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Master of Rites – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Chapter 1

A kindling roar consumed him, like the bones-deep rumble of a feral growl in the chest of a hunting beast.

It was a sound that Ferren had come to know well through many repetitions, and with familiarity came solace. It was the sound of a planet’s atmosphere giving way to a rushing mass of ceramite and plasteel, of a cushion of flames scouring an armoured hull, as if the world itself were attempting to deny the Overlord gunship’s passage to the ground below.

But there was nothing that could stop the Ultramarines now.

‘Thirty seconds, Brother-Captain Areios,’ a voice said in Ferren’s helm, cutting past the buffeting roar outside the hold.

‘Very good.’

The interior of the Overlord’s hold was bathed in the muted red glow of the emergency lumens, casting the shadows between his men in fathomless blacks. They took each shudder and lurching jolt without comment or complaint, simply staring directly ahead through ruby helm lenses.

Like Ferren, they had experienced all of this before. They knew what to expect, and were prepared for the fighting to come.

Hammering thuds cut through the roar of air outside, as if giant hands were knocking against the Overlord’s hull in an attempt to swat it from the sky. None penetrated the thick armour, though the muffled sounds of the heavy bolter turrets told Ferren that the point defences were keeping the worst of the incoming fire from the gunship.

‘We are taking small-arms fire,’ the pilot voxed. ‘Some missiles, but we are keeping them at bay.’

‘Open the front hatch,’ Ferren said.

He slapped the restraint harness’ release with an armoured hand and stood, just as a more forceful impact shook the Overlord. Loose restraints rattled and swung as the gunship corrected its course, but Ferren’s footing was sure. He grasped an overhead rail and worked his way down the hold to the forward embarkation ramp.

The gale-force winds that whistled through the opening hatch would have thrown a baseline human back into the depths of the craft, but Ferren Areios was no human. He was a Space Marine, armoured in reinforced Gravis plate, and to him it felt like nothing more than a passing breeze as he took in the sight of the battlefield before him.

The night-dark plains of Osteraand stretched out ahead of the Overlord, hemmed in by the fortress-city of Tancherion to his left and scarred by a network of rough trench lines and dugouts below. Guns blazed from the city’s walls and from the trenches, trading las-beams and solid rounds so that the air was thick with deadly projectiles that pitted rockcrete and churned the earth. Tancherion’s walls had been left ragged and sagging from their year-long siege, but they still held for the Imperium despite the artillery bombardment that tore at them with explosive might.

The cloudless sky was filled with stars and flickering lights that spoke of the void war still raging in low orbit, whilst flaming comets slashed down towards the plains in defiance of the anti-aircraft fire thrown up by the city’s besiegers. Drop pods fell upon the battlefield like the destructive ire of a vengeful god, slamming into the earthworks with enough force to collapse dugouts and trenches for dozens of yards in every direction. Ultramarines emerged from the craters before the survivors had a chance to respond, most still half-buried beneath falling earth and rivers of mud.

Ferren absorbed all of that information in less time than it took for him to blink.

‘Sixth Company, hear me!’ he cried as he opened the company-wide vox-channel. ‘You have your objectives and your orders. Together we will be the blow that breaks the heretics’ grip on this world, and see Osteraand’s skies cleansed of their foul touch in the name of Lord Calgar. Courage and honour!’

The roar of the wind outside was briefly drowned out by a score of voices shouting the battle cry back over the vox, their enhancements lending the sound a guttural resonance that fired the blood of all who heard it.

Figures grew visible beneath him as he hefted his thunder hammer, Honour, and called forth his squads from the depths of the Overlord.

‘Brother-captain, this ground is too unstable for us to land,’ the pilot voxed as humans in ragged clothes began to fire their ramshackle weapons up at the gunship passing thirty feet above their heads.

‘Then we deploy now,’ Ferren replied.

With a battle cry on his lips, he leaped from the open hatch.

Mud and churned earth rushed up to meet him. Bullets and las-beams scoured the air as he fell, Honour raised above his head as he hurtled towards the earth with adrenaline surging through both of his hearts. A terrified face looked up to see the Ultramarine falling from the sky above him, and the heretic turned to run.

Ferren struck the earth with all the might his augmented musculature and power armour could lend him. Thunder rolled out from the point his hammer fell, breaking the bones of those nearest and deafening still more as a wave of force tore down trench supports and collapsed dugouts. Lightning played across the impact crater as bodies flew through the air, carried by the concussive energy of the blast.

Ferren was momentarily deafened as the audio-dampers engaged in his helm, but sound quickly returned as he straightened to take in the devastation he had wrought.

Broken and twisted bodies lay in tangled piles of shattered limbs before him. Those who had tried to run had been caught by the blast regardless, and the few survivors mewled in the dirt, clutching at bleeding ears as Ferren raised his boltstorm gauntlet and put each of them down with a single shot. Timeon, Ferren’s slaved servo-skull, emerged from the cover provided by his pauldrons and scanned the ground ahead with a burr of tuning auspex fields, feeding the additional information into Ferren’s helm display.

Heavy impacts behind him announced the arrival of Sergeant Soultos and his squad of Aggressors, followed by two squads of Intercessors.

‘I would say you have secured the landing zone, brother-captain,’ Soultos said.

‘There is still work to be done,’ Ferren replied, pointing with his thunder hammer to the entrance of the nearest trench. Heretics were running towards the impact, their weapons raised, screaming battle cries that were laced with fear.

‘To battle, then,’ Soultos said and raised his boltstorm gauntlets.

Osteraand had not always been a fortress world. It had been an important transport hub before the Great Rift split the sky, situated as it was at the terminus of several shipping routes, but it had been forced to change like so many of the other worlds of Ultramar close to the Rift.

Gone were the orbital shipyards and low-orbit freight platforms, to be replaced with weapon platforms and deep-space warning systems. Its sprawling cities had been transformed into fortresses hemmed in by massive walls encrusted with barracks and gun emplacements, all manned by a populace whose only duty was the defence of their world.

Under the light of the Great Rift the world had found a way to survive, until the arrival of the Plaguechildren.

Hundreds of thousands of heretic cultists had invaded aboard a flotilla of ragged ships, emerging from behind the calming warp storms that fringed the Great Rift. They had fallen upon Osteraand like a swarm of insects, overwhelming the orbital defences and laying siege to the great fortress-cities that dotted the planet’s surface.

It had taken the Imperium a full solar year to respond, but it did so in force.

The combined might of the Ultramarines Fifth and Sixth companies had been dispatched alongside a sizeable Astra Militarum contingent to break the siege of Osteraand and to secure Ultramar’s borders. As captain of the Sixth Company, Ferren had been tasked with breaking the siege of Tancherion before the heretics could gain a foothold within the city, a mission that he carried out with brutal efficiency.

Honour smashed aside a heretic with bone-shattering force, throwing the man down to the mud in a pile of broken limbs and tangled rags. Even deactivated the thunder hammer was a powerful weapon, and more than enough to kill baseline humans in a single Astartes-powered blow. He put a second man down with a forehand swing, crushing the human’s chest cavity with a muffled crump of breaking ribs, before slamming a third’s head into the trench wall with his free hand.

The heretic slid down the cratered iron plate, leaving a streak of blood and pulverised brain matter behind him.

‘Lieutenant Cicero, what is your position?’ he voxed as he raised his boltstorm gauntlet to spray suppressing fire down a connecting trench. Robed bodies exploded in bursts of wet meat, splattering the walls of the trench as their comrades ran for cover.

‘Assaulting the artillery positions as we speak, captain. Estimate mission completion in less than three minutes,’ Cicero replied a moment later. Muted gunfire could be heard in the background, though if his lieutenant was concerned, it didn’t come across in his voice.

‘Acknowledged. Move to rally-point alpha and begin clearing the trenches once your objectives are accomplished,’ Ferren said. ‘Lieutenant Golan, situation update.’

‘Sweeping north through the trenches towards the anti-air emplacements. Resistance is persistent but ineffective,’ Golan said.

‘Acknowledged. Vox if additional support is required, Areios out.’

Ferren called up a cartolith overlay on his helm’s lenses as he ran down thin trenches lined with the bodies of fallen Plaguechildren. The siege of Tancherion was just one of many they would have to break if the fortress world was to be liberated, but such a victory was days away. Ferren’s mission was to destroy the heretic leadership here; all other concerns would have to wait, and so he fought on towards his objective.

The Plaguechildren had no discernible uniform, just variations of the same mouldering folds of cloth about their bodies and tight wrappings on their wrists and ankles. Even in the stuttering flashes of light from bolter and autogun fire, Ferren could make out the weeping sores on their pale faces and the scabrous growths that obscured their features.

He killed them all without hesitation or pity.

‘Their flesh is almost as rotten as their trenches,’ Soultos said, pulling his power fist through the thin iron plating that held back the sodden Osteraand mud. He had punched straight through the torso of one of the Plaguechildren and into the trench wall beyond with equal ease, and the heretic’s corpse slumped beneath a flood of loose earth and muck.

‘Followers of the Plague God,’ Ferren replied. Hard rounds spanged off his armour as he turned down a communications trench, the flattened bullets tinkling as they fell to the duckboards behind him.

His boltstorm gauntlet thundered his response down the length of the trench, slaughtering the heretics even as they tried to escape the power-armoured giant running towards them.

The darkness was hindering the heretics’ attempts to mount a cohesive defence against the attackers in their lines, even as they tried to understand the scale of what they were facing. Men would come running around switchback corners as they tried to regroup, only to find themselves face to face with Ferren’s men or even Ferren himself. He dispatched all who came, and continued to monitor the Plaguechildren’s frantic transmissions across unencrypted vox-channels, allowing himself to feel some measure of grim satisfaction at the fear and panic in their voices. It was dawning on the heretics that this was no desperate attack from within the city; something far more terrible had come for them, and it was in their midst.

An indicator rune flashed over the entrance to a dugout at the end of the trench, its pitted plascrete walls and lintel contrasting against the rusted iron plating to either side. Ferren opened a vox-link as he ran towards it, Honour flashing out to collapse the entrance of another dugout as a robed human emerged into the trench. It fell apart with a whump of falling earth, cutting off the cry of the heretic as he was buried alongside his comrades.

‘Shipmaster Bellios, I have arrived at the entrance to the command bunker,’ Ferren said into his vox, its signal boosted by augmetics enhancements built into Timeon’s housing. ‘What is your situation?’

‘Progressing well, brother-captain,’ Bellios replied. Ferren could not help but look skyward as he slowed, through the tracer fire still flashing overhead and to the void beyond. Somewhere in the inky darkness, Bellios commanded the strike cruiser Emperor’s Mercy as it cut a bloody swathe through the remains of the Plaguechildren’s flotilla alongside the Imperial fleet. ‘The enemy are dogged in their resistance, but they cannot stand against us. Captain Phelian has begun landing his forces within Tancherion, and Lord General Breil has engaged the enemy to your north.’

‘Acknowledged. I will contact you again when I return to the surface.’

‘Courage and honour, brother-captain.’

Ferren cut the link and waved his squads forward, through the plascrete portal and into darkness.

The air within the dugout was stale and thick with the smells of unwashed flesh. Ferren’s helm engaged its filters to remove any toxins or bacteria, but could do little to hold back the stench of the Plaguechildren. Each breath brought the taste of feverish sweat and rancid meat on his tongue, though the source of the stink eluded him as he descended the earthen slope into the dugout’s depths.

The sound of the surface battle shrank away as they went lower, dimming from a distant clamour to the occasional thump-thump of artillery that was felt through the earth rather than heard.

Soon, impenetrable voids of pure darkness yawned open to either side of the slope, and Ferren gave his support squads orders to clear the galleries as he pressed on with Soultos. Short vox-clicks signalled their acknowledgement, and the sound of muted bolter fire echoed through the bunker’s tunnels.

‘This is poorly designed,’ Soultos said as the slope continued ever downward. ‘No traps or defensible points – where are the emplacements?’

‘They were not expecting to be attacked,’ Ferren replied as a dim glow grew at the very end of the tunnel. ‘This was not designed to be defensible, simply to weather the fire from the walls.’

The light grew as Ferren reached the foot of the slope, and revealed itself to be the thready glow cast by a string of lumen bulbs pinned to the low ceiling. Dust and dirt trickled from fissures in the hard-packed earth of the roof as the Ultramarines followed the corridor away from the slope and deeper into the bunker. Ferren mag-locked Honour to his back; the forces the weapon could unleash were far too powerful to be used so deep underground, as likely to collapse the bunker as to slay a foe.

Another corner brought the sound of panicked voices, muted by the soft walls but still audible to the vox-thieves built into Ferren’s armour.

‘They’re saying it’s Space Marines!’ one voice slurred.

‘It’s an attack from the city, that is all. They are desperate and close to breaking, so they send the last of their strength against us,’ a deeper voice said before letting out a hacking cough. The sound of thick mucus slapping against dirt followed, then a tired sigh.

‘We should pull back from the walls at least, clear the trenches before–’ a third voice said, sibilant and fearful. Ferren recognised it from the vox on the surface.

‘Before what?’ the deep voice interrupted. ‘The Mad King sent us to take this world, not to run away at the first real sign of resistance!’

Ferren rounded the corner with his boltstorm gauntlet raised. Three robed figures stood about a low table bearing a rudimentary map made from tattooed leather. One was large and broad, with a heavy gut and a pendulous goitre over his pockmarked throat. The second was stooped and slight, a withered arm held tight against his chest, whilst the third had a long fleshy tongue protruding between swollen lips. A row of vox-units hummed against the wall behind them, their receivers blaring static as they dangled on coiled wires.

The three men looked up from their argument to Ferren, their eyes widening in terror to reveal yellowed sclerae within shadowed sockets.

Ferren shot the stooped man and the one with the long tongue, the sound painfully loud in the tight confines of the bunker, then sprayed bolts into the vox-units. The heretics died with muted thumps, the horror written on their features turning to agony as the bolter shells tore them apart from within and spread their innards across the floor, table and ceiling. Sparks flew from the vox-units as they exploded, showering the remaining heretic with shards of white-hot metal.

He cowered under the onslaught, raising tumour-lumpen arms to cover his head as if they were any defence against the advancing Ultramarine.

Ferren slapped the table aside with contemptuous ease and grabbed the man by the front of his robes. His bloodshot eyes looked up without any trace of defiance; all Ferren could see was the man’s fear as he was brought face to helm with a Space Marine.

‘You are in command here?’ Ferren asked, his voice amplified by his armour’s vox-speakers.

The heretic nodded, the jerking action setting the goitre at his throat to bobbing as his eyes flickered from Ferren’s helm to Timeon’s leering countenance at his shoulder.

‘Deliver him to the Inquisition,’ Ferren said, pushing the heretic towards Soultos. ‘I will lay charges then meet you at the surface. We still have a war to win.’

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2025.
This eBook edition published in 2025 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 Igor Sid.

Master of Rites © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2025. Master of Rites, 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: 978-1-83609-288-9

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.

For Ava, my favourite niece (and the only one at time of writing).

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