Contents

Cover

Lantern’s Light – Extract

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

Lantern’s Light

By James Swallow

The message had been phrased to make it sound like a request, but in truth, it was a summons.

It was a father’s demand to his son, the orders of a general to his soldier.

Make haste to my side, it said, so we may speak.

It pretended to be spoken among equals, but Mortarion knew that it was anything but. The Emperor of Mankind could not utter a single word without it becoming an inviolate command.

And who are you to defy your gene-father? The question echoed in the depths of the warrior’s clouded thoughts. It came to Mortarion in a ghostly voice he almost recognised.

His eyes rose, looking up from the depths of the hooded robe that formed a shroud about his sallow face. The great mantle was draped over a suit of artificer-wrought power armour, which in recent months Mortarion had learned to wear like a second skin, and it pooled on the deck of the shuttlecraft where he sat on a low iron bench.

The armour had been modified extensively after it was presented to him. The body-sleeve, battleplate and synthetic musculature fitted the primarch as if he had been born to it, but Mortarion had not cared for the ornate beautifications and martial décor built into the gauntlets, greaves and cuirass. To the dismay of the armorial artisans in service to the Emperor, Mortarion stripped the superfluous detailing and discarded it, leaving only the heraldry that was necessary for battlefield operations.

Instead he made them cast an icon of the Death Guard sigil and place that upon the plate. The skull-and-sun was too potent a symbol, too close to his heart to be left behind along with the rest of his old life.

The skull meant death, as it both threatened Mortarion’s life and stood as his ally, while the six-pointed sun represented the illumination of freedom he had brought to his world.

But is our world free? The voice whispered the question as the small star-craft passed beyond the pull of planetary gravity, and Mortarion allowed his attention to drift to a glassy portal in the shuttle’s hull.

Out there, framed against an endless veil of dark nebulae, he saw the arc of Barbarus’ surface. From this vantage, his home world was a churning sphere of orange-amber toxin clouds agitated by the radiation of a weak yellow sun. Only the vaguest shape of land masses beneath the cloud banks could be determined. The planet had a baleful, menacing aspect, but still it stirred a strange kind of melancholy in Mortarion’s heart.

Even as the revelations of his true roots continued to unfold, Barbarus would forever remain the place where Mortarion had been born, and it mattered little to him if he had not actually originated there. Barbarus had forged Mortarion into what he was now, and he would never forget that.

And yet… Mortarion’s gaze moved to the stormy nebula shroud, billions of spans beyond the furthest orbit of this solar system. He had long known of sister worlds to Barbarus orbiting their sun, having snatched the knowledge of such forbidden lore from the books of his adoptive father, the brutal Overlord Necare. But to know as he did now that there were trillions more stars and worlds out past that Stygian veil… The thought of it was dazzling.

A part of him wanted to see those worlds, to sink his mailed gloves in their sands and waters, to stride across new lands and alien vistas, to fight in new battles. Not since he had been a youth had Mortarion been so thirsty for knowledge. Then, the skeletal and cruel Necare had beaten him and denied any education that was not of the Overlord’s desiring, forcing Mortarion to learn through guile and subterfuge. He felt the same familiar frustration returning now.

After they had been reunited, Mortarion’s father – his true gene-father, the Emperor – had bid him to remain within the bounds of this system for more than a Barbarun solar year. It had not been easy.

Imagine, said the voice, living your whole life in one room of one house and never knowing anything more. Then the door is flung open and you see a street, a town, a nation, a world beyond. But you are told you cannot venture out. Not yet.

Such disappointment.

The Emperor had come to Barbarus with His mighty fleet, and offered the people of the poisoned world a chance to rejoin the great Imperium of Man, from which they had been lost millennia ago. They took it without hesitation.

Of course they did. They were mortals, after all, and Mortarion’s father was a being like no other. How could they have refused Him?

In the upheaval that followed, much had changed, and was still changing. Each day, Mortarion found it a struggle to hold on to the threads of the old life he had lived.

Before the coming of the Emperor, Mortarion was the rebel son of the highest of the Overlords – at first Necare’s most terrible weapon, then his most hated enemy. He had turned on his adoptive father and the court of callous beings led by the twisted fiend, fighting to liberate the beleaguered ‘lesser’ humans of Barbarus from the monstrous predations of the creatures who subjugated them.

Mortarion was an outsider, then a warrior, and finally a leader. He raised an army that took back the planet one domain at a time, and christened the best of those freedom fighters as his Death Guard. He named them as his unbroken blades.

He dwelled on thoughts of those warriors – of Rask and Murnau, Skorvall and Kargul and the others – and of course his acerbic brother-in-battle, his fellow exile Callas Typhon.

That questioning voice he heard in his thoughts always sounded like Callas. Indeed, it was his old friend’s way to challenge everything, and to ask the unaskable questions.

All of them were up here too, out in high orbit beyond the planet, aboard the ships that the Emperor had left behind after His departure. Mortarion’s elite were the first to be uplifted, and remade by the Imperium’s incredible technologies in the bio-labs aboard those craft. Even now, that process was nearing its conclusion, as his most trusted soldiers were subjected to a rigorous regime of genetic modification, biological implantation and neural programming.

Mortarion looked away, glancing at one of the grey-armoured warriors sharing the shuttle’s cargo bay with him. A Dusk Raider, or so they had first been named, one of the tribes of the Emperor’s Legiones Astartes – his so-called Space Marines. They were to Mortarion as Mortarion was to his gene-father, greater than mortal men but still born out of mortality.

One day soon, Typhon, Rask and all the others would be like that one. The common clay of the Barbarun Death Guard would emerge reincarnated, striding into the light to stand side by side with the warrior Legion the Emperor had brought Mortarion as a gift. They would all carry the name from that day onward.

Some would not survive the process, of course. Several had already perished, their bodies unable to withstand the great toll the forced transformation put upon them. And there were more to whom this great boon was denied: those deemed too old or whose chromosomal matrix was incompatible with the Emperor’s bio-altering technology.

A waste of good material, said the voice in his head.

The legionary in grey noticed his primarch’s gaze upon him and came to attention. ‘My lord?’ he asked, taking a step closer. ‘Do you wish something of me?’

He was Terran-born, like all of the Dusk Raiders. By Mortarion’s word, they too were now renamed as Death Guard, but they were very different from the pale sons of Barbarus. They hailed from dozens of disparate ethnicities drawn from the northlands of the Emperor’s distant Throneworld, and the warriors of the XIV Legion were seasoned, hardened by battles in the gene-father’s so-called ‘Great Crusade’.

The warrior was of standard rank, armed with a powerful boltgun. He was one of several assigned as Mortarion’s honour guard, and they were superlative fighters to a man.

‘Your name?’ asked the primarch.

‘I am Brother-Legionary Alexus Xael, my lord.’ He gave a shallow bow.

Mortarion nodded. He remembered this one from recent training engagements on one of the outer worlds of the system.

Good with that gun, he recalled. With a dozen like him, Barbarus could have been freed in days, not years.

At first, Mortarion’s instinct had been to distrust these Terrans. In the wake of the Emperor’s arrival, he’d had an entire army gifted to him, with the express implication that he would step into the role of their commander and lead them in his gene-father’s wars.

But no leader could start from zero. Just as Mortarion had to learn how to use the new weapons and armour the Imperium granted him, so too he learned the tactics and strategy of how to fight with these Legiones Astartes.

He was an exceptionally quick study, and months of wargames and training had brought Mortarion to where he stood now – battle ready, straining at the leash to leave Barbarus behind and venture out into the galaxy beyond.

But more than that, Mortarion had encountered something he had not expected. He had bonded with these Dusk Raiders, in a manner that words could not articulate. In a strange way, it was as if that connection had always been within him. Lying dormant, waiting to be activated.

‘A question for you, Xael,’ he said. ‘Soon we will dock with my father’s command ship. What is the protocol?’

Xael’s brow furrowed. ‘I do not understand…’

‘I am still new to this. What will be expected of me?’

‘Ah.’ The warrior gave a nod as he caught on. ‘There is much of the Imperium that prides itself on great ceremony. This is an important occasion. I imagine there will be many formalities to be observed.’

In the depths of his hood, Mortarion’s gaunt features twisted into a scowl. ‘I have no tolerance for such things.’

Xael smiled slightly. ‘I share your dislike, my lord. But I do not have the rank to ignore those demands.’

‘I do.’ Mortarion rose from the bench and walked toward the portal in the hull.

Click here to buy Lantern’s Light.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Dave Gallagher.

Lantern’s Light © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2019. Lantern’s Light, 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: 978-1-78999-406-3

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

See Black Library on the internet at
blacklibrary.com

Find out more about Games Workshop’s world of Warhammer and the Warhammer 40,000 universe at
games-workshop.com

eBook license

This license is made between:

Games Workshop Limited t/a Black Library, Willow Road, Lenton, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, United Kingdom (“Black Library”); and

(2) the purchaser of an e-book product from Black Library website (“You/you/Your/your”)

(jointly, “the parties”)

These are the terms and conditions that apply when you purchase an e-book (“e-book”) from Black Library. The parties agree that in consideration of the fee paid by you, Black Library grants you a license to use the e-book on the following terms:

* 1. Black Library grants to you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free license to use the e-book in the following ways:

o 1.1 to store the e-book on any number of electronic devices and/or storage media (including, by way of example only, personal computers, e-book readers, mobile phones, portable hard drives, USB flash drives, CDs or DVDs) which are personally owned by you;

o 1.2 to access the e-book using an appropriate electronic device and/or through any appropriate storage media; and

* 2. For the avoidance of doubt, you are ONLY licensed to use the e-book as described in paragraph 1 above. You may NOT use or store the e-book in any other way. If you do, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license.

* 3. Further to the general restriction at paragraph 2, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license in the event that you use or store the e-book (or any part of it) in any way not expressly licensed. This includes (but is by no means limited to) the following circumstances:

o 3.1 you provide the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.2 you make the e-book available on bit-torrent sites, or are otherwise complicit in ‘seeding’ or sharing the e-book with any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.4 you attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.

* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.