Vaults of Terra: The Carrion Throne

by Chris Wraight

  ‘Clearly you do.’

  Gloch looked thoughtful for a moment, then finally stowed his sidearm and got to his feet. Standing, he was daunting, a giant of nearly seven foot, only a fraction of that accounted for by his thick body armour. His face was scarred and lined, his beard grey-streaked. ‘How long have you been on Terra, interrogator?’ he asked.

  Spinoza felt impatience rise within her. All she wanted to do was get out, get after that damned woman. She had been so close. To go back to Crowl, now, and admit another failure…

  ‘Long enough,’ she said. ‘You?’

  ‘My whole life, and I love it. Now, to come down here, alone. I’m not telling you your business–’

  ‘Damn right.’

  Gloch shrugged. ‘She’s called Falx.’

  ‘The woman?’

  ‘A case-name. Quantrain’s been after her for weeks. You’ll have noticed she’s well trained.’

  ‘And what else?’

  Gloch looked up, then around, then down. His troops were moving through the nutrient hall now, scanning, arresting, closing down processor units. ‘I can shunt the details to you at Crowl’s tower. You’ve seen these kills, the ritual ones? She’s always there, always close. The Angel’s Tears – I guess you know the name. I’ve not seen cameleo-plate for ten years.’ He started to chuckle. ‘I shot her once. In the chest, close as you are to me now, and she still got away. She’s got a tough hide, I’ll give her that.’

  ‘I might have broken that a bit.’

  ‘Good. Next time she’ll feel it more.’

  ‘What do they want?’

  ‘They’re unbelievers and killers. I don’t give a damn what they want.’

  Spinoza felt the comedown of the long chase. Her muscles ached, her innards felt empty. ‘They’re going for weapons,’ she repeated, thinking back to the pseudo-abhuman’s agonised thrashing. ‘Throne, how has this been tolerated?’

  ‘Tolerated?’ Gloch lost his smile. ‘You really haven’t been here long, have you?’

  ‘This is His world,’ Spinoza insisted, feeling lightheaded. ‘It makes me want to vomit. In four days–’

  ‘Yes, in four days. We are aware.’ Some of Gloch’s troops began to return, limping along the gantry. He shot them a quizzical look, but the lead sergeant shook her head. ‘You want my advice?’ Gloch said. ‘Go back to your old crow. Tell him if he wishes to assist us in this, it’d be better to attend in person. You understand?’

  That, at least, Spinoza could agree with. ‘I’ll tell him.’ She turned, ready to stalk off, her cheeks hot. Then, grudgingly, she turned. ‘And… my thanks. And, just so you know, I will pursue her. And I will end her. Then we will talk again.’

  Gloch looked back at her. Another laugh had died on his chapped lips.

  ‘See, now I believe you,’ he said, bowing. ‘Until next time, then.’

  Crowl’s storm troopers, some of the finest mortal troops in the Imperium, lay across the floor of the cell-zone corridor as if a Rhino had bludgeoned through them. Most were out cold; a couple had had their carapace plates ripped apart and slumped in growing pools of blood. Thirty hardened Ordo Hereticus soldiers, cast aside as if they had been nothing more than children playing at warfare with model guns and paper armour.

  Crowl drew himself up to his full height. In normal circumstances that stance would have been imposing – he was a head taller than most human males, and his master-crafted armour added to that heft – but just then he felt little more substantial than the broken warriors who littered the floor.

  He let Sanguine’s muzzle drop – it would be of no more use here.

  ‘Waiting for something?’ he asked.

  Before him, immense and wreathed in dying curls of plasma, loomed the destroyer of his men.

  He was more than a giant. He was a leviathan, a juggernaut of gold and black, an armour-bound killing construct studded with blades and jewels and plumes. His battleplate was heavy, unsullied, carved into swirls and arcane symbology, and palpably crackling with ferocious energies. Massive shoulder-guards, rearing high over a lightning-embossed breastplate, enclosed a tall helm crested with a mane of black horsehair. In his right gauntlet he held a guardian spear, a glaive twice the height of a human-normal subject. The halberd thrummed with plasma snarls, vibrating down the heavy length of the shaft and making the steel walls around them swim with reflections. A long black cloak hung behind him, and for all the carnage he had caused, he was immaculate – untouched by blood or grime, as dazzling as a shard of ancient sun cast into the mire of the world.

  There were stories told of such creatures as this, myths spun across the gulf of ten thousand years until they had swelled and burst beyond all reason. To live to witness one of the Angels of Death was a privilege granted to a vanishingly small proportion of humanity. To witness one of this select order was even rarer, something even the great lords of the Throneworld’s mighty citadels and macro-cathedrals would barely dare to dream of.

  It had been said by some that they no longer existed – just another casualty of the darkening of the long ages, a mere echo of a greater past that had long since sunk into oblivion. Perhaps, others offered, they had never had been real at all. Perhaps they had always been chimeras, phantoms dreamed up by desperate men in desperate times to make the night seem a little less cold.

  There was a certain satisfaction to be found in proving such speculation wildly, unforgivably and indubitably false.

  ‘Why are you here, inquisitor?’ said the Imperial Custodian. Though nominally a question, it was delivered as a command, as if the speaker could countenance no response but acquiescence. The voice was as otherworldly as his physical appearance – deep, measured, betraying no accent but that of the most strenuous refinement of High Gothic. No mortal spoke like that, nor had they done so for millennia.

  Crowl held his ground. The aura of extreme violence still made the air electric, and the guardian spear had not yet been powered down.

  ‘You have my man,’ he said. ‘I look after my own.’

  The Custodian considered that for a moment. His helm-face was a piece of artistry beyond anything Crowl had ever witnessed in battle-armour – a tracery of wings rising from a hawk-like vox-guard, enclosing twin jewelled lenses amid swashes of heavy gold. He found himself recalling the Ministorum images of Sanguinius, those adoring frescoes of the Angel himself, and wondered just how mind-alteringly magnificent a living primarch must have been if this were not the pinnacle of human martial splendour.

  ‘You would come here, then,’ the Custodian said, ‘in defiance of justice, and dare to take him from me.’

  So this was the test. For all his long years of service, Crowl was not an excessively proud man. He knew perfectly well the myth-born god before him could end him with a single strike of that guardian spear. Even if it had been in his nature, though, there was no room for dissemblance here. This creature, so the legends went, had been built to perceive the nature of falsehood.

  ‘He is my man,’ said Crowl again, lifting his chin. ‘You want him, you come through me.’

  The Custodian made no move. The halberd’s energy field rippled across the monomolecular edge of the great glaive’s blade, itself a metre long.

  ‘What are you named?’ the Custodian asked.

  ‘Erasmus Crowl, the Ordo Hereticus.’

  ‘What do you know of Phaelias?’

  ‘Nothing at all.’ Crowl took up his rosette and fixed the golden giant with a defiant glare. ‘But if you do, then you are bound by the authority of this mark to disclose it.’

  There was something like a laugh then, rumbling up from the heart of that rococo armour – a deep and fleeting amusement at the audacity of it, echoing from the fluted lines of the crafted vox-grille. ‘I am bound by no authority but the Throne.’

  ‘Then that makes two of us.’

  It took anot
her second for the energy field crawling across the glaive-blade to flicker out, and even then Crowl could not be sure that it wouldn’t come scything across at him, whistling through the air faster than thought. A rosette could halt many things, but not, he guessed, that spear.

  ‘It is rare, inquisitor, that I leave the precincts of His Palace,’ the Custodian said. ‘When I consulted the augurs two dawns ago, seeking the path to truth among the maze of falsehood, there was no certainty in my mind. I might have sent a lesser servant. Even now, I do not know with any certainty why I did not do so, and chose instead to attend this hunt in person, for I am not habitually given to whims.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it.’

  Finally, then – finally – the Custodian relaxed his stance, and his grip on the halberd’s stave relaxed. For the first time Crowl noticed the ranks of arbitrators clustered further down the corridor, their weapons trained on him, and it struck him how ludicrous that was. The Custodian himself moved as if there were no one there but the two of them – no prisoner, no stricken storm troopers, no troopers of the fortress, just two sanctioned agents of the Emperor’s immortal will.

  ‘I have many names, but you will call me Navradaran,’ the Custodian said. ‘Now we will talk.’

  Chapter Nine

  Spinoza strode along the bridge, barely aware which way she was headed, knowing that she ought to summon a flyer but unwilling to contemplate returning to Courvain with so little to show for her efforts. Again.

  She pulled her rebreather mask from her face, letting it dangle around her neck, and tasted the unfiltered air of Terra. It was more acrid than she’d imagined, a melange of promethium fumes, human stinks, mouldering organics, the pyres of the faithful. She drew it in deep, feeling its acerbic grit graze against her windpipe.

  This is my world now, she thought. I must immerse myself within it.

  She had only gone a short distance from the squalor of the processing plant and the twisting streets were already packed with humanity. Mouldering bridges soared far overhead, and bridges crossed over those bridges, and more and more until they overlapped into the blur of distance. The crowds merged and split, men and women pushing past one another, locked within the confines of transit conduits or processionals, barely seeming to notice those around them, keeping their heads down and their faces hidden.

  Spinoza pushed her way through. Where they were huddled and limping, she was erect, moving with the confident gait she had been taught in Astranta. They might have been another species, those masses, a sub-order worthy only of cultivating for some kind of brute sustenance.

  An old man blundered into her path, not noticing her armour and her signifiers until too late, and she elbowed him aside. When he saw who had shoved him, his bleary eyes went wide and he fell prostrate.

  ‘Forgive me, lord!’ he croaked, cracking his forehead onto the rockcrete as if in penance, flecking the road with his blood. ‘I did not see! Forgive me!’

  Spinoza looked down at him. He stank like all the others – the stale, ingrained stench of a body long unwashed.

  They are afraid, terrified, all of the time.

  She kept walking.

  The bridge spanned a wide gap between mountainous hab-cliffs. The unnatural valley’s foundations were far out of sight, its descending sides studded with diminishing points of low-power lumens. On the far side was a tripartite tower complex, ridged and buttressed with interleaving support structures. A triumphal arch had been raised before them, forty metres high, hewn from solid granite, crowned with graven images representing the Four Defenders of Mankind: the Astra Militarum, the Imperial Navy, the Mechanicus of Mars, the Angels of Death. All of them were thick with a lichen-like patina, their edges worn away by age. As Spinoza got closer, she could see that the final statue, that of the Space Marine, had been defaced – the raven-beaked helm was scratched, as if a knife had been taken to the stone.

  That made her angry, and she looked about her, suddenly furious that no one seemed to notice. The crowds just kept on stumbling to wherever it was they had to get to, their woollen cowls drawn close about their heads, their cloth-bound feet bleeding onto the rockcrete.

  ‘Do you not see that?’ Spinoza cried out, gesturing to the defaced statue. ‘Do none of you see that?’

  No one answered. Those who heard her retreated quickly, bewildered and fearful, trying to push themselves back into the herd’s innards in case the fault was theirs. The greater mass did not even hear, lost in the eternal city’s background roar of engine-growl, bell-clang, procession-chant, forge-burn.

  She kept walking, knowing she should just summon the damn flyer but still resisting it. It felt as if the entire planet were rearing up over her, sliding under her, swelling around her, dragging her down into its squalid and stifling embrace. There was no end to it – the hives towered overhead, crumbling and decayed; the pits went down forever, the searchlights swayed, the pyres smouldered. She felt nausea curdle in her throat, but left the rebreather hanging.

  You could go mad on a world like this, and no one would ever notice. The euphoria she had felt when in sight of the Palace itself had long died, replaced by the dull pang of revulsion.

  That was bad. That was unworthy – it would blunt her effectiveness and slow her down.

  She paused. Ahead of her stood yet another towering edifice amid the forests of competing gaudiness – a tottering pile of elaborately decorated stone, arranged in a running series of gradually narrowing archways. The stone was blackened as if burned, crowned with pyramids of human skulls, grinning and eyeless. Columns swept up alongside either flank supporting more stands of statues – skull-faced angels, winged lions, coiling serpents with eyes of adamant. Hung from the peaks were heavy banners bearing the icons of the Adeptus Ministorum – the Terran ‘I’ barred with a death’s head-within-sun, the tear-and-chalice images of sainthood, Archaic Gothic passages from the Lectitio Gouldiensis and Apocrypha Chymes scrawled in tight-cut lines of script.

  Driven part by curiosity, part by her need to escape the filth, Spinoza walked up to the open doors. There were no guards, and she passed under high gothic vaulting, her heels clicking on marble flags.

  Inside the cathedral it was cool – mercifully cool. Ranks of alabaster pillars marched away into darkness, lit at their bases by racks of flickering votive candles. Pilgrims huddled in clusters, swaying to the dull rhythm of a drum beating down in the depths. Every so often a bell would toll, high up in the towers, its heavy resonance making the stone around her tremble.

  She came to a halt before one of many hundred high altars. There was no peace in that place – priests with blood-red robes were screaming from hovering pulpits, making the congregations scream back in terror and exhilaration. Servo-cherubs buzzed like blowflies in the smoky heights, bumping into one another and spilling more incense in clots. Ahead of her, the altarpiece soared up high, a confection of blackened gold depicting the Nine Primarchs in various warlike or devotional poses.

  That was familiar, though at first she couldn’t place why. Then she remembered a similar set of icons, taken from the same Missionaria template no doubt, that had been placed in the chapel of her schola on Astranta. She remembered the lessons that had gone along with it.

  And so the Emperor created the Nine Primarchs to guard against the Nine Devils of the Outer Hell, and they were victorious, and now sleep, watching over Mankind lest the Terror return.

  As a child, it had never been clear to her who had created the Nine Devils. She did remember asking Sister Honoria why the Emperor had not created a hundred primarchs rather than match exactly the numbers offered up by the Outer Hell, and had received no answer but a lash from the electro-lance for her trouble.

  After she had left childhood behind, she often reflected on those words – lest the Terror return – wondering just what degree of horror would be necessary to bring them back. She knew that there were those who even den
ied the divinity of the Emperor and His pantheon, like the Imperial Fists she had served with, who had revered Dorn’s memory but never called him god or angel – and perhaps she had even been tempted by that severe philosophy at the time, for all that it was surely heresy, since it explained with typical Space Marine bluntness just how bleak the prospects for the species could become. No falsehood, no deception, just defiance.

  She reached out to one of the racks of candles and took a thick slug of tallow. It took a while to light from the taper. She placed the guttering candle high up, out of reach of all but the healthiest and tallest, watched all the while by insolent servo-skulls with Ministorum bandanas draped over their cranial humps.

  ‘I shall not waver,’ she breathed, bowing low before the sacred image. ‘I shall not enquire, I shall not doubt, for enquiry is the doorway to heresy and doubt is the harbinger of weakness. I shall pray for the soul of my master. I shall not despise those whom I protect. I shall love the works of His hands, and this, His world, more dearly than I love my life, for there is only service, and there is only sacrifice.’

  Then she bowed again before the altar. She ignored the whispering throngs that hovered around her, afraid to come close but too fascinated to pull away, drew herself up to her full height again, and made the sign of the aquila.

  Then she drew in a deep breath, replaced the mask over her mouth and nose, and turned to leave. If not invigorated, the worst of her enervation left her. She strode back out into the blood-grey smog, her gait a little freer.

  Once she had left, the crowds pulled in closer, mumbling and stumbling, reaching for candles of their own to offer up in hope of cures. One of the servo-cherubs bobbed down from its high vantage, its augmetic eye-lens hissing as it adjusted focus. It hovered over the candle that Spinoza had left there, and its systems chittered. With a robust puff, it blew the candle out, reached out with a fatty hand and stuffed the tallow-lump into its mouth. Then it bobbed off, chewing stupidly, floating under the high arches, before being lost in the shadows of the high nave, just another meandering blip amid a constellation of fumbling automata.