‘Not what you hoped for, but something,’ said Revus.
They climbed up to the cockpit, and Gorgias swooped under the canopy as it hissed closed. Revus took the controls, winding up the engines.
‘And you?’ the captain asked.
‘I was shown… things.’ It was still difficult to talk about. ‘And discovered some more.’
‘Where to?’
‘Xericho perimeter section. I will shunt you the coordinates.’
Revus applied the power, and the Shade rose into the air, sending turbulence buffeting across the apron. He tilted the angle a little, sending a blast of downdraught at the tottering cardinals and making their robes billow.
Crowl snorted a laugh. ‘Now, then,’ he said.
Then the Shade was rising above the platform, high into the evening sky. The domes of the great cathedrals were lit by a faint sheen of gold, competing briefly with the haze of blood-red rising up from the smoky pyres. In the distance, Crowl made out the Titanolith of the Holy Primarch Corax, standing in gaunt splendour as the rays of dying light played over his drawn face.
‘Tell me,’ said Crowl.
‘We were watched the whole time,’ said Revus. ‘But the skull was useful.’
‘Tergiversation said Gorgias. ‘Subterfugio. No one suspects.’
‘And you found?’
‘Nothing concrete,’ said Revus. ‘Quantrain’s base of operations is a long way inside. You’d not get close to it if you had fifty years. But the skull accessed a comms system in the approach tower. There were frequencies to extract, coded channels.’
‘And you cracked the codes, because.’
‘.they were in Hereticus cipher. You can try them. I do not guarantee success.’
‘It’s a start. Give me access.’
Gorgias bobbed closer, activating its ethercloud resonance vane. Crowl’s internal comm-augmetic picked it up, and a selection of possible vectors slid over his retinal feed. The activity made his already severe headache crippling, and he winced. His calves were throbbing, his joints on fire. Still, no glanding. Not now.
‘This is no good,’ Crowl said, cycling through the options. ‘This is ancient. These I do not recognise. These. now, this one. Well done. This one.’
He applied the comm-vector, negotiated the internal ciphers, pulled up its internal screeds. It took a few moments — even inside the Outer Palace wards the grids were under severe strain. Then the connection was made. It was an old audex-capillary, one-way only, an emergency vector for use, no doubt, by Quantrain’s aides alone.
‘My Lord Flavius,’ voxed Crowl. ‘Speaker is Inquisitor Erasmus Crowl, O.H. You have mislaid something, I think. I believe I have located it. You may join me, if you wish, at the base of the Xericho wall section. Precise location to be determined, but you will, I trust, know what you’re looking for. Bring some friends — your guests are proving quite troublesome.’
Revus laughed as the link closed. It was rare for Revus to laugh, and the sound was unpleasant. ‘Wise, to tell him?’
‘I want to see his face,’ said Crowl, losing his smile. He caressed the hilt of Sanguine absently. ‘I want to see it, and then I want to know why.’
The Shade pulled out east, heading low over the sea of jumbled domes and spires. The sunset was dying fast, draining the light out of the sky and leaving only the growling undercurrent of the fires below. Crowl looked over his shoulder to see the mausoleum of the Sanctum Imperialis wallowing amid the press of lesser structures.
‘Understandable,’ said Revus, picking up a little speed. The wall loomed ahead of them, sweeping up out of the morass in a sheer black face like carved flint. Defence towers emerged from the smog, gothic-roofed, festooned with lascannon batteries, underpinned with volcano cannon emplacements. ‘But, with respect, there are only two of us.’
‘Tertio,’ interjected Gorgias.
‘Not quite,’ said Crowl, settling back into his seat. ‘Observe your proximity scanner, bearing four five oh.’
Revus switched vid-feeds to match the coordinates, and the screen filled with gold. He looked up at Crowl, surprised, and then banked the Shade to bring the origin into visual range of the cockpit.
A heavy flyer filled the sky, turreted and crenellated, powered by enormous down-burners that kept it aloft on a curtain of booming soot. Thick, down-angled wings jutted from a bulbous superstructure marked with the emblems of the Adeptus Terra and surrounded by fabulous arcana picked out by inlaid rubies and silver wire. Rows of underslung autocannons competed with what looked like heavy bolter emplacements, crowding over a sunken cockpit cowled by a jewelled spine-vane. It was bigger than a Thunderhawk and embellished further than a cardinal’s pleasure-barge — more an airborne oratory than a ship of war, and yet its deadliness could not be in any doubt.
‘Striking, is it not?’ Crowl said, smiling. ‘Or obscene, depending on your taste.’
‘Your Custodian friend?’ asked Revus, resuming course with the golden flyer thundering alongside.
‘Not a friend. Not yet, anyway,’ said Crowl, turning his attention to the walls. ‘Gorgias, you will be required here. You have records of the radiation signature from the Rhadamanthys?’
‘Affirmativo, yes-yes.’
‘I want them online and fed to the Shade’s augur net. That is what we are scanning for, somewhere down there. It’ll be far below ground — ready the auspex for close-range use.’
He peered out through the narrow slit of armourglass, watching the walls swim towards them. As yet his Shade and the Custodian flyer were the only aircraft in that vicinity, and there was no sign of other Inquisition craft rushing to join them. The last shafts of sunlight faded away, plunging the vista below into a pall of lumen-studded darkness. The transitways were like blazing arteries, corridors of flame that stretched out into the night in vast spokes.
‘Any word from Spinoza?’
‘I will keep trying,’ said Revus.
Crowl nodded, watching the eternal parapets approach — the ramparts from which men had once gazed on the approach of the Warmaster’s Legions. They looked unbreakable, forged in the Age of Wonder and bolstered by millennia of constant vigilance. No army had come close since those half-forgotten days, and the sentinels had stared across nothing but a vista of slow degradation for a long time.
Never regret that war has become our race’s constant state, Crowl recalled, reputedly the words of the primarch Rogal Dorn. Treat it as a friend, the means by which we keep our vigour. In conflict, strength. In vigilance, only decay.
‘Down there, somewhere,’ he murmured, reflecting on that. ‘And still unseen.’
From the undervaults of Armengand, Lermentov drove them hard. They pushed into wider, deeper outfall tunnels, ringed with bars of crumbling iron and now as dry as dust. Soon the passages became vast, great manmade shafts under the world’s roots, and the entire army coalesced again, running fast, their helm-beams swaying against the wide sweep of the inner walls.
Spinoza said nothing to the False Angel. Lermentov had not spoken since leaving the charnel chambers, and now moved with a grim fury, his lasgun held ready for use. Khazad had been right — it was trivially easy to follow the path taken by the abominations, and slime and blood coated the walls, mingling with the detritus of under-urban filth. They had even come across one of the xenobreed creatures abandoned on the way. It was some kind of stillborn horror, only half converted into a full grotesque, its ribs poking from its chest and its organs pulsing in glistening sacs. It had tried to fight them, propelled by the stimms that mercilessly injected into its half-finished circulatory system, but its tendons snapped before it could lift its claws. The ogryns stamped it into the ground, crushing its skull and skeleton under their massive ironshod boots, but even then it took a long time to die, screaming the whole time.