‘Proximity signals?’ voxed Spinoza, not trusting her helm unit.
‘Nothing,’ Hegain replied, staying tight on her shoulder, the lumen beam on his hellgun’s muzzle rippling across the tight spaces ahead.
The chill had become crippling, and puffs of condensing vapour issued from the storm troopers’ rebreathers. Spinoza felt something crack underfoot, and saw ice riming the puddles. The smell was becoming maddening — a toxic fug that crept under the skin, making her itch all over. The more she smelt it, the more she wanted to scream.
Then the air pressure suddenly relaxed, and the lumen beams angled up into a sweeping void above them. Things were suspended in the dark, bumping against one another, and the trickle of liquids echoed in the distance.
‘Can’t see a damned thing,’ said Lermentov, gesturing to one of his troops. ‘Get us some light.’
A soldier came forwards with a flare gun, angled it up into the murk and fired a charge. It spiralled up and up, throwing sparks behind it in a long trail, before the charge went off, releasing a slow-burn phosphor flare that drifted slowly back down to ground level.
The chamber was big — more then fifty metres up and perhaps twice that in length, burrowing back into the earth and supported by heavy hammerbeam arches. The walls were thick with the same slime as everywhere else, weeping in a curtain of semi-frigid mould-webs, but no one was looking at the walls.
The suspended objects were bodies. Eyeless corpses hung from the arches, throats pierced with spiked chain-lengths. The floor was littered with more bodies, contorted and broken. Bone glistened whitely from meat-slick muscle. Some cadavers still carried the instruments of agony within them, jutting like ice picks from ravaged skin, while others looked to have been sewn up, or sewn together, or rearranged in bizarre reconstitutions.
One of Lermentov’s troops pulled his helm off, bent double and vomited noisily. Others backed away, their lumen beams suddenly held less securely.
‘Hold,’ Lermentov ordered again, watching grimly as the flare gradually burned itself out. Then he turned to Spinoza. ‘You see this? You see this?’
Spinoza walked out across the carpet of limbs, scanning for more than corpse remnants. It was just as the lithocasts had been. None of these victims had died quickly. The sadism was daunting in its variety, even to one with her training.
‘Assassin,’ she voxed, treading carefully. ‘Recognise anything?’
‘Keep going,’ Khazad said sourly. ‘More to come.’
There was, much more. Soon the tally of pain became numbing, a charnel-yard of steadily freezing body parts, piled up, heaped into pyramids. There were what looked like gnaw-marks, and long gouges, and surgically precise incisions, all laced with ink-black webs of blood.
‘What… purpose?’ Hegain voxed, his normally equable voice shaken.
‘For this,’ said Khazad, pushing her way through a brace of hanging bodies.
Spinoza and Lermentov followed her, and were confronted by a series of metal cages running back into darkness along the near wall. Their design was like nothing Spinoza had even seen — curving, serrated, more like screens of thorns than artificial constructs. Each one was huge, fully three times the height of man. All were open, their doors swinging freely. Inside were half-frozen slops of what appeared to be pus, blood and clear liquids, splattered crazily. Tubes, empty and dripping, hung in clusters from the roof of each cage, many connected to glass vials.
Khazad turned to Lermentov. ‘That thing. What I call grotesque. Made here. In these cages. Fed on flesh, given chems. Should take years, but they can speed up, when they have to.’
Lermentov counted the cages. It was hard to tell how many in the dark — he stopped after thirty. ‘Do not allow any more of my people in here,’ he ordered his second. ‘Find another way round.’ He turned back to Khazad. ‘The creatures. They’re not here now. Where have they gone? Can we follow?’
There was a loathing in his voice now. Credit to him, thought Spinoza — his anger is greater than his fear.
‘You can follow them now if you are both blind and stupid,’ said Khazad. ‘They need no secrecy — they march. Are unleashed. Look, the trail goes.’
She pushed on, crunching over the bones, heading further down into the dark. The chamber seemed to have no end, disappearing eventually into a black haze of more tunnel mouths leading further down. Spinoza and Lermentov followed, accompanied by the storm troopers and those of Lermentov’s command who could stomach it.
Spinoza checked her orientation on her helm’s internal sensor. They were moving north now, having already come a long way. Only one thing lay in that direction, and the thought of it made her shiver.
‘We need to be quicker,’ she urged, imagining the horrors loping down the tunnels ahead of them, goaded by whatever master had created them. Just one of them had taken an entire army to capture. It was disconcerting to think what so many could accomplish.
Just as they neared the hall’s far end, she was disturbed by a sudden movement to her left. She spun round, ready to deploy Argent, only to see one of the corpses shift. It slid down the heap, slick and fluid, and a trembling hand reached out from under the pile. Like some horrific underground parasite, human shoulders emerged, extending a trembling arm.
‘Pl… ea…’ a calloused face croaked. The owner of it tried to claw her way out from under the mass of suppurating flesh.
Spinoza crouched down, ready to extend her hand, when she saw what remained of a woman’s torso. Or rather, how those remains had been grafted, and how many more vials pulsed steadily into that long swelter of naked organs and shivering skin-scraps.
The woman’s face was agonised, sent mad with pain and terror, her eyes milky and unseeing, her bloodied fingers shaking in bewildered shock.
‘His grace, sister,’ said Spinoza quietly, taking her laspistol and pressing it to her forehead. The flash of light was brief, and the shaking stopped. Spinoza stood back up, only to see Lermentov watching her.
‘You see it, now?’ he said again, insistent, outraged.
‘We will find them,’ was all she said, pushing past. ‘We will find them.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Revus greeted Crowl with a curt nod. Gorgias flew overhead, its eye pulsing with what looked like indignation.
‘Molto tempus,’ the skull voxed. ‘Kick-kick heels.’
The landing platform extended out across the summit of the guard tower, high up on the southern face of a big defence bastion. The sun was setting again, marking the end of another day of frenzy below. Lights began to flicker on across the expanse of the great wall, accompanied by searchlight beams piercing the encroaching gloom. A heavy troop-carrier powered overhead, destined for the Lion’s Gate approaches, its underside studded with cluster-charges. The drums had started up again, booming in the chasms, and the lightning flashes had grown stronger. It was hot, just as ever, and it was febrile, like the breaking cusp of some planetary fever.
The Shade waited on the apron, guarded by white-robed Palace sentinels. Other ships stood around it, their engines winding down in the parched wind. One of them, a gold flyer-barge with ebon livery, was dispatching a cargo of high-ranking Ministorum dignitaries, their robes flapping over fat-slick bodies.
‘Did you use the time well?’ Crowl asked, making for the flyer.