by Joe Parrino
The God-Emperor’s name was on her lips as the Temple of Shades fell fully into the warp and her mission ended.
Epilogue
Kurei Adamta took a long pull on his lho-stick, savoured the smoke that poured into his lungs, and tried to remember what empathy felt like. Ever since the events on Achyllus, during the long flight back to the Solar System, Adamta had had difficulty remembering emotion. He missed the sound of another voice, another presence. A slight tremor palsied his hand, small but perceptible. His thoughts kept whirling with the possibilities of what had happened in the Temple of Shades.
Some viewed eidetic memory as a gift, a blessing from the Emperor of Mankind. The Vanus Temple recruited only those who possessed such a mind. Kurei Adamta cursed the gift for the first time in his life.
He walked through the metal-chased halls of the Vanus Temple on Holy Terra. The great sigils of the Vanus clade, and of the wider Officio Assassinorum, stared down with skull-eyed glory. Today, they felt oppressive. His footsteps echoed off the metal, the soft clang of each step a boon so rarely granted to his ilk. The ability to make noise, to physically exist in an environment, rather than merely act as a fixture of stealth, should have been a treasured moment. It was not.
Kurei Adamta walked alone, as was his right, his burden as the sole survivor of an Execution Force mission.
His heart pounded. Anxiety drove roughshod in his mind.
The other Assassins, regrettably, had been unable to recover. They had simply seen too much, endured what no mortal, however trained, could ever be asked to. The very nature of their task had ensured their elimination.
Rhasc had been decent, certainly better than many of the Assassins he had handled. The others were what they were, embodiments of the Temples that had crafted them, fit them for purpose in the service of the Throne of the God-Emperor. Some small part of him mourned, as it always did after an operation like this.
Subtle beams of red light swept out from recessed niches. Flesh-verifiers and gene-coders sought to determine that Adamta was who he purported to be. Imposed after the madness of the Age of Apostasy by a rightly paranoid convocation of the High Lords, the precautions guarded against infiltration and subversion. Vandire’s reign of blood had left many scars on the Throneworld and its political institutions.
Images kept flashing through his mind, full of the shrieking madness of lost souls. The Temple of Shades was broken, the sorcerer lord’s mad plot finished. The apocalypse had been averted, for the moment. It was left to Adamta, the handler for the Execution Force, to report to his superiors.
Footsteps ringing against the metal, Adamta entered the debriefing chamber. He stood alone in a vast room. The ember-tipped cap of his lho-stick flared brightly as he drew in a juddering breath.
Light bloomed as vast monitors blinked into static-laced life. The crackle of vox speakers joined the ambience. Vid-screens, hololiths and other communication systems came online.
Shadows stood within. Hooded figures broadcast their presence. They moved as one, spoke as one. These were the hidden masters of the Officio Assassinorum. Adamta suspected that the High Lords themselves watched as well.
Sweat broke out against his brow. His face flushed, however he controlled the tremble his hands.
‘Is it done?’ asked the voice of his masters. It spoke with the uniform patterns of machine alteration.
‘It is done, my lords,’ Adamta said, his voice confident, though in his mind he still watched Drask die while the Temple began to collapse over the other Assassins. Daemonic things descended on his charges.
‘You have done well, Vanus,’ the voices said. Several of the screens and hololiths faded out. Now, the true debriefing began.
I did nothing, Adamta thought. Instead, he thanked the lords of the Temple.
‘Then the crisis is concluded to our satisfaction. The Despoiler will not be allowed another foothold in Imperial space. The realm of man remains inviolate. Is the Execution Force disbanded?’ The final question was rhetorical. All present knew that the Assassins were dead, that it was the only outcome of an Execution Force mission.
Adamta bowed. ‘It is, my lords. The other Assassins were, regrettably, unable to effect exfiltration from the fane.’
More obfuscation of the truth. He knew, from long experience, what answers his masters expected to be entered into the records.
The death of Rhasc replayed in his mind. The betrayal, evident as he watched through picters installed in Zhau’s mask, showed in her body posture. He saw the horned shadows that came for the bright souls of the Assassins as the Temple shuddered back into the warp. He watched as the picter recorded the shift into the nightmare hells of the empyrean. Adamta had seen many terrible things in his long service to the Officio and the Imperium. All paled in comparison with the torment and the horror, he witnessed during those few seconds. He knew, as he breathed out a cloud of grey-blue smoke, that the images, the fate of those Assassins, would haunt him to his dying day, that they might have compromised his ability to fulfil his function.
‘Excellent and so noted.’ The final vid-screens and flickering hololiths died.
Adamta was left alone in the gloom. He took another long draw on his lho-stick.
About the Author
Joe Parrino is the author of a range of Warhammer 40,000 stories, including the novella Shield of Baal: Devourer, the audio dramas Alone, Damocles: The Shape of the Hunt and Assassinorum: The Emperor's Judgement, and the short stories ‘Witness’, ‘The Patient Hunter’, ‘Nightspear’, ‘In Service to Shadows’ and ‘No Worse Sin’. He lives, writes and works in the American Pacific Northwest.
On the world of Tevrat, Callidus Assassin Klara Rhasc stalks her prey, awaiting the moment to strike.
A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION
First published in Great Britain in 2015.
This eBook edition published in 2015 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS UK.
Cover illustration by Marek Okon.
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