Grey Knights: Sons of Titan

by David Annandale

  ‘And the heretics?’ Styer asked.

  ‘They boarded after… I was already lost.’

  ‘Lost,’ Styer repeated, but he understood. He wondered how despair and faith could be the same thing. Sadon had not been corrupted by the Ruinous Powers. The impossible had not taken place. But he had been infected by the genestealers. His attacks had been under their telepathic control.

  No wonder the intelligence that guided them had sought to preserve this great prize.

  Sadon sank to one knee. ‘Thank you, brother, for granting me this freedom. One more gift, please.’

  Despair, faith, hope, gratitude. All the same in this moment. All the same.

  Styer wished he could protest. He could not, but he hesitated.

  ‘I am unclean,’ Sadon whispered. ‘There are still too many aboard for me to resist… Drawing nearer…’

  A greater, more implacable will was coming to shut his down once more. Sadon was performing one more miracle by resisting even this much.

  Styer aimed his storm bolter at Sadon’s bowed head. The Purifier’s progenoid glands were tainted. He would be unable to render his final service to the Chapter. Even so, Styer granted the great warrior the full measure of the Emperor’s Peace. ‘Finis Rerum,’ he said before he fired.

  The Grey Knights, carrying the unconscious Gared, headed back to the Final Sanctity. They worked their way through the tangled, surreal wreckage of the decks nearest the chapel. They climbed upwards through metal that had sprouted blind eyes. Some of the formations had been frozen in the moment of acquiring daemonic life. The silence of the Blade of Purity had become an arrested scream.

  With Sadon dead, the genestealers retreated to the shadows. They made a few probing attacks, but did not commit to a full assault. They no longer had the numbers.

  ‘They hope we will leave the ship to them,’ Furia said as they boarded the Sanctity.

  Styer grunted. ‘Let them be its final passengers.’

  When they returned to the Tyndaris, Styer ordered that Sadon’s funeral pyre be constructed. His body could not be returned to the Dead Fields, but he would have a proper end.

  The strike cruiser’s guns pummelled the Blade of Purity until her orbit degraded. On the bridge, Styer watched the frigate approach the writhing atmosphere. ‘Now,’ he told Saalfrank, and the cyclonic torpedoes travelled down to the surface with Sadon.

  The planet exploded with the incorruptible fire.

  ‘Our brother completes his mission,’ Styer pronounced. ‘He purifies Korzun.’

  The tolling began. In the spire of the Mourning Tower, the great bell sounded its peals. Each note was deep, loud, as harsh as grief and as commanding as iron. The tolling was slow – the measure of a funeral march. It was picked up and repeated by the other lesser chapels, monasteries and cenotaphs of Sitheros. The echoes of the memory rite for Korzun echoed across the shrine world. The bells would sound for the next ten days.

  Relic Keeper Aldhelm passed through the high funerary wall and began the long walk towards the centre of the Plain of Anger, where the Mourning Tower rose, its jagged claw stabbing at the night sky. The plain was, in reality, the top of a plateau whose slopes were dense with houses of worship and reflection. Ringed by the wall, it was a circle five kilometres wide and paved with black cobblestones. On each was carved the name of a great loss. A capital ship, a city, an army, a moon – all consumed by the Ruinous Powers. Extinguished, too, from the official memory of the Imperium. Not on Sitheros, though. Here, with extreme care and precautions, the losses were recorded, and the remembrance of what had been preserved. Sitheros was the lone planet of its star, and the system was isolated in the Maeror subsector, far removed from any trade routes. The Inquisition was the supreme authority on Sitheros, and the existence of the world of memory was unknown to most of the Imperium.

  The most powerful safeguards were used within by the Mourning Tower itself. It was the memorial to the greatest losses and the most profound tragedies: entire worlds. The names were engraved on the walls. Below ground, the archives held the cultures and histories. Aldhelm avoided the archives as much as possible. He devoted himself instead to the monument and its rituals of sanctity and grieving. The Tower was built of the same black basalt as the cobblestones. Its form was tapering, twisting flame. A staircase spiralled up its exterior. There was no interior: the Mourning Tower was a solid mass, its height pierced by pairs of windows that starlight shone through. The top of the spire was hollowed out to contain the great bell, and the names of the lost worlds blazed in electro-runes visible from dozens of kilometres away. For the next ten days, the most recent addition would pulse and flare with every peal of the bell.

  Korzun. Unimaginable. Korzun the Pious fallen, utterly consumed by daemonic forces. Subjected to Exterminatus.

  Aldhelm looked up at the name high on the Tower, his old joints aching from the walk on the cobblestones. That was his destination. He had come to mount the stairs and pray before Korzun’s memorial. When he lowered his eyes, he saw another figure crossing the Plain of Anger from the direction of the north gate. They met fifty metres from the entrance to the archives at the base of the tower.

  ‘Inquisitor Ravel,’ Aldhelm said. ‘When did you arrive?’

  ‘Only just.’ The inquisitor was close to Aldhelm’s age, but much more limber, thanks to heavy juvenat treatments and augmetic legs.

  ‘Are you here for the Korzun observance?’ They had to raise their voices to be heard over the bell.

  ‘I am.’

  ‘You were familiar with the world?’

  ‘Very.’

  They walked together towards the entrance.

  ‘Ah. The archivists will be pleased.’ Aldhelm was careful to keep his distaste from his voice. He believed in the commemorative function of Sitheros, but was less sanguine about the research that went on beneath the surface of the Plain of Anger. The records of the lost worlds included everything known leading up to their fall, and the dominant inquisitorial faction on Sitheros was Xanthite. Its adepts were avid students of the data. Their stated purpose was to understand the causes of disaster, and to discover how better to combat the Ruinous Powers. Aldhelm and many of his fellow ecclesiarchs were leery of the practice. Its dangers were clear. But he had no authority to interfere. The Xanthites’ grip on Sitheros was absolute.

  Ravel was silent until they reached the huge bronze doors of the entrance. On their surface, agonized figures writhed in frozen horror. The damned were drowning in the medium of their creation. At the top of the doors, the sculpture of a robed, hooded figure hunched forward, its hands clasped in prayer or judgement. Ravel said, ‘Actually, I wonder what sort of welcome the archivists will give me.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘I have come about the future, not the past.’

  Hadriana Furia’s quarters on the strike cruiser Tyndaris were the mirror of her discipline and rigour. The shelves of her personal library occupied two of the walls. The other two were dominated by shelves that held her records – stacks of sealed metal cases containing the notes and evidence of the cases she had undertaken. Those walls, Justicar Styer thought, were a mausoleum of daemonic crime.

  A large, marble-topped rectangular table dominated the centre of the chamber. The inquisitor paced before it, spreading sheets of vellum and scrolls, and consulting multiple data-slates. The material was damaged, much of it torn, burned or marked with claws.

  ‘You wanted to see me,’ Styer said.

  Furia nodded. The red crystals of her eyes did not look up. Her face of bronze and scars remained focused on what was revealed to her on the table. ‘I’ve been going over what we recovered from the Blade of Purity,’ she said. The frigate commanded by Purifier Sadon had been sent to put an end to the daemonic incursion on Korzun. Not only had Sadon failed, his ship had become the site of a struggle between cultists and genestealers.
r />   ‘Have you learned why Korzun fell?’

  ‘No. What I have discovered is that the Blade of Purity did not come here alone.’

  Styer frowned. ‘We heard nothing from Titan about another ship.’

  ‘Which is just one of my concerns. I doubt its presence was sanctioned at any level by the Ordo Malleus. It was the Tenebris Scientiam.’ She tapped a finger on one of the data-slates. ‘Inquisitor Johannes Ravel.’

  ‘Do you know him?’

  ‘I know of him. He is Xanthite, but careful. His reputation is of one more inclined to forbidden knowledge than to the actual practice of warp sorcery. But…’

  ‘Yes?’

  She waved her arm at the documentation. ‘The references to Ravel’s presence during Purifier Sadon’s mission are very fragmentary. They appear as brief tangents in very disparate notes. He was definitely aboard the Blade of Purity, though.’

  ‘You think he attempted to destroy the records of his presence?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘We must find him.’ If Ravel had been corrupted by events on Korzun, the mission of Styer’s squad had not ended with the destruction of the planet and the death of Sadon.

  ‘Agreed.’ Furia picked up a log book. ‘According to this, Sadon gave orders to his astropathic choir to send reports about Korzun to Sitheros.’

  ‘So he knew the planet was lost before the genestealers attacked.’

  ‘So it would seem. And this,’ she gestured to a scrap of vellum, ‘is not in the Purifier’s hand. It is an annotation about the power of memory.’

  ‘Of which Sitheros is a concentrated repository.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘Then our course is clear.’

  When the Tyndaris transitioned into the materium at the Sitheros System’s Mandeville point, the vox communications from the planet were normal. And when the strike cruiser made anchor, the Grey Knights found another vessel in geostationary orbit over the position of the Mourning Tower: the Tenebris Scientiam. The Inquisition sloop did not respond to hail.

  Standing in the strategium, Epistolary Gared said, ‘The ship is dark.’

  ‘Dead,’ said Styer.

  ‘Do you plan to board?’ Vohnum asked.

  ‘No. We’ll find Inquisitor Ravel on the surface. However… Shipmaster!’ he called.

  ‘My lord?’ Bruno Saalfrank answered.

  ‘If that vessel does anything at all during our absence, even if it is no more than the firing of an engine, destroy it.’

  ‘As you will, my lord.’

  The descent in the Stormraven Harrower was without incident. Brother Warheit brought the Stormraven down in the Plain of Anger. The night was illuminated by the cold glow of the Mourning Tower’s runes. The bell tolled as Styer and his battle-brothers disembarked. The squad’s losses had yet to be replaced, and six Grey Knights set foot on the square: Styer, Epistolary Gared, and Brothers Vohnum, Andrax, Gundemar and Tygern. Furia stood with them. Warheit remained aboard the Harrower, the engines at low rumble, ready for rapid take off and engagement.

  An aging ecclesiarch approached from the base of the tower. He was a thin man, stooped, moving with some difficulty, but without a staff. As he drew near, he slowed down even more, staggered for a moment, clearly awed by what he saw and uncertain about who these giants in Terminator armour were. His lank hair was white. His eyes were bright, but they were not youthful, Styer thought. Their light came from faith, and the knowledge of following his life’s calling. The man bowed low and introduced himself as Relic Keeper Aldhelm.

  ‘You are welcome, lords,’ he said. ‘Your presence honours us.’ He paused, looking as if he wanted to say more. He was looking at the Harrower.

  ‘Speak freely,’ Styer told him.

  ‘I mean no disrespect, but your landing site is… unusual.’

  ‘You fear disrespect for the memorials on these stones.’

  Aldhelm spread his arms, agreeing without speaking words to offend. ‘Your descent within the walls suggests you are at war.’ He smiled to show he knew the absurdity of his words.

  ‘We believe we are,’ Styer said. The evidence against Ravel was not conclusive. But it was more than suggestive. He didn’t need the prognosticars to point him in the direction of Sitheros. He had had the sense of events linking themselves together ever since the Sanctus Reach. The battle against Ku’gath over Squire’s Rest, a daemonic incursion triggered by the arrival of the Grey Knights, the Plaguefather’s later psychic attack against Gared, which had raised the impossible spectre of a possessed Grey Knight. That apparition, still false, summoned again aboard Sadon’s desecrated vessel. Even where there was no causal link between the crises, Styer could see a pattern: doubt. That was the seed every conflict seemed calibrated to sow.

  He would battle the doubt with certainty and he would banish all thought of coincidence. Were there hints that Ravel was corrupted? Then he was. Was it strange that the fall of the famously pious civilization of Korzun should next point towards a shrine world? No. It was inevitable. It was another link, another portion of an even larger pattern, one whose shape he had yet to discern.

  He had learned a hard lesson over Squire’s Rest. He was treating Sitheros as an active battlefield. By bringing the Harrower within the Mourning Tower’s wall, he had laid claim to the high ground. His squad was ready to unleash its firepower upon the instant.

  ‘What is the military standing of Sitheros?’ he asked Aldhelm.

  The old man was taken aback. ‘My lord, I don’t really know. That is not my province. I know the Inquisition has a large contingent of Astra Militarium veterans at its disposal. The Frateris Militia has many adherents, too, but…’

  ‘Yes, I see.’ The militias who fought for the Adeptus Ministorum were strong in numbers, but had no training. Their equipment would be haphazard.

  ‘I need to speak with the ranking inquisitors,’ Furia said.

  ‘The council is below,’ Aldhelm pointed to the doors at the base of the Tower. ‘In the archives.’

  ‘The whole council?’

  ‘Yes, since earlier this evening, at the request of Inquisitor Ravel.’

  Styer exchanged a look with Furia. ‘It will be here, then,’ he said.

  ‘And before we can summon reinforcements,’ replied Furia. The nearest gate was thousands of metres away. A long run even if Aldhelm could point her to the nearest barracks.

  ‘We can accelerate their arrival,’ Styer said. He raised his right arm, waited for the pause between the peals of the bell, then fired a burst from his wrist-mounted storm bolter into the air.

  Even in the dim, shifting light of the plain, Aldhelm had turned visibly pale. ‘What is happening?’ he cried. ‘I don’t understand…’

  A roar drowned him out. Styer felt it build beneath his feet. It thrummed up through the ground. The cobblestones vibrated. Their engraved memories blurred.

  A halo of energy crackled around Gared’s psychic hood. The Librarian was preparing a strike as he faced the doors.

  ‘Pray well,’ Styer told Aldhelm. He marched towards the base of the tower. The head of his daemon hammer pulsed, the Nemesis weapon reacting to the nearby unleashing of the immaterium’s energies. ‘With me, brothers. We are the right hand of the Emperor. Let it fall heavily on the enemy.’

  The subterranean roar grew louder and closer: a wind rushing to the surface. Styer was less than ten metres from the doors when a fireball blew them open with such force that they flew off their hinges and they crashed to the ground on either side of the entrance. The flames raged upward. They spread wide. For a moment they were like wings – a constant billow, a monstrous torch. A figure staggered up the stairs from the archive, his clothes charred and smoking. His hair had burned away and his flesh was blackened and glistening. He stumbled to the side of the doorway and he leaned against the wall of the Tower.


  ‘Inquisitor Ravel?’ Adhlem called.

  The man’s mouth opened and he shook. He was laughing, Styer realized, though he could barely stand. Ravel looked at Styer. ‘Justicar,’ he said, ‘are you here to fight the past or the future?’

  Styer walked towards him, hammer raised. ‘Neither,’ he said. ‘I am here to slay the witch and the daemon.’

  ‘The past and the future then.’ Ravel sank to his knees. He glared at Styer with manic intensity, but he carried no weapon. Nor did he seem to be preparing a psychic attack.

  But the earth tremors continued, growing stronger. Styer glanced at Gared, who shook his head. ‘There is no sorcery about him. Not now.’

  The justicar started to bring the hammer down on Ravel’s skull but stopped mid-swing. He had to know what was coming. ‘What have you done?’

  Ravel tried to grin. His melted lips clung to his teeth and tore. He tilted his head back and looked up at the Tower. His eyes were starting from their sockets in pain. He could still see, though. ‘Loss,’ he whispered.

  Styer leaned closer. Even with the sensitivity of his Lyman’s ear, it was difficult to hear the dying man over the rumble in the ground, the roar of the fire, and the tolling of the bell.

  ‘Loss,’ Ravel repeated. ‘So much power in it. So much grief.’ He stared at the great spire as if mesmerized. ‘This reservoir…’ His voice crumbled into silence.

  Reservoir? Styer thought. He looked up at the Tower. The shapes of the runes were the same. So were their colours. But the quality of their light was altering. It grew colder, more intense. It became the shine of bleeding wounds and jagged bone. A twisting, pulsating nimbus formed around the Tower. It gathered strength and spread, a plague writhing over the night.

  As the runes changed, so did the meaning of the monument. The Mourning Tower transformed from memorial to threat. It became a threat because it was a memorial. All those worlds, all those billions of souls mourned. The collective grief of the Imperium gathered in one location, given a single form. The Tower was a psychic lightning rod.