The engine hissed out, and the cockpit vibrations shuddered away. Crowl took up Sanguine, Revus his hellpistol. Down at ground level it was as dark as night, and the hunched shells of the architecture loomed into a fire-tracked sky.
Crowl descended, touching down lightly onto a stained deck of riveted iron. Revus crept ahead, his helm’s lenses lit faintly with a blush of blood-red. A revived Gorgias swayed into the air above them both, its lumens glowing softly.
Crowl sniffed. All he got was the thick stink of promethium, tight and caustic. The place didn’t look like Terra. It didn’t sound or feel like Terra, and it certainly didn’t smell like Terra. Less than two hours’ flight from Courvain and they might have been on a different planet.
‘Extraordmanus,’ whispered Gorgias.
Crowl activated the location markers on his retinal feed, triggered a proximity detector and glanded a small amount of a moderately effective painkiller.
‘No argument,’ he said, moving out into the dark.
The Titan staggered down the long avenue, its weapon-arms festooned with pennants and its motive-units growling with steam and smoke. Rockcrete rippled under its crushing tread, the air around it shimmered with engine-heat. Its dog-snarl head hung low, slung under a thick cowl-carapace. Mega bolter and turbolaser arms swung in counterweight rhythm, encrusted with a boiling coating of ritual oils.
Behind the Titan came the battalions — first skitarii, macroclades arrayed in phalanxes of gold and red, an eerie precision to their massed marching. Behind those, esoterica from the Martian auxilia, secutors and myrmidon destructors, gouting steam of their own from closed mouthguards. And then, to emphasise the essential unity of the bipartite domains of mankind, the Astra Militarum, whole regiments of them in their varied, chequerboard livery, crawling in squares of infantry, flanked by the shaking hulls of mobile armour and followed by rows of tracked artillery pieces, their high-ratcheted gun barrels daubed red and their turrets bedecked with flags.
They moved up from the fortresses of the Lion’s Gate space port, through the great avenues overlooked by the requisitio-basilicae of the Departmento Munitorum, cheered on all the way by thousands of carefully choreographed citizens. Every viewing balcony was taken, thronged with generals in ceremonial robes, adjutants with augmetic monocles, commissars-general in real-leather greatcoats and high-peaked dress hats.
Flights of Thunderbolt heavy fighters scored overhead, their engine-roar making the spire flanks shudder, booming through the inter-tower chasms before releasing clouds of vivid red ink bombs that tumbled earthwards in bloody tentacles.
The procession marched on, moving into the sacred Ways of Mourning, passing the linked citadels of the Estates Imperium, the pleasure palaces of the Courts Exquisite, the hyper-habs of the Administratum Centrum Subsector Solar, and the saturnine relay hubs of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica. From there it headed out towards the many-columned processionals angling towards Dorn’s Redoubt, the plazas of the Nine Primarchs, and then along the arrow-straight road towards the Outer Palace, where the assembled prefects of the Imperial Household were waiting to formally greet them in ranks a thousand deep.
From high up, Spinoza watched them march. The air around her was fragranced with something floral, the chamber filled with the soft chiming of a mirrorharp. Menials glided between the guests with empty expressions on plastic faces, decked in sharp-hemmed robes of nightshade. The viewing window was a crystalflex portal rimmed with butter-yellow gold. All those present at the spire’s summit were senior officers in the Terran court hierarchy — Administratum directors general, Novators of the Houses, subsector ambassadors. They looked down on the crawling columns in the streets below with idle disinterest. The hum of conversation, hushed to mask a hundred conspiracies, went on unabated as the Mars-pattern Warhound led the crushing display of Imperial strength onwards to its destination.
‘I was not sure whether to come,’ Spinoza said, looking uncertainly at the plate of sucrose-dusted sweetmeats handed to her by a golden-eyed youth with flawless pale blue skin.
‘I’m glad you did,’ said Rassilo, chewing steadily, her hair glimmering under the soft lighting. ‘That was why I left the contact details in the file. So you’d have an outlet, if you needed it.’
‘And you thought that I would.’
‘I didn’t know. Have some of this food. It’s real, all of it.’
Spinoza put the plate down. ‘Did you know he is sick?’
‘He’s been in loyal service for over a century. We can postpone the drain of time, we can’t destroy it.’
‘Is it known?’
Rassilo shook her head. ‘Not for certain, not by me. I did wonder, but then we’re all carrying secrets, are we not?’
‘Why did he want an acolyte?’
‘He did not have to specify a reason.’
‘And has he always been alone, then? The files were redacted.’
‘He has not always served on Terra.’
‘And… relations?’
Rassilo raised a plucked eyebrow, and her rejuve-stiff face creased a little. ‘Family. Now you say it, it sounds quaint — something a hive-worker would cherish. Do you think that likely, having met him, knowing what he does?’ ‘And yet he is flesh and blood. Such things have been known.’
‘Why would you ask it, child?’ Rassilo reached for a silver goblet in the shape of a diving cetacean, and took a delicate sip of a clear liquid. ‘You look tired. I trust he is not working you into the ground.’
Spinoza looked back out at the procession, still grinding its way towards the distant Palace heights. At such a distance the individual soldiers were impossible to make out, merging into regimental squares, like immense human tiles sliding over an iron-grey ground.
‘I care not for rest. I have not hunted well, not yet. I must adjust to this terrain.’
Rassilo laughed, but not unkindly. ‘What’s your quarry?’
‘A False Angel to set against the true one. His gangs are running through the underhives. We kill a few, we discover more. They are ritual killers, some kind of blood cult, but their master eludes me.’
‘They mutilate their victims,’ said Rassilo. ‘They leave the excruciated bodies to be found by the authorities. Something in the pain of it — a rite? — fuels their devotion.’
Spinoza turned to look at her. ‘You are tracking them too.’
‘The Feast brings them out of the dark. Maybe the same ones as yours, maybe an allied cabal. But I’ve not seen work quite like this, not here.’
‘I encountered an operative — Aido Gloch. You know of him?’
‘Quantrain’s interrogator. Yes, by name,’ said Rassilo.
‘He was hunting a woman he called Falx. She was well trained, well equipped. If there are more like her, then it is to be taken seriously.’
‘If Quantrain is involved, then it already is.’
‘I do not feel we are close enough to them. Time is running out.’
Rassilo’s gloved hand hovered over a plate of sweetmeats before deftly selecting one of the more outlandish — a lurid green confection studded with nuts. She ate it, slowly chewing, her attention taken by the spectacle of the procession.
‘There was a time when I enjoyed Sanguinala,’ she said. ‘A celebration of dominance over the dark. That’s why they light the fires, to push the shadows back. Now even this is threatened, and it angers me. For one day we should be able to rest, eh?’ Rassilo smiled grimly. ‘A void-hauler exploded in orbit. Destroyed completely. An accident, they’re saying — a plasma drive breach that flooded the engines. To have these accidents now… I don’t have much faith in accidents. There’s fate, there’s will — these are the drivers.’ She put her goblet down. ‘I think you’re right, child. I think your judgement’s sound, which is no doubt what he wants from you. For what it’s worth, my agents believe the Boreates hives are at the heart of it, and I’ve sent more in. Consider hunting there — you may have better luck.’