THE WARMASTER Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Warhammer 40,000

  One: Corpse

  Two: Ghost

  Three: And Back

  Four: Dead In The Water

  Five: V’heduak

  Six: Pick Our Bones

  Seven: The Line

  Eight: Bad Shadow

  Nine: Blood Price

  Ten: Visiting Death

  Eleven: Forge World Urdesh

  Twelve: A Place Of Safety

  Thirteen: Good Faith

  Fourteen: Line Of Fire

  Fifteen: Staff

  Sixteen: The Inner Circle

  Seventeen: Eagles

  Eighteen: And Stones

  Nineteen: Weeds

  Twenty: Offensive

  Twenty-One: Lice

  Twenty-Two: The Tulkar Batteries

  Twenty-Three: The Warmaster

  Twenty-Four: I Am Death

  Twenty-Five: Executor

  About the Author

  A Black Library Publication

  WARHAMMER 40,000

  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.

  The King of the Knives!

  The King of the Knives!

  This is the song of the King of the Knives!

  He sleeps in the woods and he hunts in the hives!

  The King of the Knives!

  The King of the Knives!

  He dies where he doesn’t and lives where he thrives!

  The King of the Knives!

  The King of the Knives!

  He cuts all the husbands and preys on the wives!

  The King of the Knives!

  The King of the Knives!

  His voice is as loud as a battleship’s drives!

  The King of the Knives!

  The King of the Knives!

  He comes in the darkness and he takes all our lives!

  The King of the Knives!

  The King of the Knives!

  This is the song of the King of the Knives!

  – Children’s skipping chant, Tanith

  ‘By the start of 791.M41, the thirty-sixth year of the Sabbat Worlds Crusade, the Imperial forces were stretched to breaking point. Warmaster Macaroth’s scheme to create a schism between the archenemy Archon Gaur and his most potent lieutenant, the Anarch Sek, thus dividing his opponent’s strength, had shown genuine signs of success over the preceding years. Macaroth had achieved this goal through select and specific military strikes, sabotage and propaganda, driving the tribal forces of Sek and the Archon into competition and sometimes open hostilities.

  ‘Emboldened by the sense that a tide was turning, and that his foe was divided, Macaroth had moved rapidly to capitalise, extending the bulk of his huge Astra Militarum force across a midline front to prosecute both. But the ferocious legions of Archon Gaur had consolidated their hold on the Erinyes Group, and Sek’s battle hosts were making a counter-push along the Archon’s coreward flank through a series of vital systems that included the pivotal forge world of Urdesh.

  ‘Further, Macaroth was facing increasing dissent from his own generals and lords militant. For over a decade, they had been urging that lasting success in the crusade could only be achieved through decisive focus on the warlord Archon, and that simultaneously campaigning against Sek spread the Imperial groups too thinly. Macaroth rejected this approach again and again, insisting that focusing on Gaur would allow Sek time to rebuild his strength, and that this would ultimately lead to an Imperial rout. Overruling objections, he tasked Lord Militant Eirik with the prosecution of Archon Gaur and the Erinyes Group, and drove the attack on Sek himself.

  ‘He had, however, reckoned without two things: the manner of the Archenemy’s defence of Urdesh, and the magnitude of a new threat revealed by the very operations designed to effect the schism between Gaur and Sek.’

  – From A History of the Later Imperial Crusades

  ONE: CORPSE

  Human ship. Imperial human ship. Cold thing from which life-heat has bled. Nothing-thing. Corpse-wreck, broken, inert, adrift…

  How long has it been dead? How long had it been alive? How long had it been brave? When and how had that bravery ended? Had the souls within it served their puppet-fool-god dutifully? Had they taken our blood before the void took them?

  If they had been worthless fools, then this patch of space was their boneyard. If they had been heroes to their kind, then this blackness was their sepulchre.

  Just a hulk now, a sun-charred lump of chambered metal, rotating slowly through an airless darkness. At the current distance, it is visible only by auspex and sensoreflection. Drive core cold, like a perished star. Organics nil, just the trace residue of decomposition. But there are grave goods to be retrieved. Salvage potential is determined from the gathering metadata. Good plating for reuse, hull panels, ceramite composites, fuel cells for trading, cabling, weapons systems – perhaps commodity loads too: promethium, small-arms, explosives, even food-packs…

  Sixty thousand kilometres. Range and intercept is locked. The signal is given. Amber, the challenge screens blink awake like opening reptile eyes, bathing the command bridge with golden light. Ordnance automates from dormancy, rattling autoloaders and charging cells. Boarding arrays power up and extend, sliding hull-claws, mooring anchors and assault bridges from shuttered silos. The drives come up: a vibration and a hum, and the advance begins.

  Forty thousand kilometres. The swarms assemble, tools and weapons poised, filling the ready-stations and the companionways behind the assault bridge hatches.

  Twenty thousand kilometres. The corpse-ship becomes visible. A tumbling mass of metal, trailing debris clouds. A halo of immaterial energies shimmers around it, blood from the wound that spat the wreck out of the empyrean and into real space. Benedictions are murmured to ward against any daemonia or warp spawn that might have been left clinging to the dead thing’s hull.

  Ten thousand kilometres. The corpse-ship’s name becomes legible, etched across the buckled steeple of its prow.

  Highness Ser Armaduke.

  TWO: GHOST

  Silence.

  Nothing but silence. A weightless emptiness. The pale yellow light of other stars shafted in through unshuttered window ports, and washed slowly and uniformly up
the walls and across the ceiling.

  The Ghost opened his eyes.

  He was floating, bodiless, an outsider observing the life he had left behind through the fog of mortality’s veil. He had no name, no memories. His mind was cold. Death had robbed him of all vital thoughts and feelings. He was detached, freed forever from sensation, from weariness, from pain and care. He haunted the place where he had once lived.

  He was not part of it any more. He could only look at the world he had left, dispassionate. The things that had mattered so much when he had been alive were meaningless. Duty had ceased to be a concept. Hope was revealed to be a laughably perishable quantity. Victory was an empty promise someone once made.

  The light of the heedless stars moved slowly. Across the deck, along the walls, across the ceiling, around and around like the morning, noon and night of a fast-running day. Perhaps this was how a ghost saw the world. Perhaps time and the day-night rhythm of life ran fast to the dead’s eyes, to make eternity more endurable.

  Except, no.

  The stars weren’t moving. The Armaduke was. Powerless, dead, inert and gravity-shot, it was tumbling end over end in real space.

  The Ghost considered this with glacial slowness, forcing his frosted mind to think. The ship was moving. How had it come to this? What doom had overtaken them? Had death come upon them so swiftly and so traumatically that the memory of life’s end had been ripped entirely from his recollection?

  How had he died?

  The Ghost heard drumming. It was getting louder: steadily, progressively louder.

  He saw something in front of his eyes. It was a metal washer, a small one. It was hanging in the air before him, rotating very slowly, not falling at all. Light winked off its turning edges. Two more washers and an oil-black restraining bolt drifted across his field of vision from the left in perfectly maintained formation. They passed behind the first washer, creating a brief astrological conjunction before drifting on.

  The drumming became louder.

  The Ghost felt pain. Slight, distant, but pain nevertheless. He felt it in his phantom limbs, his spine, his neck. The aftertaste of the agonies he had suffered in death had come with him to the other side of the veil, to haunt his shade.

  How fitting. How true to the universe’s treacherous nature. Only in death does duty end, but pain does not end with it. That’s the thing the priests and hierophants don’t tell you. Death is not a final release from pain. Pain stays with you. It clings to you forever.

  What other lies had he been taught in his brief existence? The revelation made him want to curse the names of the ones who had given him life, the ones who had pretended to love him, the ones who had demanded his loyalty. It made him want to curse the Throne itself for telling him that death was some kind of serene reward.

  It made him want to curse everything.

  The Ghost opened his mouth.

  ‘Feth you all,’ he said.

  His breath smoked the air. His skin was cold.

  Wait, breath?

  The drumming became louder.

  It was the blood pounding in his ears.

  Suddenly, he could hear again. His world was abruptly full of noise: his own ragged breathing, the cries and moans of those nearby, the wail of alarms, the mangled shriek of the ship’s hull and superstructure.

  Gravity reasserted itself.

  The washers and the restraining bolt dropped to the deck. The Ghost dropped too. He hit a surface that was slick with frost, and he hit it hard. All the airspaces and blood vessels in his body realigned to gravity. He half choked as his windpipe flexed. His lungs panicked. His gut sloshed like a half-filled skin of sacra. All around him, he heard other impacts, and realised it was the sound of every other loose and unsecured object aboard the old ship falling to the deck. Inside the Armaduke, it was raining things and people.

  The Ghost got to his feet. He was not steady. A ghost was made for floating, not walking. Every part of him hurt.

  He found his lasrifle on the deck nearby. He picked it up with hands that did not work as well as he would have liked. Could a ghost touch things? Apparently so.

  Perhaps this was some penance. Perhaps he had been called back to mortality for one final duty. Another lie, then. Even in death, duty did not fething end.

  The Ghost moved down the companionway. He heard whimpering. He saw a young Belladon trooper, one of the new intake, sitting on the deck with his back to the wall, his teeth clenched like a rat-trap, nursing a broken wrist. The boy looked up at the Ghost as he loomed over him.

  ‘What happened?’ the boy asked.

  ‘Am I dead?’ asked the Ghost.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Am I dead?’

  ‘N-no. No, sir.’

  ‘How do you know?’ asked the Ghost.

  He saw terror in the boy’s eyes.

  ‘I d-don’t know,’ the boy said.

  ‘I think I am dead,’ said the Ghost. ‘But you are not. You can walk. Get to the infirmary. Consider us at secondary order.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  The youngster winced, and clambered to his feet.

  ‘Go on, now,’ the Ghost said.

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  The Ghost thought about that.

  ‘I don’t know. But I reckon the God-Emperor has some purpose reserved for me, and this gun suggests it will involve killing.’

  ‘S-something you’re good at, then,’ said the boy, trying to seem braver than he actually was.

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘Famously, sir.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Thyst, sir.’

  ‘Get to the infirmary, Thyst.’

  The boy nodded, and stumbled away.

  Nearby were two of the ship’s crew personnel, deck ratings. One was bleeding profusely from a deep cut across the bridge of his nose. The other was trying to pick up all the labelled machine spares that gravity had inverted out of his push-cart.

  ‘What happened?’ the Ghost asked them.

  The bleeding man looked up at him.

  ‘I have no idea,’ he said. ‘It has never happened before.’

  The left side of the Ghost’s upper lip curled slightly in a frustrated sneer. He turned away. He knew pretty much nothing about voidships, but he was sure that this was what the commander had warned them about. The commander. The commander. What was his name? The Ghost was having such difficulty remembering anything about his life. It hadn’t ended that long ago.

  Gaunt. That was it. Gaunt.

  What was it Gaunt had said? ‘The Armaduke is experiencing drive issues. It might not bring us home. If we fall short or explosively de-translate, I want the fighting companies ready for protection duties.’

  The Ghost tried a wall-vox, but nothing but static came out of it. They had light and they had gravity, but the ship was stricken. They were dead in the water. If something came upon them, they’d be helpless.

  If something tried to board them, how would they even know?

  The Ghost suddenly hesitated. He looked up at the ceiling. There was too much noise, far too much: the fething alarms and damage klaxons, the squealing of the hull de-contorting, the babble of voices.

  It was probably his imagination, conjured by the trauma of his violent death, but the Ghost could swear he had just heard something else.

  Something wrong.

  Up. It was coming from above him, high above.

  How did he know that? How could he discriminate one noise from the chaotic swirl of sounds coming from all around him?

  Because he could. It was something else he was good at.

  He clambered up a deck ladder. The soreness in his limbs was fading. Just bruises. Bruises and bone-ache. He felt a deep chill in his heart, in the very core of him, as if he were a slab of grox meat that had been dragged out of the vittaling freezers and left on a kitchen block to thaw. His fingers were working, though. The clumsiness was fading. Any minute now, he’d get back some useful faculty.

&
nbsp; Like the ability to remember his own fething name.

  He began to climb. He had purpose at least. Duty. A fething unasked for duty, whether he wanted it or not. That’s why the Holy God-Emperor of Mankind, thrice cursed be His whim, had brought him back, dead from beyond death, to serve his regiment and his commander. It had to be him. That much was clear. It was a purpose, a duty fit only for him. Something he was good at. Otherwise, why would the Master of Terra have requisitioned his soul, and pulled him back through the veil for one last miserable tour in the life-world? But why did the God-Emperor need a dead man when there were evidently many living around him?

  He clambered up. Ceiling hatch. Standard iris. He yanked the lever, and it dilated open. He knew how to do that. He didn’t even have to think. He knew how the mechanism worked.

  Loose objects fell past him. Broken machine parts, a couple of hand tools. A small wrench bounced off his shoulder on the way down. All things that had fallen onto the hatch when artificial gravity realigned.

  The Ghost pulled himself through the hatch. He was in a service-way. The bulkhead lights flickered uneasily, like the sense-disturbing strobes of an interrogation chamber. Noises still, from above. Tapping. Scratching. He cradled his weapon and prowled forwards. He needed another vertical access.

  He found a dead man. Another dead man. Unlike the Ghost, this one hadn’t been reanimated and sent back to serve, so the God-Emperor clearly saw little value in his talents. He had been a fitter from the ship’s Division of Artifice. He must have been floating upside down when gravity reset. The fall had driven his head into the decking like a battering ram, breaking his neck and crushing the top of his skull. The Ghost looked up and saw where the fitter must have fallen from. An engineering space above the service-way, a shaft that rose up through four decks of the ship at least. It was a tunnel of cabling and pipework.

  The Ghost used the footholds inset in the service-way wall to reach the open bottom of the shaft, and then began to ascend the small-rung ladder.

  He climbed at a pace, knowing that ghosts didn’t tire. It occurred to him that immunity from fatigue was a benefit of death. He would miss food, though.