Vaults of Terra: The Carrion Throne by Chris Wraight

Author:Chris Wraight
Language: eng, eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3, pdf
Published: 2017-01-13T10:31:29+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

Crowl and Revus took a Shade from Courvain’s fleet and piloted it north west, out of Salvator and out towards the approaches to Skhallax. As they gained loft, a scatter of dirt-caked spires ran away towards the gradual rise that culminated in the Palace, a faintly visible smudge of darkness on the horizon. The night’s fires had gone out by then, but the last remnants of smoke twisted up into the heavens like greasy tresses.

Gun-barges now hovered over all the major thoroughfares, their bolter banks steadily tracking anything within range. They were ugly things – old hulls, dragged out of semi-dormancy for counter-insurgency work with weapon-racks capable of levelling city blocks. Higher up, amid the tox-haze, Imperial Navy fighters were busy blank-strafing imaginary targets, sweeping back and forth ahead of the controlled airspace of the Palace itself in tight-held formations.

The cloud mantle had darkened, curdling like spoiled milk and twisting in eerie patterns where the hot wind ruffled it. Flickers of pale lightning danced along the horizon. The air felt heavy, close, ripe to detonate. The soaring faces of oratories and cathedrals gazed out over the fervid atmosphere, their gables studded with rows of eyeless statues. Those static figures had seen it all – the invasions, the reconstructions, the purges, on and on, cycling across the millennia in a black comedy of repetition.

Revus, at the controls, said nothing. Crowl, happy not to break the silence, prepared the Shade’s augurs for deployment. A dormant Gorgias hung back behind the cockpit seats.

Soon the towers of Skhallax became visible through the murk, first as a series of dull red lights in the gloom, then in the stepped outlines of ziggurats and forge-temples. Temperature gauges in the Shade’s cockpit rose a little higher. Revus lowered his speed, brought the craft down a few hundred metres, hugging the shoulders of the hab towers.

The place was many hundreds of square kilometres across, a scar of off-world edifices intertwined with the jungle of habitation-blocks at its fringes. A confection of manufactoria, refineries and ritual sites for the worship of the Mechanicus’ strange theological construction the Omnissiah, Skhallax had risen up over thousands of years of alternating growth and stagnation, its great factories built atop the shells of older factories, its complex systems of cabling and pipework and power generators and heat exchangers patched and repaired but never fully replaced. Now most of the structure was deemed sacred, an ossified relic to be tended, not extended, and over the most recent centuries, in keeping with the long slide into decrepitude across the entire planet, it had begun to degrade into a swamp of corrosion. Its steep flanks remained caked in the dark red skin that all Martian architecture employed, though Terra’s grinding winds had bled most of the colour out of the highest walls, slowly eroding its distinctiveness and imposing its own uniform pall of pale grey.

The Shade’s chronos ticked over to midday, a time when favoured parts of the Throneworld experienced a modicum of filmy sunlight, but Skhallax remained dark.

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