Castellan

by David Annandale

  When he turned his gaze from Sandava III, he saw strain on the faces of Drake, Sendrax and the other Grey Knights. They were looking at the doomed world with anger and, Crowe thought, a hint of defeat. The sword was working on them, too, hitting them with the same lie. He had been too long in their presence. Time to withdraw, and take the poison with him.

  Crowe left the bridge. He walked the corridors of the Excoris ­Dominus. Mortals gave him a wide berth, turning frightened eyes from the sword he carried as the tendrils of its will reached for their souls. The other Grey Knights he passed greeted him with respect, though he could see their relief as he moved on. He made for the quarters Voldus had reserved for him. The space was one of the most isolated on the ship. It was an observation blister on the bow, rarely used except during combat. Midway there, he paused at a large, stained armourglass viewing block. The torpedoes were on their way, and he would shortly witness the cremation of Sandava III. In every meaningful way, the world was already dead. All that remained to be done was purge its taint from the galaxy.

  We have survived, Crowe thought.

  There was triumph in that fact. But not enough.

  As he waited for the great pulse of orange and red, Crowe mused upon victory and defeat. He thought about patterns.

  He thought about the abominations of the Dark Prince, of the nature of that god’s taint, and of the meaning of the daemonic art.

  Ossidius lay on his back and cursed the stars. He hurled an invective for each hated glint in the darkness above. He could no longer shout, but he whispered his malice. It was the only sound he could manage now. The great murder of noise was lost to him forever. His senses were shutting down. Soon he would no longer be able to see the stars. Before that happened, though, he was sure that destruction would come for him. The brightest star, the one that moved, would be preparing the end of Sandava III. He was about to be killed by an enemy that did not even know he existed.

  The humiliation cut deeply. The failure was worse. He had still been miles from the war when the terrible light had come, blinding him with its purity.

  To his right, he heard the tap-click of taloned feet beating a complex rhythm against rock. He managed to turn his head. A daemonette danced a short distance away. It carried a staff in its human hand, hammering its tip against the ground and carving intricate passes through the air. The movements were exquisitely painful to watch, and Ossidius drank the sensations in hungrily. There were precious few left to him.

  The daemonette noticed him. It danced over to where he lay, then paused, crouching over him, its head cocked as if awaiting a question.

  ‘I have failed,’ Ossidius gasped. He could not even send word of the disaster to Tarautas. The mission had fallen from triumph to disaster, and he had done nothing to stop it. A perfection of sensation had slipped from his grasp, and now the great project had ended under his watch. He needed to wail, to scream his frustration, but he could barely draw breath, and so he gasped his confession to this servant of the Dark Prince.

  ‘Do you think these events are not known?’ said the daemonette. Its voice slithered down his spine like a caress. It savaged his nerves with claws.

  It was nectar.

  And though it brought delicious pain, the voice soothed too. At its words, something flared in his chest.

  ‘Word has been sent?’ Ossidius asked.

  The daemonette took his left arm in its pincer. His armour was smashed around the elbow. The creature severed the joint with a playful snap. Ossidius shuddered in delicious pain. ‘All is known,’ said the daemonette. ‘The work is harmed, but it is not destroyed. It cannot be.’ The daemonette rose and began to dance again. ‘See,’ it said. It swirled, mesmerising in the precision of its steps. Its path took it directly towards a jagged rubble heap. Ossidius watched the pattern of the dance, and winced in anticipation of the collision that would destroy the art. At the last second, the daemonette turned. It incorporated the barrier of the rubble into the dance, and the movement was so fluid, it was as if the obstacle had always been part of the work. ‘See,’ said the daemonette. ‘See.’

  ‘I see,’ said Ossidius.

  ‘So shall it be. The dance goes on. The dance will reign.’

  ‘Yes.’ The word leaked from Ossidius’ body like escaping air. Yessssssssssss. He was almost finished. The blood pumped from his stump, and he could feel some pain there.

  So many boons. He was grateful for them all.

  His eyes dimming, Ossidius watched the daemonette dance. Sharp contrails cut through the upper atmosphere. The end was here, and he didn’t care. He spent his final moments drinking in the seductive agony of the dance.

  His mutilated lips parted in the smile of hope reborn.

  Chapter Six

  Trajectories

  On Titan, the holy kept eternal watch and prepared for war against the unholy. On Titan, the sacred emerged from the shadows. The Citadel of the Grey Knights stabbed upwards from the ice sheets at the base of Mount Anarch. The mountain’s bulk shrouded the harsh spires in darkness, and darkness was thick in the stone corridors. But it was the dark of solemnity, and of grim, sanctified purpose.

  The deepest shadows gathered in the cell of the castellan of the Grey Knights. The room was designed as a prison for the Black Blade of Antwyr. Circular, its walls embedded with hexagrammic runes of gold and silver, it had a single exit that gave onto a long corridor leading back to the main complex of the Chambers of Purity. The hall was another security measure, a runic trap of such strength it would destroy any daemon that attempted to travel its length.

  The prison was for the sword. In practice, it was a prison for the warden, too. When on Titan, Crowe rarely left the cell. He could go nowhere without the sword, and Antwyr was too poisonous a presence to bring into the holy precincts of the Citadel except with careful preparation, and only briefly, and when absolutely necessary. Crowe was a revered pariah. He had always accepted his lot, though it had changed him from what he had been as a Knight of the Flame. Brotherhood had become a distant vista. Isolation and the sword’s siege had tempered the iron of his faith, and hollowed out the human. His solitude was one of the ways in which he stood guard on the walls that held Antwyr in chains.

  The dome of the cell was fifty feet high. The entire span of the walls, broken only by the shrine to the Emperor and the massive iron door, was covered by rows of niches filled with vellum. This was the archive of the Antwyr’s ravings, faithfully transcribed by each succeeding castellan, with the intent of learning more about the sword’s nature through its words, and finding, at last, its weakness and the means to destroy it.

  Above the shrine, empty chains hung on the wall. Before Crowe, the Castellan Merrat Gavallan had kept the sword there while in his quarters. Crowe had too, in the early days of his wardenship. But the Blade found ways to move. If his vigilance ever relaxed, it would escape. Gavallan had never used the Blade in combat. He had chained it to his back. It had broken those chains, leapt into the hands of an enemy, and destroyed him. The Blade would not escape Crowe. This was his great duty, and he would not fail it. So he never loosed his grasp on the sword. Even when it was sheathed, he kept his hand on it.

  Crowe sat at the granite altar of a desk. He had two sheets of vellum in front of him. On the left were two stacks of sheets, the latest transcriptions of Antwyr’s words and a supply of blank pages. Since the return to Titan a month ago, the daemon had abandoned attacks specific to the events around Crowe. Time passed in the cell with a studied uniformity, and the Blade had little material to use to craft new assaults. Instead, it ground away at Crowe’s will with the relentless monotony of surf battering at a cliff face. Sometimes whispering, sometimes shouting, it produced a litany of curses and threats. It threatened Crowe, and the Grey Knights, and the Imperium, and reality itself. The rant was unending, moving from one topic to another, sometimes wheedling, sometimes incoherent, always angry,
always a cancer on the mind. It was in the changes of subjects and the moments where the sword shifted its ire from Crowe that the words might be of value, when an unexpected name might point the prognosticars of Titan to turn their psychic attention in a particular direction and perhaps see a threat they might otherwise have missed. On the left sheet of vellum, then, Crowe wrote the words that slithered and growled through his consciousness.

  On the right sheet, Crowe made notes about the research he had undertaken. Ancient tomes, scrolls, and data-slates took up the right side of the desk. Every day, his brother Purifiers brought him more materials from the archives of Titan, and took away the texts he had finished with. He was filling page after page with notes about the Sandava system, and the regions of the Imperium that Sandava III had crossed.

  He was plotting trajectories. He was looking for a destination. A huge daemonic army had sacrificed itself and the mortals of Skoria in order to move the planet. If he could not learn why they had undertaken this effort, then the victory the strike force had won would be incomplete. It might even be a hidden defeat.

  There were only two clear data points as a basis for his investigations, and that was not enough. Crowe knew Sandava III’s original coordinates, and where it had arrived. And he had no guarantee the second point was relevant. When he and Voldus had pulled Sandava III from the warp, it might have emerged in a region far from the intended path.

  He had nothing else to go on, though, so he used what little he had. He began by tracing a straight line from one to the other, and then, because the Dark Prince did not favour such simplicity, he started plotting arcs that would take the planet through its point of arrival and onward through the galaxy. For each possible trajectory, he combed through the records, looking for intersections with significant incursions of the past.

  There were too many possibilities. None were compelling. He could construct an infinite number of arcs, and every one of them would, at some point, pass through a region that had known the taint of Chaos. Everything felt too vague, the connections too tenuous.

  He constructed each trajectory to the edge of the Imperium as it was before half had fallen into darkness on the other side of the Cicatrix Maledictum. He worked his way systematically along its length, giving full thought to each region with a daemonic history, and when he was satisfied by his dissatisfaction, he started again.

  The process was slow, painstaking, and his thoughts were forever split between the research and the transcriptions of Antwyr’s curses. Time was still in the cell of the castellan. He had the patience and the will to see the work to its conclusion.

  A week, or a month, or a decade passed. The sword suddenly laughed. Blind, it taunted. Blind by nature, blind by choice, blind by faith, blind forever. You have no vision, mortal. You have no art.

  Crowe wrote the words. Antwyr moved on to curse him with a coward’s grave, but Crowe studied what he had just written.

  You have no art.

  He looked back at the arc of his most recent trajectory. He wondered if there was a useful truth in the Blade’s insult. He considered the form of daemons that had infested Sandava III. He thought about the rhythm he had ruined. The melody. The art.

  The parabola he had sketched looked too simple. It had no aesthetic value. None that would appeal to a malevolence that prized the perfections of excess.

  He started a new sketch with his stylus. He must make perfection his watchword if he wanted to see the design behind the wandering planet. Perfection, and aestheticisation pushed to the level of the monstrous. The first sketch looked promising. He felt a cold wind of inspiration and premonition at his back. He took a fresh sheet of vellum, and this time took careful measurements based on the principle of the original sketch. Instead of an arc, he drew a spiral, the logarithmic spiral of the golden mean. Such a path for the planet was excessive. There were no physical laws, especially in the madness of the warp, that would require Sandava III to follow this route to reach a given destination. The movement was its own end, a world thrown into a dance.

  Crowe completed the line, then looked at where it took him. Again, there were many possibilities. He dismissed them as again too vague. All but one. Unlike the other paths he had explored, this one passed directly through the heart of a system.

  ‘Angriff,’ Crowe muttered.

  He turned to the records. It did not take him long to find the chronicle of an incursion there. What he read stopped him cold.

  There were few omens that boded as ill as the impossible coincidence.

  Styer entered the council chamber and took one of the stone seats lining the periphery of the solemn hall. There was room at the central table, but the thrones there were reserved for the Grand Masters of the Brotherhoods. Massive fluted pillars climbed into the darkness of the vaults. The banners of the Brotherhoods hung from them, seeming to emerge from the upper night like phantoms. Seated at the table were Voldus and Grand Master Vardan Kai of the First Brotherhood. Drake stood beside the table, a data-slate in his hand. A large scroll of parchment lay on the table.

  The Grand Masters nodded to Styer. ‘We have requested your attendance, Justicar Styer,’ Kai said, ‘because Castellan Crowe has made certain discoveries that suggest some immediate courses of action, and that concern you and your squad directly. Knight of the Flame Drake will speak for the castellan.’

  ‘I am honoured to be here, Grand Master,’ Styer said. He was relieved in spite of himself that Crowe and the snarling sword would not be present. He would be able to think without that voice trying to pry its way into his soul.

  ‘You may begin,’ Voldus said to Drake.

  Drake lowered his head in respect to the Grand Masters. ‘The castellan,’ he said, ‘has plotted the possible trajectory of Sandava III. He believes the daemons intended the world to pass through the Angriff system.’

  Styer’s eyes widened.

  ‘The memories of Angriff are not pleasing to you, I know,’ said Kai.

  They were not. He had lost two brothers on Angriff Primus. The near-disaster his squad had experienced there had also marked the beginning of a series of battles through the Sanctus Reach and beyond where too often he had felt that he and his men were pawns of Chaos.

  ‘Please join us,’ Kai said.

  Drake unrolled the parchment, revealing a star chart as Styer walked over to stand at his side. Styer looked at the wide spiral that began in the lost Sandava system’s location. The pleasing proportions of its loop felt like a taunt. It cut through the centre of Angriff with the certainty of prophecy.

  ‘Did the castellan send this to the Auguirium?’ Voldus asked.

  ‘He did,’ said Drake. ‘Despite the difficulty of readings in the Imperium Nihilus, they have identified a point of an imminent incursion.’

  ‘Angriff,’ said Styer.

  ‘No.’ Drake nodded at Styer’s raised eyebrow. ‘I know. I was surprised also. The incursion will not be in Angriff, but it will be very close.’ He tapped on the chart, pointing to a mark less than a light year to the galactic west of Angriff.

  ‘There is nothing there,’ said Kai.

  ‘The prognosticars were definite, Grand Master.’

  Voldus said, ‘We have certainly learned not to be too sure of absences.’

  ‘Another wandering planet?’ Kai wondered.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Voldus.

  Styer didn’t need to know what would emerge from the emptiness near Angriff to trust in what he saw. That Crowe thought Sandava III had been intended to reach Angriff was all Styer needed to be convinced. As far as he was concerned, everything that had happened since Angriff Primus was confirmation of the castellan’s theory. ‘I would like to speak with Castellan Crowe,’ he said.

  Kai looked up at him. ‘I am not sure that is wise, brother-justicar.’

  ‘I am conscious of the risks, Grand Master.’

  ‘Are y
ou?’ Voldus asked. ‘It is one thing to be on the battlefield with the castellan. Your moments in close proximity are brief, and the presence of other brothers does, we hope and pray, divide the attention of the Black Blade of Antwyr. A private audience is much more concentrated exposure to the daemon.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Styer. ‘There are matters I must speak of with the castellan. Given their nature, I think he will want to speak to me one-on-one. I do not undertake this lightly.’

  Kai nodded slowly. ‘I gather, Justicar Styer, that you would wish to be part of a strike force to the Angriff System.’

  ‘It is extremely important to me and to my squad brothers that we are.’

  Crowe moved to the wall opposite the shrine when Drake escorted Styer to his cell. He wished to put as much space as possible between Styer and the blade. The effort would not make much difference, but any distance at all was better than none. As it was, the justicar’s features were tight with the strain of being in the presence of Antwyr.

  ‘I understand that Angriff Primus has meaning for you,’ Crowe said.

  ‘It is a place of grim memories for my squad,’ said Styer. He pointed to his face. On each side, from temple to chin, ran three deep, parallel scars. ‘These are the least of the wounds I sustained there. I lost two brothers, Erec and Morholt. They do not sleep in the Dead Fields. They were taken from us utterly by the abominations on Angriff Primus. Our mission there was a near disaster.’

  ‘Why was that?’

  ‘The prognosticars foresaw an incursion on Primus, but all the evidence in the system pointed to the source of threat as its moon. That was where a heretic cult had risen. We let our attention be drawn by the struggle there, to our cost. When the incursion happened, it did not appear to have a direct link to the cult.’

  ‘There was an indirect one?’

  Styer nodded. ‘There was a considerable release of psychic energies during the attack we and the Ordo Malleus launched against the cult. Considerably more than was necessary. The local ecclesiarchs had an inflated sense of the cult’s threat. Local forces should have been enough to deal with the problem.’