Contents

Cover

Fury of Magnus – Extract

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

Time of Trial

The day was dark with the smoke of a burning world.

His armour’s chrono indicated it was morning, but all divisions of time were virtually meaningless now. Day, night, morning, evening… they all blended into one span of flickering, hellish light that painted everything in the colours of a banked hearth-forge.

The distant glow of molten rock backlit misbegotten giants lumbering on the horizon, and plumes of fire from ruptured bedrock flickered low to the ground as boiling clouds of searing ash drifted over shattered ruins.

The Time of Trial was an extinction-level event on Nocturne, a time of fire and endings during which its Promethean moon would pass so close it would all but tear the planet apart. Clashing gravitational forces reached deeps into Nocturne’s bedrock to wake the world-serpents coiled around its molten heart. Stirred from their deep slumbers, the ur-drakes roared and raged, shaking the world above with the fury of their fractured dreams.

Their terrible heat surged forth in the lava of a thousand volcanic eruptions that blotted out the sun. The movement of their titanic limbs shook the world with cataclysmic earthquakes that reshaped Nocturne’s continents, and their breath sent boiling tsunamis to smash its coasts. And in the aftermath of their ferocious waking, a terrible winter fell upon the land as they returned to their slumbers and their searing fury subsided.

In such times, life beyond the protected walls of Nocturne’s Sanctuary Cities became all but impossible. The plains camps, mountain holdfasts and coastal settlements emptied as Nocturne’s people sought their fragile safety. Their gates would be flung open, and any who requested shelter would be offered a place within.

Atok Abidemi had seen only one Time of Trial before he had been chosen to join the ranks of the XVIII Legion, the Salamanders. He had been a boy, no more than four Terran-standard, but vividly remembered the sky afire with lightning as it raged with the warring of gods and the wrath of the world-serpents. Even as a child, he had seen meaning in the play of flames in the sky, fated significance in each peal of thunder and crash of volcanic fury.

Fleeing the approaching pyro-storms, his parents had abandoned their nomadic life on the T’harken Delta and sought refuge within the walls of Skarokk, the city of the Dragonspine. All Abidemi had known was a life on the plains, hunting the leo’nid with his father and grandfather, so when the gates of the Sanctuary City closed behind him, Abidemi felt the terrible claustrophobia of being trapped in a place from which there could be no escape.

That same sensation held his heart in a cold grip again.

Yet this was not the Dragonspine and he was not on Nocturne.

This was Terra.

But it was a Time of Trial.

‘Stand to!’

The cry went up along the wall, all but drowned out by Indomitor’s blaring klaxons.

Another alert, but it wasn’t for them, not yet.

Abidemi flexed his fingers on the grip of Draukoros. Longer than a standard chainblade, the weapon was toothed with the ebon fangs of the great drake of Nocturne whose name it now bore. Once, it had belonged to Artellus Numeon, but with his disappearance upon Mount Deathfire, the honour of its use passed to Abidemi.

The shadow cast by its former bearer was long, and both Abidemi and the blade understood he was only its custodian. The blade would always be Numeon’s, and it was Abidemi’s fervent hope that one day he would return it to their fiery home world.

That hope was fading with every passing day, and as the discordant clamour of war pulled him back to the present, the tragedy engulfing Terra swelled around him.

White ash fell like snow. The sky burned with fiery colours, and the relentless drumbeat of war buckled the air with a continual rumble of explosions and big guns that would never tire.

He and his two Salamanders brothers were stationed on the Indomitor Wall, the towering north-eastern bulwark of the Sanctum Imperialis, the very heartland of the Emperor’s Palace. It resembled nothing so much as a vast cliff carved into the bones of the mountains, twelve hundred metres tall, with an inner mustering ground behind the shielded and reinforced ramparts of its outer wall, which stepped down to layered outworks before diminishing to the ruined edges of the western Katabatic Plain.

Its outer faces were reinforced with steel and stone, its once glorious bas-reliefs peeled away at Lord Dorn’s decree. Its functionality was brutally simple, the newly raised drum towers, turrets and enfilading gun-boxes turning the fifteen kilometre strip of smouldering ruins beyond into a killing ground of almost perfect proportions.

In any conventional engagement, it would be a nigh-impregnable barrier, but the war the traitors had brought to Terra was anything but conventional.

Braying war-horns and screams issued from the host currently attacking the wall. Six times they had come at its defenders in the last two days, and six times they had been thrown back. Their thwarted howls were those of beasts, and to Abidemi’s ears they sounded like a barbarian horde from an earlier epoch.

Smoke and a seething orange glow limned Indomitor’s broken-toothed defences on this seventh attack, where fifty thousand soldiers fought the blood-maddened host. Explosions and plumes of blue-green fire rippled up from the base of the wall far below. Percussive blasts rocked the walls, chewing the rockcrete in fiery bites with every impact.

Shell blasts swept the parapet in storms of shrapnel, gunfire plucked troops from the firing step in droves, and the screams of the wounded were drowned out by the hammer blows of heavy artillery. Frag shells burst overhead, shredding flesh and stone, splintering the walls. The air was thick and toxic with a mixture of fyceline, propellant and promethium fumes.

Blasts from the autocannon turrets and the artillery mounted on the battered slopes of the Hegemon behind them answered the roar from beyond the wall.

But it would make little difference, the enemy host was seemingly without number.

This portion of the wall was designated Indomitor Three.

As much a name for us as it is the wall, thought Abidemi. Perhaps if–

A blackened smiter’s gauntlet clapped him on the shoulder guard and a voice with the sharp accent of a Sanctuary City-dweller said, ‘Focus, brother.’

Abidemi nodded, lifting his head from his contemplation to regard his battle-brother.

Barek Zytos was a solid mountain of dark skin and battered warplate that had somehow retained its dark green lustre, even amid the constant ash falls and tarry smoke banks drifting from the burning ruins of the Anterior Barbican and the smashed Brahmaputra Wall.

Abidemi and Zytos stood with Indomitor Three’s reserve force, ten thousand soldiers and twelve ad hoc squadrons from a score of different regiments. This deep into the fighting, hundreds of Terra’s regiments had been effectively wiped out and their scattered survivors quickly organised into scratch battalions with no names save any they gave themselves.

In honour of the Salamanders in their midst, these soldiers had named themselves Vulkan’s Own. Normally such presumption on the part of mortals would have angered Abidemi, but in this place, at this time, he understood the honour these brave men and women did them. Once, their uniforms had been different in design and colour, but weeks of fighting in the mud and gore of Terra had rendered them all the same grey-brown and painted their exhausted faces with ash and grief.

They watched the fighting at the ramparts with a mixture of anger and horror, fearful of the slaughter being unleashed, yet eager to advance and push the enemy from the walls.

Abidemi understood that feeling all too well.

It railed against his warrior soul to stand and watch brother soldiers of the Imperium dying, but he and his brothers’ strength was best spent when it would have the greatest impact.

Sensing his dark mood, Zytos nodded to the bloodshed on the wall.

‘This is a bad one,’ he said. ‘Yes, a bad one indeed.’

Abidemi grunted. ‘Has there ever been a good assault?’

‘You know what I mean,’ said Zytos, interlacing his fingers on the drake-skull pommel of his mighty thunder hammer. The weapon’s killing head sat between his feet, engraved with scenes from the forge, its haft a length of unbending adamantium. ‘The man who always looks to the sky does not see the drake at his feet.’

‘And the man who looks to the ground does not see the winged dactyl,’ finished Abidemi.

‘Brother, are you here?’ asked Barek. ‘Really here? Since Vulkan passed into the Palace your mind has wandered too often of late.’

‘Apologies, brother,’ said Abidemi, shaking his head. ‘We sacrificed so much to bring the primarch to Terra… I feel lost without his presence.’

‘He is here,’ said Zytos. ‘Doing his duty to the Emperor. As we must.’

‘You’re right,’ said Abidemi. ‘But this war saps my soul as much as it tests my body.’

Zytos rapped his knuckles on the pommel of his hammer and said, ‘Concerns of the spirit must be put aside until after the fighting’s done.’

‘You’re wrong,’ said Abidemi. ‘We must win both together or else we lose everything.’

‘I’ll put my faith in this,’ said Zytos, swinging the hammer up from the ground and hefting its immense weight as easily as a mortal man might swing a walking cane.

Barek Zytos had ever been the most direct of his brothers, as was only to be expected of a man born to the city of warrior kings. The drakes cut into the onyx skin of his skull were markers of the beasts he had hunted on the Arridian Plain, and his words provided a much needed anchor for Abidemi.

‘And though he’s young, I put faith in him,’ continued Zytos, nodding to where Igen Gargo stood scanning the ramparts atop the turret of a rust-brown Shadowsword. Above him, the unending barrage of shells and lasers flared and burst against the aegis shield: relentless impacts from orbit and plunging fire from distant batteries. The swirling patterns rippled like the violent borealis of the Time of Trial.

The colours reminded Abidemi of looking deep into the fires of a forge ready to receive metal. It was said a master smiter could look into a furnace and know the exact moment to thrust the iron into its heat, when to turn, and when to withdraw it just by listening to its song.

Zytos had led them back to Terra, but of the three of them, Igen Gargo was the master of reading the fire’s song.

Gargo scanned the fighting, ready to call out any weakness or predict a rout. The burnished metal of his augmetic arms reflected the light of explosions, and fire danced in the red lenses of his battle helm.

Abidemi followed his gaze, but it was impossible to guess where one part of the line would bend or break. Lightning-shot smoke all but obscured the fighting, and the sounds of clashing metal and gunfire was much the same at one point as it was at another. Vast shapes reared up, bloated silhouettes and angular snapshots of unnatural creatures the enemy had pressed into its ranks.

Zytos lifted his helm and snapped it into place with a hiss of pressurised air.

‘Here,’ said Zytos, turning to retrieve a pair of battered breacher shields from the ground behind him and handing one to Abidemi. ‘It’s not Promethean craft, but it’ll do.’

Abidemi nodded, scabbarding Draukoros and clamping the shield tight to his arm.

The yellow-gold metal was thick and dented, the ebon fist at its centre chipped and silvered by a hundred or more impacts. It felt unnatural to bear wargear marked with the heraldry of a Legion not his own, but these were desperate times and the shields had not failed them yet.

‘It’ll be soon,’ said Zytos, looking back towards Gargo.

Abidemi snapped his own helmet on and engaged the gorget seals. Even insulated from the atmosphere, the air tasted of ash and burnt iron. His visor lit up with targeting information, damage assessments and energy-depletion warnings.

‘How can you tell?’ he answered.

‘I can’t read the fire as well as Gargo, but I can read him,’ said Zytos.

‘Stand to!’ yelled Gargo.

‘Told you,’ said Zytos as the vehicles around them roared to life, reactors powering up and drive mechanisms shrieking like the magma vents of the Pyre Desert. Blue fumes belched from exhaust grilles, and commanders unfurled pennants of dead regiments upon their antennae.

‘Watch the right,’ ordered Gargo, pointing a silvered arm towards the wall.

Abidemi scanned the fighting.

‘What does he see?’

‘I don’t–’

A thunderclap of shield failure was swiftly followed by a titanic blast that shook the staging area with the force of an orbital strike. Colossal blocks of stone lofted skyward as something exploded just below the level of the rampart Gargo had indicated. Abidemi couldn’t see what had caused it, but a hundred-metre portion of the wall simply vanished in a blinding sheet of fire. The ringing echoes of its detonation were deafening, even within his helmet, and his auto-senses dimmed to shield his eyes against the incandescent brightness of the explosion.

It seemed the battle paused for breath, as though death were admiring its handiwork.

Gargo leapt from the Shadowsword’s turret as a ululating roar swept up the molten remains of the wall. He too hefted a breacher shield and ran to join his brothers at the centre of the line.

‘Into the breach?’ asked Gargo.

‘Once more,’ agreed Zytos.

He lifted his hammer high and raised his voice beyond the tumult.

‘Indomitor! Into them!’

With Abidemi, Gargo and Zytos forming the tip of a charging wedge, the reserves of Vulkan’s Own advanced into the fire and smoke. Abidemi saw the half-molten shape of a siege belfry, monstrous shapes surging from its buckled assault gates: migou giants in heavy suits of heat-resistant plate and iron helms beaten into the forms of daemons. Each was a hulking abhuman carrying a belt-fed chain gun and with a drum-like ammo hopper bolted to its spine. Roaring with idiot hatred, they braced themselves and unleashed the full fury of their weapons.

Two-metre tongues of fire blazed from their flared muzzles. Hundreds of men went down in the first volley of scything, high-calibre shells. Indomitor’s advance faltered, but pushed on into the storm of fire and steel.

‘Into the fires of battle!’ yelled Gargo.

‘Unto the anvil of war!’ answered Abidemi and Zytos.

Abidemi felt dozens of bludgeoning impacts on his shield, each one striking with the force of a forge-servitor swinging a sledgehammer. He gritted his teeth, locking his arm at ninety degrees as he slotted his bolter into the shield’s firing notch.

More of the migou gunners were mounting the walls, unleashing fresh torrents of fire into the flanks of the defenders.

Clawed ladders and piston-driven grapnels bit stone. A tide of degenerates swarmed behind them, scrambling for a foothold on the walls. Little more than a howling mob wielding crudely stamped weapons and mass-produced guns, but there were so many. So very many.

Prioritise. Execute.

‘Take out those gunners!’ Abidemi shouted.

Hammering impacts buckled the curved plates of his shield, the power of the shells making Abidemi feel like he was advancing into the teeth of a pyro-storm. He lined up a shot and fired his bolter, the hard bang swallowed in the thunder of gunfire. One of the abhuman gunners fell back, its chest blown open. He fired again, and another dropped to its knees with half its torso ripped away. A third migou vanished in a pyre of streaking rounds as a mass-reactive detonated inside its ammo hopper.

Abidemi’s visor pinged each of the migou in turn. Pull the trigger: an enemy dead.

Single shots only. Not enough ammunition for any wasted shells!

Another target lit up, limned by his visor. Another round, another dead.

Then he was in amongst them. He clamped his bolter to his thigh and swept Draukoros from its sheath.

‘Numeon!’ he roared, hammering the foe with his shield and reaping a bloody harvest with every butcher’s cleave of his sword.

His weapon was an extension of his arm, and he tore apart heavy plate and pallid flesh with every strike. The blade’s shrieking teeth chewed through the armoured migou with all the hunger of a Nocturnean drake, devouring steel and flesh and bone with every ripping roar.

The enemy matched his bulk. Abidemi couldn’t just smash them aside with his own mass. He kept moving, giving the migou no time to bracket him nor give his mortal enemies a chance to pin him in place with their numbers.

His shield was a bludgeon, pistoned forward to make space.

Breathe and swing. Hack and cut.

Each migou was a powerful foe, but they were slow. He slammed the hard edge of the shield into their faces. Ram the sword up and under their plates, twist, withdraw. Turn and move, do it again.

The slaughter was machine-like.

Repetition made it instinctual and unthinking.

Abidemi felt the presence of his brothers. Their grunts and oaths over the vox were wordless, but he understood every one. Zytos swung his hammer with a forging cadence as Gargo spun and lunged with his spear, scything and impaling men like wriggling fish.

The men and women of Vulkan’s Own fought with rifle, pistol and bayonet; with iron bars or whatever else came to hand. The fighters were woven together so densely it was all but impossible to tell friend from foe. Men clawed at their enemies, bloodied fingers tearing off masks and thumbs gouging eyes.

This was not the war the remembrancers had spoken of in the earliest days of the crusade.

War, when it had come at all back then, had been filled with glory and heroics fit for song. Not this frenzied brawling in the mud of the Throneworld, scraping for a rusted blade to open a throat, or a chunk of fused masonry to bash in a skull. This was the true face of war: a desperate fight for survival; a scrambling, maddened horror in which only the insane survived.

All else was but a soldier’s lie.

Abidemi slammed three men from the walls, their broken-limbed bodies spinning over the rampart to fall two hundred metres to the ruins below.

He let out a shuddering breath.

Remember to breathe! Take in oxygen. Turn and fight!

He’d fought to the very crest of the breach, where the vast detonation had broken the rampart. The full horror of the broken landscape before Indomitor was revealed, and the shocking sight of the enemy was like plunging into an ice bath after a hard march over the Pyre Desert.

Abidemi had heard the estimates of the enemy’s order of battle, the impossible numbers thrown around by Lord Dorn’s strategos. He’d seen the vast shadows cast by the drop-ships blotting out the sky over Lion’s Gate space port, and had fought this war long enough to know just how many of his fellow Imperials had cast off their oaths of loyalty.

But each time he saw the unending horde ranged against them, it broke his heart anew.

The force attacking Indomitor spread like an undulant sea beneath a choking layer of petrochemical smog. To Abidemi’s eyes, it was like a host of pack predators swarming a leviathan at bay. Larger, battle-bred creatures moved among them: hideous by-blows of the fallen Mechanicum that walked on stilt-legs and loosed violent squalls of corrupt binharic hate, and things that might once have been living, but were now armoured, chimeric monsters transformed by warp-spawned rituals.

Far to the south, the air rippled around the immense form of Titans as they strode from the Anterior Barbican to pummel the strongholds protecting the Eternity Gate. Heedless of the life-and-death struggles at their feet, the god-machines howled their fury from war-horns at their shoulders, but even those sounds were overwhelmed by the rolling thunder of explosions and shellfire.

A series of seismic detonations smashed into the slope below, pulling him back to the present as a killing rain of debris hammered down. More of the mortals swarmed the breach below him. They fired their weapons into the air, hooting like maddened beasts. Huge stalk-tanks bristling with spikes and heavy ordnance stomped among them. Through the twitching smoke, Abidemi thought he saw the red-and-gold heraldry of swift-striding leviathans.

Too small to be Titans, even predatory Warhounds. Knights…?

He knew he was exposed here, backlit by the smoke and flames swirling around him, but didn’t care. He wanted them to see him, to know the Emperor’s warriors were not afraid of them, that the traitors would pay dearly for every step inwards they took.

This was an enemy driven by a hate Abidemi simply could not fathom.

A rippling string of ignitions bloomed in the smoke below, and the red-gold shapes strode from the fog banks in their wake. Low to the ground they came, heedless of the mortals they crushed beneath their splay-clawed feet: three giant bipedal forms with vast glaives and weapons mounted beneath wide pauldrons of bloody crimson and gold.

‘Morbidia,’ hissed Abidemi, recognising the spiked-helm sigil on the fire-blackened banner rising over the lead Knight’s skull-faced cockpit.

A crackling voice blared a warning in his helmet vox. Gargo.

‘Incoming!’

Abidemi looked up in time to see a salvo of Ironstorm missiles flashing downwards.

He closed his eyes.

‘The man who looks to the ground does not see the winged dactyl…’

Click here to buy Fury of Magnus.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2020.
This eBook edition published in 2020 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Neil Roberts.
Internal artwork by Mikhail Savier.

Fury of Magnus © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2020. Fury of Magnus, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-80026-448-9

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

To Amanda, Henry, Nick, Kristina, Christian, Alex, Giovanna, and John,
for all the things you taught me in the Room.

And to Evan, who every day teaches me something new.

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.