Celestine - Andy Clark Read online

  Other stories featuring the Sisters of Battle

  SISTERS OF BATTLE: THE OMNIBUS

  James Swallow

  THE BLOODIED ROSE

  Danie Ware

  SHROUD OF NIGHT

  Andy Clark

  CULT OF THE WARMASON

  C L Werner

  IMPERIAL CREED

  David Annandale

  THE DEATH OF ANTAGONIS

  David Annandale

  BLOOD OF ASAHEIM

  Chris Wraight

  Other stories from the Warhammer 40,000 universe

  SPEAR OF THE EMPEROR

  Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  BLACKSTONE FORTRESS

  Darius Hinks

  • DARK IMPERIUM •

  Book 1: DARK IMPERIUM

  Book 2: PLAGUE WAR

  Guy Haley

  • VAULTS OF TERRA •

  Book 1: THE CARRION THRONE

  Book 2: THE HOLLOW MOUNTAIN

  Chris Wraight

  • THE HORUSIAN WARS •

  Book 1: RESURRECTION

  Book 2: INCARNATION

  John French

  Contents

  Cover

  Backlist

  Title Page

  Warhammer 40,000

  Beyond

  404th Day of the War – 0600 Hours

  Beyond

  405th Day of the War – 0730 Hours

  Beyond

  412th Day of the War – 1300 Hours

  Beyond

  415th Day of the War – 1840 Hours

  Beyond

  415th Day of the War – 2240 Hours

  1st Day of Peace – 0616 Hours

  Beyond

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘Vaults of Terra: The Hollow Mountain’

  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.

  Consciousness, sudden and violent.

  Her eyes snapped open and hellish light poured in. She sucked a breath down her red-raw throat, then coughed hard, doubled up, curling foetal on her side. Her eyelids flickered, and darkness threatened to swallow her again. Her mind kicked against it, fought back, surfaced. Another painful series of coughs wracked her, then subsided. She took a slow, shuddering breath, blinking quickly as her eyes adjusted to the glare.

  Her surroundings resolved; her senses cleared, sight, sound, smell and touch coming slowly. She registered that she was lying on something hard and lumpy, an irregular surface that shifted beneath her as she moved. To her bleary gaze, it looked like a mound of pale stones and jagged debris, but no matter how much she blinked and frowned, she couldn’t quite focus.

  She could hear a low moan. The wind, she realised. It was warm, but not pleasantly so. Its touch was like the first bloom of fever-sweats that warned of illness to come. It bore a sharp tang. It took her long moments to place the stench. Sulphur, and something worse, some underlying stink of corruption that triggered primal revulsion within her. She pushed herself into a sitting position and redoubled her efforts to see straight.

  What began as a fiery haze became a sky, though a more forbidding and ominous sight she could not have imagined. Blood-hued clouds roiled through a bruised void of purples and rotted greys. Vortices of black fumes whirled across the vista, ripping the bloody clouds to tatters and trailing crackling storms of lurid green lightning in their wake. Her gaze lowered, taking in the distant horizon with its jagged line of half-seen mountains. Fume-wreathed plains marched away from their feet.

  She shifted again, fighting down feelings of dislocation. Her heart thumped as she realised that she had no idea where she was, or worse, even who she was. The questions almost escaped her lips aloud, before she realised there was no one there to answer. Something crunched beneath her palm, hard and splintering. She looked down with dawning horror.

  Not stones.

  Bone.

  She snatched her hand back through the broken, brittle brow of an ancient skull. Bones ground beneath her as she moved, and this time she did let out an involuntary moan. She scrabbled backwards on hands and heels, as though to escape the carrion mound. Osseous matter cracked beneath her weight. Shards jabbed through the grey shift she wore, scraping her bare legs and arms. The macabre clatter of bone on bone grew, skulls and femurs and finger-bones grinding with her every movement.

  She felt something cold and hard beneath her palms. She dragged herself backwards with a gasp of gratitude, until she sat on a slab of black-painted metal several feet across. It was part of something larger, she realised, buried in layers of bone, rusting and studded with rivets and old bullet-holes. Dimly, she perceived the faded remnants of an insignia still clinging to the metal, but she had no more attention to spare. The slopes of bone stretched away on all sides, spilling down and down, broken by jutting metal wreckage, tatters of coloured cloth and other, more organic looking remnants that she didn’t care to identify. She couldn’t tear her eyes away.

  ‘Not a mound…’ she said, her voice a dry croak. ‘This is a mountain.’

  Questions chased one another through her mind. She shut them into cages forged from her iron will, there to languish until she could address them rationally. Panic spread like hoarfrost in her gut, surged up through her chest. It met the fire of her determination and melted back as quickly as it had come. She took a deep, slow breath and closed her eyes, centring herself.

  ‘Emperor, protect me and light my way,’ she said, the words coming unbidden to her lips. They felt right there, natural, reassuring. She could not say for sure who the Emperor was, but she drew strength from His name. Feeling calmer, she opened her eyes and took mental inventory.

  She could see no signs of movement beyond the occasional stirring of wind-tugged cloth. Whatever macabre carrion peak she found herself atop, wherever this wasteland was, she was alone here. She realised she had clenched her fists in readiness to defend herself.

  ‘A fighter, then, perhaps,’ she murmured, finding comfort in the sound of her own voice. It was deep and strong, a voice made for firm statements, s
tern prayers and binding oaths. But prayers to whom? Oaths of what? Seeing no immediate danger, she resolved to begin by answering as many questions as she could about herself.

  She would open her mental cages one at a time and interrogate the thoughts within.

  She took personal inventory. Her grey shift was unadorned, its material coarse against her skin. The body it clad was a powerful one; she could feel graceful strength in her every movement, and see wiry, chorded muscle shift beneath the skin of her arms and legs.

  Her hair was shoulder length, and she could see from holding it out before her eyes that it was raven-dark. Beyond that, without a reflective surface she could tell little more about her age or appearance. What she had gathered for now would have to be enough.

  She let her fingertips explore her facial features, moving down over her chin to her throat. She gasped and pulled her hands away as she felt a ragged ring of scar tissue there, bespeaking a catastrophic wound. Feeling nauseated, but needing to know, she gingerly felt around the circumference of her neck. Sure enough, the scar ran all the way around, and for a moment she felt an echo of something within her mind.

  Screaming.

  Flames reflected in churning waters.

  Something towering and monstrous.

  A light.

  The strange sense was gone as suddenly as it appeared, moonlight glimpsed through tattered cloud. She frowned in puzzlement as she realised that the scar was gone too. She felt at the flesh of her neck with increasing agitation as she tried to find the horrible mark.

  ‘How is that possible?’ she asked the empty mountaintop. ‘How is any of this possible?’

  She had no possessions, that much was clear. No weapons or armour with which to protect herself, no food, drink, any other items of clothing or gear. Nothing to suggest who she was, or to help her survive.

  ‘And no idea how I came here,’ she said. ‘But I have myself. That is enough.’

  She knew she could not simply sit atop a mountain of bones forever. There was no telling what kinds of ferocious storms the brooding sky might disgorge, and she felt no desire to be plucked from this peak by a screaming gale or caught amidst ferocious lightning blasts. Though she felt neither hunger nor thirst, she doubted that would remain the case forever. Starving to death and adding her bones to the mountain held even less appeal.

  Yet the thing that drove her to her feet was the desire for answers. Who was she? What was she doing in such a ghastly place? How had she come to be here? Who was the Emperor? She needed to know, and she would find no insights here.

  She stood atop the mountain, shift and hair blowing in the hot winds. She stared down the steep slopes. They vanished ever downward on all sides into a thick crimson mist.

  ‘Nothing to suggest a route,’ she said. ‘No hint as to where I must go.’ Strangely, the notion held no terror for her. Instinctive as breathing, she closed her eyes and offered up a wordless prayer to the Emperor for guidance. To her surprise, she felt a faint warmth upon her cheek, as though a candle flame had been brought close to it for the briefest of moments. The sensation was there and gone, yet it was enough, its touch somehow pure, distinct from the clammy caress of the winds.

  ‘Are you a god, then? My protector, perhaps?’ Her questions fell dead and unanswered. Whatever the truth, she knew it would not be as easy as simply demanding answers.

  She opened her eyes and turned in the direction from which she had felt the warmth. Steeling herself, she stepped carefully out, barefoot, onto the jagged carpet of bones. She began to make her slow and slithering way down the mountainside.

  The going was treacherous. An ache built in her muscles until it became dull fire, and her chest tightened reflexively whenever she took in the nightmarish steepness of the slope. In places there was little more than a compacted cliff, and she was forced to spend long minutes scrambling crabwise across the slopes in search of a more forgiving descent. Splinters tore at her. Rusted jags of metal scraped her shins. When she was forced to put her hands down in a hurry, her forearms and palms were scratched and pierced until she left a trail of bright red blood drops behind her to mark her path.

  Bone shifted underfoot with every movement, small avalanches of ghoulish matter clattering away down the steep incline to vanish into the mists below. She had to be constantly careful lest she twist an ankle or slip and fall; if she lost her footing, she might fall to an agonising death upon the jutting bone shards below.

  Within minutes of beginning her descent, she found her heart thumping and her nerves singing from the constant exertion and peril. Briefly, as she clung by tenuous handholds to a protruding ribcage and felt for a foothold in the shattered arch of some ancient shrine, she contemplated turning back. Perhaps she could try another angle of descent? A glance upwards showed no obvious route of return, and she realised that – now that she had begun this perilous climb – her only option was to press on.

  She gathered quickly that the mountain was not just made from the bones of the dead, but more specifically from those that had fallen in battle. It was apparent not only from the ways their limbs and skulls had been smashed, hewn and blasted, but also in the increasing quantities of rusted weaponry, armour and even vehicle hulls that peppered the mountainside.

  Here, she picked her way carefully through a thicket of swords whose blades had been shattered and turned to rust. When there, she was forced to traverse the jutting prow of some manner of combat aircraft, its nose cone hanging downwards, its cockpit glass crazed with bullet-holes. Banners and pennants flapped in the wind, bearing myriad insignia that stirred feelings within her she could not identify. A portcullis gate flanked by eagles and lightning bolts here, a dark blood drop fringed by spreading wings there. Some seemed so familiar that she could almost taste their names on the tip of her tongue, yet she was left frustrated by each attempt to place them.

  She had been scrambling downwards for perhaps an hour when a tangle of bones she was gripping cracked and gave way. She fell, her stomach lurching at the momentary weightlessness before she hit the slope feet first and spilled awkwardly sideways. Bones cascaded around her, clattering in a hollow storm of remains. She fell with them. She rolled and skidded.

  Chest tight, she grunted with effort as she tried and failed to arrest her fall. Something gouged her arm. Something else crunched under her hip. A flare of pain shot up her leg and she cried out. She scrabbled for purchase as her speed increased, knowing with sick certainty that at any moment she would feel the slope vanish from beneath her as she sailed out into the void.

  Her fingers found purchase at last, a solid chunk of metal that took her weight and arrested her plunge with a jolt. Her shoulder screamed in protest, but she hung on, heart thumping fast in her chest. She managed to get a grip on a femur with her other hand. She braced her feet against a jutting slab of stone and breathed out slowly. Fragments of bone continued to slither and roll past her, but the avalanche became a trickle, then stopped altogether. She realised that she had stopped just yards above a sheer drop.

  ‘Thank you, Emperor,’ she breathed.

  As her pulse slowed, she looked to see what miraculous object had saved her life. Her eyes widened as she realised that it was a breastplate, moulded, lacquered black and edged with fine gilt filigree. Compelled by a feeling she could not name, she dug the fingers of one hand in around the segment of armour to work it loose, while clinging tightly to a rusty spar with the other. More bones scattered. For a moment she was gripped by vertigo as she wobbled on her perch, but at last she tugged the breastplate free and held it out before herself.

  ‘It is not just the breastplate…’ It was, in fact, torso armour both front and back, its clasps half-fastened, its plates dented and edged with verdigris. It was clearly meant to be powered in some fashion, for its interior boasted a webwork of fine circuitry, and she saw servo-actuator sockets ready to accept connecting components. A rent had
been torn clean through both front and back. She let out a gasp as another sensory echo struck her. It was stronger this time, the sound of a blade rasping through metal, flesh and bone, accompanied by the acrid stink of smoke and burning flesh. She gritted her teeth as a tearing pain flared in her chest, there and gone in an instant.

  She knew, then. This breastplate had been hers. It was hers. How that could be, she had not the faintest idea, but she knew it as surely as she still drew breath. As she turned the armour over in her hands, she saw a scrollwork plate set along its gorget. She ran her fingers over it, dusting away a patina of ancient grime.

  ‘Celestine,’ she read. The name was powerfully familiar. ‘Is that… me? Am I Celestine?’ The notion felt right, and she resolved that, until it was proved otherwise, she would claim this name for herself. It centred her somehow, made her feel less a wraith of this wasteland and more a being that ventured through it.

  She considered throwing the armour aside, for it was battered and worn to the point of uselessness. Yet it was the first familiar thing she had seen in all this forsaken realm. She could not bear to part with it. She glanced down at her shift, ragged and torn where it had snagged bone and metal during her fall. She had been lucky not to suffer worse.

  The armour would at least provide her some protection against another fall, and although she had no power pack for its systems, it didn’t seem so heavy that it would encumber her overly. Awkwardly, mindful of the drop beneath her, Celestine manoeuvred the armour into place. She slid her arms through the holes, then sealed its clasps with an instinctive, practised ease.

  ‘O divine machine-spirits, demideus Omnissiah espiritum, I beseech thee to shield my fragile flesh from harm.’

  As the last clasp clicked into place, she blinked in bewilderment. Not only had the prayer of benediction sprung from her lips by some instinct, but the rent in her breastplate had vanished. The dents and grime faded as though they had never been. The armour she had donned had been a battered relic, but this was brand new, its lacquer shining in the bloody light, its scrollwork glinting. It took Celestine a moment to place the sudden hum that invaded her thoughts. She realised that an internal power source had activated within her backplate.