Spinoza got to her feet. Already more of the grotesques were closing in, their movements jerky and over-rapid.
‘Where’s the master?’ she asked.
Her helm’s proximity auspex was swimming with targets, awash in a haze of white noise. More flares went up, exposing bloody carapaces heaving amid a sea of frenzied limbs. Up ahead, against the wall itself, something was happening. The grotesques were shielding something, and the air began to fizz with gathering static.
‘We have to get to it,’ Spinoza ordered. Hegain nodded, and the surviving storm troopers pulled together. ‘Right flank. Go.’
They pushed on, firing steadily, making for a wide stair cut into the rock along the nearside wall of the great chamber. The grotesques flailed at them, though the sheer number of bodies in the flickering space now made the battlefield choked and confused. A xenobreed leapt straight at Spinoza, claws extended, and took a whole volley of shots direct to its chest, which dropped it heavily. Spinoza pounced, ramming Argent into the grotesque’s neck and pressing down. The energy field raged, burning and cutting. Hegain raced to aid her, firing at point-blank range as the creature tried to lash her loose. The grotesque shuddered, its neck spewing stimm-fluids, its chest streaming with puncture wounds.
Then she pulled away, running again, her squad coming with her. Khazad followed, darting and ducking under the roaring assault of the grotesques that tried to bring her down.
Spinoza made the stairs and raced up them two at a time. From the vantage she caught sight of something buried beyond the mass of raging xenobreeds, still hidden but active. Snaking lines of coal-black force were kindling, rippling out across the stone and snaking up the wall itself.
‘Bring it down!’ she ordered, dropping to one knee and reaching for her laspistol.
The storm troopers fired, but the press of xenobreeds took the impacts and kept coming at them, loping closer in a rolling tide of hissing malevolence. Spinoza got a glimpse of the thing beyond the tide of warped bodies, just for a second — something hovering, skeletal and emaciated, with a hyperextended neck, whiteless eyes, fluttering robes of night-black.
Then the world shook. An elemental crack shivered out from the epicentre, making the rock beneath their feet tilt and shudder. More black lightning speared out against the wall, latching on and flickering like caught flame. The air seemed to suck out of the chamber, tearing towards an unseen singularity, and the high-pitched whine became unbearable. Black sparks raced across the adamantium, spinning and bouncing, before coalescing into a pulsar of darkness.
‘No…’ breathed Spinoza, reaching out as if she could somehow stop it.
Reality blinked. The entire chamber reeled, then suddenly reconstituted, and tendrils of black matter cobwebbed out from the nexus, crawling across the wall and leeching at it. The adamantium froze, cracked, flexed, then sucked inwards like water pulled down a whirlpool.
‘Not possible,’ Khazad hissed, crawling beside her as the unbreakable stone liquefied and ran deeper, dissolving into nothingness, snatched out of existence. A perfectly circular tunnel opened up, glowing darkly at the edges, burrowing further in.
‘It will get inside,’ said Spinoza, getting to her feet, firing again. ‘By the Throne, bring it down.’
Half the grotesques were now piling into the circular breach in the walls, the sheer edges surrounded by a raging corona of black electricity. The creature at their heart went with them, disappearing over the cracked lip of the tunnel, swept along as if by a palanquin of its slaved horrors. The rest of the xenobreeds stayed where they were, killing freely and rampaging further into the oncoming battalions of the rabble army.
Spinoza watched it go, horror making her sluggish. She looked across the chamber, where the grotesques were killing, Lermentov’s army dying, the last spirals of the flares tumbling into hopeless darkness.
It is inside.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Shade plummeted fast, falling below the parapet levels and down into the inside lee of the great wall. A blurred line of shadow fell across it, the terminator of the wall’s long summit, smothering the diffuse haze of the billion lumens out beyond the perimeter. The flyer dropped between mighty defence towers crowned with aquila-lined bolter banks and kept on going.
The Custodian flyer came down with them, content for now to follow Crowl’s lead. Its engines hammered, throwing out power extravagantly.
‘Did you detect it?’ Crowl demanded, turning to Gorgias.
The skull chittered indeterminately. ‘Veritas, yes, yes, for momentario, then… no.’
Revus swore under his breath, battling to hold the Shade steady in the turbulence caused by the heavy engines roaring above him. They were falling fast, and the defence tower’s lower lumen tracks blurred past them and up into oblivion.
‘No strong fix,’ the captain muttered, fighting the control columns. ‘Work harder, skull.’
Gorgias’ eye flared up in anger. ‘Foulness! You fly the-’ Then it swivelled, processing hard. ‘Affirmitivo. Trace signal, longa via, down-down.’
The Shade’s console flickered with light as Gorgias shunted the data to the captive machine-spirit. Revus reacted instantly, dropping the Shade’s nose and sending them running along the base of the wall.
Crowl sat back, wincing at the sudden shift of direction. ‘How far?’ he asked. ‘What nature of detection?’
Revus accessed the auspex feed from Gorgias’ instruments. ‘No idea,’ he said, hesitantly. ‘It looks like… No. I have no idea.’
Crowl reached over to look at the data himself. ‘So I see. Not possible indeed.’ His eyes flickered up, out ahead, watching the nominal ground-level race up to meet them. ‘But actual, something, and concrete. That’s it.’ His audex-feed crackled into life. ‘We sense nothing,’ came Navradaran’s preternaturally calm vox voice. ‘Confirm course of action, inquisitor.’
‘A radiation signature,’ Crowl replied. ‘In sympathy with the ones recorded in the void-hauler. It’s faint, but trust me — this is our target.’
The two flyers shot down further, sinking below the level of garrison blocks and training squares. Floodlights whirled overhead, picking out the hovering gunships of rapid-reaction Guard units, many liveried in the white and gold of the Palace’s own.
‘Will you alert more forces?’ Crowl asked Navradaran, just as the Shade boosted over the edge of a vertical shaft-mouth and the last of the light from above was swallowed up.
‘Negative.’
Crowl hesitated. ‘There are hundreds of-’
‘Negative. Prepare to disembark — we approach the base.’
Both aircraft were now far below the level of the great halls and spires, and had travelled deep down the straggling curve of the inner walls.
Revus looked at Crowl. ‘What do you make of that?’
Crowl reached for Sanguine. ‘That there are still secrets he is unwilling to share,’ he said.
The Shade’s lumens kicked in, throwing bars of harsh light across steadily darkening rockcrete. They passed tenements pocked with empty windows, collapsed lintels, low smouldering fires. Deeper chasms striated filth-ridden platforms, old tiers of columns cracked and bowed under the gargantuan weight above.
Then they made a landing, hard against the corroded plinth of some ancient statue — a winged knight with hollow eyes, striding out into the grimy murk to face some unseen enemy. Dust kicked up by the Shade’s descent billowed around them, and Crowl reached for the cockpit release. The Custodian flyer set down a few metres away, making the earth tremble with the impact of its landing. Crowl watched its occupants disembark — Navradaran leading four others down a gilt ramp. They were all the same — arrayed from head to foot in a complete shell of gold, immaculate, their black robes snapping in the heatwash of the turbines. All carried guardian spears, and the blades shimmered coldly in the dark.