She would not be held back from the fight.
‘An orbital bombardment is about to commence,’ Crowe said. ‘Do not be within its range.’
Vendruhn tried to make sense of this. ‘Forgive me, lord, but I had understood you were heading into the city.’
‘We are,’ Crowe said, and ended the transmission.
Vendruhn gazed into nothing for a long moment.
‘General?’ Morenz said.
Vendruhn didn’t answer. Her anger at being told to sit out the war held her motionless.
‘General,’ Morenz tried again. ‘We are still moving towards Dikaia. Shouldn’t we–’
‘Maintain course,’ Vendruhn snapped. She dropped the handset and scrambled up through the roof hatch. She looked west.
The walls of Dikaia were just coming into view. The guns of the Vigilance tower were still firing. They were targeting the Grey Knights gunship, and it was flying on a path to the south of the militia. Thus far, Vendruhn’s companies had been spared an artillery barrage. They could get closer. They could get close enough to hit the army that waited outside the city.
But now the Grey Knights planned to annihilate Dikaia. She didn’t understand. Why mount an assault that would never happen? Why lay siege to a ruin?
Dikaia was standing. She was within sight of her retribution. She did not understand Crowe’s command, and so she ignored it.
‘General!’ Morenz called from below.
‘We. Do. Not. Halt!’ Vendruhn roared.
The wrath descended from the skies once more. Vendruhn saw the devastation come, but where she had welcomed the extermination of Egeta, here she felt her vengeance cheated, and she shouted at the dread rain as if her will could arrest it.
The explosions began. Again Vendruhn beheld the terrible light. Again she heard the huge, cumulative thunder. Again the world shook with the beat of an impossibly vast war-drum. The earth erupted and erupted and erupted. A wall of flaming columns lunged for the sky. Even from this distance, Vendruhn could feel the heat against her face.
She felt no less awe before the sight than she had during the obliteration of Egeta. But there was frustration now too. She saw what she wished to do. She saw the power to punish absolutely, on a scale commensurate with her rage. But it was not her power. It was not her action. Her arm did not wield that tremendous death.
The Purgation’s Sword flew past the militia. It headed directly towards the firestorm. It dropped down, preparing to land.
They are going in, Vendruhn thought. Crowe had meant exactly what he said. The Grey Knights were going to march into the teeth of their own bombardment.
Vendruhn’s imagination burned with the vision of what would happen next. The battle in the flames. The cutting down of their foes in the midst of the end of the world. There were no words to capture the nature of that kind of war. It was the very essence of the sublime to surpass language.
It was also its essence to command irresistible desire.
She would make that war hers.
Vendruhn dropped down the hatch. She seized the handset and climbed up again. ‘Forwards!’ she shouted into the vox. She stared at the towering explosions as she spoke. She gathered the power on display for her own. The column of infantry and armour was still advancing, but there was a hesitation in the face of the bombardment, an uncertainty of action. She could sense it. Legacy of Glas’ engine was subdued, as subdued as if Owrun, her driver, were holding back, unwilling to commit the Chimera to its destiny. She looked back. As she had suspected, the infantry’s march was slow. She was sure of that.
‘Forwards, by the Throne!’ she called again. ‘March, you pride of Sandava II! Will you let others fight your war? Will you shirk reclaiming your honour? Glory drums before us! March with me! Charge into the enemy! The fire is our victory and our revenge. It does not come for us! March, damn you, march!’
She switched the channel to Owrun’s frequency. ‘What are you waiting for? The road is clear before us. It is paved and flat. Maximum speed, or I will shoot you now.’
Owrun believed her. He obeyed. Legacy of Glas leapt forwards over the breaking ground. The rockcrete pavement bucked and split. The maglev tracks rang and groaned from the beats of the bombardment.
Ahead, the Stormraven lifted off. It had unloaded its warriors. It flew back and forth near the edge of the bombardment zone, strafing the ground with its heavy bolters and assault cannons.
Vendruhn was so close now. The explosions shook her bones. The storm of fire and smoke and dust obscured the city. Only the Vigilance tower was visible above the devastation. Shadows contorted at its peak, lashing out in violent spirals. Thick tendrils, clouds thick as flesh but jagged and fast as lightning, struck down into the flames. The cannons flashed still, but they were silent, overwhelmed by the immensity of the blasts hurled at Dikaia by the vessel in orbit.
Closer, closer. Vendruhn’s chest vibrated painfully, and smoke stung her eyes. She tasted blood in her mouth. She had bitten her tongue. Her skin baked from the heat. The pain enthralled her. It was a foretaste of what she was about to inflict.
Almost there. The world shaking and cracking open from the monstrous concussions. The boom, boom, boom shattering coherence, scattering thought.
‘Forwards!’ she cried again. That thought was clear. That thought was strong.
The enemy did not appear until Legacy of Glas plunged into the maelstrom. Billowing smoke embraced the militia. Vendruhn was inside thunder. She had arrived in an otherworld of final dissolution. She could see no more than a dozen yards ahead, and then only in snatches as the smoke eddied. Darkness flashed with flame. The landscape was overlapping craters and pulverised ruins. The Chimera rode over smashed slabs and shredded, carbonised bodies. Owrun steered it from crater to crater as if shells would not land where destruction had already occurred.
And through the fire, over the bodies, came the foe. They did not heed the bombardment. A shell landed twenty feet off the Chimera’s right flank, and a hundred people died in a second. There were no cries. The attackers on either side of the explosion did not flinch. They charged in perfect silence.
In Egeta, the apostates had been hysterical, chanting, screaming things. They had gabbled prayers and curses. They had been terrified and ecstatic.
These people were different. Their silence gave way to shrieks when they closed with the militia, but they screamed all at once, as if the impulse to howl came from somewhere else. This enemy was a single, inseparable mass. There were no individuals, and death meant nothing except a brief gap in the tide of foes. Many were unarmed, yet they all fought with skill. They were fast and were more nimble than any of the heretics in Egeta. Vendruhn gathered these impressions in splinters. No more was possible in the inferno. She saw the enemy, and she trained the heavy bolter on the wretches. Its mass-reactive ammunition hit them at close range. There were no daemons here, only heretics, humans guilty of falling away from the Emperor’s light. Her slaughter was enormous. Mighty shells exploded weak bags of flesh and blood. In the midst of howling fire, rain fell on Vendruhn, a warm rain, a splashing, copper-tasting rain.
Her infantry were dying on all sides, overwhelmed by the possessed or caught in the bombardment. The Chimera behind Legacy of Glas vanished. The crack of the explosion made Vendruhn’s ears bleed. The blast wave slammed her back and forth. Fire washed over her as the Glas pulled away. Pain raked molten claws down her face. Her hair smouldered.
Vendruhn laughed.
She held the trigger down, swept the weapon left and right, and she laughed. She had no idea where she was. She had lost all sense of direction seconds after entering the storm. She was deep in the realm of excess. The war, the destruction, the eruption of all reality – all of it glorious, magnificent, overwhelming excess. The blood on her face, the bursting bodies, the vortex of unending violence that she was now part of, all of it, all of
it, all of it. Excess.
She did not think of honour. She did not think of righteousness. She did not think of justice, or vengeance or even the possibility of victory. This moment, this ever-building paroxysm was the end in itself. Excess. There was no meaning to the universe except excess. There was no universe any more, only this volcanic celebration of chaos.
Vendruhn lost herself in the butchery and the devastation, and she rejoiced.
The crowd was burning. Thousands ran at the Purifiers from the flaming streets. On the right, a hab tower collapsed, crushing the attackers, burying the boulevard beneath a mountain of rubble forever.
Forever, until a solid shell, an artificed meteor launched from the Sacrum Finem, struck moments later, and then everything to the right was dust and flame.
On the left, the burning people kept coming. The concussion of falling building and shell impact flattened many of them, but hundreds still remained, and they did not slow.
They were still on fire.
Crowe swung his Nemesis blade in wide arcs, chopping the attackers in half. He advanced through them as though they were weeds of flesh. They were in agony. Their faces were twisted with silent screams. They felt the fire. But the will that controlled them did not care. It did not even let them scream. It threw them forwards, pushing the ten million of Dikaia at the Grey Knights.
‘They fight well,’ Drake voxed. It was impossible to communicate in any other fashion, even in close proximity, in the hurricane of the bombardment.
‘They do,’ Crowe said. The people attacked with too much skill for civilians. Some wore militia uniforms. Most did not. ‘We are not fighting the mortals they were,’ he said. ‘We are fighting the Black Blade.’
He swung the sword again, killing four of the possessed heretics at once. His strength and the sword’s power field cut through muscle and bone like air. Two more thralls leapt over his blow. They landed on his shoulders and tried to pry his helmet loose. He shook them off and stomped their heads open. He moved on. ‘Be wary,’ he warned his brothers. ‘Do not underestimate them.’
Sendrax laughed. ‘Be wary?’ he said. ‘Here?’
He spoke, and the world erupted again. High-explosive shells detonated ahead and on either side. Fire obliterated everything. The ground heaved. The fire died down and the colossal, blackened shape that had been a sprawling, hundred-storey hab complex toppled downwards. It was too wide to evade. Crowe ran forwards. This was the war he had created. He would face it head-on.
Sendrax was laughing again. ‘Are you depending on destiny to preserve us, or are you still offended I insulted your patience?’
‘Neither,’ said Crowe. The Emperor protects, he thought.
The sky became sloping rockcrete, raining slabs and metal. Fire engulfed the base of the structure. A huge burst of flame billowed out of an entrance. Crowe made that inferno.
The roar of the collapsing hab block was everywhere. Crowe did not look up. They would reach the base or they would not.
Crowe ran into the fire. It bellowed in a wide corridor extending through the complex. The Purifiers pounded through a tunnel of flame. Warning runes flashed red on Crowe’s lenses. He saw only fire. It blasted at him with the fury of a gale. He ran, and the rumble of the hab’s destruction reached its climax. Everything shook. Everything crashed. A giant sought to crush the Purifiers in its grasp, but the corridor held its shape. The fire vented its wrath on Crowe. He faced it. He ran through it. You will not stop me, he thought. I have a greater enemy to fight.
The corridor took the Grey Knights to the other side of the fallen complex. The hall ended at the source of the fire – a crater filled with burning promethium. The fuel poured in from the right, coming from a manufactorum that had been torn in half. Ruptured pipes ten feet wide hung from multiple levels of the structure. They were the outflows of incinerating cataracts. The heat was intolerable. Crowe was already pushing the limits of his armour’s thermal shielding. He turned left, wading through the edge of the crater until he was finally out of the fire.
The heretics were waiting. Antwyr knew where the Grey Knights were at every step. All it took was for one set of eyes, even from a distance, to survive long enough to see the Purifiers enter the flames. Antwyr was using its omniscience well.
The heretics rushed forwards, using their weight to push the Grey Knights back into the lake of promethium. They attacked as a mass, but an intelligent one, each heretic angling to amplify the force of those ahead. They hit with the strength of a seismic wave.
Crowe leaned forwards and braced himself. He lunged ahead with his sword. He fired his storm bolter at the same moment. At his sides, the shells of his brothers slammed into the heretics too. The Purifiers cut a wedge into the throng. They charged into the ocean of bodies. The heretics could not throw the Grey Knights back, so they tried to entangle them instead. They threw themselves down. They crawled over each other, crushing the bodies beneath, slowing the Grey Knights down while clawing and hacking at them with improvised weapons. The possessed militia stood back and trained their lasrifles on the Purifiers.
‘They seek to destroy us with trivialities,’ Carac snarled.
‘Give them an opening and they will,’ Crowe told him. The accuracy of the militia was inhuman. The las-beams did no more than score his armour, but the shots were aimed consistently at his helm, dazzling him each time they struck.
‘We must move faster,’ Crowe called. ‘Climb their mounds. Take out the shooters.’ He did as he said, slashing the heretics before they could grab at him and storming up the hill of bodies. He turned his storm bolter on the militia, splattering them against the ruins of the buildings surrounding the crater. Destrian and Ruluf torched swathes of heretics with incinerators. They directed their fire to the west, fighting to clear the way forwards to the Vigilance tower.
The tower’s peak rose above the conflagration of the city, its cannons blazing, its summit a fury of shadow. The bombardment sent more and more dust into the air, and the smoke further darkened the day. In the burning, flaming, thundering gloom, the Vigilance tower had become a dark silhouette, black as the sword that reigned at its top.
Vigilance indeed, Crowe thought. Visible everywhere in Dikaia, even a Dikaia turned into a pyre, the Tower saw all of the city. Wherever there were eyes, the sword could see. The bombardment was killing millions. Enough to stymie Antwyr’s defence, but not enough to blind it yet.
The militia fell, shredded by bolter fire. The soldiers’ nuisance shots stopped. Crowe loped over the hills of bodies, using his momentum to overcome inertia. He slammed through heretics, chopping off limbs and heads, refusing to slow. The Purifiers moved even faster. They pulled away from the crater, heading for another wide avenue. The base of the Vigilance tower was only half a mile ahead.
A premonition made Crowe look back. What happened next could not have been destiny. Surely it was mere chance, the inevitable result of defied odds taking their revenge. Sometimes the chance result was inevitable, and there was no contradiction.
It could not have been preordained. Futility could not be a foretold end. The Emperor would not allow it.
Even so, Crowe looked back, already sensing what he would see.
An influx of the possessed from the rear caught up with Brother Doran. They stumbled through the fire, becoming human torches. They burned so ferociously that even their daemonic master could not retain full control over their motor functions. They fell clumsily onto Doran. He fought them off and put them down. He crushed skulls with his bionic arm. But they surrounded him with their fire. He took a wrong step and sank into a gap between piles of corpses. The bodies slid down onto him. His sword cut through them and he climbed to the top again. The delay was a matter of seconds.
It kept him close enough to the centre of the shell impact.
The high explosive came down beside the crater. Crowe’s auto-lenses snapped shutters d
own, shielding him from the flare of impact. They opened again as he was knocked back by the blast. It sent Sendrax and the others flying. But not Doran. He had vanished.
Sendrax regained his feet. Standing in the midst of hundreds of corpses, he looked between the new crater and Crowe.
I hear your judgement, Crowe thought. He heard, but he rejected it. These were the consequences of his decision to prosecute the war in this way. He accepted them. He would mourn the loss of Doran later. There was no time now.
And his decision was the correct one. It had brought the Purifiers this close to the Vigilance tower.
Crowe plunged down the avenue running west. There was a clear run to the base of the tower. The road was filled with the possessed, but buildings had fallen on either side and there was no way of funnelling large crowds into the zone as reinforcements. The Black Blade was trying. Heretics scrambled over the burning wreckage like insects on a corpse. The Purifiers hit the crowd with blade and bolter and fire, thinning the enemy before them. They slammed through the bodies, metal ploughing through flesh. Crowe refused Doran’s fate. The sword would not win through the trivial act of slowing the Grey Knights down.
He knew there was no logic to his determination. It was chance, not speed, that had killed Doran – Crowe could just as easily rush into the next shell – but in momentum there was progress, and thus he felt the bombardment was an ally. He had caused this to happen. He had taken the most drastic steps to ensure the success of the mission, and the fulfilment of his duty passed down to him from Gavallan. He must be the Warden of the Blade, and he would crack the planet with his hands if that was what the Emperor required of him.
Warden of the Blade Page 19
