Contents

Cover

The Lost and the Damned – Extract

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

When strikes midnight
Bombardment
We will stand

Bhab Bastion, 13th of Secundus

On the thirteenth day of Secundus, the bombardment of Terra began.

The enemy aimed the first shell deliberately at the centre of the Inner Palace, the Sanctum Imperialis, the Emperor’s own quarters. It screamed a song of fire as it tore apart the atmosphere over Himalazia, falling through the furious storm of anti-ship cannonades and defence laser beams coming up from the Imperial defences. The assault on the Warmaster’s fleet was so intense that the shell went almost unnoticed. Its flight was short, being cut apart by a net of las-beams as soon as it was detected.

But it was seen.

The Emperor’s Praetorian watched its brief descent, his stern features unmoved. Two others stood with him, mighty lords of the Imperium both. The Great Angel and the Warhawk saw the momentary flash also.

Three armoured giants forged in the fires of yesterday’s knowledge. They were brothers, after a fashion, born of the same science and the same inhuman genius.

The Praetorian’s name was Rogal Dorn. His armour was of gold. His hair was shocking white. His sculpted face was as severe as any patriarch from mankind’s long history. There was no room for compromise in his expression.

Sanguinius, the Angel was named. He was garbed in gold as bright as Dorn’s panoply. His armour covered all his body save his face and his snow-white wings. He was beautiful, a divine being incarnate pulled down from heaven and exiled in the soiled world of men. He observed the universe sadly.

The Warhawk wore gleaming white. His adopted people called him Jaghatai Khan, the first name given for his prowess, the latter because he was their king. He kept the name. Like his brothers he went without his helm. Below a tall topknot his face was proud, wild, always on the verge of a smile, but troubled, like the sky at summer’s end edged with autumn’s clouds. He sought out death simply for the joy of laughing at it.

‘Midnight, as the old reckoning has it. The symbolic spearcast,’ said the Khan. ‘Our brother marks his enmity for us. It is a challenge. A promise of his victory. We did this on Chogoris, when armies met. This shot is meant for the three of us.’

‘Such arrogance,’ said Sanguinius softly.

‘Horus was well gifted with confidence. It has grown wayward. He is too sure of himself.’ The Khan shrugged as if Horus’ fall had been an inevitability. His glorious armour hissed and sighed. ‘Arrogance is close kin to hubris. He will fail because of it.’

Dorn turned his gaze to the Warmaster’s armada. Not since the Principia Imperialis had mustered at the opening of the Great Crusade had such a fleet of void-ships gathered over Terra, and never before had so many come as enemies. Terra’s iron children returned to their origin with murder in their hearts, to spit hatred onto the cradle of mankind. And yet, for the moment, they held back, weathering the storm of explosives and violent energies hurled at them from the ground.

Thousands upon thousands of ships crowded every orbit, so many that their lights outcompeted the stars and sun and turned night and day into a single, ceaseless murk of red war-glow, strobed with vicious flashes. Void shields deflected the Palace’s attack, spilling unclean colours across the upper atmosphere in such amounts that they encased the planet in vile aurorae.

Bells rang from every Palace tower. Sirens wailed. Tocsins clamoured. Guns rippled out asynchronous drumbeats. The sky crackled and boomed with the discharge of mighty weaponry. The Palace defences had been firing since the moment the ships came within effective range. The fleet was so densely packed the defenders could not miss. As the brothers watched, a ship came apart, shedding debris meteors.

The enemy’s response was that single shell.

‘Why do you wait?’ Dorn said quietly. The ramparts of the Bhab Bastion were empty except for the three brothers. The question he uttered for the sake of speaking, for recently he felt himself falling too often into silence. ‘Come to us. Break yourself upon our walls.’

‘He waits no more,’ said Sanguinius. His voice, once melodious, was strained. ‘It begins.’ He lifted his hand and pointed.

The sky sparkled a billion times as every ship in the fleet spoke together. The Emperor will fall, the pattern of light seemed to say. We have come to wreak ruin.

‘Every war I have ever seen has hidden beauty,’ said the Khan. ‘But I have seen few sights quite so entrancing as this.’

‘A fleeting beauty,’ said Dorn. ‘And deadly.’

The shells hit the upper atmosphere where they drew flaming lines through the sky.

‘All things are fleeting,’ said the Khan. ‘Life is short and full of woe. One must wring every moment dry, and drink in the experience it has to offer, good or bad.’

The space above the Palace was full of the downwards arcs of munitions, and the straight lines of las-bursts stabbing upwards. The air shook with matter hurtling from the void. Booming reverberations echoed from the peaks of the Himalazian massif, resounding around the whole world, girdling it in sound even before the first shot detonated.

‘How can you see the good in this?’ Sanguinius asked the Khan. As he turned to look to the Warhawk the first shells burst over the Skye orbital plate, the last of Terra’s artificial satellites. It hung low to the horizon, near the Inner Palace, its wide arrays of grav engines labouring to keep it aloft. The munitions exploded harmlessly, their fury vented into the warp by void shields. The dome of the plate’s protective aegis shone with baleful energies.

‘Joy is an act of defiance,’ said the Khan. ‘With joy, we win, even if we lose. To have lived well is a victory all its own, for we all die. Death is unimportant to the laughing warrior. A poet makes tragedy glorious. That is why.’

The shells hit the main shields seconds after hitting Skye. The aegis was wrought with ancient knowledge jealously harboured by the priests of Mars. The voids comprising the aegis reacted, and roofed the Earth with fire. Storms of flame shot out complex tangles of discharge lightning. The Palace shuddered with the effort of buried machines as halls of generators fought to hold back the bombardment from the spires of the city. Beyond the aegis’ protection the ground bucked. Towers of nuclear fire roared skywards from every horizon. Tremors shook the world. As the first round of shells hit, the fleet’s energy cannons awoke, hurling shafts of burning light and streams of plasma down, so that the void shields danced, and the view of the ships was lost.

The Emperor’s Praetorian looked into the inferno in the sky. His eyes focused somewhere past the fleet, deep into the hidden void, as if he could see beyond the bounds of the Solar System and the material universe and out into the warp, where the fleets of Roboute Guilliman made all haste to the Throneworld. His gauntlets gripped the lip of the parapet tightly.

‘We will not fall,’ he said with utmost certainty. ‘We will stand.’

Altai Wastes, 13th of Secundus

Thousands of kilometres away, in a land where cold wind cut over bare peaks, other eyes watched the skies. From Altai, the Palace was a glow reflected from the heavens. The curve of Terra hid the Palace and the mountains it usurped, but the Emperor’s home dominated the globe. One was always certain where it was, no matter how far distant, for in an empire of a million systems, Terra was but a small place.

Horus’ fleet swam above the city shine, like sparks over distant forest fires. To the watchers on the mountainside the first shell fell obviously down the sky in a bright tear-track streak. In the long slit lens of high-powered magnoculars, it shone even brighter.

Myzmadra lowered the magnoculars from her mask lenses. The lenses and magnoculars worked together to snatch at the light and drag the image so close to her that she felt she could feel the shell’s re-entry heat. Bringing the magnoculars down ended the illusion, and she shivered with the cold, though she wore a voluminous cloak over her body glove. Puffs of air exhausted of oxygen blew away from her breathing ports in misty curls.

‘Is that the signal?’ Ashul didn’t feel the cold like her. He tolerated the high altitude better too and so wore no mask. His left eye was shut gently, the other pressed to the scope of his sniper-las, watching the shell as it came apart under the anti-munitions beams.

‘It is as good as any,’ she said. ‘We have to be quick. Altai is a long way from Southern Himalazia.’

The mountain over the valley had a perfectly squared chunk removed from it. At the bottom of this square the sun could never touch was a mining town built around a monorail halt, currently crammed to capacity with people rounded up for the final conscription.

‘There will be no more trains after this,’ said Ashul.

The glaring light cast by the town’s tall lumen pylons picked out every individual in the crowd as clearly as rocks in the desert under noonday sun. He swept his sight over them, idly calculating beam diffraction and the difficulties of distance kills.

‘You can get us in there?’ he asked.

‘Do you think I can’t?’ said Myzmadra.

Over the Palace, the bombardment began in earnest. The sky flashed, and the earth shook.

Ashul shrugged. ‘Our luck has to run out sooner or later.’ Privately, he felt their luck was exhausted when they’d been sent back to Terra. Not so long ago he made the mistake of telling Myzmadra this. ‘Our orders keep coming, but the assets dwindle. Now the end.’ He waved to the rising false dawn of the bombardment. ‘This is the last run for us. We’ll get caught, or we’ll die in the crossfire.’

‘Do you care?’ Myzmadra said.

Another cynical shrug. ‘I still believe in the Legion, if that’s what you’re asking.’

‘It wasn’t.’ Myzmadra divested herself of her kit, all of it – cloak, pouches, weapons, everything she carried. She did so methodically. Only when she stripped off her body glove did she begin to hurry. In the glare leaking from the town her naked body was cast into a relief as pronounced as the Altai Mountains: peaks of muscle, deep valleys between. Goosebumps formed all over her. Everyone has weaknesses, thought Ashul, being cold was one of hers. She was his.

‘Do you care about dying?’ she said.

He wished she hadn’t put it so baldly.

‘I do care. I thought I wouldn’t,’ admitted Ashul. ‘Death in the abstract is a friendlier fellow than death in the flesh, and he’s breathing down my neck right now.’

She kept her mask on, because anyone who could get a mask like that in the Altai wore one. They were relatively common despite their expense. From a backpack, she pulled out padded utility clothes worn by the workers, and a heavy, waist-length jacket. She shuddered noticeably as she clothed herself again. The body glove was a far more efficient form of insulation than the worker’s uniform.

‘You’ve become afraid,’ she said.

‘I’m no coward,’ said Ashul. ‘We’re all going to die, one way or another. I’m still with you. You asked, I said. I don’t want to die, but I will if I have to. I’d prefer it if it made a difference.’

‘We’ll make a difference.’

‘What are our orders, even?’

‘Free rein,’ she said. ‘Havoc. We’ll find something.’

‘Will we?’ he asked flatly.

Myzmadra gave him a look he had come to know only too well. Her face was invisible under the mask, of course, but the look was there, on her face, right now. He could tell from the tilt of her head. He could tell from the tone of her voice.

‘You do your job, Ashul.’

He got up and dusted his knees off. His rad counter gave out five slow clicks; the mountains were rife with residual radiation from one of Terra’s forgotten wars. He’d read somewhere that the region used to be quite beautiful, a land of rivers, forests and steppes. He couldn’t believe this freezing desert could be any other way than what it was today. He couldn’t even imagine it. That was always his problem, he thought, no imagination. That was why he never believed the Emperor.

‘I will,’ he said. He dumped his rifle with some regret. It was a good gun.

His other possessions – stub pistol, knife, rations and such – were common enough to pass as the authentic kit of a dirt miner.

They wrapped their belongings in plastek before placing them in a cleft in the stone and heaping rocks on top of them. They would not be coming back, and nobody would find the cache, but old habits died hard.

‘Alpha to Omega,’ he said.

‘Alpha to Omega,’ she responded.

They snuck down the mountain. The muster point was simmering with tension. The few officials present struggled to keep order. Everyone was scared. Nobody on Terra had slept well for months; hellish nightmares tormented all the world.

The crowd, heaving with irritation and fear, absorbed Ashul and Myzmadra without ever noticing they were there.

End of the line
Eternity Terminus
Through the Palace

Eternity Terminus, 13th of Secundus

Bolts rattled in the pitch-dark, startling Katsuhiro from the numb, aimless terror that had replaced sleep. The door to the cargo container swung down and out on creaking hinges, slamming hard onto rockcrete. Light that wasn’t so very bright but seemed as glaring as a plasma flash flooded the compartment. When his eyes adjusted, lumens grouped in berry bunches on iron vines were the first thing Katsuhiro saw of the Imperial Palace. Beyond the lights was a ceiling of coloured glassaic, softly backlit. Everything else was obscured by the throng crammed into the freight container. Since the very beginning of the sixteen-hour trip, there had been standing room only. His legs shook with the effort of remaining still so long. If it weren’t for the bodies rammed in beside him, Katsuhiro would have fallen.

Trying to crane his neck to see better invited a sharp spasm of cramp. His kitbag pulled at him, sending spiders of pain over his scalp and making his shoulder ache. The bag had been plucked from a pile of identical bags and slung around his neck when he boarded. There had been insufficient room for him to adjust it. He blinked and cracked his stiff spine. As if summoned by the pop of his bones, the noise outside started abruptly, and overwhelmingly.

Whistles blew. Voices bellowed.

‘Move, move, move, move, move, move!’

The passengers were slow to obey. The groans and mutters of men and women long confined turned to shouts as burly men reached into the containers and hauled individuals out at random. After hours and hours of the rattling, stifling quiet of the train, the noise was terrifying. Despite the demands of the marshals outside, the conscripts shuffled forwards in the dazed way common to large crowds. They were hemmed in by the people around them. Progress was tortuous. The light outside remained unreachable. Biting gusts of thin air blasted into the container, churning up the damp, sweaty fug. There had been nowhere to relieve themselves. Urine stink stung Katsuhiro’s eyes.

The threat of a shock maul’s buzz motivated the first row onto the platform, and the occupants of the container surged. They toppled out, some falling, trampled by those behind. With no more agency than a molecule of water, Katsuhiro drained towards the open ramp. The lights and the beautiful ceiling drew nearer and nearer, then the man in front of Katsuhiro was yanked forwards hard by the bag around his neck, and Katsuhiro went after him, falling into the Imperial Palace and the open gullet of war.

Thousands upon thousands of people were spilling from containers clamped to flatbed trucks into a monorail terminus. Katsuhiro could not see far, but the pressure of many people pushed at him from all directions. Voices shouted, wailed, screamed and begged in cacophonous profusion.

A marshal half caught Katsuhiro, and a flash of a face behind an armoured visor joined all the other fragments of sensory information that fought their way into his mind. Badges of the Adeptus Arbites surmounted with unfamiliar heraldry flashed past and Katsuhiro was shoved into the reeking flow of humanity pouring towards destruction. Bells and sirens sang from every quarter, and from far away there came a steady thudding, as insistent and dull as a thousand hearts. He was turned around in the crowd, sucked into eddies in the human river before being shoved back out into swift currents. Men and women of all kinds jostled him: scribes, old warriors, algae farmers, technicians, rich, poor, young, old. Every hue of skin and eye and hair present upon Terra was there. Every uniform and badge of occupation Katsuhiro had ever seen, and thousands more besides. His head spun with the overload. More details stabbed into his awareness, painful as darts. Decorations on the walls, a noble face captured in a marble relief. A sign proclaiming his location to be Eternity Terminus, Sub-Platform 99-8-Epsilon. The expressions of his fellows, two in particular – one blue-eyed and leering, the other brimful of fear – struck him. Hands grabbed at him. He was funnelled between a stack of boxes and a gun slapped into his hands. The crush increased as the crowd slowed unbearably. Elbows played his ribs as if they were bars on a semandron. The smell was dreadful. The noise was worse. Then he was out the other side, pushed along with gathering speed. All the people on the platform had only two things in common: the mass-produced lasguns clasped in their uncertain hands, and the kitbags slung around each of their necks, dragging them into hunches. Some struggled, now they were moving, to switch the straps to their shoulders, but there was as little space on the platform as there had been on the trains. Katsuhiro saw a man drop his gun. When the man bent to pick it up, the weight of the crowd pushed him down. Katsuhiro did not see him rise.

Katsuhiro blundered into a pillar, raising more bruises to add to those he already had. His feet snagged on something soft. He glanced down to see a dead man, blood running from his nose and ears, crushed by the herd. He recoiled, rebounded off a giant stacked with vat-grown muscle, bald, squinting and full of violence.

‘Watch it,’ the giant growled. Katsuhiro backed away apologetically, and the crowd caught him again, whirling him away, while from above the rapid, hurried heartbeats boomed on and on.

The platforms opened out and the ceiling sprang away from them, lofted upwards on giant piers of stone and plasteel, the crowd spreading across the vast concourse sheltered beneath. The panes of coloured glass lost their individual form, merging into a display that stopped the breath in Katsuhiro’s lungs. Captured in glassaic, men and women stood victorious upon a field of battle. Supplicants bowed, defeated, holding out their hands in fealty towards the figure dominating the centre of the piece.

‘The Emperor!’ Katsuhiro gasped. So lifelike was the display, so radiant the figure, that for a second the addled Katsuhiro thought the Master of Mankind was standing above them in judgement. A triple thump of the ceaseless hearts broke the spell, stuttering the lumens behind the image and cracking certain panes to shards. Colourful, razored rain fell that brought blood and screams from the crowd.

The conscripts slowed again, spread out and dawdled, as a swift river is arrested by a lake. Katsuhiro had a moment to catch his breath. The sheer size of the muster was sinking in, and it terrified him. Empty trains were pulling out, fresh ones rolling in. Hot engines and overtaxed rail levitators baked the scent of metal into his nostrils.

Grille-gates rattled somewhere off to the right. Whistles blew again. A line of marshals, or arbitrators, or whoever they were, formed across one side of the plaza. More gently this time, the crowds were directed towards a row of arches and through the opened gates. Katsuhiro passed through into the terminus’ hidden spaces, utilitarian cargo halls of new rockcrete where cranes and conveyor belts sat idle. All were bereft of the usual goods, and full instead with the chiefest currency of war, that of human bodies. Armies and armies of people shuffled within.

Issuing from a line of officers at the far side, men pushed their way deep into the crowds, grabbing people and directing them to groups that grew swiftly.

‘You, you, you, you.’ There were no pauses between their words. Gloved hands grabbed shoulders, hung coloured chits around necks and impelled the dazed populace of Terra towards the officers behind them. ‘You, you, you,’ they barked from helm speakers and external voxmitters, the voices roughed to inhumanity as they rounded up the nations of the world, broke them apart and pressed them towards their deaths. People cried as friends, lovers and families were separated. The officials did not notice nor did they care. ‘You, you, you.’

Katsuhiro’s time came soon enough. A leather gauntlet grabbed him, a second dragged a green plastek chit on a chain over his head, catching his ear painfully in the process, and shoved him on his way. A small desk greeted him. Numbly, he presented his token to the army officer behind, which earned him another shove, and so, as aimless as driftwood, Katsuhiro came to a slow, grounded stop with a hundred others all clutching green plastek and blinking fearfully.

‘What do we do?’ said a lean woman, wasted by years of short rations. Thinness was a look common to them all.

‘You be quiet,’ shouted a uniformed man with a harried face. ‘And you wait.’

The man moved on without paying them any more attention, pushing himself sideways like a blade through the recruits.

‘You there!’ he shouted. ‘You there! Stop–’ and he was gone, his commands vanishing into the chorus of voices echoing in the cargo hall.

Katsuhiro shook. Shock, lack of food, cold and the effort of standing upright for so many hours were each enough alone to upset his humours. Together, they brought him close to collapse.

A warm hand slipped around his side and pulled him close. Ordinarily Katsuhiro would have recoiled from such unexpected intimacy, but now he welcomed it.

A small, powerfully built man had him. Shorter by a few centimetres than Katsuhiro, he had to look up to address him. He was filthy, and stank of oil and stale clothes, but his smile was genuine.

‘It is cold, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Enough to knock you down if you aren’t used to it. Winter at the top of the world!’

Katsuhiro frowned at him, growing embarrassed by the embrace. Being so close to someone else bothered him. It was not the done thing in his subculture. Needing the support shamed him more.

‘Yes,’ he managed. ‘Thank you. Please, let me go. I am fine now.’

‘You sure?’ The man released him anyway. The man’s left hand grasped the straps of his kitbag and rifle, both slung neatly over his right shoulder. He held out his dirty right hand. ‘The name’s Doromek. From Baltica.’

Katsuhiro swallowed his distaste and limply shook Doromek’s hand.

‘Katsuhiro,’ he said.

‘Dragon nations, eh?’ said Doromek. ‘We’ve got a fine mix here and no mistake. Tell you what, let’s get you sorted out. You want to get that bag strap off your neck.’

As Katsuhiro struggled the bag over his head – it had somehow gained weight since it had been hung there – the man continued talking.

‘You’ll find some tablets in there. Recaff tabs, salt and glucosium energy blends. Take one of each. Chew them up, don’t just swallow them – it’ll get the spit flowing in your mouth and make it easier for your body to process them. You hear me?’

‘Is there water?’

‘Not yet,’ said the dirty little man. He looked behind him. Flustered officers were arguing with a man in the robes of an adepta alien to Katsuhiro. ‘They’re not coping very well,’ said Doromek. ‘Hurry up though, we’ll be moving out soon.’

‘Where to?’ he said.

The man snorted. ‘Where do you think? The fighting. You hear that noise?’ He pointed upwards. ‘The bombardment has begun. The traitors are here. This is the big…’ He frowned at Katsuhiro’s fumbling. ‘What are you doing to your kit? Give me that.’

Doromek grabbed his bag. Katsuhiro surrendered it. Doromek set it on the ground. Once he had the drawstring open Katsuhiro saw the contents neatly arrayed, all sealed in plastek packets. Doromek moved aside.

‘You need to learn your way around this. This one, this one and this one.’ He pointed with a strong, broad finger.

Katsuhiro ripped open the packets his new companion indicated and placed the pills in his mouth. ‘Thank you. I have no idea what–’

A hard-faced woman barged her way into their conversation.

‘You two. Shut up,’ said the woman. ‘They don’t like it if you talk. I don’t want the attention.’

‘But someone’s got to tell us what’s going on!’ Katsuhiro protested.

Another responded to this, a man even thinner than everyone else, who was cleaning his nails with a worn knife. ‘They don’t have to tell you anything, my friend. Nobody does.’

‘You’re soldiers,’ said the woman nastily. ‘There are things expected of you. Shutting up is one of them.’

‘I’m not a soldier, I’m a third-grade enumerator for the Eighty-Sixth Nihon nutrient complex,’ said Katsuhiro.

The woman shot him a grim smile. ‘You were. You’re a soldier now.’ She drew back, looking around at the swelling gaggle of people. ‘Now just shut up.’ She held a finger to her lips. Above the cut-off of the half-glove she wore, her nails were incongruously well manicured.

She scowled at him and turned her back.

‘Charming lady,’ said Katsuhiro.

‘Glad to see you’re recovering your sense of humour.’ Doromek lowered his voice. ‘But word to the wise, don’t antagonise the likes of her.’ He watched her carefully as he spoke. ‘I recognise bad news when I see it. That one’s a fighter.’

A whistle blew. The officials had apparently resolved their argument.

‘Green chits!’ The man was non-military, his voice unsuited to bellowing over a crowd’s noise, and Katsuhiro struggled to hear what he was saying. ‘Green chits follow me!’

Without waiting to see whether all in the group had heard him or not, the official turned about, and shoved his way through the throng towards more gates in the back of the cargo hall.

They were taken in their groups through a massive service corridor, emerging some minutes later via a side tunnel onto another fantastically decorated public platform. Hundreds of maglev trains awaited them, their insides welcomingly lit. The far end of the platform was open to the outside. The icy wind blasted in unimpeded. The bombardment’s racket roared over the trains. The firelight flicker of exploding bombs had taken the place of sunlight.

Men yelled themselves hoarse to no effect. Only those with voxmitters and vox-hailers had any hope of being heard, and then their commands battled one another into incomprehensibility. The moment of calm in the cargo hall seemed as if it had never happened. Katsuhiro was herded urgently onto the carriages. By the doors, menials with buckets collected chits, snatching them violently from people too dazed to understand what they were supposed to do. A single-sheet flimsy was thrust into Katsuhiro’s hand, and he was shoved hard from behind into the carriage.

‘Move down! Move down!’ A voice crackled over the train’s vox-speakers.

Katsuhiro stumbled his way along the aisle. The train was luxuriously appointed, each set of seats half screened from the rest by high backs and panels of frosted plastek imprinted with symbols of Unity. But there were far too many people for the seats to accommodate. Soon the aisle was full. Uniformed marshals began to physically ram people onto the train. The people behind Katsuhiro shoved at him in turn, and he was jammed into one of the nests of seats. Already, eight people sat in a space for four. If anything, it was more crowded than the monorail cargo box that had brought him from the east.

He had been separated from the few people he had spoken to, but he recognised most of the faces as being from the green chit group. They scowled as he tripped on their feet. He was forced closer to the window by the pressure of the crowd. Just when he thought the air would be forced from his lungs and he would suffocate, the doors slid shut and the train pulled out. Held aloft on a counter-gravitic field, the train accelerated quickly, blurring the innumerable people outside into a single, heaving mass.

Light flashed, and the train sped outside. The great mountain of a space port dominated his view for a fragment of a second, huge, flat-topped and covered in lights. The maglev whipped past it before he got a proper look, affording him a view of a city he had never seen for himself, but every man, woman and child on Terra knew. The artful spires and bridges he expected from the holocasts had gone, replaced by buildings more fit for war. Not all had changed. He glimpsed the soaring Tower of Hegemon and the great dome of the Senatorum Imperialis, where giant machines stood guard. Fire, Titans, glory and doom – all gone in a heartbeat as the train plunged into the side of a hab-spire, and thereafter hurried past rockcrete pilings into roots of the earth that showed him nothing but the dark.

Click here to buy The Lost and the Damned.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2019.
This eBook edition published in 2019 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.

The Lost and the Damned © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2019. The Lost and the Damned, The Siege of Terra, 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: 978-1-78999-469-8

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.