The storm troopers opened fire, hitting the Custodians and sending all five reeling. Gloch roared back to his feet and raced after Khazad, firing from his autopistol and reaching for a combat blade. The entire chamber erupted again in a hail of noise and light. Caught between the explosion of violence, Lermentov’s troops cowered helplessly, running for cover as the storm troopers took on the Custodians.
For a split second Spinoza had no idea what to do. Hegain looked to her urgently for guidance, unsure where to aim or who to take on, and she had none to give him. Gloch engaged with Khazad, winging her and then going after her with the knife. Rassilo had disappeared, lost in the blaze of las-discharge and the sudden surge of bodies. The Custodians were fighting back now, wading into the storm troopers and laying about them with their spears. She was duty-bound to aid both sides, and yet had no idea why they were fighting.
‘What orders, lord?’ asked Hegain.
She saw Khazad being battered by Gloch then, driven back into the press of advancing storm troopers. The assassin was in no shape to resist, but still fought back, just as she had done before.
‘Locate the Lord Crowl and protect him,’ Spinoza ordered Hegain, hefting Argent and racing towards Gloch. ‘I will handle the giant.’
Crowl glanded a heavy slug of motovine, giving up on the pretence of restraint. Running again was pure pain, shooting up his diseased limbs and striking at his labouring heart, but the need for haste was now acute.
He had miscalculated, exposing Rassilo while the assassin was so close. Then again, only at that moment had he realised who she must be — Phaelias’ old acolyte, sufficiently driven by loathing of Quantrain to risk everything for the kill.
The xenos had reacted instantly, taking advantage of the confusion, shifting under a cloak of darkness and scampering through the mass of advancing bodies. Its physical demise, seemingly, had been illusory, artfully constructed to project weakness, and now it was loose again, bereft of its servants but still racing towards its goal.
The shouts and cries of combat faded into the distance. Crowl had lost sight of it, but the tunnels only led one way now. For all its subterfuge, the thing had been battered by Navradaran — surely even a creature of its perverse abilities would be slowed a little by that.
Now they were headed even further down, threading through deep capillaries cut into the stone. The heat became crushing, just as it had up in the Sanctum Imperialis. The arched roofs descended with every step, narrowing the stale airspace further, choking under the press of the Palace’s straggling foundations.
He was alone. Revus had raced to aid Navradaran, and he had no idea where Gorgias had ended up. If there had been time he might have called them back, but now it was too late, and he was already deep into the tortuous mazes snaking through the roots of the old mountains. His body was giving up on him — he could feel the old wounds cluster, draining his strength, fighting against the artificial stimms that clogged his blood.
This can only end badly, he thought to himself, breathing hard, running hard, driving himself onwards through the depths.
Down, down and ever down he went, following the trace stench of corruption, trusting to instinct, never pausing. He vaulted down spiral stairs, raced under the eaves of ancient, empty vaults. He passed great barred doors, braced with iron and sealed with runes of obscure provenance. Slivers of static snaked across the ceiling again, sparkling in the deep dark. He must have been as far down below as the spires soared above, and felt like an insect scrabbling through the soil of humanity’s eternal domain, lost under the furnace-slag of its long forging.
He lost track of time, lost track of space. At points there was nothing to hold on to, and he staggered blind, his night-vision faltering. He heard massive growls from below, as if tectonic plates ground up against one another, and the rock beneath his feet became hot even through the soles of his boots. There were sounds in the dark — eldritch wails, the echoing clank of infernal engines, the slow beat of the world’s heart.
He was going mad. He could feel his exhaustion catching up with him, amplified by the insanity of this place. More runes swam before his vision, surely graven aeons ago, dull red with residual warding power.
Then he was out. He felt the oppression lift, the air decompress. A flat plain of empty stone stretched away, broken by a chasm running transverse just before an immense screen of granite that soared up on the far side. The screen was carved just as the Eternity Gate had been carved — a vast tapestry of overlapping, elaborately occult depictions of bestial and legendary figures. There were twenty great knights shown in a huge circle surrounding a magisterial icon of the Emperor Enthroned. Some of those knights looked like the Ministorum-sanctioned images of the Holy Primarchs, but why were there twenty of them?
The chasm stood more than fifty metres away. Above him, a great void opened that went up and up, bridged by vast spans of gothic stonework. Huge pipes interlaced with the stone, ringed with bundles of thick cabling and the unmistakable mark of Mechanicus devices. It all hummed, barely audibly at first, but deep and throbbing and redolent of something unutterably gigantic. A faint glow, like the first blush of dawn sunlight, bled down from the heights, only partly obscured by the haze of smog and darkness below. There were stairs threaded up into those high clerestories, wrapped around the boles of gigantic columns and twisting through the filigree of flying buttresses.
Dust lay everywhere, still like a fall of grey snow, choking and matted. The heat was incredible, the sense of oppression absolute. Crowl felt an almost overwhelming urge to sink to his knees, to give in and let his labouring heart judder and his tortured lungs cease their wheezing efforts, but he couldn’t, for he was no longer alone. Out in the open, on the edge of the chasm, two figures faced one another.
Rassilo had been faster than he, and had the xenos pinned down. The creature looked to have been shot again, and carried its eldritch blade weakly now. Grimly, checking that Sanguine was fully loaded, Crowl dragged himself towards the both of them, keeping his weapon aimed firmly at Rassilo.
‘Remain where you are!’ he shouted, coming closer, working hard to retain focus.
Rassilo did not move. The xenos sank to its knees, its nightshade eyes unblinking, watching Crowl draw up.
‘What shall I call you, then?’ Crowl asked Rassilo grimly. ‘Which name serves best?’
Rassilo smiled. ‘Whatever you want, Erasmus. But you do not look well. Why not sit awhile?’
Crowl kept Sanguine aimed at her forehead. Rassilo kept her bolter aimed at the xenos, while the xenos stared hungrily at both of them.
‘You do not wish to kill it,’ Crowl said. ‘This was your cargo. Why?’
‘I had my orders,’ said Rassilo. ‘Set in motion a long time ago. I am only a small part in it. You are an even smaller one. If you think you can stop it now, you are, I am afraid, quite in error.’
‘Tell me why.’
‘Or you will shoot? Come, now. Our friend here will finish you before my body hits the ground.’
The xenos let slip a fractured smile of its own then, exposing black teeth in pearl-white gums.
‘For the sake of the past, Adamara,’ said Crowl, softly. ‘Whatever you planned here has failed. Tell me, before they wring it from you later.’
Rassilo lost her smile. ‘Ah, Erasmus,’ she said. ‘I always said it — you spent too long in Salvator. The battle was here, within the Palace, and you wasted yourself out there.’ Her bolter never wavered. ‘I counselled against it. When all this is done, tell them that. I told them the creature could not be trusted, but still they persisted. And I was right. We got it as far as Terra, and then we were betrayed.’