Setheno’s head rang and her vision blurred from the concussion. Her clarity of perception was undiminished. Diotian had stopped and was turning the blastmaster on Furia. Setheno could not distract him with pointless fire clanging against his hull. Instead, she trained her pistol on the huge claw that conducted the lightning to the stage. She fired into the intricate weaving of iron. The lightning flashed, vaporising shells. But some hit the iron, and they damaged it. It would take too long for Setheno to try to shoot down the massive structure. Furia’s blade was faster and more precise in slicing through the supports. As a distraction, though, her attack worked. The injury she inflicted on the structure was enough.
Diotian turned away from Furia. The Dreadnought howled. The sound of his distress smashed pews between him and Setheno. Above, chains cracked like glass, dropping in a hail of black fragments onto Diotian’s hull. He marched down the slope of the Cruciatorium. Setheno backed up, edging closer to the runic circle. At her back, the lightning struck again, always on the beat of the song. It was so close to her that the residual warp energy tried to overload the circuitry of her power armour. The thunder was so loud, her eardrums would have burst if she had not been wearing her helmet.
Diotian’s weapons were trained on Setheno, but he did not fire. She was too close to the claw. He could not avoid doing more damage to the claw than she did, even if he hit her directly. Without taking her eyes off the Dreadnought, Setheno sent more bursts of shells backwards and up, hitting the claw again.
Diotian screamed. He charged, chainfist roaring and crackling with energy.
Setheno waited for the last second before she moved. She saw the blow come in, tracked its angle of descent. She saw precisely where and what Diotian could not afford to strike. The meteor arrived, and she leapt to the side. Diotian slammed the chainfist into granite. He formed a crater in the stage, sending up a cloud of dust. The lightning glowed eerily inside the cloud. Setheno moved in it, grey within the grey, to the other side of the claw.
‘You will stop! You must stop!’ Diotian shouted. ‘You cannot break the fate! You will not, you must not, must not, must not, MUST NOT!’
He chased Setheno. She kept just out of reach of the chainfist. It hit the stage again and again. Soon, Setheno had to climb over the smashed rock. The destroyed surface slowed down Diotian as he moved through the craters and ridges of the ruin he had wrought. The Dreadnought wailed in frustration. His heavy flamer and blastmaster waved back and forth. The fury of his madness pushed him to fire. His awe of the power he served held him back.
‘Let me fire! Let me destroy her!’ he pleaded to the force that compelled him. ‘You cannot be here!’ he shouted at Setheno. ‘You cannot harm the art! Where is sensation? Where is pain? FEEEEEEEEEEED!’
At the top of the Cruciatorium, Furia was on her feet. She climbed again. Setheno divided her attention between watching her progress and keeping Diotian’s attention on her. The tactic was working, but it was unsustainable. She had to take the Dreadnought down.
Furia reached another support and sliced into it with her power blade. Even before she had cut through, the conducting network trembled, a nervous system recoiling from the source of injury. Diotian stopped with his chainfist in mid-air. He turned again, and fired in Furia’s direction. The shot was too urgent, without aim. He missed, shearing away low-hanging chains and collapsing a portion of the far wall.
Setheno seized her chance. She rushed Diotian, and slashed at the cables and joints of his legs with her power sword. Diotian moved back. He snarled down at her, the blast from his vox-casters hitting her with physical force. She staggered. He brought the chainfist down. She sprinted forward. The blow missed her by inches. The shockwave of its impact knocked her down, underneath the Dreadnought.
‘FEEEEEEED!’ Diotian screamed. He raised a foot to crush her into the broken granite.
Setheno rolled and cut upwards. She severed the conduit running from the right leg to the hull. Electrical fires exploded around her. The Dreadnought slewed to one side and its foot stamped down past her, crashing through six inches of granite. Setheno stood and ran out behind Diotian. He turned to follow, dragging the right leg. She had not immobilised him, but his gait was uneven. His wails became incoherent screams. They drove wider fissures into the deck. Weakened iron fell from the ceiling, entire nets of chain and razor wire dropping on to the stage. The walls split, and shook free of their cladding.
The lightning struck the circle. The thunder drowned out Diotian’s screams. Furia cut through another support, and the claw swung back and forth. The Cruciatorium flashed with blasts of undirected energy. The soul-festering colours of the warp flowed over the chamber. The reality of the ship softened. A storm of madness was building, hungry to consume the heart of the Catharsis.
Diotian’s hull rotated back and forth, torn between the targets.
Take him down, Setheno thought. Find the chance and finish him. She circled the Dreadnought, slashing with her blade, forcing his choice. She crossed in front of him and closed with the runic circle. Diotian moaned his denial. His immensity lurched after her. Create the chance, she thought. She stopped just short of the circle and lunged back as the claw swung her way. The lightning surged, reaching beyond the runes. The trailing end of warp energy caught her. The flames of the empyrean engulfed her armour. A corrupt fire reached through it and tried to consume her soul. She kept moving, blind with agony, but she had seen where she must go and what she must do. There was a grinding explosion to her left and behind, and another shockwave. That was the chainfist, overshooting. She struck to her right, though the fires of Ruin raged along her arm. Her sword hit resistance, then sliced through.
There was an explosion. She rolled and regained her feet as her vision cleared and the corrupting flame, unable to find purchase on her soul, died away.
She had damaged both of Diotian’s legs. The left jerked, its mechanism misfiring. At the moment the Dreadnought was leaning forward with the momentum of the chainfist strike. He toppled over, a monument of madness falling from its plinth, and crashed into the runic circle.
There was time between the beats for Diotian to howl again. His flamer turned, unleashing a firestorm across the Cruciatorium. It swept over the ruins of the stage and the pews. The stark outlines of fallen iron stood out like the bones of a great beast. It engulfed Setheno, but it was mere fire. She stood her ground, and waited for the next beat.
It came. The lightning flashed down the length of the claw and struck Diotian. A double explosion filled Setheno’s sight. The massive charge of warp energy blew up the Dreadnought’s power plant. The plasma fireball and the eruption of the blocked warp lightning interwove, the materium and the immaterium burning together. Setheno leaned into the blast as if into a hurricane. The fires scoured the Cruciatorium, and when they faded the claw was a twisted mass. Where Diotian had lain, there was a huge new crater.
Suspended above the carbonised chamber, Furia cut through another support. The framework of the conductor lost what was left of its strength. The entire structure collapsed, and Setheno moved now, evading the crushing drop of girders. The fall short-circuited the gathering of the lightning, and the final storm broke in the Cruciatorium. Warp lightning lashed out in every direction. It seethed above the stage. Vortices formed and collided, destroyed each other and formed again. The ceiling split and bowed inwards. The fissure in the deck cracked wider and raced up the walls.
The storm grew in rage. Thunder bellowed, but the third beat of the music had ceased. The lightning no longer left the Catharsis for Angriff Primus. And the other, more distant portions of the rhythm were wrong, too. They had turned into the erratic, staggering beats of a failing heart. The daemonic song screamed as it destroyed itself.
Setheno ran back up the slope of the Cruciatorium, racing the growing chaos. Furia had dropped from the ceiling chains. She was covered in burns, and there were hitches in the movement of her bionic limbs. Setheno extended a hand as she reached her, but Furia shook her head. ‘I can run,’ she said, and she did, keeping pace with Setheno as they charged for the exit.
Just past the threshold of the Cruciatorium, two of Furia’s veterans were still alive. Klas Brauner and Yira Rozh had crawled out from under the bodies of their comrades. They were both badly burned and their legs were broken. Furia lifted Brauner over her shoulder without hesitation. In the act, Setheno perceived the acknowledgment of a debt of honour. She picked up Rozh, and they ran down the corridor, heading for the assault ram, leaving the spiralling chaos of the Catharsis behind them.
The lightning ceased. The inverted dome of the palace was still. There were no longer any blasts descending to the gate. The portal itself still blazed with coruscating light. Its interior swirled with destructive force. Gorvenal stared at it for a moment, mentally praying that in the next moment, or the one after that, the castellan and Drake would return from the other side. They did not. The opening in the floor now seemed more like a barrier than a portal.
When the lightning did not come, and the daemonic beat dissolved into chaotic hammering from the north tower, the legion of daemons froze. After a moment of no movement at all, there were hesitant half-steps of confusion. The power that had governed the actions of the abominations had suddenly abandoned them. The song had been their motivating force. It had directed the flow of their attacks and shaped their revels. Now it was gone. Fiends howled. Daemonettes sang plaintively, their melodies clashing with each other as they sought to conjure the music that was gone forever. They had failed to defend the gate from the Grey Knights, and now they were bereft.
The Purifiers did not stand idle. While disorder gripped the enemy, they cut down more clusters of abominations.
‘Has the castellan triumphed?’ Venrik asked.
‘If he and Knight of the Flame Drake have not returned,’ Destrian said, ‘then they are fighting still.’
Gorvenal noticed he offered no other explanation for their absence.
‘They must travel this passage again,’ said Carac. ‘This position is ours, now, and we shall hold it for them.’
He had barely finished speaking when the daemons started moving again. They stampeded towards the portal. They were not attacking the Purifiers directly. They barely seemed to be aware of them, except as obstacles to their goal. They were intent on throwing themselves into the gate.
The Purifiers sectioned the circumference of the opening into quarters. Each claimed an arc, laying down an unbreachable wall of bolter fire. The daemons trampled each other in their desperation to reach the gate. From its maw, the warp convulsions shot higher into the hall, then fell back into the roiling cauldron of energies.
‘The abominations will destroy themselves trying to get through that,’ said Carac.
‘Perhaps not,’ Gorvenal told him. He swept his Nemesis force staff back and forth, its holy light turning daemonic flesh to ash. ‘Warp returns to warp. They can traverse what we cannot.’
‘Then we shall destroy them before they can try,’ said Venrik.
No one asked how long they would have to hold the line. Yet Gorvenal wondered, and he knew his brothers did, too. The daemons flooded down the sides of the bowl. Their numbers were inexhaustible. Destrian’s reservoir of promethium was not, nor were the supplies of shells for the storm bolters. The time would come when Gorvenal would have only his strength and his faith to fight the abominations. His faith, at least, was eternal.
Intoning prayers of thanks for the glorious burden the Emperor had given him, he lay waste to the waves of unclean horrors.
The music ended in a scream. At the moment when the beat should have summoned the lightning to the Masque’s dais, nothing came. The daemon whirled in its dance, as trapped as ever by its curse, but now there was only cacophony to echo its moves. The orrery spun itself into ruins. Planets collided, metal fusing and exploding. The arms and gears of the clockwork smashed together. Warp lightning still lashed out from the orb representing Angriff Primus, but its destruction was random, without direction, outside the control of the Masque. The roar of cataclysm filled the chamber. The shattered remains of Angriff Secundus slammed into Crowe. The blow would have smashed even Aegis armour, but his artificer armour withstood it. He embraced the shock of the impact and tried to free himself from the Masque’s grip. But though he stopped moving, he was not free. He was suspended by the disintegration of the dance, no more.
The initial fury of the destruction receded. The wreckage of the orrery lay on the floor of the chamber in angular heaps, an ossuary of murdered art. As the roar faded, Crowe realised the music was still present. Its power was greatly diminished. It was no longer the rhythm of an entire system. But it was still the melody of the Masque’s dance. The daemon turned its head to stare at Crowe. Its limbs described sinuous arcs, its body moving in sinister, ritualistic beauty even as it kept its head eerily still, its gaze burning with hate.
‘You have done this,’ the Masque said. ‘You have brought ruin to my design. I would have gathered the galaxy in my dance, and you, so cold, you would turn the universe grey.’ The daemon waved its sceptre, drawing an obscene rune in the air, and pain like a hundred claws of ice sank into Crowe’s nervous system. ‘You will fail. You have failed. You thrash against the beauty of excess, but you are an insect in a web. You tear the strands, yet your freedom is lost, long lost. You will die, and I will dance, and in the end, all will dance with me before Slaanesh.’ The Masque raised its great claw, and the orb of Angriff Primus, still intact, still flashing with eldritch energy, resumed its orbit around the dais.
‘I still have this world,’ the daemon said. ‘It dances for me. I shall rebuild. You have destroyed only an iteration of my art. The design lives on in my conception, in my palace, in this world. The dance goes on.
‘But you…
‘Oh, you, grey thing, you will dance your end for me now. You will expiate your sin against the sublime. Bleed for me, grey thing. Suffer for me. Die for me. Give me your suffering in worship.’
The Masque snapped its pincer three times, a sharp clacking of summons. The music’s chains pulled on Crowe once more. The melody traced the path of his execution for him. He would spiral in towards the Masque. He knew he would not be torn apart before he reached the dais. The daemon had reserved a more personal end for him.
He saw all this, because he knew the melody down to the smallest nuance now. He knew the music as he would a daemon’s name. The Masque had shown him too much, and his knowledge was his weapon.
The music commanded his movements, and he did not resist. He anticipated each gesture, each step. He did more than accept the command. He commanded his limbs to follow the dance. His will overtook that of the Masque. He moved as he was bid, at the precise moment he was bid, but he was prepared for each movement, and bit by bit, he pulled himself free of the chains.
Illusion, said the Blade. Futility, and then it screamed in his mind. It shrieked and clawed at his defences. It sought to break his concentration, to throw him back into the thrall of the Masque. Crowe reinforced the walls, and kept Antwyr’s screams at bay. He rebuilt the stones of his ramparts. He was castellan of the Grey Knights, and the fortress of the Imperium would not fall on his watch. Let the Black Blade howl and batter his fortifications. They would stand, and he would hurl the daemon before him from the battlements.
The Masque danced, and Crowe circled the dais of the sun. His orbits narrowed. He came closer to the daemon, and as he did, the abomination’s mesmeric hold crumbled. When he looked at the Masque, he anticipated every moment of its flowing actions as completely as he knew his own steps. He divided his focus between himself and the daemon. He had to lunge and gesture with such precision that his concentration rushed ahead of the demands of the Masque. He moved exactly as the daemon wished, and it could not know that his defiance was growing. By the time he was within a single revolution of the dais, he had regained control of his body. He broke the daemon’s hold through a perfect mimicry of obedience.
As he completed the final turn of the spiral, the Masque’s lips parted in a snarling grin. Its eyes gleamed, hate making way for the eagerness of protracted vengeance. The daemon spun on one leg, as if drawing in Crowe’s chain, and its great claw swept through the air towards him. It was coming to slice off his left arm.
Crowe leapt. The daemon knew precisely where the dance would place him, and he knew it too, before the moment came. And so he leapt back, and the claw cut only empty air, and then he lunged onto the dais.
As Crowe made his move, Antwyr changed tactics. The grating shriek became an urgent command. Use me. Use me or fail.
The temptation was familiar. It was the sword’s eternal refrain, yet it knew when to chant it for greatest effect. Crowe was a lone human attacking a daemon who was able to kill thousands at a stroke. The assault was mad, a last gesture of pointless defiance. Only the daemon contained by the blade, freed to wield its immense power at last, could counter such an abomination.
This was the insinuation of the sword. The temptation was skilful. It was convincing.
It failed, as it ever would.
Crowe fired his storm bolter into the daemon’s face at point-blank range. It was like shooting a tank. The Masque’s being was too strong to be broken open by mere physical shells, but Crowe’s sudden movement and the explosions caught it off guard. It missed its strike, and though it could never miss a step in its dance, Crowe forced the Masque into an altered movement, a graceful recoil. The daemon spun back in a counter move, and its pincer closed around Crowe’s torso. The grip was crushing. The serrated edge of the pincer dug into the artificer armour.
‘I have you,’ the monster hissed. It winced to clutch a being so holy. The light that shone from Crowe ate into the unnatural chitin of the claw. The Masque held tight, and squeezed more tightly. It was no stranger to pain and its pleasures. The burns it would suffer were a satisfying cost of its revenge.
Its triumph left it open to Crowe’s true attack.
Crowe stabbed the Masque where the pincer arm joined the waist. He wielded the sword as he always had, as he would until he breathed his last. He wielded it as a blade, and nothing else. But it was still the Black Blade of Antwyr. If it could be destroyed, the means were unknown to the Grey Knights, though they scoured the galaxy for the key to bring an end to the cursed relic. The flesh of a daemon, even one so great as the Masque, was not indestructible. Crowe struck with all his strength, and he carved a deep wound into the side of the Masque.
The daemon screamed. This pain was not welcome. This pain threatened dissolution. The Masque released him and spun in a blur, striking with its claw to decapitate him. Its speed was blinding, but it was still held by the prison of its dance.
As he had known the steps he would be forced to make, Crowe knew the limits of the Masque’s speed. It had to dance. There was a rhythm it could not break. He was free of it. He foresaw the attack before it began. He blocked the claw with the sword. The collision was tremendous, as great as the shock from the globe of Angriff Primus. The servo-motors of his armour caught, spun, and caught again. The blow knocked him back, but the Blade chopped off a third of the claw’s length, and the jerk of the impact forced the Masque to move against the music. The daemon screamed again, and a seething wound split its face and shoulder, as if it had been struck by the lash of a dark god.
They moved back and forth across the surface of the dais in a duel split between sublime and broken choreography. Now the Masque struck not to torture but to kill. Crowe had placed himself outside the influence of the music. Yet he heard it, and he read it, and he moved between the beats, against the strains of the melody. He evaded the Masque’s blows where they would have cut him in half, and he countered them when he could. He weaved in and out of the daemonic whirlwind, slashing with the blade, opening one wound and then another. He could not escape every hit. The Masque was too fast. Crowe’s blood stained the silver of his holy armour, but now the dance of the daemon sprayed ichor over the dais and beyond, onto the ruins of the orrery.
The light of purity clashed with the violet shine of corruption. The opposing fires twined and warred, a blazing aura of battle that wavered back and forth over the movements of the duellists. The flame rose to the heights of the chamber. It licked against the crystalline ceiling and walls. The palace trembled, and the furnace of the star’s heart pressed in harder, hungry to destroy the impossible intruder.
‘Enough!’ the Masque shouted. Though it did not pause in its attacks any more than it could pause in its dance, Crowe sensed its focus shift. While claw and pincer grabbed and slashed, it held its sceptre high. It spun around the axis of its raised arm, creating a still centre. ‘There is only grey in you. If you are beyond art, then you shall be silent.’
The globe of Angriff Primus ceased its revolutions. It hovered, motionless, above the sceptre. The Masque seized the lightning from the planet. The daemon’s control over the eldritch sorcery that had shaped the world was as profound as the planet’s core. The thunder of the music grew as the energy poured into the sceptre. The song mounted a crescendo towards Crowe’s finale.
Crowe took a step back. He turned, braced, and let the pincer crush his flank. The blow cracked open his fused ribs. The pain was without meaning. The daemonic music governed all. He let the hit from the pincer move him further to the right, one step outside the Masque’s line of sight. The daemon turned its head to follow him, the sceptre blinding with the energy of annihilation.
But the blow could not fall until the rhythm announced its moment had come. And Crowe knew the music. He foresaw the beat that would mark his death. He struck first.
Clutching the hilt with both hands, Crowe slashed sideways with the Black Blade. He hit the neck of the Masque as the sceptre descended. He struck at a moment as precise as the daemonic song. He struck a lethal blow against the rhythm. The sword cut halfway through the Masque’s head. It hung to the side, mouth working in silenced rage. The blow of the sceptre could not fall. Crowe severed the rhythm, and the energy consumed itself.
The Masque danced on, now with even greater violence, and frenzy. It whirled faster and faster. The sceptre seemed to explode, unleashing all its energy at once. The blast was slow, measurable in seconds. It reached as far as the ends of the daemon’s limbs, and then it withdrew. The daemon’s form pulled in with it. Faster, faster, the daemon became a vortex of movement, narrower and narrower, the foul lightning withdrawing, becoming denser, darker, until it imploded. The daemon vanished, and the sudden collapse of warp flesh into the immaterium triggered a blast wave that hurled Crowe halfway across the chamber. The daemon’s scream of despair lingered past its disappearance. The echo bounced like a trapped beast from wall to wall, and when it, too, faded, the music at last was truly gone.
Yet there was still thunder. It was an insistent, climbing, groaning roar. It came from everywhere. Tremors of escalating violence shook the chamber.
Then the translucent walls began to crack.
In the violence of its discharges, the warp lightning destroyed more of the tower. Seconds after the first asteroid strike on Angriff Primus, a blast took out a section of the tower beneath the upper chamber. A thin spine of the unnatural stone held up the broken dome. The floor swayed. There were seconds before the fall, and no way down.
Styer thought of the squad yet fighting below and cursed. There was no way to reach them. Even if there was, time had run out. The sky was falling on Algidus. His squad had done its duty.
There is always more, he thought with frustration. The battle never cleanly won; the duty never clearly fulfilled.
His duty now, though, was clear, as the unleashed storm in the tower raged with destruction. ‘Our work is done,’ he told his battle-brothers. ‘Engage your teleporters.’
Styer triggered his device. There was a flash of energy, and with it came dissolution, the moment of unbeing, and then the piercing agony of rebirth. The chamber vanished, and the teleportarium of the Tyndaris appeared. The columns of the circular hall glowed in the light of the central power block, still crackling white.
Styer marched off the teleportation pad in the Tyndaris while wisps of energy ran up and down his armour. Gared kept pace with him despite his wounds. The Librarian’s breath rattled, and his eyes were sunken. He looked diminished, as if he had left half his life force in that tower. But he moved quickly, his need to reach the bridge as great as Styer’s.
Saalfrank reported over the vox as they made their way up the decks. ‘The Catharsis is destroyed,’ he said. ‘The evacuation of our forces from Angriff Primus is underway. The Malleus Maleficarum and both Stormravens are aboard.’
The shipmaster’s list of good news was ominous in the silences. Styer exchanged a look with Gared. He did not ask about the other squads. If they had made it back to the ship, Saalfrank would have said.
Styer’s misgivings were confirmed by what he found on the bridge. Furia and Setheno were there, but of the Purifiers, only Sendrax was present. The Knight of the Flame was supported by an iron medicae framework. He was in his armour, refusing treatment, but his arms hung limp. When he turned his head at Styer’s arrival, the rest of his body remained motionless. His face was pale with anger. Styer did not ask how the rest of his squad fared. He had his answer.
The oculus displayed Angriff Primus’ funeral pyre. The atmosphere was opaque, thick with the dust kicked up by the asteroid impacts. The cloud cover glowed with the fires of recent hits, and the hail of fragments continued. Lightning reached up from the position of Algidus, lashing in mad anger across the void.
‘No word from the castellan?’ Styer asked.
Saalfrank shook his head.
‘Nothing from his squad?’
‘Vox contact is difficult with forces still inside the palace,’ said Soussanin. ‘We have had some contact. They fight on, though in the absence of Castellan Crowe and Knight of the Flame Drake.’
‘I see.’ Drake had the squad’s sole teleporter. Unlike the Terminators, the Purifiers’ power armour did not have the capacity to carry the homers. Without Drake, their only chance of evacuation was to leave the palace. If both gunships were aboard, they had refused that option.
‘We cannot put off the decision indefinitely,’ Sendrax rasped.
‘Which decision?’
‘Orbital bombardment of the palace. We have broken the workings of the daemonic engine, but the source of the evil remains. If the castellan has fallen, we may put an end to the enemy.’
‘We do not know he is dead.’
‘There is no reason to think he is still alive.’
The lightning stopped.
‘Isn’t there?’ Setheno asked.
And now the great mourning of the daemons began.
A hurricane wind howled into the gate, and the flaring energy disappeared. The gate went dark. It was only a pit in the bottom of the floor now. It led nowhere.
The daemons halted in their rush. They cried out, an immense choir of grief, dismay, and fury.
‘Well done, castellan,’ said Gorvenal.
‘The way is closed,’ Venrik said. ‘How will they return?’
‘Drake has the teleporter.’
‘Can it work from where they are?’
‘We must have faith that it will, brother.’
Tremors radiated outwards from the former gate. The floor vibrated as if some immense force were rising from below. Soon the walls were swaying. There was a grace to their back-and-forth movement. At first Gorvenal thought the motion was an illusion caused by the general shaking. The stone could not move in this way. Then he saw that the walls moved in time to the mourning song of the daemons. The rising force was a physical manifestation of the emotion of defeat.
The grief became anger. The walls still swayed, now with the rage of the abominations.
Carac laughed. ‘The question of our situation remains, brothers,’ he said. He sounded eager rather than bitter. Carac took active pleasure from battle. If the end had come for them, then a struggle to cap a grand victory was no tragedy.
Gorvenal looked up the staircase to the level floor. Thousands of daemons stood between the squad and the palace gate. The way forward was clear. The destination was not.
The daemons came for them again, keening the song of mourning and of vengeance. In the higher pitches of the writhing melody, Gorvenal thought he detected a sound familiar from human hymns. It was a plea for expiation. The abominations were crying out repentance to their dark god.
The perversion of true faith was disgusting. Gorvenal raised his Nemesis warding staff, and it blazed with his righteous anger. ‘Brothers,’­ he called, ‘exterminate them all!’
‘We are the hammer!’ they all shouted. In a tight formation, they charged up the stairs and into the sea of monsters.
They had fought their way halfway up to the floor when the movement of the walls grew suddenly more violent. From the direction of the blasted doors of the palace came a noise like the shifting of two mountains, and then there was an immense crack of stone masses coming together.
‘What was that?’ Destrian asked.
‘That,’ said Gorvenal, ‘was this corrupt palace sealing the breach.’
The walls split. Translucence frosted. The heat spiked. The first brilliant filaments of the sun’s matter broke through into the palace.
Crowe staggered across the wreckage of the orrery, calling for Drake. He had heard the Knight of the Flame’s last cry. He had not seen his brother’s fate.
Footing was treacherous. The chamber did more than shake. It contracted as pressure on it increased. Stone bunched like flesh, turned brittle, and exploded into powder. Geysers of crystal fragments, vicious shrapnel, burst from the walls and floor. Dust and fire filled the room as the Masque’s bubble within the star failed. Crowe could see only a few yards in any direction.
‘Drake!’ he called again, his vox-casters at maximum. There was no answer.
He reached the location where he had last seen his brother. The Knight of the Flame’s power armour, thrice-blessed and anointed with holy oils, had been torn open. It lay in fragments, scattered across a wide area of the floor. There was no body. Crowe heaved the hemisphere of a broken planet to the side. He found Drake’s gauntlets, but not his corpse. His sword, too, was missing.
‘You wield it still, brother,’ Crowe whispered. ‘No mere daemon could break so strong a hold as yours.’ He raised his voice. ‘I will find you, brother!’ he shouted. ‘This is my vow!’
The only answer he received was the accelerating collapse of the room. The star raged, and the cracks in the walls became fissures. The crystalline palace was moments away from its dissolution.
Crowe’s auto-senses were flashing red. The temperature in the chamber was already several hundred degrees.
He turned towards the doorway, then stopped. He had seconds left with nowhere to go. He was in the centre of an architectural spiral with no exit.
A poor death, said the sword. And I will be free. The scrape of the voice was satisfied, pleased to contemplate Crowe’s ultimate failure. You defeated the daemon, it said, yet you betray your first charge, warden. You will die, and in dying loose me upon your precious Imperium. Let your final thoughts be the measureless oceans of blood I will spill.
Crowe looked back at the armour. There was one possibility. The pieces were large. Drake’s helmet was intact. So was his power pack. Crowe moved through the wreckage near the power pack. Beneath a huge orrery cog, he found Drake’s teleporter.
I will find you, brother, he promised again.
With a splintering crash that turned into the wail of captive souls, the walls collapsed. Crowe activated the teleporter. In the last moment before he ceased to exist inside the heart of a star, Crowe saw more than the blinding might of the sun break through the palace. He saw the collapsing matter of the daemon’s creation turn into something dense and sharp. The art of the Masque would outlive its creator’s presence in the materium long enough for an act of murder so great, it was art of the most grandiose and cruel kind. The palace was compressing itself into a dagger that would assassinate a star.
‘Nine minutes!’ Crowe voxed the bridge as he ran from the Tyndaris’ teleporter pad. ‘We have nine minutes to make the jump to the immaterium.’ He did not know what the fused, eldritch palace would do to Angriff. But he could guess. Angriff Primus was nine light minutes away from the star. When the sun died, it would take that long for the effects of its death to reach the Tyndaris. ‘Are all our forces aboard?’ Crowe asked.
‘All except the squad of Knight of the Flame Drake,’ said Saalfrank.
Crowe winced. ‘Where are my brothers?’
‘Still inside the palace.’
‘Are you in contact with them?’
‘We are.’
‘Link me to them.’
A moment later, Gorvenal’s voice arrived from the surface of the planet. ‘We give thanks to the Emperor that you still live, castellan,’ he said. He spoke over the sounds of battle and the shrieks of daemons.
‘What is your situation?’ Crowe asked.
‘The entrance to the palace is gone. We are sealed inside the walls.’
Crowe stopped walking. The deck vibrated as Saalfrank pushed the Tyndaris’ engines through an emergency acceleration. There was no decision to be made about the squad’s fate. Everyone on the ship knew it. But the sensation of the ship pulling away from Angriff Primus felt like betrayal.
He was standing before a tapestry that depicted the last stand of Tristis V, when two strike forces of the First Brotherhood gave their lives purging the planet of the forces commanded by the Lord of Change Ix’thar’ganix. The image of noble sacrifice towered above him. That he should see this image at this moment was an unmistakable sign. It drove home the fact that there was nothing he could do. It was no comfort. It was merely a reminder of the two sorrowful duties of the moment. It was the squad’s to be sacrificed. It was his to accept his brothers’ doom.
‘Destruction is about to overtake the Angriff system,’ Crowe told Gorvenal.
‘I understand, castellan. Is the enemy defeated?’
‘It is. We have triumphed, brother.’
‘Then I am grateful. We shall fight here to the last. The light of the Emperor burns the abominations in their very stronghold.’
‘You are His right hand,’ said Crowe. ‘Fight well.’
‘We shall. The Emperor protects.’
‘The Emperor protects.’
Then there was nothing more to say, and there was nothing more Crowe could do. The fate of the Purifiers on Angriff Primus and of the Tyndaris were no longer in his hands.
When he reached the bridge, the primary display was trained on the receding planet and the distant star. The vibration in the deck was violent. The engines strained to their limit, though the strike cruiser seemed to be moving with glacial slowness. The final minutes were slipping away too fast.
Styer, Furia and Setheno stood next to Saalfrank’s command throne. Crowe remained at the back of the strategium, isolating himself and the sword from the others, but granting himself the license to be present long enough to see fate decided. The trio looked back and nodded to him. Alone on the starboard side of the strategium, Sendrax did not respond to his arrival.
No one spoke. Crowe did not ask Saalfrank whether they would make the jump in time. All that remained to do was to bear witness.
Crowe bore witness to Angriff going supernova. At first the star flickered, the moment of its death a phenomenon utterly removed from the materium. The flicker was the stain of the empyrean. After the flicker came the blaze. Angriff shone more brightly than it ever had before. It seared the void with the brilliance of its pain.
The star exploded. Its outer layers expanded across the system, a sphere of absolute annihilation, swallowing the inner planets, erasing all trace of their existence, and of the hundreds of billions of souls who had lived upon them. Civilisations that had endured for thirty thousand years only to be destroyed by the dance of the Masque now vanished even from memory.
A monster worse than all-consuming fire raced ahead of the stellar material. It was a warp shockwave. It distorted space. It made the void bleed. The colours of the immaterium, screaming corruption and madness engulfed the system, one final cry of power from the daemonic engine. It arrived to consume every psychic life force in the system.
The warp wave overtook Angriff Primus. Crowe saw the first moments of the planet’s final damnation, its transformation into a burning nightmare.
Then the Tyndaris made its jump, leaving only flame behind.