Castellan

by David Annandale

  They all did.

  The song held an entire system, and an entire system began to dance.

  A few hundred yards from the eastern side of the pillar’s base, Tarautas turned to his warband. ‘Is this not the grandeur I promised you?’ he asked. The exquisite agony of the song throbbed through every wound in his flesh. Old scars tore open. Layers of pain overlapped. His flesh was a tapestry of sensation. His eyes were wide with joy. Extremity touched every nerve. His senses were overwhelmed to the point of ecstasy, and he felt like he could tear the planet open with his hands.

  And this was just the beginning.

  ‘You spoke truly,’ said Gothola. He could not tear his eyes away from the palace. He was trembling, caught in the same rapture as Tarautas.

  The pinnacle of rock slowed its climb, and finally stopped. The palace’s twin spires now rose higher than any other peak in the city. The slopes of the rock were steep and uneven, glowing faintly as the rock softened and settled into a flat surface. A monstrous symbol of Slaanesh cut deeply into the entire eastern face, the circles and scythes of its shape reaching diagonally from the base to the peak of the column. It crackled with violet light, the touch of the warp embedded in its every sinuous curve. The daemons gathered at the base of the rock mass began to climb, forming a pilgrimage of savage celebration, a procession of tribute to the ruler of the palace. They advanced along the wide grooves of the rune. The path took them around a full three hundred and sixty degrees, daemons marching sideways and upside down as the power of the rune usurped the reign of gravity.

  Between the Emperor’s Children and the base of the new mountain, the gunships of the Grey Knights hovered.

  Tarautas started marching forward, kicking away the still-twitching bodies that lay in his way. ‘Our place is in the palace,’ he said.

  ‘The Grey Knights will be there long before us,’ Casca said.

  ‘I don’t think so. Our role was set long before now. Destiny will not be set aside by such a small concern.’

  The inhabitant of the palace would provide. He was certain of that. He and his brothers had helped bring about its ascendance. They had played their part to help shatter a planet. They would not be forgotten now.

  They were not. Tarautas had taken barely ten steps when the air began to spiral in front of him. The fell light of the warp broke through. The spiral widened, its centre falling away into the deep swirl of nightmare. A tunnel through the real opened up before Tarautas. He spread his arms. ‘Behold, brothers. Are we not chosen? Are we not gifted to be part of this great sublimity?’

  He crossed the threshold of the tunnel without hesitation. The others followed.

  The Stormravens set down on a hill of rubble opposite the mount of the daemonic palace. Crowe watched the warp lightning as he listened to Saalfrank’s report from the Tyndaris. There was a definite rhythm to the blasts. A heavy beat from the bolt striking from the sky, a fractional pause, then two regular beats as the lightning rose from one tower, then the other. Another, slightly longer pause, and the pattern repeated. There was no variation. The throbbing of the lightning joined the tritone to create the structure of the daemon song pervading the city.

  ‘The planets have accelerated in their orbits,’ Saalfrank was saying. ‘They are moving with unnatural speed.’

  ‘How unnatural?’ Crowe asked.

  ‘They will complete their solar revolutions in a matter of days.’

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘Yes. Even the world furthest out, for that matter.’

  Crowe briefly contemplated the havoc that would be wreaked on the planets. Angriff Primus would experience a new season almost every day, with all the disasters that condition would entail. He put the thoughts aside with a mental shrug. Angriff Primus had no long-term future. There had been little doubt of that since the start of the mission.

  ‘The system itself is also moving much faster,’ Saalfrank went on.

  ‘To what end?’ Furia asked. ‘No matter how fast it travels, it cannot reach any destination before centuries have passed.’

  ‘That is if it continues to travel through the materium,’ Setheno pointed out. ‘I have been on a xenos device assembled from worlds that moved through the warp.’

  ‘Is there a new accumulation of energy?’ Crowe asked Saalfrank.

  ‘Yes, castellan. The taint of the warp is spreading through the system.’

  ‘Then we have our answer,’ said Crowe. ‘And we know what we must stop.’ He pictured the destruction inflicted on the Imperium by a rogue system appearing at the whim of the Ruinous Powers. He foresaw fleets battered to nothingness by planets, crucial worlds ripped from their stars by the system’s gravity and hurled into the deep void. He pointed to the palace. ‘There can be no doubt the being who commands this design lurks there. That is our target.’

  ‘There is no need any longer to withhold an orbital bombardment,’ said Setheno. She did not sound optimistic.

  ‘You don’t think one will work?’ Sendrax asked her.

  She gestured towards the lightning rising from the towers, perpetually striking in different directions. ‘I suspect the enemy’s defences will prove more than enough to counter such an attempt.’

  ‘We will not risk the destruction of the Tyndaris in a futile endeavour,’ said Crowe. The bolts were striking planets. A single one of them redirected at the strike cruiser would annihilate it.

  ‘Perhaps the enemy has not detected its presence yet,’ Drake suggested.

  Crowe shook his head. ‘That is unlikely. Our foe know we are here.’

  ‘We have been used to unleash this monstrosity,’ said Styer.

  ‘Precisely.’ Crowe observed the rhythm of the lightning for another moment. ‘I suggest the energy must be required in exact measure and exact location.’

  ‘There is some regularity in the way the lightning strikes the other worlds of the system,’ Saalfrank confirmed. ‘They hit Angriff itself, too. There is more. An enemy vessel has appeared. We have identified it from archival records as the Catharsis.’

  ‘Of the Emperor’s Children,’ Crowe said.

  ‘Yes, castellan.’

  ‘And it is the source of the third bolt.’

  ‘It is. It appears to be receiving echoes of energy from the bolts, reflecting back from the other planets.’ Saalfrank sounded frustrated with having to describe one impossibility after another. ‘This makes little sense, I know.’

  ‘It makes no rational sense, shipmaster,’ Crowe told him. ‘It does, however, make aesthetic sense.’ They were still fighting the creatures of the Dark Prince. Whatever daemon was enthroned in the palace, it had laboured to create something more than a weapon. It was a work of art, and so were the fates of the Grey Knights that had been woven into this construction. We are part of a tapestry, he thought. Then he thought of the movement of the spheres and the rhythms of the unholy song, and corrected himself. Not a tapestry. A dance.

  ‘We will refuse our role,’ Crowe said. ‘We will shatter the daemon’s art, as we have before.’ He considered the palace again, and tried to follow the aesthetic that underpinned the construction. ‘We have four possible targets,’ he said. ‘The two towers, the centre of the palace, and the Catharsis. I would have us strike all four at once.’

  ‘With respect, castellan,’ said Sendrax, ‘that will sharply divide our strength. Should we not hit one target at a time, in force?’

  ‘We do not have the time. We do not know if one or all the locations are critical. Disable one, and the enemy may well be able to adjust. It has done so at every stage. All our victories have been meaningless. The enemy has twisted them all to produce what we face now.’ He shook his head. ‘Not this time. We can see the points on which the daemon’s work depends. We will smash them all.’

  ‘How can we,’ Sendrax demanded, ‘if we are spread too thin?’

 
He defies you, said Antwyr. Make an example of him. Show them true strength, if you truly believe you can achieve your deluded dream.

  For a moment, the sword was silent. In that second, Sendrax turned his head sharply towards Crowe, and then away from him. The Knight of the Flame’s helm stared fixedly at the palace.

  ‘The Black Blade lies,’ Crowe said softly. The natural impulse would be to move closer to Sendrax, to invoke the confidence of brotherhood. Instead, Crowe took a few steps away, putting a little bit more distance between Sendrax and the sword.

  ‘I know it does.’ Sendrax sounded offended by the reminder.

  ‘But it does with skill, brother. It always knows which lies to tell.’

  When Sendrax said nothing, Crowe continued with the briefing as if there had been no disagreement. He noticed Setheno’s hard, golden eyes had focused on Sendrax. It was rare that Crowe had seen anyone outside the Chapter look upon a Grey Knight with judgement. Rarer still to feel that individual possessed the moral authority to do so.

  Drake was also watching the exchange. He had removed his helmet. There was no expression on his metallic face, but his eyes were troubled.

  ‘We will attack the palace gate as one force,’ Crowe said. ‘That would appear to be our sole point of access.’ He had examined the peaks of the towers through telescopic lenses. There were no windows. The towers might as well have been gargantuan lightning rods. He would not rule out that possibility. ‘Knight of the Flame Sendrax,’ Crowe said, ‘your squad will take the south tower. Justicar Styer, the north tower is yours. Knight of the Flame Drake, your squad and I will make for the centre of the palace.’

  ‘That leaves the Catharsis,’ said Furia.

  ‘Once we are through the gates, one gunship will suffice to hold back the daemons while we are inside. The other will bring you to the Tyndaris. Shipmaster Saalfrank, do you understand what will be required of you?’

  ‘I do, castellan. We will engage the Catharsis.’

  ‘Be wary. The enemy may well be able to direct the lightning in the same way that the towers do.’

  ‘Understood.’

  ‘We will board the enemy if necessary,’ said Setheno.

  ‘Brother Berinon,’ Crowe said, ‘you will transport the Canoness Errant and the inquisitor’s forces. Return to us once they are aboard.’ He spoke presuming extraction would be possible. The Knights of the Flame and the justicar were equipped with personal teleporters. Should the worst happen, they would make use of that means to return to the Tyndaris.

  Crowe looked at the squads. The handful of warriors before him were also a rampart. They were the hammer of the Emperor, and the tip of his spear, but they were also the shield of the Imperium. They were the defence against which the enemy’s weapon of annihilation would shatter.

  No shield, said the sword. No wall. No hope. No edge but me. No sword but me. You are mine, warden, though you cannot see your fall. It is coming. You will turn to me. It is written.

  At the base of the ruins, the Malleus Maleficarum arrived, Tech­marine Bray having negotiated the maze of streets strewn with rubble or fallen into chasms. Its guns turned towards the symbol that marked the unnatural path up the palace’s rock.

  It was time.

  Crowe advanced through another sea of daemons. If he looked up, he saw the shattered landscape of Algidus reaching up for him. He was high in the interior of one of the arching curves of the symbol. The taint of the shape squirmed around him, rock hissing with sensuous languor to the clash of weapons and claws. The Grey Knights were literally moving within a daemonic design, and this truth disturbed him.

  Drake made the same connection. ‘We are forced to follow the path laid out for us by the foe,’ he voxed. He ducked beneath the pincers of two daemonettes and blasted their thoraxes in half.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Crowe. He decapitated a fiend with the sword, and cleared the path ahead with a steady burst from his storm bolter. ‘Then we will smash the enemy’s art with the force of our faith. It seeks to contain us in the frame of its creation, and we will explode it.’

  The Malleus Maleficarum’s auto-cannons churned the ground ahead, and the Stormravens made repeated passes past the rune, strafing the abominations. From Crowe’s perspective, the gunships appeared to be flying at impossible angles, now vertical, now upside down, depending on his position within the symbol. With the path the only route to the palace gates, the mass of daemons found their movements restricted, and their means of escaping the bombardments few. Some leapt from the path onto the almost vertical cliff face. When they did, gravity reasserted itself and they tumbled down the huge rock, raging against the Grey Knights. The abominations whose forms were not smashed to pulp in the fall had a long climb before they could attack again.

  The circling twists of the rune prevented Crowe from seeing how close his strike force was to the peak. The climb became the totality of the campaign. The rhythms of the advance were mesmerising. The hard, monotonous butchery seemed endless. Crowe guarded against the impact of the tedium. The certainty it engendered was lethal. So, too, was the way the sameness and the repetitions grasped at Crowe’s instincts and tried to make him part of the great daemonic song.

  He countered the song with prayer. He recited the First Psalm of Sacred Extermination, and his brothers joined him. The vox-casters from their armour and mounted on the sides of the Malleus boomed their words across the cliff face. ‘Blessed by the Emperor is the warrior that walketh against the daemon, the traitor and the heretic,’ they thundered. ‘His reward is the wrath of the Emperor, and His law doth he render with fury day and night. His strength shall not wither, and whatsoever he striketh shall fall unto dust. The unclean are like chaff before him, which the wind driveth away. For the Emperor knoweth the way of the righteous, but the way of the tainted shall perish.’

  The psalm was a slash of a blade through the world-shaking sound of the daemon song. It had the purity of silver, a peal against the stain of the abomination. The Black Blade snarled in anger. It tried to shout down Crowe’s thoughts. It lashed out at his brothers. But the psalm resounded without hesitation, striking the daemons as surely as the bolt shells and Nemesis weapons.

  As Crowe roared the last stanza, the path of the rune ended and he reached the peak of the mount. The entrance to the palace loomed ahead. Close up, the exquisite construction of the structure was even more apparent. The art of the palace surpassed its function as a fortress. And that will be your weakness, Crowe promised.

  The fusion of violet-and-white stone was perfect. The colours were interweaving veins that spiralled and coiled around palace and the towers. There were no seams, no signs of masonry at all. The building now seemed less carved than grown, a full expression of inorganic purpose. It was the stone’s destiny, what it had always been fated to become. The walls curved in and out, and combined with the swirl of the colours, the palace resembled a wave frozen in mid-contortion. It did not move, yet it conjured movement, and inspired it. The daemons at the walls swayed and gyrated, echoing the lines of the architecture. To look upon the palace was to feel the urge to join in the foul dance.

  There were no windows anywhere on the walls of the towers. The palace looked inwards, and it summoned the eyes of those outside. It contained its own truths, and had no need to gaze outside its confines. The only opening was the huge archway. Its doors were in a state of constant flux, their being flowing between stone, flesh and bone and towering cataracts of blood. The daemons cavorted before them, consumed with desire for what lay inside the palace, passing through in the moments when bone turned into blood. The abominations in the rear turned to block the Grey Knights. They attacked without breaking from the rhythms of the dance. The song held them, and they held tightly to it.

  They ran into the concentrated fire of the Stormravens and the Crusader. The storm of shells and las hammered the doors, the fist of the Emperor’s justice demanding ent
rance. The palace reacted by sealing the entrance. Flesh burned, bone cracked, and craters opened in stone, but then blood washed over the whole, swallowing the impacts, and when it passed, the doors were untouched once more. No other daemons crossed the threshold. The force inside the palace had decreed that the Grey Knights would advance no further.

  As the holocaust of high explosives and molten energy raged, Crowe raised his hands, and the full strike force joined him in a collective blast of anathema. They banished the reality of the doors, and the palace screamed. Between the Grey Knights and the walls, daemons burned and disintegrated, cannons and psychic force cutting short their wails and their song. The Harrower and the Purgation’s Sword launched a volley of Stormstrike missiles. The impact of the overlapping concussive blasts and incandescent faith was devastating. The rippling booms of the Grey Knights’ combined strength overwhelmed, for a moment, the earth-shaking beat of the daemonic rhythm. Hundreds of daemons vanished, thrown back to the immaterium, and the doors collapsed, sagging into a ruin of melted, shredded flesh. The way into the palace was clear.

  ‘Now, brothers,’ Crowe called. ‘Now let us tear out the heart of the enemy.’ He charged forward, his cloak billowing in the wind of the explosions. His banner flew proudly above the staggered mass of the daemons. He held the Black Blade high, a challenge and a declaration. Let the abominations see and understand that he held this evil prisoner, and he wielded it against its will. Let them seek his destruction. He would send them to theirs. He blazed with the light of purification. It was a fire to consume every unclean thing. Purity came from the unwavering fidelity to the annihilation of the Emperor’s­ foe. In Crowe, purity became an unstoppable force of violence.