Spear of the Emperor - Aaron Dembski-Bowden

by Warhammer 40K

  I couldn’t imagine what chemicals she’d imbibed to stay awake and alive, to slow her blood loss, to keep focused through the pain of her body’s near annihilation.

  ‘Anuradha.’ My name rang discordantly from her tongue. She pronounced it as Kartash did, but in a voice I’d never heard.

  I didn’t fire. If she moved, I’d pull the trigger, and to hell with the Spears wanting her alive. As it was, I was sure she’d be dead from her wounds in minutes. I tracked the gun over her, choosing where to fire.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said. Her bloodshot eye tracked the movement of my hand. ‘Please don’t.’

  ‘Then don’t move. The Spears want you alive.’

  She smiled, and it was ugly and knowing and vicious even without the blood that bubbled over her bottom lip.

  ‘I’m sure they do.’ She sighed, and I saw pleasure in her eyes, mixed in with the pain. ‘A Space Marine Chapter Master, on the bridge of a ship. My name will be a legend among my sisters.’

  ‘If your sisters ever learn of it.’ She was bleeding on the deck. Whatever blood coagulants she’d used were either wearing off or not potent enough to fight wounds this bad. ‘And you were shot to pieces trying to escape. Not a pretty end to a legend, Kartash.’

  She licked her bloodstained lips as I used her abandoned name. ‘You don’t have to be a slave any more, Anuradha.’

  I hesitated. ‘What?’

  ‘Your thraldom.’ She waved a trembling hand around at the chamber, at the bank of monitors I’d just reawakened. ‘You don’t have to be a slave, any more. There’s another way. Come with me. Help me get off the ship.’

  ‘You beat me bloody and left me for dead.’ The shotgun was the most delicious, tempting weight I’d ever felt in my grip. The urge to squeeze the trigger was a physical sensation that buzzed through me. ‘I was enslaved because of you. Tyberia died because of you.’

  ‘There are temples,’ she said, carefully forming the words with a numb tongue. ‘Sanctuaries. Even here, in Imperium Nihilus. Help me. Help me reach one. I can’t… I can’t do it alone.’

  That much at least was surely true.

  ‘You’ll be rewarded,’ she said. ‘Freedom. Wealth. Anything. Anything.’

  The join where my human leg met my bionic ankle started to itch. I didn’t reply, and I didn’t lower my gun.

  Had Amadeus received my signal? How far away was he, when he received it?

  ‘You have no reason to trust me, I know that. But I meant you no malice. You were just in the way. I had to remove you. But the game has changed.’ She spat blood onto the deck. Whatever was wrong inside her was accelerating. ‘Freedom, Anuradha. Is this the life you want? ­Staring through that fool’s eyes at war after war? Living as a slave, ignored by arrogant demigods?’

  ‘I could never trust you.’ That was entirely honest. ‘And I’m not tempted by freedom.’ That was a lie, brazen and raw, to balance out the truth.

  I was about to mock her, for she was desperate indeed if I was her last hope, but then she started to… flow. That’s the only way I can describe it. Her skin began to flow like a sluggish liquid, though that implies a slowness that feels wrong in the retelling. It only took a few moments, but where she’d been a moment before, now Kartash sat on the deck – hunched and wounded and in very real pain.

  Had I not been so appalled and fascinated, I would have ­recognised this for the distraction it was. I’d have seen the blades glinting in Kartash’s palm.

  ‘Just help me hide, then. Use your probes. Help me evade the patrols. I came to you, Anuradha… I thought, after all these years of slavery to the Mentors, you’d hunger for freedom…’

  ‘Maybe I do.’ I felt traitorous just saying it, but confessing it didn’t mean I’d trust him. Or her. Or whoever this creature really was.

  ‘Just help me hide. Help me heal. We can flee later. Once we reach my temple…’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Then you’ll be free.’ Kartash crawled closer, his stubby fingers curling in the gantry decking, dragging his ruined form forward.

  ‘Stop,’ I warned. ‘The Spears want you alive. I don’t.’

  He stopped. His eyes were bestial and calculating as he gazed down the gun barrel. Those dark eyes made me think of an animal alone at night, weighing whether to approach a fire to taste the blood of a sleeping man. Hunger warred with wisdom in that stare.

  He wisely said nothing more, letting my imagination fill the silence with wonder. Clear skies. No more endless living on warships and polishing armour and repairing weapons. Pure water. No more refiltered, brackish fluid that tasted of the countless souls that had drunk it before you. Freedom. No more overseers, no more orders, no more ­living life only to prepare a distant and uncaring master for ­endless warfare.

  Of course I was tempted. Of course I was. Anyone would be.

  ‘I promise you, Anuradha. On my life and soul, I swear I can set you free.’

  That decided it. Those words. They drenched me with a clarity so severe I almost laughed.

  ‘A witch warned me about trusting a broken man’s promises.’

  His features twisted. ‘What…?’

  Silver flashed in his hands. The Engager kicked in mine.

  4

  I threw myself to the side, avoiding his envenomed blades. Later, I’d find them impaled to the hilts in two of my monitors, the alchemical poison on them having dissolved the circuitry behind the screens.

  As I moved, he moved, and his façade fell apart. He rolled away, flowing again, regrowing his leg in the time it took me to rack the shotgun’s slide. The assassin was on his feet, not the woman she had been but not the Kartash I’d known, either. This Kartash was taller, muscled, needing no hunchback to hide his weapons and no maiming injuries to elicit sympathy. The alien shortsword gave off a sickly jade sheen as it projected from his fist. It shivered out of harmony with everything around us, phasing in and out of being.

  The wounds weren’t wholly a deceit. He was bleeding and he was ragged, and no narcotic cocktails or malleable flesh would let him ignore the bolt shells he’d taken in the botched escape.

  He ran for me. He leapt. The jade sword shimmered, existing and de-existing, breath by breath.

  None of this mattered. I’d fired, but I hadn’t missed. The vortex grenade I’d launched at the far wall burst when Kartash was still halfway across the chamber. It didn’t explode outwards and spray fragmentation debris. It tore through physical law, ripping through reality instead of flesh and metal.

  I can’t describe the colours that swallowed that section of the chamber, because my eyes are natural and mechanical, and what I saw was outside the realms of both. If fire and hate and acid were colours, they would be the colours of that vortex. It was a hole in the ship, and a maw in reality, and a wound in the world. The sound it made was the sound you would hear if a city of a hundred thousand men and women woke to find their children dead.

  I was on the ground, holding to the grated floor. My bionic hand crushed the iron deck, I held it so fiercely. My machine foot clamped with a claw’s grip, bending the metal it locked on to. I still slid in the force of that tempest, blown and dragged towards the puncture that led into the open ocean of the Sea of Souls. One of my metal fingers snapped. Another two started to bend.

  Kartash was still on his feet, leaning forward as if fighting the wind of a true hurricane. What inhuman strength kept him able to stand against that storm, I’ll never know or understand. He bellowed wordless hate at me, the sound sucked away into the rip in reality behind him. He screamed in his own voice, in mine, in Tolmach’s and Brêac’s and Amadeus’. I remembered the voices I’d heard when the Huntress boarded us. The voices over the vox, trying to herd Tyberia and I away from safety. Back then I’d thought it was the whispering of the warp, but perhaps even that had been Kartash, too. He hadn’t known Tolmach was dead; th
at was why he used the war-priest’s voice first. Then he tried Brêac… He’d been trying to find us, to make sure we both died in the battle.

  Whatever polymorphine was, it played havoc in his bloodstream now, amplified by the warp or perhaps just taking advantage of his lapse in control. Faces grew out of his flesh and sank back into his body. His mouth opened wide enough to show half of his skull, streamed with bloody veins and tendons, then slid back almost into the right place. His eyes split and reformed in their sockets. They divided like cells under a microscope.

  The chamber’s bulkhead fell inwards, but no crashing sound or tremor through the deck could be heard or felt over the void-slit I’d blasted into being. Amadeus stood in the carved-open doorway, silhouetted by flashing red emergency lume-globes. In one hand was his sword, the plain and serviceable weapon given to him by one of the Spears when he’d awoken as one of the Second Generation. Lightning flowed down its length from the generator in the hilt.

  Brêac was next to him, with his war-spear raised to throw. They’d sawed through the door, and now the vortex sucked at them, pulling them closer, their boots scraping sparks across the deck. They could have been a painting in that moment, a representation of the Emperor’s Angels of Death. Hell screamed at them, starving for their souls. They answered it by throwing their weapons.

  The spear took Kartash in the chest, the sword lanced through his belly, and the blades struck with a twinned crack that I heard over the shrieking of the damned. It’s tempting to milk the tale by swearing I recall Kartash’s defiant snarls or describe yet more superhuman endurance, but the truth is that those two weapons practically bisected him. The second they struck he catapulted backwards, shedding blood like red rain in a spinning spray.

  The vortex welcomed his spinning corpse. It ate him.

  And an eternity later, which my master assures me was no more than ten seconds, the rupture in reality collapsed. Ectoplasma hissed in the sudden silence, fizzing its acidic way through the iron deck. A few spatters of toxic energy. Blood, maybe, from who knows what.

  ‘You owe me a new spear,’ Brêac said to Amadeus.

  My master didn’t answer. He was staring at me, at the ruin of our chambers, and the place where Kartash had been.

  ‘And you, Anuradha.’ Brêac spoke as he entered the chamber. ‘If you ever discharge a vortex grenade on my ship again, I’ll throw you out the airlock. Rains of Nemeton, Serivahn is going to kill you.’

  5

  But.

  Some nights when I wake bathed in sweat, even all these years later, I think I remember it differently. In my memory, Kartash’s eyes are glazed in death, but in my dreams I see the dawn of knowing horror in his gaze. I recall his body dissolving in the Sea of Souls, torn apart from flensing energies. But in my dreams, I see him torn apart by grasping hands and hungry mouths; fingers that rend, teeth that tear.

  He was obliviated by unchained energies. That’s what happened. He wasn’t eviscerated by a shrieking banshee with fire for a grave shroud and Kartash’s name on her skullish lips. Tyberia is at the Emperor’s side. She wasn’t there, with skin of burning blood, clawing at the deck with talons of black fire and screaming for me to give Kartash to her.

  Sailors see lies in the warp’s tides. That’s all. Everyone knows that. It’s why staring into the Sea of Souls is forbidden.

  I’ve never rewatched that moment from my data-spools. Why would I need to? I know what I saw.

  Dreams are just dreams.

  Epilogue

  THE HISTORIAN: IV

  There. It’s done. The tale of Amadeus’ arrival is told.

  But Vadhán doesn’t think so. He says there’s more to the first chapter, and when I ask what he means, he taps his scarred fingertips against his tattooed cheeks.

  I say he’s being foolish. That part of the story is obvious, surely? In reply he bangs his knuckles on his breastplate, giving the Spears’ traditional wartime drumbeat. He intends to drown out my protests. He does this with a smile.

  ‘That’s a little rude,’ I say to him.

  Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.

  ‘Fine,’ I tell him. ‘Fine.’

  As the Hex sailed with the Blade of the Seventh Son, Brêac composed a brief report to be loaded into an emergency beacon pod. It would be fired into the Straits of Epona, where it would either drown in the warp’s tides or find its way back to the true Imperium with the God-Emperor’s guidance.

  It read as follows:

  The warship In Devout Abjuration has reached our dominion after a cataclysmic journey through the Rift. We found her dead in the void, all souls lost. The remains of Amadeus Kaias Incarius were identified. Decay and mutation rendered his gene-seed unrecoverable from the carcass.

  During our boarding actions, we uncovered indisputable evidence of the Inquisition’s ploy to interfere with the Adeptus Vaelarii. Witnesses from the Black Templars, the Celestial Lions and the Emperor’s Spears will attest to the truth of this discovery.

  Any subsequent vessels in the Mentor Legion’s heraldry or bearing the Inquisition’s mark that run the Straits of Epona will be destroyed without hesitation.

  We are the Sentinels of the Veil. We still live. We still fight.

  Elara’s Veil is ours.

  Amadeus approved. ‘That says all it needs to say.’

  Brêac nodded. ‘I thought you might like it. How do you feel?’

  For once, he didn’t hesitate. ‘Free.’ After a moment, he gave a dry chuckle. ‘I just realised, this probe and its message form my tombstone.’

  ‘It’s poetic enough for the likes of you, False Scorpion. Don’t expect me to shed any tears, though.’

  They stood in one of the Hex’s secondary launch hangars, their words echoing around the cavernous space around them. I was half a mile away, sat at my consoles, watching through Amadeus’ eyes and listening through his ears.

  ‘If you’re staying, you need ink on your face.’ Brêac looked at my master with distaste. ‘You look like a child. It’s embarrassing.’

  Amadeus nodded. ‘It will be done.’

  Beyond the void-shielded hangar bay the warp raged on, helplessly hating us. Deep in the ship, Nar Kezar railed at his captivity, mere months away from inflicting such grievous wounds upon us that we’d forever regret not letting him die with his accursed ship.

  We sailed for Elysium, where the future of the Adeptus Vaelarii would be decided; where the Armada would muster to save the Lions from extinction.

  ‘Lord Brêac,’ I voxed to him.

  ‘Anuradha, do you ever stop spying?’ he replied.

  ‘It’s my duty, lord. May I ask a question?’

  ‘Aye, you need tattoos as well.’

  ‘That isn’t my question.’

  ‘No? Well then, go on.’

  ‘The Vargantes dialect’s word for false is “Va”, isn’t it? So what is the word for Scorpion?’

  ‘Dhán,’ he replied. I watched through my master’s eyes as the Lord of the Third Warhost grinned. ‘False Scorpion would be “Vadhán”.’

  Acknowledgements

  Sincerest thanks to Nick Kyme for his patience and advice, to John French for much of the same, and to my test readers in the Ezekarion (Ead, Greg, Nikki and Marijan) for enduring those endless Ifs, Buts and Maybes.

  Additional thanks go out to Rachel Harrison and the Black Library crew for their art direction (especially Rachel’s insightful feedback at a crossroads moment), and to my wife Katie for putting up with the stress of yet another late novel. Muchos gracias to Abigail Harvey for motivation, and Chris Wraight for his faith and support.

  Thanks as well to Phil Kelly and Andy Hoare, whose frequent back-and-forths and easy availability have been infinitely helpful. I owe you both big over the last year for various reasons. Call on those favours any time, guys.

  Lastly, obviously, thanks to the
readers. You patient and kindly souls.

  A portion of this book’s proceeds will go to Cancer Research UK, the SOS Children’s Villages charity to help orphans in Bangladesh, and Ellie’s Retreat: a charity in Northern Ireland for H-ABC research and the affected, bereaved families.

  About the Author

  Aaron Dembski-Bowden is the author of the Horus Heresy novels The Master of Mankind, Betrayer and The First Heretic, as well as the novella Aurelian and the audio drama Butcher’s Nails, for the same series. He has also written the Warhammer 40,000 novel Spear of the Emperor, the popular Night Lords series, the Space Marine Battles book Armageddon, the novels The Talon of Horus and Black Legion, the Grey Knights novel The Emperor’s Gift and numerous short stories. He lives and works in Northern Ireland.

  An extract from Deathwatch: Shadowbreaker.

  ‘Wrong side of the line this time, Lyndon. She made a mistake. Dragged you into it. Don’t make it worse. We can help her, but only if you talk to me. The longer you wait, the greater the chance she dies out there.’

  The speaker moved in closer. Lyndon could feel hot breath on his face, noted the sharp scent of recaff on it.

  ‘We already know about the shipments, the fringe-world smugglers, the charters into t’au space. I admire your loyalty, but think, man – no transmissions, no word of her for months. If she weren’t in trouble, why the silence? The ordo can’t just sit on this.’

  The pitch-perfect tones of the confidant, all understanding and sympathy and reason. Every sound, every look, every gesture was calculated to convey that this was a fellow on your side, a man with your best interests at heart. All he wanted was a little information. Just a few words, so easy to speak, so unbearably painful to keep to oneself.

  Bastogne, he called himself. Not his real name.

  He was good, but Lyndon knew the dance. He’d been on the other side of it often enough. Didn’t make it easier. Too much was at stake. Her ladyship had asked for trust. She needed time. Lyndon expected to die here in order to buy her that. It was the best he could realistically hope for now.