Praise Him, thought Spinoza, relief washing over her. Rassilo had answered. A defence had been organised, and now the ways further in were barred.
‘Pull left!’ she roared, driving the others to comply with the orders, knowing that the barrage from the storm troopers would only give them so much time. The grotesques were reacting now, lurching with typical abandon towards the humans hemming them in. There were still so many — perhaps too many — but at least they were fighting now.
‘My lord!’ Spinoza cried, seeing Rassilo fighting her way towards her. ‘How did you-’
‘Not now, child,’ Rassilo replied coolly, swivelling smoothly on her heel to take aim again. ‘Just fight, if you please.’
‘I hear them,’ said Navradaran, picking up the pace.
The Custodian ran with a heavy, fluid grace, powered by armour systems far grander than Crowl’s own. His squad sped through the labyrinth of the lower levels, churning up dust that had lain undisturbed for millennia. Their helm-lenses glowed a vivid red in the dark, their armour glinted in thin outlines of dark gold.
Crowl struggled to keep up. His lungs felt like they had been scraped clean by rusty blades, and his breaths came with effort now. He could no longer hide the limp in his right leg and had to run through the pain. Gorgias hovered overhead, Revus maintained a solid pace, and the chambers passed by in crepuscular procession.
He was tempted to look. Out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of aisles leading back into gloom, alcoves and antechambers swathed in dried-out cobwebs. Everything down here was as old as the Imperium itself, some of it possibly older. A rogue trader might give up his fortune for just a few minutes alone in those rooms; a warlord of the outer worlds would trade her empire, a cardinal his diocese — and yet there was no time to look, to absorb, to study, and despite all that was at stake, that near broke his heart.
Such was the tragedy of the times. Terra still held its riches, diminished from glory but still greater than a thousand other worlds combined, and yet they were forever cloistered, kept locked down by ignorance. If some catalyst could be found to revive the species’ questing spirit, to shake off the terror of the new and escape the dread hand of the Mechanicus and the Priesthood, then those treasures might yet be used.
But they never would be, not now. All that remained was the continual struggle for another decade or two of life, to endure just a little longer amid the gasping terror while the beasts circled. Human presence here was an aberration, born of desperation, and when they were gone the shadows would close over, perhaps never to be broken again.
‘Signals,’ Revus reported.
Crowl blinked his proximity scanner across the retinal feed. There were hundreds of signatures, close-packed, just up ahead. He looked at Navradaran, who must have seen the same thing, but the Custodian said nothing and kept going without pause. His squad’s guardian spears were alight now, flaming like brands, their silver disruptor shrouds streaming into the dark.
And then he saw it — Spinoza’s auspex signature, there among Hegain’s, and the others. His heart leapt, and a sudden burst of energy shot through his agonised muscles.
‘We are in time,’ he breathed, to himself as much as Revus, reaching for Sanguine.
They burst into another wide chamber, its floor a sea of dust, its cavernous interior marked by an eerie procession of half-made statues. Old electrotools lay discarded in the filth, cast aside by long-dead masons before their works could be completed.
Las-bolts criss-crossed between the stonework sentinels, smashing carved heads and torsos, and sending shadows jumping crazily across the floor. Crowl saw huge outlines stalking between the graven images, far too big to be human, moving fast amid a maelstrom of noise and confusion. He took aim, only to see a squad of human troopers retreat across his path, firing steadily at one of the monsters before it tore into them.
The Custodians charged directly into the heart of the battle, their spears kindling a blaze of iridescence that sent the shadows flying back. They were just as fast as the nightmare creatures, just as strong, their staves swinging around them in tight, brutal arcs, leaping from one strike to the next before crashing down among their prey in scattering clouds of thrown blood. Two of them pushed on past the battleground, hunting for xenobreeds fleeing back into the dark, the other two stayed with their captain and began the slaughter in earnest.
‘I see her!’ Revus shouted, firing as he ran, pulling towards the right flank and darting between tottering, las-blown statues. Crowl raced after him, jumping clear of a secondary column even as the weight of impacts sent it smashing to the ground. He could see Spinoza’s armour now, lambent blood-red in the light of the Custodians’ blades. She was in the heart of the fighting, wielding her crozius two-handed in mighty, bone-shattering swipes. She and others stood before some kind of stone altar, huge and heavy, their backs against it as they fought off more of the xenobreeds. He caught flashing glimpses of the others — an assassin, the remnants of Hegain’s squad, a man in an Astra Militarum uniform carrying a bad wound, more Inquisitorial forces doing their best to hold their rapidly diminishing ground.
And among them was Lord Inquisitor Rassilo — Rassilo — fighting against something wizened and blackened and bedecked in tatters of shadow.
‘That one,’ he ordered Revus, indicating the withered creature.
Revus reacted instantly, switching his aim towards the creature in rags. Crowl tried to get a shot away, but the creature seemed to have an aura of misdirection crackling around it, a shimmer of fractured reality that slid and popped with its every move. He fired a single round where its head looked to be, only to see the bullet slip into nothingness.
The creature swivelled, discharging some spidery web of kinetic force that hurled Rassilo to the floor and sent a dozen storm troopers tumbling after her. It lurched towards Spinoza, hoisting a hooked blade in one of its many hands, moving too fast to halt. Crowl fired again, too far away to intervene, and could only watch his bullet flicker out of existence as it hit the realitywarping field around the alien.
He wouldn’t get there in time. Nothing could stop that blade falling, shearing through dimensions to shatter its target.
Except for Navradaran. The Custodian hit the centre of the battleground like a forge hammer, smashing through grotesques to get to the prize. He travelled like a god out of legend, wreathed in streamers of pure gold, the runes on his armour coruscating and swimming with unshackled ether-light. He leapt for the tattered wretch and seized it by the neck, reaching through the distortion field unscathed, hauling it back, then slamming it hard to the ground. The thing screamed, writhed, tried to fight back, but Navradaran was inexorable, crunching his fist in and cracking the bones in its glass-fragile face. The xenos tried to lash out at him with spine-mounted scything arms, but Navradaran broke them, smashing them, snapping them across the haft of his blade and twisting the black-blooded remnants aside.
He dragged the xenos to its feet, now a bedraggled and wounded mess, then crunched its battered body onto the altar top, grinding ravaged flesh into the stone and blasting the reality field into black-edged slivers.
Crowl limped closer, unable to take his eyes from the display of pure, brutal dominance. The remaining grotesques were being taken apart by the other Custodians, impaled on their blades even as they tried to stagger back into the dark, rendering irrelevant the Inquisitorial troops still present on the battlefield.
But the xenos master was still alive. Crowl crept closer to the altar, feeling waves of nausea emanating from its crushed body. Spinoza limped alongside him, her armour bloodied and her maul still fizzing with power.