by Guy Haley
Backlist
More tales of the Blood Angels from Black Library
DANTE
MEPHISTON: BLOOD OF SANGUINIUS
SHIELD OF BAAL
LEMARTES: GUARDIAN OF THE LOST
THE BLOOD ANGELS COLLECTION
More Warhammer 40,000 stories from Black Library
The Beast Arises
1: I AM SLAUGHTER
2: PREDATOR, PREY
3: THE EMPEROR EXPECTS
4: THE LAST WALL
5: THRONEWORLD
6: ECHOES OF THE LONG WAR
7: THE HUNT FOR VULKAN
8: THE BEAST MUST DIE
9: WATCHERS IN DEATH
10: THE LAST SON OF DORN
11: SHADOW OF ULLANOR
12: THE BEHEADING
Space Marine Battles
WAR OF THE FANG
A Space Marine Battles book, containing the novella The Hunt for Magnus and the novel Battle of the Fang
THE WORLD ENGINE
An Astral Knights novel
DAMNOS
An Ultramarines collection
DAMOCLES
Contains the White Scars, Raven Guard and Ultramarines novellas Blood Oath, Broken Sword, Black Leviathan and Hunter’s Snare
OVERFIEND
Contains the White Scars, Raven Guard and Salamanders novellas Stormseer, Shadow Captain and Forge Master
ARMAGEDDON
Contains the Black Templars novel Helsreach and novella Blood and Fire
Legends of the Dark Millennium
ASTRA MILITARUM
An Astra Militarum collection
ULTRAMARINES
An Ultramarines collection
FARSIGHT
A Tau Empire novella
SONS OF CORAX
A Raven Guard collection
SPACE WOLVES
A Space Wolves collection
Visit blacklibrary.com for the full range of novels, novellas, audio dramas and Quick Reads, along with many other exclusive products
Contents
Cover
Backlist
Title Page
Warhammer 40,000
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
About the Author
An Extract from ‘Shield of Baal’
A Black Library Publication
eBook license
Warhammer 40,000
It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.
Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Astra Militarum and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse.
To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.
Chapter One
The Red Mist
Already the morning gongs were ringing when Uigui the water seller roused himself for another day of thankless toil.
Uigui rose fully clothed, and went to empty his bladder into the home-made purification unit in the corner. Every drop of water was precious on Baal Secundus, whatever the source.
His single-roomed home held three cots, a table, the recyc unit and precious little else. Old transit pallets heaped with threadbare blankets against the cold of desert night were their beds. On the way to the recyc unit, Uigui passed his great burden, his idiot son. The boy had gone away to the Chapter trials full of hope, and come back minus his wits.
‘Get up! Up! Up, you little fool!’ Uigui kicked at his son’s booted feet. The boy thrashed awake and threw up his hands in alarm. A frightened face peeped out between filthy fingers.
‘Get up!’ growled Uigui. ‘Dawn’s coming – can’t you hear the Angel’s gongs?’ He looked out of a window of low-grade alabaster set into the wall of unpainted adobe. Daybreak should have shone pink through the stone. Instead a red darkness lingered outside.
Most mornings were cold but beautiful, the sky flawlessly smooth and tinted a deep rose by the light of the Red Scar. Sometimes, the colours were enough to stop Uigui and make him forget how much he hated his life. ‘Not that you can tell,’ grunted Uigui. ‘Red mist. A thick one too.’
‘D-d-d-d-do we-e-e have to, Da?’ said the boy.
Uigui looked at the boy with clear hatred as he urinated into the recyc funnel. ‘Y-y-yes!’ he spat back, mocking the boy’s stutter. ‘Now, up! I need help to fill the flasks, age be cursed, or I’d turn you over to the Emperor’s mercy and be rid of you!’
Uigui adjusted his filthy clothes and stamped, bow backed and swaying, to the door of gappy wood that separated the single room of his home from the goods yard outside. He clutched at his lower back as he reached for the door handle and rubbed fruitlessly at the pain in his bones, his mood souring further.
‘Be kinder to the boy. He is my daughter’s son,’ croaked the aged voice of the room’s final occupant. The coverings on the third bed shifted, the lump beneath them growing thin arms and knotted hands as a woman even more wasted and hunched than Uigui emerged. ‘You owe him some love for her memory, if you can’t summon some for the boy himself.’
The old woman coughed hard. Phlegm rattled around her throat. Uigui looked at her in disgust. Her face was as deeply lined as the pit of a fruit, as if time had rotted away the pleasant outer flesh, leaving the bitter, craggy interior of her soul exposed for all to see.
‘Where’s your daughter now, you old witch?’ he said. ‘
Dead. Dead and gone, leaving me with a fool and a crone for company.’
‘You are cruel,’ said the old woman. Clustered carcinomas blighted her face. She had only a few more months of life in her, but her eyes were bright and shrewd. Uigui hated her eyes most of all. ‘The Emperor will punish you.’
Uigui snarled. ‘We’ll all starve long before the Emperor notices if you and your precious grandson don’t rouse yourselves. We must be at the gates before they open for the day.’
The woman shrank back into her blankets. ‘The Red Mist is here. You will have no customers.’
Uigui rested his hand on the piece of scrap he had fashioned into the door handle. It was worn almost featureless. He had unearthed the metal in his youth from one of the moon’s ruined cities. An unidentifiable artefact of the system’s lost paradisal past, it could once have been a piece of art, it could have been a component from a wondrous machine. It could have been anything. Now it was old, ugly and broken, suitable only for the coarsest work. Just like Uigui.
‘Then we will starve. Get up. We go to work.’ He flipped the door open, letting it bang into the wall to show his anger.
The Red Mist was the worst he’d ever seen: a choking, thick vapour laden with sand particles. Only on a low gravity lunar body like Baal Secundus was such a phenomenon possible, though Uigui didn’t know that. His worldview was necessarily limited. What he saw was a day’s business ruined. Red Mist was iron sharp in smell and texture, a soupy brume that lacerated the nostrils. He coughed and pulled up his scarf to cover his mouth and nose. He had no clip to hold it in place, so he pressed it to the contours of his face with his left hand.
Though his home was modest, his stockyard contained a fortune. Four huge terracotta urns, taller than men and too wide for the embrace of two people to meet around, lined the wall. With such wealth to protect, the courtyard was better built than the house. The walls were of stone, not mud brick, and high, the tops studded with rusty spikes and broken glass. The gate was deliberately small, triple-barred, plated in scavenged metal, upon whose pocked surfaces the marks of the ancients were still visible, when the light was right.
There was no sun. The early day was tainted a bloody murk. The urns were looming shapes, the wall invisible. The yard was little over twenty feet side to side, but the Red Mist was so dense that day Uigui could not see across.
He paused. At the very least the fog would be full of toxins given off by Baal Secundus’ poisoned seas. If the sands in the mist had been picked up over one of the old cities, the rad levels would be high. Uigui supposed he should fetch his rad-ticker from inside. Frankly, he could not motivate himself to retrieve it. He was old. A dose of radiation from the badlands could not shorten his life by much, and if it did, what of it? He was tired of life. It was hard and unforgiving.
Sometimes he thought of ending it all, the misery, the graft, the wearing company of his son and mother-in-law. He had no illusions death would bring a happy afterlife in the Emperor’s care; all he wanted was peace. He could not bring himself to do it. The mindless will of genes forced him to continue living, which he did begrudgingly.
Blinking gritty moisture from his eyes, he headed for the lean-to where he kept his cart. A pair of tall wheels bracketed two cargo beds, one above the other. Three dozen clay flasks were on each level. He fetched the first and took it to the tap attached to the nearest urn. To fill it he had to let his scarf drop. The dust in the mist tickled his nose and he swore. Rusty water ran into the bottle, making him want to piss again. His bladder was another thing that was failing him.
‘Boy! Boy! Get out here and help me!’
The door creaked. Out came the old woman instead, her face veiled in the ridiculous manner of her desert tribe. Uigui should never have married out of town.
‘Where’s that damn boy?’ growled Uigui.
‘Let him breakfast, you old miser, he’ll be out in a moment.’
‘He’s a waste of food and water,’ said Uigui. He shut off the tap, pressed the cap closed on the bottle and fetched another flask.
‘It’s not his fault,’ said the old woman.
‘I think we all know that it’s the Angel’s fault,’ said Uigui quietly.
‘Hsst!’ she said. ‘That is heresy. Would you leave him without a father as well as his mind?’
‘He went to their trials a strong youth, and was returned to me a fool. Who else should I blame?’
‘Fate,’ she said. ‘He was not meant to join them, and he is getting better.’
‘He is not,’ said Uigui sourly. He set the full flask into his cart, and fetched a third.
The crone shuffled across the courtyard to the cart, her long skirts disturbing the moist sand of the ground. There she stopped, but she did not help, only watched him, a judgemental phantom in the fog. Uigui gave her a filthy look.
In her gnarled hands a small auto-tarot deck made its tooth-grinding clicks. She pushed the button at the side. The tiles behind its scratched viewing pane clattered into place. She studied the little pictures on them a moment, then pressed the button again. Then again. Uigui fought the urge to strike her, to knock the tarot from her hand and cast her out. The tarot was the instrument of the Emperor. Even he balked at such blasphemy.
‘Help me, then,’ he said. He squinted at the sky. ‘The sun is rising.’ The fog remained as thick as ever, but the light behind it was getting stronger. ‘We are late.’
The old woman hooked her tarot deck to her rope belt, took a flask up and went to the second urn.
‘Today is a day of great portents,’ she said.
‘You say that every day,’ said Uigui.
The woman shrugged. ‘Today it is true.’
‘Nonsense,’ he said, but he was wary of what she said. She had a knack for reading the tarot. He half believed she was a witch. In truth, he was frightened of her. He slammed the latest filled flask into the cart hard, making the others rattle. ‘Where is that boy?’
The boy pushed the cart. At least he was good for that. Uigui and the old woman walked behind. The flasks knocked and clinked in their trays, warning others they were coming. It was a good advertisement, but under the cover of the fog the noise made Uigui nervous. For all that Angel’s Fall was under the direct administration of the Blood Angels, there was always the possibility of robbery on a day of mist.
They met no misfortune as they walked the street from Waterer’s Row towards the Sanguinian Way, the small city’s main street. There were precious few people about. Those figures that appeared suddenly out of the murk were swaddled head to foot, and just as quickly disappeared.
‘Quicker, boy,’ grumbled Uigui. ‘We want a good spot. I want to get there before they are all gone.’
They turned onto the Sanguinian Way. At its far end was the Place of Choosing, where the giant statue of the Great Angel spread his arms and wings to face the eastern sky. Immense though Sanguinius’ effigy was, the fog obscured it totally. With the majestic statue hidden, the cramped, low buildings that made up Angel’s Fall seemed ruder than ever. It did not look like a holy city. The fog forced attention onto its inadequacies. Even the Sanguinian Way was meanly proportioned, and crooked. Without Sanguinius, Angel’s Fall could have been any town on any backward, arid world in the galaxy.
Gongs boomed from unseen towers, signifying the start of the Peaceday markets. Only a handful of stalls had been set up at the roadside, and foot traffic on the way was low. Uigui reckoned visitors to Angel’s Fall would be fewer than usual, though there were always some. The Red Mist discouraged travel. Not only was it toxic, but Baal’s violent wildlife hunted under its cover. He cursed his luck. Water was expensive to both the buyer and the seller. The price he’d get for his stock barely covered the cost, and he owed a lot of money to Anton the reguliser. Anton took prompt payment of debts very seriously. Uigui rubbed at the stump of his left little finger, a reminder of the last ti
me he’d been late with a payment. Anton had been nothing but apologetic; he had said he had no choice.
Uigui thought they would have to stay out late, selling to people exiting the city to travel in the cool of the night. Assuming the mist lifts today at all, he fretted. Such a fog was rare. Baal Secundus’ principal weathers were wind and dust storms, but there was not a breath of a breeze today.
‘This weather is unnatural,’ he said.
‘A day of portents,’ said his mother-in-law in satisfaction.
‘Shut up,’ he said. ‘It’s just a day. Boy. Here.’ Uigui pointed out a patch of ground in the lee of the Temple of the Emperor. The temple occupied a whole block by itself, and another of Angel’s Fall’s major streets intersected the Sanguinian Way there.
‘This will do.’ The gongs continued to ring. ‘Why all this racket?’ Uigui said.
‘Happenings. Baalfora has much in store for us today,’ said the old woman, using the local name for Baal Secundus. She settled herself down. Her joints grumbled, and she grumbled back at them, forcing her old legs to cross. Upon skirts held taut between her knees she set her tarot deck and began repetitively clicking at the workings. Uigui bared his teeth at her. He took out his irritation on the boy.
‘Come on, boy, set out the table! Where are the cups? By the Emperor, we’d all die if you were in charge here!’
‘S-s-s-orry, father,’ said the boy.
‘Don’t call me that,’ he said. ‘My son is dead. Stolen by angels. There is no one to inherit my business once I am gone. Do not presume your place.’
The boy bowed his head to hide his tears, showing the ugly scar running across the top of his head. Uigui hated the sight of that most of all. He was sure had his boy not fallen he would be up there on Baal as a warrior of the Emperor. He stared at it as the boy set up the little table that folded out from the side of the cart and put out a set of small bronze cups. Something like grief hurt him. He responded with anger.
‘Quicker!’ he snapped.
The gongs were still booming long after they should have stopped. He squinted into the dim morning. There was another sound, a distant rumbling, under the clamour of the gongs.
