Castellan

by David Annandale

  On Setheno’s right, miles to the north, an entire sector of Algidus burned. Tens of thousands of serfs had perished in the firestorm. It would spread much further before it ran out of fuel. The conflagration was the cost of killing two Emperor’s Children, and it would take more fighting still, and more burning, to purge the city of the rest of the heretics who had fallen under the Traitors’ sway.

  Zealots streamed like ants between the maglev trains. They screamed their praise of the Emperor and their hate of traitors. Their shouts were a background murmur, barely audible over the tolling of the bell and the deep, clanking, hissing, roaring song of the manufactory. They were useless to Setheno, but they had come to see her bring the last of the monsters down.

  She ran half the length of the walkway, ceramite boots pounding a steady rhythm as she took in the surroundings and found the battleground she wanted. Then she turned, bolter and her power sword Skarprattar at the ready. The relic, the former weapon of Saint Demetria, glowed a furious blue as the corrupted warrior emerged from the entrance. She looked straight at the Noise Marine as her peripheral vision tracked the environment.

  ‘Have you had enough of running?’ Erossus taunted. He was a massive figure, his muscles swelling out of the rents in his armour. His helmet was a grinning horror, and the lower half was cut away to reveal a flayed jaw. Barbed, hooked iron peeled away his exposed flesh. Spines emerged from his helmet and along limbs, glowing and vibrating. They burned an angry, violet light with every spike in the volume of the din. Setheno guessed they plunged into the body of the Traitor, amplifying sound and conducting its violence directly to nerve clusters. Erossus carried a weapon that resembled a distorted bolter. Its barrel ended in a screaming maw.

  Setheno answered the Noise Marine with the taunt of silence. She ran forward, head down, firing. She blinked through her helmet’s auto-senses and triggered a sensory shutdown. The clamour of the manufactory vanished. Her gun bucked with every shot, but its reports were a distant whisper. Through thick filters, she saw the world as a dim twilight.

  She saw well enough.

  Her shells struck Erossus, punching new holes in his armour. His jaw parted in pleasure at the wounds and he rushed forward to meet her, firing a blast of murderous sound from his gun. She was braced, yet it hit her like a wall of pain. The handrails of the walkway disintegrated and the ferrocrete span twisted and cracked, crumbling to powder, a yard-wide gap opening in front of her. The sound pierced through her helm’s defences, rattling her teeth. Blood filled her mouth and ran from her nose and ears. The vibrations hit her armour and her bones so hard she felt as if she were on the verge of liquefying.

  She had expected the blow. She ran through the pain and leapt over the gap. She landed awkwardly on the other side and dropped to one knee.

  ‘Yes!’ Erossus exulted. ‘Yes, daughter of the grey, now you welcome the sublimity of sensation!’ His shouts, distorted by laryngeal surgery and amplified through wailing vox casters, were music performed on instruments of sinew and torture. He waited a moment before he fired again. He was savouring the moment. He was lengthening her pain before granting her the deliverance of death.

  He was attacking as she had known he would. He was making all the mistakes she needed.

  She had planned her fall before she had begun her charge. Her crouch gave her the angles she needed. She fired a burst of shells that looked like her aim had been destroyed by the sonic blast. They scattered on a diagonal to her right. The first shells struck supporting struts of one of the cranes. It leaned suddenly towards the catwalk, swinging its reservoir at Erossus.

  The other shells punctured the reservoir. A stream of molten iron ore jetted out of the holes and struck the Noise Marine’s skull. Erossus screamed in ecstatic agony as the liquid fire enveloped his head, flooded the interior of his helmet and poured into his ears. He staggered, blind, his eyes boiled by the ore. He weaved forward, out of the bright, glowing flood. He was covered in the ore. In the gaps in his armour, his flesh bubbled and flowed.

  Erossus fired his weapon again. The sonic blast went wide and high, shattering the framework of another crane. It collapsed, raining tonnes of metal wreckage on the zealots below, its reservoir spilling onto the maglev tracks.

  Setheno ran forward, still crouching. She came in under the direct line of the blast, though the sound was still loud enough to make her vision crack and waver. She had marked her steps ahead of the attack, and stayed true to her path. She drew level with the swaying Noise Marine. He was screaming in rage now. He had dropped his gun and was clutching his head. The burn had deafened him. Setheno had plunged him into the only hell he recognised. She had robbed him of sensation. His only novelty now was pain. She rose and struck with Skarprattar, driving it through his exposed lower jaw and into his skull. She slashed the blade back out of the corpse as it toppled forward onto the smoking walkway.

  A long series of crashes came from below as a train leaving the Laboris Gloria derailed. The length of cargo containers whiplashed across the open space, wrecking the tracks completely, spreading ruin and killing hundreds. In the midst of the destruction, heedless of their safety, the zealots shouted praise to the Emperor and hailed the fall of the last of the Traitors.

  The city burned. There were more purges to come. Thousands would die before Setheno would consider Angriff Primus reclaimed. And there was the question of why the planet had been the target of two attacks by the Ruinous Powers in a short period of time. Angriff Primus had value as a forge world, but it was strategically insignificant.

  Below, the explosions of the derailments ended and the cries of celebrations grew louder, the zealots joined by crowds rushing out of the Laboris Gloria and the blackened ferrocrete blocks of the sector.

  Then the cries changed. They became screams of grief and terror. Setheno felt the change, too. The certainty of disaster stabbed her heart, and she looked up. There was no change to the choking smog cover over Algidus. Yet change had occurred beyond the dark curtain of the atmosphere. She knew it. The entire population of Angriff Primus knew it.

  A scream was ripping through the galaxy. Though it was still day, the light over Algidus altered and dimmed.

  Night had come.

  Night eternal.

  The burning wave roared across the shore, sweeping the abominations out of existence. The arm of the inlet reached miles further into the mainland, a dagger of flame and scouring. The wave hurled itself against the mountainside, a tide determined to swallow all of Sandava III in a pyre of drowning. The fire and the water surged upwards, reaching for the Malleus Maleficarum as it struggled for higher ground. The tank’s treads spun for a grip on the slope. They caught, and the Crusader lurched again. In the open rooftop hatch, Justicar Styer watched the smothering burn come for the Malleus. The flames billowed far higher than the Crusader had come. The thunder of the wave’s impact against the mountains reverberated in his chest.

  Styer had climbed onto the roof of the Malleus instead of joining his squad in the Harrower. Ardax had remained with the Crusader, determined to save the sacred tank, and Styer had chosen to stand with him. Ardax had performed the impossible, blasting the mountainside terrain and urging the Malleus up over slumping rubble to a height it should never have reached. Styer had assisted with the multi-melta, but the accomplishment belonged to Ardax. If the Malleus lived, it was his doing.

  The mountainside quaked. The fire swept over the Crusader. ­Styer’s Terminator armour shrugged off its assault. The Malleus ground against scree, holding its position. The wave raged. It sought to uproot the mountain, and when it failed, it subsided. The edges of the flood passed a few yards below the Crusader, and then sank. The wave moved on, losing strength and height as it expended its fury inland.

  ‘Well done, brother. Well done,’ Styer voxed.

  ‘The Emperor protects, brother-justicar,’ Ardax answered. ‘I merely serve.’

  �
�As do we all. But you serve well.’

  Ardax slewed the Malleus to the right, resting its flank against a heap of stone. The slope was shallower here, and the engines lost the pained intensity. Styer thought he could feel the relief of the tank’s machine-spirit.

  The water dropped. The flames slid down the mountainside, guttering and sullen. Overhead, the Stormravens began their descent. The Purgation’s Sword flew back towards the shore. Its purpose was clear.

  ‘What of Castellan Crowe?’ Ardax asked.

  ‘We cannot know yet,’ said Styer. The waters were still too high. The air was thick with smoke. He could barely make out the shape of the Sword as it dropped lower. Its engines stirred the smoke into whirling maelstroms, clearing a path beneath it to the black, smouldering water.

  The light over the ruined landscape brightened and dimmed, flashed and smeared. Shadows danced beneath the tormented sky.

  The waters continued to drop. They did not withdraw to the ocean. Instead, they seemed to be vanishing. The sludge thickened. It appeared to merge with the land, the difference between water and rock fading. Spray coagulated in mid-air, turning into splayed sculptures. The mountainside and shore were changing, becoming strange. The disease of the sky was spreading to the surface of the planet.

  As the fires dwindled, the foul water darkened from a grey-brown to a glowering crimson and black, pulling the flames inside itself, turning them into mineral veins of hate. A layer of darkness and blood was settling over the land, changing the contours, reshaping this region of Skoria into new, tainted forms.

  The smoke diminished, becoming a haze shaded by the shifting colours of the sky. Below the Harrower, a bright point appeared beneath the surface of the receding flood. It was different from the dull red glow of the veins. It was a blaze more pure than heat. It was a white sear in the dark, a defiance of the works of the daemonic. It grew brighter and the waters fell, and at last the darkness tore away from what it concealed. It could no longer hold the figure below. The flood pulled back as if in pain.

  The psychic light faded. Garran Crowe rose from his crouch. The tainted muck, burned brittle by contact with the castellan, cracked and fell away from him. Crowe pulled the Black Blade of Antwyr from the ground, and began to march uphill.

  ‘The castellan lives,’ Styer voxed Ardax.

  ‘How?’

  ‘Ruin cannot touch him,’ Styer said, awed. ‘He is the Emperor’s flame in the dark.’

  ‘We will have need of that flame.’

  ‘Indeed.’ Styer looked up at the madness that embraced Sandava III. There was no sun and no night for the world now. There was only the scream of the storm, and the greater absence of the Emperor’s light. The justicar’s soul bled. He knew the injury would never heal. All the Grey Knights on Sandava III were the walking wounded.

  Crowe, who lived with the perpetual assault of the Antwyr, was the leader these dark times required. He knew the reality of the wound that could not close, and the light of his purging faith was undiminished.

  We shall fight all the harder, Styer thought. But yes, we will have need of this flame.

  The daemons were gone, though Crowe knew the respite was temporary. Sandava III was in the realm of the daemonic now. The abominations would return. There would be no limit to the numbers they could muster. The war had changed. There was no longer any question of reclaiming Sandava III. The struggle would now become one of survival. We have become the besieged, Crowe thought. We require a bastion.

  The mass of Skoria still bulked high and solid. Towers had fallen, but many more stood strong. The wave had done its worst against the lower reaches of the hive, but its walls appeared to be largely intact. Lights shone in the heights of its spires. The city still had power. It would be the bastion.

  The way to Skoria was clear. The ocean was gone. At the horizon, strange shapes wavered and fell with majestic gravity, an unholy fusion of mountain chain and fire. The signs of the daemons’ causeway were still there. Millions of remains lay spread across the dry channel. To left and right of the strike force, as far as Crowe could see, limbs and torsos emerged from the tar-like surface. The Grey Knights marched over a vast graveyard. The sea bed could not contain the motionless entreaties of the dead, and their silent cries for justice.

  With the gunships flying overwatch, the strike force crossed the channel of the dead and arrived on the island. The walls of the hive were less than a mile from what had been the shore. They were burned and scored, but had been high and strong enough to withstand the wave. The people of Skoria lined the parapets. As the Grey Knights approached, the citizens streamed from the open gates. They cried out to the Space Marines, their arms outstretched for liberation, their entreaties as agonised as those of the dead, but more desperate. They kept a respectful, cowed distance on either side of the strike force. Their shouts were pleas, they were fearful, and they were howling demands for hope.

  Drake moved up from his squad until he was almost level with Crowe. He suffered the psychic assault of the sword no less than the other Grey Knights, but he subjected himself to its proximity for longer periods than most, brief though those seconds were. He and Crowe had served together long before the burden had fallen to the castellan, and he was unwilling to abandon his brother entirely to the isolation that came with the task. Crowe appreciated the Knight of the Flame’s gestures, and he trusted Drake to know how much of the sword’s presence he could tolerate at any one time.

  Drake turned his helmet towards the crowds. Tens of thousands had rushed out of the gates, as if there were no dangers the world could hurl at them when the Grey Knights were near. ‘They think we are their liberation,’ he said. ‘Rather than their doom.’

  The moment the strike force had become visible to the people of Skoria, their fate was sealed. The outcome of the war was irrelevant to the citizens now, though they did not know it. They had seen what was forbidden. They gazed upon secrets they would not be allowed to keep.

  The Grey Knights passed through the gates of Skoria, the clamour of its population growing into a deafening thunder. The people thronged the main thoroughfare into the hive. They clustered at the windows of the massive hab blocks that merged with each other and with manufactories like immense, overlapping excrescences of rockcrete. They stood on the spans of crossways that linked towers like webs. They were there in the millions, and their pleas merged into a single howl of need. The need was so massive, so anguished, it had moved beyond words. It was instinct. It was mindless.

  Crowe’s jaw clenched in anger. The need of the crowd grated. He heard no faith in their shouts. There was only the selfish clawing for personal survival.

  A short distance ahead, the avenue opened up into a wide square. To the left and right, the sides were dominated by the huge doors of manufactory loading bays. Facing the Grey Knights was one of the hive’s soot-blacked façades of the Chapel of Saint Alverese the Unforgiving. A delegation stood on the steps before its grand, vaulted entrance. The group wore the robes of the Ecclesiarchy and of Sandava III’s ruling family. A score of honour guards flanked the stairs, holding back the rabble.

  ‘What do they think this is?’ Drake asked. ‘Are we to be invited to a feast next?’ He glanced up at the sky. The light of the warp made the shadows of the chapel’s spires dance and squirm over the square.

  ‘They are unwilling to relinquish the slightest remains of normality,’ Crowe said.

  ‘Those are mortals who would make a spectacle of us for their own benefit,’ Sendrax voxed.

  ‘So they would,’ said Crowe. This was more of the same, craven need that radiated from the crowd. It was simply dressed in a more formal array. Crowe looked at the lectern that had been set up on the top step, between the highest dignitaries. Cables ran from it to the shadowed interior of the chapel. Crowe could just make out a large bank of vox-casters in the vestibule. If he was not so disgusted, he would be impressed by
how quickly Skoria’s leaders had arranged to broadcast this meeting with the presumed liberators to the entire hive. Their instincts for self-preservation were strong, and made no distinction between the survival of the body and the survival of the political power.

  Crowe reached the steps and mounted them with a purpose. ‘I will give them the spectacle they deserve,’ he said, his fury mounting with every stride.

  They are animals, the Blade whispered. You see them for what they are. Let us bring them to their destiny. The charnel house must be the slaughterhouse. Turn these vermin into the slick of remains. It is their due. The anger is your due. The Imperium is gone. Forge the new one with me.

  Antwyr’s insinuations poured fuel onto the blaze of Crowe’s anger. The transparency of its manipulation was an insult. He rejected its call. Instead of bloodlust, his fury burned with righteousness. He was judgement itself as he ascended the steps. The nobles on the lower steps shrank away from him, huddling closer to guards who had turned pale with shame and fear. Behind him, the Purifier squads took up positions on the staircase, facing out towards the crowds. The Terminators formed a barrier at the base, while the Malleus Maleficarum stopped in the centre of the square. The strike force’s position was forbidding. It was the threat of punishment.

  Crowe reached the top step. The chief ecclesiarch scuttled forward to be the first to meet him. The man was heavy in the gut, though the siege had had a visible impact even on him, and his flesh hung in sagging rolls from his frame. His bow was slight, as if he still put great store in his rank. ‘We give thanks, lord, for the deliverance you bring us. I am Cardinal Reikart Mihok.’ He gestured to the nobles behind him. ‘This is Governor Kalab Vester.’ An old man, shorter and gaunter than the cardinal, nodded solemnly. ‘And these–’