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Sons of Titan

THE GREY KNIGHTS OMNIBUS

PANDORAX

THE EMPEROR’S GIFT

MORTARION’S HEART

BLADE OF PURITY

CRUCIBLE

WITNESS

DREAD NIGHT

The Ghost Halls

Knight of Titan

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Contents

Cover

Backlist

Title Page

Prologue

Part One - The Truth Of Masks

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Part Two - The Fall

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Part Three - The Mask And The Sword

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Epilogue

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Grey Knights Sons of Titan’

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

Warhammer 40,000

It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Astra Militarum and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse.

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

Prologue

THE HOLLOW WARRIOR

The sword was laughing.

The sound in Garran Crowe’s mind was ugly. It was a grating laughter, rusted with hate, a jagged, jangling, snarling rasp of blood and metal. The laughter was anticipatory, and it grew in ferocity as Crowe climbed the hill of black iron.

Soon. The Black Blade of Antwyr’s whisper slithered about the laughter. The eagerness hissed with dark promise. Sssssssssssooooon. The shape of pain awaits beyond the crest. You will seek my strength. I am that pain’s destruction. Nemesis comes. Who shall it be? Your enemy or us? Let it be us, Garran. Let it be usssssssss.

Crowe did not answer. The words placed their brand on his psyche, and then there were more to burn him again. Then more. He fought on while the sword ranted, as he had done for years, and years, and years.

And years.

Fighting with claws scratching for purchase on his soul.

The fiends of Slaanesh capered about him. The hooves of their hind legs and the claws of their forelimbs scrabbled and danced on the surface of the blasted hill. Not days ago, this had been a district of Labos, the hive primus of Sandava III. But the manufactoria and hab blocks and chapels of toil and worship had all been destroyed, melted to slag, millions of inhabitants crushed out of existence.

Darkness had come to the forge world. The abominations of the Dark Prince had spread across the planet with the speed of a flash flood. The Prognosticars of Titan had foreseen the incursion. They had warned of the intensity of the threat. The depth of its corruption had been cause enough to send the Purifiers, but there was also the fact that this was the Sandava System.

‘There is dark meaning in this attack,’ Crowe had said to Kaldor Draigo.

‘There is,’ the Supreme Grand Master had agreed. ‘Go. Learn what this portends. Uncover the goal of the Ruinous Powers. Burn it to ash.’

The strike cruiser Sacrum Finem had made all haste to the Sandava System. But the Grey Knights had arrived too late. Sandava III was infested. One hive, isolated on its island in the viscous, toxic ocean of the southern hemisphere, was still untouched. For that reason, Exterminatus had not been invoked.

There was another reason, though. Crowe had vowed to save this world. The utter destruction of a Sandava System planet would be too close to a defeat, even if the incursion itself were ended. The system had personal meaning for Crowe. He had been here before. There had been the war on Sandava II, the mistakes made there, the destinies that had been determined. So much had been lost. Now, all these decades later, another incursion, another invasion by the forces of the Dark Prince. There were already too many echoes of the past in this mission.

The hill was cold, hard as winter, dark as ancient night beneath the writhing, warp-tainted sky. It was a riot of twisted, slumping wreckage. There was nothing left of the manufactoria but misshapen forms softened into abstraction. Things like grasping limbs thrust from the ground as though the world itself were pleading for mercy. Some rose fifty feet or more before they fell back to merge with the iron mass again. The hill barred Crowe’s path towards what remained of the central spire of Labos. There he would find the heart of this plague. That was clear from the currents of the warp.

‘What is it to see through your eyes?’ Brother Drake had once asked.

‘It is to see the river of the warp flow over the stones of the materium,’ Crowe had answered. The warp was always before his sight, a crystalline rush, sometimes sluggish, sometimes turbulent, never still.

The currents that streamed over this hill had their source in some great force in the distance. From that centre, the ripples of taint washed across Labos, and then all of Sandava III. And at the crest of the hill, there was turbulence. The warp was caught in a vortex. Something waited for Crowe up there. Something that made the sword laugh.

The fiends gibbered. They howled. Their long, reptilian jaws snapped as they sang. The music of damnation enveloped the hill of slag. Whistling trills hovered on the edge of resolving into melodies. The beats of a deep bass humming taunted with the possibility of rhythm. The music tortured the mind with the lie of fulfilment. It called Crowe to join in the song, to surrender his voice to the abandoned riot. The air was redolent with the musk of daemons. It was as cloying as the song, a lure to pleasures beyond dreams.

The musk came in through Crowe’s rebreather, and he sensed only poison. He saw through the song. He rejected its temptations and smashed its deadly harmonies with the blows of his blade, eviscerating the singers, rending daemonic bodies with a violence that found its purity through direct brutality. He marched onwards, up the hill, closer and closer to the nexus of the warp currents. He could not destroy the host one daemon at a time. He would carve out the heart of the incursion. Every abomination that threw itself in his path, he struck down. The others would have their reckoning when the power tearing open the materium was no more.

The horde sang on. The night resounded with the voices of the hellish choir. The dance of the abominations at a distance from Crowe was gleeful, as if the mindless horrors too were mocking him, as eager as the Blade was for him to see what waited. The fiends that closed with him showed less joy. Their snarls were full of rage. They smashed at him with flailing claws, their frenzy desperate. His very existence caused them pain. The mass of daemons seemed to want him to reach the summit – there were more of them behind him now than in front – but had they been able to destroy him, they would have done so before he took another step.

He took another step. Then another. He thrust the Blade of Antwyr through the thorax of the fiend before him. The daemon shrieked. Its huge claws battered his helmet. The blows rang through his skull. He twisted the black sword. The daemon lost control of its limbs. Its stinger tail thrashed. Ichor jetted over Crowe’s artificer armour. He had despatched so many daemons, he was coated in a mucky layer of their unholy blood.

He pulled Antwyr free. The daemon collapsed, twitching. He marched over the body, its form already beginning to melt away from the material world. He lunged forwards and up, swinging the Blade with both hands, and decapitated another fiend before it could strike back.

Crowe was more than halfway to the peak of the hill now. The daemons cavorted. They attacked him in mobs. He cut through their warp flesh, never taking a single step back. Behind him, he left a wake of disintegrating bodies, and the gathering of an even greater horde.

He was wading through an ocean of abominations. He had destroyed scores on his climb. Daemons rushed him only to be cut down, but his slaughter made no difference. The daemons were pouring through the wounds in the materium. He knew there would be no victory until the source of the infection was cauterised. He accepted the truths of this battle.

Yet he was weary.

I will renew you, said the Blade. Take the power. Turn your foes to ash.

The sea of daemons was nothing to the depths and breadth of Antwyr’s malice. The decades of eternal vigilance, unbroken by a single moment of surcease, were a weight upon Crowe’s shoulders, his limbs, his soul.

I need not be a burden, said Antwyr. Let me be your boon.

He would not answer the sword. There was nothing to be gained in speaking to the evil, and everything to lose. It would use every word, every reaction, even every pause against him, learning more and more of who he was as it sought to break through his defences. The Blade’s assaults were already strong enough. Its words echoed through Crowe’s being. Hollow. He felt hollow, as if, over the years of his dark duty, he had turned all his inner self into spiritual armour, and now there was nothing else left.

The top of the hill was close. Each step forwards was a little harder, just as with every breath he felt the weight of the years and the claws of the Blade’s voice a little more. His burden until death, and death was forbidden. He had no successor. He was alone in his task as he was alone on this hill. He had become separated from his squad hours ago when a wave of daemons had come between them, a scrabbling, stinging, clawing mass he could not break through. The other Purifiers were out of vox-range. The torment of the air and sky limited communications to line of sight at best, and he had no sight of his brothers. There was only the hill, the dark dance of the Ruinous legions and the convulsions of the night.

Driven by a phrase of the daemonic song, a chance harmony from the choir, a trio of fiends charged Crowe as one. Their voices were united in ecstasy as they attacked. Their clawed forelegs stretched wide to embrace him. Just as they closed, they dropped low as if bowing. Their tails whipped over their heads, stingers lashing down to pierce his armour and flood his veins with the poison of delirious excess. He swept his wrist-mounted storm bolter before him. A sustained burst of thrice-blessed mass-reactive shells shattered the creatures’ chimerical forms. The bodies exploded. A rain of chitinous articulations, chunks of flesh, hooves and spinning stingers fell onto the hillside. The song of the horde stuttered. It rose to a wail. When it fell, a sinuous note of anticipation sounded. Crowe was only a few steps from the top of the hill. The path before him was clear.

The mass of fiends rippled, their movement a sensuous shudder. The daemons scrabbled forwards to Crowe’s left and right. The huge throng behind him rose higher, but the attacks paused and no fiend tried to block his way. The summit was not his goal. His route to the centre of the immaterial storm took him over the hill, and that was all. But the daemons hummed and swayed, waiting for a monstrous ending, or a worse beginning.

And Antwyr exulted.

Now! cried the Blade. Now it will be accomplished.

Crowe climbed the final yards to the summit.

The peak of the slag heap had slumped into a hollow bowl, like the caldera of an extinct volcano. It was half a mile wide. The slopes of the bowl were steep and long. Crowe felt he had arrived at the top of an amphitheatre, and indeed, there was a spectacle here. It was a display prepared for an audience of one, and only one. Crowe’s eyes widened. The blow landed. It struck home, deep into his core. His armour was no protection.

He staggered.

Do you see? the Blade shouted. Do you see? Do you see? Its laughter was deafening. The hooting of the fiends rose to the pulsing sky. It was a hymn of riotous delight.

Thousands of iron crucifixes lined the slope of the bowl, going all the way down to its centre. White-hot spikes pierced the bodies of their victims, holding them in torment, hammered through arms, legs and torsos. The mortals had been decapitated. They could not be alive, yet they strained against the spikes, their bodies arching and twisting in an unending, transcendent agony indistinguishable from a pleasure beyond language. The pain was a dance, entwined with the song of the fiends, the two fusing to become a terrible work of art constructed by a will that had melted a city and reshaped its citizens into this very specific form. The millions killed, the mountain of slag and the spasming mass atrocities were a single attack aimed at a single target.

In the Sanctum Sanctorum of Titan, the secrets of the warp were held, contained and, under rigorous controls, studied, the better to counter the machinations of the Ruinous Powers. There Crowe had read some claims that the greatest threat of Chaos was the destruction of meaning. He knew this to be false. The greater threat was in the creation of the most monstrous of meanings. There was meaning in what he beheld now. Meaning that cut him. Meaning that opened wounds his Larraman’s Organ could not staunch.

There was meaning in the crucifixions. There was meaning in the decapitations. And there was meaning in the arrangements of the sculptures of pain. The crucifixes formed rings and spirals, straight lines and curves. There were patterns here, patterns that seized Crowe’s gaze and took it on a looping, jagged, agonising journey. His eyes darted from body to body, movement to movement, dance to dance, round and round, down one slope, up the other side, then back again in a whirling diagonal, until, at the last, he perceived the grand design in all its madness. The crucifixions formed a single vast rune. Its language could not be spoken. Its significance could not be denied.

The rune wounded Crowe by virtue of its familiarity. The symmetries of the mission achieved their culmination. He had seen this sacrifice before. Just once, long ago, in the Sandava System.

Once before was enough. This single repetition was a trap, decades in the making, and it snapped closed around his soul. Antwyr roared in triumph. You see! You see! You see!

Crowe saw. And he remembered.

Chapter One

RENEWAL

In the deepest vaults of the Citadel on Titan, purity held watch over darkness. Here was a concentration of night so terrible, if freed it would devour the stars. And there were still greater depths, a still greater night, held at bay not by any physical barrier, but by the holy might of the warriors who walked the halls. The Chambers of Purity contained the worst corruption. Their purity was embodied in their perfect guardians.

Frozen evil surrounded Purifier Garran Crowe. It lurked in the niches worked into the walls of the circular, vaulted chambers. The Knight of the Flame moved past the niches at a deliberate pace, closely observing the stasis caskets they held. Doing so was an act of remembrance, acknowledging the price in lives paid by the brotherhoods of the Grey Knights to recover the objects inside the caskets. It was also an act of duty. The contents of the Chambers of Purity were never to be taken for granted. Stasis technology was not enough to lock the harm away. Eternal vigilance was the true prison. The Purifiers were far more than guardians. They were the first, truest and most direct defence, the wall between the artefacts of the Ruinous Powers and the Imperium. Crowe’s examination of each relic was careful, profound and imbued with reverence for the Emperor. It was by the grace of His gifts that the grave duty of the Purifiers was possible.

The caskets were fashioned of blessed adamantium and pure, tempered gold. Their surfaces were marked with dense, overlapping layers of warding runes. The runes ran over the sculptural representations of the relics inside. The stasis fields shimmered and torchlight flickered, casting wavering shadows over the engravings – for Crowe, the movement was a simulacrum of the forces imprisoned, a reminder of what lurked within, and must be held.

Crowe walked past rows of unholy books. Some were written in Gothic, the better to lure human readers. Many more were in xenos tongues. A few of the books were recent creations, monstrous blasphemies inspired by dark gods, written by lost heretics or, worse, by deluded faithful who knew not what they did, even when the moment of their execution arrived. Most of the tomes, though, were ancient beyond measure. Their origins were unknown. They had bindings of flesh and pages of vellum inked in blood. Crowe paused before the prison of the Grimoire of Fate Devoured. Its pages resembled ivory scales. Each was composed of hundreds of slices of human teeth. Crowe had looked upon the pages when he had captured the book on a moon of Uscana Secundus. The inhuman runes were incomprehensible, but he had felt the sickening pressure of their meaning. No mortal could be exposed to them without succumbing to violent corruption on the instant. The very matter of that moon had been poisoned. When Crowe looked up from the book, he had seen crimson images of the runes sliding down the air of the vault. He had stared at the bloody writing until he was sure it was no illusion, the runes settling and running along the floor, their shapes cutting through rock.

Five brothers had died in the struggle to capture and neutralise the Grimoire. The mining concessions of the moon had been put to the torch. A hundred thousand citizens of the Imperium had died. Crowe did not view such a purge lightly, but nor did he question its necessity.

As long as the book was imprisoned, every death on that moon had been for a great purpose.

Crowe examined the stasis field and the seal on the casket. He watched the flow of the warp. It was untroubled. The Grimoire was inert as stone. Crowe murmured a psalm of anathema and a prayer of thanks. Then he moved on to answer a summons. In the kingdom of purity and ruin, he was heading for the darkest sanctuary.

Crowe made his way through the chambers, his journey a ritual. He nodded solemnly to his brother Purifiers as he walked. They moved with the same deliberate pace. A brother who passed through these sacred spaces of captured horror was oath-bound to be active in the maintaining of the eternal locks.

Crowe left the primary chambers behind. He followed a long corridor that sloped down even further beneath the surface of Titan. He was heading for the prison of the worst relic. There were no brothers standing watch on the route. It was too dangerous even for Purifiers to remain in proximity to this evil. The prison had only one living guard.

Runes covered the walls, ceiling and marble floor of the passageway. Silver and gold glowed with the strength of the wards they formed. Daemonkind would burn to nothing before these signs. And still this barrier was a poor attempt to contain the relic. There was only one way to hold the Black Blade of Antwyr, and that way had the name of a man.

Garran Crowe had come to speak with Castellan Merrat Gavallan.

Who is this who comes? Ah. I know you, Purifier. Do you know me? You think you do. I think you do not. Will you prove me wrong? Come then. Choose a destiny of power.

The voice reached down the hall for Crowe. It made no sound. It spoke in Crowe’s mind, scratching at the edges of his soul. Yet it seemed to travel a physical distance and crawl along the walls and ceiling. It crouched in the vault, an arachnid presence, ready to leap upon him.

Crowe had heard the voice before. It worked its way into his consciousness whenever he was in the presence of Castellan Gavallan. Its attack felt stronger today, though. More directed.

Your coming has a purpose, said the Blade of Antwyr. Fulfil it!

The brotherhood champion of the Purifiers was seated at his desk when Crowe reached the door of his chamber. The circular space was a meditation cell and an archive. The desk in the centre was a massive slab of granite. It was an altar in shape if not in function, though it had been blessed and prayed over, and was sanctified every day with holy oils. It needed to be a sacred object in its own right to withstand the unclean knowledge that would lie on its surface. Gavallan sat with the entrance to his right. He faced a shrine to the Emperor. Incense lamps burned on either side of the silver-and-iron winged skull. Above the shrine, wreathed by the coils of incense, the Blade of Antwyr was fastened to the wall. The black sword was sheathed. Chains crossed and re-crossed the relic. Somehow, the Blade seemed to be straining against its bonds.

The rest of the wall space around the chamber was composed of rows of niches, reaching fifty feet to the shallow dome of the ceiling. Inside the niches were reams of vellum. Gavallan had more sheets stacked on the desk. He was writing, and had almost filled another page when Crowe arrived. He looked up, his stylus pausing.

Strike! Antwyr screamed in Crowe’s head. Free me and the galaxy is yours!

Crowe glanced at the sword, then back at Gavallan. The castellan was watching him carefully.

‘The Blade is calling to you,’ Gavallan said.

Crowe nodded. ‘It is.’ When he did not do as Antwyr commanded, the Blade began cursing him. Crowe pushed the stream of blasphemies to the back of his mind. He focused his attention on Gavallan.

He had rarely spoken to the champion. When not in battle, Gavallan was sequestered in this chamber, and all others were forbidden to venture here without specific orders. It was rarer still for Crowe to see Gavallan without his armour. The castellan was robed in vestments of solemn grey. The warrior before Crowe was engaged in combat of a spiritual nature.

And he was exhausted.

When had Crowe last seen Gavallan’s face? He wasn’t sure. Years, perhaps. The strain of his duty had been evident in Gavallan’s features then, but now a profound shadow had fallen over him. He was pale as tallow and there was a yellow tint around his eyes and lips. His skin was too tight, pulled into the hollows of his bald skull by the strain of endless watchfulness. Gavallan’s war never ceased. The Blade never rested, so neither could he. But the Blade did not need rest.

‘Shut the door,’ Gavallan said.

Crowe did. The heavy door scraped against the flagstones. It closed with a booming clang. Gavallan gestured to the manuscript before him. Crowe walked to the desk and examined the vellum sheets. What he saw was a frothing litany of curses. There were promises of pain, blood and retribution. There were fantasies of a universe on fire. There were names – hundreds of names – of planets and systems, a catalogue that covered pages in Gavallan’s precise, flowing handwriting. The entries ended in a pronouncement of doom. There was a burst of invective directed at Gavallan, and then the names began again.

‘Do you know what this is?’ Gavallan asked.

‘The words of the Blade,’ said Crowe.

‘Yes. It is my task to record everything it says.’ He swept his arm to take in the niches of the chamber. ‘This archive is devoted solely to that end. Perhaps one day Antwyr will err, and reveal a weakness. It has not been my privilege to see that day. Nor was it for the castellans who came before me.’ He tilted his head back, gazing at the uppermost rows. ‘Centuries, Brother Garran. We have been transcribing this foulness for centuries. What you see here is my handiwork. Entire vaults are filled with these obscenities.’

‘These names,’ Crowe said, running his eye over the list. He picked one at random. ‘Does Sandava have any significance?’

‘Not to the history of the Blade, insofar as we know it. But there are three millennia unaccounted for between its disappearance during the Occlusiad and its capture on Tethys. There may be meaning there. There may not.’ Gavallan’s tone was both frustrated and resigned. ‘I set down the words,’ he said, giving the weight of unwavering commitment to his words. ‘The Prognosticars parse them. We work in hope.’

Crowe was still looking at the names. ‘It would be strange if these worlds were chosen entirely at random. The hatred directed at them is precise.’

‘Do you see a pattern?’ Gavallan asked.

‘Not at first glance, no.’

Gavallan stood. ‘Will you sit, brother? Examine them more closely. I would be glad of your thoughts.’

Crowe took his place at the desk. He began to make his way through the scores of names, stopping at each one to either situate the world in his mind, or note it down to seek out on star-charts later. Every so often he raised his head to see Gavallan standing before the black sword, his fists clenched. Antwyr’s curses scraped away in the back of Crowe’s mind. He ignored them.

He lost track of time. When he had finished going through the lists, he said, ‘I see no threads here. Sandava and Dierna are in the same subsector, but that is as close as I can see to any sort of connection.’ He looked up. Gavallan had his back to the sword now and was watching him. There was renewed fire in the castellan’s eyes.

‘How long do you think you’ve been here?’ Gavallan asked.

‘I’m not sure,’ said Crowe.

‘The night has passed. Dawn has come.’ Gavallan’s smile was one of grim triumph.

At first Crowe did not see the significance of the passage of time. Then he looked at the sword on the wall. He still heard its frustrated snarling. The implications of his prolonged stay in the castellan’s presence registered. ‘The Blade…’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Gavallan. ‘No other brother has borne being in such close proximity to it for so long. Certainly not without having to devote all of his energies to combating its will.’

Crowe stood. ‘I have not yet asked why you wished to see me,’ he said.

‘And now you don’t have to,’ said Gavallan.

Perhaps not. But as Crowe perceived his fate taking shape, he knew the questions needed to be voiced. It was the form of inquiring and receiving an answer that was necessary, like the call and response of ritual. ‘My interpretation of these texts was superfluous, then,’ he said. ‘It was my ability to examine them in this chamber that mattered.’

‘To a degree, that is true,’ said Gavallan. ‘Your insight is welcome, but I did not expect you to succeed where no one has.’

Antwyr’s voice was suddenly loud in Crowe’s head. You have been deceived! Will you let yourself be used in this way? Destroy him. Seize the fates. Carve the galaxy into the image of your desire.

At the same moment, Gavallan winced.

‘The Blade rages,’ said Crowe.

‘It does always.’ Gavallan began to pace slowly back and forth before the relic. ‘The sword is my burden,’ he said. ‘It is mine alone, but it will, in time, be another’s. And then it will be his alone.’

Unspoken but implied was the inevitability of the castellan’s death. Crowe saw greater significance in Gavallan’s exhaustion. His duty was draining him. It would do so until there was nothing left. Crowe wondered how close to the end Gavallan was. ‘You think I am fit to be your successor?’ he asked.

Gavallan nodded. ‘This is not my conclusion alone. It is also that of the Grand Masters. The selection of a castellan is one of enormous moment. It is not done quickly. Your candidacy has been a process of years, Brother Garran.’

Learning he had been under scrutiny without being conscious of it did not disturb Crowe. ‘I am honoured to be worthy of such notice,’ he said.

‘It was inevitable. I have seen the abominations of the immaterium burn at your approach. Your presence alone is a danger to them.’

‘I would wish nothing less. None of us would.’

‘That is true. But there is a gulf between wish and reality.’ Gavallan paused in his pacing. He looked at the sword as if there were, indeed, things he would wish to be different, even as he accepted their painful reality. ‘Do not underestimate what you are,’ he went on. ‘The purity of your faith is a great weapon.’

Crowe bowed his head. Praise made him uneasy, but he would not insult Gavallan by rejecting it. That would be ostentatious false modesty. He despised such displays.

‘If I am chosen for this duty,’ he said, ‘then I will enter into it with thanks that I may serve the Emperor in this way.’

Yes, said the sword. Bow and scrape. Cringe before this slave. Earn his confidence. Then strike when his back is turned.

‘This is a dark honour,’ Gavallan said. ‘At my death, you will inherit a duty that will destroy you.’

‘And I will fulfil it until that destruction. So I declare,’ Crowe said, looking at the shrine. ‘In the name of the Emperor, before Him and His saints, I swear to uphold this burden.’

As Crowe finished speaking, Antwyr lashed his mind with a shriek of rage. The chamber resounded with a harsh, rattling clang. Crowe and Gavallan stared at the sword. It was motionless. Of course it was. But in the echoes of metal against stone, Crowe thought he perceived the vanishing traces of movement. Where the Blade of Antwyr hung on the wall, the warp boiled.

The curses of the sword went on and on and on, a howling blast of promised vengeance, and the scrape, scrape, scrape of claws scrabbling to pierce Crowe’s will.

I will not be your prisoner! Antwyr snarled. I am your future. I am the fate you would embrace.

The captain of the Envoy of Discipline was waiting in the landing bay to greet Cardinal Beatus Rannoch as he disembarked from the shuttle. The journey from the surface of Sandava II had been a rough one. It was the season of storms in the agri world’s northern hemisphere. In the normal course of events, Rannoch appreciated the storms. They kept the land fertile, and Sandava II’s food exports were easily on the same scale as Sandava III’s industrial output. The storms were also spiritually valuable. Even the most unimaginative members of the congregation could see them as symbols of the Emperor’s wrath, especially once Rannoch’s sermons pointed their thoughts in that direction. The storms were good, necessary and holy.

But they had taken the shuttle in their teeth and worried it. For much of the ascent, Rannoch had been convinced he was experiencing his final moments. Between his terror and his nausea, he had found the space for regret. This would be a poor death, an embarrassment to his legacy. He was no warrior, but he was a crusader. His end, when it came, should be in the active service of the Imperial Creed, not panicked and sick in transit.

The shuttle had survived, though, and so had he. His ecclesiarchal robes hid the unsteadiness of his legs when he descended the steps from the passenger hold.

‘Cardinal.’ Captain Yaxinth Cragg bowed and took a knee. ‘You bless my ship with your presence.’

‘Please rise, captain,’ Rannoch said, pleased. He held out his hand, and Cragg kissed his ring of office before standing.

She was tall, though not as tall as Rannoch. He knew no one on Sandava II who was his equal in height. Cragg was almost at eye-level with his chin, and that was rare enough. The captain was a veteran trader, her decades of experience weathering her face despite juvenat treatments. Her hair, a silvery grey, was braided and put up in a bun beneath her cap. There was, in the way she held herself, an air of pragmatic piety. Rannoch approved. His first impression of Cragg matched the reputation of the Envoy of Discipline. She was, he thought, someone who would understand what he needed.

Cragg led the way out of the loading bay. The corridor beyond was broad, high-vaulted and hung with rich tapestries. They depicted the spread of the Emperor’s light across the galaxy. The xenos and the heretic fell before the onslaught of truth. Faith, in the form of fiery beams, burned the unclean. The apostates held up their hands for mercy. Their faces were stretched by wide howls of despair, because they knew there would be no forgiveness. The forces of the Emperor marched behind the beams of truth. Ecclesiarchs, soldiers of the Astra Militarum, the Adeptus Astartes, even the humblest of serfs – together they were the unstoppable advance of the Imperium.

Cragg set a leisurely pace so Rannoch could examine the tapestries. ‘These are magnificent,’ he said. ‘They are in exquisite condition. Are they reproductions?’

‘Some are,’ said Cragg. ‘Others are not. Can you tell the difference?’

‘I can’t,’ Rannoch admitted. ‘How did you acquire originals in such fine condition?’

‘They are my inheritance. They have been in my family for centuries.’

‘As has this trade?’

‘And this vessel. Exactly.’

Rannoch was more and more impressed. He looked closely at the tapestries, pausing at the signs of wear in the weave. He pointed to a representation of Saint Celestine leading the people into battle against a vaguely formed darkness. The edges of the tapestry were faded. There was a musty, aged smell. ‘This isn’t a reproduction, surely?’

‘It is,’ said Cragg. ‘An old one, though. One of the first of this series to be made. About seven hundred years ago, I believe.’

‘Then it must have acquired a value of its own.’

Cragg shrugged. ‘It is still not an original. But yes, it has a value. A spiritual one.’ She gazed at the saint’s rapt features. ‘The function of all these tapestries is to inspire and to instruct. If they do that, the question of authenticity is not very important.’

Rannoch nodded. ‘I agree with you completely. Captain, your arrival in our system is fortunate indeed.’ Cragg understood what was at stake in her profession. That much was clear. She was committed to her purpose. Excellent. There were too many opportunities for fraud in her trade. Too many corrupt adventurers. Rannoch had dealt with his share. He had seen to the execution of more than a few.

But he had heard nothing but glowing reports concerning the Envoy of Discipline. And everything he saw confirmed those reports.

The Envoy was a missionary ship. Once a freighter, it had been repurposed by the Cragg family in the 40th millennium. Its original shape was recognisable, but it had been much altered over the centuries. The hull’s statuary had multiplied, many of the figures colossi, captured in marble in the act of striding forwards, pointing the way to judgement. The vessel’s journey was perpetual, spanning generations. Its mission was to bolster faith wherever it arrived, by whatever means necessary. Sometimes it transported wandering confessors, delivering firebrand zealotry to where it was most needed. Most frequently, though, it fanned the fires of belief with its cargo of relics and religious art. It engaged in the trade of sacred objects carefully, piously and with all due reverence. Some of its treasures were for temporary display only. The Envoy’s crew would bring the relics planetside for the faithful to witness. Billions of pilgrims would pour in from all corners of a world to gaze upon the bones of saints and the shields of martyrs. The visitation would last for a few weeks at most, adding urgency to the pilgrimages. Then the Envoy of Discipline would depart. It might return in a year. It might return in a hundred.

Cragg took Rannoch up through the decks to the central hold of the ship. Rannoch gasped in joy when he set foot in the space. It was huge. It had long ago ceased to resemble a freighter’s hold. It was a gigantic reliquary the size of a cathedral’s nave. The light was rich, warm and subdued, though not so dark that it concealed the enormous ceiling fresco of the Golden Throne radiating its light across the galaxy. A hundred-strong choir stood on tiers at the forward end of the hold. The solemn hymn of the singers sounded across the space. Rannoch moved down the aisles between gilded display cases of jewelled fingers, jawbones on cushions of violet silk, hymnals of bronze, the sceptres of great ecclesiarchs and aspergilla fashioned from sacred femurs.

Cragg smiled. ‘I’m glad to see you are pleased, cardinal.’

‘Pleased?’ Rannoch croaked. ‘That is a poor word. Captain, no description can do justice to your work here.’

‘Then I’m hopeful we can assist you.’

‘So am I.’

‘Was there anything specific you had in mind?’

‘I’m not sure,’ Rannoch said. ‘My concern is not apostasy. There are no instances of heresy on Sandava II.’ He spoke with perfect confidence. He would know if such evil were abroad on his world. He was vigilant. The church’s grip on the citizenry was secure. That was not sufficient, however. ‘I feel the people take their faith for granted,’ he said. ‘They need a renewal of commitment. They need to be enflamed.’

‘I see,’ said Cragg. ‘I hope you will not be offended, cardinal, if I say your situation is not unusual. It is, in fact, what we specialise in addressing.’

‘I am not offended. I am delighted.’

‘Good. In these cases, my normal recommendation is, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, a display of relics in the capital city.’

‘Agreed.’

‘Then would you care to select the relics?’

He would. But as he walked up and down the aisles, passing hundreds of cases, his initial wonder faded. His spirits lowered. Disappointment set in. There was nothing wrong with the relics, yet they were not exceptional. Maybe there were too many. Maybe he was hoping for something so sublime, yet so vaguely defined, that no actual object could meet that expectation. Rannoch wanted to be transported. He wanted to tremble in awe. He wanted to experience the all-consuming fire he would then see ignited in his congregation.

Nothing he saw achieved those heights. He felt respect. He felt reverence. He was not overpowered. No relic was too much for his senses.

Cragg sensed the shift in his mood. ‘I fear our offerings are disappointing you.’

‘It isn’t that,’ Rannoch said. ‘It’s hard for me to define what I am seeking. It must be transcendent. It must…’ He groped for the words. ‘It must exceed the limits of what we imagine. That is when we feel the divine touch of the Emperor’s will.’ He sighed, frustrated by the inability of mere words to express something beyond their boundaries. ‘Do you understand what I’m trying to say?’

Cragg had begun to look uneasy as he was speaking. ‘I think so,’ she said. Her eyes flickered involuntarily to her left.

Rannoch caught the movement. He turned his head. There was an empty case a few yards down the aisle. Rannoch approached it. ‘What was in here?’ he asked.

‘A funerary mask,’ Cragg said.

‘Where is it? Was it sold?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘It is not an object that will ever be sold.’

‘Then where is it?’ Rannoch insisted.

‘We have removed it to a storage vault for the time being.’

‘What does “for the time being” mean?’

‘Until we can be more certain of its provenance, we will not display it. It is something of a mystery, and so has no place among confirmed relics. We thought it was from the tomb of Saint Estheria.’

‘Wasn’t that destroyed?’

‘It was. The planetoid on which she was buried was shattered by an ork incursion three centuries ago. We believed some fragments of the tomb had survived.’

‘You no longer think the relic is from her tomb?’

‘It may be. It may also be the funerary mask of Saint Praxtor. The general description in both cases matches.’

‘Saint Praxtor’s tomb has never been located,’ Rannoch said.

‘That is so. The mask corresponds to surviving records of his burial. That is all.’

The ambiguity was frustrating. It was also fascinating. Two possible origins from two vanished tombs. There had to be meaning in that coincidence. ‘I would like to see this mask,’ said Rannoch.

‘I can vouch for nothing about it,’ Cragg said.

The reservation sounded mechanical to Rannoch. Cragg blinked, as if she had meant to speak more firmly than she had. Rannoch puzzled over the response, then decided he was seeing a clever merchant pretend to object to something she had intended to show him all along.

‘I understand,’ he said. ‘I want to see it, all the same.’ Whether Cragg was trying to manipulate him or not felt irrelevant. The conviction was stealing over him that fate was at work. It was important that he see this mask.

‘Very well.’

Cragg turned right, towards the ship’s bow. Rannoch followed. They passed the choir, entered a narrow passageway that ran off the reliquary and took it for a few hundred yards. At an intersection, Cragg went down a staircase. She and Rannoch descended many levels until the stairs ended at a massive iron door. At a nod from Cragg, two guards pulled the door open for them. Inside the vault, crates and chests were stacked high on steel shelves. The space was purely functional. Rannoch frowned when he saw it.

‘You disapprove,’ said Cragg.

‘Where is the invocation of the sacred I saw before?’

‘I believe it must be earned.’ Cragg gestured at the containers. ‘Many of the items stored here are reproductions. They are treated with respect, but not the reverence due to an icon. I will have no false worship on my vessel.’

Rannoch bowed his head, conceding the point.

‘As for objects like the mask,’ Cragg went on, ‘the same principle applies. Until we can definitively establish its identity, and therefore its sanctity, it remains here. This vault is unadorned, cardinal, but it has been consecrated.’

‘I am satisfied, captain. Please proceed.’

She brought him to a chest at the end of the first aisle of shelves. It was sitting on a large work table, flanked by data-slates and stacks of scrolls and leather-bound volumes.

‘You have been hard at work, I see,’ said Rannoch.

‘Yes, the research is proving extensive, and very contradictory. We are no wiser than before we began.’ She started unlatching the chest. It was not locked, but a dozen bronze clamps held it closed.

‘Where did you find it?’ Rannoch asked. ‘Wouldn’t that provide some guidance?’

Cragg shook her head. ‘We recovered it from the wreckage of the Steadfast Apostle. Our sister ship went missing thirty years ago. We found what was left of her on a planetoid in the Apsorus System.’

‘What could she have been doing there?’ Rannoch said. There were no colonies in Apsorus. There were no planets there at all, not since the hive world of Apsorus IV had been subjected to Exterminatus four centuries ago. That civilisation’s fall had provided material for warning sermons across the subsector ever since. Rannoch had made frequent use of it himself. That’s three, he thought. Three instances of absent worlds. The connections he was drawing were spurious, he knew. If the mask was from one tomb, it could not be from another. Even so, he saw still greater meaning in the growing coincidences.

‘I don’t know,’ said Cragg. ‘The Apostle seems to have come to grief in the debris field, though why she was there at all, I can’t guess.’ She raised the lid of the chest. ‘At any rate, this is what we found.’ She lifted a stand from the interior and placed it on the table. She stepped back to give Rannoch the space to examine the mounted relic.

The mask stared at Rannoch with empty eyes. He met the cold gaze, and a buzzing began in his extremities, working its way towards his heart, leaving numbness in its wake. The mask was gold, though it must have had a framework of something more rigid, for the relic seemed strong as well as beautiful. Jewels were inlaid around the eyes and mouth, and in sharp lines along the contours of the cheekbones. They picked up the light from the vault’s lume-strips, refracting it into a dazzling spectrum. Rannoch beheld a play of gold and a shimmer of every colour at once. The face was both serene and demanding. Its forehead was engraved with almost microscopic runes, line upon line of them running across the mask’s surface like wrinkles of age and experience, yet they enhanced rather than marred the beauty of the face. The mask held the cardinal rapt. His eyes flicked from detail to detail. Each element of it was perfect. Together, they forged something that went beyond perfection. Rannoch felt as if he should be wincing. The beauty before him was painful. But his eyes remained wide, his gaze caught in a perpetual dance from individual feature, to whole, and back to feature. He could spend his life trying to learn all the different configurations of the artefact before him, and there would always be more.

‘This…’ he whispered. He cleared his throat. He could not look away. ‘This is astonishing,’ he said.

‘It is a powerful work,’ said Cragg. ‘I will rest easy once we have determined its origin.’ If she really was uncomfortable, she conveyed her emotion too softly once again, almost as if it were being suppressed.

Rannoch admired the merchant’s craft abstractly. He could think of little else than the mask.

‘To contemplate this wonder is to feel the gaze of divinity,’ Rannoch said. ‘It could only come from the tomb of a very great saint.’ As he spoke, a sliver of doubt stabbed at him. Not concerning the holiness of the relic, but the idea that this was a funerary mask. Rannoch experienced the solemnity that came from standing before a humbling force. But there was too much energy in the network of lines on that face. The play of light upon the jewels was too great, too alive to sequester in the darkness of a tomb. The power of this art would overwhelm any grave. It was meant to be seen. It was meant to have living eyes looking out from behind it, calling the faithful to an engulfing ecstasy of death.

He felt the ability to look at the mask with anything like rationality slip away from him. He tensed for a moment, and then awe swamped his concern.

‘I agree,’ Cragg said. ‘The personage for whom the mask was fashioned must have been extraordinary. But until we know which saint, I must keep it here. It is the responsible thing to do.’

‘True,’ Rannoch said. Reluctantly. He was even more reluctant to let Cragg replace the mask in its chest. He stared at the relic until the lid closed. Its removal from his sight felt like a theft. No, worse than that. It was a bereavement and a wound.

Rannoch’s limbs were heavy as he walked with Cragg out of the vault. His mind raced. He had found what he had been seeking. The mask had more power than all the other relics on the ship combined. It had to go down to Sandava II. He imagined the incendiary effect the mask would have on the faith of the citizenry, and the heaviness fled from his body. His excitement was very like an urge to dance.

He did not ask Cragg to arrange for the mask to be displayed, or if she would sell it. He knew what her answer would be. Just as he knew with absolute certainty he must bring to Sandava II the gift that would create a faith of fire.

There would be a way to make this happen. Surely that was the will of the Emperor. Why else would fate have shown Rannoch such a relic?

The image of gold and jewelled light shone in his mind’s eye. Already the memory was a torment. The thing itself called to him. He vowed he would answer.

Chapter Two

THE SHADOWS COMMAND

The Silver Pinnacle pierced the darkness in all its forms. It rose from the centre of the Citadel on Titan, a gleaming knife stabbing through the deep orange gloom of the nitrogen atmosphere. Its brilliance was aimed at the greater dark of the void, and the force within its walls penetrated the most profound darkness of all. The Silver Pinnacle was the light of wisdom. It was the sword of foreknowledge.

It was the redoubt of the Prognosticars.

Reflection. Refraction. Distortion. Amplification. Madness. These were the ways of the warp, the nature of the immaterium’s corruption of the real. To counter the warp meant understanding it. Reading it. Becoming intimate with its currents of insanity and the vortices of dreams while remaining untouched by the lures of its sins. And so the Grey Knights turned to the dreadful power of mirrors.

The Auguirium was the Chamber of Reflection. Its walls and ceiling were mirrored. Their concavity concentrated all images in the huge, perfectly polished mirror of the floor, turning it into a pool of infinite depth. The Prognosticars sat around its circumference. Their focus was an even more powerful form of concentration. It was the one that gave the mirrors their power. It opened the way to the coils of the immaterium. They spiralled on the great mirror, twisting themselves into shapes without reason, but heavy with omens. The Prognosticars observed what their focus wrought, and they peeled away the madness to find the meaning.

They did not seek to control the warp. That impulse was the betrayer of heroes and the doom of souls. It could not even be truly navigated. It could be traversed with caution, and at great risk. So too could portions of it be read. With great caution. At great risk. The mind that contemplated the warp did so as a nomad, always moving, adapting, aware of the eternal storm and the lethality of transcendence and contingency. The warp could not be seized. It could not be surveyed.

But when the mind travelled the warp, with the respect due to an ocean in fury, warnings could be found in the particular clash of waves, in the runic turn of eddies, and in the howling reflections of the spirit. Time in the warp was as illusory and treacherous as space. The configurations of madness, interpreted at the right moment, could be the ripples of the future. The Prognosticars who saw that future could sound the alarm. With diligence, predatory powers could be stopped, or at least the present might not be destroyed.

In the Auguirium, the Prognosticars watched and meditated, meditated and prayed, prayed and watched. The sea of nightmares convulsed before them. The screams of the real broke against each other, falling into nothingness. And then, a vortex became a knot, a contusion of corruption. It gathered coherence. It moved to strike.

The Prognosticars did not move, but their minds raced with one accord to the knot.

Something was coming. It did not yet exist, but it was coming, and the hour of its reality onrushing.

The Prognosticars directed their focus to the growing nexus. And so the Grey Knights went to war against a thing that did not, as yet, exist.

But it was coming, gathering nightmares in its wake.

Rannoch couldn’t sleep. He didn’t think he would ever sleep again. As long as the mask was not before his eyes, the golden, acid-etched memory image would eat at his peace, remind him of his failure and twist him with the phantom agony of absence. If he beheld the mask, how could sleep return then? There would be the unending fire of worship. He would be transported forever by awe. Either way, there would be no rest for him. If this was to be his fate, it would be better to embrace his obsession than deny it – better to be bathed in the light of a saint than savaged by the thought of duty unfulfilled.

He was lying in a stateroom situated midway up the superstructure of the Envoy of Discipline. A glassteel window looked out over the length of the ship. Its frame was flanked by two of the immense statues. Their heads, hooded and bowed in prayer to raised hands, were level with the window. Their monumental piety invited Rannoch to contemplate the infinite vistas of the Emperor’s galaxy, to give thanks and to find rest within their protection.

He glared at the statues’ profiles, resenting their calm of stone. Did they not see his pain? Were they mocking him?

The bed was huge. He was lost in it. He thrashed, strangling himself in the covers. He fought free, then lay back, gasping.

Cragg had invited him to stay through a night cycle, then make his decision regarding the relics in the morning. He had accepted even though he already knew what he would say. None of the relics Cragg was willing to display were adequate. Only one would answer the needs of Sandava II. Rannoch stayed because the thought of quitting the ship and losing the mask forever was unbearable.

He had eaten with Cragg and her officers. The feast in his honour had been lavish. He had barely tasted it. He had washed down a couple of mouthfuls with gulps of amasec, conscious of doing a grave injustice to the vintage, but unable to care. Then he had stared at his plate, just managing to take part in the conversation. He couldn’t remember what had been discussed. He chose now to regard his abstinence as a fast. His mind and his soul were caught in a tempest. Perhaps the denial of the body would help see him safely to port.

Rannoch prayed for guidance. He tried to find even a single moment of calm, but the turmoil refused to let him go. The golden face stared at him, accusing him of cowardice and neglect. Its perfection was marred by the flaws of memory, and he wept at his sacrilege.

He stumbled from the bed and collapsed in front of the window. ‘Father of Mankind,’ he cried to the void, ‘what would you have me do?’

There was no answer. He had never been so alone.

Illumination burst upon him one heartbeat later. Despair became exultation. His solitude was his answer. He had come to the Envoy of Discipline without his retinue. He had never travelled without attendants before. He had surprised himself with his decision almost as much as his major domo. At the time, he could not explain his impulse. Now he understood. Now, he saw the workings of destiny, and he sobbed his praise of the God-Emperor.

He was alone, and this was a blessing. If his retinue had been here, servants would have been knocking at his door at the first sound of distress. He would not have been able to take step beyond the threshold of the state room without being asked what he desired. Here and now, though, he could act. He could do what the Emperor demanded, and not be seen.

A small inner voice, easily ignored, wondered why the Emperor’s work should require secrecy of him here, on this missionary vessel. He was not an inquisitor, after all.

Rannoch silenced the voice with the simple thought of the mask. Besides, holy secrets were the mortar of faith.

He dressed without hurry. There was nothing furtive or shameful in the mission before him. He donned his vestments, though not the chains of office. He left off anything that would make a noise as he walked. He hesitated about taking his sceptre. It was iron, and seven feet high. Topped with a massive skull, it was heavy. He was used to marking his steps with it, the clang of metal on stone both a call to worship and a knell of condemnation. Walking with its tip raised would be an additional strain. He deliberated a few moments longer, then took up the sceptre. What he was about to do was divinely ordained. His actions would be ceremonial. He should carry the sign of his office before him.

He opened the state room door. The corridor beyond was empty. The lume torches lining the walls seemed dimmer than earlier. The shadows pooling between them were deeper. They were waiting for him. The ship felt silent. Rannoch knew there were hundreds of crew members working their shifts. Yet he sensed the Envoy of Discipline open to him. The quest, the empty hall, the shadows, Rannoch’s accidental foresight in not bringing a retinue – these were all omens. Everywhere he looked, Rannoch saw the fates aligning to guide him on his path.

He wondered how it had taken him so long to see what he must do.

Rannoch moved down the hall. His steps were light, soundless. The sceptre weighed nothing. Instead, it pulled him along through the ship, as if it too were being summoned by the mask.

Rannoch descended the levels of the superstructure. He flew down and down the stairs, his robes flapping like wings. He suppressed a laugh of delight, and he smiled, giddy with the joy of his mission. He encountered no one on the staircases, and in a few minutes he had reached the vault’s deck. He raced along the wide, arched corridor towards the midsection of the hull. He was not winded from his run down the stairs. His energy was limitless. He could sprint indefinitely if the mask was at the end of his journey. Everything was possible, because he was the instrument of the Emperor’s will. He was not acting on his own desire. He was obeying destiny.

The shadows were thick along this corridor too. When Rannoch moved into them, away from the lume torches, they embraced him and concealed him. They surrounded him with the very fabric of mystery. He was consumed with wonder. He rejoiced that his life should have been blessed to reach this pass.

A crewman appeared at an intersection a hundred yards farther on. The man turned into the hall, heading in the cardinal’s direction.

Rannoch felt no anxiety.

He had spent his life in the church. He had been on battlefields, though not for decades, and even then he had been at the rear of the lines. He had never been involved in any action himself.

But I know what to do, he thought, and almost giggled.

For a brief moment he wondered why he had thought of battle. He was not at war. There were no enemies here. At the very worst, Cragg and her crew were simply a little too cautious in their faith. No, he was not at war. Yet he reacted to the approaching crewman as if he were a foe.

Rannoch evaded. There was an alcove two steps back. The shadows within were profound. He could barely see the shrine it held. The cardinal withdrew into the alcove. There was just enough room for him between the shrine and the wall. His movements were graceful. He flowed. His journey through the ship was a dance. Every step was choreographed. Nothing was separate. All the moments, from leaving his bed to the joyous conclusion still awaiting him, were an indivisible whole. Nothing as trivial as one man choosing the wrong corridor at the wrong moment could break that whole.

Rannoch smiled in the shadows. His vestments were still more darkness. No one could possibly see him. He was concealed by the power of the Emperor. Yet why should he hide? Why was he dancing with the shadows? Why did he not just order Cragg to turn the mask over to his care? Because this was the wisdom of the Emperor. Because Cragg would be blind enough to resist. Perhaps she wished to keep the mask to herself. If so, he was at war after all. The crew might be misguided enough to constitute a real enemy.

Most of all, Rannoch became one with the shadows because he could. They were his allies. They were his gift. They called to him, and he answered. They were propelling him towards the mask, and who was he to deny them?

The crewman walked past.

You cannot see me, Rannoch thought.

The man did not even glance at the alcove.

Rannoch shook with silent laughter. He felt sorry for the crewman. He had played a part, small though it was, in the sacred dance, and would never know. Rannoch waited until the man had turned off into another passageway. Then he left the alcove.

Down the rest of the corridor now, flying past torches, doorways, hall intersections, tapestries and more shrines. The details of the ship blurred, became insubstantial, and that was right, that was true. There was only one object with weight on this vessel. The mask was more real than the Envoy of Discipline. It had power. Its perfection alone made its presence stronger than anything Rannoch had ever beheld.

Even now, when he had not yet reached the mask, its image was becoming more sharply defined in his memory. His growing proximity was reversing the work of time, rolling back the seconds since Cragg had shut the lid of the chest.

Rannoch stopped running. He stood before the door of the vault. He placed his hand on the brass handle. Would the door be locked? Of course it would not. Not to him. He pulled, and the door opened. The hinges whined. The door scraped against the flagstones of the deck. The sounds were loud in the empty corridor. Rannoch was unconcerned. No one would hear. That was impermissible.

He entered the vault and made straight for the chest. He slowed down as he approached it. The solemnity of the moment impressed itself upon him. He tapped the floor with his sceptre once more. He became a procession of one. In his head, he heard the hymns of rejoicing, sung by choirs millions strong. They were the voices of renewed faith that would soon be shaking the firmament of Sandava II.

He leaned his sceptre against the table and placed both hands on the chest. Was the metal warm to the touch? Could he feel the gaze of the mask piercing the final barrier between them? He believed he did. Rannoch murmured his thanks. He opened the clasps, his heart pounding harder and harder with each release.

He raised the lid.

He had not turned on the lume-strips of the vault. The weak light came from the passageway. Even in the gloom, the mask was resplendent. Its gold blazed, and the jewels flowed into one another, joined by the complexity of their refractions. He stared into the eye sockets. Seen through them, the darkness of the chest ceased to be a mundane space. Instead, it was the limitless depths of sacred mysteries.

Rannoch lifted the mask free of its stand. He dared to let his hands profane the relic. He cupped the edges of the face. He stared at the perfection, its beauty so far beyond his memory, it was like seeing the mask for the first time. The sublime stabbed his heart with agonised, ecstatic woe.

The moment was the most precious one of his life. And it was cut short.

‘Your eminence?’ said a voice behind him.

Rannoch turned, still holding the mask. The crewman he had seen earlier stood in the entrance to the vault.

So, the cardinal thought. He has a larger part to play after all.

‘Your pardon, your eminence,’ the man said, ‘but…’

‘What is your name?’ Rannoch interrupted. It was right that he should know. Nothing of this great day should be forgotten.

‘Vance, your eminence. Kyler Vance.’

‘Please approach, Vance,’ Rannoch said. ‘You may be of some assistance.’ He let go of the mask with his right hand, but clutched it all the more firmly with his left.

Vance walked down the aisle. His features were in shadow, but Rannoch could read confusion in the uncertainty of his gait. He drew near, and Rannoch could see his frown.

‘I’m sorry for intruding,’ Vance said. ‘I mean no disrespect, but I hope you understand my duties…’

‘Of course, of course.’ Rannoch waved off his apologies. ‘I will never condemn a man for doing his duty.’ He observed the way Vance was looking at his left hand. The man’s frown was deepening. He looked very unhappy about what he clearly felt he would have to do next. Vance was torn between his responsibilities and the impossibility of confronting a cardinal of the Adeptus Ministorum.

Rannoch took pity on him. He resolved Vance’s dilemma.

Grace. Everything was grace. The mask was grace made of gold. Rannoch was in a state of grace. His movements were yet another form of grace. With his right hand, he made a gesture of blessing. In the same motion, he seized his sceptre and slammed its skull down on Vance’s head. The man’s forehead cracked open like an eggshell. Blood splashed up into Rannoch’s face. Vance fell. His legs twitched, his boots rattling against the floor. Then he was still. Dark blood pooled across the flagstones, glistening faintly in the gloom. Rannoch watched it spread. Soon it surrounded the corpse. It flowed about his feet and beneath the table. It lapped against the shelves.

Rannoch looked down at his robes. They were spattered. Flecks of matter clung to the silk. He blinked at the fragments of Vance’s death, fascinated. He had commanded executions, but he had never killed with his own hand before. He crouched to examine the body more closely. A distant part of his mind wondered what he should do. He could not leave the corpse here. He could not wander the ship with a man’s blood on his person.

He cocked his head, entranced by Vance’s crushed skull, seeing in it the shape of revelations, of great secrets spilling into the light. Without meaning to, he dropped his left hand. The mask touched the blood.

Rannoch gasped. He jerked his hand up, horrified that he had marred the relic’s perfection. Only he hadn’t. The blood flowed into the lines and runes of the mask, and the crimson made the gold and the jewels shine even more brightly. The contours of the sacred face stood out, sharp as burning plasma. With tears of awe streaking his cheeks, Rannoch lowered the mask into the blood again.

The miracle began. The blood ceased pooling. It rushed to the mask, pulled in by a gigantic thirst. The edges of the body started to foam. Vance lost definition. He sank into the floor, spreading out, becoming soft, then a slurry, then liquid. Blood and flesh and bone mixed and ran, becoming a tide of red and white and pink and black. Rannoch could see the colours clearly because light blazed from the mask; he was sitting at the centre of a dazzling aurora. Gold interwove with every shade of the spectrum. The display was art. It was a tapestry, a glorious extension of the mask’s being. It enveloped Rannoch. It transported him beyond sensation, beyond sense itself. He dropped the mask. His mouth was open, and he would have screamed in ecstasy, but even a scream was too little a thing; even that primal expression was overwhelmed.

Time vanished in the storm of light and blood. Eternity touched Rannoch’s soul. It opened up to him, and took him in.

And then everything stopped. Eternity cast Rannoch out. The mundane lie of time resumed. The light dimmed and vanished. The sob that shook Rannoch was so huge, it felt like he was expelling a boulder from his chest. He fell to his knees. He was on the verge of wailing in despair when his eyes dropped to the mask. It lay on the floor, imperturbable, perfect and still. Rannoch snatched it up again and stared at the beauty, calming himself with the physical fragment of transcendence.

The floor was dry. There was no blood. There was no trace of the corpse. Even the stains on his vestments were gone.

Rannoch picked up his sceptre and rose to his feet. He looked at the mask one more time, then concealed it in his robes. He closed the chest, latched it and walked to the exit. By the time he reached the corridor, his legs were steady again.

He grabbed the door, and was about to close it when a whisper made him pause. He looked in the vault. It was shadowed and very dim. The source of its true light was with him now. The shadows were stirring. The whisper was a reptilian hiss. It grew louder. Soon there were sounds of tearing and of bubbling acid. Rannoch stared down the aisle. Where Vance had lain, the shadows were coming together. They twisted. The air frayed. There were movements that sought to form limbs, colours that threatened to become claws. The real was dissolving before Rannoch’s eyes.

He could not contain this sight within the belief of sanctity. The death and dissolution of Vance was framed by beauty and destiny. This was different. This was a new excess, one that threatened to crack his cherished constructions of belief. Ice reached from the shadows. It seeped into his veins.

He pulled the mask out. He looked at it again. Could he have been so terribly wrong? No, he realised. Perfect beauty gazed back at him. It filled his spirit and his mind. It left no room for thoughts of what might be happening in the vault. The world beyond the gold became trivial. Events lost meaning. They were ignorable, empty, insignificant. Without taking his eyes from the relic, he pushed the door closed. He looked up only when he heard the hollow boom. The vault was sealed. There was nothing happening inside. There was nothing there to disturb his understanding of the mask.

He returned the relic to his robes and headed back to his state room.

In a few hours, he would take his leave of Cragg and the Envoy of Discipline. He would return to Sandava II, bearing such a gift.

Such a gift.

‘The threat,’ said Brother Trevas, ‘is to the Dierna System.’

Dierna. Gavallan’s transcription flashed before Crowe’s inner eye. Hearing the name so soon after reading it was an ill omen. He would consider that later, though. He focused on the immediate concerns. ‘What is the timeline?’ he asked the Prognosticar.

‘Imminent,’ Trevas answered. ‘If it has not already transpired.’

They were in a briefing room just outside the Chambers of Purity. This sector of the Citadel was a bridge between the rest of the brotherhoods and the Purifiers. Here the guardians of the chambers could meet with the other Grey Knights while remaining near at hand to their duties. The room was a small one. It held a long stone table. The walls were adorned with the banners of reclaimed worlds. Crowe was here as the senior brother among the Purifiers. He spoke for the castellan, sparing Trevas the need to be exposed to the toxic presence of the Blade of Antwyr.

‘Imminent,’ Crowe repeated. It was not unusual for Prognosticars to foresee incursions years before they happened. If a crisis point had already been reached, that was cause for great concern.

Trevas nodded, his face grave. ‘There was a sudden confluence in the immaterium. Even now, we cannot find the threads leading to it. The traces are broken and fragmentary, if they are present at all.’

‘And the threat is severe?’

‘It is. There is a storm of consequences radiating from Dierna. We cannot parse them. They are too many, too varied and too overlapping. If we hope even to see the nature of the wider danger, the threat must be stopped now, while we can localise it.’

Crowe thought through the implications of what Trevas was describing. ‘A threat of this sort can hardly have arisen through chance,’ he said. ‘The Ruinous Powers revel in their schemes. How can their planning have left no sign in the warp?’

‘This is precisely what troubles us,’ said Trevas. ‘The best we can theorise is that a trap has been triggered.’

‘In what sense?’

‘Something was prepared and then has lain in wait. If even its creators did not know when it would strike, there would be no trace of the plan.’

‘So we are dealing with the consequences of chance after all.’

‘Perhaps. Severe ones. If this is a trap, it is a potent one.’

‘It would have to be,’ Crowe mused. ‘Nothing trivial would be concealed so carefully.’

‘Our council agrees.’

‘As does Supreme Grand Master Draigo?’

Trevas nodded. ‘That is why he is calling upon the Purifiers. The threat is great, highly concentrated and mobile.’

‘Mobile? A ship?’

‘We believe so. It is imperative it be stopped before it reaches the Dierna System.’

Crowe agreed. There was little time, but there was also an opportunity. The situation presented two stark alternatives – a decapitating blow or a spreading infection. And the infection would lead to worse. If the Prognosticars could not read the consequences of failure, if they were too manifold and terrible, then they would extend far beyond the corruption of a single system. Dierna held only one inhabited planet: Dierna Primus, a hive world and one of little inherent strategic significance. One way or another, Dierna’s fall would be just the start.

So Dierna must not fall.

And he must speak with the castellan about the name.

‘Dierna,’ Gavallan repeated a short while later.

‘Yes,’ said Crowe.

Gavallan looked at his desk, at the reams of his work there. At the endless record of the daemon sword’s words. ‘One of the two names you happened to read aloud.’

‘This cannot be chance,’ said Crowe.

‘I agree. Though learn from the doubt we must still face. There are so many systems named in that list, it is almost inevitable that some of them should come under attack eventually.’

True, Crowe thought. But I only spoke two names, not a hundred.

The sword was muttering. Its voice was not aggressive as it had been when Crowe had last been in this chamber. It was a grating lure instead. The words hovered at the very edge of intelligibility. They pulled at Crowe’s attention, a hook at the back of his mind, calling on him to turn his attention to the Blade, to seek to understand its words and so take them on board. Crowe held the voice back. He did not give in to the seduction of mystery. But when he paused before speaking again, the sword laughed in the darkness. The sound that was no sound was a low, snickering growl. It was no more pronounced than the muttering. It was barely heard, barely felt and all the more insidious.

Gavallan’s eyes twitched in hatred. He kept his face averted from the Blade, refusing to grant it the satisfaction of a greater reaction.

‘It knows,’ said Crowe.

‘It know and it plans,’ Gavallan said.

‘Is it possible the Blade has created this threat?’

Gavallan shook his head. ‘I do not believe that is possible. If we approach this mission with that assumption, our error could well leave us vulnerable to the true adversary. And that mistake is precisely what the sword seeks to create. That is what it can set in motion.’

Antwyr laughed again. Crowe looked past Gavallan’s shoulder, facing the sword directly. If this was to be his burden, then let it know he was prepared for it. Let it face him too, and know its future guardian would hold it as securely imprisoned as the present one.

‘Beware of outright defiance,’ Gavallan said.

Crowe shifted his gaze to meet the hollow, exhausted eyes of the castellan.

‘Defiance can lead to engagement,’ Gavallan went on. ‘Once you begin to discourse with the Blade, you expose yourself to its closer scrutiny. It will use what it finds.’

‘I understand,’ said Crowe. ‘I will heed your words.’ With one more glance at Antwyr, he turned back to Gavallan’s transcription. ‘If the sword has not caused the incursion, and chance did not govern my pronouncing of those names, then I see two possibilities. Another force entirely has extended its influence this far from Dierna.’

‘A daemonic one?’

‘Not necessarily.’

‘A dark omen or a divine warning. A stark choice, Brother Garran, and a difficult one,’ Gavallan said, but did not disagree. ‘And the other possibility?’

‘The sword has foreseen these events, and plans to use them to its advantage.’

‘These possibilities are not mutually exclusive,’ said Gavallan.

‘No,’ Crowe conceded. ‘They are not.’

The sword muttered and laughed, muttered and laughed, rejoicing in its secrets, daring the unwary to pierce them.

The castellan and two squads of Purifiers prepared for war. Almost a quarter of the brothers who guarded the Chambers of Purity were bound for the Dierna System. This was the determination of Kaldor Draigo. The intensity and the urgency of the threat warranted the deployment of the most incorruptible of the incorruptible. Crowe was glad of the Supreme Grand Master’s command. He and Gavallan would have petitioned him to order this action. The gathering threads were that ominous.

They were also too vague. As the squads met in the Chapel of Flame’s Unction, Crowe thought of how much they did not know about the threat, and of how dangerous that ignorance was. He wondered how high a cost would be paid before the true nature of the foe became clear.

Merrat Gavallan stood apart from the two squads. He advanced to the centre of the transept crossing and knelt before the altar. The Black Blade of Antwyr was chained to the back of his power pack. A hundred yards separated him from his brothers, but the curses of the sword reached them all.

And this was as it should be. The presence of the evil in so holy a place was a spur to the Purifiers, a reminder of the necessity and danger of their task. They followed the example of their brotherhood champion. They knelt in the vast space of the nave. There were no pews here, only an expanse of stone. The Grey Knights planted the tips of their Nemesis force weapons against the floor. They bowed their heads against the hilts of swords and the shafts of halberds. They prayed.

‘Thou, Emperor, art great and powerful above all,’ Gavallan intoned.

‘Grant us thy strength as we defend your cause against the face of the enemy,’ said the Purifiers.

‘O Emperor, thou art the tower of defence of mankind.’

‘We shall be your holy violence visited upon the enemy.’

‘Father of mankind,’ said Gavallan, ‘by and through your will, we fight for you and glorify you.’

‘O Emperor,’ vowed the others, ‘we shall not suffer the abomination to live.’

They would not, Crowe vowed. They would burn the unclean things from the materium.

Gavallan stood. From fonts to the left and right of the altar, he anointed himself with holy oil, pressing his gauntleted fingers to his forehead, his chest-plate and his blade. Though he carried Antwyr everywhere with him, always the warden, always the guard, he did not use it in battle. He wielded a Nemesis sword, one that blazed with a blue light as pure as the Black Blade was corrupt. So close to Antwyr, though, the holy fire of the Nemesis sword seemed to Crowe to strain, as if pushing back darkness at the edge of its reach.

The castellan stood before the altar a few moments more, surrounded by a cloud of incense. Then he moved on towards the rear of the chapel, the scrolls of his oaths of moment swaying as he walked.

Crowe and Sendrax advanced to the altar. They repeated Gavallan’s ritual, then waited for their squads to do the same. Doran, Ruluf, Harsath and Klandon marched with Sendrax. Crowe watched the warriors of his squad, his brothers from a hundred campaigns, and he wondered how much longer he would lead them as he did now. How much longer before he would lead all the Purifiers, and at the same time have to isolate himself for their sake. Gavallan’s state was his future, his world outside of combat circumscribed to his cell in the Chambers of Purity, lest his presence harm the other Grey Knights. The fellowship he knew now with his brothers would come to an end.

He knew them and their strengths like the fingers of his right hand. Together they formed the mailed fist of the Emperor. There was Destrian, the most methodical in combat. His face was a mass of overlapping burn scars earned in an exploding manufactorum on Anbeten IV. There was Gorvenal, sombre of feature and intensely pious. Carac was rough hewn and fiery. His temper made him the balance for Destrian’s coolness.

And finally Drake. Crowe had fought in more battles with him than he had with Sendrax. Most of Drake’s face had been reconstructed. There was so much metal that his features had taken on a cast of frozen nobility.

The ceremony complete, the Purifiers followed Gavallan to where the iron gates opened out of the chapel, leading to the grav-lifts that would take them to the heights of the Citadel and the waiting Stormraven, Purgation’s Sword. Piloted by Berinon of the First Brotherhood, the gunship would carry them to orbit, to the strike cruiser Sacrum Finem, and it would take them to the Dierna System. It would take them to war.

The Grey Knights marched in reverential silence.

They marched with the Blade of Antwyr whispering to their souls.

Chapter Three

INAUGURATION OF THE REVELS

Her father was waiting for her outside the throne room. General Vendruhn Glas blinked in surprise. Lord Governor Otto Glas stood several yards from the closed doors, beside the glassteel window overlooking the wide plaza before the palace. He was alone except for Waclav, the head of his personal guard, who waited beside the doors. Vendruhn joined Lord Otto, glancing curiously in the direction of the throne room.

‘He hasn’t arrived yet?’ she asked.

‘Oh yes,’ said Otto. ‘The cardinal is in there.’

More and more confusing. Rannoch alone in the throne room. The Lord Governor outside. This was a deviation from protocol so bizarre it couldn’t even be called a breach. The normal practice wasn’t even in sight. There weren’t even any attendants waiting to open the doors. The hall was empty.

‘What’s going on?’ When she had received her father’s request to attend the meeting, she had expected a fairly unexceptional summit. The cardinal had returned from the missionary ship with a sacred object. Coordination with the Sandava II Militia would be necessary in view of the mass celebrations to come.

‘I’m not certain anything is going on,’ Otto said.

‘Maybe not certain, but you think something is.’

The Lord Governor grimaced. In his floor-length greatcoat, a deep blue embroidered with the gold emblems of the office and the family’s heraldry, he was the embodiment of righteous rule. His bearing fused authority and humility. Otto was conscious that his governorship was a gift of the Emperor’s will, and had meaning only to the degree it enforced that will. That very humility was the source of his authority. His rule in the Emperor’s name was implacable. Today, though, the set of his jaw was uncertain. His eyes, looking out from beneath the locks of a silver ceremonial wig, were narrow with doubt. His posture was as rigid as ever, but he was showing his age. Vendruhn had never seen that before. This was the first time she had seen him hesitate.

‘I need your thoughts on the cardinal’s state of mind,’ Glas said.

‘Why? Has something happened to disturb him?’

‘Quite the opposite. He is joyful.’

‘And this makes you uneasy.’

‘The tenor of his joy does. There is an edge to it. I find it…’ He stopped, thinking through his sentence. ‘I find it excessive,’ he said. He pointed down at the plaza. ‘Did this feel right to you as you arrived?’

The plaza was filled with a crowd waiting for an official announcement. Vendruhn had seen the people as her Vendetta gunship had flown over the capital city of Egeta, bringing her in to the palace’s landing pad. She had paid little attention to the gathering. She looked more closely now. The afternoon sun shone on tens of thousands of upturned faces. There was restless movement, as if the expectation of news was an electric current running from body to body. Yet Vendruhn could see no one conversing. No one turned away from the throne room’s balcony. The anticipatory tension reached through the window and prickled the back of Vendruhn’s neck.

Excess, she thought. ‘I see,’ she said. Her father’s unease was catching.

Glas nodded. ‘Then let us have our conversation with the cardinal.’ He walked to the doors and pulled them open. The throne room was huge, uncluttered by furniture except for the seat of power itself. It was designed to receive hundreds and felt cavernous with only three people present. The throne, constructed of gold and the ivory of the tusked herbivores of Sandava II’s arctic regions, sat on a three-level dais in the centre of the room. The wall hangings depicted the unification of the world under the Glas family, and the Lord Governors’ fidelity to the Imperial creed.

‘General Glas!’ Rannoch exclaimed when he saw her. Lord Otto offered no explanation for having left him alone, and Rannoch asked for none. The cardinal strode forwards from the glassteel doors opening onto the balcony. Even though his frame was concealed by his vestments, he seemed thinner than when Vendruhn had last seen him. His gait had an insectile angularity. And had he always stooped? He seemed to curve forwards in order to look down at her. ‘I am delighted you have come too,’ he said. ‘We have much to plan and more to celebrate.’ He took her hand with both of his. His skin felt too warm and smooth.

‘I’m sure we do, cardinal,’ Vendruhn said. ‘Your trip was successful, then.’

‘Indeed it was. Indeed it was. Beyond all my hopes. General, Sandava will glorify the Emperor’s name as never before. The stars will ring with our shouts of praise.’

‘I’m glad to hear it.’ She was. Rannoch’s fervour for the Emperor was reassuring. Perhaps he was only feverish in his excitement.

‘You have brought a relic to us, you were telling me,’ Otto said. He had taken a position a few paces to the side, between Rannoch and the throne. He seemed to want distance between himself and the cardinal.

‘I have.’ Rannoch’s voice broke in wonder. ‘It is a marvel. I have never seen the like before.’

‘You have me very curious,’ Vendruhn said. ‘What is it?’

‘I will show you,’ said Rannoch. From within his robes he pulled out a mask. ‘Behold,’ he said.

Vendruhn took a step back. The beauty of the mask was painful. It jabbed at her temple. Her right eye twitched. Excess, she thought, and looked away.

Otto was rooted to the spot. He stared at the mask, his face a conflicting mixture of reverence and fear.

Rannoch held the relic high. For a moment, Vendruhn thought he was going to place it over his face. He looked at the Lord Governor and at her. A ripple passed over his expression. Then he returned the mask to its place of concealment, his smile as firmly fixed as ever.

Vendruhn found the space to wonder why the mask was not in a reliquary. Rannoch was carrying it loose, as if it were his personal property. He had looked at it with veneration, but he clutched it with ferocious possessiveness.

‘That is a relic with powerful presence,’ Vendruhn said, breaking a silence that had stretched long enough to be uncomfortable. Otto was no help. He was stunned. Awe and anxiety raced over his face. He still looked at Rannoch with concern, but he also seemed smaller, as if shrunken by the mask’s golden majesty. ‘Where does it come from?’ Vendruhn asked.

‘It is the funerary mask of Saint Estheria,’ Rannoch answered quickly. He gazed back and forth between general and Governor. ‘It is my intention to announce its arrival on our world from this balcony. The people must know. You will agree, then, that we have many preparations to make, and little time in which to make them.’

Otto was silent.

Vendruhn said, ‘I agree.’ She thought about the crowd outside. She wondered if the people were already enraptured by an object they had yet to see. When they beheld it, what then? Rannoch was right. The militia had to instigate crowd control measures.

And, Vendruhn thought uneasily, she would need to be ready to curb Rannoch’s excesses. She took in the cardinal’s delighted smile. He seemed only partly present in the throne room. Vendruhn considered the idea of trying to ban the celebrations altogether. Reluctantly, she dismissed it. She would be trespassing on Rannoch’s authority, and she had no clear justification to pit herself against the cardinal. She had only her unease.

The auspex array of the Sacrum Finem found the ship midway between Dierna Primus and the system’s Mandeville point. It was heading for the hive world at little more than a rapid drift.

‘Has the vessel been identified?’ Crowe asked.

‘Yes, lord,’ Shipmaster Gura said. ‘The Envoy of Discipline. A missionary ship.’ Gura had been at the command of the Sacrum Finem for decades. She and her crew, sanctioned by the Ordo Hereticus for service to the Grey Knights and for no other duty, were veterans of dozens of campaigns. Mindwiped after each one, they remembered none of them. They were conscious only of the solemnity of their purpose.

‘The Ruinous Powers delight in their targets,’ said Levas Sendrax.

Crowe nodded. He and the other Knight of the Flame were in the bridge’s strategium. They had acting command. Gavallan was sequestered in a cell at the peak of the strike cruiser’s superstructure. He was in vox communication with the squads, but his presence on the bridge would have been dangerous for the crew. Though the sword did not speak as clearly to the non-psykers, it still made itself heard. The mortals’ exposure had to be kept to a minimum.

‘Shall we hail the Envoy, lord?’ Gura asked.

‘No need,’ Crowe said. He watched the image grow larger in the oculus.

‘Yes, lord.’ She sounded relieved.

There was no doubt this was the target. The Envoy of Discipline was under power, but minimally. It was not broadcasting any requests for aid. It was a dark mass, closing in on Dierna Primus like a predator from the tomb. There were no obvious signs of damage. But as the Sacrum Finem drew near, the ship’s nature became apparent.

Corruption had spread over the exterior of the hull. The lines of the freighter were unnaturally smooth, its plating seamless. In the distant light of Dierna, it glistened like oily flesh. A slow, heavy movement, like the gradual heave of a lung, passed down the ship’s length. It ended with a sensuous shudder. Spires tumbled from the vessel, shedding dust.

Crowe focused on the superstructure. ‘Magnification on the principal statuary,’ he ordered.

The image shifted. The colossal guards became visible. One had both arms outstretched, fending off some unseen horror. Its face was contorted, its eyes wide with unspeakable emotion. The other was clawing at its eyes. Its fingers were frozen in the moment of self-mutilation. The stone flesh of its cheeks hung in huge, immobile flaps.

‘The daemonic mocks us,’ said Sendrax.

‘Let it while it can,’ Crowe answered. ‘It reveals its nature.’

‘Aye,’ Sendrax nodded. ‘The abominations leave their signature.’

‘No skulls or brass,’ said Crowe. ‘No lesions of plague. But look at the eyes.’ He pointed to the statue with the exposed face.

‘There is more than terror there.’

‘There is desire.’ Crowe spat the words. It enraged him to look upon the desecration of sacred art. But knowing the enemy would be a tactical advantage. ‘The Dark Prince,’ he said.

‘And so the initiative is ours,’ Sendrax said. ‘They do not expect us, or do not know us, to announce themselves so boldly.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Crowe.

‘You disagree?’

‘Much was hidden from the Prognosticars. This concerns me.’

‘Then let us purge that concern with flame,’ said Sendrax.

The Cathedral of Martyrdom Embraced was at the other end of Egeta to the Lord Governor’s palace. Leaning against the parapet of the cathedral’s highest spire, Rannoch could just make out the towers of the palace. The two monuments were built on the summits of low hills, with the entirety of the city’s administrative and hab sectors between them. Egeta’s population was a mere ten million. Outside its walls were the endless plains of Sandava II’s primary land mass, their bounty tilled by millions of serfs on horizon-spanning collective farms. The harvest days would soon be here, and after them the burning of the stubble. There would be fire and smoke in the distance then. At night, Rannoch would see the flickering orange of an ocean of flame extending to infinity.

A glorious sight.

A sight that found its spiritual form in the goal he had set for himself. The fires of faith would blanket Sandava II. Nothing would stand in the way of Rannoch accomplishing this sacred task.

Nothing and no one.

He had observed Vendruhn’s reaction in the throne room. Her father was slow to understand too, but Rannoch thought the Lord Governor had received an instructive religious shock when he had seen the mask. Indeed, the relic seemed to have grown stronger since Rannoch had first set eyes on it. Its impact on viewers was more pronounced and immediate. It had not, though, had the same effect on Vendruhn. She had turned her face from it.

Rannoch could not imagine a clearer sign of incipient heresy. Vendruhn could not even bring herself to gaze on sacredness. And now she proposed to guard it against the unruliness of the people? Rannoch had agreed to all her security measures only because he knew it was the people who would defend the mask against her. Let the general deploy her troops. They would see the truth, and know how they should act.

But some might not, Rannoch thought. There might be others like Vendruhn, others who had fallen from the Emperor’s light. They would try to work against the glory the mask would spread.

Rannoch looked down the height of the spire to the streets and squares of Egeta, hundreds of yards below. They were filled. A vast current of citizens ran towards the cathedral. The news he had announced a few hours earlier had raced across the city. The people were coming to worship. The faith of Sandava II was already aflame, and the witnessing of the mask had not yet begun.

Rannoch should have felt joy. This was what he wanted. This was what he had foreseen.

And yet…

He eyed the militia formations in position along the main avenues, controlling major intersections, arriving by Chimera to the cathedral’s parvis. His chest tightened. His throat became parched. Anger buried elation. Suspicion and worry bloomed. He knew to watch the soldiers. By their uniforms, he would know one possible source of threat, however small the number of apostates might be.

But what of the people? What of the hundreds of thousands soon to flow through the nave? How many of them would be there under false pretences? Very few, certainly. But a few mattered. Even one could matter. He could not watch them all.

Unless he could see into their souls, he could not trust any.

Down inside the cathedral, waiting on the central altar, mounted on a jewel-encrusted bronze stand, was a reliquary. Rannoch’s original intent had been to place the mask there. It would be protected by the reliquary’s stasis field, and it would be on high and illuminated for all to see. It would be safe enough.

Safe enough is not good enough.

No stasis field was impregnable. The reliquary was not indestructible. He could not place his faith in it any more than he could be certain of every person who entered the cathedral.

He felt the reassuring weight of the mask in the folds of his vestments. The thought of its absence was intolerable.

He could trust no one absolutely. He could only rely on himself. It was, after all, to him the will of the Emperor had entrusted the relic.

The solution was clear. Rannoch started to laugh. He shook his head at how blind he had been. ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered to the mask, vowing to do better. Then he laughed again, because with the solution his joy had returned.

If he could only trust himself, then he would keep the mask. He would be the means by which the people beheld its glory.

He would wear the mask.

He would wear it, and he would preach. It would be as if the mask itself were speaking to the congregation. Rannoch shivered as he thought of the inspiration that would take him when he dared to become one with the holy. When he would look through the eyes of the mask.

Worries of safety and risk evaporated. He knew he would be a guardian infinitely surer than a simple stasis field. He had proven that on the Envoy of Discipline. He would know what to do, no matter what challenge arose. He would know what to do, and he would have the power to do it.

He pulled the mask into the light. He held it before him. It dazzled him with golds and reds, blessed by the setting sun. Rannoch stared at the face for a long time. It had new meaning for him. Those features were going to be his. This would be his face.

His fingers trembled as he turned the mask around. For the first time, he looked at its interior. His eyes ran over the contours that would meet his own. There were no jewels here. The inside of the mask was perfect in its simplicity. It was golden flesh.

He brought the mask towards his face. The eye holes grew larger. The world appeared through them. Already, it seemed brighter, richer. A violet luminosity suffused the evening.

Rannoch took his last unfettered breath. Then he donned the mask.

The two boarding torpedoes cut through the hull of the Envoy of Discipline. Perhaps what Crowe had seen was true, and the hull had breathed. But it was still metal, and it shrieked as the drill-heads ripped it apart. The torpedoes struck within yards of each other. Gavallan had ordered a unified strike. They stabbed through the freighter’s superstructure at the level of the bridge.

The hatches slammed open. Eleven Purifiers burst into the corridor of the tainted ship. The atmosphere was thick. It had become a miasma of heady scents and pheromones. Crowe snorted in disgust. The air crackled. As he marched behind Gavallan, the clinging mist recoiled from the presence of the Purifiers. Crowe perceived the ugliness in the warp’s current. The immaterium had settled into cracks in the real. It festered, dissolving the materium’s coherence. But as he walked, the current flowed again. His anger burned the turbidity away. The filth that had come with the warp flinched away from him.

The corridor was a wide one. There was room for the Purifiers to advance two abreast. Gavallan had the lead. He was several paces ahead of the squads. Any closer, and the effect of the Blade of Antwyr would have been too strong. The Purifiers would have to devote too much spiritual energy to warding off its attacks.

Sendrax and Crowe’s other battle-brothers all wore power armour. Only Gavallan and Crowe wore the stronger artificer armour. Crowe had earned his plate through feats of battle, but he understood now that the judgement which had found him worthy of this sacred armour was the same that had chosen him as the future Warden of the Blade. The dark honour had been prepared for him for many years. Perhaps decades.

So why has the castellan spoken to you of it now? he asked himself. Why now?

Because he is dying.

Gavallan’s stride was strong. He showed no outward signs of weakness. But each time Crowe had seen him on the journey to Dierna, he had noted the deepening grey in Gavallan’s face, and the eyes receding further and further into the skull. The Blade had consumed him. Gavallan needed to know Crowe was ready for his task, because the castellan could foresee his end.

You will not guard me, Antwyr snarled. You will be mine.

The sword had been directing more and more of its attention Crowe’s way. Its attacks were more pointed, more ferocious. It saw what was coming too. Its work on Gavallan was nearly done. It sought to groom Crowe.

It would fail.

The corridor was adorned with tapestries. They had all been transformed. The trace of their original subjects was there, just enough for the full extent of the blasphemy wrought to be seen. Ceremonies had become orgies. Scenes of triumph were now celebrations of atrocity, their heroes convulsed in deformity, limbs elongated, serpentine in elegance, writhing sensually in blood. The weave of the tapestries had changed, too. It pulsed like worms and flesh. The tapestries billowed in an absent wind.

Ahead, the doors to the bridge were open.

‘The enemy must know we’re here,’ said Drake. ‘Where are they?’

‘They run in terror before our approach,’ Carac said. ‘Where is our battle?’ The Purifier spoke half in jest, though Crowe heard his impatience to be in the fight.

The emptiness of the hall was odd. ‘Have patience, brothers,’ Crowe said. You especially, Carac, he thought. ‘The foe will come.’

But why not here? The ship was heavily corrupted. Crowe had expected the corridors to be infested. And why would the daemons leave a clear access to the bridge?

The Purifiers passed through the doorway. Beyond it, atrocity waited. There were still functioning work stations on the bridge. The space had not been so tainted that it could no longer function at all, and the Envoy of Discipline could be guided towards a target. But what remained was surrounded by madness. The walls and vaulted ceiling were painted in blood and viscera. Enormous runes covered the original artwork. They were angular, twisted things that clawed the mind and stroked the senses to raw, hideous arousal.

At the front of the bridge rose a mound of wreckage. On its summit and around its periphery were metal crosses. Crew and servitors had been crucified and decapitated. Their lifeless, deathless bodies twisted in an endless fugue of pain.

Gavallan stopped before the mound. ‘The doors were open,’ he said, ‘so we would see this. The enemy is proud of its work. It desires witnesses.’ His voice ground out of his helm’s grille with stony anger. ‘Well, we have witnessed. Purge this obscenity from our sight.’

Ruluf from Sendrax’s squad and Destrian stepped forwards with their incinerators. Blessed promethium and sacred oils ignited in a stream of blazing white purity. Deliverance washed over the twitching bodies. The crucifixions became a pyre.

Crowe turned from the fire, watching the flow of the warp, scanning for a sign of attack. The currents were accelerating, clashing with greater violence.

‘You sense something, brother?’ Gavallan asked.

‘Yes. The turbulence of the warp is increasing.’

‘Where?’ Sendrax asked.

‘At both exits,’ said Crowe. The Grey Knights had entered from the starboard side. The port doorway was wide open too.

‘They think to trap us,’ said Drake.

The squads took up positions in the centre of the bridge, facing the doorways, ready not to defend, but to take the offensive and charge.

‘What are your orders, castellan?’ Sendrax asked.

Before Gavallan answered, Crowe said, ‘This is a poor trap. Our foe was not ready for us.’

‘What do you mean?’ Gavallan asked.

‘The turbulence of the warp is only reaching an intensity foretelling an attack now.’ He waved a hand at the pyre. ‘That display could have waited for centuries for eyes to see it. It required very little energy. To come at us, the enemy has had to gather its strength. Yet the entire structure of the ship has been corrupted.’

‘What do you conclude?’

‘That the initial spread of the taint consumed a great deal of energy. There is something missing. The true power behind this corruption is no longer here. We will be fighting its potent traces.’

Gavallan nodded. ‘Then we must learn where it has gone.’

‘Navigation records would prove useful,’ said Sendrax.

Doran glanced at the tainted work stations and said, ‘We will not find that information here.’

‘We will make for the captain’s quarters,’ said Gavallan.

The currents darkened in Crowe’s sight. A storm was coming. ‘Prepare!’ he called.

And the Blade lashed into his mind. Think what you will do when you wield me. End the husk that guards me. Bring the stars to heel.

The sword laughed. It laughed with a terrible triumph, as if delighted by the progress of a game only it understood. The laughter was a psychic blow, a razor’s slash across the soul. Crowe stood against it, felt the strike snap against the stone of his resolve. But he saw the tension vibrate through his brothers. He saw Gavallan shift his stance as if to steady himself. He saw that mark of pain.

And as the sword laughed, the taint on the Envoy of Discipline found its strength. From port and starboard came the thunder of hooves and the hammering of claws. The daemons had arrived, howling with pleasure. The doorways filled with a rush of monstrosities.

And still the sword laughed.

From the roof hatch of her command Chimera, Vendruhn watched the pilgrimage become a celebration, and the celebration move towards something else, something larger and wilder.

‘Hauk,’ she voxed the captain stationed inside the Cathedral of Martyrdom Embraced, ‘how are things going?’

There was no answer.

‘Hauk,’ she called again. ‘Give us your evaluation.’

She waited a few seconds, eyeing the flow of the crowd. The Sandava II Militia had set up a corridor down which to channel the arriving faithful. It led from the principal avenues of Egeta, directly to the northern door of the west-facing cathedral. Troops and Chimeras divided the parvis, keeping the flow organised and funnelled into the door. What Vendruhn envisaged was the orderly procession of people entering the cathedral, walking past the relic, capturing their brief glimpse of it, then filing back out.

The problem was, the people who emerged from the church were slow to leave. They milled about, gazing longingly at the doorway as if they might try to push their way back in. The crowd grew larger by the second. Its songs of praise had been a confused mix at first, but now were blending into one. Vendruhn did not recognise the hymn, which surprised her. She thought she knew all the great religious songs of her world. This one was more ecstatic than any she had heard before, its chorus approaching an ululating frenzy. She could not make out the words. That made her uneasy. She felt as though she were on the shore of an ocean of mouths, and the song was the pounding of a chanting, inhuman surf.

Up and down the militia lines, Vendruhn’s soldiers shifted uncomfortably, stared at the singing crowd and adjusted their grips on their weapons. Like her, they were not feeling inspired to join in. If this was what Rannoch and his relic were inspiring, it did not feel like the faith Vendruhn knew. Where was the discipline? Where was the self-abasement? Where were the promises of judgement on the heretic?

Where were any words she knew?

She had to quell an impulse to order the militia to open fire. She recognised the desire came from her personal revulsion. She would be acting for her own satisfaction, rather than the dictates of duty. But she could not pretend the celebration was unrolling as it should.

‘Hauk!’ she said again, barking the name.

This time there was an answer. ‘General,’ Hauk said. He sounded frayed. ‘I’m sorry… I... What did…’ He spoke as if forming words was an intolerable effort, and something else had a firm hold on his attention.

‘Captain,’ she said, ‘you will tell me what is going on in there.’

A pause. Then, ‘General… I don’t know how… The cardinal is wearing the mask…’

What? Vendruhn thought.

‘He is preaching… Oh, general, if you could see…’ He broke down in sobs.

‘Hauk,’ Vendruhn said. ‘You will take command of–’

The captain’s vox transmission cut off suddenly, interrupting her. She switched to an open channel. ‘To any troops stationed in the cathedral, this is General Glas. Respond immediately.’

No one did.

Vendruhn looked at the people streaming out of the north door again. As the song grew louder, the people emerged with less reluctance. They ran to join the choir. They added their voices, and the music swirled upwards, a coiling exultation wrapping around the cathedral’s spires. Every person singing knew the words, if indeed those syllables were words. Vendruhn still could not understand any of it. The greater the energy of the congregation became, the more she felt revolted by the sound. A pulse of hatred beat at the base of her skull.

She had deployed some infantry squads to aid in the dispersal of the crowd. They were being overwhelmed by the numbers. Some people were leaving, but they brought the song with them, and it was spreading beyond the parvis.

‘End access to the cathedral,’ Vendruhn voxed. ‘Seal the doors and block them. No one goes inside.’ She thought for a moment, then ordered the solders on the avenue to stop the pilgrimage.

‘How should we meet resistance?’ Captain Lehnert voxed, his way of reminding his general of the inevitable.

Vendruhn hesitated. She was poised on the edge of an irrevocable decision. She was one order away from entering into open conflict with the Ecclesiarchy. She knew in her soul that Rannoch’s celebration had turned into something deeply wrong, but she did not yet have undeniable proof. Was there any chance she was mistaken?

The song ratcheted up in intensity. The pilgrims ran from the south doors, screaming their mad praise.

At the north door, the people were pushing forwards, trying to force past the soldiers blocking their way.

‘Use deadly force,’ Vendruhn told Lehnert. She repeated her order for all the companies to hear. ‘If there is resistance, open fire.’

She was unsurprised by how easily the order came. She felt something like satisfaction. Rannoch had disturbed the good order of Sandava II, and she was ready to punish those who followed him.

The flow of the crowd into the parvis slowed, but did not stop. The numbers kept growing. The people who were denied entry to the cathedral ceased to push as hard. They were starting to react with unease to the song of the others. Those rushing outside were even more frenzied. They were tearing at their hair and clothes as they sang.

‘Block the exit!’ Vendruhn voxed. ‘Let no one out!’ She would deal with those trapped inside later. Right now, she had to stop the stream and isolate the elements of the crowd.

At the back of her mind, the thought took shape that she might have to burn the cathedral.

‘Gunner,’ she shouted down the hatch of the Chimera, ‘aim our turret at the south door.’ They were less than a hundred feet from the target. She prepared herself to order a slaughter.

But then it was too late. It was all too late. The people were not tearing their hair any longer. They were tearing their faces. Tearing them with joy.

And still they were singing.

Chapter Four

SYMMETRIES OF FLAME

The daemonic horde was an ecstasy of limbs and claws. Fiends of Slaanesh charged with animalistic abandon, flailing at the Grey Knights with hooves and teeth and talons, their hooting song a mad invitation to obscenity. Between them the daemonettes danced. They darted their long limbs between the fiends, pincers snapping at gorgets, the razored edges seeking to cut through exposed seams. Others used whips that could slice through plasteel. Their lashing scored armour, each hit cutting a little deeper into adamantium and layers of ablative ceramite. In the first moment of the battle, the abominations attacked with the promise of sensation beyond name. They offered the enforced joys of blood and pain. They would not be refused. They could not conceive of refusal.

But as they closed with the Purifiers, the pain they encountered was their own.

An explosion of storm bolter fire punched through the horde, blowing gaping holes in torsos, shattering limbs and exploding skulls. Daemons fell to the deck, their ruined bodies thrashing as they lost form. The ones that made it through the hail of sanctified shells ran into a different sort of fire. There was the flame of Destrian and Ruluf’s incinerators, jetting outwards on both sides of the Grey Knights phalanx, burning flesh that was not flesh, filling the air of the bridge with the stench of madness turned to ash. And there was another fire, a greater one. It did not come from weapons, nor indeed from any material device. It came from weaponised souls. It was the fire of purity itself. Crowe felt the collective spiritual strength of his brothers. The squads lit up the psychic space of the bridge. The fire in his heart burned with an even greater fury, and he met the daemons’ assault with his anger. He sliced a blow through a warp-spawned whip, and a daemonette and fiend recoiled from the great sweep of his blade, shrieking as they burned even before the sword cut them in half.

A ripple of pain and surprise knocked the daemons back. Then they surged forwards once more, their songs now filled with rage, but still shaped by the lure of extremity. They would bring sensation to the Purifiers. They would force them to know the furthest limits of what the flesh could experience.

The Grey Knights moved forwards down the centre of the bridge, a sword blade slicing through the daemonic mob. Gavallan led the way towards the rear, where steps rose to the captain’s pulpit. He slashed back and forth before him with his Nemesis blade, firing bursts with his storm bolter at the same time. He created a scythe of flashing blue light and exploding shells. The daemons fell, and the narrow stairs on the starboard side of the pulpit were cleared. The Purifiers raced to the upper level of the bridge. Behind the pulpit and the command throne, the walls curved inwards, narrowing the chamber. A doorway at the rear opened onto a passageway running towards the stern.

The daemons leapt upwards, a cataract of white and pink and mottled blue rushing against gravity. In seconds, they surrounded the Grey Knights once more, a monstrous, howling crush. The stench of excess was overwhelming. Crowe responded with greater fury, hacking limbs apart, scorching the taint from the air with bolter fire. Gavallan was only a few paces ahead, but the daemons clustered around him with ferocious intent. They were trying to isolate him from the rest of the phalanx. They reached for the chains holding Antwyr to Gavallan’s back. Whips lashed at the links.

The Black Blade’s laughter had given way to rage again. A stream of unholy curses reached into Crowe’s mind. Antwyr sought to fray the thoughts of the Grey Knights.

This will be your burden, Crowe told himself. This will be what you will guard your brothers against.

The greatest warrior of the Purifiers must fight alone.

At this moment, the champion of the brotherhood was doing just that. But he did not need to. He had served well, and as his strength began to fail, Crowe would be at his side. In this rare juncture of time, the champion had an heir, and so could have a brother to lend him support.

‘Castellan!’ Crowe called over the vox. ‘I am your right arm.’ He cut another fiend in half and lunged forwards. He was a few paces ahead of the rest of his squad. That was enough for the daemons to force their way into the gap. Crowe’s brothers read the purpose of his actions. They formed up tighter and hit the daemons with more concentrated fire. Gavallan was now only a yard ahead. Crowe lunged again, burning with faith and the need to stand with the Warden. The daemons burned in their turn. They shrieked as he hurled himself through them, their hides and limbs flashing white at his approach. He was a Knight of the Flame, and the abominations felt the blow of his sacred wrath.

Gavallan was now halfway to the exit, and Crowe’s path to his side was clear. The castellan’s helmeted head turned back to look at him, and in that gesture, Crowe saw both thanks and exhaustion.

Crowe took another step. His heavy boots rang hard against the deck. Then the metal stopped ringing. He felt his boots sink, and he looked down. The deck had given way in a circle two yards wide. The edges of the hole were lined with curved teeth as long as Crowe’s hand. The daemonic mouth gnashed in hunger.

Crowe dropped down, down into the monster’s howling maw. Instead of a tongue, there was a spinning shaft of bone. Its length was a whirl of blades. Teeth lined the walls of the throat. As Crowe fell, the blades and teeth bit into him on both sides. It was a slashing, battering, grinding assault, and the mouth howled and howled and howled, the noise deafening him to all other sounds. For several seconds, he was aware of nothing but the sensation of being devoured by bone and steel, and of a hunger screaming for his blood and the taste of his pain. Curved, ivory spikes snapped against him. Some cut deep into his armour before they shattered. He was bleeding. The teeth and blades were slicing through the joints of his armour.

He had been falling for less than two seconds.

Crowe fought through the pummelling confusion of the blows. He brought his hands together on the hilt of his sword. He swung towards the spinning blades. The sword smashed through the whirling butchery and sank its edge into the bony spine. Ichorous marrow spewed over Crowe. The howls turned into gargling shrieks of agony, a giant of myth choking on a dagger.

Crowe dropped a few more feet, dragging the wound open, cutting deeper and longer. In the pain he inflicted on the beast, he found his centre, and though teeth and blades still flailed at him, he was on the offensive now. He hauled down and at an angle with his sword. It was anchored far into the bone, and gave him leverage. He kicked forwards, into the slashing blades. They chopped at ceramite, but the ceramite was stronger in the end, and it was reinforced by blessings and the incandescence of purity. The savaging bone disintegrated. Crowe dug his feet against the turning shaft. The discs of the blades ground and bit and broke. He arrested his fall, shoving his sword deeper, and fired a burst with his storm bolter.

The shaft snapped in two. The scream of the beast tore the air into crystal shards. Ichor flooded its maw. The spinning stopped, and the bony structure of the blades began to crumble. The walls of the throat closed in. The movement was convulsive, involuntary, yet the constricting teeth sought to sever Crowe’s limbs and crush his chest.

He yanked his sword free, straining against the walls of fleshy, porous metal. He had been falling. Now he could barely move. But the daemonic body could not stay in contact with him. The monster kept twitching, its agonised throes becoming more and more pronounced. His very presence was destroying the flesh of this horror. There was no hunger in its howl any longer. There was pain and incomprehension that sensation could be turned against it, and there was failing, falling, dying anger.

Crowe climbed. He kicked and stamped on bone and metal. He sawed back and forth with the sword. He rose slowly, fighting for every inch against the crushing, collapsing mass. The monster’s cry was still so loud it was the only thing he could hear. The vox was a distant, sporadic crackle. He could make out no voices. He had been in the jaws of the beast for less than a minute, but seconds could be eternal in battle, and he had no way of knowing the state of the struggle.

He looked up. There were faint glimmers above him. A suggestion of the maw opening and closing, a hint of the space beyond and the flash of gunfire. He struggled harder, feeling the pressure of the entire hull ready to fall against him the moment the daemonic throat passed from its existence in the materium. He sawed and kicked and fired upwards through the gnashing teeth. Metal and bone and ivory shards rattled against his helm. He climbed, the ragged opening above now closing for seconds at a time, each wince of pain growing longer.

But the fire of purity was too much for the daemon. Even as the horror lost coherence, its fading instincts rejected the cause of its pain. The collapse beneath accelerated, its spine shattering into splinters. Ichor rose around Crowe’s legs, then his chest, as if the daemon might drown him yet.

It failed. Crowe erupted from the jaws. Scorched, disintegrating daemonflesh filled the space of the bridge with oily fumes. A group of daemonettes had clustered around the jaws, and they wrapped their whips around Crowe the moment he emerged. Crowe turned sharply, letting the coils draw tighter for a moment, before sweeping his Nemesis blade in a wide arc and firing his storm bolter. The daemonettes found themselves bound to him by their whips. His shells hit them at point-blank range as his blade sliced through their torsos. Their wails joined the monster’s before being overwhelmed by the blasts of his storm bolter. Then the abominations fell.

The opening in the deck slumped in on itself. The bridge shuddered as the animating force departed. The flesh was gone. Only metal wreckage remained.

In the moment of relative quiet, as he tore away the tangling whips, Crowe understood the implications of what had happened. The daemonettes had been waiting for him. The abominations had wanted to ensure he was destroyed. They had not been willing to count on the pit of blades and teeth to be his doom. The Ruinous Powers were paying close attention to him. They saw him as a particular threat.

He would pray on this later.

Crowe turned towards the exit. In the time he had been caught in the maw, the battle had moved into the corridor beyond. At the far end, holy and unholy light clashed. Impacts shook the walls. He could hear his brothers on the vox. Gavallan was shouting his name.

‘I am here, castellan,’ Crowe replied.

‘I am glad of it,’ Gavallan said. He sounded hard-pressed.

Crowe pounded out of the bridge, roaring. He held his sword aloft with his left hand. With his right, he unleashed a long burst of shells into the back of the daemonic horde. ‘I am the hammer of the Emperor!’ he raged. ‘I am the edge of His sword!’

He was the storm.

The daemons attacking Sendrax’s squad turned in confusion. Crowe was but one warrior, yet in this hall, the daemons now found themselves caught in a vice. They had thought to kill the Grey Knights by trapping them between the crush of their forces. Instead, Crowe attacked their rear flank like a battering ram.

The shells hit the daemons. Then Crowe did. He drove through a maelstrom of exploding flesh and thrashing limbs. The daemons were too crowded. They could not reorient their attack quickly or easily, and the storm of mass-reactive death had smashed a wedge through the bodies before Crowe. The abominations’ revels turned into a frantic scramble of collisions. Then Crowe was in their midst, still firing, slashing bodies apart with quick, furious sweeps of his sword. Back and forth, back and forth, an arc of purifying energy scorching and severing all it touched. The songs of the daemonettes and the mindless whistling of the fiends became a cacophony of confused distress.

‘Our brother has cut off the daemons’ retreat,’ Sendrax voxed. He had entered the spirit of Crowe’s actions. The Grey Knights were now on the offensive. It was the daemons that had fallen into a trap. ‘Let us honour his foresight. Leave none standing between us!’

Hooves and jaws and pincers and whips struck Crowe from all sides. Every monster that attacked him fell in the next moment. Soon he had to stop using his storm bolter. The wall of daemons was thinning before him. If he kept shooting, his shells would start hitting his brother Purifiers.

He was knee-deep in sundered daemonflesh. The screams of the abominations went from distress to despair. They attacked him and burned, attacked him and bled. They failed and failed and failed, and as Crowe closed, step by step, with Sendrax’s squad, they knew their defeat had come. The glories of excess had broken against the implacability of purity. The flame that shrivelled the abominations found its source in Crowe’s supreme cold.

There was nothing the daemons could do. They knew it, and mourned as they met their doom.

Crowe raised his sword over his head with both hands. He brought it down with a snarl. He bisected a fiend from skull to pelvis. The two halves of the body fell away from each other, and beyond them stood Sendrax. He had made his way to the rear of his squad to meet with his brother Knight of the Flame. There were no more daemons in this part of the corridor.

Crowe nodded his greeting. Sendrax clapped him on the pauldron. ‘Let us finish this, then,’ he said.

‘Agreed,’ said Crowe. He ran forwards again, to the last of the fighting. The final concentration of daemons had split in two. The largest number were throwing themselves at his squad. The fought with a viciousness that was almost sacrificial. They were doing everything they could to hold the Purifiers back while the smaller group of daemons tried to bring down Gavallan. The terrible music of Slaanesh was loud as the daemons fought the squad. It was louder still around Gavallan. It was a frenzied answer to the Black Blade. The sword’s curses grew in Crowe’s mind as he closed with the struggle. There was little sense to the litany of rage. It was instead a song in its own right, a rhythm of fury that rose and fell and twined around the calls of the daemons. Crowe heard no promise or explicit summons. Antwyr was luring the daemons through its being, and nothing else.

It does not seek to fall into their possession, Crowe thought. It will use their presence to engineer its escape. Nothing more.

He was learning, he realised. He was learning to read the stratagems of the foul relic. That was how he would keep his guard strong. He could not rely on chains and physical strength to hold the Blade prisoner.

Ruluf ran with him. ‘I will aid your passage, Knight of the Flame,’ he said. As they came up behind the squad, Ruluf aimed his incinerator high and launched an arcing stream of fire over the heads of the Grey Knights and onto the daemons. Destrian followed his example. The abominations turned into a writhing blaze. They did not let up their attack, but their blows were crazed and blind.

‘Let me pass,’ Crowe ordered. His brothers parted left and right, still pouring shells into the foe. Crowe charged between the Purifiers. He had said he would be Gavallan’s right arm. He had not yet fulfilled his vow.

He plunged into fire, meeting it with the flame of his soul. The warp jerked around him, like an animal stabbed through the heart. The daemons cried out. They tried to stop him. He burst through their bodies, shrouded by a red-flamed conflagration, rivers of ichor baking onto his armour. He left the burning mass behind for his brothers to finish off. He rushed across the final gap between him and Gavallan’s attackers.

Antwyr screamed at the cosmos.

Gavallan’s breath on the vox was heavy and ragged.

Crowe hit the abominations from the right. He was an extension of the castellan’s blows. He was his champion’s weapon. He smashed a daemonette to one side hard enough to shatter the creature’s pincers. He made a murderous diagonal slash with his sword, and another fiend collapsed, its spine broken, its flesh ruined and left pooling on the deck.

Gavallan responded by slicing right with his own blade. He brought down another daemonette. The castellan’s breath sounded an explosive hah! It was an exclamation of triumph and exhaustion. He was a warrior finding a burst of energy at the point of collapse. He slashed and shot the daemons with renewed fervour. Crowe matched him blow for blow.

‘I am the hammer,’ said Crowe, once again reciting the war-cry of the Grey Knights as he hacked a fiend’s jaw in two.

‘I am the right hand of the Emperor,’ Gavallan answered, his voice hoarse, but growing stronger.

‘The instrument of His will,’ said Crowe.

‘The gauntlet about His fist.’

‘The tip of His spear.’

‘The edge of His sword!’

As they finished the war-cry, they finished the daemons. The flagstones of the hall were awash with a thick sludge. The daemonic bodies merged with each other as they lost form. The stench of dissipating monstrosities was foul.

Crowe ran his eyes over the walls of the corridor. The flow of the immaterium quivered and streaked. The ship was as tainted as ever – the Envoy of Discipline could not be redeemed – but the energy behind the corruption had weakened. The vessel was less of a trap now. It was more like a rotting corpse.

‘Is there another attack gathering?’ Gavallan asked.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Crowe. The immaterial river was not growing violent again. The atmosphere seemed lessened, drained. It confirmed his earlier impression. ‘The source of the taint has left the ship,’ he said. The daemonic assault had been the work of a residue. The true voice was gone.

‘Then we must pursue it, learn its nature and destroy it,’ said Gavallan. He had been leaning on his sword. He straightened now and marched onwards.

Crowe was struck by a parallel he wished he could dismiss. Gavallan, like the force aboard the ship, had lost something essential. His strength was being drained, and it could not be replaced. The castellan was becoming a shell.

They found the captain’s quarters a hundred feet further down the hall. The door was open. Inside, the chamber was a ruin. The wreckage of a desk, chairs, shelves and cabinets littered the floor. The tattered shreds of tapestries hung on the walls like flaps of skin. A large shrine had been overturned and smashed. Chunks of stone were scattered before the rubble of marble like a spray of petrified blood.

An unnameable thing crouched amid the debris. The rags of a uniform clung to its limbs. They were the only sign that the daemon had burst from a human frame. The monster was twice the height of a mortal. Its many limbs were the dirty grey of neglected tombstones. They ended in half-formed pincers and claws. One turned into a spur of bone four feet long. Its head was a sunken horror of fleshy horns surrounding a misshapen skull. It had fallen to its knees, but when it saw the Purifiers, it tried to rise. It failed, and scrabbled forwards instead. Its joints made brittle clicks. Its jaw opened in frustrated hate. A hissing wind emerged from its throat, foetid, a last breath held in for far too long.

Gavallan shot the daemon. Storm bolter shells exploded through its chest. The thing gaped at the hole in its midsection. Crowe could see through the body to the wall beyond.

The daemon whined, long and high, the piping of a splintered flute. Two long notes formed the beginning of an unholy song. They faded to silence before there was a third. The daemon collapsed in on itself, a crumpling husk. Soon there was nothing left but dry fragments resembling a carpet of insect bodies.

‘A poor foe,’ said Carac, sounding disappointed, still burning to send more daemonkind to oblivion.

‘It had been weakened,’ Crowe replied. ‘And it was incomplete. Did you not recognise the form?’ The creature had been an approximation of a greater daemon of the Dark Prince.

‘I did,’ said Carac. ‘It must have put too much of itself into its foul art.’ He made a sweeping gesture, taking in the entirety of the altered ship.

Crowe shook his head. ‘No. This was a remnant, constructed from the energies left behind when the source departed. We have been fighting the echo of the real foe.’

Gavallan pointed to the wreckage. ‘The Emperor grant we find evidence of where the threat has gone, then.’ He withdrew from the chamber, taking with him the dangerous, whispering blade chained to his back. He headed back down the hall in the direction of the bridge. The snarls of Antwyr faded as the castellan put some distance between himself and the squads.

‘You’re right, brother,’ Carac said. ‘My thoughts were clouded.’

‘That is to be expected,’ said Crowe. He turned to the remains of the desk. Sheets of vellum and cracked data-slates lay mixed with the debris. He saw faint ripples of the warp over the parchment. Fate lurked here somewhere, contained in the most mundane objects.

The search began. Beneath a relatively intact slab of wood from the surface of the desk, Crowe found a data-slate that still functioned. He scrolled through its contents. It was an inventory of the Envoy’s relics. Crowe ran his eye down the columns of names and descriptions. He saw nothing anomalous until he reached the entry for a funerary mask. Its presumed origin had been revised and questioned. More interesting was the red icon that had been appended to the entry in the last few days.

‘A relic of unknown origin went missing recently,’ Crowe said.

‘That is too suggestive to be a coincidence,’ said Sendrax.

‘Agreed.’

A few minutes later, Doran found the captain’s log. Many of the pages were torn, but the most recent entries were still present. He held the book in his right arm, a bionic prosthetic. The log was dwarfed by his metal hand.

‘The last port of call before Dierna was Sandava II,’ Doran announced.

Sandava, Crowe thought. The other name he had read aloud from Gavallan’s transcriptions. He joined Sendrax’s squad brother and looked at the record. ‘Not long before the mask was listed as missing,’ he said. He voxed Gavallan. ‘Castellan,’ he said, ‘we have picked up the scent of our quarry.’ The certainty he felt was matched by his unease at the sense of an indefinable trap closing.

‘Where?’ Gavallan asked.

‘Sandava II.’

‘Ah,’ said Gavallan. He did not sound surprised. He sounded resigned.

The trail was too easy to find, Crowe thought. We have stopped nothing. The Grey Knights were being lured onwards. Yet there was no choice but to follow this path.

Chapter Five

THE COLD MIRACLE

There were monsters on the road ahead. They gambolled towards the lead Chimera, their song of sensuous pain bouncing off the hab façades. More creatures raced alongside the retreating armoured column. Still more were coming up behind, spilling from side streets, leaping from windows and doorways, a growing flood of grotesqueries, things that Vendruhn dared not look at for any longer than it took to aim the heavy bolter. She fired in long bursts, always rotating, never letting her gaze rest. She saw the street in a blur of unholy flesh and fire. She would not stare. She sensed the danger of paralysing terror, and she sensed the even graver risk of fascination.

She would not be lured. She would not fall.

She was still holding at bay the word that defined these monsters. She was not ready to take on the implications of daemon.

There were almost a dozen vehicles in the column, brought together from fallen units across the cathedral district. The transports had left behind any infantry not already on board. There had been no choice. The horrors were too many, too fast, too strong. In the first few minutes of the frenzy, when the worshippers pouring from the cathedral had revealed themselves to be maddened heretics, Vendruhn had thought perhaps she could regain control of the situation. But then the transformations had begun. A plague of abominations had torn the militia formations apart. There had been no chance to regroup. Perhaps, if the troops could have retaliated in strength, they might have resisted, but chaos had engulfed the district. The entire sector had to be abandoned. The best she could hope for now was to salvage something from the retreat.

The Rybas river cut Egeta in half from north to south. Vendruhn had ordered all the bridges demolished. Her column was rushing for the last one. Make it across, she thought. Less than a mile. Make it across and we’ll fight back.

‘General…’ The voice on the vox was hard to recognise. It was cracking with strains Vendruhn was forcing herself not to imagine.

‘Siedler?’ she said. That couldn’t be the colonel.

‘General, I’m sorry…’

The Chimera swerved to avoid one of the things with hooves and horns. The sudden jerk almost threw Vendruhn from the turret hatch. The left corner of the hull sideswiped the beast, crushing one of its legs. It seized the Chimera and began to climb on top. Vendruhn recovered her balance and spun the heavy bolter to face the abomination. She held the trigger down until the shells had turned the thing into a mist of ichor.

‘Danek!’ she yelled. ‘Drive straight! Run them down! Don’t look at them!’

She couldn’t hear Danek’s answer, but the engine roared louder and the Chimera leapt ahead, as if the machine itself were desperate to reach the bridge.

‘Siedler,’ Vendruhn said, ‘where are you?’ The colonel had been charged with controlling the pilgrim movements in the northern sector. ‘Have you blown the bridge?’

‘It’s gone,’ Siedler said. ‘We had to destroy it before we crossed it. We’re trapped.’ Gunfire rattled in the background. ‘We can’t break through. We…’ Her voice cracked. When she spoke again, she wasn’t speaking as a colonel, but Vendruhn’s friend, desperate and breaking before the horror that confronted her. ‘Vendruhn,’ she said, ‘what are they?’

‘Our enemy, Hansa.’ Vendruhn stared too long at one of the lithe creatures as it danced towards the column. The sinuosity of its movements reached into her soul. She gunned the monster down, looking away before she was done. The thing was dangerous even in defeat. Its mere existence was a threat.

‘Just another enemy,’ she lied.

‘No,’ said Siedler. ‘They’re more than that.’ She let out a long, tearing howl.

Vendruhn winced. She had fought alongside Siedler her entire military life. They had saved each other’s lives more than once. Vendruhn trusted Siedler like she trusted no other officer. She believed in her as she believed in the necessity of the Glas dynasty’s rule of Sandava II. Siedler was a rock. She was unwavering in her devotion to the Emperor.

But she howled, and Vendruhn heard the terminal agony of her soul. The wail did not stop. It seemed it would rip the vox apart. Vendruhn shouted too, and fired a continuous burst from flank to front to flank. She could have closed that vox-channel. She did not. She bore witness with her comrade as long as she could.

The gunfire on Siedler’s end ceased. The scream went on. It changed. It became both rougher and more musical. It transformed into a singing, mocking laughter. It was no longer human, though it knew humans. It knew their hungers and their weaknesses intimately.

Vendruhn killed the feed.

Siedler had fallen. She had given way to the unholy. Vendruhn had seen how the monsters manifested themselves. They burst out of, or transformed, humans. That was the fate that had taken Siedler.

If she can fall, any of us can.

No. No. I will not. Even if everyone else succumbs, I will not.

The truth of her resolution gave Vendruhn strength. It gave her fire. It gave her hate. As she trained the heavy bolter on the enemy, she found that she could look at the monsters now. They terrified her, but they could not touch her spirit. There was triumph in the midst of fear as she blasted the daemons.

She let herself think the word now. She was strong enough in her anger to face it. There was no other name for these things. They were no xenos. They came from beyond the veil of the real. Their existence made a lie of what her faith had taught, and the lie had burst, ravening, from the cathedral.

The Emperor protects, she thought.

Doctrine was wrong, but her belief in the Father of Mankind was unshaken. He was her shield and her wrath. She would kill for Him. The abominations were not invincible. She was cutting them down. With enough power, she could destroy them all.

And so she would. She would save her world, cost be damned.

She would fight without limits. The prospect gave her pleasure, and she shouted with renewed faith as she hammered the road ahead with shells.

The Chimera’s multi-laser fired too, and the barrage at last cleared the way of daemons. Only fifty yards remained before the span of the Cardinal Gandering XI bridge. Danek pushed the engine harder. The Chimera shot forwards.

Vendruhn looked back. The entire column was picking up speed. But so was the flood of horror. More and more and more daemons filled the avenue. Heavy bolters and lascannons could not keep them at bay. The tide was coming to swallow the transports.

The bridge was narrow. It was barely wide enough for a single Chimera. There lay Vendruhn’s hope of escape, of a regrouping, and of a counter-offensive.

The command vehicle swept up onto the bridge. It rumbled over the Rybas. The main turret could no longer fire without hitting another Chimera. Vendruhn still had some targets for the heavy bolter, and she hit them hard, buying her troops a bit more time and space. One vehicle after another reached the bridge. The abominations engulfed the rear transports. No amount of gunfire could keep them off. They clambered onto roofs. They ripped off hatches and side doors. Vendruhn could not see what happened to the soldiers inside. The screams, though, reached her, even this far away.

The wave moved forwards. It claimed another Chimera.

Vendruhn would not be able to save the whole column.

‘Barratz,’ she voxed, ‘are you ready?’

‘Yes, general,’ the sergeant said.

‘Very well. Stand by.’ She watched the rear, unable to help, unable to act. She stopped firing. There were no daemons in her range. There was nothing she could do except choose the moment to give the order.

Her Chimera reached the other side of the five hundred-foot span. Danek pulled it off to the side, next to the embankment wall. Vendruhn climbed out of the hatch to stand on the roof, grabbing as much height as she could. Barratz ran up, detonator in hand. Vendruhn gave the grey-haired sergeant a curt nod. ‘What have you heard about this side of the river?’ she asked without looking away from the progress of the armoured column. The second and third vehicles had reached the western bank.

‘The conflict is still contained to the eastern sector of Egeta, general,’ Barratz said.

‘Good,’ said Vendruhn. Good? she thought. We have lost half the city. How is that good?

We are still fighting. The foulness has not won. That is what is good.

Two more vehicles made it across the bridge. The greater part of the column was through. But the wave of unholy flesh and claws was surging forwards. It was a third of the way over.

Vendruhn hesitated a few more seconds, weighing the moment of sacrifice. Was there time for one more Chimera to reach safety? How many good and loyal troops would she kill with her choice?

She watched the flow of monstrosities. The songs of the daemons drew closer. A madness of sensuous excess was coming for the administrative sector of Egeta. Her flesh prickled, her body anticipating the arrival of infernal vistas of sensation.

The choice was clear. ‘Do it now,’ she said.

Barratz depressed the detonator. A series of explosions rocked the bridge’s supports. Fireballs erupted in the centre of the roadway. The entire structure rose from the water, hurling daemons and vehicles into the air. Then everything fell, disintegrating in a maelstrom of flame and smoke and a white curtain of water. The booms of the explosions and the cracking thunder of shattered stone rolled across the river.

The sound had not faded when Vendruhn spoke into the vox. ‘All artillery units,’ she said, ‘commence fire.’ We have retreated only to punish, she thought.

The barrage was enormous. Every long-range cannon and mortar still in the militia’s control targeted the eastern embankment of the Rybas. The night sky shrieked with the descent of shells. A strip of the city a hundred yards wide, running for miles to the north and south, became a firestorm. Vendruhn felt the beat of terrible hammers shake the ground even on this side of the river. The eastern contours of her city vanished behind a barrier of dark, billowing red and clouds of black smoke. A volcano opened its maw beneath the embankment and unleashed its molten rage.

Scorched earth. This was Vendruhn’s second sacrifice. She mourned the soldiers she had killed on the bridge. They had fought well, done their duty and obeyed her orders faithfully. They had still been following her at the very instant of their deaths. She mourned them, yes, but she was glad of what she had done for them. She had rewarded them, sending them to the Emperor’s side, their souls untainted.

Vendruhn did not mourn the tens of thousands of civilians crushed and incinerated by the bombardment. She had no doubt that many had not yet succumbed to possession. The daemons had been arriving from the epicentre of the heresy, the cathedral. They had only just been reaching the riverside sectors. The civilians would be expiring in terror of the abominations and the shells. Let them burn. They were not fighting to defend their city or their souls. Those who had not reached the cathedral before the pilgrimage had turned into madness would have retreated to cower in their homes. They were not worthy of salvation, either bodily or spiritual. Vendruhn brought them punishment instead.

She would leave nothing standing along the eastern embankment. Let the enemy try to cross the barrier of the shelling. Nothing would pass. She would lay waste to the city until she could muster the force of arms to take it back.

She watched the conflagration of her judgement. Instead of defeat, she tasted grim joy.

‘The Envoy of Discipline is no more,’ Crowe said to Gavallan. The Sacrum Finem had fired torpedoes into it until the engines had ruptured and a plasma explosion had taken the ship. For a few seconds, the Dierna System had gained a second sun.

Gavallan nodded. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘You did not come here simply to tell me that, though, did you?’

‘No,’ Crowe admitted. He could have used the vox for that. He had come to Gavallan’s quarters to talk of other matters. The chamber was cut off from the rest of the ship by a tall spiral staircase and a series of doors strengthened by hexagrammic wards. The space was small and dark. There was no glassteel window onto the void here. It was more like the cell of a prisoner than the quarters of a brotherhood champion. It was, though, conducive to meditation and prayer.

This too is my future, Crowe thought.

‘I would like to discuss the Black Blade’s role in our journey,’ he said. He looked at Antwyr, chained to the wall much as it had been in the Chambers of Purity.

‘I see,’ said Gavallan. He was seated on a stool in the centre of the chamber. He had removed his helmet, and Crowe was struck by how much more grey and lined his features had become even since the start of the mission. The sword, he thought, was working on Gavallan in ways he could not sense. ‘You are disturbed by the coincidence of the names,’ Gavallan went on.

‘Dierna and Sandava were the two names I read aloud from your transcript,’ said Crowe. ‘Now we journey from one to the other. Brother castellan, that cannot be a coincidence.’

‘I agree,’ said Gavallan. ‘What, then, do you conclude?’

‘I’m not sure. But I dislike the aura of inevitability that has descended on our mission. I do not know what role the sword has played in these events. The fact that it has played one makes me very uneasy.’

Antwyr’s amused snarl rasped in his head. This is but a taste, said the sword. Think what might be accomplished. Think what we shall do. Your destiny is written. All you can do is delay it. Why commit yourself to pointless resistance? Why waste existence on futility?

‘You cannot assume the Blade has had a part to play in these events,’ Gavallan cautioned. ‘It is powerful, but it is contained.’

‘I did not mean to suggest it wasn’t,’ Crowe said.

Gavallan shook his head to show he was not offended. ‘Your concern is a valid one. The issue is this: there is too much about the Blade we simply do not know. Has it, in some fashion, contrived to bring this situation about? I don’t think so, but I can’t know that it has not. Has it, perhaps, foreseen what is coming to pass? Perhaps. Or are the names a coincidence after all, and the sword seeks to trouble us by making us believe it is an actor or precognitive? There were, remember, many names on that list. Perhaps the precognition came from you.’

Gavallan raised his hands in a gesture so close to despair it disturbed Crowe more than any of the castellan’s words. He wondered how many times over the decades Gavallan had been tormented by these questions.

‘I hope you will learn more when the burden passes to you,’ Gavallan said. ‘I hope you will see further and more deeply than I have. I hope you will find the answers I have not.’

There are no answers, the sword whispered. There is only obedience.

‘As for our present circumstances,’ said Gavallan, ‘our choices are limited.’

‘That troubles me too.’

‘And me.’ Gavallan shrugged. ‘Yet here we are. So we shall proceed with our eyes open, aware that we may be heading into a trap. Which is no more than we must always do.’

Crowe nodded, then took his leave. As he descended the stairs, he wrestled with his frustration. Gavallan was right. The Grey Knights must pursue the threat whose absence had still been so potent on the Envoy of Discipline. They had to follow the evidence to Sandava II. But Gavallan seemed prey to a kind of fatalism. That worried Crowe at least as much as the sense the Purifiers were being forced to follow the steps of an unholy dance.

Crowe reached the bottom of the staircase. On the other side of the last of the warded doors, Sendrax was waiting for him.

‘I thought you might be here,’ he said.

‘I wanted his thoughts on the state of the mission,’ Crowe answered, deliberately vague.

Sendrax laughed. It was an unusual sound in the halls of the Sacrum Finem. It was even more unusual in the Chambers of Purity. It was not usual coming from Sendrax, though. Crowe had never been sure whether to envy or disapprove of his sense of humour.

‘Your visit was more important than that,’ Sendrax said. He turned serious. ‘You have been chosen as the Warden, haven’t you?’

‘What makes you say that?’ The evasion was ridiculous. Yet Crowe did not feel comfortable admitting to that truth yet. Doing so felt like a death sentence for Gavallan.

‘You are the obvious candidate, brother. And I can think of few other reasons for one of our number to subject himself repeatedly to the proximity of that sword.’

‘True,’ said Crowe. He would not lie.

‘It is inevitable, then?’ Sendrax asked.

Crowe frowned, unsure what the other Knight of the Flame meant. ‘If it is to be my fate, so be it,’ he said. ‘We all must serve as we are called upon to do.’

‘Yes, we must.’

‘What, then?’

Sendrax shook his head. ‘Forgive me, brother. It is the thought of your sequestration that pains me.’

‘It will be necessary.’ Crowe headed down the hall in the direction of the arming cells.

Sendrax fell into step beside him. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Of course.’ Then, after a minute, ‘Is necessity all there is, then?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Is everything preordained? Is it all written?’

The question was uncomfortably close to Crowe’s concerns about the mission. ‘I have faith that it is not,’ he said. ‘That is the essence of the Prognosticars, is it not? With their aid, we change the writing.’

Sendrax grunted and fell silent. Crowe recognised his mood. Sendrax did not suffer opposition well. This made him a ferocious warrior. At times, though, Crowe thought it also made him unwilling to accept unpalatable realities as quickly as he should. Crowe believed there was a difference between refusing defeat and not recognising necessity. Sometimes there was nothing else.

Crowe would be the next Warden of the Blade. That was a necessity that could not be altered.

The arming cells sounded with the murmur of prayers and the quiet activity of serfs assisting the Purifiers make ready for the coming battle. Armour was being restored to gleaming purity. Prayer scrolls were affixed once more. There were new oaths of moment to be recorded. There were weapons and shells to be blessed anew.

Crowe and Sendrax parted company at the entrance to the cells. The hall branched left and right. Crowe went left to join his squad. He walked past the cells, nodding a solemn greeting to his brothers.

Drake was kneeling before a shrine, but rose when he saw Crowe.

‘An era is coming to a close, isn’t it?’ he said.

Crowe stopped. He did not have to ask what Drake meant. If Sendrax had deduced what was coming, Drake would have known even longer.

‘It will end,’ Crowe said. ‘It has not ended yet.’

‘I hope not,’ said Drake. ‘Long may our champion be victorious.’

‘Long may he be,’ Crowe said. Then he stopped and shared an uncomfortable look with Drake. They had both been seized by the same thought. Was it their place to wish a longer sentence for Gavallan in the purgatory of his guardianship? Crowe thought about the canyons being etched into the castellan’s face. They were the reflections of the deeper ones cut into his soul. ‘As the Emperor wills,’ Crowe said.

‘As the Emperor wills,’ Drake echoed.

Crowe moved on to his cell. He had many of his own preparations to make. The Sacrum Finem was storming through the warp towards Sandava.

He had to be ready for whatever truths might await.

For three days, the bombardment held back the daemons. For three days, the fear in the west of Egeta rose as rumours spread. But for three days, Vendruhn lived with the hope of a successful counter-attack. Because for three days, no one saw past the barrier of explosions. The intensity of the barrage triggered a firestorm. It swept far beyond the targeted strip. Smoke blanketed the city, making reconnaissance flights impossible.

The fire died down at the end of the third day. A wind blew from the north, clearing the worst of the smoke. At dawn, Vendruhn took off from the palace in her Valkyrie. The overflight was brief. She saw all she needed to know almost right away. The ground in the vicinity of the cathedral crawled – it undulated –with capering abominations. Their number was beyond estimation. They had not been diminished by the shelling or the fire. Vendruhn had delayed their encroachment on the western sector of the city. That was all.

And after she had returned to the palace, and ordered a further intensification of the bombardment, as the sun rose on a day of haze and anticipation, the true siege began. The daemons moved in a concerted mass through the barrage zone. The shells destroyed them by the score, then by the hundreds. When their movement was spotted, Vendruhn rushed to lead from the front. On the embankment, looking through magnoculars, she saw the daemons, silhouetted by the blasts, monstrous figures torn apart and smashed to nothing.

For a few seconds, she was almost able to believe the abominations were falling victim to a folly, and that their attempt to cross the wall of fire would give her the victory. Then she saw that she was wrong. The daemons were destroyed, but not obliterated. They fell, they lost form, and the liquefying remains flowed together. The shells struck the daemons faster than the sludge could vanish from the materium. The cratered streets filled with a thick, viscous mass of white and pink and putrescent blue. It flowed towards the Rybas. It washed over the east embankment’s parapet. It dropped towards the water slowly, like molten candle wax.

The daemonic foam touched the water. The taint spread over the river in moments. Vendruhn hissed as she watched oily, nauseating colours race across the water, and to the north and south. The river looked like skin stretched too tightly over a human ribcage. The skin tore. The river heaved like a wounded beast. The surface broke up into soft rubble. The water had turned into gelid flesh. The level of the Rybas dropped as it threw out chunks of itself, and they began to evaporate.

The Rybas became the rotting corpse of a giant. The river vanished. Soon there was only the riverbed, piled high with hills of vanishing skin.

When the river had been corrupted away, the daemons surged forwards. They drove through the shelling in even greater numbers. There was no way to kill them all, and so the breach began.

Horrors emerged from the smoke and fire. They spilled over the embankment, a stampede of monstrous forms. They raced across the riverbed. Their song came on before them and the air Vendruhn breathed turned thick with luxurious scents.

In seconds, the situation of the war changed. The daemons were advancing on a front miles long. Vendruhn had built up her forces on this side of the Rybas. She had deep columns of infantry and armour. But all those columns were about to be surrounded by the tide sweeping over the dead river. Her militia was about to drown.

‘All companies fall back,’ she ordered. She banged her fist against the hatch as Danek started the engine and turned the Chimera around. ‘Our new positions are inside the palace sector’s walls. We will hold there.’ The circumference of those fortifications was less than three miles. She had the strength to protect that. She refused to believe otherwise. ‘Artillery,’ she voxed, ‘reduce the range. All guns concentrate on the Rybas riverbed. At my command, walk the shelling back. We will destroy the foe as it advances.’

The companies of the Sandava II Militia retreated, and the streets of Egeta filled with exhaust fumes and the thunder of pounding shells. From the windows of hab blocks came the wails of the populace as they saw their protectors abandon them. Vendruhn heard their despair. She grimaced in contempt. If these people would not fight, if they expected to hide and let others do the dying for Sandava II, then what was coming would be a fitting judgement.

She swivelled the heavy bolter to face the rear. She would be amongst the last to enter the inner wall of the palace district. She would be among the first to fire upon the enemy.

The infantry kept pace with the armour. This time, Vendruhn would preserve more of her troops. She vowed this retreat would not be a second rout. The militia formed a solid wall across the Obeissance Boulevard. It was the main artery running west towards the palace sector. This would be her site of bitter, contested retreat. She would make the abominations pay for every yard of their advance.

The curtain of blasts marched in from the east. The riverbed exploded. Daemons clambered over the western embankment’s parapet, defying the shells. They loped along the boulevard, giving chase to the militia. Vendruhn pulled the trigger, sending a stream of shells over the heads of the running troops. They smashed into a pair of daemons who resembled patchwork insects, blowing them apart. One of the dancing female horrors burst through the cloud of misted flesh, arms wide and eager to embrace its victims with pincers. It swept down upon the last of the troops. It crushed the heads of two men with quick snaps of its pincers. It wrapped its arms around a third and lifted him high. His screams were horrifyingly ambiguous. Vendruhn blasted him and the daemon from existence, ending his bloody transcendence and saving his soul.

The boulevard turned sharply. The hab blocks hid the enemy advance from her view. Vendruhn could still hear it, though. Over the booming of the artillery barrage, over the growls of the engines, over the rapid march, over the sharp discharges of lasrifles, she could hear the piercing, whistling rise and fall and twist of the daemonsong. It clawed at her spirit. It sought to lure her, but it encountered only her anger instead.

Vendruhn raised her eyes to the sky. ‘Will you not aid us?’ she cried to the Emperor. Then she yelled until her throat was raw. Her cry contained her rage, her frustration and her grief at what was to come. It was also her prayer, her wordless appeal to the Father of Mankind and her shout of loyalty unto death. And it was her despairing plea for a miracle.

She fell silent as she saw the miracle arrive.

It took the form of a streak of silvery grey. It descended through the haze, the sun glinting off its hull. At first, it was a dagger thrust in the sky. It dropped lower so fast it was like a meteor roaring to earth. Its angle of descent flattened out, and it flew overhead less than twenty feet above the rooftops. It was a gunship of the Adeptus Astartes. A Stormraven, Vendruhn thought. The colour was strange to her. She had encountered very few of the Adeptus Astartes in her lifetime, but she had seen many representations of them. The iconography of their heroism was a constant throughout the Imperium. In all the tapestries and murals and friezes and mosaics she had held over the years, Vendruhn had never seen this silver-grey represented.

The gunship slowed as it passed from her sight. Just after it vanished, flying in the direction of the river, there came the sound of its guns. The drumming was deep and resonant, the music of violent salvation.

‘Danek,’ Vendruhn voxed, ‘hold our position.’

The Chimera slowed to a halt. The rest of the column kept moving. Vendruhn made sure it did.

‘All units,’ she ordered, ‘continue on your path. Secure the inner wall. I will join you shortly.’ But not just yet. She had to see. She had to know.

There had been no communications from the Space Marines. No warning of their arrival. Just a sword blow from the sky. Who were they?

‘Take us back, Danek,’ Vendruhn said.

The Chimera reversed again. It headed back down the boulevard. As it reached the bend, it seemed to Vendruhn that the cries of the civilians had lessened. It was hard to tell in the maelstrom of roaring sound coming from the Rybas. Vendruhn did see faces at the windows now. The people of Egeta had been summoned by a mixture of wonder and terror to bear witness. Though her contempt for their cowardice was undiminished, when the Chimera rounded the corner and she could see as far as the embankment again, Vendruhn shared in the awe.

The Stormraven was making strafing runs over the riverbed, turning the ground below it into an inferno with twin-linked heavy bolters and assault cannons. It struck with the force of a flying artillery barrage. Missiles streaked from wing-mounted hard points. Their concussive blasts were huge. The shattered bodies of daemons flew over a wide area, and with the precision of those explosions, the ongoing artillery barrage appeared to be making more of a difference. The tide of abominations was no longer advancing along the boulevard.

The gunship had dropped its troops at the head of the thoroughfare. There were two five-man squads of Adeptus Astartes and a commander. The Space Marines’ power armour was the same silver-grey as the hull of the ship. A mere eleven warriors, yet in Vendruhn’s eyes it was the daemons who were suddenly outnumbered. The abominations converged on the Space Marines as if they were being pulled in by the gravitational grip of a black hole. Vendruhn sensed the narrowing of the huge front that had driven her forces into retreat. The daemons were compelled to destroy a great enemy, and that enemy was ripping them to shreds. Vendruhn gaped at the flash and pound of wrist-mounted storm bolters. These warriors could not be human beings. They were walking tanks. Their swords and halberds and hammers devastated unholy flesh with every blow. The weapons blazed with a light that seared Vendruhn’s vision with its purity. The leader of the Adeptus Astartes bore a crimson banner that rose above his power pack. Chained to the pack was another sword. There was nothing sacred about this weapon. The blade was a thing of night, and it drew her gaze even though her soul tried to turn away. It confused her and disturbed her, even from a distance of several hundred yards.

But the sword was the imprisoned anomaly. As the Space Marines fought with both crusader fury and immaculate precision, Vendruhn’s overwhelming impression was of terrible sanctity and unforgiving nobility. She knew, without being told, that witnessing these beings was a privilege, a rare opportunity, and one that would come with a great cost.

She stared, stunned into silence with the rest of the Chimera’s crew. For a brief moment, the Space Marine fighting at the right hand of the leader turned his head and looked up the boulevard. Vendruhn felt his gaze behind the visor of his helmet. She felt the judgement. She felt the full power of the ice at the heart of the miracle that had come to Sandava II.

Chapter Six

CATHEDRAL RISE

The throne room of the Lord Governor’s palace was on a war footing. The grandeur of its wall hanging had faded into the background. The large reception space had been given over to tacticarium tables. Otto Glas was in military uniform, but it was a ceremonial garb, and there was a marked contrast between it and the uniform worn by his daughter. The general was a veteran, and carried herself with the determined stride of someone bearing a familiar weight of responsibility. Lord Otto had the posture of a man conscious of the dignity required of his position in a crises. He and Vendruhn were carved from the same stone. Their faces were weathered, lined by age and care despite juvenat treatments. The sculpt of her brow and jaw was harsher, more unforgiving than his. Otto was the face of Sandava II standing firm against the threat of the Ruinous Powers. Vendruhn was the fist that would bring retribution to the heretics. They were both, Crowe thought, perfectly suited to their positions. They were exemplars of duty. Unlike the corrupted cardinal, ensconced in the cathedral, they did the Imperium proud.

Crowe saw their heroism and acknowledged to himself that their deaths would be regrettable. They were most likely unavoidable, though. The entire population of Egeta already possessed too much forbidden knowledge. That doomed them all even more thoroughly than the daemonic incursion itself.

Earlier, aboard the Stormraven Purgation’s Sword, Destrian had looked down at the swarms of daemons and said, ‘This city is past salvation. Orbital bombardment would be a mercy.’

‘You would deprive us of a battle?’ Carac asked.

‘I do not like to disappoint you, brother. But this course of action seems to me inevitable.’

‘We must find the relic and burn the root of this infection,’ Crowe had reminded Destrian. ‘Too much can disappear in a bombardment, including that which would use the destruction as a cover for flight.’

He understood Destrian’s reasoning, though. There was an aspect of futility to the ground war. There was little that could be done, in the end, for the people of Egeta. That was not Crowe’s concern. Even so, he saw the loyalty and bravery in this hall. He would see more in the streets, he was sure. He could not offer these people salvation. He would grant them remembrance instead.

The Purifiers’ initial attack had been enough to slow the advance of the daemons. They had blunted the invasion, and at length forced the daemons to regroup. The abominations had pulled back across the riverbed. The militia’s artillery appeared to be holding them in the east again for the moment. The respite would not last long, but it had been enough for the inner wall of the palace district to be reinforced by many guns and thousands of infantry, and for some planning to take place.

‘They will come again,’ Vendruhn said. She, the Lord Governor, Crowe and Sendrax surrounded the central tacticarium table. The hololithic display showed an overview of the entire city.

‘Yes, they will,’ Gavallan said. He stood at the far end of the throne room, dozens of yards from the others. If the mortals wondered about his isolation, they did not ask about it. ‘The question is whether they can be held at the wall.’

‘They can,’ Otto said, with all the determination of a man who believed he could will reality to do his bidding. He had the look, too, of a man who had gazed upon something that had overwhelmed him, and was now eager, in its absence, to prove himself still strong.

Vendruhn was slower to answer. ‘With half my complement of troops…’ she said, weighing the variables. ‘And our combined assault drawing the enemy’s attention…’ She bowed her head. ‘Yes, lord,’ she said to Gavallan. ‘The wall will be held for as long as necessary.’

Crowe looked at Vendruhn with something almost like pity. She did not realise that the assault was not the distraction. The palace district was. It was the bait, splitting the daemon force to give the Purifiers the chance to breach the cathedral.

‘I could be even more certain of our position if you were commanding the defence,’ Otto said to Vendruhn, slipping from the confidence of his office and into the concerns of a human being.

‘No,’ said Vendruhn. ‘I won’t wait for those things to come to us. I’ve had enough of retreats. I will march with the Grey Knights.’

Crowe caught her slight hesitation before the last two words. She was wondering about this Chapter she had never heard of before. She had questions. She would not get answers. It was enough of a privilege for her to know what force had come to her world. She would not enjoy that privilege for long. But if it gave her more strength for the struggle ahead, then well enough.

‘Our overflights of the cathedral sector show large numbers of heretics still present,’ Gavallan said. ‘They are the conduits through which the abominations enter the materium, but they are also a corrupted army in their own right. It will be the responsibility of General Glas’ forces to destroy them.’

‘Gladly,’ said Vendruhn.

‘Could there still be untainted citizens east of the river?’ Otto asked.

‘There may be,’ Crowe said. The point was moot.

‘They are all fallen,’ Vendruhn hissed through a clenched jaw. ‘If they were not, they would be fighting. They will be exterminated with the others.’

Crowe’s eyes narrowed. He did not precisely disagree with what Vendruhn had said. It was her tone that drew his attention. There was the iron of increasing fanaticism there, and that, too, was as it should be. There was no place for anything less on the battlefield. But beneath the fury and the faith, Crowe thought he detected eagerness. Vendruhn seemed to enjoy the prospect of the slaughter to come.

‘Lord,’ Otto said to Gavallan, ‘forgive me, but the sword you carry on your back... I was wondering… I can see that it is a relic of great antiquity. Will it be useful against the mask?’

Do you see? the blade whispered to Crowe. Even the mortal can see what must be done. Unchain me. Use me. Our victory will be swift and bloody. Our reign will be eternal.

‘You will not speak of the sword again!’ Gavallan’s voice boomed with anger across the throne room. ‘You will not look at it. You will not think of it. It is never to be used.’

Otto leaned back against the tacticarium table as if pushed physically by the castellan’s words. ‘Your pardon, lord, I…’

Crowe stepped towards the Lord Governor. His shadow passed over the mortal. Otto looked up, shaken. ‘Do not make the error of thinking you understand what is happening on your world, or what must be done to combat it,’ Crowe said.

‘No, lord,’ said Otto.

‘The existence of the daemonic realm has been revealed to you. That you are still sane is to your credit, but it also suggests you do not fully comprehend what you now face.’ A glance at Vendruhn’s eyes suggested she had a much more visceral understanding of what had come to Sandava II. ‘Do not overstep your authority.’

‘No, lord,’ said Otto.

Crowe turned from him before he could finish. He pointed down at the tacticarium table, tracing a path down the major avenues between the palace and the cathedral. ‘High ground here and around the cathedral,’ he said. ‘The routes are direct between them.’

‘Symmetry,’ said Gavallan.

Crowe nodded. ‘The city divided in two. The centres of command at opposite ends.’

‘Those things have a leader?’ Otto asked.

‘Your cardinal,’ Sendrax said. ‘Or what he has become.’

Crowe was still thinking about the symmetry. Was he right to see it as more deeply symbolic? And if so, of what?

The sword laughed, a razor slicing through tendons.

He could not divine the symbol. It felt like sheer excess. A superfluous gesture by a power with no greater purpose. A display of art, perhaps. A dark power’s perverse amusement.

‘We strike now,’ said Gavallan. ‘General, you will advance directly for the river. Cease the artillery bombardment as you reach it. We will land before the cathedral at the same time. That will divide the focus of the enemy.’

‘And if the daemons cross before we do?’ Vendruhn asked.

‘Then we will land earlier. The strategy is unchanged. Your spear thrust. Our gladius to the heart.’

Vendruhn still looked uneasy. ‘Will that end the threat? Your pardon for the trouble in my soul, lord. I have visions of Sandava II’s fall to these powers.’

‘Sandava II will not be taken by corruption,’ Crowe told her. ‘This I vow.’

The daemons met Vendruhn’s advance just to the west of the corpse of the Rybas. As before, they charged in a sufficient mass to get through the shelling. They were not an overwhelming tide this time, though. They were a concentrated mass.

Not as many, Vendruhn thought as the militia opened fire. They’re holding back a reserve. They are bracing for the threat of the Grey Knights. The castellan’s strategy was already working before the operation had truly begun.

Humans filled out the ranks of the unholy legion. They were ragged, wretched, raving things. Most had been civilians. Some wore the tatters of militia uniforms, and they made Vendruhn’s lips curl in even greater rage. All were shrieking and singing. They had torn their flesh, marking it with bleeding sigils. They bore crude weapons fashioned from scavenged metal. Many had driven the blades through their own palms. They rejoiced in the ecstasy of their pain. They clamoured to welcome more converts to the embrace of delirious agony.

As the armour and infantry unleashed las and stubber fire on the enemy, Vendruhn looked on the corrupted humans with glad hatred. They were not threats to her soul. They were base, weak and contemptible. She did not fear them. She rejoiced in their easy destruction.

She could focus on them without danger.

‘Defenders of Sandava II,’ she voxed to the troops, ‘see our fallen brethren! Look upon them with all the power of your anger. Know that you have already vanquished our enemy, because you are not of their number. Find strength in seeing them and annihilate all before us!’

She swept the Chimera’s heavy bolter back and forth in a tight arc, cutting into the clustered foe. She stared at the humans. At the edges of her vision she saw daemons brought down by the massed firepower of the column. And she saw the fallen citizens explode. She saw their heretical pain give way to violent death, their bodies turned to shards and spray.

When the column hit the mass of the enemy, Vendruhn was shouting with gratitude.

With Berinon piloting, the Purgation’s Sword hit the parvis with stormstrike missiles. The massive concussive blasts cleared swathes of the square of daemons and heretics long enough for the gunship to land. The squads leapt out of the side door, and the Stormraven took off again.

Before them reared the mass of the Cathedral of Martyrdom Embraced. The lines of the façade and the towers were perfectly vertical. Its immensity soared towards the sky. The north tower’s spire rose higher than the south’s, and this asymmetry created a sense of movement, as if the cathedral were striving to reach ever higher. Its huge rose window was dim, its designs invisible in the gloom, lit only by a dull but gradually intensifying, throbbing violet.

Crowe kept pace with Gavallan as he marched through the mass of abominations. The rest of his squad and Sendrax’s team kept back a few paces, blasting daemons that tried to get between the Purifiers.

They were fifty yards from the cathedral doors. The whistling of the fiends and the songs of the daemonettes were an ululating hymn that seemed to climb the façade and twine about the towers, claiming the defiled sanctuary for the Ruinous Powers. Clusters of heretics ran amongst the daemons, heedless of anything except the compulsion to attack the Grey Knights. They were trampled by the hooves of fiends. Daemonettes decapitated them with contemptuous pincer snaps if they got in the way. They wailed their frightful joy until they died. If they reached the Purifiers, their blows were meaningless. They were vermin, but they too had to be destroyed, because daemons still burst from the forms of the most fanatical.

Crowe and Gavallan scythed their way forwards with bolter and sword. Behind them, their battle-brothers destroyed the abominations that attacked from the flanks. Ruluf and Destrian kept up a steady stream of flame with their incinerators. The Purifiers were an untouchable blade stabbing towards the heart of the infection.

In the midst of the gunfire and unholy song, the Black Blade of Antwyr snarled its way into Crowe’s mind. This is opportunity. This is chaos. Seize the hilt and strike, strike, strike, strike, strike. He ignored the blade. Its blandishments did not affect the precision of his blows. It shrieked at him, cursing him with the venom of its frustration.

‘Is it calling to you?’ Gavallan asked. He drove his Nemesis blade through the torso of a fiend, sliced upwards, cutting the daemon in half, then brought the sword down again, cutting off the clutching arms of a daemonette.

‘It is,’ said Crowe. He vaporised the head of a fiend with bolter shells. ‘Does it speak to us both at once?’

‘It speaks to all who can hear, its call different for each. That is one facet of its threat. How do you fare?’ Gavallan’s voice was still more drained. It belied the energy of his attacks. The castellan fought as he ever had, but the toll was growing.

‘I am strong,’ Crowe said. ‘Let the sword rave as it will.’

‘Good.’ Gavallan hacked another daemonette down with a grunt. ‘Exposure has not diminished you.’

Before them, the daemons gathered in a massed wall.

‘Do they believe they can stop us?’ Sendrax voxed.

‘If they do, they are mistaken,’ Crowe said. ‘They are presenting themselves for execution.’

The wall became a battering ram. The daemons charged. It was an assault that would overturn tanks and reduce regiments of mortals to howling madness. Crowe looked upon the surging horror and felt only holy rage. This was everything he stood against. The destruction of this unclean mass was the purpose for which he had been forged. He was the arm of purification, and he would not permit the abomination to taint the worlds of the Imperium.

His wrath grew. He raised his arms and gathered the flow of the warp in his will. His wrath ignited it. Beside him, Gavallan was doing the same. They acted in concert, two warriors striking with perfect unity. They were the will of the Emperor, and He would not suffer the daemon to exist.

They unleashed the rage.

A wall of blue flame burst from their hands. It roared over the daemons. It was purgation itself. It incinerated the unholy flesh. It was a firestorm of sanctity. It silenced the song of the daemons. It dragged screams from their throats, and then it silenced those too. The smoke-filled, late afternoon gloom on the hill of the cathedral lit up with a cold and terrible blaze.

In its wake, there was only ash.

For a few seconds, nothing stood between the Grey Knights and the Cathedral of Martyrdom Embraced. Then the daemons on the parvis, and in the adjoining streets, and all the corrupted mortals rushed to fill the gap. Only now they did not attack. They ran and galloped and sprang towards the entrance. The door opened and the daemons poured inside.

‘Are they retreating?’ Drake asked.

‘No,’ said Crowe. He saw the immaterium’s currents in flood, a violent turbulence streaming with the daemons into the cathedral. ‘They are being summoned.’

The thing wearing Rannoch’s skin paced back and forth as it examined the cardinal’s memories. Its long legs carried it over the fallen altar in a single stride. Its four arms drew shapes in the air with languid, graceful gestures, conjuring fates, drawing in the energies it had planned to use from the moment Rannoch had donned the mask. From outside the walls of the cathedral, the daemon heard the arrival of the enemy’s ship. The moment it had expected was drawing near. It smiled with anticipation. In the flesh of its belly, a mouth that had been Rannoch’s moved its lips and chattered its teeth in mindless praise and joy. Stretched over the distortions of bone and skin, the remnants of Rannoch’s self experienced pain so complete, so perfect, it hungered after it like pleasure. The cardinal’s illusions had vanished with his identity, but the desire that had propelled him to his damnation still lingered, exulting in a pain that was both punishment and reward.

Rannoch’s mind was gone, devoured by the daemon. It had consumed him, and now it looked through its spoils, searching. Its moment had come. It already knew pleasure from the thought of what it was about to inflict on those cold deniers of sensation, but it did not underestimate the foe. It anticipated more than the humans’ deaths. There were other pleasures it sought, pleasures it hoped the traces of Rannoch would unlock. And so it leafed through the cardinal’s memories, searching, searching.

It found what it wanted deep inside, buried beneath layers of the mundane. The memory was small, easily overlooked because the human had almost forgotten it. Rannoch had never had cause to pay attention to this knowledge and it was hidden by administrative trivia. But the daemon found the memory, and it was more than it had hoped for.

Outside, battle was raging. The grey enemies were destroying the messengers of sensation. They thought they were achieving a victory. It was time to prove them wrong. Time to show them true glory.

The daemon’s gestures became more rapid. The powers gathered in the cathedral more quickly, and with greater intensity. Dark potential sank into the walls, the floor, the pillars, the vaults. The potential built up, verging upon reality.

Outside, there was a sudden burning roar.

The daemon snarled. It moved towards the rear of the cathedral, heading for the crypt. It formed a great conjuring with the movement of its arms. The potential it had brought into being fused with the stone of the cathedral, but it needed to feed before it could become truly real.

The daemon crooked a finger, and the doors at the front opened. Called to the dance and to the sacrifice, the lesser servants of the Dark Prince charged inside.

The cursed scions of the corpse-god would not be far behind. They would think their chance had come to enter the cathedral. Perhaps it had, the daemon thought. Though not as they imagined.

It laughed as it descended the stairs to the crypt. The sound was musical. It was the sound of flies in a wound and tongues set to razors. And it was a signal. The ceremony was complete. There were no further gestures to make. The potential became reality.

The walls of the Cathedral of Martyrdom Embraced shook with the strength of the first great breath.

The retreat of the abominations was as sudden as it was unmotivated. Vendruhn’s strike force was causing damage, but so were the daemons and the heretics. Then the daemons were gone. They disappeared in the direction of the cathedral. This was no retreat. This was an assault. The abominations sundered the air with their monstrous song. Vendruhn felt a premonition of disaster. Something dark was on the verge of being fulfilled.

She could not pursue. The daemons were too fast. The Chimeras at full throttle might be able to catch up, ploughing through and over the mass of heretics, but that would mean leaving the infantry behind. She would not divide her strength to rush into a possible trap.

The daemons abandoned their human slaves. The heretics were running, but much slower. Vendruhn looked at the wretched apostates. She felt loathing, hatred and contempt in equal measure. In the demented hymns of the heretics, she heard elements she had not detected before. The songs were not as alien as she had thought during the initial moments of the crisis. They contained fragments of familiar chants, all the more debased for being recognisable. Did these creatures still believe they were serving the God-Emperor?

No, Vendruhn decided. They weren’t thinking at all.

‘Kill the heretics!’ she shouted. ‘Burn them all!’

Her command was unnecessary. The militia was gunning down the running mob. But her hatred needed its full expression. These creatures had turned from the Emperor’s light. The crime was unimaginable to her, yet they were all guilty of it. They threatened the order her family had guaranteed on Sandava II for centuries. And they tainted the honour of the world.

She would build a pyre of their bones.

‘Artillery,’ she voxed the command centre at the palace. She gave coordinates for a barrage a thousand yards ahead, where the hab blocks rose higher just before the cathedral’s hill. Her armour and infantry kept up their fire, slaughtering the heretics, crushing bodies beneath the Chimeras’ tracks.

Guns boomed in the distant west. The sky whistled. It screamed. The street and hab blocks exploded. The shells kept descending. Critically weakened towers fell towards each other. A hill of rubble blocked the way forwards. Choking dust rushed back down the avenue. The heretics bunched up and collided. They were confused. They did not know where to run. Some shrieked. Some sang. Many turned back to attack the militia. They all died.

Vendruhn’s Chimera advanced into a deepening lake of blood, and she rejoiced.

‘General,’ Gentner, the communications officer, called from below.

‘What is it?’

‘I’m receiving distress transmissions from a location in the shelling zone. Someone has access to a vox-unit there. They proclaim their loyalty to the Emperor.’

‘They may proclaim it, but they do not show it. If they are sheltering in those structures, they are hiding from their duty to fight the heretic. The shelling continues. We will seal this area and kill everything in it.’ If they could not reach the cathedral, nothing would.

The way forwards was punishment. She would raze the city if necessary. And she would not turn from the consequences of her commands. She would embrace them.

‘Gentner,’ she said, ‘are they still transmitting?’

‘Yes, general.’

‘Put them on my feed.’

A moment later, her ear bead crackled with panicked, pleading voices. They begged. They sobbed. They prayed to the God-Emperor. Vendruhn fired the heavy bolter at the heretics and her lips pulled back in disgust at the voices in her ear. Then they screamed, disappearing into static. Another tower fell, blocking an even wider swathe of routes to the cathedral, and it took its terrified inhabitants down with it.

Vendruhn’s snarl became a smile. The betrayers of the Emperor and Sandava II were meeting their judgement. The sentence came at her hands. As this sector of Egeta fell to smoke and flame and blood, she felt pleasure, and she was not ashamed.

Then she saw movement above the smoke. Impossible movement.

They had to fight their way forwards again. The gap leading to the doors had filled in seconds. But now Crowe was shooting and hacking through daemons that had turned their backs on him. The situation was unique in his experience. The summons was so strong, the daemons did not turn as he destroyed their forms. They trampled the heretics running with them. The mortals screamed the urgency of their task. Many died on the threshold of the cathedral. Many more passed through the doors. Human blood and dissolving daemonflesh spread out from the doorway across the flagstones of the parvis. The warp turbulence grew worse. Crowe saw vortices catch up reality and begin to twist it.

‘Faster!’ Gavallan shouted in frustration. He could sense what Crowe did. All psykers could now. The build-up was huge. A massive event was coming. Inside the cathedral, the source of madness was performing a ritual.

Stop it. Disrupt the flow.

Faster.

Crowe reached for the flames of purity once more. The strain was huge, so soon after another burst. He acted alone this time. Gavallan was drained. Crowe stretched his left arm forwards. Cleaning warp fire burned over corrupted warp forms and contusions of warp energy. It cremated abominations. The path was clear again.

Crowe lunged for the doorway, a step ahead of Gavallan.

He already knew he was too late as he began to cross the threshold.

The arch sprouted fangs of stone. The entrance became a mouth. Crowe threw himself back, hacking his arms free of the gnashing teeth. The doorway bit heretics in half. Their heads fell to the ground, gaping in ecstasy.

The stonework about the entrance rippled. A wave like the shudder of flesh spread across the façade.

‘Back!’ Gavallan ordered.

Crowe retreated with the others. The transformation shook the cathedral. Crowe saw the storm in the immaterium’s currents reach its apotheosis. He understood what was happening, and he cursed the depth of the Purifiers’ failure.

The ground trembled with such force that the remaining heretics fell. The parvis cracked. Crevasses opened, wide enough to swallow a man. Crowe leapt over a gap that snaked between him and his battle-brothers. At the base of the cathedral, the crevasses grew into canyons.

The towers swayed. With cracking booms, their spires hooked into claws. Flying buttresses heaved in and out like a ribcage. Then the central mass reared up. It lifted the towers free of the ground, reaching higher and higher with them, and now they truly were arms.

The Cathedral of Martyrdom Embraced began to walk.

Chapter Seven

MARTYRDOM EMBRACED

The Lord Governor’s palace was a fortress. Within its inner wall was the keep: crouched, squat and solid as a fist. From its centre, though, a single tower, its walls a blinding ivory and gold, soared hundreds of feet up. The Glas dynasty was unyielding in its demand for order. But from discipline rose magnificence. This was the lesson embodied by the palace.

The windows behind the throne looked east, across the expanse of Egeta to the cathedral. The city had grown and spread around these two peaks, and from spire to spire, Sandava II’s most powerful representatives of the Adeptus Administratum and the Adeptus Ministorum could gaze at each other’s high seats in the city, though the Ministorum palace itself was half a world away. No other structures in Egeta reached as high as the spires of the palace and cathedral hills.

Every day of his reign as Imperial Commander, Otto Glas had found the time to stand before the glassteel window and look towards the cardinal’s perch. The view was a dual celebration of responsibility and glory. He stood there now, as evening fell on his city. The last evening he expected to see, because Egeta, too, was falling. He stared at a panorama of smoke and fire. The palace guns were thundering again, wreaking ever more devastation on the eastern sector. He could barely make out the cathedral’s towers through the drifting ash. It was easy to believe there was nothing left beyond the Rybas. He winced.

‘Lord Otto?’ said Waclav. He and the rest of the personal guard maintained a respectful distance as they watched the entrance.

He must have grunted without knowing it. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I’m all right.’ He chastised himself for thinking Egeta’s end had come. He should have more faith in Vendruhn, and in the Adeptus Astartes. But Egeta was burning, and reports were coming in of Vendruhn employing scorched earth tactics. Otto trusted her to do what was necessary, but if this was necessary, would there be anything to save? And if Egeta fell, how long before the rest of Sandava II did as well?

As for the Grey Knights, he had no lack of faith in their fighting strength and in their determination to destroy the unholy monsters that had come to Otto’s world. But he feared them. Their sanctity was cold as the void, and without mercy. He believed they had come to kill the daemons, not to save Sandava II. Otto had thus far seen the abominations only from a distance, through magnoculars. Looking at the Grey Knights had made him feel a very similar terror. It came from the sense of gazing upon forbidden mysteries. There would be a price to pay for what he had seen.

And there was the sword the commander carried. Otto had been unable to put it from his mind. He was wrong to have asked about it. He was wrong to question a being such as Gavallan. And yet the sight of the black blade had pulled at him. He knew, instinctively, that the simple fact of seeing the Grey Knights meant his life was drawing to a close. Their mystery was that profound. But the sword was something deeper and far older. He did not understand what it was, but it had to be a relic of enormous importance. Why else transport it into combat?

But why in chains? Why not use it?

Power. After Gavallan had commanded Otto to speak no more of the sword, after the strategising, when the Grey Knights had been leaving the throne room, the word had come to Otto in the form of an absolute conviction. The sword was a thing of incalculable strength. Even now, with the relic miles away, its black edge cut through his consciousness. The sword was before his mind’s eye, a looming promise. It was power. A single glance was all it took to sense the embodied vastness. He could not fathom why the Grey Knights would not put it to use.

Are we that unworthy? Otto thought. Is the salvation of our people so pitiful an endeavour that the greatest means to victory will be set aside?

He could not let things be so. He would speak to Gavallan again. Otto, at least, would do all in his power to save his city.

In the deepening gloom, the flames burned brighter. The east flashed with shell bursts. The smoke billowed in thick clouds. The rising coils made it seem as though the towers of the cathedral were moving.

Otto realised he was wrong when he heard Waclav gasp.

‘Emperor save us,’ the officer pleaded.

The towers were moving. They rose into the air, wielded by the body of the cathedral, which had reared up like a gargantuan scarab. Then the monster began to move forwards.

Otto stared, not blinking, not breathing, not understanding. He was in a numb state surpassing horror. The sight of the cathedral’s march was too impossible. He could not process it beyond the most superficial of levels. A thing was moving that must be stopped. His mind shielded itself from any deeper implications. He consciously held them at bay. If he faced them, the terror would destroy him. Already he felt his ability to function slipping away.

‘Lord Governor?’ Waclav said. He was asking for orders. He was desperate for orders. He needed the illusion that someone knew what to do.

‘The guns,’ Otto said. His tongue was sluggish and dry. His body was a thousand miles away and slow to respond to his commands. ‘Turn the guns on it,’ he croaked.

‘At once.’ Waclav’s gratitude was tragic. He spoke as if he believed the action would make a difference.

Otto knew it would not. Nothing in the field would bring down the cathedral. His faith in the Grey Knights crumbled. They were insects before the colossus. Only a power equal to the one that created such evil wonders could fight it.

Power.

The image of the sword burned with black fire in his soul. It brought him pain. The sword was Sandava II’s salvation. Yet it was out there, in the fire and the ruin, about to vanish in the destruction of the Grey Knights.

Otto leaned against the window, hands splayed. He mouthed silent prayers and wept as his hope was trampled beneath the walking stone.

The cathedral came down its hill with the sound of a falling mountain. It was a wave of rock, rearing and falling, rearing and falling. It slammed into the hab blocks, crushing their walls to powder. A cascade of towers fell on the streets of Egeta. The ground shook with perpetual tremors. Smoke and dust turned the air into a thick, lung-scraping mass. Vendruhn coughed and spat. She wiped the grit from her eyes and tried to see forwards. Her column was running blind.

She forced herself to focus on what needed to be done and nothing else. Terrible awe tried to break her. If she let go of her mental discipline, she would gaze, paralysed, at the cathedral until it crushed her. As the leviathan battered the city down, it turned the evening into a heaving night. The armour drove through darkness thick and turbulent as an ocean in storm. Illumination came from muzzle flare and bursting shells. There were flashes of greater light when fire gouted from damaged buildings, but all was smothered into greater darkness when the structures fell.

Vendruhn’s sense of the city’s geography fell apart. The streets were blocked by rubble. Gaps opened where complexes had been. Danek turned the Chimera down whatever path he could find. Vendruhn had given him a single order: flank the cathedral. She trusted him to find what route he could through the vortex of this mad war.

The infantry kept pace with the armoured transports, but her troops were dying beneath the rain of debris. Larger chunks of rubble, columns and walls weighing tonnes, were taking their toll on the vehicles, too. She kept the shrinking column moving. There was no retreat from the cathedral. They would destroy it, or it would come for them all. So she held to the advance, striking deeper into chaos, looking for the chance she knew they would not find.

Daemons cavorted along the edges of the column. They darted in and out, slashing at the ragged formations, picking off foot-soldiers, sometimes attacking in a group to rip open the hatches and doors of Chimeras caught upon ridges of debris or impaled by falling columns. They were fewer than before and could not launch a concerted assault, but Vendruhn did not see a victory in their smaller numbers. The others had gone elsewhere. They had run, and the cathedral had come to life. The victory was theirs. The advantage was theirs.

Hopelessness howled at Vendruhn from every facet of the dark. She shouted back at it. She would fight until she died. As long as she burned with wrath, she could not despair.

Bit by bit, the column drew level with the cathedral’s north flank. Vendruhn had no illusions about bringing down the monster with lascannons, but a frontal charge would be suicide. She held the vague hope of providing a distraction and so aiding the Grey Knights. Anything to keep in the struggle. Anything for the honour of the Glas family and Sandava II.

The cathedral was a black mass, a hill that moved and lunged and mauled its way through the smoke. Artillery shells from the west struck the battering limbs of the towers and the spine of the roof. They blew holes in the masonry, but the beast in its transformation was more resilient to the barrage than it should have been. The stonework had some of the flexibility of hide. It was denser, stronger than before. The impact of shells only enraged it. The ones that missed added to the inferno of Egeta.

Rage. Yes, and more than that. Hunger. Desire. A furious ecstasy. The cathedral roared. Every doorway was a maw, behind every maw a throat. The cathedral was its own choir. Its voices united in a song of excess, hate and war. The terrible music vibrated in Vendruhn’s chest. It was so huge, it threatened to shake her bones to dust.

And there was the eye. That was the one constant source of light. The monster was darkness in darkness, except for the eye. The cathedral’s rose window had been a masterpiece of stained glassteel fifty feet wide. It had been a mosaic of red and violet and gold, hundreds of lens-shaped panes forming the great circle. Vendruhn had known it as a work of sublime art, a symbolic expression of the God-Emperor’s eternal vigilance. Now it was a uniform dull purple, a sombre, blinking cancer in the gloom. The light seemed flat, yet when Vendruhn looked at the eye, it was hard to tear her gaze away. It radiated a mesmerising hunger. It twitched from side to side, seeking fulfilment it would never find. And so the cathedral’s hunger fed its rage.

Danek made a hard right, narrowly missing a wall that suddenly toppled forwards. The engine strained. The tracks spun in gravel, then caught and the Chimera lurched ahead. The vehicles behind tore through the falling rockcrete. One was buried. More soldiers died. Others ran crouched on the right side of the Chimeras and found some shelter as debris bounced off the roofs. Somewhere in the dark, clusters of heretics shrieked their crimson joy, drawing las-fire.

Ahead, the path opened up. Near the base of the hill, the cathedral had levelled entire blocks around it. The column angled in towards the north side a third of the way down from the head of the beast. It reared up again. Vendruhn thought the eye was focused on a point on the ground below. She glanced in that direction. She saw a blur of movement and a flash of blue light that was blessed in its purity. The Grey Knights were there.

The cathedral dropped down with a boom that almost knocked Vendruhn from the roof hatch. It howled its polyphonic hunger. Then it started to rise again. It lifted the south tower back in preparation for a blow.

‘Fire on the windows!’ Vendruhn ordered.

The arched targets no longer resembled stained glassteel. They were scales, faintly iridescent in the reflected light of explosions. Vendruhn had no idea if they were weak spots, but they were points to aim at, a means to keep the troops’ minds on a purpose.

Lascannons, heavy bolters, lasguns and rockets tore through the dark and into the cathedral’s stone hide. A ripple of overlapping blasts cut across the wall. The notes of the cathedral’s song changed.

‘We hurt you!’ Vendruhn shouted, determined to believe it. ‘We hurt you!’

But the south tower came down without deflection. It struck the ground with meteoric force.

And the north tower…

The north tower swung out over the militia. Vendruhn saw it move, saw the sudden intention. She had plenty of time to realise what was coming. But there was no time to escape their doom. The tower was too big. There was too much distance to cover. The column was caught in the limb’s immense shadow.

The tower seemed to pause before its descent. Perhaps that was an illusion. The scale of movement was so great, it destroyed perspective.

‘Move down its flanks!’ Vendruhn screamed into the vox. ‘Stick close to its wall!’

Danek had already started the run. The race was desperate, the chance tiny. But maybe, Vendruhn thought, maybe they could get too close for the cathedral to reach them with its mountainous arms.

The shadow, huge and deeper than night, grew larger. A wind blew straight down. Vendruhn’s hair stirred in the breath of disaster.

In the end, Danek brought the Chimera to the very edge of the shadow. In the last, long-but-too-short second, Vendruhn had a rush of hope. Then the sky fell. It smashed the ground. It smashed the world. The rockcrete surface exploded. Vendruhn flew through a hurricane of stone and metal. Reality fell apart, shattered by endless thunder. Vendruhn tumbled endlessly, was battered by the stones of her failure, and then fell into dark, into darker, into darkest, and then into nothing.

You can stop this! the sword yelled. With me you can stop this! With me you will triumph! With me you will rule!

Antwyr’s shrieks cut into Crowe’s mind. They were louder than the storm of the cathedral’s march. They were the Blade’s most fearsome assault yet. Crowe had to will his way past the howls every second just to see the world and not be swallowed by the psychic gale.

The Purifiers were on the defensive. The cathedral had smashed a tower down at them in the first seconds of its life. They saw what it intended in time to evade. The concussion was stunning, and as the south tower rose again, the north one came down, lengthwise. The Purifiers were already moving to the south and west, and the second blow missed them by seconds.

They had been dodging the blows ever since. The cathedral was single-minded in its huge, steady, brutal rage. Its attacks were a volcanic drum beat all the way down the hill. The squads raced along the avenues, turning left and right at random. The city fell about them. They could not regain the initiative. Berinon flew the Purgation’s Sword around the front of the colossus, firing at the towers and the eye. The cathedral ignored the Stormraven, though several times it almost smashed the gunship by chance with a descending tower. Shells continued to fall, putting the Stormraven at more risk, forcing Berinon into risky evasive manoeuvres. The cathedral roared at the artillery strikes. A shell hit just ahead of the Purifiers. It engulfed them in flame, but they leaned into the destruction and kept going.

And all the time the sword raged, its psychic attack as stabbing and acute as the cathedral’s flailing was blunt.

‘It will destroy the city to reach us,’ Sendrax voxed as they reached the bottom of the hill.

‘We must be a threat,’ said Crowe.

‘How?’

‘We’ll know when we destroy it.’ And we will, he thought. If the monster hunts us, it fears us.

The hab block behind them fell. Ahead was an area devastated by earlier artillery barrages. The squads were in the open. The cathedral burst through the ruined façades, a giant predator shouldering aside fragile reeds. It lunged forwards with a rise and fall. The ground jumped from the impact tremor. The south tower lifted. The infernal eye looked down on the Grey Knights.

The monster telegraphed the angle of its blow in the way it raised the arm. The cathedral’s movements were unstoppable, but they were vast and slow, like a capital ship manoeuvring in void war. The Purifiers could anticipate the strike and move from its path. They headed to the left, further south, towards the edge of the open space.

You. Will. Stop!

The Black Blade’s psychic roar of command blasted through Crowe’s thoughts as if the Bell of Lost Souls had rung above his head. He did not falter. He heard grunts of effort on the vox. The sword was attacking his brothers with the same poison.

And Gavallan staggered.

He slowed. Crowe turned, and saw that Gavallan hesitated in his next step.

Too slow. Too slow.

Gavallan staggered a second time. His arms sagged. He fell to a knee. On the vox, his breath hissed with fatigue and pain. He had fought the sword for a century and more. Their war had been without surcease. All Antwyr needed was a single mistake, a moment where the endless emotion of psychic waves against the rock of faith at last produced a crack.

One crack. One mistake. One moment where exhaustion reigned.

The castellan fell forwards.

Crowe ran the few steps back to Gavallan. ‘Keep going!’ he shouted to the others. The distance was less than ten feet. He and Gavallan had lost all of two seconds. But the tower was coming down.

Crowe grasped Gavallan’s arm. He pulled the castellan up. He gave Gavallan his shoulder. The two of them moved forwards again.

Too slow. Too slow.

Crowe looked up, already knowing what he would see. The tower was coming, a mountain of night plummeting towards him and Gavallan. There was no time. There was no chance.

Ragged foundations, the stone claws of madness, screamed down. The wind of descent howled. It was the sound of ignoble defeat.

Crowe refused it.

There was no time to escape the blow. Crowe supported Gavallan, holding the castellan tall in this ultimate moment. He raised his sword, pointing its searing purity at the coming darkness. Crowe roared back at the terminal wind and the crushing night with all the wrath of faith. He would not surrender. He would not accept the blow. The daemon-transformed Cathedral of Martyrdom Embraced believed it had him and Gavallan. Let it learn to its cost that it was wrong. It was putting itself within Crowe’s range. It was not destroying him. He was the one attacking.

And so he roared. He gave voice to his rage. He gave light to his faith. In the moment before the tower hit, the blue flame burst from the sword and his arms, his soul unleashing a holocaust. The fire blasted upwards, spreading wider. Light against dark, fire against stone, the holy against the corrupted.

The tower hit.

The mass of a world fell on Crowe. The impact cratered the ground, its concussion turning stone to dust. Crowe felt the blow, but his attack tore into it. The cathedral’s form was more than just stone. Fire and Nemesis blade found transformed hide, and holy wrath struck the truth of the monster. It cut into its daemonic essence. Flesh parted and burned as fast as it came down. A flood of ichor enveloped Crowe and Gavallan.

The weight bore down on Crowe. The shock of the sudden force hammered his body, and his physical existence flickered at the edge of annihilation.

Then the mass pulled away. The tower rose again. Ichor continued to fall in a cataract from the centre of the tower. From the wound. The cathedral’s legion of throats cried out in pain and anger.

We can kill it, Crowe thought.

Crowe and Gavallan were still standing. Gavallan’s breathing was laboured. But as the tower retreated, he straightened, finding his strength again. A lake of daemonic blood surrounded them, pooling around smashed rubble.

To the north, the other tower had struck a different target. The gloom was lit by the explosions of vehicles. Sporadic las-fire streaked in futility at the beast. The militia, or what was left of it, was out there. Vendruhn and her troops had distracted the cathedral. For the first time, it had attacked something other than the Grey Knights. It might have destroyed the militia, but their sacrifice had broken the rhythm of its attacks. It gave the Purifiers the seconds they needed.

You have doomed yourself, Crowe thought. There was time now to act.

Gavallan said nothing. Antwyr was shrieking in anger. Crowe did not think Gavallan had the strength to give commands. Crowe shoved the curses of the sword to the back of his mind. He ran at the cathedral, heading for the south flank.

‘It bleeds, brothers,’ he called on the vox. ‘Let us press the attack!’

Sendrax was already leading the others back to join him.

The cathedral issued a booming howl of frustration. It slammed the south tower down again. It was too late. The Purifiers had moved past the façade, out of range of the violet eye. They reached the flank. Crowe leapt at one of the buttress legs. He slashed its stone flesh with his sword as the limb left the ground. Rocky hide parted. Crowe grabbed the edge of the wound. The leg rose, taking him up with it. He used the momentum to propel himself upwards and slash again. He seized the new wound and pulled himself higher. Below him, Gavallan climbed too.

‘Well done, Knight of the Flame,’ the castellan rasped. ‘You have the measure of our foe.’

Not yet, Crowe thought. But the momentum of the battle had changed. The cathedral was on the defensive, even if it did not yet know this was so.

Sendrax followed Crowe’s example and slashed into the next leg down. It was a column, much thinner, but still large enough for the Knight of the Flame and his squad to climb. The Purifiers moved up the flank of the monster. They timed their movements to the rise and fall of the limbs, using the heaving of the beast’s lunges against it. Their ascent was rapid. Ichor poured from the wounds, soaking the limbs in fluid darkness. Crowe passed scales that had been windows. The cathedral’s maws changed their chorus to hoots of alarm as Crowe reached the sloping roof. The monster knew something was awry. It felt the lash of blades, but it could not reach the tiny enemies.

The cathedral flailed its towers in frustration. It bellowed and shrieked at the same time. It plunged forwards. As the Grey Knights gathered on the roof, it crossed the dead Rybas. Furious, it began to smash at the western sector’s buildings. An Administratum complex exploded under its blows, lesser spires collapsing in rockcrete splinters.

Crowe moved towards the west end of the cathedral. He timed his steps as best he could with the heaving movements of the beast’s march. Wind screamed over the roof.

‘What do you intend?’ Sendrax asked.

‘The eye,’ said Crowe. ‘It’s as close to a vital point as I can see. I would pierce it, and burn what lies beyond.’ He paused and looked at Gavallan. All the Purifiers did. They waited for the brotherhood champion to speak. To lead.

‘Agreed,’ Gavallan said.

The wait before he spoke was brief. It would have been unnoticeable in a mortal, but in a hero like Gavallan, it felt eternal. His fatigue filled the moment of that hesitation. Everything the sword had taken from him was clear to Crowe, and he grieved. He wondered what the others thought. Then he saw wary tension in their stances. They were fighting the sword too. They would have little energy left to notice the fading strength of the castellan.

‘Make for the eye,’ Gavallan said. He ran forwards, his stride gaining certainty after a few steps. Crowe followed just behind, determined to let Gavallan regain his pride.

The Grey Knights moved along the spine of the roof. It tilted to the near-vertical as the monster lurched onwards. With each rise, Crowe slashed the hide with his blade and held the ridge of the wound to keep from sliding off the roof. The smoke-filled sky above was torn by the blazing orange streaks of artillery shells. Three hit the cathedral in quick succession, one against the south tower, the other two landing on the roof. The nearest was on the slope to Crowe’s left, less than ten yards from his position. He saw the fountain of ichor jet upwards in the wake of the blast. The wound bubbled and frothed. The stone hide around it twitched. The injury was superficial, though. The cathedral ignored it, and the hole began to scab over with rock.

Crowe pointed at the damage as he pounded along the spine. ‘Any wound in the hide is meaningless. We need to strike deeper.’

‘Assuming the eye is vulnerable,’ said Drake.

‘It is an eye, so it will be vulnerable,’ Crowe said. He looked at the movements of the warp over the cathedral. All was vortices and turbulence. Their chaos grew stronger the closer to the front the Grey Knights came. At the far edge of the roof, between the towers, the warp became a furious storm. The density of the maelstrom was tremendous. He was heading for the nexus of the energy that powered this unholy creation.

‘Berinon has been firing at the eye to no effect,’ Sendrax pointed out.

‘I know,’ said Crowe. ‘Our attack must be a spiritual one.’ He raised his Nemesis blade in a gesture of promised victory. ‘We have hurt it once. We have its measure. We knew it feared us. Now we know why.’

Gavallan said nothing. He forged on in grim silence. Though he set a strong pace, Crowe sensed his fading energy. He felt the assaults of Antwyr in his own mind as a psychic artillery barrage, forever in the background, but with the ever-present chance of a sudden direct hit. Gavallan was caught in the centre of the blasts. He had reached the point where merely advancing was a miracle of heroic strength.

They reached the edge of the roof. Gavallan stood tall, his banner snapping in the burning wind of the night. He was as indomitable as the figurehead of a ship, and equally unbending. He stood and waited, consumed by his struggle, and did no more. Crowe understood the role that had fallen to him. He must be the one to find the path of attack. His thoughts were capable of doing more than resisting Antwyr’s attack.

Note your destiny, Crowe thought. Prepare for what might come, and fight it to the end.

He looked down the bucking façade. There were thirty feet of stone before the top of the eye. The orb was recessed. There was no angle of attack from this position. ‘We must get closer,’ Crowe said. The warp turbulence was at its most intense directly before the eye. The warp and the materium were in flux there, blending into each other as they fought. The impossible condition of the cathedral’s life emerged from nightmare and into reality from one moment to the next, an endless renewal of horror.

Sendrax crouched beside Crowe. They held tight to gargoyles perched at the edge of the roof. ‘We climb again, then,’ he said. He sounded angry at the poor option. The rearing of the cathedral was much more violent here. The beast might be able to shake its tormentors free.

‘No,’ Crowe said. ‘Watch.’ He pointed down when the cathedral rose again. As it hit the apex of its lunge, the façade of the monster was raised to the sky. The slope down to the eye was no more than thirty degrees. There was a pause of a few seconds before the cathedral dropped forwards and its face became vertical again.

‘You want us to slide down,’ Sendrax said with admiring disbelief.

‘When the face is raised,’ Crowe said, ‘we might be able to get down to the recess in time.’

‘Madness,’ said Sendrax.

‘Our way forwards.’

Sendrax grunted with bitter amusement. He looked up at Gavallan. ‘Castellan…’ he began.

‘We leap at the next chance,’ Gavallan cut him off. The distortions of his helmet grille did not hide the clenched pain in his voice.

‘So be it,’ said Sendrax, and he sounded almost eager. He had pointed out the recklessness of Crowe’s idea, and now he embraced it. It was an act of rebellion against the strictures the fates thought they could impose. He was eager to spite them.

The cathedral fell again. The path of destruction through the western sector of Egeta grew wider and longer. In the distance, atop the city’s other hill, the walls of the Governor’s palace flashed with cannon fire. The palace’s spire was a crystal beacon. It was growing easier to see. It was the marker of the city’s fall, Crowe thought. Perhaps Egeta was already lost. He was fighting against a daemonic force, not for the survival of the doomed. Even so, the destruction of that tower would be a defeat of a kind. He would bring this monster down before it climbed the hill. It was time the daemonic march came to an end.

The cathedral rose.

The Grey Knights leapt from the edge of the roof.

Crowe was first. He jumped the moment before the monster’s lunge began. He jabbed his Nemesis blade into the beast’s hide. The muscle of stone parted. He pulled a long wound open in the cathedral’s face, the friction of severed flesh slowing his fall.

The monster reared again. The slope of the façade decreased and the cathedral’s face turned upwards. Crowe was sliding now, bouncing against the uneven, transformed masonry. Then the stone ended, and he was plummeting down across the eye. The surface was a foul paradox. It was hot and cold at once. It was a soft jelly, yet it rejected the point of his sword like adamantium. It was solid, yet Crowe felt a legion of grasping storms clutch at his armour.

The beast dropped down again, completing its lunge forwards. The angle of the façade steepened once more. Crowe fell faster. Without the drag of his sword, he quickly reached dangerous speeds. If he hit the ledge with too much momentum, he might bounce off it and fall a hundred feet to the flaming ruins below.

The ledge rushed up. Crowe stabbed down with his blade. His boots struck the ledge with a violent jar and he jerked forwards. He began to fall again. The blade went deep into the hide. It yanked him to a halt. The flesh began to part, but he grabbed the ledge with his other hand and hauled himself up. His battle-brothers used their blades to arrest their descents too. Crowe reached out to grab Gavallan. He pulled his hand back when he saw the castellan had a firm grip on the recess. He would not humiliate Gavallan by presuming weakness.

Gavallan drew himself up. He stood in the centre of the Purifiers as they stood at the bottom of the eye. He seemed to grow in stature before the daemonic gaze. Antwyr snarled and prophesied defeat, but the strength of the Grey Knights was greater than the psychic wounds it could inflict. As one, they raised their blades and aimed their storm bolters at the centre of the eye. Gavallan spoke, and his thundering voice rose in its righteousness above the din of war.

‘You bear the stolen form of sanctuary!’ Gavallan shouted. There was no weakness in him now. He was the brotherhood champion, the greatest of the Purifiers, and he fought with the force of perfect sanctity. ‘You have defiled sacred ground! For this, you have called the great and holy wrath of the Emperor upon your being. We are the wrath. We are the hand. We are the blade. Be gone from His sight, wretched and unclean thing. Fall before the judgement of purification!’

As one, the Purifiers passed sentence.

They fired their storm bolters at the same moment they unleashed the scouring flame of purity. Shells and psychic fire became a single collective blast, magnified by unity into a power no tainted being could withstand. Blessed shells punched into the surface of the eye. The flame followed, and it annihilated the matter of corruption. The eye burst and burned. A hundred mouths screamed. The daemonic song of the cathedral ceased, becoming a howl of outraged pain, then maddened pain and finally the pain of a dying animal. The howl spread across Egeta, echoed by daemons and heretics as the cataclysm of loss fell upon them.

The eye burned and burned, consumed by the holy inferno. Its matter pulled back into the recess it inhabited. The Grey Knights kept up their bolter fire, and the cleansing flame still poured from their hands. The purge struck deeper and deeper into the cathedral. The drain was enormous. Crowe felt how ephemeral his life was, how thin his existence in the currents of the vast forces of the cosmos. But he was also the conduit of great power, and he wielded it in the name of the Father of Mankind. He would give himself to incineration if that was what was asked of him.

He was the willing sacrifice.

His submission to duty gave him power. Free of doubt and temptation, he was the perfect vessel. Where he sensed his brothers’ psychic strength nearing exhaustion, he gave of himself. The wall of flame did not falter.

Burning and burning and burning.

The cathedral reared up. The towers reached for the sky, mindlessly pleading. There was no answer from its dark god. Perhaps the daemonic creature had been abandoned. Perhaps it was not heard. Perhaps its god could do nothing for its creature.

The fire burned, and then it ended all at once. The light went out. Where the eye had been, there was a deep, circular abyss. Smoke poured from the blind void. The maws fell silent. The cathedral froze at the extremity of its lunge. Its animating force vanished. Hide became simple stone once more, stone held in a position it could not physically sustain.

The cracking rumble of a rockslide warned the Grey Knights what was coming. ‘The abomination falls!’ Crowe called in warning and triumph.

‘And us with it!’ Sendrax answered, eager to ride out the monster’s death.

The cathedral slumped forwards. The centre of the roof snapped in half. The towers, outstretched, collapsed like a petrified sky on the streets of Egeta. Buttresses crumbled as the front half of the cathedral slammed down. The impact broke the bones of its supports. The vacant ruin of the rose window jerked downwards, stopped, then began its last fall as the façade broke apart from the base upwards.

Crowe saw a strange grace in the first seconds of the collapse. He rejoiced to witness the triumph of the Purifiers.

Then he was falling through a dying mountain. He knew the fall would not kill him. There was too much duty left unfinished.

Vendruhn woke to the rumble of the cathedral’s destruction. She dragged herself upright against the overturned, crushed wreckage of her Chimera. She wiped blood from her eyes and looked to the west. She saw the monster fall from supplication to ruin. Dropping shells lit the sky as they smashed into its stone corpse.

‘General?’

She turned her head. The movement sent shooting pains down her neck and spine from the base of her skull. Her body felt like a mass of contusions. She could move, though. She was bleeding from a gash in her forehead, and something was stabbing into her left side, but she thought she could walk.

Sergeant Barratz ran up to her. ‘General,’ he repeated, ‘we couldn’t find you. We feared…’

‘I’m all right, sergeant,’ she said. Her ears were ringing. She could barely hear herself. She wondered how long she had been unconscious. Too long, if the cathedral had made it across the river. She didn’t ask. Instead she said, ‘How do we stand?’

‘We lost half the armour,’ Barratz told her. ‘And at least a third of the infantry.’

Bad, she thought. We are still in the fight, though.

She took in her surroundings more clearly. Being thrown clear of the hatch had saved her life. Her crew had not been as fortunate. She grimaced, acknowledging their loss to herself, then moved on. There was no time for the luxury of mourning. Around low rubble heaps, soldiers were firing into the darkness. The remaining Chimeras were manoeuvring into formation in the most open area.

‘Enemy movement?’ Vendruhn asked Barratz.

‘Some. Not a great deal. Still less since the…’ He trailed off as he glanced in the direction of the cathedral. ‘Since it began to walk. Even less now.’

Vendruhn distrusted the good news. The heretics and daemons had vanished in large numbers shortly before the cathedral had risen. There was a connection. That much was obvious. But where had they gone?

‘Do we have a working vox?’ she asked.

‘Yes, general.’

‘Any word from the palace’

‘They are not under attack yet. The main threat is now down.’

‘So they’re sounding optimistic.’

‘They are.’

She pointed to the nearest Chimera. ‘That is the new command vehicle. I want a vox-officer and the unit in it. We make for the parvis.’

‘General?’

‘I want to see where the enemy has gone.’ She needed more information before deciding her next move. The cathedral had fallen, so the Grey Knights had that sector of the conflict in hand. If the situation at the palace was calm, there was perhaps a chance to learn how best to press the advantage.

And where did they all go?

The journey up the hill was direct, following the straight-line path of the monster’s march of devastation. The militia’s progress was slowed by collapsed buildings, many still burning. Attacks were minimal. There did not appear to be any daemons left in the destroyed eastern sector. There were only heretics, and just scattered groups of those.

Where are they?

The column, bleeding, badly wounded but still proud, reached the parvis. Vendruhn called a halt at the edge of the foundations. She climbed down from the vehicle and approached the huge crater.

In the days that followed, she would reflect with a stab of pain that she had already known what she was going to see.

The pit was deep. The remnants of the cathedral’s support columns stood in it like broken teeth. Staircases spiralled in from nowhere, descending to rubble-strewn halls. Thousands of burned bodies lay in the ruins. They were mutilated in ways that went beyond being crushed. There were hints of patterns in the dispositions of the corpses. The arrangements hurt Vendruhn’s mind, and she instinctively averted her gaze before the meanings became clear.

‘Get back,’ she ordered the militia. ‘No one approaches this pit without my authorisation.’

Being careful not to let the patterns seize her attention, she looked along the walls of the pit. She wished she did not know what she was looking for. But old memories of even older rumours had surfaced. She had no choice but to listen to them.

She walked along the edge. At the western end of the pit, she found what she had feared. Tunnels ran from what had been the crypt, to judge from the smashed sarcophagi. They headed west, underground.

The stories, forgotten since childhood, were true. There was a subterranean path, unused for many centuries, linking the cathedral to the palace.

The ringing in Vendruhn’s ears grew worse. She felt a sudden pressure as if she were becoming deaf. Then she realised she was responding to silence. The artillery guns at the palace had gone quiet.

She ran back to the Chimera, shouting for the vox.

It was too late. The palace, too, had fallen silent.

The cathedral fell.

Otto had watched its approach, felt the beat of every ponderous lurch as a blow to his heart, to his hope, to his faith. He could not understand how such a thing could be. Its existence contradicted all the teachings he knew of the Imperial creed. If this should be, what was true?

The cathedral had crossed the river. It had closed in on the palace’s hill. It had ignored the artillery. His orders had resulted in the destruction of his city to no purpose.

And then the blue flame had come. High in the façade of the cathedral, purity had flared into life. And when the light faded, the monster fell. The cathedral collapsed, losing all recognisable form. It ended as a huge mass of rubble. It lost all terrifying meaning. The Imperial creed declared that this obscenity could not be, and so the lightning of truth brought it low. The Emperor forbade the existence of the monster, and the monster died.

Otto’s faith reasserted itself. He fought back tears of gratitude. He did not have the time to indulge in the luxury of weeping. He had a war to conduct.

Waclav said, ‘What are your orders for the guns, Lord Governor?’

There was no point in bombarding the corpse. ‘What reports do we have of other enemy activity?’ Otto asked.

‘A few isolated incidents on this side of the Rybas. We believe more have been seen on the east side, but contact with General Glas’ forces has been difficult. They have suffered heavy losses.’

‘Is…’ He almost said my daughter. He caught himself, and respected her office and his. ‘Is General Glas still living?’

‘We have no definite word.’

Otto nodded. ‘As soon as you do, I want to know.’

‘Understood.’

‘As for the guns…’ He thought for a moment. ‘Resume interdiction fire aimed at the east embankment. We will stymie any attempts by the enemy to make the crossing.’ It was the same tactic that had run its course before, but he chose to believe the foe had been sufficiently weakened to make it effective once more.

‘As you will,’ Waclav said. His usual calm was returning to him. He seemed once again like a man sure of his ability to discharge his responsibilities and protect his Lord Governor.

The background booming of the guns stopped.

Otto frowned. ‘I gave no order…’ he began. Then he heard gunfire and screams coming down the corridors outside the throne room doors. The sounds of battle, and unholy songs.

And there was a voice he knew. It was Rannoch’s. Only it was too loud, and strangely multiplied, as though a choir of Rannochs approached.

‘Otto!’ the Rannoch voice called and mocked. ‘Otto! Otto, Otto, Otto! We have business together! We are called upon to dance! Will you join me? Will you not? Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you, will you, will you see?’ As the voice drew nearer, it became less and less human. It was something that sounded like Rannoch only for its own amusement.

Waclav paled. He turned with his squad to face the doors. They raised their lasrifles. Otto pulled his laspistol from its holster. He had not pulled the trigger in half a century. He dreaded the futility of doing so now.

The doors crashed open. Abominations burst into the throne room. Beasts with horns and hooves smashed aside the tacticarium tables. They impaled Otto’s honour guard with scorpion tails. Lithe horrors that suggested the female form distorted by talons and pincers stalked forwards on either side of the thing that laughed with Rannoch’s voice. They pounced on more of the guards. The daemons set to work, and Otto shuddered at the screams of blood and joy that came from the troops. Waclav moaned as a daemon lashed him to the ground with a whip. The air was filled with an overpowering scent. Otto felt his knees weaken with terrified desire.

The Rannoch-thing was the worst of all. It was the tallest of the daemons. It bent down to pass through the doorway, and when it straightened, it stepped over its minions as if they were beneath notice. It was thin, though its misshapen body rippled with corded muscle. It had four arms. Two ended in clawed hands. The third, on the left, was a huge pincer. The fourth was a bone spur as long as a spear, and edged like a sabre. The right hand kept opening and closing, grasping at air as if possessed by hunger. The torso of the daemon had mouths. They snapped their teeth and laughed, and all their voices were Rannoch’s. The mouth over the belly, in the curve of its lips and the lopsided superiority of its smile, horrified Otto with its familiarity. That mouth, he was sure, truly was the cardinal’s. The daemon’s head, atop its elongated neck, was narrow, and even in its monstrosity possessed an elegant silhouette that suggested artistry and pain. A serpentine tongue licked out, tasting the air with delight.

Where the daemon walked, desire followed and gathered around its limbs in a mist.

The daemon wore the mask. Otto could not tell if the jewelled relic was an ornament or now part of the daemon’s flesh. The sublime artefact still called his eye, lured his senses and broke him with nauseated awe.

‘Otto,’ said the daemon in the sonorous, sensuous, musical, Rannoch-not-Rannoch voice.

‘Otto! Otto! Otto!’ the mouths echoed in different timbres, but with the same intonation, and one voice – the voice which issued from the mouth that looked so familiar – truly was Rannoch’s, his words quivering in the fusion of pleasure and pain.

‘Look upon the wonders come to your world,’ said the daemon, spreading its arms.

‘Wonders! Wonders! Wonders!’ cried the mouths.

‘Rannoch…’ Otto whispered. Before the enormity of the cardinal’s crime, he could do no more than plead to a man who no longer existed. Something clunked on the floor beside him. His hand, cold yet prickling with anticipated sensation, had dropped his pistol.

‘Your cardinal was a useful fool,’ the daemon said. (‘Fool! Fool! Fool!’) ‘But he has served his purpose. So has his name.’ (‘Name! Name! Name!’) ‘Here is a new name. One you shall worship.’

And all the mouths cried, ‘Mnay’salath! Mnay’salath! Mnay’salath!’ They shrieked the name in a perfection of agony.

‘And you,’ said Mnay’salath. (‘Otto! Otto! Otto!’) ‘You have a purpose to fulfil.’ It strode towards Otto and picked him up with its left hand. The pincer snapped and clicked beside his ear. Mnay’salath looked at its right hand, which opened and closed, opened and closed. ‘I am lacking,’ it hissed. (‘Seize! Seize! Seize!’) It carried Otto to the window. It held him up to look at the works of the burning city and the illusion of hope. ‘My prize is out there,’ Mnay’salath said. Its voice dropped lower, turning into an insinuating whisper. ‘You will help me claim it, won’t you?’

Otto vowed to himself he would not. He would die before he betrayed Egeta. At the same time, he sensed there was nothing he could deny this horror. A claw scraped against the back of his neck, drawing blood, drawing shivers, the piercing jab suggestive of obscene secrets. The daemon knew Otto. It knew things about him he could not imagine being true.

I will defy you, Otto thought. His will seemed so brittle and tiny. I will defy you.

Mnay’salath laughed, and its mouths laughed, as if it heard his pathetic defiance and was pleased. It lifted Otto even higher. Its pincer smashed the glassteel with a single blow. The wind blew inside the tower, mixing smoke and ash with the daemonic musk. Mnay’salath stretched out its arms to the city. It dangled Otto over the huge drop to the roof of the keep.

Mnay’salath shouted. Otto screamed at the sound, but he could not hear himself. The daemon’s voice was everything, a roar that reached across the entire city. It was the blast of immense, all-powerful desire. It was a command given power by final hunger.

‘Bring me the sword!’

‘Antwyr! Antwyr! Antwyr!’ shrieked the mouths in hysterical need.

‘Bring me the sword!’

Chapter Eight

CHAMPION

Crowe kicked away the last of the rubble blocking his path just as the daemonic shout resounded across Egeta.

‘Bring me the sword!’

He clambered out of the wreckage of the cathedral. Drake and Gorvenal had found their way out first. They moved to assist him. Crowe shook his head. He was drained from the energy he had used to kill the beast. He felt that effect far more than the physical damage he had sustained in the fall, and from the battering meted out by the massive blocks of broken stonework. He did not need help, though.

He was less sure about Gavallan.

The castellan had landed near him in the collapse. Crowe had led the way out, clearing the path. They had spoken little. Now Crowe turned back to the crude tunnel he had created. Gavallan emerged just as Sendrax crawled from the rubble a few yards away.

‘Bring me the sword!’

There was a musical quality to the shout, as if it were the blast of an unholy fanfare.

Antwyr responded with a renewed savagery of curses. Gavallan tensed, but did not stagger this time. He straightened and looked in the direction of the palace. As the rest of the Purifiers fought their way clear of the ruins, Gavallan said, ‘Brothers, our way forward is clear.’

‘The Black Blade is unhappy with that choice,’ said Crowe.

‘Good.’

Gavallan sounded stronger than he had. Crowe was surprised, but grateful.

‘What are your orders, brother castellan?’ Sendrax asked. ‘Are we going to honour the daemon’s request?’

‘We are,’ said Gavallan. ‘Its summons gives us a target.’ His helm turned briefly to the cathedral. ‘We know what we seek is not in there.’

‘An aerial approach?’ Crowe suggested.

‘Yes,’ said Gavallan. He paused, looking up at the spire. ‘Knight of the Flame,’ he said to Crowe, ‘what can you see?’

‘Little from this distance, but the flow of the immaterium grows more turbulent in the direction of the tower.’

Gavallan nodded, satisfied.

The Grey Knights headed east from the cathedral ruins. The streets in the immediate vicinity were too blocked by debris for Berinon to land the Purgation’s Sword. They needed a more open area to board.

There was movement in the openings of the manufactorum they passed. It was one of the few in the city. Almost all of the system’s industrial production was on Sandava III. The complex had become a refuge for civilians fleeing the destruction of the Administratum buildings. They gathered at the doorways and windows. They looked at the Grey Knights with desperation, and no longer with awe. Their faces were pale, pinched by the night.

‘Be ready,’ Crowe voxed the squads.

‘Bring me the sword!’

The people attacked. They ran into the streets from the manufactorum and the facing hab blocks. They were a mob without sense or thought. They only had fear. They feared the daemonic shout, and they saw the sword on Gavallan’s back. Days of war and horror had broken them. They ran towards damnation as though it were their last chance for salvation.

‘Are they mad?’ said Carac.

‘They are maddened,’ Crowe answered. He understood that only terror beyond their ability to process would push civilians to charge at Space Marines. He understood, but he judged all the same. The mortals’ weakness robbed them of any claim to mercy. In their fear, they had embraced heresy.

The Purifiers did not waste ammunition on the mob. Crowe was loath even to sully his blade with the blood of so pathetic a foe. The squads waded through the howling crowd. Fists and makeshift clubs beat against their armour with no effect. The mortals were trying to stop a power that would not be turned. In the eyes of the civilians closest to him, Crowe saw a new terror take hold, sparked by awe as they closed in. But the power of the daemonic command pushed them on and they clawed, weeping, at his flanks. He broke limbs with every stride. The Purifiers marched over the unfaithful who fell in their path. Crowe took no pleasure in the deaths. He felt no regret, either. There were reasons why these people had abandoned their faith, but there were no excuses.

The Black Blade pulled the mob in like a psychic lodestone. The heretics, mere animals now, still knew at a level deeper than instinct that this was the prize the terrible and musical voice demanded.

‘Bring me the sword!’

The heretics tried to push their way between the Grey Knights. They tried to isolate Gavallan. Crowe marched half a step behind the castellan. He smashed the heretics aside.

Your chance is now, Antwyr hissed at his soul. I am in your reach. Look how easily you can grasp me. Will you have these vermin claim me in your stead? Embrace your fate. With me, this plague vanishes. With me, all barriers fall. Free me. It will be so easy. So easy...

Crowe ignored the sword. A heretic ran in from the left and scrabbled at the back of Gavallan’s power pack. Crowe hurled the heretic away, but as he did, the chains holding Antwyr rattled. Crowe eyed them. They looked as secure as they always had. The Black Blade had not shifted.

So easy, said the sword. So easy.

‘Brother castellan,’ he said.

‘I heard it too,’ said Gavallan.

A few hundred yards past the manufactorum, the street widened and was clear of debris. Berinon landed the Stormraven. The downward blast of the engines filled the street with a gale’s fury, and the mob howled in distress. At the edges of the crowd, and further up the street, the materium cried out in a tearing of flesh and sanity. Mortal forms split, stretched, twisted. Daemons rejoiced at their violent birth into reality. The people of Egeta fled the multiplying abominations. They rushed the Grey Knights with renewed desperation. They tried to climb into the Purgation’s Sword.

‘Do they think they can bring it down or that they can escape?’ Drake wondered.

‘I doubt they know,’ said Crowe.

‘What they do or do not know is irrelevant now,’ Destrian said flatly. He turned his incinerator on the mob before the gunship. He performed the execution without anger, and in the cold light of necessity. The heretics collapsed, writhing, beneath the wash of flame. So would burn everything tainted by Ruin. The Purifiers boarded the Stormraven through the side door. Crowe stood in the opening as Berinon lifted off. He watched the street devolve into a riot of daemonic transformation and slaughter. The Sword rose higher. Other streets were burning. Chaos was spreading over the western sector of Egeta. Everywhere Crowe looked, he saw cavorting abominations. The destruction of the cathedral had done nothing to stop the incursion. The great daemonic voice had triggered a new offensive, rippling out from the street the Grey Knights had left behind.

Sendrax joined Crowe. ‘I dislike leaving the foe to do as it pleases,’ he said.

‘The critical battle is not down there,’ said Crowe. Egeta might fall. All of Sandava II might fall. Victory did not lie in the salvation of a single city or work. It lay in the destruction of the force behind the incursion. It might be necessary to destroy the diseased body to stop the plague.

‘Agreed,’ Sendrax said. ‘Still, our hand is being forced yet again.’

Crowe nodded. ‘Maybe so,’ he said. He pointed to the palace tower. ‘But our enemy is there.’ As they closed in on the spire, the density of the warp flows grew clearer. The ramparts of the keep were burning. There was heavy fighting under way there. But that too was a distraction. The throne room was the key. Still pointing, Crowe said, ‘That is where we will end the foe’s game.’

‘The daemon calls for the Blade,’ Gavallan said behind them.

Crowe turned. The castellan stood in the centre of the troop compartment, defying the exhaustion in his voice with his proud stance.

‘Very well,’ Gavallan said. ‘We will put the daemon to the sword.’

The laughter was everywhere. It skittered out of the dark. It whipped around the flames of burning buildings. It followed the remnants of the Sandava II Militia as it made its run from the eastern sector. It exploded overhead as the armour and the ragged infantry crossed the Rybas riverbed. It was waiting for them in the west of the city.

‘Bring me the sword!’ cried the voice of command, the choir of a single will, and the laughter fell from its echoes.

Vendruhn had commandeered the heavy bolter on the new Chimera. She fired into the blackness that had descended upon the streets with the coming of night. Power was failing all over the sector. She had left the devastated east to find the war taking the west. She saw few daemons. They flashed by the edges of the phalanx. Their forms flickered into sight by the light of flames. They snatched at infantry stragglers, but most of their prey was further out, running and screaming in the streets. Vendruhn heard their songs and their whistling, though, and the laughter was in the foul music.

It was everywhere.

It was aimed at her.

She knew this because she felt its lethal stab in her soul. The laughter triumphed over the fall of the Glas dynasty. It revelled in the end of glory. Centuries of reign faithful to the Emperor. Centuries of peace through iron. Sandava II was exemplary, a model to be held up across the subsector, and it was the Glas family who had made it so.

And now the laughter. In the air or in her mind, it was real. Sandava II was lost. There was nothing to save. The people were wretched cowards, unworthy of Glas rule, unworthy of protection, unworthy of life. So Vendruhn fired into the dark. It did not matter what she gunned down. Everything that moved was condemned in her eyes. She fired at the laughter. When, in the wavering fragments of light, she saw something fall, be it human or daemon, she answered the laughter with her own. Her laugh was a weapon as fierce as her shells. What she had given her life to protecting had been revealed as deserving only death. Executing that sentence was a release, a grim joy. There might have been perversity in her pleasure if there had been anything less than justice in each kill.

The perversity lay in still fighting.

She stopped firing for a moment, her breath wheezing through her harsh laugh, and she heard someone calling to her. It was Morenz. The infantry trooper had charge of the vox-unit for her platoon. It still worked, and Barratz had assigned her to Vendruhn’s Chimera to handle the patchwork communications net.

‘What is it?’ Vendruhn asked, angry at the interruption.

‘Communication from the Adeptus Astartes.’ Morenz sounded alarmed to have spoken to figures so divine.

Vendruhn dropped through the hatch into the Chimera’s troop hold. Along with Morenz, the transport had taken on wounded soldiers, men and women who could no longer run, but were still able to fight. Vendruhn took the handset from Morenz. ‘This is General Glas,’ she said.

The Grey Knight did not bother to identify himself. When he spoke, Vendruhn recognised the deep, cold rasp of the one called Crowe. ‘What is your position?’ he asked.

‘About a mile east of the palace sector,’ said Vendruhn. ‘We are making good time. We will be in position to attack in minutes.’

‘The enemy stronghold is the throne room,’ Crowe told her. ‘Secondary forces may seek to detain you at ground level. Do not permit this. Make for the spire immediately.’

‘At any cost?’

‘If you do not, your cost will be total.’ He snapped off the vox-channel.

Vendruhn stared at the handset. The Grey Knight’s peremptoriness would have enraged her had it come from a mortal. She felt no anger at Crowe. She might as well condemn a mountain for being inflexible.

‘Understood,’ she said to the silent handset. She gave it back to Morenz. ‘New orders,’ she said. ‘We make for the throne room. No pause will be tolerated. If you stop to fight, you will be abandoned.’

‘Yes, general,’ Morenz said. She sounded taken aback, but she turned to her equipment and began the process of relaying the order to the rest of the column.

Vendruhn did not wait to hear her command transmitted. She climbed back up to her heavy bolter. She fired with renewed fury. She had remained calm before Morenz. Now she set her hate free. She killed anything she saw move beyond the edges of the column. Her troops followed her example, and their fire cut into the dark. The militia left a wake of blood as it stormed through Egeta. There were more and more civilians in the streets as the palace drew nearer. Vendruhn gunned them down, her lips pulled back in a rictus of excited wrath. Unworthy, unworthy, unworthy, she thought.

She did not know if her father was alive. What she knew was that the centre of the Glas regime had been taken. She would reclaim it, or burn everything.

It occurred to her that she might reclaim the throne, then burn everything. Nothing could be redeemed on Sandava II. Nothing was worth saving.

The palace sector’s main gate appeared at the end of the boulevard. Troops were fighting on the battlements, struggling against daemons that mocked and toyed with them. In the writhing light of muzzle flashes and leaping flame, the monstrous silhouettes capered. The abominations were amusing themselves with their prey.

The gate was open. Mobs of citizens blocked the space between the walls. The people in the streets sought the false refuge inside. Those within the walls tried to flee the fighting and the ravening horrors. The streams collided in the gateway. The people fought and screamed and tore each other to pieces.

‘Clear our path!’ Vendruhn ordered. She aimed the bolter forwards. The Chimera’s multi-laser turret blasted the mob. Behind Vendruhn, two other transports moved to either side and burned the civilians with their las-bursts. The gateway turned into the threshold to a smouldering charnel house. The Chimeras roared over the corpses and the crawling survivors. Vendruhn felt the jerk and grind of tracks crushing bone. She heard cracks and screams. She shouted at the night, and the sound of dying wretches pleased her well. She saw the doors to the keep open before her, only a few hundred yards away, and she yelled, giving voice to an emotion that was neither rage nor triumph, nor defiance nor hate, but something she dared not name.

The night answered with the laughter, the endless laughter, the laughter that already strode the world in victory.

‘Bring me the sword!’ the monstrous voice called once more. There was satisfaction in its perverted musicality now. An expectation of fulfilment.

Above, the gunship of the Grey Knights closed in on the top of the spire.

‘Do you see?’

The daemon’s voice was suddenly quiet, intimate, a seductive whisper at the back of Otto’s neck, hissing the last word, sssssssseeeeee, turning it into a serpent of wind that stirred his hair. He breathed in a mixture of heady blossoms and rich putrescence.

Mnay’salath swept its pincer before it, taking in all the movements of the night. ‘Behold,’ it gloated. ‘As below, as above, as I say. I command and it is done. My prize comes to me.’

Its empty hand opened and closed, claws clicking against each other. Otto squirmed in the daemon’s grip. He looked where he was commanded. He had no choice. Mnay’salath had the reins of his mind and his body. He would obey, and obey gladly, whatever he was told, even though another part of him would scream with all the passion of a dying soul.

Vendruhn’s forces had returned. The armoured column smashed its way into the palace grounds. The square before the keep lit up with a sudden increase in las-fire. In the air, something was flying directly at the throne room window. It had the build and armament of a tank, and it cut through the night on wrathful engines. In the final seconds of the Stormraven’s approach, Otto experienced an overwhelming vertigo. It seemed the gunship might slam straight into the throne room. Otto would have welcomed the sudden oblivion. It would have freed him from the torment of fear and hope and rage and desire.

The Grey Knights were here, but the daemon welcomed their arrival. They carried its prize. Bring me the sword, it had commanded, and they had obeyed. Below, Otto’s daughter was fighting her way to the heart of the curse that had taken Sandava II. The daemon was pleased by her arrival as well. Otto saw all this in the few moments it took for the Stormraven to slow and turn its right flank to the window. Otto cried out. He cried for salvation and for vengeance. He cried for the pain of Sandava II. He cried a warning too, a wordless one, a pointless one, and in his agony he saw just how futile it was. Nothing could change what was about to happen. There was no path open to the Grey Knights except to attack, exactly as the daemon commanded. Otto’s only hope was in their victory.

The side door of the gunship was open. Mnay’salath made a casual, graceful leap that carried it and Otto halfway across the throne room. It bowed, sweeping its free arms in a gesture of welcome to the Space Marines. Its vassal daemons snarled and trilled, celebrating its pleasure.

Gavallan stood in the centre of the Stormraven’s opening. The leader of the Grey Knights was not wielding the relic sword.

Otto despaired.

The sword was the only way of defeating the evil. He had known this from the moment he had first seen it. Gavallan had brought it here, but would not use it. He would not use the thing the daemon wanted against it. The trap was complete.

The Grey Knights leapt, storm bolters blazing. The remainder of the glassteel window exploded. So did the daemons closest to it. The shells struck them with the force of sanctity, for that was what landed in the throne room. The Grey Knights did not seem to notice when their shells blasted through the abominations and into the bodies of their human captives. These Space Marines were the terrible might of the holy Emperor. As they launched their attack, Otto was almost as afraid of them as he was of the daemons. They were the idea of the sacred given form in silver-grey, and the sacred was fearsome, a thing divorced from mercy.

Otto was at the centre of a war between forces that surpassed all understanding, and he cried out again from the depths of his perfect terror.

The Purifiers landed in close formation in the throne room. They arrived as a single entity, already destroying abominations before they had taken their first step. The two squads made a wedge with Gavallan at its tip. Crowe and Sendrax led its wings to his right and left. They cleansed the near space of the lesser horrors and took the measure of the foe.

The greater daemon regarded them through the eyes of the mask. It grinned. It held the Lord Governor aloft with one hand. ‘Give me the sword,’ it snarled.

The monster was one of the high creatures of the Dark Prince. A Keeper of Secrets. Crowe had witnessed such a thing lay waste to an entire battlefield. He had read much about these daemons in the forbidden texts preserved in the Chambers of Purity. They were dangerous on levels far beyond the physical.

Gavallan raised his sword, pointing it at the daemon’s chest. ‘We shall bring you judgement!’ he roared. At the same moment he gunned down a fiend that lunged at him over the tacticarium tables.

Mnay’salath! Antwyr shouted. Pretender! Wretch of Slaanesh! I will cleave you where you stand!

The sword’s anger seemed directed entirely at the Keeper of Secrets. Crowe distrusted the perception. The rage still cut into his mind with as much force as any of Antwyr’s blandishments. The Blade’s hatred for the daemon was genuine. It was also a ploy, a truth fused to a lie.

The Lord Governor and his honour guard were the playthings of the daemons. Fiends and daemonettes coiled around the soldiers. Most of the guards were still alive. They were dying by degrees, tortured by sense experiences that had no name. They screamed for release and begged for more.

There were sporadic sounds of combat from elsewhere in the tower, but only more daemons, not mortals, entered the broken doorway. The abominations had full control of the throne room. Mnay’salath drew itself up to its full, impossible height and dangled Otto before it. The daemon was amused in its arrogance to let the Grey Knights strike first.

Or so it seemed. Crowe perceived the tension in the warp gather around Mnay’salath. The daemon was building its attack.

The Purifiers unleashed a maelstrom of bolter fire. There was no question of saving Otto’s life. Even if he survived this battle, his planet was infested. At the very least, Egeta and every soul within would have to be reduced to a smoking crater.

Mnay’salath had more interest in keeping the Lord Governor alive. It hurled Otto high, sending him flying across the chamber as it danced away to the right. Its movements were as fast as thought. Otto struck the far wall and landed in a moaning heap. Mnay’salath dodged out of the way of the storm bolters. Crowe pivoted hard, deliberately overshooting the mark. The daemon ran into his shells. They punched into its right shoulder. Daemon flesh and ichor sprayed on the wall behind. Mnay’salath absorbed the hits and spun, no slower, each movement no less a gesture of sublime grace. It snarled, though. Its arrogance was injured.

The lesser daemons abandoned their victims. They rushed the Purifiers. Storm bolters and incinerators broke their wave. The atmosphere of the throne room was redolent with decaying perfumes. Now it also stank of burning, disintegrating warpflesh.

Mnay’salath was isolated from the mob of fiends and daemonettes. Carac brought up the rear of Crowe’s wing of the wedge. He was closest to the Keeper of Secrets. Mnay’salath had its eyes on Gavallan. Carac took his chance and made a reckless lunge at the daemon. Crowe caught the moment in the corner of his eye a split-second too late.

The opportunity to strike was clear. Carac was right to seize it. He was wrong not to consider it had come too soon in the fight. The squads had not pressed the daemon hard enough for it to make a mistake on this scale.

Carac came at Mnay’salath from the side. He swung his Nemesis force halberd up beneath the daemon’s left arm. For a fraction of a second, the blow seemed to strike through. Then it hadn’t. A blink, and the daemon had side-stepped further to the left. The movement was casual, unforced and contemptuous. Mnay’salath looked down at Carac and launched its attack.

All the maws on the abomination’s body shrieked. The scream came from the breadth and depth of the warp’s insanity. It slashed the soul with the despair of a million murdered worlds. It was all the grief of time turned into a drawn-out, rise-and-fall chorale of pain. The sound of the scream filled the throne room and spilled into the night. But the cry had a focus too. Its greatest strength lay in a straight line from the daemon. Mnay’salath shrieked at Carac. The scream tore into the Grey Knight like a dagger and paralysed him. A Space Marine did not fear, but had no immunity to grief and hopelessness.

The edge of the scream sliced into Crowe’s emotional core. It was a call to despair as powerful as the Black Blade’s curses. It tore open every doubt, however buried, and turned it into psychic shrapnel. This drew blood, and the blood rose, seeking to drown him in an overwhelming sense of unworthiness.

He refused the attack. It declared him unworthy, but could not change his duty. ‘You will not turn me from my purpose!’ he shouted and turned his storm bolter back on the daemon.

Mnay’salath leapt over the trajectory of the shells and came down on the immobilised Carac. It smashed the Purifier to the ground. It jabbed its razored pincer against the chest-plate of his Aegis power armour. The blows were a rapid-fire hammering, the impacts merging together into a splintering grind. The pincer broke through the armour. It pierced the carapace. Blood spurted from the wound.

Crowe’s bolter fire hit the daemon. Shells shattered flesh. Others exploded against chitinous armour. Mnay’salath ignored the wounds. It drew strength and joy from the pain it inflicted.

Gavallan threw himself at the Keeper of Secrets. He struck the pincer with the edge of his Nemesis force sword. Ichor jetted into the air. The daemon turned and grabbed at Gavallan with its other arms. The castellan parried the clawed limbs. He took a step back. The daemon followed, leaving Carac. Destrian pulled his fallen battle-brother clear.

Crowe waded in to assist Gavallan. The daemon’s bone spur blocked his first attack, and then Mnay’salath sang. The stream of abominations racing into the throne room had not stopped, and now all the daemons in the chamber closed with the Grey Knights in a sudden, determined rush. There were too many, and they were too heedless of their destruction, to hold them at bay. Those that fell were momentary shields for those behind. Fiends and daemonettes fell upon the Purifiers in a storm of claws and whips. A lash grabbed Crowe’s sword-arm, arresting his blow. A second and third joined it. His arm was held, the unholy bonds pulling in three directions at once. He snarled and jerked to the right, using his full mass. He yanked the daemonettes in to him. The whips went slack. He slashed his blade across the three fiends, severing arms and necks. He was free again, but the skirmish had cost him seconds. The struggle between Gavallan and Mnay’salath had moved a few yards away. The lesser daemons swarmed around Crowe. He chopped them down and blasted them apart. He was knee-deep in ruined foulness. The bodies turned to sludge before they evaporated, and the morass slowed him down. His brothers were caught in the same trap.

All the while Mnay’salath drew Gavallan farther and farther away, isolating the castellan. Gavallan fought the immense abomination with holy fury. Every blow was fuelled by supreme skill and righteousness. The greatest hero of the Brotherhood of Purifiers stood tall, unbowed and unstoppable against a foe over twice his size and wielding the terrible gifts of excess.

Mnay’salath shrieked again, and the scream was echoed and amplified by the daemonettes. The scream was everywhere. It rose and rose, gathering such strength that its message took on the shape of an absolute truth. The whistling song of the fiends chopped and twisted any train of thought that tried to counter the despair in the scream. There was no shelter from it. It smashed into Crowe with the weight of the world. He staggered. Mourning strangled him. Its limbs were veils and gossamer, subtle and innumerable. He could not cut through them all.

In the centre of the throne room, unreadable, Gavallan became the focus of his brothers’ despair. He was the legend fighting his last. The magnificence of his battle was the foundational image of grief. He fought on and on, and the scream went on and on, growing ever more piercing with the perfection of his struggle.

The daemon screamed, but the dancing movements of its legs and claws took on a new, mocking aspect. Mnay’salath’s blows were the same as laughter. I am toying with you, it announced through its dance. I have toyed with you since the Envoy of Discipline.

Behold the pain that is your reward.

For I will have my prize.

I will have the sword.

The tower’s grav-lifts were ruined. Their wrought-iron doors hung open. Smoke poured out of the shafts, so Vendruhn led the charge up the stairs. The climb was a long one, but she made faster progress than she had expected. The stairs were a spiral, fifteen feet wide, going up the inside of the tower’s outer wall. On Vendruhn’s right, the inner wall was smooth rockcrete, hung with dynastic tapestries, interrupted by arched doorways leading to each level. The curve of the walls meant Vendruhn could see barely twenty feet ahead. In her anger she abandoned caution for speed, and was rewarded by a rapid climb through the blood of apostates. She could hear the songs of the daemons coming down the staircase from on high, but it was never any nearer. It was retreating faster than she could advance.

There were human enemies here, though. Civilians and palace functionaries who had sought refuge when the danger from the east had begun to make its way across the Rybas. These people had fallen, their faith no match for their terror, and they had become maddened apostles of the source of the fear. Many had scavenged weapons from the bodies of militia killed when the daemons had burst from the underground tunnels. The wretches were many, but untrained. They hurled themselves at Vendruhn and her troops, screaming and shooting in panic. Killing them was easy. It was brutally satisfying. The blasts of her plasma pistol left behind the stink of burned flesh. Her soldiers formed a wall across the staircase. They fired their lasrifles with anger the equal of the heretics’ panic. Their precision was much greater.

Vendruhn was at the head of a machine of righteous fury. It marched up the tower, annihilating the fallen. Vendruhn conserved her shots. She used her sword, running it into the howling faces of the heretics. She cut bellies wide open and sliced throats with such force she almost decapitated her foes in a single blow. She was drenched in blood. It felt good against her skin. It tasted good, warm and salty with retribution. She took more than satisfaction in the kills. She took pleasure. She wished she could destroy these pathetic beings with even more violence. They deserved worse. There was no excess of cruelty to equal their treachery. But every dismemberment and every incinerated face was a step towards a dream of fulfilment. She revelled in the bloody joy. It was the experience of justice.

At the head of a phalanx several hundred strong, she reached the top of the spire. The staircase ended in a great vestibule. It was a vast space for applicants to gather and be humbled, while they waited, by views of Egeta from the surrounding windows. Ahead was the wall that separated the vestibule from the throne room. The doorway gaped. A last rush of daemons was passing the threshold. The vestibule was littered with the bodies of massacred honour guard. Vendruhn looked once at the faces of the dead, then turned away. Their expressions were frozen in horrified ecstasy. She stared straight ahead and shouted as she ran, firing, into the chamber beyond.

Madness greeted her. Her charge faltered. The room was filled with daemons. There was nowhere safe to look. The sight and song of the abominations blasted her senses. Soldiers behind her moaned, overcome by the riot of terrible meaning.

Scores of daemons grappled with the Grey Knights. In the centre of the room, Castellan Gavallan clashed with a thing somehow more monstrous than the cathedral. It was beautiful and ghastly, cruel and seductive. It was a shape carved from nightmare and desire. It slashed at Gavallan with pincer and claws. Daemon and Grey Knight landed blows that would have shattered stone. Ichor ran down the ivory-white of the daemon’s skin. A jagged, crimson bone spur of a limb smashed Gavallan’s left flank. His armour was broken on that side, and stained with coagulating blood. The daemon held one arm up, its claws grasping at the air as if it sought to clutch hold of a dream. The duellists circled one another, each strike unleashing lightning blasts of eldritch energy, shaking the throne room with the thunder of an entire war. The struggle was a clash of forbidden myths. These were beings which had sprung from hopes and terrors that could never be acknowledged. Their reality sundered the soul.

To Vendruhn’s right, her father crouched by a wall. He clawed at the floor. ‘Use the sword!’ he screamed. ‘Use the sword! Use the sword!’ The same hysterical words again and again, repeated with machinic insistence.

All this she saw in the first seconds of her arrival. Her anger kept her sane, but the horror slowed her decision. She did not know where to attack first. And there was another voice shouting. Its source was in the room. Its sound was in her mind. It was the raging counterpart to her father’s cries.

Use me use me use me use me use me use me use me!

She hesitated. The men and women with her hesitated. The madness was too great. Then the madness came for them. The newly arrived daemons leapt at the militia.

And the giant looked at Vendruhn.

It spun away from Gavallan. It covered the distance to where she stood in two strides. In the first, it bellowed, ‘Welcome!’ In the second, its mouths screamed. All the daemons screamed.

The pain in her soul was so great that she felt nothing when the towering abomination seized her.

The daemon’s scream was beyond any Otto had heard before. It devoured him, reducing him to nothing. It shattered his perceptions. It turned the world into a rain of jagged glass. The Grey Knights and the daemons became shards of sense impressions, all smashed and tumbling into the abyss of the pain, pain, pain.

One image remained whole. It was his agony perfected. Mnay’salath, godlike, the master of the dance, holding Vendruhn in its claws. The great evil taking the last true thing.

Use me use me use me use me use me use me!

Cutting through the storming pain, through the rain of falling glass, came a crystalline darkness, the shout of command the equal of the daemons’ scream. The command was welcome in its clarity. In its power.

In its hope.

There had been the lie of hope before the scream. An illusion of silver-grey. Giants of metal and arrogance. All part of the broken-glass reality now. All part of the world lost in the night before the scream, before the pain.

Use me use me use me use me use me use me!

The command was the one thing outside the pain. The one thing that was sure. The one and only hope.

He knew where to go. The command was so strong, it would guide him through the pain and glass.

Use me use me use me use me use me use me!

He obeyed. He crawled forwards. Soon he could stand. Soon he could run.

The Keeper of Secrets snatched up the militia general. It turned its head in the direction of the Lord Governor as the worst of the screams ripped through the throne room. The pain exploded from the depths of Crowe’s psyche. A nova of searing blades cut him from the inside out. It sought to blind him to everything but the pain.

It failed.

The Grey Knights still fought. Their calling and their souls were one. The Purifiers roared through the pain of the daemon’s scream and cut the foe down.

Crowe saw the triumph in Mnay’salath’s look. He understood the daemon had orchestrated this moment. It had conducted every step of the dance. The moment was the summit of its art, its masterpiece.

But the daemon was arrogant. It trusted in the power of the scream to hold its enemies down long enough for it to complete its great work, and so it shifted its attention away from the Grey Knights. It believed it could no longer be stopped.

It was wrong.

‘You are banished!’ Crowe roared at Mnay’salath. He reached for the whorls of the immaterium surrounding the daemon. At his shout, his battle-brothers joined him. Together, the squads attacked the links between the warp and the materium exploited by the daemon. They began to sever the threads of its being. The other daemons redoubled their attacks. Crowe felt claws sink through the seams of his armour. He sprayed bolter shells before him, destroying and maiming. His body fought on instinct, sword blows and defence automatic while his pain-wracked mind turned its full psychic might on Mnay’salath. His vision of the warp was clearest. The other Purifiers followed his lead.

They struck hard. The flesh of the daemon’s torso rippled. It began to rise in flames of skin.

Crowe could not hear Antwyr. He did not notice the silence then. He would remember it later, to his shame, when his mind returned again and again to the Egeta throne room.

Mnay’salath snarled in anger. It turned back, but did not face Crowe. Instead it rounded on Gavallan.

The castellan had not yet joined in the collective ritual of banishment. He fought free of the cluster of daemonettes that had rushed at him when Mnay’salath abandoned the duel. He raised his sword with both hands. ‘I am the will, the spear and the sword!’ he bellowed. A nimbus of warp fire encircled him. It crackled with the rage of the sacred. ‘I am the hammer and the fist!’ he cried.

Gavallan’s strength was suddenly everywhere. Crowe felt the ferocity of the champion’s spirit imbue his limbs and his mind. The pain diminished. The psychic assaults of the other Purifiers intensified.

The castellan supported them all.

At the edge of Crowe’s awareness, he realised what Gavallan was doing to himself. He was dividing his psychic strength among his brothers. He did not have the energy to spare, yet he was sacrificing himself. Blinding silver light leapt from Gavallan and flowed into the Purifiers. It fed the banishment. The edges of Mnay’salath’s form began to blur as the Purifiers cut the daemon away from the real. Gavallan advanced through slashing foes towards where the Keeper of Secrets stood, suddenly at bay.

Crowe moved forwards too. The world of the material war receded dangerously. He put more and more of his being into the assault on the Keeper of Secrets. A blistering, coruscating storm exploded from his body and blasted against Mnay’salath. One of the daemon’s left arms began to flicker, its reality uncertain. The attack was working. But the blows of the lesser daemons were landing against Crowe more frequently. His advance was slow, and so was Gavallan’s. The champion was beset on all sides by the abominated foe. He swung his blade in wide, sweeping slashes through the bodies of the horrors. He closed on Mnay’salath with the majesty of holy war. Power flashed about him, travelling down his limbs and blade. It jumped to his brothers, feeding their strength. The daemons charged at him, and he turned them away.

Mnay’salath’s snarl became a roar of rage. Its flesh sloughed off its form. Smoke rose from myriad wounds. Its mouths screamed again, but now in the daemon’s pain. And still it held Vendruhn. It lashed out at Gavallan over the heads of its vassals. The castellan blocked the pincer. He lunged forwards through the grasping daemonettes and plunged his sword into Mnay’salath’s abdomen.

With the might given him by Gavallan, Crowe took the collective force of banishment and channelled it down the champion’s blade into the core of the daemon.

Mnay’salath shrieked. Its anger cracked the ceiling. Dust and chunks of stone fell on the combatants. Eldritch lightning and fire burst from the wound. It engulfed the daemon and its prey. Vendruhn was screaming in something worse than pain as she was covered by flames of unformed madness. Faces howled in the fire, then vanished; colours appeared and died, bleeding through the flames.

The light of purity and the light of corruption battled. A vortex of energy surrounded the Keeper of Secrets and Gavallan. It flashed brilliance and darkness. It thundered with rage holy and unholy. The lesser daemons shrieked with their master. The Grey Knights struck with the power of a single burning soul.

Otto came up behind Gavallan. The daemons were before the castellan and at his flanks, holding the focus his material self could still spare. He was consumed by his struggle against the things of the warp. There were no humans to fight, so he was not watching for Otto.

At the centre of the maelstrom of banishment, Crowe saw Otto reach up for the sword on Gavallan’s back. He commanded his body to shout a warning.

The warning came. Gavallan began to turn.

The chains snapped.

The Black Blade of Antwyr leapt from Gavallan’s back into Otto’s hands. Crowe abandoned the banishment. The collective blaze wavered. The vortex grew darker, the whirling fire taking on a violet hue. Crowe snapped back into the full awareness of his body. So did the other Purifiers. With a clap of thunder that resonated in the soul, the vortex flared with searing darkness, then vanished.

A fraction of a second had passed from the perception of danger to the reaction. Gavallan had barely begun to turn.

A fraction of a second too long.

Otto looked upon his prize. His face lit with triumph. He smiled with the relief of the well and truly fooled.

Then he changed.

The metamorphosis was swift. It occurred with the intake of a single breath. The might of the sword swept over Otto. It swallowed his uniform and merged it with his body. It took away his features and his hair. He became a physical shadow, nothing but a silhouette, a shape to wield the Blade.

The shape that had been Otto brought the sword back. Gavallan finished turning. The Purifiers opened fire. The shadow absorbed the bolter shells and swung the sword with perfect accuracy. Antwyr sliced through the seam between gorget and helmet. The blow was the embodiment of decades of hate. It cut halfway through Gavallan’s neck.

Crowe was less than a step away.

He caught Gavallan with one arm as he fell. The legend’s blood fountained into the air. It fell upon the vengeful blade and upon the Knight of the Flame. Gavallan made no sound.

‘Mine!’ Mnay’salath screamed. ‘Give me the sword!’ It dropped Vendruhn. She had been the lure, and was of no interest any longer. The grasping right hand reached for the Blade.

Antwyr flashed. Mnay’salath’s talon-like fingers fell to the floor. ‘Not yours!’ the shape cried. Its voice bore some resemblance to Otto’s, but its ferocity belonged to Antwyr. The serrated shout resounded in the throne room and in Crowe’s mind. ‘All is mine! The path of blood is mine!’

The daemon, its body smouldering, its contours ragged, snatched at the shadow. Daemonettes and fiends rushed at it. The Purifiers blasted all the abominations with shells and incinerator flame. Crowe stood over the fallen Gavallan. His limbs were heavy. His soul was exhausted from the abandoned banishment ritual. He attacked the shadow with the desperate energy of wrathful grief. The flame of purification shot from his outstretched arm. Storm bolter shells and psychic fire hit the shape at the same time. It snarled and jumped the moment Crowe’s fury struck. The shadow’s leap carried it over Crowe’s head and away from the daemons. It landed before the smashed window. It paused there, a thing that hovered in limbo between human and daemonic form. What had been Glas was gone, but the shape of Antwyr had yet to take its place. With a voice of mockery and graves it said, ‘You rejected your destiny, Garran Crowe. Now your fate is only ash.’ Then it threw itself out of the window, a darkness that dropped into the wider darkness of the night.

Mnay’salath howled. It stumbled forwards through the concentrated fire of the Purifiers. It spread its damaged arms and drew them together, as if pulling a curtain closed. A tide of darkness came in from the corners of the throne room. It fell across Crowe’s eyes. The Keeper of Secrets vanished from his sight. The other daemons abandoned the fight and rushed into the warp-born void.

‘It is there before us!’ Crowe shouted, training the last flames he could manage on a vagueness in the dark. He and his battle-brothers pursued the daemon. They fought to clear their minds of the suffocating shadow. They struck true.

The Keeper of Secrets screamed in pain and anger at its lost prize. But it worked its will with the cloud of shifting blackness. A great wind blew through the throne room, and the darkness shrouding Mnay’salath passed out of the windows and into the air. In flight or in pursuit, in another moment it was gone.

The shadows lifted. The lumoglobes of the throne room brightened over the carnage.

Crowe leaned over the castellan and removed his helmet. Gavallan’s tormented eyes locked on to his. Gavallan’s mouth was open, but he could neither speak nor breathe. Blood frothed from the crevasse in his throat.

‘You have earned your place at the Emperor’s side,’ Crowe told him.

But until they dimmed, Gavallan’s eyes glittered with the icy light of shame.

Chapter Nine

THE END OF THE DANCE

There was no sound of mourning on the night’s wind. It blew through the shattered window, carrying the echoes of terror and the smell of burning past Crowe. But there was no mourning. The city roiled in its fall. It rotted. The faithful and the apostate clashed. And there was nothing beyond the throne room to show that one of the great heroes of the Imperium was no more.

Crowe had run to the window in pursuit of the daemons. He was not sure how long he had been standing there, staring into the crimson-tainted dark. It could not have been many seconds, he thought. Enough, though, to face the reality of defeat. Enough to impose a cold rationality on himself, so the decisions he must now make would be the correct ones. And enough for him to see all the night and beyond the smoke to the ice of the stars, and to know that Gavallan’s death had not been marked.

No Grey Knight’s death would be known by the wider universe. His only possible memorial would be in the Dead Fields. Even so, at the loss of such a warrior as Gavallan, the earth should have cried out. The stars should have dimmed in grief.

Instead, the night went on. The terror and the killing in Egeta continued without pause or notice.

Something smashed behind Crowe. He turned. Sendrax had punched the throne, reducing it to splinters.

‘Every step,’ Sendrax snarled. ‘Every step. We have been led perfectly. What need have we of Prognosticars? We would save time by asking the Ruinous Powers themselves what they would have us do. We seem destined to act as they wish.’

The other Purifiers had gathered around Gavallan’s body. They stood in a circle, a silent honour guard, waiting for the Knights of the Flame to command. Near the doorway, Vendruhn stood hunched, shaking, her fists clenched. Her hair had been burned to stubble by the psychic fire. The back of her neck and her hands were blackened. Sores oozed. But the worst of her injuries, Crowe knew, were spiritual. How severe those wounds were he could not tell.

Vendruhn had her back to the Grey Knights. She faced her surviving troops, the few that there were. The mortals had retreated from the throne room. They, at least, showed some awareness that a death unlike others had occurred. They were silent out of fear and respect.

But Vendruhn’s silence was different, Crowe thought. Her grief and anger were so strong, they choked her voice.

Sendrax was still raging. ‘What steps have they arranged for us next?’ he shouted. ‘Are we amusing them as they would wish?’

‘Brother,’ Crowe said.

Sendrax stared at him. He marched over, kicking through wreckage and dissolving remains. His helm inches from Crowe’s, he said, ‘Do you have insight, brother? More of the insight that has served us so well thus far?’

Crowe said nothing. He did not point out that Sendrax was condemning Gavallan’s leadership. The other Knight of the Flame would realise that in his own time. Crowe had no desire to refute Sendrax’s accusations. They held a truth. It was a massive, painful truth. He acknowledged it, but he must not surrender to it. It wanted to be his sole truth. If he let it, it would crush him with shame and despair.

So he said nothing. He held the truth at bay so that he might counter it with a different one, a truth built of victory and redemption. Let Sendrax rage. Let him give voice to the nature of the defeat. Sendrax was proud. He resented the inflexibility of fate. And storm as he might now, it was not his duty to lead the mission. That fell to Crowe.

‘Flames!’ said Sendrax. ‘The Ruinous Powers would have us dance upon this stage? Then let us burn it!’ He faced the window. ‘Abomination!’ he yelled. ‘Antwyr, do you hear? The fire of Exterminatus comes for you!’

Vendruhn straightened at his words. She twitched. She turned around for a moment, her eyes a glittering darkness. Then she led her soldiers away from the doorway, back towards the tower staircase.

‘Brother,’ Crowe said again.

‘What is it?’ Sendrax snapped.

‘We cannot invoke Exterminatus. The Black Blade will not perish, even if Sandava II does.’

Sendrax scowled. He did not contradict Crowe. Good, Crowe thought. He understands. For all his grief and anger, he understands. The Blade was indestructible. That was why it had to be imprisoned. The annihilation of Sandava II would only put it beyond reach.

‘Then what?’ Sendrax said.

‘You are right, brother. We have been led on this dance. Now it ends.’

‘How can you be sure?’ He was listening, at least.

‘Because Antwyr has accomplished its purpose. It has escaped us. It will seek now to ensure we do not recapture it. So we force it to react to our moves. The initiative is ours.’

Sendrax grunted. The sound that emerged from his helm grille was a burst of electronic distortion. It could have been anger or bitter humour. ‘A fine speech, Garran,’ he said.

‘Do you doubt it?’

‘Would it matter if I did?’

Crowe did not answer.

‘Let it be so.’ The storm of Sendrax’s anger had passed. ‘Tell me how we will take the sword back.’ He looked at their silent brothers, and the stillness they surrounded. ‘Tell me how we will avenge our castellan.’

There were no more daemons within the inner wall when Vendruhn emerged from the keep. Captain Lehnert was waiting for her. His uniform was torn and soaked with his blood. A long claw gash ran from his right temple, down the side of his face and his neck. His weathered features were no longer those of a jaded veteran. He had seen too many new horrors this night. War was fresh for him again, in the worst possible way. Even so, his salute was crisp. ‘The palace is held, general,’ he said, as if the victory had meaning.

From the other side of the wall, Vendruhn heard the wounds of the city tearing itself apart.

‘Where is Colonel Droste?’ Vendruhn asked. He had been commanding the companies charged with holding the palace district.

‘Dead, general.’

‘And the enemy?’ She could believe the militia had contained the daemons. She could not imagine the abominations had been destroyed.

‘Gone,’ Lehnert said. He gestured in the direction of the wall. ‘When that… that thing…’ He looked up at the tower’s crown as if expecting the nightmare to hear him and return.

‘I understand,’ Vendruhn said. No need for Lehnert to finish. The great daemon had taken its legions with it. Mnay’salath and all its furies were pursuing the thing that had been her father.

But if this was so, what then of the tumult she heard beyond the wall? It was the cry of a worthless, faithless population turning on itself in panic, obeying the commands of abominations that had lost interest in it, still tearing down all Vendruhn’s family had built in the name of the Emperor.

All her father had stood for. All he had defended.

The grief cut through her again, savage and ragged as a blow from a chainsword. The only defence against it was anger. A hatred bright as incandescent iron, never to be quenched except in an ocean of apostate blood.

Exterminatus, the Grey Knight had said. The word resonated in her soul. The syllables were a dire toll. Exterminatus. It was a shout and a whisper and a hiss. All were finality. It was the only true thing left for Sandava II. Exterminatus. She spoke the word in her head, over and over, as if through repetition the refrain would become reality.

The one called Crowe was wrong to forbid its use. But he had, so she would have to create the pyre for her world herself.

‘Colonel Lehnert,’ she said, and saw the wounded man take a warrior’s pride in his sudden promotion. ‘Gather our forces. Prepare them to march beyond the wall. If Egeta has chosen to fall from the Emperor’s light, then it deserves no mercy. We shall show it none.’

She would burn the city. She would serve justice on its citizenry. She would see every last soul in the capital put to the sword.

She already knew that would not be enough. She knew the grief and the hate would still be there. But the action was necessary. She would worry about another step only after this task was complete.

The new colonel left to carry out her orders. Vendruhn walked across the great square towards the wall. The flagstones were slick with blood. Bodies had turned the area into a mire of flesh. She passed civilians burned by las and disembowelled by sword, and soldiers of the militia twisted at strange angles, their broken faces contorted by pleasures beyond nightmare. There were no longer any remains of the abominations, but the traces of their acts were everywhere.

Vendruhn’s pulse beat the rhythm of her hate louder and louder. Her vision shrank to the wall ahead of her. In the grey periphery, she now saw only the twisted abstraction of atrocity.

She reached the wall. She mounted the staircase next to the gate. On the ramparts, she stood at the crenellations. She watched the city burn. She watched the mobs tear into each other. Bring me the sword, the daemon had commanded, and they still searched and killed and ruined. If she left the people to their devices, they would destroy themselves and the city on their own.

But there would be no punishment in that.

She lost track of time. She was mesmerised by the sight of the people she would execute, enveloped by the grasp of her hate. Exterminatus, she thought.

Exterminatus.

Exterminatus.

At length someone called her name. Vendruhn turned. Lehnert stood at the head of the stairs. ‘Do you wish to address the troops?’ he asked.

Vendruhn supposed she should. Morale was low. The militia had not been victorious. It had been spared annihilation by circumstance. Survival was by chance, losses were huge and the world had fallen to horrors of myth. Yes, she should speak to her soldiers. She should inspire them to new efforts.

All she had to offer was her hate. Let them share in it, then. If they were faithful, they already did.

‘Yes,’ she said to Lehnert as she moved away from the crenellations to join him. ‘Yes, I will speak to them.’

‘No,’ said a voice, harsh, metallic, majestic. ‘You will say nothing.’

Lehnert whirled. He gasped and stumbled back from the stairs. A moment later, the armoured form of Garran Crowe appeared. He marched up the final steps. He loomed over Vendruhn and her colonel.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Vendruhn. Though she had seen the Grey Knights brought low, defeated by the monster that had possessed her father, she was still awed by Crowe. His presence was much more than his height and the impregnability of his armour. It was more than the power she had witnessed him unleash against the daemons. It was all of this, and an aura of icy, unyielding, terrifying sanctity. How, she wondered, could unclean things exist in proximity to this being?

Perhaps they could not.

She felt her own existence become gossamer-thin before Crowe. She lived because he allowed it. If his judgement turned against her, there would be no recourse. Nor should there be.

‘You propose to destroy Egeta,’ Crowe said.

‘Yes.’ She did not question how he knew.

‘No. A more important duty lies before you. I will speak. You will hear. All of you.’

With that, Crowe turned his back on Vendruhn. He stood at the edge of the wall, looking down at what remained in Egeta of the Sandava II Militia. He waited, motionless, a colossus as immovable as the wall. Vendruhn stepped forwards to stand to his right. Lehnert took up a position a few yards further on. Crowe was doing her a courtesy, Vendruhn realised. He was allowing her to save face before the companies. He was not visibly undermining her authority. She knew she should be grateful. What she felt was resentment at the countermanded slaughter.

In the great square, the militia had gathered in columns. The formations were much smaller than they had been before. The Chimeras were fewer, and the ones present were all damaged, scarred by massive rents left by claws in their flanks and roofs. This was a much reduced army. Still strong enough, Vendruhn thought, to turn the city to ash.

Crowe spoke. ‘Warriors of Sandava II,’ he said, ‘hear me.’ His helm’s voxcaster amplified his voice. It rang across the square, authority itself. ‘You have fought, and fought well. But there can be no rest for you yet. The enemy still walks upon your world. You have witnessed this enemy. Will you permit so foul a thing to exist?’ Where another speaker might have paused for an answer, letting the assembled men and women join in the energy of the speech, Crowe gave the soldiers their response.

‘No,’ he said. ‘You will not.

‘Hear me.

‘The enemy is not defeated, yet the enemy has fled. That is an act of fear. The foe is a great abomination. The foe is a defilement upon the face of the Imperium. The foe is strong, and yet it flees. My brothers and I will pursue. So will you. To do so is more than duty. It is the holy calling of every soul in the Imperium to destroy whatsoever is unclean.

‘Hear me!’

Crowe drew his force sword. He held it aloft. It blazed, a symbol of coruscating, deadly purity in the darkness of the night. The light surrounded Crowe. Vendruhn trembled. It took all her strength of will not to step away. The holy was as fearsome as the unholy. Crowe’s state was far beyond the mortal human. Sacred terror overwhelmed her, cutting through the rage, if only for these brief moments.

‘I am the edge of the Emperor’s sword!’ the Grey Knight roared. His words were as claps of thunder over the square. ‘I will strike the daemon down, and you will strike with me. Hear me and answer!’

A thousand mortal voices gave Crowe his answer, striving to match his thunder with their own.

The thunder swept over Vendruhn. It humbled her, but she felt no pride. She felt instead the frustration of vengeance delayed. And in the midst of her awe, doubt gnawed at her faith. Too many of its foundations had already been shattered.

Crowe turned away from the square. ‘What is the state of the militia’s reserves?’ he asked.

Vendruhn realised she had no idea. She had not thought beyond her line of sight since the battle in the throne room. She had not taken stock of her forces’ strength.

Lehnert spoke up, sparing her the need to admit her ignorance. ‘The base outside Egeta is untouched,’ he said. ‘The troops there await deployment, lord.’

‘Your aerial transport capacities?’

‘Valkyries. Some heavy lifters. Enough for the troops in this region.’

‘Good,’ said Crowe. To Vendruhn he said, ‘Be ready for a mass airlift.’

She nodded. ‘To where?’

‘We will know soon enough.’

‘The most rapid deployment would be by orbital transport,’ Lehnert put in.

‘No,’ said Crowe. ‘Nothing leaves the atmosphere of Sandava II. Not any longer.’

Mnay’salath raged, and the world cried out. As the legions stormed over land and ocean, wrath shaped by frustrated art twisted the air and tortured the stones of the earth. Mnay’salath inscribed its fury in its passage. The fields of Sandava II exploded with an obscene excess of life. Crops transformed into muscular coils of flesh that swallowed the agri-serfs in a monstrous embrace. The rains became scented oils, driving human and beast to frenzied deaths. A swathe of madness, of moaning rivers and gasping, heaving landscapes marked Mnay’salath’s journey. Even the ocean was defiled with the fleshy scar of desire as the daemon flew, held aloft by conjured warp energy, towards the western tip of Sandava II’s southern continent.

Over the hundreds of miles of empty ocean, the daemon brought its rage under control. All the meticulous steps of its dance had been for nothing. It had underestimated Antwyr. The sword had duped it.

It had expended too much of itself on the cathedral. It had not left itself enough strength to capture the escaping Blade.

But Antwyr was still on this world. It had not escaped yet. Mnay’salath could feel its presence. The fusion of daemon and sword had not been broken. Antwyr was held in the materium.

It was time to begin a new dance. And so Mnay’salath followed the memories it found in the ruins of Cardinal Rannoch. It descended on the city of Beroea, and the Ecclesiarchal Palace.

Beroea, the holy city of Sandava II, perched on the jagged end of a peninsular claw reaching westwards into the ocean. A metropolis of shrines, surrounded on three sides by high cliffs, the eternal wind pounding the waves against the rock with the booming of a giant’s heart and the relentless insistence of a tolling bell. Beroea, where every shrine housed a relic, a horde accumulated by the diligent work of centuries of ecclesiarchs devoted to the pride of their diocese.

Beroea, which Rannoch’s excessive pride had now doomed.

In the highest towers of the palace, Mnay’salath crouched. It gathered its strength. In the city below, its vassals rampaged. They slaughtered the citizenry of Beroea. They filled the streets with blood and revelry. Their numbers grew, and at their master’s command they herded the terrified faithful together. The new dance required a great gathering. A great unison. When the dance was accomplished, it would expunge the defeat in Egeta from memory.

In the heights, in the winds, in the succession of nights, Mnay’salath moved its arms, weaving, conjuring, dancing. It did not know where on Sandava II the sword was. Others would be searching for it too. Let them find it. Let them bring it here, for they would be driven by their pallid service to the corpse-god to do so. And when they came, Mnay’salath would present them with its greatest work yet.

The sacrifices grew in number, feeding the art of annihilation.

Sometimes Otto looked out at the world. His selfhood would coalesce into something more substantial than vapour, and he would know what he had been. He would scream at what he had become, but his transforming body did not obey him. He would look out through eyes that no longer belonged to him. He would take stock of where he was, and think how best to get where he must go. And when he was certain of his path, he would feel himself grow faint again. He would become an evanescence of pain, flickering in and out of a form of consciousness, trapped in the nightmare unleashed by his decision in the throne room. It pleased the sword to make him see the consequences. The tattered rags of his soul screamed. The sword laughed. And made him do its bidding. The sword controlled the body and plundered Otto’s knowledge of Sandava II to make its escape from this world. But not into the warp. Antwyr was held within the materiality of the Blade. That final escape was not within reach.

The body was still a solid shadow, human in form but featureless. The eyes through which Otto saw were not really there. The body saw and heard, but there were only vague depressions where eye sockets would have been, and irregularities on the sides of the head to suggest ears. The thing raced through the burning streets of Egeta. It moved with the grace and speed of darkness leaping from flame to flame. Where it flew, where it was seen, the inhabitants of the city obeyed a will greater still than Mnay’salath’s. They no longer searched for the Blade. They killed each other in a perfection of violence. The chaos spread wide and Antwyr fed on the fury. It moved faster. On the wings of violence and the obedience of the mob, it left Egeta behind.

It took a day to speed over hundreds of miles north west, and it was night again when the Black Blade and its slave reached Dikaia. The city was a major hub for the northern continent’s agri-shipping. Millions of tonnes of the harvest of Sandava II arrived in Dikaia every day to be shipped off-world to satisfy the inexhaustible hunger of the Imperium.

The shadow-thing flowed past endless maglev freight trains. It shot from one rusting iron pillar to the next, darkness moving through gloom. It did not engender strife here. It did not wish to make its presence known. It followed the track to the spaceport and arrived just as two orbital lifters rose from separate launch pads. They were bulky, clumsy, brutish craft, suitable to their purpose of bringing Sandavan grain to freighters waiting at low anchor.

They were also suitable to Antwyr’s purpose.

Otto’s awareness sharpened again as the sword approached the moment of its complete victory. It was about to finalise its escape.

You have wrought this, the sword told Otto. You are the author of the fires to come.

Otto’s spirit howled again. The shadow body had no mouth, only the shape of one. But it could have shrieked to shatter the sky if the Blade had so willed it. Antwyr did not will it, and Otto’s horror was silent.

A third lifter was being readied for launch. Its four engines were rumbling, preparatory to the efforts of heaving the hull, more warehouse than ship, into the night. The cargo bay doors were still open. The shadow climbed a maglev pillar, then ran along the edge of the track towards the lifter. A train rumbled past in the other direction, its huge, cylindrical cars rocking back and forth.

The sky lit up. A burst of orange daylight spread over Dikaia. The shadow looked up. Before the light faded, there was another flash. Then another. The sky boiled, as if the stars were too close, suddenly raging just beyond Sandava II’s atmosphere. The fireballs expanded, then dimmed, burning plasma dissipating. In their wake came the streaks of violent re-entry. Wreckage rained towards the surface, disintegrating as it came.

Otto rejoiced. The ships in orbit over Sandava II were being destroyed. There would be no way off the planet.

The body shrieked now. It gave voice to Antwyr’s rage. At the moment the sword had reached the threshold to the galaxy, the door had slammed shut. The shadow roared, and the track turned molten.

The sword tore into Otto’s memories. His triumph disappeared beneath pain as Antwyr ransacked his mind. Now he wished to dissolve again. He wished for a final oblivion. Antwyr denied him that solace. It held him present, aware, conscious as it searched. It found what it wanted almost at once, but the moment for Otto was eternal.

The sword stole his knowledge of the cities of Sandava. It found the population of Dikaia. It weighed the hub against all the other centres within reach. Egeta was the governmental centre of the world, but Dikaia was the locus of commerce. Millions more lived here than in Egeta. The sword’s anger was muted by a predatory satisfaction.

It refused Otto his wish. It ripped him apart, and the dissolution was agony, but with each stab his consciousness became more and more pronounced. Antwyr would not free him. The body began to change again, taking on features, while Otto wailed in the terrible silence of his prison. He begged to weep, to weep for his failure, for his people, for his world. As the scope of the sword’s power appeared before him, he begged to weep for the Imperium.

But the sword granted only pain, and its laughter was the voice of a holocaust.

Chapter Ten

ANTWYR ASCENDING

The Black Blade came to a city whose life was shaped by a great shadow.

The fields of Sandava II came to an end in the approach to Dikaia. There was no room for a single tree, much less farmland, amid the web of roads and tracks that converged at the city. For hundreds of square miles around the city’s walls, the land was paved by rockcrete and steel. In the centre of Dikaia rose the source of its shadow. The city nestled around the base of the Vigilance tower. Rising thousands of feet above the plains, the tower was a lone peak, a narrow, vertical, striated upthrust of igneous rock. It was visible forever, a column standing guard over the flat expanse of the prairies. Every day, with the rising and the setting of the sun, its shadow would stretch across the breadth of the city and sweep around it, the hand of a monstrous sundial telling the hours. The tower was vigilance in stone, and it was a call to vigilance, a summons to the population to think upon the loss of light and the dangers of darkness. The extending grasp of Vigilance tower was the call to hold fast to the Emperor’s light, and mark well the coming of judgement. So went the sermons from every pulpit in the city. So went the hymns. So went the nature of evensong rites when the shadow became night, and so too the solemn celebration of matins, when the counting of the hours began anew.

The possessed body of Otto Glas began its long walk with the coming of morning. As one shadow retreated, another, fouler one followed it. The Black Blade disdained to hide its slave now. The thing of darkness announced its presence just inside the east gate. It appeared in the wide square before the gate, where the road transports arrived before heading down the avenues that led to the multitude of warehouse and manufactoria districts.

As the matins services were still under way, and the first wave of rail and road shipments were arriving, the being stood in the centre of the square. The direct rays of the sun did nothing to banish the shadowstuff of its form. It was a creature of pure void, a fragment of the night in the shape of a man, absorbing all light and reflecting nothing.

Transport drivers and warehouse serfs stopped in their tracks. They stared at the figure in their midst. As would every other inhabitant of Dikaia that day, they experienced a single, blinding moment of terror in recognition of the danger to their souls. Then the shape held the Black Blade of Antwyr aloft, and their battle was lost. Their will was Antwyr’s. The shadow creature began to walk, and they followed. In the first minute of the great march, more than a hundred citizens of Dikaia gathered to follow in the sword’s wake. Before the shadow left the square, there were a thousand.

Past the square, the sword’s creature moved down a great perimeter boulevard curving to the south and west. The thing did not speak. There was no need. The sword’s will stretched wider and wider. Every soul that gazed upon the Blade fell within the gravity well of its influence. The more slaves it captured, the stronger its pull became.

Within the first mile of the march, Antwyr’s power extended beyond sight. By the end of the first hour, a hundred thousand people filled the streets. Their steps were synchronised. They had become the physical manifestation of a single consciousness. In some, the most pious and stubborn of the citizenry, the flickers of their original selves writhed. They knew they were lost. Like Otto, they suffered for their fall. Otto’s pain was yet of a different order. The sword pushed his awareness to the fore. It made him see the full scope of his damnation. It made him understand what he was becoming.

Will you not rejoice? it taunted. Do you not see the power that lies before you? Do you not hunger to see worlds burn? No? I will teach you to revel in the fire. I will teach you to embrace your transcendence.

The body’s metamorphosis continued.

The sword had begun by stealing all traces of Otto’s physical identity. His body had become the empty symbol of a man. As the sun rose, and the sword’s harvest continued, the crowds growing and growing and growing, the body developed features once again. It grew taller. Its limbs thickened. It became more solid, pure shadow giving way to a monstrous presence. There was texture now. It existed in a nether zone between flesh and armoured plating. Spikes began to push outwards from the limbs and chest and dark horns grew from the brow. Otto felt the thing that was both him and no longer his become a massiveness of many blades.

The march became a huge, sweeping spiral going deeper and deeper into the city. Past warehouses, past hab blocks, in the manufactoria sectors. Dikaia was the most industrial city on the agri world. On either side of upheld Antwyr, narrow, sharp spires reached for the hard steel of the daytime sky. The architecture of Dikaia was in the mould of the Vigilance tower. The city was a dense cluster of rockcrete-and-iron claws. They dragged at the air, smoke and burning gases trailing from the peaks like dark, livid wounds. The population poured down into the streets in answer to the sword’s call. Some could not descend fast enough and hurled themselves from windows, falling hundreds of feet to end as broken offerings to Antwyr’s supremacy.

The Blade’s grip covered the entire eastern half of Dikaia, from wall to centre. Millions walked to its command.

There was resistance. It was brief. Pitiable. The huge shape of Otto’s body strode past the Chapel of Militant Blood. The doors opened. The Archdeacon of Dikaia ran down the steps, brandishing his iron staff. The sight of the winged skull was another brand on Otto’s soul. The Archdeacon raised the staff high. He began to shout. His anathema did not make it past the first syllable. The people overwhelmed him. They attacked quickly and in silence. They trampled him to death. The synchrony of their kicks and stomping horrified Otto. It was another measure of the Black Blade’s absolute control. He did not want to see. He would have looked away. But the sword kept the body’s new eyes on the scene. It laughed at the death. It laughed at Otto’s agony. It laughed as it delighted in the sweep of its power.

On and on the march went, through the city and through the day, until at last, with the coming of evening and the triumph of all shadows, the monster holding Antwyr reached the centre of Dikaia and the base of the Vigilance tower. Here it began to climb. It ascended rapidly. The spikes bristling on its body were so long and sharp now, it used the ones sprouting from its fists to punch handholds in the rock. While it climbed, the people gathered still. Dikaia was Antwyr’s domain now. No corner of the city was outside its grasp.

The monster climbed. Otto noted the gun emplacements mounted at intervals in the cliff-face. He sensed the sword’s calculations too. He was rocked by its laughter yet again. The Black Blade was pleased. It was eager for the war to come.

You had no memory of these? it said to Otto. You are a poor officer. Your true glory comes now. You called yourself Lord Governor. Let me show you what you govern.

Not I! Otto tried to form the thought. He tried to answer the sword. He could not. Were these not still his hands, however transformed? Was this not still his body? Did not all these actions flow from his first crime in the throne room?

He reached the summit and turned around. It seemed that night had sprung from the Vigilance tower to cover Dikaia, bringing all within the grasp of the Black Blade. Down below, beneath the vertical height of stone, in the streets, on rooftops, in windows, ten million people stood to silent attention, waiting, incapable of any act that went against the will of the sword. They were serfs and administrators, preachers and nobles, merchants and arbites, farmers and soldiers of the militia. They were the full mosaic of Dikaia’s populace, and they were a single, unified force. No mortal army had ever been capable of the perfectly coordinated action that defined this ten million souls. No mortal army since the Black Blade of Antwyr had last been free to drown the galaxy in blood.

Your true glory, the sword said again.

Otto’s body raised its arms. The sword pointed to the heavens, hungry for their death. The left hand made a gesture, a command given to the perfect army.

The roar of fealty shook the tower. Ten million people obeyed at once, and the very stars trembled.

The Black Blade of Antwyr exulted.

Your true glory, it said, is mine.

Crowe watched the Purgation’s Sword return to the militia base. The solemn voyage to the Sacrum Finem was complete, then. Gavallan’s body was aboard the strike cruiser, ready for its final journey to the Dead Fields of Titan. That much had been accomplished. Good. Crowe gave thanks that it had been possible to attend to this before the next phase of the war. He was grateful, too, that Gavallan would be returned intact to Titan. There were too many empty suits of burial armour in the Dead Fields. So many brothers whose bodies had been utterly destroyed when they fell in service to the Emperor. Gavallan had earned his rest. He would have it now, in proper form.

If the thoughts did not give Crowe a measure of peace, they did help him accept what had happened. There would be much more in his future he would have to accept. Unless he failed in his mission, and that he could not accept.

The Stormraven came down on the base’s landing pad. The furnace wind of its engines’ down-draught washed over the wide expanse of rockcrete, which was crowded with Valkyries and heavy transports, all ready for deployment when Crowe gave the word. He had not done so yet. He needed a target first.

He waited beside the command bunker for Sendrax and his squad. They marched back from the gunship in silence, their formation still ceremonial. Crowe had sent Sendrax to the Sacrum with Gavallan while he and his squad made ready for the new mobilisation. Crowe had hoped the Knight of the Flame would find some calmness of the spirit. His grim countenance as he approached was not promising. The rest of the squad entered the bunker, leaving the two senior Purifiers alone.

‘It is done, then,’ Crowe said.

Sendrax gave him a curt nod. ‘Gura says all orbiting vessels have been downed.’

‘Good.’ A necessary sacrifice, of the sort never taken lightly, but not unusual. The war was making the presence of the Grey Knights and the existence of daemons known more and more widely across Sandava II. The hard duties were to be carried out with no hesitation or regret, and with a full understanding of their weight.

Here was the truth Crowe and Sendrax both knew, and would not reveal to the soldiers waiting to fight at their sides: Sandava II was subject to what amounted to a slow Exterminatus.

The ships were destroyed. Thousands had died in orbit. Now the first phase of the planetside purge was about to begin. Crowe could have ordered the commencement sooner. But he felt that this, too, should be accomplished with Sendrax present.

‘Well?’ said Sendrax. ‘Have you located our quarry?’

‘Not yet. It won’t be long now, brother. The sword cannot leave Sandava II. It is being hunted by the daemons as well as by us. It will be forced to react. A little patience more.’

‘Patience,’ Sendrax repeated. He pronounced the word as a curse. ‘I freely acknowledge patience has never been my strength. But, brother, you have too much. It looks like resignation.’

Sendrax was wrong. Crowe wanted to tell him so. He believed in militant patience. It was the patience that waited for the best moment to attack. More importantly, it was the patience that endured the unendurable, tempering the soul on an anvil that could be mistaken for martyrdom, but was something far more aggressive and unforgiving. Crowe would endure until the last enemy had fallen. Sendrax’s impatience was a weakness. It left him vulnerable to error. To recklessness. To the clouded judgement of anger.

Crowe said nothing of this to Sendrax. To insist further on calm would serve no purpose. Sendrax would not listen. Instead, Crowe said, ‘Come with me.’

He led the way from the bunker, down the bare avenue between the barracks. Soldiers stared at them as they passed. The buildings were dark prefab rockcrete. The double-headed Imperial eagle rose in iron on each roof, a call to vigilance to every man and woman inside. The base was austere, yet not without a cold grandeur in the scale of its vehicle hangars. The walls were massive, built to withstand direct cannon fire. The setting sun tinged the eagle’s pinions with red. Sanctified violence resided here, ready to be unleashed in the direction of the foe.

Crowe could tell at a glance which troops had been in Egeta and which had been held back here. The reserves were fresh, eager to be in combat. The veterans of the current war had haunted looks. They had already seen too much for their spiritual health. They went through their drills with a grimness of purpose. They knew what they would be fighting. They were terrified. And they were still ready to fight.

‘The stocks are being kept busy,’ Sendrax said as they passed a parade ground. There were three figures in the iron pillories. They had been there since the morning.

‘Yes, they are,’ said Crowe. There was something here he would have to think about later.

He took Sendrax to the wall facing east, towards Egeta. They found Vendruhn on the ramparts. She was staring at the wounded city, ten miles away. When Crowe spoke her name, she spoke without turning around. ‘Has the time come?’

‘For what?’

‘For Egeta’s punishment.’

Crowe had told her nothing of what was coming. Perhaps she spoke from hope, not knowledge. Either way, she was correct, and there was no point in concealment. ‘Yes,’ Crowe said, ‘it is time.’ He opened up a vox-channel to the Sacrum Finem.

Gura’s voice answered immediately. ‘Yes, Lord Crowe,’ she said.

‘You may begin,’ Crowe told her.

There had been an order to events since the retreat from Egeta. Crowe had no control over when the Black Blade would make a move and so reveal itself. He did have control over the actions taken at the base and aboard the strike cruiser, though. There were steps to be taken, mourning to be observed, retribution to be exacted. The lines between these actions blurred. So Crowe had a solemn ritual performed. First Gavallan had been escorted to the place he would rest until his arrival at the Dead Fields. Now it was time to destroy the faithless and mark Gavallan’s death with a great pyre built from the city that had killed him.

Crowe voxed the squads. ‘Brothers,’ he said, ‘look to the east. Behold Gavallan’s wrath.’

The late evening sky was streaked with the fire of orbital bombardment. The lines of holy anger descended on the city. The Sacrum Finem had the power to reduce Sandava II to a cinder. What it sent now was the smallest portion of its wrath. That was enough. Ship-to-surface rockets raced ahead of cannon shells twenty feet long. High explosives and ordnance whose devastating force was a product of sheer mass fell on Egeta. The claws of destruction came lower, and lower yet. Then touched the city.

The purge began with light. Searing flashes went off in such quick succession that the skyline disappeared. They were succeeded by the fireballs. Huge, blazing orange, they swallowed the towers. The architecture of Egeta became disintegrating silhouettes as centuries-old edifices flew apart. High spires collapsed on themselves. The conflagration grew and grew and grew, and in the midst of expanding spheres of flame, new flashes erupted as more rockets and shells hit.

Finally the sound came, the thunder of blast upon blast, shaking the ground and the walls of the base. Crowe and Sendrax stood fast. Vendruhn clutched the edge of the parapet. Her mouth was open. At first, Crowe thought she was wailing in grief over her fallen city. Then he saw he was wrong. Her eyes were wide with anger. She was drinking in every moment of the annihilation. She caught his gaze and shouted. He could not hear her, but he could read her lips: Let the heretics burn.

The bombardment continued. The immense booming was without surcease. The flames of Egeta rose to the sky as if hungry for still more shells, still more rockets. Soon there was nothing but the fire. The silhouettes of the buildings vanished completely. In the city-wide firestorm, Crowe knew, roads were melting. Metal was evaporating. All that had once stood tall was being laid to waste. The people caught in that onslaught burned, were crushed, vanished beneath flows of molten iron, and were blasted out of existence by the sunbursts of the shells.

At last, the bombardment ended. The explosions ceased. The firestorm still burned, and would for days to come. But the thunder was over. The night seemed almost silent after the overlapping concussions had faded.

Almost silent. The quiet was punctured by Vendruhn’s bitter laughter.

The night was spent in prayer to the God-Emperor, and in the psychic search for His foes. The two squads gathered in the command bunker. They kneeled with their swords before them, their hands clasped on the hilts. They sought to read the turbulence of the warp over Sandava II. But the storms in the immaterium were too great. There was so much disruption, and so much corruption, that it was difficult to determine with precision where Mnay’salath and Antwyr had gone. There were storms over both of Sandava II’s land masses, but they were too violent and too large to find a centre. More information was needed.

It came in the morning, when one of the militia’s vox-operators stood before Crowe, trembling in awe. Her name was Morenz. ‘We have lost two more cities,’ she said.

‘To what?’ Crowe asked.

‘We are not sure. Beroea was the first. We did pick up some distress signals from there. We have reports of monsters.’

The daemons were there, Crowe thought. So the sword must be elsewhere. ‘And the other city?’

‘Dikaia, lord. We do not know what has happened there. It has gone silent. We only noticed after there had been no vox traffic for several hours.’

‘You’ve tried to contact the militia there?’

‘Yes, lord,’ Morenz said. ‘There has been no answer.’

A sudden, absolute silence. That was suggestive. It would accord with the unleashed will of Antwyr. Crowe thanked Morenz. A few minutes later, he announced to his brothers that Dikaia was their target. Then he told Vendruhn, and the entire base began to mobilise for war.

Drake drew Crowe aside as the Purifiers walked across the launch pad to the Stormraven. ‘The moment of your fate is at hand,’ he said.

‘So it would appear.’ Crowe noted with satisfaction that Drake took it as certain that they would recapture the Black Blade.

‘It has been an honour to fight by your side, brother.’

Crowe nodded. ‘The honour has been mine.’ This would be the last time they would march to battle as comrades. When Crowe took the sword, he would be made separate from his battle-brothers forever. The process had already started. He had spent most of this campaign at Gavallan’s right hand, in a proximity to Antwyr too dangerous for any other Grey Knight. Victory today would transform Crowe into something other, a solitary warrior almost as dangerous to his fellows as he was to a daemon.

‘I would wish you well in your burden,’ Drake said.

‘My thanks. I will shoulder it with gratitude.’

‘Which is why it must be yours.’ Drake’s head moved infinitesimally in Sendrax’s direction.

Crowe said nothing at first. He understood. Sendrax did not have patience. He did not have resignation. He would always resist the dictates of fate. These traits made him a furious warrior, but he would have been ill-suited to be Antwyr’s guardian. ‘Our duties to the Emperor are apportioned to us according to our powers,’ Crowe said at last. The words were not a platitude. He believed what he said. Those who failed in those duties were guilty of the worst sort of faithlessness. And that would never be true of Sendrax.

‘Well said,’ Drake murmured. ‘I mean no slight to any brother,’ he emphasised.

‘Understood.’

‘Then let us fight well together one final time,’ Drake said.

‘Agreed.’ They clasped forearms, then mounted the ramp to the troop hold of the Purgation’s Sword.

The Stormraven outpaced the air transports of the militia. It ate up the ground to Dikaia. It was midday when Crowe saw the city, and what the Black Blade had wrought. Outside the walls of Dikaia, a million mortals stood ready to repel invaders.

‘I see firearms,’ said Destrian as the gunship made a pass over the army. ‘Proportionately few. Some thousands perhaps.

‘The militia has fallen,’ said Gorvenal. ‘A poor testament to their faith.’

Destrian grunted. ‘Many tens of thousands of improvised weapons,’ he continued. Crowe could almost see the other Purifier’s methodical calculations at work, weighing the best approaches to deal with the taint below.

‘They are motionless,’ Sendrax said.

‘Possessed,’ said Crowe. ‘The Blade has them in its thrall.’

The city seemed to be frozen, waiting for a single will to hurl it into war. Rising above the city, the Vigilance tower rumbled. Its peak was shrouded in shadow. There was the only movement. The dark pulsed and whirled and twisted.

The tower gave welcome to the Grey Knights. It welcomed them to the vengeance of their former prisoner.

Chapter Eleven

ERUPTION

Berinon took the gunship high. He flew directly at the peak of the Vigilance tower. In the troop compartment, Crowe watched the tableau of Dikaia draw closer.

‘I do not trust their stillness,’ Berinon voxed.

‘A display for our benefit,’ said Crowe.

‘I would have called it a trap.’

‘It is not a trap when both foes know what must happen. The sword taunts us. Test its hubris, brother.’ Crowe indulged in the hope that Antwyr desired to exact its vengeance directly. How do you wish to taste our blood? Crowe thought. Do you wish to strike us down yourself?

No, came the answer.

The perimeter of the city exploded at a stroke. Berinon cursed. He threw the Stormraven into a hard right bank. The fire of every wall-gun and long-range cannon on the tower reached for the Purgation’s Sword. Thousands of lasguns opened up at the same time. What would have been mere nuisance fire became deadly as all beams converged with inhuman precision on a single point. Weapons never designed for anti-air struck with the accuracy of sniper rifles. Earthshaker shells screamed past the hull. Lascannon fire struck the port engine. The armourglass of the viewing blocks cracked. The world was blinding flashes. The Stormraven shuddered. Warning klaxons shrieked. The scream of the engines vibrated the bulkheads. Berinon pushed the ship harder yet, his turn so sharp it did violence to the integrity of the hull. Crowe and the others joined the pilot in a prayer of forgiveness to the machine-spirit.

Something huge sideswiped the undercarriage. The Purgation’s Sword lurched in the air, then dropped, its engines screaming as it completed the turn. Berinon aimed the nose down. He used gravity to turn the dive into a furious sprint to the ground. The firestorm of las and ordnance overshot them, then was corrected. Berinon slammed the controls right, right again, then left, jerking away from the fusillade. At this height, the Purgation’s Sword was in easy range of the small arms. The hull rattled and hissed from the hits. Lower yet, faster, and Berinon levelled off just fifteen feet from the ground.

The Purgation’s Sword roared over the possessed army. Crowe saw a blur of expressionless faces and expertly wielded guns. There were more las hits against the hull. Massive explosions chased the fleeing Stormraven. Berinon launched two Stormstrike missiles to the rear. They killed hundreds in seconds. The slaughter made no difference to the ocean of enemies. The guns pursued the Sword until it passed beyond the reach of most of the defences. Even then, Berinon kept the flight jagged and random to throw off the aim of the biggest cannons. The Vigilance tower continued to boom, belching fire, the bombardment unceasing now that it had begun.

Crowe said, ‘We cannot approach the sword’s position by air.’

‘We were almost hit by mortar and anti-fortification ordnance,’ Carac said, outraged. ‘How is that possible?’

‘This is the power of the Black Blade,’ Crowe told him, ‘and why its threat is so severe. Its possession of its victims is total. Every set of eyes in that army belongs to the sword. It is a single will with millions of bodily manifestations. In Dikaia, it is effectively everywhere at once.’ He had studied the writings on the Black Blade. He had learned from Gavallan. He knew what it had done in the past. He had understood what it might do again.

No, he thought he had understood. Now he had experienced the sword’s powers. Now he saw what it could do. He imagined Antwyr’s control spreading across Sandava II, then to Sandava III, then from one system to another. Antwyr becoming omniscient and omnipresent across the galaxy.

Becoming a god.

‘A ground assault will not fare any better than an aerial one,’ Sendrax said.

‘It might, if we alter the battlefield,’ said Crowe. ‘If we take away the sword’s advantage.’

‘Alter the battlefield in what way?’ Sendrax asked. ‘The transformation would have to be radical.’

‘Yes,’ said Crowe.

Sendrax grunted in surprise. ‘An orbital bombardment?’

‘Yes.’

‘The risks…’

‘Are considerable. I realise that. But the sword is on the peak of the Vigilance tower. That target is large enough for Shipmaster Gura to avoid.’ If the sword disappeared in the devastation, the attempt would be for nothing.

For the first time since Gavallan’s death, Sendrax smiled. The expression was grim, but the trace of iron humour was there. ‘You would have us march into our own bombardment to conduct a ground war.’

‘I would.’

The smile grew a little broader. ‘I chastised you for your patience yesterday,’ Sendrax said.

‘So you did,’ said Crowe. Militant patience, he thought. I waited for our enemy to reveal himself. Now I strike. I do not make this choice lightly, brother. I know what we risk if we do this. I know what we risk if we do not. I accept the consequences of this decision.

‘I shall walk in the valley of fire,’ said Gorvenal, intoning the twenty-third martial prayer.

Crowe joined him. ‘The pillars of flame shall be at my side and in my steps.’

Now all the Purifiers took up the prayer. ‘The earth shall fall and the firmament shall crack, for my soul is strong with the Emperor’s wrath. My foe’s domain ends in blood. The fire is mine. The chasms of the earth are mine. The comets of the sky are mine. For all that is mine is naught but the will of the Emperor. And I shall walk in the valley of fire with fell purpose and war-bound heart.’

‘Do not approach the city,’ said Crowe.

Vendruhn stared at the vox-unit. She could not accept the order she had been given. Morenz stood on the other side of the Chimera’s tacticarium table. She looked anxious to be elsewhere, out of earshot of this conversation.

‘We have disembarked,’ Vendruhn told Crowe. The last of the armour had rolled down the heavy lifter ramps a few minutes before. She once more had a Chimera suitable for command. She had rebaptised it before leaving the Egeta bases, over the objections of the company’s Mechanicus adept. Vendruhn had no regard for the offence she might cause to the vehicle’s machine-spirit. It was now the Legacy of Glas. She was going to fight the thing that had been her father. She had no illusions about what, if anything, would remain of Sandava II in a month, or a week, or even a few days from now. But in that time, she would hit back at the obscenity that had tainted her world, and she would strike for her family’s honour. The name of Glas would shed blood in terrible righteousness, even if the blood were her father’s.

She would not be held back from the fight.

‘An orbital bombardment is about to commence,’ Crowe said. ‘Do not be within its range.’

Vendruhn tried to make sense of this. ‘Forgive me, lord, but I had understood you were heading into the city.’

‘We are,’ Crowe said, and ended the transmission.

Vendruhn gazed into nothing for a long moment.

‘General?’ Morenz said.

Vendruhn didn’t answer. Her anger at being told to sit out the war held her motionless.

‘General,’ Morenz tried again. ‘We are still moving towards Dikaia. Shouldn’t we–’

‘Maintain course,’ Vendruhn snapped. She dropped the handset and scrambled up through the roof hatch. She looked west.

The walls of Dikaia were just coming into view. The guns of the Vigilance tower were still firing. They were targeting the Grey Knights gunship, and it was flying on a path to the south of the militia. Thus far, Vendruhn’s companies had been spared an artillery barrage. They could get closer. They could get close enough to hit the army that waited outside the city.

But now the Grey Knights planned to annihilate Dikaia. She didn’t understand. Why mount an assault that would never happen? Why lay siege to a ruin?

Dikaia was standing. She was within sight of her retribution. She did not understand Crowe’s command, and so she ignored it.

‘General!’ Morenz called from below.

‘We. Do. Not. Halt!’ Vendruhn roared.

The wrath descended from the skies once more. Vendruhn saw the devastation come, but where she had welcomed the extermination of Egeta, here she felt her vengeance cheated, and she shouted at the dread rain as if her will could arrest it.

The explosions began. Again Vendruhn beheld the terrible light. Again she heard the huge, cumulative thunder. Again the world shook with the beat of an impossibly vast war-drum. The earth erupted and erupted and erupted. A wall of flaming columns lunged for the sky. Even from this distance, Vendruhn could feel the heat against her face.

She felt no less awe before the sight than she had during the obliteration of Egeta. But there was frustration now too. She saw what she wished to do. She saw the power to punish absolutely, on a scale commensurate with her rage. But it was not her power. It was not her action. Her arm did not wield that tremendous death.

The Purgation’s Sword flew past the militia. It headed directly towards the firestorm. It dropped down, preparing to land.

They are going in, Vendruhn thought. Crowe had meant exactly what he said. The Grey Knights were going to march into the teeth of their own bombardment.

Vendruhn’s imagination burned with the vision of what would happen next. The battle in the flames. The cutting down of their foes in the midst of the end of the world. There were no words to capture the nature of that kind of war. It was the very essence of the sublime to surpass language.

It was also its essence to command irresistible desire.

She would make that war hers.

Vendruhn dropped down the hatch. She seized the handset and climbed up again. ‘Forwards!’ she shouted into the vox. She stared at the towering explosions as she spoke. She gathered the power on display for her own. The column of infantry and armour was still advancing, but there was a hesitation in the face of the bombardment, an uncertainty of action. She could sense it. Legacy of Glas’ engine was subdued, as subdued as if Owrun, her driver, were holding back, unwilling to commit the Chimera to its destiny. She looked back. As she had suspected, the infantry’s march was slow. She was sure of that.

‘Forwards, by the Throne!’ she called again. ‘March, you pride of Sandava II! Will you let others fight your war? Will you shirk reclaiming your honour? Glory drums before us! March with me! Charge into the enemy! The fire is our victory and our revenge. It does not come for us! March, damn you, march!’

She switched the channel to Owrun’s frequency. ‘What are you waiting for? The road is clear before us. It is paved and flat. Maximum speed, or I will shoot you now.’

Owrun believed her. He obeyed. Legacy of Glas leapt forwards over the breaking ground. The rockcrete pavement bucked and split. The maglev tracks rang and groaned from the beats of the bombardment.

Ahead, the Stormraven lifted off. It had unloaded its warriors. It flew back and forth near the edge of the bombardment zone, strafing the ground with its heavy bolters and assault cannons.

Vendruhn was so close now. The explosions shook her bones. The storm of fire and smoke and dust obscured the city. Only the Vigilance tower was visible above the devastation. Shadows contorted at its peak, lashing out in violent spirals. Thick tendrils, clouds thick as flesh but jagged and fast as lightning, struck down into the flames. The cannons flashed still, but they were silent, overwhelmed by the immensity of the blasts hurled at Dikaia by the vessel in orbit.

Closer, closer. Vendruhn’s chest vibrated painfully, and smoke stung her eyes. She tasted blood in her mouth. She had bitten her tongue. Her skin baked from the heat. The pain enthralled her. It was a foretaste of what she was about to inflict.

Almost there. The world shaking and cracking open from the monstrous concussions. The boom, boom, boom shattering coherence, scattering thought.

‘Forwards!’ she cried again. That thought was clear. That thought was strong.

The enemy did not appear until Legacy of Glas plunged into the maelstrom. Billowing smoke embraced the militia. Vendruhn was inside thunder. She had arrived in an otherworld of final dissolution. She could see no more than a dozen yards ahead, and then only in snatches as the smoke eddied. Darkness flashed with flame. The landscape was overlapping craters and pulverised ruins. The Chimera rode over smashed slabs and shredded, carbonised bodies. Owrun steered it from crater to crater as if shells would not land where destruction had already occurred.

And through the fire, over the bodies, came the foe. They did not heed the bombardment. A shell landed twenty feet off the Chimera’s right flank, and a hundred people died in a second. There were no cries. The attackers on either side of the explosion did not flinch. They charged in perfect silence.

In Egeta, the apostates had been hysterical, chanting, screaming things. They had gabbled prayers and curses. They had been terrified and ecstatic.

These people were different. Their silence gave way to shrieks when they closed with the militia, but they screamed all at once, as if the impulse to howl came from somewhere else. This enemy was a single, inseparable mass. There were no individuals, and death meant nothing except a brief gap in the tide of foes. Many were unarmed, yet they all fought with skill. They were fast and were more nimble than any of the heretics in Egeta. Vendruhn gathered these impressions in splinters. No more was possible in the inferno. She saw the enemy, and she trained the heavy bolter on the wretches. Its mass-reactive ammunition hit them at close range. There were no daemons here, only heretics, humans guilty of falling away from the Emperor’s light. Her slaughter was enormous. Mighty shells exploded weak bags of flesh and blood. In the midst of howling fire, rain fell on Vendruhn, a warm rain, a splashing, copper-tasting rain.

Her infantry were dying on all sides, overwhelmed by the possessed or caught in the bombardment. The Chimera behind Legacy of Glas vanished. The crack of the explosion made Vendruhn’s ears bleed. The blast wave slammed her back and forth. Fire washed over her as the Glas pulled away. Pain raked molten claws down her face. Her hair smouldered.

Vendruhn laughed.

She held the trigger down, swept the weapon left and right, and she laughed. She had no idea where she was. She had lost all sense of direction seconds after entering the storm. She was deep in the realm of excess. The war, the destruction, the eruption of all reality – all of it glorious, magnificent, overwhelming excess. The blood on her face, the bursting bodies, the vortex of unending violence that she was now part of, all of it, all of it, all of it. Excess.

She did not think of honour. She did not think of righteousness. She did not think of justice, or vengeance or even the possibility of victory. This moment, this ever-building paroxysm was the end in itself. Excess. There was no meaning to the universe except excess. There was no universe any more, only this volcanic celebration of chaos.

Vendruhn lost herself in the butchery and the devastation, and she rejoiced.

The crowd was burning. Thousands ran at the Purifiers from the flaming streets. On the right, a hab tower collapsed, crushing the attackers, burying the boulevard beneath a mountain of rubble forever.

Forever, until a solid shell, an artificed meteor launched from the Sacrum Finem, struck moments later, and then everything to the right was dust and flame.

On the left, the burning people kept coming. The concussion of falling building and shell impact flattened many of them, but hundreds still remained, and they did not slow.

They were still on fire.

Crowe swung his Nemesis blade in wide arcs, chopping the attackers in half. He advanced through them as though they were weeds of flesh. They were in agony. Their faces were twisted with silent screams. They felt the fire. But the will that controlled them did not care. It did not even let them scream. It threw them forwards, pushing the ten million of Dikaia at the Grey Knights.

‘They fight well,’ Drake voxed. It was impossible to communicate in any other fashion, even in close proximity, in the hurricane of the bombardment.

‘They do,’ Crowe said. The people attacked with too much skill for civilians. Some wore militia uniforms. Most did not. ‘We are not fighting the mortals they were,’ he said. ‘We are fighting the Black Blade.’

He swung the sword again, killing four of the possessed heretics at once. His strength and the sword’s power field cut through muscle and bone like air. Two more thralls leapt over his blow. They landed on his shoulders and tried to pry his helmet loose. He shook them off and stomped their heads open. He moved on. ‘Be wary,’ he warned his brothers. ‘Do not underestimate them.’

Sendrax laughed. ‘Be wary?’ he said. ‘Here?’

He spoke, and the world erupted again. High-explosive shells detonated ahead and on either side. Fire obliterated everything. The ground heaved. The fire died down and the colossal, blackened shape that had been a sprawling, hundred-storey hab complex toppled downwards. It was too wide to evade. Crowe ran forwards. This was the war he had created. He would face it head-on.

Sendrax was laughing again. ‘Are you depending on destiny to preserve us, or are you still offended I insulted your patience?’

‘Neither,’ said Crowe. The Emperor protects, he thought.

The sky became sloping rockcrete, raining slabs and metal. Fire engulfed the base of the structure. A huge burst of flame billowed out of an entrance. Crowe made that inferno.

The roar of the collapsing hab block was everywhere. Crowe did not look up. They would reach the base or they would not.

Crowe ran into the fire. It bellowed in a wide corridor extending through the complex. The Purifiers pounded through a tunnel of flame. Warning runes flashed red on Crowe’s lenses. He saw only fire. It blasted at him with the fury of a gale. He ran, and the rumble of the hab’s destruction reached its climax. Everything shook. Everything crashed. A giant sought to crush the Purifiers in its grasp, but the corridor held its shape. The fire vented its wrath on Crowe. He faced it. He ran through it. You will not stop me, he thought. I have a greater enemy to fight.

The corridor took the Grey Knights to the other side of the fallen complex. The hall ended at the source of the fire – a crater filled with burning promethium. The fuel poured in from the right, coming from a manufactorum that had been torn in half. Ruptured pipes ten feet wide hung from multiple levels of the structure. They were the outflows of incinerating cataracts. The heat was intolerable. Crowe was already pushing the limits of his armour’s thermal shielding. He turned left, wading through the edge of the crater until he was finally out of the fire.

The heretics were waiting. Antwyr knew where the Grey Knights were at every step. All it took was for one set of eyes, even from a distance, to survive long enough to see the Purifiers enter the flames. Antwyr was using its omniscience well.

The heretics rushed forwards, using their weight to push the Grey Knights back into the lake of promethium. They attacked as a mass, but an intelligent one, each heretic angling to amplify the force of those ahead. They hit with the strength of a seismic wave.

Crowe leaned forwards and braced himself. He lunged ahead with his sword. He fired his storm bolter at the same moment. At his sides, the shells of his brothers slammed into the heretics too. The Purifiers cut a wedge into the throng. They charged into the ocean of bodies. The heretics could not throw the Grey Knights back, so they tried to entangle them instead. They threw themselves down. They crawled over each other, crushing the bodies beneath, slowing the Grey Knights down while clawing and hacking at them with improvised weapons. The possessed militia stood back and trained their lasrifles on the Purifiers.

‘They seek to destroy us with trivialities,’ Carac snarled.

‘Give them an opening and they will,’ Crowe told him. The accuracy of the militia was inhuman. The las-beams did no more than score his armour, but the shots were aimed consistently at his helm, dazzling him each time they struck.

‘We must move faster,’ Crowe called. ‘Climb their mounds. Take out the shooters.’ He did as he said, slashing the heretics before they could grab at him and storming up the hill of bodies. He turned his storm bolter on the militia, splattering them against the ruins of the buildings surrounding the crater. Destrian and Ruluf torched swathes of heretics with incinerators. They directed their fire to the west, fighting to clear the way forwards to the Vigilance tower.

The tower’s peak rose above the conflagration of the city, its cannons blazing, its summit a fury of shadow. The bombardment sent more and more dust into the air, and the smoke further darkened the day. In the burning, flaming, thundering gloom, the Vigilance tower had become a dark silhouette, black as the sword that reigned at its top.

Vigilance indeed, Crowe thought. Visible everywhere in Dikaia, even a Dikaia turned into a pyre, the Tower saw all of the city. Wherever there were eyes, the sword could see. The bombardment was killing millions. Enough to stymie Antwyr’s defence, but not enough to blind it yet.

The militia fell, shredded by bolter fire. The soldiers’ nuisance shots stopped. Crowe loped over the hills of bodies, using his momentum to overcome inertia. He slammed through heretics, chopping off limbs and heads, refusing to slow. The Purifiers moved even faster. They pulled away from the crater, heading for another wide avenue. The base of the Vigilance tower was only half a mile ahead.

A premonition made Crowe look back. What happened next could not have been destiny. Surely it was mere chance, the inevitable result of defied odds taking their revenge. Sometimes the chance result was inevitable, and there was no contradiction.

It could not have been preordained. Futility could not be a foretold end. The Emperor would not allow it.

Even so, Crowe looked back, already sensing what he would see.

An influx of the possessed from the rear caught up with Brother Doran. They stumbled through the fire, becoming human torches. They burned so ferociously that even their daemonic master could not retain full control over their motor functions. They fell clumsily onto Doran. He fought them off and put them down. He crushed skulls with his bionic arm. But they surrounded him with their fire. He took a wrong step and sank into a gap between piles of corpses. The bodies slid down onto him. His sword cut through them and he climbed to the top again. The delay was a matter of seconds.

It kept him close enough to the centre of the shell impact.

The high explosive came down beside the crater. Crowe’s auto-lenses snapped shutters down, shielding him from the flare of impact. They opened again as he was knocked back by the blast. It sent Sendrax and the others flying. But not Doran. He had vanished.

Sendrax regained his feet. Standing in the midst of hundreds of corpses, he looked between the new crater and Crowe.

I hear your judgement, Crowe thought. He heard, but he rejected it. These were the consequences of his decision to prosecute the war in this way. He accepted them. He would mourn the loss of Doran later. There was no time now.

And his decision was the correct one. It had brought the Purifiers this close to the Vigilance tower.

Crowe plunged down the avenue running west. There was a clear run to the base of the tower. The road was filled with the possessed, but buildings had fallen on either side and there was no way of funnelling large crowds into the zone as reinforcements. The Black Blade was trying. Heretics scrambled over the burning wreckage like insects on a corpse. The Purifiers hit the crowd with blade and bolter and fire, thinning the enemy before them. They slammed through the bodies, metal ploughing through flesh. Crowe refused Doran’s fate. The sword would not win through the trivial act of slowing the Grey Knights down.

He knew there was no logic to his determination. It was chance, not speed, that had killed Doran – Crowe could just as easily rush into the next shell – but in momentum there was progress, and thus he felt the bombardment was an ally. He had caused this to happen. He had taken the most drastic steps to ensure the success of the mission, and the fulfilment of his duty passed down to him from Gavallan. He must be the Warden of the Blade, and he would crack the planet with his hands if that was what the Emperor required of him.

Fate. Destiny. No, Sendrax was wrong. Crowe did not rely on destiny to see him to his goal. Destiny was not a predetermined event. It was a responsibility. It was a calling. It could be failed.

He would not fail.

And in answer to his determination, the sky hurled itself down on Dikaia. On all sides, the city exploded. Crowe ran through the blasts. Shock waves buffeted him. Pieces of shrapnel the size of Land Raiders flew across the avenue. Fire consumed his sight. The thunder of the explosions was the roar of Sandava II itself. The rockcrete of the road melted. Crowe’s boots stuck in the molten sludge. He pulled himself free and charged over the bodies of the enemy. They sank into the road, burning, their faces betraying no sign of the agony inflicted upon them. The sword’s control over their beings was so complete, it would not let them scream.

Dikaia rocked and howled. It surrounded Crowe with the cataclysm of its death. Except in front. One shell landed near the base of the tower, and a horde of heretics vanished in the explosion. The crater was free of rubble.

‘I give thanks to the Emperor,’ Crowe prayed. ‘His hand scatters my enemies before me. His wrath is the flame of their annihilation.’

‘I am His sword,’ Drake said.

‘He directs my blow,’ said Gorvenal.

Crowe moved through the fury of a sun. There was the road ahead, the straight path through the writhing enemy to the Vigilance tower. And there was the tower itself, the great solid, black mass, the single unchanging point in the vortex of the bombardment. All else was shattered, all else was hurtling ruin. All else was a storm of total incineration.

But the path was there. Crowe’s steps were sure. This was the nature of destiny. It was the clear road, the path that must be followed, even if the end was never reached.

What is the end? Is it the destruction of the Black Blade?

No. Even if the impossible was finally accomplished, and Antwyr was destroyed forever, that would not be the end. Crowe’s destiny would stretch ahead to the task appointed by the completion of the last. He would walk the path until his end came. That was where destiny would take him.

He accepted his task with full heart.

The Purifiers ran through the crater. Ten yards beyond it, they reached the Vigilance Tower. Behind them, the possessed mortals continued their pursuit. The bombardment had thinned their numbers still further. There were a few hundred at most, and they were dying all the time, sinking into the road, crushed by falling wreckage.

Crowe looked up at the vertical face of the Vigilance tower. A regular series of handholds marked the trail of the daemon’s climb. Crowe thought about the Black Blade’s omniscience, and in the diminished horde rushing at the Grey Knights through the inferno of the bombardment, he saw opportunity.

‘We must kill them all,’ he told his brothers. ‘Every last one. We need a few moments where there are no eyes on us.’

They formed a half-circle with their backs to the tower and welcomed the heretics to their deaths.

‘What are you planning?’ Sendrax asked.

‘To climb the tower out of the sight of the Blade.’

‘Alone?’

‘I will have to be.’ And from this moment forward, he knew he would be alone for the rest of his existence. ‘We need to keep Antwyr’s attention focused on the rest of you. If it believes the threat is elsewhere, we will retain the initiative.’

‘I understand, brother.’ It was clear Sendrax did, in every sense.

‘Thank you, brother.’ Crowe stabbed a heretic through the neck. His blade came out the other side and pierced another’s eye.

‘You will begin to fight alone so soon?’ Drake asked.

‘So it must be.’ Destiny. Not chance. This was his appointed task, leading to his appointed burden.

The world burned and fell. The avenue melted. The heretics attacked and died, attacked and died. The skill of the Blade, channelled through the possessed, meant nothing as their numbers diminished. The full ocean of that army’s strength might have overwhelmed the Grey Knights, but this small tributary could do nothing but die.

This is your mistake, Antwyr, Crowe thought. You are about to blind yourself. If you held your slaves back, you would prevent what I am about to do. But in your folly, you will blind yourself.

The last of the heretics fell. The street raged. There was nothing but flame. In the midst of the eruption, the Grey Knights were alone.

‘Fight well, brothers,’ Crowe said. If they met again, they would see him with different eyes. He would have his burden, and he would be dangerous to them.

‘Go,’ said Sendrax. ‘Avenge our champion.’

Crowe seized the first of the handholds. He began the ascent, to take a prisoner and to make a prisoner of himself.

Chapter Twelve

DESTINY

Crowe ascended above the fire. The world below screamed and roared. Its agony trembled up the height of the Vigilance tower. He seemed to be climbing the spine of an animal caught in its death throes. The tremors tried to throw him down. Cracks opened up along the igneous columns of the tower. Dust fell on him. Small rocks bounced off his armour. He held fast, but his progress was slow. An age passed, and the summit with its roiling darkness seemed no closer. When he glanced down, though, the ground was now hundreds of feet away. He was leaving the chaos of Dikaia’s destruction behind, and moving steadily towards the heart of a deeper madness.

His motions were steady. He did not rush. He thought about each movement before he took it. He had reached the point where there could be no mistakes. If he fell, that would be the end to his mission. That would be the most ignoble betrayal of his destiny.

He would not fall.

The steps of the climb were monotonous, mechanistic. He forced himself to be conscious of every moment of the climb. He approached the task as he would a prayer. In truth, it was a form of prayer. It was a test, one he must pass to prove himself worthy of the destiny revealed to him by Gavallan, and set before him by the Emperor. The Vigilance tower was the physical embodiment of his life’s journey to this point. He was moving towards the summit of his existence to this day. There waited his honour and his curse. They were one and the same. They were his destiny, but he must fight harder than he ever had before to embrace his fate.

He was higher than the flames now. He had risen past several cannon emplacements, his progress slowing as he avoided them. The guns fired with the same relentless rhythm as he climbed. He wondered if they were still shooting at the Purgation’s Sword. Berinon was flying strafing runs, but only at the edges of the city. There was no reason to risk the destruction of the gunship in the bombardment. But if the ship was the target, then Crowe gave thanks. There was something else to draw the sword’s attention away from the silver-grey speck moving up the Vigilance tower. You can be everywhere in Dikaia, he thought. But first you must think to do so.

He had not heard from the other Purifiers for some while. He did not try to contact them. He had faith in them, and that was enough. His concern was the summit of the tower, not the ground below. He could not think about the effect of any orders he might give. All that mattered was the recapture of the Black Blade. Every sacrifice was permissible.

He cut two more grooves into the stone. He paused before he climbed, looking up at the peak once more. The shadow storm was as ferocious as ever, as the smoke-obscured day drew to a close and night fell. A slashing tendril of the dark streaked down the face of the Vigilance tower less than fifty yards away from Crowe’s position. He froze until it withdrew. He studied the vortex above him a few minutes longer. Was it smaller than it had been at the start of the battle? He thought so. It had reached farther during their attempt to reach the summit in the Stormraven.

Crowe pondered this. There was a weakness here, something to be exploited. The sword was not omnipotent. Something had eaten away at its strength.

What did we do to you? Crowe thought.

We have been destroying your army.

The ten million people of Dikaia had been decimated. Not a single tower was standing in the city now. Every sector had been pounded into rubble, and the attack continued. With every shell that landed, the Blade lost more slaves.

We are hurting you already.

He had been unable to hail Shipmaster Gura since entering the bombardment zone. Now high above the devastation, he tried again as he moved upwards once more. On the third attempt, Gura answered. The vox-link was plagued by static, but it would do.

‘Lord Crowe,’ she said. ‘Do you wish me to cease the bombardment?’

‘No. I want you to increase its intensity. Destroy everything except the Vigilance tower. Level the city completely, then bomb it again. Do not stop until you have received the order to do so.’

‘Understood.’ She paused for a moment. ‘Lord Crowe, the auspex array picked up a large movement from the east of Dikaia, heading into the bombardment zone.’

‘General Glas has led the militia into the city?’

‘It would seem so.’

Vendruhn’s act was something that went beyond the merely foolish. It was more important than that. It changed nothing, though. In the long run, Vendruhn and her troops were doomed no matter the outcome of the war. ‘I see,’ he said to Gura. ‘My order stands. Obliterate Dikaia.’

‘So ordered.’

Crowe’s path was clear. The need for the bombardment was clear. But there was a matter here that was not. Vendruhn’s behaviour made him uneasy. Her loyalty to the Emperor was beyond reproach. Her anger at the corruption that had come to Sandava II was immense. Her struggle was certain to end in her death before long, regardless of her tactical decisions. But the sense that there was something important here would not leave him. Crowe approved of Vendruhn’s fanaticism, but not her recklessness. Now she had chosen to hurl herself and her troops into the teeth of an orbital bombardment, one that Crowe had commanded be pushed to the limit, leaving nothing in Dikaia alive.

He saw a pattern here. It was not an accident. It was not foolishness. It was a path. He saw in Vendruhn’s actions a distorted mirror of his own.

More than a path, then, he thought. Destiny.

The implications were obscure. He could not read them, but he did not like their direction.

The consequences were also out of his hands. He turned his attention from the shadows below and resumed his climb to the shadows above.

The sublimity of excess was unending. Vendruhn revelled in the disorientation. She was at the centre of the judgement. The explosions were an extension of her rage. Wherever she looked, wherever she fired, the enemy died. North, south, east, west – where she turned her eyes, fury erupted. She looked everywhere. She spun in the turret, firing across three hundred and sixty degrees, and there was fire everywhere. Perhaps she was inside the city walls... Only there were no more walls. Huge masses of rockcrete fell near her. Gargantuan masses toppled. She did not know what they had been. She did not care. All that mattered was the enactment of judgement, judgement without limit, judgement that surpassed all understanding.

Judgement was excess, and she was one with it.

There could be nothing proportional in the punishment of Dikaia. To turn from the Emperor was a crime beyond proportion. Excess must be met with excess. Faith and the miraculous existed in the realm of the excessive.

And that was where Vendruhn was, killing the apostate, lost in the celebration of total punishment.

Legacy of Glas kept to no fixed path. Where a space opened through the ruins and the blasts, there Owrun directed the Chimera. The rest of the militia followed as it could. Vehicles and infantry died. The losses registered at the edge of Vendruhn’s awareness. The slaughter of the Dikaians remained central. So many died at every second, they far outweighed her casualties.

Now and then enemy vehicles appeared. There were few, and most of them were destroyed before they came near. One appeared now, surging through a fountain of flame. Its multi-laser turret blasted the right flank of the Glas. Owrun turned into a crater, dropping the Chimera out of the arc of the other vehicle’s guns. Vendruhn heard screams coming from inside the hull. The side las gunners had been hit. The Glas’ steering seemed sluggish. But its multi-laser was ready as Owrun turned and brought the transport roaring back up from the crater.

Then all was light – terrible flaming light – and the duel ended. Shells rained down with a new intensity. There was nowhere to turn. Vendruhn’s illusion of judgement disintegrated. Everything was destruction. Everything was flame. The attacking Chimera took a direct hit. Vendruhn saw nothing but searing red. She was flying, jerking back and forth. She thought she had been thrown free of the hatch. She had not. Legacy of Glas was lifted into the air and spun around by the explosion. It came back down in the new crater. Vendruhn fell into the hold. Smoke filled the space. Burned bodies lay beside ruined lasguns. Morenz leaned against the tacticarium table, clutching a shattered arm.

‘General,’ said the vox-operator, ‘we must leave.’

No, Vendruhn thought. No.

The Chimera jerked violently. Outside, gods were howling their wrath at all things mortal.

‘While we still can,’ Morenz pleaded.

Vendruhn was dizzy. She realised she had struck her head in her fall. She rubbed her temple. She looked up at the hatch. A sky of flame stared back.

Reason sank cold fingers into her veins. She had thought herself part of the tapestry of excess, but she was not. A storm had come that did not care for her or her vengeance.

‘Yes,’ she said. Her throat was raw. ‘Order a retreat.’

Did the order matter? Did Owrun know where they were? Vendruhn could not think what direction would take them out of the bombardment. But the Chimera lurched into motion again. Owrun knew where he wanted to go. That would have to be enough.

Fire licked through the hatch. Thunder on top of thunder on top of thunder roared its monstrous victory. Vendruhn climbed up again. She grabbed the hatch to close it, but hesitated, frozen by what she saw outside. The maelstrom was total. There was no distinguishing between enemy and militia.

This was true excess.

It was also betrayal.

Where are you? she begged the Emperor. Why do you not protect your servants? Why have you abandoned us?

The only answer was a dragon’s roar of annihilation.

The shadow storm raged above Crowe. It billowed towards the sky, then whirled back down to the summit with the force of madness. It had continued to shrink as he climbed. The ramping up of the bombardment was having an effect. Antwyr’s army was blasted to ash, and the Blade’s power diminished as its slaves fell. It was feeling its weakness, Crowe was sure. The storm’s fury was growing as it faded. Desperation screamed from the peak of the Vigilance tower.

A few feet from the end of his ascent, Crowe heard from Sendrax for the first time in hours.

‘You have kept us busy, brother,’ said the Knight of the Flame.

‘Say rather that I sent you reinforcements.’

‘Very true. The enemy is reduced to clusters.’

‘They are still following you?’

‘They are. I split up our squads to further the confusion. It may be that Antwyr believes you dead.’

Perhaps. Crowe had not heard the Blade in his head since its escape. He would have expected to experience its taunts during the attack, but there had been nothing. He wondered why. Perhaps in its need to escape, Antwyr sought every form of distance from its captors, even a psychic one. Perhaps it had been more desperate from the start. Its first taste of freedom must have seemed passing and fragile when it had lost any means of getting off-world. ‘It will learn I am not dead soon enough,’ he told Sendrax.

‘Brother Drake is right. You do not need to fight alone so soon.’

‘I must. The sword still looks down and attacks you. Hold its attention a little longer.’

‘Very well.’ Sendrax said nothing after that, but he did not sign off.

‘What would you ask?’ said Crowe. He paused now. He was just below the peak. When he moved again, he would be on the summit, and within the shadow.

‘Do you not trust us, brother?’ Sendrax asked.

‘You know I do.’

‘But you would keep us at a distance from the sword.’

‘Yes,’ Crowe said. ‘I would. You know the power it has when it is captive. You have felt it seek to influence you.’

‘I have,’ Sendrax admitted.

‘How much stronger is it now? This is my task. I will not subject my brothers to a fate from which it is my duty to shield them.’

‘Is it written? Is it destined? And what if this should be our chance to destroy the Blade? We will have lost that opportunity because you blindly submitted to Gavallan’s dictate. He made mistakes, Garran. And now he is dead.’

‘We all shared in his errors. I do not want to compound them. Do you see the means to destroy the sword, now when it is more powerful than it has ever been since its capture? If so, tell me, because I do not.’

‘Nor do I,’ Sendrax said after a moment.

‘Then our course of action is clear. I fight alone, brother.’ And so I will until my death, whether that is moments away or at the end time.

‘So be it.’

Crowe would not dishonour Sendrax by thinking that he sounded relieved. He knew the Purifier would march into the foulest keeps of the Ruinous Powers without hesitation. But like all Grey Knights, Sendrax knew the value of a soul. The Blade of Antwyr had been the most sinister artefact on Titan. It was the relic that would destroy its guardian, the weapon that held mortal danger even for the Grey Knights, and the prisoner that must always be held. Sendrax honoured Crowe by offering to join him. But it was well Crowe did not accept, and they both knew it.

The summit of the Vigilance tower was flat and featureless, as though the blade of a colossus had sheared off a higher peak. Crowe grasped its edge and lifted himself up into the shadows.

Night had fallen, but the city was lit by the fury of the bombardment. Inside the sword’s storm, the dark was total. Whirling clouds buffeted Crowe. They tried to pick him up and throw him from the tower. They howled and shrieked. They screamed. But not in his ears. The murderous cacophony was in his head. The shadows were the will of Antwyr made manifest. This was not the whispered insinuations or shouted commands. This was not malevolence directed at Crowe. This was the pure darkness of a will so powerful it tore its way into material existence. The clouds slammed against him. They coiled and constricted. They were chains one moment, a lash the next. They were physical and mental attacks, demanding his obedience, but without direction or purpose, inchoate, as if they were but the radiation of the true evil.

Crowe could see nothing in the darkness. There were brief moments when the clouds lifted and he caught glimpses of the surface of the tower, but he saw only a few feet in each direction. He could sense a consistence and a gravity to the storm, though. It had an eye. He walked towards it, his strides steady and careful on the rough surface beneath his feet. He sword was drawn. The holy light of its blade shone brighter as he moved closer to the centre of the vortex. The dark will shrieked, grasping at him, eager to haul him to its source.

Crowe gave the dark what it wished. He gave it too much. He marched in the faith of the Emperor. He marched in an abhorrence of all that was daemonic. He marched as a Knight of the Flame of the Grey Knights. His presence burned the dark.

The current reversed. The darkness began to tear. Crowe could see the ground again. He walked faster. The shadows smouldered. The light was coming from him. Where the shadows touched him, they ignited. They recoiled, writhing and flaking. Screams of rage became screams of pain.

The Blade could not be destroyed, but Antwyr, in the form it had adopted, could be injured.

The daemonic dark shrivelled before Crowe’s advance.

The annihilation of Dikaia resounded on all sides of the tower. The Sacrum Finem pounded the city and all its citizens to dust and glass. The army of the possessed dwindled further. The shadows receded, drawing in to their centre.

Though Crowe was still in shadow, he was no longer blind. The dense nothing he had entered upon reaching the summit was now a dense fog, rolling and swirling, concealing and revealing, but Crowe could see where he walked. He broke into a run. The eye of the storm was close.

Antwyr attacked first. There was a sudden rush of shadows to Crowe’s right. He turned and started to raise his sword. The monster that had been Otto leapt at him, the Black Blade raised high. The form was still growing and changing, becoming a manifestation of Antwyr as the daemon worked to free itself at last from the sword. It was a creature of spikes and armour, taller and broader than Crowe. It was faster too. It was wielded by the Blade, and it moved with all the speed and accuracy of its lethal will.

Crowe had come to take the sword by surprise. Antwyr attacked first. Yet as he tried to block its swing and knew he was too slow, Crowe tasted the first hint of triumph.

The Black Blade slammed against his Nemesis sword, knocking it aside and chopping into Crowe’s right pauldron. Antwyr cut deep. It drew blood. Crowe dropped in the direction of the blow, pulling the sword from his shoulder, and rolled away. He came to his feet, blade ready. He launched himself at the daemon, storm bolter firing as he swung his sword. As he attacked, he thought, You are desperate. There was too much rage in that blow. You could have done better. You fear me.

His bolt shells tore into the armoured surface of the daemon. Chunks of plates and spikes flew into the air. The monster ignored the hits. It swung the Blade with such force it countered Crowe’s blow and cut into his arm. He stepped back. It whirled around and brought the sword in sideways with both arms. It would have cut a marble column in two. Crowe leapt backwards. The tip of Antwyr cut into his chest-plate, slicing through a purity seal.

Sloppy, he thought. Antwyr was trying to kill him with a single, massive strike. You are desperate. You never thought I would get this close. My presence is a surprise. You feel you are in danger. I am not the one on the defensive.

Antwyr pressed the attack. Each swing was huge and fast. It forced Crowe backwards. When he parried, he felt the shock travel up his arm as if he had struck a mountain. He aimed a few blows of his own, but he did not expect them to land. His defence was his careful assault. He studied the Black Blade’s strategy. He watched for a mistake. He watched for the true opportunity.

Militant patience.

The daemon roared. There were two souls in its voice. Crowe heard the rage of Antwyr, and he heard the agony of Otto Glas. In that daemonic shape, the trace of the Lord Governor remained, and it suffered.

Antwyr came down on Crowe with an overhead slash. This blow was too fast, too strong. It was a strike to cleave granite. He blocked it. His Nemesis sword exploded. Sacred energy burst into the night, crackling ball lightning that blinded as it fought its last against the daemon. Crowe fired his bolter into the blaze, while his sanctified wrath gathered in his right hand. Antwyr stumbled back from the sacred light. The bolt shells did not injure it, but the impact of the volley knocked it back another step. It snarled as it charged towards him once more, the sword overhead again. Now, confident it was about to deliver the death stroke, Antwyr spoke to Crowe.

‘I will burn stars without you, Garran Crowe.’

‘You will burn indeed,’ Crowe said. He unleashed the cleansing flame into the face of the monster. The fire engulfed its horned head. The dual voice bellowed again, only now both souls were in pain.

The monster let go of the Blade with one hand and lashed out blindly. It struck Crowe, knocking him to the side and down. He jumped up again and put a few more steps between himself and the daemon. It recovered and charged him again.

He was ready. He had seen the mistake. For a fraction of a second, as the fire of purity had burned away the daemonflesh, the body had leaned into the flames. It had sought the scouring. The movement was brief. It was almost imperceptible. Crowe had seen the tormented soul of Otto Glas reach for salvation. For that infinitesimal moment, the sword’s control had slipped, and the damned Lord Governor had exerted some influence on the body.

The clouds of shadow broke apart. The Black Blade gathered its strength. The armoured face looked at Crowe. Fury mixed with two desperations in its eyes. It attacked, swift as thought and powerful as a Dreadnought.

Crowe had its measure. He stood his ground.

Militant patience.

Strike now.

He drew upon the full breadth of his faith, and with both hands extended, he spoke the words of banishment. He did not seek to expel the being inside the sword. No force known to the Grey Knights could do that.

He sought instead to banish it from the body of Otto Glas.

He did not break Antwyr’s hold on the Lord Governor, but he weakened it. He weakened it enough for Otto to make a heroic grasp at redemption. As it reached Crowe, the monster jerked. Energy leaked from its blow as it thrust the point of the Blade at Crowe’s chest. Otto fought to arrest the attack. He failed, but what he did was enough.

Crowe braced himself, accepting the sacrifice he must make. Let my task begin here, he thought.

Antwyr’s point slammed into his chest-plate. It pierced the armour and stabbed through his black carapace. It sank deep into his flesh and broke through his ribcage. Bone splintered. Blood jetted onto the arms of the daemon.

The tip stopped just short of Crowe’s heart. Otto’s victory.

Crowe’s wound was his trap. I have you, he thought. He grasped the Blade with both hands. He turned and yanked with all his strength. He held on through might and will and blood sacrifice.

The hilt pulled free of the monster’s hands.

The last of the shadow clouds vanished. Crowe grunted and pulled the sword from his chest. He reversed it and grasped the hilt.

No! Antwyr screamed. Release me, release me, release me. This will not be!

The daemon dropped to its knees. Too much of Antwyr was still within the sword. With the connection severed, the manifestation began to disintegrate. Spikes crumbled away, armour sloughed off.

No no no no no no no! the Blade howled.

The monster appeared to shrink from the inside. Its form became brittle and cracked. It fell in on itself, then flaked into ash, which whirled away on the wind. What remained was the size and silhouette of a mortal. It was a thing of shattered and suppurating grey. It was a body that had been burned to death, but still somehow moved.

His lungs gurgling with blood, Crowe moved to the thing. He held the sword fast. Its will raged in his mind. He sensed a potential that would leap from his fist if he relaxed his vigilance.

The wreckage of Otto Glas looked up at Crowe. Eyes that had gazed beyond agony pleaded for release. Otto raised hands whose fingers were leprous stubs. He moved his lips, but they turned to powder, leaving behind grey, rotting teeth. Otto could not speak. He was eloquent in his desperation.

‘You have betrayed the Emperor,’ Crowe told him. ‘You struck down his champion.’ He gestured with his left hand, encompassing the martyrdom of Dikaia. ‘These are your works.’

Otto remained motionless. He did not shake his head in denial. He held his arms as they were. His lidless eyes gazed at Crowe. They made no claim to mercy. They asked only for holy destruction.

Crowe nodded. ‘There is no redemption,’ he said. ‘But there is an end.’

For the first time, Garran Crowe swung the Black Blade of Antwyr, and severed the crumbling skull of Lord Governor Otto Glas from its body.

Then there was only ash, vanishing on a wind that seemed to cry out.

Ash, and the dawn of the hard destiny.

Chapter Thirteen

BEROEA

An armada of the air rumbled across the ocean towards the southern continent. Valkyries and heavy lifters transported all that remained of Sandava II’s militia. The remnant, regrouped at the base outside Egeta, was a muster of five companies of infantry and armour. Enough to defend a city against a human foe. Enough to raze that same foe’s city to the ground. The aircraft flew in tight squadrons, the olive green of their hulls a dark, roaring shadow in the squall-tossed air. Ahead of the transports, a single, silver-grey craft carried more power than all the others combined. The Purgation’s Sword led the crusade to Beroea.

I made you a promise once, said the sword. You turned away from me. I make the promise again. You wield me now. Wield me as you should. We will lay waste to Beroea. The galaxy will fall before us.

Held by his grav-harness, Crowe sat at the rear of the Stormraven’s troop compartment, as far from his battle-brothers as was possible in the cramped conditions. The Black Blade of Antwyr was sheathed at his side. He kept one hand on the pommel of the hilt, a reminder to the sword that it was his prisoner, and an act of conscious guardianship for himself.

In truth, he thought, I am the sword’s prisoner too. He considered the fact dispassionately, without rancour or regret. Iron acceptance was the twin of militant patience. It too was a critical part of his task. His duty. His destiny.

The sword had moved on from its raging cries at the moment of its capture. There had been a few other moments when it had screamed in Crowe’s mind, but for now it was content to whisper and scrape. The eating at his mind was more insidious than it had been when Gavallan held the sword. Crowe understood now what the champion had been going through at the same time he had been resisting Antwyr’s assaults. The sword reached much deeper. Each word cut into the citadel he had erected around the very core of his soul, and the depths of his mind. He knew the nature of his enemy far better now, and it knew him. It tapped and prodded and scratched and clawed at him. He was besieged. He would be forever. So he reinforced his ramparts as the sword chipped away at them, standing firm guard for the sake of his brothers, even as the necessary isolation around him grew.

You will succumb. You saw what I wrought at Dikaia. You will see what waits at Beroea. You will have need of me. You will see the truth.

Crowe had known that isolation would be his new existence. He had seen it in Gavallan. He was prepared. He accepted it. Even so, the experience of its birth was painful. It began the moment he took hold of the Black Blade. He felt it properly for the first time when the Purifiers had returned to the Egeta base.

After the battle. Before the next. And another battle, his lone war, his unending war, already under way.

‘You stand against Exterminatus for this world, then,’ Sendrax had said. ‘Even now the sword is captive once more.’

‘Yes,’ said Crowe. ‘It was a relic that began this war. Our mission will end when we have recovered it.’

‘Recovery rather than destruction.’

‘Perhaps both. We cannot be sure of the latter without the former. What is true of the Black Blade may be true of the mask. Too much has gone wrong, and there have been too many dark patterns to ignore the possibility. We must take the mask. Then we can consider the fate of Sandava II.’

Sendrax nodded, acquiescing to the need for the mission.

Both squads stood on the far side of the base’s briefing room from Crowe. They did not approach the tacticarium table unless he moved away from it. He did so again now, shutting off the hololithic display of Beroea. His brothers remained where they were. They were keeping their distance from him. He could sense their discomfort. A wall had come down between him and all other souls.

They are ungrateful, said the sword. You led them to victory. Now they seek to flee your presence.

He would remove himself to an unused corner of the base until preparations were concluded, Crowe decided. Except in combat, he would be a liability. He would do this without announcing it. He would spare himself the sight of relief in his brothers’ eyes.

‘Then we know what we are about,’ Crowe said. He headed for the exit of the command bunker, but paused there for a moment. ‘Brother Drake, will you speak with me?’

Drake joined him. He concealed the effort it took him to do so, but Crowe saw the minute increase in tension around his jaw.

There were barracks at the north west of the base that no longer housed militia. The casualties at Dikaia had emptied it. Crowe walked towards it.

‘I would like you to speak with General Glas,’ Crowe said to Drake.

‘On a particular subject?’

‘More of a sounding. I’m interested in your impression of the state of her soul.’

‘You think she might be corrupted?’

‘I’m not sure. Her faith has been strong. But her decision to march into the bombardment zone is troubling.’

‘Would we be better leaving her troops here. If she is a potential threat…’

‘I don’t think she is. I have seen no signs of corruption in her subordinates. Have you?’

‘No,’ said Drake. ‘Given what they have witnessed, they seem strong of purpose and morally resolute by mortal standards.’

‘I agree. Unless we see signs of imminent danger, then I see no reason to leave a potentially useful asset behind.’ The conditions in Beroea were unknown. It had been more than a day, though, since the city had fallen. Long enough for the daemonic infestation to take firm hold. Crowe doubted the militia would survive there long. Still, Vendruhn’s troops might serve as a diversion. ‘There is something more,’ he continued. ‘Whatever strands are being woven together here, General Glas is to be part of the pattern. To leave her here would be to ignore that fact.’

‘Having her in Beroea may hasten its completion. The patterns have been dark ones, brother.’

‘They have. So see what you make of her.’ Another task Crowe could no longer undertake himself. He was a danger to everyone. The sword would distort any interaction he would have. And the distortion would not be in his perception, but in the person he was near.

‘I will,’ Drake said.

And he had.

His report was uneasy, but inconclusive. It was not enough to remove Vendruhn and her troops from the coming struggle. And so the militia flew to the south with the Purgation’s Sword, where Crowe sat, conscious of the damage the hours did to his brothers, so close to the dread burden he carried, so close to its whispers and its threats.

Berinon’s voice came over the troop compartment’s vox-speaker. ‘Land on the horizon,’ he said. ‘We approach Beroea, brothers.’

Crowe looked out of the viewing block. The city’s peninsula was a narrow shape on the horizon, a darkness breaking the grey sweep of the water. He watched the city take on definition as they drew nearer. First it was a smudge. Soon it was a dark silhouette. He noted the towered bulge at its centre.

Crowe frowned. The location corresponded to the Ecclesiarchal Palace. The hololiths he had consulted at the base, however, had not suggested a structure of this height.

‘There was not enough punishment,’ she had told Drake. ‘It was cut short.’

Seated in the navigator’s seat of the Valkyrie, minutes away from first sight of Beroea, Vendruhn rehearsed the conversation again. She had spoken her truth to one of the Emperor’s unforgiving angels. She had not been cowed. The Grey Knight had found her on the exercise grounds. She was overseeing the disciplining of a trooper who had miscounted his squad’s stores of ammunition. The man, stripped to the waist, was held in one of the metal pillories. The flogging had begun just before Drake’s arrival. The Grey Knight had asked her how she viewed the siege of Dikaia, and she had told him.

‘Cut short?’ Drake said. ‘The city was destroyed. Its population was exterminated. How is that cut short?’

‘Our punishment. The one we mete out. The Emperor’s loyal subjects on Sandava II. With respect, lord, you do not know our world. Do you care about justice here?’ She didn’t wait for him to answer. ‘I… We were punishing the apostates. We were not able to complete our task.’ She had not destroyed the monster that had been her father. She had not restored the honour of her name. She looked away from the flogging for a moment to give Drake a hard stare. ‘Lord, I hope you do not mean to prosecute the war without us.’

‘You know the enemy we expect to encounter. You have seen daemons now. You saw what they did in Egeta. They have had time to consolidate their hold on Beroea. There will be many more than what you tried to fight before.’

‘Odds and duty have nothing to do with each other,’ she said. She turned back to the disciplining. The cat-o’-nine-tails rose and fell. Blood sprayed in the afternoon light. Chunks of flesh fell to the ground. The red of the blood, the pale pink of the trooper’s skin and the rapid, sinuous movement of the whip formed a whole that caught her eye. If just one element had been absent, the effect would have been lost.

‘Do you serve the Emperor or your vengeance?’ Drake asked.

‘My vengeance is my service to the Emperor,’ she said. ‘What answer other than violence can there be to the abominations that have invaded Sandava II?’

‘None,’ Drake agreed. ‘There is temptation, though, general. Have a care not to succumb to it.’

‘The only temptation the abominations can offer me is their destruction,’ Vendruhn said. ‘I doubt they will oblige me.’

Drake said he thought she was right. He left her a few minutes later, before the flogging was finished.

There can never be enough punishment for the abomination, Vendruhn thought now. She would destroy the daemons by any means necessary. She rubbed the burned tissue on the side of her face absently as she made her vows. She was still troubled that the Emperor had not protected the militia in Dikaia. She had been doing His work. She had been killing the heretic. Why had He abandoned her?

The word betrayal hovered at the edge of her thoughts. She pushed it away. She knew better than to articulate it, even in silence.

Dikaia didn’t matter any more. What mattered was Beroea. What mattered was punishment. She thought again of the sight of sprayed blood in sunlight, of pale flesh and blurred movement. Her lips twitched into the beginnings of a smile.

Punishment. She would outdo the daemons in savagery. She would surpass them in excess, and they would learn they could suffer too.

Beroea came into view. Vendruhn blinked, then rubbed her eyes. She worried fatigue was affecting her vision. She looked again. The sight had not changed. It had been months since she had last been to the city. She had no reason to mistrust her memory, though. The towers of the city should not be clustered like that. There should not be a hill at its centre.

A few minutes later, she saw her mistake. The massive hulk in the middle of Beroea was not a hill.

The Purgation’s Sword circled Beroea, spiralling in closer to the monstrosity at the heart of the city.

‘By the Throne,’ said Sendrax. ‘This is worse than I imagined.’

‘We should have imagined this,’ Crowe said. ‘We did not learn the lessons of Egeta well enough.’

The hololiths the Purifiers had studied at the militia base were useless. Beroea had been more than transformed. It had been recreated entirely. It was still a city, and it retained the character of worship through its temples and shrines. But there were no longer habitations. Structures that might have been hab blocks before the coming of Mnay’salath were now enormous sculptures of bone, hundreds of feet high, their façades twisted into arboreal convolutions and positions of frozen, organic pain.

Crowe released his grav-harness. He crossed the troop compartment and threw back the side door. He wanted to know all.

The wind blew the song of Beroea into the gunship. It was sung by a choir of millions upon millions of voices. Very few of them were human. Their throats were hollows of bone. Their lips were the corrosion of metal. The wind was the cry of the city, and the cry was a shrieking hymn.

The structures of Beroea created the song, and they shaped the worship. They bent towards the centre of the city. They bowed at such steep angles that they should have fallen – but that would have been contrary to the art of Beroea’s new incarnation. Here, the aesthetic was pre-eminent. Reality fell before it. Morality fell before it. Reason, possibility, hope, faith, thought and the release from pain all fell before it. And the aesthetic found its full manifestation and its purpose in what loomed in the centre of the city, the thing to which all shrines and cathedrals and tombs bowed.

The immense construct had been the Ecclesiarchal Palace. It was here that monstrous divinity resided. The palace had become an explosion of spires. Towers were built upon towers. Peaks led to more peaks, their heights sprouting and growing thinner. The uppermost spires were needles fifty feet high and sharp enough to draw blood from the wind. The towers were of iron. They emerged from the huge mass that had appeared to be a hill from a distance. It was flesh. It heaved and trembled. It was mottled green and grey and white. It was thick, scaled, its substance stronger than granite, yet there was no mistaking it for stone. The towers appeared to have been driven into it like nails. Blood oozed from their bases. The pained tremors that shuddered through the flesh were as heavy as earthquakes. The towers swayed, but none fell.

Around the circumference of the palace, extending in a spiral across the entire breadth of the city, was the atrocity that had made the art possible.

Will you fight that without my aid? Antwyr whispered. Look at these works. Are they not sublime? They are beyond your conception. They are beyond your strength. Will you take arms against so great a culmination? Not without me, Purifier. Not without me.

Crowe’s hand tightened on the Blade’s pommel. He was not tempted. There was enough damnation already below him.

Crucifixions formed vast circles of sacrifice. There were hundreds of thousands of them. Perhaps millions. Headless bodies writhed, their agony was unending. Blood poured from the stumps of their necks, flowing down the struggling forms to cover the stony roads. Avenues had become red canals, carrying the blood towards the daemon palace.

‘This does not look like the work of a weakened opponent,’ said Drake.

‘Did we accomplish nothing in Egeta?’ Sendrax demanded.

Did Gavallan die for nothing? Crowe thought. That is what you are asking, brother, isn’t it? He had no answer for Sendrax, except to say, ‘We will complete our task here.’ He pointed to the arrogant majesty of the palace. ‘The daemon reveals its presence,’ he said. ‘It will be in that monument to its pride.’ He stepped away from the open door and voxed Berinon. ‘Take us to the crown, brother,’ he said.

At the summit of the flesh hill, one tower was pre-eminent. It was higher than all the others. Its circumference was greater, its iron a glistening black. Its crown was wider yet, and it was surrounded by an illumination of stained-glass windows. They shone with pulsing lights of red and orange and purple.

‘Acknowledged,’ said Berinon. He angled the Purgation’s Sword in.

The Stormraven had not crossed the innermost ring of crucifixions when the palace stirred more violently. The skin went taut. It expanded as though it were vast lungs taking a geologic breath.

The palace rose.

Vendruhn saw Beroea turn into a monster. The creature was hundreds of times larger than the cathedral in Egeta. The palace climbed higher and higher into the air. It tilted on its side. Three legs, each hundreds of feet wide, formed from the buildings closest to the ground. Towers twisted around each other and burrowed into the flesh. The bloody creations, part architecture, part butchered animal, grew until the legs were a mile high. Immense waves traversed the flesh of the body. Towers sank and rose until they projected from beneath the mound as well as above it. The palace tilted back down until the highest tower was vertical with respect to the ground again. The walls thickened with more grey rolls of scaled flesh. Vendruhn thought they were beginning to look like shoulders.

‘General,’ voxed Bahnen, the pilot of the Valkyrie. The man was pleading for a command so he would not go mad.

‘Take us closer,’ Vendruhn said.

‘General…’

‘We go in.’ Her voice surprised her. It was strong. She hadn’t thought she could speak at all. But here she saw the final battle-lines being drawn. Here she saw the last chance for retribution against the being that had ruined her world and her honour. She switched to the company vox. ‘Look for landing sites on the...’ What could she call it? She must call it by what it was. ‘The palace,’ she said. ‘It is the enemy. Seek level ground in the upper regions.’

She could feel the horror inside the cockpit. ‘Now,’ she said before Bahnen could protest, and he obeyed.

The palace drew closer. Something flashed in the sun above it. The Grey Knights gunship was circling the monster. It was barely visible next to its mass, a spark of light, nothing more. The palace took its first steps, and Vendruhn was filled with surpassing awe. The dust of pulverised shrines rose from the bottom of the palace’s legs. She was too high to see movement in the streets below. The scale of the walking palace was beyond grasping. She thought she had seen excess in Egeta. She thought she had been at its centre in Dikaia. She had been wrong.

This was excess. This thing of architecture and life, this thing of uncountable spires and monstrosities of flesh, of movement where none should be, of movement without meaning or purpose. Everything on the palace was in motion. The towers turned like pistons. Some revolved around each other. Some moved up and down in the flesh, drawing rivers of dark blood that fell to the ground in a torrential rain. The palace was a refutation of reality, a collision of the impossible and the irrational and the purposeless. And it was all in the name of a terrible, transcendent, soul-destroying beauty. The undulating, shredding movements created the complex rhythms of a symphony. Excess and absolute art were one and the same, and Vendruhn beheld a masterpiece.

It could not be destroyed by the likes of her. Now that it existed, the universe could never destroy the change it had wrought on reality. But she must destroy it. She must find her anger as transcendent as this form, and in destruction create an even greater, even more excessive, beauty.

As the armada closed in, the palace grew arms. They sprouted from the shoulders. Towers and flesh whirled together, a cyclone of tissue and iron. The growth was too fast for something so large, yet it was in perfect time to the visual music of the monstrosity. The arms were tentacles, almost as long as the colossus was tall. It lashed out.

Bahnen dropped the Valkyrie as soon as the formation began. Its engines screamed as it entered a near-vertical dive, and the titanic limb barely missed. The arm smashed two of the heavy lifters that came behind, the impact disintegrating them. The explosions of the huge aircraft were small blossoms against the snaking mass.

The three-legged monster turned on its axis and struck out with its left arm. The tentacle caught three more lifters. Half of Vendruhn’s forces fell to earth in chunks of flame. The palace’s movements were too fast. The air burned with the speed of its arms. Yet the majesty of immensity remained. Too fast, too huge, too mad, the palace-thing embodied all that transgressed the bounds of reason for the benefit of murderous art.

‘Pull back!’ Vendruhn shouted. ‘Pull back!’ The command was unnecessary, yet it was necessary to command. Bahnen pulled the Valkyrie out of its dive midway down the height of the palace’s legs. She scanned the ground. As the palace walked, it left behind empty, uneven, wounded ground. ‘There,’ Vendruhn said, pointing. ‘We land there.’

At this height, she could see what moved in the streets of the transformed city. Daemons cavorted, celebrating the god-monster their sacrifices had created.

They were an enemy Vendruhn could destroy.

Gunfire erupted from the spires of the palace. Some of the cannons were still of human construction, remnants of the original form of the structure. Hundreds of others were new, forged in the malign genius of the immaterium. Fusions of iron and bone, they fired blasts of warp energy. Berinon banked the Purgation’s Sword and wove between the fire as he sought to reach the peak of the monster.

Crowe stood at the open door, bracing his stance and holding the bulkhead with his free hand. The enemy fire became more intense with every second, as if the monster were still waking, the act of war calling more and more of its furious being into existence. Its massive tentacles smashed the militia armada from the sky. Vendruhn’s manoeuvre had been a mistake, but her force’s presence drew the beast’s attention away from the gunship and bought the Grey Knights more seconds to act.

‘We won’t be able to land on the tower,’ Berinon said. ‘The movement of the abomination is too violent.’

Crowe had realised the same thing. With every ponderous yet graceful step, the great tower at the palace’s peak swayed like a reed in the wind.

‘See if you can get us close to its base, brother,’ Crowe told him.

‘There is more movement in the flesh,’ said Drake.

They were lines upon lines of ripples. They grew sharper. Blood suddenly slicked every surface between the towers. Then spinning, grinding teeth emerged from the flesh. A thousand mouths, ten thousand – they chewed through the surface of the palace’s flesh and gnashed hungrily for more to devour. Their whirling jaws seemed small in comparison to the towers. But the teeth, Crowe saw, were each larger than a man. They would reduce anything that came near them to pulp in moments. They were everywhere. The flesh of the palace had become a monster of infinite hunger and infinite devouring.

There was nowhere to land.

The daemonic cannon fire became even heavier. It drove the gunship back. The cluster of weapons circling the primary tower unleashed a barrage so massive it became a wall of destructive energy, a single shock wave of howling colours. Berinon turned the Purgation’s Sword away and raced for the ground, evading the largest concentration of guns. The edge of the wave touched the hull and the gunship groaned. Infernal lightning crackled along its length. It reached its claws into the troop compartment. The sanctified adamantium bubbled, but the ship held firm, and the energy dissipated with a shriek.

‘There will be no landing on this titan,’ said Sendrax.

‘No, but there are still towers. Those are structures.’ There was structure and shape to the monster’s being, Crowe saw. If it ceased to be a palace, the art of its horror would be compromised. For it to be a distortion, the thing that it had once been must still be present. ‘There is an interior,’ said Crowe. ‘There are entrances.’ He looked down. ‘Brothers,’ he said, ‘will you join me in another climb?’

The Stormraven jerked violently, evading a ball of energy ten feet wide. It screamed past the hull with the sound of a choir of hungry souls.

‘Brother Berinon,’ Crowe voxed the pilot, ‘take us to the ground.’

The Purgation’s Sword streaked downwards. Below the main bulk of the palace, there were fewer guns. Even the legs had cannons, though, and Berinon hauled the gunship through one violent turn after another as he dodged their fire. He brought the Stormraven to within ten feet of the rooftops. The shrines and chapels below were as deformed as the palace. They reached upwards in painful twists of metal and stone. Their doorways were maws frozen in mid-howl. Their screams were not silent. The sounds of terrible ecstasy moaned across the lower reaches of Beroea.

Berinon aimed the gunship at the leading leg. It had just come down, pounding a crater into the ground, reducing the shrines beneath it to dust. Now the other legs would move while it remained motionless. The Grey Knights had several seconds to close with a motionless target.

‘Stand by,’ said Berinon.

The other Purifiers stood now, taking up positions behind Crowe at the door.

How will you fight this without me? the sword whispered. You take your brothers only to defeat and death.

In the streets, daemonettes and fiends leapt up, their claws grasping for the gunship. Berinon unleashed a stream of fire from the hull’s twin-linked heavy bolters, cutting through daemonflesh, blasting apart the blasphemous structures, clearing the path towards the leg.

The palace took another step. A massive shadow of a limb passed over the Sword. The leg came down with a boom that echoed through the city. At the same moment, the gunship drew level with its target. Berinon fired the retro-jets on full and slewed the Stormraven around to present its starboard flank to the leg. The craft’s flight became a hover. It came down over an open space of ruins flattened by the impact of the limb’s descent.

Crowe leapt from the doorway while the gunship was still ten feet from the ground. Sendrax and the others followed. He did not look back. Already, the third leg was beginning to move. The opportunity he sought would last for only a few seconds more. There was a large, vaulted doorway a few feet off the ground. It was canted at almost forty-five degrees. Crowe ran for it. Behind him, he heard the gunship take off again. Its turret pounded the ruins, holding back the horde of daemons.

The third leg thundered down. All of Beroea shook. Crowe was less than ten feet from the door. The ground around him trembled. Dust flew. The leg shook, preparing to rise.

Crowe leapt through the door. He landed on a slanted wall of cartilage and muscle. He plunged onwards into the moist darkness of the corridor. He did not stop until he felt the upward movement of the leg. He turned, then, and saw that both squads had made it through the doorway in time.

‘Brother, you have the sword drawn,’ said Drake.

‘I do.’

‘You intend to use it?’ Gorvenal was horrified.

‘Not as Antwyr would wish.’

Crowe faced the interior of palace and marched on, defying the dark and violence of motion. He was here, a minute figure come to cause the death of a giant.

Chapter Fourteen

THE MASKED BALL

Gravity pressed down on Crowe as the leg rose. He pushed back as it tried to knock him down. He moved forwards, into a towering shaft. The flesh of the corridor gave way to massive iron. Spikes jutted in from the walls, a mirror of the towers on the bulk of the palace. Thick, viscous ichor dripped from the joints. The rivets were weeping eyes. And teeth were everywhere, pushing from the surface of columns and ramps, grinding at Crowe’s boots and gauntlets as he climbed. Gravity suddenly reversed. The movement of the shaft was a sudden diagonal downward plunge. Crowe grabbed a spike, crushing eyes and teeth. He held on as the leg finished its movement. It came to a jarring stop. The huge blow of the impact almost knocked him loose. His grip would have been more secure with both hands, but he held the Blade of Antwyr in his right fist. The lesson of Gavallan’s fall was present in his mind. He would not have the sword on his back.

‘The last summit you scaled did not move as much, I think,’ Sendrax called.

Crowe stormed up twisted, muttering stairs. ‘Then we should use the seconds before the next step wisely,’ he said. And we will use your art against you, he promised Mnay’salath. The daemon had not transformed the interior out of all recognition: Crowe was not trying to haul himself up veins. The interior followed the same aesthetic principle as the exterior. It achieved its obscenity by keeping the original form perceptible. Though the shaft cried madness, it was built of halls and stairs, and so the Purifiers climbed.

The leg rose and fell. The huge movement shook the Grey Knights as if they were climbing through the launch of a Stormraven and the plummet of a drop pod. Faith kept them strong. Duty gave them direction. The shaft ascended for a hundred feet. The mouths in iron screamed in frustration at the beings they could not devour. Then the angle of the ascent changed as the Grey Knights passed the leg’s articulation. The space widened, becoming vast. Crowe entered a realm of intersecting staircases and chambers. The halls piled into and through each other. Floors and walls and ceilings were at perpendiculars and diagonals. There were staircases of iron and staircases that seemed to be of grey stone, but were actually undulating flesh. Flights extended into mid-air, ended at walls, circled back on themselves, and crossed so many others they formed a webbing of lunatic pathways.

From every room, down every staircase, hooting and singing as the space rocked and shifted and rose and dropped, the daemons came. And all the fanged mouths on every surface, in their tens of thousands, spoke with the voice of Mnay’salath.

‘You are welcome to my art.

‘You are welcome to the ball.

‘You are welcome to your end.

‘I will take the sword!’

The last word echoed and re-echoed, hissed and whispered and snarled by the tens of thousands, hungry and eager and vengeful.

‘Sword, sword, sword, sword!’

The tentacles took out another militia lifter before it could land. The blow was a backwards lash. Hundreds of troops died in the insult of a monster’s afterthought. The lesser daemons swarmed to attack as the militia disembarked. They were upon Vendruhn’s forces before the Chimeras had rumbled down the embarkation ramps. In the scoured, open ground of the palace’s wake, Vendruhn had just enough warning to establish a rough infantry perimeter. Most of her soldiers were veterans of the siege of Egeta. They had not lost their terror of the abominations, but they had fought them before and survived, so they had the spiritual strength to fight them again now. They laid down a barrage of las-fire that slowed the wave of daemons. They were the same monsters Vendruhn had seen before, the patchwork animals and female grotesques. There were other horrors too. Bipedal, reptilian, hideously lissom in their movements, tongues as long as their necks licking out to taste the air and the fear, they were ridden by the female daemons. They were the cavalry of obscenity.

Hit by enough las, they dropped and burned, but more and more came. Vendruhn was not even convinced the militia had truly slowed the charge. The air was filled with daemonsong that lured and tempted and taunted. Dark joy slithered around the landing site. The thought came, as she stood behind the line and directed the arriving Chimeras into reinforcing positions, that the daemons were toying with the militia.

Toying with her. Mocking her determination and her vengeance.

Her anger enflamed her desire to lose herself in the slaughter of her enemy. But the attack forced her to remain in the realm of reason. She could not attack before her troops had disembarked. She roared her commands as if through force of will she could move the armour off the lifters herself. She fired her plasma pistol at the daemons that danced near. She moved her troops into as narrow a formation as she could, concentrating their fire as much as possible, cutting enough of a wedge into the swarm of abominations that it split in two.

The halves now arced away from the militia and returned in a sweeping motion, attacking from two sides, forcing her to divide the fire. But the bulk of the Chimeras were on the ground now, and she used their multi-lasers and heavy bolters. The waves of daemons slowed again. Though the air roiled with their musk, and the day shimmered as though it were about to transform, the last traces of reality crumbling in the void of unreason, the abominations did not launch a long-range attack. They swept closer and closer, a malevolent promise.

I will make a promise too, Vendruhn thought as she climbed onto the roof of Legacy of Glas. I swear you will come to fear me.

I am ready for you now.

As if they had been waiting for that moment, the daemons sang a triumphantly eager fanfare. The waves split again. Through the shrieking hordes, on each side, came the monstrous engines of the cavalry. Each was towed by four of the hellish steeds. The other ones were mounted. The middle two were governed by a third female creature who reigned on an elevated platform of jagged bone. The beasts pulled two parallel axles, whose entire lengths were covered in rotating discs of curved teeth. The vehicles tore the ground open as they closed in. The wounds to the earth were the foreshadowing of the joys awaiting the flesh.

The earlier charges had been simple taunts. The beasts charged, and the engines raced across the ground towards the militia with blinding speed. To the left and right, the field was suddenly full of grinding monstrosities. Vortices of spinning claws closed in on Vendruhn.

Go up, Crowe thought. All else is confusion wrought by the daemon. Ignore the art. Go up.

The daemonettes danced down the stairs towards him. With lash and claw, they swung and leapt over and around the architectural collisions of the space. They seemed to emerge from the corners of walls, revealing dead ends to be still more passages. They sang Mnay’salath’s praises and crooned the allurement of refined agony. They were the heralds of the dark artist, and they came to force the Grey Knights to join in the dance.

‘Sword, sword, sword!’ the mouths chanted.

‘On me, brothers!’ Crowe shouted.

The Purifiers closed the formation. As they did, Antwyr screamed. It filled Crowe’s mind with its curses. The claws of its rage slashed into his consciousness.

‘Father of Mankind,’ Gorvenal muttered over the vox, ‘grant me the strength to banish that voice.’ It was not the voice of the daemon Gorvenal struggled against, Crowe understood. It was the voice of Antwyr. The tight formation needed to fight the daemonettes magnified the danger the sword presented to the other Purifiers. Gorvenal’s prayer continued, a holy refrain that reinforced the resistance of all his battle-brothers.

There was no sense to the Black Blade’s howling. It was not trying to corrupt him. It was trying to blind him. Crowe saw through the tactic, and he used that knowledge to see through the red storm of the sword’s shouts. He ran up the stairs at the daemons. He fired ahead with his storm bolter, and he brought his right arm back, raising the sword. The first two abominations collapsed, their material forms smashed by the blessed shells. Another dropped down from a sideways chamber above. Crowe swung the sword…

The moment stretching, becoming eternal in its significance.

The act not the execution of the Blade’s defeated slave.

An act of war.

The Blade used in combat for the first time by a Grey Knight.

The Blade wielded, and the Blade denied. Its terrible power held back. The Blade used as a blade and nothing else.

A new kind of prison for the daemon within.

… and cut the monster in half.

Antwyr’s raging became a long, drawn-out howl of despairing outrage. It understood the significance of what had just happened.

No! it shrieked. What have you done? What are you doing?

Crowe did not answer. He would never answer the Blade. He would not dialogue with it and so walk into its web. But he had an answer for himself. I am the Warden of the Blade, he thought. It is my prisoner. I cannot destroy it, but I will contain it, and I can punish it. It will seek my suffering, but it will suffer too. The Blade will strike for the Emperor, and never for itself.

As he made this vow, he consecrated it with another blow, destroying another daemonette.

The creatures of the Dark Prince descended in a swarm. The Purifiers were a dense fist of righteousness, and they hurled them back with sustained bursts from their storm bolters, the jetting of sacred promethium flame and the slashes of Nemesis swords.

‘Brother Garran,’ Drake said.

‘The Blade is guarded,’ Crowe told him. ‘With every blow it feels its prison.’

‘We hear its anger.’

‘It is the anger of the condemned.’

Crowe moved upwards. Always upwards. He traded one staircase for another, keeping to narrow ascents where the daemonettes could not attack in large numbers at once. The squads burned the daemons away and advanced.

Upwards. Always upwards. Through the violence of change as the Ecclesiarchal Palace walked, through the increasingly angry songs of the daemonettes, and through the covetous cries of ‘Sword, sword, sword!’ from the mouths.

At last the Grey Knights entered the bulk of the palace. The movement of the interior became less violent. Now it was a slow sway from side to side, a mountain bending to the wind. Here was the glory of the building, and it had undergone the same transformation and distortion. The confused space of the monster’s leg here achieved a transcendent scale. It was not chambers but great halls that were brought together in a tumbling kaleidoscope of madness. Immense chandeliers hung upwards and sideways. Marble floors as bright as mirrors reflected the light from each side and above. Huge windows of stained glass revealed their wonders at every angle. Their colours and their shapes represented nothing, but they articulated the elegance of horror and of madness. They blazed with infernal illumination. The flights of stairs seemed to be as thin as silk as they intertwined or floated into imperceptibility. Perspective was tortured. Floors appeared to float unattached to any walls. Every direction was up, and none were. In the malevolent generosity of the space, all the lithe and venomous creatures of the Dark Prince had the means to attack. And they did. With claw and pincer and tail and horn. With song and scent and torturous desire.

The infantry and the heavy weapons managed to bring down two of the charging engines. The rest were too fast. The harnessed beasts leapt high when they reached the militia’s lines. The abominations at the reins laughed in the flight, the sound musical and horrifying at once. The beasts came down in front of the Chimeras and rushed forwards.

The clawed axles rode over the infantry, flaying the troops to shreds. The teeth hooked into bodies, gutted them, tangled them, then brought their trapped victims back around to be ground against the earth. A harvest of blood exploded in the lines. Vendruhn fired the heavy bolter of Legacy of Glas in the same direction as the multi-laser. The combined blasts smashed through the platform of one engine and broke the axles in two. They spun off, out of control, ripping apart still more of her soldiers. The abomination on the platform sailed gracefully through the air and landed on the roof of Spear of Egeta. The daemon struck the Chimera with its lash, splitting armour. The daemon whipped the Egeta again, several more times in eye-blink succession, carving the roof open. It reached in with its claws, singing to its prey. The screams of the crew inside turned into moans before there was silence.

A round object, spinning wetly, smacked against the hatch of the Glas, blinding Vendruhn with a spray of blood. She wiped the gore from her eyes. Sergeant Barratz’s head stared back at her, eyes wide with final, forbidden knowledge.

‘Forwards!’ Vendruhn shouted into the vox. ‘All units fire forwards and advance!’ She would grind the enemy beneath her tracks as the daemons were doing to her infantry. Some of those troopers were still in her path. There was nothing to be done. They could not be saved. Advance and retaliate – that was the only meaning she had left.

But as the Chimeras lunged ahead, crushing human and daemon alike, bolter shells releasing a driving rain of blood and ichor, Vendruhn saw that she was wrong. As the rain fell on her, drenching her, driving into her nose and mouth, she understood that advance and retaliate was not the meaning. It was the path to meaning. The meaning was in the slaughter itself, in the surplus of death. In the excess of war.

She had found it again. Only here was there fulfilment. Her anger and her skill were united in the expression of battle. In the blood and the fire, in the transcendence of violence, there was joy. There was pleasure. Thoughts of pride and legacy fell away. What mattered was the battle. What mattered was the slaughter. Everything else was the road to this end.

Legacy of Glas ploughed through dying infantry and capering daemons. The abominations clutched at its hull, and she hammered them with the heavy bolter. There had been no time to repair the damage the Chimera had sustained at Dikaia, but there were still usable gun slits in its battered sides. Scarred and burned, the Glas roared to its final war, eager as its general. Las-blasts from all sides held the worst of the daemonic legions at bay long enough for the Chimera to leave the ruined wasteland behind, and reach a narrow avenue between the monstrous shrines.

Vendruhn glanced back. The rest of her armour was following, as were the infantry, though they were quickly vanishing. The daemonic engines cut back and forth, grinding soldiers to nothing. There were so many arcs of red. So many individuals turned into abstractions. The sight arrested Vendruhn’s gaze for a second, and she saw the art in the transformation. Every hope and fear and love and personal hatred rendered down to a single crimson brushstroke in the air. The absolute subtraction spoke to her. It was another wonder of war.

Another grace note in the dance that had taken Sandava II in its swirl.

Legacy of Glas raced down the avenue. On Vendruhn’s right, where the ground rose in the direction of the outer walls of Beroea, a line of headless, crucified bodies twisted against the bone nails that held them to their crosses. Their movements too were part of the dance. They writhed in synchrony with one another. They were the prisoners and the fuel of this song of atrocity.

Daemons jumped from rooftop to rooftop, keeping pace with the armoured convoy. At the rear, engines howled, metal tore and a Chimera exploded. The daemons ate into what was left of Vendruhn’s forces, one swarming attack at a time. She ignored the inevitability of defeat. The prospect had no meaning for her. She fired and fired and fired, feeling the kick of the heavy bolter up her arms, the juddering throb of shells leaving the gun. She took in the sight of their impacts, of daemonflesh erupting and shredded. She fell into the dance of excess. She had no plan now. There was no strategy to employ.

There was only the quest to find eternity in the joy of massacre.

The Grey Knights plunged into the vortex of the great daemonic ball. They charged across a great hall’s ceiling, blasted apart a chandelier and the daemonettes crouched within it. Crowe made for a spiralling flight of stairs at one corner of the chamber. The flight bounced back and forth between three more tilted spaces. Its furthest end disappeared in the blinding light of a stained-glass window a hundred feet across. A mob of fiends barrelled towards them across the ceiling. Their hooves shattered marble. The daemons ran to block the Purifiers’ way. Storm bolters and incinerator fire cut them down. A few clambered up the wide staircase and made ready to leap on the Grey Knights. Crowe put on a burst of speed, sprinting ahead of his brothers, taking the steps three at a time. He rammed the Black Blade through three fiends in quick succession, piercing their midsections and severing their spinal columns. Then he ran upwards.

Except perhaps he was going down. The pull in his legs suggested he was. He had to pay conscious attention to avoid losing his balance and falling up this staircase. Perspective shifted again, and then again as the stair passed through the other halls. Gravity pulled Crowe one way, then the other. Directions became nonsensical, but he kept moving along the staircase. He made it his constant, one step and then another, heading towards a goal no matter the madness of the halls.

A tide of daemonettes raced along the stairs from both ends. More leapt from the wall above, or appeared from the other side of the flight, pincers and whips snapping out to catch the Grey Knights’ legs. Crowe swung the Blade to meet the daemons. He severed pincers, transpierced thoraxes. He shouldered the shuddering monsters aside, hurling them from the steps. Some fell down. Some up. Some shot away in a straight line from him and smashed against a vertical ceiling hundreds of feet away.

The feel of the sword in Crowe’s hands was strange. His lost Nemesis blade had been his faithful weapon for decades. It had been swift. Its power field had cut through enemy armour and flesh with a precision that bespoke its sacredness. Antwyr was heavier. It was balanced for the hard blow, the brutal disembowelment and the decapitation. And every strike Crowe made with the sword came against the background of the weapon’s curses. It wished him defeat and death. Every swing became a victory, a statement of imprisonment and a further punishment of the Black Blade.

The weight made the sword formidable. There was no doubting its edge, either, but the weight gave its blows a brutal efficiency. Twice already, Crowe had struck a daemon with an overhead slash. Each hit was so powerful, he had cut the daemon in half and chopped a deep gouge into the rippling stone-flesh of the stairs.

Each blow was also another test. Swear fealty to me, the Blade demanded. I am your destiny. You will give in. I will take your soul apart atom by atom until you do. Bow down now at the height of your strength. You will be a burned offering to me. Be that now. When he ignored it, the sword’s curses resumed, and the endless scratching at the stone keep of his soul, the claws looking for the purchase and the crack, the flaw that would break him open.

The Blade found nothing, and time and again he drove it through daemonic bodies. He struck, and he held back the force that begged to be unleashed. He struck, and he prevented himself from using a weapon so powerful it would make short work of any foe, no matter how strong. He struck, and proved himself worthy of his task.

The staircase ended at a landing where every surface was stained glass. Crowe did not know if he marched on wall or ceiling or floor. There was no direction here, only a savage confusion of colours and more staircases. The daemons were gathered in force. Hundreds fell on the Purifiers. Crowe kept the formation in a tight circle. The Purifiers advanced slowly. No battle-brother left the formation, even for a second. They gave the daemons no chance to get between them, no chance to isolate one of the Grey Knights. They moved as an indissoluble unit. Where they marched, they left a scoured wake. The unclean things could not survive contact with them.

‘Where is our ascent?’ Sendrax asked. ‘There is no up or down in this accursed place.’

‘The ascent is towards our foe,’ Crowe answered. He kept moving.

‘You know the way?’

‘I sense it. We are moving towards the denser corruption, brothers.’

‘We are moving in spirals,’ said Drake.

‘Do not trust that perception,’ Crowe told him. He had the same impression, and knew he had to dismiss it. As they cut and burned through the daemons, he felt as if their progress were no more than facing in a different direction in the hall of stained glass. ‘It is Mnay’salath’s desire to have us believe we are turning circles in its dance. It is wrong.’

He knew the perception was wrong because he could see the vortex of the corruption. The warp was in storm inside the palace, but there were still currents. The gravitational pull of the will controlling the palace was unmistakable. And the further down this path he moved, the more ferocious the daemonic resistance became. Lashes and pincers and horns and stingers assaulted the Grey Knights. The songs of desire and musks of sensation wrapped around them. The scents were thick enough to be seen. Their strands clung to the Black Blade as it whistled through the air. The songs were becoming desperate, furious. Gradually, they offered less desire and expressed frustration. The presence that lurked in the palace wanted the sword, but it had not expected the Purifiers to come this far.

The flow of the warp twisted around and around before him, cyclonic, revelatory.

Step by step, kill by kill, disintegrating daemonflesh bubbling in a lake of ichor around their boots. The daemons howling, massing and charging, hurled back again and again. Antwyr stabbing its will against Crowe’s wall, and forced to cut down the foes of the Emperor from within its prison. And in all this, as the maelstrom of abominations grew more intense, the light and flame of purity also grew stronger. The daemons shrieked with pain as they approached Crowe. He felt the light in his chest, and he greeted it with humility and gratitude.

‘Brother…’ Drake said, and trailed off.

Sendrax said, ‘You are the Emperor’s flame!’

Crowe winced at the awe in their voices. He did not see what was happening as his due. It was not his achievement. It was the blessing of the Emperor. He refused all other interpretation. But it was light, it was fire, it was death to the monsters of the warp. He followed the vortex of the warp, and the flame burned more fiercely. The light pointed the way through the smouldering, agonised daemons. Crowe took the path.

Is this destiny?

If it is, earn this too.

They were still in the immense hall of glass. The jagged colours attacked reality. They attacked reason. The red of flesh’s monstrosity, the blue of a soul’s ice, the violet of art’s torture, the green of murder’s grace – they were corruption and malevolence, and they destroyed all sense of space. But Crowe’s light grew brighter, and his fire scarred the colours, and though he had not mounted another flight of stairs, he realised that he and his battle-brothers were climbing. He could not say there was a slope to the floor. Their journey through the space was nothing so simple. And perhaps Drake was right. Perhaps they were moving in spirals. But if so, they were moving inwards, working their way back up towards the origin of the dance. The daemons sang, but Crowe broke their chorus. Mnay’salath had woven the events of Sandava II’s martyrdom into its dark ball, but the Grey Knights had come to bring an end to the cacophony.

Deeper and deeper, through colours and glass and daemon, closer and closer towards the presence at the palace’s heart.

At last, Crowe gazed upwards, and he could see the true shape of the spiral. The terrible windows wound up and up and up, a nightmare given the beauty of form, and Crowe knew they stood in the base of the primary tower.

‘We are here, brothers!’ he shouted, as his bolter shells entered the gaping jaws of a fiend and blew apart the back of its skull. ‘Our foe hides at the summit.’

‘No,’ said the monstrous voice. It resonated against the windows. The colours twisted into mouths and whispered the echo. ‘No, no, no, no.’

‘I have waited long enough for my prize.’

‘Prize, prize, prize, prize.’

‘The sword is mine!’

‘Mine, mine, mine, mine.’

The roaring cry of monstrous desire descended the entire height of the tower, and with it came the dark, angular shape of the great daemon, plunging down for its vengeance and its joy. Mnay’salath landed before the Grey Knights. The mouths of the palace screamed their chorus of pain and ecstasy, and all that was real began to shatter.

In a trance of ecstasy, Vendruhn saw the blood she spilled. She felt the ichor squirm down her face. She felt the heat of the fires. Explosions drew nearer and nearer to her, and they seemed like a promise. They did not mean anything else. Even when the Chimera skewed violently, she did not concern herself with anything beyond the immediate destruction of those foes in the sights of the heavy bolter.

There was a noise at the edge of her hearing, insistent, irritating, demanding attention she would not grant. It scraped and scraped, until at last she recognised it as her name being screamed, and it was Morenz who was screaming. The realisation forced itself upon her at the same moment that Legacy of Glas collided with the wall of a shrine and stopped.

The heavy bolter whirred, empty of ammunition.

Vendruhn blinked, her breath heavy, growling. The shrine was a tall, twisted wave of metal, a shape that was an abstracted scream of geometry. Behind her, the crucifixions bled and suffered. To her left, she saw a trail of burning shells. The armoured column had made it this far in its pointless advance through the city of daemons and sacrifice. The hull of her Chimera was torn open on both flanks. The sounds from the interior were human moans and the crooning pleasure of abominations.

Ahead of her, one of the flaying daemon engines waited. The steeds pawed at the ground. Their tongues flicked in her direction, anticipating the taste of her pain. The daemon on the platform looked down at Vendruhn. It cocked its head. It shivered in the expectation of joy. Its attendants waited for its signal.

A shadow killed the sun. Vendruhn looked up. The Ecclesiarchal Palace towered above her. It took a step. The earth thundered and shook.

Vendruhn was alone.

She turned around, taking in reality. She looked past the crucifixions, past the flaying engine. Daemons everywhere, as far as she could see, revelling in the fall of Beroea, singing the praise of the masterwork of their ruler.

The thunder came again, another step – the immense three-beat rhythm that had taken Sandava II, and would soon spread far beyond.

Vendruhn saw her futility, her doom, the utter ruin of everything she had devoted her life to. She felt despair, and she felt rage. But those passions were now mere channels. It was through them that she could reach transcendence. They were the road to the palace of excess. No violence would ever be enough to take revenge on the beings that had destroyed her world. Nothing would ever be enough to sate the desire that consumed her.

And that was the only real truth that was left.

She climbed onto the roof of the Chimera. She pulled her plasma pistol from its holster.

The daemons sang in welcome eagerness.

She defied them with a roar, and began the final journey with the pull of the trigger.

The Purifiers attacked Mnay’salath as one. In an unspoken accord, they spread in a semicircle around the Keeper of Secrets. They struck with the weapons of sanctity. Holy fire washed over the daemon, the warp used against the warp, and they ran in with holy Nemesis weapons. The flames burned Mnay’salath, but though it snarled in pain, the jaws of its elongated head were parted in the abhorrent imitation of a smile. The daemon danced backwards on its towering limbs. In two graceful bounds it was out of the immediate reach of the Purifiers. Its four arms made a gesture like an embrace, and its legions rushed in from behind the Grey Knights, grasping and clawing, seeking to bear them down and hold them for the slaughter. Crowe hit back with his left arm, firing a burst from his storm bolter and blasting away the fiends that tried to trample him. Then two daemonettes seized his outstretched arm with their pincers. Three others took his right. They shrieked in pain, burning as they came into contact with him. They held fast and pulled back hard, arresting his movement.

‘Bring me the sword!’ Mnay’salath commanded.

Unleash me, Antwyr urged Crowe. Now is the time. What price your dead faith if Mnay’salath claims me instead?

Drake spun quickly with his storm bolter, spraying the shells wide, forcing the daemons back before they could seize him. He turned the momentum of his spin into a second charge at Mnay’salath. The Keeper of Secrets lunged at him as quickly as it had retreated before. Its clawed hands reached for him. He slashed at them with his sword. The Nemesis blade cut through the bone-white armour of the daemon. Mnay’salath laughed. Its attack had been a feint. The pincer arms, a beat behind the other two, closed around Drake’s arms. The daemon squeezed and yanked. There was a splintering of ceramite and bone. Drake’s sword-arm came away from his body.

Ruluf managed to twist around and turn his incinerator on the infernal legion. He turned his immediate area into a firestorm. He waded into the flames and kept up the stream of promethium, then turned the fire to where Harsath and Carac were struggling against a tangled throng of fiends. The conflagration freed Sendrax and Destrian, and they ran in together. Destrian launched his flame over Sendrax’s shoulder, giving him cover by aiming the burning fuel at Mnay’salath’s face. The daemon dropped Drake.

Crowe hurled himself forwards. He shouted anathema at the daemons that held him. He called upon the might of the Emperor to banish them from the world, even here in the heart of the domain claimed and shaped by the Ruinous Powers. The daemonettes howled. Their pincers disintegrated and he was free.

Sendrax closed with the Keeper of Secrets. He arced his run at the last moment and came in at an angle as the daemon snatched at Destrian. It was another feint. Destrian dodged, but Mnay’salath had already moved away and launched its true attack. Sendrax swung at air. His storm bolter shells found their target. Mnay’salath ignored the damage. It slashed the space before it with its left arm, as though it were wielding a whip, and a whip appeared, a hissing, whickering lash of sorcery. It hit Sendrax full on. It coiled around him, eating through his power armour, striking him with blasts of warp energy, then hurling him fifty feet through the air. The whip recoiled and hit Destrian. The blow pierced his reservoir tank. The incinerator exploded, wrapping him in flame.

One more time the whip curled and struck, catching Ruluf around the gorget. The whip crackled with a last burst of dark power before it vanished. Ruluf stumbled, his aim going wide. Fiends rushed him from the side, knocking him down, and then the wave covered him too.

Crowe charged, and he knew Mnay’salath expected him. He knew the daemon had choreographed this moment, when the Warden of the Blade would be alone in the fight, and rushing towards the Keeper of Secrets with the prize. This was the culmination of the great dance.

Guide my hand, Father of Mankind, Crowe prayed. Grant that I may turn this abomination’s certainty into its weakness.

Mnay’salath whirled to meet him, as Crowe had known. He drew the Blade back, preparing the strike he would not be allowed to land.

Do your worst, and I will overcome it, because I must.

‘You will dance for me,’ the daemon snarled. It spoke a word. The word was formed by all its mouths. Syllables overlapped. It could never be spoken by a single voice. It was a word that had a chord progression. It forged a rhythm. The word reached into Crowe’s being. It grasped hold of his core and shot its tendrils through his limbs and down his spine. For a moment he was paralysed. Then he began to shudder and spasm. His bones jerked against each other. Pain hammered him. The spasms grew worse. His body was trying to tear itself apart.

The daemon hissed its pleasure. It stalked over to him. ‘My prize,’ it said.

Free me! Antwyr cried. Free me now or all is lost!

Crowe focused on his right hand. He accepted the pain of the rest of this body. Let his skull shatter against itself; he would not loosen his grip on the Black Blade. This was his most sacred task. Only death would end it, and he was not dead yet. So his grip must remain closed.

And it did.

Father of Mankind, I will not fail your trust.

Mnay’salath reached for him. Its head leaned in close, its eyes blazing with a mocking yellow fire.

The eyes that still looked out at the world through the mask.

Crowe turned to his psychic fire. The flames that burned the daemons, that turned away the depredations of the warp, were the flames of faith, adamantine in its inflexibility.

I accept my destiny. I accept the pain it brings. But this pain is not destined. It is the work of the wretch who would destroy the path I have been tasked to walk.

Mnay’salath regarded him. It savoured the perfection of the moment it had created, an artist well pleased with its work.

Militant patience.

Your certainty is your weakness.

‘Now give me the sword,’ the daemon gloated.

And Crowe did. His arm obeyed the will of his faith. He drove the point of the sword against the mask.

Relic struck relic.

The Blade was immortal.

The mask shattered.

Mnay’salath screamed. The mouths of the tower screamed. Every daemon in the stained-glass space howled in anguish. The Keeper of Secrets staggered away from Crowe. It clutched its forehead as if it could hold the mask together. It failed. Fragments of the mask fell like ash. Eldritch light pulsed and died, pulsed and died. The shape of the daemon rippled and wavered. Its monstrous dance lost its grip and drained away from Crowe. The tower trembled. The hall rocked like a ship in a storm, and the palace stumbled. Mnay’salath screamed again, the coherence of its power unravelling.

Crowe launched himself at the abomination. He seized a pincer with his left hand and pulled himself up. Level with the daemon’s face, he drove the sword through its hands and into its forehead.

For a moment, Antwyr’s snarls faded in his mind. The sword was his prisoner, but its hate for the daemon that had sought to enslave it was great. The Blade sank deep into the abomination’s skull.

Mnay’salath’s scream cut short. The shrieks of the tower became maddened. The daemon fell to its knees. Crowe dropped to the floor and yanked the sword free. Mnay’salath’s form wavered again, like a distorting reflection. It lost its hold on the materium... and exploded.

The blast of uncontrolled warp energy threw Crowe backwards. The entire palace trembled. Lightning seethed and lashed out against the heights of the tower. The stained glass shattered, raining down in disintegrating shards. The lesser daemons shrieked in echo of Mnay’salath. Enslaved to their master’s song, they had to answer to its final verse, and their chorus was their end. The lightning lanced from daemon to daemon, enveloping them all, tearing them apart. The palace lurched. Perspectives realigned. The materium flooded over the dying monster. The tower’s form held strong for the moment, but beyond it, the impossible halls began to collapse in on each other. Crowe felt the palace lean, and lean some more. The floor tilted.

The palace was the pinnacle of the daemon’s art, surpassing the work of the cathedral. And now the greatest fall began.

The daemons mocked Vendruhn as she ran into their midst. She fired the plasma pistol as quickly as she could pull the trigger. The weapon became hot in her hand. She was past caring about the chance of an explosive overheat. A stinger tale whipped past her face, and she shot the daemon until it was a melting, indistinguishable mass. She did not seek shelter or try to escape. There was nothing for her now except finding the ecstasy of the kill one last time. The leaping, frolicking abominations were a blur that surrounded her with their laughter and their song.

They taunted her. They danced forwards and invited her violence. Some she destroyed. Their wails only added spice to the pleasure of the others. She was their toy. The last mortal in Beroea, a final amusement to be savoured at the moment of victory.

She did not care. She ran at them, raging, firing, and brought them down. And in their destruction she found the pleasure. The pistol approached critical, its heat burned through her gloves, and that too was part of the sensation. She would destroy everything to prolong the ecstasy.

The daemons’ joy ended suddenly. They howled. They wailed in despair. Their heads rocked back, and they ignored Vendruhn.

She paused in her frenzy and looked up.

The Ecclesiarchal Palace rocked forwards. Its step faltered. It slammed a leg down, and the leg crumbled. Vendruhn stared at the slow collapse and fall of the limb. The events were so huge, they took an age to unfold. There was so much time for her to see what was happening, for understanding to pierce the haze of furious desire. But there was no time for escape. Time only to bear witness and die.

No, she thought.

The shadow of the palace was as big as a world. It grew bigger. The spiked towers began to fall way from the main body. They plummeted to the ground like immense javelins. And just behind them came the great corpse of the palace, an endless massiveness that cried out with a voice of iron.

Vendruhn screamed her denial as the sky fell upon her.

Crowe leaned forwards, keeping his feet as the floor slanted thirty degrees. He grabbed Drake as the fallen Grey Knight slid past him. Drake was conscious, and his stump was clotting, but he had lost a lot of blood. His movements were sluggish. Crowe hauled him up, and dragged him towards the other Purifiers as they fought their way to their feet. The sludge of vanishing daemons slowed their movements.

‘Well fought, brothers!’ Sendrax called.

‘We will fight again,’ Crowe yelled. ‘We are the hammer, and our duty has not finished.’ Crowe felt something huge snap in the heart of the palace, and the floor levelled ominously. There were only moments now. He held up the sword. ‘This mission is not complete until we depart Sandava II!’

Destiny. It had to be earned. It had to be fought for. And now the fight began again. There was no escaping the collapse. There were no stairs to climb. There was no destination to reach. There was only the struggle, the refusal to end with the palace.

Crowe felt himself grow lighter. The huge mass was plunging now. The stained glass of the walls and floor dissolved, flowing to mix with the bodies of the daemons. The sludge turned into a rising tide. The interior of the palace lost all form. Molten, it flowed in on itself. The tide clutched Crowe’s feet. It rose past his knees. He forced himself forwards through the thickening entropy, supporting Drake, bringing the Purifiers together, brothers refusing oblivion as one.

Then walls and ceiling and floors lost all coherence at once. A massive wave of fluid architecture slammed down on the Grey Knights, and the surface beneath them became a sea. Crowe lost his grip on Drake. He fell, tumbling through the substance of Mnay’salath’s fading dream. Vanishing forms battered him. He saw the echoes of glass and staircases, of chandeliers and pillars, of arches and of domes. The savage colours streaked through the sea of lost forms, melding with each other, smearing madness. Jagged masses struck him. For a moment he was caught between the collision of two monolithic slabs, and then passed through them as they too melted. And he was falling, falling – everything was falling. The palace fell towards the ground and the art it embodied fell to nothingness.

Crowe fell, but his soul did not. He held fast, to the Blade, to his being, to his duty, to destiny.

The force of the palace’s impact against the earth slammed through the sea of disintegration. The shock was visible, a sudden wave, and it was a blow like a Dreadnought’s power fist against Crowe’s spine. Consciousness flickered in the storm of pain. He held it as tightly as he did the sword. He had a direction now. The collapse of the palace had ended, and the sludge had a surface. Crowe righted himself and struck upwards. The molten warpstuff dragged at him. It would not let him go. It would smother and drown him in its final murderous act before it vanished. The weight of his armour pulled him down, but he fought. He dragged his way forwards and up through swirling, grasping insanity. The colours faded, turning to muck. The sludge retracted into itself, becoming denser as it shrank. It tried to crush him. He pushed on, cutting through the muck with the sword, refusing all ends except the one that awaited when all duty was complete. And that would never be.

He fought, and he broke through the surface. He dropped down again at once, then rose again, and so struggled to overcome the mass of his armour and the drag of the quagmire. He surfaced and sank, over and over, and the sludge contracted, monstrous dreams and desires shrivelling to nothing.

Then his boots touched ground, and he hauled himself to the edge of the muck. He saw his battle-brothers dragging themselves out, and he gave thanks. He looked for Drake, and spotted a still hump in the muck a few yards away. He made his way over and pulled the Purifier into the fading light of the day. He staggered on, and at last left the sickening morass behind.

The Purifiers gathered at the edge of the palace’s swamp. They gathered, but Crowe saw how the others instinctively, perhaps unconsciously, moved away from him. He walked several yards on, putting more distance between himself and his brothers, drawing the poison of Antwyr with him.

For hundreds of yards in every direction, every shrine had been flattened by the palace’s collapse. The monster had destroyed everything beneath it, and now the last of its being drained away over the ruins. No daemons attacked. Too much of their essence had been slaved to Mnay’salath’s masterwork, and they too had been destroyed by the Keeper of Secrets’ end. Beyond the site of the impact, the crucifixions stretched to the horizon, but they were still. The victims were finally dead. They had been released from the dance.

‘The militia has not fared well,’ Gorvenal said. He pointed to the smashed lifters and the ruined Chimeras. There were no bodies visible.

Crowe contemplated the scene. He thought about the pattern he had seen being woven around Vendruhn. The militia had served a brief purpose, drawing the palace’s attack away from the Stormraven. That seemed very little. There was something unsatisfying about the death that had come to the general. Perhaps he had ended the pattern’s formation by destroying Mnay’salath’s material form. Perhaps. That solution did not convince. Yet her end had clearly come. ‘The Emperor grant them peace,’ he said.

The silence of the dead city was broken by the growl of the Purgation’s Sword’s engines. Berinon brought the gunship down over a level field of rubble fifty feet away.

Sendrax said, ‘This land is dead, but there is no peace here.’

‘Agreed,’ said Crowe, and the other Knight of the Flame nodded.

It was time to return to the Sacrum Finem. It was time, too, for the final martyrdom of Sandava II. Time to kill the planet, and the memories it held.

Epilogue

THE HOLLOW WAR

But the memories could not be killed. Decades later, Castellan Crowe stared at the crucifixions, and felt the circle close. On Sandava II, he had seen his exhausted mentor fall. On Sandava III, he had come bearing his own burden of exhaustion. And this was waiting for him. The endless, dancing, writhing death favoured by Mnay’salath. The daemon’s pleasure that was the fuel of its great works.

The daemon’s machinations had brought Gavallan low. It would be a fitting revenge if now it destroyed Crowe and so finally claimed the prize it had sought so many decades ago.

Antwyr gloated. Antwyr laughed. You see, you see, you sssssseeeeeee! All is accomplished. This is the true moment of your destiny. This is the end of the path. Will you turn from it now? I think not. You have followed it too long. The claws of its will jabbed with greater insistence than ever at his soul, convinced they had at last found their purchase.

He could not dismiss the Blade’s words. Vertigo assailed him. It was borne of a past whose meaning was suddenly revealed. A pattern had been woven on Sandava II, and he had fallen into it, been trapped by it ever since, his apparent victory then a perverse lie. The symmetry was too great. The dark echoes had come for him, now, when he had been scraped empty by the years, and the timing was too perfect to be anything other than planned. Gavallan’s fall and now his, in the same system, at the hands of the same weaver of art.

On the outer slopes of the bowl, the daemons laughed. Lilting, monstrous songs coiled through the burning night of Sandava III. They slithered around the bowl, shaping the movements of the crucified bodies’ dance.

You have failed, castellan, the sword whispered.

If he had, Crowe had failed in far worse a fashion than Gavallan. There was no successor. He was alone. The Blade would be lost.

Antwyr snickered. The sword’s eagerness for the endgame was a turbulent constriction around Crowe’s thoughts.

I do not accept this, Crowe thought. This will not be my destiny. My oaths will not break on this world. I will not fail the Emperor.

This will not be the end. I am the Warden, and my task is sacred.

He straightened as he made the vow. He clutched the hilt of the sword, and prepared for battle again, not in hopelessness, but in determination. As he did, he looked at the bowl and his gaze sharpened. He saw past the symmetry. He saw the differences.

On Sandava II the crucifixions had formed a spiral with the Ecclesiarchal Palace at the centre. The design here was more complex, and there was nothing at the centre. The daemonic rune formed by the sacrifices bespoke a different intent, a different use to what Crowe had seen before.

‘The symmetry is incomplete,’ he said.

It might be that the differences were meaningless. Yet the crucifixions aboard the Envoy of Discipline had also been arranged in a circular fashion. There had been a greater consistency to the atrocity then. This was new. Crowe chose to see meaning in the difference. He and Gavallan had missed signs and misread significance on the Envoy and on Sandava II. He would tear the heart from the dark meaning on this day.

He descended the slope. The daemons did not follow. They danced along the lip of the bowl. Their pleasure taunted him. He stared straight ahead, to the other side of the bowl. It was raised higher than the side he had entered. He could not see beyond it. He saw meaning in the barrier too. It was a veil. Behind it was further revelation. The spire of Hive Labos was still hidden from him.

He moved through the rune and observed the flow of the warp. It raced around the lines drawn by the crucifixions, picking up speed and power. It appeared to flow out of the bowl in two directions, to the rest of Sandava III, and back towards the spire. At the centre, he swung the sword with both hands and toppled an iron cross with a single blow. He moved swiftly from sacrifice to sacrifice, chopping them down. He severed the arms and legs of the torsos, setting them free. He destroyed the core of the rune and paused.

The daemons’ celebration did not diminish. The currents of the flow were unchanged. The bodies he had dismembered were still caught in the dance. The limbs twitched. The torsos convulsed. The creation of the rune had already done its damage. The link between it and the source was too strong. Destruction here would serve no purpose.

Crowe climbed the far slope. At the top, he looked down towards the vestiges of Labos. The hive had been devastated. Vast areas had been reduced to craters boiling with magma and blood. The landscape crawled with daemons joined in the great dance. The hive had been a monstrous agglomeration of manufactoria. Most were gone. The burning, bleeding shells of some remained. In a path leading across the plain from the base of the hill towards the spire, though, dozens of manufactoria still stood, transformed. The spire too, was in the grip of daemonic possession. The path of the surviving structures replicated the rune of the crucifixions. And the manufactoria too were caught in the dance. Their walls twisted back and forth. Immense chimneys whipped like snakes. The spire, shorn of all the tumours of hab blocks, was a narrow, tormented spear. It too flexed, serpentine. Its peak had split into snapping jaws. A hollow wail of hunger boomed from within.

You are summoned, the sword said. Your strength is gone, and you will fall.

Crowe believed in the summons. He believed in nothing else Antwyr said. As he strode down the hill to meet with his enemy, he thought he detected a return of anger in the Black Blade’s tone. It was no longer gleeful. It sensed his determination. It bore witness to his own summons. A summons to strength from within, and from his faith in the Emperor’s power without.

He tried again to reach his battle-brothers. ‘Sendrax,’ he called. ‘Drake.’ He cycled through the channels. Nothing. This test was his alone, then. So be it.

He reached the bottom of the hill, and moved between the writhing manufactoria. And here, he thought, was another difference, another flaw in the symmetry. The structures strained. They screamed. The dance tormented them. But they remained in place. They did not walk the plain like the Cathedral of Martyrdom Embraced or the Ecclesiarchal Palace.

‘Your repetition is false!’ Crowe shouted to his enemy. ‘Your symmetries are empty!’ The pattern was weaker. It was an echo, not an amplification.

As if in reaction to the truth he brought, the daemons and the manufactoria attacked in anger. Outflows of molten ore flooded onto the plain. Daemons disappeared beneath the incandescent flow. Others outran it. Daemonettes leapt from building to building, staying above the burning metal until they pounced on Crowe. The sudden rage of the enemy renewed his strength even further. He had dismayed the daemons and the sword. He had not surrendered. Now he would cut through their dance and destroy the defiler of Sandava III.

Ruins lay everywhere between the manufactoria, and he used them to gain height where he could. He tore the daemons apart with such force and speed, it seemed they were the defenders being ambushed by a lone warrior. Above his power pack, his banner flapped in the hot wind of the flood of ore. It bore his coat of arms – a sword imprisoned by coiling barbed wire. As he ran towards the spire, vaulting from one sinking ruin to another, trampling fiends into the ore beneath him and charging through the infernal flood itself, he heard the Blade shriek in his mind, and he took new pride in the symbol of his honour and his burden. His iron halo’s energy field flashed at blows and when it came into contact with the ore. He hurled frag grenades ahead of him, the blasts ripping open a passage through the daemons. Storm bolter shells put the abominations down, creating causeways of daemonflesh over the molten ground. He thrust the Blade upwards, impaling a fiend that jumped from the snarling bay door of a manufactorum. Ichor streamed down his arm, steaming. The daemon’s weight pulled his arm down, and the agonised abomination slid off the sword and into the destroying light of the flood.

There were safer paths to the left and right, sloping up or so choked with wreckage that they dammed up the ore. Crowe ignored them. They would take him down the long path between the manufactoria. They would make him trace the lines of the rune. He would not reinforce the sorcery by re-enacting its form. He stormed straight ahead, cutting through the pattern, slicing it open, defying every intention of the Ruinous Powers. He attacked with his own meaning, his own significance. He imbued every bolter shell fired, every blow of the sword and every step forwards with his truth. War was a clash of symbols, and his were mighty.

The ground began to rise again in the approach to the spire. He left the flood behind. Daemonettes leading hellflayer engines rushed up on either side of him. They drew closer. The spinning teeth of their axles were covered in the flesh and gore of previous victims. The daemonettes called to each other and snarled at him. He threw a krak grenade to his right and fired his storm bolter to the left. The sanctified explosive melted through the centre of the axle. The shells vaporised the head of the leading seekers of Slaanesh. The engine to the right snapped against itself. The seekers on the right fell, and the momentum of the engine rolled the savage teeth over them. Engines, riders and steeds were entangled in whirling self-destruction. The demented, inhuman shrieks followed Crowe through the great archway of the howling spire. But the daemons did not cross the threshold.

He found himself in a vast, domed hall. The walls were fifty feet high. Though the exterior twisted, and the spire snapped for prey it would never devour, the interior was more stable. Here, stone was stone, though it was soaked in the blood of mortals nailed to the walls. Like the crucified, they too were decapitated and twisted eternally in the dance of pain. They hung in vertical lines. In between were huge tableaus. They were painted in blood and stretched flesh. They pulsed with unholy light. They depicted the martyrdom of Sandava II. Around the hall, Crowe was confronted with gigantic images of the events of the planet’s fall. Crowe saw the clash of worshippers and militia, and the march of the cathedral. He saw Gavallan struck down by Otto Glas. He saw the burning of Dikaia. He saw the exultation of the Ecclesiarchal Palace. And the Exterminatus. In every case, the perspective of the scenes was mortal. Even the Exterminatus, when cyclonic torpedoes had turned the world into a debris cloud, was portrayed as seen from the surface. There was something familiar about the point of view of all the paintings but the last, and even it had the impossible authenticity of memory.

The daemon waited in the centre of the hall. It did not attack. It seemed to be waiting for Crowe to see and understand the infernal art. ‘You made a vow once,’ the daemon said. ‘As did I.’

Crowe circled the abomination warily, waiting for its attack, for the move he would counter and turn against the daemon. The lies of the symmetry were now exposed. This was not Mnay’salath. Yet somehow there was an element of truth to the repetition. There was a link to Sandava II. Even the daemon’s appearance announced this. It was twice Crowe’s height and broad-shouldered. It had less of the monstrous grace of the Dark Prince’s creatures, though it had their perverse beauty. It appeared to be constructed of the stained glass that had reigned at the heart of the Ecclesiarchal Palace’s power. The thousands of coloured shards were also mirrors, each reflecting a facet of the paintings, as if the daemon were constructed from shattered, reconstructed, obsessive memory.

The daemon’s build and stance clicked into place. They were martial.

Details of the paintings took on pointed meaning. Telling elements of the perspective. There was a heavy bolter turret just visible at the bottom of the tableau of the street battle. The death of Gavallan was seen from a high perspective, as if the witness were being held in the air. The death of Dikaia shown from inside the storm of the orbital bombardment.

‘Vendruhn Glas,’ Crowe said. The pattern stretching over the decades was only partly his, then. It was also hers. Her journey had not ended, as he had thought, beneath the ruins of the palace. The whim of the Ruinous Powers had raised her to daemonhood. This was the end point of her fanaticism. She was an artefact of vengeance.

At the sound of the name, the daemon hissed in anger. ‘Varangallax!’ it shouted, the name smashing its old identity to shards. ‘You vowed to save one world of Sandava,’ Varangallax said. ‘I have vowed to destroy another.’

‘We saved Sandava II,’ Crowe said, still circling, thinking about the nature of his enemy. So much repetition, so much echoing, so little that was new, only the old patterns repeated. The repetitions were powerful. Memories were. They had been almost strong enough to ensnare him. He studied this monster of reflection and bitterness, and he experienced an important doubt. Though Varangallax was at the centre of the dance, he doubted this daemon was the author of this trap. He suspected it too was ensnared. ‘We saved the soul of Sandava II,’ Crowe said. ‘We gave the world the peace of oblivion, freed of the corruption you now embody.’

‘Did you?’ Varangallax snarled. ‘Did you?’ Blood erupted from the paintings and washed across the floor of the hall. A hiss, a shaking of glass and light, a shifting of the reflections, memories reassembled and reconsidered, and the daemon calmed. ‘No matter. There is no salvation. There is only transcendence.’

A pause, and the air crackled with the coming attack.

‘Only transcendence,’ the daemon repeated. ‘And I will have it!’ Varangallax shrieked, and extended its arms.

It hurled a storm of stained glass against Crowe. Thousands of jagged shards struck every second. They overwhelmed the energy field of his iron halo. They cut deep into his armour. They sliced through his black carapace. The hail pierced his flesh and poisoned his blood. He was assailed by the pounding fragments of a world’s agony. And among the memories were the echoes of Mnay’salath’s attacks. The daemonic scream, the lash and the dance that shattered bone stabbed into Crowe. The fragments sought to fragment him. They sought to reduce him to a shattered mirror of agony.

They sought to render him hollow.

He forced his right leg forwards. He completed a step against the howl of the lethal wind. He took another.

I am whole of purpose. I am the instrument of His will, and that is indivisible.

Another step. Another. Faster now.

His identity had value only as it served the Emperor. Transcendence was not the ecstasy of war. It was in the most perfect service.

His flame burned. The perfidy of the immaterium burned before it. He charged through the hurricane of warp glass and closed with the daemon.

Varangallax howled in rage. The glass erupted from its entire form. The daemon smashed its gladius-sized claws into Crowe’s flanks at the same moment that he ran the Black Blade through its torso.

The daemon’s body was brittle. The Blade burst out of its back. Its claws plunged through the rents in Crowe’s armour and punched into his reinforced ribs.

In the centre of the tableaus, another took form. The wind of glass raged. Crowe and Varangallax were motionless. Daemon and Grey Knight reached into the other’s very being. Varangallax’s convulsive desire for the perfection of slaughter burned through his veins. It sought his anger, his frenzy.

Militant patience.

He answered with the iron determination of faith. The faith of cold, implacable fire. The fire he unleashed in the centre of the daemon.

Unslakeable desire fought with immovable faith. Desire burned creation in the quest for the eternally absent. Faith exulted in the service to an eternal core. Crowe had the unalterable reality of the Emperor. Varangallax had only need.

The daemon was hollow. Crowe was not. The truth burst upon him with the force of revelation. The Black Blade eroded him, it sought to turn him into a shell, but it could not empty him of his faith. As long as the Emperor was on His throne, there was the strength Crowe needed. His faith was a source of power and guidance as unending as the Astronomican.

Crowe saw the illusion of the symmetries. The lies woven around Sandava III fell apart. The pattern had sought to make him despair, and its failure was its destruction. The past had come to claim him. The past held Varangallax prisoner, trapping the daemon in a cycle of diminished, false repetition.

Crowe had entered into his destiny on Sandava II. His path was not a circle, and it was not ending on Sandava III. He understood the lesson of the past and the present. Gavallan had found his successor, and so foreseen the end of his journey. There was no one to take up Crowe’s burden, and so he found his new strength.

Crowe bled. The sympathetic vibrations of the daemonic dance splintered his bones. His hearts began to beat out of synch with each other. The Black Blade of Antwyr pounced on his agony. Call upon me. Let me strike. Let this be an end to pretence, an end to false symmetry. I shall be your true freedom.

Crowe did not look for freedom. He looked for the perpetuity of service. He held sword and daemon prisoner in the iron of purity.

Varangallax’s frenzy grew. It had no purchase on him. Its perfection was not here. The daemon screamed in frustration. It could do no more than rend his body apart. So it would. The claws of glass tightened into fists, dragging through muscle. Crowe’s blood poured in torrents to the floor.

The daemon took his blood. He gave it his fire. He called upon the full force of the cleansing flame. It entwined with the unchanging fact of his burning faith. The two flames exploded inside the daemon. They erupted through absence. The thing the mortal Vendruhn had lost, that had curdled into fanaticism for its own sake, and then into the void of desire, consumed the emptiness of the monster. Varangallax released Crowe. The daemon staggered back, yanking itself free of Crowe’s hands and the sword. But the psychic fire could not now be extinguished. It devoured the nothingness, burning more and more fiercely. The daemon took one more step, then froze, limbs rigid, jaw agape. The storm of glass became a whirlwind, turning back on its host. Crowe’s sacred fire scoured Varangallax with memories of what had been lost, burning it with the very wounds it had thought to inflict on Crowe. The fire bellowed from its jaws, reaching for the dome fifty feet above.

Crowe swung the sword and shattered the flanks of the daemon. The flames burst from the broken glass. He struck again and again, smashing the hollow thing. At last there was only a fireball of white, searing flame and the scream of unutterable desire. Then the scream burned too, and the flames faded.

Crowe took a long breath. Things rattled in his chest, but the worst of his bleeding had stopped. For several moments his breathing was the only sound. The dance had ended. The tower was still. He turned to face the entrance. The manufactoria were mundane ruins. Their volition had evaporated. Sound returned as, outside, the daemons shrieked. Their celebration was at an end. The source of the power that held them to the materium was gone.

His vox-bead crackled to life. ‘Castellan.’ The voice was Sendrax’s. ‘Are you receiving?’

‘I am,’ Crowe said.

‘What is your position?’

‘The Labos spire. The source of the incursion is no more.’

‘Hold fast, brother castellan. We have Stormravens heading to your location.’

‘I am glad to hear it.’

Crowe walked towards the spire’s archway. His boots crunched on the last, faded traces of warp glass. He paused, thinking as he gathered his strength for the final extermination of the daemons on Sandava III.

Victory on the world was assured, yet he felt no real triumph. There was a greater labour that he knew was incomplete. He felt a contained, simmering rage at a manipulation that had stretched over decades and brought devastation to two worlds. There had been patterns in conflict. Antwyr had tried to use the machinations of other powers to its advantage. It had failed, though in the process it had rendered the full picture even more opaque. What Crowe perceived with clarity was that he would be mistaken to believe the web of events begun on Sandava II had finally been torn asunder and burned.

There was another artist at work. A greater one. There had to be. The daemonic Vendruhn had been used. She was part of the pattern, not its originator.

The Black Blade scraped once more at the wall of his soul. It said nothing for the moment, preferring to press its will against the wall, always and forever seeking the cracks it might pry apart.

Let it try. His banner still flew, pronouncing the truth. He was not the sword’s victim. It was his prisoner. He was the Warden, and his vigilance was unwavering.

The exhaustion had not left him. The erosion was real. He had not reversed the toll of the decades since Sandava II. There had, though, been a change. He had stepped to the edge of an abyss. Perhaps, to his shame, the abyss was despair. The symmetries of Sandava III had almost pushed him over. They had seemed too much like a form of inevitable destiny. Not one that was earned through faith and devotion to duty, but a doom, a malign accumulation of events that would not be avoided, no matter how hard he fought against them. He had thought he was caught, forced to repeat Gavallan’s failure.

But he had smashed the lie.

His path was clear once more. He would seek out the greater artist. He would destroy it, and all its works.

With a shout, with his fire burning high in his soul, he charged out of the tower, roaring his challenge to the abominations he would exterminate to end this war, and his warning to the one he would find in the next.

I accept this task.

About the Author

David Annandale is the author of the Horus Heresy novel The Damnation of Pythos and the Primarchs novel Roboute Guilliman: Lord of Ultramar. He has also written the Yarrick series, several stories involving the Grey Knights, and The Last Wall, The Hunt for Vulkan and Watchers in Death for The Beast Arises. For Space Marine Battles he has written The Death of Antagonis and Overfiend. He is a prolific writer of short fiction, including the novella Mephiston: Lord of Death and numerous short stories set in The Horus Heresy, Warhammer 40,000 and Age of Sigmar universes. David lectures at a Canadian university, on subjects ranging from English literature to horror films and video games.

An extract from Grey Knights Sons of Titan.

CHAPTER ONE

VOYAGERS

Klas Brauner saw the contrails first. He and his crew had just moved another stone out of the way of the plough. He arched his back, working out the kinks, feeling every decade as hot coal on his spine. He looked up into the hot steel of the summer sky, and saw them: hundreds of streaks as the ships tore down through the atmosphere. Within seconds, the spreading cloud of the contrails dimmed the sun. The shadow fell over Brauner’s land, and everyone at work in the fields stopped to stare at what was coming.

War was raining down on Squire’s Rest.

Brauner traced the direction of the streaks. There would be no landings on his farm, nor on Elna Stumar’s. But the nearest wouldn’t be many kilometres away. And the rain of ships kept falling. These numbers would make distance meaningless.

‘Get everyone to the house,’ he told his foreman, Stellan Dietrick. ‘Shutters down. Distribute the weapons. Wait for me there.’

‘Yes, colonel.’

Colonel. He hadn’t been one for twenty years. Dietrick hadn’t been a sergeant for just as long. They had fought their last official campaign with their fellow Cadians on Vhun. They had survived to retirement and earned their reward on Squire’s Rest. Brauner no longer held military rank over his employees. The old habits died hard, though. And the wars kept following them. In these last years, there hadn’t been a single month without at least one skirmish.

Today was different, though. Today, he thought, their ranks would be needed again.

He ran over to the battered Tauros. He drove the utility vehicle across his fields towards the Stumar farm, bouncing over the stones and ruts of the tired land. Squire’s Rest was held out to active troops as a promise of paradise. Perhaps it had been so, a few millennia back, but its Arcadian glories had passed. The agri world was still productive, but reluctantly so. Its fertility was being squeezed from it through overwork and the damage caused by the ork raids. Ten years of raids. Growing more aggressive, eroding the accomplishments of a world of veterans.

Bastards.

He drove for twenty minutes, jouncing straight through both farms, jouncing though crops of struggling maize, until he reached the bluff at the western edge of Stumar’s property. He’d guessed right. He saw her, a hard silhouette, watching the streaks of the invasion. He pulled up a few metres back from the cliff edge.

She nodded once as he approached, but didn’t look away from the contrails. ‘Colonel,’ she said.

‘Colonel,’ he replied. He stood beside her. ‘What do you think?’

‘This isn’t a raid.’

‘Not this time,’ he agreed. The contrails now covered the sky. The orks were coming to take the planet. ‘They want it all. Any word from Ascra?’ The regional capital was over five hundred kilometres away. The population of Squire’s Rest was not much more than ten million, sufficiently spread out that the individual homesteads were largely autonomous. But the planet’s agricultural production needed to be shipped, and so there were spaceports and administrative centres. The Administratum gnomes at Ascra had been of little help during the raids. Brauner did not expect military aid now. But he did wonder if there was news about the rest of the Sanctus Reach.

Stumar grimaced. ‘I did a vox scan a few minutes ago. Ascra is just sending out warnings about the obvious.’

‘Any off-world transmissions?’

‘Nothing from Malaghai Morca.’

So the trading post had fallen. ‘And Ghul Jensen?’

‘A lot of screaming.’

The hive world reacting as expected. ‘They’re hitting everywhere then.’

‘Seems like it.’

They watched in silence for a few minutes. In the distance, the first booms of landing echoed.

‘So,’ Brauner said.

‘So,’ Stumar replied.

‘I never was much of a farmer.’

‘Know anyone who is?’

They looked at each other then. Here we are, Brauner thought, two old war dogs who should know better than to be happy about this. They still had some iron in them. It hurt to stand straight, but he could do it. Stumar did too, and didn’t let on if the arthritis was gnawing at her back just as much as it did his. She had it worse with her hands, though, both of them hooked into permanent claws. White hair on both veterans, almost as many scars as wrinkles. Their skin was leather so tough it was almost wood.

‘So,’ Brauner said again.

‘So.’

‘How are we going to fight them?’

Stumar kicked a stone off the top of the bluff. ‘Like we always do.’

‘Las and piss it is, then.’

‘Greenskins won’t know what hit them.’

They grinned at each other, but Brauner felt something clutch in his chest. It wasn’t the coming of war that bothered him. It wasn’t the thought of dying. It was the knowledge that Stumar was going to die too.

They were all going to die.

The orks would make sure of it.

‘We’re ten minutes from the Sanctus Reach Mandeville point, justicar,’ Hadrianna Furia said as she walked into the Chamber of Militant Quiet.

Justicar Styer looked up from the hololith of Squire’s Rest that dominated the projection table in the centre of the room. ‘Thank you, inquisitor.’ The Grey Knight did not resent the arrival of an unannounced presence into the room, intrusive though it was. The space was meditative and tactical, a sanctuary for prayer and war. Situated one level above the bridge of the Tyndaris, it provided a valued retreat for Styer while giving him rapid access to the strike cruiser’s nerve centre when necessary. It was circular. The adornment of its dome was simple. The ribs were carved into the representation of spears, in alternating orientation. Between them was the darkness of obsidian. When he gazed upward, Styer found he could empty his mind of the extraneous and concentrate on the absolute necessity of the moment. What was even more crucial: he could bear down on the problem that faced him and strip it of its inessentials, unearthing the true core of the challenge. On the walls beneath the dome were shelves holding texts that were devotional, military, and arcane. As a librarium, the Chamber of Militant Quiet had a small collection, but it was a powerful one.

Furia looked at the projection of the world. ‘Any luck?’

‘No.’ Styer had been going over everything in the Tyndaris’s data banks about the planet during the strike cruiser’s journey to Sanctus Reach. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘The world is innocuous.’

‘It is in the path of a massive ork force.’

‘And its inhabitants have my sympathy.’

‘Do they?’ Furia asked.

Was she testing him? Styer wondered. For what? Necessary signs of humanity, or extraneous ones? Or was her purpose less well defined, a question of probing him from different angles, looking for the weakness that would explain his scepticism about the mission? He shrugged off the questions. They weren’t useful ones. ‘Yes,’ he told her. ‘I am not unmoved by their plight. But I will not waste time or energy mourning what a single squad cannot prevent. Nor do I find any records,’ he waved his hand at the data-slates fanned across his side of the table, ‘that point to the work of the Ruinous Powers. What purchase would they find in a population composed of retired Imperial Guard who have been rewarded for loyalty and service? If the fall of Squire’s Rest is a concern for the Inquisition, I would think it falls within the purview of the Ordo Xenos, not the Ordo Malleus.’

‘Nevertheless, those are the coordinates the prognosticators gave us. A major daemonic incursion is imminent.’

Styer grunted.

‘You doubt the prognostication?’ Furia sounded surprised. She shouldn’t. He hadn’t made his reservations a secret. But this was the first time they had discussed the matter directly.

‘About its accuracy, yes.’

‘That is a highly unorthodox attitude, justicar.’

‘And a sound one. I have no wish to suffer further pointless losses.’

The last mission had savaged his squad. The prognosticators had forecast an incursion in the Angriff System. Situated in the Finial sector, Angriff was close enough to the Eye of Terror for warp distortions to be expected. Still, all information had pointed to Angriff Primus’s moon as the site of the attack. The planet was a miserable forge world, but it was in the moon’s mining colonies where the Ordo Malleus and the Ecclesiarchy had already been combating a growing cult whose conception of the Emperor was a dangerously extreme deviation from the orthodoxy of the Imperial Creed. The Tyndaris had arrived, preparations had been made, and the cult’s centres of activity assaulted. But the daemons had appeared on Angriff Primus itself. Styer’s squad had had to fly into battle with no time to formulate a proper strategy. They had managed to contain the infection to a single manufactorum. In the end, they had destroyed the plant and every soul, possessed or innocent, inside.

Two battle-brothers had been lost. Erec and Morholt, their centuries of battle deeds brought to an end by the abominations that should never have been given the chance to enter the materium. Styer didn’t know when his squad would be back to full strength. He bore a new set of scars: huge claw slashes, two sets of three parallel gouges that ran down either side of his face from his temples to his chin. The raised flesh of the wounds’ ridges reminded him of how badly they had been blindsided. If the prognosticators had sought deliberately to mislead his squad, he thought, they could not have done better. He kept these musings to himself. He would never accuse another Grey Knight of treason or corruption. Those were impossibilities. But what he saw on the table before him made him question the accuracy of the prognosticators even more.

He was surprised that Furia didn’t share his mistrust. She had been on Angriff Primus too. She had fought, and she had been wounded. Badly. Most of the left side of her body was augmetic. Arm and leg were bionic. Anyone who saw her in profile saw one of two different people. On the right, there was the flesh of a mid-career inquisitor. Juvenat treatments preserved something that could not be said to be youth – her eye was too hard for that – but was the prime of strength. The left side of her face was a bronze mask, just as stern and remorseless as the flesh, the red lens of her eye a piercing judgement, but the time and the expression were frozen. The right side of Furia was capable of expressing kindness. It could laugh. The left was frozen in unending purpose.

‘Our losses on Angriff Primus were not in vain,’ she said.

‘True,’ Styer replied. ‘But neither were they necessary. If we had been looking in the right place from the start, they would not have happened.’ He stabbed a finger at the hololith of Squire’s Rest. ‘And this is the wrong place. Again.’

‘The coordinates were specific. One of the moons, perhaps?’

‘Doubtful. They’re just fragments. Nothing larger than a mountain. No mining operations on any of them. They’re dead rock.’

‘Then there is something that we’re missing. Just as there must have been something we missed on Angriff Primus. We were in error, not the prognostication.’

‘If we go into battle second-guessing our strategy, we deserve defeat.’

‘Then we will make certain we are not in error,’ Furia said, and turned to go. ‘I think we should be on the bridge, Justicar Styer.’

He grunted and extinguished the hololith. He was dissatisfied with his session in the chamber. He had come to no resolution. He left with as many doubts as he had entered. But Furia was right.

The Grey Knights were about to arrive on their field of battle. Time to lead the charge.

As he and Furia stepped outside the chamber, he saw Vohnum waiting for him. ‘I’ll join you in a moment, inquisitor,’ he said.

Furia glanced at Vohnum, nodded to Styer, and walked on.

‘You wanted to see me, brother?’ Styer said.

‘I was wondering whether you had found greater clarity with regards to our mission, brother-justicar.’

Styer didn’t care for the ambiguity of Vohnum’s phrasing. It could be read as a helpful expression of concern. It could also be a veiled criticism. Vohnum might be implying that it was Styer who lacked clarity, not the mission. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I have not.’ He waited for a moment, then said, ‘Why? Do you see something I don’t?’

Vohnum was the most senior of the warriors who served with Styer. It was he who commanded the other combat squad when they split their force into two on the battlefield. They had fought side by side for over a century, and they had done so well. But Angriff Primus had driven a wedge between them. Vohnum didn’t doubt the prognosticators. His faith in every aspect of them was absolute. If something went wrong, the blame fell with the decisions made in combat. Following that logic, Styer knew that his battle-brother was looking at his leadership critically.

‘It is not for me to engage in exegesis,’ Vohnum began.

‘Why not? An interpretation that would make sense of the contradictions before us would be helpful.’

‘I see nothing to interpret. The prognosticators have foreseen a daemonic incursion at these coordinates. So we have come to defeat it.’

‘Indeed we have.’

Vohnum grimaced in frustration. ‘Forgive me, brother-justicar, but that is not the impression you are giving.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘You have not made a secret of your questions about the prognostication.’

‘And?’

‘I believe doing so is detrimental to the spiritual health of our squad.’

Styer bristled, but he made himself calm down before answering. Honest debate was part of the mortar of trust between battle-brothers. But not when disagreement crossed over into dissension. ‘After Angriff Primus, I have questions. The current situation makes them even more urgent. I will not conceal my doubts from the rest of you.’

‘I expressed myself badly,’ Vohnum said. ‘It is not your honesty that troubles me. It is the questions themselves.’

‘Are you questioning my leadership?’

‘I seek reassurance about the soundness of your judgement.’

‘Then be assured,’ Styer said, and the air filled with ice. ‘Any question I ask is for the benefit of our squad, and for the fulfilment of our duty and our oaths.’ He leaned in towards Vohnum. ‘Have no doubt of that.’ He was not reassuring the other Grey Knight. He was giving him a direct order.

‘The landings are still ongoing, inquisitor,’ Lowell Montgelas said.

Malia Orbiana stifled the worst of her impatience. ‘I can see that very well, shipmaster.’ The primary oculus of the Scouring Light displayed the long rain of ork landings. ‘The bulk of the ork fleet is moving on though, is it not?’

‘It is,’ Montgelas admitted.

She looked down at him from where she sat in the command throne. The seat was an isolated one, rising from the end of a platform that projected into the space of the bridge like a spur from the rear wall. Orbiana’s position was four metres above the deck. She had a clear view of the oculus and of the activity below her. She was present before her crew, but far beyond their level. The architecture of the bridge was symbolic, and symbols could have a direct impact, shaping the perception of power and its currents. ‘The greenskins crave violence like a drug,’ Orbiana continued. ‘This is an agri world. It isn’t worth much of their attention.’ She gestured at the oculus. ‘Clearly, they know this. How many ships at anchor do you see?’

‘None,’ Montgelas said after a minute.

‘Precisely. The orks who seek sport here are landing. Their kin won’t tolerate waiting around without a battle coming their way. We’ll have the near space of Squire’s Rest to ourselves. Don’t concern yourself unduly about the greenskins. How close are we to the coordinates I gave you?’

‘We’re nearly there.’ Montgelas was standing at a pulpit in the centre of the bridge, a few metres forward of Orbiana. When she was absent, the station gave him the authority he needed. When she was in the throne, Montgelas’s subordination to her will was reinforced. He was the shipmaster, but the Scouring Light was hers. Every soul aboard served the will of the agent of the Ordo Xenos. ‘Auspex,’ Montgelas said to the woman sitting at the station to his immediate left. ‘Please show us the target.’

Marga Furth tapped some keys, and runes appeared on the oculus, highlighting the goal of Orbiana’s journey. It was very close to a cluster of ork landing sites.

‘That could be better,’ Orbiana muttered. ‘What do we know of the vicinity?’

‘Farmland,’ said Furth. ‘Sparsely inhabited. The specific destination is not immediately adjacent to cultivated areas.’

Orbiana nodded. ‘So the orks will have little reason to venture there.’

‘They will if we’re there,’ Montgelas said.

‘Then we’ll be discreet.’ She mentally ran through the risks. Montgelas was right, of course. If the orks decided her landing party was interesting, then the mission would come to a quick end. She decided that the danger was a manageable one. ‘Get the shuttle ready,’ she said and stood up. She wanted to make her preparations for landing, keep herself busy. She didn’t want to listen to the small, grating voice in the back of her mind, the one whose accusations made her chest pinch.

She didn’t want to listen, but as she walked along the platform and off the bridge, she heard what it said anyway. It complained that she had only pretended to weigh her options, and that she had decided on her course of action before she had even known how close the greenskins would be to the target. That was true. Of course she had. She had decided months before arriving in Sanctus Reach.

The full truth? There was no decision to be made.

She commanded the voice to be silent.

The Scouring Light was Orbiana’s personal vessel. A modified Viper-class sloop – it was not a combat ship, though it had slit the throat of many xenos threats. It was fast, stealthy, its dark plating almost as effective at concealment as that of the Black Ships. It was a shadow that slipped into enemy territory and brought the Emperor’s Light in the form of purifying death.

Orbiana made her way down from the superstructure and headed forward. Midway to bow, she turned off the main corridor. She took maintenance tunnels, dropping three more levels and weaving through multiple intersections before she arrived outside a closed vault door. ‘Is he here?’ she asked the guard stationed before it.

‘No, inquisitor,’ one answered. ‘He said he was going to rest.’

‘Has he been gone long?’

‘About an hour.’

She nodded her thanks. She walked on another hundred metres, and then took a staircase up a level. She stopped before another door. This one was as nondescript as the one below was massive. They both protected objects of great value. She rapped once on the door. After a few seconds it opened.

The man who admitted her to the small sleeping quarters was twice her age and a head shorter. He seemed even smaller thanks to his rounded posture. His hair was lank and grey and his chin sprouted rough, greasy-looking whiskers. His robes bore multi-coloured chemical stains, and there were pinprick burns in the sleeves. His face was sallow, its flesh hanging loose. He looked exhausted.

‘I’m sorry to disturb your sleep,’ Orbiana said to Ertuo Andoval.

‘Not at all, inquisitor,’ the sage answered. ‘You know how much I value our exchanges.’

‘Are you making progress?’

He shrugged, embarrassed and modest. ‘Some, I think. Always forwards, inquisitor, always forwards. I have, I believe, stumbled onto what might be some very promising variants, but of course we can’t know with any certainty. We need more material–’

‘You’ll get it. Plenty of it.’

‘And the other…?’

‘That’s what I’ve come to tell you. We’ve arrived.’

‘Will I be coming down with you?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

Andoval looked crestfallen. ‘But what we’re looking for is so specific…’

‘I know very well what we require. Are you questioning my skills?’

Andoval shook his head quickly and took a step away, head bowed. ‘I would never think to do that.’

‘Good. And this is for your own safety. The orks are here before us. You are too valuable to risk taking you there.’

‘I will continue my research while you are gone, then, inquisitor.’

‘No,’ she snapped. She used her tone as a whip. Andoval recoiled as if struck. Good. ‘You will do no such thing. You will never do that work when I am not on board. Am I clear?’

‘Yes, inquisitor.’

‘Am I clear?’

‘Yes, inquisitor,’ Andoval repeated, hunching lower as if he might kneel.

‘Good. We are close,’ she said more gently. ‘I have strong hopes that we are only a few cycles away from the answer. Such an accomplishment is worth a bit more patience, isn’t it?’

Andoval nodded. ‘It is.’

She gave him a long stare, then said, ‘Thank you, Ertuo,’ and left.

As she walked away, she faced the idea of Andoval disobeying her command. She knew that he would not. He was loyal. He held the authority of the Inquisition in great awe, as he should. He knew the dangers. He would not disobey.

But he had proposed a course of action that should never have crossed his mind. So Orbiana made herself confront the possibility of Andoval’s disobedience. When she did, she felt more than a pinch in her chest.

She felt terror.

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* 3. Further to the general restriction at paragraph 2, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license in the event that you use or store the e-book (or any part of it) in any way not expressly licensed. This includes (but is by no means limited to) the following circumstances:

o 3.1 you provide the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.2 you make the e-book available on bit-torrent sites, or are otherwise complicit in ‘seeding’ or sharing the e-book with any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.4 you attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.

* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.