Penitent
Dan Abnett
More tales from Warhammer 40,000 by Dan Abnett
EISENHORN
Book 1: XENOS
Book 2: MALLEUS
Book 3: HERETICUS
Book 4: THE MAGOS
RAVENOR
Book 1: RAVENOR
Book 2: RAVENOR ROGUE
Book 3: RAVENOR RETURNED
BEQUIN
Book 1: PARIAH
Book 2: PENITENT
• GAUNT’S GHOSTS •
THE FOUNDING
Book 1: FIRST AND ONLY
Book 2: GHOSTMAKER
Book 3: NECROPOLIS
THE SAINT
Book 4: HONOUR GUARD
Book 5: THE GUNS OF TANITH
Book 6: STRAIGHT SILVER
Book 7: SABBAT MARTYR
THE LOST
Book 8: TRAITOR GENERAL
Book 9: HIS LAST COMMAND
Book 10: THE ARMOUR OF CONTEMPT
Book 11: ONLY IN DEATH
THE VICTORY
Book 12: BLOOD PACT
Book 13: SALVATION’S REACH
Book 14: THE WARMASTER
Book 15: ANARCH
THE SABBAT WORLDS CRUSADE
DOUBLE EAGLE
I AM SLAUGHTER
BROTHERS OF THE SNAKE
TITANICUS
LORD OF THE DARK MILLENNIUM
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Contents
Cover
Backlist
Title Page
Warhammer 40,000
King Door
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
My Warband
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
True Learning
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
About the Author
An Extract from ‘Lord of the Dark Millennium’
A Black Library Publication
eBook license
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 might of His inexhaustible armies a million worlds stand against the dark.
Yet, He is a rotting carcass, the Carrion Lord of the Imperium held in life by marvels from the Dark Age of Technology and the thousand souls sacrificed each day so that His may continue to burn.
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. It is to suffer an eternity of carnage and slaughter. It is to have cries of anguish and sorrow drowned by the thirsting laughter of dark gods.
This is a dark and terrible era where you will find little comfort or hope. Forget the power of technology and science. Forget the promise of progress and advancement. Forget any notion of common humanity or compassion.
There is no peace amongst the stars, for in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.
The first section of the story, which is called
KING DOOR
CHAPTER 1
Which is of the society one keeps,
and also of societies that keep you
My dreams had become sticky and black since I met the daemon.
It had been two months since he first visited me, and his immaterial presence had seeped into my dreams like tar, gumming all of my thoughts together so that nothing was clear or separate any more. Just one fused lump of black confusion, wherein ideas writhed, enfeebled, unable to pull themselves free or define themselves.
I had hoped for clarity. I believe, in fact, that clarity was the thing I had been seeking my whole life. I wished I had met, instead, an angel, whose essence would have flooded my mind like amber. This was, I confess, utter fancy. I had never met an angel, and I did not know if they existed, but that is what I imagined. Where a daemon’s touch might drown my dreams like dark ooze, an angel’s would fill them with golden resin, so that each thought and idea might be preserved, alone and intact, quite clearly presented, and I could make sense of them. Of everything.
I had seen amber on the market stalls below Toilgate. That was how I knew of the stuff: polished pebbles in hues of ochre, gamboge and orpiment, resembling glass, and within each one a lace fly or burnished beetle, set fast for eternity.
That is how I wished my mind was: each thought presented thus, available to the light from all sides, so clear that one might examine every smallest detail through an enlarging glass.
But the daemon had welled in, and all was black.
I say daemon, but I was told the correct term is daemonhost. His name was Cherubael. This sounded to me like the name of an angel, but as with all things in the city of Queen Mab, things and their names do not agree. They are, ineluctably, ciphers for each other. Through my sticky, black dreams, I had come at least to understand that Queen Mab was a city of profound contradiction. It was a place half-dead, or at least half-other, where one thing was in fact some opposite thing, and truth and lies interleaved, and people were not who they appeared to be, and even doors could not be trusted for, altogether quite too often, they opened between places that should not intersect.
The city was a dead thing inside a live thing, or the other way around. It was a place haunted by the ghost of itself, and few had the mediumship to negotiate between the two. The dead and the living questioned each other, but did not, or could not, listen to the answers. And those few who walked, aware, in the dark places between the two, the margin that divided the physical from the shadow it cast, seemed more concerned with consigning souls from one side to the other, sending the screaming living to their deaths, or plucking the purblind dead back to life.
Great Queen Mab and I had that in common. There was a dead-half part of me too, a silence within that made me pariah. I was a true citizen of Queen Mab, for I was a contradiction. I was shunned by all, an outcast orphan not fit for society, yet sought by all as a prize of some sort.
My name is Beta Bequin. Alizebeth was my given name, but no one called me that. Beta is a diminutive. It is said Bay-tar, with a long vowel, not Better or Beater, and I had always thought this was to distinguish it from the Eleniki letter that is commonly used in scientific ordinal notation. But now I began to think that was exactly what it was. I was Beta, the second on the list, the second version, the second-ranked, the lesser of two, the copy.
Or maybe not. Perhaps I was merely the next. Perhaps I was the alpha (though not, of course, the Alpha who stood with me in those days).
Perhaps, perhaps… many things. My name did not define me. That, at least, I learned from Cherubael, despite the gluey darkness of the dreams he spread. My name did not match me, just as his did not match him. We were both, like Queen Mab, contradictions from the outset. Names, as we will see, are infinitely untrustworthy, yet infinitely important.
I had become very sensitive to the distinction between what something is called and what it actually is. It had become my way, and I
had learned it from the man Eisenhorn, who was by then, I suppose, my mentor. This practice of not trusting something by its surface was his very mode of being. He trusted nothing, but there was some value in this habit, for it had patently kept him alive for a very long time. A peculiarly long time.
It defined him too, for I did not know what he was any more than I knew what I was. He told me he was an inquisitor of the Holy Ordos, but another man, who claimed to hold that title with equal insistence, told me that Eisenhorn was, in fact, a renegade. Worse, a heretic. Worse, Extremis Diabolus. But perhaps that man – Ravenor, his name – perhaps he was the liar.
I knew so very little, I did not even know if Eisenhorn knew what he was. I wondered if he was like me, bewildered by the way the truth of the world could shift so suddenly. I thought I was an orphan, raised in the scholam of the Maze Undue to serve as an agent of the Ordos. But now it seemed I was a… a genetic copy and not an orphan at all. I have – had – no parents. There was no dead mother and father for me to mourn, though I had mourned and missed them my whole life, for they were a fabrication, just like the story of their tombstone in the marshland cemetery.
And I had been told the Maze Undue was not an Ordo scholam, but in fact an academy, run by a hermetic society called the Cognitae, which was of ancient standing, and served as a shadow-twin of the Inquisition.
I was expected now to decide my loyalty. Should I serve the Cognitae that bred me, or the Holy Ordos that I always believed I was a part of? Did I throw my lot in with Eisenhorn, who might be a servant of the Hallowed Throne, or a thrice-damned heretic? Did I turn to Ravenor, who claimed Imperial authority, yet may be the biggest liar of all?
And what of the other parties in this game? Not the least of them, the King in Yellow? Should I stand at his side?
I was resolved, for now, to walk with Gregor Eisenhorn. This, despite the fact he consorted with daemonhosts and a warrior of the Traitor Legions, and had been denounced to me for a heretic.
Why? Because of all the things I have just said. I trusted nothing. Not even Gregor Eisenhorn. But I was in his company and he had, I felt, been the most open with me.
I had my own principles, of course. Though it was done underhand by the Cognitae, I was raised to believe my destiny was to serve the Throne. That, at least, felt right. I knew I would rather pledge to the God-Emperor of us all than to any other power or faction. Where I would ultimately stand, I could not say, for, as I have stated, I could not identify any truth that could be relied on. At least in Eisenhorn’s company I might learn some truths upon which I could base a decision, even if it was, in the end, to quit his side and join another.
I wished to learn, to make true learning, not the dissembling education of the Maze Undue. I wished to learn the truth about myself, and what part I played in the greater scheme of mystery. More than that, I wished to unravel the secrets of Queen Mab, and lay them bare to light, for plainly an existential menace lurked in the shadows of the world, and exposing it would be the greatest duty I could perform in the name of the God-Emperor.
These things I wished, though, as I came to reflect later, one must be careful what one wishes for. Nevertheless, revelation of the entire truth, in all clarity, was the purpose I had privately vowed to accomplish. Which is why, that cold night, I was Violetta Flyde, and I walked through the streets of Feygate Quarter at Eisenhorn’s side to attend a meeting at the Lengmur Salon.
Yes, I know. Violetta Flyde was yet another veil, an untrue name, a false me, a role to play, something that the tutors of the Maze Undue used to call a function. But illumination might be earned from the play-acting, so I walked then, and for the time being, at Eisenhorn’s side.
Also, I was fond of his daemon.
Cherubael was cordial. He called me ‘little thing’, and though he polluted my dreams, I fancied he was the most honest of my companions. It was as though he had nothing left to lose, and thus honesty would cost him nothing. There was no side to him.
Not all found him so bearable. Lucrea, a girl who I had brought with me into Eisenhorn’s care, left after a short time. She slipped away into the streets one night, without a goodbye, and I am sure it was the daemonhost’s company that had finally driven her away, despite all she had seen till then. But Lucrea had never been part of the intrigue, just a bystander. I could not blame her for wanting to be out of it.
Cherubael was a daemon, a thing of the immaterium, shackled inside a human body. I think the body had been dead for a long time. His true self, inside, stretched at his outer casing as if trying to get out. The shape of horns pushed at the skin of his brow, as though some forest stag or scree-slope ram was striving to butt its way out of him. This pulled taut the bloodless flesh of his face, giving him an unintentional sneer, an upturned nose, and eyes that blinked oddly and too seldom. I wondered sometimes if he would burst one day, and there would be nothing left but sprouting antlers and a grinning skull.
He was quite terrifying, but I found the fact of him reassuring. If he was a daemon, then such things existed. And Queen Mab constantly demonstrated that there was symmetry in all things: dead and alive, materia and immateria, truth and lies, name and false name, faithful and faithless, light and dark, inner and outer. So if he was a daemon, then surely there had to be angels too? Cherubael, cursed and wretched, was my proof that angels existed.
And perhaps, in time, one would come to me and fill my dreams with amber sap, and let me see things, golden and clear, for what they actually were.
‘One may measure a city,’ Eisenhorn remarked as we walked, ‘by the number of metaphysical societies it harbours.’
‘One may measure a circle,’ I replied, ‘starting anywhere.’
He looked at me, puzzled.
‘Your point?’
‘It’s still a circle,’ I said. ‘No start, no finish. Infinite.’
‘Yes. And this is still a city.’
‘Is it, though?’ I asked.
I was in a playful mood, and he didn’t care for it. He meant, of course, the temperament and health of a city. A city in decline, one leaning towards corruption and malady of spirit, becomes home to curious beliefs. An interest in the other grows. This is basic Ordo teaching. A fashion for the occult and esoteric, a preponderance of fringe interests, these are the symptoms of a culture in dangerous deterioration.
If you do not know the city, the Lengmur Salon lies in a hollow of old streets beneath the flaking spire of Saint Celestine Feygate, whose bells chime at odd hours. On this night, upon the broad steps before the templum, many of the poor wretches known as the Curst loitered, begging for alms. I could not help but look to see if Renner Lightburn was among them. In the months since we had been separated, I had thought of him often, and wondered what fate had befallen him, for no trace of him could be found anywhere.
Nor was there trace here. Eisenhorn noticed my look, but made no comment. Though Lightburn had been brave and selfless during his time with me, his mind had been wiped by Ravenor’s agents and he had been returned, mystified, to the streets. Eisenhorn believed I was better off without him and, most certainly, that Lightburn was better off without me.
Still, I had never had the chance to thank him.
All around that small, muddled quarter of Feygate there were salons, dining halls and meeting houses that were popular haunts for those of a metaphysical bent. I saw placards on the walls and notices in windows advertising spiritual lectures, quizzing glasses and table-turning evenings, or opportunities to hear noted speakers orate on many matters esoteric, such as ‘Man’s place in the Cosmos,’ or ‘The Secret Architecture of the Queen Mab Templums,’ or ‘The Hidden Potency of Numbers and Letters’. Several establishments advertised the reading of taroche, by appointment, and others promised spiritual healing and past-life revelation that would be delivered by expert practitioners.
The Lengmur Salon, its old windows glowing gold in the deep
ening evening, stood foremost among these. It was the meeting place of souls artistically and mystically inclined. It was said the celebrated poet Crookley dined here regularly, and that often he might be found drinking with the engraver Aulay or the beautiful opera singer Comena Den Sale. The place was famous for its lectures, both formal and informal, and its readings and performative events, as well as the provocative dialogues that flowed between the eclectic clientele.
‘On another world,’ Eisenhorn muttered as he held the door open for me, ‘this place would have been closed by the Magistratum. By the Ordos. This whole district.’
There is a fine line, I believe, between what is permissible and what is not. The Imperium loves its lore and its mysteries, and there is always active interest in what might be considered fringe ideas. However, it is but a short step from those harmless and jolly diversions to outright heresy. Queen Mab, and establishments like this, teetered on that edge. There was an air of the occult to it, by which I mean the old definition of the word, the hidden and the unseen. It felt as though real secrets lay here, and true mysteries were discussed, mysteries beyond the innocuous fripperies and trifles tolerated on more upstanding worlds.
Queen Mab, indeed the whole world of Sancour, had slid into unwise, bohemian decay, falling from the strict and stern grasp of Imperial control into a state of end-times dissolution, which would only end in its decadent demise, or in a hasty and overdue purge by off-world authorities.
But the salon, ah such a place! Facing the street was its famous dining hall, a large, bright room that rang with the clatter of flatware and chatter of the customers. The place was packed, and people queued outside to get a supper-table.
Behind the hall and the kitchens lay the salon itself, a back-bar accessible by doors in the side lanes and through a curtained archway at the rear of the dining hall. This was the heart of the establishment. It was fusty, I would say, if you have never visited it, lit by old lumen globes in tinted glass hoods, the walls papered with an opulent pattern of black fern-leaves on a purple field. There was a long bar to the back, the heavy wood of it painted a dark green and ribbed with brass bands. The main space was filled with tables, and there were side booths around which black drapes could be drawn for private assignations.
