The Master of Mankind

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  Its lessers among the weaker Choirs lashed out blindly, unable to even sense the human maidens slaughtering them. The weakest of them all, the most wretched and insignificant within their ranks, dissolved even before the fall of the Daughters’ killing blades.

  The daemon of the first murder was prey to no such gullible weakness. It didn’t need to sense them or see them in order to kill them. Its clustered node of hunger-senses flowed outwards over the hundreds of warring bodies, sensing the dissolution of its own kind. Wherever its lessers were drained of their strength, wherever their corpuses haemorrhaged potency, there it turned its guns. Blinded by the Sisters’ soullessness, it hunted the holes in its perceptions, firing streaming volleys of solid shot or bolts of dark energy wherever its kindred suffered against foes it couldn’t see.

  The weapons so preciously crafted by ancient hands and recovered by Arkhan Land did their duty once again, chewing through the embattled Sisters with murderous precision. It raked them with explosive fire or reaved them down with energy beams – one it even managed to destroy by crushing her beneath its foot when it sought to impale the daemon’s stolen metal corpus.

  The daemon exhaled blackness, its breath staining the golden mist around its maw. Its tongue slithered free, hanging long and undulating in the fog. It wasn’t capable of pleasure beyond the fulfilment of its nature, but there was satisfaction here. These hollow impressions of human females were far easier to kill when they could be torn apart with mortal weapons that vomited killing energy.

  Though it wasn’t born of war, it sensed the ebb and flow of the battle around it. Each of the Anathema’s Daughters’ deaths was a lessening of pressure against the creature’s pained perceptions. Each burst body let the warp’s song grow louder once more. Every one that fell allowed the daemon’s lesser kindred to rise again, to fight harder.

  Floating war machines raged at the creature, blasting portions of its stolen body apart. This punishment scarcely slowed it. Blood, old and new, painted its armour plating. The mist around its towering form was rancid and red with the shrieking of souls torn from their bodies since its arrival in this realm. Flesh-machine growths added to its size, quivering pods and birth-sacs of lesser daemons in rapid gestation, and thrashing tentacles of sinewy, veined metal that drilled through battle tanks to seek the mortals within. Its back-mounted weapon arrays annihilated whole swathes of the front lines, feeding the warfare while the daemon itself paid no heed to it. The creature butchered only the Golden and the war machines that sought to oppose its advance on the Anathema’s Daughters.

  As the warp’s song grew and grew, threatening an exalting crescendo, the daemon of the first murder felt the defenders’ desperation gaining a stained, queasy brittleness. It cast its senses wide to see why, and immediately let forth a roar that was half canted across the noosphere and partially bellowed into the webway’s relative reality. The Anathema itself was within reach, stilled and crippled and bound to its Throne. These last, exhausted defenders were all that stood in the daemon’s path.

  Two of the dead Golden approached in their metal shells, weapons crashing, ripping yet more shards of armour-flesh free. The daemon lashed back with its tendrils, hammering one of them away, sending it tumbling into the ranks of the creature’s own kindred to be pried open and the meat within devoured.

  It lifted the second in its coiling grip, smelling a familiar soul. It knew this one.

  ‘End of Empires!’ it voxed, screamed and canted. ‘End of Empires!’

  Land made a sound in the back of his throat, one he wasn’t proud of. He had to swallow before he could speak. Even the Custodians were falling back from what the Archimandrite had become. It had downed Sevik within mere heartbeats. It killed one of the Ten Thousand’s Dreadnoughts as quick as Land could blink. It lifted another in its tentacles, and…

  ‘What in the Omnissiah’s name will your chainsword do against that?’

  ‘Very little,’ Zephon replied. Yet still he gunned it. ‘Bring us in closer.’

  Arkhan did so, his eyes locked to the visions feeds.

  ‘Baroness D’Arcus,’ Zephon voxed. ‘I require your aid.’

  Zephon climbed out onto the tank’s roof. A second later, Land heard the thruster bark of the Blood Angel’s jump pack igniting.

  Sagittarus was drowning. Or suffocating. He didn’t know which. He was struggling to breathe in the womb-fluid of his coffin, each inhalation coming with the coppery taste of blood and a sour tang of oil. Whatever was left of his physical form – even Sagittarus had never been sure how much of himself remained inside the coffin – banged and thumped inside the life support sarcophagus, sloshing in the amniotic fluid but no longer submerged within it.

  Leaking. That thought held primacy in the darkening light of his perceptions. Crippled. Hurt. Leaking.

  He faced ahead, trying to raise arms that wouldn’t obey. He had to pull himself out of the monster’s tendrils. His weapons clunked, devoid of ammunition for hours. His chassis, alive with warning readings for so long already, was held together only by dumb luck.

  Yet he’d charged the Archimandrite. Limping and bleeding and ammo-starved, he’d charged it as it stepped over the dead Knight. There had been no choice. Its cannons were devastating the faltering Imperial lines.

  Only in death does duty end.

  One blow was all he’d been able to land, a shattering strike from his fist that ripped the plating from the Archimandrite’s chest, revealing a subdermal layer of secondary ablative plate. And then, he was in the creature’s clutches, hauled from the ground.

  To his shame, he cried out when his right arm tore free. He had no nerves in his Dreadnought shell but the synaptic backlash of being mutilated was all too real. The Archimandrite brandished the ripped limb, still spitting with sparks, before hurling it away into the seething tides below.

  Sagittarus’ world lurched as he was lifted even higher, the whine of protesting metal resounding in his ears through the murky, muffled coffin. He felt the pressure in his thigh as the daemon took a firmer grip, then the wrenching jolt of dislocation that followed. Another crack of synaptic feedback coursed through his revenant flesh. Malfunctioning systems railed at him. Empty weapons cried out for him to fire.

  Turbines screamed as a figure in bloody red thudded onto the Archimandrite’s shoulder. The Blood Angel, Zephon, cleaved down with a two-handed blow of his chainblade, the sword ripping into a tendril’s joint where flesh met machine in unholy fusion. The sword rose and fell, tearing away chunks of bloody metal, spitting its own teeth as its revving track was fouled by gore and dense armour.

  The Archimandrite pivoted but the Blood Angel’s jump pack spurted stabilising gas jets, long enough for a fifth blow to bite deep into the carved wound. The tendril deformed with the damage, gushing oil and slime as it fell limp, dropping Sagittarus into the melee below.

  His last sight before plunging into the battling bodies was the Archimandrite’s left hand closing around the Blood Angel’s torso, dragging him from his unstable perch.

  Sagittarus rolled with all of the grace of an overturned sand turtle, clawing his remaining fist into the ground, and dragged himself back.

  ‘Five,’ he heard Zephon vox, the Blood Angel’s voice marred by strain for the first time.

  Four.

  Zephon thrashed in the beast’s grip, laying into the machine’s forearm with his damaged chainsword.

  Three.

  A lucky nick at the wrist tore a fluid-wet spillage of cabling from its housing, weakening the grip before it fully closed. The Blood Angel fired his jump pack, red ceramite scraping against the Archimandrite’s clutching fingers as he boosted free, straight up.

  Two.

  With a grace any winged being would envy, the Blood Angel twisted in the air, angling his propulsion to veer him back to the Imperial line.

  One.

  The bandolier of
grenades mag-locked to the back of the Archimandrite’s head detonated in incendiary harmony, sending shrapnel rainstorming across the embattled lines. Daemons near to the detonation howled at the punishment delivered to their predator-monarch. The Archimandrite, missing a significant portion of its hunchback and both shoulders, staggered forwards, emitting a shriek that the true war machine was incapable of producing.

  ‘Engaging,’ came Jaya’s voice in Zephon’s helm.

  She had expended her ammunition hours before, even depleting Torolec’s reserves. Her swordlimb was a cracked ruin; it had shattered against a Warhound after cutting through the bare metal and severing the leg at the thigh. Lacking any other recourse, she was down to clubbing with the broken hilt and her ammo-starved gunlimb, doing her best to guard the front ranks from harm by warding them from the Archimandrite’s onslaught with her ion shield.

  Zephon sent the signal. Jaya forced her Knight into a sprinting run, charging as Sevik had charged, heaving her Castigator’s weight against the staggering Archimandrite. Hunched as she was, she found herself face to face with the Mechanicum’s creation, looking down into the broken cranial armour left in the wake of the grenades’ detonation. Fluids ran and bubbled in scorched cables. Fleshy matter was burned against the insides of the dome – what had once been Hieronyma’s brain and spinal column. The incinerated remnants still quivered with impossible life.

  End of Empires, she heard in her mind. In the same second, warning chimes began singing their familiar song. The creatures were swarming around her knees and she had no means of shoving them away. The Custodians and Sisters were too far back to reach her.

  Jaya reversed her grip on the control levers, throwing the Knight into a leaping backstep, coming down awkwardly on the flesh of the daemons around her. Freed from the pressure of her weight, the Archimandrite overbalanced and stumbled forwards – meeting the rising energised remains of Jaya’s swordlimb. The uppercut blow pounded into the machine’s ruptured chest-plating, sinking all the way to Jaya’s elbow joint.

  ‘For Sevik,’ she spat into her external speakers. ‘For the Emperor.’

  The Archimandrite’s only reply was to slump, powerless, dead. For precious seconds they remained there together, fused at the point of death. Her cockpit shook as the creatures beneath her began crawling and cutting their way upwards, ascending her Knight’s savaged armour plating.

  The Archimandrite began to topple, dragging the Knight down with it. Jaya locked her stabilisers and compensator balancers, buying her a few more seconds of standing upright. Her gloved hands scrabbled for the ejection release, but it had either not functioned since its initial repairs or fallen into uselessness during the days of fighting. The seals blew in the hatch above her, but her throne remained locked in place.

  She heard the first creature reach the top of the Castigator’s carapace, its talons pulling at the seal-blown hatch. Yet when it ripped away, a figure in arterial-red stood silhouetted and haloed in the golden mist. It reached down and offered her its shining metal hand.

  Jaya grabbed it, immediately hauled up into the Blood Angel’s grip. She barely had time to suck in a breath before his turbines kicked in and sent them skywards, shaking every bone and pulling every muscle in her body.

  They hit the ground no gentler. Zephon’s armour was built to withstand the pressures of his short-burst flight, but Jaya felt something snap inside her when they thudded onto the misty ground behind the Custodians and Sisters in the front lines. The Blood Angel didn’t release her, half carrying her into the dim bay of Land’s volkite-squealing grav-Raider.

  One-armed and one-legged, Sagittarus lay on the tank’s internal decking, taking up almost half of the bay. The stylised helm that housed his sensorium relays stared up at her with shattered eye-lenses.

  ‘Dawn,’ he intoned, drawling and unfocused. Jaya had no idea what he might mean.

  ‘Something is…’ said Arkhan Land, looking right through the vision slit. His curse was a breathy whisper as he blinked tired, gritty eyes. ‘Teeth of the Cog…’

  Jaya turned towards the technoarchaeologist. The unhealthy radiance of the viewscreen was gone from the explorator’s features; instead he was bathed in white light streaming through the vision slit. Dust motes danced in the beam of illumination.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Arkhan stammered. ‘It looks like the sun is rising.’

  And in a sunless realm, the sun rose at last.

  The light of dawn was palpable on Ra’s armour as well as his skin. It was a pressure, a presence with searing physicality. The enemy hordes felt it as acid on their skin. The creatures – daemons no matter what secular truths held strong – lost what little order they had ever possessed.

  The Anathema! Ra heard their frantic agony as a sick scraping on the edges of his mind. The Anathema comes! The sun rises!

  His features were those of one born in the wild lands of Ancient Eurasia. His skin was a Terran blend of bronze and burnt umber, His eyes darker still, His hair darkest of all. The long black fall of His hair was held by a simple circlet crown of metal leaves, binding the mane back from His face so He could fight. More practical than regal.

  He moved as a man moved, coming through the straining ranks of His guardians on foot, pushing through the press of bodies on the rare instances they didn’t instinctively move aside for Him. He wore gold, as all of His guardians wore gold. The same sigils of Terran Unity and Imperial nobility that showed on their armour were cast thricefold upon His own. His armour joints didn’t growl with the crude industrial snarl of mass-manufactured legionary plate, but purred with the song of older, purer technologies.

  On His back, held by a simple strap against His flowing red cloak, was an ornate bolter of black and bronze. In His hand He carried a sword – one that looked nothing like the blade portrayed in the victory murals and illustrated sagas. By the standards of Terran lords and kings it was inarguably beautiful, but in the grip of the ruler of an entire species it was, perhaps, rather plain. A weapon to wield, a tool for shedding blood, not an ornament to be admired. Impossibly complicated circuitry latticed its blade, black and coppery against a silver so hallowed that it was almost blue.

  In other wars on other worlds He had greeted His Custodians with subtle telepathy, speaking their names as He passed them before a battle. Here He was more restrained, moving to the embattled front rank without offering any acknowledgement at all.

  Of the Neverborn, some broke ranks and fled. These cowardly shards of their vile masters knew that destruction had come. Some tore into each other, cannibalising their kindred for strength in the face of destruction. Some lost what little grasp they had on corporeality, their forms melting and dissolving before the sword-wielding monarch even reached the front lines.

  The strongest raged at the sin of His existence. With a gestalt bellow loud enough to shake the windless air of this alternate reality, they fought to reach their archenemy.

  Ra was at the Emperor’s right side, spear whirling, lashing out to punch through the amorphous bodies of flailing blue creatures that wailed through their many mouths. Sweat baked his face inside his helm. The blood in his muscles was heavier than liquid lead.

  ‘Orders, sire?’

  The Emperor raised His sword in a two-handed grip. As His knuckles tightened, the geography of circuitry ignited along the blade’s length, spitting electrical fire and wreathing the sword’s length in flame.

  He didn’t speak. He didn’t look at any of His warriors. The sword came down. The webway caught fire.

  Twenty-Three

  Dawn

  The reason for illumination

  When all that remains is ash and dust

  Shapes raged in the flames – shadows and suggestions doing battle with the daemons, their fiery forms indistinct and ever-changing. The fire-born avatars of fallen Ten Thousand, knee-deep in psychic
fire and thrusting with lances of flame. The silhouettes of Space Marines, the betrayed dead of Isstvan bearing axes and blades and claws; half-seen sigils of slaughtered Legions obscured by the ash of their blackened armour. A giant among giants, its great hands bared and ready as it seared forwards at the crest of the tidal fire. The tenth son of a dying empire, so briefly reborn in his father’s immolating wrath.

  Daemons burned in their thousands, their aetheric flesh seared from their false bones. White flame haloed from the sword in corrosive, purifying radiance. It coruscated in thrashing waves from each fall of the Emperor’s blade. To look at Him was to go blind. To stand before Him was to die.

  And with a roar, the Custodians followed their lord and master. They reaved the Neverborn, banishing them with each thrusting spear and bellowing boltgun. Their blades carved through daemonic flesh, sending acidic blood raining in corrosive sprays. It wasn’t mist that occluded sight now, it was ash from the incinerated dead. Spears flashed silver in the dust-thickened air. The Last Charge of the Ten Thousand.

  Behind the golden warriors came their arming thralls, bearing fresh ammunition and armour sealant; warriors in their own right but sheltered from harm by their masters’ spinning blades.

  It didn’t matter that all these years of secret war had depleted the Legio Custodes to a ghost of itself. It didn’t matter that they had fought and bled and died for the last half-decade in this sunless, merciless realm populated only by the dead and the damned. Their king had come, the sun had risen and they charged with a cry that far eclipsed the wails of the daemons dying on their blades.

  The beasts that survived the Emperor’s onslaught staggered and lurched towards the Custodians, raising brittle blades in dissolving hands, uselessly staring through bleeding, blinded eyes. Something dead – a creature hunched and bloated, still bearing within its flesh the plague that had slain it – lunged at Ra. His spear thrust burst its eye and cracked through the malformed skull. Hissing and bubbling blood sluiced across Ra’s gauntlets, steaming as it burned away in the Emperor’s aura.