CONTENTS Cover Backlist Title Page Warhammer 40,000 Book One Prologue I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX Book Two Proem X XI XII XIII XIV XV XVI XVII Book Three Proem XVIII XIX XX XXI XXII XXIII Epilogue Acknowledgements About the Author An Extract from ‘Deathwatch: Shadowbreaker’ 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. BOOK ONE THE ROTTING EDGE OF HUMANITY’S EMPIRE ‘Strength without wisdom breeds nothing but savagery. Wisdom without strength promises nothing but extinction.’ – Nisk Ran-Thawll Chapter Master of the Mentor Legion PROLOGUE THE HISTORIAN: I Vadhán asks me to write these words. He comes to this place of cold stone and candlelight, smelling of the blood he sheds in battle and the storms he sails through to come home. Each time I see him, his armour is always cracked and dented. His face shows fresh bruises, his flesh new scars. And every time he asks if I’ve recorded what happened so long ago, when the war was still a war, when the Exilarchy was rising rather than standing over us in domination, when the Armada defended these stars. When the Lions and the Spears held back the shadows of endless night. Vadhán tells me they still hold, and I know it’s true for I have access to the auspices of stellar cartography. But so many of the stars on those maps seethe red with the Exilarchy’s jagged runes, and so few glimmer with the blue of the Adeptus Vaelarii. The Imperium endures here, but will it ever regain the ground it has lost? How many worlds now burn behind enemy lines, crying out for liberation that will never come? ‘You are old,’ Vadhán says, and though the words are coldly true, his tone is kind. ‘Old, and only human. You stand at death’s edge and it taints everything you see.’ And perhaps this is so. Perhaps mortality darkens my thoughts the same way that it dims my eyes and slows my hands. Time steals everything from us in the end. I don’t need to write the words he asks for, though. I tell him that it’s all in the archives. Amadeus, my former master. Kartash. Tyberia. Brêac, the smiling god of war. Ekene, the golden lion. Serivahn, the cripple. Morcant, the murderous. Faelan, the rav- aged. Ducarius, the dutiful. The Immortals. The arrival of In Devout Abjuration. The Storm Tide. The Ashes of Elysium. The final flight of the Hex. It’s all there, in picter footage and mission reports. ‘I don’t want pict-captures and mission data,’ he says. So he wants a saga? Aye, he wants a tale for the feasting halls and fireside storytellers. It’s my turn to mock him: does he want to be a hero? Is he seeking a legend where he shines above his brethren? Once, he would have taken offence at my tone. Now the rains of Nemeton have seeped into his blood, and he returns a smile. ‘Just the truth,’ he says. ‘Nothing more, nothing less. And it’s not for me. It’s a chronicle for the archives.’ I tell him that I’m neither a bard nor a poet, a fact he should be well aware of after all we’ve been through, but he answers with another cold truth. ‘You’re the only one left, Anuradha. It has to be you.’ We both know these are likely to be the last words I ever commit to parchment. My human hand is a claw now, too snarled with the rumatiz to hold a stylus. My bionic hand, slowed by time and wearing down at the knuckle joints, will have to suffice. It used to purr smoothly with each movement. Now it clicks and ticks as I hold this quill. The story Vadhán asks me to tell is a tangled one. It crosses paths with the valiant Lions of Elysium and the soulless Exilarchy. It stirs the ashes of history, rekindling memories of the lost Scorpions of Khamun-Sen and the treachery of the twin princes Kaeliserai and Nar Kezar. It is a story of war, of brotherhood, of victory and loss. I don’t know if there are any lessons to be learned within these pages. I don’t know if that even matters. And I warn anyone reading this chronicle that if my master seems cold to you, even by the inhuman standards of the Adeptus Astartes, it is because he was. He was born to the Mentors Chapter, a fraternity that demands exacting perfection of its sons. These were the last days of his life, before Nemeton and the Death of Lions and the breaking of oaths. Before he became what he was at the end. Before he was as I want to remember him. This, then, is the tale of Amadeus Kaias Incarius and the Spears of the Emperor. It is a tale that has yet to end, but began many years ago, in the reign of the sword-king Arucatas, as a warship set sail for the Elara’s Veil nebula and into the Great Rift. I SHIP OF THE DEAD 1 Crossing the Great Rift killed five thousand, nine hundred and thirty-one of the crew. Whole districts of spinal battlements were ripped from the ship’s back. The void shields could not be rekindled. The warship’s superstructure groaned around us as if im- bued with miserable life. Living within these bent steel bones, we laboured on, illuminated by the throbbing red of emergency lighting. The industrial sounds of repair work echoed through every corridor and chamber. Between the metallic crashes, we heard the chanting of choral prayers invoking the Emperor, the Machine-God, and His Reborn Son. In the silence between the prayers, we heard weeping. For four days and eleven hours after we emerged, we drifted in the deep void, crippled and cold. No one was permitted to look out into space, where the thrashing madness of the Great Rift still sought to encircle us. Those who broke this edict were executed to spare the rest of us their raving. I killed some of them myself. When the Motive Force of the ship’s drive was reawakened in the twelfth hour of the fourth day, the air scrubbers clattered back to life in the same moment as the engines. We drew in deep, stale breaths of refiltered oxygen, coughing out the toxin-laden air we’d been sharing amongst ourselves since the power died. We were alive. Many were not. Blessings were spoken over the shrouded forms of the fallen, before they were fed to the engine furnaces. In death, they served the warship one last time – this time as fuel. No one among us was unscathed, but we were alive. Alive, and on the Nihilus side of the Great Rift. It took fifty-two days to run the Straits of Epona through the Rift and it almost cost us the ship, but we had survived. We’d left the Imperium behind. There was no going back. The ship would never hold together for a return voyage. My master gave the only order he could give. ‘Set course for Nemeton.’ 2 Our vessel was the Sword-class frigate In Devout Abjuration, with an initial crew complement of twenty-four thousand, six hundred and ninety souls. We numbered just over two-thirds of that figure after the casualties of crossing the Great Rift and the shipboard riots that followed. Exile. That was the word my master used for the mission. The notion filtered through the diminished crew, perhaps by virtue of the fact it was true. What hope did we have of seeing home again? In Devout Abjuration set sail with a full human and servitor crew, but the absence of other Space Marines was a telling sign.