Castellan

by David Annandale

  Vohnum grunted, clearly unhappy with the mystery of wider war. ‘It would be nice, when disrupting the enemy’s goals, to know what they are.’

  ‘So it would,’ Styer agreed. ‘But we are no strangers to fighting with those goals obscured.’ Ever since the Sanctus Reach, it seemed, that had been the lot of his squad. Crowe saw emerging patterns on Sandava III that linked the struggle to the Purifiers’ past. Styer believed he was right. The justicar perceived links relevant to his squad, too. The confluence of fates did not surprise him. Nothing should. If the Astronomican had failed, there could be no more surprises.

  The Malleus roared through the daemons, across the dry channel, and onto the mainland. Styer watched the daemons, and they watched him. They cavorted. Daemonettes danced in whirling, sinuous mockery just ahead of the Crusader. Fiends gibbered their idiot song. But the sea of abominations continued to part, letting the tank pass. They did not attack, and neither did Styer. He had to make a conscious effort not to pull the trigger of the multi-melta.

  ‘They retreat, and we flee,’ Vohnum snarled.

  ‘You know we do not, brother,’ Styer told him. ‘We pull back our fist to strike all the harder.’

  He understood Vohnum’s frustration, though. He trusted Gared and Crowe’s analysis. He believed in the castellan’s strategy to counter the work the daemons were labouring to complete, whatever that goal might ultimately be. But this first move went against his instincts and his training.

  He stared with loathing at the endless ranks of abominations. The ocean of warp spawn undulated over the landscape. And the Malleus Maleficarum charged on, racing south-west in a straight line from Skoria, obeying the single command Crowe had given.

  Go as far as possible.

  The journey to the underhive showed Crowe how shallow the roots of faith in Skoria truly were. He and Drake’s squad encountered pockets of the faithful, tiny enclaves of the desperate who held fast to their belief in the Emperor here in the absence of light and the dominion of death and squalor, but too many of Skoria’s subterranean citizens had despaired. And in their despair, they had turned to heresy.

  The Purifiers travelled into the depths along the widest avenues of descent. They had to. Behind them came scores of militia and manufactory serfs, driving a narrow-gauge transport barely large enough for the cargo it held. It was possible to bring the vehicle down to the underhive, using the massive grav lifts of a foundry a few miles north of the wall. The mines under Skoria were still active, and the manufactory drew its raw material directly from them. The grav lifts took the vehicle down to the bottom of the underhive. From there, the Purifiers escorted it along the major underground thoroughfares to its destination.

  The roads through the underhive were crude. They were dug out of the bedrock, repaired and reinforced in haphazard fashion. Deep pools of industrial waste lay stagnant across them. The patchwork homes of the underhive denizens crowded in on both sides, the cast-offs of the hive’s society living in the cast-offs of its production. There were very few lumen globes still functioning. The illumination came from the headlamps of the transport and the glow of fires from gas burn-offs and ruptured pipes. Thick, viscous effluent ran down all the walls, glistening like disease. The stench was ferocious.

  The people were worse.

  War consumed the underhive. Despair battled with faith, and in its awful exuberance, despair was winning. The shadows boiled with violence. Screams of abandoned ecstasy roared through the low tunnels of the underhive. The heretics fell on the loyal, butchering them in the deluded belief that they might somehow curry the favour of the daemons when they arrived.

  ‘The foundations of Skoria are already lost,’ Drake said, marching one pace behind Crowe.

  ‘They are,’ Crowe agreed. ‘So what we do today is doubly necessary.’

  The road dropped, and the convoy advanced into a riot. If there were any of the faithful still present, they were impossible to see. Desperate, ragged humans tore at each other with scraps of metal and their bare hands. They battered each other’s skulls open with clubs of stone and lead piping. They ripped the dead apart in a desperate frenzy, draping themselves with organs and painting themselves with blood in attempts to outdo each other in degradation.

  Crowe’s lips pulled back in disgust. These things were beyond vermin. They were lower than the brown scum that floated on the pools of sewage. He glanced back at the militia and the serfs. They were looking at him rather than at the heretics. He was the true locus of their terror. They knew what he was thinking. How much longer would it have taken for the upper reaches of Skoria to become as corrupted as the underhive? Not long at all. Even now, he suspected it was the fear of the Grey Knights more than the love of the Emperor that kept these people from heresy.

  There was very little to save on this planet. But there was much to destroy.

  Crowe turned back to the tumult. ‘Open fire,’ he commanded the militia. ‘Kill everything in our path.’

  As the lasrifles cut into the rioters, Crowe and the Purifiers marched into them, wielding blades. They did not waste storm bolter rounds on these creatures. It was enough of an insult that the Nemesis weapons had to be put to such lowly use.

  Crowe’s anger lit the darkness of the tunnel. The most corrupted of the heretics screamed at his approach, burning before he cut them down with the Blade of Antwyr.

  You are right to hate them, said the sword. Darken the sky with the smoke of their pyres. Submit, and we will incinerate them in a moment. The daemons will kneel in the next.

  Crowe tempered his fury to cold judgement. His anger was too close to what Antwyr desired. ‘Our purpose is not extermination,’ he voxed to the other Purifiers. They would feel the same anger he did, and the sword would be scratching at their minds to be let in. ‘Our task is to advance, and to make the preparations for the true attack.’ They had to kill these fallen wretches to carve a path for the transport. Anything else was a distraction. In the presence of the Blade, anything else was a temptation.

  It took hours of wading through the mindless riots to reach the destination. The transport stopped in the geographic centre of Skoria, at the intersection of mining shafts. Serfs rushed to prepare a berth for the cargo. The militia set up a cordon and kept up a stream of fire into the tunnels on all sides. The heretics rushed out of their darkness and died, miserable lives brought to a violent end in the malodorous shadows.

  When the preparations were almost complete, Crowe turned to Vester. The governor, in his role as colonel, had elected to accompany his troops on this mission rather than lead the defence of the wall. ‘You know what must be done,’ Crowe said.

  ‘I do, lord. We will not fail.’ Vester spoke with true, renewed faith. By coming to these depths, knowing full well what the mission entailed, the governor had done much to redeem himself in Crowe’s eyes.

  ‘Good,’ said Crowe. ‘The Emperor protects, and your path to his throne is clear now.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Vester bowed deeply.

  The militia’s lines were steady. They would be able to hold back the heretics for as long as was necessary. Crowe surveyed the work, and was satisfied. ‘All shall be accomplished,’ he said to Drake as the Purifiers left the militia behind. ‘We will give the daemons the song of their nightmares.’

  Chapter Four

  The Glory of Sandava III

  The great cannons of the Sacrum Finem fired into the surging tide of daemons. It was their last barrage. Their huge voices boomed five times. Their shells carved even deeper scars into the land. Thousands of daemons vanished in the immense fireballs of the detonations. Then the guns fell silent.

  Across Skoria, the citizens looked to each other in dread. The deafening thunder of the guns had been the guarantor that their final day had not come yet. The silence was more terrible than a death knell. The turret emplacements still fired, as did the ranks of militia and conscripts
on the ramparts, but those reports were paltry after the majesty of the strike cruiser’s armament. The gunfire now was the sound of a last stand. And the Grey Knights had left the city. The people were alone.

  The daemonic tide was endless. Fresh roars filled the silence, and new waves of abominations flowed over the craters. The daemons stormed up the wall and over the parapets. They hurled themselves at the gate, and after so many days of siege, the huge doors gave way before the battering ram of unholy flesh.

  Cardinal Reikart Mihok was on the wall when the wave came. He was attempting to lead the combatants in martial prayer, but he barely heard the words he uttered, and he took no strength or comfort from them. Though duty demanded his presence, it was fear that had brought him to the wall. He had initially resisted Vester’s insistence that he join the front lines. He had spent the first day of the siege in the Chapel of Saint Alverese, preaching faith and resistance from his pulpit, as he had done since the beginning of Sandava III’s agony. But with the daemons so close, doom looming over the threshold to the city, he had been consumed by the terror of wondering when the abominations would burst through the chapel doors. In the end, it was better to see them coming. It was better to know.

  Or so he had thought. Before this day, it had been better to stand on the ramparts because he had seen the power of those terrifying warriors of the Emperor. They were almost as frightening as the daemons, and it had been with inexpressible relief that Mihok had seen them turn their fury on the abominations. He could not stand their gaze. He could not stand their judgement. The leader of the strike force was the worst. His black sword was a monster, a thing so unclean that Mihok sought refuge in prayer whenever he drew near it. The blade was dangerous to look at, yet held tight by a remorseless will. Mihok never saw the castellan without his helmet, but he could feel Crowe’s eyes. He knew Crowe saw how he had failed his calling and his flock, and despised him for it.

  So Mihok stood on the wall through the siege. He was here now, in the awful silence of the guns, bearing witness to the coming end. The people of Skoria, trained or not, lined the parapets five deep. The las barrage was constant. And it was futile, little more than a blaze of defiance. Daemons burned and fell back, but what mattered, and what Mihok saw, was the unstoppable surge, the hideous multitude that swept over the battlements and onto the wall. Creatures of desire and excess ripped into the human lines. Lithe figures both beautiful and hideous snapped the limbs off defenders with their claws and laughed with pleasure as they toyed with the mutilated victims. There would be no swift deaths on this day.

  Mihok’s prayer died away. The words turned to dust in his mouth. He staggered back, the rockcrete cracking beneath his feet from the sudden trampling of uncountable abominations. He retreated until his shoulders hit the rear crenellations, and there was nowhere left for him to go.

  A daemon leapt high over the wall and landed before Mihok. It was tall and pale, its features a blurring of male and female into a fusion of sensuality fed by pain. One arm ended in a massive pincer. The other wielded a whip with three tails, each ending in a barbed hook. It looked down at the cardinal, its lips parted, its serpentine tongue licking out to taste his fear. When he whimpered, the daemon laughed and struck with its whip. Mihok screamed as the hooks tore his flesh away.

  The abomination was in no hurry. It kept the cardinal alive through the extremities of his torture. He was still breathing when it peeled his face from his skull and showed him the rag of flesh.

  Over the wall and through the gates, the daemons poured into Skoria. The militia fought street by street, but the abominations might as well have been unopposed. The defenders gave them more to savour, but the flood did not slow. Through the avenues, into the manufactoria, into the hab blocks and towers and grimy palaces of Skoria came the rampaging stream of horror. Blood and fire spread. The walls of the towers glistened with the cataracts of gore. The forges of Skoria went out of control. Smoke and flame raced upward, consuming the hive. Thousands of citizens were immolated within minutes, and they were the fortunate few. Tens of thousands fell to the butchery of the daemons, their deaths prolonged and refined, the human body transformed into seeping tributes to art and joy.

  Hundreds of thousands died.

  Millions howled for salvation and release, but the twisting, writhing sky was not open to entreaty. It bulged down towards Skoria, licking the peaks of its spires with violet and emerald flame. The collective howl of the revel drowned out the screams. Skoria reverberated with the triumph of its captors. The hive became a burning, moaning, chanting, rasping throat of sensation itself. The rockcrete of the walls began to tremble like flesh on the verge of ultimate paroxysm.

  The song of the daemons rose to the sky. The sky answered, turning into vortices. Yet the song was incomplete, and there were false notes, fracturing the whole. The daemons shredded the citizens of Skoria in triumph, yet they called out, too, seeking an enemy that had not answered their challenge.

  The symphony of corruption roared, suspended in frustration.

  On his spire in Conatum, Ossidius frowned. ‘Something is wrong,’ he said. The war was out of tune. The chords of his sonic blaster were suddenly no longer in key or synchronisation with the echoes arriving from Skoria.

  ‘How do you know?’ Livra asked. He was sharpening his talons against the stonework of the roof. The instrument was almost complete, and he was eager to indulge in the torture and murder of all the remaining slaves.

  ‘Can’t you hear?’

  ‘Not very much.’

  ‘That is the problem.’

  ‘It’s over, then?’ Livra sounded angry at having missed out on the battle. ‘So the work is complete?’

  ‘No. This isn’t a conclusion. Where is your sense of art, Livra? There is nothing complete about this.’

  ‘The enemy was weaker than expected.’

  Ossidius shook his head. ‘The Grey Knights would not have gone down so quickly.’

  He listened to the muted grumble of carnage, and grew uneasy.

  The Malleus Maleficarum had reached its target point and had turned around. In the air, the Purgation’s Sword and the Harrower were also moving to their attack vectors. Crowe stood in the open side door of the Purgation’s Sword, looking forwards to the north-east, towards Skoria. The hive was barely visible, a small, spiny silhouette on the horizon, blurred by the rising smoke. Crowe’s gaze was steady. He knew what was happening in the streets and towers of the hive. The faith of the citizenry of Skoria had been found wanting, but there was no satisfaction to be had in what was befalling them.

  They were weak, said Antwyr. This is what they merit.

  The sword was coming at him in another oblique attack, seeking to align itself with what it believed he was already thinking. It was wrong, though. The people of Skoria did not deserve what was taking them. Their doom was inevitable. What was just had little to do with the realities of war, especially the struggle against the daemonic. There was nothing just in the exterminated populaces that marked the passage of the Grey Knights. There was nothing just in the mind-wiping of Space Marines who encountered them. There was only the mission, to preserve the Imperium from the ravages of the daemon. Antwyr perceived Crowe’s actions, and thought it discerned the absence of pity, because that was what it understood. It was wrong. Crowe knew pity and its wounds. But he also knew when to see it for a weakness, and when to crush it.

  Even if it was necessary always to crush it, he still knew what it was.

  He crushed pity now, but he did not crush mercy. The action he was taking was necessary, but it was also merciful. The people of Skoria had always been doomed. There could be mercy in the form their end took.

  He voxed Kalab Vester, who had earned the right to this moment. ‘The moment has come, governor.’

  ‘We have held the position, lord. We are ready. And thank you.’

  Crowe turned to Techmarine B
ray, who for this mission was riding in the Purgation’s Sword rather than with Styer’s squad in the Malleus Maleficarum. ‘Do it now,’ Crowe said.

  Bray triggered the remote detonator he had constructed and linked to the Sword’s vox. In the deep foundations of Skoria, the death of a city received the signal. There, placed at Crowe’s command, was a cyclonic torpedo. It was buried with the warhead facing upwards, so that the greater energy of the blast went back up to the surface instead of down into the core. The full force of the weapon would be dispersed.

  Crowe’s purpose was not to destroy Sandava III.

  Merely a portion of it would suffice.

  The torpedo exploded. The hive disappeared in a colossal eruption. This was Crowe’s act of mercy. The suffering of thirty million citizens ended at once as a burst of magma more than ten miles wide shot upwards, the jetting of a severed artery that reached as high as the tortured sky. The city turned into a geyser of molten fragments.

  That was the first moment of the destruction.

  In the second, the full pressure of the detonation shattered a chunk of crust more than a hundred miles in radius and hurled the fragments into the air. Dust and fire consumed the eastern seaboard of Sandava III’s principal land mass. The land fell into an incandescent crater. The distortions wrought by Chaos melted away in the vast cauldron. A wound had opened on the surface of the planet like a screaming maw, and its agony was a purification. The holocaust swallowed the daemonic hordes. The army without end suddenly become finite as the massed abominations perished in the apocalypse that raged from Skoria to the edges of Conatum.

  Crowe fulfilled his vow. He burned the sea.

  A new chord battered the land. It was not a song shaped by the power that ruled the fate of Sandava III. It was too huge, too great, an immense disruption of the daemonic melody. Ossidius cried out. The fusion of physical destruction and the colossal psychic spike of millions of daemons cast back into the warp in an instant was a sensation greater than any he had yet experienced. It gave him no pleasure. It overwhelmed, and it was the thunder of defeat.