There were no lights on the control banks. No movement of instruments, no colour or sound in the readouts. No printout spools. No glowing runes. No power.
Almost none. Deep in a system core that the King’s conquerors had dismissed as inactive, a warm little worm of electricity still flickered. At the call from the Blighting King it awoke, flexed and sparked for a split-second to accept the transmission instructions from the Poison King. Finally, in barely a blink, came the inload that the intelligences of the other three Kings had compiled between them. Only a blink before the suffocating fog of jamming squeal came frothing up from the machine-shrines’ masts, but enough.
For the half-year since Asphodel had fled this chamber the secret nerve-matrices buried deep in the King’s brain had been without function, empty. Blank paper, an unsown field.
Now the pen had been wielded. Now the seeds were here.
In the darkness of the Inheritor King’s core, an intelligence began to wake.
In the comparatively short period of time since he unleashed his fiction upon the readers of the Black Library, the talented Mr Dembski-Bowden (that’s ‘bow’ as in the front of a boat, not the thing that fires an arrow) has more than proved his chops with some frankly pant-damaging pieces of writing awesomeness. For the sake of balance, however, and for the entertainment of those who get the reference, I feel this introduction should also include the words HI DAN ABNETT.
Regicide is named after the chess-like game I feature a lot of people playing in 40K. The story’s set on Balhaut, site of the great battle that started the whole Sabbat Worlds Crusade. In revisiting this ground zero origin point, Aaron is also delving into areas that are now increasingly occupying me in the Gaunt books: the Blood Pact, the nature of the enemy, and the nature of the Crusade itself. Although set twenty-five years before the ‘present’ in Gaunt continuity, this story provides a powerful addendum to both the story of Warmaster Slaydo, and the revelations made in the novel Blood Pact.
Dan Abnett
REGICIDE
(Aaron Dembski-Bowden)
She spoke the words with a knife in her hand and a lie on her lips.
‘Tell me what happened, and I’ll let you live.’
Even if he had nothing else left, he still had his voice. She hadn’t taken his tongue.
‘You know what happened,’ he said.
In the knife’s reflection, he caught a glimpse of what was left of his face. The smile he couldn’t seem to shake was a mess of split lips and bloody gums.
Her face was covered by a carnival mask. Only her eyes showed through, and they didn’t look human.
She said, ‘Do not struggle,’ as if she expected him to actually obey.
Do not struggle. Now there was an amusing idea.
His shins and wrists were leashed together by pulley ropes. It looked like they came from an Imperial Guard tank. Probably his tank, he realised. Either way, there’d be no breaking free in a hurry. Even with her knife in his hands, it would take an age to saw through those ropes.
His head sagged back into the mud and the dust. While his eyes ached too much to see clearly, the sky met his sore gaze with bruises of its own. Choked and grey – heaven promised a storm – but the moon yet showed through cracks in the caul of clouds.
He lay in the rubble, knowing that before this place was a ruin, it was a battlefield, and before it was a battlefield, it was a public marketplace. Apparently something of a pilgrim trap, where relics and icons of dubious validity found their way from sweating hands into bandaged ones; a desperate industry based around hope, fuelled by deceit and copper coins.
He blinked sweat from his aching eyes and wondered where his weapons were.
‘Tell me,’ she came even closer, and the knife turned in the moonlight, ‘what happened on the eighteenth hour of the tenth day.’
Already the words felt like a legend. The eighteenth hour of the tenth day. She whispered it like some sacred date from antiquity, when it was only hours before.
‘You know what happened,’ he said again.
‘Tell me,’ she repeated, feverish in her curiosity, betraying her need.
His smile cracked into something more, promoting itself to a laugh – a laugh that felt good even though it hurt like hell. The sound was made by a punctured lung, flawed by cracked ribs, and left his body through bleeding lips. But it was still a laugh.
She used her knife as she’d been using it for over an hour now: to scrawl letters of pain across his bare chest. ‘Tell me,’ she whispered, ‘what happened.’
He could smell his own blood, rich over the scent of scorched stone. He could see it, trickling falls of red painting his torso below the jagged cuts.
‘You know what happened, witch. You lost the war.’
He was in a different place when he next opened his eyes.
His neck gave protesting twinges as he looked this way and that. The arched doorways, the broken gargoyles littering the floor, the stains of ash marking the pyre-sites of holy books...
This was the Templum Imperialis.
Well. One of them.
Muffled thunder betrayed the presence of distant artillery. Whoever this witch was, she’d barely moved him from the front lines.
He swallowed, but it was too thick and tasted of blood. Fists tightened as he tested the bonds that leashed his wrists to the chair. Nothing. No yield, no slack, and the chair itself was fastened to the floor. He was going nowhere.
‘Stop struggling,’ her voice came from behind. Footsteps echoed in the small chamber as she moved to stand before him. ‘There is no dignity in it.’ Her words were coloured by an ugly, halting accent. She wasn’t just from off-world – she’d barely spoken Gothic in her life.
‘Who are you?’ he asked, and punctuated the demand by spitting blood onto the tiled floor.
She stroked her fingertip along the hideous mask covering her face. ‘I am Blood Pact.’
The words meant nothing to him. Unfortunately, what she did next meant a great deal. With a chuckle from behind the mask, she reached for a weapon sheathed at her hip.
‘Your sword, yes?’
Instinct drove him to test his bonds again. He tried not to look at the blade in her hands – seeing her touch it with her seven-fingered hands made his heart beat faster. He’d preferred it when she’d been holding the knife.
‘That’s better,’ she smiled. ‘It is time to speak some truths.’
‘You’re not going to like anything I say.’ He forced the words through a wall of tight teeth. ‘Drop the sword.’
With her free hand, she stroked his jawline, the gesture gentle, grazing the unshaven skin without scratching it. Her fingernails had crescent-moon bloodstains beneath them, but they were old, from previous inflictions of pain.
‘You want this sword,’ she whispered, ‘and you want to see the colour of my blood as I lie dead upon this floor.’
He didn’t answer. With her free hand, she lowered the black mask that covered half of her face. It was a carnival mask, perversely featured and rendered in dull iron, with a witch’s hook nose and curving chin. The face it revealed was both lovelier and uglier, all at once.