Warden of the Blade

by David Annandale

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Part One - The Truth Of Masks

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Part Two - The Fall

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Part Three - The Mask And The Sword

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  A Black Library Publication

  Warhammer 40,000

  It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

  Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Astra Militarum and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse.

  To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

  Prologue

  THE HOLLOW WARRIOR

  The sword was laughing.

  The sound in Garran Crowe’s mind was ugly. It was a grating laughter, rusted with hate, a jagged, jangling, snarling rasp of blood and metal. The laughter was anticipatory, and it grew in ferocity as Crowe climbed the hill of black iron.

  Soon. The Black Blade of Antwyr’s whisper slithered about the laughter. The eagerness hissed with dark promise. Sssssssssssooooon. The shape of pain awaits beyond the crest. You will seek my strength. I am that pain’s destruction. Nemesis comes. Who shall it be? Your enemy or us? Let it be us, Garran. Let it be usssssssss.

  Crowe did not answer. The words placed their brand on his psyche, and then there were more to burn him again. Then more. He fought on while the sword ranted, as he had done for years, and years, and years.

  And years.

  Fighting with claws scratching for purchase on his soul.

  The fiends of Slaanesh capered about him. The hooves of their hind legs and the claws of their forelimbs scrabbled and danced on the surface of the blasted hill. Not days ago, this had been a district of Labos, the hive primus of Sandava III. But the manufactoria and hab blocks and chapels of toil and worship had all been destroyed, melted to slag, millions of inhabitants crushed out of existence.

  Darkness had come to the forge world. The abominations of the Dark Prince had spread across the planet with the speed of a flash flood. The Prognosticars of Titan had foreseen the incursion. They had warned of the intensity of the threat. The depth of its corruption had been cause enough to send the Purifiers, but there was also the fact that this was the Sandava System.

  ‘There is dark meaning in this attack,’ Crowe had said to Kaldor Draigo.

  ‘There is,’ the Supreme Grand Master had agreed. ‘Go. Learn what this portends. Uncover the goal of the Ruinous Powers. Burn it to ash.’

  The strike cruiser Sacrum Finem had made all haste to the Sandava System. But the Grey Knights had arrived too late. Sandava III was infested. One hive, isolated on its island in the viscous, toxic ocean of the southern hemisphere, was still untouched. For that reason, Exterminatus had not been invoked.

  There was another reason, though. Crowe had vowed to save this world. The utter destruction of a Sandava System planet would be too close to a defeat, even if the incursion itself were ended. The system had personal meaning for Crowe. He had been here before. There had been the war on Sandava II, the mistakes made there, the destinies that had been determined. So much had been lost. Now, all these decades later, another incursion, another invasion by the forces of the Dark Prince. There were already too many echoes of the past in this mission.

  The hill was cold, hard as winter, dark as ancient night beneath the writhing, warp-tainted sky. It was a riot of twisted, slumping wreckage. There was nothing left of the manufactoria but misshapen forms softened into abstraction. Things like grasping limbs thrust from the ground as though the world itself were pleading for mercy. Some rose fifty feet or more before they fell back to merge with the iron mass again. The hill barred Crowe’s path towards what remained of the central spire of Labos. There he would find the heart of this plague. That was clear from the currents of the warp.

  ‘What is it to see through your eyes?’ Brother Drake had once asked.

  ‘It is to see the river of the warp flow over the stones of the materium,’ Crowe had answered. The warp was always before his sight, a crystalline rush, sometimes sluggish, sometimes turbulent, never still.

  The currents that streamed over this hill had their source in some great force in the distance. From that centre, the ripples of taint washed across Labos, and then all of Sandava III. And at the crest of the hill, there was turbulence. The warp was caught in a vortex. Something waited for Crowe up there. Something that made the sword laugh.

  The fiends gibbered. They howled. Their long, reptilian jaws snapped as they sang. The music of damnation enveloped the hill of slag. Whistling trills hovered on the edge of resolving into melodies. The beats of a deep bass humming taunted with the possibility of rhythm. The music tortured the mind with the lie of fulfilment. It called Crowe to join in the song, to surrender his voice to the abandoned riot. The air was redolent with the musk of daemons. It was as cloying as the song, a lure to pleasures beyond dreams.

  The musk came in through Crowe’s rebreather, and he sensed only poison. He saw through the song. He rejected its temptations and smashed its deadly harmonies with the blows of his blade, eviscerating the singers, rending daemonic bodies with a violence that found its purity through direct brutality. He marched onwards, up the hill, closer and closer to the nexus of the warp currents. He could not destroy the host one daemon at a time. He would carve out the heart of the incursion. Every abomination that threw itself in his path, he struck down. The others would have their reckoning when the power tearing open the materium was no more.

  The horde sang on. The night resounded with the voices of the hellish choir. The dance of the abominations at a distance from Crowe was gleeful, as if the mindless horrors too were mocking him, as eager as the Blade was for him to see what waited. The fiends that closed with him showed less joy. Their snarls were full of rage. They smashed at him with flailing claws, their frenzy desperate. His very existence caused them pa
in. The mass of daemons seemed to want him to reach the summit – there were more of them behind him now than in front – but had they been able to destroy him, they would have done so before he took another step.

  He took another step. Then another. He thrust the Blade of Antwyr through the thorax of the fiend before him. The daemon shrieked. Its huge claws battered his helmet. The blows rang through his skull. He twisted the black sword. The daemon lost control of its limbs. Its stinger tail thrashed. Ichor jetted over Crowe’s artificer armour. He had despatched so many daemons, he was coated in a mucky layer of their unholy blood.

  He pulled Antwyr free. The daemon collapsed, twitching. He marched over the body, its form already beginning to melt away from the material world. He lunged forwards and up, swinging the Blade with both hands, and decapitated another fiend before it could strike back.

  Crowe was more than halfway to the peak of the hill now. The daemons cavorted. They attacked him in mobs. He cut through their warp flesh, never taking a single step back. Behind him, he left a wake of disintegrating bodies, and the gathering of an even greater horde.

  He was wading through an ocean of abominations. He had destroyed scores on his climb. Daemons rushed him only to be cut down, but his slaughter made no difference. The daemons were pouring through the wounds in the materium. He knew there would be no victory until the source of the infection was cauterised. He accepted the truths of this battle.

  Yet he was weary.

  I will renew you, said the Blade. Take the power. Turn your foes to ash.

  The sea of daemons was nothing to the depths and breadth of Antwyr’s malice. The decades of eternal vigilance, unbroken by a single moment of surcease, were a weight upon Crowe’s shoulders, his limbs, his soul.

  I need not be a burden, said Antwyr. Let me be your boon.

  He would not answer the sword. There was nothing to be gained in speaking to the evil, and everything to lose. It would use every word, every reaction, even every pause against him, learning more and more of who he was as it sought to break through his defences. The Blade’s assaults were already strong enough. Its words echoed through Crowe’s being. Hollow. He felt hollow, as if, over the years of his dark duty, he had turned all his inner self into spiritual armour, and now there was nothing else left.

  The top of the hill was close. Each step forwards was a little harder, just as with every breath he felt the weight of the years and the claws of the Blade’s voice a little more. His burden until death, and death was forbidden. He had no successor. He was alone in his task as he was alone on this hill. He had become separated from his squad hours ago when a wave of daemons had come between them, a scrabbling, stinging, clawing mass he could not break through. The other Purifiers were out of vox-range. The torment of the air and sky limited communications to line of sight at best, and he had no sight of his brothers. There was only the hill, the dark dance of the Ruinous legions and the convulsions of the night.

  Driven by a phrase of the daemonic song, a chance harmony from the choir, a trio of fiends charged Crowe as one. Their voices were united in ecstasy as they attacked. Their clawed forelegs stretched wide to embrace him. Just as they closed, they dropped low as if bowing. Their tails whipped over their heads, stingers lashing down to pierce his armour and flood his veins with the poison of delirious excess. He swept his wrist-mounted storm bolter before him. A sustained burst of thrice-blessed mass-reactive shells shattered the creatures’ chimerical forms. The bodies exploded. A rain of chitinous articulations, chunks of flesh, hooves and spinning stingers fell onto the hillside. The song of the horde stuttered. It rose to a wail. When it fell, a sinuous note of anticipation sounded. Crowe was only a few steps from the top of the hill. The path before him was clear.

  The mass of fiends rippled, their movement a sensuous shudder. The daemons scrabbled forwards to Crowe’s left and right. The huge throng behind him rose higher, but the attacks paused and no fiend tried to block his way. The summit was not his goal. His route to the centre of the immaterial storm took him over the hill, and that was all. But the daemons hummed and swayed, waiting for a monstrous ending, or a worse beginning.

  And Antwyr exulted.

  Now! cried the Blade. Now it will be accomplished.

  Crowe climbed the final yards to the summit.

  The peak of the slag heap had slumped into a hollow bowl, like the caldera of an extinct volcano. It was half a mile wide. The slopes of the bowl were steep and long. Crowe felt he had arrived at the top of an amphitheatre, and indeed, there was a spectacle here. It was a display prepared for an audience of one, and only one. Crowe’s eyes widened. The blow landed. It struck home, deep into his core. His armour was no protection.

  He staggered.

  Do you see? the Blade shouted. Do you see? Do you see? Its laughter was deafening. The hooting of the fiends rose to the pulsing sky. It was a hymn of riotous delight.

  Thousands of iron crucifixes lined the slope of the bowl, going all the way down to its centre. White-hot spikes pierced the bodies of their victims, holding them in torment, hammered through arms, legs and torsos. The mortals had been decapitated. They could not be alive, yet they strained against the spikes, their bodies arching and twisting in an unending, transcendent agony indistinguishable from a pleasure beyond language. The pain was a dance, entwined with the song of the fiends, the two fusing to become a terrible work of art constructed by a will that had melted a city and reshaped its citizens into this very specific form. The millions killed, the mountain of slag and the spasming mass atrocities were a single attack aimed at a single target.

  In the Sanctum Sanctorum of Titan, the secrets of the warp were held, contained and, under rigorous controls, studied, the better to counter the machinations of the Ruinous Powers. There Crowe had read some claims that the greatest threat of Chaos was the destruction of meaning. He knew this to be false. The greater threat was in the creation of the most monstrous of meanings. There was meaning in what he beheld now. Meaning that cut him. Meaning that opened wounds his Larraman’s Organ could not staunch.

  There was meaning in the crucifixions. There was meaning in the decapitations. And there was meaning in the arrangements of the sculptures of pain. The crucifixes formed rings and spirals, straight lines and curves. There were patterns here, patterns that seized Crowe’s gaze and took it on a looping, jagged, agonising journey. His eyes darted from body to body, movement to movement, dance to dance, round and round, down one slope, up the other side, then back again in a whirling diagonal, until, at the last, he perceived the grand design in all its madness. The crucifixions formed a single vast rune. Its language could not be spoken. Its significance could not be denied.

  The rune wounded Crowe by virtue of its familiarity. The symmetries of the mission achieved their culmination. He had seen this sacrifice before. Just once, long ago, in the Sandava System.

  Once before was enough. This single repetition was a trap, decades in the making, and it snapped closed around his soul. Antwyr roared in triumph. You see! You see! You see!

  Crowe saw. And he remembered.

  Chapter One

  RENEWAL

  In the deepest vaults of the Citadel on Titan, purity held watch over darkness. Here was a concentration of night so terrible, if freed it would devour the stars. And there were still greater depths, a still greater night, held at bay not by any physical barrier, but by the holy might of the warriors who walked the halls. The Chambers of Purity contained the worst corruption. Their purity was embodied in their perfect guardians.

  Frozen evil surrounded Purifier Garran Crowe. It lurked in the niches worked into the walls of the circular, vaulted chambers. The Knight of the Flame moved past the niches at a deliberate pace, closely observing the stasis caskets they held. Doing so was an act of remembrance, acknowledging the price in lives paid by the brotherhoods of the Grey Knights to recover the objects inside the caskets. It was a
lso an act of duty. The contents of the Chambers of Purity were never to be taken for granted. Stasis technology was not enough to lock the harm away. Eternal vigilance was the true prison. The Purifiers were far more than guardians. They were the first, truest and most direct defence, the wall between the artefacts of the Ruinous Powers and the Imperium. Crowe’s examination of each relic was careful, profound and imbued with reverence for the Emperor. It was by the grace of His gifts that the grave duty of the Purifiers was possible.

  The caskets were fashioned of blessed adamantium and pure, tempered gold. Their surfaces were marked with dense, overlapping layers of warding runes. The runes ran over the sculptural representations of the relics inside. The stasis fields shimmered and torchlight flickered, casting wavering shadows over the engravings – for Crowe, the movement was a simulacrum of the forces imprisoned, a reminder of what lurked within, and must be held.

  Crowe walked past rows of unholy books. Some were written in Gothic, the better to lure human readers. Many more were in xenos tongues. A few of the books were recent creations, monstrous blasphemies inspired by dark gods, written by lost heretics or, worse, by deluded faithful who knew not what they did, even when the moment of their execution arrived. Most of the tomes, though, were ancient beyond measure. Their origins were unknown. They had bindings of flesh and pages of vellum inked in blood. Crowe paused before the prison of the Grimoire of Fate Devoured. Its pages resembled ivory scales. Each was composed of hundreds of slices of human teeth. Crowe had looked upon the pages when he had captured the book on a moon of Uscana Secundus. The inhuman runes were incomprehensible, but he had felt the sickening pressure of their meaning. No mortal could be exposed to them without succumbing to violent corruption on the instant. The very matter of that moon had been poisoned. When Crowe looked up from the book, he had seen crimson images of the runes sliding down the air of the vault. He had stared at the bloody writing until he was sure it was no illusion, the runes settling and running along the floor, their shapes cutting through rock.