The lesser daemons abandoned their victims. They rushed the Purifiers. Storm bolters and incinerators broke their wave. The atmosphere of the throne room was redolent with decaying perfumes. Now it also stank of burning, disintegrating warpflesh.
Mnay’salath was isolated from the mob of fiends and daemonettes. Carac brought up the rear of Crowe’s wing of the wedge. He was closest to the Keeper of Secrets. Mnay’salath had its eyes on Gavallan. Carac took his chance and made a reckless lunge at the daemon. Crowe caught the moment in the corner of his eye a split-second too late.
The opportunity to strike was clear. Carac was right to seize it. He was wrong not to consider it had come too soon in the fight. The squads had not pressed the daemon hard enough for it to make a mistake on this scale.
Carac came at Mnay’salath from the side. He swung his Nemesis force halberd up beneath the daemon’s left arm. For a fraction of a second, the blow seemed to strike through. Then it hadn’t. A blink, and the daemon had side-stepped further to the left. The movement was casual, unforced and contemptuous. Mnay’salath looked down at Carac and launched its attack.
All the maws on the abomination’s body shrieked. The scream came from the breadth and depth of the warp’s insanity. It slashed the soul with the despair of a million murdered worlds. It was all the grief of time turned into a drawn-out, rise-and-fall chorale of pain. The sound of the scream filled the throne room and spilled into the night. But the cry had a focus too. Its greatest strength lay in a straight line from the daemon. Mnay’salath shrieked at Carac. The scream tore into the Grey Knight like a dagger and paralysed him. A Space Marine did not fear, but had no immunity to grief and hopelessness.
The edge of the scream sliced into Crowe’s emotional core. It was a call to despair as powerful as the Black Blade’s curses. It tore open every doubt, however buried, and turned it into psychic shrapnel. This drew blood, and the blood rose, seeking to drown him in an overwhelming sense of unworthiness.
He refused the attack. It declared him unworthy, but could not change his duty. ‘You will not turn me from my purpose!’ he shouted and turned his storm bolter back on the daemon.
Mnay’salath leapt over the trajectory of the shells and came down on the immobilised Carac. It smashed the Purifier to the ground. It jabbed its razored pincer against the chest-plate of his Aegis power armour. The blows were a rapid-fire hammering, the impacts merging together into a splintering grind. The pincer broke through the armour. It pierced the carapace. Blood spurted from the wound.
Crowe’s bolter fire hit the daemon. Shells shattered flesh. Others exploded against chitinous armour. Mnay’salath ignored the wounds. It drew strength and joy from the pain it inflicted.
Gavallan threw himself at the Keeper of Secrets. He struck the pincer with the edge of his Nemesis force sword. Ichor jetted into the air. The daemon turned and grabbed at Gavallan with its other arms. The castellan parried the clawed limbs. He took a step back. The daemon followed, leaving Carac. Destrian pulled his fallen battle-brother clear.
Crowe waded in to assist Gavallan. The daemon’s bone spur blocked his first attack, and then Mnay’salath sang. The stream of abominations racing into the throne room had not stopped, and now all the daemons in the chamber closed with the Grey Knights in a sudden, determined rush. There were too many, and they were too heedless of their destruction, to hold them at bay. Those that fell were momentary shields for those behind. Fiends and daemonettes fell upon the Purifiers in a storm of claws and whips. A lash grabbed Crowe’s sword-arm, arresting his blow. A second and third joined it. His arm was held, the unholy bonds pulling in three directions at once. He snarled and jerked to the right, using his full mass. He yanked the daemonettes in to him. The whips went slack. He slashed his blade across the three fiends, severing arms and necks. He was free again, but the skirmish had cost him seconds. The struggle between Gavallan and Mnay’salath had moved a few yards away. The lesser daemons swarmed around Crowe. He chopped them down and blasted them apart. He was knee-deep in ruined foulness. The bodies turned to sludge before they evaporated, and the morass slowed him down. His brothers were caught in the same trap.
All the while Mnay’salath drew Gavallan farther and farther away, isolating the castellan. Gavallan fought the immense abomination with holy fury. Every blow was fuelled by supreme skill and righteousness. The greatest hero of the Brotherhood of Purifiers stood tall, unbowed and unstoppable against a foe over twice his size and wielding the terrible gifts of excess.
Mnay’salath shrieked again, and the scream was echoed and amplified by the daemonettes. The scream was everywhere. It rose and rose, gathering such strength that its message took on the shape of an absolute truth. The whistling song of the fiends chopped and twisted any train of thought that tried to counter the despair in the scream. There was no shelter from it. It smashed into Crowe with the weight of the world. He staggered. Mourning strangled him. Its limbs were veils and gossamer, subtle and innumerable. He could not cut through them all.
In the centre of the throne room, unreadable, Gavallan became the focus of his brothers’ despair. He was the legend fighting his last. The magnificence of his battle was the foundational image of grief. He fought on and on, and the scream went on and on, growing ever more piercing with the perfection of his struggle.
The daemon screamed, but the dancing movements of its legs and claws took on a new, mocking aspect. Mnay’salath’s blows were the same as laughter. I am toying with you, it announced through its dance. I have toyed with you since the Envoy of Discipline.
Behold the pain that is your reward.
For I will have my prize.
I will have the sword.
The tower’s grav-lifts were ruined. Their wrought-iron doors hung open. Smoke poured out of the shafts, so Vendruhn led the charge up the stairs. The climb was a long one, but she made faster progress than she had expected. The stairs were a spiral, fifteen feet wide, going up the inside of the tower’s outer wall. On Vendruhn’s right, the inner wall was smooth rockcrete, hung with dynastic tapestries, interrupted by arched doorways leading to each level. The curve of the walls meant Vendruhn could see barely twenty feet ahead. In her anger she abandoned caution for speed, and was rewarded by a rapid climb through the blood of apostates. She could hear the songs of the daemons coming down the staircase from on high, but it was never any nearer. It was retreating faster than she could advance.
There were human enemies here, though. Civilians and palace functionaries who had sought refuge when the danger from the east had begun to make its way across the Rybas. These people had fallen, their faith no match for their terror, and they had become maddened apostles of the source of the fear. Many had scavenged weapons from the bodies of militia killed when the daemons had burst from the underground tunnels. The wretches were many, but untrained. They hurled themselves at Vendruhn and her troops, screaming and shooting in panic. Killing them was easy. It was brutally satisfying. The blasts of her plasma pistol left behind the stink of burned flesh. Her soldiers formed a wall across the staircase. They fired their lasrifles with anger the equal of the heretics’ panic. Their precision was much greater.
Vendruhn was at the head of a machine of righteous fury. It marched up the tower, annihilating the fallen. Vendruhn conserved her shots. She used her sword, running it into the howling faces of the heretics. She cut bellies wide open and sliced throats with such force she almost decapitated her foes in a single blow. She was drenched in blood. It felt good against her skin. It tasted good, warm and salty with retribution. She took more than satisfaction in the kills. She took pleasure. She wished she could destroy these pathetic beings with even more violence. They deserved worse. There was no excess of cruelty to equal their treachery. But every dismemberment and every incinerated face was a step towards a dream of fulfilment. She revelled in the bloody joy. It was the experience of justice.
At the head of a phalanx seve
ral hundred strong, she reached the top of the spire. The staircase ended in a great vestibule. It was a vast space for applicants to gather and be humbled, while they waited, by views of Egeta from the surrounding windows. Ahead was the wall that separated the vestibule from the throne room. The doorway gaped. A last rush of daemons was passing the threshold. The vestibule was littered with the bodies of massacred honour guard. Vendruhn looked once at the faces of the dead, then turned away. Their expressions were frozen in horrified ecstasy. She stared straight ahead and shouted as she ran, firing, into the chamber beyond.
Madness greeted her. Her charge faltered. The room was filled with daemons. There was nowhere safe to look. The sight and song of the abominations blasted her senses. Soldiers behind her moaned, overcome by the riot of terrible meaning.
Scores of daemons grappled with the Grey Knights. In the centre of the room, Castellan Gavallan clashed with a thing somehow more monstrous than the cathedral. It was beautiful and ghastly, cruel and seductive. It was a shape carved from nightmare and desire. It slashed at Gavallan with pincer and claws. Daemon and Grey Knight landed blows that would have shattered stone. Ichor ran down the ivory-white of the daemon’s skin. A jagged, crimson bone spur of a limb smashed Gavallan’s left flank. His armour was broken on that side, and stained with coagulating blood. The daemon held one arm up, its claws grasping at the air as if it sought to clutch hold of a dream. The duellists circled one another, each strike unleashing lightning blasts of eldritch energy, shaking the throne room with the thunder of an entire war. The struggle was a clash of forbidden myths. These were beings which had sprung from hopes and terrors that could never be acknowledged. Their reality sundered the soul.
To Vendruhn’s right, her father crouched by a wall. He clawed at the floor. ‘Use the sword!’ he screamed. ‘Use the sword! Use the sword!’ The same hysterical words again and again, repeated with machinic insistence.
All this she saw in the first seconds of her arrival. Her anger kept her sane, but the horror slowed her decision. She did not know where to attack first. And there was another voice shouting. Its source was in the room. Its sound was in her mind. It was the raging counterpart to her father’s cries.
Use me use me use me use me use me use me use me!
She hesitated. The men and women with her hesitated. The madness was too great. Then the madness came for them. The newly arrived daemons leapt at the militia.
And the giant looked at Vendruhn.
It spun away from Gavallan. It covered the distance to where she stood in two strides. In the first, it bellowed, ‘Welcome!’ In the second, its mouths screamed. All the daemons screamed.
The pain in her soul was so great that she felt nothing when the towering abomination seized her.
The daemon’s scream was beyond any Otto had heard before. It devoured him, reducing him to nothing. It shattered his perceptions. It turned the world into a rain of jagged glass. The Grey Knights and the daemons became shards of sense impressions, all smashed and tumbling into the abyss of the pain, pain, pain.
One image remained whole. It was his agony perfected. Mnay’salath, godlike, the master of the dance, holding Vendruhn in its claws. The great evil taking the last true thing.
Use me use me use me use me use me use me!
Cutting through the storming pain, through the rain of falling glass, came a crystalline darkness, the shout of command the equal of the daemons’ scream. The command was welcome in its clarity. In its power.
In its hope.
There had been the lie of hope before the scream. An illusion of silver-grey. Giants of metal and arrogance. All part of the broken-glass reality now. All part of the world lost in the night before the scream, before the pain.
Use me use me use me use me use me use me!
The command was the one thing outside the pain. The one thing that was sure. The one and only hope.
He knew where to go. The command was so strong, it would guide him through the pain and glass.
Use me use me use me use me use me use me!
He obeyed. He crawled forwards. Soon he could stand. Soon he could run.
The Keeper of Secrets snatched up the militia general. It turned its head in the direction of the Lord Governor as the worst of the screams ripped through the throne room. The pain exploded from the depths of Crowe’s psyche. A nova of searing blades cut him from the inside out. It sought to blind him to everything but the pain.
It failed.
The Grey Knights still fought. Their calling and their souls were one. The Purifiers roared through the pain of the daemon’s scream and cut the foe down.
Crowe saw the triumph in Mnay’salath’s look. He understood the daemon had orchestrated this moment. It had conducted every step of the dance. The moment was the summit of its art, its masterpiece.
But the daemon was arrogant. It trusted in the power of the scream to hold its enemies down long enough for it to complete its great work, and so it shifted its attention away from the Grey Knights. It believed it could no longer be stopped.
It was wrong.
‘You are banished!’ Crowe roared at Mnay’salath. He reached for the whorls of the immaterium surrounding the daemon. At his shout, his battle-brothers joined him. Together, the squads attacked the links between the warp and the materium exploited by the daemon. They began to sever the threads of its being. The other daemons redoubled their attacks. Crowe felt claws sink through the seams of his armour. He sprayed bolter shells before him, destroying and maiming. His body fought on instinct, sword blows and defence automatic while his pain-wracked mind turned its full psychic might on Mnay’salath. His vision of the warp was clearest. The other Purifiers followed his lead.
They struck hard. The flesh of the daemon’s torso rippled. It began to rise in flames of skin.
Crowe could not hear Antwyr. He did not notice the silence then. He would remember it later, to his shame, when his mind returned again and again to the Egeta throne room.
Mnay’salath snarled in anger. It turned back, but did not face Crowe. Instead it rounded on Gavallan.
The castellan had not yet joined in the collective ritual of banishment. He fought free of the cluster of daemonettes that had rushed at him when Mnay’salath abandoned the duel. He raised his sword with both hands. ‘I am the will, the spear and the sword!’ he bellowed. A nimbus of warp fire encircled him. It crackled with the rage of the sacred. ‘I am the hammer and the fist!’ he cried.
Gavallan’s strength was suddenly everywhere. Crowe felt the ferocity of the champion’s spirit imbue his limbs and his mind. The pain diminished. The psychic assaults of the other Purifiers intensified.
The castellan supported them all.
At the edge of Crowe’s awareness, he realised what Gavallan was doing to himself. He was dividing his psychic strength among his brothers. He did not have the energy to spare, yet he was sacrificing himself. Blinding silver light leapt from Gavallan and flowed into the Purifiers. It fed the banishment. The edges of Mnay’salath’s form began to blur as the Purifiers cut the daemon away from the real. Gavallan advanced through slashing foes towards where the Keeper of Secrets stood, suddenly at bay.
Crowe moved forwards too. The world of the material war receded dangerously. He put more and more of his being into the assault on the Keeper of Secrets. A blistering, coruscating storm exploded from his body and blasted against Mnay’salath. One of the daemon’s left arms began to flicker, its reality uncertain. The attack was working. But the blows of the lesser daemons were landing against Crowe more frequently. His advance was slow, and so was Gavallan’s. The champion was beset on all sides by the abominated foe. He swung his blade in wide, sweeping slashes through the bodies of the horrors. He closed on Mnay’salath with the majesty of holy war. Power flashed about him, travelling down his limbs and blade. It jumped to his brothers, feeding their strength. The daemons charged
at him, and he turned them away.
Mnay’salath’s snarl became a roar of rage. Its flesh sloughed off its form. Smoke rose from myriad wounds. Its mouths screamed again, but now in the daemon’s pain. And still it held Vendruhn. It lashed out at Gavallan over the heads of its vassals. The castellan blocked the pincer. He lunged forwards through the grasping daemonettes and plunged his sword into Mnay’salath’s abdomen.
With the might given him by Gavallan, Crowe took the collective force of banishment and channelled it down the champion’s blade into the core of the daemon.
Mnay’salath shrieked. Its anger cracked the ceiling. Dust and chunks of stone fell on the combatants. Eldritch lightning and fire burst from the wound. It engulfed the daemon and its prey. Vendruhn was screaming in something worse than pain as she was covered by flames of unformed madness. Faces howled in the fire, then vanished; colours appeared and died, bleeding through the flames.
The light of purity and the light of corruption battled. A vortex of energy surrounded the Keeper of Secrets and Gavallan. It flashed brilliance and darkness. It thundered with rage holy and unholy. The lesser daemons shrieked with their master. The Grey Knights struck with the power of a single burning soul.
Otto came up behind Gavallan. The daemons were before the castellan and at his flanks, holding the focus his material self could still spare. He was consumed by his struggle against the things of the warp. There were no humans to fight, so he was not watching for Otto.
At the centre of the maelstrom of banishment, Crowe saw Otto reach up for the sword on Gavallan’s back. He commanded his body to shout a warning.
The warning came. Gavallan began to turn.
The chains snapped.
The Black Blade of Antwyr leapt from Gavallan’s back into Otto’s hands. Crowe abandoned the banishment. The collective blaze wavered. The vortex grew darker, the whirling fire taking on a violet hue. Crowe snapped back into the full awareness of his body. So did the other Purifiers. With a clap of thunder that resonated in the soul, the vortex flared with searing darkness, then vanished.
Warden of the Blade Page 15