That made her angry, and she looked about her, suddenly furious that no one seemed to notice. The crowds just kept on stumbling to wherever it was they had to get to, their woollen cowls drawn close about their heads, their cloth-bound feet bleeding onto the rockcrete.
‘Do you not see that?’ Spinoza cried out, gesturing to the defaced statue. ‘Do none of you see that?’
No one answered. Those who heard her retreated quickly, bewildered and fearful, trying to push themselves back into the herd’s innards in case the fault was theirs. The greater mass did not even hear, lost in the eternal city’s background roar of engine-growl, bell-clang, procession-chant, forge-burn.
She kept walking, knowing she should just summon the damn flyer but still resisting it. It felt as if the entire planet were rearing up over her, sliding under her, swelling around her, dragging her down into its squalid and stifling embrace. There was no end to it — the hives towered overhead, crumbling and decayed; the pits went down forever, the searchlights swayed, the pyres smouldered. She felt nausea curdle in her throat, but left the rebreather hanging.
You could go mad on a world like this, and no one would ever notice. The euphoria she had felt when in sight of the Palace itself had long died, replaced by the dull pang of revulsion.
That was bad. That was unworthy — it would blunt her effectiveness and slow her down.
She paused. Ahead of her stood yet another towering edifice amid the forests of competing gaudiness — a tottering pile of elaborately decorated stone, arranged in a running series of gradually narrowing archways. The stone was blackened as if burned, crowned with pyramids of human skulls, grinning and eyeless. Columns swept up alongside either flank supporting more stands of statues — skull-faced angels, winged lions, coiling serpents with eyes of adamant. Hung from the peaks were heavy banners bearing the icons of the Adeptus Ministorum — the Terran ‘I’ barred with a death’s head-within-sun, the tear-and-chalice images of sainthood, Archaic Gothic passages from the Lectitio Gouldiensis and Apocrypha Chymes scrawled in tight-cut lines of script.
Driven part by curiosity, part by her need to escape the filth, Spinoza walked up to the open doors. There were no guards, and she passed under high gothic vaulting, her heels clicking on marble flags.
Inside the cathedral it was cool — mercifully cool. Ranks of alabaster pillars marched away into darkness, lit at their bases by racks of flickering votive candles. Pilgrims huddled in clusters, swaying to the dull rhythm of a drum beating down in the depths. Every so often a bell would toll, high up in the towers, its heavy resonance making the stone around her tremble.
She came to a halt before one of many hundred high altars. There was no peace in that place — priests with blood-red robes were screaming from hovering pulpits, making the congregations scream back in terror and exhilaration. Servo-cherubs buzzed like blowflies in the smoky heights, bumping into one another and spilling more incense in clots. Ahead of her, the altarpiece soared up high, a confection of blackened gold depicting the Nine Primarchs in various warlike or devotional poses.
That was familiar, though at first she couldn’t place why. Then she remembered a similar set of icons, taken from the same Missionaria template no doubt, that had been placed in the chapel of her schola on Astranta. She remembered the lessons that had gone along with it.
And so the Emperor created the Nine Primarchs to guard against the Nine
Devils of the Outer Hell, and they were victorious, and now sleep, watching over Mankind lest the Terror return.
As a child, it had never been clear to her who had created the Nine Devils. She did remember asking Sister Honoria why the Emperor had not created a hundred primarchs rather than match exactly the numbers offered up by the Outer Hell, and had received no answer but a lash from the electro-lance for her trouble.
After she had left childhood behind, she often reflected on those words — lest the Terror return — wondering just what degree of horror would be necessary to bring them back. She knew that there were those who even denied the divinity of the Emperor and His pantheon, like the Imperial Fists she had served with, who had revered Dorn’s memory but never called him god or angel — and perhaps she had even been tempted by that severe philosophy at the time, for all that it was surely heresy, since it explained with typical Space Marine bluntness just how bleak the prospects for the species could become. No falsehood, no deception, just defiance.
She reached out to one of the racks of candles and took a thick slug of tallow. It took a while to light from the taper. She placed the guttering candle high up, out of reach of all but the healthiest and tallest, watched all the while by insolent servo-skulls with Ministorum bandanas draped over their cranial humps.
‘I shall not waver,’ she breathed, bowing low before the sacred image. ‘I shall not enquire, I shall not doubt, for enquiry is the doorway to heresy and doubt is the harbinger of weakness. I shall pray for the soul of my master. I shall not despise those whom I protect. I shall love the works of His hands, and this, His world, more dearly than I love my life, for there is only service, and there is only sacrifice.’
Then she bowed again before the altar. She ignored the whispering throngs that hovered around her, afraid to come close but too fascinated to pull away, drew herself up to her full height again, and made the sign of the aquila.
Then she drew in a deep breath, replaced the mask over her mouth and nose, and turned to leave. If not invigorated, the worst of her enervation left her. She strode back out into the blood-grey smog, her gait a little freer.
Once she had left, the crowds pulled in closer, mumbling and stumbling, reaching for candles of their own to offer up in hope of cures. One of the servo-cherubs bobbed down from its high vantage, its augmetic eye-lens hissing as it adjusted focus. It hovered over the candle that Spinoza had left there, and its systems chittered. With a robust puff, it blew the candle out, reached out with a fatty hand and stuffed the tallow-lump into its mouth. Then it bobbed off, chewing stupidly, floating under the high arches, before being lost in the shadows of the high nave, just another meandering blip amid a constellation of fumbling automata.
Crowl and Navradaran moved away from the cells, shadowed initially by a cadre of black-clad arbitrators. Most of Hegain’s detachment had been left alive by the Custodian’s assault — they had been felled artfully, their threat nullified but their bodies capable of recovery. No doubt the Custodian had been fighting well within his capabilities, doing what needed to be done and no more, and that was something significant to take away from the encounter.
The two of them left the apothecaries to their work and ascended the Fortress Arbites’ levels, travelling by creaking chain-lifter to the pinnacle. At the summit their escorts left them, and they entered an armourglass pyramid framed with adamantium spars. The space was planted liberally with hothouse flowers, the floor burnished bronze. A verdigrised statue of the primarch Rogal Dorn stood in the centre, flanked by stands of ferns and orchids. The dome’s atmosphere was clammy, and rivulets of moisture ran down the inside of the pyramid’s sloping walls.