Vaults of Terra: The Carrion Throne

by Chris Wraight

  Crowl and Navradaran moved away from the cells, shadowed initially by a cadre of black-clad arbitrators. Most of Hegain’s detachment had been left alive by the Custodian’s assault – they had been felled artfully, their threat nullified but their bodies capable of recovery. No doubt the Custodian had been fighting well within his capabilities, doing what needed to be done and no more, and that was something significant to take away from the encounter.

  The two of them left the apothecaries to their work and ascended the Fortress Arbites’ levels, travelling by creaking chain-lifter to the pinnacle. At the summit their escorts left them, and they entered an armourglass pyramid framed with adamantium spars. The space was planted liberally with hothouse flowers, the floor burnished bronze. A verdigrised statue of the primarch Rogal Dorn stood in the centre, flanked by stands of ferns and orchids. The dome’s atmosphere was clammy, and rivulets of moisture ran down the inside of the pyramid’s sloping walls.

  Crowl looked at the riches, the abundance of natural growth, and a part of him recoiled. ‘Strange,’ he remarked, ‘how judges always seem to have access to coin.’

  Navradaran walked over to the pyramid’s eastern face, pushing past the overhanging foliage, his heavy boots clinking on the metal floor.

  ‘I ask you again, inquisitor,’ he said, halting as he reached the great sloping armourglass panels, facing the eternal city in all its murky grandeur. ‘Why did you come?’

  ‘I gave you my answer,’ said Crowl, drawing alongside him and looking out at the same view. They were a long, long way up. Jagged pinnacles rose above a seething mat of grey. A cargo-hauler was burning its way slowly north, underslung with cargo modules, trailing lines of inky residue behind it. Over to the north, the clouds were building into turbulent snags of darkness, as if they might break into rain.

  But it never rained.

  ‘They would not have harmed him,’ said Navradaran. ‘Not once they realised whom he worked for. You would have got him back, sooner or later.’

  Crowl smiled dryly. ‘Your faith in them exceeds mine. What did you want him for?’

  ‘He had entered the Triad spire.’

  ‘Triad is a long way from the Palace. I thought you never left it.’

  ‘Where then does His Palace end?’ asked Navradaran.

  ‘The Imperium Entire is His Palace,’ said Crowl, remembering the line from the catechisms. ‘I always supposed that was figurative.’

  ‘Know this – if there were a threat capable of harming His realm, I would travel to the edge of time and space to run it down.’

  ‘What threat?’

  Navradaran turned to face Crowl, his wing-marked helm glinting dully from the weak sunlight. ‘A thousand ships enter orbit every hour. A million eyes watch them, and yet even the most vigilant may be blinded. Twenty-one days ago a formal request was made to the Provost Marshal to halt all Terra-inbound vessels and subject them to Tier Four scrutiny.’

  Crowl raised an eyebrow. ‘Now? Before the Feast?’

  ‘The request was granted.’

  ‘Who made it?’

  ‘Inquisitor-Lord Hovash Phaelias, the Ordo Xenos.’

  ‘So that’s who that is.’

  ‘You had not heard the name?’

  ‘I don’t mingle much. What was he after?’

  ‘I wish to learn this. The inquisitor and members of his retinue last made traceable contact with authorities eighteen days ago. Since then, silence. But then, after the silence, something else. There have been bodies left, close to the inner walls of the Palace where none but the sanctified may tread. Mutilated bodies, marked with excruciation. This is a great blasphemy. I sent servants to scour the approaches. They found nothing, but heard tales of flesh-gangs working in the underhives. The False Angel – you know this name?’

  ‘I’ve heard it.’

  ‘Now we reach the limits of what is known. An inquisitor orders orbital quarantine, for reasons unknown, then disappears. Organised killing begins, with signs of ritual debasement, and stories of heretical movements grow in number. I place these events together.’

  ‘Correlation does not imply causation.’

  ‘Your pardon?’

  ‘An old superstition. Go on.’

  ‘I took it upon myself to study the eyes that watch the voidcraft. Phaelias believed that something of importance had been due to arrive from orbital transfer, and if he was correct in this then the Chartist guilds were capable of corroborating it. We listened, we waited. I commandeered the services of this precinct-fortress, and that brought us to Triad. When my agents reported the intervention of an outside force in Holbech’s jurisdiction, I believed it might be him. When I encountered your captain, I remained of that conviction.’

  ‘So you forcibly took him in.’

  ‘He disabled six of those under my command, crippling two.’

  ‘That’s what we trained him for. You’ve spoken to him?’

  ‘We had barely begun. He was… defiant.’

  Crowl smiled and pressed his fingers of his right hand up against the armourglass, watching the condensation bobble over the ceramite plates of his armour. The hauler had almost disappeared by then, sliding into the smog-sea that its own burners fed. More atmospheric bulkers appeared on the eastern horizon to replace it, members of an endless procession, eternally moving from maw-depot to maw-depot.

  He couldn’t see the street levels below – too far down, occluded by the urban fug. For a moment, locked away in such rarefied air, he might forget who existed in those lightless metal valleys, jostling, sweating, scrabbling for air.

  ‘But that’s not enough,’ he said, softly.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Crowl turned back to him. ‘You tell me of bodies and of heretics. My interrogator chides me for chasing scraps like these, and I have the commission to do it. But you. You.’ He let his gauntlet fall from the streaked glass. ‘You are as close as I will ever come to the gods of old. What have you seen? What did your augurs tell you, to bring you out from the Palace?’

  Navradaran did not answer immediately. When he did reply, the voice was just the same as it had been before – deep, rolling, muffled behind that great golden mask.

  ‘I wish to know what became of Phaelias,’ he said. ‘I wish to know why there is a mockery of the Angel breaking flesh as the Feast approaches. If you discover these things, you will tell me.’

  Crowl smiled to himself. ‘How will I find you?’

  ‘The Feast concludes in four days,’ said Navradaran. ‘On the final day, the elect will march upon the Eternity Gate itself for the final rite of remembrance, and then all my vigilance must be there. So you have that long, no more.’

  ‘A simple task, then.’ He turned away from the cityscape and ran his eyes across the sweltering plant-life. ‘I will take my troops back with me. I trust the judges here will wish to let any outstanding grievances drop.’

  ‘There are no grievances.’

  ‘Then our business here is concluded.’ Crowl extended a hand. ‘Whatever else transpires in this, it was the highest honour to meet you.’

  Navradaran looked down at the proffered gauntlet, bewildered. He made no move to follow suit.

  ‘Four days,’ he said, turning away.

  Chapter Ten

  Spinoza did summon a flyer, and it came for her within ten minutes, weaving through the swarming skies. The pilot did not ask what she was doing so far from the last drop-point, nor why she had neglected to report in immediately after the failed action. Spinoza considered asking for news of Crowl and Hegain’s kill-team, but decided against it. Either the pilot did not know, which made the enquiry pointless, or he did, in which case it was shameful to ask.

  They took off, turning east, and powered up into the labyrinth once more. The day was waning, though there was no lessening of activity in the multilayered web of acces
sways and transit corridors. As the mottled grey sky fell away to a dull gloaming, a massive land-train trundled out of a tunnel below and across a many-tiered viaduct, spewing soot from banked smokestacks as its armoured tracks churned. Bulky cargo-cars clattered past, one after the other, following the heavy locomotive-unit as it powered along the long bend, across more soaring arches and into another tunnel mouth several kilometres back into the urban sprawl. Spinoza watched the land-train travel as the flyer climbed higher. By the time they had passed out of range, angling past the shoulder of a twisted comms-node the height of an upended starship, its progress had shown no sign of ending. They might have hovered over that thing for an hour or more and the massive payloads would still be trundling past, just one of thousands of scheduled supply drops for the insatiable appetites of a famished planet.

  They flew back to Courvain, taking the route she was now getting used to – tight through the hive-spires, skimming across the lightless chasms between those mountains of rockcrete. Spinoza pressed her face close to the view­portal, watching specks of humanity marching below. Shift-bells were toiling now, summoning workers from their stations. The communal refectories were opening, and the duty-watches in the cathedrals were changing over. Just as always, the vox-augmitters were hammering out the same messages, and she saw a mechanised throne-walker staggering along at the head of one of the many processions, bearing a cardinal in purple robes. His choristers were heavily altered, with grille-speakers for faces and spiked banner-racks for arms, and they all limped and swayed along, accompanied by pilgrims scourging themselves with barbed neural-whips. Gun-servitors prowled at the procession’s edges, their body-cannons tracking anything that got close.

  Crowl’s fortress appeared again in the forward scopes. The flyer slowed, then entered the hangars. Once they were down, the pilot hurried to open the doors, saluting as Spinoza disembarked.

  ‘I require the keeper of records,’ she said. The pilot bowed, and said he’d show her the way.

  They went up from the hangar level, climbing narrow spiral staircases cut deep into the black matter of the fortress, lit only by the bumping pale suspensors that glided over their heads. Once at the destination, the pilot bowed and left her at the doors. She pressed her palm against the authorisation seal, felt the pinprick of a blood-taker, and waited a moment for the analysis to complete.

  The doors clunked, clicked, then slid open, revealing a tall lamplit chamber, circular like a well shaft, more than thirty metres across and rising up in a series of terraced levels. Every wall, every surface, was covered with bundles of dry parchment tied with ribbons and sealed with brown wax. Archive servitors, little more than torsos, sinewy arms and fibre-bundles, whirred up and down the rack-faces on long chain-pulls, their spindly claws reaching for records, replacing them, spinning around, plunging through the chamber’s central void.

  As Spinoza entered, she saw a withered woman clad in faded, patched robes. Half her face was augmetic, and the rest was aged by service under artificial light and deprived of what passed on Terra for fresh air. Her shrunken face was dominated by a circular oculus that cycled and focused continually. Ironwork fingers the length of a child’s arm protruded from the frayed hems of her sleeves, and her stooped stance was dragged even lower by a heavy linked chain of office hung across bony shoulders. Thick cables ran from plugs in her back and into the jaws of a ring of cogitator columns, keeping her shackled to her station on the floor of the chamber. Whenever she moved, the cables shook and pulsed with strobing slivers of darting electro-pulses.

  ‘Then you’re his new one,’ the old woman said, smiling to reveal two lines of grey teeth.

  ‘You are the keeper of records?’ Spinoza asked.

  ‘I am.’

  ‘You carry records of serving Ordo Hereticus personnel?’

  ‘Of course. Whether they’re correct, whether they’re out of date, whether they’re forged – could you tell?’

  ‘You will show them to me.’

  The woman chuckled, and the sagging flesh under her robes wobbled. ‘He told me you’d be stiff. Schola-trained? So was I. A long time ago.’ She shot Spinoza a shrewd look from her one filmy real eye. ‘But the manner won’t get you far here, girl. This is Terr–’

  ‘Show me the records.’

  The woman chuckled again, shaking her head, and shuffled over to the first of the cogitator columns, her cables dragging. ‘I was Yulia Huk, once as young and stiff as you. I like it better here now. It’s best, when you find your place. Come, take a look.’

  She had moved in close to one of the cogitators and extended her spike-fingers into its activation nodes. The column shuddered, gouted a wisp of steam, and began to valve-up.

  ‘Speak the name to me, girl,’ said Huk, licking her dry lips and concentrating on the pict-screen stuck out from the cogitator’s central hub like an insectoid compound eye.

  ‘Two names: Aido Gloch, interrogator. Quantrain, inquisitor.’

  Huk chuckled, and punched at a heavy runewriter keyboard with her unplugged hand. Every input caused the unit to chunter to itself, and green-tinged arcs of electricity spiralled between copper spheres hung high above the stations.

  ‘So this is a waste, is it not?’ Huk chided, completing the enquiry then turning back to face Spinoza. Once it was done, neural pulses flickered out across the dome, and the archive-servitors started to work, boosting up their chain-pulls to seek parchment bundles. ‘Every­one knows those names. Inquisitor-Lord Flavius Quantrain – I could fill your prayer-chamber with screeds on him, and you’d never squeeze inside to read them.’

  ‘Then he operates on Terra?’

  ‘Of course he does. And I know the name of his interrogator too. I know a lot of names. And he has a retinue the size of a small army, and he is in the favour of the High Lords, so if you have a problem with him then best you tell Crowl quickly, and then keep your head down and your armour on.’

  Spinoza looked up at the servitors. They were little better than meat-lumps with needle-limbs, diligently probing and siphoning through the rustling leaves before pulling the required documents out and throwing them into their back-mounted storage hoppers.

  ‘No problem,’ she said. ‘I merely wished to confirm his identity.’

  ‘Throne, child, he is known everywhere.’ Huk unplugged herself from the cogitator and licked the end of her oil-greased node-fingers. ‘What do you want this for? Just ask Crowl. He can tell you it all. Sometimes he pretends he doesn’t know names. I don’t know why. But he remembers them all – the ones who crossed him, the ones who were honest and the ones who told lies. He is fair, is Crowl.’

  Rassilo had said that too.

  ‘The inquisitor has not made contact with me since this morning,’ said Spinoza. ‘I will no doubt speak to him when he returns.’

  Huk laughed then, a vaguely horrifying sound like felines being skinned. ‘Ha! You’ll keep it up. I like that. But don’t let that neck get too stiff, or it’ll crack.’ She limped back across from the cogitator column, just as the first of the servitors began to drop down bearing heavy piles of parchment, filling up a shaky-looking gurney. ‘He’ll test you, because he wants to see if you can weather it, and I don’t doubt he sees something interesting there under that stiffness. Right now, all you see is this place and its shadows, and he does not talk like the ones you’re used to, and you think this is some kind of purgatory, but you and I were made to serve in purgatory so the others don’t have to. They will all die for Crowl, in here. I would, if he asked me. But he hasn’t yet. And he wasn’t always alone like he is now.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Come now, you think things have always been this way?’

  The last of the bundles slapped down onto the gurney, and Spinoza saw how many of them there were. The dust hung in clouds above them, fine and settling, kicked up as the chained servitors sped back up into the heights of the a
rchive to their endless task-rotas.

  ‘You will send them to my quarters,’ Spinoza said. ‘There are other names I need reports on, and I will send you requests.’

  ‘Do that!’ said Huk, sounding delighted. ‘The more obscure the better.’ Then she came closer, and Spinoza smelt her odour – a mix of congealed machine unguents and halitosis. Huk extended a metal hand towards her, though fell short of actually touching. ‘I hardly remember the schola now,’ she murmured. ‘Perhaps, when your time allows, if you come again, you can remind me how it was. I was there, just like you. I was Yulia Huk, before… all this.’

  Spinoza looked down at her for a moment. It was hard to know how to reply.

  ‘You will get my requests in due course,’ she said, turning. ‘Until then, you have your work.’

  The Nighthawk’s engines throbbed arrhythmically as it powered out from under the Fortress Arbites’ shadow. Like the other two, it had taken bolter hits on the way in, and would require lengthy remedial work in Courvain’s tech-bays before reuse. All three of them, flying in formation through the towers, were half-empty – most of Hegain’s troops, including the sergeant, required medicae attention and had remained in the precinct-fortress until that could be completed.

  The sun hung low in the western sky, a filmy red disc burning like a sore among the smog-curtains. In the distance, where the colossal Mechanicus enclave of Skhallax City entangled itself with the basilicas of the Order of the Ebon Chalice, palls of ashen smoke were rising in thin columns. Looking at them through the Nighthawk’s narrow viewports, Crowl couldn’t tell whether they were sacrificial fires or residue from the forges. Probably both – right now the entire world seemed determined to burn whatever it could find.

  Far to the north, past Skhallax’s burn-off chimneys, he could just make out the greater mass of the Outer Palace zones, where the march of the hab-spires was replaced by the Ministorum’s temples and ceremonial plazas, piled atop one another like coralline outgrowths, suffocating the old under the accretions of the new in a maze of competing holiness.