The House of Night and Chain Read online

  • THE VAMPIRE GENEVIEVE •

  by Kim Newman

  BOOK 1: DRACHENFELS

  BOOK 2 : GENEVIEVE UNDEAD

  BOOK 3 : BEASTS IN VELVET

  BOOK 4 : SILVER NAILS

  THE WICKED AND THE DAMNED

  A portmanteau novel by Josh Reynolds, Phil Kelly and David Annandale

  MALEDICTIONS

  An anthology by various authors

  THE HOUSE OF NIGHT AND CHAIN

  A novel by David Annandale

  PERDITION’S FLAME

  An audio drama by Alec Worley

  Contents

  Cover

  Backlist

  Title Page

  Warhammer Horror

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘The Wicked and the Damned’

  Warhammer horror : A Black Library Publication Imprint

  eBook license

  A dark bell tolls in the abyss.

  It echoes across cold and unforgiving worlds, mourning the fate of humanity. Terror has been unleashed, and every foul creature of the night haunts the shadows. There is naught but evil here. Alien monstrosities drift in tomblike vessels. Watching. Waiting. Ravenous. Baleful magicks whisper in gloom-shrouded forests, spectres scuttle across disquiet minds. From the depths of the void to the blood-soaked earth, diabolic horrors stalk the endless night to feast upon unworthy souls.

  Abandon hope. Do not trust to faith. Sacrifices burn on pyres of madness, rotting corpses stir in unquiet graves. Daemonic abominations leer with rictus grins and stare into the eyes of the accursed. And the Ruinous Gods, with indifference, look on.

  This is a time of reckoning, where every mortal soul is at the mercy of the things that lurk in the dark. This is the night eternal, the province of monsters and daemons. This is Warhammer Horror. None shall escape damnation.

  And so, the bell tolls on.

  Prologue

  Then

  ‘It’s haunted,’ Katrin said the first time she saw Malveil. She spoke with the adamantine assurance of an eight-year-old, and Zander, who was four, began to cry.

  ‘It is not,’ Eliana said. She crouched beside our daughter and gave her a hug, but her face showed alarm at Katrin’s blasphemy. ‘Never say that.’

  I lifted Zander in my arms. He rested his face against my shoulder, wetting my uniform with his tears. He did not turn his eyes from the house, though. He stared at it, terrified, his sister’s statement confirmation of what he had already decided for himself.

  We were standing at the gates to the grounds of Malveil. The house was some distance away, brooding at the top of its hill. From this vantage point, under the leaden sky, the great mansion was a dark shape, the silhouette of its towers jutting up from the walls. The details of the facade were invisible. Malveil was a hard mass of black, and I could understand the children’s reaction, even as I regretted it. The grounds were rugged and broken, gnawed apart by the generations of mining. The industry that had burrowed into the stony hill was the foundation of the Strock family’s wealth and power, though much of the machinery was quiet now. The seams were almost exhausted. We would not be drawing much more wealth out of the ground. We no longer needed to. With enough accumulation, wealth and all that flows from it is self-sustaining.

  ‘Ghosts do not exist,’ I told Zander and Katrin. ‘Do not offend the Emperor by believing in such nonsense.’ I spoke gently, but I needed them to know there were ideas no one should have. I patted Zander’s shoulder and smiled at Katrin. ‘Anyway, you shouldn’t be frightened of Malveil. You should be proud. This is our family’s home. It is a great house. The greatest on Solus.’

  ‘If it is our house, why don’t we live there?’ Katrin asked. She did not sound eager to do so, but at least it was curiosity, rather than fear, that prompted her question.

  ‘My uncle Leonel lives there now. It is his home, because he is lord-governor of Solus.’ Over time, the line between family estate and governor’s palace had blurred. Though Malveil was not officially the seat of government, it had become so in practice since the rise of the Strocks to prominence. As long as a Strock was governor, Malveil would be the governor’s residence. Our line had had its share of travails, but there was still no sign that power might slip from our grasp. Even in the present circumstances.

  ‘But you’re governor,’ Katrin said.

  ‘Governor-regent,’ I said. ‘Just for a little while, until Leonel is better.’ He had been ill for some time now. The precise nature of his affliction was unclear, and he had become a recluse, never leaving the house and rarely admitting visitors. He was an absent ruler, and I had been recalled from my Astra Militarum service as captain in the Solus Nightmarch to act as governor until Leonel recovered or a proper regency could be established, one that would, naturally, both ensure stability on Solus and see off any political challenges to Strock supremacy.

  This period lives, in my memory, as a golden time. I was home on Solus for most of a year, and had been given that rare opportunity for an officer – the chance to be a part of one’s family, even if only for a short while. I had left to do my duty to the Imperium while Eliana was still expecting Zander. That I had been able to see Katrin through her first years had itself been an unusual dispensation, a privilege granted by my family’s standing. I had not expected to return until – if I survived – late in life, by which time both children would be complete strangers to me, assuming they were still on Solus at all and not swept up in a subsequent Astra Militarum tithe themselves. So Leonel’s affliction had become my blessing.

  That year was a glorious one. Its memories sustained me in the time that followed, whether I was facing the horrors of the battlefield or other, more personal griefs. But when I finally came back to Solus for good, it was this day that loomed over all the others, casting its shadow upon the entire year. Even before my return, it had begun to grow, metastasising, becoming the dominant image of that year, hauling my thoughts back to it with an irresistible gravitational pull. I should have been recalling my games with the children in the grounds of the family’s secondary residence, near the centre of Valgaast. I should have been picturing the two of them splashing in the fountains of the courtyard. I should have been thinking of Eliana, and her smiles as she watched them. I should have been thinking of her hand in mine.

  Instead, I kept coming back to Katrin’s fearful pronouncement and Zander’s tears. And the moments that followed.

  ‘Will you ever be governing governor?’ Katrin asked.

  I exchanged a glance with Eliana, and she pressed her lips tightly together, holding back a laugh. ‘That’s hard to say,’ I answered. ‘It depends on whether Leonel has any children.’ An unlikely prospect at his age, but not impossible. ‘If he does, then one of them will become governor, not me.’

  ‘Good,’ said Zander.

  ‘Oh?’ I teased. ‘You don’t think I’d make a good governor?’

  Eliana had straightened u
p from hugging Katrin, but now our daughter pressed herself tightly against her mother’s waist. ‘We don’t want to go in that house,’ she said.

  ‘Please, papa,’ Zander sobbed. ‘No, papa.’

  ‘We’re not about to move there,’ Eliana said. She ruffled Katrin’s hair and gave me a sign that it was time to go. ‘We can’t even visit it, so stop your worrying.’

  We started walking again, Zander quaking in my arms, Katrin clutching Eliana’s hand and snuffling through her tears. We put the high wall of the grounds behind us as we headed back down the Malveil Road, making our way through the industrial sector, back towards the residential quarters of Valgaast. I looked over my shoulder to get one last glimpse of the house before a curve in the road took it out of sight. I had never feared Malveil. It had always been a palace of dreams for me while I was growing up. It represented the highest summit a Strock could climb, the highest honour and, as my understanding matured, the noblest duty. I did not think of it as haunted. When I looked back at it at that moment, I felt pity for Leonel, gratitude for my time as regent and wistful longing to see again the halls that I had visited only once before.

  I had no dark thoughts. I felt no presentiment of menace.

  But when I turned back to my family, a wave of vertigo struck me. I stumbled, almost dropping Zander, as the ground turned treacherous beneath my feet. It seemed to be as thin as cobwebs, about to give way and throw us into a nightmare chasm. Zander was limp in my arms, his head a lolling dead weight, his neck broken. Eliana was dragging Katrin’s corpse, heedless of the blood pouring from our daughter’s open throat.

  I gasped, struggling to find the air to scream. I was drowning, falling and suffocating all at once.

  And then the moment passed. The horror receded, evaporating from my memory. The road was solid, my children unharmed. I had had a brief dizzy spell, that was all. My stride was sure, and within seconds, all that had happened was that I had looked forward too quickly and gone light-headed.

  For years, that was all I would recall. Even when the memory of Katrin and Zander’s terror grew large, my terrible vision remained buried, hidden from my mind’s eye. It did not resurface.

  Not until I returned to Solus. Not until I looked upon Malveil once more.

  Chapter 1

  Now

  The antechamber to the Hall of Judgement on the battleship ­Eternal Fury was a semicircle, fifty-four paces across at its widest. I had counted. Against the fore wall, a single iron chair stood next to the heavy bronze doors that separated me from my judges. I had yet to sit in it. I could not keep still. I walked the periphery of the antechamber, finding no relief in movement, only the necessity to avoid the curse of stillness.

  To port and starboard were deck-to-ceiling windows, and from the port one I could see the charred lump of coal that had been the world of Clostrum. The world it had been my duty to save. Every time I passed before that view, I paused, wincing through fresh spasms of guilt. Averting my gaze was not within my power. The sight pulled me, hooks sunk into my soul. Again and again, I stared at the dead world and then jerked away, my heart thumping hard, my gut dropping away, my left palm tingling with new sweat.

  There was no feeling in my right palm. Nor anywhere else in my right arm, or my right leg. Or, more precisely, there was no natural feeling. They were my prosthetics, replacing the flesh and bone taken from me on Clostrum. I was not used to them yet. My pacing was more than restlessness. It was also my attempt to come to terms with the new realities of my body. The faint whirs of the servo-motors were still an alien sound, a machinic voice that I could not truly connect with myself. It was a whisper that followed me everywhere I went, its true source perpetually out of sight, though always near. The arm and the leg worked well, obeying the impulses sent by my brain. I did not consciously have to command their motions. At the same time, they were a strange land, a zone I did not recognise. They belonged to someone else, someone whose intentions perfectly reflected my own. I felt the phantom pains of my vanished limbs, and the aches corresponded to places on the prosthetics yet did not come from them. I was a divided being, playing at unity.

  My soul was as split as my body. I was present in the moment, and grappling with the agony of my shame. I was also distant, part of my mind retreating into a cocoon of numbness, observing my torment with a cold disinterest.

  I had been waiting in the antechamber for hours. When my eyes did not go to the ruin of Clostrum, they lingered on the relief sculpture of the bronze doors. On each was a massive figure, Justice personified in heroic lines, arms crossed, jaw stern, gaze directed far above my head, as if seeing the arrival of judgement. There was no mercy to be had here, no concessions.

  I expected none. I desired none.

  I did not think I desired anything. Not any longer. I awaited the call to pass through the doors with no impatience. I did not even feel the urge to get the process over with. There was only the shame, its spears battling with the protective shield of the numbness. The shield that held the memories of Clostrum at bay. I had to protect myself from them, or they would rip me apart. I would not be able to function at all. And if nothing else, I was determined to meet my fate with dignity. I owed that to my regiment. And to my fallen troops.

  ‘Steady,’ I whispered to myself as I approached the port window again. ‘Steady.’ But the effort to avoid the memories backfired. Instead of blocking them, I summoned them. They stormed my defences. They came for me with pincers and claws that could shred a Leman Russ like parchment. They came with bodies bloated with bioweapons. They came in a swarm that blotted out the sky and covered the land with an undulating carpet of horror. I saw the heroes of the Nightmarch, the soldiers who trusted me, who followed my commands without question, who looked to me for guidance and the path to victory. I saw the monsters turn them to blood and pulp. I saw the ocean of jaws devour my regiment.

  I was in the roof hatch of my command Chimera again. The giant horror rushed us. It towered over the vehicle, its body armoured with impregnable chitin, its huge arms ending in talons like serrated spears. It stabbed its talons through the flanks of the Chimera, lifted it from the ground and ripped it in two. It hurled the halves away. I went flying and landed twenty yards from the burning wreckage. I tried to stand. I tried to make my last stand a worthy one. Before I could rise, the creatures were on me, marching over me, barely seeing me. One warrior form paused. Its talons pierced my shoulder and thigh.

  The agony was fresh again. The agony and the sound, the awful tearing of muscle and the cracking of bone. The agony and the smell, the mix of my blood and the sharp, burning stench of xenos pheromones. The agony and the sudden absence, the parting of arm and leg from body.

  And still other memories came, more fragmented but just as terrible, maybe even worse. They were confused impressions of gunfire, light and darkness, screams and roars. They were my last impressions as I wavered in and out of consciousness, of the troopers who came to my aid and died saving their failed colonel.

  I hunched forward in the antechamber, clutching my false arm, my right leg feeling as if it were buckling, even though it could not. I gasped for air, and my nostrils were filled with the smell of xenos and massacre. My eyes watered. My chest heaved. I growled, because if I didn’t, I would scream.

  ‘Colonel, you may enter.’

  The words jerked me from the memories. My eyes cleared. The bronze door had opened. Two men, one in the livery of the Imperial Navy, the other a surviving major of the Solus Nightmarch, stood on either side of the doorway.

  I straightened up, cleared my throat and gave the major a curt nod. His name was Hetzer. He had been among those who had saved me. He was one of the few who had survived doing so.

  I crossed the threshold into the Hall of Judgement. Four sculpted swords pointed to the centre of the vaulted ceiling, from which a great skull stared down. The room was circular, and I advanced down an aisle to its
centre, to stand on a bronze aquila inlaid in the marble floor, directly beneath the gaze of the skull.

  A ring of thrones surrounded me. All were occupied. The majority of the authorities present were of the Astra Militarum, most notably General Pereven of the Solus Nightmarch. There were a number of officers from the Imperial Navy as well, in deference to the fact that it was in their ship that this court was assembled. There were others too. There was Captain Numitor of the Ultramarines Eighth Company. I had never seen him before, but I knew who he must be. We had all known that the Ultramarines were fighting on Clostrum, though they had not been present near the battle I had lost. This was the first time I had been in close proximity to one of the Adeptus Astartes. I was dwarfed by his colossal stature. I felt something even worse than shame to be in the presence of so noble a warrior.

  Sitting next to Pereven was a woman in solemn robes of black laced with gold. She was very old. The heavy chain and pendant of the Adeptus Terra seemed to weigh her neck down, but her eyes were piercing.

  Pereven confirmed my surmise by introducing Numitor, and presented the woman as Lady Arrasq. ‘The rest you know,’ he said.

  I did. I had the deepest respect for every officer in the room. It made my failure all the more painful to have it witnessed by them.

  ‘Colonel Maeson Strock,’ said Pereven, ‘the Circle of Judgement has been called to consider your actions in the battle for Clostrum. Do you understand your position in these proceedings?’

  ‘I do, sir.’ I stood straight. I stared at a point on the wall just above the general’s head. ‘I understand that the work of the Circle is complete. Judgement has already been reached. I am here for it to be rendered, not to defend myself.’

  ‘Good,’ said Pereven. ‘Before we pronounce the verdict, this court would like to hear your evaluation of the event.’

  ‘Sir, I was charged with leading my regiment against the tyranid invasion and protecting the civilian population of Hive Throndhelm. I failed in this task. My regiment was defeated, taking severe losses, and Throndhelm was overrun. So was all of Clostrum. In the wake of the Imperial defeat, Exterminatus was declared. I make no excuses for the part I played in losing a forge world. Whatever the verdict of this court, I accept it with thanks and will do grateful penance.’