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Blackstone Fortress: Ascension – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Before

Vorne had not come this far to be intimidated by screams. She had heard worse.

‘Do not be afraid,’ she said, her voice chiming through her faceplate. ‘I have come here to save you.’ She peered into the darkness, listening for movement. ‘I understand your fear. And your anger. Your talismans were fakes. Your spells are powerless. Your utopia was a lie. But the Emperor is real. He will scour your sin. He will bring you truth.’

There was no answer but, after a brief pause, Vorne heard a shuffling sound from the lower steps.

She pulled the flamer’s trigger. The promethium tanks were empty but the weapon had other ways to elevate the faithless. Sparks billowed as the underslung chainsword rattled into life. She glimpsed mutated flesh, a face of lipless mouths, then the teeth bit home, glittering the darkness with blood. The heretic tried to aim a stubber but she wrenched the chainsword free, severed his arm and kicked him down the steps. She followed and lunged again, hacking twice, finishing the baptism with a whispered prayer.

A metallic chorus swelled around her, filling the shadows. The voice of the Blackstone. Near the Crucible it was hungry and eager. This was the very heart of the fortress. Tinny shrieks and whistles assailed Vorne from every direction. It was like a mockery of birdsong, trills and warbles woven into a scream. It rose to a crescendo, gripping her shaven scalp, resonating in her skull. Vorne sneered, amused that the Blackstone thought she could be so easily cowed.

‘Vorne?’ called Taddeus.

‘I’m fine, eminence,’ she replied, staring down the blackness. ‘It’s nothing. Your false gods have deceived you,’ she said, addressing the shadows again. ‘They do not care if you live or die, because they are illusions, conjured madness. By turning your back on the God-Emperor, you have ensured that your souls will–’

There was another rustle of combat fatigues and she lunged, triggering the chainsword.

The teeth screamed, rattling uselessly against colourless rock, scattering sparks. A piece of the Blackstone had risen from the floor and formed itself into a mockery of the divine human form. Vorne cursed as her weapon kicked and bucked, sending painful tremors through her arms. She backed away and, before the sparks died, the column tumbled back down into steps, folding into faceted blackness.

This was new. She had seen the fortress assume many shapes and forms, but nothing that looked like a man. The Blackstone Fortress was becoming progressively less stable, and on this latest expedition it was so erratic that it had been almost impossible to traverse. Taddeus had warned her that this would be the case. The Chaos cults had triggered something momentous with their blood rites. The fortress was preparing to ascend. Soon it would begin the next stage of its development.

Soon it would be reborn.

There was more noise and she triggered the chainsword again. Another step had risen up and become a rotating column, almost human in shape. This time, she managed to hold her blade back and avoid blunting its teeth. She caught her reflection in the column’s shifting surface. She was pleased by the savagery of her appearance. The lower half of her face had been burned away on the day she met Taddeus and he had grafted an iron mask over the scars. She looked as merciless as she felt.

The column of polygons fell away as she stepped closer, crashing down the steps like spilled coins. She followed them, using the last shreds of light to reach the passageway at the bottom of the steps. She was effectively blind, but she could feel shapes moving all around her, forming and reforming.

‘What is this?’ she muttered, edging through the blackness, slowly feeling her way with her iron-soled boots. Light glimmered up ahead, revealing shapes all around her, human-sized, but more like architecture than people – chiselled columns, bent and crooked, built of black geometric blocks. The sounds of the fortress grew louder, and Vorne had the strange sensation that she was passing through stone boughs. There was no sign of movement, and she was thinking again of turning back when a voice rang out over the whistling noise.

‘Vorne.’

‘Raus?’ she replied, guessing it was one of the abhuman runts who had led them to the Crucible. She had seen them fall down a shaft, but perhaps they had survived. ‘Rein? Is that you?’

‘Here,’ said the voice.

Vorne hesitated. The voice was familiar, but it was not one of the ratlings. She glanced back in the direction of Taddeus and, for reasons she could not explain, her hands began to shake, her gauntlets knocking against the flamer.

A column moved towards her, coalescing as it approached. The light flared brighter, and Vorne saw a face.

‘Mother?’

How could it be? But it was. It was her. She looked unchanged, and as she loomed out of the darkness she reached out towards Vorne. Vorne lowered her flamer, shaking her head, and reached out to take her hand.

‘Traitor,’ said Vorne’s mother, striking her hard across the face.

Vorne stumbled back and tripped over the bottom step, landing painfully. Her mother walked after her and booted the side of her skull, snapping Vorne’s head back so hard it slammed against the steps. She tried to rise, blood filling her mouth, but her mother kicked her again, harder, in the guts.

Vorne curled into a ball, winded, unable to stand.

‘You betrayed us.’ Her mother’s voice was cold with hate. ‘To an off-worlder.’

Blood filled Vorne’s eyes as a metal-capped boot cracked her cheek, splitting the skin and sending her tumbling down the steps. Shock had slowed her reactions, but Vorne had stopped taking beatings from her mother when she was nine years old. And she was not about to turn back the clock.

As her mother rushed at her again, drawing back her fist, Vorne rolled clear, letting the woman’s knuckles crack against the steps. Her mother cursed and reeled away, clutching her bloody fist, then fell back into the dark, headless and trailing blood. As the decapitated body hit the ground Vorne stood over it, her chainsword spraying gore. Then she released the trigger and silenced the weapon. She staggered back onto the steps. Her legs buckled, and she sat heavily on the cold floor.

The corpse juddered.

Vorne lurched to her feet, but then her mother vanished, leaving a mound of black polygons.

Had she ever been there? Vorne laughed at the absurdity of the question. Of course not. Her mother had died years ago, burned by Taddeus with all the other wretched sinners from her clan. How could she be here, now, looking just as she did when Vorne was a teenager? How could she be on the Blackstone? The fortress was trying to confuse her. Or the heretics had employed their dark arts against her. Something had reached into her mind and plucked out her greatest fear.

She climbed stiffly to her feet, her head still light on her shoulders and her legs trembling. Her greatest fear? Is that what her mother was?

She looked at the black shape. The light was fading again. This happened a lot in the Blackstone. Lights came and went without logic. As darkness swallowed her, Vorne thought about her mother. A driven woman, dragged into idolatry believing it would be a way out of Gethsemane Hive. Cruel and relentless. So driven she had almost dragged Vorne into damnation. But not worthy of fear. Certainly not now, so many years after her death. Since Vorne had pledged her allegiance to Taddeus, she had seen true horrors. And that had been before Taddeus brought her to the Blackstone Fortress.

She looked around, using the last few shreds of light to study the shapes at the foot of the stairs. There was no more movement. The Blackstone had played its trick and then fallen back into its fathomless slumber. She wanted to sneer but she could not. Her mother’s thin, resolute face filled her thoughts. The fortress had guessed correctly that it would shake her resolve, but why? Why did she care?

She tried to hurry back up the steps but then she had a thought so dreadful, so painful, that she thought she might vomit. What if she had been wrong about her mother’s guilt? She had not handed her mother to Taddeus, but she had known that her evidence would lead the priest to her mother’s door. What if her thinking had been clouded by hate? All those years of cruelty and beatings might have confused her. Vorne was not worried that she had wronged her mother; she was worried that she had wronged the Emperor.

‘No,’ she hissed, heading back to the steps. She knew what this was. She had strayed too far from Taddeus. Without his fierce soul to ward her, her mind often played tricks on itself, roaming avenues best left unexplored. One word from him would set her straight.

‘Your eminence?’ she called.

There was no reply.

Her head pounded where she had fallen and she had to wipe more blood from her eyes. Pain lanced through her broken cheekbone, but the break was not serious. Her mask had taken the brunt of the kick.

She climbed awkwardly back up the steps, keeping the flamer raised as she followed the trail of charred heretics she had left behind. Using the bodies as a guide, she eventually saw a pool of light and the hunched shape of Taddeus, still poring over the Liber Eudoxus. Even a glimpse of him was enough to banish her doubts. The Blackstone had distorted her memories, that was all. Taddeus believed in her. Which meant the Emperor believed in her.

Taddeus did not look up as she approached. He had removed the tall mitre he usually wore. Vorne had never seen her master without his elaborate headgear. Taddeus wore his holy vestments at all times, even into battle. There was something shocking about seeing his gleaming, tonsured head. He was pawing furiously at his scalp as he stared at the Liber Eudoxus, the holy text that had led him across half the galaxy to the Western Reaches and the Blackstone Fortress. He was looking at the same page he always looked at. It showed a simple picture of a square on a faded pattern of triangles.

‘It’s not me,’ he said. His voice was uncharacteristically quiet. Taddeus was usually a booming, confident man, perpetually mid-sermon.

Vorne hurried to his side, wiping blood from her face so as not to trouble Taddeus with her fall. ‘Your eminence?’

One of Taddeus’ servo-skulls was drifting above his head, shining a lumen on his pate and on the pages of his book. The picture of the square was heavily annotated, surrounded by Taddeus’ florid script. He jabbed his finger at the drawing then hurled the book at the wall.

‘Eminence!’ Vorne was unable to disguise her shock. ‘It is holy!’

‘It’s a lie!’ He hauled his massive bulk upright and slammed his mace into the cover. The servo-skull had to bank away to avoid being smashed, and light flashed drunkenly around Taddeus as he pummelled the ancient book.

Vorne rushed to Taddeus and tried to stop him, but he hurled her back towards the steps with such violence that she barely stopped herself from falling. Taddeus raised his mace, glaring at her, then paused, a flicker of recognition in his eyes.

‘Forgive me,’ he said, lowering the mace and helping her back to her feet.

‘No need,’ she said, but she was shaking. ‘What happened?’ she asked, glancing at the ruined book. Its cover had torn and the spine was broken, spilling pages across the floor.

Taddeus stared at her. ‘I am not the Anointed.’

‘Of course you are. The abhumans have led us to the Crucible. Just as you prophesied.’ She waved her flamer at a light in the distance, glinting and flashing. ‘We have come through the Aberration. You found the entrance, exactly as you said you would.’

Taddeus shook his head and headed over to the tattered remnants of the book, glaring at it. ‘But I could not get in, Vorne. It would not admit me. None of the prayers worked. I am not the one.’

‘Your eminence, you must be. It is what you’ve always known. How could you have managed to come this far if you were not the Emperor’s chosen? No one else has made it through the Blackstone’s storms.’

He glanced around, still gripping his mace tightly. For a moment, she thought he might attack the walls, but he looked at the distant light instead.

‘I tried to get in, Vorne, while you were purging the unclean. I tried and I was denied. It would not admit me.’ He drew the shape of a square in the air. ‘All these years, I thought my mission was clear – to reach the Crucible and claim it in the Emperor’s name, but I’m wrong. I could not enter. I am not the one.’

‘Then this is just not the right time,’ said Vorne. ‘This is not the moment. We can return to Precipice and pray for more guidance. The Emperor will speak to you, as He always has done.’

Taddeus waved his mace at the shadows. ‘Not the moment, Vorne? This is the only moment. The fortress is changing. Being reborn. This is the ascension that was foretold by Saint Corval, by the Idumaen Prophecy, by the Scrolls of Varros, by every sacred text we have studied. The Blackstone is about to become unstoppable. And the Anointed must enter its heart! Cleanse its darkness with fire! Steel its soul against Chaos!’

His face turned purple with fervour and his eyes flashed. Then he halted and shook his head. ‘But it is not me. I reached the Crucible and I could not enter.’ His voice was desolate. ‘I was blessed with a message from the Emperor Himself, and in my hubris I misunderstood it. I did not listen hard enough.’ His head was trembling. ‘I am worse than heretical. Trusted with a great duty and too blinded by pride to perform it.’

A clamour was rising in Vorne’s head – not the din of the Blackstone, but the voices of her own victims. Hundreds of them, burned on the orders of the man who was now saying he had made a mistake.

‘You are not wrong.’ She dropped to her knees and started collecting the pages of the book. ‘Read it again.’

She was about to rise when the floor shifted beneath them and the symphony of shrieks swelled in volume. Taddeus thudded against the wall, while Vorne stayed on her knees until the tremor passed.

‘More light!’ cried Vorne and the servo-skull obeyed, revealing the broad, octagonal chamber at the stop of the steps.

They had learned to use lumens sparingly. Bright light sometimes triggered the Blackstone’s defence mechanisms. But here there was no option and, as the light reached the far side of the room, Vorne saw that the walls were crumbling, collapsing as quickly as Taddeus, who was now babbling to himself. The sheer black surfaces had fragmented like shattered crystal, and the pieces were flooding across the floor. As they landed they clumped together like metal filings drawn to a magnet, creating dark, blocky mounds that quivered as they rose.

‘Time to leave,’ she muttered.

But the steps had gone. The slope was still there, but the steps had become a torrent of glinting shards. Taddeus was still staring at the light and he did not seem to hear.

‘Your eminence!’ she snapped, grabbing his arm. ‘We have to go.’

He turned to her with flat, lifeless eyes. Vorne was almost as shocked as she had been on seeing her mother. She had never seen Taddeus like this. The zeal was gone. The fire was out. He looked like a normal man.

‘I am not the one,’ he said, oblivious to the flakes of black ore whirling around them.

‘You are everything,’ said Vorne, gripping his arm tighter. ‘Do not…’ She lowered her voice, trying to stem the rage burning through her throat. ‘Do not fail me.’

He grabbed his mitre from the shifting floor, placing it back above his jowly face.

There was a noise like a landslide and the walls folded away from them, revealing the endless dark beyond. Even at full brightness the servo-skull’s lumen could not penetrate more than a dozen feet in any direction. With the walls gone it looked like Vorne and Taddeus were standing on the peak of an undersea mountain, surrounded by ink-dark leagues. Colossal shapes churned in the depths, impossible to make out, and a brittle breeze whipped into the two priests.

The mounds created by the toppled walls were growing and reforming. Some were as tall as Vorne, and they were taking on the same shape as the structures Vorne had seen earlier – tall, columnar crystals that glinted as they turned and grew. Some of them were gripping blades of black ore, and blocks that were forming into guns. Some of the slabs were falling away and sliding down the churning slopes like abandoned sledges, rattling into the darkness.

There was a grinding roar as something swelled up from beneath the shifting slopes. It looked like an anvil carved from bone and it was the size of a tank. It was armoured like a tank, too, with rows of gun muzzles at its sides. It climbed from the tumult on three spindly, arachnid legs and towered over the landslide. A drone, like others they had fought earlier, but built on an even larger scale. The darkness shook as it pounded up the slope towards them, turning its T-shaped head to take aim.

Vorne pointed her flamer, then cursed as she remembered she was out of fuel.

‘This is a punishment,’ said Taddeus, staring at the mountainous automaton.

‘No!’ cried Vorne, looking around the summit they were now standing on. ‘This is the Blackstone.’ She knew she had no chance of escaping alive while Taddeus was so dazed. And without him, she would be…

The thought was too dreadful to pursue. She had to rouse him.

‘Your eminence,’ she said. ‘Think about what we have seen. The fortress is overrun with Chaos cultists. Despite everything we have done to drive them out. They are everywhere. If the Blackstone is becoming a weapon, it must be our weapon.’

Taddeus nodded. ‘Yes. You are right. Of course you are right. We have to make sure they are not the ones who claim it. We have to seize control, just as it was written. But I am not the Anointed.’ Taddeus was clearly still dazed by this revelation. ‘It is not me.’

‘Then what do we do?’ demanded Vorne as the drone thudded up the slope towards them. ‘The Emperor must have a plan.’

Taddeus stared at her. ‘But what is it?’ He snatched the torn pages of the book from her hand, peering at his notes.

‘If we die here, we have no chance of finding the answer,’ she said. ‘We have to make it back to the lander and return to Precipice. The rest of the crew will be waiting. If we find a–’

‘Wait!’ He snapped his fingers eagerly, looking closer at the picture of the square.

Vorne whispered a prayer of relief. The holy rage was back in his eyes.

He smiled grimly. ‘I see what happened. I have been so focused on driving Chaos from the Blackstone that I turned a blind eye to the heresy in our own ranks. The heresy on Precipice. That is why my visions have been clouded. I need to turn the Emperor’s vengeance on them.’

Behind her mask, Vorne’s ruined mouth spread into a grin. This was the Taddeus she had sworn to serve. This was the fiery prophet who would lead her to deliverance.

‘Then you are the Anointed?’

‘Perhaps.’ He gripped her shoulder so tight her armour creaked in his grip. ‘Or perhaps not. It matters not. I see my mistake now. I was sent here to cleanse Precipice as much as the Blackstone.’ He looked around at the looming shadows. ‘I was beguiled. I lost my way. I must purify Precipice. And then, as the ashes fill the air, the Emperor will show me my path. Perhaps it is to come back here or perhaps it will be to send another, but,’ he raised his mace into the air, shaking with passion, ‘either way, I will fulfil the mission I was born to–’

The ground exploded beneath Vorne’s feet and she fell onto the seething rubble. She rolled clear and staggered back to her feet in time to see the drone’s guns flashing. She crouched and wrapped her arms around her head as the ground detonated again. More slabs of wall collapsed and hurtled down the slopes, leaving no trace of cover.

Taddeus lurched to his feet, mace held aloft, and howled prayers at the drone. The machine was only a few dozen feet away now and it was turning its triangular head in his direction, aiming guns at his billowing robes. Vorne sprinted across the heaving ground and barrelled into him, sending them both flying through the air onto one of the pieces of toppled wall.

The ground where Taddeus had been standing exploded, hurling shards in every direction, but the two priests were already gone. Their weight had dislodged the slab of wall and sent it sliding down the steep slope.

The drone swivelled its head, still firing, slashing the air with blue-white energy, but the wall hurtled clear and Taddeus and Vorne plunged into the abyss.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2020.
This eBook edition published in 2020 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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

Blackstone Fortress: Ascension © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2020. Blackstone Fortress: Ascension, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
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ISBN: 978-1-78999-361-5

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With thanks to the Blackstone’s most genial guardian, Jon Flindall.

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