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The Relentless Dead – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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I

The prisoner was held deep underground.

The witch hunter tightened his satin-lined cloak as he made the winding descent down worn stone steps into the foetid cold.

His duties had taken him to many such dungeons, on many backwater worlds, but something about this one was different. He felt the weight of the place’s damp black soil pressing on his chest – the weight of its dry, dead bones.

The jailer, a hunchbacked servitor whose parchment skin had surely never been exposed to daylight, unlocked a cell for him. The light of sconce-mounted torches in the passageway spilled over the crumpled form therein.

Though manacled, bloodied, soaked in her own filth, the prisoner glared up at her visitors defiantly. ‘At last,’ she huffed, ‘somebody in authority! Do you know who I am, and how long I have been kept waiting here?’

The witch hunter’s most thuggish acolyte sprang forward, stopping her mouth with a meaty fist. ‘Speak only when Inquisitor Idelax demands an answer from you!’

The prisoner spluttered indignantly, but heeded the caution.

She was wrapped in a lady’s robes, but they were torn, dirty, stripped of their fine accoutrements. She had lived a pampered life, so the witch hunter was given to believe, and thus he had expected to find her spirit broken. Ideally, his acolytes would have had a few days with her, to wrench a confession from her throat, but time was of the essence, so he chose another tack.

Inquisitor Idelax crouched before the chained dignitary. Defiance melted into a desperate appeal as her red-rimmed eyes found his. Blood trickled from her swollen lip. The witch hunter knew his smile looked like a trap, but also that his prey had no way to avoid it. With honey in his voice, he laid the bait.

‘My lady, I hear there has been a terrible misunderstanding.’

Lady Emelian recalled her first impressions of Oleris III.

She had wrinkled her nose and complained as her shoe squelched into its mud, but a wet foot had become her least concern.

An overcast sky had cast a grey pall over churned-up fields and simple tracks. Though a serf had hefted a parasol over her head, still a mean wind had whipped her powdered face with shards of rain. Modest headstones had stretched beyond her sight. This entire world had felt oppressive to her.

Though she had travelled here in search of life, now she had felt keenly that this was a place of death – perhaps, she thought fleetingly, her own.

Her titled husband had expressed the same foreboding. Had he only held his tongue, she might have mustered the strength to turn back. Instead, she had despised him for his weakness and marched on to their damnation.

‘Tell me what brought you to this world,’ the inquisitor demanded.

‘To pay our respects to the sainted Josefina, why else?’

He showed no reaction to the lie. The lady had no doubt that he had discerned it, all the same. Her guilty silence hung between them until she felt compelled to add, ‘And in hope that her spirit might bestow a great blessing upon us.’

Inquisitor Idelax nodded. That was more like it.

‘You may be aware that my… our son is interred here.’

‘I am aware that you went to great lengths to arrange it.’

‘The invitation was extended,’ said the lady. ‘We were perfectly entitled to accept it.’

‘Of that, I am also aware,’ he said.

‘My son was a soldier of the Emperor, proud and true. A captain in His Astra Militarum, decorated for his valour. Torn from us by some filthy xenos bomb on a foreign battlefield.’ Her voice trembled with her deepest grief exhumed. ‘They couldn’t even piece him back together.’

A thousand Guardsmen had perished that fateful day, too brave and loyal to withdraw from a hopeless battle. Her son had ordered them to stand their ground. At punitive expense, Lady Emelian had chartered a necrofreighter to gather their remains and ship them to a better resting place. She refused to abandon him to rot where he had fallen, in eternal anonymity, not the merest scrap of him.

‘You came to Oleris for him,’ said Idelax.

‘Yes, we did, only for him. I wished to see the monument we had commissioned for him. We wished to be close to him, pray for him.’

Idelax’s eyes flashed as he leaned closer to her. ‘And?’

Naivety was not one of the lady’s flaws. Despite his handsome face and gracious manner, she knew whom she faced. She knew that, no matter where they looked, few witch hunters ever failed to find a witch. But this was her chance, her first and last, to plead her case, her one slim hope if she could make him understand.

She met his gaze unflinchingly. ‘And speak with him,’ she said.

She remembered:

Everything about the monument was wrong. The sculptor had entirely failed to capture her son’s likeness, despite the holo-pict she had provided. His stance lacked nobility. He was cast in too dark a shade of bronze, and his eternal flame burnt neither highly nor brightly enough.

Enumerating these defects at length, she tuned out the whispering behind her. She assumed it was only a serf requesting her attention. The lord and lady had brought just a skeleton staff, wishing this to be a discreet visit, and they had been instructed to stand back for this intensely private moment.

The voice intruded again, and the lady whipped around with a piece of her mind ready, but nobody was behind her.

She turned to her husband. ‘Did you hear that?’ she demanded, but as usual he only looked bewildered. She rounded on their guide, a plain young girl with plain, straight hair in plain hessian robes. ‘I heard a voice. Tell me you heard it too.’

‘It may have been meant for your ears alone, milady.’

‘Then… it is indeed true, what they say?’

Lady Emelian swallowed dryly. Her husband tried to speak, but impatiently she shushed him. She listened as hard as she could, wishing her heart would quiet its pounding, and at first there was only the mournful wailing of the wind, but then she fancied she heard soft words carried upon it.

‘Father, mother, I am here, can you not hear me?’

She threw a hand up to her mouth, stifling a racking sob. She looked at her husband again and he returned her glare with haunted eyes, his gaunt face pale. This time, there was no doubt about it.

This time, the lady knew the voice was real.

‘Sorcery!’ hissed Idelax.

‘No! I mean, we did not know,’ the prisoner protested.

‘Is that not what brought you to Oleris III? The true reason? Is that not why you had your son’s remains shipped here?’

‘We only wished to speak with him again. Just one more time. I had to know that he… that he was at peace.’

‘Your son fought for the Emperor, died for Him, died with honour.’

The lady agreed vehemently: ‘Yes. With honour.’

‘But you would not accept his noble fate.’

‘I heard… Certain rumours reached our ears. It is said that, on Oleris, the veil between life and death is stretched thin and can be parted, but I swear not by such means as you suggest.’

‘How else?’ the witch hunter accused her. ‘How else but by consort with the vilest, darkest powers could you hope to raise the dead?’

‘By the grace of a saint!’ the lady wailed.

Idelax straightened and paced the cramped confines of the cell, clasping his hands behind his back. He let the prisoner believe that she had given him pause for thought, judging this to be the most expedient way to keep her talking.

She continued, ‘On my world, on Vostroya, it is custom that the firstborn child of every family is given into service.’

‘More than custom,’ Idelax snapped. ‘It is a duty shouldered gladly by your people in atonement for your sins.’

The lady inclined her head in meek acknowledgement. ‘But, inquisitor, what of we who…? What if, through no fault of our own, one child is all we have and there is no other to further our bloodlines, our titles and our lands?’

‘You do your duty as well and accept that it has been thus ordained.’

‘Of course,’ the prisoner agreed, ‘of course we do. Of course we did. But when that child, our only child, is sent to fight and…’ She choked back the rest of the sentence, taking several shuddering breaths before speaking again.

‘Is it really so wrong of us to pray that our duty, our loyalty, might be recognised, at least? That the Emperor might bestow a fraction of His great mercy upon us? Tell me, inquisitor, is it such a sin for the likes of us to have faith in a miracle?’

The truth was, in her heart, she had known everything was wrong.

She had felt it, perching on a dirty wooden pew inside a dirty wooden hut that, though its walls were chalked with holy symbols and though candles burnt atop a simple altar, resembled no chapel she had seen before.

She had found it incongruous for such a ritual as this to be staged in such grubby surroundings – and by such grubby congregants and clergy members, gravediggers with stooped backs and filth beneath their fingernails.

She had silenced her husband as he tried to voice similar concerns. They had reached out formally to Oleris’ priests, she reminded him, impressing the force of their many titles upon them, but had not been so much as acknowledged. What choice had they been left with?

As wrong as their being here felt, it could only be right. It had to be. So, Lady Emelian had bitten her tongue and borne her great discomfort.

She remembered:

Red fingers of the setting sun probing between the wall slats, shadows lengthening beyond their reach. The heady scent of incense, almost blotting out the odour of their hosts. The lady joined in prayers to the Master of Mankind, feeling that this made it better, the words forming a shield of faith around her. Faith that deserved its reward.

Her heart sang as she heard the voice again. It was stronger and clearer than it had been outside. The speaker could almost have been seated in the pew behind her, but this time she knew better than to look.

‘Father. Mother.’

‘We hear you, son.’ The words emerged from her throat as a deathly whisper.

‘Thank the Emperor. I have been so lost, so alone.’

‘We are here now. You have no need to fear.’

‘So cold. Why? Why am I so cold? Where am I? What happened to me?’

The music in Lady Emelian’s heart died.

She searched the other faces in the chapel for inspiration, but her husband’s face was frozen, his damp hand leaching strength from hers, while the others’ eyes were closed, their lips still forming incantations. ‘You did your duty, son. You made us proud, and you can rest now.’

‘I cannot,’ the disembodied voice insisted. His voice, exactly as she remembered it, perhaps a little younger than when last she had heard it. ‘Mother, there are things here. Screaming, clawing, biting things.’

‘Then you must do as we always instructed you. Fight. Fight for Him as you did in life. Fight your way to His side. He will protect you.’

‘There are so many of them, too many, tearing, gnawing at my soul. I am so weak, so tired of fighting and so very, very cold. I need you, mother!’

A savage gust of wind rattled the wooden walls and snuffed out the altar candles. The lady heard shocked gasps around her – and emitted a small squeal herself – as the hut was plunged into darkness.

She called out to her son, but he was gone. Instead she heard a female voice. The voice of the plain young congregant, she thought.

‘The veil has once more closed around him. For now, he is beyond our reach.’

‘No. You must get him back. I insist you bring him back. I will pay any price. Anything you ask.’ A whimper of protest from her husband raised her ire. ‘You heard him. You heard our son. He is in torment.’ She turned back to where she thought the girl was. ‘Please. There must be something you can do, a way to save him?’

She heard a striking match. A candle was relit and, in its glow, a wizened figure came to sit beside her. The woman who had led the ceremony. The others had deferred to her as if she held some rank, although no one had said as much and her vestments were as plain as theirs. Close up to her now, the lady saw that she was younger than she had looked, her face prematurely lined and worn. Wisps of white hair escaped from her hood – or were they blonde?

The wizened woman laid a gnarled hand on the lady’s knee.

‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘One thing alone.’

The prisoner sighed. ‘I see it now. I see it clearly, though I couldn’t in the moment. I see how we were drawn into…’ She met the witch hunter’s steely glare and couldn’t quite make the confession. ‘But surely you too understand why we did what we did?’

Idelax growled, ‘I see that you were weak of faith.’

‘No! Our faith was strong, as it has always been, even when most sorely tested. But must faith not also necessarily be blind? Is that not how our priests instruct us? We were blind, my husband and I, and our blind faith was used against us.’

He was tiring of her self-justifications. ‘Faith that drove you to take a life!’

‘Not take. Our intention was to exchange one life for another. A worthless soul for the soul of a nobleman, a soldier. A far better servant for the Emperor.’

The witch hunter’s voice was like a breaking storm. ‘Your faith, I believe, was only in yourself and your own selfish desires!’

His prisoner burst into tears as she let go of her final shred of hope. He had seen it happen many times before.

‘We wanted… I needed to believe,’ she sobbed. ‘That was my only crime. I only acted out of love – you must believe me, only ever out of love. Have mercy upon me!’

She remembered:

Another fitful night in a stifling cabin aboard a merchant ship. Whenever the lady closed her eyes, behind them she saw her son’s face, frozen at an age before his moustache had grown out. He was screaming.

Trudging through the planet’s mud again as twilight glimmered. Asking why the ritual must be conducted in the dark, she was told the veil was thinnest then. Back to the ramshackle hut that it helped her to think of as the chapel. They had left most of their staff in orbit, bringing only one serf with them today. She had picked out the strongest, healthiest of them. The young-old woman, whom she chose to call the pastor, examined him as a butcher might a slab of meat. ‘Yes, he will do nicely,’ she said.

The lord and lady took their seats.

The lady had not prepared herself for her serf’s sudden panic. She avoided his beseeching eyes as he was hauled up onto the altar. He started to struggle against his robed captors, too late, as ropes secured his wrists and ankles. ‘Milord, milady,’ he howled, ‘haven’t I been loyal to you?’

Squeezing her husband’s hand tightly, she kept him in his pew.

The ceremony itself was interminable, as the pastor led her followers in endless murmured chants around the altar. Unable to make out the words, instead the lady bowed her head and mouthed her own silent prayers. At some point, it occurred to her that she had been praying for forgiveness.

The realisation made her blood run cold. It flushed the haze of sweet incense from her mind, and with it the lies she had been telling herself.

Lady Emelian leapt to her feet, startling her husband, and drew breath to speak up in protest at this terrible transgression. The words never came, because at that second the chanting swelled to its triumphant climax and the pastor plunged a black-bladed dagger into the bound serf’s heart.

He screamed.

The altar candles flared fiercely and died.

Despite this, somehow there was light to see as the congregants dropped to their knees in awe. Only the lady, and now her husband beside her, were left standing as the body on the altar stirred. Ropes fell away from it, unwinding into slender threads, as it swung its legs over the side and levered itself to its feet.

For a moment there it stood, swaying slightly as if testing its balance, and the lady realised that the dim light was coming from its green-glowing eyes.

Eyes that now turned upon her.

The serf’s body, or whatever controlled it, took a jerky step towards her. Its torn tunic exposed the glistening wound in its chest, from which miraculously no blood flowed. Lifting an arm like a dead weight, it reached for her. A guttural snarl welled from its throat, resolving itself into a slurred word: ‘Mother!’

The lady couldn’t help herself. Despite everything her heart and mind were screaming at her, in a tremulous voice she spoke her dead son’s name. ‘Eoric? Is that… you?’

‘You… did it… saved me from that… torture.’

‘No, don’t come any closer!’

He halted as she bade him, as she warded him off with raised hands, but she saw the same look of confusion and fear in the serf’s face that had been there before. That same look of betrayal.

‘How do I know it’s really you?’ she asked.

His speech was already clearer. ‘I knew you’d find me, mother. It was my faith in you that strengthened me in that thrice-damned place. I knew you would come for me and take me home. May we go home now, mother?’

She said, ‘A ship is waiting for us.’

‘I long to see my home again. I miss the salty taste of ohx and the gritty smell of industry. I long to reunite with cousin Laena as I promised her we would when we parted. She must have ascended to the ruling council now?’

Tears stung the lady’s eyes. She couldn’t speak. All she could do was open her heart and her arms to the unkempt, shambling figure before her, the only one who had ever truly found a place in either. Drawing together, they embraced, and she clung to the still-cold body that wasn’t her son’s body, but it didn’t matter now. Nothing in this world or any other mattered but this, but the two of them together.

She said, ‘I’ll never let you leave my sight again. If they come for you again, then I shall fight them to my final breath.’

‘Take me home, please,’ he begged her.

‘I will,’ the lady swore. ‘I will, my son.’

She turned to her husband.

She saw the knife in his hand.

She couldn’t stop him. Never had she seen such resolve in Lord Emelian before. She howled as he plunged his blade into her son’s fresh wound. Almost gleefully, he worked it to draw out the blood that had been stopped there. Perhaps he ought to have paused to ask himself, if one knife blow had not severed this body’s life thread, then why would another?

His victim groaned in pain but didn’t fold. He lashed out with his knuckles to the noble lord’s face, sending him sprawling. One hand clamped to his gushing chest, he raised the other. His eyes flashed, and that same green energy coalesced around his outstretched fingertip. Crackling, it flared to strike the prone and trembling lord.

The serf’s face had contorted into a mask of purest malice, and when the thing inside him spoke again, its rasping voice pained the lady’s ears. Her son’s tongue could certainly never have shaped the profanities it spewed.

Her husband writhed and whimpered in green fire. She smelled his burning hair and skin. Turning to the altar, she saw no salvation there. The congregants cowered around it, most gaping at the scene in abject horror. Contrary to her later assertions, she believed that they had genuinely not expected this.

Then, locking gazes with the young-old pastor, she saw satisfaction in her eyes and a smile tugging at her dry, cracked lips.

She did the only thing she could possibly have done. She turned and bolted.

The lady knocked her shin on the corner of a pew. Her impractical shoes, already soiled and split, turned under her and she crashed into the hut’s door, splintering its wood. A bright green flash dazzled her, and she felt her lacquered hair bristling. Only her fall, she realised, had saved her from a blast that had passed above her head.

She couldn’t think about that now, else she would lose her mind. Blindly, she fumbled for a latch and found it. She tumbled through the door into the cold, wet night. As she scrambled to her feet in the mud, the lady’s head turned and she caught a last glimpse of the thing behind her, in the chapel. The daemon – how could she have mistaken it for anything but? Its green-burning eyes were fixed upon her, casting the face of her old serf into shadow.

Its fingertip was poised to strike again, but then, with a grunt, it doubled over, clutching at its wound. The lady felt an unfamiliar sensation. She was grateful for her husband’s actions. Her husband, whose blackened, twisted body lay on the chapel floor. She couldn’t think about that either.

In its slow, thick, rasping voice, the daemon-thing commanded, ‘Stop her!’

So, the lady ran.

‘Evidently, you made your escape,’ said Inquisitor Idelax.

‘I know not how, if not by the Emperor’s grace.’

He scowled at her presumption. ‘I find that doubtful, unless He wished only that I find you. Did the entity in your servant’s body pursue you?’

The prisoner shook her head. ‘No. I mean, not that I saw, but perhaps I… I did not wish to see, so I…’

‘Did not look back,’ he concluded.

‘In the dark, I knew not to where I ran, nor for how long before my straining heart and lungs arrested me. I only ran.’

‘Leaving your husband to his fate.’

She left the accusation unaddressed. ‘I came upon another hut, a shed. I broke it open with a rock and, though it shames me to admit it, sheltered in there beneath a pile of rags. Throughout the night, I heard footsteps and voices without, and presumed the members of that blasphemous church to be seeking me out.’

‘And once daylight returned?’

‘I fortified myself with prayer and set off to find a priest, anybody in authority, to tell of the horrors I had witnessed.’

That was another lie. The prisoner had found her way to a provincial landing pad where, bedraggled and shaken as she was, she had drawn a constable’s attention while attempting to contact her orbiting vessel. Her incoherent answers to his questions had only inflamed his suspicions, and so it was he who had alerted the governing priesthood.

So, the lady had found herself shackled in the vaults beneath their tower. So the Inquisition had received an astropathic message, and so Idelax had been despatched to this backwater world. He didn’t tell her that he knew all this. He had just one thing left to say to her.

‘As soon as it can be arranged, you will be taken from this cell and executed by beheading.’

He had made such pronouncements to many beaten wretches like her, and their reactions varied wildly. In Lady Emelian’s case, her shoulders sagged in resignation. She seemed almost relieved to know her fate. It would not last.

‘I suggest you use your short remaining time to reflect upon your sins and pray for absolution.’ The witch hunter turned on his heel and strode out of the cell, his acolytes straggling behind him. The servitor jailer slammed the door shut, turned its heavy locks and drew its bolts.

The prisoner had told Idelax little he had not already deduced. Oleris III had been thought well rid of its witches, but evidently some had escaped the brutal purges and had since grown in power. To have drawn an entity from the immaterium, given it corporeal form!

He shuddered at the thought and cursed the fools who – albeit in ignorance – had abetted this ultimate transgression. Nor had they been the first, for how else had the rumours spread that had lured these fools here? Their weakness had endangered every soul upon this planet and perhaps across the galaxy itself.

Halfway up the winding steps, from far below Idelax heard the inevitable pounding of fists upon plasteel. He heard the muffled voice of a condemned woman, protesting her innocence anew.

‘I acted through faith and love alone,’ she screeched in vain, ‘and… and I am a noblewoman of Vostroya with friends in the highest courts. You cannot treat me like this, you have not the authority. Do you hear me? Come back! Come back at once, I command you, and unchain me.

‘Do you know who I am?’

When the lady’s throat was raw and her knuckles skinned and bleeding, she sank back against her cold stone wall and wept.

She wallowed in her misery until it was punctured by an unexpected sound. A whisper from inside the cell itself. She stiffened, her eyes seeking out shapes in the gloom. Was there a patch of deeper darkness over there? A patch in the shape of a proud, young Vostroyan soldier?

‘Leave me be,’ she croaked in fear.

‘Mother,’ came the whisper. Was it really there, she wondered, or a breath of stale air through her prison bars, or merely her imagination?

‘I know what you are now. Leave me be. Unless you can save me from this torture.’

‘Mother!’

‘No, begone with you!’ she shrieked.

‘You should be happy, mother,’ the whisper persisted. ‘Why else did you come here but to find me and be with me? Now, we both have our hearts’ desires.’

Pulling on her heavy chains, she clapped her hands over her ears, but the voice was already in her head. She thought to drown it out with prayer, but the words turned to ash on her unworthy tongue. ‘No, no, no, no,’ she moaned.

‘Now, we shall spend eternity together.’

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 Kieryluk.

The Relentless Dead © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2025. The Relentless Dead, 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.
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ISBN: 978-1-83609-368-8

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