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Castellan – Extract

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Chapter One

The End

The causeway of flesh burned before Garran Crowe’s eyes.

The Stormravens Purgation’s Sword and the Harrower strafed the end where it met the island of Hive Skoria. Washed by the turgid waves of the ocean of sludge, soaked in the effluent of tens of thousands of years of industry, the bodies ignited. The conflagration spread wide. A wall of flame cut Skoria off from the mainland. The fire rose and fell with the waves. Noxious smoke billowed thousands of feet into the air. Skoria was a phantom, the dark mass of the hive appearing and disappearing behind the firestorm. The last hive of Sandava III to be spared the daemonic incursion was unbowed. The channel between it and the mainland was a flaming moat. The towers looked down on the end of a war.

‘This is the final stand of the abominations!’ Crowe voxed to his strike force. ‘We have them at bay!’

This is no victory! the Black Blade of Antwyr snarled in answer. The voice in Castellan Garran Crowe’s head lashed out in rage. You struggle in futility, it warned. Your hope burns.

Crowe heard desperation in the sword’s raving. He heard impotence. It was Antwyr that had failed on Sandava III. It was Antwyr’s hope that burned. It had failed to break Crowe with despair. He was renewed. At the head of two squads of Purifiers, he was closing in on the shore of the mainland, and he was closing in on the end of the war. Antwyr shrieked, and Crowe plunged it into the body of the fiend of Slaanesh that charged him, gabbling its desperation to pummel with its hooves. Its tail stinger struck over his shoulder at his spine. It failed. The iron halo mounted above his power pack generated a gravitic conversion field that turned the blow away. The stinger shattered against artificer armour whose sanctity had been confirmed by a thousand battlefields. Crowe twisted the blade in the thorax of the fiend. The daemon stumbled forward, impaling itself on the indestructible metal, and falling into the terrible light of Crowe’s purity. His righteous anger matched the wrath of the blade. Where he walked, the sombre day of Sandava III blazed with harsh, merciless holiness. The daemon’s shape tore open from the thorax, peeling back, disintegrating into ash from the inside out. It issued a last, gargling scream, and then Crowe marched through the swirling cloud of its remains, already swinging the sword to decapitate two more fiends that lunged for him, jaws agape.

The squads marched behind him in two close formations. There was a space between him and the two Knights of the Flame at their heads. There was room for daemons to get between the castellan and his battle-brothers, if they were reckless enough to make the attempt. The few who tried did not fight long. The gap was a needed distance. It diminished the voice of the Blade of Antwyr just enough for the other Purifiers to push its taunting and insinuations into the background and focus on the extermination of the daemons. The war on Sandava III had been a hard one, and a long time for the other Grey Knights to be exposed to Crowe’s presence. The burden of Antwyr was his to bear, and never set aside. His grip, the surest prison of all, must forever be on the hilt of the corrupt, corrupting, indestructible relic. By the Emperor’s will, his being had been shaped for this task. His brothers were strong in faith and sinew, yet the sword was a spiritual poison, its corrosion so powerful it could erode even their defences.

There was another gap between the Purifiers and the strike force from the First Brotherhood. Two Terminator squads had taken part in the salvation of Sandava III. Beside them rumbled the Land Raider Crusader Malleus Maleficarum. Heroes beyond taint, a dozen warriors now who had exterminated a world-wide plague of daemons, they still needed to keep their distance from Crowe.

‘You seem renewed, brother castellan,’ said Drake, a Knight of the Flame, the voice of fellowship reaching across the physical distance between his squad and Crowe. He used a private channel, for Crowe’s ears alone.

‘I am, brother.’

‘That was no simple victory against the daemon prince at Labos, then.’

‘It was not.’

Hive Labos, a thousand miles west on the mainland, had been the centre of the incursion. There Crowe had destroyed Varangallax. The transformed keep had fallen, the guiding hand of the incursion was no more, and the purification of Sandava III had become a matter of time. Crowe’s struggle against Varangallax had also been a personal one. ‘The enemy sought to make me despair,’ he said to Drake. ‘It confronted me with the echoes of our losses on Sandava II.’

‘Old ghosts.’

‘Indeed.’

His spirit had been drained by the decades of being besieged by Antwyr. Varangallax, a monster born from the tragedy of Sandava II, had tried to break him down with visions of the futility of all his struggles. It had failed.

‘My burden is my honour,’ Crowe said. ‘I welcome it.’ He welcomed Drake’s perception, too. It was a reminder of brotherhood that transcended the isolation that was Crowe’s lot. It would make easier the return of that isolation, at the end of this battle.

In a final push to taint the world beyond salvation, the daemons were attempting to reach Skoria. From the ruins of Hive Conatum, less than fifty miles south of the narrows between the mainland and the island of Skoria, the abominations had dragged the bodies of millions of slaughtered civilians. They had thrown the bodies into the viscous sea, and so had created shoals of corpses, building flesh upon flesh until the causeway advanced, a finger of damnation, across the waters.

They had not reached the other shore. The Stormravens were destroying the causeway, filling the air over the channel with the clouds of human debris. They strafed back and forth over the flames, knocking the furthest point of the causeway back and back away from Skoria. Crowe brought up the Purifiers and the strike force of warriors from the First Brotherhood behind the final daemonic horde, closing from the south and west. To the north of the corridor from Conatum to Skoria, the land shot up in jagged, heavily mined peaks. To the south-east, a fault line began as a mile-wide canyon before Conatum, and as the land dipped, became a talon-like inlet a hundred miles long. The daemons’ advance had stalled, and now they were trapped. Ahead, they faced an impassable ocean of fire. At their backs came something worse. A relentless force of silvered grey cut them down.

This is something more meaningful than victory, Crowe thought. It is a cleansing.

He deliberately turned from the personal satisfaction of the war’s end. But then Sendrax shouted over the ululations of the daemons, and there was no escaping the personal. The war had been aimed at him, but it had dragged in his comrades in destiny. ‘The day of our long vengeance is almost complete, brothers!’ the Knight of the Flame announced, his voice booming from his helm’s vox-casters. ‘We shall lay the ghosts of Sandava to final rest!’

The other Purifiers of Sendrax’s squad cheered. Enough of them were survivors of Sandava II to feel the rush of final justice. Crowe bit his tongue rather than impose solemnity until the last daemon was hurled back to immaterium. He knew why Sendrax exulted. He felt the same urge, though he could no longer celebrate. This moment had been long in coming. It had been due for more than a century. He had been a Knight of the Flame when, led by Castellan Gavallan, the Grey Knights had landed on Sandava II. The daemonic work had begun there, with the death of Gavallan and, at the last, the Exterminatus of that world. A web had been cast for him then, one that had closed here on Sandava III, with the same atrocities, and the daemon prince created by the war on Sandava II attacking Crowe when the decades of ceaseless spiritual and mental attacks by the Blade had weakened him, made him vulnerable to the claws of the past and to the illusion of futility. He was the target, but his brothers who had been with him on Sandava II, and suffered the same losses, had felt the impact of the attack, too.

On this day, final justice was rendered. For Gavallan and the dead battle-brothers, and for two worlds of the Imperium sacrificed to the dovetailing machinations of Antwyr and abominations of the Dark Prince, the debt was being paid. The daemonic works were ashes now. Hive Skoria would be spared.

For Crowe, there was satisfaction, but no triumph. The cost was too great, and his war had no pause. The Blade was always there, always in his head, grinding and insinuating, whispering and screaming. It was tireless, sleepless, merciless – a battering ram at the gates of his will.

This is no victory, the sword said again as he swung it with relentless rhythm.

Sensing defeat, summoned by the presence of the daemon blade, the abominations surged at him, shrieking their hate. They ran straight into the burning halo of psychic force that surrounded Crowe. It was the light of a purity of faith so absolute, so unwavering, it lit up the battlefield near the castellan, and the abominations burned at its touch. They staggered back, flesh smouldering, and Crowe cut them down with the sword that drew them. If this was not a victory, it was something very close to one. He would accept it.

Drake voxed, ‘Some ghosts will never lie easy. But I am glad to give them justice.’ He was more sober in his assessment than Sendrax. He always was.

‘The success of our mission is sufficient,’ Crowe said. The incursion was on the point of being defeated. He should not expect more. ‘But I agree with you, brother. I, too, am glad.’

The rocky terrain sloped down, and Crowe could see over the daemonic horde to the burning shore. Less than a mile separated the Grey Knights from the sea. The abominations had run out as far as they could onto the shrinking causeway. They were writhing silhouettes in the flames. Their forms reached out in frustration and wrath for the hive that was now denied them. Some of the daemons that congregated on the shore pushed forward, their rush toppling their foul kin into the burning sea. Others turned back, hurling themselves at the Grey Knights. Crowe measured the desperation of the abominations in their anger. Creatures of sensation and vice, they had, until recently, howled with pleasure as they rampaged across the planet. Their songs had changed since the fall of Varangallax. The music of damnation had become shaded with bitterness, then with panic. Now there were only screams. The daemons charged into a storm of fire from the legionaries. The Malleus Maleficarum came up on the left flank of the Grey Knights’ strike force. Its hurricane bolters shredded landscape and daemon alike. The sweep of its fire carved arcing swathes ahead of Crowe. The sound of hundreds of mass-reactive bolt shells exploding in near simultaneity smashed the final traces of the daemons’ song. This was a different music, brutal in its rhythm and regularity. It was a martial drumming. It split the air with fury and with judgement. The horde boiled with confusion on either side of the swathes. Confusion and dismay robbed the daemons of what momentum they had.

The vanguard of destruction came in the form of incineration by fire and las, and physical annihilation by shell. But the truest anger of faith came when the Purifiers and the First Brotherhood fought in close quarters. The grey day flashed with the incandescent blue lightning of Nemesis force weapons. The runes and power fields of halberds, swords, axes and hammers turned daemons into less than ash. The Stormravens were attacking closer to the shore as they cut down the causeway. The fire on the ocean seemed to roar higher, the peaks of the flames reaching up into their smoke, clawing the unseen sky. This final cremation of the unclean was at hand.

Crowe beheld the panorama of victory, and in that moment the Blade of Antwyr attacked him with a sickening blast of triumph. You look on illusion. This is nothing. The ashes are yours. Defeat is coming. Submit or perish with all you have fought for. Look, warden! Look for the ending! Look for its coming!

The sword’s hiss chased itself around Crowe’s skull, slicing at his thoughts. He had stood upon the ramparts of his soul, his vigil unflagging, ever since he had reclaimed the Blade after the death of Gavallan and made himself its jailer and its prisoner. He did not blink. He did not let the sword stagger his assault and drop his guard. Antwyr’s shout was so fierce, some of the Purifiers behind him grunted in pain as the bow wave of the assault washed over them.

There could never be a response to Antwyr’s harangues. To engage in dialogue with the daemon would be to invite corruption. Yet Crowe listened, always alert, always parsing the sword’s words, watching for a weakness it might let slip, or a truth that might escape sideways. Antwyr was gleeful, triumphant. Its anger had vanished.

Danger was coming.

Still marching forward, still rending and burning abominations, Crowe voxed the pilot of the Stormraven Harrower. ‘Brother Berinon,’ he said, ‘is a new enemy approaching our position?’

‘There is no sign of any within line of sight,’ Berinon answered. ‘Auspex is clear.’

Berinon sounded displeased with his own report. Crowe wasn’t satisfied either. He voxed the Sacrum Finem, and received the same response from Shipmaster Gura. She was ancient by mortal standards, barely alive except when the mechadendrites of her command throne made her one with her beloved ship. Crowe had absolute trust in her acumen. ‘There is no enemy closing in,’ she said. She sounded as definite and as unhappy with her pronouncement as Berinon had with his.

There was an enemy. There had to be. He felt a psychic build-up. There was a storm about to break. Gura was no psyker, and she could sense it, too. It was that strong.

‘Brother-castellan,’ Drake voxed. ‘Something is going awry.’

‘I know it,’ Crowe said. But he couldn’t identify the danger. It was too vague, and so powerful that it seemed to be emanating from everywhere.

A fiend lunged at Crowe and he impaled it through its open jaws. The Blade came out through the back of its skull. The fiend went limp, its mass dragging down on Crowe’s arm as it sagged. He pulled the sword free and Antwyr said, That was your last blow in your broken dream. Now you will awaken.

‘Be warned,’ Crowe voxed the strike force. ‘A new attack is imminent.’ He scanned all sides in the time it took to take another step forward. He saw the diminishing numbers of daemons, the blasted landscape and the flames upon the waves. There was nothing else out there.

He raised the sword to strike again.

Antwyr said, Oh. A single syllable, so different from any of its ravings and curses. It was an expression of wonder, and of a delight so great it stopped the flow of words.

A great silence fell. The daemons ceased their attacks. As one, they turned away from the Grey Knights. They looked up, staring into smoke and unbroken grey clouds. The legionaries advanced still. Heavy weapons fire cut into the motionless horde. Daemonic forms vanished, burning and disintegrating. Those hit by the barrage did not react as they were destroyed. Nor did those standing near. The ranks of abominations had become a congregation awaiting the manifestation of the divine.

The silence lasted no more than a second, but it was huge. It felt to Crowe as if the entire materium were holding its breath. The instinct was too strong, and he paused. He looked up, too, in time to see the clouds ripped away.

The skies over Skoria were suddenly clear. For a fraction of a second, they were a blue that had not been seen on the world for more than three thousand years. Then blue darkened to violet and then to black. The effect was vertiginous. The firmament seemed to fall away, as if an abyss had opened up and Sandava III was about to plummet into its depths. Then the tearing began. The rip slashed through the blackness, a terrible wound opened like flesh being pulled asunder. The blood that rushed from the tear was the monstrous light of the warp. The energy was all colours and it was none. It was a shriek from beyond and beneath the spectrum of sanity. It was the bright, stabbing shades of nightmare and madness, of pain and foul joy, of the worst of war and of bloody, tormenting fate. It was the death of reality, and of a galaxy’s fragile, battered, fraying dream.

Antwyr had spoken the truth. Hope burned.

The tear stretched from horizon to horizon, from east to west across the entire celestial sphere. It opened wider, roaring, becoming maw as well as wound. Now the silence was over, and the surviving daemons were singing. It was a hymn of praise, of triumph, of mockery, and of pleasure that was the absolute disorder of the senses. There were barely a hundred of them left. In a matter of minutes, the war would be over. They could not stand against the Grey Knights. But now a far greater ending was at hand.

Antwyr laughed. You had no victory, said the Blade. This. This is victory. Now is the devouring. Now is the storm of culmination.

In the midst of the convulsing sky was a sharp point of silver light, a single glint of hard reality in the spreading holocaust. It was the Sacrum Finem, holding its position. Gura had been moving the strike cruiser to follow the course of the war, faithfully keeping it in anchor above the main body of troops, ready to drop more heavy support or begin an orbital bombardment. It had been invisible through Sandava III’s murky atmosphere, yet Crowe had felt its presence, and known its strength was ever at hand.

The sight of it now felt like an invitation to mourning.

‘Castellan,’ Gura voxed. ‘We cannot hold.’ Her transmission stuttered with bursts of energy. Her voice rasped with pain as well as age.

‘Take the ship out of the system,’ Crowe ordered. ‘Leave at once. Make the jump and report to Titan.’ Even as he spoke, his command felt redundant. It was impossible to tell how huge the rift was. A terrible intuition whispered that Titan already knew. The triumph of the Blade and the daemons was enormous. He was witnessing something far worse than a localised warp storm.

‘We cannot leave,’ Gura said. Before Crowe could condemn her for a misguided show of loyalty, she spoke again, and her despair was the most profound he had ever heard a mortal express, ‘There is nowhere to go. Castellan, the Astronomican has gone out.’

Crowe’s spirit recoiled, refusing to accept the truth of such an appalling sentence. The light of the Emperor could not have been extinguished. Without it to light the road through the warp, how could the Imperium survive? And if the Astronomican had been extinguished, did Terra yet exist?

Is the Emperor dead?

The thought was a horror beyond blasphemy. He banished it from his consciousness the moment it took form. What he could not banish was a sense of loss that descended upon him. It was a response to a sudden, immense absence, and he knew that what Gura said was true.

In its place a different light was coming to embrace Sandava III now. It would not guide. It would give no hope. It could only devour.

The rift was wider yet. It covered a third of the sky. The fire of the ocean was a pale shadow of the holocaust of burning reality. Roiling, screaming, the maw of horror drew closer. Coronal energy blasts arced outwards, and the glint of the Sacrum Finem grew brighter. The spark winked in and out. Crowe thought he saw movement.

‘We have lost power and steering,’ Gura voxed. ‘We are going down. I am launching everything I can to your coordinates. Perhaps some of it will reach you. Castellan, forgive me, for I have failed my charge.’

‘You have not failed, Shipmaster Gura. The blow that has fallen is beyond us all.’

‘Then I will fly to the Emperor’s side.’ Gura’s prayer was desperate. Her words were pious. Her voice sounded terrified. If the Astronomican had failed, what of Terra?

‘Castellan,’ Gura continued, ‘will there be–’

An explosion cut off her plea. Crowe heard the roar of destruction on the bridge of the Sacrum Finem, then silence. The vox feed ended. The spark that was the strike cruiser was brighter still, and then it became a shape. Pushed out of the sky by the bellowing cry of the immaterium, the ship plunged toward the surface of Sandava III. It had been hit hard, and it spun as it fell. It whirled, the movement a blur, far too fast to maintain structural integrity. The force of the spin tore the ship in two. The aft section was hurled out in a long arc over the ocean. The bow streaked downwards, a broken spear. It came down a few miles to the south. Shattered in its lines and in its purpose, it left a trail of fire and smoke in its wake. There was majesty still in its shape. It was huge, towering over the landscape even at the moment that it struck the earth. The statuary on the upper hull was just visible. In the last second of its fall, the ship was a ruined column, a monument to its own desolation. It was tragedy given form.

Then it hit, a hammer striking the surface of Sandava III. The earth trembled. The tremors threw daemons and Grey Knights to the ground. Crowe kept his feet as the world around him crumbled. The mountain peaks shook. Rockslides cascaded down the slopes. A storm of dust and rock shrapnel rose from the base of the fallen monument. The cloud enveloped the lower half of the column. The bow drove deeper into the ground. Two massive fissures ran up its length, splitting the ship like an axe striking a log. The wreckage leaned away from itself. It slumped to the left and right, a ruined city fallen from the skies.

The aftershocks of the crash still thrummed through the rock when the stern fell into the ocean. The ruptured engines exploded a moment before impact. A plasma sun blinded the land. The photo lenses of Crowe’s helm slammed shutters down against the killing light. When they lifted, the new fire was still brighter than the blaze from the rift. The shockwave came next. Braced, his feet planted on the agonised earth, Crowe leaned forward into the blow. ‘Stand and hold, brothers!’ he shouted into the vox. ‘There is no wind that can break us!’

The blast swept over the ocean. It snuffed out the flames as it passed, while new ignitions followed in its wake. It shredded chanting daemons. Crowe roared his defiance as a wall of fury hit him, but he did not fall. The wind came, a hurricane scream tearing banners to ribbons. Crowe took a step forward into the wind. He could barely see. He was moving against a force that sought to lift him and his battle-brothers from the ground. He refused to fall. He brought the sword down again, striking against the wind as much as the fiend he cut in half. Behind him, the strike force followed. Their ship was fallen. The galaxy bled. Yet the Grey Knights marched. There was no end to duty, and no end to faith.

Even when the end came for everything else.

The rift was the entire sky now. The howl of the warp reached the atmosphere of Sandava III. The maw was on the point of swallowing the world.

At the horizon, where the fireball of the Sacrum Finem’s pyre was turning a sullen red, a mountain was forming. All the ocean blazed now, and the huge displacement of the waters advanced. A hundred feet high, the burning wave raced towards the shore.

And the rift of madness engulfed Sandava III.

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For Margaux, in the joy of what we have made.

A Black Library Publication

Published in Great Britain in 2018 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by David Alvarez.

Castellan © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2017. Castellan, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
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ISBN: 978-1-78572-841-9

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