Contents

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The Beheading - Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Chapter One

Death to the Beast!

The citizens of Terra crowded the streets in their millions. They sang out their praises to the Emperor with tears in their eyes. They roared their approval until they were hoarse. After months of terror, there was victory.

Terra’s most beloved sons were coming home, and the Throneworld had found its voice.

Maximus Thane led the heroes of the Imperium, standing tall in the cupola of the Land Raider Dorn’s Fist. The Imperial Fists marched in tight lockstep, their yellow armour gleaming in the smog-choked morning of Terra. The Imperial Fists were newly gathered as brothers still, and nearly half of those who had taken up the yellow and black to fight on Ullanor had fallen, but they marched as one: Excoriator, Executioner, Iron Knight, Soul Drinker, Black Templar, Crimson Fist and Fist Exemplar had cast off their prior identities and subsumed them into the deeper brotherhood of Dorn. Old ties dissolved into the rebirth of a greater past. Continuation would be their legacy, though none outside the ranks of the Adeptus Astartes would ever know the Imperial Fists had fallen.

Behind the reformed Imperial Fists came representatives of a dozen other Chapters of the First, Second and Third Foundings. They were small contingents in the main, but in some of them were contained every remaining member of their orders. The victory against the Beast had cost the Imperium dear.

After the marching Space Marines snaked a trail of armoured vehicles ten kilometres long, all brightly painted in the honourable heraldries of the Emperor’s chosen. Behind them the ground quaked to the tread of thousands of Astra Militarum Guardsmen, macroclades of Martian skitarii, and plodding, mighty mechanisms of the Legio Cybernetica. Machines and men of every conceivable type walked proudly past the Tortestrian Gate, Ballad Gate, and Bastion Ledge. Overhead soared flights of Navy Aeronautica fighters and Chapter Thunderhawks. Above them, the dim shapes of starships at low anchor coasted across the brown sky, serene as icebergs.

Laud-hailers borne by floating platforms sang their praise to the Emperor. Servo-skulls and cybernetic constructs without number swarmed in the sky. Along every street, from every window, from balconies and suspended ways hundreds of metres above ground level, from buried halls and avenues hidden in the planet’s metal skin, the people of Terra gave thunderous voice to their gratitude.

The procession turned onto Victory Way and headed east. There, tens of millions of pallid clerks blinked in the unaccustomed daylight. The crowds were thousands deep, reducing the kilometre-wide road to a ribbon of rockcrete. Singing priests gathered in huge numbers. Shrieking herald-seraphim, set free from their roosts in the great cathedrals, soared on the thermals, chanting the names of the victorious. Light from Terra’s rising sun pierced the cloak of industrial filth that veiled her face and lit upon the sons of Dorn, birthing gold from the yellow. The roaring of the crowd intensified. It was overwhelming, deafening. The eyes of a world were upon Thane. Thane! Thane! Thane! They chanted his name like a heartbeat. Terra had returned to life.

It should have been Koorland, thought Thane, not I. It is he who deserves this honour.

If he was saddened his friend’s name was not chanted, he was grateful for the shortness of man’s memory. Soon he too would be forgotten, and another name would take the place of his. How had Koorland managed to cope with all this, he thought. How can any child of humanity?

His helmet auditory equipment and Lyman’s ear struggled to keep the noise of the crowd to tolerable levels. There would be mortals there that day deafened by the crowd’s tumult, he was sure. They would tell their grandchildren proudly that the sound of victory was the last thing they heard.

The procession ground on, already hours into its passage. More hours of noise awaited.

Victory Way opened up onto the Fields of Winged Victory, a vast space built to accommodate the armies of the Great Crusade so that the Emperor could address them. Giant vid-screens surrounded it, displaying Thane’s face to the adoring populace of the Imperial Palace. A sea of faces turned towards him as Dorn’s Fist rode into the Fields, eyes rippling to the procession’s entry point underneath a skyscraping triumphal arch. A row of twenty Titans formed an aisle to receive the heroes of the Imperium. They waited with their heads bowed. As each war machine was passed by the procession on its way towards the centre of the Fields, it rose up and gave voice through its war-horns, until the ground vibrated with their basso profundo song, the mightiest chorale in the galaxy.

Thane’s destination was an edifice three storeys tall erected specially for the occasion. Dorn’s Fist mounted the ramp winding around the outside. It was lined with the Adeptus Custodes, come out at last from the inner wards of the Palace. At each sharp corner, Dorn’s Fist swung around abruptly, until the last was taken, and the marble summit of the platform opened. A pinnacle awaited Thane, topped with a smaller platform and a lectern. As the crowd roared on, the tank’s assault ramp slammed down to crack the fresh, gleaming paving and Thane strode out. The ordinarily still, heavy air of Terra had space to move over the Fields, and a light wind teased his honour papers and oath scrips.

He emerged at the top of the pinnacle to a deafening cheer that seemed to last an age.

In front of the lectern, upon a stone bier decorated with a frieze of victorious Space Marines, lay the corpse of an immense ork. It was an impressive specimen, twice the height of Thane and clad in barbarous armour. Every time the vid-screens showed its magnified face to the masses, there came a hysterical booing, whole sectors of the Palace hissing so that it sounded as if a desert’s worth of sand spilled upon the rockcrete.

This ork was not the Beast. The example before Thane had been selected carefully by those adepts skilled in the manipulation of the human psyche. Fabricator General Kubik had offered his best magi-genetors for the task. Thane had elected to employ Grand Master Vangorich’s logistaries and Temple Vanus agents instead.

The Beast could not be too large, for it would instil fear in the people rather than dispelling it, Vangorich insisted. Nor could it be too small, for then contempt for the rulers of Terra would seep into the hearts of humanity that they were bested repeatedly by a weak foe. Thane wished the Beast itself had survived, for he was tired of subterfuge, but the Beast’s head and those of its monstrous comrades had detonated under the stress of psychic feedback, and their corpses were buried in the ruins of Gorkogrod.

The gleaming of his armour put a cast on everything he saw, tinting the red of his eye-lenses orange. The colour was a deception. He was not made to be an Imperial Fist. When he first put on the colours of the old Legion he had expected it to be temporary, but the lie had become the truth; he was no longer a Fist Exemplar. The Imperial Fists were dead, but the Imperial Fists must be seen as immortal. The Defenders of Terra could not fall.

Only months before, he had been outraged by Udin Macht Udo’s demand that the fall of the Fists on Ardamantua be kept secret. He had privately doubted Koorland’s judgement when he had warriors of the other Chapters masquerade as Imperial Fists during that other, premature victory parade. At last he understood. Some walls must be rebuilt in the night. Appearances were everything.

Thane had come to loathe politics. Far on the other side of the Fields, on another platform, were twelve stone thrones. He upped the magnification of his sensorium. The High Twelve were not yet present, but the steps were crowded with thousands of lesser lords and ladies. The sight of them made his jaw clench.

He waited. In the crowded confines of the Terran hives, the Fields were an anomaly, a perfectly square clearing over a thousand hectares in size. Thousands of men, women and armoured vehicles rumbled onto them, taking up position in perfect blocks that shimmered in a haze of exhaust heat. Thane marvelled at the display of arms, but not for the first time he was taken aback at how it was dwarfed by the accomplishments of the past. The Fields had room for hundreds of thousands more men; millions more.

Kilometres away, the great walls of the Imperial Palace stood sentinel over Terra’s screaming populace. Patches of bare adamantium gleamed where gravitic disruption had caused their decorations to tumble free, but the walls held firm. Similar signs of devastation were evident wherever he looked around the city, and these were not superficial. Broken hives, piles of rubble and twisted metal; gaps in Terra’s claustrophobic skyline opened by the gravity weapons of the attack moon. The smooth, artfully laid paving of the Fields was buckled in places, hastily and inexpertly patched in others. More signs of time’s erosion of the achievements of the past; one more step away from the dreams of the Emperor towards the nightmare of endless war.

For an hour Thane stood to attention as the sun climbed over the towering hives of Terra and the formations of troops and machinery laid themselves out line by line. The crowd unceasingly sang and shouted. Atmospheric craft and void fighters streaked overhead, releasing bursts of fireworks and scintillating displays of directed energy.

Finally, the last of the heroes took up position and stopped. An army bracketed Thane’s pulpit. Ten thousand trumpets sounded, overtaken at the last by the mass sounding of Titan war-horns. The remaining members of the High Twelve emerged. Their greeting from the crowd was muted.

‘People of Terra!’ Thane roared. His suit’s vox-systems were rerouted to giant public address systems and his voice filled the Fields louder than the death of worlds. The crowd shouted back even louder. ‘Silence!’ he commanded. His single word rippled away, an infinity of echoes carrying his voice across the planet’s surface. Before the last had died, a hush fell that carried the curious weight of a hundred billion breaths withheld. The wind that stirred his parchments and tabard blew harder, then dropped to nothing. He reached up, unclasped his helm from its softseals, lifted it off, and breathed the unfiltered air of Holy Terra.

It was stale with overuse.

‘I come before you today to announce a great triumph!’ he said. ‘The orks of Ullanor are defeated. Their leaders are no more. Already, their attack fleets fall upon each other in disarray. The Imperium is saved!’

A vast, howling cheer roared from the masses. The wind of their breath buffeted Thane again. He held up a hand, magnified and multiplied on innumerable vid-screens, and held it there until the noise once again dropped.

‘As a species, we have come close to the brink. Holy Terra itself was threatened. The Emperor was at risk!’ He pointed an accusatory hand in the direction of the Palace, making sure that his gesture encompassed the distant dome of the Great Chamber of the Senatorum Imperialis. Let the High Lords think he meant to accuse them, for he did. ‘The Lord of all Mankind, who raised humanity back up from the dark days of Old Night, who built this Imperium of which we are all citizens, who gave all to shield His species, and who sits in agony eternal to protect us still – He was in danger, He was in peril, He was failed by all of us. No more, I say. We shall never allow this to happen again!

‘This is the second time in a year that I have taken part in such a celebration,’ shouted Thane. ‘That first time, nine months ago, was premature. We were complacent even at the height of danger. This time, we celebrate true victory.’

Again that howling of a world, a nation of billions in ecstatic release from fear. Thane strode from his pulpit. The Sword of Sebastus, the Dornsblade, rang from its scabbard. Pollution-tainted Terran sunlight sparkled with renewed purity along its edge. The prismatic pommel called forth a rainbow from filth. With a crackle amplified to deific proportions, he swung the blade down. The sword shattered the creature’s crude gorget, severing the ork’s head from its bullish neck. With swift, exaggerated movements, Thane reversed, cleaned and sheathed the Sword of Sebastus and picked up the dead ork’s head in both hands. Steam rose from its cauterised neck. The deep chill of methalon preservation cooled his face as he lifted it over his head.

‘The Beast lies dead, the Imperium endures. Ave Imperator! All hail the dominion of Man!’

Maximus Thane, Chapter Master of the Imperial Fists, cast the head of the proxy Beast from the top of the spire. Propelled by his augmented strength, it sailed over the edge of the platform and shattered messily on the stone of the Fields of Winged Victory scores of metres below.

‘The reign of the Beast is over!’

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2016
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