‘We’re being tracked,’ Revus reported, edging the Shade a little higher.
‘How many active weapon locks?’
Revus glanced at the console. ‘Three hundred and seventy-four.’
Crowl smiled. ‘They’re doing their job.’
He activated the comm-bead at his neck and scrolled through the access ciphers. Crowl’s retinal feed glowed with lists of runes, sliding smoothly across his visual field.
The wall drew closer. The processional way was packed with both foot-traffic and the sanctioned walkers of the Ecclesiarchy. An immense tracked land-train ground its way onwards, its ranked chimneys spewing thick black clouds of smoke, its sloped prow crushing any pilgrims dull-witted enough to stagger into its path. Priests floated above their flock on grav-pulpits, roaring out injunctions across overlapping vox-augmitters. Halfway along the route, two Warhound Titans of the Legio Ignatum stood sentinel, their guns garlanded with banners, their blunt cockpits facing one another across the swollen river of bodies.
‘We have a challenge,’ said Revus.
‘Maintain course. I am working on it.’
The Shade powered on, passing over the Titan sentinels, a lone speck of black against the hosts below. More challenge runes flashed up on the console, most from arbitrator command-fortresses, some bearing Astra Militarum markings, a few with classified origins.
The wall drew closer. More detail filled out the auspex screens. Their target, the Lion’s Gate, could just be made out as a floodlit haze among the coal-black surrounds, glinting from the slivers of lightning, its base stained dull red from the millions of blood-lanterns at its feet.
Long shadows fell across them. More craft were slowly descending, heavier variants of the crowd-suppressor gunships, their thrusters straining and their gun-banks swinging around to track.
‘Seven hundred active locks,’ said Revus calmly. ‘In a moment, one of them will engage.’
‘Maintain course.’
Crowl worked through the comm-protocol channels, scanning for a lock of his own. Even with Navradaran’s cipher-keys, opening a line was not simply a matter of finding a frequency — a billion comm-beads were opening and closing every second, swamping the ancient relay towers and filling the night air with hails of static. Crowl negotiated the symbolic gateways, appending his own ordo respond-codes and then threading through signatory synapse paths.
By Terran standards, the landscape around them was open, a vast field of plazas and stepped terraces. The Lion’s Gate had been the great voidport of the capital world, hundreds of square kilometres across, capable of receiving massive Crusade-era drop-ships. During the Great Heresy, legend told the site had seen some of the fiercest fighting as Traitors and Loyalists had slaughtered one another for control of the prime landing sites, and even now many of the old stages were revered centres of devotion, hallowed across the millennia and protected by the Ministorum, the original crumbling rockcrete preserved under high vaults, the scorch tracks and mortar craters meticulously tended by armies of slaved menials.
‘Energy spikes detected,’ Revus noted, bringing them into line with the Lion’s Gate itself, its bulk still half shrouded in shadows.
‘Noted,’ said Crowl, working hard. ‘Maintain course.’
The wall now filled the forward viewers, rising like a cliff-edge above the old void stages, its parapets spiked with gun-lines. The immense portal doors, each one over two hundred metres high, were closed and had been for ten thousand years. The two door faces were embossed with beaten ceramite, sculpted into representations of the battles that had taken place. Idealised Angels of Death clashed in bas-relief, their blades glimmering under an accumulated patina of ages. In the very centre, where the immense bosses swelled out, were two greater figures — the Holy Primarch Jaghatai Khan, and a nameless daemonic monster wielding a scythe.
‘Now in interdict,’ said Revus, his voice as passionless as ever. ‘They tell me they will open fire in five seconds.’
Crowl could see the truth of it. Atop the closest parapets, linked lascannons were swinging around to gain a clear shot. The Shade’s console was swimming with warning runes, its main comm-intake clogged with challenge hails. Inquisitorial markers would buy them a little time, but not much.
He pushed on, filtering and mind-sorting, progressing through levels of symbolism. The key was there, locked down amid a thicket of overlapping astrological cartographs.
‘Time’s up,’ said Revus, noting the power surge on the lascannon battery. He neither slowed nor deviated course.
Then Crowl broke through, and his rune-feed blinked into a >transmit invitation. ‘You wanted to see me,’ he voxed. ‘Call off your dogs.’
The lascannons remained lit, their power coils swollen with electro-static. The Gate swam closer, its surface details now visible to the naked eye. For a moment longer they coasted, high above the artificial plains, angled towards one of the many armoured ship-access portals cut into the doors themselves, their every movement tracked by silent gun barrels.
Then the lascannons swung away. The coils powered down, and the closest shadowing gunships peeled clear.
‘You are early, inquisitor,’ came Navradaran’s voice, not through the teeming comm-channels but direct into his armour’s audex system.
‘I have news of Phaelias,’ said Crowl. ‘And of others — I must speak with you.’
There was a pause. ‘Follow the markers. Once inside, do not deviate — the guards will not give a warning beyond the wall.’
Ahead of them, one of the ship-access portals folded in on itself, sending a shaft of red-gold light bleeding out into the poisoned atmosphere. Revus shifted trajectory to match it.
‘Not very friendly,’ he remarked.
Crowl stared ahead, watching as they crossed the threshold and the Inner Palace unfurled before them in all its terror and splendour.
‘We’re just getting started,’ he murmured.
It was not a cell, not a cabal, not a rabble. It was an army.
At the far end of the cavern, past the heaving crowds, half lost in the swirl of smoke and the ripple of the fire, was a great archway and a raised stage. A red-robed, masked figure stood there, arms raised, flanked by dozens of ogryn-breeds and armoured honour guards, surrounded by a halo of vox-augmitters. He had been addressing the crowds, whipping them into mania, but now he turned towards the interlopers into his subterranean kingdom, pointing them out with a dark gauntlet, his reflective facemask mirroring the leaping flames.
‘Your persecutors!’ he cried out, his vox-pattern fractured by a distortion filter. ‘Take them.’
The crowd rushed at them, spilling over themselves to get at the intruders. Hegain and his troops backed off, firing steadily, dropping the first rank of cultists into a tumbling pile of bodies. Spinoza whirled around, only to see their retreat cut off by fresh troops emerging from the portal behind them. Guards in what looked like heavy carapace armour blocked other exits higher up, preparing to open fire. There was no cover, no escape route, only a seething mass of rage coming at them, eyes-wide and desperate.
Khazad swung her powerblade in practice-arcs. ‘He is nexus,’ she voxed, nodding up at the stage.
Spinoza was still frozen with indecision. There were more of them than she had thought possible. Hundreds more.
Get a grip, she told herself, angrily.
Stay where they were and they would die swiftly for nothing. Somehow get to the cult-master, and perhaps something could still come of this.
‘We take the leader,’ Spinoza ordered over the vox. Hegain responded instantly, moving alongside her and Khazad, and the three of them charged directly into the oncoming mass. The assassin pirouetted as she sprinted, somersaulting high before crashing into the first wave of cultists. Her powerblade whistled, taking two heads clean off before she was in close, kicking out, jabbing, cutting.