Oaths of damnation, p.1
Oaths Of Damnation, page 1
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Contents
Cover
Warhammer 40,000
Oaths of Damnation
Dramatis Personae
Quote
Prologue
RITE I
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
RITE II
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
RITE III
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Epilogue
About the Author
An Extract from ‘Night Lords: The Omnibus’
Backlist
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 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 cruelest 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.
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
The Hexbreakers
Exorcists Tenth Company Vanguard Strike Force
Almoner-Lieutenant Daggan Zaidu
Reiver Squad Belloch
Lector-Sergeant Belloch
Almoner Azzael
Brother-Initiate Makru
Brother-Initiate Nabua
Brother-Initiate Shemesh
Infiltrator Squad Eitan
Lector-Sergeant Eitan
Brother-Initiate Balhamon
Almoner Hasdrubal
Brother-Initiate Hokmaz
Brother-Initiate Kleth
Brother-Initiate Nazaratus
Brother-Initiate Pazu
Brother-Initiate Urhammu
Brother-Initiate Uten
Infiltrator Squad Haad
Almoner-Sergeant Haad
Brother-Initiate Akkad
Almoner-Commsman Amilanu
Almoner-Helix Adept Gela
Brother-Initiate Kephras
Brother-Initiate Lamesh
Brother-Initiate Marduk
Brother-Initiate Nizreba
Eliminator Squad Anu
Lector-Sergeant Anu
Almoner-Marksman Dumuzid
Almoner-Marksman Lakhmu
Attached: Codicier Torrin Vey
Prominent Hexbreaker Orison Sub-Cults:
The Hermetic Brotherhood of the First Degree
The Blade and Skull
The Order of the Eagle Most High
The Fraternity of the Eleusinian Mysteries
The Inner Circle of Tranquil Enlightenment
We are living in the end times, and the doom of mankind is at hand. I know this to be true for I have witnessed the canker that eats at the bedrock of our beloved Imperium, have borne the corruption of the daemonic and know the price that must be paid to cast it out. To know Chaos is to know the folly of existence, the ruination of life and the damnation of too much knowledge. But all things serve the Emperor, and even such maddening wisdom may find its use… The daemonic can be beaten, but the sacrifice it entails will be greater than many of you will be able to sustain.
– Lord Inquisitor Marchant of the Ordo Malleus,
at the MXII Conclave of Andrastacles
PROLOGUE
NOWHERE
Containment ship C5-17 was screaming.
Inquisitor Harrow fled through its depths, unmade by her own terror. This should not have happened. It could not have. Her tarot, the visions, Lord Inquisitor Mundar’s missives – how could she have been misled by all of them?
And how could she get out of this place alive?
She raced along another corridor of corroded pipes, ancient prayer scrolls and mesh decking plates, her ears aching from the shrieking of the alarms. The ship – every passageway, berth, brig and bunk room – along with all of its crew, they were all screaming, howling ahead of the damnation Harrow knew she had unleashed.
The lumens blinked over to emergency protocols, red. Red like the blood she had shed when, in a moment of madness, she had allowed herself to become infected with the rage of the thing she had come here to interrogate. That was all it had needed. Anger, and a little vital essence spilled in its presence, and its wards had started to burn.
It was all wrong. Harrow had been given assurances, ones she now realised were lies. She had been investigating rumours of warp-related discordance among the mega-smelteries of Keliso VIII’s hives when she had first become aware of the portents. The work on Keliso had been dropped in favour of intercepting C5-17 as soon as she had realised just how serious the situation was. As soon as her sanctioned psyker, Heldar, had torn out her own eyeballs and eaten them.
Every tarot reading since had been the same. The cards had shown the Psyker, the Tower and the Daemon, over and over, even when Harrow had reconsecrated and reshuffled them. Mundar had confirmed the growing threat via astropathic séance. She had been authorised to do the unthinkable: to intercept an Exorcists containment ship at Nowhere, the unmanned beacon station that pointed the way to the Purgatomb.
It had all been lies.
A hatch to Harrow’s left juddered open as she neared the end of the corridor, causing her to come up short and drag free her long-barrelled Lucius laspistol. Two figures tumbled through the gap, grappling furiously. They were Chapter-serfs, members of the containment ship’s crew, dressed in dark robes, their scalps shaved and carved with occult symbology.
They were killing each other. One was bleeding badly from a gash in his throat. He was hauled to the deck by the other, who was wielding a bloody crowbar which she smashed over her fellow serf’s head once, twice, three times, the hideous crunches audible even over the ear-aching assault of the alarms.
As the serf raised the bar for a fourth blow, she seemed to sense Harrow’s presence. She turned, snarling, her lower face a mask of blood that glistened black in the hellish lighting. Harrow realised she had torn out the other serf’s throat with her teeth.
The inquisitor shot her through the head and stumbled past, clutching at the porthole leading to the stairs beyond. There were bodies there, more serfs and crew, their eyes wide and white, locked into awkward death throes. Madness had gripped the entire ship the moment the binding seals had been broken, the same madness that had caused Harrow’s interrogation to falter in the first place.
She should have been better prepared. The host body, the thing the Exorcists called the Broken One, contained three Neverborn, but it was only one she was interested in. The Red Marshal. She had merely wished to confirm its identity. The portents, and Mundar, had claimed that the Red Marshal had to be stopped from reaching the Purgatomb, even in a captive state. But none of them, even the Exorcists, seemed to have realised just how powerful this particular entity was.
The unthinking, unknowable rage that had gripped her in its presence was now gone from her own thoughts. It was as though the thing she had unleashed wanted her to suffer all the horror of these last moments unfiltered and uninhibited, like it was taunting her, making her bear witness to the true extent of her failure.
It was coming for her, she was sure.
She hammered down the stairs, trying desperately to remember the route she had taken up from the docking bay. She needed to get back to the Arvus. Then she could take the shuttle back to the Share of Defiance, send an astropathic alert, and turn the light cruiser’s guns on C5-17. She could end this before it deteriorated any further.
Before the Broken One escaped these last, desperate confines.
There was a figure standing in the hatchway at the bottom of the
A refectory hall lay beyond. It was a scene of bedlam. Regular members of the crew were slaughtering each other with anything they could grasp. One was beating the head of a deck overseer repeatedly against the floor, the man’s face broken mulch, while another was strangling a cyber-cherubim with the chain of its censer ball, the sanctified incense fogging the air but doing nothing to banish the warp madness. Harrow choked as she stumbled past, tears stinging her eyes and half blinding her.
She pushed on, brandishing her laspistol, but none of the crew seemed to notice her. They were lost, lost and damned.
There were two hatches leading from the refectory, one on the left and one on the right. Harrow forced herself to pause, to not choose on impulse. She was an inquisitor, a Plutonian and a former interrogator under Lord Inquisitor Mundar. She had endured the horrors of the warp before. She would not compound the errors she had made here with further mistakes.
Right. She remembered seeing the litany above the hatchway during her journey up from the docking bay. Damnatio pro nobis omnibus venit, a line from the Liber Exorcismus. Damnation comes for us all. Too fitting.
She began to descend the next set of red-lit stairs beyond, feeling sudden, renewed determination. As she went, she caught an unmistakable sound ringing down from the decks above, punching repeatedly over the noise of the alarms.
Bolter fire.
Almoner-Sergeant Hekez rallied his Intercessors in the corridor before the containment berth. He linked his vox to the bridge and gave clear, uncompromising instructions as his brethren checked their bolt rifles.
The Oblivion Protocol was to be enacted, which meant they would all soon be annihilated. Hekez accepted that, just as he accepted the knowledge that he had failed. He should have forbidden the inquisitor, denied her boarding rites and ignored all the evidence she presented that the containment ship had to be stopped from reaching the Purgatomb. All of those realisations counted for nothing – retrospection would be pointless now. All that mattered was buying a little more time.
‘The Black Psalter of Primordian Primus,’ Hekez said to his squad over the vox, seeking to focus them on what lay ahead. ‘Brother-Initiate Hammurabi, lead us in verse.’
As the Exorcists began to chant, the almoner-sergeant received confirmation from the bridge that the Oblivion Protocol was under way. It was simple, and came in two parts. Once the order was given, the ship’s chief tech-priest would overload the engine drives, resulting in a catastrophic meltdown that would rip C5-17 to pieces. Even a Neverborn would not be able to survive both the devastating blast and the ensuing vacuum of space.
The second part of the protocol involved the remote station, Nowhere, cutting its signal, temporarily removing the link between the way station and the Purgatomb and thus making the isolated prison impossible to find.
Once the protocol was initiated there was no way to stop it, and C5-17 had no salvation pods or other means of egress. It would take approximately ten minutes of overdrive before the engines began a chain-reaction meltdown.
Ten minutes to keep the Neverborn and its host contained. Hekez ensured a round was chambered and faced the blast door sealing the berth off from the remainder of the ship. It was laden with purity seals, layer upon layer of ancient, discoloured black and red wax and folds of yellowed parchment, inscribed with prayers of warding and abjuration. The only parts of the door clear of them were the locking wheel and the central plate, embossed with a horned, fleshless skull – the Calva Daemoniorum, the grim Chapter icon of the Exorcists – that was mirrored on the left pauldron of Hekez’s armour.
A series of shuddering blows echoed down the corridor. At the same time, one of the purity seals adorning the door caught light. The flame leapt across the dry parchment and wax, quickly forming a blazing curtain of fire. Only the horned-skull sigil remained visible in the centre of it, slowly blistering and blackening.
The impacts continued until there was a metallic shriek. The flames burned themselves out, every last purity seal gone, revealing the scorched metal beneath.
With a dull groan, the door swung ponderously open.
The lumen strips started to go out, one by one, starting with those nearest the door and sweeping down the corridor, a rapidly advancing wall of darkness. The alarms continued, though they had changed, becoming more akin to true screams, wails of despair and roars of anger, mirroring the primordial fury that had swept through the ship and gripped so much of its crew as the monstrosity bound at its heart broke its bonds.
For his own part, Hekez’s blackened soul suffered only the faintest twinge of anger. It was no match for the only other emotion he felt: cold, hard determination.
His auto-senses kicked in, preysight stripping away the darkness. He caught a slight heat blur of movement in the doorway.
The Exorcist managed one semi-automatic burst before the Broken One was on him.
It was a Primaris, or had once been. It was naked bar scraps of singed prayer cloth and broken chains, its flesh bleeding with damnable sigils that appeared to have been freshly carved in its brute, heavy musculature. Around its neck was a thick metal collar stamped with the aquila, while a visor, similarly marked, covered its eyes, ears and nose. Its jaw had been sealed shut by bolts, screwed into the bone. It had been a warrior of the Chapter. Now it was a Broken One, its sole remaining purpose to act as a vessel for damnation. But the vessel had failed and damnation was loose.
It slammed aside Hekez’s bolt rifle then ripped away his gorget and the upper part of his breastplate with monstrous, unnatural strength, before flinging him against the wall. One-handed, it pinned him there, fist closing around his throat.
Hekez drew his combat knife. Even as the Broken One drove him to the wall, he was already stabbing the blade up and under the Primaris’ fused ribcage, then wrenching it from left to right, disembowelling the creature.
No blood issued forth. It didn’t even appear to realise it had been wounded.
Flames surged down the corridor in the Broken One’s wake, the scriptures decorating the walls igniting like the ones that had guarded the blast door. Smoke, ash and burning scraps of parchment filled the air.
Hekez found himself face to face with his Chapter’s darkest secret. Though the collar was still in place, it had managed to shatter half of its visor, breaking the Imperial aquila in two. One eye stared at Hekez. He had half expected it to be riven with unnatural energies, but it was still altogether too human, bloodshot and wide with horror. The soul of the host’s body – Ashad, his name had been – was not yet altogether lost.
The other Intercessors opened fire, filling the corridor with wrath to accompany their dark litany, but even at point-blank range they had no effect. Instead of striking and detonating, the rounds were transmuted into molten metal mid-flight, so that only a hissing splatter struck the monster’s flank.
‘You will not be free,’ Hekez rasped with what air he could drag through the Broken One’s grip. ‘Oblivion will claim us all.’
The thing should not have been able to respond, for though they glowed red-hot, the screws in its jaw were still in place. But as Hekez struggled, a horizontal slit appeared along the Broken One’s sinewy neck, just above the restraining collar. It tore open, dark, vital blood flowing down its broad chest.
‘Do you really believe that?’ the wound slurred, offering Hekez a red-raw smile that exposed the thick, glistening tendons underneath.
‘You will know nothing but banishment,’ Hekez managed. He had started a timer on his retinal display as soon as he had received confirmation that the protocol had been initiated. He could already feel the vibrations of the overcharged engines thrumming through the wall at his back, threatening to shake the ship asunder.
