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Tyrant of the Hollow Worlds - Extract

A Black Library Publication

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One

‘We live and die for Huron Blackheart!’ shouted Garreon.

As the gathered officers of the Red Corsairs raised their fists and shouted ‘Aye!’, Captain Rotaka shouted as loud as any of them.

For Huron Blackheart they lived, and for Huron Blackheart they waited.

The lord of the Red Corsairs had gathered his commanders for one last feast before the invasion, to remind them of who they served, and the depth of his wrath should they fail him.

They were aboard the Might of Huron, flagship of the Red Corsairs fleet. Three decks below bridge level, the commanders met in an open area vaulted with dripping girders, condensation from life support and coolant tubes running down the walls to form murky pools of liquid.

With all powered functions on ship reduced to the bare minimum as the fleet approached its destination, the light in the chamber came from guttering flames – slaves had dragged in great piles of refuse, placed them in wide bowls, doused them with oil and set them alight. The smoke was foul, the flames spitting and hissing.

The Red Corsairs did not rest on the high ceremony beloved of the hated Imperium and the bloodless loyalists who retained faith in their damnable Corpse-Emperor. Instead there was simply service and reward: they gave unquestioning service to their master, and in return he rewarded them with a share of the spoils, as he saw fit.

Such a gathering of the Red Corsairs senior officers should, by that theory, have been devoid of formality, and indeed for the most part the arrangements were simple: the officers attended, and slaves brought them fine foods and drinks, plundered from a hundred worlds and countless ships.

In practice, although they were traitors to the cause they remained Space Marines, and the physical pleasures of eating and drinking were of limited interest to them. Equally, while they professed an abandonment of their former conventions and an embracing of anarchy, the Red Corsairs were still born soldiers, and any gathering was riven by complex strata of rank and achievement.

There were also newer traditions, traditions which would have been utterly repugnant to the gathered Red Corsairs under their former colours – rituals and ceremonies that had developed since their master embraced the faith of Chaos Undivided.

One such tradition was that involving the Cup of Blessings.

Rotaka had entered the gathering of officers precisely on time. While he followed his master into the service of Chaos, as he would follow him anywhere he was required to, Rotaka took little interest or pleasure in the practice of his adopted faith. He simply served his lord as he had since he had been elevated to the ranks of the Adeptus Astartes, and while his master’s loyalties may have changed, Rotaka’s more narrow loyalties had not.

To follow one’s master into the depths and fight on, that was true service.

He surveyed the room. Even on this, one of his master’s more personal and obsessive campaigns, the full complement of Red Corsairs officers was not present. The Red Corsairs had their stronghold within the Maelstrom along with other holdings, and smaller fleets that had been sent out to menace Imperial shipping lanes and were long out of contact with command. They were a warband, not a Chapter, and their reach was vast. It made a true gathering of the captains almost impossible.

Still, many of them were here, including some of their lord’s closest allies.

One such luminary was Garreon the Corpsemaster, Chief Apothecary of the Red Corsairs. Amongst the near-identical ranks of former Astral Claws, Garreon stood out with his sharp, scarred features and impenetrably dark eyes, his greying brown hair falling to his shoulders. He somehow seemed to stand taller than those of identical height as he impassively surveyed the chamber.

His eyes did not meet Rotaka’s, though the latter could not tell whether this was accident or calculated sleight. Rotaka truly didn’t care. Garreon was a formidable opponent and while Rotaka did not wish to cross him, neither did he feel the need to court the Corpsemaster’s favour.

In this he was obviously alone; while Garreon stood apart from the throng, the other officers took turns to step up to him and pay a few words of homage. This sickened Rotaka, although he could not quite place why.

Of the others, Rotaka saw Valthex, the Red Corsairs Chief Techmarine, ignoring everyone around him and checking a data-slate, as was his habit. While the other Red Corsairs had mostly abandoned their helmets, Valthex remained hidden beneath his. He was still carrying the bulk of the unique array of ancient machinery, mounted on the shoulders of his armour. He moved amongst his peers like an oblivious tank, a giant amongst giants.

The rest? Rotaka thought little of them, except in memories of old campaigns. He realised that he was one of the few still adorned as he had been the day after they struck away their old insignia and adopted the red saltire of the Corsairs.

In that chamber he saw hands that had steadily mutated into great, crab-like claws, pauldrons edged with brass trim, an increasing number of modifications and trophies. One Red Corsair had both cheeks pierced with rows of silver thorns, while another wore a hood of gold chains over his head, his misaligned eyes suggesting some severe mutation or injury beneath the glittering mask.

‘Let us drink, brothers,’ said a velveteen voice, cutting through all other noise in the room. Rotaka turned to see who had spoken, and found it hard not to spit on the floor at his use of the word ‘brothers’.

The speaker was Anto, formerly of the disbanded Tiger Claws Chapter, secretly adopted into the Astral Claws under circumstances which even Rotaka was still not fully aware of, decades later. Anto’s expression was unreadable beneath an ornate cylindrical helmet with horizontal, dark eye-slits, but Rotaka imagined it was one of infuriating smugness at his ability to command a crowd.

Anto considered himself a keeper of secrets, above or equal to all except their master, but Rotaka had other opinions. The surviving former Tiger Claws were born traitors and vicious survivors who had, with his master’s blessing, hidden themselves amongst the ranks of the Astral Claws long before Rotaka’s Chapter had rejected the Imperium and become the Red Corsairs. Rotaka had no doubt that, should circumstances favour it, the likes of Anto would abandon the Corsairs as they had all other prior loyalties, and seek to continue their own mysterious practices elsewhere.

Whatever secrets the Tiger Claws brought with them to secure the favour of Rotaka’s master, Anto remained one of the keepers. A sorcerer of considerable power, his power armour was partially concealed beneath a long cloak of dark red fabric, tattered from countless battles. He carried a tall staff of ornate iron, adorned with a spiralling engraving that either resembled or actually was a series of human spines curling round the shaft.

For all Rotaka’s distrust of the former Tiger Claw, he knew it was unwise to snub Anto, especially when he was currently in their master’s favour due to his role, alongside Garreon, in preparing the ground for the current campaign.

So Rotaka joined his fellow officers in forming a single ritualistic circle in the room. Only Garreon and Valthex stood outside the circle, taking a position behind Anto’s shoulders as he prepared to lead the ceremony, holding in his hands an ornate silver chalice. The engravings on the cup seemed to shift when looked at directly, skulls and twisted faces writhing on the surface.

The Cup of Blessings. To drink from the cup was a ritual performed amongst the Red Corsairs before great battles. Not all would drink, and indeed not all battles would see Anto produce the cup first. The criteria for when the cup was used, and by whom, were known only to Anto himself.

Anto spoke words Rotaka could not comprehend and made gestures over the cup, then walked to one corner of the room where a trickle of water poured from a hole in the ceiling and held the cup under it, filling it.

‘What enters the cup matters not,’ said Anto. ‘The cup blesses its contents as it blesses those who drink from it. It transforms liquid as it transforms life.’

Rotaka had heard these words countless times before and suppressed a sneer at Anto’s relentless sense of theatre, keeping his face a mask.

‘The cup chooses who drinks from it,’ said Anto. He walked over to a Red Corsair called Becaro, holding the cup before him as if pulled by some invisible force. Becaro took the cup and poured some of the liquid into his mouth.

The ‘blessings’ bestowed upon those who drank from the cup in these pre-battle rituals were varied in nature. For some, the elixir changed nothing. For others, it brought a temporary gift, a mystical power or ability of use in the coming battle that would fade with time. Others would receive the more permanent blessing of a mutation, warping them into a form more pleasing to their gods.

But for many, it simply brought death. Painful, retching death as the elixir burned through them.

Becaro grunted with pain and doubled over, clutching his stomach. Then he raised his head and released a peal of deep laughter. He lifted his hands to show the others, and as he did so green flame crept from his wrists to consume his gauntlets. He flexed his fingers, flinging sparks of spectral fire.

‘A true blessing,’ enthused Anto. ‘Becaro is most favoured.’

This time Rotaka could not quite suppress his contempt, and felt a twitch of disgust pass across his face. He didn’t care for the tricks of sorcerers.

Anto’s head snapped round to stare straight at Rotaka. He said nothing, but moved his entire body around towards him, and raised the cup. ‘Rotaka, will you drink?’

As surely as Rotaka knew that Anto was a walking curse who brought nothing but betrayal and destruction to those around him, so Anto surely knew that Rotaka’s faith in the gods their master had sworn them to was limited. If the cup truly tested faith to decide who was worthy of a blessing, then it would reject and destroy Rotaka with a single mouthful.

Equally, a straight rejection of Anto’s offer would be a rejection of their shared gods, and the faithful would not hesitate to hack Rotaka down where he stood, regardless of his rank.

Rotaka looked down into the chalice. The water in the cup had turned into a thick elixir of indeterminate colour. There did not seem to be much of the liquid left after Becaro’s long gulp.

‘Will you not sup first, brother?’ Rotaka asked Anto. ‘I would hate for the bearer of the cup to be deprived of the chance to be blessed. Your stewardship makes you worthier than I for its rewards.’

Anto’s helmet made his expression unreadable as he looked back at Rotaka, as if weighing the sincerity of the proposal.

‘I will,’ said Anto. ‘You do me great honour by offering to let me sup before you.’ He turned to the others. ‘Please, favoured Becaro, would you hold the cup and my staff for one moment while I prepare.’

Becaro did so, laughing once more as the flames around his hands licked the staff and cup as he held them. Meanwhile Anto, who Rotaka had not seen remove his helmet in many decades, reached behind his neck and released the clasp that attached it to his power armour.

With a hiss, the helmet came away, and the sorcerer revealed his true face. If he was self-conscious about his appearance, either due to pride or self-disgust, he did not show it, and neither did those around him react to the change in his appearance over the long years.

The ravages of experimentation with the powers of Chaos were written across Anto’s features. His jaw was lopsided, the teeth on one side of his mouth crooked and over-sized. A diamond shaped patch of skin on one cheek was scaled like that of a lizard, purplish and rough. His scarred scalp was hairless except for patches of dark, wiry fur. Even his ears were tapered, and while one of his eyes was piercingly dark the other was slack-lidded, coloured a milky blue with no visible iris.

‘I accept any blessing the gods may choose to bestow upon me,’ said Anto, taking the cup back from Becaro and lifting it to his lips.

A gulp taken and swallowed, Anto passed the cup to Rotaka, who couldn’t help but glance down and note that there was still a sip’s worth of elixir lingering in the bottom. He had not escaped his fate just yet.

Rotaka looked up, and found Anto holding his gaze, the slack eye more alert than it first appeared. Then Anto’s gaze became glassy; he swayed slightly on the spot and began to cough fiercely.

For a few precious seconds, Rotaka thought that it was he who had been blessed, that the sorcerer was going to die and he could cast aside the hated cup in the confusion.

But Anto’s coughing ended not in death but in a large exhalation of fine purple smoke, and a blissful expression utterly alien to a genetically bred warrior. Whatever he saw in that moment, it was not the chamber they were in.

Then Anto’s eyes snapped back to normal, and his shoulders straightened. As the smoke cleared, he replaced his helmet.

‘A vision,’ he said. ‘A minor blessing, but a welcome one.’ He did not elucidate further.

Rotaka knew that to delay further would be of no use. ‘May I be so fortunate,’ he told Anto, lifting the cup to his lips and draining the last, thin trickle of liquid. He tried to slip it past his tongue, presuming it would taste worse than anything he had ever drunk before, but to his surprise it tasted of… nothing. Less than nothing. An absence of taste. It did not even feel like liquid, but a sense of passing dryness.

Dry. Wet. Stomach full. Stomach empty. Pain. No pain. Hot. Cold. Breathing. Suffocating. Burning. Freezing. Muscles tight. Muscles loose. Light. Dark.

The elixir spread throughout his system in seconds, causing all his senses to flare in contradictory directions. Then the sensation passed, and he was somewhere else altogether. A frozen moment of time.

He was in that hidden room within the Palace of Thorns, still wearing the colours of the Astral Claws. Iltz, wearing those same colours, was on his knees beside him. A pipe, ripped from the wall in their fight, pushed down by Rotaka into Iltz’s neck. The blood exiting the wound, the look of mutual betrayal, brotherhood festered into hatred, exchanged by the dying and their killer. The tension through the length of pipe as it was pushed down, slippery with rust and oily water, the strain and exhilaration of combat. The certainty and confusion of following a cause, deeply believed in, to places absolutely uncertain. The fading life in the eyes of a former friend.

That moment, too, passed and Rotaka was back in the present. In one hand, he held the Cup of Blessings. In the other, he could still feel the weight of that improvised weapon.

‘Brother?’ asked Anto.

Rotaka passed him the cup. He thought carefully, and decided to answer truthfully, but not in a way that needed to be comfortable. He had passed Anto’s test.

‘A vision too, of another time,’ he replied, holding the blank gaze from Anto’s helmet. ‘Of striking down a brother for an act of treachery.’

‘A useful insight, I hope,’ said Anto.

‘A blessing from the gods will always prove useful,’ replied Rotaka.

‘Of course,’ said Anto, returning the cup to some hidden pouch beneath his robe, before addressing all of them. ‘Three of us have drunk of the Cup of Blessings, and all survived. Our enterprise is well fated.’

‘Fate?’ boomed a harsh, gravelly voice as the chamber’s doors were thrown open. The newcomer entered, flanked by bodyguards in Terminator armour. ‘Fate and the gods provide opportunity, but it is for us to seize those opportunities, and squeeze victory from the chances the gods give us.’

The gathered officers of the Red Corsairs parted as their lord, their master, Huron Blackheart, strode to the centre of the chamber. He towered over the greatest of them, dominant even in a room of demigods and sorcerers. He wore blood-red power armour, cracked and aged and emblazoned with a gold eight-pointed compass, the symbol of Chaos. A Sigil of Corruption arced behind his head like a perverse halo.

His skin was grey, dead, with patches of bone visible, augmented by bionics including the Tyrant’s Claw, an adapted power claw with built-in flamer that made up his entire right arm. As he prowled the chamber, he moved around the Corsairs, the claw flexing as if it might crush the skull of one of his underlings at any time.

Rotaka felt the fear in the room aboard the flagship, but did not share the trepidation. His master was uncompromising, but just, and Rotaka knew that if he served him well he had nothing to fear. He had followed him into the abyss and back out again, and would not have done so if he did not believe in his judgement.

His recent flashback to that day in the Palace of Thorns still lingered with him. He knew as well as anyone the hard decisions of leadership, and the need to harshly deal with betrayal.

‘Our gods I thank for providing opportunity,’ Huron said, his voice cutting through the silence of his servants. He raised his claw and gestured around the room, pointing at all of them but pausing on both Garreon and Anto along the way. ‘But it is you, my Red Corsairs, who I entrust to carry out my battle plans, to fulfil your part in my campaign, to die in doing so if required.’

Blackheart’s meaning was clear – that even in death, failure would not be tolerated, and that to fail and live would only bring a greater suffering. Rotaka felt a swell of energised pride that he would not allow himself to fail his master.

‘Our prize is great, the challenge it presents greater,’ said Huron, striding around a central point in the chamber, his Corsairs backing away to make room. ‘Valthex.’

The Techmarine stepped forwards, and a hololithic projector built into his armour created a flickering three-dimensional image in the air at the centre of the chamber. Nine spheres, most of them cloaked in a miasma. As they moved around each other the image glitched and some of the spheres jumped from one place to another, as if the person who had made the hololith was extrapolating from incomplete information.

‘The Hollow Worlds of Lastrati,’ said Huron, audible hunger in his voice. ‘Nine hollow spheres, planets inhabited on their inner surfaces, under the possession of the hated Corpse-Emperor. Consumed by the impassable Siren Clouds, our closest access point is the Hellward Gate on the outer surface of Laghast,’ said Huron, the hololith enlarging until one of the outer planets filled the space. An orbital dock and buildings on the planet’s desolate outer surface appeared. ‘We have worked long and hard to break these defences, and even now Taemar is close to shattering the final link. When those defences fall, we strike.

‘We will crack open these Hollow Worlds, and the callow mortals who live within them will bow to new masters.’

There was a further series of ‘ayes’ around the chamber, raised fists and jubilation. Rotaka felt his pride swell again, but also a sense of trepidation that all their hopes rested on Garreon, Anto, and of course the absent Taemar.

Rotaka wished he could believe those hopes were well placed.

Click here to buy Tyrant of the Hollow Worlds.

For Liz and Georgina

Thanks to Sarah Cawkwell for Taemar consultancy and Chris Wraight for Space Wolves timeline tips. Any errors are the author’s fault, not theirs.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2016.
This eBook edition published in 2016 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,
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Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

Cover illustration by Roman Tishenin.

Internal artwork by Paul Dainton, Hardy Fowler and Neil Hodgson.

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