She did not care. She ran at them, raging, firing, and brought them down. And in their destruction she found the pleasure. The pistol approached critical, its heat burned through her gloves, and that too was part of the sensation. She would destroy everything to prolong the ecstasy.
The daemons’ joy ended suddenly. They howled. They wailed in despair. Their heads rocked back, and they ignored Vendruhn.
She paused in her frenzy and looked up.
The Ecclesiarchal Palace rocked forwards. Its step faltered. It slammed a leg down, and the leg crumbled. Vendruhn stared at the slow collapse and fall of the limb. The events were so huge, they took an age to unfold. There was so much time for her to see what was happening, for understanding to pierce the haze of furious desire. But there was no time for escape. Time only to bear witness and die.
No, she thought.
The shadow of the palace was as big as a world. It grew bigger. The spiked towers began to fall way from the main body. They plummeted to the ground like immense javelins. And just behind them came the great corpse of the palace, an endless massiveness that cried out with a voice of iron.
Vendruhn screamed her denial as the sky fell upon her.
Crowe leaned forwards, keeping his feet as the floor slanted thirty degrees. He grabbed Drake as the fallen Grey Knight slid past him. Drake was conscious, and his stump was clotting, but he had lost a lot of blood. His movements were sluggish. Crowe hauled him up, and dragged him towards the other Purifiers as they fought their way to their feet. The sludge of vanishing daemons slowed their movements.
‘Well fought, brothers!’ Sendrax called.
‘We will fight again,’ Crowe yelled. ‘We are the hammer, and our duty has not finished.’ Crowe felt something huge snap in the heart of the palace, and the floor levelled ominously. There were only moments now. He held up the sword. ‘This mission is not complete until we depart Sandava II!’
Destiny. It had to be earned. It had to be fought for. And now the fight began again. There was no escaping the collapse. There were no stairs to climb. There was no destination to reach. There was only the struggle, the refusal to end with the palace.
Crowe felt himself grow lighter. The huge mass was plunging now. The stained glass of the walls and floor dissolved, flowing to mix with the bodies of the daemons. The sludge turned into a rising tide. The interior of the palace lost all form. Molten, it flowed in on itself. The tide clutched Crowe’s feet. It rose past his knees. He forced himself forwards through the thickening entropy, supporting Drake, bringing the Purifiers together, brothers refusing oblivion as one.
Then walls and ceiling and floors lost all coherence at once. A massive wave of fluid architecture slammed down on the Grey Knights, and the surface beneath them became a sea. Crowe lost his grip on Drake. He fell, tumbling through the substance of Mnay’salath’s fading dream. Vanishing forms battered him. He saw the echoes of glass and staircases, of chandeliers and pillars, of arches and of domes. The savage colours streaked through the sea of lost forms, melding with each other, smearing madness. Jagged masses struck him. For a moment he was caught between the collision of two monolithic slabs, and then passed through them as they too melted. And he was falling, falling – everything was falling. The palace fell towards the ground and the art it embodied fell to nothingness.
Crowe fell, but his soul did not. He held fast, to the Blade, to his being, to his duty, to destiny.
The force of the palace’s impact against the earth slammed through the sea of disintegration. The shock was visible, a sudden wave, and it was a blow like a Dreadnought’s power fist against Crowe’s spine. Consciousness flickered in the storm of pain. He held it as tightly as he did the sword. He had a direction now. The collapse of the palace had ended, and the sludge had a surface. Crowe righted himself and struck upwards. The molten warpstuff dragged at him. It would not let him go. It would smother and drown him in its final murderous act before it vanished. The weight of his armour pulled him down, but he fought. He dragged his way forwards and up through swirling, grasping insanity. The colours faded, turning to muck. The sludge retracted into itself, becoming denser as it shrank. It tried to crush him. He pushed on, cutting through the muck with the sword, refusing all ends except the one that awaited when all duty was complete. And that would never be.
He fought, and he broke through the surface. He dropped down again at once, then rose again, and so struggled to overcome the mass of his armour and the drag of the quagmire. He surfaced and sank, over and over, and the sludge contracted, monstrous dreams and desires shrivelling to nothing.
Then his boots touched ground, and he hauled himself to the edge of the muck. He saw his battle-brothers dragging themselves out, and he gave thanks. He looked for Drake, and spotted a still hump in the muck a few yards away. He made his way over and pulled the Purifier into the fading light of the day. He staggered on, and at last left the sickening morass behind.
The Purifiers gathered at the edge of the palace’s swamp. They gathered, but Crowe saw how the others instinctively, perhaps unconsciously, moved away from him. He walked several yards on, putting more distance between himself and his brothers, drawing the poison of Antwyr with him.
For hundreds of yards in every direction, every shrine had been flattened by the palace’s collapse. The monster had destroyed everything beneath it, and now the last of its being drained away over the ruins. No daemons attacked. Too much of their essence had been slaved to Mnay’salath’s masterwork, and they too had been destroyed by the Keeper of Secrets’ end. Beyond the site of the impact, the crucifixions stretched to the horizon, but they were still. The victims were finally dead. They had been released from the dance.
‘The militia has not fared well,’ Gorvenal said. He pointed to the smashed lifters and the ruined Chimeras. There were no bodies visible.
Crowe contemplated the scene. He thought about the pattern he had seen being woven around Vendruhn. The militia had served a brief purpose, drawing the palace’s attack away from the Stormraven. That seemed very little. There was something unsatisfying about the death that had come to the general. Perhaps he had ended the pattern’s formation by destroying Mnay’salath’s material form. Perhaps. That solution did not convince. Yet her end had clearly come. ‘The Emperor grant them peace,’ he said.
The silence of the dead city was broken by the growl of the Purgation’s Sword’s engines. Berinon brought the gunship down over a level field of rubble fifty feet away.
Sendrax said, ‘This land is dead, but there is no peace here.’
‘Agreed,’ said Crowe, and the other Knight of the Flame nodded.
It was time to return to the Sacrum Finem. It was time, too, for the final martyrdom of Sandava II. Time to kill the planet, and the memories it held.
Epilogue
THE HOLLOW WAR
But the memories could not be killed. Decades later, Castellan Crowe stared at the crucifixions, and felt the circle close. On Sandava II, he had seen his exhausted mentor fall. On Sandava III, he had come bearing his own burden of exhaustion. And this was waiting for him. The endless, dancing, writhing death favoured by Mnay’salath. The daemon’s pleasure that was the fuel of its great works.
The daemon’s machinations had brought Gavallan low. It would be a fitting revenge if now it destroyed Crowe and so finally claimed the prize it had sought so many decades ago.
Antwyr gloated. Antwyr laughed. You see, you see, you sssssseeeeeee! All is accomplished. This is the true moment of your destiny. This is the end of the path. Will you turn from it now? I think not. You have followed it too long. The claws of its will jabbed with greater insistence than ever at his soul, convinced they had at last found their purchase.
He could not dismiss the Blade’s words. Vertigo assailed him. It was borne of a past whose meaning was suddenly revealed. A pattern had been woven on Sandava II, and he had fallen into it, been tr
apped by it ever since, his apparent victory then a perverse lie. The symmetry was too great. The dark echoes had come for him, now, when he had been scraped empty by the years, and the timing was too perfect to be anything other than planned. Gavallan’s fall and now his, in the same system, at the hands of the same weaver of art.
On the outer slopes of the bowl, the daemons laughed. Lilting, monstrous songs coiled through the burning night of Sandava III. They slithered around the bowl, shaping the movements of the crucified bodies’ dance.
You have failed, castellan, the sword whispered.
If he had, Crowe had failed in far worse a fashion than Gavallan. There was no successor. He was alone. The Blade would be lost.
Antwyr snickered. The sword’s eagerness for the endgame was a turbulent constriction around Crowe’s thoughts.
I do not accept this, Crowe thought. This will not be my destiny. My oaths will not break on this world. I will not fail the Emperor.
This will not be the end. I am the Warden, and my task is sacred.
He straightened as he made the vow. He clutched the hilt of the sword, and prepared for battle again, not in hopelessness, but in determination. As he did, he looked at the bowl and his gaze sharpened. He saw past the symmetry. He saw the differences.
On Sandava II the crucifixions had formed a spiral with the Ecclesiarchal Palace at the centre. The design here was more complex, and there was nothing at the centre. The daemonic rune formed by the sacrifices bespoke a different intent, a different use to what Crowe had seen before.
‘The symmetry is incomplete,’ he said.
It might be that the differences were meaningless. Yet the crucifixions aboard the Envoy of Discipline had also been arranged in a circular fashion. There had been a greater consistency to the atrocity then. This was new. Crowe chose to see meaning in the difference. He and Gavallan had missed signs and misread significance on the Envoy and on Sandava II. He would tear the heart from the dark meaning on this day.
He descended the slope. The daemons did not follow. They danced along the lip of the bowl. Their pleasure taunted him. He stared straight ahead, to the other side of the bowl. It was raised higher than the side he had entered. He could not see beyond it. He saw meaning in the barrier too. It was a veil. Behind it was further revelation. The spire of Hive Labos was still hidden from him.
He moved through the rune and observed the flow of the warp. It raced around the lines drawn by the crucifixions, picking up speed and power. It appeared to flow out of the bowl in two directions, to the rest of Sandava III, and back towards the spire. At the centre, he swung the sword with both hands and toppled an iron cross with a single blow. He moved swiftly from sacrifice to sacrifice, chopping them down. He severed the arms and legs of the torsos, setting them free. He destroyed the core of the rune and paused.
The daemons’ celebration did not diminish. The currents of the flow were unchanged. The bodies he had dismembered were still caught in the dance. The limbs twitched. The torsos convulsed. The creation of the rune had already done its damage. The link between it and the source was too strong. Destruction here would serve no purpose.
Crowe climbed the far slope. At the top, he looked down towards the vestiges of Labos. The hive had been devastated. Vast areas had been reduced to craters boiling with magma and blood. The landscape crawled with daemons joined in the great dance. The hive had been a monstrous agglomeration of manufactoria. Most were gone. The burning, bleeding shells of some remained. In a path leading across the plain from the base of the hill towards the spire, though, dozens of manufactoria still stood, transformed. The spire too, was in the grip of daemonic possession. The path of the surviving structures replicated the rune of the crucifixions. And the manufactoria too were caught in the dance. Their walls twisted back and forth. Immense chimneys whipped like snakes. The spire, shorn of all the tumours of hab blocks, was a narrow, tormented spear. It too flexed, serpentine. Its peak had split into snapping jaws. A hollow wail of hunger boomed from within.
You are summoned, the sword said. Your strength is gone, and you will fall.
Crowe believed in the summons. He believed in nothing else Antwyr said. As he strode down the hill to meet with his enemy, he thought he detected a return of anger in the Black Blade’s tone. It was no longer gleeful. It sensed his determination. It bore witness to his own summons. A summons to strength from within, and from his faith in the Emperor’s power without.
He tried again to reach his battle-brothers. ‘Sendrax,’ he called. ‘Drake.’ He cycled through the channels. Nothing. This test was his alone, then. So be it.
He reached the bottom of the hill, and moved between the writhing manufactoria. And here, he thought, was another difference, another flaw in the symmetry. The structures strained. They screamed. The dance tormented them. But they remained in place. They did not walk the plain like the Cathedral of Martyrdom Embraced or the Ecclesiarchal Palace.
‘Your repetition is false!’ Crowe shouted to his enemy. ‘Your symmetries are empty!’ The pattern was weaker. It was an echo, not an amplification.
As if in reaction to the truth he brought, the daemons and the manufactoria attacked in anger. Outflows of molten ore flooded onto the plain. Daemons disappeared beneath the incandescent flow. Others outran it. Daemonettes leapt from building to building, staying above the burning metal until they pounced on Crowe. The sudden rage of the enemy renewed his strength even further. He had dismayed the daemons and the sword. He had not surrendered. Now he would cut through their dance and destroy the defiler of Sandava III.
Ruins lay everywhere between the manufactoria, and he used them to gain height where he could. He tore the daemons apart with such force and speed, it seemed they were the defenders being ambushed by a lone warrior. Above his power pack, his banner flapped in the hot wind of the flood of ore. It bore his coat of arms – a sword imprisoned by coiling barbed wire. As he ran towards the spire, vaulting from one sinking ruin to another, trampling fiends into the ore beneath him and charging through the infernal flood itself, he heard the Blade shriek in his mind, and he took new pride in the symbol of his honour and his burden. His iron halo’s energy field flashed at blows and when it came into contact with the ore. He hurled frag grenades ahead of him, the blasts ripping open a passage through the daemons. Storm bolter shells put the abominations down, creating causeways of daemonflesh over the molten ground. He thrust the Blade upwards, impaling a fiend that jumped from the snarling bay door of a manufactorum. Ichor streamed down his arm, steaming. The daemon’s weight pulled his arm down, and the agonised abomination slid off the sword and into the destroying light of the flood.
There were safer paths to the left and right, sloping up or so choked with wreckage that they dammed up the ore. Crowe ignored them. They would take him down the long path between the manufactoria. They would make him trace the lines of the rune. He would not reinforce the sorcery by re-enacting its form. He stormed straight ahead, cutting through the pattern, slicing it open, defying every intention of the Ruinous Powers. He attacked with his own meaning, his own significance. He imbued every bolter shell fired, every blow of the sword and every step forwards with his truth. War was a clash of symbols, and his were mighty.
The ground began to rise again in the approach to the spire. He left the flood behind. Daemonettes leading hellflayer engines rushed up on either side of him. They drew closer. The spinning teeth of their axles were covered in the flesh and gore of previous victims. The daemonettes called to each other and snarled at him. He threw a krak grenade to his right and fired his storm bolter to the left. The sanctified explosive melted through the centre of the axle. The shells vaporised the head of the leading seekers of Slaanesh. The engine to the right snapped against itself. The seekers on the right fell, and the momentum of the engine rolled the savage teeth over them. Engines, riders and steeds were entangled in whirling self-destruction. The demented, inhuman
shrieks followed Crowe through the great archway of the howling spire. But the daemons did not cross the threshold.
He found himself in a vast, domed hall. The walls were fifty feet high. Though the exterior twisted, and the spire snapped for prey it would never devour, the interior was more stable. Here, stone was stone, though it was soaked in the blood of mortals nailed to the walls. Like the crucified, they too were decapitated and twisted eternally in the dance of pain. They hung in vertical lines. In between were huge tableaus. They were painted in blood and stretched flesh. They pulsed with unholy light. They depicted the martyrdom of Sandava II. Around the hall, Crowe was confronted with gigantic images of the events of the planet’s fall. Crowe saw the clash of worshippers and militia, and the march of the cathedral. He saw Gavallan struck down by Otto Glas. He saw the burning of Dikaia. He saw the exultation of the Ecclesiarchal Palace. And the Exterminatus. In every case, the perspective of the scenes was mortal. Even the Exterminatus, when cyclonic torpedoes had turned the world into a debris cloud, was portrayed as seen from the surface. There was something familiar about the point of view of all the paintings but the last, and even it had the impossible authenticity of memory.
The daemon waited in the centre of the hall. It did not attack. It seemed to be waiting for Crowe to see and understand the infernal art. ‘You made a vow once,’ the daemon said. ‘As did I.’
Crowe circled the abomination warily, waiting for its attack, for the move he would counter and turn against the daemon. The lies of the symmetry were now exposed. This was not Mnay’salath. Yet somehow there was an element of truth to the repetition. There was a link to Sandava II. Even the daemon’s appearance announced this. It was twice Crowe’s height and broad-shouldered. It had less of the monstrous grace of the Dark Prince’s creatures, though it had their perverse beauty. It appeared to be constructed of the stained glass that had reigned at the heart of the Ecclesiarchal Palace’s power. The thousands of coloured shards were also mirrors, each reflecting a facet of the paintings, as if the daemon were constructed from shattered, reconstructed, obsessive memory.
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