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  SONS OF THE HYDRA

  by Rob Sanders

  SHROUD OF NIGHT

  by Andy Clark

  LUCIUS – THE FAULTLESS BLADE

  by Ian St. Martin

  • FABIUS BILE •

  by Josh Reynolds

  BOOK 1 – PRIMOGENITOR

  BOOK 2 – CLONELORD

  • BLACK LEGION •

  by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  BOOK 1 – THE TALON OF HORUS

  BOOK 2 – BLACK LEGION

  • AHRIMAN •

  by John French

  BOOK 1 – AHRIMAN: EXILE

  BOOK 2 – AHRIMAN: SORCERER

  BOOK 3 – AHRIMAN: UNCHANGED

  NIGHT LORDS: THE OMNIBUS

  by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  (Contains the novels Soul Hunter, Blood Reaver and Void Stalker)

  KHRN: THE RED PATH

  by Chris Dows

  WORD BEARERS: THE OMNIBUS

  by Anthony Reynolds

  (Contains the novels Dark Apostle, Dark Disciple and Dark Creed)

  STORM OF IRON

  An Iron Warriors novel by Graham McNeill

  SPACE MARINE BATTLES: THE SIEGE OF CASTELLAX

  An Iron Warriors novel by C L Werner

  PERFECTION

  An Emperor’s Children audio drama by Nick Kyme

  CHOSEN OF KHORNE

  A World Eaters audio drama by Anthony Reynolds

  More Warhammer 40,000 stories from Black Library

  The Beast Arises

  1: I AM SLAUGHTER

  2: PREDATOR, PREY

  3: THE EMPEROR EXPECTS

  4: THE LAST WALL

  5: THRONEWORLD

  6: ECHOES OF THE LONG WAR

  7: THE HUNT FOR VULKAN

  8: THE BEAST MUST DIE

  9: WATCHERS IN DEATH

  10: THE LAST SON OF DORN

  11: SHADOW OF ULLANOR

  12: THE BEHEADING

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  A Space Marine Battles book, containing the novella The Hunt for Magnus and the novel Battle of the Fang

  THE WORLD ENGINE

  An Astral Knights novel

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  An Ultramarines collection

  DAMOCLES

  Contains the White Scars, Raven Guard and Ultramarines novellas Blood Oath, Broken Sword, Black Leviathan and Hunter’s Snare

  OVERFIEND

  Contains the White Scars, Raven Guard and Salamanders novellas Stormseer, Shadow Captain and Forge Master

  ARMAGEDDON

  Contains the Black Templars novel Helsreach and novella Blood and Fire

  Legends of the Dark Millennium

  ASTRA MILITARUM

  An Astra Militarum collection

  ULTRAMARINES

  An Ultramarines collection

  FARSIGHT

  A Tau Empire novella

  SONS OF CORAX

  A Raven Guard collection

  SPACE WOLVES

  A Space Wolves collection

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  Contents

  Cover

  Backlist

  Title Page

  Warhammer 40,000

  I: Solace

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  II: The Manse

  Chapter Five

  III: Dark Imperium

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  IV: Eye’s Edge

  Chapter Nine

  V: The Weeping Veil

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  VI: The Gate Breaks

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  VII: Castellans

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  VIII: Iron Shades

  Chapter Twenty

  IX: Plague Planet

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘Black Legion’

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  It is the 41st millennium. 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 will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of His inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that He may never truly die.

  Yet even in His deathless state, the Emperor continues His eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in His name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Astra Militarum and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse.

  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. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

  With many thanks to Nick Kyme for his expert editorial guidance, and to Guy Haley for helping sort out where everyone is and why.

  I imagined that I had encountered all possible cruelties.

  For a long time, I had understood the worst pain was to be denied that for which we thirsted. The centuries passed, each colder than the last, and that knowledge was the sharpest thorn my father had left in our flesh.

  But I have been wrong so often before, and so I was again then. In those days, once the Despoiler had broken the wheel of fate and our jail’s walls crumbled around us, we learned just how far we still had to go.

  The greatest cruelty, you see, was not being deprived of what we wanted. The greatest cruelty, as it turned out, was being given it.

  – Attributed to the primarch Mortarion

  I: Solace

  Chapter One

  ‘One, two, three.’

  He moves, slowly. His claw reaches out, pushing through debris. Lights flicker – sulphur-yellow, intermittent like a failing heartbeat.

  ‘Four, five.’

  He does not want to count. His lips move, unbidden, rehearsing well-trodden paths, stabilising his nervous system. Numbers have power – the subtle know this – but still he does not want to do it.

  ‘Six.’

  He pushes himself free of the piles of metal, the heaps of flesh and iron. His boots, cloven like devil hooves, find purchase and push back. He drags himself out of th
e ruins, his breath wheezing through a rusted vox-grille.

  ‘Seven.’

  That is the perfect number, the one that signifies the accomplishment and the end, but also the conception and then the process. It gives him strength, though he does not wish it to. It has always given him strength, even before the long change, and he dimly remembers this. Now, it is just a habit. So many things are just habits now.

  He gets back to his feet. Detritus sheds from his back, clattering on the deck. Warning klaxons are sounding from somewhere, muffled and broken. A length of cable as thick as a torso hangs from the roof, glittering with a weak mantle of sparks. The grav field is off-kilter. He feels lighter than he should. His old plate should be heavy. It is crusted with the patina of age, thickened and fleshed, scabbed with boils and laced with glistening strings of pulled marrow.

  He staggers over to a servitor station and sees the wretched operator fused to the deck, its fingers locked into a cat’s cradle of sensor plugs. It’s dead now, the last strobes of its cortex blown out, which is probably for the best.

  He presses fat fingers to the command console, summoning status runes across greasy picter crystals.

  He sees that the ship lives. He sees that Solace’s enemy is no longer in view. He wonders how much he aided the starship, or if this is just one more sign that things are running away from him.

  ‘Dragan,’ he voxes, and gets nothing but static back over the link.

  Others are beginning to stir now. He sees one of his kindred emerge from under a sagging beam, helm lenses glowing vivid green in the dark. He sees a servitor twitch back into life, its bulbous stomach spilling across a disc-shaped tactical column. He sees a Little Lord plop down from a fizzing cluster of cabling. It shrieks as it splats on the deck, and he gathers it up carefully. It coos at him, and then nuzzles into the crutch of his elbow, snickering needle-teeth.

  He is beginning to remember now. He is beginning to piece things together again. Is he slower now than he once was?

  The Little Lord starts to lick the blood from his cracked ceramite.

  Of course he’s slower. Everything is slowing down, congested, like running through water. That’s the Gift, of course. That’s one of the great objectives.

  Vorx turns on his heel, patting the Little Lord absently.

  ‘Lumens, if you please,’ he grunts. ‘Get us moving.’

  The bridge responds. Crew stagger out of the dark, pull themselves up from behind half-melted cogitator stations, wipe sweat and mucus from their eyes.

  Around them, Solace starts to come to life. It’s hard to kill a ship like this. It’s hard to kill any of them.

  ‘One,’ he mutters, starting again.

  Dragan gets to his knees, snarling. A gun-crew slave staggers over to him, perhaps trying to help him. This is a conceit, and he shoves the emaciated human into the wall, hears the faint snap of something osseous breaking. Then he’s turning, drawing himself up to his full height. The gun cavern yawns away from him, its roof lost in dark clouds, draped with rotting cables like spider threads.

  Something big has detonated, hard enough to fry Solace’s grav-generators and throw the virtual axis off-kilter. The ship’s a big, bulky beast, so the damage must have been catastrophic, and close.

  He slaps the side of his helm, then again, hard enough to knock some sense back into his incoming visual field. His mood is dark, and he wonders if the explosion was somehow his failure – if so, that’ll be more fodder for Vorx.

  The gun gangs are coming back to life. Several dozen lie in the murk of the deck, limbs severed or ribcages smashed. A chain-mounted lumen swings lazily over them like a censer. The nearest gun barrel – a two-hundred-metre-long iron howitzer – rears up through the miasma towards its gunwale sheath. Recoil columns splay out, lodged deep into the substructure. Much of the breech is still made of black metal, a metre thick at its thinnest point, crushingly heavy. Only the edges show creeping evidence of the biological – strands of hair-thin follicles worming away, glacially slowly. They’ll get there in the end, consuming the inorganic and replacing it with the tougher stuff of sinew and cord.

  Six metres away, Gunnery Captain Kodad regains his feet. He’s one of the more senior of the Unchanged, and something like a uniform still clings to his hefty frame. His skin is white-grey and boils cluster at his neckline, but he might even pass for human-normal in some of the grimier Imperial hives.

  Dragan looks into his smeary adjuster-lens, then down the long rows of howitzers.

  ‘What’s the damage?’ he growls.

  ‘Significant,’ Kodad whispers. He always whispers now – some wasting­ Gift in his vocal cords, most likely. ‘It will take time.’

  Dragan grunts. He can smell promethium, mingled with heavier aromas. Solace is bleeding somewhere.

  ‘Did you get a salvo off?’ he asks.

  Kodad looks at him. His black-in-black eyes are unblinking. ‘Six, lord.’

  ‘Six.’

  ‘Rather proud of the crews, lord.’

  Dragan grunts again. ‘Not good enough, though, was it?’ he snarls, and stalks out towards the exit aperture. His boots suck at the soft fleshy stuff on the deck – the permanent soup of swill that bubbles and ferments in every crevice. ‘I’ll be back in an hour. Any guns still out of action, I’ll flay the loader teams. Get it done.’

  Vorx heads down from the bridge. As he goes, more lumens flicker back on. A grinding hum breaks out erratically from under the blackened deck-plates. Servitors – the name they still give to the panoply of brainstem-clipped monsters who man the low-level functions of the battleship – scuttle and lurch back into life. Some are almost human shaped, with two legs and two arms, and the head they were born with. Most are not. Some are like insects, while others have been almost entirely swallowed into the embrace of the corridor walls, their dried skin fusing with nutrient lines and power cables, until all that remains is a half-glimpsed face. Those faces gape stupidly as Vorx passes, some vestigial recognition response making their jaws twitch.

  There was a time, Vorx thinks idly, that life and death were clearly delineated things. The human body would persist for a while, discrete from its fellows, before expiring and returning to the mulch. Now, though, every possible shade between the states of living and dying has been exploited. Half of his crew are, to all intents and purposes, semi-dead, or maybe semi-alive, their required service sustained by amalgams of ancient biotech and even older necromancy.

  He glances at one of the buried servitor faces. It has no eyes, no nose, just an open mouth crammed full of electric strobe lines. Its lower lip spasms. Vorx wonders if it can detect his presence. He reaches out and gently presses a withered cheek.

  Then he’s moving again. There’s no use pondering these things too deeply. It’s all part of the great panoply, the more-than-infinite variety that he serves and seeks to propagate. In another reality, he might have had the leisure to study these creatures, to see just how far the boundaries of decay and resilience can be taken before the parameters snap, but that is not, of course, his calling.

  He works his way down a long spiral stair, wheezing as he goes. His lungs are half full of fluid, and he cannot help but think it a poor Gift. Then again, he has thought other Gifts were poor in the past, only to discover their genius much later.

  ‘Forgive,’ he says, speaking softly to the Little Lord at his elbow.

  The tiny daemon giggles, then farts liquidly into the crook of his armour. That counts as forgiveness, probably.

  He reaches his destination. He is a long way down now, buried within the folded heart of Solace’s central chamber-core. It smells rich here, like old soil. He sees pale worms wriggling through the mouldering metal­work, each barely longer than his fingernail. They glow. They have many eyes. And long teeth. Why does a worm need teeth?

  He’s doing it again. Too curious – that’s always
been his problem.

  A door stands before him. It is made of wood. The beams are rotten and pocked with a sieve of beetle holes, and it all smells deeply of another world. Corroding iron bars and hinges creak as the door opens, letting a curtain of deep-green miasma roll across the threshold. He steps inside and enters a dank chamber of mists and mellow putrescence.

  Tables, all of them hewn from thick beams of the same rotten wood, groan under the weight of age-spotted books. Candles flicker in their holders, struggling to stay alight against the humidity. Many pairs of tiny eyes blink from the shadows, red and vicious. Clocks tick, archaic mechanisms grind, and a hooked wheel turns slowly against the domed ceiling.

  ‘Were you damaged?’ Vorx asks.

  A figure swivels in the murk, its face partly hidden by a thick cowl. Under those shadows pulses the evidence of many Gifts – boils, buboes, raised veins that throb with black fluid.

  ‘No, not much,’ the Tallyman Philemon replies, greeting Vorx with a nod. ‘Too far down, here. But you took a beating up there, yes?’

  Vorx smiles wryly. ‘We are still alive. Or what passes for it.’ He looks around. He breathes in the rich air, and sees the many Little Lords squatting on high shelves. They grin back at him, chittering and belching. ‘This one took a fall. Perhaps you will look.’

  He hands his charge to the Tallyman, who lifts the doughy bag of flesh up to the flickering light and turns it over in his gauntlets.

  ‘So I see,’ Philemon murmurs to the Little Lord. ‘Perhaps stay here a while. You can assist me.’

  He reaches into a bag and pulls out something meaty with an eyelash still attached, before feeding it to the diminutive monster. It gurgles delightedly and hops up to the shelf with the rest of them, where a chattering tussle breaks out.

  ‘Solace must be wounded,’ Philemon observes, reaching for a taper to light more candles. ‘I feel it even in these bowels.’

  ‘It will recover,’ Vorx says.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I do not know.’ Vorx leans against a heavy pile of books – grimoires and ledgers, some open to reveal webs of inked diagrams and tables. ‘I thought we had a contest. They landed a few – raiding parties – but we matched them in the void.’ He shook his head. ‘The truth will emerge.’