Crowe turned away from the square. ‘What is the state of the militia’s reserves?’ he asked.
Vendruhn realised she had no idea. She had not thought beyond her line of sight since the battle in the throne room. She had not taken stock of her forces’ strength.
Lehnert spoke up, sparing her the need to admit her ignorance. ‘The base outside Egeta is untouched,’ he said. ‘The troops there await deployment, lord.’
‘Your aerial transport capacities?’
‘Valkyries. Some heavy lifters. Enough for the troops in this region.’
‘Good,’ said Crowe. To Vendruhn he said, ‘Be ready for a mass airlift.’
She nodded. ‘To where?’
‘We will know soon enough.’
‘The most rapid deployment would be by orbital transport,’ Lehnert put in.
‘No,’ said Crowe. ‘Nothing leaves the atmosphere of Sandava II. Not any longer.’
Mnay’salath raged, and the world cried out. As the legions stormed over land and ocean, wrath shaped by frustrated art twisted the air and tortured the stones of the earth. Mnay’salath inscribed its fury in its passage. The fields of Sandava II exploded with an obscene excess of life. Crops transformed into muscular coils of flesh that swallowed the agri-serfs in a monstrous embrace. The rains became scented oils, driving human and beast to frenzied deaths. A swathe of madness, of moaning rivers and gasping, heaving landscapes marked Mnay’salath’s journey. Even the ocean was defiled with the fleshy scar of desire as the daemon flew, held aloft by conjured warp energy, towards the western tip of Sandava II’s southern continent.
Over the hundreds of miles of empty ocean, the daemon brought its rage under control. All the meticulous steps of its dance had been for nothing. It had underestimated Antwyr. The sword had duped it.
It had expended too much of itself on the cathedral. It had not left itself enough strength to capture the escaping Blade.
But Antwyr was still on this world. It had not escaped yet. Mnay’salath could feel its presence. The fusion of daemon and sword had not been broken. Antwyr was held in the materium.
It was time to begin a new dance. And so Mnay’salath followed the memories it found in the ruins of Cardinal Rannoch. It descended on the city of Beroea, and the Ecclesiarchal Palace.
Beroea, the holy city of Sandava II, perched on the jagged end of a peninsular claw reaching westwards into the ocean. A metropolis of shrines, surrounded on three sides by high cliffs, the eternal wind pounding the waves against the rock with the booming of a giant’s heart and the relentless insistence of a tolling bell. Beroea, where every shrine housed a relic, a horde accumulated by the diligent work of centuries of ecclesiarchs devoted to the pride of their diocese.
Beroea, which Rannoch’s excessive pride had now doomed.
In the highest towers of the palace, Mnay’salath crouched. It gathered its strength. In the city below, its vassals rampaged. They slaughtered the citizenry of Beroea. They filled the streets with blood and revelry. Their numbers grew, and at their master’s command they herded the terrified faithful together. The new dance required a great gathering. A great unison. When the dance was accomplished, it would expunge the defeat in Egeta from memory.
In the heights, in the winds, in the succession of nights, Mnay’salath moved its arms, weaving, conjuring, dancing. It did not know where on Sandava II the sword was. Others would be searching for it too. Let them find it. Let them bring it here, for they would be driven by their pallid service to the corpse-god to do so. And when they came, Mnay’salath would present them with its greatest work yet.
The sacrifices grew in number, feeding the art of annihilation.
Sometimes Otto looked out at the world. His selfhood would coalesce into something more substantial than vapour, and he would know what he had been. He would scream at what he had become, but his transforming body did not obey him. He would look out through eyes that no longer belonged to him. He would take stock of where he was, and think how best to get where he must go. And when he was certain of his path, he would feel himself grow faint again. He would become an evanescence of pain, flickering in and out of a form of consciousness, trapped in the nightmare unleashed by his decision in the throne room. It pleased the sword to make him see the consequences. The tattered rags of his soul screamed. The sword laughed. And made him do its bidding. The sword controlled the body and plundered Otto’s knowledge of Sandava II to make its escape from this world. But not into the warp. Antwyr was held within the materiality of the Blade. That final escape was not within reach.
The body was still a solid shadow, human in form but featureless. The eyes through which Otto saw were not really there. The body saw and heard, but there were only vague depressions where eye sockets would have been, and irregularities on the sides of the head to suggest ears. The thing raced through the burning streets of Egeta. It moved with the grace and speed of darkness leaping from flame to flame. Where it flew, where it was seen, the inhabitants of the city obeyed a will greater still than Mnay’salath’s. They no longer searched for the Blade. They killed each other in a perfection of violence. The chaos spread wide and Antwyr fed on the fury. It moved faster. On the wings of violence and the obedience of the mob, it left Egeta behind.
It took a day to speed over hundreds of miles north west, and it was night again when the Black Blade and its slave reached Dikaia. The city was a major hub for the northern continent’s agri-shipping. Millions of tonnes of the harvest of Sandava II arrived in Dikaia every day to be shipped off-world to satisfy the inexhaustible hunger of the Imperium.
The shadow-thing flowed past endless maglev freight trains. It shot from one rusting iron pillar to the next, darkness moving through gloom. It did not engender strife here. It did not wish to make its presence known. It followed the track to the spaceport and arrived just as two orbital lifters rose from separate launch pads. They were bulky, clumsy, brutish craft, suitable to their purpose of bringing Sandavan grain to freighters waiting at low anchor.
They were also suitable to Antwyr’s purpose.
Otto’s awareness sharpened again as the sword approached the moment of its complete victory. It was about to finalise its escape.
You have wrought this, the sword told Otto. You are the author of the fires to come.
Otto’s spirit howled again. The shadow body had no mouth, only the shape of one. But it could have shrieked to shatter the sky if the Blade had so willed it. Antwyr did not will it, and Otto’s horror was silent.
A third lifter was being readied for launch. Its four engines were rumbling, preparatory to the efforts of heaving the hull, more warehouse than ship, into the night. The cargo bay doors were still open. The shadow climbed a maglev pillar, then ran along the edge of the track towards the lifter. A train rumbled past in the other direction, its huge, cylindrical cars rocking back and forth.
The sky lit up. A burst of orange daylight spread over Dikaia. The shadow looked up. Before the light faded, there was another flash. Then another. The sky boiled, as if the stars were too close, suddenly raging just beyond Sandava II’s atmosphere. The fireballs expanded, then dimmed, burning plasma dissipating. In their wake came the streaks of violent re-entry. Wreckage rained towards the surface, disintegrating as it came.
Otto rejoiced. The ships in orbit over Sandava II were being destroyed. There would be no way off the planet.
The body shrieked now. It gave voice to Antwyr’s rage. At the moment the sword had reached the threshold to the galaxy, the door had slammed shut. The shadow roared, and the track turned molten.
The sword tore into Otto’s memories. His triumph disappeared beneath pain as Antwyr ransacked his mind. Now he wished to dissolve again. He wished for a final oblivion. Antwyr denied him that solace. It held him present, aware, conscious as it searched. It found what it wanted almost at once, but the moment for Otto was eternal.
&nbs
p; The sword stole his knowledge of the cities of Sandava. It found the population of Dikaia. It weighed the hub against all the other centres within reach. Egeta was the governmental centre of the world, but Dikaia was the locus of commerce. Millions more lived here than in Egeta. The sword’s anger was muted by a predatory satisfaction.
It refused Otto his wish. It ripped him apart, and the dissolution was agony, but with each stab his consciousness became more and more pronounced. Antwyr would not free him. The body began to change again, taking on features, while Otto wailed in the terrible silence of his prison. He begged to weep, to weep for his failure, for his people, for his world. As the scope of the sword’s power appeared before him, he begged to weep for the Imperium.
But the sword granted only pain, and its laughter was the voice of a holocaust.
Chapter Ten
ANTWYR ASCENDING
The Black Blade came to a city whose life was shaped by a great shadow.
The fields of Sandava II came to an end in the approach to Dikaia. There was no room for a single tree, much less farmland, amid the web of roads and tracks that converged at the city. For hundreds of square miles around the city’s walls, the land was paved by rockcrete and steel. In the centre of Dikaia rose the source of its shadow. The city nestled around the base of the Vigilance tower. Rising thousands of feet above the plains, the tower was a lone peak, a narrow, vertical, striated upthrust of igneous rock. It was visible forever, a column standing guard over the flat expanse of the prairies. Every day, with the rising and the setting of the sun, its shadow would stretch across the breadth of the city and sweep around it, the hand of a monstrous sundial telling the hours. The tower was vigilance in stone, and it was a call to vigilance, a summons to the population to think upon the loss of light and the dangers of darkness. The extending grasp of Vigilance tower was the call to hold fast to the Emperor’s light, and mark well the coming of judgement. So went the sermons from every pulpit in the city. So went the hymns. So went the nature of evensong rites when the shadow became night, and so too the solemn celebration of matins, when the counting of the hours began anew.
The possessed body of Otto Glas began its long walk with the coming of morning. As one shadow retreated, another, fouler one followed it. The Black Blade disdained to hide its slave now. The thing of darkness announced its presence just inside the east gate. It appeared in the wide square before the gate, where the road transports arrived before heading down the avenues that led to the multitude of warehouse and manufactoria districts.
As the matins services were still under way, and the first wave of rail and road shipments were arriving, the being stood in the centre of the square. The direct rays of the sun did nothing to banish the shadowstuff of its form. It was a creature of pure void, a fragment of the night in the shape of a man, absorbing all light and reflecting nothing.
Transport drivers and warehouse serfs stopped in their tracks. They stared at the figure in their midst. As would every other inhabitant of Dikaia that day, they experienced a single, blinding moment of terror in recognition of the danger to their souls. Then the shape held the Black Blade of Antwyr aloft, and their battle was lost. Their will was Antwyr’s. The shadow creature began to walk, and they followed. In the first minute of the great march, more than a hundred citizens of Dikaia gathered to follow in the sword’s wake. Before the shadow left the square, there were a thousand.
Past the square, the sword’s creature moved down a great perimeter boulevard curving to the south and west. The thing did not speak. There was no need. The sword’s will stretched wider and wider. Every soul that gazed upon the Blade fell within the gravity well of its influence. The more slaves it captured, the stronger its pull became.
Within the first mile of the march, Antwyr’s power extended beyond sight. By the end of the first hour, a hundred thousand people filled the streets. Their steps were synchronised. They had become the physical manifestation of a single consciousness. In some, the most pious and stubborn of the citizenry, the flickers of their original selves writhed. They knew they were lost. Like Otto, they suffered for their fall. Otto’s pain was yet of a different order. The sword pushed his awareness to the fore. It made him see the full scope of his damnation. It made him understand what he was becoming.
Will you not rejoice? it taunted. Do you not see the power that lies before you? Do you not hunger to see worlds burn? No? I will teach you to revel in the fire. I will teach you to embrace your transcendence.
The body’s metamorphosis continued.
The sword had begun by stealing all traces of Otto’s physical identity. His body had become the empty symbol of a man. As the sun rose, and the sword’s harvest continued, the crowds growing and growing and growing, the body developed features once again. It grew taller. Its limbs thickened. It became more solid, pure shadow giving way to a monstrous presence. There was texture now. It existed in a nether zone between flesh and armoured plating. Spikes began to push outwards from the limbs and chest and dark horns grew from the brow. Otto felt the thing that was both him and no longer his become a massiveness of many blades.
The march became a huge, sweeping spiral going deeper and deeper into the city. Past warehouses, past hab blocks, in the manufactoria sectors. Dikaia was the most industrial city on the agri world. On either side of upheld Antwyr, narrow, sharp spires reached for the hard steel of the daytime sky. The architecture of Dikaia was in the mould of the Vigilance tower. The city was a dense cluster of rockcrete-and-iron claws. They dragged at the air, smoke and burning gases trailing from the peaks like dark, livid wounds. The population poured down into the streets in answer to the sword’s call. Some could not descend fast enough and hurled themselves from windows, falling hundreds of feet to end as broken offerings to Antwyr’s supremacy.
The Blade’s grip covered the entire eastern half of Dikaia, from wall to centre. Millions walked to its command.
There was resistance. It was brief. Pitiable. The huge shape of Otto’s body strode past the Chapel of Militant Blood. The doors opened. The Archdeacon of Dikaia ran down the steps, brandishing his iron staff. The sight of the winged skull was another brand on Otto’s soul. The Archdeacon raised the staff high. He began to shout. His anathema did not make it past the first syllable. The people overwhelmed him. They attacked quickly and in silence. They trampled him to death. The synchrony of their kicks and stomping horrified Otto. It was another measure of the Black Blade’s absolute control. He did not want to see. He would have looked away. But the sword kept the body’s new eyes on the scene. It laughed at the death. It laughed at Otto’s agony. It laughed as it delighted in the sweep of its power.
On and on the march went, through the city and through the day, until at last, with the coming of evening and the triumph of all shadows, the monster holding Antwyr reached the centre of Dikaia and the base of the Vigilance tower. Here it began to climb. It ascended rapidly. The spikes bristling on its body were so long and sharp now, it used the ones sprouting from its fists to punch handholds in the rock. While it climbed, the people gathered still. Dikaia was Antwyr’s domain now. No corner of the city was outside its grasp.
The monster climbed. Otto noted the gun emplacements mounted at intervals in the cliff-face. He sensed the sword’s calculations too. He was rocked by its laughter yet again. The Black Blade was pleased. It was eager for the war to come.
You had no memory of these? it said to Otto. You are a poor officer. Your true glory comes now. You called yourself Lord Governor. Let me show you what you govern.
Not I! Otto tried to form the thought. He tried to answer the sword. He could not. Were these not still his hands, however transformed? Was this not still his body? Did not all these actions flow from his first crime in the throne room?
He reached the summit and turned around. It seemed that night had sprung from the Vigilance tower to cover Dikaia, bringing all within the grasp of the Black Blade.
Down below, beneath the vertical height of stone, in the streets, on rooftops, in windows, ten million people stood to silent attention, waiting, incapable of any act that went against the will of the sword. They were serfs and administrators, preachers and nobles, merchants and arbites, farmers and soldiers of the militia. They were the full mosaic of Dikaia’s populace, and they were a single, unified force. No mortal army had ever been capable of the perfectly coordinated action that defined this ten million souls. No mortal army since the Black Blade of Antwyr had last been free to drown the galaxy in blood.
Your true glory, the sword said again.
Otto’s body raised its arms. The sword pointed to the heavens, hungry for their death. The left hand made a gesture, a command given to the perfect army.
The roar of fealty shook the tower. Ten million people obeyed at once, and the very stars trembled.
The Black Blade of Antwyr exulted.
Your true glory, it said, is mine.
Crowe watched the Purgation’s Sword return to the militia base. The solemn voyage to the Sacrum Finem was complete, then. Gavallan’s body was aboard the strike cruiser, ready for its final journey to the Dead Fields of Titan. That much had been accomplished. Good. Crowe gave thanks that it had been possible to attend to this before the next phase of the war. He was grateful, too, that Gavallan would be returned intact to Titan. There were too many empty suits of burial armour in the Dead Fields. So many brothers whose bodies had been utterly destroyed when they fell in service to the Emperor. Gavallan had earned his rest. He would have it now, in proper form.
If the thoughts did not give Crowe a measure of peace, they did help him accept what had happened. There would be much more in his future he would have to accept. Unless he failed in his mission, and that he could not accept.
The Stormraven came down on the base’s landing pad. The furnace wind of its engines’ down-draught washed over the wide expanse of rockcrete, which was crowded with Valkyries and heavy transports, all ready for deployment when Crowe gave the word. He had not done so yet. He needed a target first.
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