The Successors, page 1
More Warhammer 40,000 from Black Library
• DAWN OF FIRE •
Book 1: AVENGING SON
Guy Haley
Book 2: THE GATE OF BONES
Andy Clark
• DARK IMPERIUM •
Guy Haley
Book 1: DARK IMPERIUM
Book 2: PLAGUE WAR
Book 3: GODBLIGHT
• MEPHISTON •
Darius Hinks
Book 1: BLOOD OF SANGUINIUS
Book 2: REVENANT CRUSADE
Book 3: CITY OF LIGHT
DARKNESS IN THE BLOOD
Guy Haley
SPEAR OF THE EMPEROR
Aaron Dembski-Bowden
SILENT HUNTERS
Edoardo Albert
LEGACY OF DORN
Mike Lee
TRAITOR BY DEED
Ben Counter
SONS OF SANGUINIUS
A Blood Angels omnibus by various authors
THE DEVASTATION OF BAAL
A Blood Angels novel by Guy Haley
ASHES OF PROSPERO
A Space Wolves novel by Gav Thorpe
WAR OF SECRETS
A Dark Angels novel by Phil Kelly
OF HONOUR AND IRON
An Ultramarines novel by Ian St. Martin
APOCALYPSE
A Primaris Marines novel by Josh Reynolds
FIST OF THE IMPERIUM
An Imperial Fists novel by Andy Clark
Contents
Cover
Backlist
Title Page
Warhammer 40,000
The Empty Place
The Phalangite Ascendancy
Disgraced
The First Primaris
The Last Planet
Legacy of Posul
The Wolves of Raukos
The Sins of My Brothers
Patience Kills
Bless the Curse
Living Relics
Iron Watch
Son of the Storm World
About the Authors
An Extract from ‘Dawn of Fire: Avenging Son’
A Black Library Publication
eBook license
It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of Mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of His inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that He may never truly die.
Yet even in His deathless state, the Emperor continues His eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in His name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Astra Militarum and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse.
To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.
THE EMPTY PLACE
GRAHAM MCNEILL
Uniquely resilient against the predations of Chaos thanks to a ritual that sees their recruits possessed, then purged, none have gone as far as the Exorcists in their wars against the Daemon. Now, in the wake of the Cicatrix Maledictum, these Sons of Dorn stand to hold the denizens of the warp at bay.
Daemones non operantur nisi per artem.
– Grimoire Purgatus
Sight is the last of my senses they mutilate.
I have been all but deafened with endless chanting designed to break my will, suffered red-hot chains of fire at my neck, choked on the cloying reek of noxious incenses, and had vials of their physiker’s poisons forced down my throat.
I have endured it all without breaking, spat my fury back in their masked faces.
But now they come for my eyes.
Their brutal alchemies are still slowing me, and heavy chains bind my wrists, neck and ankles to the iron frame of an excruciation throne. Mute servitors with dead faces and blood-red eyes drill into my immobile skull, and I tense my jaw as steel anchors extend into my parietal and sphenoid bones.
I grit my teeth. I have known worse pain. What is to come will be much worse.
I have known pain every day since I was deemed worthy for ascension and they gave my flesh to another. I accept it. I use it. Pain is part of who I am. Every time the doomed, weeping serfs fix my warplate to my scarified flesh, I know pain will come.
Blood flows down the side of my head. I taste its metallic tang as it runs into my mouth.
I relish it, feel its ancient potency.
The blood is the power, the strength, and the source.
A mask of black iron is fitted over my face. Whirring clamps extend, peeling my eyelids back and slitting them from my head with a buzz of blades. I barely notice the pain. A gag of frozen iron is pressed into my mouth, burning my gums and forcing my jaw apart – so wide I feel the skin at the corners of my mouth split.
The servitors step back, and I hear recitations: dogmatic scripture from a book, its nature familiar to me from a long-ago ritual. The words are relayed into the room via a winged cherub augmitter hanging upside down on a cable by its ankle. It sways gently from a flaking roof girder next to a slowly rotating ceiling fan with only a single blade remaining.
Wait… Are they praying for me?
Do they think to purge my soul before they mutilate me?
Wild laughter bubbles up a throat made raw and bloody by vile recitations, but all that emerges from my split maw is a retching, hacking death rattle.
My lidless eyes scan the room. The walls are tiled in pale ceramic, pitted with old blood.
The floor is a fine metal grille, its mesh dripping with rust and clotted blood. This last detail, together with the heavy, bovine reek of fear, tells me I am in an abattoir’s kill-chamber: a place where beasts and men have been driven towards hooded figures with knives whetted for their murder.
A cell. A place they think safe enough to cage me.
Then, bright light; blinding. Something moves within it.
A figure enters the room, robed in black and wearing the onyx death mask of a chirurgeon. His back and arms are scaffolded in clicking, ratcheting instruments of surgical steel. The stuttering light of the only remaining lumen gleams from innumerable blades and needles.
He is attended by acolytes in similar robes, their faces likewise hidden like cowards. Each bears a guttering candle and whispers something just below the threshold of hearing, but which buzzes in my ear like a trapped insect.
The chirurgeon looks at me through his glossy mask with eyes of pale blue that seem almost pitying. He steps close and runs a leather-gloved hand over my shaven scalp.
The servitors have already torn out my killing implants, the wounds still wet, but his touch is gentle, as though concerned he not cause any suffering beyond that which he has been ordered to inflict.
‘So rare to capture one of your kind alive,’ he says.
His eyes roam across my naked flesh: the web of ash-rubbed scars, the tattooed symbols of excoriation culled from blood-soaked tomes, the ritual tally marks of death. I have paid in blood for each of these signs, mine and that of my enemies.
I want to spew hate at him, to curse him and his deluded kind, but the iron gag keeps me silent. For now. When they remove it, as I know they must, I must fight the urge to spit my venom and tell him of all the murderous ruin I will visit upon him and his followers.
His acolytes spread out, three to either side, still whispering their useless catechisms. I cannot make out the words, but I feel them against my skin like tiny, rasping needles, probing and pricking me like an electric current.
Their words make my eyes itch, and I wish I could blink.
The quality of the light changes, and I turn my eyes past the chirurgeon to the rusted bronze eagle on the wall. Shock-pulses from the bombardments above have set it askew, but the chirurgeon cares little for the blasphemy. The lumen sways from side to side as the pulses fade, and light plays over the eagle’s face.
A face in light, a hooded eye in darkness, then reversed.
The instruments of the chirurgeon’s trade unfold from his arms, each like the curling stinger of a jungle-devil, gleaming with threat and dripping with the promise of agony.
Another seismic rumble trembles the chamber walls. Closer this time. This deep in the building, I cannot tell to which faction the guns belong. Dust drifts from the ceiling, stirred into patterns of significance by the lone blade of the fan. Some o
Two more detonations close by. The entire building shudders.
One of the acolytes stumbles, and I feel his robes brush the ends of my fingertips.
I don’t waste my chance.
I seize him, curling my fingers around his robe and pulling him in close.
He struggles against my grip, but it’s already too late. I have barely a handspan of travel in my wrist, but piston my fingertips like a blade into his solar plexus. The impact sends waves of shock-trauma through his chest to shatter his ribs. Bone fragments drive up through his lungs and into his heart.
He drops, choking for breath, tearing at his throat and coughing blood. The others pull back in alarm, but the chirurgeon only smiles. He bends over me, his blue eyes meeting my drug-dilated black ones.
‘Kill them all, it won’t matter,’ he says. ‘He will get what he needs from you.’
One of his scorpion-tail devices arcs up behind his shoulder. A fat droplet forms at its tip. I smell its acrid, counterseptic stink.
The tail stabs down, so fast I cannot follow.
Needle-sharp metal pierces my right eye, hot enough to vaporise the fluid within. It snaps back and my remaining eye sees the pierced orb plucked from my skull, trailing an arc of blood and a neatly severed frond of optic tissue.
Slivers of viscous fluid spill down my cheek.
‘Now we can begin,’ says the chirurgeon.
The words are spoken, the offerings made.
Blood and the foetid leavings of corpses.
The veil is weak here, worn thin by acts of intentional cruelty.
My form is formless: knotted, twisted-up screeds of violence and murder-lust. I am hate engraved on immaterial bones, a fury older than time.
Limbs unfold, foetal-soft, hardening as the bland physics of realspace effects its change.
I feel it tear, this wall that seals the way between worlds. So very thin: new-grown skin on the blade’s hard edge, but anathema to my kind.
I rip through it like a newborn clawing at its birth-caul as it fights its way out of its mother’s bloody belly, raw and screaming.
I pour through, my energies inimical to this world.
My form is dark. Smoking. Blood-hunger as a burning pattern of horror etched in the air.
I am the carrion-eaters over a slaughter-field, the murderer’s blood-fugue, the thirst of life-taking that dwells in all mortal hearts.
I need form no poisoned skin, no scales of armour; no horns to gouge, nor teeth to rend. A host body has been prepared for me, ripe to violate and make mine. His flesh is cut with the marks that turn the lock of his soul and leave it wide open.
No hapless warlock this, woefully unequipped to face the consequences of his foolishness. This is a willing host, one who has been made ready by men with understanding of such things. I can taste the power of his flesh, the strength of his heart.
Oh, the slaughters I will reap with such a form!
His fear invigorates me. He is willing perhaps, but unprepared for what his assent truly means. I will abuse the meat of his flesh, and in time I will grind his bones down to powder. And if he is not dead when I am done with him, I will discard his husked skin-sac like offal.
Even then, he will know no respite.
His mind will be broken, his flesh ruined.
His kin will shun him, will hate him for my sins.
They will burn him and salt his ashes.
And I will watch from beyond the veil for his soul when it is sent screaming over that numinous threshold for one last horror.
Such a wretched soul will be a frail, wasted thing, barely worth the attention of a Neverborn prince such as I.
But I will devour it just the same.
For hate’s sake, for spite.
He resists me now, but I tear my way inside.
Finally understanding the inescapable truth of what he has invited into his flesh, his body rebels. He cannot resist, and I pour my essence into him.
The screams of agony are delicious, rarefied, for his kind do not scream easily.
His flesh is mine now.
I am left in the light of the swaying lumen, raging, my vision steeped in red.
They will not leave me too long; the bloody noose around this city is tightening, and they cannot afford to wait to split me open and study my inner workings. They are right, it is rare to capture a being like me alive, for we are uniquely new and mighty beyond anything they have faced before.
My flesh is old and yet new, empowered by mystic arts unknown to them.
I am a worthy prize indeed. A prize worthy, perhaps, of powerful eyes.
As if my captor has been summoned by the thought, the door grates open on rusted wheels. I can taste the stale blood of tens of thousands of animals on the rollers. I can almost feel their blind, bowel-emptying terror as they are dragged in. A fitting place for what they intend, I think.
Two acolytes in bloodstained robes and pewter masks enter. They circle behind me, careful to keep their distance.
I have already shown them how dangerous I am.
I lose sight of them on my blinded side, then feel metalled hands on my skull, unshackling the iron gag wedged in my stretched jaw. I close my mouth, and the pain is blinding, my jawbone cracking as if fused and now splitting like bones on a pyre.
The acolytes back away, and my attention turns to the one they serve.
He enters the kill-chamber, and I confess I am disappointed at how ordinary he looks. Most of his kind I have killed were garbed in the panoply of death to better evoke the terror of their masters, bedecked in useless finery, and ludicrously ill-suited for the battlefield.
This one has none of that, and I am immediately wary.
He wears only a simple hessian robe, secured at the waist with a frayed cord that might once have been ivory, but is now a washed-out ochre. Droplets of blood stain its weave, but beyond that, he might have stepped from any backwater temple.
His skull is tonsured, his face bland, almost androgynous, and doughy with an unhealthy pallor common to those who rarely venture from within their walls of stone. But his eyes tell a different story: they are utterly white, icy and without mercy.
An acolyte moves a seat into position, and he gathers his robe to sit opposite me. He pauses to brush some dust from his shoulders. A pointless gesture, as the approaching bombardments will just shake more loose from the slaughter floors above.
He laces his fingers together and clears his throat.
I speak before he can.
‘You are going to die here,’ I say, my throat raw from the poisons I have ingested.
He nods. ‘That is entirely possible. Your cohorts are tearing this city apart to find us.’
‘It won’t be a good death,’ I add. ‘Your kind never dies well. It’s always messy. Lots of screaming. Lots of blood. It’ll probably be me that does it. I owe you a death, a painful one.’
‘Is this supposed to frighten me?’
‘Yes.’
‘It does not. Oh, you are new and impressive, yes, but I have faced things far more terrible than you. Things of blood, of fire and of corruption. I am still here, and they are not.’
‘You have not faced anything like me or my kin.’
‘No,’ admitted the man. ‘Which is why I am here. Your flesh is valuable.’
I almost laugh, but blood bubbles up from the ruin of my lungs.
‘You think to carve secrets from my bones, is that it?’
‘Something like that,’ he agrees. ‘My chirurgeon is very skilled. He has dismantled many of your brethren over the years. But, you…? You, I think, will be different. You are special.’
‘More than you know.’
‘Exactly my point,’ he says, leaning in. ‘But I am getting ahead of myself. My name is–’
‘Serdai Tymon,’ I say, and am rewarded with a fractional raise of his eyebrow. ‘I’m curious, is Serdai a name or a title?’
‘Neither,’ he says, recovering quickly. ‘And you are Merrin Dragomir, First Blade of the Sons of Balthasar. I’m curious, is that a sect within your ranks or a martial warrior lodge?’
He thinks to show that his knowledge is the equal of mine, but it is a poor gambit.
‘I know you know me,’ I say. ‘I would already be dead if you did not. On this world, in this conflict, there are few who do not know and fear the name of Dragomir. I hear your soldiers say a prayer each night to be spared the teeth of my blade.’
