Ascension, page 14
Draik had no interest in whatever Taddeus was calling the Crucible, but Audus was right: he did need to remember why he came. He had to keep moving and find something valuable enough to begin building his fortune. Or he would be as nameless and defenceless as the wretches who were being sacrificed beneath the bridge. He nodded at the ratlings.
They crossed the bridge in silence, weapons at the ready as they eyed the horrific scene below. As they crossed the cavernous space, the chanting from the heads grew louder and the cloud rolled and grumbled, tearing rifts in the floor and hauling more flesh into view. Draik was reminded of the religious paintings in his father’s palace, apocalyptic scenes wrought on a grand scale. He felt as though he were travelling through a hellish afterlife, waiting for a daemonic monster to rise up and devour him.
No one brought up the subject of stopping to rest. They just stumbled along, heads hung low and faces smeared with blood. They looked like a mob of revenants ambling from a crypt. The crowd of missionaries eyed the scene with undisguised loathing, praying furiously as they trailed after Taddeus and Vorne. Even the ratlings had lost some of their relentless optimism. As usual, Grekh seemed unaffected, loping after the abhumans with his usual nonchalance, occasionally studying a distant detail through the scope of his rifle.
As Draik walked, his mind returned again and again to the distant cloud. There was something dreadful about the way it seethed on the ground, never moving away or dispersing. Draik began to find it even more offensive than the murders at the shrines. He could feel the force of its evil, disturbing the air like static electricity, washing over him in waves. He thought again of the eyepiece at his belt and what it might reveal if he turned it on the cloud.
‘What is in there?’ he muttered.
Isola was at his side and caught his words. ‘What does it matter?’
He glanced at her.
She shrugged. ‘You’re here to make yourself rich. As long as you can build your empire why would you care what’s in the cloud?’
‘Are you trying to distract me?’ he replied. ‘Of course I care, but Janus Draik does not simply give up at the first obstacle.’
Amusement flickered in her eyes.
‘I see what’s happening down there,’ he said. ‘Do you think it doesn’t pain me? Do you think I want to let those people die? Do you think I am not concerned about whatever it is they’re building?’ Audus and the valet were only a few paces behind them so he lowered his voice and leant closer to Isola. ‘Why do you think I want to build a new Draik empire?’
She gave him a sideways glance. ‘To rival your father.’
‘No. Well, yes, but not for the reasons you think. I will build a new House Draik, forged in the heat of adversity, Isola. While my father and my sister parade themselves at Terran balls, I will use my position to stop atrocities like this.’
She shook her head. ‘It’s in your blood. You’re a Draik. You want power for power’s sake. You are reckless and hungry. If you build a dynasty it will do as much damage as good.’
Isola had never spoken to Draik in such disparaging tones before and he felt a flash of fury. But the sadness in her voice leached the anger out of him. He had been barely more than a boy when his father had cast him out into the galaxy as a pariah. Isola had been the only constant presence in the intervening years. They had grown together, and he could not find it in himself to hate her.
‘Then join me,’ he said. ‘If you doubt my motives or my constancy, why not serve the new House Draik as you so loyally served the old one?’
She was staring at the screaming figures below, her expression bleak. ‘I want something better.’ She gave him such a direct, intense look that it almost drove the storm cloud from his thoughts. ‘Partners, Janus, or nothing.’
Before he could reply she turned away to talk to Audus. Draik marched on, following the ratlings, but Isola’s words rankled. Was she right? Was he putting personal glory before duty?
He looked out at the horrors below the bridge. There were thousands of cultists down there and they were not a disorganised rabble – they were heavily armed and working with the precision of a well-drilled Astra Militarum regiment. He could see armoured cars and artillery being manoeuvred around the pit, as though they were preparing for an offensive. But an offensive against what? Against whom? There was no one on the Blackstone, except perhaps a few half-starved expeditions from Precipice that had managed to survive longer than the rest. So why did the heretics look as though they were mustering for an attack?
As he studied the columns of troops and war machines his gaze was drawn inexorably back to the storm cloud at the heart of the madness. His eye socket itched and he touched the pouch at his belt, feeling the heavy bulk of his disconnected eyepiece. He remembered what had happened on the Vanguard – the painful hallucinations that had forced him to remove it. Perhaps it had just been cognitive interference, something temporary caused by the magnetic storms? He took the augmetic out and studied it as he walked. The pain had been bad but not debilitating. And if he suffered the same ill-effects as last time, he could simply remove it again.
Draik lifted the eyepiece, slotted it into the frame that circled his eye socket and triggered the power. The mechanism whirred into life and the lens clicked as it tried to focus. There was no pain. Data scrolled across the lens and Draik realised how much he had missed wearing it. He had lost his original eye in a duel on Terra, while still a youth, but the optical implant was more than just a replacement eye: it acted as a mixture of cogitator, auspex, targeting display and vital functions monitor. It was also capable of seeing through almost any kind of weather conditions.
As Isola continued talking to Audus, Draik paused and stared through his augmetic at the distant thunderhead. For a moment, there was nothing to see as the lens refocused and recalibrated. Then it pierced the gloom and Draik began to make out shapes in the centre of the cloud. At first, he thought it was more of the tendrils snaking from the chasm, but then he saw they were not solid shapes but lines of power, like coruscating plasma. The beams were the cause of the destruction that had crossed the whole chamber, spreading out into the Blackstone and ripping it apart. As Draik saw the centre of this spectacular display, a feeling of intense hatred rose up in him.
‘Janus?’ Isola’s voice seemed to come from another world.
At the centre of the cloud, Draik saw a tree-shaped altar, similar to the ones scattered around the pit, but built on a larger scale. It was a tower of muscle and ligament, and at the top was a single figure, chained to a throne with her head tilted back and her hands gripping a staff. Draik grimaced. The woman wore the tattered uniform of a Militarum officer but her head was billowing and fluttering with the plasma beams, distorting and elongating.
‘Draik?’ said Isola again, but it was too late. He was consumed by the heretic’s amorphous face. The power he had sensed, the energy that charged the air, was all radiating from this nightmarish skull. The sense of dreadful urgency he had felt on the Vanguard gripped him again. It grew so intense that he felt he would scream if he did not do something.
To Draik’s shock, the woman looked directly at him. She must have been nearly a mile away. Draik could only see her so clearly because of his augmetic. How could the mutant see him?
The woman opened her mouth to speak and Draik realised that, if he heard what this monster had to say, his mind would break. All the time, the awful sense of urgency was growing.
He flipped his splinter pistol from its holster and, using the targeting system in his augmetic eye, he shot a hole in the woman’s forehead.
14
The woman’s head rocked back and her staff fell from her hands, bouncing down the bloody shrine. The lines of plasma vanished and the grinding hum that had been filling the air was silenced. All around the crater, the heretics’ song faltered as the storm cloud dissipated and revealed the corpse on the altar.
There was a great clamour as heretics rushed up the pyramid towards the dead woman.
‘What did you do?’ asked Isola, her voice hushed.
Draik finally looked at her. ‘I’m not sure,’ he muttered as all the others gathered around him and looked down at the panicked crowds. He was about to suggest they keep moving when a new sound rose up over the cries of the heretics – a deep, grumbling roar that sounded like a landslide. Beneath the bridge, the pit started to collapse, spilling more captives to their deaths and throwing up dust clouds.
Hundreds of heretics were looking around for the source of the shot and it was only a few seconds before cries rang out and weapons were pointed up at the bridge.
‘Here we go,’ muttered Audus. ‘Is this the famed Draik diplomacy?’
‘Move!’ cried Draik, waving everybody on as shots filled the air, smashing chunks from the bridge’s edge. They all turned to run but failed to take more than a few steps before the entire bridge shifted to the left, throwing them off their feet and sending them sprawling across the crimson surface.
‘What have you done?’ cried Audus, just managing to grab Quintus before he was hurled to his death.
There was another seismic groan and the bridge jolted in the other direction, wrong-footing them again. One of the missionaries howled as he tumbled from the bridge and plunged towards the pit.
‘Run!’ cried Draik, managing to stand and break into a sprint. ‘It’s collapsing!’
A few shots were still howling up at them, but the heretics now had problems of their own to contend with. The star-shaped chasm was splitting into dozens of new cracks, flipping up slabs of flooring and hurling heretics towards the shrines, giving them the same death they had been inflicting on their captives.
Draik snatched a glance at the altar and saw a crowd of heretics rushing away from it towards an octagonal hole in the opposite wall. There was something odd about the aperture. It was designed to mirror the surrounding angles and vertices.
He paused for a second and switched off his augmetic. The aperture in the wall vanished, and then reappeared when he triggered the augmetic again.
‘Strange,’ he muttered, struggling to stay upright as the Red Stair shook. He had worn the eyepiece on every previous expedition and it had never revealed hidden doorways before. He looked around and saw that there were several more openings in the chamber that were hidden by optical illusions until he fixed the eyepiece on them.
‘Draik!’ howled Taddeus as auto-rounds strafed the surface of the Red Stair.
Draik dived clear, rolled back up onto one knee and returned fire, his pistol kicking in his hand. The shots had come from overhead. A group of heretics had used a jerry-built gurney to scale the walls and gather on a ledge. There were six of them and he knocked them down with six calmly placed headshots. His father might be a pompous prig, but Janus regularly thanked him for the rigour of his training regimes.
Taddeus and the others had nearly reached the far side of the structure, but at the sight of Draik so far behind, Taddeus ordered his missionaries back, bellowing furiously at them to give him covering fire. Shafts of flame spewed from the bridge as the priests turned flamers on the heretics who were clambering up power cables. Screaming figures tumbled from the walls but hundreds more rushed to replace them. The pit was still heaving and fracturing, freeing more of the gruesome substance beneath, but the heretics seemed oblivious to the danger, intent on hunting down the man who had shot their leader.
It quickly became a slaughter. As more heretics reached the upper levels a fierce barrage of shots ripped up the surface of the bridge, tearing a channel through the crowd of priests and sending several more toppling.
Draik sprinted, his legs fuelled by rage. His new empire would not be destroyed before it had even begun. He leapt over screaming priests and weaved as he ran, attempting to confound the gunmen on the walls.
Audus strode back onto the bridge and dropped to one knee, ripping up the walls with her autogun. A heretic landed on the bridge and clubbed her down with the butt of a lasgun. He flipped the weapon around and was about to shoot Audus when Draik reached him, drew his rapier and slashed it across the heretic’s neck, sending the man staggering away in a shower of crimson.
Draik’s blade shimmered as he turned on his heel and plunged it into another heretic, who had tried to rush him from behind. Dozens of them were now dropping from the walls and racing towards him. He gunned several down then lunged at the ones who reached him, dancing into them with a flurry of thrusts and slashes.
Isola appeared and hauled Audus to her feet, giving the pilot a chance to fire another barrage of deafening shots and punch more heretics into the air.
‘Go!’ cried Draik, seeing that another, larger group of heretics were about to drop from the walls. They ran on, quickly covering the last few feet of the bridge and dashing through an opening at the far end.
They emerged into an octagonal room, about fifty feet wide. It was made of the same black material as the rest of the fortress, but the walls were splintering here, too, revealing the fleshy substance they had seen in the pit.
Taddeus and the rest of the surviving priests rushed into the room. ‘Bar the entrance!’ cried Taddeus, waving his followers back to the opening.
The priests turned and pointed a line of flamers back out at the heretics rushing towards them across the bridge. The opening became a wall of light as they fired in unison, spilling flames into the heretics and filling the air with howls.
‘Draik!’ cried Rein and Raus simultaneously, rushing over to him. Their expressions were desperate as they waved their guns at the walls. ‘There are no doors.’
Draik whirled around in confusion, looking at the walls. All eight of them framed tall, narrow openings that led off into further chambers.
‘What are you talking about?’ he said – then, before they could reply, he guessed what had happened. He killed the power to his eyepiece and, as he expected, his natural eye saw eight featureless walls with no sign of the hidden exits. He triggered the eyepiece and the doorways reappeared.
How many routes had he missed since he first began exploring the Blackstone? It looked like almost every surface contained an opening that was camouflaged to blend seamlessly with the surrounding stone. Who knew what incredible discoveries he might have made if he had not been walking blindly past countless hidden doors. But why was his eyepiece revealing them now when it had never done so before? What had changed? He started fiddling with the casing, wondering if he had inadvertently altered the settings.
‘Draik!’ cried Audus. She was standing with the priests, adding a steady barrage of auto-rounds to their gouts of fire. ‘There are a lot of unhappy people heading this way.’
‘Let them come!’ roared Taddeus, gripping his mace in both hands and crouching like a pit-fighter. ‘I’m ready.’
‘She showed you something,’ said Grekh, breaking away from the fight to speak to Draik.
Draik looked up at the kroot’s proud, avian face. ‘She?’
‘I saw you tapping your eyepiece. The Blackstone showed you something. She shared secrets.’
Draik nodded, looking again at the slender openings that only he could see. ‘It’s not the Blackstone, it’s my optical implant. It’s been behaving oddly since we left Precipice. It’s showing me things that–’
A chain of holes exploded across the ceiling, scattering shrapnel as a heavy weapon opened fire on the chamber. Draik had to shield his face as missionaries flew across the room, their blood spraying, holes punched through their flak armour.
‘Draik!’ cried Audus, giving him a warning look as she continued firing out onto the bridge. ‘What are we doing?’
‘Raun!’ cried Draik, picking rubble from his face and looking for the ratlings.
The brothers scurried from a corner and approached him, flinching and ducking as shots whined past.
‘Which way?’ he demanded.
They looked at each other then back at Draik. ‘There are no ways,’ said Raus, scratching anxiously at his patchy beard.
‘Just walls,’ said Rein.
‘There are doors,’ said Draik. ‘Just tell me which direction we need and I’ll show you.’
Another section of ceiling exploded. Everyone ducked and the ratlings dropped to their bellies with their hands over their heads. As the dust cleared, Draik grabbed Raus by his collars and lifted him up in front of his face so that the abhuman’s feet were kicking uselessly in the air.
‘Which direction?’ said Draik.
Raus grinned awkwardly, as though humouring a lunatic, then looked around the eight walls. ‘That’s the direction,’ he said. ‘But last time we came there was–’
He landed heavily on the floor as Draik dropped him and strode through the rubble towards the opening. ‘Look!’ he cried, causing almost everyone to turn his way. He held his arm out into the aperture he knew only he could see. As soon as his hand passed through the opening, the optical illusion was broken and the others rushed towards him, muttering and shaking their heads as they passed through the hole and into a corridor on the far side.
When most of the group had filed out of the chamber, Draik headed back over to Taddeus and the other priests who were still drenching the bridge in flames. He reached Taddeus’ side and raised his pistol, firing a few shots out onto the bridge. It was like shooting into a furnace. There were mounds of burnt heretics sprawled in every direction, twisted, blackened husks that were being trampled by the living troops who were massing in ever-greater numbers. Draik guessed there were already a couple of hundred on the bridge. It was only the narrowness of the opening that had allowed the priests to hold them back.
Several of Taddeus’ missionaries were bleeding and stooped, their faces grey with pain, but they were all still pouring liquid death through the air, filling the chamber with heat haze and causing Draik to choke on the promethium fumes.
