Contents

Cover

The Dark Coil : Damnation – Extract

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

CHAPTER ONE

The Mire, unknown

The alien has cheated me of my Thunderground. One moment we were pinned in a deadlock of hate by its knife, the next… treachery! A twist of agony and then that blade was tearing up through my hand and slashing back down into my face. It took an eye for an eye and left a scar for a scar, but mocked me with my life.

I awoke on this little atoll, stranded Emperor knows where. The traitors had bandaged my wounds, pumped me full of xenos drugs and left me with a week’s worth of supplies. They’d also left me the bloody relic of my severed arm, but the real insult was the pamphlet they’d stuffed into my pocket. ‘Winter’s Tide’ it’s called, named after the slippery tyrant who leads them on this world.

Yes, of course I read it. One must know one’s enemy after all. Besides, it might have offered up some clue to Wintertide himself, but all I found was a diatribe extolling the so-called Greater Good, the blasphemous philosophy that binds the blueskin empire together. The threat was implicit in every line, so polite it was almost an apology of malice: ‘Join us, or else.’

Emperor damn them! They thought I was finished, but I’m not alone here. My trinity of ghosts is with me and together we will endure. There is such strength in hatred. But of course you already know that. We are of a kind are we not? That’s why I’ve kept on writing with the wreck of a hand remaining to me. So you’ll understand. So you’ll be ready. But first we have to get out of the Mire…

Bleeding ectoplasm from the stump of an arm, Niemand gestures defiantly and tells me we’ll be found soon, but sometimes it seems that this limbo has been forever and everything else was just a dream. Bierce always censured me for thinking too much, but out here there’s nothing else to do. Besides, it’s a flaw that runs blood deep, another shadow of my Arkan heritage that the schola couldn’t exorcise.

You know, lately my thoughts keep turning back to Providence, the home I left so long ago. I think of the frozen Norland rifts and the blistering hell of the Badlands, the white marble colonnades of Capitol Bastion and the gabled mansions of Old Yethsemane. I think of the pioneers and the patricians, the machinists and the savages, all the clans and cartels and tribes, forever at each other’s throats but forever Arkan. They came late to the Emperor’s Light and they didn’t come quietly.

Sometimes I wonder what became of them all…

– Iverson’s Journal

Following its ordeal in the warp, the transport ship was slumbering at low power, recovering its strength and resolve for the return journey. Its passage to Phaedra had almost ended in catastrophe and now there was hell to pay. While the ship’s tech-priests worked frantically to salve its pain and the captain whipped his crew back into shape – and in one case into death – the passengers on Q-deck were left in ignorance. To the Navy men the Imperial Guard were little more than cattle with guns.

After the crisis a junior lieutenant had descended from the bridge to brief the regiment’s officers, talking patronisingly of power outages and fluctuations in the Geller field – meaningless words that said nothing of the horror that had overtaken the eleven men billeted in Dorm 31 when the warp had seeped into the ship. Colonel Cutler had broken his nose and sent him blubbering back up to the bridge. After that the Guardsmen had heard no more.

All things considered, Major Elias Waite had to admit it was a bad start to the regiment’s first campaign away from home. The 19th Arkan Confederates had travelled a long way from Providence, but they had a lot further to go in their hearts before this new life made any sense to them. Having passed his seventieth year, Waite doubted he’d be travelling the whole way with them. He was still technically their second-in-command, but he knew many of the officers regarded him as a spent force, and since the horror in Dorm 31 he’d begun to wonder if they were right. By the Emperor, he was tired of it all…

As he navigated the murky labyrinth of Q-deck, his lantern painting strange shadows across his path, he couldn’t shake the feeling that the walls were just a thin line between life and the void. His path was carrying him along the skin of the ship, where the membrane seemed tense and fragile, ready to dissolve from one step to the next. His mind told him this wasn’t so, but his blood told him otherwise and he was sure every man and woman in the regiment felt the same way. The Arkan simply weren’t bred for deep space.

Well plenty of folks aren’t, Waite chided himself, but most learn to live with it. We’ll just have to learn the trick along with the rest of them. We’re true Guardsmen now and space is part of the job.

The Imperium of man was a troubled giant and it was a Guardsman’s lot to be shuffled back and forth across the galaxy as duty called. Besides, few Imperial forces had been as fortunate as the Arkan regiments, who’d fought all their wars at home for so long.

But were we really so lucky? Waite wondered.

Long ago, someone very wise and very bleak had remarked that civil wars were the worst kind. After the madness that had ravaged his home world, turning parish against parish and brother against brother, Waite wouldn’t argue. The rebels had called it Independence, the brave old Union of Seven Stars reborn brighter and better than before. How the fools had rallied to their ‘March of Freedom’ – croppers and collarmen, hicks and gentry, even some of the savage tribes, banding together to throw off the shackles of Imperial tyranny.

Eleven years of blood and betrayal!

Suddenly Waite was breathing hard and there were tears in his eyes. It was the sheer waste of it all that hurt so much. What chance had the separatists ever had? Even if they’d won – and they’d come pretty damn close at Yethsemane Falls – well, what then? How could one planet have hoped to stand against the juggernaut of the Imperium? Fortunately it had never come to that. The price of victory had been high, but the Arkan faithful had put their own house in order before the wrath of the Imperium had come crashing down on their world.

‘And now here we are, a billion leagues from home, come to do it all over again to some other poor fools,’ Waite told the darkness. ‘Emperor-damned rebels…’

There was to be no rest for the loyalists of Providence. With the civil war finally over, the surviving Arkan regiments had been thrown into the lottery of galactic deployment and scattered across space on the whims of some distant, inscrutable strategy. For the 19th Confederates that whim had led to a backwater subsector on the Eastern Fringe of the Imperium and a world called Phaedra.

Well, as the Emperor wills it, Waite decided wearily.

Realising he’d come to a standstill, he spat and got himself moving again. He wasn’t usually a man prone to introspection. In his youth he’d been a traveller, wandering the high sierras and rift valleys of the frozen north, taking his chances as a trapper and a prospector, but always careful to play fair with the Norland tribes. They were a moody folk, not much inclined to trust a stranger (more inclined to spit and gut him if the truth be told), but he’d won them over. The fact was he’d always liked people and thirty years in the Guard hadn’t changed that. True, he was old now, his face a brown leather walnut and his hair a fond memory of better days, but he’d kept his muscles and could still swing a sabre with the best of them. Damn, but he had to shake off this oppression. It was clinging to him like a leech…

Like the abomination Trooper Norliss had become in Dorm 31. Like the broken things they’d put to the sword in that blighted town back home. Like the tolling of the daemon bell hanging at the town’s rotten heart. Waite had prayed never to hear those soul-jangling chimes again, but they had followed the regiment across the stars. Or maybe they had always been there, waiting in the warp for fools to listen. Whatever the truth of it, the daemon bell had tolled again inside Dorm 31.

Ringing in Trooper Norliss’s changes…

But no, he mustn’t go there. These were not memories to dwell upon at the best of times and certainly not in this gloomy mausoleum. Unconsciously Waite’s fingers brushed the aquila symbol hanging from his neck. He was vaguely surprised to find that he had reached his destination. The viewing gallery was a grand atrium of fluted marble pillars and delicate murals, but in the dim emergency lighting it looked forbidding. He saw stars twinkling through the immense window in the outer wall, promising something brighter than this shadow-haunted concourse. Two figures were framed against the void, one very still, the other almost manic as it stalked back and forth, gesticulating with sharp, angry motions. Waite heard the murmur of their conversation, but the words escaped him. It was just as he’d expected: the colonel was with his witch again.

With a sigh Waite entered. Something loomed from behind a pillar and he leapt back, his hand reaching for his sabre before he recognised the giant. The man’s face was pale against a cascade of ebony braids, his eyes canted above high cheekbones. He had a feral look that sat strangely with the smart cut of his grey Confederate uniform, almost like a wolf in man’s clothing.

Waite cursed himself for a skittish fool. He should have expected the Norland giant. Wherever the witch went, her weraldur followed. The warrior had been ritually bonded to her when she’d first manifested the wyrd as a young child. As tradition demanded, he had waited patiently while his charge had made the long journey on the Black Ships to be tested for any trace of taint. If she had been found wanting and failed to return to Providence within a span of seven years that same tradition would have demanded his ritual suicide. Their fates were bound tightly in life, tighter still in death. He was her guardian and potential executioner. The double-headed axe strapped to his back was consecrated to grant the Mercy if his charge fell to the warp. Unsurprisingly the weraldur path was one of the few Norland traditions the Imperium had actively encouraged.

‘The God-Emperor’s blessings upon you, Mister Frost,’ Waite said, feeling uncomfortable with the title. To call a strapping Norland warrior ‘Mister’ or one of their fierce, mysterious women ‘Lady’ was absurd, but after the war the Imperial witch hunters had come down hard on all the Outlander folk. Although many of the tribes had fought alongside the loyalists, the fanatics had campaigned to ‘civilise’ them all. The first things they’d stolen were their old tribal names. Take away a Norlander’s name and you were halfway to owning his soul. It was the kind of logic that appealed to a witch hunter.

Waite tried a smile. ‘Your vigilance commends you, weraldur, but I’ve words for the colonel.’ He made to step past the giant, but the Norlander blocked him again. The major’s expression turned hard and he raised his voice: ‘I’m here on the God-Emperor’s business, so step aside.’

He wasn’t expecting a reply. The giant was a mute, his tongue removed during his bonding to the witch, but the confusion in his eyes was answer enough. Waite’s brand of down-to-earth piety was well liked by the troops and since Preacher Hawthorne’s death he’d served as the regiment’s surrogate priest – which gave him a hold over this devout savage.

‘Stand aside in His name, weraldur!’ Waite boomed theatrically.

Frost frowned, trying to weigh up his divided loyalties. Suddenly he cocked his head, as if listening to a secret voice. The talk by the window had ceased and the silhouettes were watching them. Queasily Waite realised he’d been right about that secret voice. The witch was talking to her guardian, brushing his mind with hers. A moment later the giant stepped aside.

‘Well now, I’ll be damned if I recall asking for visitors,’ a voice bellowed across the gallery, flush with anger and easy authority, ‘but someone’s here so I guess I must be damned or just plain stupid.’

‘Never stupid, colonel!’ Waite called back. ‘And not damned yet if I’ve any say in it.’

Silence. Then laughter, deep and bitter and laced with something Waite didn’t much care for.

‘Get your scrawny arse over here, old man. There’s something I want you to see.’ Now there was genuine humour in the voice and Waite shook his head, already sure he wouldn’t find the words to challenge his commander.

The witch drew back as Waite approached, hiding her face in the dark arch of her cowl. The colonel was still pacing across the stars, his back rigid with tension, his left hand clenching and unclenching ferociously, the right locked to the hilt of his sabre. His wide-brimmed hat was slung over his back, bouncing about as he stalked back and forth. He hadn’t cleaned up since the horror in Dorm 31 and his rawhide jacket was still blotched with black stains. There was a gash in his right leg where a thorny tendril had whipped past his guard, but Waite knew it was useless telling him to see a medic. These days it was useless telling Ensor Cutler anything. These days he only had ears for the witch.

‘Take a look outside, Elias,’ Cutler said without breaking the fierce rhythm of his pacing.

Waite peered through the glass. The grey-green swathe of a planet curved away beneath them, looking mottled and moist, like a colossal fungal puffball. Unclean. A ship hung on the horizon, sharing their orbit. Waite could tell it was a behemoth and a warship, its prow blunt and pugnacious, its decks encrusted with gun turrets and sensor spikes. A welter of scars pitted the hull, culminating in a deep furrow carved across its midriff where something had almost sliced the ship in half. The fissure showed no signs of repair and Waite suspected any attempt to move the vessel would seal its destruction. The leviathan had taken a mortal wound and this planet would be its grave. If it weren’t for the lights glittering in its portholes he’d have wagered the ship was already dead. He squinted, trying to decipher the faded tattoo of its name.

‘The Requiem of Virtue,’ Cutler said, as if reading his mind. ‘Damn strange name for a warship.’ Abruptly he stopped pacing and sized up the vessel. ‘I don’t trust it, Elias. And I trust that filthy planet even less.’

Waite hesitated, unsure whether the colonel expected an answer. He prided himself on reading the hearts of men, but Cutler had become increasingly mercurial over the last couple of years. Since Trinity and its bell. By Providence, that daemon-haunted town had cast a long shadow over the regiment.

‘Zebasteyn. Estevano. Kircher.’ Cutler chewed through the words one by one, evidently not much liking the taste.

‘I don’t follow your drift, colonel…’

‘Another name I don’t trust. Kircher’s the Imperial Commander here – our lord and master until this war’s done.’ Cutler nodded towards the ship. ‘Man runs the whole show from up there, hiding away in that floating hulk, keeping his boots squeaky clean while he throws good men after bad, pulling the strings and watching the chips fall. Calls himself the ‘Sky Marshall’, whatever the Hells that’s supposed to mean! Is he army? Navy? Maybe even an Inquisition lackey…’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t trust any of it. This war is old, Elias. It makes our little uprising look like a backyard tussle.’

When he got angry, Cutler always slipped into his Yethsemane drawl. Like Waite, he wasn’t a product of the aristocratic academies that churned out most of the Arkan officer class. He was a patrician, but his family had been knee-deep in debt, so young Ensor Cutler had signed up with the Dust Rangers, a rough-and-ready cavalry outfit. While other officers had studied strategic theory at Point Tempest, Cutler had made his name hunting feral greenskins in the Badlands. The rawhide jacket he wore in lieu of the regulation grey was a legacy of those wild days, its tassels woven with greenskin tusks and finger bones. That coat had raised a few eyebrows when Cutler had finally received his commission from the Capitol, but he’d refused to discard it. It was the kind of thing that made him who he was – the kind of thing that got him into trouble. Inevitably the Old Guard had clipped his wings, only granting him his colonel’s stars when the war was over and they could pack him off into space.

‘It don’t smell right, Elias,’ Cutler was suddenly glaring at Waite, his eyes bright, his lips drawn back into a snarl. Looking at that fierce, leonine face, with its shoulder-length mane and tangled beard, Waite sensed this tarnished nobleman was more savage than any Norland tribesman. But it was the whiteness that unnerved him the most.

Cutler wasn’t yet fifty but his hair was dead white from scalp to beard. Before Trinity there hadn’t been a white hair on his head. That town had changed so much about him, but the whiteness was its most visible mark. Waite wondered if Cutler knew his men had nicknamed him ‘the Whitecrow’. And if he knew, did he even care?

Suddenly Waite was sure time was running out for all of them. He had to find the words to get through to this man who’d once been his friend. He had to know what Cutler had found inside the mouldering temple at Trinity’s heart. Waite had been by his side when they’d purged the town, but only the witch and her guardian had faced the source of the cancer with him. Only they had seen the daemon bell.

Why did I let him talk me into staying behind? Why didn’t I insist on going in there with him? But in his secret, guilty heart Elias Waite knew that nothing could have made him walk into that desecrated shrine.

‘The bastards promised me a full sitrep once we made orbit,’ Cutler stormed on. ‘Campaign records and troop dispositions, field maps and recon reports… Some Emperor-damned orientation! And then they send me that!’ He jabbed a finger at a crumpled sheet of parchment on the floor. ‘One damn page!’

Waite bent to retrieve the document but Cutler waved him back. ‘Leave it. You’ll hear it all soon enough, but don’t hold your breath.’

Suddenly Cutler frowned and glanced at the witch, his eyes narrowing as she whispered into his mind. The intimacy of it made Waite’s skin crawl. Lady Raven, the men called her, and unlike her warden’s childish name, hers felt right. His distrust for her came from the gut. She was a psyker, a mutant cursed with heightened psychic potential that made her a living, breathing time bomb of corruption. Yes, she had survived the tests that culled all but the strongest of her kind and been sanctioned to practise her craft in the Imperium’s name, but you could never be sure with a witch. To Waite’s mind a sanctioned psyker was just a rubber-stamped monster. How could Ensor allow her to touch his mind? And was there any truth to the whispers about them? She always kept her face hidden, as was the way of the Norland women, but it was rumoured that she was beautiful.

‘Ensor…’ Waite began, realising he hadn’t used his comrade’s first name in almost a year. Suddenly he was sure he had the words to get through to him. ‘Ensor, we have to talk about Trinity. How did that thing in Dorm 31 know…’

But the colonel waved him to silence, his attention on the witch. Finally he nodded and straightened up, rubbing his unruly beard.

‘I have to go clean up, Elias. We’ll be making planetfall in a couple of hours and the men deserve better than this. I’ll see you at the assembly old man.’ Cutler stalked away, trailed by the witch and her guardian. Alone in the dark, Elias Waite realised he had lost the words again.

‘Word is Norliss went void crazy and chopped ’em up while they was sleeping. Chowed down on ’em too.’ Kletus Modine licked his lips suggestively. In the dancing pilot light of his flamer he looked like a leering gargoyle. Not that the hulking, barrel-chested pyrotrooper was a pretty sight in any light. With his brutal potato head and bright red crest of hair, he was an archetypal Badlander and Dustsnake squad was his natural home.

The squad was hunkered down in a corner of the hangar bay, chewing over the fat as soldiers always did before deployment. There were near on eight hundred troops scattered around the cavernous chamber, clustered up in squads around their lanterns, creating pockets of light in the gloom. The emergency strips were running, but their thin red haze was somehow worse than the darkness. Everyone was jumpy after what had happened in Dorm 31 three days back, although nobody knew exactly what had happened. Nobody except the officers and they weren’t talking. Sure, Verne Loomis had seen it too, but he wasn’t doing much talking either these days.

‘He ate ’em?’ Boone’s eyes were wide in his broad bumpkin’s face.

‘Down to the bone,’ Modine affirmed. ‘Colonel put a lid on them boys pretty quick too. Took a flamer in there and torched the lot of ’em. Didn’t want us greyback grunts seeing what Norliss gone and done.’

‘Figures.’ Dix nodded sagely, always quick to back his hero. Another Badlander, he was a scrawny doppelganger of Modine, right down to the jutting crest of red hair.

‘But that don’t add up, brothers.’ The voice came from beyond the lantern’s pool of radiance, outside the Dustsnake inner circle.

‘You say something back there, greencap?’ Modine snarled over his shoulder.

‘Just been thinking is all.’ The speaker ambled into the light, seemingly oblivious to the hostility. He was almost painfully young, but taller than Modine by a head and built like a grox. His straw-blond hair was neatly cropped, his uniform pressed and pristine. The green trim of his flat-topped cap and tunic identified him as a raw recruit, just as the book of liturgies hanging from his belt marked him as a devoted student of the Imperial Gospel.

Audie Joyce was a misfit in this squad of veteran scum. He’d joined them just before they’d left Providence and Modine would have chewed him up and spat him out if the sarge hadn’t been looking out for him. There was talk the old goat had had a thing going with Joyce’s ma back home, might even be his pa, but not even Boone was stupid enough to ask bullet-head Calhoun about something like that.

Frowning, Joyce continued, ‘I mean it weren’t just his squad. Norliss killed the commissar too. And he sure weren’t sleeping.’ Gravely the boy made the sign of the aquila. ‘No, brothers, the commissar’s chainsword was buzzing with the Emperor’s own wrath when he walked into that chamber of iniquity. And he didn’t go in alone neither.’

‘The greencap’s got a point, boys,’ came another voice from the shadows, even further from the inner circle, mocking and low. ‘Ain’t no way one crazy man could’ve taken down the commissar, especially not with old Whitecrow along for the ride.’

It was true and they all knew it. Every one of them had been there when the horror had kicked off. It was the noise that had drawn them – a deep, irregular chiming that had run through the walls and shaken their teeth like a quake from hell. There had been no ignoring it so they’d gone looking and wound up outside Dorm 31 just as Verne Loomis had come crawling out. He’d slammed the hatch shut then folded in on himself like he was all broken up inside. The crazy look on his face had stopped their curiosity dead. Modine had hit the alarm. Nobody had gone for the door.

That was when the lights had died, leaving everyone standing around in the dark fiddling with their rifles as they listened to all the tearing and chewing and screaming going on behind that hatch. Maybe if the sarge had been with them it would have gone down differently, but he’d been up in the mess hall playing cards with the other NCOs. They’d all been kind of glad about that.

The colonel had arrived in double time, almost like he’d known what was going to happen. And maybe he had, because the witch and her watchdog had been with him and she’d probably seen it like she saw everything else. Then Major Waite and Commissar Brody had turned up and the five of them had gone inside, locking the hatch shut behind them. Five of the regiment’s finest against one crazy man.

After that there’d been a lot more tearing and swearing, then a hellfire snarling that was more animal than man, but like no animal the Arkan had ever heard. And then the voices had started up and that had been the worst part. They oozed through the steel hatch, sounding like a whole chorus of corpses drowning in an ocean of maggots, laughing and gibbering as they sang the same words over and over, round and round: ‘Trinity in embers… Trinity remembers…’

Somewhere along the way they’d heard the commissar shrieking like no commissar was ever meant to. That had gone on forever and the greybacks had wondered how there could be so much screaming inside one man, but finally there’d been silence. After a while the hatch had opened and the slayers had come marching out. All except Commissar Brody. Every one of them was splattered with blood and some kind of black slime that reeked like a corpse pit. The witch had been shaking under her robe and Major Waite was watching her like a hawk, almost like he was afraid of her. And then the colonel had grabbed a flamer and gone right back inside. Afterwards he’d sealed the hatch shut and turned Dorm 31 into a tomb for nine men. Nine men and maybe something more than a man…

‘It weren’t no crazy greyback the Whitecrow torched,’ the voice from the shadows continued. ‘You gotta think bigger, man. Uglier.’

Modine snatched up a lantern and lumbered over to the speaker. The man was sitting cross-legged with his back against the wall, his eyes on the gnarled bone flute he was carving in the dark. The same flute he’d been carving every day of their journey through the warp.

‘We talking uglier than you, Mister Roach?’ Modine growled, angry that his safe little lie was unravelling. Scared of the truth.

Roach kept on carving, unmoved by the tired old insult. His hatchet face had the bloodless complexion of a Norlander, but his hair was bright red. ‘Roach’ had been his father’s name – a solid Badlands moniker – but his mother had been a Norlander. It was a long story with a short, sharp end that had left him an outsider wherever he went. There’d been plenty of hurt and heartache, but after the war he’d decided he didn’t much care either way.

‘Ain’t you heard?’ Roach said. ‘There’s things in the warp just waiting to find a way inside a man’s head and outside into the world.’

‘We don’t buy that Hellfire crap in the Badlands,’ Modine sneered. ‘All that spook talk’s just to keep the Outlanders in their place! Course, a breed like you…’

‘You saying you don’t believe in daemons, Brother Modine?’ Suddenly Joyce was standing beside Modine, his earnest face troubled. ‘Or you saying you don’t believe in the God-Emperor’s Holy Gospel?’

‘Now wait, that ain’t what I meant…’ Modine spluttered, not exactly sure what he had meant. He glanced at his comrades for support, but even Dix had looked away. Only Boone grinned back at him, too dumb to pick up on the tension. Modine could feel the intensity of the rookie’s gaze, like he was some jumped up witch hunter angling for a burning. ‘Look, I was just saying…’

‘What Trooper Modine was saying is he’s so dense the Emperor’s light bends right on round him,’ Willis Calhoun barked, marching out of the shadows.

The sergeant was a short, stocky veteran in his fifties whose bullet head seemed to shoot straight from his shoulders, hairless and almost pointed at the tip. Most men in the regiment towered over him, but there was a pent up ferocity in that compact frame that even the apes in Dustsnake wouldn’t cross.

Calhoun strode over to the pyrotrooper and glared up into his face. ‘See, Trooper Modine here is a piece of deep-fried grox crap, but he’d still lick the rust off the Emperor’s holy throne. Ain’t that right, Trooper Modine?’

‘Every golden spot, sir!’ Modine bellowed, staring into infinity.

‘Damn straight!’ Calhoun nodded. ‘Right, playtime’s over you righteous maggots. I’ve got our drop-ship designation, so haul your sorry arses!’

The sergeant sized up his nine charges as they grabbed their gear. They were rough scum all right – the troublemakers and meatheads who’d sunk to the underbelly of the regiment, picking up charges the way heroes chased after medals, but they were his scum and they could pack a helluva punch in a tussle.

Young Joyce was still frowning as he went past. The sergeant shook his head. The last thing he needed was for the boy to start acting like a greenhorn commissar. He’d told Maude the regiment was no place for him, but she’d argued and wailed until he’d sworn to take Audie under his wing. Willis Calhoun wasn’t scared of any man, but Emperor’s Blood, that woman could nag! If only the boy hadn’t turned out so damn holy! He’d have to have a word with the young fool before he got himself killed. Teach him some basics. Faith wasn’t optional in the Imperium, but some men believed a whole lot harder than others.

‘You said you’d talk to him. You assured me he’d come to his senses.’ As he spoke, Captain Hardin Vendrake kept his eyes on the Silverstorm Cavalry, alert to the slightest misstep amongst the mechanical steeds. So far his riders were keeping things together, guiding their walkers onto the waiting drop-ship with precise, elegant steps. Even Leonora was doing just fine and she was frankly the worst Sentinel rider Vendrake had ever known. He wouldn’t have kept her on if her other talents hadn’t been quite so exceptional…

Vendrake suppressed a smile as he addressed his fellow officer again. ‘I admit I’m disappointed. Sir,’ Vendrake finished pointedly.

‘Don’t question my judgement, captain,’ Elias Waite said irritably. ‘After Trinity, Ensor Cutler deserves our faith.’

‘Does he?’ Vendrake asked. ‘Frankly I still don’t know why we burned that old town to the ground.’

‘Because it needed the burning!’ Waite snarled. He knew Vendrake didn’t like to talk about Trinity. The town had shaken the man up badly, but he was too proud to admit it. Or maybe it just didn’t fit in with his neat little worldview. Seeing the unease on Vendrake’s face, Waite calmed himself and tried again: ‘By Providence, you were there, man! You saw the sickness with your own eyes.’

‘Frankly I’m not sure what I saw,’ Vendrake said, growing agitated, ‘perhaps some kind of mass delusion… We were all half-starved and frozen when we stumbled on that place.’ He waved the subject away. ‘Besides, Trinity isn’t the issue here.’

Waite shook his head in disgust. He despised true patricians like Hardin Vendrake, men bred with an unflappable faith in their own excellence. With his chiselled jaw and aquiline nose the captain had the look of a war poster hero, the kind of man who’d seen thousands of comrades die but never suffered anything worse than a tasteful scar. Vendrake actually had that scar, a tidy little line along his left cheek that had always gone down a storm with the ladies. But despite his rakish façade and wilful blindness, the man was no fool and Waite didn’t need him for an enemy.

‘Look, I’d trust Ensor Cutler with my soul,’ Waite insisted, trying to believe it himself.

‘And what about the witch?’ Vendrake said, cutting to the chase. He smiled at the major’s hesitation. ‘Personally I don’t give a damn who the old man cavorts with, but this is hurting the reputation of the 19th and I won’t stand for that.’

‘I’ll talk to him after we make planetfall. You’ve got my word on it,’ Waite said coldly and marched away.

‘I’m just thinking of the regiment,’ Vendrake called after him. He winced as Leonora’s Sentinel slipped on the boarding ramp and she struggled to regain her balance, the clawed feet of her machine scrabbling on the metal. It looked like she was going to topple when Van Hal nosed his steed in and nudged her back to stability. Vendrake nodded his approval. A fine pilot and a gentleman was Beauregard Van Hal. A fellow made of the right stuff.

Still, he couldn’t entirely blame Leonora for the error. He’d kept his riders on their toes but they’d only had a couple of months to play with the modified machines. Unfortunately there had been no choice about that. The colonel had warned him they would be fighting in swampland, where the Arkan-pattern ‘hooves’ of the Sentinels would be a liability. The heavy, flat pads were designed to race across the open plains and savannahs of Providence, but on Phaedra the design would mire the machines in no time, which would be fatal if they came under fire. Sentinels were light hunter-killers that relied on speed and agility to stalk their prey. While they might intimidate an infantryman, it didn’t take much to penetrate their armour. Cutler had even hinted that Vendrake’s force might have to sit this one out, but the captain was damned if he’d let that happen. The Silverstorm Cavalry was a bastion of nobility amongst the 19th and it would have its share of the glory!

Determined, Vendrake had sequestered the ship’s forge and holed himself up with the regimental tech-priests to crack the problem. During the voyage they had replaced the Providence-pattern hooves with wide, splayed claws that distributed the weight of the machines more evenly and enabled a limited gripping action. Their research revealed that this was actually the prevalent model on many worlds of the Imperium. While extreme divergence from the sacred construction templates was deemed heretical by the Mechanicus priests, modest alterations were permitted, if not exactly encouraged.

Poring over reports of customisation throughout the Imperium, Vendrake had been drawn to the Drop Sentinels of the Elysian regiments. Fitted with grav-chutes, such machines were capable of diving directly into battle from airborne transports. Fired up by the tactical possibilities, he had resolved to win that capability for Silverstorm. At first the tech-priests had hesitated over such a radical deviation, but he had soon cajoled them into it. Under their soulless augmetics Arkan blood still ran through their veins and they hadn’t lost the old thirst for invention. Lacking access to grav-tech they had opted for single-use jump packs and retro stabilisers, granting the Sentinels limited manoeuvrability during a drop.

Once the project had caught their imagination, the cogboys had pursued it with almost human passion. After that it had been a small matter to push them a little further with the modifications to his own steed, Silver Bullet. And over the months a little further had stretched the abilities of his Sentinel far beyond the norm. Bristling with directional thrusters and gyro-stabilisers, it was capable of swift contortions and great leaps that filled Vendrake with fierce joy whenever he trained in the hangar bay. The fact that some would have deemed his Sentinel a new kind of machine altogether – and likely denounced it as an abomination – cut no ice with the captain. He had lost himself wilfully in the challenge of forging the perfect steed. It was the kind of problem that made sense to him, unlike old Waite’s obsession with that vile town…

No, he wouldn’t think of that. The things he had seen there were impossible and impossible things could not be. He was a gentleman of Providence – a rational man. He wouldn’t buy the propaganda the Imperium used to terrorise its ignorant rabble into submission.

Like many Arkan patricians Vendrake was no great believer in the Emperor’s Light. After all, He hadn’t shed much light on Old Providence. Just two centuries ago, blithely unaware of the approaching Imperium, Vendrake’s ancestors had revelled in the new-found glories of steel and steam. It had been a time of unfettered innovation, with the Grand Machinists churning out new wonders every day. The Senate had declared the old gods dead and the Seven Hells mere fables. Men were free to explore a puzzle box universe where everything was possible and nothing was forbidden. Then the warships of the Imperium had arrived and crushed the dream, but the grand families had never forgotten their past.

Maybe that’s why we keep on making the same mistakes, Vendrake mused. Maybe that’s why we keep on rebelling. The fools amongst us anyway…

A klaxon buzzed and he saw the colonel stride into the hangar. Vendrake had to admit the old man had got his act together. His hair was tied back into a neat ponytail and he’d trimmed that scruffy beard. It looked like he’d finally washed too. The captain nodded approvingly, but then he caught sight of the witch trailing Cutler like a second shadow. Her giant watchdog was carrying the regimental banner, unfurled and resplendent. Vendrake’s heart soared at the sight of the ram’s skull and crossed sabres overlaid on the Seven Stars of the Confederation. It was good to see Old Fury awake again, even if it was in the hands of a savage.

The trio marched wordlessly through the silent ranks of the Arkan and stopped at the centre of the hangar. Suddenly Cutler let out a ferocious howl and leapt onto a crate, his agility belying his years. He held out a fist and the savage threw him the banner. The colonel caught it with a flourish and spun about, brandishing the flag above his troops as they gathered round.

‘Seven Stars for Old Fury!’ Cutler bellowed.

‘Seven Furies for the Stars!’ The men bellowed back.

‘For Providence and Imperium!’ Cutler roared, completing the regimental canticle. Then he led them through the litany again and again, binding them together with those glorious words, defying the horrors they’d come through and the ones still ahead. And despite himself, Hardin Vendrake shouted along with the rest of them, his heart soaring. This was the Ensor Cutler of old, the man whose audacity had won the day at Yethsemane Falls and turned him into a living legend! And then it was done and Cutler became the Whitecrow again. Vendrake could almost see the bitterness seeping back into the man as Trinity exerted its curse.

There is no curse, Vendrake told himself. Cutler’s intellect is weak. That’s why the horror is eating him alive, but I won’t fall for it.

‘I won’t lie to you, Arkan.’ Cutler’s voice was flat with suppressed rage. ‘And I won’t dress things up nice and pretty either. You and me, we’ve come too far for that.’ There were murmurs from the crowd, agreement and unease in equal measure.

Damn it all, Vendrake thought, we’re so far from home even the memories are stale. This isn’t the time for truth. Give them some hope, man!

‘So I’m just going to tell you what I know,’ Cutler continued, ‘but frankly that’s not a whole lot.’ He touched a switch on his belt and a murky sphere flickered into life beside him. ‘Gentlemen – and all you Badlander scum too – meet the Lady Phaedra.’ The hologram was blocky and riddled with distortion, but the planet’s essential ugliness still bled through.

I don’t want to breathe Her air, Vendrake realised with sudden conviction. The intensity of the instinct disturbed him. It was entirely irrational.

‘Pretty name for a rat’s arse of a planet,’ Cutler growled. ‘She’s got swamps, rain and a thousand dirty ways to kill you. Gentlemen, you’re going to hate her like the Hells, but I’ve got something else you’re going to hate even more.’

He threw another switch and the planet morphed into a disembodied alien head. Its skull was hairless save for a braided topknot that looked fibrous and fleshy. The face was a flat wedge from brow to chin, bevelled with deeply recessed cheeks that gave it a vaguely cadaverous look. Its mouth was a lipless slit and there was nothing resembling a nose.

‘What is it, sir?’ asked Templeton, the quietly intense commander of the 4th Company as he peered at the hologram through thick round spectacles.

‘That, Captain Templeton, is a tau,’ Cutler said. ‘Take a long, hard look because it’s the reason you’ve been dragged halfway across the galaxy to this mud-ball. Seems these xenos have themselves a jumped-up little empire of their own and our Lady Phaedra is sat right between Them and Us. She’s a worthless harlot, but we can’t let her go and neither can the tau.’ Cutler chuckled, the sound low and harsh. ‘There’s a whole subsector’s worth of pain just waiting to happen if she falls. I guess the tau see it that way too.’

‘These tau boys, what have we got on ’em, colonel?’ Major Waite growled.

‘I’m told they’re big on guns and tech, but not so fond of getting up-close-and-personal.’ Seeing that Waite expected more, Cutler shook his head ruefully. ‘That’s all I’ve got, Elias.’

‘What about numbers? Mechanised divisions or air support?’ Under his bushy eyebrows Waite was frowning ferociously.

‘I can give you rebels – a whole planet full of them. They call themselves the Saathlaa. As far as I can tell, Phaedra was a pre-Imperial colony much like home, but unlike us the Saathlaa were dead in the water by the time the Imperium came along. Whatever civilisation they ever had was long gone.’

‘Savages,’ Captain Machen sneered. The 3rd Company commander was notorious for his loathing of the Outland tribes back home. ‘We cross half the hellfired galaxy and we still can’t escape their stench!’

‘Degenerates,’ Cutler corrected, ‘but that didn’t stop them turning on the Imperium when the xenos came along. I’d guess these tau boys are sneakier than the greenskin vermin we’re used to back home.’

‘What’s the game plan, colonel?’ Waite again.

‘Seems we’ll be touching down on what’s called a Poseidon-class battleship.’ Cutler snorted. ‘Which is a fancy way of saying a damn big boat. We’re talking the old kind here – the kind that sails on water, not across the stars. From there we’ll be joining up with a push on a chain of islands that go by the name of Dolorosa. Some kind of rebel stronghold…’

‘How long, colonel?’ Vendrake interjected. ‘Exactly how long has this war been going on?’

‘Sharp as ever, Captain Vendrake.’ Cutler rubbed the bridge of his nose wearily. ‘Like I said, I won’t lie to you. Gentlemen, the Imperium and the Tau Empire have been fighting over Phaedra for near on fifty years.’

There was a long silence as the men thought it through. Then a murmur began, rising to a hubbub of disorder as the reality sank in. The explosive crack of a bolt pistol put a stop to it.

‘Much obliged, Elias.’ Cutler nodded appreciatively to Waite as the veteran holstered his sidearm. Vendrake could see the colonel gathering strength, dredging up every drop of his faded myth. Uncannily he seemed to be looking every man in the eye, talking to each soldier as if he were an old, personal comrade. ‘Arkan, I expect better from you…’

Abruptly a klaxon began to wail. The main lights flickered on and Cutler glimpsed the hangar chief signalling to him. It was time to go, but he wasn’t finished yet.

‘In fact I expect the best!’ Cutler shouted over the noise. ‘It’s what you’ve always given me and it’s what you’re going to give me now. Do that and I’ll get you through this mess! Now move out and make Providence proud, Arkan!’

He knew they had no cheers left in them and he didn’t much blame them, but at least they’d get on the drop-ships. Right now he couldn’t ask for more.

Click here to buy The Dark Coil : Damnation.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

‘Out Caste’ first published digitally in 2012.
‘A Sanctuary of Wyrms’ first published in Xenos Hunters in 2012.
Fire Caste first published in 2013.
‘Fire and Ice’ first published in Shas’o in 2015.
‘Vanguard’ first published digitally as ‘Adeptus Mechanicus: Vanguard’ in 2015.
‘Cast a Hungry Shadow’ first published digitally in 2016.
Cult of the Spiral Dawn first published as Genestaler Cults in 2016.
‘The Greater Evil’ first published digitally in 2017.
‘Altar of Maws’ first published digitally in 2023.
This eBook edition published in 2025 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Represented by: Games Workshop Limited – Irish branch, Unit 3, Lower Liffey Street, Dublin 1, D01 K199, Ireland.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Jodie Muir.

The Dark Coil: Damnation © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2025. The Dark Coil: Damnation, 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: 978-1-83609-062-5

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
warhammer.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

the purchaser of a Black Library e-book product (“You/you/Your/your”)

(jointly, “the parties”)

These are the terms and conditions that apply when you purchase a Black Library e-book (“e-book”). 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.

* 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.