But he had remembered his dignity. He was a man of rank, one of the few with a bloodline that had allowed him to take part of his world’s name as a badge. He could not have asked for a death more fitting to that rank, not if he really stopped to think about what he was doing. He reloaded his autopistol and felt the weight of the hand-bombs in his satchel.
The chatter sped up again, acquired a squeal and then a bass note. Kovind had coded some of it himself, had Psinter refine and recompile it, had drawn on mysteries he had had etched directly into deep memory and could barely recall consciously. Now in the brains of the Kings it was feeding into a matrix that Asphodel himself had laid down. What concepts, what layers of logic and unlogic, might that mind have wielded? Kovind glanced back at the transmission deck. The three colours were still there, the three Kings’ brains all parallel-processing the code as it grew. The telltales on the power-block he had connected to the codecasters were still green, It could run for an hour yet. Could he hold off any Imperial invaders that long? He could try.
And then the subtle song of the chatter matrix was defaced. An ugly hoot of interference blared out of the codecaster lectern, scraping through Kovind’s transmission. He stood there for a moment, pistol dangling in his hand, mouth open, as the lights on the great key flickered, darkened for a moment and came up again, struggling to find their old rhythm. Now in among the chatter was a reedy discord, weaving around a crackling syncopation that Kovind knew had no place in his code. They were being jammed.
In a bound he was back at the console, but what could he do? How could they have prepared for a countersignal? Could they? Kovind growled aloud and looped a fist around to strike himself in the mouth. Focus. Act your rank. Self-recrimination was for lessers.
What could they do? Recoding on the fly was out of the question. Modify the frequency? How could he get a signal to Psinter or Jopell, if they were even still alive? Override the code for a moment? Try to work an instruction into it? Kovind was unaware that he was making panicked little moans under his breath as he scanned the console, looking for the right controls.
This ended with glorious battle in the halls of the Treading King. This ended with his little work entering the greater work and the Hammerstone Kings walking again. It didn’t end like this, not with the squalid little redcloaks and their filthy—
The hellgun shot cratered the top of Kovind Shek’s spine and the back of his head, and the explosive vaporisation snapped him forward at the waist. His face bounced off the controls and his corpse slid slowly down the lectern. By the time it had sunk onto its knees the Guard were in the command bridge and a boot kicked Kovind’s body aside. A moment later the chatter squealed to a stop as Haffith tore the great key out of the codecaster and broke it in half under his heel.
“Has Transmechanic Aim managed to confirm what the signal was?”
“No, magos,” Daprokk answered. The breeze plucked at his red cowl. The two of them were standing beneath the Machina Opus atop the shrine ziggurat, using vocal conversation that the wind would render hard for vox-thieves to overhear. “We… selected a course of action that incidentally matched that which the other Adeptus had… happened to…”
“You took their advice, enginseer. No need to pretend you didn’t. I was watching you, remember? I’m not holding it against you.” Daprokk’s hands twitched for a moment.
“Without knowing what the signal was,” his interlocutor went on, “we’ve no way of knowing whether we managed to defeat its purpose or not. Speaking as part of a priesthood that takes gaps in knowledge as an affront, still this is a particular concern.”
“The Sister seemed to believe that it was an attack that was to use the three most functional Hammerstone Kings as weapons against the Ramosh Incalculate,” Daprokk ventured. “An attack on you, even, sir. The initial purpose of the delegation was to meet you, but at the time they set off they apparently believed you were still on board the Headstone.”
“Even they’re using that nickname now, then?” Daprokk didn’t know how to answer that. “No matter. I don’t believe this is any reason to alter my plans, Enginseer Daprokk. Except in one respect. I think it is time to speed them up. When the transmechanic has completed her current analytical cycle ask her to create an encrypted tightlink to Shipmaster Tobin, please.”
Daprokk made the sign of the cog, canted a formal, if slightly rushed, salutation, and hurried to the lifthead, noetic speech already radiating out from his personal links and feeding into the shrine’s manifold. The other magos, in his dusty robe that was almost as much russet as red, watched him go. The successful jamming of the transmission had not eased his mind any.
He walked around the sculpture, adjusting his vision for the floodlights, and stared up at the King the insurgents hadn’t managed to breach. The Inheritor King’s colossal raked prow and spire-bridge loomed over the shrine in the dark.
“Not the reception I’d wanted,” murmured Magos-Parralact Calhoulin Tey. “I wonder what will happen next?”
Deep night in the graveyard. Blackness and silence in the bridge of the Inheritor King. The breeze-blown dust against the windows could not be heard in here, and the combat shutters were drawn, sealing the little wedge-shaped chamber off from the gentle Asheki moonlight. The great throne where Asphodel had sat, the coding pit where he had crafted his chattercodes, the pulpits from which his lieutenants had commanded this King and passed his orders out to his armies, all now empty and lost in the dark.
There were no lights on the control banks. No movement of instruments, no colour or sound in the readouts. No printout spools. No glowing runes. No power.
Almost none. Deep in a system core that the King’s conquerors had dismissed as inactive, a warm little worm of electricity still flickered. At the call from the Blighting King it awoke, flexed and sparked for a split-second to accept the transmission instructions from the Poison King. Finally, in barely a blink, came the inload that the intelligences of the other three Kings had compiled between them. Only a blink before the suffocating fog of jamming squeal came frothing up from the machine-shrines’ masts, but enough.
For the half-year since Asphodel had fled this chamber the secret nerve-matrices buried deep in the King’s brain had been without function, empty. Blank paper, an unsown field.
Now the pen had been wielded. Now the seeds were here.
In the darkness of the Inheritor King’s core, an intelligence began to wake.
In the comparatively short period of time since he unleashed his fiction upon the readers of the Black Library, the talented Mr. Dembski-Bowden (that’s “bow” as in the front of a boat, not the thing that fires an arrow) has more than proved his chops with some frankly pant-damaging pieces of writing awesomeness. For the sake of balance, however, and for the entertainment of those who get the reference, I feel this introduction should also include the words “HI DAN ABNETT”.
Regicide is named after the chess-like game I feature a lot of people playing in 40k. The story’s set on Balhaut, site of the great battle that started the whole Sabbat Worlds Crusade. In revisiting this ground zero origin point, Aaron is also delving into areas that are now increasingly occupying me in the Gaunt books: the Blood Pact, the nature of the enemy, and the nature of the Crusade itself. Although set twenty-five years before the “present” in Gaunt continuity, this story provides a powerful addendum to both the story of Warmaster Slaydo, and the revelations made in the novel Blood Pact.
Dan Abnett
REGICIDE
Aaron Dembski-Bowden
I
She spoke the words with a knife in her hand and a lie on her lips. “Tell me what happened, and I’ll let you live.”
Even if he had nothing else left, he still had his voice. She hadn’t taken his tongue. “You know what happened,” he said.
In the knife’s reflection, he caught a glimpse of what was left of his face. The smile he couldn’t seem to shake was a mess of split lips and bloody gums.
Her face was
covered by a carnival mask. Only her eyes showed through, and they didn’t look human.
She said, “Do not struggle,” as if she expected him to actually obey.
Do not struggle. Now there was an amusing idea.
His shins and wrists were leashed together by pulley ropes. It looked like they came from an Imperial Guard tank. Probably his tank, he realised. Either way, there’d be no breaking free in a hurry. Even with her knife in his hands, it would take an age to saw through those ropes.
His head sagged back into the mud and the dust. While his eyes ached too much to see clearly, the sky met his sore gaze with bruises of its own. Choked and grey—heaven promised a storm—but the moon yet showed through cracks in the caul of clouds.
He lay in the rubble, knowing that before this place was a ruin, it was a battlefield, and before it was a battlefield, it was a public marketplace.
Apparently something of a pilgrim trap, where relics and icons of dubious validity found their way from sweating hands into bandaged ones; a desperate industry based around hope, fuelled by deceit and copper coins.
He blinked sweat from his aching eyes and wondered where his weapons were.
“Tell me,” she came even closer, and the knife turned in the moonlight, “what happened on the eighteenth hour of the tenth day.”
Already the words felt like a legend. The eighteenth hour of the tenth day. She whispered it like some sacred date from antiquity, when it was only hours before.
“You know what happened,” he said again.
“Tell me,” she repeated, feverish in her curiosity, betraying her need.
His smile cracked into something more, promoting itself to a laugh—a laugh that felt good even though it hurt like hell. The sound was made by a punctured lung, flawed by cracked ribs, and left his body through bleeding lips. But it was still a laugh.
She used her knife as she’d been using it for over an hour now: to scrawl letters of pain across his bare chest. “Tell me,” she whispered, “what happened.”
He could smell his own blood, rich over the scent of scorched stone. He could see it, trickling falls of red painting his torso below the jagged cuts.
“You know what happened, witch. You lost the war.”
II
He was in a different place when he next opened his eyes.
His neck gave protesting twinges as he looked this way and that. The arched doorways, the broken gargoyles littering the floor, the stains of ash marking the pyre-sites of holy books…
This was the Templum Imperialis.
Well. One of them.
Muffled thunder betrayed the presence of distant artillery. Whoever this witch was, she’d barely moved him from the front lines.
He swallowed, but it was too thick and tasted of blood. Fists tightened as he tested the bonds that leashed his wrists to the chair. Nothing. No yield, no slack, and the chair itself was fastened to the floor. He was going nowhere.
“Stop struggling,” her voice came from behind. Footsteps echoed in the small chamber as she moved to stand before him. “There is no dignity in it.” Her words were coloured by an ugly, halting accent. She wasn’t just from off-world—she’d barely spoken Gothic in her life.
“Who are you?” he asked, and punctuated the demand by spitting blood onto the tiled floor.
She stroked her fingertip along the hideous mask covering her face. “I am Blood Pact.”
The words meant nothing to him. Unfortunately, what she did next meant a great deal. With a chuckle from behind the mask, she reached for a weapon sheathed at her hip.
“Your sword, yes?”
Instinct drove him to test his bonds again. He tried not to look at the blade in her hands—seeing her touch it with her seven-fingered hands made his heart beat faster. He’d preferred it when she’d been holding the knife.
“That’s better,” she smiled. “It is time to speak some truths.”
“You’re not going to like anything I say.” He forced the words through a wall of tight teeth. “Drop the sword.”
With her free hand, she stroked his jawline, the gesture gentle, grazing the unshaven skin without scratching it. Her fingernails had crescent-moon bloodstains beneath them, but they were old, from previous inflictions of pain.
“You want this sword,” she whispered, “and you want to see the colour of my blood as I lie dead upon this floor.”
He didn’t answer. With her free hand, she lowered the black mask that covered half of her face. It was a carnival mask, perversely featured and rendered in dull iron, with a witch’s hook nose and curving chin. The face it revealed was both lovelier and uglier, all at once.
His captor took a deep breath, inhaling the scent of recent battle and burned books.
“You are one of the Argentum.” She licked a slow circuit of her black lips, as if tasting the word. Even her smile was tainted. Her face was a canvas of meticulous scars, inflicted by a madman’s hand.
He laughed again, though thirst made the sound ragged and raw.
“What is amusing?” she asked, closer to sneering than speaking. “You think we cannot recognise the difference between Imperial regiments?”
“What gave it away?” He inclined his head to his silver shoulder guard, where the Warmaster’s laurel-wreathed skull was displayed in detailed engraving, and banged his silver vambraces against the back of the chair he was tied to. The same sigil was repeated on each of them, in echo of the Warmaster’s own armour.
Had he been able, he’d have shot her through the eye with his hellgun, which was—assuming it was still in one piece—embossed with silver aquilas on both sides of the stock.
“Perhaps I dress like this because it’s cold outside,” he said. “All the silver keeps me warm.” She smiled, as if indulging a spoiled child.
“You are one of the Argentum.” He didn’t like how she mouthed the word, like she hungered for it. “The Silver Kindred.” She swallowed, and something wet clicked in her throat. “The Warmaster’s Own. How proud you must be.”
He didn’t dignify that with a response.
“You will tell me what I wish to know,” she insisted with stately politeness.
“Never in life.”
Fine words, but they came out badly, slowed by blood-thickened saliva. Throne, he wished she’d put the sword down. The hurt of seeing it in her hands went beyond a matter of personal pride—beyond even regimental honour.
“We know the customs of the Silver Kindred,” she said, and her voice was rendered gentler still by the whispering hiss of profane fingertips on sacred steel. “To lose your weapon is to betray the Warmaster, isn’t it? It carries the harshest penalty.”
She didn’t wait for an answer, instead drawing the blade from its scabbard. Steel sang in the air as the blade scraped free. He winced, and hated himself for it.
“This pains you,” she told him, not quite asking because the answer was so clear. “It hurts you to see your blade in enemy hands, doesn’t it?”
Once more, his words were thickened by exhaustion and a bleeding mouth. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
As he spoke, she turned the sword over in her hands, seeking something. There, etched onto the grip: an Imperial eagle of white gold. She smiled at her captive, and spat on the God-Emperor’s sacred symbol. Her saliva hung down in a string, dripping from the sword onto the filthy floor.
His eyes closed, and he imagined his hands slipping through her dark hair, fingers curling to cradle her skull while his thumbs plunged into her slitted eyes. Her screams would be music.
“Look at me,” she commanded. “There. That’s better.”
She stepped closer. He had one shot at this. One shot.
“I’m going to kill you,” he promised through the threat of tears. “In my Warmaster’s name, I am going to kill you, witch.”
“Your Warmaster.” She cast the sword aside without a care. It tumbled across the floor with a clash of abused metal. “Your Warmaster is nothing more th
an crow shit by now. He is as dead as your Emperor, a feast for the carrion-eaters. Now tell me what happened.” This again.
“You know what happened,” he said. “Everyone knows.”
“Tell me what you saw.” She stepped even closer, the knife in her hand again. He hadn’t seen her draw it. “You are one of the Argentum. You were there, so tell me what you saw.”
One shot. Just one. She was close enough now.
The knife’s tip kissed his jawline, stroking along, scratching patterns too soft to break the mud-marked skin. As the blade caressed his lips, she smiled again.
“Tell me what happened, or you die a piece at a time.”
“You don’t want to know what happened. You just want to know how he died.”
She trembled. There was no disguising it. The knife pricked his cheek at her lapse of control, and tears drip-dropped—one from the left, one from the right—almost in unison from her fluttering eyelashes. She had to moisten her lips to speak, which she did with a black tongue.
“How did he die?”
In a traitorous moment, he realised that she was beautiful. Pale, poisonous and corrupt. But beautiful. The corpse of a goddess.
His breath misted on the polished knife blade. “He died first. And we killed everyone who came for his body.” No need to lie when the truth was enough to hurt her. “I saw your king die, and we shot every weeping bastard that came to claim his body.”
“He was not my king. My lord is Gaur, for I am Blood Pact. But Nadzybar was the best of us, nevertheless.”