Hand Of Abaddon, page 1
Praise for Book One
Dawn of Fire: Avenging Son
by Guy Haley
‘The beginning of an essential new epic: heroic, cataclysmic and vast in scope. Guy has delivered exactly what 40K readers crave, and lit the fuse on the Dark Millennium. This far future’s about to detonate…’
Dan Abnett, author of Horus Rising
‘With all the thunderous scope of The Horus Heresy, a magnificent new saga begins.’
Peter McLean, author of Priest of Bones
‘A perfect blending of themes – characters that are raw, real and wonderfully human, set against a backdrop of battle and mythology’.
Danie Ware, author of Ecko Rising
Black Library
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Contents
Cover
Praise
Warhammer 40,000
Hand of Abaddon
Dramatis Personae
Map
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Epilogue
Appendix: Notes on the Crusade
About the Author
An Extract from ‘The Lion: Son of the Forest’
Backlist
A Black Library Publication
eBook license
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 might of his inexhaustible armies a million worlds stand against the dark.
Yet, he is a rotting carcass, the Carrion Lord of the Imperium held in life by marvels from the Dark Age of Technology and the thousand souls sacrificed each day so his may continue to burn.
To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable. It is to suffer an eternity of carnage and slaughter. It is to have cries of anguish and sorrow drowned by the thirsting laughter of dark gods.
This is a dark and terrible era where you will find little comfort or hope. Forget the power of technology and science. Forget the promise of progress and advancement. Forget any notion of common humanity or compassion.
There is no peace amongst the stars, for in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
agents of the emperor
Leonid Rostov – Inquisitor
Syreniel – Oblivion Knight of the Palatine Vigilators, Silent Sisterhood
Katla Helvintr – Rogue trader
Benidei Antoniato – Interrogator
Hayden Lacrante – Investigatus
Cheelche – Xenos gunslinger
Yamir – Rogue trader
Nirdrangar – Inquisitorial storm trooper
astra militarum
Isiah Falden – Colonel, 84th Mordian
Magda Kesh – Sergeant, 84th Mordian
Abel Munser – Lieutenant, 84th Mordian
Lodrin – Trooper, 84th Mordian
Mavin – Trooper, 84th Mordian
Vosko – Corporal, 84th Mordian
Nakaturo – Colonel, 116th Catachan
Hagan – Captain, Catachan
servants of chaos
Tharador Yheng – Sorceress, acolyte of Tenebrus
Tenebrus – Sorcerer, the Hand of Abaddon
The Iron Magus – Dark Mechanicum magos
Augury – Entity, the Hand of Abaddon
renegade astartes
Graeyl Herek – Red Corsair, pirate lord and captain of the Ruin
Vassago Kurgos – Red Corsair, chirurgeon
Rathek – Red Corsair, called ‘the Culler’
Clortho – Red Corsair
adeptus astartes
Maximus Epathus – Sixth Company Ultramarines, captain
Ferren Areios – Sixth Company Ultramarines, lieutenant
Maendaius – Sixth Company Ultramarines, Librarian
Cicero – Sixth Company Ultramarines
Drussus – Sixth Company Ultramarines
Helicio – Sixth Company Ultramarines
Valentius – Sixth Company Ultramarines, Apothecary
Vitrian Messinius – Lord lieutenant, White Consuls
the kin
Vutred – Kâhl of Omrigar Kindred
Othed – Grimnyr
Utri – Einhyr Champion
Prologue
Fathomless black surrounded Yheng.
Absolute and suffocating.
It was a palpable otherness emanating from the walls of the vast ritual chamber, in the very stones beneath her feet. The stone shone like glass as she walked, her soft-soled feet padding on dark mirrors. Only it wasn’t glass, though her pale skin was reflected back at her. And the mirror wasn’t a mirror, not in the mundane sense.
It was all an illusion, perpetuated by the alien nature of this place and the primordial darkness the Hand had summoned into being. She knew this to be the black heart of their hidden fortress, where they had gathered in secret the pieces of a weapon so ancient its existence in the here and now defied belief. The prospect of that weapon and what it could do, in pieces though it still was, excited her.
Close enough to power to be able to step forth and touch it, close enough to something that had laid low the demigods of an elder age… The hairs arose on the backs of her arms as its name coalesced in her mind.
Anathame.
Its reacquisition was the Hand’s great purpose, overriding any personal agendas or enmities. And there were many between the members of the Hand.
Now the culmination of that goal drew near as they brought forth the supplicant into the ritual chamber and Yheng, like the rest of the gathering, took her place to bear witness. The supplicant was stripped of all trappings and naked, his skin a canvas upon which eight sigils would be written. She had paid rapt attention to her master as the ‘bestowing’ ritual was described to her, eager for knowledge, keener still to use that knowledge and everything else she had gleaned to step out of his shadow.
Soon… Much like the supplicant, her time was approaching.
He was led by a hooded acolyte to a large stone dais in the centre of the room. Eight thrones stood around it, carved with ancient sigils and the markings of the gods. The supplicant’s head was low, as if in abeyance, his muscular body together with the stark metal ports punched into his flesh revealing that he was one of the Traitor Astartes. Yheng smirked cruelly. She doubted a lesser being would survive the rite. As he knelt down, he bowed his head further, ready to receive the blessings of the Eight – otherwise known as the Hand of Abaddon.
Yheng’s master went first. Tenebrus had been standing just in front of her, a subtle reinforcement of his position and hers. She despised him for it. He was known in this dark covenant as the Sorcerer, a tall, hairless creature with corpse-like flesh and a cruel mouth that put Yheng in mind of the doktor-surgeons she had met when she was still in the bone-whittler’s gang on Gathalamor. How far away that seemed now… How small she had once been. No more.
Tenebrus stooped, his dark robes pooling around his feet like spilled ink, a narrow arm extending like a pallid proboscis, his outstretched finger as the quill. He inked a hex, and sombre chanting stirred from the room’s periphery where the hooded acolytes in attendance sang praises to the gods. Their voices echoed from the vaulted ceiling and soaring walls.
Eight shards would be bestowed upon the supplicant, the formerly disparate pieces of the Anathame reunited within this mortal flesh, one for each sigil made by the Hand. The first slid through skin and meat with ease as if the piece of scarred metal were eager for this union, as if it had sentience of its own.
Yheng knew little about the mythic blade that, legend said, had pierced Horus’ side
As Tenebrus retreated from the dais, he took care not to disturb the bloody runes painted onto the floor around it. Yheng could smell the bloodless bodies who had given up their vital fluids for the rite, could feel them staring sightlessly from the deeper shadows.
And so the weak are punished for their weakness…
‘Thus is the first anointing made and there will be eight and from the eight a great doom shall be made anew…’ Tenebrus uttered as he returned to her side. The air felt thicker all of a sudden, warm like an oven. As Yheng went to steady herself she made the mistake of touching one of the columns that stood between each of the thrones. Every nerve lit like a burning ember, white hot and searing. Yheng gasped but quickly mastered her pain. She would show no weakness here, not to the Hand.
Not to anyone.
Tenebrus turned, and laid a thin claw on her shoulder. Little, she admitted grudgingly, passed his notice.
‘What do you feel, Yheng of Gathalamor?’
Yheng spoke through gritted teeth, surprised at how thin and rasping her voice had suddenly become. ‘Pain…’ she hissed. ‘I feel its pain. How is that possible?’
She wasn’t talking about the supplicant. And Tenebrus somehow knew this.
He smiled, too wide, too deeply, his mouth like a crescent moon. ‘It is more than a place, more than a mechanism or a mere fortress. It has concealed us from prying eyes and allowed the shards to be gathered in secret.’ He gestured to the chamber and all the corridors and halls beyond. ‘It is ancient, Tharador Yheng. It can feel. It writhes in sympathetic agony for its twin that fell upon the Gate World of Cadia,’ he whispered. ‘Think of it as an animal, once wild and rampant. It has been shackled, bent to the will of the Hand. Chains will chafe if you pull against them.’ His eager gaze drifted to the supplicant, Yheng following with her eyes. ‘For in the end we are all slaves to the darkness, whether we want to admit it or not.’
The ceremony continued. Two of the Hand had returned to stand by their thrones: the Butcher King and the Host of Masks, their marks made. The Butcher King did not linger, his ragged crimson cloak trailing behind him as he stalked away to marshal his warriors, leaving the scent of hot copper in his wake. An impatient beast was the Butcher, a brutish instrument who craved battle. Yheng had heard his murderous rampages across the fortress echoing through the walls and had wisely steered away.
In contrast, the Host of Masks retreated with slithering poise after it had impaled another one of the shards into flesh, the face it was currently wearing etched with studious rapture. What lay behind that false face Yheng did not know, but she imagined scars or hideous mutation. Perhaps it was unsettlingly blank, a shapeless canvas upon which the Host could impress its moods. It wore a bodyglove of dark leather that did nothing to reveal who or even what it was. Like so many of the Hand, it was an enigma.
Less so, the maker of the fourth mark.
This was inscribed by the Iron Magus, a hulking shape whose black robes hid a plethora of cybernetics, a devotee of the Dark Mechanicum. As they ascended the dais, the Iron Magus turned their hollow and hooded regard upon Yheng. At the same moment, the light in the chamber darkened and she saw a bleak aura exuding from the kneeling supplicant. It suffused him in an unlight that ate the pale glow of lumens and the crackling blue fire of electro-flambeaux overhead. Yheng watched as their glow was devoured, and by the time her attention returned to the Iron Magus they had performed their part of the ritual and resumed their place in the covenant.
The fifth and the sixth marks were given by the Wretched Prince, a twisted, mutated creature whose withered form drew sneers of hatred from the assembly, and the Sin of Six Knives, a warp-born thing whose ethereal body flickered in and out of reality with only its sextet-blades and hooked grin persistently visible. A wind howled through the throne room at these two inscriptions, carrying the voices of the damned and the promises of the malign yet unborn essences of the warp. Reality shuddered, and for a fleeting half-second Yheng felt a hundred thousand eyes regard her with eager hunger. It was almost overwhelming, the insignificance of her existence never more achingly apparent. She took an involuntary step back, inwardly cursing herself for her weakness and doubly so when Tenebrus held her fast with a grip of iron.
‘You must witness!’ he snapped. ‘The eye of the gods is upon us.’
Six shards down, only two remained.
At the seventh shard, a bell began tolling, as if from far away, as if from a place beyond the throne room, beyond reality. The Scion of Plagues stepped back, his gauntleted hands resting on the pommel of a massive axe. He leaned backwards, a chuckle slipping through the grille of his bucket helm. A late ascension, this one, his appointment unexpected but needed. A putrescent reek wafted from this grim headsman, who was a warrior of the old war.
Upon the dais, the supplicant was barely a juddering silhouette in the unlight, feathered at the edges like a paint smear on a damp canvas. His back arched in apparent agony, limbs rigid by his sides as the culmination of the bestowing neared.
The eighth figure wore a formless cloak, white skin peeking from within the folds of a voluminous hood.
Augury.
As they placed their mark, long fingers caressing like a tongue tasting their prey and fed the last piece of jagged metal into flesh, they turned towards Yheng. At first, she thought it was her imagination, but the gaze of Augury was unmistakable. They had literally stopped to stare at her. Not a glance or a challenge like the Iron Magus – that had been blatant, obvious – though if any others of the Hand noticed Augury’s sudden interest in Yheng, they did not stir. Not even Tenebrus, who appeared almost entranced, locked out of time and place.
This moment was only for Yheng.
Augury’s lipless mouth curved into a sickle grin as the eighth pulled back its hood to reveal…
The demagogue who had recruited her on Gathalamor. Yheng had killed him herself, a sacrifice to the gods to ensure her rise to cult leader of the Blade Unsheathed. A shadow passed over the man’s face and, in its wake, his features thickened, his head broadened, old Colchisian runes marked his skin, and he became Kar-Gatharr. She had once called the Word Bearer master until–
The face changed again, thinning as if all its vital Astartesian vigour was draining away, to leave…
Tenebrus. The sorcerer eerily looked back, both simultaneously by her side and standing across the dais. She did not flinch, nor breathe, her heart thudding against her chest.
If the true Tenebrus thought anything amiss, he gave no outward sign.
Though it disgusted her, Yheng felt the urge to run. Flee or die, her body screamed. She should not be here in this place. This was beyond her, the wagers of gods and monsters. The ambitions she had harboured were nothing but the foolish dreams of a child grasping for the sun. Her overreach would destroy her.
No. She didn’t believe that.
Her expression hardened, the revulsion she felt for her former masters galvanising her, spurring her on.
I am Tharador Yheng, she asserted to herself. None will master me.
At this the simulacrum faded, sloughing away like dead skin, a mask of dust and nothing more, Yheng’s brief sense of disquiet fading with it. Augury’s pale visage remained, eyes hidden by the low hood, that lipless mouth still smiling. White and gelid, like a creature of deep places, of fathomless ocean trenches that had never felt the touch of sunlight.
And though the mouth did not move, Yheng heard its voice nonetheless, like a lover’s promise into her ear.
Behold…
Unlight filled the chamber and as it touched her, Yheng heard screaming – a long-held cry of agony, out of phase, echoing through displaced time.
Behold…
Through the pain and the tumult, Yheng felt it. The malign regard of the gods of Ruin. The rapture of it, the sense of being chosen. The sheer magnificence of it all…
Until it consumed her, and she fell screaming.
Chapter One
daughter of mordian
tartarus
