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  Contents

  Cover

  A Rose Watered With Blood – Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘Heralds of the Siege’

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  A Rose Watered With Blood

  By Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  I

  ‘…cast a queenly shadow,

  Against the dappled theatre of eternal fusion,

  Across the tide of our voiceless ocean,

  And here,

  Enshrined in this royal iron,

  We carve her invocation.’

  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.

  The weeks became months. With astronavigation fouled by endless interference and mechanical breakdown, and the warp’s tides offering no hint of their true location, she half-heartedly began marking the passage of time by the length of her hair. Once the furnace heat faded and the lice plague abated, she’d stopped shaving her head. Grey now showed at her temples, but she was far beyond caring about the mundanities of her appearance. She saw privation reflected back at her in every crew member she encountered. As far as she was concerned, that was enough information to go by. A mirror wouldn’t add any insight.

  Ivar Tobin would have teased her about showing her age, but Ivar Tobin was also beyond offering up that kind of commentary – or, indeed, any commentary at all; he was just another casualty in this impossible war, and the equally impossible curse that gripped the World Eaters flagship.

  Lotara wasn’t sure if she missed him. To invest that level of emotion into something, or someone, you needed the energy to care.

  No. No, that wasn’t fair. She did miss him. His efficiency, his exacting nature. He was a blade, a cutter, a killer. She needed officers like that, and Tobin had been one of the best.

  Still, emotion had become a luxury. She was on her feet each day only by an unhealthy melange of paranoia, duty and adrenal amplifier serums synthesised from Khârn’s blood. Sometimes she’d muse, with a passionless smile, how illegal a stimulant made from Legion blood would be in a functioning and disciplined Imperium. Rules and rationality were things of the ignorant past now. Necessity was all.

  Repair crews crawled throughout the warship’s body, doing what they could to restore at least mechanical order. At first they were assigned legionary guardians to fight back against the dreadful things that clawed at them and dragged them away into the darkness, but soon enough, Lotara realised she was losing just as many crew to the World Eaters’ rages. Reports filtered back to her of repair crews butchered by their own guardians, and none of the XII Legion’s commanders she spoke with could do anything to prevent it. The pain engines inside the warriors’ heads would tick, tick, tick with drilling life, and the carnage would begin.

  ‘If this keeps up,’ Guhuj ventured, ‘we’ll never reach Terra.’

  Lotara wasn’t so certain. She was beginning to believe the Conqueror would reach Terra, no matter what happened to her crew. Even if the vessel was nothing but a cold and ruined hulk, torn open to space with its insides coated in void-iced blood, Angron’s malignant cravings would ensure the flagship washed up on the shores of Terra.

  Raiding Heshimar for supplies hadn’t ended the Conqueror’s torments. The crew walked its gore-darkened decks, going about their duties to the percussion of chainblades revving in the distance and screams echoing out in answer. The power woul
d gutter and fail without warning, at any time of day. Crew members that had died long ago would speak across the vox, sometimes in snippets of old communication chatter trapped in the audio network, sometimes crying out for help, for mercy, for everything to end.

  One night she’d woken up to a touch on her shoulder. Weariness, even down to her bones, hadn’t been enough to override training and instinct then; she rolled from the sleeping pallet, pulling her service pistol from beneath her pillow as she moved. Wide-eyed, teeth clenched, Lotara faced the intruder in her bedchamber. In her bed.

  The intruder was already dead. Had, in fact, been dead for some time. There he lay, despite having been torn apart months ago by Khârn in one of the legionary’s rages. After deck crews had gathered the remains, Lotara had ignited the cremation chamber herself. She’d watched Tobin’s remains burn.

  Yet she could see him now, unburned, and smell him too – the scent of old, dry death that was less like spoiled meat and more like something spicy, a musk that caught in the back of the throat. As she stood by her bed, pistol aimed, she drew breath to insist the body wasn’t there. The thought never became words because the thought was a lie. He was here. The Conqueror had brought Ivar Tobin back to her. She didn’t know how, but she was sure she knew why.

  ‘The Conqueror is trying to kill us,’ Guhuj was fond of saying.

  But again, Lotara wasn’t so sure. She was more worried that the Conqueror, in its blood-maddened inhuman way, was trying to please her.

  ‘A security report cites “anomalous agitation” in your quarters last night.’

  Lotara had no desire to get into it with Guhuj. She leaned back in her command throne, fingertips to her temples. The command deck rattled and clanked and chattered around her, alive with the industry of the crew attending to their duties. Kaleidoscopic blurs of migraine violet and cancer red played across the iron deck and ragged uniforms worn by the crew. Everyone working – man and woman, servitor and officer alike – had a standing order not to look at the oculus. The warp’s poisoned landscape lashed against the ship’s hull, and the command deck’s viewscreen looked out, nakedly, upon it.

  The Conqueror’s beleaguered captain had made the mistake of glancing towards it once. She wasn’t keen on repeating the error. The last of her subordinates to do the same had been Internal-Comms Officer Rabekka Syler, who had – three hours later – put her sidearm under her chin and pulled the trigger.

  ‘Ma’am,’ Guhuj tried again.

  ‘What?’ Lotara said. Emperor’s balls, but she sounded exhausted even to herself. That little truth made her sit up straighter.

  ‘I was asking about the security report.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ It doesn’t matter was fast becoming code for You won’t believe me and You don’t want to know and The ship is cursed and we’re all damned.

  Guhuj nodded. ‘Understood, captain.’ He looked back down at his console. Lotara glanced over, seeing a manifest of weaponry scrolling down his screen. He was taking inventory.

  ‘Is there word from the repair team assigned to the oculus?’

  Guhuj didn’t look up. ‘Yes. It will require a complete reinstallation.’

  ‘Again?’ When she sniffed, she could taste blood in the back of her throat. She resisted the urge to spit. ‘You can’t be serious.’

  ‘The report came in late last night. The tech-adepts can still find no mechanical fault.’

  Lotara bared her teeth in something that was barely a smile. ‘So it’s the ship’s machine-spirit. I told them that before they started.’

  ‘I believe you did, ma’am.’

  ‘I want results,’ she said with weary politeness, ‘not excuses. I can’t command a warship that refuses to obey any orders.’

  But that wasn’t quite true, was it? The Conqueror obeyed anything and everything that got it closer to Terra. It even cared for its crew, in its own way. Not for their survival, and certainly not for their sanity. But…

  Lotara gave another of her non-smiles at the thought.

  ‘Something amusing, ma’am?’

  ‘The ship won’t close its eyes. That amuses me. It also amuses me that the ship wants us to see what’s out there.’ She gave a soft, bitter laugh. ‘Does it really require a crew any more? Does it even need us?’

  ‘You… exaggerate, captain.’

  ‘Oh?’ Lotara showed more teeth. ‘You don’t sound very certain, lieutenant…’

  Skane was the one to approach Lotara.

  Skane the Destroyer, Skane the ugly, Sergeant Skane whose blood was so poisoned by his sacred weaponry that he might never know the immortality promised to the Legiones Astartes in their genetic heritage. Skane spoke the words that began everything – a single sentence that was notable less for the treachery it suggested and more for the fact no one believed he could string that many words together any more.

  What he said wasn’t unprecedented; they were words everyone had already thought themselves, either in moments of fear when they were bathed in the sweat of survival, or in the increasingly rare moments of peace aboard a warship that seemed to want them dead.

  Skane spoke what was on so many minds, perhaps because he was so close to losing his own. He was ragged and twitching and had to speak through scabbed lips that he couldn’t stop biting. He’d lost control of his Betcher’s Gland some weeks before; now his chin was raw with a rash from a constant trickle of acidic drool. One of his eyes was gone, punctured in a duel a month back somewhere in the bowels of the warship, where every chamber was an arena drenched red in emergency lighting. Somehow the wound hadn’t healed. Red tears dripped from it, night and day. The blood just kept flowing.

  And so, with the freedom of the almost-mad and the nearly dead, Skane was the one to come to the Conqueror’s captain and speak the words that damned them all.

  He cornered her in one of the subsidiary spinal corridors diverging from the main avenue along the Conqueror’s back. She was on the way to her quarters when he caught her, massacred her bodyguards and backed her against the wall. His remaining eye was bright with fever, his movements twitchy and feral. Every few moments his face would contort with muscle tics and he’d jerk his head towards a voice only he could hear.

  Lotara looked at the two armsmen that were tasked with escorting her. One of them was still alive, reaching across the gantried floor towards his fallen rifle. Skane ended that with a press of his boot to the back of the man’s head. There was a wet crackle of collapsing bone, then dirty wet redness crept across the deck like a creeping shadow.

  She lifted her eyes from the dead soldiers, sighting Skane down the barrel of her sidearm. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d opened fire on a member of her own Legion, but with how close Skane was, she doubted she could cut him down before he beat her to the deck with his bare hands, just as he’d done with her bodyguards. The Space Marine towered above her, yet made no move to finish what he’d started.

  ‘Lotara,’ he said. His metal teeth clanged together as he twitched again, hard. ‘I need to tuh-tah-talk to yuh-yuh… you.’ It took him three full seconds to get the final word out.

  ‘That’s Captain Sarrin to you, sergeant.’ She kept her weapon aimed at his mutilated face and fought to keep any fear from her voice. ‘You killed my armsmen. That… seems unnecessary.’

  ‘Alone.’ Skane struggled to speak, straining as if lifting a weight from his back; Lotara saw the cords stand out in his neck. ‘Talk to you alone.’

  ‘I’m alone now,’ she said, guarded. Two thoughts clashed behind her eyes, the first uncharitable and irritable, the second eternal and vile. What a stupid, stupid way to die… Killed by Skane, of all people, was the first. The second was, Where’s Khârn? Khârn could kill him… Where’s Khârn…?

  Skane was blind and deaf to her thoughts. He could barely form his own.

  ‘Captain Suh… Suh…’ he said. ‘We n
-need to get off this ship.’

  Mutiny, then. She should have felt shock, should have pulled the trigger and tried to punish him, yet the grinding weariness of reality bleached all emotion from the revelation. She found herself at once stunned by his betrayal and too numb to feel a thing.

  For Skane to come to her, of all the souls aboard the ship, was a risk beyond description. He couldn’t be alone in this. There had to be others, others like him that sought to get off the warship before the Conqueror killed them.

  And having told her this… Would he kill her to keep his secret?

  She looked at his riven features. Saw how they ticced and tensed. Saw the fever-heat in his halved gaze, and the clacking of his bloodstained durasteel teeth. His face was freckled with the blood of her bodyguards.

  Yes. He would kill her if she refused him.

  But he was counting on her not to refuse. He was counting on her to see things his way. To see reason.

  Lotara lowered her sidearm.

  ‘I know. But how?’

  ‘Need…’ Skane grunted, battling to form the words. ‘Need your help.’

  II

  ‘…no seasons

  In that endless night

  No lies survive

  The solar winds

  No sanctuary

  Beneath the light of watching stars

  Beneath the gaze of night’s queen

  Beneath the silent storm she brings…’

  The mutineers met several times, never in the same place. The ship offered up plenty of abandoned districts in which conspiracy could thrive.

  Tonight they met in the tertiary starboard foundry, where the forges had long ago grown cold. Legion weapons hadn’t been manufactured here for over a year, with production ceasing abruptly on the night the 29th Assault Company had rampaged through its hallways and antechambers, wretched and shrieking with blood-need.

  Here, the traitors among the Traitors met to speak of survival. It may not have been the first time, but it was – if all went to plan – likely the last. Gathering was becoming dangerous with how many of them there were now. Secrets could only be kept for so long aboard a warship, especially one where the dead walked and whispered.