Tm glad you're still with us, Brother Guilar,' I said.
We traced the paths on through the gardens of the saruthi, unopposed. The enemy dead we passed – floating in the tanks or sprawled on the pathways – had signs of branding on their faces. Chaos marks, burned into the skin by evil rather than heat. Admiral Spatian had hoped that some of the heretic forces, especially the Gudrunite Imperial Guard, might yet be restored to the Imperial cause. Like feruss and his men, most had been unwilling pawns caught up in Estrum's treason, and the fleet tacticians had presented models of victory wherein Locke and Dazzo found the bulk of their ground forces turning against them.
Such a hope was dashed. The minds of these good men had been burned away and poisoned by Chaos. The heretics had enforced the loyalty of their stolen armies.
Via tetragates we advanced, passing through six more garden spheres, then on into wide, tiled courtyards and halls of asymmetrical pillars whose function we could not imagine. Twice, we had brief skirmishes with heretic forces, driving them back into the warped cavities of the edifice. More often, we could hear ferocious war, full-blown battles that seemed right at hand but of which there was no visual or physical trace.
Contact wim fleet command was fragmentary. Purge One – Lord Rorken's party – was locked in combat somewhere, and nothing had been heard of Molitor's Purge Four. Schongard's group, Purge Five, was lost somewhere in the tetrascape. Plaintive calls for aid came from them at irregular intervals, piteous half-sane ramblings about 'impossible spaces' and 'spirals of madness'.
From Titus Endor we heard nothing.
The main surface war still raged. Mirepoix commanders reported gains along the fire lakes that edged the target edifices, one of which was reportedly beginning to implode as if great harm had been done to it internally.
In a vault of smooth, polished beige that seemed to us to have no ceiling, we found our first saruthi. They were dead, a dozen of them, their grey bulks split and mauled, silver stilts torn off. Through the next gate lay a spiral room littered with a hundred more. Moving among the grey dead, their pallid limbs dripping with ichor, were several of the white slave beasts that had carried the Necroteuch onto the plateau. They seemed to me to have broken free as many dragged their wire restraints. Some had taken up silver stilts and were stabbing them slowly and repeatedly into the corpses of their grey masters.
I wondered if the pitiful white things were a separate race enslaved by the saruthi, or a bastardised, mutant caste kept in servitude. The invasion, it seemed, had freed them to turn on their owners and butcher them. Such is the price of slavery, sooner or later.
The slave-things offered us no threat. They didn't even appear to notice the humans moving amongst them. With silent, methodical determination, they mutilated the bodies of the saruthi.
In another chamber, an oval dish with tessellated tiles and a strangely warm atmosphere, living saruthi milled aimlessly in their hundreds. Some had lost stilts and were limping, others lay in trembling masses, their skulls flopped back on their bodies. The smell of liquorice, or whatever it was, reeked here. As we watched, white slave-things lumbered into the chamber through another tetragate and began to twist apart and maul the saruthi, one by one, with the calm, methodical motions of insects. The saruthi offered no resistance.
This story was repeated in other chambers and curving halls, saruthi lay dead or meandering without purpose, freed slaves finding them by touch and dismembering them.
I wonder, even now, as to the meaning of these alien scenes. Had the saruthi given up, resigned to their doom, or had some other circumstance stolen their will to live and resist? Not even the tech-priests or the xenobi-ologists could provide an answer. There is, ultimately, only the fact of their alien nature; abstract, inscrutable and beyond the capacity of the human mind to fathom.
When we found the archpriest Dazzo, he was close to death.
A battle of titanic proportions had taken place in the tetrascape where he lay. Thousands of dead lay on the tiled floor: Mirepoix infantry and heretic troops alike. Two Children of the Emperor and three Deathwatch were among the fallen. The tetrascape, by far the largest of any we had seen in the edifice, reached away beyond the curve of all human dimensions, and the jumbled corpses covered the endless floor into infinity.
Dazzo lay at the foot of an asymmetrical block that rose from the tiles like a standing stone. His body was torn by gunshot wounds. Heldane sat nearby, his back to the great block, guarding the archpriest with an autopis-tol. Heldane's torso was smirched in blood and his breathing was laboured.
He saw us approach through the tetragate and lowered the gun weakly.
'What happened here, Heldane?'
A battle/ he said, wheezing. 4Ve came upon it as it was raging. When Inquisitor Endor saw this wretch, he drove us into the fight to reach him. It was a blur after that.'
Where's Endor?' I asked, looking around, hoping I would not see his corpse among the dead.
'Gone… gone after Locke.'
'Which way?'
He pointed weakly to a tetragate on the far side of the sea of bodies.
'Does Locke have the Necroteuch? The saruthi Necroteuch, I mean?'
'No/ Heldane said. 'But he has the primer/
The what?'
'Dazzo got it out of this thing somehow/ he said, slapping the stone block that supported him. A language primer. A translation tool. Without it, the saruthi version of the text is unreadable to us/
'How in the Emperor's name did he do that?' Guilar asked.
'With his mind/ Heldane said. 'Can't you feel that after-burn of the psychic effort?'
I found that I could. The mental taste of a mind almost burned out. The raised block was clearly another part of the saruthi's mysterious technology, perhaps the equivalent of an Imperial cogitator, perhaps something more sentient, even something alive. Dazzo, whose psychic abilities I already knew to be monstrous, had identified it and psychically assaulted it, forcing it to give up its secrets. An extraordinary feat of the mind, a triumph of will.
A polyhedron/ Heldane added. 'Irregular, small, made of pearl, it seemed to me. It just came out of the block into his hands. Materialised. I saw it happening as I fought my way to them. But the effort destroyed his mind. Endor cut him down. He hadn't the strength to resist/
'How do you know it was this… primer?' asked Bequin.
'I read it in his dying mind. Like I said, there is no resistance left there. See for yourself/
I crossed over to Dazzo and knelt next to him. Ragged breathing sucked in and out of his bloody mouth. I drove my mind into his, pushing aside pathetic strands of denial, and confirmed Heldane's story. With inhuman willpower, Dazzo had wrenched the language primer from the saruthi technology, and with it the whereabouts of the xenos Necroteuch. Dying, he had passed both to Locke to finish the task.
'Gregor!' Midas hissed. I turned. Far away, across the curve of the tetrascape, heretic troops were advancing through the dead. They began firing at us.
Guilar and the Gudrunites fired back, taking what cover they could to resist.
'Brother Guilar, I need you to hold these bastards at bay/
Where are you going, inquisitor?' he asked, sliding a fresh clip into his storm bolter.
After Locke and Endor, to do what I can/
TWENTY-FIVE
Xenos Necroteuch.
Endgame. The blank-eyedman.
We left the firefight behind us and plunged through the tetragate. Bequin, Midas
