Castellan

by David Annandale

  There were two squads in the chamber now. Styer’s battle-brothers outnumbered the Emperor’s Children by two. But the monstrous eruptions of energy worked against the Grey Knights. The power of the chamber was the power that controlled the movement of planets, and it would not tolerate the invaders.

  The Emperor’s Children tightened their formation into a circle. The Grey Knights surrounded them. Shells, sonic blasts and warp fire erupted across the chamber between the two forces. The sphere vanished, the thunder roared, and then the coruscating tendrils struck inwards from the walls again. They were beyond counting, and this time, as if attracted to a purity that must be destroyed, scores of them lashed the Grey Knights with the lightning of distilled Chaos.

  The abominations filled the bowl beneath the dome. They raged at Crowe and Drake’s squad. The songs of the daemonettes were threaded with desperate anger. The hooting whistles of the fiends were high-pitched, shrieking warnings. They fought the Purifiers in a manner Crowe had rarely seen in the creatures of the Dark Prince. The daemons took no pleasure in their struggle. The sensuality of the monsters was subsumed by cruel precision and an implacable, focused need to destroy the foe. There was no attempt to seduce humans with obscene extremities of sensation. The daemons sought to stop the Purifiers’ advance, and nothing more.

  Yet even in their desperation, they were monsters of the art. They remained linked to the palace’s cosmic song. Their movements and the waves of their attacks were governed by the dread rhythm.

  Crowe used their nature against them. He used their desperation, too. The assault of the daemonic tempo was more than familiar to him now. It was as firm and constant as the floor beneath his feet. He read the timing of the daemons’ attacks, and hit them in the gaps between the beats. He lunged with the Black Blade as if he were attacking the music itself. One daemon at a time, he broke the choir.

  The more abominations he destroyed, the more urgent their need to stop him became. They grew more and more reckless. Many threw themselves at him, trying to stop him through sheer mass. They burned as they came near. The light of purity at its most unforgiving turned them, screaming, to ash.

  Behind him, Drake’s squad carved a wide path through the monsters. They marched down the bowl’s staircase with a deliberate pace. Destrian’s incinerator and Venrik’s psycannon scythed through the approaching daemons. The Nemesis weapons and storm bolters took apart those that made it through the fire and psychic bolts.

  The resistance stiffened the closer the Purifiers came to the bottom of the bowl. The blowback from the lightning strikes grew fiercer. Gorvenal maintained a constant litany of prayer over the vox, and Crowe could hear the strain in his voice. Only the most infinitesimal portion of the energy escaped into the wider area of the bowl. Even so, the shocks that radiated through the materium were worse than any of the daemonic blows. Reality turned brittle. The immaterium pushed at the weakening veil.

  Crowe descended into a gathering storm. It buffeted him. Flecks of warp fire scraped at him like the blasts of a sandstorm.

  The stairs ended at a level area a few dozen yards in diameter. In the centre, the lightning struck a circular void. The gap was less than ten feet across. Having failed to stop the Purifiers’ descent, the daemons now tried to hurl them into the lightning.

  ‘Defend our position,’ Crowe ordered. ‘We must be the authors of our next move.’

  Destrian and Venrik took up the rear and trained their weapons up the slope, creating a shield of opposing fire. Gorvenal and Carac wove storm bolter fire between the flames and psycannon bolts. They held the daemons back, though the position was tenuous.

  Crowe approached the gap in the floor. Drake followed, giving him covering fire.

  ‘You plan to go through that?’ Drake asked, disbelieving.

  ‘Somehow,’ Crowe answered. Something was being fed by the lightning. The true enemy was not yet apparent. There was somewhere deeper to go, even if that was not necessarily still in the palace.

  After each lightning strike, the opening flashed again. Energy spun in a seething vortex. The storm was a momentary one, but before it could dissipate, the lightning hit again. There was no mistaking the enormous destructive power of the bolts. If he was hit by one, his annihilation would be instant. Even the residual maelstrom was far too powerful. The way was closed.

  ‘We cannot pass that,’ said Drake.

  ‘No,’ Crowe agreed. Without taking his eyes from the opening, he slashed the Blade to the right, piercing a fiend through its open jaw, severing its skull in two. ‘Yet there is no other path for us.’ The only exits from the great hall were the tower staircases. He had to get through.

  Crowe moved forward, placing each step carefully, exterminating any daemon near him before advancing. ‘This is the palace’s true gate,’ he told Drake. ‘Everything around us is a mere vestibule. Our enemy hides on the other side.’ He watched each vortex closely. The lightning strikes dazzled him. Every yard he crossed intensified the level of warp energy hitting him. Even if he didn’t get any closer to the gate, it would be lethal to remain here for any length of time.

  Which death do you choose? Antwyr asked. Will you stay, stymied and withering, or will you let the lightning put an end to your futility? This is the extent of your choice, warden. Make it. I tire of you, and would be free.

  Minute flames of warp energy flickered up and down the length of the Black Blade. They twined around it, momentary serpents of blue and violet.

  ‘Look,’ said Crowe. ‘The vortex does end just before the lightning comes again. There is a fraction of a second when the gate is dark.’

  ‘I do not see it,’ Drake said.

  ‘Keep looking.’

  They stopped less than ten feet from the edge of the gate. The squad held the abominations at bay. Crowe and Drake punished the few stragglers who approached with bursts of bolter fire. An army of daemons lined the slopes of the bowl, but they did not dare come this close to the lightning. It was as lethal to them as it was to the Grey Knights.

  ‘I think I see now,’ said Drake. ‘But that moment is too brief. It is of no use to us.’

  ‘I know,’ Crowe said. Drake was right. Even if he timed his leap perfectly, it would take too long to fall through the gate. ‘Yet I must,’ he said. He took another step forward. Then another.

  He risked opening himself up by a small degree to the daemonic song. The rhythm travelled through his body. The monstrous beat of the lightning strikes took hold of his hearts. His fingers twitched, keeping time. Existence narrowed to the lightning and the rhythm. He was only dimly aware that Drake was still firing his storm bolter. Crowe was motionless. He absorbed the intricacies of the song. It was foul. It was the music of damnation. He rejected its blandishments, and he anatomised its elements. As he learned the names of daemons, he learned the soul of the song.

  He knew the moments of the lightning and the seconds of the vortex as he knew his own breathing. He could see the splinter of time when the gate was dark clearly now. That did him no good. The window was too small. No amount of precision would change that.

  Yet he must pass.

  Take your leap, the sword urged. Become futility.

  Necessity and Antwyr’s demands converged. The omen was an ill one.

  Drake was keeping pace with him now. ‘I do not ask this of you,’ Crowe said.

  ‘I demand it, castellan. I stand with you, and I shall cross this gate with you.’

  Crowe nodded his thanks. It would have been an injustice to attempt to acknowledge their century and more of brotherhood in words.

  They were a leap away from the gate. The shockwaves from the blasts battered them with the force of hurricanes. The thunder could shatter worlds. It seemed to Crowe that if he leapt, he would be hurled backwards. The displays on his auto-senses burst with static. Warning runes flickered on and off. He was standing in the midst of a fra
ying veil between the materium and the empyrean at its most violent.

  Now! Antwyr cried. Now! Now! Now! Now! The sword sought to break his concentration. It shouted and roared against the daemonic rhythm in an effort to throw off Crowe’s timing. Drake grunted in distress.

  ‘Shut the Blade from your mind,’ Crowe said. ‘Its cries are desperate. The Emperor protects. Have faith that he will see us through this passage.’

  ‘I have faith,’ Drake answered. ‘The Emperor is my guide.’

  ‘We are the guardians of his walls.’

  ‘Our watch will never falter.’

  Crowe’s sense of the music’s timing grew more and more refined. Still the darkness was too brief. No degree of understanding could lengthen its stay.

  The Emperor protects. The Emperor would guide him through the gate, because it was Crowe’s duty to reach the other side, and his faith was absolute. We shall cross, he thought. It is written.

  He waited and he endured. The lightning blinded, the blasts punished, and the sword howled. He was unmoved. He leaned forward against all the forces of destruction. He watched, and from this new rampart he would not move until the time came to strike the enemy.

  And the time did come. The vortex of energy in the gate faded. The moment of dark came. But the lightning strike did not. The beat was missing. The great rhythm stuttered.

  Crowe had no hesitation. The instant the blast did not come, he leapt, and so did Drake. Now there was time, as the two beats of the towers sounded. Crowe did not ask what would happen once he dropped through the gate. He did not ask whether he would simply fall into the dark and be struck by the lightning when it returned. He knew what he must do, and that was enough. To defend the ramparts of the Imperium, he must fall.

  So he fell, and Drake fell with him. Through the dark, into the maw of night, to the centre of the art of ruin.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Unmasked

  The Caestus ram hit the Catharsis just sternward of amidships, low in the hull. It was piloted by Brion Thesten, one of Furia’s Astra Militarum veterans. He timed the impact for the moments immediately following one of the lightning strikes at the planet. His judgement was sound, and the assault ram drove through the adamantium plates of the strike cruiser’s armour. The squad accompanying Setheno and Furia disembarked through a tangle of ruined walls into the dank corridors. The Caestus’ arrival triggered electrical fires and ruptured coolant pipes. Live steam and black smoke filled the passageway. The hull thrummed with the greater shocks of the lightning strikes. In between each discharge, the walls and bulkheads crackled with the build-up. Micro-tendrils of warp energy crackled against Setheno’s armour when she brushed close to a wall. The perversion of the ship was clear even in the obscurity. Conduits looked too much like veins. A mosaic of rapturous atrocity ran the length of the ceiling, its tiles carved out of human bone and teeth.

  The strike force moved through the steam and smoke, heading towards the bow. The direction to choose was clear, though it was difficult to see more than a few yards ahead. The entire ship vibrated with the strain of the discharges, and the tremors ran to amidships, as if the Catharsis’ very being was being sucked in to that point. Setheno and Furia had agreed on their target before the Caestus had launched. They would not seek to control the bridge. The primary objective was the mechanism, whatever it might be, that fired the lightning and fed the enemy.

  There were bodies in the hall, mortal heretics killed by the explosive arrival of the ram ship. There were more bodies, though, past the site of the damage. Setheno took the lead, and found a wide staircase leading to the deeper levels. The dead here had adorned its golden bannister for some time. They had been crucified, and their limbs wrapped around the metal, the bones broken in so many places the arms and legs bent like tentacles. Their scarified flesh was black with decomposition, and shone with viscous fluids. Some of the corpses had been here a long time, and were desiccated husks. Others had been added recently. Midway down the stairs, Setheno saw one man who was still alive. His lower jaw was missing, his ribcage was exposed, and his slow, painful breaths rattled like wet stones. Though he was a victim, he was clad in heretical robes, and the electoos on his scalp were runes in praise of the Dark Prince.

  ‘Perhaps the Traitors are running out of slaves,’ Furia said with a quick, indifferent glance at the man.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Setheno said. She strode past the martyr to Chaos without pausing. He deserved no mercy.

  The strike force advanced further down and towards the centre of the ship. It became easier to see. The walls and deck and ceiling glowed and pulsed with the ebb and flow of warp energy, and a permanent taint remained. There was no sign of any defenders yet. There were many more corpses. Fresh and old, murdered by mortals or by Space Marines, they had all suffered careful, meticulous agony. Furia’s veterans gazed at the bodies with mounting horror. The men and women who served the inquisitor had witnessed much of the daemonic, and they had no illusions about the realities of war. But they were still human, and hardened as they were, they had not come through the crucibles of the Inquisition or the Adepta Sororitas. They had breaking points she had left behind long ago.

  ‘Nothing you see here is worthy of your pity,’ she told them. ‘Everything on the ship is damned. You carry fire and you carry faith. Hold fast to those, and be merciless. Take satisfaction in the extermination to come, but beware pleasure. Be cold and be merciless, and that will be your salvation.’

  Brauner nodded. ‘So it has been before, canoness.’

  ‘So it will always be, colonel.’

  Voices reached them, rising from the shafts and halls. They were coming from further down, closer to the target.

  ‘The heretics have chosen to concentrate their forces,’ said Furia.

  ‘Then our strategy is sound,’ Setheno said. ‘They guard what is most precious to them.’

  She moved faster. The strike force descended four more decks. The chanting of the heretics grew louder, and the glow of the walls became more intense. The sacrifices were also more numerous. The fourth deck was deep in the bowels of the hull, and the nature of the sacrifices changed. In a wide, vaulted hall, an arabesque of mummi­fied bodies was sewn together midway up the walls, too high for mortals to reach. The limbs and skulls merged with each other, the human form all but vanishing into the lines and curves of the design, yet present through the insistence of dried blood, torn flesh and splintered bone. Beneath the arabesque was a new slaughter. The hall was wide, yet the deck was crowded with bodies on both sides. Most of the victims were still alive. There were hundreds of them, and they, too, were joined together. They writhed, and so the two human chains moved like serpents, wounded but in thrall to the rhythm of the daemon music. The immense beat of the Catharsis’­ lightning bolts dominated all, and the walls boomed with its echoes. But though the drumming of the palace’s towers could not be heard, the tritone was present, and the dark melody that ruled the system reverberated through the ship like blood through veins.

  The hall ran straight for the best part of a mile, a gallery of murder and torture. In the distance, it ended at a great door of silver and iron. It was incandescently bright from the energy being gathered and unleashed beyond it. Before it, the crew and worshippers of the Catharsis had gathered. Their voices were raised in celebration, delighted pain and defiance. They charged down the hall, a mass of blades and lasguns. Their robes and flesh were ripped with self-inflicted wounds. Their faces shone with fresh blood. They were ragged, yet their wounds were not simple. They had tortured each other, themselves and the victims on the sides of the hall, and they had done so with both frenzy and art. They rushed forward to enact their gospel of excess.

  There was no shelter in the hall. Setheno pounded down the centre of the deck, a juggernaut of sepulchral grey. She drew the bulk of the fire. Furia, one step behind and to the side, made herself a secondary target. Setheno
had the armour, and Furia the bionic replacements, to weather the shots. The greatest mass of the cultists were armed with melee weapons. They worshipped the art of the intimate murder, the sensuality of rending flesh, and the taste of jetting blood. They came to kill in close quarters.

  ‘Cull this filth,’ Furia ordered her squad. ‘Fire for effect and keep your distance for as long as possible.’

  Furia had come with only ten mortals, but their collective experience amounted to centuries of warfare. She had veterans of Cadia, and of Armageddon, and of Pythos, and they had the weapons to fight worse foes than these. On either side of Setheno, triplex-pattern las shots and Metal Storm frag bolt shells tore past and into the cultists. A cloud of shell fragments shredded the first ranks of the enemy just ahead of her arrival. Heretics screamed. Their las-fire became more sporadic and uncontrolled.

  Setheno charged into their midst with a long burst from her bolt pistol. She swung her power sword like a scythe, gutting a swathe of heretics in a single stroke. Furia stepped into the gap she had created. She lashed the mob with rapid-fire cracks of the neural whip, killing with lethal shocks to the nervous system, and followed up with her power knife, cutting throats so quickly, her victims’ faces were frozen in surprise as they fell.

  The cultists scrabbled at Setheno’s armour with fingernails lengthened into claws. They grabbed at her cloak and tried to drag her down into the riot of their flesh. She cut them down with the sword and strode deeper into their midst, leaving a river of blood behind her. Her bolt pistol smashed the way ahead, and she walked into a welter of exploded bodies. Furia’s squad stayed at long range, maintaining a steady barrage. The hall filled with the stinging odour of burned fyceline and wet stench of death. The mob of heretics swayed and attacked in time with the daemonic song. The music seemed to embrace the mass death. It tried to reach into Setheno, to subtly change the speed of her blows and her pulls of the trigger, to make her attack just another part of the choir. It ran into her freezing clarity of perception. It encountered faith at its most brutal, and most utterly devoid of hope. She rejected the music. She attacked the cultists with even greater force.