‘Just four?’ Crowl asked.
‘It will suffice.’
Doubt seemed to be something Navradaran did not entertain. Perhaps he was incapable of it.
‘It’s a long way down,’ Crowl said, checking the auspex reading and moving to the edge of a deep, square-edged well-mouth. A stone stair wound down the inside of it, clinging to the face of sheer rockcrete. There were no railings, no barriers, and the hot wind sighed up out of its dark heart with what felt like malevolence. Above them, perched on age-withered pediments, rows of gargoyles leered out into the eternal gloom, tongues poking out over rows of curved teeth. The rad-streaked sky was lost, a memory of the levels far above.
Navradaran strode to the head of the stairs, and gestured for Crowl to lead on.
‘Then there is no time to lose,’ he said.
Spinoza shook off her shock. She saw Lermentov struggling out in the centre of the chamber, surrounded by his ogryns and his best fighters. His beleaguered formation was holding its ground but little more.
‘The wall,’ she voxed to him. ‘We must make the wall.’
She saw him look up at her, his helm covered in blood, then acknowledge. A vox-augmitter order went out, just audible over the screams and the roars, and the ogryns suddenly pushed forwards, driving a wedge through the ranks of the xenobreeds. Spinoza leapt down from the stairs, accompanied by Hegain’s troops, and they fought their way to his side, weaving between the flying blades and hooks.
‘This will kill us,’ Lermentov panted, firing in rapid bursts as his ogryns threw themselves suicidally into the enemy.
‘You are dead already,’ Spinoza said coolly, reverting back to Argent and sending the maul cracking into the hides of the grotesques pressing around them. ‘The master. That is everything now.’
The toll of the charge was terrible. Abhumans went down in droves, their heavy bodies pulled into strips by the surgical weapons of the xenobreeds. The human troops fared even worse, their armour too weak and their weapons too crude — dozens were flayed into gore-flecked chunks by the whirl of blades, their screams cut abruptly short. With their guiding intelligence gone, though, the grotesques fought without formation and without strategic purpose. They went for blood, for pain, for slaughter, caring nothing for where they got it, and the hordes of fodder still charging at them provided an orgy of targets for their agony-blinded minds to process.
That left a narrow window for a disciplined core to cut through. Spinoza and Lermentov fought at the apex of it, backed up by the remains of Hegain’s squad, now down to four after taking further losses. The sacrifice of the abhumans proved just enough to break through, and they pushed towards the wall breach even as the last of the ogryn bodyguard fell under whirring talons.
Spinoza was first, leaping up into the mouth of the tunnel as the energies of its creation crackled around her. Argent’s light glittered along an impossibly perfect inner surface — the breach was over ten metres in height, circular, driven ramrod straight as if created by a precision excavation tool. Ahead, she could just make out the onward progress of the intruders, still cutting their way further in and heedless of pursuit.
Lermentov joined her. Less than fifty of his vanguard had made it through — behind them the orgy of slaughter was ramping up, fed like a furnace by the huge numbers still pouring into the chamber from the deep tunnels beyond.
‘There is nothing we can do for them,’ Spinoza said, grabbing Lermentov and pushing him bodily into the tunnel ahead of her.
Hegain and Khazad came with her, and they started to run again. Even as Spinoza picked up speed, feeling Argent snarl in her grip, the madness of it was perfectly obvious. Perhaps thirty of the huge xenobreeds remained up ahead, all of them loping into the heart of the Palace itself. Stripped of the ogryns, what remained of Lermentov’s forces was hopelessly insufficient to match them, and even if the hunters caught them they would surely be finished off swiftly.
But there was no alternative. Whatever tech-sorcery the creature had employed had done what was needed, rending physics, imploding pure adamantium, and now it was in the Palace. In the Palace.
She ran harder. The delved tunnel felt like it went on forever — the wall must have been over two hundred metres thick. By the time they reached the end of it, the xenobreeds were far ahead, galloping across the deserted floor of another yawning, dust-filled hall and into the mazes beyond. The grotesques travelled with single-minded purpose, racing up forgotten stairwells and streaming across dank, echoing balconies. They clearly knew where they were going, and yet Spinoza had no idea where she was, her helm-unit still scrambled, her senses disorientated by the dark and the flailing lumen beams. At any moment she expected them to hit an inhabited section where the defenders of the Inner Palace would come swarming to counter the threat… but perhaps they were too far down. Perhaps they had emerged into sections so ancient and enclosed and buried in ignorance that no watch was kept on them.
Her lungs burned, her leg muscles throbbed. They had been on the run for a long time, and the creatures before them were more powerful and seemingly never tired. From distance, she caught sight of the xenobreeds sprinting out over a long, narrow span, suspended high over a chasm that fell away into unguessable depths. At the far end was a gate in the shape of a gaping dragon’s mouth, barred by doors of verdigrised bronze. The creature, the master, paused for only a moment to destroy it, shattering the barrier in a blaze of unnatural whip-curl energies, but that lost them time. Spinoza saw the chance, and drove herself even harder to catch up. Khazad, fastest of them all, came with her. The two of them gained the broken gate and burst through into the chamber beyond.
The space was silted with blankets of dust. An octagonal floor stretched away in all directions, overlooked by ranks of skull-headed column clusters. Devotional statues stood in their hundreds, half-hewn, unfinished, their empty expressions blind to the curtains of unbroken shadow.
Xenobreed nightmares turn to face the incomers, their ranks briefly parting to expose the withered horror in their midst.
Khazad and the others skidded to a halt, opening fire as soon as they entered, spraying the ranks of grotesques with a flurry of neon-hard las-beams.
For a moment, Spinoza didn’t understand why the beasts had turned to fight — they should have been far ahead still. Screams rang out from the grotesques. Their momentum left them, and their pale limbs thrashed in the flicker of shadows. Las-beams scythed across, latticing the open space and searing black scorch marks into the ancient walls.
Something hissed in her helm’s audex unit, then a stream of raw sound waves roared out of the damaged intake. She reached to shut it down, just as the feed juddered back into intelligibility.
‘…sponse to your message. Take cover and pull left — we will pin them down. Thanks to the Throne, child — we had rather given up hope.’
Rassilo’s voice. Spinoza narrowed her eyes, blinking against the flare of las-discharge, and finally saw the reason for the firefight — rows of Inquisitorial storm troopers in regulation grey, maybe two hundred, lined up along the far wall of the chamber, dug in and already firing in disciplined drill-lines. Their inquisitor lord was there with them, leading the foremost into a charge against the xenobreeds, a smoking boltgun clutched in her armoured fist.