The Warmaster
(Dan Abnett)
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 battle fleets 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 Emperors 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 Imperial Guard 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.
For Isaac Eaglestone.
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!
‘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.’
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.