SAINT THECLA
The fortified Cathedral of Saint Thecla the Unyielding was a massive block of ferrocrete. In its brutal strength it was, Stern thought, a fitting tribute to the warrior whose name it bore. It rose from the peak of its hill like a basalt extrusion. It was spireless, and its walls were five hundred feet high, sheer and black, their blank faces broken only by turret holes. It was half again as long as it was wide, and the sole entrance was in the eastern side. The façade here was rounded, and dominated by an immense sculpture of the God-Emperor’s winged skull. The east face was the prow of a blunt, battering ship, which was ready to descend from its heights and crush the apostate and the heretic beneath its dread weight. Demolisher cannons on the parapet aimed their judgement at every quadrant. The Cathedral of Saint Thecla was the shock maul of faith. It demanded everything of the worshipper, and granted nothing. In a galaxy without mercy, Saint Thecla herself had taught, the true servant of the Emperor must also be without pity, impervious to human frailty. A soul must be of iron, or be destroyed.
Though it seemed the entire population of Severitas had succumbed to heresy, the cathedral had not been defaced. Its great doors had remained shut. It was as if it had risen above the cauldron of apostasy that raged in the streets below its hill. The heretical tides had rushed around it, but since it had been abandoned, the fallen hordes had chosen to ignore its existence. With no need to attack, they had avoided the sacred ground.
The situation changed as soon as the commandry of the Order of Our Martyred Lady entered the cathedral, but by then it was too late. The Battle Sisters had their fortress.
The heretics should have destroyed the strongpoint when they had the chance. Stern gave thanks they had not. She thought, too, that perhaps they had never been able to, that the cathedral had been preserved by the Power they had betrayed.
‘Yours is the will that protects, God-Emperor,’ she murmured, kneeling in prayer. ‘Yours is the will that commands.’
She had taken a prayer cell in the crypt of the cathedral. There were barrack cloisters off the nave, and the vestry was a command post with a grav-lift running directly to the battlements. Though Macrina had made no attempt to imprison her, recognising the futility of doing so, Stern had respected her suspicions by removing herself from the centre of things as much as possible. In the cell, she was isolated. No Sister of Battle need see or hear her unless they chose to. She would not impose her presence on planning sessions. She trusted Dagover far enough to presume he would keep her informed.
If she was to earn her place back into the grace of her sisters, it would be on their terms. She would do what had to be done to save them, just as she would do what had to be done to save the Imperium from the doom that haunted her visions.
The sound of guns reached down into the crypt. Muffled by walls twenty feet thick, it was almost gentle, a deep heartbeat. Another attack had begun. She would be needed again soon, but she would not dishonour her sisters by racing to the battlefield prematurely. They knew how to fight a war, and how to repel a siege. They would summon her when it was time, as they had three times already since they had taken possession of the cathedral.
She would practise humility, and she would wait.
Their terms. Her return must be on their terms, or it would fail.
While she waited, she meditated, and she prayed for guidance.
And all the while, the visions were growing stronger. With increasing frequency, it took a conscious effort to hold them back, to stop them from overwhelming her, a black wave of freezing nothing swamping her consciousness. The horror was coming closer.
‘How must I fight it? Where will it come from? All my being is at the service of your will. Guide me, God-Emperor. Guide me to the field of this battle.’
Wheresoever she was commanded to go, though, for now she was trapped on Severitas. After so many years of travelling the webway with Kyganil, it was a jolt to have to adjust to no longer being able to depart any world at a moment’s notice. The evil on this world had to be defeated first. By any means possible.
‘You have sent me here for a reason, Father of Mankind. I accept the task you have placed before me. I will not fail. This is my vow. In your name and by my blood, my sisters and I will purge Severitas of the heretic.’
If they let her.
She looked up at the sound of footsteps approaching her cell. She rose to greet her visitor. She expected Dagover. He had been the only one to come to her so far. Macrina still refused any but the briefest of direct communications with her. If Dagover resented being made the go-between, he did not show it. He seemed amused.
The visitor came into view in the dim light of the crypt. It was not Dagover. It was one of the Dominions, Klavia. Her short crop of white hair stood out even against the ghostly pallor of her complexion. An angry red scar ran down the side of her neck. She was solidly built, as if born to carry a storm bolter. Stern had noticed her at the first encounter with the commandry. Klavia was one of the few who had not looked at her with hatred.
‘Pardon the interruption, Sister Superior,’ Klavia said.
The courtesy almost snapped Stern’s heart in two. ‘No apology is necessary, Dominion. I am honoured by your visit.’
‘I…’ Klavia grimaced. ‘There is something I must tell you, sister. I have been watching you at your devotions.’
Stern nodded slowly. ‘I have been aware of someone there. More than once.’
‘You said nothing.’
‘If this person wished to speak with me, then they would. If not, they would not. I am glad you chose the former.’
‘I do want to be clear. I was not spying on you. Or at least, that was not my intent.’
‘I did not think it was.’ Stern wondered if she should smile reassuringly. She realised she did not know how. She was long out of practice with that skill. She might look like Dagover. Stern contented herself with keeping her voice soft. ‘Is there something I can do for you, sister?’ she asked.
‘I wanted you to know that you are not alone,’ Klavia said. ‘I believe in you. I am not the only one.’
Stern closed her eyes for a moment in gratitude. Then, concerned about what Dagover was trying to do, she said, ‘When you say that you believe… not, I hope, that I am a saint.’
‘I believe you are not a heretic,’ said Klavia. ‘I believe that you follow the Emperor’s will.’
That was not exactly a denial, but it would do. ‘Thank you, sister,’ Stern said. ‘Thank you. To follow the task the Emperor sets for me is my one desire.’ She sighed. ‘It can be so very hard to know His will.’
‘Do you have visions?’
‘I do. Too often now they are a burden more than a guide.’
‘Then how do you know His will?’
‘I am not always sure of it. A sense, sometimes. An intuition. Sometimes I must deduce it when the visions do not clearly point the way. Especially now.’
‘Why now?’
‘My visions are all the same. They are of a coming horror, an all-destroying nothing. With every passing day, the visions grow stronger. This nothing is drawing closer. I believe it will consume the galaxy, sister, if it is not stopped. That is the battle the Emperor has set before me. There can be no other reason for these visions.’
‘I see.’
‘Tell me. Is it true that Guilliman has returned?’
‘He has.’
‘And the Imperium still stands?’
‘It does, by the Emperor’s will, and by the might of Guilliman. He returned in the hour of our greatest need, and now he leads the Indomitus Crusade.’
‘Tell me of this crusade.’
‘The Order of Our Martyred Lady is part of it,’ Klavia said. ‘The largest crusade since the Great Crusade is taking back the Imperium from the darkness that would consume it.’
Stern listened carefully as Klavia described the scale and might of the Indomitus Crusade, and what it had accomplished thus far. Bit by bit, Stern understood what had happened to the Imperium during the century of darkness. So much had been lost and destroyed. For another doom, much like the one announced by her visions, to fall upon the Imperium was too much.
No. Never too much. Whatever came, they would triumph. It was the will of the Emperor.
‘Yes,’ Stern said when Klavia had finished. ‘Yes.’ She spoke half to herself, and half to the Dominion. ‘What comes is monstrous, but we have the strength to fight it. This crusade. The means are before us. This is how the obliterating nothing must be fought.’ With every word, the certainty took hold of her. It was the same one she had felt when she had told Dagover to take the Iudex Ferox into the maelstrom of the Cicatrix Maledictum. The path that had taken her from Parastas to Yvraine and to here was more than fated. She was on the journey the Emperor had commanded. She had been brought here to join the Indomitus Crusade, and through that great strength to fight the nothing. She focused on Klavia once more. ‘We must leave Severitas,’ she said.
Klavia gave her a sour smile. ‘I agree, Sister Superior.’
‘I know.’ Stern offered a tentative smile in return. ‘It is easily said.’
Klavia showed Stern how much she believed in her. It was through her intervention, more than Dagover’s, that Macrina grudgingly asked her to meet. Stern joined Macrina and Dagover in the vestry. Maps of Severitas covered the huge table in the chamber. The architecture of the cathedral was sombre, solemn. Even in the halls of worship, the cathedral embodied brute strength. It was a redoubt of the faithful, and had no patience for ornamentation. The same was true of the vestry. The walls were dark, the furnishings massive and functional. In one corner of the room, a Battle Sister worked with a vox-unit, struggling to re-establish contact with the Iudex Ferox.
‘Still intermittent?’ Stern asked. The vox had become very erratic during Xenos Bane’s descent from orbit.
‘Worse,’ said Dagover. ‘No contact at all since our arrival at the cathedral.’
‘And your greatest strength is depleted.’
‘It is.’
Macrina looked questioningly at Dagover. She had given Stern no greeting on her arrival. She had simply stared at her coldly, and moved to the far side of the table.
‘The Iudex Ferox was capable of Exterminatus,’ Dagover explained. ‘No longer. It launched its last cyclonic torpedo against Parastas.’
‘So even if an evacuation were possible, we would have to leave this planet in the grip of corruption, and the Ruinous Powers triumphant.’
‘Quite,’ said Dagover.
‘That is not acceptable,’ said Stern.
‘On that point, I will agree,’ Macrina said, though there was no warmth in her tone.
‘Severitas must be purged.’ Stern would not countenance the idea that her path had brought her to her sisters only to abandon this world.
Dagover chuckled. ‘I have never known the Adepta Sororitas to be adherents of the art of the possible. So be it.’ He waved a metallic arm. ‘There is no choice anyway, if we cannot contact the ship.’
‘Will your crew not send a search party?’ Macrina asked.
‘No doubt they will. How well will such a party fare?’
‘Destroyed if they do not find us,’ said Stern. ‘Trapped with us if they do.’
‘There is something else,’ Dagover said to Macrina. ‘What is left of my astropathic choir suffered a massive psychic blow when we entered orbit. The level of warp interference around Severitas is powerful. We cannot contact the ship, and the ship cannot contact anyone else.’
‘The enemy on this world is more than a heretical populace,’ said Stern.
She saw a grimace flicker across Macrina’s face before she nodded. Agreeing with Stern caused the Canoness physical pain. ‘The cultists are too organised,’ she said. ‘Their assaults show coordination and planning. And the deception that lured us to Severitas was too well done.’
‘Too powerful as well,’ said Dagover. ‘To conceal the true nature of an entire world, and then to seal it off at will… The question, then, is who is in command?’
‘They are our target,’ said Stern.
‘One we have not found.’
‘What scans were you able to do?’ Macrina asked Dagover.
‘Very few that were useful. We were able to find the heat signatures of your combat from orbit, but they were just spikes in a sea of static. Auspex readings became clearer as we descended in the Valkyrie, but then the range was too limited.’
‘So we must look for ourselves,’ said Stern.
‘Look where?’ Macrina snapped. ‘Do you think to search the entire planet?’
‘I have faith we will not need to,’ Stern said quietly, and Macrina’s left eye twitched, a wince in the face of what the Canoness took as a rebuke. ‘The attacks are coordinated. The fact of coordination will carry within it signs of its origin.’
‘What do you propose?’ Dagover asked.
‘That you and I fly sorties.’ She turned to Macrina. ‘We will not abandon the Cathedral of Saint Thecla. Like her, we shall not yield.’
‘We can hold back a siege without your help.’
They could not break it, though. Stern nodded and kept silent.
Dagover was studying the map. ‘I agree with the Sister Superior. I can see no other way forward. We may be at this some length of time, though.’ He waved an arm over the maps. ‘The geography of the city and of the land means there will be certain inevitable dispersions and concentrations of the enemy.’ He looked at Stern. ‘If it were possible to go beyond the city, that would help, but we cannot.’
The contiguous land masses of Severitas were covered by a single population centre, a complex of forges that sprawled for thousands of miles in every direction. It covered plains and valleys and mountaintops. Only the deep, angry, polluted oceans marked its boundaries. Severitas the world and Severitas the city were one and the same.
‘In what direction do we even begin?’ Dagover continued.
‘The heavy armour seemed to make its initial approach from the east,’ said Macrina.
‘Then that is a beginning.’
‘We will not be alone in our search,’ Stern said. ‘The Emperor protects. The Emperor guides.’
The wind blew hot with smoke and ash against Stern’s face as she flew beside Xenos Bane. She and Dagover left the Cathedral of Saint Thecla the Unyielding in a grimy dawn, after Stern had assisted in throwing back another wave of cultists. The heretics had to regroup, and build up their strength before another attack. Stern and Dagover took advantage of the window to try to read the currents in the flow of reinforcements.
They went high over the city’s forges, keeping below the ceiling of smoke and ash so the ground was always in sight. Stern flew with the Valkyrie more than a couple of miles to her left. She could just see the searchlights of the gunship from her position. She and Dagover were within line of sight of each other. Vox communication was working for the moment, but she did not trust it. Even over this relatively short distance, Dagover’s voice kept breaking up in her vox-bead.
At first, their search seemed like it would bear no fruit. The cultists closed in on the cathedral from all quarters of the city. Stern headed east, and she saw more and more tanks, the farther she went.
‘Guide me, God-Emperor,’ Stern prayed. ‘Show me your enemy that I may destroy them.’
She had to resist the temptation to engage the armour when she saw it. This was not a time for skirmishes. They would slow her, bog her down fighting an endless supply of foes.
‘The heretics’ army is very well supplied,’ Dagover voxed. He had noticed the increase in armoured vehicles too. ‘My pilot is relaying their positions to Canoness Macrina.’
‘Good.’ The commandry would have to launch some strikes out of the cathedral. There were tanks with heavy cannons heading that way. Even the walls of Saint Thecla’s were not invincible.
‘The forges of Severitas are busy,’ Dagover commented. ‘More evidence of the power behind the attacks. It is worrisome that they are still operational.’
‘They will provision the heretics with weapons until the cathedral is destroyed with everyone in it,’ said Stern. She paused, sweeping her gaze over the horizon. Everywhere, the city pulsed with the monstrous chants of the apostate, and the endless pounding and grinding of the forges at work, steam and fire blasting up from the chimneys like the irregular exultations of a ritual. To the east, though, the light from the fires burned more brightly. Not every manufactory in Severitas still functioned. Sectors of the sprawl had fallen dark, turning into smouldering ruins. In the east, there was fury.
She flew on, and as she travelled east, she saw the light more clearly. The blazes of fires mixed with a different glow. Crimson and violet, it was an aurora with the qualities of an oil slick. The light twitched and oozed over its domain. Its source was miles away yet. The ground rose in that direction until, at the horizon, the manufactories crowned a high, rocky plateau. The cliffs were dark, shadowed by the glow above them, a brooding menace in the sunless dawn.
‘That light over the plateau,’ said Dagover.
‘I see it, inquisitor. That is what we seek.’
‘The commandry will not be able to travel that distance, even with your help.’
‘I know.’ There would be millions of heretics between the Sisters of Battle and their goal. ‘Let us try to learn what and who is there. If need be, return to the cathedral without me.’
As she spoke, a wide line, bright as a stream of molten ore, extended down the height of the plateau. Shortly after the forward end reached the base, the rear pulled away from the peak. The light dimmed somewhat, turning into an angry orange shot through with streaks of blood red. The light pulsed, and Stern detected a regularity to its rhythm. It felt like something was marching west.
‘Do you think that is a response to us?’ Dagover asked.
‘It may be. If so, the greater foe shows us its hand.’
Stern flew towards the glow. Xenos Bane kept pace, and narrowed the distance between them. They arrowed east, and the glow brightened. The streets between the manufactories filled with shouting cultists. There was a new intensity to their charge, a revelry at the prospect of the fight to come. A cluster of high chimneys a mile wide blocked Stern’s view of what was coming. The smoke billowing from them was so thick, it brought the choking cloud cover down low enough that the tops of the chimneys disappeared in the murk. Stern dropped lower, making straight for the linked complex of manufactories. She planned to fly between the chimneys.
The complex exploded before she had the chance. A series of massive blasts tore the core structures open. Walls flew out, a wind of rockcrete fragments. The chimneys jerked up, as if trying to launch themselves skyward. They buckled, their heights breaking up, and they fell on themselves, the columns of a temple of fire collapsing into the cauldron. A storm of dust and smoke enveloped Stern. The wind and heat of destruction buffeted her. For long moments she was blind, and she hovered in the grey-and-red maelstrom. She coughed, her psychic shield no defence against the grit-filled air. Her lungs felt as if they were caked in clay.
‘Pull up! Get us above the dust!’ she heard Dagover shouting at his pilot. The engines of the Valkyrie screamed as the gunship fought for altitude.
Stern cleared her eyes. Shapes moved in the dust cloud below her, and things brighter and larger advanced through the blazes of the ruined manufactories. She drew closer. She was ready to fight whatever vision was now materialising before her.
She was wrong. She was not prepared for what she saw as, driven by the wind, the worst of the dust cleared.
The dead of the Order of Our Martyred Lady had returned. The corpses of Battle Sisters marched again. They were burned, mutilated, dismembered. Their armour was riven by gaping holes. Their faces were grotesque. Some had been flayed to the bone. Some glistened with exposed muscle, their jaws hanging wide with unspeakable hunger. Still others were just recognisable as the Sisters they had been, but their features were distorted by the abominations that now resided in their bodies. The horrors sang as they marched. The sounds that issued from their throats clawed at Stern’s soul. They were parodies of the human, each voice torn in two. One part squalled like an infant. The other was the high, fluting, worshipful praise of a dark god.
Limping heavily at the back of the mass of bodies was a worse horror yet. Some of the corpses had been so badly damaged that they were now fused together. Monstrosities with three legs and four arms and two screaming heads. The creatures shambled forward, waving limbs that had become one with their weapons.
Stern looked down upon desecration itself. The mockery and insult to the saintly dead took her breath away.
Behind the possessed corpses came larger monsters. They were things of conduits and pipes and half-molten rockcrete. They were portions of the manufactories turned into daemonic engines. The industry of Severitas had come to foul life. Huge assemblages that had been twisted into a simulacrum of limbs walked heavily, punching craters into the street with every step. Steam and burning gas jetted from their joints. Their heads were open furnaces, skulls without eyes, shaped around maws that gaped wide, vomiting fire and smoke. As they advanced, the sightless heads turned this way and that, unleashing their burning rage on the world around them.
‘Throne!’ Dagover cursed over the vox. ‘Shoot it down, blast you! Don’t let it get–’ His voice disappeared in a burst of static.
Stern looked for Xenos Bane. It dropped out of the clouds, control lost, spiralling towards the ground. A daemonic engine held it in its talons. The creature was winged, an aircraft transformed into a blasphemous image of a drake. Its torso burned with its internal fires, and its reptilian jaw unleashed the flames over the cockpit of the Valkyrie.
It was a heldrake. Even as the attack began, she began to see the signature of the threat. Daemonic engines. Many of them, and possessed corpses. Her rational analysis of the attack took place at the same time that her heart swelled with horror.
The gunship’s weapons fired to no effect. The heldrake clung to the top of the Valkyrie and perched to the rear of the cockpit, out of range. It smashed its claws through the fuselage and began to tear the ship open.
‘Dagover!’ Stern shouted. She launched a searing burst of light at the abomination. Silver fire scorched the heldrake’s back. It screamed but did not release its hold.
Xenos Bane plummeted.
As if in answer to her shout, the corpses of the Sisters of Battle looked up at her, and the blind manufactory monsters swivelled their heads in her direction. The creations of ruin paused in their march, and in their song.
The dead Sisters pointed at Stern and screamed. A wave of hate and loss and hunger for retribution swept over her, stunning her with a force that felt like the actual souls of the Battle Sisters shrieking at her, a new collective of the dead coming to take vengeance because she had failed them. The limb-weapons fired, and the manufactories unleashed the full force of their flames. Burning rage enveloped her.
The world vanished in a sun of pain and the screams of the dead.