The triumph of saint kat.., p.1
The Triumph Of Saint Katherine, page 1
Other stories and audio dramas featuring the Adepta Sororitas
THE BLOODIED ROSE
Danie Ware
WRECK AND RUIN
Danie Ware
THE ROSE IN ANGER
Danie Ware
SISTERS OF BATTLE: THE OMNIBUS
James Swallow
THE BOOK OF MARTYRS
Alec Worley, Phil Kelly & Danie Ware
MARK OF FAITH
Rachel Harrison
OUR MARTYRED LADY
Gav Thorpe
CELESTINE: THE LIVING SAINT
Andy Clark
EPHRAEL STERN: THE HERETIC SAINT
David Annandale
REQUIEM INFERNAL
Peter Fehervari
Other stories from the Warhammer 40,000 universe
• DAWN OF FIRE •
Book 1: AVENGING SON
Guy Haley
Book 2: THE GATE OF BONES
Andy Clark
Book 3: THE WOLFTIME
Gav Thorpe
• DARK IMPERIUM •
Book 1: DARK IMPERIUM
Book 2: PLAGUE WAR
Book 3: GODBLIGHT
Guy Haley
Contents
Cover
Backlist
Title Page
Warhammer 40,000
Prologue
Monster
Sisters
The Service of Tales
The Tale of Mina
The Tale of Lucia
The Tale of Silvana
The Tale of Arabella
The Tale of Alicia Dominica
The Tale of Avra
The Triumph of Saint Katherine
About the Author
An Extract from ‘The Book of Martyrs’
A Black Library Publication
eBook license
For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of Mankind. By the might of His inexhaustible armies a million worlds stand against the dark.
Yet, He is a rotting carcass, the Carrion Lord of the Imperium held in life by marvels from the Dark Age of Technology and the thousand souls sacrificed each day so that His may continue to burn.
To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. It is to suffer an eternity of carnage and slaughter. It is to have cries of anguish and sorrow drowned by the thirsting laughter of dark gods.
This is a dark and terrible era where you will find little comfort or hope. Forget the power of technology and science. Forget the promise of progress and advancement. Forget any notion of common humanity or compassion.
There is no peace amongst the stars, for in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.
PROLOGUE
Sororitas
‘They’ve got behind us!’
Dropping to a combat-crouch, shield in hand, Katherine strove to see through the smoke. The broken streets were filled with soot and floating grit, with fragments of fluttering banners that still smouldered at their edges.
The cultists were raving and fearless. They’d come on in a rush, torching everything and slavering as they burned. The very air seemed scorched, rippling with heat and fervency. But Katherine’s sacred armour defended her; the air she breathed was pure. She was still standing; her Sisters were still standing. The relic they bore was safe. She could not see them clearly – only the curves of their pauldrons and helmets that glittered with reflected fire – but she could hear and feel them, their closeness and unity.
Their faith, and the Litanies that carried it, echoing even now in the wake of her Sister’s warning.
‘Walk with us, O Emperor!’
‘They are taint and foulness,’ Katherine replied, her tone lit with rage. ‘And we will show them no quarter.’
Stone dust drifted in hot winds, obscuring her vision further. Beside her, her closest Sister gave a curt, merciless nod, and they kept moving. There was no need for conversation. They were the army’s heart and courage, and they knew what awaited them. Knew the death that they must deal.
‘In His name!’
Around them, they could see little. Rising convection currents confused their preysight, and the shattered streets were both endless and maze-like. Flitting like shadows, the cultists were many, gleeful with unconstrained violence. They flickered past ruined shrines and through splintered windows, round tumbled corners and across heaps of still-steaming rubble. In many places, the ancient spires and statues had crumbled completely, giving the foe cover to both advance and retreat. Unlike so many of their kind, Katherine had realised, these had tactics; they thought, planned.
And that made them dangerous.
‘Be wary,’ she told her Sisters.
‘He is with us,’ a voice answered her, unshakeable.
From somewhere close: howling. The sound was eerie, shockingly inhuman. Her skin prickling, Katherine raised a gauntlet and they stopped, trying to place its source. It circled them in waves as if their enemy had some interlinked witch-mind. As they turned to try and locate it, it grew louder, becoming a battering, an onslaught of pure noise. It assaulted their ears, tried to stick its curious, taloned fingers into their thoughts.
Katherine prayed, her tone a smoulder of determination.
‘Walk with us, O Emperor. Bring us your rage, your strength, your light.’
And there, upon the heels of her prayer, a vox-bark of stern orders – the Jaguar himself, Major Owai Haro of the 16th Gavera. Command HQ were behind the Sisters, but they, too, were responding to the cultist incursion.
‘Platoons one, three, five, defence point delta.’ Haro was one of those steel-haired infantry veterans who knew exactly how to manoeuvre his company. ‘Haija, I want every Sentinel we have!’
‘Sir!’
‘Walk with us, O Emperor. Bring us the righteousness of wrath!’ She prayed for their souls, for their weapons, for the hammer of their strength. She prayed for the spirits of the Sentinels and their pilots. For–
‘Renagi, give me range!’ Haro, again. ‘And fire!’
Heavy weapons bellowed, cutting off her thoughts. There were mortar detonations, the cracks and rumbles of falling stone, thicker billows of smoke, eddied by the resulting currents. The ground shook.
The cultists’ howling climbed to a shriek. In defiance, there came the barks of sergeants’ orders and the crack of the troops’ las-fire. Scarlet flashes, streaking out through the murk. The mortar thumped again, loud through the thickening air. She heard the faint servo-whine of the running Sentinels. The smoke stirred again, the floating fabric whipping to spirals.
With a roar, another building came down.
‘They move left!’ a Sister’s voice came over the vox. ‘We must stay with them!’
Another Sister shouted her battle-rage, the sound of her hymnal an outright challenge. More howling came in its wake. Daring her. Daring all of them. The smoke grew thicker, choked with soot.
Her visor clogging, Katherine repeated, ‘Bear left! We must keep the relic with company command!’
Agreements returned to her like prayers, and the Sisters were moving in a low, swift run, their purity seals fluttering and the relic suspended between them. Armoured boots stamped on cratered roads, the noise their celebration of His presence. The shadows over their heads were their floating cherubim, prayers carried aloft, their wings wafting the darkness to a deeper, stirring gloom.
A chime of ancient hymnal rang from their vox-hailers, loud enough to reach the soldiers around them.
‘From the lightning and the tempest!’
‘Advance by sections, give covering fire!’ A sergeant’s vox-shout was barely audible over the racket. Glimpsed between broken walls, the moving platoons were no more than flak-armoured shades, tiny, red-firing spectres that ran, and dropped, and ran again.
A Sentinel came past them, eerily quiet at full speed. In the vox, a Sister cursed. They kept moving, staying with the main force. But–
‘Hold!’ The order came from another of the Sisters’ unit, her voice suddenly tense.
They had come to the end of their cover. Ahead of them lay an open, flagstoned square. In its centre stood a vast plinth and two stone feet, both broken off at the ankle. Behind this rose the soot-stained front of a mighty cathedral, its towers shattered, its steps cracked and stained. Its front doors had been wrenched from their hinges and cast aside; its mosaic flooring was pitted with explosive damage. Katherine could just see its pews, piled roughly into a central, defensive barrier–
Without warning, the cultists’ yammer fell away, leaving a sudden, hollow silence. At the outer edge of the building’s forecourt, the Sisters stopped. Listening.
Somewhere, lasers cracked and spat. The mortar boomed again. Another building crashed down, all thunder and dust. Screams cut like glass, human and mortal and laden with dread.
Around the Sisters, nothing moved.
Chills went down Katherine’s back – but she ignored them. He was with her and she was not afraid. Behind the huge feet, the front wall of the building was carved into intricate archways, layers of designs that radiated outwards from its empty door. Sai
Instinctively, the unit pulled closer together, shoulder to shoulder, all facing outwards and defending the relic at their centre. Over them, the cherubim still hovered, sinister with vigilance. Bell-tower hollows watched them, each one an enemy eye. The stone was covered in grime, like the black smudges of some spreading disease.
‘Throne.’ One of the Sisters muttered a curse. ‘I know they’re there…’
‘Hold,’ Katherine told her. ‘He is with us.’
Another Sister voiced the Litany, her words laden with tightly controlled fury. ‘Our Emperor, deliver us!’
‘There!’ The youngest of them extended her arm, pointing. The cherubim shifted, their banners flapping in the heat.
Katherine stared, her heart in her throat.
The cultists were not in the pews. The air wavered, and they were suddenly visible, lurking behind the plinth, and amongst the edges of the outer buildings. There were a hundred of them, a thousand. Many wore robes, which danced in the heat-
currents, burned or torn at their edges. Others wore fragments of scrounged gear, a lot of it Militarum, some of it even bearing the Gavera’s distinctive Jaguar insignia. And there were things with them, things looming, things stalking on stick-thin legs, things with eyes and teeth in all the wrong places. Some of the daemon-things had mandibles, or great jaws dripping with slaver. Others had bloated bellies, muscled arms, hands that dragged on the floor or that ended in pincers or claws.
The Sisters were surrounded. The monster throng had stopped, letting them see it, count it, fear it.
‘From plague, temptation and war!’
There was no need to call an order – without hesitation, six bolt pistols opened fire. Weapons barked, rounds howled, detonations of flesh and ooze splashed at the symbol-gouged stone.
Dozens of monsters died, dozens more fell injured and screaming. The noise blended with the cries of the still-moving. The Sisters added noise of their own, the harmonised chime of their hymns drowning out all but the loudest of the incoming horde.
Pressure began to build in Katherine’s mind. Again that sensation that someone – something – was trying to gain entry to her thoughts, trying to prise open her skull like some box of ill-gotten treasure.
‘Our Emperor, deliver us!’
She cried her prayer and kept firing. Beside her, a Sister stopped to change her magazine, and the reload flowed around the formation in perfect synchronisation, each Sister in her turn, no words being spoken.
He was with them. He spoke through their movements, their voices. They were the heart of His army; its soul and its mettle, and they would stand at its very core.
Pistols and voices howled His rage.
‘From the scourge of the Kraken!’
But the things cared not for His wrath; they were still coming. As more fell, hundreds seemed to take their place as if the foe knew that if they took down this unit of Sisters, then the entire force would falter and eventually fail.
And they, too, moved with a bizarre and fluid rhythm.
In the vox, a Sister said, ‘We were correct, there is a single focus to this force. Something controlling them.’ Her voice was low, with the odd, guttural catch of one unused to speaking. ‘We will break through the enemy lines. Find it, take it down.’
Katherine looked for a break in their ranks, a flaw, a figure in command, but there was nothing, only the onslaught of mutants that came ever closer, and yet more creatures that piled in from behind. Most had crude hand-weapons, some bore spurs of bone that stuck from their flesh. But there were others with–
‘Defend the relic!’
Katherine did not know who had spoken. The monsters were upon them now and there was a colossal, mutant beast standing over her, its thin legs bowed, its gangling arms muscled and with fists like hammers. It drove a blunt, fingerless hand at her and she moved, raising her bolt pistol and shooting it clean through the eye.
But behind it came another, and a third.
‘We must break out,’ the quiet-voiced Sister said. ‘Find this commander.’
But they could not. They were completely encircled, each fighting for her life, her faith. Voices raised in the hymnal, a blend of song and shout, and laden with vehemence. From somewhere, the barks of the platoon sergeants could still be heard. Soot still clogged Katherine’s visor. She could not spare a hand to wipe it away. Instead, she shot and shot again, brought two more creatures crashing down. Around the Sisters, the wall of death was beginning to grow.
And then, to her side, a Sister staggered to her knees, buried below the creature that had leapt upon her.
‘Stand!’ Katherine bellowed. She shot the beast in the face, kicked it aside, then covered her Sister with her shield.
The Sister was regaining her feet, but the monsters had seen the breach and they were there already, crowding at the gap. The other Sisters tightened their defence, moving sideways, but it was too late. One of the creatures had ducked through and was reaching for the relic.
‘Our Emperor, deliver us!’
Howling, Katherine did the only thing she could.
She turned to take the monster down, but in doing so, she exposed her flank to the pack that now filled the concourse. Only for a moment, but it was enough.
A bone blade went clean through the side of her gorget. Into her throat. Gagging, her own blood hot on her skin, in her mouth, she crashed to the floor.
But that could not be. She must stand, get back to her feet. She must…
Thumping feet, close, that familiar servo-whine. The ground shook. A boom of heavy weapons and the front wall of the cathedral crumpled like parchment, its defiled saints lost.
Through the billowing mess, the Sentinel was half-unseen, its head tracking back and forth, its weapons firing. Beside where Katherine struggled for life, the downed Sister was back on her feet, shouting, fighting furiously.
Katherine tried, she tried to get up. She tried to get her boots under her. But the wound was open and fluid coated her gorget and pauldron; she could feel it, thick and sticky down the inside of her armour. Her vision was blurring, her legs would not hold her. Her knees were like water.
‘From the blasphemy of the fallen…’
She must stand.
The Sentinel stalked forwards. The rest of the front wall came down in a thunder of rubble.
And why could she smell incense?
Her Sisters were shouting, but the vox was hollow, a world away. Above her, the sky and the cherubim spiralled in patterns. The smoke made no sense. Where was that smell coming from? She needed to understand it, that warm, soft scent of the Convent Prioris, of the great cathedral, and home…
And then, she saw Him.
Monster
Lance-Corporal Gideon Mase had a lho-stick, a packet of rations, and a mess tin of recaff. Well, not ‘recaff’ exactly. They’d mixed it with something, and it tasted like boiled mud… but that was what the quartermaster issued, and moaning was heresy.
Mase’s little hexi-stove was still burning, a tiny blue flame like some miniature beacon, and he’d sat his weary arse down on the boot-pounded dirt beside it. Broken buildings towered all around him, many of them heaped into makeshift defences, but here, the ground was flat.
He took a long drag on the stick, and blew out a plume of grey. It was late, and finally quiet, thank the Emperor. The sky was dark, and drifting, settling clouds of soot and stone dust were everywhere, getting in his eyes, his mouth, his hair, his kit.
He took another drag on the stick, and coughed up black gunk.
‘Nice.’ His squadmate Kewa nudged him with a battered, camo-covered elbow. She was a small, wiry thing, her eyes tired, her face dirty. Like him, she had the rich, purple-black skin of Uvodia III, and her hair, once shorn and dark, now more resembled the tangled filth of Kiros. And of this endless bloody war.
His recaff was too hot, and he scalded himself on the metal. ‘Shit!’
The 16th Gavera, known to themselves as the ‘Jags’, had been here on Kiros for almost a Solar year, fighting back and forth, and back and forth; a grinding, endless tedium that never seemed to change. The foe attacked, slobbering forwards, screaming and shrieking; the Jags skirmished out and drove them back. They were an infantry company, stationed on the outermost edge of what had been Kiros’ capital city, and way too bloody far from home.
