Vaults of Terra: The Carrion Throne

by Chris Wraight

  ‘I had full trust in you,’ replied Crowl, perfectly relaxed.

  The Spiderwidow was now travelling at full speed, boosting clear of the void-hauler, its cockpit lowering and its plasma drives burning hard. A second later, and a huge blast wave caught them, hurling the gunship into a swirling dive. Heavy clangs made the hull shiver and buckle – big objects were hitting them, careening into them before spinning away planet­wards. Their enclosed world tilted on its axis as the grav-compensators lost traction and the Spiderwidow corkscrewed. That lasted for what seemed like many minutes – a wave of impacts that would surely smash the gunship apart and send them all burning up into the toxic airspace below.

  Eventually, though, the onslaught abated. Aneela righted the gunship and set them on a stable course. The comm-link crackled open, and her matter-of-fact voice broke out from the cockpit above.

  ‘That’s created a stir,’ she reported. ‘We have incoming patrol vessels, and a battleship’s turning to gunward.’

  ‘Evade them, Aneela,’ ordered Crowl, reaching up for the seal on his helm. ‘Get us down before anyone gains a lock. They’ll put this down to an accident.’

  Spinoza twisted her own helm free and glared at her master. Adrenaline pumped hard around her system.

  ‘So was it worth it?’ she demanded, trying hard not to shout the words out loud, half wishing she could reach out and throttle him.

  Crowl looked back at her, and smiled.

  ‘Very much so, Spinoza,’ he said. ‘At last, I think we’re getting somewhere.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  Despite her growing exhaustion, sleep did not come easily. Even insulated within Courvain’s thick walls, the clamour from the world outside remained audible. After an hour of attempted mind-calming meditation, Spinoza donned her robes again, left her chamber and went to one of the tower’s many viewing balconies.

  It was close to dawn, though the skies were still dark, underlit only by the thousands of fires. The drumbeats had become incessant – a rolling, beating clamour that echoed and re-echoed down the twisting emptiness between the spires.

  Spinoza leant against the balcony’s railings. Even in the hour before sunrise, it was still humid. Her throat was dry, and swallowing only brought more filth into her system. Overhead, the permanent cloud cover was angry with reflected flame, a shifting mass of bloody turmoil broken only by the ink-black profile of the world-city’s extremities.

  Far below her, the causeways were now entirely occupied with teeming crowds of pilgrims, roaring out their devotion in increasingly frenzied tones. They knew that time was running out – if they were still languishing in Salvator by now then they had little chance of fighting their way anywhere close to the Palace approaches in time. Most of them did not know the way, in any case. If given no guidance, they would soon wander into oblivion, dropping off the face of the world and into one of its many pits of forgetfulness.

  The airspace above them was filling up steadily, too. Gaseous blimps plied smoky paths between landing stages, trailing pennant banners with injunctions against vice and exhortations towards piety. Ministorum flyers hovered low on straining grav-plates, their vox-augmitters now tuned exclusively to Sanguinala-specific screeds. More effigies of the fallen primarch, some many metres high, tottered through the sweaty bedlam, given crude masks of gold paint and sporting crooked wings.

  Spinoza flexed her muscles, one by one, going through the rituals she had been taught on entry to the Inquisition. It was hard now to conjure up the raw excitement she had felt in those early days, having been plucked from obscurity and taken up into a world of terror and wonder, shown the things that had caused her to experience unmatchable ecstasy, as well as the horrors that had made her retch quietly in private.

  She had never considered herself a candidate. There had been others in the schola more obviously suited to the rigours of the Holy Orders, or so she had always supposed. The ones who had highborn family to sponsor them, pulling strings within the cat’s cradle of Imperial diplomacy. For her, the wild orphan without connections, brought into the precincts on a military transport with only the recommendation of an Astra Militarum colonel to her name, the choices had seemed more limited. As her devotion to the rituals had grown, her first ambition had been for the Missionarus Galaxia – inspired by the tales of adventurous piety, she had dreamed of travelling out into the furthest reaches of the galaxy, fuelled by faith, bringing the Emperor’s Light to those wretched scraps of humanity temporarily lost from its embrace. That would have been a worthy life, one that rather than merely guarding the realms of humanity actually expanded it.

  It had been rain-soaked night on Astranta when the alternative summons had come. The agent had been burly, armour-clad and taciturn, as if words were not his preferred tools of trade. The schola’s masters had woken her and taken her to the Chambers of Discipline in the north keep, the ones that overlooked the tide-crashed rocks of the Ironfell coastline.

  ‘Do you love the Emperor?’ the man had asked her, and she, shivering in her nightshift, her fists balled against the cold, had said, ‘With all my mind, with all my heart, with all my soul.’

  That, at least, had not changed. Throughout the following years, after leaving the storm-wracked world of her instruction and enduring the tests and the trials, that devotion had not wavered. When she had killed her first human – the two of them alone in that cold cell, his face hooded, her only weapon a blunt knife – she had repeated the mantra to give herself the strength to do it. When she came into contact with her first xenos, a coiled horror of purple segments and curved talons chained up in the cages under Regita’s dungeons, she mouthed the words to herself to keep from vomiting. As she became hardened, tempered, turned from an earnest scholar of the Imperial Cult and into one of its most potent weapons, the words never changed.

  With all my mind, with all my heart, with all my soul.

  They were singing the same thing now. Faith was cheap, for the desperate. It was only valuable for those with the strength to understand its purpose. The mania that gripped the throngs below could so easily be turned, channelled into devotion to another power. That was what the orders of the Imperium existed for: to keep the fire of fervour stoked, but also to keep it directed. The masses believed through fear, and that kept them safe, whatever Crowl might preach.

  At the thought of her master, her stomach twinged with distaste, and she chided herself. In his own way, following his own method, he was as devout as her. He had to be. If he were not, then he would not have survived here, for this was the heart of it all, the sun around which the faith of quadrillions orbited.

  Crowl would call her soon. With the dawn, he would meet her and Revus, and they would plan their next move. It was impossible to argue now that his instincts had been wrong – something terrible had been carried on that void-hauler. And yet, and yet…

  Somewhere out there, mingling with the billions, she lingered. Falx. That was business left unfinished, a stain on her honour that could not be left hanging. If Crowl cared little for such things, then she did. Time spent with the Angels of Death had taught her that, in the final resort, when privation left no space for the more rarefied human emotions, what remained were the primal aspects of the species – rage, honour, endurance.

  Far in the east, the pattern of black-and-red began at last to bleed away. In an hour or so the horizon would discolour into grey, creeping like a spill of protein-sludge across the heavens until every surface was bathed in its sickly drear.

  Terra was more endurable at night. The towers rose more sheer, the statues were more grave, the arches were more sweeping, bereft of the signs of decay that mottled the stone. In the dark, the cleansing dark, it was possible to imagine how it had might have been when He was still present in the mortal world, walking with His people, bathed in the gold blush of pristine eternity.

  Crowl would call her soon. She would have to retu
rn to her cell before the summons came, attempt to gain an hour or two of sleep, and then steel herself for whatever task would be given her.

  But not just yet. For a moment longer she lingered, looking out over the heart of the shrine world, its wretchedness and its magnificence, drinking it in, wondering what she would have thought on that freezing night on Astranta if the taciturn man had told her she would be here, now, doing these things, as far from the edge of the galaxy as it was possible to get.

  She liked to think that she would have been pleased, that she would have been able to seize the chance, and understand what an honour that was, and how few living souls could dream to achieve so much.

  She watched the multitudes of the eternal city, and heard the screams of awe and anguish, and saw the pennants snap in the hot, hot air.

  Crowl would call her soon.

  The drums never stopped.

  With all my soul, she thought.

  Crowl entered the archive chamber, and Huk turned to greet him. She smiled toothily, and her cabling scraped as she shuffled over to him. Above them both, the servitors rattled and hauled up their long chains.

  ‘She came down here,’ Huk said, holding out her ironwork hands.

  Crowl took them, and nodded. ‘Yes, she told me. I hope you were helpful.’

  ‘Always.’ Huk shot him a look of childish reproach. ‘And now you are here too. It has been a very long time.’

  ‘When the time allows, you know I wish for nothing more.’

  Huk snatched her hands away. ‘Just information, then, you want.’

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

  ‘You don’t know the name?’

  ‘People always seem surprised.’

  Huk shot him a conspiratorial smile. ‘You don’t miss much.’ Then she limped over to the cogitator stands. ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘I wish to find him, if that remains possible. So, everything we have, please.’

  Huk inserted her augmetic node, and the servitors began to alter course, sweeping up to parchment shelves, whiteless eyes scanning the rows of vellum data-tags.

  ‘Is it the Feast yet?’ Huk asked.

  ‘Soon.’

  ‘I would like to see that.’

  ‘I do not think you would. Better to remain here, I think.’

  Huk scowled, twisted in her robes and jerked the cables tighter. ‘Ach. Sometimes, sometimes, the hate for them is too much.’

  ‘They serve a purpose.’

  ‘Don’t we all?’

  ‘For good or ill.’

  The servitors began to return, dumping sheaves onto a waiting gurney. Crowl reached for the topmost and began to leaf through it. The documents were mostly of the thick vellum used by Adeptus scribes for their scholarship, wrapped in fading leather covers, blackened at the edges by old fires, neglect or simply age. All were stamped with the blood-red classification seals of the Inquisition, and most had scribe-marks annotating the margins. Many of the varied typefaces were archaic, almost unreadable even to him, reflecting the hidebound practices of the arcane copyists and their guild training.

  ‘He seems to have kept himself to himself,’ Crowl murmured, looking through references to Phaelias in official almanacs.

  Huk chuckled. ‘A crime?’

  ‘In my mind, a positive virtue.’ Crowl skimmed over more of the paperwork. ‘I’ve more names here. He had a large retinue.’

  ‘All ought to.’

  Crowl raised an eyebrow, then carried on reading. ‘Slaro Argorine, abhuman, henchman grade thirteen. The muscle, I suppose. Noode de Quin, a hierophant from the Night Worlds. Veronika Skeld, crusader, interesting. Bors Dalamor, weapons specialist. Niir Khazad, assassin, Shoba death cult. Inducted Guardsmen, drawn from several regiments. Jerro Vaskadre, savant. Throne, he had an army. Where have they all gone?’

  Huk edged closer, peering down the lists, mouthing the words as she read them. ‘Where was he located?’

  ‘Not ordinarily resident,’ said Crowl, turning to other documents. ‘One of the wanderers. Terra proved unexpectedly dangerous for him, but I suppose we knew that already.’

  Huk withdrew from Crowl’s side, returning to the cogitators, where she hauled on levers, dimming the floating lanterns, summoning more servitors. Crowl carried on reading for a little longer, selecting some documents and taking them out of the folios. Once he had accumulated a handful, he threw the rest of the leather-bound tomes back into the gurney and brought the bundle over to Huk.

  ‘See that Spinoza reads this,’ he said. ‘I will be absent from Courvain for a while.’

  Huk bowed, and accepted the bundles. ‘I’ll have them copied. Where do you go now, or is that forbidden knowledge?’

  Crowl smiled sadly. ‘What would be the use, Yulia?’

  ‘I could imagine it. I imagined it when you went to the Palace, in the days when you told me things.’

  ‘That was a long time ago.’

  ‘Shows how often you come down here.’

  ‘I will do so more often. When all this is done with, we’ll talk. I’ll tell you tales.’

  Huk beamed, her grey mouth glinting from the metal within. ‘You promise?’

  ‘When all this is done with.’

  Crowl left her then, and stalked back towards the doors. As he went, Huk gazed after him, almost hungrily. Only once the doors were closed did she turn back to the servitors, three of which hung on their chains before her, their jaws hanging, their withered skin as dry as cured leather.

  ‘To work again, then,’ she muttered, shaking her scrawny head.

  Chapter Fourteen

  ‘And so some things are now clear to me,’ said Crowl.

  Revus and Spinoza faced him across a hexagonal flecked-granite table in his private chambers. Crowl thought the interrogator looked tired, perhaps unsurprisingly after the events of the previous night. Perhaps he was driving her too hard, though there would be little chance of respite in the days ahead. She would have to endure it, just as they all did.

  His captain looked as stone-faced as ever, his brief sojourn in the arbitrators’ domain seemingly having inflicted no fresh scars.

  Despite the coming of fragile dawn, the chamber still burned with thick candles, dozens of them in elaborate iron frames. A polished skull sat in the centre of the table, black with age but reverently cared for. Legend said that it had once belonged to Inquisitor Axio, first of the bloodline, though that was of course impossible to prove.

  ‘Before the Rhadamanthys was destroyed,’ Crowl said, ‘I was able to study some of the ship’s sensor logs. The hauler had, as the captain told me, been detained for the Provost Marshal’s scrutiny, and nothing was found. At that stage, it was still fully laden, and so there was more chance of missing something, though the crew weren’t going to take that chance.’

  Crowl reached for a decanter of opalwine, and offered it around.

  ‘No, thank you,’ said Spinoza.

  Revus shook his head.

  ‘There was a discrepancy in the logs,’ Crowl said, pouring himself a goblet. ‘The internal location records showed just what the captain told me – it had entered the solar system, was detained off Luna for inspection, and then gained orbit two days afterwards. But the ranged augur logs told a different story. They recorded an encounter with a sub-warp vessel on the first of the two days the Rhadamanthys was supposed to be undergoing scrutiny, one that then locked on a trajectory for Terran orbital space. One of the records was thus incorrect. I will assume that the location sequence was the one at fault.’

  ‘Altered,’ said Spinoza.

  ‘You have a suspicious mind, Spinoza. So here’s the thing – whatever was carried on the Rhadamanthys was transferred to this second ship prior to the scrutiny teams arriving. The crew did what they could to clean up the mess, but did
n’t have time to complete the task. They sealed the chamber and slapped on a counterfeit sigil, trusting that the overworked arbitrator units wouldn’t notice. There was, after all, nothing much to see, so any cursory scans wouldn’t have revealed a signal, as you and Gorgias discovered.’

  ‘They didn’t make much of a job of it,’ said Revus.

  ‘They didn’t have the time. The Custodian Navradaran told me that the request for Tier Four clearance was made two days before the Rhadamanthys was due to achieve orbit – just before it had the chance for this rendezvous in sector four five six nine. That order originally came from Inquisitor Phaelias, who’s still missing. So here’s what I believe took place. Whoever wished to use the Rhadamanthys to bring this – we’ll say – illicit cargo to Terra was uncovered, at least partly, by Phaelias, who launched an investigation and imposed the scrutiny cordon. The importers could not risk the cargo being discovered and so made arrangements to have it transferred to a vessel with a better chance of evading the blockade. In the meantime, Phaelias pressed on with enquiries, and has either been neutralised or is still active in pursuit. Despite his diligence, the cargo, we can assume, made it as far as Terra. The Rhadamanthys was allowed to continue to hold orbit, since the diversion of so much genuine loading would have drawn attention, and in any case they had no reason to suppose anyone would take an interest in it after the arbitrators had cleared it for entry.’

  ‘Unless someone were to notice the discrepancy between the two logs,’ said Spinoza.

  ‘Such as, for instance, a quintus-level Schedulist scribe with a penchant for correcting errors,’ said Crowl. ‘Perhaps he made too much of a fuss, highlighting the Rhadamanthys’ contradictory submitted timestamps on arrival at Luna, and wouldn’t let it drop – so someone with an interest in making all of it go away decided to quieten him.’

  Crowl took a sip of opalwine, and its warming liquor ran thickly down his throat. He hadn’t eaten yet, and felt the need of sustenance.