Contents

  Cover

  Warhammer 40,000

  Apostle

  Prologue

  PART I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  PART II

  A Memory

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  PART III

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘Night Lords: The Omnibus’

  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

  The ship wailed as it began to break apart. The death cries of plasteel reverberated through the decks. First Acolyte Cerastes felt them, deep yet piercing, vibrating through the floor and up through his armour, shaking his spine. Staccato shocks of explosions punctuated the screams of the hull. The Sisters of Battle had fatally wounded the cruiser Epiphany’s Flame, but they kept striking, injuring the corpse again and again. The Order of the Thorn had come for the Word Bearers ship, and would be satisfied only with its annihilation.

  Not now. Not now. Not when I am so close!

  Cerastes pounded down the hall, making for the chapel. He had lost his squad. There was a chance that he might be able to regroup with Dark Apostle Eurybios in the chapel. The bridge was lost, and so was the battle, but the chapel would allow them a last stand. The maddened zealots of the False Emperor would have to pay a high price for their victory.

  If we can force them back. If we can hold them off long enough to move forward just a bit further…

  The deck heaved. The ship’s gravity wavered, and Cerastes fought to keep his balance. The walls creaked. A fissure split open down the length of the vaulted ceiling. Tapestries made from the sanded skins of fallen enemies fell away from the walls, dropping like folding sails. A brass eight-pointed star, ten feet across, broke loose from the vault and crashed to the floor in front of Cerastes. He leapt over it, came down awkwardly as the deck heaved left and right, then kept running. Smoke filled the hall, dark and choking, and growing denser. The fires on the rest of the deck were drawing nearer.

  The ship is lost. The Word Bearers had never had a chance. The struggle had been decided the moment they had fallen into the trap.

  The bait was a freighter, the Obeisance. Its distress beacon had been the lure, and the prey, floating alone in the intersystem void with its engines dark, had been irresistible for the Epiphany’s Flame. The cruiser needed supplies badly for its own repairs. The Obeisance was more than an opportunity. It was a necessity. And it had come so tantalisingly close to the nexus of Cerastes’ hopes.

  The Flame had docked with the freighter. And then, with the already weakened cruiser immobilised, the Sisters of Battle attacked. Their heavy cruiser, the Wrath of the Immaculate, had come out from behind the concealment of an abandoned mining planetoid. It was there too quickly for the Flame to free itself from the Obeisance. There would have been no possibility of flight regardless. The Wrath of the Immaculate was a ship hungry for battle. The Epiphany’s Flame had had its recent fill of the same. Battered, bleeding, it needed refuge and the chance to lick its wounds. It received a raptor’s talons instead, seized and boarded in its turn.

  Cerastes had already lost most of his brothers. The struggle now was just an effort to delay the inevitable as long as possible. His lips pulled back in a grimace of anger. No, he would not accept that final defeat. The ship was lost, but he would find a way forward. He had to.

  So close. So close.

  Cerastes reached an intersection. The chapel waited to the right. Before he could make the turn, the cruiser shook hard, a bone in the jaws of a flesh hound of Khorne. From the left came a huge cracking, as if heralding the fall of a great, ancient tree. An entire section of the hull was cleaving away from the ship, Cerastes realised. The air in the corridor gusted with the warning wind of a nearby breach.

  From the corridor down which he had come, pursuers arrived. A pair of Retributors of the Order of the Thorn advanced through the hall, armed with heavy flamers. Their tan-coloured power armour was splashed with the gore of Cerastes’ brothers. Their faces were twisted into masks of hatred. Though the weight of their weapons slowed their approach to a steady march, they were as unstoppable as time, howling in a frenzy of religious fury. They unleashed twin streams of ignited promethium, and the hall became a firestorm. Incinerated, the remaining tapestries curled up and fell to ash. The flames came for Cerastes. He dropped low, gaining a few extra moments. Pain lashed his face as the wave of the storm washed over him.

  Cerastes mag-locked his boots to the deck, anchoring his position. With his left hand, he pulled a krak grenade from his belt and hurled it to his left, where the short corridor ended at a sealed bulkhead. The grenade’s magnetic clamp held it to the door. As the flames enveloped Cerastes, the grenade went off. It melted through the door. On the other side was the void. There was explosive decompression, and the air in the halls rushed out into the abyss with hurricane force, taking the flames with it.

  The jolt of the explosion and the sudden intake of monstrous breath from the rift knocked the Retributors off balance as they reached the intersection. They fell. They scrabbled for handholds that were not there. Cerastes tossed two more krak grenades to land between him and the Retributors. The charges ate through the deck, and a chunk of it peeled away, a raft hauling its passengers to their doom. The hurricane pushed them through the door. One managed to mag-lock her boots to the wall as she tumbled, but Cerastes shot her leg away, and she flew off into the void.

  The gale’s fury continued unabated. A few yards ahead of Cerastes, another bulkhead door ground down from the ceiling to cut off the new breach. Cerastes stomped forward, locking each step, his progress frustratingly slow as he raced for the exit. A few steps away, he leapt and rolled under the door just before it closed. The hurricane ended with an angry hiss.

  Cerastes rose and sprinted the rest of the way to the chapel. The beat of the explosions grew louder and faster. The Epiphany’s Flame drew near its end. In minutes, the ship would be gone.

  This couldn’t be the end. This was so ignominious, so pointless. To be caught and destroyed in so banal a trap was beyond bearing.

  I will not die for nothing. Not after so many years of struggle to reach this point.

  He arrived at the chapel. In the centre of the octagonal chamber, the great eight-pointed star of Chaos, sculpted of brass, jade, emerald and lapis lazuli, sat atop the altar, surrounded by the icons of Khorne and of Tzeentch, of Slaanesh and of Nurgle. Dark Apostle Eurybios, commander of the Word Bearers host the Eightfold Bane, supported himself against the altar. His chestplate was scorched and broken open. A rent in his left flank exposed his ribs. He had left a long trail of blood behind him.

  Cerastes ran to his side. ‘Dark Apostle,’ he said. ‘I have come. Here we will make our stand. We will throw back the foe.’

  Eurybios shook his head. ‘You know that is not true, First Acolyte.’ His breath hitched and stuttered. It sounded like the rattle of bones. His fist tightened around his great accursed crozius, and he straightened, drawing strength from the icon. Intricately carved, its dark metal embedded with fragments of the defiled bones of a hundred Imperial saints and sanctified by thousands of years of bloodshed, it was a staff of office, and the promise of the final victory of Chaos Undivided.

  ‘We cannot defeat them, but we can steal their prize from them, and perhaps wound them grievously.’

  ‘How will we do that?’

  ‘Join me now, Cerastes. Together, we will call upon the Ruinous Powers. We shall offer ourselves up as sacrifices, that a rift might open and swallow the ship.’

  Ice and wrath clutched Cerastes’ heart. ‘But we are so close to Legitur…’ he blurted without thinking.

  ‘What of that?’ said Eu
rybios. ‘That world is meaningless to us in this moment. Whatever we might have done there is irrelevant. We have one course left open to us, and we must take it, one last great act by the Eightfold Bane.’

  Legitur is not meaningless to me. I will not abandon my course.

  Eurybios turned to the altar. He raised the crozius. ‘We must hurry. She will be here soon. She has hunted me through our corridors.’

  She. The leader of the Sisters of Battle. She had hailed the Epiphany’s Flame at the moment that the Wrath of the Immaculate had come in for the kill. She had announced to the Word Bearers who it was that would purge them from existence. Palatine Aesura had made good on her promise.

  Eurybios lowered his head and began to intone.

  ‘No,’ Cerastes said softly.

  Eurybios hesitated. He turned his head, confused by Cerastes’ denial.

  ‘We do not turn away. Not now. Not so close.’

  ‘First Acolyte–’ Eurybios began, voice rumbling in anger.

  Cerastes slammed the spiked head of his crozius into the Dark Apostle’s gaping wound. He yanked it out savagely, drawing flesh and tissue. Blood gushed in a torrent, and Eurybios staggered.

  Before he could recover from the shock of surprise, Cerastes brought his weapon down on the Dark Apostle’s skull. The first blow forced Eurybios to his knees. The second smashed through bone and exposed his brain.

  ‘You have failed the Eightfold Bane,’ said Cerastes.

  He rained blows upon him until the headless corpse leaned down into a sludge of grey and pink, peppered with bone fragments.

  ‘My path is clear,’ said Cerastes. ‘It has been commanded by the gods.’

  Cerastes gazed at the great crozius, and the razored halo of spikes surrounding the skull at its centre. He put his own weapon down and seized the sign of his new standing. The Eightfold Bane belonged to him now. What remained of it.

  ‘I am the hand of the gods,’ Cerastes said. ‘I am the blessing of the Word.’

  The relic he held in both hands had been wielded by the Dark Apostles of the Epiphany’s Flame for more than ten thousand years. He would not let its journey end here, nor his. The crozius would drink the blood of the Imperials for another ten thousand years and more. And he would fulfil the task the gods had laid upon him.

  He heard bootsteps approaching the far entrance of the octagonal chapel.

  She comes, as Eurybios said.

  He drew his bolt pistol, then started for the door. He would meet Aesura with fire.

  The door exploded inward before he could reach it, and a stream of bolter shells followed, slamming into his pauldron and spinning him around with the force of their impact. The shells struck the altar, shattering its marble base. The eight-pointed star toppled towards him, as if the symbol of his faith were pursuing him from corridor to chapel, coming to punish him for his own failures. This time, he could not duck out of the way, and it crashed down on him, two tons of sculpture pinning him to the floor.

  Palatine Aesura marched into the chapel. She stood over Cerastes, bolter in one hand, power sword in the other. She was young, yet made ancient by hatred. Her face, more pale and hard than her armour, was as still as stone, though her eyes, a translucent, icy green, burned with the frenzy her body barely contained. She was a whirlwind of war madness, stilled for the frozen moments in the chapel. When she spoke, her low voice grated with the tension of holding herself back from the berserk rage that had carried her through the ship, and through the bodies of Cerastes’ brothers.

  ‘So ends this stain on the Emperor’s galaxy,’ she said. ‘So will end all the filth of treason and heresy.’

  She raised the sword.

  Cerastes cursed her. He cursed her in the tongue of Chaos. He roared at her, and he called upon the gods to bear witness to his fidelity to the Word. He called upon the Word itself, on the deepest truths of being, to come to his aid and show this pitiable fanatic the depths of her self-deception.

  He roared in anger, then in pain, as the true gods answered and demanded their price. A network of wounds opened on his face and scalp, as though a mesh of razor wire had been drawn tight around his skull. He bled in streams, and a rain of tiny flaps of skin fell to the floor like shed scales.

  The Palatine flinched at the words, squinting in revulsion. Her recoil made her hesitate, power sword held high, for the space of a heartbeat.

  Violet energy erupted from the fallen star. A crackling web spread in an instant over the floor and walls and dome of the chapel. The chamber screamed in pain, and it split open. The walls fell away into a swirl of warp energy and the void. The ceiling caved in, the decks above giving way, and the floor dropped beneath Cerastes. There was suddenly nothing under him, and he dropped away from the star, plunging into darkness, into cold, into the abyss.

  As he fell, Cerastes saw Aesura framed by the end of the Epiphany’s Flame. Explosions rocked the disintegrating ship on both sides of the ruined chapel, silhouetting her with red and orange. She stared at him, and he stared back, each a being of fire and ice, faith and blood. Then she vanished, running through the dying ship to make her retreat to her vessel.

  Cerastes fell through the dissipating warp energies, into deeper darkness.

  Vacuum embraced him, waiting for the vapour of his last breath.

  PART I

  EVANGELIST

  CHAPTER 1

  Vox-casters boomed the cardinal’s recorded homily up and down the gloomy depths of the Lower Glyphs of Legitur. The voice from the Upper Glyphs descended into the realm of endless, choking fog, of snowing ash and drifting paper.

  ‘Longing is heresy,’ the ancient rasp of Cardinal Mazarine intoned. ‘To wish for what one does not have is to express ingratitude. It is to forget one’s duty to the Emperor. Duty and obedience are the only true callings. To know one’s place is an act of holy submission. To desire otherwise is to rise up against the will of the Emperor. Awake to duty. Punish the malingerer.’

  Overlapping echoes made the homily hard to make out. The cardinal’s words collided with each other, turning the exhortation into the sound of an old man shouting at himself. Palura Wrack knew what he was saying, though. The homily had been played many times in the last year. She knew it by heart.

  When the homily was done, the bells would ring, the summons to chapel. She imagined that everyone residing in the sun-bathed Upper Glyphs would be flowing into the great churches and cathedrums. All the residents of the Lower Glyphs who could attend would. Many could not.

  Most could not.

  The sound of the cardinal’s voice made her parents stir in their bed. It was too small, too old. The pallet sagged in the middle. The sheets, threadbare, had turned grey from exposure to the air of the Lower Glyphs.

  ‘Ah,’ said Heret Avial. ‘Finally.’

  The Administratum serf had been trying to get Wrack’s parents to rise for the last fifteen minutes. Wrack kept telling them to stay put while she pleaded with Avial. They had done as she said. They didn’t have the strength to do otherwise.

  Avial had come to evict them from their home. It was miserable enough. It consisted of a single room. It could almost have been a cell, a hollow nodule midway down the height of the hive tower. It had a window, though, a mark of Wrack’s achievement in providing them with a dwelling. Filth had rendered the window little more than translucent, but it did let in a sense of the deep twilight that pervaded at this altitude of the Lower Glyphs. Twilight, not full darkness.

  Her parents had a window, a bed, and they did not dwell in the night. Wrack had done this for them. She had taken pride in it. Now Avial planned to take it all away.

  ‘Thank you for doing your duty,’ he said to the old couple.

  ‘They’re just trying to get to chapel,’ Wrack said. ‘Mother. Father. Please. Lie down. I’ll get you to chapel after this man leaves.’

  Her mother coughed. Her malnourished frame shook with the grating hack. She sounded as if she had slurry instead of lungs. Her husband started coughing a moment later. They staggered to their feet and then swayed, leaning against each other.

  ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ said Avial. ‘Your parents are.’ His pinched features looked pleased with his turn of phrase, as if he had said something interesting.