The Damnation of Pythos Read online

  It is a time of legend.

  The galaxy is in flames. The Emperor’s glorious vision for humanity is in ruins. His favoured son, Horus, has turned from his father’s light and embraced Chaos.

  His armies, the mighty and redoubtable Space Marines, are locked in a brutal civil war. Once, these ultimate warriors fought side by side as brothers, protecting the galaxy and bringing mankind back into the Emperor’s light. Now they are divided.

  Some remain loyal to the Emperor, whilst others have sided with the Warmaster. Pre-eminent amongst them, the leaders of their thousands-strong Legions are the primarchs. Magnificent, superhuman beings, they are the crowning achievement of the Emperor’s genetic science. Thrust into battle against one another, victory is uncertain for either side.

  Worlds are burning. At Isstvan V, Horus dealt a vicious blow and three loyal Legions were all but destroyed. War was begun, a conflict that will engulf all mankind in fire. Treachery and betrayal have usurped honour and nobility. Assassins lurk in every shadow. Armies are gathering. All must choose a side or die.

  Horus musters his armada, Terra itself the object of his wrath. Seated upon the Golden Throne, the Emperor waits for his wayward son to return. But his true enemy is Chaos, a primordial force that seeks to enslave mankind to its capricious whims.

  The screams of the innocent, the pleas of the righteous resound to the cruel laughter of Dark Gods. Suffering and damnation await all should the Emperor fail and the war be lost.

  The age of knowledge and enlightenment has ended.

  The Age of Darkness has begun.

  ~ Dramatis Personae ~

  The X Legion, ‘Iron Hands’

  Durun Atticus, Captain, 111th Clan-Company, commander of the Veritas Ferrum

  Aulus, Sergeant, 111th Clan-Company, acting Master of Auspex of the Veritas Ferrum

  Anton Galba, Sergeant, 111th Clan-Company

  Crevther, Sergeant, 111th Clan-Company

  Darras, Sergeant, 111th Clan-Company

  Lacertus, Sergeant, 111th Clan-Company

  Camnus, Techmarine, 111th Clan-Company

  Vektus, Apothecary, 111th Clan-Company

  Achaicus, Battle-brother, 111th Clan-Company

  Catigernus, Battle-brother, 111th Clan-Company

  Ecdurus, Battle-brother, 111th Clan-Company

  Ennius, Battle-brother, 111th Clan-Company

  Eutropius, Battle-brother, 111th Clan-Company

  Venerable Atrax, Contemptor Dreadnought, 111th Clan-Company

  Khalybus, Captain

  Sabinus, Captain

  Plienus, Captain

  Rhydia Erephren, Mistress of Astropaths

  Bhalif Strassny, Navigator

  Jerune Kanshell, Legion serf

  Agnes Tanaura, Legion serf

  Georg Paert, Legion serf

  The XVIII Legion, ‘Salamanders’

  Khi’dem, Sergeant, 139th Company

  The XIX Legion, ‘Raven Guard’

  Inachus Ptero, Veteran

  Judex, Battle-brother

  The III Legion, ‘Emperor’s Children’

  Kleos, Captain, Master of the Callidora

  Curval, Ancient

  Colonists of Pythos

  Tsi Rekh, High Priest

  Ske Vris, Priestess-novitiate

  The Adeptus Terra

  Emil Jeddah, Astropath

  Mehya Vogt, Scribe

  Helmar Galeen, Administrator

  Prologue

  The flesh of mercy. The blood of hope. The splintered bones of joy. It would have this feast. It would have the taste in its mouth. Its jaws would chew through gristle. Its claws would feel the sensual, despairing rip of opening wounds. It would revel in all these dark glories, and soon. It knew this.

  It had faith.

  And what did it mean, for a being such as itself, to have faith? What did it mean for a timeless entity to be in the service of patrons? There was so much opportunity to ponder these questions in the flow of melting time and churning space that was the realm of the gods. So much opportunity to explore their shapes, to tangle in their contradictions, to savour in their perversities.

  Too much opportunity.

  Because there was always the impatience, the need, the hunger. They were never answered, never satisfied. How could they be? They were the very matter of this maelstrom, the sinew of the monster’s existence. But though the passions were all-consuming, they left room for the questions and speculations, because these were the fuel for the beast’s needs. They were the whetstones for the blade of its intent.

  But what did it mean that it had faith? How could the concept have meaning, here where meaning itself was tortured to death, and where the murderous existence of the gods was not a question of belief? The answer was simple in expression, a complex and exquisite agony in its full manifestation.

  To have faith was to trust in the promise of the revel. To believe that the time of feeding was drawing near.

  The feast would begin on this planet. The barriers to the universe of matter and flesh were thin here, and growing ragged. The entity pushed against them, eagerness and frustration twinning and entwining, becoming a growl. And this growl coiled through the warp to sink into the minds of those keen enough to hear it, bringing them nightmares, bringing them madness. The barriers held, but only just.

  The thing’s consciousness seeped out. It moved over the face of the waters, where unthinkable leviathans hunted, and it saw that this world was good. It reached the land, where nature was given over to a carnival of predation, and this, too, it saw was good. It saw a world that knew nothing but fangs, a world where life itself existed only to build death’s great kingdom. It experienced something very like joy. It laughed, and this laugh skittered across the galaxy, through the dreams of the sensitive, and those who began screaming would never stop.

  Its mind ranged over the serpent world. It travelled jungles of endless night. It soared over mountain ranges as barren of hope as the light from dead stars. It learned the threats that lived here. It learned the promises that killed here. It saw that there was no difference between the two. It bore witness to a planet that was, in its monstrosity, the worthy image of the warp itself.

  The thing amused itself for a day and a night with the concept of home.

  Then it grew restless. To look was not enough. To have the material world, the canvas for the artist of pain, so close, yet still out of the reach of claws, was maddening. Where was the promised feast? The planet writhed in the grip of its own horror. It was existence as carnivore, as predator. But the entity was not a guest at the table. It could do nothing but watch. What was more, the planet was a wasted paradise. Where was the sentient life? Without intelligence, there could be no true innocence, no true victims. Without victims, there was no true horror. The world was a massive, unrealised potential. Though the entity had faith, and though it was a loyal servant, it was also impatient. It made to withdraw its mind from the planet.

  But it could not.

  It struggled briefly, but the powers it served told it no. They held it in place, and understanding dawned. It had been drawn here by something more than a promise. It brushed once more against the frayed veil. It read the currents of the warp, and again it laughed, and again it snarled. It found the necessary patience. The planet was but a stage. No actors strutted upon it yet, but they would not be long in coming. The beast would wait behind the curtain, and its moment would come. It whispered its praise.

  All around it came answering whispers, its fellows here to do its bidding, here to worship, here to join in the reve
l. The moment was coming for all of them. The moment when they would at last be free to spread their slavering truth over the breadth of a shrieking galaxy. They pressed forward, straining to taste the flesh of the real. The whispers built upon one another, desire feeding desire until the immaterium echoed with raging hunger.

  The beast called for silence. It sensed something momentous was transpiring. It looked away from the planet. It was like staring up from the depths of a well, for this world had become a prison, the gravitational force of destiny holding the beast here so that it might fulfil a role. It strained the limits of its perceptions of the material world. At the very edge of its knowledge and awareness, there was movement, like a fly touching the outermost strands of a web.

  The promise had been kept. The stars were right.

  Someone was coming.

  One

  Scarred

  Role models

  Cells

  ‘Scars are a thing of the flesh,’ Durun Atticus had once said. ‘They are the mark of a weak material that tears easily and is repaired imperfectly. If the flesh is scarred, it should be excised, and replaced with a more perfect substance.’

  Did he still think so? Anton Galba wondered.

  The captain had made this speech, Galba remembered, in the aftermath of the Diasporex campaign, during those last days of illusion, when the shadow of treachery was already falling over the Imperium, but the Iron Hands still believed that when they fought at the side of the Emperor’s Children, they were amongst brothers. There had been many wounds taken in that battle. The Fist of Iron had suffered the worst of the damage, but the strike cruiser Veritas Ferrum had been far from unscathed. An energy weapon salvo had struck the bridge. Critical systems had continued to function, but Atticus, unwavering on the command throne, had been badly burned.

  The vessel had been repaired. Atticus had been, also. He had returned, it had seemed, not from the apothecarion, but from the forge. There were no scars on him. And very little flesh. That was when he had made the speech. Galba, who bore plenty of scars on a face that was still mostly flesh, understood that Atticus was speaking in metaphorical terms, indulging in the hyperbole that was one of the rewards of victory. The Fist of Iron also carried its brands from the battle, but they would be expunged in due course. So Atticus had maintained.

  So they had all thought.

  And then had come the Callinedes campaign. And the betrayal. The crippling of the fleet. The X Legion’s darkest moment.

  So they had all thought.

  But Callinedes had been nothing more than a prologue. Its name had been supplanted in the pantheon of infamy. Who could brood over Callinedes IV when there was Isstvan V?

  Isstvan. The word was a hiss and a blade to the spine. It was a toxic sibilance that would never die. It was a wound that would fester until the galaxy’s last stars flickered out.

  It was a scar. Not a surface one that marked what had been healed. It was a deep one, the site of pain that would never be soothed, of rage that would never be quenched. Is this weakness? Galba asked the memory-Atticus. How can we excise this torn flesh? The wound reaches to our souls. He glanced back and up at his captain.

  Atticus stood before the command throne, at the front of the lectern, arms folded. He was motionless, his eyes fixed on the forward oculus. His face bore no expression. It had not since the Carollis System and the battle with the Diasporex. Atticus’s augmetic reconstruction had replaced most of his skull. Of all of the 111th Company’s warriors, he was the one who had come closest to a complete conversion to the machine. Inside the captain’s metal shell, Galba knew, blood still flowed and hearts still beat. But the exterior was the same dark grey as the Legion’s armour. The profile was human, but almost without features. Atticus was more iron sculpture than living being now: unyielding, without mercy, without warmth.

  But not without passion. As still as the captain was, Galba could sense his rage, and not just because he felt the same fury smouldering in his veins. Atticus’s left eye was organic. Galba did not know why he had kept it. Having lost or replaced so much of the weakling flesh, why keep any trace of it? He had not asked. But that last remnant of the human was all the more expressive for being isolated. It glared at the void, rarely blinking, barely moving. It was rage itself. Galba had seen Atticus in full, molten wrath. But in this moment, the rage was frozen, colder than the void it reflected. It was a rage that went as deep as the wound, and it answered Galba’s question. There was only one way to heal the X Legion: by exterminating the traitors. Every single one.

  Galba faced forwards again. His left hand, bionic, was still, impassive, but the fingers of his right curled in frustration. That which would heal the Iron Hands was beyond reach. No amount of discipline or skill in warfare could change that fact. Isstvan had seen to that. Horus had smashed them, as he had the Salamanders and the Raven Guard. They were shadows now, all of them. We are ghosts, Galba thought. We thirst for vengeance, but we have no substance.

  He was not being defeatist. He was not being disloyal. He was being truthful. Only fragments remained of the three loyalist Legions that had been on Isstvan. They were scattered. Their forces were small. The Veritas Ferrum’s escape from the Isstvan System was miraculous. To still have an operational strike cruiser was no small thing. But in another sense, it was very insignificant. The Veritas was one ship. What could it do against fleets?

  Something, Atticus had promised. We will do something.

  ‘Captain,’ Auspex Master Aulus called. ‘Navigator Strassny reports we have reached our destination. Mistress Erephren asks that we proceed no further.’

  ‘Very well,’ Atticus answered. ‘We hold.’

  A rocky mass the size of a mountain passed before the oculus. The Veritas’s position was just outside the Pandorax System. The outer edge of the system was marked by an asteroid belt of unusual density. As the planetoid tumbled away into the night, Galba could see another far to port, a moving patch of grey in the reflected light of Pandorax. The Veritas’s sensors were picking up dozens of targets in the near vicinity, all of them massive enough to wreck the cruiser in the event of a collision.

  These were not the remnants of an accretion disc. They were not chunks of ice and dust. They were rock and metal. There had once been something else here, Galba deduced. Something huge.

  Something grand?

  The thought was involuntary, a product of his mood. He realised that it was important he hold on tightly to his anger. It was keeping him from despair. He shoved away dark meditations about destroyed magnificence. But there was still the question of the asteroid belt. He was looking at wreckage. Something had been here, and it had been destroyed.

  By what?

  To starboard was the dirty brown orb of the planet Gaea. Its orbit was deeply eccentric, at a steep angle to the ecliptic. It crossed the orbit of Kylix, the next planet in, and, over the course of its year, briefly passed beyond the asteroid belt. At this time, it was still within the belt. Its surface was pockmarked by overlapping craters, its thin atmosphere filled with dust from the latest impact. The possibility of a planetary collision crossed Galba’s mind. But no, Gaea could pass for a large moon. Perhaps it had even been one, spinning off on its bizarre path after the destruction of its parent.

  There had been a cataclysm here, but its nature was unknown. So was what had been lost. Despite himself, Galba felt the temptation to see omens in the wreckage-strewn doorway to Pandorax. He fought it back. The impulse was dangerously close to superstition, and such an indulgence was a betrayal of what he stood for. There had been more than enough betrayals of late. Do you want to see a lesson here? he asked himself. Then learn this one: what was here has been shattered, but it is still dangerous.

  ‘Any word from our brothers?’ Atticus asked.

  ‘The astropathic choir reports none as yet,’ Aulus answered.

  The door to the bridge opened. Two w
arriors entered, neither of them Iron Hands. The armour of one was the dark green of the Salamanders. Khi’dem, a sergeant. The other wore the solemn black and white of the Raven Guard. He was the veteran, Inachus Ptero. At their arrival, the atmosphere on the bridge changed. To the rage, frustration and sorrow was added a thread of resentment.

  Atticus turned his head. The movement was so cold, it was as if he had trained a bolter on the two Space Marines. ‘What is it?’ he snapped.

  The onyx features of Khi’dem seemed to darken further. ‘The very question we were going to ask you, captain,’ he said. ‘We would like to know what your purpose here is.’

  Atticus waited a few seconds before answering, and that beat was concentrated anger. ‘Your rank does not grant you leave to question me, sergeant.’

  ‘I speak for the Eighteenth Legion as it exists on this vessel,’ Khi’dem answered, calm but firm, ‘as does Veteran Ptero for the Nineteenth Legion. We are therefore owed the courtesy of being informed about the prosecution of the war.’

  ‘Legions?’ Atticus spat. The sound of emotion being expressed by his bionic larynx was an eerie one. The larynx was capable of variations of intonation and volume, and it sounded not unlike Atticus had when his voice had been entirely his own. Now, though, there was a hint of the uncanny, as though Atticus were mimicking himself and not quite succeeding. ‘Legions,’ he repeated. ‘Combined, your numbers are not much more than a dozen. Those are–’

  ‘Captain,’ Galba said, preferring the risk of interrupting Atticus to that of his commander speaking words that could never be withdrawn, ‘with your permission.’

  ‘Yes, sergeant?’ There was no pause before Atticus’s response, but there was a shade less venom, as if he were half-willing to be stopped.

  ‘Perhaps I can address our brothers’ questions.’

  Atticus favoured him with a long look. ‘Elsewhere,’ he said, his voice soft with anger barely and provisionally contained.