Cult of the Warmason Read online

  Backlist

  More Warhammer 40,000 stories from Black Library

  The Beast Arises

  1: I AM SLAUGHTER

  2: PREDATOR, PREY

  3: THE EMPEROR EXPECTS

  4: THE LAST WALL

  5: THRONEWORLD

  6: ECHOES OF THE LONG WAR

  7: THE HUNT FOR VULKAN

  8: THE BEAST MUST DIE

  9: WATCHERS IN DEATH

  10: THE LAST SON OF DORN

  11: SHADOW OF ULLANOR

  12: THE BEHEADING

  Space Marine Battles

  WAR OF THE FANG

  A Space Marine Battles book, containing the novella The Hunt for Magnus and the novel Battle of the Fang

  THE WORLD ENGINE

  An Astral Knights novel

  DAMNOS

  An Ultramarines collection

  DAMOCLES

  Contains the White Scars, Raven Guard and Ultramarines novellas Blood Oath, Broken Sword, Black Leviathan and Hunter’s Snare

  OVERFIEND

  Contains the White Scars, Raven Guard and Salamanders novellas Stormseer, Shadow Captain and Forge Master

  ARMAGEDDON

  Contains the Black Templars novel Helsreach and novella Blood and Fire

  Legends of the Dark Millennium

  ASTRA MILITARUM

  An Astra Militarum collection

  ULTRAMARINES

  An Ultramarines collection

  FARSIGHT

  A Tau Empire novella

  SONS OF CORAX

  A Raven Guard collection

  SPACE WOLVES

  A Space Wolves collection

  Visit blacklibrary.com for the full range of novels, novellas, audio dramas and Quick Reads, along with many other exclusive products

  Contents

  Cover

  Backlist

  Title Page

  Warhammer 40,000

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘Faith & Fire’

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  Warhammer 40,000

  It is the 41st millennium. 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 will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

  Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Astra Militarum and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse.

  To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

  Chapter I

  Kashibai felt the hum of heavy machinery pulse through the ceiling of rock above her. Was it a trick of the promethium lamps or were the walls of the tunnel visibly shivering? She found herself listening for the patter of pebbles and dust, the grinding groan that would presage a crack in the roof. Some small part of her heart sickened at the thought of Tharsis, capital city of Lubentina, smashing down on her head in all its sacred vastness.

  Not for the first time, Kashibai whispered an imprecation against the atavistic dread she continued to hold for places such as the Cloisterfells. Even a segmentum away from the rolling plains of her home world, the old anxiety about being underground refused to die away completely. But if the fear lingered, it was only an echo of itself. No longer was it Kashibai’s master. The steely discipline of faith and duty had subjugated all fear. Anything, good or ill, that might compromise her usefulness to the Order of the Sombre Vow had been stripped away from her soul, leaving only the resolve to serve the God-Emperor of Mankind.

  ‘The Emperor is with me,’ Kashibai said. She pulled her gaze away from the roof overhead, looking across the winding tunnel down which they’d been advancing. She could see the black and crimson armour of her companions illuminated by the flickering lights bolted to the rock walls. A dozen Battle Sisters stealing through the ancient tunnels beneath Tharsis, impelled upon a mission of both mercy and violence.

  Forsaken and shunned by Tharsis’ establishment, the Cloisterfells were far from deserted. Disgrace and reverses in fortune and integrity had forced many to eke out a troglodyte existence far from the sculpted spires and ornate sanctuaries of the city. Some of these wretches watched the Sisters from the doorways of hovels cobbled together from the garbage dumped into the underworld. Some of them gazed upon the armoured warriors with obvious fear; others considered the Adepta Sororitas with reverence and piety. Most, however, were so lost in the squalor of their circumstances that they simply stared with fatalistic dejection, indifferent to this intrusion into their shadowy world.

  Appearances, however, belied the reality. Not all those who dwelt in the Cloisterfells were so resigned. Far from the attention of Lubentina’s leaders, buried away from the Emperor’s light and the Imperial Creed, strange ideas and curious ambitions festered. Sometimes the rot would erupt in a spate of crime and sedition that wafted up from the depths to defile the city above.

  ‘Be vigilant,’ Kashibai warned her squad through her helm’s vox-bead. ‘We’re near the objective.’ There was no need to elaborate. The staccato wail of a heavy stubber firing further down the tunnels was explanation enough. Kashibai pressed a finger to the brand upon her cheek, the sacred flower that symbolised the Adepta Sororitas. She whispered a short prayer and touched the purity seal bound to the trigger guard of her flamer. She accepted the caustic machine-spirit of her weapon and the danger of being so reckless as to fail to appease it before entering combat.

  To the chatter of the heavy stubber there was now added the muffled roar of an explosive and the sharp crack of an autogun. Shouts, screams and animalistic shrieks drifted down the tunnel. The honour of leading the attack had been bestowed upon Kashibai and her squad.

  Kashibai turned to her Sisters. ‘Our duty is before us,’ she said. ‘God-Emperor guide and guard our deeds.’ At her command, her squad quickened their pace, rushing ahead.

  The noise of combat intensified as Kashibai’s warriors raced down the winding passage. They ignored the side tunnels that opened into the corridor, leaving them to the attentions of the second squad of Battle Sist
ers following behind them. The ramshackle shelters and their scruffy inhabitants were likewise bypassed. Kashibai would allow nothing to compromise the momentum of the advance. Such were the orders she’d been given.

  Hurrying down the tunnel, the charge of Kashibai’s Sisters was drowned out by the swelling din of gunfire and violence that rolled down the passage. With startling abruptness the corridor opened into a wide gallery, a subterranean vault dozens of metres across and nearly half again as deep. At some point in its existence the chamber had been connected to the infrastructure of Tharsis. Great pipes and conduits slithered down from the ceiling and crawled along sections of the floor. Puddles of industrial effluvia seeped from one corroded pipe, the distinctive reek suggesting to Kashibai that the muck was a by-product of the incense manufactured to anoint the Warmason’s Cathedral and Lubentina’s numerous lesser shrines and chapels.

  ‘How can anyone live in such a stink?’ Sister Reshma wondered. The sharpshooter of Kashibai’s squad, Reshma was close beside her leader as they entered the vault.

  ‘This isn’t living,’ Kashibai said. ‘Without the Emperor there is only existence, not life.’

  In defiance of the stench, the shanties and scrap-huts of the under-dwellers littered the vault, squatting beneath the huge pipes and pressed between nests of conduit and cable. It was amidst the disorder of this slumland that a fierce combat now raged. The beams of lasguns flashed across the cavernous chamber, stabbing through flimsy walls and scouring corroded pipes. The bark of slug-throwers and autoguns smashed through the doors of hovels and ripped knots of cable from the walls. Somewhere the grisly blaze of a meltagun shot outwards to transform a shack into a snarling inferno.

  ‘We’ve found the missing patrol,’ Kashibai reported, as she gazed across the violent harvest strewn about the vault.

  Mangled bodies wearing the green and gold of Lubentina’s local militia were sprawled amid the confusion of shanties or slumped beside the massive pipes. Far fewer in number were the bodies of their enemy, grubby men arrayed in a riotous assortment of coveralls and cloaks, the only unity of their appearance effected by the dominance of purple and red in their vestments. Whether they signified gang colours or the heraldry of some seditious political sect, Kashibai didn’t know, but she was grateful the malcontents so boldly announced themselves. It would enable her Sisters to identify the enemy from any slum-dwellers who’d been caught in the middle of the fighting. They’d come here to find the missing militia platoon, not massacre hapless bystanders.

  ‘Confirmation of contact,’ Kashibai repeated. ‘Heretics distinguished by purple and red costume.’

  ‘Are there survivors, Sister?’ The question crackled across the vox. Kashibai could detect the tension in Sister Superior Trishala’s voice. They’d descended into the Cloisterfells charged with rescuing the soldiers. If that duty was impossible, then the only penance to redress that failure would be to exterminate the heretics responsible.

  ‘None visible, but the heretics appear to be concentrating their fire on a cluster of shacks under some drainage pipes. God-Emperor willing, there are soldiers who haven’t succumbed,’ Kashibai said.

  ‘Relieve the pressure against any survivors,’ Trishala ordered. ‘Do all that is needful to draw the enemy away from that junction. Visit the Emperor’s justice upon them.’

  Kashibai activated her flamer and swung the weapon around. She could see a clutch of figures stalking around the curve of a two-metre wide pipe, trying to flank a cluster of shanties where the intense discharge of las-beams bespoke a concentration of local militia soldiers. Before the slinking figures could rush the position, the Order of the Sombre Vow announced their presence upon the battlefield.

  ‘Emperor guide our wrath,’ Kashibai swore, motioning her squad forwards.

  At Kashibai’s signal, the Battle Sisters fired upon the enemy. The roar of boltguns boomed through the vault as high-explosive shells slammed into their targets. Scarcely human shrieks rose from the stricken foe as flesh and bone were torn asunder by the devastating fusillade. The attempt to flank the militia strongpoint disintegrated, its impetus shattered by the sudden and brutal impact of the Sisters’ firepower. Creeping shapes collapsed as the bolters ripped through them, autoguns and pistols falling from dying hands. Prowling foes in coveralls crudely stained purple and red crumpled in the dark beneath the industrial pipes, their arms clawing at the air as vitality fled from their mangled frames.

  Survivors of the Sisters’ initial volley swung about, seeking to extricate themselves from the gap between the huge pipes. The cover that had hidden them from the attentions of the local militia now acted as an obstacle to their escape, funnelling them into a killing ground the Adepta Sororitas were quick to exploit. Ten, twenty, even thirty of the enemy were shot down as Kashibai’s warriors poured their fire into the reeling foe. It was butchery, but of a sort that didn’t trouble the Sisters of Battle. Those who took up arms against the forces of the Imperium, who profaned the dominion of the God-Emperor by thought and deed, were entitled to neither mercy nor pity. Their lot was extermination without compunction or compromise.

  Eradication of the flanking force relieved the immediate menace to the local militia holdouts, but it turned the violent attentions of the enemy upon Kashibai’s squad. The local militia patrol had numbered a hundred soldiers when it went missing over ten hours before, losing vox contact with the surface after a brief report of contacting hostile elements. Only a considerable force would challenge such an incursion into the Cloisterfells, much less spring an ambush so ferocious as to find those soldiers cut off and surrounded. The creeping assault party had been but a small part of the enemy’s strength. Now the Sisters felt the full fury of the foe.

  Out from the cluster of huts, a riot of gunfire blazed away at the Sisters. Autoguns, lasrifles, stubbers and shotguns all barked away from among the shanties. A lance of searing light scorched a hideous gouge across the slums, shearing through shacks and conduits like a daemon’s fiery claw. Sister Bishaka dropped to the ground as the cleaving laser came at her, slashing through the wall of the shanty she’d been using for cover.

  ‘Cover her,’ Kashibai told her squad, redirecting their fire to the enemies targeting Bishaka. While she crawled back towards her comrades, rounds from a slug-thrower glanced off her power armour. A burst from Sister Reshma’s bolter shredded the side of a shack and reduced the shooter to a gory mess.

  ‘I should have settled that faithless cur once I recovered my bearings,’ Bishaka complained as she reached the squad’s position.

  ‘In His beneficence, the Emperor has provided enough heretics for us to share,’ Reshma declared.

  An autocannon now added its vicious fire to the assault, its shots obliterating entire shacks, sending burning debris bouncing off the ceiling overhead. Entire swathes of the slums were being flattened by the furious assault. Between the autocannon and the scything beam of the big laser, the enemy seemed intent on depriving the Sisters of any measure of concealment.

  Except from one quarter. Kashibai was swift to notice that there was a several-metre wide strip that was being ignored by the brutal retaliation. At once her suspicions were aroused. Her Battle Sisters had already experienced something of their opponents’ penchant for ambush and misdirection. Here, she felt certain, was another sampling of the foe’s skulking methods.

  ‘Watch my left,’ Kashibai told Sister Reshma. Among the warriors of her squad, there was none who married accuracy and speed so well as Reshma. If her suspicions played out, speed would be more important than precision. ‘The rest of you continue to return their fire. Keep their attention fixed on you.’

  Orders given, Kashibai swung her flamer towards the undamaged strip of shacks. ‘The Emperor protects,’ she intoned as she thought of the under-dwellers who might still be hiding in the shanties. The choice between compassion and duty was never a comfortable one, but the demands of duty would brook
no hesitation. The shanties were being spared by the enemy deliberately to cover their own purposes. She was certain they were using the strip as a corridor to bring fighters directly against the Sisters.

  With a searing roar, fire erupted from the nozzle of Kashibai’s gun. Liquid flame jetted out across the shanties, immolating those closest to the Battle Sisters and setting those further back ablaze. Screams of horror and anguish rose from the conflagration. Reeling shapes stumbled out from the smoke and flame, bodies wrapped in orange tongues of fire. Reshma’s bolter cracked away, picking off those who tried to flee the havoc wrought by Kashibai’s flamer. A few lasguns and autopistols growled from behind the crackling mass of fire, striving to silence Kashibai before she could inflict further damage.

  ‘Well struck, Sister,’ Bishaka called out.

  ‘Too well,’ Reshma declared. ‘They’re going to rush your position.’

  Tightening her grip upon the flamer, Kashibai sent another scorching blast into the slums, prosecuting her campaign against the enemy assault force. More screams rang out, and figures dressed in purple and red scrambled away from the burning ruins, smoke rising from their scorched clothes and seared skin. Reshma maintained her grim vigil, dropping enemy after enemy with crippling shots, pitching many back into the very flames they’d sought to escape, leaving others wounded and writhing in the shadows.

  Their assault broken, the enemy now loosed an even more abandoned barrage against the Sisters. Autocannon and laser joined with the smaller weapons in assailing the position adopted by Kashibai’s squad. Slivers of rock gouged from roof and floor glanced off the black power armour that protected the Sisters. A stony splinter struck Reshma’s helm before spinning away into the gloom.

  The local militia survivors tried their best to support Kashibai’s squad, intensifying the volleys of las-fire they were directing at the enemy positions. It was a gallant if fruitless effort. Kashibai knew it would need more than a few embattled soldiers to break their foe. Fortunately such a force was near at hand. While Kashibai’s squad had been holding the enemy’s attention, a second squad of Sisters had been taking the field. Keeping to the perimeter of the vault, they’d kept to cover while circling around the combat, biding their time until they were in position to strike.