‘It shall be even as you say, lady. I will go down into the dark for you, and find this thing. It shall be done as you command.’
‘Not quite as she commands,’ Jonah Kerne interrupted him. ‘The mines are a dangerous place – all manner of things might be lurking down there. I will send my first sergeant, Fornix, to accompany you, along with a small escort of the Dark Hunters.’
He turned to Te Mirah again. ‘Just to keep an eye on things.’
TWENTY
Cor Tenebrosum
Above us, the war goes on: my brothers fight, and die, and win honour and renown before their peers, Fornix thought. And here am I, creeping into a hole in the ground.
The war raged on, but there was no inkling down here of that massive cataclysm. It was silent, dark, as dry and dead as a corpse’s throat.
Behind him, Brother Gad spoke. ‘Auspex is clear. We have left behind the upper levels. It seems the refugees did not make it down this far.’
Small wonder. There was nothing down here but the echoing dark. All the power to the lower levels had been shut off in the early days of the initial invasion, to save on energy, and the civilians who had fled the fighting in their tens of thousands had crammed into the upper levels of the mines, where there was light and air still being pumped in.
They did not dare venture further down into the blackness, where the air was bad, and the great mining engines stood stolid and silent, their beds still loaded with precious ore.
Some eighty thousand people had come down here in the first weeks of the war, and huge numbers of them had died of thirst and hunger and mere despair, their bodies tossed into the deeper shafts so that their corruption might not bring sickness among those who survived.
These unfortunates still crammed the upper levels, kept alive by a trickle of food and water from the hard-pressed workers who were still working, fighting and surviving in the manufactoria of the Armaments District.
Men fought and worked in hellish conditions above so that their families might survive in the hellish conditions below. Fornix did not know whether to admire or despise these folk.
It had been a near stampede of terror at first, as the eldar warriors and the Dark Hunters had entered the mines. Despite the warning messages over the voxponder system, the sight of the lean, masked xenos and the giant, camouflaged Adeptus Astartes had engendered something close to panic.
Many had been trampled underfoot before order had been restored. They had finally made way for the mismatched, fearsome company as a mouse might cringe back from the shadow of a hawk, and even in Fornix, the exasperation he felt at their weakness had become tinged with pity.
How pitiful, and frail, ordinary men were. And how lucky, how blessed was he to be something more, something which held in its flesh the very spark of the Emperor Himself.
Now they had left the upper levels with their packed, feral mobs behind, and were venturing into the deep mines. Here, there was no light, the air was thick as paint, and it was becoming hotter moment by moment.
The xenos up at the front spoke up.
‘The passage ends. Another elevator. We need your device again.’
The five Space Marines brought up the rear of the party; Ainoc and his six guardians were at the front. Now they drew together ahead of a great plascrete platform which rose in the shaft ahead. The controls in the wall were dead, and beams from the helm-luminators of the Space Marines went around the walls like will o’ the wisps, the passage rising above them, cavern-like. It was sandstone here, buttressed with plascrete beams and steel girders.
Brother Heinos stepped forward, his servo-arm rising at his back. Clipped to his powerpack was a plasma-fuelled generator. This he plugged into the elevator controls. There was a clank, and a whirring noise under their feet. The light on the generator at his back flickered and dimmed somewhat.
‘The machine-spirit of the mechanism can be revived for only a few minutes,’ the Techmarine warned. ‘We must be swift.’
They clambered onto the platform, Space Marines and eldar together, and with a lurch, it began to descend, dust rising in the beams of the helm-torches, the spirit stones on the cloaks and belts of the eldar glittering green and red and aquamarine.
They went down a long way, and the elevator rattled and clanked like a bad-tempered beast under their feet.
‘Nine hundred metres,’ Brother Gad read out, staring at the auspex. ‘One thousand metres.’
Shining veins of ore went past in the walls as they descended, catching the light. This was the wealth of Ras Hanem: adamantium in quantities so great that it was here the armour of Imperial Titans had been forged. It was for this ore that, ultimately, men were dying in their thousands on the surface above.
‘Fifteen hundred metres,’ Brother Gad intoned.
They stood unspeaking, the Space Marines with bolters ready, the eldar with their shuriken catapults and wicked-looking rune-chased swords. Ainoc’s Witchblade remained on his back, and the runes upon the sword glowed with a pale light which was both bewitching and hurtful to the eye.
Finally the elevator ground to a halt. Fornix looked at the information streaming on his helm display. The temperature had risen further, and the atmosphere in the mine was now unbreathable to normal humans. Even an unprotected Space Marine would find it harmful long-term, but in their power armour the Dark Hunters could ignore it as their atmospheric systems instantly adjusted.
The eldar were similarly unaffected, all wearing the tall, pointed helms of their kind. They looked slender enough for a Space Marine to break over his knee, but Fornix had fought their kind before, and knew how formidable they could prove as foes. Especially the warlock, the one named Ainoc.
Ainoc caught Fornix watching him, and the mask-like helm tilted to one side. ‘I sense your hatred, human. But remember we are allies down here, and must face the pit together.’
‘For now,’ Fornix growled. He called up the plan of the mines which had been loaded into his armour’s tactical readout before leaving the surface.
‘The deepest shaft lies ahead some eight hundred metres, bearing one five three. After that, xeno, we must rely on your nose, and hope that this buried treasure of yours is not buried too deep.’
‘My nose?’
‘Whatever it takes to sniff out the location of this trinket you are after.’
They moved on. The passageway was wide enough for two files now, and the eldar walked on the left, the Space Marines on the right.
Here, the shaft became rougher, and the geology changed. Striations of quartz and mica appeared, glittering star-like as they caught the light of the torches, and the stone grew dark and close-grained. It was basalt, igneous rock which in eons past had been lava.
The man-made portion of the shaft ended, and cutting across their path was a smooth-bore lava-tube, like a giant ridged oesophagus telescoping steeply downwards out of sight.
‘This is the end of the mine, first sergeant,’ Brother Gad said, tapping the auspex screen.
‘I know,’ Fornix replied thoughtfully. In his helm readout the map came to an end here, with nothing but blankness beyond.
Ainoc strode to the front of the party. ‘Now, human, you will have to rely on the subtler senses of the eldar. Stay close behind me, and try not to fall behind.’
Fornix’s power fist clenched and unclenched in a glow of blue-white energy discharge, but he said nothing. The party began to descend the lava-tube, moving more slowly now, settling their feet in the circular ridges that lined it, and feeling the gradient steepen.
‘Brother Heinos, knock in a spike or two,’ Fornix said.
The Techmarine unfolded his servo-arm and blasted a series of thick metal pitons into the stone, the metal sparking as it was driven into the basalt. From these pitons hung carabiners, and attached to each was a small luminescent marker. Then Heinos ran out a thin filament of steel wire from the drum at his belt, locking it through the carabiners, the wire whining as it spooled out behind them.