Helbrecht knight of the.., p.1
Helbrecht Knight Of The Throne, page 1
By the same author
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Other great Warhammer 40,000 fiction featuring the Space Marines
INDOMITUS
Gav Thorpe
• DAWN OF FIRE •
Book 1: AVENGING SON
Guy Haley
Book 2: THE GATE OF BONES
Andy Clark
Book 3: THE WOLFTIME
Gav Thorpe
Book 4: THRONE OF LIGHT
Guy Haley
• DARK IMPERIUM •
Guy Haley
Book 1: DARK IMPERIUM
Book 2: PLAGUE WAR
Book 3: GODBLIGHT
THE HELWINTER GATE
Chris Wraight
SILENT HUNTERS
Edoardo Albert
blacklibrary.com | games-workshop.com
Contents
Cover
Backlist
Warhammer 40,000
Helbrecht: Knight of the Throne
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
An Extract from ‘Dawn of Fire: Avenging Son’
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
A DEMIGOD’S DISPLEASURE
Then
The knight knelt in the heart of sanctity.
The vast ship was a sacred place – a fragment of a bygone age given leave to sail the stars, crafted in a time of wonders when mankind had still borne out its primal ambition. Such immense engines of war were known as Gloriana. Where other vessels of humanity’s conquest of the stars had been brief candles, these were infernos. Potent beyond reckoning, they would burn and fight and die until the ending of time.
They were few now. Precious. Holy in their rarity.
Of those that remained, there were none that could rival the Eternal Crusader’s forthright mastery of the void.
High Marshal Helbrecht bowed his head in prayer. He meditated upon the holy space that he occupied. He dwelt upon the injuries sustained by his plate. His armour bore the scars of dozens of battles, so relentless and all-consuming that it would have taken an entire team of armourers weeks to return it to full functionality. Time he did not have to spare. He stank of blood and smoke, of sacred oils and the machine-reek of constant movement in powered plate. His face was streaked with soot and an ashen cross had been daubed upon his forehead, just above the brazen circlet that graced his brow. His armour was heavy now, a weight of which he was intimately aware. Muscle-fibre bundles bunched with his subtle agitation, rippling with the exaggerated movements of his breathing.
But he did not feel soiled in the heart of the great war vessel. If anything he felt deserving of his presence there. A right he had earned in fire and blood.
His hands clenched involuntarily and he drove his armoured knuckles into the perfect marble of the floor. Banners swayed at the edges of his vision, speaking of thousands upon thousands of crusades waged down the long years of their unending struggle. The Eternal Crusade. The undertaking of Dorn.
‘That is why I fight,’ he whispered, the words rendered into a prayer by his surroundings. ‘In your name. In the name of all those who have gone before me. In the God-Emperor’s light.’
He raised his head and examined the plinth before him. Across the stone lay the sword.
The blade was a thing of glory. It, like the ship it occupied, had been forged in a lost age. Risen from the fires of grief and shame to be borne again with duty and faith behind it. A sword of heroes. The sword of Sigismund. The Sword of the High Marshals. Even now, so long in the keeping of the blade, he found he almost could not look upon it without weeping. It was a mighty thing. Too long and heavy for a mortal man to wield – perhaps too much of a burden for many of the Astartes brotherhoods who roamed the stars.
His weapon. His burden.
In this sword was embodied the many facets of command within the Chapter. To wield it was to stand as first amongst equals. Master of the Eternal Crusade.
He allowed his fingers to close around the hilt as he rose to his feet and drew it up from its plinth. The blade caught the light of the stasis fields that surrounded it, dancing with the refracted radiance of other plinths holding other relics. The blade was keen and well tended where his own appearance was still ramshackle. He had cleaned and oiled it himself, with reverence and due faith.
‘With faith and fidelity I wield the weapon of Sigismund, instrument of the past and key to the future. I hold the Chapter’s legacy as I direct its course. I do this in your name, O beloved Emperor, that you might see my deeds and judge them by your holy metric. On the day of judgement, when death finally claims me, I shall stand before you and let the worth of my soul be weighed. That I might dwell at the right hand of the Throne, to serve and fight forever.’
He bowed his head again. His lips continued to move as he prayed before the blade. In his ruin he had never been more glorious, nor truer in his faith.
A chime echoed from behind him. It sounded once and rang through the open, empty space of the temple. He ignored it. He continued his recitations and kept his eyes locked upon the blade.
The chime came again. And again. It grew more insistent until he finally rose to his feet. He sighed. Helbrecht had dismissed even the Chaplain brotherhood from their attendance within the temple. He had wished to undertake his obeisance in private, that only the God-Emperor might perceive and judge him.
‘Come,’ he said at last, and turned towards the vast doors of the chamber.
The doors opened, casting the low crimson of candlelight and the dull glow of lumens into the temple. Centule, a Chapter-serf, bowed low.
‘My lord,’ he said softly, his voice quaking, ‘He is here. The primarch is come.’
Helbrecht looked at Centule for a long moment, then sheathed the great weapon and bowed one last time before he went to face down destiny.
He received the primarch in his sanctum, the Galleria Astra, still rimed with the detritus of war. He had turned the arming servitors, serfs and Neophytes – all eager to attend upon him and see to his armour – away, preferring to meet the primarch as a commander fresh from war. By will alone he stilled the tremble in his flesh and allowed himself to exhale. This was a singular moment. One he had yearned for and dreaded in equal measure. To see a fragment of the exalted past walk the stars anew; beholding a son of the God-Emperor Himself as he strode the galaxy. The bringer of wrath and flame. The fury of the heavens kindled.
It is the Emperor’s will that he return to us now. As the galaxy splits and evil walks abroad, so too must the glories of the Great Crusade stir anew. Would that it had been our own gene-sire. To see Rogal Dorn once again at the galaxy’s helm…
Yet it was not him. Not the great Praetorian who had raised Terra’s ramparts in ages gone past. It was Guilliman. The statesman. The Avenging Son. A being whom many now called regent, and viewed as the Emperor’s incarnate will.
Helbrecht wondered what it would be like to look upon the primarch. Would he be as the statues were? He wondered if he might pick out the familial resemblance between Guil
The doors slid open with a hiss and Helbrecht allowed himself to look up. To know.
To gaze upon the primarch was truly a thing of wonder. He was not a numinous thing of light and fire but neither was he stolidly material. He was a storm of cold blue and gold, bound into the shape of a man. It almost hurt to look at him. It was not simply the superlative craft of his armour, but the skill worked into his very flesh. This was a being who had been sculpted by the Emperor’s own hand. The primarch had fought and bled with the Master of Mankind Himself; upholding His truth, enforcing His laws, and shaping what the Imperium had become down the long marches of darkness. He was a fragment of the very soul of the human species, carved out and presented as an exemplar.
Helbrecht looked up at his face, the stern patrician features, and beneath that gaze he stood taller, as surely as any initiate upon the battlefield spurred to zealous action by the attention of a marshal.
The primarch spoke in a rumble, in a voice as different from Helbrecht’s as a Space Marine’s was from a mortal man.
‘You are the one they call Helbrecht? The High Marshal of the Black Templars?’
‘I have that honour,’ Helbrecht said as he went to one knee.
‘I was there when your brotherhood was founded,’ Guilliman said. ‘When my brother eventually yielded and allowed his Legion to be broken.’ A smile flickered across his lips. As he strode forward he seemed more at home in the great chamber than Helbrecht – occupying a space which had been intended for his brother and slowly repurposed for his heirs. ‘Your forebear, Sigismund, I fear he would have fought the edicts of the Codex forever had circumstances not intervened as they had.’
‘You honour me, my lord. It is as the God-Emperor wills that you return to us now.’ Helbrecht looked up, just quickly enough to catch the wrinkle of distaste which graced the demigod’s face. He had heard the rumours – that the divinity of the Emperor and His primarchs sat ill with the Avenging Son. A test, perhaps. A sign of the strange mechanisms by which the galaxy turned. Most other brotherhoods of the Adeptus Astartes shunned the Imperial Creed, true enough, but the primarch had walked in the age of the Emperor’s glory and gazed upon His eternal entombment.
‘Rise,’ Guilliman said, to dispel the fleeting moment of awkwardness. ‘It is enough that bureaucrats and functionaries greet me upon their knees – it is no place for a warrior.’
Helbrecht stood. ‘Forgive my appearance. The days since the opening of the Rift have been unkind. We have fought and we have bled. Against the greenskins whom we pursued and against those worlds which have proven unworthy of His light. They turned, and for those sins they were burned clean. Now we are again upon the path. The fleets of the crusades gather and they will hunt the Beast of Armageddon until death finally claims it.’
‘The Beast of Armageddon…’ Guilliman tilted his head as he considered the words. For a being such as him even a minor gesture was loaded with potency and meaning. ‘You mean to pursue this course?’
‘I am set upon it,’ Helbrecht admitted. ‘There has been too much blood spilled by the alien. These are nights of blood and fire. Madness walks abroad, but I know my duty. The crusades we have launched… those that have been fought and for which brothers have died… Ash Wastes. Void. Helsreach. The Beast must answer. I would see its head taken and mounted upon a pike that all might see the ruin which befalls those who challenge the Throne. There can be no compromise. No peace. Only judgement and death. That is what the enemies of mankind deserve.’
‘And I do not doubt that you are well suited to delivering it, but I would urge caution. I have absorbed the tactical circumstances of every warzone, across every segmentum, known to us before the Rift opened. The Beast is not alone amidst the pantheon of horrors set against us. Each tears wounds in our galaxy, gouting the Imperium’s blood into the void. I would ask for your aid.’
Helbrecht was silent. He could sense the challenge in the primarch’s words but would not rise to it. ‘Then ask it,’ he said. ‘Ask and I shall consider your request in my capacity as High Marshal and by the will of the Emperor.’
‘You speak of the battles that have been fought. Helsreach, the Void and Ash Wastes crusades. I have studied the history of many Chapters and many wars as I seek to heal my father’s beleaguered empire. I would give you new objectives in place of the old. Service in lieu of vengeance. Aurilla, Ophelia VII, Dachsus, Orteg III. They, along with dozens of other shrine worlds, are within reach of your gathering forces. A hammer blow against those who would strike against the Imperium’s morale.’
O, Emperor, how you test me. How you offer me an easier path and tempt me with what seems to be the very voice of righteousness.
‘You speak with wisdom, yet the opening of the Rift is opportunity for the Beast to escape. Even now it flees from our justice, to burrow into whichever crevice will hide it. It will spawn in the darkness until its hordes come again. And again. And again. No more. We have its scent and we will fight to burn it from the galaxy.’
‘You would choose vengeance over duty?’
Helbrecht slammed his bionic fist against the chamber’s desk. Primarch or no, none questioned his honour without reproach. ‘I would choose duty and honour. My warriors gather – numbers enough for our task but far from enough to minister to every world that cries for succour. The defenders of such worlds bear their own aegis of faith. Sisters of Battle, Militarum regiments, other Chapters who are closer. The Emperor has set this task before me – as His servant, should I not do His will?’
‘There are many amongst the Ecclesiarchy,’ Guilliman said, and Helbrecht could see the ripple of bemused frustration play across his features, ‘who would insist that I am the very instrument of His will. If not in the manner of my perceived divinity then certainly in my capacity as Imperial Regent.’
‘We are not the lay preachers of the Imperial Creed to be awed by signs and wonders. We are Templars, my lord Guilliman. We stand, black against the darkness, bearing the righteous fire of the Emperor’s wrath. We cast down false idols, break the backs of recalcitrant civilisations, and sear the alien from the flesh of the Emperor’s galaxy. That is our duty. Our honour. Our lives.’
‘It is strange to find you so.’ The primarch shook his head. Such a peculiar gesture to observe, to note, as though a mountain were shaking its head. ‘In you I see so much of the Great Crusade as it was, yet changed beyond recognition. Your creed is in opposition to everything intended by that era. We wrought enlightenment, not superstition. We were the light that they required to lead them out of the darkness of Old Night.’ He sighed. ‘I fear that you are the very same chains that would bind them.’
Helbrecht stood taller. ‘There are few other forces that have fought for as long or as hard as our sacred brotherhood. We follow the example laid down by Sigismund as he fought before the walls of the Palace. He was the exemplar of our bloodline. We take not a single step backwards. We fight on. Across the galaxy with faith and fury, we fight. Only His word will stay our wrath.’
‘There is much in you, High Marshal, that reminds me of First Captain Sigismund – as I knew him.’
‘You do me an honour, lord.’
‘That was not my intent,’ Guilliman said. ‘To you he is a legend, perhaps even an idol. I knew him as a man. Impetuous and flawed, as all men are.’
Helbrecht’s jaw tightened but he said nothing in response.
‘A fine soldier. A great leader of men. Yet despite all that, he was guided, at times, by his own will and wants. He erred in that, perhaps.’
‘As you think that I err now.’
‘I do,’ Guilliman said plainly. ‘I bring you reinforcements. Men and materiel that will enable you to rise to answer the challenges laid before us. Now, more than ever, I require people of vision and insight. Those who can think on their feet but who can appreciate the grander threats we face. Who can look at the galaxy and take stock of what must be done.’
