Path of the Renegade Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Warhammer 40,000

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  About the Author

  Legal

  eBook license

  Warhammer 40,000

  It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

  Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants - and worse.

  To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

  ‘ Consider the moment of godhood. The desires of an entire race meeting and merging, caught and reflected endlessly in the Sea of Souls. Think of the billions upon billions of psyches merging in impossible depths, drawn together by the deadly undertow of their own lusts to meet and intertwine, finally awakening to become something Other.

  ‘Imagine the moment of merged consciousness awakening, tearing free from the last bonds of sanity. Picture the glory of release, the unbridled forces of the id ripping open the walls of reality and feasting upon the shattered ruins of the super-ego.

  ‘Ultimate ascension awaits the ravening meta-entity, a place in a pantheon of ruling powers as old as the stars themselves. In the fever realms of otherspace it becomes as a god fuelled by the death-screams of its progenitors. Reality is breached, godhood achieved and the cosmic balance tilts yet further against the fragile substance of reality and order.

  ‘Mourn, if you will, for an entire civilisation so cruelly snuffed out at the height of their power, and then begin to consider what manner of survivors such a cataclysm might breed.’

  – The Dark Mirror, by Veslyin the Anchorite

  PROLOGUE

  Rain.

  Rain encompassed the world, it thundered down in a ceaseless torrent, cascading from the treetops in twisting waterfalls. All that could be seen was greenery distorted by a wall of water. Sindiel had never experienced anything like it. He huddled miserably in the bole of a titanic hardwood tree wrapped in his camouflage cape as he had done for three days now, suffering through periodic downpours and the steaming tropical humidity that followed them. Three days also spent enduring the biting insects and inquisitive predators that seemed drawn magnetically to him, to the point where Sindiel had simply given up on trying to remove his flexmetal gloves or hood for relief. Now he endured the cloying sweat-slicked touch of his armour and tried to be patient.

  He squinted through his scopesight at the gate in a futile effort to see it through the torrential rain. He didn’t need to see the gate to picture it accurately, the two primitive-looking upright stones and capping lintel etched firmly into his mind. Night, day, rain, shine he had watched the gate with the others for three days and seen absolutely nothing out of the ordinary.

  Sindiel wasn’t overly fond of patience, and his limited supply of it was rapidly becoming exhausted. He was seriously considering petitioning Linthis again that they should move on. The Dark Kin weren’t coming here, despite what her complex lunar calculations said about the inactive gate they’d found. Corallyon and Belth couldn’t be any happier than he was, although in the end they were bound to align themselves with whatever Linthis wanted just like they always did.

  Sindiel had found himself starting to question all the half-hushed whispers he had heard about stopping the wicked soul thieves. All the talk of secret lore and hidden paths had come to this: sitting in a sodden jungle watching an inactive gate and hoping they would show – or rather hoping that they didn’t but hanging around just in case they did. It was pathetic, and Sindiel felt more pathetic for allowing himself to be trapped by his ego into staying. Leaving now meant proving himself to be less tough than the other Rangers, the old hands, and that simply stuck in his throat too much to be borne.

  The rain eventually stopped as suddenly as if it had been turned off at a tap, leaving the jungle fresh and dripping. Within minutes steam was rising from the forest floor where a hundred tiny pools and rills glittered in shafts of light that pierced the high canopy. Sindiel looked at the gate again. It was still there, still exactly as he had seen it a hundred times before; a silvery rivulet of water was running through it, quite picturesque.

  A brightly coloured tree snake slithered into Sindiel’s hiding place, seemingly intent on making its way into his lap in a friendly yet determined fashion. Sindiel evicted the venomous reptile as gently as he could, earning a few dry bites to his gauntleted hands in the process.

  He looked at the gate again. It had changed. Silver now filled the entire space between the uprights and the lintel, a shimmering wall of mercury. Spiral markings on the stones were glowing with a faint inner light as the webway portal aligned and reopened for the first time in three hundred years.

  +–l’s active,+ Linthis’s voice whispered in his mind. He was so intent on the active gateway the interruption made him flinch.

  +Say again?+ Sindiel thought back. +Yes, the portal’s active, I can see it. What do I do?+

  It wasn’t clear if Linthis’s response was just to Sindiel or to the whole group. It was flat and emotionless. +Shoot anything that comes out of it.+

  Sindiel fumbled to focus his scope and disable the safety locks on his long rifle, his hands and mind disjointed and disobedient in his sudden panic.

  Shapes were emerging from the silver wall. Lithe humanoids clad in darkly burnished armour stepped forth, their weapons jagged with blades and barbs. The nightmarish figures swept their avaricious, red-eyed gaze over the virgin forest in anticipation of new conquest.

  +Shoot!+ came the hard, clipped thought of his leader.

  Sindiel sighted on a masked helm and fired, jerking the shot so badly in his eagerness and panic that he missed it altogether. He saw two of the soul thieves drop so suddenly it seemed as if the earth had swallowed them up; probably Linthis and Belth getting the kill shots they were always so quietly competitive about.

  The Dark Kin’s reaction was instantaneous. Half of them
turned their weapons on the tree-line and rip-sawed at the foliage with streams of poison-laced hypervelocity splinters. The others grabbed their fallen comrades and dragged them unceremoniously back through the portal. The shooters put up a creditable enough suppressing fire that Sindiel only got off a few snapshots at them before they also ducked and weaved their way into the portal a few seconds later. A sudden silence descended on the scene as the whip-crack echoes of the brief firefight faded away.

  ‘Close in,’ Linthis whispered. Sindiel reluctantly slithered closer, barely hearing any sound as the other Rangers moved in behind him. He kept expecting the nightmarish figures to erupt from the portal at any moment, a feeling that got stronger the closer he got to it. He noticed blood sprays where two of the Dark Kin had fallen. They were bright, arterial and definitively fatal. He found he wondered at why the cruel, sadistic soul thieves would risk themselves to recover their dead.

  He noticed something else, a small polished sphere half-buried in the mud that looked as if it had been dropped by the fleeing soul thieves. His heart froze when he realised he could be looking at a grenade. No, it was too big for that, and what kind of grenade looked like stone banded in different colours? He realised it was something else entirely just in time to hide it beneath his foot when Corallyon wandered over to find out what was so interesting. Linthis and Belth were busy doing something to the gate to shut it down.

  ‘They took their dead with them,’ Sindiel offered by way of explanation. ‘I wasn’t sure if they were really dead but see,’ he pointed to the bloodstains and drag marks, ‘dead. We would just take the spirit stones, why bother with empty vessels?’

  He’d given Corallyon exactly what she wanted, an opportunity to illustrate her superior knowledge. Sindiel had joined Linthis’s band years ago, only a short time after Corallyon, but as an even fractionally senior member Corallyon took pains to belittle Sindiel as a newblood as often as she could. It was the great cycle of life. Eventually a new recruit would come along and it would become Sindiel’s privilege to make them miserable in their turn.

  ‘They don’t have spirit stones, lackwit,’ Corallyon said with relish. ‘They go off to the daemon city to get brought back to life in a test tube.’ Sindiel felt his own waystone give a cold pulse of warning. The empathic gem had been with him his whole life, it was his soul-anchor, his moral compass. To live without one was so unthinkably dangerous that it was just… well, unthinkable. A private part of him found the thought thrilling.

  ‘Don’t talk like that, Corallyon,’ Linthis said as she walked up, her silvery hair floating free after its confinement beneath mask and hood. Behind her the portal was closed, and the ancient arch had returned to looking as it had done for centuries. ‘It’s no daemon city that they come from, it’s a real place and they certainly do not suffer daemons to rule there.

  ‘They eke out eternal lives by preying on the souls of others, taking back what they lose with pain and torture. That’s why we work against them. But they aren’t daemons, not yet. In some ways I think they’re worse.’

  The rounded shape beneath Sindiel’s foot felt as if it were going to explode after all. He was experiencing the wildest vicarious thrill of his life just by hiding it from Linthis and her pompous little band. It was all he could do to keep from laughing out loud at them. He shifted his weight, pushing the sphere completely out of sight beneath the mud.

  ‘Why didn’t you just destroy the gate,’ Sindiel asked innocently, ‘if you knew they were going to use it to come here and steal people?’

  When Linthis replied she spoke as if to a child. ‘Because that would damage the webway just that little bit more, Sindiel, and another piece of it would be forever lost.’

  ‘It seems like they get more use out of it than we do,’ Sindiel persisted truculently.

  ‘Of course they do, they live in it!’ Corallyon blurted.

  ‘That’s enough, Corallyon,’ Linthis admonished. ‘We do not speak of such things. All you need know is that our work here is done. We repelled the Dark Kin and now we move on.’

  ‘Where next?’ Corallyon asked, suitably chastened.

  ‘To another maiden world named Lileathanir, a place very much like this one. Our cousins there have also grown lax and all but forgotten the peril of the gates.’

  Sindiel reflected that they hadn’t so much repelled the soul thieves here as given them a slight pause. Four snipers would not have held them back for long if they had only realised how few stood against them. They were simply lucky that Linthis had the craft to shut the gate from this side before they returned in greater numbers. Most likely once they had gone the Dark Kin would come creeping back anyway; as Corallyon had said, they knew more about the labyrinth dimension because they lived in it.

  He decided he would return to the spot later, alone, and see if the object he’d hidden was really what he hoped it was. He felt sure he’d seen that kind of striped banding before on spheres held by old statues on his craftworld. He remembered it was reckoned a symbolic object, like a crown for rulership or a spear for hunting. The sphere represented speech with distant stars.

  CHAPTER 1

  THE ACCURSED HALLS OF SHAA-DOM

  ‘Do you know what it is when you must question your every action in light of what punishment it may bring? Do you understand what it is to feel the eyes of your owner upon you even when he is not present? That is what it is to live in fear, to live the life of a slave. You tell me to beware of raising up that which I cannot then put down. I tell you that I will make any pact or bargain to gain the strength to free myself from the clutches of the tyrant. I will have my freedom, no matter the cost.’

  – Archon Ysclyth of Talon Cyriix, as quoted in The Articles of Hubris

  Walking is controlled falling. Every step means abandoning oneself to gravity and then trusting that an outstretched leg will prevent disaster. Nyos Yllithian felt as if he were falling towards his destiny, being drawn inexorably onwards as if in a dream. He was in the dark places under the world, walking cautiously through worming corridors of scratched and mouldering stonework. Shadows gave back reluctantly before him and came clustering in behind him as he passed. He walked cautiously because ur-ghuls and carrion slaves still lurked in these tunnels, although even alone as he was he had little to fear from them. The dark, secret places of the eternal city always had their perils and he was well armed against such mundane foes.

  In truth his caution was born of an uncharacteristic tinge of fear at what lay ahead of him. Everything he’d done up until now was deniable, excusable, explainable, and perhaps even laudable once garnished with a little bluster and bribery. Even if he were caught right now, sneaking through the catacombs of Talon Cyriix, there was no crime in that in the tyrant’s laws. Not yet. Talon Cyriix was certainly an ill-starred locale to be found in, the scene of an invasion and dreadful massacre in times past, but the eternal city of Commorragh had many, many places that could fit that description.

  However, what lay ahead was a blatant act of betrayal if the great tyrant should ever come to know of it. Yllithian consoled himself that caution, and even some fear, was an appropriate response to that state of affairs. Betraying the great tyrant of the eternal city bore all the consequences that might be imagined to extend from that distinguished title. Death was the least uncomfortable prospect, and inevitably one that would be long deferred in favour of far more visceral punishments.

  The great tyrant had disposed of a vast number of would-be rivals down the ages, including several of Nyos’s own ancestors in the coup when Vect first seized power. The scrofulous slums Nyos was now entering had once belonged to Archon Ysclyth of Talon Cyriix, a great house almost as old as his own, until only a few centuries ago. Ysclyth had broken Vect’s laws and made pacts with unspeakable, otherworldly entities to overthrow the tyrant. When he made his own coup attempt Archon Ysclyth was aided by an unstoppable legion of daemons from beyond the veil.

  Unfortunately for the ambitious archon he had reck
oned without the tyrant’s command of ancient failsafes within the city. Before the horde could debouch into other districts the whole of Talon Cyriix spur was sealed off from the rest of Commorragh by impenetrable shields of energy. Trapped, denied the blood and souls they had been promised, Ysclyth’s untrustworthy daemonic allies turned on him and sated themselves on his holdfast before disappearing whence they came. Now the ravaged halls of Talon Cyriix stood abandoned and silent, fit only for skulking wretches and slaves that would dare the unclean spirits said to lurk there. The tyrant’s sycophants still celebrated the ironic downfall of the faithless Archon Ysclyth in poem and song, praising the just punishment meted out by their master.

  Nyos emerged into an open courtyard between broken towers. High above him he could glimpse a patch of dark sky, an oily shimmer that was barely lighter than the deep gloom all around him. He sought and found the rambling outline of a mansion that occupied one edge of the court. Whatever grandeur the building had once possessed had been ripped away, daemon-fouled and defiled to leave it a mouldering corpse reminiscent of some long-dead sea-monster. A dull miasma of old horror hung over the place, an indelible psychic taint left by the abhorrent feasts that had been enacted there. Yllithian steeled himself and pressed on inside.

  He found himself in a hallway lined with plinths. Once they had supported lifelike busts of the proud antecedents of Archon Ysclyth, carved with cunning artistry in stone so pure and white that it seemed luminous. Now most of the heads lay smashed and broken, while the survivors still on their plinths had been obscenely mutilated by daemonic claws sharper than steel knives. Thousands of years of pure-blooded lineage had been wiped out by the misplaced hubris of one descendant. Ysclyth’s line had ended here and although Yllithian cared not one whit about that, save perhaps for rejoicing in the removal of a potential rival, the loss of Talon Cyriix grieved him on some level. Such a loss could never be recovered, and through it the majesty of the eternal city was lessened just a little more, driven further down the paths of entropy and ultimate dissolution.