Castellan

by David Annandale

  Crowe held the sword with both hands, pointing the blade at the heart of the rift. He and his brothers linked psychically. Crowe felt a flash of pain shoot through the others as touching his spirit brought them into closer contact with the sword. Antwyr lashed out savagely, and Crowe erected a mental wall around the daemon, shielding his brothers.

  These ramparts will not save you, castellan, said the sword. Its choice of words startled him. The attack was a deep one, hitting him precisely at the point where he sought to find the most strength. Even after all these years, he did not know how much Antwyr could see into his thoughts. That was one of the reasons why he never answered the sword’s taunts. Any dialogue would simply give the daemon more weapons to use against him. When its bolt shot home, he was unsure whether Antwyr was riffling through his mind, or if it was simply observant. They had been each other’s prisoners for so long, no matter how Crowe sealed his mind from the sword, there was much it had come to know about him. You guard nothingness, and I will throw you from your wall.

  Crowe stood firm. He held the venom of the sword close, and forged a psychic ring of iron with his brothers. Together, acting as one soul, they gathered the powers of banishment. Crowe’s nimbus shone brighter. Its intensity was piercing, and it flowed from him to join the weaker light of purity around the other Grey Knights. Blue-and-white energy built, crackling down the length of Crowe’s arms. He took the force of the warp and turned it against its ­unreality. A halo of purification surrounded the rift. It was blinding, and nothing unclean could cross it. Daemons howled and recoiled, falling back into the rift. The vortex’s movements turned jagged, as if it were a caged beast.

  ‘We are the instrument of the Emperor’s will,’ Crowe intoned at the same moment as his battle-brothers. They were a choir of one voice, one purpose. ‘No daemon shall pass. No daemon shall live. The gauntlet of the Emperor’s fist closes about the unclean fire, and extinguishes its light.’

  The halo contracted around the rift. What had been a wall became a siege engine. The energy of the vortex began to scream as though it knew real pain.

  ‘Begone!’ Crowe roared. The holy light rushed in on the vortex. It throttled the base and shot up the height of the daemonic torch. The fire of sanctity warred with the fire of corruption. The raging column thrummed and swayed, bolts of lightning striking the roof of the cathedral, disintegrating huge chunks of masonry. The balance between the powers swung back and forth, until at last a spear of pure energy pierced the night. It engulfed the corrupt light of the warp, overwhelming it with the searing clarity of faith. A sudden wind tore through the cathedral, sucked in by the implosion of the rift. It ripped pews from the stone floor, smashing them into kindling. The daemons in the nave wailed, and then, in the space above the shattered altar, there was nothing. The rift was closed.

  Crowe broke the psychic link, and the Grey Knights turned on the remaining abominations. The daemons tried to flee, but Furia’s team and Setheno blocked the path to the door. Then the wave of armoured purification swept over them, and left only the ash and pools of deliquescing daemonflesh. As the smoke of the extermination roiled out into the night, the cathedral walls reverted to stone. The building could never be consecrated again. It would have to be destroyed utterly, along with much else, but its immediate taint was gone.

  ‘A good victory,’ said Sendrax.

  ‘There is still an army of daemons loose in the city,’ Drake reminded him.

  ‘Indeed, but we are finally getting somewhere.’

  ‘I don’t think we are,’ said Crowe. ‘There is something building in the city. I know you can feel the psychic tension, brother. And what we have accomplished here has done nothing to diminish it.’ The tension was even more severe, more painful. It was a sound in Crowe’s head, a whine pitched so high it could cut through bone, a sustained note that could only end in a monstrous chord of thunder. The breaking point was still closing in. ‘At best, we have delayed the explosion.’

  In the next moment he winced. As if mocking his words, the tension ramped up, twisting like a barbed wire tourniquet. The other Grey Knights stiffened in sudden pain.

  ‘Castellan,’ Berinon voxed, ‘more rifts have opened. There are five now. Relaying you their positions.’

  Crowe blinked through his auto-senses to a display of the coordinates. He sent what he saw to his battle-brothers and the inquisitors. At first glance, the locations of the rifts appeared random.

  ‘We can no longer contain this,’ said Drake.

  Sendrax said, ‘I see no option except orbital bombardment.’

  ‘That tactic presents us still with the problem of sudden, massive psychic discharge,’ Setheno pointed out.

  ‘You agree, then, with Epistolary Gared’s assessment of that danger?’ asked Crowe.

  ‘I do. Every move of the Ruinous Powers seems designed to amplify the psychic harm.’

  And every attempt we make to counter that escalation is futile or feeds into it, Crowe thought. Sendrax was not wrong, and Crowe was tempted to order a limited bombardment, but even that would cause mass death much faster than the daemons were inflicting it at the moment. He appreciated the intelligence of the trap in which the Grey Knights found themselves, even as he raged against it. The only move left to them was also the one that would serve the enemy’s purpose.

  He examined the coordinates of the rifts again, searching for any kind of pattern, and any hint of strategy that he might have overlooked. The Black Blade’s snarling laughter rasped through his mind, coiling around the tension, squeezing the band tighter around his skull. The sword’s attack had intensified, too.

  There is something it does not want me to see, Crowe thought. He looked more closely at the immediate vicinity of each rift, and saw nothing to suggest the importance of any location. He tried again, thinking in terms of movement and angles of approach.

  He saw it. ‘The positions of the rifts create barriers on all sides of the site of the Sanctus Vincula,’ he said. ‘The abominations are not attacking a target. They are defending one.’

  ‘Stormravens inbound,’ Casca voxed. He was standing watch in the highest tower on the eastern side of the Sanctus Vincula ruins. All of the inhabitants of the hab had abandoned it before the arrival of the Emperor’s Children, first to tear each other apart, and then, as they moved farther afield, to fall to the dark pleasures of the daemons. There was no rift in the immediate vicinity, though, and there were large mobs in the sector, most of them still caught up in the frenzy of their bloody worship of the Emperor.

  For Tarautas, they were chattel, waiting for the correct moment to be slaughtered. ‘Thank you, brother,’ he said to Casca. ‘Come down and join us. There is nothing more for you to do up there.’

  The moment had come.

  Tarautas strode out from the overhang of ruined iron. His squad had taken up position in a cave formed from the collapsed remains of the manufactory. ‘The Grey Knights are coming,’ he said. ‘We march.’

  ‘Against them, finally?’ Gothola asked.

  ‘They outnumber us two to one,’ said Utheian. He was the closest any of Tarautas’ warband came to being truly pragmatic. He pursued the extremities of sensation with passion, but he also had the foresight of one who wished to remain alive to continue that pursuit. There were times when Tarautas had listened to his caution, and benefited from it.

  Today, Utheian’s warning was unnecessary.

  ‘We outnumber them by thousands to one,’ said Casca. ‘Or are you mad enough to discount the children of Slaanesh?’

  ‘They are not here,’ Utheian said. He turned around, pointing at the pulsating glows of the rifts. The nearest one was almost a mile away. ‘If the Grey Knights are targeting the Sanctus Vincula, they will see this flank is relatively unprotected.’

  ‘Be patient a bit longer,’ Tarautas told Gothola. ‘Our purpose is not to fight the Grey Knights just yet. Our t
ask is to complete the work. This is what we will do before they can slow it down. Come, ­brothers. Let us see to the great creation. Art demands cruelty.’

  The Emperor’s Children charged out from the ruins, stabbing westward towards the mob, towards the blood. In less than a minute, screams of penitence became screams of fear and pain. The gutters of the boulevards overflowed with red, and the canyons of the city cried out with the echoes of dark music. Belagas was the last Noise Marine of the warband, and there was rapture in his murderous composition as it boomed and wailed against the building façades. Tarautas drank in the song of torture. It resonated through his mechadendrites, their electrical bursts matching its rhythm as they seared new wounds into his flesh. He waded through the mob, mutilating quickly, but with precision. This was not a massacre for the Blood God. This was not an accumulation of skulls, but of sensation. Tarautas’ victims were still alive when he left them writhing on the rockcrete pavement. They had time to contemplate their end, to experience in full the new horizons of pain he opened up to them. If they did not appreciate the revelation, that was of little importance. Each voice made the choir greater. Each note of pain was a needed thread in the tapestry being woven in Algidus.

  Tarautas looked back towards the ruins. The two Stormravens were descending. There was nothing between them and the Sanctus Vincula. Awful doubt seized him. Perhaps he had been overconfident. Perhaps the murder he and his brothers were now committing was not enough.

  He stopped moving, glaring at the gunships. The silver of their hulls was dull in the weak light of Desma, yet its purity was still a jab in the eye. For long, terrible seconds, Tarautas feared he had, in the end, failed in his service to the Dark Prince.

  The ground quivered, and told him he had not failed. It began to shake.

  Tarautas held up his hands in joy and worship. ‘Oh, my brothers!’ he shouted into the vox. ‘Turn and see! Turn and see! Turn and see!’

  The Purgation’s Sword banked sharply, passing through the triple peak of a tower that had been the home of merchant nobles, evading the rifts that had opened on either side of the opulently carved palace. The gunship flew out over the Sanctus Vincula. Berinon dropped the nose of the Sword and descended to within twenty feet of the ground.

  Before Crowe could leap, the ruins started to tremble. The dark mass of twisted, melted, burned rubble, more than a mile long on each side, shook like a beast about to wake. The black silhouettes of fallen structures wavered. Weakened heaps fell. Old ash rose, a cloud of grainy darkness.

  Crowe pulled back from the open side door of the gunship. He gasped in pain. The psychic tension screamed, its limit reached. Over the vox, Gared, riding in the Harrower, tried to shout a warning, but his words disintegrated in a cry of agony. Blood flowed from Crowe’s ears and eyes. A red-hot razor sliced through his brain. His nerves and his soul were on fire. Antwyr shouted, deafening him. The sword exulted in his pain, and drove the agony to new heights.

  ‘Pull back,’ Crowe ordered. He could barely form the words. ‘Do not land. Retreat from the Sanctus Vincula.’

  He managed to keep his feet. Drake and Sendrax were clutching bulkheads to keep from falling. Gorvenal was on his knees, and Carac was punching the inner wall of the fuselage as if to batter his pain into submission. The vox was a confusion of shouts, but Crowe’s orders were heard. Berinon reversed course. The engines howled with strain at the sudden change, and the Stormraven climbed in a steep diagonal. It and the Harrower rose above the hab complexes next to the ruins, almost brushing against the roofs of the towers.

  Crowe clutched the edge of the doorway. His lips pulled back against the force of psychic pain. His body’s instinct was to retreat inside the gunship, to turn away from the coming explosion as if from the birth of a sun, but he forced himself to see. He would bear witness. He would know what was being wrought on Angriff Primus.

  The ruins of Sanctus Vincula heaved upwards, a bubble of ferrocrete and iron. The great mass bulged to half the height of the towers. The tremors spread across the city, their violence toppling spires further out. A sound rose from beneath the ruins. It was deeper than the grinding of tectonic plates, and more complex. Bedrock and metal and seething energy formed a single chord, a tritone of perfect malevolence, a peal that should never be sounded. It came from the core of the planet, a world’s agony summoned and transmuted into a most terrible art. The tritone shot to the surface, rising from thunder to shriek. It blew apart the ruins of the Sanctus Vincula, and it became light. A beam of warp energy blasted into the sky. It was as wide as the manufactory. It was a violet as searing as destruction itself. The air over Algidus roiled in its passage, rushing away from the site with hurricane force. It spun the gunships, seized them and tried to hurl them down against the towers. Berinon and Warheit fought the gale and kept control, righting the Stormravens and pulling them further away from the explosion.

  The vortex of winds was a minor effect. The full, monstrous strength of the blast was in the beam, and it went up, away from Algidus, away from Angriff Primus. Its target was not on that world. When Crowe saw where the beam went, he understood its purpose. Too late, he saw the greater pattern that had been woven. The unholy blaze cut through the void. It split the night. It travelled light seconds across the system. Desma was at the zenith, and the beam struck the planet in the centre of the globe.

  Crowe looked up, his psychic pain easing with the release of the energy. He could think more clearly, and he watched the distant cata­clysm unfold with a mixture of hate and cold analysis.

  You know what comes next, said the sword, and it was right. You know you cannot fight an enemy that commands this power, Antwyr gloated, and that was a lie.

  Yet he felt the crushing power of awe, and he fought against it.

  The molten glow in the centre of Desma travelled north and south on the globe, a lethal meridian. The wound opened wider. It ran deep. It cut all the way through. Desma blazed with the light of ending, and then the two halves of the planet separated. The foul miracle continued as Desma did not shatter. The hemispheres moved away from each other. Their interior faces raged with the fires that, once freed, should have annihilated the unnatural forms. Lava and fire raced over the surfaces. The seas boiled and the air burned. All life on Desma died, yet its presence, now doubled, remained in the Angriff system.

  The gap between the hemispheres widened. They parted forever, the force of the beam pushing them off into new orbits.

  ‘Our victory on Sandava III is undone,’ said Crowe.

  There had been seven worlds in the Angriff system. Now there were eight. A daemonic number.

  Warp energy still blasted from beneath the surface of Angriff Primus. After the initial blast, it forked into two streams of endless lightning. And the tritone went on and on. Its source felt closer now.

  Crowe looked away from the new planets, and gazed into the crater left by the blast. The sword exulted and raged and mocked. It shouted the promise of its victory and its death. Crowe defied it. This, he thought, is what we have come to fight. This is what we will defeat.

  The tritone thundered, and the dust clouds of the explosion gradually dropped, revealing the thing in the crater.

  Chapter Thirteen

  A Miracle of Rare Device

  The palace rose on a column of rock. The crater inverted itself, carrying that which had lain hidden for millennia into the brilliance of the incandescent night. The sky burned, and the city burned, flames above and flames surrounding the grinding climb of rock, a ferocious dance of praise. For miles around the crater, Algidus trembled and fell as the palace rose. New canyons radiated out from the column, narrow abysses suddenly opening in streets and swallowing structures. Daemons and mortals fell into the crevasses. The citizens of Algidus screamed in despair, but the abominations revelled in the destruction, even if it was their own. The warp rifts faded away, their purpose accomplished, their energy taken by the
great centre of the art. Daemons by the thousands turned from their atrocities and moved as a swarm through the shattered city towards the palace.

  The palace glittered, a crown jewel of decadence and pain. It was a thing carved from monoliths of amethyst and opal, if those stones were tainted by the sensuality of torture. Its wings were surmounted by narrow, twisting spires. They were elegant and cruel, a frozen dance of architecture. Thin as they were, they conveyed the strength of claws. They curved inwards as they rose, leaning so far over the roof of the palace that their peaks almost touched. They were the sources of the warp lightning. The constant blasts lashed out into the void, now at one half or the other of Desma, now at the more distant worlds trapped in the Angriff system. As soon as the palace began its emergence, a third stream of lightning began. Instead of originating with the palace, it came from the void, though from no great distance. The lightning stabbed down from orbit and struck the inverted dome that formed the centre of the palace.

  The tritone sounded again and again, creating the shattering foundation for the song that reverberated across Algidus, and rode the lightning through the system. The hoots of fiends and trilling of daemonettes were the melody. Legions of abominations forged a choir with a single purpose, conducted by a single will. The song was immense in power, rich in structure, poisonous in its nature. It promised only damnation. Its threat was its lure. The millions of civilians still alive in Algidus heard it, and succumbed. The wretched survivors in the blackened cities of the rest of the planet heard it, too, and they succumbed. So did the billions who had lived until this moment on the other planets of Angriff. Torn from their home systems, their civilisations burned in lethal proximity to the star, or froze to death, distant from its heat. Others died more slowly, their cities shattered again and again by gravitational storms as their planets passed too close to each other. But on every captured world, enough of the populations survived to hear the song, and they succumbed.