Vaults of Terra- The Hollow Mountain - Chris Wraight

by Warhammer 40K

  Haessler reached the siege doors. The brace-columns on either side of them were shaking, and spiderwebs of tiny cracks ran across the reinforced armour of the outer surface. The entire space vibrated, shaking like chaff in a thresher.

  Spinoza hauled in painful breaths, dropping to one knee. Her vision was blurred, and when she blinked she saw, alternately, both Crowl and the xenos staring back at her from the bleary shadows.

  ‘They are in there,’ she panted, stating the obvious out of sheer desperation. There was no time. The outer Fortress was falling apart, and this door had been made to keep the world at bay.

  Haessler studied it for a split second.

  ‘Stand back,’ he ordered, waving his own squad to withdraw. He took up a number of charges from his belt – melta-bombs, from their look – and mag-clamped them to the door-seal. Then he pulled back alongside the rest of them. All of them, storm troopers included, trained their weapons on the same point, readying themselves for the timed explosions.

  Spinoza looked up above. More debris was now falling from the roof. The floor rippled like water, and the screaming was getting worse. Whatever was causing this was already well under way, building up to its inevitable crescendo.

  ‘We are too late,’ she murmured, watching the runes on the melta-bombs spin down to zero. ‘For the love of the Throne, we are here too late.’

  The air exploded. It kindled, flashed, sparked, then blew apart.

  The Master reeled suddenly, and Sanguine, free of his control, clanked to the ground. He staggered, falling back towards the spur’s edge, just as the psykers in the chamber, one by one, began to erupt.

  Crowl was felled too, hurled back down onto his knees. The spur shook, feeling for a moment like it might snap off and tumble into the gulf below. He went after his revolver but missed it, his vision blurring.

  The screams were everywhere now, inside his head, inside the sphere, swilling around, spilling over, deafening and unending. He saw lines of black force shoot across the sphere’s heart, snapping into the orb and sending it dark. Flames rushed across the chamber’s zenith, chewing through the thrones set into the curving walls, immolating them in bursts of shattered metal.

  ‘Khazad!’ he yelled, feeling as if the world were tilting away into the abyss. From the corner of his eye, he saw that the Resonance had been thrown aside too and now tottered on the edge of the spur. The assassin only needed a fraction of a second – freed of the psychic lock, she pounced, launching a flying kick at the woman and sending her sailing out into the seething ocean of burning souls. The surviving guards went after her, and Khazad swung around to take them on.

  That left the Master.

  Crowl grabbed Sanguine, clutched it in his shaky fist and fired. The shot went wide, disappearing into the gathering inferno, and Franck regained his poise. One faltering step at a time, he advanced on Crowl.

  ‘This delegation,’ Crowl demanded, firing again. ‘Where did you send them?’

  Franck held up a palm, and the bullet exploded before reaching him, showering them both in fragments.

  ‘Beyond help,’ the Master said, pulling a powerblade from his belt. His outline shook with what looked like a heat-haze, and the blade’s disruptor-flare pulled around him in wild tendrils. The air fizzed with psionic charge, kindling without warning, causing the air to sizzle and pop. Making aggressive use of the warp now was perilous – the combatants were reduced to the physical even as the very elements of reality turned into hellish plasma around them.

  Crowl snarled, launching himself at Franck, his free gauntlet curling into a fist. He struck out, and the Master parried with the knife, catching Crowl’s hand and snapping it back. Crowl punched out with Sanguine’s heel, catching Franck in the ribs and knocking him, staggering, back towards the edge. The Master dropped down to his knees against the pull of the flying energies.

  As he did so, the orb above them suddenly shrank radically, imploding into itself as if caught by some psychic black hole. The air in the chamber howled after it, sucking inward towards the rapidly blackening heart, and dark lightning blades leapt out from the sphere’s edge. The screams became ear-burstingly unbearable.

  Crowl shot a pained glance back towards Khazad, seeing that the assassin had dispatched the last of the guards. She swivelled on her heel, riding the surge of the unnatural winds, and galloped towards him.

  Franck struggled back to his feet, facing them both. His coat rippled around him, pressed flat against his body.

  ‘You can still redeem this!’ Crowl shouted. ‘Tell me where you sent them! Tell me what they took!’

  The Master tensed, ready for the coming impacts. ‘You are a persistent man!’ he cried. ‘Too persistent!’

  Crowl fired a third time as the Master lunged again, hitting him in the chest and blowing a long line of blood out the other side. That barely slowed him, and Franck slashed the powerblade across Crowl’s helm, driving the metal in. His vision dissolving into bloody blotches, Crowl reeled away, dropping Sanguine, only for Khazad to barrel into the Master, yelling Shoba curses so loudly that they were audible over the roaring tumult around them.

  Half-stunned, Crowl scrambled after his weapon. He never got the chance to pick it up.

  The black orb at the heart of the sphere suddenly pulsed, shuddered, then blew out.

  A thunder-clap rang out across the gulf, shattering every remaining light-point across the crystal’s edge. The screams extinguished. The fires guttered away. The psychic pressure accelerated into excruciating density, before it, too, blasted into nothingness. Blackness fell, as complete and choking as the void itself, broken only by the racing tongues of fire still guttering amid the preternatural hurricane.

  Crowl cried aloud, his back arching, watching as iron fragments – thrones, tiaras, bolts – blasted across the void and rained down from the sphere’s zenith. He crawled forward through the shadow, on his knees again, watching as the dark profiles of the Master and Khazad struggled desperately on the spur’s edge, backlit by driving flame.

  With the Beacon’s destruction, the sense of loss was suddenly agonising, as if a chunk of his soul had been wrenched from his body, leaving only a shallow husk behind. They were still fighting, the two of them, their limbs blurred amid the driving rain of iron flecks. The Master had his blade, but Khazad had her armoured hands, and it wasn’t clear which would prove decisive.

  Snarling through the pain, Crowl pushed himself up onto all fours and scrabbled along the spur, closing in, going for Franck’s trailing leg. As he did so, the final shockwave from the pulsar’s demise hit the spur, rupturing the stone’s surface and making it bounce like a storm-blown branch.

  Both Khazad and the Master were thrown from their feet, their momentum carrying them out over the edge.

  With a sudden burst of clarity, Crowl knew he could still reach them. His first thought was Franck – he could grab the Master, haul him back, get the answers he so desperately needed. His legs kicked straight, and he threw himself forward, his chest slamming into the stone floor. His left hand shot out, grasping an armoured wrist as it slithered down the steep rocky drop.

  Shouting aloud from the pain, Crowl lodged his other hand into a crack in the rock, bracing against the stone, and pulled hard. For a moment, as the suspended body thudded against the overhang, he thought his spine would crack. His shoulder shrieked with pain, taking the full weight. If he had not been wearing his armour, no doubt the bone would have sprung from the socket.

  He held on, breathing through gritted teeth. Wincing, he started to pull. Slowly, agonisingly, he dragged the dead-weight back from the edge.

  It worked. Khazad managed to get a foothold down below, somehow, and gradually reappeared over the rock’s lip. Once she had hauled herself over the spur’s edge, the two of them rolled onto their backs, panting hard.

  Crowl stared up at the zenith of the sphere. Flecks o
f smouldering metal were still drifting. The screams had all gone now, snuffed out with the extinguishing of the Beacon’s power.

  Everything hurt. He could taste his own blood against his teeth. His lungs felt as if they had been scraped internally by a blunt razor.

  Khazad was the first to recover the power of speech.

  ‘Though you would… go for… him,’ she gasped.

  It took Crowl a while to be able to respond.

  ‘Changed my mind,’ he whispered. ‘Kataj, once. Now Saijan.’

  She chuckled, painfully. After a while, she managed to get up. The rain of burning metal continued steadily, a scatter of dull red sparks against the darkening globe. Tremors still rumbled below them, and smoke was pouring out of the exit tunnel.

  ‘Think you can go back in there?’ she asked, concerned.

  Crowl lifted his head painfully. He wasn’t even sure he could get back to his feet. His shoulder was surely broken. His skull had been cut open where the Master had slashed against his helm. It was a struggle just to remain conscious.

  What did it matter, anyway? The quest had been in vain. Franck had achieved what he had set out to do – his forces had left Terra, carrying with them all that was needed to make the contract irreversible. The Beacon was extinguished. Everything had failed. The Wound had come to the Throneworld, and the fury of the End Times rode on the hems of its ragged, death-stained cloak.

  He was about to tell her that, and advise her to make her own way back alone, if she wished to, when he spied movement amid the smoke. At first he thought it must be one of the corrupted, staggering out of the hell they had created and ready to impose the final indignity, when he saw the first golden-yellow armour-profile break out from the swirls of roiling black.

  He let his head crack weakly back against the stone.

  ‘Spinoza,’ he croaked, smiling bleakly under his ruined helm.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Crowl didn’t know very much about what came next. He only had fleeting impressions of armoured giants in the dark, lifting him, taking him back into tunnel, and then across the bridge where the buried machines now flailed and sparked. He never remembered how they got him back to the hangars and into the gunship. He didn’t know whether they had pulled out again in one of Courvain’s Spiderwidows, or one of the Space Marines’ own massive transports. He had vague memories of many other troops arriving, pouring into the Fortress alongside red-robed priests. His unconsciousness ran very deep after that, and became completely dreamless. That, after all that had happened, was a relief.

  When he awoke properly, two days later, he discovered that not very much had changed. The anarchy, which up until then had seemed unprecedented in its severity, had only got worse. The loss of the Beacon could be felt by everyone, as if a heat-source they had never known about was taken away, leaving them shivering and naked. The Space Marines hadn’t lingered. There were too many fires to put out, even for them. He asked Erunion where they had gone, and the chirurgeon couldn’t tell him.

  Later, they would call that time the Days of Blindness. Those days would not last forever, but then, just then, right in the heart of the storm, none of them knew that. Being awake was an ordeal. Trying to sleep was even worse. Entire sections of the planet became ungovernable. The comm-links hissed with nothingness. Starvation reared its head in the underhives, and there were tales of daemons rising from the despoiled earth to prey on the harried minds of mortal men.

  Courvain, already damaged, became an island in a sea of danger. There was little rest for any of those who had survived. Revus took command of the defences, once he had recovered sufficiently, and was soon hard-pressed keeping the rabble from the gates, just as he had feared.

  Crowl spent his own recovery in isolation, refusing all but the company of Gorgias and Erunion. The worst of his wounds started to heal, but the underlying damage was now profound. He lay in his bed, staring at the ceiling, feeling his bones ache.

  On the third day, he managed to walk again, then dress himself. He felt strangely light, as if his innards had been stripped out, leaving him hollow and transparent. When he hobbled over to his hygiene-station, he looked into the mirror, and saw nothing but his own reflection.

  That, too, was a relief.

  On the fourth day, he summoned Spinoza to his chamber. She came promptly, just as always. She looked far better than he felt. Then again, she was younger, and stronger, and in every way a better representative of the ordo than he was.

  She sat at the far end of the long table. Suspensors floated overhead, casting a weak light across the furniture. It was dusty, now. Not enough staff remained for the luxuries of cleanliness, only survival.

  He sat at the other end. For a long time, neither of them said anything.

  ‘So,’ he said, eventually. ‘What do we do now, Spinoza?’

  She looked uncertain. ‘I do not know, lord.’

  ‘The last time we spoke, our exchange was not… friendly.’

  ‘There was a madness, lord. It affected us all.’

  ‘Some of us,’ Crowl said. He found his fingers reaching for a ­goblet, even though he had ordered that none be put out. ‘Tell me, how stands the Fortress?’

  ‘I am told they have stabilised it. The chambers were purged. I believe that agents of Mars are in place now, attempting to repower the mechanisms.’

  ‘Without a Master.’

  ‘I assume so. Unless another has been appointed.’

  ‘But there is a hope of saving it.’

  ‘There is a hope.’

  ‘As a result of your work, Spinoza. It might have passed beyond all recovery had you not acted as you did.’

  ‘We do not know that.’

  Crowl looked equivocal. ‘A reasonable supposition.’ His shoulder ached. ‘And so, I have a dilemma. When we spoke here before, in this place, I told you my trust in you was absolute. I needed it to be. We were embarking on a dangerous mission. I needed to know that, if we were placed in peril, I could rely on you.’

  Spinoza stiffened. It was always hard to read what she was thinking. Was she still resentful, now? Guilty, even? It was impossible to tell.

  ‘I did not think,’ she said carefully, ‘that you were yourself.’

  ‘Or perhaps,’ he said, evenly, ‘you thought that I was more myself than ever.’

  ‘No, I would not put it like that.’

  Crowl nodded. ‘No, I would not put it like that either. Even so.’

  Another silence fell.

  ‘I will be honest,’ Crowl said at last. ‘I do not know what to do. My thoughts are still disarranged. I do not know what to do about what we discovered. I do not know what to do about Revus. I do not know what to do about you.’ He paused, feeling the effects of his fatigue again. ‘There may be nothing left to do. Perhaps this is the end, not only of what we started, but of all things.’

  Spinoza said nothing. There might have been pain there, in her eyes. So hard to know.

  ‘An inquisitor must be master of his domain, or he is nothing,’ Crowl said, staring into the polished wood of the table. ‘His trust must be unshakable. If he tolerates insurrection in his retinue, how can he root it out elsewhere? And yet…’ He looked up at her again. ‘You were right.’

  There could be no doubt about it now. She was unable to hide her disquiet. ‘What, then,’ she asked, ‘would you have me do?’

  Crowl placed his hands together. ‘Nothing, Spinoza. Nothing. I need to go away for a while. I need to reflect. I need to think.’

  She looked concerned. ‘Go away? Surely… It is dangerous.’

  ‘So it is. Nonetheless, it must be done.’

  It looked like she might protest, but evidently thought better of it. Then, and for the first time, she looked him directly in the eye.

  ‘And after that,’ she said, cautiously, ‘after that is done, and w
hen you know your own mind, what of us, lord? You and me?’

  ‘I do not know,’ he said, looking away again. ‘That is the issue. I do not know.’

  He left Courvain by himself, not asking Aneela to pilot him this time. Using a flyer, he followed the route they had taken together by groundcar, travelling far quicker. The evidence of disorder was everywhere, lit up by skies the colour of flame. The threads, which had been loose for so long, had now unravelled entirely, turning Terra’s eternal city into one vast, untrammelled battlezone.

  He found himself wondering what Navradaran must have made of it. The Custodians were surely aware, even from their lofty vantage, of what was taking place. Would they sit back and let it happen? Were they even still present, guarding the ancient walls, or had the passing of the Beacon seen them disappear too, like daemons banished with a word of power?

  His speculations were becoming fanciful, uncontrolled. Such flights of imagination were not helpful.

  He landed and passed inside the spire, carrying his weapon openly. The tunnels were empty, though strewn with the debris of running battles. Some of the habs were burned out. A few were still smouldering. He could hear armed clashes some way in the distance, and knew that they would spread this way soon enough.

  Right up until he stood before Jarrod’s old armoured portal, he had dared to hope that the security devices would be intact. Of course, they were not. The hidden guns had been smashed, the doors kicked in. Much of the old man’s finery now lay, broken, in the street outside, its value unappreciated by those who had taken it.

  Crowl went inside. The evidence of destruction was mixed. Some of it was looters, but they had not been the first ones to break in. Jarrod could have held out almost indefinitely against that trash. No, the ones who had destroyed the security cordon had been more professional, more disciplined, acting in greater numbers.