Castellan

by David Annandale

  The hall beyond the door was an amphitheatre of torture. The remains of thousands of victims were arranged across pews, along aisles, and fastened to the walls. Past the Dreadnought, the floor sloped to a stage on which lay the ruins of an exploded vault. An elaborate iron structure, designed as both claw and ritual, conducted the blinding strikes of warp lightning to a runic circle in the centre of the stage. Instead of destroying the granite surface, the lightning vanished where it struck, channelled down to Angriff Primus. The Cruciatorium shook and flashed, the entire space rejoicing in the creation of the unholy song.

  With the clarity that was her gift in battle, and her shield against hope, Setheno saw the contours of what it would take to disable the sorcerous machinery of the chamber. Only the narrowest of threads differentiated the difficulty of the task from the impossible. Furia’s veterans would be of little use here. The Dreadnought would kill them in seconds, if he had not already done so.

  But little use was not the same as complete futility. Their oaths would compel them to join the fight.

  She would have it no other way. She would use them as she could.

  The Dreadnought flailed his chainfist again, splintering a row of pews just behind Setheno. She ran downslope, jinking left and right, but visible to the monster, holding its attention. ‘The conductor of the lightning,’ she voxed Furia.

  ‘I see what must be done,’ the inquisitor answered. She sprinted to the nearest wall, fast and angular as a blade. She jumped up, grabbing the spikes holding up the crucified dead and started to climb.

  The lightning flashed, and the Dreadnought hesitated, seeing one target and not the other. The crazed mind inside hunted for direction. The beast howled, gabbling nonsense. ‘Hunger, hunger, hunger, where is the sensation, where is the prey?’ He stopped, distracted by the forces building in the iron above. ‘Who calls Diotian? Who is Diotian? I am Diotian? Will I feed? Will I feel?’ Then, with growing certainty, ‘I will worship. I will serve. I will feed!’

  Furia reached the network of chains that hung from the ceiling. She leapt away from the wall and caught a hook dangling beside one of the conducting struts.

  Diotian’s hull-mounted heavy flamer sprayed a wide stream of burning promethium down the slope. It doused Setheno, turning her into a moving torch before it ran off her armour. The moment the flame hit, she reversed course, running back uphill towards the Dreadnought. Diotian knew where she was, and was content to launch an area attack in her direction. The disappearance of Furia was what tormented him. Setheno fired her bolt pistol, trying to bring Diotian’s focus back to her. Her shells exploded against the hull, chipping armour pointlessly. The Dreadnought ignored her. He spun back and forth, seeking Furia. He did not consider Setheno a threat. Because he could not find Furia, she was a danger.

  So we are a threat, Setheno thought. We can cause harm here.

  The Dreadnought spotted Furia hanging from the chains. She was attacking the framework with her power knife, timing her blows with the moment after each discharge. ‘FEEEEEL!’ Diotian screamed. ‘FEEEEEEED!’ He raised his blastmaster arm. The huge sonic cannon’s hum rose from a deep thunder to a piercing whine as Diotian attuned its fire to his target. Either the maddened warrior’s instincts still functioned well enough for him to understand what he must kill, and what he must protect, or another force whispered to him, directing his attacks.

  A rocket screamed across the Cruciatorium from the doorway. It slammed into Diotian’s right flank just as the Dreadnought fired, rocking him. His shot went wide – a sound so concentrated it was a visible blur of disintegrated metal a few yards from Furia. Chains, blades and chunks of dried, leathery corpse rained to the deck. The impact rippled over Furia. It knocked her off her chain, but she grabbed another hook as the sound threw her sideways. She held tight, arresting her movement with a yank that would have dislocated an organic arm.

  Diotian turned towards the flame. ‘I will feel, I will feel, I WILL FEEL!’ he shouted. Klas Brauner sent a second rocket into the Dreadnought’s faceplate. Diotian roared with hope, embracing the explosion and the damage it caused as if they were the near approach of the sensation forever desired and forever out of reach. Diotian pounded towards the false promise. Furia’s veterans met his advance with flamers, las and grenades. The assault washed against the Dreadnought’s hull, delivering nothing of the promise. Diotian screamed in horror as the mirage of sensation retreated. He fired back with heavy flamer and blastmaster. Fire enveloped the doorway. The sonic wave was deep this time. Air and decking and flesh were all the same to the destructive blast. It tore them all apart with a thunder as profound and shattering as an earthquake.

  Furia cut through one of the conductor’s supports. A long chunk of iron rod a foot thick crashed to the deck. Energy arced out from the gap, and the Cruciatorium vibrated from the uncontrolled discharge. Furia swung from chain to chain, making her way to the next support. Diotian shouted in distress. He had let himself be distracted, and his maddened consciousness realised he was failing the task given to him by his Dark Gods. He turned away from the burning wreckage of the doorway and reached up as if he would pull Furia down with his chainfist. The blastmaster’s hum ran high again.

  Setheno ran in front of the face-plate. She slashed at it with Skarprattar. The only damage she did was to score the armour, but the flash of the sanctified blade against the corrupt hull was blinding. Diotian jerked, momentarily disoriented by the sudden eruption of holy light.

  Setheno maglocked her pistol and climbed the Dreadnought using the spikes of the tainted armour and the weapon mounts for handholds. The fury of Diotian’s outraged shrieks almost knocked her down, and blew apart a swathe of pews before the Dreadnought. She stood astride the hull and struck down with her sword. She was stabbing a mountain, but each blow burned deeper through the layers of ceramite and adamantium. Diotian screamed. His arms waved in frustration, unable to reach her. He rocked from side to side, trying to shake her off. She kept her balance and stabbed deeper. She cut through a layer of circuitry between the plates. Electrical fire exploded from the breach. The sarcophagus jerked again, its movements more wild and erratic. The monster shrieked even louder, torn between the insanities of anger and the hope of pain.

  Furia cut a second support. The daemonic song became ragged, distorted by secondary thunder triggered by the lightning arcing from the gaps and striking the walls and deck of the Cruciatorium.

  ‘No!’ Diotian howled. ‘I do not fail, I must feed! YOU MUST NOT MUST NOT MUST NOT!’ Reckless, desperate, he fired the blastmaster.

  The sonic wave, narrowed like a heavy las-beam, struck Furia’s perch as she leapt. The network of torture pulleys and chains vanished, blown to dust. The entire structure of the lightning conductor groaned in stress. The immense claw wavered slightly, and the lightning struck dangerously close to the edge of the runic circle. Furia’s jump took her out of the direct impact of the blast, but the shockwave sent her spinning. She collided with an intersection of girders and dropped twenty feet to the deck.

  Setheno stabbed again, desperate to reach a vital core, but there was still too much armour. Diotian turned the blastmaster arm straight down. The weapon’s charging hum grew deeper once more. The Dreadnought screamed incoherent curses at Setheno, and fired. The slope of the Cruciatorium erupted in a radius of fifty feet. The explosion lifted Diotian into the air. A battering ram of air and sound smashed into Setheno. She flew from the Dreadnought and crashed into the last set of pews before the stage. Her entire body rang like a bell. Blood poured from her ears and nose, rushed up her throat, choking her.

  As she dragged herself to her feet, the Dreadnought closed in on Furia.

  The music changed. The difference was not a critical one. It was a nuance, though, marked enough for Styer to hear it. More importantly, he felt it. The beat in the tower became more pronounced. Once more, the intensity of the lightning sphere spiked, as if somewhere
, another portion of the system-wide instrument had begun to break down, and the tower again was called upon to compensate. The sphere was brighter. Styer could not look at it directly. It grew larger, too, each expansion bringing its surface to within a few inches of the chamber walls. It was impossible to stand upright without being swallowed by the lightning ball.

  Styer did not think he could stand still if he wanted to. But he could move. Fewer tendrils struck him from the walls. There was less energy to spare in defence of the sphere. Almost everything was being pulled into it, and then sent into the void. The shackles of electrocution and sorcerous pain loosened their grip on the other Grey Knights. Like Styer, they were on their knees, dropping just before the sphere’s lethal expansion. They were beginning to find the strength to move again.

  Gared was motionless. He lay where he had fallen, in the centre of the chamber, the bottom of the sphere only a few feet above him. Clusters of energy from the sphere itself attacked him, holding him down, keeping him helpless. The power behind the sphere sensed the presence of the most powerful psyker in the squad.

  The biggest threat.

  ‘I am coming for you, brother,’ Styer called, unsure if Gared was even conscious. His breath became a snarl as he rose to a low crouch, fighting off the blistering shocks. He moved towards his brother.

  From the other side of the chamber, Vohnum began to crawl forward. ‘I will be at your side, justicar,’ he voxed.

  ‘Maintain your position,’ said Styer. The shocks made it difficult for him to form words. ‘Keep the circle formation,’ he told his squad. ‘The banishment must proceed.’

  The music’s thunder battered his hearing. The growth and flash, growth and flash of the sphere seared his vision. Warp energy surrounded him, coruscating about his armour. It wished to break him, to force him to concede to weakness. He refused. Supported by faith, he kept walking until he crouched beside Gared.

  The Librarian’s eyes were open. Gared had fallen forward. His head was turned to one side, his unmoving gaze fixed on the wall. He did not blink when the sphere flared. He was not dead. He was conscious. Styer saw the tremor in his cheek. Energy pulsed at the edges of his psychic hood, sparks that could not achieve the ignition of a counter-attack. Gared could not move, and it was taking all of his strength to protect himself from a fatal blast of lightning.

  ‘I am here,’ Styer said. ‘Together, we will fight back. The Emperor protects, brother. We are the hammer.’ He braced himself. ‘We are the hammer.’ He placed himself between Gared and the expanding sphere. Warp energy blasted against his Terminator armour. He shouted in pain, but he was prepared. He took the blow, and did not fall. The sphere vanished, and he dragged Gared away from the centre of the floor before it came again. When the lightning ball reformed, it lashed out after them. The energy hit them both. This time, Gared fought back. He raised a shield. The lightning shattered it at once, but even that brief protection made a difference. Styer moved faster, pulling Gared towards the edge of the chamber.

  Tendrils of lightning pursued them in the build-up to each thunder­clap. Every blow was agony. Styer’s mouth flooded with the taste of copper. His muscles trembled like iron just before it snapped. He did not stop. Away from the direct centre of the chamber, the lightning strikes were fewer. They felt weaker, and Gared’s shield grew stronger. When he tried to stand, Styer held him down.

  ‘Conserve your strength,’ Styer said. ‘We have need of it.’

  And then they were next to the wall.

  ‘Help me up,’ Gared rasped.

  Styer raised him to his knees. Gared hissed at the sphere, and straightened his back. Arms parted, hands curled into angry claws, he faced the lightning directly. ‘Now, my brothers,’ he said. ‘Now we purge this chamber of sorcery. Now!’

  Gared’s mind reached out to Styer’s. The justicar joined his ­psychic strength to the Librarian’s. So did Vohnum, Tygern, Gundemar and Ardax. They formed a ring of silvery grey beneath the endlessly reborn sphere.

  ‘We are the will unbreakable!’ Gared cried. ‘We are the vigilance unceasing! We are the light incorruptible! We cast you out!’

  He roared the last word with the power of six souls. Styer shouted with him, as did the entire squad. The moment the sphere disappeared, they tore the materium open in the centre of the chamber. Into that rift the energy would fall when it returned. The sphere of lightning would die as it was born anew, vanishing back into the warp.

  The chamber shone with the terrible light. The lightning gathered. The sphere contorted as it formed around the rift. It shrank in on itself to the point of near implosion, but then it expanded again, trembling and flickering, but intact. Its growth slowed, and the beat of the daemonic song staggered.

  The sphere vanished, the lightning struck out into the Angriff system, and the thunder boomed. And then it came again. The song went on, straining but unstoppable.

  ‘It is too powerful,’ said Gared. His words came in a harsh staccato. ‘We cannot banish it.’

  Yet we are having an effect, Styer thought. There had to be a way of harming the daemonic engine still more.

  ‘I cannot hold the rift open much longer,’ Gared said.

  The sphere filled the chamber. Styer saw how perfectly the contours of the wall matched the surface of the sphere. ‘The vessel!’ he shouted. ‘We must smash the vessel!’

  The stone of the palace was unnatural. Buried for millennia, awaiting this day to rise and unleash the malice of its ruler on the galaxy, the palace was anchored in the materium. But no natural geologic process could have created the material of its walls, and its construction was sorcerous. The taint of the warp lay deep in every aspect of the palace. It was daemonic.

  ‘What is daemonic can be banished,’ Styer said.

  ‘We do not have the strength to banish the castle,’ said Gared, his words coming in a slow, agonised whisper. He was shaking with the effort of maintaining the banishment. The sphere’s resistance smashed at him and the rest of the Grey Knights. The threat of explosion kept building in Styer’s chest. The danger and the pain would be even more intense for Gared. If the Librarian’s strength failed, they would all perish with him.

  ‘Not the palace,’ Styer said. ‘The tower. A focused banishment. The roof, Gared. Target the roof.’

  Gared understood. His eyes blazed with determination. With a burst of renewed psychic strength, he waited until the sphere vanished, then moved to the rift. He pushed it through the air to the top of the chamber’s dome. ‘Let all that is tainted burn in the Emperor’s­ sight!’ he cried.

  The dome tore open. The rift disrupted its integrity, ripping open the veil between the materium and the warp. But the rift was one of banishment, and it dragged all that was daemonic back into the abyss of the empyrean. The matter of the walls flowed. A maelstrom of stone formed, hurling itself into the breach. The upper third of the dome twisted. Architecture screamed with a voice of sudden sentience. The entire section of the dome imploded as the lightning sphere reformed.

  Gared collapsed. The rift closed, but the vessel was smashed. The tower was open to the air. The peak was gone. The sphere expanded beyond the confines of the walls. It lost coherence. No longer a sphere, it was a dense, raging cloud of destructive energy. The chains of the daemonic song held it even now, and when the moment of the beat came, the lightning lashed at the sky. But the strike was uncontrolled, its direction random. Styer heard the injury to the music. He felt it in his soul. The melody was ragged, turning towards confusion. The thunder roared, the sphere returned, and the lightning flashed. The rhythm was the beat of a massive engine marching itself to destruction. The blasts of the lightning cut across the sky with chaotic savagery.

  Gared was on his hands and knees. ‘I can do no more,’ he said to Styer.

  ‘You have done much, brother.’

  ‘The music still rages. The energy is still in the thrall
of the enemy.’

  ‘Not as it was.’ Styer watched the inchoate anger explode across the void. ‘This is not the heart of the evil. It has not fallen to us to end the war.’

  The other Terminators staggered their way. Styer helped Gared to his feet. The Librarian shuddered and looked up. ‘But what have we done?’ he asked Styer. ‘What have we done?’

  Styer looked again. Between the flashes of the lightning, he saw doom had come for Angriff Primus.

  Sendrax lay at the base of the tower. He hovered at the edge of a sus-an membrane coma. He could almost itemise the list of broken bones and ruptured organs. His auto-senses had gone dark. His armour’s power plant was badly damaged, and all but the most critical systems had shut down. The servo-motors would still obey his will, he thought. He would not have to fight his armour as well as his body when he tried to stand.

  The pain helped keep him conscious. He tried to move his fingers. This time, they obeyed him. That was a start, his first movement since he fell. He might yet find his way through the thicket of agony and regain his feet.

  He must move. He would not lie here and wait for the daemons to discover him as helpless prey.

  Scratching at his ear, a voice. The vox, he realised. The vox was working. The voice was Berinon’s. He and Warheit were calling for any of the squads in the palace to answer. After three tries, Sendrax managed to whisper his name.

  ‘Knight of the Flame?’ said Berinon. ‘Are you within the palace?’

  His auto-senses had gone black, so had any signals from his suit other than vox traffic. ‘The tower’s base,’ he said.