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Death Rider – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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CHAPTER 1

‘It’s time to go.’

Jens never insisted on herself. She was direct but never sharp. Korpsmen never wasted urgency unless death was on the line. Jens was being urgent now; she was already tacked up and masked. Valian knew he had not been asleep for long, and he knew that something had gone wrong. If he had waited for an explanation, it is likely he would have died. Perhaps he trusted Jens or perhaps he simply trusted his own instincts for survival. Either way, he was up and in the saddle a few seconds later.

Outside, the men and women of the Astra Militarum drifted dreamily from their tents in slow anarchy. Nobody had answers. Commanders came charging after their troops, mouths full of roared orders and threatened violence, then stopped to join everybody else in gawping, hollow-mawed, eyes full of brightening fire. Valian did not know it, but in ten seconds or so each and every one of these men and women would be blinded for life, which, in this case mercifully, would not be very long.

He was high in the stirrups. Beneath him, the steed clawed through the dirt and the broken stone and the fallen with idiot ease, all fear of the light, fear of the sound, fear of the other living beings around it bred from it centuries before. Nobody had bred the fear out of Valian, but he had been trained well and so smothered his amygdala with the same thought: of three sentences carved into the great stone portal of the Krieg Cavalry School, the wisdom of some ancient tyrant.

Cavalry charges are useful at every stage of a battle, and must always be made on the flanks of the infantry.

What the infantry begins, the cavalry ends.

It requires more courage to suffer than to die.

There was a prickling of heat at the back of his greatcoat. Beneath him, skin lifted from yawning skulls in thin black sheets and drifted upwards, like leaves. The world went white. Heat coffined him in his thick leathers and plastek undersuit, welding him by sweat and by terror to his tack. Beneath his legs, the steed pressed forward, ignorant and unstoppable.

It was day for perhaps two weeks or so. The ride was hardest at the summit of the first ridge, where the winds scoured hard and the heat was at its worst. Once the group were descending, Valian felt the metal fittings on his mask and flak groan in relief. Nobody spoke – there was no time, and no way to give voice to any words, each figure swaddled in hazard clothes and riding in loose file to filter through stony ground, or piles of the dead, or desperate, sprinting packs of the dying. For the first stretch, Valian managed, with one group in ten of these, to raise a clumsy glove from the reins to pointlessly signal that he was friendly, more out of habit than anything else. He stopped eventually. What could he offer? A moment’s pause to deliver the Emperor’s Mercy would kill them all. He kept his hands on the reins and his eyes forward. His gas mask put him in blinkers.

Discerning time and distance was impossible. He was sure, on some level, that Jens knew. She had an artillery officer’s head for figures and, as a Krieg-born, had been raised ready to die, so would doubtless be counting steps, triangulating from one burning building to another, cross-comparing the height of the shattered hives in the distance with the planet’s diameter. Valian had half-arsed his artillery training. He’d watched the instructor instead and had worked out what noises made him jump and what merely made him flinch. Useless, now. A commissar’s job, as Katarin used to say, was to kill the fleeing, and Valian was fleeing with the rest of them.

For the first day, or perhaps the first week, or longer, he bitterly envied the artillery and the tank crews and the Aeronautica, snug in their compartments behind hardened plate and high-grade environmental filters. This envy faded quickly. Once, Rezlan VI had been well developed for heavy traffic, with miles of tunnels and plains of asphalt painted in traffic runes that were visible from orbit. In keeping with planetary reconquest doctrines, this network had been bombed to gravel in the opening days of the war – not to slow the t’au, who used skimmers, but to discourage any civilians from fleeing centres designated for collective punishment.

More than once Valian rode past a column of Leman Russes, or Chimeras, or even heavier, stranger machines, turned askew on some shattered road, vehicles caught between the burnt-out husks of mass conveyors and private groundcars owned by those who had thought privilege would save them from Imperial justice. The gene-wrought horses ridden by the majority of the group managed this terrain better than most, but the Krieg steeds strode through the churn like it was clover. Valian remembered diagrams of the creatures’ feet flickering against the dusty walls in the Krieg Cavalry School: ‘Here is the primary foreclaw, hooked to pull down wire and pull out organs.’

His steed was big even by the standards of a warhorse. It had eaten its twin in the vitae womb, had twice the requisite glands, two layers of flat, flak-hard ribs, two sets of mandibles, double-thick muscle bundles, and stood twenty-one hands high. It was pale and hairless, but the stimms had blackened its vascular system, which bulged from beneath its skin like veins in marble. It could ride for a month without pause, without sleep, without food. Valian wondered if he would do the same, or if he would be found, starved and shrivelled in the saddle, the steed beneath his legs powering forwards endlessly into nothing.

They kept to the coast. White villas burned on scenic hills. The light had dimmed enough for the riders to turn, but they chose not to. Nobody wanted to know what was behind them. Hesh signalled Jens and asked, with his hands, where they were going. Jens lifted her gloved palm and made a pushing motion: Through.

They rode along the burning seawall and into the vast, blessedly cold expanses of the storm drains. During the long, ten-year summers of Rezlan VI, the locals dammed miles of bay and grew fields of gaudy tulips, every bloom drinking twice the fill of a hiver on a crueller world. They were hand-picked – not without loss of life – then shipped to the anterooms of minor nobles light years away. Here, they were presented alongside cards that, in small, neat type, described how many people had died harvesting them and how far they had come, which was less vulgar than simply stating their cost.

When Valian had arrived a few months ago, the people had hung garlands round his and his troops’ necks – the last flowers that would ever grow on this world.

Even in the dark and the cool of the drains, the riders dared not stop. On the surface, vox had been spotty. The few transmissions that did break through the choking air were confused and panicky but spoke of walls of fire and tens of thousands dead, the speakers reading their coordinates with the same reverence as catechisms, as if there were anything that could be done to save them. There was a mile or so of rockcrete above the riders now, but Valian was unsure if it would be sufficient to protect them.

Still, the riders were only human. They stopped at a junction, a cathedral of flat stone designed to hold an ocean captive until it was needed. Some collapsed and did not stand. Their comrades took their horses and lashed them to their own. Valian looked to Jens. She shook her head and cupped a hand to where her ear would be, beneath her gas mask. Valian listened. In the dark, invisible reaches above, something huge was breaking. The seawall had been breached after all. He was away and galloping in seconds, with the wiser and faster of the other riders following shortly after. As fire and light had roared behind them above, water and darkness now roared below.

Valian had read somewhere, before they had landed, of the great pride Rezlan VI’s planetary authority took in their crisis resilience. For the emergency systems to fail, four separate generators would have to go offline simultaneously. All four were sealed permanently in ancient mineshafts long since filled with rockcrete, each staffed by pale, eyeless engine-clans conditioned for millennia to believe failure was worse than death. On the ceiling above him the emergency lumens dimmed, then flickered, then winked out, one by one. The great hollow sound of the water howled off the walls, and in the dark, Valian hoped he was riding the right way.

The exit tunnel was partially blocked with rubble. They had to dismount to continue. Valian went first, then his steed. Valian had to hold his breath to pass through the narrowest point. It requires more courage to suffer than to die, it requires more courage to suffer than to die. His steed shouldered through the broken rock placidly, even as it scraped its flesh. There were rumours, on Krieg, among the other commissars, of wild subterranean packs of beasts, galloping down forgotten access tunnels.

Valian waited until he saw Jens come out of the tunnel. The sky was black and the ground gleamed white with ash. It looked soft. He lay down, and collapsed into sleep’s sticky, crushing embrace.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2026.
This eBook edition published in 2026 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 Maksim Kostin.

Death Rider © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2026. Death Rider, 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: 978-1-83609-485-2

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.

For Riley.

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