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  Backlist

  More Grey Knights from Black Library

  WARDEN OF THE BLADE

  SONS OF TITAN

  THE GREY KNIGHTS OMNIBUS

  Contains the novels Grey Knights, Hammer of Daemons and Dark Adeptus

  PANDORAX

  THE EMPEROR’S GIFT

  CRUCIBLE

  WITNESS

  DREAD NIGHT

  THE GHOST HALLS

  KNIGHT OF TITAN

  BLADE OF PURITY

  An audio drama by David Annandale

  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

  8: THE BEAST MUST DIE

  9: WATCHERS IN DEATH

  10: THE LAST SON OF DORN

  11: SHADOW OF ULLANOR

  12: THE BEHEADING

  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

  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

  Part One – Doloroso

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Part Two – Crescendo

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Part Three – Furioso

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘Dark Imperium’

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  Warhammer 40,000

  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.

  Chapter One

  The End

  The causeway of flesh burned before Garran Crowe’s eyes.

  The Stormravens Purgation’s Sword and the Harrower strafed the end where it met the island of Hive Skoria. Washed by the turgid waves of the ocean of sludge, soaked in the effluent of tens of thousands of years of industry, the bodies ignited. The conflagration spread wide. A wall of flame cut Skoria off from the mainland. The fire rose and fell with the waves. Noxious smoke billowed thousands of feet into the air. Skoria was a phantom, the dark mass of the hive appearing and disappearing behind the firestorm. The last hive of Sandava III to be spared the daemonic incursion was unbowed. The channel between it and the mainland was a flaming moat. The towers looked down on the end of a war.

  ‘This is the final stand of the abominations!’ Crowe voxed to his strike force. ‘We have them at bay!’

  This is no victory! the Black Blade of Antwyr snarled in answer. The voice in Castellan Garran Crowe’s head lashed out in rage. You struggle in futility, it warned. Your hope burns.

  Crowe heard desperation in the sword’s raving. He heard impotence. It was Antwyr that had failed on Sandava III. It was Antwyr’s hope that burned. It had failed to break Crowe with despair. He was renewed. At the head of two squads of Purifiers, he was closing in on the shore of the mainland, and he was closing in on the end of the war. Antwyr shrieked, and Crowe plunged it into the body of the fiend of Slaanesh that charged him, gabbling its desperation to pummel with its hooves. Its tail stinger struck over his shoulder at his spine. It failed. The iron halo mounted above his power pack generated a gravitic conversion field that turned the blow away. The stinger shattered against artificer armour whose sanctity had been confirmed by a thousand battlefields. Crowe twisted the blade in the thorax of the fiend. The daemon stumbled forward, impaling itself on the indestructible metal, and falling into the terrible light of Crowe’s purity. His righteous anger matched the wrath of the blade. Where he walked, the sombre day of Sandava III blazed with harsh, merciless holiness. The daemon’s shape tore open from the thorax, peeling back, disintegrating into ash from the inside out. It issued a last, gargling scream, and then Crowe marched through the swirling cloud of its remains, already swinging the sword to decapitate two more fiends that lunged for him, jaws agape.

  The squads marched behind him in two close formations. There was a space between him and the two Knights of the Flame at their heads. There was room for daemons to get between the castellan and his battle-brothers, if they were reckless enough to make the attempt. The few who tried did not fight long. The gap was a needed distance. It diminished the voice of the Blade of Antwyr just enough for the other Purifiers to push its taunting and insinuations into the background and focus on the extermination of the
daemons. The war on Sandava III had been a hard one, and a long time for the other Grey Knights to be exposed to Crowe’s presence. The burden of Antwyr was his to bear, and never set aside. His grip, the surest prison of all, must forever be on the hilt of the corrupt, corrupting, indestructible relic. By the Emperor’s will, his being had been shaped for this task. His brothers were strong in faith and sinew, yet the sword was a spiritual poison, its corrosion so powerful it could erode even their defences.

  There was another gap between the Purifiers and the strike force from the First Brotherhood. Two Terminator squads had taken part in the salvation of Sandava III. Beside them rumbled the Land Raider Crusader Malleus Maleficarum. Heroes beyond taint, a dozen warriors now who had exterminated a world-wide plague of daemons, they still needed to keep their distance from Crowe.

  ‘You seem renewed, brother castellan,’ said Drake, a Knight of the Flame, the voice of fellowship reaching across the physical distance between his squad and Crowe. He used a private channel, for Crowe’s ears alone.

  ‘I am, brother.’

  ‘That was no simple victory against the daemon prince at Labos, then.’

  ‘It was not.’

  Hive Labos, a thousand miles west on the mainland, had been the centre of the incursion. There Crowe had destroyed Varangallax. The transformed keep had fallen, the guiding hand of the incursion was no more, and the purification of Sandava III had become a matter of time. Crowe’s struggle against Varangallax had also been a personal one. ‘The enemy sought to make me despair,’ he said to Drake. ‘It confronted me with the echoes of our losses on Sandava II.’

  ‘Old ghosts.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  His spirit had been drained by the decades of being besieged by Antwyr. Varangallax, a monster born from the tragedy of Sandava II, had tried to break him down with visions of the futility of all his struggles. It had failed.

  ‘My burden is my honour,’ Crowe said. ‘I welcome it.’ He welcomed Drake’s perception, too. It was a reminder of brotherhood that transcended the isolation that was Crowe’s lot. It would make easier the return of that isolation, at the end of this battle.

  In a final push to taint the world beyond salvation, the daemons were attempting to reach Skoria. From the ruins of Hive Conatum, less than fifty miles south of the narrows between the mainland and the island of Skoria, the abominations had dragged the bodies of millions of slaughtered civilians. They had thrown the bodies into the viscous sea, and so had created shoals of corpses, building flesh upon flesh until the causeway advanced, a finger of damnation, across the waters.

  They had not reached the other shore. The Stormravens were destroying the causeway, filling the air over the channel with the clouds of human debris. They strafed back and forth over the flames, knocking the furthest point of the causeway back and back away from Skoria. Crowe brought up the Purifiers and the strike force of warriors from the First Brotherhood behind the final daemonic horde, closing from the south and west. To the north of the corridor from Conatum to Skoria, the land shot up in jagged, heavily mined peaks. To the south-east, a fault line began as a mile-wide canyon before Conatum, and as the land dipped, became a talon-like inlet a hundred miles long. The daemons’ advance had stalled, and now they were trapped. Ahead, they faced an impassable ocean of fire. At their backs came something worse. A relentless force of silvered grey cut them down.

  This is something more meaningful than victory, Crowe thought. It is a cleansing.

  He deliberately turned from the personal satisfaction of the war’s end. But then Sendrax shouted over the ululations of the daemons, and there was no escaping the personal. The war had been aimed at him, but it had dragged in his comrades in destiny. ‘The day of our long vengeance is almost complete, brothers!’ the Knight of the Flame announced, his voice booming from his helm’s vox-casters. ‘We shall lay the ghosts of Sandava to final rest!’

  The other Purifiers of Sendrax’s squad cheered. Enough of them were survivors of Sandava II to feel the rush of final justice. Crowe bit his tongue rather than impose solemnity until the last daemon was hurled back to immaterium. He knew why Sendrax exulted. He felt the same urge, though he could no longer celebrate. This moment had been long in coming. It had been due for more than a century. He had been a Knight of the Flame when, led by Castellan Gavallan, the Grey Knights had landed on Sandava II. The daemonic work had begun there, with the death of Gavallan and, at the last, the Exterminatus of that world. A web had been cast for him then, one that had closed here on Sandava III, with the same atrocities, and the daemon prince created by the war on Sandava II attacking Crowe when the decades of ceaseless spiritual and mental attacks by the Blade had weakened him, made him vulnerable to the claws of the past and to the illusion of futility. He was the target, but his brothers who had been with him on Sandava II, and suffered the same losses, had felt the impact of the attack, too.

  On this day, final justice was rendered. For Gavallan and the dead battle-brothers, and for two worlds of the Imperium sacrificed to the dovetailing machinations of Antwyr and abominations of the Dark Prince, the debt was being paid. The daemonic works were ashes now. Hive Skoria would be spared.

  For Crowe, there was satisfaction, but no triumph. The cost was too great, and his war had no pause. The Blade was always there, always in his head, grinding and insinuating, whispering and screaming. It was tireless, sleepless, merciless – a battering ram at the gates of his will.

  This is no victory, the sword said again as he swung it with relentless rhythm.

  Sensing defeat, summoned by the presence of the daemon blade, the abominations surged at him, shrieking their hate. They ran straight into the burning halo of psychic force that surrounded Crowe. It was the light of a purity of faith so absolute, so unwavering, it lit up the battlefield near the castellan, and the abominations burned at its touch. They staggered back, flesh smouldering, and Crowe cut them down with the sword that drew them. If this was not a victory, it was something very close to one. He would accept it.

  Drake voxed, ‘Some ghosts will never lie easy. But I am glad to give them justice.’ He was more sober in his assessment than Sendrax. He always was.

  ‘The success of our mission is sufficient,’ Crowe said. The incursion was on the point of being defeated. He should not expect more. ‘But I agree with you, brother. I, too, am glad.’

  The rocky terrain sloped down, and Crowe could see over the daemonic horde to the burning shore. Less than a mile separated the Grey Knights from the sea. The abominations had run out as far as they could onto the shrinking causeway. They were writhing silhouettes in the flames. Their forms reached out in frustration and wrath for the hive that was now denied them. Some of the daemons that congregated on the shore pushed forward, their rush toppling their foul kin into the burning sea. Others turned back, hurling themselves at the Grey Knights. Crowe measured the desperation of the abominations in their anger. Creatures of sensation and vice, they had, until recently, howled with pleasure as they rampaged across the planet. Their songs had changed since the fall of Varangallax. The music of damnation had become shaded with bitterness, then with panic. Now there were only screams. The daemons charged into a storm of fire from the legionaries. The Malleus Maleficarum came up on the left flank of the Grey Knights’ strike force. Its hurricane bolters shredded landscape and daemon alike. The sweep of its fire carved arcing swathes ahead of Crowe. The sound of hundreds of mass-reactive bolt shells exploding in near simultaneity smashed the final traces of the daemons’ song. This was a different music, brutal in its rhythm and regularity. It was a martial drumming. It split the air with fury and with judgement. The horde boiled with confusion on either side of the swathes. Confusion and dismay robbed the daemons of what momentum they had.

  The vanguard of destruction came in the form of incineration by fire and las, and physical annihilation by shell. But the truest anger of faith came when the Purifiers
and the First Brotherhood fought in close quarters. The grey day flashed with the incandescent blue lightning of Nemesis force weapons. The runes and power fields of halberds, swords, axes and hammers turned daemons into less than ash. The Stormravens were attacking closer to the shore as they cut down the causeway. The fire on the ocean seemed to roar higher, the peaks of the flames reaching up into their smoke, clawing the unseen sky. This final cremation of the unclean was at hand.

  Crowe beheld the panorama of victory, and in that moment the Blade of Antwyr attacked him with a sickening blast of triumph. You look on illusion. This is nothing. The ashes are yours. Defeat is coming. Submit or perish with all you have fought for. Look, warden! Look for the ending! Look for its coming!

  The sword’s hiss chased itself around Crowe’s skull, slicing at his thoughts. He had stood upon the ramparts of his soul, his vigil unflagging, ever since he had reclaimed the Blade after the death of Gavallan and made himself its jailer and its prisoner. He did not blink. He did not let the sword stagger his assault and drop his guard. Antwyr’s shout was so fierce, some of the Purifiers behind him grunted in pain as the bow wave of the assault washed over them.

  There could never be a response to Antwyr’s harangues. To engage in dialogue with the daemon would be to invite corruption. Yet Crowe listened, always alert, always parsing the sword’s words, watching for a weakness it might let slip, or a truth that might escape sideways. Antwyr was gleeful, triumphant. Its anger had vanished.

  Danger was coming.

  Still marching forward, still rending and burning abominations, Crowe voxed the pilot of the Stormraven Harrower. ‘Brother Berinon,’ he said, ‘is a new enemy approaching our position?’

  ‘There is no sign of any within line of sight,’ Berinon answered. ‘Auspex is clear.’

  Berinon sounded displeased with his own report. Crowe wasn’t satisfied either. He voxed the Sacrum Finem, and received the same response from Shipmaster Gura. She was ancient by mortal standards, barely alive except when the mechadendrites of her command throne made her one with her beloved ship. Crowe had absolute trust in her acumen. ‘There is no enemy closing in,’ she said. She sounded as definite and as unhappy with her pronouncement as Berinon had with his.