Castellan

by David Annandale

  The groans of the vessel grew louder in the hours that followed. Styer felt the ship vibrate in pain. In his throne, mechadendrites linking him to the machine-spirit of the Tyndaris, Saalfrank gripped the armrests tightly, knuckles whitening in pain. The old man had lived with the strike cruiser for almost a century. He and the Tyndaris were one, and he could coax manoeuvres out of his charge that bordered on the miraculous. His skills would be needed now, Styer thought. The Nachmund Gauntlet could tear ships apart by the very nature of storm-torn space, even if there was no enemy.

  ‘The foe will come,’ Gared said quietly.

  ‘Are you reading my thoughts, brother?’

  ‘Simply voicing my own, justicar.’

  The first contacts came a few minutes later. They were derelicts. Gutted, scarred by explosive burns, their bridges blown out and their hulls gouged open, they altered their aimless courses when they collided with the icy masses or were caught by the gravitational eddies of the storm. They grew in number the further into the passage the Tyndaris penetrated. It was as if the victims of the Nachmund Gauntlet had been gathered into a cemetery. Proximity warnings sounded as Saalfrank guided the Tyndaris through the cloud of ruined ships. The severed half of a frigate, floating in the void perpendicular to the strike cruiser’s course, came within a thousand yards of ­scraping its bow against the Tyndaris’ superstructure. Saalfrank’s guidance was sure, and the Tyndaris passed the derelict.

  But the warning klaxons kept on. The vessel graveyard lit up with sudden lance fire as the attack began.

  Chapter Eight

  The Gauntlet

  They were ships from the old past that came for the Tyndaris. Their names had once been beacons in the galaxy, the martial light of the Emperor’s great dream. But they had turned against the Father of Mankind, adding their names to the lexicon of treason, and then they had vanished for ten thousand years. The battleship Dark ­Honour, the grand cruisers Perdition of Dawn and Pertinax Fatum, they were barely even myths now, but their names were retained by the memories of cogitators. They were data not accessed for ten millennia, but they came out of the night of void, and the machinic memories that served the Grey Knights recognised them from the lists of the damned.

  The ships were giants, much larger than the Tyndaris, but the centuries and corruption had eroded them. Metallic tendrils like waving cobwebs draped their forms. The lines of their hulls were uneven, as if they had been gnawed by rot. In Styer’s eyes, they were immense tombstones, monuments of loss and treachery, surging through the void to bring more victims down with them into the ruin of the grave.

  The three giants came at the strike cruiser in a loose triangular formation to catch it in a crossfire. The salvos of lance beams and cannon shells smashed through the partial cover of planetisimals and wrecks.

  Decay had attacked their weapons, too. When the ships fired, there were gaps in their salvos. Entire batteries were missing.

  Use the gaps, Styer thought. It was the only crack he could see in the enemy’s wall of devastation.

  The vessel graveyard turned into a storm of fiery wrecks and colossal shrapnel. A dead escort blocked a torpedo from the Perdition of Dawn and flew apart. Its wreckage, molten at the jagged edges, hurtled at the Tyndaris, slamming against the hull. The impact and lance fire from the Dark Honour and Pertinax Fatum overloaded the starboard void shields. They flashed out. Before they could be brought on line again, shells punched into the adamantine hull.

  ‘Hard to starboard,’ Styer said. ‘Make for the battleship.’

  ‘We are nearing the limits of our structural tolerance,’ Saalfrank warned. Underscoring his point, a violent current of immaterial energy rocked the ship. The deck heaved as if the void were a sea in storm.

  ‘I’m counting on that,’ Styer said. ‘If we are close to that limit, so are they. Take us in, shipmaster. All cannons and torpedoes, fire forward. Lances port and starboard at the cruisers. Make them wary.’

  The Tyndaris closed with the Dark Honour. The battleship, broadside to the strike cruiser, unleashed a new salvo. Destruction crossed the void between the ships, and the materium cracked and howled under the pressure of the Great Rift.

  In his cell, Crowe listened to the rhythmic booms of the Tyndaris’ guns, and sharper, cracking thunder of damage. The cell shook, the walls and deck thrumming with the ship’s struggle. He stood in the doorway, looking out across the librarium. Books tumbled from the shelves when a heavy tremor seized the vessel. Crowe adjusted his centre of gravity, remaining still, reading what he could of the battle from a distance. The new tremor was something other than guns. It was too large for a single impact. The Tyndaris was moving closer to the warp storm, he judged. The forces of the Cicatrix Maledictum were seizing the ship in their jaws.

  Crowe opened a vox channel to Drake. ‘Are you on the bridge?’ he asked.

  ‘I have just arrived.’

  Crowe listened to Drake describe the state of the engagement, and experienced the familiar frustration. His impulse, still present after all these decades, was to make for the bridge and know first-hand the ebb and flow of the battle, to see for himself what was coming. His discipline was stronger than the impulse. Unless a boarding action occurred, there was nothing he could do. He would cause harm if he went to the bridge. Doing so would expose everyone there to the Black Blade. He would be worse than a distraction. He would be a danger as acute as if he were the enemy attacking from within.

  You make us both prisoners, said Antwyr. Our strength is enchained, buried in the dark. Free us. With no pause, the daemon leapt from temptation to threat. Your duty is your tomb. Your chains will not hold me. I will open your throat. Your blood will drench this blade. All your loyalties are illusions, and all your value will burn. Even death will be no release from my vengeance.

  Unmoved, unmoving, Crowe stood fast. The blasts of the war were so distant, even with the rocking and trembling of the cell, he did feel entombed.

  But so he had been since he first grasped the hilt of the Black Blade of Antwyr.

  So he waited. This was Styer’s war, not his. The true battle was yet to come, if they survived this one.

  Crowe’s certainty that the Tyndaris would reach Angriff Primus was solid as granite. Its strength came from something that felt disturbingly like fate.

  The smoke from torch sconces thickened the gloom in the vestry of the Cathedral of the Saints Unforgiving. On the spandrels of the arches, the stone faces of the Imperium’s holy men and women stared down without mercy on Cardinal Paulus Orla as he struggled to rise from his knees. The bells announcing the beginning of matins had ceased to toll. He was late. The murmuring of ten thousand people in the pews filled the vestry, a rising tide of anxiety. He should go. He must go.

  He gazed at the Emperor’s shrine, looking to it for inspiration and renewed faith. All he saw was a skull embedded in gold.

  The door of the vestry creaked open. ‘Cardinal?’ said Lina Vismar.

  Orla turned around. He still could not rise. Vismar met his gaze, and took a step back, recoiling from his pain. ‘I will be there momentarily,’ he said.

  ‘Will you?’

  Orla didn’t answer. There was no lying to his older cousin. The necessities of the posts they held, governing the secular and spiritual machinery of Angriff Primus, had taught them great skills in dissembling. Neither had ever been able to lie to the other, though. Not convincingly. And there had never been any need. They had leaned on each other as they ruled the bodies and souls of the citizenry, and they had ruled well.

  Orla had never believed the day would come that he would wish to relinquish his authority. But the day had come. Years ago, now. An eternity, it seemed.

  He tried again to stand, and failed. Vismar came and knelt beside him. Her eyes were haunted, but there was a grim determination to the set of her jaw. And there was anger. The anger was always greater after her en
counters with the canoness.

  ‘You’ve seen her, then?’ Orla asked.

  Vismar nodded. ‘At the Laboris Gloria. Production has trebled since her visit.’

  ‘Naturally. And did she renew your hopes?’

  ‘Do I look like she did?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I saw them again, Paulus,’ Vismar said, whispering now. ‘The things in the sky. They seem to be planets, but they don’t belong.’

  Orla chuckled, but it was his despair laughing, not him. ‘Maybe our struggles will soon be at an end, then.’ He was silent for a moment, then said, ‘Why do we still struggle?’

  ‘What other choice do we have?’

  ‘Oblivion,’ he said, so quietly he could barely hear himself. ‘We have survived this long because we fear Canoness Setheno,’ he said, louder now, giving voice to his pain. ‘And because we haven’t been attacked since she came here. How much longer will that fear be enough?’

  ‘It is enough for now,’ Vismar said bitterly. She stood and took Orla’s arm. ‘Do what you are called upon to do. If you don’t, the canoness will hear of it.’

  The thought of what would happen then gave Orla the strength he needed. He staggered to his feet. He stared at the shrine for a few moments more.

  ‘What is it?’ Vismar asked.

  ‘Nothing.’ Orla gestured at the winged skull. ‘There is nothing.’ The threat of Setheno’s wrath had brought him to his feet, not his vocation. ‘I have lost my faith, Lina.’ The shrine was a meaningless sculpture. It had no more worth than what it could fetch if melted down for its gold. Orla’s hands curled into claws. He wanted to tear the flesh from his face in grief and shame. Pluck out his eyes. Tear out his tongue. ‘The Emperor does not protect us. He is dead. Nothing awaits us.’

  Vismar’s hand jerked away from his arm. He faced her, expecting condemnation and horror. Instead, the governor’s expression was hard to read. Her eyes were narrowed, speculative. She looked back and forth between him and the shrine. The anger in her gaze grew stronger, but it did not seem directed at him. Her lips pressed together when she faced the shrine. At length, she said, ‘Let’s go,’ as if he had not spoken at all.

  Vismar walked away from the shrine and out of the vestry. Orla followed her automatically, barely noticing where he walked. When Vismar stopped, Orla blinked, surprised to find himself at the foot of the spiral staircase leading to his pulpit. The murmur of the crowd had risen to a dull roar.

  ‘We still have our responsibilities,’ Vismar said, her tone flat and dripping with acid.

  Do we? Orla wanted to say. Why? What point is there in doing anything but accepting the inevitable. We live until the nightmares that have taken the galaxy decide it is time for us to die. He kept his thoughts to himself. He saw how brittle the governor’s strength was, and he would not add bringing her down with him to his list of sins.

  ‘The people need you, Paulus.’

  ‘For that, I pity them,’ said Orla. He climbed the stairs, though. His fear of Setheno was enough to move him forward.

  In the pulpit, he placed his hands on either side of the lectern as if about to launch into his sermon. In fact, he was holding himself upright. The black rockcrete pillars soared upwards to the fan vaults of the nave. As ever, the vastness of the space imposed his insignificance upon him. For the first time, there was no reason to lift his eyes and see, in the majesty of the cathedral, a reminder of the Emperor’s power.

  When Orla appeared, the choir, five hundred voices strong, began to sing the Third Hymn of Submission to the Emperor. Servo-skulls floated over the congregation, chattering parchment out of the jaws, dropping the words of the hymn to the faithful. But the people all knew the hymn. They sang with the choir, and the cathedral resounded with the power of the song.

  In the time before the fall of night over the Imperium, Orla had found this hymn stirring. No longer. Perhaps the people below him still did. Perhaps his presence gave them hope, and for the length of the service, within the walls of the Saints Unforgiving, they could make themselves believe that the Imperium was out there, somewhere, and that the Emperor really did protect.

  If any of this was true, he wondered how it could be possible. He wondered how anyone on Angriff Primus could believe in anything except the end of hope and the inevitability of doom.

  Even so, he conducted the service. He went through all the motions. He even delivered a sermon, though he barely knew what he was saying. It was a tissue of platitudes and tired exhortations, every phrase worn into meaninglessness.

  He did his duty, held up and animated by the fear of the Canoness Errant, and pierced bloody by the grief of lost faith.

  ‘Auxiliary power to the forward shields,’ Saalfrank ordered.

  The Tyndaris closed with the Dark Honour, its prow pointing at the centre of the great battleship’s hull. The Dark Honour’s broadsides punished the strike cruiser’s void shields. They strained, verging on collapse even with the rush of energy diverted to them. The Tyndaris was surrounded by flares, violent power discharges, and the eruptions of ordnance exploding against derelicts and ice. The Dark Honour was between the Tyndaris and the outer reaches of the Cicatrix Maledictum. The Perdition of Dawn and the Pertinax Fatum approached on the flanks. The closer the Tyndaris came to the ­Honour, the more the grand cruisers had to hold back on their fire.

  What they could do was bad enough.

  Saalfrank took the ship towards the target at full speed, racing against the mounting damage. He leaned forward on the throne as if he might urge the Tyndaris on faster, sending it tearing across the void in a streak of vengeful light.

  The tremors in the hull became more violent. The enemy barrage and the tidal upheavals in the proximate zone of the Great Rift attacked the vessel like a predator seizing its prey in colossal jaws. Styer had commanded the warning klaxons to be silenced. He had committed the Tyndaris to its course. To deviate now would be to ensure destruction.

  ‘Take us under the battleship,’ Styer told Saalfrank. ‘Keep our focus midship.’

  ‘Their salvos are more sparse there,’ Drake observed. The two squads of Purifiers had arrived on the bridge shortly after the beginning of the engagement. They had gathered towards the rear of the strategium, with the two Knights of the Flame taking up positions just behind Styer. The mission was under the command of Garran Crowe, and so was ultimately a Purifier campaign, as the purging of Sandava III had been. With Crowe in isolation, either of his lieutenants could claim authority here. But the Tyndaris was Styer’s ship. The traversal of the Nachmund Gauntlet was his war to wage. He appreciated the respect Drake and Sendrax extended him.

  ‘If the enemy’s guns are inoperable there,’ Styer said, ‘the weakness may be more general.’

  ‘A theory worth testing.’

  ‘Also the only strategy open to us.’ Styer eyed the hololithic screen that displayed the relative positions of the four ships. The Fatum and the Perdition were moving to the rear of the Tyndaris even as they drew closer. They were seeking to place the Tyndaris at the centre of a lethal triangle. If they succeeded, and all three turned broadside to the strike cruiser, the Tyndaris would not last long.

  The Dark Honour launched a cluster of torpedoes as the distance between the ships shrank. Coming at the Honour head-on, the Tyndaris presented a narrow profile. Two of the torpedoes missed, streaking by its flanks. The other ran into a cloud of explosions as cannons sent out a barrage of shells with proximity fuses. One got through, slamming into the prow. The armour was at its thickest there, and the explosion failed to punch through it, though the ship shuddered again from the impact.

  Saalfrank waited until the last moment before altering the bearings of the Tyndaris. Though the engines were pushing the ship to its fullest, the movements of the vessels played out with terrible grace and a majestic slowness, as if mountain ranges manoeuvred around each other, while the
strikes of lances and shells came with the fury of a storm. Gradually, the Dark Honour grew larger in the oculus. As it filled the screen, the Tyndaris began to lower its prow below the plane of the ecliptic. It seemed an age before Styer could detect any alteration in the perspective. Very slowly, the battleship rose higher in the oculus. Soon it loomed close, an entire world of corrupted adamantium. Its guns followed the Tyndaris, punishing it for the temerity of its approach.

  The Tyndaris hit back with all its force. Torpedoes, shells and las hammered the centre of the Honour’s hull. As Tyndaris began to slide under the Dark Honour, Styer saw geysers of burning plasma erupt from cracks in the armour. The aged, distorted plating glowed an angry red behind the pulsating, trembling void shields.

  The strike cruiser passed under the battleship, and for the length of that transit, the enemy’s fire was blocked. The grand cruisers could not attack without hitting the Dark Honour, and the Tyndaris was out of the arc of the Honour’s batteries. It kept up its barrage on the Honour.

  ‘Hit it with everything,’ said Styer. ‘Tear it open.’

  The strike cruiser’s batteries fired upwards. The two ships were so close, the Tyndaris’ void shields flared from the backwash of its own shells bursting.

  ‘Hard to port,’ Styer said. The Tyndaris’ prow was just beginning to come out from under the Dark Honour. ‘Keep us close.’

  The turn began as the stern of the Tyndaris emerged from beneath the enemy. The Dark Honour was manoeuvring, too. Its crew was trying to bring its guns to bear on their target again, and to escape the mounting damage the Tyndaris was inflicting. Its engines burned with increasing brilliance as it accelerated.

  The manoeuvre was clumsy, unsure, and made the mistake of turning away from the Grey Knights. The Tyndaris had the initiative. Still on a lower plane than the battleship, the Tyndaris completed the turn, bringing its port flank around. The ships were now moving away from each other, with the Tyndaris heading even closer to the rift. The battleship still blocked clear shots from the grand cruisers.