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Mad Dok – Nate Crowley

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Avenging Son’

A Black Library Publication

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MAD DOK

By Nate Crowley

I

Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka, the Prophet of Gork and Mork, who left worlds ablaze in his boot prints, was dead.

There wasn’t much arguing with that, since his body was hanging in a hundred pieces, on a rusty scaffold as high as a Stompa’s chin. But that was all right, as far as Dok Grotsnik was concerned. In fact, he reckoned the human Blackmane had done him a bit of a favour, by removing Ghazghkull’s head. He’d been asking the boss for permission to remove it himself for years, after all, saying that the best way to fix all his wonky bits would be to just… switch him off for a bit, and get ’em all done at once.

But since Ghazghkull’s counter-offer had always been that he should do the same thing to Grotsnik (without the fixing or the putting back together afterwards, mind), the dok had come to terms with the fact it probably wouldn’t ever happen.

But then along had come Blackmane and his mob of beakies – chop, clang, whirr, splat, thud – and here Grotsnik had found himself, with a blank canvas to work on at last. Letting the corners of a rare grin begin to work across his staple-puckered face, the dok looked up at the jungle of chains which bore the bits of the Prophet, and flexed his talons in anticipation of the work ahead.

They were good hands, these new ones: extra-nimble ones from his private stash, which he’d grafted on fresh that morning. And while they were still a bit fuzzy under the talons from barrel-mould, and itchy where his blood was still finding its way through the dead bits, Grotsnik knew they were ready to work wonders.

And what wonders they would work. He had big plans for the rebuilding of the boss. Plans so big, in fact, that he couldn’t see the whole of ’em at once, just bits here and there. Still, the dok was sure inspiration would show him the way, once he’d started cutting. That was how it had always been, during his truly great works.

It was certainly how it had been on the night of his greatest work, all those years ago: the night when he’d first operated on the ork who would go on to become Ghazghkull Thraka. Under the leaky patchwork of that squighide tent, with just that bucket of third-rate tools to work with, Grotsnik had forced the whole galaxy to reconsider what an ork was capable of.

And now? Well. Now he was going to do it again. But bigger. And better. And with much fancier kit.

Inside the ferrocrete dome he’d claimed as his lab, deep down under the big human kafeedral where the boss had been felled, was enough weird machinery to bring anything back to life. Stacks of generators ringed the edge of the vault, exposed coils alive with sizzling blue discharge sparks, while banks of pumps and bioreaktors chugged and hissed and gurgled with every fluid the dok had been able to get his hands on. That was just the start of it: Grotsnik had spent years hoarding machines that looked like they might do interesting things if you attached living things to ’em, and at last he had an excuse to get the whole lot out to play with. And so, every few minutes, a new pile of crates appeared with a bang and a sizzle of dirty yellow light, as they were tellyported down from the belly of his medikal frigate in orbit.

Then there was all the meat-bits. A row of cages held packs upon packs of all the painboy’s staple squig breeds, from bulbous transfusion squigs to saggy-faced skinlender-squigs, as well as a few mobs of hysterical, shrieking snotlings. Beneath them, a second, worse row of cages held a load of captured beakies, with their eyes and jaws and hands taken off so they couldn’t cause trouble. Grotsnik wasn’t certain what he’d actually do with ’em, since their blood was about as much use as piss in an emergency. But at the very least, they’d give him something to drill holes in while he was thinking.

And there, of course – well, everywhere – was Ghazghkull.

With all the bits of the boss suspended around the dome, Grotsnik was reminded of one of those horrereys the human meks made, in service to their pointless obsession with how fast stuff spun round in space. The bits of armoured gristle were like brooding green planets, he reckoned, orbiting the massive slab in the middle of the dome, where Ghazghkull’s head sat looking way angrier than anything dead should’ve been able to.

The dok hobbled over to the slab then, until his torso was level with the dark green cliff of Ghazghkull’s face. He admired the yellowed jags of his tusks, reflected in the glassy surface of the Prophet’s good eye. Then he poked the eye, just because he could. The head retained its bloodied scowl of fury, but nothing happened.

The boss could be as angry as he liked, Grotsnik figured, letting his grin stretch into a great, giddy leer as realisation dawned. Because right now, the boss was dead. More than that though, he was a patient. And patients never got a say in what happened during surgery. Medikal effix, the humans called that. It was one of their rare good ideas.

Grotsnik ran a talon over the web of rope-thick scars covering the patient’s hide, and as he saw how many had been left by his own blades, he snarled with pride. This was his monster. And how well he had done, under the circumstances. Every bolt he’d hammered into the boss over the years, every bloodpipe he’d stapled to another bloodpipe, he’d had to get permission for, from Ghazghkull himself. He’d had to cheat and sneak his way to every creative flourish. And still, he’d created a masterpiece.

Naturally, all the underbosses would’ve said the boss was the work of Gork and Mork. But Grotsnik had never seen either of ’em show up with a spanner. Ghazghkull might have been the design of the gods, sure. The dok would give them that. But Ghazghkull was Grotsnik’s work. All Gork and Mork had ever contributed to their Prophet, for all their holy clamour and barging, had been a beakie-forged bolter shell to the skull. The dok had been left to figure out the rest, and he’d done mirikals. But it had all just been practice, for the work in front of him now. And in the hours to come, he was finally going to show Gork, and his big idiot twin, just how much room he had found to improve on their work.

What new feats might the boss go on to rack up, Grotsnik dared to wonder, now that his creator was free to flex his art muscles without constraint? How many more planets would he swallow up with war, and make fit for orks to thrive on? The dok looked up past the scaffold to the dome of masonry above, and pictured the stars beyond it turning green one by one. A whole galaxy, claimed for orks by Ghazghkull... and by Grotsnik too, if you thought about it properly.

The dok thought about it very properly, until he found it was too big a thought to keep inside his brain. So, since he was grinning anyway, he vented it all in a big, mad roar of a laugh, which filled the dome just as thoroughly as his authority. At last, if only for a little while, his genius was free to burn out of control. No gods, no warlords: just Grotsnik.

That wasn’t a bad note to get started on, the dok thought. So he fished his oldest scalpel from his belt – the tool he’d made the first cut with, the night Ghazghkull was created – and leaned in to begin the operation.

II

Just as Grotsnik’s blade was about to meet flesh, something heavy and wet smacked into the flagstones next to him. A spatter of small, viscous gobbets followed, coating the left-hand side of his body, and as they began to slither down the grooves of his knobbly musculature, his grin shrivelled into a mean, crooked grimace.

‘It was that one what dropped it,’ a voice squawked down, from the top of the scaffold. But Grotsnik’s immediate interest was in what had been dropped. He looked to the floor where, just as he had expected from the sound of the splat, Ghazghkull’s heart lay in several ragged pieces.

It was going to have been Ghazghkull’s heart, anyway.

Alongside the bits of the Prophet’s original body hung around the dome, there were a lot of bits from other orks too. Some, Grotsnik had been saving for years, putting them on ice whenever he’d found himself operating on a patient too thick to notice the lack of a few ribs or a kidney. Others, to the dok’s amazement, had been donated, as word of Ghazghkull’s fall had spread across the trenches of Krongar.

This had been the route by which he had acquired the heart. A titanic but simple-minded Goff known as Got-So-Angry-He-Tried-To-Fight-Himself, had come to Grotsnik’s lab just days before, ducking under the lintel with an expression that made Grotsnik instinctively reach for his chain-scalpel. He had presumed the giant had come to hurry the work, via traditional Goff motivational methods. Instead, the hulk had simply prised a broad slab of armour from the centre of his chest, before reaching into the shell-wound which the carapace had covered, and tearing free his heart with a rubbery snap. For the boss, he had mumbled as he had handed Grotsnik the organ, before slumping to his knees and passing out.

It had been a first-rate heart, Grotsnik thought, as he watched its ruptured mass quivering on the stone – the kind of organ he’d once have sold half his tools to acquire. Now it was just more meat for the squigs, however, and he supposed he’d have to modify the fuel pump off a truck instead. But before Grotsnik could even register the disappointment he felt, it had transmuted itself into anger, and his gaze had snapped to the gantries high above, scanning them for the likely culprit.

He did not have to look long. Awaiting his gaze were a cluster of grots in stained overalls, all frantically jabbing fingers of mute accusation at each other. Behind them, the winch which had been conveying the heart towards its socket swung to and fro forlornly.

Grotsnik found he did not care which of the snivelling things had dropped the organ. He wanted, very much, to shoot the lot of ’em, if only to dodge the tedium of listening to them blame each other. And any other day, he would have done just that. Indeed, his hand was already reaching for the slugga at his hip to do some killing. But a muted boom from beyond the dome above, and a trickle of dust from its apex, checked his arm before he could level the weapon’s sights. Because this was not any other day.

Ghazghkull might have fallen, but the battle wasn’t over. Up there, beyond the dome, hundreds of thousands of orks were still fighting a vicious defence against Blackmane’s Space Wolves. The beakies’ boss had been thoroughly gutted in the process of getting Ghazghkull’s head off, but rather than calling it evens and moving on, his lads had reacted by getting really, really upset.

The orks weren’t winning.

Privately, Grotsnik had even started to wonder if the orks were losing. Ghazghkull’s forces had, by now, been driven entirely into the crypts beneath the kafeedral. They were trapped there. And with every day that went by, they were being driven deeper and deeper, to the makeshift command bunker and the dok’s lab at its centre. Even if it felt ungodsly to think about it, Grotsnik knew that if that load of grey-armoured nutters pushed all the way down before he could get the boss up and running again, they’d be done for.

‘Mightn’t even have that long,’ Grotsnik muttered to himself through his tusks, as he glanced at the heavy blast doors sealing his laboratory off from the rest of the bunker. When he’d set the place up, he had hoped the doors would give him a bit of quiet to fill with the noise of his own work, but he’d soon been disabused of that notion. From the tunnels outside came a constant, discordant racket of bickering and roaring, which grew louder by the hour as more orks were forced down here, and as they got closer and closer to breaking Ghazghkull’s Big Rule, by coming to blows.

From the sounds of the current bout of hollering, Finds-Bullets-He-Has-Not-Lost, the Deathskull lieutenant who was meant to be in charge while the boss was ‘recovering’, was moments away from unleashing his fists on Urzog, the Goff chieftain who considered himself to occupy the exact same role.

The idea of being nominally in charge – like the idea of not fighting whenever you felt like it – was a Ghazghkull thing. Usually, if a boss got so much as mildly brainshot, that was that: he’d be done for, and the next biggest orks would slug it out for the job. It was a testament to the Prophet, Grotsnik supposed grudgingly, that the underbosses were waiting at all for him to recover.

But they wouldn’t wait forever. One way or another, whether by angry humans or angrier orks, this miserable little burrow of theirs was going to get torn apart. Unless, of course, Ghazghkull came back to will it otherwise.

There was too much work to be done, Grotsnik knew, for him to afford a few shot grots. It was a pure case of what he knew as straight-line-thinking, and it made him miserable. He hated it, more than anything, when he was forced to reason himself out of what he knew was the right thing to do. It felt… alien. Made him think of all the bones he’d had cracked in his youth, all the blades he’d taken, for being unorky.

His habit of straight-line-thinking was why they’d called him Mad Dok Grotsnik, back on Urk, and it was why they’d treated him like second-hand squig turds. But eventually, as he’d grown older and nastier, he’d developed a knack for this weird, ungodsly cunning. He’d learned to use it to his own advantage, and soon, the cracked bones had started to belong to other orks.

‘Who you gurner shoot then?’ asked one of the grots on the scaffold, breaking the dismal fog that had settled on Grotsnik’s brain, and prompting him to scowl upwards again.

‘None of yer,’ growled the dok, finding a new ceiling for his already extraordinary hatred of grots, and he drove all thoughts of the burst heart from his mind. ‘Too much work to do. But if I were any of you – and thank Mork I ain’t, you rotten, degenerate gits – I’d set to getting a new zoggin’ heart for the boss fixed up, from anything in the Big Pump Store.’

Grotsnik turned then, with only the quiet splintering of a clenched tusk giving away how much fury he’d made himself swallow, and began stalking back over towards Ghazghkull’s head. He’d just got to wondering why he couldn’t hear the anxious, moist rustling of a pack of grots getting to work, when the question came.

III

‘Is there any real point to it though, boss?’

‘You what?’ Grotsnik said, in a voice like a knife-tip glinting in the dark, and stood stock still.

‘Well… is there any point in working, now?’ repeated the voice. It was reedy and nasal, just south of a full sneer – and worst of all, without a trace of terror in it. Grotsnik spun round to its source, baring his fangs and narrowing his good eye, only to find… another grot. It wasn’t as if he’d ever bothered giving his orderlies proper names, given how long they tended to last, but he’d always thought of this one as Drippa, thanks to the thin strand of mucus which seemed perpetually suspended from its gristled promontory of a nose.

‘You’re going to have to explain your reasoning there, Drippa,’ replied Grotsnik, not doing much to stop his hand reaching for the slugga again.

‘This place is done for sooner or later,’ said the grot, clamping a miserable twist of fungus trimmings between its fangs, and lighting the tip with a sparky-stick. It took a vicious little wheeze, shrugged, and spoke its next words through a thin cloud of rancid brown smoke. ‘And we all know you’re a miracle-doer, ’cos you tell us all the time and all. But… well. Look at ’im, boss.’

With only a waggle of its broken-and-reset jaw, Drippa dipped the tip of its smoke-stick towards the mute immensity of the dismantled Prophet, and grimaced uncertainly.

‘Even if we had a whole year to work,’ said the grot, ‘you honestly reckon the boss is coming back from that?’

The dok wanted to roar that he very much did reckon that. But when he did, he found that his jaw had fallen open in shock, so he just made a noise like something dying from a massive and sudden blow to the abdomen.

The shock hadn’t come from the way Drippa had spoken to him, since basic disrespect from his minions had long been no surprise to the dok. Just as other orks had always looked down on him, grots had never treated him with the same rightful, undiluted terror as they did other orks, no matter how many acts of extreme violence he conducted either in front of them or upon them. It was like they saw him as nothing more than an especially big, strong, nasty grot.

But for all Grotsnik hated that, he was at least used to it. No: the thing which had struck Grotsnik like a mortar barrel across the brow was the fact that Drippa – disrespectfully or not – had made a good point.

Every grot came out of its hole knowing straight-line-thinking. It was natural to them, which was a big part of why it was such a shameful trait for an ork to exhibit. And in that one little question – ‘Is there any real point?’ – Drippa had demonstrated just why proper orks held such common contempt for reason. Because too much straight-line-thinking, if you weren’t careful, could lead to the unorkiest thing of all. It was a concept so wrong, Grotsnik only knew it as a human word: dowt.

And now, to his horror, his brain was awash with it. As his eye flickered over the scattered armour plates, muscle chunks and limb ends that currently made up Ghazghkull Thraka, Warlord of Warlords and Prophet of the Gods, more and more dowt rushed in through it. It was a flood, and the boulder of rage which had been growing in his mind sank down into it, dissolving into nothing. Then, as he carried on staring, slack-jawed, at the suddenly impossible scale of the task, Drippa carried on.

‘S’just not gurner happen, dok. Beakies are at our door, bosses at each other’s throats, and the big boss is in bits. S’no blood in him. No…’ The grot flailed its arms, as if groping for words big enough to describe what it was thinking. ‘No Green in ’im.’

Grotsnik found a spark of rage at that, even in the murk of the dowt. Because even though he considered the gods idiots, that was blasfermy, that was. The Great Green was bigger than gods. It was bigger than every ork and grot and snot and squig stacked together, and nobody but the Prophet had a say in what did and didn’t have the Green in it. Grotsnik didn’t respect much beyond his own abilities, but he respected that.

‘Zoggin’ wretch!’ he barked, lunging a pace forwards and prompting Drippa to skitter three back. ‘Who do you reckon you are, then, to be the sayer of that?’ With his heart thudding, and the seams on his wrists splitting as his hands clenched into killing-claws, Grotsnik felt a reassuring surge of orkiness, and pressed on without questioning it. With every step he took towards Drippa, the shadow of his confidence swelled. Indeed, by the time he gripped the creature by the throat and lifted it, spluttering, into the air, Ghazghkull’s resurrection felt like a near certainty.

‘You don’t know nothing, bin-git!’ hissed the dok, snatching the tattered roll-up from Drippa’s teeth with his spare hand, and taking a vicious drag of his own, before discarding it. ‘You think this is beyond Grotsnik, do yer? Think you’ve seen the extent of what he can do, in the clawful of stinking, cringing years you’ve spent in the world? Have you forgotten, grot, that I’ve brought the boss back from the Great Green once? Never woulda been a Ghazghkull to begin with, if it weren’t for me bringing him back to life, back in that tent on Urk.’

Drippa’s thin lips writhed over its rotten fangs, as it wrestled to draw enough breath to speak. When it did, Grotsnik couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

‘It… wasn’t you though... was it?’ gargled Drippa. ‘You just… killed him, operating. Was... Makari what brought him back to life.’

The only reason Drippa didn’t die then, is because Grotsnik was too distracted hating someone else. Makari. The grot who had dragged bodies for him back on Urk. Or rather, the thing that grot had become, out in Grotsnik’s corpse-yard, as they had tried to prise the adamantium plate from the skull of the dok’s freshest failure. Because while Makari had been the grottiest grot who had ever skulked out of a hole, they’d also been… something else.

Grotsnik didn’t know what that was. Makari had always insisted they were just the Prophet’s banner-waver. But the dok knew better. He knew Makari had been granted visions by Ghazghkull. Visions and secrets, and some weird, unknowable connection with Ghazghkull that should’ve been Grotsnik’s. That little scrap of gristle had always stood between Grotsnik and his creation. And while he couldn’t prove it, he swore Makari talked to Ghazghkull – nudging him here and there, and always keeping Grotsnik from seizing the control which he knew would have made the Prophet unstoppable.

The banner-waver had died at the same time as Ghazghkull, in the scrap with Blackmane up top. But that didn’t do much to reassure Grotsnik. Makari had died plenty of times before now. The dok had even killed them himself, once. But the little turd-scrap came back, every time – even though everyone knew grots were too rubbish to live more than once. Grotsnik couldn’t figure it out in the slightest. And if there was one thing he hated more than grots, it was puzzles he couldn’t think his way through.

‘Makari’s dead,’ barked Grotsnik, throwing Drippa into a bank of sparking capacitors, ‘and so’s their name. They was a thief, is all they was. Got that? It was me what brought Ghazghkull back, and that… chancer just happened to be standing in the right place when it happened.’

‘If you say so, boss,’ croaked Drippa, wincing as it tried to sit upright. Grotsnik lurched towards the little ingrate, intent on giving it a further pasting. But as he did, he became aware of the dozens of watery, beady little eyes fixed on him. The only thing grots enjoyed more than watching their own rise up against their masters was watching them get beat back down, and it seemed that Grotsnik’s entire horde of orderlies had gathered to watch the show.

The dok’s fists itched, and not just because they’d recently been someone else’s. He knew it was right for Drippa to die. But he also knew – somehow – that this was the moment that everything yet to come hinged on. There was another lesson he could teach here, besides the ever-reliable lesson of fists, that might save Ghazghkull, the battle and the whole of the Waaagh! He didn’t know how. He didn’t even know what the lesson was. But the dok trusted his brain well enough to know it wouldn’t have piped up for nothing.

There’d be something there, if he just started talking. If. And that was what it came down to, he supposed. Would he be a proper ork and beat Drippa to mush? Or would he be Mad Dok Grotsnik?

‘Listen up, you puddles of squig-pus!’ shouted Mad Dok Grotsnik, glaring all around him at the grots assembled in the shadow of Ghazghkull’s lifeless bonce. ‘You’re going to work yourselves to squigmeat, every last one of you. You know why? ’Cos I says so. Something’s only impossible, you see, if Grotsnik ain’t done it yet. And since the boss is coming back – and it’s gonna be me who brings him – then this ain’t impossible. Got that?’

There was a faint flicker in the dark, as a swarm of grots looked at each other in frantic incomprehension. But it didn’t matter, because this time, not even Drippa was stupid enough to speak up.

‘But before we get to work,’ added Grotsnik, as his mind finally worked out what the masterplan was, ‘I’m going to tell you a story. It’s not one I’ve ever told anyone. It’s not something anyone ever saw, besides one other ork. And it’s why you’re going to work your snot-green arses off, once I’m done. Because guess what? There was another time Ghazghkull died, after the first. And that time, there was no Makari to get in the way. I brought him back, all by myself. And this is how it happened.’

IV

It happened not long after the boss invaded Armygeddon for the second time. We were down under the ocean, sneakin’ up on Tempestora Hive in a great big fleet of submersibbles. And of course, I know yous lot weren’t even spores back then. But you know what I’m talking about, don’t yer? I’ve seen the little scrawlings you do in places you think I won’t see, in glyphs you think I can’t read. You pass down your little… histreys, and so you know what happened well enough. At least, you think you do.

Oh – and before any of you gits tries to say otherwise... those submersibbles? My idea. Oh yeah, I know very well everyone says it was Orghamek. But who do you think grew all of Orghamek’s brains, eh? And who got ’em to play nicely together? Yeah, that’s right. Grotsnik. So anything he invented counts as my idea, ’cos of intallectual propatee.

Still, it’s not all bad that I don’t get the credit for the subs, ’cos they weren’t exactly our best work of the war. They did their job and didn’t sink, sure. Two-thirds did, anyway. But I swear by Gork’s bloodied boot-nails, you’ve no zoggin’ idea what it was like on board those things.

We’d welded ’em together from scrapped human tankers in the wastes up north, bulked up with armour plate that the voidboys cut off the hulls of the kroozers in orbit, then dropped straight down through atmosphere. It was tough stuff, all right. But it was leaky as a Blood Axe cipher – in the end, we gave up trying to weld all the bullet holes shut, and just packed ’em with scrap metal and squig resin.

Then there was the heat. You’ve not got the know-wots to understand this, but spaceship metal’s meant to work best surrounded by loads of… nothing, yeah? Put it under the sea – ’specially a boiling hot, sludgy sea like Armygeddon’s – then stick one of Nazdreg’s mega-reaktors in the arse end, and you’ve basically made yerself a moving kiln full of thousands and thousands of orks. We was boiling alive in those things – up to our knees in soupy bilge slime wherever we went, blistered all over from the reaktor leaks, and only eating tins of whatever humans we’d managed to round up and render down during the rush to get the Mork-snicked things built.

That’s not even starting on the squigs, neither. See, thanks to a snarl-up with the first landings, half the Goff Dread-mobs the boss had ordered for the Big Boat Attack, ended up halfway across the planet, wonderin’ where the sea was. And what did we get instead? A whole karrier full of Beastsnagga warbands, complete with their stamping, farting, biting squigs. Worse still, ’cos the boss’ sub was the biggest, it ended up with the biggest squigs. So we had this giant barn filling a full third of the hull, packed with tank-sized turd factories. Let’s just say it didn’t help with the smell, right?

Anyway. I’m only telling yous all this, so you can get an idea how... worked up we all was, after what felt like forever chugging along at the bottom of that ’orrible sea. You think you’ve seen orks spoiling for a fight? Not till you’ve seen ’em packed inside a hot tin for days on end, you haven’t.

It was that bad, even Ghazghkull weren’t above it. Dunno whether it was the heat, or the radiation, or the poison I’d been injecting in his neck because I wanted to see how mad he’d go, but his headaches had been getting worse and worse the whole time. It’d got to the point where he wasn’t getting any words at all from the gods during ’em, they were just roaring right into his brain, making him thrash so hard he left dents in the walls. Gork’s grin, though – it got so bad I even laid off the poison in the end, just in case he thrashed so hard he made a hole and sank us.

Before we left, the Prophet had stood up on the battlements of the flagship’s peekin’-spire, and he’d sworn to every ork there that he’d personally lead the charge, once we’d crossed the ocean and beached at Hive Tempestora. The cheer was so zoggin’ loud, after he said that, I wondered if they’d hear us in the bleedin’ hive itself, all the way across the sludge.

But when, at long last, the day of the landings arrived, I went up to Ghazghkull’s throne-chamber to check on him, and found him in the rottenest state I ever saw. He was twitching, and snarling, and he couldn’t seem to go three squeezes of a timer-squig without his whole body going rigid and shaking like a Deff Dread’s drill arm. It was like nothing I’d seen before. I’d definitely gone too hard with the poison, but there was something more than that, too. Like something had grabbed him by the head, and wouldn’t let go.

Now, I’ve never been one to under-esty-mate my own work. Especially a piece of work so killy as Ghazghkull. I knew what kind of punishment the boss could take, ’cos I’d dished enough of it out to his brain, and even taken proper notes. But it looked like here, at last, was the limit. One look at the boss that day told me all I needed to know. He was, in my medikal opinion, proper busted, and there was no way he was gonna be leading any charges at all, unless they was charges face first into the sea.

Naturally, I had a plan. I reckoned I could loosen some of the pressure in Ghazghkull’s skull. Knew I could, in fact, ’cos I always left a few screws overtightened in there, just in case I ever needed an excuse to get in his head for a bit. He’d need a full overhaul of his headmeat, soon enough. But I figured a quick tune-up, finished in time for the boss to give his big pre-fight speech, would be enough to get him through the day. So I told Ghazghkull that I needed to operate.

Didn’t go down well. Lucky for me, he was in such a state that the punch only clipped me, cracking my left arm, and then burying itself two tusklengths into the steel of the chamber wall. Still, I knew I couldn’t let that put me off. I needed to get inside that skull. ’Cos if I didn’t, and Ghazghkull went ahead and led the invasion anyway, it wouldn’t take the underbosses three kidney-beats to realise their Prophet was cooked in the head.

Well… desperate times, yeah? What can you do? Well, this is what I did. After a quick breather to steady myself, I told the boss he was being an idiot, and that he needed the op done there and then.

The second punch didn’t miss me. Or at least, it wouldn’t have done. But Ghazghkull never finished it. He launched himself towards me, all full of murder, then stopped dead halfway with his face gone slack, and fell to the deck like a sack of anvils and steak.

Seeing him lying there, not even twitching… Well, it was almost like I couldn’t see him at all. My eyes was taking him in, all right, but my brain wasn’t having any of it. Dropping flat for no reason? That just... didn’t happen to Ghazghkull. But there he was, dropped flat. Don’t think I could quite grasp what’d happened, to be honest. Same way you lot would lose the plot if, oh I dunno, I paid you, or something.

’Cos of what a mindbuster it was, it was a good long while before I worked up the nerve even to go over and poke the boss. And for all my surgical know-wots, poking was all I could think to do, for a while. Eventually though, I heaved the boss’ face off the floor, and wished I hadn’t. There was blood pouring from his nose, his ears and the corner of his good eye, and even leakin’ out from the edge of his metal skullplate. Now, as an expert in bleeding, that told me all I needed to know. The Prophet’d got so angry, on top of the state his head was in anyway, that some part of his brain had just… burst.

That was just… that. Burst brain. And if he hadn’t been dead when he’d hit the floor, he definitely was by the time I’d worked out what was going on.

The boss was dead. And wouldn’t you know it, at just that moment, the shouting-boxes roared into life all down the inside of the sub, and started blarin’ out a message from the lookouts up top in the peekin’-spire. They’d seen the target, hadn’t they? Just visible through the smog on the horizon, lurking like a git-nest in a marsh, was Hive Tempestora itself.

And that meant that, in the time it’d take you to refill any of those lymph tanks over there, the whole fleet of subs would be ploughing up out of the water, beaching ’emselves on the slag-drifts of the shore, and grinding over any human defences like soil-gits under a boot. When that happened, every ork, on every sub on the fleet, would be waiting in the holds chanting the great war chant, ready to follow the Prophet into battle. Even before that, now that the hive had been sighted, they’d be expecting the boss to show up down in the musterin’ chambers, to give his big pump-up speech.

Only… his brain had burst.

There wasn’t even time to panic. I knew, right then, I needed to snatch up every moment of time I could possibly get my gristly hands on, to have a hope of resussertatin the Prophet before we hit the beaches. That meant someone needed to cover for the boss down below, playing for as much time as possible. And I knew just the someone.

That’s not good, Biter had said, when they’d climbed up through the hatch into the throne-chamber, and clapped eyes on the stone-dead Ghazghkull. Typical Biter.

They’re all zoggin’ weird, the Blood Axes are. But Biter – or Taktikus, as they’d called themself back then – was something else. They’d just become the chief Blood Axe genrul on Armygeddon, after shanking their predecessor during a raid behind human lines, and they was probably the weirdest ork I’ve ever come across. Actually likes being around humans. Fought with ’em once, they says. Still betrayed ’em in the end, mind. But they’re a creepy git however you look at it.

Unfortunately, they’re a clever git and all. And in that moment, they was the only ork on that rotten boat who I reckoned had a chance of seeing Ghazghkull dead, and not completely losing their mind. So in that moment, they was the most precious thing in the world to me. Straight-line-thinking, yeah? Anyway, once they’d got a grip on the situation, I sent them down to where the speech was due to be held, and told them to think up some zoggin’ good reasons for the boss not being there.

So that was one problem dealt with, at least. Later, I found out exactly what Biter had done to keep the troops busy, and I will grudgingly admit it was a masterpiece of a lie. They’d said Ghazghkull had left the sub to fight a sea monster, because he’d got too annoyed with being cooped up below decks. They’d even had mines detonated just outside the hull, so it sounded like there was a fight going on out in the sludge. Bought me a lot of time, Biter did, with that little ruse.

Not enough time, though. Working like a grot trying to wall up a gap in a gnasher-squig pen, I’d opened up the whole of Ghazghkull’s bonce, and laid it out in bits on the floor of his throne-chamber, all the while hoping nobody walked in on me. It was a miserable situation for brain surgery to begin with, what with the dim red emergency lights, and the stench of the squigs and all. But it got worse, fast.

When the subs at the front of the fleet burst through the defensive perimeter of the human sea wall, the hive’s defenders scrambled their bombers, and started filling the sea around us with depth charges. They launched too late to actually cause much damage, mind, since the subs were wrapped up in spaceship metal after all. Think they only managed to sink a couple of dozen boats, if I remember right. But the rocking of the hull, and the constant zoggin’ concussion waves from the blasts, really tested my detail work. For almost every bloodpipe I managed to close up in the boss’ knotted great ball of a brain, it seemed another got tore open when an explosion knocked my hand.

Still, what I lack in precision, I’ve always made up for in speed. I was makin’ progress. And as we passed under the bombardment, I got every rupture in the Prophet’s brain closed up. I even charged it with a few gobfuls of my own genius blood, so it’d have enough juice in it to think with, once I got his hearts started.

And I swear, for all that I hate both of the gits, thank Gork and Mork I managed to get his skull bolted together, with just an instant to spare, before our keel hit the beach.

’Cos when I say beach, I’d be better off saying junkyard. Weren’t a grain of sand to be found there – just piles upon piles of smashed-up human machinery, eaten through with rust, and with all the gaps filled in with jagged chunks of slag from the foundries upcoast. The sound of it, as jags and snags tore through the sub’s belly like squiggoth claws, made it feel like being stuck in the inside of a dakkajet turbine.

As the sub ploughed all the way out of the water and started grinding along under its own weight, I thought we was going to be shook to pieces. And if I hadn’t had the massive dead weight of Ghazghkull to cling onto, I would’ve been smashed to splinters against the walls. It was a grim old ride, that. Sometimes, you know, I wonder how many more mobs might’ve made it out onto the beaches, if we’d thought to put handholds in the troop bays.

I couldn’t believe how long we kept on skidding. But then, I s’pose a ship the size of a small city, sat on a nuclear turbine going at full blast for days, is gonna build up a bit of momentum, isn’t it? Still, gravity’s such a hard old brute that even ork hardware can’t outlast it. In the end we came to a long, rattling halt, and after one last massive groan of metal, and a crack of the central girders for good measure, there was silence.

Gork knows how many of the other subs got shredded to bits on the way out of the sea, or broke in two once they had to take their own weight, but I could see the little red lights on the wall of the boss’ throne-chamber pinging green as the survivors reported landfall, and it looked like it was probably more than half of ’em.

Not bad, I know. Weren’t gonna last, though. Already, the silence’d been broken by the drone of the human bombers, as they wheeled back round out at sea to take another run at us. And this time, we were sitting targets, with no sludge to hide under.

I heard the rattle and crack of the flak turrets on the sub’s tail opening up, but then they stopped again, one by one – no doubt as the gunners took slaps across their heads from their bosses. Why? ’Cos Ghazghkull had said he’d start the attack. That was how it had to go; so far as every last ork in the fleet saw it, that was how the gods were going to give us our win. And if that meant losing a few more subs, while the boss chose the perfect moment to strike? Well, that was just the way things went.

All well and good, only the boss’ heart wouldn’t start. I’d tried squishing it with my hands. I’d tried getting the spare one going first. I’d tried sticking the sparky end of a sliced-through cable into the middle of it. I’ll be honest, I’d even tried battering it with a wrench, just in case. But the zoggin’ thing just sat there between the boss’ ribs, cold and rubbery, refusing even to twitch.

The bombs were falling now, of course. But I had to keep trying. So, with my making-things-bigger goggles on and a glow-squig between my teeth, I pushed my head right inside the Prophet’s chest for a proper look. At least it was a break from the smell of squig turds.

I don’t really know what I expected to find in there. But as it turned out, I was in luck. The problem was stupidly simple, actually. Shining my light through the walls of the boss’ main bloodpipes, I saw the biggest one coming out of his heart was all blocked up. I spent a good while squinting at it, trying to work out what it might have been, when I remembered I’d injected him with molten plastek a few days previously. Supposedly, it’d been a cure for the rashes on his neck – which I’d also caused, with a swab dipped in used reaktor coolant – but really it’d just been a bit of spite on my part. For a moment there, I almost regretted having done it.

Especially when something started cutting its way through the wall.

As soon as I managed to pull my head out of the boss, I saw sparks flying, and I knew that the fierce, white-orange square drawing itself slowly across the inner hull could only mean one thing. We’d taken so long to invade the beaches, that the zoggin’ humans were invadin’ us.

Before that moment, I’d been coming up with a dead elegant plan for clearing the boss’ bloodpipes. But that had to go down the drops sharpish: this was no time for fancy surgery. Knowing I’d have to go with my gut, I stopped any sort of straight-line-thinking, and solved the problem like any good ork.

That’ll do, I thought, spotting a skinny, jagged little banner-pole sticking up from Ghazghkull’s shoulder armour. Twisting it off with a neat little snap, I peered back into the boss’ open chest, poked my tongue between my tusks to make my aim better, and jabbed him right in the ventrikular arteree with the sharp end.

Two things happened at once, then. There was a big, gurgling pop from Ghazghkull’s heart as it unclogged itself and started beating, and a massive hollow clang from behind me, as the cut section of hull fell through. The whole chamber filled with smoke, and I had to use my rivetgun blind to close the incision, accidentally putting two bolts through my hand in the process. But I closed it, and as I swept the worst of the muck from the seal, I could feel the thud of the boss’ heart through the skin.

Which was just as well. Because standing in the hole in the wall were three massive beakies. I’d spent so long in that miserable, dim red light that they were just black outlines against a wall of blinding white. But there’s no mistaking a beaky when you see one – those big pretend shoulders, that tiny little head, those big ridiculous boots: they’re all a dead giveaway. Still, it wasn’t the most welcome sight in the world, right then.

I was squinting down the barrel of one of their chunky guns, I remember, trying to remember how good beakies could see through smoke, when I heard it. The best sound I’d ever heard in my life, even though it was just five words.

‘Move out the way, Grotsnik.’

V

‘Now obviously,’ said Grotsnik, his stitch-riven chest puffed out with pride, ‘there was a lot of fighting still to come, after that. But as far as I’m concerned? That was the moment we won the invasion of Tempestora Hive.’

‘Yeah,’ said Drippa, its face entirely motionless, earning it a scowl from the dok. ‘Great story, boss. Just got one question, though.’

‘Oh, did I miss something?’ hissed Grotsnik, nostrils flaring, as he towered over his nonplussed audience.

‘Just one thing, yeah… the pole.’

‘What pole?’

‘The one you fixed the boss’ heart with. You said it was a banner, right?’

‘I… think you… yeah.’ The dok snorted, taken aback. ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘Do you remember what was… on the banner, at all? Like, a picture or sumfink?’

‘Uh?’ grunted the dok, his long, scarred face crunching up in bafflement. But then, as some mean little detail fell into place, deep within the algal folds of his own mind, realisation set in. His lone red eye, furrowed into a smouldering volcanic crack with concentration, flared suddenly in shock, and his mouth gaped in wordless exaggeration, as what had seemed such a trivial detail at the time swelled to monumental importance.

‘Was it that banner?’ asked Drippa, a mean strand of mucus swaying across its sharp little grin, as it extended a claw towards the mountainous shape of Ghazghkull’s torso in the gloom.

There, screwed into a socket high up on the boss’ fortress of a shoulder, and glinting weakly where endless bullet-strikes had hammered and holed it, was indeed a tattered metal banner. And on its lumpy surface, copied faithfully from the copy of a hundred previous copies, was the design that had first been daubed in the Prophet’s own blood, back in the yard behind Grotsnik’s own medical tent.

Makari? Makari? Makari?

The name echoed in Grotsnik’s head, like a drumbeat, coming from every direction at once. Is this it? he thought to himself, as the full misery of the truth continued seeping through his skull like ice water. Am I finally, properly, going mad?

But Grotsnik was not going mad. Or if he was, it had nothing to do with the name he could hear being shouted, over and over again. Because the name, he heard now, was being repeated in the same, unmistakable voice whose bellows and barks had underscored Grotsnik’s work for some time now. It was Bullets, somewhere outside the laboratory’s door. And there was, in fact, a drumbeat underlying it. Something like a drumbeat, anyway: a wet, thudding crack, just a moment or two after each repetition of that hated name.

Makari? Crack! Makari? Crack! Makari? Crack!

Despite the many, many other thoughts clamouring for space in Grotsnik’s mind, then, he could never ignore the evidence of somebody else getting know-wots wrong, and he clicked his tusks in contempt.

‘The zoggin’ moron,’ he muttered. ‘He’s trying to find them, isn’t he? Trying to find a new Makari. Goin’ along a line of grots, I’ll bet, and braining ’em when they don’t respond.’ The dok shook his head mournfully, and absent-mindedly gathered a spanner from his belt. ‘Doesn’t he have the wits to realise it was always the boss’ touch, brought the little bin-git back, not just the name?’

‘We’ve still got the Prophet’s old hands…’ said Drippa, nodding conspiratorially towards a hopper at the back of the dome, stacked with hunks of leathery green flesh. ‘Wonder if they’d still work?’

Grotsnik the ork opened his mouth to roar abuse, with fangs bared and talons arched. But Mad Dok Grotsnik said nothing, because he was doing straight-line-thinking. The grot, for all its attitude, was correct. There was one factor that had been common to both incidents of Ghazghkull’s resurrection, it turned out. And yet, it was absent from this attempt. For all that he hated Makari, he knew that – as a scientist, if not as an ork – it was his duty to suffer them once more.

He took a long look down at Drippa the grot, and narrowed his eye. Was there a similarity there? No. But it didn’t matter: the little sods looked different every time. But the attitude? The spiteful, smug piety? Oh, yes; on that front, Drippa was more than halfway there already. It’d make a perfect test subject.

Drippa had been about to say something, but didn’t get the chance before the ork’s arm swooped down and picked it up bodily by its ragged, greasy ear.

‘Congratulations, Drippa,’ announced Mad Dok Grotsnik, a smirk of triumph finding a foothold on his face again at last. ‘You’re about to pioneer an entirely new field of research with me. I suggest you start thinking godly thoughts.’

He turned, then, to the rest of the lab’s grot workers, who had been beginning to disperse in disappointment, now that it looked like further violence was unlikely.

‘And you lot?’ boomed the dok, his eye gleaming with reflections of arc lightning from the capacitors. ‘Fetch the boss’ old hand, and pulley armature three. We’re going to do a little experiment.’

‘How’s that gonna help?’ screeched a miserable specimen at the back of the crowd, with a feeble shrug. ‘Bringing the Prophet back’s still impossible.’

‘Foolish grot,’ grinned Grotsnik, turning his wild gaze to the ceiling once more, and the green stars which shone, concealed, behind it. ‘Something’s only impossible, you know, if the Great Green ain’t willed it yet.’

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nate Crowley is an SFF author and games journalist who lives in Walsall with his wife, daughter, and a cat he insists on calling Turkey Boy. He loves going to the zoo, playing needlessly complicated strategy games, and cooking incredible stews. Severed is his third story for Black Library, the others being ‘Empra’ and ‘The Enemy of My Enemy’.

An extract from Avenging Son.

‘I was there at the Siege of Terra,’ Vitrian Messinius would say in his later years.

‘I was there…’ he would add to himself, his words never meant for ears but his own. ‘I was there the day the Imperium died.’

But that was yet to come.

‘To the walls! To the walls! The enemy is coming!’ Captain Messinius, as he was then, led his Space Marines across the Penitent’s Square high up on the Lion’s Gate. ‘Another attack! Repel them! Send them back to the warp!’

Thousands of red-skinned monsters born of fear and sin scaled the outer ramparts, fury and murder incarnate. The mortals they faced quailed. It took the heart of a Space Marine to stand against them without fear, and the Angels of Death were in short supply.

‘Another attack, move, move! To the walls!’

They came in the days after the Avenging Son returned, emerging from nothing, eight legions strong, bringing the bulk of their numbers to bear against the chief entrance to the Imperial Palace. A decapitation strike like no other, and it came perilously close to success.

Messinius’ Space Marines ran to the parapet edging the Penitent’s Square. On many worlds, the square would have been a plaza fit to adorn the centre of any great city. Not on Terra. On the immensity of the Lion’s Gate, it was nothing, one of hundreds of similarly huge spaces. The word ‘gate’ did not suit the scale of the cityscape. The Lion’s Gate’s bulk marched up into the sky, step by titanic step, until it rose far higher than the mountains it had supplanted. The gate had been built by the Emperor Himself, they said. Myths detailed the improbable supernatural feats required to raise it. They were lies, all of them, and belittled the true effort needed to build such an edifice. Though the Lion’s Gate was made to His design and by His command, the soaring monument had been constructed by mortals, with mortal hands and mortal tools. Messinius wished that had been remembered. For men to build this was far more impressive than any godly act of creation. If men could remember that, he believed, then perhaps they would remember their own strength.

The uncanny may not have built the gate, but it threatened to bring it down. Messinius looked over the rampart lip, down to the lower levels thousands of feet below and the spread of the Anterior Barbican.

Upon the stepped fortifications of the Lion’s Gate was armour of every colour and the blood of every loyal primarch. Dozens of regiments stood alongside them. Aircraft filled the sky. Guns boomed from every quarter. In the churning redness on the great roads, processional ways so huge they were akin to prairies cast in rockcrete, were flashes of gold where the Emperor’s Custodian Guard battled. The might of the Imperium was gathered there, in the palace where He dwelt.

There seemed moments on that day when it might not be enough.

The outer ramparts were carpeted in red bodies that writhed and heaved, obscuring the great statues adorning the defences and covering over the guns, an invasive cancer consuming reality. The enemy were legion. There were too many foes to defeat by plan and ruse. Only guns, and will, would see the day won, but the defenders were so pitifully few.

Messinius called a wordless halt, clenched fist raised, seeking the best place to deploy his mixed company, veterans all of the Terran Crusade. Gunships and fighters sped overhead, unleashing deadly light and streams of bombs into the packed daemonic masses. There were innumerable cannons crammed onto the gate, and they all fired, rippling the structure with false earthquakes. Soon the many ships and orbital defences of Terra would add their guns, targeting the very world they were meant to guard, but the attack had come so suddenly; as yet they had had no time to react.

The noise was horrendous. Messinius’ audio dampers were at maximum and still the roar of ordnance stung his ears. Those humans that survived today would be rendered deaf. But he would have welcomed more guns, and louder still, for all the defensive fury of the assailed palace could not drown out the hideous noise of the daemons – their sighing hisses, a billion serpents strong, and chittering, screaming wails. It was not only heard but sensed within the soul, the realms of spirit and of matter were so intertwined. Messinius’ being would be forever stained by it.

Tactical information scrolled down his helmplate, near environs only. He had little strategic overview of the situation. The vox-channels were choked with a hellish screaming that made communication impossible. The noosphere was disrupted by etheric backwash spilling from the immaterial rifts the daemons poured through. Messinius was used to operating on his own. Small-scale, surgical actions were the way of the Adeptus Astartes, but in a battle of this scale, a lack of central coordination would lead inevitably to defeat. This was not like the first Siege, where his kind had fought in Legions.

He called up a company-wide vox-cast and spoke to his warriors. They were not his Chapter-kin, but they would listen. The primarch himself had commanded that they do so.

‘Reinforce the mortals,’ he said. ‘Their morale is wavering. Position yourselves every fifty yards. Cover the whole of the south-facing front. Let them see you.’ He directed his warriors by chopping at the air with his left hand. His right, bearing an inactive power fist, hung heavily at his side. ‘Assault Squad Antiocles, back forty yards, single firing line. Prepare to engage enemy breakthroughs only on my mark. Devastators, split to demi-squads and take up high ground, sergeant and sub-squad prime’s discretion as to positioning and target. Remember our objective, heavy infliction of casualties. We kill as many as we can, we retreat, then hold at the Penitent’s Arch until further notice. Command squad, with me.’

Command squad was too grand a title for the mismatched crew Messinius had gathered around himself. His own officers were light years away, if they still lived.

‘Doveskamor, Tidominus,’ he said to the two Aurora Marines with him. ‘Take the left.’

‘Yes, captain,’ they voxed, and jogged away, their green armour glinting orange in the hell-light of the invasion.

The rest of his scratch squad was comprised of a communications specialist from the Death Spectres, an Omega Marine with a penchant for plasma weaponry, and a Raptor holding an ancient standard he’d taken from a dusty display.

‘Why did you take that, Brother Kryvesh?’ Messinius asked, as they moved forward.

‘The palace is full of such relics,’ said the Raptor. ‘It seems only right to put them to use. No one else wanted it.’

Messinius stared at him.

‘What? If the gate falls, we’ll have more to worry about than my minor indiscretion. It’ll be good for morale.’

The squads were splitting to join the standard humans. Such was the noise many of the men on the wall had not noticed their arrival, and a ripple of surprise went along the line as they appeared at their sides. Messinius was glad to see they seemed more firm when they turned their eyes back outwards.

‘Anzigus,’ he said to the Death Spectre. ‘Hold back, facilitate communication within the company. Maximum signal gain. This interference will only get worse. See if you can get us patched in to wider theatre command. I’ll take a hardline if you can find one.’

‘Yes, captain,’ said Anzigus. He bowed a helm that was bulbous with additional equipment. He already had the access flap of the bulky vox-unit on his arm open. He withdrew, the aerials on his power plant extending. He headed towards a systems nexus on the far wall of the plaza, where soaring buttresses pushed back against the immense weight bearing down upon them.

Messinius watched him go. He knew next to nothing about Anzigus. He spoke little, and when he did, his voice was funereal. His Chapter was mysterious, but the same lack of familiarity held true for many of these warriors, thrown together by miraculous events. Over their years lost wandering in the warp, Messinius had come to see some as friends as well as comrades, others he hardly knew, and none he knew so well as his own Chapter brothers. But they would stand together. They were Space Marines. They had fought by the returned primarch’s side, and in that they shared a bond. They would not stint in their duty now.

Messinius chose a spot on the wall, directing his other veterans to left and right. Kryvesh he sent to the mortal officer’s side. He looked down again, out past the enemy and over the outer palace. Spires stretched away in every direction. Smoke rose from all over the landscape. Some of it was new, the work of the daemon horde, but Terra had been burning for weeks. The Astronomican had failed. The galaxy was split in two. Behind them in the sky turned the great palace gyre, its deep eye marking out the throne room of the Emperor Himself.

‘Sir!’ A member of the Palatine Guard shouted over the din. He pointed downwards, to the left. Messinius followed his wavering finger. Three hundred feet below, daemons were climbing. They came upwards in a triangle tipped by a brute with a double rack of horns. It clambered hand over hand, far faster than should be possible, flying upwards, as if it touched the side of the towering gate only as a concession to reality. A Space Marine with claw locks could not have climbed that fast.

‘Soldiers of the Imperium! The enemy is upon us!’

He looked to the mortals. Their faces were blanched with fear. Their weapons shook. Their bravery was commendable nonetheless. Not one of them attempted to run, though a wave of terror preceded the unnatural things clambering up towards them.

‘We shall not turn away from our duty, no matter how fearful the foe, or how dire our fates may be,’ he said. ‘Behind us is the Sanctum of the Emperor Himself. As He has watched over you, now it is your turn to stand in guardianship over Him.’

The creatures were drawing closer. Through a sliding, magnified window on his display, Messinius looked into the yellow and cunning eyes of their leader. A long tongue lolled permanently from the thing’s mouth, licking at the wall, tasting the terror of the beings it protected.

Boltgun actions clicked. His men leaned over the parapet, towering over the mortals as the Lion’s Gate towered over the Ultimate Wall. A wealth of targeting data was exchanged, warrior to warrior, as each chose a unique mark. No bolt would be wasted in the opening fusillade. They could hear the creatures’ individual shrieks and growls, all wordless, but their meaning was clear: blood, blood, blood. Blood and skulls.

Messinius sneered at them. He ignited his power fist with a swift jerk. He always preferred the visceral thrill of manual activation. Motors came to full life. Lightning crackled around it. He aimed downwards with his bolt pistol. A reticule danced over diabolical faces, each a copy of all the others. These things were not real. They were not alive. They were projections of a false god. The Librarian Atramo had named them maladies. A spiritual sickness wearing ersatz flesh.

He reminded himself to be wary. Contempt was as thick as any armour, but these things were deadly, for all their unreality.

He knew. He had fought the Neverborn many times before.

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* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.