Belisarius Cawl: the Great Work © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2019
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More great Warhammer 40,000 fiction from Black Library • DARK IMPERIUM • by Guy Haley Book 1: DARK IMPERIUM Book 2: PLAGUE WAR BLACKSTONE FORTRESS A novel by Darius Hinks RITES OF PASSAGE A novel by Mike Brooks WATCHERS OF THE THRONE: THE EMPEROR’S LEGION A novel by Chris Wraight • VAULTS OF TERRA • by Chris Wraight Book 1: THE CARRION THRONE Book 2: THE HOLLOW MOUNTAIN • THE HORUSIAN WARS • by John French Book 1: RESURRECTION Book 2: INCARNATION SPEAR OF THE EMPEROR A novel by Aaron Dembski-Bowden FORGES OF MARS An omnibus by Graham McNeill, including the novels Priests of Mars, Lords of Mars and God of Mars CONTENTS Cover Backlist Title Page Warhammer 40,000 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 About the Author An Extract from ‘Rites of Passage’ 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. Fed on stars of dying light, Broken now, and scattered far, For sins of violence and deceit Soul greed brought down those bright Enduring beings more luminous than we, Numinous, who saw worlds born, and burn, Made monsters By their greed, And by their art making more, Are banished by steel children. Defeated, undefeated yet asunder, Warnings for seer and shepherd seen Beware! Soul hunger has no sating What rests awakens They wait, they stir, they starve, These gods that sleep, And dream. – Aeldari lay of unknown origin, translation by Rollof Uzmartinequa of Dane (executed 879M39) CHAPTER ONE BORROWED TIME Circa 10,000 years ago Ezekiel Sedayne was dying. There was a time when he stood tall among men, as much a physical as an intellectual giant, but those days were done. He was old. He was at the end. His seven-foot frame had shrunken in. His spine curled with calcium loss. His hands were knotted with arthritis. His skin was slack, flowing around brittle bones like draped cloth. His lustrous black hair had turned as fine and white as the silk of a spider’s nest. It spread around his head on the pillow as if it, like his skin, had been laid there, and if he stood, if he had been capable of standing, he would have left it behind as a cloud of down. Sedayne’s life had lasted longer than any child of Terra had a right to expect, but all things are finite, and his existence was coming to a close. Human beings are aware of their mortality, yet they deny it to the very last. Sedayne regarded his intelligence to be in excess of most others. He believed he was free of the delusions that ruled the mind to reason’s detriment, yet now he succumbed. He could scarcely believe death was knocking at his door. This cannot be happening to me, he thought. But it was. Sedayne had come from nothing to become one of the greatest scientists of his age. Despite his failing body his mind was sharp. His insight clear. In numb amazement, he insisted he felt young in his soul. The ravages of age on his body gave the lie to that. He appeared in many respects like a corpse. Lips drew back from yellow teeth made long by the recession of dark gums. No matter how fast his thoughts raced, his body barely moved. His chest trembled with the bird flutter of his heart. Every inhalation was a bellow’s wheeze. But he was not dead yet. The breaths kept coming, and when the door to his bedchamber creaked wide his eyelids flickered open and his eyes, which were strikingly moist in the dry valleys of his parchment skin, swivelled to fix themselves upon his visitor. ‘The Altrix Herminia,’ he wheezed. His top lip stuck to his teeth for want of saliva, spoiling his smile. He was drying up from the inside out, like a spice pod left out to desiccate in the sun. Soon every drop of life would be wrung out of him, and there would only be an arid husk left. Then there would not even be that. The Altrix came forwards with a rustle of layered, soft, plastek clothing. Upon her breast pocket she wore a caduceus in red and white that contrasted with the pale green of her dress. The uniform was formal and tightly laced, a symbol binding her to her duty, but though her garments were restrictive she moved with easy grace that suggested athletic, if not dangerous, power. ‘My lord director,’ she said, dipping her head respectfully. The sharp curve of her fringe swung neatly over her eyes. ‘Your arrival pleases me.’ Sedayne’s head moved feebly to the side so he could follow her approach. The appetites of a younger man tormented him. ‘Age does not agree with me,’ he said. He was tiring, his breath rasping harder. He was a machine close to shutdown. He looked to the Altrix’s face, then at the fat syringe she carried in her hand. ‘The time… is close…’ Each word was an individual effort. Each syllable required him to assign it a painful breath. Such care and attention his words received now, when once they were spent so carelessly. ‘It is, my lord,’ said the Altrix. ‘You are dying.’ Sedayne gave a death’s-head grin. ‘I can always trust you to dress things up prettily for me,’ he said. ‘How goes the search?’ ‘I have identified seven possible candidates, all acolytes of Diacomes. Recovery missions are outbound.’ ‘Then administer the last of the elixir. I want to walk and move again. I have been confined here too long.’ ‘You are sure?’ He nodded his head painfully. ‘You brought it. You knew what I would say.’ ‘This is the last,’ she said. Marbled, opaque, silvery liquid that moved to currents of its own filled the glass cylinder. ‘The Adarnians are gone. The last rendered down. Their world is empty. Once I inject this dose, there will be no more. I am sorry.’ The Adarnian race was decreed harmless during the Great Crusade, and allowed to live under an Imperial protectorate. It had not prevented them being harvested to extinction. Unluckily for them, their body chemistry had miraculous effects on the human organism. ‘A shame… I… never…’ he swallowed twice, trying to summon enough spit to lubricate his creaking larynx. ‘Learned how to synthesise it,’ he said in a breathless rush. ‘Are you certain that now is the time, my lord? We could delay a few days. There is sufficient here to return you to health for a few months, no more. It may be better to wait until a candidate has been selected and returned to Terra.’ He closed his eyes. ‘No. Do it now.’ He was too weak to hold out his arm, so Herminia pulled it gently from under the covers, fetched a stirrup rest and strapped the limb in place. The veins in the crook of his elbow were ruined by repeated injection, and it took an amount of coaxing to find a suitable place for the needle. The drug had to be administered directly into the bloodstream in large amounts; pneumatic injection or skin absorption would not do. Adarnian elixir was the last resort of dying men when all other rejuvenats failed. It came with many prices, not least the atrocity of its making. The elixir was illegal, its use punishable by death. Sedayne didn’t care about the xenos or the law, but there were other, more immediate costs. Firstly, when the elixir’s positive effects were exhausted, the user returned to a worse state than before.