Table of Contents

Cover

Kill Hill - Dan Abnett

Blood Blessing - Sarah Cawkwell

Immortalis - Andy Smillie

Blood Sport - Josh Reynolds

Only Ash Remains - Nick Kyme

Easy Prey - CZ Dunn

Cankerworm - Darius Hinks

For The Fallen - Aaron Dembski-Bowden

Voices - David Guymer

The Weakness of Others - Laurie Goulding

Gilead's Craft - Nik Vincent

All Is Dust - John French

Evil Eye - David Annandale

Army Of One - Rob Sanders

Sword Guardian - Graham McNeill

Legal

KILL HILL

(Fifteen Years Later...)

by Dan Abnett

Priad of Damocles, of the Iron Snakes of Ithaka, is clad in slate grey armour, one shoulder marked with a blue coiled snake upon a white field.

Iron Snake. Indomitable. Relentless.

The hour is approaching. The final hour. The ending of the fight. The end of the undertaking. The skin of his armour is crazed with a million tiny nicks and gouges, scratches and grazes.

The place is called Bar’ad Atyok. In the voice of the greenskins, this means Kill Hill. It is the highest peak of the western continent of the world Koram Mote. Priad of Damocles, of the Iron Snakes of Ithaka, knows this for a fact. He knows it because there is not one place, not one single, lonely part of the western continent of the world Koram Mote that he has not been to, measured, cleared of enemies, and conquered. He knows Kill Hill is the highest peak because his armour’s visor display tells him so, to eight decimal places. It is sixty-one metres higher than Osh Tarr (‘Blood Summit’), and a mere seven metres higher than Bar’ad Onkgrol (‘Marrowbone Hill’). It is demonstrably, technically the highest peak on the western continent of the world Koram Mote, and that is what matters.

Screamer vox-signal to Ithaka Beacon: Extraction point, highest geo-feature/western continent.

Greenskins await in the slipline of the rocks as he ascends. Another day on Koram Mote. More to kill, ever more to kill. Another day on Koram Mote. Except it is the last day.

Priad of Damocles, of the Iron Snakes of Ithaka, still carries his boltgun, though it has been dry of rounds since the seventh year of the undertaking, the pod-dropped ammo-hoppers finally emptied. It is too beautiful and precious a weapon to leave behind. Priad bears his power sword, and his automated claws. They still function. He had fashioned a lance too, but he left it behind last night, rammed through the gizzard of a greenskin warboss on the lower slopes of Bar’ad Atyok.

As good a place as any to leave it.

The first of the greenskins rush him, howling rage. They are all spittle and slack, trembling lips filled with rot-peg teeth, their animal bulks painted with ochre, chalk and woad. Spears and cleavers rip at him. More tiny marks on the patina of his armour.

He has been here for fifteen years. Fifteen years. Still the greenskins haven’t learned they cannot kill him. They will not ever kill him. If he stays any longer, the highest peak on the western continent will be the mound of greenskin corpses he has stacked up.

He meets the first, braced, armour joints locking to withstand the collision, clouts it aside, greets the second and decapitates it. Its lungs are still exhaling a war cry, and air slaps and farts out of the severed throatpipe as it pitches away.

Blood droplets in the air.

The third. A dull steel axe-head sparks off Priad’s shoulder guard. His lightning claws find a throat and chest, and fork through the flesh as if through wet parchment. A fourth. His sword takes off an arm, and the axe it is holding. Priad kicks, his amplified blow casting the maimed greenskin down the slipline scree, head-over-heels. He catches the axe out of the air. It is still spinning and falling, slipping from the dead arm that is also still spinning and falling. He is moving so fast, it is as though time has slowed down to wait for him, as though the greenskin left the axe in mid-air for him to take, as if the air held it for Priad like an obedient servitor.

He catches the axe, turns it, buries it in the face of the fifth. Blood spray. On, on up the slope.

Priad of Damocles, of the Iron Snakes of Ithaka, has been here for fifteen years. To the human mind, that is a great chunk of a lifetime. To an Imperial Guardsman, that would be a long and heartless tour in hell.

To Priad, it is an undertaking, a period of occupation, a duty. Onerous, perhaps, grueling even, but in the end just another mission notch on his service history, just another action to while away a life that will be functionally immortal if violent death does not claim him.

He looks forward to seeing Ithaka again. He looks forward to the surroundings of Karybdis, the fortress moon, the Chapter House. He looks forward to seeing his brothers in Damocles Squad. He looks forward to the Rite of Returning. These are the only consolations he permits himself, the only comforts for the vestigial humanity he allows in a mind that otherwise has been a focused weapon for fifteen years.

He looks forward to speaking to another soul for the first time since the undertaking began. The silence has been long. He looks forward to cleaning and mending his armour, to polishing out the million scratches, to servicing his boltgun, to sleeping for a term, more fully than the half-rest periods he has eked out with his catalepsian node so that he cannot be taken by surprise.

Fifteen years. Hold the greenskin clans at Koram Mote, said the Chapter Master. Keep them occupied. Focus their attention. Stem their numbers. Buy us time to range Battlefleet Reef Star against their base worlds, and purge them.

How long will it take to manoeuvre the fleet into position? Priad asked.

Not long. Fifteen years.

Entirely reasonable. For a moment, Priad had been concerned that it might be a significant length of time. Great Petrok’s two centuries spent holding Ankylos might have become tedious by the end. Steelmen are less entertaining to hunt than Greenskins.

He’s reaching the summit. One of the suns is coming up in the south. The light is yellow, sidelong. He sees a bright speck, like a low star, to the west. Running lights. Inside his visor, a chime sounds and an icon illuminates.

Two minutes out. The last two minutes of fifteen years.

There are greenskins on the summit. He has become a myth to them, a monster, hunting and killing them across the western continent for fifteen years. They want him dead, but they cannot have him dead. He cuts one in half with his sword, punches the face off another with his claws. A warboss looms, twice Priad’s size, laughing like an ogre, a grunting infrasonic boom, axe side-swung to chop.

Huge, but just so slow. Priad of Damocles, of the Iron Snakes of Ithaka, leaps over him, drops in behind, cuts through a tree-trunk spinal column with his sword, cuts throat blubber as the warboss sprawls, vast body no longer working. Priad lops the giant, bloodied hands aside as they spasm and grope at him.

He delivers the killing blow.

‘Ithaka!’ he cries, the first word he has said aloud in fifteen years on Koram Mote, and the last.

The Thunderhawk powers in, hanging overhead, settling down onto Kill Hill, ramp open, thrusters screaming.

The fifteen years are done.

He wonders what they will have him do tomorrow.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dan Abnett is a multiple New York Times bestselling author and an award-winning comic book writer. He has written over forty novels, including the acclaimed Gaunt’s Ghosts series, and the Eisenhorn and Ravenor trilogies. His previous Horus Heresy novel, Prospero Burns, topped the SF charts in the UK and the US. In addition to writing for Black Library, Dan scripts audio dramas, movies, games, and comics for major publishers in Britain and America. He is also the author of other bestselling novels, including Torchwood: Border Princes, Doctor Who: The Silent Stars Go By, Triumff: Her Majesty’s Hero, and Embedded. He lives and works in Maidstone, Kent.

BLOOD BLESSING

by Sarah Cawkwell

Prepare to be judged in His name. Prepare for your reckoning in the name of the Blood God, warrior. He has deemed you worthy of this, the ultimate reward. Not all of His followers receive this honour in person. Look upon me. I am the harbinger of death. I am the herald and consort of He Who Thirsts. I am Valkia, known as the Bloody and my face is the last that your eyes will see.

You shiver.

You react.

You know me, then? This is good. It is right and proper that a warrior who declares his loyalty to my lord and master cowers in the presence of his betters. Do not fear me, beloved. You knew this day would come. You have anticipated and hoped for my presence throughout your entire life.

Perhaps it is your fanatical devotion that makes you tremble like a leaf in the wind.

Do not die. It is not yet your time, warrior. Not quite yet. There is something that remains to be done. Listen to me, disciple and prepare to make a final choice. No, do not die. I have not yet given you permission to do that.

Look at me. What do you see? A daemon-woman, clad in armour of scarlet? Perhaps you see your queen. Do you see your equal or do you see your better? So many questions, when all you want to do is die. You tremble again.

Perhaps it is the rain, bringing an aching chill to your mortal bones.

Perhaps you are shivering in fear. Perhaps you are shivering in ecstasy. Which is it, beloved disciple? No… No, do not answer. There is no need.

I am no fool. I know that whilst your tremors may be due to any of these things, you simply shiver from the mortal wound that steals your very existence. The gaping wound in your gut through which your life bleeds, dragging you inexorably and inevitably to your end. I know the truth, beloved. It is written in your dying face and written in the blood that smears the head of your weapon. You have killed countless numbers on this battlefield today. You have slaughtered your way through your enemy without fear or hesitation, but now you can fight no longer.

It is a poor end to come to. What is a warrior without war? What is a fighter without a fight? You are dying, mortal. You are a man. Nothing more, nothing less.

But with the whisper of a single word, you could be more.

You have cried my lord’s name with every stroke of your weapon and He has received the plentiful tithe of blood reaped from the bodies of your enemies. You have strived for glory and in so doing have brought yourself to His attention. You have done well and He is prepared to give you the choice.

The rain is coming down harder now, washing the blood and ooze from your flesh, cleansing your body but your soul can never be absolved from the stains and filth that cling with tenacious determination.

This is good.

I smell the blood oozing from you; I see the life force ebb between your fingers. Each laborious beat of your heart brings another surge of scarlet bubbling to the surface. There are few things more worthy than the spilling of blood in the god’s name… but the blood of the devout is greater. Would that I could describe the scent of that purity. The taste.

So what do you desire? I offer you the greatest honour my lord can give. And it is the most simple of choices, warrior.

Death or glory.

The choice is yours. While it may seem obvious, consider what it is that you really want. Your world is bloodied and broken, your eyesight failing, but what is it that you do see? Is it the path to darkness unending, or the path to life renewed?

Life brought me to death and in that death I found life. A delightful conceit, but once I threw off the chains of my mortal existence, once Khorne granted me life beyond, I saw all. Perhaps that is what your heart desires. If you choose glory, Khorne will raise you up to more than you could ever imagine you could be. You will fight the Battle Eternal in His name, the endless thirst for blood and the desire to bring skulls to His throne driving you ever onwards. You will fall countless times in those wars, banished to the eternal realm by the foul magic and enchanted blades of the living, but you will rise again and again.

Is this the warrior’s true dream? The lust for battle, the need for bloodshed and the desire to leave a trail of broken bodies in your wake? Or is it the true dream of the warrior to end their life at the appropriate time? Do not necessarily be fooled by your tribal tradition that a warrior’s legacy begins with the legend of his death. Think on this.

What child of the Blood God would ever wish to end the battle?

You see it now, my fading friend. Death is, for many, the ultimate honour. Choose death… The pain ends and the legend begins. Choose glory and the pain no longer matters… though it remains.

Either way you choose, know that you are honoured. Choose death and I will personally reap your skull for his throne. Not for you the casual tumble into the pile. For you will come the honour of being added to the throne itself.

Choose, warrior. Your life is measured now in seconds. Whisper the word before the sands of time trickle to their inevitable conclusion or you will be just one of the other dead on this battlefield, unimportant and forgotten. Death will bring you closer to the Blood God than you would ever dare imagine. Glory will grant you the chance to serve by my side.

Which will it be?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sarah Cawkwell is a north-east England based freelance writer. Married, with a son (who is the grown up in the house) and two intellectually challenged cats, she’s been a determined and prolific writer for many years. Her first novel, The Gildar Rift, was published in 2011. When not slaving away over a hot keyboard, Sarah’s hobbies include reading everything and anything, running around in fields with swords screaming incomprehensibly and having her soul slowly sucked dry by online games.

IMMORTALIS

by Andy Smillie

I am dying. But this is not my first death. I have died twice before.

Blood. Blood was everywhere. It coated my armour like a second skin and hid the serrate symbol of my Chapter. It clogged the blunted teeth of my chainsword, silencing its adamantium roar. My brothers’ weapons had fallen silent too, their wrath extinguished on the bodies of the enemy. The green skins lay waist high, a torn wall of copses heaped around gore-filled craters. They had met us head-on, braying like maddened hounds as their crude weapons barked in their hands.

But they knew nothing of true fury. Nothing of the bloodlust that drives all sons of Sanguinius to war.

My own blood still thrummed in my veins, burning like the smouldering husks of the ork war-engines that studded the plain. A cloud of battle-rage hung over me, boiling my brain. Untempered anger wrenched a growl from my lips, demanding I kill again.

I obeyed without pause, slaying the nearest human in a heartbeat. The sodden plates of his carapace crumpled under a hammer blow of my sword. His body broke and tumbled. The pulse in my head quickened like a gleeful child as I slew another Guardsman. I killed another, then another and another. Humans die all too easily, I thirsted for righteous murder. Discarding my weapons, I began to bludgeon the fleeing weaklings with my gauntleted fists. Ignoring the beads of desperate las-fire that stung my armour, I wrapped my fingers around a head and squeezed. Viscera and brain matter smeared my helm as it burst. The tang of blood and excrement was like ambrosia. I bathed in the smell, relishing death’s visceral facet.

Something hard thundered into my helm. I felt my jaw snap. My vision swam. I stumbled, falling as I was struck again.

I had long believed that in death, darkness would claim me. Instead, I awoke to find that I was the darkness.

Clad in night-black armour, I stood mag-locked in place, trapped in a plummeting drop pod. Red saltires daubed my pauldrons and greaves, marking me out as one of the damned. A polished Chapter symbol was the only sign that I had once stood among the Flesh Tearers. Nine of my new brothers were with me. Their optics slashed crimson holes in the gloom. They growled in sympathy with the rumbling drop pod. A vicious snarl guttered from my own throat, a bestial noise I did not recognise. I felt my muscles bulge beneath my armour, swelling with the urge to rend, to maim, to kill. The altimeter above my head spun down towards zero. For an instant I saw it spin in reverse, counting upwards. Faster and faster, it tallied the lives I had taken and those I surely would.

The pod shuddered as its ferrite petals slammed to the earth. Released from my bonds, I rushed forwards, driven by my thundering hearts, down the ramp and out into the jagged light of battle.

The enemy were everywhere. Lithe warriors in porcelain armour fought with swords that crackled with azure lightning. Others, in thicker, segmented battle-plate as dark as my own, fired explosive volleys into the distance. The porcelain aliens shrieked a battle-cry and charged towards us. I snarled, hatred bursting from my throat in rumbling waves. I could smell their fear, taste their dread at our arrival, and hear the weak thrum of their alien hearts. My sword arm rose and fell, rose and fell, possessed of its own murderous mind as I cut and hacked with a vigour I had never known. Orphaned limbs and broken torsos rained against me like a fleshy storm as I ripped through their ranks. My wrath was unceasing. They would all die. I would kill them. I–

Blood. Blood pooled in my mouth as a crackling sword speared my primary heart.

Darkness took me. Yet I was not dead. I was reborn, gifted a new life as death incarnate.

Tortured fragments seared my mind as I awoke entombed. Nightmare remembrances of neural drills, bonesaws and sacs of bio-fluid that had hung above me like a puppet’s strings. The Chapter’s Sanguinary Priests and Techmarines had interred me within the adamantium womb of a Dreadnought. A burning memory haunted me, the impotent rage I’d felt while strapped to their workbench. I screamed. A metallic roar sounded in place of my voice. My mortal form was shattered, my vocal cords long since atrophied. My world had been reduced to snatches of data bundles, fed to my brain through the sarcophagus’s sensoria. My actions were left to the interpretation of consecrated machine-levers and vox-amplifiers. I screamed again, smiling as I listened to the distorted roar.

I was steel and I was wrath, and nothing more.

A thousand klaxons wailed. Their incessant screeching roused my ire, drawing me from my slumber to a vaulted corridor. The broken bodies of Flesh Tearers and the savaged remains of human auxiliaries coated the floor in a sickly flesh-paste. Weapons fire thundered from every possible direction. I growled in response, slamming the massive power fists attached to my adamantium torso into the wall. I powered into an adjoining corridor, crushing the protruding vertebrae of a dozen creatures beneath the ridged plates of my feet. I roared, elated, as my audio-receptors replayed the snap of xenos spines, looping the sound into my cortex. A fresh horde of creatures leapt towards me. I caught one in my fist and pulped it with a thought, while flame spat from my other, washing away the rest of the brood and cleansing the corridor of their sickening taint.

A growl sounded from behind me. I turned, though not quickly enough. A monstrous creature, its mouth dripping acid-fire, barrelled into me. It mewled in pain as my fist struck its face, but continued to press me into the wall. Its claws, each as long as I was tall, tore into me. Yet I felt no pain as it pulled back from the embrace, bisecting me in one fluid twist. My ruined sarcophagus thudded to the floor, like the spent shells of some mighty siege cannon.

My power cell is damaged. My brain function will soon cease. I shall not awaken from this final death, and I am glad.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Forged from beef and brawn, Andy Smillie emerged from the blacksmith’s fire like a slab of Scottish iron. Hailing from the northern reaches of Glasgow, he crossed the border into England intent on conquest, but instead found gainful employment at Games Workshop. Leaving a trail of carnage in his wake, he eventually settled in the Black Library where he works in marketing by day and as a literary superhero by night. His writing credits include a swathe of articles for various sci-fi, fantasy and hobby magazines. His debut work of fiction, ‘Mountain Eater’, was released in 2011 in the digital publication Hammer and Bolter.

BLOOD SPORT

by Josh Reynolds

The screech echoed across the peaks of the Grey Mountains. It was a sound of raw, animal agony that set the crows to flight and the horses to pulling at their tethers. The echo of the screech faded and the cockatrice slumped, serpentine tail lashing, its unnatural ichors staining the harsh soil. A hoof stamped down, pulverising the dying beast’s skull and its writhing body abruptly went still.

The hippogryph shook itself and snapped its beak angrily. It reared up on its hooves, flapping its wings as it clawed at the air with the talons on its forelimbs. It squalled at the cheering crowd and Felix Jaeger heard the raw hatred in the beast’s voice and shuddered. ‘Nasty beast,’ he said.

‘Aye,’ Gotrek Gurnisson grunted, his one good eye locked on the hippogryph.

‘Are you sure about this?’

‘Aye,’ the dwarf said again. The Slayer’s tattooed frame trembled with what might have been eagerness and his pace, never very swift, had nonetheless become inexorable.

‘We don’t need the money that badly, Gotrek,’ Felix said, following the dwarf down through the rickety stands. The arena attached to the mountain trading post was made of convenient stones and hastily assembled planking and it groaned from the weight of the crowd. They were a mix of the worst from either side of the Gisoreux Gap, and there were accents from as far north as Kislev and as far south as Tobaro. The arena itself was simply a great crater of stone and wood with a thick woven net mounted over it.

Gotrek turned and glared at Felix. ‘It’s not about the money, manling,’ he rasped. The haft of his axe creaked as his grip tightened. Felix stepped back.

‘Gotrek, this–’ he began. Gotrek turned and stamped away, his fiery crest of greased hair marking his path as effectively as a shark’s fin. His massive hands, elbows and shoulders cleared his way through the crowd.

‘Is perhaps not the wisest course,’ Felix finished lamely. He looked down at the betting slip in his hand and shrugged. If the Slayer was determined to pit himself against the beast, there was little the poet could do to stop him.

They had been on their way to Bretonnia when the first stories of the so-called ‘King of the Gap’ had reached them. Beast-baiting, distasteful as it was, was quite common on both sides of the Gap and the longevity of the beast in question was measured in days, if not hours.

The King of the Gap had survived for three years.

The hippogryph squalled again and leapt into the air, striking the net that kept it trapped. It was a magnificent beast, despite the chaotic amalgamation of equine, avian and feline qualities. Old scars covered its once-glossy coat and the vibrant crimson plumage was dulled by age and grime. It dropped low and drove a massive shoulder into the heavy boards that separated it from the stands, snarling and squawking.

Long hunting spears were jabbed through the boards, driving the beast back. It sank to the arena and galloped around the circumference, trumpeting a challenge. That cry was answered by the blast of a hunting horn as the wooden portcullis was raised and Gotrek stalked into the ring.

Hippogryph and Slayer eyed each other for a moment. Gotrek raised his axe. The beast broke into a gallop. Gotrek dodged to the side, far quicker than his heavy frame would seem to allow, as the hippogryph’s claws gouged the stone. A wing snapped out, nearly bowling the dwarf over. Gotrek’s axe chopped down, shaving a tuft of hair from the monster’s tail. A hoof shot out, catching Gotrek on the shoulder and Felix winced as he heard an audible ‘pop’. The crowd bayed.

Gotrek grabbed his dislocated shoulder and snapped it back into place with barely a glimmer of effort. The hard-faced guards who worked for the trading post began to look unhappy. The outcome wasn’t in doubt, but Felix wondered whether he and Gotrek would live to collect their winnings. The beast had made the owners of this trading post money for three years. They weren’t going to be happy when Gotrek butchered it. He loosened his sword in its sheath.

The hippogryph shrieked and spun, lunging for the Slayer. Again Gotrek ducked, throwing himself between its legs. He popped up behind it, and Felix tensed. This was it.

Except that it wasn’t.

Gotrek grabbed a handful of the hippogryph’s hair and jerked himself up onto its back. It began to thrash and buck, screaming wildly. Gotrek clung tightly to it. The crowd didn’t seem to know what to make of it. Neither did Felix. His heart leapt into his throat when the hippogryph thrust itself into the air. Its wings beat like thunder as it rolled upwards. Gotrek held on with stoic determination.

The creature smashed itself into the nets and began to squall. Gotrek, trapped between the beast and the net, struggled to free his axe. The betting slip crumpled in Felix’s hand and his mouth was dry. Gotrek’s axe sprang free… and sliced through the net.

The crowd gave a collective moan as the hippogryph hurtled into the sky with a triumphant scream. Gotrek tumbled to the arena floor. Felix drew his sword and sliced through the boards separating it from the stands. He leapt down, rushing forwards as the Slayer struggled to his feet. The crowd was in chaos as the guards struggled to regain control, and a number of the latter were hurrying towards them, murder stamped on their faces. It looked like all bets were off.

‘Gotrek, what did you do?’ Felix said, as he and the dwarf faced the approaching guards.

‘We should all be free to seek our own doom, manling.’ Gotrek ran his thumb across his axe and squeezed a drop of blood from his thumb, flicking it at the approaching guards as he grinned wildly. ‘Now, let’s go help these fools with theirs, eh?’

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Josh Reynolds was formerly a roadie for the Hong Kong Cavaliers, but now writes full time. His work has appeared previously in anthologies such as Specters and Coal Dust, Historical Lovecraft and How The West Was Weird as well as in magazines such as Innsmouth Free Press and Hammer and Bolter.

ONLY ASH REMAINS

by Nick Kyme

The mag-lev descended in slow, jerking spasms and groaned in machine-like cadence against the weight of three hooded figures riding on it, struggling to bear them despite the regular shipments of ore and freight it carried to the Deeps.

Emitting a high-pitched squeal, the lifter stopped dead, stranding the figures in abject darkness halfway to nowhere.

‘Get us moving,’ uttered the one standing in front. His arms were folded across his chest as he glared imperiously from within the confines of his heavy hood into the shadowy underhive below.

‘Immediately, sir.’ A second, loitering at the rear of the group, knelt down to examine the mag-lev’s protesting engine. There was a little smoke, even the flicker of flame. It briefly lit up the figure’s face, whose eyes flashed fire-red as if in empathy.

After a few seconds of tinkering and muttered imprecations from the second, the first spoke again. ‘How long?’

A hard strike with the flat of an armoured palm brought the engine sputtering back to life again.

‘Immediately, sir,’ answered the second.

The first hid a wry smile.

Descending again, it wasn’t long before the mag-lev was bathed in the low-grade phosphor lamps of the Deeps. Much like the upper world, the lower hive was heavily industrialised. But unlike the city above, order was far from certain, or even common, down below. Here, there were monsters. The three looked for one in particular. They had tracked it to this benighted place.

The shrieking mag-lev came to rest with a final lurch, booming noisily as it touched down. Five miles up to the surface, the sound carried just like it did throughout the Deeps.

Dregs stirred in their warrens, alerted by the sudden clamour.

It was to be expected. The three knew this and had prepared accordingly. For now, the dregs kept to the shadows, lurking at the periphery of vision, pretending to be anonymous.

Striding down a broad concourse, a steel-gridded gantry underfoot and a nest of steam-spewing pipes overhead, the three paid them no heed.

After several minutes and several hundred metres, a voice called out to them.

‘This area’s restricted.’ It had a drawl to it, as if even the owner’s voice was lazy.

The three turned as one to regard a bizarrely dressed human and a cohort of fifteen others. Every one of the gangers was armed with an array of weapons ranging from the mundane to the exotic. They all wore leather and coloured bandanas; the leader wore his around his wide-brimmed hat.

‘Move on,’ the first told him, keeping his hood low to cover his eyes.

‘Can’t do that,’ said the gang leader. His cronies had begun to circle. ‘Y’see, there’s a toll needs paying.’

The third, the one yet to speak since they had boarded the lifter, tensed to attack but the first held up a hand that stopped him.

‘We have no money for you. I advise you once more – take your people and move on.’

The gang leader was belligerent. He was also clearly an idiot.

‘Don’t want money, hulk,’ he said, referring to the first’s massive size. If it daunted him, the ganger didn’t show it. Perhaps it was his fifteen friends, or the fact that three of them were bulky chrono-gladiators, lumbering into the phosphor light. ‘We want your weapons, your blood and your organs. Hand ‘em over quiet, and I’ll make the transfer less painful.’

‘You have made a mistake,’ said the first, his two companions angling to each face a different aspect of the closing net of gangers. One protected the back of the other, and so the web of steel was forged.

‘You’re the one don’t appreciate simple arithmetic. Sixteen against three is bad odds.’

‘For you, yes,’ muttered the first.

‘Let me gut them!’ snarled the third, his voice an angry rasp.

The first looked about to protest, hand straying to the blade beneath his cloak, but then relented and stepped back.

‘Quick and quiet.’

The gang leader uttered a command word and the three chrono-gladiators roared into action, arco-flails and electro-whips crashing.

Sweeping between them, low and faster than he had any right to be wearing full armour, the third cut off their arms in a welter of blood and oil. A bleating sound escaped the scarified lips of the gladiators, who collapsed and died from chronic blood loss, time still on their clocks.

Terrified, dumbstruck, it took a few seconds for the rest of the gangers to realise what was happening. The leader opened up first, his pump-action taking the third in the chest but scarcely stalling him. He baulked when he saw what was beneath the cloak, but had no time to shout a warning when a long bone claw punched into his sternum and went right through his back.

The others did not last long. One or two got off a las-round. A bulky-looking ganger even managed to crank up his autocannon before it was shredded, and him with it. In just under nine seconds, all sixteen of the dregs were dead, their blood and viscera painting the Deeps.

When it was done, the first asked, ‘What happened to quiet, Brother Zartath?’

‘You also said “quick”, Brother-Captain Agatone.’

Agatone sighed. If not for the fact that the ex-Black Dragon was a consummate hunter, he would have remained on the Vulkan’s Wrath with the rest of Third.

‘They were protecting something,’ the second called from off in the darkness.

Agatone and Zartath joined him. ‘What have you found, Brother Exor?’

The Techmarine didn’t need to answer. It was plain to see, surrounded by rubble and months old debris, veiled in a thick patina of dust.

A gunship. It carried the winged lightning bolt insignia of the Marines Malevolent.

Agatone nodded to Zartath, who scurried inside through a ragged tear in the fuselage with the apparent agility of a spider.

It took a few minutes for him to reappear.

‘Well?’ asked the Salamanders captain.

‘Lots of bodies, all Malevolents. Looks like he killed them all.’

Agatone stiffened uncomfortably. ‘And our quarry?’

Zartath shook his head. ‘He’s in the wind. Tsu’gan is alive, but he’s not here. Only ash remains.’

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nick Kyme is a writer and editor. He lives in Nottingham where he began a career at Games Workshop on White Dwarf magazine as a staff writer and journalist. Nick’s writing credits include the Warhammer 40,000 Tome of Fire trilogy featuring the Salamanders, Fall of Damnos, the Space Marine Battles novel, his Warhammer Fantasy-based dwarf novels and several short stories. He has also penned several short stories for the New York Times bestselling Horus Heresy series.

EASY PREY

by CZ Dunn

The first sign that the Dark Angels were in trouble was when the bolter round smashed through the visor of Brother Jeremiel’s helmet, exploded in his brain and killed him where he stood.

The huge figure of the Space Marine rocked uneasily for a second before collapsing to the dusty ground of the shanty town, thick crimson blood slicking the dark green ceramite of his power armour. The harsh peal of another shot rang out but, having just witnessed Jeremiel’s fate, Brother Terach anticipated it and sought sanctuary behind the cover of a pre-fabricated hab-unit. By the time the report of the third shot echoed off the corrugated metal of the haphazardly arranged structures that formed the vague semblance of a town, Terach had already determined the shooter’s location and the type of weapon he was firing. The fact that the unseen assailant was using a bolt pistol was strange enough in itself, the small mining planetoid having barely achieved a technological level beyond that of steam power, but the accuracy of the shot was what unnerved Brother Terach. To aim a shot so precisely that it shattered something as small as a helmet visor was difficult enough from a hundred metres. At two hundred metres it required the intervention of the divine and at three hundred metres it was bordering on the impossible.

At four hundred metres it was superhuman.

A fourth bolt shell found its mark quickly followed by a fifth, both shots punching through the thin metal frontage of the hab-unit before doing the same to the rear wall, a pair of starburst apertures just above the Dark Angel’s shoulder evidence of their progress. Before the shooter could fire again, Terach emerged from cover and, sprinting in a zig-zag motion to present a harder target, covered the ground to the next hab-unit before shot number six disturbed the cool night air.

Their mission should have been a simple one. This world, though neither Jeremiel nor Terach had deemed it of operational importance to learn its name, was the subject of an Inquisitorial purge and when the Ordo Hereticus had requested assistance from the Adeptus Astartes, a single squad of Dark Angels had been despatched to aid the Inquisition’s ministrations. A Slaaneshi cult had taken root on the world, its tendrils probing deep into the Administratum who ran the ore mining operations that made this planetoid more than just an obstacle to be avoided by the Rogue Traders and pirates who conducted their business in this sub-sector. Exterminatus had quickly been ruled out, the ore being vital to the construction of some tiny component used in the tanks built by neighbouring forge worlds, and so the Dark Angels’ task was to eliminate all life on the planet while leaving the infrastructure intact ready for repopulation.

The Space Marines made short work of cleansing the two major population centres and, with only the outlying mining settlements left to be purged of any potential heresy, split into pairs to deliver the Emperor’s judgment. They expected no opposition and would brook none should they find it.

The seventh shot shattered the window Terach was crouched beneath. As he closed the distance to the next flimsy metal structure, shots eight, nine and ten whistled harmlessly past him. The Dark Angel now had a clear view of the shooter’s location, and when the twelfth shot sounded, the muzzle flash placed him at the shot-out window next to the door of the hab-unit he was sheltering in. Unslinging his own weapon, the Space Marine laid down fire to cover his approach to the final pre-fab before his objective and, as he nestled in the lee of the cover provided by the building, shots thirteen through seventeen sprayed wildly in his general direction. The shooter was getting desperate and Tarach could use that to his advantage.

Switching to full auto, the Dark Angel emerged boldly from the shelter of the hab and raked the shooter’s hut with bolter shells, emptying the clip in the time it took him to reach the enemy position. Screams emanated from within and, preparing to face multiple combatants, Terach replaced the empty clip in his bolter before ripping away the corrugated front wall of the hab like a child tears paper from a gift.

Cowering in the corner of the pre-fab were a dozen or so miners, the reek of their sweat almost overpowering the scent of fear detectable by Terach’s heightened senses. Several of them were already dead, caught by shots from the Dark Angel’s fusillade while others were weeping and wailing, imploring the Emperor to spare them. At the head of the ragged group an old man stood shaking, bolt pistol pointed weakly at the Space Marine, the tears running down his craggy face carving runnels in the grime that coated his cheeks.

Terach raised his own weapon and was just about to drain another clip when realisation hit him and he lowered the weapon ever so slightly, tilting his head in contemplation.

‘Wait. How did you–?’

The remainder of his query never left his lips as searing heat pierced him between the shoulder blades and the stench of super-heated hydrogen and scorched flesh filled the tight confines of the hab-unit. Terach relinquished his grip on his bolter and slumped to his knees, struggling to gather air into his ruined lungs as a vast shadow fell across him and the frightened miners.

‘Go,’ said a voice like rape and honey. ‘Go now.’

The miners did not need telling twice and, helping those who were too grievously wounded to move unaided, scattered from the wreck of the hab, abandoning their dead.

‘My weapon,’ the voice said as the old man made to exit and Terach strained to turn his head ever so slightly to see the old miner passing the bolt pistol to a gauntleted hand clad in Dark Angels green before fleeing after his co-workers.

‘Please, brother. This is some kind of mistake,’ Terach said. His secondary heart had kicked in, although he already knew he was dead.

‘I have long since ceased to be your “brother”,’ the figure said, circling around to stand in front of the stricken Space Marine. The newcomer wore robes over a suit of power armour, and a hood covered his features. A scabbard hung from his waist and he held a bolt pistol in one hand and a plasma pistol in the other. ‘What are you doing here?’

Terach was momentarily confused. ‘I… I’m here to carry out the will of the Emperor. To keep his dominions free from the taint of heresy and corruption.’

‘The Emperor, you say?’ The hooded figure was silent for a moment before crouching down so that his face was level with Terach’s. ‘I know the Emperor. This…’ He gestured to the bolt-riddled corpses of the miners lying in the corner of the hab. ‘This is not his will.’

Before Terach could protest, the muzzle of the robed figure’s bolt pistol was against the temple of the Dark Angel’s helmet. The back of Terach’s head disappeared in a crimson bloom, the report of the shot echoing loudly off the remaining walls of the metal hut.

It was still echoing as the robed figure ghosted out of the shanty town.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

C Z Dunn is a man of mystery, domiciled in the East Midlands. His multiplicity of special talents includes many years working in the publishing industry, with a strong leaning towards genre fiction. He is an expert in e-publication, audio production, zombies and cheese. When asked to supply a bio, he replied, ‘C Z Dunn is a thoughtcrime’… a statement to which there is no sensible reply.

Cankerworm

by Darius Hinks

Is murder necessarily such a bad thing?

The question rang so clearly in Captain Zelter’s mind that he thought for a moment he had spoken it aloud. He peered into the smoky, candlelit gaming room and was relieved to see that even if he had, no one would have noticed. The prioress was slumped in her filthy chair, talking to a bemused-looking wolfhound and the other guests were piled around her in various stages of inebriation.

The captain placed a hand on the hilt of his sword. There were certainly worse crimes than murder. He looked at his aunt with a sneer of disgust. Her powdered wig was hanging comically down one side of her jowly face and her robes were covered in food, wine stains and animal hair.

The old woman grinned, revealing a set of ridiculous, ill-fitting wooden dentures. Her eyes were rolling wildly. ‘Did you hear about those monkeys in Nuln?’ She spoke in a lilting, singsong voice. ‘The Emperor’s engineers have taught them to bear arms and march in columns.’

Captain Zelter shook his head, gripping his chair so tightly that his knuckles gleamed.

The prioress patted her adoring wolfhound as she spoke. ‘Our animal friends are far more intelligent than people think.’ She waved at a mullioned window and the colourful shapes flitting by outside. Even at this time of night, the streets of Altdorf were crowded with life. ‘My neighbour, the Margrave, often plays chess against his horses. Not the mares, obviously.’ She picked a tiny speck from her leg and watched with delight as it moved up her arm. ‘And did you know that bedbugs only appear to be silent? They speak a lot of sense actually, just very quietly.’

Captain Zelter’s head swam with a mixture of disgust, desperation and alcohol. In a few hours it would be dawn and the regiment would leave for Ostland. It was not fear of battle that made him drink so heavily, but fear of disgrace. Duke Klatzkin had made it clear: credit could only be extended so far, even for a noble. If the captain did not clear his debts of honour soon, he would be ruined, and banished from his beloved regiment. Bile rose in his throat. While this babbling old lunatic was sitting on the family fortune, talking to insects and making a fool of herself, he was on the verge of disaster. Why did she cling to life so tenaciously, when her only living relative was in such dire need of an inheritance?

As the prioress climbed awkwardly from her chair, a pair of ferrets peered out from the folds of her robes, eying the captain suspiciously. ‘More wine,’ she demanded, but the servants had long since gone to their beds, so she waved at her scowling nephew. ‘Come,’ she slurred, sounding as drunk as the captain felt. ‘The cellars.’

The captain moistened his lips and grinned. This was it. This was his chance. Away from the others, in the cavernous cellars of the prioress’s townhouse, there could be an accident… The old bat had been drinking all night. A blow to the head could be easily explained.

As they staggered through a series of creaking, gloomy passageways, Captain Zelter had to shove his way past dogs, ponies and potbellied pigs. These animals had inherited his ancestral home, staining the rugs with their filth and scraping the oak panelling with their claws and hooves.

The prioress continued to babble merrily to herself as she led the way. ‘The rabbits in Averland have learned to paint portraits of each other.’ She paused beneath a gilt-framed canvas. It was smeared with muck. ‘They adopt all the latest techniques, but their skill is grounded in good, honest draftsmanship.’ She paused, and turned to her nephew with a frown. ‘Draftsrabbitship?’

The captain gave a noncommittal grunt and shoved his gibbering aunt through the next doorway.

The oil lamps had been extinguished hours ago and the only light came from a single candlestick. The weak flame flickered over mounds of slumbering beasts and piles of broken furniture.

As they turned a corner, a snarling face loomed out of the darkness.

‘By the gods!’ cried the captain. ‘What’s that?’

The prioress lifted her candle to reveal a stuffed head mounted on the wall. It was a huge rodent with long, jagged canines and a pair of glittering rubies for eyes. She gave her nephew a surprised frown. ‘Surely you’ve heard the tales of the underfolk?’

The captain cursed, annoyed with himself for jumping at shadows. Now that he saw it more clearly, he realised that the thing was just a grotesque portmanteau of animal parts, crudely sewn together. ‘Ah yes, a ratman.’ His voice was utterly deadpan. ‘Of course.’

The prioress missed the captain’s sarcasm and her bloodshot eyes glittered with excitement. ‘Exactly. A denizen of the Under-Empire.’

Captain Zelter raised his eyebrows.

The prioress dusted the head with her sleeve and smiled. ‘This one was a great warlord; perhaps the greatest. Its name was Longfang.’

The captain gestured onwards down the corridor, eager to kill his aunt as quickly as possible, before he lost his nerve. ‘Are the cellars this way?’

The prioress nodded and headed down an unadorned passageway that ended in a single, rough-hewn door. ‘Longfang was a legend amongst the underfolk. It carried a halberd charged with a magic stone that made it incredibly powerful. It slew hundreds, maybe even thousands, of its own kind, carving out a vast kingdom beneath the Empire.’

Ancient stone steps slumped down into the shadows. ‘This way?’ The captain’s head was still spinning from the wine, but he could feel his resolve slipping. Was he really a murderer? To kill someone in the heat of battle was one thing, but this…?

The prioress ignored his question as she began climbing awkwardly down the steps. ‘In fact, if anything, Longfang was too powerful.’ She paused for breath at the bottom step. ‘Such bravery is unnatural amongst the underfolk. Its deeds were bound to be noticed.’

The captain decided to distract his aunt with a question as he looked for a suitably blunt weapon. ‘Tell me, Magdalena, how did the Old World’s most famous rat lord end up with its head on your wall? Did you kill it yourself?’

The prioress let out a derisive snort. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I’ve never travelled to the Under-Empire. If I had, I’d be insane by now.’

The captain shook his head. ‘Imagine that.’

‘The underfolk are ruled by thirteen devious, cowardly kings,’ she continued, lifting her candle to one of the barrels. ‘They were terrified by the warlord’s power and swore to destroy Longfang.’

The captain grunted to imply he was still following the story but he was actually engrossed in his weapon hunt. He had found the remains of an empty barrel and was trying to extract one of the shattered planks without making too much noise.

‘The skaven warlord fought desperately as it saw its enemies closing in, determined to hold on to the domain it had carved with its own claws. The Under-Empire was rocked by a vast, bloody war.’ The prioress paused and held out her hand without turning around. ‘Your glass, boy.’

The captain stepped quickly away from the broken barrel and handed over his empty glass. He hid the jagged plank behind his back.

The old woman gave him the wine and continued. ‘But the harder Longfang fought, the more sure the thirteen kings were that it had to die. They raised an army like nothing the Under-Empire had seen before. Even Longfang’s blazing halberd could not turn it back and, one by one, as they saw defeat looming, the warlord’s generals started to plot against him.’

The captain scowled as his fingers sank into the piece of wood. It was completely rotten. He cursed under his breath and let it slip to the floor.

‘Just as it seemed that Longfang was on the verge of defeat, a hooded, grey-furred stranger entered its lair, offering a last chance at victory. Claiming to be the infamous sorcerer, Grey Seer Slinktail, it offered to teach Longfang a powerful secret: an ancient curse, known as the cankerworm. Such magic could easily turn the tide of a battle, but there was a condition. Longfang would have to show allegiance to Grey Seer Slinktail. The warlord would have to wear an iron medallion around its neck, cast in the shape of the sorcerer’s rune – making it clear to the whole Under-Empire that Longfang was in thrall to Slinktail. All would know that the warlord’s victory over the thirteen kings was only made possible by the sorcerer’s dark magic.’

The prioress shook her head, oblivious to her nephew, who had drawn his sword and was studying the hilt. ‘Longfang bristled at the idea of sharing its triumph, but it was that or face imminent death. As the warlord grudgingly swore to wear the iron badge, the rune glittered and sank deep into its chest armour. Then, with a satisfied nod, the sorcerer handed over the ancient curse in the form of a potent, luminous green salve to coat the warlord’s weapons.’

The captain raised his sword and stepped closer, preparing to silence the old woman forever.

The prioress continued. ‘As Longfang led its army in a fierce counterattack, the poisonous weapons took effect. A mutating disease struck down the warlord’s enemies, turning them into bloated, spineless lumps. The warlord howled victoriously and took its army to the throne room of the thirteen kings, demanding that they kneel and worship their new emperor.’

The old woman shook her head. ‘Only then did Grey Seer Slinktail reappear. It offered to destroy Warlord Longfang for the thirteen kings – at a price, of course. The kings looked at the mewling, slug-like remains of their army and agreed, willing to pay Slinktail anything, if it could rid them of the warlord. The sorcerer laughed at their pitiful entreaties. Then, with a wave of its claws, it detonated the medallion embedded in Longfang’s chest armour. The iron rune contained the cankerworm in its purest, most virulent form and the warlord exploded like a green firework, scattering body parts in all directions and sending its head spinning off into a fast-flowing sewer.’

The captain tried to swing his sword but found he did not have the strength. His arm suddenly felt incredibly heavy.

The prioress turned to face him, showing no surprise at the sight of the raised weapon. And there was something else odd about her: all trace of madness had vanished from her gaze. She nodded at the captain’s glass. ‘The cankerworm is visible for a while, before it has fully dissolved.’

The captain’s sword clattered to the floor as he looked at his half-finished drink. There were strange, green lights suspended in it.

His aunt gave him a sympathetic smile. ‘When Warlord Longfang’s head was discovered by a dockworker, he quickly realised it was infused with powerful magic – not quickly enough to avoid a pitiful fate, though. The explosion left the head highly contagious. Extracting the cankerworm without poisoning myself has been quite a challenge.’

The weakness in the captain’s arm spread to the rest of his body and he dropped heavily to the cellar floor. ‘Why?’ he croaked.

The prioress lowered her voice and leaned closer. Her words had lost their lilting, lunatic edge and were now full of venom. ‘I know your kind, nephew. I know why you’re here. You’re a thief, just like all the others, but you won’t have my money. My animals rely on me. They need me.’ She waved her candle around the cellar and revealed a mass of pale, limbless shapes, struggling across the cobbled floor. Their faces retained hints of humanity but, more than anything, they resembled giant, bloated rats.

As the captain felt his body softening and expanding he tried to cry out, but all that emerged was a long, terrified screech.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Darius Hinks’s first novel, Warrior Priest, won the David Gemmell Morningstar award for best newcomer. Since then he’s become one of the Black Library’s most prolific and popular authors, writing a whole swathe of novels, novellas and short stories set in the worlds of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000. His recent works include the Warhammer Heroes novel Sigvald and ‘Sanctus’, a novella included in the Space Marine Battles anthology Architect of Fate.

FOR THE FALLEN

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

The necronomer walked in silence through the city of the dead – spiritual capital of a worthless world. His aide walked behind him, trudging at the programmed three paces, muttering to itself as it panned left and right with the imagifier built into one eye. The servitor’s murmurs were disrespectful but unavoidable. Its propensity to mutter was one of many behavioural tics it had picked up in the thirty-nine years since Esca first purchased it from a junk trader on his homeworld.

Its limp was another. It walked in a ragged un-rhythm, its bionic leg never quite bending enough for fully agreeable perambulation. Instead, Esca was forced to listen to it thud on the stone as it dragged its augmetic leg in an ungainly half-stride.

‘Adjusting to compensate for light saturation,’ the servitor mumbled. Esca heard the mechanical purrs in its neck as it tilted its head. ‘Angle adjustment complete. Secondary memory spools at forty-seven per cent capacity. ‘

‘Yes,’ Esca replied beneath his breath. ‘Whatever you say, Solus.’

Solus had been the name given to him by the trader, to use when commanding the servitor. Esca could have paid to reprogram it at some point down the years – it wasn’t as if the lobotomised bionic slave was going to object – but he felt strangely guilty about the idea.

The necronomer pulled his hood up against the bitter wind. Even the breeze smelled of ash on this world. Some stains needed more than a handful of years to fade.

If, he thought, they ever fade at all.

He walked to the first of the grave markers lining the next avenue. The warrior depicted here was yet another towering god, carved from black stone, rendered faceless by a neutral, noble helm. The statue stood atop a plinth of white-veined black marble, quarried off-world and brought here for the holiest of purposes. Twenty such statues lined every avenue in the city of the dead. A memoriam site for the Adeptus Astartes and, occasionally, a place of pilgrimage for scholars such as himself.

Esca knelt down before the bronze plaque, pressing a page of parchment over the inscribed letters. Solus was tasked to record every name and citation, but Esca liked to take his own notes from time to time. It gave him something of substance to present to his peers. A necronomer’s duty was easy enough, but difficult to do well. It was all about remembering what mattered. Emotional truth, that was what mattered. Not just names in a list.

He started rubbing the charcoal stick over the warrior’s written deeds, tracing them onto the parchment and trying to ignore the ache in his knees. As usual, he found himself pretending he was still young enough to kneel down without making the same grunts and sighs his father used to make doing the very same thing.

That was when he first heard the footsteps.

Esca looked up, forcing weak eyes to stare down the avenue. Five figures, five statues come to life, were stalking towards him. Their strides ate the distance in a matter of moments.

‘Hail,’ said the first of them, the one dressed in black. His helmet’s facemask was a sculpted skull, red-eyed and grinning with the secrets of the grave.

‘I… I…’ Esca’s throat wobbled as he tried to speak and swallow at the same time. ‘I… I…’

‘A gifted conversationalist,’ said one of the others – the one with the bandolier of malformed xenos-breed skulls. The giant warriors shared a chuckle that left their helms’ mouth grilles as a vox-crackling rumble.

‘I…’ Esca said again. ‘I have a permit. A permit to be here.’

Only one of the figures wore black armour. The others were clad in ceramite plating the colour of deep oceans on other, better, untainted worlds. One of them, the one whose armour was draped in a robed toga of rich red, leaned on a massive axe.

‘He has a permit,’ the axe-wielder said.

‘Impressive,’ voxed one of the others. His helm was white, and he wore a bulky gauntlet on one arm, complete with a clicking scanner and several tools that looked like flesh-drills and bonesaws. Esca had to tear his eyes away from the torture device. His hands trembled as he reached for his carrybag, fumbling for his printed-paper permit.

‘Enough,’ the warrior in black said. He had brutal, ornate war maul over one shoulder, inlaid with Gothic scripture. ‘My brothers meant no offence with their taunting words. This is Sergeant Demetrian, Brother Imrich, Brother Toma and Apothecary Vayne. And you are?’

‘Esca,’ he replied. ‘Esca of Teresh. A necronomer, lord. I came here for my order. I record the–’

‘I am aware of a necronomer’s duties, Esca of Teresh.’

The old man’s hands were still trembling as he held out the permit. He hadn’t risen. He wasn’t sure his knees would allow it.

‘Here, lord. My permit. See.’

‘You do not need to show me any permit, Esca. And I am no lord. My rank is Chaplain. My name is Argo. Use either when addressing me. What brings you here?’

The old man swallowed again, and gestured to the statue rising above him. ‘I record the fallen. Their names. Their deeds.’

‘That is not what I meant.’ The Chaplain reached up to his armoured collar, disengaging the seals there. Air pressure released in a sighing hiss, and he pulled the helm free. He was… young. Esca could scarcely believe it. Despite the warrior’s immense bulk, he seemed scarcely older than twenty or thirty.

His eyes were pale blue, and curiously kind. ‘I mean,’ the Chaplain continued, his deep voice clear without the vox-crackle, ‘why have you come to Rynn’s World? Our fallen are recorded. They’ve been recorded many times over, in hundreds of archives.’

Esca felt something like a blush taking hold. ‘This was as much a pilgrimage as a duty. I’ve always wanted to walk here, in the Necropolis, and see it with my own eyes. My order seeks out places of great mortis-resonance, of great emotion and memory. We… We collect memories of the dead. Iconic images. Untold lore. The moments that get forgotten, that never get recorded in traditional, sterile archives.’

Argo went to his knees, crouching by the old man. The ceaseless hum of his active power armour set Esca’s gums itching. Even the smallest movements made the suit of black ceramite growl and snarl.

‘This,’ the Chaplain said softly, ‘is the graveyard of the Crimson Fists. We return here ourselves, on very rare occasions, to perform pilgrimages of our own. We come home to pray, to reflect, to remember, before we journey back to the stars. Hatred keeps us crusading. Regret brings us home. Shame always calls us back.’

Argo helped the old man rise, and escorted him a few steps away. ‘You wish something for your archives? Something less sterile and dry than a mere name?’ The warrior gestured to the abandoned, unfinished parchment etching.

‘I’d be honoured, lord.’

‘Argo,’ the Chaplain corrected with a half-smile.

One of the others stepped forward. This one wore a shoulder guard of shining silver, with his left arm painted to match. He was marked with the symbol of the Holy Inquisition.

‘I am Toma. The warrior whose grave you are etching was Athren. Let it be known in your off-world archive that Athren was a murderous shot with a bolter. I never saw him miss.’

‘I am Imrich,’ said the next, the warrior with the bandolier of alien skulls. ‘Athren once beat me in a fistfight. I never forgave him for that.’

The next to step forward was the warrior with the white helm. ‘I am Vayne. I was the one to harvest Athren’s gene-seed. He lives on, at the genetic level, within the Chapter. Let that be known in your archive, Esca of Teresh.’

The last to step forward was the axe-bearer in the scarlet toga. ‘I am Demetrian. Athren’s laughter banished all doubt among his brothers. Let it be known that he is among those missed most by we who survived.’

Esca was writing frantically, heedless of his arthritic knuckles. At last, he looked at Argo. ‘And you, lord?’

The Chaplain said nothing. Something passed between him and the old man, some silent understanding. Argo turned, unlocking his gauntlet and drawing a gladius from a sheath at his thigh. He drew the sword across his palm – a clean, bloodletting slice that painted the blade red. Without a word, he pressed his bleeding hand to the statue’s chest.

The other four warriors did the same. All five of them honoured their fallen brother with their crimson hands pressed to his cold chest. Unity, even beyond death. The kind of kinship that so easily survives the grave.

‘Solus…’ Esca whispered.

‘Compliance,’ replied the servitor, interpreting its master’s need. Its imagifier ticked and clicked as it recorded this rarest, most precious of moments. Few souls in the Imperium ever bore witness to the intimate privacy of the Adeptus Astartes honouring their fallen. In a long life of service, travelling to three dozen worlds, Esca had never even seen traces of such a moment in any of his order’s archives.

His recording would be the first.

The Crimson Fists withdrew their hands, and replaced their gauntlets.

Argo made the sign of the Aquila, his gloved hands forming the Imperial eagle over his chestplate.

‘Remember us, Esca of Teresh. Remember Rynn’s World, and remember Athren of Fifth Company.’

‘I will, my lord.’ He could barely speak. ‘I will.’

‘Die well,’ the Chaplain said, as he replaced his helm. The last words left his skullish faceplate as a vicious vox-snarl. ‘But live well before that happens.’

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Aaron Dembski-Bowden is a British author with his beginnings in the videogame and RPG industries. He’s written several novels for the Black Library, including the Night Lords series, the Space Marine Battles book Helsreach and the New York Times bestselling The First Heretic for the Horus Heresy. He lives and works in Northern Ireland with his wife Katie, hiding from the world in the middle of nowhere. His hobbies generally revolve around reading anything within reach, and helping people spell his surname.

Voices

by David Guymer

‘Mighty-great Queek,’ whined the voice. ‘Over-master asked you be wait-still.’

The warlord hissed angrily, writhing in his dilapidated throne like a viper. At last he settled, his legs hanging over the granite armrest, his long serpentine tail coiled like a noose around the tall dwarf-like form of the chair’s high back. Huffing with boredom, he arched his spine, stretching back and down and beyond the throne’s hard edge to collect the sword that lay amidst the shattered bones of conquest strewn about his warren. Idly, he bounced the flat of the blade against his nose.

‘Queek wait-wait,’ he grumbled, kicking his loose footpaws at imaginary foes, watching them bleed. He closed his eyes. He could almost taste the blood, almost hear the screams.

‘Grey seer come soon-soon, for certain-sure,’ reasoned the voice. ‘Best not anger grey-ones. Scary even for Queek, yes?’

‘Is that what they say?’ Queek snarled, his eyelids snapping violently open. ‘Is that what you squeak-talk when you think Queek not listen-hear? Well Queek always listen-hear, and Queek hate-hate grey seers!’

The speaker didn’t answer.

Wise, Queek thought.

Nudging himself upright onto his elbows he glared dead ahead to where, hunched beneath the low ceiling, loomed the near-complete skeleton of a troll. Queek stared at it for a long moment before shaking his head. No, it could not have been that. Boredom and paranoia were obviously making him crazy. The troll had no head, so how could he speak?

Not the troll then, so who? Which of these voices insisted on plaguing him?

His gaze washed over the four walls. From every direction, faces looked upon him, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. He basked in their chorus of approval, an awed susurrus that was always pleasing to his ears. They hung from great spikes driven into the earthen walls, and for every race that walked, crawled, or bled in this part of the world, there was a fragment of it on these walls. Here hung the tall, reedy skull of an elf, keeping company with a thick-browed orc. Over there, suspended above his entryway on a dozen spikes, mouldered the chitinous claw of a giant scorpion. Every single one of them had fallen by his paw and every one had earned their place on his wall. Still more miscellaneous scraps of bone littered the floor. Queek’s attention span was short, but nothing was thrown away.

His gaze lingered on the elf. Darthurian was his name, a ranger who had thought to delve into Queek’s dominion. Queek grinned, prodding his tongue with his blade until the sharp point summoned a bead of blood. He swallowed it greedily, the metallic taste taking him right back to the moment when it had been Darthurian’s blood welling in his mouth. The elf had been quicker than most – but not as fast as Queek.

‘Elf blood tasty-sweet like honey, yes-yes?’ He tittered as Darthurian glared silently, empty eyes void with rage. He sighed when the elf would still not answer. A pity. Darthurian normally had such a sharp tongue. ‘Too bad you have no little elf-friends,’ he continued. ‘Queek so bored without dwarf-thing or orc-thing to fight. If more elf-thing here too then maybe Queek have meat to kill.’ Wistfully, he licked at his paw with his bloody tongue, using the dampened claws to preen the hard black fur behind his ears, his eyes thoughtful and far away. ‘Queek hear-tells of whole island of elf-things. A magic place far over the sea.’

Darthurian remained defiant in his silence.

‘Yes-yes!’ Queek snapped, leaping from his throne in a sudden fit of energy. ‘Queek sail-go to elf-place. He conquer all elf-things and all will know the glory of Queek!’ He snarled at the obstinate elf, daring him to disagree.

‘But… what of grey seer?’

‘Hah!’ Queek squeaked, pressing his snout against Darthurian’s arrogant face. ‘Queek think-smell you not like-like. Queek kill all elf-things, then maybe Queek not speak to you any more. Maybe find better elf-thing, maybe you live on floor with others.’ His paw swept across the broken shards that littered the warren. Every so often, one of them shifted with the burrowing of the many rats that laired beneath the carpet of bone. ‘What you think of that?’

‘Is masterful plan, most cunning-wise of generals. Is just… no skaven ever go-seek elf-place. How we get there?’

‘How?’ shrieked Queek as he tore the skull of Darthurian from its mount. His eyes burned into its vacant orbs. White foam dripped from his fangs, coursing down Darthurian’s gaunt cheeks like tears as though the claws stabbing into his cranium caused him pain. ‘Queek sail. In boat. Stupid-slow elf-thing, Queek hate elf-thing!’

‘Elf-thing? I–’

With a shrill squeal, Queek flung the skull from his paw. It travelled barely a foot before shattering against the stone-carved dwarf face that glowered from the head of his throne, tiny white pieces of bone raining down onto the seat. From a standing leap, Queek sprung on to the throne, his claws gripping the grey rock back as his footpaws ground the delicately-boned Darthurian into powder. All the while, he whispered into his whiskers like a bitter chant. ‘Stupid-slow elf-thing…’

Movement from behind the throne made his eyes narrow. How long had that been lurking there? He squinted around the high back, his claws gouging ever deeper into the granite face as the shape came into focus. A word arose, surfacing from the red flood of madness. A name.

‘Ska,’ he whispered, uttering the name of his lieutenant.

In response, the huge, black-furred warrior bobbed his head low, his hunched shoulders and wrung paws contriving to make the otherwise imposing fangleader seem small. ‘Grey Seer Razzel be here soon-soon. Certain sure, he bring orders for fighting.’

Queek released his grip and jumped down, bone crunching beneath his footpaws. He played his feet through the mess of bones and skulls, enjoying the clacking and chattering of their unquiet voices. He brought up his paw as if seeing for the first time the sword that was held there, its serrated edge still wet with black blood.

Yes, he remembered, from the green-thing raid about an hour ago.

His heart sank. A whole hour.

‘Come-come,’ he said, sweeping past his terrified underling. ‘Fetch-find Queek’s armour, we find dwarf-meat to kill!’ The warlord thumped his chest, his mad eyes gleaming like fiery jewels. ‘Stupid-slow elf-thing, Queek wait for no rat, they wait on Queek!’

Ska’s lips twitched nervously. ‘Er, yes-yes, most perceptive of masters, stupid-slow elf-thing…’

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

It has been many long years since David Guymer first succumbed to the Curse of the Horned Rat. In that time, he has appeased his dark master by devoting his energies to the study of the plagues of mankind. By the hours of daylight he prods hopefully at bacterial strains until they bend to his diseased will, but with the coming of darkness he retreats to his burrow to write stories of magic and chaos as he plots the downfall of the surface-dwellers.

The Weakness of Others

by Laurie Goulding

The flamer is bulky and unfamiliar in my grip, and far heavier than my holstered pistol. Half-remembered rote training guides my hand. Open the reservoir, adjust the ignition angle. Thumb the safety and squeeze the trigger.

From within, there are more screams and the reports of unspent bolt rounds detonating in their magazines. The heat of the flames drives steam from the frozen earth all around.

Movement.

The crash of an armoured body flailing to the ground. Footfalls. Frantic.

Hefting the flamer in my off-hand, I swing Gorechild in a wide arc. My timing is perfect – the shrieking teeth of the chainaxe greet the burning man in the instant that he emerges from the archway, cleaving through armoured gorget, meat and bone. His head strikes the floor before he would even have registered the fresh pain of the blow.

The tally reading in my visor scores the kill. 1,302.

A small red skull icon flashes next to it as the telemeter transmits the location. I do not know who receives the data. All I know is that my kills are always waiting for me when I return, fresh skulls jumbled into heaps at my arming post.

None shall surpass my count this day.

The old Legion had encouraged ‘The Contest’. Certainly, it was already an established tradition when I first stood before Centurion Gruner upon the training grounds of Bodt, along with the other recruits assigned to his instruction. A Terran-born veteran of the Unification Wars, the Master of Neophytes had eyed us for a long while before growling in his clipped Jermanic accent.

‘You are weak. I see that just from looking at you. Stronger than your friends and family ever were – you can thank the Emperor for that. But I don’t think a single one of you has the fire inside.’

We shuffled nervously under the gaze of this giant, his bare torso rippling with transhuman strength and sporting an elaborate tattoo of some canine predator tearing into its prey. Though our enhancement surgery scars were still fresh, we had been deemed ready to begin our legionary training.

‘We do not start with boltguns or the axe,’ he continued. ‘And I don’t tell you how to tie your boots. Instead I show how the War Hounds know who is best.’

From the burlap sack at his hip, the centurion produced an object and held it out to us reverentially. Empty eye sockets stared from between his oversized fingers in the pale dawn light, the smooth bone polished almost to a sheen.

‘All legionaries compete in The Contest. The rules are simple – first to reach one thousand skulls wins.’

Murmured excitement rippled through the group. One neophyte raised his hand.

‘My lord, what do we win?’

Gruner shrugged. ‘Don’t know. No one has come close enough yet.’

As he carefully replaced the skull, I warily raised my own hand.

‘My lord… where do we get the skulls from?’

The tattooed giant had roared with laughter, drawing the attention of those other legionaries and neophytes close enough to witness my first humiliation.

I dismiss the memory with several twitching blinks. My senses return. I shoulder the flamer and quicken my pace.

The main causeway is treacherous underfoot, the blood which before had run freely upon the flagstones now freezing in the plummeting temperatures of the Skalathrax night. Hoarfrost rimes the armour of the fallen, marked with darker patches of cinnabar where Gorechild has done his work.

True enough, I have never known cold like it. Not the deep cold of the tundra on Gedren V, nor the icy gales that scoured the mountain passes on Tekeli. This is a cold which burns and bites. A cold which threatens to steal away the fire inside.

But not from me.

Victory or death. The sons of Angron will never again know defeat. I will not allow it. Our foes will fall, or we will offer ourselves to Khorne in their stead.

To the west, the keening of another sonic attack echoes in the darkness. My boots skid upon loose debris as I double back towards the sound, the rage building within me once more. Fulgrim may have forsaken them, but his bastard children shall pay the price for hi–

Too late, I spot the ambush. Time slows.

The shadows around me erupt in a blaze of bolter fire, shells detonating and peppering the flesh of my bare arm with shrapnel. In the milliseconds before I leap, I count three shooters and another concealed figure.

My pistol is in my hand before I leave the ground, and a burst of incandescent plasma vaporises the head of the nearest attacker. Momentary regret over the loss of the skull. 1,303.

A stray bolt strikes my breastplate, sending my leap wide and forcing me to dispatch the concealed warrior with an improvised backhand strike. I whirl around to cleave through the boltgun of the third before slamming him insensible to the floor and hurling Gorechild to the left. The chainaxe bites deep into the throat of the last legionary, and arterial blood strikes the vaulted roof of the arcade. 1,305.

The rage fades. I stand over the prone warrior as he scrabbles to find a weapon.

Words. Anger. His face is familiar to me.

Gruner.

Backed into a corner amongst the bodies of our fallen brethren, he speaks of madness and of betrayal. He curses me, the berserker champion who would strike down his own Legion once more.

Whelp-master. Who are you to doubt me?

I was the first to stand upon the walls of the Imperial Palace. I was the last to be borne away from Terra, my body broken by the slaying of one million of the Emperor’s lackeys through the breach at Lions Gate. None shall ever surpass my count.

The Contest is over. I won.

The weakness of others is the reason we were defeated. Weakness in the other Legions, and our own. If this is all that remains of the honour of the World Eaters, then I am glad to be called their betrayer.

1,306.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Laurie Goulding was born in London, grew up in Burton-upon-Trent, and then experienced a slight regression in Winchester before finally settling in Nottingham. As the director of Black Library TV he would regularly make the authors uncomfortable by sticking a camera in their faces – now he achieves the same effect by wielding a red pen as a member of the editorial team. His own writing allows him to exercise the enthusiasm born of more than twenty years as a Games Workshop hobbyist, and proves that an obsessive and encyclopaedic knowledge of the Warhammer universes can be a useful thing after all.

GILEAD’S CRAFT

by Nik Vincent

Gilead always retrieved his arrows after a battle or a hunt, but he seldom found them whole. Fletching was often missing, and shafts broken.

The elf cut a long spruce branch, straight and true. Four feet was the minimum cut length for his reach, before planing, sanding and oiling.

He flexed one dowel at a time to check its spine. Fithvael had always used a weight and a gauge, but they were in his pack, to which Gilead did not have access. He’d been weighing and balancing arrow shafts in his hands for long enough to know which were true and which should be rejected.

The first arrowhead was leaf-shaped, carved from bone a hundred years previously by Fithvael. Gilead used it more often for hunting than in combat and it had killed more beasts than he cared to recall. He had shot the woman with it because she was slight and her armour was nothing more than various leather off-cuts cleverly stitched together. He disliked killing women, even those capable of accurately throwing a spear at a moving target, and he always used smaller, finer heads when firing on them.

Gilead had found the arrow on the battlefield. The head was bloody, but the shaft had been broken deliberately, as if over someone’s knee. So, he had not killed the woman after all.

The bone head had shrunk with age and Gilead had to taper the end of the shaft to accommodate it. The head weighed very little, so he simply notched the other end of the dowel for the nock, making sure that the groove bisected any split grains along the shaft, adding to its strength. Gilead took the shaped goose feathers from their pouch and tied them against the shaft with a tight wind of sinew, cut and treated by Fithvael and kept wound around the old, iron bodkins that Galeth and Gilead had used on practice arrows when they were boys.

Gilead wondered whether Fithvael would ever mentor another young charge. He thought it unlikely, and it saddened him.

Gilead had retrieved the six heads of the arrows he had fired that day. He had not drawn his sword. These human-hunting humans deserved no better, and the hunters had become the hunted as the elf picked them off, one-by-one, from his vantage point higher up the wooded slope.

Gilead generally fired his collection of elf-steel broadheads at beasts and monsters, but the man had been so big, and his chain-mail so complete, that Gilead had chosen his favourite broadhead arrow to bring down the hunter. Despite the armour, the broadhead had done its job, and Gilead had to cut through the shaft to retrieve it. The arrow had penetrated chainmail, chest and back, and torn through the flesh between, flooding the battleground with a good deal of hot blood. He cut free the nock, too, which balanced the weight of the head.

Gilead spent several minutes weighing each of the shafts he had cut and planed, checking the tightness of the grain and how evenly it ran the length of the shafts. He chose one and flexed it in his hands before rolling it between his palms to judge how true it was. When he was satisfied, he tipped a little sap oil onto a cloth and began to polish the shaft with it so that moisture could not penetrate the wood and lift or warp the grain. He also used a straw to blow a fine mist of the oil over the goose feathers that he had cut long with triangular ends for the fletching, adding more weight to the nock end.

He tapered both ends of the shaft, and then began to clean the nock and the head, removing all traces of the old shaft, along with glue and the scab of old blood that had dried on the head.

Gilead turned the shaft this way and that in his hands, fixing the head and nock in place, constantly weighing and balancing, choosing the position of the fletching and the length of sinew he would need to fix it in place.

The elf repeated the process with the other four arrowheads, made from flint that he and Galeth had napped, and the white bone nocks that belonged to them. That day, the flintheads had killed one old man and three youths. Gilead did not care how his six victims were related, but when he looked down on their bodies, they each wore the same broad, flat face.

Each of the heads and each of the nocks, whether bone, antler, iron, flint or steel, was singular to Gilead. No one except a huntsman or combatant as experienced as Gilead could hope to tell one steel broadhead from another or a bone nock from its twin. None but a fletcher as experienced as Gilead could hope to match a head to its nock every time.

There was no human as experienced as Gilead.

Six killers had hunted two youths, little more than adolescents, wide-eyed and bedraggled, running as fast as they could, as far as they could, all the time holding hands, the girl behind the boy, who encouraged her and never let go of her hand.

Gilead had waited until the young lovers had passed him, never realising that the elf was there. Then he had made his way down the slope. He had found five bodies, each with a fatal wound to the head, throat or torso. He followed a trail of blood from the injured female to make sure that she did not intend to hunt the young couple alone.

It took longer to make six new arrow shafts and to fix their heads, nocks and fletching than it had to track and shoot the six hunters, but Gilead was an elf with honour in his heart and time on his hands.

A very great deal of time.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nik Vincent has more than a dozen titles to her name, mostly children’s fiction, but also educational and reference books, and comics, and she co-wrote Gilead’s Blood and The Hammers of Ulric with her husband, Dan Abnett. She has finally succumbed to the lure of Warhammer 40,000, and hopes to have a long and rewarding career writing about the guys and girls, and villains and daemons that play games with her imagination. Total immersion will do that to you, so, thanks, Dan.

ALL IS DUST

by John French

Only dust remains. Dust and emptiness. I do not know what I am. I had a name, but it is gone. I am nothing. I am locked in darkness, tumbling without end through broken memories.

I remember blue. The blue was sky, slashed red by fire. I could smell smoke. There were pyramids on the horizon. Fire leapt from cracks in their sides. The dead were a slick carpet on the ground. The warrior stood amongst the corpses, his grey armour spattered, his mouth open like a dog panting for air. His pupils were black bullet holes in amber irises. Blood pumped in my veins, roaring in my ears. I was running, firing as I moved, churning the dead into bloody mud with each step. The gun in my hands shook with a thunder-rhythm. The grey warrior snarled and leapt to meet me. Rounds hit the ground around him, raising red craters in dead flesh behind his feet. He had an axe, its head a chest-wide span of black iron, its cutting edge curved like a skull’s smile. I remember it singing in the air. The axe hit me in the side. It cut deep. I remember the pain, star bright, and ice cold. I bled, red liquid running over red armour, over gold, red drooling onto the ground. I looked up as the warrior pulled his axe back. Blood fell from the blade edge. It glittered in the sun, crimson against the blue sky. I put him down then, I shot him until he was broken armour and folds of meat. I killed him before death could take me. I remember that I felt anger and joy at that moment, but I do not know why.

The memory fades. I am alone again. I have a shape. It is a shape like that of a man, but I am hollow. I am just the outline. I have hands, but cannot touch. I have no mouth, but I have been screaming since I began my fall. I want to breathe, but I cannot. I cannot remember what it is to breathe; only what it is to drown in an abyss, to sink without hitting the bottom.

Time passes. I can feel it passing, like wind burying a statue in sand.

I had a name once. It is an echo, fading but never vanishing, forever beyond hearing. I was once flesh, but that is gone.

+Helio Isidorus.+

The voice comes to me out of the black night. I know the name, but I do not remember why.

I remember fire. It was white, the stark white of a sun’s heart. It roared from a black sky and remade me. I fell to my hands and knees. The ground beneath me was red dust, the colour of rust, the colour of dried blood. Pain, hotter and sharper than any wound, filled me. I could not see; the fire took my eyes first, and then it took my tongue before I could scream. Inside my armour my muscles bunched, straining against metal. The fire burned through me, blistering my skin. I felt mouths open across my body, a thousand mouths each with razor teeth, each babbling a plea for the pain to stop. The fire pulled through my body like hands through wet clay. I was suffocating, as if sinking in sand. The acid touch of panic burnt my flesh. I could not breathe. I could not move.

Everything stopped. It is like a razor drawn through the memory, a hard line severing me from everything that came before.

I felt nothing.

I stood slowly, the dust spilling from my armour. I begin to walk, one slow step at a time. A dull haze shrouds the world. Beside me, other shapes move. They are lumbering figures, like walking statues. Somewhere in the distance I can see a cluster of figures. Golden light outlines their shapes. They stand as if waiting. I walk towards them, towards the light. I cannot remember my name.

The memory breaks, and I spin on through the empty dark.

+Helio Isidorus.+ It is a dream voice shouting from the darkness.

I can see light. It is distant, like a moon glimpsed from beneath the waves. The light is getting brighter and closer. I am rising out of the dark. Hands that I cannot see are pulling me. I can feel fingers gripping flesh that I do not have. I try to stop. I cannot stop. The light is getting brighter and brighter; it is a sun that I cannot look away from.

+Helio Isidorus,+ the dream voice says again. I am drowning but I cannot breathe. I thrash my arms. Cold metal holds me still. I am a swirl of dust rattling in a skin of metal.

+Helio Isidorus,+ says the voice that is a thought.

I know the name.

+Helio Isidorus.+

It is my name.

I can see.

The world is movement, and fire, and the roar of distant sounds. I am standing on a plain of leaping fire and melting snow. Beside me is a figure. He wears armour the blue of the desert sky, and his helm rises into a high crest of lapis and gold. Silk robes flutter around him, though there is no wind. Golden light glows from him, filling my eyes. He is more real than anything else I can see. It is his voice that called me from my sleep; I know this but do not know why. He turns and points. I step forwards. I have a weapon in my hands. I see an armoured warrior moving towards us. His armour is the grey of storm clouds. I fire. Blue trails of flame find the grey warrior, and he staggers to his knees before he burns. I am moving forwards, turning my eyes on the world around me. Other figures in blue armour advance beside me; we move as one.

There are more grey warriors moving towards me. They are tall, but hunched with speed. I see axes, and swords, and grey armour painted with bright colours in jagged patterns. I see black pupils in wide yellow eyes. They shout as they come. I can hear them. I can understand them. They are screaming for vengeance.

A blow strikes my shoulder. There is a cut in the metal of my armour, a dark gash through metal to the black void within. I feel nothing. The cut glows; it breeds green maggots of light, and then closes like a silenced mouth. I turn my head. I see a warrior pulling back his blade from another strike. His face is bare and his beard is wet and red with blood. A cut runs across his face from temple to cheek. I can see white bone in the open lips of the wound. He is a pace from me. I do not know how he got so close.

I fire. My weapon is low and the rounds tear the warrior’s legs off in a blaze that burns even after he falls. His flesh begins to cook inside his armour.

I take a pace forwards, stepping through the flames. I pause. Memories swirl in the darkness within my skin, rattling like sand against bronze. I watch the grey warrior burn, become ash, become dust. I know this should mean something, but in my memory there is only the emptiness that drowns all else. I am an outline held in a dream of falling, and this moment means nothing.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John French is a writer and freelance games designer from Nottingham. His work can be seen in the Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader and Deathwatch roleplay games and scattered through a number of other books including the award nominated Disciples of the Dark Gods. When he is not thinking of ways that dark and corrupting beings can destroy reality and space, John enjoys talking about why it would be a good idea, and making it so with his own traitor legions on the gaming table…that and drinking good wine.

EVIL EYE

by David Annandale

There was a jitter in Bekket’s eye that I didn’t like. We were trained at the Schola Progenium to watch for the early signs of political deviance or dereliction of duty. That meant being able to read all the nuances of body language. Hans Bekket was no traitor, and he was no coward. But the time of our imprisonment was eroding him, physically and spiritually, as surely as the sands of Golgotha had eaten away at the metal and flesh of our forces.

I had been watching him for several shifts now. How many days those were, I had no way of telling. The concept of time as a series of moments arriving from the endless potential of the future to become a distinct and defining past was a luxury denied to the slaves on Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka’s space hulk. We had only the grinding scream of an eternal present. Existence was labour, whips, agony, death. I had tried, early on, to gauge the length of the shifts, but the orks made even that effort futile. They simply worked us until the numbers collapsing from exhaustion became annoying. Then they bundled those of us who were still alive back into our cages. There we slept as best we could, waiting to be turned out to suffer again.

Bekket and I were hauling salvage. It was junk of every description scavenged from the ships that, along with a central asteroid, made up the hulk. We dragged heavy, clumsy carts full of the stuff to a massive depot, where the orks’ grotesque versions of enginseers pawed through the material. We pulled the carts with chains, but we weren’t chained ourselves. The orks didn’t bother. Where could we go? And what fun would there be in beating stragglers to death, if there were no stragglers to be had?

Bekket’s eyes flicked back and forth as if he were a malfunctioning gun servitor seeking targets. He was unconsciously looking for an excuse to strike out. When he did, he would believe he was acting out of rage and honour, but he would be wrong. Impulsive rebellion in this terrible place was an act of despair. It had only one possible outcome.

I would not have it. There were so few left of the men who had come with me to Golgotha. And our mission was unfinished. Thraka still lived.

Bekket was a few metres ahead of me. Beyond the strain of pulling his cart, there was an extra tautness in his shoulder blades. He was on the verge. I tried to get closer. It was difficult. I only had one arm with which to pull the chain. My battle-claw was long gone, my trophy now Thraka’s. And I wasn’t a young man. All the same, I managed to draw within two metres before I risked speaking.

‘Trooper Bekket.’

‘Commissar?’

I had his attention, but then the man in front of him stumbled. He was another Guardsman, wearing the rags of a Mordian uniform. I didn’t think he’d been with us on Golgotha. He looked like he’d been here for much longer. And still, he didn’t fall or drop his chain. He just stumbled. That was enough for the nearest ork guard. The greenskin roared and lashed out with its whip. The weapon was a length of flexible metal cable embedded with jagged bits of blade. It wrapped around the Mordian’s neck. The ork yanked hard. The coils tightened, constricting and severing. The man’s head flew off. The ork roared again, this time with delighted laughter.

There was a heavy piece of piping in Bekket’s cart. I had seen him eyeing it earlier. Now he grabbed it, letting his chain drop to the ground.

‘Bekket, no,’ I shouted, but he was already lunging at the ork, swinging the pipe at the monster’s head. The ork swatted him down. The spikes on the back of its wrist-guard tore his cheek open, and I heard the crunch of his nose breaking. He spun as he fell. The ork put an iron boot on his chest. It stowed its whip and pulled a massive axe from its belt. It raised the blade high, the stupidly glowering eyes under its thick brow fixed on Bekket’s skull.

I stepped forward. I locked gazes with the ork.

‘No,’ I said again, but I said it to the guard, I said it with ice and I said it in orkish. It disgusted me to use that obscene tongue, but it startled the guard. The ork hesitated.

I held the monster’s eyes with my single one. I peered up with my head tilted slightly down, so there would be more shadow, more mystery, in my empty socket. I was a one-armed, one-eyed human past his prime making direct eye contact with an ork. I should have been dead, my guts strewn all over the ground. But I was Yarrick, and I had the evil eye. I killed orks with a look. The brute in front of me knew this. At that moment, so did I. With Bekket’s life dangling by a frayed thread, I channelled all of my faith in the Emperor and my hatred of the orks into the crystalline, adamantine belief that my gaze was a greenskin’s doom. I was what they believed me to be.

The guard’s axe wavered. The ork looked away from my eye and my dangerous socket, and glanced around, uncertain. It seemed to notice something on the gantries in the gloom high above our heads. Then it lowered the blade. It took its foot off Bekket, gave him a kick in the ribs, and stalked away down the line of slaves, snarling to itself.

As I helped Bekket up, the back of my neck prickled. I looked up into the shadows. I sensed the massive presence. He was up there, watching. The ork. Thraka.

I couldn’t see him, but I hoped he saw the look in my eye.

I hoped he saw the lethal promise that lay within.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

By day, David Annandale dons an academic disguise and lectures at a Canadian university on subjects ranging from English literature to horror films and video games, shaping his students into an army of servitors awaiting his signal to rise. He is the author of several thriller and horror novels and the acclaimed short story ‘Carrion Anthem’ for Black Library. He lives with his wife and family and a daemon in the shape of a cat, and is working on several new projects set in the grim darkness of the far future.

Army Of One

by Rob Sanders

Through the super-chilled methalon mist - a face.

It burns into my brain through the neural link. That face. A face I know…

I blunder through my nightmares. The realm of the half-remembered, a labyrinth of nonsensical gloom.

I am at once alone, a shanty urchin shivering in the squalor and shadow of the mighty primus hive. The chemical stench of the drosshill stings my nostrils, as once it did.

I snort and find myself a bag-of-bones youth, trampled in the crush of the Imperial Army recruitment drive amid whispers of a great war coming to Proxima Apocryphis. The Apocryphadi Hort will play its noble part. I wait three days in an unruly line, however, just to hear the caustic laughter of the subaltern and his watchdog sergeant. I turn to walk away.

I storm straight into the cacophony of gunfire. The underhive, running with the Thunderbloods. I taste the copper thrill of a firefight, the stub rounds flying and stiletto blades flashing amongst the rust-choked palisades. This is Tritus Falls. We’re in Gundog territory – and by we I mean me and Fluke. I remember the hot passage of the betrayer’s shot through my back-flesh and the scrape of his fleeing footsteps as he left me for dead. Left me to the Gundogs. To the brutality of Marshal Corquoran and his hive enforcers. To the solitary madness of a two-by-two standing-cell in the cramped incarcetoria. To bicep-building hard labour on the spire construction chain-crews.

From the nosebleed heights I am bagged, bought and dragged to a cell once more. A slave-cage. A holding pen for one of primus hive’s many gladiatorial pits. I am an animal that lives only to bring death to others. An animal that catches the eye of one Baron Chravius Blumolotov – bloated nephew of the equally bloated primus and planetary Lord-Governor. He attends my cell at night – when my bloody work is done - and runs his fat fingers through my gore-clotted hair. An inbreed’s thanks. A fiend’s mercy.

‘My loyal subject,’ he soothes.

But once more my blood finds its price. An offworlder’s offer even the broken baron can’t refuse.

A long, long darkness away, I re-discover my dread in agonies and desecrations of the flesh no pit fighter or ganger could ever dream of inflicting. I find… the Clade and their torturous gift of a new existence. My body becomes their work of dark art: a surgical sculpture of genetic and cybernetic augmentation. Hypertrophic muscular barbarism, draped across a broken, restructured, then reinforced endo-skeletal frame. I become for them a torrent of chemical warfare. My blood curdles and my veins broil with combat drugs and infusions of such enslaving potency that I am doomed never to know life without them. Psycho-indoctrination shatters whatever is left of me hiding within the Clade’s monstrous creation. I am catastrophe. I am cold rage. I am wanton destruction – distilled and directed. A living weapon to be deployed.

I am Eversor.

Only then do I meet the architect of my deadly design. The one they call the Sigillite. He instils in my multi-hearts the depths of an Emperor’s love and the abyssal hatred I must hold for his enemies. From his lips I hear my name spoken for the first time in a seeming eternity.

‘Ganimus…’

Through the neurolink he shows me that face. The face I know. ‘Ganimus…’ the Sigillite says. ‘This man is now counted amongst our enemies. He is the Warmaster’s pawn. A faithless heretic. You must end this man, Ganimus – and all who stand with him.’

The super-chilled methalon mist clears.

Cryo-suspension is itself suspended. I hear the howl of atmospheric descent tearing at the pod plating as I drop like a bomb, like a thunderbolt, like the Emperor’s vengeance through the lead-scorched skies. Impact jolts me from my mission-nightmare. The cortex downlink is complete. My assignment is a mind-crippling master that must be obeyed. My target is everything – he draws me with the irresistible gravity of a star. The unquenchable rage is all my own.

I rip my way out of the pod’s plating as if it were a metal womb. My midnight bodyglove barely contains my gruesome potential. Pumped to monstrosity – a grotesque, hewn from flesh and hate – I step once more out onto the ash of Proxima Apocryphis. Out into the shadow of the primus hive and the chill gloom I once called home. I draw my executioner pistol from my belt and extend the hypodermic fingertips of my toxin-primed neuro-gauntlet.

Through the optics of my skull helmet I see the Horusian banners flying from the palace spire. The Warmaster’s single eye, watching my assassin’s approach. One boot in front of the other – each stride growing with speed and fury – up through the drosshill slums. And then the killing begins. And it doesn’t stop.

I feed on death. Hivers, factory menials and warring gangers – all die before my bloody path. I sate my appetite for destruction. Smoke stacks fall, factories collapse, infernos rage. Like a beast, I tear through the enforcers despatched to drop me before bringing battle to the traitor hortmen of the Apocryphadi 3rd. In the habs I become the great war they’ve got coming to them, slaughtering simple soldiers in their droves before ripping the heart out of their heretic command. I leave the Warmaster naught but dumbfounded youth and the craven dead. I explode up through the spire palaces like a rising monster of the deep. Awash with the blue blood of my betters, I tear the rich and powerful limb from limb, until finally I am granted a rare audience with the primus Lord-Governor.

That face. The face I know.

‘I am the Emperor’s loyal subject,’ Chravius Blumolotov blubs, baron no more.

‘No,’ I whisper. ‘But I am.’

My voice trembles. I am beyond words now. I can no longer contain the carnage I am about to wreak. I am Eversor. And I become vengeance.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rob Sanders is a freelance writer, who spends his nights creating dark visions for regular visitors to the 41st millennium to relive in the privacy of their own nightmares, including the novels Atlas Infernal and Legion of the Damned. By contrast, as Head of English at a local secondary school, he spends his days beating (not literally) the same creativity out of the next generation in order to cripple any chance of future competition. He lives in the small city of Lincoln, UK.

SWORD GUARDIAN

by Graham McNeill

He was pushing the horse too hard, its flanks lathered and heaving with effort, but Sigmar knew he didn’t dare arrive in Reikdorf too late. The landscape thundered past him, flashing trees, rolling hills and evidence of habitation. Smoke from outlying settlements curled lazily into the sky from hearthfires that would long since have guttered and died but for his hammer.

Sigmar paid them no mind, intent on the road ahead, riding recklessly towards the city that sat at the centre of the Empire. It was foolish to ride like this; a rabbit hole or projecting root could trip his horse and break its leg. And as strong and brave as Taalhorsa was, that was a death sentence for any steed.

The others were far behind him: Wenyld, Cuthwin, Leodan, Teon and Bransùil the Aeslandeir. They knew this was a ride he had to make himself, and followed behind at a more measured pace. Their horses were weary and thin from the long ride into the Vaults and back, and though they had changed mounts often, these latest beasts had come a long way, and there would be little gained in breaking them this close to home.

Reikdorf lay just over the hills yonder, and the smell and sounds of the thriving city came to Sigmar, even from so great a distance.

‘I’m coming, Wolfgart,’ he said. ‘When one Sword Brother calls, the other answers.’

The rider had met them at a village whose name Sigmar could not remember, a growing collection of well-raised hearths at a ford on the Reik’s westernmost mountain-birthed spur. The man had chosen his location well, a place any riders returning to Reikdorf from the south would almost certainly pass through. His news had galvanised Sigmar like few things had since the defeat of the Great Necromancer’s army, and he had stripped his mount of every bit of loose weight before riding north with all the speed in Taalhorsa’s grain-fed limbs.

Ghal-maraz was a heavy weight at his shoulders, the rune-etched hammer strapped tight to his back. Leodan had urged him to leave it with his sword-brothers, that it was too great a weight to carry, but Sigmar would sooner hack off one of his own limbs than abandon the runehammer. Better to arrive too late than arrive ill-prepared. This was a time of great moment, and the gods did not look kindly on those who met such dangerous times without due reverence and care.

He had stood beside Wolfgart at such a time before, and the memory still had the power to bring tears to his eyes and a swelling sense of pride to his breast. Maedbh would never forgive him if he failed to honour his oath to her husband, but more importantly, he would never forgive himself. He had a duty that placed a grave burden upon his shoulders, a burden that could never be shirked, never be passed on and never, ever, be forgotten.

And Sigmar was not a man who gave his oath lightly.

The landscape fell away around him, the pollarded trees left behind as he rode out onto the scalped hilltop overlooking the city of his birth. Over the course of his life, it had changed almost beyond recognition, growing from a rough collection of huddled timber fish-houses to the largest city in the Empire. Stone walls girdled its heart, but vast swathes of building work were already pushing out beyond their protection, like grain spilling from a split seed-bag. People were coming in from the countryside in droves; in search of work, shelter and the opportunities such a huge place offered.

Ships from as far afield as the ice-locked ports of the northern coastline bobbed in the freshly-cut inlets through the muddy shorelines. The River Reik was a multi-stranded waterway of fens, channels and ever-widening streams, and work was already beginning to sink rocks into the water’s edge to build up a serviceable harbour to match the fey-built quays of Marburg. Sigmar took all this in with a glance, pushing Taalhorsa down the stone-flagged road towards the Sudenreik Bridge and the open Sudengate.

Warriors cloaked in bearksin and wolf pelts patrolled the ramparts, and the tips of their spears and the links of their mail shirts gleamed in the early morning sun. Sigmar had ridden through the grey of false dawn to reach Reikdorf in time, and a horn skirled from the saw-toothed walls as the keen-eyed wall guards saw him riding hard for the bridge.

He galloped over tended fields that were being worked by men, women and children that cheered as they saw him. They couldn’t know the urgency that drove him, and he had not the time to spare in acknowledgement of their devotion. His horse was staggering, blowing hard and he could hear its pain in every wheezing breath.

‘One last push, greatheart,’ said Sigmar as they galloped over the Sudenreik bridge, passing the frescoes and carvings of Unberogen heroes. The warriors at the gate waved him on with urgent cries as he reined in his exhausted horse. He leapt from the saddle and paused to rub his steed’s lathered face.

‘You are a horse fit for a god,’ he said, before handing the reins to a nearby warrior.

Sigmar turned and ran into the cobbled streets of the city, breathless and deathly afraid he might already be too late. As he crossed the open square on the river’s northern bank, he bent to touch the Oathstone at its heart, loosening the straps securing Ghal-maraz to his back. He swung the weapon around, running with the warhammer held across his chest. The magic bound to the ancient starmetal glittered in anticipation.

If the blood-wyf was right, he would have need of Ghal-maraz.

At last he came to Wolfgart’s home, a fine two-storey dwelling of dwarf-cut stone, timbers shaped by Master Holtwine himself and curling ironwork wrought by Govannon the smith. It was a fine home, one that had been blessed by great love and much laughter.

Sigmar heard screams from within, pain-filled and drawn out into silence.

The door opened and Wolfgart emerged, weeping and with his arms bloody to the elbows.

‘Am I too late?’ asked Sigmar.

‘No, my lord,’ said Wolgart, choking the words out. ‘It has just ended.’

‘And…?’ said Sigmar, holding out Ghal-maraz. ‘Was the blood-wyf right?’

‘She was,’ replied Wolgart, his face splitting open with pride. ‘It’s a boy!’

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hailing from Scotland, Graham McNeill worked for over six years as a Games Developer in Games Workshop’s Design Studio before taking the plunge to become a full-time writer. Graham’s written a host of SF and Fantasy novels and comics, as well as a number of side projects that keep him busy and (mostly) out of trouble. His Horus Heresy novel, A Thousand Sons, was a New York Times bestseller and his Time of Legends novel, Empire, won the 2010 David Gemmell Legend Award. Graham lives and works in Nottingham and you can keep up to date with where he’ll be and what he’s working on by visiting his website.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2012 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

© Games Workshop Limited 2012. All rights reserved.

Black Library, the Black Library logo, Games Workshop, the Games Workshop logo and all associated marks, names, characters, illustrations and images from the Warhammer universe are either ®, TM and/or © Games Workshop Ltd 2011, variably registered in the UK and other countries around the world. All rights reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-0-85787-668-3

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise except as expressly permitted under license from the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.