With a last effort, the Caliphar of the Crescent City pushed his broken body upwards and off the command lectern, revealing a glowing pict-slate smeared with his own blood. Then he collapsed, his shattered legs unable to support his own weight, and lay before the warsmith, his face a mask a defiance.
His eyes narrowing, the warsmith approached the lectern, ignoring the man bleeding out at his feet. The screen showed a strategic plot of the region, and a mass of glowing runes had recently appeared in the upper atmosphere, directly above the fortress.
‘You see, traitor,’ the Caliphar breathed as his death rattle sounded deep in his lungs. ‘You really have lost…’
‘Fool,’ Ferrous Ironclaw replied as the runes upon the pict-slate resolved themselves into solid icons rapidly descending through sub-orbital space. Each rune was a symbol, a clenched black fist within a circle, the hated Chapter sigil of the Iron Warriors’ true foe.
The Imperial Fists.
‘No,’ the warsmith growled.
‘I have won…’
Throne of Lies
by Aaron Dembski-Bowden
The Covenant of Blood tore through the warp, splitting the secret tides like a spear of stained cobalt and flawed gold. Its engines struggled, breathing white fire into the ever-shifting Sea of Souls. Pulsing like arrhythmic hearts, the thrusters laboured to propel the ship onwards. Its passage was a graceless dive, slipping through boiling waves of thrashing psychic energy.
Tormented fields of kinetic force shielded the craft from the warp’s elemental rage, but the storm’s force was merciless. Reaching out from the hurricane, the claws of vast creatures raked across the shields, each impact hammering the vessel farther from its course.
In a sealed chamber at the ship’s prow, a lone figure knelt in silent repose. Her human eyes were closed, yet she was far from blind. Her secret eye, the eye she hid from the world beneath sweat-stained bandanas and uncomfortable helms, looked out into the void. The ship’s hull was no barrier, and the crackling shields no obstacle. Her secret sight pierced them with effortless ease, and she stared into the storm beyond.
Like oil on water, the seas outside roiled in a sickening riot of colour. A beacon of light usually pierced the chaos – a lifeline of ephemeral radiance splitting the swirling murk. All she had to do was follow it.
There was no beacon this time. No radiant lifeline. The crackle of the shields buckling under pressure was all that illuminated the storm outside.
The tides rolled against the ship in jagged, unpredictable waves, too fast for human response. By the time she saw a flood of migraine-bright energy spilling towards her, the shields were already repelling it. They sparked with pained fire as they sent the assaulting wave back into the psychic filth from whence it came.
The Covenant of Blood trembled again, its engines giving a piteous whine as the tremor ran through the ship’s plasteel bones. It couldn’t take much more of this. The kneeling woman took a deep breath, and refocused.
Her lapse of attention had not gone unnoticed. The voice, when it came, was an insidious whisper breaching her heart, not her ears. Each word resonated, echo-faint, through her blood.
Centuries of conquering the void. Centuries of laying claim to the stars. The dance of hunter and hunted, predator and prey. You, Navigator, will be my end. The death of glory. The pain of failure.
The ship was threatening her again. She didn’t take that as a good sign, and hissed a single word through clenched teeth.
‘Silence.’
She swore that, somewhere on the edge of imagination, she sensed its laughter.
Above all else, she loathed the crude poetry of the ship’s primal intelligence. The machine-spirit at the warship’s core was a bestial, dominant consciousness. It had resisted its new Navigator for weeks now. She was beginning to fear she would never rise as its master.
The claws of the neverborn tear at my hull-skin, promising to bleed my innards to the void, it whispered. You are damnation. You are the bearer of blame. You will cast us into oblivion, Octavia.
She bit back a reply, keeping her mouth as closed as her human eyes. Her third eye stared unblinking, seeing nothing but the storm raging outside.
No. No, there was something more now. Something else sailed the Sea of Souls, more suggestion and shadow than form and flesh. She pulsed a warning at once.
Something beneath us, something vast. Evade at once.+
Octavia sent the command with all her strength, a desperate plea to the ship’s pilots. At the speed of thought, she felt the response flash through the interface cables binding her to the throne of brass and bone. A dead voice, the tone of a lobotomised servitor at the ship’s helm.
‘Compliance.’
The Covenant of Blood shuddered now, its burning engines forcing it to climb through the psychic syrup of un-space. The predator, the vast presence beneath them, stirred in the etheric fog. She felt it thrash, and saw a shadow the size of a sun ripple in the storm. It drew closer.
It’s chasing us.+
‘Acknowledged,’ the servitor replied.
Go faster. Go much, much faster.+
‘Compliance.’
The vast presence broke through the lashing waves of psychic mist, unaffected by their density. She was reminded, for an awful moment, of a vast shark pushing through the open ocean, dead-eyed and forever hungry.
We have to break from the warp. We can’t outrun this.+
This time, the answer was rich with emotion, none of it pleasant. It was deep, low, and tainted with inhuman resonance.
‘How far are we from the Torias system?’
Hours. Days. I don’t know, my lord. But we’re dead in minutes if we don’t break from the warp.+
‘Unacceptable,’ growled the Exalted, master of the Covenant of Blood.
Do you feel the way the Covenant is shaking? A psychic shadow made of black mist and hatred is reaching out to swallow us. I am the Navigator, my lord. I am dragging this ship from the Sea of Souls, no matter what you say.+
‘Very well,’ said the Exalted reluctantly. ‘All stations, brace for re-entry to the void. And Octavia?’
Yes, my lord?+
‘You would do well to show me more respect when Talos is not aboard.’
She bared her teeth in a grin, feeling her heartbeat quicken at the threat.
If you say so, Exalted One.+
The huntress moved through the chamber, one of many in the cavernous palace, clad in a stolen crimson gown and someone else’s skin. Her name, for the last two hours, had been Kalista Larhaven. This was even confirmed by the numeric identity code tattooed onto the flesh of her right wrist.
The true Kalista Larhaven, the original owner of both the name and the exquisite dress, was now folded with graceless, boneless ease into a thermo-ventilation shaft. There she lay, silent in death, an unknown martyr to a lost cause. She had her own hopes, dreams, joys and needs – all of which had ended in the shallow thrust of an envenomed blade. It had taken longer to hide the courtesan’s body than it had to end her life.
The huntress passed a flock of acolyte clerics. They shuffled along the carpeted floor, chanting in heretical murmurs. The first of them bore an incense orb on a corroded chain, the bronze sphere seething with coils of thin, sugary mist. This priest greeted the courtesan by name, and the huntress smiled with the dead whore’s lips.
‘Do you go to attend upon the master?’
The huntress answered with wicked eyes and an indulgent smile.
‘I wish you well, Kalista,’ the priest replied. ‘Go in peace.’
The huntress offered a graceful curtsey, subtly submissive, moving as one born to a life of giving pleasure. The true Kalista had moved this way. The huntress had watched it, gauged it, captured the essence of it – all in a handful of heartbeats.
As she walked away, she felt the eag
er eyes of the whispering priests following her movements. She exaggerated the swing of her hips, favouring them with a last glance over her bare shoulder. She read the hunger in their dark eyes, and much better, the idiotic conviction. Let them go about their business without knowing the truth: that the girl they desired was already dead, packed into a tube close to the thermal exchange processors elsewhere in the palace.
The heat would accelerate the process of decay, so the true Kalista would become a quick victim to the bacteria that always laid claim to a human body in the hours after it drew its last breath.
But the huntress was unconcerned. She would be gone by the time any discoveries were made, her duty done and her escape a source of infinite grief for the people of this worthless planet.
Before she had become Kalista Larhaven, the huntress had worn the skin of a nameless maidservant for almost an hour, using the shape to reach the lower levels and move through the slave tunnels. Before that, she had been a trader in the palace’s vast courtyards, licensed to sell holy relics to pilgrims. Before that, a pilgrim herself, wearing the ragged clothes of a vagabond: a wandering beggar in search of spiritual enlightenment.
The huntress had been on the world of Torias Secundus for a single day and a single night. Even as she drew close to completing her mission, she lamented the time spent so far. She was above this assignment. She knew it, her sisters knew it, and her superiors knew it. This was punishment – a punishment for the failures of the past.
Undeserved, perhaps. Yet duty was duty. She had to obey.
She moved on through the palace, passing chanting acolytes, scurrying clerks and raucous packs of intoxicated nobles. The halls were growing busy as noon approached, for with the coming of noon came the High Priest’s long-awaited speech.
The woman who was not Kalista blended into the crowds, passing with smiles and feminine curtseys. Her irritation never showed on lips of rose-red, nor in eyes of ice-blue. The fact remained, though – this skin would not get her to the High Priest’s side at the right moment. Time was a vicious factor. If killing him was the only goal, he would be dead from a sniper’s kiss already, long before taking to the podiums later today and addressing the people of the city.
But no. His death had to be choreographed along exact lines, played out like a performance for all to see.
The huntress sensed she was reaching the end of this skin’s lifespan. Already, the chambers through which she moved were the domains of the chosen elite, with clothing becoming increasingly ostentatious and more expensive. The apparent courtesan graced her way through the carnival of colours, her stolen eyes flicking in predatory need.
Noblewoman to noblewoman, priestess to priestess, courtesan to courtesan.
None of them suited. None would allow her to finish what she had begun.
She needed another skin. Soon.
The door to the Navigator’s chambers ground open on rough hydraulics. Nothing on this ship worked right. Octavia checked that her pistol was holstered at her hip, and left through the only portal leading out of her room. Her attendants, whom she despised as much as she loathed the ship itself, bustled around her, imploring her to return to her chambers.
She wanted to shoot them. She really, really wanted to shoot them. The most normal of them couldn’t pass as a human even in poor lighting. It looked at her, smiling with too many teeth, clasping its hands together as if in prayer.
‘Mistress,’ it hissed. ‘Return to chambers, mistress. For safety. For protection. Mistress must not be harmed. Mistress must not bleed.’
She shivered under its beseeching touch. Hands that possessed too many fingers stroked her clothes, and worse, her bare skin.
‘Don’t touch me,’ she snapped.
‘Forgive me, mistress. A thousand apologies, most sincere.’
‘Get out of my way, please.’
‘Please return, mistress,’ it pleaded. ‘Do not walk dark places of ship. Stay, for safety.’
She drew her pistol, sending the creatures scurrying back.
‘Get out of my way. Now.’
‘Someone comes, mistress. Another soul draws near.’
She stared into the blackened corridor outside her chamber, lit by weak illumination globes that did nothing to defeat the darkness. The figure emerging from the gloom wore a jacket of old leather, and carried two heavy pistols at his hips. A hacking blade – the kind of weapon one might find in the hands of a jungle world primitive – was strapped to his shin.
Half of his face glinted in the reflected light. Augmetic facial features, the most obvious of which was a red eye lens, were of expensive and rare craftsmanship. The human side of his face twisted in a crooked smile.
Octavia returned it.
‘Septimus,’ she said.
‘Octavia. Forgive me for pointing out the obvious, but that was the roughest ride through the Sea of Souls I’ve ever had to suffer through.’
‘The ship still hates me,’ she scowled. ‘Why are you here? Keeping me company?’
‘Something like that. Let’s go inside.’
She hesitated, but complied. Once they were back in her chamber, she ensured the door was locked. Anything to keep her annoying attendants away.
Octavia could, if one was being generous, be considered beautiful. But beauty needs light and warmth to bloom, and these were both denied to the young Navigator. Her skin was the unhealthy pale of unclean marble, marking her as a member of the crew aboard the lightless battleship, the Covenant of Blood. Her eyes were losing all colour as her pupils grew accustomed to remaining forever dilated. Her hair, once a tumbling fall of healthy dark locks, was a ragged mess held into false order by a ponytail.
She looked across to Septimus, who was absently picking his way through piles of discarded clothes and old food cartons.
‘Look at this mess. You are a filthy creature.’
‘Nice to see you too. To what do I owe the pleasure?’
‘You know why I’m here.’ He paused. ‘Talk of your attitude is beginning to spread. You’re making the crew uneasy. They worry you’re going to enrage the Legion because you can’t follow orders.’
‘So, let them worry.’
Septimus sighed. ‘Asath Jirath Sor-sarassan.’
‘Speak Gothic, damn it. None of that whispery Nostraman, thank you. I know you were swearing. I’m not a fool.’
‘If the crew worries, they might take matters into their own hands. They’d kill you without a second thought.’
‘They need me. Everyone needs me. Without me, the ship has no Navigator.’
‘Maybe,’ said Septimus slowly. ‘But no one wants tension with the Legion. Things are always on the edge, but when someone starts to breed difficulties? The crew has lynched troublemakers before. Dozens of times.’
‘They wouldn’t try that with me.’
He laughed bitterly. ‘No? If they thought it would please the Legion, they’d hang you from a gantry in the engineering deck, or beat you to death and flush your body from an airlock. You need to tread with care. Talos is off the ship. When First Claw isn’t on board, be cautious in how you deal with the Legion and the crew.’
‘Don’t give me this crap,’ Octavia snapped. ‘I was under more strain than you can even imagine. For Throne’s sake, the Geller field was dying. The ship was moments from falling apart.’
Septimus shook his head. ‘Sometimes, you still forget where you are. Your talent spares you the worst treatment, but you’re still a slave. Remember that. Delusions of equality will get you killed.’
‘You’re as bad as those things that try to keep me sealed in here. I’ve survived three weeks without Talos watching over me. A few more hours won’t make any difference’.
She paused for a moment before changing the subject. ‘Any word from the surface?’
‘Nothing yet. As soon as they vox confirmation,
I’ll bring them back on board. It’s close to noon in the capital city. The High Priest will be speaking soon. Won’t be long now.’
‘I don’t suppose you know what they’re actually doing down there?’
Septimus shrugged.
‘What they always do. They’re hunting.’
At the heart of Toriana, capital city of the world below, the masses waited for their leader. The plaza of the Primus Palace was flooded with an ocean of humanity – ninety thousand men, women and children. Each family had been carefully selected by the government’s Departmento Culturum and marched to the gathering by armed enforcers.
Above the sea of cheering faces, an ornate balcony jutted from the palace’s side. Ten figures stood in motionless silence, enduring the crowd’s roars, with rifles clutched over armoured chestplates. Faceless black visors and carapace armour the colour of old blood marked these soldiers as the Red Sentinels, elite guard of the High Priest himself. The back-mounted power packs carried by each one hummed with suppressed tension, bonded to the ammunition sockets of their hellguns via thick, segmented cables.
The Sentinel leader kept up a constant stream of muttered words into the vox-network, checking on the position of his sniper teams situated on nearby rooftops. All was in readiness. Should trouble arise from the crowd, the Sentinels and the enforcers on the streets had enough firepower to paint the marble floors red and reduce the plaza to a charnel house.
The air itself thrummed as a Valkyrie gunship hovered overhead, its adamantium hull turned amber by the midday sun, and its cannons seeking targets in the windows of adjacent buildings. Satisfied, it moved away on growling engines, bathing the Red Sentinels below in a heated wind of thruster wash.
The Red Sentinel captain spoke a final order into the vox, and the massive double doors behind him opened. At the first sight of the robed figure walking onto the balcony, the crowd erupted in praising cheers.
High Priest Cyrus was the wrong side of middle age, and his fine encarmine robes looked painted onto his porcine form. Jowls shook as he raised fat hands to the sky.
Treacheries of the Space Marines Page 17