Vaults of Terra: The Carrion Throne

by Chris Wraight

  Gorgias, floating ahead with its eye glowing bloodily, clicked agreement.

  ‘Affirmativo,’ it chattered, mindlessly. ‘Yes-yes. Combustum. Yes.’

  Chapter Three

  On Terra, dawn was a meagre thing, a faint lifting of the dark, half-accomplished, leaving semi-night shrouding all but the highest spire peaks.

  Spinoza had woken long before the grey creeping daylight, conditioned by her schola training. She had pushed herself from her bunk, shivering as her naked feet touched Courvain’s cold steel floor, then knelt before the altar in the wall.

  Then she had prayed, mouthing the Ministorum rites, sticking to the old Pradjia doctrine, the one she had loved as a child, with its old rhythms and replies.

  I am weak. He is strength. In Him, I am strong.

  I am imperfect. He is perfect. In Him, I am perfected.

  She had knelt until her knees had numbed and her wrists ached. Then she had risen, performed the physical exercises, donned her clothing, her armour, and then finally her interrogator’s rosette – a clenched steel fist, crushing a snake with ruby eyes. It was not a full Inquisitorial sigil, and lacked the holographic tell-mark of the ordo, but those who knew what to look for would know what it meant.

  Her small chamber had no mirror, but she knew what she would see if she had one brought: a stocky woman, thirty Terran-standard years old, short peroxide-blonde hair, broad features, pale freckled skin, brown eyes. She would see the tight features, the erect stance, the belligerence bubbling under the surface, only tempered by decades of conditioning.

  I am unfinished. He is finality. In Him, I am completed.

  She looked down at her rosette. It was flecked with blood, and she reached for a rag to clean it. The pseudo-abhuman had died badly, thrashing and screaming at the end. They all died badly under the trials. It didn’t matter how they entered them – confident, terrified, numb – they all ended weeping.

  Still, there was knowledge now. She had gained what Crowl had sent her to gain. She had a name – the Angel’s Tears – and the location for two other cells, and half-snippets of data on movements and plans. It was a cabal of sorts, a gathering of malcontents, just as existed on every world in the glorious Imperium, gnawing like rats at the base of civilisation. But they were getting ready for something – an event that the subject knew almost nothing about in detail, only that it was coming, and soon, and required heavy armament if all was to be accomplished. In the end, his bloodied face had almost been ecstatic.

  A soft chime sounded at her door.

  ‘Come,’ she said, reaching for her cloak and pinning it to her shoulder.

  A thin girl entered, grey-skinned, clad in a black shift. Her hair was sparse, already beginning to shed. Spinoza guessed she was no more than eighteen standard. She carried a tray laden with food – meatslabs, vitgruel, real fruit.

  Real fruit! There were eight grapes, dried almost to raisins, clinging to a black stalk. The girl’s hands shook as she carried the tray, and her sunken eyes never left it.

  Spinoza took the tray from her, placed it on the chamber’s only table, then sat. The girl turned to leave.

  ‘Wait,’ said Spinoza, tearing a strip of meatslab and chewing. ‘How long have you served here?’

  The girl looked confused, and it was then that Spinoza realised her error. The girl had always served here. Her parents had always served here. If in the future she obtained a sanctioned mate, then he, and her, and any children would always serve here. Courvain was her world, within the world of the city, within the world that was Terra.

  ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Yessika.’

  ‘You serve the Lord Crowl?’

  The girl nodded, warily.

  ‘In his private chambers?’

  A shake of the head.

  ‘You deliver from the refectories, to the higher levels?’

  A nod.

  ‘You will serve me, while I dwell here?’

  Another nod.

  ‘Good. I am glad to know you, Yessika.’ Spinoza took one of the grapes, and the leathery skin yielded just a little in her grasp. ‘You looked at these, as you carried them to me, did you not?’

  Yessika shook her head vehemently then, a mix of outrage and fear. ‘No, lord, I did–’

  ‘You would not be human had you not. Looking is no crime. Come here.’

  Yessika shuffled closer, twisting her hands on her shift, looking nervous.

  ‘I wish to serve the Lord Crowl well, while I am here,’ said Spinoza, popping the grape into her mouth and chewing. By the Throne, it was good – real juice, acrid, bitter from whatever transport it had endured, but real. ‘I can only perform my duty with knowledge. If you hear things, you will tell me, yes?’

  Yessika looked uncertain. She halted, coming no closer.

  Spinoza took a second grape and rolled it between her fingers. ‘Come here.’

  The girl sidled closer. Spinoza reached out, pressing the grape against her thin lips. ‘Open.’

  It took a second for Yessika to comply. When she did, taking the fruit, she was too afraid to chew.

  Spinoza laughed. ‘Go ahead.’

  Yessika’s jaw began to move. As she did, a look of awe spread slowly over her emaciated features. She smiled, the juice dribbling down her chin, which she greedily caught with a fingertip and licked clean.

  Then the fear returned, and she started to twist the fabric of her shift again.

  Spinoza placed an armoured hand on her shoulder, feeling the bird-thin bones shift under the skin. ‘One gift given,’ she said softly.

  The girl looked back at her warily, then nodded.

  ‘You may go.’

  Yessika hurried out, closing the door as she went. Spinoza sat back, and finished her meal. As soon as she had done so, a red light blinked on top of the console next to her bunk. A brass receptacle, slung with black cabling, hung like a crushed spider on the wall, crowned with an iron vox-emitter. It looked like it had been there for a thousand years.

  Spinoza activated the link. ‘Your command?’

  ‘I read your report,’ Crowl’s voice crackled. ‘Very thorough. You’ll go to the coordinates you extracted and bring us another subject.’

  ‘As you will it.’

  ‘The Angel’s Tears. That’s what they call themselves?’

  ‘So it would appear.’

  ‘What do they want, Spinoza?’

  There was no answer to that, not with precision, and yet precision was hardly required. They were mobilising, storing looted weapons, spreading like a contagion throughout the lower reaches of Salvator’s spires. Like so many, they had listened to foul whispers in the night – of another order, of a better life, of another way – and that was enough to drag their actions into the sordid swamp of perversion.

  ‘I will endeavour to discover more detail,’ she said.

  ‘Keep one of them alive a bit longer next time, maybe?’

  ‘If there is something to be gained by it.’

  There was a pause at the other end of the vox-link. ‘Very well,’ said Crowl. ‘Use your judgement. And be wary – the location you identified is further into Malliax. I recommend taking an escort.’

  ‘I will.’

  The link cut out. Spinoza studied her reactions. Was she being too curt? It was hard to maintain the proper sense of respect, something that had always come naturally with Tur. Crowl was testing her, that was evident, looking for a reaction. She understood that, and ought to have been able to adjust.

  But there was no reverence in his speech. If he had been a man of the Imperium, rather than an agent of the Holy Ordo, she might have…

  I am impatient. He is eternal. Through Him, I endure all things.

  She got up, and pressed the comm-bead to summon an armed escort. Before leaving the chamber, she reached f
or the crozius and mag-locked it to her belt. She had little doubt it would be needed.

  Crowl sat back in his throne, pressing his hands together, his brow furrowing.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asked.

  Gorgias’ sensor-eye dimmed momentarily, then strobed back to life.

  ‘Like-like. Spiritus bonum. Chose well.’

  ‘Thought you’d approve. She’ll have to learn fast.’

  ‘Spiritus bonum.’

  ‘Yes, you said that. I suppose that counts for something.’

  Crowl reached for a crystal vial, perched on a leather-topped table by his side. He took a distasteful look at the blood-red liquid within, then removed the stopper and drained the contents. It took a few seconds for it to work, and the restorative effects were less than they had once been.

  Gorgias chuntered disapprovingly, and levitated into the shadows. ‘Nequissimus. No good.’

  ‘I know it,’ Crowl replied.

  Then he rose from the throne and walked from the chamber. Once in the hallway, he descended four levels, took a turbo-lift to nominal thoroughfare-level IX, and summoned a groundcar from the waiting pool.

  The driver pulled up, opened the side doors and made the sign of the aquila. She was middle-aged, in her twenties, wearing a stiff-collared uniform. The groundcar was heavy-tracked with armour-grade plates and slit windows. As it came to a halt, its trembling smokestacks leaked sooty palls up the walls.

  Crowl got in. ‘My thanks, Aneela.’ He settled into the padded seat. ‘How is your daughter?’

  ‘She is well, I thank you, lord.’

  ‘Learning her rotes?’

  ‘She strives to.’

  ‘If she wants to join the Adeptus Terra, she will need to.’

  ‘We tell her this.’

  Crowl smiled. ‘The young.’

  ‘Your command?’

  ‘Take me to Gulagh.’

  The driver saluted again, raised the groundcar’s flak shields, and powered the machine smoothly towards one of Courvain’s many exit ramps.

  Crowl sat back, watching idly through the long horizontal real-viewer. The tarquezine began to have an effect, and he felt the first twinge of stimulus bleed through his muscles.

  They trundled out into the open, leaving the arched gates to the fortress and powering out across a single-span bridge towards the forest of rockcrete ahead and above. Soon they were surrounded by phalanxes of traffic – ore-haulers, tracked personnel crawlers, Astra Militarum supply trucks, all shoving and belching into the transit lanes that webbed the chasms between towers.

  Aneela skilfully guided the groundcar out onto the priority conduits used by privileged Imperial agencies, and soon they were rumbling across a series of vaned bridges that vaulted the gridlock below. Statues of saints flanked the thoroughfare, all of them caked in soot and with their faces cracked and obscured.

  Above, the skies were thick with boiling dust, punctured only by sulphurous lumen beams. The arbitrators were out in force, their black-flanked hunter-killers hovering on gritty downdraughts like metal vultures. Below them, below it all, churned the eternal throngs, milling in amorphous gradations of mania. Crowl spied cowled processions wending their way across the ambulatory plazas, headed by priests carrying gauzy red lanterns. Dimly, just audible over the endless thunder of ranged promethium engines, he could hear the massed chanting, the rolling boom of drums, the heavy clang of servitor-dragged gong-gurneys.

  The processions were getting more numerous. Over the next few days, they would coalesce, boiling out of the cavernous shells of the cathedral precincts, swelling like a living river and rising towards the hundred-kilometre-long Avenue of Eternal Remembrance – the vast causeway built from the annihilated remnants of enemy Titans that led down, eventually, to the fabled Eternity Gate itself.

  The groundcar sped north, weaving between the colossal spire flanks, ducking under layers of overhanging transit-tubes. Vox-augmitters blared out ritual scripts, fifty-metre-high pict screens displayed glowing icons of the Angel Sacrificed, while every scrap of exposed space seemed to be occupied by Ministorum adepts, whipping up the crowds of workers into ever higher degrees of devotional frenzy. Amid the drifting clots of air traffic, augmetic cherubs in chipped gold-and-red armour floated listlessly, weeping continually from gilded tear ducts.

  ‘Madness,’ breathed Crowl, absently.

  ‘Lord?’ asked Aneela.

  ‘Nothing. Keep driving.’

  They passed around the bole of a tattered, rockcrete-grey hab tower and up higher, threading into ganglia of converging transit lanes. Soon another edifice loomed before them, dark as pitch and illuminated from within by pale blue lumen-points. A tarnished iron skull hung over the fortified gate, its eyes empty and gaping.

  The guards waved them through, and Aneela drew up to a pair of polished obsidian doors. Crowl got out, to be greeted by two guards wearing dark chainmail armour and bone-white helms. They bowed low, sweeping the tips of electro-halberds across the stone floor, and behind them the doors swung soundlessly open.

  Crowl marched in, passing under a lintel marked with the sigils of the Adeptus Terra, the serpent banners of the medicae guilds and obscure icons of lesser ordos, all crowned with an Imperial twin-headed eagle set in bas-relief.

  He was greeted by an obese man draped in robes of pale blue, blotched with grease and clinging to the folds of flesh beneath. His hairless head was pale, his lips red, his eyes piggish. The man folded thick fingers before him, each one clustered with iron rings. An augmetic earpiece glinted from behind rejuve-smoothed lobes, a wire thread with pearl-like cogitator nodes. He wore the amulet of an medicae-general on his sloping chest, marking him as psycho-screened and cleared to oversee ordo clean-up work.

  The bulbous man bowed.

  ‘Inquisitor,’ he said, turning to usher Crowl in.

  Crowl nodded, walking on. ‘How goes it, Gulagh?’

  ‘The air is hot. The pilgrims disgust me. I have more labour than I care for.’

  ‘Did I hear that right?’

  ‘The air is pleasant. The pilgrims are an inspiration. My labours are a blessing.’

  ‘All we wish for is the truth.’

  The two of them passed within the complex, entering snaking tunnels of slag-grey rockcrete. Just as in Courvain the atmospherics were recycled, sealed off from Terra’s smog outside. They passed surgical chambers, each one antiseptic, lit brightly with lurid sodium lumens, most with their medicae slabs occupied. Menials shuffled past in the tight-twisted corridors, bowing and pulling plasticky green cowls over hidden faces. They carried the panoply of their trade with them: steel trays piled with instruments sticky with blood, swilling vials, skin-bleachers, eviscerators, bone saws, deep-vein needles.

  ‘They tell me you have a new acolyte,’ said Gulagh, leading Crowl deeper down.

  ‘Cracking ordo ciphers again, Gulagh?’

  ‘Oh, I hear things.’

  ‘She won’t be mine for long. Too good. Too keen.’

  ‘Ah.’

  They entered a long hall, its floor tiled, windowless and lit by hovering suspensors that whirred from their archaic power feeds. Lines of medicae slabs ran down either wall, each one occupied by a cloth-draped body.

  Crowl paused at the first one and lifted the fabric. The corpse underneath was female, young, tattooed at the neck, greasy hair pulled back from a thin face.

  ‘These are the ones from Malliax?’ Crowl asked, studying her carefully.

  ‘The very same.’

  ‘Find anything?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Crowl turned to Gulagh sceptically. ‘Nothing at all?’

  Gulagh chuckled, and his many chins wobbled. ‘I never know why you come down here, inquisitor. None of the other lords do.’

  He pulled a magnomonocle from his robes and wedged it over his
left eye, making the lens-motors whisper. Then he bent over the corpse, pulling its eyelids down, opening its jaw, yanking at the empty gums. As he worked, he wheezed, and gobbets of perspiration twinkled on his folds of fat.

  ‘All of them the same,’ he said, pulling the sheet aside and working down to her ribs. ‘Hellgun rounds, single punctures. We’ve got one with a broken spine – who did that? Your troops are good shots, I’ve said it before. Otherwise, these are underhive scum. Rotten teeth, rotten bones, cancers, cataracts and rickets, but nothing much else.’

  Crowl looked down the rows of corpses. ‘They don’t run away, not at first,’ he said. ‘They’re organised. Something’s driving them.’

  ‘What was their crime?’

  ‘Unsanctioned association.’

  ‘You don’t know, then.’

  Crowl smiled. ‘My interrogator, the one you know all about, she spoke to one of the cell leaders. He told her they were getting ready for something, but he hadn’t been told what. They’re hoarding information from their own kind. Remind you of anyone? And they’ve got weapons.’

  ‘Who hasn’t? There’s a lasgun for every newborn down here.’

  ‘What an inspiring thought.’ Crowl turned back to the corpse. ‘How many of them are here?’

  ‘All you sent us. We’ve taken the teeth, we’ll take the hair. Any organs good enough to freeze I’ll send to the splicers.’

  ‘I count twenty-five.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘I sent you twenty-four.’

  Gulagh chuckled, wiping his podgy hand on the corpse’s shroud. ‘You counted them yourself, inquisitor? I think you do need more staff.’

  Crowl didn’t smile. He paced down the lines of slabs, pulling the linen from the face of each corpse. The one at the very end was a mountain of slumped muscle – the first of the two abhumans – while the rest were just skin and bones.

  Gulagh waddled after him. ‘They were brought in on standard transports. If there’s been a mistake–’

  ‘Detail,’ Crowl muttered, ignoring the apothecary-general. ‘That is the problem.’

  He reached a body near the end of the line, and exposed its face. This one was a man, perhaps thirty standard, a little fuller of face than the first woman, hair cropped tight to his scalp, eyes ringed red. The corpse stared up sightlessly into the sodium globes above.