Contents

Cover

Cult of the Spiral Dawn – Extract

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

Prologue

Redemption Reborn

Day and night on the scorched world were only different shades of darkness, a slow, shallow slide from grey to black across thirty-one cold hours. At their conjoined zenith the planet’s twin suns were little more than pale smears in the sky, like candles behind a dirty veil.

Nevertheless the four hunters always moved by night, only emerging from their lair beneath the spaceport’s fuel dump when the darkness was absolute. They had no memory of where they had come from, nor had they the capacity to care, but the imperative that drove them was clear.

Needing no light to see the warmth of their prey, they stalked the outer districts of the ragged city where they had awoken, targeting stragglers and binding them irrevocably to their bloodline with a swift, needle-sharp kiss.

Within three days the hunters had mastered the secret pathways of their new territory and taken a score of thralls. Despite the strangeness of this world it was just another hunting ground to them.

And yet, for one of the four – the first to claim a victim – that was no longer quite true. The shape of its hunt had changed, as indeed had the hunter itself. It understood this only dimly, but with every passing hour its thoughts grew sharper as the simple decrees of survival unfurled into new possibilities and the hunter became the Seeker. Its primal imperative remained undeniable, but the instinct was spiralling into a higher, deeper vision that allowed it a freedom to think and plan that had been impossible before.

Firstly, it recognised that its kindred hunters were not changing alongside it. Though they were bound by one purpose, the others remained creatures of pure instinct and always would. Now they followed where the Seeker led, accepting its primacy without hesitation. The apex predator felt no pride or privilege in its ascendancy. It simply was what it was, as were they.

From its thralls it learned much, drinking deep of their minds and seizing knowledge and concepts that would have been meaningless in its former, forgotten existence. This new world was ripe with prey, but they were scattered across a broken ring of spiny mountains beyond which there was only burning death. The Seeker’s own territory was a vast mesa of basalt rock at the centre of the ring – it was like a mountain that had been sheared flat at its midriff by some unimaginably brutal yet precise force, leaving a blank slate for those who had come after. The thralls called this mesa the Slab, and their lone city, huddled in squalid senescence towards its northern edge, Hope.

The surrounding mountains were encrusted with temples whose vaults ran deep into the rock, extending into the bowels of the world below. Each of these Spires was a realm in its own right, but all were bound to the Slab by sweeping bridges of stone. A single authority ruled them all from atop the narrowest peak, revered and feared by the thralls in equal measure.

They called this authority the Sororitas.

On the fifth night of its awakening, the predator climbed to an escarpment at the edge of its domain and gazed at the Spire where the Sororitas laired. A red haze shimmered in the gorge below, where the planet’s lifeblood churned between the mountains. The haze of soot and smoke rising from the abyss would have been impenetrable to lesser creatures, but like darkness, it was no barrier to the Seeker’s void-born eyes.

With an efficacy it neither understood nor questioned, the Seeker cast its awareness across the gorge to the congeries of domes and towers nestling at the mountain’s peak. Like an intangible serpent it slipped through barriers of iron and stone in search of flesh and bone and mind. Lurking at the corners of perception, it stalked its quarry’s thoughts, snatching stray emotions and scratching at convictions.

It found only a hard resolve that mirrored its own and understood that the Sororitas could only ever be an enemy. Given time, this foe would stir and hunt the hunters.

Watching from the rocks behind the Seeker, the trio of primal hunters flexed their claws restively, sensing their leader’s growing aggression. Their empathy was ignorant, but they understood the only thing that mattered: there would be killing soon.

The dying woman’s sanctum was in the abbey’s central tower, directly beneath a glass cupola stained with a kaleidoscopic whorl of wings. It was the building’s highest point, a spear of purity that lanced the mire of Vytarn’s sky, just as the sisterhood of the Thorn Eternal had lanced the planet’s spiritual mire for over three centuries. When a storm raged the wind would shred the smog-choked atmosphere, allowing listless rays of light through. In those moments the cupola would transmute the light into an iridescent spray that washed the sanctum clean of shadows and sorrows alike.

But tonight there was no wind and precious little light. The abbey’s generator had failed again, and the candles the woman had lit at the start of her ceremony had burned down to nubs, leaving her in a tightening noose of darkness.

She knelt with her eyes raised to the bronze bas-relief of the God-Emperor that dominated the chamber. The Crucible Aeterna was an esoteric relic that placed Him at the centre of an orrery of stars bound by thorns. The barbs pierced His flesh and drew a silent scream from His distended jaws. His face was wizened with geometric lines and inset with lacquered eyes that burned with true sight. It was a harsh idol, but the woman felt it possessed a rare honesty.

The Imperium’s deepest foundation is not glory, but sacrifice.

That credo had been her mentor’s, but with time and suffering it had become her own, as her teacher had always known it would.

‘But you were wrong about my death,’ the woman whispered into the past.

‘You shall die well,’ Canoness Santanza had predicted, appraising the blood-spattered, fire-eyed girl who stood before her, battered but unbroken by her Confirmation Trials. ‘But dying is not enough, no matter how well you do it, because then you can do no more.’ She had frozen the girl with a gaze long dead to kindness. ‘The Imperium is forever at war and the duty of the Adepta Sororitas is without end. Do you understand, initiate?’

‘I do, mistress,’ the girl had answered, but they had both known it wasn’t – couldn’t – be true. There had been too much fire in her thirteen-year-old heart.

Fifty-five years of service had dimmed that girl’s fire, but never quite extinguished it. Despite the horrors she had endured and the righteous ones she had enacted in the name of her faith, Canoness Vetala Aveline had never become a creature of ice. Whether that made her more or less than her mentor was for the God-Emperor alone to judge.

I shall know soon enough, Aveline reflected as the slow killer in her lungs flexed its claws again. This time it drew a cough, but she strangled it into a brief, raw bark. The bronze Emperor’s features danced between sympathy and mockery in the flickering candlelight.

Pitying or deriding a life of wasted piety…

As her trance receded, Aveline frowned at the gloomy chamber, irritated that the generator’s faltering machine spirit hadn’t been attended to during her long ritual. This was the third time in as many weeks that the power had failed, obliging the sisterhood to rely on the braziers and candles that decked the abbey, but if ever they had needed light it was now. The abbey’s wardens had been sensing a dark presence for days – an oppression that was somehow watchful.

‘It is not our old enemy,’ Aveline declared, rising from her prayer mat with a grace that defied her pain. ‘You can stand down from your vigil, celestian. I remain myself.’

A tall figure stepped from a curtained alcove behind her. In contrast to the canoness’ plain robes, the celestian wore full battle armour, the elegantly wrought plates polished to a pearlescent sheen that was luminous in the gloom. Her face was hidden behind a sloped visor, but Aveline had no need for mundane clues to read her old comrade’s disquiet.

‘I know you disapproved of the ceremony, Phaesta, but it was a necessary risk,’ Aveline said. ‘I had to be certain the daemon had not broken free.’

‘Another sister could have borne the burden, canoness.’

‘But I am the strongest.’

At least in spirit, Aveline thought. I left my soul unguarded for nine long hours. No daemon could have resisted such a lure, even one that recognised the trap…

‘You believe you have the least to lose,’ Phaesta corrected. As always, the celestian had seen through to the heart of the matter. They had been sisters in battle for almost three decades and faced their sternest test together in the pits of this world, but sometimes Aveline found her First Sister’s insight wearying.

‘The Black Breath will take me within the month. This planet’s air has killed me where all its daemons could not,’ Aveline said without rancour, ‘but I shall meet its poison with purification.’

‘So the Convent Sanctorum has approved your request,’ Phaesta guessed.

‘I received the confirmation yesterday.’ Aveline smiled coldly. ‘Vytarn is no more. This planet has been reborn as Redemption.’

She was disinclined to mention that the name was officially appended with the number ‘219’. ‘Redemption’ was a regrettably common appellation across the Imperium, but Aveline felt certain that few worlds had a better claim to it than her own.

‘You never told me the name you had chosen,’ the celestian said quietly.

‘You don’t approve?’ Aveline asked.

Phaesta hesitated before replying. ‘It is a pious name, canoness.’

‘A name that will make our world pious,’ Aveline enthused. ‘But there is more! The sanctity of the Spires has been recognised by the Convent. My application for reclassification has been accepted.’ She laid a withered hand on her sister’s shoulder. ‘Vytarn – Redemption – has been sanctioned as a shrine world of the Imperium. That is the legacy I shall leave to the sisterhood.’

It is the legacy I shall leave to you, my First Sister, she added privately, because you shall take my mantle soon.

‘For all its temples this is a dark world,’ Phaesta said. ‘A name changes nothing.’

It changes everything! Aveline wanted to say. Names shape the truth of things. But she knew the celestian would never accept such a notion. She might even call it heretical, though Aveline was certain the God-Emperor they both served would understand completely.

‘The darkness under Redemption has been chained, sister,’ Aveline pressed. ‘We bound it with faith and fire two decades ago!’

‘Yet evil shadows the Spires once more. Some taints run too deep to cleanse, canoness.’

‘You are wrong,’ Aveline decreed. Her lungs were on fire and she was eager to be done with this argument. ‘We defeated the old foe and we shall defeat the new.’

By the sixth day of its inner journey the Seeker’s mind had crystallised into true sentience. With self-awareness came a grasp of possibilities beyond the here and now, followed by a torrent of abstract ideas and imaginings. At the forefront of this was the insistent vision of an ever-turning, slowly unwinding spiral. The Seeker didn’t understand the significance of the image until nightfall, when the truth sharpened into sudden clarity. The spiral represented the great imperative that drove its bloodline.

The Sororitas would call it a ‘symbol’.

Gripped by a cold fervour, the Seeker sifted through the mental fragments it had stolen from the enemy during its incursion. Notions that had been nonsensical before now blazed with power, and from one moment to the next the great imperative became holy.

On the seventh night the Seeker bestowed this revelation upon its thralls, who carved the Sacred Spiral into reality, upon wood and stone and sometimes their own flesh. Their veneration elevated them from thralls to disciples, and in turn their worship exalted their master from Seeker to Prophet.

By the ninth night the Prophet’s path was clear, but a shadow occluded the radiance of the Spiral: the warrior women who had inadvertently breathed life into it.

Armed with faith, the Prophet cast its mind across to its enemies’ aerie once more to test them with new insight. This time it recognised the seams of madness running through their spiritual armour. In most cases the madness strengthened the alloy, but in a few it had become corrosive, and in none more so than the one called Sister Etelka, whose thoughts were riddled with dark doubts and darker regrets.

Night after night the Prophet gifted the warrior with whispered questions that she thought her own, insinuating itself behind her eyes until she saw the secret heresies of her sisters. Thus loyalty unravelled into loathing, then horror and finally hate as Sister Etelka was drawn into the Sacred Spiral and anointed as its first apostle.

On the nineteenth night, the Prophet assembled its congregation and pronounced judgement: those that deny the Divine Imperative will be cleansed.

That night Canoness Vetala Aveline clawed her way out of a writhing, thorn-wreathed fever dream and awoke to find herself in the abbey’s sanctum, slumped before the Crucible Aeterna. The Emperor’s tormented bronze visage was speckled with blood and the black detritus of Aveline’s lungs.

‘What’s the truth of a name?’ someone asked from nowhere.

That was when she heard the screams.

Gunfire and the whoosh of flames echoed through the vaulted corridors of the abbey, interwoven with a cacophony of snarls, guttural chants and a ceaseless, wordless whispering that seemed to bleed from the air itself.

The tapestries lining the walls of the grand nave were afire, bathing everything in hellish light as the celestian, Phaesta, and her three surviving sisters fought to hold the invaders back from the abbey’s altar. The heretics’ soot-stained skin and bloodshot eyes marked them out as the lost and the bland of Vytarn – the magma scrapers, refinery labourers and petty functionaries who kept the sickly promethium industry of the Slab running. Such grey spirits were the perennial fodder of the Archenemy, yet Phaesta felt their fall keenly.

‘Your souls were in our care,’ she whispered as she scythed them down with her storm bolter, ‘but our eyes were turned to the past.’

There was no telling how many of the damned had invaded the abbey, but Phaesta feared it would be too many. Though their makeshift clubs and cleavers were no match for the sisters’ blessed weapons, the heretics fought with the fearless ferocity of the possessed.

To her right, Phaesta saw a gaunt youth leap forward and grasp the barrel of Sister Galina’s bolter, tugging it towards his chest as she fired. He was ripped apart, showering Galina with blood, but his sacrifice won his comrades precious seconds to close in and bring his executioner down by sheer weight of numbers. The celestian tried to cut a path through to her sister, but the press of the crowd was too great.

We are too few, Phaesta judged as she and her remaining sisters retreated towards the chancel. The Mission of the Thorn Eternal numbered less than fifty Battle Sisters, and many had died before the alarm was raised, most of them slaughtered in their sleep.

‘We were betrayed!’ Aveline hissed from the celestian’s gorget vox. Phaesta knew the canoness was in the sanctum, watching through the eyes of the servo-skull hovering above the horde. ‘Someone opened the gates for the heretics. One of our own.’

‘That is not possible,’ Phaesta said as a cadaverous elder tried to embrace her. He was still smiling when she crushed his skull with the stock of her gun.

‘It is the only possibility.’ Aveline’s voice was a tortured croak. ‘Trust no one, sister.’

Phaesta imagined the canoness hunched in the darkness while her sisters bled for the Thorn. She knew Aveline could barely walk, let alone fight, yet she found no pity in her heart. The canoness had invited this doom upon them.

This world was meant to be forgotten, Vetala, Phaesta thought bitterly.

As her squad drew level with the statue of Praxedes the Ascendant, an indefinable instinct compelled her to glance up, and she saw a dark shape squatting upon the saint’s marble shoulders – a leering, malformed gargoyle that was all bones and teeth and far too many claws. Before Phaesta could shout a warning the creature lashed down with an improbably long arm and punched through Sister Arianne’s breastplate with talons like powered scythes, wrenching her into the air in the same motion. Phaesta and her surviving sister swept the statue’s shoulders with gunfire as the beast ducked away. Then the mob was upon them, snatching at their weapons and threatening to pull them down like poor lost Galina.

‘Daemon!’ Phaesta yelled as she swung about with her rifle, trying to clear a path through the throng while keeping the gargoyle in sight. It leapt to another statue, carrying Arianne like a broken doll in its claws. With a piercing howl it reared up and cast her aside, then leapt for the celestian.

Heedless of the heretics’ weapons, Phaesta dived into the crowd, breaking through their ranks with her armoured strength as the gargoyle crashed down behind her. It slashed the head from a chanting madman and tore another in half as it came after her in a storm of claws. She yelled as its talons gouged deep rifts through her back-plate and into the flesh below. Thrown off balance, she hit the ground hard enough to dent her visor.

‘Heretic!’ a burly labourer snarled as he stepped between them and swung his cleaver down onto her helmet in a two-handed arc. The impact reverberated through her skull and ruptured her nose, but couldn’t penetrate the sacred ceramite. Before he could swing again the gargoyle tore through him, mangling his torso into red tatters. The reprieve bought Phaesta time to level her gun and she met the beast with a volley of fire.

‘Thorn take you!’ she snarled as the rounds punched into its distended jaws, shattering the nest of fangs and throwing the thing backwards. A heartbeat later the explosive rounds detonated, vaporising its skull and spattering her with black ichor. Even in death the beast was dangerous, whirling about in a blind spasm as it fell. She lost sight of it as the mob closed in around her.

‘They walk with daemons,’ Phaesta breathed into her vox as the heretics’ blows began to hammer down on her. They were nothing beside the pain in her lacerated back and the heady, sour-sweet odour of the abomination’s blood. That stench was nauseating, yet strangely alluring. As if in sympathy, the whispering from the walls had taken on a sly, velvet resonance. Though it spoke without words its promise was unmistakable: an end to suffering if only she would surrender to that wondrous, wine-dark blood…

Phaesta denied it with a primal bellow that was something between a laugh and a cry.

‘I am Adepta Sororitas!’ she shouted as she forced herself to her feet, casting off the heretics with the armour’s powered musculature. ‘Suffering is my wine!’

She finished her attackers with precise, measured bursts before they could swarm her again and kept firing until she realised there were no more. Either the attack was over or the mob had retreated. Swaying on her feet, she surveyed the carnage in the nave as she loaded a fresh clip, her hands working of their own volition. Scores of broken bodies littered the space, among them Otokito, the last of her sisters, but darkness was rapidly claiming the fallen as the burning tapestries were consumed. Once again the abbey’s power had failed, though this time Phaesta suspected it was by design.

‘Celestian?’ her vox crackled as the servo-skull descended to regard her with soulless, sensor-filled eye sockets.

Ignoring the canoness, Phaesta activated the lumen band affixed to her helmet and swept the chamber with its narrow beam. Something slipped between the columns to her right and she swung around, chasing it with a rapid-fire salvo, but its hunched, many-limbed scurry threw her aim and it disappeared into the shadows.

‘There are more daemons,’ she hissed into her vox, ‘perhaps many more.’

‘I saw them,’ Aveline answered tightly, ‘but I do not recognise them.’

Phaesta pictured the canoness furiously poring through the order’s forbidden texts, trying to match the living gargoyles to the sketches in those malign tomes – hunting for a way to save her false Redemption.

You have already gazed too deeply into darkness, sister, Phaesta judged. Her beam caught another twisted shape, this time to her left, but it slipped away before she could take a shot. So there were two of them, advancing on her position from both sides.

‘You must send a message,’ she said urgently, already knowing how this encounter would end. ‘The Convent Sanctorum must be warned of this incursion.’ There was no reply from her vox. ‘There is no other way, Vetala!’

‘Celestian, I–’

Phaesta drowned Aveline’s voice in a storm of gunfire as the beasts came for her. They charged from the darkness in perfect synchronicity, keeping low and angling between the columns to confuse her aim as she spun between them. Despite their bulk and strange gait they moved with terrible speed, their claws extended to claim her.

‘Just the one then,’ she whispered, dropping into a crouch and focussing on the attacker to her right. Aveline’s servo-skull swooped down into her chosen target’s path like a cybernetic wasp. The gargoyle barrelled through the fragile automaton, but the distraction slowed it fractionally and Phaesta locked on and shredded its chest. As it skidded into a tangled heap she tracked it and blew its skull apart.

‘Warn them!’ Phaesta shouted into her vox.

Already certain it was too late, she spun around to face the remaining gargoyle. Her wild fire tore through its left side, shearing away a pair of arms before it yanked her into its jagged embrace.

The hololithic transceiver chimed, confirming that Aveline’s message had been received by the planet’s orbital relay station. From there the encoded hololith would pass into the Convent’s covert intelligence web. But Redemption was a remote world; even with the Diabolus Extremis priority she had invoked, it would be months before the message reached its destination.

Slumped in her chair, Aveline stared at the glowing runes on the transceiver’s panel as if they might offer answers. Like the other ancient machines in the sanctum, it had its own power source. She supposed she should be grateful for that.

‘Did I taunt fate?’ she asked the machine.

Her question would have been better addressed to the Crucible Aeterna watching from the wall behind her, but she was not ready to face her god quite yet. Besides, she doubted she could rise from her chair. Her condition had worsened over the past week, whittling her breath into a rasp that barely sustained her.

‘I should have passed command to Phaesta long ago,’ she confessed to the patient transceiver. She had lost sight of the celestian after sacrificing the servo-skull, but Phaesta’s silence told her all she needed to know.

‘I am the last.’

‘And the least,’ a voice completed the thought, though whether it was her own or a judgement from the Crucible Aeterna she could not tell.

‘Does it matter, Vetala?’

She laughed and the laugh became a coughing fit that almost finished her. The spasm subsided into a muted pounding and she realised something was attacking the sanctum’s door. She dismissed it. Nothing short of Militarum-grade heavy weapons could get through that solid titanium portal, and she doubted the invaders had anything of the sort. Thankfully neither did the abbey, or it would be in the enemy’s hands now. The sanctum’s walls were reinforced and she had activated the cupola’s shields, sheathing the glass in interlocking metal panels. Nothing could get in.

‘And nothing can get out, Vetala.’

The vox set beside the transceiver hissed: ‘Canoness, can you hear me?’

With the supernal clarity of the dying, Aveline could taste the betrayal in the speaker’s voice. ‘The enemy has been purged,’ Sister Etelka reported, ‘but many Sisters were slain. We have need of you, mistress.’

Aveline ignored her. There was nothing she could do about the traitor and she didn’t have the strength for empty recriminations. The Emperor would take his own retribution in time.

‘Retribution…’ she whispered. ‘Yes, that would have been a more honest name.’

Etelka persisted, imploring, then wheedling, then threatening by turns, but finally she went away, leaving Aveline with the only voice that mattered.

‘Look at me, Vetala,’ it urged from the shadows within and without.

‘Soon,’ she promised.

The Prophet withdrew the tendrils of its awareness from the abbey and returned to the body waiting beyond the gorge. The old, primal part of its mind had yearned to fight alongside its followers, but its destiny had precluded the risk – and that was wise, for the peril had proved great. Most of its army had been lost in the attack, including two of its kindred hunters, yet the Prophet felt no regret at their loss. Their sacrifice had cleared the path for the Sacred Spiral and more would soon take their place. Many more.

All are one in the Sacred Spiral, the Prophet decreed unto the eager minds of its surviving thralls, and the Spiral is All.

Click here to buy Cult of the Spiral Dawn.

For my mother, Irén Fehervari, the first deep thinker who I argued with. With love and thanks.

A Black Library Publication

Cult of the Spiral Dawn first published as Genestealer Cults in 2016.
Cast a Hungry Shadow first published in 2016.
This eBook edition published in 2018 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,
Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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

Cult of the Spiral Dawn © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2018. Cult of the Spiral Dawn, 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: 978-1-78572-874-7

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.