Contents

Cover

Witchbringer – Extract

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

Chapter 1

Hearing a man die was no pleasant thing. Listening to ten thousand scream their death songs in unison was almost too much for even a hardened veteran to bear.

Glavia Aerand turned on her small, firm bedroll, pulling a threadbare woollen blanket tighter around her shoulders. The aged fabric scratched against her pallid, brown skin, stretched gossamer-thin over her gaunt frame and streaked with rivulet shadows of fine veins beneath. She closed her eyes and tried to drown the screaming out, then cursed and swung her feet onto the icy stone floor.

Even with her eyes closed she saw it. Perhaps even especially then. That brilliant, burning spear of silver-gold light, charging through the deepest recesses of her mind. Blotting out every shadow. Every small preserve of solitude. Every scrap of the soul that had once been her own.

Slowly, she drew herself down to the floor, the frigid dark stone of her chamber burning like fire against warm skin. She let her blanket fall to the side, only a thin shift between her and the chilled morning air, then crossed her legs and began to pray.

‘O Immortal Emperor,’ she whispered, lips trembling in the cold. ‘I lay myself bare and true at the feet of your eternal Throne. I prostrate myself in silence for I am not worthy to speak. Only a broken servant in the face of your power. May your unending light fall upon me and strip me clean of the taint I carry within my soul.’

Words spilled from her lips like water from a drowning man’s lungs, in a desperate gout devoid of preparation or elegance. She had once believed that the words themselves had meaning. She had once clung to their phrasing and cadence with devotion and fear. She had burned litanies and rogations on the surface of her soul, like so many who called on the God-Emperor’s name, yet all that time her supplications never gleaned a response.

But she knew the truth, now.

Not that no one was listening, but that to the one who listened, her frail voice formed only a single drop in an ocean. And in that seething sea of suffering, wretched human souls reaching out to the Holy Throne of Terra across the maddening, formless void of the galaxy, what had she done to earn anything more than cold indifference? And yet, if the preachers and firebrands spoke true, the God-Emperor of Mankind heard her every word.

As Aerand’s lips stilled, she felt her mind slow and focus, drawing ever closer to that terrible, brilliant light. Five years ago, she had not even known what to look for. Four years ago, and she had not wanted to see. Two years ago, it had still pained her to look upon it for too long.

But now she could not turn away even if she wished to.

Slowly, the light of the Astronomican swelled within her, washing her skin in a prickling, burning peace. Like a pillar of living, breathing fire, the psychic beacon lanced through the fabric of the immaterium, carrying the God-Emperor’s will, and His power, to the furthest reaches of the galaxy.

As Aerand drew closer, the beacon resolved, a single cable clarifying into its component fibres. Ten thousand individual, blessed threads, twisting through the hollow dark of the empyrean. Ten thousand strained, angelic voices, screaming their own harmonies into that endless void.

Ten thousand Chosen.

Ten thousand dying psykers seated in the chamber of the Astronomican beside the God-Emperor Himself on Holy Terra, throwing their minds, and His will, into the frigid, lifeless reaches of the warp, knowing they had no hope of surviving the act.

A single tear rolled down the side of Glavia Aerand’s face. Not of sorrow, for she did not envy the psykers she envisioned. Better than most, she understood the extent of their service to the Imperium. Of their full and total surrender to, and usage by, the Golden Throne. Nor did she weep from joy at escaping their fate, for when she spoke to herself in the night with honesty on her lips, she knew that in many ways her own fate was harder. That she might be consumed in a slower burn, but that she would be consumed all the same.

No, instead she wept as only a once-soldier could, at the beautiful, terrible, enviable purpose carried undeniably in every single note. Ten thousand lives joined in unison for a moment of glory. Ten thousand voices howling in the face of cold fate. And Emperor-be-praised, she missed that purpose, maybe even more than she missed the soldiers she had once shared such purpose with.

Suddenly, however, another sound broke the music.

Aerand started from her meditation, catching a deep and gasping breath. It was not uncommon, she knew, for a psyker to lose themselves so completely within the beauty of the Astronomican that they could forget to sleep, or eat, or even breathe.

As she forced her attention away from that terrible music, and pulled her eyes from the scintillating white fire of the Astronomican, a sound from the wall of her chamber came to her again.

Thump.

The sound of flesh striking resistance.

Thump.

The sound of meat being thrown against stone.

Before she realised precisely what she was doing, Aerand stood at the door with her robe drawn around her. Its folds swallowed her thin, gaunt form in rippling waves, and she found herself, not for the first time, missing the soldier’s physique that she had long carried before five years at the scholastica psykana had turned her body into a weak, lank shell. Instincts, however, did not atrophy quite as quickly as strength, and while violence between acolytes of the schola was strictly prohibited outside of formal exercises, someone was being assaulted in the room beside her.

Aerand threw her mind across the doorway, but nothing moved in the narrow hallway beyond. Through the wall, however, in the chamber beside her, a blistering, multicoloured darkness roiled.

For a moment, Aerand’s mind recoiled from the raw warp energy gathering only yards away. For five years, she had trained to channel such forces, to reach into the Chaotic, dark space beyond the material world and bend its power to the Emperor’s will. But it was precisely that knowledge that made her painfully aware of how dangerous such forces could be.

Soon that wave of animal fear was replaced by one of confusion. Even with half a foot of psychically shielded stone separating her from that twisting, sickly darkness, she should have felt a power this strong before now. Even with her mind attuned to the light of the Astronomican, a shadow this deep should have blotted it out.

In one movement she threw open the door to her chamber and swept into the corridor outside, preparing mentally to overwhelm whatever psychic barriers had been placed on the entrance to the chamber beside hers. Instead, however, its door lay ajar and unguarded, no sound emerging but that horrible, meaty drum.

The taste of bile rising slowly in the back of her throat, Aerand toed the dark wooden door open and looked on at the macabre scene in utter disgust.

The small sleeping chamber was identical to her own in every respect aside from one. On the bare stone floor beside the adjoining wall, a young man sat in a pool of his own blood. He was naked from the waist up, and his nearly translucent skin coursed with thin, serpentine veins over emaciated bones. At the end of each of his battered wrists hung a mass of mangled, bloodied meat that had once been his hands. With a sickening drip, blood fell in coagulating droplets from the shattered mess of tendon and crushed bone at the end of each stump. Quickly, Aerand scanned the room but found no other occupants.

‘Acolyte,’ Aerand called, her voice measured but anxious. ‘Tell me who did this to you.’

The scholastica psykana was not a gentle place. To take a wild, unbroken psyker and turn them into something stable enough to be used required patience and cruelty in equal parts. These halls had not been kind to her, or the countless thousands of psykers who had walked them before her. Feuds and infighting between the academy’s myriad clandestine cabals were not only common, but encouraged, and violence between individual acolytes was simply a fact of life. But there were rules to that violence, proper outlets in which it was to be expressed, and for a student to be ambushed in the middle of night, then left to bleed out alone in the cold and the darkness…

Something turned in Aerand’s gut at the thought.

‘Acolyte,’ she called again, anger lacing her voice. She could not call the man a friend. Such words had no meaning in a place like this. But she’d been blessed with true friends once – names like Corwyn, Olemark, Vyse and Argos – and she knew precisely the fury that she would have felt if she’d found any of them in this same sorry state.

When she called, the young man did not turn. Instead, he lifted his right arm, its mangled remnant trailing a stream of dark crimson, then smashed it into the wall in front of him.

Thump.

‘Acolyte.’

Thump.

His other arm struck the wall with a wet, splintering sound as the bones of his wrist shattered against unyielding stone. When he pulled away, a clump of yellow fat and blood hung in its place, rolling down the wall to join the charnel pile at his feet. Aerand took a step into the room. Violence was one thing. She understood violence. But this was something else entirely.

‘Acolyte,’ she said slowly, reaching towards the young man’s bloodied arms. ‘Can you at least tell me what you’re doing?’

‘The light,’ he mumbled. ‘I have to reach the light.’

Aerand sighed. Of course.

She rested her hand on the young man’s shoulder. His frame was slight, but she knew better than most exactly how strong the mind inside that frail body was.

Gifted. Tainted. Cursed. Burdened. As heavily as she carried the weight of those words, this young man bore them a dozen-fold more. Acolytes talked. Acolytes gossiped. And she’d seen enough from the boy to believe the rumours that he’d nearly been classified as a beta-level psyker during his first Assignment. Never once had she stopped to think that the burdens he carried would scale with the enormity of that raw power.

If the beautiful, terrible light of the Astronomican swam behind her eyes even when she slept, how much brighter must its sun have burned behind his? If the haunting, beckoning song of its dying wove melodies into her mind with every waking breath, how strong must that symphony have blared within his?

‘Acolyte,’ she whispered, setting her hand on his shoulder. ‘You can’t reach it. You can’t reach the Astronomican.’

‘But I have to,’ he replied, raising his arm once again.

Aerand stared at the dripping lump of flesh, at the mess of shattered bone and sinew that had once been the young man’s hands. As he made to strike the wall once again, she threw her mind against the motion.

His hand halted inches from the wall.

‘Why?’ Aerand asked. ‘Why do you have to reach it?’

The young man turned his eyes towards her, acknowledging her existence for the first time since she’d entered the room. Aerand expected an expression of pain, or at least distress, but instead, his lips curled upwards in a terrible, mindless grin.

‘I have to reach the light,’ he whispered. ‘I have to reach the light, so I can put it out.’

As she met his gaze, something within Aerand shivered, the taste of metal and blood suddenly coating her tongue. Where the young man’s irises should have been sat two pools of that same, undefinable darkness, reaching out towards her with a terrible, desperate hunger.

Suddenly, the thing wearing the acolyte’s body lifted its bloodied arm towards her, and Aerand found that she was the one unable to move.

‘Come with us,’ it implored, in a thousand voices. ‘Come with us and help us extinguish the flames.’

Aerand tried to step backwards, but found her feet set in place, as the acolyte rose to an unnatural height. As he uncrossed his legs, she saw with horrible realisation a pair of bloodied stumps at the end of them, matching his arms.

‘Think of the light,’ the thing whispered, lips unmoving. ‘Think of the light and the music and that accursed choir. I can give you the shadows back, child. I can give you the silence. I can give you your mind.’

Aerand watched, horrified, as her hand rose before her. As her fist drew back and then turned itself towards the wall against her will. The power behind the compulsion was staggering.

‘All I require is that you help me reach the light.’

Beside her, the thing that had once been human grinned, and a presence like ice raked its unholy claws against her mind. She winced, watching her fist charge forward, sped by that terrible, obscene power, and she did nothing to resist it. Instead, just before her bones struck the stone wall, she summoned her will and redirected the blow. The acolyte reeled as her fist struck the young man in the face, and Aerand found herself in control of her body once again.

She may have left a soldier’s life behind when she came to the scholastica, but she would always have a soldier’s mind. When her enemy pushes, the wise soldier does not push back, she redirects her enemy’s own power against him.

Free for a moment, Aerand moved in a blur. An elbow into the young man’s face. A sweep with her leg to send him toppling. Without feet to steady him or hands to catch his fall, the acolyte’s head struck the stone floor with a sickening sound.

Thump.

The young man’s body lay motionless as Aerand caught her breath in ragged gasps. It was a simple thing, in the end, to break a body already so physically weakened. A simple thing that the gifted so often forgot. The mind might be strong, but it dwelt in terribly fragile vessels.

She looked down at the blood dripping from her own elbow, thin sickly skin split like gossamer over her bones. Five years ago she would not have been damaged so easily. Five years ago she would not have even been out of breath. She let out a small sigh, then halted abruptly as the corpse on the floor began to move.

In the corner of the room, the single, dim torch lamp stuttered, red flame flickering an unnatural grey. On the floor, the broken body lifted bloodied arms up to its own face. In a horrible motion, it clawed with shattered stumps at its own eyes, and as it did, something else began to emerge.

With an alien, unnatural motion, the broken heap of flesh rose to its feet. From bloodied, deep-set, sunken eyes, a terrible shadow began to spill out like oil. Aerand’s throat filled suddenly with the flavour of blood, as her skin erupted with a telltale burning.

The corpse took a step towards her, shredded legs bending sideways, as the raw energy of the warp flowed out from it, completely unchecked.

‘Come now, child,’ it crooned gleefully. ‘You cannot truly be so simple. Break the vessel and you simply unlock the cage. Shatter the walls and you merely release what they hold.’

Thump.

Another step towards her.

Thump. Thump.

Two more and it was close enough to touch.

Aerand threw her hands forward and silver-gold fire erupted from them, swallowing the young man’s shattered body in a veritable pyre. Flame splashed against the stone walls, scorching them black, but when the flames died away, the corpse still stood. Amidst the smell of charred flesh, its burnt face cracked and grinned, then a bloodied stump reached up and struck Aerand in the chest.

She slammed into the wall, her back squelching against warm blood and bits of leftover flesh.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

The corpse strode towards her with a grotesque grace, its arms upraised, suspending her in the air. Aerand lifted a hand and the torch lamp flew off the wall, shattering against the side of the abomination’s head, but the husk did not slow. Darkness poured in waves from its eyes, pooling across the floor, seeping into the hall. Desperate, Aerand scrambled against her invisible restraints, but found herself unable to move, unable to breathe.

Thump.

The corpse stood directly before her now. Close enough to smell the sickly-sweet char of its flesh. Close enough that the darkness pouring from its eyes dripped against her body with a sickening chill. She closed her eyes as its charnel breath rolled against her, desperately seeking that music in the back of her mind.

‘Ahhhhhh. Yessssss,’ the thing before her whispered. ‘The light. You must help me find the light.’

But for the first time since she had arrived at the schola, the light of the Astronomican was gone.

Aerand’s eyes opened to the impact of a lance haft cracking against the exposed small of her back. Gasping, she buckled forward, catching herself against the rough, aged wood of a chamber door.

She whirled as the whoosh of another strike reached her ears. Her hand caught the haft of the lance an inch from her face, and she looked up into the expressionless, reflective faceplate of a suit of obsidian armour. In its glint, she caught a brief glimpse of herself, unbloodied and utterly unharmed.

Aerand swallowed as she stared at the towering form before her.

Premonitions were tricky, feckless things, and this was not the first time she’d found herself awakening from a vision into circumstances remarkably different from the ones she had foreseen. It was, however, perhaps the most dangerous.

The creature paused for a moment, then ripped its lance from her grasp, a dark gauntlet charging towards her stomach instead. Aerand bent herself over the blow, allowing it to land, but avoiding the worst of its impact. She stepped sideways and backed slowly away. As she did, a pair of obsidian-clad figures turned with her, crystal-tipped lances glittering towards her chest.

‘My lords,’ Aerand stammered with the most deference that she could manage. ‘My apologies.’

Throne be true, she didn’t want to apologise. She wanted to scream.

Beside her stood two fully armoured Black Sentinels, the scholastica psykana’s infamous guardians. Every inch of its members’ bodies coated in night-dark, psychically shielded armour, the order represented both the schola’s protectors and gaolers in one. Charged with the defence of the academy’s acolytes from threats both peripheral and internal, the sentinels faced their role with vicious dedication.

Still reeling mentally from the clarity of her premonition, the last thing Aerand wanted was a fight. She might walk away if she was lucky, but Black Sentinels did not carry those lances for nothing.

‘I’m not certain what happened. I think I can explain.’

Unfortunately, the sentinels’ impenetrable armour shielded not only their faces, but also their minds, making it nearly impossible for Aerand to gauge either figure’s reaction. The fact that neither sentinel had impaled her yet was precious little reassurance that things were going well.

‘An acolyte found outside her chamber after hours.’ The lilting, almost inhuman voice that emerged from one armoured carapace sent a chill down the back of Aerand’s neck. Five years in these halls, and she’d never heard a sentinel speak. ‘And I can smell the bitter warp taint surrounding her from here. I don’t believe I require any information beyond that.’

Aerand cursed as the sentinels advanced. A beating at least. Certainly worse if she resisted. At each of the towering figures’ hips a small, black rod hung loosely from their armour, crackling and humming with a terrible life. In each weapon’s place a small hole glittered in the empyrean, the weapon destroying the link between the warp and the physical world. While the sentinels’ lances were more than capable of bleeding her to death from a dozen wounds, a single brush with the night rods they carried on their hips would be more than enough to cataclysmically overwhelm her psychically active mind and turn her into a seizing, frothing invalid.

Unfortunately, she didn’t have time for a beating – one that would leave her bruised and hardly able to speak, let alone pass on the warning she carried. She turned, ready to run, before noting the matching pair of obsidian figures behind her. Four to one. Not good odds. Not good odds at all.

Aerand’s eyes flicked to the door, memories of her portent flooding back in a wave. If she could only convince them of the danger within.

‘You don’t understand,’ she said. ‘It’s not me you should be worried about. I need to warn–’

A lance haft cracked against her flank. Aerand stumbled, then sidestepped the follow-on blow.

‘I’m telling the truth,’ she stammered, as another blow fell, dropping to her knees to narrowly avoid a thrust intended for her face.

Four to one. She would not walk out of this fight. And even if she did, she would find herself hanging, regardless.

Aerand closed her eyes and cast her mind towards the door to the chamber beside her. Behind it, the smallest of dark energies waited.

Small for now.

Contained for now.

But it would remain neither of those for long.

Wincing, Aerand let a blow fall across her thighs. There was no time for this. No time for simple rules executed by petty, mundane enforcers incapable of looking more than seconds into the future.

She reached out for the burning light in her mind. The Black Sentinels might be shielded from direct psychic forces, but the material world around them was not. Gold flame flickered to life at the tips of her fingers, as the deathly chorus of the Astronomican chanted in her ears. She waited for another blow to fall, but instead, a new sound interrupted that music.

Aerand opened her eyes to find an obsidian lance haft suspended inches in front of her face. The weapon shook slightly as the sentinel wielding it struggled against invisible shackles, and his breath rose and fell in winded gasps. At his side, his night rod crackled with rage, as it tried desperately, and failed, to overwhelm the psionic force directed against him. Over that sound a staccatoed clicking rose, and Aerand turned to see a hunched form approaching slowly down the hall.

She breathed a sigh of commingled relief and fear.

In any other situation, the sight of Lord Prefector Dariya Ule and the broken shell of a human crawling before him might have shattered her courage. The ancient ecclesiarch had long since cast most of his physical body aside, and the figure that approached was sculpted more of metal and holy fetish than of flesh. One by one, each of his dozen multi-articulated adamantium legs rose and fell in an inhuman, serpentine motion, carrying the man on a scintillating metal wave. An ecclesiarch’s robe fell atop the writhing appendages, bound tightly around his chest with two rows of ivory linkages, each fashioned in the sacred shape of a human skull. As the lord prefector’s garment billowed around him, row upon row of holy scripture inscribed in golden leaf glinted against leathery skin stretched thin across his emaciated ribs.

If the apocryphal rumours among the scholastica’s acolytes were to be believed, the only organic component of the man that remained was the deeply wrinkled, ochre-dark face rising from the shadowy recesses of his cowl, entirely unmarred by the fabrications that consumed the rest of his body.

Within those shadows, the gleaming surface of two adamantium eyes stared blankly outwards. And despite their lack of any appreciable markings, the lord prefector’s gaze unmistakably fell on the sentinel holding his lance at Aerand’s neck.

‘Lord prefector,’ the sentinel mumbled. ‘An acolyte of yours, I belie–’

The old priest grunted, raising a skull-capped cane, and the sentinel’s voice fell into choked silence. From the base of the macabre device, a twisting column of fused vertebrae stretched to the ground, laced with a short leash of gossamer-thin silver wire. At the other end, an emaciated husk of a man knelt on the stone floor shivering in silence.

Ule’s hound shook with the pressure of psychic exertion, his soul burning like a pyre in Aerand’s mind. Blood dripped in a slow stream from the pitiful man’s nostrils, commingled with the dark ichor that wept from the wounds where Ule’s psionic goad entered his skull. What the psyker had done to deserve such a fate, Aerand could not even begin to imagine, but his penance would be blessedly short. She had seen Ule on only a few fearsome occasions, but a different psyker had accompanied him each time.

A single glance at Ule’s hound and the sentinel smartly withdrew from the lord prefector’s path, his lance remaining suspended where it stood. A strange noise emerged from the guard’s obsidian armour, as if he had thought to object to the seizure of his weapon, then reconsidered.

As the other sentinels followed suit, withdrawing to the edges of the hallway, Lord Prefector Ule arrived at Aerand’s side and reached a single, multi-articulated arm towards her. As he lifted her to her feet, there was not the slightest of sounds. No whirring of hidden internal servos, no squeaking of aged, imperfect hydraulics. For if the rumours were truly to be credited, not a single thread of wire or tubing marred the lord prefector’s simulacrum body. No true augmetics, merely a cluster of machine-like attachments powered entirely by the wretched psyker at his feet.

‘A premonition?’ Lord Prefector Ule asked slowly, a sullen grimace written across his face.

Aerand nodded.

‘How soon?’

‘I’m not certain, lord. Soon enough.’

A simple grunt escaped Ule’s ancient mouth. The man’s gaze fell on her once again, eliciting the faintest sensation of animal fear in her mind. Ule’s hound twitched and a brief feeling of loss washed over her, her own memories of her vision greying slightly before returning to that same uncomfortable clarity.

The lord prefector nodded. ‘Ugly enough, acolyte. You were right to venture out to find me.’

‘But I–’ Aerand began, before Ule’s empty gaze cut her words short.

Of course Ule knew she hadn’t ventured out to find him. But not even the lord prefector of the scholastica psykana would choose open conflict with a squad of Black Sentinels when given the choice. And an acolyte fleeing her quarters to seek out a prefector was a more palatable explanation for them than the truth.

‘Thank you, lord prefector,’ she replied. ‘I’m simply pleased you heard my summons and arrived.’

‘Come,’ Ule said, turning towards the dark, rough-cut door to the chamber beside them. As his hound turned with him, the sentinel’s lance clattered to the stone.

‘Wait outside,’ the lord prefector ordered. ‘But in the unlikely event that your services are needed…’

The sentinel snatched up his fallen weapon, then fell into line with his three comrades.

As Aerand entered the small chamber behind the seething metallic form of Lord Prefector Ule, the echo of a premonition washed over her.

‘It is strange, I imagine,’ Ule said, ‘to tread a place once in your mind, then a second time, in body.’

Aerand shivered at the subtle intrusion into her thoughts. That she had not detected the faintest whiff of the lord prefector’s hound touching her mind made the breach all the more disconcerting. And yet his words were undeniably true.

As they swept into the spartan chamber, trepidation gripped Aerand like an anxious vice. This was the curse of premonition, the subtle danger of portents and forewarnings, always. She had watched herself die in this room only moments before, and she had played long enough at the game of soothsaying to know false visions from those that might one day come true. But whether her premonition carried warnings for this moment or next century, was a skill even the most powerful diviner struggled to master.

Even still, a true future was not one that was destined to come to pass. Just as the trunk of a tree could support myriad true-born branches, so the flesh of the present fed and nourished an infinite progeny of fates. The very presence of the lord prefector in this room was evidence that he meant to prune those branches.

‘Acolyte.’ Ule’s voice echoed as he settled into the small, dim-lit room. The torch lamp beside the young man’s bed flickered against the prefector’s steely form, reflected in waves of glimmering starbursts against the stellated, ochre-dark stone walls and ceiling. For now, the torch lamp’s flame burned true and yellow, but Aerand could not help but recall the unnatural grey hue it had assumed at the moment her premonition faltered.

Aerand stepped beside the lord prefector to find a young man lying in the centre of the room. He curled at the foot of a rough-spun bed, its firm fibres soiled with a thick sheen of sweat. His thin blanket discarded, the young psyker shivered, a glazed expression across his taut, drawn face.

‘Acolyte,’ Ule repeated, tapping his cane a single time against the stone floor. Ule’s hound shivered and the air rippled with the unmistakable tenor of psychic compulsion.

The young man’s gaze flicked up to acknowledge the lord prefector, and his cracked lips parted in silent greeting. For a moment, something akin to composure returned to his face before vanishing, swallowed again by a knit brow and the weight of mindless, animal fear.

‘Come,’ Ule spoke, a heavy sigh escaping the ecclesiarch. At his words Aerand felt that indescribable gravity and the faintest hint of copper at the back of her throat. Briefly the hymn of the Astronomican swelled in her ears at the strength of the hound’s compulsion.

Hesitantly, she crossed to the other side of the bedroll as Ule settled onto the stone floor with a quiet rustling of metal. As his gold-trimmed robe settled around him, a thin, silver arm emerged from a voluminous sleeve. Gently, the appendage settled on the young psyker’s beaded forehead, and the man shivered briefly, then stilled. As the lord prefector’s empty eyes settled on the man, the acolyte’s gaunt form convulsed slightly, then fell still.

‘Close your eyes,’ Ule ordered, meeting Aerand’s gaze. ‘Close your eyes and tell me what you hear.’

Her tongue suddenly dry, Aerand voiced no response. Instead, she shut her eyes as instructed and fell instantly into the First Meditation. The Meditation of Silence, the Meditation of Self, the Meditation of the God-Emperor’s Grace. Before a nascent psyker could learn to understand the raging power within them, let alone the God-Emperor’s will for its use, they needed to learn simply to observe.

As the room stilled around Aerand, her thoughts slowing with each breath and the pounding of her heartbeat, the sound of subtler things crept into her awareness.

‘I hear the soft grinding of tendon over bone as the man on the mat before us shivers. I hear the quiet vibration of the torch lamp’s glass casing, expanding and contracting with the wavering flame’s heat within. I hear the holy music of the Astronomican, lord, the song of ten thousand psykers crying out in both torment and blessed rapture at the God-Emperor’s feet.’

Something else, amidst it all…

‘Lord prefector,’ Aerand added. ‘I hear something amiss.’

Quiet at first, almost imperceptible, and yet unavoidable once she had noted its presence. All at once, the skin along Aerand’s back erupted in gooseflesh, and the taste of fresh blood trickled into her throat. Like the grinding of metal against a stone surface, that thrumming rhythm reverberated in her mind, clashing with the Astronomican’s hymn.

‘Good,’ Ule grunted, nodding to himself. On the bedroll before him the young psyker shook as Ule’s hound threw the full weight of its mind against him.

‘There is a common misconception,’ Ule said. ‘Even among the… gifted, that the energies of the empyrean differ in aspect. That the underlying sources of power behind the miracles of the blessed saints and the perverse ravages of heretics and daemons must somehow be inherently, morally separate. Like water from a cistern, power drawn from one focality of the immaterium will sustain and enliven, some believe, while that pulled from another might poison and corrupt. Entire cults and cabals revolve around such misguided tenets, determined – often with obscene focus of purpose – to find “pure” wells from which they might draw without risk.

‘Even within the scholastica, acolyte, these beliefs are not entirely unheard of, though I have worked tirelessly to suppress such nonsense as heresy.’

A chill washed over Aerand as the man on the floor pushed back against the lord prefector’s hound. The psyker reeled as if struck, and for a terrible moment, the swirling energy within the young man swelled. Instinctively, Aerand threw her own mind forward before she was slapped back by the hound.

Ule raised his hand in her direction.

‘There are no safe havens within the torrent of the warp, acolyte, because there are no incorruptible fragments of the human soul. The immaterium, like all other realms of the universe, holds no innate spiritual predilections at all, and the raw, Chaotic energy of the empyrean can be no more hallowed nor corrupt than a given sea wave or breeze. And yet, unlike the ocean or sky, the fabric of the immaterium is inevitably, inextricably shaped by the moral composure of the souls that access it. And while the source substance might be spiritually indifferent, the resulting symbiosis certainly is not.

‘In the best of cases, the empyrean, accessed by a mind resting at peace within the Emperor’s will, produces wonders unbelievable to behold. In the worst, when given to a mind under torment, that same power takes on another flavour entirely.’

‘Lord prefector,’ Aerand gasped, stifling a sudden wave of fear. Her eyes flashed open to meet Ule’s empty silver gaze.

As she stared at the ecclesiarch with a growing panic, she noted the subtle shifting of his hands. With serpentine fluidity the fingers of his right hand quivered in rapid succession, thrumming against his skull cane in the strangest, most unsettling metallic dance. Kneeling beside him, his hound shook, blood-tinged spittle dripping from his mouth.

‘Lord prefector.’ A more desperate appeal this time. With alarm, Aerand noted the room’s sudden darkening, and turned to face the torch lamp’s newly blackened flame. A faint haze of frost crept slowly across the glass.

On the bedroll before her, the young psyker stirred suddenly, his eyes flashing open as that screeching, metallic cry swelled in her mind.

‘Lord prefector!’ Aerand shouted, casting her own mind towards the young man. She was thrown back unceremoniously by a rigid wall of writhing multicoloured shadow, and a piercing inhuman screech that threatened to burst her ears. Then, just as quickly as it arrived, the noise vanished, and she found herself cognisant only of the sound of her heartbeat crashing in her ears.

Slowly, Lord Prefector Ule stirred, his coiled legs unwinding like a tree spreading roots. As he rose to his feet, the shivering form on the bedroll fell still, and the young man’s breathing settled into a comfortable pattern.

‘Come,’ the lord prefector ordered, casting a final glance back towards the psyker. Aerand noticed an almost imperceptible flick of the ecclesiarch’s fingers as his dull grey eyes fell upon the young man one last time. At his feet, Ule’s hound twitched and the movement of the acolyte’s breathing stilled. The man’s glassy eyes fell gently open.

The most natural shade of earthen brown.

Click here to buy Witchbringer.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2022.
This eBook edition published in 2022 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Represented by: Games Workshop Limited – Irish branch, Unit 3, Lower Liffey Street, Dublin 1, D01 K199, Ireland.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Igor Kieryluk.

Witchbringer © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2022. Witchbringer, 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: 978-1-80026-916-3

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.

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 Sarah, for fourteen years of supporting even my craziest goals.
To Filip and Michael, for keeping me at it when I would have quit long ago on my own.

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.