Warden of the Blade Read online

  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 re
newed 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.