Dozens of bodies lay across the floor, some twitching, some still. The Custodians stood amid piles of them, their blades bloody, their armour criss-crossed with las-burns. The closest one to Spinoza inclined his helm by a fraction, then lowered his halberd.
‘Lord Rassilo has fled,’ she told him, picking her way closer. ‘This is over.’
The Custodian shook his head. ‘Not yet.’
It was only then that she noticed the xenos was gone. She started to move, a sick sensation kindling in her stomach.
‘Where is your captain?’ she demanded, pushing past the Custodian.
The Custodian pulled her back, taking her arm firmly to prevent her leaving, and she found herself looking up into his implacable, unknowable golden facemask.
‘Where do you think?’ he said.
Its breath was foul, stinking of rotten flesh. Crowl felt its talons pierce his armour as if it were soft leather. He punched out frantically with his gauntlet, catching it on the side of its skull. He hit it again, working the wounds Navradaran had already given it, and managed to shove it back far enough to crawl out from underneath it.
It came after him, scuttling across the stone. Sanguine was too far to reach, and the xenos leapt back in close, its blackened eye alive with greedy malice.
Crowl blink-clicked an activation, and needle-spines flicked out from nozzles in his armour’s forearm, striking the xenos just as it got within talon range.
It froze, its veins bulging, and started to choke. Crowl pulled clear, pushing back to his knees, breathing heavily. His heart was racing. There was enough toxin in those darts to fell an ogryn, but the xenos remained conscious, coughing up a thick dark bile from its swelling throat. It looked up at him, grinned widely, then swallowed. The creature’s skin, caught in the light of Crowl’s armour lumens, seemed to darken, to stiffen, then restore itself.
Crowl levelled his needle-launcher again, and the creature gazed at the nozzles fearlessly.
‘Try again,’ it slurred, the words forming strangely from alien lips.
The xenos looked half-destroyed. The limbs it had carried over its spinal cord hung uselessly, their sinews wrenched out and their bones broken. Its leather bodyglove was ripped open, revealing long gashes down the length of its skeletal torso. Long lines of dark fluid traced their way down its bony throat.
And yet it breathed still, albeit in a disconcerting rattle. Its steel jaw was intact, and at least one of its arms still clutched a long, curved dagger. The pain could halt it, but only momentarily. Give it long enough, and it would feed off its own destruction.
Then it stumbled, coughing. Its dagger hand trembled. Crowl kept his arm raised, aiming the needles, holding position with difficulty.
‘You’re dying, human,’ the xenos rasped. ‘I taste it in your blood.’
Crowl shifted painfully. The creature’s speech was grotesquely accented, pulled from a mouth that rarely made such sounds, and yet it was Gothic, perfectly comprehensible and artfully cruel. It tried to rise again, limbs shaking, failed, and smiled ruefully.
‘I wished to see it,’ it murmured. ‘The carrion throne. Before it dies.’
‘You lie.’
‘All the time.’ It tried to smile, and coughed up more bile. ‘I wished to see your Emperor’s face, just me and Him. We’ve both been around a long time. And after that..
‘You’d never have got that far.’
‘But I was close.’ The xenos shuffled closer, and Crowl saw its eyes gazing at him from the dark. ‘And there will be more of us.’
‘Give me names,’ said Crowl, feeling the muscles in his arms begin to fail.
‘Dangerous knowledge.’
‘I’m dead already. Tell me.’
The xenos looked at him strangely then, as if devising some new torment, or perhaps recognising something of interest where it had not expected to find any.
‘There were three. They were-’
The spear slammed into its chest, whistling silently through the dark and carrying the creature back with it across the stone. Impaled on an arc of ravening plasma lightning, it twitched and screamed, unable to rise.
Crowl started, tried to get up, then collapsed again, spewing up blood. His muscles felt heavy, far too heavy. He barely saw Navradaran stride past him, heading towards his kill to finish the task. As his head swam and his strength collapsed, he heard the final shrieks of the xenos, cut short suddenly.
He rolled onto his back, gasping. Far above, many hundreds of metres up, past the cables and the pipes and high spans, he could see the faint sheen of gold again, spilling down towards him like distant rain.
But it never rained on Terra.
Navradaran came towards him, his heavy armour marked with a hundred las-scorches. The Custodian stooped, kneeling beside him.
‘You could have let him finish,’ Crowl muttered.
‘This is ended,’ Navradaran told him.
Crowl felt his last strength ebb away. He’d fought hard against it, but his awareness was fading. ‘Too old for this sort of thing,’ he slurred, focusing on the nimbus of gold far above. ‘Maybe I’ll just stay here.’
‘You have earned death already,’ said Navradaran. ‘Remain, and I shall enforce it.’
Crowl looked up at him, both amused and annoyed. ‘Earned death? For running down a traitor and a xenos?’
‘This is sacred ground.’
‘This is the Palace. It never got as far as the Throne.’
Navradaran said nothing.
Slowly, Crowl lost his crooked smile. He looked up at the cabling again. He looked at the ancient granite frieze with its twenty heroes engraved on it. He looked up at the massive mechanisms suspended above, level after level of them, and he looked at the stairs winding up towards the haze of gold. He heard the low hum that never ceased, that made every surface shake, and that filled the air with static. Far above, far, far above, he perceived vague shapes hidden amid that haze, impossible to make out clearly, shimmering as if caught in a burning heatwash, churning like a furnace, radiating both awe and fear.
He tried to reach out, to lift his hand towards it.
‘Oh, my-’ he began.
Then his strength failed. His head fell back hard, hitting the rock floor. The walls dissolved around him into eddies of swaying liquid, the world tilted, the haze snuffed out, and then, at last, he knew no more.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The air was filled with cheering. A billion voices were raised in unison, swelling into the toxic air, burgeoning through the narrow ways between the endless towers. Drums rolled and hammered, war-horns blared, huge batteries of defence cannons discharged in salute. In every cathedral, priests raised bloody offerings before their altars, and the congregations wept and roared. A great shaft of blood-red light, powered by lumen banks the size of battleships, shot into the night air over the Sanctum Imperialis, creating a ghost-memorial so huge that every eye within a hundred kilometres of the Palace could witness the apex of the Feast.
Spinoza watched it from Courvain’s summit. The worst of her wounds had been treated, but her entire body still ached from overexertion. She hadn’t slept properly for days, and she felt feverish. Still, the column of light gave her some comfort. That told her the procession had reached the Eternity Gate. Those assembled there, the elect of the elect, would only have moments to glimpse the splendour of the banners, the Titans, the great golden doors, before they were hurried away again. In their exhaustion and their excitement, most would see nothing at all. Only a few might retain a grasp of their faculties, and realise that they gazed at the immortal halls of the Emperor Himself. They would see the great hololith of Sanguinius standing defiant across the threshold, and their devotion would reach its apogee.