The Culexus Assassin Dranos is sent to destroy the Sorcerer
Xantaka before he can conjure any more daemonic legions
from the Warp. Being all but invisible to not only the
aethersight of Xantaka’s Daemon armies but also his Rubricae
bodyguard, Dranos simply walks up to the Sorcerer Xantaka
and burns his brains to ash with a blast of negative energy.

A Callidus Assassin, sent to steal away the firstborn child of the
dangerously self-centred Planetary Governor Thygmus van
Spracht, disguises herself as the infant’s matron-vigilus. By
widening her craw with Polymorphine and swallowing the
princeling whole, she walks past the elite Palace Guards without
so much as a whisper of resistance. She carries the prize in
her belly to her masters before regurgitating it whole, mewling
but safe. Pict-skull footage is sent to the governor, and he falls
back into the Imperial fold within the week.

A Culexus Assassin is sent to claim the head of the
manipulative Farseer Lithandros-Esmanthil. The Eldar senses the
threat and scries the skeins of fate accordingly, but is
increasingly alarmed to find he is unable to locate the thread
corresponding to his pursuer. After a long and terrifying hunt,
the Assassin ambushes his prey in the lonely halls of
Saim-Hann’s Dome of Reflection. Rendered psychically inert and
driven to exhaustion by the chase, Lithandros-Esmanthil gives
himself up to the sinister violence that follows.

The abhuman goliaths of Thugrock Secundus, a recruitment
moon for the Astra Militarum, develop a blood cult that
consumes the planet’s ruling caste. In an unprecedented display
of miscommunication, no fewer than six Eversor assassins are
dispatched to slay the leaders of the indigenous population. By
the time the single surviving Eversor is recovered, not one
Thugrock Goliath is left alive, and when the news reaches the
Astra Militarum, they are most displeased that such a rich
resource has been wasted. To this day, the event is used as a
cautionary fable to illustrate the dangers of despatching several
Assassins at once.

The influential cardinal Jerome the Unsaintly of Oristia IV
secedes from the Imperial Creed. He amasses an insane
amount of wealth through illegal levies, hoping to gather an
army of Frateris Militia to rival that of Goge Vandire. He is
shot in the roof of the mouth by a Vindicare Assassin whilst
singing subversive hymns.

Urhua Thereaux, Assassin of the Venenum Temple, is
dispatched to assassinate the renegade Governor Yawell of
Morisha. During transit, the starship is caught in a Warp rift,
holding the vessel in temporal stasis for some six hundred and
ninety-eight years. Not knowing that this has occurred,
Thereaux proceeds to her target, only to find Yawell long since
dead and replaced by an anti-Imperial democratic committee
consisting of over a thousand members. Faced with such an
extreme task, Thereaux only succeeds in killing the committee
members after spending three days poisoning all the chairs in
the council’s auditorium prior to a meeting of the full
committee.

The progressive astrologer Lenas Scard is marked for death
before his heretical discoveries shake the Imperial Creed any
further. The Vindicare Assassin Erasmus Menst hangs
upside-down from a promethium relay pipe for six days,
awaiting his prey, only to realise that Scard is aware of his
pursuit and has holed up inside his observatory. Menst
abandons his plan and instead climbs to the highest spire of
Hive Mendicantus, knowing that it is only a matter of time
before the glint of Scard’s scrying scope appears. Sure enough,
as the planet’s moon is bisected by the spire, a telltale flash
from Scard’s observatory appears. Menst is able to put a shot
through the telescope’s lens and into the eye socket of the
stargazer behind it.

The planet of Orlenza Triartes severs its ties from the
Imperium, hoping for better trade terms. The Planetary
Governor tricks his Adeptus Arbites into quelling a prison break
that turns out to be a carefully crafted ambush, placing the
Arbitrators under lock and key alongside those same criminals
they had arrested. Word reaches the Imperium, and two
regiments of Imperial Guard are sent to intervene. The
preening aristocrats at the heart of the rebellion muster their
forces and attack, only to find that their chief military advisor,
a vulgar but effective mercenary known as Le Kard, was not
who they thought he was. The Orlenza forces find their
dispersal to be extremely ineffective, and they are surrounded
and cut off within a week. When Le Kard’s airtight cell is
opened it is found to contain only a set of discarded clothes
and a synskin-clad Callidus, crouching like a hyperfelid ready to
pounce. The Assassin cuts a swathe through the planet’s
nobility before disappearing without a trace.

The petite but fearsome Callidus Assassin Militzia Scarvelli
infiltrates Big Mek Oilguzla’s workshops in the guise of a
gretchin slave-creature. Just as Oilguzla launches his Deff Dread
horde at the Space Marines protecting Hive Imperator, Scarvelli
recovers her phase sword from its hiding place in a nearby
stack of scrap metal and attacks. Though it takes her almost a
full minute to do so, she hacks the Big Mek into fist-sized
chunks before overloading his force-field generator and bringing
the stomping advance of the Deff Dread mobs to a grinding
halt.

The Vindicare temple is given a kill order to take out the
predatory Dark Eldar pilot known as the Skyknife. Knowing
that to enter Commorragh would be to court almost certain
failure, the Vindicare Assassin Dejedris Garamach determines
the site of a previous sighting of the Skyknife’s Razorwing
Jetfighter. He mounts his vigil in the eye socket of the
Threndian Colossus, subsisting on moss and the raw flesh of
the birds that use the statue as its nest whilst never taking his
eyes from the sky. Six years later, his vigil is rewarded when
the Skyknife appears from midair in a flash of azure light.
Within a half-second of its appearance Garamach puts a
turbo-penetrator round into the cockpit, killing the pilot
instantly.

The Ork Warlord Urgak the Unstoppable is on the verge of
completing his Gargant and launching a Waaagh! into the
Vondiac Sector when a Vindicare Assassin sends a bullet into
the reactor core of the giant effigy. The thing catches fire and
then explodes spectacularly, killing not only Urgak himself but
also the vast majority of the Meks in his employ. The Waaagh!
is halted before it even begins, putting the lie to Urgak’s
self-aggrandising title and plunging the surviving Orks into a
bloody civil war.

Hetman Grettch of the 593rd Kadaveran Tigers becomes so
incensed at constantly being interrupted by the Tactical
Auto-Reliquary of Tyberius that he ‘accidentally’ deactivates it
with a ceremonial mace. It is the first step in a rebellion that
sees not only the 593rd, but the entirety of the Kadaveran
Tigers, turn against the Imperium. A Callidus Assassin is sent
to infiltrate Grettch’s advisor corps, assuming the identity of his
eyeless Astropath before killing the traitorous commander and
taking his place. When the Tigers open hostilities against the
Cadian 342nd, their orders suddenly become contradictory and
counter-intuitive, and when the command staff is obliterated by
an artillery strike called down upon their own position, the
entire war effort falls to pieces. The Kadaverans, their forces
decimated within the hour, quickly see the error of their ways
and submit themselves for a regiment-wide court martial.
Though the Tactical Auto-Reliquary is recovered and later
repaired, they are found guilty and executed to a man.

The Officio Assassinorum, having failed to destroy the obscenely
powerful Chaos Lord Malfecius with operatives from the
Eversor and Vindicare temples, sends the Culexus Assassin
Vaedrex instead. The Culexus haunts the steps of Malfecius
across the Eye of Terror. Only when Malfecius ascends to
Daemon Princehood does Vaedrex finally strike. With Malfecius’
latest incarnation rendering him vulnerable to Vaedrex’ psyk-out
grenades, the Culexus finally manages to kill the reeling
Daemon Prince with a punishing series of blasts from his
Animus Speculum.

The Wyrdvane Psykers of the Vostroyan Firstborn 122nd come
through a difficult Warp translation as a gestalt entity of
terrifying psychic power. Revelling in their new abilities, they
rise up amongst the ranks of their former comrades and
enslave every one of them to their bloodthirsty desires. When
the regiment arrives on Sylvanus II they set about the murder
of the populace. The Hammers of Dorn are sent on a
planetfall mission to destroy the Dread Gestalt, but the powers
of the Wyrdvane Psykers are so swollen that the Space Marine
attack is repelled with terrifying ease. Only when the Culexus
Assassin known as the Revoker is unleashed into the Vostroyan
ranks does the Dread Gestalt lose its power, flopping back to
earth as weak as newborns. They are killed to a man by
Vostroyan bayonets even before the Revoker can close with his
target to finish the job.

The Lubricae Cult arises within the Adeptus Mechanicus, a
body of heretics that worship the interstitial substances that
keep the universe running smoothly. All twelve of the senior
Technomagi gather around a black and shimmering pool of
arcanoil, anointing themselves with a mixture of war-virgin’s
blood and boiling grease as they declare open war on their
former brethren. A slick black devil bursts from the pool’s
depths when the Eversor Assassin sent to slay them reveals
himself. Within moments every one of the Lubricae Cult is slain.
Their Skitarii legions attack nonetheless, but without leadership
they are quickly defeated by their loyalist counterparts.

The Imperial Assassins are the hidden blades wielded by the
High Lords of Terra. They are the slayers of kings and false
messiahs, the bane of traitors and rebels across the stars. Once
an agent has been despatched, he is as relentless and
inescapable as the march of time itself. Every facet of his
impeccable training is turned to the business of a single kill.
Though the temples of the Officio Assassinorum are shrouded
in the utmost secrecy, all men of influence fear the shadows
they cast, for their operatives are the Emperor’s Justice made
real.

In a realm the size and scope of the Imperium, it is all too
common for planets to escape the vigil of the High Lords. With
communication and travel at the mercy of the Warp’s shifting
tides, a populace can go for ten, twenty, even a hundred years
without being contacted by the wider Imperium. It is a fragile
system indeed, and given the crushing grind of Imperial life,
one that has seen many worlds fall into the thrall of heresy.

Left to fend for themselves against a hostile galaxy, it is easy
for a planet’s citizenry to harbour the seeds of corruption. A
world may fail to pay its tithes, allow its psyker containment
routines to slip, or come under the rule of an unsanctioned
government. Some simply crave independence away from the
dictates of the Administratum, the Ecclesiarchy, and a galaxy
ruled by twelve faceless figures in the name of a distant
Emperor.

Regardless of whether the new order is benevolent or
tyrannical, its orchestrators make themselves targets for the
most violent of retributions. Though their government may
thrive in the short term, word will eventually reach the Adepts
of the Imperium of their disobedience. Sometimes the resultant
confrontation leads to open war, but it is just as often resolved
by covert means. Coercion, bribery, threats, blackmail and
murder are all weapons in the armoury of those whose iron
grip defines the realms of Man. To this end, the Imperium has
developed several institutions to exploit these weapons to their
fullest; ancient organisations that trace their history back to the
Great Crusade and the very birth of the Imperium. One such
organisation is the Officio Assassinorum.

The Assassins of the Imperium are able to change the fate of
worlds with the pull of a single trigger. Where the length of the
Emperor’s reach needs to be made abundantly clear, a
Vindicare sniper will put a bullet in the target’s head whilst the
errant individual is surrounded by his followers. If the traitorous
creed has spread to an entire organisation or military force, an
Eversor will instead be set loose; a bio-enhanced berserker that
will slaughter dozens if not hundreds of rebels alongside the
key individual he has been sent to slay. Should the deed
require more subtlety, an operative from the Callidus temple will
instead be despatched; in such cases it is all but impossible to
detect the presence of these shape-shifting Assassins until the
deed is done. If the target is a psyker, one of the rare and
fearsome Culexus will be sent to hunt them down – beings
with a strange void in place of a soul that makes them the
bane of all who treat with the Warp.

The weapons of the Assassins range from simple knives and
garrotes, to exotic neural shredders and phase swords that can
cut through armour and force field alike. Even bare-handed,
these operatives are lethal foes; each is trained extensively in
unarmed combat and is more than capable of fighting their
way free from the mayhem that ensues from their kill.
Returning to their masters, they are extensively debriefed and
examined before being given a new mark and mission to
accomplish. In this way, each Assassin is locked into a constant
cycle of headhunting that spans the breadth of the Imperium,
reforging the fragile chains of Imperial rule even as the Time of
Ending breaks them apart.

The Phase Sword is thought to utilise alien
technology, though the Callidus Temple keeps its nature a close
secret. Worn as a long blade attached to the forearm, this
weapon is able to phase in and out of realspace by molecular
realignment, bypassing not only physical armour but also its
metaphysical equivalents.

The training of an Assassin is a long and arduous business.
Almost every recruit is an orphan, taken from the wreckage of
his or her former life among the population of a death world,
feral society or hive city, and transported to the Schola
Progenium for tutelage. There, they train alongside the youths
who will become the foremost agents of the Imperium.

Life in the Scholas is extremely hard, a relentless grind of
physical and mental challenge where only the strongest thrive.
Taught to strive for excellence and obedience in all things, the
minds and bodies of the recruits are sharpened to a killing
edge whilst their spirit learns to embrace the Emperor as
master and immortal father. Most of these intense young men
and women go on to train as Militarum Tempestus Scions,
Commissars or, in the most unusual cases, Inquisitors. Those of
their number who are born killers, however, are instead
appropriated by the shadowy figures that haunt each Selection
Day. Those recruits are never seen again by their fellows.
From that day onwards, their only true friend is death itself.

Training starts even as the Assassinorum ships return to Terra,
with the Officio instructors testing their prospective pupils
mercilessly. The recruits must survive on limited food or air for
days at a time. They must constantly fight each other in armed
and unarmed combat, in conditions of total darkness or
blinding light, zero-G or crushing weight, stifling heat or freezing
cold. By the time of their arrival, there may be only a tenth of
the prospective Assassins left, or sometimes – if the instructors
deem every recruit to be unworthy – none at all.

Upon arrival at Terra, the surviving initiates begin the next
stage of their training. Sailing past the space-borne basilicas,
immense queues of pilgrim craft and military cordons that
congest Terra’s outer orbit, they are carried down into the
Temples Assassinorum under the most advanced of shrouding
protocols. In subterranean safehouses, these new recruits are
divided amongst the hidden temples of the Officio Assassinorum.
Each temple has its own ancient ways and mysteries, and each
specialises in a different aspect of the art of murder. There are
many such temples, some of which are known to the others
and some that remain completely secret. There, the initiates
train for a full decade, labouring under the auspices of Lord
Assassins so harsh they make the drill abbots of the Schola
Progenium look like kindly uncles by comparison.

The training procedure becomes ever more rigorous over the
years as the temples test each candidate to his or her utmost
limits. Days are spent battling with bone-wrenching exercise
engines, fighting in deadly bouts or mastering their tolerance for
pain. Initiates must survive lengthy courses of
psycho-indoctrination and aggressive hypnosis, undergo physical
tests of ever-escalating severity, and digest vast quantities of
information about the Imperium that will soon be their hunting
ground. They must train in the most esoteric of weaponry and
steel their bodies against the ravages of endless steroids and
stimms. Even then, they have only scratched the surface of
their temple’s potential arsenal. The hidden orders of the
Assassinorum conceal masterpieces of destruction, some of
which were devised by the Primarchs, Malcador the Sigilite, and
even the Emperor himself. Truly, it is said that each temple
houses a thousand deaths and more.

Unlike other warriors of the Imperium, who are able to focus
on war and war alone, the Assassin must be truly autonomous.
Once an operative is in the field, he must be able to cross the
galaxy from one side to the other, by means fair or foul. He
must not only master his own lethal calling, but also be
proficient in a dozen others. He must know how to drive and
sanctify everything from an armoured bike to a small
spacecraft, must be able to convince truculent machine spirits to
do his bidding, and clean, disassemble and reconsecrate his
wargear whenever necessary. He must have a professorial
knowledge of the Imperium’s history, organisation, and common
languages. His understanding of human anatomy must be
complete, and every fact the Imperium has uncovered about
the physicality of the xenos is bequeathed to him under oaths
of secrecy.

Few human minds can process such vast quantities of
information, let alone master them. Not all survive the rigours
of their training with their spirits intact, and many have fallen
into madness at the sheer quantity of the trials they face. Yet
an initiate that joins the ranks of his temple’s operatives will
have all these skills at his command.

Key to the uncanny might of the Assassin is the surgery he
must undergo during his ten years of tutelage. Augmentative
nodes are stitched into his brain, and sub-muscular acoustic
surgery prepares his body for the punishment that will be
visited upon him in the line of duty. The level of arcane
technology necessary is perhaps the most advanced the
Imperium can provide – for good reason, it is constrained to
Holy Terra to minimise the chance of it being captured by the
enemies of Humanity. It is well that such ancient
techno-magicks are revered so, and maintained with such
painstaking care. Without them, the polymorphic drugs and
reality-shifting devices used by the more esoteric temples would
literally tear their operatives apart.

Even if an Assassin survives his training, his leash is still held
suffocatingly tight. Only by a successful petition to the High
Lords of Terra themselves and a two-thirds majority in the
subsequent vote can an Assassin be sanctioned and released
into the galaxy to complete the task he was born to do.
The fact that the ultimate luminaries of the Imperium give their
direct attention to the deployment of a single individual shows
just how exceptional these killers are. The records of the Officio
temples are as detailed as they are scrupulous, a source of
great pride to the masters that watch over them. Across the
millennia, occasions where the despatch of an operative has not
resulted in the desired result are extraordinarily few and far
between. Be the target man, witch, beast or daemon, the result
is the same, for an Imperial Assassin is death incarnate.

One of the exotic pieces of equipment used by the Assassins is
synthetic skin or synskin. This is a rubbery black layer that the
Assassins spray onto their bodies, forming a close-fitting suit
that enhances the function of the muscles beneath. Even items
of equipment can be sealed in place by successive layers.
Synskin acts like a flexible form of armour, absorbing blows
and dissipating the energy of a blow. Synskin also feeds the
body with oxygen and metabolic booster chemicals, allowing the
wearer to endure burning heat, freezing cold, or even the hard
vacuum of space for a limited time.