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The Son of Sorrows – John French

About the Author

An Extract from ‘The Horusian Wars: Incarnation’

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

The Son of Sorrows

John French

‘Slaughter is harder than people imagine. With the right circumstances, it can occur spontaneously, but to bring it about deliberately is a most difficult matter. Still more difficult is effective terror. The human mind is prone to fear, but terror, the deep emotion that lingers in the bone and blood for generations – for that, the tools must be sharp, and their application finely judged.’

– from an address to the High Lords of Terra
by Drakan Vangorich, 12th Grand Master
of the Officio Assassinorum

Mission time stamp 01:32:34

‘You.’

Koleg did not look around.

‘You hear me?’

Koleg kept his gaze on the temple front.

‘You need to move, friend-pilgrim.’

Statues covered the temple, piled together and mortared in place, drowning in bright paint and gold leaf. Gargoyles leered up at the blink of discharge from the remembrance towers that rose above it. Gilded haloes gleamed. Holy lips smiled red. Rain ran from the faces of the saints and the wings of the angels. They called it the city of tears for its rain.

The drops splashed on his face and patterned on his coat. He saw the water pour from the edge of an angel’s wing. The stone feathers caught a flash of light from the electro-discharge. For a second they looked real…

Oh-ho, ho-nooo…

Which one did we know…

Knowww… ho…

‘I am going to say it one more time. You need to–’

‘It needs to be an example,’ he said. ‘That’s what the order is.’

He turned and looked at the warden. The man was fat. His red cloak of office was too small for him, and he held a shock rod in his right hand. The thumb was steady on the activation stud. There were debt and penance tattoos on the man’s chin and jaw, red and black dots amongst stubble.

‘You are not a part of this,’ said Koleg. ‘You should not be here.’

He saw the pupils go wide in the warden’s eyes, but he did not back away.

‘It’s curfew,’ said the man. ‘It’s the will of the Lords, you have to–’

Koleg hit him just beneath the sternum. Air gasped from between teeth. The man stumbled backwards. Koleg jolted his palm into his jaw, and the warden dropped onto the wet stone steps. Koleg drew a needle from a sheath in his cuff and stabbed it into the man’s throat. He flicked the tiny glass bubble on the needle’s head, and sedative began to seep down the silver shaft. The warden would not wake for an hour. By then it would be over.

Koleg shrugged the pack from his back. Fastenings snapped open. Gun metal gleamed in the blue crackle. His hands worked quickly: propellant kindler into stock, stock into casing, drum number one into feed port.

I know, I know…

I know where you go…

The thread of rhyme passed through his thoughts again. He paused for a second.

Hawk shifting on a gloved hand, eyes hidden under a red falconry hood…

He blinked and stood, the grenade launcher in his hands. Viola said that communication out of the district would be disrupted for an hour. He reached into his coat and took out the mask. The raindrops formed silver domes on the black ceramic. Its eyes were mirrors. Two chrome cylinders plugged into the cheeks. He pulled it on. Luminous numerals lit at the edge of his sight. Small speaker grilles settled over his ears with a hiss of static.

He took a breath. It was not to calm him. He was always calm. It was a habit, and habits were important.

They did not know that he was coming. The shock would help.

He looked at the temple doors, big blank slabs of board and metal. White-and-red handprints all over them. Hinges exposed. Rock frame. He had time to place the charges he had brought. There was no need to rush. They did not know he was coming.

Signifier 0

‘It’s a kill mission, top to bottom. It needs to be–’

‘An example,’ said Koleg. He looked up from the weapon components laid out on the green cloth.

His room was two metres by three metres. White paint covered the riveted metal walls and ceiling. The paint was fresh, but the rust still showed on the panels next to the basin and faucet. The floor was a rough-textured black. His bunk was bolted to the wall. The sheets and blanket on the bed were taut and smoothed, edges folded tight. His personal chest sat in the corner. Equipment gleamed inside the open lid. He sat on the floor, the stripped and separated tools of his trade in front of him.

‘I understand what is needed,’ he said. ‘You can leave the mission briefing details. I will review them and clarify if necessary.’

Viola was still looking at him. He read the expression on her face: the distaste in the crease of her mouth, the questions she could not keep from her eyes. He noted the emotional markers, and then looked away. He looked straight ahead, hands and fingers finding their own way as he broke a gas-propelled grenade launcher down.

‘It needs to be an example. That is why it’s just going to be me.’ He glanced up. ‘It is this type of mission that the inquisitor recruited me for.’ He put the last piece of the launcher down and snapped the casing pins from a Kahre 354 hand cannon. ‘Is there something you wish to ask?’

Viola’s face twitched under her ash-white hair. It was a slim face, he noted, made lean by concern, and taut by habit. Her hand shifted the collar of her velvet dress coat. She began to shake her head and turn away, then stopped and looked back at him.

‘You are unsettling,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I have been told that before.’

She looked around the room, and shook her head again.

‘This is a cell, you understand?’

‘I know,’ he said.

‘We painted it and scrubbed it, but it was part of a brig.’

‘I know.’

‘You requested this?’

‘Yes.’

Viola shook her head and let out a breath.

‘Why?’

‘Because it is all I need.’

‘All right,’ she said after a moment. ‘All right. You are here by the inquisitor’s command, and that is enough.’

She moved towards the door.

‘Your discomfort is understandable,’ he said. She paused in her step. ‘I am new. I am unknown. I do not fit. Your discomfort is understandable.’

‘I thought you did not feel emotion?’

‘I don’t. Not any more. But you don’t need to feel emotion to recognise its effects. If I could not do that then I could not perform my role.’

‘And what is that?’

‘Terror, Mistress von Castellan. The creation of a precise kind of terror.’

Mission time stamp 01:35:01

Click…

Switch to arm.

A breath. Muscles relaxing.

Thumb tense on switch.

Press.

Click…

The doors to the temple blew in. Rock dust and smoke billowed through the breach, and out across the square.

Koleg’s mask blanked the flash of the explosion. The blast wave whipped over him.

Two seconds, counted precisely in his mind.

He stood. The launcher was in his hands. The first cylinder was loaded with photo flash, choke and shriek grenades. He aimed. His mask was set to infra-sight. The air around the temple door was red with heat.

Five seconds.

Orange silhouettes moved beyond the door, staggering. The metal of their guns was cold-blue.

Koleg fired, shifted aim and fired, shifted and fired. The grenades flew through the door and detonated. Choke gas blended with smoke. Hot silhouettes began to stagger and fall.

Flash of blinding light, white through the cloud. Human shouts. The sound of people trying to breathe while choking.

They have no gas masks, he noted. The shriek charge went off under the stone arch. The air shivered. The staggering figures began to spasm. Koleg caught the edge of the sound an instant before his mask filled his ears with grey noise. That instant of exposure was enough to bring bile to his throat.

Forward, another two grenades.

Thump-crack, thump-crack…

He had reached the door when the first armed target lurched into sight, and raised a weapon. Koleg put the third grenade into its central mass. It punched the figure back off its feet. The shriek grenade detonated and a fresh blast of neuro-disruptive noise ripped through the air. Koleg was through the door, slinging the launcher over his shoulder. The bloom of heat from the door breach was fading from his sight. He pulled his macrostubber from its holster. Lights flashed on as the temple finally began to wake. Koleg tapped the switch on his mask. Red markers spun at the edge of sight as the mask sifted heat and motion for threats.

Flaking faces of saints and angels covered the ceiling and walls. Open arches ran across the far end of the chamber. A man came out of a vestibule door, wearing soiled, multicoloured robes, face blue and white from ingrained dye. Koleg squeezed the trigger for an instant. Recoil kicked up his arm. Muzzle flare breathed from the pistol. The deluge of micro-rounds tore a hole in the man’s chest. Blood smudged the fog of gas. Koleg surged forwards, grabbing the corpse as it fell. The next target through the door had an autopistol.

Munitorum pattern d-3-4, thought Koleg. High rate of fire. Substantial recoil.

The target fired an instant after Koleg shoved the corpse forwards and put a point-blank burst into the shooter’s face, and went through the next door.

The temple structure opened beneath him.

Signifier 1

The door closed behind Viola. Koleg remained on the floor. His hands slotted the last pieces of the macrostubber pistol together, and he set it down beside the other weapons. All were ready. He looked at them for a moment, and then picked up the data-slate that Viola had left on the bed. It had a holo projector attachment and filled the air above it with a three-dimensional image of a structure which looked like a spire tower that had been turned upside down, and thrust into the ground. Audio crackled from the slate’s inbuilt speaker.

‘…Seekers of Incandescent Truth, a cult that conforms to the prevalent local interpretation of the Imperial Creed…’

‘… fallen out of favour within the dioceses…’

‘…temple capable of housing nine hundred adherents, numbers currently dwelling in the temple estimated at two to three hundred…’

He listened. He watched, and read. When it was complete, he set it going from the beginning. After three passes he shut it down. Then he sat, eyes open, but flickering from side to side as though he were dreaming. Parameters were set, methods selected. When that was done, he paused.

It would take him an hour to pass from orbit to the strike location. The rogue trader ship Dionysia would pass over that optimal drop location in one hundred and five minutes. That was acceptable. Inquisitor Covenant wished this dealt with as soon as possible, before the Seekers of Incandescent Truth had time to realise what was happening, before they had time to prepare. He would complete the task within the next four hours. Before he began he needed to review his signifiers.

They were in a box: green metal, foam-lined, letters and numbers stencilled on the outside. He stared at it before he opened it. That was the way he had to do it, the way that he had been taught to do it, each step meticulous. The lid opened with a hiss of collapsing vacuum. He paused, observing the passage of his thoughts, watching for threads of emotion. There were none. He would maintain his watch throughout this preparation.

Three small packets lay in the box, each wrapped in black velvet. He began on the left, taking each packet out, setting it down, and unfolded the velvet to reveal the contents: a crystal cylinder a little taller than a clenched fist; a votive candle; a falconry raptor hood to fit over the eyes of a trained hawk.

He looked at them, listening to his pulse. It remained steady, the turning of his thoughts regular, smooth, flat…

Then he reached out and picked up the crystal cylinder. A thick, brushed-steel cap sealed the top. Three slivers of pink flesh hung in the thick fluid within, each no larger than the tip of his smallest finger.

Memory filled his senses.

It began with smells: burnt flesh, urine, static and sweat all hiding under the thick blanket of counterseptic.

The orderlies moved around him, checking the bindings that held him at the wrists, neck, ankle and waist. He rolled his shoulders. Above him a cluster of articulated still limbs twitched and extended. Laser cutters, micro-saws and drills spun and cycled between different speeds. It reminded him of a prize brawler, limbering up before a fight.

‘It’s part of the mind interface integration,’ said the chirurgeon. Koleg glanced up at her. She smiled at him. It was a beautiful smile, he thought. Teal plastek robes covered her from neck to fingertip. An indentured medicae tattoo sat on her left cheek. Chrome cables led from sockets in her spine up to the cluster of flexing limbs hanging from the ceiling. ‘I have to make sure that when I impulse a drill to push through the skull it stops when I tell it, and doesn’t, you know, start trying to click fingers it doesn’t have instead.’

‘I would prefer that not to happen,’ he said, and found himself smiling back at her.

‘For now,’ she said. ‘You would prefer that not to happen for now. By the time I have finished with you, the two possibilities will seem as insignificant as each other.’

Assistants in red and teal bodygloves began to clamp his head in place. Cool fingers held him still as metal touched the skin of his scalp. The beat of his heart rose.

‘Calm, calm now,’ said the chirurgeon. She was still smiling at him. The movements of the articulated limbs on the ceiling slowed. A single needle-tipped arm reached down and jabbed into his neck. Warm numbness spread through him. ‘We are going to have to secure your head so that you cannot move during the procedure.’

A second later he heard the sound of drills and bolt drivers as they screwed the clamp to his skull. He was breathing hard. He tried to think of the swish of feathers, and the beat of wings carrying a hawk into a blue sky.

‘Heartbeat and adrenal levels rising,’ said a cold voice from out of sight.

‘You have to be conscious, you see,’ said the chirurgeon, ‘so that I can observe your emotional reactions as I work. It’s the only way to be sure that the excision and implants are correct. That we are taking enough, but not too much.’

The limbs unfolded above him, spreading like a flower under warm sun. A circular saw the size of a coin began to spin. The chirurgeon was next to him now, needle-tipped fingers moving over his skull, serene smile still in place. ‘There will be no pain once we are working directly in the brain.’

‘They…’ He tried to speak, but his breath was coming fast now. His blood hammered in his ears. ‘They did not tell me about this. They said it was an augmetic implantation. That I would wake up and not feel…’

‘Hmm… Yes, that’s true.’ Her fingers held still on his scalp. ‘But also not. You agreed to this because you do not want to suffer any more. But I am afraid to do that we need to know what part of your brain your sorrow and terror live in so that we can remove them. I need to be able to see the signal spikes. So, right here and now, Sergeant Koleg, for this to work, you need to be terrified.’

The saws and drills plunged down towards him.

Mission time stamp 01:39:42

The Seekers of Incandescent Truth had not begun as heretics. They professed love of the Emperor. But it was their faith that had led them astray. They had taken to kidnapping nascent psykers. All were tortured for pain-soaked words of revelation. Some proved imperfect to the needs of the cult. It was worse for those who survived. The cult had not done anything more directly dangerous, but they would. In time, of course they would. The rot would swell and burst its bounds. When that happened it might do a lot of damage, or it might implode. It did not matter, though; it could not be allowed to continue, and the inquisitor had decided that while it was being dealt with, the death of this heresy could serve as a lesson.

Koleg was the agent of that lesson.

He knelt on a grated platform above the cavern. Multicoloured light glimmered up through the mesh floor from the drop beneath. The space was a wide, circular shaft. Metal steps led to a spiral of metal gantries that ran down the cavern walls. Lanterns of stained glass hung in the central space, lighting the gloom with dirty red, blue and orange. Down at the bottom of the shaft, lights shimmered and crackled cold-blue and fire-yellow.

Someone saw him. Bullets sparked off the grated floor. Threat markers multiplied in his sight. He placed the macrostubber on the ground next to his knee and slid the grenade launcher from his back. More rounds pinged off the floor. The air vibrated with gunshots and cries.

Koleg looked up at the ceiling: soot-skimmed bronze and iron supports, no ventilation. They would be relying on the natural draw of air up the cavern. Fire burst across the edge of the gantry. He heard the buzz-whip of rounds passing close by. He released the launcher’s ammo drum and reached for the one in the pouch on his lower back.

A trio of figures ran from a door to the stairs leading up to him. He scooped up the macrostubber and fired. They dropped in red shreds, one tumbling over the edge, blood scattering as he fell.

Koleg put the pistol down, pulled out the drum of six grenades and locked it into the launcher.

More figures were coming up the spiral of stairs and gantries. He saw tatters of fabric, faces with fever-sheened skin. He aimed the grenade launcher up, tumbled the firing setting to low-pressure auto, and pulled the trigger. The grenades thumped free of the barrel one after another. Red and black gas trailed in their wake as they arced up and dropped down the central well of the chamber. Koleg picked up his pistol and put a trio of controlled bursts into the clusters of armed figures.

Gas dispersion would take twelve seconds in this space, air saturation thirty. He moved down the stairs, pistol tracking threat markers, his left hand pulling a chrome-and-black disc from a pouch across his chest. The disc was a little wider than his palm with raised circles of shining metal. He stopped and placed it on the metal gantry floor. It locked in place with a magnetic thump.

Black-and-red streaked fog filled the chamber now. The screaming had started: one voice and then a second, and then a chorus. It was not the sound of panic, but pure human terror. The gas was at saturation, one half hallucinogen, the other half a fear inducer that the prosecutors of the Adeptus Arbites gave the simple name of ‘scare’. The effect on anyone who breathed it was to make the nightmares of the subconscious real, while plunging them into the most intense fight or flight response. The red-and-black colouring was simply for the spectacle.

A fat man in a gown of yellow and blue burst from the fog, hands ripping at his own face. Koleg blew the man’s head to mist with a stutter of micro-rounds.

Koleg looked at the controls strapped to his wrist, and keyed a command. The disc on the floor extended upwards, rings telescoping to sections of a long silver rod. They spilt and branched, until a metre-high tree of gleaming chrome stood amidst the murk. Tiny blue crystal spheres tipped every twig. Even the most exalted of magi amongst the priests of Mars would have struggled to recognise the device or its purpose. Koleg keyed a second command and sparks began to run up and down the silver rods.

The sounds of screaming were getting louder. He paused, listening to their pitch rise as they echoed and shattered against the temple’s roof. It was not that he was indifferent to the sounds – he knew the emotional content they denoted – he just felt nothing. That was the gift they had given him in exchange for his service. To pass through a universe where even happiness held the seed of sorrow, and feel nothing.

He holstered his pistol and took the spool of micro wire rope from a pouch, locked it to the edge of the gantry, and then clipped its end to a loop on the back of his harness. The tree-like device was sparking. Motes of light grew in each of the blue spheres. A shimmering haze surrounded it. Koleg drew his hand cannon, keyed the last command on the wrist controls and jumped into the red-and-black-swirled air.

He fell, the wire rope coiling behind him. The guns were heavy weights in his hands.

‘Why does it fly so high?’ asked a voice that came from the still depths of his mind. ‘Why doesn’t it keep lower?’

‘So it can see the world.’

‘All of it?’

A small face looking up, wide eyes under a frown.

‘As good as all of it, yes.’

‘I want to be a hawk.’

He had laughed.

‘Maybe you will be…’

And above them the hawk had turned in a cloudless sky.

Signifier 2

‘Faith is a powerful thing,’ said the voice from the chapel door.

‘Is it?’ asked Koleg, without looking around.

The candle burned in front of his eyes. He had not looked up from it since he had entered the chapel. That had been six hours, and the candle had burned to almost a nub. The commissars and warders of the prefectus would find him soon enough. He had not made it hard for them to find him. Once they did there would be pain and then… nothing.

‘In another context that question would be heresy,’ said the voice. ‘But I am sure that the punishments don’t hold much fear for you, now.’

Koleg looked around then.

The man standing behind him wore grey robes, without mark or ornamentation. His face was dagger-sharp beneath his hood. He looked something like a priest and a lot like a killer.

‘Who are you?’

‘I am your confessor.’

‘Did they send you?’

‘If you mean the commissars and your superior officers, then no, they did not.’

‘Who then?’

‘A higher power, shall we say.’

Koleg grunted and looked back at the candle. He did not have the energy to think about why the man who dressed like a priest, and talked like something else, was there. It just meant that the end was coming, at last.

‘So what happens now?’ asked Koleg, looking back at the candle.

‘You beat your captain to the point that he has only just come out of a coma. There must be a consequence to that action.’

Koleg’s face twitched as the fire rose in him.

‘He should have got the grid coordinates for the fire drop right.’ He turned his gaze on the grey-clad man. He could feel the rage burning behind his eyes. ‘What are the consequences of that?’

The hand was black. The fire had shrunk the skin around the bones, and hooked the fingers into claws, but somehow they still opened to reach for his hand.

‘You…’

The fingers were cold. He looked at them, only at them, and tried not to hear the bubbling gurgle of air sucking into fluid-filled lungs. The inferno bomb had hit just the other side of the wall. The blast had ripped that down and then the liquid fire had drowned the remains. Pools of reeking, jellied promethium sat in depressions still burning with black-edged flames. He had seen corpses as he ran through the ruins – lasgun thumping into his back on its sling – pink mouths open on charred faces, silent amongst the guttering flames.

‘You… are…’ said the face that he could not look at.

‘I am here, Kesh,’ he said. Somehow the words were not a scream. He still did not look up at his brother’s face.

Kesh jerked, a huge swallow of air sucking into his lungs and crackling back out.

‘You…’ he began, but the words never followed.

The man in grey held Koleg’s gaze.

‘Regiments are raised to fight, soldiers to die. They are not meant to live, they are not meant to be family.’

Koleg’s muscles bunched, the rush of fresh anger feeling cold in his guts, like water, like cold rain. The man gave the smallest shake of his head, and somehow that movement was enough to freeze Koleg to the pew. The man stood up and moved around to the shrine that Koleg’s votive candle burned on. A statue of the Emperor as judge gleamed in the flame light, its features lost under layers of gold leaf.

‘What do you pray for?’ asked the man, his voice soft.

‘I don’t,’ said Koleg. ‘I ask Him why He did this.’

The man in grey took an unlit candle from the box beside the shrine, and lit it from Koleg’s flame.

‘Because we are made by suffering,’ said the man.

Koleg was silent for a second, and then felt his mouth open.

‘I just… I just want not to feel that any more.’

The man in grey turned to look at him, candlelight dancing in hard eyes.

‘That prayer, my son, is one that can be granted.’

Mission time stamp 01:43:05

The floor of the cavern shot up towards Koleg as he fell. Above him, the neuro-disruptor reached full charge. A ball of actinic lightning formed around it, held in place for an instant and then burst outwards. The pulse shivered through the temple. Exotic energies poured into toxin-laden synapses. It was a simple method, really. The gas mix created fear and altered perception. The neuro-disruptor took those nerve signals and shaped them into violent panic and paranoia. The aim was not just to kill; it was to make the targets tear each other apart. Pulses of grey, blue and white noise filled Koleg’s ears as the disruptor energies washed through him. Motes of pain flared behind his eyes, but he felt only the steady beat of his heart as he fell. They had cut out the strings on which emotion played its song, leaving only echoes.

He could see figures hacking and tearing at each other on the cavern floor beneath him. One of them looked up, eyes bloodshot above a bloody snarl. The wire rope snapped taut. Koleg jerked to a stop, brought the hand cannon up and fired, three times. Three figures fell. He released the wire rope and dropped the last metre, spraying a long burst from the macrostubber in a circle around him. The gun clicked empty.

Koleg rose to his feet. A figure came out of the fog to his right, screaming, a bloody length of pipe raised above its head. Koleg put a hand cannon shell into its chest.

He looked down.

Three circular hatches stuck with prayer papers formed a triangle on the floor. Motes of lurid green light were bubbling and bursting through the metal. Koleg felt a greasy pressure slide over his scalp. This was the one facet of the mission that he could not leave to chance. The psykers held by the cult would not have been able to inhale the gas, but they would have felt the neuro-pulse. Fear like that was a dangerous thing to inflict on a tortured soul whose thoughts could break reality.

He unfastened the krak charges from his waist and clamped the first one to a hatch. It armed with a dull chime. The floor began to shake. Ozone filled his nose inside his mask. Another charge clamped in place. The arming runes glowed amber at the edge of his sight.

Pain sliced across his right side. He pitched forwards, twisting, hearing the buzz and crack of the round that had gouged across his shoulder. A figure in bloody robes staggered closer, blood leaking from a torn face, a slug pistol clutched in its hands. The barrel swung towards Koleg.

The floor hatch just behind the figure exploded upwards. Arcs of ghost light crawled through the air. The figure with the pistol twisted, as a shape rose from the broken hatch. Blood-streaked amnion fell from it. Wasted limbs scrabbled at the floor. A corona of pale light pulsed around its head. The hatch ring glowed and blackened under its touch.

Pain filled Koleg’s eyes as he looked at the psyker. The floor was buckling. Heat ringed the other two hatches. The psyker opened its toothless mouth and howled.

And the world vanished into the past.

Signifier 3

The sun was high and he was laughing, Kesh running a pace behind him. High above, the hawk turned in the cold dawn air. They should not have been out, but had sneaked from the house while the sun was just a golden blush beyond the mountains, the heat of the day still to soak into the stones of the streets. Their mother and father had been asleep, and had not stirred as Koleg pulled open the door on the hawk house. Kesh had fitted the red hood over the hawk’s head as he took it from the cage. It had settled onto Koleg’s leather-wrapped arm, and kept still as they walked through the night-stilled streets to the edge of the settlement and up onto the hills. They had sung as they ran, the old nonsense rhyme remembered since the crib:

‘Oh-ho, ho-nooo…

Which one did we know…

Knowww… ho…’

On and on in the sleep-rocked rhythm of the childhood they thought they had outgrown. They ran all the way until the town was laid out beneath them, its off-white buildings clustered around the aquila-capped spire.

When he took the hood from the hawk’s head, it had given a sharp cry, stretched its wings and taken to the air. He had watched it, and laughed with joy as it had returned to his call, and then cast it back into the air, and they had run to track its shadow.

Kesh had stopped suddenly.

‘You hear that?’ he asked.

‘No,’ said Koleg, ‘hear what?’

Then he had heard it too. Kesh had pointed, and Koleg had seen the black dot on the lightening horizon. He had stared at that dot for a long minute, watching as one became two, became half a dozen. The drone of engines threaded the air. Lights lit in the town, and then he heard the blare of sirens. He stood for a second, frozen, the hawk crying as it wheeled above him. He began to run. Kesh followed an instant later. They were still running, feet stumbling on the rocky hillside as the first bombs began to fall.

Mission time stamp 01:47:26

The flare of explosions died in his eyes. He was lying on the metal floor. The psyker’s howl faded as it pulled the last of itself out of its prison. Koleg looked into its cataract-clogged eyes. It was shivering. Desperate. Terrified. The halo of ghost light above its head grew. Koleg raised his gun. It opened its mouth. He fired.

He pulled himself up. Blood flowed down his coat from his shoulder. The pain was bright, but he kept moving. Frost rimed the floor around the two remaining hatches. Above and around him rose the sound of the Seekers of Incandescent Truth slaughtering themselves. He blanked the pain in his shoulder, reattached the steel rope. He keyed his wrist controls. The air above the floor shimmered, greasy, fizzing with bubbles of light. The charge runes in his helmet display blinked green.

He triggered the explosives at the same moment as the cable recoil. The wire rope yanked him into the air as the krak charges on the hatches blew. Fire flashed through the smog of gas as Koleg rose.

In a closing box in the back of his mind, the memory of explosions rising into the blue sky shrank beneath the eye of a circling hawk.

Signifier 0

The lid of the casket closed and locked. Koleg unfolded a green tarpaulin and spread it across the floor of the cell. He began to strip the macrostubber. His eyes noted the dust and soot on each component as he laid it beside the others. The grenade launcher and hand cannon would come next, and then he would check over the neuro-disruptor. Everything would be mission ready within the hour. Viola was watching him from by the door, turning the data-stub from his mask over in her fingers. He did not return her look.

‘Any problems?’ she asked.

He split the firing block and laid the parts out, cold metal under his fingers. The light feathered from the oiled edges, and for a second became the sun behind a spreading wing.

‘Koleg…?’

‘Yes, Mistress von Castellan.’

‘There were no problems?’

‘The mission was completed. The full details are in your hand. If you need further clarification I am happy to provide it, but anything I can add might be more relevant after you have reviewed the mission capture.’

A frown pinched her forehead for a second, but then she nodded and opened the door.

‘Mistress Viola,’ he said as she was stepping through the cell door. She paused and half turned. He looked up at her, fingers still moving to break apart the macrostubber.

‘Yes?’

‘There were no problems.’

‘Thank you, Koleg,’ she said.

She made her face smile and then closed the door.

On the cell floor Koleg began to clean the pieces of the pistol. Behind his eyes he remembered hawk feathers beneath a high sun, and candle flame, and felt nothing at all.

About the Author

John French is the author of several Horus Heresy stories including the novels Praetorian of Dorn, Tallarn and Slaves to Darkness, the novella The Crimson Fist, and the audio dramas Dark Compliance, Templar and Warmaster. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written Resurrection and Incarnation for The Horusian Wars and two tie-in audio dramas – the Scribe award-winning Agent of the Throne: Blood and Lies and Agent of the Throne: Truth and Dreams. John has also written the Ahriman series and many short stories.

An extract from The Horusian Wars: Incarnation.

The harvest pilgrims came to the glass tabernacle as they always had. They trod the half-severed stalks down, and sent their prayer smoke into the blue sky, a slowly gathering tide of people old and young, man and woman, all clad in the sacred blue of rain. Thousands of them had already gathered around the tabernacle. They swirled about it, white smoke puffing from their fume pipes, scenting the air with fruit and spice.

‘Credulous fools,’ muttered Ninkurra, as she guided one of her hawks lower over the scene. The creatures were psyber-bonded – their eyes and will hers.

The pilgrim throng was swaying like the crops that had stood where they now walked. Whooping prayers lifted into the air. Inside the tent of glass, the priests were gathering around the altar box. She could see them sway as they sang their secret songs and swung incense smoke around the reliquary. From their point of view, her seeing this would be a blasphemy; she was not of the priesthood, and not initiated into the mysteries of the Emperor’s Eternal Light. The pilgrims who circled the tabernacle would have torn her apart if they had known that she could see a priest open the first leaf of the reliquary. They would have been even more incensed that she could see an acolyte at the back of the group pick his nose. A kilometre away from them, she snorted with laughter.

‘Something diverting?’ asked Memnon.

‘No,’ she said, still watching the priests, ‘not really, just… Don’t you sometimes think humanity is too petty for divinity? If we found the Emperor’s frozen tears someone would give them to a child as a toy.’

‘That is what defines the divine – that it is beyond us.’

‘If you say so.’

‘I do.’

Seen from above, the tabernacle itself was a mountain made of triangular sheets of glass, each one tethered to another, the smallest on the outside just a couple of metres tall, the largest over fifty metres in height. Its apex was a blade point thrust at the sun. Even though each sheet of glass was transparent, those stood on the outside could see only a handful of layers inside. Rainbows of blinding light scattered from its faces and edges, hiding the sanctuary at its core. Once the ceremony began, only a few of the pilgrims would be allowed inside. There was no straight way to the centre of the structure, just an ever-weaving path between sheets of reflection. If a pilgrim reached the sanctuary itself, they would be able to turn, and – thanks to the precise setting of each glass pane – see perfectly in every direction.

She opened her true eyes and for a moment felt vertigo as the sight from her hawks clashed with the world in front of her. Then the two split and the hawk’s eye view receded to the back of her mind.

‘I see no indications of the prospect,’ she said.

Memnon reached beneath his robes and withdrew a small box of bone. Ash tattoos marched down his cheeks in rows of tiny dots, each one faded to grey. His patchwork robes fluttered in the warm breeze. He alone was not dressed in pilgrim blue, but in the faded and torn cloth that he always wore. Ninkurra had often thought that he looked more like a beggar or an ascetic monk than an inquisitor. He looked young, at least young in the way that people judged such things, maybe no more than three decades to the eye. Ninkurra saw his lips move in silent prayer before he opened the lid of the box. He took a pinch of dust from within, and cast it into the air. The grey powder caught the breeze. Memnon watched it, face impassive, until it had dissolved into the wind. Ninkurra had no idea what he looked for, but she knew that he saw more than dust vanishing on the wind.

‘It is coming,’ he said at last. ‘Order the gunships to come in.’

Ninkurra obeyed, transmitting the command with a thought.

‘I am reading low-grade atmospheric interference across multiple spectra.’ Geddon’s voice was a scratched patchwork of static and voice samples. The auspextra was sweating profusely under the sun’s glare. Sweat stuck her blue pilgrim’s robe to her hunched body. Bulbous curves of metal gleamed in the gaps between the lank cloth. The heat sinks of her signal and scanning arrays must have been cooking her, reflected Ninkurra. ‘Static and moisture levels are rising. Pressure inversion unfolding at one hundred metres above ground level.’

‘What does that mean?’ asked Ninkurra, glancing back.

‘There is a storm coming,’ said Geddon.

Ninkurra snorted. ‘It’s clear blue to beyond the horizon,’ she said.

‘No,’ said Memnon softly, and raised a hand to point up. ‘Look.’

Ninkurra followed the line of his long finger. She squinted against the light, raising a hand to shield her eyes. Then she saw it – a smudge of white in the clear air. A gust of air tugged at her robe, and she was aware of the same wind pulling at her hawks as they turned above the tabernacle.

‘You may wish to bring your birds back,’ said Geddon. ‘All readings are spiking.’

Above the tabernacle the patch of cloud was growing, expanding up and out, darkening. She could hear the voices of pilgrims rising in puzzlement. Through the eyes of her hawks, she saw the black dots of the gunships rise from above the horizon. Even the voices of the priests in the tabernacle were faltering. The outer layers of glass shook in the rising wind.

‘Readings across all parameters are reaching paradox,’ rasped Geddon. The hawks spiralled down out of the darkening sky. Ninkurra could feel it now – metal on her tongue, static shivering on the inside of her skin. The mass of pilgrims were looking up at the thunderhead darkening the air above them. Some were crying out, some were already running.

‘We have targets locked and weapons live,’ said a voice in Ninkurra’s vox-bead.

The gunships were visible now. The sound of engines growled across the distance.

‘Do you have a triangulation?’ asked Memnon, calmly.

‘No, lord,’ shouted Geddon, her fingers clacking the keys of the controls that took the place of her left arm. ‘Phenomenon and paradox traces are changing too rapidly. The prospect is not clear.’

‘Very well,’ said Memnon. ‘Gunships into gyre pattern. Nothing that runs lives.’ He began to walk down the gentle slope towards the tabernacle and the crowd of pilgrims. ‘We will need to identify the prospect directly. There is not much time.’

The hawks on Ninkurra’s shoulders took to the air with shrill cries as she followed him.

Lightning flashed inside the cloud above them. Thunder rolled.

‘Come,’ said Memnon. ‘We must be pilgrims now.’

Click here to buy The Horusian Wars: Incarnation.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Black Library Events Anthology 2017/2018 in Great Britain in 2017.
This eBook edition published in 2018 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by John Michelbach.

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