Warden of the Blade

by David Annandale

  No, Vendruhn decided. They weren’t thinking at all.

  ‘Kill the heretics!’ she shouted. ‘Burn them all!’

  Her command was unnecessary. The militia was gunning down the running mob. But her hatred needed its full expression. These creatures had turned from the Emperor’s light. The crime was unimaginable to her, yet they were all guilty of it. They threatened the order her family had guaranteed on Sandava II for centuries. And they tainted the honour of the world.

  She would build a pyre of their bones.

  ‘Artillery,’ she voxed the command centre at the palace. She gave coordinates for a barrage a thousand yards ahead, where the hab blocks rose higher just before the cathedral’s hill. Her armour and infantry kept up their fire, slaughtering the heretics, crushing bodies beneath the Chimeras’ tracks.

  Guns boomed in the distant west. The sky whistled. It screamed. The street and hab blocks exploded. The shells kept descending. Critically weakened towers fell towards each other. A hill of rubble blocked the way forwards. Choking dust rushed back down the avenue. The heretics bunched up and collided. They were confused. They did not know where to run. Some shrieked. Some sang. Many turned back to attack the militia. They all died.

  Vendruhn’s Chimera advanced into a deepening lake of blood, and she rejoiced.

  ‘General,’ Gentner, the communications officer, called from below.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’m receiving distress transmissions from a location in the shelling zone. Someone has access to a vox-unit there. They proclaim their loyalty to the Emperor.’

  ‘They may proclaim it, but they do not show it. If they are sheltering in those structures, they are hiding from their duty to fight the heretic. The shelling continues. We will seal this area and kill everything in it.’ If they could not reach the cathedral, nothing would.

  The way forwards was punishment. She would raze the city if necessary. And she would not turn from the consequences of her commands. She would embrace them.

  ‘Gentner,’ she said, ‘are they still transmitting?’

  ‘Yes, general.’

  ‘Put them on my feed.’

  A moment later, her ear bead crackled with panicked, pleading voices. They begged. They sobbed. They prayed to the God-Emperor. Vendruhn fired the heavy bolter at the heretics and her lips pulled back in disgust at the voices in her ear. Then they screamed, disappearing into static. Another tower fell, blocking an even wider swathe of routes to the cathedral, and it took its terrified inhabitants down with it.

  Vendruhn’s snarl became a smile. The betrayers of the Emperor and Sandava II were meeting their judgement. The sentence came at her hands. As this sector of Egeta fell to smoke and flame and blood, she felt pleasure, and she was not ashamed.

  Then she saw movement above the smoke. Impossible movement.

  They had to fight their way forwards again. The gap leading to the doors had filled in seconds. But now Crowe was shooting and hacking through daemons that had turned their backs on him. The situation was unique in his experience. The summons was so strong, the daemons did not turn as he destroyed their forms. They trampled the heretics running with them. The mortals screamed the urgency of their task. Many died on the threshold of the cathedral. Many more passed through the doors. Human blood and dissolving daemonflesh spread out from the doorway across the flagstones of the parvis. The warp turbulence grew worse. Crowe saw vortices catch up reality and begin to twist it.

  ‘Faster!’ Gavallan shouted in frustration. He could sense what Crowe did. All psykers could now. The build-up was huge. A massive event was coming. Inside the cathedral, the source of madness was performing a ritual.

  Stop it. Disrupt the flow.

  Faster.

  Crowe reached for the flames of purity once more. The strain was huge, so soon after another burst. He acted alone this time. Gavallan was drained. Crowe stretched his left arm forwards. Cleaning warp fire burned over corrupted warp forms and contusions of warp energy. It cremated abominations. The path was clear again.

  Crowe lunged for the doorway, a step ahead of Gavallan.

  He already knew he was too late as he began to cross the threshold.

  The arch sprouted fangs of stone. The entrance became a mouth. Crowe threw himself back, hacking his arms free of the gnashing teeth. The doorway bit heretics in half. Their heads fell to the ground, gaping in ecstasy.

  The stonework about the entrance rippled. A wave like the shudder of flesh spread across the façade.

  ‘Back!’ Gavallan ordered.

  Crowe retreated with the others. The transformation shook the cathedral. Crowe saw the storm in the immaterium’s currents reach its apotheosis. He understood what was happening, and he cursed the depth of the Purifiers’ failure.

  The ground trembled with such force that the remaining heretics fell. The parvis cracked. Crevasses opened, wide enough to swallow a man. Crowe leapt over a gap that snaked between him and his battle-brothers. At the base of the cathedral, the crevasses grew into canyons.

  The towers swayed. With cracking booms, their spires hooked into claws. Flying buttresses heaved in and out like a ribcage. Then the central mass reared up. It lifted the towers free of the ground, reaching higher and higher with them, and now they truly were arms.

  The Cathedral of Martyrdom Embraced began to walk.

  Chapter Seven

  MARTYRDOM EMBRACED

  The Lord Governor’s palace was a fortress. Within its inner wall was the keep: crouched, squat and solid as a fist. From its centre, though, a single tower, its walls a blinding ivory and gold, soared hundreds of feet up. The Glas dynasty was unyielding in its demand for order. But from discipline rose magnificence. This was the lesson embodied by the palace.

  The windows behind the throne looked east, across the expanse of Egeta to the cathedral. The city had grown and spread around these two peaks, and from spire to spire, Sandava II’s most powerful representatives of the Adeptus Administratum and the Adeptus Ministorum could gaze at each other’s high seats in the city, though the Ministorum palace itself was half a world away. No other structures in Egeta reached as high as the spires of the palace and cathedral hills.

  Every day of his reign as Imperial Commander, Otto Glas had found the time to stand before the glassteel window and look towards the cardinal’s perch. The view was a dual celebration of responsibility and glory. He stood there now, as evening fell on his city. The last evening he expected to see, because Egeta, too, was falling. He stared at a panorama of smoke and fire. The palace guns were thundering again, wreaking ever more devastation on the eastern sector. He could barely make out the cathedral’s towers through the drifting ash. It was easy to believe there was nothing left beyond the Rybas. He winced.

  ‘Lord Otto?’ said Waclav. He and the rest of the personal guard maintained a respectful distance as they watched the entrance.

  He must have grunted without knowing it. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I’m all right.’ He chastised himself for thinking Egeta’s end had come. He should have more faith in Vendruhn, and in the Adeptus Astartes. But Egeta was burning, and reports were coming in of Vendruhn employing scorched earth tactics. Otto trusted her to do what was necessary, but if this was necessary, would there be anything to save? And if Egeta fell, how long before the rest of Sandava II did as well?

  As for the Grey Knights, he had no lack of faith in their fighting strength and in their determination to destroy the unholy monsters that had come to Otto’s world. But he feared them. Their sanctity was cold as the void, and without mercy. He believed they had come to kill the daemons, not to save Sandava II. Otto had thus far seen the abominations only from a distance, through magnoculars. Looking at the Grey Knights had made him feel a very similar terror. It came from the sense of gazing upon forbidden mysteries. There would be a price to pay for what he had seen.

  An
d there was the sword the commander carried. Otto had been unable to put it from his mind. He was wrong to have asked about it. He was wrong to question a being such as Gavallan. And yet the sight of the black blade had pulled at him. He knew, instinctively, that the simple fact of seeing the Grey Knights meant his life was drawing to a close. Their mystery was that profound. But the sword was something deeper and far older. He did not understand what it was, but it had to be a relic of enormous importance. Why else transport it into combat?

  But why in chains? Why not use it?

  Power. After Gavallan had commanded Otto to speak no more of the sword, after the strategising, when the Grey Knights had been leaving the throne room, the word had come to Otto in the form of an absolute conviction. The sword was a thing of incalculable strength. Even now, with the relic miles away, its black edge cut through his consciousness. The sword was before his mind’s eye, a looming promise. It was power. A single glance was all it took to sense the embodied vastness. He could not fathom why the Grey Knights would not put it to use.

  Are we that unworthy? Otto thought. Is the salvation of our people so pitiful an endeavour that the greatest means to victory will be set aside?

  He could not let things be so. He would speak to Gavallan again. Otto, at least, would do all in his power to save his city.

  In the deepening gloom, the flames burned brighter. The east flashed with shell bursts. The smoke billowed in thick clouds. The rising coils made it seem as though the towers of the cathedral were moving.

  Otto realised he was wrong when he heard Waclav gasp.

  ‘Emperor save us,’ the officer pleaded.

  The towers were moving. They rose into the air, wielded by the body of the cathedral, which had reared up like a gargantuan scarab. Then the monster began to move forwards.

  Otto stared, not blinking, not breathing, not understanding. He was in a numb state surpassing horror. The sight of the cathedral’s march was too impossible. He could not process it beyond the most superficial of levels. A thing was moving that must be stopped. His mind shielded itself from any deeper implications. He consciously held them at bay. If he faced them, the terror would destroy him. Already he felt his ability to function slipping away.

  ‘Lord Governor?’ Waclav said. He was asking for orders. He was desperate for orders. He needed the illusion that someone knew what to do.

  ‘The guns,’ Otto said. His tongue was sluggish and dry. His body was a thousand miles away and slow to respond to his commands. ‘Turn the guns on it,’ he croaked.

  ‘At once.’ Waclav’s gratitude was tragic. He spoke as if he believed the action would make a difference.

  Otto knew it would not. Nothing in the field would bring down the cathedral. His faith in the Grey Knights crumbled. They were insects before the colossus. Only a power equal to the one that created such evil wonders could fight it.

  Power.

  The image of the sword burned with black fire in his soul. It brought him pain. The sword was Sandava II’s salvation. Yet it was out there, in the fire and the ruin, about to vanish in the destruction of the Grey Knights.

  Otto leaned against the window, hands splayed. He mouthed silent prayers and wept as his hope was trampled beneath the walking stone.

  The cathedral came down its hill with the sound of a falling mountain. It was a wave of rock, rearing and falling, rearing and falling. It slammed into the hab blocks, crushing their walls to powder. A cascade of towers fell on the streets of Egeta. The ground shook with perpetual tremors. Smoke and dust turned the air into a thick, lung-scraping mass. Vendruhn coughed and spat. She wiped the grit from her eyes and tried to see forwards. Her column was running blind.

  She forced herself to focus on what needed to be done and nothing else. Terrible awe tried to break her. If she let go of her mental discipline, she would gaze, paralysed, at the cathedral until it crushed her. As the leviathan battered the city down, it turned the evening into a heaving night. The armour drove through darkness thick and turbulent as an ocean in storm. Illumination came from muzzle flare and bursting shells. There were flashes of greater light when fire gouted from damaged buildings, but all was smothered into greater darkness when the structures fell.

  Vendruhn’s sense of the city’s geography fell apart. The streets were blocked by rubble. Gaps opened where complexes had been. Danek turned the Chimera down whatever path he could find. Vendruhn had given him a single order: flank the cathedral. She trusted him to find what route he could through the vortex of this mad war.

  The infantry kept pace with the armoured transports, but her troops were dying beneath the rain of debris. Larger chunks of rubble, columns and walls weighing tonnes, were taking their toll on the vehicles, too. She kept the shrinking column moving. There was no retreat from the cathedral. They would destroy it, or it would come for them all. So she held to the advance, striking deeper into chaos, looking for the chance she knew they would not find.

  Daemons cavorted along the edges of the column. They darted in and out, slashing at the ragged formations, picking off foot-soldiers, sometimes attacking in a group to rip open the hatches and doors of Chimeras caught upon ridges of debris or impaled by falling columns. They were fewer than before and could not launch a concerted assault, but Vendruhn did not see a victory in their smaller numbers. The others had gone elsewhere. They had run, and the cathedral had come to life. The victory was theirs. The advantage was theirs.

  Hopelessness howled at Vendruhn from every facet of the dark. She shouted back at it. She would fight until she died. As long as she burned with wrath, she could not despair.

  Bit by bit, the column drew level with the cathedral’s north flank. Vendruhn had no illusions about bringing down the monster with lascannons, but a frontal charge would be suicide. She held the vague hope of providing a distraction and so aiding the Grey Knights. Anything to keep in the struggle. Anything for the honour of the Glas family and Sandava II.

  The cathedral was a black mass, a hill that moved and lunged and mauled its way through the smoke. Artillery shells from the west struck the battering limbs of the towers and the spine of the roof. They blew holes in the masonry, but the beast in its transformation was more resilient to the barrage than it should have been. The stonework had some of the flexibility of hide. It was denser, stronger than before. The impact of shells only enraged it. The ones that missed added to the inferno of Egeta.

  Rage. Yes, and more than that. Hunger. Desire. A furious ecstasy. The cathedral roared. Every doorway was a maw, behind every maw a throat. The cathedral was its own choir. Its voices united in a song of excess, hate and war. The terrible music vibrated in Vendruhn’s chest. It was so huge, it threatened to shake her bones to dust.

  And there was the eye. That was the one constant source of light. The monster was darkness in darkness, except for the eye. The cathedral’s rose window had been a masterpiece of stained glassteel fifty feet wide. It had been a mosaic of red and violet and gold, hundreds of lens-shaped panes forming the great circle. Vendruhn had known it as a work of sublime art, a symbolic expression of the God-Emperor’s eternal vigilance. Now it was a uniform dull purple, a sombre, blinking cancer in the gloom. The light seemed flat, yet when Vendruhn looked at the eye, it was hard to tear her gaze away. It radiated a mesmerising hunger. It twitched from side to side, seeking fulfilment it would never find. And so the cathedral’s hunger fed its rage.

  Danek made a hard right, narrowly missing a wall that suddenly toppled forwards. The engine strained. The tracks spun in gravel, then caught and the Chimera lurched ahead. The vehicles behind tore through the falling rockcrete. One was buried. More soldiers died. Others ran crouched on the right side of the Chimeras and found some shelter as debris bounced off the roofs. Somewhere in the dark, clusters of heretics shrieked their crimson joy, drawing las-fire.

  Ahead, the path opened up. Near the base of the hill, the cathedral had l
evelled entire blocks around it. The column angled in towards the north side a third of the way down from the head of the beast. It reared up again. Vendruhn thought the eye was focused on a point on the ground below. She glanced in that direction. She saw a blur of movement and a flash of blue light that was blessed in its purity. The Grey Knights were there.

  The cathedral dropped down with a boom that almost knocked Vendruhn from the roof hatch. It howled its polyphonic hunger. Then it started to rise again. It lifted the south tower back in preparation for a blow.

  ‘Fire on the windows!’ Vendruhn ordered.

  The arched targets no longer resembled stained glassteel. They were scales, faintly iridescent in the reflected light of explosions. Vendruhn had no idea if they were weak spots, but they were points to aim at, a means to keep the troops’ minds on a purpose.

  Lascannons, heavy bolters, lasguns and rockets tore through the dark and into the cathedral’s stone hide. A ripple of overlapping blasts cut across the wall. The notes of the cathedral’s song changed.

  ‘We hurt you!’ Vendruhn shouted, determined to believe it. ‘We hurt you!’

  But the south tower came down without deflection. It struck the ground with meteoric force.

  And the north tower…

  The north tower swung out over the militia. Vendruhn saw it move, saw the sudden intention. She had plenty of time to realise what was coming. But there was no time to escape their doom. The tower was too big. There was too much distance to cover. The column was caught in the limb’s immense shadow.

  The tower seemed to pause before its descent. Perhaps that was an illusion. The scale of movement was so great, it destroyed perspective.

  ‘Move down its flanks!’ Vendruhn screamed into the vox. ‘Stick close to its wall!’

  Danek had already started the run. The race was desperate, the chance tiny. But maybe, Vendruhn thought, maybe they could get too close for the cathedral to reach them with its mountainous arms.