Cult of the Warmason (Warhammer 40,000 Book 1) by C L Werner

Author:C L Werner [Werner, C L]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Games Workshop
Published: 2017-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter VIII

The bellow of explosions thundered down the battered streets of the psalmists’ quarter. A few frag grenades brought the purple-garbed hybrids stumbling out from their improvised fortification, blood and an inhuman treacle dripping from their battered bodies. Periphetes wasted no time in raking the cultists with his bolter, cutting them down at the knees as they emerged from the ferrocrete blockhouse. The vicious renegade brought his boltgun scything back around as he dropped the last of the survivors, ensuring none of them would crawl off to carry word back to their leaders. The blockhouse itself, the reinforced facade of an air-recycler’s shelter, exploded outwards as Captain Uzraal threw a krak grenade through the vent-like window.

Cornak could feel the mind of the magus focusing on him. It was too cautious to test the sorcerer’s psychic defences and arcane wards, but it wasn’t so timid as to keep away entirely. He had the impression that it was studying them, evaluating them like a magos biologis. It was trying to see how they worked and what use might be made of them.

Such was the impression that had reached Cornak’s consciousness. If that had been the only intelligence he distilled from the hybrid’s psychic presence, he would have felt rage. Though he was a sorcerer, he was foremost a Space Marine, the pinnacle of human perfection. He was no specimen to be ogled by a curious alien.

Yet there was more. A chilling familiarity that slowly stirred his hearts. Cornak had ‘seen’ this being before. He’d witnessed it in that confusion of prophecy shared by the Circle in the warp. He could give it a name, Bakasur, and he could give it a twisted sort of face. He could see it in a place of hellfire and shadow, leering and triumphant. At its feet, one of the Circle lay sprawled in death.

Cornak had seen many deathly visions over the centuries, witnessed the unfolding of prophecies that had taken others of the Circle. Always there’d been the concern that the doom might be his own, but never had the concern grown into a certainty. He was here and Bakasur was here. The temptation was there to try to escape the vision, to leave Lubentina and forget the ambition that had brought him here. Such timidity was for the merely human, the wretches Rhodaan and his warriors disdained as ‘flesh’. A daemon had once told Cornak that those who seek to escape their doom will find it while those who embrace their doom may find they instead have escaped it. The sorcerer had always found that the more enigmatic and vexing a daemon’s words the more truth there was within them.

‘The xenos are persistent,’ Rhodaan’s voice crackled across the vox. Cornak shifted his awareness from the psychic shadow of Bakasur to the forbidding presence of the warsmith. Rhodaan was looking across the demolished blockhouse and the hybrids Periphetes had slaughtered.

Captain Uzraal kicked one of the dead cultists. ‘Half human but all fool if they think they can stop us with such pathetic opposition.

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