Ashes of the imperium th.., p.39
Ashes of the Imperium: The Scouring, Book 1, page 39
‘It’s control, isn’t it?’ he said, looking up at her. ‘Guilliman has it now. He wants to solve this himself. He can’t trust Dorn with it, any of his brothers, so he’ll keep it secret, even if it brings them all to blows again.’ He laughed, bitterly. ‘It’s insanity. We learn nothing.’
Mouhausen looked similarly cynical. ‘No, we don’t,’ she said.
Hassan sat back again, his mind racing. His palms felt sweaty. The scenario was plausible. Maybe that was why Amon had taken him so far inside, to warn him of the same thing. Or maybe even he hadn’t been aware of the true situation. Were the Custodians in the dark? Surely Valdor had told his own people?
‘So why block us from the Council?’ he asked eventually. ‘We were all arguing for the same thing. We didn’t want the crusade.’
‘Because they want no rivals. They remember the way the Master ran things, and they fear us rising again. Maybe we’d agree with them now, but we might not in the future. And once you have a seat at that table, it’s hard to lose it, so they’ll keep us out.’
‘They were very candid with you.’
Mouhausen laughed again. ‘Because what do they have to fear from us, Khalid? What could we possibly do to them? We have no guns, we have no armies, and they have everything. They’re laughing at us. They’re telling us that we’re over, and they’re in charge, and that’s the way things are going to be.’ She shook her head miserably. ‘The High Lords have no place for us. If we are to survive, it’ll have to be as something else. Something small, meagre, pathetic.’
Hassan didn’t like to hear her talk like that. Maybe it was her illness. Maybe it was the effects of speaking to those… people.
In any case, it wasn’t true. The treasures were buried, but they weren’t destroyed. Perhaps this was what he had needed in order to make the decision – the pang of real danger, the risk of total annihilation.
‘The Sisters would not do this work openly,’ he said. ‘They would use an agent. Someone to control the rest on their behalf.’
‘They’re all in on it,’ said Mouhausen. ‘But if you want to know who they work through, think of what’s happened to the Palace. The troops emerging from nowhere, the enforcers in the camps. It’s massive, and it’s everywhere. Only one of them had the resources to mount that kind of operation.’
‘Pentasian,’ said Hassan.
‘The Administratum was always the glue that bound the rest together. Even more so now, because they have the records, they know where the bodies are, and they have the coin. At the end of the day, that’s where the power runs through. The rest will just fall in line, because they know Pentasian can starve them if he wants to, and they also know who’s behind him. If we’d got to him before Zhi-Meng…’
‘Enough. We did what we could.’
‘But we’ve missed the chance. We’re frozen out.’
‘Not yet,’ he said, reaching out to place a hand on hers. ‘Not yet. Have some faith.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘Is that meant to be a jest?’
‘Maybe.’ He squeezed her hand in reassurance. ‘I have one more decision to make. Then we’ll see.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Who made the Throne?
Witches did.
Who sat upon it?
Their enemy.
Who made it work?
The blind and the lame.
Who fed it?
We did.
– Etched fragments discovered on cell walls within the old Scholastica Psykana holding hall, Inner Palace, Terra, author unknown
The fighting underground was filthy. Prayto led his Ultramarines in a combined vanguard, supported by Abidemi and his Salamanders. The Blood Angels fought on the left, working hard but never pushing ahead. The tunnels were wide enough to send Land Raiders and other tracked armour down two abreast, but not much more, so everything was cramped, hot and painstaking. They encountered chambers branching off either side, as well as shafts leading down, and each one had to be swept, cleaned out, then secured. The abominations were everywhere down there, swarming like rats in the endless night, screaming as they limped and scuttled into contact.
Prayto began to feel weary. Truly weary. His arms were heavy, his blade notched. In the past, he would have drawn deep then, summoned up some kinetic flame or mass distortion, launched his power at the scrambling hordes and sent them reeling en masse. Now it was only bladework, only close-range bolter volleys, chopping, hammering, chiselling away at them like a mason at stubborn granite. They encountered true Astartes here too, who fought with all the guile and strength that they had been trained for. Those were Sons of Horus, fearless despite their abandonment, intensely skilled, reaping a tally before they could be cut down. In such places, defence was always the stronger hand, since they could wait in the narrow shadows, prepared, rested, forcing the invaders to make the first move. The ground was treacherous, rigged to dissolve and send the unwary plummeting into the darkness below, or the walls and ceilings were laced with motion-sensitive charges, or tank traps, or some other device that cracked armour and shattered helms.
It was still unclear what this place had ever been. The further down they fought, the closer they came to the extended foundations of the citadel itself, and the decorations on the cut stone around them became uncannier and less obviously Imperial. The air in those confined places smelled foul – not just stale, but infected with something else, something he couldn’t immediately place. Everything echoed eerily, suggesting vast spaces either ahead of them or below, such that the network of tunnels was merely a ganglion over something much grander.
‘They’re fighting within themselves,’ said Abidemi after a brutal operation to clear out two linked supply chambers.
The Blood Angels had taken another leftward ingress route, the Ultramarines the rightward. Morovain’s warriors had come up short, getting bogged down into melee fighting as the enemy counter-attacked, unable to bring their tanks to bear in the scrum and having to cut their way into the chambers beyond. They might have been badly mauled there had Prayto and Abidemi, having made faster progress into the halls on the far side, not been able to attack the traitors’ unprotected flank and break the tight formations from the side. Now the two forces, having fought hard together to clear the supply chambers, paused for a short time, just long enough to rearm and rotate the spearhead squads before pressing on down.
‘You’re right,’ said Prayto, stealing a glance at the IX Legion warriors. They had kept themselves to themselves the whole way, barely communicating beyond the necessities of force coordination. He’d seen Blood Angels fight before, many times. They had always been so committed, flamboyant even, racing to meet the enemy ahead of any others. It had always been such a paradox – their exquisite concern for aesthetics, balanced with that rage, that raw brutality that had seemed so perilously close to the surface.
Is that what the loss of a primarch did? Maybe. The grief must still have been raw. But then Prayto had also seen Iron Hands fight, and they had been, if anything, wilder and more destructive after the disaster that had ended Ferrus. To withdraw like this, to pull back even when the enemy was in front of them – it was like nothing he’d ever seen.
‘We should push on alone,’ Abidemi said. ‘Let them follow when they can.’
‘No, that would shame them,’ Prayto replied, checking the edge of his blade in the low light. ‘We move together.’
Not long after that they were advancing again, driving down the long slopes in the lee of the tanks, moving warily and tracking every half-glimpsed movement in the heavy gloom. Soon it became clear that they were reaching a far larger space – the roof rose above them, soaring into the darkness, held aloft by immense columns carved from dully reflective black stone. It was perishingly cold now, as if they’d descended into some ancient mortuary, and the faint glimmer of ice could be made out as the helm-lumens swept across the inky surfaces. In the far distance, perhaps a kilometre off, the auspexes were picking up something else – enormous concentrations of adamantine and lead shielding, the kind of thing you’d expect to see in the hangars of a major voidship, though seemingly on an even greater scale.
Then the enemy came at them, surging out of the gloom, the abominations screaming, the Astartes driving them onwards. They ran with abandon, the last assault, the final throw of the dice. No thought of defence or restraint, just to inflict as much pain as they could before the end.
‘Macragge!’ Prayto roared, and the Ultramarines around him swarmed forward to meet the charge, their bolters resounding in the vast space. The tanks throttled up, spraying their own thick layer of mass-reactives into the oncoming horde. Within moments, the two forces had met, and the combat descended into a close-set, vicious melee. The abominations were everywhere, lashing out, grabbing, strangling, trying to overwhelm individual enemies with weight of numbers. The Ultramarines pushed back hard, knowing the tactics now, knowing to guard for the sudden emergence of a greater threat from among the ranks of the gene-engorged dross.
The level of slaughter was brutal, rapid, fuelled by desperation on one side and a lust for revenge on the other. Helm lenses were smashed, eyes gouged, limbs twisted, mouths smothered, ribcages crushed. It was bloody, the tang of iron filling the space amid the crack of bolt rounds and the crackling snarl of powerblades.
Even amid all the confusion, it was evident that the Blood Angels weren’t performing well. The ferocity of the assault drove them back, exposing the left flank of the Ultramarines. Abidemi noticed it first, leading his Salamanders to counter the impending breach, but he didn’t have the numbers to stem the tide.
Prayto snapped a priority order to Istrian to maintain the momentum before leading his own squad to reinforce the buckling lines. He drove ahead at the forefront, his sword singing in his hands, his body swathed in the trailing streamers of disruptor energy. The abominations were all over him, reaching out to snatch the blade even as it scythed through their armoured fingers, diving low to try to grapple him down with them. He smashed them back, cut them open, kicked the corpses aside before piling in further, knowing that if the line failed here then the contest would become truly dangerous.
Then he was in front of the real enemy, a Sons of Horus warrior in sea-green battle plate. He carried two blades, one in each hand, both blazing from their disruptor fields. His helm-face had been reforged into the image of a sabre-toothed animal – some Cthonian beast – and skull-piece trophies clattered against his armour as he moved. His movements were a class apart from the rabble around him. They were just as violent, but also controlled, deceptive, steeped in centuries of experience.
Prayto went for him at once, his blade clanging and growling against the two others in a whirl of released energies. They duelled, the sword-edges blurs of movement – fast, heavy, every blow sending shudders of recoil down their arms. By then Prayto had been fighting for hours without serious respite, and the warrior before him was fresh. All around them both, other fights crowded close, a jostling mass of blades and bolt rounds, and they had to weave their own duel within that. He pressed in closer, bludgeoning the traitor into a wall of bodies before following up with thrusts aimed at his neck. The traitor responded, swinging round rapidly, hands jabbing and parrying in a web of energy-laced steel.
Prayto saw a gap and tensed to thrust into it. Just as he did so, something grabbed at his blade. Hands had lurched out, two, three of them, all grabbing the killing edge and hauling it away. The abominations yowled as the blade severed their fingers, but did enough to wrench it out of his grip. Prayto’s battle-brothers, close at his shoulder, leapt to disable the abominations, but none were close enough to get past the Librarian to take on the traitor. For a terrible moment – the merest fraction of a second – he was disarmed, his pistol in his holster, the enemy right in front of him, too fast and too skilled to miss the chance. Prayto felt a surge of pure rage boil up within him, the horrific realisation that this was it, that his story ended here, on this miserable satellite – too late for glory on Terra, too late to enter the annals of the Siege, now to die, here, among the filth of a dying rebellion.
He roared out defiance, thrusting both fists into the path of his enemy. It shouldn’t have been enough – the traitor was strong enough to shoulder those arms aside, bury his twin blades into Prayto’s chest – but something changed. Something rippled, uncoiled, erupted. Something that had been destroyed, rammed down under the earth, locked away, now suddenly there again, just in a sliver of its old power, its old ease. It was painful, agonising, ripped out of him like a final breath, a product of that intense despair. He cried out, no control, no finesse, nothing but a raw tearing of reality. He felt blood splatter against the inside of his gauntlets. His fists blazed, blinding, silver-white, a kinetic blast that sent reality popping and flexing around them all. The traitor was thrown backwards, driven as if by a turbo-hammer, completely unprepared, his body twisting and writhing before it crunched back to earth with a blood-wet thud.
Prayto staggered away from the blast, dumbfounded. All those around him, those who had been toppled by the blast and sent careering into one another, looked up, bewildered. The thunderclap echoed out. Prayto stared at his hands. The energy had gone. It was a one-off, the flicker of a candle. But it could not be denied.
For a terrible moment, no one moved. The fighting, so frenzied, so full-hearted, halted.
Then Prayto picked up his blade.
‘Courage and honour!’ he thundered, thrusting the sword high and reigniting its disruptor flare.
The Ultramarines roared back in acclamation. The Salamanders echoed the shout; the Blood Angels reinforced it. And then they were back into the fight, their efforts doubled, their commitment renewed. Prayto led them, knowing now that things had changed less than he thought. The old world had never disappeared. It was still there, ripe to re-emerge like a leviathan breaking the surface of the ocean.
He lashed out, his blade singing as if alive. The traitors began to fall back at last, though there was nowhere left for them to run to. They would be ended here, slaughtered to a soul in this tomb.
The power remains, he thought to himself as he slew them, not knowing whether to be relieved at that or filled with the old dread all over again. The power remains.
That proved to be the last pitched battle in those catacombs. After they had cleared out the hall, the combined forces advanced the further kilometre towards the main target. Few enemies remained in the residual side tunnels and chambers – Prayto dispatched hunter-killer squads to dispose of them, then pressed on towards the objective.
By the time they reached it, the scanners indicated they were a long way underground. The atmosphere had become very cold, enough to coat the black metal surfaces with a crystalline layer of ice. The Astartes assembled in the murk, their respirators sending plumes of condensation into the dark. Ahead of them loomed an immense wall, cliff-like, blank and unadorned. Its surface was badly scored and notched, as if weapons had been trained on it for sustained periods of time, but the damage was superficial. Huge servitor-crewed turbo-drills and lascannon arrays stood idle on the deck around them, their power coils burned out, as well as whole racks of krak charges. A pair of doors more than ten metres high soared up in front of them, interlocked and braced. They looked capable of withstanding a blast from a volcano cannon, and the violence inflicted on them had done little more than scrape the gloss from their surfaces.
‘This is the place?’ Prayto asked Morovain.
The Blood Angel nodded, and beckoned for his adjutant to come forward. ‘We have the codes.’
The adjutant moved towards a small panel to the right of the colossal doors. He activated a cogitator lens and entered a series of ciphered instructions. It was a complicated procedure, and took some time. Eventually, he withdrew. For a while, nothing. And then something boomed from deep within the structure. Slow grinding noises rang out, as if lock mechanisms the size of Thunderhawks were clanking and sliding into place. Vast servos powered up, and a thin line snaked from floor to roof between the two blast panels. The line widened to a crack, then kept going as the block-like doors slowly eased open. Ice shards split and tumbled as the gap widened, bouncing and shattering on the stone below.
A sigh of even colder air rushed out. The chamber within was completely dark. No threat markers appeared on Prayto’s helm display, just a colossal emptiness. The hall on the other side was far larger than the one they had just fought through. Whatever this place was, it had been here for a very long time, and the enemy had spent considerable effort to try to get inside.
They advanced through the aperture with the doors still slowly opening. Once inside, Morovain’s adjutant peeled away, heading confidently through the darkness towards some unseen area within. A few moments later, lumens began to flicker on. They were thin strips, glowing barely more than moonlight, set high up in the roof or placed along the walls on either side. One by one, they illuminated another segment of the hall, then another, stretching back further and further.
Prayto came to a halt, as did all those around him. They stood on the edge of a long, empty stage. Immediately beyond, the ground level plummeted, falling off into a giant metallic canyon running ahead of them into the distance. It must have been many kilometres long. The hall that enclosed it was also colossal – far bigger than any edifice they had encountered on Luna, and more gigantic than all but the largest facilities on Terra. It reminded Prayto of the great void-docks around Calth before the Disaster, only here buried deep under the earth. Every movement they made, no matter how slight, sent echoes resounding around those titanic vaults.
