She could barely bring herself to look at him. Her pride, her training, her judgement, all fought back hard, but there was a greater goal at stake now.
Gritting her teeth, she nodded. ‘I will aid you, for just as long as these things draw breath.’
‘You will swear that on the Holy Throne,’ Lermentov said, seriously. ‘I know what those oaths mean to you — you will say the words before the shackles come off.’
Now it was Spinoza’s turn to smile, albeit to herself. Words meant nothing — Tur had taught her that — but if it gave Lermentov some sense of security there was no harm in speaking them.
‘As you will it,’ she said, turning her wrists in their bonds to expose the locks. ‘Just tell me what to say.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Navradaran did not speak to Crowl on the way in. They took a flyer from the Outer Palace, passing through hemmed-in skies eerily free of atmospheric craft. The buildings were older here, edged with real stone quarried from the old earth — granite, marble, eroded limestone and wind-sheared sandstone, artfully arranged, placed with care and set in ranks of arches and tiered colonnades. The scale was still astounding, but artfulness was there alongside it — the first prototypes of building styles that would one day be raised on every world across the galaxy, the first gothic turrets, the first death’s head finials, the first dank images of cowled, sword-bearing angels standing silent sentinel. Some of these buildings had been old when the Emperor had given the first order to take to the stars. Now they were relics, fossils of a foreign age, empty veins threading back into a past of undiminished vigour.
If the Outer Palace was a riot of noise and heat, the Inner was marked with somnolence. The crowds were still intense, but the greater mass of them were high-ranking adepts rather than off-worlders, crushed by their duties into near-silence. Towers and belfries reared up on all sides, strung out with the connective matter of flyover spans and lofted transitways, casting everything below into a perennial gloom. The carved aquilae on every gable were sombre rather than proud, and the statues wept lines of old lichen from age-hollowed eyes.
Navradaran’s flyer carried them across the gently decaying worldscape.
The sun rose a little higher, bleaching the spike-pinnacles and standard-poles with a mantle of drifting grey. The rippling forks of lightning came closer now, lancing in thin lines of ivory from the gyre of the heavy skies, gilding the eroding stone with flashes of short-lived silver.
The Sanctum Imperialis loomed ahead of them, dominating all else. Its outer profile was akin to the great ziggurats of Mars, though darker, huger, its edges marked with dagger-crowned campaniles of beaten ceramite. Tallest of them all was the immense turns virorum, the colossal tower of heroes, charred across its octagonal face with ancient fires and decorated with the emblems of a thousand Chapters of the Adeptus Astartes. It was said that the only path to its summit, lost high in the churning clouds, was via the Unbroken Stair, winding up through the centre of the hollow monolith, its flags worn smooth by the tread of uncounted priests, until one reached the great bell that tolled intermittently for the souls of the lost. When that bell pealed, the whole world heard its doleful boom.
Thicker storm clouds circled above them now. The epicentre of the vortex became visible to the naked eye, a slow spiral across the apex of the Sanctum, lit from within by snaking tendrils of lightning, underpinned by a steady roar of world-pain. The air itself felt heavier, tighter. When Crowl rested his hand on the arms of his chair, curls of static scampered across his gauntlet.
He could feel it. He could feel the residual actinic force, quickening in everything around him, driving the storm, making the immense constructions vibrate down to their lost roots. He could almost hear the whispers of the millions within that sprawling place — the aspirant astropaths led trembling to the amphitheatres of the Tower of Sight; the Imperial Courtiers gliding through velvet shadows of veined-marble halls; the cardinals overseeing prayers before the baroque altars — all of them ephemera around the one soul who truly mattered, who was locked deep under all the finery and the grandeur, who was there, and had been there at the start, and would be there at the end, and besides whose immortal actuality everything else was just a ghost of impermanence.
He found his heart beating faster. The more he looked at the Sanctum, the closer the colossal mausoleum drew, the thicker the air became, the greater the heat, the more his pulse picked up. He could have glanded something for that, but somehow he doubted the tranquilisers would work. What he was feeling had little to do with the physical, and everything to do with what fearful power lay encased within that cairn-temple, at once horrific and magnificent, dolorous and ecstatic.
The flyer set down before the first of the archways leading towards the Sanctum’s looming carcass, gracefully falling under a shadow of one of the nine Titanoliths — Vulkan the Gatekeeper, by his theological markings.
Only then did Navradaran speak. ‘The rest of the way, we walk. This is sacred ground.’
Crowl did not need to be told. He wondered what the purpose of this was — to awe him? To chastise him? He descended from the flyer’s golden cockpit and breathed in the static-laced air, pungent with incense and incalculable age, laced with the stench of mouldering stone.
White-robed, white-masked priests escorted them both from the platform, their chasubles embroidered with mystical visions of the Emperor-As-He-Walked-Among-Us. Mirror-faced guards in thick black plate armour stood sentinel on every exposed parapet holding force spears that glittered in the weak sunlight. In the far distance, high up on the terraces of the Sanctum itself, gold-armoured figures marched across age-charred battlements. From far below, Crowl could hear the rising drone of ritual benedictions, swelling up, endlessly, as if emerging from the earth itself.
They walked out onto a mighty path suspended high up in the air, stretching from the landing stages to the baroque flanks of the Sanctum itself. As they went, Crowl caught glimpses of the vast processional causeways, four hundred metres down, teeming with slowly moving crowds. Those were the most fortunate of all who had made the long journey, the chosen that had gained admittance through the Lion’s Gate and now trod the Blessed Path towards the holy of holies. A mere fraction of those present there would witness the great spectacle of the Feast itself, and yet for them it would be as if the world had ended and they had caught a fleeting sight of divinity itself, and if they survived it they would return to their home worlds as revered saints, pressed for every scrap of testimony by those who had not yet been born when the void-ships had first set out for the Throneworld.
But they were still far away from where they longed to be. None would be admitted within sight of the Gate until the final stroke of the Blood Chimes in two days’ time and the mania of Sanguinala reached its height. Through the subtle arts of the astropaths and the Ministorum calendar-scryers, lesser bells would be tolled at the exact same moment across the entire Imperium, and yet it would be here, at its very heart, on the soil where the Three Exalted Primarchs themselves had once contested for the survival of the human race, that the fervour would be greatest.
The Sanctum drew closer, filling the sky before them, ringed by the fire-braziers that boiled endlessly into the heat-scorched air. Heavy, massed drumbeats became audible — dhoom, dhoom, dhoom — a heart-rhythm that shimmered up through every lightless chasm and down into every buttress, on and on, eternal, untouchable.
Crowl began to feel fear. Real fear. Over his career he had witnessed so many depravities that the toll had shriven his body and withered his soul, but never as an adult had he ever truly felt soul-deep fear, and yet here it was, creeping on him like a thief, sliding past all guards set against it and hastening his mortal weaknesses.