Plague war, p.1
Plague War, page 1
More Warhammer 40,000 from Black Library
• DAWN OF FIRE •
Book 1: AVENGING SON
Guy Haley
Book 2: THE GATE OF BONES
Andy Clark
INDOMITUS
Gav Thorpe
• DARK IMPERIUM •
Guy Haley
Book 1: DARK IMPERIUM
Book 2: PLAGUE WAR
Book 3: GODBLIGHT
BELISARIUS CAWL: THE GREAT WORK
Guy Haley
• WATCHERS OF THE THRONE •
Chris Wraight
Book 1: THE EMPEROR’S LEGION
Book 2: THE REGENT’S SHADOW
RITES OF PASSAGE
Mike Brooks
KNIGHTS OF MACRAGGE
Nick Kyme
CADIA STANDS
Justin D Hill
CADIAN HONOUR
Justin D Hill
• VAULTS OF TERRA •
Chris Wraight
Book 1: THE CARRION THRONE
Book 2: THE HOLLOW MOUNTAIN
MARK OF FAITH
Rachel Harrison
EPHRAEL STERN: THE HERETIC SAINT
David Annandale
Contents
Cover
Backlist
Title Page
Warhammer 40,000
Note
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
About the Author
An Extract from ‘Dawn of Fire: Avenging Son’
A Black Library Publication
eBook license
It is the 41st millennium.
Ten thousand years have passed since the Primarch Horus turned to Chaos and betrayed his father, the Emperor of Mankind, plunging the galaxy into ruinous civil war.
For one hundred centuries the Imperium has endured xenos invasion, internal dissent, and the perfidious attentions of the dark gods of the warp. The Emperor sits immobile upon the Golden Throne of Terra, a psychic bastion against infernal powers. It is His will alone that lights the Astronomican, binding together the Imperium, yet not one word has He uttered in all that time. Without His guidance, mankind has strayed far from the path of enlightenment.
The bright ideals of the Age of Wonder have withered and died. To be alive in this time is a terrible fate, where an existence of grinding servitude is the best that can be hoped for, and a quick death is seen as the kindest mercy.
As the Imperium continues its inevitable decline, Abaddon, last true son of the Primarch Horus, and now Warmaster in his stead, has reached the climax of a plan millennia in the making, tearing reality open across the width of the galaxy and unleashing forces unheard of. At last it seems, after centuries of valiant struggle, mankind’s doom is at hand.
Into this darkness a pale shaft of light penetrates. The Primarch Roboute Guilliman has been wakened from deathly slumber by alien sorcery and arcane science. Returning to Terra, he has resolved to set right this dire imbalance, to defeat Chaos once and for all, and to restart the Emperor’s grand plan for humanity.
But first, the Imperium must be saved. The galaxy is split in twain. On one side, Imperium Sanctus, beleaguered but defiant. On the other, Imperium Nihilus, thought lost to the night. A mighty crusade has been called to take back the Imperium and restore its glory. All mankind stands ready for the greatest conflict of the age. Failure means extinction, and the path to victory leads only to war.
This is the era Indomitus.
This is the second edition of Dark Imperium: Plague War, and has been revised for this publication. Originally, this story took place following the conclusion of the Indomitus Crusade, a century after the opening of the Great Rift. To better integrate the events depicted herein into the ongoing story of the Era Indomitus, they now take place around twelve years after the crusade left Terra.
The first part of the Indomitus Crusade is over. Imperium Sanctus enjoys some stability. Imperium Nihilus remains in grave danger.
Guilliman returns to Ultramar to save his kingdom from his fallen brother, Mortarion.
War ravages the galaxy from end to end.
The fate of mankind hangs in the balance…
CHAPTER ONE
CHRONICUS NOVAE IMPERIA
Weak light bobbed through pitchy black, casting a pale round that grew and shrank upon blue marble quarried on a world long ago laid waste. The hum of a grav-motor sawed at the quiet of the abandoned hall, though not loudly enough to banish the peace of ages that lay upon it. The lamp was dim as candlelight, and greatly obscured by the iron lantern framing it. The angles of the servo-skull that bore the lantern further cut the glow, but even in the feeble luminance the stone gleamed with flecks of gold, waking for brief moments at its caress, to glint with a nebula’s richness, before the servo-skull moved on and the paving’s glory was lost to the dark again.
The lonely figure of a man walked at the edge of the light, sometimes embraced by it completely, more often reduced to a collection of shadows. The hood of his homespun robe was pulled over his head. Sandals woven of cord chased the light at a steady pace. The circle of light was small, but the echo of the man’s footsteps revealed the space it traversed as vast. Less could be discerned about the man. He was a priest. Little else could be said besides that. It would not be obvious to a casual observer he was militant-apostolic to the Imperial Regent. He did not dress as men of his office ordinarily would, in brocade and jewels. He did not seem exalted. He certainly did not feel so. To him, and to those poor souls whom he offered the succour of the Emperor’s blessing, he was simply Mathieu.
Mathieu was a man of faith, and to him the Space Marines seemed faithless, ignorant of the true majesty of the Emperor’s divinity, but the Mortuis Ad Monumentum had the air of sanctity nevertheless.
Mathieu liked it for that reason.
Beyond the slap of the priest’s shoes and the whine of the skull, the silence in the Mortuis Ad Monumentum was so total, the sense of isolation so complete, that not even the background thrum of the giant engines pushing the Macragge’s Honour through the warp intruded. The rest of the ship vibrated, sometimes violently, sometimes softly, the growl of its systems always there. Not where the priest walked. The stillness of the ancient hall would not allow it. Within its confines time itself held its breath.
Since being freed from the Maelstrom, Mathieu had spent his quieter days exploring the hall. Its singular feature was the statues thronging its margins. They were not just in ones or twos, effigies given space to be walked around and admired, nor were they ensconced in alcoves to decorate or commemorate. No, there were crowds of stone men, in places forty deep, all Adeptus Astartes in ancient marks of armour. It might have been that they were placed with care once, but no longer, and the further you went into the hall, the more jumbled their arrangements became. When the Red Corsairs had held the ship, in their spite they had run amok and destroyed the statues nearest the doors. Yet many remained undamaged, as if the fury of the renegades had run out before their destruction could be completed. Mathieu thought some of the damage to be very old. For example, there was the place where untidy heaps of limbs gathered around an ugly patch in the wall. Surely that marked a hull breach from ancient times. He surmised that those statues had been damaged long before the Red Corsairs had come into the hall and done their violence before withdrawing, bored, defeated by the sheer number of monuments.
The warriors commemorated by the statues had died ten thousand years before Mathieu’s birth. Perhaps they had even fallen in the Emperor’s wars to create the Imperium itself. Such an incredible length of years, hard to comprehend, and yet now the being who had led these selfsame dead men commanded the ship again.
It dizzied Mathieu that he served a son of the Emperor. He could not quite believe it, even after all that had happened, all that he had seen.
Mathieu stopped in the dark where a group of statues huddled together. White stone glowed grey in the gloom. He had the terrifying notion that they had come alive and gathered to block his path, a phalanx of ghosts angered by his trespass. He put aside the thought. He ignored the cold hand of fear creeping up his back. He had come off course, nothing more. It was easy enough to get lost in a hall half a mile wide and almost as long.
His servo-skull came close, showing the large HV upon its forehead. By the letter V alone he called it. He could not bring himself to refer to it by her name.
‘V,’ he said. His voice was pure. It cut the shadows and frightened back the dark. Mathieu was an unimposing man, young, slight, but his voice was remarkable – a weapon greater than the laspistol he carried on his left hip, or the chainsword he bore into battle. Commanding before his congregations, it seemed tiny in the face of the dead past, but like a silver bell chiming deep in winter-stilled woods, it was clear and bright and lovely.
V emitted a flat, static-laced melody of acknowledgement.
‘Ascend fifty feet. Elevate lamp, pan left to right.’
The skull’s motors pulsed. It rose up into the high voids of the monumentum. The light abandoned Mathieu, angling instead for the still figures surrounding him. Stone faces leapt from the dark, as if snatching the chance to be remembered, drowning again in the black as soon as V turned away. For a moment Mathieu’s fear returned. He did not recognise where he was, until V’s pale lamplight washed over a Space Marine captain of some unremembered era, the right arm, held so proudly aloft, broken off at the elbow. This statue he recognised.
Mathieu breathed in relief. ‘Descend to original height. Rotate lantern downwards to light my way. Proceed.’
V voiced its fractured compliance. There were pretensions to musicality in the signal, but the limited vox-unit was fifth-hand at least, scavenged like all V’s other fittings, and overuse had blunted its harmonies.
‘Proceed to the hermitage, quickly now. My time for this duty is running out.’
V banked around and swept onwards. Mathieu picked up his pace to keep up.
The Adeptus Astartes pretended to disdain worship. It was well known among the Adeptus Ministorum that they did not regard the Emperor as a god. Mathieu had known this all through his calling. The truth had proved to be not so simple. On the ship there were many shrines, decorated lovingly with images of death, and containing the bones of heroes in reliquaries that rivalled those of the most lauded saint in their ostentation. The Ultramarines’ cult was strong, though they did not worship. In chapels that denied religion, their skull-masked priests protested loudly about the human nature of the Emperor and the primarchs while venerating them as gods in all but name. Their practice of honour, duty and obedience was conducted with a fanatical devotion.
There was an element of wilful blindness to their practices, thought Mathieu.
The way the Adeptus Astartes reacted to Roboute Guilliman bordered on awe. From the beginning Guilliman had warned Mathieu himself not to be worshipful, that he was not the son of a god. The priest had witnessed how irritated the primarch became with those who did not heed his words. And yet, these godless sons of his looked upon him, and they could barely hide their fervour.
Mathieu did as he had been told. He affected to see the man Guilliman wished to be, but his familiarity with the primarch was largely an act, for how could one be friends with a god? Mathieu did revere the primarch, sincerely and deeply.
The giant battleship had been in Guilliman’s hands again only a short time, but Militant-Apostolic Geestan had been quick to carve himself out a little realm in Guilliman’s palace spire after its return. Although already dying by then, Geestan had claimed what he regarded as appropriately luxurious quarters for himself, and had the largest room converted into a chapel of the Imperial Cult. It was gaudy, too concerned with expressions of wealth and influence and not faith. Mathieu had done his best to make it more austere. He removed some of the more vulgar fixtures, replaced statues of ancient cardinals with those of his favourite saints. There had been a sculpture of the Emperor in Glory standing proudly, sword in hand, upon the altar. Mathieu had replaced that with an effigy of the Emperor in Service – a grimacing corpse bound to the Golden Throne. Mathieu had always preferred that representation for it honoured the great sacrifice the Emperor made for His species. The Emperor’s service to mankind was so much more important than His aspects as a warrior, ruler, scientist or seer. Mathieu always tried to follow the example of the Emperor in Service, giving up what little comfort he had to aid the suffering mass of humanity.
The chapel was tainted by the dishonesties of holy men, of which Geestan had not been free. Mathieu preferred to lead worship with the ship’s bonded crew in their oily churches, as he had in secret while they languished under the Corsairs’ lash. He maintained the private chapel only because the display was expected of him. He rarely prayed there.
For his private devotions, he came down to this deserted cult monument of irreligious men.
At the back of the hall was a small charnel house, where the bones of fallen heroes were cemented in grim patterns. The dust lay thick on all its decoration when Mathieu had discovered it. Nobody had been there for a long time.
Beneath the eyeless stares of transhuman skulls, he had set up a plain wooden altar, this also bearing an effigy of the Emperor in Service. Arrayed around it were lesser statues of the nine loyal primarchs, as could be found in any holy place. That representing Roboute Guilliman was three times the size of the others. Mathieu genuflected to both the Emperor and His Avenging Son, though Guilliman might well shoot him for doing so.
He knelt awhile and prayed to the statues, Emperor first, His sons and then finally to Guilliman. He stood and took from a large ammunition box thirty-six candles, which he added to the racks of hundreds around the periphery of the room. When the candles were in place upon their spikes, he ignited a small promethium flame, and from it lit the wicks one by one, whispering solemnly over each.
‘Emperor watch over you,’ he said. ‘Emperor watch over you.’
Each candle represented the wish for a prayer from a menial somewhere, those ordinary folk who made up the majority of the Imperial citizenry yet otherwise had no voice. When someone asked him for the blessing of light, Mathieu never refused, no matter how high or low, but promised to burn a candle for every request. There were so many pleas, so many in pain, even within the small world of a voidship, that he could not possibly hope to keep his vow. In the end he had taken on aid, as his deacons insisted he should. Having always denied himself servants or servitors he was troubled by how easily he had got used to them. He never wanted to become like other high churchmen, with bloated households thousands strong, and feared this was but the first step on that road.
When he found himself taking the servants for granted, he had taken penance, straining the capacity of his auto-flagellator to punish himself. After his scourging he had prepared this hermitage for himself, digging it out with his bare hands, washing the floors, crafting the objects of worship, cleaning the bones of the honoured dead. When he was done, he had reverently set up an identical rack of candles to show his sincerity, so now every lost soul had two candles to burn for them: one above lit by his servants, and one below lit by himself.
His hermitage was dark when he arrived. He doused the candles when he left and he relit them every time he went within, until they burned down to stumps. There were always more to replace them.
‘The Lord Guilliman chose me for my humility,’ he said to himself. With an unwavering hand he touched the promethium torch to every stick of wax. His other hand was clenched so tightly in his robes his knuckles glowed white in the candlelight. His auto-flagellator ran at a setting of mild agony. He let the pain thrill his body, purifying him of his selfish thoughts. ‘O Emperor, do not let me lose myself in this office. Do not let me damn myself by forgetting your grace and your purpose for me. Let me be free of pride. Let me be pure of purpose. Let me help Lord Guilliman to see the truth of your light. Help me, O Master of Mankind, to fulfil the task you gave to me.’
After an hour, he was finished. He took out a sanctus-astrogator from his robes and let it find the likely position of Terra for him. Whether it truly worked in the warp he did not know, yet he followed its suggestion, and genuflected in the direction of man’s ancestral home, where the Emperor dwelled in majestic pain.
That done, he went to his desk.
He lit six large candles lodged into the open tops of a pair of skulls. They had belonged to simple people, martyred in anonymity by the marauders of Chaos. He thanked each of them for providing him light in the dark. Then he sat down and opened the leather tome he had upon the desk. The vellum was smooth and creamy, far better than any he had used before. There were some benefits to being the primarch’s tool. The book fell open at the title page, displaying the legend The Great Plague War. Mathieu turned the page, looking upon those chapters he had already finished but whose illuminations remained rough sketches. Before committing his thoughts to this history, he worked and reworked them in chapbooks, until he deemed them ready for this final drafting. Today was a momentous day. The next part of his testament was finished and could be laid down for posterity.
