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Awakenings – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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CHAPTER ONE

‘Ours is not a universe of poetry, but one of song: the sorrowful lament of the dying, lilting on the breath of ancient gods.’

– Inquisitor Callius Marloff, The Book of Endings, date unknown

THEN

Snow.

White flakes stirring on the breeze, dancing over the city spires, occluding the view.

She walks slowly through them, feeling them patter upon her face, catch in her hair.

There is no sound, not even the crump of her own footsteps.

Her left arm hangs limply by her side. She does not try to move it.

Her stomach aches with the hollow memory of an old wound.

Light flickers. She turns towards it, but there is nothing but the snow.

Only the snow.

There are others here, too. She can sense it; her hindbrain crawls with agitation, but she is unable to focus – to remember. She can see nothing of them. Not here. Not now.

And so, blind and alone, she walks on through the drifting flakes, always striding forward, always heading–

Sabbathiel woke with a start.

Then she screamed.

She prised open her eyes, but the light was hot and white and blinding, so she squeezed them shut again lest it burn out the backs of her retinas.

She realised she was still screaming, and stopped.

Silence. And then:

‘So, you’re awake.’ The voice was a metallic burr, a cacophony of pipes and whistles. Unfamiliar.

She licked her lips. Her tongue felt thick and dry. ‘Where am I?’

‘A predictable question,’ said the voice. This time, it was tinged with a hint of wry amusement. ‘A far more interesting question would be, “Where have I been?” But then, you are only human. One cannot expect such perspective from one so young.’ Something moved – metal clacking against stone tiles. ‘Do you remember?’

‘I’m not sure,’ she murmured. ‘Not really.’

A rasping sigh. ‘Then I suppose the interrogation shall have to wait. At least until you have fully regained your faculties. You are currently operating at only eighty-four point seven per cent of your anticipated cognitive capacity.’

Slowly Sabbathiel tested her movement, curling her hands into fists, stretching her neck. She was stiff but apparently unharmed. Her thoughts, though, were slow and cumbersome, as if her mind were wading through molasses… or drifts of snow. She tried to tease meaning from the other person’s words.

Where have I been…

A succession of images struck her like a wall. Memories bubbled to the surface of her thoughts. And with them, pain.

She sat bolt upright, clutching at her belly, eyes wide and staring. ‘I… I…’

‘You are quite well,’ said the voice. ‘You have been… repaired.’

Leofric of the Grey Knights. A storm bolter. A hole…

She pawed at her midriff, but there was nothing but smooth flesh beneath the white cotton gown.

But Calaphrax, the warp storm… the betrayal…

Slowly she regained her breath, forced herself to calm. Her eyes were drawing focus. She looked at the thing that had spoken, standing beside the cot, peering down at her. She fought the urge to recoil.

It had perhaps once borne human form, but now it was a thing of nightmare. Its back was stooped, its shoulders hunched, its face little more than a mechanical skull plugged with an array of pipes and valves. Red, inhuman eyes peered out from the shadows beneath its cowl. It raised a hand, needle-like fingers of metal and ceramic clacking as they twitched in constant motion. It possessed four arms, the second pair sprouting from the misshapen brass casing of its chest. She could not see its lower half from where she was sitting, but judging by its obscene height, it was no longer carried on human legs.

‘I am Metik,’ it said, its face unmoving. ‘And you, Inquisitor Astor Sabbathiel… well, you should be dead.’

The cool breeze on her cheek was a welcome reprieve from the clinical isolation of the old Ecclesiarchy complex in which she’d woken.

Sabbathiel had passed another day in woozy semi-consciousness, drifting in and out of awareness, before finally, that morning, she’d woken feeling more alert – more alive – than she knew she had any right to.

She’d hardly spoken to Metik. She had the sense that she’d conversed with him extensively the day before, though most of his words had become lost in the maelstrom of her fugue. A servitor had provided her with food and water, and she’d found some clothes laid out for her in an antechamber. She still wasn’t entirely clear on what had happened, how she’d found herself here, at the mercy of that mechanical thing, but that wasn’t a situation that would last. She’d get to the truth soon enough, one way or another.

Unconsciously her hand drifted to her midriff, her calloused palm tracing the line of her stomach, feeling the taut flesh beneath the loose fabric of the tunic they’d found for her to wear. She remembered nothing beyond the blistering pain, the shock of the betrayal, the ragged hole punched in her abdomen. And then swirling darkness. She shivered and moved her hand, tucking it behind her back, looking out to sea.

The Ecclesiarchy complex had been built on an island – or rather, an archipelago of smaller islands, now latticed with arched bridges and ornate walkways crafted in the same polished soapstone as the buildings. They were old, she could tell that much, but raised in the style of so many other, similar buildings she’d seen over the years, with towering, nested archways flanked by looming, sightless effigies; low lights and dressed stone, punctuated only by the occasional tapestry or tattered banner. This, Sabbathiel knew, was the aesthetic of worship, right across the galaxy. Even out here, on some insignificant world on the edge of nothingness, the trappings were the same. She supposed it made her feel comfortable, in a way.

The Order of the Empty Chalice, so Metik had told her, confined themselves to the other islands, rarely crossing the bridge to this small, outlying part of the complex, which had once been an infirmary but was now given over to Metik’s work. Precisely what that work entailed, Sabbathiel was unclear, but whatever it was, he appeared to have the full sanction of the Order. More investigation, she knew, would be necessary. She’d start by exploring the island, and then seek out Metik to ask him more questions.

She walked down to the shoreline, her boots crunching on the pebble beach. The wind was stirring, whipping her hair up around her face, stinging her cheeks. It seemed only right that she should wake at a place like this. A shoreline. She’d heard of old, distant cultures who had once worshipped the shore, throwing offerings into the lapping, foaming waves. The shore, they maintained, was where the barriers between the land and the sea became rugged, uncertain – temporary. A place of transition, where one thing became another. A place where people could even return from the dead.

She heard footsteps on the stones behind her and turned, her hand automatically swinging to her hip, where her sword would once have been buckled. She sighed, relaxing at the sight of another servitor, which was eyeing her with a glassy, slack-faced expression. This one might still almost pass for human, if it weren’t for the washed-out pallor of its flesh and the knotwork of cables erupting from the back of its skull. A diode winked above the orbit of its left eye, and its hand twitched unconsciously, like Metik’s, suggesting that the tech-priest’s consciousness was currently piloting the servitor’s hollow frame.

‘Yes?’ she said, with a shrug.

The servitor remained motionless, silent.

‘You want me to follow you?’ It was a rhetorical question – the servitor clearly had no capacity for speech. She shrugged. ‘Lead on, then. It’s not as if I have anything better to do.’

Metik awaited her in a gloomy chamber that might once have been a chapel, judging by the towering window in the far wall that depicted some ancient saint in ebon power armour, carried aloft on the wings of a cherubin flock. What light did penetrate the gloaming was streaming through the coloured glass to form shifting pools upon the flagstones, designed, Sabbathiel considered, to resemble puddles of spilled blood. The air was filled with the rich tang of oil and burnt ozone.

Metik, who was settled in a nest of cables and hololith projectors, turned his head to regard her as she entered the room. The servitor remained motionless by the door. ‘Inquisitor. You look well.’

‘I’m alive,’ she said, as she crossed the room to stand before him. ‘Which in itself is… somewhat surprising. I trust I have you to thank for such fortune?’

Metik made a clicking sound that might have indicated amusement. ‘In part,’ he said. ‘You were brought to me for treatment.’

Treatment. That was a considerable understatement. ‘By whom?’

‘A colleague, I presume, of the Ordo Hereticus. A man who, it seems, holds you in great regard.’

‘His name?’

‘Mandreth.’

Sabbathiel frowned. ‘I know of no man by that name.’

Metik made a shrugging motion. His fingers clacked in a distracting rhythm. ‘Then you have on your hands a mystery, inquisitor.’

‘So it seems. Tell me, how long since he departed?’

‘Twenty-seven days, thirteen hours and nine seconds,’ replied Metik.

‘And he left no word, no explanation?’

‘Incorrect,’ said Metik. His head twitched. He looked to the door. Sabbathiel followed his gaze to see a servo-skull hovering in the opening. It had been constructed from a bleached human skull, now appended with squirming mechadendrites and a halo of bristling antennae. One of the eye sockets had been fitted with a sensor array that glowed piercing red in the gloom.

‘Greetings, ma’am,’ said the skull. The voice was shot through with a burring mechanical tone but was nevertheless unmistakable.

‘Fitch?’ Sabbathiel peered at the skull, as if trying to give it new form, to remember the shape of the flesh and muscles that had once enclosed it. Could it really be?

‘Aye, ma’am. Or what remains of him, anyway,’ replied the grisly device.

Sabbathiel wheeled on Metik. ‘What is the meaning of this?’

Metik spread three of his arms in a conciliatory gesture. ‘Inquisitor Mandreth thought you would be pleased. He claimed to have recovered the remains of your former acolyte from the same warp storm where he found you, on the edge of the Calaphrax Cluster. He also reclaimed a suit of Terminator armour he believed belonged to you.’

Sabbathiel approached the servo-skull. Fitch. Cursed with the gift of honesty, he’d been the only one amongst her followers who’d ever freely spoken his mind. The only one who hadn’t feared her. Because of that, she’d trusted his counsel above all others’. Even when she’d chosen to disregard it. And this is what had become of him. Not much of a reward for all those years of service.

She peered down at him, wondering if there was something more intrinsic in this device than a mere machine, but the skull met her gaze with blank regard. ‘And the others?’

‘I know nothing of any others,’ said Metik.

Sabbathiel’s head bowed momentarily, then came up again. ‘How long? How long have I been gone? Months? Years?’

‘Almost a century,’ said Metik.

Sabbathiel opened her mouth to reply, but there were no words.

A century.

‘Much has changed,’ said Metik. He was slowly extricating himself from the nest of wires. He moved around to stand before her. ‘The Imperium is not what it once was. The galaxy is torn asunder. The Adeptus Astartes prosecute a vast campaign. The Golde–’

Sabbathiel glowered at him. ‘How? How did I survive, for a century, with a wound like that?’

Metik hunched forward, so that his face was only inches from her own. ‘The vagaries of the warp…’ he said, but even for a machine, it sounded unconvincing. He craned his neck, regarding her from a different angle. ‘What I would give to know the dreams inside that head. To understand the things that you have seen.’

‘No. That’s not enough. That cannot be enough. A century…’

Metik laughed. ‘As I said, inquisitor, you should be dead.’

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2022.
This eBook edition published in 2022 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Mauro Belfiore.

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