that may hamper our task, but it cannot prevent it.’
‘The Fortress is overrun.’
‘That is not our concern.’
In eight years of service, Revus had never spoken against his master. There had never been the cause for it. For a moment, even then, he struggled. He knew his mind was under unnatural psychic stress. He knew that his fear and his fatigue made him susceptible to error. He had already committed one great mistake, one that another master might have had him sanctioned, or even executed, for.
But this was now madness.
‘The interrogator is correct, lord,’ he interjected, feeling as if he had to drag the words out with pincers.
Crowl snapped around to face him. ‘Revus,’ he breathed, disbelievingly. ‘What is this, now?’
‘As I said, lord. The interrogator is correct.’
Another laugh blurted from Crowl’s vox-grille, just as harsh, just as laced with the evidence of stimms. ‘I think you are forgetting your duty, captain,’ he said, an edge of menace in his normally equable voice.
‘It is duty that compels me,’ Revus replied, trying to keep his voice calm. He hated this. He hated this with every fibre of his being. ‘You have seen the horrors here. They cannot be allowed to endanger–’
‘So it has infected you.’ Crowl spoke as if a great insight had just come to him. He looked over at Spinoza. ‘You were there, too. It has infected both of you.’ He backed away from them, keeping Sanguine in his hand. The storm troopers in the chamber did not intervene. Some looked to Revus, some to Crowl. ‘Jarrod told me it could affect minds. It could whisper, long after the event. You told me so yourself, did you not, Spinoza? Now we are close, its poison will not let you strike. It speaks to you still, and you are too weak to see it.’
In a flicker of battle-sign, Spinoza gestured for the storm troopers to keep their weapons lowered and make no move. ‘I have attempted to counsel you, lord,’ she said. ‘Such was my duty. When that counsel was discarded, I attempted to serve. Such was my duty. But now, in all conscience, I can no longer obey. We must make haste to draw reinforcements here, or we will lose the Beacon.’
‘You wish to delay me,’ Crowl accused, moving towards a second door on the far side of the chamber. ‘You wish to keep the traitor from justice at my hand.’
Gorgias became seriously agitated then. ‘Insanus!’ he croaked, unsure wh
ich way to float. ‘Listen to her!’
‘We can secure the Fortress,’ Revus offered, trying again. ‘Restore comms, summon assistance. Then, when the danger is past, we can pursue the one you desire to speak to. He can hardly escape.’
Crowl laughed a third time. ‘You fool. That is what he wishes for. Fate has trapped him here, caught in some mire of his own making, and you wish to break him out of it.’ He began to fumble with the door release. ‘So be it. Your treachery damns you. All of you. If you do not have the stomach for the hunt, you may go your own way.’
Spinoza risked a step towards him, reaching out with her gauntlet. ‘My lord,’ she said. ‘Do not leave. You have seen what waits in the dark.’
‘Afraid of it?’ Crowl asked, mockingly. ‘No matter. You shall not have to face it. I always preferred hunting alone.’
‘Not alone.’ The voice was Khazad’s. Unseen, unnoticed, she had edged closer to Crowl. Now she moved to stand beside him, blade in hand. ‘If he is in there, I come with you too.’
‘Good!’ Crowl said, delighted. ‘Kataj. I knew I was right to take you in.’
Revus watched Khazad in disbelief. The whole place screamed with madness. All judgement was affected – hers too, seemingly.
‘No one else moves,’ Spinoza ordered, addressing the storm troopers. ‘Stay where you are – your duty is plain.’
Crowl finally activated the locks, and doors slid open. The darkness beyond was almost painful in its completeness.
‘I pity you, Spinoza,’ he said, and the edge of mania made his words sound almost jaunty. ‘The chance to achieve greatness comes but once in a lifetime.’
For a moment, he and Khazad stood before the chasm into darkness, as solid as ever.
‘I pray you will see your folly in time,’ Spinoza said. ‘I pray that He preserves you.’
Then the two of them melted into the blackness. The doorway gaped emptily, ushering in the fresh stink of blood.
Revus looked at Spinoza, feeling more wretched than he had ever done. ‘What now?’
Spinoza stood for a moment, seemingly unable to move. Then she gripped Argent. The crozius was still activated, and a flicker of stray power ran down its shaft.
‘Close the doors, captain,’ she said, her voice cold and firm. ‘We have work to do.’
Chapter Twenty
This was vindication. This was confirmation of everything he had been working for since the Palace, drawing the threads together, tying them into the cord that had led him here, at last, to the source, to the architect.
His mind was working well, very well, much faster now. The Fortress, strangely enough, was helping with that. He could see things in the dark, flashes of memories and ideas, and they were the things that had brought him here, his angels of perception, the fragments of the whole. The xenos was there too, of course, goading him, driving him onward. He had long since stopped being surprised or shocked by its regular appearances – reflected in the black crystal surfaces, caught at the edge of sight when he turned his head, growling something unintelligible behind the speech of others.
Running helped, too. His body felt looser now. He could feel blood in his armour and guessed that something had broken, somewhere, but he couldn’t attend to that now. He was awake again. It was still hard to breathe, but if he just kept going, just kept moving, it would all be fine.
He couldn’t stop. If he stopped, he might hear Spinoza’s doubts again. He might see her face, rather than its face, with that pious, insufferable concern written all over it.
She was a good acolyte, Spinoza. He was fond of her, despite her stiffness, her obsession with the regulations of their ordo. She would regret not coming with him, when all was finally revealed. She would regret missing her chance to understand.
Khazad loped alongside him, running freely, almost invisible in the gloom. That was a reassurance, if he was honest. Now that he was back in the tunnels, heading through the blood-soaked chambers with their markers of madness and excruciation, it was good to have a blade at his side, one who had already proved her worth.
Perhaps Khazad would have made a better acolyte. Perhaps, as fate willed it, that had been Spinoza’s function all along – to bring the assassin into the fold. Perhaps, after this, another adjustment would have to be made.
‘The wound,’ he muttered, as he hobbled along. ‘The wound.’
‘Why do they say it?’ Khazad asked, lighting the way ahead with the gold-silver illumination from her blade.
Crowl thought quickly. His mind was racing now, burning ahead. It was so much easier to think in here. ‘They are soul-bound,’ he whispered. ‘They see things. They know things and they feel things. They see things even the Magister did not.’ He chuckled. ‘A wound in the galaxy. There is some doubt as to their current status and reporting reliability. Bajan was a greater fool than his master. I hear the voices of a thousand worlds. There is a link. The anomaly. The xenos. The dead of the Astronomican.’
Khazad did not reply. She seemed to have sunk into a kind of battle-trance, and uttered few words now. She, too, appeared to have been enhanced by the psychic pressure in the air, stripped down to her essentials, shorn of all things but her remaining death-oath.
The chambers were getting bigger, becoming finer. Dark crystal surfaces were everywhere, reflecting the images of horror and pain like augmenting reflectors. Senior adepts slumped among the dead now, their fur-lined robes sticky with blood, their teeth pulled and their eyes gouged. In one hall – something ceremonial he guessed, going by the proscenium arch and ranked stages – dozens were strung up, flayed, changed, damaged, stretched. Someone had scrawled The Wound across a wall made of mirrors, tracing the words out in bloody handprints.
One of the killers was still there, gorging on raw flesh, her own nightshade robes disarranged and her hair stiff with blood over an enlarged skull. Her eyes, like all of their eyes, were black-in-black, empty, pupil-less, but still somehow capable of something like sight. She screamed at them, whirling a blackwood staff until it whipped the bloody flecks into a storm around her.
Khazad did what Khazad did best, darting and dancing in close, cutting the staff up with two rapid flickers of her blade, but the woman blasted her away with a fist-clench, then rose up unsteadily into the air, her robes fluttering.
Crowl shot her. He shot her again. He shot her a third time. His aim was impeccable. His reactions were superlative. His fingers appeared to be bleeding, and there was something sharp and urgent taking place in his chest cavity, but he could not pay any attention to that. The creature bent over itself as the bullets hit, jerking back and forth before being driven back against an old hexagrammatic ward graven into the crystal walls. When she hit it, she screamed and thrashed, her robes bursting into blue-edged flame. She couldn’t get away from it. She stuck fast, like an insect on a pin, shrieking and writhing. Crowl watched it unfold, enthralled.
Khazad got back to her feet, and hobbled to his side.
‘Must keep moving,’ she muttered.
So they did, leaving the witch to burn. They raced away from the hall, entered the next, crept unseen through the procession of chambers, each one of them as black in their armour as the Fortress around them. As they hurried, Crowl found that he couldn’t stop talking, even if it was only to himself now.
‘Battle-language,’ he murmured, remembering how he had worked it out. ‘One of many hundreds in use. An esoteric dialect, based on pre-Vandire lexical forms. Suits this place. I told Palv it would be worth making a study of them, all of them, their origins, their types, but he never agreed, and now look where it has led us.’
He halted suddenly, drawing up before a baroque altarpiece encrusted with blinded angels and hawk-faced, lion-bodied sentinels. ‘Where is Gorgias?’ he asked, aware for the first time that the skull was not there.
‘The skull does not come,’ Khazad said, prowling ahead,
her boots sucking on the wet floor.
Crowl shook his head. ‘Even him,’ he said mournfully.
Then they were moving again, limping, scampering, hugging the dark, squelching through the dampness where the violence had been. The vibrations in the air became even more intense. A pressure built up, making his sinuses ache. The silence was broken now, underpinned by a low, grinding thrum, one that ran through every structure and shivered every column.
They passed through a long, narrow capillary passageway before breaking out into the biggest hall they had yet encountered. The change in air pressure was palpable. They crept across the floor. Giant supporting columns glinted at them in the gloom, each one engraved with defaced warding runes and astrological devices. Crowl caught sight of the xenos again, peering out from behind one of the pillars, smiling at him, before darting back into hiding, and he almost smiled back at it.
‘Fighters,’ Khazad warned, suddenly racing over to the chamber’s central aisle.
Crowl went after her, tripping over an extended arm on the floor, then slipping on the still-warm matter underfoot.
A tangle of bodies lay in the open centre of the hall. Most were just as the others had been – acolytes and menials of the Fortress, clad in nightshade, their sunlight-starved flesh as white as alabaster. But among them were others – soldiers, clad in well-made carapace armour. Khazad dropped down beside the nearest of them, bringing her snarling blade up close to illuminate it. The battle-plate was dark grey, unmarked, with a narrow-slit helm.
She looked up at Crowl. ‘Same ones as before,’ she said.
‘Good,’ Crowl said, looking up and out into the shadows. From up ahead, more sounds could be made out, only faintly, but there nevertheless. ‘They’re still fighting. Retreating, but still fighting.’
Vaults of Terra- The Hollow Mountain - Chris Wraight Page 24