Celestine - Andy Clark Read online

  ‘Emperor, whatever miracle this is, I thank you for it,’ said Celestine. The armour’s restoration was inexplicable, but then, so was everything else about her situation. She chose to take it on faith that this development, at least, was in her favour.

  Her spirits buoyed, she forged onwards. The descent was still challenging, but with her torso and back protected from harm it was at least somewhat less painful.

  Sometime later, a glint of light on metal caught her eye. Sprawled in the tumbled wreck of a blackened landing craft were a great heap of skeletons, many crushed and mangled, some warped into unnatural shapes that she took care not to touch. There, amidst the mounds of remains, lay the armoured lower body of a warrior. Boots, greaves, leg and abdominal armour – it was all there, rusted into a single mass. Celestine felt intense discomfort at seeing that the body stopped at the waist, the ragged stub of a spine jutting out to vanish under a heavy slab of metal. Again, she somehow knew it to be hers.

  Tentative, she reached out and touched one leg of the armour. She was rocked by the intensity of the echo that washed over her.

  Screaming voices, frantic prayers, the sounds of engines labouring and terrible voices cackling and gibbering. The crackle of fire. The crash of guns in a confined space. Bullets and bolts flying in all directions. The howl of escaping air, and a moment of steely determination as she felt herself lunge for the rune that would drop the blast shutter and seal this entire section of the dropship off from the rest of the craft. The warp breach could not be allowed to infect the rest of the ship, not so close to their destination. She struck the rune, and the seventeen-ton blast door fell upon her like an executioner’s blade.

  Celestine came back to herself with a jolt. Had she died, she wondered? And if so, how was she alive now? How was such a thing possible? Was she remembering the lives of others, perhaps? Or was this all just some strange trick, part of a greater and crueller ruse that had brought her to this place and consigned her to a living purgatory?

  Setting questions aside, Celestine braced herself upon a tilted drop-cradle and painstakingly dragged the armour into position, emptying it of its macabre contents before sliding and wriggling into it. She hissed with pain as rusted interior edges cut her flesh. She was forced to contort herself painfully to force her legs the last of the way down into the armour. Yet the moment she did, the same strange restoration occurred. System runes lit green upon locking clasps, rust flaked away and allowed joints to move whisper-smooth. Black armour plates gleamed. Celestine stood, armoured now from her feet up to her neck, and felt the strength humming through the suit she wore. The Emperor’s warmth had set her on this path, she thought. That she had found these artefacts of her own, personal battle armour amongst the remains of the countless dead… it was no accident.

  The notion gave her hope.

  Her pauldrons she found upon a skeletal figure knelt as though in supplication amidst a forest of skulls impaled upon jutting bayonets. Somehow, again, she knew this body was also hers. The kneeling cadaver was watched over by the shattered statue of some ancient saint. Her arm segments and gauntlets she located a piece at a time, strewn down a long slope of bone scree below the teetering wreckage of a super-heavy tank, each with their own twisted skeletal arms and hands encased within them. How could her armour segments be strewn so far, she wondered, and seemingly belong to so many different corpses?

  ‘Have I died more than once?’ she whispered, shying away from the question when she heard how haunted her voice sounded.

  By the time she found the last of her armour and slotted its components into place, she was well down amidst the drifting crimson mists, tasting their coppery tang in her mouth. She had hoped for a helm, to insulate her from the foulness on the air, but she had no recollection of ever wearing such a thing and none was forthcoming from the mountainside.

  With each armour component Celestine located, there came another flash of sense-memory, each stronger than the last. She was immolated in a searing ball of plasma. She was struck down by an axe as large as a battle tank. She was riddled with explosive bolts until her body was sundered and her blood misted the air.

  Each death-echo was horrifying and painful, yet each brought with it an increased sense of duty and determination, and the inexplicable knowledge that every life she had given, she had given for a righteous cause. Along with the horror and pain of each demise, Celestine saw also the hopeful faces that surrounded her, heard the prayers to the Emperor, and knew that by her own martyrdom she had secured victory or salvation for countless others. It was emotionally exhausting. With each fresh segment that she found, the temptation grew simply to cast it aside rather than shoulder the burden of the bloody memories that came with it. She rejected that notion each time. She was sure in the knowledge that each echo would pass, and leave her fortified and better equipped to find the answers she sought.

  At last, fully armoured, Celestine strode down the shallower slopes of the mountain’s foothills. Still she crunched over fields of skulls and ribs, femurs and spines, rusted blades and sundered guns and tattered flags. Yet her armour now shielded her from jabbing shards. With its servo-actuators aiding her balance and lending strength to her stride, Celestine made good time. She found herself picking her way between teetering heaps of remains that rose like cairns and carrion-piles. Many supported brass poles atop which she saw foul icons that caused her intense feelings of anger and revulsion. She saw an eight-pointed star and, as she wondered at the hatred that the crude shape awoke in her, a word rose unbidden to her lips. She spat it out like poison.

  ‘Chaos.’

  The memories were fleeting, her mind wanting to skate away from them. Instead she climbed a jagged mound and grasped the foul icon atop it with both hands. She wrenched the iron pole free with a snarl and cast it down. Then the monstrous images came in a blizzard that set her reeling, slithering down the slope of the cairn to fall to her knees at its base.

  Yawning maws stuffed with fangs; armoured heretics with burning red eyes; mobs of screaming fools, deluded and enslaved by malevolent entities they could not comprehend. Looming terrors made of smoke and flame, sorcery and evil. These were the arch-enemies of her Emperor, and thus they were her foes also.

  Celestine knew it to be true.

  As the barrage of images passed, and she returned to herself, something shifted amidst the mists. A shadow crawled along the flank of a nearby ridge, a vague suggestion of long limbs and grasping talons. Red eyes flashed in the gloom, and a wave of hatred beat against Celestine like furnace heat.

  ‘Warp spawn,’ she snarled, meeting its fury with her own.

  Celestine clenched her armoured gauntlets into fists, servos whining and powercells thrumming as they added their strength to hers. She snapped her head round as she heard bonemeal spill, knocked loose from another ossuary-heap by a second shadowy figure. There were more, she realised, slinking between the mounds and scrabbling closer like scavenging beasts around a carcass. Their eyes glowed like coals in the gloom, the only clearly visible part of them. Their voices came to her, low moans of hunger and hate with nothing human in them at all.

  Celestine could fight, she was sure of that, but she could not defeat so many of these unknown fiends at once. Sensing that the boldest of them was about to pounce, she did the only other thing that she could.

  She ran.

  Aided by the servo-strength of her armour, Celestine broke into a sudden sprint and pounded away downhill. She felt the rush of hot air as several creatures leapt, their shadowy talons missing her by a hair’s breadth. Howls of frustration chased her as she ran on, pulverised bone spraying up behind her heels.

  Celestine careened downhill through thick red mists that reduced her visibility to a matter of yards. Bones and wreckage squirmed treacherously underfoot. Jagged mounds of detritus loomed suddenly from the fog, forcing her to dodge frantically around them at the last moment. Behind her, Ce
lestine heard baying howls and the clamour of talons on bone as her pursuers gained on her.

  ‘Emperor guide my footfalls,’ she prayed as she ran. ‘Lead me not unto disaster or mischance. Ward away the terrors that hunt me.’

  Daemons.

  The word came unbidden to her mind, along with the knowledge that if the abominations that snapped at her heels caught her then she would not just lose her life, but her eternal soul also.

  Celestine snapped a look back over her shoulder and saw dozens of glowing coals burning in the murk, drawing closer with every heartbeat. She ran faster.

  The ground sloped steeply, and she almost fell, careening downhill amidst a shower of bones. Something dark shot overhead, and she had a split second to register that one of the daemons had leapt from the top of the rise to land in front of her. The monster spun towards her with a venomous hiss, lashing out with its claws. Rather than try to avoid it, Celestine clenched a fist and used her momentum to drive a thunderous blow into the creature’s face.

  She felt a raking pain in her side, followed by a vertiginous lurch as her fist passed straight through the daemon as though it were mist. Celestine cannoned forward and lost her balance, crashing down on the bone slope and rolling downhill. She skidded to a halt amidst a heap of skeletons still partially clad in armour not dissimilar to her own.

  Celestine’s head spun, and her chest heaved with the competing urges to suck in lungfuls of air or else vomit. There was no time to gather her wits. She could hear her attacker skidding down the slope above her, an alpha predator coming to claim its fallen prey. She glanced at her side and was surprised to see that her armour was wholly undamaged, though she could feel the hot pain across her ribs where the daemon had raked her.

  ‘Incorporeal enough that I can’t harm them, yet solid enough that they can butcher me,’ she gasped, struggling to her feet and preparing to run again. She felt neither panic nor fear, for her iron will kept such sensations at bay, but Celestine knew that her situation was dire. Outrunning her pursuers seemed unlikely, yet to her immense frustration it seemed that she could not stand and fight. Celestine hated that notion of powerlessness more than anything, and resolved that, should the daemons catch her, she would contrive to end her own life rather than submit to their theft of it.

  That was when the mist thinned for a moment and, in the hazy crimson light, she saw the blade. It jutted up from a bone cairn, just upslope from where she stood. It was long and straight, a bastard sword meant for single- or double-handed wielding. Its crossguard was fashioned into a winged skull of burnished gold. A garland of dead black roses hung from its hilt, which was gripped in a skeletal fist that thrust up from the heart of the cairn. Though the blade was tarnished and notched, bloody light still glinted on it in a way that nearly hypnotised Celestine.

  This was her sword. She knew it as surely as she had known that each segment of armour she came across during the descent was hers. Perhaps, with this weapon in her hands, she could fight?

  Her pursuers were almost on top of her; she could see the lead daemon slithering down the slope, more of its brood close behind. Celestine gauged the distance and made a snap decision. She could make it.

  She lunged uphill, digging her toes into the uneven surface and pushing hard. She clawed at skeletal remains to propel herself upwards, giving a roar of pure effort as she raced the daemon to the mound. The beast was almost on top of her as she reached the blade, wrapping her hands around its hilt and giving a hard wrench. For a moment, the skeletal hand seemed reluctant to relinquish its grip, and she was forced to yank it a second time, even harder.

  Bone disintegrated. The blade was made anew, gleaming in the bloodlight. Celestine drew it back as the daemon lunged. She swung, struck, and her attacker’s head spun away into the murk trailing sprays of ichor. Celestine braced instinctively for the impact of its corpse, but the daemon’s body passed through her like a cold wind and she turned, watching it discorporate into smoke as it tumbled to a stop.

  Celestine flicked black ichor from her blade and stared at it for a moment, feeling the sense of utmost holiness that radiated from the weapon. She suffered no sense echoes this time, though she had braced herself for them. Instead there was simply an abiding sense of rightness, and of completion.

  Now she had the weapon that the Emperor had bequeathed her.

  Now she was a warrior again.

  Now, she was Celestine.

  Spills of bone and rusting metal skittered around her as the daemons surged down the slope. Raising her blade beside her head, Celestine braced her feet and made ready.

  ‘Come, foul blasphemies, let me purge you in the Emperor’s name,’ she said with a tight smile.

  The first creature flung itself at her, claws lashing wildly. She lopped off one arm and spun aside, allowing the pouncing daemon to tumble past her as the first one had. The next attacker came on more cautiously, feinting low then trying to rake its talons across her eyes. Celestine read its intentions easily and swayed back from the daemon’s attack, before ramming her blade up through its jaw and out of the top of its head.

  She ripped the weapon free as the daemon dissipated into smoke, in time to aim a disembowelling swing at the next fiend to attack. Another came at her out of the mist, and another. Then three attacked at once, one of the beasts managing to rip its claws through the meat of her thigh as she held off the other two. Celestine snarled with anger and despatched each assailant in turn, but she could hear a clattering commotion that suggested dozens more daemons were surging closer.

  The fires of battle burned hot in Celestine’s chest, but she knew that standing and dying upon this bleak hillside would not bring her the answers she sought.

  ‘Golden Throne,’ she spat, turning to run again, pouring all her strength and willpower into outdistancing the daemons.

  Still they gained on her, and she cursed the futility of her plight as bone cairns and rusting wrecks flashed past.

  ‘Does this damned mountain never end?’ she gasped, legs and arms pumping as she ran.

  As though she had summoned it, the ground levelled out with abrupt suddenness and then, to her surprise, began to slope upwards. Her pounding footfalls pulverised a last layer of bone, then fell upon hard black rock instead.

  Celestine charged up the slope, through crimson mist so thick she could barely see a sword’s length in front of her face. Howls and screams billowed around her, the pursuing daemons just yards behind. Surely the sudden change in landscape must indicate a chance of refuge? Surely she could not simply have passed from one interminable hell into another, there to be swiftly run to ground and torn apart by overwhelming enemy numbers.

  Surely the Emperor meant more for her than this.

  That was when the ground vanished, so abruptly that Celestine had no chance to react. One moment she was running full pelt up a rocky slope. The next she was sailing through thin air as the stone promontory ended in an abrupt ledge and hurled her out into the void.

  Celestine fell, her hair whipping around her face, crimson mist billowing past on all sides. Behind her she heard the daemons’ frustrated howls, receding swiftly as she plunged away from them into the endless red gulf.

  The thought came to her that this was the end; not torn apart but condemned to a terrible plunge, perhaps to fall never-ending, perhaps to be dashed to red ruin on rocks far below. Then a strange sense swept through her, a miraculous unfurling of power that made her nerves sing and her soul tingle. Power surged through her body, and in a glorious moment of revelation a mighty pair of glowing gold and silver wings spread from between her shoulder blades. They snapped outwards, obeying her unconscious thought like muscle memory. They arrested her fall, caught the hot winds, transformed her plunge into a swooping glide. The mists swirled and parted before her and with a joyous shout she beat her mighty pinions and began to rise.

  Celestine laughed as she soar
ed upwards through the mists, beating her powerful wings as easily as she might command her legs to walk or her arms to swing a sword. Her hair billowed in the winds as she swept up and away from the bone mountain, bursting from amidst the crimson fog and into the desolate air above.

  As the jagged horizon came into view, Celestine felt the candle-warmth of the Emperor’s light upon her face. She felt, more than saw, the distant glow of its illumination, far, far away across the plains, among the fanged mountains.

  There lay her destination. She knew it. She had faith in the Emperor’s guidance. She had faith in her own strength.

  Soaring on glowing wings of light, her silvered blade held firm against her chest, Celestine flew on over the blasted plains.

  Towards the unseen light of the Emperor.

  Towards answers.

  404TH DAY OF THE WAR – 0600 HOURS

  IMPERIUM NIHILUS – PLANET KOPHYN

  CANYON-CITY TANYKHA ADUL – LO:564-3/LA:675-9

  Bells tolled over the Adul, calling the faithful to war. Their chimes echoed along the las-sculpted chasms and ravines into which the city was built. They rolled reverberant through shadowy cavern-habs and dusty subterranean manufactoria, candle-lit shrines and fortified cliff-side bunkers. They rang amid spills of rosy dawn light and the crash of booted, running feet. They mingled with the first volleys of gunfire.

  Major Blaskaine was out of his bunk at the first sound of trouble. Nineteen years in the Emperor’s service had honed his instincts to the point where Blaskaine’s men joked – when they believed themselves safely out of earshot – that he had a touch of psyker prescience about him.

  He allowed the men their grim jests.

  Since Cadia’s fall, any mirth was welcome, even at his expense.

  This was not a day for jokes, however. As he marched down the shady corridor that linked his chambers to the Fourth Sector command bunker, Blaskaine reflected that precious few days on Kophyn had been.