Master of rites, p.1
Master of Rites, page 1
Contents
Cover
Warhammer 40,000
Master of Rites
Prologue
PART 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
PART 2
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
PART 3
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Acknowledgements
About the Author
An Extract from ‘Avenging Son’
Backlist
A Black Library Publication
eBook license
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 might of his inexhaustible armies a million worlds stand against the dark.
Yet, he is a rotting carcass, the Carrion Lord of the Imperium held in life by marvels from the Dark Age of Technology and the thousand souls sacrificed each day so his may continue to burn.
To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable. It is to suffer an eternity of carnage and slaughter. It is to have cries of anguish and sorrow drowned by the thirsting laughter of dark gods.
This is a dark and terrible era where you will find little comfort or hope. Forget the power of technology and science. Forget the promise of progress and advancement. Forget any notion of common humanity or compassion.
There is no peace amongst the stars, for in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.
Prologue
You will wait.
The words echoed through Thule’s mind like thunder in a deep and fathomless valley, reverberating and growing louder with each repetition. His bones ached and groaned with every refrain, as if his marrow were a tuning fork that resonated in discordant harmony with a distant tone.
You will wait.
His new master had spoken those words before, a few short months after the flaming half-ruin of the Acherax had fallen from the warp and into an oasis of calm amidst the roiling shores of the Great Rift. Thule had conquered the worlds, starved and benighted as they already were. A poor prize in truth, but he had taken them in the name of his god all the same.
You will wait.
But the oasis had been a prison. There was no way for the Acherax to leave through the warp storms that surrounded it, no way to breach the etheric walls that hemmed in his brotherhood. No way for him to get back to Grandfather’s garden, to walk its paths and be amongst its wonders.
In his desperation he had wandered the immaterium alone, projecting his mind through the veil, at first in search of an escape, then for a being powerful enough to grant his warband’s freedom. He had found one.
Or it had found him.
‘Master?’
Thule’s eye opened slowly, the thin skin of its lid tugging at the crystallised film of conjunctiva until it split and cracked. The thunderous voice receded into memory as he looked out over a garden of his own making through a layer of watery pus and thin blood.
It was a shadow of what he had experienced in the warp, but it served as a salve upon his wounded soul. Long-stemmed flowers tumbled from unkempt beds, their budding petals shifting through a kaleidoscope of colours as they dripped acidic venoms upon the blooms below. Nurglings cavorted and fought in the branches and shade of trees that had sprouted from the guts of faithful cultists, their cracked and contorted ribs serving as climbing frames for the Little Lords’ games. Fat-bellied flies thrummed through the air on ragged wings, their carapace chittering as they alighted upon the rotting flesh of his compost pile.
But it was the three figures in the centre of the garden who drew Thule’s attention. Each wore the browned and corroded armour of the Brotherhood of Rust, though they surveyed their master with differing levels of respect.
Putris Ghem, Thule’s Tallymaster, inclined his helmed head respectfully as Thule’s eye turned upon him. His Corvus helm had bonded to the flesh beneath many centuries before, elongating over the intervening years to form a ceramite approximation of a mosquito’s proboscis. Beside him stood Cystix, the flesh of his tumour-ravaged face held back by thin chains encrusted with gore and rust.
Oriostanes the Shepherd waited away from the others, his attention already drifting as he cooed to a nearby nurgling and offered a scrap of meat torn from his skinless skull.
They were Thule’s lieutenants, whom he had fought beside since the Death Guard had been loyal to the Emperor, and now sought to keep from each other’s throats. Without an enemy to fight they would fall upon one another before long, and Thule could not allow that.
‘You summoned us, master,’ Ghem said.
‘I did,’ Thule replied, his voice momentarily dry and thin through lack of use.
‘I take it that your benefactor has spoken?’ Cystix said without a hint of Ghem’s deference. ‘Where is this promised route out of the Reach?’
You will wait.
Thule gritted his cracked and blackened teeth as the voice thundered back into sudden life within his skull. He forced it down into the recesses of his mind, though the exertion left him leaning on his staff for support.
‘There is no way out,’ he managed. ‘We must wait to be released.’
Cystix’s mouth twisted into a snarl at that. He had always been quick to anger, though his defiance was a somewhat new and entirely unwelcome trait – one he had only acquired since they had fled the Herald’s wrath.
‘Wait? Your idiocy has cost us enough time already,’ he spat and pointed an accusing finger at Thule. ‘You should have given the Parchroot to the Herald when he demanded it. If you had, then we would still be by his side doing the Grandfather’s work instead of–’
‘We still do the Grandfather’s work,’ Thule said, his voice rumbling with awakening power that was not all his own.
His staff thrummed in his hand, the warp-infused wood excited by the threat of impending violence. It fed strength into Thule’s withered and atrophied muscles, even as the vines and roots that criss-crossed his armour shifted in readiness. Its name was the Parchroot, an artefact of Nurgle’s own garden that had chosen Porphero Thule, and his refusal to give it to the Herald had seen the Brotherhood of Rust chased from the Plague Fleet under fire from the Terminus Est’s guns.
They had escaped into the warp and the badly damaged Acherax had carried them to the Khorsari Reach, where they had been trapped ever since.
Cystix dropped his hand but did not look away, his contorted and mottled features reddening with his unspent anger. It was only a matter of time before the fool took up arms against him, Thule thought. He would not allow the Brotherhood to fall to pathetic infighting, not when he was still so far from his true goal.
His benefactor would get him back to Grandfather’s Garden. All he had to do was wait until he was called.
‘Oriostanes, take your creatures and one-seventh of the Plaguechildren and go to Forettia. Hold it for me until I give word that we are to leave,’ Thule said. The Shepherd nodded without looking up from where he crouched, his attention on a nurgling that slurped at a pool of venom with a straw fashioned from a yellowed finger bone. ‘Cystix, go to Aeternios with your squads and another seventh of the Plaguechildren. Wipe out the resistance there and see its mines put back to use – we will need its resources in the wars to come.’
Cystix’s expression changed from one of anger to confusion, but he did not refuse the order. ‘What of Ghem?’ he asked, a snide tone entering his voice. ‘Will you not give your pet a system to rule?’
‘Ghem will stay here in Kezerus by my side. Go now, both of you.’
Ghem did not speak as the other lieutenants made for the garden’s edge and disappeared out of sight.
‘My lord, why–’ Ghem began, but Thule silenced him with a gesture.
‘Because you will not betray me, Tallymaster,’ Thule said, turning away to run his gauntleted hands through the acidic fronds of an overgrown plant. ‘The resistance in Aeternios will keep Cystix too busy to think of rebellion, and Oriostanes will hold the gates of the Reach for me until the day they open. This way, our brotherhood will remain intact.’
At least until I am back within the Garden, Thule thought.
PART 1
The Descent
Cowardice was the door by which so much evil entered the domain of the blessed, and left it foul by their passing.
– From the tome Infernus in the Library of Ptolemy.
Author unknown
Chapter 1
A kindling roar consumed him, like the bones-deep rumble of a feral growl in the chest of a hunting beast.
It was a sound th
But there was nothing that could stop the Ultramarines now.
‘Thirty seconds, Brother-Captain Areios,’ a voice said in Ferren’s helm, cutting past the buffeting roar outside the hold.
‘Very good.’
The interior of the Overlord’s hold was bathed in the muted red glow of the emergency lumens, casting the shadows between his men in fathomless blacks. They took each shudder and lurching jolt without comment or complaint, simply staring directly ahead through ruby helm lenses.
Like Ferren, they had experienced all of this before. They knew what to expect, and were prepared for the fighting to come.
Hammering thuds cut through the roar of air outside, as if giant hands were knocking against the Overlord’s hull in an attempt to swat it from the sky. None penetrated the thick armour, though the muffled sounds of the heavy bolter turrets told Ferren that the point defences were keeping the worst of the incoming fire from the gunship.
‘We are taking small-arms fire,’ the pilot voxed. ‘Some missiles, but we are keeping them at bay.’
‘Open the front hatch,’ Ferren said.
He slapped the restraint harness’ release with an armoured hand and stood, just as a more forceful impact shook the Overlord. Loose restraints rattled and swung as the gunship corrected its course, but Ferren’s footing was sure. He grasped an overhead rail and worked his way down the hold to the forward embarkation ramp.
The gale-force winds that whistled through the opening hatch would have thrown a baseline human back into the depths of the craft, but Ferren Areios was no human. He was a Space Marine, armoured in reinforced Gravis plate, and to him it felt like nothing more than a passing breeze as he took in the sight of the battlefield before him.
The night-dark plains of Osteraand stretched out ahead of the Overlord, hemmed in by the fortress-city of Tancherion to his left and scarred by a network of rough trench lines and dugouts below. Guns blazed from the city’s walls and from the trenches, trading las-beams and solid rounds so that the air was thick with deadly projectiles that pitted rockcrete and churned the earth. Tancherion’s walls had been left ragged and sagging from their year-long siege, but they still held for the Imperium despite the artillery bombardment that tore at them with explosive might.
The cloudless sky was filled with stars and flickering lights that spoke of the void war still raging in low orbit, whilst flaming comets slashed down towards the plains in defiance of the anti-aircraft fire thrown up by the city’s besiegers. Drop pods fell upon the battlefield like the destructive ire of a vengeful god, slamming into the earthworks with enough force to collapse dugouts and trenches for dozens of yards in every direction. Ultramarines emerged from the craters before the survivors had a chance to respond, most still half-buried beneath falling earth and rivers of mud.
Ferren absorbed all of that information in less time than it took for him to blink.
‘Sixth Company, hear me!’ he cried as he opened the company-wide vox-channel. ‘You have your objectives and your orders. Together we will be the blow that breaks the heretics’ grip on this world, and see Osteraand’s skies cleansed of their foul touch in the name of Lord Calgar. Courage and honour!’
The roar of the wind outside was briefly drowned out by a score of voices shouting the battle cry back over the vox, their enhancements lending the sound a guttural resonance that fired the blood of all who heard it.
Figures grew visible beneath him as he hefted his thunder hammer, Honour, and called forth his squads from the depths of the Overlord.
‘Brother-captain, this ground is too unstable for us to land,’ the pilot voxed as humans in ragged clothes began to fire their ramshackle weapons up at the gunship passing thirty feet above their heads.
‘Then we deploy now,’ Ferren replied.
With a battle cry on his lips, he leaped from the open hatch.
Mud and churned earth rushed up to meet him. Bullets and las-beams scoured the air as he fell, Honour raised above his head as he hurtled towards the earth with adrenaline surging through both of his hearts. A terrified face looked up to see the Ultramarine falling from the sky above him, and the heretic turned to run.
Ferren struck the earth with all the might his augmented musculature and power armour could lend him. Thunder rolled out from the point his hammer fell, breaking the bones of those nearest and deafening still more as a wave of force tore down trench supports and collapsed dugouts. Lightning played across the impact crater as bodies flew through the air, carried by the concussive energy of the blast.
Ferren was momentarily deafened as the audio-dampers engaged in his helm, but sound quickly returned as he straightened to take in the devastation he had wrought.
Broken and twisted bodies lay in tangled piles of shattered limbs before him. Those who had tried to run had been caught by the blast regardless, and the few survivors mewled in the dirt, clutching at bleeding ears as Ferren raised his boltstorm gauntlet and put each of them down with a single shot. Timeon, Ferren’s slaved servo-skull, emerged from the cover provided by his pauldrons and scanned the ground ahead with a burr of tuning auspex fields, feeding the additional information into Ferren’s helm display.
Heavy impacts behind him announced the arrival of Sergeant Soultos and his squad of Aggressors, followed by two squads of Intercessors.
‘I would say you have secured the landing zone, brother-captain,’ Soultos said.
‘There is still work to be done,’ Ferren replied, pointing with his thunder hammer to the entrance of the nearest trench. Heretics were running towards the impact, their weapons raised, screaming battle cries that were laced with fear.
‘To battle, then,’ Soultos said and raised his boltstorm gauntlets.
Osteraand had not always been a fortress world. It had been an important transport hub before the Great Rift split the sky, situated as it was at the terminus of several shipping routes, but it had been forced to change like so many of the other worlds of Ultramar close to the Rift.
Gone were the orbital shipyards and low-orbit freight platforms, to be replaced with weapon platforms and deep-space warning systems. Its sprawling cities had been transformed into fortresses hemmed in by massive walls encrusted with barracks and gun emplacements, all manned by a populace whose only duty was the defence of their world.
Under the light of the Great Rift the world had found a way to survive, until the arrival of the Plaguechildren.
Hundreds of thousands of heretic cultists had invaded aboard a flotilla of ragged ships, emerging from behind the calming warp storms that fringed the Great Rift. They had fallen upon Osteraand like a swarm of insects, overwhelming the orbital defences and laying siege to the great fortress-cities that dotted the planet’s surface.
It had taken the Imperium a full solar year to respond, but it did so in force.
The combined might of the Ultramarines Fifth and Sixth companies had been dispatched alongside a sizeable Astra Militarum contingent to break the siege of Osteraand and to secure Ultramar’s borders. As captain of the Sixth Company, Ferren had been tasked with breaking the siege of Tancherion before the heretics could gain a foothold within the city, a mission that he carried out with brutal efficiency.
Honour smashed aside a heretic with bone-shattering force, throwing the man down to the mud in a pile of broken limbs and tangled rags. Even deactivated the thunder hammer was a powerful weapon, and more than enough to kill baseline humans in a single Astartes-powered blow. He put a second man down with a forehand swing, crushing the human’s chest cavity with a muffled crump of breaking ribs, before slamming a third’s head into the trench wall with his free hand.
The heretic slid down the cratered iron plate, leaving a streak of blood and pulverised brain matter behind him.
‘Lieutenant Cicero, what is your position?’ he voxed as he raised his boltstorm gauntlet to spray suppressing fire down a connecting trench. Robed bodies exploded in bursts of wet meat, splattering the walls of the trench as their comrades ran for cover.
