Warden of the Blade

by David Annandale

  The daemon’s build and stance clicked into place. They were martial.

  Details of the paintings took on pointed meaning. Telling elements of the perspective. There was a heavy bolter turret just visible at the bottom of the tableau of the street battle. The death of Gavallan was seen from a high perspective, as if the witness were being held in the air. The death of Dikaia shown from inside the storm of the orbital bombardment.

  ‘Vendruhn Glas,’ Crowe said. The pattern stretching over the decades was only partly his, then. It was also hers. Her journey had not ended, as he had thought, beneath the ruins of the palace. The whim of the Ruinous Powers had raised her to daemonhood. This was the end point of her fanaticism. She was an artefact of vengeance.

  At the sound of the name, the daemon hissed in anger. ‘Varangallax!’ it shouted, the name smashing its old identity to shards. ‘You vowed to save one world of Sandava,’ Varangallax said. ‘I have vowed to destroy another.’

  ‘We saved Sandava II,’ Crowe said, still circling, thinking about the nature of his enemy. So much repetition, so much echoing, so little that was new, only the old patterns repeated. The repetitions were powerful. Memories were. They had been almost strong enough to ensnare him. He studied this monster of reflection and bitterness, and he experienced an important doubt. Though Varangallax was at the centre of the dance, he doubted this daemon was the author of this trap. He suspected it too was ensnared. ‘We saved the soul of Sandava II,’ Crowe said. ‘We gave the world the peace of oblivion, freed of the corruption you now embody.’

  ‘Did you?’ Varangallax snarled. ‘Did you?’ Blood erupted from the paintings and washed across the floor of the hall. A hiss, a shaking of glass and light, a shifting of the reflections, memories reassembled and reconsidered, and the daemon calmed. ‘No matter. There is no salvation. There is only transcendence.’

  A pause, and the air crackled with the coming attack.

  ‘Only transcendence,’ the daemon repeated. ‘And I will have it!’ Varangallax shrieked, and extended its arms.

  It hurled a storm of stained glass against Crowe. Thousands of jagged shards struck every second. They overwhelmed the energy field of his iron halo. They cut deep into his armour. They sliced through his black carapace. The hail pierced his flesh and poisoned his blood. He was assailed by the pounding fragments of a world’s agony. And among the memories were the echoes of Mnay’salath’s attacks. The daemonic scream, the lash and the dance that shattered bone stabbed into Crowe. The fragments sought to fragment him. They sought to reduce him to a shattered mirror of agony.

  They sought to render him hollow.

  He forced his right leg forwards. He completed a step against the howl of the lethal wind. He took another.

  I am whole of purpose. I am the instrument of His will, and that is indivisible.

  Another step. Another. Faster now.

  His identity had value only as it served the Emperor. Transcendence was not the ecstasy of war. It was in the most perfect service.

  His flame burned. The perfidy of the immaterium burned before it. He charged through the hurricane of warp glass and closed with the daemon.

  Varangallax howled in rage. The glass erupted from its entire form. The daemon smashed its gladius-sized claws into Crowe’s flanks at the same moment that he ran the Black Blade through its torso.

  The daemon’s body was brittle. The Blade burst out of its back. Its claws plunged through the rents in Crowe’s armour and punched into his reinforced ribs.

  In the centre of the tableaus, another took form. The wind of glass raged. Crowe and Varangallax were motionless. Daemon and Grey Knight reached into the other’s very being. Varangallax’s convulsive desire for the perfection of slaughter burned through his veins. It sought his anger, his frenzy.

  Militant patience.

  He answered with the iron determination of faith. The faith of cold, implacable fire. The fire he unleashed in the centre of the daemon.

  Unslakeable desire fought with immovable faith. Desire burned creation in the quest for the eternally absent. Faith exulted in the service to an eternal core. Crowe had the unalterable reality of the Emperor. Varangallax had only need.

  The daemon was hollow. Crowe was not. The truth burst upon him with the force of revelation. The Black Blade eroded him, it sought to turn him into a shell, but it could not empty him of his faith. As long as the Emperor was on His throne, there was the strength Crowe needed. His faith was a source of power and guidance as unending as the Astronomican.

  Crowe saw the illusion of the symmetries. The lies woven around Sandava III fell apart. The pattern had sought to make him despair, and its failure was its destruction. The past had come to claim him. The past held Varangallax prisoner, trapping the daemon in a cycle of diminished, false repetition.

  Crowe had entered into his destiny on Sandava II. His path was not a circle, and it was not ending on Sandava III. He understood the lesson of the past and the present. Gavallan had found his successor, and so foreseen the end of his journey. There was no one to take up Crowe’s burden, and so he found his new strength.

  Crowe bled. The sympathetic vibrations of the daemonic dance splintered his bones. His hearts began to beat out of synch with each other. The Black Blade of Antwyr pounced on his agony. Call upon me. Let me strike. Let this be an end to pretence, an end to false symmetry. I shall be your true freedom.

  Crowe did not look for freedom. He looked for the perpetuity of service. He held sword and daemon prisoner in the iron of purity.

  Varangallax’s frenzy grew. It had no purchase on him. Its perfection was not here. The daemon screamed in frustration. It could do no more than rend his body apart. So it would. The claws of glass tightened into fists, dragging through muscle. Crowe’s blood poured in torrents to the floor.

  The daemon took his blood. He gave it his fire. He called upon the full force of the cleansing flame. It entwined with the unchanging fact of his burning faith. The two flames exploded inside the daemon. They erupted through absence. The thing the mortal Vendruhn had lost, that had curdled into fanaticism for its own sake, and then into the void of desire, consumed the emptiness of the monster. Varangallax released Crowe. The daemon staggered back, yanking itself free of Crowe’s hands and the sword. But the psychic fire could not now be extinguished. It devoured the nothingness, burning more and more fiercely. The daemon took one more step, then froze, limbs rigid, jaw agape. The storm of glass became a whirlwind, turning back on its host. Crowe’s sacred fire scoured Varangallax with memories of what had been lost, burning it with the very wounds it had thought to inflict on Crowe. The fire bellowed from its jaws, reaching for the dome fifty feet above.

  Crowe swung the sword and shattered the flanks of the daemon. The flames burst from the broken glass. He struck again and again, smashing the hollow thing. At last there was only a fireball of white, searing flame and the scream of unutterable desire. Then the scream burned too, and the flames faded.

  Crowe took a long breath. Things rattled in his chest, but the worst of his bleeding had stopped. For several moments his breathing was the only sound. The dance had ended. The tower was still. He turned to face the entrance. The manufactoria were mundane ruins. Their volition had evaporated. Sound returned as, outside, the daemons shrieked. Their celebration was at an end. The source of the power that held them to the materium was gone.

  His vox-bead crackled to life. ‘Castellan.’ The voice was Sendrax’s. ‘Are you receiving?’

  ‘I am,’ Crowe said.

  ‘What is your position?’

  ‘The Labos spire. The source of the incursion is no more.’

  ‘Hold fast, brother castellan. We have Stormravens heading to your location.’

  ‘I am glad to hear it.’

  Crowe walked towards the spire’s archway. His boots crunched on the last, faded traces of warp glass. He paused, thi
nking as he gathered his strength for the final extermination of the daemons on Sandava III.

  Victory on the world was assured, yet he felt no real triumph. There was a greater labour that he knew was incomplete. He felt a contained, simmering rage at a manipulation that had stretched over decades and brought devastation to two worlds. There had been patterns in conflict. Antwyr had tried to use the machinations of other powers to its advantage. It had failed, though in the process it had rendered the full picture even more opaque. What Crowe perceived with clarity was that he would be mistaken to believe the web of events begun on Sandava II had finally been torn asunder and burned.

  There was another artist at work. A greater one. There had to be. The daemonic Vendruhn had been used. She was part of the pattern, not its originator.

  The Black Blade scraped once more at the wall of his soul. It said nothing for the moment, preferring to press its will against the wall, always and forever seeking the cracks it might pry apart.

  Let it try. His banner still flew, pronouncing the truth. He was not the sword’s victim. It was his prisoner. He was the Warden, and his vigilance was unwavering.

  The exhaustion had not left him. The erosion was real. He had not reversed the toll of the decades since Sandava II. There had, though, been a change. He had stepped to the edge of an abyss. Perhaps, to his shame, the abyss was despair. The symmetries of Sandava III had almost pushed him over. They had seemed too much like a form of inevitable destiny. Not one that was earned through faith and devotion to duty, but a doom, a malign accumulation of events that would not be avoided, no matter how hard he fought against them. He had thought he was caught, forced to repeat Gavallan’s failure.

  But he had smashed the lie.

  His path was clear once more. He would seek out the greater artist. He would destroy it, and all its works.

  With a shout, with his fire burning high in his soul, he charged out of the tower, roaring his challenge to the abominations he would exterminate to end this war, and his warning to the one he would find in the next.

  I accept this task.

  About the Author

  David Annandale is the author of the Horus Heresy novel The Damnation of Pythos and the Primarchs novel Roboute Guilliman: Lord of Ultramar. He has also written the Yarrick series, several stories involving the Grey Knights, and The Last Wall, The Hunt for Vulkan and Watchers in Death for The Beast Arises. For Space Marine Battles he has written The Death of Antagonis and Overfiend. He is a prolific writer of short fiction, including the novella Mephiston: Lord of Death and numerous short stories set in The Horus Heresy, Warhammer 40,000 and Age of Sigmar universes. David lectures at a Canadian university, on subjects ranging from English literature to horror films and video games.

  For Margaux, and all the days of joys.

  A Black Library Publication

  First published in Great Britain in 2016

  This eBook edition published in 2016 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,

  Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

  Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

  Warden of the Blade © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2016. Warden of the Blade, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.

  All Rights Reserved.

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-1-78572-227-1

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.