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A Rose Watered With Blood – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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A Rose Watered With Blood

By Aaron Dembski-Bowden

After the weeks of choking heat, and the deaths that had come with it, there’d been the lice. Several Apothecary reports stated the infestation of vermin had sprung forth from the corpses left strewn across every deck and chamber of the Conqueror. A legion of the desiccated dead, those dry and bloodless revenants somehow acting as incubator hives for colonies of red insects growing in their parched guts. In that respect – and not without a certain bleak poetry – one plague had sprung directly from the other.

The infernal heat abated over time, but only in the sense it diminished to tolerable levels. The inside of the Conqueror still seethed with a sickly, living warmth that radiated from its plasma generators – those ancient machines throbbed on several decks, uncomfortably organic in their twitching – but the ship’s innards no longer threatened to bake the crew in their own sweat-reeking air supply.

That was when the lice showed up. The vermin nestled in body hair and feasted on blood. They grew fat enough from their feeding that they could be picked from scalps or armpits with bare fingertips. Every crew member’s ear canals had to be rinsed with saline solution daily to flush out clutches of lice eggs. At first, that was impossible. The Conqueror was trying to kill her crew, and every drop of potable water on board the flagship had turned to blood.

Only when the ship managed to fall from the warp and anchor in low orbit above the planet Heshimar was the crew able to begin the slow process of rehabilitation.

Heshimar had declared for Horus. Joyously so. Its people chanted the Warmaster’s name in the streets. The mauled Conqueror and its miserable, haunted crew had looked down at a world where the populace cheered their arrival. Anything the Conqueror needed, said the ministers of Heshimar, it would be provided with willing hearts.

The warship’s captain, thick-tongued from deprivation, had blinked gummy eyes at the scanning displays.

‘Can they actually give us everything we need?’ she asked. The list of their deficiencies was long: the Conqueror was nowhere close to self-sufficiency, and required a continent’s worth of food and water, a city’s worth of iron for repairs, enough fuel to get across a quarter of the galaxy… The charter of needs went on and on and on.

An officer by the name of Guhuj was the one to reply. The bridge crew had once numbered over five hundred souls. It was lucky to reach two-thirds of that now, and many of those were servitors and thralls-in-training.

‘No,’ Guhuj said flatly.

‘No?’

‘Heshimar is resource-poor,’ Guhuj clarified. Three years before, Ansin Guhuj had been a handsome, broad-shouldered deck officer aged forty-four standard years. Now he was practically emaciated. He looked closer to sixty than fifty. At some point, one of the Legion had carved his arm off at the elbow. The captain was too weary to ask why. Sometimes the legionaries did things like that because they were hungry. More often they didn’t seem to have any reason at all.

The captain spent almost half an hour reviewing the data herself, data that she once would have grasped intuitively and decided upon at once. In her privation, it took time to weigh calculations of rearmament, resupply and recovery for her vessel, which was really nothing less than a city in the sky. A dying city.

‘There’s enough,’ she concluded.

‘Only if we leave the planet dead in our wake,’ Guhuj pointed out.

‘There’s enough,’ the captain repeated in the exact same tone as before.

A week later, they had food, water, iron, plasma, promethium fuel and tens of thousands of fresh slaves. Heshimar, for all its loyalty to the Warmaster’s cause, was left with a pockmarked face of silent, slagged cities.

And Lotara Sarrin, captain of the warship Conqueror, tasted clean water for the first time in almost eight months. Almost as importantly, she flushed her ear canals clean of lice eggs.

They didn’t remain in orbit for long. The colossal thing chained in the Conqueror’s infected bowels roared its rage throughout the ship. Angron cried out for Terra, Terra, Terra, and the creature that had once been the primarch of the XII Legion would not be denied.

The Conqueror sailed on. At the end of her voyage was mankind’s cradle, and in the skies above distant Terra, destiny lay in wait.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

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ISBN: 978-1-78030-763-3

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