by Dan Abnett
CONTENTS
CONTENTS
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
HELL IS A CHAINSWORD DEEP
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
I AM THE FORTRESS NOW
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
FOUR VICTORIES (TO THE DEATH)
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
THE TWENTY-SIXTH OF QUINTUS
AFTERWORD
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
The Traitor Host of Warmaster Horus Lupercal
Fulgrim – ‘The Phoenician’, Primarch of the III Legion, Emperor’s Children
Perturabo – ‘The Lord of Iron’, Primarch of the IV Legion, Iron Worriors
Angron – ‘The Red Angel’, Primarch of the XII Legion, World Eaters
Mortarion – ‘The Pale King’, Primarch of the XIV Legion, Death Guard
Magnus the Red – ‘The Crimson King’, Primarch of the XV Legion, Thousand Sons
The IV Legion ‘Iron Warriors’
Yzar Chroniates – Lord Captain of the Second Armored Century
Ormon Gundar – Warsmith, Stor-Bezashk
Bogdan Mortel – Warsmith, Stor Bezashk
The XVI ‘Legion Sons of Horus’
Kenor Argonis – Equerry to Warmaster Lupercal
The Mournival
Ezekyle Abaddon – First Captain
Horus Aximand – ‘Little Horus’, Captain, Fifth Company
Tormageddon
Falkus Kibre – ‘Widowmaker’, Captain, Justaerin Terminator section
Tybalt Marr – Captain of the 18th Company
Lev Goshen – Captain of the 25th Company
Serac Lukash – Line Captain, 5th Company, Haemora Destroyer Squad
Urran Gauk – Line Captain of the Justaerin Terminator section
Xan Ekosa – Assault Captain, Chtonae Reaver Squad, 18th Company
DeRall – Line Captain of the Catulan Reaver section
The XII Legion ‘World Eaters’
Khârn – Captain, Eight Assault Company
Ekelot – of the Devourers
Kadag Yde – of VII Rampager
Herhak – of the Caedere
Skalder
Bri Boret – Centurion
Huk Manoux – Centurion
Barbis Red Butcher
Menekelen Burning Gaze
Jurok – of the Devourers
Uttara Khon – of III Destroyers
Sahvakarus the Culler
Drukuun
Vorse
Malmanov – of the Caedere
Muratus Attvus
Khat Khadda – of II Triarii
Resulka Red Tatter
Goret Foulmaw
Cisara Warhand – Centurion
Mahog Dearth – of VI Destroyers
Haskor Blood Smoke
Nurtot – of II Triarii
Karakull White Butcher
The XV ‘Legion Thousand Sons’
Ahzek Ahriman – Chief Librarian
The III Legion ‘Emperor’s Children’
Eidolon – Lord Commander
Von Kalda – Equerry to Eidolon
Lecus Phodion – Vexillarius
Quine Mylossar
Nuno DeDonna
Jarkon Darol
Symmomus
Zeneb Zenar
Janvar Kell
The Dark Mechanicum
Eyet-One-Tag – Speaker of the Epsta War-Stead linked unity
The Defenders of Terra
Jaghatai Khan – ‘The Warhawk of Chogoris’, Primarch of the V Legion, White Scars
Rogal Dorn – Praetorian of Terra, Primarch of the VII Legion, Imperial Fists
Sanguinius – ‘The Great Angel’, Primarch of the IX Legion, Blood Angels
Malcador the Sigillite – Regent of the Imperium
The Talons of the Emperor
Constantin Valdor – Captain-General of the Legio Custodes
Amon Tauromachian – Custodian
Tsutomu – Custodian, Prefect Warden
Jenetia Krole – Vigil-Commander of the Silent Sisterhood
Aphone – Raptor Guard, Silent Sisterhood
Officers and Seniors Militant of the War Court
Saul Niborran – High Primary Solar General
Celement Brohn – Militant Colonel Auxilia
Sandrine Icaro – Second Mistress Tacticae Terrestria
Katarin Elg – Mistress Tacticae
Niora Su-Kassen – Solar Commander Staff, former Admiral of the Jovian Fleets
The VII Legion ‘Imperial Fists’
Archamus – Master of Huscarls
Diamantis – Huscarl
Cadwalder – Huscarl
Vorst – Veteran Captain
Camba Diaz – Lord Castellan of the Forth Sphere, Siege Master
Fafnir Rann – Lord Seneschal, Captain of the First Assault Cadre
Fask Halen – Captain of the 19th Tactical Company
Tarchos – Sergeant, 19th Tactical Company
Maximus Thane – Captain, 22nd Company Exemplars
Sigismund – First Captain, Marshal of the Templars
Bohemond – Venerable Dreadnought
Bleumel
Theis Reus
Madeus – Captain, Wall Master of Oanis
Kask – Sergeant, Wallguard
Leod Baldwin – Seconded to kill team duty
Gercault – Seconded to kill team duty
Mathane – Heavy weapons, seconded to kill team duty
Orontes – Heavy weapons, seconded to kill team duty
The V Legion ‘White Scars’
Shiban Khan – called Tachseer
Naranbatar – Stormseer
Khetra Kal
Yetto – of the Kharash
Qin Fai – Noyan-Khan
The IX Legion ‘Blood Angels’
Raldoron – First Captain, First Chapter
Dominion Zephon – ‘The bringer of Sorrows’, Captain
Bel Sepatus – Captain-Paladin of the Keruvim host
Satel Aimery
Khoradal Furio
Emhon Lus
The Imperial Army (Excertus, Auxilia and others)
Aldana Agathe – Marshal, Antioch Miles Vesperi
Konas Burr – Militant General, Kienmerine Corps Bellum
Ahlborn – Conroi-Captain, Host palatine (Command Prefectus Unit)
Bastian Carlo – Colonel (33rd Pan-Pacific Mobile)
Al-Nid Nazira – Captain, Auxilia
Mads Tantane – Captain (16th Arctic Host)
Willem Kordy – (33rd Pan-Pacific Mobile)
Joseph Baako Monday – (18th Regiment, Nordafrik Resistance Army)
Ennie Carnet – (Fourth Australis Mechanized)
Seezar Filipav – (Hiveguard Ischia)
Jen Koder – (22nd Kantium Hort)
Bailee Grosser – (3rd Helvet)
Olly Piers – (105th Tercio Upland Grenadiers)
Pasha Cavaner – (11th Heavy Janissaries)
Lex Thornal – (77th Europa Max)
Adele Gercault – (55th Midlantik)
Oxana Pell – (Hort Borograd K)
Getty Orheg – (16th Arctic Hort)
And others
Sinderman’s Order
Kyril Sindermann – Historian
Ceris Gunn – Historian
Hari Harx – Historian
Theraiomas Kanze – Historian
Leea Tang – Historian
Dinesh
– Historian
Mandeep – Historian
Serving the Adeptus Mechanicus
Arkhan Land – Magos, Technoarchaeologist
The Chosen of Malcador
Garviel Loken – The Lone Wolf
Heleg Gallor – Knight Errant
Endryd Haar – ‘The Riven Hound’, Blackshield
Nathaniel Garro – Knight Errant
At Blackstone
Vaskale Solar – Auxilia Veteran, Warden of the Watch
Epuphrati Keeler – Former Remembrancer
Edic Aarac – Inmate
Basilio Fo – Inmate
Gaines Burtok – Inmate
Others
John Grammaticus – Logokine
Erda
Leetu – Her Legionary
Nerie – Pilot, Port Guild
‘The Earth has lost its youthfulness; it is gone, like a happy dream. Now every day brings us closer to destruction, to desert…’
– Terran poet Vyasa, circa 850.M1
‘I need to fight whole armies alone; I have ten hearts; I have a hundred arms; I feel too strong to war with mortals -bring me gods!’
– the dramaturge Rostand, circa 900.M2
‘Immortality, for us, is impossible.’
– Horace, Odes, fl. Ml
PART ONE
HELL IS A CHAINSWORD DEEP
Reiteration
Who knows what He is thinking, or what He was ever thinking? He moves, Kyril Sindermann conceded to himself as he climbed the last of the steps, our beloved Emperor, He moves in mysterious ways.
‘Misterious,’ he said aloud, breathing the word like a sigh. The cold echo of the stairwell answered him, the patter of the rain. Sindermann was exhausted. He had come a long way; not just up the thousand step of the tower, but along the path before that, the long road that had once seemed so promising, but had led him – led them all – into unforgiving disaster.
Kyril Sindermann had walked alongside history as it was being made’, and had been appointed to observe and record that process. But history, wilful and cruel, never leads where it is expected. It cannot be anticipated. Sindermann should have known that most base of professional principles – history only makes sense in hindsight.
Did He know? The beloved Emperor? Did He read history backwardsand understand what the end of the book would be? If He did, could He have changed the words? Could He have warned us? Did He try?
Did He know, all along, in His mysterious way, that this would be where it all led to?
Here?
Sindermann unlatched the door and pushed it open. Cold air met his face. The roof garden hissed with rain. Beyond, grey cloud sloped from the upper bastions of the Sanctum Imperialis, cloud-conjured ghosts of the mountains that had been levelled to make way for this citadel. It had once seemed a wonder, a great feat of man, the flattening of a mountain range to make the foundation stone of a city-palace. ‘No greater wonder can be imagined,’ some witness had written at the time.
No longer. Greater wonders had come since to eclipse it: the war to pacify the heavens; the crusade to crush bestial species; the liberation of lost humanity; the unification of the cosmos.
The revelation of unthinkable horror. The betrayal of all that was.
Now this, here. Mountains had been shaved flat to build a palace, and from that palace, an empire was raised. All that would fail, and the palace would fall, and the rocks that had been planed away to hold it up forever would split, and so too the world beneath that rock.
Sindermann wandered along the garden walk. The Katabat Terrace, a hanging garden, once a paradise. The beds had been left to grow wild, stone tubs and planters split by untended roots. Auto-irrigation and pesticide systems had been shut down to conserve power. The botanical servitors had long since been recoded to serve in the munition vaults. The garden staff had been conscripted to siege labour brigades or sent to the front lines. Other Palace gardens, and there were many, had been turned over to food cultivation.
But not the Katabat. The highest, the loneliest, the Emperor’s favourite, near the top of old Widdershin’s Tower. It had simply
been abandoned. Perhaps He, the beloved Emperor, hoped it could be opened again one day, the gardeners brought home, the precious specimens nurtured back into bloom.
If that was so, thought Sindermann, then hope still existed.
The Katabat had not withered. Rain drummed across its paths, beds and parapets, pooled on uneven flagstones, and overspilled from empty pots. The garden had turned feral, overcome with weeds, untamed creepers and unpruned saplings. Water dripped from the bowed and buds of chemically disfigured flowers. The symbolism was breathtaking.
It wasn’t even rain, not natural rain. The entire Inner Palace, the Sanctum Imperialis, of itself a city bigger than old Konstantinopol, had been shut inside its dome of void shields since before the start of Secundus. The shields had never been designed to stay up for so long. All air was recirculated, processed, breathed a trillion times, and artificial weather systems had built under the dome, breeding stained cloud, acid rain and pocket storms that churned and festered beneath the crackling fields. This rain was recycled sweat, body moisture, piss, blood.
It was worse, he had been told, outside the inner voids: toxic smogs and bacterial clouds lifting from the burning sectors and the battle fronts, or artificially engineered; searing firestorms; ash blizzards; epileptic convulsions of lightning spasming from the aftershock of orbital strikes; shrieking tornados, propagated by the concussion of incessant bombardments. The ground shook. Even here, he could feed the constant tremble.
That was just here… Just the vast Palace Zone, the Zone Imperialis Terra, a continent wide. Beyond it, global hell, a systematic ravaging of the home planet, a collateral disaster of pollutants, seismic shock and fallout that was hairowing outwards from this monumental focus of attack. He had been told the plume of poison ash and smoke trailing off the Imperial Palace obscured the entire Europa and Pan-Asiatic landmasses.
He had been told…
He didn’t need to be told. He could see it. He could see enough. He stepped to the parapet, rain kissing his face, and stood over the thousand incite drop straight down to the roofs of the West Constant Barracks.
He could see the sprawl of the Sanctum Imperials Palatine, the scope of the vast city-palace beyond, the Anterior Barbican, the Greater Palace Magnifican, tumbled and laid out like a casualty awaiting death. He could see the vast gates, the spires, the immense forms of the once-majestic ports, the lines of walls that had been built never to fall. Beyond that, in every direction, the belts of flame, the girdling circumference of black smoke banked forty kilometres high. And through the distortion of concentric void shields that blurred the air to soft focus like petroleum jelly on glass, he could see the flash and blink of detonations, the blaze of vast and distant fire-deaths, the streak of energy weapons like lightning light years long. The muffled thunder of existential collapse rumbled on, lagged and softened by the void shields.
No sun, just twilight. Poison grey. Like sight failing.
This, here. Where it began. Where it ends.
Sindermann looked down, down the deep drop. Rain had got under his coat, and into his eyes in place of tears. He saw the toes of his boots projecting slightly over the stone lip.
He had been an iterator, but there was nothing left to say. He had been a historian, but history was dead. He had found faith – not just an intellectual faith in the Emperor’s stewardship of mankind, Inti something more: a true, shining faith that he had never dreamed possible. He’d clung to that, felt blessed by it for a while, secure against the gathering darkness. He’d even tried to share that word.
But the darkness had thickened. The howls of the Neverborn had drawn doser. His faith had leaked away, frail in the face of pandaemonic horror, as piss-weak as his philosophy and scholarship. No purpose remained for him. Last night, some of his few remaining friends had claimed
that there was still some history left to tell: a future that would in turn beget another future that would want to hear, and deserved to hear, what had taken place before its birth. I rom the Katabat Terrace, Sindermann knew that could not be true.
Others, young Hari, so diligent and dutiful, had insisted that whatever history was left, its dying days should be recorded.
‘The death should be marked,’ he had said, ‘even if no one survives to lead of it.’
Untrue, young man. Wrong. Yes, a few days or weeks or even months of history remained, but Kyril Sindermann could see it from where he stood. He could read it in the distant mountain-walls of black smoke that surrounded them, the thickets of unquenchable flames. There was history left, but it was not a history that should be recorded. It was nothing but a litany of pain, of agony, of mutilation, of miserable destruction.
No poet ever described the last, involuntary twitches of a corpse, and all historians had more decency than to linger over such things. The history left to write was a night terror of daemons, of abomination, of obscenity, and that should not be set down for anyone to hear.
Even if they tried, there were no words left. No words in any human language could begin to describe the horror of this end.
‘I’ll speak and write no more,’ he had told them.
No one had replied at first. They had all understood what he meant Kyril Sindermann would not be the first human soul to step away to end his witness by choice so he didn’t have to bear the rest ‘Who’s there?’ he asked, a halt in his voice.
‘I thought I was alone up here. Were you addressing me?’ Sindermann began to climb down. Suddenly the drop terrified him. He clutched the parapet to stop himself toppling.
A figure pushed aside dank vines and tangled branches, and stepped onto the path. The cloth of his mantle was jewelled with raindrops.
‘Sindermann? What the hell are you doing?’
‘M-my lord. I come here from time to time-‘
Rogal Dorn, several times Sindermann’s size, took his arm and lifted him off the parapet like a small child. He set him down.
‘Were you going to jump?’ Dorn asked. His voice, a whisper, was the rumble of an ocean murmuring secrets in its sleep.
‘N-no. No. My lord. I came to view the scene. It is… perhaps the best vantage point. So high up… I came to observe, and gain a greater perspective.’
