Warden of the Blade

by David Annandale

  ‘Be ready,’ Crowe voxed the squads.

  ‘Bring me the sword!’

  The people attacked. They ran into the streets from the manufactorum and the facing hab blocks. They were a mob without sense or thought. They only had fear. They feared the daemonic shout, and they saw the sword on Gavallan’s back. Days of war and horror had broken them. They ran towards damnation as though it were their last chance for salvation.

  ‘Are they mad?’ said Carac.

  ‘They are maddened,’ Crowe answered. He understood that only terror beyond their ability to process would push civilians to charge at Space Marines. He understood, but he judged all the same. The mortals’ weakness robbed them of any claim to mercy. In their fear, they had embraced heresy.

  The Purifiers did not waste ammunition on the mob. Crowe was loath even to sully his blade with the blood of so pathetic a foe. The squads waded through the howling crowd. Fists and makeshift clubs beat against their armour with no effect. The mortals were trying to stop a power that would not be turned. In the eyes of the civilians closest to him, Crowe saw a new terror take hold, sparked by awe as they closed in. But the power of the daemonic command pushed them on and they clawed, weeping, at his flanks. He broke limbs with every stride. The Purifiers marched over the unfaithful who fell in their path. Crowe took no pleasure in the deaths. He felt no regret, either. There were reasons why these people had abandoned their faith, but there were no excuses.

  The Black Blade pulled the mob in like a psychic lodestone. The heretics, mere animals now, still knew at a level deeper than instinct that this was the prize the terrible and musical voice demanded.

  ‘Bring me the sword!’

  The heretics tried to push their way between the Grey Knights. They tried to isolate Gavallan. Crowe marched half a step behind the castellan. He smashed the heretics aside.

  Your chance is now, Antwyr hissed at his soul. I am in your reach. Look how easily you can grasp me. Will you have these vermin claim me in your stead? Embrace your fate. With me, this plague vanishes. With me, all barriers fall. Free me. It will be so easy. So easy...

  Crowe ignored the sword. A heretic ran in from the left and scrabbled at the back of Gavallan’s power pack. Crowe hurled the heretic away, but as he did, the chains holding Antwyr rattled. Crowe eyed them. They looked as secure as they always had. The Black Blade had not shifted.

  So easy, said the sword. So easy.

  ‘Brother castellan,’ he said.

  ‘I heard it too,’ said Gavallan.

  A few hundred yards past the manufactorum, the street widened and was clear of debris. Berinon landed the Stormraven. The downward blast of the engines filled the street with a gale’s fury, and the mob howled in distress. At the edges of the crowd, and further up the street, the materium cried out in a tearing of flesh and sanity. Mortal forms split, stretched, twisted. Daemons rejoiced at their violent birth into reality. The people of Egeta fled the multiplying abominations. They rushed the Grey Knights with renewed desperation. They tried to climb into the Purgation’s Sword.

  ‘Do they think they can bring it down or that they can escape?’ Drake wondered.

  ‘I doubt they know,’ said Crowe.

  ‘What they do or do not know is irrelevant now,’ Destrian said flatly. He turned his incinerator on the mob before the gunship. He performed the execution without anger, and in the cold light of necessity. The heretics collapsed, writhing, beneath the wash of flame. So would burn everything tainted by Ruin. The Purifiers boarded the Stormraven through the side door. Crowe stood in the opening as Berinon lifted off. He watched the street devolve into a riot of daemonic transformation and slaughter. The Sword rose higher. Other streets were burning. Chaos was spreading over the western sector of Egeta. Everywhere Crowe looked, he saw cavorting abominations. The destruction of the cathedral had done nothing to stop the incursion. The great daemonic voice had triggered a new offensive, rippling out from the street the Grey Knights had left behind.

  Sendrax joined Crowe. ‘I dislike leaving the foe to do as it pleases,’ he said.

  ‘The critical battle is not down there,’ said Crowe. Egeta might fall. All of Sandava II might fall. Victory did not lie in the salvation of a single city or work. It lay in the destruction of the force behind the incursion. It might be necessary to destroy the diseased body to stop the plague.

  ‘Agreed,’ Sendrax said. ‘Still, our hand is being forced yet again.’

  Crowe nodded. ‘Maybe so,’ he said. He pointed to the palace tower. ‘But our enemy is there.’ As they closed in on the spire, the density of the warp flows grew clearer. The ramparts of the keep were burning. There was heavy fighting under way there. But that too was a distraction. The throne room was the key. Still pointing, Crowe said, ‘That is where we will end the foe’s game.’

  ‘The daemon calls for the Blade,’ Gavallan said behind them.

  Crowe turned. The castellan stood in the centre of the troop compartment, defying the exhaustion in his voice with his proud stance.

  ‘Very well,’ Gavallan said. ‘We will put the daemon to the sword.’

  The laughter was everywhere. It skittered out of the dark. It whipped around the flames of burning buildings. It followed the remnants of the Sandava II Militia as it made its run from the eastern sector. It exploded overhead as the armour and the ragged infantry crossed the Rybas riverbed. It was waiting for them in the west of the city.

  ‘Bring me the sword!’ cried the voice of command, the choir of a single will, and the laughter fell from its echoes.

  Vendruhn had commandeered the heavy bolter on the new Chimera. She fired into the blackness that had descended upon the streets with the coming of night. Power was failing all over the sector. She had left the devastated east to find the war taking the west. She saw few daemons. They flashed by the edges of the phalanx. Their forms flickered into sight by the light of flames. They snatched at infantry stragglers, but most of their prey was further out, running and screaming in the streets. Vendruhn heard their songs and their whistling, though, and the laughter was in the foul music.

  It was everywhere.

  It was aimed at her.

  She knew this because she felt its lethal stab in her soul. The laughter triumphed over the fall of the Glas dynasty. It revelled in the end of glory. Centuries of reign faithful to the Emperor. Centuries of peace through iron. Sandava II was exemplary, a model to be held up across the subsector, and it was the Glas family who had made it so.

  And now the laughter. In the air or in her mind, it was real. Sandava II was lost. There was nothing to save. The people were wretched cowards, unworthy of Glas rule, unworthy of protection, unworthy of life. So Vendruhn fired into the dark. It did not matter what she gunned down. Everything that moved was condemned in her eyes. She fired at the laughter. When, in the wavering fragments of light, she saw something fall, be it human or daemon, she answered the laughter with her own. Her laugh was a weapon as fierce as her shells. What she had given her life to protecting had been revealed as deserving only death. Executing that sentence was a release, a grim joy. There might have been perversity in her pleasure if there had been anything less than justice in each kill.

  The perversity lay in still fighting.

  She stopped firing for a moment, her breath wheezing through her harsh laugh, and she heard someone calling to her. It was Morenz. The infantry trooper had charge of the vox-unit for her platoon. It still worked, and Barratz had assigned her to Vendruhn’s Chimera to handle the patchwork communications net.

  ‘What is it?’ Vendruhn asked, angry at the interruption.

  ‘Communication from the Adeptus Astartes.’ Morenz sounded alarmed to have spoken to figures so divine.

  Vendruhn dropped through the hatch into the Chimera’s troop hold. Along with Morenz, the transport had taken on wounded soldiers, men and women who could no longer run, but wer
e still able to fight. Vendruhn took the handset from Morenz. ‘This is General Glas,’ she said.

  The Grey Knight did not bother to identify himself. When he spoke, Vendruhn recognised the deep, cold rasp of the one called Crowe. ‘What is your position?’ he asked.

  ‘About a mile east of the palace sector,’ said Vendruhn. ‘We are making good time. We will be in position to attack in minutes.’

  ‘The enemy stronghold is the throne room,’ Crowe told her. ‘Secondary forces may seek to detain you at ground level. Do not permit this. Make for the spire immediately.’

  ‘At any cost?’

  ‘If you do not, your cost will be total.’ He snapped off the vox-channel.

  Vendruhn stared at the handset. The Grey Knight’s peremptoriness would have enraged her had it come from a mortal. She felt no anger at Crowe. She might as well condemn a mountain for being inflexible.

  ‘Understood,’ she said to the silent handset. She gave it back to Morenz. ‘New orders,’ she said. ‘We make for the throne room. No pause will be tolerated. If you stop to fight, you will be abandoned.’

  ‘Yes, general,’ Morenz said. She sounded taken aback, but she turned to her equipment and began the process of relaying the order to the rest of the column.

  Vendruhn did not wait to hear her command transmitted. She climbed back up to her heavy bolter. She fired with renewed fury. She had remained calm before Morenz. Now she set her hate free. She killed anything she saw move beyond the edges of the column. Her troops followed her example, and their fire cut into the dark. The militia left a wake of blood as it stormed through Egeta. There were more and more civilians in the streets as the palace drew nearer. Vendruhn gunned them down, her lips pulled back in a rictus of excited wrath. Unworthy, unworthy, unworthy, she thought.

  She did not know if her father was alive. What she knew was that the centre of the Glas regime had been taken. She would reclaim it, or burn everything.

  It occurred to her that she might reclaim the throne, then burn everything. Nothing could be redeemed on Sandava II. Nothing was worth saving.

  The palace sector’s main gate appeared at the end of the boulevard. Troops were fighting on the battlements, struggling against daemons that mocked and toyed with them. In the writhing light of muzzle flashes and leaping flame, the monstrous silhouettes capered. The abominations were amusing themselves with their prey.

  The gate was open. Mobs of citizens blocked the space between the walls. The people in the streets sought the false refuge inside. Those within the walls tried to flee the fighting and the ravening horrors. The streams collided in the gateway. The people fought and screamed and tore each other to pieces.

  ‘Clear our path!’ Vendruhn ordered. She aimed the bolter forwards. The Chimera’s multi-laser turret blasted the mob. Behind Vendruhn, two other transports moved to either side and burned the civilians with their las-bursts. The gateway turned into the threshold to a smouldering charnel house. The Chimeras roared over the corpses and the crawling survivors. Vendruhn felt the jerk and grind of tracks crushing bone. She heard cracks and screams. She shouted at the night, and the sound of dying wretches pleased her well. She saw the doors to the keep open before her, only a few hundred yards away, and she yelled, giving voice to an emotion that was neither rage nor triumph, nor defiance nor hate, but something she dared not name.

  The night answered with the laughter, the endless laughter, the laughter that already strode the world in victory.

  ‘Bring me the sword!’ the monstrous voice called once more. There was satisfaction in its perverted musicality now. An expectation of fulfilment.

  Above, the gunship of the Grey Knights closed in on the top of the spire.

  ‘Do you see?’

  The daemon’s voice was suddenly quiet, intimate, a seductive whisper at the back of Otto’s neck, hissing the last word, sssssssseeeeee, turning it into a serpent of wind that stirred his hair. He breathed in a mixture of heady blossoms and rich putrescence.

  Mnay’salath swept its pincer before it, taking in all the movements of the night. ‘Behold,’ it gloated. ‘As below, as above, as I say. I command and it is done. My prize comes to me.’

  Its empty hand opened and closed, claws clicking against each other. Otto squirmed in the daemon’s grip. He looked where he was commanded. He had no choice. Mnay’salath had the reins of his mind and his body. He would obey, and obey gladly, whatever he was told, even though another part of him would scream with all the passion of a dying soul.

  Vendruhn’s forces had returned. The armoured column smashed its way into the palace grounds. The square before the keep lit up with a sudden increase in las-fire. In the air, something was flying directly at the throne room window. It had the build and armament of a tank, and it cut through the night on wrathful engines. In the final seconds of the Stormraven’s approach, Otto experienced an overwhelming vertigo. It seemed the gunship might slam straight into the throne room. Otto would have welcomed the sudden oblivion. It would have freed him from the torment of fear and hope and rage and desire.

  The Grey Knights were here, but the daemon welcomed their arrival. They carried its prize. Bring me the sword, it had commanded, and they had obeyed. Below, Otto’s daughter was fighting her way to the heart of the curse that had taken Sandava II. The daemon was pleased by her arrival as well. Otto saw all this in the few moments it took for the Stormraven to slow and turn its right flank to the window. Otto cried out. He cried for salvation and for vengeance. He cried for the pain of Sandava II. He cried a warning too, a wordless one, a pointless one, and in his agony he saw just how futile it was. Nothing could change what was about to happen. There was no path open to the Grey Knights except to attack, exactly as the daemon commanded. Otto’s only hope was in their victory.

  The side door of the gunship was open. Mnay’salath made a casual, graceful leap that carried it and Otto halfway across the throne room. It bowed, sweeping its free arms in a gesture of welcome to the Space Marines. Its vassal daemons snarled and trilled, celebrating its pleasure.

  Gavallan stood in the centre of the Stormraven’s opening. The leader of the Grey Knights was not wielding the relic sword.

  Otto despaired.

  The sword was the only way of defeating the evil. He had known this from the moment he had first seen it. Gavallan had brought it here, but would not use it. He would not use the thing the daemon wanted against it. The trap was complete.

  The Grey Knights leapt, storm bolters blazing. The remainder of the glassteel window exploded. So did the daemons closest to it. The shells struck them with the force of sanctity, for that was what landed in the throne room. The Grey Knights did not seem to notice when their shells blasted through the abominations and into the bodies of their human captives. These Space Marines were the terrible might of the holy Emperor. As they launched their attack, Otto was almost as afraid of them as he was of the daemons. They were the idea of the sacred given form in silver-grey, and the sacred was fearsome, a thing divorced from mercy.

  Otto was at the centre of a war between forces that surpassed all understanding, and he cried out again from the depths of his perfect terror.

  The Purifiers landed in close formation in the throne room. They arrived as a single entity, already destroying abominations before they had taken their first step. The two squads made a wedge with Gavallan at its tip. Crowe and Sendrax led its wings to his right and left. They cleansed the near space of the lesser horrors and took the measure of the foe.

  The greater daemon regarded them through the eyes of the mask. It grinned. It held the Lord Governor aloft with one hand. ‘Give me the sword,’ it snarled.

  The monster was one of the high creatures of the Dark Prince. A Keeper of Secrets. Crowe had witnessed such a thing lay waste to an entire battlefield. He had read much about these daemons in the forbidden texts preserved in the Chambers of Purity. They were dangero
us on levels far beyond the physical.

  Gavallan raised his sword, pointing it at the daemon’s chest. ‘We shall bring you judgement!’ he roared. At the same moment he gunned down a fiend that lunged at him over the tacticarium tables.

  Mnay’salath! Antwyr shouted. Pretender! Wretch of Slaanesh! I will cleave you where you stand!

  The sword’s anger seemed directed entirely at the Keeper of Secrets. Crowe distrusted the perception. The rage still cut into his mind with as much force as any of Antwyr’s blandishments. The Blade’s hatred for the daemon was genuine. It was also a ploy, a truth fused to a lie.

  The Lord Governor and his honour guard were the playthings of the daemons. Fiends and daemonettes coiled around the soldiers. Most of the guards were still alive. They were dying by degrees, tortured by sense experiences that had no name. They screamed for release and begged for more.

  There were sporadic sounds of combat from elsewhere in the tower, but only more daemons, not mortals, entered the broken doorway. The abominations had full control of the throne room. Mnay’salath drew itself up to its full, impossible height and dangled Otto before it. The daemon was amused in its arrogance to let the Grey Knights strike first.

  Or so it seemed. Crowe perceived the tension in the warp gather around Mnay’salath. The daemon was building its attack.

  The Purifiers unleashed a maelstrom of bolter fire. There was no question of saving Otto’s life. Even if he survived this battle, his planet was infested. At the very least, Egeta and every soul within would have to be reduced to a smoking crater.

  Mnay’salath had more interest in keeping the Lord Governor alive. It hurled Otto high, sending him flying across the chamber as it danced away to the right. Its movements were as fast as thought. Otto struck the far wall and landed in a moaning heap. Mnay’salath dodged out of the way of the storm bolters. Crowe pivoted hard, deliberately overshooting the mark. The daemon ran into his shells. They punched into its right shoulder. Daemon flesh and ichor sprayed on the wall behind. Mnay’salath absorbed the hits and spun, no slower, each movement no less a gesture of sublime grace. It snarled, though. Its arrogance was injured.