Ascension, p.12
Ascension, page 12
‘Interesting,’ he said, waving his gun at the floor. ‘Not native to the fortress, I think. It looks biological in nature.’ He looked closer. ‘There are flies.’ He looked down and tapped the floor with his boot. ‘And it has grown. It has broken through from a lower level.’
‘Draik!’ cried Isola as a piece of debris whistled through the air.
He stepped aside and it hurtled past him.
Quintus expected a messy explosion as the metal collided with the tree but the object simply vanished, slicing into the trunk and blinking out of sight as though breaking the surface of a pool.
Despite his nausea, Quintus edged closer, intrigued by the thing. As he got closer he noticed one of the fruit-like lumps dangling overhead. It slowly rotated and he cried out in horror. It was the severed head of a young man, dangling from the fleshy limb and chanting in a monotone. Somehow, it was still alive. The eyes were blank and the expression slack, but the words were coming from his torn throat.
Quintus backed away cursing, and realised that all of the suspended shapes were heads. And they were all chanting. This was the choir.
‘Stand back!’ snarled Taddeus, catching up with them. ‘This is an altar. A black shrine!’
Several of his followers pointed their flamers at the thing but Draik held up a warning hand. He pointed at the broken floor.
‘Look.’
There was a split in the floor, a jagged channel leading away from the altar and zigzagging into the distance.
‘Which way were you planning on leading us?’ Draik said, looking at the ratlings.
‘We go up,’ said Raus grimacing at the singing heads. ‘Up the Red Stair.’
‘And which way is your Red Stair from here?’
Raus shrugged and waved his pistol at the split in the floor.
Draik nodded, seeming unsurprised. He turned to Taddeus. ‘Do you know what will happen if you destroy this thing?’
Taddeus shook his head.
‘Neither do I,’ said Draik.
‘But it is a false idol!’ exclaimed Taddeus. ‘We can’t let it remain.’
Draik lit his lho-stick and took a drag, looking pensive. ‘From what I have heard, the outer regions of the fortress are littered with black shrines. We could spend months destroying them all and we have no idea how they are linked. I would suggest we–’
He ducked as another piece of metal rushed through the air and vanished into the blood tree.
‘I would suggest we keep moving and disturb nothing until we know more.’
Taddeus’ face flushed with anger. ‘I cannot allow it. These things are–’
‘Will you follow my commands or not?’ Draik took another deep drag as he studied the priest. ‘Either I am leading the expedition or we can part company.’
Taddeus looked about to yell. Then he closed his eyes and nodded, struggling to keep his voice neutral. ‘You are the Anointed.’ He bowed. ‘Your word is law.’
Draik nodded, still lost in thought as he smoked, looking at the singing heads.
‘It’s a kind of High Gothic,’ said Isola, listening to the droning song while tapping at her cogitator. ‘They’re singing words.’
Draik looked intrigued. ‘What are they singing?’
Isola shook her head, still peering at her screen, shimmering glyphs reflected in her eyes. ‘It’s an ancient dialect. I’m not sure. I should be able to decipher it in time.’ She frowned, looking up at the swaying heads. ‘I think they might be describing a place – a location. I think they might be recounting coordinates. I will keep researching it. It might be important.’
Draik watched her working and a faint smile played around his lips. Then he nodded and turned to Raus.
‘Lead us to your stair.’
As the ratlings scurried away from the light, Taddeus cried a command and half a dozen servo-skulls whirred through the air, leaving the ranks of missionaries and gliding after the abhumans. The tattooed skulls were covered in holy sigils and scraps of parchment. They had lumens embedded in their gleaming eye sockets and as they flew from the main group they scattered strands of light over the shifting floor, giving just enough illumination for Draik and the others to follow the ratlings.
With a shudder, Quintus tore his gaze away from the heads and started after the rogue trader.
12
The sounds of the Blackstone grew louder as they headed deeper into the chamber and the tremors grew more violent. When Quintus glanced back over his shoulder he saw that the darkness had swallowed the two ships utterly. All he could see was the pitiful-looking heads lit up by their crimson tower.
‘This way!’ called one of the ratlings and the expedition trailed after them. Quintus guessed that there were sixty or so missionaries, plus Draik, Isola, Audus, Grekh and himself. The priests were all heavily armed and they made a fearsome sight. He started to wonder if he might actually survive the mission.
They ran for ten minutes with the light of the servo-skulls bobbing ahead of them. Then Quintus sensed a change in the atmosphere. The air felt closer and the echoes of their running feet were deadened and truncated.
‘We’re in a smaller chamber,’ he said, noticing that Audus was nearby.
She nodded, waving her big two-handed autogun back the way they’d come. ‘They vary massively. That big one back there was the Stygian Aperture. The most visited of all the fortress’ docking points. Before all the lumens got smashed, you could even see a bit of the place. It’s like being inside a gemstone the size of a battle cruiser – all angles and facets and polished black surfaces. But the really interesting thing, when there was light, was to pick through all the wrecked landers. That place is supposedly the safest entry point, but there are dozens of dead ships in there.’
‘Because of the heretics?’
‘No.’ She gave him a sympathetic look. ‘You haven’t got a clue, have you? No, the heretics weren’t always here. At least not in these kinds of numbers. They have taken control over the last few months. I’ve never seen an altar like that at the landing point. The early expeditions were destroyed by the Blackstone itself.’
‘How? Is it defended by soldiers?’
‘No.’ She banged the butt of her gun on the cold, black floor. ‘By this stuff.’
‘The floor?’
‘And the walls. And the ceilings. And anything else you can find down here. This is no ordinary building material. It comes to life. I’ve seen it form into killing machines faster than people can step off it.’
Quintus studied the floor he was running over, wondering if Audus was having a joke at his expense. He was about to ask more when they caught up with the missionaries. They had halted as the ratlings spoke to Draik and Taddeus. Quintus pushed closer. In the confines of the smaller chamber, which he now saw was more like a corridor, the servo-skulls’ lumens were able to shed much more light.
He took in his first clear view of the fortress’ architecture. Everything was made of the same dark, slate-like material, but the structures did not seem to make any sense. The crossroads led off in four directions, but there were also passages and flights of stairs overhead that appeared to be upside down, as though he were looking up into a dark mirror.
Draik nodded, made a decision and the group headed off down another black, sheer-sided corridor. As they went, the sound of singing grew louder, filling the darkness with a rising chorus of atonal verses.
After what seemed like hours, the ratlings triggered a mechanism in the wall, and a dead end folded away like a piece of origami to reveal a dazzling explosion of red light. Quintus cursed and shielded his eyes. After so long travelling in gloom, the illumination was painful. He staggered back and bumped into someone.
‘Don’t worry, flower,’ whispered Audus. ‘I’ll look after you.’
He shrugged her off and managed to open his eyes a fraction, peering into the light. Draik and most of the party had already entered the chamber, silhouetted by the fiery glare. The missionaries fanned out, dropping into combat stances and gripping their weapons as they edged forwards, but Draik strode purposefully on, chin raised, as though he were inspecting a parade.
Quintus stumbled out into the hall, still shielding his face and gasping in disgust. The stench he had smelled earlier was twice as powerful here, and again he had to battle the urge to vomit. A hundred feet away, the sheer black surface of the floor had cracked and buckled, rising up in broken plates and creating a stockade of teeth-like protrusions. It was not the broken floor that made Quintus grimace, though; it was the cause of the rupture.
The floor had been ripped up by a seam of raw meat. Skinless flesh had boiled up from beneath the floor, like lava cutting through rock. It had been narrow at the foot of the blood tree, but here it was dozens of feet wide and it trailed off into the distance, disappearing into hazy clouds of flies.
‘What in the name of the Emperor is that?’ said Quintus.
Audus reached his side. ‘Well,’ she muttered. ‘That is new.’
She strode on to where Draik had halted, about a dozen feet away from the channel of violent pink. Quintus rushed after her and joined her at Draik’s side. Isola, Grekh, Taddeus and Vorne were already there and all of them were staring at the tear in the floor. There were more of the blood trees like the one they saw in the previous chamber, topped by the same clusters of chanting heads.
‘It’s breathing,’ said Quintus, shaking his head, looking at the thing in the floor. Up-close, the eruption looked even more like a river of flayed muscle, but it was moving, slowly, up and down, inflating and deflating all along its length.
‘Not possible,’ said Draik. ‘No animal could be this large.’ He moved to step closer, but Taddeus grabbed his arm.
‘This is the seed the heretics planted. It is taking shape.’ The priest was shaking. ‘This is the taint that you have come to drive out.’ His voice grew sing-song. ‘When the crimson hand climbs the Red Stair, the wounds shall be healed. The throne and the crucible, the dark and the light, all shall be one.’
Draik nodded and looked around for the ratlings. They were a few feet away and rushed over when he called.
‘How do we cross this?’ he demanded, waving away the flies.
‘No need,’ replied Raus.
Rein pointed his sniper rifle away from the heaving meat to the other side of the hall. The red light was even brighter in that direction and it was impossible to see anything clearly, but the ratlings spoke with confidence.
‘The Red Stair,’ grinned Rein.
‘So the stairs looked like this last time you came?’ asked Draik, frowning.
Taddeus shook his head. ‘They were red rocks.’ He waved his mace at the bloody expanse before them. ‘There was none of this. The black shrines are transforming everything.’
Draik nodded and was about to give an order when the floor shifted violently and they all staggered away from the channel of meat. A new fissure opened up as the meat rose higher, as though inhaling. Quintus reeled away as a slab of floor sheared up in front of him.
‘Move,’ said Draik, waving the ratlings off. ‘Get us to the stairs.’
‘I’ve not seen anything like that before,’ said Audus as they all rushed after the ratlings. She was looking back over her shoulder at the meat river. ‘The Blackstone is usually pretty indestructible, but that thing has broken it like eggshell.’
The fact that Audus had abandoned her sardonic demeanour made Quintus even more troubled. ‘Isola said this place is full of things that can kill you,’ he offered.
Audus shook her head. ‘But not like that. This is different. That’s not part of the Blackstone Fortress. The fortress doesn’t breathe.’
‘It looked like a limb,’ whispered Quintus as they rushed through the clouds of flies. ‘Or a tentacle.’
Audus raised an eyebrow. ‘The size of a river?’
The light grew brighter as they crossed the hall, but Quintus found he was getting used to it. The hall was too huge for him to see walls or a ceiling. All he could make out was the sheer expanse of floor, broken only by the eruption they had just run away from. Then, as they ran further into the light, he began to make out its source. Rising up over the silhouettes of Draik and the others, dwarfing them with its immense size, was a red waterfall. It was tumbling down from some unseen height, arching overhead before plunging towards the floor.
Quintus was struggling not to be crushed by the strangeness of the fortress. As he craned his neck, trying to see the top of the red waterfall, he realised that it was not tumbling as he had first thought, but bursting out through the floor and roaring upwards. The sound of crashing liquid was loud enough to drown out the ominous reverberations of the fortress.
‘Behold!’ cried Raus, trying and failing to sound confident. ‘The Red Stair.’
As they ran towards it, Quintus had the horrible feeling that it would be made of the same rotting, offal-like substance as the river, but when he got closer, he saw that it was simply blood, a vast column of the stuff, cascading upwards with ground-shaking force.
‘Did they say we have to climb it?’ he muttered, his stomach churning at the thought.
Audus was still beside him, but before she could reply Raus halted the group by holding up a warning hand. There were silhouetted figures approaching from the opposite direction, rushing towards them. Their shapes were rippling and unclear in the blazing light, but Quintus guessed that there were fifty or so people approaching from the direction of the Red Stair.
Taddeus waved his mace from left to right, indicating that the missionaries should spread out. Draik stood stock-still, his pistol trained on the approaching figures. As people scattered in every direction, Quintus fumbled with one of his pistols, struggling to wrench it from his belt and almost pulling the trigger while the gun was pointed at his foot.
‘Just keep your head down,’ whispered Audus, stepping in front of him and hefting her autogun off her back. ‘People rarely play nicely down here.’
Quintus dropped to one knee and raised his pistol as the figures emerged from the light.
‘Guardsmen?’ he muttered as he recognised their lasguns and Militarum fatigues. He laughed in relief and lowered his pistol.
‘Don’t fire until I give the order,’ said Draik calmly. ‘We can’t afford to waste ammunition.’
‘Fire?’ laughed Quintus, confused. ‘They’re Imperial Guardsmen.’
He stood and was about to approach Draik when he noticed how oddly some of the soldiers were moving – limping and lurching, as though dragging heavy loads. They were also a strangely varied range of sizes and shapes. Some seemed of average build, but others were small and hunched, like crippled children, and others were huge, looming over the others with their heads swinging low like apes.
When they were about twenty feet from Draik, the Guardsmen ceased to be silhouettes and Quintus raised his pistol again, taking a few steps backwards. ‘Throne,’ he whispered as he saw how oddly they were dressed. Some were wearing ragged, bat-like wings on their backs and others had long, bovine horns strapped to their foreheads. The Guardsman at the front, who seemed to be the commanding officer, had attached foot-long barbs to his uniform.
‘Why are they dressed like that?’ said Quintus, but before anyone could answer, Draik gave the order to fire.
A wall of flames and las-blasts ripped into the Guardsmen, hurling the front line back. As the barrage lit them up, Quintus’ pistol hung limply in his hand.
‘They’re not costumes,’ he whispered, but no one could hear him as the Guardsmen returned fire. Shots punched into missionaries either side of Quintus and they toppled away, trailing blood as their flamers clanged across the floor.
Dozens more Guardsmen lurched into view and fear jolted Quintus into action. He raised his pistol and pulled the trigger. He cursed as nothing happened.
Audus reached over and flicked his safety off. Then she placed the butt of her autogun against her hip and launched an ear-splitting drum roll of shots. As she hefted the weapon from side to side, smoking shells whistled through the air and another row of Guardsmen fell back into the bloody light.
Quintus cursed his stupidity and fired wildly into the Guardsmen, unsure if he was hitting anything. Draik had remained at the head of the group, standing in a relaxed posture, his pistol hanging loosely from his hand as he placed careful headshots into the reeling figures. Quintus fired with increasing ferocity, growling to himself as he marched forwards, invigorated by fear. It took him a few seconds to realise that the others had ceased firing and were watching him with baffled expressions.
‘You can’t kill them twice,’ said Audus, waving her gun at the smouldering corpses.
Quintus stumbled to a halt as he saw that in just a few seconds they had gunned down every one of the Guardsmen. He kept his pistol raised as he walked slowly towards the bodies.
Draik looked up as Quintus reached his side. ‘Have you seen heretics before, boy?’
Quintus nodded. ‘Of course. I have seen men burned for heresy on countless occasions, but…’ He hesitated, looking down at the nearest corpse. The Guardsman’s hands had been replaced with elongated, birdlike claws. ‘They did not look like this. I don’t understand. Why are they so deformed? Is that what drove them to idolatry?’
Draik looked at the bodies with a stern expression but before he could answer, Taddeus strode over.
‘They harnessed the warp. As fuel for their forbidden rites. The ether has unmade them. It corrupted their minds and their bodies.’
Quintus shook his head. ‘How can prayers change bodies?’
‘Transmutation!’ bellowed Taddeus, rounding on him, his face crimson. ‘The corrupting power of heresy! Pray that you never meet their fate, boy. Physical change is the least of their concerns. Their immortal souls are far more grotesque than their flesh.’ He pointed his mace back the way they had come, towards the tear in the floor. ‘The malignancy of their religion is so potent that it is transforming this entire fortress. It is their apostasy that is tearing the walls down and filling the void with storms. If we take time to pray, we may spare ourselves the–’
