Assassinorum- Divine Sanction - Robert Rath Read online

  Silence at that.

  With swift, professional hands Sycorax triggered the mobile power plant and slipped it on, centring it between her shoulder blades. She snatched up the shredder and connected its cable. Keyed the activation rune and watched miniature lightning swirl the gas inside the crystal prism.

  ‘How did you get in here? Where’s the sermon writer?’

  Sycorax responded with a shot. It was un-aimed, desperate. Meant to buy time more than anything. Blind fire around the massive desk.

  The neural shredder’s discharge popped her ears and rippled through the room like a shockwave, an expanding cone of roiling empyric energy that would sever neurological pathways and interrupt nerve function.

  She heard Rask choke. Stagger. She must have been only clipped, or psychically shielded, or else she would have simply collapsed.

  ‘For the Greater Good,’ Sycorax intoned for good measure. She laid the shredder aside and began snapping the segmented phase sword together – building the blade, locking in the power node, snapping the assembly in the vambrace – when she heard Rask cough out the command she knew must be coming.

  The trigger word.

  ‘Goneril Sanctus.’

  Howls in the corridor. Revving saws. Pistons thumping with fuel injections. The rank odour of pharm-sweat, the kind that pops when an addict is one plunge from overdose.

  Sycorax took a low stance, got ready to move.

  The Penitent Engines stormed the room.

  The first bowled the wounded Rask completely over, heedless of anything but its target.

  It was Leonine. Huge in the doorway, smokestack braziers blackening the ceiling frescoes. Leonine was a woman wearing the peaked hood of a heretic, its flaps sutured roughly to her cheeks. Red fabric bracketed a mouth full of brown teeth and translucent gums. There were no eyeholes in the hood, there was no need. A Penitent Engine killed whatever was in front of it. The long exoskeleton arms made simian swipes as it advanced on the assassin.

  Sycorax was unsure if the woman drove the Engine, or the Engine drove the woman. She wondered what horrible crime had condemned her to this fate, then decided she did not care. Because ending Leonine’s life would be a kindness. A steel kindness, but a kindness nonetheless.

  She leapt backwards, somersaulting away from the swipe of a saw blade; landed on the seat of a plush armchair and sprang upwards again, bringing her shredder to bear as she sailed backwards.

  Crack. A bolt of lightning in the gas chamber. Another blast of unreality rent the air, boiling the devotional paint on Leonine’s flesh and curling her purity seals to ash.

  She kept coming. Penitent Engines were monstrous things. Torture devices as well as weapons of war. The pilot’s neural pathways were already sundered, and even with its inmate limp and dead, the exoskeleton would continue the massacre.

  Sycorax landed and weaved to the side as Leonine continued her charge, one stamping metal foot pulping the corpse of the cleric she was created to defend.

  The Engine had no direction now, no target. It simply ploughed forward in the blindness of half-death, scything through anything in its way. Gilded wood chips flew as it carved through the confessor’s throne. The ambulatory desk shrieked as a saw chewed through its legs.

  Sycorax ducked under the sweep of one massive arm and was past.

  Behind her, she heard the overload-crackle of the Engine hitting the triple-layer refractor field and shorting it, filling the air with a smell like burned flesh and welded metal. Screams rose from the praying crowd below as the huge machine hit the railing and toppled over the balcony.

  The shorting refractor field was trying to cycle, re-establish itself, but failing. It lit the room in a flashing strobe of too-bright white that made things move wrongly, in staccato. Taurus entered the room, one huge claw crimping the doorway as it levered itself inside.

  Flash.

  Taurus the man arched his back, wrist-thick tubes of magenta liquid pumping into his eyes. Exoskeleton arms raised in threat.

  Flash.

  A chainblade arm big as a tank barrel swept down at her.

  Flash.

  Sycorax leapt over it, levelling her shredder at point-blank range. Pulled the trigger.

  Flash.

  Nothing happened; she saw the power cable dangling, severed during her duck under Leonine’s sweeping arm. She saw the chainblade swinging back.

  Flash.

  She dived, chainblade passing so close she felt the reverberating air on the back of her neck as she dodged under it. A handspring over the desk, a quick drop, and she took shelter on the other side.

  Nothing but light and sound in this room. The sizzling, intermittent flare-light of the malfunctioning refractor field. A howling chainblade and the hard metal sound of a pincer claw on marble. Her only protection was the Engine’s single-mindedness, its instinct to hack through the desk rather than go around.

  Chainblade met stone. A corner of the desk dropped away. Orange sparks fountained from each strike in great fan arcs, each blow producing a high-pitched sound that lanced her eardrums. The smell of glowing metal and hot stone filled her flattened nostrils.

  The blade shed hooked teeth. They rebounded off the wall and high ceiling, falling like sleet on Sycorax. She made herself small, stabbed back with her phase sword when she saw an opening. Whatever damage she was doing, she realised – at least what little she could see in the strobing light – was superficial. Sycorax knew she was doomed. Knew she could not get close enough to land a killing blow. No one could beat a Penitent Engine once it closed the distance.

  The battered desk began giving way. One clawed hand gripped the side for purchase, digging into the skull-faced cherubs supporting the writing surface. The other plunged down on the other side, stabbing with the whirring chainblade. It penetrated the floor to her right, spraying Sycorax with wood shavings and carpet fibre.

  It withdrew.

  She rolled right, the chainblade plunging again to sink deep in the floor where she’d just been. She gasped as saw teeth parted her synthskin suit and ripped a finger width into her leg. Blood seeped hot from her thigh; stained the carpet, ran to where her knee met the ground.

  Then she saw it.

  The phosphorus spray. The cylinder of smokeless burn-chemical, meant to dissolve bodies and incriminating clothes. It lay within reach, scattered there by the Engine’s relentless assault.

  She grabbed it up, twisted, pointed it at the leering tube-eyed face of Taurus.

  Flash.

  A cone of spray dusted the penitent.

  Flash.

  Skin bubbled. Tubes ruptured. Pastel pharm-cocktails ran down his face like a blanket of tears.

  Flash.

  Lenses blackened on the automated targeting optics. Evasion protocols went into effect. The Engine rocked backwards.

  Flash.

  Sycorax was in the air, vaulting off the desk, crackling phase sword raised for the strike.

  Flash.

  It plunged directly into Taurus’ head. She grabbed purchase on the Engine and held on like a grox-rider, stabbing over and over. Severing nerve cables. Piercing optic lenses. Rupturing hydraulics and smashing pharm-phials. She stabbed and stabbed, phase blade passing in and out of reality as it sank into the monstrous amalgam of machine and flesh. She stabbed so deep her clenched fist bruised against hard metal, so deep the tip of the phase sword emerged out of the Engine’s back. She kept stabbing.

  Long arms, flailing and revving, could not reach her. Engines were engineered that way, so the pilot could not end their torment through suicide.

  Control avenues cut, the Penitent Engine stumbled backwards, pitched over, fell.

  Sycorax rode it all the way to the ground. Its bulk splintered the polished wood of the floor, revealing ugly rockcrete beneath.

  She flexed her battered swo
rd hand, feeling the pulverised knuckles underneath her glove.

  A single moment to breathe, then she saw movement and sprang backwards into a fighting stance.

  Rask held her power sword point-first in a duelling guard. It was a thin blade, its swept hilt speaking to the traditions of honour combat on this feudal world. The neural shredder – or just the proximity of its beam – had scrambled her hard. Blood trailed from her nose and one ear, prominent against her white skin in the strobing light.

  ‘Weapon down,’ Rask growled.

  Beyond her, through the open door, Sycorax could see Apostolic Guardsmen rushing down the corridor. The only way out.

  Rask slammed her palm on the sealing rune and the plasteel double doors slammed shut.

  ‘Wish me for yourself?’ Sycorax asked, hoping her t’au accent was passable. She hadn’t studied, and improvisation was just a fancy word for bluffing.

  ‘Maybe,’ Rask smiled. Sycorax had never seen that before. It was a vinegar thing. ‘Or maybe we come to an arrangement.’

  ‘Your master is dead.’

  ‘Would’ve happened sooner or later.’ Rask shrugged. ‘If not you, the High Lords of Terra. Besides, who wants to have a master, when they can be the master? Looks to me, you and the confessor had a disagreement. Fine. His grift would only take him so far. Open heresy? Turn the planet over to the t’au? It invites an Imperial invasion. But play this right, and we both get what we want. You’re after the resources, yeah? I take emergency powers, root out the xenos agents who killed our beloved confessor. Makes me look legitimate. Meanwhile, every quarter-cycle I send whatever you want – ore, promethium, labourers – out to the disused landing fields in the provinces. You send some human freighter agents to take them off our hands. And no Inquisition or Assassinorum dogging our steps.’

  ‘Very accommodating,’ said Sycorax. ‘There’s only one issue.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I am the Assassinorum.’

  Power fields clashed, popping and sizzling as Rask parried the thrust. Sycorax drew an envenomed stiletto in her off-hand and slid it under the captain’s guard, but it bent against the carapace breastplate and the captain broke the thin blade with a chop.

  Rask was good, a product of the best mercenary academies in the sector. And her long rapier had reach on the short stabbing blade of the phase sword, which was designed for ambush rather than open combat.

  Still, none of that would have mattered if Sycorax were fresh. But her brawl with the Penitent Engines had drained her and blood loss was affecting her speed. It was all she could do to avoid being hit.

  The whickering blade forced Sycorax’s phase sword all over the place, wheeling it up and over, locking it with its swept hilt. If not for the blade’s xenos material, Rask would have snapped it twice within seconds. Instead, the hard twists merely bent the quillons of Rask’s handguard.

  Sycorax felt herself retreating under the hail of counter-thrusts. Razor-edged power fields lashed by her, forcing her to dodge and weave as the long rapier quested for her. Pain lanced down her left forearm as she used it to divert a blow aimed at her abdomen, leaving a wicked gash from elbow to wrist. Her synthskin sleeve detected blood and tightened to staunch the flow.

  Rask laughed, boxing her into the balcony, forcing Sycorax back until the marble railing with its velvet banner was at her spine. Sycorax could hear the whum-whum-whum of the misfiring triple refractor field as it cycled on and off.

  ‘I know what you are, shape-changer. But the crowds down there, they don’t. Imagine what they’ll think as they watch me kill the xenos assassin that ended their confessor.’

  Sycorax caught the downward stroke on her sword’s vambrace, the blade digging deep into the sparking circuits. Its hum died, power node winking out, blade phasing permanently into reality – dead metal.

  Rask forced her backwards, leaning on her so the twin blades bracketed her throat. The rapier’s spitting power field filled her nostrils with the smell of cooked metal. The cycling power field behind her head thrummed in her ears.

  She blocked it out, stared into Rask’s eyes.

  And saw the horror in the mercenary’s face, as Sycorax’s features flowed and rearranged to mirror the captain’s. Every duelling scar. Every freckle and frown line.

  Sycorax saw the stunned fascination, felt the woman recoil in disgust, the pressure of her sword lifting.

  And Sycorax made her move. She grabbed the bottom of the carapace breastplate and hauled while shoving the power sword upwards, bending backwards at a spine-breaking angle as she threw the captain over her head…

  Directly into the cycling force field.

  Rask had a moment to scream before the faint blue fields snapped on, dropping like a triple guillotine, segmenting and cauterising before they disappeared again.

  Sycorax let the body go, allowing it to collapse, twitching, at her feet.

  Rask’s face had disappeared by inches, fluttering like autumn leaves to the crowd below.

  When the Apostolic Guard overrode the door seal, they found a charnel house. The confessor – identifiable only by his vestments – murdered. One Penitent Engine wrecked. Their captain had rushed out, giving orders, but was then found dead, skull unmasked.

  No one knew how the xenos assassin had escaped. Not through the door or the balcony – it would have been seen – and the air vents were hardly larger than a hymnal.

  Elsewhere, the fighting raged. The t’au delegation held out for an hour, plasma weapons cutting down anyone that approached their chambers – until the rocket launchers arrived.

  The Tower of St Goneril was treacherous, unstable. Engineers had been right to close it. One wrong foot could send a man to his death on the crumbling staircases – six had died just trying to assess the damage.

  Sycorax found the going slow, even though she was trained to recognise the booby traps that the Vindicare had placed among the crumbling ruins. Here, a taut cable leading to a flechette mine dusted with rockcrete powder. There a caltrop smeared with nerve toxin.

  Admirable tradecraft. The hallmark of a professional.

  Which is what bothered her. This mission had been strange from the outset. Its parameters had not troubled her on the briefing-slate, but once embroiled she’d increasingly harboured doubts. It rode a line.

  To impersonate a heretic was no sin – a standard part of the temple’s remit. But to continue an anti-Imperial coup for months? That was unheard of. If not a violation of her vows, then as near to one as to make the distinction immaterial.

  Had the bullet, in fact, been meant for the confessor and her both? Was the Vindicare a rogue, or was she?

  The shadow-haunted bell tower looked out on blue twilight, its arches underlit by the fires burning in the streets as the Industry Lords took the streets back from the panicked Confessionists.

  Sycorax saw the shooting position immediately, a hide built from rubble and swept clear of rock dust. Fading light glinted dull on brass, and she crouched to inspect it.

  The Exitus rifle casing stood on its end, twice as long as her thumb and wide as a shotgun shell, open mouth pointed at the ceiling.

  Not fallen, placed. The Vindicare always took their casings with them on exfil.

  She picked it up and turned it over, saw its detonation cap stamped in the shape of a skull. Saw the imprint of a customised firing pin, one that had punched a crosshair over the skull when it struck.

  As she looked, a data-card the size of a thumbnail tumbled out of the hollow casing. It nearly blew away before she snatched it off the floor.

  She slipped it into her wrist slate, and ran the decryption sequence.

  Runes danced. Settled. Locked into two words.

  Operation Vendetta.

  About the Author

  Robert Rath is a freelance writer from Honolulu who is currently based in Hong Kong. Though mos
tly known for writing the YouTube series Extra History, his credits also include numerous articles and a book for the U.S. State Department. ‘The Garden of Mortal Delights’ is his first story for Black Library.

  An extract from Resurrection: The Horusian Wars.

  The dust wind sang as it blew through the ranks of silent Titans. Cables rattled against armour plates, and war banners rippled and snapped in the rising gale. Beyond the dust clouds the last light of the sun was fading to an ochre bruise.

  Koleg paused in the shadow of a Battle Titan and looked up. The machine towered into the billowing dust. Vast guns jutted from its shoulders and hung in place of arms. A web of chains bound it to the ground. Koleg could see red beacon lights winking high on the Titan’s carapace. The wind gusted and the chains creaked as the god-machine flexed against its bindings. Koleg lowered his gaze. The shadows of more Titans hung against the curtains of dust. Machines from three Legions had come to the muster, and now stood on the plains as the storms rolled in. Beyond the god-machines, taller than any of them, stood the Reliquary Tower. Generations of pilgrims had raised its walls, block by block, until it stood higher than the mountains that rose behind it. A statue of a robed and haloed woman capped the tower’s top, sword reaching up to the shrouded sky. The fires burning in the statue’s eyes blinked as the murk rippled across its face.

  ‘Halt and identify!’

  Koleg turned at the sound of the voice. Ten figures closed on him, spears levelled over the top of linked tower shields. Lightning crackled around the spear tips. Eye slits glowed in closed helms. Koleg glanced at them, as his mask-visor detected the active weapons and blinked to crimson, outlining each of the warriors in amber.

  Secutarii, thought Koleg, the guardian companions of the Titan Legions.

  He nodded at them.

  ‘Identify,’ came the voice from the warrior at the centre of the shield-wall. Static growled against the wind as a speaker amplified the words. ‘You have ten seconds to comply.’