Contents

Cover

Steel Daemon – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Part 1

The Wrathful Song hung inert in the twisted void that existed both within and beyond reality. The malignant and unpredictable tides of the Eye had consumed the vessel for the briefest of moments, an instant swallowed by a roiling wave of colours that were not colours. Within that moment its light, seen by all the covens of sorcerers and psychic choirs in thrall to the warband, was extinguished. The Wrathful Song emerged a changed thing: a pitted and dark shape like a corroded blade wreathed in clotted blood.

Those inquisitive minds that reached out to it recoiled at what they found. The most powerful suffered agonising afflictions, while those who could not claim their strength sloughed away into steaming pools of viscera, burst into incandescent flame, or became hosts for malignant entities that stalked the Sea of Souls. All the while, every one of them screamed, across a hundred languages of man, beast and daemon, the same word.

Hunger.

And so the Relentless sent Hakaron to learn what had become of the Wrathful Song. The master of the Crimson Slaughter understood better than most how a moment of corruption could bring about an eternity of damnation.

Hakaron and his cohort waited in silence within the boarding ram. They had been summoned from the depths of the warband’s labyrinthine fortress, the Lost Hope, where they had been whetting their blades in a purge of its lightless lower decks. Mutants, debauched tribes of savages and inhuman monstrosities were rife within the hulk, and the Crimson Slaughter routinely descended to butcher its foul denizens when not reaving through the Eye. With fresh blood upon their armour, their minds drew the closest they ever could towards serenity outside of battle.

Still, Hakaron’s mind was not wholly his own. The whispers, dulled by the bloodshed as they were, still caressed his thoughts, like silk catching on pitted steel. The renegade Space Marine saw the tics and twitches rippling through his warriors, limbs jerking beneath mismatched armour scavenged from their endless wars. Fingers spasmed irregularly, tightly clutching stolen weapons. Hakaron began to wish that the Wrathful Song had fallen to the malign entities of the Eye, that they would find the crew and warriors possessed rather than simply butchered. Daemon or flesh, death was the harbinger of tranquillity, fleeting as it was.

Hakaron’s grip tightened around his chainaxe. Whatever awaited them, he would not return to the Lost Hope without the prize the Wrathful Song had carried within its holds. Precious few of them remained, and few prices were too high to be paid to keep them.

Contact with the Wrathful Song’s hull came with a wrenching clang, rocking the silent renegades in restraint harnesses that had long ceased to be entirely mechanical. It was when the melta torches began liquefying the plate between them and the ship’s interior that Hakaron first heard his cohort. Low growls slipped through clenched teeth and the blackened plugs of iron that replaced them, issuing from decrepit vox-grilles as an inhuman bass chorus. Snarling helms tilted and twitched. They pierced the gloom with glowering eye lenses of crimson, sapphire and jade, some flickering unevenly or dark altogether from disrepair. Virulence exuded from every movement as they thrashed free of the harnesses and crowded before the egress hatchway. Even in the short time since emerging from the depths of the Lost Hope, their affliction had returned enough to sway their minds.

The air the traitors swarmed into from the boarding pod was stale and freezing. Steam curled from their back-mounted power packs. Reality was as thin as the air. Twisted corridors spiralled out before them, the iron of their forging given way to fleshy carapace and blackened horn.

Flickering wraiths trailed behind the warriors, clinging to them like cloaks of damnation. The souls of Umidia and beyond, torn from life by the wrath of the Crimson Slaughter, forever hung over their murderers, visible within the semi-real realm of the Wrathful Song. The blood-maddened traitor Space Marines paid them no heed, yet twitched and spasmed in response to their incessant whispers and condemnations.

Hakaron pressed deeper into the corrupted vessel, focused on reclaiming some of a dwindling number of anchors back to a time before they had cast aside old names and older allegiances.

Hours stretched by, trekking through the darkness, before Hakaron’s cohort found life within the Wrathful Song. Huddled wretches deep within the ship’s darkness recoiled from the renegades, before debasing their pathetic forms in submission. They dragged themselves forward, emaciated and blind, clutching at the traitors’ boots with gurgled prayers leaking from malformed lips. They were weakness made manifest, far beyond even the twisted slaves that had thronged the vessel’s decks hours before. These were the culmination of centuries of degradation, puppets to the unknowable whims of the warp.

Hakaron had neither the time nor the inclination for them. Muffled cries were cut short as the wretches were crushed beneath ceramite boots. The traitor Space Marines did not even break their stride.

The vile things had been clustered about a massive gateway, its pitted iron blackened with ash and daubed with blasphemous runes painted in human grease and dried blood. It had all the marks of a pagan shrine, one that had been tended for centuries.

How much time had passed within that tidal swell of psychic energy? thought Hakaron. How long had things been disintegrating here, and what could still remain?

The Crimson Slaughter set to the gateway with melta cutters and chainblades. Within a short time, Hakaron’s cohort had managed to pry the gate open wide enough to admit them one by one into the darkness beyond. Hakaron ground past the ancient metal, geneforged eyes piercing the gloom.

The chamber he entered was cavernous. The blackness that consumed it was not merely an absence of light, but also the existence of something ancient and bladed. Though he had no capacity for sorcery, Hakaron could sense a titanic presence of unfathomable cruelty dwelling in the dark.

Cruelty, and hunger.

Broken slabs of armour plating littered the rusted deck, scoured of the scarlet enamel that had once conveyed its allegiance to the warband. The cohort moved swiftly, adopting the piles of rent iron and ceramite as cover while they advanced. The barrels of bolters made haphazard circles in the air as they panned across the emptiness surrounding them.

The loss was galling to Hakaron. An entire host of battle tanks and Rhino assault carriers gone, their ruination scattered around him like carrion left stripped of its meat by howling scavengers. He had led these war machines into a hundred battles across the hellspace of the Eye and beyond. Hakaron was wondering what manner of beast could bring such destruction to these vaunted machines, when the author of their demise made itself known at last.

A cacophony of screaming engines ricocheted from the walls with deafening force. A gargantuan form slashed from the oppressive shadow, smashing renegades to ragged lumps of meat and crushing them beneath its bulk. A caustic pall filled the frigid air like dragon’s breath, reeking of promethium and charred blood.

Within seconds, half of Hakaron’s warriors were dead. He hurled himself aside as the beast skidded past, the spikes of iron and horn protruding from its scarlet flesh-metal tearing deep gouges in his armour. A building electric whine set Hakaron’s teeth on edge, as beams of heliotrope purple wreathed in silver lightning blasted the remainder of Hakaron’s cohort to mounds of burning ash.

The flashes at last illuminated the beast as Hakaron rolled to one knee. He had prepared himself for this, but still fought back hesitation as his dread became reality.

‘Rhoghon’s Blade!’ bellowed Hakaron, driving the butt of his chainaxe into the deck with a resounding clang.

The beast stilled, shivering with the pulse of its massive engines as the fresh blood caking its hull glistened in the sorcerous twilight.

‘Heed me!’ Hakaron rose, plodding towards the monster.

With a squeal of iron tracks, the beast turned to face the renegade Space Marine. Slowly it began to resolve from the blackness. Angled plates of dense ceramite that had reknit itself as carapace and raw muscle adorned its hull. The warband’s icon of a grinning horned skull had manifested life, its jaw clacking as it moaned a silent dirge. The Land Raider Rhoghon’s Blade had made war since before the fall of the Crimson Sabres. Now, like the Crimson Slaughter, it had become something else, a warp-spawned apotheosis that burned with the blood and breath of daemons.

The Land Raider’s forward assault ramp slammed down, edged with concentric rings of lamprey teeth as it exposed what had once been the tank’s crew bay. Deep within the possessed machine, a twitching form hung cocooned within a matrix of cables and fleshy mechanisms sheeted with black oil. With lidless eyes it stared at Hakaron, the bulky armour of its former station betraying its identity as Lorvyk. He had served alongside Hakaron through the armoured wars of the Crimson Slaughter, tending to the battle machines of the warband with fanatical zealotry.

‘Hunger!’ the corrupted warpsmith wheezed, reaching with trembling biomechanical tentacles towards the butchered remains of Hakaron’s troops.

Hakaron reached up to the collar seals binding his helm in place. A thin translucent skin tore away from the parting ceramite as he twisted the snarling death mask from his head. He was one of a rapidly diminishing number among the Crimson Slaughter who could still remove their armour. Most had become fully merged and entombed within the twisted war-plate, the immaterium’s malignant whims forbidding them from ever being anything but killing machines.

Hakaron placed a gauntleted hand, slick with blood and oil, upon the hull of the Land Raider that had forever ceased to be Rhoghon’s Blade. He had marched to war since the beginning, before Umidia. He had watched himself and his brethren fray and succumb moment by moment, choice by choice, to bring them to this. He accepted his fate, and embraced his damnation without regret.

Hakaron watched, his features unmoving and stare unwavering, as the living tank devoured the ragged corpses of his brothers…

Hakaron’s mind fled from the memory. It returned to the blackened deck upon which he stood before a monolithic gateway. A pair of hulking praetorians flanked the portal, the snarls issuing from their Terminator war-plate more alike those of a deep jungle predator than the buzz of servo fibre bundles. They were armoured in flawed gold-edged ceramite plates so dark that light did not escape their surfaces. The eightfold star of Chaos adorned their barrel chests, with an unblinking eye at the centre. The so-called Bringers of Despair, a loathsomely pretentious moniker if ever Hakaron had known one. The personal bodyguard of the Warmaster, as if such a being required sentinels.

The warrior to Hakaron’s left was silent and unmoving, the twin barrels of his Reaper autocannon angled at the deck in a practised grip. His comrade stared at Hakaron, the blades of his lightning claws scraping against one another in a tortured chorus of abused metal. The shadow cast behind the Black Legion warrior sketched a silhouette of curling horns and spreading bat-like wings, revealing the truth belied by what the naked eye saw of his form. With a screech of ripping metal, the warrior’s helm tore at the jawline, grinning at Hakaron with jagged fangs of ceramite stringed with mercury saliva.

Coming here was a mistake, and Hakaron had voiced this opinion to his lord. Had he borne command of the Crimson Slaughter, Hakaron considered that he might have acted differently, to set the warband upon a different course, though further idle speculation was pointless. Kranon had chosen, and, for good or ill, none rejected a summons from the Despoiler without consequence.

Hakaron stood in silence before the gateway, ignoring the taunting sneer of the Black Legion Terminator. He had never set foot upon this vessel, the Warmaster’s infamous behemoth known within the Eye as the Krukal’Righ, and to its prey as the Planet Killer. The power to annihilate entire worlds thrummed beneath Hakaron’s boots. The chieftain of Horus’ remaining sons certainly made no concession for subtlety.

A sliver of greater shadow swelled through the gateway, slowly blooming as the massive doors parted with the thunder of immense cogwork. Hakaron’s hold tightened on the chainaxe he carried low against his hips, the worn steel and leather of its haft creaking in his grip. He could not see into the audience chamber beyond the gateway, though whether that was incidental or by some sorcerous design, Hakaron could not say. All that could be seen as the slabs of black iron peeled back was the figure of his master as he emerged from parlay with the lord of the Black Legion.

Kranon the Relentless strode from the unnatural dark like a war deity dredged from ancient myth. A cloak of silver fur and hide hung from ornate armour of deep arterial red, flensed from a beast that could never exist within the bounds of reality. Sapphire eyes twitched and blinked across the warlord’s plate, ensconced in riveted brass. The Blade of the Relentless hung across Kranon’s back, the hilt of the massive longsword angling behind the twin horns that thrust from the crown of his leering mask.

The portal began to shut as soon as the warlord stepped through, opening only wide enough to grant him passage. Hakaron turned, keeping a step behind and to the left of Kranon as the warlord marched unabated from the closing gateway. The master of the Crimson Slaughter was unreadable behind his helm, and his stride gave no inkling of his mood.

‘We return to the Lost Hope, my lord?’ asked Hakaron.

A thin breath hissed from Kranon’s vox-grille. ‘I have pledged us to them. They stand poised to begin their new crusade, and we shall lend our blades to the slaughter when they do.’

‘My war machines are ready, lord,’ said Hakaron. ‘We shall drown their hulls with the blood of Cadians.’

‘No.’

To Hakaron’s credit, he did not falter in his stride as the Relentless pressed on down the corridor.

‘Will we not move with the Black Legion as it assails the Cadian Gate?’

Kranon’s horned helm tilted fractionally, regarding Hakaron. ‘Ours shall be a different path.’

The next words to pass from the Relentless stirred the voices within Hakaron’s mind to a frenzy of bladed wailing.

‘Tell me, do you remember Regallus?’

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To Emma Grasmeder, my own Berlin-dwelling cyber-Valkyrie and muse. I’ll always be confused why you would want to call me your friend, but I’ll always be grateful that I can call you mine.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2018.
This eBook edition published in 2018 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by David Alvarez.

Steel Daemon © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2018. Steel Daemon, 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: 978-1-78030-823-4

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