The Bloodied Rose - Danie Ware Read online

  Backlist

  More stories of the Sisters of Battle from Black Library

  MERCY

  A short story by Danie Ware

  SISTERS OF BATTLE

  An omnibus by James Swallow featuring the novels Faith & Fire and Hammer & Anvil plus many short stories

  SHROUD OF NIGHT

  A novel by Andy Clark

  CULT OF THE WARMASON

  A novel by C L Werner

  CULT OF THE SPIRAL DAWN

  A novel by Peter Fehervari

  IMPERIAL CREED

  A novel by David Annandale

  REBIRTH

  A novel by Nick Kyme

  THE DEATH OF ANTAGONIS

  A novel by David Annandale

  BLOOD OF ASAHEIM

  A novel by Chris Wraight

  REDEMPTION CORPS

  A novel by Rob Sanders

  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 One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘Steel Daemon’

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  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 One

  The things were still out there.

  On the altar steps, Sister Felicity stood waiting for them. Her red armour was stained with gore, her black-and-white cloak in tatters. At one hip rested her now-empty bolter, at the other, her silent chainsword.

  A small, upright figure in the heart of the broken cathedral, Felicity stood alone.

  Before her, scattered about the cathedral nave, the tech-priest’s servitors lay dead, their haphazard defence overwhelmed, their repairs all brought to an unready end. Jencir had commanded them to protect, and they had done so with utter brutality, hurling rubble and using their mechanised limbs to horrific effect – yet the incoming numbers had just been too many. Overcome by the rising tide, they had fallen as they had fought – mindless to the last.

  In a ruined state, around the base of the steps, lay the five Sisters of Felicity’s squad, their last stand thrown down. They too had fallen fighting, blade and bolter, fist and faith, savage to the last woman.

  In her head, she bade them farewell: blessed be their memories. She would not be able to give them their Last Rites, but they had perished with courage, and they stood now at the hand of the Emperor.

  With them lay the tech-priest Jencir, his back ripped open as he’d tried to flee – not an act of cowardice, but a failed attempt to reach the exterior vox-transmitters. And finally, slumped against the ruined wall, the missionary Lyconides was too broken to stand, his last breaths now rasping bloody, his lasrifle still gripped in his hand. His other hand was in his lap, as if trying to stuff his steaming bowels back into his belly.

  She respected the man’s courage – he was no soldier, but he’d given his best.

  As Felicity listened, his final prayer drifted like a ghost across the emptiness, and was gone.

  ‘Requiescet in lumine suo,’ she whispered softly. Rest in His Light.

  The missionary toppled over sideways and lay still.

  Down in the nave, the things yammered.

  They were coming closer now, skulking and sneaking – she could hear their claws scraping on the ancient stone. They were circling round to her sides, lurking in the hot, ruined darkness of transept and cloister. She could feel them pacing, feel their presence like a crawl of sweat across her skin. She didn’t know if they were taunting her, waiting to see if she would falter, or if they were simply awaiting commands – but she knew that there were dozens of them.

  Hundreds.

  She drew the chainsword.

  If she stood fast against the beasts’ onslaught, she thought, she may yet get a strike at their master…

  Before she died.

  Slowly, Felicity walked up the final steps. She looked back at the fallen Jencir, his eye-clusters and mechadendrites ha
nging damaged and broken, his red Mechanicus cloak spread about him like a pool of blood.

  She reached the high altar, and stopped before the final step.

  Above her, the great window was missing, fallen from its stone frame thousands of years before; the new electro-candles, bought as a promise of reconsecration, burned with a tiny and defiant light. Despite the creatures behind her, she took a moment to bend one knee, her free hand tracing the fleur-de-lys on the front of her armour.

  ‘A morte perpetua. Domine, libra nos.’

  And then she stood up.

  And turned around.

  The Sisters had not known.

  Felicity’s directive had come from Ophelia VII, direct from the canoness of her Order, Ianthe herself – and she and her squad had been sent all the way across the segmentum to this tiny world, this sweat of overgrowth and jungle. The previous deployment of Sisters had declared the location secure – they’d driven back the marauding orks, and had cleared the area enough to allow the tech-priest in. Felicity had come as security, and – more importantly – to ensure that the cathedral stayed within the ownership of the Order of the Bloody Rose, and of the Convent Sanctorum.

  An icon of Saint Mina, or so it was rumoured, still lay within this building – and her Order were not about to relinquish it.

  But their restoration had been interrupted.

  Jencir had raised the alarm – his deployed servitors, seeking to understand the extent of the repair, had ventured into the crypts. They’d detected movement, and the Sisters had gone down on reconnaissance.

  The first encounter had been small, and easily defeated.

  But they’d had no time. Even as they’d regrouped, taken a tactical defence position at the head of the crypt’s steps, more of the creatures had come.

  And then more.

  A welter of horrors, surging up from the depths. The servitors had been overcome in moments; the incoming beasts had seethed like nightmares, like a surge of teeth and blood. Outnumbered, surrounded, the Sisters had been cut off from their makeshift, modular habitations, and from any hope of off-planet communication.

  They’d done the only thing they could – they’d fought back. They’d retreated, defended the altar with every prayer, with every breath, with every last expended round… and they’d sung with the fury of it, their voices raised to the cathedral’s roofless, ruinous silence.

  But the things had just kept coming, mindless and slavering, attacking from every angle. Krak grenades had slain hundreds of them, brought walls down in cascading rumbles of broken stone; the creatures hadn’t cared. Felicity had seen her squad fight and fall, one after another, had watched the things dismember them, watched the creatures drag her Sisters’ limbs away in their teeth and worry at them, gnawing on them like old bones. They’d scattered the women’s remains in some deliberate pattern, some vile act of blasphemous worship.

  It was too hot in here, close and suffocatingly still. Under her blood-scarlet armour, sweat slid down her spine. Her gauntlet tightened on the hilt of her still-silent chainsword.

  Noli timere, she told them silently. I do not fear you.

  Felicity did not know why she still stood while the others had all perished, but she suspected that the things had some greater purpose for her, more than just their thirst for her life.

  Calmly, she recited the hymnal.

  ‘That Thou wouldst bring them only death,

  That Thou shouldst spare none,

  That Thou shouldst pardon none

  We beseech Thee, destroy them.’

  And the creatures heard.

  They were creeping into view, now, letting her see them. They came down the aisle, and around the bases of the headless pillars; they rose up over the rubble like the slow advance of some thick, red tide. They came patiently this time, almost as if they savoured it; they came sniffing and snarling and licking, their long teeth bared and their spiked shoulders slinking low.

  They were taunting her, and she knew it.

  She raised her blade. She wanted to go down there, punish them for the deaths of her Sisters; she wanted to hack them to gobbets, pick them up and throw them against the walls, slam them into the cracked and weed-grown floor until they howled in pain and their bones broke and shattered–

  But she was the Emperor’s Daughter and her thoughts were clear.

  She stood where she was, His light at her back.

  The things came on, closer, closer. Their eyes were sharp as fangs, yellow and glinting. They reached the foot of the altar steps, and more and more came in behind them until the whole floor of the cathedral was alive, a writhing mass of red and glistening bodies.

  With a rasping snarl, she started the chainsword. The sudden roar echoed through the building, and the things leapt forwards as if goaded. They bounded up the steps, baying with impatience, jumping for her throat.

  ‘Mori blasphemous fui!’

  Die, blasphemer!

  She cut the first two clean in half, caught another on the backswing and sent it flying, its ribs half pulled from its body. Blood slicked her already-red armour. They were all round her in moments, worrying at her cloak, their teeth and claws scraping over ceramite and plasteel. She kicked with her boots, hitting skulls and spines; the things snarled and yelped. Her free hand grabbed a leaping creature; she snapped its neck with a jerk of her wrist and threw it aside.

  The chainsword rasped its way through more.

  Her blood and voice sang.

  But still, they just kept coming. The cathedral was full of them, the whole floor rippling with spike-shouldered motion. They surged round her to get at Lyconides, and at the remains of the tech-priest. They threw themselves at her bodily, one after another, trying to knock her from her feet. She fought them off with knees and elbows and head-butts; she sawed into their red flesh, she kicked and stamped at them. Her free hand grabbed them by their collars and tossed them aside. But they had no regard for their own lives; they were driven by a bloodlust that burned from their skin.

  Ten more died, exploding into mist and gore.

  Twenty.

  Twenty-five.

  They just kept coming.

  Piles of crippled creatures grew around her, slowing their advance. One sank its teeth into her vambrace and hung from her forearm, the weight dragging at her shoulder. But she was still fighting, still singing the words of the hymnal, still defiant and exultant, still burning with her faith that was every bit as powerful as their craving for blood–

  They stopped.

  She staggered, suddenly bereft of resistance. The one on her arm hung limp; she had no recollection of having struck it. She sawed it off at the neck, watching the body detonate before it hit the floor.

  Recoiling almost reluctantly, the things shrank away. They growled at her, baring gore-smeared, yellow teeth. Coiling like curs, they slunk to the bottom of the steps and then stayed there, snapping at each other and pacing, restless.

  They watched her as they did so, their eyes burning.

  Felicity felt a rush of pure zeal; the Emperor was with her. She was still alive, still on her feet, still fighting. Her armour was scarred but intact.

  And she was still singing, her voice loud in the vox though there was no one left to hear it.

  But her discipline was strong – this was not victory, not yet. Those hounds were not beaten, they were waiting for something. She’d proven that she could best them, and they’d been called off…

  By something bigger.

  By something that wanted to face her itself.

  Not victory – but perhaps the single highest purpose of her life.

  Felicity was a Sister Superior of the Order of the Bloody Rose, here to reclaim this cathedral in the name of Saint Mina, and of the God-Emperor Himself.

  She had failed.

  Nevertheless, her final
task was clear.

  Her bloody chainsword in one hand, she laid the other on the very last of her krak grenades.

  Whatever this warp-spawned horror may be, it did not daunt her. And she would take it down as she offered her life to the Emperor.

  Defended by the high walls of the Convent Sanctorum, Sister Superior Augusta wore her padded scarlet under­armour and a chasuble of black and white. Her steel-grey bob of hair fell forwards over her face as she bowed her head. Murmuring the Litany of Cleansing, she knelt upon the cold stone floor of her chamber, and she cleared her mind, her soul and her heart.

  Augusta was a warrior, a Daughter of the Emperor and the fighting fist of His Imperial Creed – but these ritual moments were just as sacred as the bloodshed and the battlefield.

  On the floor before her, laid out on its familiar red cloth, was her Sabbat-pattern ceramite armour, each piece positioned correctly, as illustrated in The Accords of ­Deacis VI. Her chainsword, stilled and silent, lay down one edge; her bolter, stripped and cleaned, on the other. The arrangement was as much a part of her as her litanies and the fleur-de-lys tattoo upon her cheek.

  Coloured light tumbled from her tiny, narrow window, catching the scarlet curve of her helmet and making it shine.

  It was dawn, and this was Lauds, and the ritual that came with each morning.

  She recited, ‘Et promissa – daturum adversus vires hostium Arma omnium qui oderunt nos.’

  He promised that He would grant us strength to face our enemies, the weapons of all who hate us.

  As she intoned the words, she picked up the armour, piece by piece. She checked its fastenings, its purity seals, its strength and integrity; she studied it for damage, for cracks and dents, for uncleaned bloodstains.

  A Sister’s wargear was her second skin – one of the first battle-lessons Augusta had ever learned. ‘Every Sister walks with the Emperor,’ her tutor had told her, many years before. ‘But she must also depend on three things – her armour, her weapons, and her Sisters that surround her’.

  It was a lesson that Augusta had never forgotten.

  Continuing her recitation, she picked up her vambrace to check its inbuilt chrono-compass, her pauldrons, and then her breastplate to examine its semi-hidden fleur-de-lys blade. Then she laid the last piece back upon the cloth and sat back on her heels, head bowed.