‘So where is it?’ she asked.
‘Armengand. You know the name?’
Khazad shook her head, and walked past her to the cell doors. ‘Why should I?’ she asked. ‘This not my world. Is yours.’
Is yours.
Perhaps it was, now. How swiftly ownership was assumed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Navradaran took Crowl back the way they had come, out from the echoing halls of the Sanctum Imperialis and back into the gaping caverns of the vast basilicas. Life returned around them — mortal life, the bustle and hurry of robed adepts, the mechanised clank of gun-servitors, the heavy stride of the Palace guards. Every so often, rarely and always at a distance, he would spy a Custodian, half seen amid the yawning depths, standing sentinel over some nexus of significance.
The further they retreated from the Sanctum, the easier it became to breathe. The air remained gritty with toxins, but the terrible weight relented a little, the static slithered away. They passed, briefly, out into the open and Crowl looked up to see the darkening spiral of lightning-underlit clouds. For a long time he had assumed that the storm-that-never-broke was a chemical phenomenon, a consequence of the poisoned world’s hyper-urban sprawls, but now it was less easy to maintain that belief. The presence under their feet, the god on His soul-throne, leashed to a life of unrelenting torment — it was Him, lodged in the wound, atrophying the elements themselves and turning them into endless stasis.
We are becoming what He is, Crowl thought. We are all suspended between life and death.
On the passage over, Crowl’s audex unit crackled into life again, and he started to receive databursts. He blink-checked for Spinoza, found nothing, but then noticed a priority signal from Erunion at Courvain. It had been sent an hour ago, lost in the tumult of the world’s overloaded grids, and once transmitted had been stored for retrieval. He accessed it while walking, negotiating the security protocols silently.
‘My Lord Crowl,’ came Erunion’s recorded vox-print. ‘I have attempted to contact Interrogator Spinoza with no success. Throne damn these failing grids, and now I am prevented from reaching you too. However, herewith the results from the interrogator’s auspex probe, in case it proves useful when this is finally decoded by either one of you. The provenance of the radiation from the device is not of human origin. I do not have the facilities here to make a full diagnosis, but I estimate with seventy per cent chance of veracity that it is of the xenotype eldar. To be specific, the beta faction of the race, the pain-bringers. We may assume that the weapon is of alien provenance, no doubt accompanied by members of that depraved remnant. I do not have the means to probe further — in any case, your knowledge of them far exceeds mine. May you tread carefully, lord. You do not need me to tell you what their presence here portends. ’
The recording hissed out. Still walking calmly, Crowl mentally cursed. The dark eldar, on Terra — such a thing had not been heard of in a hundred lifetimes. Phaelias would have known more surely how to counter them. Had he known with certainty what he faced? Doubtful — there had been no indication in the recording taken from Skhallax.
They passed over a long arched bridge, still hundreds of metres above the chasms where the pilgrims were being herded. Navradaran reached a plaza before a tall building with bronze doors and marble pillars. A huge circular window swept up across its west face, smoke-damaged but still bearing the eroded stained-glass depictions of aquilae and various occult symbology.
Crowl noticed that every door in the Palace opened for Navradaran. The Custodian never made so much as a gesture, and still the rosewood panels, the gold-beaten portals, the heavy adamantium blast shields, they all slid silently apart as he approached. It was as if the Palace itself moulded itself around him.
‘What is this place?’ he asked.
‘You asked for data,’ said Navradaran. ‘I brought you to it.’
They passed within the basilica’s gates, and the air immediately became thick with the familiar stenches of an Imperial archive — mouldering parchment, mouldering vellum, mouldering leather bindings and rotten tallow stumps. They walked down a long aisle before entering the central chamber, a domed intersection that swept up high amid riots of lead-framed stained glass. Every wall was lined with flaking scrolls and chained tomes, their titles picked out in thin gold script and attended to by flocks of twittering servo-cherubs. Down at floor level, ranks of scribes a hundred long bent heavily over piles of retrieved manuscripts, obsessively copying the contents of books onto fresh vellum with iron-clawed hands and thick quills. Red lens glows bled out from under their cowls, illuminating both sallow flesh and the crustaceous masses of augmetic units.
At the far end of the immense nave, a priest was reciting passages from the Rule of the Administratum one after the other, leaning heavily into a vox-dispersal array as if he wished to collapse into its embrace entirely.
‘…and the act of duplication is preferable to the act of creation, for duplication is an abundance of what has been sanctified, whereas creation is, by virtue of the principles of mortal fallibility, the destruction in potentia of the righteous and the introduction of the suspect. In all things recall the lexicon of precaution and do not deviate from the…’
They passed across the width of the nave, ignored by the labouring scribes. Navradaran took Crowl into a side-chapel, where great charts had been piled on top of a wide marble map-table at least eight metres across. Hololiths flickered like ghosts over the creased vellum stacks, reacting to the glyphs on display and rotating to offer three-dimensional simulacra of the Palace environs. Servitors bowed jerkily as they entered, then went back to the methodical tasks of sorting, delivering, smoothing and scraping.
Crowl leaned over the heaps of parchment, marvelling at their intricacy. Each map had been drawn by hand in fading inks, embellished with devotional imagery and injunctions for purity, then stamped in red by various scrutinising bodies of the Administratum. The detail was fantastic. A mortal scribe might have spent an entire lifetime over a single leaf, carefully scouring ancient architects’ records and lost scrolls from semi-disclosed Mechanicus vaults before collating the data into this thing of rare artifice. Crowl began to turn the thick pages over, lost for a moment in the wealth of knowledge on display.
‘You keep the best for yourselves,’ he murmured. ‘If we had this on the outside…’
‘Here is what you seek,’ said Navradaran, reaching for the largest of the charts and hauling it across the tottering heap. The hololiths picked up on the glyphs and a fresh ghost-image of the Imperial Palace’s southern perimeter filled the incense-clouded space between them.
It rotated slowly, giving a full three-dimensional representation of the architecture. For a moment, the cornucopia of information was impossible to process. The Terran world-city was not built across a flat plain, but delved as far underground as it reared above it, everything intermingled and interlocked in a mad embrace of accumulated complexity. Only one factor remained constant amid the morass of connection — the wall itself, driving between the groves of grasping towers, cleaving them like a blunt axe-blade. Once you latched on to that, using it as a bearing, then the rest of the schematic began to make sense.
‘I will indicate where we discovered signs of flesh-cutting,’ said Navradaran. As he spoke, points of light scattered across the hololith, clustered under and around the walls themselves.