The Horus Heresy: Vengeful Spirit

‘It’s not far,’ she said, though distance would become a somewhat subjective quantity the deeper they went.

‘And how is it that you know of it?’

Alivia struggled to think of a way to answer that without sounding like a lunatic.

‘I came here a very long time ago,’ she said.

‘You’re being evasive,’ said Alcade.

‘Yes.’

‘So why should I put my trust you?’

‘You already have, legate,’ said Alivia, turning and giving him her most winning smile. ‘You wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t.’

She’d told them of what lay beneath the Sanctuary, a gate closed in ages past by the Emperor and which Horus planned to open. She told them that beyond the gate lay a source of monstrously dangerous power, and thankfully that was enough for them.

She’d not relished the prospect of trying to exert her empathic influences over the legionaries of the XIII Legion, but as things turned out there hadn’t been any need to apply pressure to the legate’s psyche.

It wasn’t hard to see why.

She’d offered him a last lifeline to achieve something worthwhile, and he’d seized it with both hands.

‘Thirty men facing the might of two Legions sounds grand in the honour rolls,’ he’d said after she’d told him what she wanted of him and his men. ‘But last stands are just the sorts of theoreticals we’ve trained our entire lives to avoid.’

‘This isn’t a fight we’ll walk away from either,’ she’d warned.

‘Better to fight for something than die for nothing.’

He’d said it with such a straight face too. She hadn’t the heart to tell him that sentiments like that were what had kept men fighting one another for millennia.

They’d found the citadel filled with refugees. Most had ignored them, but some begged for protection until Didacus Theron fired a warning shot over their heads.

The Sanctuary and its secret levels, the really interesting levels that not even the Sacristans or Mechanicum knew about, were beneath the deserted Vault Transcendent. Alivia took every confounding turn through the catacombs and located every hidden door as though she’d walked here only yesterday.

The last time Alivia had climbed these particular steps, her legs were like rubber and fear sweat coated her back like a layer of frost. She’d helped him come back to the world; her arm around his waist, his across her shoulder. She’d tried to keep his thoughts – normally so impenetrable – from reaching into her, but he was too powerful, too raw and too damaged from what lay beyond the gate to keep everything inside.

She’d seen things she wished she hadn’t. Futures she’d seen in her nightmares ever since or inked in the pages of a forgotten storybook. Abominable things that were now intruding on the waking world, invited in by those who hadn’t the faintest clue of what a terrible mistake they were making.

‘Do these steps ever bloody end?’ asked Theron.

‘They do, but it’ll seem like they won’t,’ answered Alivia. ‘It’s kind of a side effect of being so close to a scar in the space-time fabric of the world. Or part of the gate’s defence mechanisms, I forget which. It’s amazing how many people just give up, thinking they’re getting nowhere.’

‘I’ve been mapping our route,’ said a Techmarine called Kyro with a superior tone that suggested he was equal to anything this place could throw at him.

‘You haven’t,’ said Alivia, tapping a finger to the side of her head. ‘Trust me.’

Kyro flipped up a portion of his gauntlet and a rotating holographic appeared. A three-dimensional mapping tool. Right away, Kyro frowned in consternation as multiple routes and divergent pathways that didn’t exist filled the grainy image.

‘Told you,’ said Alivia.

‘But do they ever end?’ asked Alcade.

Alivia didn’t answer, but stepped out onto a wide hallway that she knew every one of the Ultramarines would swear hadn’t been there moments ago. Like everything else here it had a smooth, volcanic quality, but light shone here, glittering within the rock like moonlight on the surface of an ocean.

Wide enough for six legionaries to walk comfortably abreast, the hallway was long and opened into a rough-hewn chamber of chiselled umber brick. The Emperor never told her how this chamber had come to be or how He’d known of it, save that it had been here before geological forces of an earlier epoch raised the mountain above.

Ancient hands had cut the stone bricks here, but Alivia never liked looking too closely at the proportions of the blocks or their subtly wrong arrangement. It always left her strangely unsettled and feeling that those hands had not belonged to any species known by the galaxy’s current inhabitants.

The Ultramarines spread out, muscle memory and ingrained practical pushing them into a workable defensive pattern. Alivia’s human allies, Valance especially, kept close to her like a bodyguard.

‘Is that it?’ asked Alcade, unable to keep the disappointment from his voice. ‘This is the Hellgate you spoke of?’

‘That’s it,’ agreed Alivia with a smirk. ‘What did you expect? The Eternity Gate?’