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Praetorian of Dorn – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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One

System transport vessel Primigenia
Outer Terran approaches

‘Bring us onto the line.’

‘Entering the line now.’

‘Transmitting clearance.’

‘Clearance acknowledged.’

‘Hold steady, and make ready for pilot cadre.’

‘Hold steady, aye.’

Lieutenant Maecenas V Hon-II let the voices from the bridge wash across him. He sat on the throne of the second attendant deck officer, feet on the lapis and bronze instrument console, arms crossed across the rippled blue and yellow of his uniform. His eyes were closed, and his chin rested on his chest.

All the command crew knew that this was the most likely position to find Maecenas in when he was on second attendance. They would not bother him, even though anyone else sleeping on watch would have been shackled, electro-whipped and left in the brig for the journey back to Jupiter. Not Maecenas, though; he was of the Consanguinity. Everyone else on the ship was oath or marriage bonded at best. That meant that Maecenas had the right to do as he pleased. After all, in a very real sense, the ship almost belonged to him. Had his uncle, or his first cousin, come onto the ship and told him to take his feet off the console, he would have obeyed, but the polar Shoal-city stations were a long way away in the wrong direction, and getting no closer. So the crew let him sleep through his watch. It was better than him being awake after all.

He was awake, though. He was always awake.

From behind his eyelids Maecenas watched the command crew prepare for the pilot cadre. They had all done this so many times that well-worn routine had replaced indignance. System-wrights began to power down their stations. Chromed neural cables snaked from their scalps to ducts in the floor. Their skin was almost translucent under the glow of their instruments. Wide, black eyes watched data values change on screens, and long-fingered hands made fine adjustments. All were Jovian bred, and most had never felt the pull of a planet’s surface or breathed unfiltered air.

The Primigenia was a Jovian trading barge, a little over five kilometres from prow to stern. She had been born in the Shoal-cities above Jupiter’s pole, and had swum the solar voids for twenty-eight generations. Her engines and systems were not the products of Mars, but the secrets of the void clans saved from the darkness of Old Night. In times past she had hauled plunder from the edges of the system, and traded with the warlords of Terra. Now she was one link in a chain of ships spooling through the system’s inner and outer reaches. Filled with supplies she passed through controlled corridors of space until she docked at one of the Throneworld’s outer void stations, and unloaded her cargo. Rogal Dorn might have barred its gates, but Terra’s hunger could never be sated. So, the Primigenia and her sisters made their way to and from Terra again and again, like laden mules to the gates of a citadel.

‘We are at dead stop. Monitor craft coming alongside,’ said one of the crew.

Maecenas watched the ship’s master glance at the first attendant and nod.

‘Extend docking gantries,’ called First Attendant Sur Nel Hon-XVII. She was Maecenas’ second cousin by oath, and he made a show of holding both that connection and her rank in contempt. She hated him in return. That was good. It stopped her noticing anything else about him.

‘Pilot cadre on board. Looks like a full inspection force,’ Sur Nel muttered, as data scrolled across her visor.

The shipmaster let out a long breath and shook his head.

‘This is not going to move quickly.’

‘It never does,’ replied Sur Nel.

Behind his closed eyes, Lieutenant Maecenas V Hon-II began to count the seconds, one after another.

Gobi tox-wastes
Terra

They rode ahead of the dawn light, the crawler shaking, the smell in the crew compartment getting worse by the second. It had been eighteen hours since they had left the settlement at the edge of the tox-plateau. Eighteen hours of twelve humans sitting and sweating in a metal box while the night passed by unseen.

Most of the scavenger contingent had started the journey with jokes and attempts at conversation. That had stopped when it became clear that Myzmadra and her two colleagues were not interested in being friendly. The scavs had retreated into silence, fiddling with their weaponry and equipment. They were all big, all vat-graft muscle and crude augmetics. They had a lot of scars too: jagged craters from bullets, pale splashes from acid burns, and furrows from knife cuts. Most of them wore what armour they had over bare skin, as though daring anyone who fought them to give them a new scar. They smelt of gun oil, sump liquor and greed.

Myzmadra looked at the triangulator on her wrist, and frowned. Cogs whirled and bubbles of mercury shifted behind the crystal casing.

‘What is that thing?’ growled the scav sat opposite her. She looked up. He was a big one. The rest of the gang called him Grol. He had a drill hammer instead of a right arm, and a pair of machine claws bonded to his spine. His face was red chrome above his teeth, and he had slots for eyes. She looked back down at the triangulator without replying.

‘It’s a triangulator.’ She looked up again to see who had spoken. The scav boss, who had said his name was Nis, grinned back at her. She caught the glint of the silver inlay in his ceramite teeth. His eyes were cones of focusing lenses, and his hands were spiders of brass. His grin widened. ‘Clever little piece of archeotech. Lets you find somewhere even though the rad is bad out here and the signal storms are worse. Worth its weight...’

He let the word hang on the edge of his grin.

She held his gaze. The rest of her was utterly still, the fingers of her right hand poised above the triangulator. Inside her body glove she tensed muscle groups, and let the breath settle to the bottom of her lungs. She was poised, a single reflex away from movement, while outside of her skin nothing had moved.

She held Nis’ gaze. He raised his brass hands.

‘Just joking,’ he said, grinning wider. ‘After all, you pay the likes of us to come out here and dig, you got to have something worth finding, and a way to find it, right?’

She nodded, and looked back down to the spinning cogs and mercury.

Numbers had started to tick around the edge of the triangulator.

‘Close,’ said Ashul softly from beside her. She hadn’t even realised he was awake. He had folded his hands over his chest and gone to sleep just after they had left the settlement, not moving since. ‘And right on time too,’ he said, pulling his rebreather mask down over his face.

She took a mask from the rack behind her, and gave the figure on the other side of her a nudge.

‘I am quite awake,’ said Incarnus. ‘How I could be thought to be otherwise under the circumstances is to stretch imagination to its outer tolerance.’ He ran his fingers over his scalp, and Myzmadra could see a skim of moisture on his skin. He blinked, grey lids flicking over iris-less eyes. She handed him the mask.

The scav gangers had noticed them getting ready and were already racking weapons, and plugging breath filters into their mouths. Those that had mouths.

She pulled her own mask on and flicked the visor’s outer layer to black. Beside her, Incarnus flicked a hand at the triangulator.

‘On time,’ he said.

Bhab Bastion
The Imperial Palace, Terra

Archamus woke and came off the stone of his bed in a single movement.

‘Threat report...’ The order began in his throat, and died on his tongue. His hearts were hammers inside his ribs.

The cool gloom of his chamber answered him with silence.

He looked around. The night sky looked back at him through a firing slit in the wall above him. Besides that the only light came from the candle which sat in a niche above the bed. Hours and minutes were marked as lines and numbers on the tallow. One hour remained between the flame and the midnight line. He had slept for thirty minutes. Just enough for dreams to begin, but not enough for him to remember them.

His bolter was heavy in his hands, drawn and armed even as he woke. Slowly he tried to let his muscles relax. He could feel his blood fizzing. Behind his eyes he felt the static sensation as his mind caught up with his nerves. The bionics of his right leg clicked and hissed as his weight shifted.

Thirty minutes. Thirty minutes in which the world had turned, and his eyes had been closed. His ears strained for the sound of running feet, of sirens.

Nothing.

Just the beat of blood in his hearts and the distant crackle of dust blowing into the void shields high above the bastion’s walls. The machine rack holding the pieces of his armour sat silent in the space before the door. Its readout lights blinked green. His arming servitors stood at the edges of the room.

He let out a breath and lowered the gun. Aching weariness crawled back into his muscles.

Thirty minutes. It had been the most sleep he had managed in months, a necessity rather than the luxury it felt like. The catalepsean node at the back of his brain let him defer the need to sleep, but he could not outrun fatigue forever. So, he had let himself sleep fully, and tried not to think of it as weakness.

He took a step to the granite bowl of water on a shelf opposite the bed. The servos in his bionic arm clicked as he set the bolter down. A thread of cold air ran across his skin. Night stole what little heat clung to the air this high up, and the firing slit held no glass to keep it out. Ice had formed on the surface of the water in the bowl. He plunged his right hand through it, and scooped the liquid onto his face. The cold was reassuring in its sharpness. The water in the bowl settled, ripples stilling, pieces of ice knocking against the bowl’s lip.

For a second he found himself looking down at fragments of his face reflected in the water. Time and service had left their marks on him, both within and without.

Old and worn, he thought, as his eyes traced the tangle of lines and scars on his cheeks. His beard had been the grey of slate for four decades, but now there was a hint of chalk at the edges. He looked at the three studs bonded to the left of the brow. All of them were jet, black as the void, each a half-century of war in an unkind age.

He scooped up another handful of water, and the reflection vanished in fresh ripples. He straightened.

‘Armour,’ he said.

Three servitors stepped from the edge of the room. All were hunched, their backs bent beneath haloes of mechanical arms. Brass visors with cruciform holes for eyes covered their faces. Black robes hung over what remained of their flesh. They lifted the first pieces of armour from the armature, disconnecting power feeds and slotting components together.

They clad him layer by layer, riveting each plate in place, connecting wires, sealing ports. At last they stepped back and he stood, burnished yellow gleaming in the candlelight. The star of Inwit sat on his chest, moulded from silver and gold, its rays clasped in a fist of jet. A black-and-red cloak trimmed with ice lion fur hung from his shoulder. His mono-eyed, Crusade-mark helmet was locked to his waist, leaving his face bare. He felt the usual twinge in his nerves as the connections to his bionic limbs asserted themselves fully.

He took up his weapons from the rack, locking his bolter to one thigh, his bolt pistol to the other, and fastening a broad-bladed seax to his hip. Last of all, he lifted Oathword in his bionic hand, metal fingers clacking on its adamantium haft. Its head was fashioned from black stone that he had mined from the dead world of Stroma, and shaped over the course of a year. The ball of the pommel was half silver and half black iron, etched with the star constellations of Inwit. It was heavy but in his machine grasp its weight was nothing. He looked at it for a second, noting the crystal flecks shimmering beneath the stone’s surface. Unbreakable, almost unworkable: a stone that defied the universe by its existence. He nodded and touched the mace’s head to his scalp, then he locked it to his war-plate with a snap of magnetic force.

He walked from the chamber into the gloom of the corridor outside. A gust of air ran past him and the light of the torches burning in the wall brackets billowed. He began to walk. The signals array in the collar of his armour started chiming, and vox transmissions began to fill his ears. He could hear every military signal in a sphere of space that extended ten kilometres in every direction, and up to the edge of Terra’s atmosphere. His mind sifted the information, building patterns of strength and weakness. The Huscarl squad assigned to the primarch’s person was in place. The second and third security cordons were spread throughout the bastion. Beyond that, forty-six Legion units moved through the Palace on carefully randomised patterns. Other forces were reporting nothing that gave him pause. Everything was as it needed to be.

His eyes moved over the stones of the passages and stairwells as he climbed towards the command chamber. It was an ugly creation, both in intent and in execution. Chisel marks cut the faces of the granite walls, and its crenellations bit the air like bared teeth. It was a brutish, unrepentant creation in Archamus’ eyes. He had wondered, once, if perhaps its makers had not intended it to last, but simply to endure through the trials of some lost age. Endure it had. He could not deny that.

What will endure of what we have made? he wondered, and walked on while a palace waiting for war whispered in his ears.

Damocles Starport
Terra

Innis Nessegas hated the night, but it was all he got to see. The hours of his oversight had been allocated to his father when the old man – long dead now – had ascended to the position of third prefect of the Southern Transport Arterial Lock. There were two other prefects who watched over the system of doors, hoists and loading platforms: one of them for the day, one of them straddling the sunset. They, just like Nessegas, had inherited their positions, and their times of watch. Sometimes he wondered if either of the two envied him the night, but more often he was sure that they pitied him.

Seen at a distance, the port was a jumbled mountain of metal. Landing platforms jutted from its sides, some large enough to take a macro-lander. Shuttle craft arrived and left without cease, buzzing like bees around a hive. Nessegas never saw them. His world was far beneath the landing platforms and the layers of storage chambers. But even down at the roots of Damocles, the patterns of activity were the same. Bulk haulers and caravans of cargo-crawlers came and went at every hour. The time they spent in the Southern Transport Arterial Lock belonged to Nessegas.

Vehicles entered the lock through one set of doors – some fifty metres high – and entered its first cavern, where gangers off-loaded the cargo. Once that process was complete, the vehicles passed into a second cavern, and then out into the world again. Nessegas knew that the system was called a lock after an ancient method of allowing ships to pass between rivers of water. He did not know if the comparison was a good one. He had never seen a ship, or a river.

Fifteen hundred men, women and servitors worked to cycle the cargo to and from the vehicles. Fifty-one sub-prefects, seventy-four divisional sub-prefects and seven hundred overseers supervised those gangs, and all reported to Nessegas. From his cupola, suspended beneath the roof of the first cavern, he watched as vehicles came and went. Gangers and crew moved over and around them like insects over food. Blue data flicked across the retina of his left eye from the projector mounted on his cheekbone. His face twitched. The projector had never functioned properly and would regularly send a shock through the nerves of his face. But it was what the data was telling him that he really did not like.

He reached out and depressed a key on the brass console in front of him. Static crackled in his ears.

‘Cohort thirty-three, you are five minutes and thirty-three seconds behind timetable,’ he said.

‘Apologies, worthy prefect,’ replied an overseer. ‘It’s the inspection crews. They want to go through this whole load. They can’t go any faster.’

‘That is not my problem, but it is increasingly yours. The loss margin on that freight is being deducted from the cohort’s wealth-ration and will continue to be until this blockage has cleared.’

Another crackle of static. Nessegas could almost hear the invective it hid.

‘As you decree, worthy prefect.’

He clicked the vox-link off and glanced around at the other figure in the cupola. She had heard the overseer’s words just like him, but if she cared she said nothing. Her face was just as bland and controlled as ever. She wore the red-and-black uniform of the Damocles Port Militia, and the silver swords pinned to her collar said she was an Ojuk-agha First Class. She had said her name was Sucreen. He had never seen her before, but that was not unusual; the security protocols put in place by the will of the Praetorian of Terra meant that there was always an officer of the militia with him in the lock-control, and two hundred militiamen were present in the caverns at all times. They were never the same unit, and the officer who watched him had only been the same ten times in the six years since the protocols came into force. The militia watched, checked and searched cargos at random. It was worse when they had one of the Imperial Fists with them. Then all latitude disappeared, along with any hope of him meeting his quotas. Not that Nessegas said a word in objection. Not when one of the sons of Dorn was present, at least.

He glanced down to where a caravan was being dismantled under the eyes and guns of a dozen militiamen. Behind it a five-section crawler was just rolling through the doors. He recognised the heraldry of the Hysen Cartel and muttered a curse to himself. Even one of the crawler’s sections would hold close to a thousand tonnes of cargo. The chances of clearing it through the lock within the time contracted to the Hysen Cartel seemed remote. The flow rate for the night traffic was already the subject of acute personal embarrassment to Nessegas. If it carried on getting worse it would become a matter of censure.

‘Are you going to be searching with this degree of thoroughness from now on?’ he said, turning to Sucreen.

She met his gaze, shrugged, but said nothing.

Nessegas suppressed an urge to scream. He was considering what he could say, when Sucreen frowned.

‘What is that?’ she asked, looking over his shoulder. He turned back to his console. A light was flickering amber amongst the dots of green. Nessegas bent over it and allowed himself another muttered oath.

‘Air circulation fault,’ he replied. ‘Third time in the last division.’

He began keying a request in to the console, the keys clacking down on their arms as he jabbed at them. It was pointless; the red priests would not respond to his summons, and if they did it would most likely be several hours later.

‘Is it severe?’ asked Sucreen.

‘We will still be able to breathe,’ he said, and then added to himself, ‘though if you were to suffocate, I would not complain.’

‘What?’

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘It’s just a cold-drain, that’s all.’

Sucreen nodded. Born and raised in the starport, she had grown up with the cold-drains. They were as much a factor of life as the taste of the water and the stink of machine oil. Sometimes a ventilation sluice connecting two volumes of the starport jammed open. Air flowed up and out of the deep areas, drawn into the rest of the port structure. In a deep area – like the Southern Transport Arterial Lock – that meant that the temperature would drop to near freezing. Uncomfortable, but nothing to worry about.

Down in the cavern beneath the cupola, the Hysen Cartel crawler came to a halt. Behind it, the outer doors began to close.

The Underworld
Terra

The dark at the root of the world was like no other. It pressed against the eyes and ate any light that tried to banish it. It stretched silence and made thunder of the smallest noise. It had a soul, and that soul was unkind. Of that the youth was certain.

He waited, crouched on the edge of the fissure. It was best to wait. He had learned that quickly. The others had not. They were with the dark now. He alone remained.

How long ago had that been? There were no days down here, and so perhaps there was no time. The darkness ate that too. How old was he now? He did not know that either. Certainly his father had called him young, and his father had been the last person he had spoken to, but how long ago he did not know. His father had not learned about the dark. It had taken him soon after they fled down to the root of the world.

He let out a breath, very slow, quiet enough not to disturb the dark, and slid into the fissure. It would take him some time to reach the bottom. No matter how many times he came back, this last descent got no easier. The place he was going to had only one way to reach it: a climb down a sheer drop without light or stair to guide the way.

There was endless dark piled above him, days and days of it, all the way up to the light and sky. In that realm he had touched and seen strange things: iron bridges crossing gorges without roads leading to or from them; glowing snakes swimming in lakes of water that went down and down, past drowned windows and doors. But nothing compared to what waited for him at the bottom of this climb. He had given it a name. He called the place the Revelation.

The depths held the remains of the civilisations that had failed before He had come to save mankind from itself. The underworld was a borderland between the divine and the mundane. That was why they had fled here, because in the dark they could be safe, and close to their God. And the Revelation was a door into the sacred realm. It was the dream that had kept them alive as they fled the iconoclasts: that by going down into the dark they would find light.

Light.

There was a light below him, at the bottom of the fissure.

He blinked. The light was dim, but to his eyes it was like a scream in a silent room. It was green and diffuse, as though he was only seeing its edge.

He waited, trying to control his breathing, and the sudden racing of his heart.

There had been no light before, but this meant that something else had found his secret. He knew it would happen eventually. As soon as he had made the Revelation his own, losing it became inevitable.

He thought about climbing up the fissure, and running into the dark and never coming back. He thought about it while his blood beat in his ears, and the glow beneath him filled his eyes.

The light vanished.

He waited.

It did not return.

Perhaps it had not been there at all. Perhaps he was just so afraid of losing the Revelation that he had imagined it. Perhaps it had been a ghost in his eyes.

Slowly, finger by finger, inch by inch, he began to descend again. At the bottom of the fissure he stopped. A gulf waited beneath him, just as it had the first time, just as it always did.

He jumped.

A brief rush of air, the silent scream of panic as he fell...

And then smooth stone slammed into him as he landed and rolled. He came to his feet, eyes sweeping around him. There was no light, no waiting beast.

Yes, it must have been his imagination: not a real light. He stood and edged forwards, feeling the seams in the stone floor with his feet. When he reached the wall, his hands found the missing block, and the handle within the space. A tug, a low grinding, and then the light. Not a phantom in the dark this time, but a narrow line of orange.

He knelt. His fingers were trembling as he pulled the crack wider.

He looked through.

Fragments of light fell down to him, and he had to close his eyes. The sound of dripping water filled his ears, and the smell of rust and damp filled his nose. He waited for the blindness and stinging to fade, and then opened his eyes and looked into the realm of his God.

A tangle of debris covered a stone floor on the other side of the door. Moulds covered every inch, some green, some white. Pools of liquid reflected the light that fell down the shaft above. Stairs and balconies marched up and up above him. All of those he could see were in the slow process of collapsing. Doorways opened off into other dark holes. But further up there was light – yellow, golden light.

‘The God-Emperor watches,’ he whispered, his eyes watering as he stared up at the light of the Revelation.

This was what his father had wanted to be close to but had never seen. This was what kept him alive in the dark. Somewhere high up above him was the heart of the Imperial Palace. Up there – beyond the light – the chosen hands of the Emperor lived, and did His will.

‘The God-Emperor watches,’ he said again. The tears were rolling down his face.

When he had first found the door he had thought it chance, but of course it was not. How could it be? A door from the dark into the fortress of a living god: how could such a thing exist by chance? No, this was not chance. It was a blessing, a gift to the faithful who could come this far. He had not found it. It had been given to him. He was never alone. He was never scared. He was blessed, for he could see the light of divinity.

The rest of the prayer his father had taught him came to his lips.

‘The God-Emperor sees all,’ he said. ‘His hand lies upon all of us. The Emperor protects.’

He stopped, the rest of the words hanging on his tongue. The skin of his arms prickled. He looked behind him, at the edge of the light from the open door. Blackness looked back at him, flat and unmoving. He turned his head. The memory of the light he had thought he had seen rose in his mind. But that had not been real. It had been his fear, and he had no need to–

Hands came out of the dark, and broke his neck in a single movement.

Storage Vault 62/006-895
The Imperial Palace, Terra

The warrior with no name came to life, and began to drown.

Thick liquid was all around him, filling his lungs, wrapping his limbs, strangling him even as his hearts began to beat again. He could not see. He could not move. His body was folded, legs pressed against his chest, arms over his head. He struck out. Something hard met his hands.

Questions and needs roared through his mind.

Who am I?

He needed to move.

Where am I?

He needed to breathe.

What is happening?

The questions screamed on unanswered. He did not know. He did not know anything.

He needed...

...to stop.

Calmness flooded him, blotting out every other instinct and thought. He let the stillness hold him for an instant, and then let his thoughts move again, one at a time.

He could remember nothing: not how he had come to be where he was, not why he was there, not his name.

But he knew that he needed to stay still, and calm. The truth that he needed would come.

He waited, his hearts beating so slowly that they seemed not to beat at all.

Understanding came piece by piece, appearing like the remains of a wrecked ship floating to the surface of a sea.

He had been dead. He had been curled in the dark, not breathing, not a flicker of blood, nor pulse of a nerve signal moving through him. He had been that way for a long while. Now he had woken. There was a reason for that, and for the oblivion he had slept in. He could feel the answers just out of sight but getting closer. Other information came first.

He was in a metal tank. Its sides were airtight and made of plasteel. At its thinnest point the walls were 7.67 centimetres thick. The fluid filling the tank was the liquefied residue of bioprocessing in the nutri-factories of the Somon Prime orbital city. The tank was one of several hundred stacked together in a storage vault beneath the Imperial Palace on Terra. The Palace might be under the watch of the Custodian Guard, and the stewardship of Rogal Dorn, but the millions within its walls still needed to eat in a time of siege. The stores held by the Palace had increased tenfold in preparation. That had been his way in.

Curled inside his tank – floating in a soup of rendered flesh and biomatter – he had passed down through the transport chain from Terra’s orbital docks, and through the layers of the Palace’s security. Each time the biometric reader fields had passed over the tank they had detected nothing besides dead matter. No pulse, no bioelectric field, no shadow of life. Once inside the Palace, the tank had been stored. He had lain within his temporary tomb and time had passed, time that had now expired.

Slowly he flexed his fingers. Their tips brushed the mechanism welded to the inside of the tank. There was no room for him to turn or move his arms, but he did not need to; the mechanism was just where his fingers would find it.

A flex of force, and then a low clunk echoed through the liquid around him.

He went still. This was a dangerous moment, when he was at his most vulnerable. Gently he pushed upwards with his legs. They met the lid of the tank, and he felt it shift. Stillness again. A rebalancing of muscles. He pushed again, and the lid rose. As it did, he twisted over, switching the pressure on the lid between legs and arms.

Information was still coming to him from the fog of memory. The images of holo-projected plans and pict-captures were suddenly bright and sharp in his mind.

He pushed the lid to the side, and his head broke the surface of the liquid. His eyes snapped open. A vast chamber extended away before him. Columns rose from the floor to meet a vaulted roof. Pyramidal stacks of cubes sat between the columns. Stencilled numbers ran down the floor between them. There was no light source, but his eyes gathered the scraps that there were and let him see. Nothing moved. Long moments passed.

At last he let himself rise from beneath the surface.

Still nothing moved.

He let himself vomit up fluid from his lungs, then took his first breath of new life. The bio-soup in the tank smelt foul, a mixed organic and chemical reek that would cling to him for hours.

He looked around, reading angles and the numbers on the floor, tasting the temperature in the air. He suddenly knew that he had to move. There was an access door, three kilometres away. He knew each of its code-lock settings. Once he was past that, there was a stair up one level, then a diversion through an air duct. He would have to break through three gratings, but unless they were fitted with very sophisticated alarms he would not need to change his route. There were other routes, of course – forty-three of them, all mapped from multiple sources, and as clear in his mind as if he had already walked them. He had twenty-three minutes and four seconds to be at his first waypoint.

He reached back into the tank and felt the metal sides, until he found the two objects that he knew would be there. A tug, and they came free of the side of the tank. The blades were silver-black, double-edged, without grip or guard, like the shards of a broken sword. He flicked them free of slime. He understood their balance instantly. A more complex weapon would have risked detection by deep auspex scan, but the blades stuck to the inside of the tank were invisible to such methods.

He replaced the tank’s lid, climbed down and began to run. He made no sound, and he moved without disturbing the gloom.

In his mind the seconds flicked past.

As he reached the door out of the chamber the answer to the first question he had asked came to him, as memory gave him a name.

Silonius, he thought. I am Silonius.

Click here to buy Praetorian of Dorn.

For Graham, Jim, Nick, Chris, Gav, Dan, Rob and Aaron,
who stood at the beginning of the Age of Darkness.
And for Liz, Laurie, Andy, Alan, Greg and Ead, who held the walls within.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2016
This eBook edition published in 2016 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,
Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover artwork by Neil Roberts.
Internal illustrations by Kevin Chin.

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ISBN: 978-1-78572-066-6

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(jointly, “the parties”)

These are the terms and conditions that apply when you purchase an e-book (“e-book”) from Black Library. The parties agree that in consideration of the fee paid by you, Black Library grants you a license to use the e-book on the following terms:

* 1. Black Library grants to you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free license to use the e-book in the following ways:

o 1.1 to store the e-book on any number of electronic devices and/or storage media (including, by way of example only, personal computers, e-book readers, mobile phones, portable hard drives, USB flash drives, CDs or DVDs) which are personally owned by you;

o 1.2 to access the e-book using an appropriate electronic device and/or through any appropriate storage media; and

* 2. For the avoidance of doubt, you are ONLY licensed to use the e-book as described in paragraph 1 above. You may NOT use or store the e-book in any other way. If you do, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license.

* 3. Further to the general restriction at paragraph 2, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license in the event that you use or store the e-book (or any part of it) in any way not expressly licensed. This includes (but is by no means limited to) the following circumstances:

o 3.1 you provide the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.2 you make the e-book available on bit-torrent sites, or are otherwise complicit in ‘seeding’ or sharing the e-book with any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.4 you attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.

* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.