Contents

Cover

Tomb World – Extract

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

Chapter 1

A fire burns beneath a metal grate. Above the fire is a sigil, carved from polished onyx, wreathed in oily smoke.

The sigil is the icon of the Triarch, known to every witness gathered about the fire for it is affixed upon their bodies. These bodies, formed of living metal, are aglow from the light of the fire, and aglow from within.

Placed at intervals around the fire are other objects, grains of sand and shards of brass. The fire is unnecessary, as is the sigil and the rest. In truth, almost all of the sorcerous adornments placed about the chamber are unnecessary. Kamoteph has ever scorned the trappings of ‘magic’, the cloak-and-shadow lies that many practitioners of the cryptek arts employ to conjure mystery and conceal the true source of their powers.

But the trappings have their uses.

Lord Hekasun watches all that transpires with rapt attention. His sharp-edged skull twitches left and right in the manner of an avian as he struggles to comprehend that which is beyond him. Each of Kamoteph’s smallest gestures draws his sponsor’s gaze, his copper oculars glowing like banked coals within the depths of their sockets.

The fire dances along the planes and edges of the cube, the only object that is truly needed for the ritual’s success. It is smooth, no larger than the cryptek’s clenched fist, cradled at the peak of a pyramid of metagold struts. A work of uncommon artifice, the tesseract labyrinth is an example of the necron mastery of space and time. It can serve as repository, archive and receptacle for anything its bearer chooses to place outside the strictures of reality.

In this case, it is a prison.

A chant echoes from the stone walls, stirring the air that has been pumped into the chamber to serve as fuel for the flames. It is an ancient language, drawn not from memory but from the texts of a dead empire. The twelve most gifted of Kamoteph’s acolytes form a circle about him, though between them stand the impassive forms of Lord Hekasun’s lychguard. Mandulis, the lord’s vargard, is closer at hand, a bare pace from his master and rigid with restrained violence.

Kamoteph’s dominion-link with his apprenteks make them extensions of his will, subordinate to his needs. In the driest, most mechanical sense, Kamoteph has linked their processing power with his, expanding his capacity to interrogate the gargantuan reams of data that exist within the cube’s matrices. In the arcane sense, which is at once more true and more false, he has slaved their meagre abilities to his, sustaining him as he explores the labyrinth’s dimensionless interior.

Kamoteph stands hunched over the fire and sigil, arms and hands moving occasionally between ritual poses. He is bent almost in half, his spine a heavy arc of necrodermis that forces his head low, a bare cubit from the sigil and the flames beneath. Kamoteph the Crooked is the name he has been given by unfriendly courtiers, a mocking sobriquet to which the cryptek is entirely indifferent.

He draws metal hands together, digits shifting into the seventh configuration of Olm. Kamoteph has been at work for thirty-one days, his mind bound to the infinite medium of the labyrinth. Such endurance offers no challenge for his god-wrought body, but it is not his body that has been taxed.

It is like casting a noose around smoke. Slowly, infinitely slowly, the cryptek shapes and sculpts the mist, sifting each speck of unreality for a trace of what he seeks. Those he finds, he husbands with deft gusts of power, drawing each fragment together from the diffuse nothingness in which they dwell.

This analogy is good enough for Hekasun’s stunted imagination, but it is also wrong in every way that matters.

‘Well?’ Hekasun interrupts, not for the first time. It is fortunate that much of the ritual is purely for show, as Kamoteph’s lord and master is an impatient and querulous creature.

Lifting even a fraction of his attention from the miasma of the labyrinth is a trial, but Kamoteph does so. ‘I am drawing near, o lord.’

He is. His task requires immense focus and sublime skill, but Kamoteph possesses both. The ephemeral sense of a consciousness, of metal and fusion and a functioning mind, are all coalescing from the labyrinth’s innards.

‘I name you, Khemet.’

Kamoteph speaks the words aloud. This is not for show. The cryptek is summoning a thinking mind from a void, beckoning it to remember itself. He can feel it respond. The ephemeral is becoming enduring, the diffuse becoming whole.

‘I name you, Khemet. I call you. I seek you, and bind you, and pull you near.’

The chanting grows in strength in response to Kamoteph’s unspoken command.

‘I name you, Khemet, and I call you forth.’

It happens in a rush. Like hauling a boulder up one side of a mountain, eventually the stone reaches the peak and tips.

Atoms remember their bonds with one another. Crystalline synapses draw together, firing in sequence. Fragments of matter bind, becoming metal bones, metal limbs, metal sinews. The caged star that burns at the centre of each necron remembers its strength, and a blaze of jade light erupts within the labyrinth’s surface.

Now is the critical time. He is the conduit, the path out of the maze. Kamoteph must hold himself together. He is the beacon, the lighthouse, the flame in the darkness.

The apprenteks’ chant reaches a furious pitch in response to their master’s need. Their core-flux vents blaze with the effort, each taxed to their limits. In the sconces the flames rise, dancing in time with the chant, and the shadows lengthen. At Kamoteph’s side, all but forgotten, Hekasun leans closer, entranced by the occult magic at work.

An apprentek succumbs. His reactor core gutters like a candle in a gale, and he collapses to the godsteel deck with a discordant crash of metal that is lost beneath his brethren’s chanting. Kamoteph ignores the death, drawing harder on his bond with those that remain. He must endure. If he falters now, all that he has done to reach this point shall have been for naught.

Something stirs in the labyrinth’s depths. It comes as though from a great distance, growing from the merest flicker of movement. Clouds part, making way for viridian light that banishes the shadows of the chamber. It burns from the labyrinth cube, illuminating every plane and edge of Kamoteph’s face, shining with a ferocity that eclipses all other light.

It is only in the final fraction of a second that Kamoteph is able to perceive what it is he has summoned, and a shiver of fear racks his metal frame.

For the longest time, she has been nothing.

Less than nothing. Whatever was thrown into the labyrinth has not survived its torment. She has been broken. Torn apart by the relentless march of time. Riven by utter and total absence.

And now, without warning, she is restored.

Existence is incomprehensible. Nothing is as it should be. She feels metal where there should be flesh. Her thoughts are shards of arithmetic calculation, not the lightning storm of consciousness.

There is a void where her soul should reside.

It is too much. Whatever kernel of self that still lies at the centre of her being rebels. She cannot endure the horror of the real, and so she flees back into the oblivion that has been her sanctuary.

The thing that emerges can barely be called a necron.

It writhes, a flailing tangle of metal that bursts from the blaze of light that shines from the labyrinth’s surface. It crashes through the fire, scattering charred wood and casting the priceless cube from which it has escaped into the farthest corner of the room.

A wordless moan pours from a maw that gapes open, a cry of utter horror that lashes at the chamber’s walls. Its jaw grows wider to unleash the scream, drooping under its own weight until it detaches and crashes to the floor. Necrodermis sloughs from its limbs as its morphic field falters, leaving a skeletal under-structure that thrashes in purposeless fury. Jade light explodes from fractures that open in its torso, so much so that Kamoteph fears that all his work to pull the creature from the labyrinth will be wasted in a gush of unchained core-flux. But it holds itself together, scrabbling against the godsteel floor in a snarl of limbs.

Hekasun steps back, horrified, and his vargard takes his place. The brace of lychguard that flank the ritual stamp forwards with their warscythes levelled, replacing the apprenteks, who falter in their chanting and scatter in terror.

Whatever shred of consciousness the benighted creature possesses detects the threat. With a swirling crash of struts and spars it hurls itself towards the vargard’s blade. Mandulis catches the leap with the staff of his scythe, throwing it aside.

It lands in a heap, only to scuttle back to all fours and take off. It moves in an uncoordinated shambles, throwing itself forwards to catch itself on emaciated hands and feet. The sound of broken knives clattering against steel fills the room, beneath the moan that continues to howl from the ruin of its face.

‘Seal the chamber!’

Hekasun’s order comes too late. Despite its disordered gait it moves with unnatural speed. The entrance to the chamber is a low archway, lit by the soft glow of power conduits from the corridor beyond. A pair of warriors stand before it, gauss flayers crossed to bar the way.

The thing crashes through the meagre barrier and lopes beneath the archway’s lintel. The sound of violence and horror echoes away as it charges, heedless, into the bowels of Kamoteph’s ship.

‘What madness have you unleashed?’ Hekasun rounds on the cryptek.

Kamoteph does not breathe, but he is breathless, exhausted by the final rush of effort necessary to draw the object of his search from her prison. He steps into the strewn wreckage of the ritual fire and retrieves the carved onyx sigil of the Triarch.

‘I have released her, my lord.’

‘As one would a plague?’ Hekasun stabs an accusatory finger towards the cryptek’s faceplate.

‘Hardly, my lord.’ Kamoteph is not accustomed to error, and exhaustion and pride make his reply sharper than is wise. When Hekasun’s oculars narrow, the cryptek bows low in apology. ‘I had not anticipated such a degree of synaptic degradation.’

‘It was folly to allow you to convince me of this course. Now I must hunt and eradicate a feral warrior through the decks of the ship.’

Kamoteph starts forwards in alarm. ‘I beseech you, lord, do not. Khemet has what we require. Everything hinges upon her.’

Hekasun stares at the cryptek. ‘We do not need her.’

Kamoteph bows low again. ‘With the greatest respect, my lord. We do.’

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 Svetlana Kostina.

Tomb World © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2025. Tomb World, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-83609-321-3

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.

With thanks, as ever, to Paul, for hauling me across the finish line once again.

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