‘You know the enemy we expect to encounter. You have seen daemons now. You saw what they did in Egeta. They have had time to consolidate their hold on Beroea. There will be many more than what you tried to fight before.’
‘Odds and duty have nothing to do with each other,’ she said. She turned back to the disciplining. The cat-o’-nine-tails rose and fell. Blood sprayed in the afternoon light. Chunks of flesh fell to the ground. The red of the blood, the pale pink of the trooper’s skin and the rapid, sinuous movement of the whip formed a whole that caught her eye. If just one element had been absent, the effect would have been lost.
‘Do you serve the Emperor or your vengeance?’ Drake asked.
‘My vengeance is my service to the Emperor,’ she said. ‘What answer other than violence can there be to the abominations that have invaded Sandava II?’
‘None,’ Drake agreed. ‘There is temptation, though, general. Have a care not to succumb to it.’
‘The only temptation the abominations can offer me is their destruction,’ Vendruhn said. ‘I doubt they will oblige me.’
Drake said he thought she was right. He left her a few minutes later, before the flogging was finished.
There can never be enough punishment for the abomination, Vendruhn thought now. She would destroy the daemons by any means necessary. She rubbed the burned tissue on the side of her face absently as she made her vows. She was still troubled that the Emperor had not protected the militia in Dikaia. She had been doing His work. She had been killing the heretic. Why had He abandoned her?
The word betrayal hovered at the edge of her thoughts. She pushed it away. She knew better than to articulate it, even in silence.
Dikaia didn’t matter any more. What mattered was Beroea. What mattered was punishment. She thought again of the sight of sprayed blood in sunlight, of pale flesh and blurred movement. Her lips twitched into the beginnings of a smile.
Punishment. She would outdo the daemons in savagery. She would surpass them in excess, and they would learn they could suffer too.
Beroea came into view. Vendruhn blinked, then rubbed her eyes. She worried fatigue was affecting her vision. She looked again. The sight had not changed. It had been months since she had last been to the city. She had no reason to mistrust her memory, though. The towers of the city should not be clustered like that. There should not be a hill at its centre.
A few minutes later, she saw her mistake. The massive hulk in the middle of Beroea was not a hill.
The Purgation’s Sword circled Beroea, spiralling in closer to the monstrosity at the heart of the city.
‘By the Throne,’ said Sendrax. ‘This is worse than I imagined.’
‘We should have imagined this,’ Crowe said. ‘We did not learn the lessons of Egeta well enough.’
The hololiths the Purifiers had studied at the militia base were useless. Beroea had been more than transformed. It had been recreated entirely. It was still a city, and it retained the character of worship through its temples and shrines. But there were no longer habitations. Structures that might have been hab blocks before the coming of Mnay’salath were now enormous sculptures of bone, hundreds of feet high, their façades twisted into arboreal convolutions and positions of frozen, organic pain.
Crowe released his grav-harness. He crossed the troop compartment and threw back the side door. He wanted to know all.
The wind blew the song of Beroea into the gunship. It was sung by a choir of millions upon millions of voices. Very few of them were human. Their throats were hollows of bone. Their lips were the corrosion of metal. The wind was the cry of the city, and the cry was a shrieking hymn.
The structures of Beroea created the song, and they shaped the worship. They bent towards the centre of the city. They bowed at such steep angles that they should have fallen – but that would have been contrary to the art of Beroea’s new incarnation. Here, the aesthetic was pre-eminent. Reality fell before it. Morality fell before it. Reason, possibility, hope, faith, thought and the release from pain all fell before it. And the aesthetic found its full manifestation and its purpose in what loomed in the centre of the city, the thing to which all shrines and cathedrals and tombs bowed.
The immense construct had been the Ecclesiarchal Palace. It was here that monstrous divinity resided. The palace had become an explosion of spires. Towers were built upon towers. Peaks led to more peaks, their heights sprouting and growing thinner. The uppermost spires were needles fifty feet high and sharp enough to draw blood from the wind. The towers were of iron. They emerged from the huge mass that had appeared to be a hill from a distance. It was flesh. It heaved and trembled. It was mottled green and grey and white. It was thick, scaled, its substance stronger than granite, yet there was no mistaking it for stone. The towers appeared to have been driven into it like nails. Blood oozed from their bases. The pained tremors that shuddered through the flesh were as heavy as earthquakes. The towers swayed, but none fell.
Around the circumference of the palace, extending in a spiral across the entire breadth of the city, was the atrocity that had made the art possible.
Will you fight that without my aid? Antwyr whispered. Look at these works. Are they not sublime? They are beyond your conception. They are beyond your strength. Will you take arms against so great a culmination? Not without me, Purifier. Not without me.
Crowe’s hand tightened on the Blade’s pommel. He was not tempted. There was enough damnation already below him.
Crucifixions formed vast circles of sacrifice. There were hundreds of thousands of them. Perhaps millions. Headless bodies writhed, their agony was unending. Blood poured from the stumps of their necks, flowing down the struggling forms to cover the stony roads. Avenues had become red canals, carrying the blood towards the daemon palace.
‘This does not look like the work of a weakened opponent,’ said Drake.
‘Did we accomplish nothing in Egeta?’ Sendrax demanded.
Did Gavallan die for nothing? Crowe thought. That is what you are asking, brother, isn’t it? He had no answer for Sendrax, except to say, ‘We will complete our task here.’ He pointed to the arrogant majesty of the palace. ‘The daemon reveals its presence,’ he said. ‘It will be in that monument to its pride.’ He stepped away from the open door and voxed Berinon. ‘Take us to the crown, brother,’ he said.
At the summit of the flesh hill, one tower was pre-eminent. It was higher than all the others. Its circumference was greater, its iron a glistening black. Its crown was wider yet, and it was surrounded by an illumination of stained-glass windows. They shone with pulsing lights of red and orange and purple.
‘Acknowledged,’ said Berinon. He angled the Purgation’s Sword in.
The Stormraven had not crossed the innermost ring of crucifixions when the palace stirred more violently. The skin went taut. It expanded as though it were vast lungs taking a geologic breath.
The palace rose.
Vendruhn saw Beroea turn into a monster. The creature was hundreds of times larger than the cathedral in Egeta. The palace climbed higher and higher into the air. It tilted on its side. Three legs, each hundreds of feet wide, formed from the buildings closest to the ground. Towers twisted around each other and burrowed into the flesh. The bloody creations, part architecture, part butchered animal, grew until the legs were a mile high. Immense waves traversed the flesh of the body. Towers sank and rose until they projected from beneath the mound as well as above it. The palace tilted back down until the highest tower was vertical with respect to the ground again. The walls thickened with more grey rolls of scaled flesh. Vendruhn thought they were beginning to look like shoulders.
‘General,’ voxed Bahnen, the pilot of the Valkyrie. The man was pleading for a command so he would not go mad.
‘Take us closer,’ Vendruhn said.
‘General…’
‘We go in.’ Her voice surprised he
r. It was strong. She hadn’t thought she could speak at all. But here she saw the final battle-lines being drawn. Here she saw the last chance for retribution against the being that had ruined her world and her honour. She switched to the company vox. ‘Look for landing sites on the...’ What could she call it? She must call it by what it was. ‘The palace,’ she said. ‘It is the enemy. Seek level ground in the upper regions.’
She could feel the horror inside the cockpit. ‘Now,’ she said before Bahnen could protest, and he obeyed.
The palace drew closer. Something flashed in the sun above it. The Grey Knights gunship was circling the monster. It was barely visible next to its mass, a spark of light, nothing more. The palace took its first steps, and Vendruhn was filled with surpassing awe. The dust of pulverised shrines rose from the bottom of the palace’s legs. She was too high to see movement in the streets below. The scale of the walking palace was beyond grasping. She thought she had seen excess in Egeta. She thought she had been at its centre in Dikaia. She had been wrong.
This was excess. This thing of architecture and life, this thing of uncountable spires and monstrosities of flesh, of movement where none should be, of movement without meaning or purpose. Everything on the palace was in motion. The towers turned like pistons. Some revolved around each other. Some moved up and down in the flesh, drawing rivers of dark blood that fell to the ground in a torrential rain. The palace was a refutation of reality, a collision of the impossible and the irrational and the purposeless. And it was all in the name of a terrible, transcendent, soul-destroying beauty. The undulating, shredding movements created the complex rhythms of a symphony. Excess and absolute art were one and the same, and Vendruhn beheld a masterpiece.
It could not be destroyed by the likes of her. Now that it existed, the universe could never destroy the change it had wrought on reality. But she must destroy it. She must find her anger as transcendent as this form, and in destruction create an even greater, even more excessive, beauty.
As the armada closed in, the palace grew arms. They sprouted from the shoulders. Towers and flesh whirled together, a cyclone of tissue and iron. The growth was too fast for something so large, yet it was in perfect time to the visual music of the monstrosity. The arms were tentacles, almost as long as the colossus was tall. It lashed out.
Bahnen dropped the Valkyrie as soon as the formation began. Its engines screamed as it entered a near-vertical dive, and the titanic limb barely missed. The arm smashed two of the heavy lifters that came behind, the impact disintegrating them. The explosions of the huge aircraft were small blossoms against the snaking mass.
The three-legged monster turned on its axis and struck out with its left arm. The tentacle caught three more lifters. Half of Vendruhn’s forces fell to earth in chunks of flame. The palace’s movements were too fast. The air burned with the speed of its arms. Yet the majesty of immensity remained. Too fast, too huge, too mad, the palace-thing embodied all that transgressed the bounds of reason for the benefit of murderous art.
‘Pull back!’ Vendruhn shouted. ‘Pull back!’ The command was unnecessary, yet it was necessary to command. Bahnen pulled the Valkyrie out of its dive midway down the height of the palace’s legs. She scanned the ground. As the palace walked, it left behind empty, uneven, wounded ground. ‘There,’ Vendruhn said, pointing. ‘We land there.’
At this height, she could see what moved in the streets of the transformed city. Daemons cavorted, celebrating the god-monster their sacrifices had created.
They were an enemy Vendruhn could destroy.
Gunfire erupted from the spires of the palace. Some of the cannons were still of human construction, remnants of the original form of the structure. Hundreds of others were new, forged in the malign genius of the immaterium. Fusions of iron and bone, they fired blasts of warp energy. Berinon banked the Purgation’s Sword and wove between the fire as he sought to reach the peak of the monster.
Crowe stood at the open door, bracing his stance and holding the bulkhead with his free hand. The enemy fire became more intense with every second, as if the monster were still waking, the act of war calling more and more of its furious being into existence. Its massive tentacles smashed the militia armada from the sky. Vendruhn’s manoeuvre had been a mistake, but her force’s presence drew the beast’s attention away from the gunship and bought the Grey Knights more seconds to act.
‘We won’t be able to land on the tower,’ Berinon said. ‘The movement of the abomination is too violent.’
Crowe had realised the same thing. With every ponderous yet graceful step, the great tower at the palace’s peak swayed like a reed in the wind.
‘See if you can get us close to its base, brother,’ Crowe told him.
‘There is more movement in the flesh,’ said Drake.
They were lines upon lines of ripples. They grew sharper. Blood suddenly slicked every surface between the towers. Then spinning, grinding teeth emerged from the flesh. A thousand mouths, ten thousand – they chewed through the surface of the palace’s flesh and gnashed hungrily for more to devour. Their whirling jaws seemed small in comparison to the towers. But the teeth, Crowe saw, were each larger than a man. They would reduce anything that came near them to pulp in moments. They were everywhere. The flesh of the palace had become a monster of infinite hunger and infinite devouring.
There was nowhere to land.
The daemonic cannon fire became even heavier. It drove the gunship back. The cluster of weapons circling the primary tower unleashed a barrage so massive it became a wall of destructive energy, a single shock wave of howling colours. Berinon turned the Purgation’s Sword away and raced for the ground, evading the largest concentration of guns. The edge of the wave touched the hull and the gunship groaned. Infernal lightning crackled along its length. It reached its claws into the troop compartment. The sanctified adamantium bubbled, but the ship held firm, and the energy dissipated with a shriek.
‘There will be no landing on this titan,’ said Sendrax.
‘No, but there are still towers. Those are structures.’ There was structure and shape to the monster’s being, Crowe saw. If it ceased to be a palace, the art of its horror would be compromised. For it to be a distortion, the thing that it had once been must still be present. ‘There is an interior,’ said Crowe. ‘There are entrances.’ He looked down. ‘Brothers,’ he said, ‘will you join me in another climb?’
The Stormraven jerked violently, evading a ball of energy ten feet wide. It screamed past the hull with the sound of a choir of hungry souls.
‘Brother Berinon,’ Crowe voxed the pilot, ‘take us to the ground.’
The Purgation’s Sword streaked downwards. Below the main bulk of the palace, there were fewer guns. Even the legs had cannons, though, and Berinon hauled the gunship through one violent turn after another as he dodged their fire. He brought the Stormraven to within ten feet of the rooftops. The shrines and chapels below were as deformed as the palace. They reached upwards in painful twists of metal and stone. Their doorways were maws frozen in mid-howl. Their screams were not silent. The sounds of terrible ecstasy moaned across the lower reaches of Beroea.
Berinon aimed the gunship at the leading leg. It had just come down, pounding a crater into the ground, reducing the shrines beneath it to dust. Now the other legs would move while it remained motionless. The Grey Knights had several seconds to close with a motionless target.
‘Stand by,’ said Berinon.
The other Purifiers stood now, taking up positions behind Crowe at the door.
How will you fight this without me? the sword whispered. You take your brothers only to defeat and death.
In the streets, daemonettes and fiends leapt up, their claws grasping for the gunship. Berinon unleashed a stream of fire from the hull’s twin-linked heavy bolters, cutting through daemonflesh, blasting apart the blasphemous structures, clearing the path towards the leg.
The palace took another step. A massive shadow of a limb passed over the Sword. The leg came down with a boom that echoed through the city. At the same moment, the gunship drew level with its target. Berinon fired the retro-jets on full and slewed the Stormraven around to present its starboard flank to the leg. The craft’s flight became a hover. It came down over an open space of ruins flattened by the impact of the limb’s descent.
Crowe leapt from the doorway while the gunship was still ten feet from the ground. Sendrax and the others followed. He did not look back. Already, the third leg was beginning to move. The opportunity he sought would last for only a few seconds more. There was a large, vaulted doorway a few feet off the ground. It was canted at almost forty-five degrees. Crowe ran for it. Behind him, he heard the gunship take off again. Its turret pounded the ruins, holding back the horde of daemons.
The third leg thundered down. All of Beroea shook. Crowe was less than ten feet from the door. The ground around him trembled. Dust flew. The leg shook, preparing to rise.
Crowe leapt through the door. He landed on a slanted wall of cartilage and muscle. He plunged onwards into the moist darkness of the corridor. He did not stop until he felt the upward movement of the leg. He turned, then, and saw that both squads had made it through the doorway in time.
‘Brother, you have the sword drawn,’ said Drake.
‘I do.’
‘You intend to use it?’ Gorvenal was horrified.
‘Not as Antwyr would wish.’
Crowe faced the interior of palace and marched on, defying the dark and violence of motion. He was here, a minute figure come to cause the death of a giant.
Warden of the Blade Page 22
