Grey Knights: Sons of Titan

by David Annandale

  He had no memory of the memory.

  Yet its truth was as undeniable as the walls of the Tyndaris.

  He pushed the image from the forefront of his mind. It resisted. He pushed harder, disciplining his attention, training his focus on the present, on the needs of battle, because it was clear the engagement had begun.

  I know you, the whispers said. Stronger, clearer, as if fed by the taste of his mind. More familiar. Your path is marked. Your end is known. Your actions have determined them.

  He grasped the hilt of his Nemesis force sword. He drew it. It crackled with energy, hungry for a foe. He knew the voice now. It was distorted, rotten, buzzing with the wings of flies, but he recognized it. The voice was his own. The enemy said it knew him. It was not lying. Somehow, it was using portions of himself in its attack.

  The threat had progressed from distant and vague to extreme in a matter of minutes.

  Gared left his cell and pounded down the halls of the Tyndaris, making for the bridge. He had thought to use solitude to construct his psychic fortress. That had been a mistake. He should not be alone. The attack was too insidious. He might not be able to trust his perceptions.

  The whispers pursued him, tightening their grip, gathering definition, his voice becoming more and more deeply woven into the tapestry of attack.

  What do you hope to accomplish? Your actions bring us closer.

  He paused, rooted to the spot by the insinuation. Every action the Grey Knights had taken in the Sanctus Reach had contributed to the unleashing of Ku’gath. Their arrival had precipitated the daemonic incursion they had come to defeat. Styer had vowed to find opportunity instead of fatalism before this dark truth. If incursions were inevitable, then the Grey Knights must shape the circumstances to their advantage. Was the same thing happening again?

  He couldn’t know. There were no Prognosticars to consult.

  But the whispers were trying to hold him back. So he defied them and ran on.

  The voice reacted with outrage. It scraped at him. It threatened. It laughed.

  You run to your end. I will skin your corpse. It will be a trophy to your failure. Your soul will be a feast of gifts.

  Gifts? Gared thought. The phrasing of the threat was odd. It was distinctive. It meant something.

  I know you. The refrain was relentless. I know you. I know you.

  The whispers grew stronger still. They multiplied. In their hunger to defeat him, they entwined with one another. They became a carpet of worms writhing over his mind. The rotting clamour shouted down his awareness of his surroundings, and he reached the bridge with little sense of his journey there. He had the impression of having lost fragments of time, but how many he couldn’t say. What work of the enemy took place then? No warp spawn had entered the ship. He hadn’t become a conduit. The attack had another purpose, then. It was breaking away pieces of his identity.

  The activity on the bridge was urgent, the jump into the warp imminent. Warning tocsins cut through the whispers. The sight of his battle-brothers in the strategium, where they stood with Inquisitor Hadrianna Furia overlooking the bridge, was a call to strength and clarity. The silver-grey of their armour was a beacon, the colour of sanctity, of truth. A flying buttress supported the lectern projecting over the bridge. Styer was there, his hands gripping the iron, aquila-shaped frame of the lectern. He leaned over it, looking down at Gared. ‘Brother-Epistolary?’ he said.

  ‘The attack is intensifying,’ Gared said. He centred his gaze on the justicar. The whispers squirmed and crackled at the periphery of his vision. They burrowed into his perception of the real like carrion working their way towards the centre of a corpse. Inside his head, they were the crash of dark waves and the hiss of serpents.

  ‘And still on you alone,’ Styer said.

  ‘For now. It mimics some of the symptoms of possession.’

  ‘Then this force doesn’t realize the nature of its foe,’ Styer announced, and the rest of the squad stepped forward as one, drawing their Nemesis force weapons.

  Was that true? Gared wondered. No Grey Knight had ever been possessed. He was in complete control of his thoughts and actions now. But the creation of the symptom seemed designed to introduce doubt like an infection into the spiritual health of the Grey Knights. The attempt would fail. Styer was right about that. But the attempt itself was so specific. ‘I think the enemy knows very well who we are,’ he said.

  I know you, the voice snarled before he could continue. The voice that was ever more recognizably his, but transformed by decay into a leprous parody. The sense of being confronted by a splintered, diseased version of himself was so strong it dealt a psychic wound. He winced. Epistolary Gared of the Grey Knights, the whisper said, I know you. I know your soul. I know what you have forgotten.

  The image that had invaded his mind before rose again. The gorge, the river, the rocks, the wind, the moons. It was not a hallucination. He still knew where he was. But all he could think about was this landscape, this unfamiliar location that imposed itself upon him as if it were as known to him as Titan itself.

  ‘Gared!’ Styer called to him. He looked up, realizing that he had lost time again. He did not know how long Styer had been speaking.

  ‘Brother justicar,’ he acknowledged.

  ‘You appeared to be in a trance.’

  ‘The attacks are more concerted.’

  ‘My lord,’ Shipmaster Bruno Saalfrank said, ‘we are ready for the jump.’

  Styer held his gaze on Gared. ‘The severity of the assault has increased the closer we have come to the Mandeville point.’

  ‘It has,’ Gared said. ‘There may be no correlation.’

  ‘Shipmaster,’ Styer said, ‘is our Geller field disabled?’

  ‘No, lord, it is weakened. I cannot answer for its stability, but we are in the path of the ork fleet. We will be within their range in a few moments.’

  ‘Make the jump, brother justicar,’ Gared said. ‘There is no choice.’ He pushed the alien memory away once more.

  ‘Do it,’ Styer ordered.

  A shield came down over the bridge’s oculus as the Tyndaris’s warp drive engaged. With a shriek heard in the soul and in the mind, a wound tore open in the void. The strike cruiser plunged into the immaterium. Gared knew the Geller field was breached before the warnings sounded. The whispers exulted. He sensed the hunger of warp entities as they reached for the ship and found their means of ingress.

  ‘Incursion in the landing bay,’ Saalfrank shouted.

  Gared joined his brothers as the squad rushed from the bridge.

  ‘You will be fighting two battles at once,’ Styer said to him. ‘Is this wise?’

  ‘It is a single battle,’ Gared replied. ‘The attack on me was but the first stage of the attack.’

  ‘If not two battles, then two fronts,’ said Styer. ‘Perhaps if you remained on the bridge and marshalled your forces against the one…’

  ‘I belong here,’ Gared said. ‘Having my energies split is preferable to splitting the strength of the squad.’ As he spoke, he sensed that his words were only a portion of a much larger truth. He was right to stay with the squad, though for reasons he could not yet discern.

  As they neared the landing bay, the nature of the enemy became more clear. The corridors of the Tyndaris resounded with the hollow tolling of a bell. Gared felt each peal in the depths of his bones. The timbre was deep and strong, yet it buzzed around the edges, much as the whispers’ echo of his voice did, as if the clapper unleashed a cloud of insects with every swing.

  The Grey Knights reached the doors to the bay. From behind them came a slow, arrhythmic chanting. The voices were liquid, slurring, and muffled as if their tongues were coated in fungus.

  ‘We have heard such chanting very recently,’ Styer said.

  ‘Plaguebearers,’ said Gared. The daemons had infested the Scouri
ng Light. The chant then had been different. They had been repeating the name of the plague being sought by Ku’gath. Now there was anger. The hymn was a call to vengeance. ‘Their master has unfinished business with us,’ he said.

  ‘Then we know whose voice you are hearing.’

  ‘We do.’ Your soul will be a feast of gifts, the voice had said. Gifts. Plagues.

  If Ku’gath was attacking him from the warp, using Gared’s own voice to wear him down, then Gared found purpose in identifying his enemy. But also concern. ‘Justicar,’ Gared said, ‘The daemon is deploying weapons he didn’t use on the Scouring Light. They are specific. He has called me by name. He is using at least some degree of truth against me.’

  ‘How has he come by this knowledge?’

  Gared thought back to the fight against the Plaguefather. He relived the moment of his greatest blow and saw what had happened. ‘So much of my psychic essence went into the wound I dealt the daemon…’

  ‘That some of it was stolen,’ Styer finished.

  ‘The daemon knows me, brother justicar. He knows me very well.’

  Better than you think, the whispers promised. Better than you can imagine. Better than you do, ignorant puppet.

  ‘And now we are in the warp with a breached Geller field,’ said Styer. He rested his gauntlet over the stud that would open the landing bay doors. The chanting on the other side was growing louder. ‘What is your plan to counter the attack?’

  ‘He cannot control my will,’ Gared said, firm in belief and resolve. ‘I will ignore his insinuations…’

  You think so? his distorted voice mocked.

  ‘We should begin,’ Gared spoke through the rising clamour in his head, ‘by purging our vessel of the abominations that have dared taint it with their presence.’

  ‘Well said, Brother-Epistolary.’

  Styer hit the stud. The door rumbled upward. The Grey Knights charged through and it slammed down behind them, sealing the bay from the rest of the ship. Across the vast space, the daemons surged forward. Scattered about were the remains of the human crew assigned to the bay. Some of the bodies had partially liquefied as they bubbled and foamed with disease. The others had become the material clay used by the daemons to manifest themselves on the Tyndaris. The plaguebearers’ jaws gaped with a slobbering joy. Their pendulous bodies swayed from side to side as they advanced, heavy feet leaving a trail of glistening pestilence behind them. When they saw Gared, they raised heavy, pitted blades as if in celebration. Their chant adopted a tone of welcome.

  Some of them uttered his name.

  Gared snarled his disgust and raced ahead of Styer. Caution evaporated. ‘Filth!’ he shouted. ‘You shall not speak my name.’ He thrust his left hand forward. From each finger came a bolt of warp lightning. The psychic energy seared the daemons. The plaguebearer in a direct line from Gared was enveloped in a shroud of eldritch fire. It fell, the obscene matter of its being losing coherence as it burned.

  On either side of Gared, his battle-brothers stormed into the fray, Nemesis weapons flashing with holy energy. Swords and halberds savaged daemonflesh. Styer brought his hammer down on the head of one plaguebearer with such force that its single horn shattered into dust and the skull imploded. The deck was slick with ichor and the hissing, disintegrating slime of fallen daemons.

  Gared reached out with lightning once more. The urge was strong to tear open a rift and banish the whole of the unclean host at a stroke. In the depths of his anger, he still had enough presence of mind not to attempt such a dangerous attack while the Tyndaris sailed the immaterium. Its defences were uncertain and creating a further passage to the warp might backfire, unleashing a much greater horde. So Gared struck with the energy bolts that burned the air with his wrath. He reached deep into the warp. Its power was close at hand, its infinite potential within his grasp. Ku’gath was using a portion of Gared’s self against him, and he was turning the essence of the daemons against them.

  The lightning blazed from his fingers with incandescent fury. He hit five daemons at once. The plaguebearers writhed as the purifying energy shrivelled them to ash. While at the edges of his vision, his brothers rent the daemons asunder, the crackling bolts continued to flow from Gared’s hand. They linked him to the smoking remains of the foe.

  You think you know yourself, the whisper mocked.

  Memories cascaded through his mind. Vivid, precise and true. Unbidden, unwanted, answering to another’s will, moving backward in time. Gared saw himself in the Dreadknight, striding through the battle-ruined halls of the Scouring Light. Then he was alone in the vault on Squire’s Rest, opening the tomb of Major-General Luter Mehnert and finding the signs of the bonewrack plague. Then he was on Angriff Primus, locked in battle and unable to help at the moment the daemons killed Brother Morholt. One after another, moments in time preserved in every detail, each present for less than an instant before the next one appeared. He was buried by an avalanche of his past. The memories reached farther and farther. He was a novitiate on Titan, performing the Rituals of Detestation. That the Plaguefather had access to that memory, to the rites that armoured a Grey Knight’s soul against the daemonic, horrified him.

  His grip on the warp began to slip.

  The memories kept coming. Older yet, still as precise, but more and more alien. The landscape with the four moons appeared before his mind’s eye again, and now he understood its import. Ku’gath had excavated his deep past. The daemon had found his lost memories of the time before his transformation into a Grey Knight.

  The Plaguefather had spoken true. He knew what was forgotten. He could rifle memories of which Gared had no consciousness.

  Triumph in the whispers of the daemon, in the voice that was his and was not, the voice that was a lie constructed from deep truths: See how well I know you. Your past is my material. My material is your plague. I will shape the disease of your soul.

  More and more memories, of hunting on that hostile world, of people he no longer knew, of events that had meant something to the mortal who had become Epistolary Gared of the Grey Knights. Memories perfectly specific in sight and sound, yet so utterly alien that they belonged to another entity.

  In a terrible sense, they did now.

  His focus stuttered. His grip on the warp slipped a little more. The moment of weakness was enough. The power of the immaterium turned on him, coiling back like a serpent. The energy bolts still flashed from his hand, linking him to the incinerated daemons. A vengeful will travelled back up the link. As Gared tried to shake himself free of the memories, he saw the danger reaching for him.

  Between his second lightning strike and Ku’gath’s countermove, less than a second of objective time transpired. With his consciousness already so entwined with the warp where time slipped, fragmented and twisted around itself, it seemed to Gared that he had an age to recognize how he had fallen into the trap.

  The landing bay of the Tyndaris vanished. Gared’s psychic being fell into the warp. The experience was global; none of his senses registered any awareness of the materium. He moved through the warp as embodied as a daemon in the materium. He was armoured, carrying his weapons. His self was complete, and it was coherent.

  But reality was neither.

  He flew, and then he walked. There was land beneath his feet, and then there was squirming void. Vortex and storm surrounded him. He saw things that merely pretended to be colours. Sounds clawed at his eyes. Sights slithered across his tongue. At first he perceived nothing but the chaotic and the random. Then a foul parody of order began to assert itself. The ground became more consistent, though it had the soft, sucking quality of a marsh. Gared looked up and there was a sky. Great, dark clouds scudded over it. They changed direction with sudden, jerking movements, colliding and merging with each other. They were not clouds, Gared now saw. They were swarms of millions upon millions of insects.

  The realm took on definit
ion. It gathered an identity: it became a garden, and it became disease. There was a profusion of blooms. The growths were stone, and they were sinew, and they thrust into being with the exuberance of sin, only to rot away into bubbling froth. They were eaten by more growths, and these were devoured by still other diseases in the midst of their feasting. Gared’s legs sank almost to his knees in a mire of putrefying meat and twitching parasites. Pallid ropes, neither root nor worm, tangled around his boots. Gared took a breath, and the air was thick as clotted blood. Insect legs scuttled down his throat, and insect wings whined in his lungs, and insect stingers stabbed at the back of his eyes. The garden hissed, gurgled and buzzed. It was a riot of plenty, a cauldron of endless proliferation.

  The garden pressed close around Gared. He could see only a few metres through the density of manifested disease. Everywhere he looked was the flow and rise and fall of putrid life. There were no paths, and yet the landscape had a direction. There was an undertow, pulling everything towards a centre. An instinct Gared could not name told him that somewhere, at a distance that was both infinite and far too close, a mansion awaited. If he drew near enough to catch sight of it he would be swept inside, and then he would be lost.

  ‘You will not enter Father Nurgle’s house, kin of Thawn. You are mine, Gared.’ Ku’gath’s own voice: the thunder of sepsis that had taunted and cursed the Grey Knights on the Scouring Light. It had shed the disguise of Gared’s tones, but it used his name as a weapon.

  The voice bounced in from all directions. It oozed up from the mire, fell with the swarms from the sky and insinuated itself between the growths on a foetid wind. Gared had no target, but fired his wrist-mounted storm bolter straight ahead. On the Tyndaris, did his body raise and fire the real weapon? He didn’t know. But if his psychic being manifested his bolter here, he would use it, and hurl the purity it represented against the unholy essences. The shells blasted apart a wall of festering thorns that rattled like bones.