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Black Legion – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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‘Khayon, I know you’re here. I can smell your mongrel stink.’

Daravek’s voice was a rusted hacksaw, a thing of flaky corrosion and rotting edges. ‘Show yourself. Let us finish this.’

He was talking a great deal, almost always a sign of desperation in a warrior. I dared to think that control of the situation was slipping through his fingers, and challenging me like this was the only way he could try to reassert his dominance.

Around us, above us, sirens were crying out their warnings. They had been doing so for several minutes. In Daravek’s defence, he had done very well to last this long.

But I had him. At last, I had him. Tonight I would bring his bones to my lord Abaddon.

Thagus Daravek was an immense, bloated monster, swollen by the favour of his patron Gods. Wet filth crusted the overlapping plates of his battle armour, sealing the seams with undefined biomechanical vileness. The ceramite around his torso and one of his legs was warped with diseased swelling and fusion of the flesh within, and horns of bronze thrust through punctures in the mangled armour. The bronze spines were veined, somehow alive, and bleeding vascular promethium. The vulture’s wings that rose in ragged majesty from his shoulder blades were spindly, trembling things despite their size, the feathers and tattered bones burning in heatless waves of warpfire. Ghosts, or things that looked like ghosts, reached out from those flames.

‘He is here,’ Daravek said, deep and low, as he paced. His jaundiced eyes drifted from warrior to warrior among his elite guard. Blood decorated his face from the slaughter so far. It bubbled, slowly dissolving on the active blade of his axe. ‘I know he is here, riding within your bones. Which one of you was weak enough to fall to the mongrel magician?’

Even as I clenched my consciousness away from the risk of discovery, even as I dissolved my essence thinner than mist and threaded it through the blood of my host body, I felt a stab of irritation at the word ‘magician’, uttered in Gothic heavily accented by life in the highlands of Barbarus.

But now was not the time to amend the warlord’s ignorance.

‘Was it you, Symeos?’ he asked one of his warriors. The metal chamber shook around us. Statues to incarnations of the Undying God and the Shifting Many trembled, given shivering life by the assault on the fortress. Symeos tilted his helmed head, bearing his throat before his master’s blade.

‘Never in life, Lord Daravek.’

Daravek levelled his axe at another of his closest brethren. Some of them shared the same traits as their liege lord – the warped bloating of preternatural disease, the encrusted corruption of once pristine battleplate. This one did not; he was cadaverous in a drier, more ghoulish sense. There was something parched about him, something that spoke of undesecrated tombs beneath the earth, decorated with the untouched dust of centuries.

‘Ilyaster?’ Daravek asked. ‘Was it you, brother?’

‘No, my lord,’ Ilyaster said with the ugly rasp that served as his voice. He was unhelmed, and the words were a carrion-scented breath through blackened teeth.

Daravek swayed to the next warrior. To me. His eyes met mine, his toxic respiration caressing my face. ‘Tychondrian,’ he said. ‘You, brother?’

I was also unhelmed. I snarled through jaws that could barely close due to the length of my uneven fangs.

‘No, lord.’

The fortress gave another titanic shudder around us. Daravek turned away, laughing, truly laughing. ‘You could all be lying, you worthless wretches. Nevertheless, the day is far from done. We must get into orbit. We will go where Abaddon’s mongrel cannot pursue.’

I was instrumental in the birth of the Black Legion, yet the truth is that I was absent for many of the battles that formed its genesis. While my brothers waged war and fought to survive, I worked in an isolation that bordered upon exile. I cannot say that I never resented Abaddon for this, but I have always understood it. We each play the part to which we are best suited, and he did not need another general, or yet another warrior. He needed an assassin.

This is not a rare role for souls of great psychic strength among the Nine Legions. We possess talents and masteries that make murder something of a specialty. In a realm where deception and assassination are plagued by a million unnatural considerations – where stealth and a sniper rifle are next to useless; where physical laws scarcely apply; where every single foe is preternaturally resistant to venom and poison – those with the power to remake reality make the finest murderers.

Use of the Art, manipulating the matter of souls, allows one to bypass such limitations. A warrior who may never best his brothers with a blade can bind daemons to his will. The same warrior, who may be mediocre with a boltgun and bear no awards for either valour or mastery, can rewrite the minds of his foes to his own wishes. A marksman that has learned every scrap of intelligence about his target may try to predict his foe’s actions, but a sorcerer that has seen into his enemy’s soul knows every iota of lore without needing to resort to crude guesswork. And if you give credence to such things, the sorcerer may have walked the paths of fate and seen a host of possible, probable futures, and can manipulate events to bring about the most desired ends.

Yet if I am making this sound easy, I am doing a disservice to the slayer’s craft. Most of these undertakings are monumental. Many are impossible without a coven of allies and apprentices, both of which I have used in abundance across the millennia. Sometimes, however, I work alone, and those sorcerers capable of such feats must be psykers of immense strength. I do not say this lightly. My reputation among the Nine Legions has been hard earned, and there are precious few sorcerers able to match me in might. Most of those that can tend to waste their talents in the unreliable impracticalities of precognition and prophecy. A tragic waste. Some say the best blades are those that are never drawn, and there is wisdom in such a philosophy. But power must be wielded, tested and trained, lest it wither on the vine.

You have heard me speak of Ahriman before. I know you know his name, from his many predations upon the Imperium. My brother, my naïve but most admirably honest brother, Ahzek Ahriman once told me that he alone among the Nine Legions stood above me in talent with the Art. It was typical of his habit for blending humility with arrogance, to say nothing of manipulation.

I cannot speak for the veracity of his words. In the long years of my life, while almost all of my sorcerous rivals lie dead, a few of them came close to killing me. There are others whom I would never wish to face, and still others that carry reputations equal to, or greater than, mine.

In our Legion’s early years, I played my part as expected. My new duties for Abaddon required a breathtaking amount of preparation, and I adhered to these requirements with unfailing focus.

I was never swift in my work. I was, however, very thorough. When Abaddon needed haste, he sent warriors or warships to do his will. When he needed precision, when he wanted a point made or a lesson learned, he sent me.

When Abaddon first told me he required Daravek dead, I knew not to expect any deep conversational insight as to how he wished me to achieve his goal. It was always my place to study the target, to ascertain the consequences of various methods of death and to bring about a result most favourable to our emerging armies and the warrior-monarch that led us.

Abaddon expects results. Any one of the Ezekarion requiring the painstaking force-feeding of information, unable or unwilling to compose battle plans in his own right, would be discarded or destroyed as useless. The same stands for the chieftains, subcommanders and champions that fill the officer ranks beneath us.

This serves a twofold purpose. First, although he leads the Black Legion’s greatest battles and oversees our function, in this manner Abaddon forces his ranking officers and elite bodyguards to constantly adapt and act on their own initiative.

The second purpose, no less vital, is one of trust. By this delegation his closest brothers know they carry his trust. The rest of the Legion, and the entirety of the Eye itself, knows this as well. The Ezekarion speaks with Abaddon’s voice. Each one of us wields his authority. You cannot overstate the exultant effect this has on morale.

It was my duty as Abaddon’s silent blade that brought me to the fortress of Thagus Daravek, Warlord of This, Master of That, Butcher of Them and a dozen other titles that I refuse to consign to parchment even all these millennia later. One of them mattered more than the others, and that is the one I shall use: the self-styled Lord of Hosts.

He challenged us at every turn, a warlord who wanted to rival Abaddon, and thus he was sentenced to death. Our emissaries to other warlords would arrive only to find that oaths had already been sworn to Daravek. Our fleets would translate into a system only to sail into one of Daravek’s many ambushes.

We of the Ezekarion, and the armies we commanded, had been bleeding the Legions for some time, carving them apart as we fought for our right to exist. None retaliated with the same ferocity as the Death Guard, and no warlord was as wilful, or as dangerous, as Daravek, the so-called Lord of Hosts. The title fit. On more than one occasion he had gathered fleets comprised of warbands from several Legions, tasked with the purpose of resisting our rise. Yet always he avoided direct conflict with Abaddon. Always he remained one step ahead of us, refusing to come within range of the Vengeful Spirit’s guns.

For every victory we earned through the running blood of his warriors, he stole one back in kind. He had to die.

I was Abaddon’s instrument. It took months of watching, waiting, hiding and scrying to locate his sanctuary world, and I was blessed with fortune as well. Traitors within his ranks stood ready to work with me. I could not fail. I would not fail. Not this time.

Daravek and his warband laid claim to a world of calcified pain. Despite the madness of those words, they are neither weak poetry nor a strained metaphor. The planet’s crust was formed of tortured breaths, fearful dreams and the echoes of human and eldar agonies throughout eternity, all of it bleeding from the warp and rendered into a cold landscape of knuckly, misshapen bone.

This would have left me enraptured during my first years inside the Eye. When I walked the world’s surface, however, I was neither breathless nor awed. My mind was elsewhere, tangled in other difficulties. This was my fifth attempt on Daravek’s life. As useful as I was to Abaddon, his patience was not without limit.

‘Kulrei’arah,’ Nefertari had informed me before I left to undertake the duty. That was the name this globe had once carried as part of the eldar empire.

We had no name for it. It didn’t deserve one.

If you touched the osseous ground with bare skin, you could feel the senseless, red reflections of the dreamers and sufferers whose torment formed this place. Even without touching the bony earth you could hear the murmurs rising from its cracked, marrow-stinking surface.

What wracked imagination had conjured such a planet into being? Was this Daravek’s psyche at insidious work, shaping it to his desires? Or was it merely the Eye’s etheric discharge taking form – the warp’s excremental run-off changing a world without any guiding will?

And yet, as daemon-haunted worlds are weighed, the climate and landscape of this nameless sphere were practically tame. On Sortiarius, the home world of my former Legion, it rains the boiling blood of every liar ever to draw breath. In the season of storms, this sanguine tempest is often acidic enough to dissolve ceramite. Some say this is Magnus the Red’s rebellious subconscious at play, scourging himself for his past treacheries. I cannot speak to the truth of the matter, but it sounds appropriate for my father, as conflicted as he is.

Patches of this nameless world’s surface had, through preternatural corrosion or unrest, been reduced to deserts of bone dust. It was within one of these oceans of skeletal powder that Daravek’s fortress lay, half-buried in the dust of eroded nightmares. Its crooked spires reached skywards, surrounded in a fog of toxichemical mist. Monstrous industrial mouth-vents along the sides of each tower breathed the poison gas across the surrounding desert, offering yet another line of defence. Despite this, the bastion was still a place of pilgrimage to the beastmen and mutants that populated the world – their bodies, given over to varying degrees of rot, lay across the desert in their scattered thousands. This latter element fascinated me. What would bring these creatures on such a pilgrimage, into the face of an almost certain death? What did they believe awaited them within the fortress’ walls, those few that were strong enough to walk through the poison mist to reach it?

I recovered several of the corpses for educational purposes. Speaking with the shards of their souls, I ascertained from their pious wailing that they left their subterranean tribes and marched upon Daravek’s castle of corroded iron in the hopes of elevation into his ranks. He would hardly be the first to try and pervert the gene-seed implantation process to function on mutants, adult or otherwise, but tales of success in altering the Emperor’s original ritualised process were – and still are – as rare as you might imagine.

After each summoning I would sheathe my jamdhara knife, hurl the shrieking ghosts back into the warp’s winds and incinerate the remains to erase any evidence of my investigations. Avoiding detection was paramount. Slowly, invisibly, I began my infiltration.

It took almost a year of psychic permeation before I was ready to kill Daravek. Everything had to be precise. It had to be perfect. I could take no risks this time.

I still wonder if I acted too swiftly.

The creature’s name was a gathering of syllables that I would struggle to pronounce aloud, despite speaking several hundred linguistic variants of humanity’s proto-Gothic root tongue. This creature, whose thoughts were a turmoil of bestial instinct and slavering loyalty to its armoured masters, toiled its life away in the fortress’ dark depths. Here the only sounds in existence were the brays and yells of the menials raising their voices above the ceaseless crash of coal-fire machinery. This was the creature’s life, from birth to death.

In this dark realm, the creature moved among its kindred, clutching a rusted and broken machine strut, almost two metres in length. It thrust this primitive spear through the back of a second creature’s neck, ripped it free, then wielded it as a club to shatter the face of a third slave. This third unfortunate fell to the ground, raising its arms futilely as it was impaled through the chest.

The spear was now bent, rendering it useless. The creature left it in its kinsman’s chest and turned to the others drawing closer in the stinking, crashing darkness. It could kill one of them, perhaps two, but dozens of red eyes gleamed back in the gloom. Jagged war-shrieks and more human-sounding cries of anger and fear sounded out through the dark.

The creature did not fight its kinsmen. It turned from them, took three running steps and hurled itself into the pounding, rattling mechanics of the closest machine station. The pistons slammed. The gears ground. The creature’s final thought, not surprisingly, was washed red with panic and pain. The machine slowed momentarily, then chewed through the obstruction.

This happened again and again. One of the creatures would erupt into sudden violence, killing without warning, striking down those at its side. Several simply threw themselves into the jaws of struggling mechanical engines.

Within the space of a single minute, eleven of the machines had stalled, jammed by dense clogs of flesh and bone.

In one of the spires, a legionary overseeing the work of high-level functionary slaves stared unblinking at a console that started to flash with red warning signs. He was already dying when the console’s alert runes began flashing, suffering catastrophic ischemic shock as a carnival of messy embolisms savaged his brain.

The Space Marine – a warrior named Elath Dastarenn – remained standing. He stood slack-mouthed, dead-eyed, and keyed in several codes to deactivate the console’s warning sigils, silencing the terminal from reporting its findings elsewhere.

I believe he said something mumbled and meaningless as his synapses flared those final times. Whatever the wordless murmur was supposed to mean, I cannot speculate. Bodies, and the brains that drive them, do strange things as they die.

The legionary holding the rank of Armsmaster ceased speaking halfway through addressing his squad. He drew his sidearm in a slow snarl of arm servos, placed the bolt pistol’s mouth against his left eye and discharged a bolt directly into the front of his skull.

Atop one of the gunship platforms, a crew of mutant thralls braved the toxic gases with rheumy eyes and blood-pocked rebreathers, working to refuel a Thunderhawk. One of them unlimbered a crude flamer from beneath her cloak, a weapon she did not have the clearance to possess. She had spent several days building it piece by piece, despite lacking the intelligence to do so, and now brought it forth to bathe her companions in a roar of semi-liquid fire.

She ignored her flailing, dying herdmates, even when one of them crashed into her and ignited her gas-soaked clothing. Aflame now, she pushed the nozzle of the jury-rigged short-burst flamer against the refuelling port of the grounded gunship, but nothing emerged when she pulled the trigger. Her last act was to thrust her burning arm directly into the hole that opened into the promethium tank.

I saw the explosion just under a minute later from where I watched, several kilometres away on a low ridge.

On several other towers, anti-aircraft cannons rotated and lowered, no longer scanning the low atmosphere for threats, instead tracking the flight paths of the fighter wing patrolling above the ramparts. The servitor-brains inside these turrets would later be found boiled alive in their suspension-fluid cradles. Long before that, however, they spat volley after volley of cannon fire into the sky, bringing down most of their own aerial defences.

The primary cannon – an anti-orbital annihilator fusillade – detonated in the middle of this treacherous display due to its fifty-strong crew of mono-tasked servitors acting without orders, overriding all fail-safes and overloading the poorly maintained power cells set in the weapon’s foundations. The three tech-priests tasked with overseeing the primary cannon’s function had slaughtered one another without warning or reason, acting in cold and calculating silence, effectively abandoning their servitor wards.

I saw this explosion as well. It was considerably brighter than the first.

Power began to fail across the fortress. Partly this was because of slave crews turning on one another. Partly it was due to the sabotage of several power generators. And partly it was because one of Daravek’s own elite warriors, the legionary’s armour heaving to contain the disease-bloated flesh within, had fused several melta charges to his own body and detonated them at the tri-cortex plasma locomotor that controlled coolant for the fortress’ entire reactor district beneath the planet’s surface.

An uprising began in the fortress’ depths when a legionary powered down and deactivated the prisoner cells, flooding the lower levels of the castle with warp spawn, devolved mutants and mortal captives who were being kept as food. The legionary cut his own throat with his chainsword before he witnessed the fruits of this labour, and the vox speakers in his gorget that demanded reports heard nothing but his last breaths gurgling through his destroyed vocal cords.

Several legionaries rampaged through the warband’s barracks and armouries, butchering their unprepared brethren and slaughtering arming slaves. Each of these wayward warriors was inevitably killed in turn by his brothers, but not before each had done what damage he could. Within each victorious squad, another warrior would then turn on his brethren without warning, unloading a boltgun at point-blank range into the backs and heads of his brothers, or carving limbs from bodies with a power sword before being finished by the survivors.

Dying daemons clawed their way from several of these corpses, their soulless lives extinguished on the floor by the bodies of those they had possessed. Others I simply abandoned where they fell, moving my senses and consciousness to the next warriors whose souls I had spent months studying in preparation for this night.

One by one, death by death.

I remember every man, woman and child whose mind I touched, whose body I puppeteered, whose flesh I gouged out hollow as a haven for a daemonic parasite, purely because of what I am. A legionary’s brain is sculpted to retain everything from the moment of his awakening as a Space Marine to the second of his demise.

Far from the fortress, I was sweating in my armour and chanting, endlessly chanting, hunched in the confines of a crawl hole I had dug with my bare hands. Even with my consciousness free of my body, I felt my physical form reacting to the pressures I was placing upon it with such a protracted psychic sending: the ache of my over-bent spine; the tickle of saliva running from my moving mouth; the painful spasms of my twitching fingers.

Months and months of preparation had led to this moment. Soul by soul, being by being, I moved through the fortress, touching some minds as a mere caress, amplifying their basest instincts and spurring them to bloodshed. Others, those I had silently and unknowingly prepared over the many months, I plunged myself into, knife-like and savage, tearing their consciousnesses into mist, overriding the function of their muscles and bones with my will.

Even among those I had been spying upon for months, hollowing out for this specific purpose, resistance was tenacious. I was weary and their souls were strong, and rather than waste time seeking to overcome them I would move onto others. I was too focused on my work to keep track of every failed attempt, but in more than one district of the fortress my attempts to rally the slaves against their masters failed, as did my attempts to force the Death Guard to butcher their slaves.

It was working, though.

Bulkheads that led to avenues of escape were sealed and overridden with their mechanical processes shot. Corridors were collapsed with explosives. Gunships that managed to lift off were brought down by fire from the battlements. Section by section, district by district, the fortress was cast into darkness and pitched into disorder. A year’s work, all culminating in a single evening. The jaws of the trap slowly closed.

It was not perfect, but by the lies of the Shifting Many, it was close. So damn close.

Soon it was time to hunt Daravek. I sank my unseen claws into one last prepared and vulnerable mind, tearing his shrieking, violated thoughts free and binding my own in place. I settled into this new host, gathered my strength and waited.

Daravek was by no means easy prey, and he was anything but a fool. He had reacted with precision and competence, moving through the fortress himself, quelling the uprisings through the brutality of his axe and by ordering entire sections of the fortress sealed, flooding them with alchemical toxins to extinguish any living resistance. It might have worked had the sections actually been sealed, but many of his unit leaders and subcommanders were mind-eaten wrecks that failed to comply with his orders, or were murdered by their subordinates before they could act. In many cases, they were dead before they could even receive his orders.

But despite all my preparation, I was building an uncontrollable fire in haste and with imperfect tools. Daravek felt my nearness. He knew what was happening, knew this was the payment for resisting Abaddon’s past approach and offer of alliance. He had seen this before. Not on this scale, not to this degree of precision, but he knew the hand that held this blade.

‘Khayon is here,’ he had said.

He halted his massacring advance in one of his ritual chambers, demanding answers from the remaining bodyguards at his side. They endured this with stoic, regal loyalty.

When his eyes locked to mine, I felt the toxicity of his breath against my mutated face. ‘Tychondrian,’ he said to me. ‘You, brother?’

I snarled a denial through a fanged mouth that the warp had mangled and reshaped into something of absolute lethality.

‘No, lord.’

He laughed. By the Pantheon, he was enjoying this. ‘You could all be lying, you worthless wretches. Nevertheless, the day is far from done. We must get into orbit. We will go where Abaddon’s mongrel cannot pursue.’

The chamber shook once more with the discord I had orchestrated across the fortress. Daravek turned away from me, levelling his gaze upon the next warrior of his inner circle. All I had to do was shift my stance, lengthening my shadow beneath the flickering glare of the overhead lights so that it touched Daravek’s in lightless union.

I forced my psychic command into that patch of conjoined darkness.

Now.

Prosperine lynxes, extinct with the annihilation of my home world, were ill-named for comparative purposes. Before their destruction, they had resembled the equally extinct Ancient Terran tigrus-cat or the sabre-toothed smyladon rather than any other feline: hugely muscled, bulky with strength and speckle-striped in natural warning to ward off other predators. However, they eclipsed even those prehistoric beasts in size. A Prosperine lynx’s great head, with an arsenal of spear-tip teeth, would reach the height of a Legiones Astartes warrior’s breastplate.

That is what leapt from Thagus Daravek’s shadow. Claws first, the beast melted out of the darkness and launched, roaring, onto the warlord’s back in a move of impossible agility.

In shape it was a Prosperine lynx, but in form it was purely daemonic. This creature possessed neither flesh nor blood, and its fur – black and striped with lighter grey – was closer to smoke than hair. Its claws were the length of gladii and formed from volcanic glass. Its eyes were the kind of white that burns.

I was moving the moment it struck. I spun to the warrior next to me, igniting the lightning claws I wore as gauntlets. I could – should – have slaughtered two of the other bodyguards before they could react, but I was slowed by the unfamiliar might of the Terminator war-plate around me. Nor were cumbersome lightning claws my weapon of preference. I carved through the closest Death Guard only for the blades to lodge within the corpse for precious seconds. When I dragged them free, my chance to slaughter Daravek was lost – though he still thrashed beneath the daemon-cat’s weight and fury, his other bodyguards now moved between us.

Reality bleached down to flashes of instinct and insight, cutting, weaving aside, swinging left and right with the cumbersome claws. Despite my gouging Tychondrian’s consciousness free of his flesh, his body still resisted my control. He had been stronger than I expected. That made me slow.

Tychondrian’s body was a limping, bleeding ruin by the time I reached Daravek. Scarce seconds had passed, but it was an assassin’s eternity, where every heartbeat counted. The taste of failure was already running its bitter way over my tongue. I knew, facing the embattled Daravek as he wrestled with the thrashing, snarling lynx, that I lacked the strength to finish him from within Tychondrian’s shredded form.

Nagual, I sent. Even my silent voice was ravaged. Tychondrian was dying, the distraction of weakness rather than pain flooding through his fading muscles and slowing his internal organs. I was down on one knee, unable to force myself back up as the body died around me. Nagual… Finish him…

Master, the lynx sent back in acknowledgement.

Not a word in truth, just a ripple of awareness, yet the lynx was struggling alone. Daravek gushed a flood of alchemical flame from his wrist projectors, bathing the creature that thrashed upon his back and shoulders like a living cloak. Nagual’s smoky corpus caught fire, and the beast vanished.

Suddenly unbalanced without the daemon’s weight, Daravek took a moment to turn and stabilise himself. In the same second, the daemonic feline roared from my shadow, leaping out to crash into the Death Guard warlord once more.

Cannot kill alone, sent Nagual as his fangs scraped sparks across the ceramite of Daravek’s shoulder guards. His claws found better purchase, tearing mangled shreds of armour plating free and ripping through the meat beneath, yet each savage wound sealed almost as soon as it was carved. Prey is blessed. Gifts from the Undying God. Gifts from the Shifting Many. Cannot kill alone.

I couldn’t rise. I couldn’t shoot. The arm I raised did not end in a double-barrelled bolter clutched in an armoured fist; it ended raggedly at the elbow, severed moments before by one of the other bodyguards’ blades.

‘Khayon.’ Daravek spat my name from his bleeding mouth, advancing on me, step by slow step. ‘I. See. You.’

The daemon’s snarls turned frantically feline as Daravek gripped Nagual’s biting face over his shoulder and began to sink his fingers into his skull.

Master!

I tore myself free of the useless husk that had been Tychondrian, suffering the disembodied vulnerability of an unseen etheric form. My body, my true body, was kilometres from here – hunched and chanting and utterly useless. In the air around me, I felt the shivery threat of shapeless daemons drawn to my unbound spirit, hungering for the taste of a human soul. No time for caution.

I closed myself around Daravek, seeping through the cracks in his armour, sinking into the pores of his skin, driving into the meat of his mind. Possession is among the most desperate and difficult ways to attack a soul. It rarely works without intensive preparation, and he sensed me at once, as surely as if I held a blade to his throat. Immersion within a soul comes with a horrific sharing of overlapping senses as the brain plays host to two souls, awakening the mind with painful hisses of meshed memories and sending burning stabs of sensory input along overburdened optic nerves.

Not this time. Daravek’s spirit was iron. Trying to puppet his flesh was to shout into a storm; I was hopelessly overwhelmed against his strength. He repelled me from his flesh through force of will, and hurled the daemon-cat away through force of muscle.

He was bloodied and battered, cut off from the survivors of his warband, his fortress falling around him – yet he still lived. He turned, paying no heed to the blood he vomited down his chest-plate, disgorging internal filth through the grate of his teeth and seeking me, wild-eyed and raving.

No. Not seeking me. Seeking my ally, the traitor now revealed in his midst.

‘Ilyaster.’

One of his inner circle still lived. Ilyaster, that patient and parched creature serving as Daravek’s herald, standing as ever with his liege lord’s scythe of office in his hands. He too was wounded from the fray, his Cataphractii plate mauled and spitting sparks from its back-mounted power generator. I had not touched him, nor had my daemon familiar.

Ilyaster pulled the ceremonial weapon from the corpse of the brother warrior he had just beheaded, and raised it to ward off his own lord.

‘You.’ Daravek’s mouth ran with black blood as he regurgitated the accusation. ‘You betrayed me. You summoned Abaddon’s mongrel. You!’

The shadow-lynx advanced from one side, Ilyaster from the other, wounded but determined.

Now. It had to be now. Daravek could destroy all three of us if he was allowed to retake control of the battle.

But I had nothing left. I hurled myself into him once more. He repelled me without effort, as defiantly as though his soul were warded by steel.

Weakening by the moment, I drove back into his mind, thinning myself into near-nothingness, offering no solid presence for him to repel a third time. I did not need to master his flesh, merely steal a moment of opportunity.

No assault this time. This was attunement, a harmonising with his body’s mortal processes. I flowed through his physical form, riding his blood, feeling the singing sting of adrenaline and electrical impulses from his nervous system.

Pain.

I willed pulses of flame to dance along the cobweb of his nerves, forcing his muscles to contract, to clench, to spasm.

It was enough. Enough to loosen his grip on the axe, enough to paralyse Daravek the span of a single breath.

The daemon-beast was a hammer weight of taloned shadow against my face and chest. The ceremonial scythe was a lance blow cracking into my side. I felt myself falling to the ground, weighed down by the body I had suffused with suffering.

Feed! The daemon’s snarls came with each jarring, reaving blow of his clawed paws. Feed! Blood! Meat! Life!

I was Daravek in that moment. Every word was a thunder crack against my shattering skull. The daemon, the minion of Abaddon’s mongrel assassin, was taking me to pieces. I could not move. My armour was shattered by my own ceremonial scythe in Ilyaster’s hands.

And yet, I was laughing. Daravek was laughing. I had no power to compel him to such a reaction.

Khayon. I spoke my own name, forcing my spirit into cohesion, keeping myself together. I am Khayon. I am Khayon.

Memories flashed, acid-vile in their intensity, of warriors I had never met and wars I had never fought. Strangely it was this, of all things, that Daravek hated me for most. This voyeuristic sharing of his thoughts; this defiling insult of living inside his skull. And yet, even then, his snide laughter echoed all around me.

He backhanded Ilyaster hard enough to shatter the other warrior’s breastplate and moved for the immense doors leading to the fortress’ teleportation chamber. I had to stop him. I had to kill him.

But I could not. I could not hold myself inside his form. He would not let me. He hurled me from his flesh with the ease of a man waving aside an insect. My shock only made it easier for him to shed my consciousness from his own, and he did so with silent psychic laughter.

Almost, Iskandar! Almost, this time.

He repelled me with such brutality that all sense and sensation fled from me. I saw nothing, sensed nothing, and merely plunged through blackness. At the end of my strength, only oblivion awaited.

For a time, I did not exist. For a time, I was past consciousness. In that deep and timeless black, I remember only one thing: when it began to end. There came the sensation of fangs, jaws that closed together in the nothingness. Weapon-teeth sank into whatever was left of Iskandar Khayon, biting down into the matter of his lost soul.

Jaws that arrested my endless fall, that held me in a bladed, impaling embrace… and that brought me back.

I woke with the arrhythmic drumming of my twin hearts straining inside my chest, and a gasp of bitter air spearing its way into my lungs. My vision returned, but slowly, victim to smears and hallucinatory blurs.

When my muscles ceased spasming, I managed to rise on unsteady feet, appalled at the weakness of my limbs. Sweat greased my flesh in a disgusting coat. Blood had trickled from my eyes, my ears, my nose, my gums. The pressure in my skull began to ease as I sucked in great heaves of air, fuelling my locked lungs and overworked hearts.

Nagual emerged from the shadow cast by my crouching form, licking blood from his obsidian teeth.

Master? the daemon lynx asked, as if I were not standing right before him.

Is it done? I was so drained, I could not be certain I was even reaching outside my own head, let alone to my distant daemon. Is he dead?

The great cat turned back towards the burning fortress, kilometres away and far below us in the desert bowl.

The prey fled. Could not kill alone. Had to save you, master. Your soul was lost.

Breathless, exhausted, I exhaled into the nameless world’s reeking wind and looked up at the stars, where Thagus Daravek and his surviving brethren were surely safe aboard one of their warships, no doubt already sailing to yet another hidden sanctuary that would take me years to find.

Defeated, a failure for the fifth time, I looked down at the lynx. I would go to the fortress and claim it for Abaddon. I would find out if Ilyaster still lived. And then, after this latest loss, I would go home.

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Peter Jackson once said: ‘We all felt like Luke, but we all wanted to be Han.’ This one’s for Gav Thorpe and Andy Chambers. We all felt like Gav, but we all wanted to be Andy.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2017.
This eBook edition published in 2017 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,
Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Raymond Swanland.

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ISBN: 978-1-78572-711-5

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