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

  The sergeant, a young man named Greive, dragged Khazad off. A second later there was a crash, and he was on his back amid a tumbling batch of fuel canisters. Revus looked around to see Khazad standing next to him, perfectly relaxed and smiling blearily. The two remaining troopers drew their weapons.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ Revus growled, waving at them to stand down.

  He took a closer look at Khazad. Even half-crazed on meds, she was capable of swatting aside a trained storm trooper as if he wasn’t there. That should not have come as a surprise. Both of them, Revus and Khazad, had been there in those final moments in the vaults under the Palace. He had seen the way she fought, albeit in confused snatches amid the flashes of las-fire, and it had been formidable. She was, in her own way, far more deadly than he was. Perhaps she was even more deadly than Interrogator Spinoza, who had proved her worth to the citadel in such a very short time.

  ‘I’ll take her,’ Revus said, almost without intending to. He turned back to Greive, who was getting up awkwardly. ‘Complete the survey, sergeant, then run the next two levels down. Report on my desk within two hours.’

  ‘Aye, captain,’ Greive said, looking chastened.

  Revus took Khazad by the arm and walked her away, heading back to the elevators that led back up to the medicae levels. This time, she didn’t resist.

  ‘What you people doing down here?’ Khazad asked, looking around her, wide-eyed.

  ‘These are dangerous times,’ Revus said, keeping her moving. ‘Lord Crowl ordered a review of the defences, just in case.’

  Khazad nodded sagely. ‘Yes, yes. They came for us, too.’

  ‘I am aware of that.’

  Then she seized him by the wrist, a sudden movement that was so quick, so unconsciously fluid yet steel-trap strong, that he instantly found himself wondering how she’d done it. She seemed on the surface to move without thought or consideration – acting purely on instinct – and yet her aim, even under such conditions, was near-perfect.

  ‘I can help you,’ she said, seriously. ‘They will come again. I evaded them, a long time. I know how they work.’

  Revus wondered if he could shake off her grasp without breaking his wrist. ‘Yes, that is why Crowl wanted you,’ he said.

  ‘I am very good.’

  ‘I can see that. You do not need to grip quite so hard.’

  Khazad laughed, and let him go. Then she looked groggy again, and took a half-step backwards to keep on her feet.

  ‘That thing you did back there, with my trooper,’ said Revus, carefully. ‘Can that be taught?’

  ‘Everything can be taught,’ Khazad said, ‘to the right student.’

  She staggered, and he grabbed her swiftly, keeping her upright, guiding her to the waiting elevator cage. She appeared to be losing consciousness, and her face went another shade paler.

  ‘Throne knows how you even made it down here,’ Revus muttered, bundling her in and hitting the lock controls. The doors ground closed on rust-blotched rails before the cage started to clang its way up.

  ‘I am very curious,’ she mumbled, slumping against him with half-closed eyes, a thin line of drool running from the corner of her mouth.

  ‘This is a Hereticus citadel,’ said Revus stiffly, holding her up and watching the floors slide by. ‘Best you work on that.’

  Spinoza remembered Rassilo.

  The candles in her chamber were burning low, though due to her imminent departure she would not have them trimmed. She shifted in her uncomfortable fatigues, all greasy synth-leather and plasfibre, and tried to concentrate.

  From the outset, Rassilo had been the one she had trusted. Spinoza remembered her calm aura of command, the gentle air of authority. Rassilo had worn the badge of her office with such ­unostentatious assurance that it had engendered trust from the outset. That had been the skill, of course – the ability to inspire confidence. Crowl did not have it, at least with her, and that was no doubt why Rassilo had been an inquisitor lord with access to the interior of the Palace, and Crowl was stuck in Salvator hunting down gangers and witch-cults.

  They had known one another, those two, in some fashion that she still didn’t understand. Probably a professional liaison, but you never knew. Even a dried-up old lizard like Crowl must have had romantic attachments once or twice over his long life, though it was admittedly hard to see what the attraction could have been in her case.

  Now Rassilo was gone, though, cutting off the last thread of security to another world, one in which the chains of command were simple and well understood. Spinoza did not know what was more unsettling about the situation – that she had been so wholly duped, or that she was now on the other side of the mirror, still working with those whom her original mentor had opposed. There was no one left on the outside, now – Spinoza’s entire hinterland had become this citadel, its damaged denizens and its decaying walls.

  Well, that was not quite true. Oaths had been made. But she could think of no likely circumstances, even mortal ones, under which she could take advantage of the very last contingency available to her.

  Sighing, she reviewed the information a final time. The printed parchment documents would not be taken with her, and so every­thing had to be committed to memory.

  Revre, Haldus, forty-five-standard, access level azure-nine, specialism/modus incom–

  She looked up as her door chime sounded.

  ‘Come,’ she said, placing the parchment back on the desk and turning in her chair.

  It was Crowl. As he entered, ducking under the metal frame of the doorway, she thought he looked worse than he’d ever done, his flesh more sallow, his cheeks hollower. He’d been outside, that was clear enough – the promethium stink of the Terran atmosphere still clung to his armour and robes.

  ‘Glad I caught you, Spinoza,’ he said, a little breathlessly. ‘I wished to bid you good fortune before you left. And that is fine attire.’

  Despite herself, she let a half-smile flicker. She was not wearing her habitual blood-red armour, but had donned civilian clothing of a particular down-at-heel kind. It had been altered and fitted to her, but still felt strange – too light, too flimsy.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  ‘You would prefer to pursue this openly, I know,’ Crowl went on. ‘Creeping around in borrowed clothes and with assumed identities is hardly dignified, and Gorgias is still angry with me about it. Trust, though, that it is necessary.’

  ‘I do not doubt it, lord,’ she said.

  ‘We have no defence once we are exposed.’

  ‘Yes, I understand that.’

  ‘So you have the leads you require?’

  ‘I believe so. I intend to take Sergeant Hegain with me – he performed well before.’

  ‘Good.’ He shot her one of his crooked smiles, the kind that exposed his yellowing teeth. ‘Then, unless there is anything else?’

  She hesitated. At times, she thought her master had an almost preternatural ability to catch her at her most vulnerable, displaying forensic insight into her hidden thoughts and intentions. At others, he seemed unbearably clumsy, a clever man who nevertheless misread signals and treated all around him as tools rather than subjects. In all likelihood both presentations were correct, albeit deliberately cultivated and managed.

  She looked up at him directly. ‘A confession, lord,’ she said, firmly.

  Crowl raised an eyebrow. ‘Go on.’

  ‘I was… in communication with Inquisitor Lord Rassilo before she was exposed,’ she said. ‘In secret. She gave me the means to get in touch privately, in case…’ She searched for the words.

  ‘In case I was too difficult to work with,’ Crowl finished for her. ‘Or you required advice on how to handle me. Or I was, as many no doubt suspect, a heretic myself.’ He brushed the idea aside with his hand. ‘Come, Spinoza. I’d have been disappointed if you hadn’t been s
peaking to her.’

  ‘It was a betrayal of trust.’

  ‘You had to be careful. She was powerful.’

  ‘It was not for that reason.’

  ‘For whatever reason.’ Crowl blinked hard. Something swam briefly across his vision, a kind of cloudiness in his rheumy eyes. ‘If you wish me to be disappointed in you, or find some reason to impose discipline, then you are wasting your time. This work is too important.’

  She found herself wanting to press him further then. She found herself wanting to ask when he had last slept. She found herself wanting to ask how effective his medication was proving, and whether he was confident that his desire to press on with this investigation, alone, with such haste, was wise. She found herself wanting to ask whether he still saw the creature’s teeth in his nightmares.

  ‘Then take it as a lesson learned,’ she said, ‘that any question of loyalty is now resolved. It will not happen again.’

  Crowl nodded. ‘Understood.’ He limped over to the desk’s edge and leaned against it. ‘Though you still think this is all misjudged. Go on – speak. Healthier to get it out into the open.’

  Spinoza looked up at him. ‘No, lord, I do not know what to think,’ she said, truthfully enough. ‘I have no certainties left. Only one thing troubles me, though – the reason she did all this. If Rassilo were right, and the Golden Throne were indeed failing, then would not anything be warranted in the search for a cure?’

  ‘Do you think she was telling the truth?’

  ‘Why would she lie?’

  ‘Because she had been in contact with that… thing.’ Crowl looked briefly pained, and sighed deeply. ‘A creature like that twists every­thing. You cannot ally with them, control them or reason with them. The only safe course is to destroy them. Rassilo thought she knew better, and died for her arrogance. If there are High Lords truly involved in this too, then they have made the same error, and will share the same fate.’

  ‘But if there is even a risk of it, then should we not at least–’

  ‘I was in hailing distance of it,’ said Crowl. ‘The Throne itself. I felt it. Truly, I never wish to be in the presence of anything so powerful ever again. Having been there, I cannot believe that anything could endanger it. That may be why Navradaran took me inside. At any rate, he was not worried, and do you not think he, of all people, might have said something, if such worries had any foundation?’

  ‘Navradaran’s life has always been in there,’ Spinoza said. ‘I have observed before that when a person is surrounded by something for too long, he stops seeing it truly, and cannot conceive of a time when it might not be as it always has been.’

  Crowl raised an eyebrow. He thought on that for a moment. ‘That may be so,’ he said. ‘That may be a blindness we are all capable of suffering from.’ Then he roused himself and pushed back towards the door. ‘But it is still speculation, and only one fact is truly certain, for we witnessed it with our own eyes – a monster was loosed within the Palace and came within a hair’s breadth of reaching the Emperor Himself. Whatever was intended, whatever was believed for whatever reasons, that crime must be punished. I have killed countless souls for lesser transgressions – you have done, too. This is our sacred task now.’

  ‘Then do you still see it?’ Spinoza asked.

  Crowl halted. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The xenos. Do you still see it? I do. I hear it, sometimes.’

  ‘You must purge such thoughts from your mind.’

  ‘I have been attempting to. I will try harder.’

  ‘Do so,’ he said, sharply. Then he appeared to regret his tone, and offered a final, dry smile. ‘The truth is I need you, Spinoza. No greater duty will ever come before us, not if we serve in this Inquisition for another thousand years. We must not fail in this. We must not doubt.’

  For some reason, Spinoza immediately thought of Erastus then. That was just the kind of thing he would have said. ‘Of course, you are correct, lord,’ she said, standing to face him. Already she could see the signals flashing from Hegain, informing her the transport was prepared. ‘Once more, I have been remiss. I will do better.’

  ‘Just… do what you do so well,’ Crowl said, half-tolerantly, half-wearily, standing aside to let her pass. ‘And know that, in so doing, and in all else, my trust is absolute.’

  Despite herself, that was good to hear.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I shall endeavour to deserve it.’

  Chapter Five

  His review complete and standing orders issued, Revus took a Shade out of the hangar and headed west into the heart of Salvator. It was two hours before dusk, and the sky overhead was turning a deep, dark grey. All across the crowded cityscape, lamps were being lit, searchlights were going on, banks of neon were flickering into life. Diurnal watch-craft were returning to their claw-berths, replaced by nocturnal duty shifts. Auto-bells pealed in the many campaniles, just audible over the grind of the city’s furnaces, its engines, its sirens.

  He didn’t opt for the privileged air-lanes, but mingled with the rest of the sluggish traffic. Just as always, they got out of his way smartly enough. Over on his right-hand side, a glut of crumbling hab-units blocked out the lowering sky. They had once, seemingly, been daubed with bright colours, but Terra’s driving grit-squalls had scoured most of that from the bare rockcrete, making them look like pocked and eroded cliff-edges.

  On his left-hand side was the glowing shell of a refinery, its heart a throbbing red, barred by cooling towers that rose as high as the crowded pinnacles around them. Sparks from the open furnaces drifted across the columns of air-traffic, swept up by the eddies of the roiling wind and thrown into spirals and plumes of twinkling illumination. Revus watched them dance for a while, letting the Shade’s machine-spirit guide him. The points of light were ephemeral, glowing brightly for a few scant moments before the dry gusts turned them to ash-flakes, ready to coat the levels below in another gauzy net of dust.

  Ahead of him rose the archaic cluster of a Ministorum diocesan command-chapel, a twisting, tortured mass of age-blackened iron and adamantium. Gargoyles and devils crowded its steep rooftops. Web-like buttresses flew tightly between ranked spires and turrets, piled atop one another in a maze of overlapping construction. A hundred narrow stained-glass windows glowed weakly from the thousands of candles tended within, while autocannon placements slowly rotated atop the spire pinnacles under the blind gaze of cowled stone saints.

  The place was a micro-city in its own right, with its own priests, its own gunships, its own servitors and its own power generators. Pilgrims and supplicants processed in endless shuffling columns through its gaping portals, blared at constantly by hovering devotion-drones. Every so often an Ecclesiarchy official would push his or her way through the masses, guarded by a phalanx of masked cathedral orderlies with electro-staves and crozius-poles.

  Revus took back full control and guided his transport towards a narrow landing pad set deep in one of the command-chapel’s less ostentatious districts. He ducked it under the shadow of an overhanging prayer-tower and pulled it round, finally dropping onto the platform with a gout of yellowish steam. He disembarked, sealed the Shade remotely, and followed a spiral stairway down inside the sprawling structure.

  Once within, he witnessed the usual activities in the naves – the congregation waddling past the high altars, servo-skulls swarming up in the vaults with their sweeping red surveillance-eyes, the wild cries of flagellants and Emperor-touched pilgrims prophesying the Days of Wrath. More worshippers were gathered into the precincts than he’d seen before, outside of the great feasts and festivals. They huddled there, like herd-beasts clustering for warmth and shelter while a storm gathered energy outside.

  Soon, though, he was moving down more tight-wound stairways, entering a labyrinth of older routes and danker passages. The air got stuffier, smelling of incense and rotting books. Candles as thick
as his waist guttered in alcoves, dribbling tallow over heavy stone blocks. Tombs had been set back into long alcoves, each inscribed in various ancient dialects of Gothic and given over to the memory of men and women who had once been powerful in their own parochial way but were now almost entirely forgotten. Even the servo-skulls didn’t come this far down often, and the hum and shriek of the crowds gradually faded away.

  Eventually he reached a side-chapel – a tiny chamber carved out of mouldering black walls. More candles glimmered against damp stonework. A modest altar took up one end of the chamber, over which hung the faded banner of an Astra Militarum regiment, one of the thousands that carried the Emperor’s vengeance to His enemies. Revus had no idea how old the regiment was, where it was stationed, what deeds it had performed, or even if it still existed. Perhaps no one ever came here any more, or perhaps, one day, the regimental commanders would finally make the pilgrimage home again, replacing this standard with a more glorious one and leaving a granite-carved record of their many and famous victories. Whatever the truth, a long time ago someone had seen fit to hang the standard over the altar, and mark it with the words Religio Nostra ad Sideres Aeterna, and leave a single lasgun, now cobwebbed and dusty, before the votive candle formation.

  Revus took a seat on the hard, metal pew. As he did so, the chamber’s only other occupant shuffled a little further up.

  ‘In His service,’ the man said.

  ‘For all ages,’ Revus replied.

  The two of them regarded the standard for a while. The man’s eyes were milky, as if he were suffering from cataracts. His thin hands protruded from pale grey cuffs, and the faint smell of something gangrenous hung about his priestly robes.

  ‘It has been a while, captain,’ the man said, eventually.

  ‘Always so much to do, Heinwolf,’ said Revus. ‘How is your health?’