Vaults of Terra- The Hollow Mountain - Chris Wraight Read online

  The fervour of Sanguinala was a distant memory now, lost in the resumption of work details and shift patterns. Everywhere he looked, he saw labour-gang transports grinding their way to their silos, or Ecclesiarchy floats pushing their way through the crowds blaring out echoing hymn-loops, or supply haulers lumbering smokily towards the distribution centres. The percentage of ­Terra’s inhabitants who ever left the interior of their home spire was small, but even so every sliver of available space was still taken up, wreathed in a boil of engine exhausts that curled up through the tangle of support columns and flying buttresses.

  Aneela did not hurry, keeping the groundcar’s ride smooth through the sparser traffic of the exclusive zones.

  ‘Any trouble contacting him?’ Crowl asked, tiring of the monotonous view.

  ‘Not at all. I got the impression the appointment was welcome.’

  ‘Hmn.’

  They started to climb, following a snaking route that twisted through the very heart of a tower-cluster. Swarms of atmospheric craft hovered around them, both above and below, gliding like dirty fish through the sedimentary layers of Terra’s choked airways. A big dirigible – all flabby air-sacs and lazily spinning turbines – wallowed under the archway below, trailing long metallic sensor-fronds. Its swaying skirts bore the imagery of a sector-level Ministorum convent, but Crowl guessed it was probably a surveillance unit from one of the hundreds of scrutiny details that prowled every inch of the world-city’s airways. You got to recognise the signs, after a while.

  Soon another spire was looming – a horn-shaped mass of dark iron crowned with battered stone angels. Its flanks were speckled with flecks of neon yellow, and its entire northern shoulder seemed to be somewhat slumped, as if dozens of hab-levels had subsided before reaching a kind of equilibrium, a frozen landslide of permacrete and twisted steel.

  The groundcar slipped from the privileged zone and on to one of several dozen access routes. The space around them filled with bulkier vehicles, though the other drivers soon recognised the matt-black profile of an Inquisition transport and did their best to get out of the way. Vehicles shunted into one another or dragged themselves along the perimeter barriers just to clear a path, through which Aneela coolly guided them. In time, they reached a yawning entrance chamber, its arched ceiling lost in shadows, its walls studded with smog-caked angelic figures. Ignoring the security teams vetting incoming traffic, they peeled off up a steep ramp, plunging into the spire’s innards, then switchbacked through steeply climbing roadways. The space around them shrunk until they were almost grazing the edges of the tunnels, and the murky roof got within a metre of the groundcar’s comms aerials.

  Eventually Aneela pulled up before pair of bronze gates and got out of the cab. Crowl, still seated, peered out at twin braziers burning in the gloom, and saw armoured guardians at station on either side of a heavy blast-door. He let his eyes run over the slabbed armour-panels above, and spied two needle-gun notches and the glint of a sensor-bead. No doubt there were other devices, better hidden, further in.

  ‘Not very welcoming,’ he observed as Aneela got out, opened the doors and stood to attention.

  ‘Not at all,’ she agreed.

  ‘Wait here until I return, please.’

  ‘By your will.’

  Crowl walked on alone, passing through the gates and limping up chipped stone stairs to the doors beyond. The guardians, who looked much as Revus’ soldiers did, saluted as they activated the unlock pistons.

  He went inside. The change was instant. The grimy exterior, lost down the dead-end of a hive-spire’s buried transit arteries, hid an interior of rare opulence. Crowl’s boots sunk into a deep-pile rug. The walls were marble, and high-polished mirrors reflected the warm light of a dozen gold-lined suspensors. Every surface was heaped with artefacts and objects of bewildering variety – a long skull preserved in a glass case, a diamond-tipped sabre, a porcelain vase decorated with strange hieroglyphs. Music was playing somewhere, though of a type he couldn’t place. It was hard to listen to, if you concentrated on it.

  He pressed on, walking down a long hall hung with paintings, and eventually reached a circular reception chamber. The clutter grew ever more pronounced and strange. Much of the furniture was very fine indeed, but every tabletop and chair seat was stuffed with ephemera. Smells, most of them foreign and difficult to identify, tumbled out of the perforated lips of censers. It began to feel a little confined, a little oppressive.

  The circular chamber had three doors leading from it, only one of which stood open. Crowl passed through and found himself in a high-ceilinged room of domestic proportions. The walls were lined with books, most very old and all kept locked behind crystal security screens. More esoterica lay in heaps – antique weapons, precious stones sitting on velvet pads, slow-cycling holo-images imprisoned behind ornate glasswork frames.

  ‘Good morning to you, Erasmus,’ came a soft voice from an armchair on the far side of the chamber.

  The speaker was an old man, slim, with fine-wrinkled skin and a balding pate. He wore thick burgundy robes that hung heavily over slender wrists, and thick spectacles with silver frames. He looked frail and neat and faintly incongruous, like a tall bird wrapped in a carpet.

  Crowl picked his way through the clutter until he reached a second armchair. He removed a few items from the seat, placing them on the nearest teetering pile, and sat down.

  ‘Slek,’ Crowl said. ‘You’ve had a clear-out since I was last here.’

  The light filtering through the windows behind his host was clear and warm. It appeared as if the space beyond was open to the sky, and the silhouettes of hothouse plants trembled behind the glass. Of course, it wasn’t the real sky. They were buried too deep for that, and in any case Terra’s sky was never clear and warm.

  ‘You do not look well, my friend,’ Slek Nor Jarrod said. ‘Will you have a cordial?’

  Jarrod’s cordials were interesting things. As a long-serving member of the Ordo Xenos, he had things in his caches that were almost certainly illegal, not that anyone would have dared to rummage through them.

  ‘Something restorative,’ Crowl said.

  A moment later, a slender figure weaved their way through the tottering heaps of taxidermy and real-bronze figurines. He might have been a boy, she might have been a girl, it was impossible to tell. They were slim, almost impossibly so, and dressed in a clinging shift of gauzy silver. Something about their movements was hard to get used to – the poise, perhaps, or the silent way they trod through the mess. They carried a silver tray with two goblets, each containing a turquoise liquid that smelled of rose petals. As soon as they had delivered them, they slipped away again.

  ‘This is very expensive,’ Jarrod said, raising his goblet.

  ‘Everything you own is very expensive,’ said Crowl, taking a sip. It was good, too, though the impressions it gave were as elusive as everything else in this place.

  Alien.

  They talked companionably enough. Jarrod asked after Revus. Crowl asked after Ohanna Vroon, Jarrod’s captain of storm troopers. They discussed the politics of the Inquisition on Terra, the performance of Kleopatra Arx in the High Council, the prospect of another interminable reorganisation. Crowl admired Jarrod’s latest items; Jarrod admired, for the umpteenth time, Crowl’s Luna-forged sidearm.

  ‘But you did not come here for cordial and conversation,’ Jarrod said eventually.

  ‘I should have done,’ said Crowl. ‘Both are excellent.’

  ‘You have a question.’

  ‘I have a story.’

  ‘Very good. I like stories.’

  Jarrod settled back in his chair, letting his hands cross on his lap. His Inquisitorial rosette – an insectoid of some kind locked in amber – nestled within the folds of his robe.

  ‘I became aware of a foolish plan,’ said Crowl. ‘It was to bring a xenos creature, alive, to a hive w
orld.’

  ‘Very foolish. What kind of xenos creature?’

  ‘A pain-bringer. I can describe it – you will be able to give me the precise term.’ He listed the way the creature had looked – its skeletal frame, its shifting robes, its bone-white skin stretched tight over prominent bones, the metalwork pinned through its flesh, its eyes, its black, black eyes.

  ‘You are describing a haemonculus. Throne. Who told you of this plan?’

  ‘A friend.’

  ‘And for what purpose was one of them brought to… a hive world?’

  ‘I was never sure. But it matters not – the point is this. Once imported, it did not do as intended. It pursued its own course. One that, to my mind, was almost mad. Suicidal. And so it proved – my friend tells me the creature is dead now.’

  ‘Throne be praised.’

  ‘So, I am left with a puzzle,’ said Crowl. ‘The expense and effort required to bring it to that world were huge. They must have had expectations that it could do something for them, and yet it did not. Why? I do not know. I wondered if you might.’

  Jarrod frowned. ‘It is dangerous to look for reason in what such creatures do. Very dangerous.’ Then he smiled, brightly. ‘But also intriguing. What do you understand of the dark eldar?’

  ‘Very little.’

  ‘Keep it that way. They are beyond abhorrent.’ Jarrod shook his head. ‘Even I do not know enough. No one in the ordo knows everything, for they are almost impossible to capture. I have never met one in the flesh. Few people have, so your friend was fortunate, or perhaps unfortunate, to have done so. But let me tell you what is known.’ He reached up to his rosette, and began to toy with it absently. ‘They are called pain-bringers for a reason. They live for it. It is not an affectation for them, it is life itself. We do not know precisely why, but there are accounts of them being imprisoned and kept away from any possible prey, and after a time spent thus, even when given solid food and water and kept in comfort, they wither. They begin to rave, then to decay. Given long enough, they will expire. I have seen the footage of this, and it is unpleasant. They are terrified, at the end, clawing the metal bars, pleading. And so it has been postulated that the infliction of agony is in some way essential to their survival. If they are given subjects to… desecrate, then they can survive under such conditions indefinitely.’

  ‘How was that supposition tested?’

  ‘Do not ask.’ Jarrod let his rosette fall, and reached for his goblet. ‘Let us return to your friend. Suppose someone were foolish enough to bring a haemonculus to a hive world. It would be the very opposite of the confinement I have described. The creature would be surrounded by billions of souls, all of them vulnerable, all of them alluring. You must understand that these creatures experience sensation far more acutely than we do. Their appetites dominate them, if allowed to. For this precise sect of the species, appetite is all that remains. It was placed in an environment of overwhelming, intoxicating abundance. I suspect that your judgement was right, Erasmus. I suspect it went mad. If it had some purpose in the beginning, then that must have been quickly forgotten.’

  Crowl rested his chin on his interlocked fingers. ‘Then it would be folly for those who arranged this to try the same thing again.’

  ‘It was folly the first time.’

  ‘And what would it do to those who came into contact with it?’

  Jerrod shrugged. ‘They would die. Painfully.’

  ‘But if they survived.’

  He looked at Crowl carefully. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If a human were exposed to such a creature, even for a short time, and somehow survived.’ Crowl held Jarrod’s gaze. ‘What effects might that have?’

  For a moment, Jarrod did not reply. ‘It would depend on the context,’ he said eventually. ‘Any xenos is to be avoided – their vices are legion. In this case, I have been told their speech is treacherous. I have been told their aroma is uniquely repulsive, no doubt partly due to their vile practices. But you will know all this.’ He reached for his drink. ‘I did speak to the master of the prisons where the experiments I mentioned were carried out. He had trouble sleeping. Perhaps not surprising. He also told me there were some things he could never get out of his head. He told me that he felt sometimes as if the creature had taken up residence there, even after its documented and witnessed death, and was making him think strange things. He feared that his judgement was becoming tainted.’

  ‘How did you respond to that?’

  ‘How anyone would have done – I reported him to his superiors. His replacement was given more strenuous psycho-conditioning.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Is that the answer you were hoping for?’

  ‘It is all useful. I am still trying to make sense of the story.’

  ‘A true story, is it? I struggle to believe it.’

  Crowl ran his gaze across the objects around him. Many were of human origin, many were not. One long tusk had been mounted over the mantelpiece, its notched length studded with bulletholes. Polished gems set in rune-carved lozenges hung on either side, glimmering faintly as if animated by an internal light.

  ‘Does it not make you sick at heart, to be surrounded by such grotesque things?’ Crowl asked.

  ‘No more so than the witches and fools you treat with, I expect. Your hatred for the alien, given all other possible targets for righteous anger, has always intrigued me.’

  ‘They are the ordained foe of humanity.’

  Jarrod laughed. ‘So the Cult teaches. I thought you only paid attention to the parts of that you liked.’

  Crowl sighed. ‘A heretic was a man once, or a woman once, or a child. They were gifted something precious, but chose to cast it aside. That is a tragedy, but an understandable one, for weakness is the condition of the masses. These… things, though. They are predators. They are beasts. There is no morality in them, no judgement or law.’

  ‘They say much the same about us.’

  ‘A dangerous equivalence. If I were cut from a different cloth–’

  ‘Did you discover what you wished to?’

  Crowl smiled faintly, and looked down at his clasped hands. ‘It was helpful. My thanks.’

  ‘The story was intriguing, though. I may have to investigate it further.’

  ‘I would not recommend that. These things happened far away.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Crowl stood. ‘Thanks for the drink.’

  ‘Any time. It looks like you could use another one.’

  ‘I could. What was in it?’

  ‘Grotesque things.’

  Crowl picked a path through Jarrod’s collections as he made his way out. ‘Goodbye, Slek. Take care of yourself.’

  ‘You too, Crowl.’

  Chapter Four

  Revus marched down past the Nighthawk hangars, followed by half a dozen staff – three storm trooper sergeants, two of Courvain’s bound adepts and a lexmechanic. They had been working their way through the citadel’s standing defences and supplies for several hours, and more work lay ahead. The internal layout had never been logical, with power generators inserted next to mess chambers, dormitories next to armouries. Simply keeping a handle on what lay where and had links with what was a fiendish and unending task.

  ‘Two gunships are still out of service, are they not?’ Revus asked the lexmechanic, studying a data-slate as he went.

  ‘That is correct, captain,’ came the reply, sounding more contrite than a Mechanicus lackey was wont to. ‘The required parts are on order from the feeder depot at Skhallax, but for some reason–’

  ‘Get it done, Namon. The Lord Crowl was most insistent on that point – we must have them all airworthy within forty-eight hours.’

  Ahead of them, menials were working hard. An arc welder was being deployed over a main portal blast-defence screen, and teams of labourers huddled
around it, their faces hidden behind iron masks. The sound of turbo-hammers booming came up from the deeps below, from the larger chambers that housed the big Spider­widow orbital craft.

  ‘I had reports of a fault in the third external door mechanism,’ Revus went on, still striding, causing a servitor hauling a heavy power-wrench to lurch out of the way. ‘That is unacceptable also.’ He looked up, directly past the main overhead lumen banks to where a thin tube snaked along the peeling plaster, terminating in a cluster of capped-off nozzles. ‘And make sure that one’s been checked out, too.’

  ‘Understood, captain–’ the lexmechanic Namon began, then stopped in his tracks.

  Ahead of them, ahead of the scurrying labourers and blundering servitors, stood a woman. She looked unstable on her feet, though was dressed in combat gear of the finest quality. The plates fitted tight to her body, each armoured piece beautifully interlocked, matt-black and sheer. That armour had once used cameleo scatter fields, seemingly, but the nodes appeared to be burned out.

  ‘Reporting, sir, as ordered,’ said Niir Khazad, making the aquila to Revus.

  Revus stared at her, lost for words. The assassin’s face was grey, which was unusual, as her natural colouration was copper-brown.

  ‘I did not ask you to report to me,’ he said. ‘You do not report to me. You report to the Lord Crowl.’

  ‘I get bored,’ said Khazad, then grinned. ‘Very bored.’

  One of the sergeants grinned too, before catching the look from his superior and extinguishing it. Revus went up to Khazad, extending a steadying hand.

  ‘You are not well, assassin,’ he said. ‘How did you escape Erunion’s care?’

  Khazad looked at him conspiratorially. ‘You know what I do for living?’ Then she got closer. ‘You are good at this, too, yes?’

  She was not focusing. Clearly the sedatives she’d been given were still having an effect.

  Revus beckoned one of the sergeants over, and he took her by the arm. ‘Get her back to the apothecarion,’ he told him, turning back to his work. ‘And find out what that flesh-meddler thinks he’s doing, letting her out.’