Contents

Cover

The Swords of Calth – Extract

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

1

Before she was inducted into the Astra Militarum, Corporal Elia Vivaro used to believe war was waged in black and white. Devotionals of heroic troopers in distant warzones were always grainy and monochrome, bleached of colour by distance or distortion. The soldiers’ uniforms were grey, ochre, olive drab or urban camo. That made sense; a bright uniform would get you killed.

But since coming to Sycorax, she’d learned war was fought in hideous technicolour.

Lying on her back with the breath punched out of her and her left arm singing with pain, she watched humming emerald beams flash overhead. Return fire from the company flashed back in bolts of ruby light. Her ears were ringing, the hard thump thump thump of mass-reactives barely registering. Beneath the booming reports of the heavy bolter, she thought she heard the thudding echoes of autocannons.

Ours or theirs?

Imperial, of course. This enemy didn’t use hard rounds. They used inhuman xenotech that flayed the skin from your bones and left their targets a screaming mess of ruptured red meat and disassembled bone. Impossible technologies not even the all-knowing Cult Mechanicus could fathom.

The patch of sky she could see through the billowing, tar-black fog of fire and smoke was a perfect blue.

Surely too beautiful a sky to die under.

Elia pushed herself up onto one elbow, the one not singing in pain. Fuel from the wrecked Hellhounds turned the day into a hellish sunset, painting the shattered walls on either side of her in flickering patterns of orange and yellow. Their crews lay beside the burning vehicles, bodies char-black and bloated, exposed ribs brilliant white.

They had only just made the turn when the ambushers had struck.

A pair of tall, rust-bronze war machines stalked from the burning ruins on four clicking spindle limbs and fired beams of white-green energy at the lead Demolisher. They peeled away its frontal glacis and blew the Leman Russ apart from the inside, lofting its bombardment turret twenty metres into the air. Simultaneously, the rearguard Eradicator was swarmed with a host of drone-like creatures that flew out of the smoke to fasten themselves to its hull like limpets. They reduced it to a skeletal wreck in seconds. The vehicle’s magazine of subatomic shells exploded before they devoured it entirely, and now Elia’s rad-meter was chirruping madly.

Radiation from the wreck of the Eradicator was the least of her worries just then.

Who’s in command now?

She’d seen Captain Mosar turn to issue their convoy a punch-through order from the cupola of his Chimera. Before he could speak, his body had come apart in a flurry of green light and unravelling skin and bone. Lieutenant Rheman died moments later as another of the flitting drone things flew at his head and exploded with a pop that seemed altogether too small to kill a man. He lay on his back a few metres away, looking for all the world like he was sleeping. The only mark on him was a leaking red hole in his forehead.

The red blood was so vivid against the black of her skin, so bright it looked fake, like something you might see in a theatrica. She didn’t think it was hers. She didn’t feel like she’d been shot, but knew that sometimes shock delayed pain. Only yesterday – or was it the day before? – Trooper Maslow had wandered around with his arm flayed back to perforated bone and twitching sinews, but hadn’t seemed to notice he’d been hit until Commissar Vartan yelled at him to take cover. Her breath tasted of engine fumes and smashed rockcrete. Veils of dust and smoke hung in the air, coating the rubble and the wrecked tanks and shaken troopers in layers of chalky dust.

Hands fumbled with Elia’s flak jacket and she felt herself being dragged out of the road. Her rescuer pulled her behind a makeshift barricade of smashed machinery and slabs of a coffered floor that must have fallen from somewhere above. Sound roared in her ears, a deafening cacophony of gunfire, explosions and screams.

A yelling face appeared in front of her. A trooper with blue-polarised goggles and wearing the dust-caked uniform of a 161st Caen Pioneer and Construction Battalion vox-bearer. She knew her, but the ringing in her head made it impossible to think straight. She couldn’t place her name.

The other woman shouted again, her voice muffled by a dust-mask rebreather.

‘Are you hurt? Elia, are you hurt? I saw you thrown from the Chimera!’

‘Kyra?’ she said, dazed and trying to struggle to her feet. ‘Kyra Vance!’

Kyra gave her a strange look and hauled Elia down and pushed her back into the piled rubble. Hissing shots pulped the brickwork above her head. Dissolved molecules of aerosolised mortar caught in the back of her throat. She spat the sour taste of clay from her mouth, her saliva red with blood.

‘Imperator! Are you trying to get killed?’ asked Kyra.

Elia shook her head, and drew in a hot, sucking breath as sense returned to her and reality crashed back in. ‘Situation?’ she said.

‘All six vehicles wrecked. At least twenty dead. Enemy above and either side of us.’

‘Twenty, shit,’ said Elia, easing out to the edge of the toppled slab to re-establish some situational awareness. Even a cursory glance told her it wasn’t good. The remains of the company were strung out along the burning line of the convoy, hunched in whatever cover they could find and firing up at the structures around them.

A missile streaked through the window of a fire-blackened warehouse and exploded inside. A portion of the modular outer wall fell into the street in a rain of girders and stone. A pair of bodies armoured in the same rust-bronze plates as the war machines came with it. Impossibly, one of the figures began to rise, its broken arms and legs limned with green light, but a volley of las-fire cut it down before Elia could get a good look at it.

‘Where’s my rifle?’ she said.

‘I don’t know,’ said Kyra, leaning back to scoop up a dead man’s lasgun. She pressed it into her hands. ‘Use this one.’

Elia checked the powercell, worked the charging lever, and shouldered the rifle. She snapped off a couple of shots over the rubble into the smoke. Couldn’t tell if she was hitting anything. Didn’t matter. She just wanted to fight back, feel like she was doing something.

‘I saw Mosar and Rheman go down, so who’s in charge?’ asked Elia.

‘If those officers are dead, it’s you,’ said Kyra, flinching as something exploded overhead.

They pressed themselves deeper into the heaped rubble as pulverised chunks of rockcrete tumbled from the upper floors, and more grey dust billowed. Elia’s eyes were red and burning from the smoke, and she wiped a bloody, sweat-streaked hand over her face to clear the stinging grit. The vox-bead crackled in her ear, lousy with static bleed from other company networks. Nothing but chopped words, half-heard orders and calls for help. She reached up to key her helmet mic, but the stalk was snapped midway along its length.

‘Damn it,’ she hissed, rolling onto her back and slapping Kyra’s shoulder. ‘Where’s your vox-caster? My mic’s broken.’

‘Still strapped down inside the Chimera,’ said Kyra.

‘What the hell use is it in there?’ demanded Elia.

‘It was either leave it or die,’ snapped Kyra, still firing over the lip of the rubble.

‘Damn it,’ said Elia again.

Across the street, a trooper skidded into cover behind a slumped wall upon which the face of an Imperial saint had been painted. The trooper was a recklessly brave soldier named Vigo Tengger, a rear-echelon schematics draughter, but one who’d earned a brace of medals in every campaign in which the regiment had served. Elia didn’t recognise the saint, but given the industriousness of Port Setebos, she guessed it was likely one who extolled the virtue and noble rewards of silent devotion to hard work. An explosive round sailed from Vigo’s grenade launcher with a metallic cough and another section of warehouse wall tumbled into the street, along with more of the bronzed enemy warriors.

The relentless thump thump thump of the heavy bolter punched through the prefabbed wall-skins, the fire-teams walking their shots around the perimeter. Elia had never loved a weapon more right now. If anything would keep the enemy’s heads down while they regrouped and got clear of this trap, then it was a heavy bolter.

She heard more shouts and the clatter of ammo boxes. Across the street, Commissar Vartan was directing the company’s heavy weapons teams’ fields of fire. Spectral light reflected from the bronze skull on his peaked cap and breastplate. Crackling blue energies enveloped the gleaming silver of his sword blade. Vartan was the most courageous man she’d ever met, fearless in the face of the foe, and with an unrelenting faith in the Emperor.

The heavy, chugging bark of autocannons joined the heavy bolter, their echoes amplified by the enclosing walls of the shattered warehouses to either side. Their company were pioneers, builders and engineers for the Caen Regiment, but they were still, first and foremost, soldiers of the Astra Militarum.

Solid slugs from the autocannons swept the width of the street. Smacking impacts of brass on stone, hard las ricochets zipping into the sky. Petrochemical fog made it hard to see if the gunners were hitting anything.

Doesn’t matter, so long as it keeps the enemy’s heads down long enough for us to escape.

Vartan looked across the street, beckoned urgently for her to join him.

‘Shit, is he serious?’ said Kyra. ‘He wants to advance?’

‘We need to link up, regroup and move out as one.’

‘The street’s a kill-box,’ said Kyra, as another blast of fizzing green bolts stabbed down it. A wrecked Chimera exploded to help make her point. Crackling powercell overloads lit it from within and fire-trails streaked from its burning interior.

A burst of autocannon shells strafed the upper levels of the warehouses, demolishing more and more of their structure with every explosive impact.

‘We can make it. We’ve got cover, so let’s not waste it,’ said Elia. ‘On three, ready?’

Kyra nodded, biting her lip. Green bolts zipped down the street, neon bright. Any one of them might have their names on it.

‘One,’ said Elia.

‘Two,’ said Kyra.

‘Three!’ snapped Elia.

They burst from the shelter of the rubble and ran into the street as the autocannons opened up again. Kyra led the way, zigging and zagging as streaking bursts of fire twitched the smoke. Elia had never run so fast, her gaze fixed on the exact location she’d skid into cover, just behind a projecting spur of brickwork. She kept low, lasgun held tight to her chest. A buzzing green burst of energy chewed up the ground beside her. She jinked to the side. Kept going, head down, shoulders pumping.

‘Movement! End of the street!’ yelled a gunner’s voice.

Halfway across the street, Elia risked a glance to her left. Something metallic gleamed in the smoke, and her pace faltered.

‘Shit…’

The war machines that had taken out the Demolisher stalked from the ruins once again, glowing green machine eyes sweeping the street. Tall and slender, with bulbous, overhanging carapaces, they were borne on clawed legs that looked far too thin to bear their weight. Marching through the fire ahead of them were ranks of the rust-bronze-armoured warriors advancing in lockstep with lambent-barrelled rifles.

Except they weren’t armoured, the bronze was the metal of their bodies.

Necrons, that’s what we call them…

An apt name, wrought to conjure humankind’s primal fear of death. Their bodies were hunched, thin and skeletal, their gaunt, expressionless faces freakishly elongated skulls of bare metal. The same green corpse-light that powered their weapons burned in each hollow eye socket, and every one of them had a mockery of a human skull crudely painted across their lifeless, death-mask faces.

In the centre of their line was a drifting mass of spiralling dark energy. It swirled around an arch-spined thing like overlapping tornadoes contained by a fearsome gravity at its heart. It threw off arcing traceries of jade lightning, its hunched-over body swathed in tattered, purple robes. It carried a bladed staff that flickered as it cut the very fabric of reality.

The aliens raised their weapons in perfect unison, but before they could shoot, the impossibly deep rumble of a powerful engine-reactor filled the street. Elia turned as a mud-streaked behemoth reared up to crest the debris behind her, crushing rubble to powder beneath its armoured bulk.

It was a battle tank, but not one of the Astra Militarum. Its blue-painted flanks were more massive than anything Elia had seen. Its eagle-stamped tracks churned the broken ground, throwing up stonework and dust as the driver brought it to a grinding halt. Elia had watched enough devotionals to recognise this type of vehicle, but to see one bearing down on her like a vast transit train all but pinned her to the spot.

Land Raider, Hellfire variant.

The twin lascannons on its side-mounts thrummed with building power.

Godhammer-pattern…

The front assault ramp, emblazoned with an ivory ultima, slammed down with a booming clang like the glorious peal of a prayer bell. Shapes moved within its red-lit interior, hulking and brutish; surely too enormous to be human. They burst from within, ten warriors in cobalt-blue armour, their edges trimmed in green.

Adeptus Astartes… Space Marines, the Angels of Death…

Elia had scoffed at the veterans’ tales of the Astartes – old soldiers’ lies of immortal warriors of inhuman power, deathly killers. A single squad of them could topple a world, so they said.

If anything, the stories had undersold their might.

They spread out fast, firing on the move with weapons that would take two strong men to lift. The thunderous noise broke the spell holding Elia in place, and she dropped to the ground, fearful of being trampled by their relentless advance.

A giant with a red helm and gleaming augmetic arm paused to glance down at her.

‘Stay down if you want to survive this,’ he said.

Elia stayed down.

The Space Marines advanced under fire, never seeming like they were running, but closing the distance to the necrons in moments. Mass-reactives from their bolters exploded with booming detonations, punching holes in the alien line with a deafening barrage. Against a living foe, that one volley would have ended the fight, but already some of the deathly creatures were writhing and jerking as their bodies began to knit themselves back together.

The Land Raider fired again, and searing beams of energy carved through the carapace of the first claw-legged war machine. A rippling green halo flared, but whatever energy shielding it possessed couldn’t save it. The machine exploded in a fountain of emerald fire, its headless trunk swaying for a moment before collapsing in a molten pile of scrap metal.

The second machine loosed an ululating machine-bray and fired a pulsing beam of light that played over the up-armoured front of the vehicle. Colossally thick plates of armour were stripped back under the awful beam: ablative mesh, layer upon layer of ceramite weave, adamantium rebar and ballistic plate dissolving like grease before a flame.

Then the war machine rocked back on its flexing legs, a plume of orange fire engulfing its segmented optical apparatus as a flurry of missiles exploded around its upper section. It tilted back, scanning the skies in search of this new threat.

Elia heard it before she saw it. A shrieking raptor’s roar, a triumphant predator in the instant before it claims its victim.

A screaming blaze of jet wash parted the black smoke roofing the street, and Elia looked up to see a snub-nosed gunship drop with a subsonic shriek. Its armoured skin was the same cobalt blue of the Land Raider. Its prow dipped as its wings flared in vortices of smoke, and the twin cannons mounted atop the craft opened up.

A blitzing fusillade of explosive rounds cut through the ranks of necrons, tossing shredded bodies into the air. Smoke and dust erupted in a billowing wall as the aircraft’s gunner worked his storm of fire from side to side. Elia’s eyes widened as the gunship levelled out and she saw the massive form of a walking war machine locked at its rear.

Dreadnought…

The magnetic clamps holding it in place disengaged, and it fell the last ten metres. The Dreadnought slammed into the ground, cratering the roadway. Its midsection spun on its axis, and Elia saw one massive fist clench, throwing off arcs of blue-purple lightning, the other a vast rotary cannon that spun up with terrible velocity.

At the same instant, the gunship’s prow ramp opened and six warriors leapt from within, firing as they dropped – precision bursts of lethally efficient fire. Armoured in pristine blue, they fell through the black smoke and landed alongside the Dreadnought.

Elia wanted to warn them that sometimes the enemy came back, even from hideously mortal wounds, but they already knew. Kill shot, followed by execution shot. Lines of plasma crackled among them, green and blue light. Coruscating flames washed over them, but none of these warriors of the Emperor fell.

The Space Marines borne in the Land Raider split into two fire-teams, moving seamlessly to the smaller unit’s flanks. The gunship jinked to avoid incoming streams of fire, and banks of strafing bolter weapons demolished the buildings to either side of the street in an unending string of percussive blasts. Pulverised debris fell into the street, together with more shredded necron bodies.

A swelling pride expanded in Elia’s chest like the heat from a slug of amasec. Ignoring the admonition of the Space Marine who’d spoken to her, she pushed herself to her feet and snapped a glance left and right.

Dust cascaded from her uniform as she saw Commissar Vartan pull himself from the rubble and draw his sword. The blade ignited with a whoosh of golden heat, a beacon of courage in the fog of the conflict. He saw her and drew his bolt pistol, aiming his sword towards the advancing Space Marines. The implication was clear: advance or die.

Elia scrambled over the torn-up slabs of the street to finally reach Vartan.

‘Time for you to step up, corporal,’ said the commissar as she skidded into cover.

Technically, Vartan outranked her, but a good officer of the Officio Prefectus preferred to remain outside the chain of command, stepping in to take over with sanctioned executions for cowardice only when necessary.

Elia nodded and said, ‘Commissar, take Kyra, and round up a pair of sections. Make sure you’ve got a couple of heavy hitters and sweep to the right along the street edge. I’ll push up the centre with the assault elements. Drive them to us.’

Vartan nodded and began issuing orders as Elia gathered up the soldiers equipped with pistols, swords and grenades. She checked her pistol and the remaining charge on the lasgun Kyra had given her: charged enough.

She swept her eyes over the soldiers she’d assembled. Perhaps twenty gathered behind her – too many for any one person to effectively command, but she only needed them to hear one order.

Elia pushed herself upright and shouted, ‘Soldiers of Caen! Up! Up!’ She clambered over the rubble, not even looking to see if the pioneers would follow her. She already knew they would; they were courageous and disciplined and understood that going forward was the only way to stay alive.

Elia paused at the crest of the rubble. It was stupid, she was exposed, but if she lived through the next few minutes, it would cement her reputation as a leader.

‘The Angels of Death fight with us!’ she cried, holding her rifle high. ‘Shall the Astra Militarum be found wanting?’

The soldiers roared in response, running alongside her as she charged towards the foe. She kept her gun held tight to her chest, one eye on the broken ground, the other on the swirling mass of smoke and fire ahead.

The Land Raider ground past on her left, its immensely powerful lascannons blazing; blindingly bright, ear-splittingly loud. The energies of its weapon systems set her teeth on edge, its giant engine sent tremors through her bones.

Snapping bolts of green flashed past her. Something tugged at her shoulder. She felt wet heat, but kept going. On towards the gunfire and blazing swords. On towards the streaks of plasmic fire and the screech of buckling metal.

And then they were in the thick of it. And Elia saw, first-hand, why the Space Marines were called the Angels of Death.

The speed of it, that was what she later remembered the most.

Militarum battles were endless, bloody slogs – methodical, relentless, sensory overloads of noise and terror that every soldier had to gut their way through. Bombardment, advance, fight, survive, dig in. Snatch a moment to eat if you had any food, try and sleep in a muddy foxhole, then get kicked awake before dawn to do it all again.

Campaigns lasted months or years.

This fight was over in forty-five seconds.

She ran into the smoke. The bark and snap of gunfire sounded from the flank. Hissing las-impacts filled the air with the stink of hot metal and dry earth. The bruising crunch of metal on metal, grunts of effort, the hiss and crack of splitting metal innards. All-too-human screams of pain.

A shape moved in the smoke. She spun with her lasgun shouldered.

A Space Marine, towering head and shoulders above her. She saw him in snapshots. Armour bulkier and more adorned with honour markers and waxen seals than the others. Jade-edged pauldrons, ivory and wreathed in gold. A belt-fed bolter weapon mounted on his gauntlet that blazed with fire. Spread-winged eagle upon his breastplate, gleaming the brightest gold.

He held a bronzed necron thing by the throat, half its body missing, but its arms still clawing at his plate. Like an enginseer loosening a stubborn driveshaft, he beat its metal skull with his fist. Every crunching impact deformed its expressionless face until it was just a mass of brutalised iron.

The light in its eye sockets dimmed, and he slammed its broken body onto the ground. With hard-won economy of movement born from decades of war, he crushed its skull underfoot even as he turned to draw his sword and aim his gauntlet-mounted bolt weapon.

The sword flared with white-gold light, the gauntlet bolter spoke in thunderous roars. His warriors were wolves in the fold, as unified in killing purpose as pack predators.

The brutal form of the Dreadnought formed the tip of a hunter’s spear thrust deep into the enemy’s gut. It tore xenoforms apart with its massive fist, its cannon spewing spent shell casings in a glittering rain. Space Marines moved with it, firing on the move with pinpoint accuracy and perfect interlocking arcs.

Mass-reactives or thunderclaps of melta fire blasted gaps in the enemy line. Assault elements punched in deep. Thick-bladed swords, barking pistols and reversed combat knives cut, hacked and gouged.

Nothing was left standing in their wake.

Always on the move, each finger of this blue fist worked in perfect synchrony to tear the beating heart from the necron ambush. It was war waged at its most disciplined and perfect, no element unsupported, every movement as precise as if this were no more than a parade ground demonstration. They fought fluidly, efficiently and lethally.

But what astonished Elia the most was their speed. Astartes statuary always looked so solid and unbending. She had imagined them as living tanks, but they were graceful and inhumanly fast. She felt compelled to fight with them, but the idea of getting close to a warring Space Marine filled her with terror.

She pushed that terror down into the pit of her stomach. She was Astra Militarum, and fear was no excuse not to go forward into the fray.

Something powerful clamped around her ankle, like she’d stepped in a snare. Elia went down on one knee, cracking her elbow on a fallen roof beam. Her lasgun skittered away over the rubble.

She looked back and saw it wasn’t a snare. It was the still-living necron thing the Space Marine had killed. The xenoform tried to lift itself from the ground, but its legs were sheared away, its pelvis twisted around. The metal torso was half blown open by an explosive shell and its gaping chest cavity crawled with slithering tendrils of eldritch light. It spasmed as the craters punched in its skull groaned and popped, the metal reforming. It pulled itself up her legs, clawing to reach her.

Elia cried out in revulsion, desperately reaching for her lasgun. Her fingers scrabbled in the dust, the rifle’s stock just out of reach. Alien fingers pulled at her stomach, hard metal pushing under her uniform jacket to tear out the soft meat beneath.

Her fingers brushed the edge of the lasgun’s stock. An explosion shook the ground. Dust and rock fragments rained down and the weapon slid farther out of reach. She screamed as the necron’s unyielding fingers pressed hard into her stomach. Blunt as they were, it had strength enough to disembowel her. She rolled onto her side and snatched her laspistol from its holster.

The necron lifted its head. Green wych-fire guttered in its deformed skull.

Elia shot it through its right eye socket.

Its head snapped back, one side of its face vaporised. The inside of its head was a hollow, empty void. She heard an endless scream that seemed to echo within her own skull.

The pressure on her gut only intensified. She cried out in agony, and emptied the rest of the pistol’s charge into its face until nothing was left but a twitching spinal column that oozed noxious, metallic fumes. But the headless torso continued to climb her body, a ghastly metal corpse trying to drag her down into death with it.

Elia dropped the pistol and hauled her combat knife from its sheath. She jammed it down onto the writhing spinal column, screaming as she plunged the blade in deep. She twisted and cranked the blade, trying to do as much damage as she could.

Finally, it stopped moving.

Elia let out a pent-up breath and shoved its scrap-metal carcass off her. Swirling green energies enveloped its remains as it clattered to the rubble and began to fade from sight. Revolted, Elia scrambled away from its dissolution. Even in death they were unnatural, abhorrent things.

She didn’t notice how silent the street had become until she heard heavy footsteps drawing near. The Space Marine she’d seen earlier approached her, so tall and immensely powerful that she almost tried to retreat from him.

‘The fighting is done,’ he said. ‘Are you hurt?’

Elia’s mouth was too gummed with dust and fear to reply, so she just shook her head.

The warrior offered her his hand, and she stared at it, dumbly wondering what to do with it until her rational mind reasserted itself. She gripped his smoking blue gauntlet, her hand tiny in his. She marvelled at his control. Strength to shatter steel, but still his grip was precisely strong enough to pull her upright and no more.

She grunted in pain, pressing her free hand to her stomach.

‘Are you hurt?’ he asked again.

Elia opened her uniform jacket and pulled up her shirt. The pale flesh of her stomach was already purpling with bruising where the xenos had tried to rip her guts out.

‘Sometimes they come back,’ she said, her voice thick with lingering fear and relief.

‘Yes, sometimes they do,’ he said. ‘Apologies, I should have ensured this necron was fully destroyed.’ He turned to rejoin his warriors.

‘Elia,’ she said, her words coming out in a rush. ‘I’m Corporal Elia Vivaro. May I be permitted to know your name?’

He nodded and said, ‘I am Uriel Ventris, captain of the Ultramarines Fourth Company.’

Click here to buy The Swords of Calth.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2021.
This eBook edition published in 2021 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Anna Lakisova.

The Swords of Calth © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2021. The Swords of Calth, 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: 978-1-80026-519-6

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

See Black Library on the internet at
blacklibrary.com

Find out more about Games Workshop’s world of Warhammer and the Warhammer 40,000 universe at
games-workshop.com

To my fellow brothers and sisters of Ultramar,
who demanded Uriel & Pasanius march again.
Courage and Honour to you all!

eBook license

This license is made between:

Games Workshop Limited t/a Black Library, Willow Road, Lenton, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, United Kingdom (“Black Library”); and

the purchaser of a Black Library e-book product (“You/you/Your/your”)

(jointly, “the parties”)

These are the terms and conditions that apply when you purchase a Black Library e-book (“e-book”). The parties agree that in consideration of the fee paid by you, Black Library grants you a license to use the e-book on the following terms:

* 1. Black Library grants to you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free license to use the e-book in the following ways:

o 1.1 to store the e-book on any number of electronic devices and/or storage media (including, by way of example only, personal computers, e-book readers, mobile phones, portable hard drives, USB flash drives, CDs or DVDs) which are personally owned by you;

o 1.2 to access the e-book using an appropriate electronic device and/or through any appropriate storage media.

* 2. For the avoidance of doubt, you are ONLY licensed to use the e-book as described in paragraph 1 above. You may NOT use or store the e-book in any other way. If you do, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license.

* 3. Further to the general restriction at paragraph 2, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license in the event that you use or store the e-book (or any part of it) in any way not expressly licensed. This includes (but is by no means limited to) the following circumstances:

o 3.1 you provide the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.2 you make the e-book available on bit-torrent sites, or are otherwise complicit in ‘seeding’ or sharing the e-book with any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.4 you attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.

* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.