ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hailing from Scotland, Graham narrowly escaped a career in surveying nearly five years ago to join Games Workshop's Games Development team, which, let's face it, sounds much more exciting. He's worked on loads of codexes since then, the most recent being Codex: Space Marines. As well as six novels, he's also written a host of short stories for Inferno! and takes on too much freelance work than can be healthy. Graham's housemate, a life-size cardboard cut-out of Buffy, recently suffered a terrible accident during a party and now keeps herself to herself in the spare room, scaring people who don't know she's there and plotting the best way to have her revenge on the miscreant that damaged her.
DEAD SKY
BLACK SUN
A WARHAMMER 40,000 NOVEL
An Ultramarines Novel
Graham McNeill
To the Games Dev guys Andy, Ant and Phil. It's a dirty job, keeping me right, hut someone's got to do it.
'He that fights, with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster! '
PROLOGUE
Distant hammer blows from monstrous engines reverberated through the chamber, echoing from the Halls of the Savage Morticians far below, rising alongside noxious tendrils of acrid vapours and agonised screams. Leering gargoyles of pressed and riveted iron ringed the chamber's dizzyingly high, arched ceiling and the tops of impossibly huge, pillar-like pistons, each one wreathed in greasy steam, ground rhythmically up and down through wide, skull-rimmed holes that ran along its edges.
A great chasm in the obsidian floor billowed scalding steam in roiling waves of heat and was crossed by a gantry of studded iron decking that rested upon massively thick girders, which in turn were supported on chains whose oily links were as thick as a man's torso.
Lit by a hot, orange glow from a snaking ribbon of molten metal at the chasm's base, many hundreds of metres below, the chamber reeked of sulphurous fumes and the searing, bitter taste of beaten metal. The gantry led towards a massive, cyclopean wall of dark-veined stone, pierced by a great, iron gate that had been tempered in an ocean of blood during its forging. Studded with jagged black spikes, the inner gate of the fortress of Khalan-Ghol was flanked by two armoured colossi, whose burnished iron hides were scarred by millennia of war. The gate led to the inner halls of the fortress's new master, and both daemon-visaged Titans, hung with the blighted banners of the Legio Mortis, raised fearsome guns - capable of laying waste to cities - to track a dozen figures who dared approach the gate.
The terrible enormity of the chamber did not faze the warriors who marched towards the groaning bridge: they had seen such sights before. Indeed, the leader of this group of warriors hailed from a citadel far more ancient and monolithic than this.
Lord Toramino, warsmith of the Iron Warriors, curled his lip in contempt as he raised his altered eyes to stare down the barrels of the Titans' weapons. If the half-breed thought such a vulgar display of power would intimidate him, then he was even more foolish than his inferior lineage would suggest. They had passed through the fortress's gatehouse three days ago, travelling unchallenged by any of the half-breed's warriors, though Toramino had felt supernatural eyes upon them ever since. No doubt warlocks of the kabal were watching them even now, but Toramino could not have cared less, marching with his head held high and hands clasped behind his back.
Alongside him, Lord Berossus growled as he watched the Titans' guns train upon them, spooling up his own weapons. Toramino looked up at Berossus and shook his head at his vassal warsmith's lack of restraint. None here could face a Titan and live, but such were the ingrained responses of Berossus that no other reaction was possible.
Toramino stepped onto the iron bridge, the metal hissing beneath his armoured boot and rippling like mercury, reflecting his massive, armoured form in its glistening lustre. Standing well over two metres tall, Lord Toramino wore a suit of exquisitely tooled power armour, handcrafted on Olympia itself and burnished to a mirror sheen. Its trims were edged with arabesques of carven gold and onyx chevrons and its every surface wrought with terrible sigils of ruin. An ochre cloak of woven metallic thread, stronger than adamantium, billowed around his wide frame, partially obscuring the skull-masked symbol of the Iron Warriors on one shoulder guard and his own personal heraldry of a mailed fist above a plan view of a breached redoubt on the other.
An Iron Warrior from his most trusted retinue carried his elaborately carved helm, and another carried his blasted standard, an eight-pointed star of blackened bone set upon a spiked, brass-rimmed wheel and woven with sinew extracted from a thousand screaming victims. Long white hair, pulled into a tight scalp-lock, trailed down his back and his stern, patrician features were pinched and angular - speaking of long years of bitter experience. His eyes were opalescent orbs of gold, smouldering with suppressed rage beneath thick brows.
As they approached the wall, huge blasts of stinking, oil-streaked gases jetted from the pistons either side of the gate and with a groan and squeal of grinding metalwork, the colossal locks disengaged with percussive booms that shook the dust from the chamber's ceiling.
The Titans lowered their mighty weapons and the upper portions of their bodies twisted around on bronze joints to grip the spiked gateway and pull. Steam jetted from wheezing fibre-bundle muscles, and slowly the awful gate groaned open, spilling an emerald light into the chamber as Toramino and Berossus passed between the mighty death machines and into the sanctum sanctorum of the lord of the fortress.
Toramino remembered this place from the many times he had come to pay homage to Khalan-Ghol's former castellan - a great and terrible warrior who had now ascended to the dark majesty of daemonhood. The walls within were of a plain black stone, threaded with gold and silver and glistening with moisture, despite the heat radiating from the terrazzo floor of powdered bone. Sickly white light reflected as pearlescent streaks on the floor from a score of tall and thin arched windows that pierced the eastern wall, draining the chamber of life and imparting a deathly pallor to its occupants.
A score of Iron Warriors stood to attention at the far end of the chamber, gathered about a polished throne of white and silver upon which sat a warrior in battered power armour.
It galled Toramino that he came before the fortress's new lord as a supposed equal. The half-breed was a bastard mongrel, not fit to wipe the blood from an Iron Warrior's armour, let alone command them in battle. Such an affront to the honour of the Legion was almost more than Toramino could bear, and as he watched the lord of the fortress rise from his throne of fused iron and bone, he felt his hatred rise in a venomous wave of bile.
The half-breed's appearance matched Toramino's opinion of him in that he was unclean and had none of the nobility of the ancients of Olympia. His close-cropped black hair topped a rugged, scarred face with bluntly prosaic features, and his armour was dented and scarred, still marked with the residue of battle. Did the half-breed not care that he was now receiving two of the most ancient and noble warsmiths of Medrengard? That this upstart's warsmith could have appointed such a low mongrel as his successor beggared belief.
'Lord Honsou,' said Toramino, forcing himself to bow before the half-breed while keeping his hands clasped behind his back. His tone was formal and he spoke in low, sibilant tones, though he was careful to include a mocking inflection to his words.