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Deliverance and Damnation – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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CHAPTER ONE

When we prayed for deliverance, it was to an Emperor on Sacred Terra, light years removed in distance.
When the Emperor replied, it was in a voice of thunder.

– Father Balthan Eugenivov, The Keprian Vengeance

Who are we?

It was a thought that came often to him. He never sought it out. It always surfaced when he was fully focused. His mind was so filled by the sleep-taught mechanics of war, of wargear rites and tactical sermons, that a part of him was free to do as it pleased, and it always came back to that question.

Who are we?

He was Brother Cyvon. He was Adeptus Astartes. A Space Marine, as the Low Gothic tongue had it. He was Primaris. So were the other battle-brothers in the hold of the drop-ship. Intercessor Squad Phraates, of which Cyvon himself was a member. Squad Tiridates. Squad Respendial. Epistolary Oxyath, the Librarian, ranking officer in the cramped drop-ship. They were all Space Marines.

They were Soul Drinkers.

But what did that mean? Who were they?

‘Five minutes, praise be,’ came the klaxon-like voice of the servitor-pilot. The upper atmosphere was buffeting the sides of the drop-ship. The lights and readouts dotting the walls of the troop compartment turned from green to red.

Twenty-five Soul Drinkers were strapped into the grav-compensators. The Imperial Navy craft had been refitted to accept their huge frames, some approaching ten feet in their full Mark X Tacticus armour, their bolt rifles – barely portable to an unaugmented human – clamped above their heads. Oxyath’s face was covered by the heavy psi-weave hood that marked him out as a psyker, while the others wore their helmets in anticipation of hard vacuum, environmental hazards or worse. Their thoughts were all the same, for they had gone through the same regimes of sleep-taught combat drills and bloody live-fire training. That way there could be no doubt or hesitation of action when the doors opened and the battle-brothers spilled into the war zone. All the same, except for Brother Cyvon’s question.

Who are we?

The retro-jets on the vehicle’s underside screamed open. The craft was slammed from side to side as it plunged through the planetary winds. Suddenly, it didn’t matter who the Soul Drinkers were.

‘Through this we shall be delivered,’ said Oxyath, his voice transmitted into every battle-brother’s vox-bead. ‘We are born into war, here we are complete. Peace is a prison and war is our release. Fight cold, fight fast.’

‘Landing, thirty seconds,’ blared the servitor voice. ‘Brace, brace. Praise be.’

Cyvon felt the grav-restraints tighten and the vehicle change its orientation, throwing its nose into the air as the rear engines fought alongside the retros to slow the descent. Metal creaked and pinged. The warning runes projected onto his retinas flashed amber as they registered the forces hammering against the drop-ship’s sides.

With a crunch of stone and steel, the transport was down. The grav-restraints snaked open and the Soul Drinkers grabbed their bolt rifles from overhead. The front ramp swung forward, admitting a swirl of dust and grit. Oxyath grabbed his staff from its sheath beside him and was the first to jump out of the opening. Through the dust, Cyvon was aware of rocky desert stretching out around a fortified structure of sheer walls. Mountains rose from a smoggy horizon in one direction, while the distance swallowed stony wastes in the other.

‘Deploy, tight, full cover,’ came Sergeant Phraates’ order through Cyvon’s vox-bead. His Intercessor squad followed the Librarian out of the transport. They were led by Phraates, whose red-painted helmet stood out against the purple of the Soul Drinkers’ armour and the grimy dark fawn of the dust.

They moved with coordination, speed and precision that men could not achieve. It had been ground into their minds over years of hypnogogic battle-rites and training-ground drills. It was a reflex action for Cyvon to follow Brother Sasan out of the ship, watching the left side as Sasan covered the right, the barrel of his bolt rifle hovering precisely in the centre of his field of vision. He did not have to think to know that the rest of the squad was doing the same behind him, so no hidden sniper or lurking ambusher could take them by surprise.

He did not have to think, so the rest of his mind was free to think.

So this is Kepris, he thought.

The Keprian Reclamation was part of the Imperium’s grand work known as the Indomitus Crusade. Hundreds of wars, thousands of conflicts spread across the domains of man, all with the grander purpose of winning back what the Cicatrix Maledictum had taken.

The Great Rift. The catastrophic warp storm had ripped the Imperium in two. It was partly a stellar phenomenon, partly proof of vastly powerful enemies moving against humankind. In its wake, the Days of Blinding, to some the heralding of the end times, had settled over those worlds of the Imperium cut off from the authority of Terra. Some such worlds had fallen into anarchy and corruption. Others had starved or been overcome by environmental collapse. Still others had been seduced by dark powers that promised survival and prosperity in a time of disaster. They had died. They had suffered. They had turned traitor.

The Indomitus Crusade was the glorious, bloodstained process of winning back those worlds, and reknitting them into the fabric of the Imperium. Sometimes the flock returned with fanfare and gratitude, welcoming the crusade’s armies as liberators. Others had to be purged of their heretics before they could rejoin the Imperium. Yet others had to be conquered. Some, destroyed.

The Primaris Space Marines had been the reinforcements the Adeptus Astartes had needed to form the cutting edge of the crusade. They were the fruits of a grand experiment, the Ultima Founding. A concoction of the primarchs’ genetic material, preserved since the days when the Emperor still walked the galaxy, had been used to create a new breed of transhuman warriors in the laboratories of Belisarius Cawl. There were thousands of newly minted Space Marines to reinforce existing embattled Chapters, and even found entirely new ones composed solely of Primaris battle-brothers, thrown en masse into the Great Rift to win back humanity’s worlds.

Some of the Imperium’s wars burned brightly and ended swiftly. Others smouldered on for relentless years. Planets that were thought inviolably strong were lost to dark forces. Others were reclaimed from impossible odds by vast sacrifices of men and machines. Each war had many fronts, and each front could spread across multiple worlds. Battle groups and task forces drawn from every branch of the Imperium’s vast military were sent from one end of the Imperium to the other, touching every corner of mankind’s domain.

Amidst the bedlam, a planet was marked for reconquest. It was a psychological target, for it housed a collection of relics of the Imperial creed. To the Ecclesiarchy, whose preachers were lamenting the signs of the apocalypse, reclaiming such a sacred world and its treasures would provide a rare point of light in the overwhelming darkness of their sermons. With its deliverance, the confessors and cardinals could point not just to signs of the end of mankind, but to a sign of victory. That world was named Kepris.

The task of winning back Kepris fell to a newly founded Chapter of Space Marines. A Chapter bearing their name had won their laurels in the Age of Apostasy and countless campaigns before they succumbed to a fate that Imperial history had not recorded. The new Primaris were given the heraldry of that near-forgotten Chapter, and sent out to glorify their name once again.

They were the Soul Drinkers.

The clatter of impacts rang from the drop-ship’s hull as Cyvon jumped down from the ramp to the top of the structure’s outer wall.

‘Small-arms fire,’ came the servitor-pilot’s voice inside the drop-ship.

‘Thank the Throne!’ said Brother Sasan as Cyvon landed beside him. ‘Emperor save us from a cold landing zone!’

‘Cold and fast,’ voxed Librarian Oxyath. ‘We come down fighting.’

Cold and fast. It was partly a war cry, partly a principle of battle. The Soul Drinkers had inherited it from the lost Chapter that had borne their name. It meant the Soul Drinkers fought on the move, refusing to get tied down by the enemy. And while other Chapters revelled in mad butchery, like the Flesh Tearers or the Space Wolves, the Soul Drinkers remained aware and in control, despatching their enemies with a dispassionate precision. Little remained of the old Chapter’s history save that its brethren were fleet-based and specialised in boarding actions and rapid assaults. Their chosen way of war had been to attack swiftly and dissect the enemy up close in a rapid series of accurate strikes.

Kepris stank of propellant and rot. Through the gun smoke and dust, Cyvon could see that the walls surrounded a domed structure decorated with stone scrollwork and arched windows. The walls were swarming with figures aiming their guns up at the drop-ship or rushing to the turrets located at each corner, where heavier weapons were set up on mountings.

A crevasse ran along the ground either side of the dome, and its central portion had partially collapsed into the chasm, revealing the painted plaster and tarnished gilt within. Sections of the walls were in ruins. An Imperial aquila, painted on the remains of the dome, had been deliberately defaced with gunfire.

‘A shrine,’ said Cyvon.

‘Not any more, brother,’ replied Sasan. ‘Now, it’s a grave.’

Across the structure, the strike force’s other two drop-ships were swooping low, ready to make landfall. One of them was commanded by Captain Quhya, the other by First Sergeant Tiridates. Some way above them was the auxiliary lifter carrying the Soul Drinkers’ transport vehicles. Ideally the strike force would make its assault aboard Thunderhawk gunships backed up by Stormtalon ground-attack craft, but in the cauldron of the Indomitus Crusade no army had everything it needed.

This world had come into the gunsights of the Soul Drinkers Third Company. It would be enough.

The drop-ships dipped low over the shrine’s outer wall. Cyvon could make out more of the enemy now – they had no uniform and instead wore a jumble of civilian clothing and pieces of military fatigues. And there was something wrong with their faces.

‘This world has a greeting planned for us!’ said Sergeant Phraates over the squad vox. ‘Let us welcome it in turn!’

The rest of the squad – Sergeant Phraates, Arasmyn, Manuch and Pitamenes – dropped into close formation, covering every angle at bolter-point.

Cyvon’s bolt rifle was already in his hands and his finger over the trigger as his mind took in the battle he had suddenly joined. He automatically dissected angles of fire and routes through cover, the bloody mathematics of combat.

Autogun and laser fire streaked across the battlements. Shots rang off Cyvon’s armour. He swung instinctively into the cover of a bend in the battlements, snapping off two shots into the shape of an enemy looming through the dust kicked up by the drop-ships’ engines. He heard the thunk of the shells hitting the figure’s torso, and the wet crunch of the miniaturised warheads detonating inside.

The enemy wore a filthy orange boiler suit, that of a miner or factorum worker, with a bulky rebreather backpack trailing rubber hoses. It had an autogun in its hands. The bolter shells had ripped open the figure’s torso and it stumbled against the battlements, its brain not fully aware of the ruination done to its organs.

It wore a set of welder’s goggles. Beneath them, and beneath the grime covering the face, there was something very wrong.

The blood spattering the stone of the walls was the first Cyvon had shed on that world.

So this is Kepris, he thought.

A blue-white light lanced down from overhead and landed by the heavy weapons emplacements along the wall. It flared from the force weapon in Oxyath’s hands, illuminating the scene as the Soul Drinkers shot down the heretics rushing along the battlements to fight them. The Librarian swept the staff through an enemy trying to bring a heavy stubber to bear, and followed up with a thrust that impaled a second.

‘Draw in and move down to the interior!’ voxed Phraates. ‘By sections! Show them how the Primaris fight!’

Squad Phraates met up on the walls, by one of the stone staircases leading into the structure. The dust and smoke were thick enough to obscure the scene below but the gunfire and raised voices made it clear that the whole place was on alert, and swarming with foes.

‘Who are they?’ asked Cyvon. The nature of the enemy was as important to the outcome of a battle as Cyvon’s own. Knowing the capabilities of the foe was a weapon in its own right. The face of the enemy he had just killed rose to the surface of his mind unbidden, before he forced it down again.

‘They are dead, brother,’ replied Sasan. ‘What else matters?’

‘If your words were bullets, Sasan,’ growled Pitamenes, ‘this battle would be won.’

Cyvon followed Phraates, the sergeant distinguished by his red helmet with its white stripe of rank. Cyvon fell into formation covering the squad’s rear-right quadrant, the battle-rites drilled into them so thoroughly it was instinct that had each member taking his prescribed place. Phraates ran down the steps rapidly and the area between the walls and the shrine came into view. Several of the enemy were on the back of a flatbed vehicle with another heavy stubber mounted on it, and were firing the weapon up at the top of the far walls, where Captain Quhya’s drop-ship had disgorged its Soul Drinkers. Phraates leapt the rest of the way down to the rocky ground as the heretics began to turn, realising they were being assaulted from both sides.

Cyvon jumped, rolled to his feet, and fired as he ran. One shot blew the arm off the enemy trying to swing the stubber around. Another caught a trooper in the face as he charged at the Soul Drinkers, bayonet fixed to his lasgun. Two more rushed up behind him and Cyvon cracked the stock of his bolt rifle against the side of the first one’s head. He ducked and took the second man’s charge on his shoulder, straightening and throwing him over with his own momentum. A Space Marine was two or three heads taller than a man and the enemy fell far enough to crack his head loudly on the stone. Sasan shot the man through the throat to confirm the kill as Phraates leapt onto the vehicle and laid about him with his sword. A severed arm spun through the air, followed by a head, and the vehicle was suddenly denuded of the troopers who had crewed its gun.

Brother Arasmyn preferred to fight up close. He ran right at one of the enemy and slammed him against the side of the vehicle, then rammed his combat knife through the man’s neck. Pitamenes picked off another as the trooper ran for the cover of the half-collapsed shrine wall, and Manuch shot one more off the walls behind them.

‘Damned place is swarming with them,’ said Manuch.

‘You say that like a curse,’ said Sasan. ‘What good is a Space Marine with no heretics with which to blood himself?’

‘More talk,’ said Pitamenes grimly.

Heretics, Sasan had called them, and their eagerness to open fire on the Space Marines confirmed they were enemies of mankind. But Cyvon could not call them heretics without knowing why they fought, what drove them, what kind of madness had taken them over such that they were choosing the sure death of facing the Angels of Death in battle. He could ask who they were, but his battle-brothers would have given the same answer, in their own ways.

It did not matter.

Captain Quhya’s contingent were sweeping down off the walls on the other side of the shrine. Heretics caught in the crossfire between the two payloads of Soul Drinkers dived for cover even as bolt rifle shells found their mark and ripped wet, red holes through them. Cyvon snapped shots into the fleeing enemies as he backed against the bullet-riddled vehicle and caught a glimpse of the ruined finery inside the shrine. The walls had been painted and framed with golden scrollwork, dulled and defaced by the collapse and the intrusion of the desert winds.

He turned over one of the fallen heretics with his boot. The man’s arm and shoulder had been blasted off, laying open half his torso. He wore a scarf around his face to fend off the dust and wind. A burst of autogun shots chattered from inside the shrine, rattling off the side of the flatbed, and Cyvon ducked out of the line of fire.

He pulled the scarf aside. The face beneath had been scored down the middle with a deep knife wound, too neat and precisely placed to have been caused by shrapnel or an accident. It had been deliberately inflicted. The wound went down through the mouth, splitting the lips. The tongue that lolled from between them was split too, like a lizard’s. The nose was pared open down to the bone, revealing nasal cavities choked with scar tissue.

‘Press on!’ came Captain Quhya’s order over the vox. ‘Drive them into the interior and hit them from all sides!’

‘If these heretics want to make a last stand in there,’ said Sasan, ‘it would be rude to deny them.’

Sergeant Phraates jumped down off the flatbed. ‘Breach and purge!’ he ordered. ‘Manuch, cover the rear. The rest, full forward!’

Cyvon left the mutilated heretic where he had fallen. The other bodies bore the same mutilation. What would drive someone to deliberately damage themselves?

But these were thoughts for when the fighting was done. Cyvon ran after Brother Sasan and Sergeant Phraates, straight at the gap in the shrine wall where the crevasse had undermined its massive sandstone blocks.

Fire poured out at them. Phraates trusted in his armour, and autogun shells pinged off the purple-painted ceramite plates of his greaves and shoulder guard. Cyvon backed against the wall and Phraates charged past him, loosing off half a magazine of bolter shells into the shrine’s gloom. Cyvon swung in behind him, scanning across the interior, ready to fire.

The gloom receded. His enhanced eyesight cut through the darkness. The walls and dome had once been covered in painted angels, swooping down from sun-drenched heavens. Saints had gazed up at the firmament, holding the archaic weaponry of the Imperium’s endless wars, and gilded letters had spelled out prayers to the God-Emperor. Now, the images were almost lost behind damage and bullet scars where they had been most thoroughly defiled. An enormous circular chandelier of wood still hung lopsidedly from the sagging dome, covered in ancient candles and encrusted with wax.

The place was a wreck. The dark wood pews had been piled up into barricades, or used as fuel for a huge bonfire in the centre of the room beside the splintered remains of the preacher’s pulpit. The lit bonfire surrounded a blackened statue of the Emperor in gilded armour, from which the eyes had been struck. The eyes of the painted figures on the walls had been similarly gouged out.

Dozens of the heretics were sheltering among the ruined pews. Cyvon’s trigger finger tightened by instinct, spraying a volley of bolter shells across the room in a fan of fire. The heretics dived to the floor as Soul Drinkers burst in from every angle and criss-crossed the shrine with gunfire.

Hundreds of the enemy had barracked here. They had slept in the bedrolls scattered among the pews. Scores of them had already died in the time since the Soul Drinkers had landed. It had been less than a minute. They fell in the crossfire, shredded by shrapnel from the explosive rounds. In return, their weapons pinged and fizzed off the Soul Drinkers’ power armour, or scored furrows through the defaced murals as their panicked aim went wild. The Emperor’s statue was sprayed with blood, and bodies were draped over the altar and pulpit. The centre of the shrine was becoming a tangled swamp of gore and body parts.

It was less a gunfight than a dissection. The battle-drills of the Soul Drinkers were executed to perfection. Cyvon moved now without conscious decision, fighting by rote, knowing his battle-brothers would be following the same tactical patterns laid down hundreds or thousands of years ago and sleep-taught to the Primaris of the Soul Drinkers.

‘Onward!’ came Quhya’s order over the vox. The three jump pack-equipped battle-brothers of Inceptor Squad Astyagon rocketed across the shrine on columns of flaming exhaust, strafing the heretics with chains of fire from their assault bolters. Hellblaster Squad Khosrau swept into the shrine beside Squad Phraates and eroded the hard cover of the solid wooden pulpit with pulses of fire from their plasma incinerators. Liquid plasma washed over the heretics, burning away their flesh to leave blackened bone and melting anything they hid behind. Superheated air washed across the shrine, igniting the torn pages of discarded prayer books.

‘Follow, brethren, or be damned!’ ordered Sergeant Phraates. He led the way over the broken pews towards the heretics’ last stand, firing one-handed as he drew his chainsword. Cyvon snapped shots into the heretics taking cover behind the massive base of the Emperor’s statue and saw more skulls blown open. In the storm of fire, it was impossible to tell to whom the kills belonged.

‘Sweep the scum aside and purify this place!’ yelled Phraates, his voice ragged with the rush of battle.

The stench of death hit Cyvon in waves now, as if accentuated by the heat of the Hellblasters’ plasma fire. It hit harder than the chemicals of bolter propellant, even through the filter of his helmet.

It was coming from beneath. He could make out the steps beside the altar, leading to a lower level of catacombs or ritual chambers. Somewhere the heretics were dying to defend.

A team of heretics hauled a missile launcher on a pivoting stand up to what remained of the pulpit. Two fell immediately as the Inceptors finished their arc and riddled them with bolter fire that blew their upper torsos into crimson spray. The surviving two aimed the missile launcher across the shrine at the charging Squad Phraates.

‘You dare?’ snarled Pitamenes, stepping up onto one of the pews for a better shot at the weapons team. ‘These vermin would take the life of a Soul Drinker?’ He shot one of the heretics in the throat, blowing his head clean off.

Manuch dropped to one knee and fired a single bolt into the heretic aiming the missile launcher. The bolter detonated inside the man’s shoulder and his arm spun away in a spray of gore.

The launcher swung towards the sky as the heretic’s remaining hand contracted around the firing lever. A missile streaked straight upwards, and the dying man vanished in the billow of white exhaust.

The missile detonated against the dome in a thunderclap and a burst of orange flame. The roof cracked and sagged, and in a shower of debris the enormous wooden ring of the chandelier came loose. It seemed to fall in slow motion as its chains snapped and it plunged edge first towards the centre of the shrine.

Cyvon skidded against one of the pews to halt his advance before he ended up underneath the falling chandelier. It crunched into the floor just ahead of him and kept going, smashing through flagstones already half melted by the barrages of plasma and bolter fire.

The floor collapsed in a cascade of ancient broken stone, thousands of years of wear, combined with the undermining of the shrine by the crevasse, causing it to give way completely. The edge of the collapse rushed towards Cyvon faster than he could react and he felt the floor disintegrating beneath him. He saw Pitamenes beside him grabbing on to the stone and halting his fall as Cyvon plunged into the dark underside of the shrine.

Chunks of masonry cracked against his armour. He willed himself to keep hold of his bolter as debris rang off his helmet and bursts of white pain flashed across his vision.

He might have blacked out for a moment. Cyvon cursed the possibility, and ignored the complaints from his battered limbs as he rolled onto his front and got to his feet. His armour automatically dispensed anaesthetics, but he had already forgotten about the pain before they started working.

‘Report!’ came Phraates’ rough-edged voice, sounding distant through the vox.

‘Alive,’ said Cyvon. ‘I am alive.’

He took stock of his surroundings rapidly. He had come to rest in an arched tunnel of worked stone, now half choked by debris from the collapse. Overhead was a slice of an opening that looked up to the shrine’s dome, streaked with bolter fire. Ahead of him the passage opened up into a larger chamber lit by guttering candlelight.

This was the source of the stench. The odour of death surrounded him, so heavy it seemed the air was thick and sluggish with it.

He got to his feet, checking himself for injuries. Nothing of note. He cycled the action of his bolt rifle, and it gave a heavy, broken clunk.

Whether it was through random chance, or because he had been inattentive during his pre-battle wargear rites, the weapon had failed him. Cyvon shouldered the rifle and drew his combat blade. Its monomolecular edge shone in the faint candlelight. With his other hand he drew his bolt pistol. It had a shorter range and lower rate of fire than the rifle, but in these close confines it would suffice.

‘Unhurt,’ voxed Sasan. ‘Throne alive, something died down here.’

Cyvon heard voices from up ahead. Strident and defiant, someone ranting as if whipping a crowd into a frenzy of zeal. And he heard the crowd, too, their roar rising and falling with the speaker’s inflection.

He backed against the archway and glanced through to the larger chamber. The scene was lit by hundreds of candles oozing wax down the walls. Well over a hundred people kneeled before the far wall, on which shone an image from a projector above the archway. Each of the kneeling figures was stripped and hunched, and so malnourished their spines and ribs stood out vividly through their bruised and lesioned skin. Each figure’s wrists were manacled to an iron ring in the floor in front of them, forcing them into a kneeling position.

Forced to kneel. Forced to pray.

The stench was emanating from the congregation. Some of them had fresh wounds, as if they had just been flogged before being dragged down into the catacomb. Others had long-healed wounds and skin so grey and lifeless they might have been dead. The congregation was continually refreshed, perhaps as a punishment, perhaps as a sacred duty for the heretics above. Cyvon could not help but wonder how long they had been down here, chained in enforced prayer.

He levelled his pistol across the gloomy chamber. Niches in the walls still held scraps of bone and funeral shrouds. This had once been the catacomb where clergy had been buried beneath the altar to their Emperor. Now it was defiled by this mockery of worship.

Cyvon stepped carefully between the rows of worshippers. They did not acknowledge him. Their eyes were fixed on the projection. Their faces, like those of the heretics fighting above, were sliced down the centre from forehead to chin, opening up the nasal cavity and splitting the lips into an expression no unmutilated human face could wear. Their eyes were lidless, dry and speckled with dust.

Sasan entered the chamber from another archway. The purple of his armour was grey with grime and debris from the collapse. An acknowledgement rune flashed against Cyvon’s retina, projected by the auto-senses inside his helmet, and with a thought he returned the signal to his battle-brother.

A section of the ceiling had collapsed in a far corner of the room, brought down by the old subsidence of the shrine building. A sliver of movement flickered behind it – white fabric. Robes.

Cyvon broke into a run down the centre of the chamber, past the rows of worshippers. The other side of the collapsed stone came into view, and behind one of the blocks crouched a heretic, this one in layers of white vestments with a mask of stretched and tanned skin worn over his face. He had an autogun clutched in his hands.

‘Behold her vengeance!’ yelled the heretic, bringing up his gun to fire.

Cyvon was faster by far. Before the heretic could take aim, the Soul Drinker had pulled the trigger. His bolt pistol barked and the explosive round smacked into the centre of the heretic’s chest. The wall behind him was sprayed with the interior of his chest cavity as a second shot blew off his gun arm.

A weight slammed down from the ceiling onto Cyvon. He heard Sasan opening fire and more bolter shells thumping into flesh before they detonated. Cyvon rolled onto his back, trying to dislodge whoever had landed on him. He felt steel claws scrabbling at the neck joint of his armour, trying to wrench his helmet off.

Cyvon snapped his bolt pistol onto the magnetic clamp at his waist and grabbed a handful of the heretic grappling him. He threw the attacker over his shoulder to the floor in front of him, as if he were wrestling a sparring opponent to the ground.

The thing that hit the floor had been human once, but no longer. It still wore the tatters of a fine military uniform with threads of brocades clinging to the chest and medals pinned to the tattered front of a dark-red jacket. Its arms were reinforced with pistons and rods for strength, and for hands it had sets of steel claws.

The face was a horror. The skin was pared away from the central split, opening up the eyes into wide bloodshot orbs sitting in their deep, red sockets. The lips were peeled back and pinned to the cheeks, revealing a grimace of gore-flecked teeth.

One of the arms pistoned forwards. Cyvon caught it with his free hand before the claws found his throat. His other hand gripped the combat knife. He punched the blade forward into the attacker’s chest and felt it scrape between the ribs, but the enemy kept going.

The heretic should have been dead. Cyvon’s enhanced hearing could detect the hammering of its heart, driven by combat stimms. It struck again with a reinforced arm, with strength and speed that could crack ceramite. Cyvon pivoted to one side and the fist drove chunks from the stone wall behind him.

The heretic screamed.

In a flicker of the candlelight, Cyvon could see the dark-red flesh exposed by the deep furrow down the centre of the heretic’s face. He lunged with the combat knife, aiming for the vertical split. The knife sank into the heretic’s brain cavity, right between its eyes, up to the hilt.

Finally some key connection was severed, and the heretic fell limp. Cyvon flicked it off the blade and let it clatter to the floor. He drew his bolt pistol again and spun around to see Brother Sasan kick a similarly enhanced attacker away from him and pump two bolter shells into its chest.

The chamber was finally clear. Sasan looked around and, for the first time Cyvon could remember, seemed lost for words.

The projection showed an open square surrounded by looming city spires. Thousands of people crowded the square, facing a wooden stage that took up one end of the space. Banks of seating held thousands more on the other three sides. Banners hung around the square. Some, bearing the elaborate arms of aristocratic houses, were torn and defaced. Others, new and resplendent, had the image of an enthroned woman whose head was surrounded by a halo of sunbeams.

On the stage was gathered a group of priests. They wore masks of carved wood and metal, and their garb was similar to that of the robed heretic Cyvon had despatched. Behind them were several large steel cages with human shapes inside, crouching and pawing like animals.

Another group on the stage were hunched and emaciated, their tattered and stained uniforms hanging on starved frames. Most were in the remains of the black garb of the Administratum, while others wore the robes of Ecclesiarchy clerics. Armed heretics below the front of the stage trained their guns on this other group, even though the captives looked barely able to stand, let alone fight.

The crowd cheered as one of the priests stepped forward to a vox-caster microphone mounted on a lectern. The priest wore a mask carved into a snarling, catlike face, and the ivory of his robes was trimmed red. He held up a hand to quiet the crowd. He wore several fat rings that glinted in the lights trained on the stage.

‘I stand here as the Uppermost Hand of the prophetess,’ he began, ‘of the Voice of All. Through me, she speaks. And she pronounces death!’

‘Enough of this heresy,’ said Sasan, and strode to the back of the chamber, towards the projector.

‘Wait,’ said Cyvon. ‘We know nothing about this enemy.’

‘What do we need to know?’ asked Sasan, pausing beside the machine. ‘They took up arms against us. They defy the rule of the Imperium. They are the enemy. Or is this place not quite heretical enough for you, brother?’

‘Sergeant,’ voxed Cyvon. ‘Found something. A place of worship. A broadcast from a city, maybe Hollowmount. It might tell us something.’

‘Captain Quhya has ordered us to move in ten minutes, as soon as the transports make landfall,’ replied Phraates. ‘Cyvon, observe the broadcast until then. I should like to know what is waiting for us in the city. The rest of you, sweep for hostiles and regroup in the courtyard.’

Cyvon sent an acknowledgement rune as reply. Sasan left the projector alone and checked back through the doorway he had arrived through, hunting for any hidden enemies that had somehow survived the Soul Drinkers’ assault.

Cyvon continued to watch the broadcast as a bent old man in the black uniform of the Administratum was dragged from the gaggle of prisoners to centre stage. The chained congregation watched, too, their jaws lolling open, ignoring the dead heretics littering the chamber and several of their own number who had been caught in the crossfire and killed. Cyvon wondered who these people had been before they were brought down here and condemned to this forced observance of a heretic religion. Had they gone willingly? Was this a reward for the faithful, or a punishment?

He knew his fellow Space Marines would give him the same answer, so his questions went unasked.

They would all say the same thing. These people were the enemy. What did it matter?

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Traitor by Deed, Spark of Revolution, Prisoners of Waaagh!, Bonereapers and The Rose in Anger first published in 2020.
This eBook edition published in 2021 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Represented by: Games Workshop Limited – Irish branch, Unit 3, Lower Liffey Street, Dublin 1, D01 K199, Ireland.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Evan Shipard.

Deliverance and Damnation © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2021. Deliverance and Damnation, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, Necromunda, Warhammer, Warhammer Age of Sigmar, Stormcast Eternals, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, 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.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-80026-751-0

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

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