Castellan

by David Annandale

  The Purifiers sectioned the circumference of the opening into quarters. Each claimed an arc, laying down an unbreachable wall of bolter fire. The daemons trampled each other in their desperation to reach the gate. From its maw, the warp convulsions shot higher into the hall, then fell back into the roiling cauldron of energies.

  ‘The abominations will destroy themselves trying to get through that,’ said Carac.

  ‘Perhaps not,’ Gorvenal told him. He swept his Nemesis force staff back and forth, its holy light turning daemonic flesh to ash. ‘Warp returns to warp. They can traverse what we cannot.’

  ‘Then we shall destroy them before they can try,’ said Venrik.

  No one asked how long they would have to hold the line. Yet Gorvenal wondered, and he knew his brothers did, too. The daemons flooded down the sides of the bowl. Their numbers were inexhaustible. Destrian’s reservoir of promethium was not, nor were the supplies of shells for the storm bolters. The time would come when Gorvenal would have only his strength and his faith to fight the abominations. His faith, at least, was eternal.

  Intoning prayers of thanks for the glorious burden the Emperor had given him, he lay waste to the waves of unclean horrors.

  The music ended in a scream. At the moment when the beat should have summoned the lightning to the Masque’s dais, nothing came. The daemon whirled in its dance, as trapped as ever by its curse, but now there was only cacophony to echo its moves. The orrery spun itself into ruins. Planets collided, metal fusing and exploding. The arms and gears of the clockwork smashed together. Warp lightning still lashed out from the orb representing Angriff Primus, but its destruction was random, without direction, outside the control of the Masque. The roar of cataclysm filled the chamber. The shattered remains of Angriff Secundus slammed into Crowe. The blow would have smashed even Aegis armour, but his artificer armour withstood it. He embraced the shock of the impact and tried to free himself from the Masque’s grip. But though he stopped moving, he was not free. He was suspended by the disintegration of the dance, no more.

  The initial fury of the destruction receded. The wreckage of the orrery lay on the floor of the chamber in angular heaps, an ossuary of murdered art. As the roar faded, Crowe realised the music was still present. Its power was greatly diminished. It was no longer the rhythm of an entire system. But it was still the melody of the Masque’s dance. The daemon turned its head to stare at Crowe. Its limbs described sinuous arcs, its body moving in sinister, ritualistic beauty even as it kept its head eerily still, its gaze burning with hate.

  ‘You have done this,’ the Masque said. ‘You have brought ruin to my design. I would have gathered the galaxy in my dance, and you, so cold, you would turn the universe grey.’ The daemon waved its sceptre, drawing an obscene rune in the air, and pain like a hundred claws of ice sank into Crowe’s nervous system. ‘You will fail. You have failed. You thrash against the beauty of excess, but you are an insect in a web. You tear the strands, yet your freedom is lost, long lost. You will die, and I will dance, and in the end, all will dance with me before Slaanesh.’ The Masque raised its great claw, and the orb of Angriff Primus, still intact, still flashing with eldritch energy, resumed its orbit around the dais.

  ‘I still have this world,’ the daemon said. ‘It dances for me. I shall rebuild. You have destroyed only an iteration of my art. The design lives on in my conception, in my palace, in this world. The dance goes on.

  ‘But you…

  ‘Oh, you, grey thing, you will dance your end for me now. You will expiate your sin against the sublime. Bleed for me, grey thing. Suffer for me. Die for me. Give me your suffering in worship.’

  The Masque snapped its pincer three times, a sharp clacking of summons. The music’s chains pulled on Crowe once more. The melody traced the path of his execution for him. He would spiral in towards the Masque. He knew he would not be torn apart before he reached the dais. The daemon had reserved a more personal end for him.

  He saw all this, because he knew the melody down to the smallest nuance now. He knew the music as he would a daemon’s name. The Masque had shown him too much, and his knowledge was his weapon.

  The music commanded his movements, and he did not resist. He anticipated each gesture, each step. He did more than accept the command. He commanded his limbs to follow the dance. His will overtook that of the Masque. He moved as he was bid, at the precise moment he was bid, but he was prepared for each movement, and bit by bit, he pulled himself free of the chains.

  Illusion, said the Blade. Futility, and then it screamed in his mind. It shrieked and clawed at his defences. It sought to break his concentration, to throw him back into the thrall of the Masque. Crowe reinforced the walls, and kept Antwyr’s screams at bay. He rebuilt the stones of his ramparts. He was castellan of the Grey Knights, and the fortress of the Imperium would not fall on his watch. Let the Black Blade howl and batter his fortifications. They would stand, and he would hurl the daemon before him from the battlements.

  The Masque danced, and Crowe circled the dais of the sun. His orbits narrowed. He came closer to the daemon, and as he did, the abomination’s mesmeric hold crumbled. When he looked at the Masque, he anticipated every moment of its flowing actions as completely as he knew his own steps. He divided his focus between himself and the daemon. He had to lunge and gesture with such precision that his concentration rushed ahead of the demands of the Masque. He moved exactly as the daemon wished, and it could not know that his defiance was growing. By the time he was within a single revolution of the dais, he had regained control of his body. He broke the daemon’s hold through a perfect mimicry of obedience.

  As he completed the final turn of the spiral, the Masque’s lips parted in a snarling grin. Its eyes gleamed, hate making way for the eagerness of protracted vengeance. The daemon spun on one leg, as if drawing in Crowe’s chain, and its great claw swept through the air towards him. It was coming to slice off his left arm.

  Crowe leapt. The daemon knew precisely where the dance would place him, and he knew it too, before the moment came. And so he leapt back, and the claw cut only empty air, and then he lunged onto the dais.

  As Crowe made his move, Antwyr changed tactics. The grating shriek became an urgent command. Use me. Use me or fail.

  The temptation was familiar. It was the sword’s eternal refrain, yet it knew when to chant it for greatest effect. Crowe was a lone human attacking a daemon who was able to kill thousands at a stroke. The assault was mad, a last gesture of pointless defiance. Only the daemon contained by the blade, freed to wield its immense power at last, could counter such an abomination.

  This was the insinuation of the sword. The temptation was skilful. It was convincing.

  It failed, as it ever would.

  Crowe fired his storm bolter into the daemon’s face at point-blank range. It was like shooting a tank. The Masque’s being was too strong to be broken open by mere physical shells, but Crowe’s sudden movement and the explosions caught it off guard. It missed its strike, and though it could never miss a step in its dance, Crowe forced the Masque into an altered movement, a graceful recoil. The daemon spun back in a counter move, and its pincer closed around Crowe’s torso. The grip was crushing. The serrated edge of the pincer dug into the artificer armour.

  ‘I have you,’ the monster hissed. It winced to clutch a being so holy. The light that shone from Crowe ate into the unnatural chitin of the claw. The Masque held tight, and squeezed more tightly. It was no stranger to pain and its pleasures. The burns it would suffer were a satisfying cost of its revenge.

  Its triumph left it open to Crowe’s true attack.

  Crowe stabbed the Masque where the pincer arm joined the waist. He wielded the sword as he always had, as he would until he breathed his last. He wielded it as a blade, and nothing else. But it was still the Black Blade of Antwyr. If it could be destroyed, the means were unknown to the Grey Knights, though they sco
ured the galaxy for the key to bring an end to the cursed relic. The flesh of a daemon, even one so great as the Masque, was not indestructible. Crowe struck with all his strength, and he carved a deep wound into the side of the Masque.

  The daemon screamed. This pain was not welcome. This pain threatened dissolution. The Masque released him and spun in a blur, striking with its claw to decapitate him. Its speed was blinding, but it was still held by the prison of its dance.

  As he had known the steps he would be forced to make, Crowe knew the limits of the Masque’s speed. It had to dance. There was a rhythm it could not break. He was free of it. He foresaw the attack before it began. He blocked the claw with the sword. The collision was tremendous, as great as the shock from the globe of Angriff Primus. The servo-motors of his armour caught, spun, and caught again. The blow knocked him back, but the Blade chopped off a third of the claw’s length, and the jerk of the impact forced the Masque to move against the music. The daemon screamed again, and a seething wound split its face and shoulder, as if it had been struck by the lash of a dark god.

  They moved back and forth across the surface of the dais in a duel split between sublime and broken choreography. Now the Masque struck not to torture but to kill. Crowe had placed himself outside the influence of the music. Yet he heard it, and he read it, and he moved between the beats, against the strains of the melody. He evaded the Masque’s blows where they would have cut him in half, and he countered them when he could. He weaved in and out of the daemonic whirlwind, slashing with the blade, opening one wound and then another. He could not escape every hit. The Masque was too fast. Crowe’s blood stained the silver of his holy armour, but now the dance of the daemon sprayed ichor over the dais and beyond, onto the ruins of the orrery.

  The light of purity clashed with the violet shine of corruption. The opposing fires twined and warred, a blazing aura of battle that wavered back and forth over the movements of the duellists. The flame rose to the heights of the chamber. It licked against the crystalline ceiling and walls. The palace trembled, and the furnace of the star’s heart pressed in harder, hungry to destroy the impossible intruder.

  ‘Enough!’ the Masque shouted. Though it did not pause in its attacks any more than it could pause in its dance, Crowe sensed its focus shift. While claw and pincer grabbed and slashed, it held its sceptre high. It spun around the axis of its raised arm, creating a still centre. ‘There is only grey in you. If you are beyond art, then you shall be silent.’

  The globe of Angriff Primus ceased its revolutions. It hovered, motionless, above the sceptre. The Masque seized the lightning from the planet. The daemon’s control over the eldritch sorcery that had shaped the world was as profound as the planet’s core. The thunder of the music grew as the energy poured into the sceptre. The song mounted a crescendo towards Crowe’s finale.

  Crowe took a step back. He turned, braced, and let the pincer crush his flank. The blow cracked open his fused ribs. The pain was without meaning. The daemonic music governed all. He let the hit from the pincer move him further to the right, one step outside the Masque’s line of sight. The daemon turned its head to follow him, the sceptre blinding with the energy of annihilation.

  But the blow could not fall until the rhythm announced its moment had come. And Crowe knew the music. He foresaw the beat that would mark his death. He struck first.

  Clutching the hilt with both hands, Crowe slashed sideways with the Black Blade. He hit the neck of the Masque as the sceptre descended. He struck at a moment as precise as the daemonic song. He struck a lethal blow against the rhythm. The sword cut halfway through the Masque’s head. It hung to the side, mouth working in silenced rage. The blow of the sceptre could not fall. Crowe severed the rhythm, and the energy consumed itself.

  The Masque danced on, now with even greater violence, and frenzy. It whirled faster and faster. The sceptre seemed to explode, unleashing all its energy at once. The blast was slow, measurable in seconds. It reached as far as the ends of the daemon’s limbs, and then it withdrew. The daemon’s form pulled in with it. Faster, faster, the daemon became a vortex of movement, narrower and narrower, the foul lightning withdrawing, becoming denser, darker, until it imploded. The daemon vanished, and the sudden collapse of warp flesh into the immaterium triggered a blast wave that hurled Crowe halfway across the chamber. The daemon’s scream of despair lingered past its disappearance. The echo bounced like a trapped beast from wall to wall, and when it, too, faded, the music at last was truly gone.

  Yet there was still thunder. It was an insistent, climbing, groaning roar. It came from everywhere. Tremors of escalating violence shook the chamber.

  Then the translucent walls began to crack.

  In the violence of its discharges, the warp lightning destroyed more of the tower. Seconds after the first asteroid strike on Angriff Primus, a blast took out a section of the tower beneath the upper chamber. A thin spine of the unnatural stone held up the broken dome. The floor swayed. There were seconds before the fall, and no way down.

  Styer thought of the squad yet fighting below and cursed. There was no way to reach them. Even if there was, time had run out. The sky was falling on Algidus. His squad had done its duty.

  There is always more, he thought with frustration. The battle never cleanly won; the duty never clearly fulfilled.

  His duty now, though, was clear, as the unleashed storm in the tower raged with destruction. ‘Our work is done,’ he told his battle-brothers. ‘Engage your teleporters.’

  Styer triggered his device. There was a flash of energy, and with it came dissolution, the moment of unbeing, and then the piercing agony of rebirth. The chamber vanished, and the teleportarium of the Tyndaris appeared. The columns of the circular hall glowed in the light of the central power block, still crackling white.

  Styer marched off the teleportation pad in the Tyndaris while wisps of energy ran up and down his armour. Gared kept pace with him despite his wounds. The Librarian’s breath rattled, and his eyes were sunken. He looked diminished, as if he had left half his life force in that tower. But he moved quickly, his need to reach the bridge as great as Styer’s.

  Saalfrank reported over the vox as they made their way up the decks. ‘The Catharsis is destroyed,’ he said. ‘The evacuation of our forces from Angriff Primus is underway. The Malleus Maleficarum and both Stormravens are aboard.’

  The shipmaster’s list of good news was ominous in the silences. Styer exchanged a look with Gared. He did not ask about the other squads. If they had made it back to the ship, Saalfrank would have said.

  Styer’s misgivings were confirmed by what he found on the bridge. Furia and Setheno were there, but of the Purifiers, only Sendrax was present. The Knight of the Flame was supported by an iron medicae framework. He was in his armour, refusing treatment, but his arms hung limp. When he turned his head at Styer’s arrival, the rest of his body remained motionless. His face was pale with anger. Styer did not ask how the rest of his squad fared. He had his answer.

  The oculus displayed Angriff Primus’ funeral pyre. The atmosphere was opaque, thick with the dust kicked up by the asteroid impacts. The cloud cover glowed with the fires of recent hits, and the hail of fragments continued. Lightning reached up from the position of Algidus, lashing in mad anger across the void.

  ‘No word from the castellan?’ Styer asked.

  Saalfrank shook his head.

  ‘Nothing from his squad?’

  ‘Vox contact is difficult with forces still inside the palace,’ said Soussanin. ‘We have had some contact. They fight on, though in the absence of Castellan Crowe and Knight of the Flame Drake.’

  ‘I see.’ Drake had the squad’s sole teleporter. Unlike the Terminators, the Purifiers’ power armour did not have the capacity to carry the homers. Without Drake, their only chance of evacuation was to leave the palace. If both gunships were aboard, they had refused that option.

&nb
sp; ‘We cannot put off the decision indefinitely,’ Sendrax rasped.

  ‘Which decision?’

  ‘Orbital bombardment of the palace. We have broken the workings of the daemonic engine, but the source of the evil remains. If the castellan has fallen, we may put an end to the enemy.’

  ‘We do not know he is dead.’

  ‘There is no reason to think he is still alive.’

  The lightning stopped.

  ‘Isn’t there?’ Setheno asked.

  And now the great mourning of the daemons began.

  A hurricane wind howled into the gate, and the flaring energy disappeared. The gate went dark. It was only a pit in the bottom of the floor now. It led nowhere.

  The daemons halted in their rush. They cried out, an immense choir of grief, dismay, and fury.

  ‘Well done, castellan,’ said Gorvenal.

  ‘The way is closed,’ Venrik said. ‘How will they return?’

  ‘Drake has the teleporter.’

  ‘Can it work from where they are?’

  ‘We must have faith that it will, brother.’

  Tremors radiated outwards from the former gate. The floor vibrated as if some immense force were rising from below. Soon the walls were swaying. There was a grace to their back-and-forth movement. At first Gorvenal thought the motion was an illusion caused by the general shaking. The stone could not move in this way. Then he saw that the walls moved in time to the mourning song of the daemons. The rising force was a physical manifestation of the emotion of defeat.

  The grief became anger. The walls still swayed, now with the rage of the abominations.

  Carac laughed. ‘The question of our situation remains, brothers,’ he said. He sounded eager rather than bitter. Carac took active pleasure from battle. If the end had come for them, then a struggle to cap a grand victory was no tragedy.