Spear of the Emperor - Aaron Dembski-Bowden Read online

  Backlist

  By the same author

  • WARHAMMER 40,000 •

  SPEAR OF THE EMPEROR

  An Emperor’s Spears novel

  • BLACK LEGION •

  Book 1 – THE TALON OF HORUS

  Book 2 – BLACK LEGION

  THE EMPEROR’S GIFT

  A Grey Knights novel

  NIGHT LORDS: THE OMNIBUS

  Includes the novels Soul Hunter, Blood Reaver and Void Stalker

  THRONE OF LIES

  A Night Lords audio drama

  CADIAN BLOOD

  An Imperial Guard novel

  ARMAGEDDON

  A Space Marine Battles collection featuring the novel Helsreach and the novella Blood and Fire

  RAGNAR BLACKMANE

  A Space Wolves novel

  • THE HORUS HERESY •

  THE FIRST HERETIC

  A Horus Heresy novel

  BETRAYER

  A Horus Heresy novel

  BUTCHER’S NAILS

  A Horus Heresy audio drama

  AURELIAN

  A Horus Heresy novella

  PRINCE OF CROWS

  A Horus Heresy novella

  THE MASTER OF MANKIND

  A Horus Heresy novel

  Contents

  Cover

  Backlist

  Title Page

  Warhammer 40,000

  Book One

  Prologue

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  Book Two

  Proem

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  Book Three

  Proem

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘Deathwatch: Shadowbreaker’

  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.

  Book One

  THE ROTTING EDGE

  OF HUMANITY’S EMPIRE

  ‘Strength without wisdom breeds nothing but savagery.

  Wisdom without strength promises nothing but extinction.’

  – Nisk Ran-Thawll

  Chapter Master of the Mentor Legion

  Prologue

  THE HISTORIAN: I

  Vadhán asks me to write these words. He comes to this place of cold stone and candlelight, smelling of the blood he sheds in battle and the storms he sails through to come home. Each time I see him, his armour is always cracked and dented. His face shows fresh bruises, his flesh new scars.

  And every time he asks if I’ve recorded what happened so long ago, when the war was still a war, when the Exilarchy was rising rather than standing over us in domination, when the Armada defended these stars.

  When the Lions and the Spears held back the shadows of endless night.

  Vadhán tells me they still hold, and I know it’s true for I have access to the auspices of stellar cartography. But so many of the stars on those maps seethe red with the Exilarchy’s jagged runes, and so few glimmer with the blue of the Adeptus Vaelarii. The Imperium endures here, but will it ever regain the ground it has lost? How many worlds now burn behind enemy lines, crying out for liberation that will never come?

  ‘You are old,’ Vadhán says, and though the words are coldly true, his tone is kind. ‘Old, and only human. You stand at death’s edge and it taints everything you see.’

  And perhaps this is so. Perhaps mortality darkens my thoughts the same way that it dims my eyes and slows my hands. Time steals every­thing from us in the end.

  I don’t need to write the words he asks for, though. I tell him that it’s all in the archives. Amadeus, my former master. Kartash. Tyberia. Brêac, the smiling god of war. Ekene, the golden lion. Serivahn, the cripple. Morcant, the murderous. Faelan, the ravaged. Ducarius, the dutiful.

  The Immortals. The arrival of In Devout Abjuration. The Storm Tide. The Ashes of Elysium. The final flight of the Hex. It’s all there, in picter footage and mission reports.

  ‘I don’t want pict-captures and mission data,’ he says.

  So he wants a saga? Aye, he wants a tale for the feasting halls and fireside storytellers. It’s my turn to mock him: does he want to be a hero? Is he seeking a legend where he shines above his brethren?

  Once, he would have taken offence at my tone. Now the rains of Nemeton have seeped into his blood, and he returns a smile.

  ‘Just the truth,’ he says. ‘Nothing more, nothing less. And it’s not for me. It’s a chronicle for the archives.’

  I tell him that I’m neither a bard nor a poet, a fact he should be well aware of after all we’ve been through, but he answers with another cold truth.

  ‘You’re the only one left, Anuradha. It has to be you.’

  We both know these are likely to be the last words I ever commit to parchment. My human hand is a claw now, too snarled with the rumatiz to hold a stylus. My bionic hand, slowed by time and wearing down at the knuckle joints, will have to suffice. It used to purr smoothly with each movement. Now it clicks and ticks as I hold this quill.

  The story Vadhán asks me to tell is a tangled one. It crosses paths with the valiant Lions of Elysium and the soulless Exilarchy. It stirs the ashes of history, rekindling memories of the lost Scorpions of Khamun-Sen and the treachery of the twin princes Kaeliserai and Nar Kezar. It is a story of war, of brother­hood, of victory and loss.

  I don’t know if there are any lessons to be learned within these pages. I don’t know if that even matters. And I warn anyone reading this chronicle that if my master seems
cold to you, even by the inhuman standards of the Adeptus Astartes, it is because he was. He was born to the Mentors Chapter, a fraternity that demands exacting perfection of its sons.

  These were the last days of his life, before Nemeton and the Death of Lions and the breaking of oaths. Before he became what he was at the end. Before he was as I want to remember him.

  This, then, is the tale of Amadeus Kaias Incarius and the Spears of the Emperor. It is a tale that has yet to end, but began many years ago, in the reign of the sword-king Arucatas, as a warship set sail for the Elara’s Veil nebula and into the Great Rift.

  I

  SHIP OF THE DEAD

  1

  Crossing the Great Rift killed five thousand, nine hundred and thirty-one of the crew. Whole districts of spinal battlements were ripped from the ship’s back. The void shields could not be rekindled. The warship’s superstructure groaned around us as if imbued with miserable life.

  Living within these bent steel bones, we laboured on, illuminated by the throbbing red of emergency lighting. The industrial sounds of repair work echoed through every corridor and chamber. Between the metallic crashes, we heard the chanting of choral prayers invoking the Emperor, the Machine-God, and His Reborn Son.

  In the silence between the prayers, we heard weeping.

  For four days and eleven hours after we emerged, we drifted in the deep void, crippled and cold. No one was permitted to look out into space, where the thrashing madness of the Great Rift still sought to encircle us. Those who broke this edict were executed to spare the rest of us their raving. I killed some of them myself.

  When the Motive Force of the ship’s drive was reawakened in the twelfth hour of the fourth day, the air scrubbers clattered back to life in the same moment as the engines. We drew in deep, stale breaths of refiltered oxygen, coughing out the toxin-laden air we’d been sharing amongst ourselves since the power died.

  We were alive.

  Many were not. Blessings were spoken over the shrouded forms of the fallen, before they were fed to the engine furnaces. In death, they served the warship one last time – this time as fuel.

  No one among us was unscathed, but we were alive. Alive, and on the Nihilus side of the Great Rift. It took fifty-two days to run the Straits of Epona through the Rift and it almost cost us the ship, but we had survived. We’d left the Imperium behind.

  There was no going back. The ship would never hold together for a return voyage. My master gave the only order he could give.

  ‘Set course for Nemeton.’

  2

  Our vessel was the Sword-class frigate In Devout Abjuration, with an initial crew complement of twenty-four thousand, six hundred and ninety souls. We numbered just over two-thirds of that figure after the casualties of crossing the Great Rift and the shipboard riots that followed.

  Exile. That was the word my master used for the mission. The notion filtered through the diminished crew, perhaps by virtue of the fact it was true. What hope did we have of seeing home again? In Devout Abjuration set sail with a full human and servitor crew, but the absence of other Space Marines was a telling sign. The Chapter Master, most noble Nisk Ran-Thawll, was already risking a warship and an officer travelling one of the rare routes through the Great Rift. He wouldn’t commit more warriors into the abyss, not when our chances of survival were so low.

  Amadeus held absolute command over the warship, but its day-to-day running was overseen by Flag-Captain Harjun Engel, one of the highest-ranking serfs within the Mentor Legion. When my master remarked on the slow pace we set, Engel patched the Navigator’s murmuring voice through to the bridge:

  ‘There’s nothing here. Nothing. Nothing here. We drift in the dark. All I see are reflections of the Emperor’s Light, cast on the sides of shadows.’

  Amadeus mused for five seconds, an eternity to his enhanced cognition, seeking an appropriate reply. Doubtless he considered the Navigator’s words to be uselessly flamboyant language. He craved precision. When people embellished their words, it introduced the possibility of flawed interpretation, and unclarity was something my master took pains to avoid at all costs. Sailors, however, are always prone to such poesy. They operate in a realm without easy definition, on scales beyond comfortable reach of the human mind.

  ‘Given the nature of our journey,’ Amadeus replied, ‘I will tolerate these inexact sentiments.’

  With that, he left the command deck. He didn’t acknowledge the bows and crisp salutes performed by the crew as he passed their stations. Every one of the warship’s complement was lifebound to the Chapter. Each one wore the red eagle of the Mentors somewhere upon their robe or uniform. In this they were no different to Kartash, Tyberia and I. Only avenues of expertise and degrees of training separated us from them. Along with Captain Engel, we were the most valuable humans on the ship.

  Even after crossing the Rift, we were anything but safe. There was no Astronomican for the Navigator to sail by. No stable warp routes to follow. We jumped in fits and bursts, plunging blindly into the warp, fearing each stab into the blind unknown would be our last.

  The ship shrieked around us, day and night, night and day.

  3

  My master was the only soul immune to the horror that gripped the ship. He immersed himself in his duties, focusing on nothing but the mission ahead. When Amadeus wasn’t training, he studied in preparation for his assignment, and archived his observations with one of his helots.

  This was usually Kartash. Of the three of us, Kartash was closest to him, though that’s a relative description, for we were nothing but tools to Amadeus. He considered our individuality no differently than he considered the scratches on the casing of his boltgun, or the chip along the edge of his relic blade: minor divergences that marked them as his possessions, but functionally no different to similar weapons of war. We didn’t resent this, nor did we fight it. We were slaves, trained far beyond the skills of most other humans, but slaves nonetheless. His attitude to us was entirely natural, in keeping with our lifelong training.

  Amadeus barely slept. A four-hour slumber cycle was mandated for his kind when they endured their gruelling training rituals, this figure being the rigorously researched duration required to rest overworked muscle tissue and the chem-stimulated trans­human brain. He could survive for weeks with only minutes of true sleep, resisting the build-up of somnolent toxins in his bloodstream, but that was a matter of necessity, not optimisation.

  Amadeus slept for exactly two hundred and thirty-nine minutes each day cycle in the habitation cell allotted for his use. To sleep for that long was an indulgence, one he considered practically slovenly despite the mandate inscribed in his fragmented translation of the Codex ­Astartes. Laxity was anathema to him.

  He balanced his unaccustomed idleness by committing to an even stricter training regimen than the traditional fifteen hours a day. I never once saw him cease early. When he ate his portions of nutrient-rich gruel at the assigned hours each day cycle, his sweat-bathed, abused body cried out for nourish­ment. I knew this as well as he did, for I monitored his biostability data at all times. There was never a moment I didn’t have his vital signs ticking along, scrolling down the inside of my left eye.

  He trained with blade and boltgun, shadow-sparring and dry-firing through hour after hour of training exercises. He pushed himself through physical challenges and cardiomotivator repetitions that would rupture mortal muscle. He fought squads, hordes, armies of holo-ghosts. He ordered me to ritually drain his blood to weaken him before one training session in every five, forcing greater effort and endurance in response. He ran for mile after breathless mile every day through the ship’s labyrinthine innards. I watched the data-spikes as he repeatedly pushed his primary heart to the limit, forcing his secondary heart into overworked life alongside it.

  He considered this regimen, in his own words, ‘earning the luxury of sleep’.

 
We trained as well, as was our duty, but nowhere near to the degree set by our lord.

  One day, he told me to shoot him. We stood in the chambers we used for hololithic combat, though today we were focusing on close-quarters battle with blades and gunstocks. Our weapons were loaded with live ammunition to maintain exact weight, as we would feel in the field. Precision was our Chapter’s watchword.

  Amadeus entered at the close of our session, considering the three of us as we stood in a loose pack. We were exhausted from two hours of training, slick with perspiration, weighed down by our armour and weapons. Sweat stung my eyes to the degree that even blinking was a relief. We bowed at our master’s approach. He was unarmed and unarmoured.

  ‘Helot Secundus,’ he said. ‘Shoot me.’

  ‘Master, with respect, our ammunition is live.’

  My mistake was in hesitating, for he shook his head and looked to Tyberia.

  ‘Helot Tertius. Shoot me.’

  Tyberia didn’t hesitate as I had. She levelled her shotgun and fired – or she would have done, had Amadeus not slapped the barrel aside in a blur of motion and thrown her to the floor. The back of her head struck the deck with a jarring smack.

  She’d moved fast, faster than any unaugmented human could possibly move, yet Amadeus stood above her, his boot on her throat.

  Space Marines have a way of moving, a physicality to their merest motions, which arises from the power inherent in their form. In some, it’s an effortless and unintentional arrogance. In others, a brutal and knowing grace. It’s power, one way or another, and a natural ­byproduct of the transhuman condition. They can’t help what they are, any more than they can help the myriad ways it shows in whatever they do.

  Amadeus radiated that power then, as he pinned Tyberia with no effort at all. He was too cold to be truly arrogant, for arrogance is born in considering how you appear in the eyes of others. Our master had no such concerns. He didn’t revel in his invincibility, he just lived it. Overwhelming physical strength was as natural to him as breathing was to me. Since achieving his place in the Mentor Legion, he’d ascended above mortal concerns. He could exert his will on the world purely by strength and weaponry.