He banged his gauntlet against the rock face, the blows resounding deep within the hollow beyond the cliff but muffled by the howling wind and snow.
Knock. Knock-knock knock-knock. Knock-knock.
The dull echoes faded away and Corax wondered if he had mis-timed the blows or directed them at the wrong spots. His doubt disappeared as the grinding of gears and wheeze of pneumatics shuddered across the cliff face.
The primarch stepped back as a massive portal swung inwards, two doors of solid rock several metres thick effortlessly parting, revealing a mosaic floor. The wind blew flurries of snow over the small black and red geometric designs and howled madly as it entered the cavernous space beyond.
‘Wait for my command,’ Corax told his warriors as he took a stride across the threshold. The Emperor’s memories contained nothing that suggested the outer gate was lethally defended, but that was no guarantee of safety. He felt the faintest of tremors and, from the knowledge passed to him by the Emperor, knew that many kilometres below, ancient power plants had been stirred into life by the opening of the doors. Plasma was flaring within containment fields, electricity searing along cables and wires throughout the mountain’s depths.
Lights flickered into life, ruddy strips that ran the length of the arched ceiling, bathing the interior with a hellish glow. The walls and ceiling ran straight ahead, covered with slabs several metres across and engraved with a simple lightning bolt design. At the far end, a little less than two hundred metres into the mountain, the hall-like chamber ended abruptly, several of the wall-slabs replaced with gilded portals. Square pillars lined the corridor every ten metres, decorated with sparse geometric carvings.
Looking along the broad corridor, Corax saw that the floor tile designs were not simply ornamentation. He could recognise the pattern, discerning its message in a complex numerical code; whether from the Emperor’s memory or his own knowledge he was not sure. The tiles contained a message, a quote in an ancient Terran tongue; probably intended only for the Emperor himself, a small conceit by the Master of Mankind. Though it was in a long-dead language, Corax understood it.
In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows:
‘I am great OZYMANDIAS,’ saith the stone,
‘The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
‘The wonders of my hand.’ The City’s gone,
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.
We wonder, and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chase,
He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.
The primarch considered the words, but could not divine their meaning. His mentors on Lycaeus had taught him of poetry, of rhyme and metre and cadence, but he had never quite been able to see the appeal. Poems reminded him too much of the work-songs the prisoners had invented to keep up their spirits while they had hewn with pick and laser drill at the unforgiving stone of the penal colony. The last three lines left Corax feeling disquieted, though, as if the Emperor had suspected that his Imperium could not endure any more than the great empires of mankind’s long history.
Questions gnawed at Corax as he signalled for his expedition to prepare to enter the vault. If the contents of this trove were so dangerous, why had the Emperor kept them? He had abandoned the primarch project after the strange scattering of his progeny by the warp-bound entities called the Primordial Chaos. This much the Emperor had explained to Corax on their first meeting. Had the Emperor conceived of a time when this technology would be needed again? Had he, in truth, foreseen that one day one of his sons would require its secrets? Was it simply pragmatic not to destroy that which had taken so much labour to build? Or was this simply an extension of the Hall of Victories, in spirit if not location, a secret museum standing testament to the Emperor’s greatest achievement?
The noise of armoured boots echoed around Corax as the Raven Guard and Custodians entered, oblivious to the concealed warning beneath their feet. The clank of servitors and the drone of wheeled equipment transports filled the hall with raucous echoes, dispelling the reverent atmosphere of silence.
Searching the fragments of the memories lodged in his mind, Corax knew that the bulk of the facility lay beneath them, deep within the rock of the mountain. The doors ahead were elevators that would take them down to the hidden levels. He could not recall any traps or alarms in this place, but warned the expedition to proceed with caution nonetheless – the Emperor’s recollections were hazy in places and a slight delay for caution would do no harm.
‘Squads seven, eight and nine, secure rearguard,’ said Corax as the last of the Raven Guard passed through the portal. He moved to a slab about twenty metres from the entrance. It angled up at his touch, revealing a bank of controls. Corax punched in a sequence dredged up from his borrowed memories and the outer doors began to swing shut. ‘Transports to leave. Monitor secure channel epsilon-six for our transponder signals.’
The doors came together with a surprisingly delicate thud, leaving the Raven Guard in the red glow of the lights. Corax took the lead, quickly striding to the front of the column, where he found Agapito and the Mechanicum agent, Nexin Orlandriaz. The two of them were having an argument.
‘But it is imperative that we preserve any technology we find,’ the genetor was saying, the words coming as a clipped whisper from a mechanical grille set beneath the left side of the man’s jaw. His mouth was sealed with a pipe that looped over his shoulder into some form of rebreathing unit that hissed and whirred with metronomic precision.
The genetor was swathed in a voluminous red robe, the sleeves and hem threaded with gold designs in the shape of a cog’s teeth. A heavy chain bearing the gear-rune of Mars hung across his chest, and the device was repeated on several small ceramic studs above Nexin’s right eye. Other than the lung unit, he showed little outward signs of the heavy mechanical augmentation seen on many of the Mechanicum’s agents, but there was a strange lustre to his skin, a sheen of silvery quality. His eyes were also bizarre, seeming too large for his face, with no visible iris and dark red pupils. Given Nexin’s particular expertise – a genetor of the Magos Biologis – Corax concluded the Mechanicum operative had experimented on himself with other, less obvious, artificial enhancements.
‘The lives of my warriors are more important than any piece of equipment,’ Agapito replied. ‘We have lost enough legionaries already, I will not see any more fall without good cause.’
‘You do not seem to understand the weights being brought to the balance,’ argued Nexin. ‘A single warrior is limited. He can achieve only so much and then his light is extinguished. A weapon, a piece of technology, a fragment of our past glories, can live on for eternity, transforming the lives of billions.’
‘Life is just a commodity, right?’ Agapito snarled. He towered over the slight form of the magos, causing Nexin to flinch. ‘I remember well that attitude. That was the Kiavahran creed.’