Watchers in Death Read online

  Backlist

  More Warhammer 40,000 stories from Black Library

  The Beast Arises

  1: I AM SLAUGHTER

  2: PREDATOR, PREY

  3: THE EMPEROR EXPECTS

  4: THE LAST WALL

  5: THRONEWORLD

  6: ECHOES OF THE LONG WAR

  7: THE HUNT FOR VULKAN

  Space Marine Battles

  WAR OF THE FANG

  A Space Marine Battles book, containing the novella The Hunt for Magnus and the novel Battle of the Fang

  THE WORLD ENGINE

  An Astral Knights novel

  DAMNOS

  An Ultramarines collection

  DAMOCLES

  Contains the White Scars, Raven Guard and Ultramarines novellas Blood Oath, Broken Sword, Black Leviathan and Hunter’s Snare

  OVERFIEND

  Contains the White Scars, Raven Guard and Salamanders novellas Stormseer, Shadow Captain and Forge Master

  ARMAGEDDON

  Contains the Black Templars novel Helsreach and novella Blood and Fire

  Legends of the Dark Millennium

  SHAS’O

  A Tau Empire collection

  ASTRA MILITARUM

  An Astra Militarum collection

  ULTRAMARINES

  An Ultramarines collection

  FARSIGHT

  A Tau Empire novella

  SONS OF CORAX

  A Raven Guard collection

  SPACE WOLVES

  A Space Wolves collection

  Visit blacklibrary.com for the full range of novels, novellas, audio dramas and Quick Reads, along with many other exclusive products

  Contents

  Cover

  Backlist

  Title Page

  Warhammer 40,000

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘Deathwatch: Ignition’

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  Fire sputters… The shame of our deaths and our heresies is done. They are behind us, like wretched phantoms. This is a new age, a strong age, an age of Imperium. Despite our losses, despite the fallen sons, despite the eternal silence of the Emperor, now watching over us in spirit instead of in person, we will endure. There will be no more war on such a perilous scale. There will be an end to wanton destruction. Yes, foes will come and enemies will arise. Our security will be threatened, but we will be ready, our mighty fists raised. There will be no great war to challenge us now. We will not be brought to the brink like that again…

  Prologue

  The void

  The Imperium’s eyes did not sleep. They did not blink. Even as the body convulsed with agony, wounded to the core by the Beast, the eyes watched. Organic or augmetic, sentient or servitor, the eyes watched the human galaxy without rest. They were everywhere.

  Almost everywhere.

  They were not here.

  Here was night in its purest form. The black of the void was profound, an abyss of infinite depth, the sparks of the stars merely cold, jagged stabs. There was no true light here. There was only its dust, its ashes, the glint of the past that was years and centuries and thousands of millennia old.

  No light. No warmth.

  No watchers.

  But if there had been, they would have seen the ork fleet surround the dark world. The orks did not make planetfall. They bombarded the surface with missiles and shells. They scorched it with energy beams. The ground ran with molten tears. Glows of orange and crimson, false sunrise and false sunset, spread their rage across the land. The planet shook. It cried out in its pain.

  The orks’ target weathered the bombardment. It did not cry out. It was implacable in its silence.

  And the orks did not land.

  They battered the world with even greater ferocity. They brought light to the planet, and it did nothing but burn and shatter.

  But they did not land.

  The hurled their hatred at their target. They sought to make it scream and die. It remained silent.

  Yet it answered the orks. It answered with fury.

  One

  Terra – the Imperial Palace

  The silence crept through the halls and into Koorland’s mind. There was no lack of noise in the chamber, but the silence found the cracks between the hiss of steam, the crackle of energy, the clanking of mechadendrites. The silence was strong. It was filled with the dead, and with futility. Koorland wondered if this same silence had blanketed Terra in the wake of the Proletarian Crusade. It was a quiet deeper than mourning, more powerful than despair. It had followed him from Ullanor. It had been waiting for him on Terra.

  Its weight was crushing.

  The chamber was part of a bulbous chapel on the west side of the Cathedral of the Saviour Emperor’s exterior wall. The space was an ecumenical one, an architectural statement of the essential identity of the Imperial Creed and the Cult of the Omnissiah. The Black Templars of the Last Wall had insisted the decryption of the visual feed occur on sacred ground. Its transmission had been among the last acts of a Venerable Brother, and it had emerged from a battle where many Black Templars had died.

  The chapel did double duty as site of worship and laboratorium. It would serve. The Mechanicus adepts fed the data through cogitators, assisted by Black Templars serfs. The air was thick with incense.

  The operation was performed under the supervision of Eternity. He was of the Last Wall now, and wore the colours of the Imperial Fists, but he had come from the Black Templars. His arms were folded, his head bowed in reverence.

  Koorland watched from the rear of the chapel with Thane. They were alone. Eternity had refused to allow any of the High Lords to bear witness, and Koorland did not blame him. Their presence would have disturbed the solemnity of the ceremony. Though Koorland did not care for the religiosity of the ritual, he accepted it. Even if he hadn’t, he would have barred the High Lords. There was no place for them and dignity to coexist.

  ‘Any speculations?’ Koorland asked Thane.

  ‘None.’ The Chapter Master of the Fists Exemplar spoke with a grim, flat tone. He sounded like a man bracing himself for the worst.

  ‘We know it is important. And to our advantage, if it emerged from a victory against the orks.’

  ‘I know,’ said Thane, as if Koorland had pointed out what he most dreaded.

  Koorland said nothing else. Thane was surrounded by his own version of the crushing silence. Koorland could not dispel his own. There was nothing he could do for the Exemplar.

  The silence settled over them. The chanting of the tech-priests and the crackle of energy discharges did little to pierce it. Koorland watched the ritual, but barely saw it. His vision narrowed to a dark tunnel. His consciousness sank into the tunnel and he stayed there, numb. The suffocation of the silence held off the piercing blade of loss, guilt and defeat for the moment. It was not a respite. It was only a different quality of pain.

  He was so far in the tunnel he didn’t realise at first that he was being addressed.

  ‘Lord Commander Koorland,’ the voice repeated, its augmetic larynx buzzing.

  Koorland blinked. The chapel snapped back into place about him. He looked down at the adept. Her name was Segorine. A cluster of servo-arms, segmented so that they flexed like tentacles, emerged from her torso. Her fa
ce was a steel mask dominated by compound eyes.

  ‘The decryption is complete,’ Segorine said.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Koorland. He and Thane followed her down the chapel aisle to where the other tech-priests waited. Behind the altar, a large pict screen pulsed with snow.

  ‘Faith,’ said Eternity.

  Koorland waited.

  ‘Faith,’ Eternity said again. ‘That is what we are about to witness. That is what will grant us victory against the Beast.’

  ‘I see,’ Koorland said, noncommittal.

  Segorine snaked out a limb to a control panel built into the altar. She depressed a dial, and the screen came to life. The images flickered and jumped, and the muzzles of beam weapons flared everything to white. Explosions broke up the picture.

  But the worst distortion came from unleashed psychic energy. Koorland saw the Black Templars at bay, fighting hard against the ork horde. He saw the greenskin psyker, its power ferocious, seeming to destroy reality along with the images. He saw the Black Templars pray as they fought. The sound was a riot of distortion, a grating rhythm barely recognisable as gunfire. Breaking through in fragments were deep, sonorous chants, magnified by vox-casters. The voices of faith travelled across destruction and time to frame their moment of victory.

  For a moment, the sound cleared altogether. The yowls of the orks and the concussions of the guns vanished. There was only the stern, martial prayer of the Black Templars. The energy flares of the witch stuttered, then spread out as if they had hit a wall. They curled away from the Space Marines. Koorland leaned forward, astonished. Arcing waves of power slammed back into the greenskin psyker. The beast’s mouth opened wide, its face contorted, and still there was only the sound of the chanting. The ork’s eyes burst. It exploded into flame. The energy flashed across the frame of the feed, utterly uncontrolled, blasting every ork to ash. The energy storm swallowed up the chanting. The chapel filled with a shattering feedback shriek, and the visual feed disintegrated.

  The screen returned to snow, then went black.

  ‘The visible energy,’ Thane said slowly. ‘I didn’t see it come from the Black Templars.’

  ‘No,’ Koorland agreed. ‘It was all from the ork psyker.’ To the tech-priests he said, ‘Will you play that back again? Slowly.’

  They watched. At the end, Thane said, ‘Are the orks and their witches linked?’

  ‘In some way, they must be,’ said Koorland. He could see no other interpretation. The psyker’s death had triggered the immolation of the horde.

  ‘So if we can target their psykers…’

  ‘A possible weakness, yes.’ Koorland turned to Eternity. ‘That was not the work of a single warrior, was it?’ Certainly not a Librarian. The Black Templars allowed no psykers within the ranks of their battle-brethren.

  ‘That was the faith of all my brothers present in that battle,’ said Eternity. ‘A collective strength.’

  ‘Against a single ork witch,’ said Thane.

  ‘Its fall destroyed its entire force,’ Eternity pointed out.

  ‘Yes,’ said Koorland. ‘Yes, it did.’

  If only we’d known. The words came to him unbidden, a canker on his soul. He tried to push them away. He tried to tell himself the Imperial tactics on Ullanor would not have been altered, but his grief would permit no such comfort.

  If only they had known. They would have fought differently. They would have made a greater priority of finding and taking out the ork psykers. They would have targeted the source of greenskin strength and turned it into a weakness.

  He thought of Vulkan. The primarch had wished for the aid of the Sisters of Silence. He had recognised the need for a strong counter to the psykers.

  He must have known, Koorland thought. He tried again to tell himself that they would not have fought any differently.

  He knew that wasn’t true.

  Neither were many things, he thought, that he had been telling himself of late. He had worked hard to maintain an illusion of self that made it possible for him to carry the responsibility he had shouldered. It made it possible for him to lead. But he had led nowhere except to disaster. He had nothing but contempt for the High Lords. At this moment, though, he was not sure how he was any different from them.

  He forced himself to focus on the moment. ‘We may not see the key to the weakness in this data,’ he said. ‘But it is a weakness, and we will exploit it.’

  But an hour later, he was still thinking about difference, his mind chasing itself in a toxic spiral. He walked alone on the ramparts of Daylight Wall, looking up into the night of Terra. There was a strong wind, and the sulphurous clouds over the Imperial Palace roiled, broke and reformed. In the gaps of their anger, the light of two moons reached down. Luna was a narrow, waning crescent. The reflected glow of the ork attack moon was paler, colder and more baleful. That threat was over, or at least contained. The orks were gone, the moon blockaded. But it was still a presence in the Terran sky, an insult and a wound to the heart of the Imperium. No enemy, even defeated, should ever have come so close.

  He pictured another moon. He pictured several. Next time, the orks might not hold back from deploying their gravity weapons against Terra. They might have lost interest in conquest. They had been bloodied on Ullanor. Their vengeance might well take the form of total destruction.

  And even if the moon was dead, it was not silent. It roared. I AM SLAUGHTER. I AM SLAUGHTER. I AM SLAUGHTER. The broadcast was ceaseless. It was gigantic. It would take nothing for Koorland to open a vox-channel and hear it.

  He chose not to, but the reality of the shout was another poison in the toxic silence. The words of the Beast hammered at Terra, breaking down the spirit of its citizens. The roar mocked the sacrifices on Ullanor. It declared the futility of every Imperial endeavour to stop the orks. Every great quest, every journey, every challenge, every hard-won battle and shard of hope – they all meant nothing. What did they have to show for Caldera, for Ullanor? Even their victory against the moon was turned into mockery.

  Koorland grieved, and so did all the world. He did not know fear, but he knew its cancer possessed every mortal soul on Terra.

  The battlements of Daylight Wall were built upon many terraces. Turrets and cannon emplacements on multiple levels faced the east, so many it seemed they should be able to kill the rising sun if it dared to challenge the Emperor. Koorland walked along the top. He took up a position between the crenellations and looked down at the bristling strength below him. Not long ago, this perspective would have renewed his sense of duty and of purpose. Now he observed the defences and thought: Not enough.

  The guns were insufficient.

  So was he.

  The approaching footsteps were quiet, more from a desire not to disturb than not to be heard. Koorland turned to the right. Drakan Vangorich, Grand Master of the Officio Assassinorum, walked down the wide avenue of the wall towards him. There was enough room between the battlements for a Baneblade to pass, and the Assassin was a tiny figure in the night. On either side, the relief sculptures of the crenellations celebrated Imperial might. Heroic figures cut down their foes with sword and gun. Koorland’s eyes went back and forth from the brutal strength of the stone to the wiry Grand Master. In the contrast, he felt a glimmer of inspiration. It passed before he could discern its shape.

  Vangorich nodded to Koorland as he drew near. ‘A homecoming?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ said Koorland. ‘Daylight Wall Company is gone. And my duty is no longer named by a single battlement.’

  ‘It was never limited to that, though.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t.’ Koorland sighed. ‘But there was great order in that naming. Symbols have powerful meaning.’

  ‘As does their loss,’ Vangorich said quietly.

  ‘Yes.’ The annihilation of Daylight Wall Company was of little importance next to the loss of a Chapter. And what was
even that compared to the death of a primarch?

  ‘I’ve seen the recording,’ Vangorich said.

  ‘For all the good it does us now.’

  Vangorich gave him a sharp look. ‘Defeatism doesn’t suit you, Lord Commander Koorland.’

  ‘Neither does naïveté,’ Koorland said.

  Vangorich was quiet for a moment. Then he said, ‘It isn’t that long since we last spoke on this wall.’

  ‘It isn’t, and I don’t come here seeking to have my morale boosted by you.’

  ‘It would be an odd thing to do, given my particular duty.’

  Koorland grunted.

  ‘I hope, though,’ Vangorich went on, ‘that you will listen to counsel.’

  ‘I know what you would have to say about being a symbol.’

  ‘And you would deny its truth.’

  ‘I would deny my fitness to serve as that symbol.’

  ‘Would you deny your duty to do so?’

  ‘You know I would not,’ Koorland growled. Duty and fitness were very different things, and he resented Vangorich’s blurring of the two.

  ‘No,’ the Grand Master said. ‘You have never turned from your duty. You have always done it. You did it on Ullanor too.’

  ‘To no end.’

  ‘And who would have been better suited? Who should have led instead?’

  Koorland didn’t answer.

  ‘Vulkan left much of the campaign in your hands, didn’t he?’ Vangorich said.

  ‘He did.’

  ‘Was he wrong? Did he err?’

  Koorland looked down at the Grand Master and glared. Again he said nothing. He could not bring himself to say aloud that Vulkan had been mistaken. He would not question the final decisions of the last primarch.

  ‘I’ll take your silence as a no,’ Vangorich said.

  ‘You’re playing a game with words,’ said Koorland. ‘It isn’t amusing and it isn’t useful.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Vangorich said, his tone suddenly sharp. ‘There would be nothing useful in a game. The High Lords have proven this many times over, and as far as I can tell, they’re very much intent on proving it yet again. I am not playing at anything. What we need right now is clarity, don’t you agree?’