The daemon song directed the movement of the light. As Crowe took in the details of the palace and erected spiritual shields against its beauty, he recognised that the music shaped every aspect of the palace. The architecture was the sound given visible form. If he had been deaf, he would still have known the rhythm and the melody. The song would have come into his soul through his eyes. The palace danced.
The walls formed two concentric wings. The blinding light came from the other side, shining through their translucence.
‘That is not the light of the warp,’ said Crowe. The light was natural, though of an intensity surpassing anything he had seen before. The walls filtered its full force, and Crowe’s photolenses were still a hair-trigger away from shuttering.
‘It’s warm,’ Drake said. He walked towards the inner wall, which somehow was even brighter than the outer. He paused, consulting his armour’s readings. ‘It grows hotter as we approach the walls.’ He looked back as Crowe joined him. ‘It’s true that we are not looking into the empyrean. But how can this be the materium? Where are we?’
Crowe kept walking, closer to the heat radiating from the wall. He trained his eyes to see past the walls, ignoring the dance of design and artifice, to focus on the blaze beyond them. The light was fire, an unceasing explosion of incalculable violence. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘Though I believe I should. This palace is constructed from the warp. It is suspended within the materium.’
They were able to speak without resorting to the vox or amplifying their voices. The music was as pervasive as it was on the other side of the gate. It was not as loud, but it was more insidious. The brute force of the thunderclaps had passed. As this palace was the culmination of the first, so the music had reached its true flowering. Rhythm and melody were inseparable. The song had embedded itself in every aspect of this world. It did not seem incredible that the song could govern a star system. It shaped every facet of existence. Crowe felt the music try to control the beats of his hearts. It took a conscious effort not to speak in time with the rhythm.
‘Strange that this palace is undefended,’ said Drake.
‘I see nothing yet to defend. Do you?’ Crowe looked to the left and right, seeking a doorway on the inner wall. There was none in either direction before the wall curved away out of sight. But the music of the architecture pointed the way forward. Crowe went left, following the call of the melody.
Antwyr was silent. The daemon pressed hard against the ramparts of his being, but it did so wordlessly. The sword was waiting, gathering its forces to attack when the opportunity came. The Blade’s anticipation was telling.
‘Stand ready, brother,’ Crowe said. ‘The emptiness of this palace is a lie. We draw closer to the true enemy.’
The curve of the hall was endless. The longer they walked, the more time the melody had to work on them, and the harder it became to repel it. With no physical enemies to fight, there was nothing to distract the mind from the song, and there was only the song now. Through sound and the sights of the palace, it assailed the Purifiers. Crowe’s defences were besieged insidiously on two sides. The sword ground away from within, while the ruinous music attacked from without. Crowe and Drake intoned prayers and psalms, making a shield of sound and faith.
Gradually, the curve became more pronounced. ‘This is a spiral,’ said Crowe.
‘Are we going downhill?’ Drake asked. They were walking faster and faster.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Crowe. He made his pace more deliberate. ‘We are being drawn forward.’
‘I grow weary of being attacked without chance of retaliation.’
‘I do, too. But it is enough that we remain aware of the form of the battle. Let us learn from it. We are seeing our foe’s tactics, and something of its nature.’
‘Then this emptiness must be significant as well,’ said Drake. ‘If there are no daemons here, they must be absent for a reason.’
Crowe nodded. ‘A reason that must be stronger than our foe considering their presence unnecessary. They cannot be here.’
He and Drake fell silent, contemplating what threat of the Ruinous Powers would force the daemons themselves to withdraw.
The spiral curved more and more tightly. The heat from the walls grew more intense. The brilliance of the fire beyond them bleached the details of the architecture to fine traceries in a burning white. The song pulled with ever greater force.
At last, the hall turned sharply through an ornate doorway.
All was revealed. Despair beckoned.
The chamber contained an immense orrery. The worlds of the Angriff system were reproduced in matter that had the richness of gold and bronze, yet the spheres floated above the floor. Arms twenty, fifty, a hundred feet long and more reached from the star to the planets, yet they were not connected to the spheres. None of the ornate gears of the clockwork touched each other. They hovered above the floor, as massive and weightless as the planets. They turned in correct relation to each other, but they had no physical purpose. Their meaning came from their superfluity. The entire mechanism of the orrery was an excess, and excess was its purpose.
The planets revolved around the star in the same distorted, impossible movements as the real ones. Desma was broken into its two hemispheres, and the interior faces revealed still more clockwork, with jewels mimicking the glow of the exposed core. Lightning crackled from Angriff Primus, striking the other planets, while another bolt descended from the close orbit of the sphere. Another beam of energy, different from the lightning, coruscated around the floating bronze arm that connected Angriff to the star.
The light and heat were at their peak of intensity. They were a single force, a fury barely contained by the sorcery of the palace walls, and Crowe at last knew what that fire was. He had marched through and fought and witnessed the impossible throughout this war, and still his reason had shied away from understanding.
The palace was suspended in the heart of the sun.
In the centre of the chamber, atop the sphere of Angriff, the enemy danced.
The abomination brought the grace and horror of the daemonettes to a supreme height. Its flesh was the tint of bone, and shifted in the light to the flow of the song, now ivory, now grey. It was clad in violet robes that swayed in perfect counterpoint to its movements, as if there were two beings dancing together instead of one. Its dark hair whipped about its head like waves of serpents. It had three arms. Its left forearm turned into a great scythe of a claw. A hungry pincer emerged from its torso on the right. The humanoid left hand wielded a sceptre. A mask surmounted each end, and as the daemon whirled the sceptre, the strains of tragedy and mockery alternated their influence on the music.
Monstrosity danced. The Masque of Slaanesh danced. The undertow of damnation became a riptide.
Chapter Sixteen
The Dance of Death
The Masque raised an arm, and a planet swooped upwards, its orbit changing smoothly to bring it into graceful near collision with its neighbour. The Masque spun, and the entire orrery glowed more brightly, mirroring the build-up of warp energy in the star system. The daemon danced, and it summoned death for the Imperium.
The dance created and shaped the music, yet the dance itself was a form of captivity. The daemon moved without rest, and could never rest. The Angriff system was a puppet of the abomination’s will. Its will was expressed through its movements. Yet motion itself was beyond the control of that will. Another hand pulled the daemon’s strings. Joy and pain and shame and pride played across the Masque’s features. Through the alchemy of its sequence, it transformed its torment into that of worlds.
On Titan, in the Halls of Purity, the ancient texts that discoursed on the nature of the Masque were rare and dangerous beyond compare. Familiarity with the daemon invited its attention, and exposed the scholar to the risk of being caught in the dance of damnation. Crowe had read them, as he must, to
know the most dangerous foes of the Emperor. He had exercised extreme caution when he had opened those black volumes. He had surrounded himself with layers of overlapping hexagrammic wards. Conscious of the added danger that came from keeping the daemon sword within the protective circles, he had read only a few sentences at a time, pausing for days of meditation and prayer between each session. No siren call was more powerful than the Masque’s. The greatest artist in the court of the Dark Prince, the Masque had been cursed by Slaanesh because the god had perceived mockery in one of its dances. The daemon would now dance forever, eternally seeking a redemption its master would never grant. And the Masque’s curse was its terrible power. Only the gods themselves could resist its summons.
The archives of Titan chronicled the devastation the Masque had wrought across the galaxy. The horrors were catalogued in detail. It had annihilated armies. It had brought civilisations down in ruins. But in all the lore, so dangerous to read, there was little to provide weapons against the abomination. Its true name, even the smallest portion of it, was unknown.
Two Grey Knights marched into the orrery to battle a destroyer of worlds.
Consumed by the frenzy of its dance, the Masque did not appear to notice the Purifiers. They reached the outermost orbit, and it did not look their way or attack. Even so, with every step, Crowe felt the pull of the music becoming stronger, as if it were throwing loops of chain around his being, and would soon bring his freedom of will and movement to a violent end. The chains had not tightened because the music had not yet been turned on him, specifically, as a weapon. It was dangerous enough as the governor of all reality in this palace. But as long as the Masque did not look their way, Crowe thought, they had the chance to attack. Or at least the illusion of initiative.
‘We must draw close,’ Crowe said. Bolter shells would not be enough. Their assault had to strike the physical and spiritual existence of the daemon at the same time if it was going to have the slightest chance of succeeding.
‘Can we banish this daemon?’ Drake asked.
‘We can because we must,’ Crowe said. He had no illusions. The distance between them and the centre of the chamber was too vast. The daemon would see them. Yet he advanced. There was no choice. And there was faith.
Your faith is the greatest lie, said the sword. It has my respect because of its power. You believe in the lie. You defend an empire built on the foundations of nothing. You will abandon your faith, warden. You will abandon it, because it will abandon you.
Behold! it shouted. Here walk the abandoned!
The daemon’s snarl cut across Crowe’s mind. It slithered through the ether. The shout was more than simple mockery.
The Masque heard the voice of Antwyr, and turned its head. The daemon’s eyes fell on them. The Masque pointed its sceptre at the Purifiers, the gesture so naturally part of the flow of movement that it seemed this moment had always been choreographed, always been planned as a small part of the greater art. In the next instant, the music became a personal attack. The beat hammered against Crowe as if it would pound his bones to dust. It seized his being. It became his being. The Masque danced, and he could not look away.
Crowe tried to turn his head, tried to raise his bolter in an act of desperate defiance. He tried to shift his weight, to throw himself to the right, even if only to fall, to break free of the gaze of the Masque. But he could not, and already the Masque looked away. It did not need to watch them. It had seen the Grey Knights, and incorporated them into the dance.
The Emperor protects, Crowe thought. The Emperor protects. I am the instrument of His will.
His will.
His will.
Crowe sought the strength of that will he served, so much greater than his own. He clung to his faith in its absolute power, and for a few seconds, though he could not break from paralysis, the music could not move his limbs either.
The dance of the Masque had already taken Drake. The Knight of the Flame cried out to the Emperor, and his body attacked itself. He moved with the rhythm, but not with the same motions as the Masque. The daemon forced him through steps that were an agonised counterpoint to the wild grace of the daemon. It trapped him in a dance of self-destruction, one so perfectly attuned to the being of a Grey Knight, it could have been a dark ritual of the Chapter reserved for self-immolation. Drake lunged in attack and defence, each time straining his body beyond the limits, his limbs bending too far, striking and stopping too fast, and with too much power. The dance turned him into a grotesque, a daemonic mockery of the magnificence of the Grey Knights in battle. All his skill at violence went inwards, the Masque dishonouring him by dragging him into a lethal, narcissistic implosion. He aimed his storm bolter at his chest. He sliced at his armour with his force sword. He called out to the Emperor, and raged against the enemy with all the force of his purity, but he could not break free. He could not arrest the movements that would kill him.
Crowe resisted. For one second, then two, then three, he resisted. Excruciating pain tore through him. Tremors built in his spine. They spread to his skull, then to his limbs. He was pushing against a force that moved planets, and he could have no victory here. The daemonic music crashed through his defences. These were ramparts he could no longer defend. He fell, and the dance of death took him, while the sword howled with laughter.
The numbing toxin stole Styer’s body from him. He could feel nothing. He knew he stood, but no signals reached his brain from his legs to confirm what he could see. Hands clutched his daemon hammer, hands so distant, so cut off from his perception that surely they were not his. A void surrounded his mind.
The eyes of the captain of the Emperor’s Children gleamed in anticipation. He wanted Styer to know what was coming next, and Styer did. After the numbness would come the river of pain, made so intense by the prologue of unfeeling that it would disable him. The captain pulled back the narthecium. Its drills hummed, clicked as they adjusted to the flow of a new toxin, and hummed again.
In the pause before the Traitor struck, the imprisoning energy tendrils hit Styer. But he could not feel them. The electric agony that locked his joints and fused his spine did not arrive. Styer discovered that though he could not feel his limbs, for a brief moment he could command them once more. The repeated shocks had frozen him with the daemon hammer raised high, its blow suspended. He seized his chance.
Strike, he thought, and those faraway hands slammed the hammer down. Surprised, the Traitor could not react in time. The hammer hit his chest-plate like a meteor. There was a flash of pure blue light, a thunderbolt of justice. The Traitor’s armour caved in. Styer drove the head of the weapon through the bone plates of his fused ribcage. The damage slowed the Traitor, though the pain did not. He plunged the narthecium into Styer’s exposed throat.
Venom hit his nervous system. The pain came, washing through Styer like liquid fire. But he had expected it, and he kept moving, racing against the next blast from the warp energy. He threw his weight against the Traitor. They fell together as the lightning formed. The immaterium’s anger struck Styer, but the shock caught the captain, too. His body a storm of colliding agonies, Styer fought off the paralysis with will and anger. The Traitor’s mistake had jolted him into motion, and he would not stop. He jerked his wrist against the captain’s skull. It was like moving a mountain.
Horror flashed through the Traitor’s eyes. ‘The work will destroy you!’ he shouted. He rammed his fist against Styer’s arm.
A burst of shells obliterated his head.
Keep moving, keep moving, keep moving, Styer told himself. If he paused, the pain would freeze him again, and he would be as helpless as his brothers. He turned from the captain’s body. He was sluggish, controlling a stranger’s form. Another of the Emperor’s Children was almost on him. Styer rose, firing. The Noise Marine opened up with his sonic blaster. Shells and sound collided. Styer’s lunge carried him through the sound, his armour crackin
g and distorting. He held the stranger’s arm steady, pouring the shells into the Traitor, punching through his armour, blowing open his chest. The Noise Marine staggered. He lost control of his weapon and the waves of sound lost cohesion. Styer sent commands to the distant hands, and the stranger slammed the daemon hammer against the side of the Traitor’s neck, decapitating him.
The tendrils reached out for Styer. They drove him to his knees. The pain sucked his strength away. There was still one of the Emperor’s Children alive. The shards of corrupt lightning held the other Grey Knights captive. They roared and shook their chains of energy, but they could not break free.
Keep moving, keep moving, keep moving. Styer could not. His legs would not obey. He could not raise his arms. Standing near the centre of the chamber, the Traitor kept his distance from Styer. He trained his bolter on the justicar.
The sphere of lightning expanded to fill the chamber. There was mockery and triumph in its brilliance.
Miles away, in answer not to the command of a mere warrior, but out of sacred duty to the Emperor, a stranger’s hand moved. It pulled a melta bomb from Styer’s belt. The stranger’s hand jerked, sending the charge skittering across the floor towards the feet of the Traitor. The enemy leapt over the explosion. His head plunged into the midst of the sphere.
The thunderclap came, and the body of the last Traitor fell. Smoke rose from the charred, melted remains of his neck.
Styer slumped lower, the vice of pain crushing him, pulling him down to the floor.
Keep moving. Keep moving.
The Emperor’s Children were dead, but the lightning formed and discharged, formed and discharged, the destroyer’s beat of the music going on and on and on.
The sonic Dreadnought screamed, sending madness beyond words shrieking from its gargoyle faceplate. The sound filled the hall, and the warriors of Furia’s squad cried out in their turn. The Dreadnought slammed its chainfist at Setheno, but she saw the blow developing, and was gone before the fist shattered the ferrocrete deck. Setheno and Furia rushed at the Dreadnought, across the threshold. They broke left and right. The huge mass spun after them, torso spinning around as the legs stamped and turned.
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