Cult Of The Spiral Dawn (Warhammer 40000) Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Warhammer 40,000

  CULT OF THE SPIRAL DAWN

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Part Two

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Part Three

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Epilogue

  CAST A HUNGRY SHADOW

  About the Author

  A Black Library Publication

  Warhammer 40,000

  It is the 41st millennium. 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 will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

  Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Astra Militarum and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse.

  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. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

  CULT OF THE SPIRAL DAWN

  ‘Their cults are numberless and diverse, yet beneath the veneer of sanctity, industry or vice that they cultivate, their true purpose remains singular and changeless. And all begin and end in darkness.’

  – Inquisitor Haniel Mordaine, Ordo Xenos, on the Cult of the Genestealer

  Prologue

  Redemption Reborn

  Day and night on the scorched world were only different shades of darkness, a slow, shallow slide from grey to black across thirty-one cold hours. At their conjoined zenith the planet’s twin suns were little more than pale smears in the sky, like candles behind a dirty veil.

  Nevertheless the four hunters always moved by night, only emerging from their lair beneath the spaceport’s fuel dump when the darkness was absolute. They had no memory of where they had come from, nor had they the capacity to care, but the imperative that drove them was clear.

  Needing no light to see the warmth of their prey, they stalked the outer districts of the ragged city where they had awoken, targeting stragglers and binding them irrevocably to their bloodline with a swift, needle-sharp kiss.

  Within three days the hunters had mastered the secret pathways of their new territory and taken a score of thralls. Despite the strangeness of this world it was just another hunting ground to them.

  And yet, for one of the four – the first to claim a victim – that was no longer quite true. The shape of its hunt had changed, as indeed had the hunter itself. It understood this only dimly, but with every passing hour its thoughts grew sharper as the simple decrees of survival unfurled into new possibilities and the hunter became the Seeker. Its primal imperative remained undeniable, but the instinct was spiralling into a higher, deeper vision that allowed it a freedom to think and plan that had been impossible before.

  Firstly, it recognised that its kindred hunters were not changing alongside it. Though they were bound by one purpose, the others remained creatures of pure instinct and always would. Now they followed where the Seeker led, accepting its primacy without hesitation. The apex predator felt no pride or privilege in its ascendancy. It simply was what it was, as were they.

  From its thralls it learned much, drinking deep of their minds and seizing knowledge and concepts that would have been meaningless in its former, forgotten existence. This new world was ripe with prey, but they were scattered across a broken ring of spiny mountains beyond which there was only burning death. The Seeker’s own territory was a vast mesa of basalt rock at the centre of the ring – it was like a mountain that had been sheared flat at its midriff by some unimaginably brutal yet precise force, leaving a blank slate for those who had come after. The thralls called this mesa the Slab, and their lone city, huddled in squalid senescence towards its northern edge, Hope.

  The surrounding mountains were encrusted with temples whose vaults ran deep into the rock, extending into the bowels of the world below. Each of these Spires was a realm in its own right, but all were bound to the Slab by sweeping bridges of stone. A single authority ruled them all from atop the narrowest peak, revered and feared by the thralls in equal measure.

  They called this authority the Sororitas.

  On the fifth night of its awakening, the predator climbed to an escarpment at the edge of its domain and gazed at the Spire where the Sororitas laired. A red haze shimmered in the gorge below, where the planet’s lifeblood churned between the mountains. The haze of soot and smoke rising from the abyss would have been impenetrable to lesser creatures, but like darkness, it was no barrier to the Seeker’s void-born eyes.

  With an efficacy it neither understood nor questioned, the Seeker cast its awareness across the gorge to the congeries of domes and towers nestling at the mountain’s peak. Like an intangible serpent it slipped through barriers of iron and stone in search of flesh and bone and mind. Lurking at the corners of perception, it stalked its quarry’s thoughts, snatching stray emotions and scratching at convictions.

  It found only a hard resolve that mirrored its own and understood that the Sororitas could only ever be an enemy. Given time, this foe would stir and hunt the hunters.

  Watching from the rocks behind the Seeker, the trio of primal hunters flexed their claws restively, sensing their leader’s growing aggression. Their empathy was ignorant, but they understood the only thing that mattered: there would be killing soon.

  The dying woman’s sanctum was in the abbey’s central tower, directly beneath a glass cupola stained with a kaleidoscopic whorl of wings. It was the building’s highest point, a spear of purity that lanced the mire of Vytarn’s sky, just as the sisterhood of the Thorn Eternal had lanced the planet’s spiritual mire for over three centuries. When a storm raged the wind would shred the smog-choked atmosphere, allowing listless rays of light through. In those moments the cupola would transmute the light into an iridescent spray that washed the sanctum clean of shadows and sorrows alike.

  But tonight there was no wind and precious little light. The abbey’s generator had failed again, and the candles the woman had lit at the start of her ceremony had burned down to nubs, leaving her in a tightening noose of darkne
ss.

  She knelt with her eyes raised to the bronze bas-relief of the God-Emperor that dominated the chamber. The Crucible Aeterna was an esoteric relic that placed Him at the centre of an orrery of stars bound by thorns. The barbs pierced His flesh and drew a silent scream from His distended jaws. His face was wizened with geometric lines and inset with lacquered eyes that burned with true sight. It was a harsh idol, but the woman felt it possessed a rare honesty.

  The Imperium’s deepest foundation is not glory, but sacrifice.

  That credo had been her mentor’s, but with time and suffering it had become her own, as her teacher had always known it would.

  ‘But you were wrong about my death,’ the woman whispered into the past.

  ‘You shall die well,’ Canoness Santanza had predicted, appraising the blood-spattered, fire-eyed girl who stood before her, battered but unbroken by her Confirmation Trials. ‘But dying is not enough, no matter how well you do it, because then you can do no more.’ She had frozen the girl with a gaze long dead to kindness. ‘The Imperium is forever at war and the duty of the Adepta Sororitas is without end. Do you understand, initiate?’

  ‘I do, mistress,’ the girl had answered, but they had both known it wasn’t – couldn’t – be true. There had been too much fire in her thirteen-year-old heart.

  Fifty-five years of service had dimmed that girl’s fire, but never quite extinguished it. Despite the horrors she had endured and the righteous ones she had enacted in the name of her faith, Canoness Vetala Aveline had never become a creature of ice. Whether that made her more or less than her mentor was for the God-Emperor alone to judge.

  I shall know soon enough, Aveline reflected as the slow killer in her lungs flexed its claws again. This time it drew a cough, but she strangled it into a brief, raw bark. The bronze Emperor’s features danced between sympathy and mockery in the flickering candlelight.

  Pitying or deriding a life of wasted piety…

  As her trance receded, Aveline frowned at the gloomy chamber, irritated that the generator’s faltering machine spirit hadn’t been attended to during her long ritual. This was the third time in as many weeks that the power had failed, obliging the sisterhood to rely on the braziers and candles that decked the abbey, but if ever they had needed light it was now. The abbey’s wardens had been sensing a dark presence for days – an oppression that was somehow watchful.

  ‘It is not our old enemy,’ Aveline declared, rising from her prayer mat with a grace that defied her pain. ‘You can stand down from your vigil, celestian. I remain myself.’

  A tall figure stepped from a curtained alcove behind her. In contrast to the canoness’ plain robes, the celestian wore full battle armour, the elegantly wrought plates polished to a pearlescent sheen that was luminous in the gloom. Her face was hidden behind a sloped visor, but Aveline had no need for mundane clues to read her old comrade’s disquiet.

  ‘I know you disapproved of the ceremony, Phaesta, but it was a necessary risk,’ Aveline said. ‘I had to be certain the daemon had not broken free.’

  ‘Another sister could have borne the burden, canoness.’

  ‘But I am the strongest.’

  At least in spirit, Aveline thought. I left my soul unguarded for nine long hours. No daemon could have resisted such a lure, even one that recognised the trap…

  ‘You believe you have the least to lose,’ Phaesta corrected. As always, the celestian had seen through to the heart of the matter. They had been sisters in battle for almost three decades and faced their sternest test together in the pits of this world, but sometimes Aveline found her First Sister’s insight wearying.

  ‘The Black Breath will take me within the month. This planet’s air has killed me where all its daemons could not,’ Aveline said without rancour, ‘but I shall meet its poison with purification.’

  ‘So the Convent Sanctorum has approved your request,’ Phaesta guessed.

  ‘I received the confirmation yesterday.’ Aveline smiled coldly. ‘Vytarn is no more. This planet has been reborn as Redemption.’

  She was disinclined to mention that the name was officially appended with the number ‘219’. ‘Redemption’ was a regrettably common appellation across the Imperium, but Aveline felt certain that few worlds had a better claim to it than her own.

  ‘You never told me the name you had chosen,’ the celestian said quietly.

  ‘You don’t approve?’ Aveline asked.

  Phaesta hesitated before replying. ‘It is a pious name, canoness.’

  ‘A name that will make our world pious,’ Aveline enthused. ‘But there is more! The sanctity of the Spires has been recognised by the Convent. My application for reclassification has been accepted.’ She laid a withered hand on her sister’s shoulder. ‘Vytarn – Redemption – has been sanctioned as a shrine world of the Imperium. That is the legacy I shall leave to the sisterhood.’

  It is the legacy I shall leave to you, my First Sister, she added privately, because you shall take my mantle soon.

  ‘For all its temples this is a dark world,’ Phaesta said. ‘A name changes nothing.’

  It changes everything! Aveline wanted to say. Names shape the truth of things. But she knew the celestian would never accept such a notion. She might even call it heretical, though Aveline was certain the God-Emperor they both served would understand completely.

  ‘The darkness under Redemption has been chained, sister,’ Aveline pressed. ‘We bound it with faith and fire two decades ago!’

  ‘Yet evil shadows the Spires once more. Some taints run too deep to cleanse, canoness.’

  ‘You are wrong,’ Aveline decreed. Her lungs were on fire and she was eager to be done with this argument. ‘We defeated the old foe and we shall defeat the new.’

  By the sixth day of its inner journey the Seeker’s mind had crystallised into true sentience. With self-awareness came a grasp of possibilities beyond the here and now, followed by a torrent of abstract ideas and imaginings. At the forefront of this was the insistent vision of an ever-turning, slowly unwinding spiral. The Seeker didn’t understand the significance of the image until nightfall, when the truth sharpened into sudden clarity. The spiral represented the great imperative that drove its bloodline.

  The Sororitas would call it a ‘symbol’.

  Gripped by a cold fervour, the Seeker sifted through the mental fragments it had stolen from the enemy during its incursion. Notions that had been nonsensical before now blazed with power, and from one moment to the next the great imperative became holy.

  On the seventh night the Seeker bestowed this revelation upon its thralls, who carved the Sacred Spiral into reality, upon wood and stone and sometimes their own flesh. Their veneration elevated them from thralls to disciples, and in turn their worship exalted their master from Seeker to Prophet.

  By the ninth night the Prophet’s path was clear, but a shadow occluded the radiance of the Spiral: the warrior women who had inadvertently breathed life into it.

  Armed with faith, the Prophet cast its mind across to its enemies’ aerie once more to test them with new insight. This time it recognised the seams of madness running through their spiritual armour. In most cases the madness strengthened the alloy, but in a few it had become corrosive, and in none more so than the one called Sister Etelka, whose thoughts were riddled with dark doubts and darker regrets.

  Night after night the Prophet gifted the warrior with whispered questions that she thought her own, insinuating itself behind her eyes until she saw the secret heresies of her sisters. Thus loyalty unravelled into loathing, then horror and finally hate as Sister Etelka was drawn into the Sacred Spiral and anointed as its first apostle.

  On the nineteenth night, the Prophet assembled its congregation and pronounced judgement: those that deny the Divine Imperative will be cleansed.

  That night Canoness Vetala Aveline clawed her way out of a writh
ing, thorn-wreathed fever dream and awoke to find herself in the abbey’s sanctum, slumped before the Crucible Aeterna. The Emperor’s tormented bronze visage was speckled with blood and the black detritus of Aveline’s lungs.

  ‘What’s the truth of a name?’ someone asked from nowhere.

  That was when she heard the screams.

  Gunfire and the whoosh of flames echoed through the vaulted corridors of the abbey, interwoven with a cacophony of snarls, guttural chants and a ceaseless, wordless whispering that seemed to bleed from the air itself.

  The tapestries lining the walls of the grand nave were afire, bathing everything in hellish light as the celestian, Phaesta, and her three surviving sisters fought to hold the invaders back from the abbey’s altar. The heretics’ soot-stained skin and bloodshot eyes marked them out as the lost and the bland of Vytarn – the magma scrapers, refinery labourers and petty functionaries who kept the sickly promethium industry of the Slab running. Such grey spirits were the perennial fodder of the Archenemy, yet Phaesta felt their fall keenly.

  ‘Your souls were in our care,’ she whispered as she scythed them down with her storm bolter, ‘but our eyes were turned to the past.’

  There was no telling how many of the damned had invaded the abbey, but Phaesta feared it would be too many. Though their makeshift clubs and cleavers were no match for the sisters’ blessed weapons, the heretics fought with the fearless ferocity of the possessed.

  To her right, Phaesta saw a gaunt youth leap forward and grasp the barrel of Sister Galina’s bolter, tugging it towards his chest as she fired. He was ripped apart, showering Galina with blood, but his sacrifice won his comrades precious seconds to close in and bring his executioner down by sheer weight of numbers. The celestian tried to cut a path through to her sister, but the press of the crowd was too great.

  We are too few, Phaesta judged as she and her remaining sisters retreated towards the chancel. The Mission of the Thorn Eternal numbered less than fifty Battle Sisters, and many had died before the alarm was raised, most of them slaughtered in their sleep.