‘You were right, lord,’ she panted, looking unsteady on her feet. ‘The Rhadamanthys was-’
‘Later, Spinoza,’ said Crowl, taking her by the shoulder, looking her over. ‘You are preserved? You are not wounded?’
She shook her head weakly. By then Navradaran had pinned the xenos to the altar as if in preparation for sacrifice. He raised his blade to sever its neck, and harsh light spilled on to the thing’s face, exposing for the first time just what manner of being had penetrated so deep into humanity’s most sacred site.
It was emaciated by human standards, so thin that its bones protruded like iron staves from under a lace-slender press of skin. Veins were visible, a black web just under the surface, pulsing weakly. Its spine was as arched as those of the grotesques, implanted with blades and wickedly curved devices, now mostly smashed into fragments by Navradaran’s fury. Under its leather robes it was dressed in figure-hugging greaves studded with steel pins, and loops of chains hung about its impossibly narrow waist, from which dangled crystal bottles filled with virulently coloured fluids.
Its face was covered in blood, its cheekbones cracked. Its lower jaw looked to have been entirely excised, replaced with a mask of spattered steel connected to ripped cheek-flesh by rings of jewelled metal. Its skull was bald and tattooed with arcane symbols from its debased xenos culture.
The worst thing was its eyes. Nothing in the deepest of the Palace dungeons was as black as those eyes. They were like pits, ringed with creased lines punched through with flecks of wire, holes into an abject nothingness. Crowl had looked into many eyes over his career, knowing all the character traits given away by them, but these orbs betrayed only an awful, hungry ennui, a desperate gnawing that had long since outstripped any hope of being satisfied. Those eyes had witnessed things no living thing should ever have sought to witness, atrocities that dwarfed anything seen in the criminal vaults of the underhives, and the imprint of it lingered in patterns of concentric, kohl-black horror.
It still breathed. Navradaran pressed the tip of his blade against its neck. The xenos looked up at its executioner, struggling to inhale, bubbles of oily blood forming at the edges of its thin-lipped mouth, its many limbs broken. There was no hatred or desperation in that look, only a meagre kind of contempt.
‘End it,’ hissed Crowl, urgently.
But Navradaran did not move.
‘End it!’
Crowl whirled around, looking for a reason why he had stayed his hand.
Rassilo had recovered her feet. Her bolter was aimed directly at the Custodian, and at a range that would puncture even his peerless armour-plate. The rest of her battalion, still over a hundred of them and freed of the need to fight the grotesques, had similarly levelled their weapons at the remainder of Navradaran’s squad, all of whom had devoted their attention to slaying the surviving xenos and were now exposed.
‘Adamara?’ Crowl asked, warily. ‘What is this?’
‘The end, Erasmus,’ she said, never moving her bolter muzzle. Behind her, dozens of storm troopers began to edge closer. ‘Custodian, move clear of the xenos. You should never have come for it. It is, and has always been, mine.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The last of the las-bolts fizzed away. The screams had gone, echoing into the long vaults, but the blood was still hot on the stone. Spinoza, breathing hard, her head swimming with fatigue, looked at Crowl, then at Rassilo, then back at Crowl.
She stood with what was left of her own squad and Lermentov’s soldiers, a pitiful remnant of what had been brought up from Boreates. They were surrounded on all sides by Rassilo’s own forces — heavily equipped storm troopers in full carapace armour bearing both hellguns and carbines. Khazad had been fighting hardest of all, and was now bent double, panting hard, her power sword still glimmering in a loose grip. The greater part of the illumination in that catacomb came from the five Custodians’ power weapons, all of which still snarled away with vivid silver energy fields.
Even in the very midst of fighting it had been impossible not to be drawn to their magnificence. They were something else — imposing, arrayed in a dazzling overabundance of heraldic livery, standing like living repudiations of the species’ long decline.
And yet they were frozen now, each of them tracked by multiple targeting beads from the ranked hellguns. Rassilo, Spinoza’s sponsor and confidante, held her weapon taut, aimed at the lead Custodian’s helm, her stance unyielding.
‘It will not be suffered to live,’ the Custodian said, making no move to drive his blade further.
‘Indeed, but it will not meet its end by your hand,’ said Rassilo, as collected as ever, her voice crisp under the resounding arches. ‘This creature is under the auspices of the Holy Orders.’
‘This is the Palace, lord inquisitor.’
‘That makes no difference.’
Spinoza looked at her in disbelief. Khazad had fallen to her knees, cradling some fresh wound taken during combat, while Lermentov looked merely exhausted and bewildered. Only Crowl retained his composure, standing beside Revus with Sanguine still in hand.
‘Don’t be a fool, Adamara,’ he said. ‘You’ve failed. My advice — don’t anger this one.’
Rassilo never even looked at him. Her severe face was drawn tight in concentration. ‘Take the blade away,’ she said again, speaking to the Custodian. ‘Have no doubt, at the first movement to end the xenos, I will open fire.’
Spinoza took an uncertain step forwards, her own weapon still fully active and crackling. ‘My lord-’ she ventured, in truth not knowing which of her masters to address.
‘Silence, child,’ Rassilo snapped. ‘You are of the ordo. Do your duty.’
That was correct. Spinoza was honour-bound to obey her superior, an instinct that had been honed and strengthened over many years of psychoconditioning. Even before thinking, she found herself holding Argent more tightly, preparing to use it, and her gaze was drawn once more to the massive figure in its baroque armour, still motionless over the prone body of the xenos.
But then the spell broke. Crowl laughed — the same dry scrape she had heard in his private chambers, as cynical as it was unaffected.
‘I thought it was Quantrain,’ he said, slowly and carefully reloading. ‘That was the name that kept coming up, again and again. I even summoned him here.’
At the mention of Quantrain, Khazad’s face suddenly lifted, and the hatred in her brown eyes was virulent. One of Rassilo’s storm troopers, her captain by the sigils on his armour and his bulk, noticed too and edged protectively closer to her, all the time keeping his weapon aimed at the Custodian.
‘It’s not often I’m wrong,’ Crowl went on, snapping the chamber closed on Sanguine. ‘So you can imagine how it feels to discover the truth.’
He raised the pistol and fired a single shot. Rassilo’s captain was hit full in the helm, sent sprawling back against the bole of a stone column. He slumped, dazed, and the broken faceplate fell away from where Crowl’s shot had sheared the ceramite. With a start, Spinoza recognised the face underneath — a grey-streaked beard, spilling out at the gorget where the helm had fractured.
‘Gloch,’ she breathed.
‘How could he answer the summons?’ Crowl said, turning his pistol on Rassilo then. ‘He couldn’t. Only on Terra could a man as universally famous as Quantrain never exist. Or, to be more accurate, share existence. With you, Adamara.’
Khazad suddenly screamed, her sword snarling, and leapt up at Rassilo, her face contorted with loathing. Crowl lurched forwards, trying to interpose himself, but too late. Rassilo swung round, firing her bolter and missing before the assassin barrelled into her.