The vast body mass shuddered, impaled on the snarling power blade, before Khazad withdrew with a flourish and leapt back as the abhuman crashed, choking, to the ground.
‘Faster now,’ ordered Spinoza, sighting another guard racing into the corridor at the far end and picking him off with a long-range shot.
By then the walls were drumming around them. It was getting much, much hotter. It felt as if the entire cavern were burning up. They reached a T-junction and swept to the right, unimpeded now, but the dull clamour was growing.
‘What is that?’ she voxed, sprinting towards a doorway at the end of the last tunnel.
No answer came. Khazad was close on her heels, but said nothing. Perhaps old processor-cells were still active down here, burning away on the other side of the thick walls — all the better to block augur sweeps and comm-lines.
‘Multiple signals,’ reported Hegain from his portable auspex as they neared the door. ‘Interference, interference, but I am… Holy Throne. Not interference. Fall back!’
But by then Spinoza had kicked the last door down, gun in hand, and burst through. Khazad came with her, her sword spitting. The storm troopers followed — down to nine now — spilling out into the open, hellguns aimed outwards.
Then they stood there, breathing heavily. Ahead of them, cavern walls rose up sheer, hewn from the world’s crust either by nature or by some forgotten ancient artifice. Twin rock faces were hung with banners, all crude depictions of bloody angels. Fires thundered in pierced metal barrels, hurling columns of angry red illumination up against the stone. The vault must have been fifty metres wide, but it swept back as far as the eye could see, a long chasm rent within the earth’s deeper skin.
High above, the spire’s promethium furnaces burned, but that was not the source of the roar. Nor was it coming from the blazing fires. The noise — as deep as the lost oceans, as rich as boiling blood — came from the hundreds, thousands, of people assembled in that hall. They were shouting, screaming, raising their fists into the horrifically hot, smoky air and chanting some mantra that Spinoza could not make out. They were all armed — most with improvised weapons any hive-ganger could have accumulated, some with Militarum-issue lasguns, some with more lethal tools. All of them wore red over their regulation woollen shifts, a motley sea of cloak-scraps, dyed sashes, hoods and armour-pieces, glossy with slaps of thick paint. Looming over them all, massive and brooding, was the sign of the False Angel — the winged cadaver painting in blood, twenty metres high, scored into the walls and lit by the flames.
‘So many,’ murmured Khazad.
For a moment, Spinoza froze, shocked by what she saw. Crowl would not have made this mistake. Crowl would have been more cautious. But then Crowl was not here to see it, and that, all things considered, was something to be glad of.
They were already turning. They were already reaching for their guns, the light of feral hatred shining in their eyes.
She holstered her pistol, reached for Argent, and kindled the disruptor field.
‘For Him on Earth,’ she voxed to the squad.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Even habituated to Terra’s superlatives, the airborne approach to the Palace never failed to elicit a tremor of awe. Dawn was not far off, though the skies remained as black as the void, a pall of smoke and smog that writhed like serpents around the mighty boles of the thickening tower clusters. The spires reared ever higher, the triumphal arches spanned ever more insane gulfs. Sightless aquilae stared out over colossal vistas, all now marked with the skull motifs of the Adeptus Terra. It was said that ten billion adepts were required simply to administer the precincts of the Palace itself. Crowl had always supposed that number to be hyperbole until he had first witnessed the approaches for himself, years ago. Seeing those mighty walls of age-tarnished adamantium rise on — up and up, sweeping like the shoulders of geologically impossible mountains into the spore-filthed sky, then the next, and then the next, each bastion bigger than the last — gave at least some credence to the figures.
There was no respite from the immensity. Ten thousand years of hegemony, of tithes dragged in from every planet in the vast realm of man, found its terminus here. The land itself was ruptured, bored deep down into the core to hollow out new oubliettes and warrens, just as deep as the towering behemoths above.
The Shade powered on full thrust, heading due north. Gothic edifices with ornate rose windows passed in sequence, one after the other, hour after hour, until their number and expanse became numbing. The Palace itself, a temple-continent of titanic proportions, grew steadily larger on the northern horizon, its swollen profile backlit by perpetual storms. Blacker than the night behind it, the cyclopean Sanctum Imperialis rose into the lightning-barred sky, a dome of such mind-bending dimensions that it enclosed its own climatic system and had foundations delved far into the forgotten bedrock of Himalazian peaks.
The pilgrim columns below them had swelled into a living ocean of red-robed humanity, surging up from the maw-gates and out onto the greater Avenues Immaculate, teeming in their millions, filling every scrap of empty rockcrete and marching forth in dirty, swaying ranks. There were far too many to count, far too many to halt — a host of the devoted dredged from every backwater world in the Imperium of Man and hurled into its heart of tarnished gold. They were dying in their droves even now, suffocated by the press of bodies, parched and withered from months without adequate food or water, bloated with contagion from the passage in stinking void-hulls, but still they tramped onwards, crying out for salvation, swinging the regulation blood-lanterns they had paid their last coin to obtain, gasping out hymns to the Sacrificed before their strength gave out and they were trodden underfoot by the thousands coming on behind.
The arbitrators could only watch that progress now, hovering high in their Raptor crowd-suppression gunships, powerless against the current of blind fanaticism that surged onwards and inwards. Millions of troops from the Astra Militarum regiments had been mobilised to line the high places, all standing in ranks five deep, but they could all have emptied their lasgun power packs ten times over and made little more than a dent in those numbers.
The hab-zones fell behind, and the Shade flew almost alone, broadcasting its exempted status on every vox-channel to ensure it remained unmolested by the shoals of watch-craft. Revus piloted it down a long, long channel between high towers, two kilometres wide, flat at its base and lined with immense statues on either flank. Far ahead loomed the greatest of the triumphal arches outside the Inner Palace perimeter — the great road that led to the first of the Great Gates, one of three portals into the sanctus sanctorum, where He yet dwelt in the agony of immortality, striving every hour with the infinite will of hungry gods for the souls of His people.
The outer wall emerged through veils of drifting smog — a long screen of blackened iron, higher than a hive-spire, its bulwarks formed from the adamantium piers of the First Palace, its feet resting on foundations hewn by the primarch Rogal Dorn. Those battlements now overlooked the pinnacle-fields of the world-city, but had once gazed out over nothing but mires of carnage, and still bore the scars. By decree of the High Lords, the marks of battle had never been erased, and now pocked and disfigured the gothic outer curtain, their edges eroded by the gnawing winds but always there, a reminder to the weak in faith of the consequences of ambivalence.