Grey Knights: Sons of Titan

by David Annandale

  Ku’gath laughed. The sound was a ratcheting, wet cough. It triggered a rain of dead flies. ‘What do you hope to do? I know you so well. Do you know me so little? Will you destroy me here? Is that the shape of your hope? Tell me, Gared, and I will grant you the gift of your perfect plague.’

  Gared said nothing. He kept moving through bog and dying abominations. He advanced because that was an act of defiance. He would not be still and wait for the daemon to come to him. As the words swirled around him, he searched for their speaker. And when Ku’gath spoke his name, he caught a glimpse of the daemon. The form was faint, a suggestion of huge movement to his left behind the tentacles of the garden.

  ‘Will you know me?’ Gared shouted. ‘Then you will fear me!’ He raised his blade and lunged through the growths towards the daemon.

  Ku’gath laughed again, and the flies descended again, blanketing Gared in the soft hail of their deaths. The mire reached up his flanks, sprouting tumours with teeth. They ground against ceramite. ‘Will you destroy me? Will you presume so much in the Father’s realm? Will you, Gared?’

  When the Plaguefather spoke Gared’s name again, the attack began. The memories came at Gared, but this time not from within. Here in the warp, they had a material existence – the very stuff of which the immaterium was woven. They blasted through the corrupted thickets, and a twisting, horizontal funnel slammed into Gared’s chestplate. It threw him backwards and he landed on his back. The marsh swallowed him, closing over his head as he started to drown in visions of his past rotted by doubt and loss.

  He struggled to his feet, snarling. He started forward again, and when another blast came at him, he was braced. He summoned a shield. It was turbulence, warp-matter stripped of its toxic identity, disorder raised against chaos. The memory stream smashed into it, stopped, and then spread itself wide. It surrounded Gared and closed in hard. His shield imploded. His past, selected, filtered and repurposed until it was a disease, ate into the coherence of his being. His armour began to blister. Every misjudgement, every regret and every fallen brother clawed at him, eroding and suppressing all other thoughts, all other conceptions of his past. The centre of the plague was the memories of before, the forgotten realities that were now in the hands of Ku’gath. Truths that Gared could not deny but did not know battered him.

  His armour cracked. His flesh began to dissolve.

  ‘Do you see?’ Ku’gath taunted. ‘I know you. I know your name. I know your name.’

  The repetition was a boast. Its diseased glee opened Gared’s eyes to its special importance to the daemon. Naming was power. A daemon’s true name was its greatest vulnerability. True names were key weapons in the Grey Knights’ arsenal. And Ku’gath believed he knew Gared’s true name.

  The memories ate deeper. Gared felt his identity begin to fray. The immaterial flesh of his face erupted in running sores.

  He must not let the daemon define him. And he could not defeat the memories through denial. Turning from them only gave them more power. He had to find the weakness. He had to find the error, fight the Plaguefather by locating the lie that must lurk at the core of the truths that were taking him apart.

  Another blast hit him. He was without shield, but he staggered forward into the assault. He took in the memories. They were all strange now. They were all from before his transformation. They were poison and ripped at him with truth and confusion. Ku’gath knew what they meant, but he did not. That former self had ceased to be.

  And there was his answer.

  ‘You do not know me!’ he shouted. He raised his sword, and focused on the light of the blade. I am the right hand of the Emperor, he thought. I am his sword. ‘The past is dead. Those truths are dead.’ The light of the sword grew brighter, fuelled by the greater, living truth. The brotherhood of the Grey Knights was where his identity resided. What he had been was not who he was. The past was a shed skin. ‘I am the instrument of the Emperor’s will!’ No part of himself that was not devoted to that one goal had been cut away when he had donned his sacred armour.

  The sword was blazing. Gared reached out with his soul beyond the foul garden. He reached for his brothers. And he found them reaching back. The collective psychic force of the squad sought him. This was no miracle. This was what it meant to be numbered among the Grey Knights.

  This was his true self.

  The truth barred forever to the understanding of the likes of Ku’gath.

  The light of Gared’s blade was blinding. It tore through the festering, clinging darkness that enveloped him. He slashed forward, and the sword channelled the purging fire of his untainted identity. A wound of fire and will cut through the garden of plague. Gared became the light, became the incarnation of his holy mission, and nothing beyond that mission was real.

  The Plaguefather roared in pain and outrage.

  There was nothing but the light.

  And then Gared was in the landing bay of the Tyndaris once more. He had fallen to one knee, but he was still upright. He was surrounded by his brothers. The psychic unity of the squad gave him strength, and with a groan, he stood.

  Burns and the impact craters of shells marred the deck. But the plaguebearers were gone.

  Before Gared could ask, Styer said, ‘The ship is secure.’

  ‘Good.’ His voice rasped. He was drained. His psychic battle had drawn upon many of his physical reserves. ‘My thanks, brothers. I had need of your strength.’

  ‘The battle is concluded, then?’ Styer asked.

  ‘The battle, yes. The struggle, though, is not.’

  The whispers were silenced. But at the far edge of his awareness, Gared felt the scrabbling of a vengeful will seeking a new purchase. Ku’gath had sought to define his identity and failed. But the Plaguefather still possessed dangerous knowledge, and he had Gared in his sights. Ku’gath was untiring.

  No matter. So was Gared’s faith.

  The silent ship moved across the oculus. Lights still shone from the superstructure of the Gladius-class frigate. There was a dull, red-star glow from its engines as they maintained the orbit. But those signs, Styer thought, were lies. The silence was the truth. The Blade of Purity was dead, a tomb cutting through the void above the clamorous planet.

  The world named Korzun was not dead. The Blade of Purity had been sent to save it. Now the Tyndaris would have to kill it.

  In the strategium overlooking the bridge, the Grey Knight justicar stood with his squad and Inquisitor Hadriana Furia. They surrounded the tacticarium table. Styer and Furia had moved a pace away from its end, drawn forward by the portrait of profound loss forming in the oculus. Grief battled with anger in Styer’s chest.

  ‘Are you still hailing?’ Furia asked Bruno Saalfrank.

  ‘Yes, inquisitor,’ the shipmaster answered. ‘No response of any kind.’

  ‘Keep trying.’ To Styer, she said, ‘I fear the worst, justicar.’

  ‘And what is the worst?’ he asked. ‘Death? Failure? Both?’

  She said nothing, which made him wonder if she was contemplating darker possibilities. Styer turned his head to the left to look at Furia. Her face was unreadable. So it had always been, for as long as he had known her. Her features were even more closed to scrutiny since her injuries during the Sanctus Reach campaign. She had fought Malia Orbiana, a Xanthite inquisitor whose radical agenda had ended in catastrophe. Before that battle, the left half of her body had already been bionic, that side of her face an unmoving, cold bronze. Now both her arms were artificial. So were her eyes. They were unblinking, red glares of judgement. She had chosen to preserve the portions of her flesh that could be saved, but the right side of her face was almost as still as the metallic left. It had an armour of scar tissue. It was taut, criss-crossed with wounds. Her lips barely moved when she spoke and her larynx was bionic. It had been before she had sustained her latest injuries. but the voice that emerged from it seemed more ho
llow, less human. Even so, her concern over the situation aboard the Blade of Purity was clear.

  Styer shared that concern. He too anticipated the worst. And if it had been Furia who had asked him what the worst was, he would have been unable to answer.

  ‘If Purifier Sadon could respond, he would have by now,’ Epistolary Gared said, walking forward to stand by Styer.

  ‘That presumes he is aboard his ship,’ said Vohnum. He did not move from his position at the table.

  ‘If he is planetside,’ Styer put in, ‘his failure is beyond contemplation.’

  Purifier Sadon was a figure of awed whispers, even among the Grey Knights. His crusades were legend. Where he passed, he left nothing but the ashes of warp-spawn. He had taken the Blade of Purity to Korzun to purge a daemonic incursion foreseen by the Prognosticars on Titan. This was not a world that had previously shown signs of corruption. On the contrary, the piousness of Korzun was watchword throughout the subsector. This made it an even more attractive target for the Ruinous Powers, and any fall, however contained, would have to be met with pitiless retribution. The greater the piety, the greater the punishment for betrayal. So the great Purifier had come to Korzun and fallen silent. The Tyndaris had come to find the reason for that silence.

  Based on what Styer saw below the Blade, the threat must have been far more severe than either Sadon or the Prognosticars had anticipated. The atmosphere of Korzun was diseased and roiled with storms. Their spiral arms covered the entire globe, and there was no break in the clouds through which the continents or oceans could be seen. The vortices were stained with all the colours of rot. What had once been a jewel of the Imperium now looked like the corpse of a gas giant. The movements of the atmosphere were the slow ripples of flesh. Styer saw things emerge from the clouds and vanish again before their nature became clear. He thought of worms: maggots of impossible size squirming through the air, devouring the body and soul of the world.

  ‘Shipmaster,’ Styer said. ‘Is there any vox-traffic from Korzun?’

  ‘Ambach?’ Saalfrank asked the augur operator.

  ‘We have not been hailed, lord,’ Ambach told Styer. ‘We are, however, picking up communication signals between locations planetside and directed outward.’

  ‘Let us hear them.’

  Ambach bent over her terminal. A moment later, the damnation of Korzun echoed across the bridge of the Tyndaris. A cacophony of voices spilled out of the vox speakers. Some of the voices were human, but many were not. Insanity gibbered. Perversion raged. From the jagged confusion, syllables began to form. They shaped words in a language no human should speak, and none could hear without harm. The Tyndaris’s crew stiffened in shock.

  ‘Shut it down,’ Styer commanded.

  Ambach’s hand moved slowly, as if it were tangled in the web of the sounds. But she, like all her crewmates, was a servant of the Inquisition. She had the faith and discipline to resist the daemonic longer than most mortals. She killed the voices.

  Silence fell over the bridge and Styer watched the oculus. He could still see the cries of Korzun. They were in the convulsions of its air. A pair of storms over the equator fused into a greater one. The colours deepened to hues of dried blood and fevered dreams.

  ‘That planet is beyond redemption,’ Furia said.

  Styer nodded. There was no question that Exterminatus was necessary. Korzun was lost.

  But there was still the question of Sadon. The catastrophic failure of his mission demanded an explanation. Even more important, as far as Styer was concerned, was determining the fate of one of the great heroes of Grey Knights. He would not allow Sadon’s name to plunge into the fog of conjecture.

  ‘If Purifier Sadon is on Korzun, then he is dead,’ the justicar said. ‘If he is alive, he will be on his ship.’

  ‘Even if he is not aboard,’ said Furia, ‘there may still be answers.’

  ‘Then we are agreed.’

  Furia nodded. She walked down the stairs from the strategium to the rest of the bridge. ‘I will meet you at the Final Sanctity,’ she said.

  Styer turned to Gared. ‘Your thoughts?’ he asked the Librarian.

  Gared spoke slowly. ‘It seems to me,’ he said, ‘that the most disturbing factor here is not the fact that Sadon may have failed, but the reason behind it. I am uneasy.’

  ‘So am I.’

  Styer sat in the cockpit of the Final Sanctity with Warheit, watching through the viewing block as the Blade of Purity’s superstructure drew closer. The Sanctity was a Caestus Assault Ram. There was no question of using the Stormraven. Styer knew the bays of the silent ship would remain sealed to them if they tried that approach. He also wanted to gain access to the ship as close to the bridge as possible. Even so, he thought. An Assault Ram. Necessity didn’t make the strategy any less distasteful.

  Vohnum didn’t hide his displeasure as the Sanctity cut across the void between the vessels. ‘This is wrong,’ he said, his voice reaching Styer over the squad vox-channel. ‘We are attacking one of our own ships.’

  ‘Brother,’ Styer said, ‘if you know of another way of doing what we must, I would have been happy to hear it before we boarded.’

  Vohnum refused to answer directly. ‘It is the principle that dismays me,’ he said.

  ‘It dismays us all. Need compels us to this action.’

  ‘Brother Vohnum, if we are engaged in the most distressing action of the day, we will be fortunate indeed,’ Gared said.

  Vohnum began to answer but Styer interrupted him. ‘Brace for impact,’ he said.

  Warheit aimed the Final Sanctity at the level immediately below the bridge. The hull of the Blade filled the viewing block. Warheit fired the Assault Ram’s magna-melta. The frigate’s shields were still active, their flare as bright as outrage. The melta beam overwhelmed the shield and ate through the skin of the frigate. There was no retaliatory fire, and Styer was unsure whether or not he should view that as a mercy. Then the Assault Ram’s brutal prow slammed into the Blade of Purity, the jolt vibrating through Styer’s armour. It was the blow of brother striking brother, and it sickened the soul.

  Styer pushed away the distaste. He and Warheit charged out of the cockpit as the prow’s boarding ramps crashed down and the squad advanced into the Blade of Purity. Seven Grey Knights and the inquisitor, whose destiny now appeared to be tied to theirs as the aftershocks of the battle over Squire’s Rest continued to be felt. The squad had lost brothers in the Sanctus Reach, and before that on Angriff Primus. There had been time to repair the damage done to the Tyndaris, but the process of adding new battle-brothers to the ranks of the Chapter took much longer.

  Even diminished, they were still enough to shatter an army.

  The chamber into which the Assault Ram had broken through was a librarium. Though the Blade was much smaller than the Tyndaris, the holdings of its librarium were even more vast – a testament to Purifier Sadon’s reputation and his erudition the equal of his faith. Styer led the way through a space large enough to be a loading dock. To his left and right, marble bookcases rose to the vaulted ceiling. The Ram had smashed several rows of them down, but the librarium was so large that most of the shelves still stood.

  Even so, they were empty of books. The deck was piled high with ruined tomes. They were ripped and burned. The sconce-mounted lumen globes revealed the scorches of las and the craters of bolter-rounds. The chamber had seen fierce fighting – and then desecration.

  There were bodies here, badly burned and mutilated, and half buried by the remains of the books and scrolls. There was little that was recognisable, but Styer could still see charred scraps of uniforms that marked the victims of the ship’s crew.

  ‘Who were they fighting?’ Vohnum wondered.

  ‘And where are the rest of the bodies?’ Warheit asked.

  He was right, Styer thought. There should have been more, given the scale of the dest
ruction. He pointed to some paths that had been created in the piles of velum and parchment, leading to the librarium door. ‘They have been dragged away,’ he said.

  Furia picked up a few of the books. Their destruction was immense. ‘The enemy that destroyed this archive,’ she said, ‘is not the sort to concern itself with the disposal of bodies.’

  Styer noticed Gared frowning. The Epistolary’s gaze was unfocused. ‘Brother Gared?’ he asked.

  ‘There is something…’ He shook his head, frustrated, and tried again. ‘We have a psychic enemy aboard the ship.’

  ‘Are we under attack?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I feel as if I am trying to pierce shadows. They are filled with terrors.’

  Styer’s ability as a psyker was paltry next to Gared’s. Like all Grey Knights, though, he had some psychic strength. He had felt oppressed since the Final Sanctity had broken through the Blade of Purity’s interior. Something was pushing down on him; a wall had risen between his consciousness and the warp. It was no simple barrier.

  The shadows were full of terrors, Gared had said. Styer agreed with his choice of words. He had no fear of what lurked in the suffocating veil that had fallen on them, but there was no doubt that this was no defensive barrier. It was an assault and it concealed threats. There was an edge to the smothering, and had Styer still been mortal, he would have been paralysed with terror.

  ‘This phenomenon is not unknown,’ he said. ‘There is an enemy whose presence has this effect.’

  ‘Yes,’ Gared agreed, ‘but the signs here are contradictory.’

  True. The enemy that the psychic assault presaged might well have consumed the bodies, but it would have no interest in desecrating the librarium. That was the domain of a different sort of abomination.

  Styer raised his daemon hammer. ‘We will destroy whatever enemy awaits.’ He was about to say that its nature was irrelevant, but he stopped himself before he spoke that lie. The identity of the enemy was of the gravest importance. Why Sadon had failed mattered. It mattered a great deal.