The Dark City (Vaults of Terra: Warhammer 40,000 #3)

by Chris Wraight

The world was coming to its end, and all they could do was meet it with exhaustion.

Shoba. Death world. World of night and fire, set far into the deep void, hard to discover at the best of times, now impossibly out of reach. Niir Khazad was not a sentimental woman. None of her people were, especially those trained in the formal killing arts, but there were still times when her mind returned to the old place – its ruined cities, forever shrouded in darkness; the cold nights that shimmered with half-heard voices; the silver face of the moon riding high, its lone eye silently watchful. It had been a ghost world, a world of privation and purity, half-cordoned off from the teeming masses of the Imperium, lost in its own obscure subsector and away from the big warp lanes. To those who lived there, most in total ignorance that there was anything more to the galaxy than their strange twilight existence, it was a place of both cruelty and wonder, impossibly demanding, hard to survive, but starkly beautiful, unyielding, severe and majestic.

It was as if the apocalypse had already come, Revus thought, and they were merely living through the aftermath. As he made his way down, down into the hot heart of the old city, the spire flanks above him reared up as dark as burned metal, their thousands of windows unlit, their hundreds of access portals gaping open like parched mouths.

For now, though, he was far from that, immersed again into his old element – the low-sunk streets, overlaid with a criss-cross of multilevel viaducts and grav-platforms, the chasms and the gulfs, the seamy thoroughfares and the drifting miasmas. A thousand bodies should have been crammed into every scrap of space down there, but now it was just wreckage and ashes. The few bodies he noticed in the murk weren’t moving. Alongside the ever-present stink of engine oil, he could detect an underlying stratum of copper, much more pronounced than it had ever been before. Every vista was clouded with thick palls of smoke, rolling slowly through the narrow crevasses between spires, so much so that even his night-vision lenses struggled to give him a wholly clear view ahead. Tattered banners and fabric scraps tumbled along empty rockcrete walkways. Refuse piled up in open doorways, abandoned groundcars littered the transitways.

Everything felt sticky, viscous, poisonous.

So they left him to his own devices. He did whatever a skull did when not pressed into service. He had whatever thoughts a skull had, felt whatever emotions a skull felt. Possibly he was simply a soulless device, now – a collection of mechanical parts with a smattering of machine-spirit burbling over the top. Or possibly something deeper remained, a lacing of something softer, older, harder to pin down.

The Imperium wasn’t a place where mysteries were investigated – they were accepted, turned into truths that couldn’t be questioned, slotted into the realm of the actual as life went on around them. Most servo-units, of any kind, were functionally inert – just floating gun-platforms or messenger-drones, their cranial matter repurposed for data-storage and environment targeting. Some, though, still spoke. Some still responded to emotional cues. A few were fully intelligible, able to recall memories, converse intelligently, express hopes and dreams. What was the cause of that? Some short-circuit in the devices that had been bolted into the bone? Or something else, more ineffable, lingering like a dream over cold matter?

‘Filth toto mundo. Burn-burn.’

It was rules that made the Imperium weak, at least insofar as they trumped a more natural human sense of courage and daring. Any sin could be justified by some law or other, some cold-hearted regulation that sanctified a retreat or trench collapse or battlefront withdrawal. In Spinoza’s case, she could no doubt appeal to any number of precedents for what she had done in Courvain. Perhaps the entire place would have been destroyed if she had fought on. At least it would have been a fighting destruction, though, with men and women on their feet at the end, not choking on their own blood and ignorance.

The skies were as dark as Khazad had ever seen them in daytime. The clouds were bruised and heavy. Every horizon was smudged with a bloody rim of red from the fires, all sending slender tracks of coal-black into the lowering heavens.

The press of void craft around them had a grim, almost sepulchral air to it, as if they had come together to expire while the world beneath them turned in on itself.

Perhaps the reason so many inquisitors conducted their affairs away from Terra was not, as she had always assumed, because the danger was greater there, but because they could shield themselves from the harder worry – that it was all rotten, that there was no salvation in any form, and that all their fancy doctrines were just rarefied versions of the same self-preservation stories the most uneducated serf told themselves.

Some of that came from their sheer size, the colossal heft of their ancient weapons, but there was more to it than that – the way they moved, the barely conscious arrogance of their gait and bearing. They were earthbound gods, creatures of myth rendered into flesh and metal. Everything they did – every move of that impossibly fine armour, every fractional turn of those high helms – spoke of silent but constant disappointment, of being shackled to a plane that was unworthy of them and yet in which they were still compelled to serve.

For a split second she found herself staring into a seething wall of esoteric matter, strung like a gauze across the high-arched aperture. It rippled, shimmered, flexed, and yet there was nothing to see – no colours, no extension, just an… absence. You couldn’t even focus on it – any attempt to look directly, and your eyes slid away immediately, instinctively hunting for something natural to latch on to. In its own way, it was as horrific as anything she had ever encountered.

Everything about the environment felt hostile. She could feel it in her bones – a low-level harmonic of violence, a tingling sense of outrage. When she put her boots through the condensation-layer, it made her entire lower leg ache. When she looked up at the arches, a throb broke out behind her eyes.

The noises altered, echoing away into nothingness, then coming back muffled, then disintegrating into splinters that might have been laughs, or maybe weeping, or perhaps just the creak of ancient spars flexing against the warp’s tides.

The entire complex felt alive, albeit asleep, maybe even dreaming. After long enough inside it, you could start to think that you were just a part of that ancient and continuous dream, and the physical bodies around you just figments of your mind’s wandering.

Most striking of all were the true breaches, the places where the barriers gave out altogether. They never went close to those locations, and the junctions that led to them were heavily overlaid with sigils and warding rune-clusters, but even so, you could catch a far-off glimpse of silhouetted ruins standing starkly before a neon sea of seething distortion, as if the tunnel’s structure opened straight out into the raw stuff of the empyrean.

Like some inbred fellowship of insane aristocrats locked in a decaying mansion at the summit of an empty spire, the xenos appeared to be operating under a colossal weight of self-deception. He wished he knew more of what must have happened to them, to make them like this. It couldn’t have been natural, surely. It must have been some great trauma, some enormous rupture, to result in such uniform and evident madness.

Its face was the worst. Looking into its eyes was horrific, and yet he had gazed into them before. Just as they had been in the underhive on Terra, those eyes were empty, bottomless pits into nothingness. Only cruelty reflected from them, and not merely any kind of cruelty – not human cruelty, which was an aberration and a fault in the species – but constitutive cruelty. This thing was made of it; it was built by it and sustained by it. It breathed in pain, it exhaled desperation. Even the air of the chamber seemed to shimmer and hiss around it, repelled by proximity to such raw and pungent moral degeneration.

It looked out at the world as if through eyes that could barely summon the energy to care about anything they saw – as if all was grey and indistinct to a being of its unequalled heritage, reduced to peering through a fog of half-remembered grandeur and the savage lies of another age.

It splayed out like a nervous system, pulsing and shivering, its extremities decayed but its core still navigable.

But he had not come here to escape. He had come to retrace the steps taken by the creature itself, to burrow down into the hidden place it had emerged from, the abyss where it had practised its long and storied depravities. It would be hard, even in his non-corporeal state, to visit that place. Even before all this had started, he’d known stories of the Dark City, the fabled haunt of infinite tortures closeted away in the depths of the empyrean’s undercroft. Rumours of its legendary cruelty, its fabulous riches and its unfathomable treasures were whispered across the breadth of the human Imperium, spoken of either as myth or as a warning. To be a living soul in that place was to be in torment. No purer expression of evil had ever been constructed, for there was no pity in that realm, no redemption, only the endless rehearsal of excruciation for its own sake. A civilisation that had once bestrode the stars themselves had been driven down into its lightless pits, reduced to scratching around in the sordid depths of sensation, sucking at the teat of anguish merely to stave off the extinction their own hubris had delivered.

He felt the pressure on his own sanity now, enormous, infinite. He heard the screaming even before his mind’s eye spun through the first true gate, the chorus of endless anguish that rang like cathedral bells from every blood-steeped rooftop. The entire place vibrated with it, resonated with an endless repeat-loop of frenzied but unrequited pleading. No other sound made any impression – it was the air those things breathed, the gravity they walked in. It surged up from the torture-pits in the deepest depths, thrummed through the depraved fleshworks and oubliettes, shimmered over the gladiatorial circuses and rancid pleasure-domes – screaming, screaming, on and on, never ceasing, millions of voices never still, merged into an orgy of psychic terror that seemed to form its own physical structures, its own rivals to the pitiless towers that jutted up against the starless darkness in criss-crossed webs of pitch-black despair.

But this was a mere staging post for the even-fouler glories within. His mind surged past towering constructs that glimmered with pale light in the screaming dark, immense voids powered by crackling black spheres, stacked hell-slums teeming with multitudes that made Terra’s worst sumps look like a kind of paradise.

He delved further down, spiralling through apertures ringed with hooks and flesh-tearing crystal shards. Everything was sharp, designed to cut and tear – it was a city of knives, an entire world built from scalpels. The screaming began to change note, from horror to fury. He saw fighting in the high places – xenos against other xenos, a whirl of blades and the scatter of blood against the onyx walls. Except that they were not just xenos – some of the combatants were from the unreal dimension. They were unliving, true strangers to the galaxy of physical law.

She had cursed Terra many times, and it had always felt justified, but here was the best of it, right there, standing beside her in silent watchfulness. Across a million worlds of the Imperium were the other countless souls like him, unimaginative, competent, following orders given by those higher up, authorities who might have been gifted or corrupt or insane or brutal, but in all cases were to be obeyed. They were always present, those souls, always in the line of fire. More so than inquisitors. More so than assassins. She was about to say something about that, because it suddenly felt important. She didn’t even know how to articulate it, but her lips had started moving.

A throne is nothing without a king.’

They had been terrifying before. Not now, though. Never again. Revus and Khazad leapt to meet them, hellgun and blade moving together in alignment, slotting into the coordination they had almost mastered before. As the xenos slammed in close, captain and assassin fought them back, as good in that moment as any mortal humans had ever been, still laughing together as they fought, unbroken, united, and perfect at last.

All gone now. All that grief, the anguish, washed away, replaced by other discoveries and surprises. Most of all, that even within the rotting corpse of the Imperium he served, the one he knew full well concealed only canker at its hollow heart, there were still things that somehow survived all the madness. Loyalty. Defiance. Bravery.

‘You told me we only wished to remain in existence for the sake of it,’ he croaked. ‘You were very proud of that observation. That we would do anything to cling on. Just as you would.’ He opened his eyes again, and looked at it. ‘But you were wrong. There are things we will not do. Because we are alive still. Not revenants. Not ghouls whose time in this galaxy is long gone. Alive. You’ll never understand that, because for you, life has become just another force to twist and break. But it means something to us. We may be weak now, and corrupt, and ignorant, but we’re still here. And when your foul kingdom is nothing but a memory of fear, we’ll still be here. You must hate that. But you need to be told it, because it’s true.’