‘You are afraid,’ said Navradaran, right on cue.
‘There is nothing to fear,’ said Crowl, trying to shake the sensation off.
‘That is not true at all,’ said Navradaran. ‘Do not attempt to fight it.’
They reached the first of the portals. Custodians guarded it, each as gigantic and imposing as Navradaran himself. They did not so much as acknowledge Crowl, standing like soulless carvings on either side of the gilded aperture. Brazen doors over twenty metres high swung slowly open, and fusty air sighed out of from the pool of darkness within. Across the lintel were carved the words Eius sacrificio, nostram vitam in characters twice the height of a living man. Mute servo-skulls hovered around them, cataloguing, probing, before disappearing back into the gloom.
They passed within. The drumbeats became louder and more diffuse, resounding as if from vast wells below. Snatches of choir-dirge echoed and re-echoed from the vaults, drifting like spectres between vast, many-pillared columns. Arches swept above them into the murky heights, hung with weeping Ministorum pennants and age-pitted swords.
The ground trembled underfoot. It was almost unbearably hot. Once the doors had swung closed behind them with a soft echoing boom, the darkness became sweltering. Navradaran led the way, his armour a faint glimmer of gold amid the void-black shadow. Crowl caught only glimpses of what lay in those halls — shafts falling away towards the world’s heart, vertiginous naves marching into oblivion, immense orreries and planetariums tended by cowled adepts, masked priests prostrate before reliquaries of flame-stained gold containing old armour, old weapons, old bones, scraps of leathery flesh pinned within dark crystal lozenges…
He felt the cold swell of nascent panic rise in his gorge. His breathing became shallow and rapid. He could sense the immensity of it all pressing down, the age of it, the agony of it, crushing them both, toppling over them, entombing them here just as He was entombed here.
It was irrational. He had left such things behind him a long time ago, and yet the terror only grew. Every step became harder than the last. His palms pricked with sweat, he had to force himself to keep going. Navradaran remained silent, a brooding presence at his shoulder, striding heavily through the vaults and the transepts, his gait as secure and solid as the glinting basalt columns around them. They began to descend, to wind down long, long spiral stairways that seemed to go on forever. The last of the angled light from the world above them faded away, replaced by the dour flicker of votive candles.
Eventually they reached another portal. Navradaran gestured, and the doors unbarred of their own accord, swinging open to unfurl a yawning gulf on the far side. They emerged high up on the face of an internal wall over two hundred metres tall. Crowl hesitated at the threshold, feeling his residual assurance begin to collapse, but the Custodian beckoned him, and that was enough to pull him over.
They stood on a narrow balcony, less than three metres deep and ten metres in width. Heavy silk drapes hung on either side of them, thick with dust. The baroque plasterwork flaked under his touch — the gilt finery was fragile. They were alone.
‘Behold,’ said Navradaran. ‘The object of your conspiracy.’
For a moment, seeing what he was being shown, Crowl forgot to breathe. When his lungs forced him to drag a gulp of air in, it only made his heart race harder. He gripped the railing, feeling like he might fall through it. He felt his lips moving, and realised he was praying, over and over, the words spilling unbidden from cynical lips that had foresworn ostentatious observance a long time ago.
There were stairs, rising gently from the southern end of the hall. They were hewn from grey marble, faintly glinting in sepulchral occlusion. Many were chipped or cracked, their edges broken by the impacts of bootfalls, and none had been repaired.
On either side of the stairway were banners. They stood like some frozen primeval forest, static in the dark, row after row, file after file, gently climbing in the distance until the mind could no longer process them. Some standards were bloody, mere threads of fabric clinging to charred poles. Others were intact, slung tight under the apex of mighty iron staves. There were skeletons on those battle-flags, and winged lions, and flaming swords, and masked angels, all painted with impeccable care on chequerboard grounds and argent fields. Swathes of fine mist sighed between the endless image-fields, sighing over the staves and slinking across their emblems.
Each standard had been stained by the dust of another world. Some of the regiments their honour rolls recorded were long-gone, their heroism lost to legend and their mortal constituents expired. Some ennobled detachments were still extant, carrying the eternal war into the deep of the void while their ancient battle-standards rotted here in the dark. Other sigils, many others, Crowl did not recognise. No living man, surely, could have catalogued them all. This was an infinity of remembrance. This was a grotesque and abundant surfeit of interstellar grief.
Child-faced angels floated high above the whispering shrouds spilling incense from thick chain-held ewers. Their metal faces, scored by metal tears and studded with metal eyes, swung back and forth across the landscape of mourning. Their steel pinions snapped and furled in clockwork jerkiness, swinging them around in lazy curves, tracing arcs of faint powder-burn into an artificial sky.
The walls of that hall were half-lost in penumbral distance, their smoky stonework merging with the drifting mist-banks. Crowl could just make out the immense curve of load-bearing arches, the lamplit outlines of austere column ranks, hints of aisles and chapels beyond. There were figures moving in those shadows, many hundreds at least, all in the ornate gold of the Custodians, their guardian spears glowing like stars in an earthbound void.
But in the end, the long stairs ran out. They rose towards their apogee at the far end of the immense hall, blurred into nothingness, and then the Gate itself, the portal to the Inside, rose up from their terminus, and that was an artifice of such outrageous extravagance, even on a world brimming with
outrageous extravagance, that it near crushed the soul.
Crowl knew the Gate’s provenance, just as every educated child in the Imperium knew it — purest adamantium thrice-forged, inlaid with ceramite, braced with titanium alloys, then faced with gold, hectares of it, beaten down over sacred images stretching over half a kilometre tall, aureate like the armour of the Palace’s protectors. The Master of Mankind was depicted there, armoured, youthful, dreadful, smiting Serpentine Horus with spear and shield-rim, surrounded by a zodiacal bestiary and the occult symbols of his pantheon.
At the base of the Gate were ranks of Custodians in silent vigil, their weapons held ready, their helms blending into golden coronae of diffuse reflection. On either side of that regiment, half hidden in darkness, were two Reaver Battle Titans, their cannon-arms draped in banners bearing the interlocking emblems of the Adeptus Terra and the Adeptus Mechanicus, of the Throneworld and the forgeworld. Those twin overwatchers towered into the echoing dark, static yet terrible, their cockpit lights smouldering within the shadows.
‘Now you see it,’ said Navradaran, his voice soft. ‘The holiest portal in all the Imperium. You see the Guards Visible, and you sense the Guards Invisible. Your heart is beating. You are sweating. You wish to fall on your face and offer your soul to He Who Dwells Beyond.’
It was all true. Crowl tried to breathe more evenly.
‘And you, Crowl, are a lord of Holy Orders,’ Navradaran went on. ‘You are trained to resist weakness of mind and body, tested in the greatest trials, and live every day knowing the terror of what awaits should we fail.’