Saints and Martyrs

Book : Warhammer 40,000

by Danie Ware

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Exploration; Space Marines

Synopsis

Omnibus collection of a host of great novels focussing on the Adepta Sororitas faction in Warhammer 40,000.

Among the blessed ranks of the Adepta Sororitas there are those whose legends and deeds endure for millennia. Saints, both living and dead, whose radiance instils hope and courage in the ranks of the God-Emperor’s armies. Here, the glorious conquests and agonising losses that earned these holy warriors their sainthoods are retold. 
 

The Triumph of Saint Katherine tells the tale of this most holy procession, and how it inspires those on the battlefields of the Imperium to victory against all odds. In Celestine: The Living Saint, we follow Celestine beyond the veil of death and back again to answer the God-Emperor’s call. And in Ephrael Stern: The Heretic Saint, a maligned Sister of Battle is faced with the possibility of the ultimate darkness – the loss of the Imperium itself.

Release date: August 24, 2024

Publisher: Games Workshop

Print pages: 592

Sample

BEYOND, PART 1

Consciousness, sudden and violent.

Her eyes snapped open and hellish light poured in. She sucked a breath down her red-raw throat, then coughed hard, doubled up, curling foetal on her side. Her eyelids flickered, and darkness threatened to swallow her again. Her mind kicked against it, fought back, surfaced. Another painful series of coughs wracked her, then subsided. She took a slow, shuddering breath, blinking quickly as her eyes adjusted to the glare.

Her surroundings resolved; her senses cleared, sight, sound, smell and touch coming slowly. She registered that she was lying on something hard and lumpy, an irregular surface that shifted beneath her as she moved. To her bleary gaze, it looked like a mound of pale stones and jagged debris, but no matter how much she blinked and frowned, she couldn’t quite focus.

She could hear a low moan. The wind, she realised. It was warm, but not pleasantly so. Its touch was like the first bloom of fever-sweats that warned of illness to come. It bore a sharp tang. It took her long moments to place the stench. Sulphur, and something worse, some underlying stink of corruption that triggered primal revulsion within her. She pushed herself into a sitting position and redoubled her efforts to see straight.

What began as a fiery haze became a sky, though a more forbidding and ominous sight she could not have imagined. Blood-hued clouds roiled through a bruised void of purples and rotted greys. Vortices of black fumes whirled across the vista, ripping the bloody clouds to tatters and trailing crackling storms of lurid green lightning in their wake. Her gaze lowered, taking in the distant horizon with its jagged line of half-seen mountains. Fume-wreathed plains marched away from their feet.

She shifted again, fighting down feelings of dislocation. Her heart thumped as she realised that she had no idea where she was, or worse, even who she was. The questions almost escaped her lips aloud, before she realised there was no one there to answer. Something crunched beneath her palm, hard and splintering. She looked down with dawning horror.

Not stones.

Bone.

She snatched her hand back through the broken, brittle brow of an ancient skull. Bones ground beneath her as she moved, and this time she did let out an involuntary moan. She scrabbled backwards on hands and heels, as though to escape the carrion mound. Osseous matter cracked beneath her weight. Shards jabbed through the grey shift she wore, scraping her bare legs and arms. The macabre clatter of bone on bone grew, skulls and femurs and finger-bones grinding with her every movement.

She felt something cold and hard beneath her palms. She dragged herself backwards with a gasp of gratitude, until she sat on a slab of black-painted metal several feet across. It was part of something larger, she realised, ­buried in layers of bone, rusting and studded with rivets and old bullet-holes. Dimly, she perceived the faded remnants of an insignia still clinging to the metal, but she had no more attention to spare. The slopes of bone stretched away on all sides, spilling down and down, broken by jutting metal wreckage, tatters of coloured cloth and other, more organic looking remnants that she didn’t care to identify. She couldn’t tear her eyes away.

‘Not a mound…’ she said, her voice a dry croak. ‘This is a mountain.’

Questions chased one another through her mind. She shut them into cages forged from her iron will, there to languish until she could address them rationally. Panic spread like hoarfrost in her gut, surged up through her chest. It met the fire of her determination and melted back as quickly as it had come. She took a deep, slow breath and closed her eyes, ­centring herself.

‘Emperor, protect me and light my way,’ she said, the words coming unbidden to her lips. They felt right there, natural, reassuring. She could not say for sure who the Emperor was, but she drew strength from His name. Feeling calmer, she opened her eyes and took mental inventory.

She could see no signs of movement beyond the occasional stirring of wind-tugged cloth. Whatever macabre carrion peak she found herself atop, wherever this wasteland was, she was alone here. She realised she had clenched her fists in readiness to defend herself.

‘A fighter, then, perhaps,’ she murmured, finding comfort in the sound of her own voice. It was deep and strong, a voice made for firm statements, stern prayers and binding oaths. But prayers to whom? Oaths of what? Seeing no immediate danger, she resolved to begin by answering as many questions as she could about herself.

She would open her mental cages one at a time and interrogate the thoughts within.

She took personal inventory. Her grey shift was unadorned, its material coarse against her skin. The body it clad was a powerful one; she could feel graceful strength in her every movement, and see wiry, chorded muscle shift beneath the skin of her arms and legs.

Her hair was shoulder length, and

she could see from holding it out before her eyes that it was raven-dark. Beyond that, without a reflective surface she could tell little more about her age or appearance. What she had gathered for now would have to be enough.

She let her fingertips explore her facial features, moving down over her chin to her throat. She gasped and pulled her hands away as she felt a ragged ring of scar tissue there, bespeaking a catastrophic wound. Feeling nauseated, but needing to know, she gingerly felt around the circumference of her neck. Sure enough, the scar ran all the way around, and for a moment she felt an echo of something within her mind.

Screaming.

Flames reflected in churning waters.

Something towering and monstrous.

A light.

The strange sense was gone as suddenly as it appeared, moonlight glimpsed through tattered cloud. She frowned in puzzlement as she realised that the scar was gone too. She felt at the flesh of her neck with increasing agitation as she tried to find the horrible mark.

‘How is that possible?’ she asked the empty mountaintop. ‘How is any of this possible?’

She had no possessions, that much was clear. No weapons or armour with which to protect herself, no food, drink, any other items of clothing or gear. Nothing to suggest who she was, or to help her survive.

‘And no idea how I came here,’ she said. ‘But I have myself. That is enough.’

She knew she could not simply sit atop a mountain of bones forever. There was no telling what kinds of ferocious storms the brooding sky might disgorge, and she felt no desire to be plucked from this peak by a screaming gale or caught amidst ferocious lightning blasts. Though she felt neither hunger nor thirst, she doubted that would remain the case forever. Starving to death and adding her bones to the mountain held even less appeal.

Yet the thing that drove her to her feet was the desire for answers. Who was she? What was she doing in such a ghastly place? How had she come to be here? Who was the Emperor? She needed to know, and she would find no insights here.

She stood atop the mountain, shift and hair blowing in the hot winds. She stared down the steep slopes. They vanished ever downward on all sides into a thick crimson mist.

‘Nothing to suggest a route,’ she said. ‘No hint as to where I must go.’ Strangely, the notion held no terror for her. Instinctive as breathing, she closed her eyes and offered up a wordless prayer to the Emperor for guidance. To her surprise, she felt a faint warmth upon her cheek, as though a candle flame had been brought close to it for the briefest of moments. The sensation was there and gone, yet it was enough, its touch somehow pure, distinct from the clammy caress of the winds.

‘Are you a god, then? My protector, perhaps?’ Her questions fell dead and unanswered. Whatever the truth, she knew it would not be as easy as simply demanding answers.

She opened her eyes and turned in the direction from which she had felt the warmth. Steeling herself, she stepped carefully out, barefoot, onto the jagged carpet of bones. She began to make her slow and slithering way down the mountainside.

The going was treacherous. An ache built in her muscles until it became dull fire, and her chest tightened reflexively whenever she took in the nightmarish steepness of the slope. In places there was little more than a compacted cliff, and she was forced to spend long minutes scrambling crabwise across the slopes in search of a more forgiving descent. Splinters tore at her. Rusted jags of metal scraped her shins. When she was forced to put her hands down in a hurry, her forearms and palms were scratched and pierced until she left a trail of bright red blood drops behind her to mark her path.

Bone shifted underfoot with every movement, small avalanches of ghoulish matter clattering away down the steep incline to vanish into the mists below. She had to be constantly careful lest she twist an ankle or slip and fall; if she lost her footing, she might fall to an agonising death upon the jutting bone shards below.

Within minutes of beginning her descent, she found her heart thumping and her nerves singing from the constant

 exertion and peril. Briefly, as she clung by tenuous handholds to a protruding ribcage and felt for a foothold in the shattered arch of some ancient shrine, she contemplated turning back. Perhaps she could try another angle of descent? A glance upwards showed no obvious route of return, and she realised that – now that she had begun this perilous climb – her only option was to press on.

She gathered quickly that the mountain was not just made from the bones of the dead, but more specifically from those that had fallen in battle. It was apparent not only from the ways their limbs and skulls had been smashed, hewn and blasted, but also in the increasing quantities of rusted weaponry, armour and even vehicle hulls that peppered the mountainside.

Here, she picked her way carefully through a thicket of swords whose blades had been shattered and turned to rust. When there, she was forced to traverse the jutting prow of some manner of combat aircraft, its nose cone hanging downwards, its cockpit glass crazed with bullet-holes. Banners and pennants flapped in the wind, bearing myriad insignia that stirred feelings within her she could not identify. A portcullis gate flanked by eagles and lightning bolts here, a dark blood drop fringed by spreading wings there. Some seemed so familiar that she could almost taste their names on the tip of her tongue, yet she was left frustrated by each attempt to place them.

She had been scrambling downwards for perhaps an hour when a tangle of bones she was gripping cracked and gave way. She fell, her stomach lurching at the momentary weightlessness before she hit the slope feet first and spilled awkwardly sideways. Bones cascaded around her, clattering in a hollow storm of remains. She fell with them. She rolled and skidded.

Chest tight, she grunted with effort as she tried and failed to arrest her fall. Something gouged her arm. Something else crunched under her hip. A flare of pain shot up her leg and she cried out. She scrabbled for purchase as her speed increased, knowing with sick certainty that at any moment she would feel the slope vanish from beneath her as she sailed out into the void.

Her fingers found purchase at last, a solid chunk of metal that took her weight and arrested her plunge with a jolt. Her shoulder screamed in protest, but she hung on, heart thumping fast in her chest. She managed to get a grip on a femur with her other hand. She braced her feet against a jutting slab of stone and breathed out slowly. Fragments of bone continued to slither and roll past her, but the avalanche became a trickle, then stopped altogether. She realised that she had stopped just yards above a sheer drop.

‘Thank you, Emperor,’ she breathed.

As her pulse slowed, she looked to see what miraculous object had saved her life. Her eyes widened as she realised that it was a breastplate, moulded, lacquered black and edged with fine gilt filigree. Compelled by a feeling she could not name, she dug the fingers of one hand in around the segment of armour to work it loose, while clinging tightly to a rusty spar with the other. More bones scattered. For a moment she was gripped by vertigo as she wobbled on her perch, but at last she tugged the breastplate free and held it out before herself.

‘It is not just the breastplate…’ It was, in fact, torso armour both front and back, its clasps half-fastened, its plates dented and edged with verdigris. It was clearly meant to be powered in some fashion, for its interior boasted a webwork of fine circuitry, and she saw servo-actuator sockets ready to accept connecting components. A rent had been torn clean through both front and back. She let out a gasp as another sensory echo struck her. It was stronger this time, the sound of a blade rasping through metal, flesh and bone, accompanied by the acrid stink of smoke and burning flesh. She gritted her teeth as a tearing pain flared in her chest, there and gone in an instant.

She knew, then. This breastplate had been hers. It was hers. How that could be, she had not the faintest idea, but

she knew it as surely as she still drew breath. As she turned the armour over in her hands, she saw a scrollwork plate set along its gorget. She ran her fingers over it, dusting away a patina of ancient grime.

‘Celestine,’ she read. The name was powerfully familiar. ‘Is that… me? Am I Celestine?’ The notion felt right, and she resolved that, until it was proved otherwise, she would claim this name for herself. It centred her somehow, made her feel less a wraith of this wasteland and more a being that ventured through it.

She considered throwing the armour aside, for it was battered and worn to the point of uselessness. Yet it was the first familiar thing she had seen in all this forsaken realm. She could not bear to part with it. She glanced down at her shift, ragged and torn where it had snagged bone and metal during her fall. She had been lucky not to suffer worse.

The armour would at least provide her some protection against another fall, and although she had no power pack for its systems, it didn’t seem so heavy that it would encumber her overly. Awkwardly, mindful of the drop beneath her, Celestine manoeuvred the armour into place. She slid her arms through the holes, then sealed its clasps with an instinctive, practised ease.

‘O divine machine-spirits, demideus Omnissiah espiritum, I beseech thee to shield my fragile flesh from harm.’

As the last clasp clicked into place, she blinked in bewilderment. Not only had the prayer of benediction sprung from her lips by some instinct, but the rent in her breastplate had vanished. The dents and grime faded as though they had never been. The armour she had donned had been a ­battered relic, but this was brand new, its lacquer shining in the bloody light, its scrollwork glinting. It took Celestine a moment to place the sudden hum that invaded her thoughts. She realised that an internal power source had activated within her backplate.

‘Emperor, whatever miracle this is, I thank you for it,’ said Celestine. The armour’s restoration was inexplicable, but then, so was everything else about her situation. She chose to take it on faith that this development, at least, was in her favour.

Her spirits buoyed, she forged onwards. The descent was still challenging, but with her torso and back protected from harm it was at least somewhat less painful.

Sometime later, a glint of light on metal caught her eye. Sprawled in the tumbled wreck of a blackened landing craft were a great heap of skeletons, many crushed and mangled, some warped into unnatural shapes that she took care not to touch. There, amidst the mounds of remains, lay the armoured lower body of a warrior. Boots, greaves, leg and abdominal armour – it was all there, rusted into a single mass. Celestine felt intense discomfort at seeing that the body stopped at the waist, the ragged stub of a spine jutting out to vanish under a heavy slab of metal. Again, she somehow knew it to be hers.

Tentative, she reached out and touched one leg of the armour. She was rocked by the intensity of the echo that washed over her.

Screaming voices, frantic prayers, the sounds of engines labouring and terrible voices cackling and gibbering. The crackle of fire. The crash of guns in a confined space. Bullets and bolts flying in all directions. The howl of escaping air, and a moment of steely determination as she felt herself lunge for the rune that would drop the blast shutter and seal this entire section of the dropship off from the rest of the craft. The warp breach could not be allowed to infect the rest of the ship, not so close to their destination. She struck the rune, and the seventeen-ton blast door fell upon her like an executioner’s blade.

Celestine came back to herself with a jolt. Had she died, she wondered? And if so, how was she alive now? How was such a thing possible? Was she remembering the lives of others, perhaps? Or was this all just some strange trick, part of a greater and ­crueller ruse that had brought her to this place and consigned her to a living purgatory?

Setting questions aside, Celestine braced herself upon a tilted drop-cradle and painstakingly dragged the armour into position, emptying it of its macabre contents before sliding and wriggling into it. She hissed with pain as rusted interior edges cut her flesh. She was forced to contort herself painfully to force her legs the last of the way down into the armour. Yet the moment she did, the same strange restoration occurred. System runes lit green upon locking clasps, rust flaked away and allowed joints to move whisper-smooth. Black armour plates gleamed. Celestine stood, armoured now from her feet up to her neck, and felt the strength humming through the suit she wore. The Emperor’s warmth had set her on this path, she thought. That she had found these artefacts of her own, personal battle armour amongst the remains of the countless dead… it was no accident.

The notion gave her hope.

Her pauldrons she found upon a skeletal figure knelt as though in supplication amidst a forest of skulls impaled upon jutting bayonets. Somehow, again, she knew this body was also hers. The kneeling cadaver was watched over by the shattered statue of some ancient saint. Her arm segments and gauntlets she located a piece at a time, strewn down a long slope of bone scree below the teetering wreckage of a super-heavy tank, each with their own twisted skeletal arms and hands encased within them. How could her armour segments be strewn so far, she wondered, and seemingly belong to so many different corpses?

‘Have I died more than once?’ she whispered, shying away from the question when she heard how haunted her voice sounded.

By the time she found the last of her armour and slotted its components into place, she was well down amidst the drifting crimson mists, tasting their coppery tang in her mouth. She had hoped for a helm, to insulate her from the foulness on the air, but she had no recollection of ever wearing such a thing and none was forthcoming from the mountainside.

With each armour component Celestine located, there came another flash of sense-memory, each stronger than the last. She was immolated in a searing ball of plasma. She was struck down by an axe as large as a battle tank. She was riddled with explosive bolts until her body was sundered and her blood misted the air.

Each death-echo was horrifying and painful, yet each brought with it an increased sense of duty and determination, and the inexplicable knowledge that every life she had given, she had given for a righteous cause. Along with the horror and pain of each demise, Celestine saw also the hopeful faces that surrounded her, heard the prayers to the Emperor, and knew that by her own martyrdom she had secured victory or salvation for countless others. It was emotionally exhausting. With each fresh segment that she found, the temptation grew simply to cast it aside rather than shoulder the burden of the bloody memories that came with it. She rejected that notion each time. She was sure in the knowledge that each echo would pass, and leave her fortified and better equipped to find the answers she sought.

At last, fully armoured, Celestine strode down the shallower slopes of the mountain’s foothills. Still she crunched over fields of skulls and ribs, femurs and spines, rusted blades and sundered guns and tattered flags. Yet her armour now shielded her from jabbing shards. With its servo-actuators aiding her balance and lending strength to her stride, Celestine made good time. She found herself picking her way between teetering heaps of remains that rose like cairns and carrion-piles. Many supported brass poles atop which she saw foul icons that caused her intense feelings of anger and revulsion. She saw an eight-pointed star and, as she wondered at the hatred that the crude shape awoke in her, a word rose unbidden to her lips. She spat it out like poison.

‘Chaos.’

The memories were fleeting, her mind wanting to skate away from them. Instead she climbed a jagged mound and grasped the foul icon atop it with both hands. She wrenched the iron pole free with a snarl and cast it down. Then the monstrous images came in a blizzard that set her reeling, slithering down the slope of the cairn to fall to her knees at its base.

Yawning maws stuffed with fangs; armoured heretics with burning red eyes; mobs of screaming fools, deluded and enslaved by malevolent entities they could not comprehend. Looming terrors made of smoke and flame, sorcery and evil. These were the arch-enemies of her Emperor, and thus they were her foes also.

Celestine knew it to be true.

As the barrage of images passed, and she returned to herself, something shifted amidst the mists. A shadow crawled along the flank of a nearby ridge, a vague suggestion of long limbs and grasping talons. Red eyes flashed in the gloom, and a wave of hatred beat against Celestine like furnace heat.

‘Warp spawn,’ she snarled, meeting its fury with her own.

Celestine clenched her armoured gauntlets into fists, ­servos whining and powercells thrumming as they added their strength to hers. She snapped her head round as she heard bonemeal spill,

knocked loose from another ossuary-heap by a second shadowy figure. There were more, she realised, slinking between the mounds and scrabbling closer like scavenging beasts around a carcass. Their eyes glowed like coals in the gloom, the only clearly visible part of them. Their voices came to her, low moans of hunger and hate with nothing human in them at all.

Celestine could fight, she was sure of that, but she could not defeat so many of these unknown fiends at once. Sensing that the boldest of them was about to pounce, she did the only other thing that she could.

She ran.

Aided by the servo-strength of her armour, Celestine broke into a sudden sprint and pounded away downhill. She felt the rush of hot air as several creatures leapt, their shadowy talons missing her by a hair’s breadth. Howls of frustration chased her as she ran on, pulverised bone spraying up behind her heels.

Celestine careened downhill through thick red mists that reduced her visibility to a matter of yards. Bones and wreckage squirmed treacherously underfoot. Jagged mounds of detritus loomed suddenly from the fog, forcing her to dodge frantically around them at the last moment. Behind her, Celestine heard baying howls and the clamour of talons on bone as her pursuers gained on her.

‘Emperor guide my footfalls,’ she prayed as she ran. ‘Lead me not unto disaster or mischance. Ward away the terrors that hunt me.’

Daemons.

The word came unbidden to her mind, along with the knowledge that if the abominations that snapped at her heels caught her then she would not just lose her life, but her eternal soul also. 
Celestine snapped a look back over her shoulder and saw dozens of glowing coals burning in the murk, drawing closer with every heartbeat. She ran faster.

The ground sloped steeply, and she almost fell, careening downhill amidst a shower of bones. Something dark shot overhead, and she had a split second to register that one of the daemons had leapt from the top of the rise to land in front of her. The monster spun towards her with a venomous hiss, lashing out with its claws. Rather than try to avoid it, Celestine clenched a fist and used her momentum to drive a thunderous blow into the creature’s face.

She felt a raking pain in her side, followed by a vertiginous lurch as her fist passed straight through the daemon as though it were mist. Celestine cannoned forward and lost her balance, crashing down on the bone slope and rolling downhill. She skidded to a halt amidst a heap of skeletons still partially clad in armour not dissimilar to her own.

Celestine’s head spun, and her chest heaved with the competing urges to suck in lungfuls of air or else vomit. There was no time to gather her wits. She could hear her attacker skidding down the slope above her, an alpha predator coming to claim its fallen prey. She glanced at her side and was surprised to see that her armour was wholly undamaged, though she could feel the hot pain across her ribs where the daemon had raked her.

‘Incorporeal enough that I can’t harm them, yet solid enough that they can butcher me,’ she gasped, struggling to her feet and preparing to run again. She felt neither panic nor fear, for her iron will kept such sensations at bay, but Celestine knew that her situation was dire. Outrunning her pursuers seemed unlikely, yet to her immense frustration it seemed that she could not stand and fight. Celestine hated that notion of powerlessness more than anything, and resolved that, should the daemons catch her, she would contrive to end her own life rather than submit to their theft of it.

That was when the mist thinned for a moment and, in the hazy crimson light, she saw the blade. It jutted up from a bone cairn, just upslope from where she stood. It was long and straight, a bastard sword meant for ­single- or double-handed wielding. Its crossguard was fashioned into a winged skull of burnished gold. A garland of dead black roses hung from its hilt, which was gripped in a skeletal fist that thrust up from the heart of the cairn. Though the blade was tarnished and notched, bloody light still glinted on it in a way that nearly hypnotised Celestine. 

This was her sword. She knew it as surely as she had known that each segment of armour she came across during the descent was hers. Perhaps, with this weapon in her hands, she could fight?

Her pursuers were almost on top of her; she could see the lead daemon slithering down the slope, more of its brood close behind. Celestine gauged the distance and made a snap decision. She could make it.

She lunged uphill, digging her toes into the uneven surface and pushing hard. She clawed at skeletal remains to propel herself upwards, giving a roar of pure effort as she raced the daemon to the mound. The beast was almost on top of her as she reached the blade, wrapping her hands around its hilt and giving a hard wrench. For a moment, the skeletal hand seemed reluctant to relinquish its grip, and she was forced to yank it a second time, even harder.

Bone disintegrated. The blade was made anew, gleaming in the bloodlight. Celestine drew it back as the daemon lunged. She swung, struck, and her attacker’s head spun away into the murk trailing sprays of ichor. Celestine braced instinctively for the impact of its corpse, but the daemon’s body passed through her like a cold wind and she turned, watching it discorporate into smoke as it tumbled to a stop.

Celestine flicked black ichor from her blade and stared at it for a moment, feeling the sense of utmost holiness that radiated from the weapon. She suffered no sense echoes this time, though she had braced herself for them. Instead there was simply an abiding sense of rightness, and of completion.

Now she had the weapon that the Emperor had bequeathed her.

Now she was a warrior again.

Now, she was Celestine.

Spills of bone and rusting metal skittered around her as the daemons surged down the slope. Raising her blade beside her head, Celestine braced her feet and made ready.

‘Come, foul blasphemies, let me purge you in the ­Emperor’s name,’ she said with a tight smile.

The first creature flung itself at her, claws lashing wildly. She lopped off one arm and spun aside, allowing the pouncing daemon to tumble past her as the first one had. The next attacker came on more cautiously, feinting low then trying to rake its talons across her eyes. Celestine read its intentions easily and swayed back from the daemon’s attack, before ramming her blade up through its jaw and out of the top of its head.

She ripped the weapon free as the daemon dissipated into smoke, in time to aim a disembowelling swing at the next fiend to attack. Another came at her out of the mist, and another. Then three attacked at once, one of the beasts managing to rip its claws through the meat of her thigh as she held off the other two. Celestine snarled with anger and despatched each assailant in turn, but she could hear a clattering commotion that suggested dozens more daemons were surging closer.

The fires of battle burned hot in Celestine’s chest, but she knew that standing and dying upon this bleak hillside would not bring her the answers she sought.

‘Golden Throne,’ she spat, turning to run again, pouring all her strength and willpower into outdistancing the daemons.

Still they gained on her, and she cursed the futility of her plight as bone cairns and rusting wrecks flashed past.

‘Does this damned mountain never end?’ she gasped, legs and arms pumping as she ran.

As though she had summoned it, the ground levelled out with abrupt suddenness and then, to her surprise, began to slope upwards. Her pounding footfalls pulverised a last layer of bone, then fell upon hard black rock instead.

Celestine charged up the slope, through crimson mist so thick she could barely see a sword’s length in front of her face. Howls and screams billowed around her, the pursuing daemons just yards behind. Surely the sudden change in landscape must indicate a chance of refuge? Surely she could not simply have passed from one interminable hell into another, there to be swiftly run to ground and torn apart by overwhelming enemy numbers.

Surely the Emperor meant

more for her than this.

That was when the ground vanished, so abruptly that Celestine had no chance to react. One moment she was running full pelt up a rocky slope. The next she was sailing through thin air as the stone promontory ended in an abrupt ledge and hurled her out into the void.

Celestine fell, her hair whipping around her face, crimson mist billowing past on all sides. Behind her she heard the daemons’ frustrated howls, receding swiftly as she plunged away from them into the endless red gulf.

The thought came to her that this was the end; not torn apart but condemned to a terrible plunge, perhaps to fall never-ending, perhaps to be dashed to red ruin on rocks far below. Then a strange sense swept through her, a miraculous unfurling of power that made her nerves sing and her soul tingle. Power surged through her body, and in a glorious moment of revelation a mighty pair of glowing gold and silver wings spread from between her shoulder blades. They snapped outwards, obeying her unconscious thought like muscle memory. They arrested her fall, caught the hot winds, transformed her plunge into a swooping glide. The mists swirled and parted before her and with a joyous shout she beat her mighty pinions and began to rise.

Celestine laughed as she soared upwards through the mists, beating her powerful wings as easily as she might command her legs to walk or her arms to swing a sword. Her hair billowed in the winds as she swept up and away from the bone mountain, bursting from amidst the crimson fog and into the desolate air above.

As the jagged horizon came into view, Celestine felt the candle-warmth of the Emperor’s light upon her face. She felt, more than saw, the distant glow of its illumination, far, far away across the plains, among the fanged mountains.

There lay her destination. She knew it. She had faith in the Emperor’s guidance. She had faith in her own strength.

Soaring on glowing wings of light, her silvered blade held firm against her chest, Celestine flew on over the blasted plains.

Towards the unseen light of the Emperor.

Towards answers.

***

404TH DAY OF THE WAR 0600 HOURS

IMPERIUM NIHILUS PLANET KOPHYN

CANYON-CITY TANYKHA ADUL LO:564-3/LA:675-9

Bells tolled over the Adul, calling the faithful to war. Their chimes echoed along the las-sculpted chasms and ravines into which the city was built. They rolled reverberant through shadowy cavern-habs and dusty subterranean manufactoria, candle-lit shrines and fortified cliff-side bunkers. They rang amid spills of rosy dawn light and the crash of booted, running feet. They mingled with the first volleys of gunfire.

Major Blaskaine was out of his bunk at the first sound of trouble. Nineteen years in the Emperor’s service had honed his instincts to the point where Blaskaine’s men joked – when they believed themselves safely out of earshot – that he had a touch of psyker prescience about him.

He allowed the men their grim jests.

Since Cadia’s fall, any mirth was welcome, even at his expense.

This was not a day for jokes, however. As he marched down the shady corridor that linked his chambers to the Fourth Sector command bunker, Blaskaine reflected that precious few days on Kophyn had been.

‘A pox on this worthless ball of rocks,’ he muttered as he adjusted the collar of his uniform, double-checked the magazine in his laspistol and straightened out the medals pinned to his chest. Still, it didn’t do to look less than his best, even if there were no higher-ranking officers left to impress.

Blaskaine emerged into the command bunker to find it swirling with controlled pandemonium. The bunker was wide but low-ceilinged, its smooth stone walls typical of the las-carved chambers and corridors of the Adul. In places they were decorated by bas-relief Imperial angels and soldiery doing battle with mutants and traitors. In every carving, the forces of the Imperium reigned triumphant. If only that were true, thought Blaskaine.

Electro-lumen globes hung from the bunker’s ceiling, casting cold light over the large strategium-table that dominated the centre of the room. Maps, charts, rolls of parchment and scattered data-slates covered the table from end to end.

One wall of the bunker was dominated by a huge bank of runic consoles, vox-units, long-range auspex receivers and other machin­eries of various opaque purpose. Cadian operators jostled elbows as they leant over them, working their controls and speaking in clipped tones into bulky headsets.

Those men and women looked tired but determined. It was an expression Blaskaine had become all too familiar with over the course of this campaign.

Junior officers, priests, servitors, signalmen, tech-magi, regi­mental life-guards, commissars and dozens of other assorted hangers-on bustled around the bunker. Conversations in High Gothic and Low Gothic mingled with binharic cant and plainsong to create a substantial din. Yet all fell silent as Blaskaine strode up to the strat-table. Salutes and genuflections were directed his way. As the last senior ranking officer of the Cadian 144th Heavy Infantry, such was his right.

‘Situation report,’ said Blaskaine, pleased to hear that he sounded calmer than he felt.

‘Massive heretic assault incoming, major,’ reported Lieutenant Kasyrgeldt, Blaskaine’s adjutant. She plucked a data-slate from amidst the morass on the table and passed it to him. ‘Armour and infantry elements moving up the wadi from the south-east and pushing on Hawk Gate. Scouts have detected a second force circling the mesa to assault Jackyl Gate from the west, and long-range auspex suggests aerial elements inbound on our position.’

‘Clearly we merit substantial effort on the enemy’s part, ladies and gentlemen,’ barked Blaskaine. ‘I believe we should be flattered.’

His words elicited a handful of mirthless smiles, here and there a couple of wry chuckles. These soldiers were under no illusions as to the dire situation, but they were Cadians. With their homes, their families and all they had known torn away from them, what cause had they to fear death?

‘Enemy numbers?’ asked Blaskaine as the hubbub of the bunker resumed.

‘Substantial would be putting it mildly, sir,’ said Kasyrgeldt. She showed him a parchment print-out, and Blaskaine quirked an eyebrow.

‘Throne, Astryd… Tanks, artillery, cultists.’ Blaskaine exhaled. ‘Creed’s ghost, where did they scrounge a Stormlord from? The War Engine is throwing everything at us, isn’t he?’

‘It appears so, sir. I think he means to have done with us today no matter what it costs him.’

‘What’s our state of play?’ asked Blaskaine, plucking up a mug of recaff and pulling a face as he found it to be cold. Kasyrgeldt passed him a hot one.

‘Generatorums two, three and four are still running,’ she said. ‘Sectors two and four still have void shield coverage. Both gates are fully garrisoned by soldiers of the Hundred and Forty-Fourth.. We have sixteen platoons still at fighting strength, if you include the Whiteshields.’

‘No one is a Whiteshield anymore, Astryd,’ said Blaskaine quietly, but she pressed on as though he hadn’t spoken.

‘Forty-two armoured personnel carriers, twenty-eight main line battle tanks, nineteen pieces of self-propelled field artillery including Manticores and Basilisks, and three scout tanks remain. Captain Maklen has, at last count, thirty-four per cent strength of the Cadian Two Hundred and Thirtieth mech-infantry remaining. They’re ready to provide rapid response should a breakthrough occur. The Astorosian Ninth have mustered their engines in the runoff canyons near Jackyl Gate. We’ve substantial assets, sir.’

‘But…?’ prompted Blaskaine.

‘Candidly, sir, we’ve no strategic options left to us beyond dig in and endure,’ said Kasyrgeldt, keeping her voice low enough that only Blaskaine could hear. ‘The enemy has a planetary population to utilise against us, and all of the materiel they’ve scavenged from a dozen battlefields… Not to mention a formidable manufacturing base to turn out fresh weapons and war machines. The odds are against us surviving the day, sir, but beyond that? They’re even slimmer. And there’s no hope of rescue or escape, not since the darkness fell. We’re cut off, our astropaths are dead or mad, and we’re likely the last Imperial holdout on a world that’s already lost. No matter how determined they might be to die with honour, no matter how angry they might be at finding themselves fighting for another doomed planet, our soldiers know that it is doomed.’

‘The commissars and the preachers are doing their part, yes?’ asked Blaskaine.

‘They are, sir, but they’re fighting a rearguard action against their own sense of despair,’ said Kasyrgeldt. ‘There’s a worrying streak of fanaticism supplanting good Cadian discipline. I think the soldiery are praying for some sort of miracle.’

‘If it keeps our soldiers fighting, we’ll take whatever we can get,’ said Blaskaine, his mind racing. He knew his adjutant’s dire summation was right, and try as he might, the major couldn’t think of a way out of this rat-trap. ‘Honestly, Astryd, it sounds like we could use a miracle right about now. Talking of which, where are the Sisters in all this? I’d expected to at least hear from Meritorius, what with violence in the offing.’

‘The Sister Superior voxed word at first chimes, sir,’ replied Kasyrgeldt, consulting another data-slate. ‘They are already at the gates.’

‘Of course they are,’ said Blaskaine. ‘Good martyrs all, eh?’

‘The Battle Sisters are exceptional warriors, sir,’ said Kasyrgeldt, a note of reproach in her voice. ‘Their example is an inspiration to the soldiery, and frankly, I’ll take the aid of half a hundred warrior women with power armour and bolters any day. Sir.’

Blaskaine raised a placating hand.

‘There is no disagreement here, lieutenant,’ he said. ‘I’ve just never seen soldiers so eager to die in the Emperor’s name. I don’t see the sense in seeking out hopeless fights when one can live to fight another day, and I don’t entirely trust the sanity of those who think differently.’

Blaskaine cursed himself as he saw Kasyrgeldt’s expression set into a carefully neutral mask.

‘Very good, sir,’ she said, and Blaskaine wondered if he would ever entirely escape the ghosts of Cadia’s fall.

Now was not the time to dwell.

‘Carry on, lieutenant,’ said Blaskaine. ‘Have a voxman and a tech-priest attend me at console eleven. I’ve a war zone to coordinate.’

He turned away brusquely and marched across the command bunker, telling himself for the thousandth time that there was nothing he could have done that day, but that he could do something useful now.

Sister Superior Anekwa Meritorius stood atop the ramparts of Hawk Gate. Stocky and powerfully built, Meritorius was lent additional bulk by the ornate black and white power armour she wore. Her dark skin and bleached white hair contrasted sharply and, combined with the steely glint in her eye and the wide-bladed power sword sheathed at her hip, ensured she looked every part the stern Imperial warrior. Still, as she stared down at the horde of heretics sweeping towards the Adul, Meritorius felt little of the strength she displayed outwardly.

Hawk Gate was a towering armoured portal that sealed off one of only two main access points into the canyons of Tanykha Adul. Its hundred-foot-high durasteel gates were housed within an armoured arch, flanked by a pair of macro-bastion gun towers and overlooked by the rampart upon which Meritorius stood, amidst the Battle Sisters of her Celestian entourage.

Sister Maria Penitence shot her a zealous look.

‘These gates would withstand bombardment by Titan-class weaponry,’ said Sister Penitence, as though

 Meritorius had asked. ‘Each gun tower is a fortress. Hundreds of Cadians garrison them, Sister Superior, and with our Sisters and the mission preachers spread through their ranks to bolster their faith, they shall not waver.’

‘Sister Penitence speaks the Emperor’s word,’ said Sister Constance Indomita. ‘The foe shall have little fortune throwing themselves at these gates, and even less should they attempt to scale the cliffs of the mesa. I believe I saw the Cadian engineers laying sufficient mines amongst those crags to blast an entire army of foes to pieces three times over.’

‘Not to mention the automated turret networks that watch over the canyon edges,’ added Sister Elena Absolom. ‘Even with the enemy advancing in such numbers, I believe we shall best them with the Emperor’s blessing.’

Meritorius found herself irritated by her Celestians’ comments. It had been a hard campaign, and she made no secret of the pressure that had fallen upon her after Canoness Rokhsanja’s demise, but she resented the notion that they might think her spirits needed bolstering. The alternative, that they truly believed what they were saying, seemed somehow worse. Thousands upon thousands of heretic warriors and war engines advanced under Kophyn’s hard cobalt skies. Their ragged red banners filled the horizon, and the dust cloud that rose in their wake resembled an onrushing storm.

‘The Emperor has no time for frivolous cheer, Sisters,’ she snapped, fighting off the sense that they were all of a mind and she was excluded from it. ‘Save your hopeful pronouncements for the Cadians.’

The Celestians exchanged glances that Meritorius chose to ignore, but they fell silent. Not so Preacher Unctorian ­Gofrey, a robed figure, dark of hair and steely of eye, who stood at Anekwa’s left shoulder.

‘Have a care, Sister Superior,’ he said, his voice deep and hard as a ferrocrete slab. ‘The Emperor may not put stock in baseless hope, but he frowns still more upon the craftsman that chips away his own foundations. So it is written in the Creed Imperius.’

‘Thank you, Gofrey,’ said Meritorius, voice tight, mouth a thin line. ‘You ensure that we never go wanting for counsel.’

The preacher made the sign of the aquila, offering a hard smile that didn’t reach his eyes. As was his habit, he touched his hand to his breastbone, where a lump indicated something hanging about his neck beneath his robe. Meritorius had never seen the priest’s Imperial aquila, but she wouldn’t have been surprised if it was scrimshawed from the bones of some luckless relative.

‘The enemy will be upon us within the hour,’ said Meritorius, turning away from Gofrey and addressing her Celestians. ...