Contents

Cover

The Gate of Bones – Extract

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

Chapter One

News from the dark
Ganymede
Vigilus

Fists beat against the gates. I hear them, feel them, a tumult of impacts, an avalanche of flesh and bone. Insistent. Unceasing. Screams mingle with the thunder of flesh on metal. Cries. Pleas for help. Lamentation. Barking voices demanding orders. Fervent whispers of hope as faith gutters and dies.

Other things, not human.

I stand in the shadow of the gates and upon either side of me waves rise. They are stone and boiling surf. They are madness made real. They rear high and close, only to melt away like mists. The stench of death surrounds me. I gag upon the reek of corpses. I retch smoke. The sky is dark, and all the stars run together like wax and swirl, swirl, swirl into a vortex. I feel its pull and fear impales me. I cry out, though I have no mouth to scream, no eyes to see, no body to turn towards the glimmer of light I feel at my back.

Hope. That light is hope, but it is not for me to look upon. Not now. I must listen to the screams. I must watch the curdled stars.

I must see what I am to be shown.

The gates must burst before the fury that presses from beyond. Chains stretch. Hinges groan. And what then, if I am caught before those sundered gates in the light of poisoned stars?

Terror twists in my chest. I must see. I draw closer.

Closer.

Sound bludgeons me, a roar of amalgamated pain, a chimera of terrors that makes me whine. Charnel stink enfolds. My skin burns. Dismay reaches strangler’s hands about my throat.

I draw closer still. I must see.

I see. Each gate bears a brass plaque. They are small. Something like verdigris obscures their words and I know that this is malign and deliberate.

Closer.

The taint churns, becomes thick and dense to obscure all. Yet there is a torch, suddenly, a torch in a sconce set at the very mouth of the gate. I take it up. In its flickering flames I have the knowledge and the weapon that I need. The smoke rises, chokes me. I scour the plaques with fire, and the corruption falls away. It hates me for this. It will punish me. I cannot care.

The plaques are clear and I can see the words engraved. They mean nothing. I commit them to memory, nonetheless. I am the eye that sees, the listening ear, the quill and the parchment page. Others will interpret. Others will understand. I see, and I record.

Sangua-Terra.

Vigilus.

Translocuter First Class Tane hurried along the corridor. He crossed pools of stark illumination thrown by electro-sconces, quickening his step through the patches of shadow, wincing at the ring of his footsteps on the deck.

Lots of whispers about Ganymede, he thought each time he crossed the terminator between light and dark. It wasn’t long ago this moon was interdicto extremis. He couldn’t forget that.

They said that the moon was safe, cleansed of whatever had haunted its depths. They had been quick to excavate new corridors and chambers beneath the surface, filling them with cogitators and holocasters, the generatoria and datastacks and vox-arrays of the Officio Logisticarum. They had garrisoned Ganymede with regiments of Astra Militarum. There was a veritable army of priests thronging the central corridors, whose numbers rivalled the archivists, lexographers, numeromancers, adepts-materialum, prelates and countless other personnel. They trumpeted Ganymede to be the first of the hub-fortresses that would spring up behind the fleets of the Indomitus Crusade and provide an unbroken chain of support more ambitious than anything the Imperium had achieved before.

Such was Primarch Guilliman’s vision, and they would see it realised.

‘Well they don’t have to walk these endless corridors, do they?’ Tane muttered, clutching his aquila pendant with one hand and gripping a data-slate with the other.

He spoke to himself because it was better than the quiet, but only just, and the shadows seemed to lean in to listen.

Tane had survived long enough to know that when the Imperium decreed somewhere safe, it only meant acceptably perilous. He’d been on Vorliot during the withdrawal, making it to one of the designated safe-zones for evacuation. In his opinion, ‘safe’ was not the right word to describe anything that involved that many orks. After his recruitment into the Officio Logisticarum and subsequent assignment to Ganymede, Tane paid more attention to the rumours of malefic phenomena than he had to the moon’s threat descriptor of nil.

A patrol of Valhallans appeared from nowhere, making him jump. The men and women offered Tane crisp salutes before sweeping past and off down a stairway. He hastened on, following las-etched signs for the Astropathy Transinterpretation Sanctum. Ganymede was a maze, and even after weeks on station Tane still got lost.

Why so jumpy? he asked himself scathingly. A rhetorical admonition. Truth was, Tane knew what had him on edge. I shouldn’t have read it, he thought. Emperor knows I heard half of it from her gibbering anyway, but still…

Knowledge is a burden, ignorance a blessing. The words had been embossed upon a steel plate a hundred feet high in his scriptorium on Vorliot. The motto had always angered Tane, for he was a curious man. The trait had landed him in trouble several times, almost fatally on one occasion. It eventually led to his induction into the logister corps, so the recruiting adept had told him.

Today, Tane saw the truth in those words. He wished, for once, to be ignorant.

Shouldn’t have read it, he told himself again as he passed through a grumbling servo-hatch.

It wasn’t as though he understood most of the astropathic communique anyway. He had never heard of Vigilus, nor Sangua-Terra. But images kept coming back to him, as vivid as though he had suffered the visions himself. She was a powerful witch, that one. Insidious, the way she spread her dreams about like that.

Best not to think of it. In that place, no one knew exactly who might be dipping into a man’s thoughts. Ganymede was lousy with psykers.

Tane shook off his nerves and hurried onward. The astropath’s duty had been to receive her vision, and it had left her slumped in the grip of a coma. Another adept had recorded it and another translated it. They weren’t looking too good either. Tane’s task, by comparison, was simply to hang about and convey the record of her words to the Transinterpretation Sanctum where it could be properly considered by wiser minds, then disseminated. Or not.

‘Hardly life or death, my part of it,’ Tane chastened himself.

He reached a wider corridor, more brightly lit, but the oppressive feelings didn’t leave him. If anything, they felt more intense. Surrounded by people heading to and fro, he retreated into his own private world of fear, and paranoia burgeoned.

He held the slate tighter to his chest.

The archway to the Transinterpretation Sanctum appeared not a moment too soon, and he hurried through it, and over to the immense admissions desk. A stern-looking adept in the green robes of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica gave him a distasteful look from on high. Gimbal-mounted rotary lasguns tracked him as he approached.

‘I need to see someone,’ he said. ‘Someone important.’

‘And who would that be, Adept Tane?’ said the woman.

‘Someone more important than you!’ he hissed. He looked about himself as if he might be overheard. He would be, too. He was in one of the most secure places in the Imperium. There were always ears listening.

But secure didn’t mean the same as safe. Nowhere was safe.

‘I have a message. It’s an important one,’ he said. ‘Someone needs to see it now.’

‘Put it in the slot where you put all the rest,’ she said, pointing at a lipped marble opening in the front of the desk. ‘Get your chit, have it stamped, and go back to your duties.’

He gave her a defiant look.

‘No?’ she said. ‘Maybe I should summon security, and they can explain the proper procedure to you.’ She smiled unpleasantly. ‘They’ll use methods that you won’t quickly forget.’ Her hand moved towards an unseen button. She didn’t like him. He didn’t need to be a psyker to know that.

Tane took a deep breath. He wasn’t supposed to know what was in the message. He hoped his masters could smooth that over later.

‘It’s Imperium Nihilus,’ he said. He meant to sound firm, but he blurted it like a child with a secret he could no longer hold. ‘It’s a message from Imperium Nihilus, from a planet on the other side of the Rift. A planet called Vigilus. Don’t you see? They’re alive. The Imperium is still there. This message has to be heard now, by someone of proper rank.’ He shivered. ‘The primarch will need to be informed.’

‘You are in no position to determine what the Lord Imperial Regent hears, Adept Tane.’ The adept stared down her long nose at him for a long time. Then her hand, still poised to press, moved to another unseen button, and descended. There was a click, and the characteristic hiss of an opening vox-channel followed.

‘I need to speak to Logister Gunthe,’ she said, not taking her eyes off Tane.

Tane didn’t hear the reply.

‘Yes, I am serious.’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘Priority Alpha-Red.’

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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 Johan Grenier.

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