Servants of the imperium, p.1
Servants of the Imperium, page 1
More Warhammer 40,000 fiction from Black Library
• WATCHERS OF THE THRONE •
by Chris Wraight
Book One: THE EMPEROR’S LEGION
Book Two: THE REGENT’S SHADOW
KNIGHTS OF MACRAGGE
A Sicarius novel by Nick Kyme
CELESTINE: THE LIVING SAINT
A Sisters of Battle novel by Andy Clark
MERCY
A Sisters of Battle short story by Danie Ware
OF HONOUR AND IRON
An Ultramarines novel by Ian St. Martin
HONOURBOUND
A Severina Raine novel by Rachel Harrison
CADIAN HONOUR
An Imperial Guard novel by Justin D Hill
SHIELD OF THE EMPEROR
An Imperial Guard omnibus containing the novels Fifteen Hours, Death World and Rebel Winter by various authors.
LORDS & TYRANTS
A Warhammer 40,000 anthology by various authors
• DARK IMPERIUM •
by Guy Haley
Book One: DARK IMPERIUM
Book Two: PLAGUE WAR
• VAULTS OF TERRA •
by Chris Wraight
Book One: THE CARRION THRONE
Book Two: THE HOLLOW MOUNTAIN
CONTENTS
Cover
Backlist
Title Page
Warhammer 40,000
AURIC GODS
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
Epilogue
THE BLOODIED ROSE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
STEEL DAEMON
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
About the Authors
An Extract from ‘Dawn of Fire: Avenging Son’
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 that 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 cruellest 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.
AURIC GODS
NICK KYME
‘Gilded tombs do worms enfold.’
– The dramaturge Shakespire
PROLOGUE
The city glowered. Gaudy lights leered from its ugly silhouette. It seethed. He could feel its jagged countenance boring into his back.
Ezrik was going to die. He had known it ever since he and his sister had boarded the skimmer-craft bound for the ocean rigs.
He and Mythla were twins. Though not identical they did share certain traits, both in kin and kind. Their bond went beyond mere patrimony. So when Ezrik shivered, his thin, pale fingers clutching at his heavy robe, Mythla trembled too. Dark hair rippled beneath her hood. Her grip was firm. She had always been the stronger of the two, her gifts more profound.
‘Hold on, brother,’ she whispered, her words carried away by the wind.
Mythla tugged up the collar of her cloak, trying to ward off the scything cold. Gusts cut across the disused rigging platform like knives of ice, deep enough to find bone. Frost sheathed the mainland, and the banks of looming cloud overhead presaged a heavy snow. Ezrik loved the snow. It had a slow sort of melancholy that appealed to him. But it wasn’t the cold that chilled his sister, or set his teeth to chattering. Ezrik knew their fear came from another place.
From the deep.
Black and fathomless, made darker by the lack of a moon, the sea churned that night. Grey light shone onto the water from humming lumen arrays set around the edge of the rigging platform. It was shaped like a letter ‘C’ with the lamps aimed into the space, which was partially delineated by the sturdy metal decking. Each lamp was directed downwards, their grainy beams converging to a point where four lengths of chain hauled on something concealed beneath the ocean. It was rising steadily.
Four cranes, industrial-grade, heaved at their drowned burden. Ezrik winced as each ugly link of iron fed through the crane pulleys. Hot pins pierced his brain meat, sending small convulsions through his thin frame. Mythla tensed, her skeleton suddenly taut and rigid. A tiny yelp of pain escaped her lips.
Ezrik had never known Mythla to betray weakness before.
‘Sister…’ he tried to say, but she wasn’t listening. She couldn’t.
Fire raced through Ezrik’s marrow. He no longer felt the cold. He could barely hear the sea. A darkening intruded at the edge of his vision that put him in mind of the black water, as if it had somehow spilled onto his eyes and was slowly swallowing his sight.
It took considerable effort but he glanced at their minders, standing either side of them. He wanted to see if they felt it too. Ever since he was a boy, Ezrik had been good with details. Enhanced perception was a part of his gift. He turned that gift on the man and the woman standing close enough for him to touch. Tough, athletic, they had long storm coats that failed to hide the bonded carapace they wore beneath. Nor did their attire smother the side holsters belted at their hips and the heavy-gauge pistols sat snugly within. Both had Militarum haircuts, close-shaved, and a faded Guard tattoo on the left temple. A much newer mark was etched below the right eye – a solitary candle with a lit flame.
Most interesting of all were their collars. Though ostensibly of dull, grey plasteel, a closer examination revealed circuitry and a tiny diode, almost invisible in the foul conditions, winking… Green-green-green.
An activation rune, Ezrik realised.
He considered trying to reach into the machine, extinguish the rune and see what happened next. He wondered about escape. But then his attention went back to his sister and he knew it was impossible.
Mythla stood less than a foot away. She might as well have been on another continent. Her eyes had turned completely white. Her splayed fingers quivered, as if touched by an electrical current. She shook, slightly at first but with increasing violence.
Mythla took the strain for him. His older sister was trying to bear the pain alone.
They had been careful. They had hidden for years, successfully, swallowed amongst the masses. Hidden from the witch-takers and the Black Ships. But he had found them. The wanderer. He said it was providence. He said it was His will. Ezrik believed that ‘His will’ had nothing to do with it, that instead the slumlord to whom they owed their rent and for whom he and his sister had performed certain ‘favours’ over the years had betrayed them.
Ezrik reflected on this poor turn of circumstances as Mythla’s skin shrivelled and started to flake, the very essence of her degrading before his eyes. A sudden desire overcame him to tell her what she meant to him, that he loved her, although they had never been close by any conventional assessment. They had bickered, the presence of one an irritant to the other. A side effect of the gift. But they had stayed together, driven by the fear that gripped all outcasts, of being alone with no one to externalise their inner misery upon.
Such was their antipathy that it had been several years since Ezrik and Mythla had touched. To touch meant to share thoughts, to share pain, but as the chain links clacked upwards Ezrik reached out and held Mythla’s hand.
White heat flowed, her thoughts subsumed by it. Nothing else remained but the fire. Mythla had been cored out so that the only thing left in her skull was a piece of slowly burning meat. Ezrik smelled it. His sister. Burning.
The chain clacked again, thunderous inside the tortured confines of Ezrik’s head.
He looked down, drawn by the sound, a p
The chains clacked on, the metal casket dangling heavily in mid-air, turning slightly in the wind.
Ezrik lay on his side, the taste of his own blood heady on his tongue, in his nose. His inner ear felt wet and he knew he bled from there too.
Now he was really shaking, and though terror resonated through his body like a shock wave, he couldn’t tear his sight away from that casket. Every detail spoke to him. The heavily aged metal, the warding sigils carved into its sides worn almost to nothing, the faint Inquisitorial seal…
Through his final agonies, Ezrik became aware of a figure that had crouched down next to him.
‘Well done… well done,’ said a voice.
Calm, cultured, foreign.
Ezrik hadn’t realised he was here. The wanderer.
The chain clacked.
Smooth, faintly perfumed fingers cradled Ezrik’s chin. His eyes bulged. His teeth clenched. The carotid artery in his neck stuck out, as taut and thick as a hawser. Ezrik trembled, rage boiling inside as he breathed in his sister’s ash.
A tanned face looked down at him.
Every detail rushed by in a blur of fading cognition.
Strong cheekbones; straight, unblemished teeth; skin tightened by repeated rejuvenat treatments.
Fair hair, cut short.
A muscled neck met broad shoulders under robes, under flak armour.
Rings on every finger, shaped like little golden candles with frozen flames.
A tattoo inscribed above the bridge of the nose, the letter ‘I’ within an eye.
Such belief Ezrik saw in those silver-grey eyes. Such conviction!
The collar around the wanderer’s neck winked… Green-green-green.
Ezrik wanted to touch it, to snuff out that light and let whatever lurked in the metal casket have its way. But all he could do was die and he quailed in that moment of revelation, realising why they had been brought here.
His captors needed proof.
‘Do not yield to despair,’ said the wanderer as Ezrik’s mind slowly boiled away to smoke. The burning he smelled was his own, but the wanderer smiled in spite of the horror of human immolation. ‘Your suffering serves a great purpose.’ He wiped away a trickle of blood from his nose as the snow began to fall.
CHAPTER ONE
City of Vorganthian, Kobor, within Terra’s light
Pain was an old friend. Meroved kept this in mind as he worked through the last of the sword and spear disciplines. Thrust, turn, parry, thrust, turn, parry. The regimen was necessarily rigorous, the pace increasing with each rotation, and it showed in the finest sheen of sweat across his body. His muscles burned as he completed the final kata, his spear-tip blurring with sheer ferocity.
Meroved held his stance for several minutes at the end, his skin trembling with the effort, his breath even and controlled to siphon the pain.
He looked into the eyes of the man in the mirror before him. They were weary and the colour of creamy jade. It was not for vanity that the entire north wall of the training arena had been replaced with this silver reflective pane. He studied with it. Form mattered, so did speed and precision.
An old man, at least to Meroved’s eyes, looked back. Barefoot, naked but for the short-legged training fatigues he wore. Sweating and weary from exertion. More grey than black in his beard. The skin looser than it had been before, the ink proclaiming his many deeds and many names faded, scars that had soured with age. Even the bionics, the metal that had replaced shattered bone and destroyed tissue, appeared to have lost some of their Martian solidity. Centuries take a toll. He had lessened. To mortal eyes he would appear quite different. But their senses were not so attuned, and more awestruck.
‘End session,’ he said with barely a discernible hint of fatigue, but Meroved heard it. He knew.
The chrono confirmed it. Three-tenths of a second slower.
‘I am dying…’ he said to himself, and set down the spear. It touched the ground with heavy metallic resonance. ‘As all things must. As all things should.’
He turned from his reflection, tired of seeing it and being reminded of everything he was not, and everything he used to be in his mind’s eye, and padded out of the room.
‘Zatu…’ he said, pulling a black robe from the rack in the arming chamber.
‘My lord.’ Relayed through a vox-speaker built into the wall, the voice of his major-domo sounded cold and metallic.
Meroved cast his eye across the many weapons shackled behind stasis fields.
‘I am resuming vigil,’ he said.
‘As you wish, my lord.’
The various armaments took up most of the south wall in a vaulted room that stretched fifty feet above where he was standing. It had taken several centuries to curate those weapons and the other pieces of armour and battle ephemera that he stored alongside them. Many remained unused, for he had his favourites, though they all paled in comparison to the trappings of his former calling.
Except for one. The misericordia was a knife of rare provenance and still rarer craftsmanship. Its beauty and significance eclipsed everything else in Meroved’s vast arsenal and yet he had not drawn it from its scabbard in many centuries. Before he had exiled himself.
In any case, in this place he was no longer a spear-bearer. He had left behind the life of auric gods. He had embraced shadows and alchemy.
‘I am His eyes,’ he reminded himself, and tried very hard to believe that was still enough.
He walked out onto a metal promontory that resembled a gangplank. Below his feet, the chamber plummeted into a deep shaft not unlike a large well. At the end of the gangplank an iron cage hung from a cable bolted to the ceiling, turning slightly with the movement of the air.
Meroved crossed the rest of the promontory and entered the cage.
‘Ascend,’ he uttered, and the cage began to rise. ‘Any items of import, Zatu?’ he asked during the ascent.
‘The Vexen Cage has been found, my lord. Awaiting confirmation.’
A tremor of unease and excitement warred ambivalently within Meroved at this news. His tone betrayed none of this inner conflict, however.
‘Where?’
‘Within the city districts.’
‘Active?’
‘Unknown.’
‘Exact location?’
‘Unknown.’
The cage finished its ascent and came to a halt. The soft glow of another room beckoned through an archway. Meroved heard the low susurrus of the machine within. Its activity hum had become like music.
‘Then let’s rectify that, Zatu.’
‘As you wish, my lord,’ the major-domo replied, welcoming Meroved to the nexus chamber, the dwelling place of the machine.
Zatu bowed as Meroved entered beneath the archway, retreating on the wheeled trackbed he possessed in place of legs. His arm ports were currently vacant, having been slaved to the machine. The light in the vision slit of his helm turned from red to green as he surrendered operation to Meroved.
‘And the other matter, my lord?’
‘Make contact,’ Meroved answered, taking up position in the command throne of the machine and allowing the mechadendrite frame to attach to his back. A twitch of pain recognition registered in his cheek as synaptic pins entered his flesh. ‘Bring her here to me. Events are transpiring more quickly than I anticipated, Zatu. We must be swift to ascertain the nature of the threat.’
‘I can reach the Unsighted for you, my lord, and petition the Aegis.’
Meroved considered it. Much was still unknown.
‘That won’t be necessary. Not yet.’
CHAPTER TWO
The Imperial Palace, Tower of Hegemon, Terra
