Warden of the Blade Page 12

  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 an
d 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 ar
mour.

  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.