Broken bone grated in her shoulder as she cradled the bolter and assumed a ready stance. She would empty the clip the second the cockpit rose into view.
This would achieve nothing, but it mattered not.
If she somehow avoided obliteration when those heavy bolters returned fire, then she would leap from the wall, onto the ship and attempt to club her way through the cockpit window with the butt of the bolter.
This too would achieve nothing, but it mattered not.
Relentless violence was her sole recourse, futility and death her only rewards.
The gunship rose into view, the ship’s power-armoured pilots peering curiously at her through the scarred glass of the cockpit.
‘I stand before you a Sister Repentia,’ she croaked as she levelled the bolter. ‘Until absolution finds me once more.’
The gunship exploded before she could fire.
The Repentia was hurled backwards as her world filled with a billowing cloud of fire and smoke, the blast reverberating through her bones and pulling the bolter from her hands.
She blinked to find herself on her back, gargling blood as she stared into a smoking sky. Her ears sang a shrill monotonous tune. A length of twisted metal stood in her throat. She willed her hands to paw the thing away, but her limbs ignored her.
The smoke parted to reveal the majesty of an Imperial Thunderhawk, the draught of its thrusters spraying waves of blinding dust as it lowered to land beside her.
The Repentia’s eyelids drooped, her body pulsing in synch with her fading heartbeat. She felt herself sinking into the floor, melting into blackness.
Absolvo me in mortem.
The ambient hum of engines told her she had woken aboard a warship. The white figures of the Sisters Hospitaller drifted like ghosts in the gloom. They attended a row of beds, each ensconced within a steel archway. Candles glimmered in alcoves, the air filled with medicinal incense and the murmur of prayer. The Repentia’s hands went to her face, shocked to find she had been stripped of her hood. Her fingers found long hair. Her shaven bristles had grown almost down to her eyes. As her thoughts regained focus they coalesced into a single, devastating question: why was she still alive?
‘You’re awake,’ said a voice beside her. ‘Praise the Throne.’
Sister Eunice was seated beside her, clutching a rosary, stirred from her prayers.
Too weak to sit up, the Repentia turned her head away, feeling something catch in her throat. She felt some kind of metal plug installed at the base of her neck, its surface meshed like the grille of a vox-caster. She tried to speak, but managed only a strangled choke.
‘Shrapnel,’ said Eunice gently. ‘From the Traitors’ gunship. But fear not. The medicae have been instructed to restore your voice. You shall have need of it soon enough.’
The Repentia was confused. Why restore the voice of a doomed penitent?
‘You abided by the Oath,’ said Eunice. ‘You sought death above all else, rightly disobeyed an order I was wrong to ask of you. I see that now. Forgive me.’
The Repentia shook her head, held her ears, trying to shut out the madness she was hearing. Sister Eunice was wrong, so terribly wrong.
Eunice rose, impassioned. ‘If you had not battled the daemon hounds, killed the heretic champion, distracted their gunship, then I would have been slaughtered along with the rest of my squad and the scriptures would have been perverted to the advantage of the Ruinous Powers.’
She took the Repentia’s hand.
‘Your life has been touched by the Emperor’s grace,’ said Eunice. ‘Canoness Ingrid agrees. We have prayed several weeks for guidance and are now in agreement. Your survival has been classified a miracle. The Emperor has tested you and clearly deemed your journey of repentance to be at an end. Domine, libra nos.’
Eunice bowed her head and the Repentia was horrified to hear her speak the opening canto of The Absolution of the Penitent.
‘Before the Emperor you sinned,’ she said, still gripping the Repentia’s hand. ‘Beyond forgiveness. Beyond forbearance. Beyond mercy.’
The Repentia struggled, trying to cry out, but her mutilated throat stifled her protestations. Eunice continued, unmoved.
‘We turned our backs upon you. We cast off your armour and your arms. You left our company of your own free will and by your will you have returned.’
The Repentia kicked weakly beneath the sheets, failing to summon strength enough to free herself from Eunice’s grasp. One of the Hospitallers appeared by her side and needled a sedative into the Repentia’s arm. A softening warmth spread through her body, but did nothing to quieten her raging heart.
‘You have found the Emperor’s forgiveness in the darkest places of the night.’
Paralysed, the Repentia felt tears flooding either side of her skull, pooling in her ears.
You are wrong, mistress. I was weak. I should have stayed, fallen beneath the heretic’s axe as the Oath demanded. But I didn’t. I saved myself instead. I broke my vow to save you and your Sisters.
The Repentia silently screamed her confession.
I knew, mistress. Deep down, I knew as I climbed that chain towards the rooftop. I knew that I was obeying not the Oath, not the Emperor, but my own heart. God-Emperor, forgive me, but I yearned to stand once more among the Adepta Sororitas. I tired of exile, of loneliness. Better to live and fight beside the Sisters of Battle – even for a fleeting moment of glory – than to die a filthy, nameless pariah. Such is my blasphemy, God-Emperor. Throne of Earth, forgive me.
‘You lay before me a Sister of Battle once more,’ continued Eunice. ‘By the grace of the God-Emperor, absolution has found you.’
Mistress, no. No! I am but a craven coward. This is a mistake, a travesty. I have yet to submit myself entirely to the will of the Emperor. I am weak, selfish, corrupt. These sins are as dire as those that saw me exiled.
God-Emperor, heed my words! Is this to be my punishment? Absolution undeserved? Am I to endure life knowing that loneliness was too great a burden for me to bear? Give me a sign, my lord. A sign!
Sister Eunice leaned to kiss her forehead.
‘You are nameless to us no longer, Sister Adamanthea.’
Her mechanised speech roared over the din of bolter fire, reverberating through the compact laudhailer fitted within her gorget as she read aloud a field-translation of The Scriptures of Arch-Confessor Maxus Hurn. A shot ricocheted off the pauldron of her black power armour yet she continued.
‘For ye are likened to the reapers of the harvest,’ she sang, her brazen voice galvanising the hearts of all who heard her. ‘Ye blessed few are sworn to shear a vast and bitter field so that the soil may sprout anew.’
The Dominions chorused the words of their Sister Superior as they marched through the boiling smoke to see a line of crimson hounds galloping towards them.
‘In His name,’ she yelled. ‘Perdere illos.’
The Battle Sisters’ blessed bolters shuddered in their hands, blazing streams of spent shell casings as the reptilian beasts burst open before them.
Sister Adamanthea recalled a battle with three such creatures long, long ago. Her recitation faltered as a familiar preoccupation returned to haunt her. She had once failed the Emperor, rejected the glorious death in battle that she had sworn to find. The shame of it pained her like a wound. Her canoness had dismissed her every confession on the subject, praising her humility while prevailing upon her the need to accept absolution and move on.
Stone-faced, Sister Adamanthea and her Dominions crested the scorched hill and surveyed yet another benighted battlefield. Word of her arrival with the sacred book had spread along every front in the Abrogatum Campaign. Packs of revived Astra Militarum were now driving back the heretic foe, red las-fire stitching the smoking darkness for miles.
Another force emerged from the murk nearby: Traitor Space Marines, trampl
ing the smouldering remains of the flesh hounds, bellowing promises of pain and devastation as they charged the Battle Sisters.
The Dominions looked to Sister Adamanthea, impatient for her signal to fire. Their commander said nothing, her face betraying not a glimmer of the rage she felt boiling within her. She calmly stowed the book at her hip, feeling a familiar surge deep in her belly as she retrieved the Eviscerator from her back.
Disappointed that the Emperor had sent her a mere dozen heretics to kill, she leapt alone into their midst with a private prayer.
Until absolution finds me.
About the Author
Alec Worley is a well-known comics and science fiction and fantasy author, with numerous publications to his name. He is an avid fan of Warhammer 40,000 and has written many short stories for Black Library including ‘Stormseeker’, ‘Whispers’ and ‘Repentia’. He lives and works in London.
An extract from Sisters of Battle: The Omnibus.
And so it was decreed, in the wake of the Age of Apostasy. So it was said by the High Lords of Terra, that the Ecclesiarchy, the great church of the Imperium, founded on the worship of the God-Emperor of Mankind, would never be granted the use of “men under arms”, lest the temptation be too great for cardinals of weak character and high ambition.
The Ecclesiarchy; the guardians of the Imperial Creed and the celestial truth of the Emperor’s divinity, whose sole purpose was to regulate the veneration of millions across the galaxy. And in a universe so harsh, where heathen alien life, heretic witch-psychics and the forces of Chaos laid their threat, the church could not go undefended.
No “men under arms”; so the very letter of the edict was adhered to, and thus rose the Orders Militant of the Adepta Sororitas – the Sisters of Battle. Some called them fanatics. Warrior-women spiritually betrothed to their religion, clothed in powered armour, cleansing the unbelievers with flamer and boltgun. The Celestians; the Seraphim; the Repentia, Dominions and Retributors, called to castigate those who defied the Emperor’s divine will. The great work of the Battle Sisters never ended, for there were always Wars of Faith to be won, always more heretics for the pyre. They were the line of fire between the anarchy of the infidel and the bulwark of pure devotion. The red against the black. For millennia they had been the burning sword and holy shield for humankind.
Few exemplified such devotion more than Sister Miriya, a ranked Celestian Eloheim of the Order of our Martyred Lady, although she would never have been so arrogant as to say such a thing herself. Under the flickering light of electro-candles, she walked the length of the penitent corridor on Zhodon Orbital, voicing the words of holy catechism amid the echoes of her footfalls.
‘A spiritu dominatus. Domine, libra nos. A morte perpetua. Domine, libra nos. Ave, Imperator. Domine, libra nos.’ The phrases in High Gothic fell from her lips easily, with rote precision, whispering off the stone walls.
Like many of the citadel stations across human space, Zhodon resembled an ancient cathedral ripped free of the land and cast into the darkness. Spires and naves spread like the points of a morningstar, plasma lanterns burning behind mile-high stained-glass windows. Located on the pilgrim route to the Segmentum Solar, the platform was a way-point for travellers and a barracks for the Witch Hunters of the Ecclesiarchy.
Miriya approached the iron gate that closed off the sanctum of the prioress, the mistress of this place. She slowed and dwelt a little, taking a moment to study the complex devotional sculptures in the walls. Above was a rendering of Saint Katherine, first mistress of her order, whose brutal death gave them their title. Miriya bowed in respect, crossing her hands across her chest, forming the holy shape of the Imperial Aquila. ‘In your name,’ she said aloud. ‘Grant me your wisdom and clarity.’
After a moment, she rose to look upon the statue. Like the saint, Miriya’s face bore the ancient mark of the fleur de lys, tattooed in blood-red on her cheek. Her hair was a cascade of black, falling to the neck of her battle gear.
Saint Katherine was shown as she had been in battle, her mail and plate little different from Miriya’s, even though centuries separated them. Sigils of the aquila, purity seals and rosaries decorated the armour, and a chaplet hung from her neck. Miriya’s hand rose to her own, resting on a string of adamantine beads. Each one of the beads represented an act of devotion to the Imperial church.
She wondered if her next duty would warrant a new link in the chain. Prioress Lydia had been unusually circumspect on the details, a fact that concerned Miriya greatly. Secrets were not the currency of the Sisterhood, and she disliked anything that smacked of the clandestine. The Imperial Creed was the God-Emperor’s Light, and so all deeds done in His name were never to be committed in shadow.
Miriya knocked twice on the heavy iron door and from beyond it, a voice bid her to enter. She strode in, her eyes downcast as protocol demanded, and bowed. ‘Your Grace. As you order, so shall I be ready.’
‘Look at me. Let me see your face.’ Miriya did as she was ordered and raised her head. The prioress was two hundred solar years old, but kept to the appearance of a woman a quarter of that age by juvenat treatments. Lydia had been a prioress before Miriya had been inducted as a novice, and she would likely remain one for decades more. She was arrow-sharp and uncompromising, a masterful tactician and commander of the Orders Militant in the local sector of space. Miriya heard it said that the prioress had burned a thousand witches, and fought alongside saints. The steel in Lydia’s eyes gave truth to it. ‘You believe you are prepared for the task I will set you, Sister Celestian?’ She smiled slightly. ‘We shall see.’
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