Contents

Cover

The Corpse Road – Extract

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

The Corpse Road

Graham McNeill

Now it is the time of night,
That the graves all gaping wide,
Every one lets forth his sprite
In the corpse-road paths to glide.

This far from Terra, the light of the Astronomican was little more than a spot of distant illumination. The Eastern Fringe was at the farthest extent of the Emperor’s Light, enough to guide a ship, but not much more.

The swirling warp light beyond the segmented, crystalflex blister in which Tolvan reclined was a whorl of unnameable colours and emotions rendered in unlight.

A window into madness for most mortals, quotidian to a Navigator.

Tolvan had once plied the ebbs and swells of Segmentum Solar, where the Astronomican’s radiance was so blinding, so pure, that he could steer a ship’s course even with his third eye concealed.

And no matter how many times the House Novators reminded Tolvan that it was an honour to be seconded to Ultramar, this current duty didn’t feel much like an honour.

The Shendao was an old ship, even by the standards of the Imperium, where vessels might serve for tens of thousands of years. Its bones were tired, groaning and creaking with each manoeuvre. Its soul was cantankerous, its hull pitted with micro-impacts from millennia of dust carried by celestial winds. The fleets of Ultramar comprised many great and noble vessels, but the Shendao wasn’t one of them.

It was a corpse-hauler, a vast transloader with a hundred vaulted holds filled with the dead, stacked high in chilled cryo-holds.

The war against the daemon lord’s Bloodborn army had seen untold billions die, men and women of the Defence Auxilia, civilians and Adeptus Astartes.

The Space Marines would be interred upon Macragge, and some of the mortal dead had been returned to lie in the crypts of their ancestors. But many more had no one to claim them.

Those bodies travelled the Corpse Road to Nakilla.

The cemetery world lay just beyond the edge of Ultramarian space, across the liminal border that separated the living from the dead. An ancient superstition of betwixt and between, but one the passage of millennia had failed to erase.

The warp was restive in the wake of the war’s ending, and Tolvan was having to hold fast to the Astronomican’s light. Vicious swirls of purple-red anger roared hard against shoals of grey grief, and veils of sickly yellow hopelessness bled into everything. Tolvan ignored the torrents of weeping faces that formed and dissipated in the void. Phantoms all, but no less potent for that.

His spider-like fingers drifted across the brass dials and rheostatic levers of his Astrolabe Ephemeris, sending course corrections to Captain Matang on the bridge. The jump from Calth’s Mandeville Point to Nakilla was a relatively short one, but still required his total concentration.

To be lost in the warp aboard a ship full of corpses had all the makings of a scare story told around low-burning fires, and Tolvan had no wish to be part of such a tale.

He exhaled slowly, gently nudging the Ephemeris, and cursed as he heard a hiss of pressurised air. Someone had entered his private space. A gross intrusion under normal circumstances, and a violation of basic safety protocols during warp-transit.

Cold filled the Navigator’s blister and the bare skin of Tolvan’s arms puckered to gooseflesh. His breath misted as he heard a heavy footfall behind him. He didn’t dare turn his gaze from the kaleidoscopic maelstrom beyond.

‘Whoever you are, get out,’ snapped Tolvan. ‘You have no business being here.’

‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ said the intruder with the sonorous cadence of a Space Marine. Tolvan knew of three Ultramarines aboard the Shendao, but this wasn’t one of them.

‘Who are you? I don’t recognise your voice.’

A heavy gauntlet settled upon Tolvan’s shoulder, and he felt strength that could snap him in two. The metal’s surface shimmered like mercury trapped in glass and was limned with hoarfrost.

As though its wearer had clawed up from the depths of a glacier.

Or a cryo-hold.

‘My name’s Honsou,’ said the voice at his ear.

Click here to buy The Corpse Road.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2014
This eBook edition published in 2016 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,
Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

The Corpse Road © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2016. The Corpse Road, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78572-536-4

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

See Black Library on the internet at
blacklibrary.com

Find out more about Games Workshop’s world of Warhammer and the Warhammer 40,000 universe at
games-workshop.com

eBook license

This license is made between:

Games Workshop Limited t/a Black Library, Willow Road, Lenton, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, United Kingdom (“Black Library”); and

(2) the purchaser of an e-book product from Black Library website (“You/you/Your/your”)

(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.