Castellan

by David Annandale

  There was an enemy. There had to be. He felt a psychic build-up. There was a storm about to break. Gura was no psyker, and she could sense it, too. It was that strong.

  ‘Brother-castellan,’ Drake voxed. ‘Something is going awry.’

  ‘I know it,’ Crowe said. But he couldn’t identify the danger. It was too vague, and so powerful that it seemed to be emanating from everywhere.

  A fiend lunged at Crowe and he impaled it through its open jaws. The Blade came out through the back of its skull. The fiend went limp, its mass dragging down on Crowe’s arm as it sagged. He pulled the sword free and Antwyr said, That was your last blow in your broken dream. Now you will awaken.

  ‘Be warned,’ Crowe voxed the strike force. ‘A new attack is imminent.’ He scanned all sides in the time it took to take another step forward. He saw the diminishing numbers of daemons, the blasted landscape and the flames upon the waves. There was nothing else out there.

  He raised the sword to strike again.

  Antwyr said, Oh. A single syllable, so different from any of its ravings and curses. It was an expression of wonder, and of a delight so great it stopped the flow of words.

  A great silence fell. The daemons ceased their attacks. As one, they turned away from the Grey Knights. They looked up, staring into smoke and unbroken grey clouds. The legionaries advanced still. Heavy weapons fire cut into the motionless horde. Daemonic forms vanished, burning and disintegrating. Those hit by the barrage did not react as they were destroyed. Nor did those standing near. The ranks of abominations had become a congregation awaiting the manifestation of the divine.

  The silence lasted no more than a second, but it was huge. It felt to Crowe as if the entire materium were holding its breath. The instinct was too strong, and he paused. He looked up, too, in time to see the clouds ripped away.

  The skies over Skoria were suddenly clear. For a fraction of a second, they were a blue that had not been seen on the world for more than three thousand years. Then blue darkened to violet and then to black. The effect was vertiginous. The firmament seemed to fall away, as if an abyss had opened up and Sandava III was about to plummet into its depths. Then the tearing began. The rip slashed through the blackness, a terrible wound opened like flesh being pulled asunder. The blood that rushed from the tear was the monstrous light of the warp. The energy was all colours and it was none. It was a shriek from beyond and beneath the spectrum of sanity. It was the bright, stabbing shades of nightmare and madness, of pain and foul joy, of the worst of war and of bloody, tormenting fate. It was the death of reality, and of a galaxy’s fragile, battered, fraying dream.

  Antwyr had spoken the truth. Hope burned.

  The tear stretched from horizon to horizon, from east to west across the entire celestial sphere. It opened wider, roaring, becoming maw as well as wound. Now the silence was over, and the surviving daemons were singing. It was a hymn of praise, of triumph, of mockery, and of pleasure that was the absolute disorder of the senses. There were barely a hundred of them left. In a matter of minutes, the war would be over. They could not stand against the Grey Knights. But now a far greater ending was at hand.

  Antwyr laughed. You had no victory, said the Blade. This. This is victory. Now is the devouring. Now is the storm of culmination.

  In the midst of the convulsing sky was a sharp point of silver light, a single glint of hard reality in the spreading holocaust. It was the Sacrum Finem, holding its position. Gura had been moving the strike cruiser to follow the course of the war, faithfully keeping it in anchor above the main body of troops, ready to drop more heavy support or begin an orbital bombardment. It had been invisible through Sandava III’s murky atmosphere, yet Crowe had felt its presence, and known its strength was ever at hand.

  The sight of it now felt like an invitation to mourning.

  ‘Castellan,’ Gura voxed. ‘We cannot hold.’ Her transmission stuttered with bursts of energy. Her voice rasped with pain as well as age.

  ‘Take the ship out of the system,’ Crowe ordered. ‘Leave at once. Make the jump and report to Titan.’ Even as he spoke, his command felt redundant. It was impossible to tell how huge the rift was. A terrible intuition whispered that Titan already knew. The triumph of the Blade and the daemons was enormous. He was witnessing something far worse than a localised warp storm.

  ‘We cannot leave,’ Gura said. Before Crowe could condemn her for a misguided show of loyalty, she spoke again, and her despair was the most profound he had ever heard a mortal express, ‘There is nowhere to go. Castellan, the Astronomican has gone out.’

  Crowe’s spirit recoiled, refusing to accept the truth of such an appalling sentence. The light of the Emperor could not have been extinguished. Without it to light the road through the warp, how could the Imperium survive? And if the Astronomican had been extinguished, did Terra yet exist?

  Is the Emperor dead?

  The thought was a horror beyond blasphemy. He banished it from his consciousness the moment it took form. What he could not banish was a sense of loss that descended upon him. It was a response to a sudden, immense absence, and he knew that what Gura said was true.

  In its place a different light was coming to embrace Sandava III now. It would not guide. It would give no hope. It could only devour.

  The rift was wider yet. It covered a third of the sky. The fire of the ocean was a pale shadow of the holocaust of burning reality. Roiling, screaming, the maw of horror drew closer. Coronal energy blasts arced outwards, and the glint of the Sacrum Finem grew brighter. The spark winked in and out. Crowe thought he saw movement.

  ‘We have lost power and steering,’ Gura voxed. ‘We are going down. I am launching everything I can to your coordinates. Perhaps some of it will reach you. Castellan, forgive me, for I have failed my charge.’

  ‘You have not failed, Shipmaster Gura. The blow that has fallen is beyond us all.’

  ‘Then I will fly to the Emperor’s side.’ Gura’s prayer was desperate. Her words were pious. Her voice sounded terrified. If the Astronomican had failed, what of Terra?

  ‘Castellan,’ Gura continued, ‘will there be–’

  An explosion cut off her plea. Crowe heard the roar of destruction on the bridge of the Sacrum Finem, then silence. The vox feed ended. The spark that was the strike cruiser was brighter still, and then it became a shape. Pushed out of the sky by the bellowing cry of the immaterium, the ship plunged toward the surface of Sandava III. It had been hit hard, and it spun as it fell. It whirled, the movement a blur, far too fast to maintain structural integrity. The force of the spin tore the ship in two. The aft section was hurled out in a long arc over the ocean. The bow streaked downwards, a broken spear. It came down a few miles to the south. Shattered in its lines and in its purpose, it left a trail of fire and smoke in its wake. There was majesty still in its shape. It was huge, towering over the landscape even at the moment that it struck the earth. The statuary on the upper hull was just visible. In the last second of its fall, the ship was a ruined column, a monument to its own desolation. It was tragedy given form.

  Then it hit, a hammer striking the surface of Sandava III. The earth trembled. The tremors threw daemons and Grey Knights to the ground. Crowe kept his feet as the world around him crumbled. The mountain peaks shook. Rockslides cascaded down the slopes. A storm of dust and rock shrapnel rose from the base of the fallen monument. The cloud enveloped the lower half of the column. The bow drove deeper into the ground. Two massive fissures ran up its length, splitting the ship like an axe striking a log. The wreckage leaned away from itself. It slumped to the left and right, a ruined city fallen from the skies.

  The aftershocks of the crash still thrummed through the rock when the stern fell into the ocean. The ruptured engines exploded a moment before impact. A plasma sun blinded the land. The photo lenses of Crowe’s helm slammed shutters down against the killing light. When they lifted, the new fire was
still brighter than the blaze from the rift. The shockwave came next. Braced, his feet planted on the agonised earth, Crowe leaned forward into the blow. ‘Stand and hold, brothers!’ he shouted into the vox. ‘There is no wind that can break us!’

  The blast swept over the ocean. It snuffed out the flames as it passed, while new ignitions followed in its wake. It shredded chanting daemons. Crowe roared his defiance as a wall of fury hit him, but he did not fall. The wind came, a hurricane scream tearing banners to ribbons. Crowe took a step forward into the wind. He could barely see. He was moving against a force that sought to lift him and his battle-brothers from the ground. He refused to fall. He brought the sword down again, striking against the wind as much as the fiend he cut in half. Behind him, the strike force followed. Their ship was fallen. The galaxy bled. Yet the Grey Knights marched. There was no end to duty, and no end to faith.

  Even when the end came for everything else.

  The rift was the entire sky now. The howl of the warp reached the atmosphere of Sandava III. The maw was on the point of swallowing the world.

  At the horizon, where the fireball of the Sacrum Finem’s pyre was turning a sullen red, a mountain was forming. All the ocean blazed now, and the huge displacement of the waters advanced. A hundred feet high, the burning wave raced towards the shore.

  And the rift of madness engulfed Sandava III.

  Chapter Two

  The Death of all Dawns

  ‘High ground!’ Crowe shouted. He turned from the shore, away from the final contingent of daemons, away from the illusion of victory.

  Now you see, said Antwyr. Now you taste the ash. Your fight is over. Abandon the futile. Embrace the truth that has come. Be what fate has assigned. Be the lord of the final realm.

  The Purifiers and the First Brotherhood were already reacting. The strike force made for the mountainsides. The ground sloped up sharply barely a hundred yards away. Crowe glanced back as he ran. The wave was a rising line at the horizon. It was minutes from crashing against Skoria and then onto the mainland. The mountains were close, but the chance they presented could be as illusory as the victory. Time was short, power armour was not meant for climbing, and there were no clear routes for the tank to get to safety.

  ‘Stormravens,’ Crowe voxed as he ran, ‘pick up as many as you can.’

  ‘We will be with you in moments,’ Berinon answered.

  The roar of the gunships’ turbofans was almost drowned out by the greater thunder of the wind, the burning ocean, and the coming wave. The Harrower and the Purgation’s Sword came down a hundred yards ahead and to Crowe’s right. There was too much of a slope for them to land, and the backwash of the engines created dust storms as the Stormravens hovered a few feet above the shaking ground.

  The Terminators, furthest ahead, boarded the Harrower. It lifted off and climbed quickly, rising towards a sky filled with the flames of madness. The Purifiers began to climb into the side door of the Purgation’s Sword. Crowe put on a burst of speed to catch up with his battle-brothers. He was less than ten yards from the gunship. At his back came the all-consuming rumble of the wave. The world was tilting up behind him.

  The sky howled. Shapes swam through the chaos of raging colours. Things coalesced into being and disintegrated just as quickly. The potential for all things monstrous and violent surrounded Sandava III. Order was destroyed, beyond all hope of reach. The warp boomed with storm, it hissed like reptiles. It shattered the mind, and it raged at Crowe’s refusal to surrender.

  The ground did surrender. When Crowe was fifteen feet from the Stormraven, a fissure opened between him and the gunship, and the land dropped suddenly. He fell with it, plummeting into a narrow chasm twenty feet deep. When the rockfall ended, he jumped up, moving through a thick cloud of dust. The rock face was pitted and cracked, and he found handholds and crevices into which he could jam the blade. He worked his way back up, but there was no time now. The thunder of the wave was huge. ‘Go!’ he voxed Berinon.

  ‘Castellan,’ the pilot objected.

  ‘Look at the wave, brother. I will not reach you in time.’ The gap above him was so narrow, he could not see the Purgation’s Sword. There was only the triumphant scream of the sky. ‘Take off now. I command it.’ He was the guardian of Antwyr, but he also stood on the spiritual ramparts for the Purifiers. They were his charges. The fortress of their strength stood fast wherever they marched, and he was its castellan until his final breath. The walls would not fall under his watch. His battle-brothers would not die needlessly.

  ‘The Emperor protects,’ Berinon said, obeying his order.

  ‘And his hammer has not yet finished its work on this world,’ Crowe replied.

  He climbed, though it would make no difference now where he was when the wave arrived. He could not reach high ground. He climbed so he could face the threat. He would not have it fall on him while he was already buried in a vault.

  He reached the surface. The Stormravens had climbed high. They were above the reach of the wave, fighting the rampaging turbulence of the air. Through brute force, the Malleus Maleficarum had forged a path up the mountainside. It was a few hundred yards from Crowe’s position, and might yet reach safe ground. It might not. The Crusader’s fate was no longer the driver’s to decide.

  Crowe turned to face the wave. He could see it above the near flames of the burning ocean. Fire slipped and danced along its crown and down its height. It crashed against the base and lower spires of Skoria. For a few moments, Crowe could see the hive clearly. Its mass trembled from the impact. A burning mountain chain embraced the island. Thick, raging water boomed against rockcrete and iron. Towers fell into the racing tide.

  And the wave came on, surging past the island.

  Futility, Antwyr said. You see it now. Your sacrifice is meaningless. Your false god is gone, and with him your pustule of a civilisation. Die now or surrender. The time for choices is past.

  There was never any choice, Crowe thought. He would never grant the sword its desire. He went to one knee on ground he did not trust. With both hands, he raised the blade that was his nemesis, his curse, and his honour to guard. He slammed the point into the stone. The blow would have shattered any metal forged by human hands. The Black Blade of Antwyr was not of that metal. Centuries of searching had still not unlocked a way of destroying the relic. The sword was indestructible, and so it was the rock that gave way. Crowe drove half the length of the Blade into the ground, making it his anchor.

  In truth, he thought as he braced himself, the sword was his anchor in every dark way. Every second of every year of every decade of his life since he had first grasped the sword had been shaped by the fact of his guardianship. Even if Antwyr’s voice, the murderer of sleep, had not been the constant scrape at the gate of his will, the need always to grasp the sword, to hold it prisoner, and to be a guardian as tireless as the sword was a besieger was the focal point of every breath. Even now, as the colossal, burning wave came for him, he held his purpose. Holding the Blade was as much to keep it prisoner as it was to hold himself in place. If he died, he vowed that his corpse would still grasp the monster. The next warden would find him at his post, and Antwyr trapped.

  The wave reached the shore. It swallowed the daemons and their song of triumph. It blotted out the writhing sky. Its shadow fell over Crowe. His fists tightened around the hilt. He leaned forward, greeting the wave with defiance.

  I shall not be moved.

  Antwyr seemed to squirm in his grip, snarling for release.

  The wave swept over him with darkness and fire.

  The Ruinous Powers coveted Angriff Primus. The Canoness Errant Setheno did not know why. For now, it must be enough to deny them their prize. And for this moment, it must be enough to survive.

  She reached the belfry of the Laboris Gloria manufactory a few seconds ahead of the Noise Marine. The footsteps of the Emperor’s Children monster pounded
up the iron stairs, heavy as a hammer on a coffin, echoing like a toll. His name was Erossus. He was the last of the three Traitors who had come to Angriff Primus. The cult Erossus and his brothers had created on the planet had taken root and grown beyond what the local Arbites and militia could eradicate, and the ecclesiarchal authority had requested the aid of the Adepta Sororitas. Setheno had been in the subsector, and it was she who answered the call. It had taken thousands of zealots under her command, and three companies of Angriff’s militia to bring two of the Emperor’s Children down. The loss of his brothers did not appear to bother Erossus. His mad laughter, hungry for sensation, boomed up the staircase of the spire. It was as if he did not believe in defeat. Perhaps his mind could no longer encompass the possibility. Yet he was not mindless. He was fighting well. He had Setheno isolated. Perhaps he still understood the idea of victory. Or maybe it was indistinguishable from murder.

  She would deny him both.

  The belfry shook as its great bell tolled the hours of the long work shift. She ran under swings of the bell, through an arched entrance and onto a narrow, suspended walkway that spanned the distance between the manufactory’s bell towers. On either side, smokestacks rose level with the spires, belching black smoke streaked with sparks. A forest of cranes lifted reservoirs of molten ore to even higher reaches, where the vast moulds awaited. The Laboris Gloria was a hive within a hive, complexes built on top of complexes, housing millions of workers who would rarely leave the manufactory for the span of their short lives. The belfry Setheno had passed through was only the first of its kind. The peaks of bell towers and smokestacks kept climbing, and the upper reaches of the manufactory disappeared in the smog cover.

  Below the walkway was a fifty-yard drop to a tangle of maglev tracks. Endless trains hauled raw material into the forges and refining complexes, and transported the huge portions of cylinders and forge ovens out. The manufactory had the largest concentration of industrial moulds on the planet. It produced everything from artillery gun barrels to colossal blast furnaces for more of its kind, endlessly fuelling the suffocating density of industry on Angriff Primus.