Requiem Infernal - Peter Fehervari Read online

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  More Warhammer 40,000 from Black Library

  THE BLOODIED ROSE

  Danie Ware

  HONOURBOUND

  Rachel Harrison

  BLACKSTONE FORTRESS

  Darius Hinks

  • DARK IMPERIUM •

  Guy Haley

  BOOK 1: DARK IMPERIUM

  BOOK 2: PLAGUE WAR

  WATCHERS OF THE THRONE: THE EMPEROR’S LEGION

  Chris Wraight

  • THE HORUSIAN WARS •

  John French

  BOOK 1: RESURRECTION

  BOOK 2: INCARNATION

  VAULTS OF TERRA: THE CARRION THRONE

  Chris Wraight

  • RISE OF THE YNNARI •

  Gav Thorpe

  BOOK 1: GHOST WARRIOR

  BOOK 2: WILD RIDER

  Contents

  Cover

  Backlist

  Title Page

  Warhammer 40,000

  Dramatis Personae

  Map

  Exordium

  Prologue

  First Gospel

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Second Gospel

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Third Gospel

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Epilogue

  Afterwyrd

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘Blackstone Fortress’

  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.

  ‘All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.’

  – Antediluvian Terran heresy

  ‘We are all shadows grasping for substance in the long nightmare of the soul.’

  – Icharos Malvoisin

  Chaplain Castigant, Angels Penitent

  Dramatis Personae

  The Lost

  Jonah Tythe – Imperial Preacher

  Asenath Hyades – Sister Hospitaller (the Eternal Candle)

  Athanazius – The Artisan

  The Order of the Silver Candle

  Hagalaz – Preceptor Cognostic

  Navreen – Sister Dialogus (aide to Hagalaz)

  Haruki – Sister Dialogus

  The Order of the Bronze Candle

  Akaishi Bhatori – Palatine Chirurgeon

  Solanis – Mother Superior

  Angelique – Medicae Servitor

  The Order of the Iron Candle

  Xhinoa Aokihara – Sister Celestian Superior

  Indrik Thuriza – Sister Celestian

  Genevieve – Sister Celestian

  Camille – Sister Celestian

  Marcilla – Sister Celestian

  The Exordio Void Breachers – Darkstar Company

  Ichukwu Lemarché – Commissar

  Vanzynt Reiss – Lieutenant

  Toland Feizt – Breach Sergeant

  Bannon Pynbach – Breach Corporal

  Chingiz Zevraj – Breacher

  Avram Santino – Blast Breacher

  Boldiszar Hörka – Blast Breacher

  Konrad Glicke – Breacher

  Rem Rynfeld – Breacher

  The Providence Crusade

  Father Deliverance – Imperial Confessor

  Canoness Excruciant Morgwyn – Order of the Eternal Thorn

  Commodore Barnabas Rand – Imperial Navy

  Captain Varzival Czervantes – Ninth Rhapsody, the Angels Resplendent

  The Virtues Illuminant

  The Torn Prophet – Incarnate of Veritas

  The Bleeding Angel – Incarnate of Clementia

  The Harrowed Artisan – Incarnate of Humilitas

  The Blind Watchman – Incarnate of Vigilans

  The Penitent Knight – Incarnate of Temperans

  The Burning Martyr – Incarnate of Caritas

  The Mute Witness – Incarnate of Castitas

  Steel yourself, traveller, for the road you’ve chosen won’t be easy. You’ll find no joy and precious little glory along the way, let alone the hope of a better tomorrow at journey’s end. And if you crave immaculate answers you’d best turn back now, for such salves are for the innocent, the ignorant and the wilfully obtuse – those sleepwalkers who keep to the well-trodden avenues of life unto death. With backs straight or shoulders bowed, stirred by valour or crippled by fear, they march, stumble or crawl into oblivion in ignominious bliss. For ignorance is indeed bliss, even when it tastes of pain, just as bliss is always contemptible, even when seized with courage.

  Only Truth cuts deep enough to warrant respect.

  But you already know this, with your heart if not your head, else you’d never have stepped onto this coiled and thorny road. Few are farsighted enough to glimpse my trail and fewer still are capable of finding me, but those who prevail cannot do otherwise. No, don’t deny it, for the hunger in your eyes belies your hesitation! You’ve seen and sacrificed too much to be sated by the false idleness of faith or reason. Nothing less than honesty will suffice for you now.

  But therein lies the first and most fundamental terror that I must share with you: Truth is a manifold and slippery beast. It grew frayed when the first minds gazed upon their world with displeasure and asked ‘Why?’ – then went to war in the name of ‘No!’ Over the aeons Truth has unravelled and entangled itself by turns, wracked into disorder by the passions of those who would hunt, cage, codify and exalt it. But their quest is a futile one, for they have always been chasing their own tails.

  And their tails are barbed.

  – Anonymous

  Hive Carceri, Sarastus

  ‘Don’t go out tonight, father,’ Mina said. It wasn’t a protest or a plea. Her voice
was too lifeless for that.

  ‘I’ll be back before lockdown,’ Jonah answered, keeping his back to her as he slotted a clip into his stubby handgun. Not much troubled Mina anymore, but guns agitated her so he kept the weapon hidden in their hovel’s vent-duct, along with the other tools of his shadow life. With its walls plastered in mouldering prayer scrolls and its windows sealed behind iron shutters, their cubicle was more like a penitent’s cell than a living space, yet it cost Jonah most of what he made on the militia watch. Without the extra he scraped together between shifts they’d have been lost. Even so, they were down to their last ration cans and a few precious lumen sticks again. Their power had been cut months ago, diverted to the lights encircling the fortified hab-block where they’d taken sanctuary. Only the militia chiefs who lorded it over the top tiers still tapped into the generators.

  ‘It’s a bad night,’ Mina pressed vaguely.

  The absurdity of that made Jonah smile, which shamed him because it mocked her and she deserved better. She never left their shelter, but even if she did, she wouldn’t – couldn’t – see the truth of things. The fear that had hollowed her out during the first weeks of their ordeal wouldn’t allow it.

  That’s how she survives, Jonah thought, slipping the gun under his heavy greatcoat, alongside the cloth-wrapped book strapped to his chest. He didn’t like having that heretic’s tome so close to his heart, but it was the safest place to carry it and he’d be rid of the damned thing soon enough. He took a last drag on his lho-stick and stubbed it out. It was time to get moving.

  ‘I saw him again, father,’ Mina said.

  Jonah turned, surprised by the tremor in his twin sister’s voice. He’d given up correcting her about his identity long ago. It only confused her. Besides, he’d been more of a parent to her than their real father ever had. They’d both been diligent disciples of the old tyrant’s ­zealotry, even after they’d learnt he wasn’t a real priest, but Mina – solemn, softly radiant Mina – had always been Senior Transcriptor Malachi Tythe’s favoured child.

  He named her after a saint, Jonah recalled. Mina of the Bloody Rose…

  In the gloom his sister looked more like a ghost than a saint, her eyes dark smudges in the long, pale blur of her face. Like many of the hive’s survivors, she had slipped into an ambivalent half-life that dislocated her from sense and insanity alike. Her lank hair had turned ash white, drained of colour along with her soul. Though time had turned slippery since the Fall she couldn’t be much past twenty, yet a stranger might have mistaken her for a crone.

  But not Jonah.

  To him Mina’s grace was inviolate. Under the grime and dissolution he still recognised the sister who had shielded him from their father’s violence whenever he’d misquoted a psalm or stumbled over a catechism. Later, when he was older, she had stopped him from striking back, somehow always finding a way to rein in his rage. Without her he would have become a monster long before the monsters were everywhere.

  I’m doing this for her, father, he thought fiercely. If the old man had lived past the beginning of the end he would have been appalled by the things his son had done to survive, but Jonah didn’t regret any of it. Truth to tell, the Fall had freed him.

  ‘Who did you see, Mina?’ he asked gently.

  ‘The starving man.’ Her fingers were fiddling with the rosary beads dangling from her neck. Sometimes the coloured glass beads kept her content for hours, but not now. In fact Jonah couldn’t remember when he’d last seen her so agitated.

  ‘His face is always in shadow,’ Mina continued, ‘but I can see his eyes. Silver eyes. He’s closer now.’

  That dream again. It was more vivid to her than their reality. Maybe that was a mercy, but Jonah didn’t like it.

  ‘Silver is a mark of purity,’ he said, clasping her hands in his own to still them. They felt fragile and cold, like the bones of a small animal. ‘Perhaps you’ve dreamt of one of the God-Emperor’s holy warriors. Maybe even a Space Marine.’

  He wasn’t sure he believed in the Imperium’s most fabled defenders, let alone that one might turn up on their backwater world in its hour of need, but Mina had always adored the parables about them.

  ‘A Space Marine?’ She frowned, turning the possibility over, her eyes suddenly bright. Deprivation had withered her body, but amplified the essential otherworldliness that had always been there. If she was a ghost, it was a holy one. ‘Do you really think so, father?’

  ‘Has to be.’ Jonah pulled away and her hands resumed their unconscious labours. ‘I have to go, Mina.’ He didn’t like leaving her like this, but there was no avoiding it. ‘Remember, don’t open the door for anybody.’ He smiled. ‘Except maybe your silver-eyed champion.’

  Such salves are for the innocent, the ignorant and– Jonah cut the phrase off angrily. He’d only skim-read the first page of the heretic’s tome he was carrying yet the words had latched on to his thoughts like leeches. He could almost recite them verbatim. The years he’d wasted following in his father’s footsteps, vacantly transcribing holy texts in the Ecclesiarchy Conservatorium, had attuned him to memorising drivel. He could reel off as much scripture as any priest – and with more counterfeit conviction than most! – but this was different. These words felt alive.

  Hungry.

  They’ll fade when I’m rid of the book, he told himself.

  ‘Jonah,’ Mina called as he threw the last of the door bolts. Startled to hear his name on her lips, he glanced round. She had pressed her face up against the window, as if she could see past its iron shutter. ‘I don’t think he’s a Space Marine, brother.’

  She woke up, Jonah mused as he crept through the murky, rubble-strewn streets of the city. As always, he kept to the shadows, but never the deepest ones where predators might wait.

  Just for a moment, she knew me. He stowed the thought. Now wasn’t the time. He had to stay focused. Hive Carceri was dying, even if it wouldn’t admit it yet, but that only made it more dangerous. High above, lights still shone in the vast dome that enclosed the metropolis, but their radiance had dimmed year-on-year, receding to a listless grey that recast the sprawl of wilting tenements and silent manufactoria in perpetual twilight. Jonah doubted even that would last much longer. Beyond the dome there was only darkness and the darkness wanted in.

  We’ll be gone by then, he vowed, as he always did when he risked a shadow-run through the streets. A trickle of ships still passed through Carceri’s militia-run space port. Most were traders looking to bleed the desperate dry, but he’d heard some offered passage off-world for the right price. Whatever it was, Jonah would pay it. The book he’d stolen from the Conservatorium vaults would go a long way towards that…

  You’ll find no joy and precious little glory… at journey’s end, it cautioned.

  ‘More than we’ll find here,’ Jonah murmured as he entered a plaza littered with abandoned transports. He had attended a riotous festival here once – an event his father most definitely wouldn’t have approved of. There had been a girl back then. Throne alone knew what had happened to her. Or what she looked like. He couldn’t even remember her name now, though he’d searched frantically for her in the wake of the Fall. That had been before he woke up to the Night’s game and realised such things were relics of another life. Hanging on to them was a loser’s play.

  You’ve seen and sacrificed too much, the book agreed.

  Jonah crossed the square in the cover of a tram that had become a mass tomb. Through the dust-speckled windows he saw the passengers sitting stiffly, frozen on a road to nowhere with terminal shock etched into their faces. They hadn’t had time for terror. Like everyone who’d died in the first instant of perfect darkness they were desiccated, yet free of decay, as if the trauma that killed them had also expunged the natural processes of death. Tens of thousands had died that way, from underhive scum to nobles in their palatial towers, all struck down in the arrhythmic heartbeat w
hen True Night fell upon their world. Senior Transcriptor Tythe had been among them, snuffed out as he pored over a scroll, while the faithless son working opposite him was passed over.

  The Sacred Damned…

  The name for the first wave of the dead had been coined by the redemption cult that rose from the ashes of Carceri’s staid Imperial church. It made no sense to Jonah, but then nothing about the fanatics’ bitter creed did. Given half a chance the bastards would probably condemn his sister as a witch. Like his father they wouldn’t recognise true holiness if it wore a burning halo.

  Truth is a slippery beast, the book cautioned. It felt cold against Jonah’s chest. He imagined sly worms extruding from its binding, questing for flesh.

  Throwing caution to the night, Jonah abandoned the cover of the wheeled tomb and sprinted across the plaza. There was a howl from somewhere behind him – long and doleful, the cry of a man whittled into something less. He hadn’t heard its like before and didn’t care to put a face on it now. Out here there was no end to nightmares if a man went looking for them.

  He ducked into the shadows of the street opposite and kept on running, heedless of the risk – a sharp left at the next junction, then again two further along, then up the side of the old protein packing plant and along the roof – only a madman would go through that hellish place now…

  As always, Jonah had planned his route meticulously using the maps he’d scavenged from a gutted Arbites station in the first days. That prize had cost him heavily, forcing him to make his first kill – a dying officer who’d fired on him as he rifled through the wreckage. It had taken several blows with an iron bar to put the armoured man down. Did that still count as a murder after the Fall?

  Only if you enjoyed it, Jonah assured himself, as he did every time he took a life. Now it sounded like something the book might say.

  ‘They were all for her,’ he told the night, as if it cared.

  Clambering down a pipe on the far side of the protein plant, Jonah dropped into a garbage-choked yard and scowled. The place was worse than he remembered, but he hadn’t been through here in a long time. The slobbering noises bubbling up from below as he’d crept across the roof had reminded him why. Whatever was growing down there in the nutri-vats was getting really big.