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Creed: Ashes of Cadia – Extract

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I

THE WARLORD

‘Lord castellan? They need you.’

The interruption came as she poured the second cup of recaff. The tentative knock at the door was as unwelcome as an ogryn in the mess hall, and as easy to ignore. It was followed by a nervous cough and underscored by the faint scuffling of feet, as if whoever was waiting there had a fair idea of the reception they were about to get.

Ursula Skouros, lord castellan of the lost fortress world of Cadia and commander-in-chief of the Tectora IV campaign, closed her book and took a hasty mouthful of the scalding liquid. The first cup had been purely medicinal, gulped down in a single shot without her noticing the taste, nothing but a jolt of rapid-acting stimulant to take the edge from days of sleep deprivation. Ten minutes of peace to enjoy the second had clearly been too much to ask for.

She sighed. ‘Come in, Wilfret.’

The door opened. Lieutenant Wilfret Fletz – nineteen standard Terran years of age and the newest member of her staff – stood in the open doorway, an apology writ large in every hesitant movement of his spindly frame.

‘My apologies, lord castellan.’ Fletz looked abashed. ‘We have a problem in the strategium.’

‘What manner of problem?’ Ursula rose to her feet, any lingering fatigue instantly dismissed by a fresh wave of alertness. The assault on the planetary capital was less than two hours away, and her strategy was planned out to the minute. Now was not the time for problems.

‘I have no details as yet, lord castellan. Major Argent was quite insistent that it couldn’t wait.’

Fletz was already moving through the cramped passageways of the Capitol Imperialis. A faint vibration through the deck plating underfoot was the only sign that the Wrath of Olympus was still in motion, rumbling towards the battlefield like the inexorable march of time. Speed wasn’t one of its qualities, but the Wrath’s portable void shields, adamantine armour plating, Behemoth cannon and array of twin-linked heavy bolters provided adequate compensation, to say nothing of its entourage of Baneblades.

The strategium sat at the very heart of the vehicle, a vast chamber with a high vaulted ceiling lit by an array of sulphur-yellow lumen-globes. One wall was dominated by a huge viewscreen displaying a granular image of the ruined surface of Tectora IV, all detail rendered indistinct by the pre-dawn gloom and the driving rain. Every inch of space was jammed with data-looms, maintenance servitors, the platform’s bridge crew and her own staff officers, all of them clustered around the room’s focal point: the giant hololithic display of Redemption City projected above the war table in its centre.

‘Lord castellan. Forgive the interruption.’ Ursula’s adjutant snapped a crisp salute.

‘Major. Do we have a problem?’

‘I fear we do.’ Gideon Argent gave a rueful nod.

‘Details.’

Argent moved around the flickering blue projection so that his hand hovered over a miniature Imperial tank division on the city’s western approach. ‘The issue is the Third Armoured infantry under Lord General Valk.’

Pyoter Valk should have been holding position. Instead, his armoured column was trundling forwards with his personal Stormlord in the lead, the battle group following like fawning courtiers in a royal procession.

‘I see the general is moving early.’ Ursula took a step closer to the table. ‘Has he given a reason for that?’

‘None. And no answer on the vox.’

Ursula settled back into her command throne and placed her right hand on the sceptre built into its armrest. A needle flicked out like a razor-sharp tongue, aspirated a drop of her blood, then retracted to deliver the sample to its cogitator array. The Wrath had a permanent crew of forty-five humans and as many servitors again, but its gene-locked machine-spirit answered to her alone.

She let her eyes rest on the hololithic battlefield. Assuming steady progress over firm ground, Valk’s battle group would be in position to assault within half an hour, leaving the rest of the Cadian forces a full ninety minutes behind. Valk wasn’t an idiot, which meant either he was moving in response to enemy action – unlikely, but not impossible – or he was enacting a plan of his own that had nothing to do with the overall strategy.

‘Time for a word with the lord general,’ Ursula said. ‘Rho, open a holo-link to Deus Imperator Vult. Use my personal channel.’

With a silken rasp of well-oiled metal, the Wrath’s enginseer unfurled from between two data-looms and extended a slender mechadendrite towards the hololith.

‘Certainly, lord castellan.’

There was a bright binharic chirp, and the hololith went dark, then flickered to life again in a two-dimensional display of the Stormlord’s cabin.

‘Lord castellan! What a pleasure to see your face.’ Lord General Pyoter Valk brushed the fall of pale blond hair back from his forehead, all smiles and rakish charm, as if they were face to face at a high-society event and not thirty miles apart on a rain-soaked battlefield. Paired scars traced the high lines of his cheekbones, distinctive despite the poor quality of the projection. ‘I trust all is well?’

‘I note you are moving ahead of schedule, general.’ Ursula kept her voice flat. ‘Is there a reason for that?’

‘Of course, my lord.’ Valk’s infuriating smile didn’t waver. ‘My scouts identified an advantageous position closer to the city walls, a better vantage point to gain intelligence on enemy movements. Under the circumstances, it appears too good an opportunity to miss.’

Ursula shot a glance at her adjutant. Argent rolled his eyes. His low opinion of the lord general had been an open secret for some time.

‘Some effort has been made to acquire adequate intelligence on the enemy already, lord general. Resume your former position. We must hope your enthusiasm has avoided the enemy’s notice.’

A burst of static rippled across the projection, and when the image and audio returned Valk was leaning forward in his throne, mid-sentence.

‘…waste of time.’

‘Kindly repeat yourself.’

‘My apologies.’ With the image in monochrome it was impossible to be sure, but she thought Valk’s face was flushing red. His tone was urgent. ‘Allow me to get into position. This opportunity could bring the battle to a close within hours. I have a hand-picked assault unit ready to follow me through the city’s defences to disable its void shields from within. Once that is done, the rest of the division will be in position to force a breach and make its way inside.’

Ursula allowed a moment of silence to stretch out between them, as if she were actually considering the merits of his plan. ‘No, thank you. A valiant offer, but one that will not be necessary on this occasion–’

‘Lord castellan, may I have your permission to speak freely?’

‘By all means.’

Valk was fond of speaking freely, and she was rarely glad to hear what he had to say. A dull sense of weariness crept over her. Right at that moment, she’d have given a month’s stipend for a decent cup of recaff.

‘Let me do this, and you can have Redemption City in your hands by noon.’

The worst thing was that he was probably right. The city would be hers for the taking, albeit with its walls shattered and the streets running with blood.

‘Return to your position, lord general. Everything is proceeding according to the established battle plan–’

‘Ah, yes. Your sacred battle plan.’ Valk’s thin veneer of charm slipped, exposing the raw contempt beneath. ‘With a different strategy we could have conquered this planet in half the time. Instead we’re taking it at a crawl and worrying over every shot fired. At this rate it’ll be weeks before Redemption falls, when I could be in there right now getting the job done.’

It was nothing she hadn’t heard before. Ursula was perfectly aware that he wasn’t the only one of her officers chafing in his harness, but that was a problem that was going to take months to sort, maybe even years.

‘Your concerns are noted, general. I’ll make time later to discuss them face to face. After we’ve dealt with the matter at hand.’

‘Your father understood what it meant to be Cadian.’

The strategium fell still. Cogitators hummed.

‘Allow me to remind you that Lord Castellan Creed presided over the greatest defeat in Cadia’s history. For myself I prefer victory.’ Ursula closed her eyes, counted to three, then opened them again. ‘You have your orders. That will be all.’

The enginseer voxed a binharic command. The hololith vanished, and the image of the battlefield returned.

Ursula shot a glare around the bridge. ‘Does anyone have anything to add?’

The bridge crew were suddenly fascinated by their data-looms.

Argent shook his head. ‘I don’t believe so, lord castellan.’

Ursula watched the hololith, waiting for Valk’s squad to make their move. For a moment she wondered if he had any intention of obeying her orders, until first the Stormlord then its trailing retinue began the laborious work of retracing their route back into position.

‘Excellent.’ She settled back into her command throne, and tried to loosen some of the tension from her shoulders. Valk’s impromptu plans were becoming all too common an occurrence. This one could hardly have come at a worse time: yet another exhausting battle fought to a stalemate before the first shot against the enemy had even been fired.

Contrary to Pyoter Valk’s grim predictions, Redemption City fell just before dusk. The city’s void shields had crumpled at the first barrage of artillery, and a hurriedly voxed broadcast of unconditional surrender had followed, accompanied by a white flag wrapped around the key to the city and the former governor’s freshly severed head. It had been a textbook conquest from start to finish. Tectora’s cities had fallen one after another like an obedient house of cards, setting the planet – and by extension, the sector – on the road of return to full compliance after the isolation of the Long Night.

Ursula looked up again at the statue of the God-Emperor in the Wrath’s tiny chapel, and wondered if the uneasy sense of oppression she was feeling was the weight of His disapproval.

‘Tell me if this is overstepping the mark,’ Gideon Argent said. ‘But generally I would expect the successful conqueror of a planet to be wearing a different expression.’

‘And what expression am I supposed to be wearing, major?’

‘Less disappointed. Less angry.’ In public, her adjutant was the soul of deference, but in the privacy of their own company they could speak freely. Any real formality had long since been abraded to nothing by more years of service together than she cared to count.

‘Why would I be angry?’ Ursula forced a smile onto her face. ‘See?’

‘You’re right. That’s worse.’

Argent was right, Ursula thought. She was letting a treacherous sense of anticlimax rob all savour from her victory. Even if the fall of Redemption had been a foregone conclusion, the rebel governor’s posturing nothing but a final vainglorious stand long after his people’s thirst for war was slaked, that didn’t make it any less important. Her plans had come together beautifully in the end, the victory a fitting reward for all her labours.

It still felt hollow.

‘Maybe Valk is right,’ she said.

Argent snorted. ‘If he hears you say that he’ll be even more insufferable than he is already.’

‘I mean it. Plenty of the old guard are thinking the same. We could have had the conquest over months ago if I was willing to move quicker. Shed more blood. Reduce a few more cities to rubble.’

‘Yes, another blasted asteroid is certainly what the Imperium needs. We should reach for the cyclonic warheads every time some idiot provincial governor decides they would be better off not paying their tithe.’ Argent withdrew a compact flask from the inside pocket of his tunic and raised it in a toast. ‘To your glorious victory. Even if you failed to shed quite enough blood for your generals’ tastes.’

‘Any fool can turn a planet to ash.’ She accepted the offered flask, took a sip of Argent’s foul-tasting rotgut and handed it back. ‘Having something worthwhile left afterwards is the tricky part.’

The words hung in the air of the chapel like incense. Ursula could guess what her adjutant was thinking. There was only one broken planet that would have brought that solemn, thoughtful expression to his face.

‘Between you and me, I suspect Valk has never got over not being there for the Fall.’ Argent’s voice was bright, but there was something brittle behind the words. Years might have passed, but the wounds left by Cadia’s destruction still ran deep. ‘To hear him talk, he could have fought the Despoiler and the whole Thirteenth Black Crusade single-handed. We’d all be in Kasr Myrak right now knocking back amasec by the pint. That, and he considers himself the rightful lord castellan of Cadia. If only the High Lords of Terra had seen it that way too.’

‘Yes, if you listen to him the whole Guard is a hotbed of nepotism and corruption, and I only have the job because of who my father was.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘I would be insulted if I thought the man had a single original thought in that golden head of his.’

Decades had passed since the Fall of Cadia and the death of the former lord castellan. Ursula had been a captain with the 65th Heavy Mechanised Infantry at the time, engaged on Hakeldama against an orkish infestation that for a time had threatened to consume the planet. The first she had heard of Ursarkar Creed’s death had been the arrival of a handful of personal effects: a battered cigar case and a signet ring so badly worn that the initials U.E.C. were barely legible. They were the relics of a stranger who meant as little to her in death as he had in life, a man who had given her nothing, not even a name.

Worse, he hadn’t even had the courtesy of providing a corpse to ease the transition of power to his successor. The last anyone had seen of him was in the thick of the fighting at Kasr Myrak, but no death had been witnessed or corpse recovered. It had taken high command years after his death to agree to reinstate the rank of lord castellan, as if they had been convinced that their old commander might swagger out of Cadia’s broken remains at any moment and demand his title back.

In the end, though, the delay had acted in her favour. With years to prepare, by the time the High Lords were ready to appoint another lord castellan, she was prepared to claim the position for her own.

A pool of a hundred suitable senior officers had been reduced to twenty, then ten, then a final three. That was when she had known the battle was won. Ursula Skouros had earned her title with blood, grit and an aptitude for strategy unmatched in the Cadian armies, and she would be damned if she let any one of them – let alone Pyoter bloody Valk – take that achievement from her.

‘My congratulations on another successful conquest, lord castellan,’ Captain Landry Scheer said through Ursula’s vox-bead. Scheer’s low, pleasant voice was as clear as though they were standing in the chapel and not on the bridge of the troop ship Undaunted in orbit five hundred miles overhead.

‘Thank you, captain.’

‘I need a moment of your time.’ There was something uncharacteristically hesitant in Scheer’s voice. ‘We’ve just been hailed by a vessel midway between the Mandeville point and our present coordinates. The authorisation codes for this vessel carry the highest authority.’

‘To the point, please, captain. Who is it?’

‘The Omnia Paratus, under Captain Marcella DeQuervain. A Cobra-class destroyer, most recently assigned to Fleet Primus.’

Now that was interesting. Fleet Primus was the spearpoint of the Indomitus Crusade, a vast armada under the personal command of the reborn primarch Roboute Guilliman, Lord Regent of the Imperium.

‘She’s a long way from home.’

‘No doubt of that, lord castellan. She’s come here with a message. And a request.’

‘What do they want?’

The silence of the vox-channel stretched out into seconds of dead air before the ship’s captain spoke.

‘You, lord castellan. They say they’re here for you.’

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2023.
This eBook edition published in 2023 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 Jodie Muir.

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