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Blood of the Emperor – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Nergüi’s first memory of murder was that of his adoptive father.

His young ears pressed to his father’s chest, he remembered the frantic heartbeat as the man carried him from the massacre behind them.

At the time, Nergüi didn’t know who was doing the killing.

Down in the utterdark it almost didn’t matter.

Murder was mundane, killing the norm.

Kill or be killed. Kill them before they kill you.

It didn’t matter who they were. They was anyone beyond the light cast by the stuttering gas-lumens.

They was anyone you didn’t know.

They was everyone who didn’t bear the cut-mark of your clan, your gang, your family.

Even that wasn’t always enough to keep you safe.

Down in the utterdark, life was teeming and cheap. Brothers murdered brothers, parents abandoned children and wives killed husbands.

Back then, Nergüi was too young to know how the world worked in the lightless warrens and filth-choked tunnels infesting the planet’s bedrock like maggots in mouldy bread. All he knew was the beating of the man’s heart, a man who had become his adoptive father only moments ago.

A man who looked as surprised by that turn of events as anyone.

Nergüi remembered shouts, guttural and hot, like the volcanic heat of the deep mines.

No real sense of their meaning, but he understood the fear behind them.

Fear that had brought the Marrow Tearers with serrated knives to the clan cavern.

And even barely out of swaddling clothes, he understood that hate was fear’s twin.

His father stumbled and fell, vomiting a froth of blood and black bile.

Splintered bullet fragments had pierced his lungs. Both were rapidly filling with fluid. He set the child in his arms down and drew a rusted punch dagger. Shadows moved on the soot-stained walls. Gutting knives flashed, fresh-sharpened edges gleaming in the firelight.

Bellowing with rage, his father surged upright and fought.

Because fighting and killing was what you did down in the utterdark.

You fought until your gun ran dry, until your knife dulled and snapped, until your fists were broken.

You only lay down when your heart stopped beating or your skull was bashed open with a rock.

You fought until they cut your throat and laid the mirror coins on your eyes.

He remembered the grunts of grappling bodies, the deafening boom of primitive firearms.

Bright flashes and the taste of bad powder. Fear-stink of butchered meat.

The electric tang of blood in the air.

Father fought hard, but in the end he died.

A ricochet blew out his knee, and a motorised, tooth-bladed axe hammered his side. It tore up through his blood-filled lungs. Nergüi’s father fell beside him, blood pouring from his ruined body.

He died staring into the boy’s shining sea-green eyes with incomprehension.

That was Nergüi’s first memory of murder, but it wouldn’t be his last.

Cthonia was a world built on murder.

A mesh of iron scaffolding, like cobwebs left by a giant metal spider, clung to the painted walls of the Deeprats’ cavern, and looping runs of chain were strung between them like sinews stretched on a drying rack. Lingering fumes from pipe bomb explosions and gunfire hung in acrid screeds.

The rocky floor was slippery with sweat, shit and the wet remains of disembowelments.

Whooping yells from the fresh-blooded Reiver braves filled the air. His fellow clansmen dragged the limp corpses of the Deeprat Clan to the volcanic fissure at the heart of the infernal cavern.

No one knew how deep it was, only that, way, way down, its walls were said to be crusted with precious metals, gems and seams of chem-rich sediment. When Cthonia’s orbit swung it away from the blue sun and her molten heart cooled, it was said a clan could mine a fortune from the depths. Nergüi didn’t know if that was true, but rumour of it had been enough for the Reivers to slaughter the Deeprats and claim their territories.

He watched with a mix of envy and pride as the young men – boys no longer – carved their names into the chests of the enemies they had slain.

Kill-names; earned in murder.

The newly elevated warriors smeared dead men’s blood across their eyes and mouths. They howled like beasts, savage and feral, drunk on slaughter and war-lust.

The corpses, having served their purpose, were dumped into the magma fissure without ceremony. The braves backed away from its brutal heat as Khageddon hauled the mutilated Deeprat chieftain by his topknot to the centre of the cavern.

The beaten man struggled in their Overlord’s grip, wounded and near death, but still alive.

On Cthonia that was never a good thing.

In the utterdark, you were taught to fight so hard they had to kill you.

The tribes and clans of Cthonia were not kind to captives, inflicting tortures so hideous they reduced even the strongest-willed to soiled, gibbering lunatics.

Khageddon’s hulking metal-and-flesh body was slathered in blood, his own and that of the dozen men he’d killed. His own topknot had come loose in the fighting, and long black hair hung like a dark veil over his face. All Nergüi could see of the Overlord’s scarred features was the gleaming silver of his implanted fangs and the pale orb of his machine-eye.

‘Reivers!’ yelled Khageddon. ‘Blood has answered for blood!’

The braves slowly circled him, bent over and beating their callused palms and blades on the rocky floor of the cavern. A low growl built in their throats, guttural and subvocal, wordless but rich with dark meaning. It was the hunt song, a slow rhythm of metal and meat on stone.

Nergüi felt it touch something deep inside his patchwork body, stirring an aching sense of loss; a memory long forgotten. Or a future he didn’t yet understand.

He yearned to join his clansmen, to howl in the pack circle.

But he wasn’t yet battle-blooded, and anyone without a kill-name joining a pack circle would be set upon by the braves. Cut to pieces without even the dignity of mirror coins for their eyes.

Khageddon lifted his ritual knife, a long blade left by one of the takers of the dead.

Its edge never dulled, and no matter how much blood it spilled, the red-rust never touched it.

‘Aebathan!’ yelled the Overlord, and drew the blade across the Deeprat’s throat.

He sawed back through meat and muscle, sinew and bone until the head was cut loose and the body toppled into the fissure.

Khageddon lifted the head and let the red rain from the stump drizzle down over his face before tossing it after the body.

In the ruddy light of the magma fissure, he was monstrous.

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2021.
This eBook edition published in 2021 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Vladimir Krisetskiy.

Blood of the Emperor © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2021. Blood of the Emperor, The Horus Heresy Primarchs, 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: 978-1-80026-522-6

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