Castellan

by David Annandale

  At last you are beginning to understand the futility of your resistance, said Antwyr.

  ‘There is still the underhive,’ Drake said quietly.

  ‘There is,’ said Crowe. ‘Let us be clear. We are stopping nothing. We are seeking to retain control of the battlefield. The real enemy is coming. Whatever the form it takes, we will contest its arrival.’

  Futility, the Blade whispered. All is futility, and at last you know it. You begin to admit the truth.

  Crowe refused to pay attention to the daemonic lies. ‘The purpose of our foe takes form. So it must. We will need to know the nature of its design before we can destroy it. And this we shall do. We are the hammer, and we shall smash the abomination.’

  Without answering the sword, Crowe vowed he would show it the truth of futility. It lay in the plots of Antwyr, and in the grandiose schemes of the being that had laid claim to the Angriff system. There would be no triumph for Chaos here. From the ramparts of his duty, Crowe would cast abomination down to its ruin.

  The thunder of collapses reached into the underhive. Dust shook free from the foundation walls, dropping past the windows of the maglev cars. The train had been built by Vismar’s ancestors six centuries previously, as an emergency means of evacuating the ruling family and its loyal guards from Algidus. It ran through the deepest roots of the city, and had never been used. Now it carried Vismar, her honour guard, and three companies of the militia towards the outer walls.

  ‘They’ve started,’ said Erner Kierska. He and about half of his technicians had joined up with Vismar’s cohort when she had ordered a stop to collect more loyalists beneath the spaceport. ‘You were right, governor. They came to kill us.’

  The voice was right, Vismar thought. ‘I was warned,’ she said, proud she had listened to the warning. She was proud, too, of the action she had taken. She was leading again for the first time since Setheno had come to Angriff Primus. Vismar cursed the name of the Sister of Battle. Setheno had brought her humiliation and weakness, and then the Grey Knights had brought death. Vismar had reclaimed her pride and her strength. She had been slow to learn the lesson of what had happened to her world, but she had learned. She had been wrong to fear that the Emperor was dead. Instead, she should have hoped He was, and that Angriff Primus was finally beyond His reach. It was not, but the Emperor was not all-powerful. Even if she did not live through this day, she would die with her head held high. She would no longer bow to the perverse laws of a false god.

  ‘What will we do when we reach our destination?’ Kierska asked.

  ‘We will gather what strength we can. Then we will see. I make no promises. Who can? But we will not be lambs to the slaughter.’

  Kierska nodded. Vismar had said the same to Colonel Merkhaz and his soldiers when they had boarded the train. That had been enough to satisfy them for the moment. It had almost been enough to satisfy her. But now the Grey Knights had begun their massacre. She and all her people had been living with the imminence of death for years, but now it was truly upon them. The journey to the outer walls was hardly more than a delaying tactic. A few more miles now, and Vismar would have to choose the manner in which she would confront her end.

  I will meet it with anger, she thought. With hate. She had given her life to nothing. To strike back, at the end, would be something. Even against something as undying as a Space Marine.

  Now, in the final stretches of the journey, Vismar felt pulled forward, her spirit rushing ahead of the train. She watched the vistas of the underhive speed past the car’s armourglass window. The noise of the dark world reached her over the rattle of the transport. The underhive rang with the overlapping dins of forges, and with the shouts of labour and struggle that defined the lives of the people who struggled for existence in the endless night. The Noctis Aeterna had been hard. The reach of Setheno’s order had been limited below ground, and the underhive had become a hecatomb; hundreds of thousands had starved to death as the supplies dwindled. Untold thousands more had died in the desperate, clawing battles for what food and water could be had. Corpses rotted, spreading disease. The stench of decay, thick as cloth, came through the ventilation system. But there were people down here still, and her leadership’s purpose had been renewed. Something more than flight waited for her at the end of the line. This was what called to her.

  At first the sound was a vague uproar. As the militia companies drew closer, it became clearer, resolving into chanting. Vismar clenched her jaw. She could not tell if the voices were raised in praise or anger. They were many, and they were frenzied. That was all she knew.

  At length, the maglev track reached its terminus. When the train stopped, Vismar and her troops disembarked on a platform at the mouth of a vast chamber in the base of a manufactory that had been abandoned for a millennium. Even further below this level, there had been a mine, and the ore had been stored in this cavernous space. There were still piles of slag reaching fifty feet or more up the sides of the walls. Huge stone moulds had been brought here at some point, discarded one on top of the other like the playthings of a bored colossus. Thousands of people milled about on the floor, on the slopes of the heaps, and stood on top of the unsteady dolmens of the moulds. They were dressed in filthy rags. The crowd stank of old sweat and new fear. Most of those in the lower reaches of the chamber had become even more ragged by tearing at their clothes and their flesh. Their songs were indistinguishable from howls. The citizens on the slag heaps looked more wary. The people below raised their arms to call them to give praise. A few did in the time it took Vismar to assess the situation, adding their voices to songs of bloody repentance.

  Vismar paused at the edge of the platform. A short flight of stone steps led to the main floor of the chamber. She marched down, followed by a large phalanx of troopers, and she pushed her way into the centre of the celebrations. The rest of the soldiers spread out from the entrance to the chamber, taking up positions along the walls and the slag heaps.

  ‘Get their attention,’ Vismar said to Merkhaz.

  The colonel aimed his bolt pistol at the ceiling hundreds of feet up, and pulled the trigger. The report was titanic, reverberating within a space as open as the nave of a cathedral. The celebrants paused. In the momentary silence, another distant rumble shook the ground above.

  ‘Do you hear that?’ Vismar cried. ‘That is the servants of the Emperor destroying our city. You are praising a lie! Salvation has not come to our world. Betrayal and death are our reward for faithful service.’

  The people on the slopes listened, and looked down at the flagellants with growing anger. But the vast majority of the thousands present stared at Vismar with incomprehension. Then they sent up an even greater hue and cry, shouting down her heresy with their loyalty, now a mindless, destructive thing.

  It was always mindless, she thought. Only I didn’t know that until now.

  Vismar stared at the flagellants with disgust. They were filthy, subhuman wretches. Of course they held to their worship of the false god. They were incapable of thinking for themselves. They were incapable of any thought at all. And these were her subjects. She had given her life to the rule and protection of Angriff Primus, and she could see at last how utterly foolish she had been. Her every action had been in the service of the Emperor, and so her existence, until this very day, had been a waste, thrown away on the unworthy. The wretches in this chamber were the waste made manifest. Encrusted by filth, coated in their own blood, baying for salvation that would never come, dragging broken nails through their flesh as if their wounds were any form of offering, they were loathsome, useless. They were fit only to be discarded.

  But that would not be enough.

  ‘Kill them,’ Vismar said. ‘Exterminate all the brutes.’

  The militia did not hesitate. When Merkhaz gave the order to fire, he snarled with the same eager hate that consumed Vismar. The troopers howled back at the flagellants as they fired th
eir lasrifles. The soldiers on the periphery advanced into the crowd, many of them choosing to kill with bayonets. People descended from the debris hills to join in the slaughter. They vented their anger with stones and hands and teeth, smashing the skulls and tearing open the throats of the religious. Vismar used her laspistol, and as she sent multiple blasts into the face of a penitent, she wished for a sword. She wanted to feel the impact of the blade sinking through sinew and connecting with bone. She wanted the reward of warm blood splashing against her face, payment at last collected for a life lived in vain. There was still satisfaction in the death she meted out, and there was more than satisfaction as the prayers stopped and the screams began. As the las cut relentlessly into the bodies of the flagellants, she felt pleasure. The bodies fell one on top of each other, creating new waste heaps. Flesh upon flesh, burned and writhing its last, a parallel for the industrial slag on the periphery of the chamber. Waste surrounded waste, a symbol for the futility of her life in service. By her command, the symbol had been created. She was its author, and she took pride in it.

  The massacre brought her the first pleasurable sensations she had known for years. Their intensity shook her frame. Soon, too soon, there was no one left to kill. Hyperventilating, she stared at the piles of the murdered around her. This was well done, she thought. This was very well done.

  It took her a moment to realise the applause she was hearing was not in her head.

  Vismar looked up. There was a ledge ten feet up the wall close by on her right, above a yawning doorway leading to another passage. A Space Marine stood on the ledge, bringing his gauntlets together in a slow, amused clap. He was a gargoyle and a monument. His face was a thing of wounds. New injuries opened and old ones clotted shut before Vismar’s eyes. Graceful, twisted, murderous spikes ran up the sides of his armour. Its plates were jewelled mosaics of atrocity. The chamber was silent as all gazed upon him; he seemed to Vismar to have the stature of a prophet. She had not listened to the message brought by the earlier warriors. She had not been ready. Her world had not been ready.

  We are now, she thought. This great being embodied art and sensation. She shivered in the expectation of his truth.

  ‘You feel it,’ the great monster said. His savage voice rumbled throughout the chamber. He addressed every soul present, and he spoke directly to Vismar’s heart. ‘You see the shape of what you have done.’ He paused. ‘You feel it,’ he hissed.

  ‘We feel it!’ Vismar and her troopers responded.

  ‘Yes, you do.’ The Space Marine nodded, then he crouched and spread his arms as if to embrace the congregation below. ‘I am Tarautas of the Emperor’s Children, and I welcome you to the glories of Slaanesh. I will teach you to see. I will open for you the path to sensation and to vengeance.’ He raised a finger, instructing his new flock. ‘See the shape of events. See their beauty. You turned your backs on my brothers and killed those who had accepted the enlightenment they offered. You were loyal, for so long and so heroically, only to be betrayed. And so we close the circle. Once again, the Emperor’s Children are before you. Will you turn your backs again? Will you be slaughtered for your loyalty, as you have rightfully killed the sheep around you, or will you follow us to transcendence?’

  ‘I will follow!’ Vismar screamed. So did every man and woman with her.

  ‘Then come,’ said Tarautas. He stood and gestured to the archway beneath him. ‘Before they were slain, my brothers created new paths beneath this city. Complete your journey now, and see the gifts we have brought.’

  Vismar ran forward, and the soldiers of the militia ran with her. They ran through the archway, into the passage beyond, and into the embrace of the Dark Prince. They sprinted through the gloom of the underhive. Some fell, and were trampled by their fellows. They laughed as they ran, and they shouted in the joy of Tarautas’ promises.

  Vismar barely noticed the regions of the underhive that she passed. All she knew was that they were moving away from the outer wall. What mattered was what lay ahead. She lost track of time. She was winded, but she kept running. She learned to revel in the pain of exhaustion wracking her body. And at last, she crossed the ­threshold to another huge chamber. It was a cavern that had been formed from the scraping out of several foundations. She understood that it, like the route that had led here, had been constructed in the recent past. It must have been the work of the citizens who had embraced the Emperor’s Children on their first visit. She wept at the thought of the error she had made then, in suppressing that burgeoning cult. Yet she laughed to find herself part of it, and exulted in the aesthetic pleasure of the symmetry of her journey.

  Wide ramps led from the cavern, heading towards the surface. The wide expanse of the floor held the gifts of the Emperor’s Children, and the means to strike back at the grey lies of the Emperor. Salvaged from the fallen regions of Angriff Primus, artillery vehicles waited to turn their ordnance on the city. Before the mortars and mobile cannons was another of the Emperor’s Children. The vox-casters on his pauldrons had merged with his flesh. His massive rifle appeared to grow out of his arm. When he spoke, it was with the voice of a hurricane, and Vismar’s ears began to bleed.

  ‘I am Alectus,’ he thundered, ‘and I will lead you to the perfection of blood.’

  The artillery barrage came from a sector whose militia base had been cleared. Crowe was aboard the Purgation’s Sword with Drake’s squad when a flight of Storm Eagle rockets streaked overhead. The arcs of flame dropped towards the palace sector of Algidus. A short distance above street level, the warheads burst into rains of bomblets. Hab blocks toppled into a sea of flame. The blasts incinerated tens of thousands of flagellants, penned in by Crowe’s strategy of containment. A hail of mortar shells, fired at much shorter range, came down to the east, turning the avenues into maelstroms of shrapnel. From the open side door of the Stormraven, Crowe saw the collapse of his efforts to arrest the disintegration of the battlefield.

  ‘Brother Berinon,’ he voxed, ‘make for the east. Take us to the launch point.’ To judge from the contrails of the shells and rockets, the Manticore and Wyvern fire had come from roughly the same location.

  All burns, said Antwyr. All burns, and so will you. Fly to battle, fly to your fate. It comes at my command.

  There was no way to tell whether the sword spoke truth or lies of opportunity. Crowe recorded the words mentally, but he did not heed them.

  ‘We have found the militia,’ Drake said. He was next to Crowe at the door, holding fast against the gale of Antwyr’s rasping thoughts.

  ‘And they have found heavy weapons,’ said Crowe. ‘There should be nothing capable of this barrage in that sector.’

  ‘I do not see how they could conceal the means to create an artillery line so quickly.’

  ‘That would be impossible. They must have had help. The enemy declares himself, brother.’

  The Purgation’s Sword flew over the region of the Wyvern shelling. The mortars had turned the sector into a cratered landscape of shattered, slumping rockcrete, empty of life. The barrage continued, spreading north and south. Already, mobs of penitents were rushing into the devastation, howling for the blood of heretics, and Gared’s fears were being confirmed. Crowe felt the psychic energy of the city rising by the second. Millions of people were consumed by passion, by pain, by fear and by death. The psychic currents clashed and grew. A storm was gathering, the pressure building against Crowe’s soul with the same foreshadowing of an explosion as a sudden drop in barometric pressure.

  The gunship left the blast area behind. ‘Auspex confirms large heat signatures ahead,’ Berinon reported. ‘Vehicles and infantry.’

  ‘Advancing?’

  ‘Yes. A spearhead of infantry appears to be leading the way for the artillery.’

  ‘That is our target.’ He would cut the head from this force.

  Autocannon flak reached up from the Stormraven.

  ‘H
ydras!’ Berinon warned.

  The shells came from multiple angles. The anti-air tanks were positioned along the entire line of the artillery formation. Crowe held the edge of the door, standing firm as Berinon took the gunship into a sharp dive, beneath the range of the initial volley, and down a canyon lined by hab blocks. The avenue was narrow, barely wide enough to admit the gunship. The façades blurred past, mere feet from the port wing. A manufactory blocked the end of the avenue, and Berinon brought the nose up, climbing steeply just above the stilled chimneys. The Hydra shells sought the gunship, blasting the chimneys apart. The Purgation’s Sword dropped again into another boulevard, beneath the black cloud of exploding flak.

  ‘Enemy lines in one mile,’ Berinon voxed.

  ‘Drop us as close as you can and pull back,’ said Crowe. Against a heavy concentration of artillery, the gunship was vulnerable. Against a squad of Grey Knights on the ground, it was the artillery that would be doomed.

  The Stormraven slowed, descending closer to street level. Berinon banked sharply around a blasted chapel. On the other side was a much wider avenue, running north and south. The artillery tanks were lined up along it. They were holding their position for the time being, sending out a wide barrage over the city before them. They were surrounded by a mob largely composed of militia soldiers, though there was no sign of military discipline in the way they shouted and danced, roaring in delight at every concussion of the guns. A large contingent had moved into the chapel, and had set it ablaze. They celebrated in the ruined building and on the portico stairs. In the shattered doorway, a Noise Marine presided over the revels. He blasted the street with cyclones of writhing sound.