CH. 5 - Knock Knock

Two days after Thirty-One-Low, the deep-mine schematics arrive — and so, unrequested, does something better, hand-delivered by one of Rhen's plain-faced retainers: survey charts of the galleries beneath the mines. Passages no Imperial record has any business containing. Chambers annotated in a neat Inquisitorial hand. Depth-soundings that stop, abruptly, at a level marked only threshold.

Bjarn looks at the charts for a long time. Then he looks at me, and neither of us says the thing, because we are becoming a world of things nobody says out loud.

The war council is short, because the mobilising anthems have made every argument for us. Two tombs, one Great Company. Ulvar doesn't pretend to agonise.

"The equatorial house wakes fastest, sits under the shrine district, and owns the deadlands where two invasions went to die," he says. "We take the fight there. Cut the head, or failing the head, cripple the waking — collapse what can be collapsed, burn what can be burned, and learn what the second house is by watching what the first house fears." He looks around the strategium. "The south pole keeps. The doorstep doesn't."

Hakon will come, because where the pack bleeds, the Priest bleeds. Ottar will come, and is honest about what he's worth down there: "The dead are a hole in the wyrd. Below, I'll be a blind man with a torch. But storms still work in the dark." And I will come, because the Wolf Lord asks me in front of the whole council — "Templar. Your legs like this planet better than ours do. Walk point with Bjarn's pack" — and because there is nowhere in the galaxy I would less rather be, which after two hundred years I have learned is usually where the Emperor wants me standing.

We drop at dusk. Boreholes first — mining shafts wide enough for Rhinos, sunk through kilometres of Ashkarran's crust toward the deadlands' roots — and then the mines themselves, worked galleries eight centuries old, and then past them, into the parts of the planet that were never ours.

Rhen finds me at the muster, in the manner of a woman who has never once found anything by accident.

"Walk with me, Templar. The dead are allowing."

We walk the borehole staging ground, between lifter-cages and pallets of breaching charges, her head not quite to my elbow and the conversation entirely hers.

"Your ship was the Vow Eternal," she says. No question in it. "Karrivan Crusade. I pulled the muster records while my colleagues were pulling seismic data. The last entry in any archive I can reach has the better part of a millennium of dust on it." She glances up. "Eight hundred years, give or take? Don't trouble yourself composing a face. Displacement is not heresy. It is merely rare, and rare things end one of two ways in my profession: burned, or used. I prefer use. It wastes less."

"I am not yours to use, Inquisitor."

"No. You are the God-Emperor's, and you are inconveniently sincere about it — I've watched you. It's why I'm going to offer instead of requisition." She stops walking, which forces me to stop, which is the point of it. "You want your Chapter, brother. It's written through you like a fault line. And your Chapter is findable. Black crosses have been reported under arms within reach of my writ — a fighting company, perhaps more. I know where the reports come from. I know how old they are." A pause, measured to the milligram. "Help me get my cargo off this world intact — the hunt, the Wolves' bargain, all of it, seen through — and when the Wyrmslayer breaks orbit, you will leave this system knowing exactly where to look."

There it is. Eight hundred years of night, and the first light I have seen at the end of it — held by an Inquisitor, at exactly arm's length, with a price tag she is too professional to pretend isn't there.

"And if I refuse the trade," I say, "you tell me nothing, and my vow costs me nothing, and you learn what a Templar's cooperation looks like when it's freely given anyway. Because I was going to see this hunt through regardless, Inquisitor. You've offered to pay me for something I already owe."

For the first time since the council, something crosses her face that is not calculation. It might, in a better light, be enjoyment.

"Then consider it a gratuity," Calvia Rhen says. "Try not to die downstairs, discrepancy. You've become the most interesting line in my ledger."

She leaves me with the vial chained over my hearts and the future suddenly, horribly specific. Black crosses, under arms, within reach. My brothers — no. My brothers' great-great-successors, strangers wearing my dead's colours, who won't know the names.

I will teach them the names. First: downstairs.

The mines end at a wall that was never cut by human tools, and the tomb begins.

There is no door. There is a seam — the survey charts' "threshold" — where eight-hundred-year-old Imperial gallery simply stops against a surface of dark unmetal, smooth as still water, faintly warm, and the breaching teams' melta array opens it the way you'd open an envelope belonging to someone dangerous: carefully, and with everyone watching the corridor behind.

Beyond, the architecture stops pretending to be geology.

Halls. Vast ones — vaulted galleries of green-veined blackstone marching into the dark beyond our lamps, every surface worked with glyphs that curl, the equatorial house's script, kilometre after kilometre of a language that predates the concept of us. The air is dry and old and tastes of copper. And the deep anthem, the pulse we have felt through boot-soles for weeks, is down here a physical presence, a slow tide in the floor, in the teeth, in the two hearts.

Walk point, the Wolf Lord said. So it's Bjarn's pack and me, first into the dark of the house that killed a WAAAGH! overnight — and it's Ketil, half a step off my left, who stops first.

"Trophies," he breathes.

The gallery walls have alcoves. The alcoves have occupants.

Orks. Hundreds of them — a greenskin charge frozen mid-stride, tusks bared, cleavers raised, every one of them turned to the same grey-white mineral as the Amber Shore, arranged along the walls in ordered ranks like specimens in a collection. Further in, the specimens change: tyranid forms, scything limbs fossilised mid-strike, mounted in postures of attack. Curated. Displayed. An eight-hundred-year trophy hall, and the trophies are two entire invasions, and the message does not require translation: this is what happens to things that knock.

"They have a tooth-hall," Bjarn says. His voice does something complicated. "The bastards have a tooth-hall."

We push deeper in bounding overwatch, and the tomb ignores us with a confidence I like less than gunfire. Green light breathes in the wall-veins — brighter ahead, always brighter ahead — and my itch is a live wire now, the familiar-from-nowhere hue on every surface, and I do not reach for it, and it is getting harder not to.

At the second rest halt, in a side-gallery under a ceiling of dead glyphs, Ketil sits down next to me, quiet in a way I have never once seen him, and asks the question no one in a year of wolves has thought to ask.

"If you fall down here," he says, "who carries yours?"

I look at him.

"The seed." He nods at the reliquary chained over my hearts, and there's no joke in him anywhere, and suddenly I can see exactly what he'll look like when he's four hundred. "You carry your brothers. Forty-one of them, in one vial, through the Rift and the night — I know the vow, Templar, the whole ship knows the vow, Bjarn put it in verse six. But you've built no plan for the verse where you die. So. If you fall. Who carries?"

The gallery is very quiet. Somewhere below us, the anthem rolls its slow tide.

"The Wolves would take it to my Chapter," I say. "Lord Stormbrand gave his word the hunt-paths would cross—"

"Wolves would take it eventually," Ketil says. "Wolf Lords have wars. I'm asking a different thing." He holds out his maimed hand, three fingers and a scar-seamed palm, steady as bedrock. "I'm asking you to give the verse an owner. If you fall, I carry. I put it in your Marshal's hands and I tell them the names — Dietmar, Vairich, all of them, you'll teach me the list. That's my vow, if you'll take it. I've never made one that wasn't pack before." A beat, and then, because he is still Ketil: "It would be the making of my saga, obviously."

Two hundred years of doctrine have opinions about the gene-line of Dorn in the keeping of a heathen pup who drinks like a drainage system. I consult none of them.

"The list is forty-one names," I say, and grip his ruined hand in the warrior's way. "You'll learn every one. Starting with why your grip is short two fingers, so I know what my brothers' keeper is made of."

"Frost-wyrm," Ketil says, delighted. "Mostly my fault. It's a fantastic story—"

Which is when the anthem stops.

Not fades. Stops — between one pulse and the next, the tide in the floor simply gone, and the silence that replaces it is the loudest thing I have heard on this world, because we have all of us been hearing that heartbeat for weeks and its absence is a held breath the size of a continent. Down the gallery, wall-vein by wall-vein, the green light stops breathing — and steadies. Brightens. Locks on, the way an eye locks on.

Ottar's voice comes down the vox from the rear echelon, blind and certain.

"They know we're in the house."

Ahead of us, kilometres deep in the dark where the charts say only threshold, something begins, unhurriedly, to applaud — no. Not applause.

Footsteps. In step. Thousands of them.

"WOLVES," Ulvar Stormbrand says, low and almost cheerful, the voice of a man arriving at the appointment he was born for. "They've answered the door. Mind your manners."