He had to stop him, or at least alert others that there was a viper in the nest. Lorz had been their vox-operator, and the caster set was in the driver’s compartment of Calth’s Light. Lerato began crawling towards the side door, the sound of heavy footsteps approaching and the powerful reek of chemicals lending his agonised movements extra speed.
An armoured boot stamped down on his ankle, crushing it to fragments without effort.
‘Now, now,’ said the beast, kneeling down to flip him onto his back. ‘They’ll find you soon enough, mortal, but I need a bit more time to get aboard one of these ships before then.’
‘You won’t succeed,’ said Lerato, through clenched teeth and a dizzying haze of unendurable agony. ‘They’ll find you and kill you.’
The beast grinned, and Lerato had never seen anything so hideous in all his life.
‘If you only knew how many times I’ve heard in the last six months,’ said the beast.
Lerato spat blood in the beast’s face, but instead of anger, he saw grim amusement and a towering ego. The beast wiped the blood from his face with his arm, a glittering silver limb the surface of which swam like mercury trapped in glass. The blood vanished, drawn within the arm like water absorbed by a sponge.
‘You know, it was depressingly easy getting to this place,’ said the beast. ‘All I had to do was watch and learn where your predictable little routines made you vulnerable. I just let you see what you wanted to see, and watch as you danced like good little puppets towards somewhere far, far away from here. Who’d have thought that Cadaras Grendel would actually prove to be useful for something after all?’
‘We beat you,’ snarled Lerato. ‘Just like we’ll beat anyone else stupid enough to attack Ultramar.’
‘You and your big blue friends might have beaten M’kar’s rag-tag army,’ said the beast with a conversational nod, ‘but one day someone is going to punish you for sticking to Guilliman’s dogma like slaves.’
‘Who are you?’ hissed Lerato, as the last of his life bled out of him.
‘I’m the beast,’ said the Iron Warrior. ‘But you can call me Honsou.’
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hailing from Scotland, Graham McNeill worked for over six years as a Games Developer in Games Workshop’s Design Studio before taking the plunge to become a full-time writer. Graham’s written a host of SF and Fantasy novels and comics, as well as a number of side projects that keep him busy and (mostly) out of trouble. His Horus Heresy novel, A Thousand Sons, was a New York Times bestseller and his Time of Legends novel, Empire, won the 2010 David Gemmell Legend Award. Graham lives and works in Nottingham and you can keep up to date with where he’ll be and what he’s working on by visiting his website.
Join the ranks of the 4th Company at www.graham-mcneill.com
A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION
Published in 2012 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK
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Cover illustration by Stefan Kopinski.
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ISBN 978-0-85787-561-7
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