‘These wretches cannot be the only defences the Traitors left behind,’ said Furia. Despite her electronic monotone, her words dripped with contempt.
‘Their arrogance will not have reached as far as stupidity,’ Setheno agreed. The door drew closer, and she slaughtered the cultists with impatience. They were not worthy even of the effort it took to kill them. She and Furia were wading through detritus.
Setheno’s armour turned away swords and hooks. Whenever las charge hit, she aimed her bolt pistol in the direction of the shooter and brought the wretch down. The attacks against Furia were no more successful. Her speed and agility were such, it was as if she were an extension of the whip. When a cultist did land a blow, it was more often against metal than flesh. Furia was bleeding by the time they reached the door, but her wounds did not slow her. Her red, crystal eyes blazed with focused wrath.
Behind them, less than a third of the cultists were still alive. The squad closed in to complete the extermination.
To Setheno’s surprise, the door opened as she and Furia approached. The two halves parted, sliding back into the wall with a groan. Beyond the threshold was a huge amphitheatre. It was a realm of transcendent cruelty and overpowering energy.
The flash of a discharge dazzled Setheno, and a voice boomed from within the infernal light. It was ancient and inhuman. It was wise with cruelty, and filled with appetite beyond name and satiation. It was the voice of a thing that craved the sublime of extreme sensation, but was forever cut off from the flesh. Denial had turned it into a thing of madness and wrath. ‘I hunger!’ it roared. ‘Feed me with your death!’
The Emperor’s Children Dreadnought lumbered out of the light.
Denial tried to hold Sendrax back from the chamber. It tried to shield him from the despair of what he knew he would see. He bellowed his challenge instead, and ran up the stairs, already firing his storm bolter. His battle-brothers were with him, and their shouts echoed his. Harsath and Klandon sounded the same note of desperate anger. Unlike Letholdus, they had been with him on Sandava II. They had heard that voice before. Like him, they heard the sound of their past coming back to mock and destroy.
The enemy is here after all, Sendrax thought. Crowe was wrong to divide our strength. We are the victims of a game of vengeance.
Mnay’salath stood in the centre of the chamber. The bane of Sandava II had returned to the materium.
And Sendrax stared, momentarily confused.
The Keeper of Secrets was bound, held by chains of eldritch energy in the middle of a runic circle. Its four limbs were splayed wide, chains of warp fire running from them to the wall. More than a century after the Grey Knights had destroyed its material form, the bane of Sandava II had been returned to the material plane a prisoner. Its punishment was to be the source of the energy for this tower’s lightning blasts. The daemon shuddered and, at the command of the terrible music, a sphere of lightning built over its head, filling the dome of the chamber. Foul light rose from the daemon’s being, feeding the sphere. Mnay’salath arched in agony, yet its eyes never left the Purifiers. It screamed and it laughed.
The sphere vanished. The thunder boomed, the great rhythm shifted to the other tower and the centre of the palace, and as the sphere began to form again, Mnay’salath said, ‘Slaanesh blesses my penance and gifts me with revenge.’
‘You have nothing, monster,’ Sendrax told it. ‘Banish this abomination,’ he said, and the Purifiers formed a circle outside the perimeter of the ring. The sphere formed and vanished. Sendrax reached out psychically to his brothers.
Mnay’salath struck. The chains holding its arms lengthened as it reached for the Grey Knights. They did not release the daemon, but nor did they restrict the sudden violence of its movement. The daemon’s reflexes were faster than any enhancement of the human form. It grabbed each of the Purifiers with one of its arms. Pincers that could sever iron sank their edges into Klandon and Harsath’s armour. Long, clawed fingers wrapped around Sendrax and Letholdus. Mnay’salath lifted Sendrax before its face and parted its jaws. A tongue that was not a tongue but a whip shot out of the maw and coiled about Sendrax’s head and upper torso.
The electric pain that convulsed him was as familiar as the daemon’s laughter. The daemon had used the same sorcery against him on Sandava II. Then it had struck him a single blow and sent him flying. Now the shocks of eldritch energy were constant and intensifying. His jaw clenched, and his teeth ground so hard they splintered. The daemon whip surged with power. His body and his soul were fused into a single mass of nova agony, yet his limbs felt a hundred miles away from his consciousness. His fingers twitched involuntarily. It took a heroic effort of will to force his fist closed around the hilt of his force sword. Mnay’salath held his arms against his sides. He could not break the grip. His sword and his storm bolter were useless. He had only his psychic strength.
The pain surged and burned. It melted his thoughts, tearing his self apart. He could not focus. His counter-attack dissolved with his will.
Mnay’salath screamed as the sphere formed again. Sendrax felt its grip loosen slightly. The whip, though, burned him with even greater force, as if channelling the daemon’s pain. Through blurred vision, he saw Harsath raise his psilencer. The daemon’s pincer snapped through ceramite. The Purifier’s armour cracked. Harsath jerked, and his blood spurted over chitin. He fired the psilencer. A bolt formed of all his psychic anger and pain slammed into Mnay’salath’s right eye. The Keeper of Secrets jerked against the new pain. Its concentration faltered, and its prison stole its essence, creating the sphere anew. The claw convulsed and snapped closed all the way, cutting Harsath in half. The Grey Knight’s torso and legs fell out of the daemon’s grip. Dying, his last breath a long hiss on the vox, he still managed to fire.
His very soul struck the daemon in the chest. Daemon flesh erupted, burning and liquid. Ichor geysered forth and turned to steam. Mnay’salath doubled up. This time, when the sphere came into being, it pulled all the daemon’s strength. Mnay’salath had nothing left to use against the Grey Knights.
The whip disappeared.
Sendrax ripped his sword arm free of the daemon’s grip. He slashed his Nemesis blade down on the abomination’s fingers, and Mnay’salath dropped him. In the space of a breath, Sendrax gathered the entirety of his being. He gathered the pain of Harsath’s breath, and the honour of his sacrifice. He gathered the cries for justice of the dead of Sandava II and Angriff Primus. He stood tall, his body wracked in pain, and he transformed the totality of sorrow and anger and faith into a blow of absolute banishment.
‘The will of the Emperor cannot be defied!’ he shouted. ‘Unclean thing, begone!’
At the moment he struck, he focused on the sphere that was again expanding through the chamber. He tore the bonds that held Mnay’salath to its form, and to the materium. The chains around the daemon’s torso and arms vanished. The Keeper of Secrets became vague around the edges. It dropped Letholdus and Klandon. Their wounds were deep. Klandon could barely stand, and his left arm had been severed at the elbow. They joined their force of banishment to Sendrax’s.
‘Begone!’ Sendrax shouted again.
‘BEGONE!’ the three Purifiers roared together.
Mnay’salath snarled. It tried to attack, but when it moved, its limbs crumbled, its non-flesh flaking away and disappearing. Between its elongated, multi-horned head and the sphere, the air split open. The warp gaped into being. The powers of the immaterium flooded into the sphere of lightning at the same moment that the banishment hurled the same forces back into the empyrean. Mnay’salath froze, its disintegrating claws grasping at nothing, its jaws open in a silenced shriek. Its eyes blazed with a hatred matched by dread.
The daemon and the sphere collapsed. They shrank into a single point of monstrously concentrated energy. The rift pulled it in, but the contradictory currents remained. A vortex sucked power back into the warp, and
the tower pulled it out. The two impulses could not be reconciled. The concentrated force hung in the centre of the rift for a fraction of a second. It hesitated on the point of contraction and expansion, the materium and empyrean. Then it exploded.
The warp and the materium screamed in unison. Energy, bereft of purpose and constraints, lashed out in every direction at once. The world turned a blinding fire of silver. At the moment that the music of the spheres demanded the beat from the tower, the blast came instead. The song of chaos held its rhythm but its melody was wounded. The eruption hurled Sendrax into the air. He could see nothing but the silver fury. He heard nothing but inchoate thunder. He slammed into the outer wall. His armour, his body and stone broke each other. Then he was falling, and the darkness came for him.
Lightning shot up and down Styer’s spine. Blue-and-violet flames flowed over his armour. The pain was a physical hammering to the nerves. It was also a fragmenting attack on his psyche. It sent a hail of jagged shards of memories and emotions through his consciousness. His skull felt like a bell full of broken glass. His breath rattled, and it was as if material portions of his soul had broken off and were filling up his lungs. He could barely see, barely maintain his aim on the Emperor’s Children. The Traitors’ shells and sonic blasts hit him, and he was caught between the impacts of weapons and the blasts of warp lightning.
Underneath the reforming sphere, Gared had conjured flame from the materium. It enveloped his hands, burning fury about to be turned into a firestorm launched over the entire formation of the Emperor’s Children. But the energy from the walls hit him, too, and a bolt from the sphere struck him in the head. He lost control of his psychic attack, and the fire erupted around him. Gared staggered, a flaring torch wrapped by the monstrous, coruscating spectrum of the empyrean. The conflagration drove him to his knees.
The sphere vanished, and this time the thunderclap burst within Styer’s soul with as much force as it did outside the tower. His vision went black scarred with red in the moment of the boom. He struggled to keep his feet, fighting on multiple fronts at once. The energy, the music and the Traitors assailed him, wounding soul and body and mind and armour.
Gared crawled forward. As the thunderclap faded, he shouted something Styer could not hear. Fire gathered around him once more.
‘Close in,’ Styer ordered. Speech was as difficult as thought. He could barely hear himself. Movement was even more painful. But he kept firing, and he charged the Emperor’s Children.
‘I am the hammer,’ Styer gasped, and this truth was strong and clear even as the energy lashed at him from the walls again.
‘I am the right hand,’ a voice rasped on the vox. It was Gared, and he was on his feet again.
‘I am the gauntlet,’ said Vohnum, and Tygern cried out, ‘I am the tip of his spear!’
One after another, through veils of agony, Styer’s battle-brothers invoked their service to the Emperor. They rushed the Traitors, their Aegis Terminator armour withstanding the attacks on their bodies as their faith protected their souls. The captain of the Emperor’s Children was before Styer. The justicar raised his Nemesis daemon hammer high and aimed his blow at the Traitor’s helmet. The Grey Knights collided with the enemy in time with the next thunderclap.
Styer’s vision greyed, but did not go black. He saw enough to swing the hammer. The Traitor blocked the hit with his bolter, but the impact knocked him back. Styer pressed the attack, swinging again. The Traitor managed to get a burst of shells off before the hammer hit him in the side. The shells exploded against Styer’s chest-plate. A web of cracks spread across the ceramite, but he leaned into the impact, refusing to lose his prey. The hammer strike smashed the Traitor to the side, shattering the spikes on his armour and caving in the flank. The Traitor snarled in pain, but he was grinning as he came back at Styer.
The struggle between Grey Knights and Emperor’s Children became a close-quarters storm. Bolters and sonic weapons fired at point-blank range. Chainswords clashed with Nemesis blades. Gared launched a focused blast of psychic flame. It engulfed a Traitor, and overwhelmed his sense receptors. A slave to the pleasure of pain, his eyes widened at the extremity of the sensation, and the fire burned them away. His scream changed from joy to rage. Blind, he fired his sonic blaster wildly. The sound bolt carved furrows into the floor. Shockwaves struck Traitors and Grey Knights alike. He spun in circles, firing so quickly that the blasts overlapped, the booming cacophony so huge it almost overwhelmed the thunder of the tower. His cloak in burned tatters, his flesh blackened by warp fire, Gared lunged at the Traitor and plunged his force sword through the centre of his forehead.
The Emperor’s Children captain ducked under Styer’s next swing. He reared up, slammed the muzzle of the bolter against Styer’s helm and pulled the trigger. Styer tried to jerk away, but the shells smashed into his faceplate. His photolenses frosted. Runes shrieked red. He smelled smoke inside his armour and the visor buckled inward, breaking his cheekbone. As he fell back, he raised his arm. The storm bolter on his wrist roared. It disintegrated the Traitor’s gun and blew off his hand. Styer brought the daemon hammer over his head.
Something happened to the daemonic rhythm. The song shrieked, and the thunder of the other tower was an explosion. The centre palace’s great boom came without a stutter. When the energy gathered in the chamber again, the glow of the walls was blinding. The lightning sphere was larger, twice as intense. The lower curve of the storm raged inches above Styer’s head. The tendrils from the walls hit the Grey Knights with redoubled savagery. The explosion in Styer’s mind paralysed him. The neural shock fused his joints. His vision went black again. Crimson vortices burst across his retinas.
A sharp, heavy blow tore into Styer’s gorget. He knew his throat was exposed, but he still could neither move nor see. His vision cleared with the greater sound of thunder, but the lightning reformed almost at once. The two outward-bound lightning strikes were now coming from this single tower. Just as movement started to come back into Styer’s limbs, the monstrous jolts of empyrean energy froze him again.
His vision came and went. He saw the turn of the battle as a series of tableaux. His battle-brothers were statues, immobilised in mid-attack. Gared’s arms were splayed. Clusters of lightning held him upright and crucified him. The three surviving Emperor’s Children seized the advantage, pummelling the Purifiers with concentrated fire, and sawing through armour with ferocious chainblade attacks.
The captain stood close to Styer. Hooked, spinning drill heads emerged from his monstrously remade narthecium. He held them against Styer’s neck. ‘Are you awake?’ the captain asked. ‘Are you aware?’
Lightning. Pain and blindness. Thunder, and the scarified, eager face of damnation peering closely at Styer. The drills slowly cutting through his flesh.
Styer’s breath escaped as a hissing growl.
‘Good,’ said the captain. ‘Good. You must be present.’
The cycle of thunder and agony roared once more. The terrible rhythm that held the system held Styer, too. He could not move. He could only experience. The captain of the Emperor’s Children grinned, seeing the great prize before him.
‘So rare a prey,’ the Traitor crowed. ‘I will render you into such art.’
The narthecium’s heads plunged deep into Styer’s neck. Their poisons flooded his bloodstream.
The torture began with the numbness of profound cold.
They fell through the darkness, and the lightning spared them. It did not reappear, though the daemonic rhythm and the tritone were omnipresent. The song of destruction shaped the darkness, for it was not a void. Crowe could see nothing, but there was presence. The song was so huge, the only sense possible was hearing. He was dropping through a realm that was uncreated except by sound. And there was time, marked by the tripartite beat.
Then there was light, sudden, blinding and corrupt.
The fall ended without transi
tion, and without a landing. Crowe and Drake plummeted through the dark, and then they were standing in the light, alone in gargantuan magnificence. Crowe blinked, his eyes adjusting slowly to the brilliance that surrounded them.
‘Is this still the same palace?’ Drake wondered.
It was a palace. Crowe could not see how the space he beheld could be situated underneath the other one. It was much larger, so vast it was wider than the rocky pinnacle. The ceiling was hundreds of feet away, and what Crowe judged to be the outer wall curved around so gradually, it must have been miles long. At the same time, there was a continuity between the two palaces. The new one was an evolution, or a culmination, of the first. It was also constructed of material that had the colours of amethyst and opal. The resemblance revealed itself now to be an illusion. The stone was translucent, and it flowed into and out of forms so graceful and complex that no element of the materium was strong enough to embody without collapsing. Columns entwined and parted, delicate as vapour. Those nearest the walls bent midway up and never reached the ceiling at all. They turned into walls instead. They supported nothing. They were pure ornaments. Where they met the walls, they sprouted into cornices of a design so elaborate that Crowe could not tell if they moved and changed, or if the contortions of their art was such that they drew the gaze into a perpetual movement of discovery.
He had to force himself to look away.
The columns that touched the distant ceiling ended in even more convoluted creations. They resembled chandeliers composed of an infinity of gossamer crystals. Their points of light were more dazzling than diamonds. The play of illumination tempted and mesmerised. It flowed, limpid and graceful as a stream, yet sharp as the monomolecular blade of the eldar.
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