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A Rose Watered With Blood – Aaron Dembski-Bowden

About the Author

A Black Library Publication

A Rose Watered With Blood

By Aaron Dembski-Bowden

I

‘…cast a queenly shadow,

Against the dappled theatre of eternal fusion,

Across the tide of our voiceless ocean,

And here,

Enshrined in this royal iron,

We carve her invocation.’

After the weeks of choking heat, and the deaths that had come with it, there’d been the lice. Several Apothecary reports stated the infestation of vermin had sprung forth from the corpses left strewn across every deck and chamber of the Conqueror. A legion of the desiccated dead, those dry and bloodless revenants somehow acting as incubator hives for colonies of red insects growing in their parched guts. In that respect – and not without a certain bleak poetry – one plague had sprung directly from the other.

The infernal heat abated over time, but only in the sense it diminished to tolerable levels. The inside of the Conqueror still seethed with a sickly, living warmth that radiated from its plasma generators – those ancient machines throbbed on several decks, uncomfortably organic in their twitching – but the ship’s innards no longer threatened to bake the crew in their own sweat-reeking air supply.

That was when the lice showed up. The vermin nestled in body hair and feasted on blood. They grew fat enough from their feeding that they could be picked from scalps or armpits with bare fingertips. Every crew member’s ear canals had to be rinsed with saline solution daily to flush out clutches of lice eggs. At first, that was impossible. The Conqueror was trying to kill her crew, and every drop of potable water on board the flagship had turned to blood.

Only when the ship managed to fall from the warp and anchor in low orbit above the planet Heshimar was the crew able to begin the slow process of rehabilitation.

Heshimar had declared for Horus. Joyously so. Its people chanted the Warmaster’s name in the streets. The mauled Conqueror and its miserable, haunted crew had looked down at a world where the populace cheered their arrival. Anything the Conqueror needed, said the ministers of Heshimar, it would be provided with willing hearts.

The warship’s captain, thick-tongued from deprivation, had blinked gummy eyes at the scanning displays.

‘Can they actually give us everything we need?’ she asked. The list of their deficiencies was long: the Conqueror was nowhere close to self-sufficiency, and required a continent’s worth of food and water, a city’s worth of iron for repairs, enough fuel to get across a quarter of the galaxy… The charter of needs went on and on and on.

An officer by the name of Guhuj was the one to reply. The bridge crew had once numbered over five hundred souls. It was lucky to reach two-thirds of that now, and many of those were servitors and thralls-in-training.

‘No,’ Guhuj said flatly.

‘No?’

‘Heshimar is resource-poor,’ Guhuj clarified. Three years before, Ansin Guhuj had been a handsome, broad-shouldered deck officer aged forty-four standard years. Now he was practically emaciated. He looked closer to sixty than fifty. At some point, one of the Legion had carved his arm off at the elbow. The captain was too weary to ask why. Sometimes the legionaries did things like that because they were hungry. More often they didn’t seem to have any reason at all.

The captain spent almost half an hour reviewing the data herself, data that she once would have grasped intuitively and decided upon at once. In her privation, it took time to weigh calculations of rearmament, resupply and recovery for her vessel, which was really nothing less than a city in the sky. A dying city.

‘There’s enough,’ she concluded.

‘Only if we leave the planet dead in our wake,’ Guhuj pointed out.

‘There’s enough,’ the captain repeated in the exact same tone as before.

A week later, they had food, water, iron, plasma, promethium fuel and tens of thousands of fresh slaves. Heshimar, for all its loyalty to the Warmaster’s cause, was left with a pockmarked face of silent, slagged cities.

And Lotara Sarrin, captain of the warship Conqueror, tasted clean water for the first time in almost eight months. Almost as importantly, she flushed her ear canals clean of lice eggs.

They didn’t remain in orbit for long. The colossal thing chained in the Conqueror’s infected bowels roared its rage throughout the ship. Angron cried out for Terra, Terra, Terra, and the creature that had once been the primarch of the XII Legion would not be denied.

The Conqueror sailed on. At the end of her voyage was mankind’s cradle, and in the skies above distant Terra, destiny lay in wait.

The weeks became months. With astronavigation fouled by endless interference and mechanical breakdown, and the warp’s tides offering no hint of their true location, she half-heartedly began marking the passage of time by the length of her hair. Once the furnace heat faded and the lice plague abated, she’d stopped shaving her head. Grey now showed at her temples, but she was far beyond caring about the mundanities of her appearance. She saw privation reflected back at her in every crew member she encountered. As far as she was concerned, that was enough information to go by. A mirror wouldn’t add any insight.

Ivar Tobin would have teased her about showing her age, but Ivar Tobin was also beyond offering up that kind of commentary – or, indeed, any commentary at all; he was just another casualty in this impossible war, and the equally impossible curse that gripped the World Eaters flagship.

Lotara wasn’t sure if she missed him. To invest that level of emotion into something, or someone, you needed the energy to care.

No. No, that wasn’t fair. She did miss him. His efficiency, his exacting nature. He was a blade, a cutter, a killer. She needed officers like that, and Tobin had been one of the best.

Still, emotion had become a luxury. She was on her feet each day only by an unhealthy melange of paranoia, duty and adrenal amplifier serums synthesised from Khârn’s blood. Sometimes she’d muse, with a passionless smile, how illegal a stimulant made from Legion blood would be in a functioning and disciplined Imperium. Rules and rationality were things of the ignorant past now. Necessity was all.

Repair crews crawled throughout the warship’s body, doing what they could to restore at least mechanical order. At first they were assigned legionary guardians to fight back against the dreadful things that clawed at them and dragged them away into the darkness, but soon enough, Lotara realised she was losing just as many crew to the World Eaters’ rages. Reports filtered back to her of repair crews butchered by their own guardians, and none of the XII Legion’s commanders she spoke with could do anything to prevent it. The pain engines inside the warriors’ heads would tick, tick, tick with drilling life, and the carnage would begin.

‘If this keeps up,’ Guhuj ventured, ‘we’ll never reach Terra.’

Lotara wasn’t so certain. She was beginning to believe the Conqueror would reach Terra, no matter what happened to her crew. Even if the vessel was nothing but a cold and ruined hulk, torn open to space with its insides coated in void-iced blood, Angron’s malignant cravings would ensure the flagship washed up on the shores of Terra.

Raiding Heshimar for supplies hadn’t ended the Conqueror’s torments. The crew walked its gore-darkened decks, going about their duties to the percussion of chainblades revving in the distance and screams echoing out in answer. The power would gutter and fail without warning, at any time of day. Crew members that had died long ago would speak across the vox, sometimes in snippets of old communication chatter trapped in the audio network, sometimes crying out for help, for mercy, for everything to end.

One night she’d woken up to a touch on her shoulder. Weariness, even down to her bones, hadn’t been enough to override training and instinct then; she rolled from the sleeping pallet, pulling her service pistol from beneath her pillow as she moved. Wide-eyed, teeth clenched, Lotara faced the intruder in her bedchamber. In her bed.

The intruder was already dead. Had, in fact, been dead for some time. There he lay, despite having been torn apart months ago by Khârn in one of the legionary’s rages. After deck crews had gathered the remains, Lotara had ignited the cremation chamber herself. She’d watched Tobin’s remains burn.

Yet she could see him now, unburned, and smell him too – the scent of old, dry death that was less like spoiled meat and more like something spicy, a musk that caught in the back of the throat. As she stood by her bed, pistol aimed, she drew breath to insist the body wasn’t there. The thought never became words because the thought was a lie. He was here. The Conqueror had brought Ivar Tobin back to her. She didn’t know how, but she was sure she knew why.

‘The Conqueror is trying to kill us,’ Guhuj was fond of saying.

But again, Lotara wasn’t so sure. She was more worried that the Conqueror, in its blood-maddened inhuman way, was trying to please her.

‘A security report cites “anomalous agitation” in your quarters last night.’

Lotara had no desire to get into it with Guhuj. She leaned back in her command throne, fingertips to her temples. The command deck rattled and clanked and chattered around her, alive with the industry of the crew attending to their duties. Kaleidoscopic blurs of migraine violet and cancer red played across the iron deck and ragged uniforms worn by the crew. Everyone working – man and woman, servitor and officer alike – had a standing order not to look at the oculus. The warp’s poisoned landscape lashed against the ship’s hull, and the command deck’s viewscreen looked out, nakedly, upon it.

The Conqueror’s beleaguered captain had made the mistake of glancing towards it once. She wasn’t keen on repeating the error. The last of her subordinates to do the same had been Internal-Comms Officer Rabekka Syler, who had – three hours later – put her sidearm under her chin and pulled the trigger.

‘Ma’am,’ Guhuj tried again.

‘What?’ Lotara said. Emperor’s balls, but she sounded exhausted even to herself. That little truth made her sit up straighter.

‘I was asking about the security report.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ It doesn’t matter was fast becoming code for You won’t believe me and You don’t want to know and The ship is cursed and we’re all damned.

Guhuj nodded. ‘Understood, captain.’ He looked back down at his console. Lotara glanced over, seeing a manifest of weaponry scrolling down his screen. He was taking inventory.

‘Is there word from the repair team assigned to the oculus?’

Guhuj didn’t look up. ‘Yes. It will require a complete reinstallation.’

‘Again?’ When she sniffed, she could taste blood in the back of her throat. She resisted the urge to spit. ‘You can’t be serious.’

‘The report came in late last night. The tech-adepts can still find no mechanical fault.’

Lotara bared her teeth in something that was barely a smile. ‘So it’s the ship’s machine-spirit. I told them that before they started.’

‘I believe you did, ma’am.’

‘I want results,’ she said with weary politeness, ‘not excuses. I can’t command a warship that refuses to obey any orders.’

But that wasn’t quite true, was it? The Conqueror obeyed anything and everything that got it closer to Terra. It even cared for its crew, in its own way. Not for their survival, and certainly not for their sanity. But…

Lotara gave another of her non-smiles at the thought.

‘Something amusing, ma’am?’

‘The ship won’t close its eyes. That amuses me. It also amuses me that the ship wants us to see what’s out there.’ She gave a soft, bitter laugh. ‘Does it really require a crew any more? Does it even need us?’

‘You… exaggerate, captain.’

‘Oh?’ Lotara showed more teeth. ‘You don’t sound very certain, lieutenant…’

Skane was the one to approach Lotara.

Skane the Destroyer, Skane the ugly, Sergeant Skane whose blood was so poisoned by his sacred weaponry that he might never know the immortality promised to the Legiones Astartes in their genetic heritage. Skane spoke the words that began everything – a single sentence that was notable less for the treachery it suggested and more for the fact no one believed he could string that many words together any more.

What he said wasn’t unprecedented; they were words everyone had already thought themselves, either in moments of fear when they were bathed in the sweat of survival, or in the increasingly rare moments of peace aboard a warship that seemed to want them dead.

Skane spoke what was on so many minds, perhaps because he was so close to losing his own. He was ragged and twitching and had to speak through scabbed lips that he couldn’t stop biting. He’d lost control of his Betcher’s Gland some weeks before; now his chin was raw with a rash from a constant trickle of acidic drool. One of his eyes was gone, punctured in a duel a month back somewhere in the bowels of the warship, where every chamber was an arena drenched red in emergency lighting. Somehow the wound hadn’t healed. Red tears dripped from it, night and day. The blood just kept flowing.

And so, with the freedom of the almost-mad and the nearly dead, Skane was the one to come to the Conqueror’s captain and speak the words that damned them all.

He cornered her in one of the subsidiary spinal corridors diverging from the main avenue along the Conqueror’s back. She was on the way to her quarters when he caught her, massacred her bodyguards and backed her against the wall. His remaining eye was bright with fever, his movements twitchy and feral. Every few moments his face would contort with muscle tics and he’d jerk his head towards a voice only he could hear.

Lotara looked at the two armsmen that were tasked with escorting her. One of them was still alive, reaching across the gantried floor towards his fallen rifle. Skane ended that with a press of his boot to the back of the man’s head. There was a wet crackle of collapsing bone, then dirty wet redness crept across the deck like a creeping shadow.

She lifted her eyes from the dead soldiers, sighting Skane down the barrel of her sidearm. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d opened fire on a member of her own Legion, but with how close Skane was, she doubted she could cut him down before he beat her to the deck with his bare hands, just as he’d done with her bodyguards. The Space Marine towered above her, yet made no move to finish what he’d started.

‘Lotara,’ he said. His metal teeth clanged together as he twitched again, hard. ‘I need to tuh-tah-talk to yuh-yuh… you.’ It took him three full seconds to get the final word out.

‘That’s Captain Sarrin to you, sergeant.’ She kept her weapon aimed at his mutilated face and fought to keep any fear from her voice. ‘You killed my armsmen. That… seems unnecessary.’

‘Alone.’ Skane struggled to speak, straining as if lifting a weight from his back; Lotara saw the cords stand out in his neck. ‘Talk to you alone.’

‘I’m alone now,’ she said, guarded. Two thoughts clashed behind her eyes, the first uncharitable and irritable, the second eternal and vile. What a stupid, stupid way to die… Killed by Skane, of all people, was the first. The second was, Where’s Khârn? Khârn could kill him… Where’s Khârn…?

Skane was blind and deaf to her thoughts. He could barely form his own.

‘Captain Suh… Suh…’ he said. ‘We n-need to get off this ship.’

Mutiny, then. She should have felt shock, should have pulled the trigger and tried to punish him, yet the grinding weariness of reality bleached all emotion from the revelation. She found herself at once stunned by his betrayal and too numb to feel a thing.

For Skane to come to her, of all the souls aboard the ship, was a risk beyond description. He couldn’t be alone in this. There had to be others, others like him that sought to get off the warship before the Conqueror killed them.

And having told her this… Would he kill her to keep his secret?

She looked at his riven features. Saw how they ticced and tensed. Saw the fever-heat in his halved gaze, and the clacking of his bloodstained durasteel teeth. His face was freckled with the blood of her bodyguards.

Yes. He would kill her if she refused him.

But he was counting on her not to refuse. He was counting on her to see things his way. To see reason.

Lotara lowered her sidearm.

‘I know. But how?’

‘Need…’ Skane grunted, battling to form the words. ‘Need your help.’

II

‘…no seasons

In that endless night

No lies survive

The solar winds

No sanctuary

Beneath the light of watching stars

Beneath the gaze of night’s queen

Beneath the silent storm she brings…’

The mutineers met several times, never in the same place. The ship offered up plenty of abandoned districts in which conspiracy could thrive.

Tonight they met in the tertiary starboard foundry, where the forges had long ago grown cold. Legion weapons hadn’t been manufactured here for over a year, with production ceasing abruptly on the night the 29th Assault Company had rampaged through its hallways and antechambers, wretched and shrieking with blood-need.

Here, the traitors among the Traitors met to speak of survival. It may not have been the first time, but it was – if all went to plan – likely the last. Gathering was becoming dangerous with how many of them there were now. Secrets could only be kept for so long aboard a warship, especially one where the dead walked and whispered.

Lotara stood with Skane atop a slaughtered ore-smelter and looked over those of her crew and Legion gathered in the gloom, each of them waiting for her to speak. The first time they’d gathered, there had only been a few dozen of them.

She’d spoken then too, and it had come dangerously naturally to her. It had to be her taking the reins. She was the captain. If Lotara Sarrin, mistress of the Conqueror, was ready to abandon ship, they found it far easier to countenance doing the same. She couldn’t just be their ally. She had to be their leader.

‘The biggest gathering yet,’ Lotara said under her breath. At her side, Skane nodded.

Almost fifty World Eaters stood arrayed in rankless packs, many of them twitching or grunting at the tics forced upon them by the Butcher’s Nails embedded in their brains. Their armour joints snarled with each muscle spasm, as the servos and fibre-bundle cabling in their degrading suits of war-plate registered and magnified even the smallest motion. Power packs hummed aggressively enough to make teeth ache in their sockets.

The mortal crew gave the World Eaters a wide berth, standing in their own clusters and numbering over three hundred souls. Some were officers, some were slaves who would be useful for what was to come. With the power out in this district of the ship, the traitors met by torchlight and lamp pack, cutting the absolute blackness with beams of stark illumination across each other’s filthy and half-starved faces.

‘My friends.’

They moved closer, to hear Lotara quietly speak. Just like always.

‘It’s time to get off this ship.’

She spoke for almost an hour, outlining the details of her intent. At several points, Skane joined in with his halting tones, and other World Eaters and bridge officers – Guhuj among them – offered their own insights. Several others asked questions; she handled them patiently, meticulously, leaving no stone unturned and no possibility unexplored. Everything had to be precise. No practice runs, no second chances.

One of the World Eaters, Maruuk, asked the question everyone else had avoided, as if speaking a certain name would bring a curse upon them all. As a company captain, he was the highest-ranking legionary among the mutineers.

‘What about Khârn?’

Skane shook his ruined head. ‘Khârn won’t cuh-come. Khârn won’t luh-leave the monster’s side.’

That started more murmurs. ‘But once we move, he’ll know,’ Maruuk said. ‘He’ll know. He always knows.’

It made Lotara’s skin crawl, to hear of her closest companion being spoken of not as a man, or even a bloodthirsty warrior, but as a force of nature. What was worse was that she had no argument against it.

‘Khârn is n-not a concern.’ Skane was adamant. ‘So long as he… nnhh… knnn-knows nothing.’

‘Easier said than done.’ Several of the others nodded at Maruuk’s doubts. ‘We’ve kept our secrets so far, but once we make our move, Khârn and the others will scent blood in the water.’

Lotara cleared her throat, taking command of the moment once more. She met the warrior’s eyes as she spoke, brooking no further argument.

‘Leave Khârn to me. I’ll deal with him when the time comes. Everyone else needs to focus on getting to the evacuation points. We’ll only have one shot at this.’

III

‘…with gun-shattered steel

Sundering

Thundering

Drumbeats across a dance floor

Spreading across the heavens

A ballroom among the stars

Bathing its hostess in a million lights of pinprick fusion.’

The Conqueror roared its way back into real space. The warp drives whined into abeyance and the plasma drives shouldered the burden of propulsion alone, as smoky trails of dissipating soul-mist raked at the re-emerging warship. She trailed several of her brutal Ursus Claws, the ship-killing harpoons torn loose from their moorings in previous battles and now dragged behind her as she sailed.

All souls aboard felt the translation from the Sea of Souls back into the cold void; the ship juddered around them with a momentary flicker of switching gravities – and something in the Conqueror’s guts, which had once been the Emperor’s son, sent its rage vibrating through the vessel’s bones.

‘I think the warp eases its pain,’ Guhuj remarked, gazing at nothing with shadowed eyes.

‘His,’ Lotara corrected him.

‘Ma’am?’

‘His pain. It’s still Angron.’

Guhuj looked dubious. More than that, he looked at her with pity. ‘As you say, captain.’

Lotara let it slide. She was keying commands into the armrests of her throne, sending data-spurts across the length of the warship. Her will, to be carried out at once. Signals, in some cases, to awaken the cell to action.

Ahead of them, around them, there was nothing but star-studded blackness. For now, the Conqueror sat alone in space.

Lotara kept typing. Legitimate duty rosters had been arranged ahead of time, allowing the mutineers to be where they needed to be. Others had been falsified as necessary, to achieve the same goal. Sections of the ship were pre-sealed or unlocked as required, with repair crews and Legion squads diverted elsewhere. At her keyed commands, ship-to-ship hauler shuttles were being fuelled in the portside hangar bays – five in total, enough to carry the refugees from the mad ship across to their destination.

She watched an auspex readout of World Eaters squad leaders moving throughout the ship. The reading was almost hysterically unreliable given the degradation of the Legion’s wargear and discipline, but Lotara Sarrin worked with what she had. It was no different from organising a battle; the manoeuvring in three dimensions, arranging the pieces to move hither and thither, for some to cross paths and others to never meet at all. She played a game with squad disposition, ostensibly diverting those loyal to the escapees’ cause to where they’d be needed most.

Several World Eaters officers and three of her own subcommanders worked with her in unspeaking unity, directing the flow of personnel aboard the ship. Weeks of coordination, unfolding in a stream of quiet effort.

So far, so good.

‘Khârn.’ She spoke over a personal link, bound straight to Khârn’s helm vox. ‘Khârn? Respond, please.’

Nothing.

That was… less good.

Guhuj was watching her. She pointedly ignored him, trying a second time to raise Khârn.

Eighteen minutes later, the XII Legion frigate Bestiarius tore back into real space within the same astronavigational span, dropping anchor only an hour’s flight coreward. That was as close as any of the World Eaters fleet would come to the flagship, these days. It was a lesson hard-learned, involving no shortage of Legion boarding teams and massacres aboard allied vessels that had drawn too near to the Conqueror’s hull.

Officers reported the fleet-ship’s arrival with weary efficiency. Lotara’s stare drifted over the motley assortment of souls that comprised her bridge crew. Once they’d been the elite of the Great Crusade, a highly trained, precise regiment of crisply uniformed officers. They were merciless. They were vicious. They were the best.

And now? Half of the original crew were gone, not lost in battle with the Imperial foe but ravaged through the World Eaters’ riotous shipboard purges: when the warriors of the XII tore through their own vessel, howling and baying for blood, always for blood, never enough blood. If they couldn’t kill the enemy, they killed each other. If their gore-cravings couldn’t be met with battle, they turned to slaughter. Day by day, the crew diminished from execution, random destruction and – so it was said – being fed to the thing in the hold. The thing that had once been Angron; the thing that wallowed knee-deep in blood, stretching its chained wings high in the iron rafters, bellowing its fury through the ship’s metal bones.

Many of the bridge crew were missing limbs and had been biomechanically fused to their stations out of naked need for their expertise. Far, far too many were dead and gone, replaced by junior officers or imprinted servitors. Once, Lotara would have pitted her beloved Conqueror against any ship in the Imperium, sure that she’d emerge victorious. Now she found herself hesitating to dwell on thoughts of Terra, dreading going into battle with her mauled and inexpert crew.

She thought of Tobin, dead on the deck. And Khârn, drenched in his blood.

She thought of Tobin, dead in her bed. He’d never even been inside her quarters in life, yet in death the Conqueror had brought him right to her.

‘Captain?’ called one of the vox-officers.

‘A moment.’ Lotara blinked to clear her thoughts.

The Bestiarius was early, but no matter. She opened a tight-beam pulse to the distant vessel and sent nine encrypted code phrases in succession, timed at prearranged intervals. Even the rhythm of the signal was part of the code. Any deviation would mean the plan was compromised.

Lotara keyed in the final code, then leaned forward in her dark throne. ‘Speak.’

‘The Bestiarius has translated four hours earlier than expected, but requests permission to bring aboard supplies at your convenience, ma’am.’

Serving as occasional granary for the rest of her fleet was one of a flagship’s less dignified roles. Usually supply ships and bulk cruisers would handle such mundanity, but all sense of normalcy had been abandoned in the fragmented Word Bearers and World Eaters fleet that had broken and run from Ultramar. All bets were off in the race to Terra.

The captain watched the moving hololiths as squads and armsmen teams drifted into, or out of, position. No turning back now.

Lotara looked up and nodded to the vox-officer. ‘Send word to the Bestiarius. Tell them we’re ready to transfer supplies.’

It was simple, as the best plans usually are. It went smoothly, as the best operations often do.

Lotara was one of the last to move. Almost everything else was already done. It had to be this way. The captain of a Gloriana-class warship couldn’t just get out of her seat and go for a stroll through her cursed, scream-soaked vessel on a whim. She had to make sure everyone else was safely away first.

Four of the supply craft were in the void, streaking towards the waiting Bestiarius. Only one remained. That was to be her ride.

Skane was amongst the few that lingered with her. Armed and armoured, he was one of only a handful of legionaries on the command deck, and he stayed close to her throne. This wasn’t an unusual level of devotion; the World Eaters were rightfully and righteously loyal to their flagship’s captain. Lotara Sarrin was a point of Legion pride. She’d earned the Blood Hand badge of honour in her ascension to command one of the most regal ships in all of the nascent Imperium.

‘A murderess,’ they called her, back in the time when they were all more capable of speech, ‘but our murderess.’

She rose from her throne only when her shift was complete. Skane stiffened as if waking, as did Maruuk, across the command deck. Lotara cleared her throat.

‘Major Thrallen, you have the con.’

Gaya Thrallen, a scarred veteran of almost six decades, inclined her head. ‘Ma’am,’ she acknowledged, taking the black throne that Lotara vacated.

Lotara strode from the central dais, the sound of her boots lost in the mess of conflicting sounds that always made up the busy bridge. Skane and Maruuk fell into step behind her, and the three of them moved as one.

The last shuttle was waiting, its ugly bulk bathed in the crimson glow of the hangar’s pre-launch lighting. All notations of additional supplies being dispatched to the Bestiarius had been explained away and easily justified. The administration wasn’t a problem.

Lotara, dressed in mechnicians’ overalls, walked just behind Maruuk and Skane as they made their way across the wide, soot-washed deck. She added what she thought was a subservient hunch to her posture, though she didn’t bother with the hood that would have hidden her features. Menial crew like hangar-techs and armament thralls belonged to a caste of servants and slaves that would never look upon their captain’s face outside of shipwide propaganda messages, and Lotara had never enjoyed giving many of those. She wasn’t worried about being recognised. If she was, Skane and Maruuk would take care of it; and if they didn’t, the sidearm concealed in her overalls could.

They were late. The cargo whale’s engines were cycling up, already breathing smoke.

‘Hold the gang-ramp,’ Skane voxed ahead. ‘Final boarders.’

‘We’re going to make it,’ Maruuk was murmuring to himself. ‘We’re going to make it.’

Lotara heard the click of compliance as the shuttle’s servitor pilot acknowledged them. Her heart was racing, thumping against her ribs; she felt as if she could hear it over the rising roar of the shuttle’s spooling engines.

Maruuk was right. They were going to make it.

The World Eaters were first up the iron gang-ramp. Lotara had a boot on it, feeling it shudder with every heavy step the warriors took ahead of her. Maruuk disappeared into the shuttle’s insides. Skane, however, turned around. He saw she’d frozen.

‘C-Cnnnnh… Captain?’

He reached out a hand to her. Beckoning. A broken man, a shattered warrior, offering his aid.

If she took another step, if she placed both boots on the shuttle’s gang-ramp, she’d leave the Conqueror’s deck. Maybe forever.

‘Cnh. Cnnh. Captain. Come on.’

Lotara looked up at Skane by the shuttle’s boarding door. She steeled herself, ready to take a step. She wasn’t sure in which direction she’d go.

‘Captain!’ Skane called. He pulled his axe free. Baring his teeth now, but not at her. Behind her. Across the deck.

Lotara didn’t look over her shoulder. She didn’t need to. She knew exactly who she’d see.

‘Betrayer!’ Khârn screamed from across the hangar. ‘I see you!’

Skane pounded down the gang-ramp, gripping Lotara’s arm. His face twitched and pulled, his mind at the mercy of the pain engine in his skull.

‘G-go,’ he said, blocking Khârn’s view of his captain. ‘Get to s-safety. He doesn’t knnnh-know it’s you.’

‘Skane,’ she said. ‘Skane…’

He didn’t hear her. Skane tore away, breaking into a run, boots striking sparks on the deck. His chainaxe revved in his hands. Khârn sprinted towards him, his axe doing the same. Behind Khârn, a row of World Eaters looked on, twitching with blood-need and thwarted slaughter. They bayed like beasts, as they always did in their Legion’s duelling arenas.

Scarce seconds later the shuttle’s gang-ramp started to withdraw, pulling back on its slow hydraulics. Maruuk, having reached the cockpit, had made his decision. He was making the most of Skane’s sacrifice, leaving with or without Lotara.

She tumbled from the gang-ramp, rolling hard, bringing herself to her feet on shaky legs. She had to get away from the launching shuttle; dying in the flare of its engines would be a death even stupider than the ones that had threatened her so far. The peace of that instant incineration flashed through her mind, but too late, too weakly – she was already running, fleeing that fate.

Engine wash, smoky and blurring the hangar with heat mirages, bathed her. It reminded her of the choking heat all those months before, when every drop of water aboard the Conqueror turned to blood.

Behind her, the shuttle blasted its way from the deck and roared into the void. Ahead of her, Skane fought Khârn, brother against brother.

Skane was a Destroyer. He was granted permission to wield the Legion’s forbidden weapons: the pistols with radiation-saturated rounds, the grenades that detonated with toxic miasma mist, the launchers that lobbed acid-bursting shells capable of eating through enemy armour.

He had none of his wargear with him now. His failing cognition and decaying manual dexterity made wielding those weapons a dangerous trial. But he had his axe. An axe is an honest weapon, and Skane swung it with the desperate force of a warrior that no longer had anything to lose.

It locked, blade on blade, against Khârn’s own axe. The two chain weapons kissed with interlocking teeth, each trying to devour the other.

Skane knew he was dead. He threw an elbow that didn’t land. He tried a headbutt that didn’t connect. He landed a kick that barely moved Khârn an inch. The rotting weakness inflicted upon him by sanctioned weaponry, and the corruption of the Conqueror, had slowed him rather than elevated him.

Khârn backhanded him with enough force to floor an ogryn, rocking his brother back. Skane refused to fall, but it was too late for defiance to make any difference. Khârn followed his staggering kinsman, and bang, bang, bang went the warrior’s fist into the Destroyer’s unprotected, mutilated face. Bang, bang, bang. Reinforced bone gave each time, first with dry snaps, then with wet crunches.

Skane fell. He knelt, panting, his face miserable with blood.

‘I… will d-die on my feet,’ he swore.

‘Maybe.’ Khârn pulled his helmet free, baring his own scarred features. ‘But you’ll still die.’

Skane tried to stand. Lotara saw the muscles and tendons stand out in his neck, just as they’d done when he once had to struggle just to speak.

‘I n-never wanted to leave the Luh… the Legion. Just the ship, Khârn. Just. Just the ship.’

‘Hush now.’ A boot to Skane’s chest sent the Destroyer down to the deck for good. Khârn’s bloody eyes focused on Lotara as she drew near. He spoke through gore-pinked teeth. ‘Maruuk escaped?’

The Conqueror’s captain nodded. ‘You were late.’

Khârn’s armour snarled as he twitched with another muscle-shudder. ‘No matter. No matter. Hnnnh. All the ships are still in the sky. Hnnh.’ He grinned suddenly. ‘Not tempted to leave too, captain?’

Lotara smiled, too. She didn’t reply. Instead she looked down, meeting Skane’s remaining eye, that single window of sense in the bloodstained mess of his skull. She saw the grief there. The pain at her betrayal.

He didn’t ask why she’d done it. Perhaps because it didn’t matter, perhaps because he knew why. The Conqueror couldn’t – wouldn’t – be separated from its queen.

In lieu of useless accusations, he laughed wetly, gargling on his own gore.

‘A m-murderess,’ he said, ‘but our murderess. A rose wuh-watered with blood.’

Gorechild, Khârn’s axe, lifted high. Lotara halted him with a gesture. A captain should do the difficult duties. It was her place to punish mutiny.

‘No,’ she said in the wake of Skane’s last words. ‘Let me.’

She levelled her pistol, taking aim at Skane’s one eye. There was no anger on her face, and no hate in her heart, but she still pulled the trigger.

The Conqueror opened fire. Four of the five shuttles between the flagship and the distant Bestiarius ceased to exist, detonating in momentary flashes: final sensory flickers of influence, last imprints of light in a galaxy that was done with them.

No supplies were lost in the executions. Lotara and Khârn had arranged everything meticulously in that regard. The supply shuttles were all empty but for their cargo of mutineers and servitor pilots. No one of consequence was lost in the annihilation. All had gone as planned.

The captain of the Conqueror leaned forward in her throne. One shuttle remained. One shuttle that was hailing them. The last shuttle to launch.

‘Do you wish to respond, ma’am?’ the vox-officer asked.

Lotara hadn’t decided.

Khârn stood by her throne, knuckles twitching, salivating from the edge of his mouth. Skane’s blood was still on his face and chest-plate. He watched the debris from the dead shuttles scatter in the void, the last vestiges of treachery dispersing into blackness.

From somewhere deeper, much deeper, in the ship, a tremulous roar sounded out. A cry of victory, formed in the throat of something that had never been truly human and, in recent months, had only fallen further from humanity.

‘Angron compliments you,’ Khârn observed, dead-eyed and distracted. ‘As always. He says… He says you served him well.’

Lotara said nothing.

‘Were you truly not tempted to leave?’ Khârn turned to her. She could feel his eyes on her now. ‘Not even once?’

Lotara lifted her eyes to his. ‘Do you remember that insipid poetry the remembrancers used to write about me? The flowery piss they’d scrawl down. The stuff that was always lapped up on Terra.’

Khârn’s laughter was somewhere between a snort and a growl. ‘Oh, yes.’

Lotara leaned back in her throne, her eyes thoughtful. In the silence that followed, Khârn sucked air through his teeth, reclaiming a trickle of his drool. His armour joints grumbled as he inclined his head to the last shuttle’s silhouette on the oculus.

‘Shall we hear what Maruuk has to say?’

‘If we must.’ She signalled her vox-officer to allow the contact. A grunting, vicious voice boomed over the bridge’s speakers.

‘You wretched, filthy–’ Maruuk began.

‘Yes, yes,’ Lotara said over him. ‘Very interesting. Spare me the indignation, traitor.’

‘Skane was a fool to trust you.’

‘He was indeed,’ Lotara allowed. ‘But he was brave to the end, dying a warrior’s death. He didn’t scamper up the gang-ramp and squeal like livestock as he fled.’

‘Tell me why you betrayed us,’ Maruuk demanded. All too easy to imagine him twitching and flinching as he snarled the words, at the mercy of foul brain chemistries. ‘Why do you want to remain on that ship?’

‘Skane didn’t need to ask that question,’ Lotara replied. ‘Can it be that a radiation-soaked, half-mad, half-dead Destroyer had more insight than a company captain? Maybe the Legion will do better without you.’

‘Your insults mean nothing, mortal.’

Lotara sighed. ‘The answer is obvious, Maruuk, and you have a couple of seconds left to reach the revelation on your own. Farewell.’

She nodded to the three thralls at the weapons console, giving the signal to fire. The ship shivered as the prow lances opened up, and the open vox-link dissolved into immediate static.

She answered the dead man’s question anyway, reflectively, speaking the words as she’d spoken them a thousand times since taking the black throne aboard this cursed ship.

‘No one runs from the Conqueror.’

IV

‘…and worshipful foes

Awarded medals carved upon flesh

In scars of shrapnel

And sourceless fire.

This flock

Her flock

Unburied

Within great drifting tombs

Of silent enemy iron.’

– excerpt from A Rose Watered with Blood
By the remembrancer saga-poet Eurykidas DeMartos
(deceased)

About the Author

Aaron Dembski-Bowden is the author of the Horus Heresy novels The Master of Mankind, Betrayer and The First Heretic, as well as the novella Aurelian and the audio drama Butcher’s Nails, for the same series. He has also written the Warhammer 40,000 novel Spear of the Emperor, the popular Night Lords series, the Space Marine Battles book Armageddon, the novels The Talon of Horus and Black Legion, the Grey Knights novel The Emperor’s Gift and numerous short stories. He lives and works in Northern Ireland.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

A Rose Watered With Blood © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2018. A Rose Watered With Blood, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78030-763-3

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.