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Assassinorum: Divine Sanction – Robert Rath

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Resurrection: The Horusian Wars’

A Black Library Publication

Assassinorum: Divine Sanction

By Robert Rath

‘When the God-Emperor asks men to die, He does not ask them to die to satisfy His glory. Our Emperor is not vain. He asks men to die for each other.’

The confessor gripped the edge of the balcony, its cold white marble hidden under a velvet banner. His hands grasped the edge tight enough to leave marks on the material.

He paused, scanning the crowd that had gathered in St Lucretza’s Square, their faces upturned towards the pulpit balcony of the Apostolic fortress. They swayed and chanted. Counted prayer beads. Waved banners showing what manufactorum or far continent they hailed from. The throng stretched back through every avenue, until those present looked less like human beings and more like bullets crowding a conveyor belt at a munitions factory.

They had come to hear the New Confession. And they would get it.

The pulpit’s view of the plaza swam, distorted as a wandering servo-skull – one of hundreds that buzzed the square like dragonflies – veered perilously close to the triple-layer refractor field.

‘The Emperor.’ The confessor splayed his hands wide, face towards the sky. ‘The sanctified and revered Emperor, does not merely wish us to give our lives for Him…’

‘…but for all mankind,’ said Thacceus Velso, standing far enough behind the balcony that he was out of the crowd’s line of sight.

‘…but for all mankind.’ The confessor swept out a hand, as if taking in the whole of the multitude below.

A clever bit of emphasis, Velso thought, casually mirroring the confessor’s sweep of the hand. More natural overall, but slightly unorthodox. Most preachers would put the emphasis on mankind, drawing attention to the primacy of humanity. All was a call to the collective.

The confessor dropped his arms, worked his jaw as if thinking. ‘Is it not the Emperor’s will for us…’

‘…to elevate ourselves, our society, and our brethren?’ finished Velso, ensuring he pronounced breth-ren in two distinct syllables. He raised his right hand as he said it, fingers pressed together as if lifting a stemmed glass of wine.

Before him, the confessor did the same.

Hold it, thought Velso. One, two, three.

The confessor opened his hand, dropped it with a shrug, as if he’d gone too far. Conscious that he’d worked himself up into a froth, and slightly embarrassed by his own zeal. A humanising gesture. A bluff. A dramatic pause before dropping the final hammer.

‘For what does the Emperor want His subjects to bring about…’ Velso said, in perfect synchronicity with the confessor.

‘…except the greater good?’ finished Confessor Thuselah Illsandor.

Before him, the crowd wailed at the New Confession. The faithful made the sign of the aquila and held children in the air in hope of a blessing.

The only sound that carried over the acclamation was the crackle of the firing squads.

Not everyone believed in the Confession.

‘I’ve told you to stop doing that,’ sneered Mascelle Rask. The grid of her duelling scars twisted as she frowned. ‘We have one master of divinity already. Don’t need two.’

‘A sermon writer must know how his subject speaks,’ responded Velso, picking at the sleeve of his embroidered robe. ‘Our master is… well, he is masterful, isn’t he? I must work to keep up – just as you must work to keep him alive.’ He paused. ‘Speaking of which, how is that coming along?’ He glanced behind them, suppressing an insolent grin. ‘Any assassins lurking in this heated chamber, or are the real threats out in the cold?’

The mercenary sniffed, put a hand on the swept-hilt power rapier that hung at her hip. ‘I’m due to check the perimeter.’

‘If you must deprive us of your company,’ Velso jerked his head at the two hulking forms chained in the outer corridor, their backs to the room, ‘shut the doors on the way out. No one wants to see those monstrosities.’

‘They’re here for his protection. They can hardly guard him if they’re shut–’

‘The confessor dislikes their smell.’

The head of the Apostolic Guard set her jaw, considering, then snapped. ‘Do it yourself.’

Rask swept out, throwing her embroidered half-cloak over one shoulder to keep her rapier in easy reach. ‘Keep Leonine and Taurus ready,’ she said to the guard standing by the hulking forms as she passed. ‘Sentinel protocol. Sensors maximum.’

Velso rolled his eyes and followed her. He closed one of the heavy wooden doors, then the other, trying to keep his gaze low as he did, so as not to look at the two abominations. Still he saw their metal feet sinking deep into the woven carpet. Caught the stench of human waste, blood and funerary oil that emanated from their unwilling pilots. One had leaked, staining the hallway floor.

Velso turned the lock, leaving the confessor alone with his sermon writer.

Sycorax turned back to the confessor, reflecting how easy it was to play arrogant men. That was one of the earliest lessons in the Callidus Temple: take the place of someone unlikeable, and you’ll go undetected until the Emperor rises.

It had taken months to get this close. Sycorax had come into the city as a worker from the promethium rigs wearing a man’s face and body. Checked into a flop-hab and grew their hair out long and red, their body soft and appealing. Got a job serving at the tavern where the Apostolic Guard drank. Brought one back to the hab.

A girl and a guard went in – only the guard came out. That one was difficult. Apostolic Guardsmen kept close. Many had served in the same Militarum regiment before they heard the New Confession and defected. Knew each other in ways that were hard to replicate.

But Viridian was a city under stress. After curfew the streets flooded with anti-Confessionists building barricades and throwing promethium bombs. And each night, the Apostolic Guard went to work on them with shock mauls and choke gas. In that environment, it was not strange for a man to become suddenly distant and closed-off – so that was the mask Sycorax chose.

Sermon-writer Velso was easy by comparison. Arrogant and superior, he had no close friends. Velso had no doubt thought of himself as a complex man, but apart from moderate rhetorical skill, he was no challenge.

Confessor Illsandor was another matter. He was indeed an orator of rare talent, and Sycorax had dispatched and replaced Velso because his proximity to the confessor made close study of the subject possible. It had also given Sycorax brief glimpses into Illsandor’s duplicity.

She had only seen the t’au delegation once in the three months she’d been here. A door left open a moment too long, betraying a room of flat blue-grey faces and canny golden eyes.

She. That was a crucial benchmark. A sign the time was close. She was mentally identifying as a woman again, reverting to her real identity, not the male body she’d been wearing the past three months. Her psycho-indoctrination training ran so deep that during longer operations her assumed identities took over the conscious mind and her true self merged into the black waters of the subconscious.

But that time was over. Months of careful tradecraft would culminate today. Her studies were complete.

The confessor finished blessing the crowd, kissed the Emperor’s Skull on his vestments, and turned into the room.

‘That went rather well, Brother Velso,’ he said, cheeks rosy with cold.

‘A wonderful performance,’ Sycorax answered. She whistled, and Velso’s spider-legged writing desk clicked over to the confessor, bringing a carafe of spiced wine and a crystal goblet. ‘You should be proud.’

‘Save your praise for the Emperor.’ Illsandor poured a tall drink – sermons made him thirsty. ‘I am but His instrument.’

‘And according to this,’ Sycorax picked a tape-communique off the ambulatory desk, ‘Lady Falessca is now your instrument. The Promethium Guild has backed you and declared for the New Confession.’

‘Praise Him,’ Illsandor smiled. ‘Our planetary absolution continues. With the Emperor’s help, the rest of the Industry Lords should follow.’

‘You should thank them.’

‘For their support?’

‘For their neglect.’ Sycorax tugged at the sleeve of her robe, feeling the poisoned needle hidden there. ‘It’s always the same with revolution, isn’t it? The people have problems, obvious problems. Needs that those in power ignore, or declare themselves unwilling or unable to address. It precipitates a governance crisis, and that opens the door to people like us.’

‘My dear Brother Velso, the people have heard our New Confession. That is why they’re out in the street.’

‘The people are in the street because they’re hungry and disenfranchised,’ corrected Sycorax. ‘They would not have been so amenable to the Confession if the Industry Lords had given them a stake in the old order.’

Illsandor stared at his sermon writer, brow knitted in indignation. For a bare moment, Sycorax worried she’d pushed too hard, but then the confessor’s fury passed and he barked a laugh. ‘Of course. Yes, of course, you’re right, brother. Feed the belly, feed the soul, eh?’

‘I think it’s time we came clean with each other,’ Sycorax said. ‘We are partners in this New Confession, are we not? I need to know what the t’au offered you, and what you’ve agreed to.’

Because when I meet them, they will expect me to know, Sycorax thought.

‘Really, brother, I don’t know what–’

‘I simply want my cut,’ assured Sycorax. ‘And to tailor my speeches to best fit your aims. Are you to prepare the ground rhetorically? Edge the populace closer to the xenos doctrine? Make them amenable to accepting vassalhood in their empire?’

Illsandor took a long drink of wine, his big, red-rimmed eyes searching her flesh-formed mask.

As he did so, Sycorax planned which eye would get the needle. The left, she decided. Downward angle. Straight to the brain stem, cutting off nerve impulses for breathing and heart rate.

‘Something like that,’ said Illsandor. ‘I’ll be sector governor. And I can continue preaching. Whatever I wish, not the ossified dogma of the theologians. Life would improve here. For everyone, us included.’

Sycorax hid her hands in the robe’s big sleeves. Nestled the poisoned needle in her palm. Took aim. ‘I believe they have a phrase for that.’

‘Yes,’ said the confessor. ‘It’s all for the greater g–’

His head exploded. Illsandor’s face disappeared in a cloud of blood, grey matter spattering a centuries-old tapestry. A piece of skull shrapnel tore Sycorax’s cheek open.

She was already down, rolling into the cover of Illsandor’s enormous desk. The priest’s body toppled, his ruined head hitting its marble corner with a wet sound.

A sniper? Unlikely. The Apostolic fortress had counter-snipers, kill-servitors and a sensor grid that stretched out a mile. Some kind of cranial detonator installed by the xenos, in case of exposure?

She fixed a monocular to one of her eyes, and used a handheld pict-feed to scope around the corner of the desk. No one.

She waited. The confessor’s thick blood seeped into the carpet.

Could the mission be salvaged?

Her orders were to study the confessor, remove him, then assume his identity. Stall the t’au. Keep the sermons going, perpetuate the rebellion so the Assassinorum and Inquisition could see which Industry Lords remained loyal. Let the servo-skulls out in the square keep taking pict-captures of faces in the crowd. Evidence for the coming purge.

This… made that complicated. She had a cleaning kit, but this was rather more gore than she’d expected.

And if it was indeed a sniper, she would need to expose herself to fire in order to take the confessor’s place.

She dived behind the ambulatory writing desk to get a different view. Reconstructed angles in her mind. If it was a shot, it would have passed through the curtain.

Yes, there. A hole in the velvet. She crept across the room, flattened herself against the wall, inched back the heavy drape.

And swore.

A hole in the masonry, as if it had been bored through with a drill. She stuck a finger in and felt the smooth sides.

It had angled in high. An impossible trajectory. There was no building in range with that kind of elevation, unless it was fired from a speeder. She edged her way to the window, peered out with the corner scope.

Unless it came from the Tower of St Goneril.

Closed for renovation after a seismic shock fourteen years back. Extremely unstable.

And two miles away.

Two-mile range, without line of sight to the target. Somehow penetrating the fortress’ refractor field, which cycled every half-second. Boring right through a wall, leaving a tunnelling pattern that spoke of staggered melta-detonations.

Only one shooter could do that: one trained and equipped at the Vindicare Temple.

Did I take too long and they assigned another operative? she wondered. Unlikely. She had made her check-ins. Was the shooter still there? Was it a rogue?

No time, she decided. She had orders, and seconds to salvage them.

And no need to hide. If the sniper wanted her, there was nothing she could do. So Sycorax knelt next to the confessor, whistled at the desk to attend her.

It ambled over, unsteady on the thick carpet. She keyed a catch and a false bottom sprang open on quiet hinges. A metal document case and black zip-kit lay nestled inside.

She tore the sermon writer’s robe open, shoved it in the desk’s false bottom. Reached down on her upper thigh and rolled up the leg of her synthskin bodysuit, feeling for the subdermal polymorphine injector. Found an unnatural bulge, tumour-hard. Twisted the lump so it armed. A button sprang up, stretching the skin like a tent.

She studied the confessor’s face and realised she’d have to put on some weight. Sucked a breath. Cleared her mind.

It would hurt like a bastard – no amount of training helped that.

Three. Two. One.

The polymorphine hit her bloodstream. A tremor rattled her system. Small seizures. Controllable. Pain came, a sensation like being crushed inwards by the pressure of the deep sea. Sweat beaded out of the black synthskin suit.

Ordinarily, Sycorax could slip from one body to another with ease. But when the subjects were as physically different as the rail-thin Velso and robust Illsandor, she first needed to achieve a transitional state. Genderless, featureless, more a sculptor’s model than a human. Sycorax felt her nose retreat until it was two holes in her face. Her brow levelled out. Cheeks flattened and lips went thin. The teeth she was clenching against the pain wandered and reshuffled in her mouth. Veins retreated, making her skin grey and ashen. Velso’s close-cropped hair fell away, ready to be replaced.

Halfway there. Her most malleable form.

She reached for the black zip-kit in the desk, laid it out like a butterfly to see her tools.

A black plastek bag to isolate the body, a valve-port at one end. Aerosolised phosphorus to spray inside the bag’s valve-port, dissolving the body and clothes. Nano-scrubs for the blood. A knit-gun to repair the target’s clothes.

Now, the transformation.

She focused, held her breath. Imagined the rustling of trees on her home world.

Instead, she heard a click.

Door handle.

With the damn sniper, she realised, she hadn’t locked the door.

Rectangular light spilled across her. A wide-shouldered shadow. Sycorax twisted, grabbed the metal document case from the desk.

Rask was in the doorway, shock and fury on her scarred features. Her cut-off lascarbine was already swinging up.

Sycorax dived, shielding herself with the case. Tucking into a tight roll, she made it behind Illsandor’s huge marble desk. Las-bolts shredded the carpet and tore holes in the dead confessor.

She hunched low, back against the desk. Looked to her left. Spot fires smouldered on the bloodstained vestments. In her hand, the char of a deflected las-shot smoked on the metal case. Too close.

Sycorax popped the catches on the case. She opened it up, saw hard metal in soft velvet niches.

Inventory: a bulbous pistol, its chamber full of emerald gas; a vambrace; a blade broken in several parts; a power pack with combat webbing and collapsed cabling.

Did she have time to assemble it?

Another spatter of las-bolts hit the marble desk, throwing scorched papers across the room. A golden clock tumbled to the floor next to Sycorax, the cherubs that held the timepiece gazing at her with melted faces.

‘Cruciform One to armoury,’ Rask called. Sycorax heard the blip of a vox-bead. ‘Code Vermillion. We have an assassin pinned.’

Sycorax was about to abandon the weapon case – grab the clock as an improvised weapon and move in close – when she heard the next sentence.

‘The damn t’au killed him!’

Sycorax paused. Rask had mistaken her formless state for a xenos assassin. That might serve. That might serve well. But to preserve that, she could not be killed.

‘Truce!’ Sycorax called out, accenting her speech. ‘I will give myself up.’

She greyed her skin. Narrowed her eye sockets. Widened her mouth.

‘You said it was a peaceful delegation,’ Rask sneered.

‘It was,’ Sycorax lied. Lies came easily to her. ‘But he became zealous. Called me xenos scum. Attacked me. I had to defend myself.’

Silence at that.

With swift, professional hands Sycorax triggered the mobile power plant and slipped it on, centring it between her shoulder blades. She snatched up the shredder and connected its cable. Keyed the activation rune and watched miniature lightning swirl the gas inside the crystal prism.

‘How did you get in here? Where’s the sermon writer?’

Sycorax responded with a shot. It was un-aimed, desperate. Meant to buy time more than anything. Blind fire around the massive desk.

The neural shredder’s discharge popped her ears and rippled through the room like a shockwave, an expanding cone of roiling empyric energy that would sever neurological pathways and interrupt nerve function.

She heard Rask choke. Stagger. She must have been only clipped, or psychically shielded, or else she would have simply collapsed.

‘For the Greater Good,’ Sycorax intoned for good measure. She laid the shredder aside and began snapping the segmented phase sword together – building the blade, locking in the power node, snapping the assembly in the vambrace – when she heard Rask cough out the command she knew must be coming.

The trigger word.

‘Goneril Sanctus.’

Howls in the corridor. Revving saws. Pistons thumping with fuel injections. The rank odour of pharm-sweat, the kind that pops when an addict is one plunge from overdose.

Sycorax took a low stance, got ready to move.

The Penitent Engines stormed the room.

The first bowled the wounded Rask completely over, heedless of anything but its target.

It was Leonine. Huge in the doorway, smokestack braziers blackening the ceiling frescoes. Leonine was a woman wearing the peaked hood of a heretic, its flaps sutured roughly to her cheeks. Red fabric bracketed a mouth full of brown teeth and translucent gums. There were no eyeholes in the hood, there was no need. A Penitent Engine killed whatever was in front of it. The long exoskeleton arms made simian swipes as it advanced on the assassin.

Sycorax was unsure if the woman drove the Engine, or the Engine drove the woman. She wondered what horrible crime had condemned her to this fate, then decided she did not care. Because ending Leonine’s life would be a kindness. A steel kindness, but a kindness nonetheless.

She leapt backwards, somersaulting away from the swipe of a saw blade; landed on the seat of a plush armchair and sprang upwards again, bringing her shredder to bear as she sailed backwards.

Crack. A bolt of lightning in the gas chamber. Another blast of unreality rent the air, boiling the devotional paint on Leonine’s flesh and curling her purity seals to ash.

She kept coming. Penitent Engines were monstrous things. Torture devices as well as weapons of war. The pilot’s neural pathways were already sundered, and even with its inmate limp and dead, the exoskeleton would continue the massacre.

Sycorax landed and weaved to the side as Leonine continued her charge, one stamping metal foot pulping the corpse of the cleric she was created to defend.

The Engine had no direction now, no target. It simply ploughed forward in the blindness of half-death, scything through anything in its way. Gilded wood chips flew as it carved through the confessor’s throne. The ambulatory desk shrieked as a saw chewed through its legs.

Sycorax ducked under the sweep of one massive arm and was past.

Behind her, she heard the overload-crackle of the Engine hitting the triple-layer refractor field and shorting it, filling the air with a smell like burned flesh and welded metal. Screams rose from the praying crowd below as the huge machine hit the railing and toppled over the balcony.

The shorting refractor field was trying to cycle, re-establish itself, but failing. It lit the room in a flashing strobe of too-bright white that made things move wrongly, in staccato. Taurus entered the room, one huge claw crimping the doorway as it levered itself inside.

Flash.

Taurus the man arched his back, wrist-thick tubes of magenta liquid pumping into his eyes. Exoskeleton arms raised in threat.

Flash.

A chainblade arm big as a tank barrel swept down at her.

Flash.

Sycorax leapt over it, levelling her shredder at point-blank range. Pulled the trigger.

Flash.

Nothing happened; she saw the power cable dangling, severed during her duck under Leonine’s sweeping arm. She saw the chainblade swinging back.

Flash.

She dived, chainblade passing so close she felt the reverberating air on the back of her neck as she dodged under it. A handspring over the desk, a quick drop, and she took shelter on the other side.

Nothing but light and sound in this room. The sizzling, intermittent flare-light of the malfunctioning refractor field. A howling chainblade and the hard metal sound of a pincer claw on marble. Her only protection was the Engine’s single-mindedness, its instinct to hack through the desk rather than go around.

Chainblade met stone. A corner of the desk dropped away. Orange sparks fountained from each strike in great fan arcs, each blow producing a high-pitched sound that lanced her eardrums. The smell of glowing metal and hot stone filled her flattened nostrils.

The blade shed hooked teeth. They rebounded off the wall and high ceiling, falling like sleet on Sycorax. She made herself small, stabbed back with her phase sword when she saw an opening. Whatever damage she was doing, she realised – at least what little she could see in the strobing light – was superficial. Sycorax knew she was doomed. Knew she could not get close enough to land a killing blow. No one could beat a Penitent Engine once it closed the distance.

The battered desk began giving way. One clawed hand gripped the side for purchase, digging into the skull-faced cherubs supporting the writing surface. The other plunged down on the other side, stabbing with the whirring chainblade. It penetrated the floor to her right, spraying Sycorax with wood shavings and carpet fibre.

It withdrew.

She rolled right, the chainblade plunging again to sink deep in the floor where she’d just been. She gasped as saw teeth parted her synthskin suit and ripped a finger width into her leg. Blood seeped hot from her thigh; stained the carpet, ran to where her knee met the ground.

Then she saw it.

The phosphorus spray. The cylinder of smokeless burn-chemical, meant to dissolve bodies and incriminating clothes. It lay within reach, scattered there by the Engine’s relentless assault.

She grabbed it up, twisted, pointed it at the leering tube-eyed face of Taurus.

Flash.

A cone of spray dusted the penitent.

Flash.

Skin bubbled. Tubes ruptured. Pastel pharm-cocktails ran down his face like a blanket of tears.

Flash.

Lenses blackened on the automated targeting optics. Evasion protocols went into effect. The Engine rocked backwards.

Flash.

Sycorax was in the air, vaulting off the desk, crackling phase sword raised for the strike.

Flash.

It plunged directly into Taurus’ head. She grabbed purchase on the Engine and held on like a grox-rider, stabbing over and over. Severing nerve cables. Piercing optic lenses. Rupturing hydraulics and smashing pharm-phials. She stabbed and stabbed, phase blade passing in and out of reality as it sank into the monstrous amalgam of machine and flesh. She stabbed so deep her clenched fist bruised against hard metal, so deep the tip of the phase sword emerged out of the Engine’s back. She kept stabbing.

Long arms, flailing and revving, could not reach her. Engines were engineered that way, so the pilot could not end their torment through suicide.

Control avenues cut, the Penitent Engine stumbled backwards, pitched over, fell.

Sycorax rode it all the way to the ground. Its bulk splintered the polished wood of the floor, revealing ugly rockcrete beneath.

She flexed her battered sword hand, feeling the pulverised knuckles underneath her glove.

A single moment to breathe, then she saw movement and sprang backwards into a fighting stance.

Rask held her power sword point-first in a duelling guard. It was a thin blade, its swept hilt speaking to the traditions of honour combat on this feudal world. The neural shredder – or just the proximity of its beam – had scrambled her hard. Blood trailed from her nose and one ear, prominent against her white skin in the strobing light.

‘Weapon down,’ Rask growled.

Beyond her, through the open door, Sycorax could see Apostolic Guardsmen rushing down the corridor. The only way out.

Rask slammed her palm on the sealing rune and the plasteel double doors slammed shut.

‘Wish me for yourself?’ Sycorax asked, hoping her t’au accent was passable. She hadn’t studied, and improvisation was just a fancy word for bluffing.

‘Maybe,’ Rask smiled. Sycorax had never seen that before. It was a vinegar thing. ‘Or maybe we come to an arrangement.’

‘Your master is dead.’

‘Would’ve happened sooner or later.’ Rask shrugged. ‘If not you, the High Lords of Terra. Besides, who wants to have a master, when they can be the master? Looks to me, you and the confessor had a disagreement. Fine. His grift would only take him so far. Open heresy? Turn the planet over to the t’au? It invites an Imperial invasion. But play this right, and we both get what we want. You’re after the resources, yeah? I take emergency powers, root out the xenos agents who killed our beloved confessor. Makes me look legitimate. Meanwhile, every quarter-cycle I send whatever you want – ore, promethium, labourers – out to the disused landing fields in the provinces. You send some human freighter agents to take them off our hands. And no Inquisition or Assassinorum dogging our steps.’

‘Very accommodating,’ said Sycorax. ‘There’s only one issue.’

‘Oh?’

‘I am the Assassinorum.’

Power fields clashed, popping and sizzling as Rask parried the thrust. Sycorax drew an envenomed stiletto in her off-hand and slid it under the captain’s guard, but it bent against the carapace breastplate and the captain broke the thin blade with a chop.

Rask was good, a product of the best mercenary academies in the sector. And her long rapier had reach on the short stabbing blade of the phase sword, which was designed for ambush rather than open combat.

Still, none of that would have mattered if Sycorax were fresh. But her brawl with the Penitent Engines had drained her and blood loss was affecting her speed. It was all she could do to avoid being hit.

The whickering blade forced Sycorax’s phase sword all over the place, wheeling it up and over, locking it with its swept hilt. If not for the blade’s xenos material, Rask would have snapped it twice within seconds. Instead, the hard twists merely bent the quillons of Rask’s handguard.

Sycorax felt herself retreating under the hail of counter-thrusts. Razor-edged power fields lashed by her, forcing her to dodge and weave as the long rapier quested for her. Pain lanced down her left forearm as she used it to divert a blow aimed at her abdomen, leaving a wicked gash from elbow to wrist. Her synthskin sleeve detected blood and tightened to staunch the flow.

Rask laughed, boxing her into the balcony, forcing Sycorax back until the marble railing with its velvet banner was at her spine. Sycorax could hear the whum-whum-whum of the misfiring triple refractor field as it cycled on and off.

‘I know what you are, shape-changer. But the crowds down there, they don’t. Imagine what they’ll think as they watch me kill the xenos assassin that ended their confessor.’

Sycorax caught the downward stroke on her sword’s vambrace, the blade digging deep into the sparking circuits. Its hum died, power node winking out, blade phasing permanently into reality – dead metal.

Rask forced her backwards, leaning on her so the twin blades bracketed her throat. The rapier’s spitting power field filled her nostrils with the smell of cooked metal. The cycling power field behind her head thrummed in her ears.

She blocked it out, stared into Rask’s eyes.

And saw the horror in the mercenary’s face, as Sycorax’s features flowed and rearranged to mirror the captain’s. Every duelling scar. Every freckle and frown line.

Sycorax saw the stunned fascination, felt the woman recoil in disgust, the pressure of her sword lifting.

And Sycorax made her move. She grabbed the bottom of the carapace breastplate and hauled while shoving the power sword upwards, bending backwards at a spine-breaking angle as she threw the captain over her head…

Directly into the cycling force field.

Rask had a moment to scream before the faint blue fields snapped on, dropping like a triple guillotine, segmenting and cauterising before they disappeared again.

Sycorax let the body go, allowing it to collapse, twitching, at her feet.

Rask’s face had disappeared by inches, fluttering like autumn leaves to the crowd below.

When the Apostolic Guard overrode the door seal, they found a charnel house. The confessor – identifiable only by his vestments – murdered. One Penitent Engine wrecked. Their captain had rushed out, giving orders, but was then found dead, skull unmasked.

No one knew how the xenos assassin had escaped. Not through the door or the balcony – it would have been seen – and the air vents were hardly larger than a hymnal.

Elsewhere, the fighting raged. The t’au delegation held out for an hour, plasma weapons cutting down anyone that approached their chambers – until the rocket launchers arrived.

The Tower of St Goneril was treacherous, unstable. Engineers had been right to close it. One wrong foot could send a man to his death on the crumbling staircases – six had died just trying to assess the damage.

Sycorax found the going slow, even though she was trained to recognise the booby traps that the Vindicare had placed among the crumbling ruins. Here, a taut cable leading to a flechette mine dusted with rockcrete powder. There a caltrop smeared with nerve toxin.

Admirable tradecraft. The hallmark of a professional.

Which is what bothered her. This mission had been strange from the outset. Its parameters had not troubled her on the briefing-slate, but once embroiled she’d increasingly harboured doubts. It rode a line.

To impersonate a heretic was no sin – a standard part of the temple’s remit. But to continue an anti-Imperial coup for months? That was unheard of. If not a violation of her vows, then as near to one as to make the distinction immaterial.

Had the bullet, in fact, been meant for the confessor and her both? Was the Vindicare a rogue, or was she?

The shadow-haunted bell tower looked out on blue twilight, its arches underlit by the fires burning in the streets as the Industry Lords took the streets back from the panicked Confessionists.

Sycorax saw the shooting position immediately, a hide built from rubble and swept clear of rock dust. Fading light glinted dull on brass, and she crouched to inspect it.

The Exitus rifle casing stood on its end, twice as long as her thumb and wide as a shotgun shell, open mouth pointed at the ceiling.

Not fallen, placed. The Vindicare always took their casings with them on exfil.

She picked it up and turned it over, saw its detonation cap stamped in the shape of a skull. Saw the imprint of a customised firing pin, one that had punched a crosshair over the skull when it struck.

As she looked, a data-card the size of a thumbnail tumbled out of the hollow casing. It nearly blew away before she snatched it off the floor.

She slipped it into her wrist slate, and ran the decryption sequence.

Runes danced. Settled. Locked into two words.

Operation Vendetta.

About the Author

Robert Rath is a freelance writer from Honolulu who is currently based in Hong Kong. Though mostly known for writing the YouTube series Extra History, his credits also include numerous articles and a book for the U.S. State Department. ‘The Garden of Mortal Delights’ is his first story for Black Library.

An extract from Resurrection: The Horusian Wars.

The dust wind sang as it blew through the ranks of silent Titans. Cables rattled against armour plates, and war banners rippled and snapped in the rising gale. Beyond the dust clouds the last light of the sun was fading to an ochre bruise.

Koleg paused in the shadow of a Battle Titan and looked up. The machine towered into the billowing dust. Vast guns jutted from its shoulders and hung in place of arms. A web of chains bound it to the ground. Koleg could see red beacon lights winking high on the Titan’s carapace. The wind gusted and the chains creaked as the god-machine flexed against its bindings. Koleg lowered his gaze. The shadows of more Titans hung against the curtains of dust. Machines from three Legions had come to the muster, and now stood on the plains as the storms rolled in. Beyond the god-machines, taller than any of them, stood the Reliquary Tower. Generations of pilgrims had raised its walls, block by block, until it stood higher than the mountains that rose behind it. A statue of a robed and haloed woman capped the tower’s top, sword reaching up to the shrouded sky. The fires burning in the statue’s eyes blinked as the murk rippled across its face.

‘Halt and identify!’

Koleg turned at the sound of the voice. Ten figures closed on him, spears levelled over the top of linked tower shields. Lightning crackled around the spear tips. Eye slits glowed in closed helms. Koleg glanced at them, as his mask-visor detected the active weapons and blinked to crimson, outlining each of the warriors in amber.

Secutarii, thought Koleg, the guardian companions of the Titan Legions.

He nodded at them.

‘Identify,’ came the voice from the warrior at the centre of the shield-wall. Static growled against the wind as a speaker amplified the words. ‘You have ten seconds to comply.’

Koleg nodded again, and raised his hand, palm up. The lightning wreathing the spear tips crackled. He tapped the ring on his second finger, and a cone of light leapt from his hand. The stylised ‘I’ of the Inquisition rotated in the blue glow, glittering as its image caught the dust blowing through the projection. The lightning vanished from around the spear tips and the shield wall parted. One of the warriors stepped forward, silver weave cloak snapping in the gusting air.

‘Your pardon,’ said the secutarius. ‘You were not logged as having crossed the security cordon.’

Koleg snapped off the projection. He stood, hands in the pockets of his storm coat.

‘No,’ he said.

Koleg’s eyes twitched up. Shapes were descending through the dust-covered sky, lights blinking on tails and wing tips. His visor zoomed, picking out the silhouettes of the aircraft in glowing amber lines. A booming roar split the air as the chained Titans sounded their warhorns in greeting. Koleg felt the wind shear as the wall of sound punched through the rising gale.

Koleg watched the shuttles and gunships sweep low overhead. He clenched his jaw and his vox connection buzzed to life in his ear. He paused, listening to the ping and clatter as encryption cyphers activated.

‘This is Sentinel,’ he said. ‘The last pilgrim has arrived.’

‘We hear you,’ came the reply. ‘Join us.’

‘Acknowledged,’ said Koleg, and the vox-link clicked to silence. Above him the gunships were banking to circle above the ground at the Reliquary Tower’s base. One of the shuttles slid to a halt in mid-air, attitudinal thrusters burning orange to violet. Koleg began to walk towards the landing field, coat snapping in the wind. Dust lightning cracked in the gloom above the Titans’ backs. Arcs of white light ran down the nearest god-machine.

‘You should find cover, sir,’ called the secutarii alpha from behind him. ‘The storm’s coming.’

Koleg kept walking.

Secutarii Hoplite Alpha-34-Antimon watched the man walk into the clouds of dust. The systems in his helm cycled and tracked the man’s body heat for several seconds. The man was leaning into the wind, hands in pockets, movements purposeful but not hurried. He might have been out for a stroll rather than moving inside a vermillion-grade security cordon on a planet being used to muster a crusade-strength force. Alpha-34-Antimon did not like that; it was against the necessary order of things. The universe existed in divisions of type and authority. The nameless man in the storm coat should have been subject to the power of a greater person, and so on, until the line of authority reached the Omnissiah Incarnate himself. He should not be able to simply walk beneath sacred war engines without permission or care. He should not have been able to answer Alpha-34-Antimon’s challenge with silence.

He could, though. It was his right. He was under the protection of one of the inquisitors who were gathering in the Reliquary Tower, and that meant that he fell under no other authority.

The Inquisition was the left hand of the Emperor, a law utterly unto itself and subject to no limit or check on its authority. It stood apart, an exception to the order that bound every part of the Imperium. Its members, and by extension their servants, could do what they wanted in whatever way they wanted. If he was being honest, that lack of definition and limit bothered Alpha-34-Antimon. He had never seen an inquisitor, but he could not shed the distrust that clung to the thought of them.

In the distance the man in the storm coat was blurring behind the veil of dust. Alpha-34-Antimon turned away, and allowed his emotion-regulation implants to strip away the traces of annoyance from his thoughts.

<Unit resume patrol pattern chi-45.> The binaric command clattered across the vox-link, and the rest of the unit shifted into a diamond. He took his position amongst them, spear tilted up towards the sky. <Progress,> he signalled, and the unit walked out of the shadow of the Titan.

The wind beat against Alpha-34-Antimon’s shield. The pistons in his left arm clenched against the blows. He was not comfortable. The connection to the other secutarii units nearby was fuzzing his nerves. That was unusual. There were several hundred secutarii patrolling around the feet of the Titans. The data-link between the dispersed units passed through the god-machines, and should have been good for 21.456 kilometres in these conditions. It wasn’t though; the connection was as good as non-existent.

Alpha-34-Antimon felt a sudden surge of isolation batter his emotion-regulators.

Ball lightning flashed and rolled across the shoulders of the nearest Battle Titan. The wind was strengthening. Dust was all around the secutarii now, thick and ochre, rattling against armour plates and shields. The silhouette of another Titan emerged briefly in front of them before sinking behind the ochre veil. Static popped across Alpha-34-Antimon’s sight as his vision enhancers fought against the rushing gloom.

They had one more circuit to make before they withdrew to shelter. After that the full force of the storm would break, and nothing except the god-machines and the Sisters of Battle would remain outside.

He was forcing himself forward against the wind when something flashed in front of him: a brief fizz of brightness, and a shadow. He stopped, eye lenses whirring as they tried to focus on the rolling haze. The rest of the squad had halted with him, and he could feel their action queries queuing at the edge of the squad data-link.

<Ground level electro-discharge,> said the squad’s beta.

Alpha-34-Antimon did not reply. The flash could have been a static arc from the dust, but there had been the shadow, and for an instant he had thought it a figure standing in the dust veil, like a smudge of ink on cloth. He waited.

Nothing moved.

After eighteen seconds he signalled the rest of the squad and began to move. The data-link to the other secutarii in this area was still down. If he could not get a clear connection soon, he would have to–

<There!> the binaric cry snapped out.

And there it was again, a mass of tiny blue arcs snapping around a dark smudge in the sand storm. His eyes tried to zoom, but kept sliding off the shape as though it was not there.

<Diamond formation,> he signalled, <ready spears, fields to active.>

Light wreathed the tips of spears as the squad slid into formation. Their shields touched. The air around them shimmered. The swirling dust buffeted against the edge of impedance fields. Alpha-34-Antimon stood at the tip of the diamond, his own spear levelled at the blur of static. He could not tell how far away it was; it seemed to be both still and closing fast.

<Anomaly…>

<Anomaly…>

<Anomaly…> the sensor data blinked. He fired a priority alert signal into the data-link. It vanished into nothing.

‘Halt and identify!’ His voice roared from the speaker mounted on his chest. The wind caught the challenge and spun it away.

<Ready discharge,> he linked to the squad. The energy around the spear tips began to spiral.

A second spark-wreathed shadow appeared next to the first, then a third, then a fourth. The rational machine part of Alpha-34-Antimon had time to recognise the humanoid outlines running against the wind, and that they were not in the distance but just a few paces away.

<Fire!> he commanded. Actinic light whipped from the tips of the spears. The figures running from the storm leapt, legs bunching beneath them, strips of frayed cloth streaming behind them. Energy burned through the dust cloud, but the ragged figures were not there. Alpha-34-Antimon looked up as a figure clad in tatters leapt through the air above him. He had an instant to catch the impression of a mask of stitched cloth with torn holes for eyes. Then the attacker’s feet struck him in the chest.

His armour cracked under the force of impact. He was falling, the ragged figure descending with him. Gears in Alpha-34-Antimon’s legs screamed as they tried to keep him upright. He hit the ground. Distortion burst across his sight. The rag-swathed figure was above him, a crystal punch-blade raised to strike. Alpha-34-Antimon twisted and began to rise. The ragged figure dived sideways, rolling and stabbing back at Alpha-34-Antimon as he straightened. The punch-blade touched his impedance field in a spray of sparks. He brought his tower shield up.

Binaric screams filled Alpha-34-Antimon’s data inputs. Systems and organs in his torso were leaking blood and oil. Around him the dust wind blurred with the shadows of figures stabbing, falling, dying. His squad was dying. He could feel their data presences blinking out in his awareness.

<Attack under way, maximum threat alert,> he shouted into the data-link. Silence screamed back at him. The figure before him pivoted and backhanded its punch-blade into the shield. Alpha-34-Antimon stabbed his spear forward, but his enemy was gone, spinning wide and lashing out again and again. Lightning flared from the tower shield. Alpha-34-Antimon bunched his muscles and pistons and rammed his shield forward as the next blow fell. The figure staggered, seemed to falter, and Alpha-34-Antimon triggered the charge in his spear. He lunged.

The masked figure rolled forward as fluid and fast as water, and the punch-dagger cut through the armour of Alpha-34-Antimon’s right arm just behind his spear hand.

All sensation vanished. Silence held him. The swirl of dust around him rolled back, and he realised he must have fallen backwards onto the ground. The ochre clouds were receding down a dark tunnel.

Weak and treacherous flesh, he thought, and then those thoughts were a fading echo following him down into oblivion.

It took five minutes for the neurotoxins to finally silence his heart. The cognitive implants in his skull stopped functioning ten seconds later. By that time the rest of his squad lay beside him, their bodies already gathering shrouds of dust. Their killers had passed on, their ragged shapes blurring into the wind as they ran beneath the shadows of the chained Titans. Behind them the wind front swept in like the breath of a wrathful god.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2019 Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

Assassinorum: Divine Sanction © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2019. Assassinorum: Divine Sanction, 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: 978-1-78999-234-2

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.