Castellan

by David Annandale

  Three cannons had been salvaged from the Sacrum Finem. Bray and the tech-priests had supervised the rapid construction of huge metal frameworks that could absorb the recoil of the guns and keep them in place on the ramparts. The cannons could not be moved once they were in place, so they were spread out along the wall, facing south-west. They aimed straight out. The huge shells had to be loaded manually by squads of redirected manufactory servitors. There were long gaps between each booming report. But the cannons fired with effect. Shells designed to tear through the shields and hulls of void ships struck the land with the force of an orbital bombardment. Every blast destroyed hundreds of daemons in an instant. The terrain before Skoria was no longer shaped into twisted, screaming forms. It was a devastated landscape, scarred by huge craters.

  The wall turrets kept up a continuous barrage between the concussions of the Sacrum’s guns, and the Stormravens hammered the enemy from above. The daemons had to cross a zone of endless flame and destruction, yet still they came in waves. No matter how many were annihilated in the approach to Skoria, they still reached the wall.

  And there they were held. The Grey Knights were the line that could not be crossed. They were the greater wall. They were the gauntlet about the Emperor’s fist, and they hurled the daemons back.

  The three squads ranged back and forth along the ramparts, charging into every surge of the wave that threatened to crest the battlements. Crowe made his stand in the centre of the wall. He was visible to all the defenders, and the surges came to him. The daemons were drawn to the Black Blade of Antwyr. They answered its psychic cries of wrath, and came for its gaoler. Crowe cut them down as they clambered over the monolithic crenellations. As he swung the sword left and right, decapitating and dismembering any daemon that sought to grapple with him, he sent bursts of shells from his storm bolter down the wall, puncturing the wave, blasting apart the bodies of the unclean things. His strikes had a machine-like rhythm, but he did not let himself be lulled into a monotony of battle. He was alert to every change in the daemons’ attacks, and he fought, as ever, on two fronts. Antwyr’s will slashed at his, always and forever determined that this time, his resistance would crumble. This time, he would no longer be able to withstand the siege.

  The sword’s attacks were energised by the sky. Antwyr was triumphant as it had rarely been before. Why do you struggle? Why do you wallow in futility? You fight for nothing, now. All you defend is ash, all is darkness, all is nothing, nothing, nothing. You have lost, and you know it. You have no purpose, and you know it. You fight for nothing, and you know it. A throne of nothing. An empire of nothing. A galaxy of dreams becoming nothing, nothing, nothing.

  The sword timed its exhortations with Crowe’s strikes. It created the rhythm Crowe struggled to avoid. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. It sought to turn him into an automaton of battle, and that would be the first, fatal step. It would be a surrender.

  Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

  No, he told himself. Nothing would make me fail in my duty. Nothing would make me lose my faith.

  He sensed the danger in the form his thoughts were taking. There is something! he shouted in his mind. The Emperor protects, and the Imperium stands. ‘I am the tip of the Emperor’s spear!’ Crowe roared, and he lunged forward with the sword, breaking the rhythm of the swings, striking back against its temptations by plunging it into the throat of a fiend. The daemon’s hooves battered mindlessly against his armour. He pulled the blade free, and the abomination fell back over the wall.

  To his right, the daemons made another concerted attack. As they overwhelmed the mortal defenders, Drake’s squad closed with them. The Purifiers hit the daemons like a firestorm. The methodical Destrian sent his incinerator’s azure flame washing over the monsters. The ignited promethium, bonded with psychic agents, blinded the daemons, burned their flesh and seared away their spiritual hold on the reality of Sandava III. Though the planet was in the warp, it was still material. The daemons had form, and Destrian confined their form to flames. The sombre, pious Gorvenal struck at the rush of daemons from the right flank. He wielded a warding staff, and concussive explosions shook the wall as daemons launched themselves at him, only to be torn to shreds when Gorvenal unleashed the psychic charge he built up in the staff’s refractor fields. Drake and Carac marched in behind Destrian’s flames, Drake’s Nemesis sword and Carac’s halberd breaking the daemons, reducing them to quivering, deliquescing foulness. On the left flank, Venrik shattered the abominations’ advance with controlled blasts from a psycannon. His psychic will and his hatred of the unclean things were transformed by the cannon in a shaped charge of force. The daemons were ripped apart by the faith itself.

  Still the daemons came on. The waves crashed again and again against the walls. The army was endless, the marching daemons stretching off beyond the horizon. There was no reason for them to stop until they buried Skoria under their millions. Yet just as the attacks had not begun until the Grey Knights had augmented the hive’s defences, there were also pauses in the assaults. The daemons attacked with a fury that seemed set in devouring the very stone of the city, and then they withdrew, a tide pulling back only to return.

  The brief respites were welcome. At the same time, it bothered Crowe that he could not discern the reason for them. And he knew there was one.

  On his left, Sendrax led his squad in a devastating charge down the rampart, cutting across a wide surge by the daemons. The Knight of the Flame’s approach to battle reflected how different he was from Drake. Sendrax was incendiary faith and pride in the duty of the Purifiers. Drake was more cautious and strategic. Their approaches meshed with each other, and when they coordinated on the battlefield, no force of abominations could survive their assault.

  Three things happened in such quick succession, they were almost simultaneous.

  From where he and his Terminators were fighting further to the south on the wall, Justicar Styer voxed, ‘Brother-Librarian Gared says another withdrawal is imminent.’

  The sword’s laughter lanced through Crowe’s mind, and Antwyr said, You resist because you are blind. But illumination comes for you.

  And the daemons mocked Gared’s prediction by staging a sudden, ferocious rush at Sendrax’s squad. A cluster of fiends leapt over the parapet and dropped on Xaledor, who was nearest the edge of the wall. They struck from behind just as he despatched a daemonette with his psilencer. Xaledor’s psychic force was amplified into searing beams that disintegrated the abomination at every level of its being. The fiends were animalistic beings. Deadly as they were to mortals with their rapid strikes and mindless, soul-destroying songs, they were worthy of little more than contempt from a Grey Knight. Their attack should have meant little to Xaledor. He should have been able to turn and blast the fiends off the wall and back to the warp pit that spawned them. But chance and fate were savage. Crowe had seen them act too often against what was just. Xaledor made no mistakes, yet there was nothing he could do. The fiends hit with their stinger tails, hard and fast enough to break through the shielding of his armour’s power unit. There was a sudden discharge of uncontrolled energy. Xaledor jerked, his movements slowed. A pair of daemonettes lashed at him with pincers so long and articulated they doubled as whips.

  Unworthy opponents. An unworthy end. Xaledor knew it, and his helm voxcasters roared with his fury. Then the pull of the daemonettes and the crush of the fiends pushed him over the rampart. He dropped fifty yards to the base of the wall. He still fought after he landed, his curses ringing over the vox. But he was alone against tens of thousands, and he dropped into silence a few seconds later.

  Sendrax and his Purifiers turned on the other nearby daemons in fury, but before they had destroyed more than a handful, Gared’s words proved true. The remaining abominations on the wall leapt down in the receding tide.

  The respite had come, and once again it had arrived without reason, without sense, and only with cost.

&nbs
p; ‘It is a game to them,’ Sendrax said, his voice still tense with anger. ‘They know the outcome of this war, and so they toy with us.’

  ‘And are you, then, so sure of the outcome?’ Crowe asked him.

  The officers of the Grey Knights strike force had gathered in the command chambers of Kalab Vester. The governor of Skoria was also the colonel of its militia, and he had redeemed himself partly in Crowe’s eyes during the siege by demonstrating that his officer’s rank was not simply ceremonial. He had also shown the good sense to withdraw without protest when the Grey Knights commandeered his quarters. He waited for orders one level below.

  The command chamber was in a tower a mile in from the wall. Its panoramic, armourglass windows provided a long perspective on the daemonic army to the south-west, stretching as far as the eye could see, a cavorting plague covering the landscape. The tacticarium table in the centre and hololithic maps of the region on the walls provided little data that was useful. There were few strategic options when all of the terrain was controlled by the foe.

  ‘Do you think we have lost?’ Crowe said, pushing Sendrax harder.

  Look what awaits you, said the Blade. There is only destruction.

  ‘I will fight to my last breath,’ the Knight of the Flame said. ‘I will never despair. But I can see what confronts us, castellan. We are in the empyrean. The enemy’s forces are infinite.’

  There is truth, said the sword. Your brother knows. Every soul in this city knows. And you know, too. There is still a choice for you, though. Futility or glory. Futility or power. You will not throw yourself on the pyre of lost hopes. You will make the right choice.

  The conjunction of Sendrax’s and Antwyr’s words disturbed Crowe. The sword was speaking to all the Grey Knights who came near. Perhaps Crowe had already spent too much time in proximity to his brothers, and they were being influenced, unknowingly, by the daemon. Then again, the reality of the situation was as Sendrax implied. The Blade could just as easily be trying to undermine Crowe’s certainty by trying to suggest a connection between itself and Sendrax where none existed.

  The bedrock truth was that he must not listen to the sword. So he turned his attention back to the assessment of Skoria’s fate. ‘How much ordnance do we still have?’ he asked Styer.

  ‘Bray estimates we have enough shells to hold back one more wave of attacks,’ the justicar said.

  Crowe nodded. That was what he had expected. ‘And ammunition?’

  ‘Our stores are running low. If we still have any after the next surge, we will run out during the next. The manufactories can keep the mortals supplied indefinitely.’

  ‘As long as we hold the wall,’ said Drake.

  ‘Precisely.’

  And that was the problem. The unblessed, commonplace ammunition helped, but it was insufficient. The Grey Knights were Skoria’s true wall. Without them, its defences would crumble quickly. Without ranged weapons, the strike force could not hold back the flood.

  Crowe looked at the grim faces around the tacticarium table. Sendrax’s and Styer’s expressions mirrored his thoughts. Drake was incapable of much expression at all. His face was almost entirely metal. It was frozen in cold, iron nobility, the flesh sacrificed in battle. He had lost his sword arm long ago, on Sandava II, in the same struggle that had brought the burden of Antwyr to Crowe. His bionic limb was as nimble as the organic one had been. He was an unwavering colossus. But his eyes were eloquent. He had made the same grim appraisal as the others.

  Futility or glory, the Blade whispered, insistent. Futility or power.

  Crowe turned to Gared. The Librarian was attending the briefing at his request. ‘You knew the daemons were going to withdraw,’ Crowe said. ‘Was this the first time you had this foreknowledge?’

  ‘Not exactly, castellan. I sensed something before. It was only this time that I recognised the pattern.’

  ‘Good,’ said Crowe. A pattern was the beginning of an answer. And perhaps an answer was the beginning of a counter-strategy. ‘Go on.’

  ‘There is a build-up in psychic energy over the course of each battle.’

  ‘That is inevitable, not a revelation,’ Sendrax said. ‘We all know that experience.’

  ‘The Brother-Librarian’s experience is more precise than it is for the rest of us,’ Styer pointed out.

  Gared nodded his thanks to the justicar. ‘I believe the daemons fight until the energy reaches a precise level.’

  ‘What happens to it?’ Drake asked.

  ‘I don’t know. It doesn’t disperse. It is gone very suddenly.’

  ‘A discharge, then,’ said Crowe. ‘Somewhere. To some purpose.’

  ‘What purpose?’ Sendrax asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Gared.

  Crowe tapped the tacticarium table’s controls and called up a chronology of the siege. He simplified the display so it became a series of hololithic spikes, the withdrawals of the daemons mapped against time. He stared at the result. There was meaning hidden here and he would tease it out.

  ‘There is nothing regular in the time periods before the retreats,’ said Sendrax. ‘We would have noticed that.’

  No, Crowe thought, not regular. But Sendrax’s comment made him look at the display from another perspective, one he should have considered earlier. This was a Sandavan world, after all. And now he saw it.

  So did Gared. ‘There is a rhythm,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Crowe. ‘It is not regular, but look.’ He rapped the table, following the beats of the spikes. The sound he created was ominous, as of a heart in its final moments of fibrillation.

  ‘If this is true,’ Styer said, and he sounded convinced, ‘then the daemons seek the production of an exact level of energy at an equally exact time.’

  ‘A tall order,’ said Sendrax.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Crowe said. ‘With such numbers, it would merely be a question of controlling how many attack us at any given moment. We have seen such control before.’

  ‘Not for a long time,’ Drake said.

  There had been dark rhythms deployed on Sandava II. They had made cities walk.

  Crowe had thought he had put an end to the symmetries and ­echoes that reached across the decades to taunt him. He told himself that he had. The echoes had been lies before. They were again. What was at work on Sandava III was part of something much vaster than what had attacked the system before.

  ‘Has Mnay’salath returned?’ Drake wondered, perhaps eager to fight the Keeper of Secrets again, and revenge himself at last for his lost arm.

  ‘I’m doubtful,’ said Crowe. ‘But whether or not the daemon has, it is not present for us to fight.’ He eyed the jagged display of the rhythm. ‘It is the strategy we must counter.’

  ‘How?’ Sendrax asked. ‘Our defence of Skoria appears to guarantee the occurrence of the energy spikes.’

  Crowe nodded. ‘The daemons need us. The struggle would not reach these levels of intensity otherwise.’

  Styer said, ‘My brothers and I have encountered a similar phenomenon. Our very presence has been the key to triggering a daemonic incursion. The Ruinous Powers have found ways to use us to their ends.’

  ‘Then we will disrupt their ends,’ Crowe said. ‘We have been wrong to fight a defensive war.’

  ‘What is our objective?’ said Sendrax. ‘There is only the sea of abominations.’

  ‘There are weapons we have not used yet,’ Crowe said. ‘We will burn the sea.’

  The gaps between the attacks were irregular in length. None were shorter than several hours, but Crowe needed to know how long they had until the next assault. He withdrew from the command chamber to give Gared the chance to examine the anatomy of the daemonic rhythm alone, without the Blade eating away at his concentration. When Gared was done, Crowe studied the pattern again.

  He had to let himself hear the
melody that was taking shape. He lowered his defences very slightly. That was all it took. The melody entered his consciousness. It was a mere fragment, but in it he heard a song of murdered worlds and ravenous excess. It was a twisted thing, a succession of notes whose coherence was worse than any cacophony. It reached hungrily for his soul. It tried to ensnare him, to drag him down into the coils of its rhythm. From a great distance, he felt the fingers of his left hand twitch, involuntarily tapping out the rhythm. He stilled his hand.

  You… will have… to listen, said the sword. There were odd pauses between Antwyr’s words. The daemon was mimicking the melody’s beats. Crowe hurled the poisonous rhythm out beyond the impregnable wall of his will. He had what he needed. He knew when the next assault would come.

  Gared was waiting for him outside the chamber. The Librarian’s brow wrinkled in pain at the approach of the Blade.

  ‘Did you hear it?’ Gared asked.

  ‘I did. We have a bit more than a day to prepare.’

  ‘Agreed. Is that enough?’

  ‘It will have to be.’

  The Malleus Maleficarum roared out of Skoria’s gate. The front line of the daemonic host was at the edge of the island. Ardax aimed the tank straight at them. He fired a salvo with the tank’s main guns, blasting open a gap in the monstrous ranks. As Styer had ordered, he fired just once.

  Riding in the open roof hatch, Styer saw the result that Crowe had predicted. The daemons did not rush forward to fill the gap. Instead, they made way before it. ‘Drive hard, Brother Ardax,’ he voxed. ‘The abominations make way.’

  Inside the troop compartment, the Terminator squad was ready for a deployment that would not happen, at least not now. ‘They’re retreating?’ Vohnum asked.

  ‘They are, as the castellan said.’

  ‘A battle at this moment would run counter to their purposes,’ said Gared. ‘If the energy builds too soon, it will disrupt the rhythm this war is designed to create.’