He let Sanguine’s muzzle drop — it would be of no more use here.
‘Waiting for something?’ he asked.
Before him, immense and wreathed in dying curls of plasma, loomed the destroyer of his men.
He was more than a giant. He was a leviathan, a juggernaut of gold and black, an armour-bound killing construct studded with blades and jewels and plumes. His battleplate was heavy, unsullied, carved into swirls and arcane symbology, and palpably crackling with ferocious energies. Massive shoulder-guards, rearing high over a lightning-embossed breastplate, enclosed a tall helm crested with a mane of black horsehair. In his right gauntlet he held a guardian spear, a glaive twice the height of a human-normal subject. The halberd thrummed with plasma snarls, vibrating down the heavy length of the shaft and making the steel walls around them swim with reflections. A long black cloak hung behind him, and for all the carnage he had caused, he was immaculate — untouched by blood or grime, as dazzling as a shard of ancient sun cast into the mire of the world.
There were stories told of such creatures as this, myths spun across the gulf of ten thousand years until they had swelled and burst beyond all reason. To live to witness one of the Angels of Death was a privilege granted to a vanishingly small proportion of humanity. To witness one of this select order was even rarer, something even the great lords of the Throneworld’s mighty citadels and macro-cathedrals would barely dare to dream of.
It had been said by some that they no longer existed — just another casualty of the darkening of the long ages, a mere echo of a greater past that had long since sunk into oblivion. Perhaps, others offered, they had never had been real at all. Perhaps they had always been chimeras, phantoms dreamed up by desperate men in desperate times to make the night seem a little less cold.
There was a certain satisfaction to be found in proving such speculation wildly, unforgivably and indubitably false.
‘Why are you here, inquisitor?’ said the Imperial Custodian. Though nominally a question, it was delivered as a command, as if the speaker could countenance no response but acquiescence. The voice was as otherworldly as his physical appearance — deep, measured, betraying no accent but that of the most strenuous refinement of High Gothic. No mortal spoke like that, nor had they done so for millennia.
Crowl held his ground. The aura of extreme violence still made the air electric, and the guardian spear had not yet been powered down.
‘You have my man,’ he said. ‘I look after my own.’
The Custodian considered that for a moment. His helm-face was a piece of artistry beyond anything Crowl had ever witnessed in battle-armour — a tracery of wings rising from a hawk-like vox-guard, enclosing twin jewelled lenses amid swashes of heavy gold. He found himself recalling the
Ministorum images of Sanguinius, those adoring frescoes of the Angel himself, and wondered just how mind-alteringly magnificent a living primarch must have been if this were not the pinnacle of human martial splendour.
‘You would come here, then,’ the Custodian said, ‘in defiance of justice, and dare to take him from me.’
So this was the test. For all his long years of service, Crowl was not an excessively proud man. He knew perfectly well the myth-born god before him could end him with a single strike of that guardian spear. Even if it had been in his nature, though, there was no room for dissemblance here. This creature, so the legends went, had been built to perceive the nature of falsehood.
‘He is my man,’ said Crowl again, lifting his chin. ‘You want him, you come through me.’
The Custodian made no move. The halberd’s energy field rippled across the monomolecular edge of the great glaive’s blade, itself a metre long.
‘What are you named?’ the Custodian asked.
‘Erasmus Crowl, the Ordo Hereticus.’
‘What do you know of Phaelias?’
‘Nothing at all.’ Crowl took up his rosette and fixed the golden giant with a defiant glare. ‘But if you do, then you are bound by the authority of this mark to disclose it.’
There was something like a laugh then, rumbling up from the heart of that rococo armour — a deep and fleeting amusement at the audacity of it, echoing from the fluted lines of the crafted vox-grille. ‘I am bound by no authority but the Throne.’
‘Then that makes two of us.’
It took another second for the energy field crawling across the glaive-blade to flicker out, and even then Crowl could not be sure that it wouldn’t come scything across at him, whistling through the air faster than thought. A rosette could halt many things, but not, he guessed, that spear.
‘It is rare, inquisitor, that I leave the precincts of His Palace,’ the Custodian said. ‘When I consulted the augurs two dawns ago, seeking the path to truth among the maze of falsehood, there was no certainty in my mind. I might have sent a lesser servant. Even now, I do not know with any certainty why I did not do so, and chose instead to attend this hunt in
person, for I am not habitually given to whims.’
‘I don’t doubt it.’
Finally, then — finally — the Custodian relaxed his stance, and his grip on the halberd’s stave relaxed. For the first time Crowl noticed the ranks of arbitrators clustered further down the corridor, their weapons trained on him, and it struck him how ludicrous that was. The Custodian himself moved as if there were no one there but the two of them — no prisoner, no stricken storm troopers, no troopers of the fortress, just two sanctioned agents of the Emperor’s immortal will.
‘I have many names, but you will call me Navradaran,’ the Custodian said. ‘Now we will talk.’
CHAPTER NINE
Spinoza strode along the bridge, barely aware which way she was headed, knowing that she ought to summon a flyer but unwilling to contemplate returning to Courvain with so little to show for her efforts. Again.
She pulled her rebreather mask from her face, letting it dangle around her neck, and tasted the unfiltered air of Terra. It was more acrid than she’d imagined, a melange of promethium fumes, human stinks, mouldering organics, the pyres of the faithful. She drew it in deep, feeling its acerbic grit graze against her windpipe.
This is my world now, she thought. I must immerse myself within it.
She had only gone a short distance from the squalor of the processing plant and the twisting streets were already packed with humanity. Mouldering bridges soared far overhead, and bridges crossed over those bridges, and more and more until they overlapped into the blur of distance. The crowds merged and split, men and women pushing past one another, locked within the confines of transit conduits or processionals, barely seeming to notice those around them, keeping their heads down and their faces hidden.
Spinoza pushed her way through. Where they were huddled and limping, she was erect, moving with the confident gait she had been taught in Astranta. They might have been another species, those masses, a sub-order worthy only of cultivating for some kind of brute sustenance.
An old man blundered into her path, not noticing her armour and her signifiers until too late, and she elbowed him aside. When he saw who had
shoved him, his bleary eyes went wide and he fell prostrate.
‘Forgive me, lord!’ he croaked, cracking his forehead onto the rockcrete as if in penance, flecking the road with his blood. ‘I did not see! Forgive me!’
Spinoza looked down at him. He stank like all the others — the stale, ingrained stench of a body long unwashed.
They are afraid, terrified, all of the time.
She kept walking.
The bridge spanned a wide gap between mountainous hab-cliffs. The unnatural valley’s foundations were far out of sight, its descending sides studded with diminishing points of low-power lumens. On the far side was a tripartite tower complex, ridged and buttressed with interleaving support structures. A triumphal arch had been raised before them, forty metres high, hewn from solid granite, crowned with graven images representing the Four Defenders of Mankind: the Astra Militarum, the Imperial Navy, the Mechanicus of Mars, the Angels of Death. All of them were thick with a lichen-like patina, their edges worn away by age. As Spinoza got closer, she could see that the final statue, that of the Space Marine, had been defaced — the raven-beaked helm was scratched, as if a knife had been taken to the stone.