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Siege of Vraks – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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I

A black train snaked its way across the rocky plain.

A mighty engine bellowed with the strain of pulling its heavy carriages. Its steel wheels shrieked and threw off sparks as they resisted old, worn brakes. They were wrestled to a juddering halt, at last, the engine’s black nose nuzzling the buffer where its track abruptly ended.

For a minute, it sat groaning with relief, marinating in steam, sweating pungent oil. Then the doors of its carriages flew open. Grey figures were disgorged by the thousand. They guarded their identities beneath greatcoats, plasteel helmets, and rebreather masks with round, blank eyepieces. It was almost impossible to tell one from another, as they set about the barren ground with picks and shovels.

These were the soldiers of the fabled Death Korps of Krieg. They had come to save this world by re-establishing the Emperor’s control over it. Right now, that meant establishing a foothold here, at the end of the line.

Confessor Ignea Tenaxus stepped down from her carriage.

She strode through the busy Korpsmen, who parted before her, maintaining a deferential bubble of space around her. She planted her oak staff in the ground, disturbing ancient layers of volcanic dust. Her nose wrinkled at the sulphur smell, but she was used to it by now. She straightened her back and allowed her chest to swell as her eyes drank in the sight before her.

The Citadel of Vraks. Constructed upon the remains of a long-extinct volcano, it loomed above the surrounding flat expanses. Its tallest structure, its sensorium tower, drew the confessor’s admiring gaze. She thought about its faithful choir of astropaths, torn apart by a fearful mob even as they sent a distress message out into the warp. It was elsewhere, however, that her true interest lay.

The Basilica of St Leonis the Blind. Just a glimpse of its ornate spires sent a thrill of devotion through her unworthy body. The blessed Leonis’ shrine was one of the holiest sites in the sector. Its likely desecration by the apostate cardinal and his band of brainwashed traitors was almost more than Tenaxus could bear.

It pained her to be standing here, so close and yet so very far away.

Too much time had already passed since the first drop-ships had put down on the planet’s far side, out of reach of the citadel’s laser defences. For almost a year, Krieg Korpsmen, supported by a sizeable penal labour force, had dug trenches, erected standard-pattern Munitorum facilities, laid railroad tracks, and unloaded vast quantities of weapons and provisions from supply shuttles. Almost a year, during which the apostate cardinal had stayed safe behind his walls and poisoned who-knew-how-many minds with his blasphemous teachings.

Now, at last the Krieg were ready to wage war upon their enemies.

Black carriages stretched out for over a mile behind her. Grey figures poured unabated from them, spreading out across the Van Meersland Wastes. Their orders were to establish a forward depot here, from which they could dig towards the first of the enemy’s defence lines, thirty miles ahead of them.

Imperial tactician savants had calculated that it would take twelve years to win this war. Twelve years before Xaphan would be punished for his sins. Twelve years before Tenaxus could set foot inside the holy shrine again and assess the damage to it.

Around her, the Krieg were working tirelessly, painstakingly, as they always did. They gave Tenaxus faith that they would meet the expectations placed upon them. She prayed to the Emperor to grant her but a fraction of their patience.

At 166813.M41, the first shot of the war was officially fired.

Dawn’s light found the forward trenches packed with rows of grey soldiers standing stiffly to attention. For the first time in months, the clatter of their activity had ceased. Vraks had no native fauna and the air was still that day, so not a breath of sound disturbed the utmost silence.

Then a vox-console crackled into life. Its terse message rippled through the earthworks, passed down from officer to officer. Lieutenant Marot heard it from his company captain, who in turn had received her orders from Colonel Thyran.

‘Open fire!’

Marot’s barked command echoed out along the trench to each side of him. A moment later, though, all voices but the ones in his earpiece were drowned out as Vraks’ silence was irrevocably shattered. A thousand gun crews, including the four under his command, jerked into practised action. Their Earthshaker cannons and bombards were already aimed and loaded, and now their pent-up fury was unleashed.

Their targets were the enemy’s bunkers and pillboxes, connected by low reinforced ferrocrete walls – but vox-reports from spotters with magnoculars confirmed that their explosive shells were falling short. They pulverised rocks and punched new craters into the ground, as if punishing the very planet for the actions of its people. This was only as expected.

The enemy, so quiet these past months, was soon returning fire. The vast stores of Vraks were theirs to plunder, so of course they had no shortage of weapons of their own, forged for the Emperor, now turned upon His followers instead. Few of their shells would make it to the Krieg trenches either, but there was always the small chance of a lucky shot.

Even over the guns’ incessant roar, Marot heard a fearsome blast and felt the ground tremble. One of his crews was showered with grey dust and red-hot shrapnel, which clattered off their helmets. A Korpsman stumbled, the heavy shell that he and a comrade were hefting almost slipping through their fingers. Marot admonished the Korpsman and bawled at the rest of his gunners too – to work harder, faster, more efficiently: ‘Just one more shot can make a difference, take a life that tips a balance.’

Few of his words would reach their ears, but in truth it didn’t matter. They knew the words by now, and knew their duty. The soldiers of Krieg knew what the Emperor required of them.

The artillery duel continued throughout the morning.

It was briefly interrupted, in the early afternoon, by one of Vraks’ frequent lightning storms. The crashing of thunder in the heavens almost matched that of the now-stilled cannons. The Krieg took shelter in their dugouts as rivers of grey slime lapped against the wooden slats of duckboards.

With the storm’s abrupt cessation, the air felt thick and warm and newly sulphurous – not that the Krieg could feel or smell it through their layers of filtration and protection. They returned to their stations and resumed their pitiless bombardment. Its effect, if any, at this distance was impossible to know, but the enemy’s guns seemed muted. Imperial commissars maintained that the traitors were losing their nerve, lacking the fortitude that faith in a just cause granted.

They said rather less about the shell that struck the 413th Battery, destroying an Earthshaker and cremating its eight-strong crew. Lieutenant Marot heard the news over the command vox-channel but kept it to himself. His Korpsmen were used to living under death’s long shadow. He had already lived too long himself, to which the stripes on his shoulders testified.

Regardless of the ever-present threat, life in the trenches settled into a repetitive routine. Marot bunked in a hollow cut into the side of a claustrophobic dugout, which he shared with four other junior officers. Each moonless night, the thunder of the Krieg guns lulled him into a dreamless slumber. On the twelfth night, the less familiar sound of raised voices jerked him out of it.

Intruders had broken through a tunnel wall and been challenged by a sentry. By the time Marot and three score of Korpsmen crowded onto the scene, the matter had already been settled.

The bombardment had served its primary purpose. It had provided cover for the members of the 158th Regiment to slip out into no-man’s-land and start to dig. They had begun with foxholes, six feet deep, then worked for three days underground, connecting those foxholes with tunnels, creating a network – which they had extended back towards the Krieg’s existing trenches.

‘We had to take a detour to avoid a large granite deposit,’ a sergeant explained. He looked like a statue, his uniform caked with grey dirt apart from the finger-shaped smears across his gas mask’s lenses. ‘It threw us several degrees off. Still, our squad is the first to make it back – is that confirmed?’

The question was directed at a Korpsman behind him, who had been murmuring into a concealed comm-bead. ‘It is, sergeant,’ he reported with something like pride in his tone.

‘The going is heavy down there?’ Marot asked.

‘No, sir,’ the sergeant replied. ‘Mostly, it is as we have seen everywhere else – light, porous rock like pumice, barely a challenge.’

‘That is good to know,’ said Marot.

‘It should certainly speed up operations,’ the sergeant agreed.

‘That was not my meaning.’ Marot turned on his heel and marched back towards his dugout, continuing over his shoulder, ‘If I am to lie forever in this planet’s dirt, it is good to know that it will be nice and soft and comfortable.’

Those words came back to haunt him the very next day.

He was summoned away from the front lines to a meeting at the landing site. The seventeen company commanders of the 143rd Siege Regiment crowded into a briefing room to await their commander’s arrival. Marot was there on his captain’s behalf, as she was nursing a shrapnel wound. He felt an unfamiliar tingle in the pit of his stomach, which might have been anticipation.

His regiment had been the first to arrive on Vraks. They had worked long, punishing shifts to secure the landing site, and hadn’t stopped working in the year since then. Marot knew that every mine laid, every crate unloaded, every entrenching tool thrust into the dirt, was a vital step towards their goal. Even so, he had caught himself wondering when he might see combat again, when his turn might come to be sent out to expend his life in the Emperor’s service.

That moment was suddenly here.

The arrival of a noisy locomotive rattled the room’s shuttered windows. Hardly a minute later, Colonel Thyran and his entourage strode in. Though the air was breathable and he was far from the fighting, Thyran wore the standard-issue gas mask. Unlike the officers of other worlds, he displayed none of his many honours. His eagle-crested helmet, red sash, and rank insignia sufficed for battlefield identification.

Thyran’s polished breastplate and riding boots were legacies of his previous service in a Death Rider company. His greatcoat, at the insistence of the Departmento Munitorum, was tailored from fine mukaali hide.

At the colonel’s shoulder was Commissar-General Maugh. He too was masked, although as far as Marot knew he was an off-worlder, as most commissars were. Having outsiders maintain morale within each unit was another departmento requirement. Most Krieg took little notice of them, considering them to have a negligible effect upon combat performance.

Colonel Thyran brought news of the latest battle plan. His aides transferred schematics to a holo-projector, and the assembled officers pored over its tabletop display. The Citadel of Vraks was shown, almost surrounded by its three dense defence lines. The only break in these was to the south-east, where the land was pitted with deep canyons and gorges – impassable.

The units of the 88th Krieg Siege Army appeared too, as black skull icons. Four of its line korps formed a near-solid mass to the citadel’s west. First Line Korps was pushing north and eastwards, probing for a weakness along the northern walls, but so far had found none.

Colonel Thyran drew his sabre, brandishing it like a pointer. He circled it over the icons of the 12th Line Korps, of which his regiment was part. They were stationed towards the southern end of the western walls. The colonel’s aides obligingly zoomed the holo-map in to this area, labelled Sector 46-39 by scrolling glyphs.

‘According to intelligence,’ said the colonel, ‘this is the weakest point in the citadel’s defences. The guns of 21st Bombardment Korps have been moved up to concentrate their fire upon this sector.’ A few of his captains nodded. He continued, ‘Once they have softened up the traitors, we shall make our first infantry assault upon them. The 150th Regiment will take point, but I have secured for us the honour of supporting their left flank.’

More details followed. The Krieg would advance in three waves over two days, between them comprising some half a million foot-soldiers. Once, and only if, they gained purchase in the traitors’ first defence line, then the 61st Tank Regiment would roll forwards to blast through it.

Marot could only imagine such a glorious scene. He knew he wouldn’t likely live to see it. His regiment’s role, as part of the first wave, was to seek out the enemy’s weak spots by deadly trial and error. Their casualty rate was projected to be seventy-eight per cent. They were to make their move in five days’ time.

Thyran paused after making that announcement.

‘Ideally,’ he resumed, ‘we might have given the bombardment a few more days or weeks to have an effect. You should know that this option was considered. It was felt, however – by the 88th Army’s command staff, and Lord Zuehlke in particular – that time was of the essence.’

The commissar-general spoke up. ‘The Krieg have undertaken to retake Vraks in twelve years. We need to make a bold push and secure an early victory, in order to fulfil that promise.’

‘Understood, sir,’ one of the captains said, and Marot joined in the murmurs of agreement.

‘Most of us will not see our ultimate victory,’ said Colonel Thyran. ‘In no way does that diminish our part in its achievement. Any Korpsman who dies well enough tomorrow can be sure the sacrifice will make a difference.’

Marot felt pride in his heart as, in a deathly tone, Maugh added, ‘That life will be counted.’

At 212813.M41, the first Korpsmen went over the top.

The 143rd Siege Regiment moved on the second whistle. The first squads of Marot’s platoon clambered up the scaling ladders. He fixed his bayonet and waited as the crush of warm, musty grey bodies thinned out. His heart pounded in his ears.

These first few minutes would be crucial. The enemy knew this attack was coming. They had to know, for why else would the Krieg guns have fallen silent?

The traitors’ guns had been muted for several days; spotters were confident that many had been shattered by the shells of Imperial bombards. More than a few gunners had also died in flames, while others must have had their morale sorely tested. The rest, the ones still unbroken, would be scrambling back to their weapons emplacements, clearing rubble from them. How swiftly could they act?

The answer to that question came sooner than Marot had expected. From somewhere south of his position – from where the 150th Siege Regiment had been first out of the trenches – he heard a heavy bolter’s steady crump.

His turn on the ladder came at last. He heaved himself over the parapet, gloved hands sinking into earth still mushy from the latest storm. Marot weaved through coils of razor wire, along a path cleared under the previous night’s cover. He kept his head down, eyes on the boots of the soldier ahead of him. He could see little further as the smoke of no-man’s-land drew curtains around him.

More bolters spluttered into life behind those curtains. It sounded as though some were directly ahead of him. He began to hear breathless casualty reports through his earpiece. Bright flashes pierced the fog, and suddenly he stumbled over a Korpsman’s body. ‘Keep moving,’ he instructed his platoon by vox.

‘Turn back now and we only give the traitors a clear shot at our backs,’ the voice of one of his sergeants agreed with him.

The bolters’ chatter merged and swelled into a persistent rumble. Suddenly, the Korpsman in front of Marot reeled backwards and collided with him. Soft ground gave way beneath his heel and the pair of them slid into a fresh shell crater. Marot struggled to disentangle himself from his comrade, who flopped onto his back with a groan. A spreading patch of blood darkened his coat; his laboured breaths rattled around his re-breather tube. It was just a shrapnel wound; prompt medical attention could save him, but the colonel’s orders had been clear.

‘Delta Squad, sir. We’ve lost our sergeant. Two of us left, both wounded.’

‘Bodies piling up in front of us, sir. Unclear if any made it through.’

‘Keep moving,’ Marot growled into his comm-bead.

A storm of bullets raged above his head. As soon as it let up, he planted his knee in the sucking dirt. To the dying soldier beside him, he muttered, ‘Your life counted.’ Then he levered himself back to his feet.

More Korpsmen lay dead and mortally wounded all around him, but thousands more surged forwards to replace them. Marot reinserted himself into their flow, letting himself be swept along by it. A fresh salvo of bullets cut down figures to the left and right of him.

The calm, authoritative voice of Colonel Thyran cut across all regimental vox-channels. ‘The traitors are better prepared than we expected,’ he admitted, ‘but we have numbers, faith, and grim determination on our side. They can’t gun us all down before we overrun them.’

Almost as if the enemy mocked his words, the shattering blasts of cannons added to the tempest. A shell hit close by to the north, sending tremors through the ground and a wave of gritty heat over Marot. Keep moving…

As if he could have turned back had he wanted to. As if lying face down in the dirt would have saved him from the next Earthshaker shell…

The next voice in his ear was that of his captain, who had taken to the battlefield despite her fresh stitches. ‘Forward! Forward! The worth of our sacrifices today will be measured in ground soaked in enemy blood!’

A fierce burst of static followed, and then a long, ominous silence.

Then another voice, which Marot didn’t know: ‘I regret to report…’ The speaker broke off, coughing. ‘Fifteenth Company…’ His company. ‘First Platoon was just scaling the ladders. We lost two squads, and the captain… She had just raised her head above the parapet when…’

The words dissolved into coughing again. Another voice, more self-possessed, cut in: ‘Direct hit on the forward trenches. Extensive casualties. Fifteenth Company captain, 143rd Regiment, confirmed to have perished.’

Marot didn’t know how he had survived. He never knew. Why him? Why him again, when so many better soldiers, his captain included, had fallen?

The attack had been called off at nightfall. The second infantry wave had doggedly followed the first across the battlefield and shared their grisly fate. There had been a few glimmers of hope. As predicted, some Krieg, through force of numbers, had made it through the gauntlet. They discovered that the enemy had not been idle all this time, and that their walls were deeper and stronger than ever.

The newly settled silence rang in the lieutenant’s ears. His memories of the past eight hours were jumbled and frenetic, driving out all memories before them. He remembered shredding his gloves on razor wire coils. He remembered yelling out a warning as he realised that he was in the middle of a minefield.

He remembered hauling himself out of the dirt, once, twice, three times and maybe more. His left shoulder ached and was sticky to the touch. He remembered stifling a scream with gritted teeth as he dug a bullet from it with his knife. He had no memory of being shot. His head swam. He was concussed.

He still had his duty to perform.

Marot couldn’t make vox-contact with any other company officers. He was likely the last of them. It was up to him to gather the survivors and lead them out of there. No-man’s-land was strewn with bodies, piled three or four high in some places. Some clung to life yet, and a fraction of these could walk or crawl.

His ragtag force of the walking wounded grew, salvaging as many guns as they could carry. For what felt like hours, they stalked that fog-shrouded graveyard like grey ghosts. Marot feared they were travelling in circles, but then the lights of illum flares fired from the Krieg trenches, more commonly used for sighting targets, marked a path for them to follow.

More grey-coated corpses lined their route, their faces covered, eyepieces staring blankly. Some were soldiers he had worked, eaten, slept and fought alongside, even shared brief moments of grim introspection with. Unless he read the numbers of their dog tags, Marot couldn’t know for sure. Even had he taken off their masks, he may not have known their faces, and that was for the best.

The third wave of the Krieg assault was launched at dawn.

Marot was surprised to hear it, given the failure of the earlier waves to make a breakthrough. The sound of whistles briefly disturbed his exhausted sleep – though, as far as his trench was from those of the other companies, he thought he may only have dreamt them.

He woke in the afternoon to unsurprising news. The third wave had been repulsed. The overall cost of the assault was still being tabulated, but it was certainly horrific. Half a million foot-soldiers… It wasn’t the number of Krieg lives lost that rankled him, but the feeling that they may have died for nothing.

A quartermaster had bound Marot’s arm in a sling.

He had declined to join the sad procession of the wounded, back to the depot and from there to a medicae hut at the landing site by locomotive. The rank-and-file Korpsmen needed leaders among them to look to, and there were so few left. ‘I can still give orders one-handed,’ Marot had grumbled, ‘and operate a weapon if it comes to it.’

That night, he dialled up the stimulant content in his water supply and manned his old captain’s command post. His decision was proved justified when a sentry reported movement in no-man’s-land. Lieutenant Marot hopped up onto a fire-step and pressed magnoculars to his gas mask’s lenses. Through the lingering smoke haze, he made out distant silhouettes. ‘Could they be ours?’

‘Unclear, sir,’ said the sentry, ‘but they aren’t responding to vox-hails.’

‘Sound the alarm,’ said Marot.

The figures grew swiftly in number, until they were everywhere he looked. Too many to be routed Krieg Korpsmen from the third wave coming home. Too many and too purposeful in their advance. These were soldiers who were not defeated but triumphant. A grumble of engines reached his ears in confirmation. Around him, roused Korpsmen were taking positions on the steps to the shrill beat of the alarm bell.

‘Enemy infantry incoming,’ Marot barked at them, ‘some in armoured personnel carriers. Pick a target. Fire at will.’ He relayed the same information over the command vox-channel and requested artillery support.

The cracks and whines of lasguns and heavy stubbers filled the trench. ‘The traitors have made a tactical error,’ the lieutenant asserted. ‘They believe us broken. They think we are cowering back here, those few of us remaining, licking our wounds. They should have stayed behind their walls.’

New, familiar shapes came looming from the fog: repurposed Imperial Chimeras with hull-mounted heavy bolters and multi-laser turrets. Squadron after squadron ground the bones of the dead beneath their tracks. Small weapons fire could do no more than chip their armour. Tank traps awaited any vehicle venturing too close, along with krak grenade launchers, but Marot knew it wouldn’t be enough.

He yelled into his comm-bead, ‘We need those cannons. We can’t hold the line here without them.’ He received confirmation that his request had been relayed, but there was no response as yet. A faulty vox-relay might have been to blame; such equipment was temperamental even under better circumstances. Either that or his superiors just had nothing to say to him at present.

Marot drew his laspistol: a light weapon designed for one-handed firing, which was just as well in his present circumstances. The trade-off for this was a limited range. While his comrades sprayed no-man’s-land with withering fire, he bided his time. He waited and watched for those enemies who made it close enough, targeting each of them individually.

For a time, it felt to Marot as though the Emperor was with him.

The traitors were being dealt a bitter taste of their own medicine. Whether they ploughed forwards or turned back, as some cravenly did, they were scythed down with pitiless efficiency. Then a Chimera ground to a halt, its tracks tangled up in wire, and disgorged twelve more figures. With his best shot yet, he punched a hole through the head of the first, but the others surged forwards; meanwhile, another Chimera was pulling up behind them, then another and another behind that.

The Krieg’s guns – at least their medium artillery, their mortars and quad launchers – had woken at last. The thunder of their discharges rolled forwards over Marot’s head. Their shells’ explosive detonations, however, seemed a long distance away – and immediately, he knew what that meant.

‘It seems the enemy is attacking on multiple fronts,’ he reported. ‘Our heavy guns are defending more vital sectors. Our duty is clear. We must hold these traitors at bay for as long as we can. Kill as many as we can. This, just this, is the reason our comrades died – to lure them out to us. Each and every enemy that falls will weigh against their noble sacrifices, as well as our own to come.’

Confessor Tenaxus had never met Lieutenant Marot.

She would remember his name, all the same. She heard so few Krieg names. They used them rarely, especially between themselves. Krieg officers referred to the Korpsmen under their command by their assigned numbers, always numbers.

Tenaxus had been in the war room: a large, prefabricated structure bustling with ordinates, vox-operators, technicians, high-ranking officers and their command staffs, far behind the lines. The atmosphere had been highly charged but focused as urgent calls for assistance had crashed in, one upon another. Decisions had been made efficiently and tersely, providing much-needed support to one company here, condemning another to its fate with the stroke of a stylus there.

She may have heard Marot’s first request for artillery support; she couldn’t recall. She had certainly come to recognise his voice, its tone more urgent with each contact, albeit never tipping into panic.

There had been a tragic inevitability to his last-but-one report: a breathless snippet, set to a soundtrack of chainsword roars and screams, in which he revealed that traitors had breached the Krieg lines, invading their trenches. Tenaxus had observed an intense conversation between Colonel Thyran – the commander of Marot’s 143rd Regiment – and his counterpart in command of the 150th, which had ended with a grim nod of acceptance from the former.

‘Too many… We will fight to our last breaths, but depleted as we are… I have lost my arm… bleeding out. Too late for us, but… colonel, turn the Earthshakers upon our own positions. Wipe out the traitors before they can spread further… and Emperor, forgive us our failure…’

The voice had faded – for the last time, the confessor had imagined, but the vox-channel had remained open, nightmare sounds intruding upon the room’s detachment, and the voice had returned a moment later as barely a whisper, with the words that would stay with her: ‘This is Lieutenant Marot… signing off…’

Colonel Thyran had muttered something into his comm-bead that she hadn’t caught. She wondered if his words had ever reached their intended recipient. He had spoken to his fellow officers again, in a tone that brooked no argument. Then, with General Durjan’s consent, the artillery commanders had issued fresh orders.

The fighting was all over now, or at least at a pause. Three days of violent clamour had subsided into sullen near-silence. The Krieg’s ill-starred offensive had seen them losing rather than gaining ground, and Tenaxus had scrolled through impossibly long lists of fatalities on a data-slate.

Many Krieg had been slain by their own guns, as Marot had suggested. They lay buried in the flattened rubble of the forward trenches – but thousands of the apostate cardinal’s traitors lay with them. Word came down from Lord Commander Zuehlke on Thracian Primaris; he was satisfied with the progress made.

Tenaxus stepped from a black train carriage once again. She was returning to the front lines to preach to the soldiers stationed there, to lift their spirits and to weed out any doubters concealed among them. A decorated commissar had assured her that there was no necessity. The Krieg, he had said, were a dedicated breed, and even such a massacre as they had suffered here would not deter them in the slightest from their duty. She had prepared her sermons, anyway.

She would tell them of Leonis, martyr of the Scarus Sector, who had had his eyes gouged out for spreading the Emperor’s holy word two thousand years ago. She thought she might tell them about a hero of their own too: Lieutenant Marot, who had fought so courageously and given up his life without a qualm for that same higher purpose. She would make him an example to which all could aspire.

The trenches were still a highly dangerous place to be. The guns of each side continued to harass each other intermittently, so death could strike anywhere with little warning. Though it was the middle of the day, a pall of gun smoke now blocked out the heat and light of the Vraksian sun. The planet’s scarred surface seemed bleaker and greyer than ever.

A pungent smell reached the confessor’s nostrils, carried westward on a reedy breeze. The bodies abandoned by necessity in no-man’s-land – hundreds of thousands of them, friend and foe – were beginning to rot. She donned the gas mask given to her by Commissar Oblonsk and was grateful for his foresight.

She could no longer see the great citadel through the suffocating gloom. Strain her eyes as she might, she couldn’t even make out the outline of it. Saint Leonis felt further away from her than ever, now that even the uplifting sight of his spires had been denied to her.

God-Emperor willing, if she did her duty, one day she might see them again.

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2024.
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* 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.