Daemonbreaker, p.1
Daemonbreaker, page 1
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Contents
Cover
Warhammer 40,000
Daemonbreaker
Prologue
BOOK ONE
I
II
III
IV
V
BOOK TWO
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
BOOK THREE
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
Epilogue
About the Author
An Extract from ‘Creed: Ashes of Cadia’
Backlist
A Black Library Publication
eBook license
For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of Mankind. By the might of his inexhaustible armies a million worlds stand against the dark.
Yet, he is a rotting carcass, the Carrion Lord of the Imperium held in life by marvels from the Dark Age of Technology and the thousand souls sacrificed each day so his may continue to burn.
To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable. It is to suffer an eternity of carnage and slaughter. It is to have cries of anguish and sorrow drowned by the thirsting laughter of dark gods.
This is a dark and terrible era where you will find little comfort or hope. Forget the power of technology and science. Forget the promise of progress and advancement. Forget any notion of common humanity or compassion.
There is no peace amongst the stars, for in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.
Prologue
After
Orison VIII was a dead world.
It had not always been so. Once, its skies had been filled with praise extolling the virtues of the dead, the ringing of golden bells, and the roar of the mass-transit conveyors that brought countless pilgrims from orbit to the sprawling necropolis of red sandstone covering its surface. In those days it had been a living place, a monument to the faithful heroes of the God-Emperor’s Imperium and the great leaders of old.
Now, it was as much a corpse as those entombed in its barren earth – a desiccated carcass spinning endlessly through empty space, its waters drained dry and its sandstorms eroding the names from its memorials and the faces from the statues of the fallen. That same sand shrouded its cloisters and chapels, coated the glassaic windows, forced its way through the crypt doors into the sepulchres beyond.
All was dust.
And it was here, Cardinal Everyl Vanozza thought, as she fought her way through a scouring sandstorm so thick that even the searing light of the Great Rift was reduced to a baleful red glow, that the God-Emperor had chosen for a miracle that might be the saving of worlds.
If it was a miracle.
God-Emperor, let it be so.
The vox-bead in her ear crackled, the sound sharp enough to cut across the endless whistle of the wind. ‘Did you say something, cardinal?’
‘No, Sister Superior.’ Vanozza wiped a hand across the eye-lenses of her respirator, the gesture streaking the cream leather of her glove with dust but doing little to clear her vision. She squinted through the sandstorm, trying to make out her bodyguard’s location, but Aelsbeth of the Ebon Chalice could have been any one of the half a dozen black-armoured shadows moving ahead of her between the tombs. ‘How far until we reach her?’
‘A little under two hundred yards.’
‘And the site of the…’ What to call it? Not the miracle, not yet. ‘The… incident. Is it secure?’
‘As secure as anything can be in these difficult times.’ There was an unmistakable note of tension in the Sister Superior’s voice. ‘I would advise haste, your grace. Visibility is low. I cannot say what else is waiting beyond the sight of the auspex.’
‘An unpleasant thought.’
‘Indeed.’
Vanozza quickened her pace, the train of her cassock dragging through the obsidian sand, her legs registering a bitter complaint. Under normal circumstances she would have considered travelling on foot an affront to her person, her rank, and the God-Emperor’s Holy Ecclesiarchy itself – but normal circumstances no longer existed. The great fortress-world of Cadia was gone, the sky torn in half by sorcery, and the Great Enemy’s path to Holy Terra grew clearer by the moment.
If ever there was a time for miracles, that time was now.
Was it her imagination, or was the dust-storm clearing? The light of Orison’s dying sun seemed brighter than when her gun-cutter had set her down, tinting the ruins of the necropolis the colour of half-clotted blood. The broken remains of statues and columns protruded from the sand, but the taller buildings that had once filled this place were gone, reduced to rubble and scattered outwards as though from the epicentre of a massive explosion.
‘We are close now,’ Aelsbeth said. ‘There, cardinal. Do you see?’
Vanozza’s pulse quickened. She picked up her pace to match, heading towards a cordon of Battle Sisters arranged in a rough circular formation, obscuring whatever lay beyond. The sand beneath the cardinal’s feet was growing shallower, scuffing easily aside to reveal solid black earth beneath, fused to mirror-smooth glass by some ferocious discharge of energy.
‘Have any other survivors been found?’ she asked Aelsbeth as she reached the waiting warriors.
The Sister Superior turned her helmed face towards her. ‘Only one. We found her in a sacred stasis chamber in what remains of one of the tombs. A Battle Sister of the Sacred Rose.’
‘Has she spoken?’
‘I do not believe she has regained consciousness, cardinal. Her injuries are grave. The Hospitallers tell me it is a miracle she survived at all.’
Another miracle?
Vanozza took a hesitant step forward. She had raced across a galaxy in flames to reach Orison VIII, but only now did the enormity of what she was about to witness strike home. If what she hoped was true, then what lay behind that cordon of ceramite and piety might be the greatest miracle of the age – a sign of the God-Emperor’s enduring favour, a beacon to lead them through this darkest of times.
And if it was not, then what hope remained for any of them?
‘Where is she?’
‘Down there, your grace.’
Aelsbeth motioned to the line of Sororitas, and the nearest Sisters moved aside, revealing a pit sunk into the ground a hundred feet wide and easily as many deep. Ash drifted from the depths like black snowflakes in the wind. Vanozza moved forward as far as she dared, until the black glass below her feet sloped away so steeply that her muscles froze at the thought of stepping an inch further. All was blackness below her, as though the pit descended to the very centre of the earth itself – all except for a single white spot at its nadir, gleaming like a star in the void of space: a Sister of the Adepta Sororitas in snow-white armour, kneeling in holy vigil like a knight of ancient Terra at prayer.
‘How long has she been here?’ Vanozza whispered.
‘A week at least, your grace. More, perhaps, if–’
Vanozza shook her head and raised a hand for silence. ‘Has anyone spoken with her?’
‘No, cardinal. We were ordered to await your arrival.’
‘And is it true? What was said of her?’
Sister Aelsbeth waited for a long moment before answering, and when she did her voice was little more than a whisper. ‘It would be best for you to see her for yourself, cardinal.’
BOOK ONE
‘The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interrèd with their bones.’
– Fragment, found in a great library of Holy Terra
I
The butcher’s hatchet bit into Aveline’s shield hard enough to drive her to one knee. It was a clumsy overhand swing delivered with more fervour than skill, but its wielder – a factorum worker with thickly corded muscles that spoke of a life of manual labour – might be a worthy threat nonetheless. He had been huge even before the blasphemous alterations the Cult of the Eightfold Prophet had wrought on his flesh, but now he was truly monstrous. His skin was etched with unholy sigils and stretched tight over the hulking slabs of muscle beneath. He roared, and fish hooks through the corners of his lips stretched his mouth into a crude square, revealing bloodstained teeth sharpened to points and a forked serpent’s tongue.
Wasting time on threat displays was his first mistake. If he had followed up his first blow with a second, he might even have injured her. Fool. Aveline raised her shield and rose to her feet in a single smooth movement, bringing the hallowed mace in her right hand around to slam into the heretic’s knee with a satisfying crunch of splintering bone. His roars turned to screams, and the air filled with smoke as the mace’s power field seared through skin and fat and set his ragged breeches alight; but he stayed on his feet, drawing back the rusty hatchet for another blow.
This time she was ready. Aveline shifted to her right, letting the heavy blade glance from the edge of her shield so that the heretic lunged forward, unbalanced for a mere second before righting himself. She swung her mace deliberately wide of his face, and as he stepped back out of reach of the sparking power field, she pulled the trigger of the bolt pistol nestled into the grip of her shield. The shell struck him in the centre of his chest, obliterating the carved eight-pointed star and the ribcage beneath and sending a sizeable proportion of his internal organs spraying through a massive exit wound in his back. The bloodshot eyes went wide as a torrent of blood surged from between the sharpened teeth, and then he toppled backwards to lie twitching on the cracked astrogranite.
‘Faithful defenders of the shrine, rejoice!’ Aveline’s vox-amplified words boomed across the battlefield, drowning out the dying heretic’s choking rattle and the howls of his living companions. ‘The hour of your deliverance is at hand!’
‘Praise be to the God-Emperor!’ A ragged cheer went up from the shrine’s defenders, and a swift volley of las-bolts streaked from the parapet to dispatch a cluster of heretics.
‘The Sisters! The Sisters have come!’
‘Hail the blessed daughters of the God-Emperor!’
Aveline raised her mace overhead, blue-white light arcing between its flanges like bolts of lightning, bright as the triumph surging through her. ‘I am Celestian Sacresant Aveline Aboyé of the Order of the Sacred Rose, and I swear to you this shrine will not fall!’
The heretic at her feet moaned. She crushed his skull with a contemptuous overhand blow, and paused to savour the sweetness of the moment.
They had arrived on the Imperial world of Struthian Tertius at exactly the right time to turn the tide of battle, just as she had planned. The beleaguered planetary militia were fighting valiantly on the white granite walls of the Shrine of Saint Lycestra of the Nine Wounds, but it had been clear from the state of their defences and the increasingly sporadic volleys of las-bolts fired that their reserves were dwindling and their morale was close to shattering.
But all of that was as it should be.
The Sisters of the Sacred Rose were there to bring victory in the God-Emperor’s holy name, and with their arrival the outcome of the battle was no longer in doubt.
‘For the Prophet!’ A woman with the same filed teeth as the dead butcher ran screaming towards her, a bloodstained carving knife raised above her head.
‘Your prophet is a liar.’ Aveline spat the words with utter contempt. She smashed the knife from the woman’s right hand with an upward blow that struck her open jaw. The heretic’s head snapped back, her teeth shattering before she crumpled to the ground and lay still.
‘Do you hear that, false prophet?’ Aveline shouted. ‘I have come to deliver you the God-Emperor’s judgement!’
‘My lady, a moment.’ The soft voice through her vox-bead was laden with apology, but Aveline felt a flicker of irritation. Now was not the time for distractions, no matter how humble their source.
She knocked another cultist aside with her shield while staving in the skull of his gibbering companion. ‘What is it, novitiate? Moments of my time are in’ – she took a third at the knees, sending him to the ground screaming and clutching at his mangled legs – ‘short supply!’
Another cheer rose from the defenders on the parapets. She raised her mace in acknowledgement then unleashed a backhand blow that sent a malformed heretic flying.
‘Sacresant Superior, please, if you would only wait–’
‘If you cannot keep pace, Marguerite, the fault is not mine.’ Why was the girl so slow? The battle was ahead of them – there would be no glory found lingering in the rear.
A rune flashed in the corner of Aveline’s visor display, a fine green line tracing an outline around a human shape in the centre of the cultists. ‘My Sisters,’ she called. ‘I have sight of the false prophet.’
‘Moving to your position.’ The contrast between Novitiate Marguerite’s wavering voice and Dominion Superior Vasiliki’s confident reply could hardly have been starker.
‘Please, my lady, let me fight at your side.’
Aveline rolled her eyes and cut the vox-channel. A place in the spear-point of the advance was something earned, not given – and speed was worth a hundred quavering novitiates. A cultist darted towards her wielding a bloodstained pick, and she punched out with the edge of her shield, crumpling his skull inwards. A mace-strike crushed the chest of his companion, and she stepped over the bodies, pushing through the howling throng that blocked her path to the walls, her mace shattering skulls and limbs and ribcages, her shield slamming heretics to the ground, the precious shells of her bolt pistol spent sparingly to thin the crowd whenever they pressed in too close. This was her destiny, this fierce exultant joy that drove her on through the bone-splintering carnage, pulled towards victory as though the God-Emperor Himself waited to welcome her behind the shrine’s marble walls.
The cultists were nothing but a distraction – she could slay every one of them and the cult would grow back like tumours on the face of a rad-labourer. The prophet was the rotting heart at its centre. Carve out her malign presence, and the cult would cease to be.
‘Come and fight me, coward! Are your false gods so weak you do not dare face me?’
The throng parted, revealing the prophet clearly for the first time. She was a slight woman, her shoulders lopsided and misshapen beneath her robe. She lowered her hood, revealing a face composed of two mismatched halves – the left side twisted in a rictus grin, the right grotesquely deformed, with a bloodshot eye the size of a clenched fist bulging in its socket like an amphibian’s and the brow distorted by a single gore-smeared horn that protruded through her mottled skin. The twisted mouth stretched wider, and she extended her right hand in mocking benediction.
‘The blessings of the true gods be upon you!’
A ripple of force surged from the prophet’s outstretched hand, sending cultists scattering in all directions. It struck Aveline’s shield like a Dreadnought’s fist, pushing her back across the broken earth with warning runes flashing in her visor display. Bright, searing anger surged through her – that the witch should desecrate this place of sanctity, corrupt the weak, and stand against the God-Emperor’s chosen.
‘Know your place, witch!’
She pressed forward again, but another pair of cultists were already bearing down on her – one a lanky youth with eight-pointed stars branded into every visible inch of flesh, the other a woman dressed in the rags of a society matriarch’s robe, foaming at the mouth as she spat out a stream of syllables devoid of meaning or reason. Aveline crushed the lower half of her face to a bloody pulp with her gauntleted fist, took the legs out from under the youth with a sweeping kick, aimed her bolt pistol between his eyes and pulled the trigger. The hammer fell on an empty chamber, and the boy grinned up from the ground, his mouth full of blackened teeth.
‘Your corpse-god has deserted you!’
‘The God-Emperor is with me.’ She silenced his blasphemous tongue with the heel of her boot and stepped over his corpse, searching the melee for the prophet. A storm bolter roared somewhere behind her, heralding the welcome approach of Dominion Superior Vasiliki and her squad. The battle might not yet be over, but the tide was turning and the heretics’ fervour was becoming fear despite all the prophet’s efforts.
This had gone on long enough.
Aveline sprinted forward, the motorised joints of her leg armour granting each stride inhuman strength. She bore down on the prophet like the God-Emperor’s vengeance, with her mace drawn back to strike, shield raised to deflect another burst of arcane force, her ears full of the roar of the shrine’s defenders as they called out her name. The prophet stepped back, stumbled, then fell to one knee, and Aveline brought her mace down… to jar to a halt inches from the heretic’s skull, held back by an invisible dome.
The witch’s jagged mouth stretched wide until the lower half of her face was nothing but torn lips and a row of serrated teeth. Aveline strained against the unnatural barrier, and the prophet’s face twisted with effort. A spider web of capillaries ruptured in the woman’s bulging eyeball and turned the yellow sclera a vivid carmine.
‘Know my place, corpse-god’s daughter?’ the prophet rasped. ‘And where is that?’
