Contents

Cover

The Martyr’s Tomb – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Chapter One

the hanging gardens burn

way of sigismund

heart of faith

The Hanging Gardens burned.

The fires had swept the shrine city’s outer precincts ahead of the cult advance, lit in fits of pique and petulant deviance as befitted unruly children. Irinya Sarael gazed out across the once verdant gardens and felt the bitter pangs of loss – old and new. Her grip tightened upon her bolter as the burning blossoms spiced the air with strange smoke. She could smell it even through the seals and filters of her helm – a cloying too-sweet stench clawed its way up behind the smoke, speaking of new rot and atrocity.

‘With me!’ she barked over the vox, and her Sisters moved to answer. Across the defensive line hewn through the Hanging Gardens, the Order of Our Martyred Lady flowed into place, like shadows from the smoke. Battle Sisters wore their armour with silent pride, while alongside them fought the lightly armoured novitiates of the Order. Once they might have tended these gardens in placid repose, but now they were called to action.

Irinya looked about her, bolter raised as she advanced. Josefine was with her, muttering quiet prayers as they marched down the marble sweep of a stairway. Down and onto the sodden earth, soaked with the blood of countless souls. Loyalists and traitors. Visionaries and madmen. It had been kept sacred and it had been profaned, day after day, for the span of months. The months of the siege. She gritted her teeth inside the confines of her helm. The stench of rot was stronger now, just as it was with every incursion.

‘By the glory of the Throne we shall hold, and by the light of His will we shall endure!’ she bellowed. Banners snapped with the sudden rush of wind, flapping on the archways to the rear of the Sisters, as the bodies shook and swayed between the great crimson spills of fabric.

The Hanging Gardens were not named idly.

Once, in happier times, the faithless and heretical would have been hanged from the white marble walls – their throats crushed slowly by chains or strong hempen ropes – so that their last sights would be of the mortal paradise beyond. They would die in shame, with only the fleeting glimpse of beauty to haunt them to their torments, denied forever the grace of the God-Emperor’s light.

Once it had felt just. Now, though, so many hooks hung empty and the bodies that lingered were crow-eaten things of dry flesh and dusty bones. The war had stolen everything that the crusade had made righteous.

The instruments of that despoliation stalked through the smog and murk, wrapped in sackcloth and stolen flak armour. She knew they were not the architects of the ruin that had befallen them, not in truth. Puppets. Deluded fools who had traded lives of sanctity for the hollow horror of obedience to dark gods. The flesh of the enemy was rimed with dried pus and etched with ritual scars. They had carved weeping eyes into their skin, over and over again. Barbed with eight points or weeping seven tears – it mattered not, only that they wore their infamy proudly.

‘Disgusting,’ Josefine intoned. Irinya could hear the angry tremor in her voice. She wanted nothing more than to burn them from the earth. Though her Sister was helmed, Irinya knew that her pale features would be twisted into a glare behind its lenses. If she could, Josefine would have smote the enemy with a look alone.

It was hard to disagree with her. The enemy stank, revelling as they did in their own filth. They wore soiled bandages, not to staunch their wounds, but to cultivate the corruption of their flesh and souls. These were the Children of the Sevenfold Revelation, who had sprung up like a contagion across the seven sacred worlds of the Golden Chain.

And who now came for the last of those worlds.

‘Not here,’ she whispered. ‘Not this world. Not her world.’

Behind the Sisters the wall guns had begun their thunderous refrain, staining the ashen skies with trails of fire. In response the enemy’s crude artillery returned fire, alongside rains of plague-ridden corpses hurled by makeshift trebuchets. Flesh spattered wetly as it landed, casting up caustic showers of acidic blood and bile. Everything they did was an atrocity.

‘They are near enough now, surely.’ Agata spoke from Irinya’s left. The Sister hefted her flamer and patted it appreciatively, savouring the weight of the sacred weapon. It was called Last Light and Agata was not the first, merely the latest stalwart soul to bear it into sacred war. She would not be the last.

Irinya nodded. ‘Near enough. We shall render His wrath unto them, and they shall regret the day heresy took root in their hearts. Whether they came from other ravaged worlds or betrayed their oaths to this one, they shall know punishment.’

The wall guns fired again. Behind them, within the Bastion Sanctus, she knew Colonel Draszen of the Veluan Hoplites, the ‘Shrinesworn’, would be watching the contracting lines through his magnoculars and directing the fury of the cannons. Within the hallowed courtyards of the Presidium Imperator Gloria Sister Superior Eloise would be raising the Hymn of Righteous Obliteration and coaxing the Exorcist missile launchers to furious heights of castigation.

Combined, their fire would break the enemy. Canoness Irinya and her Sisters were the bulwark that would hold the foetid ranks of the foe in place – pinned like insects under glass.

Irinya raised her hand and the line of Battle Sisters raised their weapons. They were unified in the moment, oath-sworn to the defence of Velua and the undertaking of the Indomitus Crusade.

‘In the name of the God-Emperor and His Reborn Son, cleanse them all!’

There was a thrill to holy war that the endless tribal skirmishes of his home world could never match.

Aneirin, once a son of the jungles of the death world of Dakaram, now a Neophyte of the Black Templars, plunged into righteous battle, forcing his way through a heaving mass of diseased bodies. He passed under an archway whose pillars held the glowering skulls of martyrs entombed within them, moving through the outer gardens, away from the Battle Sisters and the unseeing eyes of the hanging dead, and swung his chainsword round and through two of the enemy cultists. Soiled robes tore, sprayed with the sudden gout of thick syrupy blood. They fell away in silence, and Aneirin scowled to see it.

Silence, in the face of a warrior such as himself, was a condemnation. It was not enough to see the enemy bleed; he would see them driven before him in lament.

‘Filth!’ he bellowed. Knives scraped against his plate and autogun fire deflected pitifully. He could already hear the guns of the Battle Sisters nearby, further to the west, deeper into the Hanging Gardens, committing at last in the sacred song of war. There was a beauty upon Velua. He had grown up on Dakaram, far from here, amidst the chants of the Forever Hunt and devotion to the Walking-Sun-Who-Scars-The-Heavens. It was only later he had been told by the sages of the Chaplaincy that their august deity was merely a veiled face of the God-Emperor.

How many faces does He wear? Across time and space, and the galaxy’s span?

It was nigh impossible to consider. In an empire of a million worlds, the god they served could wear so many more faces than that. The God-Emperor that tended to the souls of the privileged was not the same as the one who swept His scythe about the boundless poor. Nor was the God-Emperor who ruled over worlds of steel and stone simply the mirror of the master of plain and forest.

He wore His great burdens as a panoply of might and majesty. Only a god could guide the fate of a species, of an empire, and turn the very stars themselves.

‘Praise be!’ Aneirin bellowed. All these thoughts had passed through his mind in the time it had taken to break the back of the enemy squad which had been advancing through the Marbled Grottos. Statues, the ones which had not already been toppled and defaced, stared at him with mute acceptance of their fate and his presence. Blood streaked their pale countenances, and the foetor of the enemy lingered about them like a vile mockery of incense. He could see his battle-brothers moving between the mouldering statues and through the smoke, firing as they moved. The flash of a power weapon split the gloom and one of the mutilated idols fell, impacting the mud with a heavy wet slap.

Aneirin’s breathing steadied and he lowered his blade at last, shaking free yet more of the enemy’s flesh from its whirring teeth. The vox clicked in his helm, like the echo of the weapon’s machine spirit’s hunger. Special dispensation had been sought and granted by the Chaplaincy, that Neophytes such as himself would be allowed to wear their helms – the better to fend off the foe’s toxic miasma. Aneirin honoured the sacred machine spirit of the helmet, whispering a prayer as he listened to the message.

‘The youngblood has promise, Barisan, though I think if you do not leash him then he may plunge into the very heart of the foe alone. As though he were Sigismund himself!’ Laughter followed the declaration across the squad’s vox, though there was little mockery in it. A mirth born of camaraderie and growing respect. Brother Arvin was something of a trickster, though none would doubt his zeal or commitment to the crusade. As wry in his humour as he was exacting in his wrath.

‘You might learn something from his boldness, brother,’ was Sword Brother Barisan’s measured reply. Aneirin’s master knew when to indulge the passions of the Crusader squad and when to rein them in. ‘There is no shame in untempered wrath – for that is the fuel of the Eternal Crusade.’

Aneirin turned as the other members of the squad strode into the square, occupied now only by the Neophyte and his slaughtered prey. Bodies were strewn about, limbs severed and torsos gouged open as though by the passage of some great beast. It was only as the other warriors drew closer that Aneirin realised that the open space was carpeted in tiny bodies. The foul vapours and plague clades cast up by the enemy had devastated the local wildlife. The corpses and bones of birds lay everywhere, crunching under the boots of the Astartes warriors. Here and there lay dead cherubs, their aquiline pinions bent and broken.

‘So too shall the passage of the unclean scar the earth, and leave in their wake a desolation,’ Aneirin quoted from memory.

Barisan, at the head of the small band, shook his head with a smile hidden behind his helm. ‘Indeed, Aneirin. Well learned. The touch of the Archenemy is ruin and despoliation. Spreading from the Rift, and all the unbarred hells of mortal fear.’

Arvin hefted his pyreblaster with an arsonist’s relish, its long barrel already greasy with the ash of cremated bodies. He turned from the rest of his brothers and began to incinerate the cultists with the cleansing, sacred flames. Smoke once again stained the already sullied white marble of the walls that encircled them, rendering the stylised images of saints and the God-Emperor all the dourer.

‘Thus ever to heathens,’ Arvin said with a nod. ‘May they burn forever in their own sins.’

‘Such is the God-Emperor’s will,’ Aneirin finished. He turned to face Barisan, impressed as always with the simple potency of the man’s authority. He wore the armour of a full battle-brother, Mark X plate sanctified by the Chapter’s Techmarines and consecrated by the Chaplaincy. Beneath that armour Aneirin knew there dwelt a stern but patrician face, so different from his own unformed youth. Barisan was dark of hair, his pale skin marked by the passage of time and the creeping scars of service. An exemplar, as Aneirin hoped one day to be.

A sudden realisation flooded into the Neophyte’s mind.

‘Brother… The Champion. Is he near? Does he honour us with his guidance in sacred warfare?’

Barisan was silent for a moment. Aneirin wondered if he was contemplating the answer, or simply assessing the urgency which had flooded the Neophyte’s voice.

‘Where else would he be, brother? He is at the heart of the conflict.’

He fought at the heart of the conflict and existed as the heart of faith.

Even on a world barnacled with sacred things and holy relics, Gaheris was singular in his purity. The Armour of Faith turned aside all the weakling blows of the enemy, even as the Black Sword hewed through them in a sweep of blinding light. He moved through the ranks of the foe with swift economical motions, his every action exact and considered. He could hear the vox cries of his brothers, and of the Sisterhood who supported them. Calls for reinforcement, for support, for clarity. He was elevated beyond such things. As much as he was a leader of men, he was also the bearer of the God-Emperor’s holy wrath.

‘For He upon Terra!’ he bellowed as he swept through them. Leprous flesh parted. Sluggish blood barely flowed from their wounds. Vermin fled from the corpses in tides of worms, lice and maggots. Even the parasites knew the end was upon them. Gaheris had led his warriors out in force, to cleanse the enemy while the Sisterhood and the Hoplites held the walls. They would strike out into the core of the enemy’s strength and break them. That was their sacred oath.

They stood now in the way of the war. It was both the Eternal War and the End War. The conflict which had been kindled so long ago upon Terra and which had ended and began anew there. The God-Emperor’s war. Sigismund’s great undertaking, and now the regent’s renewed crusade.

As though it ever ended. As though we would allow it to end. The thought was a comfort as much as it was a goad to greater deeds.

A shambling cultist, already looking half-dead, turned at Gaheris’ sudden motion, before the back of a gauntleted fist drove it into the muck. Bubbles rose from the filth before Gaheris brought his foot down to complete the execution. Its skull shattered under his tread.

Not one of the animate dead then, he mused. Merely another soul waylaid by darkness. Gaheris shook his head and drove the blade down and through the corpse’s heart, to be certain.

‘The wiles of the enemy are deceit, trickery and malice,’ he whispered to himself. ‘They mislead and corrupt. I will not be deceived.’ He looked up again, seeking the light of the Emperor’s guidance.

Golden light coiled around a knot of darkness, somewhere beyond the ornamental gardens and garlanded tombs. Where the makeshift siege weapons of the enemy fired and thundered, there lay his prize. The one who directed the foe’s poisonous efforts. When their false prophet was dead then the enemy would falter and break – not simply on this front but across all Velua. All that remained was to trust in the God-Emperor’s grace and follow His sacred light.

There he would find his reckoning.

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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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