His descending path converged with those of his fellow pilgrims. A stream of tracked battle-servitors rumbled along the hallways in their hundreds, en route to the Imperial Dungeon for whatever purpose the Custodians had in mind.
Not long after Zephon joined this lobo-chipped convoy, they were joined by the tall and striding forms of House Vyridion. The great Knights shook the stone chambers and corridors with their thunderous march, and Zephon felt his bleak heart stir at the sight of Jaya and her war court. Gone was the gunmetal grey and bare steel of the unpainted dregs-machines donated and begged from other houses. Zephon might have expected the blue-green of their former heraldry, but this too was absent. Vyridion’s armour plates had turned black and gold, and while they lacked the banners of their past deeds, they once more showed a sigil on their tilting shields: the Imperial aquila symbolising the unity of Terra and Mars. The simplest, purest symbol they could have chosen.
Looking at the monstrous form of Baroness Jaya as she strode over and ahead of him, Zephon kindled a shared vox-link.
‘Vyridion marches,’ he said with a faint smile.
‘Vyridion marches,’ came the crackling reply.
The lead Knight turned, a great bronze aquila hanging on chains from its bolt cannon swaying with the motion, and sounded its alarm horn through the stone hallways. It was answered by the horns and klaxons of every other Knight in the procession as House Vyridion celebrated its march.
By the second day’s dawn, the travellers were far from the sun’s light. Zephon’s trudging tread was marked by the clank of pistons and the thunder of heavy metal feet in silent corridors. Billions lived and toiled within the walls of the Palace, but the procession saw none of them, as though this was not the heart of the Imperium after all, merely an empty realm, a kingdom of stone and shadow.
On they walked. Every few hours they would pass one of the seals, the irises of each gateway open and waiting: unpatrolled, unguarded, unbarred.
They passed the Hibran Arch, vaulted above the fires of torches that had burned through Old Night and burned still. They walked the Processional of the Eternals, beneath the painted eyes of vanquished warlords. They walked until they had sunk into the underworld of the Palace’s foundations, gouged into the living rock of the planet’s Himalazian spine, and still they descended.
Servitor workers began to appear at infrequent intervals, along with robed adepts tending to machines and engines squatting in the basalt rock. The earthen corridors remained tall and wide – the Knights never once had to hunch or double back to seek another way – and the ground showed the erosion of countless feet and vehicle tracks.
Despite an eidetic recollection, Zephon wasn’t certain of the exact moment he realised the convoy was no longer being presented with alternate routes. After the fifth seal? At the sixth? When had the many tributary corridors converged at last into this one final path?
His instinctive sense of direction slowly began to tell another truth – the twists and turns betrayed his route, not always downwards but never ascending, remaining deep within the planet’s crust: he was walking a labyrinth. Not one akin to the eclectic garden mazes of the wealthy or the prisons of the mythologically monstrous, but a true labyrinth out of Ancient Terran lore, of the kind once seen in holy temples and places of pilgrimage. He knew them from his studies into pre-Imperial spirituality, when they had been embossed onto cathedral floors or etched upon the earth, forming a path for pilgrims to walk every step until reaching the centre. They were meant to be journeys of understanding, from ignorance to enlightenment. Was this such a journey?
I hear thunder.
Almost as soon as the thought came he realised its untruth. Not thunder at all, no matter how similar in sound. The false thunder grew louder with the passing of time, turn by turn, tunnel by tunnel.
Zephon saw faint markings along the walls and brushed aside the dust as delicately as he could with a sweep of one bionic hand. Simple, primal pictures met his curious touch, resembling the cave paintings exhibited by the most primitive human cultures. He walked on, stopping at random to study the primeval artwork: hunting scenes of simple figures bearing spears against great beasts; a community of shadowy humans gathered around the red-orange curls of a fire; dozens of figures with arms raised in worship to the high sphere of the sun.
It wasn’t long before the travellers reached the bridge, and with it, the thunder.
The path before them spanned an abyss. The servitors stalked and rolled onwards. The Knights hesitated, reining their war suits to a halt. Zephon stopped with them, sliding from the conveyor upon which he’d been riding, looking with unbelieving eyes at the source of the thunder pouring down into the infinite black. The water of Terra, harvested for the Palace’s underground reservoirs, plunged in vast, roaring falls from the cavern’s roof high above.
Zephon found himself first smiling, then laughing at the breathtaking sight, such was its scale and the deafening pressure of its crashing bellow. He had fought on oceanic worlds, on monsoon worlds, but the effect was no less majestic to him. He was a child of Baal, and few planets could claim such a radiation-soaked, thirsty legacy as that distant globe.
Yet on they walked, steps becoming metres, metres becoming kilometres.
Eventually the thunder receded.
Zephon’s focus drifted with uneasy wonder as he ventured through the labyrinth, beneath the vast stone statues of humanity’s first false gods, over bridge-spanned chasms that cradled the bones of long-dead settlements. As he traversed another wide stone archbridge he saw the cold, sunless remains of an entire city. Even from his maddening altitude above the grave-city he sensed movement inside the black eyes of glassless windows: the ghosts of a distant past, staring up in hollow and sullen silence at the passing of their descendants and inheritors.
What was this place when it stood in the sun? He wasn’t certain whether he thought the words or whispered them aloud, until he received an answer.
‘Kath Mandau,’ a voice murmured across the vox.
Zephon didn’t tear his eyes from the dead city five hundred metres below. Impossibly, there was wind here. A soft breeze that tasted of dust.
‘Diocletian?’ he voxed back.
‘You asked what this place once was. It was the city Kath Mandau. Capital of the nation Sagarmatha, also called Nehpal. It was once the roof of the world.’
‘That is very poetic.’ And now it lies dead, part of the Palace’s foundations, remaining only in name in the precincts above. ‘Thank you, Diocletian.’
The Custodian, far ahead at the front of the column, didn’t respond again.
The next bridge was reinforced by support stanchions and black iron gantries binding the stone pathway to the cavern’s far-off walls. The air itself gleamed orange from the underworld’s light. Heat assailed Zephon in a rising miasma.
Molten rock seethed and sludged in the abyss below. The bridge spanned a wound in Terra’s crust, seemingly torn open to the planet’s mantle. A great lake of the world’s liquid blood-fire burned in the darkness far, far below, somehow only breeding more shadows instead of banishing them.
More and more images showed upon the chamber walls as the procession made its way through the labyrinth. Cave paintings of ochre and charcoal became artful mosaics and impressionist vistas. Images of suns, of the heavens, of the blue Terran sky and the black void beyond. Pictographs of satellites, those earliest machines that sung their songs into the silent night.