Chapter Fourteen
THE MASKED BALL
Gravity pressed down on Crowe as the leg rose. He pushed back as it tried to knock him down. He moved forwards, into a towering shaft. The flesh of the corridor gave way to massive iron. Spikes jutted in from the walls, a mirror of the towers on the bulk of the palace. Thick, viscous ichor dripped from the joints. The rivets were weeping eyes. And teeth were everywhere, pushing from the surface of columns and ramps, grinding at Crowe’s boots and gauntlets as he climbed. Gravity suddenly reversed. The movement of the shaft was a sudden diagonal downward plunge. Crowe grabbed a spike, crushing eyes and teeth. He held on as the leg finished its movement. It came to a jarring stop. The huge blow of the impact almost knocked him loose. His grip would have been more secure with both hands, but he held the Blade of Antwyr in his right fist. The lesson of Gavallan’s fall was present in his mind. He would not have the sword on his back.
‘The last summit you scaled did not move as much, I think,’ Sendrax called.
Crowe stormed up twisted, muttering stairs. ‘Then we should use the seconds before the next step wisely,’ he said. And we will use your art against you, he promised Mnay’salath. The daemon had not transformed the interior out of all recognition: Crowe was not trying to haul himself up veins. The interior followed the same aesthetic principle as the exterior. It achieved its obscenity by keeping the original form perceptible. Though the shaft cried madness, it was built of halls and stairs, and so the Purifiers climbed.
The leg rose and fell. The huge movement shook the Grey Knights as if they were climbing through the launch of a Stormraven and the plummet of a drop pod. Faith kept them strong. Duty gave them direction. The shaft ascended for a hundred feet. The mouths in iron screamed in frustration at the beings they could not devour. Then the angle of the ascent changed as the Grey Knights passed the leg’s articulation. The space widened, becoming vast. Crowe entered a realm of intersecting staircases and chambers. The halls piled into and through each other. Floors and walls and ceilings were at perpendiculars and diagonals. There were staircases of iron and staircases that seemed to be of grey stone, but were actually undulating flesh. Flights extended into mid-air, ended at walls, circled back on themselves, and crossed so many others they formed a webbing of lunatic pathways.
From every room, down every staircase, hooting and singing as the space rocked and shifted and rose and dropped, the daemons came. And all the fanged mouths on every surface, in their tens of thousands, spoke with the voice of Mnay’salath.
‘You are welcome to my art.
‘You are welcome to the ball.
‘You are welcome to your end.
‘I will take the sword!’
The last word echoed and re-echoed, hissed and whispered and snarled by the tens of thousands, hungry and eager and vengeful.
‘Sword, sword, sword, sword!’
The tentacles took out another militia lifter before it could land. The blow was a backwards lash. Hundreds of troops died in the insult of a monster’s afterthought. The lesser daemons swarmed to attack as the militia disembarked. They were upon Vendruhn’s forces before the Chimeras had rumbled down the embarkation ramps. In the scoured, open ground of the palace’s wake, Vendruhn had just enough warning to establish a rough infantry perimeter. Most of her soldiers were veterans of the siege of Egeta. They had not lost their terror of the abominations, but they had fought them before and survived, so they had the spiritual strength to fight them again now. They laid down a barrage of las-fire that slowed the wave of daemons. They were the same monsters Vendruhn had seen before, the patchwork animals and female grotesques. There were other horrors too. Bipedal, reptilian, hideously lissom in their movements, tongues as long as their necks licking out to taste the air and the fear, they were ridden by the female daemons. They were the cavalry of obscenity.
Hit by enough las, they dropped and burned, but more and more came. Vendruhn was not even convinced the militia had truly slowed the charge. The air was filled with daemonsong that lured and tempted and taunted. Dark joy slithered around the landing site. The thought came, as she stood behind the line and directed the arriving Chimeras into reinforcing positions, that the daemons were toying with the militia.
Toying with her. Mocking her determination and her vengeance.
Her anger enflamed her desire to lose herself in the slaughter of her enemy. But the attack forced her to remain in the realm of reason. She could not attack before her troops had disembarked. She roared her commands as if through force of will she could move the armour off the lifters herself. She fired her plasma pistol at the daemons that danced near. She moved her troops into as narrow a formation as she could, concentrating their fire as much as possible, cutting enough of a wedge into the swarm of abominations that it split in two.
The halves now arced away from the militia and returned in a sweeping motion, attacking from two sides, forcing her to divide the fire. But the bulk of the Chimeras were on the ground now, and she used their multi-lasers and heavy bolters. The waves of daemons slowed again. Though the air roiled with their musk, and the day shimmered as though it were about to transform, the last traces of reality crumbling in the void of unreason, the abominations did not launch a long-range attack. They swept closer and closer, a malevolent promise.
I will make a promise too, Vendruhn thought as she climbed onto the roof of Legacy of Glas. I swear you will come to fear me.
I am ready for you now.
As if they had been waiting for that moment, the daemons sang a triumphantly eager fanfare. The waves split again. Through the shrieking hordes, on each side, came the monstrous engines of the cavalry. Each was towed by four of the hellish steeds. The other ones were mounted. The middle two were governed by a third female creature who reigned on an elevated platform of jagged bone. The beasts pulled two parallel axles, whose entire lengths were covered in rotating discs of curved teeth. The vehicles tore the ground open as they closed in. The wounds to the earth were the foreshadowing of the joys awaiting the flesh.
The earlier charges had been simple taunts. The beasts charged, and the engines raced across the ground towards the militia with blinding speed. To the left and right, the field was suddenly full of grinding monstrosities. Vortices of spinning claws closed in on Vendruhn.
Go up, Crowe thought. All else is confusion wrought by the daemon. Ignore the art. Go up.
The daemonettes danced down the stairs towards him. With lash and claw, they swung and leapt over and around the architectural collisions of the space. They seemed to emerge from the corners of walls, revealing dead ends to be still more passages. They sang Mnay’salath’s praises and crooned the allurement of refined agony. They were the heralds of the dark artist, and they came to force the Grey Knights to join in the dance.
‘Sword, sword, sword!’ the mouths chanted.
‘On me, brothers!’ Crowe shouted.
The Purifiers closed the formation. As they did, Antwyr screamed. It filled Crowe’s mind with its curses. The claws of its rage slashed into his consciousness.
‘Father of Mankind,’ Gorvenal muttered over the vox, ‘grant me the strength to banish that voice.’ It was not the voice of the daemon Gorvenal struggled against, Crowe understood. It was the voice of Antwyr. The tight formation needed to fight the daemonettes magnified the danger the sword presented to the other Purifiers. Gorvenal’s prayer continued, a holy refrain that reinforced the resistance of all his battle-brothers.
There was no sense to the Black Blade’s howling. It was not trying to corrupt him. It was trying to blind him. Crowe saw through the tactic, and he used that knowledge to see through the red storm of the sword’s shouts. He ran up the stairs at the daemons. He fired ahead with his storm bolter, and he brought his right arm back, raising the sword. The first two abominations collapsed, their material forms smashed by the blessed shells. Another dropped down from a side
ways chamber above. Crowe swung the sword…
The moment stretching, becoming eternal in its significance.
The act not the execution of the Blade’s defeated slave.
An act of war.
The Blade used in combat for the first time by a Grey Knight.
The Blade wielded, and the Blade denied. Its terrible power held back. The Blade used as a blade and nothing else.
A new kind of prison for the daemon within.
… and cut the monster in half.
Antwyr’s raging became a long, drawn-out howl of despairing outrage. It understood the significance of what had just happened.
No! it shrieked. What have you done? What are you doing?
Crowe did not answer. He would never answer the Blade. He would not dialogue with it and so walk into its web. But he had an answer for himself. I am the Warden of the Blade, he thought. It is my prisoner. I cannot destroy it, but I will contain it, and I can punish it. It will seek my suffering, but it will suffer too. The Blade will strike for the Emperor, and never for itself.
As he made this vow, he consecrated it with another blow, destroying another daemonette.
The creatures of the Dark Prince descended in a swarm. The Purifiers were a dense fist of righteousness, and they hurled them back with sustained bursts from their storm bolters, the jetting of sacred promethium flame and the slashes of Nemesis swords.
‘Brother Garran,’ Drake said.
‘The Blade is guarded,’ Crowe told him. ‘With every blow it feels its prison.’
‘We hear its anger.’
‘It is the anger of the condemned.’
Crowe moved upwards. Always upwards. He traded one staircase for another, keeping to narrow ascents where the daemonettes could not attack in large numbers at once. The squads burned the daemons away and advanced.
Upwards. Always upwards. Through the violence of change as the Ecclesiarchal Palace walked, through the increasingly angry songs of the daemonettes, and through the covetous cries of ‘Sword, sword, sword!’ from the mouths.
At last the Grey Knights entered the bulk of the palace. The movement of the interior became less violent. Now it was a slow sway from side to side, a mountain bending to the wind. Here was the glory of the building, and it had undergone the same transformation and distortion. The confused space of the monster’s leg here achieved a transcendent scale. It was not chambers but great halls that were brought together in a tumbling kaleidoscope of madness. Immense chandeliers hung upwards and sideways. Marble floors as bright as mirrors reflected the light from each side and above. Huge windows of stained glass revealed their wonders at every angle. Their colours and their shapes represented nothing, but they articulated the elegance of horror and of madness. They blazed with infernal illumination. The flights of stairs seemed to be as thin as silk as they intertwined or floated into imperceptibility. Perspective was tortured. Floors appeared to float unattached to any walls. Every direction was up, and none were. In the malevolent generosity of the space, all the lithe and venomous creatures of the Dark Prince had the means to attack. And they did. With claw and pincer and tail and horn. With song and scent and torturous desire.
The infantry and the heavy weapons managed to bring down two of the charging engines. The rest were too fast. The harnessed beasts leapt high when they reached the militia’s lines. The abominations at the reins laughed in the flight, the sound musical and horrifying at once. The beasts came down in front of the Chimeras and rushed forwards.
The clawed axles rode over the infantry, flaying the troops to shreds. The teeth hooked into bodies, gutted them, tangled them, then brought their trapped victims back around to be ground against the earth. A harvest of blood exploded in the lines. Vendruhn fired the heavy bolter of Legacy of Glas in the same direction as the multi-laser. The combined blasts smashed through the platform of one engine and broke the axles in two. They spun off, out of control, ripping apart still more of her soldiers. The abomination on the platform sailed gracefully through the air and landed on the roof of Spear of Egeta. The daemon struck the Chimera with its lash, splitting armour. The daemon whipped the Egeta again, several more times in eye-blink succession, carving the roof open. It reached in with its claws, singing to its prey. The screams of the crew inside turned into moans before there was silence.
A round object, spinning wetly, smacked against the hatch of the Glas, blinding Vendruhn with a spray of blood. She wiped the gore from her eyes. Sergeant Barratz’s head stared back at her, eyes wide with final, forbidden knowledge.
‘Forwards!’ Vendruhn shouted into the vox. ‘All units fire forwards and advance!’ She would grind the enemy beneath her tracks as the daemons were doing to her infantry. Some of those troopers were still in her path. There was nothing to be done. They could not be saved. Advance and retaliate – that was the only meaning she had left.
But as the Chimeras lunged ahead, crushing human and daemon alike, bolter shells releasing a driving rain of blood and ichor, Vendruhn saw that she was wrong. As the rain fell on her, drenching her, driving into her nose and mouth, she understood that advance and retaliate was not the meaning. It was the path to meaning. The meaning was in the slaughter itself, in the surplus of death. In the excess of war.
She had found it again. Only here was there fulfilment. Her anger and her skill were united in the expression of battle. In the blood and the fire, in the transcendence of violence, there was joy. There was pleasure. Thoughts of pride and legacy fell away. What mattered was the battle. What mattered was the slaughter. Everything else was the road to this end.
Legacy of Glas ploughed through dying infantry and capering daemons. The abominations clutched at its hull, and she hammered them with the heavy bolter. There had been no time to repair the damage the Chimera had sustained at Dikaia, but there were still usable gun slits in its battered sides. Scarred and burned, the Glas roared to its final war, eager as its general. Las-blasts from all sides held the worst of the daemonic legions at bay long enough for the Chimera to leave the ruined wasteland behind, and reach a narrow avenue between the monstrous shrines.
Vendruhn glanced back. The rest of her armour was following, as were the infantry, though they were quickly vanishing. The daemonic engines cut back and forth, grinding soldiers to nothing. There were so many arcs of red. So many individuals turned into abstractions. The sight arrested Vendruhn’s gaze for a second, and she saw the art in the transformation. Every hope and fear and love and personal hatred rendered down to a single crimson brushstroke in the air. The absolute subtraction spoke to her. It was another wonder of war.
Another grace note in the dance that had taken Sandava II in its swirl.
Legacy of Glas raced down the avenue. On Vendruhn’s right, where the ground rose in the direction of the outer walls of Beroea, a line of headless, crucified bodies twisted against the bone nails that held them to their crosses. Their movements too were part of the dance. They writhed in synchrony with one another. They were the prisoners and the fuel of this song of atrocity.
Daemons jumped from rooftop to rooftop, keeping pace with the armoured convoy. At the rear, engines howled, metal tore and a Chimera exploded. The daemons ate into what was left of Vendruhn’s forces, one swarming attack at a time. She ignored the inevitability of defeat. The prospect had no meaning for her. She fired and fired and fired, feeling the kick of the heavy bolter up her arms, the juddering throb of shells leaving the gun. She took in the sight of their impacts, of daemonflesh erupting and shredded. She fell into the dance of excess. She had no plan now. There was no strategy to employ.
There was only the quest to find eternity in the joy of massacre.
The Grey Knights plunged into the vortex of the great daemonic ball. They charged across a great hall’s ceiling, blasted apart a chandelier and the daemonettes crouched within it. Crowe made for a spiralling flight of stairs at one corner of
the chamber. The flight bounced back and forth between three more tilted spaces. Its furthest end disappeared in the blinding light of a stained-glass window a hundred feet across. A mob of fiends barrelled towards them across the ceiling. Their hooves shattered marble. The daemons ran to block the Purifiers’ way. Storm bolters and incinerator fire cut them down. A few clambered up the wide staircase and made ready to leap on the Grey Knights. Crowe put on a burst of speed, sprinting ahead of his brothers, taking the steps three at a time. He rammed the Black Blade through three fiends in quick succession, piercing their midsections and severing their spinal columns. Then he ran upwards.
Except perhaps he was going down. The pull in his legs suggested he was. He had to pay conscious attention to avoid losing his balance and falling up this staircase. Perspective shifted again, and then again as the stair passed through the other halls. Gravity pulled Crowe one way, then the other. Directions became nonsensical, but he kept moving along the staircase. He made it his constant, one step and then another, heading towards a goal no matter the madness of the halls.
A tide of daemonettes raced along the stairs from both ends. More leapt from the wall above, or appeared from the other side of the flight, pincers and whips snapping out to catch the Grey Knights’ legs. Crowe swung the Blade to meet the daemons. He severed pincers, transpierced thoraxes. He shouldered the shuddering monsters aside, hurling them from the steps. Some fell down. Some up. Some shot away in a straight line from him and smashed against a vertical ceiling hundreds of feet away.
The feel of the sword in Crowe’s hands was strange. His lost Nemesis blade had been his faithful weapon for decades. It had been swift. Its power field had cut through enemy armour and flesh with a precision that bespoke its sacredness. Antwyr was heavier. It was balanced for the hard blow, the brutal disembowelment and the decapitation. And every strike Crowe made with the sword came against the background of the weapon’s curses. It wished him defeat and death. Every swing became a victory, a statement of imprisonment and a further punishment of the Black Blade.
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