Assassinorum kingmaker, p.14
Assassinorum Kingmaker, page 14
Dawn of Slaughter charged from the war-fog. Three-eyed. Mouth afire. Swinging a barbed reaper chainsword the size of a battle tank, the talons on its thunderstrike gauntlet long and curved like a raptor’s claws. Chains thick as a man dangled from its breastplate, links warped and snapped where the forces of the Archenemy had tried to restrain it. One thick cable still stood taut, and as the hell engine exited the war-fog, Sycorax saw that it was dragging a capsized servo-hauler, its twisted crane arm still extended in a vain attempt to arrest its charge. To keep it leashed with chain until the right moment.
Dawn of Slaughter howled like a possessed locomotorvator and ignited the reaper chainsword, smashing it downward onto the piece of equipment. The weapon’s teeth threw armour plates and struts a hundred yards before it turned the keening blade on a War Dog that was too close, bisecting it at the midsection ball pivot.
It howled its steam-boiler howl.
And to her sinister side, Sycorax heard an answer, like the song of the great cetaceans that played off the cape at Gathering Palace.
She traversed her head to see an answering blue glow light the cloud bank. A calming, noble illumination. The light of angels.
A plasma column lanced out of the fog, spearing across no-man’s-land to burst in a solar flare on the traitor Knight, its ion shield lighting up like a cataract on a milky eye.
The traitor staggered, the readjustment of its ion shield not fast enough to take the whole hit. But Sycorax’s eyes had already turned away.
She was looking at the blue-lanced fog bank, and what she knew was about to emerge.
A plasma decimator pierced the dirty smoke, the heavenly glow resolving into the bright light of a power coil. A great volcano lance was held level like an equestrian at the charge. There were gold-chased eyes and a crusader faceplate, half heartsblood-red, half sky-blue, cream pauldrons set with Imperial aquilas and the campaign badges of ten thousand years. Heraldry caught the light even on that dank battlefield.
It came out of the smoke like a breaching cetacean. Like the Leviathan of legend, who arose from the sea to kill Baron Morvayne during the Heresy. Trails of putrid air caught on its angles and streamed off behind it. Wisps caught in the golden crown that surmounted its head.
The Crown of Dominion.
‘Yavarius-Khau!’ she screamed in pride. ‘Yavarius-Khau!’
All along the line, she heard the shrieking whir of chainblades, the keening of plasma reactors and thermal cannons. From the smashed Imperial line, she saw skirmishing Armigers emerge from the twisted detritus of the battlefield. Armoured Wardens stalked out of the fog and added their weapon clamour and vox-enhanced voices, humming the Song of Deeds. Weapons hammering their tilting shields in time.
Mmm-mmmm-mm. Clang-clang. Mmm-mmmm-mm. Clang-clang.
The song, she realised, was coming from inside the Helm Mechanicum. Voices of the living and the dead joined the same chorus, beating the dirge.
Preparing to witness the challenge.
Sycorax raised her chain-cleaver and let it rev along with them. ‘Khau!’ she yelled. ‘Yavarius-Khau!’ There was moisture on her helm lenses, and she realised they were tears.
Dawn of Slaughter tore across the wasteland, smashing aside battle tanks and shouldering through a factorum wall in a mad rush towards the High Monarch.
And High Monarch Yavarius-Khau met the beast’s challenge. He set the Crown of Dominion into a run, coming straight at the traitor – volcano lance raised, the red beam of its discharge rocking Sycorax’s insides but breaking apart on the traitor’s ion shield.
Then they met directly in front of Sycorax, the traitor cutting the great lance aside so the two Knights came together in a crack of thunder.
Even through Jester’s armour plating, she felt the shockwave.
Adamant on adamant. Masks hammering each other like two anvils colliding again and again. Wrestling, weapons locked, the Crown’s arm-mounts firing into the sky. Yavarius-Khau’s twin meltaguns boiled the air with point-blank shots, hazing her view of the combat.
Dawn of Slaughter’s gauntlet gripped the long barrel of the king’s volcano lance, pushing it upward, sending bolts of lightning dancing along the weapon.
The High Monarch hunched down, trying to protect his cockpit with his thick upper carapace, and get low enough to fire his shoulder-mounted battle cannon turrets. One discharged, shattering Slaughter’s left pauldron.
But the cheer died on her lips as she once again saw how it would end.
Slaughter let go of the volcano lance, swung down and under. The clenched fist reached through the monarch’s guard and under the carapace – a direct line to the cockpit.
It was too short, unable to land a blow.
But it didn’t have to.
Sycorax saw the spikes embedded in the gauntlet’s knuckles spring outward with a discharge of dirty smoke. Not spikes at all: harpoons.
The three spears drove deep into the Crown’s breastplate, impaling the cockpit housing. The chant along the Stryder-Rau line failed as the cables leading from gauntlet to embedded spikes lit with corposant flame.
Crown of Dominion shuddered, buckled. Fell to one knee.
Dawn of Slaughter raised its reaper chainsword.
‘No!’ yelled Sycorax.
The sword dropped, cycling teeth gouging deep into the Crown’s upper carapace. Sparks arced fifty feet high.
‘Khau!’ Sycorax yelled. ‘Yavarius-Khau!’
She was running before conscious will told her to do so, sprinting through the wrecks and smoke. Dashing past a War Dog, who, braying in victory, did not even pursue her until she was well past.
NO! the ancestors wailed. A challenge is a challenge! Do not interrupt a contest. The code forbids…
But she would not let her monarch die to keep an oath. She would sacrifice her honour if it meant saving her king. Did her oaths not say that she must protect her monarch?
‘Dawn of Slaughter!’ she howled, and let off a blast from her thermal spear. It flashed harmlessly off Slaughter’s bruise-coloured shield, but it made the monster turn to look at her, its next blow faltering.
She could see other Stryder-Rau Knights moving now. Knight Wardens and Crusaders. Knight Paladins and Errants. In the Stryder blue and Rau crimson, or the quartered livery of the court.
She wished they were closer. Wished she were in a Questoris-pattern that could match Slaughter in size. Wished, in absurd vanity, that the venerated Leviathan would rise up like in the old stories and deliver the Knights of Dominion from their enemies.
But no. Fate had not constructed that destiny.
Only the little Knight Armiger Jester, standing beneath a giant twice its size.
‘I challenge you!’ she yelled, blasting a melta-stream that burst the monster’s ion shield. ‘I challenge you, beast!’
Slaughter regarded her, shaking. It emitted a meaty, wet laugh that boiled through her vox-speakers. It still held the Crown, the Knight’s systems limp and arms hanging, upright with its gauntlet. Ghost-light danced over the harpoon cables.
With contempt, Dawn of Slaughter turned away from her to make its kill.
‘For Dominion!’ she called, as she charged full tilt at the monster’s flank, spitting melta-beams from her thermal spear and her pintle-mount.
‘For the ancestors!’ she said, as she ducked below the backhand swipe of the massive chainsword, its whirring teeth showering Jester with the oil-blood of her stricken monarch.
‘With the strength of Leviathan!’ she declared, as she brought her melta-beams together on the Achilles piston at the rear of Slaughter’s back foot. Heating the metal orange.
‘I strike!’
Her chain-cleaver bit deep into the monster’s piston, severing it clean. Unbalancing the beast so it tumbled forward and to the side, unable to stand upright. She leapt atop it, cleaver biting adamantine, slashing away grotesque ivory horns that pushed through the armour, meltaguns boiling away eyes that squinted at her in mute fury as she carved at the beast’s reactor.
When the thunderstrike gauntlet hit her, she didn’t even feel it. Just knew that she was on her back, looking at the smoke-twisted vault of heaven.
‘My son…’ she tried to say, but gagged, choking.
Blood filled her mouth and throat, and pooled in her sealed helmet, so when she coughed it only sent bubbles into the red, sticky fluid that was now creeping up to the bottom of her eyes.
She tried to remove her helmet, but her arms would not respond. She sent a mind-impulse to Jester to initiate an emergency helmet flush, but received nothing but damage reports.
She raised her head, feeling broken vertebrae grind, coughed to clear her throat.
‘My son,’ she choked, as more blood welled up. ‘Tell Rakkan… to rise from his blood.’
Then she was nothing but a panicking mind, in a broken body, entombed in a shattered suit without even breath to comfort her.
Drowning in her own blood.
Sycorax sat up in her bunk, blankets soaked with sweat, hands shaking in the palsy of combat adrenaline.
There were tears on her face, and her ears rang from the impact of the great warriors.
Rakkan opened the door on her second attempt to knock. He was up, a crutch under one arm. Red eyes and puffy skin showed that he’d been drinking.
‘I–’ she stared. ‘A dream.’
‘You had it too then?’ he said. ‘I thought you might. The Battle of the Blazing Heaven. It’s the anniversary. Forgive me, I did not think to warn you. You probably have questions.’
‘That was… Sir Selkar Fang, wasn’t it? So that…’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That was how my father died. And now, in my dreams, I get to see it – and you do too, apparently.’
When she said nothing, he opened his door wide and gestured to an open bottle of amasec. ‘I think you’d better come in.’
>>Daily Briefing // Historical Background // File No. 5782-Gamma-KMKR
>>Mission Day: 21
>>PURGE DATA AFTER READING<<
Good morning, colleagues. Emperor keep you.
Given the extensive amounts of briefing material I have provided, and the general complexity of this mission, multiple force members have requested scaled-down, more easily digestible versions of pertinent information.
In the spirit of teamwork and clear communication, I will be sending daily digests of information that I consider pertinent to this phase in the operation. Today, we will be exploring the origins of the rift between House Stryder and House Rau.
As you are aware from your briefing materials [see Preamble 4: Section 6] the origins of Knight worlds date back to the Dark Age of Technology, when fleets of Long March settlement ships struck out into the dark of space. They carried with them instructions for how to found human settlements in hostile environments, along with instructions concerning how to repurpose their ships into combined construction-defence platforms we now know as the Imperial Knights.
According to oral tradition, in late M23 an autonomous survey probe landed on Dominion and marked it as suitable for settlement. The soil was good for terraforming, and the native wildlife non-sentient. Sometime in M24, House Stryder was granted exclusive colonisation rights to the world and set off to claim their prize.
However, the would-be colonists were caught in a warp current and lost in the eddies of the empyrean. When fifty years passed with no contact, they were assumed lost. House Rau took over their settlement charter and staked a claim – successfully establishing a settlement in the northern hemisphere.
It was quite a shock for the colonists, then, when the Stryder settlement fleet arrived three standard centuries after the first Rau colonists set foot on the world.
A more perfect impasse could not have been created. Both factions had paperwork declaring Dominion to be their sole and exclusive homestead. And both sets of documents were technically still in force.
Whatever legal edge Stryder held by possessing the older settlement charter could be rebutted by Rau, who had claimed rights under the Statute of First Arrival that had remained uncontested for three centuries.
The result was the First Settlement War, a nine-decade conflict wherein Stryder made planetfall and entrenched themselves in the lightly occupied southern hemisphere. Rau, however, held onto their possession in the northern hemisphere.
With both factions fighting to exhaustion, they agreed to appeal to Terra for mitigation. But their timing could not have been worse.
The warp storms of the Age of Strife descended, cutting all communication and travel back to Terra.
And so, to avoid mutual destruction and fight back the darkness, one of the most curious power-sharing agreements in human space came into being…
Absolom Raithe pushed the briefing away, dropping it on a pile of Koln’s other background material.
Closed his eyes to rest them, preventing strain that might affect his accuracy. Counted one hundred and twenty seconds.
Then opened them, and picked up the dossier marked FIGURES OF INTEREST.
The first page was Yavarius-Khau. High Monarch. War leader. Dead man. An approximate facial reconstruction and vital details. Raithe flipped past it.
He pored over the subsidiary files again and again. Court figures. Close associates. Relatives. Looking for a crack in the armour. Any exploitable weakness. An angle of attack.
A clear firing line.
He reached for the glass of amasec. Light from the overhead desk lumen hit the gold surface of the liquor and set it glowing – little splinters of soft light refracting out of the cut crystal, spilling in starlight shards across the slide of his Exitus pistol.
He took a sip. Small, tentative. Lips closed tight so most of the amasec broke across them then spilled back like surf on a shore. This way, the drink could last three or four hours, which was exactly his intention.
Raithe allowed himself a drink every other night. Exactly two ounces, offset by an extra forty minutes of cardiovascular conditioning. Even his pleasures, when he took them, were regimented and mitigated.
He placed the glass down and settled his hand on the desk, laying it within a reassuring two-inch distance from the pistol grip.
His left index finger tapped the sketched picture in front of him, a reconstructed likeness based on Rakkan’s description. A thick face and wide forehead, regal and statue-like – nearly worthy of a Space Marine. An arc of geometric tattoos decorated the right side of his shaven skull, like a mathematical rainbow.
Baron Titus Yuma. Kingsward. House Rau, but sworn first and foremost to the protection of his High Monarch. Pilot of the Knight Warden Throneshield.
The briefing materials tagged him as threat-level Alpha. And according to Koln’s debriefs with Rakkan, Yuma would be their most formidable physical obstacle. As royal bodyguard, he would always be there. Even dismounted, he was known as a fierce opponent at close range.
Sixteen years ago, a group of Knights from House Rau had attempted a coup. After years of Stryder-friendly candidates dominating the Lists, a Rau candidate had made an incredible showing at the Sanguinalia Tournaments and edged to the top. Knowing Stryder would likely retake their spot in the next tournament, a cabal of Rau Knights drew powerblades and tried to run Yavarius-Khau through as he knelt at prayer in his private chapel.
All were dead by the time Khau got to his feet – helms and breastplates caved in by the Kingsward’s power mace.
Four dead Knights. All from his own house. That was how loyal Yuma was.
Raithe moved his finger to another sketch portrait – this one a woman, thin-faced and angular, black hair held in a bun with a decorative jewelled comb and suspicion pooling in the one eye not replaced with a spidery augmetic. She looked no older than her early forties, but too-youthful skin contrasting with wrinkled eyelids hinted at regular courses of juvenats.
Symphonia Dask. Gatekeeper. House Stryder, but outwardly sworn to the throne. Pilot of the Knight Errant Basilisk’s Gaze.
Dask was just as dangerous as the bruiser Yuma, if not more so. In most houses, Koln had said, the Gatekeeper served a security function – countering any threats to the capital or palace. In short, they neutralised any danger before it reached the person of the monarch. The inner sphere was the purview of the Kingsward, the outer sphere that of the Gatekeeper.
Stryder-Rau, however, was not a traditional knightly house. Except when the house was mustered for war, the monarchs of Stryder-Rau had no fear of a traditional strike at their power centre. No xenos armies or megafauna would be smashing against the walls of Gathering Palace, and peasant uprisings, while fairly regular, were not a credible threat.
Internal security, however, was another matter.
So for thirty-six years, Symphonia Dask had served as Stryder-Rau’s counter-intelligence head and spymaster, her network of informants penetrating every servants’ quarters, alehouse and private nobles-only revel within the walls of Gathering Palace – and some said even in both houses. Her operations were not as splashy or bloody as Yuma’s. No foes vanquished with a mace for her. Rather, her targets often ended face down in a lake.
Yuma and Dask. Inner circle and outer circle. Raithe wasn’t sure who he was more concerned about, the mace or the–
His hand was on the pistol before his brain even registered the sound.
He whirled, ducked low into a shooting stance. Twisted in his chair to bring the weapon to bear on whoever had entered the room.
Over the sights of his pistol, he saw Sycorax sitting on the edge of the bed.
Flash, he saw it. Shot to centre mass. Ride the recoil up to place a second shot in the cranium.
‘I was wondering when you’d notice,’ she said.
He dropped his aim, not away from her, but not a kill shot. ‘How did you get in here?’
