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Abyssal – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Abyssal

David Annandale

The guards dragged Aveth Vairon and the other prisoners through corridors dark as despair. They were clad in thick, black carapace armour. Their faces were hidden by forbidding armaplas helms. Two of them held Vairon under the arms, and brandished shock mauls with their free hands. To Vairon, the guards of the Black Ship Irkalla were inhuman, hulking, emotionless automatons, as remote from sympathy as if they were part of the ship’s machinery.

They frightened him, but they were nothing compared to the silent women. Their armour was gold and their faces, when they were visible, were colder than masks. A pair of them walked ahead of the guards. They were conversing with each other using a hand cant. Vairon didn’t know what they were saying, but he could guess from the angry jerk in their movements.

This is my doing, and I cannot undo this.

The prisoners in the hold had been on the verge of full riot, despite the efforts of the guards. The women had imposed order through force, and through the brutal fact of their presence. Now they were bringing the leaders of the riot to their punishment. Vairon hoped that Harvus and Cassina had the strength to survive what was coming. He wasn’t sure he did.

This close to the golden women, Vairon felt as though he couldn’t breathe. He was shut down, empty, the psychic energy that tormented and defined him vanishing as if it had never been. Around the silent warriors, Vairon felt as if he had never been.

There were doors on both sides of the corridor. They were iron, lined with lead. Hexagrammic warding runes were inscribed upon them, and Vairon twitched with a stab of pain as he passed the ancient marks. Each rune was as wide as the door it covered, as if it named the inmate of the cell. Instead, it was a hand of judgement, reinforcing the prison by oppressing the powers of the psyker behind the iron. Even with these precautions, and with the dampening interference signal screeching perpetually through the prison deck of the ship, the suppression was not total. Power leaked out, weak and distorted. It was only the proximity of one of the silent women that temporarily shut abilities down completely.

Vairon caught glimpses of movement and pain through the barred observation windows in the doors. Despairing, garbled laughter rang out from one cell. The bars shivered in sympathy with the sound, and flakes of metal drifted up into the air, the laughter itself gnawing away at them. At another door, a man pressed his face against the window and gabbled syllables that sounded too rhythmic and precise to be pure nonsense. The air around him was thick and dark as if with the approach of a storm. In yet another cell, someone hurled themselves back and forth, colliding with the walls, screaming in madness, their figure blurred with superhuman speed.

The ceiling of the corridor was lost in the darkness above many levels of galleries, all running past more lines of doors. The howls of psykers, tortured by their powers and by the repression of those powers, entwined with the interference signal, the shrieks of humans and machines becoming a choir of horror.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Mharaid Morrison.

Abyssal © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2018. Abyssal, 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: 978-1-78030-776-3

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.

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