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Now Peals Midnight – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Now Peals Midnight

John French

‘Time is relentless. Fate is remorseless. We cannot outrun the future – we can only endure it.’

– attributed to the Emperor at the outset of the First War of Unification

Five Hours to Midnight

‘Are you certain?’ Rogal Dorn, Praetorian of Terra, primarch of the VII Legion, looked at Armina Fel. The old astropath had always been frail, and now was little more than bones and skin driven by will.

‘As certain as we can be,’ she replied.

‘There has been no word from the system edge,’ he said.

‘Not yet, but there will be,’ said Armina. ‘The light will follow the words, the fire…’

‘How soon do you estimate?’

‘Soon, lord, hours at most.’

She lapsed into silence, and Dorn turned away, looking out at the night beyond the worn stone parapet of the Bhab Bastion.

The Imperial Palace gleamed in his sight. Flares of burning gas from disposal furnaces breathed from stacks. Lights blinked on the tips of spires, and beneath that the glow of millions of windows seeped up to smudge the dark to a muddy orange. Gun batteries clung to the stone, barrels pointed at the sky. Clusters of macro shield generators squatted amongst the colonnades and walkways like ticks burrowed into the mane of a lion. Layers of armour-clad buildings, hiding their elegance beneath slabs of metal shaped to deflect shell impacts. Between the scabs of armour lay kilometres of structures that had been marked as snare grounds. Porous to attack, they were laced with mines and traps both small and vast. In the battles to come – battles that had seemed constantly threatening and yet somehow distant – these areas would be allowed to fall. Their purpose was to draw in as many of the enemy as possible before being reduced to rubble and flame. And around them the guns of the Palace that was now a fortress would howl into the sky as the beauty of its past burned from its face.

‘The last grains of the future now fall and become the dust of the past,’ he said softly.

‘You sound as though this is the end, my lord,’ she said.

‘It is, after a fashion.’

Clouds scudded across the night sky. The lights of the Palace caught their edges, turning them into shapes of fire-orange and grey shadow.

Half a kilometre west of the bastion, the first of the shield generators began to test fire. Blisters of energy snapped into place across the heavens, shimmered and then vanished before snapping back into place. Snow began to fall as the shield interface met the moisture of the clouds. Threads of lightning flashed between them.

‘I came to you first, lord. The message will pass to the Sigillite, of course, unless you wish to tell him personally…’

‘He will know already,’ said Dorn, still watching the flare light of the shield tests. ‘He always does.’

‘And the Khan and Lord Sanguinius?’

‘Tell them,’ he said. ‘Tell them everything, and tell them I will attend with them shortly on the eastern prospect.’

‘And the signal?’

Dorn was silent for a second.

‘Not yet,’ he said at last.

Armina Fel opened her mouth to say something, and then closed it.

‘Not yet,’ he said again, his voice low and his eyes far away. In the distance, the next in the chain of shield generators began to fire. The sequence would march across the thousands of kilometres of the Palace, treading behind the fall of night. So large was the Palace that four hours separated the onset of darkness at the eastern gates from its arrival at the westernmost reaches. But midnight was the hour when night balanced above the Dome of Unity, and that moment still waited to pass.

‘One night we shall look up and see the heavens burning.’ The words came to him like a whisper breathed by a ghost.

‘My thanks, mistress,’ he said, and began to walk towards the stairs down into the mass of the bastion. The astropath’s face twitched as though her eyelids were trying to blink over the empty sockets of her eyes. ‘Thank you for this, and for everything.’

‘I am sorry,’ she called after him, but he did not turn.

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A Black Library Publication

Published in Great Britain in 2017 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

Now Peals Midnight © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2017. Now Peals Midnight, 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: 978-1-78572-850-1

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